Fascist theocracies at war

Leaving aside the USA for a moment, to firstly focus on Israel and Iran: the ongoing war has the awful stink of religious zealotry.

Wiping out the demonic Other — in this case, an entire modern nation on either side, and the talk is of total annihilation — has the odor of a malignancy metastasizing inside two monotheisms.

To be accurate: the leadership of Iran and Israel profess to relatively new, 20^th Century strains of ancient world religions, and commit their entire populations to mega death matches. These new strains ironically idealize what is believed to be the original teaching and guidance.

Zionism, Israel’s presently dominant political ideology, holds faith in the immutability of a Promised Land, which must be kept at whatever cost to both enemy and faithful. Ownership of the Land of Israel is divinely ordained — the land complexly overlapping with Palestine, not a small complication. Meanwhile, the now dominant strain of Iran’s Shīʿa Islam is fixed on martyrdom and, effectively, a cult of death.

Both these Judaic and Islamic sub-cultures mobilize holy zealotry in the secular domains of governance, economics, social relations, and conduct in war.

Still, it is, of course, the political economy of oil that fueled this present and other wars in the Middle East since the 20^th Century. And since then, anything global spinning out of the enmity between Iran and Israel owes, too, to petrodollar flows. The flows themselves have a violent dynamic (which deserves another column).

What is important for now is clarity about how intensely these flows of the modern politics of oil are admixed with cruel versions of divine power. About how ferociously these secular-religious amalgams saturate virtual and actual wars.

MARTYRDOM, AMPLIFIED
The horrendous, in other words, is a daily experience; vicariously or in the flesh.

The estimated 30,000 Iranian protestors seeking a secular state, gunned down a month ago by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps: these dead are alive in global pro- and anti-democracy debates. Too, talk continues and remains strident about the Israel Defense Forces visiting brutality on Gaza residents. Mass starvation and bomb runs on hospitals and schools add up to the numbness uniquely produced by Israeli relentlessness.

The detonation point for recent events — the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Southern Israel that killed 1,195 Israeli civilians and military personnel, and on the 8^th, the following day, the Hezbollah escalation of hostilities — reverberates, continuously for now, in all media platforms.

Hamas, Iran’s surrogate (as are the Hezbollah of Lebanon and the Zaydi Shīʿa Houthis of Yemen), exalt explosive martyrdom to drive political projects. It is not beneath them to use both legacy media and digital social networks to amplify and weaponize these blasts into kingdom come.

And while it is difficult to parse the religious, cultural, economic, political, and historical dimensions of any war, the Iran/Israel collision does lend itself to a good gist. It is one which is not offensive to most Jews and Muslims: that this is a war between theocratic fascists, who whip up base emotions in the name of the sacred.

Which is not to picture all Israelis and Iranians and their surrogates as zombies allowing themselves to be aroused to sacred perdition. It bears saying, over and over, that Judaism is not synonymous with Zionism. Christian Zionists exist, among other caveats.

It bears saying, over and over, that Islam is not synonymous with the Ayatollahs’ rearticulation of Shīʿa Islam — the revolutionary ideological formation originally called Khomeinism, built on the velayat-e faqih as structure of government — even if the recently deceased Shaheed Ayatollah Imam Khamenei opposed Sunni-Shīʿa division.

And it bears saying, over and over, that the United States’ present leadership brings the third monotheism into the ongoing war, in the form of its own nasty, homegrown subculture. White Christian nationalism parlays a similar harkening to an imagined original form of monotheistic belief.

THE OTHER CULT
Of US President Donald Trump, a Christian nationalist said that this one head of state is “… anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to earth.” The group maintains that “America was founded as a Christian nation.” Both assertions fly in the face of the US Constitution.

The American leaders who staged the opening strike at Iran spouted macho froth about Holy War. Fired by hubris to begin with, Trump’s administration started to blow $1 billion a day on Iran-bound missiles that were downed by drones that cost only $20 thousand each. Expensive, warmongering Christianity is also the height of impudence.

