004 Dr. Strangelove

The US Civil War II started like a schizoid, just like the failure of the Long Spring Project had in China. And there, like in China, at first glance the causes were entangled in a collective disorder. However, upon closer inspection, there was something completely different in the American situation: it was a collective identity split.

This disorder, when referring to an individual, is usually strongly tied to childhood trauma, something the young nation certainly had no lack of. The birth, infancy, and adolescence of the Empire of Bias, the US, had been frighteningly traumatic and marked by three terrible, defining events: native genocide, modern slavery, and, last but not least, the nuclear bombing of Japan.

The Native demographic catastrophe was the direct result of the European colonizers and their descendants, their wars of conquest and their systematic extermination of entire communities, considered "barbaric." But even more serious were the massacres of native peoples that occurred due to the loss of their environment, lifestyle and the diseases against which they had no immunities.

Subsequently, the trauma of a bloody civil war of secession emerged from a system of slavery involving nearly one-fifth of the population. Against this backdrop of continuous and extreme violence, the individual right to possess arms, including military grade weapons of war, was enshrined in the Second Amendment of their Constitution.

Many other countries had experienced terrible periods in their history but, in this case, it was the short life of the great imperialist state that had been instrumental in forming and leading Neolib Gov. We've already gone over the fact that, for a time, the Middle Empire (China) would question this dominance and before falling into a semi-catatonic state.

There was no shortage of premonitory signs of the serious disturbance that was looming for the Empire of Bias; the first was were the continuous wars, both external and internal.

During the US's heyday, despite having become the most powerful capital-state machine in the world with unprecedented production and military presence, the Empire of Bias suffered a series of military defeats, starting with the conflict with the Viet Cong and later in the Middle East. Although these countries were considered marginal, or perhaps precisely because of this, these beatings left an indelible scar on the people of the Empire and opened a profound psychic wound in vets. The pretext invoked to initiate these disastrous conflicts was strikingly similar to that used during the so-called conquest of the West. In the past, the elimination of Natives was justified in order to civilize them; with the help of modern weapons, these interventions were an attempt to "democratize" the rest world. This without mentioning the internal wars waged against the racialized and poor classes.

The second disturbing dissociative syndrome was called "Columbine". Named after a high school in the province, two students – armed to the teeth – massacred an entire school of their peers and teachers before committing suicide at the turn of the millennium. This terrible episode, continued to reproduce itself in various forms throughout the country (and unfortunately elsewhere) like a curse. Neither these episodes nor the staggering annual number of gun deaths succeeded in prohibiting the gear that linked the state and the Constitution with the war industry. Then again, there were those who argued that the infamous state-capital machine could not survive if the war industry just up and disappeared.

The third and decisive dissociative syndrome was the opioid epidemic, characterized by the rapid increase in overdose deaths in the early 21st century due to the massive production and sale of these substances. Widespread consumption of these drugs with potent pain-relieving function, prescribed by physicians but increasingly found on the blackmarket, was encouraged through any and all means by BigPharma, generating billions of dollars in profits. Clearly, this highly addictive synthetic corresponded to the need of a increasing part of the population to escape the pain caused by an overly stressful, distressing and competitive reality. This "desertion" eventually even overshadowed the "Columbine" syndrome, becoming so deadly that Oxycodone, Fentanyl and other similar molecules claimed far more victims than firearms.

On closer inspection, these three dissociative syndromes not only seemed closely related, but even ran through all the bodies of the country. Of course, this affected not only the population, but also the state-capital machine. While techno-tycoon capital was busy concentrating on the Great Escape, the state was under great stress.

The arrival of pandemic-related lockdowns against the backdrop of Great Resignation continued to deepen identity problems. However, the aggravation of ecological collapse – symbolized by Big Apple shrouded and intoxicated for months by the yellow fumes of the immense and untamed wildfires in the north – was instrumental in transforming the latent syndrome into a severe collective crisis of multiple personality disorder. Each identity in the country's population took turs manifested itself externally, rotating which personality was in the driving seat.

