By Caitlin JOHNSTONE

Join us on Telegram, Twitter, and VK.

Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su

Australian authorities were fully aware that inviting Israel’s president for a visit was going to ignite unrest and furious opposition. They invited him anyway, and sent in the police to assault the protesters.

I saw a video of two cops pinning a kid in a keffiyeh face down on the ground and proceeding to punch him over and over again long after he’d been subdued.

I saw another video of police repeatedly punching a middle-aged man who was holding his hands in the air until he fell to the ground.

I saw another video of police repeatedly pepper spraying a demonstrator directly in the face as he was visibly complying with their demands to move and providing no resistance whatsoever.

I saw another video of police manhandling Muslim men who were literally on their knees praying, presenting no possible threat of any kind.

That’s right kids, welcome to Australia, where the government invites the head of a genocidal apartheid state for a happy cuddle party and then beats the shit out of anyone who opposes this.

It’s a testament to the courage and vitality of the pro-Palestine movement in Australia that people keep showing up to anti-genocide protests even as authorities do everything they can to create a chilling effect on them.

After all, this happens as the state of Queensland moves to make it illegal to utter the pro-Palestine phrases “from the river to the sea” or “globalise the intifada”, with violations punishable by two years in prison. This is easily the single most bat shit insane speech suppression legislation in Australian history, and that’s an extremely high bar.

To be clear, not one person sincerely believes that “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is a genocidal or antisemitic statement. This is one of those many, many instances in which Israel supporters are pretending to believe something they do not actually believe in order to further outlaw criticism of Israel.

They’re trying to make it so that nobody feels comfortable opposing Israel’s abuses without first consulting with a lawyer about what exactly they are legally permitted to say in that moment, thereby throwing a chilling effect on pro-Palestine activism throughout the nation.

This comes weeks after the Australian government passed frightening new “hate speech” laws in the name of “combatting antisemitism” which will make it much easier to designate activist groups as “hate groups”. Australian officials have conspicuously refused to say that the new laws will not be used to ban groups for speech that is critical of Israel, which tells you all you need to know about the real intentions at work here.

This also comes as the state of New South Wales cracks down on protests with extreme aggression, banning protests in certain areas and seeking to outlaw the use of the phrase “globalise the intifada” to appease Australia’s obscenely powerful Israel lobby. Premier Chris Minns is presently defending the actions of the police he sent in to crack skulls at the Herzog protests on Monday.

Just two months ago a prominent member of the Australian Israel lobby publicly announced that he wants a total ban on pro-Palestine protests throughout the nation, and said it is criticism of Israel that is the problem, not just hatred toward Jews. Joel Burnie, Executive Manager of the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC), explicitly said that what he wants is “No more protests! No more protests!” in Australia.

“I for one as a Jewish leader will no long talk about antisemitism in isolation from Israel, because it’s the rhetoric and language on Israel that motivates the people to come and kill us,” Burnie said during a video conference, later adding that “ language on Israel invading all of our social spaces in Australia have made this country a very unsafe space and place for Jews.”

Increment by increment, Joel Burnie and his ilk have been getting their wish ever since. Australian civil rights are indeed being disintegrated to protect the information interests of a genocidal apartheid state.

As I often remind readers, Australia is the only so-called democracy in the world which has no national charter or bill of rights of any kind. A tremendous amount of faith has been placed in state and federal legislators to simply do the right thing, which has proved foolish and ineffective. Professor George Williams wrote for the Melbourne University Law Review in 2006:

“Australia is now the only democratic nation in the world without a national bill of rights. Some comprehensive form of legal protection for basic rights is otherwise seen as an essential check and balance in democratic governance around the world. Indeed, I can find no example of a democratic nation that has gained a new Constitution or legal system in recent decades that has not included some form of a bill of rights, nor am I aware of any such nation that has done away with a bill of rights once it has been put in place.”

This system plainly does not work. Australians desperately need speech protections enshrined in our Constitution, because we cannot trust our leaders to resist efforts to silence us whenever our speech becomes inconvenient to powerful people and influential lobbying groups.

The more aggressively they fight to silence us, the louder we need to become. It is more necessary to oppose Israel and its supporters than ever before, because now they’re coming after us and our rights. It’s not just about opposing genocide, war and apartheid anymore. It’s about fighting for our own rights and our own future.

Original article: caitlinjohnstone.com.au

By Harrison BERGER

Join us on Telegram, Twitter, and VK.

Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su

Last month, the United States convened a symposium in Prague with representatives from roughly 40 countries to coordinate “more robust” enforcement of six reimposed United Nations Security Council resolutions targeting Iran. The measures, restored on September 27, 2025 following what Washington described as Iran’s “significant non-performance” of its nuclear commitments, will strengthen a long-existing sweeping sanctions regime aimed at Iran’s nuclear program, ballistic missile development, arms trade, and banking system. Taking their usual cues from the U.S. government, EU leaders responded by approving without any debate a new round of sanctions targeting Iranian government officials and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and moved toward formally designating the IRGC as a terrorist organization.

But it remains unclear what new sanctions are meant to achieve that decades of prior economic warfare have not already failed to deliver. The effectiveness of that sanctions regime depends entirely on how one defines “success”;  there is a difference between their economic effects and their political outcomes.

“There is a consensus in the academic literature that politically, sanctions do not work,” said David Siegel, a political scientist who studies U.S. sanctions policy. “The economic devastation is not supposed to be the goal. Economic pressure is supposed to produce a political outcome.”

The “maximum pressure” campaign, originally designed by then-National Security Adviser John Bolton during the first Trump administration, was intended, as NBC News reported at the time, “to squeeze [Iran’s] economy until its leadership was forced to curtail its aggression in the region and concede to U.S. demands to dismantle its nuclear program,” none of which has happened.

As John Mearsheimer has argued, even direct U.S. military action failed to deliver those results. After U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities in June 2025, President Donald Trump claimed the program had been “completely and totally obliterated.” But a Defense Intelligence Agency assessment concluded the attack had set Iran’s nuclear program back by only a few months. That assessment was dismissed by the administration, but no detailed public accounting of the damage to Iran’s enrichment facilities or uranium stockpiles has since been released. As Mearsheimer points out, “one would think that if everything had been destroyed, as the president claims, the tag team [Israel and the U.S.] would be advertising that fact and backing up its claims with at least some data.”

Rather, the Israel Firsters who demanded maximum pressure sanctions, and who now lobby for a U.S. bombing and regime change campaign in Iran, argue that Iran is more emboldened and aggressive than ever. “Iran’s recent round of ballistic missile tests underscores the determination of its Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps to replenish its weapon stockpiles,” said Tyler Stapleton of the pro-Israel Foundation for Defense of Democracies, citing continued missile development and alleged sourcing of materials from abroad. Another FDD senior fellow, Behnam Ben Taleblu, argued that Iran’s missile forces have become even more central to its security doctrine, writing that they were “the only element of its security architecture that proved effective” during last year’s fighting and that “the regime continues to invest in these systems.”

Those pro-Israel hawks admit that years of sanctions have failed to curtail Iran’s military and nuclear ambitions. What they have succeeded in doing, U.S. officials now acknowledge, is crippling the Iranian economy and forcing that country to rely upon what the U.S. government calls a “shadow fleet” for its exports.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has repeatedly described the sanctions campaign as a deliberate effort to do so, outlining that plan publicly at the Economic Club of New York in March of last year, where he committed to “Making Iran Broke Again.” “I know a thing or two about currency devaluations,” Bessent said at the time, adding that this was precisely what the United States intended to do to Iran.

Bessent claimed the administration’s goal was to drive Iranian oil exports, then estimated at 1.5 to 1.6 million barrels per day, “back to the trickle they were when President Trump left office.” He acknowledged that Iran had already developed “a complex shadow network of financial facilitators and black-market oil shippers via a ghost fleet” to generate hard currency, and said U.S. policy was designed both to force reliance on that system and to target it.

