The US has openly announced its intention to dismantle the International Criminal Court and liberal journalists who for years have screeched about the threat to democracy posed by Donald Trump have had absolutely nothing to say.

Neither the New York Times or the Washington Post (which maintains a “democracy in America” section to document how the Trump administration is targeting US legal institutions), have run a single editorial or opinion piece opposing the efforts to dismantle the highest legal authority on the planet “brick by brick,” in the words of Marco Rubio.

Neither of them have had anything to say about the attempt to bring about, in the most real and practical way, the end of international law. The great liberal opinion setters, the self-proclaimed guardians of the rule of law, the “democracy dies in darkness” people have decided that international law can die in darkness, thank you.

Why? Because they are Zionists, imperialists and nationalists. Because they agree with Rubio’s rationale that the court, in its pursuit of justice, is a threat to US interests, sovereignty, and to Israel. Because they believe that the US and Israel should be able to run the world unhindered by the rule of law, that they should be able to commit genocide and war crimes if they want to. They believe, like Trump and Rubio, that the US, not a global court of experts, is the highest political authority on the planet. Because they believe, in the words of the disgracefully departed Lindsey Graham that the court is “designed for Africans and thugs like Putin,” not the masters of the imperial universe. Because justice for Gaza would threaten the foundations of a Zionism they hold so close to their fetid, sickly hearts.

There is a sickness at the core of the liberal. A sickness that allows them to support genocide, deny justice, and still pretend they’re the good guys. As I’ve written before, my ire is reserved overwhelmingly for liberals because of their moralising double-standards and hypocrisy. Because of their snooty claims to moral and intellectual superiority over the right despite being, in flavour if not decorum, essentially their mirror image. Because they get good people to support bad things.

The biggest joke of all is that ICC has been a good friend to American war criminals. Despite the abundance of evidence that US troops committed heinous war crimes in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the court refused to investigate possible US crimes, despite repeated and sustained appeals from victims, their lawyers, and human rights organisations. Numerous organisations submitted evidence and legal filings to the court documenting allegations of torture in CIA black sites, abuse and murder at detention facilities, and the mass murder of civilians. Even Karim Khan, now in the gunsights of the Zionists for issuing arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, himself acted to block investigations into US war crimes. When he became the head of the ICC in 2021, he announced he would deprioritise investigations into war crimes by US forces and instead focus resources on investigating the crimes of the Taliban.

And look what he got in return for this act of imperial solidarity!

Last week the newly minted US protectorate of Venezuela announced it was withdrawing from the ICC. Was there outage in the liberal media? Of course not. Can you imagine if Venezuela under Chavez or Maduro had announced the country was withdrawing from the ICC? Scribes for empire would have denounced it as proof positive that Venezuela was run by an authoritarian regime with a brazen disregard for the rule of law. But because the country is now a compliant imperial puppet and dutifully serves empire, liberal media passed over it without comment.

Liberals are like this about everything.

Last week the deformed MAGA nutjob Laura Loomer visited Ukraine and renounced her previous support for Russia, saying she had been misled. From PBS to the Washington Post to the Guardian, outlets across the west ran with news about a grifting social media loon going to Ukraine as if it was a defining geopolitical moment of the 21st century. The New York Times opinion columnist Nicholas Kristof tweeted that he now admired Loomer. The Guardian had an 800-word analysis about its political significance! These supposedly progressive outlets reported on her damascene conversion it as if can tell us something essential about war and peace and international relations, and it wasn’t just a massive grift and a switch of paymasters. When looney Loomer got back to the US she tweeted that Muslims are polluting the US “like an incurable disease” and she liked Ukraine because there wasn’t a Muslim in sight.

I guess being a hateful, evil racist is forgivable and fine if you support Ukraine in the end!

But liberals aren’t racist, ok.

And as long as they serve empire, liberals just love the rule of law and legal institutions.

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In the wake of the death of three American troops on a base in Jordan following a retaliatory attack by Iran, I’ve seen a lot of commentary online stating that they “died for Israel.”

This idea that Americans are dying for Israel has become an oft-repeated narrative since the US and Israel began their illegal war of aggression on Iran.

I understand the impulse, attraction and utility of this argument.

Yes, Zionists and their apartheid death state have a huge amount of slaughter, blood and destruction on their hands.

And yes, the entity and its supporters have established a symbiotic relationship with US governance which has allowed them to advance the genocide of the Palestinian people and their project of regional domination.

And I think it’s likely that convincing Americans that Americans are dying for another country helps undermine support for Israel and brings us closer to the day that the relationship is severed for good.

But the apartheid entity and its supporters are merely the parasite feeding from the lifeblood of the host. The host is providing the weapons and money as well as the global political cover for the grossly engorged entity to act with impunity.

And it is doing it wilfully.

The most revealing comment ever made about Israel didn’t come from Donald Trump, it came from Joe Biden, who as far back as 1986 said, loudly and proudly from the floor of the Senate, that “if Israel did not exist the United States would have to invent an Israel to protect our interests in the region.”

This should tell you absolutely everything you need to know.

The Middle East and West Asia is a vital zone of influence for empire, and Israel is just one of the on-shore aircraft carriers that enables imperial power projection thousands of miles from its shores.

The US soldiers died in Jordan, just one of the nodes in a broad network of bases spanning Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain, Iraq, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, some of which have been in existence since the 1940s. While Israel is particularly useful to the imperium because it shares the expansionist, colonial instincts of its host, all these countries have friendly relations with the entity, the Gulf Arabs having long ago decided to choose Zionism and the siren call of empire over regional solidarity and Palestine. These bases don’t exist for Israel or the protection of Israel, they exist, exactly as Joe Biden said, to advance American interests.

Arguing that Americans are dying for Israel feels to me like a way to offload responsibility for a globe spanning empire, to indulge a fantasy that a benign America exists, and to deny the historical reality of American barbarism. It feels, ultimately, like a way for Americans to absolve themselves of their imperial sins.

Israel is a vital component of empire, but its crimes flow from the impunity and barbarity of US empire, not the other way around.

And for sure, the dismantling of a proxy regime like Israel is a necessary step on the road to a more just world, but that’s exactly what Israel is. A proxy. The tip of a spear. And an important one at that, but it isn’t the throwing arm. From Ukraine to Taiwan to its mercenaries and local insurgent groups across the globe, empire has plenty of other spear tips.

Did the apartheid state make the US invade Vietnam, commit genocide in Korea, bomb Panama, destroy clinics in Sudan or murder Venezuelans in Caracas just seven months ago? Did the Jewish ethno-state make it so that rape followed by the murder of Vietnamese women was so common that US soldiers had a special term for it: double veteran?

I don’t think so.

If Israel ceased to exist, the US regime wouldn’t pack away its toys, dissolve its one trillion dollar military death machine and go home. It would find or create another Israel.

The US resumed bombing Iran all on its own, after all.

The tragedy isn’t that American empire gets impressionable young men and women to die for Israel, the tragedy is that it gets them to die for it. For empire.

I don’t mean a tragedy we should be particularly sad about. I mean a tragedy in the original meaning of the world.

A Latina (as one of the dead soldiers, Isabella Gonzalez, was) dying for an empire of white nationalist supremacy currently trying to deport her neighbours, an empire which will never mourn her, is a genuinely classical level of tragedy, one the Greeks would be proud of.

Framing the deaths of soldiers in the Middle East as deaths for Israel makes it sound as if there would be some other just cause for which US troops could die.

There isn’t. All American troops die for empire.

The goal shouldn’t be to get Americans to stop dying for Israel.

The goal should be to get Americans to stop dying for the United States of America.

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Yesterday Pete Hegseth triumphantly tweeted a picture of Iran’s Chabahar maritime port tower collapsing following an attack by the US regime. The image bore a striking resemblance to the collapse of the towers on September 11th.

Despite the fact this was, like most of the attacks on Iran, an attack on civilian infrastructure, it will not be labelled as such by the western media and political class. They will never call it terrorism or a war crime, despite the fact that it was both. Whether a civilian tower, a bridge, or a school full of children, western actions that result in mass murder will always simply be the product of a “strike.”

Benign language whenever the imperialist death machine starts slaughtering is a critical tool in maintaining consent for war crimes and state terrorism. And even though Hegseth literally tweeted a picture of this war crime, I‘ve yet to see an imperialist media outlet reproduce the image, because they know how bad it looks. This is a classic tactic we see over and over again: selective reporting and the omission of detail in order to bolster public support for state terrorism and war crimes abroad. Western media has already bundled this “strike” in with all the others in order to present a false equivalence between an illegal war of aggression on the one hand, and legitimate Iranian defence on the other (defensive actions which, by the way, are always labelled as “attacks.”)

The underlying psychology behind the double-standard is rooted in arrogance and supremacy: they’re the bad guys, and they do terrorism. We’re the good guys, and we “conduct strikes.”

And by we, I mean the forces of western imperialism, whether that’s the US or any other power that lines up behind the American regime, especially, but not exclusively, Israel. The use of the words “terror” and “terrorism” are also a critical rhetorical device, conditioning westerners to accept imperial violence as legitimate, and any resistance to that violence as illegitimate. This tendency was seen starkly of course after October 7th. Hamas does terrorism, while Israel merely strikes. Those strikes can be genocidal, they can reduce entire cities to dust, destroy hospitals, schools, universities, water treatment plants, grain silos and the means of life for two million people. They can kill tens of thousands of children in all manner of sadistic and gruesome ways, they can wipe out entire bloodlines, but they are never labelled terrorism. They are, and always will be, simply strikes. Because terrorism is bad, and we’re the good guys.

This is why a state was so crucial to the Zionist project. Before 1948, the groups that became the IDF, from the Haganah, to the Lehi and the Irgun were explicitly called terror groups. And their members were Jewish terrorists. These labels were widely used by western media, and the existence of Jewish terrorism was not controversial. In a 1948 Guardian editorial, in the aftermath of the King David Hotel bombing, the paper referred to “Jewish terrorists” who it said are “ruthless men corrupt by the sickness of the time, caring nothing for the sufferings of the individual Jews in Europe” for whom “every school boy’s jest is another argument for Zionism.”

But as soon as the Jewish Zionists got their own state, the terrorists were absorbed into the military arm of the state, and their violence, which months before was clearly identified as terrorism, was legitimatised by the recognition of a state. And this legitimisation of Israeli state terrorism went hand-in-hand with the decades-long campaign to legally designate resistance to state terrorism as the real terrorism, a campaign which led us inexorably towards the genocide of Gaza.

Genocide. Another word reserved by the hegemonic media only for the victims of the imperial enemy, and not for those slaughtered by the imperial ally.

So for the western media, terrorism isn’t terrorism, genocide isn’t terrorism, and it’s not even genocide. Despite the almost universal belief of genocide scholars, holocaust scholars, and international legal experts that what has taken place, and continues to take place in Gaza, is a genocide, the term is almost never used. The Guardian can even write an article with the title ‘Israel committing genocide in Gaza, world’s top scholars on the crime say’, and in the majority of its subsequent coverage, refer to it as a war. Their main hub for coverage of the genocide, ten months after that headline, is titled Israel-Gaza War. If they had the courage of their supposed progressive convictions, if the truly believed in experts, as all good liberals profess to do, they would accept the evidence they presented themselves, and refer factually to genocide.

They don’t because the western mind, in matters of imperialism requires dissonance. It requires references to “strikes” not terrorism, to “wars” not genocides and to “foreign policy,” not imperialism. This is especially true of the professional media mind which must filter, process and present the news from the imperial core. My guess is that some of the benign, consent manufacturing language is intentional, and some is simply the product of subconscious western supremacy and the dehumanisation of the periphery. Because to fully internalise the evil committed by the system you not only live within but help uphold would require the instant rejection of that system. And well, you’ve got bills to pay. The genocide can be the war if it means making that next installment on your mortgage.

As the terror attacks on Iran and Gaza continue, and as the genocide deepens, we’ll hear only of strikes and wars from a media class fully complicit in both.

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The British government has announced it is going to ban Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, an idea which on the face of it sounds ridiculous.

The IRGC is the primary military branch of another country tasked with defending that country from hostile aggressors.

IRGC soldiers and commanders aren’t lurking in the shadows of Solihull plotting to blow up British politicians, they’re in Tehran, Mashhad, Isfahan and Karaj strategising, as we speak, to repel American and Israeli forces.

So what’s the point, you might ask, in “banning” a branch of another country’s military which is operating thousands of miles away?

The point, and the devil, is in the detail.

The UK government is going to ban the IRGC using the new National Security (State Threats) Act passed earlier this year.

This legislation is even wider than the Terrorism Act under which Palestine Action were banned. Like the Palestine Action ban, the IRGC ban will make it an offence to “express an opinion or belief that is supportive of (the) proscribed organisation,” but will also criminalise “working with, or accepting material benefits from the proscribed group, including….information.”

Both are egregious clauses intended to target anyone who dissents from the official line, but the second appears to be a clear attack on journalism and on journalists who don’t take the approved pro-imperialism, anti-Iran position.

Breaking the law comes with a possible 14-year prison sentence.

It will mean journalists stop quoting the IRGC in their stories or reproducing press releases they publish. The effect, however, will be broader than this. To avoid falling foul of the law and facing prosecution, over-compliance is likely. Journalists will simply stop reporting anything said by official Iranian government figures, for fear of falling foul of the clause prohibiting information from the IRGC being shared.

And the effect is likely to be felt even beyond the UK.

Any journalist in the world who plans on visiting the UK will likely avoid quoting Iranian government officials for the same reason, in case they get arrested on landing in the country.

