wiredearp retweeted
The Bunker State’s Silent State of Exception: Or, On the French Legislative and Administrative Synchronous Swim
I want to quickly comment on what has been unfolding in France over the past days. France is by no means an isolated case, but the process underway there has just become much clearer and more visible than before.
More importantly, what we are witnessing is not a single event. It is the culmination of a legislative and administrative trajectory that has been building since at least 2017—a year that falls squarely into the period when the imperial adaptation to multipolarity, the turn toward what I call the Bunker State, and the acceptance of specific territorial holding-and-staging functions by European NATO members slowly but surely began to take shape. (It also bears a striking resemblance to the legal and administrative architecture installed under Javier Milei in Argentina—a parallel process much less observed in Europe unless you are from or closely follow Latin America.)
This likely warrants a full essay of its own, but for the time being, I want to leave you with the following:
No State of Emergency Was Needed
Reports from the ground in France over the past week have read like coming from a besieged city: Operation Sentinelle soldiers deployed domestically, Centaure armored infantry vehicles parked outside the National Assembly, elite counter-terror units (RAID, BRI, GIGN) mobilized alongside 70,000 police and gendarmes, last-minute route relocations pushing protesters onto the urban periphery (périphérique), over 30 metro stations shuttered or turned into search checkpoints with automatic €135 fines, curfews across a dozen cities, and private security guards patrolling commercial streets.
These developments represent the synchronized activation of a statutory and administrative apparatus built between 2017 and August 2026 that blurs external defense and internal policing, subordinates civil rights to risk management, and integrates civilian infrastructure into counter-insurgency and hybrid-warfare planning. (The Bunkerstate, you see.)
The most revealing fact of the October 2026 crackdown was that the government did not declare a formal State of Emergency (état d’urgence). Even as figures on the right demanded it, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu kept it in reserve while Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez told the Senate that the state would rely strictly on "mesures de droit commun" (ordinary law) and "police administrative."
Why? Because the state of exception has already and basically been pre-installed into ordinary law.
National Legislation: Normalizing the Exception & the "Continuum of Security"
Over the last nine years, the French Parliament has systematically converted temporary emergency powers and wartime doctrines into permanent domestic governance:
From Emergency to Ordinary Law: The 2017 SILT law permanently transposed post-2015 state-of-emergency powers into ordinary administrative law, creating warrantless "protection perimeters" and individual administrative surveillance measures (MICAS). Tested further during the 2024 Paris Olympics, this surveillance ratchet was locked in two months ago via the RIPOST Law of August 18, 2026, which extended algorithmic video surveillance (VSA) to 2030 across train stations and shopping centers, expanded automated license-plate reading (LAPI) to "public order at gatherings," and created a 72-hour emergency drone authorization for "urban violence" (with 14 police drones deployed over Paris this weekend, and over Lyon high schools earlier this month).
Militarization and the "Continuum of Security": While the Global Security Law institutionalized the integration of private security into public order and restricted the documentation of police operations, LOPMI funded the physical militarization of internal security—most visibly the procurement of 90 VBMO Centaure armored vehicles equipped with 30-tube automatic tear-gas launchers, and remote weapon stations (yes, why?).
Total Defense and the New Statutory Exception: Promulgated just two months before the October unrest, the revised LPM added €36 billion for high-intensity warfare, introduced a national service registry profiling citizens’ skills and disposition for military engagement (explicitly designed, in part, to free up soldiers for domestic Sentinelle deployments), and created a brand-new legal regime between peacetime policing and martial law (état de siège): the State of National Security Alert (état d'alerte de sécurité nationale). Alongside the Critical Infrastructure Resilience Bill (transposing EU Directives interestingly), it brings nearly 1,500 regional and local authorities, hospitals, transport networks, and civilian "vital importance operators" (OIV) under national security compliance, forcing civilian operators to maintain war stocks and authorizing private subcontractors for counter-drone warfare.
From Subjects of Rights to Objects of Security
In the Bunker State, the liberal social contract is inverted and changed: fundamental rights become conditional privileges granted by the executive, while welfare and social reproduction are weaponized as instruments of security compliance.
