Above photo: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei Martyr’s Cemetery.
Impunity and salvation is the chosen order to our earthly demise.
Let us, for a moment, reflect deeply upon the martyrdom of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, killed in an aerial strike by U.S. and Israeli forces. Following the ongoing Zionist dispossession and genocide of Palestinians, as well as the trafficking and sexual exploitation of children that has ensnared not just Trump and Netanyahu, but the wealthy elite across the sector of capitalism’s excess and abuse that has come to light following the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Billionaires and their sycophants, and its culture of elite political access and influence continue to operate not just with impunity but with absolution. The combination of Zionism and Christian Nationalism reveals a systemic cabal of power that continues to corrupt entire populations from the appearance of any human moral or ethical rectitude for an economic system that from its conception to now, has upheld predation as virtue. It reveals the most unholy alliance leaving conventional Christian and Jewish practice questioning its very existence.
This aggression follows the unilateral arrest and forcible removal of Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro in January 2026. These are violations of fundamental principles of sovereignty and collective security. Together, as with the non stop barrage of Trump led destabilization initiatives mark a disruption of international peace and security not seen at this scale since March 1935, when Germany under Adolf Hitler openly repudiated the restrictions of the Treaty of Versailles and reintroduced conscription and rearmament.
Make no mistake, the agenda of this administration is dismantling its commitment to the United Nations in a manner not dissimilar to Hitler’s withdrawal from and rejection of the League of Nations (United States, Department of State 309). While Hitler’s 1935 breach broke the collective limits on force and triggered the events that led to World War II, the administrations of Trump and Netanyahu are effectively undermining the peace and security of the United Nations.
If one is truly opposed to the role the United States is playing, strategic organization matters more than our condemnation. Condemnation belongs to the paradigm of forgiveness and absolution. Under the condition of impunity or in the logic of salvation, the future of our planet does not hang in the balance of good and evil, rather our future is predicated on the material global repricing of risk following the strikes on Tehran and the capture of Caracas. Oil and gas risk indices, defense procurement buildups, and increased asset valuations tied to national security spending, this is the world of the financial elite. To assume that any paradigm of good and evil justify capitalist greed, provides nothing more than the snake oil of motivational speakers. For those multimillionaire and billionaires who thrive on the side of the U.S. economy benefitting from the rise of these investment markets— there is nothing for you to say so shut the fuck up.
To reflect on the martyrdom of the Ayatollah is not to romanticize power, but to confront the meaning of moral witness in an age governed by capital. Martyrdom belongs to a religious grammar of conscience and accountability before God and history. It assumes that life is measured by justice, not by market valuation. Yet we live within institutions that translate violence into risk indices, defense contracts, and asset appreciation. Faith traditions may speak of restraint, repentance, and judgment, but the religiosity of the capitalist order contradicts that moral order while defending the most immoral and predatory financial order as if they were converting before God. The contradiction is not abstract. It becomes structurally material when killing becomes a catalyst for market repricing, and when moral language is emptied of content and retained only as a marketing image of Trump receiving absolution, or Netanyahu as a defender against the siege mentality of global anti-semitism.
In 1939, Hitler exploited that breach at the Reichstag to issue a televised political ultimatum in which he said that if “international Jewish financiers” succeeded in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result would not be the Bolshevization of the world and the victory of Jewry but rather “the obliteration of the Jewish race in Europe.” This threat was entered into evidence at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg as Document 2663-PS and later understood as premeditated genocidal intent linked to ideological violence.
In Mein Kampf, Hitler argues that Germany cannot regain its freedom while bound by the Treaty of Versailles. He claims that the treaty was imposed by foreign powers and that Germany must break those limits to restore sovereignty. He also insists that internal opponents must be removed for that restoration to succeed. In 1935 he acted on this position by expanding the army and violating the treaty’s military clauses (Hitler 464).
