The New Dark Age

“The Eye: that horrible growing sense of a hostile will that strove with great power to pierce all shadows of cloud, and earth, and flesh, and to see you: to pin you under its deadly gaze, naked, immovable…”

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: the Two Towers (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 822-826

In J.R.R Tolkien’s the Lord of the Rings, the demonic dark lord Sauron (Sauron actually refers to himself in Trumpish fashion, as Tar-Mairon/”King Excellent”) manifests as malign intelligence, who manipulates men and events to advance his singular domination of Middle-Earth. In the books, Sauron did not stray beyond the walls of his citadel, Barad Dur, but instead used his missionaries, spies, servants and tools to corrupt people from afar.

Regarding tools, Sauron’s magical creations work something like technology and resemble autonomous machines that pervert, distort and ultimately come to capture the wills of those who seek to wield them. Most infamous is the One Ring, into whose design Sauron incorporated aspects of his own personality and reductive will to power.

Slightly less famous are the Palantiri, which, although not created by Sauron, were used to project his will onto others wielding them, corrupting them in the process. Tolkien explains,

 “It must be remembered that the Stones were originally ‘innocent’, serving no evil purpose. It was Sauron who made them sinister, and instruments of domination and deceit […]

Alone the palantiri could only ‘see’: they did not transmit sound. Ungoverned by a directing mind, they were wayward and their ‘visions’ were (apparently at least) haphazard […] the vision of the palantiri was not ‘blinded’ or ‘occluded’ by physical obstacles, but only by darkness; so they could look through a mountain as they could look through a patch of dark or shadow but see nothing within that did not receive some light. They could see through walls but see nothing within rooms, caves or vaults unless some light fell on it; and they could not themselves provide or project light” (Unfinished Tales) 429-435

Tolkien was a peerless writer of fantasy, not an allegorist. Nevertheless, that the powers-that-be have decided to take inspiration from the darker side of Tolkien’s legendarium in their real world projects, has made this essay possible; if Tolkien’s work was not an allegory of our society, perhaps ours is becoming a replica of his imaginary universe, albeit an alternative scenario in which the Dark Lord reign triumphant.

In a case of life imitating art, it’s easy to see why the palantiri concept inspired its real-life counterpart, the company Palantir, which has developed a range of data gathering and surveillance products. Like Tolkien’s fictional palantiri, Palantir’s products only work with an active willing connection. Unless someone is connected to them by a network, they cannot see anything, and the activities of those whose movements they would track remain shrouded in darkness. If you don’t use the internet, Palantir’s palantiri cannot see you.

The rather frightening implications of Palantir’s power in the information age notwithstanding, software that enables the collection and processing of data is only as sinister as the motives to which it is put. Unfortunately, there is considerable evidence that the applications of Palantir’s software are far from benign. Investigative journalist Whitney Webb explains,

“In general terms, Palantir was created to be a privatized panopticon of the national-security state, the newest rebranding of the big data approach of intelligence agencies to surveilling both foreign and domestic populations. The latter in particular has long been a key objective of US intelligence, having been pioneered by the CIA as far back as the Vietnam War. It was later covertly turned against the US population by both US and Israel intelligence during the Iran-Contra and PROMIS software scandals of the 1980s, though efforts to use these big data approaches to target domestic protests and specific social movements had been ongoing for years”. (One Nation Under Blackmail, Volume II), 362-3

Webb further explains how Palantir emerged from these trends and out of the US Government’s Total Information Awareness (TIA) initiative:

“The architect of TIA, and the man who led it during its relatively brief existence, was John Poindexter, best known for being Reagan’s National Security Advisor during Iran-Contra and being convicted of five felonies in relation to that scandal. Poindexter, during the Iran-Contra hearings, had famously claimed that it was his duty to withhold information from Congress.

One of Poindexter’s key allies at the time as it related to TIA was the chief information officer of the CIA, Alan Wade. Wade met with Poindexter in relation to TIA numerous times and managed the participation of not just the CIA but all US intelligence agencies that had signed on to their “nodes” to TIA in exchange for gaining access to its tools.

