Green Is The New Orange

No, not another post about Northern Ireland.

Remember the ridiculous Rose and Orange “Revolutions” in Ukraine and Georgia respectively? “Uprisings” for incorporation into the global cash-war machine by means of NATO and the EU? Well, the result in Iran certainly bears comparison with Saakashvili’s “election” by well over ninety per cent of those who “voted”. Yet now we have the Green “Revolution”. Imagine!

What do Mousavi’s cheerleaders think that his Iran would be like? California, but without Proposition Eight? Because it wouldn’t be, you know. It really wouldn’t be at all.

Frankly, if Georgia could ever become a member of either NATO or the EU, then there is no reason why Iran couldn’t. Just look at a map. Thank goodness for Russia to veto either such application (or a Ukrainian one), in the extremely unlikely event that anyone ever took such a thing seriously in the first place. But the Tehran Trendies also want into the global order of (collapsed) neoliberal economics and (collapsed) neoconservative foreign policy. Mercifully, no one else in Iran does.

Mercifully, not least because that order has no more interest in incorporating Iran, as such, than it had in incorporating Yugoslavia as such, or Iraq as such. Assuming that the demonstrations being reported are really taking place, they are now taking place in cities that are variously Arab, Kurdish, Baluchi, Turkeman (like those whose Shi’ite mosque was so savagely attacked just outside Kirkuk in the so much improved Iraq that we have created), Azeri and so on to a very large, sometimes predominant, extent.

Only about half of Iran’s population is ethnically Persian. Much of the oil is in the Arab South West. There are Kurds in the North West. Half of the Baluchis are in the East, the other half being across the border in Pakistan with long-standing secessionist tendencies. There are so many Turkemen that Tehran is actually the second-largest Turkish-speaking city on earth, even though Turkish is a minority language there. There are more Azeris than in Azerbaijan. There is a sizeable and very ancient community of Jews, complete with its own reserved seat in Parliament, like the Christian Armenian and Assyrians (also found in Kirkuk). And so on.

Iraq is being blown apart, and Iran is next. That is what global capital requires. Can you think of another multinational state that is to global capital’s inconvenience? Ahmadinejad can, even if that is not why he hates the state in question.

He is not the only one.

One of the many similarities between the Ahmadinejad tendency and the neocons is their belief in the all-pervasive, wholly negative influence of Britain. In the neocon case, this derives from the marriage of strictly academic, if highly contentious, work and a stock Irish-American saloon-bar rant against a perceived Anglophile network within the WASP élite. What are David Trimble, Paul Bew and Tim Collins doing, associating with this sort of thing through the Henry Jackson Society?

Neoconservatism takes this anti-British hysteria even further, demanding the wholesale Americanisation of Britain’s, Canada’s, Australia’s and New Zealand’s economic, social, cultural and political systems, though without the conferral of American citizenship, and thus without representation in Congress or the Electoral College. And of course, there is, as always, the American Republic’s fundamental claim to all the historically British parts of the Americas, a claim currently being pursued, entirely unchallenged by Britain, in Bermuda.

So much for the Anglosphere, from which America is in any case busily detaching herself by means of the unrestricted immigration supported by the neocons. That support is because they rightly recognise that there cannot be a “free” market in goods, services and capital but not in labour (or vice versa), there being nothing less conservative than capitalism.

This hatred of Britain and of the perceived Anglophile network, the latter seen as a global phenomenon, is as important as Zionism to the neocons. They were ethnic and regional outsiders compared to the WASP élite and its traditional base of mainline rather than Evangelical Protestants in the heartland, a base of variously English, Scots-Irish, German and Scandinavian descent. This was as true of the Irish Catholics, among others, as it was of the Jews. Neoconservatism is as much (or as little) an Irish Catholic as a Jewish movement, among other things. And Zionism also has a history, which it glorifies greatly, of quite exceptionally vicious violence against British targets.

The milleniarian hysteria, held in contempt whether at Wheaton or at Qom, may be common to the Useful Idiots on both sides. But it is in the hatred of Britain, and of all those deemed favourably inclined towards Britain, that there is the real meeting of minds. There is no reason to assume that the mind of Mousavi is any different.

After the dismemberment of Yugoslavia, now Iraq, and putatively Iran too, Belgium (a classic creation of the Anglophile network if you believe in such a thing) is next. And after that? Well, have a guess.