9/11 In Defense of Crankery (Part 2)

The United SLAVES of Amnesia

Before we can continue down the path of previously forbidden crankery and analysis dear reader, I find it necessary to explain the concept of collective memory. Specifically, we must dredge forth what was previously lost in the collective memory hole of polite Anglophone society. We must bring forth what’s been muddled or obfuscated in the collective amnesia of the masses and stare the true realities of power nakedly in the face so we can understand the larger issues.

In short, we must un-forget that we[i] are ruled by monsters.

One example is a man dubbed the Prince of Darkness, Richard Perle. Perle is (or was) described as one of those people who had all the perks of an insider with few of the drawbacks. He was a man with access and a vision like most of the neocons during the Bush years. Before being shafted from that administration he wrote An End to Evil   in 2003 with David Frum. It includes the line described as “one the most terrifying sentences written in recent years”[ii]:[iii]

There is no middle way for Americans: it is either victory or holocaust

Unfortunately, the terrifying, messianic morale clarity (combined with the requisite war crimes[iv]) of the neoconservative movement has been thrown down the collective memory hole. Perle is something of an example of this. Only cranks focus on shadowy figures like Richard Perle—    no matter how much they may tell themselves they have the respectability on the regular, bougified media classes. Cranks hold on to things such as PNAC which gradually sink into the collective memory hole. The neoconservative movement that Perle had a hand in creating, is a movement that is not allowed to be remembered. In fact, true to their New York roots, they have shamelessly tried to wokescold the people who point out the now broadly accepted facts about their movement. When he was in power at the height of the War on Terror, the neoconservatives would call their enemies terrorists, as in-functional enemies of the state. Perle did when he was losing his grip on power and Seymore Hersh exposed his role in creating the Global War on Terror from within the Pentagon.[v] In modern times, they assert that they were all about the nebulous neverending political dialogue droning in the back of public life that we all call “the discourse.” Still, when someone goes too far outside what many of the dejected Bush administration washouts would deem acceptable, they get slammed with the ‘crank’ label. And worse:

In response, the authors raise the bloody flag of anti-Semitism. Anyone who dares suggest that the (indisputable) attachment to the Israeli right wing of so many prominent White House policymakers and advisors (including Perle) may have played a role in their policy decisions about the war on terror is tarred as a bigot, one step up from a crank waving the „Protocols of the Elders of Zion.“ The authors also bizarrely assert that the „myth of the neoconservative cabal“ results from Bush-haters who „simply could not accept that it was the president’s determination that was pushing the war forward. Somebody else had to be responsible.“ Finally, they lamely argue that „the neoconservative myth offers Europeans and liberals a useful euphemism for expressing their hostility to Israel.“[vi]

From 9/11 to Covid 19

The anti-conspiracy ‘canon’ draws a smooth, direct line from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to JFK to Qanon to Covid 19 denial. Anyone familiar with the specifics however knows that the domain of cranks is rarely that simple. It seems that the closer anyone is to the political establishment, the more there is reason to be hostile towards theories that would undergird these structures. Attacks against cranks cloak themselves in justifications of logic and reason. We must have a scientific, objective shared reality after all in secular western society.

The book Voltaire’s Bastards argues that  the Enlightenment, while having begun as a way to question the legitimacy of absolute rulers invoking the divine right of kings, is now used as a tool to legitimate the current economic and social order. Fact is that logic can be used both ways. I would even motion  that some of the most outlandish and counterproductive ‘crank’ theories actually try to utilize science and logic in the same way. Most of the work on the controlled demolition theory involves going into the weeds of scientific thinking. Much of the attempts to say there is physical evidence of something untoward about the government version of these attacks relies on exactly the same manner of thinking these skeptics use to debunk or distract from the central premises of these arguments so both sides end up debating about holograms, drones, nanothermite, building 7 and so on. All these things are towards the same reach for objectivity.    

Most of the common lines used to debunk various crank theories on 9/11 have inherent contradictions within them. For example, that whichever elites, intelligence agencies, or whoever implicated are simply too incompetent, banal, greedy, corrupt to have had any role in such a thing is frankly a kind of crackpot realism in itself. The incompetent are rewarded with more power, the greedy and corrupt are given a blank check, and the banality of evil takes the form of a global war on a concept. Plausible deniability was just one of the ways the American ‘deep state’ avoided any kind of reckoning during the Iran-Contra affair and the same with the manufacturing of the War in Iraq. If the government consisted of well-intentioned fools, then why trust the word of these well-intentioned fools when it comes to discerning what’s going on in the world? There are numerous problems with this line of thinking that go far outside the scope of this piece, but Michael Parenti does well in taking apart the false choice of systematic analysis vs conspiracy in his talks.[vii]

One of the first people to come out against conspiracy theorizing on 9/11 was of course George W. Bush himself, so that alone should be reason enough to at least flirt with crankery if you’re committed to fighting neoconservatism which always has hinged off manufacturing the illusion of consensus. If we’re stripped of the specter of this ideology it seems more plausible that any complacency is prima facie impossible, but at the time before any kind of opposition to the now 20 year old wars was consumed by milquetoast liberalism from 2004-2006, there was a notion that people like Perle or Cheyney were literal demons who would do anything it takes. After all they got their start working with people who dashed every nuclear arms reduction treaty with the Soviet Union, playing hardball at about the highest-level stakes you can reach. A lot of arguments against crankery are moral arguments disguising themselves as logical arguments. For example, Matt Taibbi argued with David Ray Griffin the potential complicity of New York mayor Rudy Giuliani[viii]:

As for the charge that Rudy maybe did this to launch a run for president again, this would be laughable if it weren’t so disgusting. You don’t appear cowed at all by the act of accusing another man of murder, be it Rudy Giuliani, Richard Myers, Ted Olson, or whomever. In the real world, i.e. in the world where we can’t publish things unless they’re true, we don’t make such accusations unless we have very compelling evidence. Not only do we not want to get sued, we actually don’t want to be wrong. Because, you know, it’s a little bit monstrous to call someone a murderer without proof. This is an intellectual flaw on your part, a rhetorical flaw, but more than that it’s a moral flaw. And it pervades a great deal of your work.[ix]

Except Rudy DID run for president again, and every year since then has only become more laughable and more disgusting. Those people who said that the US government was working with Wahabbi extremists would also go on to be proven right in the Syrian War. The reaction of these crackpot realists? To pretend they knew all along. So what?[x]

Everywhere this issue is fraught with the problem of insipience. In a historical context it is a focus on things which are not yet important but will be soon. At the time there was no way you could’ve known whether or not the spectacle of 9/11 would be ‘necessary’ for the war, or whether Syria and Iran would prove to be the real threat to American-Israeli hegemony. The entire field of Middle East study in general is tainted by hindsight encompassing everything. Thousands of years of Islamic history lead up to 9/11. The collapse of Iraq tied to the split between Ali and Umar in 680 AD. Meanwhile memory holes keep popping up. Americans can remember Pearl Harbor in 1945 but when 9/11 comes, they never mention the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Watching an entire field of Middle East study get dominated by right-wing hacks and decaying navel gazing CIA socialists is enough to drive anyone insane in my opinion. Which is why I imagine the pathologizing of conspiracy theorists is so popular. Unfortunately, due to the current conspiracy canon being dominated by the right, there is little written about the 19^th century anthropological approach taken by these respectable, secular, liberal skeptics who analyze those that don’t adopt their worldview. Many of the people who have been alienated by these institutions, and thus, have no problem diving into crankery, are of course of Middle Eastern, black, and lower-income white communities around the world. Very few of these bougified skeptics talk about this fact or the implications of it for obvious reasons. Nevertheless, the idea of fighting back against conspiracies often factored into the playbook of deradicalization which became popular as David Petraeus led the surge in 2007, but it entered its most blatant stage under liberals such as England’s David Cameron[xi] or America’s Cass Sunstein[xii].   

Libs v. Plebs Aka “If Only Everyone watched The Wire”

The reason the top liberals have been so harsh on cranks is not just about their preference for ‘soft power’ both at home and abroad, it’s also about the emphasis of cultural signaling within modern politics. For example, there are scores of articles fawning over Barak Obama’s love of the HBO series The Wire.  The very fact that he watched the same vaguely socially conscious show as them was in itself a virtue. Conversely, this is their problem with the cranks. The cranks are a deviation from a world where everyone watches the same thing, operates from the same news stories, and has acquired from both media and schooling, the same kind of ersatz morality. In the absence of any true ideology outside of TINA (There Is No Alternative) brand of sensible neoliberalism[xiii], this is the closest possible substitute.

In 2008 we went from blatant lies such as “They hate us for our freedoms” to the more refined expert lies.[xiv] Of course, they came from many of the same mouths and were part of the same general system. After all, Obama’s opposition towards Bush was incredibly overstated to the point where he was angry at the small hardcore bands of antiwar protesters still mulling around the capital.[xv] See Obama never actually opposed these wars in any way that counted. The Iraq War, sure that got criticism from a small band of liberals but the Afghanistan War was still the “good war”. It was the war that liberated women from the Taliban after all. It was the war that the Clintons with the self-righteous “women’s rights are human rights” slogan.[xvi] These were lies, but they were the lies by the people that the professional classes respect. As long as they vaguely observed the same reality. Sure, war’s hell but not like we’re going to do anything about it. Just like the audience of The Wire, we just passively observe along with them.

Since then we’re forced to repeat these patterns. Most of what I can find from 2008 may as well be written today. The only difference now is that some of those same neoconservatives are now in the other party, which should annihilate any hope anybody opposed to ‘forever wars’ would have in Western electoral politics. You know who didn’t have such hopes to dash? The cranks. Now they can passively observe David Frum, who was Perle’s partner in crime, become the darling of the opposition party.[xvii] A party that at least used to entertain the idea that they had enemies, at least within the base.

