US-Saudi-Israeli State Sponsors Of Errorism Against Iran

USA: designates Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a 'Terrorist Organization'.

Iran: designates US CENTCOM [the American military command responsible for, amongst other things, the Middle Eastern theatre ] as a Terrorist Organization.

I'll address why this has happened in the next portion; but for the moment - like I say in the image accompanying ... I'm pretty sure that if *anybody's* guilty of the whole aiding and abetting "terrorism as a tool of statecraft", and generally being a "state sponsor of terror", it'd be the Americans.

Also the Saudis (identified by British intelligence services as the lead sponsor of extremist activity in the UK; and openly identified by any number of Western officials as being active facilitators of terrorism and insurgency activity in a half a dozen active hotspots across the rest of the globe) - and Israelis, for that matter (one of the more recent and egregious examples being their active assistance to Al-Nusra in the context of the Syrian Civil War)

If actions that "are fundamentally different from those of other governments " in these areas are grounds for international sanction, as Trump's press-release appears to say - somebody *please* line up Saudi-Israeliya, and the Americans, and start censuring the exceptionalists, accordingly.

But that won't happen. Because none of this is actually about "terrorism". Or, rather, as I'll briefly detail in the next post .. it *is* at least partially about terrorism - namely, the fact that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard has been a pretty solid force *against* the Sunni-Wahhabi, Israeli, and American-backed groups of extremists marauding the Arabian peninsula and further afield ... and the Anglosphere's "friends" are sick of losing their shadow/dirty war so're switching over to one of the few fields wherein they actually *do* have some form of dominance - the economic slash international talking-shop arenas of injustice.




Right, so here's Iran's Foreign Minister briefly providing a bit of perspective upon what's gone on here with the US's designation of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a "terrorist organization".

And while the Israeli election is definitely a part of it, the more interesting element is what he's alluding to with the "quagmire [...] consequences for US forces in the region".

See, here's the thing a lot of people don't know: the US has actually had rather successful military co-operation with the Iranians, and specifically the Iranian Revolutionary Guard over the past few years.

This might seem like some sort of bizarre aberration, but actually - if you go back to the opening year or so of the War on Terror, when the main combat theater was Afghanistan, it was the default norm (in part due to 'shared enemies' - the Taliban & Al Qaeda were *not* fans of the Shi'ite Iranian state; and in part because Iran was rather keen to get out of its decades of relative international isolation by being a 'good global citizen' and helping the West tackle a prime vector for terror), a pattern that *would* likely have continued, but for George W. Bush making a rather knee-jerk "AXIS OF EVIL" designation of them, which overnight scuppered the whole exercise.

Now, as the War on Terror, and its derivatives, shifted from Afghanistan to Iraq, with the Invasion in 2003 and subsequent er .. occupation, things changed once again. In *theory*, the Iranians and Americans had had a common enemy in Saddam - it's just that in practice, the Americans probably weren't counting on the Iranians "winning" the peace in much of Northern Iraq - and basically being set to extend the Iranian sphere of influence closer to the Mediterranean than it had been at any point in the past one and a half thousand years [seriously - I actually went back and checked this], as a result.

This created an effective situation of I suppose you might say a 'Cold War' style scenario. The Americans weren't keen on the Iranians merilly marionetting their way through a reasonable swathe of Iraq, yet were not able to do anything serious about it, precisely because the Iranians were a helluvalot better at working in/through/with local Iraqi communities than the US was.

This leads to a hilarious episode of Major General Qassem Soleimani basically IRL trolling his American counterpart with a series of personally written notes taunting the guy about his effective utter inability to do anything about the Iranian influence if not outright control of the area, but I digress.

If we flash forward a few years towards the present, we see the situation change *again*, with the entry into several initially national/insurgency level conflicts simultaneously of *surprisingly* well-funded and supported Sunni/Wahhabist extremist militias.

Now, just *who* was arming, supplyinig, and otherwise supporting these outfits in order to facilitate their shocking early gains, is another matter for another piece; but suffice to say that *somebody* [or, more accurately, *somebodies* from the neocon foreign policy/defence/espionage establishments of at least three countries] quite accurately viewed the immense destabilization potential of these vectors as a very potent weapon against both the Iranians, and also anybody else who might be "problematic" - such as the Assad government in Syria [which, at this stage, was still rather lukewarm about the Iranians, if I recall ] .

