War Dogs, War Prostitutes, War Mongers,  War as a Zionist (ZIM) Weapon

by Paul Haeder / November 17th, 2025

Note: Just ‘some’ of the feces in my ‘news’ (sic) feed in a two-hour period.

Defense industry heaps praise on Hegseth’s weapons-buying reformation

Terry Gerton You, I’m sure, paid very close attention to Secretary Hegseth’s speech last Friday on the arsenals of democracy. What was your takeaway?

Stephanie Kostro Thanks so much for asking, Terry. And not only was I listening with bated breath, I was actually in the room. And for any Hamilton fans out there, it was the room where it happened. There were roughly 250 folks in an auditorium on Fort McNair when Secretary of War Hegseth rolled out his ideas for transforming acquisition. And there was a lot to be said, Terry, he spoke for well over an hour, nonstop, no questions, just kept going. I would say it’s fair to characterize the audience as a rapt. We were waiting for everything he had to say. There were three main topics he wanted to talk about. One was reforming or transforming the requirements process. The second was transforming the acquisition process. And the third was reforming foreign sales processes, and that’s including both foreign military sales and direct commercial sales. So all of that were key topics for everyone in that room.

Specific attendees in the arsenals of democracy audience included:

“The Aerospace Industries Association congratulates Pete Hegseth on being confirmed to serve as the 29th Secretary of Defense. We look forward to working closely with him to bolster America’s national security, provide our warfighters with the best and most cutting-edge technology, reinvigorate the acquisition process, and ensure A

• James Taiclet, Chief Executive of Northrop Grumman Corp.
• Kathy Warden, Chief Executive of Northrop Grumman Corp.
• Senior executives from Palantir Technologies Inc. and Anduril

Our Members — A list of Offensive Weapons Companies brown-nosing Cap’n Pete.

Member company representatives partner with AIA’s councils and committees to stand as a unified voice on the many challenges and opportunities facing the aerospace and defense industry.

*****

News feed continued . . .

Can’t take a step forward without the wise words of a felon Billionaire. AmeriKKKa. Forbes, Fortune, Bloomberg, Economist, WP, NYT, Atlantic, Variety, et al.

As AI continues to reshape industries at lightning speed, it’s becoming more apparent to Gen Z that even a prestigious degree may not be the ultimate key to success. After all, the unemployment rate is ticking up even among recent graduates.

That reality has reignited the long-standing  debate  between pursuing a degree and focusing solely on skills training. But according to Udemy CEO Hugo Sarrazin, the two shouldn’t be seen as opposites.

“It’s cohabitation. I think you start with a degree, there’s a foundation that comes with a degree, but you need the skills to be relevant in the workplace,” he said.

The U.S. is committed to bailing out Argentina to the tune of $20 billion using a little-known mechanism called the Exchange Stabilization Fund. On today’s show, what is this fund, why was it created and does Argentina have any hope of paying it back?

No fucking pushback on this cunt of a deal? Where did the US get $20B to bail out Argentina.

[Genesis Prize Foundation — a group that offers an annual award to members of the Jewish community — announced that Milei, its most recent winner, would use his prize money to launch a new nonprofit, the American Friends of the Isaac Accords (AFOIA).]

*****

The value of blue state politics in my current state of chaos — Oregon and Parks, man.

[A rendering of the new Smith Rock State Park welcome center was released on Oct. 18, 2024. The project was put on hold a year later.]

4 Oregon state park projects put on hold as agency runs low on funds

Four years ago, state park officials identified 11 projects across the state that would be paid for using $50 million in GO bonds. Most of them have been completed or are slated to be completed by 2026, when the funding expires, but with that deadline looming, the parks department is pulling the plug on several of the big projects that have yet to get underway.

• Kam Wah Chung: A new interpretive center was planned with classrooms, restrooms, collection processing, archive storage and office space for staff at the historic Chinese medical clinic and community center in eastern Oregon.
• Smith Rock: A new welcome center was planned for the central Oregon destination, along with changes to parking and traffic flow. More accessible trails were planned to improve visitor flow.
• Champoeg: The Willamette Valley park was to get additional RV sites, cabins and a new restroom and shower building.
• Silver Falls: The immensely popular state park was set to get a new North Gateway campground, including new restrooms and shower facilities.

*****

But we have the putrid accused and convicted rapist and soon-to-be outed pedophile  in office spending billions.

This Dirty Rat Trump and his  Great Gatsby ball?

“Come out and take it, you dirty, yellow-bellied rat, or I’ll give it to you through the door!”

Quite the, well, accused Pedophile:

Oh, that bloody Minyan in the White Man’s House loves the cross.

What’s good for the goose is good for the gander?

 

Thune personally negotiated the inclusion of language in the legislative branch funding measure that would allow senators to receive a $500,000 payment if federal law enforcement obtains their electronic data and doesn’t notify them.

It was a direct response to recent revelations that eight Republican Senators had their phone records subpoenaed during former special counsel Jack Smith’s probe into President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

A sea of White Psychotics: Ray Ban Newsome in Brazil for COP30!

 

“After weeks of claiming they did nothing wrong, Gavin Newsom and California have been caught red-handed. Now that we’ve exposed their lies, 17,000 illegally issued trucking licenses are being revoked,” Duffy said, referring to the state’s governor. “This is just the tip of iceberg. My team will continue to force California to prove they have removed every illegal immigrant from behind the wheel of semitrucks and school buses.”

Those two psychotics:

Even as President Donald Trump and Kennedy have disagreed on issues from COVID-19 vaccines to abortion, the White House this year has largely left Kennedy alone as he has made sweeping changes to the agencies he leads, including laying off thousands of workers, firing science advisers and remaking vaccine guidelines.

The Trump administration has touted Kennedy’s efforts to phase out artificial dyes in foods, wage war on ultra-processed foods and update the national dietary guidelines. As health secretary, he has said he wants to find the root causes of chronic disease and help Americans reduce their exposure to toxins.

RFK Jr.’s brother overdosed, died on Palm Beach. Caroline says he led family to addiction!

