The US Empire Can Only Exist In A Continuous State Of Mass Military Violence
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
I shouldn’t be able to do this for a living. Criticizing the warmongering of a single power structure shouldn’t be anyone’s full-time job. No government should be murdering people so consistently and reliably that people can plan their whole lives around it.
Yet here we are. Not only are people like me able to focus on commentary about the mass military violence of the US and its satellite states as a full-time gig, but we usually find there’s too much to talk about from day to day.
Just today we’re getting reports that at least 40 people have been killed in an IDF massacre on a tented encampment in southern Gaza near Khan Younis, which Israel had previously designated as a humanitarian safe zone. There are videos of families digging frantically in the sand trying to rescue loved ones who were buried by the blast, which was reportedly so forceful that bodies are being found some thirty feet down.
Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp has taken to typing up daily updates on the documented Israeli massacres of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, often with dozens of victims added to the official death toll in a single day.
Kamala Harris has finally announced a foreign policy platform, and it contains nothing but a promise of more of the same. She promises to “ensure that the United States remains the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world,” to “make sure that America, not China, wins the competition for the 21st century,” to “strengthen, not abdicate, our global leadership,” to “stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself,” and to “protect U.S. forces and interests from Iran and Iran-backed terrorist groups,” and boasts that she “has worked with our allies to ensure NATO is stronger than ever” in the face of “Vladimir Putin’s brutal aggression.”
In other words, more unrelenting violence and militarism to ensure that the US empire continues dominating the planet. It’s not hard to see why Harris is winning endorsements from some of the worst warmongers on the planet.
Bloodthirsty empire manager Victoria Nuland is now openly admitting that the US sabotaged a peace deal in Ukraine in the early weeks of the war, saying in an interview that Washington pushed Kyiv to reject the deal because it “included limits on the precise kinds of weapons systems that Ukraine could have” if it were agreed to.
This is something people like myself used to get called Russian propagandists for saying happened, despite all the overwhelming evidence that it had.
The horrors in Ukraine are happening because the US-centralized power alliance refused easy off-ramp after easy off-ramp. This whole war could’ve easily been avoided, and it could have easily been ended shortly after it began. But they kept pushing on, because they wanted this war.
Bernie Sanders, the official face of progressivism in mainstream US politics, actually said the words “I applaud the Cheneys” during an appearance on NBC News’s “Meet the Press” in response to the endorsement of Kamala Harris by Dick and Liz Cheney.
There is no valid excuse for those words ever to come out of anyone’s face, much less from someone who people regard as the voice of reason and compassion on Capitol Hill. When your progressive hero starts singing the praises of a monster like Cheney, it’s time to find different heroes.
These are just a few of the things happening right now that I could easily have written entire essays on.
I always run into people who act like my constantly criticizing US foreign policy day after day as a full-time gig is strange and suspicious, and it absolutely is — just not for the reasons they think. They think it’s strange and suspicious because I must be getting paid by some subversive foreign government, since nobody could possibly want to spend their time criticizing the western power structure we live under otherwise. They believe this because they’ve been indoctrinated from birth into supporting the agendas and information interests of the US-centralized empire by the imperial propaganda machine which normalizes and justifies the criminality of our rulers, and trains them to view any information which conflicts with this mainstream worldview as sinister and suspicious.
In reality, it’s strange and suspicious that I can spend my life criticizing the depravity of the empire because the empire is so reliably depraved. It’s a job that shouldn’t exist, whose existence tells you that something freakish is happening that falls far outside of what you’d expect for a normal and healthy society — like if I told you I work as a vampire hunter or something. The very fact that someone can become a crowd-funded writer doing commentary on the mass military violence of one particular power structure tells you that something has gone very wrong with this world.
But there are plenty of others like me. And for every person there is making a living from opposing US warmongering, there are thousands making a living from facilitating it. In the military. In the arms industry. In think tanks. In the media. In politics. In government agencies. There is much, much more money to be made from war than from peace. That’s one of the main reasons the capitalist empire we live under exists in a constant state of mass military violence. Endless violence and the threat thereof is the glue which holds the empire together.
In a healthy world, none of these jobs would exist — people working for peace or people working for war. Peace would just be the natural order of things.
But until that healthy world has emerged, we fight on. Day after day after day after day, for however long such work is necessary.
_________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
Featured image via Adobe Stock.
