Iran
A witty subtitle about horror, and body parts, and vomiting
There is a silent conspiracy about Iran. Not a conspiracy of silence, for its participants know neither the word nor the thing. A conspiracy of chatter. Inane, contentless chatter, bulging endlessly at you, allowing you no rest. A conspiracy of memes, and dunks, and outrage, and tweets, and outrage, and Instagram selfies, and outrage, just so much outrage. Are you not yet outraged? Look how outrageous they are!
On the one side of this conspiracy are the purest specimens of human dirt: the tankies, the MAGA communists, the people who don’t get that Tucker Carlson is performance art, the vermin who read DropSite news for insight, the thing that Sam Kriss was before he became Numb. They are here to tell you that the protesters are armed thugs, that they have been put up to it by Mossad, that Israel wants to drag America into a regime change war. The Iranian regime is the head of the alliance against Zionist crimes, and now the Zionists want to snub it out.
On the other hand, there are our brothers, and the weirdo goyim who can’t get enough of them. They have a very different message. They want you to know that Israel is behind the Iranian protestors, that they want to drag lead America into a regime change war. The Iranian regime is the head of the alliance against Zionism, and the Zionists want to snub it out.
The Iran regime change movement has a dirty secret (I think it still just barely qualifies as that): it’s not very interested in regime change. Sure, the foot-soldiers, they’re legit for the most part. But the guys who know what’s up? Come off it.
The reductio ad absurdum of the Iranian opposition is the Crown Prince, Reza Pahlavi. What is his plan to remedy Iran having decimated its water sources through decades of crime and incompetence? What is his plan to deal with the millions (and they are millions) of Iranians who sincerely believe in the imminent Shi’ite millennium and will gleefully kill and die for it? What is his plan to get round the fact that most of the economy is in the hands of the IRGC crime syndicate? How does he plan to entice the Iranians with talent and drive who have buggered off over the past 40 years to take a 2/3rds cut in their income and return home? How can he create a unifying national ethos to replace Shi’ite Islam in a country that is only slightly more than 50% Persian? What are his policies to address the reality that Iran has a TFR of 1.7 and is facing a 1st world population pyramid with a 3rd world economic base?
You dummy! There is no plan. Why would the Crown Prince want to go back and rule a messed-up disaster zone like Iran? Because he wants to be a King? He’s already a King. What would he gain from having subjects with their interminable, unsolvable bullshit? He’s not a psycho. What he wants to do is stand in front of a gawdy, purple (why always purple?) stage with weird strobe lights and tell wealthy Jewish Americans that the mullahs are criminals (which is true), that they cannot be appeased (which is true), that they have wrecked Iran (which is true), and that America messed up big time by not giving his Dad support when crunch time hit (which is true). He can do that right now. If the regime falls, he might have to pack it in.
Here’s some real talk: Iran is done. Its only hope now is for colonial powers to turn up, dismember, and exploit the place, but they won’t do that. The oil isn’t worth the squeeze. In the era of liquid money, there’s a lot easier ways to leverage political power to make bank than go to places full of resentful natives and build infrastructure and stop them killing each other over whether Abdullah or Abu Gaganga was really best mates with Muhammad (no-one cares! get over it!). And all you get in return is endless gyp. So there’s no hope after all, just decline and chaos, and gunshots aimed at the eyes.
This is a non-deviationist Moldbuggist blog. That means I oppose both the Right-Wing heretical version of Unqualified Reservations called ‘Yarvinism’ and the Left-Wing heretical version advocated by blog-buddy, Deep Left Analysis. However, we all get one deviation, and my protest against the master is his contention that government is fundamentally easy.1 I’m pretty sure government is hard. The fact that it looks easy on paper is just one of the factors contributing to it actually being very hard. What’s easy, when you have modern tools at your disposal, is ruining a country, ruining it so bad there’s nothing to fix. A lot of governments have been at it, and the 21st century will be substantially the story of the chickens coming back to find there’s nowhere to roost, one by one.
