About the value of violence and religion
No one in the West, Left or Right saw this coming. I personally dreaded the horrors that a war on Iran would bring and did as much as I could to stop it. I knew that Iran could defend itself, to a degree, but US/Israel military power seemed so overwhelming. Israel/US don’t win wars; they just bomb countries into rubble and call it victory.
But surprise! The war is not working out for Trump, Netanyahu, and associates. If you look at any source other than US corporate media, you see headlines like ‘Tel Aviv is burning,’ ‘Trump is desperate,’ ‘Oil markets in chaos.’ Iranian civilians have suffered massive casualties and destruction, but their confidence seems to be growing. They seem on their way to forcing massive rollback of US hegemony. Some say they lead the way to ending the colonial order that has ravaged the global South for 500 years.
One can only hope. But how have they pulled off this apparent miracle? What can we learn from their success? In observing Iran’s behavior, their words and their results, I have learned two things I should have known long ago. But locked into a progressive, middle-class, Western peacenik worldview, I couldn’t see two crucial things the Islamic revolutionary leaders understood.
One is to stop believing that our rulers will ever be persuaded to change. They must be beaten by force, and this is sometimes possible but takes terrific skill and courage. The other is the power that religion can bring, not only to help people endure their oppression, but to make them lose their fears and defy all odds in challenging their oppressors.
1. Sometimes you need force.
All my adult life, I have tried to stop wars in the usual nonviolent, liberal ways. Demonstrations, writing articles, sending letters to politicians and editors, boycotting things, supporting antiwar candidates; none of them worked very well. To be honest, my friends and I realized long ago that these nonviolent programs were making us feel better, not changing anything. No matter who gets elected, or how much ordinary citizens lobby them, the system keeps giving us war. The empire keeps devastating more people and places, particularly those who produce oil and are located near Israel.
If you back up and look at the world from the view of a country like Syria or Iran, or of an oppressed people within the Empire, you immediately realize the game is completely rigged. The United Nations and the international courts never act to defend you; they only help regulate and coordinate imperial domination. Same goes for the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Swift banking system. The major political parties are all owned by the same corporations that own the war machine, so voting has limited effect. The Empire doesn’t give you anything unless doing so benefits them.
Can’t people or countries use creative nonviolence to accomplish change? I used to think we could, but I have learned better over the years. Those with power never voluntarily give it up; those with money don’t voluntarily part with it. The billionaire class, especially the tech bros, openly proclaim they are superior beings and can’t wait to replace the rest of us with AI. They can’t be persuaded. They own and control the vast majority of media, so they control much of society’s narratives. How can they be fought in any meaningful way?
Violence or nonviolence
At first glance, the use of force seems hopeless, almost suicidal. The US military dwarfs all others in the world. Israel has the fourteenth largest, according to the Military Power Rankings web site. Both countries are nuclear armed. The US is the only country that has ever used a nuke on cities, and Israel has made it clear they would do so if they felt pressed.
The same imbalance applies within a country like the USA. The federal government has over 20 armed agencies. States and localities have their own. Many of them are militarized to the teeth. How can violence work?
The vastly unequal military strength was part of the motivation behind Mohandas Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s strategy of nonviolence. (I’m sure there was also real spirituality in their hearts, but would their movements have caught on if violence were a real option for their people?) Nonviolence became the dominant strategy on the Left in the 21st Century.
But it doesn’t work. As Stokely Carmichael (since renamed Kwame Ture) said back in the 60s, “In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.”The same is certainly true of Israel, and when I think about it, it’s hard to name countries or corporations that do have a conscience. For a country like Iran, in the imperial crosshairs, this is an existential question. How can they survive?
Until the current war, I couldn’t imagine a way, but Iran has shown how it can be done.
According to defensebudget.org, Iran spent $7.2 billion on their military in 2025. That is less than 1% (!) of US military spending. They know they can’t match us bomb-for-bomb, and they have come up with some elegant workarounds. Their military strategy now centers on stockpiling ballistic missiles and drones. Some they make themselves; some come from Russia and China. Their weapons are extremely advanced technologically and relatively cheap, because there is no corporate graft eroding their quality and wasting resources.
How to keep those missiles from being bombed out of existence in the first days of a war? They are stored and launched from deep underground, deep within mountains. They are elevated to the surface, fired, then the launch doors close again and retreat underground. I believe they learned this strategy from the North Koreans, who apparently taught Hamas and Hezbollah about using tunnels to frustrate superior armed force. When the war started, Iran’s first step was to attack American and Israeli radar stations. With those radars destroyed, Iran’s missiles and drones have been able to penetrate Israeli air defense systems, and those of America’s bases in the Gulf region.
Still, they don’t dream of overpowering the Empire. That would be impossible, but they have a better strategy. They focus on breaking up US alliances. Iran can’t attack the US directly, but they have attacked Israel and the gulf monarchies that support us and house our military bases. Now, those Gulf states are reconsidering their alliance with Washington, and the bases are out of operation.
The biggest alliance that needs breaking up is the US/Israel alliance. I see that connection as the source of much of the world’s problems — two settler states that seek to constantly expand and destroy. I believe that without each other, both would fall or be radically transformed, and the world would be a better place.
