Empire has always used death to make profit, to get rich and build its power. It uses up resources which is death of the resources and death of the ecosystems and life that stand in the way of the resources. Sometimes resources themselves are life that must die to bring profit. There is a difference between sustenance and profit. A red actor kills when it is hungry. Native Americans killed to survive and respected the life they took so that they might continue to live.
With COVID-19, empire used death in a new way to enrich itself and increase its power, domination, control. By raising the specter of death, by instilling/teaching/ingraining fear of death from a virus into the population, who otherwise did not equate the virus with mass death, empire used fear of death to amass enormous profit and power. Empire used COVID-19 as a weapon, more psychological than physical, to subjugate, dominate the population and steal their resources and autonomy. Empire weaponized a virus to use against its own people. It unleashed fear of death on the people and then promised them protection for a price- riches (numbers on a financial ledger) and their freedom.
Empire poisoned the population and then sold them the only cure at a very high price. It did not offer multiple options as cure, as treatment, nor did it explain the risks and benefits of various options. It did not offer to spend 100 billion dollars on improving conditions that would strengthen the people’s health and resistance to illness. It only offered lockdown, masks, gloves, plexiglass, sanitizer, lab testing, surveillance, respirators and vaccines.
Empire did not even offer. It mandated, forced, compelled, bullied, threatened, intimidated, pressured the population to accept it’s treatment and to pay for it in billions of dollars. In the guise of benevolent, compassionate, munificent, altruistic, altruistic protector of the people, empire forced these measures and treatments upon the public, with punishment for those who resisted and marginalization and discrediting of those that publicly questioned.
Empire used carefully designed, premeditated, intentional psychological manipulation to brainwash, indoctrinate, swindle, fool the public into believing it was their savior. They created mass Stockholm Syndrome.
Stockholm Syndrome: From Dr. Frank Ochberg:
His criteria included the following: "First people would experience something terrifying that just comes at them out of the blue. They are certain they are going to die." Then they experience a type of infantilization - where, like a child, they are unable to eat, speak or go to the toilet without permission." Small acts of kindness - such as being given food - prompts a "primitive gratitude for the gift of life," he explains. "The hostages experience a powerful, primitive positive feeling towards their captor. They are in denial that this is the person who put them in that situation. In their mind, they think this is the person who is going to let them live."
During the pandemic measures, empire continued to build its military, to bomb and kill and exploit, pillage and plunder foreign lands. To build more advanced weapons to dominate and kill more efficiently. Two years, as the COVID-19 strategy begins to lose potency as a means to achieve profit and control, they refocus the public back to war with Russia in the Ukraine and introduce China’s threat to security. This comes as empire exits Afghanistan leaving poverty, suffering, misery, starvation, violence and death in its wake.
COVID-19 was a colossal success. Now empire has acquired another tool by which to make profit and increase power. Now they have all four horsemen of the apocalypse- pestilence and plague; war; famine and death. Each is a useful tool for wealth and power. Plague worked perfectly. Now empire can add it to the arsenal and cart it out in periodic cycles as they do with war. Plague/pandemic can also be used as a chronic tool that never goes away. Every annual cold and flu can now be weaponized with mandates and vaccines. Every election cycle can be disrupted with outcome influenced and controlled. by pandemic measures. Every public display of mass protest, resistance can be quelled by pandemic measures. Every public institution can be reduced by fear of contagion and death. Art and spirituality, the voices of ant-empire dissent, can be suppressed by the specter of contagion.
Empire is the European monarchy that sent mercenaries across the Atlantic Ocean in search of more profit, whether from a faster trade route or from discovery of new natural resources to exploit.
Empire is the slavery industry that captured and transported More than 12.5 million African people across the ocean to the Americas. It is the wealthy ship builders, the financiers, those engaged in shipping and selling sugar, molasses, rum, cotton and tobacco for what would be billions in profits in modern terms.
