Tag Archives: iran

Irreconcilable Incoherence and the Unalterable Demise of Empathy

Posted on by
1

Another “assassination” attempt in the United States.  The third one in two years.  All three directed at Donald J. Trump.  Several while he was a presidential candidate and now one as president.  Predictably, the president and his supporters blame Democratic criticism of Mr. Trump and the media’s reaction to the Epstein scandals while refusing to acknowledge that they themselves engage in similar rhetoric when given the chance, both branches of the AIPAC controlled uniparty doing everything possible to increase polarization within the United States electorate[1]. 

To me, the issue is more serious and more strategic.  What to me is very different this time is that the Trump administration no longer treats assassinations or murders of heads of state or of their families or of their cabinets and their families as crimes, at least when the United States and Israel engage in such activities.  The generality of such crimes which constitute violations of the most fundamental principal of international law, jus cogens, no longer seems applicable in the context of the United States and if assassination of political leaders is no longer a crime when engaged in by the United States, how would it then be a crime when engaged in against its own leaders?  Legal logic, possibly an oxymoron, would dictate that political assassination is either always or never legal.  In the pure legal sense, there is no room for self-serving hybrids.

Cole Tomas Allen, a 31 year old engineer, a purportedly highly intelligent and well educated individual, apparently believed that it was his duty to target Trump administration officials because of their connection to Jeffrey Epstein’s heinous crimes involving rape, pederasty, sexual abuse of minors, murder and satanic rituals, crimes which Mr. Allen’s targets refused to investigate, at least that’s what he claimed according to a note he sent family members minutes before the attack.  There are also allegations that he was a pro-Ukraine fanatic furious because of declining United States support for the Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy regime and even a photograph briefly posted on Instagram of Mr. Allen in an Israeli Defense Forces sweatshirt[2].  Indeed, “Never Trumpers” have little trouble believing that all three purported attempts on Mr. Trump’s life were orchestrated, something to which Mr. Trump’s reactions sometimes add credibility.  For example, immediately following the latest incident Mr. Trump and members of his cabinet went on the air to indicate how the incident proved the need for the “Big, Beautiful White House Ballroom” currently tied up in litigation.  Furthermore, Mr. Trump and his supporters used the incident to justify renewal of authority for warrantless spying on United States citizens.  Based on the prevalence of artificial intelligence, it’s impossible verify any of the allegations involving Mr. Allen’s motivation, ludicrous though they may be.  If they are. 

So, based on the foregoing, how is Mr. Allen to be judged based on the current state of the law?  Or is he to be judged at all?  After all, conviction without trial is hardly unusual now, at least when the United States is involved.  Or Israel.

Many people I know, men who I trust admire and respect and who share a similar educational background with me, at least through undergraduate studies, see no problem with what the United States and Israel have done to leaders in Iran, and in Gaza and in Lebanon and in Syria and in Libya and in Iraq.  The list goes on.  But they’re horrified when assassination is “attempted”, even unsuccessfully, in the United States, whether the attempts are successful or not and whether against United States political leadership or against civic leaders like Charlie Kirk (unless, of course, it involved an Israeli project, the assassination Charley Kirk and of United States president John F. Kennedy in 1963 comes to mind, or the attack on the USS Liberty).  Paranoia, apparently, is catching and I may have a touch, which brings to mind a probable urban myth concerning President Richard M. Nixon who, purportedly once exclaimed: “just because I may be paranoid does not mean there are not people out to get me.  In Mr. Nixon’s case he was obviously right (no pun intended).

So, is “the do as I say and not as I do” refrain some parents used in the past (perhaps some still do) applicable when it comes to legal concepts such as crimes?  In legal systems the concept of “comity”, a concept related to reciprocity, would seem applicable.  But do legal systems still exist?  Did they ever?  Or are they as much of an illusion as are the concepts of democracy or of liberty or of accountability for one’s actions regardless of who one is (i.e., that purportedly no one is above the las)?

