Lifting the Veil

When Apocalypse Becomes Headline News

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Despite its connotations, an “apocalypse” isn’t the end of the world. It’s not even the end of a particular thing. It gets those connotations from its use in the Bible, particularly in the original title of the final book in the collection:

The Apocalypse of John.

If you’re biblically literate, you might know the book by its more modern name:

Revelation.

The Greek word ἀποκάλυψις (apokálupsis) means “The lifting of the veil.” An “apocalype” is thus a peek behind the curtain that separates the-world-as-it-appears from the-world-as-it-is. Apocalypse is what happens in The Truman Show when Truman finally learns the truth about the world he lives in. It’s what you see in The Matrix when Morpheus gives his spiel to Neo about waking up to the real world.

These were two of a group of films that came out in the 1990s, including Dark City, American Beauty, The Thirteenth Floor, ExistenZ, Total Recall, Happiness, and countless others, all of which revolved around a central theme:

The world isn’t what it appears to be.

Why was there such a wave of these films at this time?

Because the world had just ended.

No, really. The world we’d all grown up in had just ended, and the system that ran that world was spinning out of control, and everyone could see it. All of the norms we’d all been taught to expect—everything about what it meant to be human, what it meant to be American, how the moral balance of the universe worked—were flying apart.

The iron fist of the Communist world had crumbled, but for some reason there was a pervasive feeling that nothing actually worked anymore. It was more than just “Well, we won, so now what?” Nothing we saw happening in the news, in international affairs, or in domestic politics seemed to make much sense. Regardless of cultural tribe or political orientation, the smell of ferment filled your nostrils. There was something going on, like the tremor of an off-balance machine that just ached to fly apart, but wouldn’t. We could all feel some kind of higher (and darker) purpose behind everything, and yet we also felt the knife-edge we were balanced on. Instinctively, as if by magic, we all acted as if questioning too much, or looking too closely, would have catastrophic consequences.¹

We didn’t know what those consequences might be. But we could feel their threat as surely as Neo and Truman could feel that something about the world they lived in was false. It is no coincidence that both of those heroes, upon attaining enlightenment, entered a new, uncongenial reality where they were in greater danger than they ever had been in the simulations in which they lived.

But before anything drastic emerged from the grass roots to re-make the world, the world was re-made for us by terrorist attacks that made the world suddenly-sensible again. The West had a new enemy, the system now had a rationale, and most of us bought back in when we’d already (at least mentally) had one foot out the door.

Shadows On the Pavement

What followed, in terms of the popular arts, was a retreat from the suspicion that the world was somehow fake, and a turning towards more direct revolutionary fantasy that centered on the defense of civilization against identifiable oppressors, such as one finds in the most popular books and films of the era: The Lord of the Rings (films), the Harry Potter media empire, the Hunger Games media empire, the Marvel films, etc.

In the last few weeks, though, I’ve seen a fresh wave of interest in some of these ’90s gnostic-apocalypse² films—especially The Matrix and The Truman Show.

Considering these films prompts the questions:

What kind of world do you think you live in?

Is it a world where voters dictate the course of government?

Is it a world where “war crime” is a meaningful term?

Is it a world where the political arena is contest between “good guys” and “bad guys”?

Is it a world where simple moral precepts like “don’t hurt other people,” “don’t steal,” “don’t kill,” and “don’t lie” are important?

Is it a world where imperialism is evil? Where criminal justice is important? Where government institutions are vital to ensuring that goodness and trust prevail in the world?

Is it a world where Americans live in liberty, but our enemies are totalitarians and/or aspiring dictators?

If so, the last few weeks have been pretty rough for you.

This post is going to be rougher still.

Because, if you want to make any sense at all out of the unending flood of seemingly-momentous headlines streaming out of the seats of power in the Western world, you first need to understand the world-as-it-is…and it’s not the world you were taught to see.

Clearing the Decks

“And this is very odd, because without that fairly simple and obvious piece of knowledge, nothing that ever happened on the Earth could possibly make the slightest bit of sense.”
—Douglas Adams, The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

So let’s start out with dispensing with the most pervasive and important lie ever told:

The world is a moral arena.

At least insofar as the mechanics of economies, politics, and history are concerned, it’s not. The idea that it should be is a side-effect of Christianity, and really took root in the Western mind during the late Middle Ages as the Catholic Church sought to restrain the principalities of Europe from going to war with one another. They stoked (astroturfed?) the first peacenik movement called The Peace and Truce of God, which sought to convince rulers (and knights) that they would gain favor with God if their primary allegiance was to certain Christian principles instead of to their self-perceived political interests.

This turn represented something of a break from previous Western traditions governing the behavior of the powerful. Rather than an ethic of “just war” in matters of foreign policy while domestic behavior was restrained by norms and tradition,³ the Peace and Truce of God exhorted the powerful to an ever-expanding code of conduct grounded in the ideals of Christian brotherhood (and, not coincidentally, an unbreakable respect for the clergy and the property of the Catholic church). It forms one of the roots of the chivalric tradition (from where we get the word “chivalry”).

Like Christian thinking, liberal thinking lends itself towards moralistic reasoning, because it, too, is predicated upon universalism. In Christianity, all people are of equal worth in the eyes of God, so much so that he sacrificed his son (who was also himself) to bridge the gap between God and Men. This sacrifice wasn’t just for the Jews, or Jesus’s disciples, but for all the peoples of the Earth.

In the liberal frame, all people are created equal. Anyone can become anything they want. What’s moral for one person is moral for another. The moral rules that bind the low must also bind the mighty. Privilege is to be suspected, even when it is earned.

And, in both cases, if one is thinking morally, the end never justifies the means.

You’ll have heard the dogma of the world as a moral arena in thoughts like the following

“The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”⁴

“There’s no problem with democracy that can’t be solved by more democracy.”

“We must harness the wisdom of crowds.”

“People will do the right thing if they have the right information.”

“More education will solve this.”

In all its forms, the accepted popular wisdom is that if people did the morally correct things, everything would be all right—and since most people at least want to do the right thing, everything will eventually come out well in the end.⁵

But I said at the outside that this is all a lie. Why would that be?

To quote Professor Travis Smith of Concordia University, “The Kantian formulation is that ‘right’ makes ‘might.’ In reality, telling effective lies makes ‘might,’ and ‘might’ provides the opportunity to impose ‘right.’”⁶

To understand why Smith’s formulation might be true, let’s consider what power is.

Even horsepower is real power.

In physics or in politics, power is the ability to “do useful work.”

It is solely the ability to accomplish ends…by whatever means.

Every political analyst and military philosopher from Thucydides to Sun Tzu through Clausewitz and Heidegger to Alinsky and Foucault understood this, which is why right-thinking people hate them in the same way they hate the most economical of political philosophers: Niccolo Machiavelli.⁷

If one has power, but does not exercise power, one will be eventually deposed or killed by someone who is willing to exercise power, both because power restrained is power destroyed, and because the existence of unexercised power represents an unpredictable destabilizing element in any given situation.⁸ And, worse, the potential of power is not symmetrical—a drunk with a pistol (such as Gavrilo Princip) can wield as much concentrated power over the future of the world as can the man who commands the largest nuclear arsenal on the planet (and, considering that only one of the people who have wielded that arsenal ever saw fit to employ it, maybe more).

Morality is concerned with conduct in society (and, depending on your theology/moral philosophy, within the soul of the individual). It has no relevance whatsoever in the realm of politics. When fools attempt to employ it thusly, inevitably one of two things happen:

1. The moral player is defeated by less scrupulous enemies. For an example of this sort of figure in 20th century American politics, one need look no further than Jimmy Carter.

2. The fervency of the moral player’s conviction drives him to do “good” things that have disastrous results. The Temperance Movement is an easy non-controversial example of this, though it is far from the most terrifying.

The wheels of the world are shockingly anti-moral, so much so that the difference between a “good” ruler and a “poor” ruler is often morality: the moral ruler is the poor ruler.