Crankery is more than just a vague term for vaguely unhinged sounding notions about politics; it’s an immune system. Looking at the numerous analyses of why the antiwar movement failed, one of the most common factors was movement capture. Cranks, having eschewed respectability whether they realize it or not, are uncapturable. Their existence chases out the disease that is bourgeois respectability. Per my own observation there’s a correlation between how ‘crankish’ a segment of the ‘peace movement’ was, and how susceptible they were to movement capture, in this case by the democratic party. I’d point to is the exampe of Cindy Sheehan. In The Great Derangement, Matt Taibbi bemoans that she was surrounded by these cranks. This filled him with quietly seething rage because it was the first time he had to contend with the fact that the base of people who actually opposed the war were not as self-censorious as the respectability obsessed media class. Cindy Sheehan was not attached to any party and for that reason, she was one of the first people to criticize Barak Obama for his continuation of these wars. The result was utter condemnation by these same forces. But Cindy was right in the end. She lost everything. More than any human being should have to. Nevertheless, it was the cranks who kept her from suffering the fate of the grizzly scene that Taibbi later portrayed:

„All along I couldn’t help but see the Truther movement as a symptom of a society whose political institutions had simply stopped addressing the needs of its citizens. When people can’t trust the media, and don’t have real political choices, and are denied access to the decision-making process, and can’t even be sure that their votes are being counted–when even their activist advocates are lunching with the Man in fancy restaurants in Georgetown-they will eventually act out on their own. And when they do, who can blame them if the cause they choose to pursue is a little bit crazy?“ [xviii]

Not only do the cranks serve the cause of activism from their functional inability to be bought by any self-serving neoliberal political apparatus, but they also fan the flames of radicalism. Now the term radicalism is a pejorative in most contexts, but this was another factor in the antiwar movement’s failure. The kind of well-moneyed liberal activism is designed to make the upper-middle class ‘feel good’. They measure their success by turnout and how respectable their overall image is in the media. It’s also difficult to sustain due to their reliance on Democratic party resources. The end result is this: a flash in the pan, then everybody goes to brunch.[xix]

The problem is, when the antiwar movement dwindled down to nothing after the 2006 primaries, some of those people derided as left gatekeepers turned their anger on the 9/11 Truth movement. Instead of dismissing their crankery as harmless quackery no less ridiculous than most of the garbage Americans believe anyway, they called their presence in the antiwar movement a toxin. Why? Because after the liberals ‘went to brunch’, they made a disproportionate number of the people left. The ‘truth’ movement became increasingly dominated by the right-wing after Obama, making a small fringe part of the opposition party. Many would go to support Ron Paul. Somehow in the minds of people like Alexander Cockburn or Matt Taibbi, this isn’t looked as a systematic problem that needs to be addressed urgently. Perhaps even too urgently to waste time on petty infighting about who ‘believes’ what.  

Those who sneer at the cranks, when absolutely pressed on this subject, would concede that they would at the very least that there were elements within a government that does not care about it’s people which would “let it happen on purpose”, a line that made up one of the great crank  debates within the ‘truth’ movement.

Crank Debates: LIHOP vs MIHOP

The terms LIHOP and MIHOP were coined by prominent crank Nico Haupt. LIHOP meant the US government simply ‘let’ the attacks happen, MIHOP meaning that they had a more active hand in these events. Haupt was one of the first to talk about the military plane exercises going on at the same time as the 9/11 attacks which according him almost perfectly mirrored what was actually going on at the time. Later on however, he grew increasingly unhinged even for the normally accepting crank crowd, culminating in his often derided “no-planer” theory, which as the term suggests; claims there were no actual planes used in the 9/11 attacks. Then he accused other prominent cranks like Alex Jones and David Ray Griffin of being government plants. Then in 2006, he physically assaulted Matt Taibbi at a diner and dropped off the face of the earth.[xx] Like Perle, Haupt memory holed himself.

Most would view the case of Haupt as a point against crankery, but considering the stakes of the situation, I would not be quick to blame anyone who started to act unhinged after a time. If anything, the real issue here was Haupt’s pursual of objective truth as a legitimating force. Haupt’s zeal was bellied by his certainty that this would culminate in a point where anything could be proven either way rather than the mass of American lumpenproles passively accepting their government’s narratives on a subconscious level. Why else start calling anyone who deviates from these observable truths ‘the enemy’?

Haupt went from someone who introduced a potentially useful framework to one of the most ardent advocates of a controversial MIHOP type theory which was the “no-planer” thesis. The dialectical nature of these debates made theories about no-planes or controlled demolitions like catnip for a certain type of person; namely the white middle class males who ‘fucking love science’ and epic logical rants. In the mid-aughts professional skeptics like Michael Schermer, the people at Popular Mechanics and others made a little sport of ‘debunking’ these truth theories. The ironic thing being that this was all based on a similar veneration of logic and the scientific method. At the same time, David Ray Griffin bragged about a growing number of professional associations like Richard Gage’s “Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth” who cavorted around the various forums on the internet which was gaining mainstream appeal. Indeed, the movement went from leftist ‘kids on the internet’ to a more professionalized right-wing hobbyist clique that boasted professional credentials.

The scientifically inclined MIHOP people might be easy to dismiss for the cranks who don’t find such theories necessary to either questioning the official narrative itself or even proving MIHOP as a concept. The reason I don’t find it to be so is that firstly, cranks of all stripes and colors have a passion that the bloodless milquetoast liberal subjects of any other movement lack. Why else assault a well-known journalist at a diner? A shame it wasn’t someone who more richly deserved it like perhaps a Thomas Friendman.[xxi] Furthermore it’s often proved useful not only for arousing the interest of the various professional classes in the movement. These professionals, whether their theories hold water or not, have professed a great deal of success into the movement. Alan Sabrosky claims to have showed his video of the infamous Building 7[xxii] to others associated with American military colleges and without fail they are fully converted.[xxiii]

There are limits to this approach, namely, the difficulty in acquiring the hard evidence needed. COINTELPRO[xxiv] was initially considered a crank theory until someone went and physically stole the documented proof of this program from the US government. Unfortunately, such radical action necessitates both a strong belief that such evidence does exist and a level of zeal that most people would say is ‘not a good look’.

LIHOP in contrast is interesting and promising in that it is both difficult to prove or disprove because at the end of the day you cannot read the minds of say a Dick Cheyney or a Richard Perle. Many of the self-proclaimed skeptics are quick to discount LIHOP as a small minority, but I’d motion that it’s so close to the ‘incompetence’ theory that regular progressives proclaim, that it probably makes up a great deal of the percentage of people who believe there was simply something ‘off’ about the 9/11 event.

 No matter how many reports and commissions there are, one can’t discount that according to the United States Government, they couldn’t keep 19 men with boxcutters from penetrating what should be the most heavily defended airspace on the face of the earth. This of course tracks with the pathologizing theory some skeptics have that these cranks simply want to believe somebody is in charge even if it is a malicious illuminati-like entity. This implies that the response to 9/11 should have been to throw up one’s hands and go ‘well gee I’m not sure what happened’ come to think of it. It begs the question of how they knew within the day who the culprits were. This is the language of somebody unfamiliar with both power and how Americans think. If they did, they would know about how the doctrine of “Do-Something-ism”[xxv] consumes everything in Washington.

LIHOP has other problems however when looking at the questions of how 9/11 was actually linked to Iraq. Most of how this happened has been almost entirely memory holed. Exhibit a of this is the 2001 anthrax attacks. We’ll continue this story in Part III.

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[i] Referring to people under Western hegemony broadly

[ii] James Traub, “The Unrepentant (Published 2007),” The New York Times, December 16, 2007, sec. Books, https://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/16/books/review/traub.html.

[iii] https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/prince-darkness-disowns-iraqs-tragedy

[iv] For war crimes see:

Sidney Blumenthal, “RICHARD PERLE, DISARMED BUT UNDETERRED,” Washington Post, November 23, 1987, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1987/11/23/richard-perle-disarmed-but-undeterred/b83a9f49-8d43-41bd-8e6f-1316efd52075/.

“Richard Perle – Militarist Monitor,” accessed November 15, 2020, https://militarist-monitor.org/profile/richard-perle/.

“‘An End to Evil’ by David Frum and Richard Perle,” Salon, January 31, 2004, https://www.salon.com/2004/01/30/frum_perle/.

Richard Perle, “Richard Perle: Thank God for the Death of the UN,” the Guardian, March 21, 2003, http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2003/mar/21/foreignpolicy.iraq1.

“Richard Perle Projects Nazism on the Arab World,” Mondoweiss, November 29, 1999, https://mondoweiss.net/2007/04/charlie_rose_as/.

Justin Raimondo, “Richard Perle Supports Terrorism,” Antiwar.Com Original (blog), January 28, 2004, https://original.antiwar.com/justin/2004/01/28/richard-perle-supports-terrorism/.

[v] Jack Shafer, “Perle Libel Watch, Week 4,” Slate Magazine, April 2, 2003, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2003/04/perle-libel-watch-week-4.html.

[vi] “‘An End to Evil’ by David Frum and Richard Perle,” Salon, January 31, 2004, https://www.salon.com/2004/01/30/frum_perle/.

[vii] Understanding Deep Politics  Featuring Michael Parenti, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-ofKI8QFWY.

[viii] Who of course figures into a number of these conspiracies regarding the ‘coverup’

[ix] “Griffin vs. Taibbi,” accessed November 20, 2020, https://dickatlee.com/issues/911/asc/pdfs/griffin_vs_taibbi.pdf.

[x] “Matt Taibbi: After Laundering $800 Million in Drug Money, How Did HSBC Executives Avoid Jail?,” Democracy Now!, accessed November 20, 2020, http://www.democracynow.org/2012/12/13/matt_taibbi_after_laundering_800_million.

[xi] “Document:David Cameron’s ‘counter Extremism’ Experts Work with Far-Right Donald Trump Sympathisers – Wikispooks,” accessed November 16, 2020, https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Document:David_Cameron%27s_%27counter_extremism%27_experts_work_with_far-right_Donald_Trump_sympathisers.

[xii] Cass Sunstein, “Conspiracy Theories,” 2008, https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1118&context=law_and_economics.

[xiii]For more on TINA see:

 Wolfgang Streeck, “The Return of the Repressed,” New Left Review, April 2017, 104.  https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii104/articles/wolfgang-streeck-the-return-of-the-repressed

[xiv]Ibid  

[xv] “Obama’s Memoir Is a Ripping Read until He Gets to the White House,” Australian Financial Review, November 25, 2020, https://www.afr.com/world/north-america/obama-s-memoir-is-a-ripping-read-until-he-gets-to-the-white-house-20201124-p56hna.

[xvi] For more on why that’s deluded, see:

“Why We Can’t Save Afghan Women,” Asia Society, accessed November 17, 2019, https://asiasociety.org/why-we-cant-save-afghan-women.

[xvii] David Klion, “David Frum’s Hold Over the Center,” The New Republic, May 29, 2020, https://newrepublic.com/article/157885/david-frums-hold-center-trumpocalypse-book-review.

[xviii] Matt Taibbi, The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion, Revised ed. edition (Random House, 2009), 244.

[xix] On the failure of the antiwar movement:

How Nonviolence Protects the State, accessed May 23, 2020, https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-how-nonviolence-protects-the-state.

“Seeing an Iraqi Resistance,” The Anarchist Library, accessed May 23, 2020, https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-seeing-an-iraqi-resistance.

“A Look at the Movement Against the US War in Iraq,” CounterPunch.org, July 12, 2013, https://www.counterpunch.org/2013/07/12/a-look-at-the-movement-against-the-us-war-in-iraq/.

