War as Cosmic Discharge

G.I .Gurdjieff and Walter Benjamin on the esoteric underpinnings of World War 3

There is something deeply irrational and even bizarre about the United States’ current attack on Iran. Of course, some Americans on the Evangelical Right, like Lindsey Graham, possess religious delusions around Israel’s destiny. Many Christian fanatics seem to want to speed up the literal Apocalypse so we can get to the Second Coming.

Another hypothesis, shared by a friend who is an expert on authoritarian power grabs, is that dictators need to keep the military constantly occupied to avoid any prospect of an opposition or insurrection. They will manufacture new wars and missions to make sure their Generals don’t plot against them. Of course, war is also a massive boondoggle for the military industrial complex, which manufactures the weapons, instruments, and vehicles.

Obviously, Israel is manipulating the U.S. for its own regional goals. Israel intends to use the Iran War as a pretext to expand its territory into Lebanon and Syria, hoping to create some version of “Greater Israel.” Also, Netanyahu probably has some kind of hold over Trump, perhaps via Epstein blackmail tapes. Even so, all of that isn’t, in itself, enough to explain why we are doing this.

The concept of “Greater Israel” was explored by Theodor Herzl, the father of political Zionism, who wrote in his diaries that the Jewish state should stretch “from the Brook of Egypt to the Euphrates”.

I remember feeling the same sense of murky confusion during the Iraq War, which was a jarring reaction to “9/11.” Despite all of the justifications, that war made no sense. This one seems even more incoherent.

What’s particularly stunning and depressing at the moment is the failure of the Trump regime to offer any coherent justification for what they are doing, while they are squandering as much as $1 billion per day of taxpayer money, killing Iranian civilians and even schoolgirls and destabilizing the region. Although 75% of the U.S. population is against the war, both Houses of Congress voted down war powers resolutions that would have constrained Trump's warmongering frenzy. To add insult to injury, when Matt Schlapp–a prominent Right Wing political figure, the head of the American Conservative Union–was asked on Piers Morgan about the 150 (or more) girls we killed in an airstrike, his response was that their lives were bad anyway, therefore it wasn’t a big deal that we killed them. After all, if they had lived, “They’d be alive in a burqa.” He reiterated that the girls “would... live a life in a barbaric, unequal society behind a burqa, with no ability to make career choices.” In fact, women in Iran are not required to wear the burqa, underscoring Schlapp’s bottomless ignorance.

I have an esoteric meta-theory as to why these wars keep happening, drawn from a number of thinkers including G.I. Gurdjieff and Walter Benjamin.