So Carney gets up there and says, “We are no longer relying on just the strength of our values, but also on the value of our strength.”

What in the ever loving fuck does that even mean?

That is not a sentence. That is a fortune cookie that went to business school.

That is what you say when you want applause but you absolutely do not want follow up questions.

If you slow it down for half a second, it is not saying, “Hey, we screwed up and now we are going to actually live by our values.” No. It is saying, “We are still gonna throw our weight around, but now we are gonna feel better about it.”

That kind of language always shows up when consent starts to fail and power has to prepare people for more coercion, as force expands to fill the space where legitimacy once lived.

That is it. Same power. Same outcomes. Just better lighting.

Then he goes, “The WTO, the UN, the COP, the whole architecture of collective problem solving is under threat.”

Oh really.

Under threat from whom?

Reality.

These institutions are not some innocent group project that got vandalized. They were built to manage inequality, not fix it.

They exist so rich countries can say, “Hey, this is all very unfortunate,” while continuing to do exactly what benefits them.

If Carney actually represented Canadian values, he would not be saying, “Oh no, we have to save these institutions.” He would be saying, “Maybe we should fix the fact that these things mostly protect capital and screw everyone else.” But that part is not convenient, so we skip it.

And then he brings out Havel. That is when you know something sneaky is happening.

Havel wrote about resisting the communist regime in Czechoslovakia.

Havel talks about the guy who puts a slogan in his window that nobody believes. The whole point is that the system survives because people keep repeating crap they know is false.

Havel is saying, stop playing along. Stop pretending.

Carney hears that and goes, “Exactly. We should stop pretending.” And then immediately adds, “Except for the pretending that keeps everything basically the same.”

He is not saying live in truth. He is saying, “Hey, that old story does not work anymore. Let us get a new one.”

That is not honesty. That is a rebrand.

And notice which slogans he wants to retire. The ones about the rules based order and moral leadership. Fine. Those are not working anymore. Everyone sees through them.

But the one slogan you never hear. Ever. Is the one that actually explains the mess.

"Workers of the world unite."

That one never makes it onto the stage. Funny how that works.

Except as part of Carney's speech - as the slogan everyone was fighting against.

Because that slogan does not prop the system up. It does not prop the wealthy up.  It pulls the floor out from under it. It says the problem is not countries competing. The problem is that a handful of people get rich no matter what flag is flying.

That is why it is dangerous. Not because it is outdated. Because it is still accurate.

If Carney wanted to be honest, he picked the wrong philosopher.

Gramsci would have said, yeah, of course consent is falling apart. It was manufactured in the first place. You told people this was normal until they stopped believing you.

Arendt would have said, all this force and coercion you are calling strength. That is actually weakness. That is what happens when legitimacy is gone and you start panicking.

Du Bois would have gone nuclear and said, let us stop pretending this system was ever fair. Democracy and prosperity at the top were always paid for by somebody else.

But you cannot say that at Davos. You would not make it to dessert.

So instead you get Havel Lite. Truth, but not too much truth. Honesty, but only about the stuff that is already collapsing anyway.

The whole speech is basically, “Yes, the mask cracked. So let us glue it back together and act like this time it is different.”

That is not leadership. That is damage control.

And the funniest part is they keep calling this values. 

Values are supposed to cost you something. These values pay dividends.

That is not morality. That is marketing.

We are lucky the news still tells us what happened.

Who, where, when. But if you stop there, you are missing the game. There is no major outlet that is not owned or shaped by billionaires, and that reality leaks into coverage whether they admit it or not.  Luckily the red flags are not hard to see.  

Once you see what is missing as much as what is printed, the story changes fast.

So Associated Press covers a rally for Iranian self determination and calls it an “anti Iran” demonstration.

That was the first thing that caught my eye.

Anti Iran. Like people woke up and said, yeah, screw the country, the food, the culture, the people. That is not what happened. That is like calling someone anti American because they are against the CIA flipping governments. Lazy at best. Dishonest at worst.

AP isn't lazy.

What the protesters were actually saying is simple.

Iran is not broken because Iranians cannot govern themselves. It is broken because outside powers keep putting their thumb on the scale and then acting shocked when the whole thing tips over.

Foreign interference wrecks democracy. It ends badly every time.

Then the article hands you this cute little history snack about 1953. Just a nod. Cold War fears. Communists. Ooo scary.

