A stiff drink is recommended It is a well-established fact that the universe has a sense of humour. It is less well-established, but increasingly obvious, that the humour is of the kind best enjoyed from a great distance, like, let’s say the moon. Three weeks into the Iran war, reality has passed through the looking… Read More Gold and Geopolitics – March, 19-21: God is a comedian
The Trump administration is embracing violence for the sake of violence Jan-Werner Müller It appears that members of Trump’s cabinet get chosen not despite their endorsements of violence, but because of them. Pete Hegseth was primarily known as a dapper TV host willing to defend war crimes. Markwayne Mullin is apparently still proud of challenging… Read More Pete Hegseth is promoting a nihilist cult of death
Governments that mutely line up behind the US as it prosecutes a sinister, illegal war that threatens to destroy their citizens’ ability to cook and eat aren’t rational actors, they are lemmings… Narendra Modi and his partymen are attracted to Israel’s fanatical, anti-Muslim Zionism because it has achieved the disenfranchisement and apartheid that Hindutva aspires… Read More A grey silence
NB: ‘Lebensraum’ as national policy; racism, genocidal complicity amongst vast sections of the Western population; total contempt for both morality and international law; limitless expansion of territory by force; the politics of permanent emergency (as per Carl Schmitt); the embrace of bloodlust and cruelty as markers of virtue rather than emblems of evil – all… Read More Tearing up the map
Christopher Caldwell Having Donald Trump as President probably resembles being a heroin addict: you undergo regular episodes of sweating terror and mortal danger, the end result of which is to get you – at best – back to normal. A year ago, the Liberation Day tariffs nearly caused the American economy to seize up, before… Read More The end of Trumpism
Alfred W. McCoy ( Tomdispatch.com ) – In the first chapter of his 1874 novel The Gilded Age, Mark Twain offered a telling observation about the connection between past and present: “History never repeats itself, but the… present often seems to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends.” Among the “antique legends” most helpful in… Read More Imperial Decline in the Straits of Hormuz
Shoaib Daniyal India had no role to play in starting the Iran war. But outside of the Gulf states, it is one of the countries most affected. Indians are seeing widespread shortages of cooking gas given India is highly dependent on the supply from West Asia and the country has almost no storage capacity. Faced with rising public anger over… Read More Can propaganda on Iran allowing Indian ships hide Modi government’s failure to secure gas supply?
Defence analyst says torpedo strike is a ‘humiliation’ for Modi’s government that disregarded a US defence partner Hannah Ellis-Petersen in Dubai and Aanya Wipulasena in Colombo The distress call came in to Sri Lanka’s maritime rescue coordination centre just after 5am. The ship in trouble, they determined, was well within Sri Lanka’s obligation for rescue, being… Read More ‘Bit of treachery’: US attack on IRIS Dena undermines Indian security ties
NB: Barring honourable exceptions, Western establishments are irredeemably racist. For them, it is a rule of thumb that some of don’t count as human beings. Their behaviour reminds us of the Nazi laws on ‘life unworthy of life‘ DS Double standards in Europe and elsewhere are laid bare by the muted response to US and… Read More The Iran war and international law: it’s worse than a mistake; it’s a crime
The Trump administration is receiving pushback for its celebratory tone in describing the US strikes in Iran. In recent interviews, the president joked that it is ‘more fun’ to sink Iranian warships than to seize them, while the defense secretary boasted that ‘we are punching [the Iranians] while they’re down, which is exactly how it… Read More Trump team treating Iran war as spectacle
After the truth-shower 