Killing Soleimani

If you thought 2019 was suffering from a time-compression effect, where every day seemed like a month and every month a year, it looks like 2020 is going to be more of the same.

Last night, US helicopters or drones attacked a convoy outside the Baghdad airport in Iraq. The convoy was transporting several several leaders of the Iraqi Shia militia that Washington blamed for Tuesday's siege of the US embassy in Baghdad, but also Major-General Qassem Soleimani, head of the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) of Iran. Later that evening, US President Donald Trump confirmed Soleimani was the target of the operation. Seems like several high-ranking militia leaders were just a bonus objective, so to speak.

I won't get into whether Soleimani was a terrorist - as the American Empire claims - or not. There is ample evidence that his forces contributed massively to the defeat of ISIS in Syria and Iraq, however, and among the people celebrating his death are some of the vilest neocon warmongers known to humanity, including the crew responsible for the 2003 invasion of Iraq that was a prima facie crime against peace.

There is no doubt, however, that the hit was a quintessentially imperial act. What else do you call assassinating someone who is traveling openly with diplomatic papers, in a country where the US is not at war and its troops only have a tenuous legal pretext for being present? States care about sovereignty, legality and legitimacy; empires do not.

What's especially ironic is that, while he acts like the God-Emperor of memes abroad, Trump is the polar opposite at home, either powerless or unwilling to do anything - aside from tweeting - about the media-Democrat-Deep State complex that is relentlessly persecuting his supporters, or anyone who dares step out of the ever-shifting line they keep redrawing.

One would think the domestic "Resistance" would be a lot more circumspect with an Emperor that is willing to be this ruthless abroad, but they're not. That should tell you a thing or three about the real character of the Empire, and the extent of Trump's actual power.

Some recent writings

Just because I've neglected posting here for a while doesn't mean I haven't been busy at work. We live in interesting times, after all.

Of the things I'd like to point out here, I've written on the drumbeat of war with Iran, and the possibility Justin Raimondo's theory is correct and all this inept imperialism is a feature, not a bug.

I have also touched on the finale of 'Game of Thrones' and the very real lesson about the power of narratives, however poorly it was communicated in the show.

Closer to home, I touched on the embarrassing idolatry of "Kosovarianians" for their imperial overlords, and the self-serving lies they continue to tell to justify their crime.

I've also touched on the Culture War currently affecting the Empire itself, an ongoing conflict between the mainstream media and Big Tech, and the dissidents caught in the crossfire.

So if you're still hanging around these parts, give these a read. I promise I'll write more soon. 

Some Thoughts on Language

Back in June, I expressed my reservations about the official story concerning the "Twitter revolution" in Iran. Several other people noted how events surrounding the presidential election had a distinctly familiar flavor - that of "color revolutions," a soft coup technique pioneered by the U.S. government in 2000 to overthrow the government in Serbia.

This morning I read this on the LRC blog:

It turns out that .027% of Iranians are on Twitter, and–surprise–the whole thing was foreign-funded war propaganda.

Rockwell also quotes a comment on the main story (see the link above), calling the while thing a NED-backed "astroturf campaign."

Here's the thing about the modern state: though it has set itself up as God, it is lacking in the creation department. It is really good at destruction, but about the only thing it can create is a false reality.

So what it does instead is twist - corrupt, bend, deform - things beyond recognition. Few people today know how to define capitalism, communism, fascism, democracy, human rights or freedom. These words are tossed around freely, but their meaning (what little of it remains) has almost nothing to do with the concepts they originally described. While it is true that languages evolve, this is not a case of such evolution. These terms have been stripped of meaning deliberately, so that they could come to mean whatever the state says they mean.

War is thus peace, ignorance is strength, and slavery is freedom: Orwellian dystopia made flesh, in which criticizing the "democratic revolutions" in Iran or Serbia makes one a "hardline ultranationalist" and "enemy of freedom." But that's "freedom" in terms of Statespeak, not the genuine article. How does one make the distinction in communicating this?

That's precisely why language was corrupted in the first place, you know. So even if we decide to oppose what is going on, we would lack the means to articulate our thoughts and ideas.

The Persian Puzzle

Normally I wouldn't comment on Iran; what happens there is none of my business. But the whole post-election mess there has me wondering.

You see, it looks very much like a "color revolution" scenario: the US-favored candidate contests election results, claims victory, and his supporters riot till the government caves in. But then, couldn't the incumbent actually steal the election knowing full well that he can paint the resulting opposition protests as a CIA/NED coup attempt, whether that is actually true or not?

I freely admit that I haven't a clue what's actually true in the reports coming from Iran, whether Ahmadinejad or Mousavi actually won the vote, who stole what (or not). Given the track record of the mainstream Western media when it comes to the Balkans (as a rule, their reports are almost entirely false), why should I believe anything they say about Iran? Especially since the Empire is so determined to have a war with Tehran, one way or another.

The fact remains, however, that the technique of "democratic coup" pioneered by the Empire in Serbia - and applied elsewhere since - has made it effectively impossible to judge whether any election, anywhere, is actually legitimate. Even if we somehow possessed the knowledge to make an informed decision, there is still the matter of the Empire insisting that democracy is whatever it says it is. As a consequence, "democracy" has become just about meaningless. And that, regardless of what happens in Iran, is something definitely worth thinking about...

Update: Daniel Larison at AmCon offers some thoughts in a similar vein. Worth reading.

Update II: (6/19/2009) And here is Daniel McAdams at the LRC blog, confirming that the NED is involved, after all...