An explanation is definitely in order.

I haven’t written anything for this publication for quite some time, and then, suddenly, new posts.

Since my last post in 2024, as you might know, I moved to China. It was a lengthy and complicated process, followed by a settling-in period that was a lot rougher than any China YouTuber would tell you up front. Trying to learn the language (我的中文不太好), as well as China’s history, culture, institutions, and political understandings can be very difficult to understand unless one is either born here or married into the culture. Even as an open-minded leftie carrying no Red Scare and Yellow Peril baggage with me, it was quite a rocky transition.

On the upside, the experience of moving here and making new friendships, as well as building ties with the African expat and student community, has changed how I think about writing and commentary.

For one, I’m much less interested in whatever story is dominating news headlines and social media timelines for a few days (especially anything to do with the extended nervous breakdown that passes for American, Canadian, and British politics). I’m much more interested in building a body of work capable of lasting. That means explainers and essays about the historic forces and hegemonic structures behind the news.

Which is why I’ve renamed this publication Full Context.

By listening to the news, or ending up in the wrong corners of social media, one can hardly be faulted for coming to the conclusion that things have either Always Been This Way, or Were Always Going To End Up This Way. And when turning to mainstream sources for context, there is so much distorted, left out, or flat-out lied about, that one would probably be better off not paying attention at all. What I hope to do with my ongoing work (إن شاء الله) is to show readers what came before the headlines, who benefits, what institutions are involved, what material interests are at stake, what history is being erased, and what outcomes the standard media narrative hopes to thwart.

I should also be honest that this relaunch isn’t coming after years of steady output. This re-up is coming after intermittent journalistic output, a long silence, and far too high of a Twitter-Post-to-Sound-Writing ratio. I haven’t been consistent with my writing since my permanent exit from mainstream publishing, after speaking plainly and truthfully that Israel is committing genocide, and that the Palestinian resistance has the moral and historical right to resist the eradication of their people. I continue to pray they win. But for the inconsistency and absences, I apologize.

I’ll also be launching the Full Context YouTube channel soon. It will follow the same purpose as this publication, with explainers, interviews, and historical breakdowns. The Substack will continue to be the main spot for essays, written analysis, and quick notes.

Thank you to everyone who stayed subscribed during the quiet period. Now that I’ve settled into life as a humble salaryman in China, and have gotten my schedule under control for the first time in years, I’m able to write regularly again. And to make sure it stays that way, my goals are simple: cut down on reactive takes, build a library of durable analysis; cut down on content for content’s sake, and build more constructive context.

See you soon.

On June 26th, Burkina Faso’s Minister of Communications Pingdwendé Gilbert Ouédraogo appeared on state television to announce the end of diplomatic relations with France, effective immediately. According to Ouédraogo, Paris maintained “neo-colonial ambitions” and were known to support the “subversive networks and the terrorists” bleeding the Sahel through endless waves of attacks on both military and civilian targets.

The buildup to this diplomatic severance was three years in the making. Only months after the military coup that put Burkinabé president Ibrahim Traoré in power, French troops were ordered out in early 2023, and the French ambassador recalled soon after. Then, in 2024, Burkina Faso expelled French diplomats. When Burkina Faso ended the Burkinabé-French military accord in 2023, the government insisted it was “not the end of diplomatic relations” between the two countries. But after two years of worsening relations and endless fighting against terror groups across the Sahel, Burkina Faso finally ended relations definitively in June 2026. For many who lionized Traoré, as well as the allied Sahel movement for self-determination, it came as a mortal blow against the former colonial master that had inflicted well over a century of bloodshed, suffering, and instability across the region.

And then, only days later, a photograph circulated across X (formerly Twitter) that nearly overshadowed this story. In the picture, Traoré could be seen shaking hands with Simon-Clément Seroussi, Israel’s ambassador to Côte d’Ivoire (and accredited ambassador to Benin, Togo, and Burkina Faso). The image in itself was proof of betrayal: the defiant country whose young leader had just faced down France, and become a folk hero to Africans dedicated to sovereign power over their own futures, had allegedly turned heel and embraced Israel. According to Seroussi’s own LinkedIn account, the handshake symbolized a continuance of the “longstanding ties” between Israel and Burkina Faso, and spoke of an “enduring friendship” between those countries.

What could possibly explain this?

Well, what happened in Koulouba was a credentials ceremony, the most routine event on the calendar of any newly-assigned ambassador. Burkina Faso did not sign any pacts with Israel, establish any new agreements, or commit to changing their consistent record of UN voting against Israel. It was a photographed handshake, much as another handshake was photographed with another Israeli ambassador in 2023. Unfortunately, for westerners who know next to nothing about the region or its history beyond Thomas Sankara’s martyrdom, developing countries who’ve committed to a revolutionary path exist as little more than action figurines who can be discarded the moment the sheen of novelty wears off, and once they begin doing the unpleasant things that states struggling for sovereignty must inevitably do.

Simon-Clément Seroussi is not posted to Ouagadougou. He resides in Abidjan, the commercial capital of Côte d’Ivoire, and, again, is accredited to four countries at once: Côte d’Ivoire, Togo, Benin and Burkina Faso, according to Israel’s own foreign ministry. This is not a new relationship. Burkina Faso’s diplomatic history with Israel goes back to 1961, not long after Upper Volta (Burkina Faso’s predecessor state) became independent from France. Relations were severed in 1973 under Sangoulé Lamizana, after the October War destroyed relations between not only Israel and the Arab nations of the Middle East, but almost every African nation save for Mauritius, Swaziland (now Eswatini), Lesotho, and Malawi. But in 1993, relations between Burkina Faso and Israel were restored after the Oslo agreement. In fact, 2008-dated Wikileaks documents show that former president Blaise Compaoré attempted to win favour with the US, by courting a closer relationship with Israel during the Zionist entity’s 60th anniversary celebrations.

Burkina Faso’s relationship with Israel is, of course, much different from its partner states Mali and Niger. Mali followed suit with the vast majority of Africa in 1973, and broke diplomatic relations with Israel. It has never restored them, given Mali and the US have historically enjoyed a strong relationship, especially in the post-9/11 period where Mali became a US partner in counterterrorism, and subsequently received aid and military training. Former Malian president Boubacar Keïta did meet briefly with Benjamin Netanyahu in Liberia, during a 2017 regional summit (and Netanyahu spoke of “warming” the relationship between their respective countries), but nothing of substance materialized from there.

Niger’s history with Israel is somewhat uneven: it cut ties in 1973, restored them after the Oslo agreement, then severed them again in 2002 during the Second Intifada. So while the other AES bloc nations have mostly maintained their distance from Israel, Burkina Faso’s current government inherited a diplomatic relationship from previous leadership that, like all too many African nations at the time, had sold out their national interests to the west in exchange for maintaining their grasp on power.

As things stand today, all of Burkina Faso’s non-AES neighbours (and members of broader ECOWAS economic bloc) have diplomatic relations with Israel. Côte d’Ivoire hosts an Israeli embassy in Abidjan, Togo and Benin are covered by Seroussi’s diplomatic assignment and Ghana has its own Israeli embassy in Accra. Relations with Côte d’Ivoire were re-established in 1980 (not long after the Egypt-Israel treaty of 1979), Togo in 1987 (amidst then-president Gnassingbé Eyadéma’s domestic economic crisis), Benin in 1992 (after the collapse of Kérékou’s government, and the country’s decisive break from socialist policy), and Ghana in 1994, after the Oslo agreement. Israel’s embassy reopened in Accra, in 2011.

Seroussi was not dispatched to Ouagadougou for a trade or military agreement, or any realignment of Burkina Faso’s foreign policy at all. Seroussi was one of a batch of 8 new envoys received in the same accreditation round, much as his predecessor Rony Yedidia Clein presented hers in 2023 along with 12 other envoys.

Incidentally, Clein’s handshake with Traoré also set off speculation about Burkina Faso’s secret pact with Israel, much later in 2025.

Seroussi’s diplomatic cohort represented Saudi Arabia, Angola, Somalia, the Sovereign Order of Malta, Indonesia, Tanzania and Bangladesh. Before any of these ambassadors shook Traoré’s hand, they first handed working copies of their diplomatic letters to Burkina Faso’s foreign minister Karamoko Jean Marie Traoré on the 25th of June. The originals were then presented to the head of state, who posed for routine ceremonial photographs – one of which would later become raw material for outrage-farming online.