Licensing the Right to Assemble: Ahead of the October 24 demonstrations, the Interior Ministry instructed prefects to judge protest declarations based on the "fiabilité des organisateurs" (reliability of the organizers) and to execute "contrôles des flux" in train stations to "identify persons who are not authorized to participate in demonstrations." President Macron stated flatly that requests from "people who have no legitimacy" would be refused and only marches co-signed by established trade unions would be permitted. Turning a constitutional, declaratory right into a state-licensed privilege.
The "Casseur-Payeur" Bills & Conditioning Welfare on Obedience: Currently being fast-tracked through the Senate with government amendments announced by Nuñez on October 21, the "Breaker-Payer" legislation introduces collective civil liability of up to €10,000 for anyone remaining in a crowd after dispersal orders, establishes joint financial liability for the parents of minors, and revives pre-emptive administrative bans on protesting prior to any judicial conviction. Further, the bill lifts the legal unseizability of family, housing, and minimum-income (RSA) benefits to pay for state and insurer subrogation, while an interministerial circular signed by Justice Minister Gérald Darmanin and Housing Minister Vincent Jeanbrun on October 19 ordered prefects and prosecutors to cut social benefits (prestations sociales) and initiate public housing evictions "immediately," without even waiting for the law to pass.
(For those who follow Latin America, this is the logic of the legal and administrative regime installed under Javier Milei and Patricia Bullrich in Argentina: "el que corta no cobra", stripping social assistance from anyone participating in roadblocks or unauthorized protests, billing social movements for the operational costs of their own repression, and reclassifying socio-economic protest as a threat to national security.)
Hybrid Warfare Turned Inward: Military Substitution, Intelligence Primacy, and Austerity Planning
When governmental planning is subsumed under hybrid-warfare doctrines and fiscal austerity, domestic dissent ceases to be treated as a political or social question. It is increasingly processed as counter-subversion, a threat to a society's stability.
Civil-Military Fusion: Following an Élysée Defense and National Security Council convened specifically to address domestic protests, the government requisitioned regular army units under Operation Sentinelle on October 20 to act "en substitution" of internal security forces—guarding fixed institutional sites so that 70,000 police, CRS, mobile gendarmes, helicopters, and elite counter-terror units (GIGN, RAID, BRI) could conduct mobile street containment. Notably, this reversed Prime Minister Lecornu’s own 2025 doctrine that "one does not deploy the army against one's own people."
Intelligence Services?: Macron’s strategic pivot centered on a summit "with all the intelligence services," after which the executive framed cost-of-living and social unrest as "seditious acts" (actes séditieux) orchestrated by the "ultragauche" and an "agenda of destabilization" ahead of 2027. The National Anti-Terrorist Prosecutor (PNAT) was placed in observer status following the Limoges city hall arson, Territorial Intelligence (DNRT/SCRT) was pressured to map links to parliamentary opposition, and a 30-proposal Senate report led with calls to expand upstream human and algorithmic intelligence to track "at-risk groups" and criminalize mere participation in undeclared gatherings.
Budgetary Austerity Sequenced Behind Security: All of this serves a rigid fiscal architecture. France’s 2027 draft budget enforces €43 billion in consolidation, freezing all state spending "excluding the increased defense effort", allocating +€6.4bn to Defense, +€1bn to the Interior, and +€0.4bn to Justice. With 24-year-high bond yields cited as the reason concessions are "unaffordable," the state ordered an entire week of total physical containment before scheduling a "social round table" for Monday, October 26.
Dual-Use Infrastructure, Spatial Banishment, and Privatized Protection
At the regional and municipal levels, national doctrine is executed through the unilateral power of the Prefect (arrêtés préfectoraux), backed by administrative courts and recent European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) jurisprudence validating pre-emptive protest bans in the name of a "pressing social need."
Spatial Lockdowns and Peripheral Banishment: Rather than triggering parliamentary oversight via the 1955 emergency law, authorities imposed decentralized curfews across 12 cities and banned demonstrations entirely in Lyon and across 30 communes in the Bouches-du-Rhône (with administrative courts rejecting union and human-rights appeals across the board). In Paris, the institutional center was declared a "Red Zone" where exiting a metro station into an undeclared perimeter triggers an automatic €135 fixed administrative fine, while on Friday evening—less than 24 hours before the march—the Police Prefecture banished the demonstration from Bastille–Nation to the Boulevards des Maréchaux along the outer ring road.
