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 Iran's fan ticket allocation has also just been withdrawn, meaning there will be no fans from Iran in the stadiums.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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In his televised address last night Trump said the US was going to continue attacking Iran for another two or three weeks and would bomb the country “back to the Stone Ages, where they belong.”

More on that phrase later.

But first a bit on the economics.

Promising to keep doing the thing that has brought the world to the brink of a global economic catastrophe, and threatening maximum escalation, didn’t go down well with the people who make numbers go up or down. The oil price rocketed, and markets sank. It seems the people behind the screens might finally be waking up to the looming disaster. They might be realising, belatedly, that very soon the molecules are simply not going to arrive where they are wanted and needed in the quantities required.

You can’t decouple the numbers from the atoms forever and you can only deny physical reality for so long.

And the physical reality is stark and stunning. The drop in oil production since the US-Israeli sneak attack on Iran is bigger than the drop during covid, which was the biggest drop in modern history.

Read that again if you need to.

But there’s a crucial difference that makes this situation worse.

The covid drop was demand destruction.

This is supply destruction.

In 2020 no one needed the oil because of a mandated and somewhat managed power down. In 2026 everyone still needs the oil, and gas. There’s been no managed power down. The fuel just isn’t there. For the global economy the difference is like willingly checking into rehab versus being forced to go cold turkey.

Two once-in-a-generation events in six years.

The outcome can only, logically, in the short-term at least, be disastrous.

In the medium-to-long-term perhaps, on the energy front at least, this will accelerate the shift to solar, wind and wave, as a friend suggested yesterday.

Perhaps.

But covid didn’t.

Despite that energy shock, despite all the talk of building back better and the demonstration of how active state interventions could end homelessness or drive child poverty to record lows, nothing changed. The US even re-installed Donald Trump, the man who during the first once-in-a-generation event suggested drinking bleach to cure yourself of the virus.

Nothing changed because to make pro-social changes you need pro-social leaders willing to create pro-social systems. Maniacs, war criminals and imperialists aren’t going to do it.

And that’s what we’ve got.

Additionally, for all the uses I detailed in my last article, it’s impossible to get rid of oil and gas entirely, or even mostly. You can’t even make turbines or solar panels without fossil fuels. Petrochemicals are deeply woven into the fabric of our societies, and the interests of capital have a huge incentive in keeping it that way. And when those chemicals aren’t flowing through the system in the quantities we rely on, our societies are forced to react.

And that’s what’s about to happen.

This power down will be messier than covid because it’s even less planned.

Now to the imperialism.

Trump threatened to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age. Hegseth tweeted the same.

Yes this is sadism. Yes this is an openly announced war crime. Yes it shows that this was never about helping the Iranian people.

But Trump and Hegseth’s sadism is far from anomalous.

The use of this exact phrase by US military leaders has a long history.

Curtis LeMay

General Curtis LeMay was known as The Demon. An air force general who commanded US forces in Japan, Korea and Vietnam, he advocated total war against civilian infrastructure to break the political leadership of a country. LeMay was the architect of the firebombing of Japan in March 1945, in which an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 civilians were murdered in a single night. He also commanded the total war bombing campaign against civilians and civilian infrastructure in North Korea and casually boasted that “we killed off, what, 20% of their population.”

It was during the Vietnam war, and later recounted in his autobiography, that LeMay advocated for bombing North Vietnam “back to the Stone Age.” He also said the same about the Soviet Union, arguing that the US shouldn’t just bomb but nuke them into the Stone Age.

LeMay is revered among the US military. US Strategic Command in Nebraska is named after him. LeMay was also a racist. In 1968 he joined George Wallace’s campaign for president and became his running mate. Wallace’s main policy was maintaining racial segregation.

So when Trump and Hegseth use this phrase, they are using it knowingly and deliberately. They are channelling all of LeMay’s savagery, racism and fascism.

They are channelling the savagery, racism and fascism of empire.

A savagery, racism and fascism that American empire was built on and which still today knits the United States together.

So no, Trump and Hegseth’s language, for all its barbarity, was not a surprise.

They are simply reflecting the dominant belief held for decades by US military planners that the US can, and should, commit war crimes and mass murder to get what it wants.

Naked empire

If there is a difference right now, it’s how naked empire has become. How the savagery is uttered in real time, by the president of empire, to a global audience.

The imperialists no longer pretend to have humanitarian motives for their crimes. Now they openly announce they’re going to kill large numbers of humans and overthrow governments to steal oil and resources.

Which is why anyone coming out on the other side of this still clinging to liberal beliefs about the international order, about the US as a force for good, about Trump as an anomaly, is a coward. Anyone who tells you Trump is merely an aberration is afraid to internalise the truth about empire, or is motivated by privilege not to do so.

Which goes for the vast majority of legacy media, liberal or otherwise, all of whom have utterly failed to keep citizens informed about the catastrophe this war has provoked. A major reason is because, as appendages of empire, as stenographers for imperialism, they didn’t want to say too much about the targets Iran has hit for fear of hyping the enemy.

Completely captured, but, in the end, it doesn’t matter. Because, I repeat, physical reality has a habit of being real.

It doesn’t matter whether you like that reality or not.

Molecules and atoms don’t care about your political bias or your ideology.

So now, as US-Israel escalate to catastrophe against Iran, the shock is really going to shock, especially for those who’ve been kept in the dark.

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I posted the below tweet yesterday.

It went viral.

Some people got annoyed.

Some said it was tedious, panicky, doomy.

The author and critic Yasha Levine said humanity has survived worse.

I received messages telling me to fuck off, that I was loser.

All for making what I thought was a pretty accurate, uncontroversial post.

Why did it provoke such a response?

Because people, especially Americans, are scared.

Scared that I’m right. Scared it’s true. Scared, basically, that the treats are going to be taken away.

And when they say humanity has survived worse, of course they’re right on that. But they’re coping. Humanity has literally survived everything. So downplaying the severity of this moment by saying it isn’t going to be an extinction level event is not the reassurance the scolds might hope.

The title is a somewhat tongue-in-cheek response to the critics. Of course humanity will survive this. But what will things look like through the bottleneck? What will come out on the other side?

I thought I’d put some flesh on the bones, sketch out what we’re looking at here.

This is the biggest energy shock since world war two, exceeding the oil crises of the 1970s and the Russia-Ukraine war, which previously were the biggest energy shocks in modern history.

The 1970s oil crisis struck 5 million barrels of oil per day off global markets. The war on Iran has caused an 11 million barrels of oil a day shortfall. The Russia-Ukraine war at its peak removed about 75 billion cubic metres of gas from the world. The war on Iran has caused a 140 billion cubic metres loss of gas.

Oil and gas are pretty much everything. Oil isn’t just fuel to get everything, including human bodies, from one place to another, it is also plastics, paints, solvents, cosmetics, engine lubricants.