The TIA program, despite the best efforts of Poindexter and his allies such as Wade, was eventually forced to shut down after considerable criticism and public outrage […]

Though the programme was defunded, it later emerged that TIA was never actually shut down, with its various programs having been covertly divided among the web of military and intelligence agencies. While some of TIA went underground, the core panopticon software that TIA had hoped to wield began to be developed by the company now known as Palantir, with considerable help from the CIA and Alan Wade, as well as Poindexter.” (One Nation Under Blackmail, 364 – 365)      

As sinister as the above sounds, as its name suggests, Palantir and its associated products are merely tools of the master that controls them. In this case, we’re talking about a single entity with five eyes and fibre-optic tentacles that extend across the globe.

The mind of Sauron

In Tolkien’s myth, Sauron is a semi divine spirit who fell into shadow. Once, he worked to encourage the peoples of Middle-Earth to realise their creative potential, so that they might forge their own wonders. But he came to view his own mind and its constructs as inherently superior to the creations of elves and men, who he deemed unfit to govern themselves freely. And so all of Sauron’s efforts and his works were consumed by his singular desire for control, to know all and see all, and to gain complete mastery over this world.

Not quite an equivalent fall from grace, the pre-eminent Empire of the present emerged as a challenge to Spanish and Portuguese trading monopolies in the 16th century, with the English insisting that all peoples, not just the most powerful, should be able to access God’s bounty.

Historian John Keay explains:

“Wherever English shipping called, the argument for free trade would be vigorously rehearsed. It was quite simple. In hid ‘infinite and unsearchable wisdom’, according to the text of Queen Elizabeth’s standard letter of introduction to eastern princes, God had so ordained matters that no nation was self-sufficient and that ‘out of the abundance of ffruit which some region[s] enjoyeth, the necessitie or wante of others should be supplied’. Thus ‘several and ffar remote countries’ should have ‘traffique’ with one another and ‘by their interchange of commodities’ should become friends. ‘The Spaniard and the Portingal’, on the other hand, prohibited multilateral exchange and insisted on exclusive trading rights. Such rights, if granted, would be tantamount to a surrender of sovereignty.” (John Keay, the Honourable Company, 1991, 11)

However, despite starting as a comparatively innocuous attempt to break Spanish and Portuguese trading monopolies, over time the English established their own exploitative tendencies as their dominion grew. As I argued previously,

“It’s easy to see how this logic, which appears at first glance to be an entreaty to fairness can also be used to justify forcible extraction of wealth and resources. If God gave all people the right to access the world’s resources, it is not only the Spanish and Portuguese who had no right to impose monopolies – the indigenous populations whose resources the English coveted would, in time, be perceived by the Anglo-Saxons to have no right to withhold them if the English offered what they considered to be a “fair price”, even if the indigenous people did not agree. And is no coincidence that origins of the Atlantic Slave trade lie in Elizabeth I’s reign. Eventually, this trade in human beings would underpin the economies of both Britain and the United States.”

Soon it became the mantra that the “savages” of the East were unable to properly cultivate the gifts they had received from God, without the enlightened guidance of the superior “English speaking peoples”. But of course, not all English-speaking peoples were created equal in the eyes of the Empire and the special status referred to just one privileged group who were to dominate all.

“One ring to rule them all”

Throughout its history of organising, the Empire has sought to reduce variety into more manageable, limited categories. Humans, in all our diversity and individual uniqueness are reduced to “races”. Similarly, and significantly, cultures are anglicised through the spread of the “superior” tongue of the English, who built the modern capitalist system. Adding to this nearly all culture is now spoken of in terms of currency or capital value, and every currency is judged against its exchangeability with the the dollar, which binds all to the service of the Empire. In the same way, what appear to be agreements between diverse nations in fact reflect the monolithic will of the imperial intelligence core. I’m talking about the 5 eyes partnership between leading English-speaking nations, the United Kingdom, United States, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

The 5 eyes, like the vast majority of the present-day infrastructure underpinning the West was a creation of the British Empire. As Richard Kerbaj recounts in his book, The Secret History of the Five Eyes, “there is no other spy network with the same round-the-clock geographical reach as Five Eyes, where intelligence, tradecraft and even personnel are shares between like-minded organisations in the interest of a common purpose” (Richard Kerbaj, The Secret History of the Five Eyes, Blink Publishing, 2023, 309).

