The past year has shown that a lot of anti-imperialists tend to exaggerate the strength of the US empire’s enemies.
After October 7 many said the attack would unify the Axis of Resistance against Israel and the Zionist entity would fall in short order, but that unified confrontation never materialized because Iran wasn’t willing to take on an entire global empire backed only by a few small militant factions scattered around west Asia.
Now Syria has been captured, Hezbollah is greatly weakened, Gaza is rubble, and the West Bank is primed for annexation.
The fact of the matter is that the empire has been able to rule the world in the way that it has for a reason. It’s extremely powerful, and its ruthless methods of coercion, control and manipulation are very effective.
I point this out not to demean the efforts of those who try to resist it, but to tell westerners that we can’t expect the resistance fighters of the global south to fight all our battles for us. There can be a temptation to sit back and cheerlead for this or that state or militant group and say they’re going to bring the empire to its knees, but really it isn’t their responsibility to end the western empire. It’s ours.
Hamas, Hezbollah, Ansar Allah, and the various militias in the region are relatively small groups with relatively limited resources and capabilities. Iran, Russia and China have their own concerns and are primarily focused on surviving the empire’s aggressions with their own national sovereignty intact. It is very possible that the rise of China will end up dissolving the US empire’s stranglehold on our planet, but this could take a long time.
Empires always fall, but there is no law inscribed upon the fabric of the universe which says the end of this particular empire must necessarily come soon. It could easily take a century or more if we don’t nuke ourselves in the meantime, and if the looming environmental disasters on the horizon don’t destroy human civilization first.
This is not an expression of pessimism but a call to focus. It’s not fair for us to shirk off the responsibility of ending the western empire onto foreigners in struggling nations who all have a lot more problems than we do. It is fully within our capability to awaken a revolutionary zeitgeist within our society so that we can use the power of our vast numbers to take down this machine and create a better world.
We can begin working toward this awakening today. Doing everything we can to help people see the unacceptable nature of the empire and its abuses, not just with their minds but with their hearts as well. We have a historically unprecedented ability to circulate ideas, information and footage. Media has never in history been this democratized. We are living in unprecedented times, which means unprecedented developments are possible.
We vastly outnumber our rulers. They rule solely by our consent. The empire requires not only our docility and obedience but our labor and our continued purchasing behavior as well. If enough of us refuse to consent to giving them any of these things, we can force the end of our corrupt, murderous governments and systems, and replace them with something far healthier.
Everything in our civilization is geared toward making us forget that we can do this at any time. Everything about our civilization is designed to eclipse the possibility of real revolution from our consciousness. Our politics. Our schooling. Our news media. Our entertainment. Our mainstream culture. It’s all designed to trick us into ignoring the colossal elephant in the room that we don’t actually need to put up with the way things are if we don’t want to.
It is our responsibility to help our fellow westerners notice the elephant, using every means at our disposal. Help everyone around us see how fucked things are, how fucked over we’re all being by allowing things to continue in this way, and how we don’t need to allow it to.
The empire of lies is built upon a closed set of eyelids. Once those eyes snap open, the whole thing comes tumbling down.
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Featured image: Peace protest at the White House – Photo credit: iacenter.org
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