Only months after he had gotten clean himself, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Kennedy family lost his younger brother to addiction at a Palm Beach hotel in 1984.

RFK Jr., nominated by President-elect Donald Trump to head the Department of Health and Human Services, has spoken openly about his own 14-year battle with addiction to heroin.

But his “best friend,” brother David, didn’t make it. He died at age 28 of a drug overdose at the Brazilian Court Hotel in April 1984. David Kennedy’s autopsy showed a mixture of cocaine, the painkiller, Demerol, and the tranquilizer, Mellaril.

On the eve of RFK Jr.’s confirmation hearings, their cousin, Caroline Kennedy, urged lawmakers to reject his nomination saying he’s led other family members “down the path of drug addiction.”

Here we are, the accused and convicted sexual assault pro: He hates women (wants to rape them all – those he sees as prime pussy grabber victims) and hates Chinese women.

Trump administration prepares to fire worker for TV interview about SNAP!! That fucking constitution!

The USDA employee warned that the shutdown could have negative impacts on the millions of Americans who rely on the federal government to put food on the table.

The employee, Ellen Mei, a program specialist at the Food and Nutrition Service, was interviewed on MSNBC on Oct. 2, during the early days of the shutdown, to talk about how the impasse in Washington would impact her team, as well as the work it does. Mei is also president of the National Treasury Employees Union’s Chapter 255, which represents employees at USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service in the Northeast.

While Mei’s co-workers went back to work Thursday as the government reopened, she was placed on administrative leave.

In the four-minute interview, Mei said she and her co-workers are “anxious because we’re hearing about the risk potentials and office closures that are looming over USDA as this shutdown kind of drags on.” She also explained that funding for key food assistance programs, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) — which feeds about 42 million Americans monthly — would probably be available in October but that “things might get a little dicey if this drags on into November.”

And so the Babyfication of the systems of Lower/Higher Learning and then Jewish Game of Thrones/Antisemitism is on Steroids!

Texas A&M Tightens Rules on Talking About Race and Gender in Classes — The university system will ban advocacy of “race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity” without approval.

Now, imagine talking about Palestine and the history of terrorism before, during and after the first Nakba, in Tex-ASS!

*****

Maybe end ALL Jewish/Zionist  Managers, Bankers, Financiers, dudes. Know where your mansions are, who manages your vast sums of portfolio money, who is your mortgage holder, real estate agent, producers, dudes and dudettes. Why more than 1,000 musicians are boycotting Israel with ‘No Music for Genocide’

“Artists getting robbed for their publishing by dirty Jewish execs who think it’s alms from the covenant”

 

Too many best rappers, not enough best rhymes tho
Guess I’m delusional, used to doing it all the time so
Maybe I’m just jaded, out of touch and unrelated
Unable to connect greatness based on the person who makes it
Or maybe I just hate it
And that would make me hater
Maybe it is great but that don’t mean it’s greater
Having your profile raised doesn’t make you a raiser
Being ambiguous with assertions, isn’t making you safer
What you mean tho?
Line us up, paddling us on the back
Like we steamboat you, president of the frat
You goin’ sling toast, like you Ringo
And you think Doc Holliday’s
Just goin’ tolerate and too sick to let that thing go
It’s just a matter of returns
Ashes to ashes, scattered them from the urns
To start a fire shaky to gather them from the burned
And reassemble these ashes, the blackness is something firm
Then moving blackness backwards in the bread of some other shit
Any deep we spreadin’ wheat seeds from a bucket shit
McDonald had a farm and he lovin’ it
Rolls Royce of the scented voice against the arms of the government
Artist gettin’ robbed for their publishing
By dirty Jewish execs that think his alms from the covenant
I’ll retire when I’m tired, that’s a Firestone death
Easy to say when nobody’s there, like a microphone check
They wanna hear what I’m gon’ say before the microphone check
Make me sign an NDA before the microphone test
Let you face that type of faith, institutional opposition
Then with all due respect, you are not my competition
Nah

*****

Lies from the InBred UnUnited QueenDumb.

The United Kingdom has reportedly stopped sharing some intelligence inputs with the United States regarding suspected drug trafficking vessels in the Caribbean as it doesn’t want to be complicit with America in its military strikes against the suspected drug boats and believes that the strikes are illegal, CNN reported quoting sources familiar with the matter.

 

*****

Oh, those Finks and Schwarzmans, Black/Rock/Stone: How Private Equity’s Vision for a Roofing Conglomerate Went Bust

Investment firms are buying and bundling contractors, leaving some workers and customers worse off.

The Big Short: After his employer abruptly closed last month, Nathan Hendricks, a cabinet installer, didn’t receive his last paycheck or reimbursement for the $400 he spent on gas driving to job sites.Credit…Taylor Johnson for The New York Times

Renovo took shape in 2022 when the Audax Group, a Boston-based private equity firm, started buying up family-owned remodeling companies that were leaders in their regions.

Minnesota Rusco had been around for 70 years, and was known for its catchy television jingle. Dreamstyle Remodeling was founded in 1989 in Albuquerque by a husband-and-wife team who amassed a 125,000-person client list. Newpro, which a family started in 1945 as a window replacement business, grew into one of the largest remodeling firms in the Northeast.

They were among seven purchased with about $150 million from some of the largest private lenders in America: BlackRock, Apollo and Oaktree Capital Management. By 2022, Renovo ranked eighth on Qualified Remodeler’s list of the largest home improvement companies, with 2,700 employees and $653 million in annual revenue.

Some executives stayed on to help run their companies, but knitting them together proved difficult. Management was centralized in a “top-heavy” office of people who didn’t all have experience in home improvement, said Melanie Marfoglio, who was vice president of Reborn Cabinets when it was acquired and stayed with the company until July.

More billionaire felonies, and worthless news:

With a $4.6 trillion balance sheet, JPMorgan Chase is America’s largest bank. It is more valuable than its three biggest Wall Street rivals combined. And much of that success may be due to its long-time leader, Jamie Dimon. The JPMorgan Chase CEO runs the $4.5 trillion bank with 300,000 employees. However, when it comes to a gadget that has become an integral part of work-life and otherwise for most of us, Dimon has different views. Jamie Dimon says he keeps his phone use to a minimum during the workday — including turning off notifications and ignoring most text messages.

