Colonies, colonizers, and the planet they were colonizing are collapsing all at once. It’s hard to tell what’s causing what. It’s collapse within collapse within collapse and the most salient collapse is actually the most superficial.
As Nine Inch Nails said, it runs even deeper. The colony of ‘Israel’ is collapsing just as its colonial backers in America are collapsing, and the stench of it all is collapsing the entire climate. Everything is collapsing, all around, and watching America fight for ‘Israel’ is like watching a knife fight on the Titanic over dinner rolls.
But here we are. Everything is falling apart, and it’s all connected in ways that make it pointless to say what’s causing what. Order has one shape, but entropy has many. It’s collapse within collapse within collapse. These are just three things that are collapsing, in no particular order.
The Colony
‘Israel’ is America’s guns near the gas station. Forget the marketing and follow the money and that’s the only reason it exists. To divide and conquer, to steal resources and money from the Middle East, what colonialism was always about. Don’t take my word for it, ask the US President. As Genocidin’ Joe Biden said in 1986:
It is the best $3 billion investment we make. Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region. The United States would have to go out and invent an Israel.
He’s pretty clear about this, saying,
Israel is the single greatest strength America has in the Middle East. I always say, imagine our circumstance in the world, were there no Israel. How many battleships would there be? How many troops would be stationed?
Now why does America need strength in the Middle East? Because that’s where the oil is. The entire region has to be divided and conquered to get the spoils. As Hezbollah’s Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said, also in 1986, “It [Israel] was established for the express purpose of dividing and partitioning the Muslim world. We are not only against the partition of Lebanon, but also against the partition of the Muslim world; this explains why we see no alternative to fighting Israel, with all means at our disposal, until it ceases to exist.”
100 years isn’t a long time for a resistance struggle, and Palestine is nearing that point now. 75 years of resistance to the colony ‘Israel’ and over 100 years of resistance to colonization in general. Now ‘Israel’ has taken a fatal blow in the Al Aqsa Flood and is revealed to be, in the Resistance’s words, ‘weak as a spider’s web.’‘Israel’s’ military is getting beaten by the Resistance in the field, and ‘Israel’ is globally isolated for its genocide against civilians. They’re now fighting a war on at least six fronts and losing against everyone except children and hospitals.
As the Taliban told the Americans, ‘you may have the watches, but we have the time,’ and ‘Israel’s’ time is simply running out. Not just because of contradictions within the colony, but because the colonial Empire it belongs to is falling apart. It was a stupid, cynical idea in the first place, pitting one group of people you hate against people you hate even more, and using that to divide and conquer a region. Now that region is unconquering itself, and ‘Israel’ will be the first to go. Remember that ‘Israel’ is America’s guns near the gas station, and both America and the gas are running out, whatever ‘Israel’ does.
Colonization
The broad fact is that colonization never ended. They just changed words and kept taking the money and the resources, which was the point of the whole thing all along. African gold is still in French coffers and Arabian oil is still priced in dollars. Colonization hides in plain sight if you’re looking. It’s called 'development' or globalization and administered by the IMF or CIA, but it’s the same shit different day. Still corporate control over human and natural resources, just as it was under the VoC, with whatever flag flying for appearances’ sake.
After they lost World War II, Britain’s imperial bases were handed over to the USA and the heirs of White Empire kept using them in much the same way. To us in the Dirty South, it’s one undifferentiated White Empire, just with different branding on the boot. To the human face getting stomped on forever, what’s the difference?
It’s important to remember that — as much as colonizers, personally, suck— this Empire is not really human at all. Colonization is the metabolic process of artificial lifeforms, a planet-devouring cyborg with human components. The Dutch East India Company (VoC) was the first IPO in 1602 and corporations have been legally recognized as artificial persons for centuries, because they are. They are programmed to consume anything and everything for profit and they’ve been off the chain from the start.
Capital is a genus of artificial life and living under Capitalism just means we live under their dominion. We’re ruled by AI alreadyalready, it’s not something in the future. Humans can benefit from the metabolic processes of these artificial beings just like gut bacteria benefits from our digestion, but we have about as much control. The machine will shit out even the greatest capitalist and replace them with someone new, like a new part. Capital is the genus, corporations the species, and capitalists are just passing through the guts. Hence when I discuss White Empire, while race lords are certainly part of it, these artificial overlords are who I’m really talking about. I digress because it’s important. Now let’s get back to the Americans.
America — as a capitalist colony above all — really declared the independence of property. Fuck the people, at Independence only property owners could vote, and that’s still who has the power. In reality it's the property that rules, the people are interchangeable. This carnivorous capital incarnate consumed its continent first. It actually tried to avoid ‘foreign entanglements’ because, honestly, their plate was full.