 “Resisting the Iraq War: A Short History of Anti-War Organizing in Grand Rapids,” MediaMouse (blog), January 22, 2009, https://mediamousearchive.wordpress.com/2009/01/21/history-iraq-war-protest-grand-rapids/.

[xx] Jeremy Stahl, “You’re Not Paranoid If It’s True,” Slate, September 8, 2011, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/trutherism/2011/09/youre_not_paranoid_if_its_true.html.

[xxi] “Golden Oldies: Tom Friedman at Start of Iraq War Telling Arabs to ‘Suck on This,’” Mondoweiss, November 13, 2011, https://mondoweiss.net/2011/11/golden-oldies-tom-friedman-telling-an-arab-society-to-suck-on-this/.

[xxii] Notable for collapsing while not having been hit by one of the airplanes.

[xxiii] “9-11 – They did it— Former Director US Army War College, Alan Sabrosky [MIRROR] – video dailymotion,” Dailymotion, accessed December 1, 2020, https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x32axpm.

[xxiv]

[xxv] “The ‘Do-Somethingism’ of ‘Humanitarian’ Interventionists,” The American Conservative, accessed December 1, 2020, https://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/the-do-somethingism-of-humanitarian-interventionists/.

9/11: In Defense of Crankery (Part 1)

9/11: In Defense of Crankery

Crank is a pejorative term used for a person who holds an unshakable belief that most of their contemporaries consider to be false. A crank belief is so wildly at variance with those commonly held that it is considered ludicrous.

Readers, I love cranks. I love left-wing cranks, right-wing cranks, anarchist cranks, hippies, yippies, militia nuts, conspiracists, zealots, snake oil salesmen and everything in between. Cranks are the fiery beating heart of every movement. Behind every grandiose vision there’s a crank. Behind every attack on the veneration of elites and aristocrats, I guarantee you, there is a crank. From Diogenes telling Alexander the Great to move out of his sun to David Icke calling the world’s leaders a bunch of horrible space reptiles, cranks are what take the collective mind of the masses off autopilot.  Of course, today, the modern era of crankery centers around what’s known as the 9/11 truth movement.

While there are many who would balk at the association of 9/11 truth with crankery, I’d counter that the designation of crankery has nothing to do with rationality, but the trust in the country’s most respected elites. It is a litmus test for bootlicking disguised as one for sanity. Particularly since like many events that spawn conspiracies, there is a confluence of unanswered questions and sketchy coincidences. After all there are only so many suspicious things within these events that can explained away.

Maybe the so-called lone gunman of the JFK assassination publicly announced that he was in fact a patsy before being assassinated by a mafia figure who said the world would “never know the truth”. Perhaps 9/11 was openly the endeavor of a US ally with prior CIA connections. But so, what? These undeniable facts are the domain of the cranks. At the end of the day when you wear the average person down, they will in fact concede that the government is lying to them, but they’re too tired to dig deeper or god forbid, do anything about it. Respectable liberals and conservatives will quietly mumble and make some concessions, and say that they couldn’t know these things for sure. Not the cranks however! The cranks will go deep. They will look at indestructible passports, magic bullets, symmetrically collapsing buildings. For the crank is an endless well of energy for these labors of love.

Cranks often come into conflict about their respective theories due to their deep passions, convoluted theories, and otherwise being the sorts of people with the time and energy to get into these arguments. This in some sense is a weakness. Not the respectable normals however. The normals are paragons of respectability, civility, and most importantly–agreeability.

On the exact opposite of the cranks, we have those so intoxicated by agreeability that they become a different type of unhinged; the people that the sociologist C. Wright Mills called the crackpot realists.

From C. Wright Mills‘ The Power Elite (1956)

Mills was writing about the mindset of the American political class during the early tensions of the Cold War. In just a few years he saw how the nuclear arms race, an absolutely insane endeavor by any metric, was normalized. Soon it becomes insane to doubt this status quo. The people who would trust in the government, are implicitly co-signing frankly insane policies so they themselves can seem sane because making too much of a fuss would indeed make them one of the hated cranks.

The same species of politician unfortunately seems to have a total hold on the American system today. A few years after the Cold War ended and none of these loose ends such as Saddam Hussein were giving the military industrial complex a reason to shaft the now memory holed idea of a “peace dividend” now that those scary Soviets were no longer a factor. The 9/11 attacks may have broken the brain of many Americans, but of course for those in charge (who faced 0 political consequences for their supposed incompetence mind you), it gave them a new foundational myth. A reason for existence itself as they tried to marry evangelical messianism and the liberal notion of spreading democracy in a new holy crusade that we now know as the Global War on Terror. “HOW CONVENIENT” the cranks immediately cried. And they began what is now known as the 9/11 truth movement.

For the cranks, their initial impulse was doubt and while the specifics may vary, that initial foundational impulse still remains.

On this day of 11/9, I have seen the full crackpot realist consolidation of both political parties as the neoconservative movement now functionally has enraptured both parties. Many of the Bush   administration’s apparatchiks and supporters have been showered with praise by the very same liberals who supposedly opposed them for years. To argue that the event which has shaped modern American politics is somehow irrelevant and unworthy of analysis seems foolish. Dare I say, it seems like the reflexive impulse of a crackpot realist.

Even a number of professed normals and former government ghouls have started to pick up on the American litany of hawkishness:

The benefit of crackpot realism is that the ordinary prudence of advocating avoidance of war can be depicted either as sloppy and unrealistic sentimentalism or as the irresponsible avoidance of the burdens and duties of a superpower in a dangerous world. In its refined form, crackpot realism wears the camouflage of idealism: military invasions are really aimed at humanitarian rescue, spreading democracy, or peacekeeping. In those cases, the crackpot realist can even affect a morally censorious tone: How can any serious person be in favor of letting Saddam Hussein remain president of Iraq? Or Bashir al Assad in Syria? Or whoever the Hitler du jour might be.[1]

Mike Lofgren

Of course we wouldn’t have any of this without what David Ray Griffin[2] has dubbed “The New Pearl Harbor”. Self-interest can quite easily turn to liberal interventionist once the public has already cosigned a war that they were told would be over by Christmas. In the period from 2001-2003, doubting any of the government’s narrative on Iraqi WMDs would have you clearly labeled as a crank. Even those few normals against the war had to stare a grief driven America in the face and either tell them “take the loss, you probably deserve it” or “well gee just wait for the UN first”. Not the cranks however.

The next part of this will deal more closely with  9/11 itself as well as the various reasons why so much of this event has been memory holed by those hoping to fit into respectable society. We’ll also take a look at the various ‘crank’ theories around LIHOP and MIHOP (let it happen vs make it happen).

Stay noided comrades.

---

[1] Mike Lofgren, “Syria and the Triumph of Crackpot Realism | HuffPost,” HuffPost, accessed November 9, 2020, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/syria-and-the-triumph-of-_b_2966541.

[2] One of the better known 9/11 cranks

NIAC Cuckposting Again!

Again I feel the need to bring up the incessant need for NIAC to cuck to the centrist wing of the democratic party. Now yes, I will acknowledge from experience that many democrats will pay lip service to NIAC. Although this narrative is overblown, lip service is better than nothing. That being said, there have been points that NIAC does not need to engage in apologetics on. The death of Qassem Soleimani is not one of them. Soleimani was a beloved figure in Iran and in the rest of the world. Even the Western media acknowledged his instrumental role in fighting Daesh. Why these people find a need to undermine their own talking points is baffling. Perhaps it’s the mental disease of the Washington Beltway wherein some of the worst pro-war people’s ideas are cannibalized until the internal brain rot leads us to this crackpot realist world where being pro-war is both realistic and idealistic. It’s realistic in that it’s more politically feasible to capitulate to the impulses of insane liberal „idealists“ like Madeline Albright, Samantha Power and Ben Rhodes I suppose.

Let’s start with their release on the death of Haj Qassem and the escalating ‚Iran War‘.

News just broke that the United States has unilaterally assassinated IRGC Quds Force Commander Qassem Soleimani without Congressional approval—a profoundly reckless move that could have deadly consequences and result in a war with Iran.

Now this isn’t the worst start in the world, but it seems to take a page from the book of ‚overstepping‘ political bounds rather than the act itself. No you need to have some manufactured legal excuse and THEN it might be ok. Frankly any opposition to US unilateralism has lost all meaning. The idea that Congressional approval still means anything has been gone for years. The Congress itself is a slave to AIPAC even if they don’t necessarily embrace taking the political risk in supporting war. If there was a more „level-headed“ president, I imagine this point would be moot in their minds.

The last thing the world needs is another disastrous American military adventure in the Middle East. Yet, the Trump administration has just empowered the most aggressive hardline elements inside Iran to consolidate influence internally and respond violently externally.

Now here is where the problem really starts. It becomes about empowering ‚those bad guys‘ in Iran. From a conservative standpoint, this point is laughable. From a liberal standpoint this point leads to a „Weeeeell what can you do.“ sort of attitude. After all the people who are the ‚hawks‘ on this have all the cards and there’s no real benefit to putting a stop to them when it’s just as easy to drag your feet when you have no skin in this game.

The only people this MIGHT have some traction with is the barely influential people who are anti-war anyway such as leftists and libertarians who would like Iranians to embrace their ideals without any force. This is ridiculous however because the people making the arguments for force are rarely acting in good faith. Right at this moment they have legitimized half the neoconservative talking points on Iran. That they’re a „malign influence“ and are generally ‚bad‘. The average boomer brain does not handle nuance well so it doesn’t really go beyond that. At the end of the day, it legitimizes the idea that ’something‘ needs to be done about Iran. This means funding the State Department propaganda. WAIT. Propaganda? I’m sorry. They call it ‚public diplomacy‘ and ‚democracy support‘ now. So yes it will lead to some protests and when there is a crackdown because it will inevitably be supported by intelligence agencies who would prefer that the most forceful opposition prevail so they can show their boss results; there will be another outcry and another call for violence so the cycle will continue.

This legitimizes the neocon talking points. Liberals will always cuck to neoconservatism anyway because they share ideologies and are funded by the same people. Furthermore, the Liberals will have no ‚way out‘ or better ideas so they will support the same agenda due to a lack of desirable alternatives. After all it goes against the American love of ‚action‘ and ‚results‘. You can’t just sit around and hope Iran becomes a democracy™ over night. That would go against everything their profession is contingent on.

The hardliners in Iran are always right because the hardliners in America can always be relied on to get their way eventually. Such is the issue of the US being an open society where corporations can be people, where opposing genocide is bad manners, and escalation is sane. Zionism and the military industrial complex have a powerful hold on US politics as evidenced by the bipartisan support for these forces. Even a president with hawkish or isolationists interests will find themselves surrounded by the kind of people who have never seen a war they didn’t love. From the staffers to the think tank dorks to the ethno-supremacists that have turned themselves in America’s high priests, there is no escape from this predicament without an awful lot of people being purged.