“I don’t have notifications,” Dimon told CNN’s Erin Burnett in a recent interview. “If you sent me a text during the day, I probably do not read it.”

 

AmeriKKKa, the Farewell Tour! Donald Trump is facing a tricky balancing act over H-1B visas, a key source of highly skilled foreign labor in the United States.

Trump on Tuesday defended the use of H-1Bs, acknowledging the U.S. still needs international talent, even as his administration has imposed steep new fees that have sparked confusion among employers, legal challenges and set off a global arms race for skilled workers.

China has launched a new K-visa program as part of its effort to compete with the U.S. for global talent, while Canada has announced new plans aimed at attracting skilled foreign workers.

Trump told Fox News host Laura Ingraham that H-1B visas were needed because you “have to bring in talent”. When Ingraham pushed back, saying the U.S. has a pool of domestic talent, Trump replied: “No, you don’t.”

*****

Deportations or H-1B’s?

In exchange for Hamas freeing its final group of Israeli hostages, Israel released nearly 2,000 Palestinians from prison in October.

Most of the Palestinians released by Israel had been arrested in Gaza on suspicion of taking part in hostilities during the war and held without charge, and they were sent back to the territory. But 250 of them were serving long sentences for deadly attacks against Israelis.

For 154 of those prisoners, their freedom came with a major condition: They were sent into exile, never to return to their homes in the Palestinian territories. They were sent to Cairo, with their final destination still undetermined.

 

Palestinian human rights advocates criticize the deportations, which prisoners agreed to under conditions of imprisonment, as forcible displacement. Israeli analysts defend the practice, saying prisoners were offered a choice to remain incarcerated or be freed and deported.

The majority of Palestinian prisoners’ close relatives were barred by Israeli authorities from traveling abroad to greet their deported relatives after the most recent prisoner release, according to Qadura Fares, a veteran Palestinian prisoner advocate and the former head of prisoner affairs for the Palestinian Authority. Fares says the families were told the restriction was for security reasons.

Something else, those concentration camps and death trains Jews in Occupied Palestine, man!

*****

This is what a soulless and misanthropic white psychotic looks like: It’s in the eyes, man, the slack face, the whore of it all.

 

• Michael Burry of “The Big Short” fame has terminated Scion Asset Management’s SEC registration.
• Burry posted on X that he’s “on to much better things” after betting against Nvidia and Palantir.
• The contrarian investor foreshadowed the decision, writing the “only winning move is not to play.”

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Paul Haeder has been a teacher, social worker, newspaperman, environmental activist, and marginalized muckraker, union organizer. Paul's book, Reimagining Sanity: Voices Beyond the Echo Chamber (2016), looks at 10 years (now going on 17 years) of his writing at Dissident Voice. Read his musings at LA Progressive. Read (purchase) his short story collection, Wide Open Eyes: Surfacing from Vietnam now out, published by Cirque Journal. Here's his Amazon page with more published work Amazon. Read other articles by Paul, or visit Paul's website.

 

The Gallery of Ghouls of Last Stage US Empire

From the Zionist lobby’s media buyouts, to Christian-nationalism’s grudge match with Christian-Zionism, to Mamdani-envoked moral panic to “the Mar-a-Lago face.”

by Phil Rockstroh / November 17th, 2025

The face of last stage empire on display at a Mar-a-Lago event:

The human psyche’s lexicon is imagistic in nature. The psyche speaks in visual metaphors. At empire’s end, the psyche becomes an artist of the absurd. Hence, the nature of the zeitgeist will be limned by means of fashion, form, and feature into emblems of the era.

Pictured: “The Mar-a-Lago face” i.e., human beings transformed by Spiritus Mundi into (inadvertent) supernumeraries of a Gogolian theatre of the (cringe-inducing) grotesque.

In contrast, the type of image above brings me solace, because, now, when I gaze upon my aging face, it seems as if its time-touched features are being drawn by the very hand of a redemptive force.

*****

More mingling amid confederacies of ghouls and galleries of grotesques:

Pro-Zionist billionaires are among the High Dollar donors — thus are among the ownership class — that dictate the agendas of the US political class. Said billionaires have, as of late gone, on a buying spree of corporate media properties. Their gambit being, to enforce narratives that are a litany of pro-Israel lies e.g., foremost among them prevarication e.g., the denial of genocide perpetrated on the people of Gaza.

With vast resources at their disposal their employ media operatives to intimidate and cancel critics, even for the most mild criticism of Israel. As a consequence, there has been a noxious return of antisemitic tropes regarding Jews as a whole e.g., as hidden, scheming controllers of the world.

Are the vast majority of anti-Zionists antisemites? No. Are Nick Fuentes’ and his knuckle-dragging Groypers antisemitists? You can bet your jackboots they are.

The greatest threat to power-devoid Jews such as myself in the coming years: the conflation of Zionism and Judaism by Israeli propagandists.

Regarding Israel: A schism among the religious right:

At present, we are witnessing a power struggle among death cultist Christian rightists between Christian-nationalists nativism-gripped xenophobes and Christian-Zionist End Timer zealots. The former’s ranks are comprised of young, online, Groyper types who are possessed by a Brown Shirt mindset while the latter are (far) older Jesus fetishist fantasists — who believe every Israeli transgression against humanity, from ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, to perpetual war on its neighbors, to prison guard rape gangs bring the sin-reeking earth closer to their humanity-loathing fantasy of End Times wrought salvation.

To what extreme degree does one have to hate and fear life in order to long for the entire earth to be destroyed in the name of the divine and perfect love by their Lord and Savior? From the life-loathing worldview of Christian fundamentalists, like an incorrigible child, the entire world must be whipped and punished until he displays a god-wrought purity thereby becoming deserving of the love of their demanding rage-prone Sky Father.

