“Oh, how the phrase “Israel is an ethno state” has become the mantra of those eager to cast Israel as something uniquely sinister. Repeated like a prayer by critics who seem to believe they’ve unearthed some profound revelation, it’s wielded as though it’s an indictment rather than the simplest, most self-evident fact…. This isn’t some aberration. It’s the rule, not the exception. Most nations are built this way.”

I’ve seen this line plenty of times. Ethnostates are normal so there’s no reason to be alarmed. Israel really is just like Japan, Poland, or various other countries we all see as ordinary. On some level this is not entirely wrong. It is certainly true that many countries have ethno-centric conceptions of nationality, and ethnic supremacism is unfortunately not hard to find. However, one fundamental aspect missed, is that Israel genuinely is far more extreme than most people realize. Israel is not “Just like Poland” because having citizenship or immigration policies similar to Poland would be exceptionally radical and unpresented in the history of Israel. Polish citizenship laws are far to the left of even liberal and left-wing political parties in Israel.

This may sound a bit shocking, but let’s do a comparison between Israel and Poland to see the difference.

Israeli citizenship law

Under the Israeli law of return, any Jew in the world (either a convert, or born to a Jewish mother) can immigrate to Israel and acquire citizenship. This law is very specifically catered to make sure that Jews cannot easily pass on citizenship to non-Jews To quote

“The Law of Return is meant to open the door for Jews; it is not meant to create a shortcut for non-Jewish children. Letting children of Law of Return immigrants jump automatically to citizenship, he wrote, would essentially expand the Law of Return beyond what the Knesset had ever intended for it.”

“Arab-Israelis” (or Palestinians with Israeli citizenship) have unique restrictions on their ability to pass on citizenship. Per the “Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law” It is specifically barred for an Arab-Israeli to pass citizenship to their spouse or children if they are from Gaza or the West Bank. To quote

“The law, passed July 31, 2003 prohibits Palestinian spouses from obtaining citizenship, permanent residency and temporary residency status in Israel by marriage to an Israeli citizen, a process referred to as “family reunification.” The provision also applies to children from the territories (West Bank and Gaza) who wish to live with an Israeli Arab parent”

It should be noted that this restriction functionally applies exclusively to non-Jews. A Jew born in the West Bank (in any of the various illegal settlements) would have 0 issue obtaining Israeli nationality. The distinguishing factor is entirely the ethno-religious group you belong to.

To give a specific case of this, Basel al-Qur’an was a Palestinian born in Gaza, his mother was an (Arab) Israeli national, and he had been living in Israel proper for almost two decades, married to an Israeli citizen with Israeli children. He was eventually deported in 2025 (and later killed by an Israeli airstrike). You can keep every other fact the same, and there would be a different outcome just by changing the ethnicity of his mother. If she was Jewish, he would’ve been a citizen, and would never be deported in the first place. This type of restriction would be extremely nonsensical in the case of Poland. Polish citizenship is automatically given If your parent has Polish nationality. It doesn’t matter if either of them is not ethnically Polish, as there simply is no extra ethnic requirement imposed. It’s legitimately far easier for a Palestinian to acquire Polish citizenship, than for a Palestinian born in Israel-proper (but expelled by the IDF) to get Israeli citizenship. In Israel, non-Jews don’t get automatic citizenship even if their parent was a Jew who emigrated via the law of return, it really is that restrictive.

Poland does have citizenship by descent (like Israel has for Jews) which some people use to point out a similarity, but that’s a largely obfuscatory point. Israel is not unique for offering citizenship by descent (note that by descent they just mean any Jewish person in the world, even those who have 0 ancestry in historic Palestine) but rather, for the way that it intentionally seeks to exclude certain groups (ie, non-Jews). Israeli citizenship law is extremely specific on making sure would-be citizens are Jewish, to ensure the “Jewish character” of Israel is not diluted. Poland (a famously homogenous and conservative country) has no such comparable restriction on ethno-religious background. For Poland to be comparable to Israel, they would have to only offer citizenship to ethnic Poles, and specifically prevent non-Poles from immigrating and acquiring citizenship. This of course isn’t the case. In 2024 for instance, around 16k people acquired Polish citizenship, about half of them Ukrainian refugees. Poland obviously doesn’t have much immigration, but of the ones that do, very few of them are actually getting citizenship due to Polish heritage. To give perhaps a more surprising example, there’s a Nigerian-born immigrant (John Godson) who moved to Poland in 1993, got citizenship in 2001, and later became involved in Polish politics as a conservative MP (winning elections in 2008 and 2010). There’s a Zambian immigrant who also became a parliamentarian in Poland. These people very obviously have 0 heritage in Poland whatsoever, yet all of this was still possible (over 20 years ago as well).

Just try to imagine a story like this happening in Israel. A non-Jew immigrating to the country and becoming an elected politician? It’s simply not conceivable. This would never be allowed to happen, especially if that “foreigner” was a Palestinian with generations of history inside Israeli-occupied land. Essentially 100% of the immigrants Israel naturalizes each year are ethnic or religious Jews coming via the law of return. It would be unthinkable for Israel to allow even a small percentage of non-Jews to immigrate and acquire Israeli citizenship on a regular basis. Israel has increased foreign labor plenty, but giving citizenship isn’t even a consideration, especially for Palestinian laborers. Palestinians born in Gaza, the West Bank, or refugee camps abroad, can simply never acquire Israeli citizenship. There is nothing they can do (even converting to Judaism isn’t a feasible option) an entire ethnic group is more or less specifically excluded. It should be emphasized once more that Poland clearly is not some hyper-tolerant multiracial project. It’s very ethnically homogenous, and is notoriously xenophobic, but this all goes to show just how extreme Israel actually is. Even Poland wouldn’t dare to have citizenship laws as ethnically-exclusive as Israel. Israel is fairly unique in this regard. Virtually all Israeli Jews would consider it an existential threat to have immigration laws as “radical” and “liberal” as Japan or Poland.

Even explicitly xenophobic political movements, such Germany’s AFD are considerably less ethno-nationalist than Israeli liberal and “left” parties. The AFD is rabidly anti-migrant and uses plenty of far-right nationalist rhetoric. They were under federal surveillance for suspected extremism, and seen as so radical that even other right-wing parties in the EU are hesitant to work with them. Yet despite this, even they haven’t gone as far to propose limiting citizenship to ethnic Germans. That was somehow a line too far. (Comically, the leader of the AFD is married to a Sri Lankan immigrant with Swiss citizenship). One could argue that they are just being conciliatory. Maybe the AFD actually is far more extreme, but just won’t say so publicly in order to gain more support. This could be true, but it still points to an important distinction. The fact that they would be concerned about it leading to less support, indicates that overt and explicit racism is still somewhat of a social taboo (however thin and insincere). There’s a reason why right-wing parties love having the token minority they can point to. The whole point of “masking” in the first place is to obscure your more extreme beliefs

Israeli politicians however, don’t even have to do the pretending. There’s no need for token Palestinians and virtue signals because there’s no societal taboo about anti-Arab racism in the first place. Every liberal Zionist loves to claim that “Arab-Israelis” (48 Palestinians) are equal like anyone else, but we can all see that’s ridiculous. Both inside and outside of Israel, we all know that your ethnicity is more important than whatever nationality you happen to hold. During the 2nd intifada in 2001, there was a case of an Israeli bus driver who killed 8 other Israelis in a ramming attack. That might sound like a weird story, because it obviously wasn’t described that way. The NYT article was titled “Arab Drives Bus Into Crowd, Killing 8 Israelis”. You are charged with terrorism as a Palestinian, and paraded as an “Israeli” when it’s time to virtue signal about equality. The Israeli government has essentially qualified this into law and now seeks to strip Israeli citizenship from Palestinians convicted of “terrorism”. If you want to guess how many Israeli Jews are at risk of having their citizenship being revoked, I’m sure you can guess.

On paper, “Arab-Israelis” should be an incredibly important bloc. They are 20% of the population and apparently have equal rights to any Jew. As a comparison, Black people are only 13% of the U.S. population, and are an incredibly important bloc for (specifically democratic) politicians to win over. If a Democrat doesn’t win over a majority of black voters, they are essentially a non-contender. Of course, this is disingenuous and cynical, but that makes it even more surprising that Israeli politicians don’t even bother to try and cynically court Arab voters. It’s simply not a serious consideration. Israeli politics is principally about resolving inter-Jewish disputes, Arabs need not be mentioned. Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz (both anti-Bibi politicians, who have now formed a coalition) have openly said they don’t want to work with Arab parties, as it would hurt them politically. Ra’am (one of the main Arab parties) in particular is about the most sheepish “Arab” movement you could imagine. Their leader (Mansour Abbas) has desperately sought collaboration with Jewish supremacists his entire career. He offered to work with Netanyahu, has openly declared that Israel will remain a Jewish ethnostate, and rejected apartheid label for Israel. In 2022, he was even in a coalition with Naftali Bennet, an openly genocidal racist who has proudly said he’s “killed a lot of Arabs”. Any fascist movement would be overjoyed to have collaborators this servile and impotent, yet it remains insufficient for the majority of Israeli political parties.

Ethnostates don’t exist “naturally”

As a final point, we should understand that all of this is in the context of an engineered demographic context. The Zionist movement explicitly sought to turn the land of Palestine into their own, and have achieved this with an ongoing policy of expulsion and genocide. Discourse is flattened when the ethnic character of Israel is discussed as just a random historical quirk, and not the result of an ongoing supremacist project. There are certainly many countries that have acquired their current homogeneity via mass violence, Israel is not specially unique in that regard, but even on that point, Israel does stand out for the continued persistence of said repression. Israel is the world’s least consolidated settler-state that has engaged in constant occupation and counter-insurgency in order to uphold its Jewish character. Israel is fairly unique because of the statelessness they created, and the continued violence necessary to uphold the status quo. Not many countries are actively fighting against the millions of refugees they created, but Israel is. Israel is not just another country with “Conservative” citizenship laws, but rather as one of the most radical ethno-supremacist projects still in existence.

My introduction to the concept of Oilpunk in the first place came from a piece by Kuwait-based German philosopher Botz-Bornstein. It’s titled Botzwana, and an in-depth look at Kuwait, from both a historical and aesthetic lens. I am reposting it here because (as you will see if you visit the original post) it is formatted in a rather “tedious” fashion to say the least. (I still recommend reading the original format, though it isn’t usable on mobile).

This is a very strange piece, but at the very least, I hope some find it as interesting as I did.

Kuwait Oilpunk

Some call it Petropunk, but I call it Oilpunk. No matter how you call it, Oilpunk is an idealized version of an oil-based society making use of brassy, visceral machines covered with oily grime. Bearded individuals drive through the digestive apparatus of the Oilpunk universe. Their superpowered vehicles never touch the ground, and their white clothes never get dirty. This place does indeed exist. Welcome to Kuwait.

In the 1980s, a science fiction sub-branch called Cyberpunk developed a cynical form of dystopianism by depicting the fusion of high technology and low life in post-industrial urban contexts. What started with William Gibson’s Neuromancer and novels by Bruce Sterling and Bruce Bethke became not only a literary genre but also an aesthetic code popularized by movies such as Blade Runner and The Matrix. The latter came along in greenish dark tones of dampened neon light and a material universe made of ironically displayed retro-futuristic items such as industrial ruins, disk telephones, and worn leather office chairs.

I do not find Blade Runner’s slummy urban landscapes in Tokyo’s glistening Times Square or in Berlin’s Sony Center (two places that are normally quoted as typical cyberpunk addresses), but in the district of Kuwait called Salmiya where I am currently living. Though rainy nights and humid sidewalks are absent (simply because there is neither rain nor sidewalks), there are many reasons why Megacity Kuwait should be seen as the noir version of the Middle East.

Nothing could be more opposed to the sterile New World atmosphere of Dubai, which is a “Disneyland with the death penalty.”(1) Nothing could be more opposed to the disastrous images that reach us from many other places in the Middle East either. In Salmiya, peoples’ existence transcends both the preppily optimistic and the grittily pessimistic because protagonists are too thrilled by their petro-dollar–enhanced boredom. The constellation covers more or less accurately the definition of cyberpunk. Salmiya is not a modern shopping center but the Arab version of Gibson’s imagined Tokyo–Chiba where gangs of nonchalant youths on drugs plough the area with their motorcycles. Just like Gibson’s Chiba, which is an international synthetic city built outside Tokyo in a dystopian Japan, Salmiya, located fifteen kilometers from Kuwait’s city center, has been created for expats after the damaged country’s liberation from invading Iraq.

The word punk suggests the articulation of an anarchic behavior of post-industrial youths. In cyberpunk it does not result in politically motivated counter-cultural actions, but rather in a consumer-oriented teenage anomie propelled by high-tech development, a phenomenon that was first observed in Japan. Cyberpunk can be defined as apolitical nihilism.

The shaded young males crisscrossing my neighborhood in the early morning hours are definitely technically well-equipped as they speed their Ferraris and Aston Martins and pile up their iPhones on restaurant tables (Kuwait has the highest rate of smartphone [jawal] use in the world). Like Gibson’s characters, they are fascinated with style and surfaces. Profundity is suspect in this postmodern universe: cyberpunk is pure attitude.

Knowledge is equally suspect. Like true punks, those Ferrari hipsters don’t need to know how to play the instruments they perform with; they simply go for the thrill of it.

And indeed, Salmiya provides plenty of thrills: gay people in SUVs hunting down young boys by the dozen; Philippine prostitutes in burkas; pink-lighted brothels in unassuming apartment blocks where you are led by following a white rabbit marathon rave parties in so-called “party apartments” out of which herds of niqabed women stream in the late morning hours. Or, if nothing helps, there is still the (XXX) down by Tannhäuser Gate.

In Blade Runner, Harrison Ford overhears the new Asian-European street patois while slurping his noodles at a grimy noodle stand. He understands that this is the language of the future. In Kuwait the affluent youth speaks a mixture of basic Americanized English and a local Gulf dialect that remains rather incomprehensible for people from most other Arab countries. Matrix-style leather coats have been exchanged for the impeccably white dishdasha, the traditional ankle-length robe worn by males all over the Gulf. The Orient of yesterday incorporates the Orient of today and vice versa.

(Blade Runner’s city could be anywhere from New York to London’s Canary Wharf. Salmiya has a similar feel of indistinct urbanism. And because it can be anything or nothing, it has little basis in reality.)

Instead of hacking into global computer networks, these cyberpunks are smoking the shisha (water pipe). What they share with other cyberpunks is the love of speed as well as the conviction that almost everything in this world can be easily and quickly accessed without much effort. Kuwaitis will not get wired to a computer, like Neo in The Matrix, to be programmed—​in an act of “extreme learning”—​into a Kung Fu master in a matter of seconds. Their patented approach is wasta, the famous “who you know” favoritism, which, just like “extreme learning,” can turn you into almost everything within seconds.

In one of these towers might sit a hacker discovering right now that all this is only an illusion. He will try to free us of our mental prison, but the doors are firmly locked by oil money. In reality, he is not telling us anything we didn’t know already. We simply don’t want to quit (think of The Matrix’s Cypher).

A few other things make Salmiya typically cyberpunk: the existence of towering, god-like mega-corporations (zaibatsu, in Gibson’s terms) by which humans are turned into dwarfs in most cyberpunk novels, and of which the oil-driven Kuwaiti economy is a cliché. Third, a punky “No Future” slogan lingers over the entire country because one day the oil will run out, and the exuberant lifestyle and hyperdoped economy cannot be sustained. Fourth, there is the already mentioned high-tech aspect: what could be more technologically advanced than a country that has to produce all of its water in factories?

In this world, technology thrives without having to face a “real world” ecological pessimism that could, once in a while, point out the dangers of misdirected technology. Cyberpunks are neither optimistic nor pessimistic but neutral. Garbage is brought into the desert, which means that it is swept under the Baudrillardian mega-map, which is supposed to cover, just like a carpet, the entirety of the real world.

Seven million tires are buried in Sulabiya, creating the world’s largest tire graveyard, which can even be seen from space. In the early 2010s, raw sewage had been funneled off into the sea right in the middle of the city for years because the maintenance and repair of the water purifying plant could not be guaranteed. In theory, Kuwait’s urban waste management could raise numerous questions about the government’s ability to ensure the proper disposal of thousands of tons of garbage to avoid risks taken on public safety.

The World Health Organization has declared Kuwait the tenth most polluted country in the world. But who would raise such questions when the garbage has been safely deposited underneath the map on which we are living, that is, when it has simply been brought out into the “desert of the real”? It is exactly here, at Bnaider in the desert, on the spooky premises of the former American military base that the Iraqi army had transformed into a neo-Gothic ruin, that we find a monument of Baudrillard. A lucid oilpunk wrote on a bunker:

Kuwait is a prime case of postmodernism. For example, there is no deductive link leading from traditional clothing to modern outfits: both are equal and coexist. Furthermore, an economy that values rent-seeking over industrial profit-making is post-capitalist but also, through the high degree of monopolization, neo-feudalist.

(Edited in afterward)

On February 28, 2026, Iran struck facilities in several Gulf countries, including Kuwait, using missiles and drones. For the first time since 1991, pillars of smoke rose again over Kuwait. As you read this, the war continues. Does this new situation signal the end of Oilpunk? Once the war is over, will we have to speak of a “post-Oilpunk” era, understanding Oilpunk as a cultural bracket spanning thirty-five years from 1991 to 2026? Or will there always be Oilpunks?

It’s too early to decide. On the right is a sound file of the call for prayer and sirens playing simultaneously.

A Flaneur in Salmiya.

This is the fifth point: Kuwait is cyberpunk because of the dystopian environment in which it is embedded. The sixth and probably most important point establishing Kuwait as a Middle Eastern cyberpunk enclave is its particular philosophy of urbanization. In 1970, there were still 113,400 shanty houses in Kuwait, and Salmiya was a fishing village with “stick architecture” made of mango poles and mangrove wood imported from Zanzibar. So were the twisted bows of ironwood used for the ribs of the booms that were “cut from special branches in the jungles of India.” (2) Development has been fast and sported a particularity. The real estate market is highly speculative, and buildings are not renovated but left to decay until they are ready for demolition and new buildings can be erected in their place. It takes thirty to forty years for a building to be so run down that brokers decide to have it replaced.

In the meantime, Asian workers—this third-world underclass representing the main workforce in the Gulf—populate these ruins, swing improvised electricity cables from house to house, insert makeshift cardboard windows, and fix shaky balcony railings. In the developing world, rural immigrants move into derelict old towns. In Kuwait, the old town was demolished in the 1950s, and poor immigrants moved into abandoned houses from the 1980s. They also took over former luxury malls. (3) As a result, urban subdivisions become less distinct: the old exists next to the new, and the destitute next to the well-heeled.

Like in Blade Runner’s Los Angeles, immigrants represent seventy percent of the population. In the homes of these immigrants, we might find a dust-covered Model 500 disk telephone or a Matrix-style chafed leather office chair; or a typed carbon sheet, or perhaps even dot-matrix printing paper. Right next to these slums stand generic gilded luxury apartment blocks, complete with a pink pimp sofa in the lobby and a mat-black McLaren blocking the entrance. The fusion of the fragrance of Boss aftershave with the stench of overflowing garbage bins is unique to Salmiya. No isolated barrios or favelas like in South America, but perfect cohabitation. Social borders are floating, like a scent.

Like in film noir, various sources might tell stories that contradict one another, but nobody will bother to resolve them. The narrative strategy of film noir is based on juxtaposition, misinformation, and incompleteness. Instead of providing clarity, film noir disassembles.

Very early, Kuwait opted against the concept of gated communities, those naked embodiments of colonial continuity. Salmiya is the perfect archetype of postmodern spacing determined by the fusion of levels, discontinuous signifiers, and the explosion of boundaries. While abstract Dubai is eagerly investing in a distant future by building a functional Disneyland in the form of a city, and while a great deal of the “third world” still emanates concrete elements of its colonial past, Salmiya decided upon the urban model of cyberpunk, which is virtual. Salmiya’s prototype is that of a benign but anarchic society in which the real has been brought “out there,” safely buried in the desert.

(The other day I saw the head of a live cheetah hanging out of a Maserati’s window. Was that actually a real one or an android?)

In 1983, French sociologist Gilles Lipovetsky wrote that “casual apathy [acts as] a rampart against bursts of religiosity.” His theory cannot be directly applied to Salmiya.

Chiba City blues—Salmiya blues. The early fajr prayer calls, simultaneously issued from all-powerful speakers attached to the numerous minarets of Salmiya, shroud the lawless cityscape in an air of illusion. While Kuwait has embraced the postmodern discourse of radical ambiguity in the fields of advertising and public relations and offers economic conditions more ambiguous and virtualized than most other countries, a religious call for unequivocal truth, values, and knowledge is able to vibrate in the same space and at the same time. Or are these prayer calls, condensed and rhythmic like the Arabic language, merely another series of speculative signs, fluently passing into the virtual world of Slumiya—sorry, Salmiya—thus contributing to the total screen called “Kuwaiti Reality”?

The fascinating thing about Blade Runner is that it is neither entirely utopian nor entirely dystopian. Kuwait is exactly the same.

Incompleteness is important for yet another reason: in Kuwait, many urban projects remain unfinished. The phenomenon is so conspicuous that The Aesthetics of the Unfinished has attracted the interest of international researchers, who have put together lengthy documentations.

IAN FLEMING IN Q8

Here comes a little interlude. In 1960, the Kuwaiti government invited Ian Fleming, the British inventor of James Bond 007, to write a book about Kuwait. He stayed for three weeks because it was “an excellent way to get through November,” and wrote 140 pages. The government deemed the text too critical and condescending; it bought the rights and forbade publication. The only accessible copy in the world rests in the Fleming archive at Indiana University in Bloomington, where I went. It is forbidden to take photos or make photocopies.

When reading the book, it is difficult to understand why the text got banned. Fleming is not condescending but sympathetic, respectful, and generous—not even too witty. The government probably expected the outcome to be in line with Fleming’s other travelogues (published as Thrilling Cities), which included Hong Kong, Macau, Chicago, New York… Fleming is not hypocritical but honest; he simply sees Kuwait as it is. Kuwait might be the richest country in the world, but it is not “thrilling.” Tourism is not possible because there is nothing to see. The text is thus almost ironically called State of Excitement: Impressions of Kuwait.

Fleming begins his tale with a culture shock, but the dark descriptions last only a couple of pages. Once the exotic character of the country has been established, Fleming becomes more empathetic. He discovers the lighter and humane side of Kuwait and Kuwaitis and strongly appreciates certain aspects of traditional culture.

Mild mockery directed at a nation that had moved, within a decade, from medievalism to the welfare state—from Elizabeth I to Elizabeth II—was perhaps inevitable. Maybe this is what the sponsors found unpalatable. Nowhere does Fleming criticize the government. He approves of the necessary authoritarianism, which he calls “benevolent feudalism” and which he finds “truly democratic.” He even excuses the Kuwaiti version of slavery.

The opening pages depict the country in an almost dystopian, cyberpunk fashion. Gas flares—pillars of fire by night and pillars of smoke by day—billow like tethered dragons. The Shamal wind blows a lingering smell of petrol fumes from the oil fields into the city. An oily road edged with old tires and trash brings the writer through the desert from Ahmadi to the city, every day for three weeks. The desert is dotted with dead camels because of low rain. The Shatt-al-Arab pours millions of tons of mud into the Gulf. Fleming discovers the most garish casino east of Monte Carlo, a brothel, and a pornographic cinema showing films in color.

After ten days, the sight begins to clear and Fleming sees beauty. His accounts of people from diverse social strata whom he encounters are endearing and enlightening. He finds Kuwaitis honest and genuine. None of the doctors with whom he spoke had ever heard of a Kuwaiti committing suicide, which he finds impressive. Drugs, though current in Iran, are unknown in Kuwait. In the souq, gold bars are exposed without protection; they would last only one hour in London or five minutes in New York. For expats, life is so good that they find it hard to settle down again in England. Of course, Fleming has his opinions. He is against traditional clothing for hygienic reasons—the ’agal restricts the vision of drivers. He hates the canned juice that everybody is drinking. Aesthetics does not seem to have been considered when planning the new city.

At the end of the book, Fleming calls Kuwait a “happy ship.” This old English expression refers to a country where things are all right and where everybody can live in dignity. He also points out that it is a country not bothered by trade unionism or class friction.

More on Fleming’s insights will follow if you read on.

A Flaneur in Salmiya continued

Conventional (non-cyberpunk) science-fiction novels and films revel in the optimistic colonial submissions of Martians. Nothing like that can be seen in Salmiya. Kuwait resents neither colonial oppression nor racism, and Adolf Hitler is perceived by many of my students as a sort of rock star. So far, nobody could explain to me what it actually is that makes this man so attractive, but one eagerly insists that he is “inspiring” and a “role model,” or that he is simply “always on one’s mind.”

No, Kuwait has no colonial complex. The world realized this in 1982 when the Kuwaiti football team made it into the World Cup Finals. During the match against France, France scored a goal while some of the Kuwaiti players had stopped playing because they had heard a whistle.

The goal was initially awarded by the referee, who had not blown the whistle, which prompted Kuwait to walk off the pitch in protest. They eventually resumed playing after the intervention of Sheikh Fahd Al-Ahmed, the brother of the then-Emir, who walked onto the field and persuaded the referee to disallow the French goal. France won nevertheless, 4-1. (5)

The lack of a colonial complex contributes to the status of Salmiya as a virtual world where those civilizational clashes that we can observe in the real world (television, YouTube, social media, etc.) are absent. Like in film noir, various sources might tell stories that contradict one another, but nobody will bother to resolve them. The narrative strategy of film noir is based on juxtaposition, misinformation, and incompleteness. Instead of providing clarity, film noir disassembles.

The result is perfect cohabitation. Immigrants are willing to shelve their lives without resistance, while the others play the role of phlegmatic dandies who have simply decided to ignore the world around them. This too fits the logic of film noir: since the winner takes it all, everybody else must lose completely.

(3:16 a.m. Somebody is listening to an FM radio station on a General Electric tuner.)

No, Kuwait has no colonial complex. And why should it? The closest the Arabian Peninsula has ever come to colonization was under Ottoman rule, an era that Kuwaitis have chosen to erase from their cultural memory. Identical things have been said about the United Arab Emirates, where Futurism entirely replaced passeism. Sally Findlow writes:

“With the sights set firmly on the future rather than in the past, the spirit that dominates is one of openness, discovery, [and] the authenticity problem in the sense experienced by directly colonized countries, is largely avoided.”

Similarly, the adventurer Max Reisch noted the lack of a colonial complex when driving through Saudi Arabia and Kuwait in 1952, concluding:

“The white colonial spirit has never entered this country, this people has never been vaccinated with the serum of ‘white superiority.’ [This land] feels equal to us.” (6)

Ian F. had noted the lack of a colonial complex too when writing that in Kuwait every eye meets you with a gaze that is straight and touched with arrogance. The Kuwaiti man knows that he is better than you, “and that is that.” Ian F. believed that there was not a single case of an inferiority complex among Kuwaitis. He also noted that, just for this reason, there is no social snobbery and no strong class consciousness. Rulers are on friendly terms with Bedouins—naturally, as if they were equals.

Women—well, women get stalked once in a while in Salmiya, but they are used to it. Usually, they take refuge in a corner shop

On the preceding pages, Kuwait has been depicted as relatively dystopian. The question is: has it always been like this? Obviously not. Kuwait in the 1950s and 1960s vibrated with the same cheerful and positive attitude towards a bright and technicized future that we encounter in American science fiction literature of the 1930s–40s. Kuwait’s philosophy was in keeping with that of magazines like Amazing Stories or Astounding Science Fiction, which developed under the influence of positively minded Russian and Italian Futurism. It is not exaggerated to say that Kuwait was the world’s last utopia. Like today in Dubai and Qatar, advertisements (with red and orange as dominant colors) invited tourists to indulge in a perfect blend of futurist technology and exoticism. Futurist houses—today to be admired as ruins in Salmiya—indicated an uncompromising concept of modernity and progress, naturally mixed with traditional elements. Fascinated journalists from Life and National Geographic presented life in Kuwait as liberal, modern, and healthy. Urbanism was humane, and modernity was at its best. “I want to make of Kuwait a country that blooms like a rose,” spoke the Emir of Kuwait in 1952.

In 1960, Kuwait even exercised a pivotal global logistic function, similar to that of today’s Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Qatar. Kuwait Air connected London and Tokyo via Kuwait (see Kuwait Times, July 14, 1962), which was a welcome improvement of international air traffic.

Kuwait was also a pioneer in the Arab literary renaissance, its press being one of the freest on the planet. The Kuwaiti liberal Al-Arabi magazine became the most popular magazine in the Arab world, just as popular as the book series Alam al-Maarifa (“Scientific Thinking”) that was published in Kuwait as well.

Let’s also mention that an optimistic spirit blew into the country from another direction. In the early 1960s, Russia attempted to grab Kuwait from Britain to spread communism. Russia-backed Pan-Arabists planned to march in from Iraq, all organized by KGB operatives in Beirut.

Today, the optimistic spirit of this Futurism (minus the press freedom) can be found in Dubai, while in Kuwait, Futurism disappeared behind the black clouds of burning oil wells. For Kuwait, the Iraqi invasion had about the same effect that the Hiroshima bomb had on the development of Japanese science fiction literature: technological optimism became impossible. Today, Kuwait lacks investments because Kuwaiti businessmen prefer to invest abroad. Kuwaitis do not believe in the future of their own country.

Partly, the capital flight is due to Kuwait’s pre-modern heritage: nomads don’t believe in nations and borders and quickly move to another place. Bedouins are always on the move. The refusal to invest in Kuwait contrasts, again, with Dubai, which—though being relatively hastily built on shaky economic ground and without much oil—attracts plenty of local and foreign (even Kuwaiti) investments.

Partly, the capital flight is due to Kuwait’s pre-modern heritage: nomads don’t believe in nations and borders and quickly move to another place. Bedouins are always on the move. The refusal to invest in Kuwait contrasts, again, with Dubai, which—though being relatively hastily built on shaky economic ground and without much oil—attracts plenty of local and foreign (even Kuwaiti) investments.

The contrast between Kuwait and the much newer Dubai could not be bigger. It is related to the cyberpunk problem described above. Sometimes, Dubai aspires to look cyberpunk. For example, it has created a “graffiti mall,” which looks like… a mall. So far, real Gulf cyberpunk can be found only in Kuwait. Dubai also has a “heritage wave” on its program, attempting to retrieve tradition and humaneness that might have gone lost in its sleek techno-universe. Dubai aspires to have what Kuwait used to have in the 1960s—at least on paper—the right mixture of past, present, and future.

The overlap of new religious and new economic paradigms in the late twentieth century is nowhere as obvious as in Kuwait. Cyberpunk, postmodern as it is, stands for the exhaustion of the industrial economy, the exhaustion of the avant-garde, and the exhaustion of modern cultural values. Compared with postmodern Kuwait, Dubai is highly modern. In the 1970s and 1980s, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia imported Western modern architecture en masse. A wave of Islamization caught the Middle East at the same time. In other words, modernization was organized in the Gulf precisely at the moment when the Arab world began aborting modernity. Interestingly, this was also the time when the Western world was switching from Futurism to the cyberpunk-postmodern.

In reality, Gulf regimes were always afraid of being modern because modernity brings democratic ideals and practices. In Kuwait, the present cyberpunk situation is the result of these constellations.

(Let’s not forget that postmodernism was officially born in nearby Iran in 1979, when modern ideals were, for the first time, very consistently questioned.)

“Gulf futurism”

Fatima Al-Qadiri and Sophia Al-Maria have identified an avant-garde cultural sensibility in the Middle East that they call “Gulf Futurism.” In an article praised by Bruce Sterling, the artists describe the Gulf as

“a region that has been hyper-driven into a present made up of interior wastelands, municipal master plans and environmental collapse, thus making it a projection of our global future. (…) Over the last fifty years, the Arabian Gulf has given birth to a very particular brand of futurism. It is a phenomenon marked by a deranged optimism about the sustainability of both oil reserves and late capitalism. Similar to early 20th-century Euro-Futurism and mid-century American kitsch and retro-futurism, Gulf Futurism is evident in a dominant class concerned with master-planning and world-building, while the youth culture is preoccupied with fast cars, fast tech, and ‘viddying a bit of ultra-violence.’”

The description is accurate and applies to the whole Gulf. Still, one would do better to disentangle the futurist elements from the cyberpunk ones. Master-planning—frantically pursued in Kuwait during the 1960s and 70s, though rarely implemented—is a futurist activity. But the youth culture appears more cyberpunk, which becomes graphically clear in the following depiction. The Gulf is marked by

“the isolation of individuals via technology, wealth, and reactionary Islam, the corrosive elements of consumerism on the soul and industry on the earth, the erasure of history from our memories and our surroundings, and finally our dizzying collective arrival in a future no one was ready for.”

So much for Gulf Futurism. Let’s return to Dubai. Is Dubai—still radiating a great deal of 20th-century optimistic Futurist energy—already heading toward the cyberpunk culture of Kuwait? Dubai is built on fragile ground, and any sort of invasion similar to what happened to Kuwait in 1990 would likely plunge it into the most authentic cyberpunk syndrome the world has ever seen.

Most people today would say that Dubai is ahead of Kuwait because it is better organized, cleaner, and more polished. Kuwait is even trying to emulate the Dubai model, building its own Jumeirah-style resort on Failaka Island. However, in reality Dubai is not ahead—Cyberpunk Kuwait is far ahead of Futurist Dubai. Kuwait is Dubai’s future.

Above: Kuwait as presented by Life Magazine in 1965. Below: modernist houses in Kuwait featured by National Geographic in the 1960s. Several of these houses were built by Eastern-European architects who had come over from Iraq. Most of them have since been demolished, though a few survive as ruins in Salmiya.

Kuwait cyberpunk - Kuwait Oilpunk (part 2)

Cyberpunk developed sub-genres such as steampunk and clockpunk, which are retro-aesthetic categories that attempt to recover the futuristic visions of past eras and extrapolate their characteristic technologies. Steampunk evokes a Jules Verne–like universe filled with Victorian machinery, steam locomotives, and Captain Nemo–style diving apparatus—while still retaining cyberpunk’s noir atmosphere.

A more advanced, “futuro-aesthetic” form of cyberpunk is biopunk, which focuses on the entanglement of biotechnology and information technology. In biopunk settings, bio-hackers, biotech mega-corporations, and shadowy agencies engage in biological modification and genetic engineering; oppressive governments conduct mass surveillance and manipulate human DNA.

Following biopunk comes nanopunk, perhaps the most recent expression of cyberpunk aesthetics…

I suggest calling Kuwait’s aesthetic category Oilpunk, because the world of the 1980s still shapes a significant portion of its urban objects and collective perceptions. The 1980s—before the Iraqi invasion—remain a golden age in the memory of Kuwaitis. More importantly, the most defining element of that era has not changed: the dependence on oil remains just as strong.

Sometimes, the sand is blown into the city—greetings from the “desert of the real.”

Proof that the 1980s still dominate an important part of the Kuwaiti psyche can be seen in the local success of the Kuwaiti-made retro-thriller Back to Q82 [9] and the recent Kuwaiti Netflix series The Exchange, which dramatizes events surrounding the Kuwaiti stock market in the late 1980s.

Oilpunk is naturally related to Dieselpunk. However, diesel fuel has a much higher viscosity than crude oil, which gives Dieselpunk a more retro, heavy, and mechanical feel compared to the fluidity of Oilpunk. Oil itself is slick, fast-flowing—almost like driver software—so Oilpunk becomes, in a sense, a liquefied aesthetic. Recall what was mentioned above: the Bedouin is always on the move.

Like Steampunk, Dieselpunk draws heavily on the World War I and interwar periods, when the diesel engine overtook steam power. Much of its aesthetic is inspired by WWI imagery. Its fashion vocabulary includes waistcoats, bomber jackets, goggles, wristwatches, and overalls. (In Gaspunk, by comparison, everyone wears gas masks.) Oilpunk, by contrast, has a dress code of impeccably white dishdashas and thobes.

Moreover, Oilpunk unfolds in the aftermath of an optimistic oil boom—a moment its protagonists desperately try to prolong indefinitely, even as they remain unable to ward off the dystopian elements that inevitably arise from the boredom and stasis of a utopia.

I mentioned earlier that Bedouins are always on the move. One contemporary manifestation of the remnants of this fluid, nomadic lifestyle is, in my view, the phenomenon known as هَبّة (hibba, meaning “trend”). It is a distinctly Kuwaiti word, derived from the verb هبَّ (habba)—“to blow,” like a wind that arrives suddenly and then disappears.

Just as nomads move from place to place, Kuwaitis move from hibba to hibba, from trend to trend, each one typically lasting no more than a few months. This restless circulation shapes restaurants, fashions, activities, and even the newest craze: Dubai Chocolate.

Oil has a very high fluency factor—and so does Oilpunk. “The one who utilizes a particular energy begins to resemble that kind of energy,” write Vadén and Salminen. In other words, we become oil: “We do not use oil as much as oil uses us.” [34]

The conclusion, then, is that Kuwaitis have become Oil.

The closest aesthetic relative to Oilpunk is perhaps Decopunk. Decopunk is a branch of Dieselpunk that remains inherently utopian and distances itself from Dieselpunk’s wartime imagery. It may fit Kuwait to some extent, since several of its surviving mid-century buildings are indeed Art Deco—most notably the old Kuwait University Clock Tower.

Coalpunk, were it to exist, would consist of winding towers, freight cars, pump rooms, and allotment gardens populated with android garden gnomes. (The accompanying image is from the Duisburg Industrial Landscape Park.)

Why is Oilpunk green?

An important question: Why is it green?

It is green simply because it cannot be red.

Red is the color of blood, fire, love, communism, optimism, and enthusiasm—but also of rage, danger, debt, and loss. Oilpunk is green because it is neutral. Oilpunks do not gamble with grim faces but with mines of indifference. Pressing the red button is a gesture of desperation; Oilpunks, by contrast, remain eternally cool.

Red is also the color of kings, cardinals, and the devil—figures that Oilpunk refuses to acknowledge. Kuwaiti monarchs have always dressed in white. The only red allowed in Oilpunk is the Ferrari, and, on rare occasions, a red dress.

Oilpunk cannot be orange, because no English word rhymes with orange, whereas green rhymes with gene, spleen, caffeine, obscene, vaccine…

Beyond that, Oilpunk is green because oil is made of plants. But it is not a fresh, natural green—it is an artificial, bleak neon green. Oilpunk is never a dark green either.

Hirschfeld, in his Theory of Gardening Art (1779), speaks of the necessity of a “blackish green” that produces a melancholic atmosphere in gardens. But Oilpunk is not melancholic. Oilpunk knows neither “petromelancholia” (Stephanie LeMenager) nor “petrodepression” (Anna Kornbluh). Bleak neon green is the color of indifference and neutrality, and is therefore the ideal color of Oilpunk.

Ian F. already recognized the phlegmatic Oilpunk temperament in 1960, observing that Kuwaitis are neither optimistic nor pessimistic but neutral. In a shooting competition, even if he misses every round, the Kuwaiti competitor will not be dismayed but will quite honestly assume that today simply “is not his day.” Ian F. calls this Oilpunk attitude “traditional fatalism.”

Cinema uses blue light for night scenes, and for the Romantics blue was the color of darkness mixed with wet fog. But Kuwait is dry—extremely dry—and therefore, in Salmiya, the nights are always green.

The 1980s were not as bright for Kuwait as nostalgic memory suggests. 1982 was the year of the Kuwait Stock Market Crash—often described as the biggest financial crash in human history. In an obscure souq, Kuwaitis crafted the world’s largest financial bubble in a remarkably artisanal manner. The phenomenon has frequently been compared to the Dutch Tulip Mania of 1636–37.

Kuwait 1982

But the 1980s were not as bright for Kuwait as they appear. 1982 is the year of the Kuwait stock market crash, which has been identified as one of the biggest financial crashes in human history. In an obscure souq in the historic Jibla district, Kuwaitis created the biggest financial bubble ever in an almost artisanal fashion. The phenomenon has often been compared to the Dutch Tulip Bulb Mania (1636–37). Between 1976 and 1982, enthusiastic—mostly nouveau riche—Kuwaitis traded around 29,000 unsecured checks worth roughly $94 billion (for comparison, the Madoff pyramid scheme of 2008 was “only” about $65 billion). When the market crashed, the collapse was as virtual as the bubble itself. People simply stopped trading, as if the market had never existed. Some blamed conspiracies. Nasser Al-Mutawa, the biggest loser in the stock bubble—who owed something like $10.5 billion—blamed his downfall on the established commercial families who resented his success.

Ironically, the crash unfolded inside Souq Al-Manakh, an air-conditioned parking garage in historic Jibla—a building that was, in its own way, strikingly futurist. Built between 1973 and 1975, it was designed by the Massachusetts architectural firm TAC, founded by Bauhaus legend Walter Gropius. The structure even included a station for a monorail line that would never materialize—a small piece of unrealized cyberpunk before cyberpunk had a name.

Composed of sandblasted raw concrete, Souq Al-Manakh is pure Gropius modernism. During the oil boom, it began functioning as a parallel informal trading center—less a stock exchange than a casino, an arena for speculative exuberance and improvised financial theatre. The resulting disaster is still known as the “Souq Al-Manakh Crash.” (See footnote [11] for the meaning of manakh.)

From an architectural point of view, Souq Al-Manakh is a curiosity. It is essentially a modified multistory parking structure fitted with offices on the top floor and retail spaces at the bottom. Neither the shops nor the offices ever functioned as intended, and the building today stands as a perfect emblem of Kuwait City’s urban void—a monument to unrealized plans, suspended futures, and the unfinished modernity that haunts the cityscape.

1982 is, in many ways, a magic year. It gifted the world two foundational cyberpunk films, Akira and Blade Runner, which together defined the look and mood of the genre. Also released in 1982 was The Clash’s “Rock the Casbah,” arguably the first Oilpunk music video ever made—a fictional story of a Gulf ruler banning Western rock music. Its absurd, neon-desert imagery fits the Oilpunk register perfectly:

“The Bedouins, they brought out / The electric camel drum…”

With The Clash came The Crash.

The Souq Al-Manakh Crash marks the moment Kuwait shifted from optimistic Petro-Futurism to Oilpunk. The year 1982 is nothing short of pivotal. As late as 21 June 1982, Kuwait still astonished the world with its unusual self-assurance during the FIFA World Cup in Spain. Yet only two months later, on 20 August 1982, the country would experience the largest stock market collapse in human history (Blade Runner was released June 25). Here, on that August day in 1982, the Oilpunk condition begins. The Iraqi invasion, eight years later in August 1990, did not create Oilpunk; it merely completed and sealed a transformation already underway.

Also, 1982 marks the end of Kuwait’s age of innocence. Almost immediately afterward, a series of terrorist attacks shattered the country’s sense of safety. In 1983, two embassies, the airport, and three oil installations were bombed in a 90-minute coordinated attack carried out by Iranian operatives protesting Kuwait’s support for Iraq during the Iran–Iraq War. The Islamic Revolution and the Iraq–Iran conflict had radically altered the regional landscape, and both upheavals unfolded almost literally next door: the sound of Iraqi artillery could be heard from Kuwait City.

In 1984, a Kuwait Airways flight bound for Pakistan was hijacked by Lebanese militants from the group Islamic Holy War, who demanded the release of seventeen prisoners held in Kuwait

On May 20, 1984, at exactly 11 a.m., air-raid sirens suddenly wailed across Kuwait City, triggering a brief wave of panic. It turned out to be only a test—yet its psychological impact revealed how deeply regional tensions were beginning to penetrate everyday life.

On May 26, 1985, a suicide driver rammed a bomb-laden car into the motorcade of the Emir as he traveled to the Sief Palace. The Emir survived with only minor injuries. Later that same year, a TWA flight to Rome was hijacked; once again, the demand centered on the release of the seventeen prisoners held in Kuwait.

On July 24, 1987, the Kuwaiti supertanker SS Bridgeton, flying the American flag, struck an Iranian mine near Farsi Island in the Arabian Gulf. None of the crew members were injured, and the vessel was able to reach a Kuwaiti port at a slow speed.

