KEVIN BARRETT
Originaly posted on Jan. 27, 2020
[dropcap]H[/dropcap]e was the 21st century’s most accomplished military leader—and a deeply spiritual man. Before they killed him, they didn’t even want you to know his name. After martyring him, they realized their mistake—and pulled out all the stops to stop you from finding out that he was a great man, a modern-day Che Guevara.
An unprecedented wave of censorship has crashed down on millions of people posting pro-Soleimani messages and images on social media. There has never before been a mass silencing like this. The hundreds of millions of Iranians, Iraqis, Lebanese, Syrians, Yemenis, and others from all over the world who mourn the world’s all-time greatest anti-terrorist fighter have had their free speech crushed by Zionist-instigated censorship led by Netanyahu’s buddy Mark Zuckerberg, who owns Facebook (2.2 billion users worldwide) and Instagram (800 million users). Though there is no way of knowing precisely how many social media postings have been erased by the censors, a best-guess estimate would run well into the double-digit millions. (We should, of course, include in that total all of the re-postings and sharings that would have happened had each original post not been nuked—in which case the grand total might enter the triple-digit millions, making this by far the biggest single censorship campaign ever.)
Even neutral journalistic reports on Soleimani have fallen to the censor’s bloody axe. The International Federation of Journalists reports that “accounts of Iranian newspapers and news agencies have now been removed” (from Instagram). Merely sharing a picture of Soleimani, or a link to a news account, can get you banned or censored.
My own Facebook page, featuring the maximum allowable 5,000 friends, maintained in good standing for more than a decade, was permanently removed because I posted a pro-Soleimani statement and image. Similar if less draconian assaults have annihilated the free speech of many of my American, Canadian, and European friends and acquaintances. The Zionist social media moguls whimper about how they have to follow Trump’s insane definition of who is a terrorist. CNN reported Facebook’s lame excuse for Soleimani censorship: “As part of its compliance with US law, the Facebook spokesperson said the company removes accounts run by or on behalf of sanctioned people and organizations.”
My former Facebook account wasn’t run by or on behalf of anyone other than myself. The First Amendment supposedly protects those of us whose opinions differ from those of our government. Pompeo thinks Soleimani was a terrorist; I think he was a counter-terrorist. I have a right to say so, and explain why. The Zionist-run Treasury Department’s sanctions on Soleimani should not eliminate my right to express a dissenting view.
The outrageous Soleimani-censorship overreach raises an important question: Why are the billionaire Zionists and CIA Mockingbird stooges who own our media panicking about the worldwide outpouring of love for the martyred General? Why have they tried to hide it by launching the biggest censorship campaign in world history? What is that they don’t want you to know?
General Qassem Soleimani is the man most responsible for the defeat of ISIS. Gen. Soleimani, not the hated Americans (the creators and sponsors of ISIS) trained the troops who defeated the takfiri headchoppers in Iraq. Gen. Soleimani, not the Russians, inspired and coordinated the alliance of ground forces that helped Damascus defeat the terrorist regime-change mercenaries in Syria.
General Soleimani also deserves a major share of the credit for helping Lebanon defeat the Israeli terrorist invaders in 2006—and stave off further invasion attempts since then. Gen. Soleimani’s Axis of Resistance has prevented Netanyahu from achieving his Greater Israel project and stealing all the land between the Nile and the Euphrates. Gen. Soleimani’s Axis of Resistance stymied the conquest of “seven countries in five years”—the secret goal of the 9/11 plotters, as revealed by whistleblower Gen. Wesley Clark. Gen. Soleimani and his Axis of Resistance has helped inspire Yemen’s victory over Saudi Arabia’s attempted conquest and colonization.
In short, General Soleimani, during his lifetime, laid the groundwork for the coming victory over the real Axis of Evil in the Muslim East: the alliance of the genocidal Zionists of Occupied Palestine with the playboy billionaire oil sheikhs of Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf. That Axis of Evil was responsible for the 9/11 false flag operation and the wars that followed, which have killed 27 million innocent people and triggered a refugee invasion of Europe. The Saudi-Zionist Axis of Evil is responsible for most of the world’s human trafficking, child slavery, organ trafficking, and much more. It plays a major role in propping up the neoliberal order, based on petrodollar usury, that has systematically impoverished most of the world’s population while funneling almost all wealth to a handful of billionaires and trillionaires.
