#passim soleimani

[politicaltheatre]

Kill The Messengers, pt.1

Lie to us. Tell us what we want to hear.

Tell us how great we are, how great we were, how great we can be again.

Give us someone to blame. Give us someone to hate. Give us someone to root against, if only so we don’t have to find someone worthy of rooting for.

Whatever you do, though, just don’t tell us how we failed, or how we failed others, or how others might have succeeded if only they had they never met us. Whatever you do, don’t ever tell us that. That’s bad news, and we don’t like bad news.

This is normal. None of us is immune. We all want it, even just a little. It’s natural. It’s nurtured. It’s very human.

This is what no one ever tells us about politics. Why would they? We don’t want to hear it. We have so many options not to hear what we don’t want to hear, seemingly more every day, so why should we ever have to? If they dared, most of us would just tune them out. Part of you is doing that right now even as you read this, and that’s okay.

It’s what we don’t want to talk about, what we don’t want to hear, that makes politics everything it is. It is what makes it necessary to have government, and what corrupts governments once we have them.

Which brings us to so many current events, doesn’t it? Won’t it always?

Where to start? Impeachment? Too easy? The 2020 campaign? Too on the nose? OK, how about Iran? Too far away? Too scary? Too boring? Too bad.

On this day on which we celebrate a peace maker and champion of social and political justice (or should), events in a place seemingly so far away, scary, and boring as Iran matter and deserve our attention.

Forty-one years ago, the people of Iran lived under a corrupt, despotic regime. They’d had enough. Not all of them had bought into the religious zealotry of the Ayatollah Khomeini, but few could argue against his assessment of the corruption and cruelty of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and those around him. Wildly imperfect messenger that he was, Khomeini was right: the shah had to go.

The United States government supported that regime and was blamed, quite rightly, for complicity in its worst atrocities. This, as we know (or should) led to the storming of the United States embassy in Tehran and the taking of hostages.

There can be no justification for any atrocities committed by Iranians or their proxies in the four decades since, but what we witnessed then was a violent reaction to decades of abuse, made possible by a physically and politically weakened Pahlavi, and expertly exploited by Khomeini for his own personal and political gain.

What Khomeini stood for, and what his successors still stand for, is an ideologically conservative form of Islam. Theirs is not so extreme as the Saudi Wahhabi form, the one that begat Al Qaeda and ISIS, but it is every bit as orthodox as sects in Christianity, Judaism, Hindu, and others that are known to tie their faith to a kind of nationalism. The religion is the state, and the clergy are not accountable to the people. That’s dangerous anywhere.

Few Americans at the time wanted to admit that we shared accountability for what our ally had done to his own people, so we vilified all Iranians everywhere, including American-born Persian-Americans, just as we would do a generation later with muslims after 9/11.

As we saw after 9/11, if you dared call that persecution unjust, you may have found yourself persecuted, as well. Sikhs, Hindus, and others paid the price for our silence. Many still do.

That the storming of another embassy, this time in Iraq, has led to protests against those same ayatollahs is not without irony. A raid on an American embassy should be a pretty safe play for Iran, a symbolic echo of their revolutionary success in 1979. Had it not been for an entirely predictable and preventable tragedy, it might have been.

As we all now know, or should, Donald Trump responded to the Baghdad embassy pageant by pulling the trigger on a plan to assassinate Qassem Soleimani, Iran’s top general in Iraq and a man credited by all sides with the deaths of hundreds of American soldiers there.

This was, of course, immensely stupid.

Whatever Soleimani had done, he was no Osama bin Laden. He was high ranking member of another country’s military. Killing him didn’t just escalate cold war tensions to just about open warfare, it was a violation of international diplomatic standards as well as international and, yes, domestic law (enacted by Ronald Reagan!). At best, it only served to alienate Iraqis and other international allies; at worst, it primed the entire region for still more bloodshed.

There was no good justification for it, so Trump just did what he always did and spun some BS to please his expectant base (and muddy the waters on any legal case against it). Politics by other means, indeed.

His justification that attacks on other American targets were “imminent” was laughable for any number of reasons, from his inability to provide proof - which he as president must do to justify killing people - to the fact that Soleimani’s death wouldn’t have prevented any attack anywhere. Seriously, it’s a bit like the Nazis killing General Dwight D. Eisenhower in the hope of preventing an allied invasion of Europe. Stupid.

So, yes, Donald Trump and his trigger-happy stooges got lucky. They likely won’t face any legal action, domestic or international, for killing a man few outside Iran’s sphere of influence liked, and they picked a fight with a country that has the sense to de-escalate when it knows it can’t win.

