Rebellion in the Heart of the Empire

Toasting marshmallows over the flames of the burning village

The year is 1521. A grand city of stone stands out from the Mexican jungle like a shining beacon- an architectural marvel. The city is in flames. An army from across the sea has made their way from the coast to the heartland and they’re destroying Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire. After a brief alliance, the relationship between the Spanish conquistadors and the Aztec royal family turned sour and the Spanish were driven away. But the Conquistadors have returned, bringing fire and death with them. The Spanish laid siege to the city, destroying each district slowly and methodically like a creeping tide of steel and lead. Cannons explode like rolling thunder in the night. The Aztecs fight bravely, but they are no match for the superior technology and tactics of the Spanish. It takes days of fighting, and thousands die, but in the end, Tenochtitlan falls. In his rage, Cortes orders the city to be completely destroyed. He looks over the ruins of Tenochtitlan as it burns, the light of the flames reflecting over his blood-stained armor, and he appears like a demon from the depths of hell. At his side is a native woman dressed in Spanish garb. She looks on not in disgust or despair, but reveling in the avaricious violence. The flames devouring the fallen empire reveal a small, self-satisfied smile spreading across her face.

Fast forward back to 2024 in the United States. All is not well in the empire. More than any time since the Civil War, the United States is a land divided. The contentious 2024 presidential election draws near, and the candidates are some of the most unpopular there have ever been. Very few people feel represented by these candidates but instead see them as a way to wound their political enemies. It’s not difficult to see why, either. Republican or Democrat, both parties seem to have interests and loyalties anywhere but to the American people. They both seem preoccupied with the donor class and their respective elites. They both seem all too happy to give out money to Wall Street or foreign interests and leave the American people in the dust. The things that are most important to Americans of all political stripes- jobs, cost of living, food, housing and halting the general decline of security and quality of life- are not on the table.

One of the few things both sides of the ruling class seem to be able to agree on is the continued expansion of the American empire. While many Americans struggle to pay their bills and put food on the table, endless billions are given away to foreign interests. Ukraine. Israel. Taiwan. The countless other countries and business interests that the US funds to keep the empire going. Decades of unwinnable wars were fought on false premises and dubious evidence for reasons that seem to make less and less sense to the common citizen. They say we need to “protect democracy” abroad, but we seem to not have much of a democratic choice at home. Those in power always talk about protecting “our democracy,” but increasingly, that feels like something the ruling class owns, not something we participate in together.

One of the most contentious issues of our time is the continued funding of the war in Ukraine against Russia. On February 24^th, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine in response to the nations efforts to join NATO. It’s a complicated issue, but it seems that no matter how you feel about it, one has to accept the reality that Ukraine is losing. There is no path to Ukrainian victory, but even still the US continues to fund the war, providing over 175 billion since 2022. Support for continuing the conflict is plummeting all across the world and many call for a ceasefire. However, the U.S. led coalition is not allowing peace talks, saying that Russian president Vladimir Putin is an evil dictator bent on world domination and there can be no appeasement.

However, this year in 2024, conservative journalist Tucker Carlson sat down to interview Putin. The interview itself was somewhat uneventful. Putin was more interested in giving a Russian history lesson than he was in playing into the culture war issues that Carlson tried to bait him into. Much like the Russian army itself, Putin gave no ground and single-mindedly worked towards his own interests. The part of Carlson’s trip that really interested me, however, was the segment he did on a Russian grocery store. Carlson reported on the comparatively low cost of living, and it became something of a “Mr. Gorbachev goes shopping” moment with the roles reversed.

In this segment, Carlson and his team went on a grocery shopping spree in a Russian supermarket. He purchased a cart full of staples that would feed a family of five. When the cashier rang up the items, Carlson marveled at the comparatively lower cost and all the while made comments on (what he saw) as higher quality. He commented:

“Ideology maybe doesn’t matter as much as you thought. If you take people’s standard of living and tank it through filth and crime and inflation and they literally can’t buy the groceries they want, at that point it doesn’t matter what you say or whether you’re a good person or a bad person- you’re wrecking people’s lives and their country. And that’s what our leaders have done to us”.

Even twenty years ago, a display like this would have seemed impossible. For an American conservative to openly disparage the US in favor of a foreign country- especially our historic enemy, Russia- would have been tantamount to treason. But increasingly, many Americans don’t see their interests represented domestically and are looking elsewhere for an example of what their future could look like. For better or for worse, leaders like Vladimir Putin are a stark contrast between the vast majority of American leaders of the past 30 years. While American elected officials seem to be most concerned with maintaining the intricate system of international alliances and business concerns, Putin is openly and exclusively advocating for the Russian people. He is a strong, autocratic leader who puts his nation’s interests above that of global business interests- even at the cost of war. While these actions are destructive, one also can’t deny there can be an appeal to a leader like that in an era when globalism and international cooperation seem to be on the decline. As a result, we’re seeing a resurgence of nationalism and populism in the US and across the globe that’s becoming particularly popular amongst the political right.

