Indrajit Samarajiva

1. The Cat Came Back

I don't mean to write all bummers all the time, I actually live in permanent summer. For the past week, however, I have been really bummed, because my cat took a runner.

Pippi is a street cat who walked in off the street as a kitten. One night, almost exactly a year later, I left the window open and he walked out, unbidden. We looked for him all week but gave up because people kept bringing us other cats of a similar jathiya. Then one day Pippi just walked back into our lives, meowing for his dinner like nothing happened. I'm told that this is normal for cats, who are not really domesticated, but I felt painful abnormal. Now the cat is under house arrest, complete with a tracking collar.

It's strange, what pains. I can write about all the death and destruction in the world and feel one level of bad, but what really hurt was losing something so small and personal, which wasn't really lost at all. I write about the wide world but my world is actually very small. I rarely leave my house let alone my spot on the couch. The only thing I'd move my laptop for was that cat, and I missed him terribly when he was gone. I was walking around like my cat had died (which he could've) and was unable to enjoy anything. It's only now that he's come back that I feel anything close to normal.

Someone asked where the cat went and our uncle said WILL CHECK AND REVERT. We, of course, have no idea and never will. The cat wasn't even having a bad time, he was probably out chasing tail, but his absence still consumed my waking moments and I felt miserable. It's the rainy season and whenever it monsooned I felt the worst, thinking that Pippi was out there wet and alone. He probably wasn't, he came back well-fed and only a little flea-infested. But not knowing means imagining the worst. There's no particular insight here, it's just my view. For me, a good day is looking out the window and petting the cat. That's all I do. When he was gone, for me, everything was ruined.

But now, in one bit of good news, everything is all right with my world. We actually have two cats now, because we had another kitten arrive in the interim (pre-planned, coincidental, and even more guilt inducing). I couldn't really enjoy this new kitten without my old cat, but now that he's back I can, though I can't say they enjoy each other.

I won't say that all is right with the world, because my writing is certainly not about that, but all is right with my world. The cat came back. Mashallah.

2. The Jewish Problem Problem

A self-proclaimed Jewish state is openly committing genocide. Jewish people are openly corrupting international governments and institutions. This is certainly not all Jews, but it's many if not most Jews, and Jews that don't hate enough are slandered as self-hating. Non-Jews that resist are murdered, arrested, and slandered as antisemitic for their troubles. Jews are doing everything the vile Europeans accused them of doing (killing children, destroying nations) and this is all branded as deeply Jewish across a mass media they are openly manipulating. It sure looks like a Jewish conspiracy is running (and ruining) the world. But is it?

Hezbollah's View

To understand the Jewish problem problem, I turn to Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the most antisemitic guy I know. The leader of Hezbollah knows his enemy and it's not Jews, or even 'Israel'. Nasrallah has the most clear-eyed view on the actual threat to peace in the Middle East, which is not Jews, the Jewish State®, or even (quite) the Great Satan behind it. In an interview, Nasrallah said,

There is a misconception prevalent in the Arab world regarding 'Israel'-US relations. We keep repeating this lie about the Zionist lobby - that the Jews rule America and are the real decision makers, and so on. No. America itself is the decision maker. In America, you have the major corporations, you have a trinity of the oil companies, the weapons industry, and the so-called "Christian-Zionism." The decision-making is in the hands of this alliance. 'Israel' used to be a tool at the hands of the British, and now it is a tool in the hands of America.

What Nasrallah is pointing out is true. It's not that Jews are corrupting white nations. Whiteness has corrupted the Jews! It's not that Jews are using money to corrupt the world, money has corrupted the Jews! Like every other proxy army in the history of White Empire (South Vietnam, Afghanistan, most recently) entire nations get created and decimated as mere tools. White Empire (Britain, America, same thing) has always used divide and conquer to loot and plunder, and 'Israel' is just the latest (and last, inshallah, ruse). As Nasrallah said (in 1986), "priority should be given to removing Israel from the scene, because it was established for the express purpose of dividing and partitioning the Muslim world."

The Historical View

The modern carbon crusaders created and maintain 'Israel' for two reasons. One was to get the Jews out of Europe. 'Israel' is the idea that certain people should 'go back where they came from' taken to its most illogical conclusion. This was the Nazi's penultimate solution (the Haavara Plan), taken up by the Americans who were in a hurry to integrate Nazis and continue Hitler's main cause of fighting communists. The second reason 'Israel' exists is in order to fracture the Middle East and frack its oil. As Joe Biden said (also in 1986), "Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region."

Jewish people were forced out of Europe and given completely unrelated land after World War II as long they did everything Europeans accused them of doing. Destroy nations, kill children, and corrupt the world. Jews in 'Israel' conscripted their children forever in order to be Nazis to someone else. White supremacy is a ladder, and the only rule is that you must keep kicking down. Jewish people are, however, still on the the tail-end of white supremacy, in a highly tenuous position. The ongoing genocide of Gaza and now the West Bank is really a test. Do Jews have the final white privilege, being able to commit genocide and get away with it? For example, Canada, Germany, and America now lecture people on the subject, while still doing it!

This baptism of blood into full whiteness looks, however, increasingly unlikely. Historically, Jews have long been used by Europeans, allowed to amass wealth and influence, and then made the fall guys for everything wrong with Europeans. Jews have been 'powerful', had this pointed out, and then been pogromed before. Antisemitism is, actually, a completely European category of racism that they're trying to accuse other people of out of even more racism. 'Israel' is merely dumping this particularly European vision somewhere else, which is why the 'Middle Eastern' state is the only one included in Eurovision.

The fact is that Europeans and Americans were widely and vilely antisemitic before, during, and after World War II. The fact is that Jews could have been resettled in Germany or settled in America, but the people that pushed boats of refugees back into the concentration camps still didn't want them! As the book The Last Million documents, "the Wiley-Revercomb bill, as historian Leonard Dinnerstein has written, "reflected the lawmakers' desire to exclude Jews,"

Following Hitler's own conflation of Jews and communists, the eponymous Wiley said, "This is America, our home. We want good blood to come to this country. But we do not want any "rats"—we have enough of them. We want to be careful how we handle the problem, because it is dynamite." And then, "At one of the many low points during the debate, Senator Revercomb, indulging in a time-honored antisemitic slur about money-grubbing Jews, claimed that the displaced persons who had entered the camps after the war (again, only the Polish Jews fit this description) had not been "compelled to flee" but had "migrated and moved simply because they felt they could improve their economic condition."

These men, were, in fact representatives of their people. As The Last Million continues, "Another Gallup poll, this one taken in August 1946, asked a sample of Americans whether they agreed or disagreed with President Truman's plans to ask Congress to "allow more Jewish and other European refugees to come to the United States to live than are allowed under the law now. . . . Only 16 percent of the respondents answered affirmatively; 72 percent disapproved; 12 percent had no opinion."

As you can see, 'Israel' gives Jews a position within the hierarchy of white supremacy, but only at the very bottom, following the deepest rule of the rules-based order. Always be kicking down! The problem of being at the tail end of the 'lizard people' empire, however, is that lizards will shake off their tail when threatened. This has happened to Jews many times before, and will happen to them again soon enough.

The Insanely Long View

I say all of this not necessarily to absolve Jews of all the evil they have done. My own people, the Sinhalese, are often tarred as genocidal, and we take our lumps. Muslim people to be called to examined their community after every action by any Muslim. The point is to understand 'Jewish' evil as merely a subset of the evils of white supremacy, and to know our enemy as, Nasrallah does. Nasrallah's two theses—that America is the head of the snake and that the brain of the snake is corporate—are very important. 'Israel' would disappear in an instant without American insistence, and is actually a non-entity on its own. Directing ones ire there is only nominally correct, 'Israel's' evil is really part of a larger phenomenon.

Where I go further than Nasrallah is contending that this is an even larger phenomenon than just America. In my writing I have two broad theses, that America is just the latest incarnation of White Empire, and that it has been ruled by Corporate AI for centuries now. In this insanely long-view, we can go a bit deeper into the relatively shallow 'Israel' problem.

If we apply my first thesis—that America is the head of a snake which stretches back through colonial history—then we can remove the distinction that Nasrallah makes between the British and America. They're one thing, so much so that the American flag is just a copy of the British East India Company's. The White Empire hides in plain sight, and its greatest power is the invisibility of its indivisibility. America is just the latest head of a hydra that keeps growing new ones. When that drunken war criminal Winston Churchill said, "the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old," it was true. After Britain lost WWII and was occupied, America took over British bases and baser instincts and kept colonizing, including in 'Israel'. To those on the bottom of the imperial boot, it's just one phenomenon which changes socks occasionally, but stomps on a human face forever.

My second thesis is that this Empire is not ruled by people at all, but by corporations, which I call Corporate AI. This is why the most reliable way to understand White Empire is not to follow the rhetoric. This is like trying to understand the Coca-Cola Company by parsing its advertising. No, one must follow the money, and it rarely leads you wrong. The White Empire can change nations, the nations can change parties, and colored people can even get the top (human) jobs, but money always rules the roost. Money talks and bullshit walks. Money is the lifeblood of the AI I call Capital, and it's the only thing 'they' value. I put 'they' in scare quote because the operant 'they' is both scary and not human at all.

As someone colonized, I can tell you that we weren't colonized by kings or even people, we were colonized by corporations. From hundreds of years ago, and to this day now. The Dutch East India Company, the British East India Company, white people incarnated their greed as algorithms and it is this Corporate AI which has already devoured the world. My people have already been shit out by this beast, but their devouration is news to white people who got metabolic benefits from the process until now. Now people in the imperial core find themselves on the business end of such evil, and are entirely confused because they actually believed the commercials about liberal democracy. It was rank oligarchy all along, and the business of colonialism was always filthy lucre. The entire business model of White Empire is genocide, and 'Israel' is just the final franchising opportunity.

I understand that these two metaphorical lenses (we live in an invisible empire and it's ruled by sentient AI) is a bit bonkers, but the world is crazy isn't it? Wouldn't an explanation of crazy necessarily sound crazy? The map must at least resemble the territory. Even just used as metaphorical tools, don't these two ideas bring things into focus? We can then zoom back into 'Israel'.

Making Sense Of The Senseless

If you see with these 'glasses' on, it makes sense that America is defending 'Israel'. It's all one White Empire, of course the head defends its tail. This lens also predicts how much the head will defend the tail, which is not forever, at some point the 'lizard people' will drop tail and run. It also makes sense that Germany, UK, et al are on board, they're just occupied cuckdoms who come whenever the banners are called. If you understand that America and all its 'allies' are just the capital and vassals of a greater White Empire, you really save yourself a mouthful (of bullshit).

Then—if you see via the second lens of Corporate AI—you can see why they genocide. Blood money is just money to the machine, and the blood money is good. Genocide is precisely how the White Empire became wealthy and they've given franchise rights to 'Israel'. 'Israel' is just following the classic colonial business model. It only looks out of place because the natives have smartphones now (and RPGs, mashallah). The joint-stock companies of the 1600s were algorithmically programmed to devour people and planet and let loose across the world to commit countless (and uncounted) holocausts. This was all fine as long as they wrote the history. But now history is writing itself, and it's not pretty. We are now just reaching the logical conclusion of the very bad math of infinite growth on a human planet, total human destruction and planetary ruin. We are all Palestinians in the long-run, which is now, unfortunately.

None of this coming end times is because of Jews. They're just the fall guys for a uniquely European evil, being forced into an antisemitic caricature colony of themselves. While it is true that Jews are disproportionately represented in imperial institutions (finance, media, and government) it's important to remember that they're still a minority therein. All the Germans, Scots, and intermixed 'white' people blend into the white background and the Jews (conveniently for everyone else) stick out. Jews are definitely shareholders in the imperial project but they're minority shareholders, and—historically speaking—the first to be thrown under the bus.

The fact is that human race does not actually explain the inhumanity we're witnessing in Palestine today. The White Empire has done ever worse things before, and to the Jews also. The problem is not which people are ruling, but the fact that people do not rule at all. Humans haven't run the world for centuries, ask the colonized who know. Colonialism was always done by Corporate AI, with a few 'shareholders' living in its guts, consuming byproducts like imports, and farting out excuses like 'economics'. The human parts of colonialism have always been interchangeable and Jews are just their most movable part.

