The internet is drowning in a schizophrenic carnival of images pathetic, grotesque and horrifying. New depths of artificiality and unreality, each passing day. Official U.S. and Israeli accounts splice clips from Call of Duty, Iron Man, 1990s MLB playoffs, Braveheart, Top Gun and GTA between “unclassified” war pornography of hellfire from the skies, taunting the world with a uniquely hubristic, uniquely putrid, and uniquely American spectacle. In the comments, monarchist bots assail each post prostrating themselves before the Shah. The flood of AI-generated videos further suture the unreality and reality into one disorienting stream. X, the everything app.
Much has been written since Oct. 7 about the collapse of the “rules-based international order,” and rightfully so. After the second world war, the United States constructed a network of international institutions like the IMF, the United Nations, etc which helped to protect American power and promote capitalism under the (cynical) guise of universal rules and norms. When the towers came down on September 11, 2001, the order began its bloody descent, in fits and starts, much slower than the towers – which, for the record, were the first skyscrapers to collapse – but a descent all the same.
Within the old framework, the U.S. government had a real stake in maintaining the facade of an “international order.” It needed to justify, or at least appear to be trying to justify its wars and coups and ruinous sanctions in the language of human rights, democracy, international norms, etc. Empires must nourish their own mythologies – even as much of the rest of the world could see the hypocrisy of, for instance, the only country to ever drop nuclear bombs in combat demanding that all other states forgo building their own bombs. The mass media, ever dutiful accomplice, warned the American people time and time again of new threats to world peace and the community of civilized nations – the peasants and toilers in China, and Vietnam, and Nicaragua, and Korea, and Angola, and Cambodia, and the Congo, and Chile, and Iran, and Libya, were far too dangerous and gripped by irrationality to let live. All my life, politicians have portrayed anti-Americanism as an irrational phenomena without cause.
9/11 shattered the illusion that this order could be maintained, that the blood seeping and scabbing under Freedom’s fingernails, the karmic debt sown for decades, would never be reaped. As a thick coat of asbestos and industrial dust coated lower Manhattan, Susan Sontag wrote:
“The disconnect between last Tuesday’s monstrous dose of reality and the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators is startling, depressing. The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public. Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a “cowardly” attack on “civilization” or “liberty” or “humanity” or “the free world” but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?”
The hijackers ignited a crisis, and the American response proved it may well be a terminal crisis. Leaders insisted the attack was motivated by a hatred of America and the society we had built. We were told that the terrorists had attacked the notion of freedom itself. Jihad borne out of jealousy; Bin Laden dripping with envy thinking about our superior freedoms, our SUVs and gallon jug diet cokes.
To paraphrase Cesaire, a society that proves incapable of self-reflection is doomed. And because it could not reckon with its own culpability, the hollow and crude nature of its myths, it lashed out. Back to basics: locate the frontier, the savages to be tamed, reclaim your wounded patriotism and masculine pride in the dungeons of Abu Ghraib.
Paradigms do not disappear overnight. As the Bush administration beat the drums of war and led Americans into a series of imperial blunders, they still played out the charade – feed lies to the press, “manufacture consent,” manage public perception, attempt to cajole holdouts and build public support for a war. The pundits and reporters lined up, sanctimonious and patronizing as ever, to perform their patriotic duty. Obama and Biden, too, clung to these traditions, attempting to maintain a facade that had already been compromised. [As Hubert narrates in La Haine: Jusqu'ici, tout va bien, Jusqu'ici, tout va bien – so far, so good.]
We can and should historicize Trump as the paradigm-shifter, the first President to dispel with the process of “manufacturing consent" itself, but the dominoes began to fall under Bush.
The most recent domino is, of course, Trump and Netanyahu’s suicidal confrontation with Iran. Trump has spent his term attacking those institutions of soft power which sustained the U.S.’s hegemonic position for so many decades (undermining the United Nations, pulling funding for USAID, attacking Ivy League institutions, bullying longtime allies, and generally swinging his dick around without thought for long-term consequences).