Until World War II. Then they got a taste of oil (and blood) and were addicted. Their appetites became planetary in proportion. In algorithmic hunger, they asserted global hegemony through contracts, coups, currency, and war. Then the USSR fell and they thought they reached the end of history, total domination, buffet’s open! But you know what they say about getting what you wish for. It’s a curse. Colonization — whether it’s of a Petri dish or a planet — is ultimately a bubble and making it bigger just makes for a bigger pop. As aboriginal philosopher Tyson Yunkaporta describes the phenomenon:
Civilisations are cultures that create cities, communities that consume everything around them and then themselves…
This is uncomfortable to digest because — while you may hate colonization and western civilization — you probably live in a city. I do. And Yunkaporta says that’s haram too. This actually bothers me, but I think it’s true.Yunkaporta says the core problem is the city and colonization is just a city writ large, using whips and sails (then) or planes and fossil fuels (now). The general principle is the same, and by that principle we are generally screwed. I’ll let Yunkaporta continue:
A city is a community on the arrow of time, an upward-trending arrow demanding perpetual growth. Growth is the engine of the city — if the increase stops, the city falls. Because of this, the local resources are used up quickly and the lands around the city die. The biota is stripped, then the topsoil goes, then the water.It is no accident that the ruins of the world’s oldest civilisations are mostly in deserts now. It wasn’t desert before that.A city tells itself it is a closed system that must decay in order for time to run straight, while simultaneously demanding eternal growth. This means it must outsource its decay for as long as possible.
While a city outsources decay by sucking up local resources, a colony does the same thing by going global. But they both suck! Globalizing your greed doesn’t make the problem less, it just puts it off until it’s a global catastrophe instead of a local one. As Yunkaporta goes on:
For this reason, a city is dependent on the importation of resources from interconnected systems beyond its borders. The city places itself at the centre of these systems and strips them to feed its growth, disrupting cycles of time and land and weather and water and ecological exchange between the systems. The exchange is now only going one way. Matter and energy are still neither created nor destroyed in this reaction; they are directed into static heaps rather than cycled back through and between systems.
What he’s s talking about here is entropy. There’s way more way for things to be disordered than ordered, and a consumer society that ultimately produces nothing but garbage is just speed-running the process. You simply cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet, do the math yourself. This is not a political problem, it’s pure physics. At some point, you run out of resources and/or your own waste products choke you out. This happened to local city states when the local environment collapsed, and it’s happening to today’s globalized society because the planet is collapsing. Again, bigger bubble, bigger pop.
To be honest, this process started as soon as we had a grain surplus which effectively became sentient as gods. The first apocalyptic religions emerged based on the truth that this couldn’t end well, and we would be judged. The false ‘enlightenment’ split even the concept of church from state, and worshiped greed above all. This literal deal with the devil gave us a bunch of stuff (refrigerators! color TVs!) but you know how deals with the devil go. Good at first, then completely fucked.
Colonization was the first massive acceleration of the city-making process Yunkaporta talks about. It was the beginning of corporations and the idea that you could (and should) feed entire continents and populations to them, and that idea has never changed because it was never overthrown. First, the violent tribes of Europe used renewable energy (wind and slave labor) to capture solar energy from the south. The dismal and dreary north stole sunny land and grew stuff. When they discovered oil and coal energy underneath, this turbocharged the same process. Today — under new management in America — planes and shipping containers move resources one way, and bombs and nukes the other, to keep everything in order. This is the “the importation of resources from interconnected systems beyond its borders” Yunkaporta talks about, with all the entropic debt that entails.
Now the debt is coming due, and this metabolic system is getting increasingly ‘disordered’ (a matter of perspective really), as the old White Empire falls apart. As Yeats said, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” Anarchy, however, is not a bad word. For much of the world it means something closer to freedom, at least the freedom to fuck yourself, outside the center’s hold. They say the meek inherit the Earth, but they should say the meek inherit the ruins. It’s more accurate. Colonization is broken, but it broke the planet before it was stopped. Decolonization is a literally Pyrrhic victory. The planet we knew is toast.
Colonization, as a centuries old process of global capitalism (ie, turning land and people into capital) actually broke in World War II, when Hitler had the temerity to colonize white people. Hitler’s quite conscious colonization of Europe was the end of the civilizational life-cycle Yunkaporta talked about. As Yunkaporta said, “Civilisations are cultures that create cities, communities that consume everything around them and then themselves.” Hitler executed the ‘and then themselves’ part.
This tragic dénouement had an unfortunate coda, however, as the Western Allies assimilated the Nazis and carried doing the same shit to colored people for another century. They were just Nazis that won. Case in point is that they — antisemitic and racist as hell — largely cleared Europe of Jews as Hitler wanted to (exile was his penultimate solution). This was a cynical move to just dump the displacement somewhere else, where it was politically convenient. They took some people out of a war zone into a constant war zone and called it helping. In reality they were just helping themselves to oil, and setting Jews up as generational conscripts and cannon fodder. But I’m getting behind myself, let’s keep going.
You can view this is a political process, but the movements of men are really just waves on the ocean. The actual process was artificial life using oil for its metabolic process, and moving people around like so much bacteria in its gut. The stories we tell are fundamentally irrelevant. For all we know E. coli has a religious attachment to our butts. The actual ocean beneath the waves of human politics is the biological movement of artificial beasts of the deep. This is the biological process of colonialism, and it’s no different from any colony reaching the end of its Petri dish. Which is where we find ourselves now.
