Warning! I am old, I write in paragraphs not tweets so what follows is a long read. Skip if that is not what you want :-)

I have avoided online life for months maybe years, but when Israel/USA attacked Iran, I installed the FOSS app NewPipe (downloaded from f-droid, warmly recommended) to watch world news and commentary and follow developments.

I have been listening to Glenn Diesen, a Norweigian political theorist with interest in diplomacy, and his guests discuss the end of USA imperial hegemony and, worst case, WW3 with nuclear weapons or, best case, emergence of a new ‘multipolar’ world which offers potential for, maybe, a fairer world, more peaceful, more sustainable.

As a Leftist, I am eager for a better world. I am open to learn how diplomacy could contribute to that. To be honest, this commentary from Diesen and his guests, and similar broadcasts by academics, and other specialists, everything which is not infantile trash from MSM, is my only source of optimism at present. I wondered if anyone else was listening to Diesen (or his guests’ own podcasts or video channels) and what they think of the topics discussed.

I live in UK. Starmer’s government has no credibility, is hugely unpopular, and is making every possible mistake in response to Iran crisis, just as they have mishandled the Gaza and Sudan genocides, and Ukraine war - to name only a few of the most depressing tragedies of recent history. I want to see many of the methods of conflict resolution, and ideas for resolving specific conflicts, presented in Diesen’s conversations, gain traction in wider community so that the British public (and other publics) begin to rethink policy and make new demands of our politicians and demand new policies, and thus nudge them towards a better plan for the emerging world order. I know British democracy is broken, indeed many democracies around our world are broken, but if democracy can be of benefit to working class at all, and I know that is a BIG if, this is how I want it used: to make a better world for all life, human or not, and wrest back control from tyranny.

Honestly, Diesen and his guests have made me rethink many of my ideas e.g I now agree NATO is quite dead, and there must be a new regional security framework for the whole of the Old World, and within that a smaller framework for Eurasia, and within that a smaller framework for all of Europe and West Asia and North Africa i.e. a ‘Russian doll’ of nested security agreements down to the smallest scale neighbourhood of states where peace must be established and maintained. This means radical reform of UN (or some new replacement). It means rethinking the apparatus of USA hegemony from WTO to World Bank. It means maybe the end of the petro-dollar, the end of fiat currency, the return of the ‘gold standard’, a new basis for trade, a new role for national banks, a new way to handle debt, to support trade. It means a new global economy. It must be a fairer economy.

I voted Remain in the 2016 Brexit referendum. I wanted UK to stay in EU not because EU was ever perfect but in order to reform EU and shift it Left. The Left in Britain is weak, we needed European allies and EU was a potential framework through which we might have exercised some leverage against neoliberalism. After Brexit, the British working class have suffered increasing hardship, ever intensifying ‘austerity’. We might have faired better if we had stayed in EU. Brexit was driven by Far Right and has only helped Far Right. After listening to Diesen, I see an even more urgent case for reforming EU or replacing it with a new entity more attuned to contemporary reality and less a mere legacy of 1945, Cold War, ‘End of History’ 1990s/2000s triumphalism, predatory ‘crisis capitalism’, and failing USA monopolar hegemony. I agree with Diesen and his guests that European political thinking, especially EU thinking, is often moribund, without vision, unable to adapt to change, unequal to the existential threats we all face, often driven by paranoia and co-opted by vested interests and corruption. This must change or a descent into fascism is the most likely consequence for my homeland and the continent it is part of.

Currently, British Prime Minister Starmer, a hollow careerist devoid of principle or political vision, the antithesis of a statesman, thus a typical European politician, is seeking some reproachment with EU. I fear he is seeking to reconnect to an EU that no longer exists and cannot be restored. Ideally, possibility of UK return to EU should be seen as an opportunity for rethinking Europe and part of a movement to detoxify EU and reorientate it to deal with the coming new world order. I have zero expectation that Starmer or any member of the British political class except perhaps some in the Green Party have any clue about the necessity to radically reimagine Europe, EU, or Britain’s place in Europe. They operate on a map of reality formed in the C20th. Their counterparts in Europe, in the EU, are no better. This failure of reality checking, of capacity to adapt to change, is an existential threat to democracy. Only the Far Right benefits from stale thinking by Centrists and soft Left. A new world order is not passively emerging, it is being actively constructed, but not by Britain or Europe or the Left anywhere on earth. We risk escaping neoliberalism only to be locked into something worse. We must not sleep walk into dystopia.