Meanwhile the real story is that Iran had a democratically chosen prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, who nationalized oil so his own country could benefit from it. Britain and the US lost money, panicked, and engineered a coup. They paid people to riot, ran propaganda, destabilized the country, and installed a dictator.

That is not a theory. It is in declassified documents.

But the article smooths that over like an unfortunate misunderstanding. Oops. History happens.

That framing matters, because if you pretend the US just stumbled into Iran by accident, then every future intervention can be sold as stability, humanitarian concern, or protecting civilians. Same pitch, different decade.

Finally, you zoom in on the most chaotic moment of the rally. Yelling. A truck. Confusion. Suddenly the whole protest looks unhinged.

Now the crowd is the problem. Not the history. Not the pattern. Not the fact that we keep lighting fires and blaming the smoke on the locals.

No lies. Just selective facts, bad labels, and a tone that quietly tells you who to side with.

And somehow, once again, it is never the people with the power.
 

Plus also, he's so daft he fake-newsed a screenshot of a news article that's 3 YEARS OLD. Says so in big and yellow.

Wanker.

Good morning.  Did you just wake up?

Do things seem different?

People living inside an imperial center do not wake up one morning to tanks in the streets. They wake up to erosion. To wages that no longer sustain life. To institutions that no longer serve public need. To promises that grow thinner with every repetition. 
They are told this is temporary. That sacrifice now will bring stability later.

But later never comes.

What people begin to notice is not ideology but contradiction.

They did what they were told. They worked harder. They complied. They adapted. And still the ground beneath them keeps shifting.  New day, still fucked.

This moment is unsettling because it forces a question the system works very hard to suppress. What if this is not a failure of the system, but its normal operation?

At first, people struggle to protect their own position. They chase credentials. They attempt to outrun decline. This is understandable. 
That's precisely the response power depends on.

A population fighting for individual survival is a population that does not organize.

The real shift occurs when the realization moves beyond the individual.

Frantz Fanon understood this well. Writing about colonial societies, he showed how domination survives by persuading people that their suffering is personal, cultural, or deserved. What appears as individual failure is in fact a rational response to imposed conditions. Liberation begins not with outrage alone, but with recognition that what is experienced privately is produced collectively.

Paulo Freire made the same point in the realm of education and consciousness. Oppression, he argued, persists when people internalize it as personal inadequacy. 
Transformation begins when people see their condition as a common reality shaped by political and economic forces. Without that recognition, outrage becomes noise. 
With it, solidarity becomes possible.

Hannah Arendt approached the problem from the perspective of power and obedience. Systems of domination rely on isolation. 
When people experience vulnerability alone, they are easier to manage. 
Atrocities do not require monsters. 
They require ordinary people who stop thinking relationally, who no longer ask how their lives are connected to the lives of others.

Separation, not cruelty, is the enabling condition.

James Baldwin spoke to this from inside the imperial center itself. He warned that refusing to recognize oneself in the suffering of others was not innocence, but self deception. A society that defines itself through domination cannot remain psychologically or morally intact. 
Recognition, Baldwin insisted, was not charity. It was survival.

bell hooks rejected politics rooted in moral superiority or permanent outrage. Domination continues, she argued, when people cling to individual status instead of collective liberation. 
People do not come together because they are shamed into caring. They come together when they understand that their futures are bound together.

Do you see what I'm getting at?

The most powerful move is not outrage. Outrage can be absorbed. It can be redirected. It can be exhausted.

It's not Trump.  It's the system in which Trump works.  It's been there since long before he arrived.
If you are only outraged at Trump, the same system will continue long after he's gone.

Criticizing Trump is not a power move.

The real power move is recognition.

Recognition that the people who have borne the costs all along are not alien, defective, or lesser, but subject to the same human constraints with fewer protections.

This is where politics changes.

Fighting for the individual self reinforces competition. Fighting for the collective self undermines it. One response fragments. The other creates cohesion grounded in shared exposure to the same system of power.  

It's not ideology.  It's seeing reality.

And today, this recognition is becoming harder to contain.

The scale of current events has grown too extreme to be safely managed as background tragedy. Violence is no longer distant. Suffering is no longer abstract. It unfolds continuously, in plain view. 
This creates a problem for the establishment, because suffering at this scale threatens legitimacy.

It takes only a single moment of empathy for the logic to break. One moment when someone recognizes that the people of Palestine, Venezuela, Sudan, Yemen, the former Yugoslavia, and countless others are not suffering because of ancient hatreds or inevitable chaos, but because their suffering serves profit.