Repeating Myself As A Conclusion

Jewish people are just the tail of the lizard, tossed aside when the head is in danger. This is precisely how European rulers used them for centuries, as a point they could focus their peoples' ire on, to release the pressure via pogroms. America is just the latest head of the European snake, but even vile Americaness doesn't explain what we're viewing. The inhuman massacres of Palestinians are because we are ruled by inhumans. Again and again, the problem with white nations is not their corruption by Jews. The problem is the corruption of Jews into whiteness! And the problem is not Jews corrupting the world with money, the problem is money given sentience via corporations and let loose across the world to commit not just genocide, but an ecocide most total. The world has long been run by cruel algorithms, now running into their logical, apocalyptic conclusion, All of this has been going on for centuries, not months or even decades. And it is wrecking the entire natural world, not just Gaza.

If the doors of perception were cleansed, we would see this world as it truly is. Infinitely awful. There are invisible empires that rule us and higher-dimensional beings that rule them. I know this sounds crazy, but in a world gone crazy, you have to wear funny glasses to see. Nasrallah is a good guiding antisemite, and via my two theses, you can see that 'Israel' doesn't exist, America doesn't exist, and that no one is running the White Empire at all. The problem with 'the Jewish problem' is not merely that it's unfair to a great many good Jews. It's that it misses the higher order evil that makes history such a mystery to those living through it.

3. How The Romans Dealt With Inflation

Rome was killing it from -800 to 500, they nearly made it to a thousand-year Reich. They were the unified ie United States of Rome from 0-400, under a proto-presidential system. Rome was around for so long that a 5% inflation rate almost killed them.

From 200-300 Rome was hit with massive inflation. It sounds laughable today, but a yearly 5% inflation rate quickly compounds into ruin. Over 100 years, the Roman currency devalued by 99.5%. This is how exponential growth works, it drives you into bankruptcy just as Ernest Hemingway said, "gradually, then suddenly." A bum sponge that once cost 0.5 denarii 'suddenly' cost 100. The Roman rulers were up shit creek without a paddle.

As Cornell and Matthews wrote in 1982's The Roman World,

The later 3rd century saw a momentous weakening of the monetary system. The causes of this were complex, one of them being the Roman authorities' own lack of comprehension of any theory of monetary circulation, and so of the economic consequences of their own actions.

The Romans didn't know what the fuck they were doing, but they had to do something. So the permanently warlike empire did the one thing they were good at. Class warfare. Rome's ruling Tetrarchs (great band name), issued reliable gold and silver coinage and let copper (which the masses used) inflate wildly. They protect the elite's asset class and kicked the peasants in the ass. Sound familiar? It's a tale as old as time. As the Roman General Antonio Soprano said, "this thing is a pyramid, since time immemorial. Shit runs downhill, money goes up. It's that simple."

As Cornell and Mathews said,

The Tetrarchs did not at once succeed in stopping inflation, but by a combination of methods they checked it and left a partially stable monetary system to their successors. This was achieved by a series of monetary reforms, the most important of which was the creation of a new gold coin, struck at a high standard of purity at a rate of 60 coins to the pound of gold bullion. With a devaluation of one-fifth by Constantine, this system formed the basis of the stable gold currency of Byzantium. There was also a standard of silver coinage, which held its value relatively well in relation to gold, and of copper, which did not. The result was continuing inflation in prices as expressed in copper coin, the everyday currency of the Empire's populations.

Thus Rome controlled inflation by bailing out the rich and drowning the poor, as is neoliberal (really neoclassical) policy today. For all their hand-waving, modern economist might as well be reading entrails. Modern economists can't predict recessions and don't even have a concept of the environment outside of their models. They're literally just making up reasons why the rich can just make up money, while the poor must eat austerity. As Leo Tolstoy said in 1900, "When people behave badly they always invent a philosophy of life which represents their bad actions to be not bad actions at all, but merely results of unalterable laws beyond their control."

Modern economist are as clueless as Rome's proto-economists were. America's lead economic adviser, Jared Bernstein, cannot explain how the monetary system works. Just listen to him.

Bernstein: The US government can't go bankrupt because we can print our own money.

Question: Like you said, they print the dollar, so why does the government even borrow?

Bernstein: Well, the, um, so the I mean again some of this stuff gets, some of the language and concepts are just confusing. I mean, the government definitely prints money and it definitely lends that money, which is why the government definitely prints money and then it lends that money by selling bonds.

Is that what they do? They, um, they yeah, they, um, they sell bonds, yeah, they sell bonds, right, because they sell bonds and people buy the bonds and lend them the money.

Yeah. So a lot of times, a lot of times at least to my ear with MMT [Modern Monetary Theory], the language and the concepts can be kind of unnecessarily confusing, but there is no question that the government prints money and then it uses that money to, um, uh, uh, so, um, yeah, I, I guess I'm just, I can't really talk, I don't, I don't get it, I don't know what they're talking about. Like, because it's like, the government clearly prints money, it does it all the time, and it clearly borrows, otherwise we wouldn't be having this debt and deficit conversation, so I don't think there's anything confusing there.

This answer is of course confusing as hell. The chief economic adviser to the chief economy can't explain basic monetary policy, but they're fine conducting experiments on a live human population, many of whom their policies kill. Ruling economists are both asleep at the wheel and speeding. To recycle Cornell and Matthews, 'The causes of this were complex, one of them being the [American] authorities' own lack of comprehension of any theory of monetary circulation, and so of the economic consequences of their own actions.' It is, as my historical thesis goes, same shit, different day.

Today, an Empire still based on Roman Law and operating under Roman columns thinks it's reinventing the wheel with all its fancy models and big data. But it's just going in circles. When times get tough, debase whatever the poor people hold and preserve the rich. Today, investors get government bailouts and workers get public services cut. The stock market only goes up for asset holders, while costs only go up for the dumbasses on the ground. This phenomenon is, in fact, two sides of the same coin. One man's debt is another man's interest income. The rich people hold debt slaves as an asset in their portfolio. Every prole paying 30% on their credit card is earning 30% for someone else.

The Roman Empire is very much the grandpappy of the American Empire (née European) and they're philosophical contiguous. They're all also facing the same problems. 10 rolls of toilet paper that cost a dollar in 1929 costs $15 now. The US dollar has, in fact, lost 98% of its value since just the 1970s. People say this is only if you don't count the interest, but most people don't earn interest. What these sanguine economists are describing is the phenomenon of the Empire bailing out the rich while the poor drown.

The White Empire under the US is having the same inflationary pressure as Rome but, in true American style, they've supersized the problem. 80% of all US dollars ever 'printed' were issued just during the reign of COVID the 19th, a hockey-stick span of just 22 months. At the same time, they're sanctioning 1/3rd of all nations (most of them unwitting vassals) and 60% of poor countries. They're both debasing their currency and disallowing people from using it.

As a 2023 report says, "Moneywise reported that the U.S. dollar has lost 98% of its purchasing power since 1971, but gold has maintained its value." Sound familiar? Cash (ie, copper) has devalued rapidly, while US Treasuries are still gilt as gold. The investor class is protected by the Empire, while the working class is eviscerated. Then economist look through their entrails, and say that everything is great, actually.

Economists point to their charts of asset prices (ie gold and silver) to say that the economy is 'stable,' but ordinary people know that their copper coin can't buy toilet paper or food anymore, and nevermind education or housing. The real question is not what the government's monetary policy is but for whom. Empire will always bail itself out, and unless you're a Senator or banker's son, that's ain't you. As Creedence Clearwater Revival said, "Some folks are born silver spoon in hand, Lord, don't they help themselves, no. But when the taxman come to the door Lord, the house lookin' like a rummage sale, yeah."

The fact is that we still live under an invisible White Empire today, so invisible that rich politicians play Fortunate Son at their rallies, without shame. We sit in literally segregated seats (economy and business) and pretend like we're equals. The only equalizing factor is that the plane is crashing. The economic stewards are serving one last round to the rich, while the poor can eat austerity. This is the same thing Rome did. Their monetary reforms only bought a little bit of time (and crime) before the fall. Rome, at least, only crashed Europe, which always deserves it. Today, the rapid inflation of the White Empire is burning the whole planet and the climate gods themselves are delivering a worldwide smackdown. Can't you smell what BlackRock is cooking?

4. The Little Things That Kill Lots Of People

We just got a kitten who came with a hundred fleas. I microscoped some of the thousand eggs, which was a horror I can't unsee. We're able to deal with this because we can clean our house, we have access to veterinary services, and medicine. As a household, we have running water and the toilets flush and all the little things that keep us from itching and sickening and eventually dying. We also have a house, without bombs falling on it. These are little courtesies now extended to this little poosa, but not to lots of humans, apparently.

In Gaza, today, these are the creature comforts denied to millions of people strategically. In any war more people die from secondary causes, like hunger and disease, than from proximate murdering. In any genocide even more so, as in the colonization of the Americas. This lesson was not lost on the 'Israelis,' the last colony. The destruction of sanitation, hospitals, and food and water is not a slip-up, it's their strategy. The bloodiness is executed most bloodlessly. They have meetings about this, and the KPI is number of Gazans killed, ideally all of them.

As the former 'Israeli' National Insecurity Council member Giora Eiland openly published (via), "Israel must therefore not provide the other side with any capability that prolongs its life." The 'humanitarian disaster' in Gaza is not a side effect of 'conflict', it is in fact the goal of the occupation army. As Eiland continued, "The international community warns us of a humanitarian disaster in Gaza and of severe epidemics. We must not shy away from this, as difficult as that may be. After all, severe epidemics in the south of the Gaza Strip will bring victory closer and reduce casualties among IDF soldiers."

As always, I put 'Israel' in scare quote because it's A) scary and B) does not exist. Without American bombs and bullshit 'Israel' would be gone in a week. It's just the conscript colony of America, part of the greater White Empire that pretends to be different countries. What 'Israel' is following her is just classic American strategy. During World War II, America carpet bombed German civilians, actually unleashed something called 'Operation Starvation' on Japan, and nuked two entire cities. The Red Army won World War II but America won the propaganda war and they've gotten so high on their own supply that they think strategic bombing is an actual strategy. Despite losing every war since.

As General Curtis LeMay said about Vietnam, "My solution to the problem would be to tell [the North Vietnamese Communists] frankly that they've got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression or we're going to bomb them into the Stone Age. And we would shove them back into the Stone Age with Air power or Naval power—not with ground forces." This has become a tautology among American idiots, that they're going to bomb the enemy du jour 'into the Stone Age' and that the random place they just heard about is 'going to find out why we don't have healthcare'. This strategy never actually wins, it just leads to a lot of killing, but who cares when the military industrial complex is making a killing? Which is the point of the completely out of control American war machine. To understand America, don't follow logic, just follow the money.

To return to non-existent 'Israel', they're simply following the well-established American strategy of dropping very expensive bombs on poor people and trying to starve and sicken them to death to get them to overthrow their governments. This never works but it always makes money, so it keeps happening. 'Israel' is testing whether they have the final white privilege, committing genocide and getting away with it. It's literally sickening, which is intentional. They're seeing if they can replicate the success of genocidal colonies like Canada, Australia, and America in this century. What we're seeing is nothing new, what's new is that we're seeing it.

Gaza today, apparently, doesn't smell as much of rotting bodies and smoke as waste. The 'Israelis' destroy sanitation and water supplies as a first strike, in the West Bank as well as Yemen. Wherever they be. As 'Israel's War Minister said, "I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly." None of the sickness, starvation, and suffering are side effects, this is the plan. Time-tested through the colonialism of all of 'Israel's' allies, now being executed in the final colony. They kill you with the little things.

What makes this so horrifying is that it's so palpable. You can't just see it, you can feel it in every toilet flush, in every drink of water, in every trip to the pharmacy. We all depend on sanitation and clean water and edible food and medicine that works and so many little things. Most of us don't have that much experience being bombed and tortured and raped to death, but we certainly know the basic elements of living. Which 'Israel' is also killing. Quite openly, even proudly. As Two Nice Jewish Boys said, "If you gave me a button to just erase Gaza, every single living being in Gaza would no longer be living tomorrow. I would press it in a second. No one actually gives a shit [about the genocide in Gaza]. Zero people in Israel … Do you care if this baby in Gaza gets polio? They'll be like, 'I don't.' There will be like 20 people who care … Fuck them."

