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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Too much to say and almost nothing to say.

The US and Israel have declared war on Iran.

Of course they have.

It was, as I argued on Monday, hard to see any other outcome.

It’s the early hours, so it’s unclear exactly what has been hit. We know the US and Israel have bombed Ali Khamenei’s residence in Tehran, as well as multiple other sites across the country. One of these sites, Al Jazeera reports, was a girls school where witnesses say more than 40 Iranian children have been murdered. Multiple social media accounts corroborate this story with video.

Iran has responded by launching missiles at Israel as well as at US military bases in Qatar, the UAE, Bahrain and Jordan.

Trump dressed up his declaration of war with standard lies about preventing Iran having nuclear weapons, but the real goal of regime change was clear. And it was a declaration that began with the exact same words used by Bush junior 23 years ago: “Major combat operations have begun.”

Time is a fucking circle.

Empire is going to empire.

And so bombs from a 70-year old colony of thieves, and a 250-year old loutish experiment are raining down on a 2,500 year-old civilisation. On historic towns and cities. On some of the most beautiful architecture, modern and ancient, in the world.

While the goal of the Epstein empire is clear, it is not immediately and obviously achievable. Especially not without sending in ground troops to effect an Iraq-style government overthrow and installation. Which, with Trump and Israel in a strategic corner, it might end up coming to.

Ultimately I suspect the US and Israel’s ideal outcome is the ethnic balkanisation of Iran, the logic being that the more pieces the country is split into the weaker the people are, enabling Israel to claim total hegemony over the region. Zionists and proponents of Greater Israel have been sharing this map on social media plotting their dream future.

What we do know is that the negotiations over the nuclear programme were a ruse. Reuters confirmed this morning that the US and Israel have been planning the attack for months, and the launch date, February 28th, was decided weeks ago.

If there is any lingering doubt about the nature of western empire, about its duplicity and depravity, and about the sub-human nature of our leaders, it should now be put to bed. Deceitful and deceptive, they are willing to tell any lie and undertake any action, no matter how illegal or murderous, to get what they want.

But this is not how western media will ever analyse or explain the behaviour of our leaders.

On the contrary, over the coming days and weeks, western media is going to try and convince us that two countries, one led by a wanted war criminal, the other led by a conman, fraudster and rapist, are liberators coming to save Iran. The men who committed an actual genocide, we’ll be told, are humanitarians. As the civilian deaths rise, the empire that has killed literally tens of millions of people in the last fifty years will be framed as essentially benign.

Liberal response

All the liberal outrage over Trump when the crosshairs of US empire were directed on Greenland is already dissipating in real time, like bomb smoke in the morning breeze. This morning Mark Carney, the man who not two months ago was being lauded by liberals as the guy to lead a new world order in defiance of US imperialism, backed Trump’s illegal war.

It’s not that liberals don’t care about seeing brown bodies blown apart and lands illegally attacked and invaded, it’s that they support it.

Liberals like Carney are utter frauds, motivated to speak out under very specific conditions and only when their narrow interests are under threat.

Which is why the vast majority of Democrats have been silent or voiced support, as have liberal leaders in Europe, many of whom, including Starmer, Macron and Merz, have inverted reality and framed Iran as the aggressor.

Every day is a teachable moment.

Every day we get more stunning insight into the sickness of the liberal mind.

Every day under empire we see more clearly the valueless, hollow core at the centre of liberal thought.

And of course, none of the headlines today, and none of the future coverage, will focus on the fact that this is an illegal war of aggression which contravenes international law.

You will struggle to find any article that frames it as such. We know western journalists can type and say those words in that order, because every single article about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine four years ago opened with “Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine.” Unbelievably, a number of media outlets are even doing 2003-propaganda and trying to sell unprovoked imperial aggression as a “pre-emptive strike.”

Time is a fucking circle.

And empire is going to empire.

Because what do you know? It turns out that history's most murderous empire, a bunch of child rapists and war criminals, fugitives from international law, fraudsters and genociders, thieves and colonisers, weren't negotiating in good faith after all and just wanted war!

So there should really be no surprises about the events of today.

But these acts should always spark our indignation.

We should never get used to atrocities executed with our money, committed by the people we elect.

We should never get used to illegal wars being launched under fake pretences, wars and their justifications that truly do insult our intelligence.

What happens next depends on a variety of things, including the ferocity of the US-Israel bombardment, whether Iran’s leaders are killed, how many missiles Iran has, how well protected its launch sites are and if the Iranian navy blockades the Straight of Hormuz.

What happens next also depends on us in the imperial core speaking up, making our anger clear and protesting against another round of mass murder in our name.

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This week The Netherlands elected its first gay prime minister, and the youngest in its history.

Mainstream media was full of headlines about this historic milestone.

Liberals on social media and gay rights groups swooned over his youth and sexuality (and history of heart trouble?)

But Robert Jetten isn’t a great guy. A standard-issue rainbow flag centrist, he plans to drastically cut the country’s social security state, immiserating the disabled, homeless and the jobless, while at the same time massively increasing war spending through the imposition of what he calls “a freedom tax.”

In other words, he’s a regressive dickhead.

But all of the headlines, and much of the liberal focus, was on his sexuality and age, not his politics.

Ohana

Amir Ohana is the speaker of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset. Ohana is a Netanyahu loyalist who, as minister of public security under Netanyahu, oversaw Israel’s police state apartheid infrastructure. He did this job so well that Netanyahu promoted him in 2022 to head Israel’s parliament.

This was seen in Israel as a milestone event. Why? Because Ohana, whose parents hail from Morocco, is gay.

Both his origin story and the fact of his sexuality have been a boon for liberal Zionists who’ve paraded him as a symbol of the country’s supposedly tolerant and open values. These “values,” of course, being apartheid and genocide, both of which Ohana, as Knesset speaker, plays a key role in enabling. Yet he, like all gay people in Israel, are a vital rainbow-tinted tool through which Israel’s crimes of apartheid and genocide are laundered.

Mahmood

Shabana Mahmood is Britain’s home secretary. A Muslim who has joined pro-Palestine marches, Mahmood has labelled Israel an occupying power, advocated for the boycott-divest-sanctions movement and joined calls to free Palestine.

But this all changed when she sniffed power. As Home Secretary she vociferously supported proscribing Palestine Action as a terrorist group, and in response to the recent High Court ruling that the ban is illegal has vowed to overturn the judgement. A truly detestable person devoid of ethics, values or morals.

But when it comes to British Muslims selling out both Palestine and fellow Muslims, Mahmood has competition.