Not the public good. Not universal security. Profit.

Their dispossession stabilizes markets. 
Their poverty maintains leverage. 
Their deaths are treated as unfortunate but necessary costs in a system organized around return on investment rather than human need.

Once this connection is seen, even briefly, the moral narrative collapses.

This is why language becomes evasive. Why suffering is framed as tragic but unavoidable. Why entire populations are reduced to abstractions or threats.  This is why dehumanization is manufactured. 
The objective is not simply to justify violence, but to prevent identification. To keep the line between them and us intact.

Because the moment that line breaks, the system is revealed for what it is. Not a moral order. A transfer mechanism.

And this is when unraveling begins.

Not because people suddenly become virtuous, but because they recognize that the machinery grinding others down is now grinding toward them. That there is no permanent inside. No protected class immune from the consequences of endless accumulation.

At that point, outrage is no longer the danger to the system.

Recognition is.

Because recognition turns spectators into participants. It transforms isolated anxiety into shared understanding. It makes collective action a matter of necessity, not altruism.

That is the real power move in dark times.

Not outrage.
Not purity.

Recognition.

Understanding that dehumanization is fake - it's a tool designed to keep you afraid and compliant.

Seeing that the people who have been paying the price all along are not alien, defective, or lesser, but operating under the same human constraints with fewer buffers.

That is how movements stop being symbolic and start becoming dangerous to entrenched power.

Not because they are loud, but because they are hard to divide.

Once people see it clearly, the story cannot be restored.

And power understands this very well.

A couple notice their neighbors outside arguing in the driveway. One raises their voice, the other turns around and walks back into the house. It lasts maybe thirty seconds. That’s all it takes.

Thirty seconds and boom, we’ve got a verdict.

One person in the observing couple reacts instantly. Case closed. Walks away? That tells them everything they need to know. Bad person. Cold. Cruel. Must be a nightmare to live with. 
One tiny clip from the movie and they’re already writing the review. Five stars for certainty, zero stars for curiosity.

The other person looks at the same thing and goes, hold on. We saw almost nothing. We don’t know what that argument was about. We don’t know what happened five minutes earlier or five years earlier. 
Maybe walking away was the smartest thing that happened in that driveway all day. Maybe staying would’ve turned it into something worse. They’re not excusing it. They’re just refusing to pretend they’ve seen the whole truth because they caught a glimpse through the bushes.

That’s the difference right there.

It’s not about being nicer or more moral. It’s about how fast you slap meaning onto things. One way crushes a complicated situation into a neat little label and feels very proud of itself. The other keeps the picture open and admits that most of what drives human behavior never shows up in a quick public moment anyway.

Now take that same habit of thinking and zoom it way out.

A lot of people in the United States are starting to wake up to the long, ugly pattern of US imperialism and the way the West invents reality and manufactures consent for war. What’s changing isn’t access to information. We’ve had information for decades. 
What’s changing is how people are learning to look at it.

This whole system works because the news is designed to hit you fast and hard. Here’s the bad guy. Here’s the crisis. Here’s the threat. Feel something right now. 
Be scared. Be angry. Be morally certain. Then move along. No time to ask questions. No time to think. 
Reaction first, understanding never.

Almost every major news story does this. Sometimes they’re subtle, sometimes they’re clumsy, but the goal is the same. Strip away context. Chop off history. Make everything look isolated and accidental. 
Never let you ask who benefits. Never let you notice what else is happening at the same time. Definitely don’t let you connect the dots. That’s dangerous.

But when people stop reacting on command and slow the hell down, the magic trick stops working. Patterns start to show up. 
You notice whose suffering is treated like background noise. You notice how certain kinds of violence are framed as tragic but necessary, while others are framed as unforgivable evil. 
Funny how that works.

What’s happening isn’t about learning new facts. It’s about refusing to let each story pretend it’s the whole story. It’s about keeping the frame open long enough to see power moving around, instead of swallowing the version of reality that just happens to flatter the people already running the show.

And if you want a few basic tools for cutting through the fog, here they are.

- First, it’s about power. Not oil. Not money. Power. Oil and money only matter because they give someone leverage. 
Take Venezuela. Everyone talks like the fight is over who gets to own the oil. That’s cute. Ownership is optional. Control is the prize. 
If you can box it in, choke it off, delay it, sanction it, you don’t need to pump a single barrel yourself. You just keep prices high and alternatives scarce.

