The Fight Against Imperialism Is A Fight Against Human Evil

As the American empire collapses, and panicked elites resort to irrational war runups that threaten to create nuclear war, we survey the failures that got us to this point. These are the failures that the Iraq War architect Elliot Cohen naturally didn’t acknowledge in his article in The Atlantic this year, titled How Trump Is Ending the American Era. The piece provides comfort for Cohen’s fellow imperialist political elites, making excuses for “what turned out to be” the false WMD reports behind our blunders in Iraq. But those in the global underclass have been able to get a far better understanding of the situation.

The experience of this underclass was recently illustrated with the revelation that, following the invasion and destabilization of Libya in 2011, a mass African slave trade emerged. The images from this beat us over with ruminations from the past: black slaves tied up in chains, underfed and coerced like cattle. Our leaders haven’t been directly behind these atrocities, but their actions made them possible.

Five years ago French president Nicolas Sarkozy planned a NATO regime change invasion in Libya, disguised as a “humanitarian intervention,” so that Africa’s gold and oil interests would be secured. Mainly at the request of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Obama agreed to send U.S. forces into the operation, leaving Libya a failed state that became a haven for jihadists and slave traders.

Hillary Clinton’s reaction to this chaos she’d helped unleash was the famous “we came, we saw, he died” remark. Her ego-stroking imitation of Julius Caesar
reflects the similarly hubristic attitudes of American empire’s other recent war architects. The pointless and genocidal “War on Terror” was declared by George W. Bush with pompous vows to “rid the world of evil-doers.” Neoconservatism’s pathology of wanting to militarily control the world, and to profit from the slaughter, has been revealed in remarks like Hillary Clinton’s “It’s time for the United States to start thinking of Iraq as a business opportunity.” Or, even more sociopathically, in Thomas Friedman’s “The hidden hand of the market will never work without the hidden fist—McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15.”

When Alexander the Great died at 32 after a legendary career of expanding the Macedonian empire, his successors divided up the kingdom among themselves, putting an end to the nation’s supposedly unassailable power. Clinton and her kind fit Alexander’s role. The unwieldy global power structure they created is punctured and bleeding quickly, and the Trump presidency they’re responsible for is accelerating this collapse. The Pentagon itself reports the American empire is in rapid decline, exacerbated by the unhinged and fantasy-based threats Trump and his aides make against countries like North Korea.

Whether America splinters like Macedon did, or turns into a failed state amid economic and ecological breakdown, or is ruined in a nuclear war, our crisis will come from the idiocy, selfishness, and heartlessness that our imperialist stage was defined by. The interventionists of recent decades have not just profited from war but worked to commodify it; in 2002 a Bush aide strategized about the best time of year to start the Iraq War runup, saying “you don’t introduce new products in August.” 

Lies and tribalist vanity were used to sell this product of war. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality,” wrote an anonymous Bush aide as the administration was effectively keeping the WMD lies and torture activities out of its supporters’ minds. The empire’s ability to revise reality has grown since then with the legalization of covert CIA media psyops, the hyper-consolidation of media, and the creation of an establishment liberal media echo chamber which mirrors that of the Right. 

Neoconservative propagandists have used this in recent years to conceal the Obama administration’s wars from many Democrat voters, promote elaborate war psyopsagainst Syria and Russia, and restart McCarthyism. All this has been based in the superficial deification of political leaders and brands-like the War on Terror’s nationalistic symbols and the standards for loyalty to the Democratic Party-and the concealing of facts, illustrated in the statement from a DNC official last year about the need to “keep the people ignorant.”

The perpetrators of this imperial suicide mostly regret nothing. Hillary Clinton last defended her Libya decision by saying “We did not lose a single American in that action.” Dick Cheney has said he’d authorize torture again “in a minute.” Henry Kissinger, who mentored Clinton throughout her foreign policy career, has no regrets either. As they enjoy the great wealth and stature they’ve gotten from their exploits, we confront an era that reflects the emptiness of their cause.

The empire may be ending, but the ruling oligarchs are consolidating and purifying their operations in the homeland. A government center for purging “fake news” has been set up in the U.S, and will soon have a similar partner throughout the EU countries. The social media companies are attacking and purging dissenting voices. An increasingly militarized and severe law enforcement system is ready to crush rebellion more directly. As our security centers have swelled into a fourth branch of government and the all-intrusive surveillance state has been fulfilled, corporations and the super rich have come into open partnership with our intelligence community. 

Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world and owner of the Washington Post, is colluding with them the most right now. Recent behavior from Bezos and others has lead the columnist Caitlin Johnstone to believe they’re “prepping for a tech explosion, monetary revolutions, vast shifts in the global economy and the end of oil.”

George Orwell’s predictions are coming true, even for the three separate but similar totalitarian mega-nations that make up the globe in 1984. One of these nations consists of the NATO and American-allied countries, located in North America, much of South America, some of Africa, most of Europe, much of Southeast Asia and Oceania, then India, Australia, New Zealand, Israel and Saudi Arabia. Another one is the smaller but currently growing Chinese empire. The other is Russia. The remaining lands in the Middle East and Africa are used for waging controlled, endless wars which keep proletarians in poverty and enrich the oil and weapons industries.

All three of these territories are under authoritarian and corporate capitalist control. Life for most people in each of them is roughly the same hollow, propaganda-saturated economic enslavement. The ideology of the ruling class in each of them, essentially identical, is presented under varying names, like “capitalism” in America and “democratic centralism” in China. The three are intermittently at war and in alliance with each other, with the acknowledgement of these change-ups being forbidden. This was shown last month when war pundit Bill Maher flatly lied that “what really happened was we stopped fighting the Cold War, but the Russians never did.”

As the three mega-states fortify their militaries, the global wealth divide becomes starkly defined, and authoritarian far-right politics infect most industrial countries, the future is predictable. This is the vision of Donald Rumsfeld’s assistant Larry Di Rita, who explained at one point during the Iraq invasion: “We’re going to get better over time. The future if war is that these things are going to be much more of a continuum…this is the future of the world we’re in at the moment. We’ll get better as we do it more often.”

This result of the work by Clinton, Kissinger and others fulfills the poem about what’s happened around the shrine to King Ozymandias: “Nothing beside remains: round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away.” 

The failed fight against American imperialism precluded what might emerge in the empire’s ruins, which is an effort to reorder humanity not around money and weapons, but around what makes us human. Westerners like Hillary Clinton have been creating atrocities like the Libya slave trade for five hundred years, and there will always be people like Clinton. But there will also always be people who can’t accept injustice and oppression. Seek out those people. Continue fighting fascism. Keep faith in humanity. I’ll do my best to help people in doing this.