Yusuf

Zia Yusuf is the home affairs spokesperson for Reform, Britain’s far-right party. A practising Muslim and the son of immigrant parents, he has promised, if elected, to create an ICE-style agency in the UK to round up and deport hundreds of thousands of people similar to his parents every year. Yusuf has repeatedly talked about restoring Britain’s “Christian heritage.”

Javid

Competing for the blessings of white nationalists on the “I’d deport my parents” front is Sajid Javid, the son of Pakistani immigrants and the UK’s former Home Secretary. Javid said recently he wouldn’t let his parents settle in the country today.

Thiel

Peter Thiel, the founder of AI war-tech company Palantir, arguably the most dangerous organisation on the face of the planet, is gay. His co founder, Joe Lonsdale, said recently the whole reason he and Thiel created Palantir was to exterminate communists. Because fascists have loyalty to class, capitalism and empire, not to those who happen to share the same personal identities. Thiel’s goal is to ensure the straight fascist triumphs over the gay anti-fascist.

Bessent

Trump has a number of gay men in his administration, the highest ranking of whom is Scott Bessent, the billionaire treasury secretary who’s overseen the economic warfare campaign to cripple Iran. Activist groups have incredulously asked how a gay man can live with himself serving in an anti-LGBT administration. It’s simple. Bessent’s loyalty is to empire, not to those who happen to share his sexual preferences.

Catz

Safra Catz has regularly been held up as an example of female empowerment. As the CEO of Oracle, one of the biggest companies in the world, she has been described as “shattering the glass ceiling” for women in business. But under her leadership, Oracle provided more material support for the murder of women than arguably any other company on the planet. This support included the donation of seven tonnes of military equipment to IDF units in Gaza, a stream of servers and software to help power the genocide, and the hosting of a hackathon for Israeli military intelligence to develop tech “solutions” to automate the genocide. Catz also authorised the payment of double salaries for all Oracle employees in Israel, including reservists, with a jobs guarantee for those returning from committing genocide. Catz, a billionaire and feminist icon, leaned in to war crimes and the murder of tens of thousands of women.

Obama

Then we get to the OG of liberal identity politics: Barack Obama.

The black man who led empire from a house built by slaves.

The black man who put ICE on rocket fuel and effectively built Trump’s deportation machine.

The black man who executed imperialism as brutally and effectively as any white man. Perhaps more so, and without much opposition, precisely because he was black.

A dangerous ideology

Identity politics is a hollow, apolitical ideology devoid of the values it professes to embrace.

But most of all, it is incredibly dangerous.

Identity politics has enabled capitalists and imperialists to sell a fundamentally regressive and imprisoning structure of social relations as an emancipatory ideology. Identity over the material has been a central pillar of neoliberalism’s success: “Look at this gay politician, this gay corporate leader, this CEO businesswoman, this female fighter pilot, this black man president. Look at all this progress!”

Identity sells us a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

It sells us the idea that things must be getting better if historically oppressed groups are now rising to the top of imperialism’s structure of social relations. But it’s all a ruse. A ruse designed to distract us from the only real dividing line that matters—class. Us and them. The elites versus the rest.

It’s been genius really.

Because if you as a gay person or a woman or a black person or an immigrant can be persuaded that what matters is identity rather than class interests or social relations, you can be sold backward, reactionary policies by those with whom you share a personal identity. In turn this helps perpetuate the eternal problem of people voting against their class interests.

Now before someone gets mad: this isn’t to say discrimination based on skin colour, race, gender, or sexual preference isn’t a thing.

It definitely is.

But this discrimination, discrimination which flows directly from structures of class and capital has been weaponised by the interests of class and capital to make us look down, rather than up. It’s been weaponised by the agents of the status quo to twist ideas of justice and to funnel rightful demands for justice into dead ends.

And of course people from historically oppressed groups can, and frequently are, good leaders.

But the failure to interrogate a person’s politics because of their identity, as we’ve seen with Jetten, previously saw with Obama and to an extent are seeing with Mamdani, must end. The reflexive assumption that a person must be on the side of the good because of a group status bestowed on them by colour, gender or sexuality is dangerous. It’s an assumption seeded by class and capital to undermine fights for real justice. Wrapped in the language and appearance of progress, this assumption is how fascist and imperialist politics are smuggled into mainstream thought and discourse.

And this inability to pick our way through identity politics relies on the depoliticisation of the citizenry, a depoliticisiation that neoliberalism has so effectively promoted and managed. Depoliticised social relations are essential to the success of identity politics because they so effectively obscure the fact that class and capital remain the enduring divide.

The end of the fake progress signalled by identity politics, and the re-emergence of a politics focused on class and capital is essential for actual progress to begin and for the oppressed to find real justice.

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Lenin’s refrain that “there are decades when nothing happens, and weeks when decades happen” is overused because it’s true.

And I have a feeling this week is one of those weeks.

The empire has moved a huge amount of its death machine to the Middle East and whichever decision the Epstein regime alights upon has a good chance of upending the world.

And with any luck, it will.

The truth is, we could do with a little more blowback.

Because whether Afghanistan, Iraq, or more recently Venezuela, we’ve got used to the idea that imperial violence doesn’t really affect our lives, not directly.

These wars might sprout a bit of terrorism, but in the grand scheme of things, as citizens of the imperial core, we’re largely insulated from the consequences of empire’s bloodthirsty proclivities.

But this time, if the US goes ahead with an assault on Iran, it will be different.

Iran is not Iraq, Afghanistan or Venezuela.

Iran showed that last June by hitting military targets across Israel, including sites in Tel Aviv. This time, every American military base in the region will be a target. Every Israeli military base and city will be a target.

The likelihood of a regional war, should the US pull the trigger, is extremely high.

And who knows what Iranian strikes against US bases in Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE or even Egypt might do to their internal politics.

These countries are dictatorships. They haven’t been forged through revolutionary processes. There are no anti-imperial revolutions to defend. On the contrary, much of the Arab world has become a staging post for imperialism. Iranian strikes could well trigger civil unrest among populations who harbour no love for the lackeys and servants of empire who rule over them. And in the case of Qatar and the UAE, 90% of the population are foreigners. These are entities forged through neoliberal capitalism and US hegemony. Not revolution. A prolonged war would see huge flight out of those countries, triggering economic collapse.

Should the US attack, Iran will also use its navy to blockade the Strait of Hormuz, through which a quarter of the world’s oil flows. Oil prices will spike, inflation will follow, the global economy will slump.

War with Iran will hit us in our pockets in a way that other wars haven’t.

