We keep hearing that Iran is an “evil” regime run by “clerics”. This conflation of an unscientific and emotive concept (‘evil’) with a cultural occupation (‘cleric’) is made in the context of picking on an ethnic or religious group of people as inferior. In this context, ‘cleric’ applies to Shia Islam, a major denomination of one of the world’s major religions. In the context of white supremacism, that word ‘cleric’ – as applied to Shia Islam – could have been ‘negro’.

Iran has been attacked by forces representing Judeo-Christian techno-supremacy; western super-elites who worship at the altar of military and surveillance technology. And the mainstream media within the imperium parrot the talking points of these supremacists; supremacists, seeking a unipolar world order (aka global hegemony) masquerading as capitalist democracy and riding on the coat-tails of progressive liberalism.

The West is as much a theocracy as is the Iranian regime. Only bigger, and vastly more lethal; and prone to excesses of cowardly asymmetric violence. (In the present event, one of the first groups of fatal victims were over 100 schoolgirls in southern Iran; most western media outlets have not even reported this.) As well as being a zero-out-of-ten on the scale of political ethics, the attack on Iran was illegal in both United States and international law. Once again, Congress was bypassed.

Further, we note that Israel is the world’s most secretive nuclear power; without even the semblance of a nuclear energy program that might act as cover for this. Why do we never hear about Israel’s nuclear hammer-in-waiting?

At the head of the attacking forces is an American President playing the role of the useful fool; himself being simultaneously played by, on the one side, the manifestly-evil regime of Benjamin Netanyau, and the forces of the Dark Enlightenment among which Peter Thiel of Palantir – a New Zealand citizen – is prominent.

Secret City, and President Eisenhower’s Farewell Address

Yesterday I watched the final two episodes of Season Two of Secret City, an Australian political thriller. [Secret City finishes on Netflix tomorrow!]

The story, filmed in Canberra and Adelaide in 2018, was about an innocent Australian family killed from the sky by a deliberately misdirected drone attack; an attack like many similar executions of civilians living in northwest Pakistan, as part of a highly secret US/Australian ‘security’ program. A central point of Secret City was to highlight the asymmetry of western sentiment, whereby the deaths of four white Australians elicit 100 times more outrage than 400 similar deaths in or near Pakistan. In the story, the fictitious American company, Trebuchet, served as an equivalent to Palantir. (We note that last month’s mosque bombing in Islamabad was barely reported in the New Zealand media; deeply ironic given the Christchurch attacks on 15 March 2019.)

The end of the last episode of Secret City replayed extracts from President Eisenhower’s Farewell Address, televised in the United States on 17 January 1961.

Note these excerpts from Eisenhower’s address:

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

And: “The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocation, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. Yet in holding scientific discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

Much can be said about President Eisenhower’s tenure in office. I will note just this. It was Eisenhower who was able to settle a cease-fire of the Korean War in 1953, after the more-than-two years of extremely bloody stalemate – most of the blood was shed in North Korea – which endured under the previous Truman administration. Technically, that war has not finished. But the cease-fire has held since 1953, for as long as my life, and for longer than the long reign of Queen Elizabeth II.

Is Judeo-Christian techno-supremacy an imperial theocracy?

We note that the ‘First Reich’ – labelled well after its existence – was notionally an imperial theocracy; the Holy Roman Empire (800-1806). But, once created, it was not expansionist, rather it was a kind of Roman Catholic caliphate. Philosopher Voltaire claimed that it was neither ‘holy’, ‘Roman’, nor an ‘Empire’; it was essentially a German-led ‘commonwealth’ which made titular reference to the Church in Rome. It is arguable that the European Union is a Fourth Reich which references the First Reich.

The expansionist forces out of Europe, which have made the modern world – the world of the last 500 years – came from elsewhere: Lisbon, Madrid, Paris, Amsterdam, London, Washington. Until the 1990s, those European-sourced forces of dominance were increasingly secular. Whether or not Judeo-Christian techno-supremacy represents a development of these religious traditions, there can be little doubt that world dominance and appeasement is a process of empire-building.

Especially in Washington circles, there was an air of triumphalism around 1990. This was the unipolar moment. Helping to maintain the new unipolar moment, a man called Jeffrey Epstein – an alleged Israeli asset – became a conduit between the Israeli and American administrations in the 1990s. That’s where and when I see the origins of twenty-first century entitled Judeo-Christian techno-supremacy. (On Epstein and Israel, see Starmer, Mandelson & Mossad – it’s worse than you think,Double Down News, Feb 2026; and The anatomy of the Epstein network The Listening Post, Al Jazeera, 9 Feb 2026.)

The greatest ever threat to humanity and the rest of the planetary biosphere

As noted, just about everyone in elite western politics and journalism is now, without analysis or knowledge, asserting that Iran is ‘evil’. Maybe. Though this is little more than believer rhetoric; the rhetoric of religious fundamentalists, the rhetoric of inflammation rather than resolution.

If this ‘evil’ moniker is accurate in some objective sense, then Iran – in the present conflict – is the ‘lesser evil’. The greater evil is clearly the philosophy and aggression of the Judeo-Christian techno-supremacists. Further, the appeasement of this greater evil is itself a most unsavoury thing to behold; almost as bad as the greater evil itself.