Gas isn’t just used for cooking. Around 23% of the world’s electricity is generated by gas.

Gas-fired power plants also produce steel, cement and glass. Most importantly, gas is central to food production, serving as the primary raw material and energy source for nitrogen fertilisers.

Food.

More than 30% of the world’s fertiliser (urea, phosphate and ammonia) is produced in Gulf countries before moving through the Strait of Hormuz.

We are right at the start of the planting season, when fertiliser availability is most critical, and there is a global fertiliser shortage.

The US has already reported a 25% supply shortfall of urea.

Reduced yields and higher prices are an inevitability. How reduced and how high the prices go depends on how long the US-Israel keep their illegal attacks up.

Plastics.

The Middle East accounts for over 40% of polyethylene exports. Polyethylene, the most commonly used plastic, is made using naptha, a petroleum derivative obtained during the distillation of crude oil. In a month, Asia’s naptha refining margin (the profit difference between the selling price of naphtha and the cost of the Brent crude oil used to produce it) has gone from around $100 dollars to $400 dollars.

A quote from a plastics analyst in the linked Reuters story stands out:

"Anyone who imports from the Middle East, which is pretty much everyone in the rest of the world (outside the US to a certain extent), has lost a large supplier and is having to scramble to find replacement resin at extraordinarily higher ​prices."

You might be thinking less plastic is a good thing, and if this was a managed reduction with alternatives in place it would be, but plastic is irreplaceable for many things including transporting and storing water, especially critical in the global south. Plastic is also essential to the medical industry and for transporting and storing drugs, and plastic parts are integral to complex medical devices. Basic medical equipment like surgical gloves also rely on plastic.

And plastic shortages are already driving higher prices for bottled water and medical equipment.

Plastics are also essential to almost every single consumer item in existence. So less plastic in the market means fewer jobs because less consumer stuff is able to be produced, which means business failures.

And this less input > less output > fewer jobs > business failures formula as a result of the shortages can be applied pretty much across the economic board.

Aluminium.

A critical mineral used in buildings, windows, doors, cars, planes, trains, food and drink packaging.

If you want to hit the global economy where it hurts, hit aluminium. And this weekend, in response to critical industrial sites being bombed, that is exactly what Iran did. It hit the two biggest aluminium smelters ​in the Middle East, both major suppliers to the United States. The world uses 70 million tonnes of aluminium a year. The attacks have taken 3 million of that offline. And note, this is not a question of halted transportation. These smelters are out of action. And the US imports more than 20% of its aluminium from these two smelters alone.

Helium.

More than just party balloons, helium is critical to making MRI machines, microchips and semiconductors, and is central to the AI boom. Qatar is home to one of only two plants that produce semiconductor-grade helium, which is ionized and used to etch silicon wafers.

When Israel struck Iran’s gas fields, Iran struck back at Qatar’s gas production plants. Now one-third of the world's helium has been removed from the global market. This reduction has yet to ripple through to production schedules because enough surplus helium was stored, but the forecast is for a 15% shortage in the coming months.

Again though, this isn’t a transit issue that, in theory, can resolve quickly. The physical infrastructure underlying production has been damaged.

Movement.

Oil is movement. Cars, trucks, planes and trains.

And movement, basically, is the local and global economy.

The price at the pump is spiking around the world, and countries have begun introducing control measures, including rationing.

Because Asia is most reliant on Middle East oil and gas, the shortages and rationing have begun there first, before rippling westwards.

The Philippines has introduced a four-day week, as has Pakistan. Bangladesh has imposed nationwide fuel rationing and rolling blackouts, as has Sri Lanka, and Thailand has ordered all government employees to work from home. In Africa, Egypt is closing malls and office early, South Sudan has introduced rationing and Kenya is prioritising who gets fuel. Slovenia last week became the first EU country to introduce fuel rationing.

You can also blame imperialism and Zionism for your aborted, or eye-wateringly expensive, summer holiday.

This Monday, owing to jet fuel shortages, one in twenty flights globally were cancelled.

These are the headline shortages, measures and impacts, but there are so many second, third and forth order effects, from geopolitical reordering to massive nuclear proliferation, that it’s mindboggling.

And the war isn’t over. The US-Israel are still bombing, and Iran is still responding. Ground troops are still possible, as is a final massive bombing salvo on the way out, as Trump hinted at the other day. Such a salvo would be, quite rightly, responded to in kind by Iran.

The costs of imperialism and Zionism are coming home.

All of us who said empowering an apartheid state to do genocide would embolden it to commit further crimes that will eventually drag the whole world down were right. But we were called antisemites and criminalised for this foresight.

The shit is hitting the fan and we’re about to see what happens under conditions of stress that the modern global economy has never experienced.

And I have to tell you, I’m not unhappy about this. That’s not the place this piece is coming from.

On the contrary.

I’m glad Iran struck back and gave the world a lesson in what happens when you let US imperialism and Jewish state supremacy run wild. I’m glad that there are real, material, substantive costs being inflicted as a result of US-Zionist impunity. I’m glad the US and Israel are getting bloodied.

But this all could have been avoided.

Europe could have confronted Israel and US over the Gaza genocide. They could have stood up to them when they knew they were about to attack Iran. They could have condemned their actions on the first day of war and denied them the use of bases and airspace. Iranian leaders, after all, had said for months exactly how they’d respond if attacked.

But instead through a combination of cowardice, racism, imperialism and rank immorality, western leaders let the US-Israel sink the global economy and immiserate billions while watching, or actively aiding, the US-Israel in destroying another country. It’s not just Europe though. Asian leaders have been largely silent or deferential, as we saw with Japan’s Sanae Takaichi and her obsequious behaviour in front of Trump earlier this month.

There is a lot of blame to go around, and in time, perhaps, this war will shake the global order in positive ways. Perhaps Europe, the Gulf countries and US-aligned Asian countries will wake up to the fact that the Americans do not give a fuck about them. Maybe they’ll figure out that the only country US leaders care about outside their own, is Israel.

Maybe this will be the final straw that solidifies this as the Chinese century.

But I wouldn’t pretend that what emerges on the other side of this crisis is automatically going to be good. I wouldn’t pretend, despite what looks like being a strategic defeat, this is the death-knell for US hegemony.

You can tell an extremely plausible story about how the war on Iran solidifies, not undermines, long-term US hegemony.

You can tell an extremely plausible story of more imperialist death and destruction as a failing empire lashes and crashes out.

And there’s time to tell those stories and sketch out those futures.

But first, let’s all try and get to the other side.

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Yesterday The Associated Press said it was going to start using words which accurately reflect reality.

The news agency announced, after much deliberation and a newsroom vote, that it was going to start referring to Israel’s ground offensive into Lebanon as an invasion.

The announcement went into a long and convoluted explanation as to why this was the appropriate terminology, seemingly to head off any accusations that using words to mean what words mean is antisemitism.