Conservative Americans aren’t the only ones with a wandering eye, however. In some ways, this is nothing new. Going back to as early as the 1920s, there’s been an impulse amongst those that make up the American liberal class to wistfully disparage America in favor of whichever country they can project their idealism onto while ignoring its flaws. Falling for American domestic propaganda was for the provincial rubes, they would instead gladly consume foreign imports. From the former USSR to Communist China or, more recently, the democratic socialism of the Scandinavian countries, it seems that a rejection of patriotism in favor of idealizing another country was a prerequisite to be a hip, worldly, and enlightened cosmopolitan. For the most part, this has been a toothless affectation of the bourgeois middle class that never created any meaningful push back on the worst excesses of American foreign policy or domestic politics. However, in the modern day, this pining has taken on a different dimension.

On October 7^th, 2023, there was an attack in Tel Aviv, Israel, where Hamas terrorists killed 1,189 people. In response, the Israeli government vowed to destroy Hamas by any means necessary. So far since Oct 7^th, 2023, over 40 thousand Palestinians have been killed. It is unclear how many of the casualties have been combatants and how many have been civilians since many of the dead are women and children. The U.S. has been supporting Israel in their efforts to destroy Hamas and have been an unfailing ally diplomatically, militarily and financially- Israel has had near bipartisan support in this and has received over $26 billion in aid since October 7th.

U.S support of Israel is a wedge issue in U.S. politics across the board, but it’s become particularly contentious in the American left. There are some in the establishment wing of the Democratic party who support Israel (AIPAC is one of the biggest donors in US politics, after all), but those in the progressive wing of the party are opposing continued U.S. aid to Israel strongly. The progressive wing of the party led by figures such as Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jamal Bowman, or Ilhan Omar have been particularly vocal and have labeled the actions of the Israeli government as genocidal. This has drawn sharp criticism from both sides of the aisle and even been labeled as antisemitic by some. However, these leaders are only the tip of the spear in a grassroots campaign by the American left that has manifested in protests across the country in solidarity with the Palestinian cause. This is causing a rift amongst the Democrats that’s bringing the fundamental values of the party into question.

On February 25, 2024, Aaron Bushnell, a U.S. Air Force serviceman died when he self-immolated outside the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC. Bushnell did this in protest of the continued US support of what he saw as genocide of the Palestinian people by the Israeli government. In his last words, Bushnell said the following:

“I am an active-duty member of the United States Air Force. And I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest. But compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers—it's not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal”

This is not an isolated incident, or an opinion held only by a few extremists. There have been protests across the country in major cities. Protests on college campuses have become a particular point of conflict. On one side, the pro-Palestinian protesters see the conflict in terms of colonizer and colonized, a framing that has been popular in leftist-dominated academic spaces for decades. These protesters see it as a part of the same struggle of decolonization and against white supremacy that fueled the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. The supporters of Israel, by contrast, see it as open and rising antisemitism and think that “Zionist” is merely a coded way of saying “Jewish.” And with both Palestinian flags and flags bearing the Star of David by both sides of the protest, one could be forgiven for understanding either perspective from an optics point of view.

The disillusion with America and its history goes even deeper than the current Israel-Palestine conflict in the minds of the American youth, however. In late 2023, Osama Bin Laden’s “Letter to the American People” in which he outlined the motives for the September 11^th, 2001, terrorist attack on the World Trade Center went viral due to young people sharing it on social media. In the letter, Bin Laden explicitly states that the reason for the 9/11 attacks were because of U.S. foreign policy and its continued support for Israel. He also states that both the Republicans and Democrats are united in their subservience to finance capital, that the U.S. people are being used and lied to and that millions live below the poverty line or lost their homes for international business interests. This was a message that resonated particularly with young Americans who increasingly seem to feel like their inheritance has been spent and future stolen by the greed and wars of previous generations. This viral message became so popular that the social media platform TikTok was forced to ban the tag “#LetterToAmerica”

So, how did we get here? How did it get to the point where one of the few things that seem to unite Americans is thinking America has gone down the wrong path and no longer serves the interests of its own people? The answer is long, complicated, and will depend on your perspective and values. It’s also a little outside the scope of this article. However, there is one commonality. Many Americans no longer feel like they have a future in their own country. They feel disrespected and unheard by their leaders who seem to value international business interests over the well-being of their own people. Like we have an elite class that no longer shares the values and goals of those they claim to represent. This is a tale as old as empire itself. Sadly, it is often a symptom of the sick society of a dying empire.

This brings us back to Mexico, 1521 and the fall of the Aztec Empire. At the time that Cortes encountered the Aztecs, they were at the height of their power and had conquered much of what we know today as Mexico. They were a powerful empire that ruled brutally, with an endless appetite for war, slaves and gold. They had festivals of epic proportion that reveled in human sacrifice of the conquered. Recent archeological evidence has vindicated some of the Spanish accounts of these festivals which had been dismissed for a generation as tall tales and fear mongering. In some cases, the Aztecs would sacrifice thousands of their victims in a single day. As a result, the other nations that were subjugated and enslaved by the Aztecs hated and resented their oppressors.