Iran, a nation of 80 million people, does not want war and opposes the actions of their own government. This unwise decision, however, edges us even closer to war.

One more they play defense for the mandarins of US foreign policy. Not only this, but they actually prop up the myth that Iran will EASILY collapse internally. I can hear John Bolton’s mind shattering orgasm right now. It’s not pleasant. Yes they oppose war, however NIAC obfuscates the US government’s blame in all of this. In fact, the idea that the Iranian government does not oppose war can it be avoided, means that they are in fact irrational. Now an irrational and violent government should not be dealt with forcefully? Why? They seem to not make this argument. Even the argument that they would ‚consolidate power‘ in contradicted in this paragraph due to the inherent belief that this government is illegitimate and ergo ‚bad‘. If this is nuance, it’s probably the most sloppy attempt of it that I’ve seen in a long time. This brand of nuance comes from a culture in the Beltway Press where the feelings of American and Israeli elites matter more than Iranian lives. This is why they would even entertain equivocating like this. Then they go to cite a handful of bad takes to once again poorly make their case.

Wow look at this ally hm? We can’t question that Soleimani is an ‚enemy‘ of the United States? We have no say in what the US should consider their enemies? It’s just passed down from their elites without our input? That certainly doesn’t sound very democratic. Again this is contingent on the President not getting the rubber stamp from a compromised congress. The real concern however is that we’re not allowed to question US foreign policy orthodoxy and this is the caliber of ally the Iranian American community seems keen to promote. After all, anyone actually in Iran might have some ties to the IRGC through little fault of their own. Is NIAC legitimizing the branding of young Iranian men who may have even been simply supporting the war against ISIS as ‚enemy combatants‘ to the American public? The answer to all these questions is yes apparently.

 

Finally we have this poor well-intentioned person. She cites that she does not want the US to bomb  of her family. Most Boomers probably don’t care but compared to the others, good effort. She hits all the propaganda points which activate the pleasure centers of the liberal interventionist brain and will serve to convince them they are such good people once the bombs start flying. Then there’s the narrative of the hardliners, the narrative of ‚if you fight your enemies they win, that Trudeau line that was mocked by everyone to his right. Nobody is arguing this point in good faith. Why give these abject monsters the benefit of the doubt? Would the stakes be too high? Would it be too difficult to justify this technocratic bubble wherein if you vote Democrat and validate the talking points of these covert narcissists, you’ll somehow be fine? This pushback against war is only raising more questions without any satisfactory answers.

They Have a Lot of Nerve Being Alive

The statement came to me as an offhanded twitter retort against a new inane National Review article. It isn’t so much a threat as it is a lamentation of the parasitic existence that the United States has enabled within its hallowed halls. The National Review is a creature that by all means should have died years ago but it keeps going. Why? Because of funders. Nobody actually reads this so-called magazine. It’s just another part of the right-wing welfare apparatus that keeps the bad idea factory running. These ideas don’t contribute anything new. In fact even as the media and alternative media actually seem to run counter to this narrative, this general stance is the most unimaginative, unoriginal kind of thinking that sprang from the fetid corpse of American exceptionalism. The handful of decrepit technocrats scarcely even seem to believe their own lines anymore. They have to keep it going though. They need to keep their wars going and their stride for a Middle East without significant opposition to their policies. Nevermind that their policies are nonsensical and seem to punish independent countries largely for existing. These policies would not be popular were the average person holding the purse strings. So what we have is parasitism that the public has to ignore. Maybe they’re swarming with these insects and are far too sedated to get rid of the people who write such insanity.

 

So the ‘editors’ who apparently don’t even have the courage to put their disgusting toe-shaped faces to this piece entitled “Why Iran Wants to Get Bombed” because in this nightmare reality we have entered a realm beyond parody. The whole piece reads like dialogue from a shithead wife beater fresh from the Lifetime movie of the week. Like with most cases, they start the story in the middle where multiple months of provocation are ignored in favor of the eventual response to such provocations. Of course the country is doing what most nations would do in this situation. If anything, their main crime seems to be their inability to simply take their country and move it someplace else. After some sports metaphors from a boomer who clearly hasn’t played a sport in years, they suggest the most sociopathic and escalatory course of action:

“The administration should obviously render whatever assistance the British may request. It should continue to send more forces into the region as a message of resolve, and to work with allies to better secure shipping in the Strait. It should ratchet up the pressure campaign against Tehran, and revoke the remaining waivers that allow the Europeans to cooperate with Iran’s purportedly peaceful nuclear program.”

Once again they type out a couple ill conceived thoughts that will impact millions of lives and for what? So they won’t have to say they were wrong? Or maybe they truly do buy into their messianic delusions but what I’m seeing here is a man making some low effort post that gets about a six figure salary in return. On top of that he asks for thousands of people and billions of dollars to be poured into another ill conceived vanity project.

These people contribute nothing. To anyone. At least anyone with the modicum of a soul or conscience. In any case it’s frankly infuriating that they would go through their lives unmolested. Nobody is calling out their obvious contempt for the world or wiping that smug look of their collective faces. Their entire mindset is a classic case of projection. When they say the Iranians are vicious and only respect force, they really are talking about themselves. So what of their final recommendation:

“….they obviously want to escape from the box that they are in, and Trump shouldn’t let them.”

Plain as day this  is the program these people in the pro-war movement should be subjected to. It’s true that they have managed to maintain power, but the entire political system of the United States is increasingly becoming a caricature as a populist revolt against the elites continues. Even those who managed to win this time around feel their victory be hollow as they are rightly despised by all. These….I would hesitate to call them people….don’t deserve to have the jackboots lifted from their throats. If anything it makes sense to escalate. Frankly them subsisting is an insult. Any decent human would see it answered in turn.

 

Tales of Boomery: Bolton’s Many Enablers

This is the first in a series about the largest problem when it comes to the American Empire: The Boomer. The Boomer is not just a generation, but a mindset. It is the culmination of the intellectual life propagated by myths of the World War 2. It comes in many forms with many names: neoconservatism, neoliberalism, American exceptionalism, senility, Evangelical Zionism, holocaustianity, and so forth and so on. This is the mindset of both those who benefit from the status quo and those who fearfully follow them. Outside their generation they have attempted to replicate this mindset through ‘Boomer Grooming’ the subsequent generations into ‘neoBoomers’ with some success like they had by pumping Generation Xers full of Ayn Rand. Today they put young people on the conservative version of welfare by paying millennials to shitpost against ‘the libs’. Others on the liberal side wallow in the same post-9/11 sanctimonious drivel on values and ‘the troops’ and viciously shut down anything that would contradict these fragile sensibilities.  Join me in the first of what will hopefully be an enlightening series.

 

Bolton is our first example. His entire political ethos is a kind of hard-fisted defense of the Nixonian white middle class. This thread of thought lionizes the United States, bringing up their global warmongering strategy as a force for good because of muh World War 2. [1]  He attends memorials on D-Day which have the same saccharine reverence of any religious service.[2] This chickenhawk who never fought a day in his life touts himself as the ‘defender’ of America because he made his career angrily spiting vitriol at some meek European bureaucrats during the Iraq War. For these and more he’s the first in this series on the threat of World Boomery.

 

While the political and media class are acting somehow shocked regarding National Security Advisor John Bolton’s actions in escalating conflict with Iran, what escapes people’s notice is the wide net of people who enable him. This establishment holds back these frothing at the mouth neoconservative maniacs saying that they’re bringing Iran close to conflict, and yet, these people seem to be just barely restraining these people. They never take action against them. They only simply allude to them being ‘dangerous’ and capable of visiting great destruction on those who defy American hegemony. They seem less like enemies. Instead more like acquaintances that hold back an angry belligerent drunk at a party who will inevitably shout back “You’re lucky they were there.” For such a man to have a career however, he must have a broad class of enablers. They same can be said for all of these neoconservatives as they would for anyone else who would abuse their power.

Firstly many of these mainstream media outlets have lionized him who are later ‘shocked’ at such escalation. The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, MSNBC and almost countless others were all too happy to give pro-Bolton neocons a platform throughout his career. Graem Wood[3] and Mark Dubowitz[4] scarcely have a hard time finding a platform, and while a platform does not equal endorsement, it is clear that the media is complicit in allowing Bolton apologists access to significant media clout. The same idea that propped up Hilary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren propped up Bolton in that they are ‘establishment’, ergo they know what they are doing. No need to scrutinize. As John Gans writes: ““A seasoned policymaker like Bolton, who has been serving in government off and on since the Reagan administration, could have helped bring order to the White House. The national security advisor has said, “I’m proud to say I’m a good bureaucrat,” and the unconventional president needed one.“[5]

Of course Bolton’s favorite media platform is Fox News, wherein the network shot the mustachiod bureaucrat to stardom as far as Fox’s geriatric paranoid audience is concerned. While bashing Fox News as a partisan sport is no longer as popular as it was during the Bush years with Jon Stewart dedicated nightly segments to chastising them, the issue clearly extends outside of this one network. The momentum when it comes to criticizing it is largely gone because the forces it represents are a legitimate part of the political process who very few question. The people who tune into these major news networks for the sports and stay around for the war propaganda.

Time magazine was too forgiving when they called John Bolton ‘Trump’s attack dog’. It would have been more accurate to say that he was America’s attack dog.[6] Specifically, the American political class because we should understand by now that the plebs hardly matter. The only people who mindlessly vote for them are as always: The Boomer. While some of the previous generations may still be kicking around, the mindset of the Baby Boom of the years 1946-1964 have taken a life of its own as they coalesced with the Silent Generation. This Silent Generation with curmudgeonly figures such as Bush Sr. and Richard Nixon is where we first get Bolton.

Bolton is a baby boomer through and through. His first presidential campaign was with Barry Goldwater. Bolton did not serve in Vietnam as he thought it was largely a loser’s war. Instead he threw himself in with the proto-neoconservative movement as it was, THEY who would have had to join him in the post-Goldwater republican party. He’s always been insufferably smug about how he did it first. He never gave into the Trotskyist idealism of the Straussians. Everything was par for the course by the time he was an adult and these neoconservatives gradually took over US politics through their ability to manufacture consent and gain funding by foundations of long dead tycoons.

These organizations like the FDD and AIE got funding from Israelis, various ‘libertarian/conservative’ charities, and industrial interests which would functionally serve as a type of welfare for these pundits once they were kicked out of office. This is what sustained Bolton in his gap during the Obama years. The funders were his second group of enablers. The money therefore laundered through these various interest groups in the donor’s fund managed to turn into Super Pacs that could buy media clout as well as other kinds of support for these mainstream conservatives. Neoconservatism thus went back into its shell and by 2016 the neocons were back and on both sides. While the Clintonite Never-Trumpers disliked Trump’s optics they functionally shared his goals and were all too happy to give him a pat on the back whenever he undertook hawkish actions such as the Syrian missile strike.