Missing in all of this, is the fact that working copies were delivered the day before Burkina Faso cut diplomatic relations with France. In other words, the accreditation of Israeli ambassador Seroussi was already moving through the ordinary diplomatic machinery before the France announcement was made. Based on the online narrative pushed by a small US-based account calling itself the “Institute for Black Solidarity with Israel,” many seemed to believe that Burkina Faso had kicked out Paris, only to welcome in Tel Aviv immediately afterwards.

Receiving an ambassador’s letters of credence simply means recognizing that person as another state’s official representative. It does not mean friendship, ideological alignment, economic cooperation, military procurement, or combat training. It does not mean support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. States routinely receive ambassadors from countries they sanction, condemn, vote against, negotiate with, spy on, and in some cases engage in mutual combat with. Traoré’s photo with Seroussi was not followed by any announcement of a public security pact, trade agreement, or even a shift in Burkina Faso’s United Nations voting record. The complete extent of the scandal was a non-resident Israeli envoy presenting his paperwork to the head of state, in the same week as seven other diplomats, followed by diplomatic boilerplate on LinkedIn about “longstanding ties” and “enduring friendship.”

Seroussi’s words, mind you, not a Burkinabé statement of policy.

None of this means that all of Burkina Faso’s policies are clean, consistent, or above criticism. Many commentators and publications have already drawn attention to its crackdowns on journalists, Traoré’s public skepticism towards liberal democracy (whether justified or not), and anti-LGBT policies encoded into criminal law. But to many foreigners commenting on these matters, the AES states are not so much “states” as they are symbolic representations of their own fantasies of a perfect revolution. They should be unblemished proof that Africa has finally cast off its fetters, and are ready to pull down the US, Europe, and Israel from their imperialist thrones.

The reality is, the AES bloc are landlocked, poor, heavily sanctioned, diplomatically isolated, and bogged down in fighting longtime insurgencies highly suspected of being backed by France. They need functioning infrastructure, economic redevelopment, and a broader range of trade partners, in addition to weapons, intelligence, and breathing room. They are bordered by militarized, pro-western countries which would gladly accept any pretext to intervene with western backing, and crush their sovereignist project. A diplomatic photo opportunity does not make Burkina Faso pro-Israel; it is an acknowledgment that Burkina Faso is a state: weak in some ways, defiant in others, and forced to operate inside a world where every route to survival comes with the need for compromises.

Even when they come in the form of “bad optics” which appear, at best, unflattering to the type of people who care little about the Burkinabé struggle, and know even less.

On June 26, China’s central bank, the People’s Bank of China authorized Standard Bank (Africa’s largest bank by assets) along with the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, to work jointly as the “Renminbi Clearing Bank of Africa.” The arrangement is the first of its kind in China’s offshore RMB system: a continent-branded clearing bank, jointly operated by Standard Bank and ICBC, designed to clear yuan payments across 19 African markets, including Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, and Zimbabwe.

Standard Bank only joined CIPS (i.e. the Cross-border Interbank Payment System, China’s alternative to the US-based payment system CHIPS) in November 2025. Within four months of joining, it had processed about half a billion US dollars in yuan transactions. While African countries will continue to use the dollar to settle international transactions, the ability to settle in RMB gives the important strategic and economic advantage that at least some of their transactions can be settled without the US Federal Reserve’s involvement or even potential veto.

Much of the discourse around de-dollarization in developing countries revolves around a single, and oversimplified question: Will the Chinese RMB replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency? Once you put that way, the answer is obviously no. Not only do the conditions not exist for a modern-day Bretton Woods agreement that forces the RMB into every corner of the world, this isn’t a scenario that any Chinese economist or head of state would want to have happen. The Chinese strategy isn’t currency dominance, rather currency plurality instead.

As African firms buy more from China (and, in an ideal scenario for them, sell more goods into Chinese supply chains), their ability to pay directly in yuan is essential. The current status quo involves first converting local currency to US Dollars, then converting to RMB, which is not only inefficient, it introduces another layer of exchange risk into each transaction. Order placements, and their volume, can end up depending on what’s happening with the dollar’s value on that particular day. With a commercial bank in Africa offering direct currency settlement in yuan, this obstacle is now removed, and each party can transact based mostly on their mutual interest, rather than on whether the dollar’s value (or the US Office of Foreign Assets Control) could interfere.

As things are now, the yuan is the sixth most active currency for global payments, with a total share of less than three percent. In global central bank reserves, the yuan accounts for less than two percent. The dollar, on the other hand, accounts for roughly 57 percent. In terms of China’s own trade settlements with other countries, somewhere between a quarter and a third of its transactions are now settled in yuan.

The 1944 Bretton Woods agreement made the US Dollar the cornerstone of the postwar monetary order, and the development of trade and infrastructure through the eurodollar market made it nearly ubiquitous. The dollar became the world’s default settlement currency due in large part to its convenience; getting access to US dollars and settling transactions in US dollars (backed by gold until the 1970s) made for easy commerce between non-US firms and nations. What CIPS and the Renminbi Clearing Bank of Africa are doing, is making it easier for commerce between African nations and China.

Regardless whether one believes in the US and Europe-backed narrative that China is colonizing Africa, the fact of the matter is that China has been Africa’s largest trading partner for years. Last year alone, two-way trade between African countries and China rose nearly 18 percent. This past May, while the US and China continued to joust on mutual tariff policy, Beijing removed tariffs on imports from 53 African countries with which it has diplomatic relations. Along with the flow of goods comes the architecture for settling the transactions for those goods.

In a roundabout way, the US (specifically, the Joe Biden administration) is to thank for this development. For China, watching the US use CHIPS as a large-scale sanctions weapon against Russia was an object lesson in concentration risk; building a parallel payment system not only gave its own exporters a smoother channel for foreign transactions, it raised the question for exporters in other countries whether they ought to look for alternatives to the dollar.

For African banks and firms, the appeal of settling in yuan is less exciting geopolitically, but essential nonetheless. Unfortunately, US dollar liquidity in much of Africa is scarce and expensive. On top of being required for settling transactions with external buyers, the dollar is needed to pay for imports and service external debt (including those crushing debts many countries owe to the World Bank and the IMF). In fact, more than two-thirds of imports to the African continent are priced in US dollars; routing payments to Chinese firms through a chain of correspondent commercial banks in New York or London is slow incurs fees at every stop along the way. Clearing in yuan, on the other hand, cuts out these middlemen.

The de-dollarization debate often fixates on the dollar’s global reserve share, and treats any downward movement as the end times for US dollar hegemony. This is, in many ways foolish and misses the point. In fact, the global reserve share is the slowest-moving part of the global currency system; the last of lagging indicators. If there is any cause for excitement (or alarm, depending on one’s point of view), it’s that alternative systems that challenge dollar supremacy are right now being built and expanded upon. No, we are not looking at an American collapse, but we are, at least, seeing a viable pathway to the end of America’s ability to dictate terms to African countries, on how they participate in the global marketplace.

The moon over Caracas on the night of Friday, January 2nd was one night short of full, and for a few hours that moon was nearly the only light the city had. According to US president Donald Trump, American cyber-warfare units had reached into Venezuela’s power grid and switched off all the lights in the capital.

Under the light of that moon, US helicopters came in low and fast, trading fire with Venezuelan air defenses. The operation required more than 150 aircraft: fighters, bombers, surveillance aircraft, intelligence platforms and helicopters. American strikes disabled those air defenses, hitting military sites around the capital while Delta Force moved through the dark toward the home of Venezuela’s president.

By the time the soldiers reached Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, the president and the first lady were trying to get behind the steel door of a safe room. They didn’t make it in time. According to General Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the assault on the compound lasted less than thirty minutes. By morning, Maduro and Flores were packed aboard the USS Iwo Jima in the Caribbean Sea, and from there Maduro was flown to New York to face charges brought under American law.

