The Difference Between Defeat in Vietnam and Defeat AGAINST Iran

 

Not to take away anything from the accomplishments of the Vietnamese, but what the USA calls "The Vietnam War" was supposed to be a war against Communism.  "The Domino Theory."  The narrative was that communism was spreading.  The USA was the leader of "The Free World" and its job was to stop the spread of totalitarian tyranny.  The defeat of the USA in Vietnam was traumatic for the Washington elites, in that it showed that there were limits to US power.  Still and all, the simplistic "domino theory" (which camouflaged what was actually anti-colonialism that was often [naturally] associated with socialism) held.  Vietnam was an example to the world of how much suffering and death was required to break out of the US-led capitalist/imperialist order.  And postwar Vietnam was made to suffer, with no international reconstruction assistance beyond what the cash-strapped, ossifying USSR could provide.  In other words, despite the defeat in Vietnam, the USA was still the leader of the "free world" and it was going to go on to be an example for others to emulate.

But the "Cold War" ended in 1991.  And since that year, the USA has gone from the world's only "super-power" to de-industrialized, financialized, debt-ridden, super-corrupt, politically unstable ... "Things fall apart.  The centre cannot hold."  ... Perfectly represented by the senile "Genocide Joe Biden" and the doddering, bloated, serial-grifter, rapist "Genocide Donald Trump."  The differences in living standards and technological development between the USA, Europe, Japan and the Anglo-American countries (UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) and the rest of the world have shrunk.  China is now a major world power.  Russia is back on its feet.  Leftist movements in Latin America and anti-colonial movements in Africa are arising.  And Iran has just won its war against Israel and the USA.  

So what's going on in the Strait of Hormuz is that the last vestige of European Imperialism (which is at the core of the insanity that calls itself "zionism") is dying and Donald Trump is the ego-maniac who has to face that. 

I started this post almost a week ago.  A day or two ago, the libertarian website antiwar.com provided a link to a foreignpolicy.com article by Paul Musgrave, entitled "Iran Defeat Is Bigger Strategic Defeat Than Vietnam."   I'm not saying that I'm astonishingly prescient.  Just that this sentiment is shared by many others.  The USA could walk away from Vietnam and Afghanistan.  In those cases they lost control of a small, poor country.  In both cases the USA left those countries to rebuild with their own resources from the destruction that America inflicted on them.  Iran is different.  Iran threatens the entire world economy.  It might expel all US military bases from the region.  It might defeat Israel, the last bastion of European colonial-imperialism.

 

And now, tonight, Danny Haiphong is speaking with Mohammad Marandi about Israel's sabotaging of the ceasefire

 

Furthermore, ... there is but no question that this war is bad for the United States.  I have said all along that Donald Trump himself knew this was a bad idea.  I have also said that if one combines the very strong possibility that Trump raped adolescent girls on property owned by Jeffrey Epstein.  And Epstein was a blackmailer.  And Epstein worked for Mossad.  Which would naturally mean that Donald "President of the United States" Trump is being blackmailed by Israel to sacrifice his country on behalf of Naziyahoo's Israel.

 

Let's not beat about the bush here.  There is a growing movement on the right-side of the political spectrum, represented by people like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owen, Marjorie Taylor-Greene, and (before Israel assassinated him) Charlie Kirk, that also saw the insanity of the imperialism of the Clintons and Obama and Biden (and all their media sycophants) and status-quo Repugnicans like Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham, as being bad for the United States.  It's generally the fans of these people who enlist in the "poverty draft" and who find themselves or their loved ones dying in the stupid, useless "forever wars." And those were the people who voted for Trump to bring an end to that insanity.  And Trump violated their trust.  

Don't get me wrong.  There are portions of MAGA so stupid and debased that they forgive Trump for not releasing the Epstein files, and who hypocritically blame Reneé Good and Alex Pretti for their own deaths because neither of those fine, upstanding people would bow to tyranny.  And don't get me wrong that by ascribing to some intellectual and perhaps moral consistency to Carlson, Owens, Taylor-Greene or Kirk, that I now think they are awesome.

I'm just saying that there is a significant portion of right-wing, isolationist, Christian-Nationalist and (sorry Candace) White-Supremacist US-citizens who absolutely DESPISE Israel, and AIPAC hirelings, and ordinary Jewish people.  And maybe some of Trump's top generals are a part of that, or maybe they're just realists, but either way, the people I was just talking about are on their side.  If there's any real-time hope to end this insanity it won't be the lefties milling about for an afternoon.  It'll be people with real material-world resources.  Christian-nationalist members of the US military, who may or may not harbour antisemitic beliefs.

