One good thing about Europe is we’ve all already been through it all. Here, every miserable dirt-poor republic had its century in the sun. Today, Splugovina is a dreary landlocked country of eight million people that produces sunflower seeds, insulated cables, and zinc-bearing ores, but for a brief period in the fifteenth century the glorious Splug Empire stretched clear across the continent. The crowned heads of Europe came to kneel and give tribute. After that, it’s true, there was the War of the Quintuple Alliance, and all the cities were razed, and maybe forty percent of the population starved in the fields, but there are still some very impressive ruins in the hills. That time is never coming back, though. All you can do now is put up a bunch of gaudy statues to the conquering heroes, make genocidal chants at football games. Remember, with a kind of lazy black bitterness, the days when the world was made of sugar and you were mad. [...]
The problem, though, is the corollary to all this charming American exuberance, which is the repeated bouts of mass murder. It comes in cycles. A few years of screaming bloodlust until it all blows up in your face, and then you spend the next few years at home drinking wine out the bottle and wailing over the unfairness of the world, before finally straightening your back, giving one last sniff, and bravely stepping outside to once again club someone’s children to death. I used to think some kind of progress was possible here. I used to have something called the Iraq War Theory of Divorce in Hollywood Films. The theory says that if a film features a male lead character who gets divorced or separated from his main romantic interest, and it came out before 2005 or so, by the end he will have cajoled his ex back into bed and they’ll live happily ever after. Liar Liar, The Parent Trap, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. If it came out after 2005, by the end he will have learned to accept the situation, moved on, and found someone new. A total bloodbath in the Middle East, maybe a million people shot or blown up or tortured to death with power tools, so you can learn that hey, sometimes things don’t work out there way you want them to, and hey, sometimes that’s ok. But all these things are temporary. Don Quixote got a decade of sanity between volumes before the rabbit poison started glittering in his eyes and he was babbling about knight errantry again. America got less than half. Four years after the last American troops left Afghanistan under Taliban guard, war critic JD Vance was on the TV, saying that while he understood why people were put off by the last round of wars in the Middle East, ‘the difference is that back then we had dumb presidents, and now we have a president who actually knows how to accomplish America’s national security objectives.’ The dumb presidents, the ones who blundered around getting America into quagmires, still always held back from directly attacking Iran. The smart president is Donald Trump.
America has discovered that you can just kill people. There might be a centuries-old taboo on the assassination of foreign heads of state, but that’s obsolete now. Those rules govern interactions between peers, and America has no peers. They’re useful for states that might conceivably face consequences for their actions, and America never will. Look at what they did in Venezuela. Kidnapped Maduro using weapons the rest of the world has never even heard of, sonic weapons, microwaves, directed radiation beams that can boil a Cuban guard’s brains inside his skull from half a mile away. They’ve got Kabbalistic weapons that rearrange your gematria, curdle your viscera until the vessel cracks and a glowing plasma leaks out. The US and Israel are playing on sandbox mode, so technologically ahead of everyone else it’s like the nineteenth century again, when you could scythe down masses of spear-chucking savages with one good burst from the Maxim gun. And yet every previous administration tried negotiating with the savages, threatening them, sanctioning them, playing this weird choreographed game where they agreed to let Iran fire a volley of missiles at Tel Aviv to satisfy some vague principle of honour and then shot them all down. When you’ve got so much power, why bother? Why keep having conversations? Why not just kill them? If you don’t like a spiritual leader of three hundred million Shia Muslims, just fucking kill him. Kill him, kill his wife, kill his daughter, kill his fourteen-month-old granddaughter, kill his cabinet, kill his military command, kill all the representatives you’ve been negotiating with, and kill a bunch of your preferred candidates to take over his position while you’re at it, why not, they’re only lives. What a brilliant discovery. Amazing no one else ever thought of it before. They must all be dumb. And yes, maybe something goes wrong, and Opus 4.6 accidentally deletes the wrong object. ‘You’re totally right to call me on that. What I fired on wasn’t an IRGC missile bunker—it was a primary school full of little girls. Here’s why that matters.’ But so what? It’s the world’s problem if Israel or America gets a papercut, but there’s no reason to let the disintegrated bodies of a hundred and fifty strangers’ daughters interfere with the general giddy atmosphere. They’re only lives. ‘It was something, and it is nothing. Does not this amount to exactly the same thing as though it had been nothing, and came to nothing; and about nothing it is hardly worth while to waste a word.’