In 1987, Jesse Jackson traveled to Kuwait in an attempt—ultimately unsuccessful—to negotiate the prisoners’ release. Their freedom came only during the chaos of the Iraqi invasion in 1990, when 1,300 detainees escaped from the central prison. Taxis reportedly lined up outside the jail, waiting to carry them away.

Regarding all of this, One should not forget that these events occurred in the context of a severe internal political crisis. In May 1986, the Kuwaiti constitution and parliament had been indefinitely suspended.

The invasion

The Iraqi invasion, on August 2, 1990, would become Kuwait’s own equivalent to the destruction of Tokyo in Neuromancer, where Gibson imagines a mysterious explosion obliterating the city in December 1992. [15] In a sense, the invasion is no more real than that fictional detonation. As Baudrillard put it, “they never saw each other: when the Americans finally appeared behind their curtain of bombs the Iraqis had already disappeared behind their curtain of smoke.” [16]

In February 1991, weather satellites detected immense smoke clouds drifting over Kuwait—Saddam Hussein had detonated nearly seven hundred oil wells, sending black plumes billowing across the region. The dystopian imagery of an invaded, burning Kuwait—immortalized in the IMAX film Fires of Kuwait and Werner Herzog’s Lessons of Darkness—suggests a disaster that is almost hyperreal, consumed by fascinated crowds as if it were fiction. Even the CNN style of reporting had an uncanny detachment; many viewers remarked that the war looked like a video game.

During the scorching summer months, two-thirds of Kuwaitis were abroad, experiencing the invasion only through television. Even those who remained within the country witnessed much of what unfolded primarily on their screens. Later, the war itself would be re-enacted in video games such as Battlefield 3 and Call of Duty—now banned in Kuwait—further reinforcing the layer of virtuality that had long adhered to the country.

This sense of mediated unreality, however, has deep roots. As early as 1953, Peter Lienhardt observed upon arriving in Kuwait that “reaching a strange place by air is like seeing it on television: the people who live there are just part of the scenery. Perhaps that is what ‘international’ has come to mean now.” [17]

If anything, the invasion only intensifies Kuwait’s peculiar cyberpunk aura. Here, the future had already arrived—long before the violence—creating a suspended landscape between near-apocalypse and post-apocalypse, allowing us to live indefinitely in the interstitial zone between the two. This zone is insecure by definition; it lies between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and at one point the Islamic State’s army was a mere seven hundred kilometers away. Yet we are told there is nothing to fear. Fifteen thousand American troops remain stationed in Kuwait: a lingering reminder of the past, but also the insurance policy that nothing particularly evil will occur in the future.

(Ask yourself if, after the occupation, the nation had returned…

“They hadn’t brought the real Kuwait back, only something that looked like it.” — Saud Alsanousi, Mama Hissa’s Mice)

Yes, Salmiya is a safe place. Not only because of the Kuwaiti Marine battleships silently floating day and night in the Salmiya Bay like bored crocodiles. There is also the gigantic bronze fist of invasion martyr Sheikh Fahd, grandiosely directed at the sea, protecting us from further invasions from the other side of the Arabic/Persian Gulf.

Sheikh Fahd, who officially died defending the Dasman Palace against Iraqi soldiers [18], is the same person who stepped onto the football field in 1982 during the World Cup. And this threatening fist—worthy of the obelisks and sphinxes of the Nile—is his monument. One had to be content with his fist because statues of entire people are forbidden in Islam.

It is also here, on the coast of Salmiya (called “Al Nasr” during the Iraqi occupation [19]), that the first Iraqi troops landed in 1990 on August 2 at 2 a.m. They invaded the country within hours, meeting very little resistance.

(Shavepates! Traitors of the sons of Harp! You’ll be made to pay up for the vittles you’ve eaten!)

The first monument stands in front of the Olympic Council of Asia (OCA) , which accommodates committees of forty-five Asian nations and of which Sheikh Fahd was the president. The fact that the council’s headquarter is still here in Kuwait is a reminder of the 1980s when Kuwait was influential in Asia. In 1990, the committee expelled Iraq from the OCA and banned it from the Asian Games in Beijing, which was a blow to Iraq: it was rejected precisely by those countries that it pretended to protect from the imperialist West.

The threatening fist thus memorializes Kuwait’s strength in the Eastern hemisphere as well as America’s strength in the Middle East. Times have changed. Barely 100 meters further down behind the Holiday Inn and visible from here emerges the new Confucius Institute, the Cultural Center of China.

Sinofuturism

Let’s talk a little about this emerging East-Asian power. What relationship could Kuwait have with China? To answer this, it is useful to briefly compare Oilpunk with “Sinofuturism.” The latter is a conceptualization undertaken by the artist Lawrence Lek, who combines elements of science fiction, cyberpunk, and Chinese culture to envision a future where technology and tradition collide. As Sinofuturism reflects on the impact of China’s economic rise, the influence of technology, and the blending of traditional Chinese elements with futuristic visions, at first sight, Sinofuturism can look like a Chinese version of Oilpunk. Both are Eastern, both are stereotypes. Culturally there are similarities, too: for example, both like to rememorize old texts. But similarities are limited.

While Oilpunk is a post-science fiction narrative escaping not only modernity but also Orientalism, Sinofuturism is firmly trapped in both. Furthermore, Sinofuturists are radical while Oilpunks are neutral. Oilpunks will never give up ideals of family and class. There is no real clash of tradition and technology in Oilpunk. However, while Oilpunks are no futurists, they will not embrace the anti-futurist ideals of humanism and individual freedom either.

AI is a Futurist narrative based on learning, which counts on the shift from the human to the posthuman, which is essential for Sinofuturism. However, the idea that machines are against humans and will one day submit the latter is a Western narrative that China—as opposed to Japan—has fully embraced. By contrast, the impeccably dressed white dandies who are parading through the labyrinths of oily appliances are not ready to effectuate this shift.

Furthermore, Oilpunk escapes robotism because punk robots would be useless. Sinofuturism is basically about turning humans into robots. Also, AI is programmed to learn from real-world phenomena, which is impossible in an Oilpunk environment where reality has been brought out into the desert. In Kuwait there is simply no need of Futurism, utopia, or Science Fiction; just like “Really Existing Socialism” (an official term in former Communist East Germany) did not need Futurism. Kuwait is its own post-Science Fiction and post-utopia.

One more thing: Contrary to Sinofuturism, Oilpunk is not a conspiracy theory because in an oil monarchy the conspiracy is so obvious that it does not even need a theory.

Kuwait and Dubai

The main difference between Kuwait and Dubai is that in Kuwait there are no tourists. In Kuwait it is not necessary to polish a glitzy surface for masses of people looking for all that is possible. Cyberpunk excludes mass tourism or simply any kind of tourism. Kuwait attracts neither backpackers nor oligarchs. Michael Jackson spent a year residing in Bahrain, but nobody has ever come to Kuwait. Contrary to Dubai, Kuwait has never become a brand.

By 2023, Dubai’s crypto zone had attracted over 500 crypto companies. In the same year, Kuwait’s capital markets regulator banned bitcoin mining. Still, Kuwait is, together with Argentina, the world’s most profitable location for crypto mining because electricity is heavily subsidized. However, cyberpunk is not cypherpunk. It is skeptical. Too often cyberpunk stories have shown how technology can be used to manipulate and exploit people.

Kuwait Koma

Grey desert dust is falling on Kuwait, turning the city into the magical interior of a neon-lit snow globe (the resemblance between shopping malls and snow globes deserves to be explored further). Oilpunk is what Walter Benjamin calls “Dream Kitsch” or a “dream that has grown gray” because it is covered with dust. [20] For Benjamin, the dust is the most interesting part as it contradicts the repetition of modernity. Oilpunk is also Celeste Olalquiaga’s civilization covered under dust, which, after the collapse of its last illusions, forces its civilization into the brackets of a time that has been forever suspended. Olalquiaga writes this in The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience and Megalopolis. What all these thinkers show is that Oilpunk (or all cyberpunk for that matter) can only take place in a perpetual present.

But in this country the dust metaphor is relevant for still another reason. Kuwait Oilpunk is the gentle immersion of a world into the aftermath of yesterday’s disasters in the form of a powdery cloud mixed with chemical agents that are the reminders of Iraq’s former weapons.

The great Islamic thinker Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) wrote in his Muqaddimah: “It should be known that since […] desert life no doubt is the reason for bravery, savage groups are braver than others. They are, therefore, better able to achieve superiority.” [22] But he also saw that, eventually, nomadic conquerors will succumb to the temptations of luxurious city life, and that this is the beginning of the end.

Having been wandering through decades of darkness, enlightenment, and neo-darkness, the residents of Salmiya are no longer surprised at the dreamy effects in which reality and illusion float back and forth interchangeably.

The Datsun Z

In spite of the generalized “Rebel without a Cause” driving style, I do not see a single Kuwaiti James Dean. In the 1960s, rich, bored, and spoiled kids imitating James Dean were trying to be different. This was a typical ’60s symptom, impossible to reenact in Kuwait of the 2020s. The reason is that Oilpunk emanates a machoist aristocratic feeling permitting neither Deanian confusionism nor social commentary. The cultural icon is not Dean but rather the “rock star” mentioned above.

Oilpunks prefer gas-guzzling Ferraris and Lamborghinis (gas costs very little here) and, if possible, with underglow. The futuristically flat Lamborghinis with windows tinted in dusky feldgrau seem to come straight out of the new Blade Runner 2049 or the video game Cyberpunk 2077. And so do the numerous three-wheeled Polaris Slingshot motorcycles.

However, the ultimate Oilpunk car is the Datsun Z from 1973, [23] and this not only because the letter “Z” suggests a connection with the city of Zion in The Matrix

This small but powerful sports car, which was extremely popular in Kuwait during the Golden Decade, can be spotted remarkably often on the streets of Salmiya. Perfectly restored (rust is no problem in Kuwait; we are not in the rust belt), it comes with a wooden steering wheel, black chafed leather seats, no power windows but a modern sound system. Its attitude tends to be noisy and aggressive.

The Datsun Z (also lovingly called “Zeddy”) harks back to Kuwait’s golden age, which began precisely in the year when this car was born. 1973 is the year of the oil shock, which inflated oil prices and brought unfathomable wealth to the country. On December 25, 1973, the oil ministers of Arab petroleum-exporting countries (OAPEC) met in Kuwait and decided to cut back oil production in order to raise prices.

The “Z” was built in Kanagawa, south of Tokyo and just forty kilometres from Chiba across Tokyo Bay, by a futurist and optimistic Japan still striving to be absolument moderne. The Datsun Z challenged international brands like Jaguar and the Corvette and would soon become the most popular sports car in the US.

(In a comparative study of 59 countries, Kuwait recorded the third highest number of road deaths - 19 per 100,000 people. In terms of road quality, in 2010, Kuwait still ranked fifth in the Gulf. It declined year after year until it reached the 10th place in 2019 among Arab countries, behind Egypt, Morocco, Jordan and Algeria. Arab Times 09/10/2022)

In Kuwait, via its Oilpunk demeanor, the “Z” establishes a unique link between the desert nation and the mighty industrial nation of Nippon: in 1973, Kuwait could still dream of becoming a sort of Middle Eastern Japan. Kuwait was the world’s biggest building site, had the biggest oil field, and the biggest water distillation plant. For Kuwait, Japan was fascinating because of its mixture of modernity and tradition. Newspaper articles from the 1960s and 1970s show how much Kuwait emulated this East Asian nation. Between 1962 and 1971, the Kuwait Times published more than 150 articles about Japan. (24] Youssuf Al-Ayan, journalist and founder of the Kuwait Times, traveled to Japan and brought back descriptions of an idealized country that, after having been crushed by the West, had managed to rejoin the international scene. Other excited correspondents reported about a Japanese youth culture of fast food, soft drinks, fashion, drugs, gender desegregation, and the rejection of family ties. All this was supposed to produce “a taste of better life” (Aug. 16 1970). Japanese technology promoted comfort, and “modern” origami had an educational value as it was able to combine scientific and aesthetic thinking (Nov. 29 1971). We should also look at this column from December 7 1971:

Kowaito

A few more words about Kuwait’s relationship with Japan are in order. The first Japanese fleet arrived in “Kowaito” in 1880. The Japanese found that face-veiled Kuwaiti women looked like katsuki noble women of the Heian Period (794–1192) who used to cover their faces, too.

In the 1930s, Japan became the second or third largest exporter to Kuwait, delivering mainly textiles and machinery. British colonial administrator Dickson analyzed “that the Japanese sent their travelling agents to observe minutely the tastes and peculiar needs of the people of the particular place.” [25] Ian F. observed in 1960 that bazaars were filled with cheap trash from Japan and India.

There is a darker side to it, which can sound like a premature cyberpunk scenario. As early as 1909, the zaibatsu Mitsui & Co operated in the Gulf region and imported enormous quantities of opium from Iran to be sold in China. Exchanges with the Gulf became complicated. On March 1, 1945, Saudi Arabia declared war against Japan.

Relationships improved and were definitely normalized in 1957 with the creation of the “Japanese Arabian Oil Company.” [27] In 1958, Nippon built the world’s largest tanker (and the world’s largest ship) called “Universe Apollo” in the Kure shipyard near Kobe. The giant would soon commute between Kuwait and Japan. Japanese offshore drillings paid the Emir a rent of 1.5 million pounds a year [Fleming]. When oil manager Shinichi Sato came to Kuwait in 1966, there were only 40 Japanese living there. In 1971, it had grown to 300. [28] Japan had again replaced the US as Kuwait’s biggest supplier of goods and 12% of Japanese oil imports came now from Kuwait.

In the 1960s, not only Al-Ayan traveled to Japan but also the prominent Lebanese architect and planner Saba George Shiber, who published lengthy articles on Japan in the Kuwait Times. His first editorial was entitled “Tokyo: Salvation or Suicide?” [Oct. 1963]. Japan was for him “the most fascinating, fantastic, sophisticated yet simple place in the world.” The 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo would boost interest in the country. Shiber facilitated Kenzo Tange’s recruitment as the architect of the new Kuwait Airport [29], which would be accomplished in 1979, and which the critic Stephen Gardener has described as the “most beautiful airport in the world.”

What might have mattered for this panoply of affinities was also the fact that neither Kuwait nor Japan had ever been colonized by the West. The lack of colonial complex noted by observers such as Fleming in Kuwait has also been highlighted by explorers of Japan.

Let’s not forget that another “Z” was popular at precisely that time. The Yom Kippur War began in 1973, too, and a boycott of Coca-Cola would be launched in that year. Kuwaitis were drinking Zam Zam Cola.

Sadly, not much is left of Kenzo Tange’s airport. Like many famous modern buildings in Kuwait, it has been “defaced beyond recognition,” as writes Farah Al-Nakib, who concludes: “The current mutilation of these structures, which were once considered the ultimate symbols of Kuwait’s newfound modernity […] disregards that Kuwait once aspired to be […] a truly progressive and modern place.” [31]

A dream within a drive

So, what is it like to live in a desert overgrown with landscapes of simulacra serving the upper circle of global capital?

“Thank you, I can’t complain. I’m just watching the film.”

That was a good answer, I think. But the guy still insists. He wants to know what’s the most interesting part for me in this film. Well, to say the truth, what fascinates me most is that Kuwaitis seem to be incapable of anger. Milan Kundera describes Central Europe as “an uncertain zone of small nations between Russia and Germany.” Small Eastern European nations exist on the edge of extinction or absorption by larger powers and are therefore constantly angered by their own disappearance: “A French, a Russian, or an Englishman is not used to asking questions about the very survival of his nation. His anthems speak only of grandeur and eternity. The Polish anthem, however, starts with the verse: ‘Poland has not yet perished’” (Kundera). [32]

Like Poland, Kuwait is situated between competing powers: Saudi Arabia and Iran. Kuwait has repeatedly been claimed by its neighbor Iraq and has also been occasionally threatened by terrorist forces. Still, Kuwait enjoys the lightness of being that is normally common to large and secure nations. Maybe Kuwait is a Nautilus (to use another image from Jules Verne), a self-contained underwater society turned inward. Or maybe faith makes anger impossible. Or maybe the Gulf has already moved, as Sophia Al Maria surmises, to the akhira (that is, the next world). Or, still another possibility, the logic goes like this: having survived one invasion by plunging the entire nation into a dream world, the sequel can only be a further dream in a dream in a dream... Or am I dreaming?

Kuwait would thus be the exaltation of what some believe the Middle East to be in general: the past lives here alongside the present, and the future was already written into the past, managing to produce its own private history in parallel with world history. This is how Oilpunk would extend into the deepest layers of culture: some of my students inform me that the greatest discoveries of Einstein and thermodynamics had all been put into the scriptures in the seventh century.

Good news! !زلم We can thus relax and participate in the consensual illusion called Kuwait and look for thrills in Salmiya.

However, we also need to recognize that the bigger picture has changed. While Kuwait is stuck in time [[similar to the Matrix city of Zion]], just across the border in Saudi Arabia one is building the new City of IO underneath artificial clouds.

A little more on architecture

Kuwait’s cityscape is “a sequence of fragments, dispersed among shards from different epochs, all reminders of an unaccomplished urban vision, a kaleidoscope of uncorrelated episodes of obsolescence, adaptation, and reinterpretation.” Roberto Fabbri [33]

In architecture, Oilpunk is the kind of modernism that many European architects were trying to avoid when putting forward revolutionary ideas such as “Small is Beautiful.” This was typically Western, while in Asia and parts of the Middle East, refinement and the “small is beautiful” concept remained widely unknown until the 1990s. Here metabolist (brutalist) architecture developed under demographic pressure and was considered superior because it could solve practical problems. This architecture was also seen as more imaginative, spontaneous, less traditionalist, and free. That’s how REM KOOLHAAS describes the phenomenon of “decadent modernism.” [34] In the Gulf, governments high on petroleum accelerated this architectural “liberalization” process and in Kuwait, the result is the aesthetics of Oilpunk.

Part 3

AFTER HIS DEATH, GOD TURNED INTO OIL and Oil became a surrogate God, write Antti Salminen and Tere Vadén in Energy and Experience. [35] These specialists of “nafthology” talk about the Western world where the death of God coincided with the beginnings of the Oil Age. In the West, God went underground and became Oil. Things were different in the Gulf where Oil and God were (re)discovered almost simultaneously. In January 1974, the price of Oil soared from under $3 to $12 a barrel. In January 1978 began the Islamic revolution. In this region, Oil came from below and God came from above. Both would stay on the earth’s surface and create an amalgam able to make human rationality twist. “Oil has undermined [human] intelligence” writes political scientist David Orr. [36] For the Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani, Oil [naft نفط] is an “occult matter that forms the phantasmagoric collective and political subconscious of the Middle East.” [37] Through brassy pipelines crawl not only carbohydrates, mitochondria, and ions but also djinns and spirits from esoteric Islamic and pre-Islamic traditions. Negarestani mentions a Quranic reference to naft [which I could not find]. The Brill Encyclopaedia of Islam informs us that naft is the purest form of Mesopotamian bitumen and signified in pre-Islamic times a substance that could be found ready-made.

There are more differences between Kuwait and the West. In the West, the death of God was experienced as a liberation from authoritarian chains; after which one was willingly chaining oneself to the benefits of Oil. Not so in Kuwait. For an Oil producing formerly poor country, Oil signifies freedom. At the same time, God’s authoritarian chains remained tight. In the West, the liberation from God led to a dissolution of meaning, which was compensated by adopting the new meanings of an Oil powered consumer society. By contrast, in Kuwait, two competing Gods had to share one and the same space. God cohabitated with his own surrogate: Oil.

Unlike gold, which is transparent, shiny, and visible wealth, Oil is hellish and Plutonic wealth locked away in the dark vaults of the underground. In the West, Oil has become basically evil: it is capitalist, corrupt, consumerist, and contaminating. This is surprising because Oil was once meant to bring freedom: in the US, Oil was conceived of as a replacement of slave labor. [38] It didn’t work. Today, who says Oil means BP, oil spills, and the series True Blood. Vampires suck oil. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s last novel, Petrolio, is a bitter meditation on power and immorality in the modern Oil world. Carlo, a man employed by a state-controlled oil company, is obsessed with satisfying his perverse sexual passions. He is “dirty and shady”, “diabolico e sensuale”. In the book’s chapter fifty-one, Carlo realizes that he has become a woman. In Dantian dimensions, Petrolio narrates the destruction of a familiar world and the dramatic -- almost cyberpunk style -- degradation of the Italian youth. Oil is the “protagonist of the international division of labour, [...] of our sufferings, our immaturity, of our weaknesses...” [39]

In the West, God went underground and became Oil. He became a bad god, a gloopy demon. In Kuwait, Oil had always been God; it simply had not yet been discovered. The mysterious black mass patiently waited in the bowels of the earth. Also, in Kuwait, Oil appeared out of nothing. Unlike in the West, where Oil replaced coal, here the slick grease emerged suddenly like a God-given blessing. Once the jet-black broth had come to the surface, it could easily blend with Godly splendor. One would quickly forget about Oil’s obscurity.

(”Oil intoxicated human imagination and warped human knowledge, accelerated time, and constituted illusions”, writes anthropologist Dominic Boyer. [in 35])

For all these reasons, Mid-East Oil philosophy is alchemy. In Oil, soul and matter are never separate. Oil contains spirit. Energy is something pre-material. Energy is not only kilowatt-hours and joules but also euphoria, ennui, guts, love, and horror. Peak Oil is providence. Peak Oil is Paradise whose arrival will constantly be postponed: 1995, 2020, 2030 . . . Oil is not, as believes Negarestani, “the devils excrement” but it is spirit and dark matter in one.

All this also explains why there is something like the romance of oil, but no romance of coal, as Ian F. astutely notes. Coal is not cool. Oil’s fluidity, softness, and malleability makes it less material and more spiritual. Oil is sexier than coal.

The present meditations on a Middle Eastern Oil philosophy perfectly concur with the ideology of Oilpunk: Oilpunk is neither divine nor demonic but neutral. “Cyberspace is Platonism as a working product”, writes Michael Heim. However, Plato’s abstract hierarchies never reached as far as the Gulf.

Oilpunk unites the material and the mortal [as Oil is composed of dead creatures], the divine and the human, high-tech and lowlife, truth and falsehood, thrills and boredom, dystopia and utopia, optimism and pessimism, the childish and the adult, in one and the same setting. Oil is also kitsch because, in Olalquiaga’s formulation, kitsch incorporates natural forms and matter as it represents “relics out of things whose value emanated from their intrinsic relationship to life.” [21]

That’s precisely what Oil is. Eventually, Oilpunk deconstructs the dichotomy of Heaven and Hell as Oil unites Heaven, Earth, and everything ‘Under the Earth’. Real Oilpunk does not happen in Southern California like in Upton Sinclair’s novel OIL! but in Kuwait.

Kuwait comes also close to the techno-theocracy of Texas as well as to Margaret Atwood’s fictional country described in her dystopian novel MaddAddam, in which a sect called Petrobaptists meets in the Church of PetrOleum declaring that: “Oil is holy throughout the Bible! What else is used for the anointing of priests and prophets and kings? It’s the sign of special election. […] Lift up your voices in song and let the Oleum gush forth in ever stronger and all-blessed streams!”

Pan-Arab parasitism creates a monopoly-theism-based Oil cult called “Naftalism.” Refiners are priests. A gharib, standing in a pool of molasses, emits, in extremis, ecstatic calls from the height of a conquered oil derrick [[direction qibla]]. Saints are molded out of hydrocarbures. Oil pumps dip their heads rhythmically in reverence. CHOOH2 [pronounce: chew two] counterslopes support sukuk chance patterns of traditional finance; anecdotal polycyclic molecules enable paralogical nodes and noodles; monotheistic apocalypticism spawns a Foetus Guattari!

Oil is the blood of the earth

There are a few more aspects that explain the driving forces of Oilpunk. In primitive religions, blood used to be the most precious thing on earth. It was the only element acceptable to the gods when performing sacrifices. Blood was looked upon as the very soul of living organisms. Atonement was made in blood. Blood could also be transfigured into immortal bodies. As new religions suppressed bloody sacrifices, blood became taboo; but it would gradually be replaced with Oil. Oil became the most precious item on the planet. It would soon be looked upon as the soul of all non-living mechanisms and was also needful to give life on earth. The spirits of the earth no longer thirsted for Blood but for Oil. Therefore, Oil is regularly sacrificed in Oil spills. Oil is squandered when driving hugely cylindered cars. Two hundred million gallons of used Oil are disposed of each year. So goes the sacramental use of Oil. So goes the Liturgy of Oilpunk. The emissions of the black sap are flared at the top of refineries, creating beautiful spiritual blazes similar to those on Zoroastrian fire temples. Oil was sacrificed when Saddam Hussein set fire to the Kuwaiti Oil wells, sending huge amounts of black smoke to the heavens. The human yearning for a remission of their sins is deep-seated and will never cease; but the practices shifted from blood to Oil.

CYBERBEDOONS

The red and blue Budweiser neon sign shines brightly in the Buffalo Café in this puritan country where alcohol is forbidden. Noir needs to be examined on street level. Bigwheel trucks, liposuced lips, Vaporwave music. Gargantuan potholes, police sirens, the smell of burned rubber. French percolators, peroxided fringes. An absolutely cool Sufi shuffles by sipping his green matcha tea, his feet barely touching the ground. [[Or is this perhaps the sort of Buddhist that you meet only once in a million kalpas?]]

A girl with kaleidoscope eyes only. Sound logos, digital baroque. It’s all a matter of light [nur] and darkness [zulma]. The spice of Nuxe Prodigieux subsists in the ATM cabin: ATMosphere! I believe that this country has the highest Ford Mustang rate per capita in the world.

Saksuka [[ the beard , not the dish ]]. زقرت ! A black abaya - stylistic agnosticism. Countless Starbucks -- Salmiya in flat white. Street math , dogs on diet. A raised penciled eyebrow -- corruption is in the air. Two sun-tanned American women in a freezing fast food dive look like fallen cheerleaders. Oil gnomes. Next come the downtrodden riff-raff: people who are excluded from all algorithms. “Melancholy migrants.” East meeting West , East meeting East , West meeting West. The Third World is recreated inside the First World and vice versa.

A half-hearted door slam -- somebody is wearing a cross. International trauma teams -- access denied. A long line drawn in the sand , the numbering in the parking lot makes absolutely no sense. Are these obscure codes for transients?

It is exactly here that in 2019 police drones equipped with speakers hovered above buildings advising the public to stick to the Covid walking schedule.

But that was many lunar years ago. Can you record and play back my experiences like in Braindance?

You won’t see me in the way the infrared sensor did.

(”You might think of yourself as big and powerful and worship the dangerous philosophy of the ‘nothing can happen to ME’ belief. However, eventually you will recognize that inside this nervous and explosive oil climate you are nothing, not even a grain of dust.” John Mueller about life in Kuwait in 1958 [Cadillacs and Coca-Cola] [40])

Dark glasses create inscrutable images. Busty shisha smokers with heavily painted faces are looking through me. Kolonya - Cologne? Lexical deserts... Somebody says: “I’m independently delighted.” Metaphorical paranoia.

Eye tracking, encrypted laughter, I get a silent call. The slip of a threadbare bisht. Is this an updated version of Raymond Chandler’s sleazy bars in Los Angeles in the 1930s?

Women made up like drag queens: a persistent style in the Gulf. The region might be against transsexuals for a reason: here real women can appear like transvestites. Yes, they are so much feminized that they look like men. Fake femininity put on by a female: the deception of the real. Baudrillard should really have come here.

Salmiya Block 2. I order a hawawshi, but the Egyptian waiter brings me two kebabs instead. Westerners don’t order hawawshi, only kebabs and shish taouk. Spanish fatayer? He actually means ‘spinach’, not Spanish. A ذرب Kuwaiti man in full traditional gear - dishdasha, ghutra and ‘agal - walks by pushing a baby stroller. A truly rare sight, almost as unusual as a Kuwaiti smoking a Comoy pipe or a woman riding a motorbike. . .

Entering the world of color, entering the world of sound, entering the world of taste, I receive Al-Sālimiyāh’s spirit of the ten directions. What are you seeking in the highways and byways? Illusory dreams, flowers in the night sky. Why trouble to grasp at them!

(The Matrix soft drink is produced in Jordan and is available only in the Middle East.)

In the background, 2D pixelated characters, apparitions of a pseudo-haptic world, battle their ways. CYBERBEDOONS? [41] There is kuwaiti and Kuwaiti. Kuwaiti with a capital K is a concept.

Salmiya Block 2. The shamal wind blows from northeast but decreases in the early morning hours. The metal chair on which I am sitting is cracked and might soon collapse. A stoop-shouldered Asian fellow speaking on the phone rolls a small can of Pepsi over his face to keep cool. “It makes my mind boggle”, I hear him say. Spiritual ophthalmia.

A Saddam Hussein lookalike approaches me with corkscrewing motions. As he comes uncannily close, his smile remains password protected. And this even though I am using my best Qur’anic Arabic. “January 10, 630 falls on a Monday”, the Asian fellow’s ghostly voice mutters. He is into ethics and not into aesthetics. He is not a flaneur. I leave before he can show me his manifesto written by ChatGPT.

A lit-up dog spa—a Hopperian scene. The ominous abandoned buildings are perhaps inhabited by wool-clad Islamic esoterics meditating on the vainness of human glories. Mystics see God in darkness, but the divinity utterly transcends them. After all, the “Sālimiyya” were a group of select Gnostics from Basra in Iraq, just across the border, and disciples of the famous Sufi Master Sahl Al-Tustari [d. 896]. Master Sahl is said to have had a vision of “God’s greatest name written in the sky in green letters from east to west” [Knysh: Islamic Mysticism] [42].

“Like many Sufi masters before and after him, al-Tustari spent some time in the famous ribat of ‘Abbadän, There he engaged in arduous ascetic exercises, which are said to have induced in him a vision of God’s greatest name written in the sky in green letters from east to west, Al-Tustari himself derived his spiritual genealogy (silsila) from Dhu ‘I-Nun al-Misri, with whom he had a brief meeting during the latter’s stay in Iraq”

It’s normal: Arabs write from east to west. And, by the way, did you know that the Matrix code rain consists of the Japanese カタカナ alphabet plus Arabic numerals ٩ ٨ ٧ ٦ ٥ ٤ ٣ ٢ ١? And that one of the four Matrix color codes is “Islamic Green”?

Glaring screens attached to rubbly walls of contingency. Lektrogirl with braids walking by fast. Nomad kitsch [[kitsch that travels from place to place]] is exposed in glossy vitrines. Fashion survivors, browsing pleasures. On a crumbling concrete bench, the Matrix’ Oracle provides diagnostics wearing Islamic dress.

Stars sparkle like neurons. A hefty dose of Reyah Al-Sabah incense hangs in the air. Holy gloom! But at the edge of the chalky lane, somebody is playing “Smoke on the Water” in a guitar store. Quite cheesy, isn’t it?

The Asian fellow begins rubbing his legs. Is he a nerd who was raised by machines? Three Kuwaiti women, their eyes modestly brightened by the glow of their hot-pink smartphones, smile through their niqabs. Is this a قز place? A Russian coach [female] in a red training suit, expensive Susvara headset firmly clamped on her head, parades her muscular frame through the البلدة. The whole scene looks like a niche TikTok made by an infamous existentialist mafia.

In Cyberpunk 2077 “Kitsch” is the lingua franca of the street.

While I am slowly eating my kebabs and fatayer, a car Doppler-whooshes across the undulations of speed bumps that are part of Kuwait’s streetscape. On its bumper, it wears the sticker: “I DON’T CARE, I’M KUWAITI” and another phrase in Arabic: تشوب . بايعها.

Another car has a swastika.

Cyberpsychos? “SciFi Wahabists”? (Check out Sophia Al Maria for the definition of the latter term). Or was that just the “average sicko” obsessed with scam keywords?

Now they are driving past the Catholic Church of St. Therese of Salmiya, which is serving Christians from India.

Contradictions? in Salmiya contradictions are sublimated by the general darkness. It is this very darkness that makes cyberpunk sublime—a notion prefigured by Edmund Burke (d. 1797), who wrote that “darkness is more productive to sublime ideas than light.” [43] The three women are still smiling through their niqabs.

Salmiya even has its own Salafist history. Sayyid Qutb’s influential work, This Religion of Islam (هذا الدين), was first published in English in 1969 in Salmiya by the International Islamic Federation of Student Organizations. [44]

(Some intoxicants might be used to produce states of religious ecstasy.)

Laura Hindelang finds, in her book Iridescent Kuwait (2022), that the “shimmering, enigmatic fluorescent” colors of Kuwait “reveal the full spectrum of petro-modernity.” “Iridescent” means that luminous colors seem to change when seen from different angles. Kuwait’s iridescent effect is due to “petroleum’s ability to not only have a powerful material presence [...] but to have a powerful aesthetic and visual presence in images.” In Kuwait modernity worked as “a system of visual regimes.” Like many decolonizing nations, in Kuwait, modernity was “more effective, virulent, and powerful as visual representations in the form of images.” Or, according to Wilson and Pendakis, “in the age of oil it is the image that proliferates as a medium of communication.” Iridescence is thus an “aesthetic staging.” Another aspect that contributes to Kuwait’s iridescence that oil is toxic and that its toxicity must be hidden from view by using a myriad of promotional strategies [p. 111]. The sticky and smelly substance is not an attractive product to display, and fro the beginning, oil companies have tried to show “everything except the product” [p. 115]. Only when the Kuwaiti oilfields started burning, the product became suddenly visible.

Crude awakening

The air quality reads: PM2.5, NO2, AQI-2SO. Tonight, I dine with my Kuwaiti friend, Zach, in my favorite Ethiopian restaurant. The prices on the tattered photo menu are printed in Emirati Dirhams. Why? The owner simply stole the menu from an Ethiopian restaurant in Dubai. His reasoning: why make your own when you serve the same dishes?

Using a red-black Fuyutsuki lighter, Zach ignites a “Natural American Spirit” organic cigarette, its package adorned with the stylized picture of an American Indian. He wears an off-white designer dishdasha with a modern twist—featuring an angular stand collar and classic French cuffs. The look is completed by black Tamima leather sandals with a crocodile design from the UAE.

“We must work for a shift from an oil-based economy to a knowledge- and information-based economy,” says Zach.

Before turning atheist, Zach (his real name is actually Zain) had been the head of an Islamic institute from 1424 [2005] to 1428 [2009]. Now, he specializes in the treatment of oily sands and oily sludge. When he shows off his golden teeth, he bears an uncanny resemblance to Gamal Abdel Nasser.

“Listen, Zach, you are a تكانه person [[45]], but it’s the oil that is holding you back. It’s that goddamn sticky, gooey, pliable, lazy, soft substance that prevents you from joining the spherical, immaterial, luminous lightness of knowledge. As the oil sticks to your feathers, you are confined to Oilpunk and cannot fly over to the other side of cyberpunk—which is, perhaps, the Silicon Valley-style ‘knowledge punk’ or ‘information punk’.”

That was the last time I saw Zach.

System failures

The rubbish bins are open; I put on my tactical face mask. Biokitsch. Colossal gyms, their paint scorched off the walls by the sputtering heat, gleam in the powdery air. Arathustra dreaming of Zandalusia—an inverted film. Clammy bodies, wirework coming out of their ears, are lined up on treadmills. Souls lost in the dinginess of allegorical shadow puppetry? A fat grey cat lies in a loaf position. “Her name is Schrödinger,” I hear somebody say. What?

The smell of naphthalin?

Shriveled palm trees rise like doppelgangers on desiccated sand parking lots that penetrate the city like runaway black holes. مافي قز. Ripples of wrinkling plaster swirl on my retina like woodgrain. It feels a little like rebooting an old Apple Powerbook.

Auditory responses reach me across innumerable eons. Walls develop their own identities. In the midst of X-ray architecture and translucent buildings, I discover the “Five Napkins Burger Joint” as well as the “Black Baklava Café”. Right next to them, a derelict Indian ice cream parlor sells ice cream in the most glaring colors the world has ever seen.

Mix the colors in a spin paint and you’ll get a Damien Hirst.

Architectural hearing aids—the sound gives meaning. Further down the drab alley, lighted by a dim tungsten glow, a Nepalese delivery man wrapped in an oversized, glaucous dungaree delivers pizzas from Pizza Hut to Burger King. I’ve never seen that before.

“Listen, Zach, I have a question. How can I distinguish a real cheetah from an android one?”

“It’s difficult; they look exactly the same. But the android’s tail movements are slightly unnatural...”

Salmiya block 2. Air quality: between phenanthrenic and mephitic.

The Saddam Hussein lookalike returns with even more wriggling motions. His gossamer moustache seems authentic, but he speaks Arabic with a Persian accent. He might have autorefreshed himself. To keep the protocol, I shift my idiom to neutral gear. After all, the modal might be on a loop.

But he comes closer. Who is he?

· A religious justice warrior reading 280-character tweets?

· A Sheikh who lost his Sheikhdom?

· An e-resident?

· A troll trolling himself?

· Or a private school graduate who likes Harry Potter and gets angry at everything that doesn’t simulate Dubai?

Just now, he looks as if he has read a religiously controversial line on his Snapchat. The views of God differ fundamentally among people of the sea, deserts, jungles, prairies, or congested urban environments.

The cool Sufi is still sipping his matcha.

Kuwaiti history

Kuwait is a smooth place, not only in terms of space but also in terms of time. Yes, Kuwaiti history is as smooth as Antakyan hummus. The erasure of the Ottoman past from cultural memory has already been mentioned (see note 6). Consider the 1950s, when every taxi cab carried a photo of Nasser on the windscreen [Fleming]. Who knows this today? The revolutionary newspapers Al Shaab and Al Fajr were printed until 1958.

Kuwaiti history could include, for example, 1960s pro-Iraqi activism, backed by British communists. A young Yasser Arafat, an engineer from Cairo working for the Kuwaiti Ministry of Public Works, who laid the foundations of the PLO here.

In Kuwait, Arafat met with his old Palestinian friends from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the teachers Abu Iyad and Khalil al-Wazir. It is also in Kuwait that he adopted the fishnet-patterned ghutra, fixed with an ‘agal, that was to become his emblem.

But in Kuwait, history has been ironed out. History is easy and effortless, without hiccups and setbacks. Cyberpunk does not use the past as a springboard to jump into the future but prefers to live in an absolute present. As Mohammed Riad writes, “Past” in Kuwait “does not refer to any appreciable time distance but simply to the pre-oil period which is near and vivid.” [46]

Presentism—not even Futurism—has replaced passéism. This is probably also the reason why Fleming’s book got banned.

“Listen, Zach, I have another question. There is Saddam Hussein over there dancing and jiggling in the middle of Salmiya. Is this normal?”

“In Islam, normality is characterized by what is usual, typical, or routine, perpendicular to the meaning beyond form that provides psychological security, drawn at the point of incidence—always as an act and not a state of being.”

Zach’s voice sounds prerecorded.

There was once a cyberpunk who bought an artificial plant and thought it was real. He was pleased that it did not wilt but concerned that it did not grow.

The cool Sufi has now acquired an entirely featureless existence. I bow nine times.

Kinetic wristwatch chargers

The isha call for prayer, wry as if played from an old Sony cassette player, pierces the sweltering black: the Sunni one first, the Shia one a little later. As I enter the marbled luxury shopping center that sticks out between ruins and rubble, the treble sound fades behind closing sliding doors. Cool air embraces me. It feels a little like a shift from G-minor to E-major in a Schubert Lied: slightly confusing but still pleasant.

Inside the mall, unyielding glass and steel surfaces multiply the images of fascinating objects: dog collars studded with crystals, gilded fragments of lunar meteorites, noodle shoes by Veneta... A breeze of Australian Cedar wood encases me. Thinking in color becomes the norm.

Today I want to examine the kinetic wristwatch chargers. Kinetic watches are self-loading watches that need no batteries but use the movement of the wearer’s body to create the power. But what if you never move and, as a result, your watch won’t move either? In that case, you put your watch into a kinetic wristwatch charger—a small box that will shake your watch the whole night, using, of course, electricity.

The model I am interested in has a remarkable cyberpunk retro design and costs $400 for a single watch unit. Of course, the whole thing doesn’t make sense, but I find that it fits perfectly well into the cyberpunk setting. Only cyberpunks will send their robots to the gym to work out for them! Only cyberpunks will decide to produce waste with the only purpose of having something to recycle. (The other advantage of this machine in a post-apocalyptic world is that your watch will continue working even when you are dead.)

But I hesitate: shall I take the single unit or the six-slot model for the whole family?

For more on Kuwaiti architecture https://www.botzbornstein.org/critical-regionalism

Citations:

Gibson said this in 1993 about Singapore, but it would apply even more to Dubai today.

[2] Quotation from Claudia Farkas AlRashoud, Kuwait’s Age of Sail.

[3] Of course, this happens in other places, too—for example, in Paris, where famous nineteenth-century malls like the Passage du Prado have been turned into selling points for kebabs and Bollywood movies. However, in Kuwait, this process is much faster. Olalquiaga holds that those Parisian malls have returned to their “Arab” origins because they were conceived during a wave of Egyptomania. (The Artificial Kingdom)

[4] Lipovetsky, L’ère du vide: Essais sur l’individualisme contemporain.

Kuwait was penalized by FIFA for misbehavior and had to pay an $8,000 fine. For the referee, the episode marked the end of his career. According to the Tifo studio, the “over-exuberant president’s act still casts a dark shadow over their footballing achievements to this day.” See Matthew Christ: “1982: When Kuwait brought chaos to the World Cup” on the Tifo website.

And since we are talking about Kuwaiti football: In 2000, Kuwait’s 20–0 win over Bhutan was, at the time, the biggest ever victory in international football. ˄

[6] S. Findlow: The United Arab Emirates: Nationalism and Arab-Islamic Identity (Abu Dhabi: The Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research, 2000), p. 35. Max Reisch: Im Auto nach Kuwait (Ullstein 1953). ˄

[7] See Louise Burfitt-Dons’ half-fictional spy thriller Our Man in Kuwait (2022). ˄

[8] Fatema Al Qadiri & Sophia Al-Maria “On Gulf Futurism” in Dazed, 12 Nov. 2012. ˄

“Back to Q82”. Watch trailer. ˄

[10] Daniel Pipes, The Hidden Hand: Middle East Fears of Conspiracies, p. 10. ˄

[11] Why is the souq called Al Manakh? Manakh (مناخ) means “climate,” and many people believe the souq is named thus because the trading inside was as unpredictable as the weather. However, manakh comes from yenawekh (ينوّخ), which means “to rest the camels” in the Kuwaiti dialect, as there used to be a camel watering place on the premises. (Thanks to Badriya Al Safran for this information.) ˄

[12] For the exact date, see Oblivious Finance, “The Kuwait Stock Exchange Explodes.” ˄

[13] The escape of the 17 individuals has never been officially confirmed. ˄

[14] This was the second suspension of the constitution [the first one happened in 1976], and the third one would come in 2024. ˄

[15] Sometimes the date is given as 1982, depending on the edition of Gibson’s book. ˄

[16] Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. ˄

[16*] Gulf War Loudspeaker Victories.

[17] Peter Lienhardt, Disorientations: A Society in Flux, Ithaca, 1993. ˄

[18] John Levins, in his Days of Fear, states that Sheikh Fahd was hit by a stray bullet in his car when arriving at work in Dasman in the morning. ˄

[19] See Saud AlSanousi’s Mama Hissa’s Mice (فئران أمي حصة), p. 172.

[20] Benjamin, Dream Kitsch. Gloss on Surrealism, GS Vol. 2. ˄

[21] Celeste Olalquiaga, The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience and Megalopolis: Contemporary Cultural Sensibilities (1998). ˄

[22] Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, p. 282. ˄

[23] Production started in 1969, but massive imports to Kuwait began in 1973. Production ended in 1978. ˄

[24] The findings in the Kuwait Times come from my friend Dr. Mauricio Duarte (GUST). We will soon publish an article together on the topic. ˄

[25] Dania Thafer, “Kuwait and East Asia: from the 1950s to Today” in Tim Niblock (ed.), Security Dynamics of East Asia in the Gulf Region, Gerlach Press, 2014, pp. 93-112. ˄

[26] HOSAKA Shuji, “Japan and the Gulf: A Historical Perspective of Pre-Oil Relations,” Kyoto Bulletin of Islamic Area Studies, 4: 1-2, 2011, pp. 3–24. All information in this paragraph comes from Hosaka’s article.