More perversely, when it comes to the great figures of history, you almost never find moral people acting morally, or immoral people acting immorally.⁹ A moral person who behaves morally stays at home and attends to their family and community. An immoral person who behaves immorally is readily recognized and restrained (or imprisoned, or executed). Neither of those types get very far in the power game.

But moral people who act immorally, and immoral people who act morally? Those are the ones that move the world, and both for the same reason:

In the game of power, the ends are all that matters. The ends always justify any means.

Revolting, eh? So revolting you still don’t believe me?

I’ll prove it to you.

Consider the sisters Mary and Elizabeth Tudor. Mary is known to history as “Bloody Mary” and was hated by her subjects. She is remembered as one of the worst rulers and greatest monsters of her age on account of her brutal campaign of expropriation, repression, and murder against English Protestants in an effort to restore Catholicism to England.

Her sister, Queen Elizabeth I, initiated the British Empire and presided over the beginning of England’s protracted Golden Age. She was well-loved and is remembered as wise, canny, and one of history’s great rulers.

Bloody Mary was a temperate and moderate woman, who was faithful to her one husband (her only lover through her lifetime) and stalwart in her religion in the face of great tragedy.

Elizabeth I was a murderous dictator whose murder and expropriation of Catholics significantly dwarfed the terror that her sister visited upon the Protestants. Her golden age was funded by pirate plunder and characterized by ruthless imperialism. She had many lovers, and used her sexuality as a key bargaining chip in international relations, and she did not hesitate to execute people who trusted her, but who represented a threat to her power.

The Virgin Queen

For power to be power, it must first and always seek to protect itself. In this sense, it is like life; for the same reason that “I eat the flesh of other creatures” is not a meaningful moral statement, neither is “I had him killed so that he wouldn’t depose me/block my re-election.”

And, for the same reason that “morality” will never stop a lion from eating a gazelle, moral opprobrium will never stop a politician from using every means at their disposal to achieving their objective.

So what, then, could possibly restrain power, if not morality?

Duty.

Warlord, king, President, or CEO, those who have power are given it by others in order to accomplish something. They thus have a duty to those people on whose behalf they are exercising power.¹⁰

This duty is ethical, not moral, and it is enforceable. Leaders who do not discharge their duty to their backers quickly find themselves out-of-power (if not six-feet-under) unless they’re able to replace their backers with toadies. “Replacement” involves both forming new alliances and denuding (and often dephysicalizing) old allies.

Political power is exercised through only three channels:

Direct violence, favors, and threats (either of violence, or the withdrawal of favor).

If a ruler exercises power in service of duty, he or she is a good ruler. Bloody Mary was a poor ruler because she exercised her power to further the interests of a foreign king (the Pope). Elizabeth I was a good ruler because she used her power to further the interests of the nation she ruled.

Unfortunately, things become a lot muddier in a democracy.

America the Democratic Republic

If you’re an American, the world you know looks more or less like this:

The people have the power. We elect representatives, and they make the rules we all have to live by. The exact process looks something like this old Schoolhouse Rock film:

When the bad guys (i.e. whichever political party we dislike most) are in charge, we’re on the verge of a communist/fascist takeover. When the good guys (i.e. the party we dislike least) are in charge, they’re running things for our benefit and defending the American Way, even when we don’t like some of the things we’re doing.¹¹ If they go too far, we can usually solve the matter in the courts.

Our justice system, for all its flaws, keeps us safe. It’s the government’s way of defending the public from criminals, but doing so with enough constraints in place that they’re not going to send innocent people to prison very often.

Similarly, our security services are there to protect us, and to protect the free peoples of the world. Our diplomatic corps helps the downtrodden across the world and works to deliver people from the evils of autocratic governance. They are responsible for the retreat of authoritarianism and totalitarianism across the world.

And sure, there are scandals, and malfeasance, and failures, but that’s what our malcontents are for. Lobbyist groups like the ACLU, the Innocence Project, the Institute for Justice, etc. are there to help stick up for our interests when things go astray.

Judging by the ubiquity of the quote, Winston Churchill squarely nailed the popular sentiment about democratic forms of government when he said:

‘Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…’¹²

The twentieth century geopolitical struggles saw the worldwide triumph of democracy, with other forms of government (monarchies, aristocracies, military dictatorships, etc.) fading from the world-norm to anachronistic rarity. Hell, even Maoist China, the USSR, and the DPKR were/are “Democratic” and even sometimes held/hold elections. “Power to the people” has an obvious appeal.¹³

But, even at its healthiest, democracy has a perverse side effect:

Because voters like to feel righteous, democracy makes politics a moral endeavor. This makes the exercise of power by the powerful exceedingly difficult, as it introduces thousands of small constraints that interfere with their central duty (i.e. to wield power on behalf of those whom have entrusted them with it).

This is not the end of the corruption that it introduces. It also turns your political allegiance into a religious position. It gives you good grounds to loathe your neighbor who votes for the other team. It turns questions of budget, oversight, and management into vital moral questions that will dictate how the future will judge us.

And the more democracy is lauded, the more intense this perversion becomes. This creates every incentive for the powerful to distract the people with culture war slop, so that they may carry on the business of wielding power away from public view.

And this is important to understand, because everything I’ve just recapped about what we all understand about how (and why) politics and power works in the The United States of America is a lie.

The United States of America is not a democracy, nor is it a republic.

It is an empire.

Nothing in it can possibly make the slightest bit of sense unless you understand it as an empire.

To build that understanding, we must start with an honest look at American history.

The American Empire

America is, without a doubt, the most powerful empire in history. Its literal ambition is to rule the world, and it came closer to doing so than any empire before it.

The world is a big place, and it’s not easy to rule. Britain learned that one the hard way. When the Americans decided to unseat Britain from her Imperial throne, they resolved to do things differently: instead of being the titular ruler of the world, America would launder her rule through intermediary organizations, leaving the heroic work—and only the heroic work—to America’s public face.

America would make the world “safe for democracy.”¹⁴ It would do so by buying the loyalty of the world through giving other nations free access to the American market, and a security guarantee, without demanding reciprocity. “We’ll make sure the Soviets don’t kill you” they said. “We’ll guarantee freedom of the seas with our navy. All we ask of you is that you don’t play on Russia’s side, and that you serve as a buffer between our territory and The Bear.”¹⁵

America made this pitch at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944, but it had been planning this move long before. American imperialism has been a part of the American consciousness since the Founding Fathers. Consider these quotes by Jefferson, Washington, and Hamilton:

“We shall divert through our own Country a branch of commerce which the European States have thought worthy of the most important struggles and sacrifices, and in the event of peace [ending the American Revolution]...we shall form to the American union a barrier against the dangerous extension of the British Province of Canada and add to the Empire of Liberty an extensive and fertile Country thereby converting dangerous Enemies into valuable friends.”

— Thomas Jefferson to George Rogers Clark, 25 December 1780

"where this progress will stop no-one can say. Barbarism has, in the meantime, been receding before the steady step of amelioration; and will in time, I trust, disappear from the earth”

—Thomas Jefferson to William Ludlow, 6 September 1824

“[America is] the embryo of a great empire.”
—Alexander Hamilton, The Farmer Refuted, 1775

“The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations, is, in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connexion as possible.”
—George Washington’s Valedictory Address, 1796. This is the beginning of a section where he makes the case for a commercial empire that looks very like the one established at Bretton Woods.

Underneath all the idealistic (and earnest) talk of liberty, freedom, and self-determination was the ambition to become the next Rome—to unite the world under Christian and Enlightenment principles for the glory of God and of America.

The project first began with the pacification of the American continent—not an easy task, despite the die-off of over 90% of the original native population due to diseases contracted from livestock carried by European explorers.¹⁶ The various Indian nations (and the Spanish, English, and French empires) defended their turf fiercely.

The intellectual rationale for the global Imperial project emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,¹⁷ and the opportunity to create the globe-spanning empire emerged gradually as the old European imperial system started to decay.

