The learning curve for video is quite steep, and we are still figuring out the technical elements, but we want to make this a collaborative space that facilitates more interaction with our community. We have mainly functioned at a distance, intentionally avoiding the influencer model of “content” production. We remain committed to rejecting all “influencer” pretenses, though we will show our faces in our videos. We feel that this is an important standard to uphold given how corporate algorithms structure expression and blunt political clarity for the sake of attention-seeking ultimately attached to big tech data collection tied to consumerism.

Truthfully, the decision to create video content in today’s period of intense counterinsurgency is a risk. However, we have seen partisans across the world being willing to fight and to die for the liberation struggle. We must be prepared to do our part. With this restructured platform, we hope to make a contribution to the masses and honor the many heroes among us who continue to sacrifice and strive for life after empire.

Because of this, After Empire is leading a reading group on political repression and counterinsurgency. Although surveillance technology is a major tool of repression, we will be focusing on more insidious forms, particularly at the interpersonal, ideological, and institutional levels. 

Through a mixture of movies, television, and book excerpts we will explore reactionary repression across political movements, households, sexuality, and other relevant contexts. Our objective is to prepare ourselves to recognize reactionary repression both when it is happening to us AND when we perpetuate it. 

Additionally, we'll study contemporary repressive tactics, such as the crackdown on the Palestinian solidarity activists and the use of RICO to criminalize decentralized activist structures (Stop Cop City). 

The group will begin meeting weekly on Wednesday evenings at 7PM CST via zoom starting December 4th. Please register at this link, and you’ll receive information in the next week or so to help you prepare for our first meeting. Come prepared to engaged in participatory collective study and discussion.

If you see people struggling with the fear and uncertainty of this moment, get them to this call. Share this post widely and let’s rise to the crisis with purposeful community.

Feel free to reach out with any questions (info@lifeafterempire.org) and please — join us!

She tried to balance out this blatant warmongering with a mealy-mouthed critique that “U.S. aid to Ukraine has been wrongly tied to unconditional support for Netanyahu's assault on Gaza.”

It’s as craven as it is pathetic. AOC bloviating on about separating the Ukraine war vote from the Israel war vote was just a cynical pump fake wholly consistent with her role as controlled opposition within the liberal imperialist order.

Compare AOC’s imperialist apologia with the U.K.’s George Galloway, recently elected to parliament, who nearly two years ago exposed the war on Ukraine for the NATO-sponsored criminal racket it always has been:

AOC is like Jordan in the 80’s: fake left, go right. 

That’s a reference to the social media trend started by world-class hater and Lebron James superfan, Mike Peek. Like many opportunist influencers plucked from obscurity by social media algorithms, Mike Peek is an obnoxious buffoon. He has one note, but it rings true. For months now, each day Mike Peek has gone on Instagram to upload a video of himself watching old basketball games and shamelessly ridiculing basketball players of the 90’s, 80’s, and 70’s as he shouts various catch phrases at the screen. One slogan soars above all others. His go-to move: “We Done with the 90’s!”  

So, We Done With AOC!

Look at how aggressively AOC confronts a handful of protesters criticizing her weak-kneed approach to Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza:

AOC was belligerent enough to get in the faces of these people asking her basic questions about her past remarks, a record she of course lied about in her dismissive retorts. But she didn’t have an ounce of this kind of aggression on January 6th. Instead of leading the charge against the reactionary siege of Congress that day, as she was duty-bound to do, she filmed herself cowering on Instagram and recounting stories of personal trauma from her past. Lindsey Graham showed more courage than AOC on January 6th! 

That’s BIG TRASH!

The U.S. has led the Ukrainian people by the nose into their collective slaughter, first by overthrowing their government in 2014 and then by flooding the country with arms and weapons systems in order to antagonize Russia. In the two years since the war began, U.S. battle tactics have failed on the ground, and NATO’s arrogant belief in their technological superiority has shattered against the reality of the weapons systems being destroyed almost as fast as they are deployed in many cases. 