[27] R. B. Regavim, The Most Sovereign of Masters: The History of Opium in Modern Iran, 1850-1955 (2012). Penn Dissertation, p. 117. ˄

[28] John M. Lee, “Kuwait’s Oil and Riches Draw Japanese Investors,” NY Times, Feb. 22, 1971. ˄

[29] Joe Nasr, “Saba Shiber, Mr. Arab Planner,” Géocarrefour 80: 3 (2005): 197–206. ˄

[30] Easa Husain al-Yousifi, A Tayyib from the land of Kindness [Kuwait 2006]. ˄

[31] Farah Al-Naqib, “Legitimizing the Illegitimate: A Case for Kuwait’s Forgotten Modernity,” TDSR XXIX II: 2018. Tange also built the Kuwaiti embassy in Tokyo, which was demolished in 2018.

[32] Milan Kundera, “The Tragedy of Central Europe” (1984). ˄

[33] Roberto Fabbri, “Fragmentarium: Episodes of modernity in contemporary Kuwait City,” in Urban Modernity in the Contemporary Gulf, eds. Fabbri and Al-Qassemi (2022). ˄

[34] See Rem Koolhaas: Singapore Songlines: Ritratto di una metropoli Potemkin o trent’anni di tabula rasa, p. 49. ˄

[35] Vadén and Salminen, Energy and Experience: An Essay in Nafthology [2015]. ˄

[36] David Orr, “Reflections on Water and Oil,” 2004, Moebius 2:2, Article 6. ˄

[37] Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia. ˄

[38] Stephanie LeMenager: Living Oil, p. 5. ˄

[39] Angela Molteni: “Il mondo contemporaneo in Petrolio, l’ultima fatica narrativa di Pasolini.” On Pasolini.net. ˄

[40] John H. Mueller, Cadillacs und Coca Cola, 1962, p. 173.

[41] Bedoons (not to be confused with “Bedu” or Bedouins) are Gulf residents, mostly of nomad origin, who hold no citizenship of any country. This is typically because their nomad families did not complete the obligatory paperwork at the time of the state’s foundation. “Bedoon” means “without.” ˄

[42] Alexander Knysh, Islamic Mysticism: A Short History, p. 84. The famous Al-Hallaj became Tustari’s pupil at age sixteen. The Salimiyya were named after Ahmad Salim, son of Tustari’s foremost follower, Muhammad Salim. ˄

[43] Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1759). ˄

[44] Sayyid Qutb, This Religion of Islam (Hadha al-din). Salmiya: International Islamic Federation of Student Organizations, 1969. ˄

[45] The Kuwaiti word tekana [تكانه] comes from the Hindi teeka [good]. Other Arabic words used in this article are Kuwaiti expressions that Arabs from other countries will most probably not understand:

· قز: A cool place to hang out with girls.

· بايعها: A reckless person.

· زقرت: Gentleman.

· زلم: Generous, gorgeous.

· رزﻩ: Cool. ˄

[46] Mohamed Riad, “Some Aspects of Petro-Urbanism in the Arab Gulf States,” Bulletin of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences 4, 1981. ˄

There are a lot of misunderstandings people have about how data should be interpreted. One of the most common fallacies is that if something is being reported more, then it must necessarily be happening more. A very famous example of this can be demonstrated with this chart on the rate of left-handedness

Based on this, someone could think “Wow, for some reason, starting in the 1920s, the amount of left-handed people began exponentially increasing” but most of us probably realize why that’s a flawed analysis. It’s not that the percentage of left-handed people actually increased, it’s that in the past being left-handed was stigmatized and thus less likely to be recorded. This is known as Surveillance/Detection Bias. It’s the concept that as you get better at recording something, you may find more of it, even if the actual amount hasn’t increased.

One medical example, is that people who get screened for cancer more, are more likely to have cancer detected:

“Postmenopausal women have a higher risk of bleeding when exposed to estrogen, and the bleeding might lead doctors to screen for endometrial cancer. Because doctors are looking for the cancer, they will be more likely to find it in women they screen — those with the bleeding. Surveillance bias can make it appear as though postmenopausal exposure to estrogen is a risk factor for endometrial cancer when it’s actually a result of this population getting screened more.”

Now obviously, it’s not the cancer screening that’s giving them the cancer, it’s just that it’s being detected more. The definition and categorization of the thing you are trying to record is similarly very important. You’ve probably seen a lot of conservative fear-mongering over the so-called “Autism crisis” given the 300% increase in diagnosis, but this is almost entirely explained by expanded diagnostic criteria and better screening. If you expand the scope of something, you can find it more, even if nothing about reality itself has shifted. Data does not fall from the sky, the process and mechanism you use to record data for a particular phenomena (be it a disease, a crime, or anything else) is as critical as the occurrence of said phenomena itself. As Engels would say “These gentlemen think that when they have changed the names of things they have changed the things themselves.” A dataset is only as good as the process used to create it.

This leads directly to the main topic of the post, being the differences in reported cases of sexual violence across countries. I became aware of this discourse after seeing an account that (seemingly based on AI results) claimed that a women are 10x more likely to be raped in Finland than India according to official crime statistics, indicating how cases of sexual assault are exaggerated in India, and that white countries are actually much worse.

I’m sure you can sense an issue with this almost immediately. Trying to make this comparison between Finnish and Indian data, with no regard for the differences in data collection or legal classification, is at best, exceptionally misleading. You aren’t actually presenting anything informative, and certainly have not substantiated that Finland has much more sexual assault than India. Additionally, using Finland as an example of “White men committing the most sexual assault” is questionable to begin with, as (adjusted) Finnish statistical data suggest immigrants are massively overrepresented in sex crimes. Of course, this is likely because immigrants tend to be disproportionately young, male, and low income, all of which is correlated to higher rates of crime (another example of how incomplete data analysis can skew the outcome). But regardless, virtually everything written in that post is misleading at best.

To explain why a raw data comparison between India and Finland is flawed, we should first look at the substantial difference in legal categorization of rape. In India, Martial Rape is legal, Male victims are legally excluded, and rape is specifically defined as Male on Female penetration. Finland on the other hand, has criminalized martial rape, and uses a gender-neutral definition that doesn’t necessitate penetration. There are thus entire segments of data they’d be recording that India would not. There simply isn’t a uniform standard to compare. This is important to consider for cross-country data comparisons in general, as metrics aren’t always calculated in the same way, such as the infant mortality rate or the unemployment rate. You always have to look at the specific methodology. So, given that India operates with a typically narrower definition of sexual assault when compared to Finland, the data is obviously going to be skewed. The legalization of martial rape for example, naturally leads to massive reporting issues when it occurs. To quote from a lancet paper:

“Low reporting to police might in part be because marital rape is not a crime in India. Most sexual violence in India occurs in marriage; 10% of married women report sexual violence from husbands.²”

Martial rape is an entire segment of sexual violence, that the Indian legal system systemically neglects, so comparing the data on these two points is obviously impossible. A broader legal categorization will very often lead to a higher number of reported cases, just like how more cancer screenings will increase the reported cases of cancer. That doesn’t mean more people are getting cancer or more people are getting sexually assaulted. You can see such an example after a legal reform in Finland itself. After pressure to change their previous categorization of rape, that was correctly seen as antiquated and insufficient, new legislation was adopted in 2023 to expand the scope of sexual crimes. After this was implemented, the number of reported sex crimes rapidly increased by 50%. Does this mean that sexual violence suddenly increased by that amount? Almost certainly not. More likely, the legal expansion allowed incidents that previously did not meet the statutory definition to be formally recorded. Just as after a country criminalizes martial rape, you can start getting data in that category when you weren’t beforehand.

All of this is to say, the official data statistics don’t actually tell the full story, and certainly are not enough to conclude that India somehow has 10x less sexual violence than Finland. Indian data will naturally skew downward given they classify less things to begin with. Attempting to do a raw number comparison ignores every foundation of statistical analysis. If we actually took this approach seriously, that merely the amount of reported cases is the best indicator, then the best way to reduce rape in society would be to legalize it. If you no longer classify anything as rape, then the amount of reported rape would drop to 0. It should be obvious that this isn’t a serious approach that’s concerned with the truth. It’s like saying that if we do a worse job at collecting data on the amount of people below the poverty line, then there must actually be less poor people in reality. This is the definition of a measurement bias. You can’t show up at the gym on juice and start talking crazy. And even if Finland and India somehow had identical legal classifications, there’s still an outstanding issue of endemic deficiencies in data collection related to widespread underreporting and corruption. This is especially heightened for marginalized groups in India, such as Dalit women (in which 90% of accused are of a higher caste) as well as places like Kashmir and Manipur that are subject to regular media blackouts and state militarization. One obviously cannot expect reliable reporting in these situations, especially when the state itself is a perpetrator. Certainly there are many issues with Finland as well, given sexual abuse is underreported in every country. But even with the example I gave earlier of Finland having to update a previously insufficient classification, it was still a broader categorization than India has now (as martial rape was still criminalized beforehand). There is also no region of Finland, at least to my knowledge, that is under the same media blackout and suppression as places like Kashmir (That would be impossible as Kashmir is literally the most militarized region in the world). For all of these reasons and more, it seems exceptionally likely that Finland doesn’t actually have 10x the sexual violence that India does, but rather has a broader categorization as well as better data collection. Just to say for the 10th time, just because you are collecting more data of something, that doesn’t mean that thing is actually happening more. If you do not understand this, then you do not grasp one of the most simple fallacies of data interpretation.

We can use another example to illustrate this point even further, and from the same region as well. Sweden is perhaps the most infamous case of manipulating data to serve a narrative. It was (and still is) a common narrative amongst the European far-right that Sweden, due to accepting many middle eastern refugees, has turned into a rape capital of the world. A once idyllic European society turned into a savage wasteland of violence due to mass migration. The issue is that this narrative is essentially bogus from top to bottom. Yes, Sweden does have amongst the highest amount of reported cases of rape in Europe, but this actually tells you very little. What is not understood, is that Sweden also has the broadest classification of rape in the world. To quote

“The figures peaked in 2014. The Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (Bra) says this rise is due to the changes to the legislation in 2013, which made it tougher. Similar increases in the number of reported cases were seen in 2006, after new sex offence legislation came into force in April 2005.”

The definition was expanded even further in 2018 which led to an even further uptick in reported cases and convictions. Sweden also uniquely counts each individual case separately when many countries would record long-term abuse as just a single event. This means that Sweden is simply recording much more data than basically any other country in the world, as well as having a much higher rate of reporting in the first place. To quote

“Due to this more comprehensive legal framework and a strong culture of crime reporting, Sweden has the highest rate of reported sexual assaults in Europe (192 per 100,000 people in 2023, according to Eurostat). Similarly, Swedish women have the highest rates for reporting intimate partner violence in Europe.”

This proves that Sweden is recording more cases, but it certainly doesn’t prove that Sweden is actually one of the worst countries in the world with regards to these offenses. One would have to explain why the reported cases spiked each time the definition was expanded, did the legal expansion of sexual assault just make people want to rape even more? Such an explanation is clearly nonsensical. The methodology and data collection itself is clearly the relevant factor. We can show how silly this is by doing another comparison. According to Eurostat Sweden had roughly 192 reported cases of sexual violence per 100k. Indonesia comparatively has one of the lowest in the world, with about 0.5-0.7 per 100k reported cases. This would mean that in Sweden there’s a 274 times higher rate of sexual assault. I want you to actually think about this for just a second, and really consider if this even seems feasible. Indonesia, especially up until reforms in 2022 had an incredibly narrow classification of rape, and even afterward is still quite narrow, especially when compared to Sweden. Not to mention they also have a widespread lack of reporting, with some surveys suggesting about 90% of cases of sexual violence remaining unreported. Per data presented by the UNFPA representative in Indonesia “...one in four women in Indonesia have experienced physical, sexual, or psychological violence.” So clearly, something is not adding up with the data, even if we assume all contradictory evidence is exaggerated. The math is not mathing. By any reasonable metric, the process of data collection in Indonesia is simply grossly insufficient, and cannot be accepted at face-value. It would therefore be impossible to do an honest comparison of Swedish and Indonesian statistics, as the methodology, level of data collection, and amount of reporting, simply isn’t in the same universe. There is no honest comparison to be had.

Now, just to state the obvious. This doesn’t mean that western countries somehow do an excellent job on this stuff. This is clearly a global issue, and every western country has its own history of systematic sexual violence and cover-ups (as we see now in the Epstein files). This is not a defense of any country. My issue is primarily the gross lack of intellectual honesty, and the blatant disregard of methodological and statistical analysis, all in order to craft a convenient narrative for social media engagement. The incredibly dumb and incoherent screeches of “racism” were also not especially convincing. Pointing out that India has an incredibly archaic classification of rape, as well as systematic issues in data collection, is not actually racist. This is just an incredibly crude form of “decolonial” rhetoric (that mostly exists on Twitter) in which every non-western country must, for some reason, inherently be defended. This isn’t an intelligent framework in the first place, and is especially strange when it’s done on behalf of quasi-fascist reactionary states like India. I didn’t fall for this slop when Erdogan was decrying French colonialism for the PR, and I’m certainly not gonna be falling for it now. I will (perhaps naively) continue to expect more than the absolute bottom of the barrel.

So, I figured it’s about time to take a (brief) glance at the root of their ideology, and to be specific, American Neo-Nazism. Not because I think that there’s a looming threat of Antisemitic Nazi’s taking over the country (the Nazis who rule our country are hard Philosemites) but simply because I think it could be an interesting ideological examination of Neo-Nazism, and its relation (read: hostility) to Communism.

The case study I’ll be looking at is George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi party (ANP), given that it’s perhaps the most famous Nazi movement in America. Even if you aren’t aware of this movement in particular, you may recognize his face from the random slop edits regularly posted on Twitter.

I’ve read a decent amount of reactionary thinkers. Most of it isn’t particularly insightful, but there’s still something to learn (even if hard to parse). Looking at propaganda is important, because it tells you what they really think. The sources I have looked at for this write-up, is George Lincoln Rockwell’s book “The nationalist perspective (white power)”, his other book “This time the world” the American Nazi party’s official paper “The Rockwell report”, their other paper “The Stormtrooper” as well as various interviews/second hand sources. I will cite them as such.

Fear of Communism

Let’s start with the beginning, Nazism as a primordial anti-communism. Looking at the ANP, their stance is clear, seeing Communism as the contemporaneous manifestation of Jewry. “Jew” is a parasitic creature, and Communist and Jew are essentially synonyms.

You can see how they put Communism as one moment, in the long history of Jewish conspiracy. From “This time the world”

“This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Rus-sia), Bela Kun (Hungary], Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this world- wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It played, as modern writer, Mrs. Webster, has so ably shown, a definitely recognizable part in the tragedy of the French Revolution”

The mention of the French revolution as a Jewish plot did give me notice, because It’s not a trope I was particularly familiar with, but it did actually remind me of the original Hamas charter from 1988, in which they also describe the Bolshevik and French revolution being under Zionist influence. To quote

“They stood behind the French and the Communist Revolutions and behind most of the revolutions we hear about here and there. They also used the money to establish clandestine organizations which are spreading around the world, in order to destroy societies and carry out Zionist interests.”

(Just to be pointed, I obviously do not actually see much parallel between Hamas and Nazism, merely that certain narratives/tropes can be used in various contexts)

Lincoln Rockwell saw the looming influence of Communist propaganda all across the world, especially hidden within American Media. He even described Steinback’s “The grapes of wrath” as communist propaganda. To quote once more from “This time the world”.

“I read more of these novels - Grapes of Wrath - and four or five others, and in all of them 1 sensed an attempt to convince me of social ideas, not by reason, but by emotional manipulations while my mind was hypnotized by my emotions. I didn’t fully realize it, but I had discovered left wing and communist propaganda. I hated it, without knowing what it was!”

I will say, reading Steinbeck in middle school was actually the first time I became familiar with left-wing and “Proletarian” concepts, so who knows, maybe he had a point?

Rockwell also describes how he used to enjoy Charlie Chaplin movies until he “realized” that Chaplin was apparently an anti-Hitler Stalinist. To quote once more:

“Charlie Chaplin was one of my favorites (and still is) and when I saw his “Great Dictator”, I was not only brought to tears by the funny parts, but I was brought to bursting indignation by the impassioned speech he makes at the end against dictatorship (except for Stalin’s brutal dictatorship which was depicted as benevolent love for his people, including the massacres of “enemies of the people”). The only dictators attacked by Mr. Chaplin were Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo, which 1 have since found easy to understand when we learn that Charlie is so red even our pinko State Department has banned him from the U.S.A. - and the even more significant fact for a capitalist who has made millions here in our hospitable land, that Chaplin’s real name is Israel Thonstein.”

These diatribes about all mainstream media secretly being communist almost remind me how modern conservative media screams about all media being complicit in the woke agenda. First as a tragedy, then as a Farce?

The notion of Charlie Chaplin being a secret Bolshevik largely originates with the FBI under the McCarthy era, someone who Rockwell considers to be a great anti-communist patriot, who was wrongly maligned by the jews. Furthermore, if it was not already obvious, there is no proof that Charlie Chaplin’s real name was “Israel Thonstein”. There isn’t even proof that he was even Jewish. This bizarre rumor actually emerged when the British and Americans were investigating him as a potential communist, when there were also rumors that he was secretly born in Russia. To quote

“The FBI asked its British counterpart to investigate Chaplin’s personal background and political allegiances in a bid to ban him from the U.S. for fear of Soviet infiltration. Chaplin, whose mother and father were English entertainers, said he was born in London in 1889. The Americans wanted to see if he was actually born in France under the name Israel Thornstein, and if he was a Communist spy.’

It originated with the feds, and then was later adopted by the “dissident right”. Who could’ve figured? Continuing, In the 1961 edition of the Rockwell report, they have a section talking about the farcical claims of Soviet antisemitism, given that despite the notion of Communism being innately Jewish, plenty of American Jewry remained dogmatically anti-communist (Especially amongst Zionist and proto-Neoconservative Jews). Meir Kahane was famously a rabid anti-Soviet, and the JDL actually did a famous terrorist attack against the Soviet U.N mission in 1971. If there’s one thing that both Aryan and Jewish Nazi’s agree on, it’s a common hatred of Bolshevism.

To quote from “The Rockwell report”

“In the last years, Life, Look and other media of mass communication have been pushing. hard with the idea that the Soviets and the Communists are “ anti-Semitic… When the non-Jewish peoples become thoroughly aware of the Jewish nature of this world plague “Jews will hang from lamp posts in every village and city” - as one Jew put it at the end of World War I. In other words, the very survival of Jews in non-Communist countries depends on the huge non-Jewish majorities in these countries ignorant of the Jewish nature of the criminal Communist conspiracy.”

The argument quite obviously being that Jews are trying to deceive people into thinking the USSR is actually anti-Jewish, so people don’t realize they control it.

To empathize the Jewish nature of the USSR, they regularly post Soviet imagery written in Yiddish (examples below)

In another section, they describe various Yiddish language newspapers in New York that have written sympathetically or supportively about the USSR. To quote once more from the “Rockwell Report”

“Here are excerpts from a pamphlet published by a JEWISH COMMUNIST GROUP In New York, the same outfit which publishes the MORNING FREIHBIT in Yiddish, and is OPENLY COMMUNIST.” Followed by various newspaper snippets praising the USSR.

He [Rockwell] was actually incredibly radicalized even from the start by seeing Jewish newspapers and writers praising the Soviet Union. He describes one of his first radicalizing experiences in “This time the world”

“I had suddenly been exposed to a whole secret world which the average American never even imagines and never sees: the world of the Jews. In the same Jewish Voice I saw the headlines by the editor, Sammy Gach: “Thank God!” - the day the Soviet Union got the A-bomb!”

I will just briefly mention that in this same section, he also cites the esoteric conspiracy theory of Ashkenazi Jews being a secret Asiatic tribe known as “Khazars”

“I learned, from the article called “Khazars” in The Universal Jewish En-cyclopedia, published by Jews, that most Jews are not even Semites or descendants of the Hebrew people of Palestine, and thus of Christ’s peo-ple, but mostly the descendants of a semi-oriental tribe in central Russia called “Khazars” or “Chazars”, whose king, Bulaban, in the sixth century after Christ, ordered his people en masse to become “Jews”.”

He obsessively mentions that the Bolshevik revolution was directed by Jews, with a particular focus on Leon Trotsky, or as he would say, “Bronstein”.

From “The Rockwell report”

“I pointed out that the Russian Revolution was not Russian but Jewish! I named names, one after the other, in damning succession - Trotsky, Bronstein, Litvinoff, Finklestein, etc.”

His focus on Trotsky as a uniquely malevolent and influential figure was persistent. Rockwell gave a speech at the University of Washington on June 10th, 1964, and in this he extensively mentions Trotsky and other Jewish figures of the Bolshevik Revolution. This is hardly surprising given the hyper-prominence of Trotsky, as the evil conniving jew, in hard-right anticommunist thought. One of the main narratives being his alleged masterminding of a “Holocaust” against white Christians.

This narrative is very very old, and has existed since before “Trotskyism” was even a thing. You can just look at Imperial Russian propaganda art for example.

Some of this anti-Trotsky antisemitism has even evolved far beyond it’s original purpose, with the claim of the Neoconservative movement being filled with covert or ex-Trotskyites. To my knowledge, this idea originating amongst Paleocons, but has even been repeated (often ironically but not always) on the left.

I’ve also posted about it because frankly, I just find it incredibly funny.

Rockwell never bothers asking the simple question of “Wait, if the USSR is controlled by Jews, why did they kick out Trotsky in the first place?” Especially because, per his own analysis, Stalin was also controlled by Jews. To quote “This time the world”

“Lenin, not a Jew, was married to Krupskaya, a Jewess. Stalin, also not a Jew, was married to the sister of Lazar Kaganovitch - Rose, a Jewess. Stalin’s son married another Jewess and it turns out that Khrushchev was the protege of this same Jew, and married another Jewess in the Kaganovitch family!”

So both Stalin and Trotsky were equally controlled by Jews? (or was a Jew in the case of Trotsky). If that’s the case, then why did they have a dispute in the first place? Furthermore, why would the capitalist west and the Soviet Union be fighting either? If all of these actors are on the exact same side, none of this makes sense. So it’s never asked. But I digress. Trotsky will be relevant again in a moment, but let’s continue.

Another point they emphasize is that America is not serious about fighting communism (because America is also run by Jews). You can see in this propaganda cartoon they depict America as propping up the communist regimes of Castro and Tito, whilst punishing the anti-communist regimes of Batista and Trujillo

He essentially describes the USSR and USA as being basically on the same team. To quote “This time the world”

“Today, they are in the Kremlin and the White House, wearing different masks to be sure, but nevertheless grinding the whole world under the brutal heel of the Marxist doctrines of “mass” and “equality” and racial defilement”

Hopefully I shouldn’t have to describe how laughable this notion is. America almost immediately enforced a brutal blockade on Cuba, and was a massive supporter of brutal anti-communist regimes especially across Latin America

He describes this later in more detail, about how America has supposedly helped basically every communist regime. This is first described with American support for anti-Nazi partisan groups in WW2.

“In most countries conquered by the Anti-Communist Germans, there were “resistance” groups. The U.S.A. supplied and aided these enormously, but not without the same vicious PATTERN!

In most countries, there were resistance leaders who were both anti-Nazi, AND Anti-Communist. But we ALWAYS backed the COMMUNIST leaders and did everything possible, even during the war, to undermine and wreck the anti-communis “resistance”.

The specific example of Yugoslavia is given, about how America supported Tito over Mihajlovic.

“In Jugoslavia there were Josip Brochovich (better known at “Tito”) and Col. Draza Mihajlovic with his “chetniks”, as they were called. Both of these groups fought the Germans, --but “Tito” went all-out to slaughter and terrorize CHRISTIANS and ANTI-COMMUNISTS, --while Mihajlovie fought only the German Army. So the U.S. A. poured in aid to Tito, ---and, after the war, kept supplying and helping him until he had hunted down and SHOT Mihajlovic before a firing squad!”

In reality, the Chetniks did actually seek collaboration with the British. They were also collaborators with the axis viewing communists as their greatest enemy. They were neither patriotic nor an effective partisan movement. It’s just a complete rewriting of history.

Bulgaria and Albania are also mentioned as communist regimes aided by America.

“In Bulgaria, the leader of the “resistance” was Trachio Kostov, Secretary General of the Bulgarian Communist Party, and this “patriot” also fought not only the Nazis, --but slaughtered and terrorized Christians and Anti-Communists. So we aided and abetted him, too., (Americana). In Albania, the same picture: the “partisans” were led by the Communist Enver Hoxha, called “little Tito”, --who is the red dictator of Albania today. We helped put him in there.”

He has a similar stance toward the DRC, viewing America as acting overly conciliatory to Patrice Lumumba

“Right now, in the Congo America is also pushing for another “coalition”, with three “factions”, just as in Laos: Communist Gizenga, Anti-Communist Tshombe and a so-called “moder-ate” or “neutralist, Adoula. But, as usual, the “Moderate” Adoula, together with the Communist Patrice Lumumba formed the first red political party in the Congo in 1956. Now he has “arrested” some Reds to make things look good, but we will soon see the effects of the “coalition” there, as we have everywhere else!

He ends up naming basically every socialist, or even just broadly left wing nationalist movement ever as being aided or supported by the U.S, with basically 0 evidence provided. I imagine much of this is resentment over American failures in Korea. George Lincoln Rockwell was a Korean War vet, and at several occasions wrote about how he saw the stalemate as a great betrayal.

“The chief “negotiator” of the sell-out in Laos is Arthur Dean, a member of the Communist-front Institute of Pacific Relations so thoroughly exposed and discredited in Senate hearings. Dean also helped “negotiate” the Korean “peace” which was a euphemism for a disgraceful U.S. defeat by Communist baboons.

The key role, at the moment, is being played by DEAN RUSK, the man who advised Truman to send our men in to be slaughtered in Korea when they were forbidden to win. He is also a member of the State Department clique which promoted the lies that Mao Tse Tung and Castro were “agrarian reformers”. Rusk also pushed the decision to fire the magnificent General Douglas MacArthur, --and is a past president of the Communist-aiding Rockefeller Foundation!”

Viewing the Rockefeller foundation as a wing of global communism isn’t the take you see everyday, but what do you expect. He was also extremely upset with how the Vietnam war was going, seeing it as another sell-out by American leadership.

“The latest sell-out in Laos, with our troops being sent to Thailand, (next on the list), --WITH NO AMMUNITION, --is filling up the craw of even the most patient and generous Americans. Let the traitors and plotters BEWARE! With every new sell-out they are getting closer and closer to the gas-chambers, the ONLY place where their monstrous crimes against millions of American dead from our phony wars can be expiated. The American Nazi Party is not in business to “reform” these vermin, but to KILL them after they have been exposed and proven guilty before good American juries, --in accordance with our once sacred American Constitution.”

His take on Vietnam was inconsistent. He wanted America to win the war, but also said America never should have gotten involved in the first place. To quote “I decry the fact that we are in Vietnam at all. Asia is a yellow continent, and it needs to be ruled and run by yellow people.”

This should also hopefully put to rest the bizarre notion that Nazis are “isolationist” when that’s never been true. They are just as rabidly imperialist as the liberal status quo, if not more. (You can see this now with Fuentes cheering on the U.S. assault of Venezuela).

His analysis of China is perhaps even stranger. He seems to think that China is only partially under Jewish control? Arguing that because they are “yellow” the Jews would then be noticed and possibly resented. Quoting from “White Power”

“Here they have produced a fanatical mob of convinced Communists who are YELLOW, and it is impossible for the Jews to sit at the head of this enormous human gang without being noticed and then RESENTED.

It is entirely possible that the CHINESE Communists will forget that they are supposed to LOVE JEWS! AND IF THIS GIGANTIC HUMAN FLOOD EVER TURNED ON THE JEW BOSSES IN MOSCOW, IT WOULD BE AN UNPRECEDENTED CATASTROPHE FOR WORLD COMMUNISM AND ITS JEWISH MASTERS!

It’s a bit incoherent, parsing the work in context, he seems to be saying that China could break free of Jewish control, and turn on Russia (this is during the Sino-Soviet split). He then argues that the Jews set up Taiwan in order to distract Mao from ever threatening Moscow.

“If one of the Jew-built stars appears likely to kick over the traces and turn on his Jew masters, the Jews turn on all their fantastic apparatus of publicity to RUIN the would-be rebel, and build up the OTHER Gentile, --or the “understudy”

This is precisely what the Jews have done with their Chinese “star”, Mao Tse Tung.

It would have been EASY for the manipulators to have finished off Chiang Kai Shek while they were installing Communism in China, --but this would have left Mao with the capability of defying and attacking his Jew masters in Moscow and New York City.

So the wily Jews set up an “enemy” of Mao to sit on his flank and “menace” him from Formosa in case he began to look greedily at Moscow.”

This obviously just doesn’t make much sense. The USSR heavily supported the PRC (and Mao) came to power in the first place. Why would the “Jewish communists” support Mao, if at the same time, they’d support Taiwan to oppose him?

What’s also funny about Rockwell’s analysis, is that he (strangely) seems to think that Japan became a communist country after WW2. To quote again from “White power”

“Even in Japan and China, I found the early planters of the Communist seeds were Jewish. In Japan there was an Anna Rosenberg, and guess who turned up in China as advisor to Sun-Yat Sen? Good old Jewish George Sokolsky, our late “conservative” columnist!

The last of his geopolitical “analysis” (if you can call it that) that I’ll be looking at, is his take on Cuba. It’s arguably the most incoherent so far, which says a lot.

Like his previous conspiracies, he’s of the belief that America “betrayed” Batista and helped install Castro. To quote from the “Rockwell report” once more

“In Cuba, just a few years ago, we were told that a terrible tyrant, Batista, was oppressing the people. He had to be gotten out. That he was also a powerful anti-Communist was not mentioned.”

And furthermore, he seems to hold many contradicting views on Cuba (somewhat similar to China) in the sense that he thinks it’s both controlled by Jews, and not, at the same time.

To quote from the “Rockwell Report”:

“Today in Cuba the most powerful figure emerging is that of Abraham Zincowicz, a Jew, who used the Spanish alias “Fabio Gobrat ‘ (or something very similar). Zincowiez has been an agent of the Comintern for 30 years in the Caribbean. He lays down the Party line in a high level Cuban communist periodical for party members, and he is believed to head a powerful security force within The Cuban Communist Party.”

As a note, I tried figuring out who “Abraham Zincowicz” or “Fabio Gobrat” is, and I literally could not find anything after searching it up..

I looked up the name on X, and found this post

After reverse image searching, I found the Wikipedia page of “Fabio Grobart” (Rockwell misspelled the name). He does seem to be of a Jewish background, so at least he got that correct.

But, despite his insistence that Castro is being masterminded by the Jews, he also held the position that Castro didn’t even like Jews that much, and that Jews hated him because he nationalized their industry.

“I was especially interested in why JEWS would hate Castro so much. And, although I never got close to the Jews themselves, the front man told me they were RAGING at Castro for “nationalizing” THEIR Jew businesses…Castro is one of those rarest of rare birds, a Communist who is not crazy about Jews. There is one more National leader of the same variety, Nasser, -who is not a red, but who doesn’t realize the connection between Jews and Communism; he hates only ZIONISTS and religious Jews, apparently ignorant of the fact that ZIONISTS and COMMUNISTS WOrK hand-in-glove, as they did when Moscow worked in the UN to set up Israel, and recognized this criminal, bandit state in one and a half minutes, --beating the U.S. A., which recognized the Hebrew Haven for spies and traitors in three minutes.”

All of this is a bit incoherent, you may notice the comment about Nasser. Rockwell had some level of fondness for the Arabs, seeing them as a common ally against the Jews and Israel, which isn’t necessarily uncommon against Neo-Nazis either. Nick Fuentes has expanded his audience greatly by criticizing Israel over the Gaza genocide, and David Duke was a famous admirer of Assad. But, Rockwell didn’t appreciate that Arabs seemingly didn’t want him to kick out all the Jews of America and to send them to Israel. He described this in an open letter he sent to the Arabs

On Nasser specifically, in this same letter, he claims that he receives a personal Christmas Card from Nasser every year, but he still doesn’t get proper opportunity to discuss common issues. To quote

“Every year, Col. Nasser very courteously sends me a personal Christmas card and yet, when I go to his embassy to discuss our common problem of the Jews, he has announced in the press that I will be “bodily thrown out”!”

I actually have no idea if this is true at all (couldn’t find anything about it on hand) but it is still funny regardless. But back to the subject at hand, despite thinking that Castro was potentially independent of the Jews, He unapologetically supported an American assault on Cuba, and said the current U.S. admin was too weak.

“This time, there can be no question but that America SHOULD attack Red Cuba, -unlike the first two World wars, in which our involvement was pure insanity, --and, in the case of World War II, TREASON. Cuba is poised at America’s jugular vein and stands athwart our life lines through the Panama canal. Worse, the example of a “successful” Red Cuba arrogantly spitting in Uncle Sam’s eye all the time, is DYNAMITE in the rest of South America!”

But, his argument for why America is hostile to Cuba, is simply that Castro isn’t pro-Jewish enough, so Kennedy plans to kick out Castro and replace him with a Trotskyite

“Kennedy is going in to kick CASTRO out, and put in a new, fresh, more obedient COMMUNIST IN, -a Communist more like the super-Jew-loving Trotskyite Communists in our State Department.”

He always returns to Trotsky as the key mastermind of it all, and the biggest threat always looming. His analysis of Castro being replaced with a Trotskyite is similarly inconsistent, because in some of his writings, he seems to indicate that Cuba is already controlled by Trotskyites?

To quote again from his book “White power”

“The Trotskyite Communist members of the “Socialist Workers Party”, about 90% Jews and Negroes, are violently “militant” and scorn the more subtle activities of the regular Communist Party and Soviet Russia as “too slow”. They are passionate adherents of Trotsky’s doctrine of “international violent revolution”. The Chinese Communists, the African Communists (100% Negro) and Castro (50% Negro) are also violent adherents of the bloody Trotsky doctrines of bloodshed, murder and assassination.”

He seems to be under the impression that China, the African socialist movements, and Cuba, are all adherents of the Trotskyite doctrine (despite also thinking that Kennedy will remove Castro and replace him with a Trotskyite?). Also, not super relevant, but he claims that Cuba is at least 50% African, which just isn’t true either (lmao).

Going over all of this was quite grueling (and boring) because it was just constant screeching over the same handful of conspiracies. I’ll end this by going over his brief writings on Capitalism and Karl Marx, mostly found in his work “white power”.

On the man himself (Marx)

Like many fascists, he had an incredibly warped view of capitalism, viewing it as parasitic, not due to the fundamental mechanism of capital itself, but because of some malevolent corrupting force. He starts with the theory that Marx invented the term “capitalism” in order to demonize productive white societies.

“Few notice that the phrase “capitalist” was popularized by none other than that bloody old Jew, Marx, himself -a ship-wrecker. (Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital). Until Marx told our kind of people they were “capitalists” in his “Das Kapital,” they never gave what they were doing economically such a formal name, but they did know what they believed in. It was NOT “capitalism.” Capital was only a tool for our people in the process of production. Men like Henry Ford were not interested simply in getting money. Rather they were trying to do something - in Ford’s case, give all Americans an automobile via Ford’s discovery of “mass production.” The American economy does not produce miracles because it is “capitalist,” but because it is enterprising and productive! The correct name of our system is not “capitalism,” but “productive enterprise.”

His love for Henry Ford is unsurprising, given their mutual admiration for Hitler. This idea, of good vs bad capitalism, is not uncommon amongst reactionary thought, or even amongst some naive leftists. How many rightists screech out against the illusory molasse of “Corpratism” (but never Capitalism). It’s always about saving the good, pure capitalism, from some evil malevolent force. We hate the evil and bad finance capital, but love the productive and progressive industrial capital. You see this same mindset amongst a strand of populist leftists. Some even praise China for having the “real” productive economy without such a finance sector (which even as a claim, is largely incoherent/inaccurate). Wouldn’t capitalism be so much better if we didn’t have BlackRock and tech CEOs?

This view can also be linked to Lyndon Larouche who also held the similar dichotomy of “Good Capitalism, bad Capitalism”. Such distinction is a farce, one only need read Lenin’s theses on Imperialism to see how financialization is an inevitable consequence of Capitalist development. “Finance” is not some evil cousin of Capitalism, but intrinsically related. Capitalism did not become corrupt, this was a necessary mechanism of capital. I very much enjoyed the article “Making capitalism great again” which goes over this juvenile analysis.

Continuing, Rockwell has more absurd claims regarding Marxism, he also claims that Marx… failed to consider that capitalism had other factors then just Capital?

“Productive enterprises need capital.

But it also needs labor, material, management and a hundred other things. Capital is only one of the tools of a productive enterprise system.

It took the Jewish parasitic genius of Karl Marx to elevate that one tool, capital, to the status in our civilization by attacking it and calling it “capitalism.” He has thus trapped us into defending what he created, and has thereby doomed us to defeat because we defend a system based not on production, but money manipulation.”

The necessity of the proletariat for the function of capitalist society is quite literally a main thesis of Marx. He is a firm upholder of the proletariat as the privileged subject of history. It’s like doing the “Marx failed to consider” meme, just in the most low effort way possible. It is paragraphs like this that frankly make me bored of reading this low-tier fascist dreck. It’s so bafflingly dumb it gives me a headache. (This probably isn’t a super clean writing style but I was getting pretty bored at this point. I finished this with spite alone)

He finally ends his writings on Marx, by citing a fake letter of Marx foretelling a grand Talmudic conspiracy that will establish a Jewish supremacist world.

Here is a direct quote from the correspondence of Marx with another Jew, Baruch Levy, quoted in “La Revue de Paris,” June 1, 1928, page 574:

“In the new organization of mankind, the children of Israel will spread over the whole surface of the earth and will become everywhere, without opposition, the leading element, especially if they can impose upon working classes the firm control of some of them. The governments of the nations forming the Universal Republic will pass without effort into the hands of the Jews under the cover of the victory of the proletariat, private property will then be suppressed by the rulers of Jewish race, who will control public funds everywhere. Thus will be realized the Talmudic promise that, when the times of the Messiah come, Jews will possess the wealth of all peoples of the world.”

It goes without saying the letter is laughably fake and fabricated after Marx died. It should be noted that Marx was an atheist, and grew up in a Protestant family, and never strongly identified himself as a Jew. Viewing Marx as deeply entwined with the Jewish people is quite strange or misplaced, given how little Judaism influenced his life and political thought.

With all this said, what is my conclusion? well at most, I can say I’m not impressed. I would never say that there are not important and influential thinkers on the right (Carl Schmitt and Heidegger to name a few) but stuff like this is hardly worth the time. It’s merely politicized racist schizophrenia for lack of a better term. But alas, can still be interesting as a historical case study, even if just to showcase their rank ignorance.

Thank you for reading. This is a bit of a filler post, but I’ll be working on a lot more.

The specific contention that I will be addressing is if sex is a binary variable in humans. I take the position that it isn’t, whereas many presume the fact that it is. You see the “fact” that sex in humans is binary repeated all the time, including by JK Rowling, and other high-profile figures involved in the war against “gender ideology” (whatever that means).

I personally am a little confused why people are so focused on this aspect in particular. You can believe sex in humans isn’t binary, and still consistently hold almost every other transphobic belief, but for one reason or another, they choose to highlight this specific point. It might be because they think if they concede this point, they’d have to concede that sex is not as black and white as they imagine? But that’s just speculation.

I first waded into this discourse after seeing some nonsensical rambling about trans people from George Galloway. Someone in the replies was arguing about how sex in humans is actually binary, I responded with a QRT about how they were using binary wrong, and we got into a long-winded argument (which I will discuss later)

But first, before we delve in head first, there’s a lot of concepts to unpack. Namely, what is the actual meaning of a word, how do we use definitions, and how does this relate to the subject at hand? Philosophy is often grossly underutilized or outright misunderstood in scientific discussions, which I find to be a real shame. Just some basic logic and philosophy can be extremely helpful, and this is a perfect example. Let’s begin with some fundamental linguistic philosophy.

We should understand that words themselves do not contain inherent meaning (unless you have the absurd position of linguistic realism). The meaning of “Applesauce” is presumably not hard encoded into the universe itself. That is to say, words have meaning because we collectively decide they have a particular meaning, or to be more specific, a usage. As Wittgenstein would say “The meaning of a word is its use in language.“ You might see the difficulty when a transphobe is asked to “Define a chair” because they’ll inevitably try and give some definition such as “A chair is something with 4 legs you sit on” and the response will be with a horse, which the definition would fit, but we intuitively know to be incorrect. We have an idea of what the word “Chair” is trying to convey, and a fleshy mammal it is not. We know what a chair actually is, because we’ve socially agreed upon what that use of the word is trying to reference. Words (and language broadly) are social in nature. We use them to communicate abstract concepts we hold in our mind (something unique in humans, and seemingly not observed in any other species).

Words themselves don’t create reality, we use them to describe reality (Well, what we think is reality, to be specific). Definitions themselves are not truth apt propositions. Definitions can certainly be incoherent, they can be proprietary (i.e., not commonly used by anyone) but they do not contain a truth value in isolation. Like a definition, a noun also can’t be a “fact”. Which is why when I see people say “Sex is a fact!” or “Gender is fact!” I am genuinely a bit confused with what they are trying to say. Are they saying that the mouth sounds that produce the noise “sex” or the typed out letters that make the word “sex” are truth-apt propositions? Obviously you can make truth-apt statements with nouns, such as “Bob is a fireman” but that’s clearly different from simply saying “Fireman is a fact”.

Furthermore, a proposition being true or false will obviously relate to the contextual definition that’s actually being used. For example, let’s say some random society defined “mammals” as any creature that can walk on the land. That does not entail a proposition in of itself. If, with that definition, they then claim that a frog is a mammal (because it can walk on land) that would be a truth-apt proposition. It would be introducing new information that could be correct or incorrect in relation to a particular definition, and with said definition previously stated, the claim that frogs are mammals would clearly be correct. Yes, it would not be correct with our usage of the word mammal, but in their usage of the word mammal. We are mentioning the same word, but using it differently. Do you understand? (I recommend this old Scott Alexander post from 2014 which goes over this particular aspect, the meaning of categories, in more detail). You can also see this in Wittgenstein when he talks about language games, with the example of a bricklayer yelling for slabs. “Language is, in part, an activity of giving names to objects, or of attaching labels to things. For example, a builder may instruct an assistant as to what type of stone is needed for the construction of a building, by saying “slab” or “block” or “pillar” or “beam,” according to the order in which the building-stones are needed, so that the assistant can bring the correct type of stone for the construction of the building. However, the naming of an object is only a preparation for an anticipated move in the language-game. Linguistic movement occurs when a sentence is constructed, such as, “Bring me a slab,” or “Bring me a beam.” Uttering the mouth-sound “Slab” does not inherently mean “bring me a slab” but in this context it does. The context is what gives a word uses. Language is a toolbox, and words are the tools we use in order to communicate.

To put more clearly, let’s use a stipulative definition in propositional logical form.

P1) “President” is defined as anyone with a mustache.

P2) Bob has a mustache

Q) Therefore, Bob is a President

And in predicate logic:

M(x) = “x has a mustache”

P(x) = “x is a president (under the given definition)”

P1) ∀x (M(x) → P(x))

P2) M(Bob)

Q) P(Bob)

This would all be logically valid and sound, given we take the stipulated definition of president, and not the commonly used definition. This is a deductive argument via Modus Ponens. Again, you can say it is strange to use such a definition (obviously) but that would not make the proposition false. The proposition is still contextually correct.