The core fuel is the white (white hot!) supremacist version of Christianity that revels in big exploding weaponry. That is to say, the biggest penises ever.

The term toxic masculinity — now the globally shared description of Trumpian attitude — is more apt than first meets the eye. This version of the Jesus religion seems like over-performed patriarchy, a culture shared by all three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. But this US machismo of King Kong size (though not King Kong’s heart) in the Christian nationalists’ warmonger act is entirely new, 21^st Century chest-thumping to thunder the willingness to move fast to endgame.

Nuclear endgame, hence true Apocalypse. Humanity has never been closer to global destruction as now.

Significantly, the US cannot appeal to a true grievance. It neither endured imperialist oppression (as Iran did) nor a holocaust (as the Jews did). In the case of white Christian nationalist US leadership and about half its population, the historical driver for its behavior is unthinking proclivity to trigger regime change, to invigorate white projection on the world stage.

The US forgets that regime change by imperial fiat — beginning with the MI6- and (the new birthed) CIA-staged removal of Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 — inevitably presaged increasingly bigger wars through the last and present centuries.

Last week’s failed attempt by the US in Iran and successfully in Venezuela earlier are only the latest exercises of decapitation as foreign policy.

And then, when imagined as newfangled Crusades (as the tattoos on the torso and arms of US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth assert), the present war mangles all sense of the sacred in Christianity into penis worship. Yes, there is religious ecstasy involved.

It is revolting, malefic, sexualized Christianity getting off on the thrill of Holy War.

FEELING THE END
Religion gone awry replaces foreign policy and an international rule of law in the currently unfolding, totally needless catastrophe. It is not a clash of civilizations (not that the 1992 book by Samuel Huntington, Clash of Civilizations, was ever taken seriously in academia). The three monotheisms are not homogenous within themselves.

What’s going on is definitely not a tripartite war involving violent differences amongst the three patriarchal, Abrahamic religions.

This war is far too complicated to encourage sweeping anti-Semitism, or Islamophobia, or wholesale anti-Christianity. Observe that the Saudis like it that Israeli and the US attacked Iran. Most of the Arab Gulf States also support weakening the Hezbollah. Christians in general are cool about Jews and Muslims; and vice-versa, notably in democratic communities.

Iran thinks nothing of bombing the Arab Gulf states. Israel thinks nothing of killing Lebanese and Gaza Christians, together with everyone else in its way. And President Trump has no qualms about wasting Iran’s pro-democracy citizens and its own soldiers.

Meanwhile Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, playing on President Trump’s egomania, succeeded in commencing the realization of his 40-year desire to collapse the whole Arab region. That is, realizing his own violent egomania. And both Netanyahu and Trump have an antagonist in Iran’s 200,000-strong Revolutionary Guard and its ayatollahs, who should be regarded by the world as equally egomaniac as a collectivity.

Asked when the war will end, President Trump said “When I feel it… in my bones.”

After killing nearly 200 schoolgirls and causing the largest disruption of oil production in history, after giving beneficial space for Russia and China and causing the displacement of 500,000 people from South Lebanon, and after causing global defocusing on continuing Israeli depredation on Gaza — within just two weeks — everything comes home to his own utterly ignorant whim.

Yes, this is theocracy. But the “theo” dimension, expressed in politics of death, is best described as malignancies. President Trump gives himself a God-the-Father power beyond all accountability, sustained by a malevolent version of Christianity. So does Prime Minister Netanyahu. Ditto the malignancy in Judaism. So did the deceased Ayatollah Khamenei, atop the malignancy engineered in Shīʿa Islam.

These fascists exercise a theocratic politics, pervaded by poisonous machismo, that is now threatening the survival of humanity.

Marian Pastor Roces is an independent curator and critic of institutions. Her body of work addresses the intersection of culture and politics.