Speaking again at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, Bessent celebrated how that policy had “worked,” crediting U.S. sanctions with collapsing Iran’s economy, triggering bank failures, devaluing Iran’s currency, and causing protests. As Bessent explained to Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business News, “In December, their economy collapsed. We saw a major bank go under. The central bank has started to print money. There is a dollar shortage. They are not able to get imports.”

“This,” says Bessent, “is why the people took to the streets.”

Нis admission raises the question of whether the sanctions regime is truly intended to change Iranian state behavior or if it is simply designed to manufacture an economic crisis that can be politically exploited by Israel and the U.S. government, who attempted to stage a color revolution in that country last month. To achieve that end, U.S. and Israeli involvement went beyond merely crashing Iran’s economy. An official Mossad account posting in Farsi urged Iranians to take to the streets, declaring, “we are with you in the field.” Former CIA Director Mike Pompeo echoed that message publicly. Meanwhile, Israel’s Channel 14 correspondent Tamir Morag wrote that “foreign actors are arming the protesters in Iran with live weapons,” which he said was “the reason for the hundreds of regime personnel killed.”

We have been told, by the same outlets and publishers who denied the Gaza genocide, that the Iranian government’s crackdown on those protests has killed tens of thousands of people in a mere two weeks, with Time magazine estimating the death toll at 30,000 people, with “the only parallel offered by online databases occur[ing] in the Holocaust.” Though, as Time was forced to admit, it has “been unable to independently verify” those numbers, and therefore there is little reason to believe them at all.

What is undeniable, however, is the effect that economic sanctions have had on Iran for decades, blocking that country’s access to the global banking system and depriving its population of life-essential medicines and goods. If sanctions neither dismantle Iran’s nuclear program nor curb its behavior in the region, yet reliably immiserate the population and generate unrest that foreign governments seek to weaponize, then the question is no longer whether sanctions “work,” but why Washington continues to pursue them—and how that policy serves our own interests rather than just Israel’s.

Original article: theamericanconservative.com

Join us on Telegram, Twitter, and VK.

Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su

Last week, a half-dozen masked and unidentifiable Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents killed a 37-year-old federal employee, a nurse, by spraying pepper spray into his eyes, pushing him to the ground, stealing his lawfully owned and carried handgun, and then shooting him nine times in the back.

The thugs from ICE whom the federal government has sent to Minneapolis have produced murder and mayhem on a scale far more violent, disruptive and disturbing to human life than have the immigrants residing there without papers.

Under the Constitution, immigration — who can legally come to and remain in the United States — was left to the states to regulate; and naturalization — who can become an American citizen — was left to the feds.

The court held — for the first time — that Congress could exercise regulatory powers from a source other than the Constitution. It reasoned that when British troops left the colonies after their surrender in 1781, the power to regulate immigration stayed behind and metaphysically transferred itself to the new federal government here. A rationale from nowhere.

Since then, federal immigration regulations have waxed and waned, usually depending upon contemporary economic trends and prevailing racial attitudes. A century after the ruling on the Chinese Exclusion Act, at President Ronald Reagan’s prompting, Congress enacted the Simpson-Mazzoli Act, which granted amnesty and permanent legal residence to all immigrants then in the U.S. The sky did not fall.

The White House has defended the ICE killings of two innocent Americans in the maelstrom of Minneapolis by using phrases like terrorist, agitator, assassin and self-defense. In the process of politically smearing two dead victims, it has tried to divert attention away from the ICE Gestapo-like tactics in the streets. And, in an act of obstructing justice, ICE has kept all the evidence of these murders from state investigators.

Are the masked men in the streets immune from prosecution for murder as the White House claims?

Federal and state laws mandate — and all police, even DHS agents, know this — that if the driver of a vehicle moving less than 5 miles per hour is trying to turn away from you, you don’t kill the driver; you let her turn or get out of the way. If somehow you feel threatened by a man on all fours on the ground whose lawfully carried handgun you have already seized, and whom you have temporarily blinded with pepper spray because he photographed you, you restrain him, you don’t shoot him in the back.

The reason police foreknowledge of right and wrong (who doesn’t know it is wrong to shoot an unarmed person in the back?) and of lawful and criminal use of force is relevant is another bizarre Supreme Court ruling which declared that prosecutions of government agents for excessive use of force will rise or fall on whether other similarly situated government defendants manifested this foreknowledge. Another legal principle from out of nowhere.

Can the state of Minnesota prosecute the ICE killers? Yes, under federal and state laws. Just ask Lon Horiuchi, the FBI sharpshooter at Ruby Ridge whom the state of Idaho prosecuted for excessive force when he killed the wife of the person the feds were trying to arrest by shooting her in the back. And there is no statute of limitations for murder.

More dangerous than American Gestapo is American Psycho — an attitude of government devoid of moral principles. One that — as authoritarians throughout history have done — targets a helpless, hopeless, politically weak minority and justifies murdering those who protest the violence employed in the targeting.

We have a government devoid of social virtue and bent primarily on demonstrating its power over persons. It is unbridled by the good, by the natural law, by the Constitution and by common decency. It has no values. It believes life is meaningless. In its fear of ordinary folks photographing its use of force in the streets, it verbally defends killing the photographer.

This psychotic government claimed the first Minneapolis person its agents murdered was a terrorist. She wasn’t. Then it claimed her spouse was a terrorist. She wasn’t.

Then it claimed that the nurse videoing its agents was there to kill them because he lawfully carried a handgun and ammunition. He wasn’t. Then it claimed he “brandished” his gun. He never touched his gun; the ICE agents took it from him before they executed him. Now it claims this nurse it shot in the back while he was on all fours on the frozen earth and blinded by pepper spray was a threat to its agents. That’s hogwash.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem told the media that her agents felt threatened and so they disarmed the nurse. The Supreme Court has ruled that the Second Amendment which protects the right to keep and bear arms, is as potent as the First Amendment. There was no legal basis to spray or detain the nurse, and thus these agents could no more lawfully disarm him than they could silence his speech about them.

This shameless lying is contradicted by what we all can see.

The same psychotic mentality that argued last year it can execute people on the high seas without trial has brought that might-makes-right nihilism into our streets. If Congress doesn’t stop this sickness in the executive branch by defunding it before it is too late, the voters will deem Congress complicit.

Of course, the psychopaths have the upper hand. Watch out, people of Iran. When the psychopaths are failing at home, they will bring us to war abroad.

Original article: creators.com

Join us on Telegram, Twitter, and VK.

Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su

According to a recent tabletop simulation, what the Trump administration is doing in Minneapolis is exactly what is needed to pit brother against brother in the United States.

Since January 6, around 2,000 ICE agents have stormed Minnesota in response to a vast fraud scheme that saw Somali scammers steal billions of dollars from the state. This has led to neighborhoods across the state being terrorized by masked agents who are indiscriminately and aggressively harassing and seizing individuals right off the streets and in their homes.

On January 7, ICE agents shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three who has been branded a “domestic terrorist” by the Trump administration, who appeared to be attempting to flee police officers in her vehicle before she was shot in the head three times. Rather than investigate the actions of the officer who shot Ms. Good, the Trump administration has announced “absolute immunity” for ICE agents, as well as members of Custom and Border Patrol.

“That guy is protected by absolute immunity,” Vice President JD Vance said of the ICE agent, Jonathan Ross, who killed Ms. Good. “He was doing his job.”

The violence being perpetrated against innocent civilians did not stop with Ms. Good. Federal agents have forcibly taken thousands of individuals to detention facilities, regardless of their legal status. They have shot protesters in the legs while blinding two activists with so-called “less deadly” munitions. They fired teargas canisters at the car of a family carrying six children, sending one child to the emergency room. They aggressively dragged a woman out of her car and on to the ground screaming.

