The War on Whatever

The War on Whatever is not meant to be won.

It is meant to be continuous, which it is. Like the never-ending war in Orwell’s 1984, it is waged by the empire against its own subjects, but not only to keep the structure of society intact, also, in our case, to transform society into a neo-totalitarian global-capitalist dystopia.

Are you not familiar with the War on Whatever?

Well, OK, you remember the War on Terror.

You remember when “freedom and democracy” were attacked by “the terrorists,” and we had no choice but to set aside our democratic rights and principles, and declare a national “state of emergency,” and suspend people’s constitutional rights, and wage a war of aggression against a Middle East nation that posed no threat to us, and fill the streets, train stations, airports, and everywhere else full of heavily-armed soldiers, or otherwise “the terrorists would have won.” You remember when we built an offshore gulag to indefinitely imprison the suspected terrorists we had previously renditioned to CIA black sites where we tortured and humiliated them, right?

Of course you do. Who could forget that?

Remember when the National Security Agency had no choice but to set up a covert “Terrorist Surveillance Program” to spy on Americans, or else “the terrorists would have won”? Or how about the TSA’s “anti-terror” crotch searches, which are still in effect after over twenty years?

And what about the War on Populism? You might not remember that one so well.

I do, because I published two books about it. It was launched in the summer of 2016, when the empire realized that “far-right populists” were threatening “freedom and democracy” in Europe, and Trump was on the rise in the USA. So another “state of emergency” was declared, this time by the Intelligence Community, and the media, and Academia, and the Culture Industry. Yes, that’s right, it was time once again to set aside our democratic principles, censor “hate speech” on social media, bombard the masses with ridiculous official propaganda about “Russiagate,” “Hitlergate,” and so on, or otherwise “the far-right populists would have won.”

The War on Populism culminated with the roll-out of the New Normal Reich.

In the spring of 2020, the empire declared a global “state of health emergency” in response to a virus with a survival rate of roughly 99.8 percent. The empire had no choice but to order the lockdown of entire societies, force everyone to walk around wearing medical-looking masks in public, bombard the public with propaganda and lies, coerce people into submitting to a series of experimental mRNA “vaccinations,” outlaw protests against their decrees, and systematically censor and prosecute those who dared to challenge their made-up “facts” or criticize their totalitarian program.

The empire had no choice but to do this, because otherwise “the Covid-deniers, the anti-vaxxers, the conspiracy theorists, and all the other extremists would have won.”

I’m pretty sure you remember all that.

And now … well, here we are. Yes, you guessed it, it’s time to take another big shit on the US Constitution, and freedom of speech, and deport people to some Salvadoran hellhole we rented because some cop didn’t like the look of their tattoos, and arrest and rendition university students for organizing anti-Israel protests, and, of course, bombard the masses with lies and official propaganda, and so on, because … OK, all together now, “otherwise the anti-Semitic terrorists and Venezuelan gang members will win!”

Are you beginning to detect a pattern here? Yes? Welcome to the War on Whatever!

If you’re still not quite connecting the dots, all right, let me try to spell it out for you.

The global ideological system we all live under is going totalitarian. (That system is global capitalism, but call it what you want. I really don’t give a shit.) It is stripping away the simulation of democracy, which it does not need to maintain anymore. The Cold War is over. Communism is dead. Global capitalism has no external adversaries. So it doesn’t need to placate the masses with democratic rights and freedoms. So it is gradually stripping away those rights, and conditioning us to accept the loss of them.

It is doing this by staging a series of “emergencies,” each featuring a different “threat” to “democracy,” or to “freedom,” or “America,” or “the planet,” or whatever, each with its own particular “monsters,” who are such a threat to “freedom” or whatever that we need to surrender our constitutional rights, and make a mockery of democratic values, or “otherwise the monsters will win.”

It is doing this by switching the face it wears from “left” to “right,” then back to “left,” and then back to “right,” then “left,” and so on, because it needs our cooperation to do this. Not all of our cooperation at once. Just one cooperative demographic at a time.

It is succeeding at this—i.e., the system is—by instrumentalizing our fear and hatred. The system could not possibly care less whether we identify as “left” or “right,” but it needs us divided into “left” and “right” so that it can feed our fear and hatred of each other … one administration, one “emergency,” one “war” at a time.

There you go. That’s the War on Whatever. I cannot make it any simpler than that.

Oh, and, one last thing … if you are one of my former fans, like Rob, who are confused about my “insights,” or allegiances, or whatever … well, the piece you just read should clear that up for you. I’m not on a side. Any side. But I do have a few basic democratic principles. They do not change depending on what is popular at the moment or who’s occupying the White House.