These are not an errant 'Israelis', they're quite ordinary. As the imperial Pew Research reports, only 4% of 'Israeli' Jews think their genocide has gone too far, and 70% of them think people should be censored for even expressing sympathy for Gazan civilians. This is a population completely in the thrall of genocidal madness, with the full support of their genocidal progenitors. 'Israel' is simply declaring their independence the way the Americans did. One of the complaints in the US Declaration of Independence is about "the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions." They were mad at the King for not letting the genocide enough, as many 'Israelis' complain about the Americans today. And they're genociding the same way. Through massacres, yes, but more through mass starvation and disease, spread willingly, even gleefully.

This is the atavistic horror we're witnessing in 2024, which is hard to witness because it hits home anytime you flush a toilet or have any sort of human need. I think of the cat infested with fleas and then the Gazan men, women, and children suffering from skin diseases and biting insects constantly. There is no way to deal with these scourges without clean water and basic sanitation, precisely the things the 'Israelis' are targeting and bombing. The official death toll hovers around 40,000 (because they also targeted the health ministry doing the counting) but the Lancet estimate 186,000 dead and the number must be closer to 500,000 now.

Every day I wonder how Gazans go on another day, and the answer is that many don't. Besides the dead now, many more are fated to die, and everyone has some trauma that will send them to an earlier grave. This is an extermination campaign, executed most cold-bloodedly, with spreadsheets and meetings to maximize the casualties. 'Israel' is losing the war but winning the genocide. As UN Special Rapporteur, Francesca Albanese said, "I am starting to think with horror that if it's not stopped, Israel's assault could end up exterminating almost the entire population in Gaza over the next couple of years." Retired 'Israeli' general Yitzhak Brik said, "If the war of attrition against Hamas and Hezbollah continues, Israel will collapse within no more than a year," but it's not happening fast enough, unfortunately.

In these unending moments of mass ending, the 'Israelis' are calculatingly targeting the little things that kill the most people. And the White Empire—brain dead and operating on pure muscle memory—is going out the way it came in, with genocidal violence. Gaza is not dead yet and I am not yet dead inside (though I'm getting there). Gaza loses life every single day and I feel it every day, in the black mirror that reflects my reality in a reverso of compete depravity. I guess this is why they call genocide a crime against humanity. I can feel it at a higher level, like it's literally killing me.

You can donate to the Gaza Municipality efforts to rebuild water supply, waste management, and sewage treatment here. I've been giving whatever I can.

5. Self-Servitude

I was in Europe (just visiting) and they immediately put me to work. At the airport, I had to check myself in and tag my own bags. At the supermarkets, I had to scan and bag my own own groceries. At the bar, I had to take your own order. They call this self-service but it's really just the customer doing free work for the owners. It's not self-service, it's self-servitude.

Consumer Labor

I have worked basically every service job and they're not easy. I worked at McDonald's when I was 14 and finger-jamming the menu was work, that's why they paid me. I worked Big Bear grocery at 15 and scanning and bagging groceries was work, that's why they paid me also. When you're doing this work for hours you definitely notice and it sucks, but when you split it up into minutes and assign it to the customer, this is somehow a convenience. But it's not. Self-service is not actually faster, it's not actually better, it's just the capitalist shaving minutes of labor from the customer to make a buck.

All the self-service economy has done is turn the register around, double the prices and call this an improvement. If you put a bunch of 14-year-olds in boxes and called them an app you would have a 'voice-activated AI agent' that actually worked and was worth a billion dollars, but now we have AI agents that don't work, registers that customers have to use themselves, and the (horrific) burgers cost 4x more. Any efficiency isn't going to the customer, it's going to the owner. They just made you their fractional laborer, and you're paying more for the privilege!

I was watching some old movies (The Maltese Falcon and original Ocean's 11) and they could just pick up a phone anywhere and get a voice activated city guide or dial anybody by name. Such a service now would be a corporation wealthier than most nations, and this was just a public utility back then. I had forgotten but I was like oh, they could do all the stuff we do, and the user experience was better. No modern technology can approach the quality of an old-school phone operator. All the technology has done is dump that labor on the user and increase the quantity, (a spiraling pattern we'll return to in -12,000 years). More people can use such services, but only because the labor is spread across that larger population. We actually just make stuff shit and make more of it, that's the basic formula.

Development

Capitalism is, really, what is says on the tin. The allocation of more and more resources to capital (ie machines). It's not called humanism for a reason. Humans are just squishy parts stuffed uncomfortably into the algorithm, and we constantly don't compute and cause errors. I've worked within the corporate world and the Satanic ideal is making money with no employees. If you just have a bunch of intellectual 'property' and/or capital machinery that spits out money that's the dream. Workers annoyingly demand the fruits of their labor. If you can make customers do the work, it's literally a steal.

Hence what you see at (capitalist) self-service checkouts is not about customer service, it's about capturing customer labor and eliminating workers. These kiosks are the living avatars of Capital (as a species), the most obvious capital machinery that human interact with. I say (capitalist) because these things are just tools that can be used differently under different owners. Both capitalism and communism promote industrialization, but they differ on who controls the process (and the profits), the many workers or the rich few. Of course any economic growth system has the physical problem of a finite planet, but we'll leave that crash for another conversation. For now, we're at the self-checkout machine, and hating it.

I notice the self-servitude in Europe because I normally don't notice it in Sri Lanka. Almost nothing is automated in Sri Lanka. However, when I'm flying back through Qatar they have high technology and a lot of humans, because you actually need that for customer service. What we're seeing in Europe and wherever isn't actually better customer service, it's better labor exploitation and a fundamental cheapness of the owners. Hence, when I finally left Europe and got back to civilization via Qatar I was relieved. I could finally wash my butt properly and there were people around to help and ask questions to. And when I finally got home to Sri Lanka I paid a porter to handle the bags and a driver picked us up at the airport. This would all be considered less efficient, but as one must always ask, less efficient for whom.

The Circulation Of Money

It helps to understand capital not as a system but as an ecosystem, where artificial life (like corporations) emerges out of natural life, specifically humans as social animals. This is not biologically unusual, life is always emerging out of older life in hitherto impossible ways. Capital is most accurately an artificial species whose metabolism, as Marx said, "sweats money from every pore. When one commodity replaces another, the money commodity always sticks to the hands of some third person." Humans live off the metabolic scraps of capital like anaerobic bacteria live off the scraps in our guts. Anaerobes once ruled the earth and the extinction of natural life by the artificial has happened once before.

Today natural life and artificial life coexist in what we think is a dominant relationship for us, but that hasn't been true since the 1600s for most people. That was when European corporations started eating the world, and now they're eating themselves (even more). Once we understand our proper place within the ecosystem, we can see what's happening. Capital, as a globe-spanning species, moves lots of energy and resources around and, if we're in the right place at the right time, we can get some of it, like the bacteria in our guts. However, capital unchecked by pressure from organized humans (ie communism, but could be other ideologies) will keep more and more resources for itself, and call it efficiency.

We used to live in a society where money touched many more hands before it went into the machine, if it went there at all. People use to, out of necessity, get everything locally. You got your groceries from a local green grocer, your clothes from a local tailor, your goods from a local store. Global capitalist society tries to centralize those functions as much as possible, using oil to extend its circulation across cities, across countries, across the globe. But this kills the Richard Scarry town of small producers and replaces it with scary mega-corporations and, ultimately, algorithmically driven apocalypse.

I can see the old circulation system in action when I drive down a Sri Lankan road. I see poor Sri Lankan families gather their meagre capital (coconuts and a knife) and try to get a bit of the greater circulation of capital (cars) on the road. When I step out of my car, my money sticks to their hand as the thambili goes down my gullet. This is how deeply our metabolic processes are integrated with the metabolic processes of Capital, we are just bacteria in its guts, helping with their digestion and keeping scraps for ourselves. This is called an inefficiency to the capitalist, who would rather have a giant factory bottling coconut water and delivering it via robot, but then that poor family gets little or no money, and bottled coconut water is also awful.

The Agricultural Devolution

This process of mass but also ass production is, of course, not unique to capitalism. It's a tendency that goes deep into human history, when we first put grain into rows. We used to have diverse diets, plentiful exercise, and ample leisure time as hunter-gatherers, as you can see in the fossil record. However, with the agriculture revolution of around 10,000 BC (shout-out Jesus, pbuh), we were able to sustain much higher populations, but with visibly worse bones and teeth. We left 'paradise' to labor by the sweat of our brow. Most of the 'surplus' was captured by a narrow majority while the poor (a relatively new concept) labored in progressively worse conditions through the Industrial Revolution. The thin class of rich near the beating heart of Capital often got nought but gout and inbred for their troubles (and of course damnation eternally).

I, in fact, view the entire 'progress' of humans as not being 'our' progress at all, but the rise of artificial life. This entire period has caused a mass extinction of natural life (including wet bulbs like us) and the fossil record will show—to aliens—the massive rise of machine 'bones', which reproduce via our hands and networked brains. Capitalist reproduction is viewed as somehow separate from biological reproduction, but consider the source. Humans are incredibly biased. Anaerobic life technically 'created' the aerobic life that killed it, and probably still insist on their superiority from hiding up our butts. At one point sexual reproduction would be considered artificial and weird by asexual cells, but we take it for granted now. Capitalist reproduction is just another sort of reproduction. To an alien observer, how is it clear that us random apes control all the cars and machines they'd see in the fossil record? You could just as well say the bacteria in our guts is controlling us (which may, in fact, be possible). As a Resident Alien, I see the artifacts that humans are buried with I don't see human progress, I see the evolution of the artificial out of the natural, and both forms of life as living. I see artificial life popping out of our bodies, like the chestburster in Alien.

Like any predator or even bacteria, Capital will consume more and more unless A) some other species checks it or B) it overflows the carrying capacity of the environment and crashes. Communism was the idea of checking the growth of Capital (re: Marx), but it was too little too late and capitalism has already spread out of control and ruined the earth. Thus late-stage capitalism allocates more and more resources to corporations and feeds less and less people. The tendency is for more and more wealth to be concentrated and 'invested' back into capital machinery (like giant supermarkets and self-checkout machines) and for workers to be cut out of the circulatory process as much as possible. Without the counter-tendency of other artificial beings (governments, ideally communist) none of the surplus would be shared with humans. Irregardless, it's all a deficit to the environment which cannot be paid back except for collapse. The ideal position for us meat puppets within capitalism is being given just enough resources to reproduce the next generation and no more. We are, in fact, not given enough to raise large families at all anymore, as you can see from declining birth rates across most of the 'developed' world.

We are truly not the masters of our fate but the servants of artificial lifeforms. This is the horror I stare into while visiting the mother of all evils, Europe. Humans are obviously checking out of this earth en masse, in exchange for a geologically invisible period of mass goods. We call this period, broadly, capitalism and posit some imaginary humanism behind it. But there just isn't. We are living (or more specifically, dying) through the evolution of artificial life, chest-bursting out the wreckage of the natural world. This is what I feel contributing my own labor to the depressing but deserved corpse of Europe. In the self-checkout line I'm literally checking my self out. I can feel it, the horror.

6. How America Still Has Slavery

America's warlikeness today is no different from Roman warlikeness then, and the purpose is the same. Conquer people to take resources and slaves. In ye olde days Empire conquered foreign lands to physically bring home slaves. These days White Empire (America, Britain, 'Israel', same thing) can merely destabilize foreign lands and the slaves bring themselves. They call this mass migration but it doesn't come from the masses. It comes from western elites having the same demand for exploitable labor as they always did, with the same desire to denigrate it so they don't have to really pay. Today's slaves are called prisoners or 'illegal immigrants' or just 'immigrants' but the phenomenon is—as my historical thesis goes—same shit, different day.

