I hate this.
I hate waiting for the next imperial act of war.
I hate having to be aware of sunrise time in Iran so I can relax knowing they made it through another night without US airstrikes.
I hate having to wonder which empire-targeted population is going to get hit next.
The imperial murder machine has been so frenetically active these last few years. When I first started writing about the US empire it was the beginning of Trump’s first term, at a state of relative calm. There were mounting cold war tensions with Russia and the US-backed Saudi atrocities in Yemen, a faltering dirty war in Syria and a half-assed coup attempt in Venezuela, but these frenzied nonstop regime change ops and brazen power grabs weren’t so much a thing back then.
There were days on end when there just wasn’t much to write about in terms of US warmongering. I try to write something every day, so a lot of the time I’d wind up putting out poems or articles about philosophy and spirituality, or just some observations about US politics, because things simply were not as tense as they are now. That went on for years.
Then in 2022 all the brinkmanship with Russia erupted in the Ukraine proxy war, and suddenly my audience started exploding, and I’ve been busy ever since.
In 2023 the Gaza holocaust began, and the US and Israel succeeded in turning the enclave into a gravel parking lot with the still-developing goal of ethnically cleansing the entire population.
The decapitation of Hezbollah, the rapidly accelerated assault on the West Bank, the fall of Assad, and the attacks on Yemen and Iran advanced middle east agendas that the US and Israel had been pursuing for years.
Then they started moving the war machinery to Latin America and eventually kidnapped Maduro, and then immediately shifted the imperial crosshairs to Cuba.
And now they’re doing everything they can to foment civil war in Iran, with airstrikes from the Trump administration reported possible at any time.
It’s just been a nonstop onslaught. As soon as they knock out one disobedient government or population, they’re on the to next.
In the circles I move in you often hear people talk about how the US empire is on its way out and getting weaker and weaker, but I dunno man. It sure has racked up a lot of wins lately. Maybe they’re just grabbing up as much global power as quickly as they can before things heat up with China, but whatever the reason, they’re certainly not acting like they’ve lost the ability to dominate world affairs right now.
Whether they have or not, the work remains the same: wake the public up to the unacceptable nature of the empire, and to the truth that a better world is possible.
We can use the power of our numbers to stop these bastards and force the emergence of a healthy humanity, and the first step is snapping our fellow citizens out of their propaganda-induced coma so that they open their minds to the possibility of resistance.
When all is said and done, the empire managers only have as much power as we collectively agree to let them have.
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Caitlin Johnstone 