And here’s the beautiful part. They can step back and say, “You know what? We’re gonna leave it in the ground. It doesn’t belong to us.” See? Look at that. Moral. Responsible. Good people. 
Meanwhile, leaving it right where it is happens to be the move that benefits them the most. Prices stay high, leverage stays intact, and nobody has to look like the villain. That’s power. Quiet. Indirect. Smiling for the camera.
Meanwhile nobody cares that Venezuelans will continue to suffer, business as usual.  Their only crime is having oil.

- Second, dehumanization is always a red flag. Anytime a news story keeps nudging you to see a group of people as dangerous, irrational, or less than human, your alarm bells should be screaming. 
Fear is incredibly useful. 
Once people stop seeing others as fully human, empathy goes right out the window and suddenly atrocities turn into policy decisions. That framing isn’t accidental. It’s doing a job.

So here’s a little mental trick. The next time you catch yourself believing in the boogeyman, stop. 
Reverse the thought. 
Say to yourself, “This could be anybody under the same conditions.” 
Sit with that for a second. 
Wait for it. 
“Holy shit. This could be *me* under the same conditions.” 

What if all I ever knew was poverty and violence because I grew up in a place that was devastated by war. 

Someone else's war. I'm hated by people who don't even know me, but they were given a story about people like me.

Have you ever heard that kind of story on the news?

- Third, ridicule is information. When you start questioning a narrative and the response isn’t an argument but mockery, dismissal, or bullying, congratulations. You hit a nerve. 
Power doesn’t panic when you’re wrong. It panics when you’re close. When the conversation shifts from debate to sneering, that’s usually your cue to keep digging, not to shut up.

That shit-eating grin might make you angry at first. Good. Don’t float above it. Don’t calm down. 
Don’t retreat into politeness. 
Hit them with facts. 
In French, there’s a phrase for that kind of face, une face à taper dedans, a slappable face. 
So slap it. 
Not with fists, with context. With empathy. With evidence. Slap it until the smugness cracks and something real has to come out.

Because part of that grin is cognitive dissonance.  It's discomfort.  It's hard to pivot to a new set of facts. It's extra hard because not only do you feel ignorant for not having seen it before, but coming to terms with the realities of imperialism means you're not the good guy anymore.

We're not.

That discomfort is healthy.  We should all learn to be able to sit with some discomfort.  

Because when we take it away, when we people-please, when we avoid being disagreeable, we place comfort above truth. And we already know how catastrophic avoiding the truth can be.

We cannot have justice for Venezuela in this economy.

Twenty five years ago, Canadian oil was not some unstoppable juggernaut. It was expensive, dirty, politically awkward, and barely worth the trouble unless oil prices stayed high. The oil sands were a gamble. Everyone knew it. 
Nobody was chest-thumping about Canada being an energy superpower back then.

Meanwhile, Venezuela is sitting on massive heavy oil reserves that are basically the same stuff Canada pulls out of the ground. Same refineries. Same use. The difference is not the oil. 
The difference is where the money went. Venezuelan oil revenue was being used to build schools, hospitals, and social programs instead of getting funneled straight into the pockets of Western oil executives and shareholders. 
And right there, that’s the real problem.

So suddenly, there’s a crisis. Not because anyone thought Venezuela was uniquely corrupt or incompetent. Not because the oil stopped working. The story just shows up one day, fully assembled. 
Corrupt. Failed state. Dictator. Say it enough times and people stop asking questions.

Then come the sanctions. Then the financial chokehold. Then production collapses. Millions of people suffer. Tragic.  But that suffering was not an unfortunate surprise.  

It's bad luck Venezuela.

And wouldn’t you know it, right as Venezuelan oil gets shoved off the market, Canadian oil suddenly makes sense. High cost projects become profitable. Infrastructure gets built. Shareholders start smiling again. 
Funny how that works. Totally a coincidence, I’m sure.

BTW, it’s called “Canadian oil,” but the people who own it are the same people who own “American oil.” Same investors. Same corporations. Same balance sheets. Regular people in either country are not cashing in.

 
If we actually benefited from those profits, we would already have been Venezuela’d. 
 

We get about one percent through taxes and fees if we’re lucky. The rest goes straight up the food chain.

