Indrajit Samarajiva

1. America's Long Retreat

As the anthropologist Wade Davis said, the United States never stood down after World War II. He said, "The United States, virtually a demilitarized nation on the eve of the Second World War, never stood down in the wake of victory. To this day, American troops are deployed in 150 countries. Since the 1970s, China has not once gone to war; the U.S. has not spent a day at peace."

WWII

In truth, World War II didn't end in 1945, it just ended in Europe. World War II kept going from 1939-1991 and the Nazis won in the end. They just merged with the western allies, like McDonnell Douglas and Boeing. Nazis went on to command NATO, to build weapons for the Americans, and to run West Germany and now the EU. If you read Mein Kampf, Hitler's main enemy was always communists and Slavs, and America took up his cause, along with a lot of his crew.

The western allies, in fact, finished Hitler's program of getting Jews out of Europe by dumping them (and white guilt) onto Palestine. As Sneha Krishnan said, "The displacement of European guilt for the Holocaust onto the Palestinian people is maybe the most significant imperial sleight of hand in our times. Real antisemites sit safe in their whiteness, pointing fingers at a population being genocided, egging on another atrocity." The only thing I'd add is that this is the second most significant sleight of hand. The greatest sleight of hand was hiding the American Empire entirely, and pretending like they occupied and invaded places benignly. The truth is that World War II continued for colored people, and the white supremacists that inspired the Nazis won in the end.

'After' World War II, France massacred Algerians and Vietnamese, the UK put Kenyans in concentration camps, and the Europeans kept doing Nazi shit, absolved now because Hitler died for their sins. America—a tax evasion scheme for slave-holders—came to the rescue of the 'old world' as the arch imperialist Churchill predicted. America took up the mantle of killing communists so fervently that Hitler would be thrilled. The truth is that Hitler really wasn't a European anomaly. He was just the last honest European. As Aimé Césaire said, "At bottom, what [white men] cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself … it is the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the n — of Africa." But I digress.

'After' World War II, America took over Western Europe (the worst Europe), its foreign bases and colonies, and even its wars, like the French oppression of Vietnam, and the Nazi fight against communism. Zionists became honorary White people, so long as they largely left Europe, genocided someone else, and guarded their gas. Every nation that tried to raise their head got couped and attacked mercilessly until they became permanently sanctioned or capital colonized again. They called this phase of literally world war the 'Cold' War because that's how they feel about colored people. But southern blood ran hot and red.

After World War II finally ended in 1991—when the USSR fell quite peacefully—the US took credit and declared victory for themselves. Francis Fukuyama said it was the 'end of history'. He said, "The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism." Or as the Wicked Witch of the West said about capitalism, "there is no alternative." And, indeed, this seemed entirely plausible. Just a few mopping up operations, and then blue jeans and rock music into the flying car future.

Commies

For a while America filled the mop bucket with the blood of its own sons, but after student protests they had to end the draft. After Vietnam, America could no longer just field a large army whenever they wanted to. Increasingly, like the British Empire, they had to rely on local proxies and pawns. So the CIA-heavy military outsourced conquest and chaos to corrupt local elites, or created them from whole cloth like the 'Israelis'. It was classic divide and conquer, using bribes, manipulation, threats, and coups to corrupt governments and destabilize regions. This was all disguised as 'peacemaking', but as the Quran told and foretold, "When they are told, 'Do not cause corruption in the land,' they say, 'We are only promoters of peace."

As the cold wars froze, America left a trail of divided countries and ruined hopes. Nations just lifting their head from under European colonialism were brutally smashed down by America, and entire nations like 'Israel' were created to keep their regions divided. New boss, same as the old boss. As America began running out of imperial energy, the world froze into a divided Korea, a divided Palestine, a divided USSR, and a (slightly) divided China. These are still the fault lines of White Empire to this day. This is what they broke, and this is where it breaks. Just look around. As Mao Tse-Tung said then, "Imperialism is afraid of China and of the Arabs. Israel and Formosa [Taiwan] are bases of imperialism in Asia. You are the front gate of the great continent, and we are the rear. They created Israel for you, and Formosa for us." Mao is long dead, but This is still happening.

At this point, you might notice my bent towards communism, or at least lack of animus. I don't posit two evil empires in the White and Red, no, I like communism and think the bad guys won in the end. It's indeed not coincidental that most anti-colonial movements were either socialist or had socialisty policies (I'm using the terms 'socialism' and 'communism' interchangeably here). For many countries, home-brewed communism was the way out of colonialism. Capitalism just meant being rented rather than owned by western capitalists, who literally had all the capital. Communism let colonized people seize the means of production, and rapidly industrialize like no other system, ever. As Branko Milanovic said, "Communism was a system that enabled poor and colonized, or quasi colonized countries to effect a social revolution– break the power of landlords, impose equality of genders– & create conditions for the development of autochthonous or domestic capitalism."

What Milanovic calls 'autochthonous or domestic capitalism,' however, such countries would just call 'socialism with [local] characteristics'. As Deng Xiaoping (Mao's successor) said, "It is wrong to maintain that a market economy exists only in capitalist society and that there is only [a] "capitalist" market economy. Why can't we develop a market economy under socialism? Developing a market economy does not mean practising capitalism. While maintaining a planned economy as the mainstay of our economic system, we are also introducing a market economy. But it is a socialist market economy." But I digress.

The point is that what America called 'the free world' or 'free markets' was really colonization in new rhetorical dress. Joining this 'trade' and 'security' network was really agreeing to be exploited, and to pay for your own occupation (re: especially Australia). Vassals (now called 'allies') were integrated into the Empire's economic agenda as suppliers of resources and labor, and paid imperial tribute by buying US currency and treasuries. As fancy French inequality mansplainer Thomas Piketty said recently, "Bottom line: rich countries pretend to be in favour of fair & open markets, devlopment for all etc. but in practice the way financial markets are organized & regulated leads to an enormous income transfer from global South to global North, year after year & growing over time."

This has long been obvious and spoken about by people in the Dirty South since the beginning. That giant sucking sound draining our human and natural resources was the same sound we've heard for centuries, which is why I call it one differentiated White Empire. The capital just changes capitals and flags and keeps profiteering. Under different lying ideologies, but always the same stealing, and killing at the center of it. What they called Christendom just became secular HumanRights™ and Freedom©, none of which they actually believe in. The snake just changed state religions like skins and kept slithering. Same shit, different day, as my historical thesis ends and begins.

Because America could not field its own (large) armies after Vietnam, they had to resort to CIA corruption and skulduggery. They learned how to game the 'liberal democracy' the British left us as a Trojan Horse to ensure constant instability of governance, so capital could reign. They trapped former colonies in IMF/World Bank enforced debt traps, paper chains that bound all the same. And this was all enforced by sieges (the correct word for unilateral sanctions), enforced by 'international' bodies (colonization by committee), and constant wars (the correct word for interventions), ideally fought by local proxies. It was all at arms length, just 'show me the money.'

This was all covered up by the rhetorical tricks I've just discussed, among many others. The 'free world', the 'rules-based order', the 'international community', the 'developed world'. Or the latest incantation, 'democracies vs authoritarians.' That which must never be named has so many names. To paraphrase Keyzer Soze, the greatest trick the white devil ever pulled was convincing the world it didn't exist. But then, just like that (historically speaking), it was gone.

9/11

I honestly don't know what the fuck happened on 9/11, but America got kicked in two of its three testicles in the middle of the schoolyard. It got hit in its financial (World Trade Center), military (Pentagon), and almost its political (the Capitol, reportedly) jewels. After this very public humiliation, America had to re-establish dominance, by finding someone smaller and throwing them against a wall. So they invaded Afghanistan. Then they invaded unrelated Iraq for good measure, just to show everyone they could do whatever the fuck they wanted. And yet they met their fate on the path taken to avoid, even faster for their eagerness. America responded to getting symbolically blown up on 9/11 by blowing themselves up even more. With the souls of dead millions and displaced tens of millions on their conscience, if they had one. All these wars exploded in their face, just on a delayed fuse.

America lost Afghanistan and had to humiliatingly retreat. They lost Iraq and, after being told to leave, are getting being shown the door with increasing violence (shout out PMF). All the wars they waged to establish dominance have been lost, and now it's all coming together. They're getting kicked out of Niger and Ukraine as we speak. They're being exposed as weak and genocidal in 'Israel' and have completely lost naval supremacy in the Red Sea. If you fight wars to establish dominance and lose those wars, you've lost dominance. If not A, then not B. The signal is taking a while to reach the imperial brain. but historically speaking, it's quite plain. The capital of White Empire was sacked in 2001, and the rest of the century was just a lot of violent flailing on the way to the historical dustbin.

You can see the decline in our times because American troops have simply stopped showing up. They scream and yell about how X or Y is the next Hitler, but never put their military where their mouth is. This is new. It changed in my lifetime. In Afghanistan and Iraq in the 2000s, America was still able to field armies. In fact, for a brief moment they could fund wars without conscription or raising taxes, basically a blank check which they used exclusively to commit atrocities. 9/11 made recruiting possible and the general debt slavery of their population made it necessary.

For a brief period after 9/11, the 'faith and credit' of the then unipolar Empire was good. They could get UN resolutions and fund the dissolution of nations on debt that other countries happily bought up, even at near zero interest rates. Imperial credit was still good. America also, immediately after 9/11, had the faith of most of the world. Their relentless post-World War II propaganda about being the 'good guys' still worked. As I said, America's faith and credit was good, and the war machine could execute their wildest imaginations. Which were unfortunately just nightmares thought up by draft dodgers that never sacrificed anything themselves.

In the early 2000s, America was able to move massive amounts of men and matériel thousands of miles away, for the most flimsy reasons. As someone Reddited, "The most terrifying capability of the United States military remains the capacity to deploy a fully operational Burger King to any terrestrial theater of operations in under 24 hours." In the those gory days, America could still organize a bang-up murder tour of the Orient on short notice, and the old colonial crew were all invited. Early late America was definitely able to project power, and Bush II felt confident enough to declare 'Mission Accomplished.' This was, however, a premature ejaculation. They had just blown their load spectacularly.

Casio

As the Taliban told the Americans, "you may have the watches, but we have the time." After 20 years of fighting and trillions of dollars in self-looting, all the kings horsepower and all the kings men replaced the Taliban with the Taliban and called it a win. Post 9/11, America wanted to wage a decisive war to reestablish dominance and they lost in Afghanistan. They tried to cover it up by starting another war in Iraq and lost that too. Then they tried to cover that up by starting another war in Syria, and another war in Ukraine, and then across Africa, and now in Palestine. And now they're losing all over the place. The cover-up has exceeded the crime most tragically and dramatically.

The Americans fled Afghanistan in ignominious defeat, stealing the country's foreign reserves and starving its children on the way out. They're being kicked out of Iraq now, by the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF). America didn't get regime change in Syria. They made Russia stronger and destroyed democracy in Ukraine, which doesn't even have elections now. They're being kicked out of Niger. And, in the pièce de résistance, they're destroying any vestige of legitimacy with the imperial genocide of Gaza. Nobody connects these dots because you're not supposed to. The entire western propaganda system is based on the 'end of history'. The news is just a bunch of disconnected events, like why are these people mad at us? let's bomb them, over and over again. Nobody says the Empire has no clothes, but I'll say it. If 9/11 marked the symbolic defeat of America, Afghanistan marked their military defeat. What we're witnessing now is their long retreat, leaving scorched earth as far as the eye can see.

The Long Retreat

This is the final incarnation of White Empire, rage, raging against the dying of the white. Impotent, blinded, raging like Odyssey's wounded cyclops, screaming 'do you know who my father is?' America today cannot field its own troops, it cannot make enough munitions, it is by all historical accounts a spend force. But that doesn't stop it from trying to repeat the old gory days, this time as a farce.

Early late America cannot stand on its own anymore, it has to hide behind corrupt proxies. Thus they're fighting to the last Ukrainian against Russia, the last 'Israeli' against Arabs and Muslims, and Taiwanese are next on the chopping block. America keep throwing 'allies' in front of them because their own ass is too weak now. The American Empire is actually in full-blown retreat, disguised as a world tour.

You wouldn't know this from the western media, but consider the source. As I've said, the western media is based upon the philosophical premise of the 'end of history', so everything happening now is just a bunch of disconnected events. If you just think through a brief history and your own memory, however, you can see that America could barely field troops in World War II, could not win in Asia, and has now had to abandon the Middle East and even Europe. We saw them enter Afghanistan in stealth bombers and then get kicked out by guys in Toyota Hiluxes. We saw them threaten to sanction and wunderwaffen Russia into submission, only for Russia to get even stronger.

After seeing imperial proxies beaten everywhere, especially in Ukraine, the actual strength of White Empire is becoming plain. They're not strong at all. They're weak. It's not that they don't want to fight, it's that they can't. To invert Teddy Roosevelt, they are speaking loudly and carrying a small stick. It's not just that White Empire is in decline, it's in full-assed retreat.

2. Missile Defenseless

Missile defense is a fascinating idea — that you can shoot down arrows with other arrows — and it sorta works. Until it doesn't, and until you get the bill. Missile defense is not some magic shield that allows you to be a total asshole and avoid all consequences. You literally pay for it. Just look at 'Israel', blowing nearly 10% of its yearly IDF budget in one night of ignominy.

After 'Israel' bombed their consulate, Iran threw maybe $100 million in the air and 'Israel' threw $1.3 billion after it. It was literally good money after bad. It's like if someone threw a brick at your house, and you threw your TV at the brick. It's like smashing a roach with a Rolex. It's like preventing broken windows by throwing your own glassware out the window. 'Israeli' missile defense is the definition of Pyrrhic victory. They're lighting their own money on fire and crowing about how bright it is.

A big part of attritional war is depleting the enemy's ammo, and this ammo depletes itself. If any enemy throws enough cheap munitions in the air, the ammunition will come out and destroy itself. You don't need to even target the enemy's ammo dumps, they'll target your missiles and run into them! Depleting the enemy's munitions at a 1:12 (cost) ratio is in itself is a tactical victory. If your enemy runs out of munitions in two weeks, that's strategic defeat. And if 16% of missiles breach the defenses on day one, that's just embarrassing.

This all happened to 'Israel' under the best possible conditions, with weeks of warning and all the imperial bitches (Jordan, France, UK) barking. All the kings horses and all the kings men, can't put 'Israeli' deterrence back together again. They can propagandize their own people, but the military people know what's happened on April 14th. As does anyone with a calculator and a bit of common sense. Like October 7th, it was a tactical, strategic defeat. They got hit at high cost and can't sustain this model without blowing through their entire budget in a matter of weeks.

This model of air defence is literally throwing gold at tin. The payload of a Patriot missile is worth more than its weight in gold (a 90 kg payload on a $6-10m missile), and they fling them at cheap ballistics or even drones. This obviously can't go on forever, as you could see with the IOF's air defenses buckling in one night, letting multiple hits in. Imagine how much worse it could be if these weren't just warning shots, and if the hits kept coming. Missile defense against the consequences of your own actions is very expensive, while simply not being an asshole is free. But this is of course incomprehensible to capitalists.

This is the same fate US warships faced in the Red Sea. They were shooting million dollar missiles at thousand dollar drones from Yemen and crowing about it, but now they've had to retreat and beg for peace. Their fancy missile defenses (mostly) worked at protecting their own warships, but they couldn't secure imperial shipping at all. And it's not that the Yemen couldn't damage American warships, they have superior weaponry (hypersonics) in reserve and at any point they could just swarm the Carbon Crusaders. It's just that, as Napoleon said, when your enemy is defeating themselves, why interrupt? If they want to literally explode their money, let them. The US can't reload its missile batteries at sea, so after a little battering, they have to just leave. Thus one of the poorest countries in the world has defeated the world's richest navy, by exploiting its profligacy.

This is the fate of American Empire in general. They pulled out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty in 2002 and thought they could hide behind anti-ballistic missile defenses, bombing whoever they pleased, selling expensive 'defense' systems to the vassals they put in the firing line in the first place. But now Russia, Iran, and even Yemen have hypersonic missiles that can take fast, unpredictable paths, effectively under most missile defenses. Everybody has drones that can overwhelm defenses with sheer quantity. America has developed defenses against the ballistic missiles of last century, but anything not taking a basic parabolic arc is a diabolical problem to them.

Missile defense will undoubtably evolve in response to these new threats, but when Russia can turn old, 'dumb' bombs into glide missiles with cheap attachments, they can simply overwhelm them with quantity. When wedding drones can be weaponized (in revenge for all the weddings Empire bombed), expensive air defenses actually become a liability. The best missile defense is actually diplomacy, which is incomprehensible to Empire these days. They still believe in a technological solution to their own illogical terrorism. It's like someone who builds more and more elaborate bear-protection suits, and never once considers not poking bears in the first place.

This is the state of modern missile defense, which is really nothing new. As my historical thesis goes, same shit, different day. Offense and defense have always co-evolved in competition; a stronger sword begets a stronger shield, a longer bow begets a higher wall, missiles beget missile defence in general. Offensive weapons evolve with defensive weapons in a constant mating dance of death. The long history of humans fucking themselves is fertile ground for the reproduction of weapons. But it is all ultimately folly.

The best defense is not being offensive in the first place. This is something the White Empire simply cannot understand, having gotten away with it for so long. But now the natives have rockets and rocket launchers, and all the missile defenses in the world can't protect their hegemony. All that's left is hubris, which is not at all the same thing. They're throwing gold after tin, while slaughtering defenseless children. This is simply the pride before the fall, as the worst missile offenders become missile defenseless.

3. The Genocidal Gerontocracy

I was in the car with my parents and kids and my kids were like "who's in charge here?" It's a good question, though they just wanted to resolve some inane point of order like 'whose feather is this?' The best rationale we could settle on for self-governance was averageness. We added up the ages of everyone in the car (6, 7, 41, 70, 72) and divided by 5, giving about 40. AKA me. This seems obvious enough in a car, but not in any political cartography. That's one reason the whole clown car they call the 'rules-based order' is crashing.

If you look at the vehicle of state, the dying White Empire is driven by a visibly dying octogenarian, as are many 'liberal' democracies. These 'democracies' are actually naturally conservative. Rulers fail upwards forever and pass on power to their children. There are lower age limits on civic rights but no upper, so people literally die in their seats, thinking they can take it all with them. And so they actually do. This ending generation is ending the world with them, leaving everybody else with the consequences.

In Foundation, Isaac Asimov (and the new show runners) imagined this demographic problem quite graphically. He posited one ruler, composed of three identical clones, decanted at different times. Brother Dawn, Brother Dusk, and Brother Day. Brother Day rules the day to day, with advice from Dusk (the old ruler) and with Dawn in training (the next in line). They each took turns, and the Galactic Empire rules (ruled?) for centuries. It was the reign of Cleon, the clone king. The middle-aged Cleon is always in charge, which is of course science fiction.

The White Empire we live in is ruled by some rounding error (pick a Vice-President for Obama that doesn't scare white people!) who is 81 years old and cannot physically climb stairs, but who can mount a good old-fashioned genocide. The alternative is 77 years old, probably humps chairs, and is also down for an old-fashioned genocide. WTF are we even doing? If we were on a road trip, would we put these embarrassing grandfathers in charge? No way. But that's who's steering the ship of state. They're good representatives, I guess. The White Empire is visibly dying. It's a global gerontocracy.

Globally, people who—with all due respect—can't pee straight, are expected to rule the fate of millions, if not billions. I can certainly understand on an advisory level, but executive? They're literally losing executive function. And Allah knows governing is just tiring. Old people should honestly just chill and be with their grandchildren. I can't even understand the motive for clinging to power until you die. What's the point of the thing? The lord dies clutching power, and it's just a one-way ticket to hell, guaranteed. Best to repent while you can, and let someone younger take the lead (and the blame).

Anyways, getting out of the car, we decided to go for a river bath and then my mother started getting swept away by the current. My daughter screamed 'Achchi's drowning' and it quickly dawned on me that this was not her usual bullshit screaming about inanities. This was an actual auntie emergency. My father was sitting there frozen, thankfully, else I'd have two problems. I pushed across the current and got my mother to the other side. Then we waited around for some people to help her get back across, while my children got devoured by sand flies lol.

It makes you think, doesn't it? I'm definitely not the smartest person in the family, but I'm the least physically and mentally retarded, for lack of a better word. I learn slower than my kids and know less than my parents, but I am simply average enough to be the most useful for most situations. My parents have more brains than me and my children have more heart, but my body simply works better. I literally bow to my parents and serve my children, but I am undoubtably the most competent of the lot, just by the law of averages. This is of course no match for the law of compounding interest, which largely explains the unequal and old state of the world we're in.

The great problem of this era is that our parents' generation will, on average, always be richer (and thus more powerful) than us. It's simply the power of compounding interest. It's like Fry in Futurama who had $0.93 in his savings account in 1999 and $4.3 billion in 2999, when he woke up. You can't beat compounding interest. Time is money, and older people simply have more of it 'saved' up. In bank accounts, investments, property, or education. All of this stuff used to be affordable and now it's largely unattainable assets.

The only real wealth transfer happening during the White Empire is when rich peoples kids literally inherit the wealth, or have their parents buy them a home, or an education that costs as much as a home, or fund their first, second, and third businesses until they can be 'self-made'. Modern soothsayers with spreadsheets (economists) ignore the one economic rule that survived the bronze ages (regular debt jubilees) to our collective ruin. As they knew in the Bronze Ages (re: Michael Hudson), a society without debt jubilees just ends up in debt slavery and collapse. The entire experiment of modern White Empire, carrying over from the Romans, is seeing what would happen if interest compounded forever, which is a mathematical impossibility (re: Sessi's chessboard)., But Ponzi schemes are good fun unless you're holding the bag. And if you've died before the music stops, all the better. You literally got away with it. That seems to be the plan.

My friend once told me the most revolutionary thing you could do would be to kill your grandparents, and the thought makes me shiver, but it makes sense. The trouble is that the people who have the least actually invested in the future have the most investments. The people that have the least stake in the future won't give up control without a stake through their hearts. They're really trying to live forever, and take it all with them when they go. The Empire is run by gerontocrats, people that should be playing with their grandchildren and not burying children in rubble. But here we are.

I don't mean my grandparents or your grandparents, my God, obviously other other grandparents. I mean that inchoate gerontocracy of reruns that runs the Empire at the heart of it all. I'm not saying younger people would run Empire better—it's a dumpster fire by design—but they certainly couldn't run it worse. They might park the bus rather than driving it off a cliff. It's not that 'adults' are more advanced than the elderly or the young, they're just—on average—a bit less retarded. Which is the best you can hope for in this reign of clone Emperors literally decomposing in front of us, taking the world with them when they go.

4. The Impact Of Iran's Hits On 'Israel'

The point of Iran's hits on 'Israel' wasn't carnage. It was communication. They told the enemy they were going to hit them, let them get ready, and then hit them anyways. The point of these hits wasn't mayhem. It was to send a message. The message is that Iran can hit 'Israel'. 'Israel's' air defenses are not impregnable. This was all rumored and reported, but now Iran has proven it. 'Israel's' entire existence depends on deterrence and Iran was not deterred. This, for 'Israel', is an existential problem. The point is not that buildings were blown up. It's that the whole security architecture surrounding 'Israel' is gone.

Power Projection

What Iran has just done is project power. For decades 'Israel' has bombed whoever they want in the region and everybody had to just take it. Now Iran has bombed 'Israel' itself, in the first real instance of 'what goes around, comes around'. Iran has told 'Israel' that 'we can hit you wherever we want, whenever we want, and Daddy Yankee can't do anything about it.' If the Al Aqsa Flood of October 7th lit the fire, April 14th was the 'gasolina'.

As Major General Salami (of Iran) said:

"Our information on all of the hits is not complete yet but on that part of the hits that we have accurate, documented and field-related reports show that this operation has been carried out with a success that exceeded the expectation," said Salami.

He said that the IRGC was capable of carrying out a large operation against Israel but it opted for a more restricted and limited one to hit Israeli resources that had been used for an airstrike on an Iranian consulate in Syria earlier this month which killed senior Iranian military commanders.

Iran has shown that they could have destroyed Nazi Knesset, they could have killed Netanyahu hiding in a billionaire's bunker, they could have blown up hospitals, if they were deranged enough to think of such things. They didn't do any of these things because they're disciplined and strategic, unlike 'Israel', which is following America's post-WWII strategy of carpet bombing, ie state terrorism. Iran did not blanket 'Israel' in bombs, but hit the very places that hit them on April 1st, proportionally, strategically, and telegraphed well in advance to avoid casualties. This is what deterrence actually looks like. It's a message, not a massacre.

As Iran's deputy foreign minister Ali Bagheri said, "Israel needs to know that in case of another mistake, they will not have 12 days, the response will be given in matter of seconds not in days or hours." This is a fundamental change in the balance of power in the region. For decades Empire has been bombing everyone and saying "what the fuck are you going to do about it?" Iran has finally said "something."

The New Balance Of Power

Empire has already lost the seas to the Yemenis and the land to Hamas, Hezbollah, etc. Air supremacy was all they had left, and now that bubble is rapidly deflating. All the kings horses and all the kings men cannot put Humpty together again. Of all the Empire's outposts, 'Israel' has the most air defenses, and even that plus the combined air forces of the US, UK, France, and Jordan couldn't overcome the world's largest drone swarm followed by missiles. And these weren't even Iran's best, newest weapons. Iran has gotten a lot of information about its enemy, while its enemy has got nothing. As A7 Mira puts it, "this was not the maximum offensive power of Iran, but this was the maximum defensive power of 'Israel'".

Iran targeted the most protected locations in Empire—Nevatim and Ramon Air Bases and Air Force Intelligence HQ—and hit them directly. As Scott Ritter said, "Iran put five medium range ballistic missiles on target in Nevatim air base. Nevatim is the most heavily defended spot in the world from the threat of ballistic missiles. Defenses that were optimized to defeat Iranian missiles. And yet five got through."

'Israel' claims '99% shot down' but they just spent over a billion dollars to shoot down a few million worth of decoys, that was just an L given a press release. The entire paradigm of imperial air superiority has been that they can shoot almost anything down, but what's been revealed in Yemen and now over 'Israel' is that their enemy has to send million dollar missiles to shoot down cheap drones. One way of winning a war is depleting your enemy's matériel, and expensive air missiles vs. cheap drones is just a rapid method of Pyrrhicizing yourself.

Adversaries are learning that they can simply inundate western defenses. Yemen, Iran, and Russia are proving it. They have lost naval supremacy in the Red Sea, land supremacy over rump Europe, and air supremacy over 'Israel'. The point of good defenses are that you don't have to use them, people are too scared. Now that illusion is shattered. As Master Sun said,

"winning a hundred victories in a hundred battles is not the best possible outcome. Best is to subdue the enemy's troops without ever engaging them on the battlefield."

What the White Empire is doing everywhere isn't art of war, it's amateur hour. They're getting embarrassingly clobbered everywhere, and clobbering innocents. After six months of watching children being murdered, even their privatized propaganda can't contain the horseshit. And so the final air defense is collapsing, their command of the airwaves.

On top of air defense, the White Empire always ran media air cover, legitimizing their illegitimacy. They were able to explain that they were self-defending themselves against people thousands of miles away, and that their genocidal colony 'Israel' was just trying to survive amidst savage natives. This somehow worked for a while, but not anymore. Now 'Israel' is openly massacring hospitals, while the supposed Axis of Evil is being imminently reasonable and hitting military targets. People can see what's going on and—worst of all for Empire's privatized propaganda—they can see that the western media is lying to them. The Empire has no clothes and is obviously tooting its own horn.

Hence David Cameron—the unelected Foreign Minister of the unelected Prime Minister of an unelected head of State—just looks like a nonce when he says Iran is doing a 'reckless and dangerous thing' and then, in the next breath says the UK would take 'very strong action' if its own consulate was flattened. These are the people 'defending democracy', they can't even get their lies straight. Democracy™ was obviously a Trojan horse left by colonial oligarchs, and now everyone can see it's just a pile of colonizers under an even bigger pile of horseshit.

What happened on April 14th was that Iran responded to a clear attack with clear legitimacy, given that the rabid 'Israeli's' bombed a consulate on April 1st. The 'Israelis' violated a diplomatic convention that goes back thousands of years, and the world can see this. Furtherfuthermore, the whole world has seen 'Israel' and the whole White Empire relentlessly massacring civilians for six months now, and Iran honestly has a duty to protect, as do all (actually) free countries. The West is still throwing up propaganda about Iran's response being 'unprovoked' and 'destabilizing the region', but their media power is collapsing along with their air defenses. They're still launching million dollar morons into the airwaves, but everybody can see the reality on the ground.

The End

Land, naval, and air supremacy were how White Empire enforced white supremacy, how they made it seem like a fait accompli. But all of those supremacies are shattered now, and all that's left is naked violence against innocent men, women, and children. All that's left is a lot of pointless killing on the way to their own funeral. The best Empire can hope for now is a nuclear murder-suicide. Their days of conquest are done.

What we are thus living through is the final denouement of White Empire, imploding at home and overextended abroad. We're lucky to 'live' through it, because thousands are still dying under the rubble, and millions if not billions more are fated to go. White supremacist empires sure go down ugly, and this is the ugliest of all. The comparatively short and tame Nazi Empire killed more people after WWII was obviously lost (in Stalingrad) than while they were winning. In the same way, the German's inspiration and heirs in America seem determined to go down the same way, rage, raging against the dying of the White (to massacre Dylan Thomas).

The legacy of the centuries-old totalitarian racist slave state of America has not been reconciliation or reparations, it has been exporting its genocidal violence across the globe while superficially diversifying its 1%. Now it is going out the way it came in, with genocidal violence and mass atrocities. Appealing to the conscience of this unconscionable abomination is pointless, the only language White Empire understands is resistance, including armed. That's the message that Iran has sent in a quite disciplined way, that it too can speak, and that Empire's days of disciplining the region are done. Coupled with body blows on multiple fronts, the impact of Iran on Empire is profound. Gone are the days of fucking around, raining death from above like gods. This is the age of finding out.

5. How The White Empire Is Going White Dwarf

This is a long, extended metaphor comparing the sunsetting of American (re: White) Empire to the sunsetting of, well, the sun. Our sun, like America, is a violent superpower that will at some point implode. Before that point, however, it will expand in a toxic bubble of firepower; precisely what's happening to America now.

The White Dwarf

Our sun, like any star, actually gets brighter as it's dying. The balance between fusion (pushing out) and gravity (pushing in) means that more and more hydrogen gets cronched in the center even as there's less and less of it. The sun gets brighter precisely as it's burning out. In about 5 billion years, the inner core will run out of hydrogen and suck in H from the outer core, allowing it a penultimate gasp of growth. This great greedy gobble will toss Venus and probably Earth in the oven, though life life here would have been already been air-fried 4 billion years before. At this point, the Sun will be a red giant, and have the deserted Earth for dessert.

After another 2 billion years, this red giant will run out of H for reals, but switch it for the celestial equivalent of fentanyl, helium. The sun will then contract down once again start giving off 10x as much energy. Better to burn out than to fade away, as the poets say. This last high will last about 500 million years, until the same cannibalization process plays out again. Gravity will suck in any last helium from its outer layers, and the sun will expand again, roasting everything in its plume. The Earth, then, will surely be subsumed.

When there's finally no more H and no more He, that'll be the end of our fiery deity. The sun that drifted together from solar dust will return whence it came. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. All that will be left is a hot and cooling ball of carbon at the center of what used to be it all. A white dwarf.

The White Empire

In the same way, America is doomed to implode, but not before it incinerates all its satellites. I call America the White Empire because, to the people on the boot end of Europeans and their colonies, what's the difference? The White Empire began by sucking resources from the solar rich to the solar poor peninsula of Europe. This was the first point of fusion, swirling slaves, molasses, and rum into a Satanic alchemy of avarice. Europeans incarnated their greed as corporations and let those djinns run riot over entire continents, sucking energy back to the imperial core. This fusion of 'renewable' energy was highly potent and it burned brighter every year. They called this the 'age of discovery' but it was just destruction deferred.

This first wave of colonization went on and on for hundreds of years and yet it somehow wasn't enough. As much as ships drew in resources from the rest of the world and radiated manufactured goods out, it was never, ever enough, even as populations within the imperial core remained generally impoverished. The spoilt grandchildren of one Queen began fighting over the spoils and nearly spoiled it all in World War I. That violent explosion ended with Germany being run out of resources and deep into debt, into an energy deficit. Soon enough they responded like any dying star, by cannibalizing the vicinity.

Germans got the bright idea of colonizing Europe. Hitler saw that all the good global resources were gone and thought he'd grab what he could where he could, while it was possible. Nazism is presented as some unique evil but it wasn't, much worse had been happening to colored people for centuries and, indeed, continues to this day. All that happened in World War II was that White Empire burned hot enough to fuse the outer imperial core itself, with Germany pulling in nations like France, Czechoslovakia, etc. Better to burn out than to fade away, you know the refrain.

America won World War II in the sense that it conquered Europe (beware of Americans saying they 'liberated' anything), assimilated the Nazis, and continued Hitler's main priority of fighting communists and Slavs. In truth WWII continued for decades after from Korea to South America to the Cold War, but they stopped calling it 'war' because it was not amongst white people. And so the dying star of White Empire expanded again, becoming a red giant devouring the world, paradoxically by fighting actual 'reds'. The colonial project of America continued the general colonial project, pulling in even more resources from the Middle East, from debt-enslaved Africa, from constantly couped South America, from all over the world. White Empire briefly enveloped the entire Earth, and has sucked away the Earth's climate in the process.

And so here America is, with no more easy resources to burn. They've already consumed their own continent and are fracking their last vein of fossil fuels. The only solution is to start enough hot wars to fuse 'heavier' elements, to get that old spark of World War back again, for one more violent expansion before the slow burn into irrelevance. So now America has consumed Germany again, and is trying to drag Japan out of pacifism. They're getting the old genocidal band back together, because they're on a mission from Satan. America has blown up Germany's pipeline and economy and made the Japanese PM bow before the people that nuked them. They'll let 'Israel' bring on the actual apocalypse with red heifers and child sacrifice before giving up an inch of imperial ambitions. Anything, anything for a few more moments in the sun.

So as it dies, Empire is burning brighter than before. American Empire is outgassing to incinerate its satellites in Europe, the Middle East and the Pacific. It has sucked in all available firepower to Ukraine, while cutting its vassals off from cheap energy and leaving them to shrivel on the vine. America is making its 'allies' look like diplomatic degenerates to defend their most violent vassal, 'Israel'. It's forcing aircraft carriers like Australia to cut themselves off from their main trading partner (China) and pay for their own occupation. The Empire is dying from the provinces first, as empires go. As Tyson Yunkaporta says, "Civilisations are cultures that create cities, communities that consume everything around them and then themselves."

The cannibalization of Europe (and Japan and South Korea, if they allow it) gives America a last burst of gas, but they're simply running out of steam at home. America has been printing fake money to paper over real problems since at least 2008 and funny money can only delay serious tragedy so long. America's resources are increasingly consumed on dead people abroad, old people at home, and old debts. They're the definition of an old and dying star. There's this vain idea that, as a reserve currency, America can just keep printing resources forever, but everything runs out of reserves at some point. Even stars. When it finally implodes and burns out all that will be left is a shit stain of carbon in the fossil record, and hopefully not too much radioactivity, inshallah.

White Heat

White Empires, white dwarfs, it is—as my historical thesis goes—same shit different day. Metaphors work not just because they're easy for humans to understand, they're also the signs Allah leaves along the way. The apocalyptic faiths are all surely right in the end, the sun does consume us in fire and the world ends well before then. You can 'know' this scientifically and yet people still don't believe. In eschatological as well as geological timescales, the end of the world is not a speculation, it's a certainty. And on our immediate political timescale, the end of this world is an extremely high probability. I honestly thought it would take decades, but Americans are speed-running collapse, like they do everything. America could actually implode in a relatively chill way like the Soviets, but that's not how they be. America was the evil empire and God knows they're going down ugly.

What we're seeing now is not America making itself great again, but its great undoing. Paradoxically—like a dying star—that means it burns even brighter as it bleeds. America is cannibalizing allies, genociding innocents, and violently impaling itself against enemies. They rage, rage, against the dying of the White, they do not go gentle into that good night. Its rich will keep getting richer till the very end, but without doing anything productive. They simply don't have the energy. And so it ends, inshallah without ending everything. As Oasis said, "Someday you will find me caught beneath the landslide, In a champagne supernova, a champagne supernova in the sky."

6. The Power Of Blood Sacrifice

I think of Jesus often. I think of how the Romans and their Jewish client state thought they defeated Jesus by killing him. Not just defeated him, but humiliated him, left him out there to be publicly tortured, mocked, and shamed. They crucified him like a slave. But look at the world now. Rome's dominion is gone and we live in Anno Domini. Allah turned the greatest L into the greatest W. Jesus triumphed over death and left that Empire in the dust. I think about that today.

Today, America and their Jewish client state think they can defeat Palestinians by genociding them. Not merely killing them, but starving them to death, making them suffer and die without food, water, medicine, or sanitation. As the cowardly Yoav Gallant said, announcing the whole thing, "No electricity, no food, no fuel, no water. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly." The concentration camp became an extermination camp after the inmates dared rebel.

Six months later, the 'Israeli's are still trying to genocide the entire civilian population of Gaza, burying masses under rubble, condemning them to a slow, painful death, and letting famine and disease take the rest. As Giora Eiland quite openly published, "severe epidemics in the south of the Gaza Strip will bring victory closer and reduce casualties among IDF soldiers." 'Israel's' other goal, presented as a 'moderate' solution by casual colonizers like Yuval Noah Harari, is ethnic cleansing the women and children to the desert and slaughtering the men. The bloodlust is quite common across the 'Israeli' population, its 'left' and 'right' are really just left and right boots, stomping on a human face forever.

The point of it all is re-establishing the deterrence that was lost after the brave rebellion of October 7th, much like the Romans crucified all of a man's slaves if one dared slay their master. When Pedanius Secondus was slain (seemingly with good reason), all of his 400 slaves were publicly put to death, men, women, and children. Can you not hear the refrain, in the slavery of our times? It is, as my historical thesis goes, same shit, different day. The American Senate acts now as the Roman Senate did then. Just hear Tacitus explain:

While no one member ventured to controvert the opinion of Cassius, he was answered by a din of voices, expressing pity for the numbers, the age, or the sex of the victims, and for the undoubted innocence of the majority. In spite of all, the party advocating execution prevailed; but the decision could not be complied with, as a dense crowd gathered and threatened to resort to stones and firebrands. The Caesar then reprimanded the populace by edict, and lined the whole length of road, by which the condemned were being marched to punishment, with detachments of soldiers.

Today American Senators can't go anywhere without attracting angry constituents, but they're all so legally corrupt that it doesn't matter. The President reprimands the populace as 'antisemites' while lining the whole Middle East with aircraft carriers. The collective punishment of Gaza has been televised and live-streamed for six months now, like a drawn out crucifixion. The cruelty is the point. They want the upstart slaves to suffer and they want us all to see, to stop any other slaves from upstarting. As Gaius Cassius argued in 61 AD (not knowing how time would be measured):

Now that our households comprise nations — with customs the reverse of our own, with foreign cults or with none, you will never coerce such a medley of humanity except by terror. — 'But some innocent lives will be lost!' — Even so; for when every tenth man of the routed army drops beneath the club,​ the lot falls on the brave as well. All great examples carry with them something of injustice — injustice compensated, as against individual suffering, by the advantage of the community.

The Romans were at least an honest empire, whereas the American pretend like they don't have one at all. "Aw shucks, just helping out". To get truth from the Americans you have to hold a mirror up to their lies, because everything is inverted. Every accusation is, in fact, a confession. America's 'War On Terror' is in fact a genocidal Terror War, meant to 'coerce a medley of humanity by terror.' Most of the people they call terrorists are in fact just terroirists, defending their land from carbon crusaders. 'Israel' is just Terror Jr., a traumatized population that Europeans rejected and literally deported, given the copyright to colonization as reparations. And they have taken their master's policy to the point of historical absurdity. The contradictions are now too much, and in projecting such cruel power, they are in fact losing it all.

Like a public, drawn-out crucifixion—where the cruelty and humiliation is the point—'Israel' has drawn out its atrocities against the Palestinian public for so long that even the liberal imperial core is having indigestion now. People have watched the precious child Hind surviving amidst the slaughter of her family in a car, while 'Israel' attacked the rescue workers, before finally being murdered herself, terrifying hours later. People have watched the Al Shifa Hospital being attacked not once but twice, as part of 'Israel's' general policy of medical massacres.

All of these war crimes are not mere executions, they are public torture and a vile attempt at humiliation, like a crucifixion. Of course, the imperial core can watch crucifixions all day long, it's the main programming in the Cable-TV Colosseum. Every week a rotating cast of migrants, Muslims, Russians, and Chinese are trotted out to be hated and attacked, each episode going into reruns for decades now. But you can't show the same crucifixion for six months in a row. That gets boring and, after a point, embarrassing.

What finally changed things for this celebrity obsessed culture was a celebrity chef's crew being bombed not once but thrice, hunted through a supposedly safe zone like prey. You can bomb hospitals and refugee camps, but you can't fuck with the Washington elites dinner reservations! That's a red line for these people. Injustice was fine when it was against slaves and subhumans, but once it started messing with the "advantage of the community", that's when it had to stop. And now the western media's tune has changed. The killers are losing the imperial core and, worst of all, even more 'slaves' are in open rebellion.

Rebellion has only spread across 'the unity of the fields', from Yemen to Lebanon to Iran to Iraq to Syria to even Jordan. Hamas and its allies like Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the PFLP, Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, etc are still resisting bravely, and televising that too. It's as if the crucified had RPGs and were lighting up centurions. This is not the message they were trying to send at all! They meet their fate on the road they took to avoid it. Deterrence doesn't work if the people are undeterred. Then the cruelty just appears pointless, and the people executing it look weaker rather than stronger. Then, rather than humiliated slaves, there's imperial blood in the water and, indeed, 'Israel' and America have lost the whole Red Sea entirely.

At this point, the suffering of the Palestinian people has become what the Resistance frequently calls 'an epic'. As the PFLP said: "In response to all this, our people have decisively replied that resistance is the means to deter the occupation, restore our legitimate rights, and the Al-Aqsa Flood epic constitutes one of the advanced and shining stations of our people's struggle, which history will inscribe in golden letters." Or as Hamas leader Osama Hamdan said, "the Nazi enemy has failed to break the will and steadfastness of our great people rooted in their land and has been unable to diminish the strength and resolve of the Izz El-Din Al-Qassam Brigades, Saraya Al-Quds, and the Palestinian resistance, who have inscribed an epic of heroism, dignity, and pride for our people and nation."

Even as the children and grandchildren of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh were killed in another cowardly 'Israeli' airstrike, this is what he had to say:

I thank Allah for this honor that He bestowed upon us through the martyrdom of my three sons and grandchildren. With this pain and blood, we create hope, a future, and freedom for our people, our cause, and our nation. My martyred sons attained the honor of the time, the honor of the place, and the honor of the conclusion. My children stayed with our people in the Gaza Strip and did not leave the Strip.

All our people and all the families of Gaza residents have paid a heavy price with the blood of their children, and I am one of them. Nearly 60 members of my family ascended as martyrs, like all the Palestinian people, and there is no difference between them. The occupation believes that by targeting the sons of leaders, it will break the resolve of our people. We say to the occupation that this blood will only make us more steadfast in our principles and adherence to our land.

The enemy will not succeed in their goals and the castles will not fall. What the enemy failed to extract through killing, destruction, and genocide, they will not take in negotiations. The enemy is delusional if they think that by killing my sons we will change our positions. The blood of my sons is not more precious than the blood of our martyred people in Gaza, for they are all my sons.

The blood of my sons is a sacrifice on the path to liberating Al-Quds and Al-Aqsa. We will not hesitate and will not retreat, and we will continue on our way to liberate Al-Quds and Al-Aqsa...

How do you fight this? Morally, politically, militarily, the Empire has just lost. These people are righteous and the Empire is just wrong. The latest incarnation of White Empire has tried to impose power through blood, but all they have done here is unleash the greater power of blood sacrifice against themselves, and it cannot be contained now. As an Empire which nominally claims to follow Christ the lamb, they should know what an awesome power this is. Martyrs live forever and blood sacrifice can topple the greatest powers. And America isn't even great anymore. Their Navy has lost to Yemen, their Army has lost to Afghanistan, and while their Air Force is still winning against poor people without air defenses, this is a Pyrrhic victory and a moral abomination. Meanwhile, economically, they're begging China 'please Hammer, don't hurt 'em' and have sanctioned themselves into a corner. They're taking L after L and their only Ws come from beating up children. They're not projecting power at this point, they're just projecting.

Human sacrifice—blood sacrifice—is a terrible force, a powerful force since time immemorial. Empires can play with blood if they win (and thus write the history), but if they do it and lose, well then, those empires get written out of history entirely. That's where we are now. At the end of 'Israel', at the end of America, at the end of the continuous White Empire that has oppressed us for so long, in so many contiguous forms. The end will be a beggar's breakfast because they've ruined the entire planet, but the fever dream will break before too long, inshallah. History is being written as we speak, in the only ink that seems indelible. In the human sacrifice of innocents, in the murder of martyrs, in the red red ink of blood.

7. Stupid Cat And Great God

I left a chicken to thaw in the sink, covered with a cutting board, and went to sleep. I wondered why the cat didn't come to bed, but at least nobody was pouncing on my feet. Turns out that the maid had removed the board and the cat was downstairs, having a fancy feast…

"A cat in Dragonese is called 'miaowla'. Dragonese is the languge dragons speak," by Luna. "10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 blast off! The cat zoomed into space! He zoomed past the planets, and he zoomed past the stars and the sun! He cept on zooming and zooming thru space," by Miro. Excuse me, I'm single-parenting the kids for the moment and they've taken over. As I was saying,

The cat had dragged the chicken—weighing nearly as much itself—all the way across the room and onto the rug, which is where I found it in the morning. The cat had just ripped through the bag and was happily chawing on a wing. Luckily he hadn't gotten any further. Is this chicken halal anymore? Was it now, technically, carrion? And what do I do with this cat? He's unhygienic, ungrateful, and constantly getting into trouble. In a very small way, this must be how Allah feels. They're trying to help humans and we're just stupid and dirty and ungrateful about it.

I think, then, of the Garden of Eden, and our own garden. We let the cat wander around the garden on the condition that he stays there, because outside are cars and canines and death and injury. But the cat doesn't listen, and I don't know how to communicate to him. How do I explain anything? I'm not saying I'm on a higher level than the cat, if anything animals are closer to God. I'm just pointing out the differences in communication between different types of beings.

One point against religion is that it's not literally true but what does that mean? Why would the truth of the universe fit into the grunts and scribbles of apes? Is the number 7 'true'? Is 'apple' an apple? When I say "aaaah!" to the cat when it jumps on the stove is that literally true? No, it would be more like "rwwaooow" in cat language, and even that is just a symbolic representation of the pain I want the creature to be avoiding.

Science posits its truth as superior because it's accurate, but at what level? If you get down to the quantum or universal level it's all fuzzy again. Science is really like a child who found his father's gun and brought it to school, which is not good for actual learning. Science thinks it's great because it can split the atom, but then uses this power for the basest things. Melting the flesh off human bones and powering toaster ovens for a few years at the price of toxic waste for aeons. How much thinking are we doing without understanding? How much doing without even a thought to our undoing? What's the point of getting the details right and missing the bigger picture entirely?

Science and modernity look down on stories and poetry and feelings, but does this not speak to a higher truth, which is more than the sum of its parts? If God was looking at us creatures—who live in stories and dreams and imaginings—how else would They explain things? Would explaining the scientific structure and creation of the universe A) make sense to people and B) be wise to tell them? In short, would it help or be helpful? This was a core question the Buddha asked himself, and some questions he simply didn't answer. Not necessarily because he didn't know, but because we didn't need to. This is an entirely foreign concept to western philosophy, which insists on jamming its finger into every socket, like a toddler with nuclear weapons and a God complex.

The fact is that for the most important questions in life, science has no good answers. You can see people today trying to cobble diet and parenting and 'mental health' out of science and it's just exhausting. And then you can see science digging up every grave on earth, lighting bodies on fire, and incinerating the climate. And its only answer is to dig up other stuff and kill everyone a bit slower and thus 'renewably'. People say that science 'just works', but does it? To invert the saying, what is works without faith? Just a monkey with a switchblade, let loose across the face of God's creation. Or like a cat with a chicken on the living room floor.

What I see in the cat is gaps in perception, and the difficulty of communicating across them. I also get the urge to just smite everybody and be done with it. How do you keep someone you care for in the garden? How do you protect them when they leave? How do I get the cat and dog to not fight each other, though it's really in their own best interests? You might be a 'higher' power, but you still have to 'lower' yourself to communicate on their level, and they have to reach out to you first. Meow and you shall receive. But the cat is, of course, an ancient god and takes no notice of me at all.

I just clean up the mess and try to get some praying and writing in before the children wake up which, as you can see in the intro, I failed at. There truly are signs everywhere, though we speed past them in our haste to get nowhere quickly. With children, with the pets, with all my duties of care, I can feel the caring presence of God. Of course, like most humans, I usually reject these messages in my arrogance and haste.

God gives us more than enough but we insist on dragging chickens out of the sink to eat them on the rug like ingrates. We insist on dragging every animal out of creation and ever mineral out of the earth and our reckoning is surely more than getting sprayed with a water bottle. There's a literal flood coming, and I'm not cleaning that up. The arc of history is long and it bends towards arks. We've been given the message enough. Now God is taking things quite literally.

8. The Illusion Of Control

When I wake up the cat follows me downstairs and I let the dog in and they both get into some form of chaos while I'm trying to pray. If I'm lucky, no one's destroyed the tissue boxes or taken a sneaky shit. On a good day, they just chase each other around and under me while I'm trying to prostrate. One should be so blessed, really. It's a curse to take yourself seriously.

Then I see the old man, 94-years old now, with the great-grandchildren crawling all over him. They have no idea 'who' he is at all, and don't care. He's had a long and well-respected career, but it ends like this, surrounded by rodents demanding cheese. In old age the greatest reward is not reputation among your (disappearing) peers, but the mere presence of the next generation, who will love you even if you have only a tin of biscuits and a kind heart left to your name. I should be so lucky, some day, inshallah.

I think then, of our assassinated uncle, honestly the best uncle, and how he won't see his own grandchildren. How is that fair? He did so much good for so many people, and—in the true spirit of giving—not mindlessly but mindfully. He could see when people were in need and he helped them without being asked, and generously, like he was giving to himself. I think then of the Quran, the Bible, or any message from God, which clearly says store your treasure in heaven, through kindness to other beings. When They 'roll up the heavens like a scroll of parchment' surely Din Anna's deeds will be written there, and given to his right hand. Though still grieving, this I believe.

The entire way of the world is thinking that we can have our way with the world, that if we have the right mindset or set of products or sheer wealth and power we can have control, and thus relief. But this is wholly illusory. It never works, as hard as people work at it. It's not just that wealth and power are illusory, but that the self that we try to 'create the best version' of is, in fact, illusory as well. The self is a collection of aggregates, a bunch of references to other states, to other people, to other times, a not very special relativity. Being selfish is literally nihilism. There's nothing there at the center, just a furious spinning. It's literally building castles out of sand, and calling ourselves philosopher kings. Every day brings waves of erosion, until it's all finally swept away.

Control, ie attachment, is actually the root cause of suffering. The illusion that we can sustain the illusion is what causes so much pain. As the Quran says, "there are indeed signs for people who use their reason," the rains, the plants, the destruction of every single city and person before us. The flowers rotting at the feet of the Buddha. Christ himself on the cross. Control is the mother of all illusions, and clinging is the very cause of loss.

You don't have to be a monk or experience the sublime to know this. You can have children or even pets, creatures that just don't care at all, the sages of obliviousness. In their unknowing they know more than the wisest of us all. Right now, for example, the cat is putting his paws on the keyboard while the dog explores a room, looking for trouble most certainly, which I will have to clean up. We think these creatures are dumb, but perhaps animals don't talk because there's nothing to say. Indeed, the core injunction of meditation is just shutting up. We prattle on and call it progress, until the hot air literally kills everyone.

We feel bad because we're not rich or famous, but just look at those people. They look miserable. Are they any happier than a man with a tin of biscuits and grandchildren? There's just a point of diminishing returns, and honestly it starts from the first moment of attachment. And yet in every connection there's a moment of detachment, where you think about somebody/something else. And this release from the self is where we seem to find the most meaning and indeed happiness. Nobody sits on their deathbed counting their money or newspaper clippings. They think about relationships.

