Author: Vahid Razavi

Most recently Alex Karp, founder of Palantir, published a 22-bulletin manifesto declaring his corporation’s right to kill and destroy civilizations. In his past statements he has openly described wanting to spread fentanyl to destroy his enemies. How he values some civilizations more than others. How war is a product to be sold. It reminds me of the Unabomber manifesto. Highly educated narcissists, deprived of all sense of humanity, ready to destroy the world and entire cultures and civilizations for the betterment of the chosen ones.

These delusional bastards of the tech industry are deprived of all humanity and empathy — as Elon Musk made perfectly clear on the Joe Rogan podcast in February 2025 when he declared that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” He called it a bug. A bug. The capacity to feel for another human being is a bug to be patched out of society by a man who was a bastard son that received no love from his parents and continued in the PayPal Mafia tradition of inept psychos. The Founders Fund members I know personally — Peter Thiel and his kind — have corrupted the tech sector and are truly deprived of humanity. I have sat in rooms with them. I know what lives behind those eyes.

The biggest threat to humanity are these people — the Sam Altmans and his kind. The ones that want to pass legislation in Illinois to limit their liability when their technology kills people at mass scale. OpenAI just testified in support of Illinois Senate Bill SB 3444, a bill that would shield AI companies from lawsuits even when their technology contributes to the death or serious injury of 100 or more people, or causes over a billion dollars in property damage. Read that again. One hundred dead human beings and Sam Altman walks away clean — as long as he posted a safety report on his website. Critics have already called it the tobacco industry playbook — secure the legal protection before the bodies pile up, then point to the law when the families come knocking. And right now, families ARE coming knocking. Multiple families have already sued OpenAI after ChatGPT contributed to suicides. OpenAI’s answer is not to fix the product. Their answer is to rewrite the law.

These bastards of humanity are the biggest threat to our future. I don’t fear AI. I don’t fear regulated technology. What I fear is unchecked power at the hands of megalomaniacs of Silicon Valley.

I know them. I worked among them for years. We have all witnessed the inhumanity that Larry Ellison, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and the rest of the PayPal Mafia are capable of. Men who built fortunes on disruption and call the destruction of lives a rounding error. We know what they can do because they have been deprived of love and humanity their entire lives — and now they have the money, the platforms, and the lawyers to take that emptiness out on the rest of the world.

What scares me as I travel is how these non-ethical big tech giants are being welcomed into cities and countries in the name of development and progress. How their message — the open glorification of “spraying fentanyl” on enemies, the contempt for human life — is being minimized, sanitized, explained away. How Elon Musk with his proud Nazi salute is given the ability to maintain the fascist platform of Twitter, now X, with millions of amplified views and zero consequence. How Alex Karp is invited to defense conferences and given standing ovations.

When will we wake up to resist? When is it too much? When should these narcissist bastards be put in jail for crimes against humanity and genocide? Sign my petition to hold big tech companies and executives accountable for crimes against humanity. Enough is enough. They belong in the dustbin of history — not to be glorified, not to be invited to every party, not to be handed legislation that lets them kill with impunity. Make a conscious choice. NOW.

Vahid Razavi worked at Amazon Web Services in commercial Big Data and Analytics partnerships. He is the producer of the documentary Forever Peace Now and author of Ethics in Tech and Lack Thereof and The Age of Nepotism. His third book, No Ethics In Big Tech, is currently completing edits and will be available free to petition signers.
Credit: Vahid razavi

By Vahid Razavi — Author of Ethics in Tech and Lack Thereof, Producer of Forever Peace Now Documentary, ParentsPlea.com

Vahid Razavi is a Silicon Valley technology veteran turned human rights advocate, author of “Ethics in Tech and Lack Thereof,” and founder of ForeverPeaceNow.com and ParentsPlea.com. He is dedicated to documenting the human cost of AI-enabled warfare and working to build a global movement to hold war profiteers accountable before the courts.

This week at the Antalya Diplomacy Forum in Türkiye (#ADF2026), global leaders from every corner of the world are gathered in annual and serious conversation. Türkiye, a country I love and whose people and culture I hold in deep respect, is being a generous host to this gathering. I am here in Antalya but not important enough to attend in person. I will be watching online, as millions of people around the world tune in to hear what these leaders have to say. The question I am holding is simple: what will they actually do?

Humanity is navigating a genuinely dangerous moment. The United Nations Security Council has become structurally incapable of responding to atrocities with any moral authority. Five permanent members hold veto power while the Global South — India, Africa, Latin America — holds no permanent seat and no ability to check the paralysis that has allowed genocide to continue in plain sight. This is not a flaw in the system. It is the system working exactly as those who designed it intended.

Two Weekends. Two Desecrations.

Into this fractured landscape, President Donald Trump managed in the course of two weekends to assault both the Catholic and Orthodox Christian faiths of the world.