America has discovered that you can just kill people. There might be a centuries-old taboo on the assassination of foreign heads of state, but that’s obsolete now. Those rules govern interactions between peers, and America has no peers. They’re useful for states that might conceivably face consequences for their actions, and America never will. Look at what they did in Venezuela. Kidnapped Maduro using weapons the rest of the world has never even heard of, sonic weapons, microwaves, directed radiation beams that can boil a Cuban guard’s brains inside his skull from half a mile away. They’ve got Kabbalistic weapons that rearrange your gematria, curdle your viscera until the vessel cracks and a glowing plasma leaks out. The US and Israel are playing on sandbox mode, so technologically ahead of everyone else it’s like the nineteenth century again, when you could scythe down masses of spear-chucking savages with one good burst from the Maxim gun. And yet every previous administration tried negotiating with the savages, threatening them, sanctioning them, playing this weird choreographed game where they agreed to let Iran fire a volley of missiles at Tel Aviv to satisfy some vague principle of honour and then shot them all down. When you’ve got so much power, why bother? Why keep having conversations? Why not just kill them? If you don’t like a spiritual leader of three hundred million Shia Muslims, just fucking kill him. Kill him, kill his wife, kill his daughter, kill his fourteen-month-old granddaughter, kill his cabinet, kill his military command, kill all the representatives you’ve been negotiating with, and kill a bunch of your preferred candidates to take over his position while you’re at it, why not, they’re only lives. What a brilliant discovery. Amazing no one else ever thought of it before. They must all be dumb. And yes, maybe something goes wrong, and Opus 4.6 accidentally deletes the wrong object. ‘You’re totally right to call me on that. What I fired on wasn’t an IRGC missile bunker—it was a primary school full of little girls. Here’s why that matters.’ But so what? It’s the world’s problem if Israel or America gets a papercut, but there’s no reason to let the disintegrated bodies of a hundred and fifty strangers’ daughters interfere with the general giddy atmosphere. They’re only lives. ‘It was something, and it is nothing. Does not this amount to exactly the same thing as though it had been nothing, and came to nothing; and about nothing it is hardly worth while to waste a word.’
So far, the war is going very well. It’s called Operation Epic Fury. Operation Epic Badass Ninja Pirate. Organs of state keep issuing public statements that say things like ‘Kill without hesitation, avenge without mercy’ and ‘You say death to America, we say America will be your death.’ They’re having no problems killing anyone they want to kill. Iran might be a proud and ancient civilisation with a historical memory stretching back six thousand years, but right now it’s an easily broken toy in the hands of an empire that can barely remember the day before yesterday. But somehow, the power to kill anyone at will isn’t enough. Things are not going according to plan. As far as I can tell, the plan was this. As soon as Israel and America eliminated the Supreme Leader, the entire Islamic Republic would disintegrate like an alien invasion fleet once the mothership’s been hit. At this point the Iranian people would fill the streets, overthrow the mullahs, and immediately start signing up for an OnlyFans account. Obviously these are early days, but it doesn’t look like things are going to plan. Something very different is happening. Decapitating the Islamic Republic has not shut it down. Instead, individual IRGC units are all operating autonomously, using their own mobile and highly fluid command structures. Instead of a single enemy, there’s now a swarm. No central authority to negotiate with even if you wanted to. A headless zombie Iran, the wreckage of a six-thousand-year-old state spewing ballistic missiles in every direction. Missiles falling on Saudi oil refineries, Bahraini radar installations, on the matcha labubu sexual slavery camps of Dubai. You thought all those CGI skyscrapers meant you were abstracted from geography, but this is still the Middle East. Meanwhile the revolutionaries have not yet shown up in the streets of Tehran. Possibly because the people most likely to overthrow the regime already tried that in January, and the regime killed or imprisoned them all. It might not happen. The Islamic Republic is a bad government, possibly the worst government anywhere on the face of the earth, but it’s being attacked by children making plane noises. Not inconceivable that large numbers of Iranians will, for the time being, rally around what’s left of the regime. So now the plan is to conjure up some ethnic militias, Kurds and Azeris, use them to re-enact the breakup of Yugoslavia. A pro-Western liberal democracy would be nice, but if we can’t have that we’ll settle for a giant festering sore on the face of Asia, roiling with endless massacres.
by Sam Kriss, Numb at the Lodge | Read more:
Image: uncredited