In the future, there won’t even be a fig leaf of balance to mainstream articles about Iran. Every article about conflict between Iran and the west will be self-censored, and people’s understanding of events, let alone the imperial contours of the world, will erode further. Which is, of course, the point.

The Zionist lobby for years has demanded the British government proscribe the IRGC, but successive governments, including the Tories have refused, because it is nonsensical, reckless, a legal minefield and a clear threat to factual journalism and reporting.

It took the most authoritarian, pro-genocide, Israel-sympathising British government in history to finally do it, and it was celebrated by Zionist media and politicians, including the UK’s presumptive prime minister, Andy Burnham.

And it is no surprise that it has happened now, with Iran under sustained imperial assault, an assault launched, in significant part, from bases in the UK. It is no surprise that with the illegal war on Iran wildly unpopular, and western sympathy for Iran greater than it has ever been as a result, that the British government is looking for ways to criminalise support for those resisting imperialist mass murder.

It’s the Gaza, Israel and Palestine Action playbook all over again.

As soon as a group successfully imposes costs on the US and its sympathisers, as soon as public support switches from the imperial cause and its allies, to the imperial enemy, the British government cries terrorism and threatens to lock up anyone who shows support for the resistors.

The British government isn’t banning the IRGC, a group which has never threatened the UK let alone attacked the country, to make British people safer. It is banning the IRGC to criminalise solidarity with a country under assault by, and successfully resisting, US-led imperialism.

The IRGC is the last line of defence against western hegemony and a Zionist world order which murders whoever it wants, whenever it wants, to get whatever it wants. No other group has fought so successfully against the military forces of imperialism in the last fifty years. This is their only crime.

And very soon, expressing that opinion will be illegal under UK law.

You know what won’t be illegal in the UK? Joining a foreign military which has committed genocide, and helping commit genocide yourself.

It will remain perfectly legal, as a Brit, to join the IDF, go and kill children in Palestine, Lebanon, and wherever else the forces of Zionist expansionism desire, and then come home as if nothing has happened.

And if you don’t want to do the dirty work yourself, you can wave IDF flags, praise genocide and solicit as much financial support for a military committing genocide as you like.

But if you dare express support for the forces fighting that genocidal army, or for the activists disabling the machinery of genocide, or for the protestors spraying graffiti on the war machines, you could face up to 14 years in prison.

To reiterate: it will soon be British law that committing genocide is legal, but speaking supportively of any group fighting to stop genocide is illegal.

The west is monstrous. The loss of legitimacy is total. Free speech, such as it ever was, is dead. Liberalism, such as it ever was, is dead. It died in Gaza, in Tehran and Beirut. It died for Israel, for Netanyahu, for Trump, for Ben Gvir, and for Zionism.

And it won’t stop here. Because it didn’t start with the IRGC. Before them, of course, there was Hamas, and its armed wing Al Qassam, banned as an international terror group despite being entirely local to Palestine, and the only resistance to Israeli genocide. Domestically, before Palestine Action, there was Just Stop Oil, an eco-activist group policed to extinction by British authorities. The UK’s official advisor on terrorism is now suggesting Just Stop Oil along with scores of other left-wing groups be proscribed as terror organisations. The UK’s move follows the classification in the US of “antifa,” (a loose ideology, not an organised entity) as a terror group, which will enable US authorities to go after any and all left-wing causes. It follows the EU sanctioning European journalists for reporting critically on Israel and straying from the anti-Russia line on Ukraine.

The ultimate goal, it seems reasonable to suspect, is the suppression of all anti-imperial causes and opinions, and all left-wing groups which pose a threat to the corporate-capitalist, warmongering, genocidal extinction economy.

From state-sanctioned mass murder being undertaken with impunity, to the suppression of all dissent against that violence, and the building of a coercive technological architecture to enforce acceptable opinion, we’re faced with a set of circumstances which parallel the most frightening dystopias ever imagined.

It’s grim, but it’s not over.

As the world cooks and the imperialists advance, supporting anti-imperial, pro-social groups, causes, and people is becoming the best and last insurance policy against a fully-realised dystopia.

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This morning The Guardian had a story about Israel’s ongoing efforts to illegally annex the West Bank.

Can you pick your way through this headline?

Firstly, the presentation of “settler figures” is a subtle way to shift responsibility away from the political arrangement in Israel and conjure up images of civilian crazies, even though numerous government ministers responsible for Israeli policy, including Ben Gvir and Smotrich, are settlers! (And of course the headline demands you accept the underlying premise that not all Israelis are settlers.)

The presentation is intended to create the impression of a few extremist bad apples within a legitimate government, a “coalition,” no less, a deliberate insertion intended to convey a messy political situation in which there is a divide between extremists and non-extremists. A divide which in reality doesn’t exist. In reality there is no distance between “settler figures” and the Israeli government. They are one and the same.

And how about “cement gains?” The “gains” the headline refers to are the illegal expansion of West Bank settlements, expansion which is happening because the entire Israeli government has created the legal framework to enable it, supported by the military. The “gains” are the de facto annexation of West Bank territory, an expansionist policy illegal under both international law and the 1948 UN partition agreement.

If the Guardian had any integrity and wasn’t simply a soft mouthpiece for empire dressed in progressive clothing, the headline would read “Israel advances illegal annexation of West Bank.” It certainly would if they were writing about Russia, which is another clue about the intention here. Can you imagine the Guardian soft-balling it like this over Ukraine?

“Russian government figures seek to cement Crimea gains.”

Of course not!

Why there is such a large difference in approach between how Israel’s actions are presented and how Russia’s actions are presented? Because Israel is a key outpost of colonial empire, essential to western hegemony, and Russia is the approved enemy.

Russia’s actions are automatically wrong and bad.

Israel’s actions have context and nuance.

The difference is also because most western journalists are Zionists. That is to say they believe Israel, unlike Russia, is a legitimate state and must continue to exist as it is (whether next to a Palestinian state or not). As such, they use language which carefully curates an image of Israel as a country influenced by bad actors, but not as an inherently bad, illegitimate state. Because illegitimate states have no right to exist and should be dismantled. But to demand the dismantlement of an illegitimate state would be antisemitism. And good liberals are not antisemites!

Many at The Guardian also no doubt believe in the fabled and dead “two-state solution,” without understanding that the call for two states, rather than a singular state, is the diplomatic and rhetorical trick which since 1948 has underpinned Israeli apartheid, mass murder, genocide and war crimes.

The Guardian is more insidious than Fox News, or the Daily Mail, because it uses more sophisticated language and nuance to do exactly the same job as the right-wing press. The Guardian scripts a story about the good guys and the bad guys, but cloaks it in a progressive sheen to hit the liberal pleasure centres of the brain to reinforce the exact same empire narratives as the right. The Guardian is more insidious than right-wing media because it gets decent people who instinctively are on the side of justice to buy into unjust worldviews which uphold empire.

This is, and was, extremely obvious in their coverage of Iran, which fever-pitched during the US-Israel attack.

The Guardian’s editorial line was essentially that the US shouldn’t have attacked Iran, but Iran is bad because of religious rule and protest crackdowns and internet blocks, so while you can disagree with Trump it’s also bad to support Iran because they are bad too. So where does that leave us? It leaves us, intentionally, drifting in a sea of ideological confusion. It leave us not understanding the rationale, logic and legally protected right to resistance against aggression. It leaves us not understanding other cultures, other systems of governance. It leaves us, deliberately, not understanding the fundamental contours of the imperialist world.

There was no effort in The Guardian’s coverage of Iran to explain that the government (which is always referred to using the selectively applied, delegitimising ‘regime’ descriptor) actually has huge popular support. There was no outrage at the assassination of Iranian leaders, no attempt to explain how egregious a breach of international law and norms the targeted mass killing of government officials was. There was deception regarding the internet “blackout”, with stories presenting it as an authoritarian move to prevent Iranians communicating with the outside world, when in reality all local websites remained accessible, and the block was enacted only against sites hosted in the west because they were in a war with two nuclear powers and feared cyberattack via sites known to collude with US authorities. In any case, basic VPNs also enabled access to international sites.

Rather than genuine attempts to inform readers about the situation in Iran, there was soft-peddling of imperial crimes, combined with constant attempts to undermine Iranian governance and resistance, all of which amounted to a barely-disguised justification for regime change efforts, with a few de rigueur anti-Trump articles focused on his language and threats.

In the weeks before the attack there were even efforts to soften progressives up with nonsense stories about Iran’s old oil tankers and the threat they posed to the environment. Regime change propaganda disguised as pro-environmentalism.

There were no stories subsequent to the attacks about the harm to the environment from the bombing of Iranian oil facilities which literally set Tehran’s streets on fire. (Also note the use of “shadow fleet”, a meaningless term which has become integral to buttress empire narratives. It implies illegality, but simply means that a country has been sanctioned by the US and continues to operate ships in “violation” of sanctions which have zero power under international law).

And two weeks before the US-Israeli attacks began, The Guardian wrote a story about the children of Iran’s leaders studying in the west, presenting it as a symbol of the leadership’s hypocrisy. The reality? More than 110,000 young Iranians are currently studying in the west!

The Guardian also lied incessantly about the number of dead Iranian protestors during the December riots, and not once told readers that US and Israeli officials had boasted about orchestrating the violence, a fact even Jewish media acknowledged and reported on.

The Guardian is an imperial rag masquerading as respectable opinion for progressives but feeding subtle propaganda designed to maintain western dominance and shepherd imperial violence.

Sometimes the mask fully slips, such as when Israel and the US bombed Iran in June 2025 and their “international security” correspondent, Jason Burke, a raging Zionist, wrote a story salivating about the prospects for regime change. I posted about it on Twitter at the time, the tweet went viral, and the headline was quickly changed. (You won’t find it now, but I took a screenshot).

But this is the impulse that always lies beneath.

It is the impulse that refers to illegal annexation as “gains”, or illegal Israeli invasions as the “expansion of ground campaigns.”

You’ll find the same impulses over their Cuba coverage, with constant references to “the Cuban regime,” the implication always that a liberal democracy is more legitimate than a revolutionary state or any other political formation, regardless of behaviours. A liberal democracy which does genocide and war crimes is intrinsically better than a revolutionary state which has universal healthcare and doesn’t mass murder civilians, so goes twisted empire-brained logic.

This Guardian story, while reporting critically on Trump’s threats to Cuba, says that even if the US did a Maduro-style kidnapping of leader Díaz-Canel, it would “leave in place the repressive communist regime.” The Guardian considers the only downside to another flagrant breach of international law is that it wouldn’t actually achieve regime change. Because they just can’t help themselves. You can be sure that when the US does finally invade, The Guardian will have a long, congratulatory piece on the end of the regime, replete with quotes from “Cuban” Americans living in Miami who’ve never set foot on the island.

Am I being too harsh? I don’t think so.

Of course, on occasion, The Guardian writes decent articles about war crimes, Israel and US imperialism, but this is part of the problem. You’ll read about horrific Israeli crimes one day, but these will never be placed in the context of an illegitimate apartheid state. They will always stop short of anything which smells of true justice, and too often will collude in selling the imperial story. They’ll tell us how bad Trump is, but present him as the outlier rather than the continuation of 250 years of American violence. They’ll softly condemn US violence while delegitimising the target of that violence. They’ll report on genocide, but stop reporting on genocide when the pace of the mass murder declines.

All that said, I won’t stop reading the Guardian, because identifying how liberal media sells imperial propaganda to a progressive audience is critical to dismantling empire narratives.

And if you read it, I’m not suggesting you stop either.

But read it with a critical eye, pick out the imperial tells, and never rely on it for your worldview.

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Millions of Americans will today celebrate 250 years since the United States declared independence from the British crown.

But what is there to celebrate?

The US has been the most violent and murderous state-building experiment in history.

Built from the bones of slaves atop the bodies of the indigenous, fuelled by the blood of the poor, it has created the most deeply unequal society in the west ruled by a new class of billionaire kings.

The sickly violent ethnic cleansing the country was birthed from has become the blueprint and justification for colonial crimes around the world, best reflected today by its disgusting, genocidal, illegitimate proxy in occupied Palestine.

The only country to use a nuclear weapon, the marauding, murderous invader of dozens of sovereign nations, and the single greatest cause of instability in the modern world.

There is nothing to celebrate.

The US is also the single biggest polluter in the history of the world whose military murder machine pumps out more planet-heating gases than entire countries, grim facts which are particularly apt given the record-breaking temperatures that have just pummelled Europe.

None of this is personal. All of us with a conscience born in the imperial core are creatures of circumstance, born where we’re born, grappling with our histories, desperate for change, but trying and so often failing to do anything to advance that change.

And while we might be creatures of circumstance, we are not victims of it.

The victims are the native of the land, the Lakota, the Cherokee, the Muskogee, the Seminole, the Chickasaw, the Choctaw, the Cheyenne, the Arapaho. The hundreds of thousands murdered, forcibly displaced and diseased to death by civilising European whites because their presence got in the way of greed, extraction and ownership. The victims are the non-natives of other lands, the 390,000 Africans imported as indentured slaves, a population which grew to nearly 4 million by 1860, the slaves who literally built the US, from the White House down.

The victims are the Koreans, Vietnamese, Afghans, and Iraqis slaughtered at the hands of invading forces, the collective body count due to direct violence is unknown, but runs into the millions. Iraq alone likely gave up one million bodies to the forces of American freedom.

And as I wrote in my last article, the US regularly kills with bombs, missiles and guns, but also murders more passively in huge quantities as a secondary effect of its savage imperial sanctions.