Dual-Use Civilian Infrastructure as a Filtering Airlock: Public transit networks now function as extensions of the Police Prefecture. Over 30 Paris metro stations across 9 lines were closed to sever urban connectivity, while anti-terror protection perimeters were applied to major rail hubs, empowering public transit networks' security agents to frisk passengers across every station in Île-de-France alongside police checkpoints confiscating protective gear (goggles, masks, serum). Simultaneously, digital infrastructure is co-opted under the EU Digital Services Act (DSA) "systemic risk" duties: platforms were summoned to the Interior Ministry, TikTok disabled protest-related search autocomplete, and Nuñez invoked 2025 Conseil d’État jurisprudence affirming that "nothing in principle forbids" the executive from suspending social media features during riots under "exceptional circumstances."
The "Whole-of-Society" Approach and Privatized Security: Aligned with the 2025 Revue Nationale Stratégique (which anticipates the home territory targeted by "massive hybrid actions") and the June 2025 Stratégie Nationale de Résilience priority to "make all citizens useful in the service of the Nation's resilience," the Paris Prefecture opened a dedicated portal for citizens to upload video footage of protesters to feed investigations. Even more starkly, the state’s monopoly on protection is being commodified: while the Paris Prefecture advised shopkeepers to "participate in the security of their businesses" by hiring private guards and dog teams, Lyon Métropole and the Chamber of Commerce formally funded 40 private security agents in coordination with the prefecture to patrol downtown "sensitive zones." (Which reminds me a little of what happens during the movie "The Uprising" if anybody has watched it, based on historical events. The more things change....)
What we see in France is a qualitatively transformed state—one that has re-engineered its legal, infrastructural, and fiscal machinery so that the state of exception operates silently as the ordinary rule of law, citizens are managed as potential vectors of hybrid destabilization, and the public square is governed like a military base.
Unfortunately, this is a process going on in many countries. It is silent and only emerges at times when people start acting as the subjects rather than passive objects which the current imperial order wants us to become.
wiredearp retweeted
🇺🇸🇨🇳NEW ARTICLE: Why the US Can Never Match Chinese Shipbuilding
(NOTE: Because X blocks NEO links I will publish the full text of the article below)
In a recent Business Insider article and accompanying video regarding the US’ $66 billion plan to “beat China’s shipbuilding empire,” it is revealed that US plans ultimately amount to unlikely solutions to what are deep, systemic problems with little political appetite to face, let alone address - a microcosm of the US’ wider terminal decline relative to the emerging multipolar world.
In the video, an American shipyard worker is seen wearing a helmet with a sticker saying, “Go Navy, Beat China,” China - a nation that has never attacked the United States - and instead has been subject to US encroachment, occupation, and war both before and after the World Wars - exemplifying the delusional belligerence US interests encourage among the American public and specifically those among the US military and across its military industrial base.
Detached even further from reality is the notion of the US “beating China” in the realm of shipbuilding where China is reported to build between 1,000 to 1,700 ships a year while the US builds ships in single digit numbers.
While the video discusses plans by the US to invest in shipbuilding through expanding the workforce with training programs, improve worker retention, and through the use of new technology to produce more with less, and even plans to have US proxies build ships for the US - no plans were announced to address the systemic problems creating this disparity in shipbuilding capacity in the first place.
The problems stymying US shipbuilding (and all other productive industries in the US) are problems no amount of investment or technology can solve until the root causes themselves are addressed.
US-China Shipbuilding Gap is a Symptom of Bigger Problems
The atrophy of US shipbuilding has not taken place in a vacuum or overnight.
It has been in decline alongside all other major productive American industries and for generally the same reasons. The US has spent decades prioritizing shareholder primacy (the pursuit of perpetually expanding profits) at the expense of all other considerations - including industrial capacity, national infrastructure, American education, and the workforce the US educational system is tasked with creating.
The US - in pursuit of perpetual profits - has reorganized its economy from a global industrial leader, to a financialized ponzi-economy building wealth across ledgers rather than upon factory floors.
The US educational system reflects this reprioritization - not only in redirecting students from productive vocations to better serve the ponzi-economy - but also in the form of maximizing profits to access the education system itself. This has been done through expanding privatization across primary and secondary education, and across all forms of higher education. Young adults find themselves faced with tens of thousands of US dollars in debt before starting their first step in any chosen career.