The Spanish empire’s weakness was the first to become apparent, and America was happy to press its claims against the Spanish in Cuba, the Philippines and elsewhere during the Spanish-American war and its follow-on conflicts (wars which were legitimized by a lie to the public promulgated by the press).¹⁸

Europe was next. The story you heard in high school and college goes something like this:

The European powers had a network of mutual defense pacts that set off an irrevocable chain reaction that plunged the continent into war when Serbian terrorist Gavrilo Princip assassinated Austrian Archduke Francis Ferdinand in 1914.

What you don’t learn in school is that the British had a chance to end the war before it started, but they instead opted to stoke the fires of conflict, apparently in the hopes of eliminating imperial competition.¹⁹ America, under the leadership of Woodrow Wilson, then held the US back from the war, claiming to be an isolationist.²⁰ This stance held until the British and French were nearly exhausted. At that point, he demanded a declaration of war in order to make the world “safe for democracy.”²¹

Intervening only in the final year, the US brought such ferocity to bear that they were able to force the Germans to surrender.

During the war, the Germans sent Lenin—who was their prisoner at the time—to Russia to destabilize the country. He wound up taking over and founding the USSR, which took Russia out of World War One and set the stage for the great power conflicts that have dominated the world ever since.

At Versailles, the Allies forced Germany to dishonestly claim sole responsibility and liability for the war (setting the stage for World War Two),²² while Wilson denied the claims of allied forces from French Indochina (Vietnam) and Arabia, setting the stage for both the Vietnam war and the perpetual unrest in the Middle East ever since. Wilson succeeded in chartering the League of Nations as the next step in the American imperial project, but the organization was poorly organized and ultimately failed.

World War Two followed twenty years later, as predicted (see previous footnote). It was again sold to the US public on a series of deceptions.²³ By the time the dust settled, every industrialized country on the planet (with the exception of the United States and the USSR) had been bombed into ruin, nuclear weapons had been developed and used in the theater of war, and leaked (through a security oversight of either shocking incompetence or deliberate malfeasance) to America’s great power rival, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

The American Empire was then secured. After the Bretton Woods conference guaranteed the United States total strategic control of the non-Soviet world and gave American finance and industry nearly-unfettered access to the raw materials of that world, the US continued on its total-war footing, waging proxy wars against the USSR and their allies in Korea, Vietnam (both on fraudulent pretexts, see below), the Middle East, and in several South American countries (too numerous to mention), while simultaneously sponsoring covert coups and Color Revolutions in dozens of nations to depose leaders who were unfriendly to US commercial interests.

America laundered her motivations for these conflicts, and created a soft-power structure, by establishing “international” institutions, in accordance with Jefferson’s original Empire of Liberty vision (see above). The United Nations was the weakest of these, designed to give the American imperial project access to the troops of allied nations under an international banner, and to allow lesser powers the illusion that they had a say in the international agenda. Despite its visibility before the public, the UN had little-to-any success in stopping any war that the major powers were interested in—but it has done gangbusters business in enabling military dictatorships and genocides throughout the world, and on more than one occasion its “peacekeepers” have been caught with their hands in the cookie jar (whether that “cookie jar” was a weapons cache, a money laundering operation, or the vaginas of the people that the force was allegedly there to protect).

Other American organs of “international governance” include the toothless International Criminal Court, the European Union (a plan hatched in the aftermath of World War 2 to create a puppet European superstate to control the great powers of Europe and prevent them from ever again posing a nuisance to the U.S.), the International Monetary Fund (a bank for governments to seek American largess, thus making them permanently indebted to the U.S. and putting them under its control), the World Bank, USAID²⁴ (a foreign aid fund designed to act as a slush fund for propaganda, black ops, subversive activities, regime change operations, terrorist funding, and money laundering), the World Health Organization (tasked with conducting public health programs, including advancing propaganda in favor of sterilization, population control, and euthanasia), and countless “Non-Governmental Organizations” which owed their existence and continued funding to the US Government.

This sprawling imperial enterprise created massive opportunities for companies in heavy industry, finance, media, missions work (both religious and secular), pharmaceuticals, and later in tech to use the government to advance their interests at home and abroad.

Quietly, and away from public view, the world economy and culture was reshaped to conform to these interests at American taxpayer expense—meanwhile the centers of political power within the United States that weren’t fully dependent upon the Imperial machinery were co-opted by the State.

Church groups were brought to heel by feeding them public monies to carry out their charitable activities (a project that started in the 1940s with organizations such as Wycliffe Bible Translators,²⁵ but reached its apogee of public visibility during George W. Bush’s “Faith-Based Initiative” push in the early 2000s).

Fraternal orders were gutted with the granting of a virtual health care monopoly to employers during World War Two (to increase corporate bargaining power with labor in the midst of wartime wage controls), and mutual aid societies were either corporatized, obsoleted by welfare programs, or pushed to fold by New Deal-era insurance regulations.

American imperial power came at the expense of American civic life.

Other events helped along the way, such as when the American government outlawed private gold ownership during the Great Depression, Richard Nixon stole the gold reserves of the entire world (provoking the French to sail a warship into New York Harbor) as part of his move to force the entire world to use the petrodollar (he succeeded in this strategy),²⁶ the US destabilized Libya and suborned the assassination of Muammar Gaddafi after he’d been brought to heel against the Islamists (because he was encouraging African nations to do business in gold instead of dollars), the US went to war against former ally Saddam Hussein for the crime of selling oil for euros instead of dollars (not, as we were told,for harboring Weapons of Mass Destruction).

The result of all this chicanery?

On the positive side, the most powerful empire in the history of the world, broad-based economic uplift (including the near-elimination of extreme poverty across the globe), eighty years of relative peace, and massive technological and scientific advancement. The Internet, nuclear weapons, nuclear power, rocket flight, space travel, satellite communications, microwave radio, electronics, cell phones, GPS, and digital cameras are all the results of weapons research funded, in part or in whole, by the US Department of Defense and the US intelligence establishment.²⁷

On the downside, it’s an empire that, despite maintaining a military presence in over two thirds of the countries on the planet, has never once won a war since its emergence as a global hegemon—Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Afghanistan, and Ukraine were all astonishing strategic losses. ²⁸

Through its subversive activities and fickle affections it has failed to secure or maintain the goodwill required to run a soft power empire. It has financed and propped up its greatest rivals (the USSR, China, post-USSR Russia, Nazi Germany, Al Queda) and its minor annoyances (the Ayatollahs of Iran, Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, the Communist dictatorship in Cuba, the train wreck of Venezuela). It has managed to lose most of its direct imperial holdings (such as The Philippines) and has run its remaining imperial holdings into the ground (Puerto Rico). It has, directly and indirectly, suborned corruption, genocide, and dictatorships, experimented on its own citizens repeatedly, and utterly failed to hold itself to a single standard it preens about before the voting public.

The American Empire’s propaganda campaigns and corporatist (i.e. fascist)²⁹ economic model has driven worldwide birth rates down past the point of no return, leaving it to rule over an empty world (if it manages to survive). Its total lock (until recently) on the propaganda apparatus of the developed world and its extensive taxation power means that it maintains itself by controlling what you know, how you learn, how you earn, how you spend, what you think, what you value, who you love, and what you believe.

Its ambition, lack of discipline, and its culture of secrecy, corruption, and deception have locked the voting public out of the political process for nearly eighty years (with the exception of “Culture War” issues and other such distractions that keep the people divided so that the powerful can continue to loot the land to further their imperial ambitions and their own careers).

It is not authoritarian, but it is totalitarian.³⁰

The American empire is an empire of lies, based upon secrecy, and governed by doctrines formulated by the very same people that brought The Third Reich, the Soviet Empire, the Khmer Rouge, and the Wahhabist regime in Saudi Arabia into power (people like Edward Bernays, the British finance and security sectors, the American/English prep school system, the members of the Nazi brain trust imported into the United States through Operation Paperclip and similar contemporaneous operations, and the robber-baron industrialists of the late 19th century, all of whom developed and/or advanced the discipline of eugenics and the doctrines of corporatism).

And, like all such empires eventually do, it has beggared the homeland and spent itself into oblivion. Its financial footing is far shakier than those which precipitated the economic collapse of the Roman empire, the Mongolian empire, the Dutch empire, several Chinese empires, and the British empire.