Outright and florid insanity, right? These fanatics cannot even prevent their own denominations from (perpetual) sectarian schisms: Constantinople and Rome split; the Protestant Reformation true believers split from Papal autocrats; in the North American colonies, there unfolded constant strife and acrimony among the various Protestant sects, so much so that if the Founders had not intervened and proclaimed the fledgling nation to be a dominion of secularism, Puritan Massachusetts would have marched on and perpetuated ethnic cleansing on Quaker Rhode Island.

The dismal trend continues right up to the present in which the Episcopal church has split into estranged sects between their liberal and conservative congregants and Southern Baptists have split between conservatives and conservative extremists.

Unspoken in all the right’s Charlie Kirk ceremonies of beatification: Groypers trolled Charlie Kirk for years because they insisted his pro-Zionist proclivities translated into an impurity of faith with Christian-nationalist ideology.

Example of Nick Fuentes’ legion of Groypers’ shitposting rampage against Charlie Kirk.

In essence, these spree killers in the name of The Lord have not changed their (blood-drench, intolerant) vestal garments of the mind. The split between Christian Zionists and Groypers anti-Zionists displays, once again, the propensity to schism.

Conversely and in brief, the mind of a god capable of omniscience over all of Creation would be infinite thus unknowable. Poets, humbled by the vastness of it all, speak of inspiration as a psychical force bestowing “miraculous influence.”

Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.
Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous. 
— excerpt from Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour — Wallace Stevens

Regarding the proclivity of the Christian fundamentalist’s worldview for dividing into warring factions: The only miracle here is: the seemly infinitesimal number of pieces that such small minds are capable of being split into.

Of minuscule minds and massive authoritarian longings:

Remarking on the obsequious, servile mannerisms of Chinese president’s Xi Jinping staff, MAGA Dear Leader Donald Trump proclaimed, “I want my cabinet to behave like Xi Jinping’s staff. I’m demanding that. I want them sitting up like that, just nice and straight.”

He continued, “I never saw posture like that. I’ve never seen men so scared in their lives.”

Yet MAGA-Reich soreheads wax psychotic about Zohran Mamdani’s coming reign of woke jihadist’s imposition of commie Sharia Law tyranny, all the while acting as Trump’s ambulatory testicle cozies due to their florid terror of drawing the petty-minded tyrant’s scorn.

Forget the “great” part: Their true creed: Make Americans Graze Ass.

With Trump’s poll numbers in free-fall we can expect the hyper-authoritarian compulsions of the US right to approach peak hysteria. In combination with Zohran Mamdani’s rise, for the first time in decades, the Zionist lobby and the oligarchic class have been subjected to profound and sustained, public pushback. Young people and the working class refused to be taken in by million dollar plus campaigns fomenting fear and slinging slander.

Of course, the oligarchs and their press corp operatives are not done. Far from it. Power, in particular power structures that have managed to remain all but unaccountable, do not concede control with grace. In fact, they, as a general rule, will attempt to destroy what they cannot dominate. Thousands of Palestinian corpses stippled beneath the rubble in Gaza testify to the tragic truth of the matter.

Not that there will come to pass ethnic cleansing and a genocidal campaign on the streets of New York City. But we will witness a full-spectrum campaign by the kleptocracy waged to undermine, paralyze, and generally render feckless Mayor Mamdani’s efforts at reform.

The ink-stained General Jack D. Ripper[s] of New York Post promulgated this (risible) augury of what is to come:

​Yet by sustained resistance we can do more than hope that The City’s mayor elect’s resolve endures: Mamdani to the demagogic fear mongers and retailers in fear and slander:

“We can respond to oligarchy and authoritarianism with the strength it fears, not the appeasement it craves.”

Whether authoritarianism imposes itself as capitalism’s dictatorship of money or as Zionism’s ethno-nationalism or Christian-nationalism, we can gain resolved in the knowledge the seekers of absolute power, by their mania to control what is beyond control – i.e., the vastness and intricacies of life itself – are ripe with the seeds of their own undoing.

The thoughts of the heart cannot be controlled nor dominated by their noxious will; moreover, the soul of the world is an indomitable order that will defeat all would-be conquerors.

Emblems of last stage empire: Sleepy Joe meet the Narcoleptic Don.

​Still amateur stuff, Donnie. You have surpassed Sleepy Joe but at this rate you will never make the fascist Big Leagues. Take note:

“I go the way that Providence dictates with the assurance of a sleepwalker.” — Adolf Hitler​

Out of the jaws of victory…well, we are talking about the Democratic Party:

The shutdown ends. Dems, per always, collapse into their own corruption. The Democrats only talent: a knack for capitulation and betrayal of their base.

The emerging storyline had been: Trump is in decline; the Democratic Party is entering into the initial stages of ascendancy. Yet Democrats, true to form, and in rapid order, put an end to the possibility.

The takeaway: Republicans, accurately, regard their base as imbeciles and psychos. And Democrats do not regard their base at all. Caveat: There is a base to whose agendas they heed with absolute felicity: the economic elite and the Zionist lobby.

And what of Dear Leader Trump (whose rise was enabled by corrupt Democrats)?

Here the Democrats are consistent: On every occasion that Trump begins to collapse into his exponentially increasing brain rot — the dismal Dems leap into a political abyss of their own making and reveal to the world how the art of self-undermining is performed by experts.

There is the Mar-a-Lago face then there is the Democrats’ countenance of perpetual capitulation.

Chuck Schumer, despite the glasses — emblematic of the Party’s elite — remains willfully myopic — yet Zohran Mamdani’s campaign presented a seminar insofar as the Democratic Party’s path forward.

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Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist, and essayist. His poems, short fiction, poetry and essays have been published in numerous print publications and anthologies; his political essays have been widely posted on the progressive/left side of the internet.  Read other articles by Phil, or visit Phil's website.

 

The Truth about Nuclear Weapons

by Jan Oberg / November 17th, 2025

I am grateful for the invitation from The China Academy and its Thinkers’ Forum in Shanghai to shed light on the dark logic behind nuclear weapons—their possession, their use, their philosophy. (I know of no Western media that would extend such an invitation to me).