Empire is when Europe’s powers parceled the America’s into huge swaths of private property to be owned by select super-rich men. These “explorers” were not scientists but rather entrepreneurs, fortune-seekers, mercenaries contracted by their monarchies to seek riches.
Empire is the murder of native populations in order to steal their land and their livelihoods.
Empire is the wholesale destruction of thousands of square miles of ecosystem to sell for profit. Cutting virgin forests with trees towering into the sky to build ships that would carry slaves from Africa to America to cut more forests faster to build more ships to carry wood, furs, tobacco, sugar to Europe to enrich the very few.
Empire are the slave masters. Are the banks that finance slavery. It's the capitalist economic system that makes slavery extremely profitable.
We talk about the true cost of industry now, meaning the pollution that corporations re not held responsible for. The true cost of industry then was the monstrous cruelty of slavery plus the wholesale genocide of indigenous people and ecosystems.
Empire is the government, the structures of government that allow monstrous plunder and exploitation, that permits 1% of the population to become super-rich and to use their overwhelming wealth to control government, policy and law- to create laws to perpetuate their power infinitely and hold dominion over free workers and slaves.
Empire is the government that creates the Senate (House of Lords) whose members are appointed and renewed every 6 years vs the House of Representatives (of Commons) who are elected directly by land-owning white men every 2 years.
Empire is the government that counts slaves as people, albeit 3/5 of a person, for the purpose of representative power, but that gives them absolutely no rights or voice in making policy and law.
Empire is government that chooses war to expand its territory and economy; to expand its territories in order to claim private property rights over other people’s land so to exploit the natural resources and drain everything of value to make more money.
Empire wipes out 50 billion bison and cuts down almost practically all ancient forests between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mississippi River. Empire employs slaves and indentured Chinese slaves to build railroads across indigenous land in order to more efficiently drain those lands of its natural riches.
Empire engages in a civil war to settle disputes- a war that devastates the land, kills hundreds of thousands of people and spurs huge technological advancement in the efficiency of weapons at killing and destroying.
Empire is exploits to conquer foreign lands far from its shores, whereupon it kills or subjugates indigenous peoples to steal their resources. And claims it has the right to do so based on some doctrine it created for its profit.
Empire is the exploitation of its own people, workers in factories and farms, toiling in dangerous and cruel conditions for little pay while the ownership master class lives in unimaginable levels of opulence. Empire is the government that enforces private ownership and the rights of the super-rich masters over the rights and well-being of the workers, the majority. The government that allows and aids the super-rich and powerful to use violence, intimidation and murder to quell worker demonstrations for fairness and compassion.
Empire is the government that supports ongoing brutal suppression of the rights of portions of the population based on their race, gender, sexuality and country of origin. That denies women the same rights as men and allows the exploitation of children for profit.
Empire sends millions of weapons for murder and millions of workers, men to fight across the ocean in wars that will bring about the widespread destruction of ecosystems and murder and deaths of tens of millions of people. That will enjoy the billions in profits it makes from the manufacture and sale of these weapons.
Empire yearns to extract poisons from deep within the Earth to burn in order to increase manufacturing of weapons, ships, towers of capitalist industry that promotes and declares its hegemony and supremacy. Without care or thought for the harm to people and the land that extraction of poisons may bring about.
Empire is the evils of war. The guns, tanks, cannons, ships, mustard gas, chlorine gas, herbicides, pesticides, nerve gas, biological warfare. It is always seeking better, more efficient means to kill, whether directly or by destroying the land and life the identified enemy flies upon for sustenance. Empire doesn’t care that war results in misery, fear and suffering for millions of civilians- starvation, murder, rape, slavery. Doesn’t care about the thousands and millions of working class and poor young men who are killed, maimed, traumatized, ruined by war that mainly benefits the super-rich.
Empire is willing to devote enormous resources to discover an atomic bomb that can destroy and kill everything living within an incredible area of the planet. And then to deploy it twice on cities. And then to make it bigger and deploy it more than 2000 times around the globe to test its effectiveness and display its might at murder and destruction.
