In a moment in the world with very little to laugh at, do spare a moment for a chuckle at the desperate attempts by the Western world to pretend that what is happening in the Middle East isn’t its fault. Western neediness to convince ourselves that we aren’t the bad guys never looked so silly.
People like me are routinely dismissed as irrelevant to the world because we are branded ‘anti-American’, because we ‘hate everything about the USA’. It’s such a silly insult, such a silly argument that I won’t engage with it. But I will continue to point out that us, the West, led by the US – we’re the people setting fire to the world. It’s us. Let me show you.
Let’s begin with the Middle East. Most people on planet earth know that what is happening in the region is because there is a rogue state which operates miles outside of any sane bounds of global legal norms. Can we finally say that assassinating civilians in other countries is illegal?
It doesn’t matter if the the civilians are nuclear scientists and the country is Iran. It doesn’t matter that the West is quite happy for international law to be broken in this way if it is those people and that country. It doesn’t matter if you think it a dreadful thing for the world to have another nuclear-armed state (which it absolutely is). It remains illegal.
And if Iran developing nuclear weapons outside the framework of global treaties is illegal (which it technically isn’t unless you sign up to the treaties) then the long-standing Israeli possession of nuclear weapons is equally illegal. Hearing arseholes like Keir Starmer and Joe Biden repeating over and over ‘Israel has a right to defend itself’ is now more or less defined to mean ‘but Muslims don’t’.
Lebanon has no right of self defence. Iranians have no right of self defence. Certainly Palestinians have no right of self defence. You can bomb them, murder them, assassinate their leaders, their scientists, their politicians. The only rights they have in return are to die quietly. But perhaps above all, Western Doctrine now seems to state that the rights of Israel trump the rights of the rest of the planet. It need not observe any resolution passed by the international community on anything.
I’m no fan of Iran, but let’s just remind ourselves why the country is run by extreme religious fundamentalists. It is because when the country elected a democratic government which was of a left-of-centre nature and might have impeded the US’s oil corporations’ commercial interests in the region, the US (with Britain up it’s arse as usual) manufactured a coup, overthrew the government and put in place a corrupt despot so unpopular it lead to the Iranian revolution.
In the West we believe that the situation in the Middle East is ‘complicated’, and that’s when we don’t really mean ‘genetic’, as in ‘it would be fine if it wasn’t for Arabs, Persians and Palestinians’. But it isn’t complicated. We spent two hundred years oppressing, bombing and intentionally destabilising the region for our own interests. And here we are.
Look at everything we destroyed – and stop telling yourself it was someone else because it wasn’t
I don’t have space to keep going. A book isn’t enough space. Look at Iraq. Look at Afghanistan. Look at Syria. Look at Libya. Look at everything we destroyed – and stop telling yourself it was someone else because it wasn’t. We made Saddam Hussein our monster against Iran by arming him as a despot to control territory in our interests, and then we decided we didn’t like the monster.
Over and over and over again it was us. As the media runs around writing about ‘tit for tat’ like both sides in the current conflict are taking turns at escalating when the reality is that only one side is escalating and the other is force to match it, the world sees our outright hypocrisy.
It was us who granted our proxies in the region repeated impunity from consequence for atrocity. This is mostly Israel and Saudi Arabia these days but it was the Shah of Iran when that suited and it was the President of Iraq when that suited.
So can we now write (without the terrorism police knocking down your door) that it is simply untrue to say that Russia was not provoked into war in Ukraine. Again, I’m not supporting that invasion one little bit, I’m simply explaining it. We would never have shown anything like the restraint Russia did if Cuba or Canada or Iceland or Norway was crawling with Chinese secret service agents making plans to build infrastructure to corner us with first-strike weapons minutes from our capital cities.
After the fall of the Soviet Union that was all we did. When we worked to overthrow two democratic elections in Ukraine in ten years (we did, those were only ‘revolutions’ of our allies, not the democratic majority of the country) and placed Ukraine on a path to Nato membership, we crossed red lines. Neither of those overthrown leaders were good people, personally I don’t think great powers should be allowed to set geostrategic red lines enforced by nuclear weapons.
But those leaders were elected and those red lines are an accepted part of global diplomacy – we set out ours over and over again. It was our choice to back the overthrow of elections of people who were not on board with the cornering of Russia and it was our choice to knowingly and provocatively piss all over Russia’s red lines.
