By Amin Mansouri · Monday, September 14, 2015 “What appears to be a new Iran”: the ABC News host takes us inside Iran with these words, while the ABC News reporter in Iran is ready to match him with the following: “We needed a permit, but once we got it, the city opens up to all kinds of surprises.”[1] Meanwhile, the reporter spills the end of her report reassuring us that changes are on their way but not overnight, and a new Iran is embracing pop music, iPhones, Steven Jobs, and most importantly, nose jobs so that Iranians can look more Western. This overtly Orientalist narrative presents Iran as a new and young country, in contrast to an ancient, old, mystic, and mysterious Iran that has captured and mesmerized the Western unconscious for centuries. The reporter finishes her report by conditioning these changes on the nuclear deal that will facilitate all these sweeping shifts and alterations.
Not everybody shares this Orientalist narrative, but the promising economic market in the near future of Iran is what focuses many analysts’ ample attention. Richard Javad Heidarian, a specialist in geopolitical and political affairs, unveils another aspect of this ubiquitous hope: “And similar to the case of China, an Iran–West rapprochement holds the promise of unlocking one of the world’s most promising markets, with broad implications for the global economy.” Regardless of all these cost-benefit driven analyses, the deal generated two opposing queues of political observations, rotating around a simple “yes” or” no” response to the deal. John Bell, the director of the Middle East program at the Toledo International Peace Centre in Madrid, provides us with a snapshot of all the debates over the deal: “The debate over the Iran nuclear agreement has been vibrant and will continue all the way up to the American Congressional vote. Progressives have lined up with the deal, as has most of the world. However, there are many voices in the U.S., Israel, and the region lined up against it.”
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By Timothy W. Luke · Monday, September 14, 2015 Telos 172 (Fall 2015) is now available for purchase in our store.
 Rapid climate change today is attributed to the profligate use of fossil fuels, and this consumption of hydrocarbon energy has worldwide, albeit uneven and discontinuous, cultural and economic patterns to it. Nonetheless, it is more than plausible to spin up the frameworks for a universal history of humanity based upon modern society’s increasing combustion of the planet’s biotic prehistory as fossil fuel energy. As the carbon of antediluvian plant matter is burned to light homes, run factories, and propel vehicles, the history of the present becomes materially universalized as the exhausted energy of the distant past released along with its soot, smog, and smoke.
Thus, noxious by-products of production and consumption ironically become the crown of commodified creation at the end of history, whose ultimate historical ends, as Fukuyama reaffirms, are tied to the “endless accumulation” of wealth. Little did he know, this outcome also would entail nonstop increases in greenhouse gases and rapid climate change; but, environmentalists, historians, sociologists, and technologists are more than willing now to seize upon this curious outcome for the crisis narratives of a universal history framed by the concept of “the Anthropocene.”
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By Telos Press · Monday, September 14, 2015 The following is an open letter from Heshmat Tabarzadi, Iran’s leading pro-democracy activist, to leaders of Western governments. The original Persian version is available at the Iran Democratic Front website. Translated by Banafsheh Zand.
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By Lukas Szrot · Wednesday, September 9, 2015 Anthony M. Matteo’s “In Defense of Moral Realism” offers a fascinating argument. He begins with the seemingly innocuous premise that philosophy, and by extension theorizing of any stripe, should be linked to what people actually do. Philosophy of science is his analogue, the obtuse, jargon-laden pages of such work often seeming to generate little useful insight for the practitioners of science. An account of morality, by analogy, should be useful to practicing moral agents.
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By Telos Press · Tuesday, September 8, 2015 Writing at The Tower website, Ben Cohen examines Ali Khamenei’s eliminationist rhetoric toward Israel, as well as the responses of Western politicians in the wake of the Iran nuclear deal. Cohen’s article “Global Anti-Semitism Has a New Leader” draws on the historical research recently introduced by Matthias Küntzel in his book Germany and Iran: From the Aryan Axis to the Nuclear Threshold, now available in our online store.
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By Telos Press · Tuesday, September 1, 2015 Telos Press Publishing is pleased to announce that Ernst Jünger’s Eumeswil is now available for purchase. Order your copy today in our online store.
Eumeswil
by Ernst Jünger
Translated by Joachim Neugroschel
Edited and with an Introduction by Russell A. Berman
 Eumeswil, ostensibly a post-apocalyptic science fiction novel, is effectively a comprehensive synthesis of Ernst Jünger’s mature thought, with a particular focus on new and achievable forms of individual freedom in a technologically monitored and managed postmodern world. Here Jünger first fully develops his figure of the anarch, the inwardly liberated and outwardly pragmatic individual, who lives peacefully in the heart of Leviathan and is yet able to preserve his individuality and freedom. Composed of a series of short passages and fragments, Eumeswil follows the reflections of Martin Venator, a historian living in a futuristic city-state ruled by a dictator known as the Condor. Through Venator, the prototypical anarch, Jünger offers a broad and uniquely insightful analysis of history from the post-historic perspective and, at the same time, presents a vision of future technological developments, including astonishingly prescient descriptions of today’s internet (the luminar), smartphone (the phonophore), and genetic engineering. At once a study of accommodation to tyranny and a libertarian vision of individual freedom, Eumeswil continues to speak to the contradictions and possibilities inherent in our twenty-first-century condition.
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