After declaring these instruments defunct and woke, he’s been left to manage affairs with the hard power that is American finance and, the military. More specifically: the carefully-cultivated idea that no state would be suicidal enough pick a fight with it.
Having the biggest stick is the condition from which the U.S. has imposed economic rules, designed by and favoring itself, on much of the world. The implicit threat of war sustains America’s alliances: you allow the U.S. to build a military base on your soil so it can project power, and in return you receive the guarantee that no nation would dare attack you for fear of monstrous retaliation.
The problem with relying so heavily on an aura of invincibility is that aura is a perception, and perceptions can be challenged, and shattered. Israel realized this on Oct. 7. when Hamas blinded their supposedly omniscient surveillance infrastructure (much like Iran is now doing with its targeting of expensive and irreplaceable U.S. radar systems), broke through the border fence, and overwhelmed guards standing watch over the world’s largest open-air prison. Israel responded the only way it knows, with genocide and a genocidal spectacle.
Iran, too, is shattering long-held perceptions. Their missiles and drones forced Trump to abandon critical U.S. bases across the region at the onset of the war, sending a very clear message to the hugely important Gulf states: when the chips are down, America is a fickle partner. Yes, it still possesses earth-shaking military capabilities, which it is currently using to massacre Iranian school girls and indiscriminately bomb densely-populated Tehran. But as many empires have learned, raw violence alone is rarely sufficient in times of crisis.
The closing of the Strait of Hormuz (an entirely predictable response to killing Iran’s leader and launching a full-scale war) is similarly stress testing the basic premises of the U.S.-dominated, globalized economy. If America cannot guarantee stability, and indeed is actively provoking an unthinkable level of instability, why should anyone continue to follow their orders?
America’s reputation is withering. The ruling cabal’s violent and erratic flailings indicate as much.
Preliminary observations indicate that one particular paradigm has shifted – from manufacturing consent in service of regime change to; sowing disorientation / helplessness in order to produce failed states, chaos and civil war. Libya seems to be the model they intend to impose on Iran and Lebanon (certainly the model Israel is promoting). Trump and his flunkies have not sought to build “consent” for their war, nor for the kidnapping of Maduro; far easier to pump out waves of propaganda, information and disinformation, so much incoherence and so many displays of impunity which overwhelm our capacity to process, reinforce how useless we are, how futile our efforts to change anything, ever, will be.
Robotic displays of patriotism, stand for the anthem and respect the troops, buy the snake oil that is the “end of history” – there is no alternative arrangement, no vision of a more just future to be realized – wallow in algorithmic numbness, cultural atrophy, pacification, impotence. I mentioned this in my last, but it bears repeating: it is deranged and self-centered to respond to our country inciting this war by memeing about “living through World War III.”
The White House publishes footage of airstrikes crudely stitched with what their resident nazi incel intern seems to consider based cultural reference points; signs of a mutation in propaganda, but more importantly, of desperation. The empire that cannot look forward, that is incapable of seeing anything but fire and brimstone and terrorists lying in wait behind every door when it does, is one that falls back onto stale, moldy nostalgia, furious-crass-violent-masturbatory attempts to re-capture the fading mythos of the American Reich.
As we drive headfirst, sans seatbelt, into an unprecedented era of ecological collapse, perhaps Trump and his coterie of vampires are calculating that violence will soon be the only relevant form of power, borders and fortresses the only legible form of politics. Perhaps he has become so totally hypnotized by the raw spectacle of his own power, so enamored with the impunity with which he conducts his affairs and spews his racism, that he cannot grasp that he is summoning the ghosts which eventually haunt every empire, cannot see the reckoning as it crests over on the horizon. Perhaps he’s just a fucking idiot.
The old world, dying; the interregnum, ablaze, monsters lurking and procreating; and the most pathetic, corniest LARPers you’ve never heard of are posting sigma war edits to the White House’s Twitter (formerly known as X).