Iran has won this war.  Israel is merely digging its own grave.  Here's Ian Welsh:

The Iranians have not gone to Geneva for the signing or negotiations. They are holding firm on Lebanon. And that means Trump can either rein in the Israelis or the vise starts tightening around America’s balls again.

America cannot win this war. It is impossible. Even using nukes probably wouldn’t work fast enough. That’s why they agreed to a deal that is very pro-Iranian.

That has not changed. They can rein in Israel or cut it loose now, or they can do it in two months when the US is in much more pain, or in 4 months when there are food riots.

There’s a real world. America lost a war that matters. There’s going to be a price for that. If America is smart and not completely controlled by Israel, they’ll pay that price now and if necessary cut Israel lose, because the price will go up every day if the MOU fails.

This is a momentous time.   Here's Nate Bear:

With Israel still bombing Lebanon and oil reserves at critical thresholds, however, this is all far from over.

Iran has sketched out two futures for the US and it now has a decision to make: stand behind the deal which Trump has loudly proclaimed as necessary to save the world, and force Israel to stand down, or let Israel dictate the process, return to war and drag the world into an economic depression. Anything is still possible, of course, but I judge the latter extremely unlikely.

And Trump, in his egotism, venality and conceited self-interest, might just be the man for the moment.

Blog-on dudes and dudettes! 

The Carney Government's AI Strategy

 

Recently, the Carney Liberal Government either released or had leaked their strategy for Canada's participation in the AI Revolution.

But given that AI is a towering mass of shit that nobody normal ever asked for, and, given that Mark Carney and any degenerate willing to be associated with him (that includes Pierre Poilievere) is/are complete shit-heads, nothing in it is of any value. 

Inhumanity

 

Nate Bear wrote an excellent piece on the ludicrous shrieking about "antisemitism" when a mentally ill man in the UK stabbed two Jewish men:

 

This fresh round of hysteria really ramped up after a man with a history of mental illness (and of stabbings) stabbed two Jews in north London last week. Neither died and both will live. Omitted from almost all state-corporate media coverage was the fact that he also stabbed a third man, a Muslim. Also omitted was his history of stabbings (he previously stabbed his own dog, a Somali man, and two police officers), and his history of psychotic breaks.

Despite the circumstances clearly pointing to random attacks by a person suffering an acute mental episode, the police treated it not just as a planned antisemitic attack, but as terrorism.

The terrorism threat level in the UK was raised to severe.

I remember when terrorism used to mean car bombs, political goals, manifestos and scores of dead people, not a mentally disabled man with a butter knife scratching a few people.

But the attack was perfect fodder for the British media and political establishment, who blamed support for Palestine and opposition to genocide for enabling antisemitism, and instantly began demanding pro-Palestine protests were fully outlawed.

Later, Bear mentions how this misuse of the terms "terrorism" and "antisemitism" led to the arrest of a Green Party candidate for posting online that an attack on a synagogue in Michigan, USA was an act of vengeance, not antisemitism:

Mairey posted that an attack on a synagogue in Michigan, in March, was revenge, not antisemitism. Which it was. Ten days before he attacked the synagogue, Ayman Ghazali’s family in Lebanon had been murdered in an Israeli airstrike. His attack against an open and proudly Zionist synagogue was revenge.

I've written before on the phenomenon of some Jewish people to genuinely feel threatened by criticism of Israel, because they genuinely feel that this criticism is antisemitic at its roots.  And I'll say here and now that with Israel's continued depredations and atrocities, I find this attitude to be increasingly tiresome, narcissistic, disgusting and stupid.  But Bear is talking about how the UK ruling class, including the loathsome Keir Starmer, are concocting an "antisemitism" and "terrorism" crisis pretty much out of whole cloth.  Because Israel is an important cog in the machine of capitalist imperialism.  And the fact that Israel is also a genocidal zio-nazi entity means that extraordinary measures have to be taken to attempt to normalize it. [More from Caitlin Johnstone.]