Washington called the operation an arrest. This “arrest” cost the lives of anywhere between 58-100 people (depending on whether one prefers US or Venezuelan sources), including civilians who died when American strikes hit residential areas. At least two civilian women were identified among the dead: Rosa González in Catia La Mar, and Johana Rodríguez Sierra, a mother of three, near El Hatillo.

Arrests don’t normally require bomber aircraft, or for a foreign country’s sovereign integrity to be violated.

Article 2, paragraph (4) of the United Nations Charter prohibits the use of force against another state’s territorial integrity or political independence. International law also recognizes personal immunity for incumbent heads of state before foreign national courts. But, as always, Washington had a ready-made exception for their violation of international agreements they themselves signed. Their “loophole” is that Maduro was never a legitimate president to begin with. The superseding indictment calls him Venezuela’s “de facto” ruler, which places the executive branch’s political judgment about his legitimacy inside the criminal case against Maduro.

The closest American political precedent is Manuel Noriega, whom US forces extracted from Panama in 1990, and tried in Miami. But for most of his tenure, Noriega was not Panama’s formal president. In fact, he was commander of the Panamanian Defense Forces, and never claimed the title of President. The Panamanian National Assembly declared him “Head of Government” on the 15th of December 1989, only five days before the US invasion of Panama. So while Maduro’s case isn’t completely unprecedented, it does point to something that every developing nation and emerging power in the world should take note of: America can simply claim the right to decide that a foreign president is not, in fact, a legitimate president, and therefore not entitled to any immunities or protections attached to the office. They can fly warplanes into your country, kill your soldiers and civilians, kidnap your head of state, and say “This is all being done by the book.”

But putting Maduro in an American prison was only half of what the operation accomplished. The other half was putting Venezuelan policy under American management. Two days after the raid, Delcy Rodríguez invited the United States to collaborate with her government on a new agenda, and announced that Venezuela would pursue what she called “balanced and respectful” relations with the country that had just bombed its capital, killed scores of people, and kidnapped her predecessor from his own home. Four days later, Trump announced that he was cancelling a planned second wave of attacks, because Venezuela had begun releasing what western news and human-rights agencies described as “political prisoners” and was cooperating with Washington. Less than two weeks after Maduro’s capture, Rodríguez was meeting with CIA Director John Ratcliffe in Caracas to discuss intelligence cooperation and “economic stability.” For any country whose primary natural resource is oil, it’s universally understood what American intelligence means by “economic stability.”

Under Rodríguez, the Venezuelan government immediately got to work rewriting the country’s hydrocarbons law, stripping away much of the operational, export, and revenue controls of Venezuela’s state oil firm PDVSA. Washington’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) then authorized Western oil companies BP, Chevron, Eni, Repsol, and Shell to operate in Venezuela. Any new oil contracts that Venezuela wants to sign are subject to prior OFAC approval.

Any companies based in or connected to China, Russia and Iran were, of course, excluded. Even Venezuela’s oil royalties, production levies and federal taxes have to pass through a collection of US Treasury accounts, while US Energy Secretary Chris Wright declared that Washington would continue controlling Venezuelan oil-sale proceeds until Venezuela established what he called a “representative government.” Long story short, America achieved the outcome they’d been salivating for in the nearly 30 years since the election of Hugo Chávez: it is once again in control of Venezuela’s oil.

Washington rewarded each step. In March, the United States formally recognized Rodríguez as Venezuela’s leader. In April, it removed the personal sanctions against her. Her government opened Venezuela’s mining sector to private and foreign exploitation, promised legal and security guarantees to prospective investors, and hosted delegations of American officials and corporations in Caracas. Donald Trump repeatedly praised Rodríguez for cooperating with the United States and for rapidly opening Venezuela’s oil and mineral wealth to foreign capital. Washington never needed to install its preferred opposition figure in Miraflores. It had something more useful: the institutions of the existing Venezuelan state carrying out a program Washington could supervise, approve and reward. Maduro’s government survived in personnel. Its policy of resistance did not.

The following month, during Ramadan, America and Israel began a joint bombing campaign against Iran. But it didn’t go the way they expected. Instead, Iran not only withstood the bombing long enough to force an end to major hostilities, it inflicted enough pain on its aggressors that the best outcome available to Washington became a return to the status quo before the bombing campaign began. And according to the signed Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding between the United States and Iran, that is far from what Washington got.

When the US and Israel declared and demonstrated their objectives during the initial wave of bombings against Iran on February 28th, 2026, you could strip them down to three central goals: fracture Iran’s leadership, destroy its nuclear program, and disable the ballistic-missile force that allowed Iran to retaliate across the region. The ancillary goal, whether they wanted to say it explicitly or not, was to attempt to humiliate and demoralize the Iranian people into believing they were unsafe as long as they resisted outside aggression.

The political objective was unmistakable from the moment the campaign began. On day one, the bombings killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. While bombs were still falling around the ears of the Iranian public, Trump held a press conference to tell Iranian people: “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take.”

This is the ongoing political logic of the US, going back to the Cold War: kill or subvert the leadership of a non-compliant country, destroy its supporting institutions, and install an obedient political body to inherit what remains. The operation in Caracas showed how quickly political decapitation could be converted into a new relationship with the United States. The bombing of Iran was supposed to be the larger version of the same lesson.

The United States and Israel killed the Supreme Leader, bombed military targets, and infamously killed civilians, including 120 children and 37 staff members at Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School. But what they did not do was collapse Iran’s willpower. If anything, they only strengthened it. Iran named Ali Khamenei’s son Mojtaba Khamenei as its Supreme Leader, and the state not only continued to command its armed forces, but decentralized it using the Mosaic Strategy, and retaliated with such unexpected force and accuracy on US military bases within Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE, that military bases were emptied out, airports shut down, and the US military’s THAAD radar was damaged in a drone attack. Israelis were also forced to hide out in bomb shelters. Subjected, for once, to the kind of shock-and-awe campaign they so readily support against their neighbours.

And after all of that, the Iranian opposition did not, in fact, take control of the government. The existing government didn’t capitulate to the demands of its aggressors. Washington and Tel Aviv had slammed into the mountainside of Iranian resilience, their first goal failed.

As for the Iranian missile program, the signed MoU contains no provision addressing the dismantling or scaling-down of Iran’s ballistic-missile force. There is language about nuclear weapons, enriched material, sanctions, frozen assets, oil waivers, Hormuz and a future final deal. But the missile force that allowed Iran to retaliate across the region is not surrendered in the text. So far in the Switzerland peace talks, Iranian missile defense does not seem to be under discussion. Even US Vice President J.D. Vance has, amazingly, gone on the record asserting that Iran has a right to defend itself. The second goal has also failed.

Which brings us to nuclear weapons. Under the signed MoU, Iran reaffirms that it will not procure or develop nuclear weapons. The current status of its nuclear program is supposed to be maintained in the interim, the enriched-material stockpile is to be handled through a mutually agreed mechanism, and downblending is to take place with the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency. But nuclear enrichment, Iran’s future nuclear needs and the final framework are still left for the next round of negotiations. Which more or less takes the nuclear question back to where it was before the war was launched to begin with.

Regime change failed. Missile disarmament wasn’t even mentioned in the MoU. The nuclear question was deferred under an interim restraint. Iran did not emerge untouched; no country bombed for one hundred and seven days emerges untouched. But the United States accepted a signed memorandum that looks nothing like the political and military transformation it sold to the public when the war began. And it appears to be on course for a “deal” that codifies a humiliating military loss.

But at least the Strait of Hormuz is re-opened, right?

Well, that depends on whether the Switzerland agreement holds, and whether Israel can be brought to heel by a Trump administration that has, so far, given them a blank slate to inflict its Lebensraum campaign on Lebanon. But the discussion around the strait often borders on bizarre, as western media and politicians describe the maritime passage as if it’s a global public commons. Multiple mainstream news outlets, in addition to political officials like the EU’s Luigi Di Maio, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Donald Trump himself, have referred to the Strait of Hormuz as “international waters.” But Hormuz is not, in fact, international waters. It is a strait used for international navigation, and it runs through the territorial waters of Iran on the northeastern side, and Oman on the southwestern side.