Neoliberals were another kind of enabler, and while I would not toy with the definitions game at this point, it should be noted that when Bolton faced criticism, the many figures who were seen as ‘beyond politics’ such as the military and FBI came out in support by the dozens in the Los Angeles Times. They refuted the man’s obvious disdain for international law. The stories about him threatening diplomats from European countries.[7] That didn’t matter. These trustworthy institutions said he was ok back in 2005 when 64 ‘colleagues’ supported his nomination letter.[8] These same institutions are propped up in hopes of defeating ‘Trumpism’. This is a convenient attempt to have one fall guy for all of these decades long policies.

Bolton has many enablers. It’s foolish for people to fall for this sleight of hand when the man has been legitimized by the media, the intelligence agencies, academics, the donor class, and others. Obama had a choice to prosecute the excesses of neoconservatism. Instead of going counter to the direction that the Republican party chose, the Democrats decided they could do it better, and thus continued with it to the chagrin of any of the supporters who were actually paying attention.

As many of us have grown weary of reading articles that cite the problems while avoiding both causes or solutions, it’s become necessary to cite extra steps. How do you solve a problem like the perceived issue we have now: Bolton instigating an Iran war, with or without the consent of the US president. It is clear that there are a lot of underlying problems here. Many of them stem from the same pool. Whatever the opinions on causes, it’s clear that more radical solutions are needed. Media enablers will eventually be squeezed out by the growing mediums online. What of the other enablers? What of the mindset of the man himself?

 

For the funders and government-linked institutions with unilateral power there is no easy way outside of simple legislation. This involves contacting local government officials, lobbying, and other slow processes. Organizations like the Office of Foreign Assets Control need to be curtailed so people like Bolton won’t be able to unilaterally control the economic sanctioning mechanisms. The think tanks should either be made illegal or frankly sued until they are out of funds. The funders run on what is essentially a form of legalized corruption. Once this is recognized, people can steps to correct this problem.

As for international law, the very existence of a man like Bolton exposes it for what it is: a joke. It needs to be exposed as such in every institution possible. It should be met with scornful and derisive laughter wherever it is. More on this argument later, but for now, the argument is Bolton. International law cannot constrain a Bolton. Local law probably has a better chance. In fact, a local sheriff could probably arrest any of these supposedly powerful officials should they so choose to. Never underestimate the power of local politics. There is a reason why officials with open disdain for international law don’t visit some European countries, however, the fact that any decent society with laws is the impetus for such action means that even though these laws are on the books, they are largely irrelevant.

Bolton himself and any of these neoconservative cabals should be pointed out and ostracized wherever they live in society. There is no method that would be unwelcome when it comes to targeting them. People have been more militant about Twitch rivalries instead of matters of life and death. This extends to any kind of openly Zionist, neoliberal, or ‘mainstream’ conservative institutions as well because they are frankly the same thing.

Another institution that’s obviously a large part of war: the military. There are many young people signing up to fight an enemy they don’t understand. The backlash to Vietnam War experience has citizens worship the military in a way that would make any junta dictator proud. At this point there is no reason to support the troops after a series of stupid mistakes. In fact, instead of supporting the troops, why not educate them. Let’s keep in mind military circles are extremely isolated from the rest of society and disdainful of civilians. This is a class of people trained not to think after all. If someone were to start treating military recruitment stations the same way the Republican party has treated abortion clinics, we can keep many young men from making a horrible immoral mistake they’ll regret for the rest of their lives. Why save one fetus when you can save about 20 children?

Finally, there is the matter of the root problem: Boomers. I would like to propose a plan for more muscular anti-Boomer action in the vein of the anti-fascist movements of the past. While these ‘antifa’ movements have been rather pro-establishment lately, I think that the Boomer is a much worse political problem in their soft suppression of every subsequent generation, as well as other demographics. Ergo I think it is important to have street-level organization against them. Particularly during important elections such as primaries, but even on a local level. Will detail this plan for ‘antiboom’ in subsequent posts.

 

So, there are some options from a Bolton-free world. The ones who enable him should not be able to escape the fact that they are accessories to his crimes. The media may as well have covered up the bodies of the thousands in civilian casualties. The funders handed him the weapons. The other mechanisms of enforcement turned a blind eye as he went on his merry way. We can’t be certain of what 2020 holds for the world, but if people in the know don’t muzzle America’s least favorite chickenhawk/attack terrier, nobody will.

[1] Bolton, John. Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations. Simon and Schuster, 2007.

[2] “Trump and Media Join Forces to Falsify WWII History.” Truthdig: Expert Reporting, Current News, Provocative Columnists. Accessed June 25, 2019. https://www.truthdig.com/articles/trump-and-media-joined-forces-to-falsify-wwii-history/.

 

[3] Wood, Graeme. “Will John Bolton Bring on Armageddon—Or Stave It Off?” The Atlantic, April 2019. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/04/john-bolton-trump-national-security-adviser/583246/.

 

[4] “FDD Aligned with State Department to Attack Supporters of Iran Diplomacy – LobeLog.” Accessed June 25, 2019. https://lobelog.com/fdd-aligned-with-state-department-to-attack-supporters-of-iran-diplomacy/.

 

[5] Gans, John. “Trump’s National Security Council Is Replicating Reagan’s Chaos.” Foreign Policy (blog). Accessed June 25, 2019. https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/06/21/bolton-nsc/.

[6] Wood, Graeme. “Will John Bolton Bring on Armageddon—Or Stave It Off?” The Atlantic, April 2019. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/04/john-bolton-trump-national-security-adviser/583246/.

 

[7] Hasan, Mehdi. “‘We Know Where Your Kids Live’: How John Bolton Once Threatened an International Official.” The Intercept (blog), March 29, 2018. https://theintercept.com/2018/03/29/john-bolton-trump-bush-bustani-kids-opcw/.

[8] “Bolton’s Nomination Gets Letter of Support.” Los Angeles Times, April 4, 2005. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-apr-04-na-briefs4.4-story.html.

 

Open Letter to Peyvand Khorsandi

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/nasrin-sotoudeh-iran-republic-day-human-rights-revolution-a8848801.html

Khorsandi engages in this sidesplitting parody of imperialist bourgeoisie pseudo-feminist human rights trash. It’s so subtle that you might miss it.

Firstly we have the title:

Jailed human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh is Iran’s Nelson Mandela – why aren’t we fighting for her?

He compares a lawyer for the people protesting on the hijab wedge issue to Nelson Mandela which is not only an ironic reference to the Western view of Mandela, but follows it up for a slacktivist call to action. Firstly Mandela’s sanitized and frankly castrated image in Western media that is completely devoid of what made his anti-imperial struggle which is then FLIPPED and put in the service of an entirely imperialist agenda. He’s simply a martyr for a white audience of good dissidents spreading western values rather than a fighter for anticolonialism who was violently opposed by anti-communist forces, such as the very same people who SUPPORT this silly wedge issue campaign against Iran. In short it completely not only IGNORES but subverts the Nelson Mandela of reality and his actual relation to the 3rd World Movement.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCPlz9-SyPM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJcGTjAFGjk

That’s not to dismiss the slacktivist call to action. These Iranian diaspora activists‘ use of the word ‚we‘. It’s always unclear what ‚we‘ means. Is it Iranians who might actually have a clue about what’s going on, or kharijees who support causes because they’re ‚trendy‘? He tries to turn the CIA/MI6 line into this new trend in a hilarious parody of their inane astroturfing. This kind of astroturfing that actually marginalizes Iranians who actually might know what they’re talking about by DESIGN. As neoocon Peter Kohanloo once admitted: the diaspora doesn’t matter as the choices aren’t really up to them.

Then he opens with a sloppy comparison to Brexit to capture the sensibilities of his audience of British neoliberals wherein the unwashed masses engage in a vote which ruined the country in what can best be described as a populism run rampant. The subject of his analysis here Dara Khosrowshahi, a PERFECT representation of an upper class who deigns themselves to speak for Iranians and tell the Western audience that there’s a stars and stripes (or union jack) waving DEMOCRATIC LIBERAL in every Iranian. Familiar rhetoric for those who remember the Iraq war coming from a multimillionaire CEO who literally has the word ‘SHAHI’ in his goddamn name. BRILLIANT.

And so, on April Fool’s Day 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran was declared a fact – one that millions struggle to live with daily with soaring inflation, an ever-tumbling currency, a war on women’s rights, and the threat of incarceration, torture and death for daring to highlight or fight injustice.

Here he reminds us that it’s April Fool’s Day, with the subsequent section on the revolution being the unwashed masses making a ‘mistake’ and then the subsequent neoliberal inflation of that mistake wherein State Department led color revolutions are seen as the righteous and enlightened part of the masses. Then he goes into the Orientalist tropes that became so prevalent in Western media following the Israeli bombing of Gaza. If one clicks on the link, the economic problems are caused by none other than the US government. A cheeky reference to the deflection these colonialist powers engage in. The next being a ludicrous puff piece on State Department assets trying to bring the brown people in line turned into ‘revolutionaries’ by a condescending anthropologist who consistent applied this white savior complex to Afghanistan. Nothing short of cutting edge satire.

Then once more he lionizes Iranian anti-hijab protests all the while posting articles about it by white western men who promote themselves as woke male feminists when promoting a CIA psyop to get Iranian women to where less clothing. One word for that: Genius.

Following the strawman of what the mullahs’ problem with the Shah was, he switches to an uncontexualized jab at the inflated amount of political prisoners during the war and THEN calls the reformist/hardliner dynamic a “Punch-and-Judy Show”, a sort of setup for his punchline.

Then he relays a story about a British government official

When another Jeremy – Hunt – went to Iran in December, solely with the intention of securing the release of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, he was refused permission to visit her but had brought her a present: a copy of Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom; hardly a memory-foam pillow for someone who was not even a political activist when she was arbitrarily arrested three years ago. Mandela was in prison 27 years.

This act, though, was a tacit acceptance by the foreign secretary that the political prisoner is nothing short of a Mandela in moral standing

Once more is that joke. Mandela. Mandela’s imprisonment for the ‘spurious’ reason of trying to overthrow the government order. Say what you will, but this parallel is definitely chuckleworthy with the South Africa comparison whereas Israel hasn’t even come up once, this British citizen that the British men are shilling for is becoming a (manufactured and forced) martyr. The last bit of that statement speaks for itself.