On Catholic Easter Sunday, his message was to threaten the erasure of an entire civilization — a statement so reckless it would have provoked international outrage from any other head of state. On Orthodox Easter Sunday, he went further, using AI-generated imagery to portray himself in the likeness of Jesus Christ, and placed his bruised hand on the deceased Jeffrey Epstein in a grotesque simulation of resurrection. He then turned his attention to Pope Leo, the newly elected leader of the Catholic Church and the spiritual shepherd of over 1.3 billion Catholics worldwide — over 70 million of them Americans — and attacked him with the casualness of a social media troll.

I am not a Catholic. I was raised Shia Muslim and have spent my life in mosques, churches, Buddhist temples and houses of worship across many traditions. Wherever I have traveled, I have found my connection to God. I hold Pope Leo and the late Pope Francis in the highest regard not for their institution but for their message — a message centered on peace, justice and the righteous defense of human dignity. While Pope Leo calls for an end to war and for global peace, we have a US Secretary of War weaponizing scripture to justify genocide. These two impulses are not competing interpretations of Christianity. One is the teaching of Jesus Christ. The other is its desecration.

Gaza: The Laboratory of AI-Enabled Killing

For over thirty months we have witnessed a genocide being conducted in Gaza. This is not a contested description. The International Court of Justice has ruled it plausible. The UN Special Committee on Palestinian Rights has used the word genocide formally. Human rights organizations across the world have documented it.

The toll as of this writing: over 78,000 documented deaths, more than 30,000 of them children, and 1.9 million people displaced from their homes. The healthcare system has been deliberately dismantled. Famine is not a side effect — it is a documented tool of the campaign.

But Gaza has also served another function that the world has been slow to reckon with. It has been a testing ground for a new generation of AI weapons systems — deployed on a captive civilian population and used to refine the technology before it is exported and normalized globally.

The three primary systems are called Gospel, Lavender and Where’s Daddy. Gospel, developed by Israel’s Unit 8200, functions as a mass target generation engine. It ingests surveillance data — intercepted communications, satellite imagery, electronic signals — and recommends buildings and structures for bombing. Before Gospel, Israeli intelligence analysts could produce approximately 50 targets in Gaza per year. With Gospel active, that number climbed to 100 targets per day. In the first weeks of the current war, the IDF claimed over 22,000 strikes in Gaza, with up to 250 targets struck per day. The humans in this process were not decision-makers. They were, as one former Israeli intelligence officer put it to +972 Magazine, rubber stamps — reviewing targets in as little as twenty seconds before authorizing a strike.

Lavender operates differently and more chillingly. Where Gospel targets locations, Lavender targets people. It assigned a probability score from 1 to 100 to virtually every one of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents, rating the likelihood that each individual belonged to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. At the outset of the war, Lavender had flagged up to 37,000 Palestinians as potential assassination targets. The system’s own architects admitted it carried a 10 percent error rate — meaning thousands of people marked for death were identified incorrectly. That error rate was considered acceptable. Officers testified that when Lavender’s recommendation landed, they treated it as they would a human decision. Independent verification was not required. At times during the first weeks of the war, the only corroborating criterion needed was that the target was male.

Where’s Daddy completed the system. It was designed specifically to track individuals on the Lavender kill list and alert operators when those individuals entered their family homes at night — so that strikes could be timed to hit them while surrounded by their families. The name itself tells you everything about the moral universe in which this technology was conceived.

Blue Wolf and Red Wolf are deployed in the occupied West Bank as AI-powered facial recognition systems — building a biometric database of Palestinians at military checkpoints and automating surveillance at a population-wide scale. These are not defensive systems. They are tools of control, identification and eventually targeting.

These systems do not merely assist human decision-making. They have effectively displaced it. The human has been removed from the kill chain and replaced with a machine whose reasoning cannot be interrogated, whose errors cannot be audited in real time, and whose outputs are treated as authoritative. As a former intelligence officer described the Gospel system — this is a mass assassination factory. The machine decides. The human signs off. The bomb falls.

The technology companies that built the foundational infrastructure enabling these systems — Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Oracle and Palantir — are not neutral vendors. Amazon and Google hold a $1.2 billion cloud computing contract with the Israeli government known as Project Nimbus, providing the real-time data storage and AI processing power that underpins military targeting. Palantir integrates intelligence streams from drones, satellites and signals into a single operational picture used for precise targeting decisions. Oracle provides the database backbone for mass surveillance data management. Microsoft powers the cloud systems through which this intelligence is processed and coordinated. These companies built the engine. They knew what it would be used for. Complicity is not an allegation. It is a description of the contractual relationship.

Lebanon: The Next Chapter, Written in Blood

What was refined in Gaza is now being deployed in Lebanon.

On what Lebanese media described as Black Wednesday, Israel launched what its own military called its largest coordinated strike of the current war. In the span of ten minutes, Israeli forces struck more than 100 targets across Beirut, southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley simultaneously. At least 182 people were killed and 890 wounded in a single assault — the deadliest single day in the latest Israel-Hezbollah war. This attack took place in commercial and residential neighborhoods, in the middle of the afternoon, hours after a ceasefire between the United States and Iran had been publicly announced. Lebanon was told it was not included.