No one with first hand experience with warfare seeks it out. That’s something President Eisenhower would have known. Iran’s Islamic revolution led to a decade-long war with Iraq that devastated both countries’ populations. However much they want nuclear weapons, they don’t have them and certainly don’t want to be targeted by them.

So, they did what outgunned countries around the world have done time after time in order to save face: they fired a few rockets at enemy bases, all targeted to avoid casualties, and then let their allies and proxies pass non-binding resolutions condemning their enemy’s recklessness and violence, and demanding that the enemy military go home.

It’s a strategy as old as colonialism, and in this case the Iraqi parliament’s non-binding resolution might actually have the effect of succeeding where Soleimani’s violence had failed.

Soleimani was himself a horrible messenger. If his death ultimately proves anything it will be that the aggressor is always seen as the villain. His violence was meant to stir up support among his government’s base and to distract from how it fails its people, but it was never intended to convert. If anything, it created fear and with it enemies all too happy to see him go.

No, it was his death at the hands of a country and government capable of even greater violence and greater cruelty than he could ever claim that will likely do what his violence all but ensured would never happen. Those on the receiving end of violence who de-escalate and draw our attention to the brutality needed to justify injustice are the ones who ultimately win.

Mohandas Gandhi understood this. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. understood this. Hopefully, somewhere in the Middle East, maybe even somewhere in Iran, somebody has come to understand this, too.

The world will still expect some sort of attack, somewhere the United States has an economic interest sometime down the road. That, as with violent embassy protests, is what Iran has become known for, “asymmetrical warfare”. But that, normally, would be that. The saber rattling would be done and the status quo would be restored. The Iranian regime even stood to come out ahead with the American military preparing to pull out more of its troops.

And then.

There are people who would call the 176 killed on Ukrainian International Airlines 752 “collateral damage”. There are some who read the news with glee, hoping that news that Iran’s own military shot it down and then lied about it might lead to another revolution. But, no.

Sure enough, there was outrage in Iran. There have been protests. Public figures have broken with the regime. But this is no Hong Kong.

The Islamic Republic of Iran has never promised western freedoms. Why would it? It was and remains a political system built on the power of the clergy. Whatever lip service the country has paid to democracy, there is no such thing as a balance of power within the government, let alone a balance of power between the government and its people.

Not only does the government count on this, but a sizable portion of the Iranian people do, too. Days after the protests against the government, a rally led by Ayatollah Khamenei stoked the growing legend of the martyr Qassem Soleimani and of the evil, American monsters who killed him.

Anger at stupid mistakes subsides. Anger at the government lying to you subsides. Anger at a foreign enemy seeking to force its will upon you, that lasts. If you cultivate it and have a willing idiot eager to play the role of bogeyman, it can last for generations.

We are that bogeyman. Not just Trump. Not just Trump and the idiots who surround him. Us.

The weapon our government used to kill Qassem Soleimani and those with him was a drone, the same kind of drone that has slaughtered thousands of innocents without mercy, that has ended and forever changed even more lives than we could ever hope to tie to Soleimani’s own evil.

Just this past Thursday the Iranian foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, compared the United States to a “high school bully”. He did so on Twitter. It wasn’t the first time, nor will it be the last. He said so a week earlier while meeting with his Chinese counterpart, who agreed with him. Before that meeting he met with his counterpart in Russia; after it, he met with his counterpart in India.

In the space of two weeks, Zarif met with three of the most powerful economic and military powers in the world, all rivals to each other, and they all openly agreed: The United States acts as a bully on economic policy; The United States acts as a bully on military policy; The United States assassinates people.

Is Zarif lying? Are they all wrong? Should it matter what the Iranian government does to its own people when considering that? Should it matter what the Chinese or Russian or Indian governments do to their own people or people elsewhere when they call us out for what we do and for what we allow to be done?

It shouldn’t, but clearly it does. It makes it easier for us to push them far away, easier for us to cast them as scary, easier for us to call them boring and ignore them. Worse, it makes it easier for us to call them liars. It does, just as it makes it easier for them and their people to push us away, to call us scary, to ignore us, and to call us liars.

The truth really does hurt. The lengths we will go to avoid it and keep it far away define us and lead us to define others. It takes that much more effort to hear it. That’s why it takes so much more effort to tell it.

