Gaza is only the start. The new world order is one where the weak are obliterated by the strong, the rule of law does not exist, genocide is an instrument of control and barbarism is triumphant.

Mar 15, 2026

The war on Iran and the obliteration of Gaza is the beginning. Welcome to the new world order. The age of technologically-advanced barbarism. There are no rules for the strong, only for the weak. Oppose the strong, refuse to bow to its capricious demands and you are showered with missiles and bombs.

Hospitals, elementary schools, universities and apartment complexes are reduced to rubble. Doctors, students, journalists, poets, writers, scientists, artists and political leaders — including the heads of negotiating teams — are murdered in the tens of thousands by missiles and killer drones.

Resources – as the Venezuelans know – are openly stolen. Food, water and medicine, as in Palestine, are weaponized.

Let them eat dirt.

International bodies such as the United Nations are pantomime, useless appendages of another age. The sanctity of individual rights, open borders and international law have vanished. The most depraved leaders of human history, those who reduced cities to ashes, herded captive populations to execution sites and littered lands they occupied with mass graves and corpses, have returned with a vengeance.

They spew the same hypermasculine tropes. They spew the same vile, racist cant. They spew the same Manichaean vision of good and evil, black and white. They spew the same infantile language of total dominance and unrestrained violence.

Killer clowns. Buffoons. Idiots. They have seized the levers of power to carry out their demented and cartoonish visions as they pillage the state for their own enrichment.

“After witnessing savage mass murder over several months, with the knowledge that it was conceived, executed and endorsed by people much like themselves, who presented it as a collective necessity, legitimate and even humane, millions now feel less at home in the world,” writes Pankaj Mishra in “The World After Gaza.” “The shock of this renewed exposure to a peculiarly modern evil – the evil done in the pre-modern era only by psychopathic individuals and unleashed in the last century by rulers and citizens of rich and supposedly civilized societies – cannot be overstated. Nor can the moral abyss we confront.”

The subjugated are property, commodities to exploit for profit or pleasure. The Epstein Files expose the sickness and heartlessness of the ruling class. Liberals. Conservatives. University presidents. Academics. Philanthropists. Wall Street titans. Celebrities. Democrats. Republicans.

They wallow in unbridled hedonism. They go to private schools and have private health care. They are cocooned in self-referential bubbles by sycophants, publicists, financial advisers, lawyers, servants, chauffeurs, self-help gurus, plastic surgeons and personal trainers. They reside in heavily guarded estates and vacation on private islands. They travel on private jets and gargantuan yachts. They exist in another reality, what the Wall Street Journal reporter Robert Frank dubs the world of “Richistan,” a world of private Xanadus where they hold Nero-like bacchanalias, make their perfidious deals, amass their billions and cast aside those they use, including children, as if they are refuse. No one in this magic circle is accountable. No sin too depraved. They are human parasites. They disembowel the state for personal profit. They terrorize the “lesser breeds of the earth.” They shut down the last, anemic vestiges of our open society.

“There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life,” as George Orwell writes in “1984.” “All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always— do not forget this, Winston— always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever.”

The law, despite a few valiant efforts by a handful of judges — who will soon be purged — is an instrument of repression. The judiciary exists to stage show trials. I spent a lot of time in the London courts covering the Dickensian farce during the persecution of Julian Assange. A Lubyanka-on-the-Thames. Our courts are no better. Our Department of Justice is a vengeance machine.

Masked, armed goons flood the streets of the United States and murder civilians, including citizens. The ruling mandarins are spending billions to convert warehouses into detention centers and concentration camps. They insist they will only house the undocumented, the criminals, but our global ruling class lies like it breathes. In their eyes, we are vermin, either blindly and unquestionably obedient or criminals. There is nothing in between.

These concentration camps, where there is no due process and people are disappeared, are designed for us. And by us, I mean the citizens of this dead republic. Yet we watch, stupefied, disbelieving, passively waiting for our own enslavement.

It won’t be long.

The savagery in Iran, Lebanon and Gaza is the same savagery we face at home. Those carrying out the genocide, mass slaughter and unprovoked war on Iran are the same people dismantling our democratic institutions.

The social anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls what is happening “a vast worldwide Malthusian correction” that is “geared to preparing the world for the winners of globalization, minus the inconvenient noise of its losers.”

Oh, the critics say, don’t be so bleak. Don’t be so negative. Where is the hope? Really, it’s not that bad.

If you believe this you are part of the problem, an unwitting cog in the machinery of our rapidly consolidating fascist state.

Reality will eventually implode these “hopeful” fantasies, but by then it will be too late.

True despair is not a result of accurately reading reality. True despair comes from surrendering, either through fantasy or apathy, to malignant power. True despair is powerlessness. And resistance, meaningful resistance, even if it is almost certainly doomed, is empowerment. It confers self-worth. It confers dignity. It confers agency. It is the only action that allows us to use the word hope.

The Iranians, Lebanese and Palestinians know there is no appeasing these monsters. The global elites believe nothing. They feel nothing. They cannot be trusted. They exhibit the core traits of all psychopaths — superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance, a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception, manipulation and the inability to feel remorse or guilt. They disdain as weakness the virtues of empathy, honesty, compassion and self-sacrifice. They live by the creed of Me. Me. Me.

“The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane,” Eric Fromm writes in “The Sane Society.”

We have witnessed evil for nearly three years in Gaza. We watch it now in Lebanon and Iran. We see this evil excused or masked by political leaders and the media.

The New York Times, in a page out of Orwell, sent an internal memo telling reporters and editors to eschew the terms “refugee camps, “occupied territory,” “ethnic cleansing” and, of course, “genocide” when writing about Gaza. Those who name and denounce this evil are smeared, blacklisted and purged from university campuses and the public sphere. They are arrested and deported. A deadening silence is descending upon us, the silence of all authoritarian states. Fail to do your duty, fail to cheerlead the war on Iran, and see your broadcasting license revoked, as the Chair of the F.C.C. Brendan Carr has proposed.

We have enemies. They are not in Palestine. They are not in Lebanon. They are not in Iran. They are here. Among us. They dictate our lives. They are traitors to our ideals. They are traitors to our country. They envision a world of slaves and masters. Gaza is only the start. There are no internal mechanisms for reform. We can obstruct or surrender.

