Given the ‘mainstream’ structural filters that reflexively whitewash the crimes of ‘The Good Guys’ – ‘us’, by doctrinal fiat – we have often wondered how the great and the good of corporate politics and media would react if the US or Israel ever decided to use nuclear weapons. Could they, even then, break out of their lock-step deference to power, reclaim their souls, and say something humanly honest about that ultimate moral abomination? This week, it looked like we might find out.
On Easter Sunday, Donald Trump posted a message on social media threatening to destroy Iran’s civilian infrastructure:
‘Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP’
Afterward, Trump told Fox News there was a ‘good chance’ a deal would be reached on Monday, but he was considering ‘blowing everything up and taking over the oil’ if a deal to end the war was not reached quickly.
The threat followed Trump’s April 2 bombing of Iran’s unfinished B1 bridge (40 km west of Tehran, designed to be the highest bridge in the Middle East) and his associated threat to ‘bring [Iran] back to the Stone Ages where it belongs’.
For Britons going to bed on Tuesday evening, there seemed to be a real prospect that we might wake up to news that nuclear weapons had been used for the first time since the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Trump had, after all, posted this apocalyptic prediction on Truth Social:
‘A whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.’
Of course, nothing Trump says can be taken at face value. His clear devotion to the ‘madman theory’ of international relations means he has to wildly threaten with the biggest stick possible in one hand while offering carrots in the other to achieve a ‘deal’. But many of us felt deeply anxious for the fate of Iranians being terrorized this way, facing the ultimate horror of a nuclear holocaust. Even if Trump’s threats had been a sham, Iran might have preemptively struck at Israel’s nuclear and desalination plants, triggering a nuclear response.
Iran has suffered grievously anyway. According to the Iranian authorities, around 81,000 civilian sites have so far been damaged by US-Israeli bombing, including 61,000 homes, 19,000 commercial sites, 275 medical centers, and nearly 500 schools.
Sarah Smith of the BBC described Trump’s threat that ‘a whole civilization will die tonight’ as merely ‘brutal’. Smith’s breathtakingly bland conclusion:
‘But this latest post does not indicate that he is optimistic about reaching an agreement before his deadline tonight.’
Much worse appeared elsewhere on the BBC website. Ghoncheh Habibiazad, a ‘senior reporter’ at BBC Persian at just 27 years of age, published this comment allegedly supplied by a twenty-something Iranian called ‘Radin’:
‘About them hitting energy infrastructure, using an atomic bomb, or leveling Iran – my honest reaction is that I’m okay with all of these.’
The first thing to say is that a comparable obscenity from a crazed British or US citizen eager to see the ‘leveling’ of their country would, of course, never be published by any BBC journalist. Des Freedman, professor of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London, commented:
‘Iran has 90 million citizens and yet the BBC manages to find one who claims to be “OK” with using nuclear weapons against his own country. There isn’t a single reference in the entire story to the fact that the attacks are illegal and seen by many as war crimes.’
Some seven hours after being published, following much public outrage, ‘Radin’s’ quote mysteriously disappeared from the BBC’s article, replaced by a different comment from the same source:
‘If attacking targets brings down the Islamic Republic, I’m fine with that.’
No correction or edit notice was attached at the time to highlight the change. So, what did ‘Radin’ actually say: the first comment, the second, both, neither? Grayzone discussed the background of the BBC journalist responsible, casting serious doubt on her impartiality. BBC Persian has long been a notorious conduit for regime change propaganda. On 7 April, the BBC finally added an ‘Update’ to explain its vanishing quote:
‘However, after further review, this part of the quote was removed from the article due to concerns over the way in which the speaker expressed his views and the extent to which they reflected wider Iranian viewpoints.’
This was meaningless verbiage that explained nothing.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting was asked whether destroying Iran’s power stations and bridges would be a war crime. Reaching deep into his soul, Streeting replied:
‘Not my judgement to make.’
We like to feel that we give people a chance, that we are tolerant, open-minded. But we also think it’s important to recognize the truth of Oscar Wilde’s observation:
‘It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.’