 

The thing is though, ... this has all made me feel that, once again, most "leaders" (people in positions of power) don't care about other people at all.  Look at it this way: The Roman Catholic Church is documented as having an across-the-board problem with their priests molesting children and the Church covering this up.  By "across-the-board" I mean that this was world-wide/systemic.  It wasn't some local scandal that was covered-up by those on the spot and when word got up to the Pope in Rome it was decided to go along with it and hope for the best.  That would have been bad enough.  But no.  This was a problem with the institution as a whole and it went on for generations.

But ordinary people, for whom their bullshit religious beliefs are integral part of "who they are" and whose individual fake religion was Catholicism, decided that a little thing like systemic child rape wasn't enough to make them change their lives and renounce that corrupt institution.  As long as it happened to other children, they apparently don't give a fuck.

 

The "Other."  Non-Hispanic US whites hating Latinos and Blacks.  "Old-Stock" white Canadians hating the First Nations.  Hindus hating Muslims.  Arabs hating Africans and South Asians.  Israelis hating Palestinians. Humans stupidly "other" people and make enemies of them in the blinkered hopes of being able to keep or take as much for ourselves.

And, if ordinary people are capable of such despicable behaviour, imagine what total psychopaths like Benjamin Netanyahu, Keir Starmer, Donald Trump, stephen harper, Mark Carney, Ben Shapiro, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, etc., are capable of!

To the extent that they're Jewish themselves, racist narcissists like Netanyahu and Ben Shapiro probably have some sort of genuine empathy for Jewish victims of antisemitic violence.  But make no mistake about it: Netanyahu cares mostly about himself.  He clearly knew about the upcoming Hamas action on October 7th, 2023 and conspired to make it far more deadly than Hamas intended.  It is documented that he ignored warnings from Israeli, US-American and Egyptian intelligence.  It is documented that the Israeli "rave" (dance party) was re-located to just across the line from the expected attack.  It is documented that it took hours for the IDF to respond to an attack that higher-ups knew was going to happen.  It is documented that when the IDF actually did respond, that it (in line with its "Hannibal Directive") slaughtered hundreds of Israeli civilians with tanks and helicopter gunships.

They were Jewish.  They were even Jewish Israelis.  But still, Netanyahu needs to stay in power to avoid going to prison for corruption charges that he will surely be found guilty of, and so they had to die.  Because he had to make Israelis completely lose their minds.  So "Bibi" Netanyahu slaughtered his fellow Israelis so that he could "justify" (in the minds of degenerates like Biden, Blinken, Starmer, Trudeau, etc.,) committing actual, literal GENOCIDE against the Palestinians.

Even if they don't really care about actual antisemitism, our psychopathic oligarchy does enjoy using it (or the threat of it) as a cudgel to beat the anti-genocide/anti-imperialist/anti-oligarchy side with.  Today, some zio-nazi doctor in Montreal is whining about how he's leaving Canada for the USA due to the rise in "anti-semitism" here.  And the shit-head Mark Carney had some speech to make some announcement about his government's response to this fabricated crisis.

Jewish advocacy group B'nai Brith Canada recorded over 6,800 antisemitic incidents in 2025, the highest number it has recorded since 1982. It points to those statistics as proof that anti-Jewish hatred is being normalized in Canada. 

But since B'nai B'rith Canada equates criticism of Israel with antisemitism, this is all bullshit and they can go fuck themselves.

I have now decided that the mass-shooting of the racist fanatics of the Chabad group at Bondi Beach in Australia was probably organized by Mossad, or, at least, by Netanyahu.  Even if they were paid-up zio-nazi stalwarts, their deaths at the hands of Muslim gunmen would do a lot to whip-up hysteria to justify curtailing the rights of anti-genocide protesters.  Because Netanyahu and his scum allies simply do not care about other people's lives, Jewish, zio-nazi, or otherwise.

Lately, whatever Canada's foreign affairs ministry is actually called has been paying to run ads on Fazebuck about how Canada is heroically calling out Russia for kidnapping Ukrainian children.  I've dealt with this before.  Russia is evacuating children from war-zones.  Many of the children are ethnic Russians whose parents voluntarily sent them to safer locations, while other, ethnic Ukrainian children on the Russian-controlled side of the border complain about being taken against their will.  One child complained about having to live with a Russian family who tried to make her sing the Russian national anthem every day.  She (and one other child I remember) was complaining about this to a Western news outlet AFTER HAVING BEEN RETURNED TO UKRAINE by the Russian government.  Clearly, children in immediate harm's way, were evacuated from a war zone, and some of them were Ukrainian, and from the journalists' own stories, they were returned to their families once they were identified and the transfers could be effected.