As the global economy rocks, the US will try and bomb the Iranian navy out of position, from air and at sea.

But again, Iran is not Iraq, Afghanistan or Venezuela.

Iran has squadrons of fighter jets and heavy bombers. It has a fleet of attack submarines, fast attack crafts, warships, and minehunters.

It would be war. Real war.

Not Iraq, where a demoralised, disloyal, ill-equipped military mostly stayed at home. Not Afghanistan, where an invasion succeeded through collaboration with the Northern Alliance. Not Venezuela, where a smash-and-grab raid against a military weakling was easily achieved.

And unlike these examples, there is no new government waiting in the wings, either in exile or in Iran. Iran’s government is not going to collapse at the tip of a Tomahawk missile. If it was that weak, it would have collapsed during the riots, as the US and Israel had planned. It didn’t. On the contrary, millions lined the streets in the aftermath to demonstrate support for their government. A US attack will only galvanise Iranians further in support of their leaders.

Once war has begun, escalation will be inevitable.

Iran will keep firing missiles, hitting Israel, US targets and economic infrastructure in the region, including oil refineries.

The US will keep bombing, but without any real outcome in mind.

But there’s only so much you can do from the air. You can wreck infrastructure, immiserate a population, but you can’t do regime change from 10,000 feet.

Under these conditions, the pressure would be on the US to escalate further, to change the plan, clarify the objective. Under these conditions, the US may feel compelled to send ground troops to effect regime change.

Israel will demand it.

And this is where it could get out of control.

China buys 90% of Iran’s oil and has deepened military ties in recent years, supplying the country with fighter jets, drones, radars and air defense tech.

Iran and its oil under de facto US control would be a dangerous weapon against China. China then is strongly motivated to make sure the republic doesn’t fall.

At the same time, the Israeli regime knows this is their one chance to fulfil their decades-long dream of regional domination.

There won’t be another build-up of US military power like this again in years. Certainly not under Trump. He’s not going to call this off, fly everything back, and do it all again in a few months.

For the Israelis, this is it. Now or never.

This is all a highly combustible mix, and makes the situation extraordinarily dangerous.

Despite the death, destruction and global fallout it would entail, the odds remain good that the US will attack Iran.

Israel wants it, Iran will not concede to give up its sovereignty by scrapping its non-nuclear missile programme, and Trump, having committed all this hardware, won’t want to be seen to back down.

But it hasn’t happened yet.

And if it doesn’t happen, this would also be a profound outcome that will change the world for years.

If the US doesn’t attack, if instead we get a deal on uranium enrichment, Trump will declare it a great victory for his strategy of brinksmanship.

But Iran will have won.

Because as part of that deal, there will be sanctions relief.

And there will be no limits on Iran’s missile programme.

The threat of war will pass, in the short-term at least.

The Palestinian resistance, and the broader resistance to Zionism in the region, will see its source of material support strengthened.

Israel will be weakened vis-a-vis Iran. The Zionist lobby will fume and Israel’s relationship with the Trump administration may change. A scorned Israel will lash out, maybe even against the US. The relationship could harden.

No war and a tokenistic deal could also change the dynamics over Gaza, over the West Bank and over Lebanon.

Israel, as the bully it is, will almost certainly lash out militarily at the Palestinians and the Lebanese who will become immediate casualties of any deal.

But in the longer term, Iran’s re-assertion as a major regional player would create a wider range of future possibilities for the Palestinians.

Whatever happens, this is a week that will decide years.

My advice for the short term? Fill your car up with fuel and do the big shop before the end of the week.

But we can’t go on like this.

We can’t go on watching our leaders threaten to do mass murder, or actually do mass murder, every few years to get what they want.

If this war happens, and if we do feel it in our daily lives, it would be the costs of imperialism coming home. Costs which one could easily argue would be well-deserved.

Which brings me to my advice for the long term: organise, strategise and revolt to overthrow the Epstein class, powered by the knowledge that all empires eventually end.

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The US has amassed the largest military force in the Middle East since the invasion of Iraq almost 23 years ago and is poised once again to commit mass murder and gleefully perpetrate an astonishing amount of war crimes.

Yesterday a huge number of planes, from fighter jets to air-to-air refuelling tankers to command and control planes, left the US en route to the Middle East. The planes had stop-overs on US military bases in England and Germany, because no imperial war crime is ever complete without the involvement of Europe.

A US attack on Iran, a flagrant violation of international law, if such a thing is even worth mentioning any more, appears imminent.

Why? For Israel, for oil, for power projection, for Trump’s legacy. Because the logic of the military-industrial complex demands that $1 trillion dollars a year and an astonishing array of killing machinery doesn’t just sit idle.

Because this is what empires do.

Because the US is violence.

And there is no more stunning display of American violence than a big war.

The US has been at war for 222 out of 239 years since 1776. The country is hardly going to stop now, especially not with the stars aligning for a project the US-Israel-Zionist axis has been desperate to undertake for nearly 50 years.

And despite the fact that a nation at almost constant war is going to attack a country that last initiated a war nearly 300 years ago, the US and Israel are going to pose as the saviours and pacifiers.

The leaders of these countries will self-anoint themselves as such, while western media will subject their readers and viewers to a dizzying display of propaganda to enable the murders and wash the crimes.

The groundwork

But the propaganda won’t start from the day of the attack.

The truth is, we wouldn’t be in this situation without the groundwork laid by the media over the years.

We wouldn’t be on the verge of another major US war without the often subtle lies of omission that have characterised western reporting on Iran for decades, and have been especially evident in recent months.

Let’s go through some of them.

Shifting narratives

Firstly, and importantly, the premise for an attack.

Last June Trump said the US had ‘obliterated’ Iran’s nuclear sites.

But now, eight months later, the US apparently needs to do a much bigger war to take out Iran’s nuclear programme.

No one will ask the obvious question.

The premise, that Iran’s nuclear programme is a threat, will stand tall and uninterrogated in the mind of the propagandised western media consumer who just eight months ago was told it had all been destroyed.

Loaded terms

“Iran’s nuclear programme.”

The words themselves are loaded with an intent that is rarely examined or explained.

They never come with any context and are purposefully designed to shut down any critical thinking, as I’ve written about before.

Western media never explains that Iran is one of the world's biggest producers of radiopharmaceuticals used for cancer diagnostics and treatments. And to diagnose cancer and make cancer drugs, you need medical isotopes. And you can’t make medical isotopes without enriching uranium. Iran is in the top five global exporters of radioactive drugs, supplying fifteen countries, including European countries, with nuclear medicines. And sanctions on Iran prohibit the import of radiopharmaceuticals.