Meanwhile, instead of investigating the conduct of the officer who shot Renee Good, the Department of Justice has opened a criminal investigation into the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, and Minneapolis mayor, Jacob Frey, accusing them of conspiring to obstruct federal agents. Renee Good’s widow is also under investigation.

If you think all of this resembles the early rumblings of a civil war, you are not alone. The scenario closely mirrors one explored in an October 2024 tabletop exercise conducted by the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law (CERL), at the University of Pennsylvania. In that simulated exercise, an American president initiated a highly unpopular law-enforcement operation in Philadelphia when he attempted to bring Pennsylvania’s national guard under executive control. When the governor balked and the guard pledged its loyalty to the state, the president deployed active-duty troops, resulting in an armed conflict between state and federal forces. According to Claire Finkelstein, the director of CERL, the “core danger we identified is now emerging: a violent confrontation between state and federal military forces in a major American city.”

Ominously, none of the participants, which included top-ranking former military and government officials, considered the explosive scenario unrealistic. In a rapidly evolving emergency such as the one in Minnesota, courts would most likely be “unable or unwilling to intervene in time, leaving state officials without meaningful judicial relief.” In other words, a full-blown clash between the state and federal forces, otherwise known as a civil war.

In such a scenario, military leaders must be prepared to “assess the legality” of their orders. Even under the Insurrection Act, federal troops are not legally permitted to attack protesters unless they are defending themselves from an imminent threat. Yet as we saw with the cold-blooded murder of Renee Good, such egregious conduct is already happening in Minneapolis at the hands of federal agents.

In November, Washington was rocked by comments by Democrat Senator Mark Kelly, a retired Navy captain, and five other veterans, who implored military leaders to “refuse illegal orders” against American citizens, even if the orders come from the Commander-in-Chief. While that may sound like nothing more than good old fashion common sense, it opened the door to the Trump administration accusing Kelly of treason and sedition.

Though the Philadelphia simulation appears to resemble the harsh events citizens in Minneapolis have experienced at the hands of ICE agents, the simulation misses one key factor: currently, municipal and state officials don’t seem interested in attacking ICE agents anytime soon. Let’s pray that that trend continues.

Join us on Telegram, Twitter, and VK.

Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su

The most disturbing lesson from the 2014 Maidan Revolution in Ukraine that has been well-learned by the various intelligence agencies in this business is that the application of extreme violence – especially aimed at law enforcement, other state authorities, and civilians – provides an effective template upon which to further the regime change narrative. Everything can be blamed on “the regime” and thus serve the purpose of the operation.

We have seen this recently in Iran.

When I was on the ground observing the early “color revolutions” in the 1990s in Eastern Europe it was simply about getting warm bodies in the street to wave the correct flags and mouth the NED-approved slogans and to demand a new election, the most recent one having been “stolen.”

Questioning legitimacy of elections was enough at that early stage. Even Western polls suggesting the election result matched the will of the people (as in the 2006 Belarus presidential election and subsequent “Denim Revolution” I monitored on the ground) did not dissuade the protesters. But that was all fun and games compared to what came next.

Now it is about bodies and blood and particularly the most gruesome injuries. This is difficult for any legitimate state authority to defend against, as any application of counter-force only feeds the narrative of a violent regime determined to quell “legitimate” desire for political pluralism.

For a successful regime change in the current conditions there must be maximum bloodshed. And it does not matter whose blood is shed, it can all be blamed on “the regime.” The bots and fake social media accounts under control of intelligence agencies can take care of that part. Amplify atrocities, regardless whence they came.

Heavier bloodshed also feeds the ignorance and voyeurism of the intended Western and (especially) US audiences. “Thar be dragons,” is the rallying cry. Everything beyond our borders is unsophisticated and bestial, while at the same time longing to be exactly as we are.

We saw this clearly in the well-orchestrated attacks against state law enforcement authorities in Ukraine/Maidan in 2014. What would normally have sufficed to return society to order was shown to be woefully inadequate in the face of extremely violent agents on the ground including snipers on the rooftops and “wet works” specialists willing to murder law enforcement with their bare hands. The more violence the better. The more gruesome the better.

Lenin understood it well: “The worse the better.” You must recruit the absolute lowest and most violent dregs of society to carry out the operation. But then that has been the CIA Operations Directorate modus operandi since its founding. Which is why President Truman was desperate to strangle his own baby in the cradle.

Through some serendipity, the extreme violence of the CIA/MI6/Mossad attempted regime change operation we just witnessed in Iran was defeated by technology (likely imported from Iran’s allies) targeting the plan at its weakest point: communications and coordination. Extreme acts of violence against state authorities and average citizens have no value unless coordinated for propaganda purposes.

No less than President Trump himself reduced the entire operation to body counts. So the regime-changers had the incentive to produce more bodies and their recruits on the ground were only too happy to comply.

But something happened: the shutdown of Elon Musk’s ill-advised gift of Starlink to the violent Israel-sponsored extremists was defeated somehow and you had a gang of violent killers with no directions from Langley or Tel Aviv on who to kill next.

And it turns out that no matter what you think about that country six thousand miles away, it is not as easy as the neocons claim to overthrow the government and usher in at the point of a gun “democracy” DC style. With rainbow parades and promises of an atheistic, multi-culti paradise a la – ironically – the ICE resisters in Minnesota or Seattle.

Overseas, the neocon Right becomes the most ideologically insane version of the Minnesota Left: “Iran needs to celebrate multi-culturalism, atheism, and pan-sexuality!”

OK.

In the world of US Middle East regime change hegemony there is no Right or Left. It’s all been contracted out to Tel Aviv, as our tech world has been contracted out to H1B visas. Connect the dots and realize, as the Communists so well realized, what are the correlation of forces for and against you.

Husbanding the entirety of the US global military empire to overthrow the main impediment of Israel’s “Greater Israel” goal to conquer the Middle East is in no way in accord to our own interests or future well-being. On the contrary.

The US embrace of extreme violence – the “Israel model” – overseas can only harm our actual national interest. Embracing the latest iteration of the “regime change” template not only betrays our supposed moral high-ground, it hastens the correlation of forces against dollar hegemony and against the survival of America’s own oligarch class.

Oppose this or get used to being poor, immoral, and dead.

Original article: ronpaulinstitute.org

Join us on Telegram, Twitter, and VK.

Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su

Shock and awe. The phrase is apt in describing what Israel has done in the occupied West Bank almost immediately following the events of October 7, 2023, and the start of the Israeli genocide in Gaza.

In her book The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein defines “shock and awe” not merely as a military tactic, but as a political and economic strategy that exploits moments of collective trauma—whether caused by war, natural disaster, or economic collapse—to impose radical policies that would otherwise be resisted. According to Klein, societies in a state of shock are rendered disoriented and vulnerable, allowing those in power to push through sweeping transformations while opposition is fragmented or overwhelmed.

Though the policy is often discussed in the context of US foreign policy—from Iraq to Haiti—Israel has employed shock-and-awe tactics with greater frequency, consistency, and refinement. Unlike the US, which has applied the doctrine episodically across distant theaters, Israel has used it continuously against a captive population living under its direct military control.

Indeed, the Israeli version of shock and awe has long been a default policy for suppressing Palestinians. It has been applied across decades in the occupied Palestinian territory and extended to neighboring Arab countries whenever it suited Israeli strategic objectives.

What is underway, therefore, is a race against time. Israel is working to consolidate what it hopes will become an irreversible new reality on the ground.

In Lebanon, this approach became known as the Dahiya Doctrine, named after the Dahiya neighborhood in Beirut that was systematically destroyed by Israel during its 2006 war on Lebanon. The doctrine advocates the use of disproportionate force against civilian areas, the deliberate targeting of infrastructure, and the transformation of entire neighborhoods into rubble in order to deter resistance through collective punishment.

Gaza has been the epicenter of Israel’s application of this tactic. In the years preceding the genocide, Israeli officials increasingly framed their assaults on Gaza as limited, “managed” wars designed to periodically weaken Palestinian resistance.

