Unmasking the West’s War on Iran.

 Norman Finkelstein

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Rory Mo-ran ·prSdteoons9u81uattmtim00g6h74c1igga6c1iu28fh648493i22g451i7t ·

Unmasking the West’s War on Iran.

In the opening days of what is shaping up to be a catastrophic war of aggression against Iran, the machinery of Western propaganda has sprung into action with an efficiency that would be impressive if it were not so grotesque. The coverage emanating from outlets like the BBC has become a form of self-satire, a caricature of bias so blatant that it no longer bothers to masquerade as journalism.

The western hierarchy of human value was laid bare in a single morning’s broadcast. In one report, four fallen US troops were given the full treatment. Their pictures displayed, their names spoken, their ages and backgrounds tenderly described. They were presented as individuals, as humans worthy of sympathy and grief. Mere minutes later, a separate segment casually noted the 165 schoolgirls killed by a US missile strike on the first day of the war. They were not named. Their faces were not shown. They were simply a number, an anonymous mass of collateral damage lumped together with the usual journalistic shorthand that signals to the audience that these lives do not matter. The message is unmistakable. American lives are real and have value. Iranian casualties are barley relevant statistics.

This dehumanisation is the bedrock upon which empire builds its wars. It allows the Western public to mourn its own while remaining comfortably numb to the slaughter of others. It is the same logic that has seen Russia banned by the IOC and FIFA almost immediately after the invasion of Ukraine, while the US and Israel, are guaranteedto face no such sanction. The rules of international justice apply only to the enemies of the West, never to the imperial belligerents themselves.

To justify this naked aggression, the propaganda machine has wheeled out its usual supporting cast. We have all seen the testimonies of expatriated Iranian monarchists, paraded across Western screens as authentic voices of dissent. These figures, who celebrate the invasion of their own country and cheer the killing of their own leaders, are almost impossible to understand as genuine political actors. They are, as many Iranian commentators have long noted, a manufactured opposition. They are a collection of well-funded personalities on the payroll of CIA and USAID front organisations, intent on harming their own people to accumulate favour with their paymasters. The actual footage emerging from inside Iran tells a very different story. It shows a population rallying around the regime in a display of national unity that would have been unimaginable only years ago. The effect of decades of Western sanctions, subversion, and black propaganda has not been lost in a flash to imperial hubris. Not only have they failed to weaken the government, but they have inadvertently turned even its most fervent opponents into defenders of the resistance.

While the media conducts its psychological war, the political architecture of the "international community" is revealing its true nature. European "solidarity" has proven to be a myth. Spain stands as the only EU member to have opposed this war, refusing the US access to its military bases for strikes against Iran. For this act of sovereign defiance, Spain has been threatened with economic retaliation. The threat comes not only from Washington, but with the tacit approval Friedrich Merz, the BlackRock executive who now runs Germany. Merz has lined up behind Emperor Trump’s punishment of a fellow EU state.

The excuse offered by Merz is that Spain refuses to raise military spending to 5% of GDP but thats is a transparent fiction. This is not about defence budgets; it is about punishing a nation for refusing to support another genocide. Germany, having positioned itself as a leading backer of the genocide in Gaza and a primary instigator in the Ukraine proxy war, now seeks to become the US’s preferred frontline state in the war against Iran. All principles, all pretence of international law, have been abandoned. Germany has returned to being a rogue state, run by vassals of the American empire who sell out their own populations for the promise of a seat at the imperial table.

Yet perhaps the empire’s greatest achievement is not its military, nor its media, nor its compliant political class. It is the millions of ordinary people who will defend it for free. Regular American and British schmucks on the internet are trampling over each other to prove their loyalty to warhawks in the US State Department but these fools will never see a cent from Lockheed Martin. They will never profit from the sanctions that starve children in targeted nations. But they will fight to the death online to protect the narratives that keep the weapons profits flowing and the bombs falling. They will argue passionately why other people’s children deserve to die. This is what a captured mind looks like. It is a final, and a most essential, stage in imperial collapse.