(On that appeasement, in a news report on Al Jazeera on Sunday [NZ time], Berlin correspondent Dominic Kane noted – with a straight face – that the governments of Britain, France and Germany all condemned “Iran’s retaliation”; and that Spain, in addition, condemned the American and Israeli aggression. Only Spain had the guts to demur from appeasement. One of the most important forms of  media appeasement is the omission of vital information from reports. According to those chairing the ‘Peace talks’ in Geneva, Iran was just about to present an accommodation which came very close to meeting President Trump’s stated demands, and that the aggressors were aware of this. These ‘negotiations’ were not conducted in good faith.)

The nihilistic logical endpoint of Judeo-Christian techno-supremacy is apocalypse. Indeed many of the ‘Christians’ in the Americanised conflation of Israel and Christianity are fully cognisant of, even excited by, the prophecies of the last book of the Christian Bible – the Book of Revelation.

Nuclear apocalypse – if or when it happens – will not only destroy humanity. Earth stands to become like Mars or Venus, if humanity ends in this way. In today’s circumstances, would it be acceptable to allow Israel or the United States to acquire nuclear weapons; we accept their weapons because they are already there, and because too many of us prefer hypocrisy over moral consistency.

But the Dark Enlightenment is still a developing supremacist project, embedded into Judeo-Christian techno-supremacy. Resistance to it and its premises need not be entirely futile. Worse things happen when good people look away.

PS

New Zealand is scheduled to play Iran in the Football World Cup. How will the politics of Iran’s presence in the World Cup play out, especially given that, in last weekend’s events, Iran was the aggresse, not the aggressor?

————-

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Union members at the Australian public broadcaster ABC have today passed a vote of no confidence in managing director David Anderson for failing to defend the integrity of the ABC and its staff from outside attacks, reports the national media union.

The vote was passed overwhelmingly at a national online meeting attended by more than 200 members of the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance (MEAA), the union said in a statement.

Union members have called on Anderson to take immediate action to win back the confidence of staff following a series of incidents which have damaged the reputation of the ABC as a trusted and independent source of news.

The vote of ABC union staff rebuked Anderson, with one of the broadcaster’s most senior journalists, global affairs editor John Lyons, reported in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age as saying he was “embarrassed” by his employer, which he said had “shown pro-Israel bias” and was failing to protect staff against complaints.

This followed revelations of a series of emails by the so-called Lawyers for Israel lobby group alleged to be influential in the sacking of Lebanese Australian journalist Antoinette Lattouf for her criticism on social media of the Israeli genocidal war on Gaza that has killed 25,000 people so far, mostly women and children.

Another pro-Israel WhatsApp lobbying the ABC.
It makes me sick in the stomach to see people celebrate my sacking.
It makes me sick in the stomach to see an alleged Ita Buttrose response saying I’m now gone.
It makes me worry about the ABC’s integrity https://t.co/6qTeU7f8Wz pic.twitter.com/L9Te8A1Ynx

— Antoinette Lattouf (@antoinette_news) January 22, 2024

Staff have put management on notice that if it does not begin to address the current crisis by next Monday, January 29, staff will consider further action.

The acting chief executive of MEAA, Adam Portelli, said staff had felt unsupported by the ABC’s senior management when they have been criticised or attacked from outside.

Message ‘clear and simple’
“The message from staff today is clear and simple: David Anderson must demonstrate that he will take the necessary steps to win back the confidence of staff and the trust of the Australian public,” he said.

“This is the result of a consistent pattern of behaviour by management when the ABC is under attack of buckling to outside pressure and leaving staff high and dry.

“Public trust in the ABC is being undermined. The organisation’s reputation for frank and fearless journalism is being damaged by management’s repeated lack of support for its staff when they are under attack from outside.

BREAKING NEWS:
Censorship Crisis at the ABC.

Senior ABC journalist accuses ABC of bowing to “a group of lawyers lobbying for a foreign power.”

👉 “The clue is in the name: ‘Lawyers for Israel’ thought that they could run a campaign to bully an ABC journalist out of her job —… pic.twitter.com/VbyFfGqpnB

— Peter Cronau (@PeterCronau) January 22, 2024

“Journalists at the ABC — particularly First Nations people, and people from culturally diverse backgrounds — increasingly don’t feel safe at work; and the progress that has been made in diversifying the ABC has gone backwards.

“Management needs to act quickly to win that confidence back by putting the integrity of the ABC’s journalism above the impact of pressure from politicians, unaccountable lobby groups and big business.”

The full motion passed by MEAA members at today’s meeting reads as follows:

MEAA members at the ABC have lost confidence in our managing director David Anderson. Our leaders have consistently failed to protect our ABC’s independence or protect staff when they are attacked. They have consistently refused to work collaboratively with staff to uphold the standards that the Australian public need and expect of their ABC.

Winning staff and public confidence back will require senior management:

• Backing journalism without fear or favour;
• Working collaboratively with unions to build a culturally informed process for supporting staff who face criticism and attack;
• Take urgent action on the lack of security and inequality that journalists of colour face;
• Working with unions to develop a clearer and fairer social media policy; and
• Upholding a transparent complaints process, in which journalists who are subject to complaints are informed and supported.

A further resolution passed unanimously by the meeting read:

MEAA members at the ABC will not continue to accept the failure of management to protect our colleagues and the public. If management does not work with us to urgently fix the ongoing crisis, ABC staff will take further action to take a stand for a safe, independent ABC.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz