Part of the problem that confronts any thinking person who is trying to cut through the bullshit coming from US officials is that while much of it is incoherent it is not actually trying to justify the war as “rational” policy—it is, instead, proceeding from that race logic.
creates answers to problems of growth and circulation—a spatial fix that other people pay for in blood. And it is integral to what Dylan Saba recently called on the Turbulence pod the “race logic of the new crusade“ at work in a decades-long build up to this war.
It is intended to be an object lesson in the folly (from empire’s pov) of thinking you can resist overwhelming air power—and more to the point, maintain sovereignty outside the structures of western vassalage. That is indeed the *whole* point; it is the annihilative logic by which capital
capability that would limit the reach of an imperial war machine. The price to pay for that is not simply the forced dismantling of military systems but the demolition of critical infrastructure and mindless killing of civilians (inherently expendable in a globalized racial hierarchy).
always be reframed as already defensive. In the context of this US-Israeli war, this prerogative is extended into an unlimited right of aerial maneuver. Iran’s fatal crime had nothing to do with its nuclear aspirations, less still the character of its govt, but its insistent maintenance of defensive
“Terrorist” is an ascriptive category that allows the empire to manufacture proper objects of violence: the nations and polities that can and must be treated as “already at war” with “us,“ as already jeopardizing the interests of a powers thousands of miles away, against whom offensive action can
This is a well trued tactic to prepare for the next stage, to say Iranians did not heed our word and failed to remove the government, so they must be happy with the IRI and are guilty by association and so, killing them and pummeling their lives is allowed.
BREAKING: The US has bombed Tehran’s main refinery and burning oil is now flooding down the streets into the city’s sewers.
This is a vision from hell, unleashed by the US tonight.
(🎥 Vahid Online)
March 8, 2026 - Tehran at sunrise today. But the sun is hidden behind a sky filled with smoke. After a night of intensive strikes on oil facilities, thick black clouds now hang over the city, turning morning into something that feels like night.
exceptionally chilling to watch (your) people get poisoned at such scale by the resource that empire has bled them to extract for more than a century
Though it is day, the sun cannot be seen in Tehran today because of all the smoke following the US and Israel bombing Tehran's oil refineries. People on the ground describe it as armageddon. History will not forgive Reza Pahlavi, Masih Alinejad, Nazanin Boniadi, and all other "leaders" who tricked Iranians into thinking this war would set them free.
Oh my god: this is *daytime* in Tehran.
People in Tehran are breathing toxic air. Villagers have lost their potable water supply. A school full of girls are dead and buried. All while the Secretary of Defense continually boasts of eliminating restrictive rules of engagement. Hard to ignore the connection.
Your tax dollars at work in Iran. Israeli and US military attacked oil facilites in Tehran. Per CNN's Frederik Pleitgen this AM "It is raining oil in Tehran this morning after major airstrikes on oil facilities."
In this article, Salar Mohandesi argues that for leftists in North America and Europe, the most consequential response to Iran’s crisis is not choosing between “campist” and “anti-campist” abstractions, but organizing concretely against US- and Israeli-led imperial intervention and war.
A harrowing image from tonight’s bombing of Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport. This devastating and inhuman assault seeks to violate a nation’s sovereignty, shatter its infrastructure, and pummel its dignity. #Iran
The point of all this is to say that the situation in Iran, as far as “public opinion” goes, does not map easily onto the cultural and social categories immediately available to people in the United States, Iranian or otherwise.
Zia‑Ebrahimi’s “dislocative nationalism” helps us make sense of the diaspora/homeland divide. But what about difference within Iran? This is also complex: Iran is not homogenous. There are ethnic and religious minorities. There are profound regional divides. There are class stratifications.
What is conceptually or culturally “available” to an Iranian-American, *especially* for those who came to the U.S. *because* of the revolution, is simply not fungible with the lived political/spiritual/cultural realities of most Iranians currently living in Iran.
This does not change the fact that the Iranian regime, since 1979, has committed heinous crimes against its own population, as I discuss in this article. What is often forgotten is that the previous regime, under the Shah, tortured and disappeared both leftist and Islamist activists and students.
When contemporary monarchist or secular‑nationalist diaspora currents idealize the Pahlavi era, affirm Aryan exceptionalism, or depict Islam as an external stain on an otherwise Western‑adjacent nation, they are reactivating this dislocative repertoire refracted through exile & white racial orders.
The Pahlavi state then institutionalized this ideology through schooling + official historiography, making a particular pre‑Islamic nostalgia and racial imaginary central to hegemonic national identity.
He labels this “dislocative nationalism” because it symbolically lifts Iran out of its regional and Islamic embeddedness and ties it instead to an imagined Aryan, quasi‑European civilizational space.
Cover of Zia-Ebrahimi’s book, “The Emergence of Iranian Nationalism.”
Reza Zia‑Ebrahimi’s key claim is that certain Qajar‑era intellectuals (Akhundzadeh, Kermani) articulated a modern, racialized nationalism that casts pre‑Islamic Iran as a golden age, redefines Islam as an alien imposition, & figures Arabs as permanent others.
U.S. state structures then amplify those fractions whose narratives dovetail with broader projects of containment/sanctions/regime change, turning certain exile imaginaries into durable lobbying and media forces that can constrain policy at home and politics in the country of origin.
Class selection shapes what “home” they remember + which forms of state power appear normal or desirable. This (very often) filters down into the children of Iranian immigrants.
In both cases, the most politically visible diasporic actors are disproportionately drawn from strata that lost property, status, or political position in a revolutionary rupture and that entered the United States through relatively privileged migration channels.
Murphy said in an interview he is drafting legislation that would broadly ban prediction-market trades related to government actions, saying they could corrupt public decision-making by allowing military or government officials to profit off secret information. Polymarket said in August that the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., had joined its advisory board, and a handful of recent bets on the administration’s moves have sparked public accusations of insider trading. The analytics firm Bubblemaps said it found six “suspected insiders” on Polymarket that had made $1.2 million by betting that the U.S. would hit Iran by Feb. 28, the date that Operation Epic Fury began. All of the accounts were made last month and bet exclusively on Iran-strike timing; some of the bets were made within hours of the first explosions in Tehran. One account bet $60,000 and won $560,000. Murphy said in an online post that the trades indicated “people around Trump are profiting off war and death.” Davis Ingle, a White House spokesman, said on Monday that “the only special interest guiding the Trump administration’s decision-making is the best interest of the American people.”
This shit has to be outlawed. There's just no way to justify its existence.
www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...
Tehran today, under Israeli bombardment. According to Iranian monarchists in exile, only regime supporters are killed in these indiscriminate bombings...
The brutal, despicable, and grim side of war. The burial of the 150 elementary school girls killed in American-Israeli strikes on #Iran was today.
