Where’s Muh Freedom, Bro?

Ben Wildsmith

We are caught between eras at the moment and our nervy discomfort, sat with our bags out on the lawn but with no idea where we’re headed to next, is pressing on us all.

To work out what’s being birthed we need to come to terms with what’s dying and why.

This weekend has, you’ll agree, been particularly discomfiting. I’m kind of done with railing about politicians driving us into barbarism. This weekend’s events confirm that plenty of people want an end to civilization as we’ve understood it.

It’s no good arguing human rights to people who feel safer if a big, rough man promises to stomp on anything they don’t like. ‘The Venezuelans are happier,’ they cry. ‘International law is a brake on natural morality.’

You can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into and, holistically, that is the shift we need to take notice of in the events going off around us.

Having grown up in the west and received a liberal education of some sort, Enlightenment values run through us as a given. We expect people to defend their actions using evidence and reason.

We assume that even the worst amongst us get that it’s accepted that humans are individuals with value.

They may not believe it, or act according to that notion, but even sociopaths know they need to fake agreement with this.

President Trump and his merry band of MAGA sycophants have twigged that reason and accountability have had their day. Nobody has the time or, crucially, the attention span to follow complex arguments that weigh the rights of minorities against the will of the majority.

It’s called a democracy, dumbass, which means we won so we do as we please. Cry harder.

Complicating matters further, it’s now nearly impossible to verify evidence for anything that we haven’t experienced first-hand.

It seems as if Venezuelans around the world are celebrating their liberation by Exxon and Chevron. They are pulling down statues with ropes like their predecessors in Iraq did. The tropes of liberation are being served up to us, watching the news in our pith helmets as vicarious liberators. Can you trust your eyes, though?

I’d be interested to know how many people reading are aware of what might be happening in Iran this weekend.

Protests

Traditional outlets like newspapers and TV channels have reported sporadic protests around the country that focus on the cost of living. The Iranian Rial was drastically devalued last week and, resultingly, international sanctions are biting even harder.

It’s a small story buried away in the international pages of papers and barely featuring on broadcast media.

On social media, however, and particularly Elon Musk’s X, a full-scale revolution is underway. Thousands of Iranians are, we’re told, flooding the streets and demanding the return of the monarchy.

Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, son of the bloke who didn’t like it in Rock the Casbah, is posting instructions to revolutionaries. Accounts that usually amplify Israeli government lines about Gaza are unanimous that the Iranian theocracy will fall within days.

The reason you haven’t heard about it, according to everyone from Tommy Robinson to the Davies twins, Sharron and Andrew RT, is that the lamestream media is a globalist mouthpiece for Communism and Islam. Or something, it’s hard to follow.

Debunked

Every image and film clip coming out of Iran, whether it supports or casts doubt on the veracity of an ongoing revolution, is immediately debunked as an AI fake. It is very possible that I am an AI fake, would I even know?

Out of the Enlightenment flowed the industrial revolution and the technological world into which we were born. Before cameras and sound recorders, people were reliant on the accounts of eyewitnesses to verify events. ‘The camera never lies’ we used to tell ourselves. Well, it did, as Arthur Conan Doyle found out, but not so convincingly that veracity couldn’t eventually be determined. We’re past that now. No image or recording can be considered evidence of anything as AI turns objectivity into a quaint relic of the past.

It’s richly ironic that the forces opposed to murderous superstition in Iran are conspiring to undermine the basis upon which we try to arrive at reasoned conclusions. Similarly, those who are loudest in support of AMERICA have reduced its philosophical essence to the might-is-right exceptionalism of the Monroe Doctrine and nothing else.

Real freedom is the fruit of hard thinking. It is the refusal to persist with that work that has led us here, to the precipice of tyranny.