This creed of “nuclearism” is not a strategy; it’s a civilizational tragedy. So muddled is its reasoning that NATO, built on the threat of nuclear first-use—even against conventional attacks—is still called ‘defensive.’

Despite vast cultural divides, nuclear-armed states—NATO’s US, the UK, France and the countries that host nukes in Europe, India, Pakistan, China, North Korea, and Israel—echo the same delusion: that these weapons ensure peace, that security demands them, that they and humanity cannot live without them having nukes.

They tacitly deny that even possessing these weapons is a violation of international law, since we have the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) from 2021.

They also hide that nuclear-weapons states by definition subscribe to the philosophy of terrorism, namely the deliberate and unavoidable killing of civilians (in this case, in the millions) to achieve a political goal. Remember, up to 9/11, everyone talked about the Balance of Terror!

Nothing – nothing – can ever justify the use of nuclear weapons – which are also militarily useless – so why on earth do they have them – and tell others they should not have them?

It’s high time we begin to think and cut through the militarist-nuclearist propaganda. And that is what I try to do here with a select few arguments out of many:

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Jan Oberg is a peace researcher, art photographer, and Director of The Transnational (TFF) where this article first appeared. Reach him at: oberg@transnational.org. Read other articles by Jan.

 

When the Muslim Presence Stops Explaining Itself

by Yanis Iqbal / November 19th, 2025

This article unfolds from the wager that Prof. Asim Siddiqui’s book Muslim Identity in Hindi Cinema: Poetics and Politics of Genre and Representation (2025) contains, beneath its patient encyclopedic sweep, a set of conceptual provocations that the book itself states only in passing. Siddiqui’s method is descriptive, empirical, archivally wide, committed to cataloguing currents, genres, types, and exceptions across decades of Hindi cinema. Yet embedded within this encyclopedic ambition are moments of disorienting creativity, ideas introduced in a matter-of-fact tone that nevertheless gesture toward a far more radical rethinking of Muslim presence in Hindi cinema. My aim is to extract these latent insights, to elaborate and extrapolate them into a coherent conceptual argument. What appears in Siddiqui as scattered remarks – about incidental identity, playful dissolution of genres, decontextualised worlds, or presences that refuse narrative burden – can be read as a subterranean philosophy of representation. Through a close reconstruction of these implicit lines of thought, this article seeks to show that Siddiqui’s work points toward an entirely different vocabulary for imagining Muslim representation.

Logics of Representation

Siddiqui’s survey of “meaningful marginality” operates within a recognisable critical horizon: the desire to redeem tokenism by foregrounding Muslim characters who, despite occupying small narrative spaces, exert decisive ethical influence, anchor value-systems, or embody a secular ethos. Imam Sahib in Sholay, Rahim Chacha in Deewar, or Abu Mian in Mirch Masala form a catalogue of corrective figures who elevate the moral tone of their worlds. Their marginality becomes meaningful because they provide narrative ballast, ethical clarity, or spiritual depth. Siddiqui repeatedly emphasises how these figures “shape the action, movement, and values of the film,” thereby countering the superfluity of mere representational placeholders. This approach remains tied to an overarching project: a cinema where Muslim presence acquires dignity through integration into the narrative’s moral core.

Yet this remains a reformist answer to tokenism, grounded in the logic of representation itself. Muslim presence becomes meaningful precisely when the character is culturally intelligible, ethically resonant, or narratively indispensable. In this model, the minor Muslim figure’s worth derives from his capacity to stabilise communal harmony, enrich moral discourse, or stand as a repository of secular ideals. The village of Ramgarh reveres Imam Sahib; Rahim Chacha offers the rationality behind Vijay’s anger; Dr Farid personifies the intimacy of interreligious coexistence; Fakir Baba and Abu Baba supply spiritual or ethical depth. These figures overcome tokenism through a compensatory elevation: they are small presences with large moral stakes. This logic preserves the classificatory matrix through which Muslim identity becomes legible. Even when marginal, the Muslim character must bear cultural meaning, moral example, or spiritual symbolism.

The more radical, playful solution Siddiqui gestures toward elsewhere sits askance to this entire reformist orientation. Where “meaningful marginality” operates through integration and moralisation, the playful solution that I am trying to extrapolate from his book begins from a refusal of representational burden. According to him, the classificatory apparatus of “Muslim social,” “Muslim historical,” and “Muslim courtesan film” already installs a regime of legibility in which Muslim presence must register through recognisable narrative templates, aesthetic markers, or thematic clusters. Siddiqui cites Ira Bhaskar and Richard Allen’s widely used taxonomy as “very useful,” yet he positions it as insufficient precisely because it presumes that Muslim identity requires a stable narrative container. What interests him is the cinematic field that spills beyond these containers, where “Hindi films … touch Muslim philosophical and mystical subjects without necessarily being about Muslims.” This formulation signals a dissolution of the boundary between essence and milieu, a cinema where Islamicate sensibilities circulate as affective and aesthetic currents rather than as representational obligations.

The invocation of Iqbal Masud’s reading of Devdas marks the first step in this displacement. Masud perceives “Hindu and Arabic–Persian traditions of Radha–Krishna and Laila–Majnu in Devdas,” a canonical text of Hindu melodrama. In this reading, the Islamicate is neither a separate genre nor a minority fragment. It becomes a spectral inflection, a set of thematic resonances that traverse the film without resolving into identity markers. Cinema, in this expanded sense, becomes a space where love, suffering, and devotion draw from multiple cultural lineages that remain entangled rather than segregated. Siddiqui uses this insight to pry open the rigid schema of Muslim genres, showing how certain films generate Islamicate atmospheres without requiring Muslim characters or recognisably Muslim worlds.