As the consolidation of resources highlighted here implies, although the Empire has five eyes, it continues to function with one brain. Palantir may be in part a tool co-developed with the CIA, the international intelligence arm of one member of the 5 eyes partnership Nevertheless, through the transmission of information via undersea cables, all of the Empire’s tentacles signal back to a single central intelligence – the UK’s GCHQ.

The Five Eyes “partnership” was in fact a product of British led intelligence sharing agreement between Britain and the United States during World War 2 (Michael Smith, The Real Special Relationship, Simon & Schuster, 2022, 102). It was the British who led the development of US signals intelligence, co-creating with the United States what would become the National Security Agency, a project spearheaded by former Bletchley Park codebreakers (The Real Special Relationship, 216-219).

The result is that the NSA and GCHQ are functionally the same organisation. As historian Michael Smith explains, during the 1970s,

“often, policy makers on both sides of the Atlantic were unaware as to whether the intelligence they were receiving came from US or British sources, or indeed both, within one qualifying or confirming the other, making the NSA and GCHQ, and to a lesser extent the CIA and MI6, dependent upon each other and perpetuating the Special Relationship in a way the State Department had never envisaged.”(Michael Smith, the Special Relationship, 377)

The relationship remains the same today, with different wings of the Anglo-American intelligence community working more closely with each other than with some of their “national colleagues” (The Real Special Relationship, 488). In other words, “partnership” is inaccurate framing and what Smith describes is a single intelligence organisation into which MI6, the CIA, and others like the BND and others flow as tributaries.

So whilst Western intelligence agencies have a certain degree of operational independence, they are allied to the imperial centre at GCHQ: one ring – or in this case donut — “to rule them all […] to find them, […] to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.” (J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring, “The Shadow of the Past”, Harper Collins, 1954, 50)

Explaining why the UK remains an intelligence hub is also important to understanding GCHQ’s reach and foresight. I have highlighted in the past that the City of London remains the centre of international finance and now this role is served by the convergence of international fibre optic cables on the UK. The significance of this fact for intelligence gathering is evident when we consider how intelligence agencies spy on digital financial transactions and internet communications more generally.

According to the Guardian newspaper,

“Britain’s spy agency GCHQ has secretly gained access to the network of cables which carry the world’s phone calls and internet traffic and has started to process vast streams of sensitive personal information which it is sharing with its American partner, the National Security Agency (NSA).

The sheer scale of the agency’s ambition is reflected in the titles of its two principal components: Mastering the Internet and Global Telecoms Exploitation, aimed at scooping up as much online and telephone traffic as possible. This is all being carried out without any form of public acknowledgement or debate.

One key innovation has been GCHQ’s ability to tap into and store huge volumes of data drawn from fibre-optic cables for up to 30 days so that it can be sifted and analysed […]

Britain’s technical capacity to tap into the cables that carry the world’s communications – referred to in the documents as special source exploitation – has made GCHQ an intelligence superpower.

By 2010, two years after the project was first trialled, it was able to boast it had the “biggest internet access” of any member of the Five Eyes electronic eavesdropping alliance, comprising the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.”

Again, according to the Guardian,

“UK officials could also claim GCHQ “produces larger amounts of metadata than NSA”. (Metadata describes basic information on who has been contacting whom, without detailing the content.)”

It is therefore explicit that the senior partner in electronic surveillance and signals intelligence is not the US but Great Britain. But, as I have pointed out, “partnership” is the wrong word, as we’re talking about what is, in all practical terms, a single entity. This reality indicates that the centre of power in the West does not reside in the office of the US President in the White House. Indeed, as I have previously documented and present events should be interpreted in this context.

Emerging from the Second World War was a British Empire, expanded into Western Europe via the Treaty of Brussels (Western Union) and consolidated through the creation of the Eurodollar Market, a settlement rendered de facto irreversible by the United States crashing off the gold standard in the 1970s. The development of a British-Empire-financed by the dollar in the post-war period was dubbed the “Fourth British Empire” by John Curtin, Prime Minister of Australia during World War 2.

I recount this history to highlight that the plans of the so called “deep state” develop over decades and centuries, regardless of the stated intentions of transitory middle-men politicians like Donald Trump; the present war of aggression by the United States and “Israel” was pencilled into the calendar long ago and would likely be taking place even under a different President.