Other media outlets have yet to follow suit, all still going with the less evocative “incursion,” “ground offensive” or simply saying that Israeli troops are “taking control” of southern Lebanon without contextualising it as an invasion.

How the western media provides rhetorical and linguistic cover for Israel, and how its defenestrated description of Israeli actions so wildly differs from the active language used to described Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, for example, hardly needs an explanation at this point.

But it remains a valuable insight into how supposedly objective western journalists curate their language and select their words to serve empire.

Nearly a month after Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, the Associated Press has broken ranks, I suspect, because it has simply became untenable to dance around manifest realities.

Others may or may not catch up, but for now, most western media consumers are reading and hearing about Israeli “incursions,” “offensives” and “campaigns,” language which remains firmly in the service of empire.

Sometimes they don’t even use these words. A recent BBC story written by its correspondent in Jerusalem, Seb Usher, was headlined “Israel says it will take control of large buffer zone in southern Lebanon” and avoided the mention of an incursion or offensive altogether, let alone an invasion.

Also worthy of note is that Israel’s incursion, offensive or invasion is always into “southern” Lebanon, as if this is somehow not part of the overall entity of Lebanon. Again, a tactical choice intended to convey limit. Contrast this with how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has always been described: as an invasion of Ukraine. And more often than not as “Russia’s full-scale illegal invasion of Ukraine.” It’s has never been “Russia’s incursion into eastern Ukraine.”

But it’s not just the way the media refers to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. How western media characterises why Israel is invading Lebanon is wildly inaccurate too. Which is to say it’s propaganda.

For example, take the same BBC story. It says “the latest escalation began after Iranian-backed Hezbollah fired rockets into northern Israel in retaliation for the killing of Iran's supreme leader and near-daily strikes on Hezbollah despite the November 2024 ceasefire.”

An average reader would come away from reading this paragraph assuming Hezbollah broke the ceasefire by firing rockets. The “near-daily strikes” is an attempt to balance the sentence with a kernel of truth but linguistically makes no sense. How can the “latest escalation” begin after “near-daily strikes?” The implication is those strikes undertaken by Israel (which isn’t mentioned by name) weren’t an escalation. No context is provided about those strikes. (Note also that they are not attacks, or bombings, which imply intent and damage, but “strikes,” a softer, more clinical term implying precision.)

Sorry to get deep in the weeds on this, but it’s important to break down how the propaganda works.

Many go further and attempt to generate a false equivalence between the two by saying “both sides have accused each other of violations of the truce,” a formulation seen here in this Reuters story and this BBC story.

The reality? The reality is that the IDF has taken credit for more than 250 attacks in Lebanon since the November 2024 ceasefire. They’ve boasted of bombings, commando raids and the demolition of villages. Israel bombed Beirut, the capital city, on numerous occasions during the supposed ceasefire. They haven’t hidden their ceasefire breaches. They’ve proudly declared them! You can literally count them up on the Israel-Hezbollah conflict Wikipedia page, with all these attacks fully sourced back to Israeli media or IDF press releases.

The deception is stunning.

Western journalists obviously know the truth, but they, or their editors, have taken a deliberate decision to contort context to present Hezbollah as either the aggressor or at least an equal party to the violations. Violations which, when they are committed by Israel, are hardly reported by western media. And when they are reported, they’re reported not as ceasefire breaches, but as legitimate attacks on “Hezbollah targets.” But the moment Hezbollah fought back was, of course, the moment the ceasefire was officially over.

Because in the empire-brained logic of western journalists, only one side is bound by a ceasefire.

And it’s not our side.

To empire and its proxies, ceasefires do not apply.

Imagine a ceasefire between Iran and Israel-US is agreed. Iran proceeds to launch missiles at Israel on an almost-daily basis. The first missile launched would be headline news the world over and declared a breach of the ceasefire. But Israel can breach a ceasefire almost every day for 18 months straight with zero western condemnation and with the fantasy presented to the western public that the ceasefire is holding.

The same is happening in Gaza, where Israeli attacks are said to only ever be "testing the fragile ceasefire,” not breaching it.

These are deliberate misrepresentations on behalf of Israel and of empire.

Another little linguistic trick is the use of the word “backed.” A favourite recently, as in the above BBC story, is “Iran-backed Hezbollah.”

How does this one work?

It’s primary value is its subtlety. It conceals a distortion within a truth. Hezbollah is backed by Iran. But the standards on this kind of descriptor are never universal. We never hear about the NATO-backed Ukrainian army. Or the US-backed IDF.

Why? Because “X-backed” implies a nefarious network, a control centre, and a proxy arm. It removes both context and agency from the proxy, in this case Hezbollah, and suggests dishonesty or treachery.

It is a much-employed and vital propaganda term for these reasons, and it fits perfectly with western security state propaganda and foreign policy talking points about Iran as the “primary sponsor of terror” in the world.

A similar dynamic was at work with the de-legitimising “Hamas-run.” The phrase built on a pre-established impression of the group created by two decades of propaganda and was intended to seed doubt in the western mind about the truthfulness of their statements, especially in relation to the number of dead. A number we now know was in fact not exaggerated, but conservative. It’s despicable, a form of genocide-denial.

Another gem I spotted this morning was in The Guardian.

Bombs are like rain now. They just start falling. Falling on “the regime.” A selectively applied, de-legitimising descriptor I’ve broken down before.

Despite its progressive affectations, The Guardian has been one of the worst offenders, manufacturing consent for war with soft regime change propaganda dressed up as pro-social concern.

There was a nonsense story three weeks before the US-Israeli attack about the dangers of Iran’s old oil tankers and their potential to leak oil and cause a disaster. There was no context about why these tankers are old, no explanation that US-western sanctions effectively prevent Iran from buying modern oil tankers. Two weeks before the attack began they 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 story was blatant imperial propaganda and entirely premised on ignorance about the ideology of Iran’s leaders (some of whom have PhDs from western universities), the ability of young Iranians to study outside Iran and conditions in Iran itself.

These stories didn’t appear in the weeks before the attack by sheer coincidence. They were intended, as I’ve written before, to soften progressives up for an illegal war.

Then there’s the way western journalists abandon any pretence of objectivity when presented with competing narratives that their brains, sculpted by empire, can’t process.

This was on show earlier this week when Shelagh Fogarty of LBC Radio in the UK interviewed Mohammad Marandi, a Tehran University professor and former advisor to Iran’s nuclear negotiation team. She repeated, with smug arrogance, every imperial-Zionist talking point as if it was the unadulterated truth, and struggled to process some basic facts about the nature of the war. For example, she asked Marandi why Mojtaba Khamenei, the new leader of Iran, hasn’t been seen yet because “leaders need to be visible during war.” She contrasted it with “how I see the president of the United States on television every day, he goes to play golf, he socialises, he’s highly protected, so why haven’t we seen the new leader of Iran?” She really thought she’d hit upon a gotcha moment. It had to be pointed out to her that Mojtaba Khamenei’s father, wife and daughter were just assassinated and Mojtaba is being protected because the US-Israeli regimes want to assassinate him too.

