The end of deterrence corresponds to the beginning of the information war, a conflict where the superiority of information is more important than the capability to inflict damage.
The New Horizon conference could not but be about information war. The overall theme was the fight against the Zionist lobby. Everyone knows what the lobby means and how it operates, especially in the US. And yet, in my short interventions, at the Foreign Ministry and at the conference, I preferred to focus on its global financial/economic reach. Follow the money. That's the only way to pierce the lobby's seemingly invincible armory.
Another face of information war. Everywhere I went, I had the pleasure to see how Gareth Porter's book -- Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iranian Nuclear Scare -- was received as a blessing. The book was translated into Farsi by the Fars News Agency, in only two months, with meticulous care, and launched in a simple ceremony.
It's bound to become a best seller -- as it conclusively proves, for instance, how the Iranian "plot" to equip missiles with nuclear warheads was entirely fabricated by the terrorist outfit Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) and then handed over to the International Atomic Energy Agency by the Mossad. Contrast the respect shown to Gareth in Tehran to the wall of silence of its US reception - just another reflection of the 35-year-old "wilderness of mirrors" opposing Washington to Tehran.
Predictably, the usual illiterate morons in the US dubbed the conference as an "anti-Semite hate fest." Gareth was described as "an anti-Israel journalist" and myself as "a Brazilian anti-Israel journalist." Obviously the moronic inferno is not familiar with the concept of "foreign policy."
Space is no longer in geography -- it's in electronics. Unity is in the terminals. It's in the instantaneous time of command posts, multinational headquarters, control towers, etc. Politics is less in physical space than in the time systems administered by various technologies. ? There is a movement from geo- to chrono-politics: the distribution of territory becomes the distribution of time. The distribution of territory is outmoded, minimal.
Time to go to the bazaar -- the ultimate urban distribution of territory. At the main entrance, a gaggle brandishing calculators and pieces of paper is involved in an incredible racket. With Roberto Quaglia -- author of a wicked debunking of the 9/11 saga -- we joke this looks like a slaves market. Not really. This is nothing less than a futures market on the course of the rial. With the national currency fluctuating so much because of the sanctions -- it lost three quarters of its value in the past few years -- the chance to make a bundle is irresistible.
We meet the beautiful Zahra -- she sells handmade towels but is essentially a killer fashion photographer. And then the ritual I've loved since forever; haggling for the perfect tribal rug. In this case, a Zaghol from the 1930s, never to be reproduced because the local nomads are becoming sedentary and there are no new weavers. A case of distribution of territory becoming the distribution of (lost) time.
The Pharaohs, the Romans, the Greeks were surveyors. That was geopolitics. We're no longer there, we're in chronopolitics. Organization, prohibitions, interruptions, orders, powers, structurings, subjections are now in the realm of temporality. And that's also where resistance should be.
Which lead us, once again, to sanctions. Much had been made of what Rouhani told Austrian President Hans Fisher at the UN -- about Iran being ready to deliver gas to the European Union. That's not happening tomorrow; the last figure I had, in Tehran, years ago, is that the country would need at least US$200 billion in investments to upgrade its energy infrastructure. Rouhani was forced to clarify it. And Tehran won't sell itself to the EU on the cheap.
The end of sanctions is all about chronopolitics.
We have entered an age of large-scale terrorism. Just as we speak of petty delinquency and major delinquency, I think the same should be said of petty and major terrorism. ... The military-industrial and scientific complexes continue to function on their own momentum. It's a crazy engine that won't stop.
Tehran thinks about the crazy engine all the time. I'm sort of "kidnapped" from a meeting and end up in a small think tank with a fabulous map on the wall detailing the US command centers. All the students are eager to know what the Empire is really up to with Iran.
A visit to the "nest of spies" -- the former US embassy -- is also inevitable. An apotheosis of 1970s technology -- immaculately preserved like nowhere else in the world; radio equipment, proto-computers, telephones, telexes, rolodexes, a "forgery room" for fake passports. No wonder Washington could never recover from the loss of this sterling listening post of the whole Middle East. Will this building ever be a "normal" US embassy again? Someone should ask the hick Hamlet who almost turned into a mad bomber.
This is why the airport today has become the new city. ? People are no longer citizens, they're passengers in transit. No longer a nomad society, in the sense of the great nomadic drifts, but one concentrated on the vector of transportation. The new capital is ... a city at the intersection of practicabilities of time, in other words, of speed.
The last day had to contain an epiphany. I waited for it all day long -- amid myriad interviews and a fabulous Indian lunch in North Tehran with Gareth and Dr Marandi of the Faculty of World Studies, University of Tehran; the ideal Platonic banquet of conviviality and intellect. Then, at night, a mad dash across town to the Rey shrine; working-class neighborhood, foundation stone of Tehran, one of the top pilgrimage sites in Iran alongside Qom and Mashhad.
