On the morning of February 28, A U.S. Northrop Grumman MQ-4C Triton takes off from Abu Dhabi with a flight plan to Sigonella, it instead begins to circle over the desert gaining altitude, waiting. The go-code is given following an successful Israeli combot mission. It repositions to the gulf of Oman, presumably to watch /respond to the operations in the Chabahar and Minab against the The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) naval forces. It is part of one of the swiftest and most effective military actions to decapitate an enemies capacity since the six day war, when the Isreali air force decimated it’s Egyptian counterpart.
In Minab, a school next to the base is struck, scores of young girls are dead, the numbers keep escalating, droves more are injured. It appears to been hit centre mass, similarly to all the IRGC targets around it, and despite the hundreds of aircraft and drones, live camera feeds, and active monitoring of the entire area the US military is still, days later, “investigating” as their civil propagandists share a random telegram feed and claim it’s evidence that it was an IRGC failure.
Those kids are dead because Israel wanted to strike Iran and America jumped on board and decided to show it’s strength. Their personnel watch those kids die live and not only do they not own up to it, they can’t even tell you why they instigated the series of events which will likely lead to tens of thousands dead. I don’t care whose missile it was, whether it was a target based on poor data or a misfire. They are dead and thousands more around are going to join them.
While following the flight path of the drone above I notice it was two hours before civilian flights were cleared from the skies, innocent lives of little value for either regime but perhaps a lesson you’d have thought they recalled since the 1988, downing of Iran Air Flight 655 by the US warship Vincennes and more recently the downing of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 in 2020 by the IRGC.
Civilian lives mean nothing to the pursuit of a state’s objectives and ideological victory. The coming brutal violence coming to the people of Iran means nothing to authoritarian bodies in Washington, Jerusalem, or Tehran for that matter.
They have no plan for a transition towards a lasting peace, just or otherwise. Peace isn’t the purpose, destabilisation is. To that end the factions that are deemed useful “strategic allies”, will be supplied and told to “liberate yourself”, whether that is Monarchists, the wider movement for reform, PJAK or whoever else. As noble as these causes may be, without a slow considered step forward, it will be little more than a endless battlefield. The U.S. and Israeli militaries are keen to push forward. No time to brief, no time to open talks. Fight now. Kill and be Killed.
They don’t want peace. Days go by, unable to settle on a stated objective the American state calls for a “complete surrender”. They know that no such thing will come, no matter how much of Iran they glass. They only want an eternal war.
Aims and Justification.
“America, regardless of what so-called international institutions say, is unleashing the most lethal and precise air power campaign in history. B-2s, fighters, drones, missiles, and of course classified effects. All on our terms with maximum authorities. No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy building exercise, no politically correct wars. We fight to win, and we don’t waste time or lives…
…War is hell and always will be” – Secretary of War Pete Hegseth
This is the language of the eternal war, of purposeful destabilisation.
They have absolutely no plan here other than to decimate the leadership and stir up instability and civil conflict and they will do so to thunderous applause of a population of indoctrinated reactionaries, slackjawwed and in awe of “might” and the self interest of billionaires and state officials who could not give a damn for them.
All over the media from various state resources from the White House to military channels keep enforcing that they will carry on until their objectives are complete, that they will win. There has been no actual indications of what those objectives are other than vague military targets such as nuclear prevention, destroying military threats, defending allies. Even the most recent demand of “complete surrender” is a without any substance, a strongman soundbite that means nothing. This is no end-state and even the reasons they give persistently shift.
On March 1, two sources told Reuters that there was no intelligence about Tehran attacking U.S. forces first. On March 2, US Secetary of State Marco Rubio told the the press that “If Iran was attacked, and we knew it would be attacked, that it would immediately come after us and we were not going to sit there … We went proactively in a defensive way”, Mike Johnson the Rep. Speaker of the House stated “Israel was determined to act in their own defense here, with or without American support. Why? Because Israel faced what they deem to be an ‘existential threat‘”. This existential threat seemingly be a rather florid way to describe the intel they now held of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s location,. His location alongside that of his family. Collateral they were happy to make.