The victims of US independence are those genocided by empire’s proxies to maintain hegemonic regional control, including, but not limited to, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, one million Indonesian leftists, two hundred thousand Maya people in Guatemala, 75,000 anti-fascists in El Salvador, and tens of thousands of communists and leftists who were tortured, disappeared and murdered in Brazil, Chile and Argentina through the 1960s and 70s. American support for domestic fascism, genocide and mass murder has been a historical constant.

The victims are the bison, slaughtered down from 70 million to just a few thousand in only 30 years by European settlers as a genocidal tactic to starve native Americans and force them onto reservations, or the passenger pigeon, whose brash song once filled North American skies, hunted from 5 billion to extinction.

The victims are the American working classes, white, brown and black, sold out for a globalisation which built the socio-economic pyramid which hollowed middle America and consolidated wealth at the top in ever greater concentrations.

But nationalism is a hell of a drug, and through a carefully calibrated educational curriculum designed to perpetuate empire, Americans have been successfully indoctrinated to celebrate this history.

Today’s firework displays will mark a shameful, regressive, bloodstained history few are even aware of.

Again, this is less a judgment on Americans than a judgment on the quality of the system those individuals constitute, and especially the quality of leaders who control and rule that system. And the US, having taken on empire status, and having seeded financialised capitalism around the world, is not just an objectively negative force in the world, but the greatest obstacle to true human flourishing in existence today.

At home, the US system of hyper, trillionaire-producing capitalism is objectively a failure for the majority, producing the greatest inequality in the western world.

Abroad, from the torture chambers of Guantanamo, to the highway of death in Iraq, to rape and murder of civilians by US forces, to the school children of Minab, the US commits acts of such wanton evil that its position as the head of the global international order is surely a sick joke. In Vietnam, interviews with US soldiers found that the rape and murder of children and women “was so common that American soldiers had a special term for the soldiers who committed the acts in conjunction: a double veteran.” The rape of Iraqi women and children was also routine, with only a few high profile cases ever prosecuted, including the gang rape of 14 year-old Abeer Qassim al-Janabi whose father, mother and sister were slaughtered in front of her by US soldiers, before she was then murdered.

Abroad, where, after the 2002 invasion, the US military and the CIA turned Afghanistan into the world’s largest heroin-trafficking cartel, sparking the opioid crisis on its own shores.

The USA is death, it carries death like a mascot everywhere it goes, and everything it touches dies.

On July 4th, there is nothing to celebrate, only millions to mourn.

Save your celebrations for when justice is served and this grotesque empire finally ends.

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The lack of heavy machinery in Venezuela following the devastating earthquakes which struck at the weekend has condemned thousands of people to a slow, suffocating death. These deaths may not have come at the tip of an American missile, but they very much came at the bloody hands of sadistic empire.

The absence of bulldozers, diggers and excavators is a direct consequence of nearly three decades of crushing American sanctions which have sought to impoverish, demoralise, weaken and ultimately collapse the country in the name of freedom. In this explanation, some might see an anti-imperialist talking point lazily seeking to blame the US for a natural disaster.

But it’s just the reality.

US sanctions on Venezuela prohibit Americans from buying, selling or having any contact with the Venezuelan government, any state-owned or other companies on the sanctions list (currently 154 entities), or individuals on that list. This amounts to a huge chunk of the Venezuelan economy. And even if a company is not technically sanctioned, they become de facto sanctioned because western banks won’t process Venezuela-related payments.

The end result is a massive shortage of all kinds of goods and equipment, including and especially digging and earth-moving machines such as bulldozers and excavators which are widely used by the heavily-sanctioned mining and oil industry.

Yet in all the legacy media articles I’ve read, not one has made this link clear and explicit. Journalists appear to have gone to great lengths to avoid this context and laid all the blame on Venezuelan authorities for the absence of life-saving machinery.

A Guardian article on June 26th said “years of economic misrule and corruption have left authorities woefully unprepared for a disaster on this scale.” No mention of sanctions, zero context provided for why the country may have been so unprepared. The Guardian cynically uses a natural disaster which has killed perhaps 50,000 people as merely another opportunity to put the boot in on a country already beaten to the ground.

An ITV article describes families conducting rescue operations themselves because they had "given up waiting for the government.” The government, of course, is the one under US control since the abduction of Nicolas Maduro in January. But the US gets no mention in the article, let alone any blame for the situation.

On Sunday Reuters said Venezuela has been “long mired in a deep political and economic crisis” yet neglects to mention which country helped mire it in this crisis, or the effect of sanctions. For any self-respecting journalist who wants to truthfully convey how Venezuela arrived at this point, this should be a cardinal sin.

The Associated Press said people had “taken the search for missing loved ones into their own hands, digging through the rubble of their own homes, citing the scarcity of government rescuers.” Once again, zero mention of the murderous sanctions designed explicitly to deny the country the machinery it would need in a natural disaster such as this.

A generous interpretation is that these journalists are just lazy and ill-informed. A more realistic interpretation is that they are not neutral arbiters of facts seeking to provide the full story, but cowards and shameless scribes for empire who instinctively reproduce imperial narratives. Blaming the lack of equipment on mismanagement and corruption rather that US sanctions is just their dishonest muscle memory kicking into gear.

And because most people have little idea how sweeping US sanctions are, how they work, and the extent to which they are intended to strangle a target economy, this selective journalism falls on already propagandised ears and helps reinforce imperial narratives.

Now 50,000 are missing, many trapped under the rubble of collapsed buildings, and many presumed dead. Communities are pleading for the heavy equipment which could either rescue those still alive, or at least retrieve the bodies of their loved ones in order to grant them a dignified farewell. Some is on the way, but it will be too late to save any lives.

Empire has once again committed mass murder, this time as a secondary effect of its hegemonic perversion.

The situation in Venezuela isn’t exclusively on Donald Trump. It’s on every American president, beginning with Bill Clinton, who responded to the election of Hugo Chavez in 1998 with devastating sanctions intended to punish the people for electing a socialist who nationalised the oil industry, ejected American oil companies and created a welfare state with the proceeds. Empire clothed its depravity, as it always does, in the ballgown of freedom, and liberal media happily regurgitated the lies about authoritarianism and democracy, despite Chavez being democratically elected in elections deemed free and fair by international observers, four times.

And still, in spite of Venezuela being turned into a compliant US puppet state, the Trump regime has refused to lift sanctions in the face of this disaster. Because empire isn’t interested in saving lives, it’s interested only in the hemispheric domination of the Americas. A natural disaster which further cripples the ability of the people to assert their power and practice self-determination is actually a boon for imperialists.

Empire loves chaos, and it loves using sanctions to create that chaos.

The US, then led by Joe Biden, did the same thing in 2023, refusing to lift sanctions on Syria after earthquakes struck Syria and Turkey, killing tens of thousands across the two countries.

This is simply the imperial playbook at work.

Death from sanctions in Venezuela is, sadly, nothing new. A 2017 study by the economist Jeffrey Sachs found that in one year alone, US sanctions had killed roughly 40,000 Venezuelans through the denial of life saving medicines and medical equipment.

But these numbers are just a fraction of the overall toll.

A recent study from the medical journal The Lancet estimated that US sanctions, supported by countries within the western imperial orbit, have caused 38 million excess deaths since 1970.

The average annual death toll of sanctions, depending on the year being measured, is 400,000 to one million. Currently 54 countries amounting to two billion people are under US sanctions.

Why?

Because, as the researchers Utsa and Prabhat Pratnaik describe it, global south countries which aren’t aligned with the US and who pursue economic sovereignty and independent industrial development “may increase the supply price or challenge the core’s industrial and technological monopolies.” Fully one quarter of humanity is being choked by capitalist empire in an effort to ensure no meaningful challenge emerges that would hinder its ability to force submission and exert control.

A system that uses its economic and financial power to kill up to a million people every year to maintain its hegemony is one of staggering violence and should be widely viewed as illegitimate.

People who die buried under rubble because empire prevents them from owning the machines that could dig them out are just as dead as those killed by direct violence.

And that the story of the earthquake is not a story about the violence of imperial sanctions, or about the illegitimacy of western hegemony, but instead is about the failure of a government under the boot of empire, is further proof, as if any was needed, of media complicitly in the savagery of this empire.

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Iran has forced the US into one of the biggest strategic defeats in its short, violent and bloody history.

The memorandum of understanding with Iran, signed (symbolically or not), at Versailles yesterday, signalled, as I wrote earlier this week, that we’re witnessing the collapse of American hard power.

After it was signed, Trump made some extraordinary comments that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the handbook of anti-imperial critique, including that it’s not fair to tell Iran it can’t have missiles if all it’s neighbours have them and that it’s “common sense” that the country should be able to enrich uranium for energy. Trump also admitted oil reserves were running out and the world was approaching a depression, which slays the idea (an idea I never bought), that the US attack was a genius move to control the world’s oil and gas.

Iran has suffered some serious damage to its infrastructure as well as burying over 3,000 civilians, but it has checkmated the US strategically. And Trump has had to accept that. Iran’s ability to hit key regional infrastructure from deeply-buried missile cities, along with its ability to control the Strait, won the day. The US also appears to be reluctantly accepting some other realities. A few hours after the MoU was signed, after it was put to him that Israel wasn’t happy with the tentative deal, JD Vance said that Israel “is a country of nine million people that can’t just kill its way out of every national security problem.”

They read the polls, they see the way the wind is blowing, and they’re moving with it.

Israel of course is still a vital strategic outpost for empire, and it will not be abandoned yet. But there is absolutely a future in which the value of Israel to empire becomes less useful than the economic value empire can gain from a wider peace in the region, even if that peace runs counter to Israeli interests. And if Israel, not Iran or the resistance, comes to be seen as the main obstacle to this future, a position Trump and Vance appear to be moving towards, it is entirely conceivable that Israel, just like South Africa, will be globally ostracised and abandoned.

If this were to happen, the range of outcomes is extremely broad. Tensions between orthodox and secular Jews are already high in Israel, and you could reasonably argue that under conditions of global abandonment, civil war would break out. Before or after such a war, you might get a government run by Ben-Gvir and Jewish end-times fanatics who decide to fight the world and trigger a nuclear holocaust. Or the fanatics might lose, and you get a government which enters into international negotiations towards one state with equal rights for all. A former prime minister of Israel has, after all, just labelled Israeli actions in the West Bank ethnic cleansing.

I think we’re a long way from Israel ever giving up its colonial privileges. Civil war is a lot more likely than the negotiated end of the state, but we’re certainly a big step closer than we’ve ever been to whatever comes next for the genocidal colonial outpost.

Maybe this all seems too optimistic to you. And I hate to blow my own trumpet. But I was among the minority who predicted the start of the war before it started, who said Iran wouldn’t lose, that there’d be no regime change and no US victory via an air war was possible. When the ceasefire was announced I was among even fewer who said it would hold because the US was out of real options, while the consensus anti-imperial opinion said it was a ruse to buy time for a land invasion or other escalation.

And now, despite the calling off of talks in Geneva over the next stage of the process, my prediction, for what it’s worth, is that this won’t mean a return to war, and that in fact it will further the process of US-Israel estrangement, with Trump and Vance likely to see it as further confirmation that Israel, not Iran, is the impediment to peace.

Which is all to say, Trump was a necessary evil.

Of course we’ll never know if a Democrat as president would have launched an attack on Iran, but it would have come eventually. And given that an attack on Iran was inevitable, it was the best case scenario that it happened under Trump, an ideologically drifting narcissist without any real loyalties or attachments. A man motivated to protect his own personal financial interests above anything else (a number of which sit within the range of Iranian missiles). A man who was always going to be outmanoeuvred by a country led, literally, by men and women with PhDs, by philosophers, mystics and engineers. There were reports that in the process of negotiations, Iran drafted in the country’s top psychologists to craft messages to appeal to Trump’s ego and vainglorious personality. It appears to have worked.

From only ever acting retaliatorily, from closing the Strait of Hormuz to striking American bases and the oil and gas infrastructure of US proxies, to employing psychologists to sweet talk a narcissist, Iran bossed the process from day one.

And Israel knows it.

It’s attacks on Lebanon are a final attempt to derail the process and regain some leverage over the negotiations. I don’t think it’ll work. We’re too far down the track. The Strait opens, the oil and gas starts flowing, or, with oil reserves at critical levels, we’re looking at a global depression. And Trump now appears motivated to avoid that, not least to protect his own wealth, above and beyond the objections of Israel. I don’t believe, as many still do, that the MoU, Trump’s comments and Vance’s criticisms of Israel, are all part of some drawn out psy-op before another attack on Iran.

This isn’t to give Trump any credit. It’s just to say empire isn’t omnipotent or strategically untouchable. You can, with the right war strategy, alongside favourable geography and propitious timing, force it to make concessions it doesn’t want to make.

Trump was necessary. Necessary to strip away the niceties and reveal the true face of empire, to reveal its naked impunity, to showcase the war crimes in all their immoral bloodlust. Yes, from Vietnam to Iraq to the so-called War on Terror, what Trump has shown us is nothing new, but through careful stage-management and competent administration, the myth of benign American empire has managed to endure. I’m not sure that myth will survive Trump. He’s also been necessary to reveal the limits of empire, to show it can be beaten, to expose its vulnerabilities, to detail its weaknesses.

Iran should have tied Gaza more closely to the MoU, as it has with Lebanon, but it has delivered a valuable blueprint in how to fight empire.