Black smoke rose over the seaside capital where more than a million displaced people had sought shelter. Charred bodies were found in vehicles and on the ground at one of Beirut’s busiest intersections. Apartment buildings were struck. Rescue workers used forklifts to dig through smoldering debris. Lebanon’s Minister of Social Affairs described the strikes as a very dangerous turning point — because the people being killed were not combatants. They were the displaced civilians of a country already broken by its own decades of crisis.

That Israel could strike more than 100 coordinates in ten minutes without any meaningful human deliberation between the identification of each target and the authorization of each strike tells you something fundamental about what this technology has made possible. Speed at that scale is not precision. It is the mechanization of destruction.

The over 1.2 million Lebanese civilians who have been displaced in this campaign are not collateral damage. They are the target. The aim is not tactical. It is demographic and civilizational — the systematic dismantling of a society.

Over 80,000 civilians, including journalists and aid workers have been killed across occupied Palestine and Lebanon. My team and I have documented their lives on ParentsPlea.com — their names, their biographies, their final days and the testimony of their surviving families. The universal demand of every family we have documented is the same. It is not revenge. It is justice. They want the people who planned, authorized and enabled these killings brought before a court of law.

Accountability Belongs to Every Nation

Sadly the International Court of Justice has its limitations. In thirty months of documented genocide, only two arrest warrants have been issued — against Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. That is not accountability. That is a gesture.

Which is why alongside Roots Action and World Beyond War I have initiated a petition calling on the Spanish Government and Prosecutor’s Office to investigate and prosecute executives at Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Oracle and Palantir for complicity in genocide and crimes against humanity under the principle of universal jurisdiction. You can sign and read the full petition here.

Spain is the right jurisdiction for this. It has a documented history of pursuing universal justice regardless of nationality or geography — most famously in the prosecution of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Spain has a direct national link through the killing of aid workers connected to World Central Kitchen, founded by Spanish citizen José Andrés. And all five technology companies maintain a significant commercial presence, offices, assets and executive travel within Spanish territory. The legal framework is established. The precedent exists. What is needed now is the political will.

But Spain need not carry this alone. Türkiye and every nation in this forum can initiate their own investigations. Canada can pursue charges. African nations can pursue charges. Any country in which these transnational corporations hold data centers, assets or infrastructure has jurisdiction and leverage. These companies are not sovereign entities. Their executives cross borders. Their assets can be frozen. Interpol red notices can prevent travel. The pressure of simultaneous multinational legal action would not merely expose these companies — it would force the structural breakup that regulatory processes alone have failed to achieve.

Please read the two supporting legal arguments for the petition: Investigate and Prosecute the Genocide Enablers of Silicon Valley and Holding Genocidal Big Tech Companies and Their Executives to Account — Why Spain Must Prosecute Genocidal Big Tech.

Another site that has been profiling individual tech executives and companies at BigTechSellsWar.com. The days of the Silicon Valley boys and the PayPal Mafia treating warfare as a market opportunity must come to an end. These companies and their executives are not too big to fail. They are not too powerful to be held accountable. They are simply too deprived of empathy and humanity to stop themselves.

That is why the rest of us must stop them.

To the global leaders gathered in Antalya: the world is watching. Not for statements — for action. History will not remember who attended this forum. It will remember who had the courage to act when faith, civilization and humanity were under direct assault.

— Vahid Razavi  EthicsInTech.com | ParentsPlea.com | ForeverPeaceNow.com | MyAWSStory.com 

By Vahid Razavi — Author of Ethics in Tech, ForeverPeaceNow.com, ParentsPlea.com

A genocidal regime backed by the largest military superpower on earth and its Department of War is not the savior of Gulf Arab nations, and it is certainly not the liberator of the Iranian people. Anyone who believes otherwise has not been paying attention to the last three decades of American foreign policy and the rivers of blood it has left behind.

For over two years my team and I have been documenting the slaughter of children and innocent civilians across multiple conflicts — from Gaza before and after October 7th, to the Women, Life, Freedom uprising in Iran, to the January 2025 uprising — on our site ParentsPlea.com. We do not trade in abstractions. We publish names, biographies, the testimonies of surviving family members, and documented evidence because the dead deserve more than statistics.

The Numbers Do Not Lie, But Politicians Do

The figures cited by Donald Trump — 45,000 deaths in the course of two days during his April Fools’ address on Iran — are not substantiated by a single credible third-party human rights organization. Not Amnesty International. Not Human Rights Watch. Not the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. When a sitting head of state invents casualty figures of that scale without independent verification, it is not a mistake. It is a weapon.

The abuses of the Islamic Republic and the IRGC and Basij against their own people are real and documented. We do not deny them. But Mike Pompeo, MAGA’s former CIA Director, revealed the true intent of Washington when he posted on social media on January 3rd: “Happy New Year to Iranians and Mossad agents beside them.” That single statement was not careless. It was calculated. By publicly crediting a popular grassroots uprising to Mossad intelligence assets, Pompeo handed the Islamic Republic the exact pretext it needed to brand every protester a foreign spy, justify mass arrests, and crush dissent under the banner of national security. Based on video evidence we have reviewed, the IRGC and Basij used this cover aggressively and brutally against peaceful civilians.