After the contents of the MoU were revealed, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said “Freedom of navigation must be restored toll-free.” But the signed text of the MoU doesn’t settle the long-term question that way. It does give Washington sixty days of no-charge passage. But after that, the future administration and maritime services of the Strait are still supposed to be discussed with Oman and other nearby states, in line with the sovereign rights of those states whose coasts run along the strait.

In addition to the reopening of the Strait, there’s the question of Iran’s “payment” from the US, starting with a multibillion dollar lump sum. Contrary to what many have asserted, Iran was not paid with American money. This was Iran’s own assets, which have been frozen since the Iranian Revolution. The signed MoU commits the United States to make Iran’s frozen or restricted funds fully available for use, and to issue the licences and authorizations needed for the Central Bank of Iran to direct payments to whomever it sees fit. Reuters has reported the restricted-assets figure at roughly twenty-five billion dollars, which are assets that sanctions had prevented Iran from using. A financial blockade, for the purpose of starving a country into submission, does not become generosity when the blockading power agrees to loosen it.

And then there’s the three hundred billion dollars, which, if one is algorithmically pushed into the wrong corners of social media, is a cheque being written by American taxpayers. The MoU does call for the United States and regional partners to develop a reconstruction and economic-development plan worth at least three hundred billion dollars. But all legitimate reporting on this money describes it as a private investment and financing mechanism. It’s not US taxpayer money, or just some gift handed to Iran out of the goodness of Washington’s heart. Not even the American people get that kind of gift, it’s something you’re only entitled to if your passport says “Israel” on it.

Venezuela and Iran are obviously two very different countries, with a completely different set of circumstances. One emerged as Bolivarian socialism struggling against and gradually overcoming a US-backed banana republican order; the other is an Islamic republic that emerged from a popular uprising against a British- and American-backed monarchy. They have different political economies, social bases and theories of the state. While they didn’t share ideology, they did share strategic disobedience over decades, and a willingness to fight western attempts to recapture their oil economies. Which naturally meant that neither country could accept Washington’s attempts to determine its leadership, alliances, control over natural resources, and political destiny.

But the decisive difference between their means of resistance was the ability to make western intervention so costly that it would have been better to leave them alone. In addition to its geography dooming any attempt at political kidnapping to fail, Iran also has a robust missile and defense industry and military strategy capable of sustaining retaliation, managing regional defense without relying on a central command structure, and, through its cheaply produced but highly effective drone fleet, controlling the sea passage through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas had been moving.

Venezuela on the other hand has massive oil reserves, and a large standing military, but it does not have an equivalent way to transfer the cost of a US attack back to American bases, regional partners in South and Central America and the Caribbean, shipping lanes, and ultimately the cost of living inside the US.

Iran’s retaliations, and its closure of the Strait of Hormuz, reflected that cost into the global economy. Oil prices rose rapidly, the shipping of oil, natural gas, fertilizer, and other goods essential to the global economy was disrupted, and American inflation reached 4.2 per cent in May, its highest annual rate since April 2023. Energy prices were 23.5 per cent higher than a year earlier and accounted for more than sixty per cent of the monthly increase in the consumer-price index. And on top of all that, Dubai’s tourism industry cratered while its real estate market took a major hit. The mere idea of peace, far from guaranteed and easily derailed by Israel’s relentless pursuit of ethnic cleansing in southern Lebanon, produced a market rebound nonetheless.

Venezuela couldn’t impose a comparable continuing cost for violating its borders, or its integrity as a sovereign state. Even though the operation obviously required months, if not years of intelligence work, and the cost of deploying aircraft, soldiers, and naval vessels, no part of the operation resulted in a long-term burden capable of forcing Washington to bargain over Maduro’s return. The cost was easily paid.

Which is indicative of a brutal reality: the so-called “international order” does not treat sovereignty as a right among states. Despite how often one hears the truism “Israel has the right to exist” repeated by politicians and mainstream news, it’s fairly obvious that any smaller state who’s not willing to let western countries steal their treasures and run their political affairs, has no such right. Which means there’s a price to state sovereignty, and that’s a price that has to be collected from the US, Israel, and even EU member states like France for violating it. When smaller countries can raise the price of violating their sovereignty high enough, the same powers that call their governments illegitimate suddenly discover words like “ceasefire,” “negotiation,” and “mutual respect.”

Of course this isn’t to celebrate, say, the fragments of intercepted missiles landing on innocent people’s homes. Ordinary people in countries like Jordan and Bahrain often suffer the consequences of a devil’s bargain they never agreed to, once the fragments of missiles and interceptors colliding in midair proceed to fall on their homes. A world in which smaller states require the capacity to devastate others, in order to remain sovereign, is not a sane world or a just one. But when it comes down to it, there’s only one language that imperialist countries seem to understand.

So next time a smaller country is described as dangerous because it’s building missiles, hardening bases, or coming down hard on political opposition that begs for western intervention, the first question should not be whether these countries or their measures are “threatening.” The first question should be what that country expects Washington to do, if they don’t end up paying a very high cost for doing it.

Some quick thoughts on today’s statement by ICC prosecutor Karim Khan:

Of the 12 ICC cases currently under investigation, 5 are in Africa. Of the 5 concluded investigations, 4 are in Africa. Every defendant convicted by the ICC thus far is African. As noted by international lawyers and political scientists over the past decade, the ICC is widely seen as biased at best. At worst, its critics charge the ICC is hardly fit for purpose in successfully prosecuting war criminals outside of the African continent, or even attempting to prosecute the crimes of neocolonial proxies such as Saudi Arabia (much less their benefactors in the US, the UK, and other NATO-aligned nations).

The warrant on Netanyahu and Gallant may be groundbreaking in terms of symbolism, but the warrant itself has no teeth without willingness on the part of the US (which is not an ICC signatory and has flatly refused to arrest either), or the UK (which is an ICC signatory, and will not clarify if they will comply). Neither is it especially meaningful if the states which directly supply Israel’s arms and financing face no criminal repercussions.

Not to understate the gravity of the warrant, of course. But without the stated willingness of ICC signatories to prosecute Netanyahu and Gallant if they land on or fly over those countries, the warrant is a weightless statement. And given that none of Israel’s major financial and military partners appears to be willing to restrict the flow (much less stanch it altogether), the ICJ’s genocide investigation will conclude years after Israel either completes its objectives or withdraws on terms unimpeded by the ICJ’s ruling this past May.

In other words, without the power of enforcement, what good are human rights laws but a polite suggestion to Israel?

Yesterday, the US House of Representatives voted to pass House Resolution 1449, titled “Condemning the global rise of antisemitism and calling upon countries and international bodies to counter antisemitism.” However unobjectionable the language of the bill’s title might be, the contents of the bill are certainly alarming. Included in the preamble to the resolution were the following lines:

Whereas, in 2016, the 31 member states of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance adopted a legally nonbinding “working definition” of antisemitism, an important internationally recognized tool to increase understanding of antisemitism;

Whereas, on May 25, 2023, the White House issued the United States National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism, making clear that the fight against antisemitism is a national, bipartisan priority that must be successfully conducted through a whole-of-government-and-society approach;

The “working definition” of antisemitism, as drafted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Association, has for years functioned as a tool to polarize public opinion on Israel, to smear the Palestinian resistance as inherently antisemitic, and to broadly define any substantive criticism of Israel as antisemitic. Contained within the IHRA’s working definition are the following actions considered to be examples of antisemitism: 

• Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.

• Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.

• Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.

• Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

Moreover, the IHRA asserts Antisemitic acts are criminal when they are so defined by law (for example, denial of the Holocaust or distribution of antisemitic materials in some countries). For countries such as Canada and the UK, which have laws against hate speech that can result in prison sentencing, folding the IHRA guidelines into criminal law can effectively mean that criticizing Israel for its genocidal campaign in Gaza must come with a great deal of prevarication and throat-clearing in order to avoid legal repercussions.

In the US, where hate speech that doesn’t accompany a criminal act is protected under the First Amendment, the IHRA working definition can still have a pronounced chilling effect. H.R.6090, the Antisemitism Awareness Act of 2023 (which passed the House in May of last year), also relies on the IHRA working definition. When applied to Title VI investigations of discrimination at colleges and universities, could result in higher learning institutions losing their federal funding if they aren’t sufficiently punitive of students and faculty who criticize Israel’s ongoing human rights atrocities. 