However, the trouble with these various prongs of 'anti-Iranian' insurgency/irregular efforts was, in part, that they were "too successful" , insofar as they posed a serious danger of overrunning actual official American satrapies/"friends" in the region [for example - the fear that ISIS might actually manage to topple Iraq itself]. And while it's not *quite* true to state that they were effectively "uncontrollable" [ISIS did, after all, profusely apologize for accidentally attacking Israel], their penchant for causing 'unanticipated [at least officially] occurrences' [c.f the outcomes of McCain's whole "arm the moderates" approach .. which uh .. did arm *somebody*...], and the escalating pileup of optics problems attendant in their ongoing exigencies, meant that eventually, *something* had to be done.

So in a manner not entirely reminiscent of the Dr Seuss book about the kingdom which attempts to get rid of its mice-problem by importing a whole lot of cats ... then attempts to get rid of its cat problem by importing dogs .. then eventually, at the other end of the story, attempts to get rid of its elephant problem by bringing back the mice in something approaching a fruitful co-operation ... the Americans [pointedly *not* the Saudis, the Israelis etc.] found themselves having to once more work with the Iranians, in order to try and corral, constrain, and calceate the cavalcade of decidedly *un*moderate rebels who'd taken up residence and de facto "statehood" in the ruins of what were formerly the Middle East's two leading secular states [i.e. the Ba'athist ones].

This actually worked out rather well, as can be seen by the escalating collapses on all fronts of these various movements - a situation considerably availed by Russian air power and other military contributions, as applies Syria ... although occasionally hampered by both Israeli and curiously enough *American* air-power over the same country.

Now, as vaguely alluded to in the previous paragraph, the Americans never seem to have had a 'monolithic' policy about all of this. At the same time that they were fighting on the same side as the Iranians (and Hezbollah, which I have forgotten to distinctively mention previously, etc. etc. ) against Sunni extremists in the northern Levant ... American forces were actually working *with* Al Qaeda and other such decidedly dastardly "friends of a friend" [that 'friend' being Saudi Arabia] in the *southern* Arabian Peninsula against popular forces *there*.

And at the same time as they were fighting to drive ISIS *out* of Iraq, they were attempting to provide 'red lines' and de facto 'safe zones' for ISIS in eastern Syria to continue operating and regroup in the face of Syrian Army (and Iranian, etc.) offensives intended to drive the Caliphate into the dust.

But I digress.

Nobody has ever accused the Americans of having a comprehensive, cogent Middle Eastern policy that actually makes any sort of sense and which will actually likely achieve the increasingly notional objectives it sets out in pursuit of .... so the aforementioned SNAFUs all the way down, is probably just about to be expected of them.

What's got the Neocons behind this recent Trumplosion all hot and bothered, is the fact that the Iranians have once again managed to go from being "on the hoof" a few years back, to standing astride a pretty much uninterrupted corridor extending from their own border right out to the Mediterranean via Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. And with neither Turks nor "totally not *our* terrorists" able to meaningfully break it. *And*, not to put too fine a point upon it, with the Israeli Air Force now ... rather more circumspect about running *too* much active interdiction, lest they accidentally once more run afoul of the Russians, etc.

Now, to be sure, this is a pretty fragile situation, as far as it goes. The events from the birth of ISIS up until a year or so ago show that if you can create enough chaos via ongoing insurgencies and irregular-warfare (as well as regular warfare, for that matter) efforts along that corridor, that the Iranian influence-pathway is disruptable.

Except the main things, right now, keeping a *lid* on that are, in Syria at least and in no particular order, the Russian military, the Syrian army, and a patchwork of Iranian and Iranian-allied forces. This last set also being pretty active across the border in northern Iraq - occasionally, as noted above, in co-operation with the Americans and American associates.

So if you want to *disrupt* this situation, and do your darndest to try and *prevent* the otherwise surprisingly inexorable march of Iran back to 'normal' relations with much of the outside world ... you've effectively got to turn them, somehow, into "The Enemy".

Both to disrupt their ability to work with others against* these extremist insurgency efforts [and their state-level (pay)pasters], and more directly, to just blatantly have the Iranians 'subbed in' *as* the 'terrorists' or whatever in the first place.

Hence, you put some pressure upon some people in the American government to actually listen to that Bolton guy ... and nek minnit, the very forces which have *taken the lead* fighting the often American-augmented *actual* terrorist/extremist adversaries of the ordinary man ... now suddenly *are* [for official purposes, at any rate], the direst villains imaginable and condemnable with far more force than was put into most of the years of actions against Saudi-Israeliyan associates anywhere in the Arabian peninsula.

"Alchemy" may be an Arabic word, but I don't think anybody ever anticipated such a shameless transmogrification as has taken here in the language's traditional heartland.