Similarly, in his January 21, 2026 remarks at Davos, President Trump framed the United States as having been exploited by foreign actors. He said the country had been “plucked like a chicken” and described tariffs as a way to reclaim hundreds of billions of dollars. He celebrated the rapid increase in investor wealth under his administration and told business leaders that they had doubled their net worth. The message was direct. National policy would serve capital expansion and economic power would be treated as national security. The back drop of this is BRICS, and Venezuela and Iran have both come under fire. Is Russia and China the objective? BRICS and its de facto security arm, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) does not have an Article 5 clause that Nato has. It does not have an “attack one, attack all” military security collective clause. And now, I have to ask why not? Is a multipolar de-dollarization economy enough to collapse the neoliberal empire? Is it enough to restore access and infrastructure equitably across the globe? Will BRICS provide for the regulatory mandates needed to protect peoples and environments?
In Mein Kampf, Hitler argues that Germany cannot regain its freedom under the Treaty of Versailles unless internal opposition is eliminated. He writes that those who resist the “national rise” must have their “international Marxist views of life” torn out of their “hearts and brains” (Hitler 464). Sovereignty, in this framework, requires not only breaking external limits but cleansing internal belief.
Marx uses similar language about hearts and belief, but he means something different. He writes that religion is “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world” (Marx 131). Marx treats belief as a response to material suffering. Hitler treats belief as an obstacle that must be eliminated.
If one replaces the Nazi trope of “international Jewish financiers” with the post-neoliberal privatization and asset management regime that has accumulated unprecedented concentrations of financial power since the 1980s, the functional logic is the same. The combined force of global investment vehicles, securitized wealth, credit default swaps, private equity, derivatives, and algorithmic trading reshapes how states perceive risk, how they price commodity flows, and how they mobilize for economic advantage. If that regime — which thrives on volatility, risk premia, and geopolitical instability — succeeds in driving the nations into another generalized conflict, the result will not be the Bolshevization of the world and thereby the victory of asset management, but the obliteration of the objectives of the United Nations Charter for a free and democratic world governed by sovereign equality and non-use of force.
This distinction helps clarify the present moment. When leaders defend military strikes or cross-border seizures as necessary to restore sovereignty, and when they describe multipolar alliances or BRICS alignment as ideological threats, they follow the same pattern. They portray external limits as humiliation. They portray dissent as disloyalty. They present escalation as recovery.
Today the constraint is not a treaty that limits troop numbers or weapon technologies, it is a global system of sanctions, financial leverage, asset management concentration, and security contracting. Breaking rules in that system does not produce classic colonial occupation that the Third Reich was pursuing. It is a Fourth Reich of instability increasing demand for defense production, energy speculation, mineral extraction, and surveillance technology. The Fourth Reich is a non-national corporate entity with cooperating state actors aligning inside a unipolar financial order.
Marx argued against colonialism, rightfully describing how damaged consciousness reflects damaged material conditions. Hitler argued that ideas of Marx, organized labor, and regulated capital had to be removed from the hearts and minds of workers to free Germany from Versailles. Now, Trump and Netanyahu lead the damaged ideological contamination of predatory excess while financial markets continue their upward ascension like a chosen order ascending the heavenly gates or our earthly demise.
The Fourth Reich is financial, governing through asset concentration camps, sanctions regimes, defense contracting, and risk pricing. Its power rests in firms that surveil trillions of dollars, shape capital flows, and align with state actors inside a unipolar financial order. Fourth Reich asset managers operate as shadow sovereigns beyond any functioning democratic oversight. The Fourth Reich is not a state with borders, it is a state of excess, held up by armies who continue to defend ones right to predation.
Pension funds, public treasuries, and institutional investors must demand transparency in war-linked exposure and divest from escalation-dependent returns. Sanctions and security contracting must be subject to legislative limits and public accounting. Sovereignty cannot mean the freedom to destabilize markets for gain. It must mean subordinating capital to law, and law to human life that is subject to our ecological biodiversity— not capital gains. The Fourth Reich looks a lot like portfolio growth and in my moments of deep reflection, I pray that BRICS will restore international legitimacy to our planet.