Can you imagine Fogarty asking an incredulous question about JD Vance’s lack of visibility if Iranian jets were flying over Washington DC every hour and had just assassinated Trump, his family and numerous senior American politicians?

The absurdity of a mind on empire is utterly breathtaking.

The moral superiority of western journalists is grotesque.

And their complicitly in sanitising and selling the sins of empire is criminal.

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After weeks of attacks by Iraqi resistance groups, the US and NATO yesterday began evacuating all of their military personnel from Victoria Base in Baghdad.

They are unlikely to return.

This is an unprecedented, momentous achievement, and follows the January withdrawal of US and NATO troops from the Ain al-Asad airbase after years of attacks.

These withdrawals mean the US presence in Iraq is now confined to Kurdistan.

Iraqi fighters, with the support of Iran, have effectively decolonised their country, 23 years after the US invasion, and six years after Iraq’s parliament voted to expel US forces.

At the time, the US refused to honour the democratic vote. Because despite all the lies about freedom and democracy which justified the original invasion, imperialists don’t care about democracy. They care about interests. About oil. About strategic footprints. And all these were best served by maintaining a military presence in Iraq.

Trump was president at the time of the vote, and threatened sanctions in response.

What worked in the end?

Violence. Armed resistance. Speaking the language of imperialists and colonisers back to them.

The resistance to the US-NATO troop presence in Iraq has been long-standing. Attacks by Iraqi fighters have been periodic, aided by Iran in moments of heightened tension. In 2020, after the US assassinated Iran’s General Soleimani, Iran launched a missile attack on Ain al-Asad Airbase, the largest-ever against US forces abroad. The attack left over one hundred American troops with traumatic brain injuries and accelerated US plans to withdraw forces.

And since the US-Israeli sneak attack on Iran last month, Iran and Iraqi resistance groups backed by Iran, have been pounding Victoria Base, a sprawling, city-like complex on the outskirts of Baghdad. The attacks, via drones, missiles, and small arms, have resulted in a significant number of serious injuries, prompting the US over the weekend to request a 24-hour ceasefire so they could evacuate the remaining troop presence.

Violence achieved what votes and diplomacy couldn’t.

Iran has helped liberate Iraq, and in its overall conduct of the war, is teaching the west a harsh lesson.

It is for this reason that western leaders are whining like sex-starved billy goats about Iran’s “reckless attacks.” The west is so used to the impunity that comes with imperial power they can’t accept that a nation they see as sub-human is not only able to fight back, but to do so in a way that imposes material costs on their interests. It infuriates them to see a sovereign nation completely outside the orbit of western imperialism stand up to their bullying.

What we’re seeing are both the limits of imperialism, and the lengths to which the west is willing to go to protect empire and its system of domination.

These lengths are extreme, and include of course the abandonment of international law.

It’s actually crazy when you think about it.

Day after day we see universal condemnation not of an illegal war of aggression, but of the legal response to that aggression. We keep seeing demands for Iran to stop fighting without commensurate demands for the US-Israel to do the same.

“Stop shooting back, but let them keep shooting you.”

The west is demanding Iran surrender to the aggressor without conditions.

It’s so nakedly imperialist, a gloriously teachable moment.

But this abandonment of international law is also incredibly dangerous. Because it has left Iran nowhere to turn but total war. The world’s refusal to acknowledge basic facts about who is the aggressor and who is the victim has left Iran’s leaders with no options other than to go as far up the escalation ladder, in response, as they can.

Look at it from Iran’s point of view. Twice attacked during negotiations, their revolutionary religious leader assassinated during their most important religious festival, toxic rain falling on 9 million people, thousands of civilians murdered, schools, hospitals and clinics bombed. Then when they fight back against unprovoked aggression, almost the entire world condemns them.

Under these conditions, what is Iran supposed to do? Where are they supposed to turn for support? Who can be trusted to arbitrate any deal and guarantee Iran’s territorial security?

The credibility of the UN is shot to pieces.

International law lies dead in Gaza.

International institutions work entirely for empire.

The whole UN Charter system is a lie, its administrators decadent and corrupt.

It means Iran’s only logical strategy is to carve out its future security arrangements through force.

No international body or statute is coming to save them.

Armed struggle and resistance until the enemy retreats first is the only rational choice based on their history and recent experience.

Because for Iran this is an existential war for survival.

And there are signs that Iran’s armed resistance is working.

On Saturday, Trump threatened to bomb Iran’s power infrastructure by the end of today if they didn’t guarantee all ships the right of transit through the Strait of Hormuz. Iran said if the US did it they’d attack all water desalination and oil platforms throughout the Persian Gulf. So this morning Trump revised the deadline. He said good progress had been made on negotiations and gave Iran until the end of the week to open the Strait before he commits a war crime. Iran said Trump was lying about negotiations. The foreign minister said they haven’t talked to the Americans since the war started.

So Trump backed down.

Faced with a credible threat to make the Gulf states effectively uninhabitable and collapse the global economy, he backed down.

Threats of violence worked.

Because violence, as the resistance in Iraq has just proved, is the only language imperialists understand.

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Trump said yesterday he believed he would “have the honour of taking Cuba”. Spoken like a true rapist, and a true American.

Sixty-five years of sanctions on Cuba, forty-six on Iran, twenty-one on Venezuela. Sanctions that in every case were imposed and overseen by both Democrats and Republicans and explicitly designed to provoke regime change. So when Trump said “fuck that, it’s obvious what we’re trying to do, I’m going to speed it up,” who can be surprised?

And speed it up he has. Venezuela is done, a US vassal state that will be abandoned when the imperialists are done. Iran is in progress (and thankfully proving more problematic than hubristic imperialist expectations), and Cuba will be next, whether under Trump or another president of the USA.

Trump is not an aberration. He’s the logical conclusion to decades of sanctions and imperialist posturing. He’s the inevitable trigger man. If it wasn’t him starting these wars and conducting these coups, it would be someone else. Because militarism and imperial dogma transcends party or the narrow and distracting social ideologies that masquerade as democracy. The US is always building towards violence. Always. Precisely how it is expressed, and who expresses it, are the only unknowns.

And liberals who pretend not to get it, who pretend Trump is an outlier, who luxuriate in the myth of American benevolence and freedom and values, are the worst. From AOC, to Mamdani, to Sanders to Newsom, it is Democrats voting for sanctions, applying the de-legitimising “regime” descriptor and denouncing resistance to imperial aggression who prep the intellectual, rhetorical and material ground for imperialism. It is liberals who in their language of universal rights at home provide American brutality abroad with a sheen of benign, bookish justification.

