The Multidisciplinarian

New York Times, February 28, 2026: “Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Autocratic Cleric Who Made Iran a Regional Power, Is Dead at 86”:

“With his spectacles, Palestinian kaffiyeh, long robes and silver beard, Ayatollah Khamenei cast himself as a religious scholar as well as a writer and translator of works on Islam. He affected an avuncular and magnanimous aloofness, running the country from a perch above the jousting of daily politics.”

Washington Post, February 28, 2026: “Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, is dead at 86”:

“With his bushy white beard and easy smile, Ayatollah Khamenei cut a more avuncular figure in public than his perpetually scowling but much more revered mentor, and he was known to be fond of Persian poetry and classic Western novels, especially Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables.”

Khamenei was killed on February 28, 2026, in joint U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran. The New York Times led its piece with his avuncular and magnanimous aloofness. Oh, and a religious scholar. The Washington Post opened its obit with a bushy white beard and easy smile. A soft spot for Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. Both papers called him “avuncular.” Anything odd there? No?

I read Karl Marx closely. Some of my fellow Marxists forget Marx when it’s convenient. You all know the mechanism: the narrative superstructure serves the interest. What gets foregrounded – the beard, the smile, the poetry – and what gets backgrounded is never neutral. It’s selection bias dressed up as multi-perspective objectivity and eloquence.

If I learned one thing from Das Kapital, it is that interest controls that lens. What you choose to put in the first paragraph is the tell. What you omit, or bury at the bottom of the piece, tells more. He exported death, you cowardly rags. Here’s the omitted ledger that actually defined the man who held absolute power from 1989 until last week:

Issued the fatwa against Salman Rushdie that inspired the 2022 stabbing attempt. (I list this first because I was disgusted with the UK for not declaring war on Iran when it happened. I despise cowardice. Whether one person or the entire population of the UK, calling for assassination of a citizen should mean war.)

Mass executions: Oversaw the 1988 prison massacre (thousands of political prisoners hanged in weeks), routine public hangings, and Iran remaining the world’s top per-capita executioner for years.

Crushing dissent at home: 2009 Green Movement (hundreds killed, thousands tortured and imprisoned); 2019 fuel protests (hundreds more dead); 2022–2023 “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising after Mahsa Amini’s death in morality-police custody (500+ killed, mass arrests, systematic rape reports from Evin Prison).

Exporting terror: Hezbollah (1983 Beirut barracks bombing that killed 240 U.S. Marines), full backing of Hamas’s October 7 massacre, arming Houthis to attack Red Sea shipping and Israel, Shia militias in Iraq/Syria that killed Americans.

Nuclear defiance and apocalyptic rhetoric: Pushed the enrichment program to near-weapons grade while chanting “Death to America, Death to Israel” remained state policy.

The poetry was real enough. It defines Khamenei’s 37-year rule just as much as Hitler’s watercolor hobby defined his. Yet these respected journals lead with the his “easy smile” the same way they opened Baghdadi obits with “austere religious scholar.”

This garbage is sheer institutional reflex. The Times’ default mode for anti-Western authoritarians is the “complex man of culture” framing. Raw moral clarity (“ruthless theocrat who turned Iran into a prison state and terror sponsor”) must be too binary for the elite reader. Iranians danced in the streets and shouted from rooftops; the Times writers stroked his bushy beard. Was that acknowledging complexity? Or just laundering priority. Ho ho ho.

These papers once prided themselves on skepticism toward power. Yet when the power is cloaked in anti-Western theocratic rhetoric, the victims become statistics lower in the column. The audience might skew toward people who prize balance and distrust moralistic takes as simplistic or right-wing. The Times’ superstructure of polite, nuanced prose protects the base. They wouldn’t want to alienate certain geopolitical narratives of their intellectual base. What they sell as the bravery of complexity is just cowardice and pandering dressed up as erudition.

I canceled after the Baghdadi religious scholar stuff. John, how can you still read this shit?