Trump has also been necessary to expose the plastic progressives, the liberal anti-Trump imperialists who, in their opposition to Trump’s deal with Iran, can only look like warmongering imperial psychopaths. From all those sharing memes on social media about surrender, from the Democrats and CNN talking heads decrying the deal, to Jimmy Fallon dragging Trump for giving Iran back the money the US stole, there is no articulation of an alternative to endlessly bombing Iran. There’s no anger from liberals over dead Iranians, or at the imperial state, at Zionism or the embedded death machinery that made this violence possible. No, they’re just embarrassed for empire. And they don’t want to recognise the limits of that empire.

With Israel still bombing Lebanon and oil reserves at critical thresholds, however, this is all far from over.

Iran has sketched out two futures for the US and it now has a decision to make: stand behind the deal which Trump has loudly proclaimed as necessary to save the world, and force Israel to stand down, or let Israel dictate the process, return to war and drag the world into an economic depression. Anything is still possible, of course, but I judge the latter extremely unlikely.

And Trump, in his egotism, venality and conceited self-interest, might just be the man for the moment.

What I do know is that those Iranian psychologists have some more work to do.

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This will be looked back on as the year in which American power, hard and soft, entered into accelerated collapse.

The World Cup is, in so many ways, a distraction from the war, mass murder and genocide inflicted by the empire and its proxies, but it has signalled the further fracturing of the soft power which has been integral to maintaining the myth of benign American empire.

The last four World Cup hosts - South Africa, Brazil, Russia and Qatar - used the event to bolster their soft power by doing everything possible to present an outward-looking, friendly face to the world. Russia, for example, waived all visa requirements for fans to enter the country, made long distance train transport between host cities free, and also made all local transit, from buses to subways, free.

The United States, by contrast, has used the opportunity to bare its imperialist, capitalist teeth.

It has outright travel bans on citizens of four countries playing at the tournament, has rejected fans and fan groups from countries around the world, denied visas to players and has banned referees from entering. Rather than using the moment, as past hosts have done, to repair images and restore reputations, the US has used the moment to showcase its essential imperialism. Rather than use the World Cup to defy critical narratives about who they are, the US has used it to reaffirm: yes, this is exactly who we are.

On the capitalist front, it has used the opportunity to showcase another favoured American tradition. Grift. New Jersey Transit, for example, has hiked a return ticket from Penn Station in Manhattan to MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, to $100 from a normal price of $12.90. The Massachusetts Transportation Bay Authority has priced return tickets from Boston to Gillette Stadium at $80 from the usual event-day price of $20. Other cities have enacted similar price hikes.

Every preconception about American greed has been validated, every assumption confirmed.

This fracturing of American soft power at the World Cup has been on full show for the globe to see, and it is all wonderfully self-inflicted. American leaders are capitalists and imperialists to their bone marrow. And I don’t just mean Trump, Hegseth and the MAGA crew. Do you hear complaints from Democrats about the entry bans, about the travel prices? In some cases Democratic cities are the ones grifting. Mamdani, to his credit, has been a lone critical voice. But still, New York under his and Kathy Hochul’s leadership isn’t offering free transit around the city, or to the MetLife stadium, for visiting fans.

The World Cup has perfectly encapsulated the venal spirit of the United States.

Ego, arrogance and hubris, undergirded by ideologies of capitalism and imperialism, have converged to create exactly the kind of experience they were always bound to create.

American disregard for soft power, its inability to set aside ideologies, even minimally, in order to boost its image, is underpinned by the fallacy of American hard power. American leaders, pumped up on militarism and nationalism, addicted to the action movie star aesthetic, care nothing for soft power because they believe hard power is the only type of power they need to dominate the globe.

But this misconception is coming undone in real time.

If the reports are to be believed, the US and Iran will sign a peace deal this week, and the signing will seal, regardless of its contents, a definitive and historic defeat for the United States.

The US and Israel attacked Iran explicitly to effect regime change and end the Islamic republic. They failed. However else this deal is dressed up by Trump and legacy media, this is the stone cold fact. The reopening of the Strait of Hormuz simply reanimates a status quo that existed before the attack. But the signing of this deal is anything but a return to the status quo. Iran has demonstrated deterrence, staved off two nuclear powers, dictated Israeli conduct over Lebanon, and the Islamic republic has survived. On top of that, Iran is likely now to achieve sanctions relief and the unfreezing of billions of dollars while still being able to enrich uranium. And with the toll system it initiated, while maintaining its ability to keep sending its own oil and gas out, Iran has been able to demonstrate strategic dominance over empire. The country has also inflicted billions of dollars of material damage on US military assets, damage it inflicted right up until the final round of attacks last week, and has forced US military forces to abandon their bases across the Middle East.

I’ve got no time for the petty complaints I’ve seen emerging from anti-imperialists about the deal Iran is about to sign. We’ve witnessed an undeniable, all-time anti-imperial win.

No near or medium-term US president will want to repeat Trump’s Iran misadventure, which means the country has staved off the threat of another imperial attack for some time, time it can use to manufacture thousands more of the missiles and drones which proved so effective.

Israel as always is the wildcard, but it cannot go it alone against Iran, and if it defies its handlers and reignites the war, it will be plunged into a crisis that would help speed-run the end of that diseased colony.

In so many ways, the imperium in 2026 is the outcome that Donald Trump always promised: the inability to reckon with a multi-polar world, the refusal to recognise the limits of American hard power and the rejection of soft power virtues. These pathologies have melded into a crisis for empire, a crisis that anyone who understands the necessity for the end of empire should welcome.

In 1980 the historian William Appleman Williams wrote a book about US imperialism titled Empire As A Way Of Life. While acknowledging that empire doesn’t end overnight, he also urged Americans to imagine a way out of their imperial idiom.

Despite the World Cup debacle and the Iran deal, US empire hasn’t ended. Empires end by a thousand cuts, not one decisive blow, something Iranian leaders understand well. But the US has taken on some deep gashes recently. And while we shouldn’t expect the end of imperial violence, because dying empires lash out, the last few months are a sign that US empire as a way of life is, mercifully and gloriously, coming to an end.

Now, as Williams wrote, it’s up to Americans to do some imagining about what comes next.

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The football World Cup starts this Thursday and the US regime has already guaranteed that it will be the most racist in history.

FIFA-appointed Somalian referee Omar Artan, voted the best referee in Africa last year and travelling on a diplomatic passport, was denied entry to the US when he landed at Miami and forced to fly back home.

The Iranian national team have been forced to relocate their training base from Arizona to Mexico, and the manager of the team, as well as various technical support staff, have been denied US visas. The US is also demanding that the Iranian playing squad enter and leave the US on the day of their games, a condition clearly meant to harm their ability to perform well in matches. Iran's fan ticket allocation has also just been withdrawn, meaning there will be no fans from Iran in the stadiums.

Iraqi national team vice-captain Ayman Hussein was detained, searched and interrogated at Chicago’s O’Hare airport for seven hours while Iraq’s national team photographer was denied entry and turned back on landing.

The Senegalese team were treated like criminals on landing, with security not allowing them to enter the terminal and strip-searching them on the tarmac. The Uzbekistan team were similarly searched after stepping off the coach outside the Icahn stadium in New York prior to a friendly match against The Netherlands.

At least 90 fans from two major supporter groups in Morocco have also been denied visas ahead of the tournament, most under a clause citing doubts about their intention to return home, despite their documented travel histories to Russia 2018, Qatar 2022, and the Paris Olympics. Some have lost thousands of dollars in non-refundable hotel bookings.

These refusals followed the initial refusal of a visa for the Moroccan player Zakaria El Ouahdi, who plays in Europe, after US embassy staff flagged him as a risk because his father was deemed to have a suspicious beard.

The South African team waited months for US visas to be issued, leading to a public complaint from the country’s minister of sport who said they’d been “made to look like fools,” and as of this week were still waiting for four visas to be processed.

The International Sports Press Association says that many Iranian and African journalists have been denied visas needed to enter the US and report on the tournament.

All of this is making people compare this World Cup to the 1936 Nazi Olympics, but that's really unfair. By 1936 Nazi Germany hadn't attacked any sovereign countries, assassinated any heads of state or committed any holocausts.

Some on Twitter didn’t get this, but I expect my readers understand this as an absurdist quip intended to make a deadly serious point about the barbarity of US empire.

The truth is the US regime has committed all of these criminal acts in just the last few months, from the kidnap of a head of state, to the assassination of a head of state (and his family), to an attack on a sovereign nation because it refused to submit to empire. And the Gaza holocaust, sponsored by the US and committed by its colonial proxy using regime arms and technology, is ongoing.

So yes, the argument is sound. The World Cup is being hosted by a white supremacist regime, a regime that has outright bans on citizens of numerous global south countries whose national teams have qualified for the World Cup, including Iran, Haiti, Senegal, and the Ivory Coast. A regime which has concentration-camp like facilities into which people routinely disappear, or die. A regime which constantly talks in overtly racist terms about the need to save western civilisation from non-white people and is therefore clearly not fit to host one of the world’s most preeminent, multicultural global sporting events.

Yet despite all this, compare the media focus on US crimes in the context of hosting the World Cup with the attention given to Qatar, Russia or Brazil. Where is the reporting about US human rights abuses? Where are the televised news specials about US repression and policies of mass murder? Where are the anguished op-eds about inner city gun violence? Where are the protests by national teams against the politics of the host nation?

The clear hypocrisy on show is just another indictment of valueless liberals and demonstrates how subjects of empire, whether journalists or athletes, give a pass to empire for its crimes. It’s easy to speak out from the guts of the imperial core against outsiders when you know there’ll be no consequences for doing so. It’s much harder to possess genuine principles which put you into conflict with your rulers and paymasters.

But it’s probably in many cases a lot simpler and more horrifying than this. It’s probably more likely that many in the imperial core simply agree with and support imperial violence. For many people, Qatar and Russia having draconian policies against gay people is worse than a holocaust when the victims are Palestinians, the wretched of the Earth, an essentially sub-human population in the eyes of imperialists.

The World Cup is a perfect encapsulation of the impunity with which imperialists are able to commit their crimes.

In 2017, when concerns about the US as a potential host were raised, FIFA president Gianni Infantino said “any team, including the supporters and officials of that team, who qualify for a World Cup need to have access to the country, otherwise there is no World Cup. It’s obvious. The requirements will be clear.” But now, with accredited FIFA referees and team staff being banned from attending, the cowardly Infantino says these issues are all a matter for the host nation.

No consequences or condemnation. Just the pure impunity of empire.

FIFA demanded previous World Cup hosts introduce special laws to bypass all kinds of regulations to ensure the smooth running of past events. South Africa passed a Special Measures Act demanded by FIFA, while Brazil’s parliament in 2013 passed and codified a 900-page General Law of The World Cup covering everything from criminal provisions to visa processes to press freedom. But no such demands were made of the US, with the regime able to ban anyone it wants, including FIFA referees and team staff.

The empire is granted impunity for its actions by other imperialists like Infantino who possess essentially the same politics. In their minds there is no need for white empire to pass special World Cup laws, because the governance is not just already fit-for-purpose, but infinitely superior. When empire executes power and authority, that power and authority, unlike that wielded by the periphery, is, by definition, legitimate.

Perhaps this will all be a wake-up call for the sport, but it’s unlikely, because this isn’t just about FIFA or about football. What we’re seeing with this World Cup cuts to the heart of empire and the value system which underpins it.

What we’re seeing is the racism, hypocrisy and double standards that always surface when professed liberal principles clash with imperial realities.

No, this fiasco won’t change FIFA, but it should be a reminder to us that empire is an illegitimate construct and a bankrupt project that, when ended, will end FIFA by default as well.

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This week the UK revoked the visas of leftist American influencer Hasan Piker and the podcaster Cenk Uygur who were both scheduled to speak at events in Oxford and London.

The UK government hasn’t commented on the reason, but it’s obvious it was for their views on Israel. Piker and Uygur are not radical in any true sense of the word. They are both fairly mainstream progressives close to the AOC-wing of the Democrats. Uygur used to be a Republican. They don’t call for revolution, they call for voting and standard social democratic policies. Nothing in their speech is conventionally radical, hateful or incites violence. But they are anti-genocide and anti-Israel, and this is radical enough to get you banned from entering the UK.

While it’s a frightening level of authoritarianism from a supposedly liberal democracy, the decision is not that surprising. From proscribing non-violent protest group Palestine Action as terrorists, to the mass arrest of peaceful anti-genocide protestors, to the secret terrorism charges being brought against pro-Palestine activists, the UK’s embrace of authoritarianism on behalf of Israel has been a consistent theme of Keir Starmer’s Labour government.

The incredible twist is that banning Piker and Uyghur has attracted more attention and controversy than letting them speak at the event ever would have, and is going to win Labour precisely zero votes from a right that hates them anyway.

On the face of it the decision appears, like the crackdown on pro-Palestine activism which has seen Labour bleed votes to the Greens, to be comically bad politics. But I have to consider, as was pointed out to me when I posted this perspective on twitter, that maybe politics isn’t the point here. I have to consider that rational political calculations, when it comes to Israel, aren’t part of the equation for most western governments. Maybe slavish servitude to Zionists and Zionism is the only position that matters. Maybe signalling that you are prepared to do anything for Israel regardless of the domestic political consequences is the only point. And frighteningly, we have to consider that perhaps the worse those consequences are, the better. It seems illogical on the one hand, but there’s an argument to be made that the more pain an elected official endures on behalf of Israel, the greater the benefit to them in the long run. If not politically, then certainly personally and financially.