Data-mining the mind

Not only has the imperial state’s capacity for transmitting, collecting and processing of data come on leaps and bounds in recent decades, so have techniques for control and manipulation. For example, by the end of the 1950s, the CIA had already cracked the fundamentals of what is now known as “sentiment management”. Historian John Marks has explained how the MKULTRA programme’s “resident genius” John Gittinger created a “Personality Assessment System” (PAS) designed for “assessing personality and predicting future behaviour”, much which was ultimately “verified” by other academics and it was put “into operational use” by the CIA. (John Marks, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate,  W. W. Norton & Company, 1991, 175-176):

“From observation, Gittinger concluded that babies were born with distinct personalities which then were modified by environmental factors. The internalized – or I – baby was caught up in himself and tended to be seen as a passive child; hence, the world usually called him a “good baby”. The E [externerlised] tot was more in outside stimuli and attention, and thus was more likely to cause his parents problems by making demands. Gittinger believed that the way parents and other authority figures reacted to the child helped to shape his personality.   Adults often pressured or directed the I child to be more outgoing and the E one to become more self-sufficient. Gittinger felt he could measure the compensations or adjustments […] He noticed that in later life, when a person was subject to stress, these compensations tended to disappear and the person reverted to his original personality type […] Gittinger’s most original contribution came in a third personality dimension, which revealed how well people were able to adapt their social behaviour to the demands of the culture they lived in.” (The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, 178)

To grotesquely oversimplify, the more “adaptable” a personality is, the better it is at assuming a variety of social roles. Such “charismatic” individuals would of course make better spies. But, just as significantly, those whose adaptability is low demonstrate more easily predictable behaviour.

For example, an individual whose natural temperament was that of an externaliser and who has been encouraged in life to lean-in to this tendency and seek gratification through the approval of others, is both easy to manipulate through flattery and very sensitive to criticism. Could this explain Donal Trump’s behaviour?

From the above evidence, it is easy to see the extent to which the imperial security state might manipulate people to a considerable extent in the modern era, especially considering the decades it has had to build on the its initial breakthroughs in the field of behavioural science, as well as the massive advances in data processing and harvesting by the likes of Palantir in the fibre optic revolution that has taken place from the late twentieth century until now. However, we do not need to theorise about how the security state might exploit these advances, for, as usual, they have told us.

The use of massive data harvesting to support manipulative sentiment management techniques is not “conspiracy theory”, it is conspiracy-in-practice, with NATO actively investigating how to weaponise the mind. The November 2020 NATO-published report, “Cognitive Warfare” by Francois du Cluzel highlights the new possibilities for data collection and predictive behaviour analysis:

“Behavioural economics (BE) is defined as a method of economic analysis that applies psychological insights into human behaviour to explain economic decision making. Operationally, this means massive and methodical use of behavioural data and the development of methods to aggressively seek out new data sources. With the vast amount of (behavioural) data that everyone generates mostly without our consent and awareness, further manipulation is easily achievable.”    

If this seems like a terrifying prospect in the hands of “our” Russian foes, fear not. The Security State of the West is not to be outdone. In the section, “Recommendations for NATO” du Cluzel proposes:

“To shape perceptions and control the narrative […] battle will have to be fought in the cognitive domain with a whole-of-government approach at the national level. This will require improved coordination between the use of force and other levers of power across Government […] For NATO, the development of actions in the cognitive domain a sustained cooperation between Allies in order to ensure an overall coherence, to build credibility and to allow a concerted defense”. (32)

Once again, life imitates art, and the international security apparatus is performing an allegory of the life of Sauron, whose agenda was ultimately reductive: a concern for the security of the peoples of middle-earth that through iterative decline over several defeats became the motivation for control and dominance for its own sake. In the same way, the never entirely sincere enlightened ideals professed by the Empire through its formation of such bodies as the UN and various human rights NGOs are torn away when the beast is under threat, with its dark heart exposed when it really counts. A “whole government approach” to cognitive manipulation means weaponizing society as a whole against freedom of thought via the levers of power held by the state.

Influencing the thralls

Assisting in the manipulation of public sentiment is the role played by “former” CIA officers speaking through supposedly adversarial independent media.