Those are the only choices left.

SOURCE: https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-world-according-to-gaza

The post The World According to Gaza- Chris Hedges appeared first on Void Network.

by CrimethInc

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The speed with which the Taliban have recaptured Afghanistan ahead of the United States pullout illustrates how fragile the hegemony of the US empire is: how much force it takes to maintain it and how quickly everything can change when that force is withdrawn. It offers a glimpse into a possible post-imperial future—though hardly a promising one. How did the occupation impact the people of Afghanistan? Why were the Taliban able to regain so much territory so quickly? What do the US withdrawal and its consequences tell us about the future and how we might prepare for it?

The War on Terror, like the Cold War before it, has forced whole populations to choose between mutually undesirable binaries, making it difficult to imagine any alternative to the choice between global capitalist empires and homegrown authoritarianism. In the long run, whatever it promises, colonial militarism can’t control nationalism, fascism, or fundamentalism—it only gives them a justification to recruit. The question is how to nurture global grassroots networks that could create a real alternative.

In the following analysis, a veteran of the US occupation of Afghanistan discusses this defeat for the US imperial project—framing the Taliban, the occupation, and its consequences in the context of a worldwide wave of fascism and fundamentalism that is also gaining ground in the United States.

The speed with which the Taliban have recaptured Afghanistan ahead of the United States pullout illustrates how fragile the hegemony of the US empire is: how much force it takes to maintain it and how quickly everything can change when that force is withdrawn. It offers a glimpse into a possible post-imperial future—though hardly a promising one. How did the occupation impact the people of Afghanistan? Why were the Taliban able to regain so much territory so quickly? What do the US withdrawal and its consequences tell us about the future and how we might prepare for it?

The War on Terror, like the Cold War before it, has forced whole populations to choose between mutually undesirable binaries, making it difficult to imagine any alternative to the choice between global capitalist empires and homegrown authoritarianism. In the long run, whatever it promises, colonial militarism can’t control nationalism, fascism, or fundamentalism—it only gives them a justification to recruit. The question is how to nurture global grassroots networks that could create a real alternative.

In the following analysis, a veteran of the US occupation of Afghanistan discusses this defeat for the US imperial project—framing the Taliban, the occupation, and its consequences in the context of a worldwide wave of fascism and fundamentalism that is also gaining ground in the United States.

The Taliban Victory in a Global Context

As I write this, the Taliban have taken control of Kabul and therefore of the entire country of Afghanistan. The US-backed president Ashraf Ghani has fled to Tajikistan, while Afghan Army members flee to neighboring countries or surrender to the Taliban militants. Just days ago, US Intelligence officials were predicting it would be at least 30 days before the fall of Kabul, as President Biden deployed 5000 US troops to protect the evacuation of the US embassy and personnel. Now the State Department is urging remaining US citizens to shelter in place, not to dash to the Kabul Airport for emergency evacuation. As the smoke from burning classified documents and gunfire spreads a haze over the horizon of Kabul, everyone is thinking about the fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese Army and National Liberation Front.

I cannot celebrate the victory of the Taliban. While they have been fighting an imperialist, capitalist occupation, they represent the worst of religious fundamentalism, patriarchy, and hierarchy. Still, it is striking to see the curtain pulled back so poignantly, revealing American military exceptionalism for what it is. Twenty years of wasted money, youth, and blood.

I am a veteran of the occupation of Afghanistan. Everything I am about to tell you is derived from my firsthand experience serving the empire as a foot soldier for ten years.

I joined for all the reasons you’ve seen in recruitment ads. As an intelligence analyst and a noncommissioned officer, I managed and led teams, squads, and units of soldiers. On the basis of my experience with aerial surveillance and reconnaissance, I was recruited to join a defense contracting company. The defense companies I worked for included L3, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin. I trained units in the US and Afghanistan for over three years and deployed to Afghanistan three times for those companies. I also deployed to Afghanistan as part of the operations team for a unit managing one of the largest bases in southern Afghanistan.

Based on what I saw, US counterterrorism operations are chiefly about creating markets for US military technologies and products and securing resources for the US empire. For 20 years, we propped up local and regional warlords, giving them weapons, money, and arms so they wouldn’t attack our forces. We green-lit their death squads and called them the Afghan Local Police. Working at senior-echelon levels, I watched both ranking officers and junior soldiers scramble to pad their résumés in hopes of becoming mercenaries for the companies and agencies that were actually running the show. Generals made careers and went on to be employed by those companies or the Department of Defense/Intelligence Community. From Syria and Iraq to Yemen and all across Africa, throughout our 800 military bases, I do not know of a single military mission that is chiefly focused on creating peace and stability.

I participated in this for far too long—and I wish to be accountable, though I know there is no way to truly make amends.

It took the death of one my soldiers to put it all into perspective. Afterwards, I began to suffer from effects of CPTSD [Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder]. The classic characteristics: drinking and drug use, the loss of relationships, depression, suicidal tendencies. I also began to reach out for help. I joined Iraq Veterans Against the War and connected with current and former service members fighting US imperialism. With information from the GI Rights Hotline, I was able to leave the Army Reserves. I began a process of politicization in which I learned about militarism, imperialism, colonialism, and white supremacy.

Now that the occupation has ended, an entire generation of US military veterans will be forced to question what it was all for. All I can do is ask why it took them so long to arrive at that question. It was always evident, all around us.

Throughout my time in Afghanistan, we never controlled territory outside of our bases and outposts—and we often found the enemy inside of our own walls. The Taliban ran a successful counter-insurgency for twenty years. They maintained a shadow government, collected taxes, settled social, cultural, and economic disputes, and maneuvered and captured territory, biding their time all the while.

Why was the Taliban able to wait out the occupation and recapture power so easily?

The Taliban benefitted from the tribal and ethnic structures of Afghanistan, a complex web of allegiances and social and cultural bonds that US/NATO forces were never entirely able to understand. Afghanistan, like other nation-states of the former British Empire, was created without consideration of ethnic and religious demographics. The result was a population comprised of Pashtus, Tajiks, Hazara, Uzbek, Aimak, Turkman, and Baloch—groups with a wide range of cultures and practices. Some found it easy to ally with NATO, while others were adamantly opposed.