And yet, in life, we're always putting those relationships off to do 'more important' stuff. As the Buddha said, "Viewing the non-essential as the essential and the essential as the non-essential they—nourished on false thinking—do not arrive at the essential." And so we all arrive at our final destination, firmly rooted in ignorance, confusing interruptions with the main program.

I think of this as I'm playing with dinosaur toys, or cleaning shit off the rug. No, actually I don't. I'm just thinking of it now. I'm as firmly engrossed in the illusion of control as anybody else, but every now and then some of the lesser philosophers of the world will interrupt to teach me something, though I'd rather be on my phone. This world cannot be controlled and, indeed, should not be controlled. That way lies grasping, and losing, and suffering, no matter what you hold. But if you let other things hold you, you can—even if just for an instant—be carried like a leaf on a stream, not in fear and trembling every moment, but just going.

9. Meetings About Massacres

Whatever they say in public, the 'Israelis' and Americans (same White Empire) are having meetings about massacres. They're having PowerPoints about poets. They're using cartography to mark cardiologists for execution, and wiping entire hospitals off the map entirely. They're keeping daily journals of all the journalists they kill, and having aides bring them lists of aid agencies to target. None of this is collateral. It's all pre-meditated and intentional. Beneath the pile of bodies is a pile of paperwork, and covering it all up are corrupt newspapers.

'Israel's' stated and executed policy is to just fucking kill everybody, directly and then through disease and starvation. As former National Security Council head Giora Eiland said and as the current Finance Minister seconded: "The international community warns us of a humanitarian disaster in Gaza and of severe epidemics. We must not shy away from this, as difficult as that may be. After all, severe epidemics in the south of the Gaza Strip will bring victory closer and reduce casualties among IDF soldiers. And no, this is not about cruelty for cruelty's sake, since we don't support the suffering of the other side as a goal but as a means." The cruelty is not collateral. It's intentional. If you only noticed because they killed some white aid workers (and one Palestinian), you're an asshole, but welcome.

Nothing should obfuscate that 'Israeli' policy is what's actually happening, not what the liars and their whitewashers are telling you. Some 'Israeli' publication ran an article about how 'Israel' is using AI to target militants and their families, which sounds dystopian in itself, but it's obfuscation. This implies that 'Israel' is targeting militants at all, and not hitting hospitals, civilians, aid workers, and journalists on purpose. As Norman Finkelstein says, "The nub of the problem is neither disciplinary nor technical. It's Israel's murder plan: to make Gaza unlivable and to force its people to decide—starve or leave." The plan is what's being executed, and what they say is the plan (freeing hostages) is just part of the plan (to lie about i). 'Israel' has executed more hostages than it's freed, and meanwhile have taken thousands more Palestinians hostage and killed them in the tens of thousands. If you just open your eyes and plug your ears it's obvious.

'Israel' is laser focused on killing the Palestinian people entirely, on making Gaza unlivable, as they've openly said. And they're doing it. And this all had to be planned before the people were executed. They had to have meetings to discuss where the water supplies, food, sewage treatments, and electricity were, and then they had to have more meetings to bomb them. They had to coordinate where aid was being dropped by the Americans, and then plan to bomb the people that came to get it. They had get coordinates of aid agencies from the Americans (wink wink) in order to precisely bomb them (nod nod).

Somewhere, people are sitting in air-conditioned conference rooms, drinking bottled water, pulling up spreadsheets of how many people they expect to kill of starvation and thirst. Then some politician is telling them to get those numbers up. Somewhere people are having Zoom calls where they discuss foreign aid workers coming in, and how this messes with the starvation plan, so kill them. Then someone else is sitting at a computer screen, sending a bomb through the logo, then following the wounded to another car, bombing them again, and then following up to triple-tap them. All while some bureaucrat is standing over their shoulder nodding. Good job. Let me update spreadsheet. This is all pre-meditated, and someone else gets cc'ed on the media plan to cover it up in newsprint. They're pissing on your legs and calling it rain and, shockingly, some people still lap it up as 'honest mistakes'.

They say once is a mistake, twice is a coincidence, and thrice is pre-meditated. But what do you call 3,000? What do you call n+1, every single day, for six months of reigning death? That's a plan, executed ruthlessly. These are all executions. 'Israel' does not give a fuck, and America does not withhold anything. What can genocide grandpa say to their genocidal offspring? 'Israel' said Gaza was populated by 'human animals' and they'd 'reduce it to rubble' and they're 'acting accordingly'. And that's precisely what they're doing. They're planning, executing, and everything else is just excuses with expiration dates. 'Israel' has discovered that, like break-ups, the best way to get over one cycle of bad press is to do something even more horrible. One bombed hospital is a tragedy, but bombing every hospital becomes a statistic. It doesn't even get covered. The best cover-up way to cover up some bodies is more bodies. Somehow if the corpses are a mountain it becomes a molehill.

What gets me is all the white-collar workers this takes. From the 'Israeli' bureaucrats making lists of doctors and intellectuals to murder, to the soldiers pushing the buttons to obliterate them. From the paper-pushers marking out which homes to demolish, and the software-developer reservists going out and taking selfies while doing it. Then, on the American side, the people releasing the 2,000 pound bombs to drop on starving 20 pound children. Somebody has to sign all that paperwork, somebody has to load the bombs, and then maybe some celebrity comes and signs the bombs themselves. Then the PR flacks have to have meetings to coordinate their lies, and western 'journalists' have to craft sentences without subjects or objects to make all the active violence disappear in the passive voice. It's a massive coordination job, all this carnage.

The sheer amount of dry work that goes into wet work is staggering, and yet we've only seen one or two resignations. Thousands of people are participating in this genocide as their daily job, and they just go home and play with their kids and walk their dogs like it's nothing. 'Israel' as a country is completely deranged, but America is equally arranged around this. This is not a collective madness, it's a collective methodicalness. That's what's so diabolical. There are spreadsheets behind the shrouds, there are meetings about people we'll never meet again, there are hotspots marking the hospitals, there are addendums listing all the academics to be killed, and the locations of all the universities. People are having refreshments while they discuss starving other people to death, and choosing coffee or tea while unleashing killer drones to hunt those looking for sustenance. Then they're looking for the sugar while a father looks for food, and gets murdered by a drone and left to bleed out while somebody watches it all on a video feed.

This is all written down and then there are written plans about how to lie about it. And then people go out and do it. This is the bureaucracy of evil. This is 'Israel' and America. This is the White Empire, which hides in the background like it doesn't exist, while pushing entire populations out of existence entirely. There are no bad apples here, this is a bad apple cart, and the whole thing must be overthrown, wholesale. There is no redeeming this. The western governments, the western press, the very concept that the West should have anything to do with any part of the Earth, that has to be resisted and resisted violently.

Empire must be overthrown for this world to know any semblance of peace at all. They'll keep having meetings about massacres until we're all in the grave, and the fact is that every Palestinian they've killed or maimed is enough condemnation. It is as if they've killed the whole world, and they're doing it hundreds of times every day. The only salvation is that tens of thousands of martyrs are having their own meetings with Allah right now, on top of the millions the American have already sent there for decades.

While Allah moves as he wills, when he does move, he moves inexorably. As the Quran says, "Remember how those who bent on denying the truth plotted against you to imprison you or kill you or expel you: they schemed—but God also schemed. God is the best of schemers." Allah also said "They have an appointed time beyond which there will be no escape for them. We destroyed these communities when they went on doing wrong, and We appointed a time for their destruction." I don't know when the time for the destruction of 'Israel' and America is but, inshallah, it's coming. It can't come soon enough for me. This bloodlessness with which they wage such bloodshed is enraging.

10. Why I'm Fasting This Ramadan

I've been fasting for Ramadan, so 23 days now. What this means, practically, is that I don't take food or water from around 5 AM to 6:30, despite it being the hottest season in Sri Lanka. What this means, personally, is I have a better understanding of my Muslim friends, who I've seen doing this for years. What this means, spiritually, is that I pray to Allah 4-5 times a day (despite being a Buddhist) and I find it a moving experience (despite perhaps putting my soul in danger, since I've clearly been told now). I've found it a difficult but rewarding experience. These are my experiences, insomuch as I can communicate them at all.

Literally Why

My father, a pretty devout atheist, told me to read the Bible when I was young. You simply have to know the Bible to understand modern literature and the modern world. For this reason, I try to read as many foundational texts as I can, and the Quran is obviously foundational for much of the world.

Lately I've been feeling this big gap in my knowledge because Hamas, Hezbollah, Ansar Allah, etc, make references that just go over my head. And they're great references. They talk about 'weak as a spider's web' and 'it was not you who threw, but Allah who threw.' There's obviously a big and rich literary world out there that I'm just missing without the Quran. But this is only the most literal reason to experience Ramadan and, I think, the most superficial.