That's why I read history rather than the news, the present is honestly clearer in the past. I was reading this in Cornell and Matthews Atlas of the Roman World and it sounds like today:

Peasant families were driven out in large numbers by rich investors and were replaced on the land by slave labor. Slaves were in plentiful supply thanks to military victories and the resulting mass enslavement of defeated populations; they could be organized in gangs to provide the necessary labor for large-scale agricultural enterprises, they were relatively cheap and had the additional advantage of being exempt from conscription.

In the same way today, America's 'investor' class uses slave labor for industrial agriculture, factories, and as their own nannies and gardeners. And this applies similar pressure on American peasants with pickups. The labor sucking nature of the Rome's latifundia (big agricultural estates) is the same as Big Ag today. As Cornell and Matthews continue,

Thus the development of the latifundia was facilitated by the influx of wealth and slaves, the products of victories which had been won by the efforts and sacrifice of Italian peasants who served in the army. As Keith Hopkins puts it, "Roman peasant soldiers were fighting for their own displacement."

The pickup peasantry's anti-immigrant feelings are borne from the same ancient economic pressure, and these feelings are gleefully stoked by the elites who want migrant labor abused and exploitable, and someone else blamed. The rich, of course, need slaves to get richer themselves, and want the poor to fight the poorer instead of pitchforking them. Thus the rich play the peasants against the slaves and profit both ways. American 'suckers and losers' join the army and serve as a bunch of debt slaves creating passport slaves, it's the perfect war crime. The victims blame each other while the perps get away. American elites (Corporate AI, really) use the American poor to violently fracking the earth for even poorer people, gaslighting everyone along the way. Then they laugh all the way to the bank, as the pickup peasants fight the slaves in the back.

Prison Slaves

America was founded by using slave labor captured from the African continent and it continues to enslave mostly Black people through mass incarceration. Kamala Harris, for example, served as a slave overseer in California recently. As Attorney General, she demanded to keep slaving even after federal judges ruled that conditions were cruel and unusual (even for America). As a report at the time said,

Most of those prisoners now work as groundskeepers, janitors and in prison kitchens, with wages that range from 8 cents to 37 cents per hour. Lawyers for Attorney General Kamala Harris had argued in court that if forced to release these inmates early, prisons would lose an important labor pool.

America's 13th amendment pointedly still allows slavery "as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted" and uses this power every day. For example, "Alabama is farming out incarcerated people to work at hundreds of companies, including McDonald's & Wendy's," and you still see scenes of men on horses commanding press-gangs of slave labor, just like the old day. Names change, but the present is still deranged.

In California, prison slaves are used to fight dangerous fires, a job they paradoxically cannot hold as a job, because they are felons. America has the largest incarcerated population in the world and they use them as slaves. But even that's not enough these days. The rate of profit must be maintained!

Illegal Immigrants

The next class of slave in America are the 'illegal' immigrants. Early Americans all came across the ocean without papers and actually raped, killed, and stole from the Native Americans. As you quickly learn with America, every accusation is a confession. These same non-native Americans locked the gate they broke into and now complain endlessly about natives moving across the continent in the native way. The completely artificial classification of people into 'documented' and 'undocumented' gives America the power to exploit an underclass of labor, ie to create slaves. American foreign policy whips them across the border, while American domestic racism whips them into shape.

America complains that Central and South America need to stop the flow of migrants northwards but, again, every accusation is a confession. America is constantly overthrowing, couping, invading, and corrupting southern governments, and then complaining that these governments are fucked up. What Americans don't understand is that 99% of the global problems they complain about could be solved from them just fucking off. The Purpose Of a System Is What It Does (POSIWID), and America destabilizes the world on purpose. Better to shake the labor loose. Always remember POSIWID, and look at what American foreign policy actually does. Ignore the verbiage they bury the bodies in. South America is conquered (to various degrees) by America and forced to supply slave labor. That's all that's happening, in the history beneath the news.

The modern innovation of America is that they figured out that how to conquer by losing. They don't have to win wars of conquest, they just have to wreck countries enough that the people have to flee, and then take credit for 'helping' with a problem they cause. America doesn't need to physically occupy the land and march the slaves out like the Romans did. America can just attack, even without winning, and the slaves walk themselves over. Then Americans can piously complain while greedily using the labor and cunningly using their own peasantry to kick down rather than looking up.

As we saw during the 2019 plague, 'illegal' immigrants are paradoxically essential labor, the people that feed, clothe, and care for Americans. America needs 'illegal' immigration, indeed it's founded on the concept, and it needs to have them outside the law and exploitable. This is how they deliver the rate of profit required to keep the rich in second yachts and third wives. The whole place runs—then as now—on slavery. Freedom™ is just the marketing label they stamp on top of slavery, and load into bombs to keeps the slaves coming.

Immigrants

'Legal' immigrants (who gives a fuck about the legal opinions of thieves?) are just a higher category of slaves. Legal immigrants have some legal rights, but little security. They are an exploitable underclass, just less exploitable than the 'illegals,' who they can starve, rape, and not pay at all. As in Ancient Greece or Rome, there are different punishments (exile) and taxes (fees) for this different class of people. And the public freaks out if an immigrant commits a fraction of the crime the native-born population is doing every day. America has an even bigger and more severe class system than the ancients and the only rule, then as now, is always kick down.

Legal immigrants are merely the highest of the foreign slave classes (and often the most eager to kick down). Immigrants have to beg, apply, and wait for permission to contribute their labor, and are selected specifically for their masters' needs. What Americans call immigrants are just the modern version of bonded labor or indentured servants, ie how many Europeans arrived there, although they didn't need papers. Modern indentured servants have to apply to join the underclass and then work off their lowly status over many years. Immigrant is a slave term within White Empire which you can tell because it goes one way. When a white person (don't be white if that bothers you) immigrates, they're an expat, not an immigrant. This nonsense only makes sense in the context of immigration as imperial slavery.

Immigrants, as a higher class of slave, can rise to very high positions these days. Indentured Indians are the preferred choice to take them over the reins of tech empires, for example. See Sundar Pichai running Google while the founders have endless midlife crises, or Satya Nadel running Microsoft while Bill Gates took the rape express with Jeff Epstein. There's no one better to actually run the empire than loyal slaves, which Indians especially have been supplying for centuries.

Within a generation, the 'native-born' children of these indentured servants can rise to Vice President or theoretically President, as with the half-Indian Kamala Harris. The position is just a front for the oligarchs (a brain-dead Biden can do it), but those clambering up the ladder by stepping on their own people still covet it. The only price is that you kick down the ladder even more vigorously than your masters. Indeed, there is no one more hostile to the poor man at the door than a rich man's servant.

Same Slaving, Different Day

These people are all slaves. America still has slavery. They literally have people still breaking rocks in the fields and still picking cotton in the fields and still serving as indentured servants but they call it something different so it's OK. Americans have got the idea that the idea of slavery is bad, but the whole economy is built on slave labor and can't operate any other way. So they just changed words to keep the numbers right and kept slaving. Thus, black slaves became prison slaves, native slaves became illegal immigrants, and indentured servants became immigrants plain. But it's the same slavery as American history or even Roman history, just at an even more abominable scale. I'll repeat because history keeps repeating. It's the same shit, different day.

7. The Triangle Of Power

Growing up, I learned that people overthrew kings, and we had people power now. But growing into a people and having precious little power, I can see that something is wrong. Instead of one monarch oppressing us, we have even more oligarchs, completely unchecked now. Power was portrayed as a line, which we flipped, when in fact it's a triangle.

You can view the triangle as having a monarch on one side, oligarchs on the other, and people on the third, usually as bystanders. A monarch might come from the oligarchy and preserve their interests, but occasionally they might do something crazy like actually relieve (debt) pressure on the poor. For this, they would be called tyrants, or populists, and violently attacked by the oligarchs. This was as true for ancient Greek or Roman civilizations (which I'll refer to) as it was centuries ago, or even now.

The American Revolution was, in fact, an oligarchic revolution against a monarch. Some colonial oligarchs overthrew a king, and continued oppressing the masses even worse than before. All the talk about 'the people' was just branding from people that branded human bodies and sold their own rape-borne children. At founding only a minority of white people could vote, nevermind the majority population in general. Despite some superficial changes, oligarchy is still hard-coded into the American system. Voters make a ritual 'choice' between two clans who are both bribed by the same oligarchs. This is the system that they have branded Democracy™ and bombed all over the world, like a Trojan Horse for oligarchy.

In the most famous example of oligarchs overthrowing a 'king', Roman Senators like Brutus and Cassius stabbed Julius Caesar. This did not free the slaves or the working class, it was for their own benefit. As Ramsay MacMullen said in Enemies Of The Roman Order, "Most of the conspirators, if their innermost ideas had been examined, would no doubt have meant by it only "free" opportunity to exert the weight of their family in the old ways; "free" movement of power among all members of the traditional oligarchy, without constraint by faction or tyranny; in short, free access to the political trough for all the usual company of nobles and retainers." This is really the central tension of Roman history, between Senators (oligarchy) and emperors/kings (monarchy). I'll delve into the Romans a bit because it's fascinating.

SPQR

A traditional 'name' of Rome is SPQR, the Senate and the People of Rome. This would more accurately be the Senate Versus the People of Rome, as they were more frequently opposed. You can see the triangular revolution (from Senate to monarch and back again) play out in Roman history over and over.

Early Roman history (via Cornell and Matthews' Atlas Of The Roman World) had a governance system that doesn't look much different from America's Presidential system.

At the head of the state was the king. Kingship in early Rome was not hereditary. On the death of a king the functions of government were carried on by the senators, each one in turn holding office for a period of five days, with the title interrex ("between-king"), until a suitable successor could be found. The essential test of his suitability was religious. According to Livy, the normal procedure was for the augurs (experts in divination) to ask the gods to give their assent by sending suitable signs (auspices). Thus the king was "inaugurated," a word that has passed into our language. Finally, the king's position was confirmed by a vote of the comitia curiata.

The Roman monarch came from the oligarchy, but they could exploit the third side of the triangle—the people—to get there. This was the central political tension of the Roman Empire. As Cornell and Matthews described the period vaguely around 600-500 BC,

The later kings based their position on popular support and challenged the power and privileges of the aristocrats. Thus Tarquin I obtained the throne by canvassing among the masses, and enrolled new men in the senate. Servius Tullius and Tarquin II went further by openly flouting traditional procedures and launching an all-out assault on the aristocracy. Both seized power by illegal means and ruled without bothering to obtain the assent of the gods or the vote of the comitia curiata. Tarquin II completely ignored the advice of the senate, put to death its most prominent members and generally behaved like a typical tyrant. The most obvious comparison is in fact with the tyrants who were ruling in many of the Greek cities during this same period.

'Tyrant' is an insult today, but oligarchs branded it that way because it threatened their power. It's important to understand what tyrants actually (or at least often) do. In Rome as in Greece, they often relieved debts of the poor, meaning they broke up the "progressive formation of a dominant aristocracy which had succeeded in concentrating the economic surplus of the community into its own hands and perpetuating its domination through inheritance." These men were tyrants to the oligarchs, not necessarily to the people. As Cornell and Matthews continue:

The most important element of tyranny was its populist character. The tyrants expropriated the wealth of their aristocratic opponents and distributed it among their friends and supporters; at the same time they attacked oligarchic privileges and extended the franchise to wider groups.

Because such monarchs impinged on the 'freedom' of the oligarchs to oppress the people, they were frequently beaten to death for their troubles. This is the founding tension of the Roman Republic, between monarchy and oligarchy, with the people as pawns. As Cornell and Matthews continue,

The tradition is very likely correct when it states that two of the first acts of the new leaders of the Republic were to make the people swear an oath never to allow any man to be king in Rome and to legislate against anyone aspiring to a monarchical position in the future. But what was truly repugnant to the nobles was the thought of one of their number attempting to elevate himself above his peers by attending to the needs of the lower classes and winning their support by taking up their cause. This explains why all the serious charges of monarchism (regnum) in the Republic were leveled against mavericks from the ruling elite whose only offense, as far as we can see, was to direct their personal efforts and resources to the relief of the poor.

The central insight from Greek and Roman times (lost in American marketing) is that overthrowing a king can actually be worse for the people, because then the oligarchy has free reign to oppress you.