Voters need to be clear that plastic politicians like Streeting can be judged by the sociopathic, blank look on their faces – our felt awareness that they are lacking humanity, compassion, and empathy is not mere imagination. We can all see and feel the soullessness of much of the Labour hierarchy, notably the ‘empty raincoat’, Sir Keir Starmer.
To his credit, ITV News political editor Robert Peston expressed his deep exasperation and astonishment at Trump’s ‘appalling remarks’ on ending Iranian civilization, asking Starmer:
‘How did you feel about that? And how do you sustain a relationship with an American president who can say those things?’
Starmer replied with his usual emotional vacuity:
‘Well, let me be really clear and blunt about this – they’re not words that I would use, or would ever use.’
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte replied in a similar fashion to Trump’s genocidal threats:
‘When it comes to what leaders are saying, I’m not commenting on everything.’
Consider also the US senator and leading warmonger, Lindsey Graham. Glenn Greenwald has often commented on Graham’s ‘ghoulish’ delight in death and destruction:
‘Look at the glee on Lindsey Graham’s face as he talks about people dying. It is the only thing that seems to animate him, the only thing that makes him truly happy: the idea of more war and more people being killed.’ (Greenwald, Systems Update, ‘The Sociopathy of Lindsey Graham & the Neocons’, 30 May 2023)
Graham likes to make comments of this kind on Iran:
‘You either do a deal where you get out of the business you were in, or we’re going to blow your stuff up that will allow you to function as a nation. That is your choice.’
In his classic book, ‘The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness’, psychotherapist Erich Fromm wrote:
‘Necrophilia in the characterological sense can be described as the passionate attraction to all that is dead, decayed, putrid, sickly; it is the passion to transform that which is alive into something unalive; to destroy for the sake of destruction; the exclusive interest in all that is purely mechanical. It is the passion “to tear apart living structures.”’ (Fromm, Penguin Books, 1982, p.441, our emphasis)
Fromm noted a coldness and deadness in the eyes of such people. Incapable of smiling authentically, they have rigid, unresponsive faces that limit them to smirking. Fromm pointed to a specific type of ‘hard’ or ‘cruel’ mouth set in a permanent expression of distaste or contempt. All of these traits are clearly visible in Graham’s appearance. A real problem is that these monsters can slip through to the highest echelons of politics, where they are mistaken for cool, emotionless, tough defenders of the national interest. In reality, they bring the death and destruction they crave even in their own nations.
‘Operation Eternal Darkness’ And The Ceasefire
With a nuclear holocaust apparently averted, on April 8, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif announced a two-week ceasefire between the United States and Iran:
‘With the greatest humility, I am pleased to announce that the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States of America, along with their allies, have agreed to an immediate ceasefire everywhere including Lebanon and elsewhere, EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY.’ (Our emphasis)
As this clearly states, the ceasefire included Lebanon. Nevertheless, just hours later, Israel launched its most violent bombardment of Lebanon yet, killing at least 303 and wounding 1100 people by targeting, without warning, apartment blocks in residential areas of Beirut that had not previously been attacked, and also by attacking a funeral, cafes, emergency workers, and ambulances. Israel’s name for the attack was ‘Operation Eternal Darkness’. Tucker Carlson, a devoted Christian, noted that ‘eternal darkness’ appears numerous times in the New Testament as a reference to hell. The BBC’s whitewashing response to this attempt to derail the ceasefire:
‘Well, more now from Lebanon, where Israel says it’s hit more than a hundred [Hezbollah] command centres and military sites in ten minutes.’
As we have commented before, ‘Israel says’ is not journalism. Unusually, BBC Middle East correspondent Hugo Bachega posted a defense in response to criticism:
‘There is a clip circulating that misrepresents the way the Israeli attacks on Lebanon were covered by the BBC last night.
‘This is the full segment. I’m out in Beirut interviewing people so unable to do it by myself – but here’s the introduction, my live and my report.’
His report was sympathetic to the plight of Lebanese civilians, and it did quote the president of Lebanon describing the attacks as ‘a massacre’, but Bachega missed the point: the BBC would never introduce a report on a comparable atrocity by Russia, Iran, or any other Official Enemy with those countries’ crude propaganda take on events.