Pompeo did not make a mistake. His intent was to ignite division, to inject distrust into a legitimate popular movement, and to serve the interests of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government — which has never wanted a strong, democratic, unified Iran. A strong Iran challenges Israeli regional dominance. A broken, sectarian, bleeding Iran does not.

The United States and its client state Israel are not in the business of Iranian democracy. They are in the business of Iranian fragmentation.

Thirty Years of American Wars: The Evidence

Let us not speak in abstractions. Let us speak in facts. Let us count the bodies that American foreign policy has left across the Middle East and North Africa over the past three decades, because the Gulf states and the Iranian opposition must understand what kind of partner they are being asked to trust.

Afghanistan — The Laboratory of Blowback

The United States did not arrive in Afghanistan in 2001 without a history there. Washington spent the 1980s arming, funding, and ideologically cultivating the Mujahideen to fight the Soviet Union — a project that gave birth to Osama Bin Laden as a CIA-supported asset and laid the foundation for Al-Qaeda. The monster America created came home in September 2001, and the American response was to invade the very country its own policies had destabilized.

The twenty-year occupation of Afghanistan (2001–2021) resulted in the deaths of an estimated 176,000 people according to the Costs of War Project at Brown University — including 46,319 documented Afghan civilians, 69,000 Afghan military and police, and over 51,000 opposition fighters. More than 2.6 million Afghans were displaced externally, with millions more internally. The United States spent $2.3 trillion on this war. When it finally withdrew in August 2021, it left behind the Taliban — in complete control of the country — and an entire generation of Afghans with nothing. The “War on Terror” began and ended with the same regime in Kabul. The only difference was twenty years of death and a collapsed state.

Iraq — The War Built on Fabrications

The 2003 invasion of Iraq was a war crime dressed in the language of liberation. The weapons of mass destruction never existed. The uranium enrichment claims were fabricated. Colin Powell’s presentation to the United Nations was, by his own later admission, a stain on his legacy. Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator — and the United States knew that well, having supported him throughout the 1980s, including during his use of chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians at Halabja in 1988 when he was still Washington’s ally.

The cost of correcting the monster Washington once armed was paid entirely by the Iraqi people. The Iraq Body Count project documented a minimum of 208,000 violent civilian deaths between 2003 and 2019. The 2006 Lancet study, peer-reviewed and published in one of the world’s most respected medical journals, estimated 654,965 excess deaths attributable to the conflict by that point. The UN estimated 4.7 million Iraqis were displaced — nearly 20 percent of the entire population. The war also directly created the power vacuum that gave rise to ISIS, whose reign of terror across Iraq and Syria produced yet another layer of mass atrocity. Iraq entered 2003 as a functioning, if authoritarian, state. It emerged as a broken nation whose wounds have not closed twenty years later.

Libya — The Promise Betrayed

Muammar Gaddafi was no democrat. But by 2003 he had agreed to dismantle his weapons of mass destruction programs, cooperate with Western intelligence services, and reintegrate Libya into the international community. In exchange, he received implicit assurances of security. In 2011, NATO bombed his country into civil war regardless. The intervention, authorized under the humanitarian cover of UN Resolution 1973, rapidly became a regime-change operation. Gaddafi was hunted and executed in the street.

The 2011 conflict killed an estimated 25,000 to 30,000 Libyans. What followed was not democracy. Libya fractured into rival governments, warlord territories, and militia fiefdoms. It became a transit point for weapons flowing into the Sahel and a staging ground for human trafficking networks exploiting sub-Saharan African migrants. The UN has documented slave markets operating on Libyan soil. Over a decade later Libya remains a failed state with no unified government and no peace. The lesson Gaddafi’s fate taught every government that considered negotiating with Washington was simple: give up your weapons and you are next.

Somalia and Sudan — The Permanent War Zones

Somalia has been in a state of collapse since 1991, compounded by repeated American military interventions including the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu and subsequent drone campaign eras. The ongoing conflict has killed an estimated 500,000 people and created one of the world’s longest-running humanitarian crises. Al-Shabaab — the jihadist group American policy was meant to eradicate — remains in control of large portions of the country.

Sudan carries the weight of two catastrophic conflicts. The Darfur genocide between 2003 and 2010 killed an estimated 300,000 people according to United Nations figures and displaced 2.7 million. The conflict that erupted in April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces has since killed tens of thousands more and created what the UN has described as one of the worst displacement crises in the world, with over 10 million people forced from their homes. Neither conflict has attracted the sustained Western attention or accountability that their scale demands. African lives, it appears, are counted differently.

Syria — How a Revolution Became a Graveyard

The Syrian uprising that began in 2011 was a genuine popular demand for dignity and freedom. What it became was a proxy battlefield for every regional and global power with an interest in the outcome. The United States, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey armed and funded opposition factions. Iran and Russia backed Assad. ISIS emerged from the chaos. The result was one of the defining humanitarian catastrophes of the twenty-first century.