To be effective with the much weaker force, Iran has had to hit the Empire where it’s weak, its obsession with profit. The whole America-centered Empire runs on money. It is controlled by a class of billionaires with no loyalty to country or anything else besides their wealth. So Iran realized that sabotaging the markets would get the capitalists’ attention in a way that no physical attack could. By selling their oil in Chinese yuan and charging million dollar tolls in yuan and crypto, they are sabotaging the power of the US dollar. This change is a bigger threat to US dominance than any military option, but Iran could only do it backed by their military power in the Strait of Hormuz.
They use their strength like martial artists. All their missiles and drones have done little physical damage, relative to the damage Iran and Lebanon have suffered, but their effect on the markets has been profound, and capitalist countries are ruled by markets.
Now, the US wants out of this war. The US and Israel probably kill more Iranians and Lebanese in one day than Iran has killed in the entire war, but that doesn’t matter. Unlike their attackers, Iran doesn’t massacre civilians as strategy. Israel does, and the U.S. helps them, bombing hospitals, schools, power stations, and apartment buildings, bombing a girls’ elementary school on the war’s first day, killing 160 innocents. But they are still losing.
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How US and Israel make war. What’s left of Gaza. Image:Anadolu Ajansi
To reach this point, it wouldn’t have helped Iran to patiently bear the assault without hitting back. UN resolutions wouldn’t have saved them. They had to kill some people too. They had to fight fire with fire, even while their own people were being threatened with annihilation. Like in a guerilla war, those defending their home suffer far more casualties than do the more powerful attackers. But they can still win, with the world’s support and the power of their faith.
2. The power of religion
I am not a religious person and never have been. I don’t believe in the invisible sky God who spoke to Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad. I do believe there are higher powers and more happening in the world than we can ever know. I am drawn to indigenous spiritualities that consider the whole world to be sacred, and all living things to be our relatives.
I have not yet found an organized religion that speaks to me, and I know a lot about the evil that religions can do in the service of power. The witch hunts, the crusades, the religious wars in places such as India are some of history’s darkest chapters.
Still, what I have seen in this war convinces me that faith can work miracles. The people of Iran can stand up to the West’s vastly superior firepower without flinching, and they can hit back even while their families are being killed. They can do that because they believe, maybe that they will be rewarded in Paradise, maybe that they are fulfilling the will of Allah, maybe that they are defending their land. It is their calling.
Iran’s Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khameini, was killed at the age of 86 by Israeli bombs on the first day of this war. He was quoted as saying to friends a few days earlier that he was running out of time to become a martyr, and he died working in his office until it was blown up with him in it.
When people believe their lives and deaths have meaning, they will not give up easily. As the philosopher Friedrich Nietzche wrote, “He who has a why for which to live, can bear with almost any how.”
I also note that faith gives power to people’s words. The most powerful antiwar voices in the U.S. for the last two and a half years have belonged to conservatives Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens. They speak their Christian faith from their hearts, and millions of people believe them.
Of course, the power of religion can be used for good or evil. US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is truly one of the most evil men ever. He makes Adolf Hitler look like a choir boy, while claiming to do mass murder for Jesus. Religion can do bad things, but it does have power. And the disempowered global majority needs that power. If we want to overcome a system that means to kill us and perhaps most life on Earth, we need to believe in something larger than our individual selves.
I was wrong. So what to do now?
Here’s what I’ve learned from Iran. Sometimes you have to fight. You have to be willing to use force, and you have to become skillful with it, because the Empire has a lot more force than the people ever will. We have to think like jiu jitsu masters and use the enemy’s force against him. We can do this by organizing and by attacking his weakness, his prioritizing profit above all else. That is what Iran has done in the Strait of Hormuz. They’re using minimal force to create huge effects on the market.
What kind of economic jiu jitsu can people in the US and UK apply? We don‘t have a strait to close. Two tactics come to mind now: stop paying taxes, and organize strikes. I hope others come up with other ideas and leadership.
We also need to believe in something beyond ourselves. After months of occupation, the people of Minneapolis managed to drive ICE off their streets. The movement only became powerful when protestors Renee Good and Alex Pretti were murdered on camera by ICE agents. They gave their lives for a larger cause, and they won. Rather than being frightened into staying home, the enraged people of Minneapolis poured into the streets. Media picked up their stories. President Trump backed down.
What did faith have to do with it? Renee Good was a devout Presbyterian who had served as a missionary in Ireland. She seemed to view her activism as part of her religious calling. According to Commonweal Magazine, Pretti was a lifelong Catholic who believed self-sacrifice was often necessary to protect one’s community.
We shouldn’t have to use violence or get shot to stand for justice, but we must see the world as it is. Our governments are run by self-serving psychopaths who care only about money and power, who think lesser beings like us have no rights and no worth. The system we live in made them that way, but they won’t voluntarily change.
We, too, must be willing to risk our lives. We must embrace the courage and the skillfully targeted force of the Iranians. Support them however we can. In opposing the Empire, they are fighting for us, too.
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