World War III and Other Simulacra

And so the global-capitalist empire’s destabilization and restructuring of the Middle East continues.

Yes, I’m referring to Israel’s “preemptive attack” on the Islamic Republic of Iran, or “World War III,” or whatever the establishment media and social media influencers are trying to get you to call it at the moment.

You’ll forgive me if I don’t engage with either the official “Israel is defending itself from the nuclear weapon that Iran has been days away from developing for the last twenty-five years” narrative, or the unofficial “the evil Zionists who control the US government are trying to draw Trump into a war for Israel” narrative.

The global-capitalist empire, not “America” or “Israel,” has been destabilizing and restructuring the Greater Middle East since the end of the Cold War. It is going to continue to do that until every nation in the region is playing ball with the empire.

“America” is not the empire. “The Zionists” do not control the world. The USA and Israel are components of the global-capitalist empire. Israel is the empire’s Middle East HQ. The US military-industrial complex and its international partners are the empire’s muscle. The empire is conducting a global clear-and-hold op, neutralizing internal resistance, “restructuring” the territory it conquered and now occupies.

That is what is happening in the Middle East. In Gaza. In Iran. In Israel. Look at a map. Note which countries are playing ball with the global-capitalist empire. Note which ones are not playing ball. Note which ones have already been “restructured.”

Or don’t do that. Switch off your mind and consume whatever cartoonish narratives the corporate media and influencers are peddling to you. The evil Iranians and their nuclear weapons! The evil Zionists that control the world! Netanyahu duped Trump! Trump tricked MAGA! The Rothschilds! The Deep State! The Jewish Supremacists! The Return of the Neocons! World War III!

The global-capitalist empire would prefer that you do that. And it doesn’t matter to the empire which narrative you consume. The empire doesn’t care whether you’re a liberal or conservative. It could not possibly care less who you voted for. It does not care whether you’re a multi-gendered pronoun-using anti-Trump progressive or an Elon-loving MAGA conservative. It does not care whether you’re a Waymo-burning Mexican flag-flying illegal immigrant or a race-baiting crypto-fascist creep. It doesn’t care whether you’re a Zionist or an anti-Zionist. It does not give a shit what you think about vaccines.

Whoever you are, whatever “side” you are on, the empire has a readymade narrative for you. A narrative that has nothing to do with the global-capitalist empire and its global clear-and-hold op.

And that’s one big advantage the global-capitalist empire has over earlier totalitarian systems. Unlike the Communists and the National Socialists, global capitalism has no ideology, so it can morph into anything it needs to morph into, including any potential opposition to it.

Which is what it has been doing for the last few years, more or less since the end of the Covid era. Just as the Obama “Hope-and-Change” show captured and neutered the growing opposition to the War on Terror (i.e., the original version of the global-capitalist empire’s destabilization and restructuring of the Middle East), the “Make America Great Again” show (with assistance from the Musk Cult) has captured and neutralized the “populist” opposition to the New Normal Reich (i.e., the new global-capitalist form of totalitarianism that was rolled out during the “Covid pandemic”).

I explored this in the introductory essay of Fear and Loathing in the New Normal Reich, my latest book. Here’s an excerpt …

“This is also a key feature of the New Normal Reich, the capture, conditioning, and commodification of opposition forces that cannot be eliminated. (Remember, this is global-capitalist totalitarianism, not the ham-fisted 20th-Century version.) Any internal resistance to the empire that cannot be annihilated, or otherwise silenced, can be commodified, branded, and marketed back to its members as a simulacrum of itself. Ultimately, it can be instrumentalized, like ‘the Brotherhood’ in Orwell’s 1984. It can be molded into a ‘resistance movement,’ which simultaneously exists and does not exist, because it only exists as a simulacrum (i.e., a copy of a thing that no longer exists, which conceals the fact that it no longer exists), and deployed to lure political opposition into an endless war against other simulacra, a war that is itself a simulacrum (i.e., a copy of a war which is not being fought, and was never fought, and will never be fought, because it was already over before it began).

‘Free-speech X’ is a prime example. The ease with which Elon Musk and a consortium of serious global-capitalist behemoths, Saudi royalty, and assorted other oligarchs purchased the platform formerly known as Twitter, rebranded it as ‘The Bastion of Free Speech’ (despite the fact that X continues to collaborate with the empire to censor dissent), corralled the majority of the ‘populist’ opposition to the emergence of the New Normal Reich, and transformed it into a global personality cult, is a testament to the versatility of capitalism, and to the advantage of having no official ideology. When you don’t have to conform to any specific ideology, you can wear whatever mask you need to wear. You can play whichever role is called for. It’s all just marketing, advertising, branding. It’s about selling images. The images don’t mean anything. They’re just Pavlovian stimuli designed to trigger a reaction in the target consumer.

The transformation of Twitter/X into the Musk Cult and its merger with (or takeover of) the MAGA movement has been fascinating, if extremely depressing, to watch. At the moment, it appears to be on the verge of morphing into exactly the official enemy that the empire has been desperately simulating for years.”

I wrote that in December 2024, just after the election that ushered in a “new golden age of America,” or whatever. And now … well, here we are. The destabilization and restructuring of the Middle East is proceeding apace. Israel and Iran are officially at war. The Gaza Strip has been reduced to rubble. The Assad regime is gone, replaced with a gang of global-capitalism-ball-playing Al-Qaeda thugs. The Trump regime is renditioning people with suspicious tattoos to Salvadoran gulags, arresting students for writing editorials, unleashing masked goons to round up “illegals,” and generally “making America great again.” X is now a cesspool of algorithmically-boosted racial hatred, mindless rage, Musk and MAGA propaganda, widget ads, and miscellaneous idiocy. Palantir is assembling a master database of Americans’ personal data. People are shrieking for “mass deportation.” Stephen Miller is channeling Joseph Goebbels. Elon Musk is accusing Trump of degenerate acts on Epstein Island. No one is being prosecuted for lying to everyone about “Covid,” but Bobby Kennedy fired a bunch of bureaucrats, and Trump’s military birthday parade … and so on.

Basically, the global-capitalist empire has morphed into the opposition to itself, or a simulacrum of the opposition to itself, and is now simultaneously instrumentalizing and disassembling the opposition to itself (as it markets itself and the opposition to itself to itself and the opposition to itself).

The global capitalist empire is able to do this because it has no ideology or values to uphold. It doesn’t need to make sense or be consistent. It can wear whatever mask it needs to wear because there is no face behind the mask. There is nothing, no values, no ideology, no beliefs, no principles, nothing to defend or betray, nothing to stop it from becoming anything … and then becoming the exact opposite a moment later.

Sorry, I went all philosophical there, and probably bored a lot of my readers to death. Forget about the global-capitalist empire, and the nothing behind the masks, and all that. I’m pretty sure I’m overthinking this stuff, and it’s really just that the Jews own everything, or that the Muslims hate us for our freedom, or that we’re being replaced by illegal Mexicans, or Trump is Hitler, or Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, or, I don’t know … I’m sure there’s a corporate-media pundit or a dissident podcaster who can explain what’s really happening and tell us who we’re supposed to root for.

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