The Quran is not just a book, it's a holy book. One of the proofs of the Quran is the Quran itself. As the book repeatedly says, "do they claim, "He made it up!"? Tell them ˹O Prophet˺, "Produce one sûrah like it then, and seek help from whoever you can—other than Allah—if what you say is true!"

The Quran as revealed and recited by the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) is a work of magnificent poetry and power, and I'm reading it in translation, a pale imitation of the original Arabic. To me, the Quran is definitely divinely inspired, and I felt it from the beginning, in just the way They describe it. Allah—through his messenger—says,

"˹It is˺ Allah ˹Who˺ has sent down the best message—a Book of perfect consistency and repeated lessons—which causes the skin ˹and hearts˺ of those who fear their Lord to tremble, then their skin and hearts soften at the mention of ˹the mercy of˺ Allah"

and I have felt this myself.

When I first read the Quran—in Dubai, before it became a Shaytanic playground—I 'literally' felt my heart tremble. I felt, for lack of a better word, scared, though I think the better word would be godfearing. I could feel that whatever was in there was definitely real, and definitely powerful. I sincerely believe that the Quran is the word of Allah. As the book says, "Do you not see how Allah compares a good word to a good tree? Its root is firm and its branches reach the sky." That's how it feels to read the Quran.

And yet I never finished it.

I got out of Dubai (I was just stuck there on a layover) and had other things to read and do. That book is still on my bookshelf, gathering dust. A few years ago, however, I was walking down the street in Oxford and someone just handed me another Quran. I've been carrying that copy around and trying to get through it for months now. My daughter makes fun of me because she finished Fantastic Mr. Fox in a day and I've been carrying this smaller book around for like 15% of her entire lifetime. Ramadan was a good opportunity to just finish it (the Quran is divided up into 30 juz for this purpose), so I thought I'd take it. Again, however, that's the least of the reasons. The Quran is not a book it's a holy book, and there's much more to it.

Personally

To me, the proof of a religion is not in textual nitpicking but in the sort of person it produces. And I've seen Islam produce some really good people. When I was in university I was friends with an Iraqi (all I remember is Muhammad, so I'm never finding him again). Muhammad was not a student, I met him cause he was randomly Michael Jackson dancing at a party, and he liked going out to nightclubs. But he just danced and talked to people. He never drank, he never did drugs, he never slept with anyone or even dated. This was very incongruous for me because I was still in a culture where that was all the point. At 'freshers' week the university gave us all free-flowing beer and threw co-eds together like, get at it. Honestly, God knows what happened, it wasn't good and in an unconscious way I wasn't feeling it. I was painfully insecure at the time and Muhammad helped me get out of my shell without getting wasted, which I appreciated.

After university I was travelling around Sri Lanka a lot and I went with my friend Halik. Halik would frequently stop to pray, including literally on rocks in the ocean. I'd meditate while he was doing it but I was always curious as to what exactly he was doing. Halik was also a deeply ethical person and in a way that wasn't coincidental. He might have inclined that way naturally, but Islam was clearly how he structured his life. He really followed Islam. It made him who he was, and he was a good person.

As someone who grew up in America all you know about Islam is the same shallow lies repeated over and over again. That Muslims are terrorists, that they hate women, that they're backwards and savage. I honestly thought those things once, but meeting actual Muslims quickly disabused me. The people I saw were good, and Islam was a big, obvious reason for it. It literally structured their days and, during Ramadan, their entire month. Colombo is pretty evenly split between Sinhala (me), Tamil (my wife), and Muslim (a race here), and the latter is the one community I have the least experience 'being'. And I wanted that. I've worked with and known people who were fasting for years, and I was always curious. What was this experience, and why? So this year I called Halik and just tried it.

Practically

This is a roundabout way of getting to what seems to interest most people about Ramadan, which is the fasting. Fasting is really the means and not the meaning. It's putting God first and putting worldly desires literally aside, at least in my experience. And it's a long enough experience to be habit-forming.

Fasting is a discipline that I found makes me more disciplined in general. Regardless of how much I don't want to, I just get up at 4:45 because I have to. I have to get any water and food for the day in by then. But that's not the point. The point, really, is that I start my day with prayer, that's the real discipline.

Once I'm up I'm usually up, so sometimes I get my work done before anyone else is even awake. My golden hours for writing are in the morning, and this forces me to use them. At the same time, waking up early forces me to sleep early, otherwise I'm just wrecked. Now, I will note that many Muslims in Sri Lanka become nocturnal during Ramadan and seem to stay out later than ever, but I just can't do it. I end up being early to bed and early to rise, which, as the saying goes, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise by default. A lot of the spiritual injunctions of Islam are, in fact, just good practice and hygiene. With the ritual washing, for example, my hands and feet have never been cleaner. I just wash them at least four times a day, again by default.

The downsides, however, are that if I do anything (especially in this heat) it's very draining. By afternoon I usually need a nap, which I don't usually. Being tired, thirsty, and hungry can also make me (more) cranky with my family, even though the injunction is to be on your best behavior during Ramadan. I'm often not. Also, as my mother says, I'm not Muslim and I'm not from a Muslim family. Islam is a social religion and fasting alone is profoundly anti-social. I end up missing Easter lunch and can't keep sil on Poya, which are the religions my family actually follows. Ramadan is supposed to bring people together, but for me it's mostly isolating, except when someone invites me to something.

That isolation, however, is also good for meditation, albeit in the Muslim form. The Muslim prayers took me a while to understand, but now I can go through the motions without checking WikiHow. I dunno if it's the blood going to my head, but I feel quite moved when I bow and say subhaana rabbiyal a'alaa, and I mean it when I say rabbighfirli (forgive me). At the end of the prayers I say salaam to the angel on my right shoulder (counting my good deeds) and to the one on my left (counting my bad), and they're real to me during Ramadan. The discipline around basic functions makes the higher functions more disciplined by default, and I'm more aware of when I do wrong. And I simply do less of it.

Before Ramadan I would eat, drink alcohol, or take ayurvedic cannabis out of boredom more than else, plus the grief of just everything. But now I can't do any of those things, so I just... don't. Instead I go to prayer for relief and it's actually more relieving. It speaks to the pain rather than just numbing it. And that's quite a reset. Ramadan gives you a month when you commit to just trying, and it seems to work. A month is both short enough to actually do, and long enough to be habit-forming. To form good habits, with good people, and a good book. It's quite practical.

Spiritually

What I learned as a young man was that faith is a practice. I learned that through Buddhist meditation, which changed my life. I'm a bad Buddhist, but I'm a Buddhist. I still take refuge in the Triple Gem. Paradoxically and incongruously, however, I also believe in Allah, I also revere Jesus, and I also venerate the Hindu deities. These are all the gods of my island home and I feel at home with all of them. I understand that the first commandment of the monotheistic faiths is don't do this, but that's what I'm doing. I hope I'll be forgiven.

At these times, which sure feel like end times, I find that Islam really speaks to me. People say Islam is a religion of peace, but that's the white man's word. Islam is a religion of justice. The Quran constantly repeats the fact that those who believe and do good works will be rewarded, and those who spread corruption throughout the land and set up rivals to God will be punished. In these days when the corrupt and faithless are doing so much evil, when people worship money, I honestly find this comforting. Allah very clearly says that 'this world' is nothing and the hereafter is everything. The Quran says, "This worldly life is no more than play and amusement, but far better is the ˹eternal˺ Home of the Hereafter for those mindful ˹of Allah˺. Will you not then understand?" I don't know if I understand, but I really want to. This can't be all, because this is awful.

There's a strange pedantry in not believing life after death, but what do people do with all this smartness? So what? Someone who truly fears the hereafter behaves quite differently in the here and now, and that changes their soul irregardless. A truly godfearing person would help the poor and strive for justice and try and live a better, cleaner life, so nothing is lost. And potentially everything is gained, in ways we cannot fathom. I won't get into this because it's like describing the color red in words. It's just not possible. I remember asking Bhanthe Gunaratne about rebirth and he simply said he'd experienced it, but didn't ask me to believe or explain one way or another. To me, the afterlife is literally what it says on the tin. You can't understand it in this life, but you can fear it. The feeling they call godfearing. And I definitely fear God, and worry for my 'soul' above all things.

That's why I like Ramadan, because it devotes a whole month to God, and almost all of your waking hours. Ramadan is, for me, a reset from the demands of 'this world' and a remembrance of the demands of something higher. It's easy to forget as we go from meal to meal and distraction to distraction (sometimes the same thing) and it's good to have a structured way to remember, not through reading and knowing, but through doing and understanding.

I won't say that I 'get' Ramadan and I have, in fact, been reluctant to write this piece. Faith is a practice, it's an experience, and though it may use books, it cannot be contained in books at all. This was my experience as a Buddhist growing up, praying with Jews in Montreal, taking my kids to church in England, or praying with Muslims now. Some things can't be put into words at all. You have to just do them, and you can't necessarily bring that much back to communicate. That's been my experience of Ramadan. I don't know what to tell you. All I can say is that I've been told, quite clearly.