None of them truly opposed the kidnapping of Maduro, the sanctions on Cuba or the war on Iran. I’ve checked, and not one Democrat has spoken out against Trump for his Cuba comments, or blockade-starvation policies. In the case of Iran, now it’s going badly, some of them are worming their way to the surface and arguing the US should have continued to slowly choke the people through economic warfare rather than kill them quicky with Tomahawk missiles. People like Chris Murphy who say Trump’s strategy is “incoherent and incomplete” or Cory Booker who argue against it on the basis it doesn’t have Congressional approval.

Bookish American imperialists dislike only that Trump makes the USA look incompetent and insufficiently procedural, not that he’s authorising the mass slaughter of innocents and attempting to overthrow the government of a sovereign nation. And none of them argue against the extraordinarily dangerous norm the US-Israel is setting by assassinating heads of state and government officials.

Then you’ve got the frauds like Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center who just resigned over the war. A MAGA devotee and former special forces grunt who pulled the trigger for US imperialism in Syria, Yemen, Iraq, his resignation wasn’t about ethics or principles. In his resignation letter he praised Trump’s 2020 assassination of the then-IRGC head Soleimani. “Trump was doing imperialism right now he’s doing it wrong,” was essentially Kent’s message. And if Iran had folded in a few days like the pack of cards Trump had been led to believe it was, Kent would still be sucking the teat. Kent is an unprincipled rat fleeing a sinking ship hoping it helps him win the congressional seat he’s failed twice to win. His resignation supports the narrative that this is a disastrous war provoked by Israel, but it won’t change the arc of US imperial violence.

But we can’t put all the blame on the US, as tempting as it is.

The project of imperialism is a western venture.

Yesterday, with Israel invading southern Lebanon, expelling hundreds of thousands from their homes and levelling residential apartment blocks in Beirut, Germany’s Merz was denouncing Hezbollah for the violence and for fighting back against Israel. This of course is the precise script the entire west has been running over Iran, condemning them for fighting back against the countries assassinating their leaders and unleashing chemical attacks on their people.

While Trump talks about “taking” Cuba, Merz, Starmer, Macron and the rest also adopt the language of the abuser by denouncing the victims for fighting back.

And all of these inversions of reality, all of this expansionist imperial violence is supported by mainstream media who apply linguistic propaganda to buttress illegal acts.

The Washington Post calls Israel’s invasion of Lebanon the “expansion of the war in Iran” rather than the violation of a sovereign border. The Guardian refers to the Israeli invasion as “a ground campaign.”

Calling it an invasion, while truthful, would imply aggression and violation.

Campaign is the perfect term because it implies limitation. It implies procedure.

And if there’s one thing liberals can agree on, it’s that solid procedure makes for the best imperialism.

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Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney said today he condemns Iran’s attacks on civilians and the de facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

Not a word about the 1,300 Iranian civilians murdered so far by the US and Israel, attacks which break numerous international laws. Not a word about the attacks on civilian infrastructure in Iran including schools, hospitals and the international airport. Not a word about the 170 school girls burnt to a crisp by American missiles. Not a word about the 10 million people breathing poison gas after attacks against oil storage facilities in Tehran.

The same Mark Carney who, I’ll never get tired of pointing out, was being lauded for standing up to Donald Trump just a few weeks ago is now siding with the unhinged, murderous conman some naively believed he was going to help contain.

There is a deep moral rot at the heart of the western elite, a Nazi-like disregard for life, and a lust for violence and war.

The US is launching bombing missions on Iran from UK airbases. France is sending warships. Australia is sending a spy plane to help the US select bombing targets. Romania just announced it will allow its Black Sea bases to become staging posts for American attacks.

Vassal states

This should all be no surprise to anyone who understands western liberalism and imperialism. Carney, Macron and all western leaders long ago hitched their cart to the Yankee wagon. Will they ever decouple? Or will they follow Trump to the end of this illegal, unnecessary, murderous war, no matter how many innocents are slaughtered? Absent revolutions, it’s hard to see a point at which European countries, and Euro-derived states like Canada and Australia, stand in defiance of the US. That doesn’t mean that we, as citizens of the US or its vassal states, should acquiesce to the imperium when it commits war crimes and violates international law.

We should, at the least, make our objections to imperialism, and to our vassalised status, known.

Because this is what western elites hate about Iran above anything else. They hate that it is not captured, that it is not a vassal state, that it does object. Western leaders hate Iran because it stands up to Israel and western imperialists. This is, quite literally, the only reason for this war. Don’t let the bullshit about freedom and democracy fool you. Iran is an obstacle to Israeli-western hegemony, and it needs to be removed.

Think this is too simplistic?

So then tell me why Saudi Arabia, Oman, the UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, Jordan, all repressive, absolute monarchies, are not targets for western imperialism? The answer is simple: they’re on our side. They are compliant vassal states who allow their countries to be used in whatever way the US, Israel and the west demands.

It really is as simple as that.

In September last year Qatar abolished its limited elections, vesting all future powers to elect the government in one man, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani. Did you see any headlines condemning Qatari for re-establishing itself as an absolute dictatorship? Of course not! Because Qatar is an ally of the west, and different rules, quite literally, apply.

No, Iran’s only crime is standing up to Israel, the west, and supporting the Palestinians. This is a critical element underpinning the war we shouldn’t miss. Most Muslim countries long ago abandoned the Palestinians to their fate. Iran never has. And for this the US and the west have punished it relentlessly. They’ve punished Iran because to stand up for the Palestinians means, logically, to stand against Israel and its desire for intra-territorial land grabs and regional hegemony.

“Regime”

And we also shouldn’t miss the linguistic tricks the western media and political class pull to manufacture anti-Iran sentiment while presenting the Gulf states neutrally. You’ll never hear any references to the Saudi ‘regime’, or the Omani ‘regime’, or the Bahraini ‘regime’, or the Qatari ‘regime’, or the Emirati ‘regime’, or the Jordanian ‘regime.’ Only Iran is referred to as a regime. Why? Because it is a pejorative descriptor intended to de-legitimise the country’s form of governance. This descriptor is also intended to dehumanise the leadership of the country, to soften us up for war and make us feel nothing when its leaders are assassinated.

Iran’s leadership actually has far more legitimacy than any of the Gulf states, all of which are hereditary monarchies where the same family has been in power for hundreds of years. Iran is a constitutional republic, and the government is a product of a popular revolution that defied monarchical rule. Iran has a supreme religious leader appointed by a special council, but Iran’s president is popularly elected.

Iran is therefore far more representative of its people than most countries in the region.

But other than geopolitics, what else can explain western leaders condemning defensive actions by Iran while staying silent on illegal war and the slaughtering of school children?

Sociologist Ajamu Baraka says it can be explained by the psychopathology of white supremacism.