Almost everything in this section is documented by citations of sources that were available long before the recent excitement in Washington. The DOGE audit merely helps flesh out an already astonishing public record.

The Empire in the Present Day

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that America is unusual in most of these matters. All empires do this kind of thing. It’s practically in the job description. An empire’s function in the ecology of power is to stabilize the area it controls so that life can unfold in a relatively peaceful manner, and to do so by any means necessary.

The thing that sets the American empire apart is that, since the American public is generally of an anti-imperialist bent, and the American system is at least notionally democratic, for the American ruling class to go about its imperial ways it must pretend that the United States is not an empire.

This has some very perverse effects.

First, and most obviously, it means that the State must sell its wars to the people,³¹ and since there are literally no threats to American security on the world stage, our government must invent them. This is a game it’s become very good at over the past century and a half:

The Civil War was fought over control of the American continent. Had the South been allowed to secede, it could only have maintained itself by allying with one of the European superpowers (the French were the most likely candidate, as the English were, at the time, fighting a protracted war to eliminate slavery from the face of the Earth). For any other empire in history, that would have been all the justification required. Unfortunately, that’s not the kind of rationale that really motivates the public, so the war was sold to some parts of the public as “preserving the Union (and thus, the American dream),”³² to other parts as “a war to end slavery,”³³ and still to other parts as punishing “traitors.”³⁴ Even then, it was not a popular war, and by its end nearly a million Americans (most of them slaves conscripts) were dead.

And, notably, it was the last American war in which the government’s true motivation for war was at least partly known to the majority of the public.

The Spanish-American war, as we have already discussed, was sold to the public on a lie, as were World War One and World War Two.

World War Two is worth special mention here in addition to the problems I pointed out earlier (see footnote 23):

As part of its strategy for victory, the US funded the Soviet war machine (supplying vast amounts of cash, small arms, tank parts, and other materiel), allowing Stalin to re-secure his fading grip on power. Had they not done so, the Soviet Union would either have collapsed as a result of World War Two, or been forced into a radical internal reorganization, which would have likely seen Stalin meeting his end by slipping in the shower and falling on some bullets. Power would likely then have devolved to Kruschev, who was a much less genocidal and much more reasonable fellow (as Soviet premiers went). Of course, had FDR not bragged to Stalin about having nuclear weapons at the Munich peace conference, and had the chief physicist of the Manhattan Project not leaked the research behind the A-Bomb to the KGB, the Cold War would never have happened.³⁵ Nor would the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulag Archipelago, nor some of the genocides under Stalin,³⁶ Mao, and Pol Pot.

Another satisfied beneficiary of US Foreign Aid

The Korean War was also sold to the American public based on a lie—three of them, actually. The first was that it wasn’t a “real war” (there was never a declaration of war issued by Congress), but instead a “police action.” The second is that it was conducted by the UN with US support—in reality the US supplied over 90% of the troops and material used to prosecute the war. Thirdly, and most importantly, the American public was told that the invasion of South Korea by hostile forces (North Korean communists backed by China and the Soviet Union) was a “surprise attack.” In reality, the Truman administration had many months advanced warning of the military build-up along the border between North and South Korea, and had sponsored a number of massacres on North Korean civilian populations with the aim of provoking the North into an invasion.

In 1959, the US backed a military coup in Cuba and then abandoned its stooge, Batista, who was thereafter quickly deposed by Fidel Castro (a communist revolutionary who had, himself, at one point been attached to the CIA). The Bay of Pigs incident quickly followed. Intended as an invasion to depose Castro, the American-sponsored forces faced more resistance than anticipated, and the US high command (at the direction of President John F. Kennedy) decided to withdraw US air support and strategic coordination.³⁷ Their Cuban allies were massacred.

The Cuban adventure was but one in a series of South American coups sponsored by the State Department, the two most infamous being the one in Guatemala on behalf of the United Fruit Company (the incident from which we get the term “Banana Republic”), and the other being the military coup in Chile that put the military junta of General Augusto Pinochet in power. The political term “to disappear someone” comes from Pinochet’s favorite political tactic.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Scorched earth foreign policy at work.

America’s next let’s-pretend-it’s-not-a-war was in Vietnam. Weary and leery after Korea and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the American people did not want to get involved in a full-scale war in Vietnam. The political capital to do so came, as if by divine providence, in the form of the Gulf of Tonkin incident: a sneak attack on August 4, 1965 by the North Vietnamese Army against the U.S. Navy.

The incident, of course, never happened. The kernel of truth in the center of the lie is that, a few days earlier, a US amphibious assault crew had been repelled by the North Vietnamese while in NVA controlled waters.

The Vietnam War spanned twenty years and claimed around 3.25 million lives.

Before losing badly in Vietnam (the US fought to a draw, declared victory, negotiated a treaty, and abandoned its allies who were then quickly over-run by the NVA), the US extended its prosecution of the war into Laos and Cambodia. American abuse of Cambodia’s civilian populations and interference in Cambodian politics provided the opportunity for Pol Pot to rally enough popular support to seize power. He then used that power to democide around a quarter of his country’s population (1.7-2.2 million people out of a total of 8 million)—including the entire educated class—in an incident that has since become known as “The Killing Fields.” The situation was so appalling that the Communist Vietnamese Army (America’s adversaries in the Vietnam War) eventually invaded Cambodia to depose Pol Pot.

Human femurs stacked in the tailings of Pol Pot’s killing fields. Photo by Oliver Spalt, 2002.

Earlier that same decade (the 1970s), Congressional hearings led by Senator Frank Church exposed some of the State Department’s dirty laundry to the American public for the first time. It was revealed that, despite its public championing of the Nuremberg Code (which, among other things, prohibits scientific experimentation on humans without informed consent), the United States regularly funded human experimentation of everything from mind control and torture to disease research to radiation poisoning to biological and chemical weapons research upon unwitting United States citizens (including university students and children)…and that’s just the stuff the Church Committee got their hands on after the State Department document shredder crews had been through the file rooms.

The Middle East was active as well during this time, with America sponsoring regime change actions that brought to power Saddam Hussein (in Iraq) and the one-time CIA asset Ayatollah Khomeini (in Iran), among others—and you already know how those turned out.

Then, during the 1980s, the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan were built and armed by the US taxpayer, as was their entire system of madrassas. From this group, we get Al Quaeda (who attacked the World Trade Center), ISIS, and the Taliban—all of whom, we now know, the US is still funding (or was, until a couple weeks ago). And all this is to say nothing of the Imperial involvement in the drug trade, the rise and support of Idi Amin, or of the sponsorship of guerrilla armies in Africa such as Boko Haram.

All of it done behind the scenes, sold to the American public on lies, conducted without the slightest bit of democratic input, in an ecology predicated on the manipulation of the public and the manufacture of fake consent…

…and all of it disastrous to the well-being of the empire itself.

How Empires Fall

Disastrous?

Well, an empire that wishes to maintain its position cannot do so by force of arms, or even force of Coca-Cola and movies, alone. It must maintain good will among its subjects. To do that, it needs to be perceived as being trustworthy and beneficial. Historically, successful imperial powers do this with a five point strategy:

1. Bring stability by quelling local infighting

2. Bring prosperity by loosening local hierarchies and promoting social mobility

3. Bring opportunity through opening the territory up to trade

4. Bring dignity by conspicuously honoring the local culture and religion

5. Bring trust by modeling noble behavior and sticking to one’s contracts

While America’s reign has brought broad-based economic uplift that has loosened local hierarchies and promoted social mobility in its vassal states, it has failed on every other point. It has proven eager to promote instability in its sphere of influence, faithless in its security commitments outside of Europe, Israel, and Taiwan, and aggressively destructive to and disrespectful of local cultures.

It behaves this way because its mission is as much moral as it is strategic. It really does want to spread “democracy” and liberal culture to every corner of the globe, even if that means it does so to people who do not want it and who do not have the cultural software to enact anything beyond a cargo-cult version of democratic forms, while hiding itself from democratic accountability. To advance its moral vision (and because it is a moral vision), it is willing to use any method at all: assassination, human experimentation, suborning genocide and democide, backing both sides in local civil wars, and depopulating areas by means both gentle (sterilization, free birth control, debt) and foul (killing the subjects of those who don’t toe the American line).