I think there’s a huge chunk of truth to this analysis, and I understand why people look at these moments and find it increasingly hard to interpret events in any other way. But I find it hard to accept this as the full explanation. I think a fuller explanation is that vote-losing slavish Zionism is simply a core tenet of the anti-politics of centrism. An anti-politics that clings, against all evidence, to a mythical centre ground in which an anti-fascist is considered the same as a fascist. I’ve been up close to these people, and their capacity to make utterly false equivalences between ‘extremes’ because doing so enables them to feel more secure about their defunct political ideology can be hard to appreciate. They will point to the fact the UK has also banned right-wingers from entering the country, and token progressive red meat such as recognising Palestine to sanctioning a few Israeli settlers, as proof of their centrist sincerity. They really think a sweet-spot can be found opposing fascist speech and anti-fascist speech, and because of their brainwashed Zionism do not recognise that their support for an apartheid state committing genocide is materially fascist in nature.

But it’s not just the UK of course.

France and Germany have also cracked down hard on pro-Palestine voices and are working to make criticism of Israel a criminal offence in pursuit of a miserable waste-ground politics of ‘anti-extremism’ which rests on the conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism.

Last month France denied an entry visa to the Palestinian human rights campaigner, Shawan Jabarin, a decision which came two weeks after the country arrested one of its own elected MEPs, Rima Hassan, for her pro-Palestine advocacy. France is also pushing forward with a law to make criticism of Israel punishable with up to five years in prison. Germany has embarked on a similar campaign of repression, cracking down on anti-Israel dissent by banning protest, arresting activists, outlawing pro-Palestine slogans as antisemitic, and denying entry to pro-Palestine figures. The EU has also frozen the bank accounts of critics of both Israel and NATO in its desperate attempts to wrest back control of a status quo narrative.

While these are the most high-profile efforts to codify anti-Zionism as hate speech, even in countries considered more sympathetic to Palestine, like Spain, police violence and repression against pro-Palestine activists has been a regular feature. Just this week a pregnant Palestinian woman was thrown violently to the ground and brutalised by Dutch police after her husband, a Palestinian from Gaza, was arrested on spurious disturbance charges.

All of this is happening, of course, while Gaza has been turned into a literal concentration camp, where 1.8 million people are living in tents, crammed into just 133 square kilometres of space while still being indiscriminately murdered from the sky, and with disease rampant.

But for most European governments, especially those dominated by legacy centre-left and centre-right parties, Israel’s colonial settler brutality is not an example of extremism. The sexual assault and rape of European citizens by Israeli soldiers is not extremism to be overly concerned about or condemn. No, the real extremists, in their minds, are those who oppose the creation of Palestinian concentration camps, who oppose Israeli rape dungeons, and who oppose the genocide of Palestinians.

There is no question that Zionism is a totalitarian ideology which has infected Europe deeply and at a moment of crisis has revealed the massive contradictions between the continent’s professed liberalism and its liberalism in practice. But it is not enough just to say that Zionism alone determines the political contours of growing European authoritarianism. The UK, for instance, has also been sentencing peaceful eco protestors to years in prison.

It is, I think, more accurate to say that the establishment status quo is by necessity Zionist, and a centrist anti-politics, which stands for nothing but the maintenance of the violent and oppressive status quo, is a perfect political vehicle for such an ideology.

Israel is a vital European project and a valuable geopolitical extension of the violent status quo, and embracing a natural inclination towards authoritarianism to protect it just makes perfect sense.

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It’s been record hot in parts of Europe and Asia over the last week and this has provoked an outburst of three things that have become de rigeur whenever this happens:

1. Climate change scepticism

2. Exclusive focus on heat by legacy media

3. Divorced context

The first one is baked in to the conversation, you might say, if you were reaching for an appropriate metaphor. And normally I’d not be that bothered. But I’ve been seeing more of it across my social media, especially on Twitter/X, and the explanation I think is two-fold.

Firstly, and most obviously, Musk and Nikita Bier, the guy in control of the algorithm, boost right-wing accounts by policy, which means scepticism and denial at moments of climate extremes become more visible, given these positions tend to be rightist in nature. Secondly, despite my leftist politics, my anti-Zionism and pro-Palestine writings have attracted people who approach anti-Zionism from a more right-wing, pro-sovereignty, pro-nationalist perspective. These people, my intuition tells me, put climate change and Zionism in the same bracket - as a mainstream, elite-led “narrative” to be rejected. As such I’ve been seeing some of these accounts, who I agree with on Israel, Palestine, imperialism and Zionism, in my feed posting content and takes sceptical of climate change.

To me, this is not a coherent politics. Zionism and a heating planet grow from the same root. Imperialism is a fuel source for climate change, and anti-imperialism cannot be separated from ecological destruction. The Pentagon is the single biggest institutional emitter of greenhouse gases, burning more fossil fuels annually than entire countries like Portugal, Sweden and Denmark. An empire which projects global power and launches missiles thousands of miles from its shores to impose its violent will on the world could not survive without fossil fuels. Which is why, among many other reasons, Trump, and US empire historically, have loved oil so much.

In the first 15 months of the genocide in Gaza, Israel burnt more fossil fuels than Estonia and Costa Rica burn in a year combined.

Now it’s been more than two and a half years, the ecological cost to the atmosphere of genociding Gaza and mass murdering Palestinians will be equivalent to the pollution necessary to power the lives of tens of millions of people. But instead of using fossil fuels to provide the necessities of life, Zionism uses fossil fuels on a massive scale to end lives. Zionism kills Palestinians as a first order effect, and then boosts the heatwaves that cause death and suffering years later.

That brings me to number two.

A heating planet is just one outgrowth of the current global system, yet far too often legacy media ignores the vast scale of the ecological crisis to focus narrowly on climate change. And this is where an argument for climate as a narrative can be made, but it’s not the argument made by those who scorn it as a tool to provoke fear and impose control. If climate change is pushed as a narrative, it’s because an easy solution can be sold within the existing confines of globalised neoliberal capital. A transition to solar and wind, fuelled by mega-mining companies blasting the holes and digging up the minerals which are transported by the mega-shippers, the market lubricated by metals traders, with the profits captured by the energy giants.

Crucially, in this telling of the crisis, nothing really has to change. On the contrary in fact. In this telling, capitalist growth policies become essential to combating climate change.

The root of climate change as a mainstream narrative is better understood then as seeded in and growing out of imperialist-capitalist relations, not conspiracist adjacent globalist plots.

Which brings me to complaint number three.

If the crisis is understood not just as a climate crisis but as a whole-system ecological crisis underpinned by the existing system of globalised neoliberal capital, no easy, sellable solutions can be proffered. If our ecological predicament is understood as encompassing greenhouses gases, plastic pollution, ocean acidification, nitrogen pollution, tropical forest destruction, ozone depletion and species extinction, the story of the crisis becomes far harder to tell as a soundbite. If ecological damage is assessed not just in terms of extreme heat but in terms of an integrated system under a multi-faceted assault, the breadth and scale of the problem quite obviously defies any singular, energy source-focused solution.

Taking the crisis as a whole would require a discussion which slays sacred capitalist cows, confronts elite power structures and concludes with the necessity to completely reshape not just energy systems, but many of the systems which drive our civilisation. It would require serious policies that reject global capital and move us towards sustainable, local systems that benefit communities not oligarchic structures and corporate entities, whether that be in energy, farming, tourism or trade.

Here’s the unifying kicker: a politics of true global sustainability would require the same kind of revolutionary thinking and action that would also end imperialism and Zionism.

In conclusion, yes, the world is heating up, and that’s because of the extraordinary increase in the rate at which carbon dioxide is being released from burning fossil fuels. And yes, this heating will have to stop or lots of people will die and the system will collapse. But fossil fuels can be used usefully or badly, and the externalities of their burning (the heat trapping pollution) can be more, or less, worth the cost of burning them.

Genocide, conquest and imperialism are vile and depraved ways to use any energy resource, let alone a non-renewable one that has planetary effects long into the future.

To be honest, I may have written this article for an audience that doesn’t exist. But I have been frustrated for a long time now with how ecological collapse has been so divorced from the majority of anti-imperial thought. I think that is also partly to do with a belief that imperialists weaponise climate change to demonise, for example, China’s use of coal or Venezuela’s use of its oil revenues (now of course captured by empire).

I understand this perspective, and imperialist media definitely does this.

But that isn’t a reason to pretend basic physics is wrong or to write off climate change as a conspiracy or a globalist plot.

It’s a reason to think more deeply about how and why climate change is presented to us as a problem in the way that it is, not a reason to doubt whether it is a problem at all.

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Summer music festival season is approaching (assuming the diesel is available to run the generators), and one of the artists who’ll be gracing stages across Europe and the US is Jack White.

Best known as the lead singer of The White Stripes, White is a vocal anti-Trump voice in the music industry, and also extremely pro-Ukraine. White speaks and posts regularly about Ukraine, often condemning Russia and Putin, who he calls evil.

On Gaza, on Palestine, on Netanyahu and on genocide however, he has had absolutely nothing to say, going so far as to methodically delete any references in support of Palestine posted in the replies on his social media.

I’ve picked on Jack White, but I could have chosen hundreds of other names to demonstrate the hypocrisy and double standards of so many western musicians.

Lots of artists who have spoken out against Russia, adorned their stages with Ukraine flags and performed at a 2022 benefit concert for Ukraine, like Ed Sheeran, have been silent on Palestine and on Israeli apartheid and genocide.

Lots of artists have attached themselves to the empire-approved narrative of Ukraine good/Russia bad, a feel-good position that comes with absolutely zero financial or reputational costs, but have refused to stand against Israel and its genocide of Gaza because it comes with costs. To speak up against Israel is to defy US empire and western imperialism. And in an industry filled with Zionists, standing against genocide comes with material costs, as artists like Bob Vylan and Kneecap, targeted for imprisonment by the British state, have found out.

The silence, especially from those artists who sing about war, fascism and resistance, has been telling. Shamefully telling.

Artists like Muse, who titled an album Drones, whose lyrics excoriate the militarised surveillance state, and in the song Psycho parodied the toxic culture of murderous obedience that enables the crimes of US empire.

Muse, who titled another album Resistance and in the song Uprising sung that we must “let the revolution take its toll” that “we should never be afraid to die” and that we have to “rise up and take the power back, time the fat cats had a heart attack.”

Despite this performative resistance and revolutionary aesthetic, the lead singer of Muse, Matt Bellamy, has said nothing about Palestine. He has played the role of the compliant empire grunt he satirises and performed with a Ukraine flag on his guitar. But he’s said nothing about the drones and the fucking psychos committing genocide in Gaza. Like Jack White, Bellamy didn’t perform at the Together For Palestine event and hasn’t signed up to the No Music For Genocide campaign which has seen musicians remove their songs from streaming platforms in Israel.

Very few of the artists who have signed up to the campaign are really mainstream, arena-sized bands. Notable exceptions include Paramore lead singer Haley Williams, Paul Weller, Massive Attack, Idles, Wolf Alice and Fontaines DC. But for the most part, those bands who are famous and popular enough not to fear the consequences of speaking up have demonstrated a shameful and cowardly silence. Less famous artists who don’t have the influence of Jack White or Matt Bellamy and who do have something to lose are the ones who’ve stepped up and showed the bare minimum of solidarity a genocided people should expect from artists who profess to channel the human spirit.

Too many big name artists are cowards who will gladly milk the adoration of their fans for safe political stances, but appear to believe that standing with a genocided people is a statement of radicalism rather than an expression of basic humanity. Or maybe they’re just Zionists and racists who approve of apartheid and genocide. Bruce Springsteen, with whom Trump got into a slanging match after Springsteen called Trump a moron, deserves special mention here. A performer who for decades has traded on his progressive, blue-collar credentials and standing up for the little guy, but has been silent on genocide.

Then there are the artists who’ve performed in Israel. And this is too-long a long list, a list of the great and good of the pop and rock world, from Madonna to Bono, Lady Gaga, Elton John, Paul McCartney, Bon Jovi, to Mick Jagger and Radiohead. In reality this is a list of frauds and certain racists and Zionists.

Does any of this matter?

I think it does. As do many Palestinians who lead boycott campaigns to stop artists playing in Israel, and who urge musicians to speak out on Palestine.

It matters because musicians, and the cultural soft power they wield, are vital to sustaining Israel’s apartheid and genocide project.

Legitimisation through live performances by big-name bands and singers is absolutely essential to Israel’s project of normalisation. The melodies and lyrics of the world’s biggest musicians help wash the crimes of apartheid and genocide. When these artists are pictured with Netanyahu, as Madonna has been, or out and about in Tel Aviv, as has been the case for many of the big names who’ve performed there, the message is clear: Israel is just a normal country and my appearance here is proof.

Look at how important a campy, joke song contest like Eurovision is to Israel. So important that the New York Times reported last week that for years the government has run campaigns dedicated to juicing and rigging the vote. The Times further reported that Israeli embassies in the west summoned domestic TV bosses to demand they broadcast this year’s event.

Music is important to Israel because it grants it a social and cultural cachet which becomes a license to commit apartheid and genocide.

And while those artists who have stood up for Palestinians and against Israel are a breath of fresh air, and deserve to be supported over the cowardly and complicit big-name artists, the story is not their stance.

The story is Israeli apartheid and the genocide of the Palestinians.

A genocide that continues every day.

Earlier this week Israel bombed a community kitchen, killing volunteers trying to feed their community amidst the tents, rubble and dust of their former homes.

No media outlets reported the news.

Jack White didn’t post about it.

Israel has now attacked Gaza more than 2,800 times since the supposed October 2025 ‘ceasefire’ and in that time has killed almost 900 people.

Of course there’s a lot of blame to go around in this system, but musicians with big platforms exert important cultural influence.

Every one of them who has failed to speak up over genocide has failed not just morally, but artistically, and is complicit in the erasure of the Palestinians.

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I used to follow an anarchist guy. Subscribed to his substack.