These operations were rationalized through the concept of “mowing the lawn,” a phrase used by Israeli military strategists to describe the periodic use of overwhelming violence to “reestablish deterrence.” The logic was that Gaza could not be politically resolved, only indefinitely managed through recurrent destruction.

What unfolded in the West Bank shortly after the start of the Gaza genocide followed a strikingly similar pattern.

Beginning in October 2023, Israel launched an unprecedented campaign of violence across the West Bank. This included large-scale military raids in cities and refugee camps, the routine use of airstrikes—previously rare in the West Bank—the widespread deployment of armored vehicles, and a surge in settler violence carried out with the backing or direct participation of the Israeli army.

The death toll rose sharply, with hundreds of Palestinians killed in a matter of months, including children. Entire refugee camps, such as Jenin, Nur Shams, and Tulkarm, were subjected to systematic destruction: Roads were torn up, homes demolished, water and electricity networks destroyed, and medical access severely restricted. Israeli forces repeatedly laid siege to communities, preventing the movement of ambulances, journalists, and humanitarian workers.

At the same time, Israel accelerated the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian communities, particularly in Area C. Dozens of Bedouin and rural villages were forcibly emptied through a combination of military orders, settler attacks, home demolitions, and the denial of access to land and water. Families were driven out through sustained terror designed to make daily life impossible.

Yet the most violent period of Israeli aggression in the West Bank since the Second Intifada (2000-2005) has been largely overlooked, in part because of the sheer scale and horror of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The annihilation of Gaza has rendered the violence in the West Bank seemingly secondary in the global imagination, despite the fact that its long-term consequences may prove just as devastating.

At the same time, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his extremist coalition succeeded in presenting themselves to the world as reckless, unrestrained, and ideologically driven—willing and able to expand the cycle of destruction far beyond Gaza, into the West Bank and across Israel’s borders into neighboring Arab countries. This performance of extremism functioned as a political strategy.

The consequences are now unmistakable. Large areas of the West Bank lie in ruins. Entire communities have been shattered, their social and physical fabric deliberately dismantled. According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East, more than 12,000 Palestinian children remain displaced, increasingly suggesting a displacement that may become permanent rather than temporary.

History, however, offers a critical lesson. The Palestinian struggle against Israeli settler colonialism has repeatedly demonstrated that Palestinians do not remain passive indefinitely. Despite the paralysis and fragmentation of their political leadership, Palestinian society has consistently regenerated its capacity for resistance.

Israel understands this reality as well. It knows that shock is not infinite, that fear eventually gives way to defiance, and that once the immediate trauma begins to fade, Palestinians will reorganize and push back against imposed conditions of domination.

What is underway, therefore, is a race against time. Israel is working to consolidate what it hopes will become an irreversible new reality on the ground—one that enables formal annexation, normalizes permanent military rule, and completes the ethnic cleansing of large segments of the Palestinian population.

For this reason, a deeper and more sustained understanding of current events in the West Bank is essential. Without confronting this reality directly, Israeli plans will proceed largely unchallenged. To expose, resist, and ultimately defeat these designs is not only a matter of political analysis but a moral imperative inseparable from supporting the Palestinian people in restoring their dignity and achieving their long-denied freedom.

Original article: commondreams.org

Alan MacLeod

Join us on Telegram, Twitter, and VK.

Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su

One of these groups is Human Rights Activists In Iran, frequently referred to as HRA or HRAI in the media. The group, and its media arm, the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) have become the go-to group of experts for Western media, and are the source of many of the most inflammatory claims and shockingly high casualty figures reported in the press. In the past week alone, their assertions have provided much of the basis for stories in CNN, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, ABC News, Sky News, and The New York Post, among others. And in a passionate plea for leftists to support the protests, Owen Jones wrote in The Guardian Tuesday that HRAI are a “respected” group whose death toll proclamations are “probably significant underestimates.”

Yet what none of these reports mention is that Human Rights Activists In Iran is bankrolled by the Central Intelligence Agency, through its cutout organization, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

“Independent” NGOs, Brought to You By the CIA

Established in 2006, Human Rights Activists in Iran is based in Fairfax, Virginia, just a stone’s throw away from CIA headquarters in Langley. It describes itself as a “non-political” association of activists dedicated to advancing freedom and rights in Iran. On its website, it notes that, “because the organization seeks to remain independent, it doesn’t accept financial aid from neither political groups nor governments.” Yet, in the same paragraph, it notes that “HRAI has also been accepting donations from National Endowment for Democracy, a non-profit, non-governmental organization in the United States of America.” The level of NED investment into HRAI has been substantial, to say the least; journalist Michael Tracey found that, in 2024 alone, the NED had apportioned well over $900,000 towards the organization.

Another NGO widely cited in recent media reports on the protests is the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran (ABCHRI). The group has been quoted widely, including by The Washington Post, PBS, and ABC News. Like with the HRAI, these reports also fail to disclose the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center’s proximity to the U.S. national security state.

Although it does not mention it in its funding disclaimer, the center is supported by the NED. Last year, the NED described the center as a “partner” organization, and awarded its director, Roya Boroumand, their 2024 Goler T. Butcher medal for democracy promotion.

“Roya and her organization have worked rigorously and objectively to document human rights violations committed by the regime in Iran,” said Amira Maaty, senior director for NED’s Middle East and North Africa programs. “The work of the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center is an indispensable resource for victims to seek justice and hold perpetrators accountable under international law. NED is proud to support Roya and the center in their advocacy for human rights and tireless pursuit of a democratic future for Iran.”

In addition to this, sitting on the center’s board of directors is controversial academic, Francis Fukuyama, a former NED board member and an editor of its “Journal of Democracy” publication.

If anything, the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI) has gone further than HRAI or the ABCHRI. Widely cited across Western media (e.g., The New York Times, The Guardian, USA Today), the CHRI has been the source of many of the goriest and most lurid stories coming out of Iran. A Monday article in The Washington Post, for example, leaned on the CHRI’s expertise to report that Iranian hospitals were being overwhelmed and had even run out of blood to treat the victims of government repression. “A massacre is unfolding. The world must act now to prevent further loss of life,” a CHRI spokesperson said. Given President Trump’s recent threats about U.S. military attacks on Iran, the implications of the statement were clear.

And yet, like with the other NGOs profiled, none of the corporate media outlets citing the Center for Human Rights in Iran noted its close connections to the U.S. national security state. The CHRI – an Iranian human rights group based in New York City and Washington, D.C. – was identified by the government of China as directly funded by the NED.

The claim is far from outlandish, given that CHRI board member, Mehrangiz Kar, is a former Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow at the NED. And in 2002 at a star-studded gala on Capitol Hill, First Lady Laura Bush and future president Joe Biden presented Kar with the NED’s annual Democracy Award.

A History of Regime Change Ops

The National Endowment for Democracy was created in 1983 by the Reagan administration, after a series of scandals had seriously damaged the image and reputation of the CIA. The Church Committee – a 1975 U.S. Senate investigation into CIA activities – found that the agency had masterminded the assassination of several foreign heads of state, was involved in a massive domestic surveillance campaign against progressive groups, had infiltrated and placed agents in hundreds of U.S. media outlets, and was carrying out shocking mind control experiments on unwilling American participants.

Technically a private entity, although receiving virtually all its funding from the federal government and being staffed by ex-spooks, the NED was created as a way to outsource many of the agency’s most controversial activities, especially overseas regime change operations. “It would be terrible for democratic groups around the world to be seen as subsidized by the CIA,” Carl Gershman, the NED’s longtime president, said in 1986. NED co-founder Allen Weinstein agreed: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA,” he told The Washington Post.