Here’s the part people really don’t want to say out loud. The goal was never to take Venezuelan oil and pump more of it. 
That would drop prices. That would hurt profits. 
The goal is to keep it in the ground. Sanctions, destabilization, asset seizures, invasions, whatever tool fits the moment. Less oil on the market means higher prices. Higher prices mean Canadian oil stays viable and more importantly, the same group of people keep getting rich.

And there’s an extra layer of shit baked into this. A brown skinned country using its own resources to take care of its own people instead of obeying the shareholder rulebook. That’s dangerous. 
That sets a bad example. You let that work and suddenly other countries start getting ideas.

Can’t have that.

The Canadian oil sector depends on this story continuing. Venezuelans must remain poor. They must continue to suffer. 
So Venezuela has to stay “corrupt.” That narrative is not a side effect. It is the permission slip that keeps their oil suppressed and everyone else’s infrastructure profitable.

That is why there is such aggressive pushback the moment you challenge the dictator narrative. The response is not to engage with facts or history, but to shut down critical thinking.

Suddenly everything is a “nuanced debate.” Doesn't that seem pretty unusual to you?
Suddenly the focus shifts to Trump’s misstep, his tone, his recklessness, anything that keeps attention safely away from the long record of policy, incentives, and outcomes that predate him by decades.

This should be a moment where the media pauses and asks hard questions. Instead, it is treated as a threat. An opportunity to puncture a thin layer of propaganda is turned into an exercise in reinforcing it. 
Critical thinking is framed as irresponsible. They scold. They close ranks. Context is treated as suspect. The narrative is not examined, it is protected.

Here’s the ugly truth. The prosperity of the Canadian oil sector is structurally tied to the suffering of Venezuelan people. 
That’s not a glitch. That’s the system doing exactly what it was designed to do.  

That is empire.

And honestly, the one accidental service Trump’s fuckup did was make it harder to pretend it wasn’t happening. He said the quiet part loud.

Once you see it, you can't unsee it.

Nothing will change for Venezuela.  They will go on suffering - Mark Carney's popularity is high and he will make sure the narrative that sanctioning Venezuela is the thing to do.  We're the good guys.  Meanwhile, Cha Ching!  

But maybe more people take notice this time?
 

If Americans truly want to confront authoritarianism, they have to stop treating it as a personality problem or a Trump problem.

I hear that many Americans are outraged about what's happening in Venezuela, but it's not really about Venezuela.

It is about Americans saying their president is behaving like an authoritarian - making declarations of war without congressional approval. But they are beginning to notice the exercise of power that has always been there, just usually hidden behind smoother language and better manners.

People say they are shocked by what their government has done. They say he crossed a line, he violated procedure. And they are right to be disturbed. But here is the problem. They are reacting to the style, not the substance. They are reacting to the clumsiness, not the crime.

You see, outrage is permitted when it’s symbolic, but discouraged when it threatens power.  Insult Trump all you want, we don't care, but we will not encourage you to actually talk about Venezuela.  

Nobody today should actually believe Nicolás Maduro is a dictator because there is extensive, on the record evidence that the United States has actively destabilized Venezuela for more than two decades, and that this destabilization was intentional. Calling Maduro a dictator is hypocrisy.

This is not speculation, not conspiracy, it's public record. And the press knows it, and still repeats the story.

The tools used have been political, economic, diplomatic, and informational rather than military, but their cumulative effect has been to narrow Venezuela’s sovereignty and make normal governance extremely difficult regardless of who holds office.  Sanctions are usually an act of violence.

First, the US has directly intervened in Venezuela’s political process. After the failed 2002 coup against Hugo Chávez, US agencies including National Endowment for Democracy and USAID dramatically expanded funding to opposition parties, media outlets, and political infrastructure.  Chavez took back the oil expropriation contracts from the oligarchs.

These programs were not neutral civic education efforts. They supported electoral strategy, messaging, parallel vote counts, and international lobbying designed to delegitimize elected governments.  Imagine Russia doing this in Canada or Mexico.

In 2019, the US went further by recognizing Juan Guaidó as president despite his never being elected to that role, seizing Venezuelan state assets abroad, and urging allies to reject Venezuela’s existing institutions outright.

That act alone shattered any claim of respect for Venezuelan self determination.  So much for international law, so much for democracy.

Second, the US has used economic sanctions as a political weapon, with predictable social consequences. Sanctions escalated sharply after 2017 and targeted Venezuela’s oil sector, financial system, and access to global credit. These measures collapsed state revenue, restricted imports of food and medicine, accelerated inflation, and drove mass emigration.

Starve them, then blame them.