He declared publicly that my writings inspired his own.

Then a few months ago he came out against ‘doomers’.

He began embracing AI.

He cheered for the kidnap of Maduro and the transformation of Venezuela into a client state of empire.

He said all dictators must fall and after Maduro that he hoped Iran would be next.

Yet in the same breath he would denounce the soul-crushing, life-sucking monotony of the 9-5 under neoliberal capitalism.

He felt trapped in a cage constructed by corporate-capital, but appeared, perhaps unwittingly, to be cheering for that very same cage to be imposed on others.

I could see that he was desperate for things to be better.

But in the end, that desperation, combined with the weight of his sadness and what appeared an incoherent ideological philosophy, led him to cheer on Sam Altman and Pete Hegseth.

Why am I saying this now?

Because I’m afraid he’s not alone. I’m afraid that as things get worse people will end up embracing movements, leaders, ideologies and emergent conditions which run counter to their interests.

I’m afraid that when everything comes on top, as the tunnel narrows and the light fades, that people will find hope in the hopeless, salvation in the immoral, intelligence in the fake, life in the death.

And I’m afraid that this is the point.

Without getting pseudo-religious or conspiratorial, I’m afraid that a world of suffering, anguish, precarity and fear is a boon to the forces of darkness, if not being deliberately constructed by them.

That’s not say there aren’t things to fear. On the contrary.

The point is how we react.

The reality is that most people will react predictably. Most people will do anything to survive.

But more than that, people will do what it takes to continue to live in the manner to which they have become accustomed.

So when the economy is hollowed out and reduced to AI companies, big tech giants and war-economy adjuncts, the fear is that people will feel they’ve little choice but to hand over their labour to people and entities that will entrench dystopian conditions.

I’m afraid that the panopticon will be made real by us. That to maintain a middle-class treat-world, people will cheerfully construct architectures of surveillance and control which rob us of our humanity and dignity under the guise of freedom.

I fear that in order to maintain consumptive privileges, people will choose to imprison themselves socially and technologically. That they’ll be convinced to design, build and cheer for a capitalist-carceral culture.

And the fear is that this culture, to maintain its domestic privileges, will double-down on the mass murder of people thousands of miles away to secure the resources necessary to sustain itself.

For the rare earths. For the oil. For the minerals. For the semiconductors.

And I’m afraid that without a coherent ideological framework, without an understanding of the social, political and economic conditions which underpin and govern our lives, this will simply become the default choice setting for people.

Slop choices in a murderous slop world.

I suppose I’m afraid that people will, ultimately, decide not to care about anything other than their own extremely narrow interests.

I’m sure some of you think we’re already there. There’s a fair argument to be made for that.

And I’m writing this now because I’m afraid what the next twelve months holds. I’m afraid that a material and psychological cliff edge is approaching that could throw people completely off their axis.

First off, and demonstrating the narrow interests point, we have hantavirus.

If there’s any place ideal for containing a viral outbreak, its a self-contained, essentially sealed environment of just 175 people floating far away from the rest of humanity.

So obviously, health authorities have let these people fly back to all corners of the world. Actually bonkers.

But why? Because quarantining 175 people for 45 days to spare hundreds or thousands of others was presumably against their human rights, or something.

Because in our neo-liberalised world, there is a presumption of consumptive freedom regardless of the impact that supposed freedom has on your friends, neighbours, community, or even the rest of humanity.

It’s 175 people. Would it be fun to stay on a docked ship for 45 days.

No.

Was it the most sensible option to fully and definitively contain the outbreak.

Obviously.

But these people were rich, white and entitled. So different rules apply.

Now a mad scramble is underway to track, trace and test because their freedom to eat, dine and travel was more important than global public health.

If I was pushed on the likely impact, I would say that this virus is too deadly and not contagious enough to become a pandemic (and those who’ve been with me since the early days will know I’m fairly well-versed in things viral).

A virus needs lots of asymptomatic or mildly ill hosts to really propagate. From what we know about hantavirus, the majority of cases are symptomatic and usually progress to severe disease.

Hanta doesn’t look to me like pandemic material.

But that doesn’t mean this is good news.

This was a perfect set-up for public health authorities, like ‘please model me the ideal start of a containable viral outbreak’ set-up, and they totally fucked it.

And as people in a globalised world use their consumptive freedom to grasp for experiences to fill the void (like birdwatching at a rubbish dump at the bottom of the world), the risk of spill-over viral events will only grow.

And when a pandemic virus does spill over, the chances of containing it are slim.

Hanta, with the entitlement of the passengers and the failure of health authorities, has given us a glimpse of that.

I fear what will happen when people radicalised by covid, and radicalised against public health, are asked to adjust their behaviours again to prevent another pandemic.

But before then, we have El Niño.

Some of the forecasts for how bad this might be are literally off the scale. A +4C global anomaly.

Mass heat death off the scale.

Famine-inducing off the scale.

Why? Pollution. Greenhouse gases. Every El Niño is boosted by an elevated baseline created by adding heat-trapping pollutants to the atmosphere at rates unprecedented for 66 million years.

Today’s mild El Niño is strong. Today’s strong El Niño is a monster.

The pollutants which have ratcheted up these events continue to underpin our economies and societies, and the AI data centre boom has added another accelerant to the system.

A boom which on top of the energy consumed, will destroy cropland, wild nature and communities in the process.

A boom which is imposing projects on communities that are cartoonishly evil.

The proposed Stratos data centre project in Utah is 62 square miles in size. This is a bigger footprint than entire cities like Miami or Pittsburgh. And it will need to be powered 24/7. It will need water. It will need steel and concrete and semiconductors.

And there are nearly 700 so-called ‘hyperscale-projects’ like Stratos currently planned globally, all fuelling the next El Niño.

If this one will be a monster, the next one might be a world-eater. And on and on.

And this El Niño will coincide with an oil crisis (yes, still incoming, despite the broad denial), a fertiliser crisis, and a globally depressed planting season.

A smaller global crop being wrecked by the droughts and floods triggered by El Niño would spell pain for those of us in the rich world, but absolute disaster for the poor. And the poorer you are anywhere in the world, Canada or Cameroon, the harder you will be hit.

I fear what this perfect storm will do to people’s minds, and to their behaviours.

I fear that if an anarchist anti-capitalist can be pushed to embrace imperialism during relatively benign conditions, what serious crisis conditions will do to all of us struggling under the weight of a baffling, unjust system rigged by imperial oligarchs.

I fear what happens when all of our choices narrow, and the politics and behaviours of reaction, and of fascism, are seen as the only way out.

I fear the seductive lure of false prophets, and hope enough of us can resist.

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Yesterday elections were held in parts of England to elect local councillors, and in Scotland and Wales to elect their devolved parliaments.

Fearing a challenge from the left, Starmer’s ruling Labour party spent the campaigning period, in coordination with Britain’s legacy media, confecting antisemitism slurs about Green party candidates.

The final effort, on the morning of the elections, was to turn a comment by the Green leader, Zack Polanski, that Israel nor any other country has an inherent right to exist, into one final psychodrama about antisemitism.

It hasn’t worked.

According to early results, the Greens are on course to beat pre-election forecasts for how many seats they’d win. Labour has suffered a heavy defeat.

The (very) dark, although not unsurprising lining to the cloud, is that the far-right Reform party is on course to win a large number of seats. Unsurprising because neither Labour nor the UK’s state-corporate media went after Reform with the rabid, ferocious intensity they went after the Greens.

Why?

Because Reform’s imperialist, hyper-capitalist, bigoted policies aren’t a threat to the establishment.

Reform’s promises to mass deport brown people, build private prison camps, privatise what’s left to privatise of public services, plough money into the war machine, support Israel, and cut taxes for oligarchs, are supported by a right-wing establishment.

What the establishment fears are threats to their power and wealth. What they fear are those who will redistribute wealth, expand the social welfare state and tax millionaires to do it. And with Zionism so deeply ingrained within western institutions of power, they fear anti-Zionists.

As absurd and morally depraved as it is, the establishment fear those who oppose genocide.

Which is why the media and political establishment made ‘antisemitism’ (actually anti-Zionism of course) into a central election issue. But when it was becoming clear it wasn’t working, when it was obvious that genocide, not fake claims of antisemitism, was a more salient issue for people of conscience, Labour MPs took desperately to social media to tell people not to think about Gaza when voting.

Despite this, despite the full weight of the British establishment being arrayed against the Greens, they have fought back, and fought back successfully.

The full results won’t be known until tomorrow, but a significant win saw a Green mayor elected in the London borough of Hackney, the first time the Greens have won a mayoralty election, and the first time the area has had anything other than a Labour mayor since it was formed.

More significant was that two days before her victory, Zoe Garbett had refused to praise the police for the violent arrest of the mentally ill man whose attacks on three people were mischaracterised as antisemitism (and weaponised against the Greens).

The bottom line is that genocide for many people is still, rightly, one of the primary, if not the primary political test. A test of character, ethics, morality and judgement.

The argument that local elections have nothing to do with Gaza appears logical on one level, but is an evasion.

Politics is (or at least should be) about all these things. About values.

And if you can’t oppose genocide, if you can’t stand up to genociders, why should anyone trust you to stand up for justice, or for anything decently progressive?

But for so many in Britain’s Labour party, as for those in the Democratic party in the US, and most liberal parties across the west, it’s worse than that. It’s not just that they don’t oppose genocide, it’s that they provide active support for genocide and a genocidal state.

The Labour party has effectively criminalised support for Palestine. An anti-genocide and community activist in the UK is facing fourteen years in prison having been charged under terrorism laws for social media posts. For tweets! And an NHS GP, Dr Rahmeh Aladwan, has been arrested numerous times for tweets opposing Israel and genocide and is facing years in prison. Meanwhile, another NHS GP, a Jewish Zionist who served in the IDF and claimed he didn’t kill enough babies, has faced no consequences and is still a practicing doctor.

And of course the Labour government provided funding, support and arms to Israel during the genocide, which included daily spy flights feeding back info to the Israeli army, helping fuel their genocidal assault. An assault that continues to this day, with the majority of Gaza now living in tents among rats and disease atop the wasteland of their former homes.

It’s a disgrace. More than a disgrace. Gaza is a moral collapse, and should be at the centre of all of our politics.

Gaza and genocide should very obviously be the test.

If you provide material and rhetorical support for genocide and genociders, if you have revealed genocide and apartheid as one of your core values, you should have no place in decent society, let alone be anywhere close to political power.

Which is why earlier this week I revealed that a Labour councillor in the London borough of Waltham Forest is a genocide supporter who at the height of Israel’s campaign of mass slaughter visited the country on an atrocity propaganda tour.

The final count isn’t in, so whether Lewis has lost the seat, and whether Labour lost the council to the Greens, we don’t yet know.

But what we do know is that the pro-Israel, pro-genocide, Zionist ideology Lewis wears proudly is rife within Labour.

And while Labour’s moral collapse has spurred the rise of the Greens, the overall environment being created in the UK is aiding the rise of the far-right Reform party.

Because in a country where being anti-genocide is lampooned and criminalised, and where being pro-genocide is considered the sensible and protected position, the emergence of fascism is hardly surprising. The rise of fascism is downstream, as they say, of pro-genocide sentiment. Which makes perfect sense, given genocide is the peak expression of fascism.

The UK is the perfect incubator for the emergence of hyper reactionary politics.

But these elections at least show us that Zionism may, slowly but surely, be losing its grip on western politics.

They also demonstrate that the power of legacy media to kill popular leftist politics with lies and slurs is waning, if not yet dead.

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The UK has descended into confected hysteria over antisemitism to protect Keir Starmer and Labour from being wiped out by the Greens in local elections this week.

The British establishment is well-practiced in manufacturing antisemitism hysteria, of course, having used it to destroy Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party when it got too close to power.

Now the UK’s political and media establishment is trying to pull the same trick, but this time on the Green Party and its Jewish leader, Zack Polanski.

This fresh round of hysteria really ramped up after a man with a history of mental illness (and of stabbings) stabbed two Jews in north London last week. Neither died and both will live. Omitted from almost all state-corporate media coverage was the fact that he also stabbed a third man, a Muslim. Also omitted was his history of stabbings (he previously stabbed his own dog, a Somali man, and two police officers), and his history of psychotic breaks.

Despite the circumstances clearly pointing to random attacks by a person suffering an acute mental episode, the police treated it not just as a planned antisemitic attack, but as terrorism.

The terrorism threat level in the UK was raised to severe.

I remember when terrorism used to mean car bombs, political goals, manifestos and scores of dead people, not a mentally disabled man with a butter knife scratching a few people.

But the attack was perfect fodder for the British media and political establishment, who blamed support for Palestine and opposition to genocide for enabling antisemitism, and instantly began demanding pro-Palestine protests were fully outlawed.

The environment of hysteria that ensued is hard to describe if you don’t follow British media or politics closely, but it has been extraordinary.

Keir Starmer gave a primetime televised address to the nation.

His speech was a complete misrepresentation of the facts of the case, completely omitting the Muslim victim, completely omitting the man’s history of illness and random stabbing attacks. But they were deliberate lies of omission critical to constructing an antisemitism narrative.

And it worked.

Every headline, every news broadcast for a week led with the story about ‘the antisemitism crisis in Britain.’

I remember when terrorism used to mean something. I also remember when antisemitism used to mean something. And implying all Jews support the actions of Israel used to be considered antisemitic.

But now that’s all anyone with political or media power does.

