The bright TRACES of missiles and bombs that pierced the night sky over Tehran on Friday, 13 June… also pierced television screens, our phones, our monitors, Gaza, New York, the West Bank.
BLACK HOLE over Gaza – no more internet, no more images, no more sounds – further heightening the intensity of terror in what has become, before our very eyes, a concentration camp of death and famine. At the very moment when, everywhere, huge demonstrations and declarations of love for the starving women, men and children who survive there by trying to find a little food without being shot are multiplying as never before. Today, once again, 110 murders, dismembered bodies, including those of many children, fathers, mothers and pregnant women, shot dead for a little bread, water and flour.
BLACK HOLE in New York, where France was beginning to make a promise to recognise (albeit hesitantly) a Palestinian state, only to be pushed back into limbo.
BLACK HOLE over the TRUMP/IRAN negotiations seeking a political solution to Iran’s nuclear programme.
BLACK HOLE over the legalisation of the annexation of 60% of the West Bank, forcing Palestinians to seek recognition of their land ownership by the State of Israel, under penalty of seeing their land transferred to Israel.
ISRAEL has become this BLACK HOLE that absorbs everything, this region of the world where the GRAVITY OF WAR has become so strong that nothing can escape it, not even the light of a possible future.
2.
After the WAR OF GENESIS, genocide in Gaza / here comes RISING LION, its lethal-messianic response to Iran.
HIROSHIMA followed by NAGASAKI.
An infernal response which the philosopher Gunther Anders, a “non-nationalist Jew” as he described himself, declared 50 years ago had propelled HUMANITY into another era.
The end times.
A major, irreversible anthropological transformation which he called the atomic condition.
A time suspended by the possibility of a new, even more terrifying atomic explosion, made inevitable by the very existence of nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence.
The sword of Damocles hanging over our heads today is no longer an iron sword.
It is a NUCLEAR sword.
Wielded not by an authoritarian theocratic country without nuclear weapons, but by ISRAEL, an openly supremacist “nuclear democracy” whose military aggression, which has been OUTSIDE THE LAW for decades, has become OUT OF CONTROL since the genocide in Gaza.
Let us remember that it was the USA, in the name of WESTERN DEMOCRACY, that decimated the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of which Israel has boasted of being the spearhead in the Middle East since its creation in 1948.
But also that since GAZA, the nuclear threat can no longer be limited to the apocalyptic contours of a PHYSICAL EXPLOSION, because its very existence has infiltrated everywhere – into power relations, the destruction of the region’s history and geography, the dismemberment of Palestinian families, the future of children, births, even the destruction of language.
3.
Today, 12,331 warheads are distributed among 10 powers: Russia, the United States, China, France, the United Kingdom, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea. This is an arsenal equivalent in terms of cumulative destructive power to 130,000 Hiroshima bombs.
ANDERS did not believe in nuclear deterrence for a second, either rationally or morally. He rejected deterrence, on the one hand because it is based on a logic of terror, but above all because it makes the unthinkable thinkable and even acceptable: that we could BECOME the exterminators of ourselves.
Hated and mocked by many intellectuals of his time for the radical nature of his positions, Anders concluded his Ten Theses on Chernobyl with these words:
For, thanks to a single Hiroshima, regardless of where it occurs, whether in Harrisburg, Chernobyl or Wackersdorf, whether it takes place during times of war or during this so-called peace, thanks to just one Hiroshima, I repeat, all the other places of our dear Earth could be transformed simultaneously into an immense Hiroshima, or even into something worse. Because not only all locations in space, but also all points in time, will be affected, if they have not already been affected. Then we, the men of our time and also our ancestors, will finally never have existed. (1986)
We must keep these words in mind when watching television programmes where commentators relay, without any distance, the LITANY of the Israeli army’s strike forces and talking points.
And ask yourself HOW, in the face of such painful global disaster, the colossal challenges of climate change and the fallout from the sixth mass extinction (of which all these deaths, this destruction and these wars are tangible expressions), HOW can these commentators continue to admire / endorse the necro-militaristic-messianic madness of an outlaw genocidal nuclear power, whose stated aim is to proudly subject the Middle East to its worldview, sowing terror, destruction and death?
4.
For decades, Netanyahu has been using terrorism and Iranian nuclear panic as a weapon of mass communication to destroy any promise of the beginning of a Palestinian state.
