Pepe Escobar
A symbol was shattered. A legend is born. The Resistance, more than ever, won't back down.
A symbol was shattered. A legend is born. The Resistance, more than ever, won't back down.
That was framed not by a Shi'ite, but by a Lebanese Christian leader, encapsulating how a true Political Islam icon is capable of transcending all - artificial - borders.
This decade, that I defined as The Raging Twenties, started with a murder: the - all-American - targeted assassination of Quds-Force leader Gen Soleimani and Hashd al-Shaabi commander Abu Mohandes just outside Baghdad airport.
Gen Soleimani, more than a symbol, was the conceptualizer of the Axis of Resistance. For all its setbacks, especially in the past few weeks, the Axis of Resistance is much stronger now than in January 2000. Soleimani - the martyr, the legend - left an unparalleled legacy that will never cease to inspire all the West Asian nodes of the Resistance.
The same will happen to Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah. More than a symbol, he was the Face of the Axis of Resistance, extraordinary popular and respected all across the Arab street and the lands of Islam. For all its setbacks, especially in the past few weeks, the Axis of Resistance will be much stronger in the next few years than in September 2024.
Nasrallah - the martyr, the legend - leaves a legacy comparable to Soleimani's, to whom, incidentally, he was always in awe in military matters, and always learning. As a politician though, as well as a fatherly, spiritual source of wisdom, Nasrallah was peerless.
Now let's descend from the stars to the gutter.
An unredeemable serial war criminal and psychopathic genocidal, violating scores of UN resolutions, popped up at the UN General Assembly in New York and then ordered, from inside the building, yet another war crime: wiping out an entire block in southern Beirut with dozens of American bunker buster bombs, including the BLU-109 with a JDAM precision guiding system - leaving countless civilians still unaccounted for under the rubble, including Sayyed Nasrallah.
As the war criminal addressed the UN General Assembly, over half of the delegates staged a mass walkout: the hall was de facto nearly empty of real Global South diplomats. The remaining audience was presented with yet another trademark display of IQ-impaired "maps" featuring the "blessed" - Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Egypt, Jordan, UAE - and the "cursed" - Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen.
A rabid, lowly interloper from Polish extraction - a complete fake - passing judgment on ancient civilizations does not even qualify as gutter-level trash.
History is replete with instances of entities which cannot be really qualified as proper nation-states. They are more like severe bacteriological infections. The only thing they specialize in is kill, kill, kill. Preferably unarmed civilians - as a terrorist tactic. Terribly dangerous, of course. History also tells us the only way they must be dealt with.
No more velvet gloves
Israel killed Sayyed Nasrallah for two main reasons. 1) Because he explicitly reaffirmed Hezbollah would never abandon Gaza for any "deal" allowing the genocide and total ethnic cleansing to go on. 2) Because the Talmudic psychopathological fanatics want to invade and re-occupy Lebanon.
Israel did manage to find serious breaches in Lebanon's - and Iran's security. In the case of Beirut, the whole city is infested with infiltrators. Fifth columnists of all stripes move back and forth doing anything they want. Iran is a much more serious proposition. Even as the IRGC's Commander Brigadier General Abbas Nilforoushan was also killed alongside Nasrallah in Beirut, the IRGC itself in Tehran may have been compromised.
As a serious internal security rethink now becomes imperative from Tehran to Beirut, Hezbollah's carefully constructed structure won't collapse because of Nasrallah's assassination - no matter the tsunami of tawdry psy ops by the usual suspects.
Hezbollah is independent of personalities. The structure is a maze, a rhizome - and other nodes, duly trained, as well as a new leadership, will spring up, as with the Vietcong during the "American war".
Of course it's always about an American war, because the foundation of the Empire of Chaos is Forever Wars.
Back in 1982, Israel's war on Lebanon was so brutal that even Ronald Reagan - who once threatened to pave Vietnam and paint it over with parking stripes - was stunned. He told Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who came to prominence as an Irgun terrorist, "Menachem, this is a holocaust."
And yet a lowly grifter called Joe Biden, then a Senator bought and paid for by the Zionist lobby, called Begin on the phone to reassure him that "if all the civilians get killed", that's no big deal.
Predictably, the then Senator now lame-duck zombie in the White House fully approved Nasrallah's assassination.
The ball is now moving to public opinion all across the lands of Islam. Nearly two billion Muslims to a great extent will also drive the new phase of the Axis of Resistance. The killing machine, for its part, will continue to kill, kill, kill - mostly civilians, unarmed women and children.
Now nothing prevents the Axis of Resistance from stepping up to the next level. There's simply no diplomacy, compromise, ceasefire, "two-state solution" or any other procrastination tactics in the horizon. Just a do-or-die existential fight against a relentless killing machine exhibiting, to paraphrase (and invert) Yeats, "a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun".
For all practical purposes, the real (italics mine) Raging Twenties start now.
And the rage of the lands of Islam will be focused not only on the killing machine, but on its suckling she-wolf: the Empire of Forever Wars.
Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Turkey, Pakistan, scores of Global Majority actors should be getting ready for a historical first: coordinate diplomacy, geoeconomics and military potential to the max to finally confront the bacteriological infection head on.
An auspicious scenario now becomes quite plausible: BRICS assuming the role of chief diplomatic channel for the lands of Islam. The next logical stage would be to get the UN out of Israeli/American territory and establish a HQ in a nation that really respects international humanitarian law.
The politically emerging Global Majority will then establish its own global, really united nations, organization - leaving the racists to wallow and rot inside their own walls. Meanwhile, in the battlefield, velvet gloves should be removed: the time has come for death by a thousand cuts.