This is the same rhetoric, albeit condensed by immediacy, that Putin used to launch an imperialist invasion of Ukraine. Denounced then, utilised now. Thus is the nature of nationalism and so as “we” denounce their war crimes outright, “ours” we are perpetually “investigating” until some time in the distant future when we can talk about “mistakes”.
March 3, seeking to save face and still undecided whether he has once again pitched the U.S. into war, Trump told reporters as he met German chancellor Friedrich Merz at the White House. wavered between this being support for protestors and women’s liberation and a defensive strike and a need to remove a great evil.
“I think they were going to attack first, and I didn’t want that to happen. So, if anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand” Trump said while speaking to reporters in the Oval Office. “We were having negotiations with these lunatics, and it was my opinion that they were going to attack first.”
A week into the war, March 6, Trump finally settles on a call for “complete surrender” and a personal selection for the new leader, made somewhat difficult since by his own acknowledgement they’ve killed most of the people on their list of who they could work with.
“Complete surrender” isn’t a military objective. It’s a call for an eternal war. I don’t think there has ever been an example in which a fundamentalist regime, with complete infrastructural domain, has ever “completely surrendered” without a persiod of active occupation and interventionalist regime change. Those who have seen active occupation and interventalist regime change have near uniformally seen decades of deep and painful struggle and the theft of each and every resource by Western corporations.
Once again Western states manufacture an imminent threat so that we can destabilise the region and either have an eternal war we can use to spread our sphere of influence or a regime change for a proxy who will not only be consumed into our domain but also cater the industrial rape of Iran’s resources until such a point it’s politically advantageous for us to leave and the eternal war can carry on.
This is the aim and justification, a series of empty rhetroic, bellicose statements. If you don’t support of decision to bomb cities thousands of miles around the globe, you are a traitor, you support the terror regime in Iran, you hate freedom. The “president of peace” beams with joy at he orders a seventh country to be attacked since his second term started. The “Board of Peace”, the very definition of antiphrasis, get’s it’s first war. The death cult bursts into paroxysms of jingo as they embrace distant violence.
Distraction Pieces
So begins the tsunami of propoganda that comes with a state’s desire to manufacture and manipulate public opinion. Alongside a huge spike in the usual misinfo, old footage, nonsensical statistics, we see a wave of AI fakery. The purpose of all this is to win the immediate emotional response, no need to consider the truth or the subsequent retractions after the immediate moment is forgotten. Newspapers keenly craft headlines, tone and voice used with purpose and deliberation to influence us all. Through all this I see a few narratives take hold and snowball, in particular we’re told to look to…
The History… One of the most popular trains of narrative in American messaging has been that “The war has been going on for 47 years” a reference to the 1979, when Iranian students seized the US embassy in Tehran and held 52 diplomats hostage for 444 days. Much like Putin’s excuses that his tanks rolling over the border is simply a defensive action in a larger more protracted war, so too are the American and Israeli fighters, bombers, and missiles. We’re not striking first, this war started off in history, this is defensive.
They might wish to avoid drawing a historical lenses least people look back to Aug 19, 1953 when Prime Minister of Iran Mohammad Mosaddegh was overthrown in a coup d’état that strengthened the rule of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the shah of Iran. A coup driven by the British (as Operation Boot) and Americans (as Operation Ajax) as a response to the nationalisation of oil production, which hit their profiteering, and economic dominance over the region.
The Iranian’s Celebrating… It is the son of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Reza Pahlavi who the Monarchists wish to install and who make up nearly the entirety of the footage of diaspora Iranians celebrating in American streets presented by American propaganda outfits as an after the fact cassus belli. To them, some Iranian joy is more important than others, so it’s mostly the monarchists and their lion which saturate their feed. Don’t worry though, Reza has said if he became the shah, he’d go about making Iran a secular democratic system with free elections. Promise.
