Every lie is stamped with the negative imprint of the truth it conceals. The age-old lie that certain societies are too barbaric to be allowed to exist is only a lie because of who it has historically been directed against, and by whom. At the dawn of what is now called capitalism, the cultural and spiritual attorneys of Europe put the vast majority of the planet’s population on trial for the crime of being “uncivilized,” defending their mass enslavement, murder, rape, and torture at white hands as a punishment both just and, conveniently, already underway.

The jury, composed of slave-traders, speculators, aristocrats, settlers, clergy, and “philosophers,” found itself in eager agreement, setting a precedent that the West has cited repeatedly in defense of its “police actions” from Korea to Libya, its “development policy” in sub-Saharan Africa, its “nation-building” in Iraq and Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

With any luck, the next time the court convenes, the accused will have become both accuser and executioner, for there are, indeed, societies too barbaric to be allowed to exist: the United States, Europe, and the various settler-colonies and modern-day slave-states that make up the rest of their international cartel.

This past Sunday, Israel began bombing Rafah, a city in the south of the Gaza Strip, where well over a million Palestinians whose homes have been reduced to craters stand by for oblivion, with nowhere left to run and nothing left to do but to pray that fate will favor the underdog in the race between ceasefire and death. Roughly one hundred refugees were killed on the night of February 12th in what we now know was the first stage of an Israeli plan to drive the desperate souls of Rafah into the desert of the Sinai. The world looked on in horror.

…Except the United States, where just under two-thirds of the country was instead transfixed by the Super Bowl, the annual billion-dollar celebration of the triumphs of American capitalism in the consumer age. Sixty thousand of the wealthiest spectators piled into a stadium that cost two billion dollars to build, in a country where some fifty thousand people die annually for lack of healthcare, in a world where eight hundred million people are starving, to watch two multibillion-dollar corporations bludgeon their best and brightest gladiators against each other for an average ticket price of about nine thousand dollars, roughly equal to the average annual income in Palestine prior to October 7th. 

Footage of the smoldering cash pit was punctuated by advertisements for paragons of Western virtue: manufacturers who once made war materiel for the Third Reich and never saw justice for it; the Fourth Reich itself in Tel Aviv, which sold some two hundred million viewers a story about fighting to rescue its prisoners of war while at the very same instant setting in motion the liquidation of the modern-day Auschwitz seven thousand miles away; and the US military, which has made clear by bombing Yemen, Iraq, and Syria that it will tolerate no resistance to its greatest ally. 

When the corporation named after the people massacred to near-extinction to make way for American civilization at last defeated the corporation named after the people who did a large share of the massacring (ironic—a pantomime of what should have happened when it was still possible), several hundred private jets scattered from Las Vegas, emitting literal tons of carbon into the atmosphere to ferry passengers drunk on booze and spectacle back to their penthouses, gated communities, and mansions. A few hours later, many of these people were no doubt starting their workweeks as “consultants,” “innovators,” “investors,” “lobbyists,” and other job titles as fit for members of the jury box in the courtroom of history as the slave-traders of yesteryear.

But of the two hundred million spectators that night, the one hundred most reprehensible among them had no need to take a jet back to their jobs the next day. The US Senate, which was in session over the Super Bowl weekend, watched the “big game” and even had pizza delivered while it worked tirelessly to pass a bill to spend nearly one hundred billion dollars fueling the proxy war in Ukraine, promoting nuclear brinkmanship against China, and, naturally, subsidizing the genocide of the Palestinian people.

The bill would have been slightly larger, but the two factions of our ruling class were unable to agree on exactly what level of cruelty is appropriate for the border regime that helps impoverish the third world and maintains an underclass of non-citizen laborers within the US. (To be clear, the features that achieved unanimity include a border wall, concentration camps, and mass deportations.) 

As Eugene Debs once remarked on a similar subject, “This is some of the ‘civilization’ socialism is to wreck.”

The world-historic crisis unfolding out of Gaza has rendered the ordinary barbarity of the imperialist super-profits that hold up our Super Bowls momentarily extraordinary. It will not be the last time. If the world is insufficiently transformed in our lifetime, the horrors we are about to witness in Rafah will appear many times over again, afflicting hundreds of times as many people the world over, perhaps thousands of times as many.

As the ecological holocaust we have wrought brings its full weight to bear, economic devastation, famine, mass displacement, war, and ethnic cleansing will be unleashed on larger and larger swathes of the global population, starting with the poorest before gradually working their way up to the air-conditioned ivory towers as the imperialist world-system does what it does best, redistributing misery away from the core to those areas of the world already burdened with the most of it.

The one saving grace of this global order is that it is structurally incapable of saving itself. The billions whose slavery and misery are the mirror images of our mirages of freedom and joy are also the living engine of the entire system. They will not tolerate this state of affairs forever, and they will not restrict themselves to passive objection as the mounting stresses on this machine fall with ever more weight on their shoulders. They will revolt, as they have done in the past and are doing in many places today, and as Israel has learned, no form of retaliation will permanently subdue them short of total extermination—a solution that the rest of the first world can hardly hope to scale up for its own ends, for who would be left to grow the ninety-nine cent bananas? 

Given the stakes, the degree to which the barbarians of the white world live in fear of what their seven billion hostages are capable of seems positively tame. Even the most fanatically racist paranoiac raving about Chinese fentanyl being smuggled across the Mexican border is unprepared to grasp the mortal disruption to his lifestyle that would be caused if the teat of oil, lithium, rubber, textiles, or any other such commodity were to dry up, let alone if the global working class were to take up armed struggle on a common program of righting the five centuries of wrongs that built the ultra-wide screen television which delivers his nightly lynch-mob conditioning.

Perhaps many Americans, too stupefied by our media to have internalized the lesson three thousand of us learned too late on September 11th, 2001, feel safe from the consequences of the birth and torturous rebirth of the world we live in because the United States is the most powerful state that has ever existed. It is inconceivable to us that any other power could ever pose an existential challenge to us from without.

Even those who wince at what we have done to the rest of the human race rest easy at night knowing that, if nothing else, our superpower status surely affords us the time and space to make things right on our own terms. But when we consider the immense debt that we and our littermates in the first-world pigsty owe to the world’s oppressed majority, it is terror, not guilt, we should feel—one way or another, the debt will come due.

As it is, there is a strong positive incentive for those of us in the belly of the beast to organize for the overthrow of American capitalism and the oppressive regime that maintains it. Most of us, though we may be quite wealthy by global standards, are impoverished by it in various ways, and all of us are denied control over our collective lives by the antidemocratic structures that the ruling class uses to dominate us in the political and economic realms. That is to say, we stand to gain real freedom, real joy, real human fulfillment by struggling against the system that affords us false versions of those things. But there is a further, negative incentive: if we don’t do it, the tortured billions will do it for us. 

If we refuse to participate in the liberation of the world, the rest of it will liberate itself and then come knocking to liberate us, whether we want it or not. It has happened before—it took a Dutch invasion to drag England out of feudal absolutism, and it took the Red Army to shock half of Europe out of fascism. And even this is a relatively optimistic vision. It makes no difference whether we are motivated by conscious white supremacism, fear of losing our seigneurial right to unlimited consumption, or simple indolence, the longer we delay the liberation of the world by protecting our right to ravage it, the harder it will be to convince the Red Army of the third world that we are fellow victims of this system and not its willing collaborators.

The American condition is this: We are having an orgy in a bloodbath. We had better come to our senses and climb out of it before the civilized world drowns us in it.