OK, with that out the way
But we’re not here to talk about the Reza Pahlavi or Iran. One thing I share with the hasbarists is that I don’t actually care about Iran. I see photos of body bags strewn across the floor, people milling around between them, and I feel a little sick, but they are just images. I turn off the images and I feel better. I would like to say that the difference between me and them is that I am honest, but that’s not true either. This is all artifice. Do you think I just look at a keyboard and the unfiltered contents of my brain appear on the screen? The difference is that I get my views by shorting the market for lies, and they get it by inflating it. Just as with the real economy, we are both equally sinners.
Last week, Israeli soldiers stole around 250 sheep from Syrian farmers and drove them in trucks to various farmers in the West Bank. The soldiers are in Syria because the Israeli Golan Heights needs a buffer zone. The Golan Heights belong to Israel because the Galilee needed a buffer zone. Both these needs were perfectly real, and, in the fullness of time, the need to annex a bit more of Syria to protect this buffer zone will be real too. Some of the soldiers involved in this operation got fired, but they’ll probably just join a different unit, and everyone knows no-one will be punished. Eventually, the Syrians in the area will get sufficiently annoyed at this treatment that they’ll kick off, and the need to crush them will also be real. We cannot yet say that they must go, but it shall be.
Most of mankind’s history was punctuated by waves of mass removals of human populations. Archaeologists are used to finding that all the pots in one layer are Corded Ware and then they suddenly turn into Verdic Red Ware. They used to argue whether it was because the Verdic pot people turned up and killed all the Corded pot people, or because the Corded pot people decided that the Verdic pots were much better. Then the geneticists turned up and settled it: it was genocide. History went like that up until the Indo Europeans who, possessed of lactose tolerance or whatever other advantage it really was, came and did what those before them had done: kill, kill, and kill. Then something changed. Maybe it was the moral reforms of the Axial Age, maybe it was ambient gut bacteria, maybe it was aliens, but people stopped doing genocide. Really. Conquests still happened, of course, and they could be bloody, but the genetic evidence is clear: the descendants of a random person in 1800 from 2,000 years before most likely lived where he lived. Empires and principalities ebbed and flowed over the map, but the people who lived under them mostly just kept chugging along, changing, when they needed to, their hats, or their language, or their gods. The English speak a beautiful bastard mixture of German and French, but deep down in their cells, they are mostly Celts. The Spanish absorbed Visigoth and Arab DNA, but they are mostly EEFs. The Palestinians? Sorry Ahmed, you’re Yahud.
Of course, there were exceptions. The Mongols did make an earnest attempt to kill everyone they could, but, even there, 750 years after the sack of Baghdad, the locals don’t have slitty eyes if you bother to check. The discovery of the New World also pushed the envelope. Suddenly, millions of people were dying before European eyes, stricken by disease that could only be divine judgement. Killing the survivors, many of whom reverted to the stone age but with horses, didn’t really seem like a big deal. Then, in the 19th Century, people noticed that new technology for killing people was a game changer. You could mechanise things sufficiently that, if you just didn’t pay attention, you could have the military do Bronze Age genocides over there and still have developed civilization over here. By the time the 20th Century rolled around, there was enough proof of concept to roll this out at scale. Once again, the world saw peoples and soil separated by force of the sword, but this time packed off into trains, sometimes to die, sometimes just to somewhere else.
And then we stopped. We needn’t have stopped. There are plenty of peoples that we’d be better off without, conflicts that could be solved by telling one side to pack up their stuff and scram. I’m trying to be good, so I won’t name names, but you can read between the lines. Why did we stop? Some people say it was the Jews; others say it was the goyim. Really, though, it’s because, after indulging in it for a few ghastly decades, we just couldn’t anymore. The Nazis tried, they really did try, to shed this awful thing, squeamishness about human blood, the false morality of the bourgeoisie, but they were faking it too. If even they needed to dose up on meth and then still cheat by herding their victims into carbon-monoxide filled trucks where you can’t see their face, then what hope do we have? So, we patched up international law, with a whole bunch of additional safeguards, and we tried to move on. It didn’t make a great deal of sense, but it kind of worked.
