Trump’s racist blundering in Iran is symptomatic of Western dysfunction

It’s clear at this point, as Donald Trump flounders in his illegal war against Iran, that the US president drastically underestimated his Iranian opponents. How could that happen, given the advice he would have been receiving about Tehran’s capacity to target Gulf oil infrastructure, and close the Strait of Hormuz? There was also the satellite coverage and communications penetration of his opponents that should have informed better judgement by Washington’s war criminal-in-chief.

The answer is probably that Trump is such an Orientalist, Islamophobic, generally racist, white supremacist thug, it left him with no capacity to recognise the competence possessed by Tehran.

Trump’s vile bigoted tirades are legion at this point. He’s railed against “stupid” and “low IQ” Somalis, called Mexicans rapists and ranted about banning all Muslims from entering the United States. He sees a world divided into a civilised section, populated by white northern Europeans, and contrarily, dangerous “shithole countries”.

His comments about Iran’s leaders have been straight out of decades-old anti-Iranian propaganda perpetrated by Western media and politicians. It is one that characterises Tehran (and often Iranians more broadly) as backwards, fundamentally malevolent, and irrational.

Trump deploys classic bigoted Iranian tropes

The mass murderer who has slaughtered over 3,500 Iranians has said the Iranian government “just wanted to practice evil.” He declared he intended:

…to bring them [the Iranian people] back to the Stone Ages where they belong.

He called Ayatollah Ali Khamenei:

…one of the most evil people in history.

Trump has called his rivals in the Iranian government “crazy bastards“. Finally, and needless to say, it takes extreme racism to consider it appropriate to threaten that:

…a whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back again.

This is all entirely in line with the prevailing message about Iran post-revolution that Western audiences have been bombarded with. Our media presents us with little more than so-called “Mad Mullahs” and crowds shouting “death to America”. Some in the West have internalised this narrative to the point where they refuse to believe a colourful coffee shop populated by uncovered young women could possibly be in Tehran.

US and Israeli politicians abuse these fictions as a means of gaining support for war crimes perpetrated against Iranians. This applies in particular to Tehran’s potential to acquire a nuclear bomb. The confections centre around an imagined lunatic state that will start launching off nukes left and right the second it has enough fissile material.

The implication is that they are so irrational they care nothing for their own survival, given the inevitable atomic retaliation that would follow. This too plays into Orientalist tropes about Muslims not valuing their own lives, or those of their families, thus permitting their wholesale slaughter. The US previously applied these same lies to Vietnamese people.

Far from being deranged, Iran has out-thought the US

The reality is that Iran has been a cautious, rational and defensive actor for decades. It has enriched uranium as a bargaining chip, but not gone after full-scale development of nuclear weapons. Tehran has assembled a vast arsenal of drones and ballistic missiles which it has used purely defensively. It has pursued a strategy of forward defence through proxies in Yemen, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Palestine.

Much of the latter were shattered only because almost the entire world has permitted the Zionist entity to pursue genocidal violence against them for over 30 months. However, Iran’s fallback to missiles and Shaheds has proven effective and brought the US to the negotiating table.

Iran has achieved all this despite being under crippling US sanctions that have had a murderous effect on Iranians. Their deaths due to medicine shortages are among the 38 million killed by US coercive measures from 1971-2021. Despite this isolation, and being surrounded by hostile Gulf states hosting the US military, Iranians have at this point comprehensively outmanoeuvred the brutal world hegemony.

Iran has at least been aided in this period by China, another serially underestimated and maligned nation. Western media coverage of China’s impending economic collapse has been a running joke for a generation. China has constantly defied these naysayers to become the world’s industrial powerhouse.

It surpasses the US on numerous measures now, and will likely overtake it soon on life expectancy. Again, bigoted politicians disregard this, and deploy racist stereotypes of devious East Asians, who have only excelled through underhand means.

Iran is currently well on the way to having a network of high speed rail, with Chinese assistance. The US-Israeli contribution to that has been to bomb railway lines. There can be few better examples of two worlds moving in opposite directions than the main representative of a dysfunctional neoliberal order bombing something it cannot build at home. Like a petulant child kicking over the better sandcastle built by another kid, the US is now largely only capable of violence.

US and Britain represent a dying order with no capacity to learn

Yet Western ruling classes retain a remarkable lack of willingness to learn from what emerging nations do right. You’ve heard of Inglorious Basterds fighting to stop genocide – we have Incurious Bastards that commit genocide, while having little interest in what lessons could be taken from the likes of China’s state-led industrial policies. These have accounted for a huge percentage of poverty reduction worldwide.

