Remember Who The Enemy Is
Remember who the enemy is. They’ll try to remind us repeatedly in the coming days. They will trot out terrifying estimates of refined uranium stockpiles and stories of oppressed women and minorities. History, they will insist, started only this year and no reminders will be offered up of anything that might have happened before. They will do everything to make sure we remember their excuses for what’s going to happen.
And they’re right about one thing. It would do us all good to remember the enemy. The enemy of human life and flourishing is the Capitalist State. The enemy is Empire and the Oligarchs who sustain and feed off of it. It is the imperial need for self-perpetuation nourished by the corpses of the innocent. The blood and suffering of “civilians”. “Civilian” being only a word for people do not enact the violence on others. Of course, it’s a title that’s granted by the ones doing the murdering. Civilians have a habit of magically turning into combatants the moment a bullet shatters their skull.
Words feel so impotent in the face of bombs. There’s nothing anyone’s words can do to stop it at this point. My human siblings are going to die because they happened be born inside one set of imaginary lines. Lines drawn by Empire explicitly to carve them up and contain them. So that they can be controlled and that their wealth and lifeblood can be more easily extracted. So that now they can be more easily blown to bits.
And let’s be clear, there is no other reason for their murder. None other than the bloodthirty demands of Capitalist Realism. The infernal logic that refuses the notion that the world can be any other way. The world order was itself a collection of intentional choices. And we could, if we wished, make different choices. But the first choice would need to be to tear down Empire.
Without that step, no one’s words, no legal incantations, no poem, no plea can stop the capital-class psychopaths from their butchery.
Fisher and Graeber are dead. They were better at words than me. Even they couldn’t stop any of the other spasms of Imperial slaughter. Vonnegut couldn’t, Bakunin couldn’t, Sassoon couldn’t, the hippies and the beats couldn’t. DFW asked and the answer was a resounding “no, we’ll have more blood, always more blood. Blood blood blood.”
I’m despairing because Empire seems like a force beyond human language or human reason. But never beyond human suffering. And so close to all of our lives, no matter which lines we’re born bound by. As close as a landmine to a foot or an impact trigger to the roof of a hospital. Or a bullet in flight to a civilian’s skull, just about to turn them into an “enemy”.