The Taliban were almost entirely Pashtu—the dominant ethnic group of Afghanistan, with 40 to 50% of the population. The Pashtu people exist on either side of Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan and along the southern portion of the country. Their social connections and traditions extend beyond the country’s colonial borders, making it easy for them to move between safe havens in Pakistan, exploiting a gap in NATO military control.

When I think over the many moments that illustrated why the war was useless, I recall my time at Kandahar Airfield, a base housing least 22,000 soldiers, contractors, and civilians. There, I learned that the Taliban Shadow District Commander was the brother-in-law of the sitting Afghan Air Force general. In view of the importance of tribal and familial relationships in Pashtu culture, it was obvious that the general’s allegiances to the NATO-backed government would never take precedence over this relationship. The connections between those two warlords, even if they were formally considered enemy combatants, ensured that neither would seek to defeat the other. I encountered this sort of interconnection between supposed enemies multiple times, from my interactions with everyday citizens all the way up to the then-sitting Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

The Taliban also provided for people. The legitimacy of the Taliban is rooted in their ability to provide protection and religious guidance, predating the US invasion by years. Their mullahs settled social, cultural, and economic disputes in the areas under their control. They collected taxes and controlled agriculture throughout the war. They also carried out acts of extreme violence, which is how they gained footholds in territories they hadn’t controlled before the war.

The US occupation failed to diminish Taliban resistance for twenty years because there was never a time at which the majority of the population considered the occupying forces legitimate. Bombs and bullets alone are not capable of winning a war against a determined population. By contrast, the US-backed government and military were utterly self-interested and corrupt. Being motivated chiefly by personal gain, NATO forces fought their battles around metrics—they were more concerned about numbers of projects, of casualties, about money spent or money saved. Spending time in the country in relatively short-term deployment rotations, they were never able to build trust or respect. New units and new people were constantly showing up with no idea where they were or what had been done before. This lack of respect was so essential to the insurgency that during a 2012 deployment, insider attacks (attacks by Afghan Government Forces against NATO Forces) represented over 14% of the total casualties.

In the end, the Taliban were able to take control because they understood that the essential thing to winning a struggle against colonial occupation is that you have to survive a war of attrition. For twenty years, demonstrating the ineffectiveness of a corrupt NATO-backed government, they maintained the normative and hierarchal systems of control that they had established before the US invasion.

But the fundamentalism of the Taliban was not essential to their success. Empires crumble from their extremities inward: the US withdrawal from Afghanistan is part of a larger process in which US geopolitical influence is eroding around the world. The Chinese state may gain power in the region; we may see escalating power struggles between India and Pakistan. The question is what will come next—in Afghanistan and around the world.

At this moment in history, in the core of the American empire, I see a rising conservative movement with many ideas and policies that reflect the same fundamentalism, patriarchy, and hierarchy that characterize the Taliban. The opinions I’ve seen expressed by the right wing regarding women’s bodies, LGBTQIA+ communities, migrants, and anyone deemed outsiders line up with the violent worldview justified by the religious tenets of the Taliban.

In the US, the authoritarian right is spreading a myth of shame around the American male—a mythology about replacement, feminization, defeat, a loss of control and power. They have been developing this mythology for years, and the defeat in Afghanistan will only add fuel to the fire. The violence and hatred we have seen in the streets through years of fascist mobilizations is the direct consequence of a nation that has glorified the lies of a losing war. “Patriots” and Proud Boys who wear Right Wing Death Squad patches are not far removed from the death squads of Taliban fundamentalism.

I have seen liberals fall in step with this same imperial war machine. As far as their ideas go about militarism and police, they line up side by side with the fascist right—and regardless of their progressivism, they have done nothing to bring about real safety for our communities. It is instructive that two Republican and two Democratic presidents oversaw this war. One administration after another has expanded the power of the executive branch, while the defense and security budgets of the past two decades have bled our communities dry.

The US has spent trillions of dollars on weapons. Many of these have ended up in the hands of the Taliban and ISIS; others have been brought back and deployed against communities in North America, especially against Black and Brown and Indigenous people. The proletarians who torched police stations and fought the street battles of a not-so-distant uprising have found themselves up against the same forces, strategies, tactics, and mindsets that were developed to police Afghanistan.

For a full generation now, the Global War on Terrorism that started in Afghanistan has been both exploited and commodified. People who never even participated in the conflict have purchased branded materials in order to LARP out their warrior culture fever dreams. An entire sector of the population has internalized the toxic male death cult of patriotism and nationalism. Now that façade has been stripped bare and I am watching as this generation’s identity—built around their proximity and participation in the war—crumbles around them. Liberals will inevitably blame conservatives and vice versa, while the process of political polarization intensifies and both sides surrender their futures to differing brands of authoritarianism in hopes of maintaining the illusion of stability.

If the victory of the Taliban demonstrates anything, it is that the American empire is a stack of cards waiting to fall. It is capable of extreme violence, of killing in the most technologically advanced ways known to humanity. It is capable of extreme cruelty. But it is a paper tiger nonetheless, unable to conquer people’s hearts and minds, regardless of the intensity of the intervention or the length of the occupation.

Turtle Island has seen over 500 years of resistance to occupation, and regardless of how many more years lay before us, it should be clear that we will also win. The fallout from Afghanistan will not just be the defeat of a corrupt and unwanted puppet regime—it will reverberate in many areas of this crumbling empire for years to come.

An entire generation of combat-experienced individuals have learned the hard way that our participation in imperialist rule was based on fallacies. We have already begun to invest our knowledge and experiences back into communities focused on actual liberation.

But what will come next? If the victory of the Taliban in Afghanistan is any indication, what succeeds the US empire may be oppressive fundamentalism or nationalism. We should ask how we could go about fighting the reigning order in such a way that it will not be replaced by the equivalent of the Taliban when it collapses elsewhere.

The enemies of our communities and of the futures that we desire have also absorbed disgruntled and disaffected veterans of the occupation. Their anger, rooted in the aforementioned shame, expresses itself in violence rather than solidarity. They have already attempted a coup for the sake of their authoritarian vision. The events in Afghanistan will motivate them further. We can expect to see former soldiers, special forces operators, and mercenaries mobilizing against their perceived enemies and carrying out individual acts of terrorism. That is what we are up against.

