Sunday 21 June 2009

Green Is The New Orange

No, not another post about Northern Ireland.

Remember the ridiculous Rose and Orange “Revolutions” in Ukraine and Georgia respectively? “Uprisings” for incorporation into the global cash-war machine by means of NATO and the EU? Well, the result in Iran certainly bears comparison with Saakashvili’s “election” by well over ninety per cent of those who “voted”. Yet now we have the Green “Revolution”. Imagine!

What do Mousavi’s cheerleaders think that his Iran would be like? California, but without Proposition Eight? Because it wouldn’t be, you know. It really wouldn’t be at all.

Frankly, if Georgia could ever become a member of either NATO or the EU, then there is no reason why Iran couldn’t. Just look at a map. Thank goodness for Russia to veto either such application (or a Ukrainian one), in the extremely unlikely event that anyone ever took such a thing seriously in the first place. But the Tehran Trendies also want into the global order of (collapsed) neoliberal economics and (collapsed) neoconservative foreign policy. Mercifully, no one else in Iran does.

Mercifully, not least because that order has no more interest in incorporating Iran, as such, than it had in incorporating Yugoslavia as such, or Iraq as such. Assuming that the demonstrations being reported are really taking place, they are now taking place in cities that are variously Arab, Kurdish, Baluchi, Turkeman (like those whose Shi’ite mosque was so savagely attacked just outside Kirkuk in the so much improved Iraq that we have created), Azeri and so on to a very large, sometimes predominant, extent.

Only about half of Iran’s population is ethnically Persian. Much of the oil is in the Arab South West. There are Kurds in the North West. Half of the Baluchis are in the East, the other half being across the border in Pakistan with long-standing secessionist tendencies. There are so many Turkemen that Tehran is actually the second-largest Turkish-speaking city on earth, even though Turkish is a minority language there. There are more Azeris than in Azerbaijan. There is a sizeable and very ancient community of Jews, complete with its own reserved seat in Parliament, like the Christian Armenian and Assyrians (also found in Kirkuk). And so on.

Iraq is being blown apart, and Iran is next. That is what global capital requires. Can you think of another multinational state that is to global capital’s inconvenience? Ahmadinejad can, even if that is not why he hates the state in question.

He is not the only one.

One of the many similarities between the Ahmadinejad tendency and the neocons is their belief in the all-pervasive, wholly negative influence of Britain. In the neocon case, this derives from the marriage of strictly academic, if highly contentious, work and a stock Irish-American saloon-bar rant against a perceived Anglophile network within the WASP élite. What are David Trimble, Paul Bew and Tim Collins doing, associating with this sort of thing through the Henry Jackson Society?

Neoconservatism takes this anti-British hysteria even further, demanding the wholesale Americanisation of Britain’s, Canada’s, Australia’s and New Zealand’s economic, social, cultural and political systems, though without the conferral of American citizenship, and thus without representation in Congress or the Electoral College. And of course, there is, as always, the American Republic’s fundamental claim to all the historically British parts of the Americas, a claim currently being pursued, entirely unchallenged by Britain, in Bermuda.

So much for the Anglosphere, from which America is in any case busily detaching herself by means of the unrestricted immigration supported by the neocons. That support is because they rightly recognise that there cannot be a “free” market in goods, services and capital but not in labour (or vice versa), there being nothing less conservative than capitalism.

This hatred of Britain and of the perceived Anglophile network, the latter seen as a global phenomenon, is as important as Zionism to the neocons. They were ethnic and regional outsiders compared to the WASP élite and its traditional base of mainline rather than Evangelical Protestants in the heartland, a base of variously English, Scots-Irish, German and Scandinavian descent. This was as true of the Irish Catholics, among others, as it was of the Jews. Neoconservatism is as much (or as little) an Irish Catholic as a Jewish movement, among other things. And Zionism also has a history, which it glorifies greatly, of quite exceptionally vicious violence against British targets.

The milleniarian hysteria, held in contempt whether at Wheaton or at Qom, may be common to the Useful Idiots on both sides. But it is in the hatred of Britain, and of all those deemed favourably inclined towards Britain, that there is the real meeting of minds. There is no reason to assume that the mind of Mousavi is any different.

After the dismemberment of Yugoslavia, now Iraq, and putatively Iran too, Belgium (a classic creation of the Anglophile network if you believe in such a thing) is next. And after that? Well, have a guess.

5 comments:

  1. "What do Mousavi’s cheerleaders think that his Iran would be like? California, but without Proposition Eight?"

    I don't think anybody at all thinks this. You can think that one candidate is better than another without thinking that he's particularly good. Similarly, you can be concerned at strong evidence of vote-rigging without being particularly keen on the people who were cheated.

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  2. "I don't think anybody at all thinks this"

    Oh, I think they do. In fact, I think they must.

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  3. OK. Well, I don't. And nor, I suspect, do the people who voted for him and have spent the last week on the streets - most of whom would not have voted for him if they thought he would make Iran like California.

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  4. Oh, brother...

    "Neoconservatism takes this anti-British hysteria even further, demanding the wholesale Americanisation of Britain’s, Canada’s, Australia’s and New Zealand’s economic, social, cultural and political systems, though without the conferral of American citizenship, and thus without representation in Congress or the Electoral College."

    Please. How could neoconservatism straight-facedly demand the Americanization of anything or anyone when there's virtually nothing American about neoconservatism itself? Whatever their project is, I don't see how Americanization could be it.

    "And of course, there is, as always, the American Republic’s fundamental claim to all the historically British parts of the Americas, a claim currently being pursued, entirely unchallenged by Britain, in Bermuda."

    Still on this? I see it's made a big impression on you, for some reason.

    Well, it's like this. For much of our history, the possibility of reconquest and subjugation by the British was a real threat, and so we took a defensive posture that was meant to protect ourselves and this hemisphere from European interference.

    That particular threat is gone now. But Bermuda is a North American country, just as we are. It serves both our interests to deal directly with one another. It's up to the Bermudians to decide what sort of relationship they will want to maintain with Britain in the future.

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  5. Bermuda is not a "country", and when the people there have been consulted, they have repeatedly told the extremely pro-American political elite that they do not wish to become one.

    Being a British colony is a muchg better bet than being an American colony, not least because at least we admit to having them.

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