U.S. militarist delusion has led to the wholesale destruction of the U.S.-trained Ukrainian armed forces. By 2024, the Ukrainian government was forcibly seizing disabled people to send to the front lines. The latest issue of Vogue Magazine betrays the desperation of the situation, as these PR vultures glamorize sending barely trained Ukrainian youth, kids really, to go die in a war they cannot win. 

At best, the U.S. used the slaughter of the Ukrainian people to test the battlefield capabilities of its tactics and weapons systems, similar to how the Germans and other imperialist powers tested weapons on the Spanish Republic in the buildup to World War II. These wars are crimes, and the Ukrainian people should not be treated as expendable pawns in a geopolitical gambit. AOC’s submission to imperialist war policy, particularly in how she slavishly recapitulates imperialist talking points without even bothering to repackage them in nominally socialist rhetoric, is an embarrassment of generational proportions. 

AOC is BIG TRASH!

So yeah, WE DONE WITH AOC!

As has been widely reported, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) found that there is a plausible case that Israel is guilty of committing genocide, and an order has been issued to cease all killing of Palestinian civilians. If actually enforced —an apparently unlikely scenario— this order would amount to a ceasefire in all but name. If Israel continues to defy this order, as Prime Minister Netanyahu has promised it will, the next mode of resistance carried out in the courts of international humanitarian law will be to challenge those who continue to aid and abet the genocide. 

In a conference convened by Iran last December, Nicaragua’s Government of Reconciliation and National Unity expressed its “militant solidarity with the Palestinian people and their just cause” and condemned Israel for “violating the entire system and the International Legal Institutionality.” Now that South Africa has taken the initiative to make a plausible case against Israel at the ICJ, Nicaragua is entering the fray by extending the case to include Israel’s allies for providing weapons and failing in their humanitarian duties by ceasing support for UNRWA. 

As reported by Anadolu Agency, Nicaragua has “notified the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, and Canada ‘of its decision to hold them responsible under international law for gross and systematic violations to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, international humanitarian law and customary law, including the law of occupation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, in particular the Gaza Strip.’”   

A ruling against Israel’s allies in the West could prove troubling for Washington, and for the liberal establishment more generally. As Nicaraguans well know from their past successes in winning rulings against the U.S. at The Hague, the U.S. will veto any measure to enforce these rulings at the UN Security Council.

We must ask ourselves, Does the terrain of international humanitarian law belong to us? 

Immediately upon Israel’s response to the October 7th Hamas attack, activists rallied for a ceasefire. This ceasefire coalition invoked terms such as war crimes, proportionality, genocide, among others – all of which have legal implications defined largely by international humanitarian law. It is understandable that people would seek an immediate means to intervene to stop the mass slaughter of the Palestinian people. 

However, as argued by Eyal Weizman’s 2011 book The Least of All Possible Evils (covered in our January book club), the task of the International Court of Justice is not to end wars, but to ensure that the “necessary” brutality of modern warfare is moderated by choosing the “lesser evil” at every possible opportunity. The purpose of this moderation is to ensure the maximum efficiency of both imperialist violence and the ensuing imperialist rule. The terms invoked by anti-war activists (proportionality, war crimes, etc.) are the very same concepts that imperialist armies use as war doctrine to guide their soldiers and weapons systems. 

Humanitarianism was the modus operandi of the siege on Gaza in 2007, when Israel set up the blockade that exists to this day. Israel cut off the Gazan economy from the rest of the world and restricted its population to living under permanent humanitarian governance. The humanitarian economy is based on calculations restricting food and fuel to the absolute minimum possible without causing a “humanitarian crisis.” The Israeli military set up specialized research teams to establish these minimum requirements and monitor their implementation. As a mode of governance, humanitarianism is the means by which Palestinian liberation is politically foreclosed, rendering its people wholly dependent on international humanitarian flows in perpetuity. Even the so-called “two-state solution” wouldn’t fundamentally change this dependent condition. 

Today, Israel speaks of dispelling Palestinians from Gaza altogether on the basis of humanitarianism. A January 2024 CNN article quotes Gila Gamliel, Israel’s intelligence minister and a member of the ruling-party Likud, who sought to “promote the voluntary resettlement of Palestinians in Gaza, for humanitarian reasons, outside of the Strip.” That’s ethnic cleansing as humanitarianism, and such a maneuver shouldn’t surprise us. Often, humanitarian law is the very mechanism by which liberal states manage the brutalization, destruction, and exploitation of subordinated nations and peoples.  

