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Showing posts with label US Imperialism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label US Imperialism. Show all posts
Pádraig Drummond  ✊There’s a stink coming off the American empire, the kind you’d recognise from a damp bedsit after a long weekend of bad decisions and cheap whiskey. 

Only this isn’t a hangover, it’s policy. The Trump administration, under the twitchy command of The Faux-Führer, has turned the machinery of the state into a roaming protection racket, and ICE are the lads sent out to collect.

What’s happening in Minnesota isn’t some administrative hiccup or “border enforcement gone wrong.” It’s occupation. Plain and simple. Masked men lifting people off the streets, battering workers at their jobs, dumping human beings like rubbish bags miles from home. That’s not law enforcement, that’s counter-insurgency, the same dirty playbook the Yanks perfected from Da Nang to Baghdad and now feel bold enough to run at home.

They murdered Renee Nicole Good and then did what empires always do: they shot her twice, once with bullets and again with lies. Before her body was cold, the Faux-Führer and his mouthpieces were already smearing her as a threat, because empire cannot admit innocence among the dead. If the state kills you, you must be guilty. That’s the rule. Truth gets bundled into the van with the victim.

ICE, bloated with cash and staffed up like a pub brawl with a federal budget, has been reshaped into a loyalist militia, faces covered, badges hidden, fists swinging. Anyone from a Republican estate in the occupied six counties knows this look. We’ve seen it before: uniforms without accountability, authority without consent, violence without consequence. Call it homeland security if it helps you sleep. We call it what it is, state terror.

And still, the most dangerous thing facing them isn’t a brick or a slogan, it’s refusal. That’s why the call for a general strike in Minnesota matters. When workers stay home, when buses don’t run, and tills don’t ring, the empire starts to sweat. Labour withheld is the one weapon they can’t drone-strike or spin away. Profits dry up, and suddenly the men in suits start talking about “stability” and “dialogue.” Funny how that works.

But make no mistake, this brutality on America's home soil is stitched directly to slaughter abroad. The same hands funding raids in Minnesota are signing cheques for mass graves in Gaza. Just days ago, the Faux-Führer quietly pushed through another multi-billion-dollar weapons package for Bibi the Butcher, ensuring that Israeli jets, bombs, and missiles keep raining down on a trapped population already starved, bombed, and displaced beyond recognition.

This isn’t aid, it’s a supply line to genocide. Billions funnelled through “foreign military financing,” delivered at speed, no questions asked, while Palestinians are punished for daring to exist politically. Assistance to Palestinian communities is choked off unless they meet impossible loyalty tests, keep quiet about torture, and promise never to seek justice at international courts. Even the act of asking the world to recognise Palestine as a state is treated as a crime worthy of collective punishment.

The hypocrisy would be funny if it weren’t soaked in blood. Israel receives guaranteed military grants year after year, locked into long-term deals that stretch decades into the future, while Gaza is flattened and the West Bank is strangled inch by inch. Tens of billions have already been spent arming Israel since October 2023 alone, missile systems, ammunition, replacement stockpiles, expanded arms production, enough firepower to erase a people several times over. And more deals are queued up behind it, like orders at a weapons drive-through.

This is how empire works. The colonised are placed under a microscope, demanded to prove their humanity, while the occupying power is handed bombs and legal cover. Resistance is labelled terrorism. Survival is labelled extremism. And any attempt to seek justice outside Washington’s approval is crushed with financial blackmail.

Irish people should recognise this script instantly. Criminalise resistance. Starve the population. Arm the occupier. Call it peace. We lived it, and Palestine is living it now.

The same empire that bankrolls genocide in Gaza and bombs Venezuela for its oil is the one kidnapping workers in Minnesota. There is no contradiction here, only consistency. Imperial violence abroad always comes home eventually. You can’t normalise mass killing overseas and expect civil liberties to survive in your own streets.

So when workers strike in Minnesota, when students walk out, when communities refuse to cooperate with ICE, they’re not just fighting for migrants or civil rights; they’re striking a blow against the entire imperial system. The same system that funds apartheid, sanctions starving nations, and treats the world like a balance sheet soaked in blood.

The question isn’t whether a new world is coming. It is. The only question is who builds it. The Faux-Führer and his butchered alliances want a world ruled by force, fear, and permanent war. We want one built by solidarity, refusal, and memory.

Empires look eternal right up until the moment they crack. And history has shown, time and again, that organised working people can bring even the biggest, loudest, most violent machines to a halt.

