This week, a student—a former US Marine—approached me at the end of a class to ask, "But don’t you think Iran, Russia, or China might invade us?”

“No,” I replied. “That’s another fear instilled by the merchants of death. It is the empires that invade; everyone else must resist them. If China ever invades us, it will be because this country has insisted that it do so: those at the top, because wars and conflicts are their best business and strategy; those at the bottom, because of their vocation as slaves and their lack of class consciousness.”

It is an old superstition, promoted by the mercenary media, that empires fall because an external enemy invades them. “Rome fell due to barbarian invasions,” history textbooks repeat, as if a handful of Germanic tribes could have overcome the military machine that had crushed Carthage and Attila himself in present-day France.

Every time a dumpster burns or a storefront window is smashed on the streets of France, the mercenary media suddenly discover “violence.”

Empires do not fall because they are invaded; they are invaded because they fall. If one day China establishes a military base in the United States, it will be because this society passionately accepted not only 800 bases in other countries but also a collective suicide: obscene inequalities; exploitation and demonization of workers (both its own and others’); marginalization of the dispossessed; racial, religious, and class-based hatreds; divisions instilled by the feudal lords… The perfect formula for large-scale civil conflict. As long as the prosperity born of imperial bloodsucking lasts, patriotic fanaticism masks internal colonization. Then come the demagogues peddling nostalgia and more hatred—not to delay the fall, but to hasten it.

How is this absurdity possible? Through the concentration of power, accelerated according to the formula of compound interest: the legal mafias of sects and lobbies. Resistance lies in the very same thing: in the unity of the peoples.

Around 1830, when its ships dominated the seas, Great Britain produced about 5% of the world’s wealth. China still produced 30%. An island with an economy six times smaller imposed opium, “free trade treaties,” and a campaign of evangelization that left 30 million dead upon the greatest civilization of its time.

It wasn’t GDP, that obsession of modern economists. It was the capacity to concentrate. London concentrated capital, fleets, trading companies, and, above all, an idea of itself. China was rich, but its wealth was scattered, its state worn down, its court divided. When the “civilizing” cannons arrived, the giant was already wounded from within. Later, the Taiping Christian Rebellion would kill more Chinese than all the Opium Wars combined.

Wealth follows empires, but empires rise through fanatical centralization. The first to fragment falls. The discussion must center on the type of union: the union Hitler achieved in Germany, or the union the Iroquois achieved through their radical democracy, which survived for centuries as the Great Law of Peace?

Power has never resided in individuals, no matter how much liberalism has built its mythology around the entrepreneur and the dogma that “my selfishness is good for others.” It has resided in unions: lobbies, sects, corporations, unions, churches. A thousand people organized under a single conviction can accomplish more than a million scattered individuals.

Wages and arguments alone are not enough to mobilize a society. Faith is required. The Puritans who believed themselves to be the chosen people, the settlers of Manifest Destiny, the missionaries who accompanied slave traders with the Bible under their arms—all of them, too. Not to mention the Zionists.

There is nothing more powerful than shared madness. When the fanatic wins, any genocide........

© Common Dreams