A week earlier the vast majority of those delightingly sharing new found American and Iranian joy would have been cheering on ICE kidnapping and deporting the Iranian as they have done 1,087 times in 2025. You will be entirely unsuprised to find that this has been something of a spike since Trump came into power.
To the Feminist liberation of 46 million women… if you’re not keenly embracing Monarchistic values (which ofcourse they’d never want for themselves, unless Trump decides he wants that third term) then you’re an anti-feminist now, or so millions of feminists who happen to be opposed to wars of aggression found themselves designated.
American demagogues use the language of liberty to steal that very thing from their citizens, now they weaponise the languages of women’s liberation, just like they did in Afghanistan. A sanitized bastardisation, selective solidarity with the voices that fit the propaganda required today. Make sure to only share footage of women who reflect our European culture and don’t you dare show footage of women who support the regime, or even worst, women in the movement for liberty and reform who happen to also wear Hijab. There is a right women and a wrong woman for this, inevitably brief, indulgence in reductive binary propagandising.
I suppose the expropriation of feminism is still new to conservative reactionaries so their grasp of the gender politics at play depends more upon their view of attractive young women. Some are delighted at the “baddies” and are keen to swap them with the ugly lib women of America at a favourable exchange rate (WallStreetMav, right wing investment influencer with 1.7 million followers) the top comment asserting that the Muslim women can stay in Iran tho, to which the influence laughs. Others are horrified at how swiftly the Iranian women all turned into “hookers” (Melissa Wong, “America first” Chair of Montana Libertarian Party) a post in the thread showing how removing the Hijab is the first step towards being Onlyfans camgirls.
Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of women and girls are displaced and without shelter across Lebanon and Iran, god knowns how many with die in the coming storm.
Our Might and Tremble… The Americans in particular, with great machismo, are quick to say “peace through superior firepower” and other such. Soundbite language of brutal authority and tyranny. It is a deathcult who pride themselves in apathy at the violence and awe of their capacities. These capacities ofcourse born from their absurd military spending in a land that is drowning in destitution and poverty. Twenty years ago the Democrats sought to mask this idiom with the eponymously titled “Operation Iraqi Freedom” (while washing themselves in Iraqi blood), the republicans steer into the bravado with the painfully childish “Operation Epic Fury”.
The devastation of Iranian responses… and if the BBC is any indicator the terrible suffering of holiday makers and British migrants whose been enjoying a tax free life in a sunny slave state for years? The poor babes.
Let us be clear, the often indiscriminate drone and missile attacks are nothing but vengeance, as morally repugnant and tactically redundant as they are. No amount of apologetic twaddle about “bringing the fight to the enemy” or “there has to be a response/price for their attacks” can deflect from murdering innocent people. We can highlight all the America facilities that ring Iran all day, but those bases are not the sole target are they, residential tower blocks are a lot easier to pilot a drone into than a operational command or launch platform after all.
These horrific moments are already being used as ammunition for the endless pursuit of vengence, each thrilling clip of air defence lighting up the night sky laced with jingoist sabre rattling, each life taken plastered across your screens in harrowing news reports to justify the next wave of violence, your righteous response. This spectacle of war comes for most, filtered and made digestible so you don’t have to think about your pilots dropping munitions on family homes, the children with their skin melting, and old men with their arms blown off. Saying this there are various layers of parasitic influencers and desperate to go viral “war footage” and “gore” accounts looking to profit financially and socially from the show, they serve a darker element within us. For most tho, best to keep it to the the now customary wave of “safe for social media” explosions delivered endlessly via the state and citizenry. We all end up sat there gawking at the spectacle of millions of public funds being wasted in a fireball. The delighted and terrified masses share the medias endlessly, social divisions embed and the working class tears itself in many directions once more. The eternal war serves it’s purpose in many ways.