And it isn’t as if the IHRA working definition is the sole definition that the global political community can draw from, in creating or revising legislation to protect Jewish people from antisemitic bigotry and violence. An alternative framework was created by the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute in 2021, to decouple Judaism and Jewishness from the state of Israel. It was brushed aside by Congress, and has gone almost unacknowledged in most Western countries. Per international politics writer Sana Saeed:

Despite opposition by the ACLU, free speech organizations such as PEN, and human rights organizations such as Amnesty International, H.R.6090 passed the House, with only 70 Democrats and 21 Republicans voting against the measure. Its Senate counterpart S.4127, will very likely pass, and be signed by Joe Biden into law. 

The passage of H.R.1449 came at a rather inauspicious time for American opposition to the genocide in Gaza, as the very same day, Senator Bernie Sanders’ motions to curtail the flow of munitions to Israel were overwhelmingly defeated. The Senate’s rejection of an even slight restriction on US military support comes in the wake of President Biden’s failure to offer any punitive measures, recriminations, or even mild criticism for Israel having blown past its 30-day deadline to cease the blockading of humanitarian aid to Gaza. Which not only gave further lie to the myth that Biden and Kamala Harris are “working tirelessly” towards a ceasefire, but brought yet another weasel-faced statement from House representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:

AOC, by the way, voted for H.R.1449.

After a full day of the US political machinery strangling opposition to the genocide in Gaza, both on Capitol Hill and within the UN assembly, and for all of the lofty words and ink spilled within the borders of Israel’s largest benefactor on the matter of human rights, the genocide continues unabated nonetheless.

At this morning’s UN Security council meeting, members voted on a draft resolution moved by its 10 elected members (E10). The resolution called for an immediate, unconditional, and permanent ceasefire by all parties, and in the subsequent paragraph, called for the Hamas-led coalition to immediately and unconditionally release of all hostages captured during the October 7th raid. It also called for the provisions contained in UNSC Resolution 2735 to be implemented, including the withdrawal of Israeli troops, unhindered distribution of humanitarian aid in Gaza, and the beginning of a multi-year reconstruction plan.

The draft resolution had the support of 14 UN Security Council members, which might as well have been none, because it was, of course, vetoed by the United States. 

“We made clear throughout negotiations we could not support an unconditional ceasefire that failed to release the hostages,” wrote Robert A. Wood, alternative US representative to the UN, in a letter to UN Security Council President (and primary US ambassador to the UN) Linda Thomas-Greenfield, “Because, as this Council has previously called for, a durable end to the war must come with the release of the hostages. These two urgent goals are inextricably linked.” 

The gap in linkage being that, according to the view of the Biden administration, the Gaza coalition’s release of the remaining Israeli hostages must come as a precondition to the end of Israel’s genocidal campaign. And because the remainder of the Security Council would not give Israel the maneuvering room, in the even that all hostages and remains couldn’t be accounted for, to continue that campaign unabated, the US effectively voted for the slaughter to continue.

This isn’t, however, the major topic under discussion in US media.

This was, of course, bound to happen, once incoming Delaware Representative Sarah McBride’s positive news cycle was masticated into the endless right-wing culture war against all things “woke.” This years-long campaign is, of course, the latest mutation in an unbroken narrative of mythologized decadence and degeneracy preached by American conservatives since the revivalist movement of the 1970s. But the rapid-cycle positive feedback loop between social media and legacy media has produced a distortion effect rather akin to a fishbowl lens, warping the image of politics to push cultural flashpoints to the foreground, and relegating everything else to the back. Whatever issue gains the fastest traction on social media therefore gains the fastest traction in the news cycle, regardless of its truthfulness, longevity, and overall impact on the day-to-day lives of people unlucky enough to fall off the media radar (if they were ever on it, in the first place).

One can see the pernicious effect of this culture war feedback loop reflected in the way western politics are conducted: UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy (a man more than happy to co-opt the anger and frustration of protesting Black Brits when Labor was the opposition party, and then playing sheepdog once they’re returned to power) recently invoking his enslaved ancestors to call Vladimir Putin a modern-day plantation owner, and then seeming to forget those ancestors exist less than a month later, when admonishing the use of the term “genocide” to describe what is happening in Gaza. Elon Musk claiming, for whatever bizarre reason, that diversity, equity, and inclusion policies were somehow responsible for the numerous mechanical problems plaguing Boeing 737 passenger planes, and then cheering Trump’s incoming cabinet of unqualified buffoons, cronies, accused pedophiles and rapists, and Deep State accomplices.

The ability of politicians and media to use the Culture War as a smokescreen for the continuance of plunder and exploitation at home, and imperialism and genocide abroad is nothing short of staggering. By pinning a target on the back of Sarah McBride, Nancy Mace (who once described herself as a supporter of LGBT equality) not only managed to push Gaza off the front pages, but accelerated the shift of politics from concrete reality to abstractions of identity and ideology. Today, House Speaker Mike Johnson announced that single-sex facilities in the Capital and House Office Buildings (i.e. bathrooms, locker rooms) are “reserved for individuals of that biological sex.” Democratic leadership, of course, offered little pushback, and even McBride herself capitulated in a boilerplate statement on Twitter. 

And then, once social media furor on either side of the transgenders-in-bathrooms argument has died down, McBride will, as per her staunchly pro-Israel statements to Jewish Insider in 2023, vote for US funding and arms to continue to flow to Israel, which will be used to continue the campaign of genocide, torture, and rape against Palestinian people. Because, of course, Sarah McBride, the first openly transgender member of the US Congress, was funded to the tune of over $38,000 according to AIPAC Tracker. Which further demonstrates the only true viable multipartisan consensus in the Western world is that Israel — and all other western proxies in the MENA region — have an unfettered right to inflict whatever atrocities they want. 

And after the anti-wokes and culture warriors have had their turn at the trough, whether one more term under Trump, or two consecutive terms under JD Vance, the technocrats and institutionalists within the Democratic party will, of course, come roaring back to power with promises to enact sweeping change and restore the rights and dignity of marginalized people ground beneath the heel of America’s collective MAGA fever dream. Bombs will continue to rain down on the anti-Israel resistance and civilians alike, America’s working poor will continue to slide into wretched penury, and marginalized minorities will continue to be offered token representation in media, business, and government as a empty and anemic mea culpa for their suffering.

When a state has the money, the surplus arms, and the ability to nullify any multinational steps towards peaceful resolution that it wants, still manage to fail at fulfilling the needs of its own people, and still manage to slide into global irrelevance, what else can it do besides periodically slap down marginalized people and call that a culture?

Credit: Bloomberg TV

An interesting opening gambit, to say the least. Lai, a longtime critic of the Chinese government (and whose supporters during the 2019-2020 Hong Kong protests loudly advocated for a return to British rule) faces charges alleging a conspiracy to collude with foreign powers, and to publish seditious material. His trial, along with the “Hong Kong 47” resumes this week. At the time of the group’s arrest, China faced a two-pronged PR attack with the protests on one end, and inflated accusations of genocide against Xinjiang region’s Uyghur population on the other.

But it’s rather interesting that freedom of the press and individual speech was the UK’s angle of criticism for China, given its recent crackdown on anti-Zionist speech. Only two weeks ago, Haim Bresheeth, founder of Jewish voices for Palestine, a retired film studies professor, and born Israeli, was arrested by London Metro police during a protest in front of the residence of Israeli ambassador Tzipi Hotovely. Bresheeth’s crime, according to the police, was support of a proscribed organization. In his own words:

“They cannot win against Hamas, they cannot win against Hezbollah, they cannot win against the Houthis. They cannot win against the united resistance to the genocide they have started.”

It doesn’t end there. In October, UK counterterrorism police raided the home of Asa Winstanley, an internationally-known journalist who writes for Electronic Intifada. Winstanley was not charged, but his electronic devices were confiscated. And over the summer, Richard Medhurst, a longtime critic of western imperialism, was arrested for voicing similar sentiments regarding Israel’s genocidal campaign, especially with regards to the lack of long-term viability behind the strategy of ethnic cleansing in Gaza, and aggression against Yemen, Iran, and Lebanon.