But to destroy this promise is not just about rendering a peace process obsolete.
It is the military, administrative, technical and physical ANNIHILATION of the past, present and future of Palestine and the Palestinians, 80 years after Auschwitz.
In very concrete terms, this means LIQUIDATING men, women, children, families, their rights, their ancestors, their descendants, their schools, their culture, their universities, their libraries, their hospitals, their land, their water pipes, their electrical systems, their agricultural systems, their cities, their villages, their festivals, their land registries, their languages, their memories, their futures…
In front of the whole world.
By demanding the DEMOCRATIC BLESSING of the USA and Europe.
A mass extermination that literally EXPLODES our eyes and our consciences with its scale, its terror and its efficiency.
An IRRADIATION that will have already partially fulfilled Günther Anders’ terrible prophecy.
The annihilation of the Palestinians of Gaza like an ATOMIC FLASH without the need to physically resort to the atomic arsenal.
5.
It is no longer just a question of colonisation and genocide.
It is something even more disturbing, for which colonisation and GENOCIDE are the testing ground, and which we must be able to NAME without being hampered by the fear of speaking and thinking collectively about what is happening. And which has nothing to do with Israel’s right to defend itself.
A cursed THING that has emerged from the apocalyptic tales of Biblical nights to invade the most sophisticated AI-necro-military-political machines of the 21st century.
The “existential” war that Netanyahu is waging to destroy/subjugate/absorb the lives of ALL his neighbours can only end very badly.
Which is perhaps the only truth of this bloody ride.
End badly.
Taking with it hundreds of thousands of men, women and children in Palestine, Israel, Lebanon and Iran to a merciless death, to prevent Israel from ever becoming what it has never yet managed/and probably never wanted/to be:
A LAND of PEACE.
This bloody THING that emerged from THE ENDLESS NIGHT of missiles and corpses echoes a harsh thought from another philosopher, Jean-Luc Nancy, in The Truth of Democracy.
It is possible that man desires in the end nothing other than “evil”: nor Aristotle’s “good life,” which calls for a constantly renewed supplement to “life,” an expansion beyond its necessity, but, on the contrary, that other supplement and that other expansion that can be brought about through the annihilation of oneself and others – as well as of the common, which is thereby reduced to a common incineration. Yes, all this is possible, and the current age of humanity has shown us a community of mass graves, famines, suicides, and degradations.
This possibility illuminates in a stunning fashion the insistent question of what I am calling here “communism” as the truth of democracy: for nothing is more common than the common dust to which we are all destined. Nothing is better at establishing equivalence and the definitive entropy attached to it. Nothing is more common than the death drive – and the point is not to know whether the technological politics of the state that made Auschwitz and Hiroshima possible ended up unleashing drives of this order bur rather to know if a humanity weighed down by its millions of years did not choose, a couple of centuries ago, the path of its own annihilation.
But this nihil in annihilation, this nothing, is a substantial nothing. … If it is this that we want, we have to know what such wanting means: not that “God is dead” but that death is becoming our God. (2008[2010])
6.
The atomic FLASH we have been witnessing for nearly 700 days now completely overturns our previous understanding of what a nuclear disaster could be.
It has shattered the structure, duration and substance of time.
It no longer needs to physically explode to irradiate/exterminate a people/their history, geography/future.
The lethal power of this FLASH and its BLACK HOLE have cracked the future of our democracies.
By forcing their elements of LANGUAGE, TARGETING populations, COLLAPSING international law, and HATRED of the other.
Their pure violence traverses time, continents, religions, technologies, languages, bodies, brains, futures, destroying everything in its path.
ISRAEL = B-52 SPIRIT / GBU-57 / MIDNIGHT HAMMER
WE ARE CHANGING THE FACE OF THE WORLD – said Netanyahu yesterday.
WE LOVE YOU GOD – said Trump as he dropped 14 bombs x 13.6 tonnes = 190.4 tonnes of GBU-57 on Iran yesterday.
By comparison, the single bomb dropped on Hiroshima was LIGHT: only 4 tonnes.
Each of the 14 GBU-57s (20 million dollars each) weighs three times more than the single bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.
That is to say, 47.5 times more tonnes of explosives have already been dropped on Iran than on Hiroshima.
Since 7 October, ISRAEL has dropped nearly 100,000 tonnes of explosives on Gaza.