Part of the CIA’s mission was to create a worldwide network of media outlets and NGOs that would parrot CIA talking points, passing it off as credible news. As former CIA taskforce leader John Stockwell admitted, “I had propagandists all over the world.” Stockwell went on to describe how he helped flood the world with fake news demonizing Cuba:

We pumped dozens of stories about Cuban atrocities, Cuban rapists [to the media]… We ran [faked] photographs that made almost every newspaper in the country… We didn’t know of one single atrocity committed by the Cubans. It was pure, raw, false propaganda to create an illusion of communists eating babies for breakfast.”

Mike Pompeo, former CIA director, alluded this being active CIA policy. At a 2019 talk at Texas A&M University, he said, “When I was a cadet, what’s the cadet motto at West Point? You will not lie, cheat, or steal or tolerate those who do. I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. We had entire training courses [on] it!”

One of the NED’s greatest successes came in 1996, when it successfully swung elections in Russia, spending vast amounts of money to ensure U.S. puppet ruler Boris Yeltsin would remain in power. Yeltsin, who came to power in a 1993 coup that dissolved parliament, was deeply unpopular, and it appeared that the Russian public were ready to vote for a return to Communism. The NED and other American agencies flooded Russia with money and propaganda, ensuring their man remained in power. The story was cataloged in a famous edition of Time magazine, whose title page was emblazoned with the words, “Yanks To The Rescue: the Secret Story of How American Advisors Helped Yeltsin Win.”

Six years later, the NED provided both the finances and the brains for a briefly successful coup d’état against Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez. The NED spent hundreds of thousands of dollars flying coup leaders (such as Marina Corina Machado) back and forth to Washington, D.C. After the coup was overturned and the plot was exposed, NED funding to Machado and her allies actually increased, and the organization has continued to fund her and her political organizations.

The NED would have more luck in Ukraine, playing a key role in the successful 2014 Maidan Revolution that toppled President Viktor Yanukovych and replaced him with a pro-U.S. successor. The Maidan affair followed a tried-and-tested formula, with large numbers of people coming out to protest, and a hardcore of trained paramilitaries carrying out acts of violence aimed at destabilizing the government and provoking a military response.

Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs (and future NED board member) Victoria Nuland flew to Kiev to signal the U.S. government’s full support of the movement to oust Yanukovych, even handing out cookies to protestors in the city’s main square. A leaked telephone call showed that the new Ukrainian prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, was directly chosen by Nuland. “Yats is the guy,” she can be heard telling U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, citing his experience and friendliness with Washington as key factors. The 2014 Maidan Revolution and its aftermath would lead to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine eight years later.

Just across the border in Belarus, the NED planned similar actions to overthrow President Alexander Lukashenko. At the time of the attempt (2020-2021), the NED was pursuing 40 active projects inside the country.

On a Zoom call infiltrated and covertly recorded by activists, the NED’s senior Europe Program officer, Nina Ognianova, boasted that the groups leading the nationwide demonstrations against Lukashenko were trained by her organization. “We don’t think that this movement that is so impressive and so inspiring came out of nowhere — that it just happened overnight,” she said, noting that the NED had made a “significant contribution” to the protests.

On the same call, NED President Gershman noted that “we support many, many groups, and we have a very, very active program throughout the country, and many of the groups obviously have their partners in exile,” boasting that the Belarusian government was powerless to stop them. “We’re not like Freedom House or NDI [the National Democratic Institute] and the IRI [International Republican Institute]; we don’t have offices. So if we’re not there, they can’t kick us out,” he said, comparing the NED to other U.S. regime change organizations.

The attempted Color Revolution did not succeed, however, as demonstrators were met with large counter-demonstrations, and Lukashenko remains in power to this day. The NED’s actions were a key factor in Lukashenko’s decision to abandon his relationship with the West, and ally Belarus with Russia.

Just months after their failure in Belarus, the NED fomented another regime change attempt, this time in Cuba. The agency spent millions of dollars infiltrating and buying off pliant musical artists, especially in the hip hop community, in an attempt to turn local popular culture against its revolution. Led by Cuban rappers, the U.S. attempted to rally the people into the streets, flooding social media with calls from celebrities and politicians alike to topple the government. This did not translate into boots on the ground, however, and the fiasco was written off sarcastically as the U.S.’ “Bay of Tweets.”

It is precisely for these reasons, therefore, that accepting funding from the NED should be unthinkable for any serious NGO or human rights organization, as so many that do have been front groups for American power and clandestine regime change operations. It is also why the public should be extremely wary about any claims made by organizations on the payroll of a CIA cutout organization, especially those that attempt to hide the fact. Journalists, too, have a duty to scrutinize any statements made by these groups, and inform their readers and viewers about their inherent conflicts of interests.

Targeting Iran

Apart from funding the three U.S.-based human rights NGOs profiled here, the NED is spearheading a myriad of operations targeting the Islamic Republic. According to its 2025 grant listings, there are currently 18 active NED projects for Iran, although the agency does not divulge any of the groups they are working with.

It also refuses to divulge any hard details about these projects, beyond rather bland descriptions that include:

Empowering” a network of “frontline and exiled activists” inside Iran;

“Promoting independent journalism,” and “Establishing media platforms to influence the public;”

“Monitoring and promoting human rights;”

“Fostering internet freedom;”

“Training student leaders inside Iran;”

“Advancing policy analysis, debate, and collective actions on democracy,” and;

“Foster[ing] collaboration between Iranian civil society and political activists on a democratic vision and raise awareness on civic rights within the legal community, the organization will facilitate debate on transition models from authoritarianism to democracy.”

Reading between the lines, the NED is attempting to build up a widespread network of media outlets, NGOs, activists, intellectuals, student leaders and politicians who will all sing from the same hymn sheet, that of “transitioning” from “authoritarianism” (i.e., the current system of government” to “democracy,” (i.e., a U.S.-picked government). In other words: regime change.

Iran, of course, has been in American crosshairs ever since the removal of the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi during the Islamic Revolution of 1978-79. Pahlavi himself had been kept in place by the CIA, who engineered a coup against the democratically-elected government of Mohammad Mossadegh (1952-53). Mossadegh, a secular liberal reformer, had angered Washington by nationalizing the country’s oil industry, carrying out land reform, and refusing to crush the communist Tudeh Party.

The CIA (the NED’s parent organization), infiltrated Iranian media, paying them to run hysterical anti-Mossadegh content, carried out terror attacks inside Iran, bribed officials to turn against the president, cultivated ties with reactionary elements within the military, and paid protestors to flood the streets at anti-Mossadegh rallies.

The shah reigned for 26 bloody years between 1953 and 1979, until he was overthrown in the Islamic Revolution.

The U.S. supported Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, who almost immediately invaded Iran, leading to a bitter, eight-year long conflict that killed at least half a million people. Washington supplied Hussein with a wide range of weapons, including components for chemical weapons used on Iranians, as well as other weapons of mass destruction.

Since 1979, Iran has also been under restrictive American economic sanctions, measures that have severely hindered the country’s development. During his first term, Trump withdrew from the Iran Nuclear Deal and turned up the economic pressure. The result was a collapse in the value of the Iranian rial, mass unemployment, soaring rents and a doubling of the price of food. Ordinary people lost both their savings and their long-term security.

Throughout this, Trump has constantly threatened Iran with attack, finally following through in June, bombing a host of infrastructure projects inside the country.

A Legitimate Protest?

The current demonstrations began on December 28 as a protest against rising prices. Yet they quickly ballooned into something much bigger, with thousands calling for an overthrow of the government, and even the reinstatement of the monarchy under the son of the shah, Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi.

They were quickly supported and signal boosted by the U.S. and Israeli national security states. “The Iranian regime is in trouble,” Pompeo announced. “Happy New Year to every Iranian in the streets. Also to every Mossad agent walking beside them…” he added. Israeli media are openly reporting that “foreign elements” (i.e., Israeli) are “arming the protesters in Iran with live weapons, and this is the reason for the hundreds of dead among the regime’s people.”