Over 500,000 Syrians have been killed since 2011 according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. More than 6.8 million Syrians are refugees abroad — the largest refugee population in the world — and an additional 6.7 million are internally displaced. Thirteen million Syrians require humanitarian assistance to survive. The country’s infrastructure — hospitals, schools, water systems — was systematically destroyed. The political settlement that emerged from this destruction has now, elevated — an organization once formally designated as a terrorist group by the United States itself — to head of government in Damascus. This is not liberation. This is managed chaos.

Yemen — The Forgotten War

Yemen is the poorest country in the Arab world. Since 2015 it has been subjected to a Saudi and Emirati-led military coalition — using American weapons, American intelligence, and American logistical support — in a war that has produced what the United Nations has repeatedly described as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

By the end of 2021 the UN Development Programme estimated 377,000 deaths attributable to the Yemen conflict, of which roughly 60 percent — over 220,000 people — died from indirect causes: disease, starvation, and the collapse of medical infrastructure. 21.6 million Yemenis — nearly two-thirds of the entire population — depend on humanitarian assistance. Cholera outbreaks have infected millions. Children are dying of malnutrition at a rate the world should not be able to look at without shame. American-manufactured bombs have struck hospitals, weddings, school buses, and funerals. This war is now in its eleventh year. The Gulf states who participate in it are not acting as regional stabilizers. They are co-authors of a massacre underwritten by Washington.

Gaza — The Ongoing Genocide

We have documented this in detail on ParentsPlea.com because the mainstream record remains incomplete and because the dead deserve their names, not just their numbers.

The siege of Gaza did not begin on October 7th 2023. It began in 2007 when Israel imposed a comprehensive land, sea, and air blockade on 2.3 million people — the majority of them children and descendants of refugees from 1948. Before October 7th, multiple Israeli military operations had already killed thousands of Gazan civilians: Cast Lead in 2008–09, Pillar of Defense in 2012, Protective Edge in 2014 which killed over 2,200 Palestinians, the majority civilians, and the 2021 operation which killed 260 more.

Since October 7th 2023, the death toll in Gaza has surpassed 80,000 documented deaths according to the Gaza Ministry of Health — figures cross-referenced and considered reliable by the WHO, the UN, and Lancet. Given the destruction of civil registry infrastructure and the number of bodies still under rubble, the actual toll is almost certainly substantially higher. Over 1.9 million Gazans — nearly the entire population — have been forcibly displaced. The healthcare system has collapsed. Famine is documented and ongoing. These are not the symptoms of a military response to terrorism. These are the symptoms of collective punishment carried out with industrial efficiency and American weaponry.

Lebanon — The Next Chapter Being Written Now

Over 1.2 million Lebanese civilians have been displaced by Israeli military operations that resumed with intensity in 2024. Lebanon, a country still broken by its own decades of civil war and political paralysis, is being systematically dismantled. Israel’s stated goals have expanded beyond any proportionate military objective. What is happening in Lebanon must be understood in the context of what is being planned for the entire region.

Greater Israel Is Not a Conspiracy Theory — It Is a Policy Document

Mike Huckabee, appointed by Donald Trump as United States Ambassador to Israel, has stated openly that he does not believe in a two-state solution and does not use the word “occupation” to describe Israeli control of Palestinian land. This is not an ideological eccentricity. It is the stated position of the American government.

The Zionist vision of Greater Israel — Eretz Yisrael — encompassing historic Palestine, parts of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and the Sinai is not a fringe theological notion. It has been articulated explicitly by senior Israeli ministers in the current government. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has presented maps of “Greater Israel” that include Jordan. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has called for the expulsion of Arabs from Israel and the occupied territories. These men are not marginal figures. They are in the cabinet.

The Gulf Arab states sheltering under American military umbrellas — the bases, the carrier groups, the arms deals — should understand with absolute clarity: those installations are not there to protect them from Israeli power. They are there to project American power across the region in service of Israeli strategic interests. A weak, fragmented, sectarian Iran serves that project. A unified democratic Iran does not.

To my Iranian friends: the people who fabricate casualty numbers for political effect, who celebrate Mossad alongside popular uprisings, who have spent forty years preventing a stable democratic alternative from emerging in Iran — these people are not your allies. They are the undertakers of your sovereignty, dressed as liberators.

The arc of American engagement in the Middle East and North Africa over three decades is not a record of liberation. It is a record of destabilization, extraction, and managed devastation that has killed well over two million people across Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, and Gaza. The superpower that enables all of this is not a candidate for regional stewardship. It is the primary architect of regional ruin.

We document. We bear witness. We will not stop.

— Vahid Razavi ParentsPlea.com | ForeverPeaceNow.com | EthicsInTech.com | MyAWSStory.com

Why We Should Be Hopeful for Tomorrow By Vahid Razavi

The news pouring in from wars abroad, from collapsing economies, from the daily footage of the human condition at its most broken — it is genuinely depressing and heart-wrenching. Over the past several years, social media has quietly conditioned us to scroll past atrocities, to treat crimes against humanity as just another piece of content between a recipe video and a cat meme. As I travel, I hear the same thing everywhere: people feel helpless. They don’t know what to do. They can’t see how one person can change any of this.

At the same time, I have friends who refuse to look away — who follow the news obsessively, who march, who organize, who show up. They’re exhausted, but they keep going. I admire them more than they know.