There are some words that are quite ubiquitous in meaning, and other words that are less precise, that doesn’t necessarily mean better or worse, just different. It’s fine for definitions to have fuzziness, that’s almost inevitable. Otherwise we’d never be able to tell the difference between a lake and a pond. Vague predicates exist. We also don’t have to squabble about definitions all the time because plenty of the words we say are so ubiquitous in meaning, I can understand what someone is saying without any clarification. If someone says “I ate an apple” It would be incredibly easy for me to understand what they are saying (that they ate an apple). There is also the problem of semantic primitives, or words that are so fundamental, they are almost irreducible in definition (i.e. “The’ “do” “and”). But, and this is where more concrete definitions become relevant, if I genuinely have no conception of what you are trying to convey with a word, communication would then become largely futile. This is why I can be quite pedantic when asking people what they mean by the terms they are using. You especially see this when people start throwing around terms from a subject they aren’t especially familiar with (say, philosophy or science) and are using terms in ways that are incongruent with how they are commonly used in said field. This is why I value clarity. For some reason, a lot of people get weirdly irritated by this, and act as if I’m entirely clueless about what a word means. When I ask what they mean when they use the term “woman”, they will often remark “Wow, you don’t even know what a woman is!?” Failing to realize they’ve missed the entire point of the question. I’m not asking because I have no idea what my conception of “Woman” is, I’m asking because I have no idea how coherent or sensible your understanding of the term is. You can play a lot of games when a term being thrown around doesn’t have a concrete or clearly defined meaning. As a related pet peeve, there is a persistent and annoying trend amongst many people (plenty on the left, as I have observed) in which they intentionally don’t want to understand even basic logical or philosophical terms because they don’t want to be one of the accursed “Philosophy bros” who use dastardly tactics such as trying to logically follow a point being made. Talking to said people is like arguing with a brick wall. Suffice to say, I find this attitude mostly pathetic, and common amongst midwits.

As another example of ambiguity in language, take discourse around the term “Imperialism”. In left-wing discourse this term is highly contested, particularly on when it is, and isn’t applied to certain actors or situations, all of which depends on how you are caching out the term. Are we using the classical Leninist definition of capital expansion? Some newer definition based on unequal-exchange? Just based on raw military expansionism? The definition you are using would alter if you’d be able to coherently label a country like Russia as “imperialist” or not. This can be especially frustrating when said semantic disagreements can get in the way of what you actually want to discuss in the first place. (Note: don’t take this as me saying semantics aren’t important, far from it). I especially notice this when people will use words like “Materialism” or “Dialectics” to justify basically any random jumble of words they are posting.

Definitions don’t just fall from the sky, they are inherently socially constructed. And to be especially clear, when I say that they are socially constructed, I don’t mean to demean their importance at all. Social constructs (such as language) is critical for any understanding and communication we want to have about the world. Some people (many regrettably on the left) use “social construct” essentially to mean “totally arbitrary and meaningless, and can be changed at a whim”. I am certainly not using social construct in that way. Yes, the category of “policeman” is a social construct, but try punching a cop and you’ll see the power of that construct rather fast. Trying to label the body of armed men with different sounds and collections of letters would hardly change that. Or as Engels would say “These gentlemen think that when they have changed the names of things they have changed the things themselves.”

With that all set in the background, we can finally talk about the definition of sex itself. So let’s delve in further. There’s different ways biologists can use the word sex, particularly when referencing certain anatomical traits or attributes. “Sex” can encompass gonadal sex, chromosomal sex, hormonal sex, phenotypic sex, and (for what I’ll be focusing on later in this article) Gametic sex. Each of these has its own criteria.

If you want to claim that sex is a binary variable in humans, you’d have to specify to which aspect of sex you are referring too. Before getting too far ahead, let’s also define what “binary” means when used in science. If we go to Sage Publications, one of the largest scientific journals in the world, go to their research methods, and look at the section “Logit and Probit: Binary and Multinomial Choice Models” we can see clearly the definition of binary they use. To quote “Binary outcomes are dichotomous-dependent variables coded as 0 or 1. Nominal outcomes are dependent variables with three or more unordered categories”. For something to be binary, it has to be an exclusive disjunction. Meaning, only 1 of 2 possible values can ever possibly be input. Sage gives further clarification with their description of “Dichotomous variables” and lists reasons why people shouldn’t be overly eager to categorize certain variables as “Dichotomous”. To quote;

“First, such conversions may not be theoretically justifiable. The popularity of estimation techniques such as probit analysis and logit caused some to unnecessarily convert continuous dependent variables to dichotomous form. Second, even when theoretically justified, such conversions necessarily result in a loss of information. It is one thing, for example, to know that the Supreme Court affirmed a decision, but quite another to know whether it did so by a 9–0 or 5–4 vote. Third, forcing a variable into just two categories may not always be easy or appropriate if there is a nontrivial residual category. For example, if one measures handedness dichotomously (left/right), the number of ambidextrous individuals or those with arm injuries that required converting to their other hand may pose coding or analytical problems.”

As you can see, especially with the example of left-handed vs right-handed, just because something isn’t a binary variable, that doesn’t mean there’s necessarily a 3rd distinct value being introduced, just that the combination of values themselves is not binary. The category of “left” and “right” may be the only possible inputs, but because someone can be both “left and right” (being ambidextrous) then “What hand people use to write” would not be a binary variable.

Examples of true binary variables would be inputs in binary code (0, 1), the response to a yes or no question (Yes, No) the presence or absence of a characteristic (present or absent), any proposition in logic (true, false). These are binary because it would be logically impossible to have both values at the same time. If someone asked the yes/no question “Are you 6 feet tall” and you responded with “Yes No” it would be entirely incoherent. You’d blatantly be contradicting yourself and thus violating fundamentals rules of logic (so probably just 5’11). You can see in this paper by nature in which they use binary in the scientific sense. They are discussing binary traits such as the presence or absence of a disease. It is impossible for someone to simultaneously both have a disease, and not have a disease. Hence, binary is the correct term for this subject.

To get ahead of any level 0 objections such as “ok, but if the exceptions are extraordinarily rare, can’t we say that [insert category] is mostly binary?” No, absolutely not. Something can’t be binary only sometimes, there is no such thing as “mostly binary”. That makes as much sense as saying “This polygon is mostly a triangle”. Binary is a universal quantifier relevant to all values in a given category. I couldn’t make the claim that “contradictions are logically false” if even a single contradiction was not false. It doesn’t matter if 99.999% of contradictions are false, if even a single contradiction is not, the modality would break. Take physics as another example, if you were somehow able to refute a law of physics (such as thermodynamics) you could undermine our entire understanding of physics. That’s what “impossible” means as a modal term. When you say something is impossible, you should keep in mind by what modality is this the case? something could be logically possible, but not physically possible, as an example. (More elaboration here).

To give a visual illustration, of how you can have binary inputs, but still a non-binary output, we have a perfect example from the brilliant “gender critical” intellectual, Colin Wright.

Hilariously, Colin thought he was actually debunking this very point with this illustration. He was conflating a bit system, which is binary, to a category system based on a binary bit system, which is not binary. The linear combination of a binary system is not inherently binary. You can obviously use binary inputs to get non-binary outputs. If we assume that color itself is binary (Pink, Yellow) that does not mean the way in which color can present itself in a golf ball is a binary variable. As a golf ball could be Pink, Yellow, and Pink Yellow. More than 2 possible outcomes are possible, hence color (as presented in golf balls) is not a binary variable. It is not an exclusive disjunction. This does not mean you need a 3rd color to have a 3rd category. You can think of this in relation to sex. Even if the only inputs are Male and Female, this does not mean it will be represented in an organism in binary form (given you could have male, female, and male female).

So, on the million dollar question itself. “Is sex within humans a binary variable? Can humans only be Male or female?” I would argue no, it is not, and depending on the definition of sex you are using, not only is it false, but it’s near-universally accepted to be false. It is trivially false.

To give such an example, the claim that “Gonadal sex is binary in humans” is an absurd statement. Gonads refers to the primary sex organ in vertebrates. Males have testes, and females have ovaries. We all start out with bipotential gonads in early embryonic development, and our “sex” is determined later. Chromosomal sex is established at fertilization, and this determines which set of gonads we will acquire. For Males, it happens due to the SRY gene. To quote “If an embryo is chromosomally male (46 XY), the bipotential gonad differentiates into testes under the influence of the SRY gene.” Now, just because there’s only 2 observed gonads (Testes and Ovaries) doesn’t mean that Gonadal sex is binary in humans. Obviously, given intersex conditions (with ovotesticular DSD) it’s fully possible to have both gonads. To quote; “Ovotesticular disorder of sex development, which is formerly known as “true hermaphroditism,” is the most rare form among all disorders of sex development in humans. It is characterized by the simultaneous presence of both ovarian and testicular tissues in the same individual and characteristically presents with ambiguous genitalia in neonates or infants.” Obviously then, it is trivially the case that gonadal sex is not binary in humans (or any mammal for that matter). Given you can have Testes, Ovaries, or both. This type of simultaneous hermaphroditism is even relatively common in certain mammals, such as goats. In biological literature, it’s completely valid to refer to true simultaneous hermaphrodites as having both sex categories. To quote: “the quantification of sexual selection is less clear-cut in simultaneous hermaphrodites, because each individual is both male and female at the same time.” The real question is thus, a hermaphrodite in relation to what usage of the term sex. The chromosomal definition of sex being binary collapses just as quickly. You have people with XXY or XYY chromosomes. Clearly XX and XY are not the only possible outcomes in a human. The phenotypical or morphological definition (regarding physical characteristics such as genitalia) is also silly, as I can assure you that there are people who have observable attributes associated with both sex categories. if anyone is using any of these definitions of sex (Gonadal, Chromosomal, Morphological) to argue sex is a binary variable in humans (or any organism for that matter) you can safely assume they don’t know what they are talking about. They either don’t know what binary means, or what their definition of sex entails.

But alas, we aren’t finished yet, and we’ve actually arrived at the most contentious section yet, which is the gametic definition of sex. This definition is used by more sophisticated interlocutors, the respectable “gender critics” who can read Wikipedia, rather than the purely bottom of the barrel “Man is when have penis” tier arguments that are commonly seen. So, it deserves a thorough examination, and rebuttal.

First, What are gametes? In anisogamous species Gametes are a reproductive cell that come in two different categories. Large gametes (eggs, female) and small gametes (sperm, male). Humans, like all vertebrates, reproduce through the fusion of gametes. To define sex by gametes, would be to categorize the sex of an organism based on the gametes they produce.

Colin Wright (and also apparently the Trump administration now) uses this gametic definition of sex.

To be a bit more specific, Colin has given a more precise definition [for male] as “A reproductive system with the biological function of producing small gametes.” We can presumably swap out small gametes for large gametes and the same would apply for females. Now, it is clever for him to add more than merely gamete production itself. If that was the only basis, we’d also have to believe that women going through menopause (or really any person who doesn’t produce any gametes) would suddenly be “sexless”. Which would be intuitively hard to believe. But presumably, you could still identify a function of a reproductive system, even if said function is impaired. Of course, this also leads to further questions around people who lack gonads altogether, and never producing gametes in the first place, so the function wouldn’t be “impaired” in this case, it would be entirely nonexistent.

(I would add that the usage of “function” and “Impaired” is often worth some more investigation in these discussions. Especially when people start talking about “proper” or “correct” function, which often entails some larger realist/naturalist interpretations, but given that’s not strictly relevant in this case, I shall continue.)

Let’s take the gametic definition of sex we have been provided. With this definition, would you finally be able to argue that sex in humans is a binary variable? I don’t see any argument for why this would be logically impossible, but what about physically? Well, still no. The only 2 outcomes in an organism is not producing large gametes or producing small gametes, as there is a 3rd outcome of producing both (and as we discussed earlier, this would mean it is not dichotomous, or, a binary variable).

Unlike other definitions of sex (Gonadal, Chromosomal, etc.) in which there is a large amount of substantive counter-examples, for gamete production it is admittedly harder. This cannot be as simply refuted, which makes sense, they are using this definition for reason. But alas, I still don’t find it clear that gametic sex in humans is definitively a binary variable.

True simultaneous hermaphroditism, or the production of both large and small gametes, in anisogamous species is incredibly rare. It does exist in some fish for example, but is not expected in any mammal, and is often seen as outright anatomically impossible. But, just because this is a common view, that doesn’t make it actually true. There is actually a single-case study (N = 1) that would indicate otherwise. The specific case being: True hermaphroditism with oogenesis and spermatogenesis (1973).

This paper is still largely underdiscussed (or just as likely, ignored) but is relevant to discuss. This paper does actually bring evidence of a human being a true simultaneous hermaphrodite, in the gametic definition. And yes, I will get to any potential criticisms of the paper. (I recommend downloading it on Sci-hub, and reading through the paper yourself. It’s only 4 pages long and fairly comprehensible)

JK Rowling made the specific claim that such an occurrence (a human producing both egg and sperm) is actually outright impossible (once again, a modal term) and has never been observed. Let’s see if this case debunks her.

In this case observation, the patient in question was phenotypically male-presenting, and per the case history, was married with two children who he presumably fathered, though recently had experienced impotence. (Note that impotence does not mean sperm production has ceased). The presence of both testes and ovaries (which was surgically removed) were observed. The sperm analysis showed the patient to be producing morphologically typical and motile sperm. To quote; “Postoperative investigations included a buccal smear, in which 30% of the cells showed Barr bodies. Chromosome analysis on peripheral blood revealed a normal male karyotype/(46 XY). Seminal analysis performed 3 weeks after operation revealed a count of 20,000,000 per ml. Sixty per cent. of the spermatozoa were motile and of these 80% were actively motile; their morphology was within normal limits”

The mention of Barr bodies (inactivated X cell) is relevant, because it’s an indicator of cellular mosaicism. Which occurs when someone has two or more sets of cells that differ genetically from one another. An often conflated term is Chimera, which refers to someone who has cells derived from two or more zygotes. This is not the same thing as mosaicism though, which only comes from one zygote. To give a full summary of the difference “Genetic mosaicism is defined as the presence of two or more cell lineages with different genotypes arising from a single zygote in a single individual. In contrast, if distinct cell lines derived from different zygotes, the term is now known as chimerism. Genetic mosaicism is a postzygotic mutation.”

Mosaicism is also assumed in the paper itself. To quote “Thirty per cent. of the cells on buccal smear, however, contained Barr bodies, or nuclear sex chromatin, and the ovary, tube and uterus also contained Barr bodies. This suggests that the patient must be a mosaic.” Now, this alone wouldn’t make this case observation remarkable. Mosaicism is rare, yes, but not unheard of. What’s truly unheard of is what’s observed in the histological tissue examination.

In this patient, it wasn’t merely ovum tissue and an ovary observed, but actual large gamete (egg) production. This was observed in the removed ovary. To quote from the paper once more; “The ovary contained a number of follicular cysts and one follicle was found containing a developing ovum” The ovum was in a graafian follicular stage, which is produced after fetal development and just prior to ovum release during ovulation. Pictured in figure 4

Graafian follicles don’t arrest like primordial follicles, they either ovulate or degenerate. Once a follicle is “selected” to grow, it cannot go back to an arrested or dormant state. It will either become the dominant Graafian Follicle or experience follicular atresia (i.e. degeneration) if ovulation does not occur. Graafian Follicles are the final stage of follicular development before ovulation. To quote from the paper itself “Regressing follicular structures were present, suggesting that previous ovulation had occurred.”

The patient in question had a pre-op sperm test showing sperm production whilst experiencing impotency, then they had their ovary removed (which showed ovum development in graafian follicle stage) then had a sperm test afterward, which also substantiated sperm production. It’s unlikely this was an example of sequential, as opposed to simultaneous hermaphroditism, given the proximal pre-op sperm test. It would also be strange for just the oophorectomy (removal of ovary) to make the patient go from essentially zero mitotic activity (sperm production) to roughly 20 million in a matter of 3 weeks. Some people will claim that this case is simply OT-DSD (ovotesticular disorder of sex development) but in those cases, not only is spermatogenesis already incredibly rare (only 2 observed cases) there’s also no indication that surgical removal of ovarian tissue would suddenly induce sperm production. So with all of this considered, this is in fact an observed case of true simultaneous hermaphroditism (in the gametic sense) in a human.

Now of course, before concluding, it would be prudent to go over some common objections to said paper. I find most of them to be largely unconvincing, or too dependent on wild speculation.

Some people might protest, saying that because this is so implausible, and has never been seen before or after, so therefore, it must somehow be inherently incorrect. This is a silly objection, it doesn’t provide any counter-evidence, just merely states that “it’s extremely unlikely so it can’t happen”. You can think of this almost as a black swan event, a highly improbable event with considerable implications.

The story goes that before Europeans arrived in Australia, swans were only observed to be white. “White” and “Swan” in conjunction was seen as a certainty. But after arriving in Australia, and observing even a single black swan, that one observation overturned an entire history of assumptions.

To put more formally the criteria of a black swan event:

1. The disproportionate role of high-profile, hard-to-predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, economics, and technology.

2. The non-computability of the probability of consequential rare events using scientific methods (owing to the very nature of small probabilities).

3. The individual and collective psychological biases that make people blind to uncertainty, and to the significant role of rare events in historical affairs.

Just because something isn’t expected to happen, doesn’t mean that it can’t. This sounds trivial to say, but is important to comprehend, lest we make a fool of ourselves.

For several billion years organisms have existed on earth, and for that entire existence, from the Precambrian eon to the development of nuclear weapons in the 1940s, it would be entirely correct to say that no living organism has ever been on the moon. Would it then mean it is a logical or physical impossibility for any organism to be on the moon? No, clearly not. To say this hasn’t happened, therefore it cannot happen, involves a logical jump, a hasty generalization. Take another rare medical condition such as polymelia, which results in being born with extra limbs. There have been extraordinarily rare cases (at least 2) of people being born with up to 8 limbs, but (to my knowledge) no observed case with 9 limbs has been documented. Therefore, you could correctly state “Being born with 9 limbs has never been observed” but this is naturally a separate claim from “It is actually impossible to be born with 9 limbs.” Even if such a case was never ever observed for the rest of time, it would still not necessarily be a correct assertion. You see the point. So I’ll need a stronger refutation than a simple appeal to probability. I certainly agree that 1 in a billion occurrences aren’t likely, but it would be another thing to say they are categorically impossible altogether, and that probability alone can disappear any contrary evidence.

Another other common contention is that the paper is fairly old (it’s from 1973 after all). I also find this contention to be very fallacious, and not based in any real scientific standard. The methodology used in the paper is valid, and is still used today. The researchers used sperm count and observed morphology to prove sperm production, and histology (with photographic evidence) to demonstrate presence of ovum in the ovary. Semen analysis and surgical biopsy are all it really takes in this case. In fact, this could’ve been done even decades earlier, and they would still have had sufficient technology to make these observations. There is scientific observations from centuries ago which still hold up today, Galileo argued the universe was heliocentric in the 17th century. Of course, with more technology and instrumentalization, we can come to more substantive conclusions then we could in the past, that is not in contention, but it does not mean that older observations are prima facie false. (Look at how many people write off anything Marx or Lenin ever said just because they lived a long time ago). So, I would need an actually substantive reason to throw out the documented findings than just the fact that the paper is 50+ years old. When I ask for concrete methodological flaws or errors, I seldom get an answer.

One of the most common objections will be alleging a tissue mix-up or swap of some sort. I also find this explanation to be very unreasonable, and also highly speculative.

The gross description, picture of the gross specimen, and histologic sections are not of the typical specimen. The findings in this paper being due to a specimen mix-up, when the specimen examined matched the exceptional aberrancy of the patient that was literally photographed mid-operation would be baffling. Even more, It was a surgically removed right ovary, with fallopian tubes and a rudimentary uterus (exactly what was photographed being removed from the patient) so the tissue mix-up would also have to coincidentally match the laterality (side of the body) making it even more unlikely. A tissue mix-up in this specific case, that would be able to reproduce the same extraordinarily rare anomalies, in the same laterality, and in this particular timeframe and location, is frankly unbelievable. A tissue mix-up is unlikely in general, and it’s more unlikely given these highly unique circumstances. These are both so-called “never” events (both the tissue mix-up and the reported case itself) and between these two never events, I find a tissue mix-up to be more unlikely. You could perhaps imagine a grand conspiracy theory about how these Australian researchers in the 1970s were all colluding with some more powerful force to make this fairly obscure observational paper that basically nobody cares about (the motivation I’m unsure) but I’d like some actual evidence. Thus, I’ll be going back to the first point, I will simply need more than just vague gesturing. (If you do have a contention, feel free to comment)

So, with all this said, and my explanation of the paper established, I would currently claim that I do not believe gametic sex, or basically any common definition of sex, is a binary variable in humans. I’ll state once more my confusion why this is such a contentious topic in the first place, but regardless, this is my view.

We can formalize the argument and put it into propositional logic:

P1) If Male/Female gametic sex with respect to Humans is a binary variable, then it’s not the case that there can be Humans who are male and female (P→¬Q)

P2) There can be Humans who are male and female (Q)

C) Therefore, it is the case that Male/Female gametic sex with respect to humans is not a binary variable (∴¬P)

Of course, as with any scientific inquiry, I can readily admit that I could be proven incorrect. Any scientific proposition ought to be falsifiable. If the mentioned case observation is substantially debunked, or some novel discovery is made that would inherently invalidate it, I’m open to changing my mind. What I find particularly frustrating though, is how many people (particularly TERFs) are basically incapable of changing their view about anything related to this ever, and thus dogmatically refute any counter-evidence, even when they clearly don’t comprehend said evidence in the first place. It’s simply an unserious approach made even more ironic given they define their movement as “A movement of science”.

As a final remark, I’ll just say humility is a useful trait. Dunning-Krueger is a powerful effect. For this post, I had to do an insane amount of reading (as well as talking to people more knowledgeable on the subject) and I still approach with caution. As a general rule, you should probably not launch a mass hate movement based on premises you aren’t even solidly knowledgeable about.

if any biologists want to argue why I’m a dummy and messing something up, feel free to HMU.

Thus, Zionism should be ruthlessly refuted and denied at any available instance. But, and this is the focus of this post, it should be ruthlessly attacked in a way that is both relevant and truthful. This is important because if you fail to do this, you risk falling into inconsistency, giving your opponent unneeded ammo, and getting into a dispute over something irrelevant. The facts are on the side of Anti-Zionism, so they should be utilized correctly.

Let me provide some examples for why this is important:

Imagine if someone stated “We should invade Venezuela because Maduro is a dictator” and you responded by saying “Actually, Maduro is not a Dictator” and then got into an argument on Venezuelan election results, and if Maduro was genuinely dictatorial. That’s a bad response. The reality is, it doesn’t matter if Maduro is a dictator or not. Even if he was the most cartoonishly obvious autocrat imaginable, that would not justify a single U.S. action against him. Saddam Hussein was a dictator, does that make U.S intervention any more justified?

By arguing on that question, you are conceding too much, and starting on a fundamentally incorrect paradigm. The actually relevant question is “Does America even have the right to intervene against Venezuela in the first place” (Which I’d clearly say no).

Another example could be someone saying “We should care about the holocaust because persecution of Jews is uniquely important”. This is horrible framing. The holocaust is bad because it was a crime against humanity, not just because the victims were Jewish. If it was done against Hindus or Assyrians (or Palestinians) it would be equally bad. “Jew” is not the relevant category in relation to its immorality.

You can imagine more examples. People arguing for something that’s generally good (Opposing war in Venezuela, or Opposing the holocaust) but done in a way that’s ultimately flawed.

Now, just to clarify, this obviously isn’t an issue for the overwhelming amount of Anti-Zionist discourse. Most of the attacks on Israel are that it is racist, genocidal, and foundationally ethno-supremacist. All of these attacks are both fully true and relevant, so it’s not what I’ll be addressing. What I will be addressing is a handful of Pro-Palestine arguments I’ve seen popularized, but find fundamentally flawed and insufficient.

I don’t think most of the people making these arguments have bad intentions, I imagine most of them are just trying to sincerely refute Hasbara, but still, some examination is warranted if we want anti-Zionist advocacy to be on the correct footing.

1 - “DNA evidence proves Palestinians are indigenous”

One common discourse you see surrounding Palestine is the question of indigeneity, with Pro-Palestine people claiming that the Palestinians are the indigenous people, and that Zionists are colonizers. This itself is fine, but an issue arises depending how people argue it.

On multiple occasions, I’ve seen people argue that Palestinians are indigenous to the land because DNA/genetic evidence indicates continuity going back to the Bronze Age. “Palestinians are indigenous, the DNA proves it!”

Now, the claim itself is true. There are several studies that do substantiate that most Palestinians are genetic descendants of ancient Canaanites. If someone claims the majority of Palestinians are just newly arrived foreigners from elsewhere, they are straightforwardly wrong. So what’s actually my issue with this line of argument?

Well, it fails on relevancy, and is a poor usage of indigeneity from the start.

The dichotomy between colonizer and native, has virtually nothing to do with DNA or blood quantum. (I mean, how could it, most colonization occurred before we were even aware of such things). Settler-Colonialism is about the material structures that separate in-group from out-group, such as ownership and control over land, politics, and power. As Achille Mbembe wrote in Necropolitics “The ultimate expression of sovereignty largely resides in the power and capacity to dictate who is able to live and who must die.” It is the Israelis who wield that power, who form the in-group (Jews) and use said power to brutally suppress the out-group (Palestinians). Even if the Palestinians were actually largely descended from new migrants, and even if all Jews had some provable ethnic heritage in Israel, this would be unchanged.

You see similar lines of argument used against other colonized groups. In South Africa, they argued the Bantus migrated from elsewhere in Africa and weren’t “truly” indigenous to the land. With Native Americans, people will argue that since they originally migrated from elsewhere, they aren’t really native either. But none of this is truly relevant. Your status on a particular piece of land is not determined by whatever your ancestors did thousands of years ago, but rather the material structures and systems you interact with. I don’t care about Palestinian DNA results for the same reason I don’t care about Israeli DNA results.

Between a Jew who could provably demonstrate his continued ancestry in Palestine for thousands of years, and a Palestinian-Armenian descended from refugees who arrived in 1918, It remains the Jew who holds colonial power. This is also why discourse around “Palestinian Jews” is ultimately pointless. The Jews who lived in Palestine since before Zionism, got subsumed and integrated into the Zionist project.

Colonialism is about power, not genetics.

2 - “Israelis are all European settlers”

This is related to the above point. It’s a common talking point that Israel is entirely inhabited by European Settlers as a part of a white supremacist project. It’s why you see common remarks of people telling Israelis to go back to Poland or to put on sunscreen (which yes, is funny). But, I don’t think this point actually stands, if intended seriously.

Now, in some sense the claim that Israelis are European is obviously true (Clearly there are a large number of Europeans in Israel, it was founded by Europeans, and so on). But in many ways, it’s simply not. The bulk of Jews in Israel are actually “Sephardic” or “Mizrahi”, or in other words, descended from Middle Eastern and North African Jews. Moroccan, Persian, Yemenite, and so on, are all common ancestries for Israeli Jews. Ben-Gvir, as one example, is ethnically Iraqi Kurdish. That’s why arguing Israelis are colonizers because they are European, isn’t actually sufficient. It’s also easy to refute, as any Zionist could easily mention the facts above.

The correct point is that the ancestry of the colonizer just doesn’t have much relevance. The fact that many aren’t actually European doesn’t change the reality of anything that’s happening, it doesn’t make the Zionist project any less barbaric. This framing can also lead to more insidious conclusions. When people use the framing of “White supremacy” (rather than Jewish supremacy) it’s easy to imagine how the pitiful “Jews of color” are being oppressed by the white jews on top.

I’ve seen people make sympathetic posts about how, Ethiopian Jews for instance, are victimized by racism and white supremacy in Israel. Such a notion is laughable. Ethiopian Jews, like all other Zionist Jews, are brutal foot soldiers of a colonial project. They do not deserve any sympathy. There’s even testimonies that they are among the most brutal segment of Israeli society. (All of this makes Frank Wilderson and his Afropessmist apologia for European Jews, even more ridiculous). Jewish supremacy as enforced by a Syrian Jew is hardly different from Jewish supremacy as enforced by a Russian Jew. It is all the same project. This is what’s actually relevant.

3 - “Israel funded Hamas”

This one is more common amongst more right-wing and liberal critiques of Israel. The idea goes that Netanyahu propped up and supported Hamas in order to divide the Palestinian cause, and to make an evil boogeyman. Thus, even though Hamas is this horrible and evil Islamist terror group, it’s actually the creation of Israel. It’s pushed by Groypers, Libertarians, and PA stooges alike.

Articles like this are commonly cited as evidence. It talks about how Netanyahu encouraged and allowed Qatari aid money to flow into the Gaza Strip.

It’s a very popular narrative, because it tingles conspiratorial tendencies, and allows you to safely decry Hamas. But Alas, the entire argument is absurd, and genuinely just a reinforcement of Zionism if actually examined.

The idea that Netanyahu “Funded Hamas” because he allowed Qatari aid into Gaza is ridiculous. Israel should not even be able to determine what goes into Gaza in the first place. The fact that the Israeli PM has a veto on what money can go into Gaza is the outrage, not that it went though. The logical extension of this article is that Israel actually should’ve just enforced the blockade even harder, and suffocated Gaza as much as possible, in order to not “Fund Hamas”. The argument proves too much.

Furthermore, we have to actually examine Hamas itself. Are they just some barbaric Israeli puppet? Or rather, a genuine outgrowth of the Palestinian national liberation struggle. Did they rise in popularity because they rejected the defeatism and corruption of the PA, or because associated Muslim-brotherhood charities had Israeli recognition in the 1970s? My comrade Mujamma, wrote a detailed thread on all of this. Above all, this simplistic narrative mostly serves the line of Mahmoud Abbas and the PA, and diminishes any critical examination of Islamic resistance.

4 - Netanyahu is continuing war due to his trial.

This is also a common narrative. It’s the idea that Netanyahu, who is under legal pressure related to certain corruption charges, is motivated to continue the war as long as possible so he can avoid accountability.

This argument is flawed because it’s based on similar “Netanyahu Exceptionalism” narratives, that Netanyahu personally, is the key source of this barbaric and horrific Israeli conduct. This doesn’t stand up against the smallest amount of scrutiny.

The war and aggression against Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, and so on, is a bipartisan affair in Israel. It’s something that virtually the entire Israeli political spectrum agrees on. Yair Lapid (a major political rival to Netanyahu) said so himself “Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is my political rival, but his decision to strike Iran at this moment in time is the right one. The whole country is united in this moment, when faced with an enemy sworn to our destruction, nothing will divide us.”

In fact, Yair Lapid has even made criticism of Netanyahu for not being brutal enough, and attacked Netanyahu for not bombing water and electricity plants in Yemen.

Trying to make the insidious behavior of Israel reducible to (an obviously detestable) figure like Netanyahu is not just a flawed and factually incorrect argument, but if anything, just a shielding of the true nature of Israel. It is not just one Netanyahu, it is a society of Netanyahu’s.

5 - “Israel actually isn’t progressive”

This one is pretty simple. It’s a common pinkwashing tactic of Zionists who present Israel as being a very socially progressive, feminist, and Pro-LGBT society. Especially when compared to the “backwards” Palestinian society. Hence, the Zionist ridicule of queer people and communities that voice support for Gaza.

A common rebuttal is to say “Actually, Israel doesn’t allow same-sex marriage and is socially conservative in all these other ways.”

This argument fails straightforwardly on relevance. Who cares? Even if Israel was the most pro-LGBT, feminist, and liberal society in the world, and Palestinians were amongst the most conservative and religious, would that change anything?

The same can be said for Hezbollah, Iran, or Ansarallah. Yes, they aren’t pro-queer, and are in fact quite conservative on those issues. I don’t agree with such positions, but why would it even matter?

The issue with pinkwashing isn’t that Israel isn’t actually as socially liberal as it presents, but rather, that it’s a cynical distraction from their ongoing supremacist project. Queer people who voice support for Palestine shouldn’t get defensive and try and argue on which society is more “queer friendly” but rather reject the framing outright. Solidarity isn’t conditional on a particular group liking or disliking you.

The same can be said for religion, and the way new atheist pundits try to frame Israel as a bastion against “Islamic theocracy”. I can say as a strident and unapologetic atheist myself, if you made me pick between a secular country that’s doing a genocide, and a religious country that’s not. I’d pick the religious one. That has never been a hard choice for me, and I’m baffled that for some it is.

6 - “International law opposes Israel”

One talking point that has become increasingly common, especially with the various ICJ and ICC statements against Israel, as well as continuing criticism of Israel in the United Nations, is an appeal to international law.

This seems fair enough. Israel has been an unambiguous and massive violator of international law and basic human rights, so, should this be pointed out?

Well, if you are just pointing out the fact of the matter, that various international institutions are making declarations against Israel, that’s fine. Using the evidence presented in these cases is also understandable. But, we should be careful to never set expectations within the framework of international law.

International law is not the same as morality. It was created by various states (mostly European ones, mind you) to have a particular aim. In practice, it’s more used as a demonstration of existing power. There’s a reason why Milosevic was sent to The Hague, but Ariel Sharon walked freely in Europe. International law applies only to those countries weak enough to be subjected to it. When Lindsay Graham declared the ICC was only meant for Africa and Putin, in some sense, he was actually correct. These international organizations do ultimately hold up the hegemony they were designed for. This alone cannot be a basis for right and wrong.

Ansarallah (“Houthis”) are not in accordance with international law. They aren’t recognized as the “official” state of Yemen, and their blockade of the Red Sea was almost universally decried. But do I actually care? Do I care that the UN and other such “credible” organizations have spoken against this? I can’t say I do.

Would the world be better if everybody followed international law? I mean, sure. But there’s no unbiased, omnipotent enforcer. Thus, it’s relegated to a power game. No anti-hegemonic liberation struggle has time to wait around for pointless UN declarations that will simply be ignored.

7 - “There are Jews who don’t support Israel”

This is something you see very often in anti-Zionist discourse in the west. Due to the constant conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism, people feel very keen on constantly pointing out the various Jews who are opposed to Israel, as a reassurance that it is in fact not motivated by antisemitism. Groups like the JVP and figures like Peter Beinart get special praise for being the illustrious Anti-Israel Jew(s). They all want to make it as clear as possible that Israel and global Jewry are as distant from each other as humanly possible. Some go as far to say that Israel is actually antisemitic itself!

This argument is ridiculous for multiple reasons. It privileges Jews in the discourse, and downplays fascist tendencies within global Jewish communities.

Simply being a Jew (or being an Arab for that matter) doesn’t make your opinion any more correct on the matter. There is no special insight or arcane knowledge gained by being a Jew. And furthermore, you don’t even need to point to a single anti-Zionist Jew to ignore the useless screech that opposition to Israel is Jew hatred.

Israel is bad because it is a colonial project involved in the active destruction of another people. The fact that they are Jewish doesn’t change that, even if Israel was a movement entirely perpetrated by Peruvian Catholics, it would be just as bad. That’s all that needs to be said.

Even if 99% of Jews support Israel, that is their problem, not mine. I don’t have any obligation to cater my rhetoric on their behalf. They could simply stop supporting a genocidal movement.

And on Israel itself being anti-Jewish? Well, that’s also just silly. Sure, you can point out how Israel doesn’t like anti-Zionist Jews, but that doesn’t change it’s character as a Jewish supremacist project. The apartheid regime in South Africa also hated whites who opposed apartheid (and would even arrest and prosecute those who joined the opposition). Does that mean South Africa or Rhodesia is anti-white?

The reality is that Jewish communities across the world are deeply embedded and supportive of the Zionist project. To quote “Organizations and individuals around the world have donated at least $1.4 billion toward Israel’s recovery from the attack of October 7, according to a new report published by the Diaspora Affairs Ministry The donations, coupled with widespread pro-Israel activism in the Diaspora and the arrival in Israel of tens of thousands of volunteers, represent an unprecedented effort by Jewish communities around the world to support Israel, the ministry said in the report.”

Stolen Palestinian land is sold at synagogues, as recently seen in NYC. Almost every major holocaust and antisemitism related organization is deeply pro-Israel.

Thus, anti-Zionists shouldn’t be on the defensive trying to explain how so many Jews also don’t like Israel, that it isn’t antisemitism, ect. Such framing should be rejected from the start. When I’m accused of antisemitism, I mostly just laugh. As long as I think I’m speaking the truth, I don’t feel any indication to change my rhetoric for anyone. If the Jewish community wants to wed itself to Israel, I’m under no special obligation to separate them.

For the liberals, fascists, Jewish supremacists, and all other detestable ideologies, this stance is expected. They had a pre-existing disdain for humanity, so their disdain for Palestinian humanity is already baked in. I have nothing interesting to say about these.

What I am regrettably intrigued by, is those who proclaim to be on the Marxist left, yet remain indifferent or outright supportive of the genocide. The particular tendency I'll be addressing is the “Antideutsch”.

They aren't really worthy of a proper introduction, but suffice to say, they are a grouping of German leftists who, out of sheer guilt over the Jewish holocaust their parents supported, have decided to make the cause of Palestinian holocaust their own. Every stereotype about the pathetic and philosemetic German applies to them ten fold. In fact, they are even worse than the average German. In 2003, when Germany (along with France) stood in opposition to the Iraq war, Antideusch praised George Bush as a heroic figure who was bravely toppling “fascist Saddam Hussein” and “liberating Iraq”.

To quote:

“The BAHAMAS editorial team congratulates the governments of the United States of America and Great Britain and their allies, especially the governments of Spain, Portugal, Italy, Denmark, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary, who did not submit to the blackmailing demands of Germany and France, on their swift victory over the Iraqi Ba'ath regime. The editorial team notes with relief that this first anti-fascist campaign of the new century has resulted in far fewer casualties among the Allies and the Iraqi civilian population than could have been feared, given the utter malice and inhumanity of the Saddam regime.”

As a comment on this, I'll point out a particular trend on the liberal-left. They are obsessed and overjoyed with the term fascism. They love to use it on Putin, Xi Jinping, Erdogan, and even Trump. Yet suddenly, when Arab kids are being crushed with American tanks, this word entirely vanishes from the lexicon. Look at how many people are calling America fascist only after Trump has taken office, despite knowing full well that Joe Biden was a willing architect for the final solution in Gaza. They are the people who serve as a practical justification for an extensive gulag system.

On the infamous Antideusch website “Bahamas” there was a particular article that I took attention too. Published in 2003, it was titled “Against the human right to criticize Israel”. The article explains the title, that there is literally no way to criticize Israel that isn't fundamentally antisemitic and therefore it cannot be done. Smarter “left” Zionists will launder their undying love for colonialism with vague critiques of settlements and detested far right figures such as Ben-Gvir or Smotritch, but Bahamas cannot accept even that.

They state

“Anyone, like Hermann Gremliza [A German liberal Zionist] who believes they have found the saving grace by invoking a "different Israel" to avoid clearly taking sides with the State of Israel is mistaken. There are not two kinds of Israel, but only the one Jewish state, as it stands before us in all its contradictions. Whoever wishes for a more beautiful Israel may wish for it – but no one can ignore the fact that, of all the countries next to the USA, the majority of the world's inhabitants always see Israel as the enemy of peace and believe they detect an apartheid system and institutionalized racism”

Continued in the article, when criticizing an Israeli professor Moshe Zuckermann

“Anyone who claims to criticise Zionism as the dominant state mythology today is missing the point and instead is aiming – often unintentionally – at the foundations of the Jewish state: citizenship that allows all Jews worldwide to become Israelis if they so wish, and a strong army anchored in Israeli society as the sole guarantor of Jewish self-defense against the anti-Semitic international.”

The point being made is clear. There is no such thing as some imaginary egalitarian Israel, an Israel in which the distasteful far right never arises to power, in which they never occupy or kill, there is only one Jewish state. You cannot pick and choose when to have solidarity with Israel, you must have unwavering solidarity with Israel at all times, or, you risk delegitimizing the Jewish state itself. The moment we stop sending Israel 50 trillion dollars per second, is the moment the gas chambers suddenly reemerge.

Obviously, from any basis, moral or factual, this argument is totally bankrupt, but if you're reading this post you likely already knew that. Yet, I'll say something perhaps controversial, that, in a sense, they are actually correct.

No, they aren't correct about Israel being anything other than a nuclear armed 4th Reich, but rather, that there is only one Jewish state, one that cannot be separated. This is something that can inadvertently serve as a critique of liberal Zionism. The liberals proclaim that they stand with a better, nicer, and more humane Israel, but does that actually have any practical use?

To quote once more:

“You, who have settled comfortably between two stools, don't go along with that: you side with Hermann Gremliza and Thomas Ebermann; they stand in solidarity with Israel, but with the better, the peaceful, and conciliatory Israel, and not with the government. It's supposed to be the other, the non-Zionist Israel, the conscientious objectors, peace initiatives, and Moshe Zuckermann. You want to engage in dialogue with them and not with official Israel, which is represented by “Bulldozer” Sharon, the US press and, in this country, by the public broadcaster “Grand Inquisitor” Michel Friedmann, and is even supported by anti-German free riders.”

Antideusch argues that solidarity with Israel must include solidarity with Sharon (and in contemporary times I’d imagine they'd call for solidarity with Ben-Gvir and Smotrich) because at the end of the day, they are Israel. There is no mythical egalitarian and humane Israel, there is only the Israel that has only ever existed. You cannot imagine a separation of the “ugly” things you dislike. This just serves as an incoherent rambling used to shield oneself from criticism. “Oh no, I'm not one of those nasty right wing zionists, I want my fascistic settler-regime to have a strong judiciary and respect for queer rights”. Every liberal Zionist who continues to squeal about Hamas, concern troll over antisemitism, and sheepishly run apologia for the IDF, is fundamentally on the same side as the most deranged lunatic West Bank settler, they just aren't honest enough to admit it. Yair Lapid, one of the main liberal Israeli politicians in opposition to Netanyahu, has openly called for war crimes against Yemen (and criticized Netanyahu for not doing it) as well as voting to remove Arab lawmakers from the Knesset. Being an Israeli liberal is like being in the left flank of the NSDAP.

Look at the way Zionists become absolutely enraged when Zohran Mamdani says “Israel should exist as a state with equal rights”. They, like Antideusch, understand that Jewish supremacy is the foundation of Israel. If you delegitmize Jewish supremacy, you are delegitimizing the very basis of the Jewish state. Thus, such a statement becomes impermissible. With Trump accelerating deportations of people even mildly critical of the Israeli state, he is simply following the recommendation of the German left, that there is not the human right to criticize Israel.

As a note, to my fellow Marxists, you should pay attention to the basis in which people are being deported. They are not being deported for criticizing America, they aren't being deported for criticizing capitalism, or reading Lenin, or praising Xi Jinping, they are being deported for opposition to the Jewish state. In 2025, it takes no political courage to criticize the bourgeoisie (even the fascists can do that) what does take political courage however, is to proclaim you stand with the Amalekites and against Jewish supremacy. Bob Vylan is at more risk than any Althusser reading group. The newest translation of capital threatens capital much less than a single stone thrown in the West Bank. That isn't to say these things have no value, but rather, we should understand what is at stake. The ruling class has made Jewish supremacy their cause, so opposition to it must be ours. As Mao would say “we should support whatever the enemy opposes and oppose whatever the enemy supports”.

So with this established, I respond in fashion, by stating that there is in fact no right to criticize Hamas. Gaza is amongst the most bombarded, besieged, and oppressed locations in the entire world. There is only one organization that has taken up the primary task of defending the people of Gaza, and that is Hamas. All the delusional leftcoms and anarchists who’d like to imagine a wholesome, secular, and proletarian organization to defend Gaza, simply have no awareness of reality. There is Hamas that has suffered the burden of this historic task, it is Hamas that has accepted being oppressed so that they can fight on behalf of the oppressed. It is Hamas, and not any infantile leftist. If one claims to stand with Gaza, they must stand with Hamas, just as those who stood against Nazism must stand with the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, or those who opposed slavery must stand with Nat Turner.

We must be as militantly and unapologetically pro-Palestine, as the Zionists are pro-Israel. When the Zionists say that Israel is civilization and Gaza is barbarism, we must say that Gaza is civilization and Israel is barbarism. When they say Gaza will be Jewish, we must say Tel Aviv will be Arab. When they call Hamas a terrorist organization, we must say there is no bigger terrorist than the IDF. When they say that there is no right to criticize Israel, and that they stand unapologetically with Zionism. I say there is no right to criticize Hamas, and I stand unapologetically with Gaza. The line is drawn and the sides cannot be clearer.

This article is not about that though, and whilst it's worthy of analysis, I intend to analyze something much broader. Namely, how did we get to this point in the first place, and how did the Iran-led “axis of resistance” fail to meaningfully deter the Zionist entity?