So without its deliberately misrepresented “nuclear programme” Iran would find it hard, if not impossible, to diagnose and treat people with cancer and other illnesses.

The nuclear deal

Media never explains this and also never explains the background to US threats towards Iran over this programme. Amid all the coverage of talks and possible deals, Western media never mentions the fact that in 2018 Trump himself ripped up a deal, signed in 2016, that was working just fine.

That agreement, ratified by the UN Security Council, facilitated regular site inspections and allowed Iran to manufacture nuclear material for medicine and energy. The media will never remind us of this, nor that the last inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency reported Iran to be in full compliance with their obligations.

We are never told that Trump, under pressure from his Zionist backers to manufacture a crisis which could move the US and Israel towards war, and eager to undo a rare Obama success, deliberately created a problem to solve.

And as we’re about to find out, there was never any intention of solving it peacefully.

But media will keep up the pretence that these were good faith negotiations that broke down because of Iran’s demands. And they won’t tell us those demands included being able to diagnose and treat cancer.

Unilateralism

The fact of the US unilaterally withdrawing from the previous deal is also a key omission in the coverage.

Because to remind readers that the crisis was triggered by the US might make the US, not Iran, look like the rogue state.

The fact of American unilateralism is often buried by western media. This is why we’ve heard so little about the 66 international organisations and treaties the US announced in January it will withdraw from. And in case you’re tempted to think this unilateralism is all on Trump, the Biden administration withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and the Open Skies Treaty, both key elements of an international framework to avoid nuclear war.

The US is a rogue state operating in plain sight and a huge amount of effort goes into obscuring that fact. Because if people understood the US as a rogue state, they might question if its constant violence is not the violence of a peacekeeper or a freedom fighter, but the violence of a rogue.

They might question who, in fact, the bad guys are.

Israel’s nukes

Talking of rogue states, the media will never examine the foundational premise underlying the whole issue of Iranian nuclear capability.

They’ll never question why Israel is allowed to have a nuclear weapon but Iran isn’t. They’ll never lead readers or viewers to question why the region’s preeminent aggressor, a perpetrator of genocide and a constant violator of laws and norms, is the one trusted with the most destructive weapon in human history.

Because then they’d have to frame Israel as the aggressor.

Then they’d have to explain how empire works.

Then they’d have to examine glaring double standards and hypocrisies and introduce people to critical thinking which doesn’t lead to reflexive cheerleading for empire.

And that is a big no-no.

It is, after all, much easier to manufacture consent for war if a large chunk of the population thinks you’re the good guys doing freedom and peace things.

New pretexts

If you’ve been following the news, you might be aware that the latest talks go beyond the nuclear programme and introduce new pretexts for war, one of which is Iran’s ballistic missile programme.

Israel, having been shocked at Iran’s ability to strike its territory last June, wants the new deal to include the elimination of all Iran’s long-range missiles.

When the US and Israel attack, we’ll be told that it’s Iran’s fault. We’ll be told that wanting to retain defensive capability in the face of an expansionist, genocidal enemy loudly committed to your destruction is an irrational position.

The Guardian among others have already started pushing this line.

By contrast, we won’t be asked to think about why Israel can have any weapon it likes.

We won’t be asked to think about why the US would go to war to stop a country being able to defend itself from Israel.

This will just be presented as the natural order of things.

American violence

The coming war on Iran will be a completely illegal war of unprovoked aggression committed by the US against a country 4500 miles away which poses zero threat.

Yet I doubt a single American serving in the US military will object.

Because massive war crimes are an American tradition.

Because the US is violence.

Will the US ever have a reckoning with the fundamentally violent and imperial nature of its society?

Not judging by the political alternatives currently on offer.

Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, considered by many to be the leading leftist edge of the Democratic Party and a viable future presidential candidate, just went to the Munich security conference to establish her imperial credentials. Speaking at a session sponsored by Palantir, she refused to condemn Trump’s military build-up while spouting anti-Iran regime change propaganda. At the same time, she tried to outflank Trump on the right over Venezuela, saying he should have committed to regime change and toppled the entire government.

With lefty peace-loving friends like AOC who needs war-mongering enemies like Trump eh?

Freedom

As the war begins and bombs rain down, politicians and the media will regurgitate fake atrocity propaganda regarding the number of dead in the recent protests to convince us that the violence on our screens is the violence of the liberator.

We’ll be hearing about the ‘mullahs,’ the ayatollahs and authoritarianism.

The average western media consumer will be convinced that Iranians live in a colourless society led by religious nutters who routinely stone women to death, when a simple YouTube search shows a very different reality. Scenes from streets and shopping malls in Tehran that could have been filmed in any western city are a click away, but media consumers will never be directed to these sources.

All we’ll hear about is the necessity of imperial violence.

We’ll hear that Iran failed to cut a deal in stories sheared of context.

We’ll hear that Americans are helping free Iranians from tyranny and this will be good for the world, when in reality the only path to peace is in freeing Americans from the tyranny of their own empire.

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Tech giant Apple has quietly paid nearly $2 billion for a ‘pre-speech’ tech company whose employees helped Israel commit genocide in Gaza.

And Apple has paid this money, the second-biggest deal in its history, for a company that doesn’t have a product, doesn’t have any revenues and whose website is a single page containing 15 words.

The company, Q.ai, is developing sensors which map the imperceptible movements of a human face to determine the words someone is thinking before they’re spoken.

They call it silent speech.

Or pre-speech.

And it’s exactly as sinister as you think it is.

Q.ai was founded by Aviad Maizels, Avi Barliya and Yonatan Wexler, all of whom honed their skills by testing technologies of apartheid on Palestinians. Maizels is a former commander of Unit 81, the IDF division which builds Israel’s offensive cyber weapons. Barliya, according to his LinkedIn, was an intelligence officer in the Israeli air force, while Wexler is a former Unit 8200 agent.

Apple’s genocide intake

In a blog post announcing the deal, Tom Hulme, an executive at Google Ventures, one of the company’s early investors, revealed that 30% of Q.ai’s more than 100 staff were called up to participate in the genocide of Gaza.

This admission means dozens of people implicated in genocidal acts who served under the political command of Yoav Gallant, an ICC indicted war criminal, are now Apple employees.

It should be a huge scandal. The biggest company in the US, one of the world’s most recognisable names, has folded into its staff dozens of people who served in a military during the period it committed genocide, according to all of the world’s most acclaimed rights experts.

But every single mainstream article which covered news of the deal, from Reuters to the FT, ignored this fact.