Starmer said that anti-genocide, pro-Palestine protests have created the environment for antisemitic attacks. The Green Party’s opposition to Israel’s genocide, the media said, has fuelled antisemitism. The Guardian had a story on the Green Party’s ‘struggle against antisemitism,’ a story which presumably included how just eight months ago the entire Green Party membership antisemitically elected a Jewish leader.

And when you deconstruct the logical conclusions behind the implication that Jews are being attacked because of what Israel has done, it will break your brain.

Firstly the implication that Jews are attacked because of Israel, not because of their religion, means Israel represents all Jewish sentiment.

But if you say Israel’s actions are inherently Jewish, is that antisemitism or not? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Israel is all Jews but not all Jews are Israel depends cynically on the argument being advanced.

Israel’s genocide? Not all Jews!

Pro-Palestine marches against Israel’s genocide? An attack on all Jews!

Secondly, if Jews are being attacked because of Israel, does that mean Israel has done something bad? Because the media and political class have spent years telling us it hasn’t.

We’ve reached the point where everything is antisemitism apart from the thing that is actually antisemitism.

And this is because the Zionists have lost the propaganda war. Genocide is not going back in the bottle. Everyone sees what Israel has done. Everyone can now see what Israel is: a genocidal settler-colony apartheid state run by ethno-supremacists.

The deliberate conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism then is intended to silence criticism of Israel, and erase the truth about what Israel is and has done.

It’s also intended to stop the Green Party inflicting a humiliating defeat on Keir Starmer and his Labour Party in local elections this week.

The establishment calculation is that if you can establish in the mind of progressives the idea that a vote for the Greens is actually a vote for hate, not a vote against genocide or apartheid, you can stop Labour bleeding leftist votes to the Greens.

If the Zionist establishment can reestablish that black is white, they think they have a chance.

But it goes even deeper than that.

The UK establishment aren’t just using the attack for rhetorical purposes, they are using it to actually get Green Party election candidates arrested.

Andrew Gilligan, a former adviser to Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak, and now a right-wing journalist, wrote a story about two Green Party candidates Saiqa Ali and Sabine Mairey who he said had made ‘antisemitic’ posts. Last week, he gloated that following his stories, they’d both been arrested.

The posts in question? In September 2024, Ali posted Free Palestine! and Long Live The Resistance! on her Instagram account. Mairey posted that an attack on a synagogue in Michigan, in March, was revenge, not antisemitism. Which it was. Ten days before he attacked the synagogue, Ayman Ghazali’s family in Lebanon had been murdered in an Israeli airstrike. His attack against an open and proudly Zionist synagogue was revenge.

Neither of these posts, one made two months ago, and one made 18 months ago, were antisemitic. But in an environment of hysteria, Zionists took their shot. And now Ali and Mairey have been arrested. For online posts. For Israel. For Zionism. And to try and confect a fake narrative about antisemitism to stop the rise of the Greens.

Three people are stabbed every day in London. Over one thousand people a year, of all religions and none.

None of these ever warrant a national prime ministerial TV address.

Twenty-seven mosques in the UK were attacked between July and October last year.

No extra security funding (Starmer has promised an extra £25 million for Jewish areas). No discourse about Islamophobia. Just tumbleweed.

But a random attack on two Jews gets the full national psychodrama treatment because it can be so usefully weaponised to serve the interests of Zionism.

Are people going to fall for this?

I don’t think so.

Is Zack Polanski going to fall for this after seeing what happened to Corbyn?

Hopefully not.

We have more than enough evidence by now to know that you can never appease Zionists.

There is no middle-ground, no strategy of accommodation.

Any concession is interpreted as a sign of weakness. As Corbyn showed us, once they’ve drawn blood, they’ll bleed you dry.

The only anti-Zionist strategy that makes any sense is one of full confrontation.

The only route to victory is their full defeat.

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The American tech giant behind the most popular tax filing software in the US allows employees to wear their IDF uniforms to work and also permits them to take months off the job to fight Israel’s wars.

Last month, Tom Yacobi, a data analyst at financial tech giant Intuit, whose products include the widely-used tax return program TurboTax, showed up to an all-hands company Zoom call in his full IDF uniform.

Yacobi works in TurboTax’s trust and safety team which handles the most sensitive personally identifiable information of TurboTax customers and users.

The whistleblower who provided me with this screenshot told me that since the beginning of the Gaza genocide, Israeli employees of California-based Intuit have, like Yacobi, been allowed to take as long as three or four months off work, often with minimal notice, to serve as reservists in the IDF.

“Intuit has shown no consideration for how these disruptions affect workflows and operations for employees in the US who have had to put processes on hold and postpone meetings to cater to Israeli employees' army schedules,” PM (not their real initials) told me. “And of course, there has been no concern for the emotional and mental health impact on US employees who have been put in the awkward position of joining Zoom calls with active soldiers implicated in genocide and war crimes.”

Showing up to work in a military uniform, let alone the uniform of a military which has committed genocide and war crimes, and whose former head is an ICC-indicted war criminal, is not only unprofessional and unethical, but clearly an unabashed display of arrogance and impunity.

PM said one senior manager took three consecutive months off work from October to December 2023 to participate in the genocide of Gaza. PM says Israeli employees continue to take two-week stints off work for IDF reserve duty.

PM has never raised the issue with HR or management for fear of the consequences at such an openly pro-Israel and pro-genocide company.

“What discouraged me the most was the shocking depravity of hearing directly from chief information security officer, Atticus Tysen, that the company had selected the Israel office as a ‘strategic growth site’ during the peak of the Gaza genocide, in December 2023. This was announced at the same time as the company was down-sizing certain American and Canadian offices.”

According to PM, Intuit employees are regularly required to think about Israeli feelings. PM says that on numerous occasions since October 2023, Intuit management have posted on the company-wide Slack messaging app “about the need to show our Israeli colleagues extra kindness and grace because of their distressful circumstances.” Needless to say, Intuit management have never posted similar messages concerning the distress of those who may have been affected by the Israeli genocide of Gaza or Israel’s mass murder of civilians in Lebanon and Iran.

PM adds that “many” of Intuit’s Israeli employees have moved to the US on an L-1 visa in the last few years, with the process for approval much easier than for an H-1B visa. An L-1 visa allows multinationals to transfer employees from their overseas offices to their US offices, and is a straightforward pathway to permanent US residency.

Zionists serve in key leadership positions at Intuit.

Marianna Tessel, an executive vice-president and general manager, is an Israeli-American who served as a captain at Mamram, the computing centre and IT backbone of the Israeli military. In 2023 Tessel posted on LinkedIn about her visit to Intuit’s Israel-based R&D centre which is staffed almost exclusively by former Israeli intelligence officers.

In 2023 the Jerusalem Post reported that Intuit’s Israeli employees were going to lead on integrating generative AI into TurboTax software. Tessel said Intuit’s Israel office creates “some of our fintech software, and much of the AI.”

David Hahn, another executive vice-president and general manager at Intuit, is a friend and confidante of Jewish-Zionist venture capitalist Keith Rabois, who he met when both worked at LinkedIn. Rabois is married to Jacob Helberg, an undersecretary of state in the Trump administration and an influential, if little-known Zionist voice in the US government. Rabois is often referred to, alongside Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, as a member of the ‘Paypal Mafia’ for his role in launching Paypal.

Hahn is also close with LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, another Jewish-Zionist big tech linchpin. In 2014 Hahn joined Hoffman’s venture capital firm Greylock Partners as an “entrepreneur-in-residence.”

Intuit, whose CEO Sasan Goodarzi is an Iranian exile, has a market cap of $111 billion. As well as TurboTax, the company also owns the accounting software QuickBooks, the credit monitoring service Credit Karma and the automated email software program Mailchimp. The company’s main revenue generator however is TurboTax, and as such it has spent two decades and many millions of dollars lobbying US politicians to stop the IRS building a free online tax return service.

In October 2023 the Republicans, looking for budget items they could cut to pay for Israel’s genocide of Gaza, targeted the funding the Biden administration had set aside for the creation of a government-built online tax return service. At the time the GOP only controlled the House of Representatives, and the proposed free service, known as Direct File, survived. After Trump’s win and the Republican capture of both houses of Congress however, Direct File was eliminated.

This was a significant win for TurboTax as it once again fended off the challenge of a free online tax return program and locked tens of millions of Americans into using TurboTax’s paid-for service.

Just a few months before it was scrapped, Intuit’s Zionist leadership donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration. The end of an IRS-run service was an obvious quid pro quo for this bribe.

PM’s experience and the Intuit story is like so many stories in the US today.

A story of corporate complicity in war crimes.

A story of the seemingly intractable connections between American tech companies and the genocidal Israeli military.

A story of bribery and grift.

And a story about the influence Zionists have over the political process in the US and the lives of ordinary Americans.

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Peter Magyar defeated Victor Orban in Hungary’s election earlier this week, leading to an outpouring of joy from the liberal media and political establishment. Many took the Obama line, lauding it as a victory for democracy and the rule of law.

Indeed, Magyar is so committed to the rule of the law that he has invited Netanyahu to visit Hungary in October. Hungary will withdraw from the ICC in June, and while Magyar has vowed to begin the process of rejoining, the country is extremely unlikely to be a member by October.

This is very convenient timing for Magyar, who won’t be faced with a decision to uphold international law or not. Not that we need this test to understand the man’s morality and politics. The fact that one of his first acts as prime minister-elect was to invite a wanted war criminal to his country tells us everything we need to know.

As did his first press conference after his victory.

In that press conference Magyar didn’t criticise the Israeli government once and said the countries enjoyed “a special relationship.” Magyar also said that while Orban vetoed every EU decision which sought to punish Israel for genocide and apartheid, he would be pragmatic and review each on a case-by-case basis.

So while Orban was an enthusiastic supporter of genocide, Magyar will be a pragmatic one!

And liberals like Obama crowing about Magyar’s commitment to the rule of law as a corrective to Orban had little to say when Orban refused to enforce the ICC warrant against Netanyahu on his numerous visits to Budapest. Because this was a backsliding on the rule of the law the liberal class were happy to support.

None of this is a surprise.

Until two years ago Magyar was an Orban loyalist, fully in lock-step with his Israel policy. He opportunistically split from Orban over corruption allegations, knowing he could position himself as a younger, fresher face of a new party which is still very much Zionist, and still very much of the nationalist right.

Yet headline after headline framed Magyar’s victory as a decisive break from the past. It was nothing of the sort, and this will be clear in the months and years to come.

Because in a time of monsters, we are served up the worst heroes.

We’re also supposed to be loving the pope right now, aren’t we? Because in his wordy, softly theocratic way he has been opposing Trump and the US war on Iran.

The pope, a man who leads a corrupt organisation fully beyond the rule of law which was found to institutionally rape children.

COOL.

But because he is providing some opposition to Trump, a man who runs a secret society up to its neck in money laundering and sex crimes is being lauded as a moral lodestar and radical truth-teller.

Because in a time of monsters, we’re served the worst heroes.

We’re also supposed to be having good feelings about the prime minister of the country in which pope Leo’s city state is lodged, Giorgia Meloni.

On Tuesday, Meloni’s government suspended a ‌defence cooperation deal with Israel.

I suppose we should take the win.

And we should also recognise the huge domestic pressure, especially from trade unions, that forced this decision and has compelled Meloni to become more hawkish on Israel in general.

But she hasn’t changed anything material. She doesn’t support the ICC case against Netanyahu and Gallant, doesn’t believe Israel committed genocide, doesn’t recognise it as an apartheid state.

For years Italy has been one of the main suppliers of arms to Israel, and has a host of other bilateral agreements with the country. Meloni’s far-right government is Trump-aligned, and to be Trump-aligned ultimately means being Israel-aligned.

And while Meloni’s move is better than nothing, it will have little practical effect on the only thing that matters when we’re talking about genocide and apartheid: JUSTICE.

Justice for the victims of genocide, for Gaza and for the Palestinians, and for the unspooling of Israel as an apartheid state.

A man we’re definitely supposed to have warm and fuzzy feelings about is the prime minister of Spain, Pedro Sanchez.

And in a world of moral cowards, his defiance of Trump and strong words and actions on Israel look impressive at first glace.

And I’m reluctant to stick the boot in too far, but I have to call it as I see it.

Because we’re talking about another illegal war by empire. We’re talking about Israel, genocide and apartheid.

And what I see is a man claiming a moral high ground his actions don’t deserve.

There has been a lot of positive coverage around Sanchez’s refusal to allow the US to use its airbases in the country to attack Iran. And while USAF planes might not be flying directly from Spain to bomb Iran, there has been a steady, daily stream of US airforce planes, including refuelling tankers, flying to and from Spanish airbases to Ramstein in Germany. From Ramstein, these planes are then flying on to the Middle East.

This is involvement in an illegal war. It might be once-removed, but it is involvement. And if the argument is that you can’t stop them flying from one base in Europe to another, even though you know those planes are being used to prosecute an illegal war, then do something about it!

But this hasn’t even been voiced as a concern. The Spanish government have been happy to take the positive press without standing up and really being counted on the issue.

A true affirmation of sovereignty would see Spain demand the US stop all flights from these bases. True sovereignty would see Spain demand US troops leave the country.

Sanchez has also had strong words to say about Israel, and has vowed to stop military trade between Israel and Spain.

But so much more could be done. Thousands of Israelis live in Spain. Barcelona has become a hotspot for ex-Unit 8200 spies to establish spytech firms.

If you believe in international law and justice for the victims of genocide, why not arrest every Israeli that has arrived in Spain in the last two and half years on suspicion of participating in genocide?

Many are almost certainly implicated.

If you believe in international law and justice for the victims of genocide, why not scramble Spanish fighter jets to force down Netanyahu’s plane when it flies over the EU, as it has done on numerous occasions since the ICC warrant was filed?

