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War On Iran – Czech cruiser ‘Krteček’ – Larijani’s Martyrdom – Kent’s Resignation
From a Wall Street Journal piece I quoted yesterday:
> The Trump administration as soon as this week plans to announce that multiple countries have agreed to form a coalition that will escort ships through the waterway, which runs along the Iranian coast, U.S. officials said. The U.S. and potential coalition countries are still discussing whether those operations would begin before or after the war ends. <
I commented:
What is the use of escorting ships through the Strait “after the war ends”?
So far there are no takers of Trump’s call for allies. I doubt that there will be any.
No European country and no Asia ‘ally’ has offered to help him to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Nor does the U.S. Navy.
So for once I was right – nearly right:
Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš has decided to dispatch the Czech cruiser ‘Krteček’ to the Persian Gulf, making the Czech Republic the sole EU nation to join the US-led coalition. 💪🇨🇿🇺🇸
Czech what? Some twitteratis fell for the joke. But Czechia is a landlocked country with no navy. Krteček though (also Krtek) is a famous Czech personality. I’ll leave it to you color his cruiser.
biggerIn other news the Israelis claim to have killed Ali Larijani last night. Sayed Larinjani led Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. He was a capable pragmatic politician with good relations to all power centers – IRGC, clerics, Bazaari – within the Iranian state.
Larijani would have been the first high level person to contact for eventual peace talks.
That is likely the reason why the Zionist tried to eliminate him. It makes it more difficult for the U.S. to find a way out of the conflict.
But it will otherwise not make a big difference. Larijani is, like everyone, replaceable. His martyrdom will strengthen Iran’s willingness to endure all hardship needed to finally defeat the U.S. and Israel:
The killing of Ali Larijani, like that of Ali Khamenei before him, is best understood as an instance of strategic martyrdom, a dynamic that exposes the fundamental irrationality of Israel’s and the US’ continued reliance on decapitation strategies, especially given their repeated historical failure. The decapitation-attrition-invasion playbook that the US and Israel keep drawing from reveals systems locked into a familiar repertoire of counterproductive violence that have consistently failed to adapt to reality. This failure is so glaring that even Trump acknowledged it, when he recently admitted that the US attacked Iran “out of habit.”
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Iran operates from a value-strategic rationality whereby martyrdom itself can perform important political work and generate strategic effects that not merely resist but reverse the intended consequences of assassination.
That Larijani attended the mass rally and made statements openly embracing the possibility of martyrdom before his death only underscores how consciously this logic is adopted by those who bear its consequences, a logic articulated most clearly by Khamenei himself, who declared that “either we are martyred on this path, whose honour is eternal, or we achieve victory; both are victories for us.”
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In short, strategic martyrdom ultimately contributes to deterrence by regeneration, whereby repeated attempts at decapitation are subject to a law of diminishing returns as adversaries discover that killing leaders neither fractures the system nor compels submission but instead contributes to its consolidation.
One Joe Kent, the director of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center, resigned today. In his resignation letter he blames Israel for pushing Trump towards the war on Iran.
Doing so has somewhat become a fad:
One diplomat with knowledge of the talks said: “We regarded Witkoff and Kushner as Israeli assets that dragged a president into a war he wants to get out of.”
No. It wasn’t Israel (which Kent had promoted), that has dragged Trump into or launched the war. The sole person who did that was Donald Trump – in spite of all warnings about what a war with Iran would entail. The Israelis would not have dared such a move against Iran had Trump not agreed with them.
@All Under Heaven | Mar 18 2026 11:49 utc | 715 “The main killer of the native peoples in the Americas was disease. That is not genocidal intent.”
This is patently false and is used to provide cover for the genocide.
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The documentary record on pre-contact indigenous health is remarkably consistent across centuries, continents, and observers.