Mainstream coverage also ignored a number of other extremely cogent elements to the story, including the nature of the deal and the technology itself.

Apple has paid two billion dollars for something that barely appears to exist.

Q.ai’s website consists of just 15 words.

To find out exactly what the company does you have to look beyond the press releases to the patents Q.ai and its founders have filed.

And these patents read like plot lines from the bleakest dystopian futures.

Sensing silent speech

One filing details technology capable of “determining an emotional state of an individual based on facial skin micromovements.” The same filing says the technology could be used “to identify a user based on heart-rate and breathing-rate.” Another filing says Q.ai’s software “synthesises speech in response to words articulated silently by the test subject.”

Q.ai’s technology centres around silent speech.

This is the idea that before we vocalise words and move our mouths to emit sounds, our brain has already sent signals to muscles in our throat and face determining what we’re going to say. Q.ai claims to have invented infrared sensors that can pick up these pre-speech micro-movements.

One filing talks about a “sensing device configured to fit an ear of a user, with an optical sensing head which senses light reflected from the face and outputs a signal in response. Processing circuitry processes the signal to generate a speech output.”

Tech bloggers have suggested Apple has bought the company to enable non-verbal control of an iPhone and other devices via its airpod earphones or smart glasses. An annotated diagram included with the patent shows a person wearing glasses and an earpiece integrated with the technology.

Indeed Apple is no stranger to adopting the technologies of Israeli apartheid, and in fact the company is extremely familiar with Maizels himself.

In 2013, Apple bought Maizels’s first company, PrimeSense, a developer of 3D sensing technology. PrimeSense technology went on to become the foundation for Apple’s Face ID system on its newer iPhone and iPad models.

Nonetheless, two billion dollars for a non-existent technology and a three-year old company, is unprecedented. What isn’t unprecedented, however, is a US tech giant overpaying for an Israeli company.

Overpriced Israeli tech

Last year, Google bought Israeli cybersecurity Wiz for $32 billion, which, at 64 times Wiz’s annual sales, was widely seen as an inflated price and far in excess of the sales-to-valuation ratio for similar companies.

At this price, however, Israel received a huge $5 billion tax windfall. At the time Zionists crowed it would help the country buy more warplanes and missiles to commit genocide.

The deal for Q.ai, while a lot smaller, will still generate significant tax income for Israel’s struggling economy.

And Israel is critical to Apple.

The company has a large R&D campus in the country, its second-biggest outside the US, into which large numbers of Unit 8200 and Unit 81 graduates are funnelled. Apple CEO Tim Cook is a devoted Zionist, has visited Israel on numerous occasions, and in 2018 received an award from Zionist lobby group the ADL for his efforts to censor anti-Israel speech. Apple has made good on that promise over the last two years, sacking staff for expressing pro-Palestine, anti-genocide views. Cook has never spoken about Gaza.

The price for a ghost company with a few patents, then, looks as much about politics as it does about technology.

That’s not to say Q.ai’s technology won’t be commercialised for consumer applications. It probably will be. And if the tech is realised, the implications for privacy and data collection are frightening.

As are the security state and military applications.

A pre-crime future

A few days after the Q.ai deal, the head of neurotechnology at Israel’s directorate of defense research and development, the country’s equivalent to the US’s DARPA programme, gave her first-ever interview to Israeli media. In the interview she referenced Q.ai and said the Israeli military is working on similar technology. The US has a DARPA project known as Silent Talk which is also working to develop pre-speech sensing and non-verbal control technologies.

Once the technology is developed, and pre-speech established as a legitimate biological human function, how far behind will pre-crime be?

Given the frenzied efforts we’ve seen to shut down and criminalise criticism of Israel under the guise of antisemitism, one can easily imagine a future of pre-speech sensing technology being rolled out to identify would-be critics of Israel. Or the US. Or Europe. Or imperialism in general.

You can imagine it now. “Based on our silent speech detector we have determined you were going to say something hateful or antisemitic or un-American and are therefore under arrest.”

The most dystopian technologies continue to flow out of Israel. And they continue to flow because Israel is empowered by the US and Europe to maintain a system of apartheid built upon invasive and authoritarian technologies of control.

It is therefore no surprise that the creators of Q.ai are veterans of Israel’s genocidal military security state, or that the largest company in the US sees these technologies as essential to its AI future.

And while this story may be no surprise, we should never get used to, and must resist, technologies of apartheid and genocide, and their creators, becoming embedded in our devices, our economies and our lives.

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All of western liberalism’s much-vaunted institutions, its legal, political and cultural, have collapsed in on themselves to protect a genocidal, apartheid ethno-state.

This week, at the Berlinale film festival, one of the most prestigious film festivals in the world, a journalist asked the jury why they’d never expressed solidarity with Palestinians like they’ve done previously with Ukrainians.

German director Wim Wenders, the president of the Berlinale jury, responded that the festival is “the opposite of politics. We have to do the work of people, and not the work of politicians. We have to stay out of politics.”

This is the same Wenders who in 2024 said “the Berlinale has traditionally always been the most political of the major festivals, and it’s not holding back now, nor will it in the future. I like the Berlinale because it always speaks out and says something.”

Truly breath-taking. Two diametrically opposed ideological positions from the brain, and mouth, of the same man.

And a fascinating insight into a brain on Zionism.

When it comes to the genocide of Gaza, the Berlinale “has to stay out of politics.”

But when it comes to Ukraine, the Berlinale “has to speak out.”

Four years ago the festival issued a robust condemnation of Russia’s invasion, saying the country had committed a criminal war of aggression, noting its violation of international law and calling its attacks on civilian locations a catastrophe.

By contrast, the word Gaza hasn’t crossed their lips once. No mention of Israeli violations of international law, no mention of the massive civilian death toll, no solidarity with Palestinians. Not a word from a group of cultural elites who no doubt see themselves as progressive, compassionate and anti-racist.

And while it’s tempting to say this is all about racism, it’s not just that.

In 2016, the festival had a special segment dedicated to films focused on refugees during the height of the refugee crisis provoked by the Syrian civil war. German media lauded it at the time, saying it showed the Berlinale is “a political festival.”

So it’s not just about racism.

It’s about Zionism.

It’s about a Europe which has, in a turn of the utmost irony, done the most antisemitic thing possible and collapsed the distinction between Judaism and Zionism. To criticise Israel is to criticise Jews. And we can’t do that, because Europe is where the Jews were holocausted, and the holocaust has become Europe’s civic religion.

To criticise Israel today, even for acts of genocide, is a kind of social blasphemy.