To start, the axis of resistance was a composition of regional actors, both state and non-state, that worked in tandem to undermine and deter Israeli-American expansionism in the West Asian region, comprising namely of Hezbollah, Ansarallah, Hamas, the Syrian government under Assad, Iraqi militias under the PMF banner, and of course, the Iranian government itself.

By a reasonable assessment, this axis of resistance has unraveled, and it has failed its stated goal (to deter Israel). I say this not mockingly, but in acknowledgment of the heroic sacrifices and actions they took on behalf of Gaza I think there's been a general refusal to accept what has happened. People don't want to accept that the axis has failed, and it's much easier to yell slogans of “Resistance will always continue!” than to meaningfully confront the current situation. So let's begin there.

First, we should address the situation the axis is in, and then work backwards. I need not address the state of Syria, because it has evidently collapsed. And I need not address Hamas either, because while they still continue to bravely resist, the Zionist holocaust in Gaza has only accelerated. (Yemen and PMF are a bit different which I will address in a moment)

Hezbollah (the leading non-state actor of the axis), is, for lack of a better word, neutered. After valiantly fighting on behalf of the oppressed in Gaza, they suffered a series of devastating blows. The pager attack, the martyrdom of Foud Al-Shukr and Hasan Nasrallah, which all culminated in the signing of a humiliating ceasefire deal that continues to allow Israel to act with impunity.

The ceasefire broke the most important goal of Nasrallah, which was to never, ever separate the Gaza-Lebanon front. Even after 11 months of facing a brutal Zionist assault, he reiterated this demand. “The support front from Lebanon will not stop until the aggression on Gaza stops. For 11 months, we have been repeating the same words, but this time it comes after a large number of our martyrs.” Likewise, Israeli officials themselves stated that they assassinated Nasrallah, because they came to the conclusion that he would never separate from the Gaza front. It was his steadfast refusal to leave Gaza alone that got the IDF to finally target him So why was this so important? Why was Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah willing to give up everything in order to not separate the fronts?

Well, it comes back to one of the most important aspects of the axis itself, which is “the unity of fronts”. It is the concept that the axis, as a regional force, will act in tandem to stand by each other, no matter the circumstance. It is the concept, and what Israel always feared, that if you strike Gaza, you will be hurt in South Lebanon. If you assault South Lebanon, you will be hit by Yemen, if you hit Yemen, you will feel it in Iraq, and so on. This united action has always been what has made the axis strong.

Individually they have their own capacity that is true, particularly actors like Hezbollah and Ansarallah, but even then, it must be strengthened as a part of a wider network.

This is not a new invention, but something that goes back to the very beginning. In the 2006 Lebanon war, Nasrallah proudly declared how much the victory owed to Al-Assad’s Syria. The support Hezbollah receives from Iran also goes without saying. You can see this dynamic much further in the broader axis. Hezbollah played a key role training and supporting the Shia militias in Iraq, and both of these played an important role supporting the Syrian government in its war against ISIS. Unity is hence not just a convenient political phrase, but the absolute lifeblood of the resistance itself.

This idea of a united axis is included heavily in their imagery and propaganda. I recall an Ansarallah song in which they remarked “The resistance axis as a building structure united… Sana’a, Aleppo, Qom, Gaza, Dahiya, Erbil”

(For the record, I have no idea why they named Erbil. It is the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan and has basically nothing to do with the axis of resistance, but I digress)

It was this principle that made the axis, but the same principle that broke it. The fundamental reason the axis of resistance faltered, in my view, is because the unity of fronts was lost. The fight became disunited, and Israel became capable of picking apart the actors one by one, and eventually isolating them from each other.

First, let's look at Iraq, and the popular mobilization units. I have already done a larger piece talking about the issues with regards to the “Iraqi resistance” but let's discuss their specific relation to the Gaza war.

On October 17th, Iraqi militias (primarily Kataib Hezbollah and Hezbollah Al-Nujaba) began firing on U.S positions in Iraq. Beginning with a drone assault on Al Asad airbase. Various attacks such as these, including on U.S positions in Iraq and Syria, and on Israel itself. Whilst most of these attacks never did significant damage (likely intentionally), even people deeply skeptical of the PMF, such as myself, must give at least some credit. It did serve to apply a limited amount of pressure to the U.S/Israel, and even beyond that, could serve to thin the attention Israel and the U.S are capable of mustering. If Israel has to be concerned about the Iraqi front, even a little bit, those are resources they may be diverting that could've been spent on Gaza or Lebanon, and so on. So even a more limited campaign certainly has a role to play. To quote The FDD (a rabid Neocon thinktank) a quick summarization of the attack timeline.

“Iranian-backed militias in Iraq have claimed responsibility for over 300 attacks targeting Israel over the past year. Of these, 89 have reached Israel, where the projectiles were either intercepted or landed in open areas. Notably, a UAV attack on October 3 killed two Israeli soldiers in the Golan Heights. The initiation of Israel’s ground operation in southern Lebanon has triggered a surge in attacks from Iraqi militias, with 51 confirmed incidents since October 1 — a 75 percent increase in confirmed attacks compared to previous months”

This persistent barrage continued for some time, but cracks pretty quickly begin to ferment. Keep in mind, whilst the PMF has a great deal of influence and connection to the Iraqi state, they are not necessarily identical. The PMF (particular brigades within PMF I should say) take more direction from Tehran than Baghdad, so naturally, a conflict of interest can arise. The Iraqi state, led by Shia Al-Sudani in Baghdad, feared further involvement and more strained relations with the U.S. As early as October 2023, he was already rejecting such attacks.

As attacks escalated, so would the pressure. On January 4th, the U.S reportedly assassinated a senior commander in Hezbollah Al-Nujaba. On January 28th, Iraqi militias launched a drone attack at a U.S base in Jordan, and killed 3 soldiers. Naturally, this was not taken lightly by the U.S, shortly after on February 2nd the U.S began launching strikes on PMF and IRGC positions in Iraq and Syria.

The confrontation was beginning to intensify, but whilst this was happening, Kataib Hezbollah actually agreed to stop the attacks, and on January 30th, 2024.

“As we announce the suspension of military and security operations against the occupation forces - in order to prevent embarrassment of the Iraqi government - we will continue to defend our people in Gaza in other ways," Kataib Hezbollah Secretary-General Abu Hussein al-Hamidawi said in a statement.”

Due to pressure from the Iraqi state, and considerations of getting Iraq involved in a larger war, the Islamic resistance in Iraq began to rapidly reduce its footprint and significance in the conflict. To quote “Iraq’s militias had already been reducing their attacks on Israel for weeks after months of escalation during the Gaza war. The chart below shows the two weekly drops from the high point of forty-one attacks during the week of October 29-November 4, 2024. After Saar's November 18 letter, the decline in attack claims by the Islamic Resistance in Iraq has been dramatic”

Kataib Hezbollah, after openly hinting they would be willing to send equipment and men to directly help Hezbollah in Lebanon, all but admitted they were no longer directly upholding the unity of fronts. They became bystanders to the battle they had joined.

“The group published a rare interview with Secretary-General Ahmad Mohsen Faraj al-Hamidawi (aka Abu Hussein), who commented: "Ultimately, the final decision rests with our brothers in Hezbollah, as they are more aware of their immediate and long-term interests." That is, in response to a question about the impact of these efforts on the so-called "unity of the fronts," he reiterated that the decision is with Lebanese Hezbollah”

This was a fairly significant blow to the axis, one of their largest actors, the Iraqi resistance, basically retreated. Israel’s often liked to screech that they were fighting a “7 front war”, this was always laughable, because even at the start, they were the only actor that had nuclear weapons, an air force, and backing from the U.S empire. But, there was at least a kernel of truth to that statement. There was (at least an attempt) from the Axis to suffocate Israel. Gaza from the south, Hezbollah to the north, Iraq to the east, and Yemen by sea. Post-October 2023 was a genuine political and military crisis for Israel, the most significant since at least 1973, yet, as you will see, it was not utilized to a sufficient degree. Israel was able to overcome the crisis.

Continuing, the departure of the Iraqi resistance front stung, but at the time, it seemed less alarming because Hezbollah remained fiercely in the fight, Ansarallah was continuing the red sea blockade, and Syria remained stable enough. But this early sign of weakness became a showing of what would arrive in the future. Israel and America both realized they could much more easily dismantle the axis by separating them 1-by-1 and then taking them out in isolation. Fighting the whole axis at once would be difficult, but this strategy was far more feasible and likely to succeed. Hence, it would escalate from there.

Hezbollah, which began firing on October 8th in solidarity with Gaza, was a chief security concern of Israel for much of the war. Yes, Hamas fought valiantly, and took up a huge amount of IDF resources, but nonetheless, they never had the sheer stockpile controlled by Hezbollah, and were in a much more confined space. The IDF would hence pursue Hezbollah aggressively and systematically. Hezbollah had bested Israel before in 2006, so the IDF did not underestimate them. Many things happened after almost a year of fighting, Hezbollah stood tall and refused to submit, but eventually, they also would have weaknesses emerge.

On July 30th, 2024, senior Hezbollah member Fuad Shukr was assassinated in an Israeli airstrike. The next day, Ismail Hanieh was martyred in Tehran with a planted explosive. This was a significant blow. Two highly important members of both Hezbollah and Hamas were eliminated. In retrospect, this looks like an increasingly make or break moment, and regrettably, it was not matched.

Iran and Hezbollah could've shown a joint-front against Israel, to meaningfully establish at least some level of deference. But this did not happen. The retaliation was separated. Iran actually delayed it’s response due to being fooled by the U.S that a ceasefire in Gaza could somehow arrive. To quote

“Only a ceasefire deal in Gaza stemming from hoped-for talks this week would hold Iran back from direct retaliation against Israel for the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on its soil, three senior Iranian officials said… We hope our response will be timed and executed in a way that does not harm a potential ceasefire," Iran's mission to the U.N. said on Friday in a statement.”

Iran did eventually respond with true promise 2, but it was not significant enough, and due to the disunited nature of the retaliation, Israel and America were not meaningfully threatened. Israel could sense blood in the water. Israel continued to intensify its campaign in Lebanon. At the time, I noticed many Yemeni commentators, such as Al-Bukhaiti, from the very beginning of the war, urging for further action and retaliation, and for the longest time, it felt like Ansarallah was the only actor in the axis that understood the urgency of the situation. It was Ansarallah that wanted to desperately open the Golan Front in Syria, but Assad refused, thinking it would doom his regime. So alas, Israel continued largely unhindered.

Further catastrophe would befall Hezbollah, suffering continued blows, culminating in the Pager attack (which killed or injured dozens of mid level Hezbollah commanders) and the assassination of Sayyid Hasan Nasrallah for, as previously mentioned, his refusal to separate the Lebanese front from Gaza. Shortly thereafter, Israel launched a further incursion into Lebanon, and on November 26th, 2024, Hezbollah signed an American ceasefire agreement with Israel. This is what Hasan Nasrallah fought to prevent, to prevent Hezbollah from leaving Gaza alone. But at this point, due to the brutal amount of pressure Hezbollah had faced, it became much less feasible. After this deal was signed (a deal Israel continues to violate) the genocide and extermination of Gaza only accelerated.

Jason Brodsky, policy director of “United Against Nuclear Iran” (I’m sure you can assume the politics) gleefully remarked on the events.

“This shows #Israel's military pressure was able to blow a hole through #Iran's regime's grand strategy of a unity of the fronts in delinking a ceasefire with #Hezbollah from one with #Hamas. Also the hard truth is Tehran will not go quietly into the night here. It will still seek to rebuild and rearm Hezbollah.”

As much as I hate to admit it, this analysis was correct. Israel managed to separate the Lebanon front from Gaza, it was the primary objective of Hezbollah, and they failed. Those claiming this was a victory for Hezbollah, simply because they were not totally wiped out, come off as delusional, or, for lack of a better word hooked on Copium. Netanyahu was overjoyed with his success.

(I’ll add as a special remark, that I cannot say I blame Hezbollah at all for this. They fought extremely hard on behalf of Gaza, and sacrificed a lot. Those who critique them whilst residing in the west, or even worse, puppet Arab regimes, that could barely even utter the word Gaza, have absolutely nothing to offer. But I digress.)

A bad situation became even worse, when an Idlib offensive beginning the next day, on November 27th, 2024, quickly toppled the Syrian regime in about 14 days. This was a critical blow particularly to Hezbollah. Syria was a crucial supplyline for the Lebanese resistance, and often called “The back of the resistance”. It was through Syria that Hezbollah was able to get more sophisticated equipment from Iran. Hezbollah had spent almost a decade in Syria, sacrificing blood and treasure to keep Assad afloat, it was a very controversial and politically polarizing move, and eventually became all for nothing. Assad was gone, and Hezbollah became reduced and besieged on all sides.

There is a lot to say about why Syria fell, but as it’s not directly related to the main topic, I’ll leave it for another post. In quick summary, Syria was just an incredibly weak and parasitic militia state, without strong central authority. There was no cohesive Syrian army, and it crumbled quickly. This fall was just as damaging for Tehran as well. Syria was a long-time ally of Iran, and with Syria now essentially a dismantled state, Syrian airspace has become an area of free movement for Israel, that they now use as a corridor to launch assaults on Iran.

As of right now, for the current Iran-Israel war, Ansarallah is still active and fighting alongside Iran, and Hamas is desperately trying to resist genocide as they have for months, but Hezbollah, once the prized ally of Iran, is nowhere to be seen. Likewise, the PMF in Iraq is so far, mostly just issuing statements.

So, what is the conclusion of this post? Well, there is a lot to say. The main point, is that unity at all costs, cannot just be a slogan. It has to be something materially upheld. The Iraqi militias were the first to abandon the Gaza front, Hezbollah was not shown sufficient support from the rest of the Axis (Namely Iran due to the delayed and insufficient true promise 2) and was also forced to leave Gaza. Syria hardly even tried. Ansarallah did everything they could, but are only one actor at play, and geographically limited. Now it is primarily just Ansarallah and Iran alone that are left to resist the encroaching Zionist regime. I wish them victorious. It remains that Resistance is the only path, because there is no other path.

A lot went wrong, and a lot of mistakes were made. Some were inevitable, others were not. People can use this to remark that Oct 7th was a mistake, that it wasn’t thought through, that it had no hope of victory.

I'll just quote from a famous Arabic thread on the matter

“There is no meaning to allies, and neither your opinion nor my opinion matters. The bullet has already been fired, the pride of the rulers of this region has been humiliated, and our enemies will not rest until they remind us in harsh language who they are, who we are, and why they rule the entire Middle East.”

Oct 7th ushered the region into chaos, that much is true, but no point complaining now. It has happened, and it is here. Yahya Sinwar gave the axis and region at large a choice, either unify against the Zionist entity, or shatter into a million pieces. The battle is not over yet, so we will see which path is chosen.

Hello. Last post I gave a quick reading list on some general ME history. Today I am doing a more specific Syria focused reading-list. This list will be about the Pre-War period going over Hafez and the early Bashar years. A reading list about the war-period will come later. This list is just to give some context about the pre-war context within and around Syria

Syria and the political economy of investment

This is an amazing work, detailing the reformist era of late Hafez and early Bashar from post-soviet collapse to the early 2000s. It goes over the economic transformation of Syria, from a fairly isolated Soviet-Aligned economy to breakneck neoliberalization and “Reform”. Reading this gives you a lot of interesting insight into the economic factors that contributed to the 2011 discontent, such as the decimation of rural living, instability and degradation in social safety nets, as well as the mass influx of rural migrants into urban centers. A solid companion piece to this is “The Political Economy of Economic Liberalization in Syria”

Commanding Syria: Bashar Al-Assad and the first years in power

This post is also similar to the above. It goes over to the optimistic (and perhaps naive) rise of Bashar Al-Assad as a political figure within Syria, detailing the economic, social, and political issues within Syria. I found especially interesting the way he had to balance the mosaic of competing ethnic and religious disputes within Syria.

Assad in search of legitimacy

This is one may be controversial, but I find it immensely interesting. This book is written by Mordechai Kedar, who is an extreme far-right Israeli analyst known for being one of the few Israeli’s who regularly debates on Arab media in the Arabic language. Also known for his bizarre plan for dividing Gaza into tribal cantons. Yet, despite this unhinged behavior, this book is still fairly insightful. It discusses the intricacies in which Hafez Al-Assad wielded rhetoric and media to present his political project to the public, and as the title says, how he sought legitimacy. I find this book important because it is crucial to understand how leaders in a different political and social context sell themselves to the public, rather then post-hoc imposing a western framework to what is being said. I am reminded of a comment Bashar Al-Assad made to Charlie Rose in a 2006 interview.

“When you don't understand the culture, you don't understand the politics, especially in our region. If you don't understand the culture and the politics, you don't understand what decision we take as a leader and why, and what we say and why. That's why we always have this misunderstanding when we - when make - when we make dialogue with many delegations coming from the countries in the West, especially the United States. They ask us questions, shows exactly how they - they misunderstand our region and our beliefs and our goals.”

Asad: the struggle for the Middle East

This is by far the most important book I have listed so far. It is (in my opinion) probably the most important book on Syria in the English language. Patrick Seale is an amazing author, and this is his magnum opus. He goes into excruciating detail on the rise of Hafez Al-Assad, the power struggles within the Ba’ath, and the geopolitical maneuvering of Hafez in the cold war. The section on Syrian involvement in the Lebanese civil war is extremely good. Above all, what I took from this book, is that regardless if you like or dislike him, Hafez was a force to be reckon with. He was always thinking 10 steps ahead of his opponent in the game of geopolitics, you can see especially in Lebanon how he managed to play 4-6 sides against each other to serve his own aim. He had foresight and an Iron fist. If Hafez was still in power in 2024, I have no doubt he’d go out fighting till the end. He was hardline and ruthless till the end. Hypernormalization by Adam Curtis is a good companion piece and has a fascinating section on the personality and orientation of Hafez.

Thanks for reading. Will eventually finish the Syria reading list with an addition on the post 2011 period, but am working on other posts (hopefully) coming soon.

May make this an occasional series in which I'll give a few books I recommend with short summaries / why I like them. Will recommend 8 for now.

Desiring Arabs

The magnum opus of Joseph Massad in my opinion. This is one of my favorite books of all time, and one that I constantly recommend. It's an extensive investigation into sexual relations in the Arab world, and the orientalist tropes associated. The universalization of identity politics to service imperialism (in this case, gay nationalism and pink imperialism) and more presciently, the construction of the “homosexual” identification in the Arab world to serve this end. Good rebuttal to those who imagine the Arab world was either a barbaric “anti-gay” hellscape or a queer paradise.

The persistence of the Palestinian question

Another work by Joseph Massad. Extremely good detailing of the the Zionist project with its aims and desires, from a psychological and political level. Especially enjoyed the section in which he refutes a lot of the more conciliatory and “liberal” elements of the Palestinian national movement and their arguments in favor of Oslo and other cases of surrender. It is quite harsh on the PLO and deservedly so. Very staunch for resistance.

Cultural Cleansing in Iraq

One of the best deconstructions and details of how the U.S. absolutely decimated and destroyed Iraqi society in every aspect. The destruction of all social institutions, particularly the targeting of academics and professionals, felt eerily identical to the Zionist campaign in Gaza. Required reading for the Iraq war.

A Different Kind of War: The UN Sanctions Regime in Iraq

Hans-Christof von Sponeck was a German U.N coordinator for the “oil-for-food” program under the U.S. led sanctions regime on Iraq. He resigned due to the crimes against humanity and barbarism he saw the sanctions inflict. Very detailed/specific analysis of the warfare of sanctions. I think many (even on the left) truly underestimate how devastating this type of economic war can be, and thus see it as an imminently important work.

Nabih Berri and Lebanese Politics (Middle East in Focus)

The man himself, Nabih Berri. One of the most forceful and impactful personalities in Lebanese politics. People can hate him, but there's not much you can do. He's like 90 years old but can still play hardball for 10 years if he needs too. Always one step ahead of the enemy. Saul Goodman of the resistance front.

Destroying Libya and World Order (Francis Boyle)

The most important book for understanding the NATO-led disintegration of Libya in 2011. Analysis from a legal and political perspective to how this war was launched in the first place, as well as a history of western aggression toward Qaddafi in the first place. We are seeing many of these scenes repeat in Syria.

Saddam Hussein (Renfrew)

A concise biography of Saddam Hussein from a fairly neutral perspective (Not much more to add tbh)

Latin American revolutionaries and the Arab world.

A catalogue of collaboration between primarily left-wing Latin American governments and the progressive Arab Nationalist regimes (Nasserist Egypt, Algeria, ect). Just a solid introduction to south-south solidarity and the global anti-imperialist movement in context.

Will do a more in-depth reading guide for Syria later. Thanks for reading

To begin, Iranian political scientist Hasan Abbasi during his 2010 lecture on strategic cinema made an interesting comment about this film

To transcribe;

“After the failure of Israel against Lebanon, they got to the conclusion that the west needs a Karbala (depiction) which was made to be the area that the battle of Thermopylae was fought in… watch how Americans tourists in Greece

are going to the outskirts of Thermopylae and say "look we had a group that resisted for just cause"

They had in their mind that the Hezbollah resistance against Israel had to have gotten its roots from Karbala. Therefore, the Greek who always shave their beard,happen to have full beards in '300' with 'red' capes on. The scene when they're all killed --Leonidas and the rest-- his body is depicted like a 'cross' as the camera zooms out from above showing a sort of religious sacrifice. When one of them gets his neck cut from behind --the same discussion we had in our wars, the discussion of "die standing" And when the father of the deceased comes to see how his son died, he read as an elegy of martyrdom for his son”

Now, there's a lot of interesting things being said in the passage, but let's dissect. What is Abbasi pointing toward? Zack Snyder’s movie “The 300” is trying to appeal to a lot of connected sentiments. The West vs East, Civilization vs Barbarism, ect, but above all, a deep sense of bravery and heroism. Those 300 spartan soldiers are nearly doomed to fail, but decide to stand anyway, to defend their people, and to defend their civilization. (Or so the story goes). This is the imitation of Karbala, the battle in which Imam Hussein was martyred, with an arrow to the chest, after he and his people were forced under siege by the Umayyad forces. Abbasi argues, the 300 is a feeble attempt to take this story of Islamic heroism, and repackage it for a liberal western audience. This movie was released in 2006, the same year as Hezbollah’s miraculous victory over the Zionist crusade, which was seen as a heroic and brave stand across the region and beyond. It is this true resistance that can never be easily watered down into a consumable hollywood movie. There is simply no substance to grasp. This movie released at the same time American imperialists were occupying Iraq and Afghanistan, with the only bravery demonstrated by the native partisans resisting said occupation.

It reminds me of that famous quote, in which an Iranian cleric mocked the Americans by saying “We can't get revenge for Soleimani, because America only has fictional heroes like SpongeBob”. Thus, what better way to get Americans to understand the true merit of heroic sacrifice, then with a CGI Hollywood movie. To them it's all the same. Americans love seeing everything through the lens of mass media “slop”. Even the official NATO account couldn't resist in partaking in Ultra-Redditsm.

If not Marvel or Harry Potter, what else could be the frame of reference for the average European or America? Are we supposed to be impressed by Joe Biden or Emmanuel Macron? This question is unanswered. People only have TikTok edits of fight club instead.

Of course, this story [the 300] is especially pertinent for Hasan Abbasi, because he himself is an Iranian (Persian) with his history mocked in the movie with the farcical character “Xerxes”. This speaks to another point, to how Sparta is the stand-in for western civilization against the barbarism and chaos of the orient (of course, historically inaccurate, but I'm sure you already know that).

So, Why exactly is Sparta, a hyper-militaristic slave society, so glorified? This was a mistake made on the left as well, with figures like Kautsky incidentally viewing them as some type of pre-modern communalism. To quote from Hal Draper

“Karl Kautsky, the leading theoretician of the Second International, began his book on Thomas More with the observation that the two great figures inaugurating the history of socialism are More and Münzer, and that both of them “follow the long line of Socialists, from Lycurgus and Pythagoras to Plato, the Gracchi, Cataline, Christ ...”

You see the mention of Lycurugus? That famed Spartan lawgiver, a founder of the spartan social order. Why would Kautsky list him as an example of historical socialism? Due to a crucial misunderstanding of the concrete social hierarchy.

“Plutarch’s life of Lycurgus led the early socialists to adopt him as the founder of Spartan “communism” – this is why Kautsky lists him. But as described by Plutarch, the Spartan system was based on equal division of land under private ownership; it was in no way socialistic.

The “collectivist” feeling one may get from a description of the Spartan regime comes from a different direction: the way of life of the Spartan ruling class itself, which was organized as a permanent disciplined garrison in a state of siege; and to this add the terroristic regime imposed over the helots (slaves).”

The Spartans were not Proto-socialist in any fashion, if anything, they were distinctly Proto-fascist due to the oppressive and terroristic social order they enforced. There's no association to be made with any progressive historical forces. It was the historical Persian, Achaemenid empire that actually abolished slavery and presented a preferable social arrangement, yet they were the ones viciously demonized.

The association with the Spartans is more common among the fascists. The Nazi youth in fascist Germany loved to cosplay as spartan warriors, as it brimmed with romantic heroism of the mythologized past.

Hitler himself compared his conquest of the USSR as akin to the Spartan suppression of the Helots (slaves). To quote

"The Spartans were once capable of such a wise measure... The subjugation of 350,000 Helots by 6,000 Spartans was only possible because of the racial superiority of the Spartans. They had created the first racialist state"... They came as conquerors, and they took everything… A Nazi officer specified that "the Germans would have to assume the position of the Spartan, while ... the Russians were the Helots.". Just as fascism is the ‘False revolution” it depends on “False heroes” to build a coherent self-narrativization.

The Spartans belonged to a specific sub group known as the “Dorians” and thus were seen retrospectively with a heightened racialized superiority. This was expanded upon by the Laconophiles who had a special fondness for Greek history.

This admiration is seen by the Zionists as well, who see themselves as the Spartans. Naftali Bennet, former PM of Israel, made a tweet stating this clearly: “Israel needs now to live as a Silicon Valley in Sparta.”

If he wants Jews to play the role of Spartan, then who will play the role of Helot? Well, we can only assume the Palestinians (or the Amalekites as they would say). Israelis likewise have the obsessive compulsion to be seen as heroic and brave (rather then the cowardly bullies they truly are).

They have the story of the “Lone Soldier”, the lonesome Jew from abroad with no family or friends, coming by himself to defend the Jews from Islamic barbarism. They constantly screech how they are fighting a mulit-front war, they champion their “miracle” victory in the 6 day war, and constantly want to tell everyone they are just a tiny, but determined nation fighting on all sides to defend their people and land (just like the Spartans presumably).

Of course, this is also absurd and frankly laughable. Israel is of course substantially backed by the US, the E.U, and other puppet regimes in the region such as Egypt and the UAE. The idea that Israelis are bravely fighting alone has similar historical accuracy to the 300 movie.

They've even gone as far as imitating the famous Hamas “Red Triangle” in their own footage, trying to commercialize the true heroism shown by Hamas. Israelis have no heroism, and only parasitically leech off the heroism of others. Just as the 300 must ape and imitate the story of Karbala, to try and commodify some message of martyrdom and sacrifice.

Abolish all media.

Yes, you read that correctly. What exactly is this?

This meeting was hosted by Alexander Ivonov, the leader of the Russian Anti-Globalization movement. According to the Russian Ministry of Justice, this movement has the status of a regional nongovernmental organization and was registered on March 15, 2012. This organization was under heat in 2023 when the U.S justice department accused them of being foreign infiltrators on behalf of the Kremlin, trying to interfere in American elections. They were subsequently sanctioned and prohibited from any further action in the U.S.

Now, first of all, this is just quite funny. It's an obscure political movement in Russian proclaiming support to Californian independence. It doesn't seem very serious. Obviously, this could easily be written off as meme-y political shenanigans and not much more. Well, yes and no. The Russian Anti-Globalization movement, while eccentric in practice, does offer some interesting insight into 3rd Worldist and Anti-American political tendencies within Russia. There is a real substance being articulated within this trend.

It represents the malign, almost scandalous aspect of Russia, and of Russianness, that has never been content with the liberal international order. It is the Russia that wants to finally break free from “Europe” (if such a thing even exists).

The Russian anti-globalization moment , is a political stance against American hegemony, and liberal unipolarity, that has been imperially imposed across the world. Arguing instead, for sovereignty and multipolarity.

You can see this even with their seemingly farcical stance on the succession of California, to quote;

“There are many small nations that have historical experience of political independence, and now many of them are thinking about its revival. Such territories and nations include: Texas, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Catalonia, Scotland, Ireland, Venice, Western Sahara, etc. Moreover, the peoples inhabiting these territories have a rich cultural and historical tradition, language, national identity and therefore have every right to declare their independence and autonomy from other states.”

The Russian Anti-Globalization movement is a supporter of all of these struggles, seeing them as the sovereign right of people to break free from the chains imposed upon them. As Russian patriots, they are eminently concerned with events directly within the Russian space. Most notably, this can be seen in their unwavering support for the Donbass, and it’s struggle against Ukrainian-NATO aggression. Both as an act of liberation for people of the Donbass, as well as a resistance to NATO itself. Going to their earliest statements on the so-called Maiden Revolution itself.

“Today we see that the so-called "revolution" in Ukraine has led to catastrophic consequences. In Kiev, power has been usurped by a puppet junta controlled by the West and the transnational oligarchy. At the head of this junta are people who have no relation to either the Russian or Ukrainian people: sectarians, crooks, bandits, and provocateurs”

If you scroll through any of their articles, you can find repeated mentions of their support and solidarity for the people of Donbass and Donetsk, who endure continuous shelling from the anti-Russian sectarian regime in Kiev, connecting this to larger anti-imperial struggles in Iraq and Cuba. To quote;

“On March 16, a protest action organized by the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia and the Anti-Maidan movement took place in front of the US Embassy. Those gathered called on the US government to respect human rights, demanded an end to support for the punishers in Ukraine, the immediate closure of the shameful prisons in Cuba and Iraq, the release of politically repressed people in the US and Russian citizens kidnapped by American intelligence services”

The anti-globalization movement is staunchly patriotic for Russia, and Donbass is thus a core concern for such a movement. Their advocacy for sovereignty and independence extends to the contradictions within Russia itself, where they are a staunch opponent of neoliberal and globalist policies that have been imposed upon Russia. This brings them into conflict with more liberal-minded leadership within the kremlin itself. A primary example is their protest against Russia joining the world trade organization, which began in 2012. (Russia only left the WTO in 2022 after invading Ukraine).

“People, come to your senses! We have always protected the weak, supported and support Syria, and are happy for the Libyan patriots who are fighting the scumbags on their own land. The time has come to take care of Russia too!

Unfortunately, our country's leadership includes neoliberals who tirelessly insist that the WTO is good, that we will receive a ton of preferences! No! It's not so!

The economy of our brotherly Ukraine, joining the WTO, has plunged into a terrible recession, now Ukraine is demanding through the court a revision of the agreement with the WTO.”

Despite being Pro-Putin and often supportive of Russian leadership, they still remain critical of any neoliberal policies that are suggested and/or implemented. This being such an example. They have repeatedly in their articles warned of Pro-Western infiltrators within Russia, as seen in the past with figures such as Yeltsin and Gorbachev.

While they are intimately considered with the predicament of the Russian world itself, their stances and advocacy go far beyond just Russia. They have a strong admiration of figures maligned and demonized by the west. You can see this in their praise for figures such as Hugo Chavez, Bashar Al-Assad, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Going as far to declare Ahmadinejad and Al-Assad as honorary members of their movement.

With regard to Ahmedinjad, they paid special attention to the events of 2009 (the “Green Revolution”) which was an Iranian protest movement that sought to remove him from power after alleged election tampering. The Anti-Globalization movement saw such a movement as a direct extension of American influence, and as a tool to diminish the sovereignty of the Islamic republic.

“In 2009, major protests took place in Tehran, which received all kinds of support from the political leadership of the US and the EU. But thanks to the joint actions of the authorities and public organizations, an Iranian "Maidan" was avoided, unfortunately, there were casualties. The arrested oppositionists admitted that they received money and instructions from their American curators in Turkey and Iraq…”

This style of regime change via color revolutions is something they pay close attention too. In this same post, they discuss how sanctions are one of the most fundamental tools in such a regime change. They are imposed by Washington to create chaos and instability in non-compliant states, so they can more easily manipulate the population into doing their bidding with another manufactured “Maiden” crisis as seen in Ukraine in 2014.

“It is no coincidence that Obama introduced sanctions against Venezuela, Russia and Iran almost simultaneously. The Americans are hitting the most promising states. It has long been clear to everyone that the policy of sanctions is aimed at creating social tension in an undesirable state, thanks to which it is easy to introduce an ideology of instability into the public environment and organize another "Maidan".

With that said, any and all protests movements that are praised and televised by the west, can be seen with immediate suspicion. As mentioned with Venezuela, Chavez is also a beloved figure within the anti-globalization movement, and his admirable anti-imperialist history is repeatedly praised.

(Russian anti-globalization conference on Venezuela)

They held a conference titled “Two states, one path” to describe the great affinity between the Russian and Venezuelan people. The role of Chavez in eliminating poverty and illiteracy is also praised. Robert Serra, a young PSUV cadre who was assassinated in 2014 (allegedly by opposition forces) is given remembrance for his role in upholding the revolutionary zeal of comandante Hugo Chavez:

“Today we have gathered to honor the memory of Comrade Robert Serra, a member of the National Assembly of Venezuela. He was an active and young revolutionary, called to carry the banner of the Bolivarian Revolution and represent the interests of the people. Comandante Hugo Chavez said: "The future belongs to the youth!" It is young politicians who play a big role in our time, a time of confrontation and struggle! Every young Venezuelan should know about the fate of Comrade Serra and remember that the struggle must continue no matter what.”

Said in the same post about the Venezuelan struggle;

There are forces that are trying to destabilize the situation in our countries. In particular, the United States and its allies do not give up hope of breaking the will of the Venezuelans and Russians. Today we have all witnessed the bloody events in our brotherly Novorossiya and Ukraine. The blood of peaceful citizens is being shed not by the will of the people, but by the will of Western politicians who are behind the organization of pseudo-revolutions around the world, they were also involved in the events in Venezuela 7 months ago.”

The Russian anti-globalization movement describes the PSUV in simply heroic terms. Plots to undermine Chavez and the sovereignty of the Bolivarian republic are taken note as a larger plan to turn all of Latin America into a subservient U.S vassal, so it can be more easier consumed by western corporations. The aggression of the US empire depends not on presidential figureheads, but is rather an ingrained orientation that will continue regardless of the particular personality leading the White House. To quote:

Alexander called on people to vote correctly in the upcoming presidential elections, and to remember that any vote in favor of Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump is a bullet in a black US citizen, a bullet in a defenseless resident of Syria or Yemen.

The imperialist aggression can not be cast upon only individual leaders and figures, but the American system as a whole, so therefore, America must be wholeheartedly resisted. This general anti-colonial stance is also highlighted with an interview they conducted with a Sudanese ambassador who also described the colonial transgressions of the western bloc:

“The Ambassador also added that as a result of external influence on Middle Eastern countries, innocent people are dying at the hands of terrorists, and those forces that are engaging the situation must bear full responsibility for the deaths of civilians… The United States continues to actively propagate against the Government of Sudan, thereby constantly and deliberately destabilizing the domestic political situation in the country. For many years, pro-Western news agencies have been publishing outright false materials about what is happening in Sudan. This is largely due to the fact that the Sudanese government is trying to strengthen its domestic economic position by giving preference to its own companies, rather than Western ones, in terms of developing natural resources.”

Sovereignty must always be diminished to serve and profit the west, at the expense.

With this mentioned, it might be useful to mention another term within Russian 3rd worldist discourse, that being “The Golden Billion”. This is a term, originating in the 90s, that describes how the richest billion people in the world (ie: the west) parasitically feed off the rest of humanity. It also critiques a clear Malthusian sentiment expressed in the west, highlighting how this “Golden Billion” may feel like they'd be better off removing the “overpopulated” and impoverished masses.

Sergey Kara-Muzra, a Russian nationalist who popularized the term, gave such a description.

“The term "golden billion" was formed as a synthesis of two major ideas of modern Western culture, which take on a variety of guises - from quasi-scientific to purely ideological and even mystical, religious. One idea is the idea of ​​a "Golden Age" of progress and prosperity. The other is a pessimistic recognition of the limited resources of the Earth and the impossibility of spreading this prosperity to the entire current population of the planet…Thus, when a number of scientists and UN experts declare that a prosperous life on Earth is possible only for one billion people, they are essentially using the concept of "golden billion".”

This term is used by Vladimir Putin himself, who, in an interview remarked “This so-called “golden billion” for 500 years, practically parasitized other nations”. He mentioned the term once more at a BRICS conference. (As a side note, I’d point put, that in such rhetoric, Putin is far more of a 3rd Worldist thinker, than even China under Xi Jinping, which is seen as a more traditional leader of the global south) This is an underlying sentiment in all 3rd Worldist ideology, the conception of how the oppressor nations enrich themselves at the sake of colonized and oppressed people. This is simply its typification in Russian discourse, to describe the exploitation of Russia and all other abused nations of the imperial west. The “Golden Billion” as an analysis is far more expensive than that, but I will have to discuss this in a later post in more detail.

To continue, the staunch stance against U.S. aggression by the Russian anti-Globalization movement is applied to nearly all countries under assault from the U.S and its lackeys, perhaps the strongest admiration is given to the (former) leader of Syria, Bashar Al-Assad. He is seen as a true icon of the anti-globalist resistance.

The situation of Syria, the brutal war imposed upon it, is viewed from the lens of a western regime change effort against the sovereignty of the Syrian state and it’s people, weaponizing Islamic radicalism to destroy all that exists within Syria. Thus the context is described as such;

“One group is aimed at creation, preservation of cultural identity, interethnic and interfaith tolerance. The other group is the destroyers, some antagonists of the development of peaceful concepts and national integration. The first group can safely include the Syrian people, and the second is the international Wahhabi international, which came to Syria to establish a new medieval order.”

There is a clear line being drawn at the chaos in Syria, and those who created it. Least of all the United States, Qatar, and Israel. The other actor that is specifically named is Turkey, which played an instrumental role from the very start. Putin (as well as Iran) has been reluctant to genuinely criticize Turkey, despite them playing a major role in destructive events over the past decade. Russian oligarchs have many connections within Turkey, which may be a reason for Putin to be reluctant (never forget class struggle!). But regardless, the Russian Anti-Globalization movement holds no such reservations and is fervent against the plots of Ankara. They highlight a protest that occurred in Bulgaria, 2015, against Turkish aggression toward Syria.

“It is no secret that officers from the regular Turkish army are constantly penetrating Syria and under their command, terrorist groups are capturing village after village, city after city. After some Syrian cities were occupied, Turkey plundered most of the equipment of the factories, many historical values ​​and took part in the plunder of oil. This is an act of exceptionally barbaric invasion and plunder by Turkey towards a neighboring state. The ultimate goal of these actions is to destroy the economy, statehood of Syria, overthrow the nationally responsible government headed by Bashar al-Assad, and divide Syria into separate states….Modern Turkey is the successor of the Ottoman Empire. According to historical facts, the Ottoman Empire is the only empire in the history of mankind that gave nothing to civilization.”

Thus, the position of Turkey in the geopolitical arena is made obvious to all. Such a statement becomes even more prescient as Syria finally fell at the tail end of 2024, Assad fled, and Turkish backed-militants finally captured Syria, thus achieving decade-long political game to kick the Russians out of the Middle East. Turkey has proven itself the victor over Russia, and over the sovereignty of Syria. The protest against Turkish aggression and tyranny has only proved itself more valid. Though, it appears to be in vain as the future of Syria is now uncertain, and Russia and Iran can still hardly say a word against Ankara. The real phenomena of Turkish expansion thus has no real response. As we will soon see in the caucuses, with another flare up against Armenia, Russia may remain just as incapable.

Syria being repeatedly noted makes sense from the perspective of a patriotic Russian movement, as Syria, and support for the Syrian government, is the official policy of the Kremlin itself. Yet, the Anti-Globalization movement is far more expansive than just the stated interests of the Russian Federation.

The tragedy that has befallen Yemen, and the brutal war imposed upon it, is clearly discussed, with solidarity given to the Yemeni people as they resist aggression. This particular conflict deserves special attention as Yemen been turned into the primary battlefield of U.S and it’s Arab lackeys. The context is clearly outlined:

“Regarding the situation in Yemen, it was said that the media provides extremely contradictory information about the conflict. The war in Yemen is not a consequence of disagreements between various political groups. This war was unleashed by the Saudis to establish complete dominance in this region… For every Yemeni defending his country, the homeland is a sacred beginning, and political disagreements play no role here. People are ready to unite (and they unite) under a single banner to repel an attack from the enemy, regardless of their political movement or confession… The most interesting thing is that the UN Security Council adopted a resolution on Yemen only several months after the start of the military operation. That is, the UN allowed the League of Arab States (which has become a platform for representing the interests of only Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, i.e. oil magnate countries and direct puppets of the United States) to decide the fate of the region themselves. Not a single democratic Western state or leading human rights organization spoke out against the illegal and inhumane operation in Yemen.”

Yemen is a conflict where nearly the whole world remains utterly silent. It is called the “forgotten war” for a reason. Even perceived anti-hegemonic regimes such as China sell weapons to the coalition and make no mention of the legitimacy of the Yemeni struggle. Russia also remains largely indifferent, despite a few attempts at mediation and calls for ceasefires. Outside Iran (and briefly Syria), no country has officially recognized the legitimacy of Ansarallah as the Yemeni government, despite holding Sanaa for a decade. This is perhaps another blind spot of Russian anti-hegemonic posturing, Russia has historic business ties to the UAE, and thus has no incentive to particularly raise the issue of Yemen. This is subject to change but I do not hold my breath.

The (largely) forgotten struggle of Yemen, is likewise connected to the similarly abandoned people of Western Sahara, where atrocities are being committed by the Arab client regime known as Morocco:

“He [Ali Salam] noted that in 1975, a similar situation developed in Western Sahara as is now happening in Yemen. The same war, the same victims, the same suffering from bombings, phosphorus bombs, napalm….For more than half a century, Morocco has been trying to occupy territories that previously belonged to Algeria and Mauritania. After the declaration of independence of Mauritania and Algeria, Morocco began to lay claim to 38% of the land between these countries - namely the territory of Western Sahara.”

As noted, the world remains indifferent or more likely hostile toward both Ansarallah and the Polisario front. Morocco, as an American vassal state, is jointly connected to all other puppet regimes in the Arab world, particularly those in the gulf.

Speaking of client Arab regimes, we can move onto the subject of Libya. A country devastated by similar forces already discussed. This arena is particular important from the perspective of Russian interest. The fall of Muammar Qaddafi in 2011, is seen as an unambiguous calamity for the Russian anti-globalization movement. Qaddafi is seen as one of the true martyrs of anti-globalist resistance. They go as far as saying he is the greatest personality of the century.

The greatness of Qaddafi is described in how he built up post-colonial Libya into a truly prosperous and sovereign state, that cared and provided for the people:

“The first demand after the conquest of power was the liberation from colonial dependence, the elimination of foreign military bases, the nationalization of natural resources and the transfer of companies engaged in their development under the management of revolutionary committees…This did not suit Western transnational corporations and the Western establishment, which began to plot against Gaddafi and hire people to overthrow the Jamahiriya regime.”

Qaddafi is seen as a figure who truly undermined the west, and thus became a target of NATO and the Arab puppet regimes. The overthrow of Qaddafi in 2011 is seen with special reference to France, and his growing connection to Russia. From the same post:

“The French wanted more money when the political situation allowed it. Gaddafi sent his son Saif al-Islam to negotiate with the French, as a result of which the Libyans rejected the French conditions. In 2008, to continue the project, Gaddafi went to Russia to negotiate. This gave the West a pretext to begin an active military campaign against Muammar Gaddafi and Libya.”

Libya was thus lost, with Qatar and NATO funding proxy forces on the ground to destroy the state and to murder Qaddafi. The entire country was sent into medieval chaos, which was quite beneficial for the west, as they could more easily loot what remained. This represents a huge loss for free people of the world struggling against western hegemony, and a victory for NATO. In the last passage of this article they remark that now that Libya is gone, Syria must be saved at all costs.

