Repeated Events in History as Farce: US-Israel War Against Iran
Rally against the war on Iran in Los Angeles. Photo: PSL LA
The opening lines of one of Karl Marx’s works (Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte) begin with his mention of Hegel, who said that major events of history repeat. Marx comments that Hegel forgot to add that first they occur as tragedy and second as farce. We do not know whether both the observations, namely ‘major events repeating’ and ‘occurring as tragedy first and then repeating as farce’ could be held valid in human history across time and space.
Social scientists have always shown ambivalence toward any generalisation that could hold always true. If we accept this law, then human subjectivity and its role in shaping individual and collective processes ceases to exist and society and events become identical with the natural phenomena. However, social sciences have been struggling to work out general principals of social processes for more than a century. Anything they have been able to come up is that all societies are characterised by an endeavour to have harmony and consensus of values as well as existence of conflict. Despite all these limitations there are historical occasions when events repeat with identical consequences to what Marx had commented in the middle of 19th century. Let us take the most recent one.
When Israel attacked Iran in June 2025 and Iran responded with an equal ferocity, the US intervened by bombarding the nuclear facilities without effect, but the US-intervention ended the conflict by declaring that it had destroyed Iran’s nuclear capability. Then began various rounds of negotiations between Iran and the US.
In the beginning of 2026, the world came to learn that there were anti-government demonstrations in Iran and various news agencies reported that the Islamic Republic suppressed the movement ruthlessly by killing more than 30,000 people. As a matter of fact, the propaganda against the Islamic Republic of Iran never stopped in the Western media.
On February 28, 2026, the US-Israel attacked Iran killing a large number of people that included the head of the state, Ayatollah Ali Khomeini, along with his family as well as some top leaders of note, and about 170 school girls. The Western press showed its tremendous consistency by keeping quiet on the killing of school children as it had already done when Israeli attack had been killing children in Gaza and later on Southern Lebanon.
The Iranian response to these attacks were measured, consistent, effective and well planned. The entire world was expecting the Iranian collapse that never happened. While working out the reason for Iranian ability to resist, the argument offered was that Russia and China had been helping the country in various ways.
Upon further explorations, it dawned on the world that Iranian society had developed in terms of education, technology and innovations. Women were highly educated and were engaged in various professional activities thus demolishing the myth of the oppressive nature of the Iranian political system.
It is generally understood that unlike the democratic system of governance, the totalitarian regimes are ruled by dictators resulting in a situation where the identities of political system and the dictator become synonymous. The disappearance of the dictator leads to the collapse of the regime, for it is assumed that the people in general had been suffering from the oppressive nature of the regime and seek to change it.
This is exactly what the US-Israel were expecting, but it did not happen. What emerged was that the political system of Iran has been highly institutionalised in addition to which it was not oppressive the way the people of the world were made to believe. In fact, the education levels of Iranian ministers surprised the rest of the world.
On top of that, it became clear that if the people of Iran in general were unhappy with their government, then it never meant that they would turn against it at the time of crisis. Iranians showed unwavering unity and will to fight against the aggressors. They united forgetting their economic challenges that had been largely the results of sanctions against their country imposed by the US since 1980s. The appeal of Donald Trump, the US President, to the people of Iran to take over the Iranian government turned into a farce.
It was not the first time in history that a country was invaded with the assumption that the local people would join the invaders, because they were unhappy with their rulers. One is reminded of World War II when in 1941, the Nazi Germany invaded Soviet Union under Hitler. It has remained the biggest ground attack in the history of the world.
William L. Shirer, the author of The Rise and Fall of Third Reich, writes by referring to the German General Kliest, who told in an interview that “Hopes of victory were built on the prospect that the invasion would produce a political upheaval in Russia” (p. 855). And then Shirer (p. 856) informs us that Hitler had told another army general, Jodl, “We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down”.
The history of the World War II informs us that Nazi Germany’s decline began when the German forces had to retreat and the Soviet troops stopped only when they entered Berlin and the Allies’ armies captured the rest of the capital. The magnitude of the tragedy of Soviet-German war can be measured by the number of lives of lost which were in millions and added by the destruction it caused.
Loss of lives is the greatest tragedy in any war, but nations have not learnt any lesson from history. Assuming that a nation of 90 million people would just surrender because people do not like the regime, is nothing short of farce. ‘People’ as a conceptual category is highly ambiguous because it hides certain socio-political heterogeneity by assuming that it is comprised by homogeneous population. However, there is no guarantee that the aggressors will learn from this war in future.
The writer was a professor of sociology at the Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar, and former president of the Indian Sociological Society. The views are personal.
