Anti-Capitalist Musings
Mar 08, 2026
The Guardian that morning had Blair’s TUC speech. Not news, exactly: conference season, the ritual of the party in power performing its relationship with labour.
Minimum wage. TUPE regulations. The Euro. Partnership for change. The language of administration, competent and secular and dull in the way that functional government is always dull. I worked on the railways then. I read it while travelling on the tube, as the doors opened at Victoria, I put it in my bag.
Just another day, another speech. New Labour, better than Old Tory. That was enough, then
Someone said something had happened in New York. We had a television in the mess room. We gathered around it the way you gather around a thing when you do not yet know what you are looking at. A plane, someone said. A small one, maybe. An accident. We did not know it was a jet. We did not know it was anything yet.
The Guardian was still in my bag, full of a world that no longer existed.
Blair was at the TUC when it happened. He did not give the speech. He gave a different one, shorter, immediate, and in it a word appeared that had not been in the prepared text. He called it evil. Not criminal. Not atrocity. Not mass murder. Evil: a theological category, as old as Augustine, carrying inside it a framework that no amount of subsequent legal or military language could dislodge. In the same breath, the civilisational frame: we, the democracies of this world. He said this before anyone knew who had done it. The framework arrived before the evidence. It was already there, waiting for an occasion.
That is what I want to talk about. Not the towers, not the dead, not the grief, all of which were real and are not my point. My point is the speed of the framework. One hour. The entire political vocabulary of a government shifted in one hour, and nobody who was in that mess room, nobody watching any television anywhere, had the conceptual equipment to see it happening in real time. You only see it from here.
* * *
9/11 was not a foreign policy dispute conducted by unconventional means. That is how liberal opinion eventually processed it, once the wars had gone badly and processing became necessary. In fact it was a religious civilisational project. Bin Laden was not primarily a strategist. He was a theologian of violence, and the violence he directed was in service of a vision: the purified community, the corrupted West, the sacred obligation to strike the far enemy. The available instrument was asymmetric terror, because a non-state actor with money and ideology but no air force uses what it has.
The United States is now conducting a war against Iran. The reasons offered are the familiar ones: weapons programmes, regional destabilisation, the security of allies. These are not fabrications. Iran’s government is authoritarian and its regional behaviour is genuinely dangerous. But reasons offered are not the same as causes, and causes are not the same as the framework inside which decisions are made, targets are chosen, and the war is sold domestically.
Iran was always available as a target. The material interests were in place long before 2025: oil, regional dominance, the security architecture around Israel, the arms economy that requires a theatre of operations to justify itself. Capital identified the opportunity. What Christian nationalism provides is not the cause but the ignition: the emotional language, the domestic political energy, the moral permission structure that makes the war sellable to a specific constituency. The theology does not drive the car. It provides the fuel. But fuel determines how far you go and how fast, and in this case the people with their hands on the wheel believe, or perform belief, in an eschatological framework that makes Iran not merely a strategic problem but a prophetic one. That distinction matters for how the war is fought and what it is prepared to become. Consider the man now running the American war machine.
Pete Hegseth, Secretary of War, has a tattoo on his chest of the Jerusalem Cross, the symbol of the medieval crusades, and another on his arm reading “Deus Vult”: God wills it. A rallying cry from the First Crusade, revived in recent decades by white supremacist movements and carried on flags at the January 6 Capitol attack. These are not private beliefs worn privately. They go to Pentagon press conferences. They go to war.
At his first press briefing on the Iran war, Hegseth told reporters: “Death and destruction from the sky all day long. This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.” Of Iranian leaders he said: “They are toast and they know it. America is winning: decisively, devastatingly and without mercy.”
This is not the language of strategic communication. It is the language of a man who believes he is doing God’s work and wants the room to know it. Critics noted the absence of solemnity for the six army reservists killed in an Iranian drone strike that same week. Hegseth’s response was to accuse journalists of wanting to make the president look bad.
But the most revealing thing Hegseth has ever written he wrote himself, in his 2016 memoir. Describing a photograph of an ISIS fighter, Quran in one hand, AK-47 in the other, he wrote: “With God on his side and the wind at his back, he is a conquering warrior. He is fighting for something greater than himself. He is fighting for his God.” Then: “I recognise that fighter, even though I’ve never met him. I am drawn to him because I relate to him. I deplore what he stands for, what he does and how he does it. He is a soldier of hate, subjugation and sheer evil. But I understand his passions.”
He is not being characterised by critics. He is characterising himself. He sees the mirror. He names the structure he shares with the enemy he deplores. The difference, in his own account, is denomination and direction, not the nature of the commitment.
This is not an isolated passage. In his 2020 book American Crusade, Hegseth wrote that those who benefit from western civilisation should “thank a crusader”, that the present moment resembles the eleventh century, and: “We don’t want to fight, but, like our fellow Christians one thousand years ago, we must. Arm yourself: metaphorically, intellectually, physically. Our fight is not with guns. Yet.”
The New Yorker reported a 2015 incident in which Hegseth, drunk at a bar in Ohio, repeatedly chanted “Kill all Muslims”. He was confirmed by the Senate anyway, with JD Vance casting the tie-breaking vote.
His church is affiliated with Doug Wilson, a self-described Christian nationalist who argues that the United States should become a theocracy, that women should not have the vote, and that the system of slavery in the American South was more humane than ancient Roman slavery. Wilson led a worship service at the Pentagon at Hegseth’s invitation. The Military Religious Freedom Foundation reports receiving more than 200 complaints from service members about military commanders invoking biblical end-times language to justify involvement in the Iran war.