Ancient Economics

Michael Hudson's life work has been showing this triangular tension repeating again and again in the ancient world. His core insight is the coercive power of debt, which only a king could relieve or control. Hudson said, "My articles about the origins of credit, money and interest share a common frame of reference. From the inception of economic practices and enterprise in the ancient Near East down through classical antiquity and medieval Europe to today wealthy classes have wanted to make themselves into an oligarchy in control of their government and religion to protect, legitimize and increase their wealth, especially their rent-extraction privileges as creditors, monopolists or landlords." Hudson finds examples of kings counterbalancing this tendency throughout history, and being called tyrants for their troubles. As he writes:

[In the 7th century BC the] classical Greek tyrant Thrasybulus advised his contemporary Corinthian ruler Periander who had overthrown the aristocracy, cancelled the debts that had held the peasantry in bondage and redistributed the land (which is what the Greek tyrants did, and why they were disparaged by subsequent oligarchies, who turned the label "tyrant" into an invective). When asked by Periander what to do to prevent the deposed Corinthian oligarchy from trying to recover its former despotic power, Thrasybulus walked over to an adjoining wheat field and pointed to the stalks of wheat at different sizes. He took a sickle and made a sweeping motion to make the stalks even, so that they were at the same level. The visual metaphor was clear enough.

What Hudson has done has take the abstract idea of triangular tension between classes and made it (somewhat) measurable. In his histories, the core mechanism of control was debt (which in the ancient times was overt slavery). Oligarchs would trap the people in debt, and this threatened the kings ability to raise armies, build the stuff he wanted, and have a population to rule over at all. So kings (especially new kings) would regularly relieve debts, to prevent the whole kingdom from collapsing under a cancerous oligarchy.

Hudson's core work is basically biblical economics, or even Babylonian. In his book "and Forgive Them Their Debts" he references the Lord's Prayer (the actual line is forgive them their debts, not meaningless 'trespasses') and traces it back to the commonality of debt jubilees (forgiveness) in the ancient world. The mathematical impossibility (re: evil) of usury is something the ancients knew from hard experience, which we're about to get soon enough. As Hudson said about Babylonian math,

Any rate of interest implies a doubling time. We have the textbook exercises that Babylonians used to teach scribes. They asked how long it takes for a debt to double at a rate of one shekel per month. (60 shekels made a mina-weight.) The answer was five years. How long to quadruple? (Ten years.) How much to multiply 64 times? (30 years) I wish that American universities teaching economics would ask this question.

Modern interest rates are much lower (except for personal credit cards), but the exponential growth principle is the same. If you take out a 30-year mortgage to buy a home and pay a 7 percent annual interest, what does the bank end up getting? In only 10 years at 7 percent interest, the lender will receive as much as the seller of the home received. And all the bank needed to do was to create the credit to finance the property transfer. In 20 years the bank's interest return has doubled, and in 30 years it has quadrupled.

So you see how rapidly the increase in debt service accumulates. But economies don't grow that fast. The Babylonians recognized this universal fact. In addition to teaching the scribes to calculate how fast a debt grows at a rate of one shekel per month, they had exercises to calculate how fast a herd of cattle grows.

A herd of cattle grows very much like modern economies grow, in an S-curve that tapers off. When the first Assyriologists began to translate these exercises, they thought that this couldn't be a mathematical exercise. It must be a report on how a specific herd was growing. But already the Sumerians had quadratic equations, and its scribes needed to learn more mathematics than a typical high school student learns in America today. They forecast astronomical relations and made many sorts of calculations. They knew that you had the S-curve of herds growing, and they knew about the exponential growth of debt. The striking difference was how much faster the debts grew than their indebted rural economy.

From that alone, they knew it was obvious that the debts couldn't be paid. If you don't cancel them, you're going to have a domestic oligarchy growing. Now, every introductory Economics 101 course should have that model. The mathematical models the Sumerians had were superior to any economic model that the National Bureau of Economic Research has today or any economic central bank has because they don't want to admit and acknowledge this simple mathematical reality of compound interest.

The absurdity of doubling anything is a physical fact. Place one grain of rice on a chessboard, double it every square, and watch things get out of control real fast. Exponential growth of anything doesn't just collapse societies, it collapses the planet itself, as we're also finding out. Compounding (re:doubling) debt is a Ponzi scheme and making that scheme global doesn't change the basic math, it just makes the collapse global as well.

All the fancy math of modern economics is founded on this fundamentally bad assumption, which is now reaching its apocalyptic conclusion. I point this out for academic reasons, because no one is really interested in calling out the fact that this entire civilization is going to collapse like the Tower of Babel. There's no great reward for calling out a Ponzi scheme, it falls down on your head also. As Upton Sinclair said, it is very difficult to get a man to understand something if his salary depends on him not understanding it. Hence there's a complete resistance to basic Babylonian-era math not because the math is bad, but because the money is good. As Hudson says,

I think that the addictive drive for economic power to dominate others subject to dependency relationships as debtors, renters or trade customers, dominating and impoverishing society around them, should be the center of modern economics. We're seeing the One Percent doing what similar elites have always tried to do. We can see why creditors like the freedom to deny liberty to their debtors, and treat this as part of the natural order. The financial sector controls most monetary wealth, and is horrified at the thought that debtors might be freed from having to pay their loans. There is almost an abhorrence at viewing Bronze Age economic history and that of early antiquity as a success story in restraining the emergence of an oligarchy to use debt leverage to impoverish the population and appropriate its self-support lands for themselves, putting house to house and plot to plot together so that no more room in the land is left for people, as the Biblical prophet Isaiah put it.

Where is the economic discussion today about how to make a mixed and balanced public-private economy? Students are indoctrinated about how to let the free market, dominated by the wealthy financial sector, operate so that let the wealthy can do whatever they want. The Romans did not need a Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan to advise them about economic freedom. To Rome's oligarchy, freedom was their right to do anything they wanted to the rest of the population.

That's what an economically and politically privatized free market leads to. Its freedom is for the creditors and landowners to charge rent, and for monopolies to take as much as they can from their victims. This is the opposite of what Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and the other classical economists meant by a free market. They meant a market free from landlords, free from monopoly rent and free from privatized creditor power.

That basic fight to free societies from "economic rent" and its associated oligarchic rentier power has been going on ever since antiquity.

Even by the classic capitalist texts, capitalism doesn't make sense. It's just a multi-level marketing scheme on a planetary scale. If you read Smith or Mill it's striking how our entire economic system has been based on a few random quotes (invisible hand, free market) taken completely out of context. And, of course, the context of thousands of years before these dudes is ignored entirely, not to mention other civilizations. They call this age of ignorance the Age of Enlightenment, because it's been Opposites Day for centuries now.

Autocrats

Modern rhetoric is really just stupider versions of the ancient stuff. Today the dialogue from the White Empire (America, Europe, 'Israel', no point differentiating them) is all about democracies vs. autocrats or authoritarians, which is what they're calling tyrants now. For much the same reasons. 'Authoritarian' states like China or Russia are just those that have some centralized power checking the global oligarchy trying to consume their people's labor and resources.

All the opposition to state money printing (re: creation), state-led industrialization, and public goods is really because a now international oligarchy wants to control the money, monopolize and cannibalize production. There's no free market here, it's just marketing. It's just the age-old drama of the oligarchs, whose philosophy can be distilled to 'fuck you, pay me.' As Hudson says,

We see the same fight through the ages by financial elites opposing any government power able to restrict their self-serving rent-seeking and creditor power at society's expense. We see it today in the pro-creditor economic policies of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the "libertarian" ideology, all of which seek to centralize power to allocate resources and plan economies in the financial sector instead of democratic government. Today's neoliberal idea is to get rid of government authority (except where it is controlled by the rentier sectors) and let banks in the privatized financial sector control money and credit, which is the most important public utility.

You can thus see in modern neoliberal politics the same old triangular tension between a central power, decentralized oligarchs, and the people in between.

Bringing Back Kings

This is not to say bring back kings, but just that such an idea is sayable. Some third force needs to fill out the power triangle, otherwise it becomes straight oppression. That force could be a 'populist' leader, or a 'dictatorship of the proletariat,' or a one-party state. The idea is that something needs to push back on oligarchic elites, and electing your oligarchic mascot won't do. Choosing between two clans both corrupted by the same oligarchs is marketed as freedom, but they're just lying to you. The question one always has to ask is freedom for whom?

The fact is that every form of democracy has in groups and out groups and old Aristotle clearly saw them as forms of class struggle. As his translator William Ellis, A.M. said, "When we come to Aristotle's analysis of existing constitutions, we find that while he regards them as imperfect approximations to the ideal, he also thinks of them as the result of the struggle between classes. Democracy, he explains, is the government not of the many but of the poor; oligarchy a government not of the few but of the rich. And each class is thought of, not as trying to express an ideal, but as struggling to acquire power or maintain its position."

The real problem is the mental model, which depicts power as a line that one revolution flipped, and now no more revolutions are required. In fact, power is a constant struggle between classes trapped in what I call the triangle of power.

8. The Hermeneutics Of Hamas

Since I wrote something, effectively, despairing, I thought I'd pair that with words from more effective people. People from the Resistance, like the recently martyred Abu Shujaa. I knew Abu Shujaa (literally the father of bravery) because he was assassinated, and then showed up at his own funeral. But now—after what is at least the 6th attempt on his life—he is truly gone. These were his last words:

I don't think my heart will ever fully heal. I will always feel a sense of shortcomings throughout my life, even though there is nothing that I could do that I haven't already done.

But I also cannot shake off the bad feeling that overwhelms me every time I see the sacrifices of others and what has befallen them. I see my arrest, the loss of my home, my separation from my family, the loss of my brother Mahmoud, and several others close to me as passing matters compared to a child who has lost his mother, or a father who has lost his child, or a prisoner who will spend decades in his cell, deprived of his children.

But I console myself that Allah protected me for a reason and that I did not choose to retreat but always chose resolve, and despite that, I am still among you. And I console myself that if we come out of this war alive, our duty is to be up to the responsibility and remain a source of strength to those around us.. And to remain loyal to those who sacrificed and offered so much...

This is a pledge upon us and I ask Allah to enable us to fulfill it.

Abu Shujaa is talking about the despair I feel—of seeing genocide from the side—even though he has obviously done everything possible. He lost his life well before he lost it, yet even he felt inadequate. The despair I feel is really dishonor. Both Sri Lanka and Arab cultures are (for lack of a better lens) shame cultures, and I feel ashamed. Bearing witness is unbearable, one actually wants the genocide to stop.

Hence you get the seeming paradox that people suffering more express less despair. Martyrs say that they're ready to die, and mothers say they're proud of their sons. This is written off as fanaticism, but it's not at all. It's faith, rooted in a deep philosophy, rooted in a social identity and, ultimately, the soil. When I read people from the Resistance directly (RNN Archives is a good source) I am struck how much they sound the same, from 1935 to 2024. And when I read the sources they refer to (specifically the Quran) I am struck by how words from 1500 years ago sound like they're written specifically for this moment. For lack of a better word, their faith gives me hope.

The Quranic Basis

The faith of men like Abu Shujaa is not incidental, it is not ornamental, it is, in fact, at the center of resistance. As Iran's Ayatollah Khamenei said (in 1974), "the faith the Quran is speaking about is a faith that is never separated from duty because, according to the Qur'an, faith is more than something in one's heart." As the (currently ruling) Ayatollah continued (referencing the Sūrat al-Anfāl):

'Indeed, those who have believed and migrated and struggled with their possessions and their persons'—and against their possessions and their persons—'and those who gave them shelter'—when they were refugees without a home—'and helped, they are guardians of one another'—they are bound together on the same side. They are of a single substance. They are the bricks and mortar of a single structure. 'The likeness of the faithful is like an edifice; they support one another.' Have you seen how these bricks go together in these ornate ceilings? Each brick is a single believer. Each believer is a single brick. They fit together and support one another. Together they form a structure that takes great effort to demolish. Tens of bricks side-by-side. This one brick helps to protect the whole, and the whole all help to protect this one brick. 'They are the guardians of one another.' Held together by strong bonds. United.