A developing cultural battlefield
Much of this is delivered via press conferences and media pieces with an air of officialism but beneath this is a transparent salvo of meme warfare. The fact is that while memes maintain an air of childishness, or an excusable lack of serious tone which can be used to dismiss their capacity to sway opinion, as if it’s “beneath” enlightened discussion, the fact remains that more and more their utilisation as a weapon of propaganda has been accepted. ICE has for a longtime be weilding memes to control discussion and now The White House has been gushing forth with an parade of pop-culture, machismo trash (curiously enough projecting itself not just as a rapist mass murderer, but also the hitman of a dictator who mass murders billions) while lower down the chain of speculative neoconservatives we have those holding onto meme politics from years ago, “Western Liberals speaking over Locals”, expropriated from inter-leftist discourse now weaponised to undermine the “fundamental communists” of the Democrat party/ the entire population of Iran being reduced to diaspora Monarchists. Binary reductions and and simple ration optics, the kind utilised to great effect by the likes of Tommy ten names whenever civic-fascism and social conservativism needs a brown face on the package.
There has also been a maintenance of established narratives about how the collective “leftist/wokists” move on from consideration to consideration. They do this not out of a genuine response to a succession of outrages but merely following their “Islamo-Marxist” instructors, something that saw a big spike in popularity amongst the right during the Pandemic. It is just “Judeo-Bolshevism” for the 21st century, the latest in a endless flow of euphemistic racism.
Alongside this there has been the usual saturation of absolutist positioning and badjacketing. For the popularist “right” anti-war protests are simply “pro regime”. A simple and easy binary everyone knows is not true, but berating someone with a lie has proven successful so many times now, why not? Are they still talking? Tell them they are anti-feminist and support rapists, terorists, brutal theocratic regimes they’ve actually been in deep opposition of for decades… When the aim is to present a overwhelming position either in severity or number, regardless of accuracy or merit, you do so with such a pace and strength that it becomes impossible to assert the truth, or by the time you have, the damage is done. Classic “gish gallop” prattle. If it’s not the neocons and fascists on the “right”, it’s the authoritarians and campist “left” who have keenly attacked any celebration of a regimes fall, let alone a call to utilise the moment for revolutionary purpose , as proof you are an agent of the CIA and Mossad. Supposed “Marxist, Leninist” accounts have been keen to suggest Anarchists support the American Empire. The response to the Iranian network “Decolonize Anarchism” polemics and statements has been frankly shocking to witness.
The Eternal War.
While the joy brought on by the death of a tyrant is undeniable, we don’t consign ourselves to such base reactionary reductions. Why this happened, who did it, and what is the imminent future should drive our ongoing assessment. Whether you call the counter politic in Iran a revolution, resistance or an uprising, the fact of the matter is the dictatorship saw multi-facetted opposition, from stateless balochs, to liberal democrats, monarchist, theologic rivals, kurds, communists, anarchists and women who just want to exist with every ounce of the liberty afforded to their male peers.
America and Isreal can keep blasting their way through the leadership but this isn’t some unstable dictatorship but an entire infrastructure. You’re not going to remove the social infrastructure of millions of people like this, you’re only going to embed the divisions pre-existing and light a fire that will last decades. Everyone knows this. It’s the playbook of our involvement in Asia, Africa, and South America.
The solutions in Iran were to be found in its people and the revolutionary peoples of Iran building a secure future terrifies them just as much as the PLO did. There, they put support being Hamas, and now they build a vast war zone and sit back as warlords, secessionist movements, and external interests, (national, corporate and militant) sweep in. It will be the innocent people just trying to live their fucking lives who will die in their multitudes.
The Iranian Regime has already named Mojtaba Khamenei as new Supreme Leader after his Father’s death. He’s also lost a son, his wife, and his mother. Already known as a hardliner. This regime is deeply entrenched into Iranian society and will no more be removed via kinetic power alone than Hamas have been from Gaza or Hezbollah from Lebanon.
Kurdish groups have already formed a working alliance across five major groups. They are undoubtedly seeing warfighters move eastward following the brutal losses in North East Syria. A exestential threat to an Iran built on colonial borders, they present a threat to the vision held by the previous dictatorship and subsequently the monarchists today. They face a war on six fronts, with every state actor around them deeply entrenched in Kurdish blood.