Then we get an even more amazing kicker in which he shows how these human rights issues are promoted by neoliberal war profiteers like Macron and Obama who are more than happy to push these issues under the guise of being ‘humane’ while slave markets persist in Libya as a result of their actions. This part of the satire gets bitter but it will only get MORE outrageous from here.

He then beats his chest for regime change the rest of the way, all we way to the end. Obama didn’t ‘care about human rights’. Romney is a woke liberal who cares about the ‘Iranian people’. Then comes the punchline:

At this point, it’s clear that in marking 40 years of Islamist rule today, Iran needs nothing more than a people’s vote: dictatorship of the Islamic-jurist, or democracy of the political prisoner.

At that point my sides split off and went into orbit.

His last words are essentially a call for regime change, all the while pretending democracy means something when he’s more than willing to deny it for his own ends. He ‚asks‘ for democracy but he’s really calling for more coercive measures. How can you have a referendum in a country whose elections you don’t consider legitimate. You can’t. That’s the joke. Regime change through coercive measures is clearly the only measure although this ‚character‘ Khorasandi is playing is pretending to be coy, and failing miserably, which is what makes it so funny.

Yes an arbitrary detention, the charge coming from a man who won’t recognize the government in the first place and seems MORE than happy to starve millions through sanctions to wave a bloody flag for a handful of people in the ‘important’ class. The people who practice law in Western countries, who get paychecks from foreign intelligence departments, who demonize what is supposedly their own country in the international media. His countenance becomes a grim satirical representation of the times. I only have one word for this master of satire, Mr. Peyvand Khorsandi:

BRAVO

PBS: Our Man in Tehran, Part II

Note that most of my points were covered in Part I so this will be relatively curt.

It’s pretty cool seeing someone grill the Dutchman about modernity. The problem is can it even be modernity if you end up someplace else? It seems like a large percentage of Erbrink’s female friends end up abroad from his assistant Somayeh to about half of his wife’s family. Their minds are already functionally turned westward so what would it even say about the changing nature of society if such people leave anyway. ‘What were you trying to show?’ He asks which is a valid question. It calls into nature either his naivety or his duplicity. Neither which is a good picture.

Even when he covers the more modern aspects of the country promoted by the government such as the luxury angle it’s done somewhat mockingly as they shoo off a homeless man that any Western celebrity would have probably already maced and tasered. Even whatever freedoms the reformists have brought on make it sound like these Western-backed propaganda campaigns had functionally held their country hostage for their freedom. Another triumphalist account of the soft power of the West effectively pushes his ideas of their superiority and modernity. He even ‘thanks’ the internet for the new cappuccino café in Tehran which requires all manner of logical jumps.

He then gets into the more recent headscarf protests as if to confirm a very real fear of desire creep. Like many examples of this banal phenomenon he doesn’t distinguish between societal and government suppression of these headscarf-less women.  As the government structures merely retreated rather than going away entirely like Erdbrink wished the implication of a government unwilling to let these great things happen does at least plant the seed of the regime change idea. The women act belligerently towards the police vehicles and their suppression is backwards and shocking. In enlightened nations like the United States they just shoot you for such behavior.

One of his ‘friends’ is already involved in these protests and has so for a while which only confirms the reality of the kind of circle Erdbrink is surrounded by. If anything this might actually serve as a confirmation about the ‘Western subversion’ coming from outside.

Throughout the second part of the documentary  there is a constant reoccurring mantra. The Isalmic Republic will not allow these freedoms. Things that he’ll portray as desirable: dance, music, Instagram, and fashion. He never mentions the term ‘regime change’, but at the end he does encourage protests. Overall the message is clear: for these (obviously desirous) changes to happen, the clerics must be stripped of power. The elected government such as the President of Iran can stay. Rouhani is actually talked about favorably initially so once again it is fair in some respects. The desire creep is influenced by a faction of the foreign enemies of the country that will accept nothing less than full capitulation. A defenseless Iran which goes along with every Israeli policy is needed and nothing else will be accepted by Washington or Tel Aviv. Of course this would be disastrous for the region’s security.

 

Also there’s the new girl who does the hijab protests for Instagram. A younger woman with strange hair but it doesn’t seem to be political in her own mind. It seems that in an age of social media everyone wants to get noticed. This is really what it’s about. These things make for prime destabilization and distraction in the streets of Tehran. Of course there was then the threat by ‘Mr. Big Mouth’ to the US funded promoter of the headscarf campaign, which terrified the narrator. Yes this is something that is frequently glossed over. The fact that these campaigns are promoted by hostile foreign entities in both the channels and housing the promoters. Perhaps there is a safety issue, but you  can never get around the fact that all this high minded rhetoric about individual rights is promoted by a hostile foreign power. The obfuscation of this fact is what keeps this narrative on life support for those ignorant of the objective facts.

In his part about the diaspora there is a paradox in his constant politicization of identities that is contradicted by his subjects insisting that their lifestyle is not political. The paradox here is that Westerners like him constantly politicize it. Much of the political establishment in Iran is actually quite well-read and realize how much of this works. As much as the singers and dancers might insist they are not revolutionaries, Western periodicals push everything as it’s a revolution and another nail in the Islamic Republic’s coffin.

It almost feels at points as if he shows his true motives as he curses the girl, his niece, who would like to go back to Iran. She sees no problem in adopting the local dress code. She’s proud of her heritage with a tattoo of Iran on her back. I believe this rubs Erdbrink the wrong way. Nationalism in all its forms no matter how benign seem to arise a sense of disdain in the man. He doesn’t analyze the clearly unrealistic expectations others have of the United States. Ordinarily Europeans are happy to point out the flaws in the US, but not here. Even though this film was supposedly supposed to prop up Iran the Western world is clearly superior. There is no discussion. The only people who push back are either zealots or naïve people.

In the diaspora the fact is that some Iranian descended people will not have the connection to a country that is hostile to their motherland. A country that doesn’t possess nearly the amount of history and culture that the man spent the first part of the series going over. The emptiness of materialism in American life has been covered by writers and philosophers since the 1950s. While you may dismiss such works you cannot deny that this body of thought exists.

There are also issues of race and class that are never explored because that would complicate this narrative. It’s all about gender and modernity. Everything else is more or less meaningless. The issue that one of the men in the US he interviews hints at the racial problem and the sense of displacement. These things that are to some extent brought on by the narrative that media figures like Erdrbrick promote. He doesn’t emphasize with it at all.

There were about a thousand moments in which he could have brought up the issues with other nations in a way that may have been meaningful. Since this is in fact the New York Times, the first part was filled with optimism as they expected a different presidential candidate, but now that The Donald has won they blame him for his lack of optimism. This is a pure falsehood. The neoconservatives of his administration have nothing but optimism that the country will give up their interests and surrender their sovereignty. The man who was hired to manage the ‘Iran issue’ cited this documentary. It’s insane that they would still pretend to have meaningful disagreements.

It doesn’t take the man long to shift the blame afterwards towards the faceless and backwards leader stopping the ‘inevitable’ trend of opening and modernizing Iran. He talks of his friend’s father being arrested for somehow accidentally planting cameras around Iranian nuclear sites. The friend asserts that he imagines everyone is sure of his father’s innocence. Perhaps the man was entrapped, but he admits he may never know the answers. Still his version of the story seems to tow to some manner of propaganda line even if it is completely genuine.  Given his other connections that makes him even more suspect. Let’s not forget the incredibly Zionist slant of the New York Times which is possibly the most pro-Israel than some Israeli papers.

“Surely we all agree” is now a sentiment that raises alarms in my mind because of the breadth of  assumptions that are allowed to go unchallenged. Particularly when I strongly believe they are false. Let us analyze the things that are largely ‘unquestionable’ in this documentary:

Erdbrink’s friends are innocent

Westernization is an unquestionable good

The world inevitably heads towards modernity

The clerics restrict freedom

These are the narratives that make up most of the unquestioned narrative of Iran. The only part of that which may not have been shared by the Trump administration is that the JCPOA was an unquestionably good thing. The fact is that among a certain segment of neocons they can and will nitpick at this agreement and all you’re left with is the same narrative. There never was a vigorous defense of the JCPOA in this thing.

He seems to lament the lack of activism especially between elections saying that people have been lured away from pollical struggle by ‘superficial’ freedoms. There is however a level of superficiality in all the individual rights he talks about. He asks whether the people are ready to sacrifice and writes of these upper classes who may hesitate to get involved. It seems however that these upper classes who embrace the Western modernity are the ones who support these Western style ideas in the first place. In a strange way it’s a call of going ‘back’ to the revolution when he interviews the older democracy activists. Of finishing what was started. Ironically some of the principilist conservative types feel the same way.

Functionally I believe Erdbrink signed Iran’s death warrant. Both him and his typical audience failed to understand the fragility of whatever rapprochement would be attempted. Iran will survive sure, but his audience will think they learned something in those grueling four hours when they really haven ‘t. The audience that most needs to understand how and why this is allowed to persist is able to escape their role in the machine that props up the ever-looming specter of war and famine. Even the most harmless Western-supported protests have been extremely damaging to Iran and have had deadly consequences. Every attempt to help has actually had the opposite effect. There is a crackdown. A justifiable crackdown. This is what happens when hostile powers promote unrest. It doesn’t matter what the ideal end result is. For even the sanctions relief to ever be palatable to the current political establishment, the one-sided narrative of Iran needs to finally be laid to rest. The conventionally orthodoxy about the country needs to be questioned. The impact of foreign policy towards Iran needs to be examined in all its brutal entirety. From US support to Saddam to sanctions to the drumming up of sectarian violence in Iran’s society and along its borders.

 

PBS: Our Man In Tehran Part I

Our protagonist a strangely cringey Dutch man starts off with the rather obvious falsehood of Iran’s isolation and stock footage of chador adorned women protesting. Firstly, the isolation element is a falsehood that only seeks to help draw parallels with North Korea. North Korea’s purpose as a comparison point helps draw a parallel with perhaps the single most popular target for ‘regime change’ in the western mind. This premise not only hypes up the content, but also serves as discouragement for people who would look into Iran. This props up the rare few in the Western media that can access it as the sole authority. It’s locked away and we have the key. Don’t look for it.

“A country where nothing is allowed but everything is possible” the announcer booms as the audience is bombarded with this dichotomy of white bearded Islamic clerics and girls in track suits doing Zumba one after the other. This aforementioned dichotomy once more props up the narrative of young and free versus old and oppressive. A narrative which implies the weakness of the government and the inevitability of its collapse at least on the societal scale. It follows this with a man pushing one of the headscarf protesters off the electric box she was standing, one of the short videos that make the rounds on the various propaganda networks.  Right here we have the clash and all the while the main subject of Thomas Erdbrink is unaffected and undeterred as the Persian language pop blares.

