The White Frost

No, 2016 isn't when Winter came. It's when the Orangetroopers finally smashed in the last flimsy media windows of the remnants of the American middle class, exposing them to the Ice Age the rest of us have been living in since 1975.

Now the cold and frost are seeping in, the electricity is flickering out, the pipes are starting to freeze. And where are the self-proclaimed American Leftists older than the age of 40? (I'm in my late forties myself, so I take this particular betrayal personally.)

Almost all of them are too busy trashing Hillary Clinton the way the KPD trashed the SPD in 1933, or else cheerleading the bombing of Syrian kids by Assadist war criminals, or else repeating Putinist lies about how Ukraine's genuinely popular, overwhelmingly peaceful and genuinely progressive democratic revolution was actually a CIA coup, or heaping abuse on America's finest citizen journalists whenever these latter dare to write carefully-researched, fact-checked, insightful and well-written journalistic exposes of the Despot.

Some future game designer will create an anti-neoliberal interactive open world called Escape from Plutonia, where one of the non-character players will spout lines like, "Yes, forwards, comrades, let us conquer the leading heights of the Facebook with the same failed strategies which brought ninety years of failure and worship the good overseas plutofascisms we know nothing about, as opposed to the domestic plutofascism we can't be bothered to resist!"

The disease afflicting these self-proclaimed Leftists is far more pernicious than the phenomenon of digital fake news, which is as old as the internet. It is the disease of imperialism. They think that because they denounce the occasional US war crime, this gives them the right to spout knowledgeably about 45 million Ukrainians whose language, culture and history they don't need to know -- because empire. They can proceed to proclaim final judgement on the countless other languages, cultures and struggles of the 85% of the planet who live in the industrializing world -- because empire. And if there's anything they don't know, they will interview the one and only native informant in the university system (the same university system which the Despot will now destroy, by the way) who will confirm what they already knew -- because empire.

You might think critiquing a few fringe Leftists is a waste of time. Not so. It's important to understand they are just one instance of the larger dysfunction of the American Left, from the smallest blogger to the likes of Thom Hartmann and Chris Hedges, formerly decent souls who now take money from Putinism's loathsome and despicable propaganda channel.

We have to be honest: there is no Left anymore in the United States. It will have to be created from anew, out of the tools, institutions and practices of the digital commons, and in dialogue with the resistances being born in the industrializing world.

A Republic Without a Public

The United Slavocracy is a republic for the 0.1%. It's a despotism for everyone else. Slowly, ever so slowly, the reality is seeping in. To my fellow corporate serfs who still have a job and money: don't worry, you'll be joining us debt-chattel in the poorhouse soon enough. For the next eight years (this slightly dented brain can see no further), every dawn will be the brief intermission between the insupportably awful and the still worse yet to come. It's called capitalism. Either we end it worldwide, or it will end the world.

End-of-the-Empire Reading

So much to do, so little time. But enough time, just barely, for some joyous holiday cheer. And then there's citizen journalism.


Still, the job of a geopolitical thinker isn't all sunshine and rainbows. As you may or may not know, the rotting carcass of the geopolitical options for the US empire, one of the oldest empires in existence (founded in 1607) have shrunk down to exactly two. It's either the Spanish decline (slow rot after the Hapsburg hegemony, centuries of stagnation, loss of colonies, civil war and fascism), or the Austrian decline (slow rot from within, military collapse and fascism). So far, the signs are pointing to full-scale Austrocalypse. More on this to come.

Neon Against the Shadow

There are so many reasons to appreciate CD Projekt's wondrous and awe-inspiring The Witcher 3, but there is one worth which has become salient far sooner than I expected: at the very end of the videogame's storyline, the fantasy role-playing narrative mutates, like some unimaginable quantum technology from the future, into a science fiction role-playing epic. It does so simply, yet ingeniously, with a twist as enthralling as it is convincing. You simply cannot imagine the game ending any other way that it does. This is CD Projekt's way of saying "thank you" to its fans: a subtle way of letting us know that fantasy's end is cyberpunk's beginning.

No spoilers, but if haven't already done so, log in to Gog.com and arm yourselves with the source code of the Resistance.

China Throws a Drone Party

Just eleven days ago, I wrote that reality was about to reassert itself on this dying empire. Well, reality just busted down the door: China's Navy seizes American underwater drone in South China Sea.

The American Studies historians will get the joke instantly. But if it's not obvious, read the Reuters report, and then think to yourself: why would China want to flip the bird to the Despot on December 16th, of all days? December 16th... December 16th... why, yes, that December 16th!

The original Tea Party was a brilliant piece of revolutionary theater. Nobody was hurt, America switched from tea to coffee, and the revolution went from optional to inevitable.

China's Drone Party is an equally brilliant piece of digital theater. Nobody was hurt, the location -- directly offshore the Philippines, a US colony between 1898 and 1945 -- was perfect, the world has switched from US to East Asian machine-tools, and the multipolar world went from inevitable to inexorable.

The Shadow Deepens

So after a torrent of campaign verbiage excoriating Goldman Sachs, the Despot named Steven Mnuchin -- a 17-year Goldman Sachs bankster -- as Secretary of the Treasury. Dracula, meet blood bank.

The other cabinet picks range from the merely frightful, to a number of creatures so appalling that not even invading lizard aliens would deign to use them as proxy quislings.

The disintegrating American empire continues to reproduce the worst aspects of the Soviet collapse with absolutely none of the latter's anticolonial silver linings. Since 1991, the former Eastern bloc nations have produced some of the finest videogames, fantasy novels, and citizen journalism in the world: CD Projekt Red, Andrej Sapkowski, the OCCRP, etc.

Not America. We went from Dubya's Iraqicide, that catastrophic attempt to turn the geopolitical clock back to 1898, to Premier Obamachev's bailout of the banksters without any fundamental reform of anything at all. True, we did have Occupy - but then Eastern Europe had Euromaidan.

Gravity will now reassert itself over the smoking wreckage of this once mighty empire.