So why isn’t Gen. Soleimani as beloved in the West as Che Guevara? After all, just as you don’t have to fully agree with Che’s communist ideology to admire his noble spirit of self-sacrifice in the quest for justice, likewise you need not fully agree with Gen. Soleimani’s Islamic republican ideology, and the Islamic liberation theology upon which it is based, to appreciate that, like Che, the great General Soleimani was an uncommonly pure-hearted and noble warrior who knew he would almost certainly be martyred by the forces of evil, but chose that path knowing that such martyrdom is the most illustrious of all possible deaths.
Why hasn’t Gen. Soleimani—already bigger than Che and Malcolm X put together in the Muslim East—yet achieved Che’s iconic status in the West? One reason is that he died less than a month ago. Che didn’t become an icon overnight. When he was murdered by the CIA on October 9, 1967, Che Guevara was on his way to oblivion…or so his murderers thought:
“Fifty years ago, US officials…considered the capture and execution of Che Guevara as arguably the most important victory of the United States over Cuba and Latin America’s militant left during the era of US intervention and counterinsurgency warfare in the 1960s.” (Source: “The Death of Che Guevara Declassified: A top-secret CIA memo shows that US officials considered his execution a crucial victory—but they were mistaken in believing Che’s ideas could be buried along with his body.”)
In 1967, Che was mourned in Cuba, Russia, and China—though not nearly as intensely and effusively as Gen. Soleimani is now mourned in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, and other Muslim-majority countries. But in the West of 1967, it was only the Communist fringe that cared about Che’s death. The mainstream media, though somewhat less controlled then than it is now, certainly didn’t do the make-Che-famous movement any favors. But despite MSM censorship, people gradually figured out that Che was a hero, and his CIA killers were scumbags—rather in the same way that they have more recently figured out that Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself.
Despite the partial collapse of MSM authority, Big Brother hasn’t given up. Today the mainstream media, which like social media is largely owned and operated by Zionists, is endlessly repeating Pavlovian anti-Soleimani talking points. Republicans absurdly call Soleimani a “terrorist” (when in fact he was the greatest anti-terrorist campaigner of the century). In apparent contrast, Democrats always make a point of repeating the obligatory Zionist-scripted disclaimer, “He was not a good man, but…” All of this is designed to maintain an Overton window that excludes any positive evaluation of Soleimani and his momentously inspiring legacy.
Even the hardcore anti-war-on-Iran left wingers seemingly feel obliged to avoid saying nice things about Soleimani and the Islamic Republic of Iran. (Maybe because they too, like the mainstream media, are overrun with “soft Zionists”?)
On January 25 I attended a No War on Iran demonstration in Madison, Wisconsin—one of over a hundred worldwide. The local organizers were a coalition of leftist groups. Though most of what the speakers had to say was relatively sane, at least in contrast with mainstream discourse, not a single positive word about Soleimani was spoken from the podium. One speaker even intoned “We do not support the government of Iran!” I immediately heckled him: “Yes we do!” eliciting a mixed response from the crowd. (A couple of organizers scowled while two others approached me whispering, “You’re right,” explaining that they were from Group X, the People’s Front of Judea, which realized Iran’s government was protecting its people from neoliberal capitalism; whereas the speaker was a member of Group Y, the Judean People’s Front, supporters of color revolutions. I made a mental note to side with the People’s Front of Judea against the Judean People’s Front if it ever came down to a street brawl.)
Since the left wing hates Trump, theoretically they ought to love Trump’s nemesis, Islamic Iran. (“The enemy of my enemy” and all that.) What’s more, Iran is the most successful socialist country this side of China. What’s a leftist not to love?