The "Quagmire" comment from Minister Zarif, then, is not (just) what it first appears to be - a threat, of sorts, from the IRGC to American forces.

Instead, it is actually a *warning*.

That if the Americans continue to go down this path, then they shall find themselves in exactly the same situation as they faced in Afghanistan after they spurned Iranian assistance *there* in favour of some twenty-year-old blinkered bile-oculars approach.

A long-running effort of erosion against them that *nobody* other than the vultures ... and the vultures which don't have sizeable oil reserves or an election presently in progress ... will actually win.

There is 'food for thought' midst *that* carrion.

On Bolsonaro's Ahistorical Naziism

Several days ago, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro made headlines for his visit to a Holocaust memorial in Israel. Not so much for the visit itself, of course - it's the sort of thing that is almost de rigueur for newly minted world leaders heading to that particular country on political pilgrimages.

But rather, for his ensuing statement upon exiting the remembrance center, about those archetypal villains of the narrative of the 20th Century, the Nazis. Namely, that they were of the "left".

Now, for what it's worth - I actually do not necessarily disagree with Bolsonaro saying that Naziism was born out of a 'left wing' movement.

There are some important caveats to that statement, including the fact that 'left and right' mean something different today to how the terms were used thirty years ago - and that the German political milieu and tradition in the 1920s and 30s is ... not something that maps very easily onto Anglosphere 'sports-team politics' of the Neoliberal era (I mean - where do you put Bismarck, for instance? Rolled out some of the most left-wing economic policy of his age ... but with a conservative agenda in mind).

And, of course, the fact that the Nazi Party's ideology shifted rather dramatically between its insurgent first decade and its becoming and/or reaching a reasonably cosy accomodation with 'The Establishment' in its second.

But what occurred to me, upon seeing his statement, is that the state of Israel, which he is so emphatically keen upon .. is *also* the product of a 'left wing' movement. There are good reasons why David Ben-Gurion, a key founding figure of Israel along with its first Prime Minister, was of their Labour Party [funnily enough, he actually apparently had a quite positive friendship with Ho-Chi Minh], why 'Mapai' played such a role in the 'setting up' of what would become Israel in the two decades before its declaration of Independence, and why Zionism has always had a pretty strong representation on and from 'the left'.

Now, I do not say any of this, at all, to try and talk *up* Naziism, or to talk down the vague concept of "Left" in (modern-ish) politics. Or with a specific goal in mind when it comes to the reader's perceptions about Israel being good or bad.

I simply state it because it annoys me when politicians or would-be leaders simply make up things, distort the meanings of terms and the history to which they are affixed, in pursuit of increasingly petty gains for some escalatingly delusory world view.

If Bolsonaro wants to be virulently against anything that is allegedly "left wing" by patrimony ... then I suppose that is his right.

If he wants to be vociferously against "Nazis" [whether real or imagined], then that is also within the bounds of his personal proclivity.

But to be against Nazis only insofar as you think of them as "left wing", seems odious.

And to decide that you *stop* being against anything and everything "left wing" in origin, only when it comes to Israel ... seems a decidedly un-angelic gavotte upon the head of a pin, indeed.

Then again, for men such as Bolsonaro, History is not some sort of sacrosanct set of scriptures which spell out actual truths - the story of how we really got here. Nor is it, as is the more commonly held view, a span of broadly agreed upon facts and their customary interpretation.

Rather, it is merely an exercise in creative (re-)writing, a convenient tool to be used and abused and discarded almost at will. And disparaged with a caustic venom whenever it should so happen to pose a threat to the immanentized manifestation of one's preferred vision for the world, and egoic place within it.

Bolsonaro's purpose in visiting Israel at this time was, assumedly, to endeavour to assist Netanyahu's re-election prospects.

It would appear, then, that he was in 'good' company.

From 'End Of History' To 'End Of Democracy' - Why Fukuyama Et Co Now Like China

In the past week, comments have surfaced from Francis Fukuyama - aka the man who propheceyed that the perceived ascendency of 'liberalism' in the late 80s and early 90s meant history was now 'over' - claiming Chinese system is a "real alternative" to 'Western democracy'
I am SHOCKED, SHOCKED I TELL YOU , that the man who thought Neoliberal Technocracy had 'won' history ... is keen to endorse a Neoliberal Technocracy.

I mean, leaving aside the argument that this is actually a dialectical situation in and of itself - the PRC in its present state representing a 'continuance', a 'furtherance' of the developmental trajectory that Fukuyama mistakenly assumed would end with a 'Whiggian' victory, rather than a 'merger' with something that had previously been 'beaten' ...