This was the political climate that Cortes and his small band of conquistadors entered into. A land dominated by a brutal, hated empire that subjugated all who opposed them. There is a myth that persists to this day that Cortes toppled the mighty Aztecs with 600 men. This was repeated partly by chauvinistic Europeans, but partly because perhaps the truth is uncomfortable. Cortes and his men did indeed have superior weapons and technology, but that alone would not have been able to overwhelm the sheer numbers of the Aztec empire. What really turned the tide was the numerous nations and tribes that joined Cortes in his mission to conquer the Aztecs. They hated the Aztecs and their brutal regime and were willing to take any chance to free themselves. Little did they know, they had made a deal with the devil that would result in slavery and subjugation that would dwarf what they suffered under Aztec rule.

This fatal alliance was made possible by one woman. The one who stood by Cortes as Tenochtitlan burned is known today as La Malinche. Her true name has been lost to history, but we do know a few things. She was a slave that was sold to Cortes, but the Spanish were not the ones who enslaved her. She was (by some accounts) of noble birth from another nation that was a rival to the Aztecs. However, she was captured and enslaved by the Aztecs in one of their many wars of conquest. By the time she met Cortes, she had already experienced a lifetime of being torn away from her home, family and being forced into humiliation and slavery.

It's impossible to know the mind of someone like La Malinche. By all accounts, she was a willing collaborator with the Spanish, not a passive victim. Perhaps she was a shrewd, politically savvy former noblewoman who saw an opportunity to regain her power. Perhaps she was just trying to make the best of a bad situation and survived the only way she knew how. Perhaps she truly loved Cortes, she would even go on to have a child with him. In fact, while she is sometimes cursed as a traitor who made the subjugation of her own people possible by some Mexican nationalists, she is venerated by others. Some see her as the mother of the modern Mexican nation and her child with Cortes to be the first mestizo (a person of mixed European and native bloodlines). She is even venerated by some Mexican feminists as a strong woman who took control of her own destiny to reshape history. Regardless of how one feels about her, she has left an undeniable legacy, if a complicated and controversial one.

One thing always strikes me about La Malinche and her story. After the conquest of Mexico, La Malinche would go back to Europe and live out the rest of her days in the Spanish royal court, completely turning her back on her people and the suffering she made possible. I wonder if she would have done what she did if her life had been different. If she had not been taken from her home, enslaved and mistreated, would she have been so eager to ally with Cortes? If she had felt like a valued member of her society, would she have done more to defend it? If she and the nations that joined Cortes saw a future in which they had a better fate, would they have joined the Aztecs against the invaders instead of betraying them? Why would someone show loyalty to a society that doesn’t value them?

This is a question that still looms large in the modern day. We find ourselves at a turning point in history. The world we were born into will not be the one we live through. The post-war consensus of American global empire- with the safety, security and material abundance it provided- seems to be collapsing at a rate that would have seemed unthinkable even within our own living memory. Those who should safeguard our society and look out for its citizens seem to be uninterested in holding up their end of the social contract. American empire comes not only at the expense of those it exploits abroad, but at the cost of its own citizens. The great wealth and power generated by the greatest empire the world has ever seen enriches not those who work to make it possible, but a tiny, disconnected elite caste of oligarchs and unelected bureaucrats. Many of the institutions we took for granted- for better or worse- are proving to be castles made of sand. American empire is dying, and there seem to be few in the imperial core who think it’s worth defending.

So, the question remains. What will the decline look like? Will it be a slow, death of a thousand cuts like the Ottomans or the British? Or will it be a pronounced single event like the Aztecs or the Western Roman Empire? More importantly, will anyone mourn its passing? Or, more disturbingly, will some of us aid those who would hasten the downfall?  Be it from a foreign power or domestic demagogue, will we, like those living under the yoke of the Aztecs, prefer to try our hand at a better deal from an unconventional broker rather than attempt the seemingly insurmountable task of reform? Will that bargain lead to a better life or something even worse than what we have now?

There’s a Nigerian proverb that goes "A child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth." It serves as a warning against not properly integrating children into society and giving them a reason to be invested in its future. However, to me, it’s taken on a new meaning. We don’t have villages anymore. Not merely in the physical sense, but in the sense that there are fewer and fewer places where community and belonging can be found. The way I see it, we have been cultivating a world that has raised generations of children without villages. Without a future or a place to belong. Sacrificing long term prosperity and belonging for short term, material gain. Our society has been kicking that can down the road and passing the cost down to their children for generations. Perhaps that bill is finally coming due. I don’t know if it will be from an external or internal threat, but it feels like we’re only one or two more crises away from this whole thing falling apart. We have a lot of people with no stake in or sense of belonging to the society they live in. A lot of people who are starting to wake up to this fact, and they are very, very mad about it. Unless something changes, it’s only a matter of time until they’re willing to burn it all down to the ground just to feel the warmth. And, if someone offers them a better deal than they’re getting in a society that has abandoned them, I can’t say I blame them, either.