Colonialism will finally die and is dying, but this is cold comfort. The Petri dish was the planet, and you’re in it! There’s nothing else! Unfortunately decolonization is A) too little and B) too late. The planet is already fucked by colonialism and we’ll inherit scraps, and the problem goes deeper than that. Getting rid of the one soul and resource sucking White Empire will be a great victory, but remember Yunkaporta’s dismissal of even the city, which you probably live in. Even retreating to a ‘multipolar’ world is ‘too little’. What Yunkaporta talks about is returning to essentially nomadic existence, and no one’s even discussing that. Personally, I don’t want to hear it, but it’s not like he’s the first to say it.
To be honest, we’ve been fucked since agriculture, when the first apocalyptic gods emerged, telling us quite clearly that we sucked and would be judged on Judgement Day. Not it is — Biblically or Quranically speaking — roundabouts that day. Knocking over the idol and money worshiping Empire is great, but it won’t avert our fate. Colonization was just the acceleration of a long roll-out of Eden, and — at any speed — the crash of the entire climate awaits.
Climate
I cite Yunkaporta because he introduces the challenging idea that the problem is not colonization or imperialism (which are easy to hate) but cities (which we like). When I first read this I rejected it viscerally because I like cities, but the more I think about it, it’s true. We can’t have our climate and eat it too. A) The damage is largely baked in and B) if we damage the thing slower, we still get to the same destination, just at a different rate. Hence the fall of the colony ‘Israel’ and the (now) American colonizers — while welcome — will not ‘solve’ the underlying problem in any meaningful way. Indeed, in many ways the underlying climate collapse is what’s shaking these historical abominations loose in the first place.
‘Israel’ is there for many bullshit reasons that will disappear in the mists of history, but what will persist is the obvious fact that — as Genocidin’ Biden said — Empire needed guns near the gas station, to hold up the place. By building a Jewish ethnostate in Palestine, Empire really killed two birds with one stone. They got rid of their Jews (exile was the Nazi’s penultimate solution), and turned them into a conscript army, guarding Empire’s interests in the region. The cascading problem for ‘Israel’ is that the Empire propping it up is collapsing, as is the reason Empire needs it to exist at all. This is why I talk about collapse within collapse, and why I say it’s in no particular order.
The economic (ie, made up) climate beneath all the geopolitics is that America doesn’t even need Israel anymore. It gets most of its oil from fracking-up its own home, and these people would trade with them anyways, without being coerced. At the same time, supplies of economical oil are already collapsing, if they haven’t peaked already. It ‘costs’ more and more energy to get one unit of energy out, and at some point it goes negative. Underneath all that is the actual climate which is completely fucked by all the pollution. You’re not supposed to dig up millions of years of solar energy and burn it all at once. This has obvious consequences, like desecrating any ancient tomb.
America gave blood for oil and thought they were getting closer to god but no, no, it was the other one. America is so used to giving blood for oil that they do it reflexively now, but that demon is simply not accepting sacrifices anymore. They can blood the altar all they want, but Ba'al is simply running out of stuff. Within the next few decades, they’re tapped out. There’s no point keeping guns near the gas station after the place has been robbed. This is the situation right now.
We are thus caught in a civilization pincer, the oil is running out just as it’s poisoning us. It’s really a race to see what kills us first. America is fighting for the last few drops like junkies wrestling over the last needle, but soon enough it will be (economically) gone. Again, it’s not that oil, coal, etc will disappear, but the easy deposits have been robbed and at some point it’ll take more effort than it’s worth to dig them up.
At the same time, the pollution from all our previous drug use has added up and will flood, fry, and fricassee the Earth in unpredictable proportions. Everything will get harder, and everything (as in a global civilization that’s stitched together by oil) will fall apart. We’ll run out of gas and stall just as the fumes consume us. America is fighting over resources that won’t exist and trying to maintain hegemony on a planet that’s collapsing. It’s a fool’s errand, but damned if they’re not on it. Imperialism dies hard.
Collapse³
As I’ve said, it’s collapse within collapse within collapse. A colony collapses as colonization collapses as the climate it came up in collapses too. It’s hard to say what causes what, it’s a loop. We perceive it as ‘Israel’ falling, taking America with it, then the multipolar world melting also, but you could just as well put it in reverse order. Time is a flat circle. I never understood what that meant, but it makes sense somehow.
While it seems like the news is driving history, it’s really the reverse. The news is the waves and history is the ocean. Hence while the news is full of the fall of ‘Israel’ and will be full of the fall of ‘America’, the deeper undercurrent is that this whole global civilization is fucked, and has been since we put seeds in rows. Cities consume the resources around them and implode. That’s what they do. If you expand the logic to the globe, you just collapse the globe.
It seems coincidental that the center of apocalyptic faiths brings in the actual apocalypse, but I don’t think so. I think the old gods were right, and scientists are merely taking (shitty) notes. Fuck around and find out is the eternal law, as we’ve been told over and over. Well, we were born in the age of fucking round. Welcome to the age of finding out. As all the resources and life force stripped from around the world could tell you, it sucks!