I suspect that this position, all-up, is going to become an increasingly common one within the circles of those who, twenty to thirty years ago (or even, in some parts, five years ago) were the most ardent defenders of "Liberal Democracy" [uber or unter alles].

The reasoning for this is quite simple. Democracy, when actually practiced, is "messy". It features arguments, debates. The clash of ideas at its finest .. the clashes of print-barons at its lowest .. and the clash of 'mobs', variously motivated, at some (all?) points in between.

It throws up potentially 'unpredictable' outcomes - the recent #Brexit referendum result, for example. Or Trump. Or the referendum and more recently poll results in the now-former Soviet Bloc and Russia respectively about preserving/resurrecting the USSR.

Here in New Zealand, it threw up blatantly predictable outcomes, in 1990 say, when it came to opposing and thence rolling back the Neoliberal Revolution here. Which could not be allowed to stand, by the neoliberal technocrats of their (our :( ) day.

And that's actually at the heart of each one of those 'unpredictable' outcomes I just cited two paragraphs up. They were all arguably "predictable". If not in their precise minutiae nor actual scale of achievement - then at the very least, in the large-scale and shouted from the rooftops and across the town square volume of their systemic discontent with the extant (and "unchallengeable") status quo.

This, you see, is why the Technocrat both fears and loathes Democracy.

Because not only do they find themselves confronted by a patently superior power, insofar as it is 'unmanageable' except on the broadest possible terms - like poking and prodding some great and ineffable beast, hoping it'll go in the right direction rather than kick back against the goad-wielder ... but because, as part and parcel of this, that, it refuses to just lie down and submit to the "superior logic" of whichever teleological fad-ridden moribund die-deology we find ourselves confronted with today.

Hence the ongoing efforts at every possible turn to try and neuter it, to invert it. To insist that "some things are too important to be left to the people" [so can, will, and must be left to the unelected economists and policy-wonks instead].

Now, it is a curious thing - in the mid-late 1990s, and more especially earlier, "Liberal Democracy" was conceived of as being ... if not the "antidote" to Democracy, then at the very least, as a worthwhile 'salve' for its wilder potential impulses. You could corall and constrain and thence restrain and 'restructure' [a gloriously internally contradictory Neoliberal term to effectively mean to "destroy" something whilst simultaneously pretencing at maintenance of its key elements of integrity] Democracy - the actual, untrammelled popular will - and thus straight-up subvert it with the material trappings of the late Capitalist mid Neoliberalist Age.

The idea, then, was that people would not willingly nor knowingly vote to preserve their own voices, or the Post-War Economic Consensus, etc, provided you dangled enough shiny in their faces. Whether the pyrite of "prosperity" [selectively trickluar - both in the sense of 'trickle'-down, but more directively, a "trick"], or the understandable, yet often equally illusory promises of the most recent generations of "rights".

Except it didn't quite work out that way.

And now, nearly three decades on, the very structures that were supposed to provide some sort of bulwark against the Hearing of the People Sing - indeed, against the People stirring to Song in the first place - have proven repeatedly to have failed at this very endeavour.

There are still anti-democratic forces and structural conceits in play, of course - and one only has to look at exactly what happened to Greece around its own referendum on Austerity some years ago, to see just this sort of thing in motion.

But overwhelmingly, the sense is that this "Democracy" thing ... produces loud, uncouth, and "I refuse to accept that what you're telling me is The Only Way" approaches that won't just lay down and go with the fundamental paradigm of endless wars of 'humanitarian intervention', of ever-tighter state budgets yet ever looser financial controls, and some sort of inexorable doom-march back to the darkest reaches of the 1920s drug-capitalism [by which I don't directly mean alcohol-running: I mean quite directly "This Is your Economy On Drugs", in terms of its shaping and essential performative/irrationalizing characteristics. Some sort of delusory, dissociative, and fundamentally health-wrecking, life-ending concoction of the bath-salts of the bastargeoise, one presumes] .

So what do we get instead? The casting about to find an 'alternative paradigm'. One that still combines the vague glitzyness of "proven economic success", yet without that 'troublesome', quarrelsome "Democracy" thing to upset whomever's carefully laid get-rich-long-term scheme. [Like a "Pyramid Scheme", except it's actually an Aztec Ziggurat ... replete with the "trickle down" of the blood of young "necessary casualties", required to keep the whole thing lubricated and in sun-raising 'running' order]

Where's got this? The People's Republic of China, apparently.

And I would be very surprised if their ongoing Soft Power offensive at providing various incentives to people to Say Nice Things About Them, had absolutely nothing to do with Fukuyama's remarks now entering the public arena.