If I sound like an absolutist, a maximalist, it’s because I am.

Because we’re talking about genocide, the supreme crime, the collapse of humanity, the end point of mass violence and the most heinous act a state can commit.

In the case of Iran, we’re talking about an illegal war that has killed thousands, we’re talking about the slaughter of school children, the raining down of carcinogens on nine million people.

I don’t think world leaders commanding the power of a state should be cut any slack given these circumstances.

No allowances should be made given the absolute moral, ethical and legal rot we witness daily.

The bar for ethical behaviour and for the assertion of a basic humanity has been set so low its sickening.

In a time of monsters, the worst heroes.

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Don’t be fooled by the relative lull since the onset of the ceasefire between Iran and the US.

The economic crisis is coming.

The fuse has been lit. We’re still in the burning down phase. But the bomb will go off.

First off, there is still nothing moving through the Strait of Hormuz. Yesterday, just two tankers made it through. On Thursday, three. And of those that have made it through, it’s only been oil. No gas, no fertiliser, no plastics, no aluminium, no helium. Nothing for six weeks. Pre-war, between 130 and 150 ships transited daily carrying all manner of goods.

Four days into the ceasefire, traffic is effectively still completely stalled.

And Iran has been clear that it will not reopen the Strait unless its ceasefire terms, including the end of the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon, are met. The US has so far shown little sign that it will rein in its rabid genocidal colony of thieves.

So the Strait will stay closed.

What this means is that right now, we’re eating into the liquid fuels, gasses and petrochemical by-products that exited the Strait and were on their way to global destinations on February 27th.

A tanker moves at about the speed of a push bike. The global economy therefore is operating on a pre-war economy of abundance. The lubricants, both metaphorically and in reality, are still moving through the system, greasing the cogs and pistons.

Because of this, the consequences that were put in motion as a result of the US-Israeli attack on Iran have yet to be realised in meaningful ways for many of us.

And I’m not sure anyone really understands this.

Countries in Asia closer to the Strait have begun to feel the pinch. Because tankers that exited on February 27th off loaded in those countries a couple of weeks ago, so now the glass is emptying for them first.

They’re adapting in a variety of ways. The richer Asian countries, including Japan, South Korea and China, could afford to stockpile and so are more resilient. But all have begun eating into their large stockpiles of oil (around 200 days for Japan and South Korea), and strategic reserves. The more vulnerable counties in the region with limited stockpiles, such as the Philippines, Thailand, Pakistan and Bangladesh are relying on fuel subsidies, price controls, and preparing emergency rationing plans. Some like Bangladesh and Sri Lanka have initiated rolling blackouts and four-day weeks.

The east is a looking glass, portending many of our futures. The fuel shortages eventually will arrive everywhere. This is an inevitability. Physical reality determines and demands it.

As I wrote about before, in the coming weeks and months, the atoms and molecules are simply not going to be where they are wanted and needed in the quantities required.

There will be more in some places, less in others, depending on stockpiles, contracts and access to US, Canadian and Russian energy markets, but the overall global system will not be able to adjust to this supply shock and re-balance smoothly.

I’m re-emphasising the point because, again, it would be very easy, given the ceasefire talks, given Iran hasn’t been bombed for a few days and hasn’t launched in retaliation, to be lulled into a false sense of security/abundance.

We look around, the war seems to be winding down, and things are still ticking along. But it’s like looking out into the stars. We’re looking at the past.

The Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera reported that the last tanker of jet fuel from the Persian Gulf to Europe arrived in Rotterdam yesterday. After that, European supply stops and will only restart once the Strait reopens. Europe might try to buy some from the US and Canada, but both are likely to hold on to their own supply for the most part. Russia may sell a bit, but is in no mood to help Europe out in any significant way. Major European airports keep just a few days of jet fuel in storage tanks on site.

But then that's it.

One in twenty flights were cancelled last week. In the coming weeks, more and more flights will be cancelled. If the Strait stays closed for another few weeks, we are, without exaggeration, looking at the collapse of commercial air travel.

Jet fuel supply will be rationed and prioritised for critical cargo, especially food and medical supplies.

But if the closure really drags on, even that will run out eventually.

And no government in the world appears to be telling their citizens what’s coming. Most people are clueless. No serious measures have yet been announced. Not only because authorities don’t want people to panic, but because the experience of covid has made people fundamentally distrust authorities in a crisis. So governments are being more cautious than ever.

Crisis response has been politicised. It’s a problem.

I suspect there’s also an optimism bias in action, a sense that things are just going to be ok.

That certainly seems to be driving the market response.

And as most of our governments are middle manager technocrats who look to the markets for divine guidance, the lack of market reaction is feeding into the lack of political reaction.

So what can we do as individuals?

Most of us, not a lot. If you drive, fill some jerry cans with fuel at the current price. And although food right now is somewhat less of a problem, throwing a few extra non-perishable jars and tins in the basket isn’t a bad idea. Because even despite record high wheat and rice stockpiles, and fertiliser prices below Ukraine war levels, food prices are rising. Sugar is up 7%, followed by vegetable oil and wheat at more than 4%. Dairy and meat prices are also rising. The longer the Strait stays closed, the more prices will rise.

Beyond a bit of low-level prep, let’s hope for the best.

But if you care about justice, it’s hard to know what “the best” would be.

Iran shouldn’t cave on its demands because the US-Israel started a war that blew up the global economy. They should hold out for the best deal possible, for an end to the impunity of imperial violence, sanctions relief and a new arrangement in the Strait. Some argue that pushing for this outcome could, paradoxically, drive the US back to consequence-free imperial violence. But that will only provoke more Iranian missiles and worsen the global economic situation. And the Americans, for all their murderous stupidity, know this.

US planners also know that for all the talk of American fuel self-sufficiency, this only applies in a narrow way. The US imports significantly from Canada and Mexico, its refineries are integrated into global flows, and domestic oil gets priced against international benchmarks. Shortages anywhere affect prices everywhere, even the US. And the US also still does import more than 10% of its oil from the Persian Gulf.

So a re-escalation against Iran will be bad for everyone, including the Americans. Which is why I don’t think they will return to war.

I could be wrong, obviously.

But a resumption of the war on the same attritional terms as before doesn’t achieve anything for the US and just makes a bad situation worse. Already a massive amount of infrastructure has been damaged. In the final salvo before the ceasefire, Iran hit the East-West pipeline which enables Saudi oil to bypass Hormuz and be piped straight to the Red Sea for export. The attack has taken out about 10% of supply through this route. Iran held off until the last day, a strategic decision designed to signal that they know where the key oil routes are and will keep hitting them if they don’t get a deal on, or close to, their terms.

The only military escalation that could change anything is a full ground invasion to enact regime change, à la Iraq. But this won’t happen. The US does not have the troops, they can’t rouse an Iraq-style 30 country “coalition of the willing”, and Iran is not Iraq, either in terms of geography or the willingness of the average Iranian to let American troops walk into their capital.

A limited island invasion, mooted as likely by some, may succeed militarily, but strategically doesn’t make sense. Taking an island or two by the Hormuz pinch point would, far from force a reopening, turn the Strait into a war zone. And taking Kharg island, the hub of Iranian oil production and export, also makes no sense. What are they going to do with it? They need the tankers to be exporting Iranian oil to avoid a global depression. They’re not going to take Kharg only to let operations keep running as before. And Iran isn’t going to do a Venezuela and sign over their oil rights if Kharg was taken. In the event of a Kharg invasion, it would be back to war and a global depression would loom.

I’ve seen a lot of analysis that says this ceasefire is designed only to buy time for the US-Israel to regroup and either go back to bombing Iran or start some kind of ground invasion. I totally get the scepticism. But when I play any likely sequence of events forward in my head, I only ever reach the conclusion that a resumption would be so bad for the world, and so unlikely to achieve any outcome favourable to the US, that almost everyone is motivated to avoid it happening.

Stopping Israeli mass murder in Lebanon is the hardest point to negotiate. But I’m going to stick my neck out and go against the grain somewhat. I think the ceasefire will hold.

I think Trump, at the behest of his ego, his narcissism, and Israel, has fucked it for empire and helped deliver a true anti-imperial victory. One for the ages. One that could really change everything. And I’m going to do something more comprehensive on that next week.

So, assuming the US doesn’t revisit the plan to plunge the world into a permanent, epoch-defining depression by rage-destroying everything in the country, Iran is firmly in the driving seat.

What comes next, including how long the Strait remains closed, is up to them.

What comes next for us are higher prices and shortages.

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We are on the eve of a radical evil.

Tonight Trump’s deadline for Iran to surrender or be faced with the destruction of its critical energy and national infrastructure expires.

Just the fact that the president of the United States can set a ‘deadline’ for massive war crimes which leaves the world counting down the hours and speculating about nuclear weapon use, after starting a war of aggression, should be enough to end US hegemony forever.

This kind of ultimatum should be viewed as so unhinged, so beyond the pale, so outside the bounds of anything approaching normal diplomatic behaviour that no country in the world should want anything to do with it. Embassies should be closing, US troops should be ordered to leave the nearly 800 bases in 80 countries at which they’re stationed, and these facilities shut down.

The fact none of this has ever been a possibility shows us how US hegemony is a true plague on the world. It shows us how so few states are legitimately sovereign, and how so many willingly line up behind the crimes of empire. And it shows us that those states which are sovereign get targeted for regime change precisely because they are sovereign.

This, ultimately, was Iran’s only crime. It’s original sin.

When, nearly 50 years ago, the country ended a western-backed system of dictatorial monarchism and pursued a sovereign path, it brought to life a material reality that is forbidden under US empire. The material successes Iran has created over the last near 50 years, including independent financial systems, digital systems, and military systems, all achieved while under crushing western sanctions, are not allowed. And Iran is being punished for this.

Iran is being punished for its resistance, for its ingenuity, for its sovereignty.

This is the reason the US-Israel is bombing Iran’s premier universities and research facilities, and murdering its scientists.

The MIT of Iran was bombed this weekend.

These are centres of non-western excellence and learning which produce the minds that demonstrate what can be done outside the US-Zionist orbit. These places, and the people they train, have enabled Iran to successfully decouple from western hegemony. They have enabled modern Iranians to not just inherit a proud, 6,000-year-old civilisation, but to build on the achievements of their predecessors.

And because the Persian civilisation is such a successful one, because modern Iran has shepherded that civilisation so skillfully, Trump is threatening to kill it. Literally. In the most murderously deranged turn of a murderously deranged period, Trump said this morning that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

Every journalist, every politician who reproduced anti-Iran propaganda led us to this point.

Every reference to “the regime,” every reference to “peaceful protests,” every failure to mention that the protestors were armed by the west to provoke an insurrection (which Trump just admitted), every fake “internet shutdown” story, every dubious angle used to foment anti-Iran sentiment led us to this point.

And every single person, from liberal politicians to journalists at the Guardian, the BBC, CNN, the New York Times, and all those Iranian exiles who demanded Iran be bombed and helped cultivate the ground for this war of aggression, are culpable.

Yesterday an Iranian exile who writes for the BBC, Ghoncheh Habibiazad, suggested, quite unbelievably, that Iranians actually want to be nuked.

After an outcry on social media, the quote was changed, which itself raises questions about whether those words were ever said or not.

Regardless, publishing a quote from someone in a country under a murderous assault saying they hope they get nuked is an extraordinarily depraved depth to plumb. And even if it was said, it is effectively the voicing of suicidal ideation and by any journalist ethic or standard should never be printed.

But this is the sickness of imperial stenographers.

This is where we are now.

And of course there is speculation in his threat to kill “a whole civilization” that Trump is hinting at using a nuclear weapon. Maybe he is. Maybe they will. They’ve done it before, after all, the only country to have ever done so. If he does, the world should never be the same again.

But even if the US doesn’t use a nuclear weapon, even if the US-Israel ‘only’ go through with the threat to destroy all of Iran’s critical national infrastructure, the world should never be the same again.

And even if he doesn’t go through with it and an unlikely ceasefire deal is agreed, the world should never be the same again.

Enough is enough of degenerate American empire and its crazed, out-of-control genocidal Jewish colony.

The impunity of empire has to end. It has to. Because while it remains an empire, the US will always be the greatest threat to global peace and stability. No president since the US became an imperial power has been able to sit atop such a massive amount of hardware and not order the mass murder of innocent people.

Not one.

It’s baked in.

Trump, and especially the language he uses, is a particularly vile, vicious and sick example of American barbarity. But his behaviour so far has been consistent with other presidents who have bombed countries back to the Stone Age.

And even if he uses a nuclear weapon, he won’t be unique.

Thinking about the long arc of American violence for two seconds should make us incredulous that the country was ever sold to us as a stabilising force, as the leader of the “free world,” as a symbol of humanitarian values.

Anyone who ever fell for this has been utterly hoodwinked and made a fool of.

It really is time to end empire, Zionism and the control it has over the world. Whether you’re in the US, the global north or south, a central task must be to find and elevate new leaders who can extricate us from this rule.

And doing this won’t be possible without breaking people out of their legacy media bubble and educating them about the huge lies they’ve been told regarding the benevolence of the US and the evils of the official enemy.

We’re all going to suffer when the fuel starts to dry up and the economic crisis coming down the pipe as a result of US impunity really hits. The crisis is coming, and it is certain.

And now we are at the precipice of a horror being loosed on Iran that would take the country decades to recover from.

For our collective humanity, such a horror would be an everlasting stain inviting the rightful judgement and condemnation of many generations to come.

We’re on the eve of a radical evil, and whatever happens tonight, nothing should ever be the same again.

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