- Daniel Ward

[jgmail]

EL GRAN DESPERTAR

Claudio Mutti

Alexandre Dugin, Contre le Great Reset, le Manifeste du Grand Réveil, Ars Magna, 2021, pp. 70, € 15,00

En respuesta al proyecto conocido como el Great Reset (El Gran Reinicio), presentado en mayo de 2020 por el príncipe Carlos de Inglaterra y el director del World Economic Forum (Foro Económico Mundial), Klaus Schwab, Alexandr Dugin lo confronta con la “tesis del Gran Despertar, el Great Awakening” (p. 37).  El uso en inglés de este término, Great Awakening, no es en modo alguno accidental: éste designa a los diferentes movimientos de renovación que tuvieron lugar en los siglos XVIII y XIX en el mundo protestante y actualmente está en gran circulación en los medios trumpistas, tanto protestantes como católicos.  (“¿Qué pueden hacer concretamente los Hijos de Luz del Great Awakening?” preguntó al arzobispo filo-trumpista, Carlo Maria Viganò, el conocido agitador Steve Bannon).  De hecho, el Gran Despertar, explica el propio Dugin, “proviene de los Estados Unidos, de esta civilización en la que el crepúsculo del liberalismo es más intenso que en otros lugares” (p. 47); y la intensidad de este crepúsculo estaría demostrado, según Dugin, precisamente por el fenómeno representado por Donald Trump, “un centro de atracción para todos aquellos que estaban conscientes del peligro que venía de las élites mundialistas” (p. 37).  Además, prosigue Dugin, “un papel importante en este proceso fue desempeñado por el intelectual estadounidense de orientación conservadora Steve Bannon” (p. 37), el cual, siempre según Dugin, habría sido “inspirado por eminentes autores antimodernos como Julius Evola, de modo que su oposición al mundialismo y al liberalismo tenía raíces más profundas” (p. 37). (Sobre la supuesta inspiración evoliana del agit-prop americano, véase AA. VV., Inganno Bannon, CinabroEdizioni, 2019, passim).

Según la concepción geopolítica que caracterizó al pensamiento de Alexander Dugin antes que Donald Trump se convirtiese en presidente de los Estados Unidos, si Eurasia se encuentra expuesta a la continua agresión del expansionismo norteamericano, esto se debe al hecho que la potencia americana es impulsada hacia la conquista del poder mundial por su propia naturaleza talasocrática (y no simplemente por la orientación ideológica de una parte de su clase política).  Luego, adoptando un criterio condicionado más por abstracciones ideológicas que por un realismo geopolítico, Dugin ha señalado que el “enemigo principal” ya no son los Estados Unidos de América, sino el globalismo liberal; así fue como acogió con entusiasmo el cambio de guardia en la presidencia estadounidense, archivando contextualmente sus más de veinte años de antiamericanismo.  ” Para mí – declaraba Dugin en noviembre de 2016 – es evidente que la victoria de Trump marcó el colapso del paradigma político global y, simultáneamente, el comienzo de un nuevo ciclo histórico (…). En la era de Trump, el antiamericanismo es sinónimo de globalización (…) el antiamericanismo en el contexto político actual se convierte en parte integrante de la retórica de la propia élite liberal, para quienes la llegada de Trump al poder ha sido un verdadero golpe”.  Para los oponentes de Trump, el 20 de enero [2017] fue el ‘fin de la historia’, mientras que para nosotros representa una puerta para nuevas oportunidades y opciones”.

Esta posición ha sido sostenida y desarrollada ininterrumpidamente por Dugin durante toda la presidencia de Donald Trump; y si este último (a quien Dugin le auguró “Four more years” el mismo día del asesinato del general Soleimani) ha debido renunciar a una repetición de su mandato presidencial, “el trumpismo es mucho más importante que el mismo Trump, además Trump tiene el mérito de haber iniciado el proceso. Ahora nosotros debemos ir más lejos (Now we need to go further)”.  Esto lo leímos en un artículo de Dugin del 9 de enero de 2021, titulado: Great Awakening: the future starts now (www.geopolitica.ru), en el que el autor repite: “Nuestra lucha ya no es contra América”. Textual: “Our fight is no more against America”.

El presente Manifiesto del Gran Despertar constituye, por tanto, una reconfirmación de la posición duguiniana, inaugurada con su giro filotrumpista de hace cinco años.  En efecto, sigue repitiendo la tesis según la cual no son los Estados Unidos los que representan el enemigo fundamental de Eurasia: “No es Occidente contra Oriente, ni los Estados Unidos y la OTAN contra todos los demás, sino los liberales contra la humanidad – incluido aquel segmento de la humanidad que se encuentra en el territorio mismo de Occidente” (pág. 40).  En el enfrentamiento ideológico esbozado por Dugin, el auspicio más favorable se comprueba por el hecho que el tal Great Awakening fue anunciado en suelo americano: “El hecho que esto tenga un nombre, y que este nombre haya aparecido en el epicentro mismo de las transformaciones ideológicas e históricas en Estados Unidos, en el contexto de la dramática derrota de Trump, de la desesperada toma del Capitolio y de la creciente ola de represión liberal, (…) es de una gran importancia (quizás crucial). (pág. 49).

Traducción: Francisco de la Torre