Terrorism in Russia is Nothing Special, or Surprising
Any empire that seeks to grow must turn inward for the fuel.
First responders stand-by following an atrocious terrorist attack on Crocus City Hall in Moscow on March 22, 2024.
An horrific act of terrorism in Moscow has gotten the attention of reactionaries across both parties of US politics who, despite experiencing and tending the very same inflammation that plagues us at home, have stumbled over themselves in an effort to derive some meaning for their own imperial desires. Any meaning other than the obvious that is.
Throughout history, there are many things which are abundantly clear upon further inspection: humans will consolidate; they will make art and explore the world around them freely; they will horde power no matter the costs to themselves, those they love, or the society they belong to; they will eat their young in an effort to subjugate their neighbors and enrich themselves.
Looking at the blip on the radar that is the US Empire, we can find many points where this has taken place; our own government grabbing our friends and families to be molded into invaders before delivery into the meat grinder of colonial expansion. And not only the obvious ones like the invasions of Vietnam, Korea, Mexico, and the Philippines which can be painted as virtuous wars, but the ones at home like Ludlow, Haymarket, Coral Gables, Blair Mountain, and Pullman, events remembered as labor “victories” despite those who suffered and died being no more than a footnote in our national history and in ignorance of their deaths coming as a demand of colonial expansion at home.
It takes a specific society to perpetuate such a gruesome machine, a sycophantic base that pervades all aspects of our lives and which must be stoked often with hatred for the latest objects of our national ire. The extractive nature of empire pulls at the host like a leech, filling it with poison and numbing us to the atrocity our neighbors inflict upon one another and which is utilized against others in our names. It manifests itself in strikes against anyone conveniently “other,” the accusations losing coherence as they grow in vileness and ultimately erupt in brutality. And they happen every day, talking heads spreading hatred while legislators feign impotence, our children killing one another in schools and churches and nightclubs.
In every empire in history, irrationalized masses, driven to arrogant fury by years of political favor, are empowered by self-interested maniacs driven to the natural madness that comes of such inhumane covetousness for other Peoples’ lands, resources, and lives. Today we have them across both parties of government, war hawks who pump billions into an arms industry that has been refined to needlepoint precision-terrorism against weddings, hospitals, schools, and parks across the globe; frothing pundits who have today pointed accusingly at one another while drooling over the victims of foreign tragedy, savoring the slaking of their bloodlust as they parade atrocity in-full without the propriety they would have for such an event in a Western state. It is happening in the lands of a foreign competitor empire after all.
The fact is that terror like that seen today in Russia is no different than that seen anywhere else the roots of imperialism have begun to suck the ground dry; places like Prague, Serbia, and Germany saw in 2023 alone just the same impacts as Moscow today. At home, do I need to provide examples of the nationalistic hate that is flooding our society with violence? I’m sure we can all name at least 3.
While we have begun to be enamored with the idea of stochastic terror, the incessant need to categorize and subdivide everything undermines the causes for the benefit of a typology. Mass murders and attacks on society do not occur with frequency without a common thread of oppression (whether real or imagined) that ties them together; on the edges of empire, where millions die for stolen land, they manifest first as military terror to suppress a population before becoming acts of resistance against those same systems as the subjugated seek their emancipation.
In the imperial-core, the mechanisms are the same even if the typologies and definitions which we use to understand them are different. Our police are, both today and historically, legitimized militias whose primary purpose is rote intimidation through mass incarceration and public executions of our neighbors. We are submerged in nationalistic propaganda which undermines even the thought of international cooperation outside the limited bounds of the imperial interest, our worst actors self-mobilizing in defense of an institution that doesn’t care about them but which is happy to grind them into glue for a penny of profit.
And this is what happens, hate and bigotry breed openly and without temper until we awaken to another message about our families being gunned down while simply living; until we here about another El Paso, Aztec, Pheonix, Aurora, Las Cruces, Farmington, or Clovis. What happened in Moscow today, if indeed the act of homegrown terrorism it seems, is of the exact same origin as those which we politely do not discuss at home. If, as too many perpetually online reactionaries suggested this morning, this inhuman act was taken against Russia on behalf of a foreign power, the origin yet remains the same.
Empires, by design, must consume: devouring all around whether of its own or belonging to someone else.
Addendum: when I wrote this yesterday, the news that the organization known as “ISIS" has taken responsibility for the horrendous attack on human life that occurred in Moscow had not begum rotating the news-sphere. As I reflect, I must agree with my thoughts at the end of this writing: the cause of the attack is still expansionist greed with colonial ends.
We must acknowledge that ISIS was (is?) an explicit creation by the United States and allies to undermine Syrian development and Russian imperial designs in the region. This militia turned war-band (formerly known as al-Qaida before their imperialist rebranding into the form of a caliphate) was funded and provided with Western weapons to depose Bashar al-Assad and destabilize the growing anti-colonial attitudes of the region more generally.
Just as the solution to the genocide in Gaza and the liberation of Palestinians is as simple as turning off the flow of weapons to the belligerent power, so it was with ISIS; the collapse of the modern horde coming as swiftly as the flow of arms, ammunition, and non-lethal aid ceased flowing into their occupied lands.
If the now-defunct army formerly known as ISIS/al-Qaida is indeed behind the attacks on Russia, what does that mean? Is this group suddenly now so powerful once more, years after their supposed demise, that they can commit such a strike in one of the most protected imperial cities in the world? Personally, I doubt that. Not without help.
Photo: Mosreg.ru, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
