Arms fairs and Gaza, Greenland, Iran, info hegemony and a violently dying US empire

On Thursday I’ll join protestors in Farnborough, UK, where an arms fair – let that cuddly phrase sink in a moment: an arms fair … –  will open to showcase to buyers around the globe the current state of the art in death technology. Details here.

I had thought to then motor up to London for the first big Palestine March of 2026. Turns out I’d misread date and venue. The march is not this Saturday but next, January 31st, and starts not at Embankment but Russell Square. Details here.

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Two days ago in Europe psychoanalysed I posted a satirical right wing take on Europe’s craven disarray. While I enjoyed it immensely – a UK crashing out of the EU “to take back control”, only to discover it’s forgotten how to drive … France as the chain-smoking aunt in denial she’s been unemployed for decades – I made sure to add a footnote on “the limits of any perspective, even one as witty and insightful as this, which is blind to class and empire”.

Blind, consequently, to Europe’s surrender of sovereignty to Washington while hollowing out its manufacturing capacity for the short term gain of rentier  capital. For a less amusing but more penetrating grasp of Europe’s plight, written prior to but illuminating its pathetic responses to US designs on Greenland, see my post last July, Road to WW3. Part 3: capturing minds.

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After years of foot-dragging – on the pedantic ground that such as Egypt and Libya are in Africa – I’ll henceforth eschew ‘Middle East’ in favour of ‘Western Asia’. I don’t say ‘Londonderry’ for Derry, or ‘Northern Ireland’ for the occupied Six Counties. So why use so blatantly Eurocentric a term for a region plundered by the white man since the fall of the Ottomans? Absent some third option, already in circulation and combining postcolonial correctness with geographic accuracy, Western Asia it is. ¹

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I speak of a long record of secret service involvement in protests sold as organic by the most powerful propaganda machine the world has known. But mention must be made of how the CIA, ever evolving in sophistication and over exposed by the bloody excesses of Operation Condor, saw plausible deniability in NGO cut-outs like National Endowment for Democracy, human rights groups which uncritically accept State Department dollars, and such private funders as Soros and the Gates Foundation.

CIA/Mossad fingerprints are all over this – footnote 3

I’ll post on Greenland soon. Ditto, apropos but not confined to the failed colour revolution in Iran, on the subject, hugely significant and hugely neglected, of how the US empire captures the information space of any country – i.e. almost all barring China, Russia and DPRK – which does not vigorously prevent it. Westerners who believe they enjoy democracy and free press ² damn as repressive the few states which operate informational controls and cultural safeguards; not just from the trojan horses identified in the previous paragraph but from wider erosions wrought by icons of soft power from Netflix, Amazon and Google ³ to Clooney, Coca Cola and Swift. I’ll be arguing, pace  Brian Berletic, that securing their information space is vital, and that China and Russia must do more, if only out of enlightened self interest, to share their own successes with the global south at large.

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Having featured half a dozen videos in as many days on Iran, I’m loath to ask readers to spend thirty-five minutes on another.  If you have time, great; you won’t be disappointed. If not, here’s a bullet summary:

• It’s the only one to platform an Iranian. I’ve long both respected and liked University of Tehran’s Professor Mohammad Marandi. He’s intelligent, informed and has an affability not to be mistaken, as his tenacity and skills in adversarial dialogue with such as Piers Morgan attest, for weakness. I confess I went off him after Syria’s fall thirteen months ago. (As I did others, notably Scott Ritter and Pepe Escobar. I can forgive wishful thinking more readily than failure to own an error of such magnitude.) But he’s done penance in the severe form of a year long banishment from these hallowed pages, and may now consider himself rehabilitated.
• He makes a point also made by Alastair Crooke, but omitted in my summaries. Prior to the violence led by armed men in black inside the country, defeated by the neutralising of Starlink, the rial came under sustained attack from currency traders in the Emirates. Its consequent depreciation by some thirty percent devastated small businesses already crippled by the decades of sanctions. But the ‘bazaaris’ who took to the streets with their grievances soon joined bigger demonstrations against the terrorists and in support of the government. The CIA instigated currency raid was calculated to sow chaos and dissent to be exploited by armed, trained and co-ordinated killers under outside direction. It failed but we can, and Iran must, expect more of the same.
•  Because he speaks from within the country, the professor offers more detail than any of the other pundits I’ve featured on the evidence for CIA and Mossad involvement.

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Finally for today, here’s a second video, this one just shy of half an hour. It features three men – four if we include Danny Haiphong, who keeps his own interventions brief – of rare intelligence, and offering with great perceptiveness their understanding of where the world is heading given the threat to global peace and prosperity from what I have called a US oligarchy masquerading as a democracy and determined at all costs, up to and including thermonuclear Armageddon, to shore up its weakening but still murderously powerful grip on the planet.

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1. Truth be told, geographical inaccuracy wasn’t my real objection to ‘Western Asia’. I dislike the fixations and virtue-signalling of terminological correctness, with their prioritising the policing of words and ideas over deeds and materialist analysis. But there’s only so far I  can push this without being asked if it’s OK to speak – as a white guy and straight – of “niggers” and “queers”. It isn’t.
2. On the myth of a free press in the West I’ve posted here and here and here. On that of Western democracy, as opposed to corporate oligarchy, here for the umpteenth time is a (lightly abridged) extract from Chris Hedges’ essay, Let’s stop pretending America is a functioning democracy:

   Those who wrote trade deals to profit from underemployment of U.S. workers and sweatshop labor overseas are omnipotent. The insurance and pharmaceutical industries that run healthcare for profit are omnipotent. The intelligence agencies that spy on the public are omnipotent. The courts that reinterpret laws to excuse corporate crimes are omnipotent.

   Politics is a tawdry carnival act where a constant jockeying by the ruling class dominates the news. The real business of ruling is hidden, carried out by corporate lobbyists who write the legislation, banks that loot the Treasury, the war industry and an oligarchy that determines who gets elected and who does not. It is impossible to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs, the fossil fuel industry or Raytheon, no matter which party is in office.

3. Such cultural imperialism benefits massively from a legacy of the British Empire from which Washington learned so much. I mean of course the English language as global lingua franca.