That is 25,000 times more on Gaza than on Hiroshima.
Bombs, missiles, rockets.
Not to mention drones.
2.3 million people affected, with no weapons to defend themselves, no food, no water, no hospitals, no medicine, no housing, no protection whatsoever…
365 km2.
Per km2, Gaza has had more bombs dropped on it than the whole of Germany, or even the whole of occupied Europe, during the Second World War.
Messianic SUPREMACISM is another name for the nuclear threat, whose deafening THERMAL BLAST can be heard whistling everywhere.
That of the bombs, the atoms, the money, the technology of death and the future that is being destroyed before our very eyes.
Night of the Demon/Rendez-vous avec la peur
Remake of Jacques Tourneur’s film in six parts, by Nicolas Klotz
(From Lundi matin #481, 23/06/2025)
1.
The bright TRACES of missiles and bombs that pierced the night sky over Tehran on Friday, 13 June… also pierced television screens, our phones, our monitors, Gaza, New York, the West Bank.
BLACK HOLE over Gaza – no more internet, no more images, no more sounds – further heightening the intensity of terror in what has become, before our very eyes, a concentration camp of death and famine. At the very moment when, everywhere, huge demonstrations and declarations of love for the starving women, men and children who survive there by trying to find a little food without being shot are multiplying as never before. Today, once again, 110 murders, dismembered bodies, including those of many children, fathers, mothers and pregnant women, shot dead for a little bread, water and flour.
BLACK HOLE in New York, where France was beginning to make a promise to recognise (albeit hesitantly) a Palestinian state, only to be pushed back into limbo.
BLACK HOLE over the TRUMP/IRAN negotiations seeking a political solution to Iran’s nuclear programme.
BLACK HOLE over the legalisation of the annexation of 60% of the West Bank, forcing Palestinians to seek recognition of their land ownership by the State of Israel, under penalty of seeing their land transferred to Israel.
ISRAEL has become this BLACK HOLE that absorbs everything, this region of the world where the GRAVITY OF WAR has become so strong that nothing can escape it, not even the light of a possible future.
2.
After the WAR OF GENESIS, genocide in Gaza / here comes RISING LION, its lethal-messianic response to Iran.
HIROSHIMA followed by NAGASAKI.
An infernal response which the philosopher Gunther Anders, a “non-nationalist Jew” as he described himself, declared 50 years ago had propelled HUMANITY into another era.
The end times.
A major, irreversible anthropological transformation which he called the atomic condition.
A time suspended by the possibility of a new, even more terrifying atomic explosion, made inevitable by the very existence of nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence.
The sword of Damocles hanging over our heads today is no longer an iron sword.
It is a NUCLEAR sword.
Wielded not by an authoritarian theocratic country without nuclear weapons, but by ISRAEL, an openly supremacist “nuclear democracy” whose military aggression, which has been OUTSIDE THE LAW for decades, has become OUT OF CONTROL since the genocide in Gaza.
Let us remember that it was the USA, in the name of WESTERN DEMOCRACY, that decimated the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of which Israel has boasted of being the spearhead in the Middle East since its creation in 1948.
But also that since GAZA, the nuclear threat can no longer be limited to the apocalyptic contours of a PHYSICAL EXPLOSION, because its very existence has infiltrated everywhere – into power relations, the destruction of the region’s history and geography, the dismemberment of Palestinian families, the future of children, births, even the destruction of language.
3.
Today, 12,331 warheads are distributed among 10 powers: Russia, the United States, China, France, the United Kingdom, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea. This is an arsenal equivalent in terms of cumulative destructive power to 130,000 Hiroshima bombs.
ANDERS did not believe in nuclear deterrence for a second, either rationally or morally. He rejected deterrence, on the one hand because it is based on a logic of terror, but above all because it makes the unthinkable thinkable and even acceptable: that we could BECOME the exterminators of ourselves.
Hated and mocked by many intellectuals of his time for the radical nature of his positions, Anders concluded his Ten Theses on Chernobyl with these words:
We must keep these words in mind when watching television programmes where commentators relay, without any distance, the LITANY of the Israeli army’s strike forces and talking points.