How to explain the extraordinary servility of the BBC in reporting on the crimes of a tiny foreign country of just nine million people? Aaron Bastani of Novara Media comments:
‘If they relay the facts, accurately and objectively, there is a deluge of pressure from the Israel lobby. Phone calls, emails – it’s extraordinary. And organised.
‘This is the “electric fence” approach to media monitoring and management, as [former Guardian reporter] Nick Davies calls it. You disincentivise accuracy, or even just covering stories. Even the smallest thing gets a response (like a small shock from a fence). Producers know there are costs for covering Israel, so they calculate “let’s leave it this time”.
‘It’s not excusable, but it’s explicable. For the BBC, however, which is public service journalism, and which we all pay for, it’s unacceptable.’
The destructive impacts of Israeli influence on British democracy go far beyond media flak. Israel and its supporters played a leading role in promoting the fake antisemitism smears that derailed Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party. This was a serious attack on British democracy that slammed the door on a more compassionate, people-centered politics, opening the way for Tory-lite Keir Starmer and, consequently, the disastrous threat of a hard-right Reform Party government. Gideon Levy, who writes a weekly column for Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, commented on the Corbyn smears in 2019:
‘The Jewish establishment in Britain and the Israeli propaganda machine have taken out a contract on the leader of the British Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn. The contract was taken out a long time ago, and it was clear that the closer Corbyn came to being elected prime minister, the harsher the conflict would get.’
Political analyst Norman Finkelstein, whose mother survived the Warsaw Ghetto and the Majdanek concentration camp, and whose father was a survivor of both the Warsaw Ghetto and the Auschwitz concentration camp, said:
‘The British elites could not have gotten away with calling Corbyn an anti-semite unless they had the support, the visible support, of all the leading Jewish organisations. You have to remember that during the summer [25 July 2018], all three major British publications, for the first time in British Jewish history, they all took out a common editorial denouncing Corbyn as an anti-semite and saying that we’re now standing on the verge of another Holocaust. They are the enablers of this concerted conspiracy by the whole of British elite society to destroy Jeremy Corbyn.’
Humanizing Iran
While sociopaths had their say in response to Trump’s threat that Iran would shortly ‘die’ as a civilization, something wonderful also happened: there was a global tsunami of revulsion and rejection. The threat stirred humanity even in voices on the hard right. The Mirror described Trump as a ‘maniac’ and the Daily Mail described his threats as ‘unhinged’, and they were joined by all kinds of voices from across the political spectrum. That is positive. If Trump repeats the threat, the response will be louder still.
Additionally, we saw and reposted numerous videos on X humanizing Iranians. Notably, this video of ordinary people in Tehran – people who look exactly like the rest of us – challenged decades of Western propaganda depicting grim-faced Iranian women in black burkas walking past skull-packed propaganda murals demonizing America. The video has had 5.3 million views and 52,000 ‘likes’.
Posting a beautiful image of Iranian architecture, Dr. Rhonda Garad wrote on X:
‘Trump’s done what no tourism campaign could-sparked huge interest in Persian culture. Posts on history, architecture, food, music, Lego videos-going viral. The hatred we’ve been fed about Iran for decades-rapidly transformed into support and respect.’
Victims of Capitalism Memorial Foundation posted:
‘Iranian Tar player Ali Ghamsari is currently camped at Damavand Power Plant, which provides a significant amount of electricity to Tehran. Ghamsari says he’ll remain there for a while in the hopes that his presence will protect it from bombing.’
And from Gaza, Maha Hussaini posted a beautiful, all but silent, 34-second video that somehow said so much:
‘Here, I have stood at the peak of fear and felt the deepest peace..
‘Good night from Gaza🪴’
Despite all the madness, horror, and killing, Trump’s genocidal threat provoked a display of deep-seated solidarity and compassion that defied decades of propaganda demonizing the Iranian people as ‘animals’, ‘savages’, and ‘primitives’. Clearly, very few of us are willing to tolerate the threat of nuclear genocide. In these grim times, when it sometimes feels like humanity has completely lost its way, that is something to celebrate.