It's Time to Wake Up!

Diabolical people possess the world's most technologically advanced and powerful military in the world.

Photo Credit: Alex Shuper

Here are the signs of the fall of an empire. The empire overextends itself into unending wars and military bases. There is massive inequality and an end to the middle class. Institutions become corrupt, and everything is seen through a partisan lens, making legislation nearly impossible to pass.

Politicians scapegoat the poor and marginalized to distract from their greed and corruption. A populist leader promising to restore glory by targeting scapegoats emerges and accelerates the empire’s fall. Ecclesiastes 3 says, “There is nothing new under the sun.”

Today, with every violation of the rule of law, Trump and his corrupt goons violate international law and declare war on states to exploit and extract minerals and oil, while major weapon manufacturers like Lockheed Martin and Elbit Systems are increasing their profits on the backs of the escalation of human misery.

We live in a dangerous time, especially for those on the margins. Getting out of denial is extremely important, and changing strategy and tactics to combat what is taking place is essential - we are basically on the threshold of World War III. Trump is the spectacle to distract us from this truth.

We must stop looking at governance methods from the past and recognize that we are not in a time of peace. We must meet their all-consuming, destructive, and cannibalistic violence with non-violent resistance. Non-violent resistance is not a weak way of resistance; in fact, it’s been proven to be more effective at reaching its goals.

Nonviolent resistance lowers the barrier to participation, allowing anyone, regardless of age or background, to join in. While slavery ultimately required the Civil War to end, nonviolent movements have repeatedly proven very effective.

Harvard researchers Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan studied 323 resistance campaigns from 1900 to 2006. They found:

Nonviolent movements succeeded 53% of the time, compared to 26% for violent ones.

Nonviolent campaigns were 10 times more likely to transition to democracy.

They identified the “3.5% rule”: no government can withstand sustained resistance from just 3.5% of its population. In the US, that equals about 11.5 million people.

Now is also not the time for purity politics, leftist ideological supremacy, or secular puritan fundamentalism. Some deeply diabolical people possess the US army, the largest, most technologically advanced in recorded history, and all of its power to implement fascism and white supremacy again in the US, and to recolonize the whole world, not just the global south, to enrich their pockets on the back of the exploitation of vulnerable people and ecosystems.

This is not a time to bury our heads in the sand, wait for a messianic politician to arrive to save us, or lie down and allow defeat. It is a time for truth-telling, strategic, pragmatic decision-making, coalition and community building, and collective resistance. Now is the time for strikes, boycotts, artists, and poets to create language and sustain our spirits, for us to come together in intersectional solidarity and deep underground networks of communication to ensure that the most vulnerable among us are safe. It is a time to resist.