Hegseth is not an outlier in this administration. Mike Pompeo, Secretary of State in Trump’s first term and a significant architect of the foreign policy posture now being executed, has described politics as “a never-ending struggle until the rapture” and has said that America “had worshipped other Gods and called it multiculturalism.” While serving as Secretary of State he asked publicly whether Donald Trump had been sent by God to protect Israel. He was not speaking metaphorically. These are operational beliefs, held by people who have shaped and continue to shape American policy in the Middle East. The eschatological framework is not a gloss on the strategy. For the people inside it, it is the strategy.
* * *
The difference between this and 9/11 is the tool. This is what I want you to understand if you are young enough not to have watched 2001 happen in real time.
Passenger jets are the weapon of the excluded. The state is the weapon of the arrived.
Al-Qaeda could not impose sanctions. It could not move carrier groups or authorise drone strikes or instruct the IMF. It had ideology, money, organisation, and willingness to spend human lives. So it used aircraft as missiles, because that was the instrument of maximum effect available to a non-state actor operating outside every institution of power.
Christian nationalism did not arrive in Washington in January 2025. It has been moving through American institutions for fifty years: through the Moral Majority, through Dominionist theology and its explicit project of placing believers in control of every sphere of social life, through the long transformation of the Republican Party into a vehicle for white Christian grievance. The Seven Mountains theology, if you have not encountered it, holds that Christians must take dominion over seven spheres: government, military, media, arts, education, family, religion. It is not a fringe position. It is the operational framework of people now confirmed by the Senate, tattoos and all.
What changed between 2001 and 2025 is not the ideology. It is the access. A movement that once expressed its civilisational project through culture war and electoral politics now controls the executive branch of the most powerful military state in human history. The instrument available is no longer the bomb. It is the bomb, the sanction, the carrier group, the diplomatic embargo, the intelligence service, and the unilateral capacity to reshape a region. The project is the same. The capability is incomparably greater.
* * *
Political Islam and Christian nationalism are not the same movement, and this is not a claim of moral equivalence. Their theologies differ, their histories differ, their relationships to state power differ in ways that matter enormously. Al-Qaeda was a non-state actor killing thousands. The United States is a nuclear-armed empire killing at industrial scale. The difference in destructive capacity is not a detail.
What they share is a psychological architecture, not a moral equivalence. Sacred community against corrupted other. Masculine authority as divine order. Apocalyptic struggle that sanctifies violence. Both movements mobilise that architecture. The difference is that one mobilised it with box cutters and the other mobilises it with carrier groups. When Hegseth writes that he recognises himself in the ISIS fighter’s passions, he is not being metaphorical. He is describing the shared structure accurately. The horror is not that he sees it. The horror is that he has infinitely more power to act on it.
Blair stood in that TUC hall in Brighton with the prepared speech already in delegates’ hands. Within one hour he had found a word that would come to frame much of the next two decades of Western foreign policy. Evil. He did not choose it carefully. He reached for it, which tells you it was already there, the theological vocabulary waiting beneath the managerial surface of New Labour.
The men directing the war on Iran did not improvise their framework in an afternoon. They built it across decades, installed it in institutions, confirmed it through appointments, and waited. They did not need an event to reach for the word. They arrived with the word already in office.
In the mess room, we did not know it was a jet. We could not yet see what we were looking at. We had to wait for the second jet. That ignorance was the last moment of a particular world.
Sources
Blair’s undelivered TUC speech and his statement to conference on 11 September 2001 are both in the public record. The prepared speech covers public service reform, the minimum wage, the Euro, and partnership with unions. The statement he actually gave, running to a few hundred words, introduced the word “evil” and the framing of “we, the democracies” within the hour.
Hegseth’s press conference remarks — “death and destruction from the sky all day long”, “punching them while they’re down”, “they are toast” — were reported by David Smith in the Guardian, 8 March 2026, under the headline “A very dangerous person”: alarm as Pete Hegseth revels in carnage of Iran war.
The passages from Hegseth’s memoirs — the ISIS fighter description from In the Arena (2016) and the crusader passages from American Crusade (2020) — are quoted and analysed in Jasper Craven’s profile for Politico, 6 December 2024: “Pete Hegseth’s Crusade to Turn the Military into a Christian Weapon.” Craven also reports the 2014 Christmas party incident, the Gallagher lobbying, and the account of Hegseth’s ideological evolution.
The “Kill all Muslims” incident at an Ohio bar in 2015 was reported by the New Yorker. The Military Religious Freedom Foundation’s figure of more than 200 complaints from service members about end-times rhetoric in the Iran war context comes from the Guardian piece above.
Hegseth’s attendance at Doug Wilson’s church and his family’s affiliation with Wilson’s network of schools and congregations was reported by Josh Marcus in the Independent, 7 August 2025. Wilson’s theocratic positions — on women’s suffrage, gay marriage, slavery, and Christian dominion — are a matter of his own public record. His Pentagon worship service is confirmed by Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell.
Mike Pompeo’s statement that politics is “a never-ending struggle until the rapture” and his public association with Frank Gaffney’s Islamophobic networks are documented by Heather Digby Parton in Salon, 13 January 2017. Pompeo’s question about whether Trump was sent by God to protect Israel was widely reported during his tenure as Secretary of State.
Mapping the collision of class struggle and historical trauma. Interrogating the institutions that fail us and the capital that consumes us. This is a chronicle of the wreckage; do not look away.
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