But while such states are part of the local culture or religion in many countries and are not considered pathological, in the case of the Empire of Bias things were not so.

Usually when an identity takes hold of a sick individual, it doesn't last long. But when this happened on a collective level in a large country like the Empire of Bias, the consequences were unpredictable. Shifts would cause damage, suffering and destructive effects, fueling both external and internal wars between factions.

In my temporal excursions to the US, I witnessed a slide toward the abyss in the alternation of reactionary, paranoid and scheming identities, which aggravated internal wars, and other self-styled democratic ones. The latter were actually the most imperialist and triggered evermore serious wars abroad.

Paradoxically, the only aspect that somewhat relativized the gravity of the situation was Ecofin's capitalist rationality. Even if state political power fell into the hands of these phantom and dangerous identities, capital always remained the other head of the two-headed machine. The latter had to bend to political decisions that went against its interests, but it sometimes tried to mitigate the consequences.

Chaos ensued when, in extreme confusion, two factions fighting to take control of the state entered into conflict without mediation. This event marked the end of the already declining "democratic" representative system. This time, it was not a simulated assault on the Capitol, but a strange civil war. The initial spark was a déjà vu: once again a scheming, populist candidate was attempting to overturn the result of an unfavorable election, but this time things got really hot.

All the known identities, and others, hitherto unknown, dark souls that had remained in the shadows, began to move and wreak havoc and destruction in a free-for-all, every man for himself, a purge, that took its cue from an electoral cycle but, at the same time, was completely disassociated from it. And so  it was, with a strange simultaneity, across the  whole country, and armed to the teeth, the rising of  ghetto riots, coordinated fascist assaults by organizations such as the Proud Boys, paramilitary interventions funded by the NRA, and social movements attempting to defend ethnic and religious minorities. At this juncture, state and federal police also came into the picture, but independently and without functioning hierarchies. That was the only reason why the army refrained from intervening.

It was a strange civil war, which had already been bubbling under the surface for decades, and suddenly flared up into a tremendous crisis of short duration. After the initial explosion, there was an alternation of acute phases with periods of relative calm that were no longer uniform, but came and went.

Persistent civil war set in, and the country never went back to normal. Reality had turned bipolar, oscillating between depressive and nearly delusional phases. In the latter, it dreamed of continuing world domination without actually having the slightest chance of success. On the other hand, the federal state often had difficulty in properly exercising so-called sovereign power. The fact that the state was rendered essentially impotent would not fail to have  serious consequences for local capital.

For a long time, the Empire of Bias had lived on the credit of the rest of the world through its military and monetary imperialist policies, but with Civil War  II these privileges wouldn't last long. The coup de grace would come from the last great enemy left standing: China.

It is well known that the Empire of Bias created a major enemy to defeat as its primary strategy for unity. In the weakened state it was now in, the great danger was that China, its top creditor, would take control of its productive apparatus. Since there was now no Pentagon or FED to defend it, it would've  taken little effprt for this to happen in the most peaceful and "legal" way, according to the usages of capitalist imperialism: China would simply buy the valuable assets of an indebted and failing country at rock-bottom prices.

But, as it happens, the Middle Empire was also in great difficulty, although for the quite different reasons I've already told you about.

During periods of domestic crisis in the Empire of Bias, big capital had actually sought to mitigate the negative impacts by finding opportunities abroad, taking advantage of its global presence and its established marketing networks. In this sense, the takeover of Europe, carried out through the appropriate wars, had proven successful. Many American multinationals had not hesitated to temporarily move their headquarters to the European colony waiting for better times. Of course even the colonies, though luxurious, were not doing well. But we'll get to that later...

I really don't know whether it was pure coincidence that the two most powerful capital-state machines fell into crisis almost simultaneously. Honestly, I didn't believe it even then; what happened later would only prove my hunch.

In any case, this was a significant step in the consolidation of a more centralized management of Governance. I'm not telling you that Neolib Gov was turning into an imperial command structure of the world, but certainly a new phase was being prepared.