As historic imperial powers go, America is the least competent by far. Is it any wonder she is so widely distrusted and resented, and her most loudly championed values (free speech, self-determination, freedom of conscience, the right to arms, etc.) are so disreputable, even among those closest allies whose political and cultural heritage she shares?

But, while this is a problem for America’s credibility (and especially for the welfare of its homeland population), America is, frankly, so deeply blessed with resources and strategic advantages that no amount of ill-will could plausibly unseat it from its imperial throne.

America has no peer powers—Russia certainly isn’t one. China isn’t either. Both are too deep into population collapse and debt implosion to present any credible threat at all to the United States (excepting the launch of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles).³⁸ The worst they can do to is to harass important allies. They are paper tigers—useful for keeping imperial subjects terrified, outraged, and pliable, but not actually a realistic threat (not that we should let that stand in the way of a good war).

But there is another, deeper, and more dangerous threat to America’s empire, and to her very existence as a nation. She has, at a remarkably young age, run into the same basic problem that all other empires eventually run into:

When you’ve got an empire, everyone wants a piece of the pie.

To keep the ruling class in the imperial holdings happy, the imperial seat eventually has to export more wealth for the maintenance of the empire than it takes in from the maintenance of the empire. And, of course, the activity of seeking imperial favor inevitably involves corrupting imperial officials.

By late empire, in any empire, most of the political class have been bought by client states and/or rival powers, and also compromised by the security services of at least the imperial seat (often also of client states). Between the carrot and the stick, most are willing to stay bought. This corruption speeds up the hollowing-out of the imperial seat, but the hollowing-out would happen anyway, because no client state can be kept in the fold if it’s not getting a better deal than it could get on its own.³⁹

The British were going bankrupt long before the Americans tipped them over and turned them into a client state. The Romans, likewise, were significantly overextended. So too with the Egyptian, the Soviet, the Dutch, the Spanish, the French, and several of the Chinese empires.⁴⁰

By historical standards, once an empire attains a debt-to-GDP ratio of between 200% and 300%,⁴¹ it’s pretty much toast. The United States’s Federal debt is currently at least 150%, and may already be north of 200%, depending on whose estimates you believe (official numbers are only currently available through 2021). If you include municipal, county, state, and private debts (which the calculations for previous fallen empires do), we’re north of 300%.⁴²

We’re toast.

But it gets worse.

In the aftermath of World War Two, we built our economy on the assumption that the next generation would always be bigger and more prosperous than the current one. So did all our allies. “Our children will always be richer and more numerous than we,” the reasoning goes, “They’ll be able to pay for our pensions, our medical care, and pay off our debts.”

Except, thanks to American propaganda campaigns and commercial strategies (most of which were first piloted at home on her own people), the birthrates around the world aren’t just too low to sustain welfare states, they are too low to sustain a modern economy of any known sort.

Everywhere, that is, except for the American homeland, India, New Zealand, Argentina, and France. In the developed world, those places—and only in those places—there is a swell in the population pyramid: the Millennial generation.

But even in these places, there’s nobody following on the Millenials’ heels.

The result?

In the next three decades, the Earth will lose just under half its population to attrition, and maybe quite a lot more to famines and wars that manifest as a result of economic implosion. We are already seeing the results across the world:

The beginnings of the widespread euthanasia of pensioners and the disabled (who are a burden that the welfare state can’t afford),⁴³ the importation of vast numbers of outsiders who are stoking race wars across Europe, and a Cartel War between the US and Mexico.

This is just the start.

DOGEing the End of Empire?

A significant portion of the American electorate, aware of at least part of the story I’ve laid out so far in this article, are pissed. Their country, whose story about liberty and democracy they swallowed, whose health they fed with their taxes, whose friends, parents, and children enlisted to fight and die in useless wars waged on dishonest pretexts in distant lands to enrich defense contractors and financiers, has betrayed them, and they know it.⁴⁴

Not only that, but this country has taught its closest allies—including and especially Israel—how to play the same game. Israel, after all, had advance warning of the surprise attacks of October 7, 2023 and did nothing. It was content to let its citizens get murdered, raped, and kidnapped by paratroopers who were, themselves, soldiers of an army that Israel created in the hopes that it would advance its goal of finally re-capturing the rest of the ancestral Jewish homeland (this strategy has, so far, worked).⁴⁵

To many Americans, it seems their country, which they love, is in fact the Great Satan the Islamic fundamentalists make it out to be.

Mission patch for the National Reconnaissance Office mission L-49. The payload were earth-surveillance satellites more powerful than the Hubble telescope. The Latin reads: “Better the devil you know.”

Into this maelstrom of ignominy, resentment, rage, and ruin, walks a new American Presidential administration that seems to be filled with people who understand (at least some of) the problems, and are intent on fixing them.

The stakes are these:

If the U.S. doesn’t get its debt under control, the world reserve currency will collapse in the next one-to-eight years. When it does, the economy of every developed nation on the planet will also collapse. If this happens, the US will likely plunge into civil war and balkanization. This will, in turn, cause an international famine and energy shortage (which will, in turn, cause more international wars), leading to the death of several hundred million people.

By the way, this is an optimistic scenario should the US suffer a hard crash.

So, the debt must be brought under control somehow.

To accomplish this, three things have to happen:

1. The administrative apparatus built to support the empire and the total-war economic footing in the wake of World War Two must be either dismantled or vastly slimmed down.

2. Every penny of waste, graft, and fraud in the Federal budget must be identified, accounted for, and trimmed.

3. The ruling class that has put the U.S. in this situation must be permanently locked out of the government.

4. The resulting system must be given a new mission that’s scaled to its capabilities.

This is why Trump has re-branded The US Digital Service to the Department of Government Efficiency and set things loose to conduct a ZBB process on⁴⁶ of all operations under the control of the Executive branch. This process includes a deep forensic audit—something that the Federal Government has never before undertaken. In re-purposing the USDS, Trump successfully took an Obama-era agency that was intended to get government websites working and—without expanding their remit—weaponized them against the entire system.⁴⁷

Is Trump doing it to serve a personal grudge? Almost certainly.

Is his appointee to manage the process using it to advance corrupt ends? It seems so.

Is he using it to punish political enemies? Undoubtedly.

In doing so, is he violating the norms and customs of American political life?

Not really.

Before the New Deal era, when the permanent bureaucratic state was invented, America operated on what was called the “Spoils System” of politics: to the victor in the election went the spoils. Presidents appointed their cronies to powerful positions, gutted departments and staffed them with party and personal loyalists. Sounds corrupt, but Machiavelli would approve:

Making sure one’s staff does not include disloyal actors is the only way that any ruler can securely exercise executive power.

This seems odd to us, since we’re at the tail end of eighty years of power being diffused through deniable networks of petty bureaucrats who all have some measure of ability to grind the system to a halt in defiance of orders. It was pitched to the voting public as a way to bring stability to a chaotic system:

Staff the bureaucracy with disinterested professionals; qualified people without political agendas who are experts in the very small corner of the world they’re responsible for. The system of government thus achieved is called “Technocracy,” or “Rule by Experts.”⁴⁸

As we have seen over the past twenty years (and longer), it hasn’t worked out very well. Even civil servants have political agendas, and are corrupt and corruptible. This very civil service has aided and abetted the degradation and possible destruction of the most powerful empire in history.

Nonetheless, the result of this operation will be a much tighter concentration of Executive power into the hands of the Chief Executive. This is looks a lot like a dictatorship, but it is how the system was designed to work. Congress and the Supreme Court and the States all have various Constitutional claims on checking executive power…the bureaucracy does not.

Why would the founders do this?