The Monarchist movement’s de facto leader exiled prince Reza Pahlavi has announced his intent to be Iran’s transitional leader, despite having dubious sway in Iran itself and being openly hostile to most of the other political entities and communities actually in Iran right now fighting the IRGC.
The Balochistan ethno-nationalists, specifically The Baloch Liberation Army and Baloch Liberation Front and the many groups they are compromised off are not likely to sit idle. Some might fight against the American/Isreali forces hoping to appease the Iran Regime into subsequent concessions towards autonomy, others wil take the opportunity to take militant action and seize Iranian Balochistan. If they take up arms it will likely come with intervention from Pakistan, and subsequently India.
[Just prior to posting the BLF issued a statement of solidarity with the nacent Kurdish coalition. “This political action of yours, especially amid the current fragmentation of the opposition, is the finest practical and valuable experimental step, one that all nations of Iran must welcome in solidifying federalism in Iran and actively join … [the BLF] firmly declares its cooperation with such a coalition”]
The Communist Party of Iran (CPi) call for a revolution. “In such conditions, ending the war requires overthrowing the Islamic Republic, and we must intensify the organized struggle to bring down this regime.” while at the same time cautioning against the influnces of America, Israel, and Monarchists.
The Communist Parties of Iran (TUDEH), Israel (CPI) and the United States (CPUSA) issued a Joint Statement calling for regime change at the hands of “the action of the people and patriotic leadership”.
Azerbaijan has been preparing it’s military forces along the border, which a recently successful recidivist genocide against Armenia that got next to no international attention. With a large Azerbaijani population in Iran, the land bridge to Nakhchivan being taken through might while Iran is crumbling will very much be on the cards.
As the missiles continue to rain, the cheering voices will be replaced by tears. Whether we see a sudden grand collapse or a waxing and waning erosion of civil life as pockets of armed resistance grow more and more, there are dark times and unrelenting violence recurring vengeance and ethnically driven brutally as we have seen so recently in Syria, Ethiopia, Libya, Yemen, Myanmar and so many other places.
There is no simple narrative, no utopian vision. Simply a grim knowledge that the days in front of Iranians, and the wider SWANA region, are going to be deeply traumatic and painful. The most hopeful of outlooks is that the people of Iran find moments to breath and organise. Break down the regime yes, but not for American interests, but their own and find a workable framework in which they can collectively build a future of respectful and peaceful coexistence; a coexistence which by it’s very nature will be opposed by the U.S. and Israel, though by this same nature will sap their casus belli and end the violence visited upon them by would-be liberators, or at the very least constrain it. As we all know, they don’t really require a reason to visit death upon you.
I wonder if we will sit essentially apathetic, whether we’ll defer action to a tiny handful of the brave, whether we’ll once again divide ourselves into petty fracturous camps trying to score political points from sophistry, malappropriated rhetoric, and puerile political absolutes. Will our solidarity survive the discussion over regional identity, colonialist oppression, and the resistance to it?
We have to listen to the revolutionary peoples, those who reflect our politic dispositions and those who do not, we need to render aid and support (pushing the states we live in to do so) and most that starts with stopping this fucking war.
The Anarchist Position.
The anarchist stands with the people and for liberty. We lean on (among other things) objectivity, compassion, and truth. Whether that inspires an individual act or a collective response, a meandering infrastructural campaign or a volatile moment of fire, we are driven by the same passion and desire. This has presented itself with a deep agreement in tone from across the anarchist spectrum, with first and primarily, a resurgence in anti-militarist calls and anti-war messaging and information dispersal. Building upon this are loud and clear restatements of rejection of the theocratic regimes of Iran, Israel, and the U.S.A.
No War But The Class War… The first response of any war (by any euphemism) is to pursue a cessation of military violence. Our pursuit of emancipation comes not through slaughter but solidarity. Antimilitarism and the distribution of medias and pieces have been gushing forward and with it calls to action not just on city streets but outside American postings across the UK. This is established ground for most anarchists, and despite various internecine bunfights, badjacketing and associated ire following the decision of some Anarchists (chiefly from Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia) to resist the genocidal invasion, and the following (primarily European) schism within our communities over the nature of political and material actions of solidarity with them.