It’s entirely possible that neither international nor constitutional law (at least United States constitutional law) now exist.  Perhaps only the “state of nature” posited in the seventeenth century by political philosopher Thomas Hobbes exists, one where only power matters (as Donald Trump has expressly stated).  The demise of law and of legal systems in an international context seems like a cancer metastasizing but one which may soon spread to domestic law.  Remember when, starting with the Obama administration, it became acceptable, if perhaps not really legal, for United States agents to kill United States citizens using drones and other means without a trial or even an indictment and without the excuse of self-defense?  I do.  It sickened me then, it sickens me now.  It especially sickens me when its probity among our citizenry depends on the political party in power at the time.  Especially in light of the reality that, in the United States, both major political parties are AIPAC owned, AIPAC bought and paid for.

My friends who find the extrajudicial execution of United States citizens and foreign leaders acceptable are, to the best of my knowledge, Christians, and religious Christians at that, and they claim to live in accordance with the Decalogue (the formal term for the Ten Commandments), or at least to try to do so.  Most insist that the Decalogue should be posted in classroom and courthouses and in public buildings and public spaces.  One of the commandments, not the least important, forbids murder.  But, then again, it’s never really been taken seriously as a universal proscription, after all, we have abortion and capital punishment and war and “collateral damage” and lately, much to the surprise of many of us but not to many of my friends, the perception that genocide itself is not really wrong, or that deliberate mass murder of hundreds of thousands of civilians, most women, children and the elderly, is not “technically” genocide.  Not any more anyway.  Most of my conservative friends also claim to believe in a “strict interpretation” of the United States Constitution adopted in 1787 and of the first ten amendments thereto (adopted shortly thereafter), the ones contained in what we refer to as the Bill of Rights.  However, their attitude towards both the Constitution and especially the Bill of Rights has undergone a gradual metamorphosis and strict construction is no longer as strict as it once was.  That is especially true with respect to the first, fourth and fifth amendments to the Constitution and with respect to the fourteenth amendment adopted following the War Between the States (also referred to as the Civil War, although there was nothing “civil” about it). 

I wonder what my friends would feel “duty bound to do” if, as Mr. Allen purportedly believed, they believed that Mr. Trump and members of his administration were in fact involved in rape, pederasty, pedophilia, murder and satanic rituals and that it seemed that their actions would never be prosecuted?  Would it matter?  Would they dare to take the law into their own hands as Mr. Allen purportedly attempted to do?  Should they?  I was once pretty sure they would, after all, they were heroes many times over under circumstances involving life and death, their own and those of men and women they commanded.  Now, I’m pretty sure they would not.  But also, that they should not.  John Wilkes Booth firmly believed that Abraham Lincoln was a tyrant responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths.  Brutus believed the same with respect to Julius Caesar.  Indeed, most political assassins are firmly convinced of the justice of their respective causes.  And they are frequently not wrong.  But as a society, until very recently, political assassination was anathema.  Or at least purportedly anathema.[3]  Is that still the perspective we should adopt?  Pragmatically it is and should be despite the resulting impunity, otherwise political violence would be even more prevalent than it currently is.  But the lid to the amphora in which Pandora purportedly kept the ills of the world safely locked has been smashed to smithereens.

I’m not a believer in the divinity of the person my friends refer to as Jesus (his real name was the Aramaic rendering of Yešu), nor am I any longer a believer in the god Yešu is said to have worshipped, YHWH, and whose son Yešu purportedly was[4].  But I am a believer in many of the proscriptions contained in the Decalogue and specifically the proscription against killing, and I am a believer in many of the teachings concerning interpersonal relations attributed directly to Yešu.  And I am a believer in the United States Constitution although I think it is long overdue for a massive revamping[5].  Consequently, to me, any assassination is anathema, any murder is anathema and all genocide is anathema.  But the greatest crime of all may be the corruption of the bravest and best among us, those we believed would protect us from the evil and corruption that surrounds us, those who, seeing it all, now accept it as right and proper and patriotic.  Something certainly not unique to United States society.  It obviously occurred as the Weimer Republic came to an end.