The Frenchman Jean de Léry lived among indigenous peoples in what is now Brazil in the mid-sixteenth century. Léry recorded that these people were far healthier than Europeans, suffered less from diseases, and that it was rare to see anyone among them who was lame, one-eyed, or deformed. Every other sixteenth-century traveler who encountered these populations recorded the same observation — vivid beauty and stable health among people who ate natural foods and lived simply.
In the Americas, David Stannard documents in American Holocaust that the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan operated aqueduct systems that amazed Cortés and his men, piping clean drinking water from deep springs into the city while Europeans were drawing their water from polluted rivers. The Spanish were astonished by the personal cleanliness of the population and their extensive use of soaps, deodorants, and breath sweeteners.
This is a critical detail. The single most important factor in the reduction of disease in Europe was sanitary reform. The indigenous populations of the Americas had already achieved standards of hygiene that European cities would not match for centuries. To claim that these people — cleaner, better-nourished, and healthier than their colonizers by every available measure — were somehow uniquely vulnerable to diseases that rarely killed Europeans, requires the listener to ignore everything the documentary record actually says.
The Spanish arrived in Hispaniola, saw golden jewelry, and assumed the land was rich with treasure. What followed is not speculative. It is documented in eyewitness accounts by people like Bartolomé de Las Casas and in the research of historians who studied those contemporary writings.
Stannard records that the conquistadors went wild — stealing, killing, raping, and torturing the native people to force them to reveal the locations of imagined treasure-houses of gold. When no more gold could be collected directly, mines were established using the indigenous population as forced labor. Inside those mines, in addition to the dangers of falling rocks, poor ventilation, and the violence of brutal overseers, the laborers chipped away at rock faces and inhaled the poisonous vapors of cinnabar, arsenic, arsenic anhydride, and mercury.
Life expectancy for an indigenous person engaged in forced labor during the early years of Spanish terror in Peru was not much more than three or four months.
Eduardo Galeano, in Open Veins of Latin America, writes that the Caribbean island populations finally stopped paying tribute because they had disappeared — totally exterminated in the gold mines.
Hispaniola’s indigenous population fell from eight million to virtually zero between 1496 and 1535. Stannard indicates this was not unique but represents a typical example of the near-total annihilation that occurred throughout the Americas.
The Portuguese established themselves in Brazil soon after the Spanish arrived in Hispaniola. Within twenty years, the native peoples of Brazil were already well along the road to extinction.
The British, beginning in 1607, brought their own methods. Stannard records that starvation and the massacre of non-combatants became the preferred British approach to dealing with the natives.
Many native people attempted to retaliate but were invariably overpowered by superior weapons. Others chose not to fight but to flee, with the result that crops were left to rot in the fields. Starvation followed inevitably.
The number of people who died by each of these causes is unknown, because the events were mostly unrecorded. What is recorded, through eyewitness accounts and documented reports, is that tens of thousands were directly and deliberately killed in what Stannard calls massacres and slaughters.
These are not alternative explanations. They are the primary historical record.
The nonsensical “pathogen theory” explanation for Native American depopulation serves an institutional function which is why it has proven so durable. That function is to sanitize genocide. The germ narrative converts an act of sustained, deliberate, documented human violence into an accident of biology. Nobody is responsible for a pathogen. A virus has no intent. If the indigenous peoples died of smallpox, the destruction becomes tragic but impersonal — a collision of immune systems rather than a collision of civilizations in which one side held the weapons, controlled the mines, burned the food, and exterminated the buffalo.
The documented record — assembled by mainstream historians like Stannard and Galeano, drawn from eyewitness accounts by Las Casas and de Oviedo, confirmed by the Canadian government’s own reports — tells a different story. The indigenous peoples of the Americas were massacred, starved, worked to death in mines full of arsenic and mercury vapor, driven from their land, stripped of their food systems, confined to small plots without sanitation, and subjected to the systematic destruction of their social and spiritual structures. Every one of these causes is documented. Every one is sufficient to produce mass death without invoking a single pathogen.
Posted by: Allen | Mar 18 2026 19:34 utc | 934
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