A Lantern in Stark Daylight

“Have you ever heard of the madman who on a bright morning lighted a lantern and ran to the market-place calling out unceasingly: “I seek God! I seek God!” …”Where is God gone?” he called out. “I mean to tell you! We have killed him,—you and I! We are all his murderers!
—Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Gay Science 

Is the war over?

Can wars ever be over?

Will they ever stop killing children and mothers?

With a terrible economic crisis stalking the world, and the gulf economy in shambles, is this mindless war Donald Trump was trapped into by Israel and his ‘crusading aides’ – finally over? 

Like the fake ceasefire and bombings in Gaza, will it go on and on, with Iran refusing to bend or crawl?

With a beleaguered Trump shifting ground on the war, first he said it will be only for four to five weeks, then, five/10 days of no attacks on power plants, after Iran said it will do a tit for tat in its already devastated neighbourhood of stooge regimes.

Then, “we have won the war” – game over. And, finally, the White House spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt, said in a kind of Hegelian dialectic turned upside down, that Iran should realise that they have lost the war. 

According to a Reuters report, she said, President Trump does not bluff and he is prepared to unleash hell. “Iran should not miscalculate again,” Leavitt told reporters in a press briefing. “If Iran fails ⁠to accept the reality of the current moment, if they fail to understand that they have been defeated militarily, and will continue to be, President Trump will ensure they are hit harder than they have ever been hit before,” she said.

The report stated: Iran is still reviewing a US ⁠proposal ⁠to end the war, despite an initial response that was negative, a senior Iranian official told Reuters, indicating that Tehran had so far stopped short of rejecting it outright. Talks with Iran were still under way, Leavitt said. “Talks continue. They are productive, as the president said on Monday, and they continue to be,” she added.

Talks were on before the war as well, with Oman as moderator, with Iran agreeing to the most difficult demands: no nuclear enrichment, inspection by IAEA, while US sanctions should end. Every impartial observer in the American establishment has categorically stated that there was “no imminent threat” from Iran, including Joe Kent, who recently quit as the head of the US National Counterterrorism Centre. “I cannot in good conscience support the on-going war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby,” he announced in a social media media.

The latest flip-flop is Trump is saying he is ready to end the war, and it does not matter if the Strait of Hormuz is open or shut.

Trump said in a Tweet, and he has been repeating this: The Iranian Air Force is gone. The Navy is gone. Many ships SUNK. Total OBLITERATION.

So, pray, how come US stealth aircrafts, worth billions (one shot in Saudi Arabia, experts say, will cost $700 billion now), its war carriers, its military bases in the Gulf, have been destroyed? How come all airports are shut and millions stranded, including Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv? So how many oil tankers and other installations of the Gulf nations have been blown up?

How is Tel Aviv so ravaged, and also Haifa, with its nuclear installations apparently hit, and scores of its generals eliminated? One report said that the Israel army chief has said that his force is totally demoralised and weakened – that it’s just not possible to carry on. Besides, when the US is sending troops on the ground (“to die for Israel”, as is the folklore in America), why is Israel refusing to put their own troops on the ground?

Surely, with troops on the ground, the US should remember Vietnam – the two-decade war they waged against a small, poor country, so far away. The mighty US lost.

Thousands of marines, having murdered ordinary folks without impunity, as in the My Lai massacre, were trapped forever in a post-traumatic stress disorder. For an elementary lesson, Trump and Pete Hegseth should watch Coppola’s Apocalpse Now, orOliver Stone’s Platoon.

Now, if the US has won the war and if that is so, the war has indeed seen its gory end, and Iran has been decimated. Is it so?

In the last and recent 12-day war, with, again, the Israelis as the sinister plotter, Trump claimed to have bombed the hell out of the Iran nuclear reactors, after an uprising which the MOSSAD tried to manipulate. It got exposed, and eliminated thereby, while this authentic restless movement against economic hardships was compelled to fizzle out.

Come to think of it, it’s a strategy they have applied umpteen times and exactly what they are trying out in Cuba now, with no success. Sometimes they succeed, at other times they fail miserably – and it’s funny that their crusaders do not even choose to change this squeezed- out strategy.

First, prolonged, endless, terrible sanctions for decades, crippling the economy, creating mass suffering and social unrest, propelling thereby civil society protests; then arrange the diabolical entry of MOSSAD and CIA, entrenched in ‘enemy’ countries.

Soon after, starts an orchestrated media campaign — of how democracy is being restored. In Iraq it was the mythical WMDs, and in Iran it is pro-democracy ‘regime change’.

The women’s freedom card failed, with the war starting with a trademark Israeli signal: 170 school children murdered by a Tomahawk missile fired from a naval destroyer.

(The two navy officers who did it have been identified, like the IDF officers who pumped 355 bullets into six-year-old Hind Rijab’s body, trapped in a car with dead relatives in Gaza.)

Besides, if they had bombed the hell out of all the nuclear reactors in the 12-day war, what was the ‘imminent threat’ this time?

Epstein Files?

The everyday sleazy revelations of a grotesque Paedophile Establishment? With Epstein operating as a confirmed Mossad agent!

Or, was it because after getting away with yet another genocide in occupied Palestine, the “war criminal” in Tel Aviv, an international pariah, and his fanatic extreme-right cabinet, now aimed to go for its most favourite civilizational project: Greater Israel, with a ‘regime change’ in the only country in the Middle East which has refused to succumb. All they wanted is another stooge regime in Tehran.

Hence, Trump was trapped, with his Zionist son-in-law, a real estate businessman, playing the negotiator/strategist, and another Zionist white supremacist, with a crusader’s cross tattooed on his chest (Trump’s secretary of war) — pumping for war.

As if war is a mindless video game.

The fact is as long as the ‘Axis of Evil’ is around, forcible occupation, full-scale banditry, mass murders of innocents, targeted killing of school children, military or ‘peaceful coups’, assassinations of elected leaders, among other total violations of international law will continue.

The latest is the abduction of a president and his wife, in the middle of the night, from their bedroom. For this evil Axis, this has been done ad infinitum, this was normal before, and this is post-normal now, like ‘Truth Social’ — Trump’s aptly named Twitter handle.

However, the truth is that with 8 million people marching against him across America last week and his approval ratings abysmally low, a trapped Trump wants to desperately wriggle out of this war in which he and Bibi have been decisively decimated.

If anything, it has shown the world, yet again, what an Iranian propaganda video is now showing, going viral: From Vietnam to Iran and Cuba, from Nelson Mandela to Hind Rijab, from Hitler to Mussolini – when your time is up, you don’t have to hold a lantern in bright daylight to see it.

Like Neitzsche’s mad man — with a lantern in the middle of a market place, in stark daylight.