Legitimate Targets

Donald Trump's presidency was inevitable. Not inevitable due to a political aptitude, a diplomatic demeanour nor a robust, if abrasive, vision of the future - no. The West has been hurtling toward this dialectical endpoint, this techno-fascist dystopia, for a long time.

Donald Trump was inevitable, because he is America's Portrait of Dorian Grey. He's not a carcinogen that has torn across the aioli of democracy's lungs. He is a self-mutating cancer cell, born out of evil genetics and a penchant for sadistic natural selection. He is America incarnate. He is capitalism incarnate. He is a screaming abyss of narcissistic rage. He is a bottomless chasm.

Donald Trump is incapable of recognising the value of human life. He is incapable of recognising the value of truth, or democracy, or other people, because he is in the eye of the raging Trump storm. This man was elected twice, because he allows the electorate to debase their own country, and therefore debase themselves. He's a mirror to the worst impulses of a sick, and dying, Empire. The MAGA Cult are not interested in politics. Or reality. Or morality. Or the Bible, from which they erroneously quote every fucking week. Pete Hegseth read a verse from Pulp Fiction to a room of soldiers, either unaware or disinterested in the fact it is in neither Testament.

Which brings us onto the current crusade of this administration. The Iran War.

Over the past month, the term "legitimate targets" has been thrown around in UK media. I think the hypernormalisation of this term is, to put it lightly, a cause for concern. "Legitimate targets". It's a knowingly vague phrase, one that boils international warfare down into corporate doublespeak.

Is a school in Gaza a legitimate target, if Hamas is potentially under it? What about a power plant in Iran? One that powers homes, water stations, civil infrastructure? Targeting such places would legitimately cause havoc for Iranians. If your aim is to just obliterate your opponent, which is Trump's stated aim, then I am sure the ghoulish sycophants in the White House can stretch "legitimate" to mean anything. Hegseth got bamboozled by a reporter, who asked him if they should rename the Department of War to the Department of Peace -- a joke nod to Orwell's 1984 -- and the good ol' Nazi alcoholic thought it was a legitimately great idea!

If you can stretch the term legitimate target to mean anything, so can your opposition. Keir Starmer's government is repeatedly telling the British public that we're only letting the U.S. use our regional bases for 'defensive operations'. I asked my local MP, Jeff Smith, what this means. He said that, as Britain has citizens and assets in the region, we must protect them. So far, so good. He went onto say that, to aid that, we must let the United States use our bases to attack Iranian missile systems and assets.

Ah. So, despite the government pleading that we're not involved, but only "kinda" involved, it turns out that we are... Providing military assistance and support to the Americans. Which means it's highly likely that our intelligence services are collaborating with the C.I.A to coordinate operations in Iran. In fact, that's a given. By the way, what happened to the 800 military bases the Americans have across the world? They spend $2 billion of their own taxpayers' money on the air conditioning for those things, so I assumed they would have wanted to get some bang from their buck!

Iran is fully within its right to say that the UK bases in the region are now legitimate targets. If we let an American plane land, refuel, and then take off from a British base, which then goes onto bomb Iran, have we not aided in the bombing?

The West is so morally and intellectually bankrupt, that even the brutal Iranian regime is making more sense than the current President of the United States.

Legitimate targets. Who was a target this week? Well, Trump's press dinner certainly had a couple uninvited guests. The would-be assassin, according to the "manifesto" that the federal government found (which conveniently paints him as a far-left lunatic), was targeting Secretaries of State and the President himself.

Join me in a thought experiment. Given, you know, everything.

An insane man in the White House, who threatens to raze entire civilisations from the Earth during lengthy, unhinged social media rants at 3AM. A man who is so deeply implicated in the Epstein Files that he is basically the Epstein Files. A man who is surrounded by far-right nutjobs, white-supremacists and actual fascists, hellbent on turning the States into a Palantir-ran police hellscape...

Was Trump a "legitimate target", too?