By Maung Zarni
Cartoon from Chris Hedges’ How the Media Sells Genocide
Dear TMS Friends, Supporters and Colleagues,
It is difficult to keep our eyes off West Asia – or “the Middle East”, colonially speaking. For the enveloping global economic crisis has its origin in the Zio-Imperialist wars of aggression across that energy-rich region.
Our planetarily destructive, techno-savage life depends entirely on diesel, petroleum and hydrocarbon products, so much so that a sharp rise in fuel cost does more than pinch us at the pump, whether you are a truck driver or a commuter somewhere in the US or a small Asian rice farmer or a small business owner trying to stay afloat in England.
For hundreds of millions of us humans, the deeply troubling developments in West Asia – including, most worryingly, the open talks by both Hitlerite Aggressor regimes in Washington and Tel Aviv to resort nuclear first-strikes against the non-nuclear-armed Iran – go beyond our private economic insecurities and other interests.
The “abstract” issues such as justice, fairness, freedom from domination, faith, dignity, etc. do matter.
Of the items I have read, listened or watched in preparing for this Digest, I find most fascinating the in-depth analysis on West Asian affairs offered by former British intelligence (MI6) officer and diplomat, with Irish background, Alistair Crooke.
He didn’t only look at these continuing conflicts in this troubled region as a matter of geopolitical and economic ramifications for the world at large. He offers an empathetic reading of the resistance, primarily coming from the world of Shia Muslims. He identified “esprit de corps” of the horizontalised revolutions in Iran, Yemen and South Lebanon.
To this revolutionary consciousness Palestine does matter just as it has come to matter to the worldwide popular consciousness.
To the Zionists who have for all intents and purposes captured the power centers of the imperialist West, “Free Palestine” has become as much a threat as Teheran’s inexhaustible hypersonic missiles and Northern Yemenese fighters. Exhibit A: the unfolding debacle of Ed Sheeran caving into the Zionist Jewish oligarch Robert Kraft of the Epstein class of the Israel Lobby, broadly.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uB3pS4e_7s]
How should one understand young Iranians signing up for 1 million strong-martyrs’ brigades, self-sacrifice units or divisions of Iran where the country that has been strangled by the US economic sanctions for almost 50 years? What about Ansar Allah fighters who and their populations strangled economically and aon and off Saudi-led coalition – armed and backed by – you guessed it – US and UK, for the last 10 years ?
In my intimate and meaningful interactions with Westerners I have long concluded that by and large “the Western Mind”, whatever the individual ideological hues – forgive my essentialism here – do not understand revolution, revolutionary consciousness, martyrdom, self-sacrifice, and all the rest.
Those for whom career advancement, economic security, social safety nets, prestige, social status, celebrities, gigs, and so on matter most, are not going to comprehend, much less appreciate, why men and women of certain belief & value systems under certain material and ideological conditions, would chose to forego a course of life that seems so normative in the western world – a job, a career, a safe life style, an upward mobility, a happy family.
I would certainly recommend Mr Crooke’s articulation of the emergent Revolutions in West Asia.
Contrast these revolutionary developments in West Asia with many an electorates – not just the Alternative for Germany (AfD) – in the West turning variously Fascist, in the face of similarly, or worse, material conditions.
Something to seriously think about.
The first 2 items in this collection are by our TMS Editorial Team members, Rais Reza Boneza and Richard Falk.
Zarni
22 September 2026