The Israeli intelligence services confirmed Pompeo’s not-so-cryptic assertion. “Go out together into the streets. The time has come,” the spying agency’s official social media accounts instructed Iranians: “We are with you. Not only from a distance and verbally. We are with you in the field.”

Trump echoed those words. “TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!! Save the names of the killers and abusers. They will pay a big price,” he roared, adding that American “help is on the way.”

Any debate about what Trump meant by “American help” was ended on Monday, when he stated that “If Iran shots [sic] and violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue… We are locked and loaded and ready to go.” He also attempted to place an all-out economic blockade, announcing that any country trading with Tehran would face an additional 25% tariff.

All of this, added to the increasing violence of the protests, makes it much harder for Iranians to express themselves politically. What started as a demonstration about the cost of living has spiralled into a huge, openly insurrectionist movement, backed and fomented by the U.S. and Israel. Iranians, of course, have every right to protest, but a wealth of factors have raised the very real possibility that much of the anti-government movement is an inorganic, U.S.-orchestrated attempt at regime change. While Iranians can argue about how they wish to express themselves and what sort of government they want, what is undebatable is that so many of the think tanks and NGOs called upon to provide supposed expert evidence and commentary about these protests are tools of the National Endowment for Democracy.

Original article: mintpressnews.com

En las últimas 70 horas aproximadamente no se han registrado disturbios, revueltas ni protestas en ninguna ciudad iraní. No hay nuevas denuncias, sino más bien manifestaciones masivas en apoyo al Estado.

Únete a nosotros en Telegram , Twitter  y VK .

Escríbenos: info@strategic-culture.su

Para comprender el contexto de los acontecimientos actuales en Irán, es necesario recordar lo que afirmó el pasado mes de julio el comentarista estadounidense y biógrafo de Trump, Michael Wolff, sobre la opinión de Trump en relación con los inminentes ataques a las instalaciones de enriquecimiento de Fordow, Natanz e Isfahán en Irán:

He hecho muchas llamadas telefónicas, así que creo que tengo una idea del camino que ha llevado a Trump a la situación actual [con los ataques a Irán]. Las llamadas telefónicas son una de las principales formas en que trato de entender lo que piensa (uso el término «pensar» en sentido amplio).

Hablo con las personas con las que Trump ha hablado por teléfono. Quiero decir, todo el pensamiento interno de Trump es externo y se manifiesta en una serie de llamadas telefónicas constantes. Y es bastante fácil de seguir, porque les dice lo mismo a todos. Así que es esta repetición continua…

Así que, en esencia, cuando los israelíes atacaron Irán [el 12 de julio], él se mostró muy entusiasmado y sus llamadas telefónicas eran todas repeticiones de un único tema: ¿ganarán? ¿Es una victoria? ¿Se ha acabado? ¡Son [los israelíes] tan buenos! Es realmente un espectáculo».

Las revueltas orquestadas desde el exterior en las últimas semanas en Irán han desaparecido casi por completo, después de que Irán bloqueara las llamadas internacionales, interrumpiera las conexiones internacionales a Internet y, lo que es más significativo, interrumpiera las conexiones satelitales Starlink.

En las últimas 70 horas aproximadamente no se han registrado disturbios, revueltas ni protestas en ninguna ciudad iraní. No hay nuevos informes, sino más bien manifestaciones masivas en apoyo del Estado. Los vídeos que siguen circulando son en su mayoría antiguos y, según se informa, difundidos desde dos centros principales fuera de Irán.

El impacto de la interrupción de los contactos entre los manifestantes y sus controladores externos fue inmediato y pone de relieve que los disturbios nunca fueron espontáneos, sino que se planificaron con mucha antelación.

La represión de la violencia extrema practicada por una afluencia de alborotadores bien entrenados, junto con la detención de los cabecillas, ha quebrado el pilar fundamental de esta iteración de la estrategia de cambio de régimen estadounidense-israelí.

La estrategia de la CIA y el Mossad se basó en una serie de sorpresas planificadas para desestabilizar a Irán y desorientarlo.

La sorpresa funcionó inicialmente para el ataque furtivo lanzado por Estados Unidos e Israel contra Irán el 13 de junio. La «conmoción» se basó en una red de agentes secretos infiltrados por el Mossad en Irán durante un largo período de tiempo. Estos pequeños equipos secretos lograron infligir daños sustanciales a las defensas aéreas de corto alcance iraníes, utilizando pequeños drones de contrabando y armas antitanque Spike.

Este sabotaje interno estaba pensado como trampolín para un desafío israelí a todo el sistema de defensa aérea iraní. Para el IRGC, los ataques parecían haber surgido de la nada. Provocaron conmoción y obligaron a las defensas aéreas del IRGC iraní a adoptar una posición defensiva hasta que pudieron comprender e identificar el origen del ataque. A continuación, se ordenó a los sistemas de radar móviles que se retiraran a la enorme red de túneles de Irán por motivos de seguridad.

La activación del tercer sistema de defensa aérea global no podía proceder con seguridad hasta que se eliminara la amenaza a estos recursos de radar móviles.

Este sabotaje inicial permitió a Israel enfrentarse al sistema de defensa aérea integrado iraní que, aunque mantenía su posición defensiva, operaba a capacidad reducida. En ese momento, Israel entró en el conflicto utilizando misiles aerobalísticos lanzados desde el aire desde posiciones seguras fuera del espacio aéreo iraní.

Como solución rápida, se desactivó la conexión a Internet de la red de telefonía móvil iraní para interrumpir la conexión con los operadores ocultos que proporcionaban datos de objetivos a las estaciones de lanzamiento de drones locales a través de la red de telefonía móvil iraní.

El ataque del 13 de junio, concebido para derrumbar lo que se había definido como un «castillo de naipes» del Estado iraní, fracasó, pero posteriormente dio lugar a la «guerra de los 12 días», que también fracasó. Israel se vio obligado a pedir a Trump que negociara un alto el fuego tras cuatro días de múltiples ataques con misiles iraníes.

La siguiente fase del proyecto de «cambio de régimen» entre Estados Unidos e Israel tenía un modelo muy diferente, basado en un antiguo «manual» destinado a reunir e incitar a multitudes y desatar una violencia extrema. Comenzó el 28 de diciembre de 2025 y coincidió con la reunión entre Netanyahu y Trump en Mar-a-Lago. Una venta al descubierto del rial (probablemente orquestada desde Dubái) hizo que el valor de la moneda se desplomara entre un 30 % y un 40 %.

La devaluación amenazaba la actividad de los comerciantes (el bazar). Como es comprensible, protestaron. (La economía iraní no se ha gestionado bien durante algunos años, lo que ha aumentado su enfado).

Los jóvenes iraníes también consideraban que esta mala gestión económica los había expulsado de la clase media hacia una relativa pobreza. La caída del valor del rial se sintió ampliamente.

Los bazaaris protestaban contra la repentina alteración del statu quo económico, pero fueron utilizados por Estados Unidos e Israel como medio para propagar reivindicaciones más amplias.

La «sorpresa» en este capítulo del manual del cambio de régimen fue la incorporación de alborotadores profesionales en lugares indicados por sus controladores externos.

El modus operandi consistía en reunir a los insurrectos armados en una zona urbana muy concurrida, normalmente en una ciudad pequeña, elegir a un transeúnte al azar para golpearlo salvajemente, mientras las mujeres lo filmaban y gritaban a la multitud que se había reunido que «lo mataran, lo quemaran».

La multitud, sin comprender, se calienta y se vuelve violenta. Llega la policía y, en ese momento, se disparan tiros, generalmente desde un punto elevado con respecto a la multitud, contra la policía o las fuerzas de seguridad. Estas últimas responden al fuego y, sin saber de dónde provienen los disparos, matan a los «manifestantes» armados y a miembros del público. Así se desata una violenta revuelta.

