“The planet is hostage to a death cult”

So said Pepe Escobar yesterday, speaking to Nima Alkhorshid at Dialogue Works. But which is the death cult? Is it the ethno-supremacist regime, already mid-genocide and now embarked on what Nuremberg called “the supreme crime” of waging aggressive war; one in this case capable – indeed, for said regime the entire point since no other road leads to its long term survival in ethno-supremacist form – of going global?

Or a waning hence terrifying globe-spanning empire, latest and last executor of five centuries of Western rule of the planet, its Beltway no less in the grip of a fanatical caste – wedded to a toxic doctrine of exceptionalism and incapable, psychologically or materially, of accepting a multi-polar world – than its Zionist client?

All my life Westerners, me included, have been miseducated on Israel. For the why of that, look beyond the power, real but limited, of “The Lobby”. ¹ Try my 2019 review of Israel: a beachhead in the middle east, and 2024 posts on US Neocons & Israel’s far Right. 

As to the how of that miseducation, I offer three explainers. One is that most Westerners, even on the Left and in circles horrified by Israel’s abuses, remain blind to the reality of imperialism, so fail to see the role of the colonial settler state in controlling an oil rich and geostrategically pivotal Middle East for a US underwriter and its junior partners across the West. A second is that no section of our corporate media, despite and even because the ‘quality’ wings do come through for us on matters not crucial to power, is systemically capable of speaking truthfully on matters which cut to the heart of class rule and empire. A third is the decades of bankable good will (an account now tipping, alarmingly for Israeli propagandists, into the red) toward a people which on a distant continent endured centuries of hatred culminating in a Holocaust.

In truth the death cult Pepe refers to is on the one hand a huge majority of Israelis …

Israel’s most prominent liberal newspaper, June 4 2025

… on the other the dominant wing of the US ruling class. ² To what extent its current figurehead is in bed with the crazies straddling both parties of the duopoly masquerading as a democracy, and to what extent their prisoner, is an entirely secondary question. For the US deep state – its control of the region violently set back by the 1979 fall of the puppet Shah – regime change in Iran has for decades been the jewel in the crown of its plans to set the Middle East ablaze, and in the ashes create a new order answerable to Washington. ³

If Israel is the mad dog, the madman holding the leash is Uncle Sam. ⁴

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1. As Brian Berletic said in the context of last October’s missile exchanges:

   People tell me Israel controls the US. When I ask how, they tell me AIPAC. But the arms industry spends far more. So do the Banks, Big Pharma, Big Agriculture. A cartel of industries fund think tanks producing papers which become policies and bills that the media sell to the American people. That’s how it works and the Israel lobbyists are a tiny fraction of that. if Israel truly controlled the US, all its forces would be in the Middle East. But they’re also in Ukraine and South Asia because the US is waging proxy war in all three.

2. For reasons discussed yesterday, US-groomed quislings in Berlin and Canberra, London, Ottawa, Paris and the rest will do and say whatever Washington requires of them.
3. If Iran was jewel in the crown of Neocon plans to reshape the Middle East, as revealed in 2003 to General Wesley Clark, the fall of Damascus was vital preparation. Thanks to the final success of regime change there, cheered on by well meaning dupes, not only is that once secular state now ruled by Islamist terror. The US-Israeli air strikes which began on Friday were possible because F-35s fly with impunity though Syrian air space and, since the weight of those huge bunker-buster JDAMs gobbles up juice, were almost certainly refuelled mid-flight in the same.
4. A Brookings Institution paper in 2009 – Which Path to Persia? – makes detailed and remarkably candid proposals as to how to roll back the Iranian Revolution. The title of Chapter 5? Leave it to Bibi: Allowing or Encouraging an Israeli Military Strike. In the highly recommended twenty minute podcast at the end of this post, Brian Berletic quotes the chapter at some length. Aside from his measured sobriety, and rejection of the popular myth – advanced not just by antisemites but by otherwise sound commentators like John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs – that Israel rules the USA, what makes Brian a stand-out is his attention to empire voices in the semi privacy of think-tank conversations few will notice, and pairing of the same with later events given a very different spin for the wider populace.