This psychopathology is not reducible to individual prejudice. It is a racialized, narcissistic cognitive disorder embedded in the ideological and institutional architecture of Western power. It centers Europe and its settler extensions as the apex of human development and renders its adherents incapable of perceiving objective reality when confronted with non-European resistance. While rooted in the historical experience of Europe and its encounters with non-European people during the expansion of European power, it can affect anyone socialized within the ideological and cultural mechanisms of the Pan-European colonial project.

A narcissistic cognitive disorder sounds about right to me, and explains it well.

The belief that you, the white Euro or Euro-derived person, liberal or otherwise, are simply better than everyone else by virtue of the fact that you are white, and Euro-derived. And as a result, whatever we believe about the world, happens to be correct.

This is the underlying psychopathology that ties together the entire west, regardless of political affiliation.

We see it in the language used by Trump’s counsel Stephen Miller, who says “western civilization produced the modern world, our ancestors built the cities, produced the art and architecture, built the industry. And you have no idea how determined we are to save this civilization.”

Or in the language used by Marco Rubio, who a few weeks ago in Munich received a standing ovation from European leaders for saying that “that the west has been forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry. And we will save it.”

The barely disguised, coded white supremacy and racism is obvious.

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say Euro-derived empire hates Iran because it is the descendent of a 6,000 year-old civilisation. Because the existence of Iran and its cultural heritage challenges the western civilisation narrative so beloved of fascists. This is quite obviously what sits behind Trump’s grotesque threats to bomb 52 cultural sites important to the Iranian people.

The war on Iran is being fuelled not just by geopolitical considerations, but by Euro-supremacy and a Nazi-like devotion to destroy the other.

So when we see liberals like Mark Carney, Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron refuse to condemn the mass murder of civilians, it’s not just because they’re slavishly devoted to imperialism, but because morally rotten narcissists and white supremacists stick together.

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The US-Israeli regimes last night bombed oil facilities and refineries in two different parts of Tehran, turning streets into rivers of fire as fuel leaked into waterways and tore down the sidewalks.

This morning plumes of thick black smoke covered the sun, creating what has been described as a nuclear winter effect, as oil literally rained from the sky.

Authorities in Tehran warned people against going outside, because not only is acid rain now falling, the air is saturated with toxic gas.

Nearly 10 million people have effectively been subjected to a poison gas attack by the US and Israel. An attack supported by the majority of EU leaders, as well as the UK, which is providing the US with the use of its bases as a lily pad for refuelling and resupplying the war-planes going to-and-from Iran.

Trump said today that he wants Iran to surrender but doesn’t know “if there will be anyone alive to surrender” by the time the US is finished.

On Fox News, Senator Lindsay Graham, when asked about the attack, said “you just wait and see what comes in the next two weeks. We’re going to blow the hell out of these people.”

The US war secretary Pete Hegseth said that the US is going to unleash “death and destruction from the sky all day long.”

Netanyahu in response to the attack said there will be “many surprises.”

A radical, historical evil is unfolding before our eyes.

The gleefully violent pronouncements coming from the mouths of American politicians are, even for those of us well-versed in the barbarity of imperialism, and well-versed in Israeli sadism, astonishing.

We’ve ended up here because of Gaza.

We’ve ended up here because for two years, the Israelis, with the support of the US and much of Europe, were allowed to cross every line, disregard every rule of war, and demonstrate utter contempt for international law as they slaughtered Palestinians on an industrial scale and turned Gaza to dust.

The barbarity now on show in Iran, is, as many of us warned, the inevitable consequence of the impunity granted to Israel to commit genocide. It is the consequence of an emboldened, violent, settler colony with a nuclear weapon.

The crimes of Gaza were never going to be confined to Gaza. Especially not with Zionists in power across the west. Especially not with the power of the Jewish lobby and their expansionist plans for Greater Israel controlling our political systems.

And the Europeans.

The venal, shameful, Europeans.

Just a few weeks ago, European leaders were denouncing Trump’s threats against Greenland. But as soon as he demanded it, many of them leapt into action to help him commit the crime he’d literally just been threatening against them. I was astonished to see Denmark’s ambassador to the UN, rather than condemn the attack on Iran, condemn Iran for retaliating in self-defence. Denmark, which just a month ago was being goaded by Trump. Do they really think he’s going to leave Greenland alone because they’ve supported his war crimes in Iran?

The stupidity, the idiocy, the immorality is beyond belief.

The lead eurocuck is Keir Starmer, a human rights lawyer who appears addicted to violating human rights. His latest attempt to make a mockery of the profession he’s supposedly trained in is to allow the US to use British airbases to launch attacks on Iran. Attacks which are clearly illegal under the United Nations Charter, especially clause 2 (4) which prohibits the use of initiating force. Attacks which clearly meet the three criteria required to constitute a crime of aggression under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC).

But Starmer of course has been one of the leaders most enthusiastic about betraying human rights law and ensuring Netanyahu evades the ICC charges. And now he’s neck deep in his own war crimes, with UK bases being used to launch these attacks.

And just on the media coverage of these oil refinery attacks, specifically The Guardian.

Three weeks ago The Guardian’s environment editor Damian Carrington wrote an article about Iran’s aging oil tankers and the dangers they posed to sea life. Was the timing a coincidence, less than two weeks before the US-Israeli war began? No chance. I know how these things work. I’ve worked in both journalism and PR. The Zionist lobby were working all the angles to soften people up for an attack by making everything about Iran look like a threat. This was a clever angle that introduced anti-Iran propaganda to a liberal audience under the guise of environmental concern.

But now oil is literally raining from the sky in Iran, has Damian Carrington written an article about the environmental damage of this war? Has he fuck. 24 hours later, and nothing.

He’s happy to warn about the theoretical dangers of Iranian oil tankers but not interested when the streets are actually on fire, when the soil and groundwater is being polluted for years, when carcinogens are raining down from the sky. Carcinogens that will be causing cancer in people decades from now.

The liberal media and political class are monsters. The system is unsalvageable.

But we can salvage our own conscience by opposing this disastrous war.

With all of their language about Iran being decimated, the Americans are pulling a psychological trick to make us believe it will be over so quickly there's no point in protesting or doing anything to oppose it. We can’t fall for it. As Iran fights back on the ground, we have to build pressure at home.

Wherever you live, but especially if you live in the US, UK or Germany (which has also allowed its bases to be used for attacks), write to your political representatives and oppose this savage, unnecessary war of choice.

Oppose it, because Zionism and imperial barbarity knows no limits, and it could be any of us next.

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As the US-Israel axis of Epstein continues its genocidal campaign of carpet bombing Tehran, huge crowds of people have flooded the streets of the country to protest the attacks and defend the revolution.

And they’re angry.

One man, a crowd streaming past him chanting Ali Khamenei’s name, said he wanted to go into hand-to-hand combat with “the shameless Trump.” Holding his young son’s hand, he called the exiled Iranian monarchists, led by Reza Pahlavi, despicable and said he would sacrifice his family for the revolution.

