(Dear Readers: I was unexpectedly detained in hospital on New Years’ Day, with heart issues. I am now back at home but having to manage a somewhat different situation, healthwise. My posts have been a little erratic lately, I know, for which I apologize. I expect to slip back into the groove very soon, though might not be posting quite so often as I have been in the past. I also have one or two pressing publishing and teaching commitments that are competing for my attention. I shall be doing my very best, not least because I believe that in my own limited way, I can provide added value to all those of you who need quick access to relatively upto date information and ideas outside of the mainstream as to the existentially critical times in which we are living)

For now, I have just a couple of observations to share with you. First off, I note that there are claims that responsibility for the massacre at the Suleimani tomb in Kerman in the south of Iran has been announced by ISIS. I am no more certain as to what “ISIS” is, than I am as to what “Al Qaeda” is, but there is pretty strong evidence that virtually all these radical Sunni militia are routinely exploited in one way or another by Western governments in the service of Western foreign policy interests and that it has been that way ever since Britain controlled Egypt (Egypt is still controlled, today mainly by the USA, which also means Britain and Israel). This was certainly the case through the Western/Arab League war with the Assad regime, where the principal executor of imperial disruption was the Muslim Brotherhood, a role it has played in Syria since the formation of the Bathist State many decades ago, backed up by Al Qaeda offshoot Al Nusra and the like. I still think the MEK is a pretty good bet as the agency responsible for the tomb bombing because MEK, which once played a fairly standard left-wing, Marxist role prior to the Khomeini revolution, is intrinsic to the history of modern Iran (even if it is now headquartered in Albania, or is that Langley?) and has been through some pretty strange reinventions of itself subsequently in an extremely dubious direction. Bolton, when he was Secretary of State for Trump supported it, even when it was still classified by the US as terrorist (it was delisted in 2012).

The issue of Iran is discussed by Brian Berletic of New Atlas today. He critiques western main media coverage of the bombing. The BBC covered the ISIS claim of responsibility, not making it clear that Suleimani was fighting effectively against ISIS and similar organizations, designated “terrorist” by the US, in Syria (whose weapons mainly came from the USA because the weapons first went to “moderate” Islamist militia whence they were surrendered or simply handed over to Al Qaeda or its look-alikes) when the US (Trump) murdered him. (For more detail, see my 2021 book, published by Routledge, Conflict Propaganda in Syria: Narrative Battles). See the 2009 Brookings Institiution (funded by the US Govt and large US corporate interests, foreign governments) report, Which Path to Persia: Options for a New American Strategy Towards Iran, by Byman, Indyk, Maloney, O’Hanlen, Pollack, and Riedl. The 2009 Brookings recommendations inform US policy ever since. It all amounts to regime change operations. It is abundantly clear that the Iranian nuclear deal, jettisoned by Trump, was never intended to be honored. Brookings considered the pros and cons of using a terrorist organization to create an insurgency in Iran without implicating the USA. It advised that the MEK be required to change its policies in order to look more legitimate. The main point is the Brookings’ open advocacy of the use of terrerist organizations to help the USA to bring about regime change.

The notion that Iran would be hell-bent for revenge after a strike such as that which occurred the other day at Kerman is a mainstream media invention that flies in the face of the occasions when Iran has not taken such action. Now a strike has been engineered, most likely by Israel and the USA through their proxy terrorist, MEK, to make it as difficult as possible for Iran to resist over-reaction so as to create an open conflagration in the Middle East, despite the poor likelihood of an ultimately possible outcome for the West.

A second observation has to do with an article I read quickly this morning (and which I shall post later when I have time) by my colleague at Propaganda in Focus, Piers Robinson, writing with veteran Middle East/Ukraine independent reporter Vanessa Beeley. It is the first I have seen that openly articulates the formation within what was once a “left-wing” domain of intellectual dissidence, of two important but discreet bases of concern, of which the first I would simply describe as the long-standing opposition to and total skepticism about western imperialism. The second I would describe as the growing resistance (fed in great measure by disillusionment over propaganda about the largely manufactured cluster of Covid 19 issues) to what every day more appears to be a coordinated striving at very high levels of power towards a totalitarian system of global governance, manifested in such areas as health, money, identity surveillance and so on.

The article invites much more focused attention on the ways in which these two areas of fundamental concern interact, and I shall try to be mindful of this challenge in the future. It is clear that the USA has an agenda of global subversion against all power centers which Washington does not control: most immediately, this concerns Russia over Ukraine and western-invented puppet Zelenskiy and his like, China over Taiwan, Palestine over Iran, Venezuela over western supported puppet Guaido and his like, and now over Guyana, the BRICS over NATO and the G7, even the UN.

To the cabal that controls this agenda of US-led global dominance we have ascribed the title of “neocon.” So the question therefore is what exactly are the links between this cabal and the strangeness of efforts within the WEF to select and mold national leaders, and within the WHO to take charge over global health (or its opposite), and efforts elsewhere to promote digital currency and totalistic surveillance.

To some extent, elements of the leadership of countries which do not submit to the Washington consensus and are opposed therefore to Western privilege and Western empire, do subscribe to the efforts that are being made to construct a totalitarian system of global governance. This may be the result of naivete (similar to Putin’s naive presumption that he could employ reason to convince NATO not to threaten legitimate Russian security interests by enroaching aggressively on Russia’s border) and the continuing power of Western ideology, through Western control over international media, over the minds of the more educated elites in Russia and China to convince them that they are inferior to the beautiful flower of Western wisdom (cough). Or it may be that the escalation of a global elite over national elites, serving the interests of a plutocratic, billionaire international class, even the national elites of large powers, has proceeded in tandem with, but not entirely connected to the explosion of a second age of Western imperialism. If it is a challenge for us, intellectually, to discern the interconnections, this may be because the globalists are still in the process of constructing these interconnections.

Empire, Communication and NATO Wars

Globalism v. Imperialism