Climate change, political polarization, economic crisis, the crumbling of the American empire, and simmering social unrest all stand before us as not individual phenomena, but as a single challenge comprised of interconnected disasters. We can draw inspiration from the defeats of our adversaries in the US government and learn from the successes of those who resist them everywhere while maintaining a permanent opposition to all forms of oppression. My heart pours out for the Afghan people who have suffered the traumas of war for generations now. We are talking about the legacy of a land and a diverse population of people that have repeatedly beaten the most powerful empires in the history of the world. I hope that they find the strength to carry on and, ultimately, to achieve real liberation, real safety. I hope that those of us here in the US, understanding ourselves as a part of an international movement, find the strength to do whatever it takes in the heart of this evil empire to build a new world in the ruins of the old.

Now is the time to listen to the Afghan people, to support refugees, to support aid organizations, and to rail against those responsible for the catastrophe of the past twenty years—to open our hearts to new possibilities and new potential accomplices—to develop the skills and mindsets that will keep us safe as we go forward into the unknown.

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If you or your family members are currently serving in the US military, please contact the GI Rights Hotline at 1-877-447-4487 or just go AWOL. There is no need to stay in the service of a violent front for weapons and defense corporations. There’s no reason to die for their benefit, and there’s absolutely no reason to do to the poor of the world what we’ve just spent the past two decades doing to the people of Afghanistan.

The post Afghanistan: The Taliban Victory in a Global Context appeared first on Void Network.

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Witnessing the assault on the Capitol, it may seem surprising to see Trump’s supporters relentlessly denying the facts to the point of sinking into fanatical violence. Some see them as gullible spirits deceived by fake news. But how can we still believe in this fable when we live in a world where there is an overabundance of both news and commentaries that ‘decipher’ the news? In fact, if people reject what is obvious, it is not because they are stupid, it is to show they are intelligent. A sign of a perversion inscribed in the very structure of our reason.

It is easy to make fun of Donald Trump’s follies and wax indignant at the violence of his fanatics. But the unleashing of the purest irrationality at the heart of the electoral process, in the country best set up to manage alternation in a representative system also raises questions about the world we share with it: a world that we thought was the world of rational thought and peaceful democracy. And the first question is of course: how can people stubbornly refuse to recognise the best attested facts, and how can this refusal be so widely shared and supported?

Some people still cling to an old lifeline: those who do not want to acknowledge the facts are seen as misinformed ignoramuses or gullible spirits deceived by fake news. This is the classic idyll of a good but simple-minded people who are taken in, but who only need to learn to inform themselves about the facts and judge them with a critical mind. But how can we still believe this fable of popular naivety when we live in a world where means of information, means of verifying information, and commentaries that ‘decipher’ all information, are abundantly available to all?

The argument must then be reversed: if people reject the obvious, it is not because they are stupid, it is to show they are intelligent. And intelligence, as is well known, consists in being wary of facts and questioning the purpose of the enormous mass of information unleashed on us every day. To which the answer is, quite naturally, that it is to deceive people, because what is displayed in plain sight is generally there to cover up the truth, which we need to be able to discover – hidden under the false appearance of the facts presented.

The strength of this answer is that it satisfies both the most fanatical and the most sceptical at the same time. One of the remarkable features of the new far right is the place held by conspiracy and negationist theories. These theories have delusional aspects, such as the theory of the great international paedophile conspiracy. But this delirium is ultimately only the extreme form of a type of rationality that is generally valued in our societies: one that demands that we see every particular fact as the consequence of a global order, placing it in an overall connection that explains it and shows it to be ultimately very different from what it seemed to be at first.

We know that this principle of explaining everything by the sum of connections also works the other way round: it is always possible to deny a fact by invoking the absence of a link in the chain of conditions that make it possible. This, as we know, is how certain radical Marxist intellectuals denied the existence of Nazi gas chambers, since it was impossible to deduce their necessity from the overall logic of the capitalist system. And, again today, some subtle intellectuals have seen coronavirus as a fable invented by our governments to better control us.

The logic underlying conspiracy and negationist theories is not peculiar to simple minds and sick brains. Their extreme forms testify to the share of unreason and superstition present at the heart of the dominant form of rationality in our societies, and in the ways of thinking that interpret how they work. The possibility of denying everything is not the kind of ‘relativism’ challenged by serious minds that see themselves as guardians of rational universality. It is a perversion inscribed in the very structure of our reason.

It might be said that for people to deny everything it is not enough to have the intellectual weapons. It is also necessary to want to. That is absolutely right. But we need to examine the content of this will or affect which leads to believing or not believing.

It is unlikely that the seventy-five million voters who cast their ballots for Trump are weak minds convinced by his speeches and the false information they convey. They don’t believe in the sense that they take what he says to be true. They believe in the sense that they are happy to hear what they hear: a pleasure that may be expressed in a ballot paper every four or five years, but much more simply every day in a simple ‘like’. And the peddlers of false information are neither naïve people who imagine it to be true nor cynics who know it to be false. They are simply people who want it that way, who want to see, think, feel and live in the community of sentiment that these words weave.

How should we understand this community and this desire? This is where another lazy notion lies in wait, that of populism. Instead of a good and naive people, this conjures up a frustrated and envious people, ready to follow someone who knows how to embody their resentments and point out their cause.

Trump, we are told, is the representative of the distress and anger of underprivileged white communities: those left behind by economic and societal transformation; those who have lost their jobs with deindustrialisation and their identity markers with the new forms of life and culture; those who feel abandoned by remote political elites and despised by educated elites. The song is not new: this is already how unemployment served in the 1930s as an explanation for Nazism and is repeatedly used to explain any advance of the far right in our countries. But how can we seriously believe that the seventy-five million Trump voters all fit this profile of victims of crisis, unemployment and downgrading? It is then necessary to abandon the second lifeline of intellectual comfort, the traditional figure of a people cast in the role of irrational actor: a frustrated and brutal people who are a counterpart to the good and naive people.

More profoundly, we need to question this form of pseudo-scholarly rationality, which seeks to turn the political forms of expression of the people-subject into features belonging to this or that social stratum in ascent or decline. A political people is not the expression of a sociological people that pre-exists it. It is a specific creation: the product of a number of institutions, procedures and forms of action, but also of words, phrases, images and representations that do not express the feelings of an existing people but create a particular people, by creating a specific regime of affects for it.