War is a sickness, which decimates our shared resources for the profiteering of a few. Endless young men and women, told they’ll find family and adventure in the armed service are turned into indoctrinated militants, and sent off to die for no reason. A pipeline through which the state holds millions under a regime favourable to “us” rather than “them”.
It’s our working class kids who are chewed up and spat out by this machine of unrelenting pain and suffering, and it’s upon of every person of conscience, whether that’s driven by a political notion, a faith, or personal amorality, to oppose and resist. We have failed this task so so many times already.
The highlighting of Campism…I’ve also seen multiple threads deconstructing the campist political entities who cheer on the action of these authoritarian states because it runs concurrent to their own “anti-imperalist” vision (in both directions), and ultimately the monarchist restoration movement both in Iran and in the Iranian diaspora. This isn’t merely a function of Authoritarian Communists, the residue of this easy narrative spews into anarchist spaces too. Whether that’s manifesting any resistance to “The West” as some liberatory force (tho often deferring to nuance when called out), denouncing solidarity with Palestinians as Israel tanks rolled into Gaza as being a proxy for Iranian interests, or reducing the Ukrainian resistance to invasion as being NATO maneuvering a pawn in their war for global supremacy. Reality is almost always just a wee bit more complex than this.
Some of the more disgusting reflections of this campist hyprocrisy come from adovcates of the “Axis of Resistance” camp in response to the Communist Party of Israel’s statement, in which they rally against Imperialist aggression. Commentary such as “communist party of Israel = communist party of the third Reich”, and appeals to Lenin’s 1915 text “Socialism and War” being used as justification for solidarity with the Iranian Regime, which is apparently a great front for Communism in these deluded minds. American Communist Party (ACP) top gobshite “InfraHaz” gave the tankie position clearly: “Go fuck yourselves you scum traitors. You disgrace Lenin’s memory.” Noteably, he is an advocate of Russia’s war of aggression upon Ukraine.
Anarchists are not immune to propaganda nor any of the reductive ignorance and selective bloc-making so often utilised by those who seek to use such horrendous events for their own political gain. It’s refreshing to see keen and vocal highlighting of this sophistry and encouragement to dig deeper and develop a nuanced perspective, driven by those who understand the situation in a infinitely more pragmatic manner.
Listen to the locals… there is a strong lean to listening first and primarily to the victims of the brutal regime. Through established lines of communications between organisations and individuals and to new faces both. The women of Iran who have maintained a vital and powerful struggle for existence, the ethnically minoritised communities, made stateless and oppressed, the working class who have for so many years suffered under one dictatorship and then another. These ultimately are the voices that matter.
The Anarchist Front has issued various statements and pieces denouncing the regime and Imperial aggresion, calling for, amongst other things, the immediate cessation of attacks and the full protection of civilians under international humanitraian laws. They have raise the issue of the threat of mass execution of detainees from the January 2026 protests and even in the midst of everything going on, have taken time to highlight International Womens’ Day.
Decolonize Anarchism has issued polemics, rejecting the oppressive hand of any state and celebrating Irans revolutionary peoples. “This moment belongs to those who resisted in the streets, in the factories, in the classrooms, in the prisons. It belongs to the executed, the tortured, the disappeared. [It belongs] to the workers who struck, the women murdered for defiance, the youth who faced bullets with bare hands. Their memory lives in every rupture in authoritarian power.” They have subsequently been targets of a barrage of hostility from Imperialists and Regime supporters both by people who cannot read and have only simple binaries with which to understand the world.
