The U.S. Empire: Mass Murder and Cultural Coercion

What follows is created with the assistance of AI and to get to this point of clarity took more than 20 iterations with a system that understands my political knowledge. I have edited heavily as I post it here. The outcome is one that reveals what I want to say not what a machine has dictated to me.  I’d like to verify every fact, but the overall picture would remain despite of possible errors.

Summary

Since 1947, the United States has organised a global system of power routinely described as aid. (It is not called that under the current fascist turn.)

That word “aid” used for decades conceals the formation of empire.

The empire operates through three interlocking mechanisms

The result is mass death, shattered societies ruled by gangsters, and long-term political dependency, all while the violence is narrated as benevolence.

The three pillars of the system

1. Military

  • Arms, intelligence, training, logistics.
  • Used overwhelmingly against domestic populations.
  • Outcome: killing, torture, mass imprisonment.

2. Direct killing

  • Bombing campaigns.
  • Invasions and occupations.
  • Napalm, chemical agents, siege, starvation.

3. Financial corruption (purchase of people i.e. slavery)

  • Bribes, military budgets, development funds.
  • A cultivated slave mentality: compliance in exchange for protection.
  • Fund the local capitalists and their parties
  • Supply CIA intelligence

Selected cases: deaths enabled by U.S. power

Country / Conflict Dates Estimated deaths U.S. role (plain language)
Greece – Civil War 1946–1949 ~100,000–150,000 Money, arms, advisers; napalm via client state
Turkey 1947–present ~0 (direct) Militarisation, coups, repression without civil war
Guatemala 1954–1996 ~200,000 Coup, death squads, counter-insurgency training
Chile 1973–1990 ~3,000 killed; ~30,000 tortured Coup backing, economic warfare, regime support
Vietnam / Laos / Cambodia 1955–1975 ~2–4 million Direct war, saturation bombing, napalm, chemicals
Indonesia 1965–1966 ~500,000–1,000,000 Green light, kill lists, logistics, diplomatic cover
Palestine / Israel 1948–present ~30,000–40,000 killed (pre-2023); far higher incl. Gaza 2023–25 Arms, funding, vetoes, impunity
Korea 1950–1953 ~2–3 million Direct war; systematic bombing of civilian cities
El Salvador 1980–1992 ~75,000 Death squads, military funding
Nicaragua 1981–1990 ~30,000 Proxy war, terror, economic strangulation
Congo (post-Lumumba) 1960–1965 tens–hundreds of thousands Assassination, managed chaos
Iran (post-1953 coup) 1953–1979 thousands imprisoned/killed Coup, secret police, dictatorship
Iraq 2003–2011 ~150,000–600,000+ Direct invasion and occupation
Afghanistan 2001–2021 ~170,000–240,000 Direct war, drone warfare
Panama 1989 ~500–3,000 Direct invasion

Figures are conservative historical ranges. They exclude wider demographic loss from displacement, famine, and long-term infrastructural collapse. I checked one figure and found this: The Costs of War Project at Brown University

An estimated over 940,000 people were killed by direct post-9/11 war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan between 2001-2023. Of these, more than 432,000 were civilians. The number of people wounded or ill as a result of the conflicts is far higher, as is the number of civilians who died “indirectly,” as a result of wars’ destruction of economies, healthcare systems, infrastructure and the environment. An estimated 3.6-3.8 million people died indirectly in post-9/11 war zones, bringing the total death toll to at least 4.5-4.7 million and counting.

The Indonesian example.

See the 2012 documentary The Act of Killing and the book by Vincent Bevins  The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World 

Half a million to one million people were murdered.

Extermination by United States owned elites

The term Jakarta Method later circulated in:
• Latin America
• Central America
• The Philippines

It meant:
Mass killing of the left enabled by the US.

The Indonesian massacre was described at the time (if at all) as a success.

You do not need to invade a country to destroy a million people. You coerce and own people to do it for you.

The whole thing is covered up. See  red with blood.

The American capitalist system and its empire is a killing machine

The US Empire is a  coherent post-1945 system.

It kills directly.

It buys people to kill others.