Trump’s people is not the expression of social strata in difficulty and in search of a protector. It is, above all, a people produced by a specific institution in which many stubbornly see the supreme expression of democracy: that which establishes an immediate and reciprocal relationship between an individual deemed to embody the power of all and a collective of individuals deemed to recognise themselves in him. It is also a people built by a particular form of address, the personalised address made possible by the new communication technologies, where the leader speaks every day to each and every one, both as a public and a private man, using the same forms of communication that allow each and every one to say daily what is in their mind or in their heart.

It is, finally, a people built by the specific system of affects that Donald Trump has maintained through this system of communication: a system of affects that is not intended for any particular class and which plays not on frustration but, on the contrary, on satisfaction with one’s condition, not on a feeling of inequality to be repaired but on a feeling of privilege to be maintained against all those who would want to attack it.

There is nothing mysterious about the passion Trump appeals to, it is the passion for inequality, the passion that allows both rich and poor to find a multitude of inferiors over whom they must at all costs maintain their superiority. Indeed, there is always a superiority in which you can participate: superiority of men over women, of white women over women of colour, of workers over unemployed, of those working in the occupations of the future over others, of those with good insurance over those who depend on public support, of natives over migrants, of nationals over foreigners, and of citizens of the mother country of democracy over the rest of humanity.

The co-presence, in the Capitol occupied by Trumpian thugs, of both the flag of the thirteen founding states and the flag of the slave-owning South illustrates very well this singular montage that makes equality a supreme proof of inequality and the ‘pursuit of happiness’ a hateful affect. But the ethos of a particular nation cannot be equated either with this identification of the power of all with a countless collection of superiorities and hatreds, or with a particular social stratum. We know the role played in our own country by the opposition between a ‘hardworking France’ and a ‘scrounger France’, between those who forge ahead and those who remain dependent on archaic systems of social protection, or between citizens of the country of the Enlightenment and human rights and the backward and fanatical populations that threaten its integrity. And we can see, every day on the Internet, the hatred of all forms of equality that is stoked to boiling point by the comments of newspaper readers.

Just as stubborn denial is not the mark of backward minds but a variant of the dominant rationality, so the culture of hatred is not the product of underprivileged social strata but of the functioning of our institutions. It is a way of ‘people-forging’, a way of creating a people that belongs to the logic of inequality. Almost two hundred years ago, Joseph Jacotot, thinker of intellectual emancipation, showed how anti-egalitarian folly was the basis of a society in which every inferior was able to find someone inferior to them and enjoy this superiority. Only a quarter of a century ago, I suggested for my part that the identification of democracy with consensus produced, in place of a people of social division, now declared archaic, a much more archaic people based solely on the affects of hatred and exclusion.

Rather than the comfort of indignation or derision, the events that marked the end of Donald Trump’s presidency should prompt us to take a somewhat closer look at the forms of thought we call rational and the forms of community we call democratic.

___________

this post was originally published in French on Analyse Opinion Critque here and in English translation on Verso

The post The Fools and the Wise- Jacques Ranciere appeared first on Void Network.

These events were not an aberration from democracy, because simply the USA were never democratic in the first place. They weren’t democratic when they had slaves, they certainly weren’t democratic when the segregation laws were in place, the separation of normal citizens and Others due to the Color of their skin and of course they remained un-democratic when the Jim Crow laws withdrew and the ugly systemic racism was swept under the rag.
Some, let’s say, unrelated numbers to keep in mind. USA at the moment is the country with the largest prisoner population, over 2,5 millions. Over 2/3 of those people are people of colour and the vast majority of them remain imprisoned for non violent crimes or inability to pay their fees. So this was not an aberration, because Uncle Sam was never democratic to begin with, at best USA could be categorised as a capitalist oligarchy. What happened yesterday, was the crumbling of this democratic imagination in the eyes of the people. It was shown what actually happens when the settlers get mad. And what happens is that they are able to storm the Capitol, with of course let’s not forget this, the tolerance ( some might say help even) of elected “democratic” government officials.

2.

This brings us to the next point. United States of America have been constructed as country, a nation, since the beginning under very strict rules regarding class and race. It’s not as simple as to just say that what happened yesterday was solely due to the colour of the protestors skin. Surely the case would be different if we were talking about Black Lives Matter activists, but that’s not all there’s to it.
The head of the Proud Boys, who were among the initiators of yesterday’s events, is as you know, Enrique Tarrio, who became the leader, after founder Gavin McInnes ( also one of the founders of VICE) stepped down. Enrique is non white. He is of Cuban heritage. He is what many latino activists call a “gusano”, a worm, a reactionary. And as we learned from Scarface, gusanos were the Cubans that left Cuba after Castro took power. Why? Because ideology, that’s why. Because they were power hungry reactionaries, ultra conservative anti-communists, owners of land, who in more than one cases worked with either Batista or the American Secret Services.

Similar cases have been in found, in the face of Rafael Cruz for example, Republican Ted Cruiz’s father, who is also a big time conservative and a pastor.
Likewise in the case of Mark Rubio, who in a bizarre twist, originally said that his parents were exiled from Cuba from Castro, however it was later revealed that this happened during Batista’s regime.
It’s not the first time after all that reactionary Cubans are used for Uncle Sam’s dirty work.
The decade of the ‘60s is full of examples, as we read from Mike Davis, were Cuban paramilitaries carried out bombings on leftists, anti-war activistes, latino activists and feminists. We should bear in mind that one the people arrested for the Watergate case, was a Cuban ex patriate, who also server in the CIA.
So let’s not be so surprised when non white folk support either Trump or the far right in general. It’s not only about colour, it’s also about ideology and class.

3.

True enough, as I said earlier, if instead of white MAGA’s we had BLM activists in yesterday’s events, the National Guard would have descended upon with heaven’s fury, as of course they did earlier this year. Rubber bullets would rain upon the protesters. And, if by any miraculous chance, some made inside the Capitol Building, the Secret Services would have executed them on sight. And of course the very next day, on CNN, on FOX, on MSNBC, we would hear tales about violent extremists, totalitarian ideologies, communist terrorists, Russia, China and cultural marxism, by Republicans and Democrats alike. These are all very true. And some of those commentators, feeling emboldened by the prevailing hate, would even resort to the old familiar Nixon and Reagan rhetoric, about vicious black criminals and super predators.