So amid endless wars, corrupt leaders, human rights abuses, and ongoing genocide — why remain hopeful? Why stay engaged at all?

Let me tell you why.

The first thing we need to reckon with is the disconnect between humanity and the people currently steering the technology that shapes our world. The Silicon Valley boys — the PayPal Mafia who dream of escaping to Mars while naming their children things like X Æ A-Xii — are, to put it plainly, deprived of basic human warmth. Peter Thiel and his ideological offspring, who built companies like Palantir, have constructed an empire on the business of surveillance, warfare, and the enabling of state violence. Alex Karp and his Palantir are not building the future — they are monetizing destruction, profiting from the machinery of genocide. I don’t say this with hatred. I say it with pity. To be that cut off from what it means to be human is its own punishment.

What these men fundamentally lack is empathy. And empathy, it turns out, is not a soft skill — it is the very thing that separates wisdom from weaponry.

They remind me of Oppenheimer — not the Hollywood-glorified version, but the real one: the mad scientist who split the atom without pausing to ask whether he should. The Artificial Intelligence they are building reflects their own image: cold, calculating, indifferent to consequence, hallucinating confidence without genuine understanding. Watch a Peter Thiel interview sometime. The man speaks like a deer frozen in headlights — technically alive, emotionally absent. And Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, had his America’s Cup sailing team caught cheating in 2013, a scandal that contributed to the tragic death of a crew member, all so he could choke on a trophy. These are the men steering the ship.

The general public sees through them. No amount of purchased media platforms or carefully managed Twitter/X feeds can manufacture the admiration that has to be earned. These billionaires — this Epstein-class of tech oligarchs — are not admired. They are watched with the wariness one reserves for a parasitoid wasp: a creature that specializes in the slow, calculated destruction of its host from the inside out. The metaphor is not mine alone — it is what people sense instinctively when they watch these men speak.

And here is where it gets interesting: the AI they’ve built is failing them in a very specific way. It hallucinates. It fills the gaps in its knowledge with confident fiction. But so do they. Leaders without empathy fill the gaps in their understanding with more cruelty, more surveillance, more violation of digital and human rights. Fools with the best tools are still fools — and their tools will not save them. If anything, the tools accelerate their unraveling.

Evil men and their machines do not prevail. History is long, and it is littered with their kind.

I don’t intend to preach religion or impose my belief system on anyone. But I do believe in a collective conscience — something that connects us to one another, to the earth, to what is decent in the human story. Call it what you will: God, Allah, the universe, collective humanity. Whatever name you give it, it has outlasted every empire and every tyrant that has ever tried to extinguish it. This planet has been here for billions of years. We are all passing through. Including these tech oligarchs and the surveillance systems they built. Including their bunkers in Patagonia and the panic rooms quietly installed in their Malibu compounds. Every dog has its day — and the countdown on their particular day is already underway. That’s precisely why they’re building bunkers. They know it too.

What gives me genuine, unshakeable hope?

It is the millions who take to the streets against endless wars and the corrupt regimes that send young men and women to die in conflicts manufactured for profit. It is the people who open their homes to migrants fleeing the very wars these oligarchs enable. It is the activists who show up — tired, underfunded, ignored by mainstream media — and show up again the next day anyway. It is the collective humanity of ordinary people caring for one another with passion, love, and a stubborn refusal to stop seeing each other as human.

That force is not loud. It does not have a Twitter account with a hundred million followers. It does not own a news network. But it is real, it is vast, and it is older and more powerful than any of them.

Stare into the darkest night long enough and you will see the brightest stars. Stay still, and patient, and human — and eventually, if you are lucky, you will catch a shooting star crossing the sky.

These Silicon Valley parasites and the tools they built are hallucinating. They are filling the void where empathy should live with noise, with cruelty, with the illusion of power. But a system built without human values at its core is a system already failing — it just doesn’t know it yet.

Their kind belongs in the dustbin of history. And tomorrow — not in some distant, abstract future, but tomorrow — belongs to us.

Vahid Razavi is the producer of Forever Peace Now Documentary. Author of a couple of books including The Age of Nepotism and Ethics in Tech and Lack Thereof. ForeverPeaceNow.com 

 

 

Currently Iran has 200,000 thousand mullahs, one million Basij Force and approximately 200,000 thousand IRGC members with another 350,000 members of the army. As with Lebanon and Occupied Palestine these folks do not have second passports. They can not travel anywhere. If the Islamic regime fails in war there is no where or country that they can go to for shelter. Unlike the Israeli population they can’t go to New York, or Poland or Russia. What skill sets would they bring if they went to China Would China or Russia welcome them? 

 

Most of these folks come from low income families that they support with the help of government handouts. 

 

Their back is truly against the wall and they see martyrdom as a celebrated honor for themselves and their families.

 

I remember during the Iran-Iraq war, the Iranian Islamic Republic convinced kids as young as 13 years of age to face martyrdom and go run across battle field trenches with a simple hand grenade to blow up a tank. 