“Russia has lost Libya. Now we must not lose Syria, which has become our last chance to gain a foothold in the Middle East and prevent terrorists from coming to our territory”

Given recent developments, this has become even more disheartening from the Russian perspective. Syria also could not be saved. Libya can be seen as a huge blindspot, and ultimately a failure of Russian complacency. Both Russia and China refused to veto UN resolutions 1970 and 1973, both which legitimized NATO destruction toward Libya. From the perspective of the Russian anti-globalization movement, this was a costly mistake that only resulted in catastrophe. Libya would then become a NATO logistics hub, and breeding ground for anti-Russian Wahhabi terrorists. Yet, even after Qaddafi fell, they still called on Russia to intervene and to support the Libyan people against terrorism.

They remark:

“The tribes of Libya have repeatedly appealed to the world community and Russia with requests to help resolve the current situation, but Western politicians constantly suppress any attempts to provide assistance to the dying population of the country. The Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia still has ties with the Libyan brothers. And every time in conversation they beg for help, calling for saving their families from the terror that the friends of the West are organizing there. The recent events in Tripoli with the shooting of a demonstration have once again demonstrated the face of Western "democracy". The children of Libya are begging us for help, as was the case with the children of Yugoslavia - the first country to be torn to pieces by NATO jackals.”

Of course, this never happened. Russia did stay involved in Libya later on, but mostly by supporting another thuggish figure, Haftar. It's almost remarkable how close this situation is to Syria. Assad is gone, and Damascus fell. And now it seems both Iran and Russia seem intent on leaving Syria alone. Nothing stoped history from repeating itself once more. Anti-hegemonic forces come under increasing assault, with Russian complacency playing the role as accomplice. This disdain for Russian complacency is shared by The Communist Party of the Russian Federation, who also sharply critiqued the Kremlin for leaving Donbass largely alone in the 2014-2022 period. They demanded the recognition of the Donbass republics before anyone else.

So, What does this all mean for Russia, and the position of Russia on the global stage? Russia remains ostracized by the liberal order, Russia, or more pertinently “Russianess” is no longer welcome in Europe. Even if there was a cessation of hostilities in Ukraine, Russian criminality will never truly be forgiven in Brussels. They can no longer associate themselves with the enlightened modernity found in Paris or London, but must now join the Asiatic hordes further east. How will this occur? Time will tell.

Well, there is a lot more that can be said, but given the scope of this article that may have to wait for another time. Thank you for reading. Feel free to suggest future topics.

Some say the axis project is a failure, citing Sunni sectarianism as the main reason, some say it is still alive but merely weakened, and the especially ideological say that everything is actually fine, and so on and so forth. But more or less, through all the noise on social media, many people have begun to think that this "Axis" is a lot weaker (or at the very least less effective) than anticipated. For many years, it was seen as this giant anti-hegemonic political trend that was standing against America despite all odds. Thus, you see all sorts of critiques being thrown around against the axis and against Iran. Mixed opinions to say the least.

Let’s delve a little deeper into this.

To begin with the pretext, The "Axis of Resistance” describes a collection of states and non-stater actors that are the self-proclaimed resistance against U.S hegemony and Zionism. This axis typically includes Hezbollah, Ansarullah, Iraqi PMF, Assad's Syria, and various other (Usually Shia) militias, all of which are backed and supported by The Islamic Republic of Iran. When you see western analysis screeching about Iranian proxies in the region (even if it isn't really accurate) this is more or less what they are referring to. Of course, each individual actor deserves complexity. They are all not monolithic robots that are all exactly the same, more so, just a broad alliance with various different factions within.

I find some of these critiques to be fair, and others not to be. Some say the should have “Done more” or behaved differently in certain situations, escalated at different times, ect. We can be honest and say most of these critiques are being made from people sitting in the armchair with 0 experience or credibility on military affairs. (I say right before I begin my own critique…). I figured with everyone else talking, I might as well toss in my 2 cents about a particular aspect - namely, the Iraqi PMF (or, Hash Al Shaabi in Arabic).

My thesis, is that they are by far, the less defensible force within the axis, have contributed the least to anti-imperialism, and are on outright thorn against effective sovereignty and resistance. The PMF is the axis at it’s absolute worst, and therefore, can serve as a broader representation of misguided and faulty tendencies within the axis as a broader political project in the region.

Let's begin with a brief overview, who are they? What is the PMF?

To give a very dry outline: The Popular Mobilization Units (PMU), also referred to as the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) and al-Hashd al Shaabi, can be considered as a complex umbrella organization, consisting of many different militias, the majority of which are Shia militias. It was formed in 2014 in large part due to the fatwa by influential Shia cleric Ayatollah Sistani, as a proclaimed force against ISIS.

They are an umbrella organization of various predominantly Shiite militias that formed in the wake of ISIS in 2014, most of them are proudly and openly tied to Iran. Since 2016 they have legally been incorporated into the larger apparatus of the Iraqi state, though they still act fairly independent and are not wholly subservient to Baghdad.

Many prominent figures in the PMF such as Hadi al-Amiri have openly demanded the U.S. occupation leave Iraq. These militias have also fired shots at Israel as well as U.S. bases in Iraq, and have even gotten attacked by U.S. strikes in response. They are cherished by anti-imperialist “Axis of Resistance” supporters such as Sharmine Narwani of TheCradle as revolutionary anti-imperialists fighting against US hegemony in the region.

At first glance, All of this seems great and admirable. An Iraqi resistance movement that was formed to combat ISIS, now resisting the U.S. occupation and Zionism. Seems like a great anti-imperialist movement worthy of support. So what’s the issue?

Well, no. Because this narrative of the PMF is frankly, irreconcilable with their history and actions within Iraq. This "Resistance" is at best a facade for far more nefarious activity.

I've already mentioned Hadi Al-Amiri, so let's expand on that for a bit. He's the leader of the Badr Brigades, one such notable militia within the PMF, and despite a revolutionary and anti-imperial facemask, is a useful pawn of US-Iranian domination over Iraq.

They [Badr] were formed in 1982 with the help of the IRGC as an ally of Iran during the Iran-Iraq war. Their political wing is the “Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq”. This political party was a designated supporter of the 1998 “Iraq liberation act” which was a U.S. proposal to further regime change efforts against Saddam.

Mohammad Bakir al-Hakim, a key figure of Badr, also supported an opposition conference in 2003, as the U.S. assault on Iraq was heating up, stating how they would work with the coalition forces.

Why would the heroic and anti-imperialist Badr brigades be lobbying for US imperialism? That simply doesn't make sense, right? Well it goes much deeper than that. Not only was Badr brigades a staunch political advocate for U.S. militarism on the ground, they were also a key partner to U.S. hegemony on the ground in Iraq itself.

From the very start, they were willing collaborators with the occupation and loyal stooges of empire.

“In the wake of the American invasion of 2003, Badr troops also marched into Iraq. The Badr Corps, which from then on called itself the Badr Organization, retained its paramilitary units, but also claimed a place in Baghdad politics and cooperated pragmatically with occupation forces.”

More then that, they were deeply entrenched as loyal henchmen of the regime installed in Baghdad. It was an open secret that they were partners to the interior ministry of Iraq, serving as a mafia-like sectarian death squad.

Per the United Nations human rights chief in Iraq:

“Mr Pace said the Ministry of the Interior was "acting as a rogue element within the government". It is controlled by the main Shia party, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Sciri); the Interior Minister, Bayan Jabr, is a former leader of Sciri's Badr Brigade militia, which is one of the main groups accused of carrying out sectarian killings.”

The Badr Brigades were, more or less, prostitutes of the U.S agenda in Iraq, implementing the agenda of chaos and destruction. And if that was not comical enough, these forces were utilized and approved with the help of James Steele, an accomplished ghoul of the U.S. empire who was also responsible for supporting murderous contras in Central America. At least he had the work experience I suppose.

“Celerino Castillo, a Senior Drug Enforcement Administration special agent who worked alongside Steele in El Salvador, says: "I first heard about Colonel James Steele going to Iraq and I said they're going to implement what is known as the Salvadoran Option in Iraq and that's exactly what happened. And I was devastated because I knew the atrocities that were going to occur in Iraq which we knew had occurred in El Salvador… The US had barred members of the violent Shia militias like the Badr Brigade and the Mahdi Army from joining the security forces, but by the summer of 2004 they had lifted the ban.”

These “resistance” militias allied to Iran and the Iraqi state (and therefore the U.S. occupation which created this Iraqi “State”) were mass perpetrators of sectarian violence, notably in the “triangle of death” in southern Baghdad. You can simply look at a map of the demographic makeup of Baghdad, and can see quite obviously the mass cleansing that occurred. (Of course, to quickly add, Sunni sectarianism against the Shia was also rampant at this same time). Even the Syrian girl, a diehard axis of resistance fan, when cornered, had to admit this “resistance” was a literal death squad. Suffice to say, there was not much genuine “Resistance” that can be spoken about in these situations.

The victims of this sectarian cleansing was not limited to only the Iraqis either. The Palestinian refugees, who had lived a privileged life under Saddam’s Baathist regime, were also early targets for the Shiite gangs.

“The security of the approximately 34,000 Palestinian refugees in Iraq has drastically deteriorated since the fall of the Saddam Hussein government in April 2003.Militant groups, mostly Shi`a, have targeted this predominantly Sunni minority community, attacking their communal buildings, committing several dozen murders, and threatening harm unless they immediately leave Iraq.”

The cleansing of the Palestinian-Iraqi population was done right under the nose of the US occupation, which happily watched the cleansing occur. (Perhaps a comparison can be drawn when this Axis of resistance besieged Palestinian refugees in Yarmouk under the guise of fighting terrorism). These Iranian-supported Shia “resistance” militias were much more concerned with internally repressing Iraq than confronting the U.S. occupation (which they still did on occasion). Especially given that they are the demographic majority in Iraq. Yet 90% of insurgent attacks occurred in the famous “Sunni triangle” not from Najaf, Basra, or other Shiite strongholds. Of course, there was resistance across all of Iraqi society, but certain demographics were simply represented more.

“They constitute a majority in 4 of the 18 provinces where 50% of them live and 90% of the insurgent attacks occur (the so-called Sunni triangle) – the other 50% in big mixed cities such as Baghdad, Mosul, and Kirkuk.”

(Now, as a quick note, I'll be clear on this point. Opposition to the U.S. occupation was broad and across all of society, there were many Shia who died at the hands of the occupation, while resisting, ect. I specifically do not see it as a sectarian issue. But, simply as a matter of fact, the majority of the resistance was Sunni, and the Iranian-backed Shiite “resistance” groups barely lifted a finger in comparison. This is simply a fact, just as it would be a fact that virtually all of the resistance to Israeli occupation in Lebanon was done by Shia Hezbollah.)

These early militias that established themselves in the chaos of post 2003 Iraq would become the backbone and precursor to the PMF itself. You can read the report by the ISW on Iraqi security forces, and see how many brigades are directly run by Badr, or allied groups. The connection is about as clear as you can possibly get.

Of course, the PMF is still an umbrella organization, not all forces are Badr, but Badr is easily one of the most dominant forces within the PMF. Other militia organizations within the PMF have similar histories of being connected to the puppet regime in Baghdad, particularly under Nour Al-Maliki.

You can see Hadi Al-Ameri and Falih Al-Fayyadh, both who would become PMF commanders, meeting Obama at the White House in 2011 below.

How insane is it that these apparently staunch anti-imperialist figures got a meeting at the White House with Obama? Can you imagine Yahya Sinwar or Abu Obeida getting this treatment? of course not. For very obvious reasons I shouldn't need to explain.

Even the founding of the PMF itself, is inherently linked to the U.S. imperial domination of Iraq. It was 2014, following the fatwa of Ayatollah Sistani, that Iraqi puppet leader Nour Al-Maliki, decided to institutionalize and form the PMF as an official ally of the Iraqi state.

“Former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki formed the PMF in June 2014 by "institutionalizing” pre-existing and predominantly Shia militias that were engaged in the fight against ISIS”

The fact that the PMF is linked too, and supported by Maliki at all, inherently disqualifies them from the arena of anti-hegemonic resistance. Maliki is the face of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, he was the prime minister from 2006 to 2014, and did essentially everything possible to help America entrench its colonial influence in Iraq. A notable example being the Iraq 2007 oil law, which promised profits to foreign oil companies, as well as all of the other neoliberal shock therapy he happily implemented. He was the Iraqi government that actively worked with the U.S. occupation to fight against all resistance, and to hunt down and torture those who resisted. So again, for the PMF to be related to him at all is simply disqualifying. You cannot be an enemy of imperialism whilst allying with the imperial occupation. An Algerian could not be anti-colonial if he allied with the French occupation, nor a Palestinian if he worked for the Israeli occupation. I could end the article right here, and this would be enough to substantiate that they are not a legitimate anti-imperialist resistance movement, but there is much more that can be said.

Lets, for no real reason at all, be insanely charitable and say that this doesn't disqualify the PMF. We can just say that because the threat of ISIS was so real, they had no choice but to work with the puppet government, so this can be excused. Obviously, this argument is absurd from any anti-imperialist perspective, but sure, let's just accept this for the sake of moving forward.

So what is the PMF doing in current Iraq?

From 2018 onward, when the threat of ISIS was gradually diminishing and most of Iraq was under control of the state, the PMF did not totally disband. They decided to stick around, and to maintain and grow much of the influence they already had.

First of all, I think it's important to realize how influential the PMF is, and how much power they have at their disposal. They are one of the single most powerful groups within Iraq, and have immense sway over the government and its policy.

They have influential supporters in the Iraqi government and parliament, with the “State of Law” coalition led by Nour Al-Maliki and Fatah alliance led by Hadi Al-Amiri being the two biggest examples of their influence in government. They have been a part of the ruling coalition multiple times (usually alongside Kurdish parties) and even are right now.

And this of course is nothing in comparison to their armed strength, which is itself quite impressive (and on paper, much more than Hezbollah)

“According to the 2023 Iraqi budget, today the PMF boasts some 238,000 men under arms, a force nearly half the size of the Iraqi army. Baghdad will allocate $2.7 billion this year to fund these Iran-aligned forces. In February, it was announced that All Sudan's government would underwrite the construction of a new, dedicated military academy for PMF militiamen, and the troops would be eligible for pensions upon retirement.”

To put in perspective, even high estimates of the fighting force of Hezbollah put them at around 100,000 at most. The PMF is significantly larger than Hezbollah, with almost double the fighting force, not to mention they simply have more leg room to move around in Iraq when compared to South Lebanon which Hezbollah populates.

With all this power and influence, these anti-imperialist revolutionaries must certainly be unleashing unprecedented assaults on the U.S. occupation and the Zionist entity right?

Well, simply put, not really. The Resistance from Iraq has been some of the most meager, especially when compared to their existing capabilities. Let’s start with a fair shake though. To quote from the Neoconservative think-tank Foundation for defense of democracies:

“Iranian-backed militias in Iraq have claimed responsibility for over 300 attacks targeting Israel over the past year. Of these, 89 have reached Israel, where the projectiles were either intercepted or landed in open areas. Notably, a UAV attack on October 3 killed two Israeli soldiers in the Golan Heights”

This seems quite promising, no? If you are hated by a ghoulish imperial mouthpiece like the FDD, then that is legitimately a good sign. And these operations aren't imaginary. It is true that the PMF has launched multiple missile and drone attacks in the U.S. and Israel. This alone should be supported, regardless of what you think of PMF. Likewise, U.S bombardment of the PMF should be strongly opposed as unjustifiable U.S. aggression in West Asia. Opposition to US activity in the region should maintain precedent over all other issues (Even if much of the PMF seems to disagree, given much of their previous collaboration with the west against Saddam).

So, what's the issue? Well, the problem is that looks can be deceiving.

The truth is that these PMF attacks on US bases or on Israel, simply aren't that effective and don't do much at all to change the situation. Much of them seem to have a more aesthetic purpose to rally internal support.

Some of them have even been fabricated or recycled footage.

“Very little closeup imagery of drones has been shown since mid-November, in contrast to previous claims that provided fresh imagery of individual drones with unique features (markings, serial numbers, scratches, paintwork, configuration). More recent claims have seen wider recycling of past launch imagery”

The U.S. bases in the region continue to operate, the Green Zone (US embassy in Iraq, and a center point of U.S. influence in the region) is operating fine, and the attacks in general have slowed down or halted completely. Around fall 2024, this was already on the downward trend, and the PMF was decreasing its strikes.

“Iraq’s militias had already been reducing their attacks on Israel for weeks after months of escalation during the Gaza war. The chart below shows the two weekly drops from the high point of forty-one attacks during the week of October 29-November 4, 2024. After Saar's November 18 letter, the decline in attack claims by the Islamic Resistance in Iraq has been dramatic”

You can see a chart of attacks here, and see the downward trend.

For reference, Hamas, even after several months of fighting in a bombed out concentration camp, was still able to fire 27 rockets at Israel around New Year. Even just a few days ago they managed to fire 4 rockets after being presumed basically defeated for several months. You could of course say that Hamas is closer, so it is easier for them to fire less sophisticated/cheaper rockets, and sure, but the are also in a months long genocide, besieged on all sides, and largely presumed dead. PMF on the other hand has a capacity of an entire state-backed security apparatus, and has offered much less.

Not to mention, factions within PMF have outright declared they won’t even strike bases inside Iraq either. On January 30th, a major PMF militia, Katiab Hezbollah, announced they would stop attacking the occupation forces.

"As we announce the suspension of military and security operations against the occupation forces - in order to prevent embarrassment of the Iraqi government - we will continue to defend our people in Gaza in other ways," Kataib Hezbollah Secretary-General Abu Hussein al-Hamidawi said in a statement”

Later in the same article it’s stated:

“In its statement, Kataib Hezbollah also said there were disagreements with allies over its attacks, singling out Iran.

It said counterparts in the Axis of Resistance "often object to the pressure and escalation against the American occupation forces in Iraq and Syria," the statement said.”

So, per this statement, it seems like other partners in the axis (most likely Iran) were against them escalating too far for whatever reason. Another stated reason is that they did not seek to “Embarrass” the Iraqi government. Later on February 27th 2024, a U.S. general announced that the attacks mostly stopped as well.

“Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., a retired head of the Pentagon’s Central Command, said in an interview. “The question is are the militias attacking or not,” he added, “and at least for now, they are not.”

Western media and imperial mouthpieces in the west have talked about this development glowingly, almost gloating that the Iraqi resistance has stepped down and poses no threat to them. They are cheerful because they know they've won, and the PMF won't threaten their interests. Notice how they do not speak of Yemen or even Hamas in the same terms.

I am not one to try and smugly criticize those resisting imperialism from afar. Resistance movements put their life on the line against occupation, and should be respected immensely. There's a reason I will not criticize Hezbollah for accepting a ceasefire, despite it meaning that Gaza is left alone, I'm not going to demean those who put so much on the line. And despite critiques of PMF, it is still easy to say they have “done more” than any of the regional Arab client states. Their sometimes aesthetic and unsubstantial shots at Israel is still infinitely more then can be said about Egypt or Jordan, so there’s that.

Yet still, a critical analysis of the PMF must remain. Far too many “Resistoids” for lack of a better term, are just outright cults with regard to the axis. They refuse to say anything even slightly critical, and will accuse you of being a defeatist or Zionist for saying so.

But at the end of the day, the PMF is not Hamas. Hamas is forced to change the status quo because they are oppressed by it, PMF is inclined to defend the status quo because they are empowered by it. They benefit from the status quo in Iraq, and from collaboration with the US-backed regime in Baghdad. They have all sorts of both legal and illegal activity that enriches them from taxation (extortion) to smuggling, to government contracts. The status quo is great for them because they get to maintain this cartel-like arrangement they’ve made for themselves. They get to run much of Iraq as their personal fiefdom, and as long as they don't cause too much of a ruckus for the U.S. and Israel. Whenever populist sentiment in Iraq, against the poverty and oppression imposed upon them, boils over into outright protest and riot, you can rest assured that the PMF will act swiftly as loyal dogs of the ruling class.

During 2019, you saw such a mass protest. It wasn't particularly well organized, it involved all sorts of populist slogans against American and Iranian influence in Iraq, corruption in government, abuse by militias, poor social services, and so on. These types of sporadic protest movements against the status quo aren’t a rarity in Iraq, but I mention this case because it was highly publicized in global media.

Of course, there was plenty of violence and disruption from the protester side, like in any sporadic mass movement, and naturally, the Iraqi government simply cracked down on them brutally with mass amounts of disproportionate force and thuggery. To be unbiased, I'll quote Elijah J. Magnier, who has presented himself as a Pro-Axis voice and pundit.

To quote:

“The government has failed to deal adequately with protestors and blundered with an obvious abuse of excessive force. The first seven days were catastrophic: 107 killed and 6000 wounded, an unacceptable number of victims on both sides, civilians and security forces. Most protestors’ main weapons these days are ‘Daabel’ (stones), which represent little danger to the security forces.”

Another thing about this article though, is that Elijah tries to present Muqtada Al Sadr (Very famous/Influential Iraqi Shia leader) as the primary of anti-Iran sentiment in Iraq, as if he is the sole figure who was discontent with the influence of Tehran.

“Moqtada Al-Sadr’s behavior is not new to Iraqis – Moqtada is the one who introduced the anti-Iran narrative into the street scene.”

Elijah seems entirely clueless why there is grassroots sentiment against Iran (across all sects) in Iraq. A lot of it has to do with all the militia activity I mentioned beforehand, but much of it has to do with even simpler ways Iran infringes on Iraq. For example, there have been several acts of protest against imported Iranian tomatoes. Iraq has had an independent agricultural sector since it’s inception, yet after 2003, the Iraqi market got flooded with cheap Iranian tomatoes that forced them out of the market (effecting a lot of kurdish farmers in the north especially). This is just one small reason Iran isn’t unanimously beloved across all of Iraqi society, but I digress.

Elijah mentioned the brutal crackdown, but for some reason omitted that the "Iraqi resistance" (PMF) was a core part of the very suppression he decries. Militias allied with the state played a huge role in terrorizing the protest movement.

To quote from a section in an HRW report:

“A video posted on Facebook on December 8 appears to show Baghdad Operations Command Forces in the same medical tent freeing about eight men who were handcuffed and blindfolded. The captives say they were physically abused. One officer tells them that they were detained by Kata'ib Hezbollah, a unit in the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF or Hashad, formally under the control of the prime minister) that is linked to Iran, and that the Command is there to help them.”

This is just one case, but PMF involvement in the brutal suppression of the protest movement is obvious and well known. Badr Brigades were also obviously involved, using “Any means necessary” against the protestors. In these protests, they remained far more staunch and steadfast then they ever did against the occupation. This should read as bizarre to the average Richard Medhurst viewer, why is this revolutionary anti-imperialist movement taking the side of the US-backed neoliberal puppet regime in suppressing the population? Well, I don't think it takes rocket science to figure that out. As already stated, they simply benefit from the status quo, and have an interest in maintaining the situation to their favor. This protest wasn't a sectarian issue either, many of the protesters themselves were Shia (which the PMF claims to be the protector of). Increasingly, much of the pushback against Iranian influence in Iraq has been led by influential Shiite cleric Muqtada Al-Sadr. The tension is so high that Sadrist aligned forces and more Iranian-aligned militias have brutally clashed on more than one occasion. It speaks to how poorly Iran and the militias have handled themselves, when they are rapidly losing support even amongst their own proclaimed consistency. They claim to be the protector of the Shia yet have only contributed to growing inter-Shia disputes within Iraq. Of course, Pro-Iran partisans will say that Muqtada alone is the source of instability, Sharmine Narwani even went as far as calling him an “American Dog” due to his opposition to militias. Frankly, I have very little ideological alignment with Sadr (you can find plenty of blood in his own history) yet I find it outright bizarre when Axis supporters can only respond by calling an American agent and a traitor, and for what? Pushing back against Iranian influence? I feel like in any other situation, Muqtada is the type of guy they would be heralding as an anti-imperialist icon, but because of this stance alone they can’t stand him. This is the type of cult-like “team sports-ing” you should try to avoid.

A lot of this comes down to the simple fact that having the “Militia Model” (Ie, a bunch of various militias running around the country, doing all sorts of activity, under the guise of “resistance” and “security") is just a contributor to state collapse itself. How can a state be centralized and effective if it has to compete with the influence and power of militias that try to operate as a “state within a state”. There's a reason that for as much as Iran and the U.S. love supporting militias abroad, they themselves prefer to have a centralized state with a single army. You won't see 50 different militias of various ideological strands marching around D.C anytime soon. These states understand this model is, even at the best of times, somewhat parasitic, so they prefer to export it abroad.

Revolutionary “Militias” and “Guerilla forces” are formed out of necessity, not because they are somehow better or more equipped at fighting. As seen with the Zionist onslaught on Gaza, and both the Palestinian and Lebanese resistance, asymmetric warfare is based on stealth and high maneuverability. They can be effective at evading and wearing down an enemy by pure attrition, but are not as effective at asserting their own space the same way a large conventional army can. There’s a reason you almost only see these forces in defensive posturing rather than launching bold offensives themselves (Al-Aqsa flood was wildly unexpected for a reason). I cannot blame Hezbollah or Hamas that much, simply because they did not have much a say either way. Conditions were imposed upon them that forced them into a much more limited and restrained position. That is hard to critique. But, in the case of the PMF, I find it far less defensible because for all extensive purposes they *are* the Iraqi army. Per Iraqi law, they are incorporated into the security apparatus of the state, and receives substantial funding because of this (not to mention the money they make from non-conventional sources…) yet, despite all this capacity, they remained quite dormant throughout most of the war. When compared to Hezbollah, Ansarallah, and Hamas, they were the least effective despite being one of the most powerful groups within the axis. This is not just limitation, but a logical understanding that they, the PMF, benefit from the imperial status quo in Iraq, and are not interested in threatening this further. Of course, as already stated, there are people in PMF who do resistance operations, and I will not discredit that, but as a whole, they are at best impotent and corrupt and at worst outright antagonistic to meaningful resistance to hegemony.

A simple comparison can be made between the Iraqi state under the Ba’ath administration, and the current collection of militias that occupy Iraq now. It's no question which force posed a greater threat to U.S. imperialism in the region. The Iraqi state had the industrial and logistical capacity to develop and threaten armed capabilities at a much larger scale, as well as being able to funnel more support to existing Palestinian resistance groups. The concept that an actual state with legitimate military capacity is more effective than various parading militias is so obvious it's almost tautological. The U.S. invaded and destroyed the previous Iraqi regime, and the U.S. supports and aids the current Iraqi regime. The difference is clear to anyone without self-imposed ideological blindness.

Iraqi sovereignty and development has been looted and destroyed from the bottom up. Even the vaguest semblance of reasonable statecraft and development is lost to the wind. We may have this idea that Iraq has always been this “barbaric” oriental backwater, when any accounting of history will say the opposite. Iraq was originally a bastion of development in the region. Iraq was the first country in the Middle East to export electricity, all the way back in the 80s. Yet current Iraq, still 20 years after the initial invasion, is in such a precarious position they are forced to import needed electricity from Iran. Just to quote a few passages:

“Until the late 1980s, Iraq had one of the most modern financial systems in the Arab world. It reportedly helped Jordan (and perhaps others) establish their own central banks…Iraq’s transmission grid was linked with that of Turkey in 1987, and Iraq became the first Middle Eastern state to export power….Bombing during the first Gulf war reportedly destroyed about 90% of its electronic generation and transmission facilities and electricity generation capacity”

All of this is gone, and thus, the sovereign capacity to effectively stand against hegemony is also gone.

There’s a reason why the Yemeni Ansarallah is by far the most threatening and resilient actor in the resistance axis, for the simple reason that they most resemble a state. For all intensive purposes they are the Yemeni state and have been for some time. They have strictly adhered to ideological coherence, and resisted all oppositional forces from trying to splinter them into smaller antagonistic militias. The Iraqi PMF on the other hand, wants to have all the powers and abilities of a state, with none of the responsibilities associated with running a centralized state. They prefer to live in this limbo because it is simply more beneficial to them. Whatever you think of the “Militia Model” it is not working in Iraq, and evidently did not work in Syria when Assad’s assortment of Pro-Government militias also crumbled or simply left the SAA alone. This parasitic model that feasts on the husk of a hollowed out state is simply unsustainable and unjustifiable from any analysis. Imperialism is the primary contradiction, so it must be resisted. This “Resistance” does none of that.

So what’s next? well to be honest I’m not exactly sure, but the current path does not seem overly joyous.

Thanks for reading.

There is a lot to go over, so let’s begin. To start with the context (pretext?) Syria in the Cold War, beginning in 1971 under the Hafez regime, was a USSR-aligned secular Arab dictatorship. Syria was heavily armed and financed by the USSR and eastern bloc, and populated with Soviet military advisors and infrastructure projects. Calling them somewhat of a Soviet satellite in this period may seem extreme, but is not too far from reality. This relation of course later transferred into the strong Syria-Russia relations.

To quote “So close are Syrian-Soviet ties that other commentaries call them “a bright point in the region's sky” and “an example to be emulated in relations among countries.” Syrian-Soviet ties are so close, that Syria was one of the only Muslim countries to not condemn Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. This of course doesn't mean they agreed on anything (Iran-Iraq war being a notable rift) but overall, they were hand in hand. This expresses itself in the economic conditions of Syria, which, like many other Soviet aligned regimes, was heavily statist in orientation.

To quote from the excellent paper “The Political Economy of Economic Liberalization in Syria”

“In 1984, public industry employed one-third of the labor force in industry but produced 78 percent of gross output. Thus, the state controlled the heights of the economy while the bourgeoisie, particularly its industrial wing, was confined to the periphery and deprived of many capital accumulation opportunities.”

Syria at this time was a state-dominated and import-substitution economy, focused mostly on lowering unemployment and building up small and medium industries. This was not a flourishing economy by any means, but at the very least could be said to be “relatively stable”. Surplus workers who couldn't find employment in Syria often went to Lebanon (which was under partial Syrian domination at the time) in order to find regular or seasonal work.

This could be seen especially in the rural sector, in which after land-reform, the state peppered new farmers with support and subsidies, which served to bolster support for the Ba’athst government.

To quote:

“The Syrian agricultural sector was traditionally dependent on the government's guidance and protection. Syria, among all major Arab states, invested most heavily in its agricultural sector and prevented losses of valuable agricultural land to residential and commercial construction. It improved the system of agricultural cooperatives and mobilized peasant activity in support of efficiency programmes…” (political economy of investment in Syria, pg 10)

With this said, you shouldn't get confused by the “Arab Socialist Ba’ath” or the Soviet Orientation. Syria was far from an anti-bourgeois state and went above and beyond to accommodate them. Some sections of the bourgeoisie were obviously harmed by land reform and nationalization projects, but Assad made sure to try and court a new (primarily Sunni) merchant class that existed in Aleppo and Damascus. This would be a core aspect of his supporting coalition within Syrian society.

To quote once more from the paper.

“A key Damascene section of the merchant class whose assets were invulnerable to nationalization survived the socialist era and accommodated itself to the regime. Closer to the center of power, to corrupt connections, and to regime expenditure, it prospered under Asad and is in the vanguard of partnerships with officers and politicians.”

Thus, Hafez was able to maintain a fairly consistent Bonapartist regime with a coalition of support across the petite-bourgeoisie and new industrial proletariat. This regime was not necessarily wildly popular (as seen with the Muslim brotherhood uprising in Hama) but it had enough of the ingredients to remain under the iron-fist of Hafez. This obviously had fluctuation with periods of austerity and stagnation, but alas, Syria persisted. Uprisings and Anti-Government plots never got too far, and all of Syria remained under the watchful eye of Hafez and his Mukhabarat.

But of course, nothing can last forever, especially when the geopolitical landscape would change so drastically. By 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the writing was on the wall that the Soviet Union and the bipolar world was coming to an end. Syria’s traditional protectorate, the USSR, would either be absent or at least severely diminished. This required Assad to be more forward-thinking especially with regard to western relations.

This was seen especially in the 1991 Gulf War, in which Syria decided to support the US coalition against Iraq, sending 20,000 of their own soldiers to support. This move paid directly when Syria received about 2.5 billion in aid for said involvement. “It has received about $2.5 billion in assistance from the gulf states and Japan, and its role in the peacekeeping force promises another sizable windfall.”

This also paid in another form, by being a channel to further open-up relations with the west and the gulf states. Syria had been under sanctions for decades, and was seen quite negatively in D.C for its role in creating Hezbollah in Lebanon, as well as its general Soviet orientation. This was an attempt to break the isolation, and to some extent it worked. Economic reforms and privatization were also a part of this.

The Hafez regime allowed the establishment of mixed (public-private) sector companies in the tourism and agriculture sector, and slowly began opening up the economy. This continued until 2000, when Hafez died and his son Bashar Al-Assad finally came to power, who would further try to increase Syria’s balance on the world stage with even more economic reforms.

These reforms continued, with Bashar taking even bolder steps than Hafez, being the first to invite international neoliberal organizations to participate and advise the reform process itself.

“Unlike Hafiz, Bashar allowed the International Financial Institutions (IFIs):the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, to interfere in the process of economic liberalization (IMF, 2009a and 2010). The IFIs allegedly claimed that market-led reforms would promote macroeconomic stabilization. The Syrian policymakers were also convinced that the neoliberal paradigm and its associated profit-based resource allocation mechanism would inevitably 'trickle down' and improve the social conditions of ordinary Syrians” (The political economy of investment in Syria pg 111)

Syria was on a steady path to opening itself up. Pushing against more hardline factions within his own party, he continued to try and form dialogue with western and Arab states. In 2005, Syria joined the Greater Arab Free Trade Area (GAFTA). In 2008, Syria also joined the EU's Union for the Mediterranean (and previously the Barcelona Process) and the European Neighbourhood Policy - but did not fully benefit pending the application of the EU-Syria Association Agreement (also includes a Free Trade Agreement) which was signed in 2009, but never ratified by Syria.

It was during this reform era in which we saw many of the first contradictions to emerge within Syria, namely due to the privatization of land reform and pulling back of subsidies. This neoliberalism was hoisted upon the poorest and most unfortunate of Syria.

“Apart from the traditional landlords, the primary beneficiary of this counter-reform was a re-emerging class of latifundistas tied to the state and to the Alawite ruling elites (Ababsa, 2006). With counter land reform, land became scarce to the peasants, who were forced to seek seasonal or even permanent work away from the countryside, particularly in the urban informal sector.” (The political economy of investment in Syria - 116)

This land privatization and disruption of rural living coincided with a devastating drought that occurred in Syria around the same time, that led to even worse conditions and mass migration from rural areas. Entire villages across Syria were depopulated in this process. To quote “From 2007 to 2010, Syria suffered a debilitating drought that brought crop failure and livestock mortality to as much as 60% of the country and displaced up to 1.5 million people.”

This drought and lack of subsidies led to hundreds of thousands of impoverished rural Syrians flocking to shantytowns in Aleppo and Damascus. This type of regional impoverishing and rural exodus would only add more fuel to discontent within Syria itself, especially as many of these farmers came from conservative Sunni backgrounds. It also didn't help that post 2003 after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, nearly a million Iraqi refugees also fled into urban Syria (primarily Damascus) putting even greater pressure on already limited supplies and a turbulent economy. Leading to more water and electricity shortages

“Although the regime allocated significant resources in the early 1990s to improve the standard of living of the population, this investment was dissipated by the huge population increase. Reports in the early 2000s described water and electricity shortages in Damascus once again. As al-Bath put it: "The noise of the generators used by the population during the prolonged blackouts dictated by the shortage of electricity once again causes the city to shudder."4” (Commanding Syria - 125)

There were a lot of unfortunate things, some of which were simply out of Syria’s control, happening at the same time, and the national bourgeoisie took full advantage with hardly any restriction. Syria was turning into a neoliberal paradise in which well-connected families and business people could do to Syria what they pleased.

“Merchants had free rein to raise prices as they wished, thus increasing their profit margins. The consumer price index on bread and cereal, meat, and vegetables, increased by 50.9 per cent, 58.6 per cent and 23.1 percent, respectively over the period 2006-10 (Central Bureau of Statistics, 2011).” (The political economy of investment in Syria - 116)

The urban Syrian merchants that Hafez and Bashar tried to court, were continually empowered by these reforms, leading to a further derision and disdain between the petit bourgeoise and the new landless and unemployed agrarian proletariat. The privatization of the banking sector and loosening of capital controls also empowered the bourgeoisie, as Syrian businessmen and wealthy families dumped billions into Lebanese banks. (A lot of said money would get wiped out in the 2019 Lebanese financial crisis)

As mentioned just before, with the Syrian state trying to stem unemployment both with the state sector and work permits in Lebanon, this privatization put even more pressure on the commonly understood social contract within Syrian society, something pushed back against by more leftist factions in the Ba'ath.

“For many years, strategic economic sectors, such as petroleum and mining, electricity, cement and steel manufacturing, glass, and paper were publicly owned. Privatization of state-owned enterprises was a very sensitive issue in Syria, given that it would add to the then inflated army of unemployed people.” (The political economy of investment in Syria - 119)

Employment was an important patronage tool by the Ba'ath administration, but this was surely beginning to collapse. The big bourgeoise in Syria happily rushed into these new profitable sectors while the rest of Syria was left to fend for itself. Unskilled Syrian laborers continued to pour into Lebanon seeking higher wages. This unemployment was obviously most brutal amongst the most destitute, but even amongst higher educated people from better off backgrounds, began to feel the pinch. Student protests erupted in Aleppo in 2004 when guaranteed employment for engineering students was removed.

“Student demonstrations had broken out already in February 2004 in the engineering faculties at the universities of Aleppo and Damascus following an announcement by the government that, because of a surplus of engineers, it would no longer guarantee work to all engineering graduates, as had been the practice in Syria ever since the Ba'th regime came into power. Dozens of students were arrested during the protests.” (commanding Syria - 118)

What made this general poverty even more crushing and despair-inducing was the lavish lifestyle of corrupt officials and families who continued to import luxury goods and foreign servants.

“This and other cases of corruption in Syria illuminated the existence of a small sector of persons of means. The exposure of corruption evidently underlies an order issued by the government in April 2001 banning the employment of foreign domestics and caregivers, especially from Sri Lanka, Yemen and the Philippines. The order mandated a $1,000 fine for employers who brought in such workers. 5 The fine, however, did not deter hundreds of employers from continuing to bring in foreign domestics, who numbered thousands and possibly tens of thousands, including Iraqs, Sudanese and others. In a related development, a report in the Syrian press in the summer of 2002 pointed to a growth of 150 percent in the sale of luxury Mercedes cars and of 200 percent in the sale of Jaguars.” (commanding Syria, pg 113)

Corruption in Syria is famous for how cartoonishly obvious and lousy it can be. Bribing officials, border agents, police, ect is entirely normalized. This type of behavior is seen all across the Arab World, but Syria has had a reputation for it’s mafia-like security forces. You can see how these contradictions manifested in some of the first revolts, occurring in rural Daraa, where a lot of these concerns were at the forefront.

“The first inflamed state, Dera'a, had suffered from severe droughts, low investments in agricultural infrastructure, and rising input prices that strangled the farming community. By favoring the new commercial bourgeoisie, the state bourgeoisie had not only neglected the peasantry during the Hafiz and later the Bashar regimes, but had also pauperized them in order to cheapen resources it drew from the rural areas. The exodus from the villages to the city encountered unemployment and further downward pressure on wages.” (The political economy of investment in Syria - 130)

Thus, to give a quick summary of all of this, Syria from 1991 onward entered a period of reform and opening-up partly as an attempt to build relations with the west in the wake of the fall of the USSR. This reform process involved the privatization of rural land, decrease of various subsidies, and the empowerment of local bourgeois and merchants to exploit the situation. Internal migrations from drought and lack of rural support left hundreds of thousands of Syrians living in shantytowns desperate for work and basic services. This of course, is just one aspect of all the chaos and war that has happened in Syria, and we should be careful to not over-prescribe these factors as the only cause of strife in Syria, but it is still an important factor to analyze nonetheless.

A question can be asked, what should Syria have done differently? Well, if only it was that easy. One could simply say Syria should have continued state-support and been more careful on privatization, but doing so would make it much harder to open relations with the west and EU. Bunkering down on the state may have forced them to essentially become another DPRK, a “Rogue State” economically isolated on the international stage. A lot of this is also said in hindsight, there were of course warning signs, but not many in Syria, even the opposition, ever expected Syria to reach the state it is in today. Syria was in a difficult position without any easy path, but it can be said obviously that the path chosen was not especially effective. The future of Syria, no matter if Assad remains or leaves, does not look particularly nice. All and all, let this serve as a lesson.

There's a lot that can be said about the aesthetics and imagery of a state, particularly in the way it's presented on a world stage, and the narrative it's attempting to present. The most important role, within the scope of imperial design, is drawing a clear distinction between civilization and barbarism, the occident and orient, the international community and the rouge states, and so on and so forth. The purpose is to draw a clear line that is plainly observable to all. You are either on one side or the other. There is punishment and reward for being associated with either side.

West Germany was the typification of this "divide" for the Cold War struggle between the Western and Eastern Bloc. West Germany was presented as the prosperous, free, and happy representative of liberal capitalism, that was just out of reach for those living in the “totalitarian” Eastern Bloc.   

It was pointed too as the clearest distinction imaginable, the difference between freedom and authoritarianism, and even today it remains a significant talking point. You see similar talking points used between South Korea and the DPRK. “Let's divide a country in half, one side capitalist and one side communist, and see how they do” is a favored line of argumentation by libertarian Redditors. 

It's the "success" of capitalism juxtaposed against the failure of Communism. Joyful prosperity vs austure oppression. Of course, there's all sorts of complicated context that can explain a lot of the differences, but that's not the point. Discussing the complex historical and political realties is boring and unengaging. The point is the message, which is quite clear - "If you leave communism and join the liberal world order, you can be rich and prosperous just like West Germany". Prosperity and wealth is available, you only have to follow. That is the message, it’s a direct call to action for those living under the “Regime” and discontent with their conditions.

This presented image had to be in the proper spatial distance. It can't be too close, as seeing the wealth and privilege in such proximity could have negative effects. Firstly, revealing that the "image" isn't really all it's cracked up to be, thus destroying the illusion, and secondly, building immediate resentment and anger rather than aspiration. So some legroom is needed. 

But It can't be too far either though, that would be out of sight and out of mind. People won't be as enthralled if it's just some vastly different society on the other side of the ocean, that isn't as practically desirable. So therefore, It has to be close enough to be unavoidable, but too far to be properly examined. West Germany was thus geographically perfect for this role as the designated "aspirational paradise" being that it was within the core of Europe, and casting an unavoidable shadow across Eastern Europe. Berlin was this too the extreme.

West Germany is not the only case of this either, it's just one of many in the long-game of imperial chess. The wealth and freedom of Taiwan contrasted to a depressed and repressive Mainland China, is also a common usage of this propaganda tactic. 

The example that I'd like to focus on is the role of Dubai (and the gulf states broadly) in serving as the aforementioned "West Germany" of the Middle East. The UAE is one of the most vicious attack dogs of imperialism, most notably in both Yemen and Sudan, but beyond just being a physical hub for weapon transports and militia-funding, it serves a key role in the propaganda war against all free people not yet under American domination.

One of the most common talking points you've seen from Israeli pundits, as the IOF decimates and destroys Gaza, is "If only Gaza didn't chose terrorism, with all that aid they could've been a Dubai or Singapore on the Mediterranean".

Now, this obviously doesn’t make much sense as a comparison. Dubai and Singapore are not blockaded, they control their air and maritime space, not to mention the vast oil resources of the UAE, and pretty much every other extremely obvious difference between the Gaza strip and Dubai, but that doesn’t matter. That isn’t really the point in the first place. The point is to draw a line in the sand.

When imperialist lackeys call for Gaza to become Dubai, they aren’t literally asking for Gaza to become an oil rich emirate with imported South-Asian slaves, there emoting a desire, and saying something entirely more obvious. They want Dubai because Dubai is non-threatening and unimposing, it is a partner, rather than an obstacle for US-Israeli imperial adventurism. Gaza from a fortress of resistance to an imperial outpost, that is what's most desired. 

