There was a John Carpenter movie back in the 1980s called They Live. The world was controlled by aliens. They lived among us humans. Some humans had been coopted to work for them; they were rewarded for their collaboration and were the wealthiest humans, the elite. Most humans were oblivious to this state of affairs, because the aliens among us looked just like humans. However, a small resistance had developed special sunglasses that allowed them to see the really hideous form of the aliens. Politicians, broadcasters, bankers, and so on were all really aliens, passing as human.
One guy had found a pair of the glasses and was able to see the aliens. He had to come to terms with the fact that he was seeing the world in a way that no one else could. Also, in a way that challenged how he had always thought the world operated. He tried to get his friend to put the glasses on for just a second. But his friend refused and fought him, almost to the death. Finally, he forced his friend to look through the glasses and, immediately, the guy saw and understood reality. Henceforth, he was part of the resistance. It took an instant. But, boy, did he resist facing the truth! He didn’t want to give up his illusion.
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Recently, someone told me that she didn’t have time to understand what was happening in the world. It was a crazy statement for me to process. It was like someone telling me that they didn’t have time to breathe. How can someone be so detached from the earth that they don’t care what happens to it? I see it everywhere … and always have. People live in their little moment in history without a sense of wonder, a sense of the vastness of time and space. You could say, without a soul. Without humility.
So, the point of his post is to offer They-Live sunglasses to people so that they may see daily life differently. You don’t need to research for years to finally understand what’s happening. You need to change your glasses and then go about your daily life. Then you will see the “aliens” everywhere. (Note to fact-checkers: I don’t think that the world is actually run by aliens. Just inhumans.)
In 1984, Orwell argued that he who controls the present controls the past and he who controls the past controls the future. He’s right. So, the question for us is where do we situate ourselves in time. What does the past mean? And, then, where are we going?
A decade ago, I was asked to write a fourth-year university course on the Cold War. I couldn’t imagine anything so boring, but I accepted the work as long as I could approach the Cold War as a brief moment in the five-hundred year history of the capitalist world system. This was the American-led period of capitalism. After the Cold War, Washington continued to lead the capitalist empire under the pretext of protecting the world from terrorism and rogue states and, more recently, deadly viruses. This last iteration, that we are witnessing presently, gives the game away: capitalism is at war with nature itself, with all life. (Not deliberately: nature and all life are just the collateral damage of capitalism.) To be a part of this willingly is to sell your soul. Once you put the They-Live glasses on, you won’t be able to go back.
The cover story for the Cold War was that the world was witnessing an epic struggle between capitalism (freedom) and communism (authoritarianism) for the soul of the planet. In fact, the Cold War was simply the expansion of capitalism worldwide. This was the American-led phase of capitalist expansion. But capitalism had been expanding already for nearly five centuries. Growth is one of the defining features of capitalism. Throughout the Cold War, capitalism expanded to destroy and swallow those economic systems that still thrived outside the world system. One way that capitalism grows is by swallowing up independent actors (communities, individuals, nations) that are then forced into dependence on the market for their survival. In other words, they need money to survive; money that the capitalists control. Capitalists then exploit labour and the environment to exhaustion. Once destroyed, capitalists move on. The system is based on competition: either your business (or nation) grows big enough to swallow the competition, or you are swallowed out of existence. Eventually, this need to grow comes up against the physical limits of a finite planet whose natural wealth has been destroyed. Labour also is worked into poverty, ill-health, and death. This is not new: in an earlier phase, slaves were simply worked to death on plantations and then replaced with new Africans until they too died. The plantations were also worked to death and simply left by the capitalists when they found new places to exploit. Forests were cut down out of existence. Animals were hunted to extinction. Fish caught to annihilation. Soil depleted to exhaustion. (Where we find ourselves today.)
In the later twentieth century, capitalists looked for new worlds to conquer, since the earth’s natural systems were running out, depleted, exhausted towards extinction and destruction. The major turn was to finance capitalism. They could make more money by buying productive businesses, splitting them up, bankrupting the spin-offs that held the workers’ pensions, which they appropriated, leaving the workers unemployed and penniless. They could make more money by charging interest on loans (real estate mortgages, student loans) and charging fees for infrastructure the government sold to the large hedge funds than by producing anything in the material world. In this world of finance capitalism, what the books claim you have as assets has nothing to do with reality. In this way, we’ve been living in a metaverse for decades. An alternate universe. (By the way, for those who are trying to keep alive nationalist ideals: whom do you think destroyed America’s manufacturing base and sent the jobs to China?)
What happened during the Cold War and beyond was the elimination of potential threats to the capitalist empire. Countries were brought into the empire in its transnational phase. Transnational capitalism was structured in a way that would make it almost impossible to unravel. Individual countries each play their part in the empire. Nation states are necessary to keep the system functioning. And, once incorporated into the system, they can’t get out. The governments of nation-states exist to deliver their resources and population to the system. Just like the collaborating humans in They Live deliver the earth and its people to the aliens, so do nation states cooperate with transnational capital. The leaders are well compensated. If they choose to resist transnational capital, they are destroyed – usually assassinated.
There had been a recurring debate in Canadian foreign-policy circles for decades: can there be an independent foreign policy for Canada? Of course, these academics meant independent of American policy. My answer is that the real question is whether there could be an independent foreign policy for the United States. Independent of its ruling class, I mean. The answer is, of course not: at least not within the capitalist world system.
It was never about competition among countries. It was about class. And the populations of every country are there to be dominated and controlled in the interests of the same people who manage them for transnational capital. Americans and Canadians who thought they were privileged in this world system had better wake up fast. Put the They-Live glasses on while you have the chance. You are no longer necessary to the rulers and are being tossed overboard.
Alison McDowell positions herself with the earth, nature, and the original peoples of the United States in her opposition to finance capitalism and the present assault on life. She is correctly uncovering the military foundations of the web that is weaving us all into the metaverse, a system of artificial intelligence that is colonizing our human bodies and that has, as its goal, control of all life on earth. Control from the inside of bodies. It’s terrifying and it requires They-Live glasses to see. That is the meaning and purpose of the graphene oxide that the vaccines are injecting into all humans on earth for no apparent reason. (Covid?: get serious.) It is such a bizarre and unbelievable project that it is beyond the imagination of most people. However, the science has been in development since the beginning of the Cold War.
This is where we’ve been headed all along, since world war two.
When I hear naive Americans talk about the sanctity of the constitution and the founding fathers, I see them as resisting They-Live glasses. Alison’s is the only framing that makes sense to me. She draws inspiration from the Native American poet and activist John Trudel. To start your analysis with the constitution misunderstands the violence of capitalist expansionism. The countries of Canada and the United States are empires in themselves, built on the continuous and continuing expropriation of the continent and the refusal of independent cultures that aspire to live within, and partnered with, nature.
This empire has been expanding for five-hundred years. It has proven itself to be ruthless, inhuman, and anti-life.
By the way, we could well be seeing the end of the capitalist world system and the inception of something new. Immanuel Wallerstein wrote a provocative article in the 1960s about free will. He argued that, for most of human history, free will has little relevance. For instance, imagine a slave on a galley at the height of the Roman empire. What difference would his rebellion have made? However, at an historical moment when a world system has arrived at its conclusion (as I think is happening now), then each action has the potential to move the world in a new direction. I think that it’s within that historical framework that we are under a moral imperative to act today as moral beings.