When Nicaragua condemns Israel and its allies for withdrawing support for humanitarian groups operating in Gaza, they are defending the immediate needs of Gazan civilians, but they are also entering into a process of negotiating over the necro-economy of the humanitarian war—who will be allowed to die, how many, how quickly, and so on. The short-term and immediate relief granted on humanitarian grounds is often a Pyrrhic victory. Liberation will not be achieved on this terrain, where too much is conceded before we’ve even uttered the first word.

Socialist politics require a radical transformation of society —the kind of radical transformation that would be required to build a new democracy in Palestine from the river to the sea.

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Over the last 100 days, much of the criticism of the siege on Gaza has focused on Israel’s invasion as a ‘disproportionate’ response to the violence of October 7th. Where did this concept come from? Why is proportionality framing the opposition to Israel’s war in the first place? The invocation of proportionality, war crimes, and other international humanitarian law concepts is as ubiqutous as it is uncritical, redirecting anti-war energy into frames and tactics that cannot end imperialist wars.

Eyal Weizman helps us to understand that proportionality and other concepts of international humanitarian law are created to make imperialist wars more effective, not to end them. As Weizman aruges in the introduction, “International Humanitarian Law does not seek to end wars but rather to ‘regulate’ and ‘shape’ the way militaries wage them” (11).

Through an analysis of the emergence of international humanitarian law as a politcal project, followed by a focus on the spatial technologies and built environment in the management of “lesser evil” projects from Ethiopia to Kosovo to Bosnia to Gaza, Weizman’s analysis can help us determine what frameworks might be most useful for making a world After Empire possible.

Far from being exclusively about international humanitarianism, Weizman’s book also tackles the ethical concept of the “lesser evil” more broadly. As those of us in the United States enter an election year, the same tired scripts of positioning Biden as the so-called “lesser evil” candidate are winding up, making Weizman’s arguments all the more relevant.

Per usual, we’ll be discussing The Least of All Possible Evils on the After Empire podcast in the coming weeks. Until then, please feel free to contribute questions, comments, and provocations.

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Imperialism is the enemy of peace, just or otherwise. For decades the imperialist decree has been “order, not peace.” Henry Kissinger, the key statesman responsible for the U.S.-led order in the Middle East, “believed peace was neither an achievable nor even a desirable objective in the Middle East.” For Kissinger and other imperialists, an unresolved conflict frozen indefinitely (whether by a “peace process” or “humanitarian pause” or “ceasefire”) is better than a peaceful political resolution, as such a fundamental shift could potentially disrupt imperial hierarchy. We see this imperial logic play out from Palestine to Korea to Ireland. Our demands must no longer remain contained by the parameters of imperialist interests.

What we call the Middle East was divided by imperial partition in the aftermath of World War I. Time and again imperialist powers have thwarted the transformational aspirations of the masses in the Middle East by subjecting the people to brutal religious clericalism and secular police states. Perpetual imperial repression requires reliable enforcers, Israel being one of them. This imperial bargain cannot hold, and Israel’s pro-imperial servility has it irretrievably hurdling toward “geopolitical suicide.” 

Israel controls the West Bank, Gaza, and all other lands from the river to the sea as an “Israeli Sparta beholden to American power,” as Norman Finkelstein once wrote. Israel rules on the basis of the formal legal exclusion of its non-Jewish residents, who are formally denied equality before the law and are forcibly contained in ghettos. 

From the river to the sea, we demand democracy. 

The two-state solution is an abdication of liberation as a goal and constitutive principle of the Palestinian movement. The two-state solution is the formal concession to imperial partition of the land and apartheid governance of the people. When we declare Free Palestine, we seek a secular democratic state from the river to the sea, where all residents are fully incorporated into the society without regard to religion and ethnicity. Palestinian liberation is not just for the Palestinians – it’s for Jewish people, too. It’s for us all. 