I've joked in the past that an Israeli might be safer walking in Dubai than in Muslim neighborhoods in Europe, but given what happened in Amsterdam, it might really be the case. It’s not a scary Muslim hoard like Gaza, Lebanon, or Yemen, it’s a nice tourist destination Israelis can visit and take Instagram photos. The Zionist has nothing to fear in the UAE, and everything to fear with Gaza.

Dubai is the picture-perfect representation of the ideal Arab state from the perspective of the Zionist, which something the Palestinians can never be, even if they wanted to be. Palestinians are thus endlessly taunted with the images of a stupidly rich gulf paradise, an imagined existence that they can never achieve because they chose to continue existing as Palestinians, and not as faceless and empty vassals. This is their punishment for being Palestinian, for people who chose to distinguish themselves from submission. 

It's quite similar to the punishment of Tantalus in Greek mythology. After offending the gods, Tantalus was made to sit in a pool of water with succulent fruit just above. Being in immense thirst, he would try to grab the fruit or drink the water, but both would recede and elude him just out of reach. It was an endless cycle of mocking punishment. Hence the term “Tantalian Punishment” or even just the term “Tantalize”.  

This mocking juxtaposition and comparison is made with other states and actors "deemed rouge". Notably, with Lebanon after the emergence of Hezbollah. 

There was a Haaretz article (from the beloved “Israeli left”) that discussed how Lebanon used to "Be a Dubai" relying on the same trope as mentioned beforehand. 

To quote 

"Long before Dubai was Dubai, Lebanon was Dubai. In the 1950s, '60s and '70s it was a regional center for banking and finance, an entrepot and a playground for wealthy Arabs and Westerners... Fifteen years of civil war and the grip over the country variously by Syria, Iran and Hezbollah brought an end to that fabulous era.”

This is a common talking point presented about Lebanon. A once prosperous Christian nation, amidst a glorious golden age, that was torn apart and impoverished by the vicious Shiite and Palestinian. It was quite literally called "The Paris of the East" if that wasn't enough to demonstrate that it truly was the apple of the wests eye. 

This narrative is simple and easy. It doesn't have to pay mind to the fact that Shiites lived in deplorable conditions in the south during all of this, that the “wealth” and “prosperity” was largely confined to the upper-class of a few urban centers. That is largely irrelevant. Nor the fact that the “Palestinian refugee problem” only existed in the first place because of Israel, or that Israel had (and continues) to terrorize and bomb Lebanon for decades. Israeli genocide and conquest are mere unimportant side-details for the informed and analytical writers at Haaretz. What’s more useful to analyze is a few grainy photos of Lebanese women lounging on the beach. (Which they can still do today, but I digress…)

All of that can be ignored, rather, a story about a beautiful nation destroyed by jihadi evil terrorists can be presented - with the subtle hint that all of this can return, if only they make peace with Israel. The Lebanese hoisted this upon themselves, but all can return, they only need to do one thing. The state of Israel itself can also play this role, being one of the richest countries in the world, surrounded on all sides by nations drenched in poverty, their side looks inherently more appealing to the liberal bystander.

You can similarly see the same backwards logic applied to Iran, in which the pre-1979 monarchy is seen as an idealistic western paradise, in contrast to the medieval and impoverished Islamic republic. Diaspora assets rejoice at such a contrast. It is this curated illusion which services as a fundamental attack on resistance and sovereignty itself. In terms of imperial control, the sanctions, bombardment, and killing serve as the “Stick” and the allure of a peaceful rich paradise serves as the “Carrot”. Does it matter if this paradise even existed in the first place? of course not.

This is the importance of “Dubai” more than a physical city with roads and buildings, it’s the designated mirage of “what could be” if only resistance was forgotten entirely. This is the challenge that is persistently imposed on the people that chose to resist, whether true or not.

In conclusion: fuck Israel, and fuck the gulf states. long live shawarma.

The battlefield is the greatest arena for innovation. It’s a blank canvas begging for experimentation. The worst that could happen is that someone will die, so really, there is no concern at all. It would be such a waste to let petty concerns of human dignity to hold back the future…

It would be a vast understatement to say that futurism and militarization have a dark relationship. Technology in-use for mass murder is as old as war itself, and with the ongoing Israeli slaughter in Gaza, it’s as good a time as ever to discuss the topic.

Let’s start from the beginning; the Italian futurist movement (Where better else to start?)

The Italian futurists movement was a political organization founded in 1909 by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. They were a strange group of people to say the least. Originally beginning as a group entrenched by aesthetics and art, they soon became one of the most forceful bastions of reactionary politics. They had but one obsession, the religion of speed. What use is there in discussing the bygone half-remembered past, when the future is just in sight. What use is a dusty museum or painting when you could have a shiny locomotive?

As the futurists say: "A racing car is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace." 

Speed is what gives man pride, and said pride is a justification of war. Italy is the greatest country, so therefore must have the greatest military. Hyper-Militarization was a focal point of the Futurist program, war gave endless possibility to speed. The Futurist movement knew very well that war was the ultimate representation of the latest technological shift.

An example can be made of the first aerial bombardment in history, conducted by Italian forces in Libya. An Italian pilot dropped 1.5 kg of bombs on Ain Zara, a village 8 km west of the capital Tripoli. This single moment would change all of warfare forever. A single bombardment over an unsuspecting Libya would become a typified representation of all future war until the end of time. 

Naturally, the futurists were infatuated with said bombing. They loved war and technology, and this was the greatest demonstration. Marinetti himself (founder of the futurist movement) flew to the Libyan front in 1912 to participate.  Aerial bombardment is the greatest form of war because it requires the least amount of confrontation and introspection, one can simply sit inside a mechanical contraption and release the designated explosives. It doesn’t matter who dies, you will never meet them in the first place. It is just as easy to imagine oneself as an energized child stomping on pesky ant hills. They are small and you are big, that is justification enough. 

To quote the famous anti-war song “I bombed Korea every night";

"I bombed Korea every night

Red flowers bursting down below us. 

Those people didn't even know us." 

Technology allows us to disassociate ourselves from violence. It feels less like you're killing innocent people when you're simply clicking buttons to strike abstract targets miles away. War can be reduced to numerical units being shifted around. Don't think about it any harder than that because you might get uncomfortable. You will never meet or know the people you are bombarding, so it really is not worth the sweat.

Perhaps this is also why the technical paradigm of "Fordism" was fully utilized during the holocaust. Germany took full advantage of the latest innovation to achieve state objectives. Efficiently murdering millions of people in assembly-line fashion is simply easier to stomach. It goes too fast to think about or consider. Follow orders, use the machine, and the job is done. It feels less like an active slaughter, and more like a vast bureaucratic procedure. Such arrangement also disassociates the individual and makes them function as a single cog in a larger machine. Like an automaton repeating a task endlessly, there are no bad soldiers, only bad instructions. 

To return to the realm of aerospace, this phenomenon of disconnected technological slaughter was deeply present during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. This was an American conquest won largely by overwhelming military might, a true campaign of shock and awe. This was also the first war in the so-called “Information age” in which technology and digitization was ever present in American life. It was the ideal condition for a grand performance of warfare. The American people wanted to be entertained, as well as regain lost pride after a failure in Vietnam, and Bush is always one to deliver. War can finally be fun again.

This was one of the first extensively documented wars in the digital age. There had been war reporting in the past, but nothing like this. New technologies, such as satellites allowed for all sorts of coverage that was never seen before. People all around the world were able to watch footage of bombing campaigns, aircraft carriers, and the like. The battlefield became accessible to the American public. Anyone at home could simply turn on the TV and enjoy the spectacle. 

This was better even further justified by the infamous Nayirah Testimony in which a supposed kuwaiti victim gave an impassioned speech about the brutality of the iraqi forces, including ripping out babies from incubators. Iraq, in perfection movie fashion, became the ur-enemy. All evil and horror in the world was gathered into a single entity, and that entity was Iraq. All Iraqi soldiers became stormtroopers, and the death star had to be destroyed.

The Gulf War undeniably was an enjoyable spectacle, despite the immense brutality perpetrated by the US coalition. The bombing campaign was a widespread destruction of an entire society from top to bottom. The Coalition of the Gulf War flew over 100,000 sorties, dropping 88,500 tons of bombs (1). It was a colossal demonstration of US hegemonic masculinity directly after the collapse of the soviet union in 1991. You either fall in-line or become an Iraq, and nobody wants to be Iraq.

The destruction is truly hard to describe, and is not something well discussed. To quote from the council on foreign relations: 

"..the  paralysis of electric power plants deprived Iraqis of drinking water, interrupted agricultural irrigation through pumping stations, and clogged the sewage system. Garbage and debris accumulated, rats proliferated, and epidemics spread. Hospitals without generators were unable to perform surgery... Iraq has returned to a preindustrial era: its GDP is now lower than it was in 1962, when its population, now over 18 million, was scarcely 7 million." (2)

Iraq was entirely decimated, and nobody cared. People wanted to be happy about the war, but watching videos of decapitated civilians and bombed sanitation infrastructure doesn't feel as warm and fuzzy. Americans need to be infantilized about war. People wanted to be happy about destroying the evil Iraqi enemy, but didn't want to feel sad about murdered brown people. It therefore became paramount to use technology to abstract the war, turning it into a high-tech pulverization rather than an unfortunate bombing campaign of impoverished villages and bomb shelters. This was shock and awe, a crusade. 

"The Defense Department supplied most of the video of the air war. Recorded with night vision equipment, it seemed fantastic and futuristic, something that reminded many viewers of a video game." (3). Violence is no longer real, there is only a sterile and surgical demonstration of superior military strength. All discourse must exist  within these confines. There are units and numbers changing on some excel sheet, but nothing else.   

There is something deeply libidinal about this type of warfare. To participate in such a conquest is unavoidably gratifying for the perpetrators. You feel an all encompassing feeling of domination. 

In the excellent book Desiring Arabs, Joseph Massad described how American fighter-pilots would watch pornographic content to "prepare themselves" for the bombing campaigns, in the same fashion someone would do foreplay before sex. 

"Just over a decade and a half ago, during the "first" Gulf War of 1990-91, American fighter and bomber pilots would spend hours watching pornographic films to get themselves in the right mood for the massive bombing they carried out in Iraq" (4)

War has become a fascinating spectator sport. Technology has gamified violence to a palatable degree. Who knows what the best technological paradigm has in store?  Nothing can be taken seriously anymore. War has become abstracted to a degree hard to understand. We envision powerful mechanical forces clashing, not hundreds of thousands being killed. The average American understanding of war is closer to a marvel movie than anything else. 

All of this brings us to Israel, the main topic at hand. Perhaps no other country is currently better at representing the latest technical paradigm in the arena of war. Israel is referred to as the “startup nation”. It is a country filled to the brim with tech innovation and advanced weaponry.

Air-strikes are used extensively by israel. According to the same data, the Israeli air force has hit over 30,000 targets. What is a target exactly you might ask? Well don’t ask that. It’s better not to think about it. Just assume that all of these “targets’ are abstracted representations of the greatest evil to ever exist. Maybe that will make the situation feel better.

The Palestinians do not have the same technology as the Zionists, and therefore have to resort to more primitive practices such as cheap missiles, hit and run guerrilla warfare, and the like. 

When commentators bemoan such practices of Palestinian resistance, calling it barbaric and unadvisable. Why don’t they use precision weapons like the noble Zionist?  I can only think of the conversation between the Algerian rebel and the reporter in the 1966 movie “Battle of Algiers”:

“Of course, if we had your airplanes it would be a lot easier for us. Give us your bombers, and you can have our baskets.”

Palestinians do not have Israeli technology. This critique is therefore entirely meaningless. I would also say that if these weapons truly are the most precise weapons to ever exist, would that not make the actions of Israel even more barbaric? Just because you're bombing people with shiny machines doesn’t make you any more civilized. This worship of technological superiority is widespread amongst Israel. It is a symbol of their civilization in an outpost of barbarism.

This feeling of Zionist superiority is manifested throughout all aspects of discourse, surrounding the war. The modal Israeli is an upstanding citizen with family and friends, hopes and dreams, and everything else encompassing life. Israelis are allowed to be complex individuals, so therefore Palestinians are not.  he orient will always be the opposite of the civilized. Technology is just one example. 

This “Techno-Futurism” manifests itself in many ways. Primarily, through violence against Palestinians. One of the reasons Israeli technology is so surely effective and sought after, is that it is tested live on Palestinians. War is great for capitalism.

From An Al-Jazeera article (5)

“The Israeli army released footage on October 22 of its Maglan commando unit deploying a new precision-guided 120mm mortar bomb called the Iron Sting, against Hamas in Gaza. The bomb’s Haifa-based manufacturer, Elbit Systems, has been advertising its qualities on the public relations page of its website since March 2021, when it was integrated into the Israeli military.”

There is no other way to describe this, as anything besides utterly dystopian in every conceivable way. An entire population has been turned into a guinea pig for the Israeli weapon industry. Mass graves of Palestinians are a good advert for the latest product.

This anti-Palestinian technological development is not limited to mere weapons, it also exists in the realm of artificial intelligence. AI has been used extensively during this war 

According to an investigation by +972 magazine(6):

“The Israeli army has marked tens of thousands of Gazans as suspects for assassination, using an AI targeting system with little human oversight and a permissive policy for casualties” 

The “human touch” has become superfluous. It is not hard to imagine that in the not-so-distant future, entire battles or wars will be fought entirely by hyper-complicated machines. Why bother using a human when an algorithm is always faster?

This also allows for imperial sadism to express itself more efficiently and eloquently. Going house to house and murdering the family of Palestinians by hand, might be too much work, it could also accidentally upset some people. Well, no need to fear, AI can handle this much better.

Mentioned in the same +972 magazine, there is a program called “Where’s Daddy?” in which individuals suspected of being linked to Palestinian militancy (no matter the amount of evidence) are tracked down to the residency, so they and their family can all be killed in a single strike.

We have never seen a more efficient genocide in our lifetime. You can rest assured that Israeli visionaries and innovators are hard at work trying to create more ways to murder Palestinians. This is the inevitable end state of technology under imperialism. 

Most optimistic imaginations of the future have to be interrogated. We thus have to ask ourselves a prescient question. 

Which side is the representative of advancement? The side bombing civilians with immensely sophisticated machinery and software, or the side fighting back with bottle rockets and stones? On an aesthetic level one can confidently assert that it is the Israeli who is representing the future. They have the technology to prove it, but technology alone does not substantiate. There is barbarism in this conflict, and in surprise to all, it's not the barbarism represented by the Orient, but by the West. 

To quote Robert Mugabe at the 62nd UN general assembly; 

“Let Mr. Bush read history correctly. Let him realize that both personally and in his representative capacity as the current President of the United States, he stands for this "civilization" which occupied, which colonized, which incarcerated, which killed. He has much to atone for and very little to lecture us on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. His hands drip with innocent blood of many nationalities.”

This is the civilization that is spoken about. This is the progress and advancement, represented openly by both Israel and the United States. 

References

1. Pope, C. (2021, February 23). 30 years later. AF.mil. Retrieved August 21, 2024, from https://www.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/2512938/30-years-later-desert-storm-remains-a-powerful-influence-on-air-space-forces/

2. Rouleau, Eric. n.d. “America's Unyielding Policy toward Iraq.” Foreign affairs 74 (1). From https://www.jstor.org/stable/20047019

3. “The Persian Gulf War - Television.” n.d. Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy. Accessed August 21, 2024. https://www.americanforeignrelations.com/O-W/Television-The-persian-gulf-war.html#b%23ixzz1uKXkqB1I.

4. Massad, Joseph A. 2008. Desiring Arabs. P 61. University of Chicago Press.

5. Dowling, Paddy, and Owen Jones. “Dirty secret of Israel's weapons exports: They're tested on Palestinians.” Al Jazeera, 17 November 2023, https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/features/2023/11/17/israels-weapons-industry-is-the-gaza-war-its-latest-test-lab. Accessed 22 August 2024.

6. Abraham, Yuval. “'Lavender': The AI machine directing Israel's bombing spree in Gaza.” +972 Magazine, 3 April 2024, https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/. Accessed 22 August 2024.

“Italy has been too long the great second-hand market. We want to get rid of the innumerable museums which cover it with innumerable cemeteries”

I have always been very interested in the aesthetic, it is a characteristic I find to be particularly informative. There is a lot you can learn from such a preliminary observation. 

One place in particular, very deserving of analysis, is the Persian gulf monarchies. A rapidly expanding region filled to the brim with petrodollars and vanity. I think this region has a lot to teach us about the future. And what better lens then the aesthetic of Cyberpunk?

Now, it may sound strange to analyze a bunch of US-backed and hyper-conservative absolute monarchies through the lens of a media genre, but I think this will make sense throughout (or at least I hope so). 

Let's begin 

Firstly, What is Cyberpunk?

Cyberpunk is a dystopian subset of science fiction that imagines a futuristic world with unbelievable technological advancement, paired simultaneously with crippling inequality and oppression. (if you have seen the anime “Cyberpunk: Edgerunners” you get the gist)

Neon lights, flying cars, abundant transhumanism, a criminal underworld, and corrupt politics. This is Cyberpunk;

In a general sense, this services as a critique of the inevitable conclusions of capitalism itself. To portray a system with such great wealth and prosperity, yet a perpetual underclass beneath. 

Cyberpunk is the darker contrast to techno-optimism. The future may be big, but it certainly is not big enough for the poor or otherwise disregarded. If anything, the future becomes even narrower for them. 

This is a commentary even for the contemporary context. As William Gibson, pioneer of the cyberpunk genre, would say "The future is here, it’s just not very evenly distributed.” 

So, in some sense, "Cyberpunk" is a hyperstition, it is a *fiction* that is capable of speaking to reality on a deeper level than truth itself. Fiction is deeper then truth because it can simply be characterized. Cyberpunk is thus the exaggerated characterization of what we already know to be true.  

And in actual practice, the Persian gulf monarchies are the most exaggerated forms of this. It would be harder to find a bigger contrast between the obscenely wealthy and the cripplingly oppressed, with slaves working next to shopping malls and skyscrapers. The Gulf states are techno-capitalism in the worst possible way.

Now, a lot more can be said on the particularities, so let's example that 

Firstly, how and why are the gulf states linked to futurism? And what even is Oilpunk?

One inspiration for writing this substack was an old blogpost from the Kuwait-Based author Thorsten Botz-Bornstein. He's known for writing bizarre and esoteric books on futurism, and just so happened to write an article reading this phenomena in the gulf (I will quote this post a few times throughout) .

In this article, he gives a general characterization of "Oilpunk" in specific reference to Kuwait. 

His description: 

"Oilpunk is an idealized version of an oil-based society making use of brassy visceral machines covered with oily grime. Bearded individuals drive through the digestive apparatus of the Oilpunk universe. Their super powered vehicles never touch the ground and their white clothes never get dirty. This place does indeed exist. Welcome to Kuwait."

Obviously a bit tongue in cheek, but you get the point. The gulf states are unquestionably headed to the future and have embraced technology to the fullest. Oilpunk has no time to waste.

Another related term is "Gulf futurism" as coined by Qatari-American author Sophia Al Maria, being a characterization of the gulf states as a pessimistic and hypermodern project enticed with the persona of "Futurism". It is a description of an aesthetic theme

To quote

"The themes and ideas of Gulf Futurism emerge: the isolation of individuals via technology, wealth and reactionary Islam, the corrosive elements of consumerism on the soul and industry on the earth, the erasure of history from our memories and our surroundings and finally, our dizzying collective arrival in a future no one was ready for."

“Gulf futurism” is thus a heading warning for what shall come for the rest of humanity. 

Such ideas of "futurism" are in of themselves symptoms of a reactionary capitalist society, and the political fixations it produces. 

Sci-Fi (and aesthetic in general) is ideological, even if in subtle form. Take the famous cartoon “The Jetsons” for instance. It depicts the idealized form of a 1960s nuclear family in a lighthearted future society. This serves as a window into the post-WW2 optimism of (white) American society where the future and seen as innovative and bright. 

Aesthetics can be fine political commentary, and this is especially true for Cyberpunk or any “Punk” really 

To quote 

"Literary and cultural critics have long maintained that postmodernism marks a post-futurist moment in which imagined futures are pre-determined by the ideological imperatives of market capitalism. Yet, this “slow cancellation of the future” has paradoxically entailed a proliferation of 21st-century futurisms: Afro-Futurism, Sino-Futurism, Gulf Futurism, accelerationism, design fiction, climate fiction, and so forth."

Futurism is often an extremely reactionary idea, and it's no coincidence that the original Italian futurists were fond of the rise of Mussolini. 

Being narrowly obsessed with the latest technological advances will leave you absentminded to all other considerations. 

The Italian futurists cherished war, because it was the ultimate manifestation of the latest technological paradigm. They loved the Italian bombings of North Africa in 1911 because it was the first aerial bombardment in history. Accumulation for the sake of accumulation is not much different from barbarism after all. There’s a reason the industrial character of Fordism would be directly linked to outright support for Nazism.

This hyper-fixation on technological innovation and progress may actually sound similar to some ideas of Accelerationism. This is worth a brief overview 

In 1967, Roger Zelazny wrote a famous Sci-Fi novel titled “Lord of light” 

In this book he describes a group of revolutionaries called the "Accelerationists" whom want to radically changed societal perception of technology, believing that unmitigated technological development is best possible path. 

Nick Land expanded on this concept, and saw it as a natural conclusion to capitalism itself. 

To quote Nick Land in his intro to accelerationism

"In this germinal accelerationist matrix, there is no distinction to be made between the destruction of capitalism and its intensification. The auto-destruction of capitalism is what capitalism is. "Creative destruction" is the whole of it, beside only its retardations, partial compensations, or inhibitions. Capital revolutionizes itself more thoroughly than any extrinsic 'revolution' possibly could."

That is to say, the only way through capitalism is through *it*. The hurried intensification of capitalism is the only hope available. Hence, we should not look at rabid neoliberal outposts such as Kuwait or Dubai as problems, but rather as solutions. Oil is the fuel for all humanity.

To quote Vaden

“Oil does not only create change, but increasing rates of change. All that is solid melts into air, and the melting is faster, year by year. Futurism took up the torch of acceleration; various forms of romanticism opposed it. The sovereignty of oil has a privilege previously reserved for gods: it can change the way experience is experienced.”

Much more will happen, and this is only the beginning. Oil will hasten the velocity of time itself 

To quote once more from land

"Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to "accelerate the process," as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven't seen anything yet."

Maybe the solution was never supposed to be found in Lenin, but Rather in Mohammad Bin Zayed? (Or maybe this is just a meaningless schizophrenic ramble, but who can tell the difference these days...) 

Now, with all that said, let's circle back and further discuss the particularities of futurism and Oilpunk in the gulf. 

The conservative and regressive nature of the gulf states can be deceiving. In contrast to said backwardness, they are absolutely obsessed with (at least the aesthetic) of Futurism and Cyberpunk. 

They are known for suggesting bizarre and futuristic infrastructure projects, such as the "the line" the metallic and linear "smart city" that would be built in Saudi Arabia. It is such an excessive and indulgent proposal that one cannot help but be enthralled.

Or, one can look at the already existing tallest building in the world "Burj Khalifa" in Dubai. These constructed symbols are nothing and mean nothing, and that's precisely the function they must serve. 

To quote from a separate Bronstein article 

"At the heart of Dubai is the Burj Khalifa. Being rather empty for the time being, the tower seems to illustrate Roland Barthes' idea of "the zero degree of the monument" that must be empty and useless in order to fully realize its utopian potential. For Barthes the Eiffel Tower is a supreme example of an empty signifier or a pure sign, whose meaning, constantly bordering on the irrational, can never be exhausted"

The Burj Khalifa is that exact irrational nothingness you are drawn toward, it is the creation of a symbol from nothingness. 

Beyond just infrastructure, this desire for the future is represented on every other level of organization. 

They invest heavily in bitcoin, they sponsor internet influencers, and host gaming events. Everything to be on the cutting edge of technology and trends. If there is an excessive and aesthetically futuristic commodity or concept, you can imagine the gulf states are already onboard. They are headed for the future no matter what. This is true even on a population level  

The gulf states have an extremely young and internet-connected population. 

Looking at Mobile cellular subscriptions (per 100 people) the UAE has 212, and Kuwait has 181. 

For reference, the U.S. is only 110. 

Looking at Individuals using the Internet (% of population) you would find that the UAE is 100%, Kuwait is 99%, and the U.S is 91%

If you want to find a society more hyper-online than America, it's in the gulf. (No wonder so many gulf teens got radicalized into joining ISIS via the internet, but that's a story for another day). 

This is how you get the "Punk" in "Oilpunk". It is that rambunctious youth frenzied with consumerism and excess. The new crashing against the old.

From Bronstein:

"The word 'punk' suggests the articulation of an anarchic behavior of post-industrial youths. In cyberpunk it does not result in politically motivated counter-cultural actions, but rather in a consumer-oriented teenage anomie propelled · by high-tech development, a phenomenon that was first observed in Japan. Cyberpunk can be defined as a political nihilism."

Oilpunk is entirely about speed and energy. Dostoevsky in his famed work "the idiot" said that "Beauty will save the world". Such a statement is entirely juvenile. It fails to recognize that beauty can *only* exist in speed 

From the futurist manifesto:

“We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed.”

It's thus no surprise that gulf states have some of the highest rate of car accidents in the world. They want to get where they're going. The future does not have time to wait.  

If you’re familiar with the racing car anime “Inital D” you are familiar with the line “Gas, Gas, Gas”. This is futurism distilled. The racing automobile is the tool of the future

And, As the Italian futurists would say "A racing car is more beautiful then the victory of Samothrace".   

There's something even deeper that can be said, particularly on the aesthetics of both city and Oil. Naturally, Dubai is the best example.

Dubai first of all presents a deep Americanization.

There is something deeply *American* about Dubai, with its abundant mixture of consumerism, classism, and the like. 

Indeed, Ann Applebaum  wrote herself "Americans visiting Dubai know how 19th century Europeans must have felt when they saw the United States." 

Even modern America and Dubai share similarities in in the simple realm of a ghastly car-centric urbanism.

"Every road has at least four lanes; Dubai feels like a motorway punctuated by shopping centers. You only walk anywhere if you are suicidal."

The closest parallel is perhaps, Los Angeles, with its similar urban planning and world-famous consumerism. Jean Paul-Sarte visited Los Angeles in 1949 and gave a colorful description, one that could similarly describe the cities of any Gulf Monarchy.

To quote Jean Paul-Sartre:

"Los Angeles, in particular, is rather like a big earthworm that might be chopped into twenty pieces without being killed. If you go through this enormous urban cluster, probably the largest in the world, you come upon twenty juxtaposed cities, strictly identical... In America... cities... that move at a rapid rate are not constructed in order to grow old, but move forward like modern armies, encircling the islands of resistance they are unable to destroy; the past does not manifest itself in them as it does in Europe, through public monuments, but through survivals."

This totally excessive urban sprawl does draw a visual parallel. LA and Dubai can chain themselves together in the art of consumption and splendor.

Yet, with that said, a major difference can be found. Primarily in the form of Disneyland. That being the fact that Dubai does not have Disneyland (at least yet)

To quote: 

"For Baudrillard - and for Louis Marin long before him - Disneyland has been created "in order to make us believe that the rest [of America] is real." Otherwise, we would think that "Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and the order of simulation" 

The Utopic atmosphere of Disneyland has a function. With its clear geographic boundaries, it enables us to distinguish between the real and the unreal, between the authentic and the inauthentic, that is to say; if Disneyland is unreal, then Los Angles must be real. 

To distinguish oneself from the other there has to be an other in the first place.

Dubai, on the other hand, has no such anchor in reality at all. You have no reference point to distinguish between the real and the unreal. Henceforth you are left adrift,

As Bronstein would say "Nothing could be more opposed to the sterile New World atmosphere of Dubai which is a "Disneyland" with the death penalty."

If you've read "Oil" by Upton Sinclair (or the more popular adaptation "there will be blood) you would know that real Oilpunk does not occur in Southern California, but in the gulf. 

Oil is a very transient commodity, and it is a defining aspect of the Middle East - and this leads us to one of the most important questions of all: an examination of Oil itself 

Oil is the center of everything for this, It is the most remarkable and excessive commodity. Dubai will have to be understood in the terms of oil.  

We have to understand Dubai in terms of perpetual "appearance". A city that is "not yet there" yet perpetually in speed and occurrence.  

A city may have a performance. Hong Kong for instance, performs as a taste of the orient for the western traveler, and a taste of the west for the Chinese traveler. It is contrasted to something concrete.

Dubai has no precedent. It is not based on Arab or Islamic culture. Arabism has never entered it, and it has never entered Arabism. This is what gives Dubai the ability to transcend time and space. Dubai is new performance or appearance.

This can be understood in terms of Cinematography. 

Take the editing technique of "Step-Printing". 

Step printing is used in filmmaking in which individual frames of a film are printed multiple times onto a single frame of the final print, resulting in a slower frame rate. 

It creates a blurred and dreamlike effect to motion (here's a representation if still unclear)

This technique is used abundantly by director Wong Kar-Wai, the Hong Kong filmmaker known for "Chungking express" and "In the mood for love". 

To quote Bronstein

"Wong Kar-Wai uses this method abundantly in several of his films. I believe that this "step printing" symbolizes Dubai's cultural situation. In step printing, speed acquires a new dimension because it establishes a paradoxical relationship between the past and the future.”

As one frame appears or disappear into the next, you conclusively acknowledge  that disappearance is in fact appearance. The conclusion has revealed itself in the premise.

And in the particular case of Dubai, It is an appearance predicated on the disappearance of *oil*

From Bronstein once more

"The paradoxical constellation that Dubai's eternally postponed appearance is, in the last instance, based on the disappearance of oil makes the comparison even more pertinent"

This was a choice. Dubai has never chosen anything different. They desire to become fictitious, to live only in the aesthetic, to immediately engage in an act of self-abstraction, which is the contemporary mode of disappearance.

As Pablo Picasso would say, "Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction”. 

The appearance must exist within the disappearance 

There is something deeply libidinal about the extraction of oil. Even if it may be wrong, one cannot help themselves 

The excessive nature of oil helps us understand the excessive and consumeristic nature of the gulf itself. It is a consumption in perpetuity. 

-

I think an interesting example to further illustrate this would be  "Spec Ops: the line" which takes place in a post apocalyptic war-torn Dubai. 

This game touches a lot on the darker side of war, paranoia, ect 

But what I would like to talk about is the visual aesthetic of the city. It speaks a lot to the character of Dubai even contemporaneously.

Walking around the long-abandoned skyscrapers that were overtaken by a huge sandstorm, there is a persistent feeling of being stuck in the past, if not long abandoned.

There is consistent illusions throughout the game, and the player can never tell if his perspective is being misled or confused. It all feels very fleeting. 

I think this aesthetic and vibe (for lack of a better term) speaks to the contemporary gulf itself.  

From Bronstein: 

"Kuwaiti economy is a cliché. a  punky "No Future" slogan lingers over the entire country because one day the oil will run out, and the exuberant lifestyle and hyperdoped economy cannot be sustained."

The stereotypical desert mirage incurs seeing some desired object (be it water or food) until, on arrival, the commodity is then fleeting and never existed in the first place. Dubai is the oasis that will never arrive, yet the every thirsty wanderer cannot help but to partake.

In a sense, this is similar to the hyper oil-dependent gulf economies. At some glance, they seem like a feverishly wealthy, yet, with an underlining feeling that this is not sustainable and could not possibility last. 

You may find this aesthetic analysis to be a bit tripe, but understand, it is often difficult to discern between the aesthetic and the political 

As the Italian futurists would say:

"As any good anthropologist will tell you, aesthetics and politics are so closely interwoven that it is often impossible to determine where one begins and the other ends."

Now, even with all this said, we have only scratched the surface of Oil. 

There are much deeper philosophical implications for such a miraculous and unique commodity. 

From the Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani

"Oil [naft نفط] is an occult matter that forms the phantasmagoric collective and political subconscious of the Middle East." 

For Negarestani, oil is decidedly non-human, and consequently outside the area of simple rationality.

In the modern age, Oil serves as the pretext (and subtext) for all political and economic conflict in the Middle East. It is the "Ur-Commodity" with an influence beyond imagination. 

Oil distributes itself across the world via a network of pipelines and ports that humans have built on its behalf. Oil is the liquid gold, it is the ultimate fetishization 

In the gulf states especially, capital has become synonymous with oil. The overwhelming majority of their currency, wealth, and capital is derived from the trade of Oil. 

Oil in the gulf is a symbol for everything they have, it is in some sense, god-like in character.

From Bronstein.

"For an Oil producing formerly poor country, Oil signifies freedom. At the same time, God’s authoritarian chains remained tight. In the West, the liberation from God led to a dissolution of meaning, which was compensated by adopting the new meanings of an Oil powered consumer society. By contrast, in Kuwait, two competing Gods had to share one and the same space. God cohabitated with his own surrogate: Oil."

Oil, as a perfect representative of capital itself, unites everything between heaven and earth. It can serve the function of god as well as anything else. Oilpunk unites the material and the immaterial 

In the West, the bourgeoise revolutions of secularism and modernism killed God, sending him underground turning into Oil. God became associated with the formation of industrial capitalism, of greed, and of the bourgeoise. (Rockefeller got rich from standard oil after all). Oil became bad god 

In the gulf, Oil had always been God; it simply had not yet been discovered. Zion has arrived, and it is oil.

It makes sense that god comes from the ground. Theism can illustrate itself in the material. Particularly in the Middle East, which is the origin of all Monotheism. 

Monotheism is a perfect religion for the desert, with everything in existence between the sand and sky. Everything ends as it begins, we come from dust and will end as dust. As Carl Sagan would say "we are all made of Stardust". Truth is in the singular and the united.  

Marx described such evolution into monotheism.

“At a still further stage of evolution, all the natural and social attributes of the numerous gods are transferred to one almighty god, who is but a reflection of the abstract man.”

We will all return to the ground, and what better representative of that then Oil, which itself comes from the ancient remains of long-dead organisms. 

Oil has a demonic and esoteric character, and it is not hidden just for the Middle East. Due to the proliferation of engines, chemical fertilizers, and petrochemical items, the jinn within oil is spread across the globe. 

Yet as we remain, Life and limb will continue to be sacrificed for Oil, and it must be sacrificed for oil. In the 21st century, oil is the most consistent pretext for war. To destroy oil is akin to human sacrifice (though as we've seen, many would happily sacrifice humanity for oil) 

In 1991, when Iraq was retreating from Kuwait, they set fire to the oil wells, leading to the largest oil fire in human history, costing billions of dollars to repair. in a sense, this was the largest ritual of sacrifice. 

From Bronstein 

"Saddam Hussein set fire to the Kuwaiti Oil wells, sending huge amounts of black smoke to the heavens. The human yearning for a remission of their sins is deep-seated and will never cease; but the practices shifted from blood to Oil."

Oil has this godlike characteristic, due to its obvious relation to capital, and capital as god is something Marx acknowledged extensively. 

Commodities are so fantastical and inexplicable that Marx writes of the “mystery of commodities” with its “magic and necromancy”.

Marx saw money as an "alien mediator" that has estranged itself from man, existing far beyond man himself.

From his 1844 comments on James Mill

"Owing to this alien mediator – instead of man himself being the mediator for man – man regards his will, his activity and his relation to other men as a power independent of him and them. His slavery, therefore, reaches its peak. It is clear that this mediator now becomes a real God, for the mediator is the real power over what it mediates to me. Its cult becomes an end in itself."

This “god” is what knowingly or unknowingly guides our actions and perspectives within capitalist society. It is an abstraction without an abstractor. 

The experience of living in a developed capitalist world is the experience of being at the mercy of opaque and complicated systems whose origin, function, and even purpose are often unclear to the participant. All that is known is that we must work the machine.

We think that we've become the master of commodities, whilst only becoming ever-more enslaved. 

Capital destroys both us and the environment (especially the case with oil). The endless loop of production and profit cannot possibly stop, because each individual capital must ruthlessly compete to survive. 

Like automatons marching into unknown infinity, capital most progress.

Marx in capital volume 1 said as much: 

“Accumulate, accumulate! … reconvert the greatest possible portion of surplus-value … into capital! Accumulation for accumulation’s sake, production for production’s sake: by this formula classical economy expressed the historical mission of the bourgeoisie”.

This is the end state of capital. This is the end state of oil. Breaking the cycle is the only alternative. Until then, we must accumulate. Might as well enjoy it while we can.

I could continue a bit more, with other schizophrenic screeds to fill more of the page, but perhaps that would just be pandering. So I will leave you this.

Thank you for reading. let me know what you think.

The relation and conflict between Islam and Marxism is a hotly discoursed topic, from which you can find opinions on all sides of the spectrum. A major topic of this discourse is the accuracy or correctness of Islamic analysis in comparison to Dialectical and Historical Materialism.

I obviously do not have the ability to respond to all Islamic critiques of Materialism - but I can respond to some of the specific critiques made by the Shiite scholar Baqir Al-Sadr. I hope to defend the validity of historical materialism in face of Islamic critique

Let’s begin now 

Starting in 1959, the famous Iraqi Sheikh Baqir Al-Sadr wrote a series of books titled “Our philosophy” (Falsafatuna) and “Our Economics” (Iqtisaduna). 

These books primarily serve as an Islamic response to various European and philosophies, with a focus on specifically rebutting Materialism and (Soviet) Socialism -  I will be specifically focusing on the statements he made regarding “Human nature” and historical materialism.

I can say quite honesty that I did actually enjoy reading these books, but nonetheless saw some fatal flaws worthy of addressing. that is the purpose of this post

Early in “Our Philosophy” (pg 26) Al-Sadr questions materialism on the basis of human nature or “self-love” (self-interest). 

“In fact, this Marxist notion of self-love views, in a reverse order, the relation between individual reality (the instinct of self-love) and social conditions. If this were not so, then how could it hold that the individualistic motivation is the product of private ownership and class conflicts that result from this kind of ownership?

But if people did not already have individualistic motivation, they would not have created such conflicts. nor would they have thought of private ownership and exclusive personal possessions: Why would a human being seek exclusive power over the acquisitions of the system and employ this power in a manner that preserves his interests at the expense of others, if he does not deeply feel an individualistic motivation?”

To quote once more from the same book  (pg 23)

“Thus, we can explain human behavior in general, (as being well-grounded in] the areas of selfishness and [self]-love alike. In human beings, there are many propensities for taking pleasure in a variety of things, such as taking pleasure in material things exemplified in food, drink, the various kinds of sexual pleasures, and similar material pleasures.”

Al-Sadr is fundamentally addressing the question of human nature and motivation - Essentially to say “Private property was created by individualism. How could individualism have been created by private property, if said property didn’t even exist yet”

He’s stating the Marxists analyze in “Reverse Order” between individual mentality and social condition - that is to say, “The Marxist is putting the cart before the horse”

This statement rests on the assertion that humanity has been driven by personal motivations of greed, individualism, etc.. That ideals themselves are a primary factor to the development of humanity and civilization. 

Boiled down, this is the question of “human nature argument”. or, to put in another way, is consciousness a fundamental and preliminary driver of mankind.

Now, this is an argument every Marxist has heard a million times, but it’s still an important line of argumentation in need of rebuttal. First, let’s clarify some things 

It’s important to understand that Marx did not wholesale reject the notion of “Human nature” or ideals being important to history and development 

What he rejected was the conception of an abstract and transhistorical human essence that operated as a primary driving force of humanity (or as the religious would say, a “Soul”). Marx rejects these metaphysical notions.

As Mao would say “Where do correct ideas come from? Do they fall from the sky? No, they come from social practice”

The inescapable social dimension is why Robinson Crusoe-type individualism could not possibly correspond with humanities “being”. We are not isolated entities floating throughout open space (or at least I’d like to hope so)

Our consciousness, ideologies, and ideas were not gifted to us by a god or spirit - but rather developed in parley with specific material conditions,

Imam Khamenei (Iranian leader/Ayatollah) actually declares this distinction himself. He speaks to the special essence of humanity, refuting the Marxist (and Darwinian) concept of evolution

“In the logic of Marxists and Dialecticians, evolution is this: becoming more complex. However, within Islamic Logic, all forms of becoming more complex does not mean becoming more evolved. Hence, within the scope of Islamic Logic, evolution is not only becoming more complex; but, evolution happens when an animal essence changes into human essence.”

Imam Khamenei is speaking to a fundamental and defining “essence” of humanity that differentiates them from animals. For him, this “essence” could only come from God. 

This is not entirely distinct from Descartes, the famous philosopher of “I think therefore I am”. Being a devout Catholic, he saw human consciousness and self-realization as the product of a god imbued “Soul”.

This dualism between body and soul is ubiquitous in Christianity and many other religions. Al Sadr himself, while separate from the mechanical materialism of Descartes, echoed this notion of dualism between body and soul.

Our philosophy (pg 258)

“At this point, we reach an important conclusion - namely, that there are two sides to a human being.

One of them is material; it is represented in his organic composition. The other is spiritual or immaterial.

The latter is the playground for mental and intellectual activity. A human being, therefore, is not just a complex matter; rather, his personality is a duality of material and immaterial elements.”

In direct contrast, the monistic model rejects the division of man into parts and views him as a singular, complex organism. Marxism has always rejected such dualism - this infinite conception. In fact, it was a major point of argumentation between Marx and Proudhon, as mentioned in his 1846 letter to Pavel.

“Mr Proudhon posits on the one hand eternal ideas, the categories of pure reason, and, on the other, man and his practical life which according to him, is the practical application of these categories, you will find in him from the very outset a dualism between life and ideas, between soul and body—a dualism which recurs in many forms. So you now see that the said antagonism is nothing other than Mr Proudhon's inability to understand either the origin or the profane history of the categories he has deified.”

Dualism is a mere superstition that seeks to abstract the human condition, Marx on the other hand is squarely monistic.

Circling back to Khamenei, “essence” he speaks of, is merely the conclusion of Darwinist adaptation over an extended period of time, which resulted in human consciousness, intelligence, and realization.

Evolution is not linear either, the division between “Humanity” and “Animal” was not pre-ordained. We have a common ancestor, with natural selection leading to the split. It was a long walk from Micromomyidae to Homo-Sapiens but we eventually arrive.

The first step on this long journey toward humanity being the upright posture or bipedalism (First evidence coming from the fossil “Lucy”).

Yes, contrary to popular belief, it was the ability to walk upright that came before the profound intellect of man. explored more in detail by this excellent article from Stephan Gould

Our ability to stand improved our ability to hunt and gather and to increase our nutritional and caloric intake - requiring and maintaining larger brain capacity was not free, and took considerable effort.

To quote Neil Falkner

Hominid brains had been getting bigger. Selection for this characteristic was a serious matter. Brain tissue is more expensive than other kinds: the brain accounts for only about 2 per cent of our body weight but no less than 20 per cent of food-energy consumption. It is also high-risk. Humans are adapted for walking upright, which requires a narrow pelvis, yet have a large brain-case, which imposes a strain on the woman’s pelvis in childbirth; the result is slow, painful, and sometimes dangerous birth trauma. But the advantages are considerable. Large brains enable modern humans to create and sustain complex social relationships with, typically, about 150 others. Humans are not just social animals, but social animals to an extreme degree, with brains especially enlarged and sophisticated for this purpose

This brain development did not emerge so we could write esoteric poetry and sculpt animal figurines, but rather because the ability to develop complex social relations is an overwhelming advantage when it comes to surviving in a brutal and hungry world. Being able to organize bands of hunters with crafted tools is what made humanity a game-changer on the world. This is the emergence of consciousness

 Marx would call this consciousness and self-recognition the “species-being”. Our ability to participate in labor is the defining aspect of humanity 

“In creating a world of objects by his personal activity, in his work upon inorganic nature, man proves himself a conscious species-being, i.e., as a being that treats the species as his own essential being, or that treats itself as a species-being. Admittedly animals also produce. They build themselves nests, dwellings, like the bees, beavers, ants, etc. But an animal only produces what it immediately needs for itself or its young. It produces one-sidedly, whilst man produces universally”

This ability did not drop from the sky or come from a soul, it’s consciousness that emerged from human evolution. This may also be known as “Duel inheritance theory” a model of human evolution initially theorized by Engels in his unfinished manuscript “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man”

“Consciousness” as we like to call it, is closely connected with the central nervous system and core functions of the brain; we know, for instance, that certain brain damage affects our consciousness. 