 

 

 

 

Systems and sociodrama

Associative conditioning in gene regulatory network models increases integrative causal emergence

Federico Pigozzi, Adam Goldstein & Michael Levin — 09 July 2025

https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-025-08411-2

When is a system more than the sum of its parts? When and how do the properties of active components enable the emergence of a high-level, integrated decision-making entity1,2,3,4,5? These questions bear on issues in ecology, philosophy mind, psychiatry, swarm robotics, and developmental biology6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13. In a sense, all intelligence is collective intelligence14,15 because even human minds supervene on a collection of cells which are themselves active agents. One practical way to define integrated emergent systems is by the fact that they have goals, memories, preferences, and problem-solving capabilities that their parts do not have. For example, while individual cells solve problems in metabolic, physiological, and transcriptional spaces, what makes an embryo more than a collection of cells is the alignment of cellular activity toward a specific outcome in anatomical morphospace16. Here, we focus on one aspect of emergent agency: integrated, distributed memory.

What does this mean for psychodrama and group work  

(see Logeman 1999)

Let me summarize what I’m reading above.

A group is more than the sum of its parts, and there’s a of leap in intelligence (cognition/governance/awareness) at a certain point, where the group can influence the structures within  it.  e.g. the embryo grows fingers in the right place.  This is true of groups of cells.

I think it’s true of groups of people. It’s not to say that all groups have reached some form of higher understanding and agency.

Psychodrama groups definitely bring together people who can then discover a theme  or concern and work on it together for days, finding more and more enabling solutions. People are healed, educated, and may have new consciousness. I’m thinking of consciousness here as a leap of understanding that reverberates through the person’s life and being.

I’m convinced the psychodrama stage and structure facilitate this process. There are structural guidelines; warm-up, action sharing, director and auxiliaries, protagonist and auxiliaries. These formalities and traditions are part of the holding space.

A group can facilitate delving into the psyche together, and there’s a lot of language that supports that, e.g collective unconscious.  People share such things as feelings or relationship dynamics for instance, the victim-persecuted triangle These structures can be revealed; they’re commonly tundeerstood, they can be worked on together.

What about social forces and social reality? Can we learn about those together? Can we look outward together?

Moreno talks about sociometric revolution, he likes small scale micro revolutions.

That’s sounds like psychodrama to me. It is still looking into the group and the relationship dynamic and sociometry in the group?

 

Look outwards! 

How to do that in sociodrama?

 

  • Look at history,
  • Political frameworks.
  • Moments of colonialism.
  • Victories for the oppressed
  • Make it a part of the warm up to read or watch something.
  • Director  directed warm up  e.g. Action for a Better World 

How does this relate to the next level of cognition theory presented by Levin et al?

From the abstract above:

One practical way to define integrated emergent systems is by the fact that they have goals, memories, preferences, and problem-solving capabilities that their parts do not have.

But how to get there?  Can sociodrama help?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If its alive – its a computer!

Long Now talk by Blaise Agüera y Arcas

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhSJuqDUJME

From the blurb:

13,364 views 10 Oct 2025 Long Now Talks
Blaise Agüera y Arcas’s Long Now Talk took us on a journey through What is Intelligence?, his groundbreaking new work connecting the evolutionary dots between life, computation, and symbiogenesis.
He explores how, in our symbiotic world, things combine to make larger things all the time. We might think of humanity in terms of the individual — but we’re already part of everything we’re creating, which is in turn co-creating us.
In the story of technology and humanity, are we distinct from the technologies that we make?
Agüera y Arcas’ cuts through the essentialist dogma with a functionalist view: Biological computing — computation through DNA, RNA, and proteins — is not a strange outcropping of life but its very nature.
This talk was presented September 16, 02025 at the Cowell Theater in San Francisco. Episode notes: https://longnow.org/talks/02025-aguer… The event livestream is here:
https://www.youtube.com/live/NKxAWa7wKbU This talk is part of Long Now Talks.

 

 

Blaise Agüera y Arcas is a VP and Fellow at Google, where he is the CTO of Technology & Society and founder of Paradigms of Intelligence (Pi). Pi is an organization working on basic research in AI and related fields, especially the foundations of neural computing, active inference, sociality, evolution, and Artificial Life. In 2008, Blaise was awarded MIT’s TR35 prize. During his tenure at Google, Blaise has innovated on-device machine learning for Android and Pixel; invented Federated Learning, an approach to decentralized model training that avoids sharing private data; and founded the Artists + Machine Intelligence program. Prior to Google, Blaise was a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft, where he worked in a variety of roles, from inventor to strategist, and led teams with strengths in experience design, pro­to­typ­ing, machine vision, augmented reality, wearable com­put­ing and mapping.