We oppose apartheid governance, imperial partition, and the imposition of ghettoism anywhere in the world. We have the same aspirations for liberation in the United States, as we live in a land where millions of our fellow residents are excluded from citizenship and exploited in the shadows. There is a George Floyd killed by police in this country nearly every day. Religious authority is increasingly the basis of public power in the United States. Just last month, the newly elected Speaker of the House and aspiring theocrat, Rep. Mike Johnson, declared in his initial remarks as speaker:

“I believe that scripture, the Bible is very clear. That God is the one that raises up those in authority… What is our creed? ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.’ Not born equal. Created equal.”

We refuse to submit to a vision of the U.S. as a Christian state, just as we reject Israel’s claims to be a Jewish state. We reject religious statehood as a matter of principle, whatever its religious content. 

We do not believe that society should be ruled on the basis of religious authority in general, and we specifically reject the notion that ethnoreligious statehood – the Jewish state – is necessary to secure the physical safety of Jewish people. By demanding a Free Palestine, from the river to the sea, we call for a democratic secular state of religious and ethnic pluralism for all, not for the eradication of Jewish people. 

We believe that Jewish cultures are a constitutive element of our shared society, and we are radically committed to the right of Jewish peoples and faith to exist side by side with everyone else. Jewish people have the right to live anywhere in the world as fully emancipated and incorporated constituents within the polities in which they reside. We call for an end to religious supremacy and sectarian exclusion.

It is entirely antisemitic to believe that Jewish people cannot or should not be fully incorporated into the polities in which they reside. “A horse that is born in a cowshed is far from being a cow. A Jew who was born in Germany does not thereby become a German; he is still a Jew,” German statesman Hermann Ahlwardt spewed this cruel barbarism in 1895. The idea that Jews belong in Israel is Ahlwardt’s 1895 antisemitism rearticulated in 2023 geopolitical terms. 

We understand the urgency that people feel as they desperately seek to pressure the belligerent sponsors of Israeli apartheid to stop this most recent iteration of mass killing. Yet, while a ceasefire has been in place over the past couple of days, imperial business has continued as usual. Joe Biden has sought to lift existing restrictions on Israel’s access to stockpiled weapons, while Israeli officials have planned the further ghettoization of displaced Palestinians. The imperialists can accept a ceasefire, as they have so many times before in Palestine and other conflicts, but they cannot countenance political transformation against their order. 

From the river to the sea, we demand democracy – these are fighting words, an invocation of revolution against the imperialists. From the river to the sea does not belong to the Israeli apartheid state, nor does it reside with those who seek to replace Israel with some other sectarian authority. From the river to the sea is a beacon to all those who are discarded, particularly the other apartheid states that rely on externalized peoples and disposable migrant laborers. It is a guiding light for us all. 

The liberation of the Palestinian people can only take place as part of a broader radical rupture in the region and the world. We must break the hold of imperialist frameworks, and call a new world order into being that is predicated on the full incorporation of all people, everywhere. 

“The Palestinian cause is not a cause for Palestinians only, but a cause for every revolutionary, wherever they are, as a cause of the exploited and oppressed masses in our era.” 

– Ghassan Kanafani, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine

We call for an international protracted popular uprising to end the occupation of Palestine and liberate the Palestinian people. 

The following strategic plan of action is oriented to the United States, but we wish to unite with forces internationally along similar lines.

Core Principles:

1. The people of Gaza need more than a ceasefire. They need us to end the blockade of Gaza and the occupation of the West Bank. Peace under occupation and imperial subjugation is no peace at all. 

2. We call for a just peace in Palestine. That is, a peace which provides transformational political resolutions to the exclusion, degradation, and exploitation inherent to the settler colonial project of Israel and all other imperialist impositions. A just peace is a means, not an end. 

3. When we declare Free Palestine, we seek a secular democratic state from the river to the sea, where all residents are fully incorporated into the society without regard to religion and ethnicity.

We have identified four key fronts for waging peace in the struggle for the liberation of Palestine: cultural, political, economic, and military.

The Cultural Front 

Culture is how we imagine and define who we are and what future we want. 

Literature is a crucial aspect of how a people exist as a nation, and is of particular importance to oppressed nationalities who are denied political and economic self-determination. 