This explains the feeling of being 'bricked' (or broken) when you're not helping your brother or sister, when you're not following the clear word of God. The edifice of existence is a beautiful and noble arch, connecting you back to your ancestors, to the earth itself, and reaching upwards to God.

Doing your duty, fighting and dying for a cause, these are generally vestigial values in western civilization, buried in Flanders Field long ago. But they are still living values in the Resistance, expressed almost uniformly by those who die. In a capitalist society, solidarity just means selling your body as another commodity, like the debt slaves in the US military. As Mia Khalifa said "Honestly, I think that selling your body, like if we are going by that definition, being in the army is worse than being on OnlyFans. You're selling your body to the government." Sacrificing your body to protect your people and the temples of your ancestors is a different thing altogether.

If you only read what the colonial press, you'd consider the Islamic Resistance to be savages, but consider the source. Westerners never discuss the simplest solution for the Middle East, which is them fucking off. Nor does the western press delve into the motivations and philosophy of the Resistance, beyond 'they hate your freedom.' However, especially if you consider Islamic Resistance movements like Hamas, Hezbollah, or Islamic states like Iran enemies, it's important to understand them on your own terms.

I have been trying to (dimly) understand Islamic philosophy for a year now, reading the Quran and fasting for Ramadan and (occasionally) going to the mosque with my thambis. In mosque, the first thing you learn is to 'straighten your rows,' to basically snuggle up to the guy next to you, with your feet in line. You get a very real sense of belonging, and even a sense of helping out by participating in something bigger than you.

I can see that deep feeling in my children, when they 'help' out with cooking or lighting incense or various acts (where they're actually causing me more trouble). Deep within them, they want to help, they want to be a 'useful engine', as Thomas The Tank Engine said. A body without use is abused. Your muscles, your bones, your life literally withers away and dies if you don't use them. God, knowing man, made Islam a very physical practice, because faith without works is dead.

Islam is very much a faith of action. During Ramadan, I woke up at 5:30 AM to eat and pray before the sunrise, and then didn't eat or drink water for the rest of the day. I was hangry, to be honest, but it forced me to be disciplined all day. I had to stop what I was doing multiple times to pray. I've prayed in fields, I've prayed in closets (my office is a closet), I've prayed with my kids crawling over me, only rarely has it been convenient to pray. But prayer is an action you consciously take, which changes your consciousness, which changes your actions, it's a virtuous cycle inshallah. Ritual is the most ancient programming language and prayer encodes a different sense of self in the one who prays. The very fact of bowing in the same direction with millions of other people at the very same time communicates and, indeed, creates a very different conception of being, and bowing towards a higher being really puts it all in perspective.

As a personal example, during one of the last days of Ramadan we were praying on the roof as a huge thunderstorm was happening across the ocean. It wasn't raining in Colombo but we could see lightning over the horizon. My friend Halik told me A) to straighten my row and B) to pray as if Allah was right in front of me. And I said "dude, I know. I can see Them." The dark clouds in front of us were shuddering with some unearthly light. I don't know what believing in God means, but I definitely fear God and I definitely saw Them that day, God is everywhere, it's not that hard really. If you start, as I do, from the presumption that Allah is real then you can begin to understand the people that really believe in Them. Whether you believe this or not is immaterial, just take it as a philosophical assumption to understand an argument and see where it lead you.

Self and Selflessness

What strikes the western mind most about 'other' cultures is that they are plural and not singular. Peoples and not persons. Years of capitalism and competition have atomized the western being into an 'individual' who forms and dissolves little corporations called 'marriages' and 'friendships' at will. They say 'you're born alone, you die alone,' which never made sense to me at all. This Ferengi way of life is literally inhuman (we're social animals!) and causes the mental health crisis that also gets dumped on the individual. Western civilization doesn't know any better because 'they' don't know who they are. The individual is the starting point of western philosophy which has never internalized the teachings of Jesus.

Jesus is a prophet within Islam and his words are considered the words of God. Islam, like all people of the book, is about the reality of God and the unreality of this world. To me, this means that if you truly see God (and see like God), individuals perceived quite differently. You're just too zoomed out. What's a fart to a thunderstorm? As a human, bowing in front of God, God is equally close to the guy next to you. Action then becomes a question of dharma (duty) not decisions. You might have to kill the guy next to you, but as Lord Krishna told Arjuna vis-à-vis killing his cousins (in the Mahabharata):

Thy concern is with work only, but not with the fruit (of work). Let not the fruit be thy motive for work; nor let thy inclination be for inaction. Staying in devotion, apply thyself to work, casting off attachment (to it), O Dhananjaya, and being the same in success or unsuccess. This equanimity is called Yoga (devotion). Work (with desire of fruit) is far inferior to devotion, O Dhananjaya.

The fact which we forget in (temporary) modern comfort is that life is a life of survival, and that other beings besides the self live and die. There are many dimensions of self, both higher and lower. If you go up, you are part of a family, a nation, various causes. If you do down, your gut bacteria is its own ecosystem, and even the mitochondria that powers your every cell has its own existence. Krishna talks about 'embodied being' in general, not human being as something special. He said,

'The Holy One said,--Thou mournest those that deserve not to be mourned. Thou speakest also the words of the (so-called) wise. Those, however, that are (really) wise, grieve neither for the dead nor for the living. It is not that, I or you or those rulers of men never were, or that all of us shall not hereafter be. Of an Embodied being, as childhood, youth, and, decrepitude are in this body, so (also) is the acquisition of another body. The man, who is wise, is never deluded in this.

In the same way, every martyrdom notice I receive quotes the Quran, saying, "And do not think of those who are killed in the way of Allah as dead. Rather, they are alive with their Lord, receiving provision." What is life and death to higher beings, like a community of believers? In the face of a genocide, what's one? When you destroy one person it is like destroying the whole universe, but what is that to the creator of the universe? It is an insult but not an injury. And the Quranic God promises full recompense. The full verse is:

And do not think of those who are killed in the way of Allah as dead. Rather, they are alive with their Lord, receiving provision, rejoicing in what Allah has bestowed upon them of His bounty, and they receive good tidings about those [fighters] who have not yet joined them, that there is no fear concerning them, nor will they grieve.

This is, indeed, the verse that the martyred leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, was reading on his fateful flight to Iran, before he was assassinated.

If there's one verse to understand the Islamic fight against oppression, it's this one, Al-Nisa 74-75, literally titled Fighting Against Oppression:

This is the call to jihad and people of stout heart should hasten towards jihad. There are many verses on 'those who cower', and they are an embarrassment now and cursed hereafter. The leaders of Jordan and Egypt, for example, are surely bound for hellfire, because they know and do not act. Words like Jihad and Allah scare uneducated people, but this is the same god as Christians and Jews talking sense, which divers nations agree upon. The right of oppressed people to self-defence and liberation, including armed resistance. As UN Resolution 3314, article 7 states:

Nothing in this Definition, and in particular article 3, could in any way prejudice the right to self-determination, freedom and independence, as derived from the Charter, of peoples forcibly deprived of that right and referred to in the Declaration on Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations and Co-operation among States in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations, particularly peoples under colonial and racist régimes or other forms of alien domination; nor the right of these peoples to struggle to that end and to seek and receive support, in accordance with the principles of the Charter and in conformity with the above-mentioned Declaration.

It is, indeed, an international duty under the UN Genocide Convention to help the resistance. It's the same thing Allah is saying. There is a deep philosophical truth to the cause of Hamas and the entire Axis of Resistance. If you've seen one Palestinian child die, you've seen enough. As James Baldwin said, the children belong to all of us. As Allah said, as if he was speaking to us today,

That is why We ordained for the Children of Israel that whoever takes a life—unless as a punishment for murder or mischief in the land—it will be as if they killed all of humanity; and whoever saves a life, it will be as if they saved all of humanity. ˹Although˺ Our messengers already came to them with clear proofs, many of them still transgressed afterwards through the land.

If you think about this seriously, if you believe it (even for argument's sake) it leads to an altered perception. If you see God (and see like God) you can see things as they are, infinite. You can see time in terms of hundreds and thousands of years, and selves as existing on multiple planes, and see existence as hundreds of thousands of rebirths (whatever you want to call the mystery behind your navel). As Frank Ocean sang, "Human beings in a mob, What's a mob to a king?, What's a king to a god?" As his verse continues, however, "What's a god to a non-believer, Who don't believe in anything?" Take, for example, Aldous Huxley. Huxley said,

We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies—all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes."

You can, however, test all of these statements and they're false. Lovers fuse their insulated ecstasies into literal new selves, babies are physically part of the mother's body and tied to her with a cord. Very few people suffer and enjoy in solitude, that's why we have weddings and funerals. Sensations and feelings are not private, if you put people in a sensory deprivation chamber they actually go mad, we are biologically wired as social animals. And, returning to our cruel point, it is quite possible, indeed common, to be martyred together. Refaat Al-Areer was killed with his nieces, Ismail Haniyeh's precious grandchildren were murdered before him, the killers actually wait till leaders get home to kill the whole family. Entire generations are martyred together when they bomb apartment buildings. Humans obviously do not live alone and die alone, just look at our bodies. We are all born physically tied to our mothers and too many of us buried in rubble together.

I like Huxley but he's also philosophically wrong. It's peak white man to think you're alone in the world, while depending on maids and entire colonies of labor. Feeling alone actually requires a lot of people. If you look closely at the self it reveals... nothing. It doesn't even make sense. What 'self' are you in heaven? The age when you die, the age when you were the coolest, or you as a child? Those are all fairly distinct selves, each a unique point in spacetime. Which 'self' is more important? There's actually more viral and bacterial DNA in (and on) you than human DNA. There's a strong argument that we're just spaceships for microbial life, with 'consciousness' as a crude guidance system to just not disturb their ride.

The individual, taken as the core assumption of western philosophy, is a philosophical mess. The closer we look at atoms the more weird they get, how much weirder do you think it gets navel-gazing? The answer is really right there, we are all connected. The individual is no island of solidity, we are all, as the sage Dolly Parton said, islands in the stream. The universe is full of island universes, there are many dimensions of 'self', none particularly more 'real' than the other. 'Embodied' beings are always popping in and out of existence, gods, men, machines, et cetera. Family, nation, individual, man is a stranger even to himself. Like scientific models, all assertions of self are false, but some assertions of self are useful. Hence we must cleanse our doors of perception even more than the unhygienic white man, who wears his shoes in the house, kicks God out, and proclaims his self sovereign. We must take our shoes (and selves) off before God. As the Allah said to Moses in the Bible.

God said, "Do not come any closer. Take off your sandals, because you are standing on holy ground. I am the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob." So Moses covered his face, because he was afraid to look at God.

The concept of holy ground, of standing your ground, this is central to the Islamic Resistance (HAMAS is just an acronym for Islamic Resistance Movement). The October 7th rebellion is called the Al-Aqsa Flood, referring to the mosque where the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) met Abraham, Moses, and Jesus in the Night Journey. The Al-Aqsa Mosque is the lodestar of Islamic Resistance, and 'Israeli' soldiers not taking their shoes off inside is one of Hamas's stated reasons for October 7th.

This religious sense makes the Resistance much more than a nationalist movement. Indeed, as Hezbollah's Hassan Nasrallah says, all of the Arab borders are made up, not just 'Israel'. As he said in 1986,

We do not believe in multiple Islamic republics; we do believe, however, in a single Islamic world governed by a central government, because we consider all borders throughout the Muslim world as fake and colonialist, and therefore doomed to disappear.

We do not believe in a nation whose borders are 10,452 square kilometers in Lebanon; our project foresees Lebanon as part of the political map of an Islamic world in which specificities would cease to exist, but in which the rights, freedom, and dignity of minorities within it are guaranteed.

Therefore, in order for this project to be realized, priority should be given to removing Israel from the scene, because it was established for the express purpose of dividing and partitioning the Muslim world. We are not only against the partition of Lebanon, but also against the partition of the Muslim world; this explains why we see no alternative to fighting Israel, with all means at our disposal, until it ceases to exist.