The New Horizon conference could not but be about information war. The overall theme was the fight against the Zionist lobby. Everyone knows what the lobby means and how it operates, especially in the US. And yet, in my short interventions, at the Foreign Ministry and at the conference, I preferred to focus on its global financial/economic reach. Follow the money. That's the only way to pierce the lobby's seemingly invincible armory.
Another face of information war. Everywhere I went, I had the pleasure to see how Gareth Porter's book -- Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iranian Nuclear Scare -- was received as a blessing. The book was translated into Farsi by the Fars News Agency, in only two months, with meticulous care, and launched in a simple ceremony.
It's bound to become a best seller -- as it conclusively proves, for instance, how the Iranian "plot" to equip missiles with nuclear warheads was entirely fabricated by the terrorist outfit Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) and then handed over to the International Atomic Energy Agency by the Mossad. Contrast the respect shown to Gareth in Tehran to the wall of silence of its US reception - just another reflection of the 35-year-old "wilderness of mirrors" opposing Washington to Tehran.
Predictably, the usual illiterate morons in the US dubbed the conference as an "anti-Semite hate fest." Gareth was described as "an anti-Israel journalist" and myself as "a Brazilian anti-Israel journalist." Obviously the moronic inferno is not familiar with the concept of "foreign policy."
Space is no longer in geography -- it's in electronics. Unity is in the terminals. It's in the instantaneous time of command posts, multinational headquarters, control towers, etc. Politics is less in physical space than in the time systems administered by various technologies. ? There is a movement from geo- to chrono-politics: the distribution of territory becomes the distribution of time. The distribution of territory is outmoded, minimal.
Time to go to the bazaar -- the ultimate urban distribution of territory. At the main entrance, a gaggle brandishing calculators and pieces of paper is involved in an incredible racket. With Roberto Quaglia -- author of a wicked debunking of the 9/11 saga -- we joke this looks like a slaves market. Not really. This is nothing less than a futures market on the course of the rial. With the national currency fluctuating so much because of the sanctions -- it lost three quarters of its value in the past few years -- the chance to make a bundle is irresistible.
We meet the beautiful Zahra -- she sells handmade towels but is essentially a killer fashion photographer. And then the ritual I've loved since forever; haggling for the perfect tribal rug. In this case, a Zaghol from the 1930s, never to be reproduced because the local nomads are becoming sedentary and there are no new weavers. A case of distribution of territory becoming the distribution of (lost) time.
The Pharaohs, the Romans, the Greeks were surveyors. That was geopolitics. We're no longer there, we're in chronopolitics. Organization, prohibitions, interruptions, orders, powers, structurings, subjections are now in the realm of temporality. And that's also where resistance should be.
Which lead us, once again, to sanctions. Much had been made of what Rouhani told Austrian President Hans Fisher at the UN -- about Iran being ready to deliver gas to the European Union. That's not happening tomorrow; the last figure I had, in Tehran, years ago, is that the country would need at least US$200 billion in investments to upgrade its energy infrastructure. Rouhani was forced to clarify it. And Tehran won't sell itself to the EU on the cheap.
The end of sanctions is all about chronopolitics.
We have entered an age of large-scale terrorism. Just as we speak of petty delinquency and major delinquency, I think the same should be said of petty and major terrorism. ... The military-industrial and scientific complexes continue to function on their own momentum. It's a crazy engine that won't stop.
Tehran thinks about the crazy engine all the time. I'm sort of "kidnapped" from a meeting and end up in a small think tank with a fabulous map on the wall detailing the US command centers. All the students are eager to know what the Empire is really up to with Iran.
A visit to the "nest of spies" -- the former US embassy -- is also inevitable. An apotheosis of 1970s technology -- immaculately preserved like nowhere else in the world; radio equipment, proto-computers, telephones, telexes, rolodexes, a "forgery room" for fake passports. No wonder Washington could never recover from the loss of this sterling listening post of the whole Middle East. Will this building ever be a "normal" US embassy again? Someone should ask the hick Hamlet who almost turned into a mad bomber.
This is why the airport today has become the new city. ? People are no longer citizens, they're passengers in transit. No longer a nomad society, in the sense of the great nomadic drifts, but one concentrated on the vector of transportation. The new capital is ... a city at the intersection of practicabilities of time, in other words, of speed.
The last day had to contain an epiphany. I waited for it all day long -- amid myriad interviews and a fabulous Indian lunch in North Tehran with Gareth and Dr Marandi of the Faculty of World Studies, University of Tehran; the ideal Platonic banquet of conviviality and intellect. Then, at night, a mad dash across town to the Rey shrine; working-class neighborhood, foundation stone of Tehran, one of the top pilgrimage sites in Iran alongside Qom and Mashhad.
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