When the Trump war began, I predicted Iran would come out on top. With the US media abandoning independence to echo the Trump regime and Israeli narratives, it's important to clarify the stakes. Iran's growing influence is shifting the balance of power as expected; the change I anticipated is now evident.
If you're unfamiliar, here's a brief update. Many in the American Empire struggle with losing control over information. As trusted media disappear, conspiracies surge. While some suggest societal collapse, most distract.
Trump's war is illegal and managed by Israel, sharing the goal of distracting from both leaders' corruption, criminal backgrounds, and legal troubles. Netanyahu needs war to halt his criminal trial. Trump faces mass accusations of corruption, while the slow release of Epstein files proceeds despite attempts to block them, promising a lifetime behind bars.
Netanyahu used this bait to convince Trump to attack Iran. Though both are corrupt leaders who have obtained power in their countries, Netanyahu is smarter than Trump and benefits from over a century of bizarre Zionist backing, which both created and now controls Israel. The Zionist movement arose among European Jews in response to centuries of oppression, culminating in the German genocide of WWII. Guilt over that genocide led to acceptance of the Zionist demand for a Jewish state.
Trump, of course, has no historical justification, real or fabricated. He is simply a con artist trained as such, buffered with serious family wealth, mostly criminal from his father, and a lifetime of failed businesses and theft. He is driven by greed, megalomania, and pathological narcissism, radicalized by senile dementia. Trump is known by anyone who has worked with him, from teachers on, as ignorant and amazingly stupid. He has the trained cunning of a con artist and the ability to lie without regard, focusing on what his marks desire. Everyone is a mark to Trump as he has no friends who are not using him. With age and senility, noted in his family history, he fades in and out of delusions, but has surrounded himself with similarly damaged individuals willing to do anything for wealth and power.
The losers in this historical tale of centuries of hate and oppression are the Palestinian population of the Ottoman Empire, inheritors of the Byzantine or Eastern Mediterranean lands once ruled by Rome. Empires rely on centralized control, but when decline sets in, and they break apart, the ethnic groups within often have no experience governing their own regions. Centuries of conflict and conquest, along with cultural changes, shape new countries and smaller empires.
The Middle Eastern region under original Roman rule retained imperial forms until the early 20th century, while Europe became 'modern' and colonialist, using technology and industrialization to dominate other regions of the planet for resources and assets. The radical economics of capitalism demanded vast assets and resources, specifically energy sources, in the late 19th century, resulting in 50 years of warfare in the first half of the 20th century and 75 years of warfare around the Middle East's oil fields thereafter, continuing to the present.
An important aspect of the Middle East's long history, largely unknown to modern populations, is the region's tentative nature as a whole, with its "nations" often defined by shifting borders. While the region's cultures are among the oldest on the planet, the modern nations have very little history, except for Iran (Persia) and Egypt. These states were created arbitrarily based on European colonial areas of influence following World War I, and had little to do with cultural or ethnic groups beyond powerful clans or families with connections to the colonial administrators, split between England and France.
The absence of European-style kingdoms or states has made it difficult for Middle Eastern populations to form recognizable nation-states on the Western model. This also made it possible for the European winners of WWI to give away a significant piece of Palestine to the European Jews (Ashkenazim) to solve a historical problem and, later, to soothe the consciences of Europe over the Jewish Holocaust in WWII.
The cause of this confusion was the organizational structure of the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium), which was carried over to the Ottoman Turk and Islamic form of that empire. The diverse populations, composed of multiple religions and cultures, were administered not by geography but by religious community or "millet".
Palestinians, as a prime example, were not citizens of Palestine but of their religion and residents of the district of Jerusalem. Ottoman courts addressed only disputes between individuals of different religions; all other administrative matters were handled by the religious leaders of their respective millets, such as the Jewish, Christian, or Islamic denominations.
Because of this, all wars in the Middle East are religious wars, as families long identified themselves and their communities by their religion. Iran has a far older culture, with several thousand years of history, depending on how you define the different eras of Persian history, so it has a stronger cultural and geographic identity, as do the Egyptians.
While the European Jewish population, who became Zionist and demanded a Jewish state, were descendants of the Palestinian population but had married European women over the centuries in their migrations, they demanded a European nation-state, and the Roman and Ottoman millet system was alien to them. They demanded a sovereign geographic state and claimed that the parts of Palestine they were allowed to settle in were "vacant" land, since their cousin population did not recognize those lands as a "state".
In the historical context, this is a ridiculous statement, but it was allowed to stand as the population of the Palestinian region (the old Roman Province) had no identity but their religious identity in the millet system. The Ottoman-ruled communities had lived together for centuries, and the system worked fairly equitably. We may want to try that again (see below).
After more than a hundred years of internal propaganda, many members of the modern Israeli population maintain that Israel was empty, as the Palestinian population had no modern-style residency status. This is absurd, but it is the consequence of historical distortions and willful ignorance.
The Zionist Israelis remaining in Israel, while the non-Zionists have and are leaving because they are uncomfortable with Zionist dogma, active genocide against the existing Islamic Palestinians, and war against all surrounding peoples, have made Israel a radical and criminal state. This ignores the centuries of Byzantine and Ottoman rule that maintained a tradition of communal harmony.
The capitalist-driven dominance of planetary destruction via fossil fuels and infinite growth has destroyed that and is destroying the modern civilization of which we are a part. We are facing the very real possibility that Trump and Netanyahu's war will trigger that inevitable collapse a decade or so earlier than expected.
Looking to the future, we may discover that the Roman and Ottoman millet system can be used not to manage a planetary society of religions, but rather to escape political and social authoritarianism. Rather than problematic large nation-states, it is a way to coordinate planetary standards among many diverse, migratory social communities that do not necessarily live in the same geographic areas.
But first, we need to mediate the collapse of our existing civilization to prevent our annihilation. Our existing governmental systems appear to be totally useless for that. We can start by defining a reasonable standard of sanity to control who can be involved in the rules of our cultures.
Anyone involved in starting wars to divert attention from corruption needs to be removed. Perhaps Iran will help accomplish that.