In one of the best pieces on psychological operations I have ever read, Challenge the Narratives’ Aya explains how there is no such thing as a former intelligence agency employee:

“There is no such thing as ‘ex’ CIA or Intelligence Service. They do not suddenly leave and spill their secrets. Just because they said they’ve left doesn’t mean they actually have, they can’t be called back into service at any moment, they aren’t actively running you, after gaining your trust with the claim that they’ve left their shady past behind.

Simply knowing that people have links to the CIA, ex-CIA, MI5, MI6, State intelligence are RED FLAGS. They are all the RED FLAGS you need. There is never – and repeat it to yourself, NEVER – any benign reason for ‘ex’ CIA to be anywhere near protest groups. They work for the State, they have sworn allegiance and secrecy to the State – i.e. the government, and not to the citizens of the State.”

Khan’s assertion is demonstrably correct. Taking the CIA as an example, the 1982 code of conduct for former CIA employees emphasises that they must remain loyal to the service, even in “retirement:

“Current and former CIA officials are expected to maintain high standards of conduct consistent with the agency’s mission. Certain activities are restricted by explicit provisions in law and the CIA employment agreement. In addition, there has long been a tradition of loyalty to the Agency that has guided the conduct of Agency personnel in the performance of their official duties and in their private lives. The agency continues to rely heavily on this discipline and loyalty, not only during the period of employment but, of equal importance, after employment. With respect to former personnel, the agency expects, indeed depends on, continued adherence to the same high standards of conduct which governed them during their employment. Former CIA Personnel are expected to avoid personal or professional activities which could harm or embarrass the Agency or the Unted States. When former personnel have questions as to whether a proposed activity may fall within the Agency’s concern, the Agency is prepared to provide guidance upon request.”

The insistence that “former officers” seek permission for any public intervention regarding matters relating to the security services is also clear within the terms of the CIA’s employment agreements:

“The Employee will be required to keep forever secret this contract and all information obtained by reason hereof (unless released in writing by the Employer from such obligation), with full knowledge that violation of such secrecy may subject him to criminal prosecution under the Espionage Laws, dated 25 June 1948, as amended, and other applicable laws and regulations.”

As noted by Government Executive, in practice this means that

“All current and former CIA employees have long been required to submit manuscripts for books, opinion pieces, and even speeches to the agency’s Publications Review Board, which ensures that the works don’t reveal classified information or intelligence sources and methods. The board has not generally factored political opinions into its decision-making, former CIA officials say.”

In other words, when a former CIA officer spills the beans with an analysis that signals the end of the US Empire in conversation with an independent media outlet on YouTube – as numerous former CIA officials are doing via Conservative channels – the revelation is likely to have been approved by the agency in advance. Rather than trusting this information, we should ask ourselves to what purpose these “secrets” and stories of tradecraft are being allowed to seep into the public consciousness. Could it be to use breadcrumbs of truth to lead dissenters down a false path?

My point here is that, even when it is telling the truth, the Empire is seeking to mislead and distort. Like Sauron, the Empire seeks to control every side of every argument as a means of advancing the singlar purpose of total domination, to the extent that even the “independent” media podcasts we rely on as a means of bypassing discredited mainstream media are often fronts from the imperial propaganda machine. Meanwhile, everything we watch, read hear, and write is tracked and monitored by the Five Eyes.

Indeed, thanks to “dissident” podcasts, the international security state knows exactly who the potential dissenters are, what they know and how they think, even as it shapes the narratives that influence their ideas. In the West, therefore, the public sphere is an entirely cultivated space and the internet is more a tool of surveillance and control than liberation. We may have access to more “information” than ever before but we are no more free, probably we are more controlled than ever. Does the dawning dystopia of “total Information awareness” amidst mass institutionalised ignorance scare you?

It should.

Serving the simulacra

To my mind, a Western society that emulates the model of a fictional Dark Lord resembles the concept of “simulacra” as described by Jean Beaudrillard.

For Beaudrillard, simulation becomes “simulacra” when the representation ceases to reference anything resembling a real object. In other words, simulacra is when a simulation simulates a simulation and removes sight of the kernel of reality – the “referent” – that inspired the original representation in the first place and even trace of the original artefact’s absence. To live in simulacra is to inhabit a simulation without knowing what it masks or even that it masks anything at all – think of the ghoulish attempts by some people to converse AI versions of their dead relatives:

“Representation stems from the principle of the equivalence of the sign and of the real (even if this equivalence is utopian, it is a fundamental axiom). Simulation, on the contrary, stems from the utopia of the principle of equivalence from the radical negation of the sign as value, from the sign as the reversion and death sentence of every reference. Whereas representation attempts to absorb simulation by interpreting it as a false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation itself as a simulacrum.