This idea of a caliphate might be too much for people, but if you think about it as the European Union it's not that crazy. Also not your business. There's a genocide going on, while groups like Hezbollah are committed to non-coercion, because that's quite clear in the Quran. To return to the secular logic, every nation is, obligated to support the Resistance under the UN Genocide Convention, but only two nation states have answered the call—Iran and Yemen. In this case, the clear moral duty is the clear religious duty. It's irrelevant whether you believe in Allah or not, They're telling the truth. As Yemen's Ansar Allah said after blowing up the ship "Sunion,"

In light of the developments in Palestine, we all remember our religious, moral, and humanitarian responsibility towards the genocide of an oppressed Muslim people.

The clear reluctance of many members of the [Arab/Islamic] nation has significantly contributed to the suffering of the Palestinian people. The state of deafness and ignorance that some try to adopt towards what is happening does not absolve them of responsibility nor protects them from the consequences of negligence and failure.

It's important to understand that Ansar Allah is not talking about an earthly punishment, he's saying that the cowards' souls are forfeit. As the Quran says, "Those who stay at home—except those with valid excuses—are not equal to those who strive in the cause of Allah with their wealth and their lives." Hence Yemen holds million man marches every week, wishing that the cowardly Saudis would get out of the way and let them march to Gaza. Protecting the oppressed is not just an obligation in Islam, it is a test. And this is not an inherently Islamic value, it's just objectively valuable, and we're lucky to have had multiple prophets tell us so. As Jesus lived, love your neighbor as I have loved you, and take a whip to the temple if you need to.

In Context

In this context, the martyrdom message of Abu Shujaa makes sense. His committment is actually quite common. For example, this is Umma Mohammed, the mother of a Hezbollah fighter martyred at just 19. As RNN reports:

At the funeral of 19-year-old Mohammed Ali Hassan Qdouh, a young Hezbollah fighter martyred on the road to Al-Quds, his mother declares: "I offer my son, and the blood of my son, to the eyes of the children of Gaza, the women of Gaza, the men of Gaza, and the blood that falls from every resistor in this world. I am offering, with all satisfaction. And I say more than that. Are you satisfied my Lord? Take until you are satisfied! Until we reach victory and firmness for this nation. Praise be to Allah."

This seems like zealotry unless you engage with her culture, and the history these people have lived through. Then ask yourself what you would do. Would you be as brave for your people, if they were invaded and violated so? Remember that we're not just talking about the genocide of Gaza, the White Empire has killed nearly 5 million and displaced nearly 40 million Muslims since 2001. 'Israel' is just the tip of the spear, and America is supplying it. Any culture is going to react to being attacked like this, and Islam, mashallah, has been ready for this for centuries. Going back a century, RNN reports:

On the day of his final battle in 1935, the British surrounded Sheikh Al-Qassam and his fighters. An Arab collaborator with British forces called out, demanding their surrender. At this moment, Al-Qassam declared, "We do not surrender. This is jihad for the sake of Allah and the homeland." He turned to his comrades and said, "Die as martyrs."

As Leila Khaled, a communist PFLP fighter, said, "The PFLP began where Al-Qassam left off. His generation started the revolution. My generation intends to finish it." You can see how revolution within Palestine is not necessarily Muslim or Communist, or Sunni (like Hamas or Ansar Allah) or Shia (like Iran and Hezbollah). Resistance is simply the right thing to do, whatever lens you choose. The proper response to genocide is the genos fighting back, and given that we're all part of the human gene pool, that onus is on all of us too. As the philosopher martyr Basil Al-Araj said, "every Palestinian (in the broad sense, meaning anyone who sees Palestine as a part of their struggle, regardless of their secondary identities), every Palestinian is on the front lines of the battle for Palestine, so be careful not to fail in your duty."

Given that we have a duty, and we live in a society, shirking that duty makes us look like schmucks. Not hastening to jihad or the Genocide Convention is—in a shame culture—something to be deeply ashamed of. In a guilt culture like the West it's something you write a mea culpa about 10 years later, but their culture is bullshit. A genocide is happening now and not stopping it is a stain on everyone living. Those who do not resist will forever be 'those assholes' in the history books, and condemned by every holy book in the hereafter.

If you read these books, or listen to the people that live them, it's a striking experience. I can read people from 1446 years ago, or 89 years ago and they're saying the same thing as now. These people simply have a wide perspective of self (comprising the Muslim ummah) and a long perception of time. As the martyred founder of Hamas, Sheikh Al-Yassin said:

Ahmed Mansour: "As someone who witnessed the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, and now that this state has existed for 50 years – how do you see its future?"

Ahmed Yassin: "I say Israel was founded upon injustice and plunder. Any entity founded on injustice and plunder is destined to be destroyed."

Mansour: "Even if it has power that allows it to survive?"

Yassin: "The power of no one in the world lasts forever. You start as a child, then you become a teenager, and a young man, and then you become an aged man, an elderly man, and then it's over. The same is true of countries. They progress little by little until they become extinct. This cannot be helped."

Mansour: "At what stage is Israel now?"

Yassin: "I say that Israel will be gone in the first quarter of the next [21st] century, inshallah. To be precise, I say that by 2027, there will be no Israel."

Mansour: "Why that [specific] date?"

Yassin: "Because I believe in the noble Quran. The Quran tells us that the generations change every 40 years. During the first 40 years, we had the Nakba, in the second 40 years, the Intifada started, with confrontations the fighting, and the bombs, and the third [group of] 40 years, will see [Israel's] end, inshallah."

Mansour: "So this estimate..."

Yassin: "This is a Quranic conclusion."

Despite 'Israel' torturing and killing his family, despite them air striking him in his wheelchair, Yassin was not killed just as Al-Qassam was not killed in 1935. Today the Al-Qassam Brigades fires Yassin 105 RPGs at tanks and the latter's predictions don't just look possible, it looks probable. As the martyr Naji Al-Ali said in the 1980s, "Palestine is not far. Nor is it near. It is within reach of the revolution."

This is what gives me hope amidst all the horror, #1 reading the Quran and #2 reading people that live (and die) the Quran. Those fighting the horror don't have the feeling of being trapped in it, because they're fighting against it, and they have faith in a higher power that loves justice. Whether you believe in this God or not, you can appreciate what They're saying with your own reason and your own beating heart. If you approach the Islamic Resistance on its own terms or on your own terms, there's no world where watching this many men, women, and children die is a good thing. In neither this world nor the next is this genocide justifiable. As Basil Al-Araj said, "Palestine is the moral standard for any human. If you want to see the moral side of any person, know their stance on the Palestinian cause and the Resistance in Palestine."

That is why I think supporting Palestine and condemning Hamas is a contradiction. As the saying goes, those who are in solidarity with our corpses and not our rockets are hypocrites, and not of us. If you do any serious reading of Hamas beyond 'HAMAS BAD' you'll see that Hamas is not bad, they are in fact the guys resisting a genocide with their tortured bodies. And genocide is bad, in case you forgot. Whenever I feel bad, I read from the Resistance themselves and they're always less despondent than I am. Most of their communiqués end with a steely determination, whether you read them from 1935 or 2024. For example, this is from Saraya Al-Quds, the military wing of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, who offered up the martyr Abu Shujaa, as mentioned at the beginning of this article. They said,

Rest assured that we are in excellent condition, and your resistance is steadfast and unyielding, unbreakable by the army of cowards. The illusion that the enemy spreads, thinking that it can put an end to this pure journey, is a clear indication of its foolishness and ignorance of what is happening and what has been prepared for it on the ground today, tomorrow, and beyond. We will all witness what we mean, and in due time, the days will tell of the good news they carry.

It is a jihad of victory or martyrdom.

Neither jihad nor martyrdom are losses in this context. As the martyred spokesperson of PIJ, Tariq Izz El-Din said, "Whenever a leader ascends, ten will emerge to replace them. When a martyr ascends, 100 martyrs will emerge to replace them. The march continues, and it does not stop until the defeat of the occupation." These people truly have a long-term view of history and, as events all across the globe show us, the long term is upon us. The fall of 'Israel', the fall of 'America,' the fall of this entire civilization. Whenever I feel discomfited, I take a strange comfort in this. Allah's promise is justice, and I actually believe in it.

9. I Feel Like I'm Going Crazy Because The World Has Gone Mad

Today I saw a wounded Palestinian child dying on a ruined hospital floor. Still gasping for breath but obviously fated, peace be with him. I couldn't watch but I saw. I have children. It cuts me to the core. Today I also saw that they finally killed Abu Shujaa, a brave fighter I've seen cheat death before. Now he's really martyred. At least he died fighting, while I'm fighting useless tears. How many more? How much can one people take? How much can all people witness? The Genocide of Gaza is not stopping, indeed, Abu Shujaa was martyred in the West Bank, where it's spreading. Along with disease, famine, and all the horsemen these wicked people are riding.

We are deep in the extermination phase of genocide which—as per the 10 Stages Of Genocide—means, "At this stage, only rapid and overwhelming armed intervention can stop genocide. Real safe areas or refugee escape corridors should be established with heavily armed international protection." And yet the armed resistance of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, etc is condemned in the ruling press, and the support of Iran, Yemen, and Hezbollah is suppressed by naked censorship. What a topsy-turvy world we live in. What a mindfuck it is just waking up every morning, into the same Groundhog Day of genocidal madness.

The actual, official response to genocide is shut up. Shut up to students, shut up to writers, shut up to anyone with a shred of humanity in them, shut up to entire social networks. Shut up and let us 'finish them' or 'finish the job' (an 'Israeli' bumper sticker and American campaign slogan, respectively). Shut up until we lecture you about genocide a few years later. In addition to watching people burn to death quite regularly, I also have to deal with the constant gaslighting and reheated rhetoric from the people doing it ('Israel', America, same White Empire). Under the rule-based-order of these mendacious morons, the people opposing terror are terrorists, the people condemning racism are racists, and the people opposing war crimes are criminals. These killers don't just take life, they try to take death from you also. They don't just take your last breath, they want the last word on top of it. Then they'll throw flowers on your grave generations later, as a land acknowledgment. Hell is truly empty and all the devils are here, in high places.

I know the Buddha said this world is suffering, I've heard Allah say, "the most excellent abode is with God," I believe Jesus when he said store up your treasure in heaven. God knows They've told us enough, but it still hurts to realize it for yourself. I had been coming to a theoretical understanding that America was the Great Satan years ago, COVID made it clear that they were at least passively anti-human, and the Genocide of Gaza has shown how actively evil they are. But, I must admit, I was happy when this was an academic exercise. As much as I knew this great evil was real, I didn't really want to know. The Buddha said this life was illusion but I always liked the illusion. But now all illusions are falling apart and I'm left with Siddhartha's dilemma, at least 100 lives too early. I just have to suffer through this one.

The illusions turned obvious delusions are the press, free speech, elections, international institutions; all the things that were supposed to protect us turn out to just empty slogans painted on our prison walls. The decent journalists I knew were relegated to obscure corners of the Internet, and now they're being arrested or harassed in their homes. The platforms that I read them on are censored or prosecuted. Even a lowly blogger like me has a file with Whitey Bulger's real crew and can't travel reliably anymore. In the long run (where I work), I know that the Empire will fall, but in the short term (where I live) it feels like they're striking back just fine. As Gramsci sorta said, the old world is dying and the new one is struggling to be born. Now is the time of monsters.

We are, too many of us, trapped inside a White Empire that will only crush more and more of us as it falls, including most of God's creation (the animals). They both paved paradise and want to bomb it to rubble on the way out. They'd rather make money on complete destruction than admit they've gone wrong. They'd rather crash the whole ecosystem than see their precious economy be uncomfortable for even a quarter. And they'd rather kill children every day for years than admit even one colony is wrong. 'Israel' is, as I've said, just the collapse within collapse within collapse (Collapse³) and all the illusions in the world can't keep reality out much longer. People have been calling it for centuries (millennia, really) but now the apocalypse has shown up with all of its horsepower. As William Gibson said, the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed. We are all Palestinian in the long run.

For years I've been able to write about the end of the world (as we know it) and still feel fine. As if I'll be able to eat 'I told you so,' I don't know what I've been thinking, I honestly turn that part of my brain off when I close my laptop. My job has been analyzing the perilous state of the world, but I haven't had to struggle to survive. It was really an academic exercise. But now my subjective perspective is bleeding into my objective reality and everywhere I look, I see blood out of the corner of my eye. One cannot gaze so long into the abyss without the abyss gazing back, and it's dark inside. I'm empathetically exhausted. I'm compassionately cratered. And I'm doing the least. I think about the people directly living through this, directly losing through this, and I feel even worse.