And it’s also about imperialism.

The victims of the refugee crisis were the victims of an approved enemy.

Ukraine’s dead are victims of another approved enemy.

The Palestinians on the other hand are the victims of an approved imperial ally.

For European elites, solidarity, progressivism and compassion stop at the borders of empire.

Israel tops journalist murder ranking

But obviously it’s not just European elites.

Cultural liberal institutions self-censoring to protect Israeli war criminals has been a theme across the west.

This week it came to light that The Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York-based non-profit promoting press freedom around the world, had cancelled its annual “Impunity Index” because Israel was set to top the ranking.

Whistleblowers at the CPJ told the Electronic Intifada that to avoid the pressure and criticism that would have come from putting Israel at the top of a ranking, bosses at the committee simply cancelled it. Rather than write the accompanying report which would have documented the fact that Israel is the number one killer of journalists in the world, employees were directed to write a “general global account” of the decline in press freedom.

A freedom of speech rights group cancelling their own speech because that speech bound them to criticism of Israel. Another breath-taking event underscoring the fact that liberal values have always been an illusion.

Looking at the CPJ’s donor list also reveals this episode to be another demonstration of the reach and extent of Zionist power. The CPJ is funded by wealthy Zionists including Ariel Investments, a Chicago-based fund that invests in Israeli spy-tech companies.

The episode demonstrates no principle is sacred if that principle clashes with Zionist interests and ideological preferences.

It demonstrates no value is unassailable if holding to that value exposes the true nature of Israel as a genocidal state.

It shows us that for the western professional class, being opposed to genocide is a selective value, dependent on who is doing the genocide and who the victims are.

Herzog in Australia

The selective nature of so-called liberal, humanitarian values was also on view in Australia this week following the state visit by the Israeli president and Epstein pal Isaac Herzog.

Protestors were brutally beaten by Australian police for chanting pro-Palestine slogans. One man was arrested simply for shouting “shame” in the direction of Herzog. On the day Herzog visited, Queensland said it was planning to make uttering the slogan ‘from the river to the sea’ punishable with a two-year prison sentence.

In the same week, a disabled Australian woman in a wheelchair pocket-dialled someone while in the offices of a Jewish nutritionist. The nutritionist reported the disabled woman to the police, claiming the muffled noises from her pocket were antisemitic. The woman was subsequently investigated by police for committing a possible hate crime.

You might be thinking “what the actual fuck is happening?”

What the fuck is happening is a confected, McCarthyite-level of hysteria to protect a genocidal regime because that regime is essential to western interests.

What’s happening is the full collapse of the distinction between Judaism and Zionism.

What’s happening is that the ideological agents of an apartheid state in our political, legal, business and cultural institutions have been activated to protect that state, regardless of its actions.

What’s happening is that popular sentiment against Israel is clashing with deeply embedded Zionist interests.

These interests used to be able to operate in the shadows, largely unencumbered by scrutiny.

Genocide changed that.

Watching children get split in half, beheaded, orphaned and starved for two years changed that.

Mass murder sanctioned by the west woke lots of people up to the fact that liberal values are a construct designed to make us feel good about our place in the world.

The cat is out of the bag.

And what we’re seeing are the desperate attempts to stuff it back in.

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We have unprecedented access to information.

We have an unprecedented ability to map networks of power.

We’ve just had a massive dump of files documenting the inner workings of a global criminal mafia.

This should be a golden age for journalism.

But instead we get slop. Empire-brained, imperial slop.

The Epstein reporting has only confirmed this retreat by the western media into disgrace and venality. It has only confirmed their betrayal of what should be a noble profession.

I’ve written before about how the media have attempted to defenestrate the Epstein story, a story about a shadow state operating though elite networks of corruption, criminality, power, and abuse, and reduce it to a tabloid-style palace intrigue.

But now, watching the media ignore Epstein’s extensive connections to Israel and instead try to make the Epstein files about Russia, really tops it all.

This was a man who was best friends with Ehud Barak, the former prime minister of Israel. A man who was involved in numerous schemes to support the Israeli government and Israeli businesses, who wore an IDF hoodie and said in an email to Steve Bannon that “all roads lead to Tel Aviv.”

The current president of Israel, Isaac Herzog, was named by Epstein in an email listing upcoming visitors to his island.

The current president of Israel hung out at Epstein’s paedo island.

Have you seen this reported anywhere?

Of course not.

Because western journalists are scribes for imperialism, working to keep empire narratives on track. So instead of focusing on Herzog, they focus on Putin. Instead of telling you about the president that actually visited Epstein’s island, they are fabricating an elaborate, evidence-free plot about one who didn’t. Why? Because Israel is a crown jewel of western empire, and Russia is the approved enemy.

Epstein, Israel, Zionism

It would take a book, in fact numerous books, to document all the ways in which Epstein was connected to Israel. The connections are so deep and extensive there’s sufficient evidence to suggest he was an Israeli intelligence asset running a blackmail ring, ensnaring key politicians and decision makers on behalf of Israel. A 2020 FBI email contained in the files says Ehud Barak trained Epstein to be a spy for Israel.

The Epstein files are astonishing in their documentation not just of Epstein’s ties to Israel, but also in documenting the network of largely Jewish Zionists who revolved around the paedophile.

There’s his close friendship with Peter Mandelson, the now-disgraced Labour politician and former UK ambassador to the US who may bring down the Starmer government. Mandelson, a proud Jewish Zionist who first visited Israel in the 1970s, was constantly seeking Epstein’s advice on a range of issues connected to Israel. In 2013, Epstein told Barak, then the prime minister of Israel, that Mandelson should be recruited to lead the sale of Paz Oil, Israel’s biggest oil company.

Mandelson is a pro-genocide, pro-Israel fanatic. After thousands of children had been slaughtered, he angrily argued that it was “ridiculous” to suggest Israel should stop the killing. On a 2024 trip to Israel where he met Herzog, Mandelson repeated lies used to justify the continuation of the genocide, saying Hamas, a local group which has never attacked outside occupied Palestine, was “an immense security threat to the entire western world.”

It would be karma, if not justice, should a fanatical Zionist end up bringing down a government complicit in genocide.

Then there are the Jewish Zionist billionaires like private equity kingpin Leon Black, a friend and key financier of Isaac Herzog, and Epstein’s personal financial adviser, and hedge fund billionaire Glenn Dubin and his wife Eva.

In a 2010 email, Eva Dubin says Epstein should come and visit because Celina will have five friends over. Celina is the daughter of Eva and Glenn Dubin, and she was 15 at the time.