Normally, reporters present for the G20 summit are not able to stay for the duration of the meetings between leaders, and Chinese security was well within its power to usher press members out of the room. But Starmer obviously knew what he was doing with those opening remarks — raising the spectre of Chinese repression against its citizens and the press, and anticipating that reporters would catch at least part of his remarks while being escorted out.

On the other hand, the G20 is not a UN meeting, and Starmer certainly has no room to posture. With the possibility of a new US-led tariff regime looming over the events, and China’s increased influence in Latin America and the Asian Pacific, it was a rather bizarre choice for Starmer to pander to western press with those opening comments. Especially given the UK is not only providing military assistance to Israel in order to prosecute a genocide, but stretching the definitions of its counter-terrorism legislation at home to stifle activists and journalists who speak out against that genocide.

As with the United States’ anemic attempts to assert itself as a viable and ongoing partner to Asian Pacific countries during the APEC Summit in Peru, the UK government must, by now, be well aware that its diminished empire no longer provides the weight of military and economic hegemony behind its Prime Minister’s words.

Welcome to a new age, lads. The world is moving on with or without you.

This, of course, brought a flood of negative responses on Twitter. 

The announcement was indeed an embarrassment, but for a completely different reason than the brain-scrambled right wing of Twitter seems to think. Blinken was not announcing US investment or aid for Peru, but instead putting a charitable spin on the fact that Caltrain (the San Francisco to San José rail service, which recently upgraded to an all-electrical fleet) found a purchaser to take its disused Diesel engine and railcar fleet off its hands.

In exchange for 19 locomotives and 90 passenger cars, the city of Lima paid $6.32 million. In other words, Blinken’s announcement didn’t represent a cost to US taxpayers; it represented a quick and profitable means for Caltrain to get the obsolete hulks out of storage.

However useful the trains may be for Lima’s commuters though, the announcement paled in comparison to events a day earlier and 35 miles north in the city of Chancay, where Chinese president Xi Jinping attended the opening ceremony for the city’s newly-completed mega port:

The massive deepwater port, the largest of its kind in the South American west coast, has the capacity to dock 18,000 ultra-large container vessels, will reduce shipping times between Shanghai and Peru from 35 days to 23 days (as ULCVs will no longer need to use Mexico’s ports as a transfer point), reduce shipping costs by 20%, generate $4.5 billion annually, and bring approximately 8000 jobs to the region. 

Having invested $1.3 billion USD into the project, and with state-owned firm COSCO’s exclusive operation of the port, Puerto Chancay represents the largest accomplishment for China’s Belt and Road Initiative thus far. With the Peruvian government’s $10 billion investment into planned railway lines from Barranca to Ica, scheduled improvements to the Pan-American highway, and real estate investments in the region already picking up, Puerto Chancay represents a potential 2-3% boost in growth for the Peruvian economy.

As rapidly as Peru has been modernizing its infrastructure and technology, and as liberalized it has been with its willingness to engage in foreign investment and free trade, the country struggled since the early 2010s to find an investment partner for the construction of its deepwater port. With a water depth of 18 metres, and Chancay’s convenient proximity to the Pan-American Highway, US investment in the project could have created even larger access to Latin America and the Asian Pacific for American firms, as well as helped rebuild trust in a region that has mostly been ravaged by extractionist US foreign policy. 

But it took until 2019 for Peru to find an investment partner for the project. Having adopted a policy of economic, infrastructure, and technological improvement for its lesser-developed trade partners, China (through the COSCO shipping conglomerate) partnered with Peruvian mining firm Volcan to redesign and redevelop the project in order to increase its ambitious scope. Five years later, China now has an export doorway to move finished goods to and through South America, and South America has an export doorway to move agricultural and natural resource goods to China. 

While the bow-cutting ceremony on this multibillion dollar project was happening, Anthony Blinken was rehearsing a speech to announce the arrival of old, obsolete diesel trains in Peru’s capital. Unsurprisingly, US media did not take the inauguration of Puerto Chancay well, calling the megaport’s opening a sign that South America is “disrespecting the US,” and that the Chinese had gained “a foothold in America’s Backyard.” To US observers, in keeping with the long-dead Monroe Doctrine, any business conducted by China or Russia — regardless whether profitable opportunities had long since been passed over by America — necessarily represents a threat to US interests. Global south nations aren’t of course, populated by human beings, but abstracted away by numbers on spreadsheets to justify a two century-long policy of plunder and wanton slaughter.

With the Trump administration incoming, and a tariff increase (of some size, if not the self-immolating figure of 60%) on Chinese-produced goods almost certain to arrive with it, the global south appears to be finally coming out from underneath the shadow of economic and military force inflicted by the US and its western allies. With a senior partner in China (which of course makes these investments for long-term profit far more than any pious sense of altruism), countries like Peru as well as Trinidad & Tobago, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Chile have completed the sort of projects (highways, hydroelectric dams, fiber optic networks) that they wouldn’t have been able to accomplish on their own. Without firing a shot, China has not only effectively displaced the US as the world’s leading hegemonic power, it’s done so to the measurable, material benefit of its partners in the developing world.

There are, of course, major exceptions to this trend. In the past, Congolese mines have been massively undervalued by Chinese firms, and the paltry infrastructure investments promised in return have not been fully honoured. Mismanagement and even physical abuse by Chinese management staff in Zambia’s copper mines soured the nation’s mood enough to elect a president who campaigned on a platform promising economic sovereignty. In the interim, President Hichilema lobbied western interests to help Zambia restructure its debt, and re-opened Zambia to the IMF (which, through its disastrous structural adjustment programs in the 1970s, gutted Zambia and reduced it from one of Africa’s richest nations to one of its poorest).

But these exceptions pale in comparison to the policies of military entrenchment, forced austerity, and political capture that tend to mark any partnership that global south countries engage with the US. 

Though Puerto Chancay might be the last megaproject of its kind in China’s Belt and Road strategy, when compared with Blinken’s train announcement, it is certainly emblematic of an emerging truth. The age of American global dominance is coming to a close, and along with a Chinese century comes the hope that the west’s former imperial subjects can finally become a new First World in their own right.

The 2026 APEC Summit, by the way, will be held in China.

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin,

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer,

Bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

By the time Wilfred Owen reached 18 years of age, he had already charted out his life’s path. An ardent reader and devotee of John Keats, two of his poems written in the prior year (Written in a Wood, September 1910, and Sonnet: Written at Teignmouth, on a Pilgrimage to Keats’s House) were written in Keats’ honour. As the imperial expansion of European powers augered towards all-out war, Owen worked patiently and inexorably towards his calling in poetry.

Hailing from a lower middle-class family (who, if he were to be believed in his youth, had descended from aristocracy and fallen into pastoralism), Owen was hungry for beauty in all its forms. During his stay in Wimbledon in the fall of 1911, he was a frequent visitor of galleries and museums in London. Of his time at the British Museum, he wrote of spending “hours in subdued ecstasy,” devouring Keats’ manuscripts, studying their handwriting, and making note of the corrections. 

When Germany declared war on France in August of 1914, Owen was working as a tutor in France. By dint of his family’s class position, which denied him the prerequisite knowledge of the Greek language, his near-lifelong dream of attending Oxford had nearly evaporated. To gain a new perspective (and perhaps enough worldliness to edge his way into the university’s vaunted halls), he took up a position as an English teacher at the Berlitz school in Bordeaux. 

He learned the French fluently enough to develop a Bordeaux accent, and a love for the café culture (though, in his letters to his mother, he assured her that he hadn’t fallen into the habit of indulging wine). Over the summer, he accepted an offer as a private tutor for in the Pyrenees for the Léger family. The family’s matriarch, a Parisian businesswoman, required English before her return to the city in the fall. By the time news of the war reached the Léger summer home, Owen was rather enjoying his full-time duties between improving the Madame’s English, and entertaining the Légers’ daughter Nénette with duets on the piano, and games of hide-and-seek.

Throughout the time he spent in France, Owen sought to improve his chances of study at Oxford by ingratiating himself with influential people. In fear of letting his talents stagnate, continued to work on his poetry. However, by 1915, the war had cast a pall over Bordeaux. It was also becoming increasingly likely that Britain would conscript its soldiers, and with the army opening its officer ranks to the lower middle class, Owen chose to enlist rather than be drafted. 