The Kurdish Anarchist Forum (KAF) continue to share opinion pieces from comrades, one noting the perceived silence and inaction of the wider Anarchist community around the world and calling for a greater antimiliterist voice, another confronting the organisational failings which have brought Iran to this point “… the current crisis lies in the growing power of counter-revolutionary forces that exploit the war to advance their own agendas — reshaping society along authoritarian ideological lines, normalizing violence, and paving the way for a renewed cycle of despotism — all amid the absence of cohesive and unified revolutionary forces. At the same time, we are witnessing behavioral and political fragmentation within the opposition, with some factions choosing to endorse the war or actively participate in it by supporting one of its parties, thereby deepening the political and moral crisis”
[WIP LIST OF STATEMENTS AND ARTICLES FROM SWANA AND INTERNATIONAL]
A Short Reflection on War.
I’m was trying to work on a piece about the last atrocity when this next one began. I don’t speak on behalf of any organisation I am with. I don’t share my stream of conscious ramble (mildly collated and organised) with the attitude that my thoughts are particularly important. I am not an academic with lifetime of study of the subject, I’m not an author with the capacity to craft my words to plead and influence. I am just another anarchist sharing an opinion from distant safety. As I trying to reduce this text from 10,000 words to something more manageable (I failed), I watch a briefing with SoW Hegeseth. He stands there with the glee of a child as he states they will be “Flying over their capital. Death and destruction from the sky all day long.” It stopped me mid sentance. I’ve heard this bellicose rhetoric before.
It reminds me of the first moments I found my anti-militerism. Watching in numbness the live broadcasts over the Baghdad during the ‘shock and awe’ campaign. A car sped along the road only to disappear, engulfed in a blur of death. A weapon produced in Britain to the tune of hundreds of thousands, used to snuff out some random lives, for nothing.
For my generation war was a video game, an action movie and dopamine kick. Liveleak footage of absolute brutality, pouring out over the internet, desensitised and numb. Distanced from the truth of war “peace through superior firepower” actually meant. I was very much another working class conscript in the war for our minds, all too happy to believe in the adventurism and nobility of the armed forces. Programmed to believe with every ounce that the good guys, that’s us, would always win. Sure our boys would be emotional scarred, but with grit and brotherhood, we’ll save the day and the world. Fuck, I was ready to sign up and drive tanks a few months before this, though thankfully, my principles got in the way and I refused to lie my way through an oath of allegiance to the Queen.
A week later I would read Robert Fisk’s piece in The Independent.
“It was an outrage, an obscenity. The severed hand on the metal door, the swamp of blood and mud across the road, the human brains inside a garage, the incinerated, skeletal remains of an Iraqi mother and her three small children in their still-smouldering car…. Who dares call this ‘collateral damage’? ”
Fisk’s relative merit as a journalist aside, the report, and that of many others, chilled me to the core. As the Eternal War filled our screens, so did the atrocities and the unrelenting waves of pain we had allowed to happen in our name. The best we could do was march and pat ourselves on the back, and I hadn’t even done that. I had been a fool. While I didn’t care much for the obvious lies about Weapons of Mass Destruction, I knew Iraqis, Iranians, and Kurdish people who had suffered under Saddam, and I believed that intervention was needed. If a war to remove him was needed then sure, I’d rather it was some fantastical notion of the UN Peacekeeping forces I held at the time, but heck, I was positive our boys were professionals, diligent, and driven by a sense of justice. I was wrong.
The Iraq Body Count recorded 6,700 civilian deaths as a result of action taken by US led forces during the ‘invasion phase,’ including a shock-and-awe bombing campaign. 14,007 in year one. 112,017 – 122,438 civilian deaths from violence between March 2003 and March 2013. It means nothing to no one but myself but I will always hold it against myself that I supported that war. Twenty years later and despite what has been said about my solidarity with the peoples of Rojava, Ukraine, Palestine, Myanmar and so on in their conflict with Imperialist invasions, Juntas, and Genocidal despots, I am and always will be deeply entrenched in opposition to war. Not this or that war, but war.
