Day 21: Empire under COVID-19
Yasha Levine
[dropcap]I[/dropcap] started this newsletter to explore the history of how America weaponizes nationalism in the service of empire. And with COVID-19, both nationalism and empire are being deployed in a big way.
On the empire front: Using the chaos of the pandemic, we’ve been ramping up attacks on the usual list of official enemies — and Iran and Venezuela in particular. Trump’s bloodthirsty hairless walrus Mike Pompeo has been going around telling anyone who’ll listen that he and his people want to make sure COVID-19 kills as many people as possible over there. He wants to use the pandemic to finally push these countries over the edge — and so they’re squeezing them more than ever. On top of that, our military is bombing targets in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and continuing the war in Yemen — all in the midst of a pandemic.
None of this is very surprising. We’re a predatory empire and we act like it. The pandemic is simply an opportunity to inflict more damage.
All this stuff is hard to keep track of. Luckily, Abby Martin’s The Empire Fileshas a great 15-minute primer on what these assholes are up to all around the world. Check it out.
 |
Mike Pompeo
What’s funny is that a lot of people in DC thought that COVID-19 would lead to the collapse of China’s Communist Party. The idea as far as I can tell is that China’s authoritarian system is took weak, too fragile. It simply would not be able to handle this virus. The Chinese people would rise up and the Communist Party would have no choice but to come begging for an American humanitarian intervention. And in the days before COVID-19 fully hit here at home, even lefties and progressives on my Facebook feed started gloating about China getting hit by the virus so hard. To them it was proof that “authoritarian” societies are can’t deal with pandemics as effectively as “democracies.”
Well, turns out that America is the one that can’t handle the virus. China’s has coped with it much better than us. It’s even sending out aid all over the world — including ventilators and protective gear to New York. All that our feds can do is seize shipments of gear destined for other countries.
We’re a failed society ruled by a predatory elite. And we’re also a predatory empire. These things go together.
—Yasha Levine
Addendum
Sign up for Immigrants as a Weapon. You won’t regret it! And check out the archive.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
• remember: ALL CAPTIONS, IMAGES, PULL QUOTES AND ANNOTATIONS BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHOR—
[premium_newsticker id="211406"]
Read it in your language • Lealo en su idioma • Lisez-le dans votre langue • Lies es in Deiner Sprache • Прочитайте это на вашем языке • 用你的语言阅读
[google-translator]
OR you can simply scan our QR code—
THIS WORK IS LICENSED UNDER A Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
OF INTEREST TO OUR READERS
Acclaimed by critics, Ron Ridenour’s incisive history of the struggle between the US and Russia, extending from the Bolshevik revolution to our day, plus a wide-ranging and comprehensive analysis of many cultural America features which continue to bolster the US drive for world domination, is now available in print at a discount price. It’s 564 pages packed with information, many critical but practically unknown facts, and an uncompromising revolutionary perspective on the colossal challenges confronting this generation. (Click here or on the image below to order.)
 |
THE DEEP STATE IS CLOSING IN
|