His disgust at the Pahlavi’s was not unique. Another scene from the protests shows Iranian’s chanting “death to Pahlavi.”

At one pro-government rally, a woman, her young daughter by her side, said that “America and Israel have dug their own graves, and we will bury them one by one.”

Another young woman said Iranians will defend the revolution and that it will continue even in the absence of Khamenei.

When the western media and political class tell us to “listen to Iranian women,” these are obviously not the women they’re talking about.

And when they talk about freeing Iranian women, do they mean Akram Khodabandeh? The captain of Iran’s women’s Taekwondo national team and the holder of eight gold and silver international Taekwondo medals, Khodabandeh was volunteering for the Red Crescent and searching for bodies in the aftermath of the US-Israeli slaughter.

No. They talk about freeing women and the first thing they do is murder 168 children, mainly girls, in cold blood.

This mass slaughter of children as the opening salvo of the attacks galvanised Iranians.

And amid all the talk of repression and freeing women, we won’t be told that Iran’s official government spokesperson, Fatemeh Mohajerani, is a woman. We won’t be told that Shina Ansari and Zahra Behrouz Azar, both women, serve as vice presidents of Iran, or that 70% of all of STEM graduates in Iran are women.

The idea that Iran is a house of cards waiting to fall is a lie.

One guy, obviously secular, interviewed yesterday in a park in Tehran said this will be “the last loss” for the Zionists. He doesn’t, I’m sure you agree, look particularly oppressed. In the video his friend, an artist, says his studio was destroyed by bombs.

I don’t need to tell you that these scenes aren’t what you’d expect to see from a repressed people who just needed a little encouragement to rise up against their leaders.

These are the scenes you expect from a proud people and a deep-seated revolution that has, according to polls taken by western organisations, majority support among the Iranian people.

And as a result, these are not scenes that will feature prominently, if at all, on the BBC or CNN, because they undermine the propaganda about the ‘brutal regime’ which has been fed to us for nearly 50 years.

‘Brutal regime’

This regime change propaganda has in recent days been parroted by supposed anti-war politicians like Mamdani and Zack Polanski, the leader of Britain’s Green Party. How hard would it be for people who trade on their anti-war credentials to say "now isn't the time to talk about the internal politics of a country which has just been illegally attacked and is now being carpet bombed." How hard would it be to point to the massive protests we’ve seen since the attacks began and question this prevailing narrative?

Too hard, obviously.

I’ve even heard Corbyn, the hero of the British left, feel the need to preface every anti-war sentiment with something about the Iranians needing to have the ability to “decide their own future.” What does that even mean? Do we who live within corrupt, capitalist liberal democracies really decide our own future? Are we free to pursue our interests free from burdens? Did we choose to be born into capitalist systems? Are we free therefore to choose another system of economic-social relations?

Of course not.

It’s baby-brained stuff, but it is a very particular, and frankly racist reflex among many western politicians, even those like Corbyn, Mamdani and Polanski who call themselves progressive. A reflex which assumes every non-liberal western style democracy must be inherently bad for the governed.

It’s absolutely tiring.

Of course some Iranians hate the government. And the riots in December and January, followed by the wildly exaggerated atrocity propaganda regarding the number of dead, have made it more difficult to talk about this in a rational way. This muddying of the waters was, of course, the explicit intention of the US and Israel, both of whom had agents on the ground inciting violence.

And Iran isn’t a monolith, ideologically. But no one wants bombs raining down on their heads, destroying their cities, killing their husbands, wives, friends, neighbours, and children.

Bombs which have now killed over 1,000 Iranians.

This is a despicable, shameless war. A war of choice and aggression.

The supreme international crime.

A war of unadulterated, bloodthirsty imperial violence by an out-of-control empire worse than the Nazis. Nazi Germany lasted 12 years. American violence, from the Sioux to Korea, Vietnam to Iraq, has been going on for decades, centuries.

The United States is effectively one giant fucking war crime.

And despite cheering at the prospect of these war crimes before they started, even the exiled Iranian diaspora are starting to have second thoughts about Iran getting the Gaza treatment.

Iranian exiles

While we’re on the exiles, there’s this very strange idea that an Iranian living a bourgeois life in the west has a greater moral authority to determine the narrative on Iran than anyone else. Diaspora Iranians are treated as if they are mystics or sages. They’re not. They’re people with an ideology and an agenda. That Iranian friend certainly doesn’t have a higher moral or ethical standard just because their parents fled a revolutionary process they disagreed with. I can’t believe it needs to be said, but calling for war and murder on the country your parents are from doesn’t make you a good person. And on top of that, not all in the Iranian diaspora want the republic to fall, far from it. But again, these are not the voices you’ll find if you consume only mainstream western media.

An undefeatable idea

The truth is, the Zionist pigdogs are at war with an idea. And you can’t defeat an idea. The Islamic republic is an idea, an idea of national sovereignty grounded in religious and spiritual beliefs. As such, it cannot be defeated, whatever the outcome of this war. And seeing your neighbours and loved ones vaporised and beheaded by American bombs only strengthens the underlying premise of the idea: that America is an imperial evil which must be resisted and defeated.

When it comes to empire and imperialism there is no sweet spot, no liberal middle ground that enables you to denounce imperialist war crimes while also denouncing the target of those war crimes. You stand with the victims of western imperialism, or you don’t. If you have any sense of solidarity, you don’t create the intellectual and rhetorical ground for imperial crimes by droning on about ‘brutal regimes’ at the precise moment those countries are in the crosshairs of empire.

US imperialism has killed millions of people, but because the system switches out its leader every four to eight years, its legitimacy is never questioned. Almost everyone, on the other hand, is happy to question the legitimacy of a government under attack by these imperial forces. It’s crazy, I’ve seen too much of it in recent days, and we need to combat it. Whether Mamdani, Polanski or Corbyn, the reflexive imperialist consciousness from people who sell themselves as enlightened and progressive is dangerous and contagious.

But combatting it is uphill work. One hundred articles like this get instantly drowned out by one five minute BBC segment recycling imperial tropes and propaganda, or one Guardian article. Because many will subconsciously defer to mainstream media, especially when it positions itself as unbiased, or of the left, believing it, wrongly, to be an honest arbiter of truth.

So please share this article and follow and share the work of other anti-imperialists like .

Together we can at least try and use these moments, these disgraceful, shameful wars, to build a broader anti-imperial consciousness.

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Living under late stage empire is like living in a twilight zone. The last few days have been especially trippy.

The US and Israel declared war on Iran with the full support of many European and regional leaders, and when Iran retaliated (as is their legal right under international law) the western political and media class wet the bed.

Every major western leader, from Albanese, to Carney, to Starmer, Macron and Merz, rather than condemn an illegal first-strike war, condemned Iran’s response.