Las técnicas son eficaces y profesionales. Se han utilizado en muchas otras ocasiones en otros países.

La solución iraní ha sido doble: en primer lugar, gracias al apoyo de los servicios secretos turcos, muchos de los combatientes kurdos armados (entrenados y armados por Estados Unidos e Israel) han sido asesinados o detenidos mientras cruzaban la frontera para llegar a las zonas de Irán con mayoría kurda, procedentes de Siria y Erbil.

Pero el factor determinante fue la interrupción de las conexiones Starlink a las aproximadamente 40 000 terminales satelitales introducidas clandestinamente en Irán (muy probablemente por ONG occidentales).

Los servicios secretos occidentales consideraban que Starlink era imposible de bloquear, de ahí su posición privilegiada entre las herramientas para un cambio de régimen. La interrupción de Starlink ha cambiado la situación. Las revueltas se han desvanecido. Y el Estado ha reaccionado. No ha habido deserciones del ejército, del IRGC o de los Basij. El Estado permanece intacto y sus defensas se han reforzado.

¿Y ahora qué pasará? ¿Qué puede hacer Trump? Su hipotética intervención se basaba en la narrativa de que «el régimen estaba masacrando al pueblo», en medio de «ríos de sangre». Eso no ha ocurrido. Al contrario, ha habido manifestaciones masivas de apoyo a la República.

Bueno, Michael Wolff se ha puesto en contacto con sus fuentes en la Casa Blanca: «He vuelto a hablar con las personas con las que hablo en la Casa Blanca para revisar el tema».

Wolff informa de que la idea de una nueva ronda de ataques contra Irán parecía haber cobrado fuerza entre sus interlocutores a finales del verano y principios del otoño. El punto de partida era que Trump estaba «entusiasmado» con el resultado de su ataque de junio contra las instalaciones de enriquecimiento de uranio iraníes: «Funcionó; funcionó de verdad», repite Trump.

Pero en otoño, Trump empezó a darse cuenta de que tendría que librar una dura batalla en las elecciones de mitad de mandato. Empezó a decir:

Si perdemos [la Cámara], podríamos estar acabados; acabados; acabados».

Y Trump continuaba —con cierta conciencia—, dice Wolff, citando los problemas a los que «ellos» se enfrentan, es decir, [la falta de] «puestos de trabajo, la mierda de Epstein y esos vídeos de la ICE que hacen llorar a todo el mundo». En estas conversaciones, Trump da a entender que los republicanos podrían incluso perder el Senado, en cuyo caso, «volveré a los tribunales, lo que no será agradable».

El día antes de atacar las instalaciones de enriquecimiento en junio de 2025, Trump, en una llamada telefónica a sus amigos que revela su forma de pensar, repetía constantemente:

Si lo hacemos, tiene que ser perfecto. Tiene que ser una ‘victoria’. Tiene que parecer perfecto. Nadie tiene que morir.

Trump seguía repitiendo a sus interlocutores: «Vamos a entrar, explotar y salir: el gran día. Queremos un gran día. Queremos [esperen, dice Wolff] una guerra perfecta». Y luego, de repente, tras el ataque de junio, Trump anunció un alto el fuego, que según Wolff fue «el final de la guerra perfecta de Trump».

La extrema violencia utilizada por los alborotadores contra la policía y los funcionarios de seguridad iraníes (hasta su punto álgido el 9 de enero de 2026); los incendios de bancos, autobuses, bibliotecas y el saqueo de mezquitas, fueron muy probablemente ideados por los servicios secretos occidentales para mostrar un Estado en ruinas y en descomposición que, en su agonía, estaba matando a su propio pueblo.

Probablemente, en coordinación con Israel, esto se le presentó a Trump como la introducción «perfecta» a un «escenario al estilo venezolano»: apostamos por la decapitación, «dentro-boom-fuera».

Esta semana, Trump ha dicho a sus asesores (por segunda vez), según informa Wolff, que quiere «una iniciativa de gran impacto; un acontecimiento de gran alcance, que sea noticia. Tiene que «sonar» bien». A pesar de que las revueltas se han calmado, sigue insistiendo en que su equipo le garantice la «victoria» en cualquier acción que se emprenda.

Pero ¿dónde encaja el escenario «dentro-boom-fuera»? Los disturbios han cesado. Tras el ataque del 12 de junio de 2025 y el secuestro de Maduro, Teherán es muy consciente de la obsesión de Washington por la decapitación.

Entonces, ¿Qué puede hacer Trump? ¿Bombardear edificios institucionales iraníes como el cuartel general de la Guardia Nacional? Y es casi seguro que Irán responderá. Ha amenazado con responder atacando las bases estadounidenses en toda la región.

En una situación así, un ataque autorizado por Trump podría no parecer en absoluto una «gran victoria».

Quizás Trump se limite a una ‘victoria’ menor: «Tenemos un gran palo», sigue diciendo. «Nadie sabe si lo usaré. ¡Estamos asustando a todo el mundo!»

Publicado originalmente por Conflicts Forum
Traducción: Observatorio de trabajador@s en lucha

Join us on Telegram, Twitter, and VK.

Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su

We are practically accustomed to it by now. Despite the many protests in recent times falsely categorized as color revolutions, when we see particularly violent and organized protests in Iran, we generally know we are dealing with a color revolution.

Western reactions are so predictable and automatic they seem mechanical. Regardless of the concrete circumstances behind the events, the West always frames protests in Iran as something related to “oppressed women,” even when there is no connection. It’s as if the West hasn’t truly gotten over the failure of the last large-scale color revolution attempt in 2022-2023, following the death of Mahsa Amini.

That’s why, although the protest waves that began on December 28 were led by unions and shopkeepers and were related to concrete recent problems—such as the water crisis caused by years of mismanagement of Iranian aquifers and the economic instability caused by the unthoughtful economic policies of President Masoud Pezeshkian—images more likely to resonate with the distorted Western imagination and with its scarcely disguised perverse yearnings for sexual tourism and pornographic profanation of Iranian women’s bodies quickly spread on social media.

Now, however, it is quite clear that when we refer to the disturbances in Iran over the past two weeks, we are necessarily talking about two different “waves.” The first days saw mostly small, peaceful demonstrations. Starting on December 31, however, some small groups began trying to invade police stations or occupy government buildings, as well as attempting to turn peaceful protests into violent actions. For about a week, these efforts seemed isolated, were repelled by peaceful protesters, and quickly suppressed—although cases of police or security personnel being lynched had already begun to appear.

Suddenly, in a manner that can only be considered coordinated, masked elements began setting fire to mosques, shops, public buildings, and cars, as well as using firearms and bladed weapons against public officials, including firefighters. Reports indicate that 250 mosques, over 800 shops, 182 ambulances, 265 schools, 3 libraries, and 4 cinemas were damaged or destroyed. Worse than that, hundreds of police officers, firefighters, Revolutionary Guards, and even simple bystanders were murdered, some beheaded.

Now, videos are beginning to appear showing the coordinated and far from spontaneous actions of masked elements retrieving weapons from backpacks and orchestrating the destruction of buildings and violence against others. The coordination for these actions, obviously, was done via the internet.

And this is where we can witness how the color revolution was suppressed. Because as soon as the Iranian government realized the protests had been co-opted by insurgents acting in a coordinated manner, the internet was deactivated at the national level. What a surprise it was when, suddenly, some “points of light” began to appear in the Iranian “virtual darkness.” It turns out “someone” was distributing Starlink devices to the color revolution leaders.

From then on, the government only needed to track these few internet users and reach them, even in their homes. Having identified the Starlink users, the government then simply jammed the Starlink signal, and within just 2 days, the acts of vandalism and destruction ended. What is “revolutionary” here, fundamentally, besides the strategy used, is how Iran managed to jam Starlink.

