Sometimes, the mask slips.
It's the epistemology, stupid.
At the risk of being boring by repetition: It’s not just that the facts don’t matter anymore, it’s that it doesn’t seem to matter that the facts don’t matter anymore.
That’s how epistemology comes into it. It’s the theory of knowledge, what it is, where it comes from, how we get it, and how a society goes about the business of figuring out what the truth is.
How Iran comes into it: A truly revolutionary moment may well be unfolding in Iran right now but it’s very hard to say, and it shouldn’t be hard to admit of that predicament. I’ll admit this much. I want it to be true. Very much. So I have to be especially careful.
I’ve been covering Persia’s agonies and uprisings for a very long time and I can’t recall any event that comes close to the current upheavals. We may be witnessing an event that is not so much an overthrow of the Khomeinist regime, but an implosion of the entire country.
I was on about it this past week in the National Post, and right here in The Real Story, looking at the deep and elaborate alliances between the Bolivarian Republic and the Islamic Republic. As for Venezuela, for all the fireworks and the brave talk, the result: Madurismo without Maduro. If a similar American fireworks display occurs over Iranian skies, don’t be surprised if the endgame is a similar anticlimax.
This seems tragically solid enough as a situation report: ‘Massacre’ feared as Iran tries to crush protests; U.S. weighs military options. And this is a useful analysis: Is the Iranian regime about to collapse?
.The thing is, the NATO capitals are wholly unprepared for a possible catastrophe in Iran. That’s because of the broad Euro-American hands-off consensus to the effect that there are “moderates” we can work with among the regime’s hardliners. President Trump has concocted a weirdly similar rationale, or fiction, as a cover for his Caper in Caracas.
If we hadn’t all gone along with former U.S. president Barack Obama’s decision to surrender Syria to Iran, Hezbollah, Bashar Assad and Russia in exchange for empty Khomeinist nuclear deal promises, we could have skipped a hell of a lot of bloodshed and disorder that has befallen the entire Greater Middle East in recent years. But here we are, with Iran now very possibly on the verge of a Syrian-scale humanitarian disaster.
I’m not going to bother with any handwringing about the Anglo-American news media’s strange inattention to the Iranian eruptions underway at the moment. It’s been this way for quite a while now. There’s more than a kernel of truth to the claim you’ll hear from the “liberal” mainstream that it’s almost impossible to know what’s really going on. How many cities have fallen to the protests? How many dead? Is it really true that elements of the security apparatus have defected?
There are also several kernels of truth to the proposition that the paridigmatic metanarrative favored by the soft-palmed bourgeois press doesn’t easily accommodate a story that places Islamists as the greatest geopolitical villains of the piece. So it’s convenient to just hope the story goes away. It’s just too awkward.
But sometimes, the mask slips.
Not long ago, Bristol University professor David Miller was transformed into a kind of folk hero among “progressive” journalists for having been allegedly persecuted by the wicked Zionists for merely documenting the sources of Islamophobia in Britain (starts with “J”). Judith Butler and Roger Waters and Noam Chomsky and that whole crowd sprang to the poor darling’s defence.
Well here’s Professor Miller now, describing the Iranian tumults as just “a few thousand rioters, among whom were a few hundred armed and trained Mossad operatives shooting both at security forces and ordinary Iranians.” So that’s what’s going on.
Responding to the ayatollahs’ declaration that there should be no leniency shown to the “saboteurs” in the streets by the tens of thousands, Miller says “Yes!” He goes on: “This should be the last time the Republic’s enemies are allowed to mobilize within the nation. Liquidate the Zionist threat. . . If anything, the major structural problem within the Islamic Republic is that it has been far too liberal/democratic for too long.”
Quite the progressive he is, that Professor Miller.
Below I’m going to provide subscribers with some background and resources on propaganda and disinformation operations that have made basic questions about what is happening in Iran so difficult to answer. It’s not just because of the regime’s total communications blackout.
There are other reasons why it really is difficult to know what’s happening in Iran, and why it has become even more difficult in the current cultural and technological moment. After all, it’s almost as difficult to comprehend what is truly happening in the United States just now, where a resumption of the George Floyd disturbances of 2020 may well be in the offing.
A homicide in Minneapolis
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. Part 1, Chapter 7, Nineteen Eighty-Four.
According to President Donald Trump, the woman who was shot and killed by an ICE officer in Minneapolis just a few blocks from the streetcorner where George Floyd was killed nearly six years ago was “very disorderly, obstructing and resisting,” and “then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense.” It’s “hard to believe he is alive,” Trump added melodramatically, “but is now recovering in the hospital.”
Within two hours of Renee Nicole Good being shot in the face and killed, President Trump’s director of homeland security, the eccentric former South Dakota governor Kristi Noem, declared that the 37-year-old Good was “an anti-ICE rioter” who “weaponized her vehicle against law enforcement. Our officer relied on his training and saved his own life, as well as the lives of his fellow officers.”
Noem, who seems to rarely appear in public except in some Halloweenish costume or another - construction worker, Coast guard sailor, forest ranger, state trooper, border patrol officer, cowgirl - repeated and embellished Trump’s account. “Our officer relied on his training and saved his own life, as well as the lives of his fellow officers.”
Noem’s Department of Homeland Security reported that the “violent rioter” Renee Nicole Good had tried to “run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them,” and that the ICE officer involved, 43-year-old Jonathan Ross, “fearing for his life, the lives of his fellow law enforcement and the safety of the public, fired defensive shots.”
Vice-president JD Vance was adamant that the Trump administration’s version of events should not be contradicted. Shouting at reporters during a press briefing, Vance defended Ross: “He shot back. He defended himself.
“He's already been seriously wounded in law enforcement operations before, and everybody who has been repeating the lie that this is some innocent woman who was out for a drive in Minneapolis when a law enforcement officer shot at her. You should be ashamed of yourselves.”
Last June, Ross was badly injured when he was dragged by a vehicle driven by a Guatemalan immigrant, who sped off during an investigation. Ross suffered a “substantial wound” to his arm, with abrasionss to his face, an elbow and a leg, requiring 50 stitches.
This would be a useful point to raise as an extenuating circumstance at a sentence hearing if Ross were convicted on a murder charge in the case, but it’s not even clear whether he will face charges at all. Kash Patel’s FBI has blocked Minnesota's Bureau of Criminal Apprehension from the case documents.
Evidence doesn’t matter now. It’s the “narrative’ that matters.
What can we say that we know with any certainty about what happened the other day on Portland Avenue in Minneapolis?
One thing we can say is that the several videos of the incident, along with eyewitness accounts and footage from Ross’s own cell phone camera, fail to show anything remotely resembling the version of events Trump, Noem and Vance are insisting Americans must believe.
There’s nothing extraordinary about the Trump administration’s preoccupation with “narrative” or the president’s own pathological aversion to facts that make him uncomfortable. What is extraordinary is the broken epistemology at work here, the substitution of knowledge with belief, and the mass acceptance of this weird state of affairs.