Because the President is more-or-less immune from prosecution…but he is vulnerable, by design, to a political coup. Since the President’s power is political, only a political act that can remove him from office. The fact that the Congress has long declined to discharge this duty (except on the flimsiest of pretexts) doesn’t change the fact that the duty is theirs.⁴⁹

This state of affairs—both the Constitutional political context and the sudden-death threat that the United States currently faces—is why Trump, like Jackson, Lincoln, FDR, and Jefferson before him, is unironically and openly stating his willingness to flout both law and convention to do the job.

It also is why Trump has turned the US imperial focus away from Europe and towards a reaffirmation of the Monroe Doctrine. US foreign policy officially now does not have much interest in what happens in Europe, but it IS interested in what happens on the American continents and in the South Pacific (a massive shift in post-WW2 strategic footing, but one that is entirely and exclusively within the President’s Constitutional powers).

And it is why none of the usual playbooks seem to apply anymore.

Change on this scale invariably involves hurting a lot of people. Like chemotherapy, you must poison the body politic in order to purge the cancer that will otherwise kill it. Even if done perfectly, it might not work, but the price of not doing it is known:

The end of the United States and the collapse of global technological civilization.⁵⁰

In this sense, while Trump is positioning himself as a transformative figure on par with Lincoln and FDR, it is quite possible that he will actually become a transformative figure in the vein of Gorbachev.

Any massive change in the status quo—particularly a long-established status quo—is going to scare people. Any big power move requires backing and support, paying off established interests by fair means or foul (and usually both). Trump’s brain trust brings with it a lot of people with very complicated politics, including some (such as Yarvin and Thiel) who are outright hostile to democracy per se, seeing it as the enemy of liberty.

But before you mistake me as cheerleading for Trump, there’s another sting in the tail here to consider.

On the Subject of Marbles

Here’s the really perverse part of how power works in a system like ours:

Only an outsider to the system could do what needs doing.

And, because of the extent of the corruption and reach of that system, only an insider could ever get chosen for the job.⁵¹

Trump is an insider by virtue of his position as a politically active financier. He’s an outsider by virtue of his pedigree. This puts him in the perfect position to perform some kind of hard reboot of the imperial system.

Like everything else in the world, power operates according to its own set of rules. The powerful in the American system have, for over a century, neglected their duty to the electorate—yet their longevity suggests that they have attended to their duty to someone, be that “someone” a person, an organizational philosophy, a banking cabal, or an imperial vision (my money is on some combination of the final three).

To take the most cynical possible tack, imagine that the ruling class views the public as cattle. There are some among that class that are, like ranchers, interested in keeping the herd healthy so it can keep providing them with meat, and there are others who, like wolves, are happy to exterminate the herd and move on to greener pastures (pun intended). When evaluating rulers, those who behave like ranchers are “good,” while those who behave like wolves are “bad.” And a good rancher is supremely responsive to conditions in the environment his herd must inhabit.

Because of demographic and financial pressures, the world is changing. The change is likely to be as momentous as that wrought by the Black Death (which ended the medieval world and birthed the modern one). The entrenched power structures that ruled the medieval world persist to this day, but their power is greatly diminished. We might therefore also expect that the entrenched power structures of our world (Imperial hegemons, global finance, the military-industrial complex, the Imperial security establishment, etc.) should also persist, but fade in power in the face of some new paradigm.

The Catholic Church couldn’t keep its iron grip on political power in the face of the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the printing press. It follows, then, that the Covert State might not be able to retain its grip on the world in the face of the Internet, the auditing power of DOGE, and a public that no longer is entranced by the power of the empire and the corporatocracy and technocracy that made it great.

Just as the Enlightenment era had the printing press, and paper money, and private banking to overturn the medieval paradigm, we have the internet, and cryptocurrency, and AI to overturn the modern.

The moves that DOGE is making (or making possible) are exactly the ones that someone had to make to shatter the old system and save the empire and country from the parasite load that has accumulated on its body.

Unfortunately, these exact moves are also a prerequisite for the final elimination of privacy and the establishment of an iron-fisted authoritarian state.

I mentioned earlier on that America is a totalitarian state but not an authoritarian one. This has been the case for a long time. Here’s what that means:

A totalitarian State demands your soul. All your relationships, all your finances, and all your private beliefs are expected to conform to the diktats of the State, for the good of the State, and for your own survival. In a totalitarian system, if you stray too far out of bounds, you will be burned alive, or shot through the head while holding your infant son, or publicly humiliated, or suicided, or debanked, or quietly disappeared.

But as long as you stay within those bounds (no matter how broad or narrow they might be), so long as you pose no threat to the ideological regime, you will be okay. And the totalitarian state will help you comply. They will shape your consciousness, fund your news sources, subsidize the artists who promote the vision of the State, and give you tax breaks for believing and doing according to the Will of the State.

This is The United States of America…at least today.

An authoritarian State is different. The authoritarian state does not care what you believe—it cares what you do. If you do something that is out of bounds—and those bounds are usually narrow—you will be made an example of. You will be destroyed in public, drawn and quartered, the memory of you will be poisoned, and your legacy wiped out. And they will know if you step out of bounds, because you will be watched.

Constantly.

Medieval societies were authoritarian states, but not totalitarian.

We are totalitarian, but not authoritarian.

China is both. The USSR was both. The DDR⁵² and Nazi Germany were both.

And, in terms of espoused ideology, Larry Ellison is both. Bill Gates is both. Peter Thiel is authoritarian but not totalitarian. Elon Musk is authoritarian but (probably) not totalitarian.

All four of them appear to have Trump’s ear.

All four of them are longtime, indispensable allies of the security services.⁵³ This lends considerable credibility to those who believe that Trump’s second administration is a counter-coup against the Administrative State on behalf of the DoD and State Department (who used to run the show, empire-wise, before the New Deal).

Assuming Trump does not fail in his stated goals (as well he might), he may yet save America from debt dissolution.

If he does, we face three possible futures:

A new golden age of latitude and privacy, in which income taxes are abolished in favor of tariffs, where less of the burden of government falls on working people, and technological uplift takes us to the stars.

A digital-currency enabled, totally surveiled, social credit-driven authoritarian state which, because of the nature of American culture, may also remain totalitarian.

A new turn of the wheel, where the current machine—the most profitable organized crime enterprise in world history—gets a good tune up, and returns to business-as-usual, stealing from the hoi polloi to line the pockets of the managerial and donor classes.⁵⁴

And, of course, it is always possible that we get some portion of all three at once.

And, as in all political systems (including all democratic ones), the people do not get to decide what will happen. They do, however, have a certain amount of say in what will not happen. No population can be directed or controlled without its tacit consent. In eras of delicate transition, discontent (especially focused discontent that is well informed about the way that power works, and avoids partisan thought-traps) can play a decisive role.

In the game of power there are allies, but not friends. Your ally today may be your enemy tomorrow. So stay sharp, stay informed, and stay critical.

This one’s for all the marbles.

This column is a big part of how I make my living—bigger now due to recent exciting events which you can read about here. Because of this, I’m offering a 20% lifetime discount off the annual subscription rate. If you’re finding these articles valuable, I’d be honored to have you join the ranks of my supporters!’

1. Some subcultures DID do this, regardless of the inhibition. Most of these were people who had started out in the Evangelical scene (a minority came from the Marxist hard-left, which is an almost mirrored subculture to the Evangelical, so the following analysis is applicable to them to). Why did this scene foster more of a willingness to engage in frame-breaking inquiry? It is uniquely theologically brittle, but philosophically robust.

Evangelicalism is a form of quasi-hyper-orthodox Christianity that is built on a postmodern epistemological foundation (basically, an understanding that truth—even divinely-revealed truth—is a form of sense-making narrative, especially as explored by Girard and Foucault). The Evangelical theological frame is highly Manichean (i.e. good vs. evil) and is utterly predicated upon a Cold War worldview, from top to bottom. As a result of the end of the cold war, the Manichean moral frame was thrown into chaos (how can one understand good without Evil as a reference point?) and the ability to engage with truth and meaning in terms of narrative meant that Evangelicals thrown thusly into chaos by Evangelicalism’s theological fragility were surprisingly adept at setting forth into the waters of cultural uncertainty.