Such would be the successive phases of the image:

it is the reflection of a profound reality;

it masks and denatures a profound reality;

it masks the absence of a profound reality;

it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum.” 

(Simulacra and simulation, 6, https://dn720006.ca.archive.org/0/items/baudrillard.-1970.-the-consumer-society/Baudrillard.1981.Simulacra-and-Simulation.pdf  )

It should hardly surprise us that this inversion of reality has been brought into being by a system that models itself on the machinations of literary fiction’s greatest supervillain. The only antidote to this state of affairs is to be sceptical of every narrative put forward by any influencer or would-be influencer (yes, even this essay and myself!) and subject it to the test of factual accuracy; this is not easy in a world where evidence is so easily faked!

For example, when it comes to the subject of a supposedly collapsing Empire, the key test is not what “former” CIA officers say on YouTube but actual decisions measured against definable trends.

Empire’s Gotterdammerung?

The United States is currently engaged in what to all appearances is a disastrous war against Iran. The Straight of Hormuz is blocked threatening calamity for the petrodollar, Israel and other US allies are being bombarded by Iranian rockets and there appears no obvious route out of the quagmire, save for an embarrassing climbdown that would leave a key strategic economic artery in the hands of an enemy of the United States. Superficially, this looks like the end of the so-called “US Empire” (which, in line with the theme of simulacra, doesn’t really exist!). However, a closer look at evolving geopolitical trends suggests that not everything is as it seems.

Paving the way for the War in Iran was of course the coup in Syria, and, running parallel to the overthrow of Venezuelan President Maduro, is a rightward, pro-western swing across South America and the US blockade of Cuba.

Meanwhile, India, a member of the BRICS coalition, which is supposedly building an economic alternative to the Empire increased its integration into the Eurodollar market just days before the United States and Israel began their war of aggression against Iran. According to a report by the World Economic Forum,

“The EU and India already trade €180 billion worth of goods and services every year. Moreover, with roughly 6,000 European companies operating in India, the trading relations supports nearly 800,000 European jobs […]

Under the deal, India will eliminate or reduce tariffs on 96.6% of EU exports by value. Meanwhile, the EU will reciprocate by reducing tariffs on 99.5% of Indian goods. The European Commission projects $4.7 billion in annual duty savings, with exports potentially doubling by 2032.”

The extensive integration of India, which never entirely left the Empire’s orbit, into the economic infrastructure of the Western Union, suggests that India may, at least to an extent, reprise its role as the industrial engine of the empire if the US is badly impacted by the consequences of the Iran war (yields for 10-year US treasury bonds are presently rising). It may also provide an indirect conduit for connecting European countries to redirected Russian oil whilst the Straight of Hormuz remains blocked.

Moreover, even as the cluster warheads reign down on their cities, the Gulf States show no sign of abandoning their commitment to the United States – quite the opposite, it seems. The Gulf States frame Iran’s retaliations as inexplicable and outrageous acts of aggression, as if Iran had not itself been the victim of many acts aggression by the US, to which they were parties. For example, the United Arab Emirates has issued the following complaint:

“The United Arab Emirates has condemned and denounced in the strongest terms the blatant Iranian missile attacks that targeted the UAE and several brotherly nations in the region, considering these acts a flagrant violation of national sovereignty and a clear breach of international law and the Charter of the United Nations.

In a statement, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA) affirmed the UAE’s full solidarity and unwavering support for the countries in the region affected by these attacks, emphasizing that their security is indivisible and that any infringement on the sovereignty of any state constitutes a direct threat to the security and stability of the entire region.

The UAE reaffirmed its categorical rejection of the use of the territories of regional states as arenas for settling disputes or expanding the scope of conflict, warning of the grave consequences of continued violations, which undermine regional and international security and threaten global economic stability and energy security.”