Erdbrink claims to believe that the Iran Deal was a game changer in his many interviews on American media. In retrospect I don’t see why anyone should have had high expectations unless they were completely out of touch with US politics. Even the Hafez poem in the documentary seemed to predict it when he visited Shiraz: “when did our friendship end? Where are those who support you?”. It seems like he was mostly focused on showing his day-to-day life in Tehran although the often unstated fact of focusing on Tehran is that there is no reason anyone should assume the nation’s largest city is in any way typical of the rest of the country. Especially in this case because he is one of a number of foreign correspondents who coalesce there.

One of the first subjects he focuses on is a divorced woman who he notes ‘have a hard time in Iran’. This once again holds up a very different country to the Western audience’s standards. These contradictions are never actually addressed. In fact given the ‘post-nuclear deal’ setting, the Western audience is somehow able to subconsciously take credit for these changes that come about the in 2^nd part of the documentary with Erdbrink as the stand in for the white savior.

The problems of individuals in his life with the society around them thus becomes part of a greater clash between tradition and modernity. These ideas of modernity and Islam are once more part of the politicized analysis of the Orient that is propped up by people like Bernard Lewis and Francis Fukuyama. Once more a supposedly open-minded audience is imprinted with the post-9/11 period’s political orthodoxy.

With the divorcee she’s from a smaller, backwards and traditionalistic world that’s just one of many examples of the lost potential of women within the country. The New York Times gives her work in essence serving as a savior within itself. The issues of mandatory clothing are covered perhaps too extensively as she talks about her issues with her move to Tehran and no longer wearing a chador ‘shocks’ her father. They still have perfectly fine relationships; However, she states that not wearing the chador is a part of her ‘identity’. In that another part of the problem lies as this very specific line of thinking coming from the West wherein everything becomes identity and identity becomes political. She’s a woman, not just a woman, but not one of those chador-wearing women. A modern type of woman.

Her words at the time are somewhat mistranslated I have noticed. I might wonder if it is done so manipulatively. Some statements are made more profound and others are made less profound. When speaking about chadors these statements about the clothing issue are blown out of proportion in both its coverage and its translation.  He shares some time with the traditionalist family. After leaving he applauds her ‘bold move’ and ‘choosing her own path’. It seems 17 years in this country hasn’t torn him from a mindset of identity politics and staunch individualism divorced from any greater social context. It’s followed by an Iranian woman who works as a trucker which is somehow a surprise. There was a prominent film about a taxi driver not too long ago. From that point a trucker seems like hardly a stretch, but his fascination with a  woman trucker seems like the epitome of the American mindset in Iran. The fact that she’s been doing it for over 20 years isn’t even touched on compared to conditions in the rest of the Muslim world.

Someone does actually bring up the problem of a Westerner writing for a Western audience in the Western media. It has pitfalls, which he acknowledges for a half second through a fictional ruling of some Ayatollah. In this fictional scenario with a fictional Ayatollah that makes a decree about outlawing vascectomies or something, the journalist says that he would question the authority in Iran. “This fictional ruling will not work how you think!” he says.

Here is where we have an inherent paradox. By challenging the authorities within the country. These challenges to their authority however is not for an Iranian audience. It’s for a Western audience, so it serves a different utility. Namely to mock the irrationality of the people who would defy the Western order. The single entity that matters in his life is this faceless ‘state’ he quietly rebels against in small ways when he’s inside the country. By putting film on his windows. By bringing up the ever-trendy hijab topic that keeps getting funded by Western governments and media every chance he gets.

Speaking of Western media he speaks about Jason Rezanian’s arrest in 2014. Rezanian was at The Washington Post which does in fact have ties to the CIA that have been frequently documented. The problems of periodicals like the New York Times and Washington Post could be chronicled on their own. Still Rezanian is an Uncle Tom whose appearance in this makes for a useful discussion point. While Rezanian once more claims to oppose sanctions he serves as a neocon talking point. The first and most obvious factor is his arrest. Secondly he promotes just about all the fashionable talking points and human rights campaigns that are funded by various Zionist interests.[1] He writes stories that demonize the government and spread paranoia against it. Immediately after promoting his book he writes on the handful of Facebook accounts that are part of the Iranian ‘propaganda and brainwashing’ campaign that has nothing to do with Iran and merely promotes leftist, occasionally veering into anti-Israel talking points. The issue here as with Erdbrink is that they both work for periodicals that are ‘occupied territory’. NYT and Washington Posts are filled to the brim of apologetics for the nation that has constantly been sabre rattling against Iran and at this point poses an existential threat to Iran: Israel[2]. Neither of these writers ever break in their demonization of Iran in their contextually devoid analysis. Rezanian has been released by the Iranian government only to prove them right by putting CIA talking points at full blast. It was a similar case of the Western aligned journalist arrested during the rather suspect Green Movement. Furthermore the man’s presence in this all exposes one issue that I’ve long had with the mainstream US media; that it is a largely incestuous clique. This particular kind of clique is smugly self-assured in its own political orthodoxy.

This props up a foreign establishment. He’s a foreigner. Writing for foreigners. Reinforcing the perceptions of foreigners. An oft unsaid problem is that there is a narrative in which all young people are yearning for and potentially even willing to die for liberal, secular, modern western style democracy. This is taken for granted when the strawman that an entire nation is a monolith is brought up. The problem is not that there is any perception of these nations being monoliths. Yes there might be an evil caricature of the nation. Yes this can be used to prop up a disdain for the country leading to even action from outside the country. The problem is when you think this somehow works against the wishful thinking of these neoliberal types in which everyone will ‘get on board’. These ideas work in concert unless someone decides to point out how one idea could contradict the other. If this is a society crying out for modernity, has the program of countries of the United States worked against that? This question, if the people doing these works should have been a central question if the people who make them are in any way genuine about being a well-wisher of this country.

Being a Westerner he lives in the country and largely considers the state somewhere between a nuisance and a modern authoritarian state. In the age of the NSA and CIA he state ‘they watch you ALL the time’ as if it is somehow different or surprising. It is painful to watch someone who can judge this nation with this much naivety towards the US or anywhere else that seem to fit more into some manner of anarcho-communistic ideal than the actual reality in the way that his perceptions seem airlifted from the most alarming interpretation of The Authoritarian Personality.

Another issue with the man’s background as a secular European is his mystification when it comes to religion or even nationalism. Such is apparent when he claims that Westerners do not comprehend martyrdom when the concept itself is in a sense found in many cultures. Christ’s crucifixion for the most obvious example. The detachment from ‘the Passion’ in some forms of Christianity does not wipe out the role that such a concept has had in the past. The man scarcely comprehends how Iranians could want to die for their country oblivious to the concepts of honor and service inherent within every nation’s military. Once more I find that many of those Westerners who spend all this time analyzing Iran fail to understand the United States.

He considers Iran’s involvement in Syria ‘strange’ as it has been labeled as a ‘holy war’. It is ‘across the border’ as has been the tradition since the Iran-Iraq War. This is another point where the weak geopolitical analysis is a great problem. Syria isn’t just ‘across’ the border, it is ON the border as the Syrian war had bled into Iran’s neighbor Iraq. This is without involving the cultural ties or even the military alliance with Assad that aided Iran during this Iran-Iraq War. Is it so strange that Iran is involved there? Is it really that far away considering that even Australians are involved? When any Western reporter even asks these questions its as if they open their mouths and Netanyahu’s voice comes out. The same voice that came up in those more recent 2018 protests and a few soundbites called out against what is perceived as ‘foreign intervention’ by the handful of street interviewees he got. These people must have somehow managed to stay ignorant of the terrorist attacks and skirmishes on their border. It is clear that like the narrator they have even entertained the possibility that the ‘regime’s’ foreign policy is a pragmatic means of keeping war out of Iran itself. The sole voice of reason was the Iranian soldier who clearly dashed Erdbrink’s expectations.

The Syrian War clearly has a negative impact on some in the country and while he tries to keep it in religious terms, he can’t bring himself to demonize the people who support Iran in it. Another aspect he would never dare mention is the role of the Western powers and Western media in escalating the role in the first place. The Syrian War serves as a reason why many Iranians are justifiably worried about participation in another 2009 style resolution. It was media outlet’s like Erdbrink’s who portrayed the conflict as a one sided struggle for freedom. Particularly by the left-wing Western media that Thomas Erdbrink works for. They propped it up on mainstream media and social media. Some elements of the Western governments even funded it. He is silent in all of this. Another aspect of Western complicity, one involving the media no less, is brushed under the rug.

The only area in which I would give this kind of soft propaganda credit is that there is at least a human element which yes does vocally recoil at the ever-present threat of war and sanctions. That being said, it still props up the narrative of those who do not see the people in Iran as individuals. People like Benjamin Netanyahu who will make up fictional people to talk about their hardships on one hand and tell Congress to bring back sanctions on the other. To them, they are abstracts and the ends justifies the means. This is the inherent problem. The problem being is that the forces of US interventionists, the Israelis, and even a portion of Europe will go ‘ok but this is good for you in a long run; the status quo can’t persist’. At the end of the day a regime collapse is still at least implicitly the desirable outcome because the government is nothing but an oppressive and nebulous force.

Even when people like Erdbrink argue against sanctions they do it for entirely the wrong reason. They claim it is because this is not the way to accomplish what the Western governments want. They claim that this will only strengthen the most reactionary elements of the regime. However, the very same people who make this narrative go out of their way to prop up the reformist elements of the society as the easy winners. Furthermore, they do very little to make the more straightforward argument: that the sanctions and warfare are inherently immoral.

This renders this liberal argument vulnerable to the same kind of wishful thinking they have engaged in all along. If modernization is inevitable, if the youth will wash over this desiccated old government, why should we not have a hand in it? Why not hasten it along? They cannot argue against this because no matter what the other side will engage in the same kind of wishful thinking they did when they showed the youth of Tehran in their cafes, Zumba classes, and anti-hijabi protests.

Perhaps it would have been effective if after the collapse of the deal Erdbrink would go over to the notorious Mr. Big Mouth’s house and conceded that he was wrong. Maybe end it on a less than hopeful note and remind the Western world that some actions can and will have negative consequence, but to do so would betray his own hubris. This brand of Western modernization is not only inevitable, but without fault. He cannot concede the merits of enmity towards Western governments. Also by the end of the series he’s probably terrified of the man even if he’s usually joking half the time and holds no real political power.

