The Guardian Class Discovers Iran
Pity they didn't spare a thought for the victims of clerical fascism.
They’re going to be more insufferable than usual, aren’t they? Greta will come out of hiding, and Jeremy Corbyn – who increasingly resembles the late Ayatollah Khomeini but with less charm – will pop up in TV interviews. He’ll declaim on the evils of regime change, waffle something about international law, and become indignant and evasive the moment anyone points out the nauseating hypocrisy – which they won’t because it’ll be on the BBC.
When this is over, and Iran is free, I’d like to parachute him into Tehran to explain “international law” to the schoolgirls who survived the latest massacre, while their sisters were executed by the theocratic regime for the crime of being raped. Maybe he could take a BBC film crew. I’d watch that.
Because today, the Guardian class has discovered urgent moral clarity on the Iran strike that somehow eluded it while the regime was massacring thousands of its own people. Iranian lives, it turns out, only count when America is holding the weapon.
And it’s America that we’re really talking about. The left finds it useful that Trump is at the helm because he’s easier to dismiss. But even if it were Abraham Lincoln, they’d still erupt in paroxysms of contrived moral fury at these events. Because what really animates their wrath isn’t international law but Western imperialism. America is the Great Satan, enemy number one, the overarching obsession that makes clerical fascism a minor inconvenience and the slaughter of tens of thousands of unarmed civilians a nuisance by comparison.
The rest of us – which is most of us – should ready ourselves for an avalanche of obfuscation and manufactured outrage in the coming weeks. The mainstream media will be at it too – we can expect Iraq analogies and furrowed brows from people who haven't had an original thought since 2003. We don’t yet know what Piers Morgan will say because he hasn’t decided what position will earn more clicks, but when his judgment comes, we can ignore it anyway. If that man is right about anything, it’s usually by accident.
Everything will be viewed through the orange prism of Trump's character, naturally. He isn’t Churchill, let’s not kid ourselves. And I doubt he was losing sleep over the mass murder of the Iranian people. We might question his motives. Not long ago, he told us the nuclear threat of Iran had been “totally obliterated” – yet today, he says the threat is imminent. Both statements cannot be true. And yes, we should be concerned about what fills the vacuum after any regime collapse. The Middle East has a long and painful history of Western interventions that swapped out one catastrophe for another.
But frankly, today, I don’t much care to hear these objections from the progressive aristocracy and their legion of useful idiots. Nor do I want to hear a word from Islamist apologists and neo-Marxists who see these events as a disaster for their sclerotic dreams of utopia – a moral and intellectual inversion that can only survive in the minds of people already emptied of moral reasoning.
We must hold our noses while they march in sudden solicitude for a UN-sanctified death cult that hanged gays from cranes — the same deranged cohort that held banners about ‘the right side of history’ while offering nothing to young Iranians being slaughtered for wanting freedom. Where were the marches a month ago? The emergency protests? Where was Greta Thunberg?
Those young Iranians deserved the same moral energy that was spent excusing Hamas atrocities. Who can forget the ecstasy of righteous fury that consumed the Guardian class from October 8th against a tiny democracy defending itself against existential annihilation? The Iranians won’t.
So go ahead with your marches through the nations’ capitals. Rehearse your talking points about international law and American imperialism if you must.
The rest of us might tune in occasionally – but not after eating. We want to keep our food down and maintain some semblance of moral clarity in the weeks ahead.
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The long-form piece on conservatism (originally planned for today) should appear next week.
It's a shame the useful idiots on the left are more exercised by our striking a bloody, terrorist regime of religious zealots than they are by that regime murdering tens of thousands of people both at home and abroad.
Americans have a particular grudge considering the Iranians took American diplomats hostage in Tehran, killed 241 American Marines in the Beirut bombing, kidnapped and murdered Lt Col William Higgins in Beirut, killed Americans in Iraq with their EFPs, and tried to assassinate US citizens in the US - just to name a few.
The Iranians got away with bullying, threatening, and bluffing every US Administration into inaction until now. Trump called their bluff.
Let's be clear. The Left hates the US and everything about it. There's nothing the US could ever do that would satisfy them save declare to itself a People's Socialist Republic.