Multiple UN officials and economists have noted that these outcomes were foreseeable and not accidental.

When elections are held under conditions of engineered scarcity and economic crisis, the resulting dysfunction is then blamed on leadership rather than on the coercive environment that produced it and the media repeats it as though it’s an objective diagnosis.

Third, the US has conducted sustained narrative warfare around Venezuelan legitimacy. Elections are routinely declared illegitimate in advance, regardless of turnout, observation, or results, while opposition boycotts encouraged by foreign governments are later cited as proof that elections lacked credibility.

Media framing consistently isolates Nicolás Maduro from the context of sanctions, asset freezes, and diplomatic isolation, creating the illusion that Venezuela’s collapse is uniquely domestic. This framing would not be accepted if applied to countries aligned with US interests under similar pressures.

So, calling Maduro a dictator is hypocrisy.

When the US rejects elections it dislikes, recognizes unelected leaders, and punishes entire populations to force political outcomes, it forfeits the moral authority to declare another government illegitimate.

What is presented as a defense of democracy is, in practice, a long running campaign to control political outcomes while denying responsibility for the damage that campaign causes.  Democracy is invoked as a slogan while policy serves investors, oil companies, and geopolitical dominance.

It's an invented reality and you are not supposed to see it.

But Trump is a clumsy motherfucker.  Trump makes the quiet part loud.

The United States did not suddenly lose its democratic compass under Donald Trump. The systematic destabilization of Venezuela began long before him.

This started under Barack Obama. Venezuela, a poor country, was formally declared an extraordinary threat, a legal fiction that opened the door to sanctions.

Again, these are all facts that are on record and verifiable. So it's an insult to anyone's intelligence to pretend otherwise. It's outrageous.

Under both Obama and Joe Biden, financial isolation intensified, assets were frozen, oil revenues were strangled, and political legitimacy was deliberately undermined. Under Trump, the same policies continued, with added theatrics and less diplomatic camouflage. Different presidents, same machinery.  Same interests.

What Trump changed just the other day was not policy but visibility.

His bluntness tore away the humanitarian language, the talk of norms and values, that usually disguises coercion. Suddenly Americans could see what had long been done quietly. The outrage they feel now is real, but it is misdirected if it stops with Trump.

The authoritarianism they are alarmed by did not begin with him. It has been operating politely, administratively, and with bipartisan approval for decades, especially beyond US borders.  And it comes home eventually.  

It already has.  You've been lied to.  You see it.

And here is the final insult. For years, Americans were fed a simplified story about Venezuela. Dictator. Socialist failure. Hopeless corruption. Almost every outlet, every expert panel, every talking head repeated it while omitting the role of sanctions, asset seizures, and overt interference.  Propaganda by omission.

That was not an accident. It was narrative discipline. To be shown only part of the story while being asked to consent to the consequences is an insult to people’s intelligence and to their freedom.

If Americans truly want to confront authoritarianism, they have to stop treating it as a personality problem or a Trump problem. It is a structural feature of empire. Trump did not invent it. He just made it harder to pretend it was not there.  The empire is the problem.

You want to fight for your freedom? You've got to think critically, connect the dots, follow the money, follow the power, and you've got to aim way higher than Trump.

(What the fuck is happening in Yemen?)

Let's go back just a few decades.

Yemen wasn’t even one country to begin with. 

People act like it just “fell apart,” but it was duct-taped together in 1990. You had the north, poor, tribal, backed by Saudi money, and then you had the south, which was basically this old British colony that actually had institutions, schools, and some idea of how a government is supposed to work. 

Then the Soviet Union collapses, everyone panics, and boom, they mash the two together like it’s a bad group project. No real agreement, no real plan, just “eh, we’ll figure it out later.” Spoiler alert, they didn’t.

So what happens next? Power goes north, money goes north, southern leadership gets shoved aside, and the south goes, “Wait, what the hell just happened?” They try to leave in the 90s, get crushed, and from that point on the country is basically broken. 

Not “struggling.” 
Broken. 
Way before the current war.

Then people act shocked when groups like the Houthis and the STC show up. Like they just appeared out of nowhere with evil plans. 

No. 

Western media describes the Houthis and STC pretty much as extremists, rebels, terrorists or militants.

The Houthis came out of northern communities that got ignored, pushed around, and bombed. The STC came out of the south after decades of getting screwed over politically and economically. Neither of these groups invented the chaos. They walked into a house that was already on fire.