Though Owen spent the vast majority of the war at home in Britain, due to suffering a concussion from falling into the crater of an exploded mortar, his naive, romantic view of war had given way to exhausted cynicism. 

From Exposure (1917):

Watching, we hear the mad gusts tugging on the wire, 

Like twitching agonies of men among its brambles. 

Northward, incessantly, the flickering gunnery rumbles, 

Far off, like a dull rumour of some other war. 

       What are we doing here?

During his convalescent stay in Edinburgh, Owen met fellow writer and poet Sigfried Sassoon. The two struck a deep, profound relationship which, some historians suggest, may have been a romantic one. Himself once a dreamer of patriotism and empire, Sassoon had quickly been plunged into the horrors of trench warfare. Soon afterwards, his poetry began to reflect the depression and trauma of an emerging modernism, fueled by the bodies of young men ground and mingled into lifeless meat for the territorial aspirations of idle aristocrats.

From The Counter-Attack (1918):

An officer came blundering down the trench:

“Stand-to and man the fire step!” On he went ...

Gasping and bawling, “Fire-step ... counter-attack!”

Then the haze lifted. Bombing on the right

Down the old sap: machine-guns on the left;

And stumbling figures looming out in front.

“O Christ, they’re coming at us!” Bullets spat,

And he remembered his rifle ... rapid fire ...

And started blazing wildly ... then a bang

Crumpled and spun him sideways, knocked him out

To grunt and wriggle: none heeded him; he choked

And fought the flapping veils of smothering gloom,

Lost in a blurred confusion of yells and groans ...

Down, and down, and down, he sank and drowned,

Bleeding to death. The counter-attack had failed.

The following year, wracked with what appeared to be survivor’s guilt, Sassoon returned to active combat in the Western Front. Less than two months later, he was shot in the head — a friendly fire incident. He returned to England, this time for good. Owen would follow in his footsteps, departing for France as the Alliance was making its final push towards a decisive victory against Germany. 

He returned to England as a corpse. 

Wilfred Owen was killed while attempting to take the western side of the Oise-Sambre Canal. Shouting for the men under his command to fashion a makeshift bridge from wooden planks, he was hit by German machine-gun fire. Over a thousand men were killed in the attempt to cross the canal and breach German lines, which ultimately failed.

The survivors of the attempt would ultimately cross the canal via an existing road bridge, just a few kilometres south.

Over a hundred years later, and millions upon millions more dead in service to — and as a result of — the boundless greed and ambition of the ruling class, the poetry and symbolism of the anti-war movement that emerged in the wake of The Great War has amounted to less than nothing. 

The poppy, once a symbol of the blood of young men who died for no purpose relevant to their own lives or that of their communities, now serves the opposite purpose: a gauche signifier of support for more war, more territorial aggression, more ethnic cleansing. The gallantry and virtue of the military officer is not only taken for granted, but social compliance with “honoring the troops” is strictly enforced, no matter how vile and inhumane the accounts of their killing, torture, rape, and bodily desecration of civilians and enemy combatants alike. 

How many writers would have emerged from Iraq, if not for the 2005 invasion? How many poets in Gaza have been obliterated by glide bombs while at morning prayer? The answer to that question, as with the millions of war dead from 1914-1918, lies in the decaying flesh, blood, and bone spread across poisoned soil by the bombs we continue to manufacture and deploy relentlessly. 

A pitiful and damning irony, then, that our day of remembrance has so wholly and efficiently been warped into an annual celebration of war propaganda, and collective amnesia.

Lest we forget.

For months, U.S. Democrats (as well as their sycophantic enablers in the entertainment and political media industries) have taken to every available platform with ominous warnings of a Republican plan to reshape democracy in Mussolini’s image. Project 2025, according to the Skye Perryman-founded project Democracy Foward, represents “a ruthless plan to undermine the quality of life of millions of Americans…and prioritize special interests and ideological extremism over people.” And the Project 2025 policy agenda certainly includes proposals that would alarm anyone who’s been in a deep coma since before the Bush 2 Administration and just woke up.

However, it is doubtful that anything in this 900-page document will leap out to the average voter as some harbinger of an immediate fascist takeover of America. That hasn’t stopped Democrats from using it as paranoiac leverage to whip up their base, though – a base that’s becoming increasingly sheepish, if recent polling is any indication – in the face of a sinking reality that President Biden’s cognitive state is, much like the “world’s oldest democracy” he leads, sliding into terminal senescence.

Which presumably is how Hollywood actor Mark Ruffalo (whose spirited enunciation of the c-word on-camera recently earned him an Oscar nomination) recently found himself boosting the message on Twitter with a dire pronouncement that “Project 2025 is not a game, it’s white Christian nationalism.” His message would have landed quite neatly if he had ended it there.

But, given the liberal tendency for rhetorical self-immolation, of course he didn’t end it there.

“It is the Sharia Law of the ‘Christian’ crazy people who aren’t Christian at all but want to control every aspect of your life through their narrow and exclusionary interpretation of Christ’s egalitarian, inclusive, and kindly teachings,” Ruffalo continued. “Don’t be fooled by Project 2025’s extremist and perverse ideology. Trump is bringing it to all our lives: abortion, LGBTQIA+ rights, freedom of expression, freedom of religion, freedom of education, and equality between the races and genders—GONE. Forced birth and forced religion. Trump’s American Taliban.”

Using Islam as a shorthand to invoke fear of a reactionary social agenda is so commonplace by now, and it has been for so long, that it would probably go unnoticed were it not for the rather un-subtle shift in its intended target: American conservatism. It’s the sort of role reversal that liberals seem a bit too enamored with these days—we’re the ones who are really tough on our enemies, and those Republicans just resemble them more and more all the time, don’t they? 

Under this rhetorical construction, all stops must be pulled out to stop this descent into extremism, yet, rather conveniently for Democrats, stops being pulled out begin and end at the ballot box.

I’m a relatively new convert to Islam, and I’ve certainly had my struggles with everything from regular prayer, to my sexual identity, and beyond. While it hasn’t been easy to reconcile my attitudes, habits, desires, and such with my Muslim faith, I can’t attribute that to any intolerance I’ve experienced within the ummah. In fact, my Muslim brothers and sisters have been extremely welcoming, and they check in with me regularly about my general well-being and that of my family, without judgment (except, perhaps, whether I’m eating enough, due to my polite but frequent declining of offers to buy me snacks after prayer service). So remarks like Ruffalo’s are bound to stand out to someone like me—possibly more acutely than they might to someone who has endured Islamophobia all their lives, and therefore, become painfully inured to it.

But even prior to my conversion* in 2022, and well before the immediate post-9/11 period began roughly a quarter-century ago, I knew about the concept of Sharia, and I also knew about the diversity of its adherents around the world, just by growing up in neighbourhoods as diverse as Malton and Rexdale, Ontario. Deploying the spectre of “Sharia Law” as a scare tactic, among both conservatives and liberals, has always struck me as one of the most vulgar forms of racism and ignorance. One aimed at an entire quarter of the human population who find the Qibla before they kneel in prayer, and for whom Sharia is not just “law”, but a living set of practices.

Ever since the Taliban and al-Qaeda replaced the USSR as the Civilized West’s existential enemy in 2001, the beliefs of Muslim extremists have served as a proxy for Islam itself. Samuel P. Huntington’s so-called “Clash of Civilizations” has gripped pundits and intellectuals, and anyone who was at least old enough at the time to watch primetime TV with their parents saw Alexander Siddig’s star rise, as both the overt jihadist fanatic and the sleeper agent tropes crowded out the available villain slots, in fiction as in reality.

These stereotypes, of course, served the vital function of legitimating the U.S. war machine and its horrific misdeeds. Rather than Nazis sending minorities to concentration camps and crematoriums, and Soviets sending political dissidents to freeze to death in northern gulags, the death-loving Wahabbist beheading young men and sending off young women to join the concubinage of some crazed mullah loomed large in the collective Western imagination. Bombs and black sites soon followed.