The condemnation of the Palestinian Literary Festival at the University of Pennsylvania, and the subsequent withdrawal of millions of dollars in pledged donations to the university, were attempts to invalidate the cultural and national identity of the Palestinian people and intimidate the rest of us from recognizing or affirming Palestinian national culture. 

What You Can Do:

• Organize readings and literary events at your local libraries to recite the revolutionary works of distinguished Palestinian artists such as:

  • Mahmoud Darwish, known as the National Poet of Palestine

  • Ghassan Kanafani, award-winning novelist

The Political Front

Recognition is how states receive legal status within the international system. As Gaza faces an unprecedented, genocidal onslaught it is imperative for the rest of the world to recognize the legitimacy of its people. 

What You Can Do:

• Local Government Action:

  • Attend your local city council meeting and propose naming Gaza City your sister city, as a recognition of Palestinian self-determination and right to exist. 

    • Many cities already recognize Gaza City as a sister city, including:

      • Barcelona, Spain 

      • Turin, Italy

      • Brasília, Brazil

      • Moyle District Council, County Antrim in the Occupied Six Counties 

• State Legislative Action (full list of legislative dates for all states here): 

  • Overturn state laws that criminalize condemnation of Israel by labeling it antisemitic hate speech subject to hate crime enhancements

    • 30 states have adopted antisemitism hate crime legislation that codifies the working definition of antisemitism adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, thus potentially subjecting citizens to hate crime charges for saying “the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” or “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.” 

  • Overturn state laws that ban the nonviolent protest campaign of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS)

    • 35 states have anti-Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions laws on the books to discourage nonviolent protest of Israel.

The Economic Front

The apartheid occupation of Palestine is perpetuated not only by force of arms, but also by the international trade of goods and services with the occupiers. 

What You Can Do:

• Participate in the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions Movement 

  • Individuals, clubs, religious organizations, businesses, universities, local governments, and others can take direct action through consumer boycotts and institutional divestment thereby refusing to conduct business with enterprises that uphold the apartheid economy of Israel.

• Refuse to Sign Anti-BDS Loyalty Clauses in State Contracts  

  • Even though many states have anti-BDS laws to on the books to discourage boycotts, a federal judge ruled that states cannot outright forbid companies from boycotting Israel so any company or contract employee should reject such clauses.

The Military Front

Logistics drive the operational decisions in war. Contemporary conventional war relies heavily on ranged weapons systems, particularly artillery. In Gaza, artillery shells are crucial for Israel’s brutal siege against Palestinian civilians, and Israel has insisted “they urgently need artillery shells to prepare for a ground invasion in Gaza,” and in response, the U.S. has pledged to provide more artillery shells to Israel for its siege of Gaza, which will kill thousands of Palestinian civilians.

To meet the demand, U.S. manufacturers are accelerating the production of artillery rounds. Prior to the War in Ukraine, the U.S. produced approximately 14,000 artillery rounds per month. In order to sustain and expand the war machine, the U.S. aims to produce 90,000 artillery rounds each month. Currently, U.S. manufacturers are producing 28,000 per month and rising. 

Artillery shell production is set to expand at some of the following U.S. Army locations:

• Scranton Army Ammunition Plant in Pennsylvania 

• Iowa Army Ammunition Plant of Middleton, Iowa

• Army Ammunition Plant of Kingsport, Tennessee 

• McAlester Army Ammunition Plant of Garland, Texas

What You Can Do:

• Peace activists can engage in demonstrations at weapons manufacturing sites. 

• Call for an arms embargo against Israel, as well as a just transition for the workers of the arms manufacturing plants of Scranton, Middleton, Mesquite and elsewhere, so that their advanced production skills can be used to make socially-responsible goods that serve the people rather than kill us. 

This moment of turmoil and despair demands of us, as the poet Sade once implored, to be soldiers of love. We are going to win, not by fighting what we hate, but by saving what we love. We must turn resistance into construction, and engage multiple fronts to call forth a world after empire.

This document is merely a starting point in forging a new popular struggle for Palestinian liberation. We want to hear from you if you take any of these actions or if you have any suggestions. We are sending this document to comrades around the globe, and if you know anyone who would benefit from this document, please share and put them in touch with us (including Sade, if you know her — she is our hero!). We can be reached at info@lifeafterempire.org.