This behaviour by countries associated with the imperial periphery is not anticipatory of imperial decline. It appears to be a reassertion of commitment, a bet placed on the future of an Empire and economic infrastructure and security architecture that has sustained them in the past. Rather than a collapse of Empire, we appear to be witnessing some kind of imperial reconsolidation and realignment, perhaps the emergence of a Fifth British Empire as BRICS (supposedly Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) is demolished piece by piece. Further to this, Iran may be winning the conventional war in terms of managing to control traffic through the straits of Hormuz, hitting US bases and overloading Israel’s Iron Dome defences. But the highest threshold of escalation has not yet been met. Ultimately, the US and Israel have nuclear weapons at their disposal and Iran does not. Nor does it have a comprehensive security pact with either Russia or China to compensate for this deficit.

This means that Iran has to thread the needle in terms of its response to aggression by both Israel and the United States by doing just enough to damage Israel and in a way that ensures future terminal decline becomes inevitable, without causing the type of immediate strategic defeat that might trigger Israel’s use of the Samson option. Therefore, the United States and Israel continue to constrain Iran’s options in terms of waging war. Should they choose to end the conflict immediately with the destruction of Iran’s civilisation, they could do so. Moreover, although the pressure on the US military would be enormous should it seek to occupy and hold the straight of Hormuz, it could theoretically manage this feat were it to truly commit to the operation. According to reports by “former” US intelligence analyst Harrison Mann, Trump’s Kharg Island plan sounds like a “deathtrap” and any attempt to occupy the coast of Iran,

“combines the most dangerous aspects of the island seizure and nuclear site raid. An indefinite occupation – otherwise missile trucks could just get in position after US forces leave – but now on the Iranian mainland. Keeping missile trucks off of some 200 miles of Iranian coastline 24 hours a day would require a full-fledged invasion, possibly beyond even the 10,000 or so rapid-response forces at Trump’s disposal.”

It would certainly be difficult, but to put this claim in context, Garmon Tactical claims that, in terms of the servicemen available to the US the US military apparently has,

“as of 2025, there are approximately 1.3 million active duty service members and around 750,000 reserve and National Guard personnel, bringing the total force to over 2 million.”

According to the Hoover Institution, within the 1.3 million figure are, “on average” 100,000 “undistributed troops”, which are most likely allocated to West Asia.

These figures don’t include the various militia armies that the CIA and US military have trained in the area, making the real number of troops available to the US much higher. By contrast, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the Iranian army consists of 610,000 active-duty personnel plus 350,000 reserve and trained personnel. US-Israeli escalation capacity therefore outstrips that of Iran on paper and the United States probably could take and hold the Straits of Hormuz if it really committed to seeing the project through and the path to occupation were opened by a massive nuclear strike. It would, however, be costly both in terms of lives lost and the money and material spent.

People hearing from CIA linked sources that the United States and Israel will be defeated by Iran should also consider that the all-seeing eye of the master has been fixed on Iran for many decades, with every possible outcome of every scenario anticipated and simulated. That a conventional war could not succeed in toppling the government was known, and yet Trump was purposefully manipulated into starting the present conflict anyway.

The outcome simply depends on how committed the Empire is to the objective it has set itself. If the crisis is as existential as many claim, we should expect it to be very dedicated to the cause.

Conclusion

My purpose in suggesting that we are, in effect, living in a simulated Lord of the Rings fan fiction in which the Dark Lord has won isn’t to “black pill” readers into a state of nihilistic despair, which of course would be pointless. There may yet be a route to freedom but, whilst we plot our path, we should be wary of misdirection from the agents of the empire cloaked in a digital disguise.

In the Lord of the Rings, Tolkien’s Dark Lord is defeated by ordinary folk whilst his gaze was fixed on his mightiest enemies. There is a lesson here: perhaps, when the Empire is defeated (and all Empires eventually fall), it will not be by an external military force but by an unanticipated blow struck from within by the ordinary decency of the overlooked common man.

To this point, the Empire may have total information awareness, but it can’t easily evaluate the amount of data it gathers. Moreover, like the palantiri, we are only visible to the surveillance system if we connect and our sentiment can only be managed if we engage with Sauron’s proxies on social media. There may soon be a time when the only effective resistance takes place offline and begins, not with superficial and shallow Defend our Juries/Just Stop Oil-style stunts, but a core, firm base of support built with ordinary acts of kindness and personal solidarity developed within our own communities.