I started this newsletter to explore the history of how America weaponizes nationalism in the service of empire. And with COVID-19, both nationalism and empire are being deployed in a big way.

On the empire front: Using the chaos of the pandemic, we’ve been ramping up attacks on the usual list of official enemies — and Iran and Venezuela in particular. Trump’s bloodthirsty hairless walrus Mike Pompeo has been going around telling anyone who’ll listen that he and his people want to make sure COVID-19 kills as many people as possible over there. He wants to use the pandemic to finally push these countries over the edge — and so they’re squeezing them more than ever. On top of that, our military is bombing targets in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and continuing the war in Yemen — all in the midst of a pandemic.

None of this is very surprising. We’re a predatory empire and we act like it. The pandemic is simply an opportunity to inflict more damage.

All this stuff is hard to keep track of. Luckily, Abby Martin’s The Empire Files has a great 15-minute primer on what these assholes are up to all around the world. Check it out.

What’s funny is that a lot of people in DC thought that COVID-19 would lead to the collapse of China’s Communist Party. The idea as far as I can tell is that China’s authoritarian system is took weak, too fragile. It simply would not be able to handle this virus. The Chinese people would rise up and the Communist Party would have no choice but to come begging for an American humanitarian intervention. And in the days before COVID-19 fully hit here at home, even lefties and progressives on my Facebook feed started gloating about China getting hit by the virus so hard. To them it was proof that “authoritarian” societies can’t deal with pandemics as effectively as “democracies.”

Well, turns out that America is the one that can’t handle the virus. China’s has coped with it much better than us. It’s even sending out aid all over the world — including ventilators and protective gear to New York. All that our feds can do is seize shipments of gear destined for other countries. And all around the country people are desperate and lining up and waiting for hours to get free food — breadlines, but in cars.

We’re a failed society ruled by a predatory elite. And we’re also a predatory empire. These things go together.

—Yasha Levine

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