I look to the terrifying spectacle the American state is delighted in and shudder to my core. Tehran has a population density of 12,052/km2.To give you an idea, London’s is 5,782/km2. In this dense and ancient city, there is no such thing as “precision strikes” and it’s becoming more and more evident that no such thing is even being attempted with footage of vast explosions pouring forth. Schools, hospitals, homes, and much needed infrastructure, little more than “collateral damage” and “victims of conflict” to these warhawks, who uniformly blame Iran, mostly for just existing it seems. On Wednesday they destroyed the Red Crescent headquarters, you could not have the intent made any clearer. None of the states involved are concerned with peace, but vengeance politics to maintain antagonism with the regional threats to their hegemony. I suppose a lasting peace for the people of Iran is too “woke”.
To the militant mind, blood deserves blood, an endless cut through history as authoritarians, states, and fanatics commit atrocity after atrocity. The Sabra and Shatila massacre in response to the Damour massacre in response to the Karantina massacre. Vengeance politics leading to endless reprisals and it’s almost always the innocent peoples of some community, deemed ontologically evil by the collective rational of men possessed with self-interest, who suffer.
Away from such atrocities you have the maximalism that excuses military actions out of scale with any tactical and strategic necessity and beyond even the norms of war, mass murder of those who don’t even pose a threat. No warning and no aid rendered. “War crime!” is a term people often turn to, with the same tired manner as appeals to the “Constitution” or some other document: Written by them, ignored by them, used by them when it suits”. The “laws of war”, an array of often contradictory texts are nothing more than a framework in which states elect to operate within when slaughter their working class.
“We’re at war” the vultures cry. It’s the excuse for any action their side takes. Whether it’s tanks rolling over unarmed Palestinians, Drones flying into hotels in Bahrain, unarmed Russians being turned into pink mist by a DJI Mavic, a grenade and some gaffer tape. “He was the enemy, fuck him”. Every action acceptable before the drumhead of your compatriot’s popular opinion.
So many otherwise right-minded people get joy from watching footage of IDF conscripts getting domed by Hamas. “They are colonial settlers, fuck ’em”. Dare to feel bad for the poor basterd and it’s the same machismo that drives the American, Isreali and Iranian industries of death which responds. “Stop being a pussy”. In multiple groups, anarchist and “leftist” comrades, insurrectionaries, revolutionaries, academics and otherwise gawk at the spectacle. Social media posts from “War Monitor” and “Popular Front” sit side by side with footage from the Iranian and American states. Does life mean so little? I’m no better, I share footage too. “Holy shit have you seen this?”, I convince myself it’s a mere horror which drives me. I don’t know that is always the case, I’ve felt the grim voyeuristic creep into these past few years of endless drone footage and it distrubs me deeply.
I hope I/we can do better. I hope we share their words and postive actions more than we do dramatic footage of great pain. I hope that we share their words whether they reflect ours or not. I hope we listen. I hope they find a way to build bastions of solidarity and community from the devastation they have been thrown into so recklessly, and that the multitude of communities, cohorts, organisations, and peoples can find a way to a bright future built together despite how it started. It wont be any “Anarchistic vision” but hopefully something that provides for liberty, autonomy, and a genuine democractic existance to flourish. I hope if they call for aid we provide it.
I worry that we are already too late. Our systematic apathy to the ever swelling tumour of fascism in the halls of governance has taken us to this next phase of it’s inevitable navigation. How long will we collectively turn a tired eye to imperialist endeavours, genocides, and profiteering “fury”. We are failing and innocent people around the world are being brutally murdered because of it. How much longer will we remain to inactive, entrenched in petty disputes as our would-be masters slaughter the working class, directly and by proxy, in distant lands in our name?
If you are a person of action. Act. If you’re in a union, swing it into a response. If you’re an academic, write the papers, make the case. If you are a creative, make the materials that share the voice of the revolutionary peoples and of peace. Speak up in your locality, in your spaces, and in your region.
If you have capacity to lend material aid in the coming days, do.
Listen out for what the comrades in Iran call for, amplify them, and respond.
Solidarity with the revolutionary peoples of Iran.
Jin, Jîyan, Azadî
Peter Ó’Máille
