DON’T PRAY FOR IRAN! ACT!

Americans as Hostage to the Military-Industrial-Media-Academia-Censorship Complex

The state tax building is shown in Tehran on 19 January 2026, after it was destroyed by fire during recent protests in Iran’s capital over the country’s failed economy. Photo credit: Majid Asgaripourvia

The renaming of the US Department of Defense to the Department of War, many agreed, was an act of honesty, a removal of masks and Orwellian speech. We get exactly what they promise and what we see. NATO, that is, the European allies (and Canada too), has adapted to the militant rhetoric of the Pentagon and the White House, even when the military threat is directed at their own territorial integrity. But this is nothing new: the problem of normalizing the language of military threats and interventions has long been the only mechanism for “defending American national interests.” I do not recall it ever being otherwise… In fact, the Democratic candidate in the last elections, Kamala Harris, pledged that, as commander‑in‑chief, she would ensure the United States retains “the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.”

Therefore, despair over Trumpism and its global military march should not lead to the conclusion that “the other option would have been better.” The American problem—and our global problem—is that other options are intentionally removed from the stage as non-credible and “unelectable.” So let’s be clear once again: the United States has never had a truly peaceful president, but it has a series of mature war criminals with bloodied hands.

Of course, at first glance, it seems ironic that after establishing a Board for Peace, an administration orders an imminent attack on another country, Iran. And this is not the first time. To be clear, the Board for Peace is a façade to legitimize genocide and bring it to completion. In an interview for Al Jazeera, Turkiye’s Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan warned that a United States attack on Iran would be “wrong”, calling on Washington and Tehran to resolve their issues diplomatically and gradually. The same person signed Trump’s “Peace Charter” just days before!!

Trump’s ambitions to build peace worldwide are equally monstrous. Taken together with what is happening in Minneapolis (and not only there, but where the eyes of the media and public are focused), the question of the fascist tendencies of American policy becomes legitimate. The first lesson of political science in university is that “foreign policy flows from domestic policy—and vice versa.” They are Siamese twins of every policy, no matter how it is presented to the electorate.

Unfortunately, the American public has always been more concerned with its own welfare, regardless of the cost paid by other peoples and places whose names they cannot even pronounce, let alone locate on a map. Now, rightly, they protest what many of us have long forewarned: the day will come when it comes for you, and there will be no one to defend you! Now it has come.

Yet this does not prevent the Commander-in-Chief, to whom Congress has effectively handed all authority, from ruling by executive orders and decrees—even in foreign policy—and starting new wars. A massive armada, as he announced on his Truth Social profile, has set course for Iran. It moves quickly, with great power, enthusiasm, and purpose. What he does not say, but the world knows, is that behind the desire to “Balkanize Iran” (i.e., destroy it, similar to the former Yugoslavia) stands the Siamese twin, Usrael.

The European Union participates and blesses the war in its own way: the news reports that “the crackdown on protesters in Iran has been a turning point for the Europeans. This is why they managed yesterday to overcome their differences and decided to impose sanctions on the IRGC (Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps).”

If until yesterday, the kidnapping of a legitimate president was shocking, now, for the first time, the armed forces of a sovereign country (which, by the way, have the right to self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter) are declared a “terrorist organization.” If you start searching for information about the Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), you will immediately encounter narratives that it is a paramilitary force under the leadership of the Ayatollah and merely part of the armed forces. Again, the old battle of narratives: Iran is instantly demonized, even though the country has never committed aggression against another state. In official Iranian rhetoric, the Revolutionary Guard is a “people’s institution”; it recruits volunteers and participates in natural disasters, rescue operations, pandemics, and more. In other words, it is a combination of army, civil protection, and patriotic anti-imperial movement. I remember Yugoslav defense forces used to be defined in a similar way.

But if they convince you that the IRGC fired on its own people because it is anti-people, rather than because 2–3,000 foreign agents (mainly Mossad) attempted a violent coup in Tehran, then you will believe any lie. To make it even more ironic, at the same time in the US, troops of the US National Guard are deployed on city streets beating the weakest, the different, the poor… Why? To make Washington and other cities look nicer and tidier. Security and order, they would say.

Why does this matter? Because just a few weeks ago, we were debating—even in like-minded circles—the bloody toll on the streets of Iranian cities. My principled stance then, and now, is the same: inserting the crackdown on demonstrators as a point in our concerns about Iran is counterproductive for everyone who advocates peace. An attack on Iran has long been on the Pentagon’s agenda. One way or another, it destroys both the people and the fabric of society.

Many of us, as observers, and as people who have experienced Western “remedies” and “civilizing missions,” must show solidarity with Iran and condemn the true culprit (even when it comes to the so-called regime in Tehran). First things first.

Whether Trump’s intervention in Iran aims to distract the American people from domestic violent and destructive policies is only a rhetorical question—and I would call it pointless. The American citizen has been “distracted” for generations, even before Vietnam. S/he is uneducated, dulled, incapacitated by propaganda and an education system designed to keep him hostage to the Military-Industrial-Media-Academia-Censorship Complex. We should expect nothing more from the American public, except that they may start to realize that now it truly comes for them—for anyone opposing the officialized madness at home. But from all others, we must demand a principled stance against aggression toward a country that poses no threat to the US or the world—because it will come for us too. Only now, in the form of a third world war.