That people who share backgrounds so similar to mine have such divergent perspectives so passionately held is problematic.  For all of us I suppose.  As is the profound general demise of empathy and tolerance which has been replaced with intolerant polarization and the rejection of the philosophies reflected in United States Bill of Rights, philosophies that the world seemed to admire so much and which many societies sought to emulate.  But today’s world seems more like one in which the most fervent fascists defeated in the Second World War would feel comfortable.  Assassination of political leaders and their families and extermination through genocide and ethnic cleansing has somehow become reasonable, at least to many, and the imbalance of wealth between the wealthiest and the poorest now seems an unbreachable chasm.  As in preludes to civil wars, we see each other, even within families, as not just mistaken but evil, and we seem unable to even consider the reasons others hold opposing views.  The apparent human instinct to vilify is availed of by tiny minorities comprised of the worst among us in order to keep us divided and easily controlled, fighting each other while we’re slowly bled, morally, ethically, economically and physically.  We react based on our fears rather than our hopes, fears that are induced rather than prudent, casting aside the values of tolerance that we had seemingly been developing over the past several centuries.  The values which echoed those the gentle Nazarene from Palestine tried to teach us millennia ago.  Values largely predicated on a single concept: empathy.

How is it that so many Christians, that so many military officers (both serving and retired) who have willingly put their lives at risk to uphold a noble system of values, now so cavalierly reject them?  How is that those who so cavalierly wasted the lives and welfare of so many of my fellow alumni[6] now rule unfettered and without sacrifice over us?  People like the current president of the United States and his predecessor Joseph Robinette Biden, or Barrack Obama, or George W. Bush, etc., people who have no “skin in the game”, either theirs or their families.  People who continue to send the best of us to waste their lives, taking the lives of other young men and women, other sons and daughters, other mothers and fathers, other siblings and friends as though they were irrelevancies because they were born elsewhere and feel as strongly about their values as we purport to feel about ours?

How sick is that?  How sick are we?  Where have our values gone?  Where has our humanity gone?  For what have we exchanged it?  Would our planet be a better place without us?  If Yešu in fact lived, whether as a divinity or merely as an ethical human being, what would he think of us, especially of those who promote assassination and murder and genocide and ethnic cleansing and inequity and inequality and injustice, in his name?

So, back to more current events, should we be surprised that political assassination attempts and that mass killings in our schools are seemingly becoming so normal when the organized mass murder of so many millions abroad has become praiseworthy and when the armaments industry has become the prime beneficiary of a major portion of our earnings?

Are we really as stupid and manipulable and lacking in decency as the worst among us hope?  It’s hard to imagine that we are when we think of those we love and respect but, when we listen to them now, when we read their posts and their opinions, the decency inherent within them seems to have vanished.  It seems to have been stolen in a manner identical to the way the virtue of children is stolen when they’re raped and abused.  Something sickeningly more common than until recently, until after Epstein and friends were brought into the light of day (sort of), we thought possible.  But our hypocrisy and lack of empathy and ability to rationalize makes it possible, heaven or something like heaven, help us.
_____

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2026; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

[1] See, e.g., Fisher, Anthony L. (2026): “The shameless hypocrisy of MAGA’s post-WHCD attack blame game”; MS Now, April 28, 2026, 6:00 a.m., EDT.

[2] See, e.g., Olson, Cade (2026):  “The Correspondents’ Dinner Shooting, Time Travel, and Solomon’s Temple: Conspiracy Roundup”, Substack, April 28, 2026.

[3] The Central Intelligence Agency, the Mossad, Britain’s MI6, etc., clearly not only believed otherwise but acted otherwise.  Do you perhaps remember Ngô Đình Diệm and the havoc that ensued?  Or president Kennedy?

[4] Jews, of course, reject those assertions as discussed in the Toledot Yeshu (See Calvo Mahé (2024): “The Life of Yešu According to Diverse Jewish Sources”; Academia.edu.).  Muslims take an equivocal position between the two, respecting Yešu as the second most important man who ever lived, and as their savior, but not as divine.

[5] See Calvo Mahé (“2023): “Motley Constitutionalism: a labyrinthine aphorism”, Academia.edu.

[6] E.g., of graduates from the Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina and from the Eastern Military Academy, and from institutions like those that to me seem so noble, institutions like the Virginia Military Institute, the United States Military Academy at West Point, the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, the United States Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs, Norwich University, Texas A&M, etc., and, of course, of the men they led.

Pandora’s Box, Chemical Warfare, Thomas Hobbes and the Israeli-United States State of Nature

Posted on by
Reply

‘Intentional Chemical Warfare’: Toxic Black Rain in Tehran after US-Israel Bomb Oil Facilities, article by Jon Queally published on March 8, 2026 in Common Dreams:  “These attacks on fuel storage facilities amount to nothing less than intentional chemical warfare against the Iranian citizens.”