The answer, in one word: religion. Iran’s socialism, like its “protect the weak, fight the oppressors” foreign policy, is guided by Islamic principles. What’s more, the Iranian system of government is a theocracy, at least in Peter Simpson’s sense of that loaded term. Simpson explains that theocracy does not mean absolute rule by a religious group; instead, it simply refers to a political system, like almost all pre-19thcentury political systems, in which the worldly power (king, oligarchs, senators, etc.) is balanced by a spiritual power (the church, ulama’, etc.) Simpson persuasively argues that theocracy is a better system and tends to produce a more just, equitable, and free society than modern “secular liberal” systems, which are in reality tyrannical oligarchies in disguise.
The Islamic Republic of Iran comprises both a secular worldly power (the elected parliament and president, regional and local officials, the regular Iranian military) and a spiritual power (the Supreme Leader and associated Council of Experts and religious officials, the religious scholars in general, the Revolutionary Guard, the Basij volunteer force). All these forces work together, sometimes clumsily, sometimes harmoniously, in an amazingly intricate system of checks and balances. The net result is a uniquely free society, vastly more free than anything in today’s West. What I mean by that is that the Overton Window is wider, by orders of magnitude, in Iran than in the USA or any other Western country. The debates you’ll hear in Iran, on the streets, in taxis, among religious scholars in Qom and Mashhad, in the universities (where more than a few spoiled middle class kids have no idea how lucky they are), on television (where Nader Talebzadeh’s show puts American talk-TV to shame) and of course at New Horizon conferences, all points ineluctably to one conclusion: America’s leading Catholic intellectual E. Michael Jones is right when he calls Tehran “the capital of the free world.”
Do Iranians have anything valid to complain about? Sure: the traffic. It seems like just about everybody in Tehran can afford a car. Suffering under the most brutal sanctions in history, the Islamic Republic of Iran has learned to manufacture its own automobiles and to put its own satellites into space. On my annual visits since 2013 I have witnessed what appears to be a shockingly vibrant economy—lots of construction, impressive infrastructure, the aforementioned glut of private automobiles, cutting-edge science and research parks where sanctioned medical equipment is being built—and other signs of economic activity comparable to booming Turkey and light-years ahead of un-sanctioned, heavily-aided-by-the-West Morocco. Iran has beaten the sanctions through its resistance economy: “Instead of buying it from the West, let’s just build it ourselves.”
And then there is the Iranian film industry. Operating on ridiculously low budgets compared to Hollywood or even Bollywood, Iranian movies are generally of considerably higher esthetic and spiritual quality than American or Indian commercial fare. That’s partly because the society that makes those movies has remained human, while the ultra-capitalist hyper-materialist USA (and for that matter urban India) produce films whose main purpose is to make money by appealing to the lowest common denominator, to vice rather than virtue.
The purveyors of vice are spending billions of dollars beaming pornography, hyper-commercialism, and other forms of destructive propaganda into Iran, targeting young people in hopes of injecting and infecting them with decadent and degenerate Western values. A veritable army of US-backed Zionist-backed MEK bombers and bloodspillers (the MEK is a terrorist cult that combines the worst features of the Moonies and ISIS) is hard at work blowing up Iranians in mosques and markets. At last count nearly 20,000 innocent Iranians had been killed in bombings and massacres by the MEK and related forces.
The MEK is universally hated in Iran. Gen. Soleimani was almost universally loved. The Trump Administration’s decision to formalize an alliance with the former, while martyring the latter, may be the most tragicomically inept hearts-and-minds campaign ever. Its reverberations will spill over beyond Iran, where the entire population’s mourning for Soleimani has united the country as never before, to Iraq, where it has also united the people—in fierce resolution to expel the American occupation forces. Syria, too, mourns Gen. Soleimani and hates America all the more for his murder. As all of these countries (and sympathizers elsewhere) mobilize for “Soleimani’s revenge”—the complete expulsion of all Americans and Zionists from the region—General Qassem Soleimani will gradually rise to the status of the 21st century Che Guevara in the global imagination.
In the end, there will, however, be one highly significant difference between the legacies of Che and Soleimani. At least for the foreseeable future, Che will remain a beautiful loser…whereas General Qassem Soleimani is going to win.
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[google-translator]
THE DEEP STATE IS CLOSING IN
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