This playful solution rejects the demand for a “stable Muslim presence” by showcasing films where Muslim characters appear within mainstream genres without delivering legible cultural pedagogy or symbolic multiculturalism. A film like Lagaan embeds Ismail within the broader national allegory of anti-colonial struggle, where his partnership with Bhuvan arises from shared vulnerability rather than from token inclusion. Similarly, Iqbal refracts the difficulties of a Muslim protagonist through the grammar of sports melodrama rather than through a programmatic minority narrative. These films exhibit what might be called dispersed Muslimness: a presence fully absorbed into the narrative’s horizon of action, desire, and conflict, without becoming a cultural specimen.

The case of Chak De India brings the logic of dispersed Muslimness into sharp relief because the film builds its central crisis on an act of communal suspicion while refusing to organise its narrative around that suspicion. Kabir Khan misses a decisive penalty stroke in an India–Pakistan match, and this single sporting failure is immediately interpreted by the media and by his neighbours as evidence of betrayal. His “identity is criminalized,” as Siddiqui notes, since “he was charged as a Muslim for collaborating with Muslims,” and the ferocity of this accusation forces him into seven years of exile. Crucially, however, the film does nothing to narrativise or work through this communal wound. Kabir’s Muslimness remains the silent precondition for his ostracisation, yet the narrative declines to treat his identity as an object of exploration, confession, defence, or explanation. Instead, the film absorbs him into the mechanics of sporting redemption, allowing his identity to remain untheorised, even opaque. This refusal to monumentalise identity provides a counter-move to tokenism. The Muslim figure escapes assimilation through moral overdetermination and escapes marginalisation through decorative inclusion; he becomes a character whose identity is neither erased nor thematised.

Siddiqui’s conceptual wager – or the implicit line of thought that I reconstruct here – lies here: a cinema that suspends the requirement that Muslim presence carry representational weight opens a field where the Islamicate operates as a wandering affect, a tonal undercurrent, a narrative intensity. By declining to stabilise Muslim identity through genres, markers, or pedagogical functions, such films stage a different kind of pluralism, one grounded in shared narrative worlds rather than in curated diversity. This mode of representation carries a radical potential since it breaks the pact between identity and legibility. Muslimness circulates freely, unanchored in pre-given forms, allowing the cinematic world to articulate coexisting sensibilities without resorting to classificatory closure.

Thus, we can detect a structural tension between two approaches in Siddiqui’s book. The corrective paradigm requires morally weighty Muslim figures whose minor roles carry maximal ethical force. The playful paradigm loosens this requirement by allowing Muslimness to drift through unexpected genres, affective registers, and narrative environments. It refuses the expectation that Muslim characters must rescue the narrative from ethical deficit or solidify its secular promise. Films like Lagaan, Iqbal, or Chak De India exemplify this shift: Muslim characters participate in narrative action without embodying a pedagogical function. Kabir Khan’s trauma remains unworked through in communal terms; Ismail’s partnership with Bhuvan arises from action rather than symbolic multiculturalism; Iqbal’s journey unfolds within sports melodrama rather than identity ethics. In this schema, Muslim presence gains freedom precisely because it ceases to serve as the conscience of the cinematic world.

Whatever Muslim

This cinematic freedom is strikingly visible in Siddiqui’s category of the “incidental Muslim,” which opens a representational field that aligns strikingly with Giorgio Agamben’s notion of “whatever being.” These characters neither conform to the older regime of visible markers (sherwani, skull cap, chaste Urdu) nor serve as the ethical correctives that populate Siddiqui’s catalogue of meaningful marginal figures. Instead, they inhabit the cinematic world as ordinary presences whose Muslimness neither disappears nor crystallises into a narrative function. Their identity is “incidental,” yet this very quality reveals a new mode of cinematic singularity: a Muslim character presented “such that it always matters,” to borrow Agamben’s re-reading of quodlibet. These characters refuse the reduction of Muslimness to properties or predicates and appear instead as singularities that carry their identity without being confined by it.

Agamben’s key insight is that the whatever being “relates to singularity not in its indifference with respect to a common property… but only in its being such as it is.” This perfectly captures the status of figures like Inspector Khan, Jaan Nisar Khan, Sultan Ali Khan, Rizwan Ahmed, or Dr Jahangir Khan. In each case, the film acknowledges the character’s Muslim identity, yet declines to convert that identity into an interpretive anchor. Rizwan Ahmed in Baazar announces his full name “without any self-consciousness,” and the film retains his Muslimness without structuring his narrative fate through it. Jahangir Khan’s presence in Dear Zindagi does the same: his name signals a Muslim lineage, but his function in the narrative arises entirely from his skill as a therapist, his wit, his charisma, his professional ethics. These characters are neither assimilated into anonymous secular universality nor curated as emblems of multicultural depth. They appear instead as Muslims “in their being such,” free from the classificatory compulsion that ordinarily governs cinematic identity.

Through this lens, Siddiqui’s incidental Muslim approximates Agamben’s singularity freed “from its having this or that property, which identifies it as belonging to this or that set… reclaimed… for its being-such.” These characters neither perform Muslimness nor abandon it; they simply carry it, lightly but irrevocably. Sultan Ali Khan’s Haryanvi-inflected world foregrounds regional belonging far more strongly than religious identity. Yet the nikah ritual, the ziyarat at the tomb of Syed Sahib, and the Muslim names in the narrative surface without narrative weight or cultural exposition. These gestures preserve identity at the level of appearance without making it the ground of meaning. The films thus stage Muslimness as a mode of appearing rather than a category that demands narrative justification.

Agamben’s formulation that “whatever singularity… is lovable” illuminates precisely this form of representation. The incidental Muslim is presented in such a way that the audience’s attachment stems neither from stereotype nor from pedagogical elevation. Inspector Amjad Khan’s comic eccentricity in Qurbani or Jaan Nisar Khan’s image of domestic joy in Andhaa Kaanoon creates affection through manner, gesture, vulnerability, and force of personality rather than through emblematic identity. The viewer encounters a Muslim character who is desired, admired, or remembered “with all of its predicates, its being such as it is.” In Agamben’s language, these characters allow identity to function not as a classifying predicate but as part of a singular constellation of traits that draw love and recognition.