However, where Diesen and guests have been consistently wrong in my view has been their attempts to rationalise the irrational e.g. they try to explain Israel/USA attack on Iran as USA imperialism, as just another episode like the attacks on Venezuela and Cuba, and threatened attacks on Canada, Greenland, Mexico - all about seizing territory and control of trade routes and/or appropriation of resources such as oil or rare earths. Soul-less Trump may be driven only by greed and conceit but he is simply a puppet of others and the puppet-masters are not seeking a profitable deal, are not rationally calculating profit, not propping up the USA empire, except as a side effect of a plan with other goals. The core fact of the attack on Iran is that it is religiously motivated. It is a ‘holy war’ and the gains sought are existential. This means it requires an entirely new approach from those seeking an end to killing and a sustainable new, peaceful, international order in West Asia post-war. I think the religious aspects of the Iran war are beyond the full comprehension of the political and diplomatic experts in the West or in new world powers such as China because their ‘worldview’ is entirely secular or because rentier financialised capitalism and worship of hoarded money is their only religion. Despite the fact the Trump regime is controlled by cults (christo-fascistic or neofeudal transhumanist or Israeli-Zionist), expert commentary still assumes motivation is rational not eschatological. This is ‘head in the sand’ denialism. This weak thinking must change. It is another aspect of rationalisation, the same response by mainstream commentary which politely ‘sane-washes’ the crazy ravings of the psychopath Donald Trump. We must be rational enough to reject self-serving rationalising swerves that avoid facing uncomfortable truths and sane enough to call crazy crazy and only then can we find a way through these dangerous days to a better world.

Whether the Left likes it or not, it has to become expert in understanding religion in order to avoid being destroyed by global death cults. I see no real appetite for that amongst intellectuals although there are popilarist channels like Middle East Eye that make superficial attempts to widen discussion and educate the public. I think the Left has grassroots expertise on dealing with cult-minds, especially the USA working class because USA is saturated with cults and the working class there has developed its own praxis, its own capacity to fight back against cults whether Scientology, Mormonism, prosperity gospel, MLM, influencer marketing, MAGA or countless other cases. Somehow, the expertise of the working class has to inform top level diplomacy if we are to find a good end to the holy war in West Asia. I see no other way to bridge the skills gap on which our future depends.

I was disappointed by China’s self-serving attitude to these conflicts, I thought China would be more proactive in supporting Iran, but I now realise China is clueless how to manage religious war. China cannot comprehend USA cults, Israel cults, or Iran’s unique form of Islam. China is choosing to work through a proxy, Pakistan, in pursuit of an end to violence because China is, I think, clueless how to act directly and prefers to find a go-between able to bridge secularist China with Iran, GCC and other Islamic states where religion empowers. I suspect the same cluelessness has transfixed Russia and Europe, and unlike China they have found no proxy although I suspect Turkiye is frantically waving and saying ‘pick me!’ Maybe India could comprehend religious war, but India could not be a peace broker in this war because of religious conflicts between the Hinduist-Nationalist politicised religion of India’s government and the various non-Hundu cult motivations of the warring states. I cannot identify any other state which might broker a peace because, apart from India or Pakistan, states with power enough to play a global peace-maker role (i.e. empowered by holding nuclear arms) only became powerful by embracing capitalism and treating religion as a trivial left-over of pre-capitalist society. Perhaps Russia is more religious than Europe, less in need of a go-between. I am not sure - Putin invokes religious themes in his rhetoric but I am not convinced he is religious or really understands the religiosity of some Russians or Russia’s past. I think Putin himself and Russian diplomacy in general is maybe less clueless on religious war than China or Europe but still essentially baffled. East Asian powers like Japan or American powers like Brazil might have a better understanding of religious motivation but without military power (without nuclear leverage) they cannot (yet?) be peace-brokers for this kind of war. As a world community, political elites almost all under-estimated religion and now we are threatened by a ‘holy war’ that might escalate to WW3 and we are powerless to stop it because ‘holiness’ is beyond our ‘leaders’ capacity to adequately imagine still less think about strategically or incorporate into policy as they seek ways to de-escalate those who are focused on heavenly rewards and are not afraid of martyrdom.

I think we can see how the rulers of our world are clueless about how to end the Iran crisis. As Diesen argues, and I largely agree, they could be helped by diplomacy, if they had the nous and humility to seek help. And diplomacy itself could escape its own academic and secularist blinkers if it could be educated by ‘ordinary people’ who have themselves learn how to manage the threat of cults which prey upon their communities. The working class, especially the USA working class, or working class in places like Brazil or Nigeria which have been relentlessly targeted by US-originating cults seeking converts, has been resisting holy war for centuries. These people are today’s experts in managing religious aggression. Exclusion of the working class from government, even in democracies, has deprived government of the capacity to deal with existential threat. What is a more devestating indictment of the oppression of the working class, even in systems which claim to empower us, than this? Those with the answers we need are not even consulted when governments make policy, still less asked to lead responses to existential threat.

Well, those are some of my Easter Sunday thoughts about Diesen and what role secularist diplomacy and working class praxis might play in a religious war crisis.

I do not use social media much so I will probably only post again next Sunday if I have other thoughts to share. If you read all of my essay, thank you for your attention.