But the depravity of the Dubin’s goes deeper than that. Glenn Dubin was named by Virginia Guiffre as the first person Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell trafficked her to.

And Dubin, you guessed it, is a Jewish Zionist.

A vice chair of the Zionist lobby group the American Jewish Committee, Dubin said in an interview last year he’d donated millions to Israel since the start of the genocide. The AJC regularly send delegations to Tel Aviv, meeting in the past with Netanyahu and Herzog. The AJC were also a key part of the network of Zionist lobby groups which led the crackdown against pro-Palestine student protests.

Ghislaine Maxwell of course is the daughter of Robert Maxwell, a British publishing tycoon and likely Israeli spy. Maxwell was buried on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, with Israeli state officials and Mossad chiefs in attendance. The Washington Post described the funeral as “befitting a national hero.”

There’s also Epstein’s deep relationship with the legendary Jewish-Zionist banking family the Rothschild’s, with former US treasury secretary Larry Summers, and with lawyer and academic Alan Dershowitz. Dershowitz, Epstein’s personal lawyer and a regular visitor to paedo island, said in 2024 that he was “building a legal dream team” to defend Netanyahu and Israel from charges of genocide and other war crimes.

There’s also Epstein’s direct financing of Israel’s machinery of genocide and apartheid. A 2006 email shows Epstein sent money to the Friends of the IDF, an American dark money group which funnels cash directly to the IDF. The email also shows he funded assorted Zionist groups funding Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank.

How much of this does the average BBC and CNN-watching, New York Times and Guardian-reading liberal know?

Very little. Many instead will have been convinced Epstein was a Russian asset.

Because journalism is dead.

Because western media brand-names are still naively trusted by so many to deliver the unbiased truth.

Because most western mainstream media exists to reproduce imperial propaganda.

It’s not just with the Epstein story.

Regime change propaganda

The reporting of the Iran protests and riots have been designed not to educate and elucidate, but to provide cover for regime change, as I’ve also written about recently.

How many people know that the US keeps boasting that it purposefully collapsed the Iranian currency to force an uprising? Trump last week said, with pride in his voice, that they’d made the country “a mess.” Twice in the last month, during a Senate hearing and at Davos, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the US had deliberately created a dollar shortage in Iran to collapse the economy. He called this strategy a great success.

How many people know this, or know that the former director of the CIA, Mike Pompeo, said Mossad agents were on the streets of Iran during the riots?

These things aren’t reported.

The only reporting is of a 30,000 dead number repeated ad nauseum that appears to originate from an Indian fashion blogger connected with exiled Iranian monarchists employed by the Guardian to write anti-Iranian hit pieces.

The Guardian coverage of Iran has been some of the most rabid, full of manipulation and analysis designed to soften readers up for regime change.

This week The Guardian’s diplomatic editor Patrick Wintour wrote an article in which he excoriated Iran for retaining “maximalist” demands in talks with the US given Iran is so much weaker than last year.

Firstly, he never explains to the reader that these maximalist demands, which include the continued refining of uranium, have little to do with nuclear weapons.

Iran is one of the world's biggest producers of radiopharmaceuticals used for cancer diagnostics and treatments. And to produce radiopharmaceuticals you need medical isotopes. And you can’t make medical isotopes without enriching uranium. Iran is in the top five global exporters of radioactive drugs, supplying fifteen countries with nuclear medicines. Demanding zero uranium enrichment, a supposedly ‘maximalist’ demand, is a demand for Iran to abandon modern medicine and destroy a critical industry.

Wintour, like all western journalists, never explains this context when referencing “Iran’s nuclear programme.” Nor that the only reason Iran hasn’t been bombed again is because it proved the effectiveness of its long-range missiles last June. The US and Israel are now demanding Iran give up this deterrent, and Iran, obviously, is saying no. Wintour calls this a ‘maximalist’ demand, failing to explain why Iran should not be able to defend itself from Israeli and US aggression.

Even if Iran did want to acquire nuclear weapons, Wintour and his kind never explain why Israel can have them but Iran can’t.

Because then they’d have to explain empire.

Because Wintour is so empire-brained he can’t interrogate why Iran, having survived regime change riots and demonstrated effective military deterrence, might actually be stronger, not weaker, than before. Because of this empire brain he views Iranian demands as the product of arrogance and stupidity, rather than as the product of grounded, strategic calculation.

The endless propaganda, the twisting of narratives, the scrubbing of context, the manufacturing of consent.

Western media as a mouthpiece for empire.

Epstein as a Russian not Israeli asset.

It’s a clown show, and it’s all so tiring.

And the clownish propaganda is all very easy to miss and very easy for the casual reader to absorb.

Which is why I’ll keep pointing it out in the vain hope that maybe, just maybe, we can turn the tide.

(All my writing is free to access and republish, but if you appreciated this story please consider donating here. I’m fully reader-funded and could really use the support right now.)

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Israel has killed 21 people in Gaza since dawn today, a killing spree which follows the nearly 40 killed earlier this week, bringing the total number of Palestinians murdered since the fake ceasefire to more than 500.

The latest murders, which included children sleeping in their tents because their homes have already been turned to rubble, come after the return of all the hostages.

Remember when Israel said that if Hamas just gave back the hostages the killing would stop? It was a line repeated ad nauseum by Israelis and Zionists on TV and on social media. The new line is that if Hamas disarms the violence will end.

Only stooges and fools believe these depraved lies.

Israel was killing Palestinians long before Hamas, long before hostages, long before any other pretext the genocidal state and its supporters parrot today for their crimes.

In fact, Jews were killing Palestinians before there was even an Israel.

Zionist terror

In a two-year period between 1938 and 1939, there were 36 bomb and gun attacks targeting Arabs by Jewish-Zionist terrorist groups across Palestine. These included simultaneous bomb attacks on vegetable markets in Haifa and Jerusalem in February 1939, the bombing of a cinema in May that year, then another bombing of the same Haifa market in June. These three attacks alone killed more than sixty Palestinians.

Attacks continued regularly through the 1940s, up to the eve of Israel’s creation. Just one month before Israel came into being, Zionists massacred over 100 Palestinians, men, women and children, in the village of Deir Yassin near Jerusalem.

None of this violence of course was in self defence or in resistance to an occupying power. It was purely colonial and territorial, designed to advance fear, propel ethnic cleansing and achieve the Zionist goal of a Jewish state in Palestine.

And in 1948 this was achieved, not just with help from the west, but also in collaboration with Hitler’s Germany which, in 1933, signed a pact with Zionist leaders that facilitated the transfer of tens of thousands of Jews from Germany to Palestine.