A ruling order raised on Thatcher’s formulation of TINA – There is No Alternative (to neoliberalism) – are incapable of imagining the self-loathing state they have constructed doing anything useful. Perhaps with some basis in the case of Britain, now successive governments have ensured endless cuts have hugely hollowed out the state’s own knowledge banks and capacity to act.

The obvious riposte to this would be to point out that Iran and China are autocracies, so whatever the economic or infrastructural gains made, they matter little without meaningful political freedoms. That would be a fair point, were it not the case that both living standards and political freedom are receding in the likes of Britain and the USA.

In the case of England and devolved nations, wages have been stagnant for over 15 years as basic services decline, in effect making the majority worse off. What used to be world class public services now barely function. You wait months for an appointment in underfunded health services, then miss it because the dysfunctional privatised postal service couldn’t tell you in time. Meanwhile, police throw people into the back of vans for holding up a sign, or posting an unauthorised tweet.

Britain isn’t a democracy

Britain is a nation with an unelected second chamber. There is an unelected head of state. It has an electoral system where people’s votes don’t count. It is a place where levels of inequality and a system of political donations makes thing closer to ‘one pound, one vote’, rather than ‘one person, one vote’. Work is a largely democracy free zone – people spend the best hours of the day, through the best years of their life in places where they are simply supposed to follow orders, with little opportunity for their own input.

Britain can therefore in no meaningful sense be described as a democracy. The same policies persist year on year, whether its Labour or Tories in power. Eric Li said of the United States:

In America, you can change the political parties but you can’t change policies.

In China, you can’t change the party but you can change policies.

The same applies to Britain. Another memorable Chinese formulation is the notion of the “Kill Line“. This is in reference to the huge number of US citizens who are at:

…the point where a single stroke of bad luck—a $3,000 ambulance ride or a sudden layoff—triggers a terminal collapse into homelessness.

The Kill Line: USA’s massive precariat

At its most horrifying, the Kill Line can be seen in US streets rammed with people struggling against substance abuse, openly injecting and dying in full view of an indifferent ruling class. This too is the inevitable consequence of a society in which democracy has been worn down to the nub. A place where the priorities of the rich leave the majority to suffer. A place where in effect, a tiny number of people dictate policy and the views of most Americans are ignored.

As for the case of so-called ‘Israel’, despite our media referring to it as the “only democracy in the Middle East“, it has never been any such thing. Founded on ethnic cleansing, it has always been an apartheid pseudo-state, getting worse post-1967 and now a rabidly genocidal, deeply ill society. Once upon a time even this abomination had a strong social-democratic character – at least for its Jewish population – but that too has been hollowed out, following the same pattern of its aforementioned Anglophone backers.

Britain, the US, and the Zionist entity have effectively de-developed themselves, and can now merely be content with de-developing the likes of Iran via endless 2000lb bombs. This is virtually the only thing the USA builds anymore.

The so-called democracies have allowed oligarchic parasites to feast on their body politic for so long, all that remains is a husk. It shuffles feebly on in a zombified form that wears its mangled democracy as a kind of hideous mask, concealing the vile reality beneath – that of a brutish creature lurching between authoritarianism at home and imperial violence abroad.

Hollow shells offer only violence

Their citizens are no longer likely to enjoy a good quality of life, though they still fare better than those underneath Western bombs. When the latter people flee their countries, they inevitably seek shelter in the same places from whence those missiles came. The compensation offered to the struggling ‘native’ population is that the newcomers will be treated even more poorly.

Is this sufficient? Is it enough to be shivering in a cramped, damp-filled home, teeth rotting in your skull, because you can’t afford the cost of fuel and there are no dentists anymore, as long as you know someone has it even worse than you? Can one be cheered by a union jack on a lamp post or when told by Nigel Farage that one has the correct amount of melanin in one’s skin? Is it sufficient to know that your country is falling apart, but you can still destroy someone else’s?

Probably not. The wreckage at home and the wreckage abroad may differ in form, but they are two sides of the same coin. Both are the result of a completely unrestrained capitalism allowing a handful of reckless fuckwits to accumulate the wealth and power to determine the fate of billions. Economic and democratic renewal are essential to end this malaise.

Our racist culture deters us from accepting we have something to learn from the likes of Iran or China. Their welcome rise should grant us the humility we desperately need to follow suit.

Featured image via the Canary