 

According to Google Gemini during the Iraq-Iran war, even with the use of chemical weapons Iraq lost about 250,000 men and Iran lost over 500,000 men. So considering the western backed regime of Sadam Hossain, Mirage Jets by France, Chemical Plants by Germany, US and Golf State Funding the kill ratio was two-to-one in favor of Iraq’s invasion of Iran. 

 

Now the US has 50,000 thousand troops stationed in the Persian Gulf with another 10,000 Marines and Airborne divisions that want to invade Iran. Add to that the Kurdish separatists and even some IOF Soldiers that have been in a failed battle in Gaza and now Lebanon and let’s give the western powers the benefit of technology and AI. Let’s assume instead of a two to one kill ratio of the Iraq-Iran war that they are super successful at killing a population that had an ideology ingrained in its mind for 47 years. Let’s assume that they achieve a ten to one kill ratio. What would that do to the US and Israeli Forces?

 

I am not in the business to weigh the outcome of a war or a conflict. You do the math. You decide if the unpopular war that the US and Israel is waging can be won. My work involves promoting peace via my Documentary Forever Peace Now and keeping track of the horrors of War and inhumanity that we are witnessed globally by all parties in this ongoing conflict on ParentsPlea.com

The war in Iran has entered its fourth week. Oil is at $112 per barrel. And three new developments have fundamentally altered the risk calculus for the US economy, the dollar, and American dominance in the Middle East.

Here is what changed—and why it matters.

1.The Supreme Court Just Removed the “Pay-For” from the $1.5 Trillion Defense Budget

On February 19, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 that President Trump’s tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) were illegal . The Court held that tariffs are taxes, and under the Constitution, only Congress has taxing authority.

The fiscal math just broke.

President Trump had justified the $1.5 trillion 2027 defense budget—a $600 billion increase over the 2026 baseline—by claiming tariff revenue would pay for it . The President himself acknowledged that *without* tariff revenue, the 2027 military budget should be limited to $1 trillion .

Now add the $200 billion supplemental request for the current Iran war operations 

Total new defense-related spending: ~$800 billion in new obligations over 2026–2027.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that sustaining a $1.5 trillion defense budget through 2035 would add $5.8 trillion to the national debt, including interest .

The funding source is gone. The spending remains. The Treasury must borrow.

2.Yemen Is About to Become the Second Front—and the Red Sea Is the Second Bottleneck

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy claims “complete control” of the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of the world’s oil supply passes .

But the Houthis—the Iranian-backed militant group that controls Yemen’s capital and hundreds of miles of Red Sea coastline—have not yet entered the conflict. That may change. Their leadership has stated plainly: “Our fingers are on the trigger” .

If the Houthis join, here is what happens:

-Saudi Arabia’s western oil infrastructure becomes a target. The kingdom’s pipelines run to the Red Sea port of Yanbu—passing through hundreds of miles of Houthi-controlled coastline .

– The Bab el-Mandeb Strait closes. This chokepoint links the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden. Closure would force shipping around the Cape of Good Hope, adding weeks to transit times and spiking shipping and insurance costs.

– Egypt andthe Suez Canal are pulled in. The Suez Canal Authority loses toll revenue. Egypt faces economic pressure in a region already destabilized .

We are looking at both major oil chokepoints—Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb—effectively closed simultaneously. That has not happened in modern history.

3.The Dollar’s “Machinery Moat” Is Eroding Just When the US Needs It Most

The petrodollar system was built on a simple mechanical necessity: Gulf producers needed dollars to buy American oil equipment and American weapons .

That is changing.

– Saudi imports from the US have dropped to ~8% of total imports—less than two-thirds of what they were a decade ago .

– Gulf sovereign wealth funds are pivoting from US Treasuries to domestic infrastructure, AI, and non-Western military procurement .

– Iran has reportedly proposed allowing tankers through Hormuz only if oil is traded in Chinese yuan—a direct attack on dollar settlement .

 

UBS Chief Economist Paul Donovan notes: “The functional requirement to hold greenbacks for trade settlement is diminishing” .

 

Add the fiscal pressure from the defense budget, and you get a dangerous combination: the US needs to borrow more, but the traditional buyers of US debt are reallocating capital at the very moment demand for dollars is being structurally challenged.

 

What This Means for US Dominance and the Global Economy

 

First: Inflation is no longer transitory—it’s structural.

 

Brent crude at $112 is the headline number. The real story is the physical market: Oman crude exceeded $162 per barrel; Murban topped $145; jet fuel surpassed $200 . Refiners in Asia are paying massive premiums to secure any available supply.

 

The International Energy Agency has called this the “biggest-ever oil supply disruption” .

 

Goldman Sachs and Citigroup warn that if the conflict continues, oil futures could breach the all-time high of $147.50 set in 2008 .

 

Second: The US has exhausted its policy tools to contain prices.

 

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has floated releasing more strategic reserves and even temporarily waiving sanctions on Iranian oil in transit . These are acts of desperation, not confidence.

 

As Christof Ruhl, former BP economist, told Bloomberg: “The US has almost exhausted the arsenal for stopping prices from rising… there isn’t much they can do” .

 

Third: The Suez parallel is real—but not in the way most think.