The marriage of Evangelical morality and philosophy to unfettered inquiry had some pretty remarkable effects. Direct-and-indirect consequences of this impertinence (and the countermoves against them) included: The New Atheist movement, the moralization and domestication of the kink scene, the Tea Party movement, gay marriage, socially-acceptable polyamory, Occupy Wall Street, Wokeness, the popularity of Curtis Yarvin and the Grey Tribe, the political ambitions of Peter Thiel (himself a postmodern Christian, though not an Evangelical), and the popularity of both Joe Biden (riding on Obama-nostalgia) and Donald Trump.

As we will see, most of these phenomena are, in some measure non-organic and function as traps for those with minds willing to ignore intellectual taboos.

2. “gnostic” in the small “g” sense of the word is best summed up in The Gospel of John 8:32: “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” Gnostic apocalyptic is literature in which the attainment of understanding brings salvation/resolution. Mystery is a popular genre in which gnostic-apocalyptic is routinely employed and validated (when the bad guys are brought to justice—cozies are the exemplar of this) or subverted (when knowing the truth merely reveals a bleak reality—noir [i.e. “black”] detective stories are of this sort. Most types of mysteries lie between these two extremes). Gnosticism (in both its formal-mystical and in its more secular forms) always becomes extra-popular with the masses during times of cultural unmooring and ferment.

3. These norms and traditions were, in turn, enforced by courtiers who had the power to pull legitimacy from the ruler should they feel sufficiently motivated.

4. Often attributed to Martin Luther King, Jr., and happily parroted by more recent figures such as Barack Obama, Steven Pinker, and Michael Shermer, this was originally formulated by abolitionist agitator Theodore Parker in 1853 in his sermon “Of Justice and the Conscience.”

5. This way of thinking was anticipated by Jean Jacques Rosseau in his doctrine of The Noble Savage, but was actually crystallized by Immanuel Kant in his Groundwork on the Metaphysics of Morals. From there, it went on to infect influence most thinkers that followed.

6. He adds that “Kant appears to have believed that repeating the lie that right makes might often enough would force the universe to make it true.”

7. Indeed, Machiavelli’s very name has been appropriated by psychologists to describe a personality trait that is entirely self-seeking, ruthless, and cynically manipulative without regard for the consequence of one’s actions. It would be hard to find a personality trait cluster that is more opposed to Machiavelli’s philosophy as this, but the logic is similar to that which thinks that knowing how to make a bomb is in the same moral universe as detonating a nuclear weapon over a preschool.

8. And, ironically, the refusal to exercise power is often considered immoral per se. Consider if an ardent pacifist had access to a loaded pistol at the same time he caught sight of a police officer in the act of raping a child prostitute he’s just arrested. If the pacifist did not pick up that pistol and kill that police officer, very few people would consider the pacifist’s morally-motivated refusal to use power to be a moral act.

9. See Machiavelli’s discourse on cruelty and mercy in The Prince.

10. See Hobbes, Leviathan.

11. See Aristotle on the difference between oligarchy and aristocracy in Politics.

12. 11 November, 1947. https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/quotes/the-worst-form-of-government/

13. Indeed, North Korea’s official system of government, when viewed as an org chart, looks very like our own. See Dear Reader by Michael Malice.

14. A mission statement originally coined by Woodrow Wilson.

15. See The Accidental Superpower by Peter Zeihan

16. Related in great detail and nuance in Charles C. Mann’s masterwork 1491. Also covered by Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America 1.2.10.

17. Predicated upon the emergence of the World Island theory of geopolitics, which posited that any power or alliance that controlled the area between Berlin and Moscow would have the population, resources, and sea ports to rule the world. The definitive work on the topic is The Geopolitical Pivot of History by H.L. Mackinder, but his most popularly accessible work (which covers the same ground, and also predicts the rise of the Nazis, WW2, the Cold War, the coming of a global hegemon, and the broad brushes of the current Ukraine war) is Democratic Ideals and Reality.

18. Specifically, the 1898 explosion and sinking of the USS Maine due to a fire in her coal stores (combustion of aerosolized coal dust) that triggered an explosion in her powder magazine. The sinking was maliciously attributed to Spanish military action. There was no evidence at the time to support the story, and a Naval investigation of the wreckage in 1975 verified that the sinking of the Maine was an accident. The opportunity to railroad the public into war nevertheless presented itself, and the rising powers in the ruling class (led by Teddy Roosevelt), in collusion with Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, whipped the public into a frothing lust for Spanish blood that carried the American imperial project halfway around the world and drove the Spanish from Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines.

19. Historians disagree whether the series of decisions relevant to this moment represented inertia and wishful thinking on the part of British and American leaders, or deliberate calculation. The reality is that there was a pronounced disinclination to get involved at the point where the entire conflict could have been prevented, a great deal of awareness of the consequences of preventing the conflict, and certain vested interests (especially the military, which had been secretly in cahoots with France for years beforehand, the British financier class represented by the Bank of England, and some of the American robber-barrons) that pushed for lack of action early on, and then for escalation once things got going, as they saw the opportunity to expand their spheres of influence. This is a big rabbit hole to slip into. You can get a starter with a lot of footnotes in this article, which is sympathetic to the “inertia” theory: https://www.e-ir.info/2010/11/13/does-britain-bear-the-primary-responsibility-for-world-war-i/

20. He wasn’t. He was an imperialist at least from his days as a professor at Princeton, and practiced foreign adventurism in accord with the Monroe doctrine throughout his administration https://millercenter.org/president/wilson/foreign-affairs

21. https://totallyhistory.com/woodrow-wilsons-role-during-world-war-1/

22. As warned by MacKinder in Democratic Ideals and Reality, which was written for the benefit of those attending the Versailles peace conference.

23. Among them:
1) The “surprise attack” by the Japanese was nothing of the sort—it was the endgame of a long unofficial diplomatic and economic war conducted by FDR in order to provoke the Japanese into war (a goal he’d entertained since his prep school days—see Harry Elmer Barnes in Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace:A Critical Examination of the Foreign Policy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Its Aftermath).
2) the Italian Fascist and German National Socialist parties borrowed much of their political system and social programs from the American and British progressive movements and eugenics laws (see Edwin Black, War Against the Weak and Franklin Hugh Adler’s Mussolini's Intellectuals: Fascist Social and Political Thought).
3) The US and Britain refused to take in Jewish refugees when Hitler had made it clear to them that they would be eliminated from Germany by hook or by crook,
4) Germany didn’t have territorial ambitions beyond Eastern Europe, but the US propaganda portrayed the Nazi Program as pursuing world domination. MacKinder’s World Island theory was the justification for this, but even in MacKinder’s calculus, “the world” consisted primarily of the Eastern Hemisphere, and “rule” in this context means “to set the tune” not “to be a one-world government.”
And many many others.

24. This monster is, in itself, worthy of several articles. If you’re on the left, you’re likely wondering why anyone could oppose this foreign aid organization. If you’re on the right, you can’t imagine why anyone could possibly continence the extent of corruption on display. Both forms of bafflement are easily reconciled by the basic strategic mechanism for organs of empire in the modern age: Create something with a positive mission, fund good things through it, and then use those things as hostages for its true function, which would be un-fundable if the public had a say. Funnel the funding for the dark projects through the bright mission so that it’s nearly impossible to stop the dark without tanking the bright.

Fortunately, El Gato did a pretty decent analysis of it just as this article went to press, so I don’t have to cover all that material here:

the global crime scene

25. A missions organization dedicated to documenting tribal languages, creating written forms, and translating the Bible into them. Their methods were fairly accurately portrayed in the 2000s viral film hit The End of the Spear. Founder Cam Townsend created the organization with the help of the State Department, allowing the State Department to use the missions work to smuggle spies and information in exchange for the State Department helping it out with obtaining permission to go into tribal areas in hostile countries.

26. A very brief primer on the history of the dollar, including the shift from the gold peg to the petrodollar, can be found here: https://medium.com/@irfanoli/how-the-us-dollar-became-the-worlds-currency-b7a8c34ad914

This article (on a broader topic) includes more background on the how/why of these moves and their economic and geopolitical context:

Is Trump FDR, or Gorbachev?