Crucially, this mode breaks the older representational dialectic between stereotype and token transcendence. The incidental Muslim no longer stands as the moral conscience of the village, the wise old man, or the custodian of secular harmony. Siddiqui’s earlier figures overcame tokenism through moral depth; the incidental figures sidestep tokenism by releasing identity from moral or symbolic labour. This creates a cinematic analogue of Agamben’s “intelligibility of an intelligibility,” where the character’s presence communicates a form of belonging without the weight of representation. Javed Siddiqui’s role in Uunchai or Lateef Zaidi’s in Chehre exemplify this shift: eloquence, intelligence, and decisiveness shape the viewer’s relation to the character, while Muslimness remains a fact that neither structures the plot nor demands interpretive decoding.

We see the emergence of the “whatever Muslim,” a being who belongs without being bound, who appears without becoming exemplary, and whose presence matters not because it fills a representational quota or corrects a stereotype, but because it embodies “being-such” within the cinematic world. This mode holds the promise of a new politics of representation in Hindi cinema: one that neither fetishises identity nor evacuates it, but allows Muslimness to circulate as an ordinary, lovable, fully singular presence.

Siddiqui’s reading of the “decontextualised world” of gangster films reveals a further mutation in Muslim representation, one that extends and radicalises the logic of incidental identity. In these narratives, Muslim gangsters inhabit a cinematic space stripped of political referents, real-life communal conflicts, and recognisable ideological coordinates. Their Muslimness remains legible primarily through names (Musa, Sultan, Jibran, Abdul Khan) yet the films decline to bind these names to cultural or religious predicates. The world itself is stylised, insulated from real history, operating in what Siddiqui calls “a decontextualised world of crime where there is no reference to any political ideology, political party, or government.” This evacuation of context paradoxically generates a new mode of Muslim presence: freed from both stereotype and the burden of positive pedagogy, Muslim characters appear as singularities, neither exemplary nor emblematic.

Characters like Musa Bhai in Plan or Abdul Khan in Parinda function within a stylised universe where identity cues lose their explanatory force. Musa’s regret that he could not perform kanyadan blurs the religious code entirely; Abdul Khan’s refusal to return Iqbal’s salaam foregrounds gang loyalty over communal solidarity. These gestures detach Muslimness from its usual narrative functions (victimhood, moral conscience, bearer of composite culture) and reposition it as a trait among others. Agamben writes that “singularity is freed from its having this or that property… for its being-such,” and Siddiqui’s decontextualised gangsters embody this state. Their Muslim identity neither determines their morality nor aligns them with communal narratives; it instead appears as one element in a constellation of qualities (loyalty, cruelty, wit, weakness, aspiration) that define them as singular cinematic beings.

This decontextualisation provides a solution to the impasse of Muslim representation by suspending the demand that Muslim identity signify. Earlier models oscillated between stereotype (gangster, fakir, qawwal) and corrective tokenism (moral guide, secular conscience, guardian of harmony). Even Siddiqui’s “meaningful marginality” preserved this logic by requiring Muslim figures to enrich the ethical universe of the film. The decontextualised gangster breaks that cycle. The films sidestep both burden and sympathy; Muslim characters neither redeem the narrative nor threaten it with communal meaning. In Agambenian terms, their identity is encountered as style, gesture, rhythm, rather than semiotic content.

This dynamic becomes especially vivid in Parinda through the figure of Abdul Khan, a Muslim gangster whose presence unsettles the viewer through an unexpected aesthetic register. Siddiqui emphasises that Abdul is “the most trusted man of Anna,” a violent enforcer who “cuts throats of people,” yet the film repeatedly shows him in moments of stillness, absorbed in playing the flute. This juxtaposition is central. In Hindi cinema, the flute often carries associations of refinement, classical training, or mystical interiority, and these associations are themselves historically entangled with the prominence of Muslim ustads in classical music. Parinda invokes this cultural resonance only to fracture it. Abdul does not play the flute as an emblem of cultural sophistication or as a coded indicator of an Islamicate interior life. Instead, his playing appears in odd, quiet moments that offer no narrative explanation or psychological backstory. The film refrains from linking his musical skill to a tradition, a lineage, or a stereotype.

What emerges instead is a moment of eerie singularity. The police officer’s line – “the way he plays the flute in the same way he cuts throats of people” – collapses two registers that are usually kept apart: aesthetic modulation and violent precision. Abdul’s flute becomes neither a sign of refinement nor a symbol of moral contradiction; it becomes a purely cinematic gesture, an unexpected texture that complicates the viewer’s sense of who he is without resolving him into a type. This is precisely where the scene departs from the usual representational patterns that attach Muslim identity to musical artistry. Siddiqui calls this juxtaposition “a subversion of the association of classical music with a lot of well-known Muslim artists,” but the key point is that the film does nothing to stabilise this subversion into commentary or critique. It simply lets the incongruity stand.

Abdul’s flute playing, therefore, exemplifies the “whatever” mode of Muslim presence: a trait that gestures toward cultural memory without collapsing into it, a behaviour that enriches the character without explaining him, a moment that belongs to the visual and sonic logic of the film rather than to an identity script. The conjunction of “music and crime” becomes an aesthetic quality, an unsettled, atmospheric detail, rather than a cultural message. In this way, Abdul Khan’s character contributes to the larger movement in Siddiqui’s analysis: Muslimness appears as a lightly held, untheorised presence that refuses both stereotype and symbolic weight.

Moreover, the decontextualised world creates a space where Muslimness appears without being mobilised as a marker of community politics. When Tyson’s Christian gang, Jibran’s Muslim gang, and Jindal’s Hindu identity appear in Mohra, the configuration mirrors “the power dynamics of Indian social structure” yet refrains from moralising or politicising these identities. Religion becomes a background texture, an as rather than an essence. Jibran can survive, betray, or align himself without his Muslimness offering narrative justification. This loosening of identity from function allows Muslim characters to exist outside the usual dialectic of visibility and burden.

