Revised version. Originally published at https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/the-optics-of-imperialism-are-ghoulish-but-opportunities-are-ripe/
THE SYSTEMATIC extermination of the people of Gaza by a rampaging ethnofascist global pariah state is certainly creating some terminal problems for international law. Any concept of restraint or ethical norms is markedly up in smoke like a block of flats being bombed with something that cost more than the annual salary of the holy soldier firing it. This is the ‘rules-based’ world order in reality. This much is true. The optics are terrible.
We would be remiss if we did not perform due diligence in acknowledging as much. Ruthless bloodletting is bound to create uncertainty in global markets. There are bound to be ripples in the pond. Normalised atrocity world be bad for business if it wasn’t still good for business, on the other had, and the spice must flow as they say.
The good news is that we have streamlined our portfolio of national governments to ensure that it does. Our subsidiaries dangle carrots in front of the peasants when not dangling demons and sticks. They pass batons reinventing themselves as solutions to problems both of them are responsible for, while blaming the other. Everyone enjoys the spectacle and obeys either way.
Indeed, we must not lose sight of a fundamental truth: One man’s crisis is another man’s opportunity. Chaos is a cash register. Naomi Klein, the documenter of many incredible opportunities made possible by the new science of disaster capitalism, may not have intended her work to function as an instruction manual, no more so than did George Orwell. If we look at both laterally, however, we can see that it reflects this great human truth—one with great potential for exploitation.
As a figure of literary history, Orwell has much to teach budding imperialists about social and thought control. As a science of thought control, Orwellianism has much to tell us about exploiting the truth for opportunity; as far as instruction manuals for imperialists are concerned, history is like a cavern of treasures no one has been to. While even thinking about history might feel as repulsive as work or having to talk to peasants, really we are looking a gift horse in the mouth. Crisis and opportunity are two sides of the same coin; Zen philosophy is never impractical.
The first thing the budding imperialist needs to note is that the big names of history—your Hitlers, your Stalins, your Torquemadas, your Pompeys—were ruthless sociopaths. In all likelihood you are already well versed at hiding from yourself inside national cliques. You know the value of national security blankets in holding them together. In all likelihood you’re a budding sociopath and a budding sadist yourself who enjoys the power we hold over others, not least when we squeeze them for its measure in yelps. We need not preach to the choir. Just go limp before your conditioning.
The fact remains that power is an excellent substitute for being even halfway in touch with ourselves and the world around us. If we can’t command respect, compel it. This is a WAY easier option. It demands much less of us. It’s a lot less work, apart from all the unintended consequences. The choice is obvious. If people won’t love us for who we are, if we don’t even love ourselves for who we are, people can worship us like Gods instead.
What this means in practical terms is a lot of gaslighting. Unfortunately, this is where the budding imperiaist has to put in actual effort of their own, but there are mad power and dividends. The gaslighting script is by no means hard: if we want something, and someone is in the way, tell them the harm we’re doing to them is for their own good, blame them for existing in any way other than under our control, and make them defend their right to exist while we use them as crutches, bleed them to measure our power over them and our sadism in pain, and go over their heads to get more mad power and dividends.
Say for example someone is getting in your way because they think they have a right to live on your private property because they occupied it before you improved it by putting a fence around it. That script has worked a charm: the occupants of the land are hurting your individual freedoms not being allowed to dispossess them by enclosing the land. But, you ask, what if anyone asks about the individual rights of people we’re putting labels on only because of DNA markers that make them easy to classify and stereotype? This is something we must come to terms with—which is to say, we must have a proactive strategy to ward off such questions before they even arise. Doubt in the Providencial calling of the empire is a clear and persistent threat to civilisation. It must be ruthlessly persecuted for the greater good.
Again, in practical terms, this means whatever story we can come up with to explain to the slaves why their slavery is necessary. Slaves don’t want to be slaves. Slaves don’t like being slaves. Slaves don’t know what’s good for them; we have to explain this to them. This is why gaslighting and coercive control are necessary. Slaves don’t know how good they have it. Slaves don’t like being slaves. Slaves resent being slaves. Slaves have to know that they are bad and will be punished for saying bad things about slavery. Sometimes slaves don’t even want to identify as slaves. Nonconformists refuse to understand what’s healthy and natural about subordination under positively sacred social and class hierarchies, personal boundaries not so much. They have too much false pride to be correctly programmed.
The budding imperialist must endlessly impress on the slave that slavery is for their own good. We need to reconstruct the harm we to do slaves as a service; one has to be cruel to be kind. Pain is an excellent measure of our power over the slave, but it can have corrective effects for the slave also. This is what we can tell them anyway, and do, and as much as this invites the slave to blame themselves for the harm we do to them, the budding imperialist will be pleased to discover that it has soothing effects on one’s conscience also.
The second thing we need to do is to extend this logic into the norms of daily life under the empire. The vastly more agreeable state of affairs engendered by being cruel to be kind can be maintained and perpetrated further I mean nurtured by tough love domestically and geopolitically. While any halfway sane despot leaves civil life well alone, a close control can be exercised socially and ideologically through innovations on the Civilising Mission narrative upon which the West was built.
