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America has no right to slam violence (it has helped provoke or executed) anywhere…Martin Love From one American’s perspective, Ayatollah Khamenei jumped on Twitter this week and said something quite true even if it is not ever said nearly enough: “Our main enemy is one of the most evil, cruelest governments in the world. It supports terrorists like ISIS and the Zionists and former dictatorships such as the Shah’s in Iran and the cruel Saudi family….” The Ayatollah’s statement is worth unpacking a bit. First, Khamenei did not mention in his assertion how the U.S. goes around the world trying to unseat existing governments to install its chosen, usually unelected “leaders”. The baldest example of this kind of action of late was the recent coup d’état in Bolivia, and then we have the desired coup in Venezuela and Cuba and other countries such as Syria, plus scores of earlier coups, accomplished or attempted, since World War II, including the overthrow of Mossadegh in the early 1950s. None of these countries under attack in one form or another, including Iran, have ever, ever constituted any kind of real threat to ANY aspect of the United States or to Americans EXCEPT as a threat to the utterly perverse desire of the U.S. government to destroy any kind of opposition to any of its overweening “exceptionalist” policies. In other words, the U.S. wants full spectrum dominance to dictate to anyone, anywhere, and not only is this a preposterous and undemocratic demand, especially when the chosen means to achieve it has not involved diplomacy but violence which has made the U.S. and its allies de facto (if not yet de jure) war criminals of the worst kind. Nothing like this has been witnessed even remotely in the modern era except quite clearly in the case of Nazi Germany in its quest for lebensraum which culminated in its defeat, thanks to the Soviet Union largely during World War 2. The entire world knows this but has yet to call the U.S. (and its allies) to account because of cowardice and fear of becoming a U.S. target themselves. There is no other explanation that makes any sense. So much for the big picture, which is undeniable, even for many Americans who have been subjected to so much propaganda by the mainstream U.S. media since it was co-opted by narrow corporate ownership and various billionaire oligarchs that their heads spin trying to get a grip in what is fact and what is not. And to make matters worse, the U.S. is now teetering on the edge of a potential economic and social dislocation it has not experienced since the Civil War almost 200 years ago as every President since Jimmy Carter has been worse than the preceding one in advocating destructive policies at home and abroad that have undermined the health of the U.S. internally in almost every dimension. In this the U.S. media has been complicit, and since this writer addressed the case of Thomas Friedman of the New York Times recently, it’s time to narrow the focus to yet another U.S. journalist, this time to the Washington Post’s Jason Rezaian, who for a time was the Post’s correspondent in Tehran until he was arrested and jailed for over a year and then released by the Islamic Republic along with two or three other American prisoners at Evin. By all accounts Rezaian is a decent man and he seems, far more than Friedman ever has, to attempt to get his reporting more or less correct at the Washpo, but he clearly does not succeed. He recently castigated the “brazen use of force” by Iranian authorities to put down the protests in Iran that the rise in gasoline prices allegedly provoked, and in which an alleged 200 or so people died amid some significant physical destruction. But at the same time in the same article, he failed to point out that the current relative economic misery in Iran is almost exclusively the result of draconian U.S. economic sanctions and the U.S. withdrawal from the JCPOA over 18 months ago, plus the failure so far of the other signatories to the JCPOA to assist Iran in getting around the sanctions to keep the Iranian economy healthy. (There WAS to be a quid pro quo with the erection of the JCPOA!) Rezaian also claimed that as a result of the protests, Iran’s authorities can now have few illusions about the degree of popular support they enjoy among the population, and that there are “plenty of people (outside Iran) salivating over what they see as the imminent demise of the Islamic Republic” even as they have no idea or concept about whatever might come next. Rezaian and those alleged others fail to understand that the demise of the “Islamic Republic” is NOT going to happen even if changes instigated by the Iranian people alone occur. Opposition groups such as the MEK and those around the late Shah’s son have been claiming they have helped establish an opposition movement inside Iran to which they are connected, Rezaian wrote, but at least he has the sense to call such assertions false. The protests were started, he says, by ordinary Iranians upset over their economic circumstances and outsiders did not lead them. But one comment by Rezaian is so very far off the mark that it lacks credibility and thus seems to destroy a good portion of his own credibility. He wrote flatly that the current Iranian government “has never valued human life”. It’s quite fair to say that ANY government anywhere trying to preserve itself and/or its nation will demonstrate in extreme circumstances (or not) a varying degree of respect for human life. On this score, the Islamic Republic’s “respect for human life” far surpasses the respect for human life shown by its enemies, especially the United States and its “allies”, in particular for examples in the Mideast Israel and Saudi Arabia. Is it necessary to point to what everyone can readily see if only they would admit to the truth: the U.S. having butchered millions of innocent lives (all told) over decades in places like Iraq, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Syria (by proxies), Libya, Yemen and elsewhere…while Iran has NOT attacked any country on offense nor expressed extra territorial ambitions in well over 200 years? Is it necessary to point out again the butchering of human lives by the Saudis in Yemen and in Arabia, or the nearly genocidal activities of the Zionists west of the Jordan River and its offensive attacks on Syria, Lebanon and even Iran, not to mention its illegal land grabs with U.S. support? And the U.S. is and will be ultimately responsible for the ramping bloodshed in places like Bolivia, or the potential for the same in Venezuela, as it has been responsible ultimately for the bloodshed in Ukraine during and after the U.S. fomented coup there. And it must be said, finally, that if ever there is ever serious protest by the disenfranchised and relative poor in the United States, the resultant action by the U.S. government is going to be far more violent and bloody than any reaction by Iranian authorities has ever been. It’s hard to say whether the U.S. is close to or far from a serious upset or insurrection, but Washington has sure been fertilizing the field for it with the absence of smart domestic policies and actions that might address the widening social and economic gaps between the haves and have nots inside the U.S. and its offensive foreign policies. It’s anyone’s guess what lies ahead everywhere, but the declining Empire of Chaos is a dangerous animal indeed. ### Martin Love 321gold Ltd |
