Part 3: Sage Series I 5524.3
Benjamin Netanyahu used the opportunity of a cowardly massacre on stolen land to escalate a conflict that has fractured the Western world. Much as the United States maliciously killed hundreds of thousands as part of its triple war in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the War on Terror, Israel’s prime minister had no limit in his pursuit of bloodshed from the Muslim people across the eastern Mediterranean region. In Gaza, the retribution has destroyed thousands of innocent families. The extension of hostilities into Lebanon prolongs the possibility of regional warfare with Iran as well as the seeds of a third World War. Israel, like the United States, betrayed the ideals of its founding by believing that it must kill without limit to defend itself. Had both nations learned the lessons of the twentieth century, military restraint would have guided wisdom in these nations.
With the American election of 2024, a new era of global politics begins. The alignment of the NATO nations around the world is broken, and, from its remnants, a dangerous collaboration among Russia, China, Iran, Israel, North Korea, and the United States offers decades of abuse and instability. The corruption of the American aristocracy is the key element in this transformation. The children of apartheid South Africa have crafted an agenda to bankrupt the world’s democracies in service to a vision of multi-polar empires and generations of warfare beyond the horrors of the first two world wars. Consider the ideologies that combined in the MAGA coalition in 2024. Vladimir Putin’s broken soul of communist espionage starves for vengeance against the West. Xi Jinping, in the shadow of Mao Zedong, marches forward, determined to show that democracy is too fragile to endure. Leonard Leo’s conservative Catholicism, wedded to the insurgent evangelism of American southern protestants, fueled the Israeli nationalism that burned the peaceful aspirations of the United Nations. Mitch McConnell’s confederate Republicanism dismantled federal progressivism for two full generations in defense of the Ku Klux Klan’s dream of jurisprudence led by Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas. All of this poison bound together by the insatiable, unreasoning greed of Donald Trump and the forces of white nationalist patriarchy.
Africa remains the unconquered territory for these forces as they compete to shape the future of the world. Trump’s Red Empire has an advantage through central Africa. The enduring hostilities among western Europe, Russia, and China will inform short-term negotiations for access to the continent’s resources. South and Central America face intensifying bondage under the Red Empire, and their best option is to break the Monroe Doctrine in alliance with Europe, Southeast Asia, as well as northern and southern Africa. These consequences are truly illmatic on a scale unimaginable a year ago. The rhetoric and legal practice of critical race theory remains a fundamental tool to reshape the global order in the years ahead. Resistance on a global scale must take new shapes to fracture the supply chains and consumer entitlement that American conservatives need to assert their power.
One of the essential political struggles is the conception of global reparations. For more than a century, African Americans have led this effort to redistribute wealth in North America to repair the damage of enslavement and segregation.
In the last decade, these movements have successfully challenged the remnants of European empire and capitalist extraction. Part of the backlash that created the Red Empire was the indignant outrage that reparations might actually be paid in this century. Red imperialists hope to inflict deprivation wherever reparations claims are most feasible. A new generation of apartheid and Jim Crow policies will attempt to bankrupt and destroy the centers of Black authority in cities and states around the world. The reverse must, in fact, occur. The nations of the global south must unite to starve the developed world of the natural resources that power the information economies. The force that thwarted the last effort to consolidate corporate control on global politics in 2020 came from the COVID pandemic. For three months, production and distribution stopped, crippling the Red imperial march to extraction. To repeat and sustain that moment in 2025 is the first step towards a world that rejects authoritarian domination.
The alternative is nearly too horrific to imagine. The Supreme Court of the United States has positioned itself as a Christian theocratic arbiter of law. Its corporate lackeys in the digital markets intend to weaken, or even destroy, the stability of the dollar as the basis for the world order. Widespread violence has returned as the ultimate currency in determining social and political order. Rape, sexual assault, and forced reproduction have returned as the foundation of patriarchy. A voracious closet will devour sexual expression, silencing the voices of the LGBTQ community. Advocacy for the poor, the disabled, and senior citizens face crippling sanctions and starvation of essential resources. For immigrants and Black people, exile and incarceration will grow – the only options will be brutality and death. The world has seen the camps that lead to extermination and war in the past. However, today, there is an infinite capacity to combine artificial intelligence with surveillance technologies and the human genome project to promote wholesale genetic extirpation for billions of people.
The Red Empire represents a danger that humanity has never faced. It is just getting started.
Walter D. Greason is the Wallace Professor of History at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
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