My point is: I understand why it was that these sorts were so keen on "Liberal Democracy" twenty to thirty years ago. Just as I understand why they're already so keen on what they perceive to be its antithesis [see?There's that Dialectic again!] today, and just as they seemed to be so enthusiastic about the fruits of "Illiberal Democracy" [think Singapore] perhaps five to fifteen years ago.

It's because, deep down, they want "control". And they don't want to have to "waste time" explaining to the people being controlled as to why whatever counter-intuitive, counter-productive, counter-cosmological contrivance they've pledged undying allegiance to this time is actually a Really Good Idea despite all available lived experience evidence to the contrary.

For this, the "Chinese Model", is a spectacularly immanent success.

On The National Party's "Emotional" Indecision As To Migration Pact Petition In The Wake Of Christchurch

> December 2018: National Party comes out swinging against UN Migration Pact it probably would have signed up to anyway, had it been in Government; sets up petition to oppose it
> Friday Night: National Party, perhaps feeling sensitive to the day's events, removes said petition from its website
> Sunday: Somebody asks National what's happened with its petition; Bridges claims it was taken down weeks ago - "well before any of the recent tragic events in Christchurch" - as part of "normal web maintenance" .
> Monday: It's pointed out that the page was still up on Friday afternoon ... so no, no that wasn't what happened
> Tuesday: National shifts to claiming that the petition was removed on Friday night by an "emotional junior staffer". Insists it wasn't lying about its previous stance.

Now, in terms of my own thoughts about the above ... whatever one thinks about immigration, and from wherever slash of whomever - the National Party's claimed opposition to the UN Migration Pact has always rung so hollow, you could creatively refer to it as having achieved Nirvana [ok, well .. Sunyata; but there's definitely no lights on inside, i'll put it that way].

This is a party which, after all, presided over back-to-back-to-back record high immigration figures, while consciously tamping down proposals even from within its own membership to lower them [c.f. Bill English announcing such a policy .. and then walking it back a short while afterwards due to opposition from some farmers and employers] ... and which had such a lackadaisical approach to the "protection of national sovereignty" and lawmaking ability which it *claimed* were core parts of its reasoning for opposing the UN Migration Pact - that it thought the ISDS provisions in the *original* #TPPA were a *good idea*. [They're *still* not a good idea in the revised CPTPP agreement, but that is another story for another time, as best told by Professor Jane Kelsey].

Or, in other words, the Nats do not and have never really cared about the issues they purported to raise by pushing that petition.

They were doing it for mere "populist points". Because apparently, the party which militantly blocked its own ears against the Voice of the People on, say, asset sales in the course of *that* referendum campaign ... was all of a sudden going to be the People's Microphone on a rather obscure piece of intergovernmental values-statement of little actual legal effect.

Or, to phrase it another way - this wasn't really about "listening to New Zealanders". it was about putting out a "YOU SHOULD BE REALLY CONCERNED ABOUT THIS" line into the polis, and then using that to try and make the Government of the day look scary, unrepresentative, and even more incredibly Globalist than the Nats themselves were for the previous nine years.

However, the risk with putting out emotive political content into the electorate ... is that occasionally it comes back to bite you in the hand and/or posterior.

And that's pretty much exactly what's happened here.

Now I'm NOT saying that National's stance on the Migration Pact had much, if anything, to do with Friday's atrocity. Because it probably didn't. The terrorist in question claimed he had a thousand years or more of history to Wikipedia his way through and/or visit in person during his European jaunt to (mis)inform his views - with the obvious implication that no help from any New Zealand politician was required.

Had National *not* attempted to oppose the Migration Pact, I cannot see how anything would have really changed.

Yet someone in National was plainly aware that the 'optics' of the matter ... were not going to look particularly good, in the blood-tinged aftermath of our worst-ever terrorist attack. And so - whether motivated by a sense of compassion (or, as Bridges put it today, the result of being both "emotional" and possibly also "junior"), or simply a desire to limit the potential finger-pointing post-facto from a PR perspective ... somebody chose to remove the petition from public view.

Now, I'm not sure quite what to make of National's changing story on the matter. It is at least possible that the conflicting statements are simply the result of an 'evolving informational picture'. That is to say, somebody at National HQ not understanding that "unlisted" and "not viewable to the public" are not actually the same thing. It happens.