Murphy’s Law and the purported Law of Unintended Consequences sometimes coincide and they may have done so when the United States and Israel bombed Iranian petroleum facilities creating a toxic chemical rain that seems to have violated the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on their Destruction which purportedly entered into force on 29 April 1997.  Israel has signed the treaty but has not ratified it (although it has, as it does with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, accused others of its abuse and with the help of its proxy, the United States, has sought to have other countries punished for its purported violation). 

The foregoing is not surprising as both Israel and the United States now feel that they have the right to violate International Law at all levels with impunity.  But, in this instance, they may have bitten off more than they expected.  Chemical weapons (and biological weapons as well) are not difficult to manufacture or to put into play and having opened Pandora’s Box (figuratively, it was an amphora, not a box) it may be that other states or even non-state actors will also decide that International Law is not a norm binding on them, certainly not on them but not on their adversaries, and may decide that when treaties are not honored, they certainly do not apply with respect to protecting the violators.

Until now both Israel and the United States have enjoyed absolute impunity in their violations of international law assassinating and kidnapping foreign heads of state, blatantly stealing other countries national resources, imposing illegal blockades and embargoes, attacking, invading and destroying foreign cities and towns, even engaging in blatant genocide and ethnic cleansing but, until now, there seemed now viable means for the victims to strike back.  Strike back at the United States and Israeli homelands, not just defensively.  But when you place an adversary in a position where it has nothing to lose, the consequences can be terrible.  That has not been the case in modern history, until now.  There have always been the protections provided to the vanquished under International Humanitarian Law and International Law, but those concepts have proven to be delusory illusions.  Even the Nazis refused to violate very international norm.

So what now?

Chemical weapons, mass poisoning, etc., are seemingly on the table but the real horror, the one likely to wipe us out, is the one apparently recently experimented with under the guise of the Covid 19 pandemic, something many feel was a trial run by the United States, Israel and their allies.  And that is biological warfare.  And biological warfare can quickly spin out of human control.

The sixteenth century English political philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, used the concept of a primordial State of Nature as an illustration of a lawless society, one without any rules other than strength, the kind of society to which both Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump allude from time to time and one which their ministers and followers seem to fully embrace.  The State of Nature was a metaphor for a time where only the strongest ruled and ruled with impunity, but Hobbes noted that even the strongest had vulnerabilities, they had to sleep, and thus a rules based society emerged.  That society has now, in large part, broken down. 

Both the United States and Israel act as though they can engage in any kind of conduct, regardless of how depraved.  And in that they, especially the Israelis, enjoy widespread domestic support.  But cheap and easily deployed biological and chemical weapons may change that equation leaving us to wonder what species will replace us after our extinction and whether, eventually, some successor species will evolve with the ethical and moral instincts necessary to assure their survival.  Something we, or at least enough of us, seemingly lack.

The Armageddon that Christian Zionist pray for may be on the brink of arrival, albeit not quite in the manner they expect.  If Jesus does return, he may well return to find nobody home.  
_____

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2026; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

On Gratifying Self-Delusions

Posted on by
2

“Ignorance is bliss” is a saying truer than we care to admit.  And orchestrated ignorance is perhaps the most reliable tool for controlling slaves, especially when they are unaware of their status and are treated just well enough to keep them from rebelling.  Especially when they can be kept divided and polarized, fooled into thinking they have a meaningful voice in their own lives.  Especially when they can be turned against those who seek to free them.

During the academic year that started in the fall of 1976 and ended as summer approached in 1977 I was a student at the graduate division of New York University’s school of law working on my LL.M in international legal studies.  My classmates in that endeavor included students from all over the world.  The best and the brightest.  One was a member of an African country’s supreme court, two were Lebanese legal scholars and several were Iranian jurists.  There were others but those were the ones I most remember; my apologies to the rest.  The academic aspects of that experience were very important, especially those that dealt with comparative constitutional law, but much more important were the eye opening experiences shared with me by my classmates.  Real people who introduced me to the real world rather than the one to which I’d been exposed as a student and then replicated as a lecturer in history.  History as to which I had been abysmally misled, especially with reference to Iran and Islam, topics now all too relevant.

