The empire strikes back
For some, it’s liberation. For others, it’s a violation of international law. And yet others call it justice. But we should all be calling it what it is: empire being empire.
Wait. Let me rephrase that. It’s the latest dick move of an empire on life support, refusing to believe it’s gasping its way towards its inevitable descent into irrelevance. Someone, do the world a huge favor and euthanize this dying beast. Haven’t we had enough of its arrogance and greed, not to mention its delusions?
And its one central delusion? That it is so exceptional, it will never die.
Sure, sure. Tell that to the Romans. Or the Ottomans. Or the Dutch. The Spanish. The British. As the American academic, social critic, and feminist Camille Paglia noted, “The Earth is littered with the ruins of empires that believed they were eternal.”
Tell it to the Marines, literally. And to Delta Force, the elite United States Army unit that kidnapped the sitting president of a sovereign nation and transported him, handcuffed and blindfolded, to American soil to be arraigned and tried on specious charges of drug trafficking on behalf of a drug cartel that doesn’t exist—yes, the US Justice Department already admitted as much.
Flexing its proverbial muscles
America would like you to believe that it was flexing its muscles and reasserting its power while, of course, liberating an oppressed people from a tyrant with its invasion of Venezuela and abduction of Nicolas Maduro.
But the truth is, America is weak, fractured, broke, and increasingly senescent, which is perhaps the most dangerous state for an empire to be. If it truly were acting from a position of strength, with real geopolitical and economic leverage, it would not need to barge into another country uninvited to steal its oil.
The mad emperor himself, Trump, said that it was all about the oil. Restoring democracy could be a possible by-product of this otherwise textbook display of colonial resource grab and extraction. Venezuela, after all, is said to be sitting on the world’s largest proven reserves of oil, and America wants to get to the black gold before China and Russia do. That’s all there is to it. The rest is noise.
For if America controls the oil and its proxies control the shipping routes, then there may be a chance that it can rescue its diminished hegemony and restore the dominance of the equally diminished dollar.
Other countries are already bypassing the dollar completely and conducting trade in their own currencies. BRICS is already testing—albeit on a smaller scale, and with some success—a payment system that has nothing to do with the dollar. China is buying up as much physical gold as it can because it is losing trust in fiat currency, specifically the world’s reserve currency, the US dollar.
The world’s biggest bully
And so America, like every other empire that has never learned from history, is fighting the inevitable slide into insignificance the only way it knows how: by force and by being the world’s biggest bully. Bombs away, in other words.
But in doing so, however, it has assembled the most execrable cast of bad actors the world has ever seen:
* Donald Trump: A real-life emperor with no clothes—so vain, so greedy, but fortunately so candid that he lays the empire’s objectives so openly, there’s no need to dress them up in the guise of human rights or democracy.
He’s a president so thirsty for a midterm win, so desperate to cosplay commander-in-chief, and so terrified of the Epstein files and what they reveal of his true criminal and paedophilic nature that he pre-empted their release with his Operation Absolute Resolve.
* Nicolas Maduro: A despot in sweats and socks and rubber slides, insisting—very calmly at that—that he was a decent man who had been kidnapped and was innocent of all charges. You almost fall for his shtick.
But then again, if he were as bad as he’s been made out to be, wouldn’t he have tried to flee and protect his assets like dictators clinging to power the world over?
* Maria Corina Machado: The pick-me girl, so desperate for Trump to notice her and make her Venezuela’s new president that she offered him her Nobel Peace Prize; after all, he’s only bombed seven countries in his first year of office.
* Stephen Miller: The alleged power behind the throne, the mastermind of American bully tactics that have become foreign and domestic policy, the kid everyone knew was a little shit in school, only to grow up to live up to his inherent assholery in all its smug, racist, white supremacist evil ugliness.
Doesn’t realize that all that hate shows on his face and hairline. Had the unbelievable misfortune to marry someone who hates all the same things he does.
* Marco Rubio: The former never-Trumper turned snivelling sidekick.
* Pete Hegseth: The frat bro war freak who just wants to nuke ‘em all. Like Miller, they all believe it’s time for America to fight back because democracy is for pussies.
Make America great again…?
If you still believe America is the good guy, think again. Violence is the defining characteristic of empire, and by this metric, America is the evil empire.
The great Palestinian-American academic Edward Said so sagely observed:
“Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn’t trust the evidence of one’s eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest mission civilizatrice.”
And that, in a nutshell, is what empire is: the greatest grift of all.
