Paris, Beirut, Gaza, Hiroshima

Paris death tolls, claims of responsibility, false-flag theories, vows of merciless retaliation, military forces mobilized—the future of unlimited war our rulers promised after 9-11 continues to unfold before a world aghast at the atrocities. A ruthless logic underlies the apparently senseless violence. Unlimited war requires an unlimited supply of enemies, and an unlimited supply of enemies requires manufacturing an unlimited supply of hatred. That hatred now exists in overflowing abundance, not only hatred of the western corporate empire waging this war, but also hatred among the empire's unwitting subjects for the very people victimized in manufacturing the hatred. And, of course, unlimited war guarantees unlimited profits for the corporations that gain access to resources, markets, and cheap labor through its conquests.

Yet the day-by-day atrocities of this war mustn't make us lose sight of atrocity in a wider perspective. I don't mean the media bias that highlights 128 deaths in Paris while neglecting 40 deaths in Beirut. I mean the contrast between such attacks and overt state terrorism like Israel's assault on Gaza in 2014 that killed over 2200 Palestinians, 800 of them children and women. I mean the contrast between such isolated state terrorism and the US invasion of Iraq which has thus far killed at least half a million people. And I mean the even greater contrast between the atrocities of today's "war on terror" and those of the last world war, when the US killed 100,000 Japanese within minutes by nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Overall, World War II killed more than 60 million people, half again as many as lived under the Roman Empire at its largest. Nothing can surpass armed central authority in brutality and violence—violence committed not because of hatred, but for purposes of geopolitical dominance.

This doesn't make the Paris or Beirut death tolls less atrocious, it makes clear the cosmic atrocity of modern political power at work. Unlimited war turns restaurants, places of worship, and concert venues into battlefields, turns citizen against citizen in divisive hatred, casts a constant pall of terror over our daily lives. It tricks us into accepting fascism as a defense of "security" that only secures the advantage of our rulers, tricks us into funding, supporting, even dying in wars that only advance the frontlines of corporate conquest. Since Domination was invented 6000 years ago, the price of political power and privilege has always been paid in innocent human blood. Unless we condemn and challenge political power as such, rise up against it worldwide and dismantle its deadly institutions, the rivers of blood will continue to flow.

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