But even as political viewpoints began to shift in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial disaster and fatigue with endless war grew, and the West began looking inward to find its true villains, vestiges of that Bush-era Islamophobia remain etched indelibly in the Western mind. Ruffalo himself is borrowing from an old script. Long after red states and municipalities exhausted their political capital (and voters’ patience) with empty ballot measures and legislation to “ban Sharia Law,” Democratic politicians still managed to eke out some mileage with the charade. For example, former Democratic Congressional representative Alan Grayson attacked his Republican opponent Daniel Webster in a 2010 campaign ad with the label “Taliban Daniel Webster,” likening Webster’s proposals to ban divorce and abortion to religious fanaticism in countries like Iran.

This, despite the fact that divorce and abortion in Iran, while certainly facing many more restrictions than within the US, are not strictly illegal.

And herein lies the larger problem: when people refer to “Sharia Law” in Western politics, not only is it a sign of abject desperation, a last-ditch bid to avoid a catastrophic electoral loss we all know is coming, it’s also a tell that the doomsayer invoking it doesn’t know what the hell they’re talking about.

To begin with, “Sharia Law,” or simply Sharia (شَرِيعَة) is itself a body of rules and jurisprudence which governs broad and, in fact, mostly mundane aspects of life. The strictest and most well-defined of those rules generally govern worship, sacred times and places, and purifying oneself, while other, more loosely defined rules concern social relations. Sharia covers everything from which hand washes which first, to which foods are permitted to be eaten, to the number of daily prayers, to permitted sexual practices, some much more strictly interpreted than others within the four madhhab, or schools of Islamic jurisprudence.

All of this might sound overbearing and constricting to those of us in the West who value individual freedom over and above every other ideal or principle. But our understanding of freedom may not be the only understanding of that ideal, nor must it always and exclusively be thought of as the highest good for all people everywhere, at all times. This line of thinking betrays the historical tendency to believe in the white man’s burden to tame and civilize the more savage races and nations. 

Yes, there are rules under Sharia which many in the secular West consider oppressive, such as those governing the modesty of dress, and the fact that same-sex marriage is not recognized. But this paradigm isn’t at all unfamiliar to even the most strict secularists in the West. In fact, most people living in the Western world carry out their social and personal affairs under laws and customs whose origins are mostly ecclesiastical.

I don’t say this to make Sharia sound innocuous, or more palatable to those who take exception to the rules they can’t reconcile with their personal beliefs. But consider that, in states like California, committing adultery within a marriage can affect spousal support payments, the division of assets, and even child custody. Adultery even remains a felony in several states. So it’s worth asking what it is that makes adultery more worthy of social opprobrium and juridical punishment than other leading causes of divorce, such as financial irresponsibility, or saddling one’s spouse with an unfair burden of chores.

We’d be lying to ourselves if we didn’t admit that many of our social, legal, and political norms — despite efforts since the Enlightenment period to splice together a Christianized West with the traditions of Classical Antiquity, along with influence from Indigenous cultures — stem from laws and traditions developed on the understanding that nations, institutions, and people are ultimately answerable to, and governed under the watchful eye of, an all-powerful God. Adultery within marriage doesn’t simply imply a breach of trust between partners, but carries the epigenetic stain of a breach of the sacred covenant which we’ve traditionally understood as having been sworn between a man, his wife, and the Almighty. 

In fact, the American trend towards secularism over the past half-century hasn’t necessarily resulted in less religiosity among the public, per se, but rather a stratification and individualization of religious practice. Many sociologists, including Georgetown professor José Casanova, cheekily refer to this trend as “supply-side” secularism. 

Knowing this, and knowing the extent to which Christian extremism in the West has contributed to repression of the LGBT community at home as well as abroad, why then does the phrase “Sharia Law” continue to function as a shorthand for religious absolutism  encroaching on the public sphere?

Well, it’s because the people who push those tropes are racist.

I hate to be simplistic, but there’s no way to make it complicated without waffling. The idea that certain elements of Project 2025 can be simply attributed to Christian extremism, and the further idea that such extremism can only be understood by audiences through an image of, say, ISIS militiamen throwing gay men from rooftops, comes from a well-studied impulse in the white Western imagination. It’s the same impulse which attributes violent, lustful, and “toxic” behaviour among males to the Black man, and avaricious, double-dealing greed in commerce to the Jew. It’s the impulse to believe that a certain set of standards governs the way white men fight, or that unchecked “authoritarianism” and the never-ending growth of the surveillance state is an unsavoury adoption of Chinese practices.

In short, it’s the belief that America (and the West, broadly) is fundamentally good. That any deviance from the core of its virtues and ideals is due to pollution by foreign and essentially malignant cultures, beliefs, and practices which are not only incompatible with American culture in the long-term, but must be excised totally before America is transformed into something unrecognizable. It’s ethnocentrism at its worst.

This, from people born in a country that had to fight a bloody war over the question of whether one man has the right to enslave another, a country that infiltrates, imprisons, and assassinates Black freedom fighters, that sends money and missiles to Israel for the purpose of conducting a genocide, and that dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to demonstrate its military strength to the Soviets, is entirely too much to stomach.

Mark Ruffalo has, for several months, spoken out forcefully against the ongoing genocide in Gaza. To his credit, he is one of the first Hollywood celebrities to cut against the (near total) censorious and Islamophobic consensus within the entertainment industry. To see this kind of message coming from him in particular is all the more depressing. But Ruffalo is, like the rest of us, steeped within a chauvinist and Orientalist mindset which affords itself endless grace, but has none left over for the vaguely illusive, abstracted cultures of the people for whom he advocates.

Sharia doesn’t even prohibit abortion. Depending on which state, school, or scholar one subscribes to, it’s permissible for as few as 40 days after conception, or as many as 120 days. Homosexuality isn’t considered a “sin of the mind” in Islam, as it is with Christianity, even though the view (and potential punishment) of homosexual acts differs from school to school, and from place to place. And all that is moot for everyone else, as it’s generally accepted among the ummah that Sharia doesn’t apply to non-Muslims. It’s no secret that Muslim caliphates throughout history have mostly allowed religious minorities to conduct their religious and social affairs according to their own frameworks.

Ruffalo likely doesn’t know any of this, because he’s never had to learn. The glib cultural shorthand of “Sharia Law” is all that’s required to condense Muslim culture, customs, and ways of understanding the world into a discursive bogeyman. Anyone familiar with the chauvinism of white abolitionists in the 19th century, and white anti-apartheid advocates in the 1980s, wouldn’t be surprised by this tendency at all.

It’s unfortunate, but in the end, a mere fact of life. It isn’t as if these people can even talk about each other’s differing political stances without lapsing into fearmongering, so why would we expect they wouldn’t fall into old habits when talking about the rest of us? Why even spend all of this time and energy on so many words that have little chance of being read or understood?

Well, because the expectation of disappointment from liberal “allies” simply isn’t good enough. Christian extremism belongs to Christendom and the occidental culture within which it resides. Liberal “allies” to Palestinians—the latter of whom are much more occupied with resisting their own genocide than giving any thought to electoral politics or cultural freedoms in the United States—can’t continue to project their own cultures of violence and structural dominance onto others who have nothing to do with those things. “Sharia Law” is a bogeyman that entails whatever the speaker wants or believes. But Muslims don’t practice “Sharia Law,” which, once transliterated from Arabic, would read “Sharia Law Law.”

We subscribe to Sharia.

Sharia doesn’t call for legislating a permanent end to divorce, a ban on abortion even in the case of rape and incest, subsumption of the bureaucracy under the auspices of the Oval Office, or further dismantling of the Voting Rights Act. These are aspects of a broad policy agenda pushed by Christian reactionaries, and their goals far exceed those of America’s rhetorical antipodes like Iran and China (within which America has also backed religious and fascistic elements in order to further its own goals) .

On the off chance you are reading this, Mark Ruffalo, Project 2025 belongs to you and yours. It is entirely your mess. Stick to invoking your own culture and history, replete with more than enough bloody, repressive moments to draw from, as you try to rally your dispirited voters in a last-ditch effort to clean it up.

*My deepest apologies to those who insist on the word “revert,” but the term raises far more questions than answers among non-Muslims, so I’ll stick with “convert.”