Furthermore, with advanced brain imaging such as functional MRI, and further scientific discovery in the field of neuroscience. Studies have claimed to detect thoughts and decisions in the brain even before we become conscious of them. (This Italian study is one of the most famous if interested)

All of this is a serious roadblock in the concept of a sharp dichotomy between body and the soul, as well as the entire notion of a god-imbued “Free will”.

What Materialism does, and what religion fails to do is to understand the basis of man's essence in actually existing premises, rather than finding them in ideas abstracted from existing humanity. Materialism is going directly to the root

As Marx would say “man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man”. Conceiving of man as some designed entity, placed on earth with special properties, almost like a toy hand-crafted by an artisan, has no coherent justification.

This was the classic blunder of Feuerbach, and it seems the Islamic scholars are making the same mistake, but I digress 

The contribution of Darwin was a wrench thrown into the ideology of many theists. It rebuked many the notion of a god-driven development, and particularly the religious notion of a predetermined destiny 

“In retreat since Newton, orthodox Christianity had alien back into the belief in a God who was first cause of the natural world and still remained the dav-co-day controller of life--and especially of human destiny. Darwinism wrested God's final hold on human affairs from his now powerless hands and relegated the deity to, at the best. some dim primordial principle which will no longer determine human action.”

Due to scientific discovery, religion has often been forced to step back. In medieval Europe, people often believed mental illness and insanity was sparked from demonic possessions, though this had to be abandoned because as an explanation it was bogus. 

All sorts of phenomena that used to be explained by gods, after being explained by science, were abandoned as argumentation. 

Evolution is an extremely difficult obstacle for creationists, a clear challenge to the assertion that man was created in a particular image - and a battle that many theists have stopped fighting altogether. It reasserted the organic development of humanity and all organisms. 

This also serves as a useful analogue for historical materialism in comparison to more idealistic notions of history and humankind

Both Darwin and Marx came to a similar conclusion that it is primary struggle against material relations that drive humanity (and all organisms) forward

To quote Engels 

“Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.”

But this is not a post about Marxism and Evolution, so to stop myself from going on a further tangent, I will stop here. 

Now, Marx, and all Marxists, still firmly believe that ideology can change and shape humanity - after all, what would be the point of studying Marx in the first place, if such a rigid determinism was inevitable? 

Marxism changed the world in part because it’s analysis gave fundamental respect to the preliminary social conditions effecting humanity. To say otherwise would have resulted in Marx following the same (flawed) path of the utopian and reactionary socialists

Marxism observes that it is the actually existing conditions of life that necessarily come first. Man does make history, but not in a vacuum.

The famous quote from the 18th Brumaire says as much: 

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past”

Or, to put it another way - “it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence determines their consciousness."

This transhistorical imposition of “Human Nature” as a fundamental human characteristic, not determinant from real conditions, is simply bankrupt - and unfortunately, we see Al-Sadr (and other theists) falling into the same fallacy 

If you read his books, you’ll notice Al-Sadr talks a lot in terms of “mentality” and “Standards” (I.E the ideologies and values held by humans on an individual or societal scale)

To quote from Our Philosophy (pg 22):

“None of these fearful tragedies was the result of private ownership. Rather, they were the product of personal, materialistic interest that made the standard of life in the capitalistic system and the absolute justification of all managements and dealings. A society based on such an individualistic standard and personal justification cannot be expected to do other than what it actually did.

The problem isn’t private property itself, but rather the individualistic, materialistic, and greedy mentalities that became standard.”

Furthermore in his other book “Our economics” (Volume 1, Pg 13)

“Freedom has played a major role in the European economy. It has been possible for the economic development process to benefit from the deep-rooted desire for freedom, independence and individuality pervading the Europeans in the success of the free economy, as a mechanism that is compatible with the firmly embedded inclinations and ideas of the people in Europe. Even when the European economy presented a socialist method, it also tried to base itself on the feeling of individuality and self-interest, but this time it was class individuality instead of the individuality of a person.”

As you can see, Al-Sadr is putting a significant emphasis on mentalities, Ideologies, and “deep rooted desires”. He is putting mentality and “human nature” as a primary driving force of humanity. 

This position is expected, and quite similar to any other religious ideologue. 

Al-Sadr has to put forward the primacy of ideas, because if he took the contrary condition, that ideas are mere reflections of material relations, then Islam (and all religion) would inevitably become defunct. His initial presupposition of God has railroaded him into the path of idealism.

This religious view is fundamentally incompatible with Marxism. As Mao would say 

“Christianity says that God created the world, Buddhism and all of China's various fetishist religions attribute the movement and development of all the myriad phenomena (Wan Wu) of the universe to spiritual forces. All of these doctrines which think about movement apart from matter are fundamentally incompatible with dialectical materialism…”

To say that God created the world is to insert an unfalsifiable and static force into the universe.

Now, Ironically enough, this critique from Al-Sadr is actually beginning to cross into a form of vulgar materialism - particularly a sociobiological reduction on the nature of man itself

The argumentation from Al-Sadr (and other theists), putting forward the primacy of ideas and mentality, is actually strikingly similar to the argument of Israeli author Yuval Harari in his famous pop-science book “Sapiens”. 

In this book, Yuval puts forward the analysis that “myth” itself is a primary driving factor of humanity.  

“Since large-scale human cooperation is based on myths, the way people cooperate can be altered by changing the myths - by telling different stories. Under the right circumstances myths can change rapidly. In 1789 the French population switched almost overnight from believing in the myth of the divine right of kings to believing in the myth of the sovereignty of the people''

Isn’t it a bit strange that an Israeli Atheist and an Iraqi Sheikh can both end up spouting a similar argument? It seems that the fallacy of idealism is equally wrong if said from a secular or religious perspective.

As I’ll discuss more, private property and class did not emerge from human ideas, but rather as a conclusion to revolutions in the productive forces (labor saving devices)

We simply believe that material relations are the guiding force - and let’s discuss that now, with one of the earliest forms of humanity “Primitive communism”

Primitive communism is a term used to describe a stage in history that developed prior to private property and class society 

Primarily in the early to mid neolithic age, when humanity consisted of hunter gatherers and (early) agricultural communities.

These societies are called “primitive communism” because they had no concrete class division or private property. They were truly “moneyless, classless, and stateless”. They were also surprisingly egalitarian

Not due to any moral values, but due to an obscenely low rate of productivity. They simply did not have the ability to generate enough surplus to create such a hierarchical society 

To quote Ernest Mandel

“…every step forward in the history of civilization has been brought about by an increase in the productivity of labor. As long as a given group of men barely produced enough to keep itself alive, as long as there was no surplus over and above this necessary product, it was impossible for a division of labor to take place and for artisans, artists or scholars to make their appearance. Under these conditions, the technical prerequisites for such specialization could not possibly be attained….”

In such societies, the initial and primary struggle was against nature itself - as that was required to sustain oneself and continue living. One had to eat before sculpting or philosophizing 

The same sentiment is echoed by Marx in capital volume 3 

"[Man] must wrestle with nature to satisfy his needs, to maintain and reproduce his life [and] He must do so in all forms of society and under all possible modes of production."

Man is immediately challenged by his material conditions, hunger, thirst, heat, cold, ect. It is this which he must invariably grapple with. 

Now, this is some interesting theory, that early human societies were some bizarre egalitarian commune - it’s a bit hard to believe. So let’s hack it up with some concrete scientific egocentric.

As a quick case study, let’s use the ancient settlement of Çatalhöyük, located in modern day Turkey. 

There is archeological evidence from a human settlement that existed in roughly 7500 BC to 6400 BC. This evidence gives us intriguing information on the lifestyle habits and organization of mankind in prehistory 

To quote 

“Feasting models emphasize household competition and complexity, but wide-ranging ethnographic studies show that hoe-farming societies in areas of land abundance are usually egalitarian, with little material wealth, little inequality, and little wealth transmission (inheritance).””

By analyzing the similar house sizes, the similar diets, ect they could scientifically determine the relative egalitarianism of early Neolithic societies.

It was materially impossible for the concrete social divisions that exist in current society to emerge.

This relative egalitarianism also extended to equality between Men and Women. Correcting previous biases in academia, there has been much more recent anthropological research. The patriarchal social structures that exist today were not present in pre-agrarian hunter gatherer societies 

This observation is also an obstacle for religious doctrine that presume gender relations as pre-ordained to be a certain way, rather than as a fluid response to social practice. Our modern understanding of complex gender relations cannot simply be tacked onto all of human development post-hoc

Social relations do not, and cannot, manifest out of pure ideology, they require specific conditions to emerge. This is true for gender, as well as other relations we know and love in modern class-society

Let’s give the example of guards, soldiers, or “armed men” as Lenin would say. What we know today as the modern institution of policing or law enforcement 

These institutions and occupations did not exist in primitive communism. There was nobody who had the specific and singular job of being a guard. 

Why was this the case? Was it because they were studied anarchists who espoused non-violence and social harmony? Did they reject the authoritarianism of the police?

It has nothing to do with ideology and everything to do with food. Primitive humans quite literally could not support the structure of an army or police force, and thus they did not require any theory or argument to justify said institutions, because they didn’t exist. 

Let’s think about this for a moment and take a few steps back. *how* Can a guard exist? Not even why, but *how*. 

Well a guard needs a few preliminary things. He needs to eat, He needs to drink, he needs to sleep, he presumably needs a weapon, and possibly some training. He needs to do things that are outside hunter-gathering and subsistence farming. Being a full time guard, he won’t have time to farm, and In ancient times, food was ubiquitously insecure.

Not to mention, what would he guard? There was no private land, wealth, estate, or commodities in the first place. Organized warfare did not have the pre-conditions to exist 

It could only emerge later, after the Neolithic revolution (agricultural revolution) when sedentism took root. and it would still take time from there for the right conditions to emerge

To quote once more from “The Marxist history of the world” by Neil Falkner

“In the beginning, there had been no war. For 2.5 million years, throughout the Old Stone Age, small bands of hominids had roamed the land in search of food by hunting, gathering, and scavenging. Meetings were few; clashes of any kind scarcer still. Only later, as the numbers of people increased, were there occasional conflicts over resources. Cave art shows hunters with bows shooting not only animals but sometimes each other. But this was not war as such. War is large-scale, sustained, organized violence between opposing groups. There is no evidence for this before the Agricultural Revolution which began around 7500 BC”

Let’s expand on this notion more, primarily by demystifying the nature of “force” itself 

To quote Engels (from anti-Durhing), force is not an act of the will. It requires real preliminary conditions (instruments). 

“…Force is no mere act of the will, but requires the existence of very real preliminary conditions before it can come into operation, namely, instruments, the more perfect of which gets the better of the less perfect; moreover, that these instruments have to be produced, which implies that the producer of more perfect instruments of force, vulgar arms, gets the better of the producer of the less perfect instruments, and that, in a word, the triumph of force is based on the production of arms, and this in turn on production’s I in general…”

“Force” does not fall from the sky. “Bodies of armed men” is not a transhistorical phenomenon, it could only emerge after specific material conditions had already occurred. 

It requires preliminary conditions that arise from production. Without production, it doesn’t begin. 

As a side note - this is why the anarchist notion of “rejecting authority” is silly. Just as you cannot “will” authority into existence” you cannot “will” authority away. Try to simply reject the authority of a soldier in real life, you will soon realize it is much like rejecting the theory of gravity. 

With all this background established, we can move forward to the emergence of civilization, property, and class itself. And what better location to start than Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilization - also, coincidentally the same place that Al-Sadr lived (Iraq). Who could have thought the answer was just beneath his feet?

As already clarified, an advancement in stage of history is pushed by revolutions in the productive forces, which could be better farming tools, irrigation, The earliest known systems of irrigation began in roughly 6000 BC in Egypt and Mesopotamia. Being between the Tigris and Euphrates river comes in handy.

To quote from Neil Falkners “a Marxist history of the world” (excellent book btw)

“Ancient Sumer was roughly the size of modern Denmark. Once its rich soils were under cultivation, it could produce massive agricultural surpluses. These made possible a qualitative shift from living in villages to living in towns. Sumer accomplished what the great interwar archaeologist Gordon Childe called the ‘Urban Revolution”

Due to the fertile soil and later food surplus, this area led to one of the first “Urban” settlements in history. Not everyone had to be a subsistence farmer. This advancement is the basis of civilization

With this food surplus, it now required management. This is when the division of labor began to emerge. Sculptors, priests, guards, ect all henceforth became possible. 

Uruk is one of the first examples of “paid” laborers in history. This was in part determined by an examination of ancient pottery

“Why were these bowls made? Clue: why are they all the same size? Scholars believe that these bowls were made as measured containers with which workers could be paid in grain.¹ With the advent of urbanism, work became specialized—refining metal tools, for example—and workers could not spend their time growing food to feed their families. Coinage had not yet been invented, so whatever institution they worked for (a palace led by a king or a temple led by a priest) paid the specialized workers in a form they could use or store; one could argue that barley was a form of money.”

This is also directly related to the emergence of written language. Writing did not emerge to create poetry and philosophy, but rather as a bureaucratic tool of elites to record and manage labor and food.

There was enough productivity to produce this specialization and division of labor. There was a surplus (of food, and later wealth) that had to be managed. This is when we see the emergence of the first ruling class and real social hierarchy 

I mean, what is a state but the question of who will control the surplus? 

As Marx would say “The existence of the state is inseparable from the existence of slavery.” This is a slavery of class relations - an irreconcilable class conflict that the state consists of 

In every state, one class will rule over another. In capitalist society, it’s the bourgeoisie who hold dictatorship, in feudalism, it was the land owners, and so on. In the earliest societies it was the religious priest-class that was atop the hierarchy

It was in Uruk in which the first permanent religious buildings emerged. These buildings were allocated land and were managed by the priests 

To quote from the same book

“The goddess Baü owned 44 square km. Some of this was allocated to individual families, and some was worked as Baü's personal estate by wage-laborers, tenant-farmers, or 'clansmen' doing customary labor-service.

In the absence of Baù herself, the property was managed on her behalf by temple priests. Many of Baù's people held only 0.32-1 ha of land. But one high temple official is known to have held 14.4 ha. So the priests formed a social elite, with both private wealth from their own estates and collective control over the wealth of temple estates”

This would be one of the first examples (of many) of religion being used to justify the hierarchical social relation. It was the material relations and the productive forces that emerged, with the religion (idealism) used to justify and explain. Not much different from current day I suppose.

So with all of this said, I arrive back to the original question and response. 

Class society and private property emerged due to material revolutions in the productive forces. It did not emerge from ideas or mentalities. Social conditions emerge from real existing premises. 

Unlike what Al-Sadr implies, “Human nature” is not a stagnant and transhistorical phenomena. It changes alongside the respective productive forces. To say capitalism was sparked by individual mentalities is thus entirely illogical 

Ideas come from reality, not the other way around. Al-Sadr has taken the Hegelian dialectic but forgot to flip it on its head. He is making the same fatal flaw of Feuerbach.

His initial statement that the Marxist understanding is in “Reverse Order” is actually his exact mistake. Al-Sadr is the one who, like Hegel, must flip his dialectic on its head to arrive to an accurate conclusion

This is why Marx is the most frustrating philosopher. When you think that he’s wrong or incorrect, all you need to do is dig deeper. Try and find the fault, try and find the conclusion. By the time you're done, you’ll have only proven him more correct. That’s what it means to be a dialectical thinker, and to have analytical depth

Thank you for reading. Ruthlessly critique me and tell me what I got wrong (;

But with this said, I think it would be interesting to revisit a period in which Nigeria played a more positive role in African development

Nicknamed “The giant of Africa” Nigeria is the most populous country on the African continent and the Nigerian state has played a crucial role in the development of Africa. (both positive and negative)

This article will give a brief overview of how Nigeria helped end apartheid. 

Nigeria gained independence from the British empire on the 1st of October, 1960. Like all colonized countries in Africa, it was especially backward and impoverished. Despite this, Nigeria would quickly take a leading role in opposing the Apartheid administration setup in South Africa

To quote “The History of Nigeria/South Africa Bilateral Relations”

“During the 1960s and 1970s, Nigeria took a leading role in supporting black liberation movements in Southern Africa, including the African National Congress (ANC).  …also played a pivotal role in the establishment of the UN Special Committee Against Apartheid in 1963. [which is the institution responsible for implantation of international sanctions on South Africa]”

Nigeria was involved in post-independence African organizations such as the Organization of African Unity (OAU) which were used to apply pressure against apartheid South Africa, both financially and diplomatically.

As a simple example, Nigeria was the first country to boycott the commonwealth games in 1978 in protest of New Zealand having sports relations with South Africa. 

Nigeria successfully got other countries (32 out of 59)  to boycott the 13th Commonwealth games and sanctioned countries and companies that continued to deal and cooperate with the apartheid government 

Nigerian support for the anti-apartheid struggle was not purely political or diplomatic either, Nigeria gave hefty material support to the struggle. Beginning with its relation with the ANC itself.

After the 1976 Soweto uprising in South Africa (A militant student movement against Apartheid), Nigerian students contributed financially towards the education of black South Africans; the Nigerian High Commission in Botswana issued hundreds of Nigerian passports to South Africans who had fled the country. 

Nigeria also contributed to the voluntary UN Educational and Training Programe in 1973 which enabled black South Africans to attend higher education in other countries, due to the segregation within South Africa itself.

Nigeria also played a heavy economic and financial price to support them, and gave vast material support to the Anti-Apartheid struggle.

The South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA) estimated that by 1994, Nigeria had spent $61 billion in the anti-apartheid struggle. 

Keep in mind that even today, Nigeria is one of the most impoverished countries in the world. So this is really a tremendous amount especially for them.

Nigeria also forfeited potential economic gains to punish the apartheid regime. 

On April 5, 1960, a Private Member Bill was passed at the Lower House of the Federal Parliament urging the Federal Government to take actions to ban the importation of South African goods to Nigeria. (Pg 30 https://theses.cz/id/bib5zq/Final_Thesis_-_Grace_Eshiet.pdf)

Nigerian banks were prohibited from purchasing South African bonds and trade was stopped both ways. 

“The Guardian (Lagos) newspaper revealed in an article published in 1986 that Nigeria has forfeited about $45 billion dollars by refusing to export oil to South Africa”

Nigeria sacrificed a lot of potential economic activity and growth for refusing to deal with apartheid South Africa. You should remember this when lavishly rich gulf states such as the UAE can’t be bothered to stop supporting Israel. Solidarity is about real intention, it’s not purely a function of wealth. 

Mandela had a historic visit to Nigeria in thanks in 1993. You can watch an excellent documentary about this here. Nigerian support was understood as crucial \

Another important aspect of the anti-apartheid foreign policy of Nigeria was varying support to countries such as Angola, Namibia, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique which were battling the South African regime militarily. 

Nigeria led the OAU in recognizing the MPLA-PT in 1975.

The Nigerian government barred Portuguese from entering Nigeria and denied them the use of Nigerian airspace and seaport facilities because of their status as colonizers. (Pg 33 https://theses.cz/id/bib5zq/Final_Thesis_-_Grace_Eshiet.pdf)

Nigeria was more neutral toward Angola at the beginning, but gave increasing support to the MPLA struggle (which was engulfed in a brutal war with the Apartheid South African-backed UNITA)

“Nigeria not only recognized the MPLA: it gave N13.5 million (about $24.3 million) and military supplies to the MPLA government and launched a diplomatic offensive among African states to get them to recognize the MPLA. The fact that, by February 1976, seventy three nations (forty African) had officially recognized the MPLA government, made Nigeria's new attitude hardly original.” (US policy toward Southern Africa. Pg 74)

By 1975, under General Mohammad, Nigeria was allowing exiled Angolan revolutionaries to setup office with the country. Similar support was given to Mozambique 

This actually caused a growing strain in Nigeria-US relations. And even accusations that America was involved in the 1976 coup attempt against General Mohammad. 

Regarding Zimbabwe, Nigeria put similar sanctions in place against Rhodesia. The Shagari government provided $5 million for Zimbabwe's independence, regarding Mugabe's victory during the elections in 1982 as victory for the Third World. (41 https://theses.cz/id/bib5zq/Final_Thesis_-_Grace_Eshiet.pdf)

Nigeria was consistently playing an active role across Southern Africa, including Namibia and Tanzania. One of their major foreign policy goals within Africa was to crush apartheid no matter what. 

“Nigeria had played a role in the independence of Zimbabwe and in the late 1980s was active in assisting Namibia to achieve independence. In the latter case, it contributed about US$20 million to assist the South West Africa People's Organization in the 1989 elections and other preparations for Namibian independence. The country also contributed financially to liberation movements in South Africa and to the front line states of Zambia, Tanzania, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe, which were constantly harassed by South Africa.”

Nigeria was giving a lot of support to all of these various struggles, and played a crucial role especially in South Africa and Zimbabwe

As noted by Pan Africanist Congress leader Robert Sobukwe, "Nigeria's support in Angola and Mozambique had encouraged the blacks in South Africa to fight for the total liberation of the country, from white dominance." (Pg 38 https://theses.cz/id/bib5zq/Final_Thesis_-_Grace_Eshiet.pdf)

Mugabe also gave strong praise to Nigeria for their assistance in this regard. (Though relations would later deteriorate) 

With all this said, I think it is clear to say that Nigeria arguably played the single biggest (outside) role in ending apartheid (yes, including Cuba and the USSR). This policy was a bold example of Afrocentric Foreign Policy.

In conclusion, what does this mean? well simply put it shows a case study of how Pan-African approaches to foreign policy has had a staggering effect, and further indicates the necessity for even stronger policy like this in the future. With the future of the Sahel still unraveling, one can only hope that Nigeria won’t be used as an imperialist doormat for wars of aggression.

If you’ve been paying attention, Sudan has become engulfed in one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes in recent history. Millions have been displaced so far, a horrific war is ongoing, and pretty much any crime against humanity that you could imagine, is likely occurring. 

Now, a lot of people likely are not particularly informed about Sudan, which is understandable enough, it isn’t exactly a major topic in western media, but this is why I think it is important to shed some light. This is why I decided to make this post, to shed some light on recent Sudanese political history.

Sudan is a crucial region for understanding the confusing global-system we exist in, and has been a major subject of both imperialism, and regional alliances in the middle east. What is happening in Sudan today speaks a lot about the question of hegemony in the Arab world. Let’s start from the beginning 

The Man Himself 

Omar Al-Bashir is far and away the most important figure for understanding Sudanese Geopolitics. To give the background, he came to power in 1989 in a bloodless military coup against the elected prime minister, Sadiq al-Mahdi. After this, Bashir would grip power for almost 30 years of rule. 

Al-Bashir allied with Hassan al-Turabi, the speaker of the Sudanese parliament and head of the National Islamic Front, and then dissolved parliament, banned political parties and went on to introduce a hard-fisted Islamic law, which was naturally unpopular for the south. 

This, amongst other factors, would contribute to the already existing divide between north and south. Sudan proper is mostly Sunni and Arabic speaking, while the south is mostly Christian and often English speaking. This is just an easy example of the remaining conflicts created by haphazardly drawn euro-colonial borders.

There was already conflict with the South, but this would become further intensified under Al-Bashir. He would forcefully try to crush the south through the Second Sudanese Civil war

This conflict would become a major theater for the existing enmity between Sudan and Israel.

This conflict was happening much earlier than Bashir, going back to 1967. Sudan being a Sunni Muslim and Arab country, was naturally aligned with the Arab World against Zionism. In 1973, there was even a Sudanese brigade fighting on behalf of Egypt. (A brigade that Al-Bashir actually fought with when he was younger). 

To quote 

“From the beginning, it made strategic sense for Israel to provide military aid to rebels in South Sudan.  This would serve as a useful distraction to Egypt and Sudan, and would open a new and vulnerable front against the Arab World.  However, it wasn’t until the June 1967 war that Israel truly acted upon this opportunity, following Khartoum’s decision to support Egypt in that conflict.”

Sudan was an ally of Egypt and Palestine, so it was an obvious target of Zionist destabilization.

In fact, Israel supported the overthrow of Ugandan president Milton Obote, and directly supported the installation of infamous dictator Idi Amin, to help further destabilize southern Sudan with military training and support. 

“ Bar-Lev was eager to help Amin, who was serving Israel’s interests in Sudan, and he advised the Ugandan commander to form a battalion within the Army to protect himself. The Israelis would train it. This unit, consisting of paratroopers, tanks, and armed jeeps, proved instrumental a few months later when, in January, 1971, Amin overthrew the regime while Obote was in Singapore for a meeting of the British Commonwealth.”

“Just months after the Six-Day War, in 1967, Israel sold Uganda weapons worth seven million dollars. In 1969, Israel began funneling weapons through Uganda into southern Sudan, where a ragtag rebel group known as the Anyanya had been fighting the Arab-dominated Sudanese government since the nineteen-fifties. Israel’s purpose was to distract the Sudanese Army so that it would not join forces with Egypt, which was mobilizing to retaliate for the capture of the Sinai Peninsula.”

I highly recommend reading the full New Yorker piece, it gives a very detailed outline of Israeli involvement in Sudan. Even today, Israel maintains good ties with the new Ugandan dictator Museveni

The rabbit hole goes even deeper when you examine how US alongside Ethiopia helped train child soldiers in the south against Khartoum, but that’s a story for another post

Israel would continue to pursue this goal of Balkanization, especially by the start of the second Sudanese civil war in 1983. A weakened Sudan would be a major geopolitical boon by substantially weakening a regional opponent. They would extensively funnel weapons into the South Sudanese rebels for this aim. 

John Garang, one of the major rebels of the south, enjoyed close ties to Israel. His rebel group (Sudan People's Liberation Movement) received ammunition, weapons, fuel, ect from Israel in the fight against the Khartoum government. He was also known for widespread usage of kidnapped Child-Soldiers. Definitely a perfect ally for the only democracy in the middle east. 

In 2005, Garang was killed in a helicopter crash while returning from Uganda. Garang's successor,  Salva Kiir Mayardit, continued the beneficial relation with Israel. After independence in 2011, Israel would be the first country that Salva Kiir would visit. Their alliance was as clear as could be. The creation of South Sudan was an astounding victory for israel.

It has long-time been a policy of Israel to support Balkanization and division of unfriendly regimes in the region. This goes back to the Yinon plan in 1982. Which described desired Israel Balkanization of Iraq and Syria. 

“The idea that all the Arab states should be broken down, by Israel, into small units, occurs again and again in Israeli strategic thinking. For example, Ze'ev Schiff, the military correspondent of Haaretz (and probably the most knowledgeable in Israel, on this topic) writes about the "best" that can happen for Israeli interests in Iraq: "The dissolution of Iraq into a Shi'ite state, a Sunni state and the separation of the Kurdish part" (Ha'aretz 6/2/1982). Actually, this aspect of the plan is very old.”

The reason why Israel supported South Sudanese separation is the same reason they desired sectarian and ethnic separation in Iraq and Syria, Sudan was an unfriendly regime that they wanted to weaken, and division was the preferred strategy. They already had the mismanaged European colonial borders to take advantage of. 

To quote Boyle from his excellent book “Destroying Libya and the world order”

“U.S./NATO/Israel planned, promoted, and brokered the secession of the oil-laden South Sudan in 2011, thus permanently debilitating the remainder of that now amputated country. Lebanon is currently being massively destabilized as part of the neoliberal Obama administration’s not-so-covert war against Syria. Iran has already been targeted as the next victim of the Pentagon’s Zionist Neo-Con/Neo-Lib murder list.”

Everything that happened in Sudan happened as it was meant to be 

South Sudan also coincidentally signed an oil deal with Israel. Just like how Israel managed to get over 77% of its oil from Iraqi Kurdistan. It is really great luck for Israel, that whenever an Arab country is balkanized, they just happen to reap substantial benefits.

Now, I gave the Israeli side on this, but I should mention that Sudan did not persist through all of this without swinging back. Sudan was a fierce opponent of Israel throughout this, and would become a major-backer of Palestinian militancy, largely through an alliance with Iran

To give a concise summary 

“The close connections between Teheran, Khartoum and Hamas are a matter of public record. Brigadier Bashir's regime is, with the exception of the Hamas enclave in Gaza, the only overtly Islamist and pro-Iranian government in the Arabic-speaking world. Sudan is an acknowledged member of the Iran-led regional alliance, which includes Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Sudan has maintained close relations with Iran since the 1989 coup which brought Bashir to power. “

Sudan found itself in company with Tehran and Hamas, which resulted in it becoming a major target of Mossad. Sudan was a substantial smuggling hub for palestinian resistance 

“The route starts on Sudan's east coast, traveling north by boat on the Red Sea to the Sinai peninsula, a notoriously lawless region where weapons smugglers operate freely outside the control of the Egyptian government. The northwesternmost tip of Sinai is where the peninsula meets the Gaza Strip. Officially, Egypt controls the border crossing with Gaza, but underneath the border, hundreds of tunnels are used to smuggle goods -– and occasionally weapons -– to Gaza.”

In 2009, there was a massive air strike which killed roughly 119 people. This was to prevent smuggled weapons from reaching Gaza and Hamas

“Israeli media has reported that the Israeli air force carried out at least two secret operations in Sudan in January and February 2009. The first involved the bombing of a convoy carrying arms through Sudan to Gaza, in which 119 people were killed. And a ship at a Sudanese port was bombed from the air. Sudan accused the US of carrying out these attacks. In June that year Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, told US officials there was "a steady flow of Iranian weapons to Gaza through Sudan or Syria and then by sea".”

Another Israeli strike occurred in 2011 when Israel assassinated a top Hamas official in Sudan. 

“April 6, 2011 (KHARTOUM) – The target of the air strike launched by an a foreign plane was a senior official in the Islamic militant group Hamas which controls Gaza strip, according to Al-Arabiya TV channel based in Dubai… Sudan foreign minister Ali Karti accused Israel of standing behind the raid.”

And *Again* In 2012 there was another attack against the Yarmouk Munitions factory which was apparently owned by Iran. 

“It is still unclear who is responsible for the attack on the Yarmouk military plant in south Khartoum, but according to past reports in the foreign media, Iran has built such facilities in order to arm Hamas.”

There was actually an Al-Jazeera interview about that specific attack 

Sudan was even relatively supportive of Hezbollah as well. In 2006 there were protests across Sudan in support of Hezbollah against Israel. 

There are possibly even more Israeli attacks within Sudan that we don’t even know about, but these are the recorded instances. Sudan was arming and harboring Palestinian militants (with the help of Iran), and Israel acted strongly to prevent this.

Beyond this, Bashir would soon find himself in trouble with the “international community” due to his proven and alleged affiliations with other maligned states (Such as Ba’athist Iraq and the DPRK) and support for international Islamic terrorism. 

He has a controversial record of funding and hosting international Jihadis, most notably, Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden. 

“Sudan was first added to the list in 1993 after the United States said it had provided assistance to terrorist groups. The country gave safe haven to Osama Bin Laden and it was implicated in the twin bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and then in the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000.”

This resulted in Sudan being put on the international sponsor of terrorism list, hit with crippling sanctions, and even facing airstrikes.

The most horrific example is the Clinton-approved bombing of the Al-Shifa pharmacy in 1998. It was alleged to be a chemical weapon plant (without substantial evidence)

This bombing lead to further devastation of the already Impoverished Sudanese health sector 

“Some, like Germany’s then ambassador to Sudan, Werner Daum, estimated that the destruction of the Al Shifa plant may have led to thousands of deaths, though there does not actually appear to be reliable data on the public health consequences of the bombing.”

Omar Al-Bashir called out Clinton for being a criminal, and there was massive anti-American protests in Sudan.

Little would we know, this was only the beginning of the war on terror. Sudan was just a brief example of what America was preparing to unleash on the rest of the world. 

With all this said, let’s do a do a brief examination of Sudan within the global system. It’s an interesting case-study of contradiction.

As mentioned, Omar Al-Bashir was seen to be deeply aligned with the “rouge states” of the world. He opposed the usage of American soldiers against iraq during the 1991 gulf war, and similarly opposed the Iraq war in 2003. 

He was also alleged to be close militarily with the DPRK. The U.S. wanted to pressure him to implement sanctions

“The July 2017 delay in the lifting of sanctions (which had been promised in January) introduced an unexpected new element to the process by seeking to ensure that Sudan was committed to the full implementation of UN Security Council resolutions on North Korea (USDoS, 2017a). Allegations of Sudanese military procurement from North Korea are not new: US démarches to Khartoum regarding Sudan's alleged efforts to procure North Korean ballistic missiles date back to early 2009”

Being under US-sanctions, China was still willing to invest and purchase Sudanese oil. It was actually one of the major suppliers for the quickly growing, energy-demanding, Chinese economy 

“A little under a decade ago, Sudan was China’s 6th largest foreign oil source, supplying 5.5% of its needs. That position fell sharply when South Sudan seceded and took 80% of the once united country’s oil resources with it.”

Naturally, after Sudan was split, such investment shriveled away. Sudan proper lacked much oil after 2011. But China was still interested in South Sudan (and was even controversially a major part of the UN peacekeeping force, but that’s another subject entirely)

China and Sudan had a long-term understanding with each other since 1995, and the continued under Xi Jinping 

“President Xi Jinping welcomed Omar al-Bashir's visit to China to attend the commemorations marking the 70th anniversary of the victory of the Chinese People's War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-fascist War. Xi Jinping pointed out that since the establishment of the diplomatic relations 56 years ago, China and Sudan have always understood and supported each other”

This has been a long standing policy of China. They are willing work with pretty much anyone on an economic level, as long as mutual sovereignty is respected. This was convenient for Bashir, as he was a pariah on the international stage and China was a strategically important trade partner. 

With regard to Russia, Omar Al-Bashir notably maintained excellent relations, and was a major purchaser of Russian grain and military equipment. 

“SIPRI reports that only 8 percent of Sudanese arms are Chinese, and that Russian arms actually make up the majority, at 87 percent. Russia is the major weapons supplier to the Sudan.”

Putin and Al-Bashir both saw themselves as independent actors struggling in a multipolar world against US hegemony. Al-Bashir desired Russian protection and even compared himself to Assad in that regard. 

To quote Omar Al-Bashir when he visited Moscow in 2017:

“We believe that the problems the region is now facing have been caused by US interference. We think the situation that developed in our country (the same applies to Darfur and South Sudan) has the same roots – US policy. As a result, our country split into two parts, which made a bad situation worse. We need protection from aggressive US actions. 

We believe that what is happening in Syria today is also due to US interference, which resulted in such a disaster there.

We think peace cannot be achieved without President Bashar al-Assad. We believe that Syria would have been lost without Russia’s assistance.

Sudan has extensive ties in Africa and we can help Russia develop relations with African countries. Sudan may become Russian’s key to Africa. We are a member of the African Union. We have great relations with all African nations and we are ready to help. We are also interested in developing relations with BRICS.”

Al-Bashir made sure to point out the negative implication of the splitting of Sudan (which is obviously given the drastic decrease of oil supply). He also highlighted Russian intervention in Syria on behalf of Assad, whom he blamed the U.S. for creating the unstable situation in the first place.

This is in line with his earlier comments in an interview in which he accused the CIA and Mossad of supporting ISIS

It’s also interesting how he mentioned BRICS. This is an organization that has become relatively infamous in 2023, with most people seeing it as a beacon of “Multipolarity”. Even in 2017, Al-Bashir saw himself aligned with this vision. 

In this context, Al-Bashir saw himself as apart of the newly emerging Russia/China aligned bloc of the global south. 

Now, Despite this substantial anti-American postering, it was all a lot more farcical than you’d think. To be frank, he hardly cared about imperialism. He opposed America because he was a pariah, and therefore it was convenient. He was fully willing to align with imperial conquest as long as it was convenient and profitable 

Libya is a prime example of this contradiction. Sudan and Libya have long had a complicated relationship. In 1971, Qaddafi supported then Sudanese president Nimeiry against a Soviet-backed coup. But later they would sever relations due to alleged Libyan support for terrorism. Relations would somewhat improve early on under Al-Bashir in the 90s, but this was short lived.

The biggest strain would happen in 2002 when Libya supported the Darfur liberation front against Sudan (this was during the Darfur genocide). So naturally, ties were tense. 

Omar Al-Bashir had a bone to pick with Qaddafi, and during 2011 he feared his own position. He opportunistically decided to support the Anti-Qaddafi rebels in Libya. 

Sudan would give logistical and military support to the opposition (With Qatari funding) 

“The Sudanese armed forces alongside forces of the National intelligence and Security Service (NISS) tightened their grip on the Sudan-Libya border.  The Sudanese authorities coordinated with the Libyan opposition, and offered them to provide logistical assistance, training and supply of arms, ammunition and combat equipment and security and intelligence cooperation. After that, the presence of Sudanese security and intelligence increased inside Libya, to play critical roles for the benefit of the Libyan armed revolution. On 1 May 2011, the Libyan authorities expelled the Sudanese consulate at Kufra, in southeast Libya close to the Sudanese border, and closed down the mission headquarters, accusing Sudan of interfering in favor of the revolutionaries.”

This was a big play, and helped topple Libya. This was apart of the larger strategy of Omar Al-Bashir trying to align himself with the Sunni gulf monarchs, and being affiliated with the Muslim brotherhood himself, he had a strong ideological inclination to Qatar.

Sudan actually cut off long-standing ties with Iran on this basis. As mentioned beforehand, Sudan and Iran worked together to support Hamas in Palestine, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad even visited Sudan in 2007. In 2008, Sudanese and Iranian officials signed a military cooperation agreement, and in 2013, Iran stepped up its construction of naval and logistical bases in Port Sudan. Sudan and Iran share geopolitical objectives, and Sudan is a strategic gateway for Iran into the African continent. Sudan was the largest ally of Iran in Africa. 

They had a solid relationship, but that wasn’t enough for the ruined Sudanese economy, Omar Al-Bashir decided to pivot for better funding. 

He even strangely accused Iran of trying to “Spread Shia’ism” in Sudan and shut down an Iranian cultural center

Sudan decided to turn on Iran in favor of substantial gulf funding. This is a major reason the Sudanese army was sent to help pillage Yemen. He needed the money, especially after losing 80% of the oil in South Sudan. 

“Khartoum recently announced that officials in the Saudi capital of Riyadh had deposited $1 billion in Sudan’s central bank earlier this year. The Qataris deposited $1.22 billion shortly after Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir visited Doha last year.

In October, Sudanese Defense Minister Awad bin Auf said, “There are 6,000 fighters from special forces, ground forces and elite troops ready to participate when requested by the leadership of the coalition. … Even if more troops and military contribution is needed, we are ready for any developments.”

Sudan would become increasingly aligned with the gulf states. 

All of  this makes his appraising of Bashar Al-Assad and Syria even more paradoxical. Omar Al-Bashir visited Syria in 2018 and praised him, all while his beloved gulf allies were trying to overthrow him.

One day he’s aligned with Iran and supporting Hezbollah and Hamas, the next day he’s aligned with Saudi Arabia,  and strongly supporting them in Yemen, but opposed them in Syria (despite being Muslim brotherhood himself).  He opposed the Americans in Iraq but supported them in Libya. He harbored Al-Qaeda in the 90s but would later call Al-Qaeda and ISIS western/Mossad backed. 

None of this really makes sense, but it doesn’t need too, as long as he was getting paid, he didn’t really care.  

All of this is without mentioning his various crimes in Darfur, the south, and in Sudan in general. 

Let’s fast forward back to 2019, this is when Omar Al-Bashir was toppled in a series of protests, and this related to the economic war that was waged on Sudan. 

As I mentioned beforehand, Sudan was under punishing sanctions from the west (and in the state sponsor of terror list) since 1997. But that doesn’t give the full scope of what was happening.

Sudan was also being horrifically brutalized by the IMF and international debt. To put in perspective now mind-bogglingly deep this neocolonialism was, Sudan owed roughly 900 million pounds to the UK, and *80* of that debt was *interest*. 

“ A report in Sunday’s Observer newspaper has claimed that the war-torn country owes Britain £861m, (US$1.187 billion) of which £684m (US$943 million) is interest, accounting for nearly 80% of the total amount due.”

Yeah, you read that correctly. 80% of the debt that they owed to the UK was interest. The UK Government has been charging Sudan a compounded 12% per annum. That data point itself should be disturbing. 

This massive international debt (owed to western nations) resulted in a series of brutal, and borderline murderous, austerity measurements. In 2018 Sudan was forced to devalue its currency and remove subsidies. 

“In Sudan, for example, it was the IMF insistence on removing fuel and bread subsidies in 2018 that caused the price of food, medicine, and transport to skyrocket. Its demand that the Sudanese Central Bank devalue its currency was also a major contributor to higher costs on the imports needed for agriculture and other industries. These policies raised the cost of living for ordinary Sudanese people and unquestionably lead to more impoverishment.

Sudan is a country that lost its oil export revenues after South Sudan declared its independence. At the same time, it’s heavily dependent on imports like wheat, basic food, medicine, and chemicals for industry. These were factors that triggered the fall of the regime in 2019.”

So it’s no surprise then that during the 2019 protest, the major demand of the movement was bread. The Sudanese people couldn’t survive this debt

“The immediate cause of the protests, which began on 19 December 2018, was the slashing of bread subsidies in the northern Nile-side town of Atbara. Citizens saw the price of bread triple overnight and took to the streets, burning down the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) headquarters, and breaking into stores to distribute grain to the people.”

The protests continued, and eventually Omar Al-Bashir was ousted and arrested. Ending almost 30 years of his military dictatorship.

And what would you know, he would be replaced by a man named Mohamed  Dagalo or “Hamedti”. This is an interesting figure who has had a long role in Sudanese politics. 

Hamedti was a former member of the Janjaweed (the genocidal militia which committed crimes against humanity in Darfur). This militia was later changed to “rapid support forces” in 2013, and he was the leader of that. 

He was able to maneuver the military correctly, strategically opposed Al-Bashir, and became debatably the most powerful figure in Sudan after he was toppled. Replacing one genocidal militarist with another.

“ After years of loyally supporting Bashir, Hemedti took part in the military coup that toppled the leader in April and is now a senior figure in the transitional government that is preparing the ground for elections in three years’ time. “

Hemedti was a notoriously corrupt figure, and made millions by smuggling gold out of Sudan (notably to the UAE) under the firm “Alugande”

“Current and former government officials and gold industry sources said that in 2018 as Sudan’s economy was imploding, Bashir gave Hemedti free rein to sell Sudan’s most valuable natural resource through this family firm, Algunade…The documents, covering a four-week period from the end of last year, show Algunade sent around $30 million of gold bars to Dubai, around a ton in weight.”

In short: Hamedti is a corrupt thief backed by the UAE, who worked as a warlord who worked on behalf of the Al-Bashir dictatorship to slaughter hundreds of thousands of Sudanese. The 2019 protests, essentially landed the Sudanese people under the same type of tyrant they were protesting against. 

To loop all the way back the beginning, This is also in context of the Israel-Sudan normalization which was negotiated in the post-2019 government. This was something that the US had required of Sudan in order to move off the list of State-sponsor of terrorism, and hopefully get removed from sanctions 

“In December 2020, after the US removed Sudan from its state sponsors of terrorism blacklist following its pledge to normalize ties with Israel, the Arab nation revoked the citizenship of top Hamas leader, Khaled Mashaal, as well as that of some 3,000 other foreign nationals accused of terror links.”

The new Sudanese Junta would designate both Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations.

The US has long used economic leverage to get normalization for Israel. This is a consistent strategy. Egypt for example, got substantial debt relief and consistent US aid for mending ties with Israel. It’s easy enough to bribe a comprador bourgeoisie leader into making a peace deal. The same trick would be continued with other Arab countries, and now Sudan.

This was all a part of the greater American strategy in the region.  The Biden administration is determined to sever Sudan’s relationship with Russia and China, close Sudan’s large Red Sea port of Port Sudan to the Russian navy, and strengthen its regional alliance against both Iran and Russia.

What does this mean for the future of Sudan?

With all this said, the future is still uncertain as Sudan falls deeper into catastrophe as the beloved “International community” adds fuel to the fire, both politically, economically, and militarily. If one thing is certain, it is that the constant usage of Sudan as a geopolitical token has only had disastrous effects. The IMF and covert Israeli war on Sudan have all served the purpose of strengthening (American) hegemony in East Africa.   

More posts coming soon (Maybe?)