Because this kind of rhetoric is not a privilege only to Republicans. It’s also part of the Democrats. Because it’s as American as apple pie and it goes back to the colonial era, where colonisers needed to dehumanise the slaves, the Others, in order to justify the unspeakable brutalities they inflicted upon them. And these brutalities carried on until the 60’s. We’ve all heard about the trees baring strange fruit after all. And we should also bear in mind that this all started because the colonisers wanted to rob Africa and the Americas, from spices and gold. The cheap labor in the form of slaves was the fat bonus that came later. How could the colonisers say no to unpaid labor, the bloody labor that would later create the Land of Liberty.
And this is why we say, that class and race, are inseparable.

4.

The basic reason that there was no heavy repression yesterday, has also a lot to do with the demands of the protestors. Trump is not an anomaly. He is not an aberration. He is a systemic symptom. He is a billionaire, right from the belly of the beast. The government officials yesterday would not green light an operation because they thought that Trump is one of them. What drove them in the end, to call on law enforcement, was the fact that this was public. It was because CNN was broadcasting, in a sense. Because we also know, that the USA have no problem with coup d’etats, as long as they are happening on the other side of the iron curtain or under the guise of the night. If a coup happens in broad daylight, with national television on it, it has failed.

The demands of protests during 6/1/2021 in Washington, as it seems are demands that the Police likes as well. And we can tell this, from the hundreds of selfies, cops took with protesters on the Capitol Building. The National Guard didn’t seem to mind a lot, as well, since it’s head, personally appointed by Trump, was holding them on position.
On the other hand, demands from protests like the ones for social equality and justice, for defunding or abolishing the police, that came from the racist murder of George Floyd, are demands that no government official wants. Democrat or Republican. And this was obvious as soon as Biden was elected. It was also clear from Obama’s words that “ slogans like Defund The Police are snappy and polarising”
This is something we’ve said for a long time, that Democrats and Republicans are two sides of the same coin. They both serve this capitalist oligarchy to the letter. As long as our analysis doesn’t factor in accounts of race, class and gender ( who I didn’t mention because I don’t think it’s relevant to this specific event, but is essential in the larger picture) then we are doomed to watch history repeat itself.

5.

Α lot of non white American folk, even black, supported Trump. Apart from the gusanos, there is another important factor. Ever since the 70’s, politically speaking, race was disconnected from class. The general idea that, in the Land of Opportunities you could make it, regardless of race, gender, religion and what not, became prevalent, as a direct result of the New Deal hegemony. From then on, we came to today, where we learn that race is a different thing from class and from gender. We also learn that these 3 things have nothing to do with each other. But a look again, the numbers will prove us wrong.
The prison numbers don’t lie. The ones that suffer come from a specific class and have a specific colour. Also we look at the numbers of police killings. The ones who are being eaterminated in alarming rates, come from a specific class and have a specific colour ( or the absence of it, they are not white).

Constantly referring to class, while avoiding all other issues, is class reductionism and wrong. Constantly referring to race and gender while overlooking class is liberal identity politics and also wrong. Lets try intersectionality for a change, it might work for us. Otherwise we can’t see the forest for the trees.

______________

written by Kostas Savvopoulos (phd Candidate of Political Science)

The post Capitol Riot: The Grambling of Democratic Imagination appeared first on Void Network.

by Umair Haque

_______________________

Yesterday, the Mayor of Portland was gassed by the secret police of storm troopers that Donald Trump has sent to occupy the city.

Wait. What? Let’s read that sentence again.

Yesterday, the Mayor of Portland was gassed by the secret police of storm troopers that Donald Trump has sent to occupy the city.

If I wrote that sentence five years ago, you would have laughed at me. It would have seemed impossible. Inconceivable. Outlandish. And yet here we are.

Shortly before that, Trump announced that he was sending his new secret police’s shock troops…men in camouflage body armor, carrying machine guns, abducting people off the streets, and now gassing mayors…nationwide.

If I wrote that sentence five years ago, you never would have read another word I wrote. And yet here we are.

Where is this, though, this strange new territory America finds itself in? What’s really happening here?

Something that those of us who’ve lived through — and survived — authoritarian-fascist collapses know all too well. We’ve seen it before, maybe, like me, several times over. We know how it begins, and how it ends — usually — too. None of that’s to be a know-it-all blowhard. It’s to warn, as seriously as I can. You probably have an inkling of what I’m about to say, but your rational side denies it. Your gut is right, and your brain — which has never lived through this kind of collapse before — is wrong.

Trump is instituting martial law. Yes, really. That is what sending a secret police of shock troops across America is. No, not suddenly, all at once, in a kind of sweeping and obvious way. But rather, in the time-honored way that authoritarian-fascists do. One step at a time. A process. A creeping martial law. One which is all too easy to normalize and accept, because it proceeds in slow steps. Martial law isn’t declared like in the movies, usually. More often, it happens like this.

Step by step. Town by town. City by city. This shock troop added to that one. Their powers expanded, to take away your freedoms, one by one. An occupying force whose power is always growing, and never really goes away. And before anyone really knows it — they’re living in a police state, an authoritarian society. Nobody can really remember how it ended up this way. It seems to have happened in a kind of slow-motion suicide of a democracy.

It happens that way because every good authoritarian knows that’s how you normalize it, how you minimize resistance, how you create that strange mix of apathy, bewilderment, and fear all at once, by getting people to ignore what their gut is shouting at them. A mind always says: “Come on! It’s not that bad. Those troops aren’t on my streets yet, and even if they are, they’re still pretty friendly, aren’t they? Stop imagining the worst! Everything will be fine!” The unthinkable isn’t thought fast enough, widely enough. And so one small step at a time, martial law spreads like a black veil across a society, replacing civil society, democracy, decency, and a modern society.

It’s hidden in plain sight. Predictably, funnily, sadly — nobody much is seeing it, because the demagogue’s magic is blinding. Trump is instituting martial law now.

So let me put it another way — which is more accurate still.

