Waterloo. Stalingrad. Egomaniacal imperialists think they can conquer the world. But they can’t–at least not forever. So maybe I’ve been looking at this all wrong. Well, not *all* wrong, but from too dark a place. Until now it has been tempting to see the US and its imperial death merchants as being on a roll, a sort of superhuman circus performer who can somehow juggle chainsaws without cutting his own balls off. Look at them go! Full Spectrum Dominance Death Star firing on all cylinders–we can overthrow governments in Syria, Venezuela, and Ukraine at the same time, without breaking a sweat. After all, we didn’t see them sweat much when they took out Guatemala, Chile, Iran, Dominican Republic, Honduras, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Libya, Congo, Dominican Republic… well, you get the picture. Instead of feeling meek and overwhelmed, it may be instructive to see them failing and flailing on all three current fronts. The schoolyard bully may be running out of punches. In the same way those speaking in public are advised to calm their nerves by imagining their audience naked, maybe it would behoove us to think of empire not as an invincible machine, like Skynet, but rather more like Pinky and the Brain, a devious but hapless duo whose exploits are doomed to fail: Same thing we do every night, Pinky–try to take over the WORLD!
This is not to underplay the massive forces arrayed against humanity, nor the insane willingness of the women and men with their itchy fingers on the trigger to rain death upon the peoples of the world as casually as if they were ordering a sandwich. And perhaps it would be wiser to wait on this assessment. At this writing rumors are flying that NATO and its US overlords are planning a desperate, Blackwater-like attack on Donetsk, to provoke the Russians into a wider war, an insane and needless escalation. They are capable of anything. But no matter what happens in the next days or weeks, the writing is on the wall.
I mean look at them flail, beating their chests, nostrils flaring, teeth bared, yet with perfectly coiffed hair hiding perfectly empty rhetoric and even emptier threats. Despite how scary these men are, and notwithstanding the horror they are capable of unleashing, it is a very good thing that their hypocrisy and their true agenda are laid bare. To the people outside the bubble of the west, they look for all the world like the lunatic zealots they are, bent on world domination with only the most thinly disguised motives. Increasingly, it is to be hoped, those of us inside the bubble who have been speaking out will be seen to have been telling the truth, canaries in a coal mine, as it were.
But for the rest of the world, the jig is up. No one with any sense buys the newest color revolution scheme, and they need not be swayed by timeworn, photoshopped images of people power. From this moment on there will be no daylight whatsoever between Russia and China on issues of any strategic importance, with the others in the BRICS coalition and across the Global South glad for this protection. Their very survival is at stake, and they know it. In response to US and EU threats to impose financial punishment on Russia, China has indicated that, it may need to call in U.S. debt obligations, and from now on may require gold instead of the Fed’s “debt tenders” or worthless dollars based on nothing but trust and the US government’s own say-so. Other reports seem to suggest that China has convinced Turkey not to allow NATO ships through the Bosphorous. Sometimes what a bully needs is just to be punched in the face–hard–once and for all, before the rest of his terrified victims gang up and close in for the kill.
This may just wind up to be one CIA coup too many, and the civilized world will respond with increasing unity and awareness that the only enemy left is one that faces us all–and must be stopped before they destroy the world. Sure, there will still be color revolutions, Arab Stings and faux-populist fronts, movements either hijacked, co-opted or fabricated from whole cloth by the demons of the CIA and the national security state. And there will be no shortage of useful idiots to cheerlead the latest “revolution,” full of vim and vigor about deposing ‘tyrants,’ ‘despots’ and ‘dictators,’ while mounting not a single breath of effective resistance at home and continuing to underwrite the psychopaths in charge with their taxes and their moral support. The usual, but dwindling coalition of liberals, ‘human rights’ agencies, and so-called leftists will dutifully chime in, punctuated by the chorus of idiot tweets from clueless Hollywood celebs. But many more may see with increasing clarity what has been right before our eyes this whole time.
The great irony is that the core imperialist countries allow no such freedom within their own borders, and even the slightest whisper of dissent which actually threatens the status quo is met with alarming and immediate violence. Moreover, the most restive and potentially troublesome elements of their populations are preselected for extreme prejudice. These communities are always suspect and an intrinsic threat to the established order, and so they are targeted, tracked, stalked and killed with impunity, not only by agents of the state and its police, but increasingly by fascist vigilantes acting on their own. This is, in a very real sense, the anglo/white axis that has plagued the world for centuries–basically white people against the rest of humanity, not to put too fine a point on it.
The naked truth is that slavery ain’t what it used to be, to coin a phrase, and the benefits of servitude have slowed to a trickle [“Sanitation, medicine, education…” to quote the old Monty Python gag]. The bloom is off the rose in the whole Euro project. Easy visas and greener grass are great in theory, but as time marches on, the concept of consumerist freedom and the entire range of western ‘values’ begins to look like another load of shit to beguile the masses. Instead, the reality is starting to sink in that, on the contrary, IMF slavery offers a different constellation of woes: unpayable debt, crippling austerity, endless wars and second class citizenship in one’s own country–or status of hated immigrant in the Zone itself. Gee, thanks. Where do we sign up?
By contrast, the fascist junta in Kiev has signaled that it will do absolutely anything the IMF asks, selling its people out to the slavery it pretends to have been opposing. It’s akin to saying, “It is a bit uncomfortable to have to roast all our newborn babies on a spit, but hey–if that’s what it takes to get a loan, what choice do we have? Beggars can’t be choosers.” Idiots–rats swimming to a sinking ship. So let them. Western Ukraine is completely screwed: the EU and IMF want nothing less than to strip them to the bone. NATO wants only to antagonize Russia. If the east can successfully secede with as little violence as possible, it may turn out that empire has shot itself in the foot once again, only the gangrene from Syria is spreading, and sepsis is beginning to set in.
I may yet, of course, be proven disastrously wrong. The world over, and not just in the spheres under direct control of the west and its agents, people’s minds are as colonized as their cultures and economies. The death throes of empire may just be a prelude to a new and more virulent strain of global fascism with the gloves off, a sort of dystopia that makes Sarah Connor’s nuclear playground vision of the future seem tame by comparison. People’s ability to stand up and fight back depends on how confident they feel, and on how secure they are in the belief that others will stand up with them. A few voices crying in the wilderness just makes us look like the crazy ones. There are, however, the systemic realities I refer to above, which are grinding ever closer to an inevitable reckoning whether the people realize it or not.
And the old adages still ring true, with the same imagery and same tone. From the Latin American struggle, ‘pueden cortar las flores, pero no pueden parar la primavera.’ From the Irish struggle, “When the Law can keep the blades of grass from growing as they grow/ And when the leaves in summertime their verdure dare not show/ Then I will change the colour that I wear in my corbeen/ But ’til that day, please God, I’ll stick to Wearing of the Green.” Let’s hope more of us are awake for the epilogue.