27. As was the research of Norman Bourlag, who spearheaded the Green Revolution, which alleviated famine and made the bulk of the world dependent upon American agricultural inputs and seeds.

28. There is a good case to be made for the idea that much of this strategic buffoonery was deliberate, as war provides excellent cover for money laundering and covert payments that finance both black ops and pay off political backers, but untangling that mess is well beyond the scope of this article. See the article by El Gato linked in footnote 24 for some work in the direction of building this argument.

29. As laid out in the writings of Giovanni Gentile and Benito Mussolini, fascism is the exercise of government power through corporations (by means of regulation, subsidy, tax policy, and direct instruction) and the reciprocal involvement of corporate leaders in national strategy, and the propagation of this power through state-controlled social institutions and education. Gentile ghostwrote The Doctrine of Fascism for Mussolini in 1935, where on page 41 he states: “The Fascist State lays claim to rule in the economic field no less than in others; it makes its action felt throughout the length and breadth of the country by means of its corporate, social, and educational institutions, and all the political, economic, and spiritual forces of the nation, organised in their respective associations, circulate within the State.”

And on page 135-136:

”The corporate State considers that private enterprise in the sphere of production is the most effective and useful instrument in the interest of the nation. In view of the fact that private organisation of production is a function of national concern, the organiser of the enterprise is responsible to the State for the direction given to production.

State intervention in economic production arises only when private initiative is lacking or insufficient, or when the political interests of the State are involved. This intervention may take the form of control, assistance or direct management.”

30. From page 14 of The Doctrine of Fascism:
”The Fascist conception of the State is all-embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value. Thus understood, Fascism is totalitarian, and the Fascist State–a synthesis and a unit inclusive of all values–interprets, develops, and potentiates the whole life of a people.”

31. In nakedly imperial systems, the dynamic between the public and wars and the legitimacy of power is markedly different.

32. “…we shall nobly save, or meanly lose, this last best hope of Earth.” —Abraham Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address.

33. Fears over the end of slavery was a major—and arguably THE major—contributing cause to the South’s decision to secede. Ending slavery, however, was a cause that was made popular in the North during the war in order to bolster the Union’s moral authority in the eyes of its subjects.
The Emancipation Proclamation was a document with no legal force, for several reasons. First, its diktats only encompassed the Confederate states, not the slave-holding states in the Union. Secondly, if one views the Confederacy as a separate country at the time, it had no legal standing in Confederate territory. Thirdly, if one views the Confederacy as still being subject to the US Constitution, then since slavery was accounted for in that founding document, ending it would require a Constitutional amendment. Fourthly, if one holds that the Federal supremacy doctrine in interstate commerce gave the Fed the power to outlaw slavery (something that could be plausibly argued only under 20th century Supreme Court precedent), the document still could have no legal force, as it was an Executive Order which did not depend upon authority delegated by Congress to the Executive. The document was a PR move whose only legal force was to compel the Union army to treat escaped slaves as freedmen—this is great insofar as it goes, but it is not what it’s since been cracked up to be.
Slavery was officially ended by the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1865 by the Union states and a handful of formerly Confederate states, many months after the surrender of the South to Union forces. It has been effectively ended in many places before that point by occupying Union forces conducting a campaign of divide-and-conquer aimed at bankrupting the Confederacy, and thus her ability to make war. It was a brilliant strategy, and a win for those of us who detest slavery (which is, I daresay, almost everyone now), but it was not the moral crusade it was sold as.

34. That the Confederacy followed the same forms in declaring its independence as the US did in rebelling against Britain was ignored on the grounds that the Union owned the South because the US had invested taxpayer money in developing its infrastructure.

35. To be clear, no evidence available to the public indicates that Klaus Fuchs leaked the A-Bomb plans to the Russians under orders from the American brass. He appears to have just been a fan of the Soviet Union, being a communist activist during his days in Germany before fleeing to Britain (where he volunteered to spy for the Soviets), and then being lent to the United States for The Manhattan Project. The American military establishment, in typical bureaucratic fashion, was happy to let the Brits take responsibility for doing the due diligence on its personnel.

36. The Holodomor was already ancient history by this point.

37. Following the logic of power, Kennedy issued the withdrawal order because he found out about the operation while it was in progress. The CIA tried to get him to sign on, but he recognized that doing so would amount to putting his power at the disposal of his subordinates. Power must first preserve itself if it is to be useful.

In unrelated news, he was assassinated two and a half years later by Lee Harvey Oswald, a former Marine and communist activist who had been on the CIA’s radar for several years.

38. See The End of the World is Just the Beginning by Peter Zeihan, and also the following clip:

39. This includes the downside of being subject to an occupying force by an annoyed imperial power.

40. Notice that, with the exception of those empires that fell before A.D. 1800, ALL of those empires were dealt their death-blows by the United States.

41. This is the break range of the British, Roman, Dutch and several Chinese empires.

42. Currently the GDP of the United States is estimated at just below $30 trillion. The total debt load, including all public and private debt, is upwards of $95 trillion.

43. See Canada’s MAID program, and its analogues in Britain and on the European continent.

44. Which is to say nothing of the way America’s soldiers and veterans are treated—they are currently having trouble getting adequately fed at several military bases and being charged for the privilege, as the result of Russian Army levels of embezzlement and corruption. The US, it seems, cares as little for its soldiers as it does for its allies.

45. This is not to say it’s all America’s fault. A persuasive argument can be made that the Israeli leadership class got its start in the British security services, and learned its early dirty tricks there.

46. ZBB means Zero-Based Budgeting. It’s a technique used for reigning in a company whose spending and cohesion have spiraled out of control. The process is explained here. You can read a layman-accessible write-up of the way that DOGE is employing this process here.

47. This is the essence of a hard-power move, and an excellent example of why you should never hand someone a gun if you don’t know where their successor is going to point it. How many other such powers are sitting around waiting for an opportunistic character to pick them up, I wonder?

48. The most robust championing of this sort of system I have ever encountered is to be found in the novel Space Cadet by Robert A. Heinlein. It sketches a vision of a professional class that is entirely constrained by ethics and devoted to its mission, it does so in a convincing and compassionate way that doesn’t shy away from the terrible burden of power bestowed on the members of such a professional class. It is a beautiful model that, unfortunately, only works within the constraints of fiction.

49. This entire situation is downstream from Congress’s determination to avoid its duties and powers. It long ago realized that it could spend more time raising money and taking long lunches if it avoided the whole debate/draft bills/negotiate/horse-trade messiness of politics if it just wrote it’s laws along these lines: “Hello, Executive Branch! Here’s a few billion dollars. Use that to do address X issue in whatever way you deem appropriate. Set up an agency to make regulations about this thing. If we have any questions about what you’re doing, we’ll call you.” (Yes, a lot of Federal laws really are that vague.)

50. No, I’m not exaggerating.

51. Don’t get me started on elections. The US security services wrote the book on how to steal them, and it’s been stealing them for the last eighty years anywhere it needs to in order to advance its interests. Nobody gets into power who isn’t allowed in. The interesting question is always “Why were they allowed to win?” The answer is not always obvious.

My personal opinion in this case is that the security services came to see the malfeasance of the bureaucratic state as a threat to their existence, so they (or some faction within that establishment) threw weight behind the Trump candidacy. His team of advisors (we’ll get to them in a minute) lend weight to this hypothesis.

52. The German (Deutsche) Democratic Republic, a.k.a. “East Germany.”

53. Thiel founded Palantir, which does total-planet surveillance data mining for the NSA and CIA. Musk founded SpaceX (which handles all US surveillance satellite traffic) and Starlink (which provide US space surveillance infrastructure and battlefield tactical support for American military operations and CIA color revolutions). Gates founded Microsoft and Intellectual Ventures, both of which are indispensable to the Federal Government’s IT infrastructure (in the former case) and the DoD’s strategic technological development operations (in the latter case). Larry Ellison founded Oracle, whose database technologies under-gird NSA data capture programs and much of the Federal Government’s internal operations.

54. Or to a managed-decline version of same.