Yet it was Bridges' response to a question asked earlier today, as to whether actually removing the petition was the right thing to do (you know, making reality finally accord with what National thought had been the case for a few weeks now, apparently - per their earlier statement, anyway... ) - "I think the reality is we're not going to be critical of it because, as I say it's a junior staff member, [who was] very emotional" - that caused me to wonder if this were really the case.

That implies that otherwise, they *would* be critical of it. But also states that they *aren't* critical of it. It is, so to speak, a bob each way - with an emphasis upon "Emotionally affected Kiwis" getting a bit of slack given recent events.

And that, I think, is very, very deliberate play from National.

They're as-yet uncertain which way both a) public opinion in general, but also b) the rather more specific sectors of opinion in various parts of the electorate which they either claim to represent or really want to win off at least one party in particular (you know, the one you would have *thought* would perhaps be opposing said UN Migration Pact were *it* not in Government) ... which way those are going to go over the coming weeks and months as we head towards the next Election Year.

They *don't* want to make it suddenly seem like they're bowing to "PC", or that they've suddenly stopped faux-caring about national sovereignty or immigration policy settings. That'd lose them the Talkback Brigade, and suchlike.

But they're *also* acutely conscious that, for a pretty appreciably broad swathe of "Middle New Zealand" [often, but not always, where elections are actually won and lost - in those instances wherein they aren't won by tactically nuking NZ First and/or other support parties] - Friday's events represent something of a watershed in which the previously not-entirely-un-acceptable approach to speaking with perhaps outright concern about "Islam" , may now wind up being looked at with very different eyes, indeed.

About the only thing that *everybody* can agree upon, is that Friday's literally atrocious events, have represented a considerable shock and emotive impact to both the collective and individual psyches of New Zealanders.

So any 'inconsistency' on National's part .. well, "we'll just chalk it up to that, then."

In a curious bit of irony, that's probably the closest thing we're likely to see to empathy from Simon Bridges in a press conference, during the entirety of his (remaining) run as National Party Leader.

But I digress.

The point, I suppose, is that we have known for a long time now that National (and, to be fair, other parties too, especially when consigned to the relative discomforting boredom of Opposition), have long ago ceased in believing in acting as a genuine conveyor of polis opinion unto the corridors of power. Instead, they've "outsourced" that, to PR companies, lobbyists, and focus-groups. Which is rather like presuming that an elevator-muzak or cellphone ringtone version of a great opera is much the same thing, at best.

And often, instead, seems to be exactly the other way around to "representing public opinion"; rather becoming far more actively interested in "representing [often pre-formed] elite opinion to the public".

Hence why you need the PR companies involved. And the lobbyists, to make sure you know just *which* 'elites' you should be listening to the loudest.

Now, there's no "script" for what's going on at the moment in New Zealand politics. Not really. I mean, there's general platitudes, and there's an array of foreign case-studies that are being cited about the place [the Howard Government in Australia pushing through firearms controls being Exhibit A upon everybody's lips, it would seem] .... but just four days after the Atrocity in question, it's *far* too soon to tell how things are likely to unfold.

Hell, there hasn't even been time to start focus-grouping or whatever it is that the Nats do when they're trying to figure out which way to arc a long-term policy/political trajectory on something potentially divisive. Or what colour ties Simon Bridges should wear. Or how long Judith Collins should spend outside of Cabinet following a corruption-tinged teacup-milk-scandal. Or the precise differential value of an Indian MP versus a Chinese MP for the sake of donation soliciting purposes. Etc. ETc. Etc.

So in the absence of anything hard or reliable [inasmuch as political opinion about anything ever actually is] to go upon, they've instead adopted a creative non-stance that *might look like* something else, in at least two directions. And which endeavours to hit the mid-point of the intersecting Venn Diagram with an 'emotive' impact, regardless.

Very clever, in its own way. I wonder who wrote that for 'em.

As applies National actually deciding which way it's going to go upon this, and quite a number of other somewhat related issues ... I suspect we're going to be left wondering for awhile yet. The dust takes time to clear on these things, which is what is required in order to perceive the best "optics" for the situation.

The National party are not, by instinct, these days "leaders" - they are "managers".

Which is, one could argue, exactly the wrong set of priorities and proclivities, for an emergent and paradigm-reshaping [at least here in NZ politics] event such as this.

Will NZ Also Initiate Legal Action Against Turkish Politicization Of Christchurch Footage?

Now here is a curious thing. According to today's Herald, Turkish President Erdogan, is using footage of Friday's atrocity as part of his party's ads for a currently occurring suite of elections being held in Turkey.

In some ways, it is not surprising that the attack would have such a resonance in Turkish politics - after all, the shooter, a self-declared 'Turkophage', was quite vocal about said country, and repeatedly singled out Erdogan himself for threat of death.