Zionist collaboration with the Nazis is a fact often left out of the officially approved and sanitised story regarding the creation of Israel.

And when Zionists finally got their promised land, not carved out of Europe, the continent that had historically oppressed the Jews, or out of Germany, the country that had just genocided them, but in Palestine, the Zionists continued as they had before, only now with state power behind them.

The Nakba

In the months after Israel was declared a state, about half of Palestine's predominantly Arab population, around 750,000 people, were ethnically cleansed by newly empowered Zionist forces. Homes were stolen, olive groves and vegetable gardens uprooted, and thousands slaughtered during the Nakba. Prominent events include the Lydda massacre, when a nascent Israeli army massacred over 400 Palestinians, including executing 250 people in a mosque; the Safsaf massacre, in which Israeli soldiers executed 70 civilians; and the Abu Shusha Massacre in which dozens of Palestinians were murdered in their homes.

The massacres continued into the 1950s. In November 1956 Israeli troops lined hundreds of Palestinians up against a wall in Khan Younis in Gaza and summarily executed them. An Israeli soldier wrote to his girlfriend: "We killed hundreds, but for me it is not enough."

Decades before Hamas. Decades before hostages. Decades before Netanyahu.

Because it’s not about any of those things. It’s about colonisation, ethnic cleansing, and Jewish supremacy.

Which is why the massacres have continued and haven’t stopped. Khan Younis, now a sea of tents, was bombed by Israel earlier this week.

It is tempting to label the genocide of Gaza a culmination, but that would imply some sort of finality, the end of a process.

But there is no end. Today, February 2026, the blood of Palestinians is still flowing and no one is doing anything to stop it.

Einstein’s opposition

None of this is in any way complicated. And arguing that it is complicated, as many reflexively still do, even after all we’ve seen, is itself a form of genocidal anti-Palestinian propaganda which obscures the crystal clear nature of the situation.

The nature of the situation is this: an ethno-supremacist Jewish state fences off Arab communities behind razor wire and checkpoints in AI-surveilled compounds, steals their homes and massacres them. Daily, weekly, monthly. And it has been doing this literally since the day of its creation.

Some Jews at the time feared this. They feared a Jewish state would become what it now is: a generational evil.

In a 1948 letter to Zionist leaders, Albert Einstein raged that they were ‘terrorists and criminals’, and predicted that colonising Palestine would set up what he called ‘a final catastrophe’ for the Jews.

I don’t mean to recount history, especially for all of you who know it well, but Israel is attempting to rehabilitate itself, Zionists are now in charge of key media outlets including CBS News and TikTok, pro-Palestine content is being heavily censored, and Gaza is slipping from the public consciousness.

My fear is that people get soft-minded. That we get fatigued. That the propaganda works. That Israel and the Zionists, having trained their sights on full information control, succeed. That when Netanyahu says the new battleground is social media, and the forced sale of TikTok was “most important” for Israel, that he’s right. That when the new CEO of TikTok says they are censoring anti-genocide content and are working with over two dozen Jewish organisations to shut down pro-Palestine voices, that they’ll win.

My fear is that after seeing genocide in HD, the comfortable of the imperial core decide it’s too radical to view Israel-Palestine as black and white, when a black and white understanding is the only thing that will do.

So this article is in response to that fear, I suppose.

Because we must never, ever forget what Israel has done to Gaza. What it has done with the support of our governments. The massacres they paid for with our taxes, the children they shredded with our money, the cities, the places of community, worship, laughter, business, and fun they turned to rubble and dust.

Last week an Israeli soldier posted a ‘sunset’ photograph from Rafah on his Instagram. This is what they are proud of. This is what we paid for. This is what support for Israel means. This is Zionism.

And amidst the massacres, we must never forget the individuals. Muhammed Bhar, a young man with Down’s Syndrome ripped apart by IDF attack dogs. A soul so kind and gentle that as the dogs were killing him, he was petting them, trying to soothe them, telling them it was ok. Hind Rajab, a five-year old who, when on the phone to paramedics surrounded by her dead family, told the paramedics she didn’t want to wipe the blood coming from her mouth because it would stain her clothes and her mum would be mad. Hind, who, while on the phone, was murdered in cold blood, her body shredded with hundreds of bullets from an Israeli soldier just metres away. Anas Al-Sharif and all the other journalists killed in Gaza for documenting their own genocide.

We must never forget what Gaza says about the monstrous nature of the western system, and of imperialist capitalism.

We must never forget the Palestinians have always been test subjects for western weapons of war and that the drone tech tested in Gaza is now surveilling us in our towns and cities.

We must never forget ICE and US Border Control agents now visiting terror on US cities are trained by the IDF.

We must never forget that there is no talk whatsoever of justice, no talk of holding Israel to any kind of account, no discussion of rebuilding Gaza beyond the criminal Trump mafia racket known as the Board of Peace.

We must never forget that France, the UK, Canada and other western states recognised a Palestinian state not out of a genuine belief in Palestinian statehood or because they consider the Palestinians to be people worthy of a state, but to try and silence critics of their pro-Israel, pro-genocide policies.

Because look what their recognition meant. Nothing. They recognised a state only to let it be destroyed, because the destroyer was Israel.

We must never forget the control the Zionist lobby has over our politics, working behind the scenes to cover up Israeli atrocities, to keep the money flowing to Israel and ensure the country is never held accountable for its crimes.

We must never be cowed by accusations of antisemitism, utilised so effectively for decades to shut down criticism of Israel, the Jews that run it and the Jewish diaspora that supports it.

We must never give in to Zionist disinformation that the conflict is complicated.

Or that it is even a conflict at all.

There is no conflict. There is only a colony of thieves driven by a lust for Palestinian and Arab blood.

There is only apartheid and genocide.

And we have to know that the violence, the genocide and apartheid will only stop when there are either no Palestinians left, or when there is no such thing as Israel. When the ethno-supremacist Jewish state no longer exists. When Zionism is defeated. The violence will only stop when there is one state, called Palestine, led by the expelled, the cleansed and the genocided.

The genocide ends when there is only Palestine, led by Palestinians.

Einstein was right.

Israel has become a generational evil.

And its existence robs us all of our collective humanity.

Ending Zionism and its political project is essential, first and foremost, for the Palestinians.

But it is also essential for any hope of a decent human future.

A massive thank you to my financial supporters who help sustain me and my writing. If you aren’t one, please consider upgrading or making a donation. or just sign up free. Please also forward and share this article. Thank you, stay radical. Nate.

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