Western, secular liberal democracy both compositely and in its entirety can be nothing but a force for good. The ‘real’ solutions to Iran’s failed policies have to come from the West whether its environmental scientists, Alcoholics Anonymous, or the dollar itself. Everything about US wars on Iran’s borders has to be pushed aside to talk about hijabs and Pharrell. In other words the kind of things about Iran that go viral in Western media.[3]

The end of the first part seems to give way ultimately to a kind of cultural assault. This Islamic order is a set of rules. Rules against love and fun like many of the early depictions of Khomeini’s uncompromising cultural revolution. There’s a gender partition that is every present and probably accounts for about 75% of this thing’s coverage. He covers a Zumba instructor just to see what parts would have to be censored. In some ways it almost turns to mockery.  The Zumba woman clearly hasn’t spent all or even most of her life in Iran first of all. There are foreign elements to this which remain unaddressed. In some ways it nearly seems like the Western media there is using Islamic sexual hang-ups to instigate. Anyone who has read The Arab Mind and thus has observed Israelis broadcasting pornography into Palestine or US conduct in Abu Ghraib should recognize the pattern. While this may sound conspiratorial it would be equally ridiculous to dismiss what is clearly Western mockery.

“Perhaps it seems childish to go about this, but your personal freedom and space are determined by the state.” Is a quote that rang a number of alarm bells for myself as it both uses Western ideas of human rights that have been manipulated to bring Iran down since before the Revolution, and the racist tropes of Arabs or Muslims being ‘childish’. He humors the clerics like a man toying with a baby. While there is a reflexive skepticism of racism accusations in some circles, I must admit there is a level of condescension coming from this European man.  His mission to get Zumba on Iranian TV isn’t genuine. The man has no intention of it and covers little if any of what is actually on Iranian TV at all. It’s simply another step to show media suppression in comparison to Western countries. This is the only standard where such perceptions can hold water. Women in urban clothes dancing whether in Zumba classes or on Instagram might be regular and even ‘innocent’ in Europe but outside of this very narrow worldview nothing close to this is even entertained.

The causes of Iranian enmity towards the West come up in the extremely brief discussions on the overthrow of Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh and subsequent takeover of the Shah. He did briefly throw in the Iran-Iraq War, and the downing of the civilian airplane, but the issue is this is supposed to be ‘all in the past’. It’s a part of merely decorative national identity.

 

The idea that this is ‘all in the past’ is absolutely laughable because the elements in the American government which agitate against Iran have not gone away like he would like to believe. Sanctions and covert operations are still an ongoing problem. On a more concrete note we should contemplate how the consigning of these grievances to the past is disingenuous.

The overthrow of Mossadegh was an attack on Iranian sovereignty by US intelligence agencies which still attempt to do the exact same thing. These agencies also fund the son of Iran’s last Shah and funnel his messages into Iran through satellite stations such as the Voice of America. The latest string of protests had people crying out for the Shah because an element of the diaspora broadcasts propaganda that lionizes Iran’s monarchy. The United States houses a number of both current and former Shah supporters. The United States has scarcely recognized the new government of Iran since the 1979 revolution. They have not made peace with the past of the Shah and still house both him and his supporters while elements of every Western government wax nostalgically about the Shah’s time.

 

The Iran-Iraq War as explained by Iran’s Foreign Minister, Dr. Javad Zarif, was a time in which the entire international community turned their back on Iran.[4] Even just recently, evidence that the United States supplied Saddam Hussein with the materials to use chemical warfare on Iranian civilians is just being released. The Iran-Iraq War is a part of the governments well-founded belief that sets Iran against much of the rest of the world that have largely become subservient to US interests. It is symbolic of a larger issue that when an Iranian government puts their trust in international institutions they are functionally signing a death sentence.

The irony of asking Iranians to brush the Iran-Iraq War aside is particularly ridiculous when the Iraq War never really ended after the former Iraqi leader’s execution. This is only considering the United States of course. When looking at the real agitator against Iran in current years, the Israelis and their relation to the Holocaust this becomes even more worthy of disdain. I highly doubt there would be a single documentary in Israel that would brush this particularly thorny historical issue as ‘just the past’.

While the architects of the 1953 coup are largely dead, those responsible for much of the others problems are largely either active themselves or their progeny carry out their work without hiccup. Bush Jr.  took over the work of Bush Sr up until 2008. Bush Sr. who refused to apologize for the death of Iranian civilians on flight 665. Bush Sr. who with Donald Rumsfeld cooperated with Saddam Hussein. Every President after Carter including Barack Obama kept up the economic siege of sanctions on Iran. The neoconservatives within the various administrations never stopped beating the war drums along with their Israeli counterparts in the Likud party. These basic policy doctrines never really changed. Now that Saddam is dead the US government had taken to backing the MEK, a former terrorist group which sided with Saddam during this war. These historical issues were never really dead.

The human-interest element of work like this does not give the piece the appropriate amount of pessimism that this topic deserves when those in power are so quick to pass judgement while being completely out of touch with reality. If he considered at least the possibility that the US government would see this and still judge it worthwhile to torment these people to spite a government, they had quarrel with perhaps that would have made a difference.

The fact that this is a PBS documentary by a New York Times reporter actually subverts the simple need to depict Iranians as ‘simply humans. Both of these American media outlets are affiliated with US democrats. They will concede that yes foreigners are people intellectually. They have no problem with this sentiment. Their issue is that they will not do anything to circumvent any of the mechanisms which make life difficult for these people. The information presented in human interest pieces like these are fundamentally useless. They’re not helping. The chief focus is on a relatively well-to-do and cosmopolitan population overall. These people can survive sanctions and in fact many of them will flee to Western countries. Anyone who thinks that these people will fight either for or against the regime is simply fooling themselves. It is the poor and vulnerable classes which will actually suffer the most such as the 15 year old boy who died without receiving his hemophilia medication. [5]

Throughout all of this he states nothing of the role of foreign powers in Iran’s problems. In fact he dismisses the sentiment but when it comes to Western cultural capital and Western support on social media THEN the United States is allowed to be impactful. The message that this sends is that the policy of the United States has no affect on Iranian lives when it comes to something negative. Maybe he lacks the intellectual capacity to get his head around such issue. At points he even seems to believe that it was Iran posing the sanctions on itself.

The assumption is they would support a change of government. They would support protests. The fact that these people are a centerpiece reinforces the assumptions of the men in the Foundation of Defense of Democracies.[6] Erdbrink’s analysis is rather weak and one sided even if this isn’t the worst documentary about Iran. In fact, due to the really low standards of them, this one is relatively ok. At least some of the more conservative side got their voices out. He doesn’t even really seem to accept that there is an element of Iran’s society that supports the government. They were dismissed, and nobody stuck around that long to hear them, but they got out.

 

 

[1] This isn’t hyperbole. All you need to do is see these human rights people praising John McCain or follow the money trail

[2] Or Occupied Palestine if you prefer

[3] For more see: https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/this-is-what-modern-war-propaganda-looks-like-ffb523ce8be

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqhfGTNZhg8

[5] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/nov/14/sanctions-stop-medicines-reaching-sick-iranians

[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5-fcZU1b0U

 

You’re Not Helping

You’re Not Helping[1]

The media no matter what its political affiliation serves as a mythmaker for the public for all future, past, and present wars. While the Iran War is thankfully not yet a reality this is an idea on the mind of every Western journalist that covers Iran. Unfortunately, when they cover Iran in abstracts their opposition never comes clear. If they write in the ‘human element’, this is when supposedly their opposition to the campaigns of war and sanctions against a vibrant and kind people comes through…or does it?

The truth is that the media’s coverage of Iran props up many of the same myths that keep the constantly circulated meme that the government will collapse any day now and the ‘people’ will welcome it. Anyone who is even tangentially familiar with the concept of a ‘Color Revolution’ will be able to connect this to well-trod techniques for destabilizing, and ultimately collapsing a government.[2] These oft stated ideas that the youth of Tehran will bring about the kind of government that both sides of the American political spectrum want keep the myths that push the current US foreign policy establishment alive.

Currently millions of “leftists” weep for soulless warmonger John McCain. I’m not going to get into the specifics of his career but I must once again reiterate how people on the political left in the US and even Europe frequently play their role in the neoconservative establishment’s mythmaking. As McCain is laid to rest I have no doubt his colleagues will continue to push his last unfulfilled ambition to “Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran”

While few on the so-called left will openly state their desire for sanctions, war, and regime change, they prop up the same myths which give rise to the inevitability of such policies. The one I specifically mean is the idea of the embattled Iranian youth against the stale, old repressive ‘regime’. A theme that is repeated time and time again as Westerners creepily try to catch a glimpse of ‘Iran under the veil’.

This idea was touched on in the recent Frontline PBS documentary “Our Man in Tehran” in which a Dutch man who has lived in Iran for 17 years covers Iran for the New York Times. Like the periodical’s articles he reveals the exact same biases that he wanted to step away from. The Iranian censorship minister even brought it up to his face in part II. He hastily changed the subject.

The documentary that had been 17 years in the making and totally at 4 hours of footage  is long enough to serve as a representation of all of the left-wing media talking points on the Islamic Republic of Iran.

 

 

There is great support for the reformist camp but given their inability to completely turn Iran into what suits the high expectations of Westerners and Westernized Iranians they are inevitably disappointed. You can almost here the cries for government overthrow beneath the surface even implicitly. Always more. More protests. More media. More miniskirts. Even as the Washington Post and New York Times condemn sanctions when led by the Republican party they are silent when these same sanctions came from their own party. It seems as the issue is not what is being done, but who’s doing it.

The youth in Iranian as a topic are largely considered the great white hope for the Western media. They are the future. The ones who will overthrow this old and stale regime bringing secular, liberal democracy. This is a recurring theme in all Western media. If they keep pushing this idea is it any wonder that neoconservatives would take this idea and run with it? Why it sounds like they would greet American soldiers as liberators! Just as they greet the Western media.

[1] Alternatively: Stop Peering Under the Veil You Subversive Kharaji Concern Trolls

[2] Joaquin Flores, “The Color Revolution Model: An Exposé of the Core Mechanics,” Center For Syncretic Studies (blog), December 3, 2014, https://syncreticstudies.com/2014/12/03/the-color-revolution-model-an-expose-of-the-core-mechanics/.

Death of an American War Hero

On August 25th 2018, the world mourned as it lost a true patriot. After a battle with a terrible disease that lasted 15 months this American icon was lost and the flags were cast half mast. While we may have had our disagreements with his methods, we would be right to take a moment of silence for one who gave themselves entirely to the service of the United States and the world.

I am of course talking about John McCain’s Tumor.

Tumor was a tireless peace activist who suffered from the awful condition of being in John McCain’s brain. All around poor Tumor the disease of warmongering and imperialism festered. Tumor perished fighting for peace. I only wish that we could have gotten to know Tumor better before they gave their ultimate sacrifice to this country and indeed the world. Truly the United States had not seen a more dedicated and passionate  activist in our time. With Tumor gone we are truly at the end of an era. I hope you can find time to celebrate his great accomplishments.