As Karim Wafa-Al Hussaini said, "I'm tired of seeing my people slowly fade away every single day. I'm exhausted. The world doesn't care. It's been almost a year and nothing has changed. Look at this tiny angel with his birds. Imagine the thousands of other kids who died as well. They all had hopes and dreams." Or as Refaat Al-Areer said before he was martyred, "As a parent, I feel desperate and helpless. I can't provide the love and protection I am supposed to give my kids. Instead of often telling my kids "I love you," I have been repeating for the past two weeks: "Kids, eat less. Kids, drink less." And I imagine this being my last thing I say to them and it is devastating."

I feel what they're saying empathetically, and I've read such things before, but it's every day now, and I know I'm just scratching the surface. A million voices cry out in hunger and hundreds are silenced forever, every night. The doses keep adding up and it's well past a humanly tolerable level. Empathy is no longer something I feel for other people, it feels for me, and it feels like I'm losing my mind. Every single day, some new atrocity is discovered, some old abomination is repeated, and then they do it again tomorrow, after lying and arresting the messengers for trying. The little doses of distant pain add up, till it all hits way too close to home. Till it actually hurts, inside.

A lot of people I know have turned away. I don't begrudge them this, I do it myself all the time. But if I just look out a window, or see undisassembled concrete, or drink water, it all comes back to me, like a bat out of hell. Perhaps we're all like this, mourners at a wedding, pretending that the bride hasn't died. Perhaps we're all falling apart inside and only pretending on the outside. Like Poe's Masque of the Red Death, where everyone pretends until they all drop dead. I feel like everyone has been stacking trauma since COVID-19 and just pretending to go back to a 'normal' that doesn't exist. We keep expecting something from a culture that has long since become unacceptable. Younger generations won't be burdened with such delusions of grandeur. Olds like me have known the peak of a wave that was supposed to raise all boats, but they'll only know decline and rising sea levels. They'll expect the worst, and they won't be disappointed.

As I writer, I must admit that I always wanted to live through history, but hoo-boy does it suck in real-time. I grew up in the 90s, which I thought was mind-numbingly boring, but those were the good drugs, in hindsight. Now I'm on the cusp of history and I just feel like throwing up and/or crying all the time. The more I learn, the less I want to know, the more I dig, the deeper it gets, the more I understand, the more it's beyond understanding. How do you analyze when you're emotionally paralyzed? How do you write such wrong? How are we expected to live, through so much dying?

10. White Empire Is Arresting My Homies

In the past few weeks, the White Empire has raided Scott Ritter in America, arrested Richard Medhurst in the UK, and arrested Telegram founder Pavel Durov in France. These are my intellectual homies, and the censorship is coming close to home. The Feds are even fishing for haal masso like me in Sri Lanka.

The Empire is doing so much censorship that they reveal themselves in all the clumsy white-out. When they kidnapped Julian Assange for 14 years, they revealed the actual borders of Empire, arresting an Australian citizen in the UK because Australia and the UK are not real countries. Assange showed them slaughtering brown journalists and America said, "so what? now watch us kidnap white ones." Like so many arrogant criminals, they revealed themselves in the cover-up.

In the same way, the kidnapping of Pavel Durov exposes France as another palace eunuch. France gave an honorary citizenship to Pavel Durov for his work on free speech, and then arrested him for it, because America said so. This all exposes European countries as occupied territory and White Empire as a problem for imperial citizens also. As Aimé Césaire said, "no one colonizes innocently, that no one colonizes with impunity either." Or as Malcolm X said, chickens come home to roost.

For 10 months, we've seen chickenhawks slaughter hundreds of journalists in Gaza, targeting people like Refaat Al-Areer with guided missiles through his apartment window, killing him and his little nieces. Of course the censorship is coming home, America and 'Israel' are one regime. 'Israel' does precisely what America arms it to do, it is just a conscript colony in a larger colonial empire. As Césaire continued, "a nation which colonizes, that a civilization which justifies colonization—and therefore force—is already a sick civilization, a civilization which is morally diseased, which irresistibly, progressing from one consequence to another, one denial to another, calls for its Hitler, I mean its punishment."

So late American Empire proceeds from one consequence to another, one denial to another, finding its zombie Hitler in braindead Democrats. The Democrat tagline for their unelected candidate is "if we don't commit genocide, someone else will." They can't bother to do better propaganda, so they're trying to cover it up with censorship. It's all too ugly and obvious and they've lost all soft power. Today the western media is exposed as vile propagandists and people can see that they're being lied to. By attacking the fringes, Empire just makes its censorship more obvious, which is a big problem for an invisible empire. Shooting and arresting the messengers just draws a big white line around their war crimes, it—in fact—highlights them. As the most cowardly Palestinian, DJ Khaled said, "you played yourself." The White Empire thinks it's caught my homies, but they have, in fact, been caught red-handed.

Free Speech®

What is American censorship? They cunningly privatized it and branded it Free Speech®️. As the old joke goes, an American asked a Soviet Professor "what are you doing in the United States?" The professor said, "I am here to study American Propaganda." The American said, "What propaganda?" The Soviet said "Exactly!"

America's post-war propaganda game was immaculate and invisible. They made a million movies taking credit for the Red Army's victory, assimilated the Nazis (into NATO and NASA) and deported the Jews out of Europe. And then marketed themselves as the 'good guys' for decades. And people believed them, it was excellent marketing. The Holocaust became the only bad thing that ever happened (though, as Césaire said, it was just colonialism applied to Europe) and Americans became the aw shucks good guys policing the world. America's big USP was Freedom Of Speech®️, which they could deliver within 24-hours if necessary, via bombs. This was all marketed as a good thing—via Hollywood and 'international' news agencies—but now the propaganda is visible. After 10 months of seeing the insides of children's skulls, it all rings hollow.

America's post-war censorship regime was also ingenious. Rather than reducing information, America massively increased it, flooding the zone with shit. Rather than shutting up critics, they just made them very quiet, and made corrupt journalists very loud. Noam Chomsky described the American method best, saying, "The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."

America strictly limited speech of communists/socialists at home, with blacklists and outright assassination of black leaders. America then indirectly limited speech using drugs and drug laws. As Richard Nixon's domestic policy chief John Erlichman said, "We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities." Now America has the largest caged population in the world, people who literally have to pay extortionate fees to private companies to talk to their families. And they call this the land of the Free Speech®️. Incredibly branding, on the backs of slaves.

The oppression was much worse in the provinces of White Empire, and the places they tried to control like Korea, Vietnam, and Indonesia. America helped slaughter millions of young communists, distant people that were killed for their ideas. They killed them along with whole communities, using biological weapons, torture, and rank brutality. At the same time, America demanded drugs from of the rest of the world, and supplied endless 'drug wars,' violently disrupting entire continents. Then, after the Cold War 'ended', they killed nearly 5 million Muslims, a genocide merely reaching its crescendo in Gaza. As if communism and 'Islamism' are not ideas that people are free to have, without being murdered and tortured for generations. What America marketed as Free Speech®️ was, in fact, very violent oppression.

American media is really like the Roman Colosseum, a controlled space where idiot citizens can give a thumbs up or down on human life, and think they're emperors for a day. Americans really believe they're philosopher kings, when in fact they're just bloody minded children, holding a toy steering wheel in the back seat. As Chomsky said, "the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate." America has rich debates about which country to bomb, but never about not bombing.

Communists have been trotted out for slaughter for decades, then Arabs, with scary drug dealers as a constant sideshow. Opposition to this is also performed in the Cable-TV Colosseum, though always too little too late. As the saying goes, a liberal is someone who opposes every war except the current one, and supports every civil rights movement except the one happening right now. These are the people twiddling their thumbs in the Colosseum, ignoring the structural violence all around them.

Frank Zappa

Now, however, the illusion that American are or ever were the good guys is falling apart. People have been watching a live-streamed genocide for 10 months now, and all the white-out in the world can't cover up the blood. As Lady Macbeth said, "Here's the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. Oh, oh, oh!" White Empire has finally played its hand in Palestine and the illusion is falling apart. As Frank Zappa said (in 1977),

I would say the illusion will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move all the tables and chairs out of the way, and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theatre.

And here we are today, with the Empire simply disappearing journalists and entire networks, exposing the brick wall of censoriousness surrounding Palestine, and thus exposing the global censorship regime behind the curtains. Zappa was referring the CIA pushing LSD—something I thought crazy but true, just ask NPR. Zappa's insight applies equally to other hallucinations, like the American idea of Free Speech®. For a long time, the people I mentioned at the start of this article were being 'censored' the traditional way, via obscurity. But now Empire has exposed the Overton Window by defenestrating them. To quote myself quoting other people:

As Noam Chomsky said to a newsman once, "I'm sure you believe everything you're saying. But what I'm saying is that if you believe something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting." Or as Upton Sinclair said, it's very difficult to get a man to understand something if his salary depends on him not understanding it.

For decades, America didn't have to demote critical journalists, they just promoted corrupt ones. The best way to censor a journalist is to not hire them in the first place, and let them wander the wilderness doing podcasts. Scott Ritter and Richard Medhurst are big to me, but they're rarely (if ever) invited on TV and are algorithmed down everywhere. Telegram, also, is a big social network, but not for people Empire traditionally cares about, who have already been herded into tame platforms like WhatsApp or Facebook. These people should not be a problem for the great White Empire, but the fact that they are are a problem proves one thing. Empire has a big problem. Openly arresting and persecuting these people is not a sign of strength. It is in fact desperation.

Remember that the whole packaging of Free Speech® is that you can complain about the Empire. This is their USP. Now they're arresting people at the airport and ruining their own marketing. I personally know a professor that got fired (shout out NLM), radio hosts that got cut, TV hosts that disappeared, and I have seen many Palestinians killed in front of me, usually with their children. The murder is visible and the censorship is no longer invisible, which is a huge problem for an empire that used to manufacture consent quite cheaply. Empire is a business above all, and nobody is buying this shit anymore. They can arrest all the podcasters they want, but this just makes it worse.

Zappa predicted why the illusion would collapse in 1977. Not because it was evil (it was always evil) but because it would cease being profitable. Right now, there's a choice between the marketing department and the murdering department and Empire is choosing murdering, cause the whole thing is built on blood money. Empire simply cannot sustain the illusion of decency against the massacre of Palestine, so they've just given up. They're going out like Scarface, guns blazing and coked out of their skulls. As Al Pacino's Scarface said,

Me, I always tell the truth. Even when I lie. So say good night to the bad guy! Come on. The last time you gonna see a bad guy like this again, let me tell you. Come on. Make way for the bad guy. There's a bad guy comin' through! Better get outta his way!

America is, geopolitically, trying to punch China at one end of the bar, and getting punched 30 times before it can get there. Their military is too weak to take the field in Russia, their Navy is too weak to beat Yemen, and their Air Force can only bomb innocents and misses the heros of Hamas entirely. America is an old drunk brawler, covered in blood and piss and just embarrassing themselves. America's current military strategy makes as much sense as Scarface's home security. Scarface died so coked up that his body kept firing. That's America right now, braindead and bombing out of pure muscle memory.

America cannot sustain the illusion because it doesn't have the energy to sustain the illusion, it's too busy collapsing. So the marketing collapses, the interest payments skyrocket, and the 'full faith and credit' of the United States is increasingly null and void. The planetary Ponzi scheme called colonialism—passed like hot potato from Europe to the UK to the USA—is finally collapsing but, as you know, there's no reverse Ponzi. You just have to keep hustling until your heart explodes a la Scarface.

America, unfortunately, cannot peacefully collapse like the USSR, capitalism has to get rich or die trying. So they're going hard, committing genocide abroad and trying to censor it at home. But these are both losing propositions. Martyrs fight harder in death and messengers speak louder when silenced. The White Empire's true superpower was invisibility, and now they're losing superpower status in front of the world. The White Empire can arrest my homies, but it cannot, mashallah, arrest its own fall.