Yet the ads come at a time when New Zealand authorities have been rather busy seeking to clamp down upon the dissemination of the video as Objectionable Material; and we have already seen at least one New Zealander in court for it [although to be sure, it's likely that some of his *other* postings at roughly the same time, may have 'tipped the balance' toward full-scale enforcement action], as well as, I am given to understand, an array of what are, effectively, 'cease-and-desist' notices sent out to foreign entities demanding that they halt any hosting or distribution of the materials in question immediately or face further legal consequence.

My question is a simple one: will we be *also* attempting the same thing in the direction of the AKP? [Erdogan's party]

Christchurch Terror Attack - "God Defend Our Free Land" - For Us, The World Has Gotten A Little Bit Darker

Mandir was .. a little bit tense tonight; and was closing early, for understandable reasons.

The world has gotten a little bit darker. At least, from our perspective down here in Kiwiland.

That is to say - I'm fully aware that this sort of apprehensiveness is deplorably, "life normal" for many people in many other parts of the world, day in and day out.

Yet we are not used to it here. We have often felt safe - that the issues which plague the "rest of the world" are so remote, separated from us by thousands of kilometers of ocean, and the glass of our TV screens or the fibre of our internet cables.

Indeed, even the introductory news of this afternoon's occurrences had a bit of that to it. It *Had* Happened Here. But it was in Christchurch, right? A few hundred kilometers, and the Cook Strait away. And after all - "Thar Be White Supremacists".

[Note: that is not intended as a dig at Christchurch - which has been through a huge spectrum of suffering these past eight years.]

It's only once the vague congealment of anxiety and surprise at reading the initial newspaper coverage, is overwritten by the specific shock of the TV and internet news broadcasts - wherein we find, to our horror, that victims, bystanders, first responders, heroes, and others caught up in the tumult ... may speak with Kiwi accents, may be standing in streets, in front of architecture and road-signs and cop-cars and ensigns, that we recognize ... - that things truly start to feel "familiar".

And by that, I mean absolutely, nightmarishly *unfamiliar*, precisely because it is what we are used to seeing and hearing, in the places we are used to seeing and hearing them, but through atrocity, near-completely and utterly divorced from that warm sense of comfort which the 'familiar' customarily elicits.

Yet even then, with our hearts and our headspaces going out in train to our countrymen and our guests; unless we are personally affected by it (and it was interesting hearing a senior Newshub journalist who'd just arrived in Christchurch noting that he'd been picked up from the airport by his brother, who was just about to go grab his nephew from lockdown), there's still a certain sense of the "abstract" to it.

We hope and we pray that "it" won't come any closer.

That's understandable, in the extreme. And precisely because these are extreme circumstances that we are witnessing - it feels somehow eerily 'dissonant' with the relative calm for us out here elsewhere in the rest of the country.

Yet at Mandir tonight [and for those of you who for some reason *aren't* conversant with basic Hindu religious terminology .. that's a Temple] , with the curtains all unseasonably drawn, closing time brought forward, an eye kept upon the perimeter, and a number of those who were there having that extra-electric "everything's alright" carefully-"cheerfully"-charged demeanour of the sort that actually evinces a deep-seated unease which cannot be allowed to be outwardly vocalized [perhaps partially, because white supremacist types are not often known for their faculties of discernment, when it comes to telling apart the perceived "non-white" religions] ...

... well, I guess what I'm trying to say is - without a shot being fired (that I'm aware of) in Auckland, and without the police presence that, say, the Avondale Mosque currently has camped outside it ...

It's those 'little things' that 'bring it home', a bit. That, as I say, the world seems a little bit darker, even here at the other end of the country, tonight.

Obviously, this is absolutely inconsequential in comparison to the suffering being experienced in Christchurch.

The only candle it can hold to it is one of shared grief and memorializing. And maybe, just maybe, seeking to illuminate some of New Zealanders' better nature in shared feelings of support and solidarity with same.

Yet it is a curious thing: as I approached Mandir from the east, down Balmoral Road, with the Sun setting behind it over the Waitakeres ...I noticed that the flag atop the spire seemed a triangle of black. Usually, even when silhouetted by the Sun, it retains its Saffron-coloured hue.

On the eve of World War One, the then-British Foreign Secretary, Edward Grey, remarked that "The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time."

New Zealand has often seemed almost an "ark" against the tumult and the current of iniquity which so readily floods global affairs.