During my time at my alma mater, the Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina, and for the bulk of the decade that followed my graduation in June of 1968 while I was an instructor at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York, I was a devout supporter of Israel.  Israel, the purported David amidst a sea of Goliaths.  And I was also an admirer of the Shah of Iran, Israel’s greatest and perhaps only ally in the Middle East. Islam, I had been taught, was the greatest threat to world peace and Zionism the savior not only of Judaism but of Christianity as well (I had never heard of the Toledot Yeshu or of the Zionist tradition of spitting on Christians).  The world was purportedly evolving following the defeat of evil in World War II, the second war to end all wars, and international law was to be the norm that made Kant’s aspirations for perpetual peace possible. And that was what I was specializing in.

As reality demonstrates, I could not have been more wrong.  False narratives impact us more than anything else, they always have, and false narratives were what I’d been fed.  What we’d all been fed and what most of us continue to be fed.  We were taught that we were a benign force seeking to share freedom and prosperity and democracy with our less enlightened neighbors, not that we were rapacious looters of their natural resources.  Or at least that some among us were, most of us were merely useful tools.

 In our high school and undergraduate studies as they touched on modern Persia, on Iran, we were not taught about the coup on the 19th of August in 1953 when democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh was overthrown because he’d dared to place the interests of his people over those of British and United States oil interests, an industry he’d nationalized after the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company had refused to account for the income it had consistently looted.  That coup against democracy, decency and the right to national self-determination was not unusual.  It was what the United Kingdom and the United States had always done and still do when faced with the desire of any people to control their own destinies threatens to become a reality.  In hindsight it’s become clear that World War II was not about preventing genocide or saving the world for democracy, the German genocide could not compare in breadth or scope to that engaged in for a century by the United Kingdom and the United States and Belgium and the Netherlands and France, etc.  It was about preserving the right to loot and enslave of the billionaire class which ruled us all as though possessed of Tolkien’s One Ring.  And International Law?  A useful delusion for a while.

The CIA and MI6 and Mossad orchestrated Iranian coup of 1953 restored the power of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the monarch without a monarchical background who had ruled and would again rule Iran with an iron fist under the direction of the United States CIA, the British MI6 but, most of all, the Israeli Mossad.  The Shah who, as the figurehead for United Kingdom, United States and Israeli interests, brutally ruled the Iranian people through the Bureau for Intelligence and Security of the State (the Savak), an agency modelled on the German Gestapo and the Soviet KGB but under the ironic tutelage of the French intelligence service and, according to a declassified CIA memo, run by the CIA which provided the Savak with both funding and training, albeit on behalf of the Israeli Mossad.

Unlike all too many of my contemporaries, my blissful ignorance was not destined to last forever.  My new acquaintances at the International Legal Studies program at NYU (doctoral students or post-doctoral students all), especially the Iranian jurists (who were actually part of the Shah’s regime), provided me with a narrative completely at odds with everything I’d been taught and which I’d been parroting to my own students for almost a decade.  I listened to them during our conversations, listened uncomfortably but politely, but refused to believe what they were telling me (the way my contemporaries refuse to believe the truths I seek to share with them now).  I refused to believe them at least until the fall of 1979, two years after I’d earned my LL.M and was no longer in contact with any of those who’d sought to open my eyes to uncomfortable realities.  Until the Iran I thought I knew, a Muslim anomaly purportedly peopled by a happy and grateful populace, exploded and seemingly from one day to the next turned into a mass of seemingly ungrateful monsters who hated the hand that had “fed them” for so long.  Until the Shah I’d been taught to admire was cast out without a shot being fired and a religious theocracy was established under a long exiled religious cleric, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, something seemingly out of Frank Herbert’s imagination on the Planet Dune

It was only at that point that I decided that perhaps I should do my own research given that the Iran in which I’d believed seemed to have been replaced by the Iran about which I’d been warned, and my own research confirmed the worst that I’d been told about the Iran I thought I knew, the Iran that sent its purported best and brightest to study in the United States, including at the Citadel.  Research was more onerous back in the late 1970s and early 1980s than it is today but it was possible.  Today, despite increasing censorship of information by Zionist ownership over most means of communication, it is still possible for those who care about truth to engage in adequate personal research, even if only on Wikipedia which is not the most reliable of sources but is frequently adequately accurate.  I found several relevant articles there just now and it took less than ten minutes.  As of today they can be found at the following links: the 1953 coup d’état:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat#:~:text=On%2019%20August%201953%2C%20Prime,AJAX%20Project%20or%20Operation%20Ajax.;

the Savak: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAVAK; the Iranian Revolution of 1979:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Revolution.  But I recommend that you conduct your own research.

