America lacks talent

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“Power corrupts and total power corrupts totally”, said 19th Century English historian Lord Acton, reflecting on how history should judge the abuse of power by royals and popes.

The core of that corruption is to discount the rights, suffering, dignity and value of whole swathes of humanity, treating them as a sub-class of disposable slaves, cannon fodder, factory machines and collateral damage.

It is not possible for empires to be moral, because power over others is both seductive and feared, its material rewards are addictive to the ego and thus rapaciously demanding of defence.

Westerners live in an empire as corrupt as any other, a truth hidden from them by their political / media class, Plato’s modern puppet masters. Many (most?) seem happy enough for the truths of empire to be hidden from them by this entertainment industry (serious discourse having ceased many decades ago).

The comfortable middle class lives of empire are incompatible with morality and thus the puppet show must convince all classes of empire of the lie that they act within a moral sphere for the greater good.

Chatter about a ‘multi-polar world’ is essentially about whether one empire (the USA) has hegemony over all. Whether we live under the heel of one empire or five, the net global result is unchanged, for all classes under empires are powerless (materially) to work towards the common good. The power of empire corrupts all who take its coin and in modernity we are all obliged to take it, quite regardless of the many inducements to do so.

Some point towards a globalised capitalism as the true empire, but this is to confuse the methodology of exploitation with its owners. Empires function now as they always have by eschewing morality in favour of rules that entrech and defend acquired and inherited material power.

There is are two main reasons why publications like this one are relatively unpopular:

(a) The rapid ‘progression’ away from the written word that began with the telegraph and ended with Instagram via television. We deal primarily in words – not pictures, thus we go against the tide.

(b) We perform the function of a whistleblower, ratting on the immorality of both myself and everyone around me inside the empire, such people are rarely popular.

Donald Trump switched from reality TV to politics so adroitly because it wasn’t really a switch. Reality TV is the perfect training for a career in contemporary empire non-politics. The forthcoming run off between the orange racist and the handmaiden of genocide is just another episode of America Lacks Talent. It will have very serious consequences but will change nothing about the rampant social cancers within U.S. society nor the cancer that the U.S. / NATO empire represents around the world.

As I write the news portals of the empire (all captured to a man long ago by the usual suspects) are giddy with excitement about the coronation of Kamala Harris while completely ignoring a live streamed genocide in Gaza. We shouldn’t be surprised by this, since this represents that which the powerful want us to focus on and that which they want us to forget about.

Voting in the U.S. elections makes about as much sense as trying to fight climate change via voting on Love Island. There will always be another Punch and Judy show at the colosseum, but voting in this grotesque debasement of democracy gives the process itself a mandate that will prove more dangerous than either candidate’s tenure in the end. There is no real democracy in the U.S., just the baubles and flummery of an imperial court. There is no real choice between evils, no meaningful distinctions between cabals of dumb and dumber.

All empires collapse under their own corruption in the end, but our modern empires are not just destroying life in sacrifice zones like Ukraine, Gaza and the global south, they are destroying it on a planetary scale.

It is clear that our species will not survive the rapacious and ever increasing demands of empire upon the fragile ecosystems of the earth and neither is it clear that we can survive the temper tantrums associated with the slow motion collapse of U.S. hegemony either.

How did we get here? It’s complexly overdetermined of course, but also very simple, as a species we keep running away from the truth of our collective immorality.

It may be already be way too late to prioritise moral truth over comforting entertainment but this is what must happen. The citizenry of empires must be persuaded to have more serious conversations and to make more serious choices than who gets to be the new emperor or empress.

If that seems obvious, then well it really ought to be, but what is it that preoccupies the nations of the west right now? An empire that pivots around palace intrigue instead of climate change, that elevates a shallow popularity contest over a genocide deserves to die – one way or another.