Is Labor Day really about us and out work, our lives, the wars we fight?
From the beginning, I have described the War On Iran, with emphasis on the ON, not ‘with,’ not ‘in,’ but on. In and with are so neutral, they convey just some happening ‘over there.’ But it was an unprovoked intentional act of military agression, an act of war. The US and Israel attacked Iran, killing several top leaders and family members, and through sloppy use of AI for targeting, killed hundreds of children and adults at a girls’ school.
Nobody talks about how many Iranians have been killed in the heavy bombing; so far 18 American service personnel have died in this one to satisfy Hegseth’s and Trump’s thirst for violence and destruction—from a safe distance of course.
Bibi conned Donald, Pete begged to bomb, and off we were with no provocation and the nuclear agreement summarily trashed, merely because it was negotiated by the “Black President,” whose legitimacy ‘The Donald’ refused to accept, just as he denied the outcome of the election he had lost so clearly.
The extent of strategic planning was no more than fantasy that if we just use our “superior air power” to bomb them and kill the ‘head of the snake.’ Then the political hierarchy would simply crumble and the people would rise up and take control and, of course, do whatever Donald wanted.
The intelligence professionals recognized that the regime was actually a many-headed Hydra, a well-organized fanatical network, which had been planning its defense for decades, with a complex system of regional leadership and a systematic protocols for succession.
The huge obstacles to their imaginary overthrow of the Iranian regime were beyond their grasp. That is at least partly do to the fact that anyone with information that conflicted with the desires of “The Boss,” was to be banished from the inner circle, demoted, or fired. So much for intelligence.
Who Are We?
For any dictatorship, anyone not part of the inner circle is to be considered either a resource to be exploited then discarded like worn out dirty underwear, or the enemy to be eliminated. Well then, who are “we the people”? First, anyone who holds a civil service position in the government, sworn to uphold the Constitution, is to be eliminated due to her/his formal failure to put personal loyalty to The Man, above loyalty to the nation itself. Purges are not only emotional expressions of the power of the autocrat; they are strategic moves to dismantle the power of established institutions to manage the social or economic territory over which their authority was established by law. Remember, fascism thrives on chaos, which gives them wide open doors through which to drive their vehicles of absolute power over the people and the land. Remember too, when the Spanish conquistadors led by Columbus could not get the Taíno population of the island he named Hispaniola, to cooperate and submit to the Spanish as slaves, 80-90% of the Taínos were massacred (1493-1550).
Of course, the conquistadors were not the only empire builders to massacre the people indigenous to the territory they stole. We tend to forget that the “Winning of the West” that resulted in the formation of the United States of America, was a deliberate operation of displacement, routinely violated treaties, concentration in “reservations,” and outright massacres.
The structure of confiscation, abuse, violation, and mass murder is quite the same as we see in Putin’s war on Ukraine, and Netanyahu’s genocidal campaign to eliminate the Palestinian native populations in Gaza and the West Bank. Trump’s feeble attempt at conquering Iran is a failed case of emulating more serious and competent tyrants. Many other examples could be found throughout history.
So, who are we? Well, in the contemporary context, we are the indigenous people of North America. Yes, our ancestors and some current citizens were immigrants, and the earliest immigrants after the “first Americans” were colonial ‘settlers,’ who confiscated the lands of peoples who had much less advanced weapons to defend themselves.
We are the inheritors of stolen lands, yet, we are all indigenous now. But even now, most of the land has been stolen from us by large scale financial manipulation of the debt-based economy of the corporate state. Or, as George Carlin used to say, “They own you!”
The Techno-Fascist Alliance
Things are quite different now than they were during the ‘Age of Conquest’ or the subsequent ‘Age of Industrialization.’ The modern world is fully industrialized and the complex interconnected systems that the ‘Age of Modernity’ requires, have matured right past the limits of growth and viability. Only the techniques of brutality and plunder have changed.
The technical complexity of the new systems of control has passed the tipping point beyond which domination of Nature and Humanity are no longer viable in the context of life and limits of the Earth System that provided the elements of control: energy and materials. The “progress” of the industrial age turns out to be a great big predicament, a dilemma the resolution of which appears to fit the metaphor of being caught “between a rock and a hard place.”
The choices before us also appear to be not our choices at all, at least within the existing context of political economy and global power struggles. But that may not be entirely true.
If the society continues down the path of ‘business as usual,’ the ‘doomsayers’ will have been proven right when they asserted, “there is no hope.”
If societies take the much harder path of transforming themselves into ecological communities that Nature can sustain, then some hope for the ‘survival of the species’ can be realized, if only for much smaller remaining populations after catastrophic collapse of many systems upon which survival depends.
The War on Us
But the self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe will have none of that. The so-called leaders of corporate and governmental elites, sometimes mouth transformative platitudes about renewable energy, conservation, reducing pollution or population, and even enabling the economic independence of women and girls in developing nations. But the huge global transformations—which would require the loss of their monopoly power over economies—are just not present in their vocabularies.
For them, we are the enemies of their hegemony. The people of the world are inconveniences for the AI enhanced techno-fascism that they imagine as their utopia. Take note: most of the victims of the wars of choice and the endless wars, are civilians, mostly not from any elite. In the “singularity” of the techno-fascist utopia, there is little need for humans other than the techno-elites. We are expendable, and if we get in the way, such as demanding an ecological civilization to enable human survival, we are the enemy of techno-industrial progress. The biggest war of all is the war on us.
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 