As in the case of the myriad Middle East monarchical dictatorships that exist today as vassals of Israel and the United States, or the myriad dictatorships imposed by the United States in Latin America during the past century, the common people in Iran during the fall of 1979 had no reason to love the United States and certainly not Israel, something that became evident when, in an orgy of rage, Iranian students seized control of the United States embassy in Tehran and held United States personnel there hostage until after the United States presidential election of 1980.  Ironic given current United States and Israeli organized student demonstrations against the government their parents and grandparents founded.  But as to Iran, history for most of the current generation in the United States only started when that embassy takeover occurred, just as the history of the Palestinian conflict only purportedly started on October 7, 2023 (rather than in 1948 when Israel initiated its campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing).

It comforts the current successors of the United States’ mid-nineteenth century American Party (self-described for non-pejorative reasons as the “Know Nothings”) to study history in that manner, or rather, to be taught history in that manner.  The exclusion of inconvenient truths, like the genocide of indigenous Americans, or slavery, or child labor, or orchestrated mass pedophilia makes looking in the mirror much easier and facilitates cheering for the Star Spangled Banner and God Bless America at ball games followed by the honoring of heroes who kept and keep us free and safe.  And it certainly makes it much easier for us to sanctimoniously attend Sunday religious services where we can repeat memorized prayers and hymns while ignoring the real messages that underlie them.  We are taught to fear Iran because it purportedly seeks to join the nuclear armed club of which the United States and Israel are members and would then be in a position to not only defend itself, but also to defend all the Muslim countries in the Middle East whose lands Israel covets and intends to incorporate into a Greater Israel.  The fact that Iran, unlike Israel, has under both international and Islamic law renounced such ambitions is ignored.  As is the fact that the prophecy that Iran is within several weeks of acquiring nuclear weapons and must thus be destroyed now before it destroys us, destroys us because it hates our freedom not because of anything we’ve done, is an utter fallacy, one personally spread by Israel’s genocidal prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, during over two decades (making obvious its deceptive nature).  But perhaps now that the author of that prohibition, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, has been assassinated by the United States and Israel that false prophecy may become a self-fulfilling reality.  His Fatwa, an edict prohibiting the development of nuclear weapons, may have died with him as more realistic Iranian leaders may decide that in a world bereft of law, nuclear weapons may provide the only source of national security, something North Korea has apparently demonstrated.  And if it does, nuclear proliferation is likely to spread, and if it does, a nuclear holocaust may well become a reality.

My ignorance certainly comforted me during most of the first half of my life.  It comforted me as I self-righteously engaged in all of the fascist nationalist tapestry so comforting for my contemporaries, hymns and parades and demonization and dehumanization of opponents all in the name of liberty and democracy, and especially of war in the name of peace.  As I engaged in activities the way most of those with whom I attended school still do.  Unfortunately, my eyes were forced open and I chose to keep them that way.  I was educated under an honor code that I took seriously but that perhaps should have included another vow, one not to engage in gratifying self-delusion.

There is a joke popular in the areas surrounding retirement communities in South Florida about the “driving dead”.  Old people who continue driving, albeit at a snail’s pace, unaware that they’ve passed away.  A similar joke may, in a sense, apply to neoliberal citizens in the United States, the United Kingdom and Western Europe who are blissfully unaware that they’ve already been conquered, politically, economically and intellectually, not by the hordes of Muslim immigrants fleeing the countries they, at the behest of Israel, have gleefully bombed into oblivion, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, the Sudan and now Iran, but by the Zionist billionaire class who have seemingly acquired the One Ring of which Tolkien once wrote.

Unfortunately, the reign of Sauron, or perhaps of the anti-Christ, is upon us and we have no Bilbo Baggins or Samwise to bail us out as we pontificate with our eyes wide shut.

_____

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2026; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.