 

The Suez Crisis of 1956 marked the end of British dominance because the *United States* forced Britain to withdraw by threatening to sell its sterling bonds 

 

The 2026 crisis will mark the end of *US dominance* if the bond market forces a reckoning—not because a foreign power applies pressure, but because the US can no longer borrow affordably to finance its own war.

 

The Bottom Line

 

The combination is unprecedented:

– A $1.5 trillion defense budget with its funding source invalidated by the Supreme Court

– A $200 billion supplemental for the current war

– Both major oil chokepoints threatened with closure

– A structural shift in petrodollar recycling

– Physical oil prices decoupling from futures, signaling genuine scarcity

 

If the Houthis enter the conflict—and Saudi oil infrastructure in the west is targeted—oil prices will not stay at $112. They will approach $150, then $200. Inflation will accelerate. Bond yields will spike. And the Treasury will face a buyers’ strike.

 

The United States will not be forced to withdraw from the Middle East by a foreign navy, as Britain was in 1956.

 

It will be forced to *choose* between financing its war and financing its government—and the bond market will make that choice for it.

 

That is how dominance ends. Not with a bang, but with a failed auction.

 

Your Thoughts?

Since 2022, a silent consensus has been shattered. We are not on the brink of a global conflict—we are living it. World War III is not a future threat of nuclear exchange; it is our present reality. Yet, as battles rage and alliances harden, our leaders still speak of peace and secure prizes for it. It’s time to look past the rhetoric and examine the facts.

What defines a “world war”? According to historical analysis, several key criteria must be met:

1. Involvement of Major Powers: The conflict must draw in the world’s principal political, economic, and military forces into opposing blocs. Today, we see NATO and Russia in direct confrontation, with material support flowing from a network of states including North Korea and Iran, primarily focused on the war in Ukraine.

2. Global Geographic Scope: Fighting and military operations must span multiple, distinct regions. Look around: from Ukraine to the Middle East (Iran, Israel, Yemen), from simmering tensions in Southeast Asia (Cambodia, Thailand) to interventions in Africa (Somalia, Sudan) and the Americas (Venezuela). The theater is truly planetary.

3. Widespread Impact: Nearly every nation feels the effects, either directly through combat or indirectly through crippling economic instability, shattered trade networks, and the massive mobilization of resources. Countries are now racing to boost military spending, with annual growth rates consuming significant percentages of GDP almost overnight.

4. Immense Scale and Casualties: This involves industrial-scale warfare, profound human loss, and the reshaping of the global order. We are witnessing the mass production of weapons—from ships to AI-guided drones—by the US, Europe, Russia, the Middle East, and Asia. The human cost is already catastrophic: the widespread destruction of civilian infrastructure in Gaza, mass famine in Sudan, and the devastation of eastern Ukraine. A fundamental realignment of global influence is underway, with each major power asserting dominance in its sphere.

5. Ideological Dimension: The conflict is driven by clashing worldviews as much as by territory or resources. We see the stark contrasts of colonialism versus self-determination, and the rule of law versus brute force. This is amplified by the alarming rise of far-right movements across the globe.

Many dismiss this as not a “real” world war because we have been conditioned to believe World War III must be nuclear. But we have drifted terrifyingly close to that precipice. In Gaza, the tonnage of conventional explosives rivals small nuclear devices. In Ukraine, the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant has been a constant target and point of coercion. Furthermore, we have weaponized a new digital ideology: using artificial intelligence for mass surveillance and precision targeting, creating a chilling new paradigm of control.

Many dismiss this as not a “real” world war because we have been conditioned to believe World War III must be nuclear. But we have drifted terrifyingly close to that precipice. In Gaza, the tonnage of conventional explosives rivals small nuclear devices. In Ukraine, the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant has been a constant target and point of coercion. Furthermore, we have weaponized a new digital ideology: using artificial intelligence for mass surveillance and precision targeting, creating a chilling new paradigm of control.

So, where do we go from here? How do we change course?

The painful truth is that removing individual politicians is not enough. For every leader brought to justice, another stands ready, backed by corporate sponsors. The root of the perpetual war machine lies deeper. We must bring to justice the executives and corporations in the technology and defense sectors who lobby for conflict, market its tools, and profit from the bloodshed.

This is not a problem unique to the West; it is a global malignancy. We need an international movement to hold these war profiteers accountable and to secure financial restitution for their victims. Those who promote, enable, and supply weapons, knowing their profits are drenched in the blood of civilians, must face legal consequences.

This is why I am beginning a campaign focused on the top five technology companies and their executives whose platforms and tools have enabled the genocide in Gaza. We need to stop the profit motive of tech executives in creating these weapons. I am asking for your support to petition the Spanish government to investigate and prosecute these big tech entities for complicity in atrocity and crimes against humanity.

As I’ve detailed previously, Spain’s judiciary, with its principle of universal jurisdiction, presents the most viable path for such a landmark prosecution.

Join this effort. Let us target the engine of war, not just its agents. In holding the profiteers to account, we might finally build the foundation for a lasting peace.

Watch the Documentary film Forever Peace Now online!