We can but hope that those fundamentally, quintessentially Kiwi characteristics of an inexorable resiliency of spirit and cast-iron commitment to community, mean that at least here - here of all places, in what should otherwise be (but sadly, often isn't), "the best of all possible worlds" - "the lights" may be dimmed somewhat ... but that they do not , *cannot* , go out in perpetuity.

It is clear, from what has been said by the abominations responsible for these attacks, that they chose us as a target *precisely because* we are free and we are good-natured.

Precisely because, we have hitherto been spared - despite occasional quite serious provocation - from the rampancy of hard-hearted and steely-eyed "security-mindedness" that so dominates so many other parts of the world (whether London with its "ring of steel", and omnipresent surveillance cameras, or fast food restaurants in the United States being equipped with bulletproof glass, etc.).

And precisely because, lest there be any doubt about this, we have such a society wherein the 'problems' of the outside world - around racially- or religiously- motivated murders, attempted ethnic- or religious- "cleansing", or whatever else these crimes bear a certain resemblance to ... wherein these things have hitherto seemed largely (but not entirely, to be sure) absent from our shores.

If we wind up more like the various Anglosphere etc. countries wherein these things *are* a much more common and even almost "accepted" "fact of life" , which is what the mini-minds of maleficence behind this seem to dearly wish we become ... then needless to say, they will, in a striking sense, have "won".

The New Zealand National Character has always been somewhat 'dour' - even, at times, allegedly "gloomy". [Colin McCahon's paintings, rather than the Black of our national colour, may be the better evidence for this, perhaps]

Yet it has generally also been resoundingly compassionate, and almost incandescently innovative, into the bargain.

In some ways, it is just what you would expect , from a nation whose almost every constituent, either came here themselves, or is descended from those who did, motivated and fuelled by the desire for - the hope and aspiration for - a better life, here, than could be found in those times amidst the often nightmarish and bereftly barren quarters, of so much of the rest of the world. (Seriously - Industrial-era Victorian England, does NOT sound like an ideal place to be!)

It is those values which shall see us through. And, more than "hopefully" - which shall damn near *certainly* see us find a way to "keep the lights on" here, for years - for decades - for perpetuity, to come.

I shall resist the temptation to make a joke about utilizing number eight wire as a filament.

As the National Anthem states, and no matter perhaps whom we're identifying with the personhood of providence within it ...

"God Defend Our Free Land": -

"God Defend New Zealand".

FLIPPING THE SCRIPT: On Friday's Terror Attack In Christchurch

So here is the thing. From what little we know about the perpetrators of what's surely NZ's worst terrorist attack ... the main figure appears to be an Australian who arrived here "recently".

We often hear certain sorts of people going on about the "threat" from "Muslim migration" or whatever other demographic they can scaremonger about. And yet, quite directly - quite simply - what we have seen here is the opposite. Shootings at multiple sites, would-be bombings, and other such things, with a stated intent to show "nowhere in the world is safe" ... as carried out by English-speaking white chaps.

Now I am *not* attempting to say that having white Anglosphere migrants turn up at your door is an intrinsic security risk (I am resisting the temptation to make a 'colonialism in the 16/17/1800s possibly excepted' joke).

But once again: this incident shows quite plainly that "the script" which many subconsciously run on ... of "terror incident" means one group [an Eastern religion] being the perpetrator , and another group they're more closely related to being the victims ... is worse than useless. It's an outright *obscuration* of fact.

What has happened here is quite simple.

At least one foreigner - and in all probability, also some Kiwis (although the IDs of several arrested have not yet been released to confirm this) - have come here, to kill New Zealanders, and our guests here in this country (potentially including the Bangladeshi cricket team).

They have done so, in order to further, to perpetuate, to *perpetrate*, an ideological agenda that has no place here in New Zealand.

Yet because the identified perpetrators are white, they will have been able to walk down the street, operate in our communities with *far less* suspicion or sideways-looks upon them, than an ordinary and morally blameless person who might look like they're of a particular swathe of religious minorities here in NZ.

For a third time: I am NOT seeking to suggest that there's some innate connection between being a white man , and carrying out some sort of brain-dead act of brutality.

What I *am* saying, is that - as applies the New Zealand experience today, especially - "terrorism has no [intrinsic] religion".

It is "political" violence, sought to be amplified through media, to push whatever abys(m)al agenda could not be attained through reasoned discourse.

If you're from any of the various tendencies out there which have previously sought to suggest that it's "only" a "Muslim issue" [which flies flat in the face of the fact that, for a start, the previous incident of international terrorism which took place here in NZ was, in point of fact, *French* government authored] you should probably Adjust your Perceptions, accordingly.