After Empire is a partisan think tank and cultural institute dedicated to resolving the big contradictions of our shared world and advancing social life beyond the exploitation, degradation, and exclusion fostered by imperialism. After Empire seeks to unite with all people who desire a liberated society.

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We unite with people around the world in their deep desire for peace.

The anti-war movement we need must be organized around three minimum principles:

1. Dissolve NATO

2. Demilitarize Europe

3. Destroy all nuclear weapons

We see the global ravages of imperialism, and we are prepared to fight for the common humanity of all people.

In just the last twenty years, the world has known an unyielding tide of brutal wars – from Libya, Afghanistan, and Syria, to Iraq, Palestine, Ethiopia, Yemen, and more. In the last eighteen months there were five coups across Africa. U.S.-imposed sanctions have created a humanitarian crisis in Venezuela, an act of war that has destabilized the entire continent.

The U.S. continues to militarize Europe, building new military installations ever closer to Russia, recently authorizing a new base with nuclear capabilities a mere 100 miles from the Polish-Russian border. Ukraine has been forced into a death chamber, suspended between U.S. and Russian spheres of influence as tensions mount due to the aggressive expansion of NATO.

Collectively, the world’s nuclear powers continue to hold humanity hostage with threats of total annihilation.

Peace is not enough, we must fight for life after empire.

⭑⭑⭑

The Russian invasion inspired what Ukrainian President Zelenskyy has called “the big anti-war coalition that unites many countries.”

This multinational anti-war coalition not only seized the assets of Russian billionaires but also imposed broad sanctions on the Russian economy.

This anti-war coalition has supplied Ukraine with billions of dollars in arms, spurring an arms race in Europe. Germany is now doubling its military spending to form its largest force since the Nazi period, and what is expected to be the largest military in Europe.

This anti-war coalition is now agitating for the U.S. and NATO to enforce a no-fly-zone in Ukraine, a massive escalation of the war that would require shooting down Russian planes and bombing Russian air installations. NATO members Estonia, Lithuania, and Slovenia have already passed parliamentary resolutions to that effect.

In his remarks to the U.S. Congress, President Zelenskyy acknowledged the antiwar coalition, but concluded, “We need to move on and do more.” He then invoked Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech shortly before demanding the formation of a new U.S.-led global police force which could militarily intervene anywhere in the world to “keep the peace.”

The present anti-war coalition is not the anti-war movement we need.

⭑⭑⭑

It should not be a surprise that calls for peace can obscure escalations of war.

The week before invading Iraq, U.S. President George Bush declared that the “cause of peace” required preemptive war.

The relevant question is peace for whom and to what end?

The U.S. is the primary steward and chief enforcer of the imperial system. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, U.S. policy has been defined by the belligerent expansion of its global sphere of influence.

Russia seeks to preserve its own marginal sphere of influence and revise its place as a junior partner within the imperial world order. Despite clashing with U.S. interests, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is an expression of the imperialist order and not a break with the system.

Opposition to imperialism, by default, requires confrontation with U.S. hegemony. But not every conflict with the U.S. is an attack on imperialism.

It doesn’t matter which hegemon predominates in the imperial system. Whether it’s Russia, China, the U.S., or some other imperial accommodation, the wars wouldn’t stop.

⭑⭑⭑

The anti-war movement we need cannot triangulate between imperial rivals, but must instead uphold the struggle for the liberation of all oppressed peoples.

The anti-war movement we need must reject all imperial accommodations and privileges.

We will not join our nation’s rulers in antagonizing their imperial rivals.

We will fight the real enemy.

What is peace without liberation?

A peace that perpetuates empire is no peace at all.

We call on the people of all nations to transform the demand for international peace into a fight for a world beyond empire.

Peace to the streets, war on the palaces.

After Empire is a partisan think tank and cultural institute dedicated to resolving the big contradictions of our shared world and advancing social life beyond the exploitation, degradation, and exclusion fostered by imperialism. After Empire seeks to unite with all people who desire a liberated society.