War and Constitutional Indifference
Since its inception, the government of the United States has inexorably exceeded its powers under the Constitution. All three branches have been complicit in a consistent pattern of constitutional indifference.
Congress has regulated in areas of governance nowhere articulated in the Constitution. Its general regulatory powers were granted to address interstate commerce, but during the FDR years, the Supreme Court ruled that Congress can regulate events that affect interstate commerce. This has resulted in federal regulation of matters too infinitesimal to measure, that are not commercial and devoid of movement across interstate lines.
The most extreme of these is the regulation of a farmer’s small field of wheat, all of which was ground into flour and consumed as baked goods by the farmer’s family. Though this had no measurable effect on interstate commerce, the court ruled that if you add up all the similarly situated farmers who may do the same, the aggregate will affect interstate commerce. And, by growing their own wheat and baking their own bread, the farmer’s family was buying less bread from their local grocer and that — though truly infinitesimal — affected interstate commerce.
Once unleashed by this judicial frivolity, Congress recognized no real limits on its regulatory powers. When hosting a show on the Fox Business Network, I once invited nearly all my Fox Business colleagues on set and asked all on air if they could find anything in the studio that was not regulated by the feds.
The chairs on which we were seated? No, the feds regulate their leg length and the rollers on which the legs sit. The color of the walls? No, the feds regulate the pigment in the paint. The cameras used to video us? No, the feds regulate the lenses and the electricity used to power them.
To James Madison, who was the scrivener at the Constitutional Convention and who drafted the Commerce Clause, the word “regulate” in “to regulate Commerce… among the several States” meant “to keep regular.” Indeed, one of the main reasons for the elites’ displeasure with the old Articles of Confederation, and a significant impetus for the Constitution itself, was the effect on commerce of state tariffs and monopolies and their use to impede businesses from out of state.
This was the reason for granting Congress the power to keep commerce regular. But power corrupts, and keeping it regular led to regulating everything that affects it — the speed with which commercial goods moved, the ages and wages of those who worked to produce them, even the prices that could be charged. And the courts permitted all this, in defiance of the Constitution, which prohibits the feds from interfering with contracts without due process.
But all of this, as deleterious as it has been to personal liberty and limited government, takes a back seat to presidential extraconstitutional behavior. And that behavior is nowhere as manifest and harmful as war.
War is the health of the state because it induces fear among the people and thus their compliance, produces jingoistic patriotism and abject hatred of the persons in the country that is the object of war, facilitates vast borrowings in order to pay for the war, enriches elites, slaughters innocents and curtails the civil liberties — the natural rights — of those opposed to the war.
The object of war is, of course, to kill people in a foreign land. Hence the mandate of the Framers that this should not take place without a substantial nation-wide consensus in support of the killing. The Framers of the Constitution so feared wars on presidential whim that they made it clear that only Congress can declare war.
Yet, within months of taking office in 1797, President John Adams fought a war against France without a congressional declaration of war. This was unthinkable at the time, and in order to stifle domestic political dissent, he commenced a regrettable American tradition of silencing domestic opposition to foreign wars.
He asked Congress to enact the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798, which, among other things, criminalized words used to disparage the government. This is perhaps the most remarkable and abominable piece of legislation in American history. It not only legislatively interferes with a natural right — the freedom of speech, essential in a liberal democracy — but it was enacted and enforced by the same generation, in some cases the same human beings, that had just offered and ratified the First Amendment, which states in part that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech.”
Yet the enforcement of this statute was deemed a wartime necessity, as were many of its progeny. Following Adams, American presidents have arrested journalists without charge or trial during the Civil War; prosecuted opponents of the draft during World War I by arguing that their words of dissent in the U.S. impeded the American military in Europe; incarcerated Japanese-Americans in camps they could not leave during World War II for fear that their words would encourage the government of their ancestors to invade the U.S., and during the war on terror asked for and enforced the Patriot Act, as odious as the Alien and Sedition Acts, which permits searches and seizures without warrants.
All of this terror follows the pattern of interpreting the Constitution so as to curtail personal liberty in wartime, contrary to the plain meaning and common understanding of the founding documents of America. The root of this terror is war. And the application of this terror came about by indifference to constitutional restraints on war.
As we approach America’s 250th anniversary, we see that constitutional indifference leads to leviathan and war by whim. Speech that opposes war should be praised because it exposes unconstitutional behavior, challenges authoritarianism, forces the government to explain its killings and is a hallmark to tolerance in a liberal democracy.
Without free speech and constitutional fidelity, what are we celebrating next month?
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