Some say Iran used the Russian Murmansk electronic warfare system, others mention the Russian Tobol system, and others claim the use of Chinese technology. What is known for sure, however, is that it was brilliant for the Iranian government to simply let the terrorists act and even connect to Starlink to identify them more easily.

Immediately afterwards, moreover, the government called on the Iranian population to take to the streets to protest against the terrorist attacks and in defense of the country. And indeed, millions of people went out. And it’s important to highlight this to talk about the Western media coverage of this entire process.

The world has rarely seen so much absolutely fallacious propaganda produced simultaneously about events. The lies ranged from the number of rioters (Western media spoke of millions, when in Tehran there were never more than 40,000 protesters in total, both peaceful and violent), to reports that Khamenei had fled the country or that the government had lost control of several cities. And when it became clear that the subversives were being suppressed, “black propaganda” began, accusing Iran of killing up to 20,000 protesters, without presenting any evidence.

In parallel, the US brandished military threats against Iran. Until they suddenly stopped and backtracked, even emphasizing that the Iranian government had only executed dangerous criminals who were shooting at the police.

What explains the change in behavior?

Everything indicates that the US expected the color revolution process to last longer. The idea was to keep Tehran in constant tension, forced to use violence without effectively managing to suppress the enemies. This would build the casus belli for military action. But Iran simply liquidated the armed insurgencies in a matter of few days, before allowing “momentum” to be generated that would enable a significant military attack on Iran, facilitating a regime change.

The fact that today the Iranian police seized 60,000 weapons on a ship, which had entered the country clandestinely, shows that a scenario similar to Libya or Syria was projected for Iran. We recall here, by the way, that in Libya, the US embassy itself acted as a hub for the international arms trafficking to Wahhabi rebels.

These weapons would probably have been distributed to the “protesters” in an “ideal” context of a stalemate between the government’s repressive efforts and the intensification of anti-government forces, potentially radicalized by the police repression itself, in a dialectical movement.

Without assets on the ground, it would make no sense to undertake military action against Iran. And the tragedy seems total for Israel and the US regarding the regime change objectives. It’s as if they have lost all local assets. Without looking back at the war between Iran and Israel in 2025, we will remember that the initial moves involved infiltrators using drones to destroy air defense systems and radars up close, the same tactic used in a terrorist attack carried out on Russian territory.

With the rapid and efficient Iranian action, there was no one left to deactivate Iranian defenses, no one to receive the trafficked weapons to try to turn vandalism into armed revolt, no one to take advantage of the chaos caused by a massive airstrike by the US Air Force.

The Iranian lesson must be heeded by all counter-hegemonic countries in a scenario where color revolutions are once again becoming a common tool for imposing the will of the unipolar hegemon.

Junte-se a nós no Telegram , Twitter e VK.

Escreva para nós: info@strategic-culture.su

Há exatos três anos, uma pequena massa plebeia utilizou métodos plebeus para expressar seu desgosto pelo regime político. Quem vai negar seu direito de demonstrar indignação com um regime putrefato como a “democracia” brasileira? Nem a plebe bolsonarista nem o conjunto das massas empobrecidas se reconhecem nas instituições ditas democráticas.

A composição social do sistema de justiça e o soldo cobrado pelos ministros do STF são uma prova cabal de que o Estado é uma máquina controlada pela classe dominante. O salário médio no Brasil é de 3,5 mil reais. Mas isso não é tão realista, pois equilibra a massa de ⅓ dos trabalhadores que ganham até um salário mínimo com os poucos que recebem dezenas ou centenas de milhares de reais. Um ministro do STF, que não foi eleito por ninguém e que já nasceu em berço de ouro, recebe mais de R$ 46 mil, isto é, 13 vezes o salário médio dos brasileiros e 30 (trinta) vezes o salário mínimo, do qual depende um em cada três trabalhadores.

Se a democracia é o governo do povo, as instituições deveriam ser o reflexo da sociedade. Mas elas são o reflexo da burguesia, do latifúndio, dos banqueiros e não do povo.

Aos olhos de milhões de cidadãos comuns, os desembargadores, promotores, procuradores, juízes e ministros não têm a menor legitimidade. No entanto, sua função social dentro do organismo estatal lhes concede a maior de todas as autoridades. São pigmeus que, com o poder que têm até mesmo os mais medíocres deles, coagem o cidadão comum. Mas é uma autoridade artificial, e por isso mesmo ela precisa ser reforçada ininterruptamente. As palavras de Engels se encaixam perfeitamente neles:

“Donos da força pública e do direito de recolher os impostos, os funcionários, como órgãos da sociedade, põem-se então acima dela. O respeito livre e voluntariamente tributado aos órgãos da constituição gentílica já não lhes basta, mesmo que pudessem conquistá-lo; veículos de um poder que se tinha tornado estranho à sociedade, precisam impor respeito através de leis de exceção, em virtude das quais gozam de uma santidade e uma inviolabilidade especiais. O mais reles dos beleguins do Estado civilizado tem mais “autoridade” do que todos os órgãos da sociedade gentílica juntos; no entanto, o príncipe mais poderoso, o maior homem público, ou general, da civilização pode invejar o mais modesto dos chefes de gens, pelo respeito espontâneo e indiscutido que lhe professavam. Este existia dentro mesmo da sociedade, aqueles veem-se compelidos a pretender representar algo que está fora e acima dela.”

A polarização política e a desconfiança nas instituições, a oposição à “democracia”, revelam que o povo repudia um regime em que ele não participa ativamente da vida política. Que ele recusa um regime que o exclui das decisões, tomadas por funcionários que o oprimem. Significa que o povo quer ser um elemento ativo e decisivo da vida política, que ele quer tomar o poder em suas mãos. Significa, mesmo que isso ainda esteja confuso para a maioria, que ela quer derrubar toda essa velha e carcomida estrutura da burguesia e governar ela mesma, em uma verdadeira democracia – ao contrário dos que acham que o povo quer um Estado forte, totalitário, para se proteger (quem quer isso é a burguesia, para se proteger do povo).

O cidadão comum – inclusive a pequena burguesia e camadas da própria burguesia – é esmagado por esse regime putrefato, que o oprime e o humilha dia após dia. Mas ele tem que fingir que ama todo esse inferno que é a sociedade capitalista. Se ele expressar o seu sentimento legítimo e natural (o mais legítimo e o mais natural) de ódio por essa situação, ele pode ir preso por discurso de ódio contra essa maravilhosa democracia na qual ele vive. Odiar profundamente uma sociedade como essa é a obrigação de nove em cada dez cidadãos. Os bolsonaristas expressam esse ódio de forma confusa, mas a razão do seu ódio, no fundo, é a mesma dos trabalhadores organizados e de todas as massas oprimidas.

A esquerda põe a mão sobre o ombro do juiz, aponta o dedo para o trabalhador ou comerciante “intolerantes” e cochicha no ouvido da autoridade, pedindo para que o puna. E depois ainda se espanta com o apoio de grandes massas aos demagogos bolsonaristas, muitas vezes se perguntando: “onde nós erramos?” Mas o pequeno-burguês está distante da realidade do povo, ele vive sua vida relativamente confortável, e quanto mais longe da vida material, mais importância ele concede às idealizações. Logo, importa-se mais com o que as pessoas pensam do que com o que elas fazem, e inventa uma realidade fictícia para nela embriagar-se.

Ao apoiarem leis contra o “discurso de ódio”, os pretensos democratas também atuam como auxiliares da burguesia para conter a manifestação dos oprimidos contra os opressores achando que são os opressores que estão sendo proibidos (por eles mesmos!) de odiar os oprimidos! O Estado que proíbe o “discurso de ódio” é o mesmo que chacina centenas de pobres nas favelas. Não se pode desejar a morte de ninguém, mas a polícia tem carta branca para matar. E ai dos órfãos e das viúvas que se recusarem a engolir a indignação, porque, além de perderem seus familiares, ainda poderão ser processados por “discurso de ódio”!