Just before a crucial election — one which will decide if democracy lives or dies — a President who would be dictator, like America’s Gaddafi or Saddam Hussein, feels he’s on the ropes. So he’s beginning to institute martial law: the rule of an occupying paramilitary force over and above civil law and everyday democratic norms.

If you doubt that — as your rational side still might — let’s think about it for a moment.

What is “martial law”? Here’s a definition which will do just fine: “Martial law is the imposition of direct military control of normal civil functions or suspension of civil law by a government, especially in response to a temporary emergency where civil forces are overwhelmed, or in an occupied territory.”

Let’s take that step by step. The imposition of direct military control. The “federal agents” that Trump is sending to occupy America’s cities and towns aren’t part of the Army or Navy or Air Force — but they are a part of the ominously named “Homeland Security.”

If you doubt they’re a “military”, what else do you call men wearing camouflage body armour, festooned with heavy weaponry, carrying machine guns? If that’s not a military — or in this case, a paramilitary — surely the word holds no meaning whatsoever.

What are they there for? “The suspension of civil law.” Trump’s shock troops are shredding the Constitution. Not in some abstract, theoretical, Ivy-League-Debate-Club kind of way — but with violence and brutality on the ground. They wear no badges, are unaccountable to anyone, have the power to abduct people off the streets for no rhyme or reason, and take them to God only knows where. The right to free speech? Assembly? Association? Privacy? Peaceful protest? To just walk down a street with your friends, carrying a banner? Bang — gone. They gassed the Mayor of a major American city.

Civil law doesn’t matter to Trump’s army of shock troops. If it did, they wouldn’t be gassing mayors, who are elected public officials. What does matter to Trump and his shock troops? Why are they there?

Because there’s a “temporary emergency.” Which one? Could it be the lethal pandemic — which Trump’s stunning negligence allowed to explode, and become the worst outbreak in the world? How about the 18th straight week of more than a million people filing for unemployment? Or the death rate of that pandemic beginning to skyrocket back up? Maybe the millions of Americans who now find themselves falling into disease, poverty, and despair? Those emergencies?

Nope, the emergency that Trump calls “law and order.” Only there is no breakdown of law and order in America — at least not at the level of people peacefully protesting in the streets for the causes of equality and justice. The breakdown of law and order in America is a demagogue President who’s instituting martial law.

What those of us who’ve survived authoritarianism and studied it know — and need to share with you — is this. If you want to kill a democracy dead, first you chop off its limbs. Then you slowly, slowly suffocate it. You deprive it of the air it breathes.

First you chop off the limbs — you appoint “acting directors” who are your cronies in the extremist projects of ethnic supremacy and racial cleansing to head most of the major offices of government. You purge government of every last decent civil servant you can, so nobody much is left to stand in the way. You stack the courts with unqualified extremists, too, so that you’re protected from legal challenges. Check, check, check.

At this point, the stage is set. For what? For you, the authoritarian, to begin suffocating a democracy to death. That means: one by one, taking away people’s basic rights. You don’t send a hundred thousand shock troops to every small town. You just send a few hundred to the cities — especially where people resist your brutality and violence and supremacism.

You use those shock troops to make an example. This mayor resisted me. He got gassed. These people thought they could resist me. They got beaten. These people thought they could express their voices in opposition to me. They got abducted. This group of mothers thought they could link arms and oppose me. They got disappeared. You make an example, as loudly and publicly and visibly — and violently — as possible.

This is what happens when you cross me. You pay the price. The price is a heavy one. It’s not one that anyone in a decent society is used to paying — beatings, abductions, disappearances, gas attacks, and so forth. This is the price you pay for crossing me.

A society descends into an atmosphere of fear and panic, usually. People do what they tend to do when they’re threatened by overwhelming force: they get frightened. The intimidation and brutality serve their purpose. The point of a secret police is now made real — to keep people in check with the authoritarian’s wishes, to stifle dissent, to silence and frighten.

You suffocate a democracy by denying it of the air it breathes. The sweet and pure air of freedom. Where people express can themselves, especially if they’re critics and opponents and dissidents. Instead, the poisonous miasma of terror becomes a grim daily reality.

“Are you going to that protest?,” says one friend. “Of course!,” replies the other. Neither shows up — because who will look after their families if they’re abducted, disappeared, gassed, wounded?

A society has been terrorized into submission. The authoritarian is now free to obtain what they’ve always really wanted. Power. The next election? People stay home. Not enough votes are cast. That atmosphere of fear has never gone away. The authoritarian wins it. And that’s it — game over. The last election that country is to have — at least for a generation.

Those of who’s studied and lived through authoritarianism have seen this before — and it’s our basic duty as decent and sane human beings to warn you. But it’s your duty to heed the warning, this time. Not to ignore it, like the last four years. That’s how we got here, to a place where a lunatic demagogue is destroying America before the eyes of a baffled, shocked, horrified world.

Heed the warning this time, because this is the last time. The last chance.

Trump is declaring martial law. The way authoritarians do. Stepwise. One small step at a time. Just like you’d choke the life out of someone you really hated if you were a sociopath — slowly, to make sure, to watch the light go out of their eyes, and revel in it.

How do authoritarians win? By making the abnormal seem normal, by transgressing so often and so frequently, it all comes to seem plain, by making each transgression worse than the last, so yesterday’s seems like old, small news. But it isn’t. All those transgressions — camps, bans, raids, purges — are a pattern. Leading up to this.

The imposition of a creeping kind martial law, just before a crucial election. One city at a time. A group of shock troops added to the last, one at a time. One set of new powers for them to abuse people with at a time. Until anyone barely remembers a time when people weren’t being disappeared off the streets, beaten, gassed, thrown into the camps.

It’s not me telling you. It’s history. It’s the ghosts of Orwell, Camus, Arendt, Frankl, Malala, all the people in all the nations who’ve been through this before, and know. How it ends. They are the ones trying to tell you, in a desperate whisper, that barely pierces the veil of time.

Heed the warning.

This is your last chance.

Umair
July 2020

SOURCE: Medium

The post Do Americans Get That Trump is Instituting Martial Law? appeared first on Void Network.