But even if Russia is kidnapping Ukrainian children, for Canada to complain about it whilst enabling Israel to starve, torture, rape and kill Palestinian children is the height of hypocrisy.  Hypocrisy doesn't get any worse than that.  It's like Israel has shit its pants and Canada is complaining that Russia farted.

Canada doesn't care about Ukrainians.  Canada doesn't care about the Palestinians.  Canada doesn't care about the Iranians.  Canada doesn't even care about Canadians.

We are ruled by insane, stupid monsters.  And there is nothing that they won't do to us if they somehow, stupidly, think it will serve their insane agenda.

Antisemitism and Anti-Arabism

 

Znetwork had two good essays that I read today.  One was about the intellectual poverty of antisemitism: "Why Antisemitism Obscures the Real Architecture of Power" by Vuk Bačanovic.

One of the most repellent forms of that old-new popular thinking—now once again spreading with mounting intensity across Western societies since the genocidal devastation of Gaza and the American-Israeli escalation toward Iran—is the stale, mildew-ridden yet ever-ready conclusion: that, finally, the dehumanization of the Jews has been vindicated. That the racist phantasmagoria of Jews as a “cancer of humanity” was merely awaiting its historical confirmation. Ah yes – Hitler, it seems, “knew something after all”: because Zionists, because AIPAC, because Netanyahu, because lobbies—because of that wonderfully crude analytical apparatus that explains history as if it were He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, with a single eternal villain scheming from Snake Mountain against the pious people of Eternia.

...

And here we arrive at the question that spoils the sport for all professional hunters of the “eternal culprit”: why are other accomplices across the vast spectrum of wars, massacres, sanctions, blockades, and mass deaths somehow always deemed “less evil” than the “evil Jews”? Why are Anglo-American imperial elites – Protestant or secular, it makes no difference – and their allies in various petro-monarchies, including Wahhabi–Kharijite ideological apparatuses, so readily portrayed as misguided marionettes of grotesque Jewish caricatures lifted from Nazi propaganda, rather than as fully conscious, fully responsible accomplices in joint criminal enterprises stretching from Libya, through Iraq, to Syria, Gaza, and Iran?

So, is it therefore impossible to be evil if you are not a Jew? Are Washington, D.C., London, Riyadh, and Abu Dhabi in fact historic courts of virtue and humanism—merely bewitched by wicked counsellors, like King Théoden in The Lord of the Rings? Otherwise, would they—as a kind of global alliance of beauty queens—ceaselessly labour for peace and human understanding, if only “the Jew” were not whispering in their ear that today, of all days, is perfect for yet another humanitarian catastrophe and genocide?

...

That is why the antisemitic “explanation” of the world is not only morally repugnant, but analytically foolish and politically harmful: it does not expose the existing system—it rescues it. It is especially useful to the system entrenched in Israel, which in fact thrives on the premise that antisemitism is the natural condition of non-Jews, a premise designed to render every new enterprise of Netanyahu’s killers intelligible, even inevitable. Instead of focusing on the nature and structure of capital, the state, lobbies, military-industrial complexes, petro-monarchies, imperialism, and comprador elites, it reduces everything to an ancient, fetid metaphysics of blood and soil—of a handful of uniquely evil people without whom the world, supposedly, would be better.

Only it would not.

 

Of course, Netanyahu and other zionist leaders celebrate how Israel's atrocities reinforce the existing prejudices of the already antisemitic and inculcate antisemitism in confused people who are now seeing this behaviour for the first time.  Which is not to say that a maniac like Netanyahu doesn't himself believe that antisemitism is the core of every non-Jewish person at that same time that he manipulates and creates that hatred. He's like Adolph Hitler; stating his desire to go to war against all his enemies, starting those wars, and then whining that the Jews started them.

The other article was from last July: "The Problem is Not Palestinian Culture - Rebutting Modern Right-wing Colonial Propaganda" by Roman Kozhevnikov.  I most enjoyed this because two days ago I started reading a substack article by some writer whose name I forget, I gave up reading it in disgust, knowing that all the talking points were garbage ... maybe he or she is a paid opinion writer or maybe they're just some anonymous shlub like me.  Regardless, it was all the crapola so eloquently destroyed in this article.

Pro-Israel propagandists want to control the narrative about the Arab-Muslim world and we hear their narratives more often than academic consensus on the matter. Palestinians are accused of low economic productivity to justify their colonization and to whitewash its adverse effects on them. Arab-Muslim values are slandered to present them as the cause of Palestinian problems. However, Palestinians—and other Arabs—were developing their economies rapidly throughout numerous periods of growth and their values guided and inspired them. 

The likes of Caroline Glick paint Israeli occupation as bringing economic growth to the occupied territories, but these claims became outdated in the 1980s, whereupon short-lived West Bank economic growth—brought by Palestinians working abroad—changed to the decades of struggling, caused by Israel’s strangling economic policies. Now that international aid no longer constitutes such a large share of Israel’s GDP, Israel’s economic growth slowed down to less than half its former pace. Meanwhile, the World Bank estimated that the depressed West Bank economy might’ve grown 7.5% per year, if only Israel ceased its damaging policies.

I just thought I'd share.

Politicians are Rotten and Stupid Because the System is Rotten and Stupid

 

This isn't the best humanity can do.  True, we are a flawed, limited species.  But we're capable of better.  We haven't figured out how to restrict the ability of the sociopathic power-seekers from dominating our societies because for most of our time on this planet human beings lived in smaller groups with less power to control nature and each other.  But as our collective ingenuity has increased our ability to manipulate nature and to politically dominate, physically coerce, and psychologically manipulate ourselves, the nasty people with the impulse for narcissism and domination have become a danger too extreme to ignore.

The old order is dying.  "Zombie Neoliberalism."  That is why the malignant narcissists it pukes up are so godawful.  Nobody truly sane could believe in this garbage.  That's why the USA has Donald Trump.  And it's why the Democratic Party USA is so decrepit and deluded and jaded and stupid that they tried to run Joe Biden as a candidate for re-election, even though they'd been hiding him from his own cabinet since at least 2023.  (When those books at that link came out, Democratic Party stooges uniformly whined: "Why are you bringing this up NOW???  Can't you see that Donald Trump is the danger we need to focus on???"  The fact that books about 2020 election came out after the same interval that books about immediately past elections come out didn't matter.  The fact that those books helped explain how Trump was able to win the 2024 election didn't matter.  What mattered was allowing a cabal of corrupt, incompetent shit-heads escape any consequences for their stupid behaviour.  It never ceases to amaze me how entitled and stupid the Democratic Party is.  Because of their own incompetence, arrogance, delusion and cluelessness, they can't even one-hundred percent take advantage of Trump's own advancing senility and stupidity because they themselves tried to lie to the world that their candidate, Joe Biden, wasn't senile, when they knew he was.  I mean, what an "own-goal"!)

And it's why Canada has Pierre Poilievre and Mark Carney.  Poilievre has been a public laughing-stock for years.  And now he's reduced to rigged leadership reviews and whining impotently as his own MP's cross the floor and join the Liberals in order to at least taste power once in their careers.  They join Carney, who, as a central bank governor in Canada and then the UK helped grow two real-estate bubbles.  Carney who blathered about "values" at Davos while supporting genocide in West Asia and starvation sanction in Cuba.  Who is killing national childcare and pharmacare, while increasing military spending and talking about privatizing airports.  

And, of course, a sick society produces an ignorant, deluded, selfish, fucked-up electorate.  "Conservatives" who are afraid of their own shadows, lashing out at immigrants, refugees, feminists, homosexuals, artists, ... and "Progressives" clinging to the official parties of "decency" even when they're dominated by psychopathic thieves and murderers, while castigating anyone who tries to point out their error.

Worst Case Scenario

 

Delusional, megalomaniacal, Blackmailed Trump, ... not wanting to go to prison for raping 13-year old girls, ... because that is what Netanyahu, Mossad, Epstein, are threatening him with, ... incoherently decides that he (and the UNITED STATES of AMERICA) will go out "In A Blaze of Glory"!!!!

He WILL try to attack Chinese ships.  Chinese military vessels are in the area.  

It will lead to war and it will turn nuclear. 

Empty Speculation About Charlie Kirk and Last June's "12 Day War"

 

I've heard unsubstantiated rumours from right-wing bloggers and yootooberz that Trump was supposed to have joined Israel's attack on Iran in a substantial way last June, but that Charlie Kirk went to the White House and talked him out of it.  Ah! Here it is: "Charlie Kirk urged Trump in Oval Office to avoid war with Iran, Carlson says"