(from https://research.google/people/106776/?& )

Some thoughts from me

There’s a hierarchy of complexity, the collective directs the the smaller parts below it in the hierarchy in accordance with its higher function.

My meditation:

What is the entity that is larger than a human being? A nation, a corporation, a psychodrama group, (see Logeman 1999)  or a couple? Those have their own systemic life and intelligence compelling the individuals in certain directions.

What about functionalism of production in society? Is there an intelligence computing the relations of production, the ownership of the means of production?

Is there a base and superstructure. There is a materiality in the relations of production that does not exist in something like geography or race.

But what does that mean for tapping into class consciousness? Will the consciousness effuse like chemicals under pressure in a tectonic plate?

 

 

AI – a force of production.

We’ve had many forces of production, think of the steam engine, changed everything. Think of digitalisation, changed a lot in the world. Phones. Now AI, maybe pushing capitalism to its limits. Its under pressure, turning fascist.

There’s no need for Luddite-ism. There’s people who say don’t use AI. That misses the point.

AI can be used and misused. The problem  is who owns the means of production. They’re going to screw up AI tools more than they can a spade or even a television.

Sovereignty over the creation of our world! Social ownership of our culture and relationships. Take it back!

Marxism 101

A one page summary of Marxism as I understand it.  Maybe expand with a link to a page on each point?  With reading & references!  Nice project.

Marxism 101

  1. The basic idea

Marxism starts with the question: who does the work, and who gets the benefit?

In most societies, a small group own and control the means to extract wealth: land, factories, companies and banks.  Most people have to work to survive.

  1. Class struggle

Owners and workers have conflicting interests and different forms of power. That tension is everywhere: money, education, health, media, culture. Differences in race, gender, age etc. are used to divide the working class. Class conflict shapes our unconscious and our relationships.

  1. Capitalism

Workers are paid less than the value of what they produce. Marx saw this as built into the system. It’s systemic, not psychological, not about greed or human nature

  1. The State

The State exists to maintain class power for capitalists. It disguises its nature to make it look like it is there for everyone. It is active in law, education, enforcement and military.

  1. Revolution

Workers become conscious of their shared situation. Then as a class conscious force they organise to transform society. The prime directives of society change.

  1. Socialism

The stage where workers have their own State and use it to ensure ownership of the means of production is social and not private. There is no need to disguise its class nature.  It is now in the hands of the many.

  1. Communism

Communism is an aspirational society where no one owns another’s labour. People contribute according to their ability, and receive according to need. There is no class struggle and thus no need for a State.

  1. Why it matters

Marxism helps see beneath the surface of politics, ads, work, and media, who benefits and who doesn’t. It’s a lens for understanding power.

 

Marxism 101. PDF

Punishment for Māori reveals true nature of race relations in Aotearoa

 

Te Pāti Māori MP Hana-Rawhiti Maipa-Clarke was among those to perform a haka, at Parliament, after the first reading of the Treaty Principles Bill, on 14 November, 2024.Te Pāti Māori MP Hana-Rawhiti Maipa-Clarke at Parliament, after the first reading of the Treaty Principles Bill in November.

Te Pāti Māori co-leaders suspended from Parliament for 21 days

From RNZ news. Friday, 06 June 2025 :

And former Speaker Adrian Rurawhe cautioned: “When you come into this House, you swear the oath… you agree to the rules of this House. You can’t have it both ways.”

Labour leader Chris Hipkins’ recent comments also tell a story. Speaking to RNZ last week, he questioned Te Pāti Māori’s choice of priorities, a line aimed squarely at centrist voters who might support Māori aspirations but baulk at Te Pāti Māori’s tactics.

This is so disgusting. The word punishment itself should be banned for this action. It is a ghostly echo of children being punished for speaking Māori, Te Reo, in schools all those years ago. Māori sovereignty is at stake behind these actions because the Treaty Principles Bill to attacked Māori sovereignty, and now the action here speaks louder than words. I hope there is a ferocious counter-attack, especially on Labour for going along with this. demeaning colonisation.

No punishment, no apology.

 

 

Marx in Moreno’s Writing

Karl Marx: A Singer to the Hammer and Sad Eyes

I’ve been writing here about my close reading of Moreno’s writing on Marx and revolution.  I’ve been reading Who Shall Survive and other sources.

I’ve stopped posting chapters here as I’m editing in Google Drive

See my whole effort here. 

That link is auto updated with every edit!!