The point must be reiterated:

Donald Trump stood in front of a camera, declared illegal war, without Congressional or UN approval, on a sovereign nation that had never attacked the US, and when that country fought back, they were framed by hysterical screeching western elites as the aggressor.

It’s quite extraordinary.

If we were in any doubt after the last two years that the end of international law has dawned, the western response to the war on Iran has put all doubts to bed. The Euro-empire, after basing its case for Ukraine on the need to uphold international law, just signed international law’s death warrant.

And what’s even more extraordinary is that Marco Rubio admitted Iran posed no threat to the US. Rubio said last night the US only declared war because Israel was about to strike Iran so the US ‘pre-emptively’ attacked on the basis that Iran would retaliate against Israel after being hit.

A cat’s cradle of rationalisation that only a brain pickled in empire could ever come up with.

So what we’re left with is the fact that the McMuffin Reich went to pre-emptive war for the Paedo Colony against the nation of mystics, poets and philosopher kings.

It is, after all, as Huntington forecast, a clash of civilisations.

Let’s examine it.

The most famous cultural export of American empire is McDonald’s. Cheeseburger and McMuffin. The leader of empire is a philistine, a real estate conman, reality TV host, grifter and, lately, watch salesman. A nation of no historic architecture, no ancient works of art, nothing of historical substance to recommend it culturally. (Please don’t get mad. This is not personal, simply objective fact.)

There are pepper grinders and duvet covers older than Israel. A colony of thieves which raped and terrorised its way to existence, its leader a war criminal wanted for genocide. Its primary export is terror and surveillance technology that can take over your phone camera while you get undressed for bed. Israel is literally a refuge for paedophiles.

Iran is 6,000 years old. It is home to some of the most ancient architectural wonders in the world including 29 UNESCO World Heritage Sites, 27 of which are cultural heritage sites, the highest designation. The works of Omar Khayyam, a 10th century Persian philosopher, are sold in bookshops nearly one thousand years later. I have a book of Rumi poetry on my bookshelf, poems that were written 800 years ago. Ali Khamenei, Iran’s assassinated religious leader, was a scholar who spoke four languages, including English. His successor, Ali Larijana, has a degree in computer science & mathematics and a PhD in western philosophy. Larijana’s thesis was on Kant's philosophy of mathematics and he has authored three books on western philosophers.

Trump and the leaders of empire by contrast, barely speak English.

It truly is a clash of civilisations.

But there is so much racism.

So much racism that despite the ability to go on YouTube and find thousands of scenes from shopping malls in Tehran that look essentially indistinguishable from the average shopping centre in the west, the vast majority of westerners believe the racist propaganda. (Not that western-style shopping mall scenes should be the yardstick for civilisation, but I’m sure you take my point.) Despite the reality being a click away, many believe that Iran is a blood-curdling theocracy where women are stoned to death for showing their hair. And because they believe this, because the bourgeois mind can’t understand revolutionary politics, it can’t understand the depth of support for an anti-imperial revolutionary republic.

They don’t understand the support for a civilisation steeped in mathematics, engineering, architecture, science, mysticism and astronomy. A civilisation which is fighting against a nation steeped in cheeseburger and mammon on behalf of a 70-year old colonial outpost steeped in thievery, apartheid, rape and paedophilia.

The assassination of Khamenei was a perfect example of this civilisational clash. The McMuffin military, the paedo colony and its stenographers hollered about the epic and based operation to assassinate an 86-year old man with late-stage prostate cancer who was conducting the normal business of state in his undefended, austere townhouse with his three-year old granddaughter beside him. They hacked the traffic cameras in Tehran! They had a guy on the inside! They knew all his movements! They Zero Dark Thirty-ed the killing of an old man whose address you could find in the phone book. Utterly pathetic.

And contrast his home and the demonstration of a lived principle with Trump’s new White House ballroom. Contrast Khamenei’s unadorned lifestyle with Trump’s obsession with the gold and the gaudy, with ostentatious displays of wealth. It’s all completely sick-making and grotesque.

And of course the McMuffins and the paedos, the Epstein Axis, hollered and whooped about murdering a man alongside his family after tricking him for months that they were negotiating in good faith. A murder which, of course, did not spark an uprising. And because it hasn’t sparked an uprising, Israel and the US, after murdering 165 school girls, decided to carpet bomb Tehran.

There is no value set here beyond death and conquest.

There is nothing but money, stuff, commerce and war.

We are untethered as a culture. If you can call us that. We are certainly not a civilisation in any grand tradition.

The depths of the philistinish depravity on display with this war are cavernous.

But thinking it all through it does bring home an extremely dismal reality: imperialist wars of aggression continue to be launched because they work.

And they work because hard power, rivers of blood and human sacrifice works.

The US killed nearly 400,000 civilians in Vietnam. Burnt their villages, raped their women. Babies in Vietnam are still being born with birth defects from the indiscriminate use of Agent Orange which destroyed millions of acres of farmland. But Vietnam is now one of the closest allies of the US. A cucked state seamlessly folded into US regional hegemony.

Afghanistan was turned by the US into a state-sized CIA-run heroin den, Iraq was looted, a million killed, whole transport planes of cash flown out of the country, and a compliant regime installed. Most recently Venezuela has overnight been transformed into a US-vassal state.

The US is objectively the most evil force of conquest and domination on the planet, and Iran is now the frontline of anti-imperialism.

Anyone with any sense of justice should want Iran to win this war.

If it falls, it falls to the Epstein Axis and the no-nothing worshippers of cheeseburger and mammon. If Iran falls, all of our future possibilities narrow and we’re sucked further towards neoliberalism’s event horizon. If it falls, the empire moves on to the next target, probably Cuba, maybe Colombia, possibly Turkiye, which Israeli politicians recently hyped as a regional threat.

But Iran isn’t down yet. And while a conventional victory isn’t possible, there’s a path to survival through a war of attrition. Empire won’t want to bear costs for long. If Iran can keep the Strait of Hormuz closed and keep hitting US-aligned assets for long enough, it could force a ceasefire which sees it survive on something like its own terms.

But if Iran does fall to the forces of consumptive philistinism, there is one small crumb of comfort as I see it, and that is this: the deep sickness of the soul will remain in those of an imperial conscience no matter how many wars they start, no matter how many defenceless women and children they kill. Because there is no sating the appetite of the conquistador. This inability to quench a thirst leaves them consumed by a hollow bloodlust, destined to spend a life searching for the next hit.

For those of us with souls, those of us with fuller, richer lives, that is, I think, something to hold to.

We will never be them.

We can never be like them.

They might be of us, but they can never be like us.

The disconnect is spiritual, not able to be bridged by language, a shared land or culture.

We can never understand what possesses them.

And that absolute disconnect with the monstrous is something, however small, to celebrate.

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