The New Dark Age

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.