Yet in the media this can’t be said. In fact simply stating these facts gets you one of those tirades from security service-orientated journalists about how you’re basically a traitor (that language is sometimes used). You know who they are in Scotland because they write about Ukraine a lot but never mention Palestine. Nothing has anything to do with facts, just ‘patriotism’.
And this isn’t all about war. We have destroyed the world in so many other ways. It is Western powers which were at the forefront of blocking climate change action for decades. It is the Western powers which have crippled the law-making ability of the United Nations with its three-out-of-five veto powers in the Security Council.
But perhaps above all it is the globe’s enforced economic model which lies at the heart of so much of what is wrong. From the 1970s onwards we created a brutal global economic regime which was designed to punish aggressively anyone who did not adopt it (through punitive institutions like the IMF). The US wanted cheap labour and devised a global model for getting access to it.
The rest of the world had little choice but to learn how to play this game. Except once the rest of the world learned the game, the West unilaterally abandoned the game. The second this economic theory started to work the way it was claimed it was meant to work (we forget it was sold as a means of ‘levelling up’ the developing world through trade), the West pulled out.
The second that China took not just to making bits of cars for the West but actually making cars for itself, all the free trade rules were dropped and tariffs came back. ‘Oh dear’, says the West, ‘we didn’t actually mean it, we meant for you to all keep doing what you were told’.
The Palestinian people are simply a metaphor for everyone and everything else the West has destroyed, killed and impoverished
And this all has blowback. The economic order that suited US corporations created sharp levels of economic inequality everywhere, and that always, always brings strife. Again, you’ll be aware that the war in Ukraine caused energy prices to spike. Except that’s not really right. Energy prices reached their peak before the invasion.
What did it was the economic model creating a global trading system that was too centralised and lacking in resilience which left it unable to cope with a pandemic. That spike led to mass corporate profiteering that screwed every one of you. So they want you to believe it was Russia – but that’s not honest. Russia would be delighted still to be selling Europe cheap oil. It’s not the war that is screwing Europe, it’s the sanctions we placed on Russia (sanctions Isreal has not faced for doing worse).
You can work your way through this and disagree with any my interpretations or you may well think that actually some of these things were the right course of action. You can try and justify this as pragmatic responses or a duty of leadership or honest error or whatever you want.
What you can’t do is deny this is all true. This is all true. This and massively much more is all true. We failed the Palestinian people massively and as a result they’ve been massacred, ethnically cleansed, murdered, the full show. The Palestinian people are simply a metaphor for everyone and everything else the West has destroyed, killed and impoverished.
Just before my critics kick off their ‘he hates the West’ shit, let me first say that I wholly reject the idea that Western leaders are genetically incapable of honesty or decency, and I do so with every bit as much force as I argue the same about those Arabs, Persians, Palestinians, Russians…
We’re not worse, we’re the same. We just have more power so we can do more damage. And dear fucking christ have we done the damage. That damage is now trapping us. It is doing us the damage now. Look at pathetic, failed-President Biden, chasing around after a psychotic Netanyahu, clearing up his shit, being made to eat it but, most humiliating of all, being forced to pretend he likes it while the world watches him with contempt.
And the world does watch with contempt. We’re losing the planet. Western rule is coming to an end. On our way down we’ll do what every failing empire does. We’ll destroy more. We’re doing it now. It’s just that this is the ‘tragedy repeating as farce’ moment.
So Joe, tell us more about your ceasefire. It finished on a cliffhanger at the end of last season where it was just a week away. Can’t wait for the next season. And Keir, tell us more about why you need £30,000 of suits in which you can wring your hands authoritatively as you fucking nod along you sorry excuse for a Labour leader.
And next? Well, Netanyahu’s intervention in the US election was clearly well-planned. He knew the Biden administration was too weak to face him down during the last weeks of an election campaign and he knew he could make Biden and Harris look truly pathetic. It might just put Donald Trump back in the White House. Talk about foreign governments interfering in domestic politics…
The good news is that Keir has been practicing nodding along with Trump as well so we’re in safe hands. Except when I say safe, I mean we’re screwed. The West is now shaping up as the final thing the West is going to destroy. God help us all.