The unforgiving war will be long and bloody. Yet the Angel of History seems to have caught a second wind.
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It’s one of the most mesmerizing passages in the history of knowledge. In the 9th of his Theses on the Philosophy of History, Walter Benjamin – Jewish, tragic figure, solitary genius – dissects Paul Klee’s haunting painting Angelus Novus and graphically explains to posterity the drama facing the Angel of History:
“His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events: he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in its wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm propels him into a future to which his back is turned – whilst the pile of debris before him goes even higher. This storm is what has been called progress.”
The time has come to go beyond what may be read as a very apocalyptic Christian parallel between divinity and violent retribution. As Alastair Crooke detailed in his astonishingly perceptive 2010 book, Resistance: The Essence of the Islamist Revolution, it was the need to restrain the furies of “divinely inspired” violence that led Hobbes to conceptualize Leviathan, where he called for a social contract between the individual and a necessarily strong, implacable government.
Moreover, it was the Hobbesian version of a social contract that laid the basis for John Locke to assert a dubious “natural goodness” of humanity, complete with a – very private – “pursuit of happiness” and the general welfare gleefully coalescing via the work of an invisible hand.
This fallacy/fairy tale shaped Western thought for over the next 300 years.
Now it’s a completely different ball game. We have been prisoners of Hobbes and Locke for too long: such a seductive pole dancing of legitimacy around which the Western-conceived nation-states grouped to protect and legitimize themselves and their plunder of the rest of the world.
Lately, the contemporary specter of “divine violence” was marketed to everyone from Africa to Asia as armed Islamist resistance. But now this mask has also fallen. The “new” Syria shows to everyone how al-Qaeda R Us – and always was.
Shelter from the – ultimate – storm
The time has also come to re-evaluate the plight of the Angel of History. No, he is not transfixed by “divine” rage; that’s actually quite man-made. Meanwhile, what continues to propel him forward – even as he casts his eyes to the past (“the backward half-look, over the shoulder, toward the primitive terror”, in T. S. Eliot’s striking image) is the wind of secular, Darwinian, tech “progress” – a single, unified catastrophe much more that a chain of historical events.
Yes, he continues to contemplate the tragedy; he badly wants to awaken humanity to the extent of the disaster; but the rush of now tech “progress”, AI-tinged, inevitably sweeps him away.
The Global South now seems to have a crystal clear perspective of the new contours of the catastrophe laid at the feet of the Angel of History.
The top two contemporary agents of the catastrophe have been fully identified: a psycho-pathological, genocidal death cult composed by elements of a self-appointed chosen tribe; and the post-historical elites of a dwindling empire. A deadly embrace – if there ever was one.
Yet now they have met an immovable symbol of Resistance. And they had to back off. To the astonishment of the Angel of History himself.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei laid it all out in a few sentences:
“The key point I wish to emphasize in my speech is that in one of his remarks, the President of the United States declared that Iran must surrender. Surrender! The issue isn’t about enrichment or the nuclear industry anymore. It’s about Iran surrendering.”
This is the voice of an ancient civilization-state – in contrast to post-modern, out of control barbarism: “Our cultural and civilizational wealth is hundred times greater than that of the US and other similar countries (…) The Iranian nation is noble and will remain noble.”
An irrational, and certainly not “divine” storm now aims to totally paralyze the Angel of History – imprinting on the narrative their revamped but equally tawdry notion of “end of History”, applied to the circumscribed space of West Asia.
And that brings us to how the Resistance will have to delve deep into the nitty-gritty, as in the practicalities of deterrence and defense, so the Angel of History may reinvent himself.
Cut to the Yemeni Armed Forces – this bastion of rectitude, a military organization guided by spiritual power: “The US and Zionist entity’s ceasefire agreement with Iran highlights that military force is the only language they understand.”
Add to it the number one lesson from the 12-day war: whoever controls the skies eventually will control the lands.
Iran’s leadership, as the fulcrum of Resistance, has some serious decisions to make. The most important, on the “language” issue as framed by the Houthis, is to trust Russia to help it set up a comprehensive, multi-layered offense/defense system, complete with hardware, combat and control centers, long-range radar stations, electronic warfare equipment, and badass jet fighters.
As Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov made it quite clear ahead of the meeting one week ago between President Putin and Iranian FM Abbas Araghchi:” It all depends on what Iran needs right now.”
They need serious backup. The Majlis – Iran’s Parliament – delayed for over a month the ratification of the comprehensive strategic partnership signed with Russia after the Duma approved it in late May. That includes weapons sales, military inter-connection and deep intel exchange – even if it does not imply a full military alliance.
Previous Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi clearly saw The Big Picture. He went full “Look East” – as in Eurasia integration. The current, meek Pezeshkian presidency attempted a “Look West” – naively trusting that the Empire of Chaos would actually practice diplomacy. They were in for a rude awakening.
The unforgiving war will be long and bloody. This is just the beginning – current pause included. Yet the Angel of History seems to have caught a second wind. Looks like his warnings about the catastrophe were finally understood by the overwhelming majority of the Global South. As we sift through the accumulated debris, Resistance is at hand – sheltering us from the ultimate storm.