And then of course the outside world shows up. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, the US, also Iran kinda lurking in the background, all backing their favorite guys, dumping weapons everywhere, flattening infrastructure, and somehow acting surprised when the place turns into a disaster. 

The Houthis or the STC “govern”, but  that doesn’t mean they’re running Sweden. It means they’re the ones keeping courts open, schools running, hospitals barely functioning, collecting taxes, and stopping total anarchy. 

Is it pretty? No. Is it democratic? Definitely not. 
But when the state collapses, legitimacy goes to whoever can keep the lights on and the place from completely falling apart.

And then you look at today’s events in Mukalla and it feels like history repeating itself with a bigger headline. Saudi Arabia goes and bombs a port city because it thinks weapons destined for the STC just pulled in from the UAE, the STC pushes back, everybody’s calling everybody else dangerous, and now you’ve got that southern separatist force backed into a corner while Riyadh and Abu Dhabi are yelling at each other like two siblings fighting over the remote. 

That’s the part that shows how messy this whole thing has become. It’s not just a local feud anymore. It’s foreign powers dragging their disagreements through Yemen like they’ve got no idea the country is actually full of people trying to live their lives. 

It’s tragic, it’s chaotic, and it’s exactly what you’d expect when the state collapses and everyone else tries to fill the vacuum to serve their own interests.

It Doesn’t Matter What You Call It

Let’s not kid ourselves.

Whether you call it hegemony or empire, it doesn’t really matter. It’s happening. And it’s been happening for a long time.

Most folks living inside the dominant power, the metropole, as they call it, like to think their country is just a leader on the world stage. 
They tell themselves it’s influence, not control. 
That their government is spreading democracy, helping the poor, keeping peace. 
They don’t see empire. They see a moral mission.

But step outside that bubble. Go to the client states. The so-called “developing nations.” 
The places where resources flow out and suffering flows in. 
The people living there know what’s going on. 
They see the deal for what it is: You give us *everything*. In return, we don’t bomb you. Yet.

That’s not consent. That’s coercion wearing a friendly face.

Hegemony is the idea that people go along with the system because they believe in it.  They’re persuaded, not forced. 
But persuasion only works when people believe the story. 
And here’s the thing: more and more people don’t believe it anymore.

They don’t believe that regime change is liberation.
They don’t believe that debt slavery is development.
They don’t believe that censorship is for safety.
They don’t believe that some allies “accidentally” commit atrocities while enemies “deserve” to be punished.

They’ve seen too much.
And once the illusion breaks, 
shit gets real.

--->You are here.

When the empire loses the mask of legitimacy, it doesn't apologize. It tightens its grip. It stops pretending to care about freedom and justice.

You get:

- More surveillance, more censorship
- More propaganda, more fear
- More bombs wrapped in humanitarian slogans

And while it clings to power, the world starts to fracture. Alliances crumble. Global coordination weakens. Every region starts looking out for itself. 
You get chaos, confusion, instability.
Eggs cost six bucks a dozen.

And while states fall apart, corporations rise up.
They take over where governments leave off, controlling food, water, health, data, even borders.

Problem is, to a corporation, you're not a citizen.  You never were.  
That's not a thing. 
You’re a consumer. A data point. A liability.

Now here’s the hard truth: Just because an empire is falling doesn’t mean something better is coming.

Collapse can lead to fascism.
To warlords.
To tech oligarchs.
To neo-feudalism wrapped in 5G.

But it can also lead to resistance.
To solidarity.
To movements rooted in justice, memory, and real democracy.

Taking care of one another - our neighbors - in our world today, is an act of resistance.  And a badass one, too!

If you live in the heart of empire, you’ve benefited. One way or another. That doesn’t make you guilty. But it does make you responsible for what’s been done in your name, for what’s still being done, and for what comes next.

You were born in the wrong place to see it clearly.
But the world is a big place.
And the people on the receiving end of empire have been seeing it for generations.  We dehumanize them so that we don't listen to them.

Empires fall. They always have.
What we build after is what matters.

So name it.
Don’t flinch.
Call it what it is.
And get to work.

As boomers, deaf to their own contradictions, scramble to worship Brigitte Bardot for the sole reason of being famous, let’s not overlook that in 2003, she published A Cry in the Silence, a book that railed against gay people, young people, the unemployed and Islam. 

She held opinions so offensive that they are literally illegal: she’d been repeatedly fined for inciting racial hatred.