Mangione and Palestine: Two Faces of the Imperial Polyhedron
Whether in the Imperial Core or the Occupied Periphery, justice is off-menu.
Alleged CEO-Shooter Luigi Mangione as seen in surveillance footage released during police manhunt.
There is something to be said about the ways in which the excesses of US empire abroad have led to the dramatic decrease in quality-of-life in the core-nations of the NATO-led West; how the limitless extortion of the masses to uphold foreign regimes and corrupt ideologies has come at the express cost of the welfare of those whom such extortion is purported to serve. Looking to the obvious case in point, Israel, we have seen clearly how the cost of upholding an unjust empire abroad has translated into real-world negatives economically, socially, and politically for members of the Imperial Core. Most glaringly, we have seen how government – an organ ostensibly built in our name and for our benefit – has entirely subsumed itself to sending $billions to far away conflicts while those at home are in a stage of starvation, exposure, and sickness in the streets. Rather than protect their constituents, our leaders instead elect to wage wars of territory abroad.
And while the US populace has largely upheld the blind-eye traditionally turned to the costs of our own lives on those abroad, the taste for continued expansion has soured substantially in the last years. The near-universal disgust felt across the empire in the days following the October 7th Gaza Uprising – whether as a result of the attack itself or the following onslaught on the civilian population of Palestine – has only spread in the days since. The realities on the ground in the Middle East have prompted revulsion in the American seeing them with honest eyes and the arguments peddled by pro-empire lobbyists fall increasingly on deafened ears.
Even regarding Ukraine, the US citizen has begun to question our role in upholding a foreign regime even in what is an ostensibly “just” war. Indeed, we have artificially lengthened the eventual Russian annexation of East Ukraine and funded the Israeli oppression and invasion of three distinct Nations while allowing our own streets to decay and children to go hungry. We have gone so far now that our leadership has continued to support Israel despite overwhelming evidence of genocide enacted upon the Peoples of Palestine and war crimes/crimes against humanity in general against Lebanon, Palestine, and now Syria while scrambling to maintain her bully stance in the region. The US has forsaken the ill-gained title of “Leader of the Free World” once and for all, sacrificing the preciously protected monicker, undoing the breathless revisionism with which the occupations of Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan are remembered in the Homeland™.
People are beginning to ask why.
Luigi Mangione is an example of just what happens whenever the strictures of expansionism abroad translate to real deprivation at home, the continued over-investment of resources in external affairs allowing for a complete degradation of affairs here. The pressure has mounted across the country, building against the banking, housing, education, manufacturing, service, and healthcare industries with little to no release as US legislators focus almost exclusively on the maintenance of empire and the intentional distraction of their constituencies which this necessitates. Our systems have become corrupted, reverting to the post-bellum days that enabled the likes of the Santa Fe Ring and constituting little more than a mafia of interlocked and self-interested politicians, businessmen, and generational elites who strive solely to enrich themselves and their adherents. In these times, there is no justice for the little guy, no meaningful way in which any but the most connected can seek recompense. As the Old West days illustrated before and the CEO-shooter emphasizes now, in times without justice, justice will seek itself out. Societal pressures demand a relief valve as much as any other and when they’re absent, disaster is sure to follow.
While one should never endorse violence as a method of political negotiation, history tells us time and time again that violence, whether assassination or invasion, is the natural outcome of a dispute which has progressed beyond tenability for one party. Violence is politics in the extreme, a method of power exchange; when a party is disempowered and disconnected from the mechanisms which they believe have been built in their interest, can find no redress, they will resort to more extreme methods.
This is the common link between the alleged actions of Luigi Mangione and the proven actions of the US and her allies abroad: manipulation and dehumanization. Despite the abundant privilege of Mangione, his mainstream identity and life-course in the most influential State of the age, he too was preyed upon by the very apparatus he trusted – expected – to act in his interest. He was denied the most fundamental levels of care arbitrarily, his wellbeing cast aside for the sake of shareholders and executives who see him – as they do all others – as numbers on a spreadsheet, another sucker to be milked and cast aside.
Americans empathize with this in an extremely fundamental way after a national lifetime of exploitation and explicit, feudalistic violence directed against neighbors seeking justice in our very front yards. As a society, we have experienced decades of corporate-sponsored deregulation and liberalism stripping away the wealth of the vast majority of those living here; a century of US-occupation abroad have sacrificed hundreds of millions of civilians abroad alongside hundreds of thousands of US troops, all in the name of our comfort in the Core. Today, as exemplified by both the breathless pearl-clutching of mainstream media institutions and the universal sense of justice seemingly spreading across the country, a new perspective is dawning across the nation, an undeniable solidarity transcending the suddenly inconsequential shock-politics of our spectacle-dependent leadership.
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