U.S.A TOUR 2010

creative cells of members of Void Network, writers, poets and cultural activists, traveling for 6 months all over U.S.A constructing open public situations featuring assemblies, talks, debates, open public dialogues, info-centers, multimedia shows, film festivals, poetry performances, sound systems, raves, art exhibitions, cross-platform collaborations based on the book

We Are an Image from the Future The Greek Revolt of December 2008 – edited by A.G.Schwarz, Tasos Sagris and Void Network (AK Press pub. 2010)

follow the links for complete reports of the events and contacts from the USA social movements

[February 22]

Chapel Hill Internationalist Bookshop

Democracy and Insurrection in Greece & the World

[February 23 / 24]

Asheville

Firestorm Café & Books

Guns for Global Warming and Democracy and Insurrection in Greece & the World

[February 26]

New Orleans

Iron Rail Bookshop

Democracy and Insurrection in Greece & the World

[March 1]

Houston

Sedition Books

Talk and Discussion about Democracy

[March 2]

Austin

Monkeywrench Books

Anarchy Works

[March 5]

Tucson

Democracy & Insurrection in Greece & the world

[March 6 / 7]

Phoenix Arizona // O’Odham Tribe Land

ASU / Beer & Revolution

Democracy & Insurrection in Greece & the world

Nonviolence, The War on Terror & Revolution

[March 9]

Claremont Los Angeles

Democracy & Insurrection in Greece & the world

[March 10]

Los Angeles at Hyde Park Half

[March 11]

Santa Cruz at Sub Rosa

Democracy & Insurrection in Greece & the world

[March 13 /14 ]

San Francisco Anarchist Book Fair / Golden Gate Park 

University of Berkeley Oakland

BASTARD Conference

Democracy & Insurrection in Greece & the world

We Are an Image From The Future 

[March 15]

San Francisco Station 40

An Anarchist Look at the Barcelona Squatters’ Movement

[March 19]

Portland Red and Black

Guns for Global Warming

Portland Blackrose

Democracy and Insurrection in Greece and the World

[March 23/24]

Olympia Washington Last Word bookshop 

[March 25]

University  of Washington Tacoma

[March 26]

Seattle at the Bookshop Left Bank

Democracy & Insurrection in Greece & the world

[April 1]

Missoula at Zoo Art Community Centre

We Are an Image From The Future

[April 5]

Chicago Illinois

We Are an Image From The Future

[April 6]

Bloomington

Boxcar Books

We Are an Image From The Future

[April 8]

Pittsburgh Pensylvania Union Project

We Are an Image From The Future

[April 10]

Baltimore Red Emma’s

We Are an Image From The Future

[April 11]

Philadelphia at Wooden Shoe

We Are an Image From The Future

[April 13]

Providence

We Are an Image From The Future

[April 13]

Boston Lucy Parsons Centre

Democracy & Insurrection In Greece and the World

[April 16-17-20]

New York Film Festival

City Judson Memorial Church

Armed Words Poetry Performances

[April 20]

New York  at BlueStockings Books

We Are an Image From The Future

The post WE ARE AN IMAGE FROM THE FUTURE – U.S.A TOUR 2010 appeared first on Void Network.

The FBI, Pentagon, and CIA are “interviewing” Assange. Kwiatkowski writes:

Interviewing is the wrong word.  I’d like to say doctoring him, because it would be more accurate, except that word implies some care for a positive outcome.  Chemical Gina has her hands in this one, and we are being told that Assange is being “treated” with 3-quinuclidinyl benzilate, known as BZ. 

BZ is a powerful drug that produces hallucinations. “Soldiers on BZ could remember only fragments of the experience afterward. As the drug wore off, and the subjects had trouble discerning what was real, many experienced anxiety, aggression, even terror,” the New Yorker reported. “…The drug’s effect lasted for days. At its peak, volunteers were totally cut off in their own minds, jolting from one fragmented existence to the next. They saw visions: Lilliputian baseball players competing on a tabletop diamond; animals or people or objects that materialized and vanished.”

Assange is being chemically lobotomized prior to being extradited to the United States to stand trial on bogus computer hacking charges that—and the corporate media won’t tell you this—passed the statute of limitations three years ago (see 18 U.S. Code § 371. Conspiracy to commit offense or to defraud United States).

Forget about the statute of limitations. The US government has long violated both domestic and international law. It is a rogue nation led by an ignorant clown who opened the back door and ushered in neocon psychopaths notorious for killing millions. In normal times, these criminals would be in the dock at The Hague standing trial for crimes against humanity. But we don’t live in normal times.  

The message is clear: if you expose the massive criminal enterprise at the heart of the US government, you will be renditioned, chemically tortured (a favorite of Chemical Gina, now CIA director), chewed up and spit out until you’re a babbling mental case like David Shayler (who believes he is the Second Coming of Christ). Shayler, a former MI5 agent, made the mistake of exposing the UK’s support of terror operations in Libya. Shayler spent three weeks at Belmarsh after a conviction for breaching the Official Secrets Act. He emerged from prison broken and delusional. 

I seriously doubt most Americans care about the chemical torture of Julian Assange. On social media, liberals and so-called progressives, along with their “conservative” counterparts, celebrate Assange’s arrest, confinement, and torture. Members of Congress have called for his execution, while one media talking head (teleprompter script reader) demanded the CIA send a hit team to London and assassinate Assange. 

Americans are similar to the propagandized and brainwashed citizens of Nazi Germany. Most went along with Hitler right up until the end when their cities lay in smoldering ruins and their once proud country was carved up, half of it given over to the communists. They set up the Stasi to deal with East Germans who were not following the totalitarian program.

________________________________________

source: https://kurtnimmo.blog/

The post Julian Assange Tortured with Psychotropic Drug appeared first on Void Network.

The Longest Walk: We Shall Continue has been initiated to address the major threats to American Indian and Indigenous Peoples and Nations. This is a spiritual Walk for all Indigenous Peoples and our allies. In 1978, The Longest Walk came about as a way to confront eleven (11) anti-Indian bills in Congress. This included a bill that proposed abrogating all Indian treaties. In 2019 we are facing a renewal of serious threats to our children, women, lands, waters, sovereignty, and even our Indigenous Knowledge. Our Entire Environment is being attacked constantly.

The post The Longest Walk: We Shall Continue 2019 / American Indian- Indigenous Peoples and Nations in action appeared first on Void Network.