They’re terrified of that. They should be.

⏩Pádraig Drummond is an anti-racism activist.

January 23 🪶 Day of Truth and Freedom

Tommy McKearney ☭ The US Empire is in the throes of a cycle leading to its terminal decline.

4-July-2024

 It is not possible to predict how long this phase will last but there is ample evidence that this process is underway. History teaches us, too, that while imperialism is a affliction on humanity in all its phases, that an empire in decline is at its most dangerous as it strives to cling on to its fading power and influence.


It is unlikely that the United States will behave differently, and it appears that the world is edging ever closer to a major conflict. The question for us in Ireland is how we should or indeed can respond to the likelihood of this potentially catastrophic conflict.

Undoubtedly the USA remains the most powerful military entity in the world. It was estimated, for example, that in 2022 over half of the entire global military spend could be attributed to the Pentagon. Much of that budget went to pay for the upkeep of Washington’s more than 900 military outposts across the globe. To put this figure into context, the US spent $1.537 trillion on its military but only $252 billion, i.e. one- sixth of that amount, on education.

With such a disparity between investment in social infrastructure, often called “human capital” by free-market economists, and building the machinery of global domination, it is no surprise that the American economy is losing ground in comparison with China.

Thanks to its commitment to promoting learning among its citizens rather that the purchase of weapons, the People’s Republic has taken a clear lead in several key modern technologies. At a time when climate change is threatening the future of humanity, Chinese engineering is providing a practical and viable answer to the crisis. For example, in terms of solar energy panels, factories in the PRC are producing more such components than anywhere else in the world, and at more competitive prices.

Then there is the electric vehicle industry which is now led by Chinese car manufacturers. So successful has been their entry into this industry that they have overwhelmed their western competitors. Look for a moment at developments in the business managed by Elon Musk. A short few years back his Tesla EV practically dominated the field. Now, however, he has been forced to reduce his prices significantly and yet is unable to retain Tesla’s former market share; now, his focus is on X/Twitter and artificial intelligence.

And the overall response from Washington? It is not to improve the national training programme but instead to enact legislation banning imports of solar panels and electric vehicles from China. Supplementing this crude use of protectionism, elsewhere the US imposes a regime of economic sanction and blockade.

All of which is the rationale underpinning the White House’s attempt to protect a faltering, indeed atrophying, American economy. Here a difficult situation is compounded by deindustrialisation, a consequence of strict adherence to the diktats of free-market economic policy resulting in the outsourcing of production overseas.

A final challenge to US hegemony is now emerging in rising doubts about the long-term prospects for the dollar remaining as the global reserve currency. The loss of such a position is a clear indication of empire’s declining power. Sterling was the world reserve currency throughout the 19th century, holding that position until the late 1920s when it was replaced by the dollar. A time roughly coinciding with the displacement of the British Empire and the rise of what became known as “the American century”.
In order to stem the loss of its power, and with it the wealth and privilege enjoyed by its dominant class, the US administration is becoming ever more aggressive in asserting its position. Having long promoted and practiced bloody war in the Third World, Washington is now escalating conflict against dangerously powerful states.

Arming and giving unconditional backing to Israel’s genocidal onslaught on Palestinians risks engulfing the entire region, including Iran, in hostilities without limit. Prosecuting a proxy war with nuclear-armed Russia while striving to prevent peace talks with Ukraine is, by any calculation, dangerous in the extreme. More alarming still is the provocative coat-trailing in the South China Sea coupled with a confrontational stance vis-a-vis Taiwan, a dispute which if not resolved can only lead to a global scale conflict.

Ominously, this alarming assessment may well be shared by Washington’s principal acolyte, the UK. Within the past year, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has advised British households to stock up with several days of emergency rations and more recently advocated reintroducing national service. It would be easy to dismiss these suggestions as the egregious ramblings of a gaffe-prone Tory PM. And still, what if they are based on something more concrete?

So how should we in Ireland respond? Let’s be clear that none of the great powers will seek our advice or consider our opinion. Nevertheless, the neo-Redmondites in Dublin and their counterparts in Stormont will attempt to follow the lead of US-led imperialism whether in its British or EU manifestation.

A suggestion: it would be a good start if the Irish anti-war movement were to initiate a drive to pressurise the country’s largest all-Ireland political party into committing itself to publicly campaign for the closure of Shannon and Aldergrove to the US military.

Tommy McKearney is a left wing and trade union activist. 
Follow on Twitter @Tommymckearney

On The Terminal Decline Of Empire

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