Empire assassinates whoever stands to block its aspirations for power and profit. It overturns governments chosen by the people in favor of governments that work to enrich the Empire. It doesn’t care about human rights abuses, either perpetrated by itself or others, as long as it increases profits.
Empire will lie, cheat, steal, slander, destroy, murder anything or anyone that may impede its insatiable quest for profit and power.
Empire will enslave and exploit its own people for profit. Empire will jail, beat, kill citizens, students that advocate for basic rights, fair treatment and peace. Empire will take away the right of its citizens to vote. It will pass new laws to criminalize use of certain substances in order to have reason to incarcerate its citizens.
Empire will change trade laws in order to increase its own profits and power/influence around the world, with disregard for the welfare of its own people, or any people/workers anywhere.
Empire will change the law, including election campaign laws, to consolidate its own power and disenfranchise the workers from having influence over policy and law.
Empire will use a national crisis, even one that is manufactured or exaggerated, to increase its power and profit, and tip the balance further away from the people/workers.
Empire: absolute control, central authority, plutocracy, kingdom, world power, dominating power, supremacy, dominion.
Emperor: ruler, sovereign, king, monarch, czar, kaiser
Plutocracy: government by the wealthy, an elite or ruling class of people whose power derives from their wealth; country or society governed by the wealthy.
Empire uses death, destruction, violence, intimidation, exploitation, fear, ignorance, mistrust, conflict to increase its wealth and power.
What force is in opposition to that? Creation, building, growing, healing, restoring, preserving, protecting, increasing knowledge, teaching, trust, love, compassion, honesty, altruism, family, friendship, community, caring, fairness, empathy, cooperation, tolerance, inclusion, spirituality, art, music, literature, beauty, wonder of nature, respect and play, laughter. Congregation, the commons.
These are the tools that can counter empire’s lust and greed, spread of death and fear and hate. These are grass roots tools, decentralized. To be effective, they require mass participation, unity, solidarity and cooperation of all the people. They need community and connection, social capital.
Empire reviles these traits and ever seeks to squash the people’s capacity to organize, unite. Their strategy is to divide and conquer. Keep the people split into multiple factions that mistrust, fear, hate each other. Create stories about rifts between peoples and repeat them endlessly until enough people believe these stories. Then the fear and hatred can be perpetuated.
Keep the people living in hardship, subsisting, struggling for basic life necessities so they are beaten down, disillusioned, dis-spirited, depressed, hopeless, irritable and angry. These are chains, the binds empire uses to enslave, subdue and control the population.
Focus the people’s anger and mistrust towards one another to distract them from the true oppressors, the men who profit from empire and death. Doublespeak about caring and make endless promises that will never be delivered. Confuse, distract, bewilder. Create chaos that screens the truth. Create indecipherable bureaucracy to entangle, ensnare, obfuscate, dis-empower, exclude, confuse and instill resignation, complacency, blind acceptance among the masses.
Use intimidation, bullying, force, violence and death to quell rebellion. Isolate and discredit, marginalize the dissenters, even assassinate them if necessary. Silence them however possible. Control means of communication, of disseminating information, the press, the internet, search engines so that information is carefully controlled to suppress dissenting views.
There is little profit in healing, health, wellness. Keeping people healthy involves healthy food, water, environment, infrastructure, schools, exercise, leisure, community and connection. Illness and disease is much more profitable - lots of tests, procedures, hardware, software, drugs, supplies.
In regards to Nature, death is immensely more profitable. A healthy forest gives very little profit until it is cut down for lumber, furs, soil to grow corn or land to mine for minerals and fossil fuels. Wilderness and wild animals give little profit. Dead animals make money. Hundreds of millions of pigs, cows, chickens, turkeys, sheep grown in crowded pens make billions in profit after they are killed; their bodies sliced apart while still warm and sold for meat to satisfy insatiable hunger that shrewd marketing created. Healthy and vibrant prairies have no value except to plow to grow corn to fatten meat animals.
Healthy ocean ecosystems have no profit but industrial fishing creates billions in profit.