And ask yourself HOW, in the face of such painful global disaster, the colossal challenges of climate change and the fallout from the sixth mass extinction (of which all these deaths, this destruction and these wars are tangible expressions), HOW can these commentators continue to admire / endorse the necro-militaristic-messianic madness of an outlaw genocidal nuclear power, whose stated aim is to proudly subject the Middle East to its worldview, sowing terror, destruction and death?
4.
For decades, Netanyahu has been using terrorism and Iranian nuclear panic as a weapon of mass communication to destroy any promise of the beginning of a Palestinian state.
But to destroy this promise is not just about rendering a peace process obsolete.
It is the military, administrative, technical and physical ANNIHILATION of the past, present and future of Palestine and the Palestinians, 80 years after Auschwitz.
In very concrete terms, this means LIQUIDATING men, women, children, families, their rights, their ancestors, their descendants, their schools, their culture, their universities, their libraries, their hospitals, their land, their water pipes, their electrical systems, their agricultural systems, their cities, their villages, their festivals, their land registries, their languages, their memories, their futures…
In front of the whole world.
By demanding the DEMOCRATIC BLESSING of the USA and Europe.
A mass extermination that literally EXPLODES our eyes and our consciences with its scale, its terror and its efficiency.
An IRRADIATION that will have already partially fulfilled Günther Anders’ terrible prophecy.
The annihilation of the Palestinians of Gaza like an ATOMIC FLASH without the need to physically resort to the atomic arsenal.
5.
It is no longer just a question of colonisation and genocide.
It is something even more disturbing, for which colonisation and GENOCIDE are the testing ground, and which we must be able to NAME without being hampered by the fear of speaking and thinking collectively about what is happening. And which has nothing to do with Israel’s right to defend itself.
A cursed THING that has emerged from the apocalyptic tales of Biblical nights to invade the most sophisticated AI-necro-military-political machines of the 21st century.
The “existential” war that Netanyahu is waging to destroy/subjugate/absorb the lives of ALL his neighbours can only end very badly.
Which is perhaps the only truth of this bloody ride.
End badly.
Taking with it hundreds of thousands of men, women and children in Palestine, Israel, Lebanon and Iran to a merciless death, to prevent Israel from ever becoming what it has never yet managed/and probably never wanted/to be:
A LAND of PEACE.
This bloody THING that emerged from THE ENDLESS NIGHT of missiles and corpses echoes a harsh thought from another philosopher, Jean-Luc Nancy, in The Truth of Democracy.
6.
The atomic FLASH we have been witnessing for nearly 700 days now completely overturns our previous understanding of what a nuclear disaster could be.
It has shattered the structure, duration and substance of time.
It no longer needs to physically explode to irradiate/exterminate a people/their history, geography/future.
The lethal power of this FLASH and its BLACK HOLE have cracked the future of our democracies.
By forcing their elements of LANGUAGE, TARGETING populations, COLLAPSING international law, and HATRED of the other.
Their pure violence traverses time, continents, religions, technologies, languages, bodies, brains, futures, destroying everything in its path.
ISRAEL = B-52 SPIRIT / GBU-57 / MIDNIGHT HAMMER
WE ARE CHANGING THE FACE OF THE WORLD – said Netanyahu yesterday.
WE LOVE YOU GOD – said Trump as he dropped 14 bombs x 13.6 tonnes = 190.4 tonnes of GBU-57 on Iran yesterday.
By comparison, the single bomb dropped on Hiroshima was LIGHT: only 4 tonnes.
Each of the 14 GBU-57s (20 million dollars each) weighs three times more than the single bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.
That is to say, 47.5 times more tonnes of explosives have already been dropped on Iran than on Hiroshima.
Since 7 October, ISRAEL has dropped nearly 100,000 tonnes of explosives on Gaza.
That is 25,000 times more on Gaza than on Hiroshima.
Bombs, missiles, rockets.
Not to mention drones.
2.3 million people affected, with no weapons to defend themselves, no food, no water, no hospitals, no medicine, no housing, no protection whatsoever…
365 km2.
Per km2, Gaza has had more bombs dropped on it than the whole of Germany, or even the whole of occupied Europe, during the Second World War.
Messianic SUPREMACISM is another name for the nuclear threat, whose deafening THERMAL BLAST can be heard whistling everywhere.
That of the bombs, the atoms, the money, the technology of death and the future that is being destroyed before our very eyes.
The eyes do not always want to close, said Danielle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub.
Nicolas Klotz