Through these variations on a theme, the budding imperialist reconstructs harm as being in the best interests of our slaves, gaslighting and trauma-bonding targets into submission. There, they will hopefully bend, ideally break, and their souls can then be harvested. We conflate doubt with lack of faith, criticism with attack, opposition with abuse—hey presto whoever is in the way of empire-building is guilty of existing. Ethics don’t apply to unpeople, slaves too proud and lacking in proper gratitude to accept the station God and nature have imposed on them not least of all.
The script runs thus: If the natives don’t want to be slaves, or exterminated, they’re resisting social improvement and moral salvation to the level of the colonialists and empire-builders who enslaved or exterminated them. If the slaves don’t want to be slaves and the targets for crimes against humanity who survived but who wish they were dead, they’re jealous of the improvements of invading colonisers, which as slave labour they had no part in, on lands they used to roam freely through.
By the same token, slaves who are leased like the car pool to save on capital overheads, but who aren’t excited about not controlling the product of their own labour, are jealous of the slaves who are getting ahead into a lifetime of subsidising industry dividends by raising their kids to working age completely for free. As good as a second mortgage to the free market each one. The budding imperialist needs to understand the people enough to know that as long as they feel like they’re upwardly mobile, they won’t rebel. Hope of upward mobility is a systemic safety valve against class struggle. We also need to keep in mind that, sometimes the people will get antsy and eventually rebel when we squeeze them hard enough.
We have not made it this far without being well-versed in the science of peasant control. Right up until the very last day of mad power and dividends, the bread-and-circuses approach to population management will work just as well as the tried-and-true divide-and-conquer. The problem for the budding imperialist—as always—is to innovate on the narrative. Snobbery will suffice where the national security blanket does not. Divide the people by feeding them the circus freakshows of their own society, from those least able to defend themselves backwards. Everyone wants to hide inside a pack nowadays, they just don’t know it yet.
Pick off the weakest first in endless games of performative purging of weakest links and moral renewal of the selective tribe. Take the blood from the Colosseum and put it online. Feed the people social freakshows they can feed the alienation monster when they can’t feed it conspicuous consumption and narcissistic supply from external approval. Feed the people dopamine, our Stockholm syndrome in their neurochemistry. Dig the claws of empire deep.
The budding imperialist needs to be able to apply this logic wherever necessary: in the sake of DNA markers, this means labeling people whose markers are different coloured skin “lazy” for not wanting to contribute to society as slaves. This means labeling people whose genetic markers are varying chromosomes “emotional” and “difficult” for not wanting to be brood mares for an economy geared more to fat dividends than respecting personal boundaries.
Clawing our way up the social hierarchy means keeping an ear open for how these scripts are deployed to maintain the hierarchies needed for climbing. The budding imperialist may note at this juncture that the same dynamics apply in the authoritarian household as in the empire; the nuclear family is the cornerstone of the state. In the same way as we must remain vigilant against nonconformists within a family unit where authority stems from God, or nature, or whatever works, so we need to do the same socially and politically to get mad power and dividends.
The whole point of gaslighting the slaves and all the other shit we carry on with is to make sure they never understand that we need them, we depend on them, not the other way around. The whole point of leasing slaves is so you can claim ownership of the value they create; as soon as they start asking themselves questions like, “if slavery means losing 100% of the product of your labour, at what point does it stop being slavery,’ the budding imperialist is in all sorts of trouble. Slaves might start questioning the wage they get as a substitute for control over the product of their labour and job democracy.
Needless to say, this must never happen, under any circumstances. Slaves who ask too many questions should be fed to the alienation monster with all power and haste as an example to the rest. In the same vein, there is no honour amongst thieves, and so the budding imperialist must always be on our guards against each other. At least as much as we are the domestic slaves who raise our leased slaves to working age for free, and the leased slaves, and life.
The good thing about supremacist cliques however is that we can hide from ourselves inside them, sharing the conspiracist script against outsiders we ritualistically dehumanise amongst the self-appointed elect, and substituting it for any sense of personal identity and a personality in three dimensions. The best part about fetishising violence as wolf packs of tough cunts is that we can then entitle ourselves to acting out on the violence of history instead of rising above it, which as everyone knows is a communist prejudice and a terrorist conspiracy.
Inevitably, our violence extends to each other, particular when we see ourselves mirrored in one another. It’s the natural order of things. We must and do exploit any weakness real or perceived in one another to leave the other buds behind and fully flower. It’s everyone for themselves; this is the true meaning of civilization. The self-appointed Elect stab each other in the back as unconscious expressions of our own inadmissible self-loathing when we’re not running moral crusades against folk demons to reconstruct ourselves solutions to problems of our own making, e.g. that the deviants we’re purging have an annoying habit of expressing doubt and asking questions.
Civilisation must be protected in the building of empires. We have to be cruel to be kind. Being doubted and attacked have to be the same thing in the same way that selfish means and altruistic outcomes have to be the same thing in order for the budding imperialist to fully flower. It doesn’t matter what your stripes are; if the capitalist peasants think for themselves, the communists win; if the state capitalist peasants think for themselves, the enemies of New Economic Policy state communism win. To the budding imperialist I say, let your paranoia flower and the might of the empire along with it.
The flower of the empire is the flower of the world and the glory of Creation. Accumulate mad power and dividends while you can.
