TOM EATON

As the Israeli-American attack on Iran and your economic survival approaches the end of its third week, certain things are starting to become slightly clearer. It’s still a confusing time, though, so in the hope that we can all stay abreast (even if we might soon not be able to keep afloat) here are some of the most recent developments.

There are now three ways to publicise that you’re not a big reader and that your opinions are supplied to you by the people who are farming you. The first is holding up sign saying all of the above. The second is to tell people that Donald Trump is playing 4D chess and is weeks or even days away from replacing the regime in Tehran with something much, much better.
The third way is to post the thing I’ve seen on Facebook quite a lot this week, namely, a picture of the late Ayatollah looking all benevolent and wise, along with some claim along the lines of “Iran Fights for Humanity”. If you believe that Iran’s regime wants anything for Iranian humanity but to impose religious autocracy on it, and murdering it now and then when it steps out of line, then I would urge you to sign up for my new religion which I will tell you all about in return for you paying me R5,000 a month forever.
Next month’s fuel price increase is going to be a monster. At the time of writing the Central Energy Fund’s calculations showed petrol going up by close to R5 a litre, diesel rising by over R8, and paraffin rocketing up by over R10. When the increase is announced, you will hear a lot of South Africans blaming Cyril Ramaphosa and the ANC, but make no mistake: the economic pain that’s coming your way is brought to you almost entirely by Israel and the United States. Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have chosen to make us all poorer, and we should name them as the wreckers they are.
Speaking of which: it turns out that turkeys do, in fact, vote for Christmas. As fuel prices in the US soar towards the same levels that saw MAGA voters denouncing Joe Biden as an economic catastrophe, those same self-identified MAGA voters have just given Trump a 100% approval rating in an NBC poll reported by CNN on Wednesday. For context, this week North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un won a parliamentary election with 99.93% of the vote. A cult, you say? Never!
The Israeli military, regularly described by itself as The Most Moral Army In The World™, has now morally displaced over 1-million Lebanese civilians as part of its ongoing moral invasion of southern Lebanon, morally killing over 800 people, including at least 100 children, to go along with the 70,000-plus civilians it morally massacred in Gaza.
The US navy, meanwhile, might be rebranding itself as The Most Pointless Force In The World™. After all, what, exactly, is the point of spending R4.6-trillion every year on a branch of military that apparently can’t take control of a stretch of water 54km wide? Admittedly, it’s not working in ideal conditions —as Pete Hegseth told us last week, the main problem is that for some reason, Iran keep unsportingly and unfairly shooting at ships — but still, I can’t blame American taxpayers for wondering what, exactly, the navy is for.
They say that the truth is always the first casualty of war, but while I don’t want to absolve war entirely, in this case truth has been the first casualty of the tech oligarchy, which is both funding and profiting off this attack on Iran, and whose platforms are now eagerly killing off anything even vaguely resembling truth. Every day this week I have seen intelligent, sensible people I respect post the most obvious fake or AI-generated news and images, from burning US aircraft carriers to a completely devastated Tel Aviv. We are cooked, and they have cooked us, for money.

In conclusion: they also say there are no winners in war, but they clearly haven’t met Vladimir Putin. Whatever you think of the man you have admit: nobody in the history of Human Resources has ever got a more incompetent puppet parachuted into the C-suite and then sat back to enjoy a bigger payday. No more weapons for Ukraine, Nato fractured, and now Europe plunging into an energy crisis as sanctions are lifted on Russian oil? Chef’s kiss. Well played, Vlad.