Finally, this mode reconfigures the Muslim presence beyond the politics of recognition. The decontextualised gangster does not seek inclusion, does not serve as a stand-in for secular harmony, and does not embody the threat stereotype. The character’s name may echo real-life resonance (Yusuf Pathan, Billa Jilani) yet the film withholds sociological explanation, refusing to translate the character into a symptom of Muslim criminality or minority marginalisation. This refusal creates a representational openness: Muslim identity becomes a free-floating signifier, part of the world’s texture rather than its problem. In this sense, Siddiqui shows how decontextualisation enables a “whatever” mode of representation: Muslimness appears without obligation, without typology, without symbolic weight. It becomes part of the cinematic world’s taking-place, a presence that matters precisely because it no longer must matter in the old ways.

A Muslim Without Qualities

Siddiqui’s reading of Company provides a striking instance of what may be called a presencing without essence, a mode of Muslim representation that refuses both erasure and fixation. The marriage scene becomes the conceptual hinge of this mode. Malik performs a Hindu fire ritual to please Saroja, and Siddiqui emphasises that this gesture carries no capacity to “determine his identity.” This refusal of determination is the point. Malik’s willingness to step into a ritual associated with another community exposes identity as a wearable surface rather than a deep predicate.

This mode of appearance places Muslim identity in the realm of the incidental, the lightly held, the lived rather than the declared. The film avoids dwelling on Malik’s background, history, or religious commitments. His name circulates as a sign with dual resonance in Hindu and Muslim settings. His actions supply no interpretive anchor that would allow the viewer to classify him within a religious framework. Identity becomes something he carries rather than something he performs. In this sense, the marriage scene stages a form of identity as gesture, an embodied flexibility that avoids both assimilationist erasure and essentialist visibility.

The contrast with Chandu’s world sharpens this insight. Chandu’s marriage is saturated with visual cues and ritual indicators that affirm a Hindu domestic setting. Siddiqui highlights “religious symbolism” in Chandu’s surroundings precisely to show the asymmetry: Hindu identity is thematised, foregrounded, placed within a frame of social recognition, while Malik’s identity remains suspended, indeterminate, neither concealed nor highlighted. The result, however, is not an erasure of Muslim presence. Instead, Malik’s Muslimness enters the frame as a possibility, a horizon, an as that structures how he is read without enclosing him in a fixed type.

Chandu’s companions complete this conceptual field. Hasan wears a skull cap and immediately signals Muslim identity. Koda Singh marks Sikh presence. The small gang becomes a miniature tableau of secular plurality, yet Malik stands apart as a figure whose identity appears through relation rather than symbolism. His connection to Chandu, his participation in ritual for love rather than doctrinal fidelity, and his position within a mixed religious world all create a form of Muslim presence grounded in lived interaction rather than archetype.

This produces a new representational possibility. Instead of affirming Muslim identity through visible markers or narrative functions, the film allows Muslimness to appear as an aspect of social being that emerges through action, affection, and environment. It dramatizes a world where Muslim identity gains presence by entering shared rituals, shared life, shared risk, and shared ambition, without losing its distinctiveness or becoming a stereotype. It shows a Muslim figure who belongs through gesture rather than through explicit cultural coding, allowing representation to escape the rigid binary of hypervisibility and invisibility.

Conclusion

What emerges from this excavation of Siddiqui’s text is a para-political theory of futurity. The eccentric Muslims of Hindi cinema – Kabir Khan coaching the nation after being hounded out as a traitor, Malik stepping calmly into a Hindu fire ritual, Abdul Khan playing the flute between murders, Rizwan Ahmed circulating in corporate boardrooms without anxieties about his name – constitute, in their very implausibility, a political archive of possibility. They are absurd, yes, because the world that surrounds Indian Muslims today offers little space for such unburdened existence. Yet cinema’s absurdity becomes its strength. It conjures forms of Muslimness that social reality disallows, producing figures neither governed by the stabilising demands of secular reassurance nor trapped in the punitive gaze of majoritarian suspicion.

These cinematic Muslims expose the poverty of our political imagination. Against a public sphere where Muslim identity is constantly policed, explained, defended, or pathologised, Hindi cinema inadvertently generates Muslims who neither apologise nor signify, who neither embody minority trauma nor enact multicultural aspiration. They simply exist – irregularly, unpredictably, as beings whose presence cannot be reduced to pedagogy, grievance, or stereotype. In these figures, identity appears as gesture, accident, style, attachment, mood. Their very unseriousness becomes politically serious, for it breaks the monopoly of state and society over what counts as a “proper” Muslim life.

The “whatever Muslim” gestures toward a mode of belonging that escapes the traps of hypervisibility and invisibility. It hints at a future where Muslimness circulates without pre-scripted meaning: a future where one can be a therapist, a gangster, a lover, an athlete, a trader, a neighbour, a traitor, a saint, a nobody, or all at once, without each role collapsing back into a single communal essence. It invites us to imagine Indian Muslims as beings whose possibilities exceed the representational grids that have long trapped them in the dialectic of threat and token.

This, finally, is the political provocation of Siddiqui’s accidental philosophy: that Hindi cinema, through its most casual gestures, its throwaway details, its narrative indifference, sketches the outlines of Muslims who remain irreducible to the categories that dominate the nation’s imagination. These are Muslims without qualities, without assigned meanings, without explanatory burdens. And in a moment when the Indian Muslim is relentlessly fixed into legible roles – loyal patriot, dangerous outsider, secular friend, demographic fact – the cinematic figure who walks through fire for love, refuses to return a salaam, snorts drugs, lifts a hockey team to victory, or plays a flute between killings becomes profoundly political. These are beings who refuse to be what they are told they are.

In their unpredictability lies a lesson: that identity can be lived without weight, that belonging can occur without permission, and that Muslim life in India might yet inhabit forms that exceed both fear and representation. Here, in the strange freedom of these cinematic presences, we glimpse what Indian Muslims can become: lives unshackled from the compulsion to signify, lives allowed to be as they are, lives that stake a claim to the world simply by appearing within it.

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Yanis Iqbal is a student and freelance writer based in Aligarh, India. Read other articles by Yanis.