This has created not only a critical shortage of workers for the US industrial base, it has created a systemic obstacle that must be removed before that critical shortage of workers can even be addressed. Reforming US education alone, is a process that could take a generation to solve.
An atrophied workforce is only one of several systemic problems the US faces. The other takes the shape of national infrastructure, including transportation, energy production and distribution, and the very facilities at which shipbuilding and other forms of industrial activity take place.
Because the US functions as a for-profit system where the “private sector” is responsible for all of the above - and because profits are always easier to make through financialization and/or legacy industrial processes (making money by doing or selling the same thing over and over again) - the chances of the “private sector” investing in the infrastructure and facilities required to even expand US shipbuilding significantly, let alone meaningfully close the gap with China, are next to non-existent.
Shortcuts have been proposed, including private and government-funded training programs to rapidly expand the pool of qualified workers for jobs across the US military industrial complex, and specifically in the realm of shipbuilding.
But even with the proposed training programs to expand the US workforce - another systemic problem exists preventing the efficient use of this workforce. The cost of training and retaining American workers will always be astronomically more expensive than in China precisely because of the for-profit financialized nature of the US ponzi-economy in all aspects beyond (including directly upstream from) shipbuilding.
In the United States, any particular American laborer requires a wage capable of paying for the exorbitant cost-of-living in the US, including not only their own education/training, but also their rent, food, utilities, transportation, and healthcare. Even with healthcare provided by the shipbuilding industry - the corporations themselves must pay astronomically higher costs for that healthcare than in China.
This is because - in addition to the shipbuilding sector itself attempting to maximize profit in exchange for minimal effort or purpose - the US workforce is preyed upon by similar profit-maximization across all other sectors of US economic activity. The pharmaceutical industry alone uses US tax-funded research and development to produce medication - then charges many times its production costs for access to it.
China’s government does vastly better in subordinating pharmaceutical production to national interests - rather than the other way around as it functions in the US. This means that regardless of whether a company, an insurance policy, or an individual patient in China is paying the costs for healthcare, it will always be cheaper overall than in the United States.
This example applied across other costs of living - whether it is food, electricity, Internet access, or rent - plays out in a similar way. Chinese workers consistently enjoy cheaper prices, accessible services, and better infrastructure because the Chinese government places the purpose of production and the livelihood of those involved above the maximization of profits. This means China’s private sector, state-owned enterprises, and combinations of the two are free to pursue profit maximization as long as it doesn’t undermine collective national interests including the welfare of the Chinese population.
The US system, when compared to China's, could be best equated to a troop of chimpanzees stripping bare fruit trees across the forest they live in (and taking that of other nearby troops) versus farmland carefully and sustainably cultivated by a family of farmers. Both approaches ultimately satisfy hunger. Only one approach does so reliably and sustainably by emphasizing long-term planning over short-sighted and immediate satisfaction.
Beyond a more humane economic and political system, China’s is also a more efficient system. The maximization of profits not only comes at the cost of the vast majority of any population within a system doing so - it also comes at the cost of any other objective besides maximizing profits - including the quality of and accessibility to services, and the quality and quantities of manufactured goods - in this case - ships.
The Chinese government’s overall approach to economics and governance ensures sound fundamentals in terms of infrastructure and workforce, but also ensures that the shipbuilding process in China itself serves the purpose of actually making ships to serve specific national priorities - both in the realm of commercial commerce and national defense - in addition to simply making money (which they also do).
In order for the United States to even meaningfully close the gap with China - it would need to address all of these systemic problems plaguing its shipbuilding industry and all the upstream economic activity that makes shipbuilding possible - including cost of living for workers, supply chains, and the infrastructure facilitating both.
If the US Cannot Compete, it Will Try to Delete
Even if the US were to shift over to an entirely purpose-driven socioeconomic model - it would still fall far short of matching Chinese shipbuilding solely because of the disparity in scale between the US and China. China’s population is vastly larger, as is its overall industrial base, education system, and its national infrastructure.
Because of the US’ inability to outcompete directly with China and other productive nations around the globe - it will increasingly seek the use of asymmetric methods of undermining and disrupting productive forces.
This includes the US’ current regional war in West Asia - targeting Iran and its allies - Hezbollah in Lebanon and Ansarallah in Yemen, but also the targeting of supposed US “allies” like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, and Kuwait whose energy production and exports have been likewise targeted and disrupted amid the ongoing US aggression.
The disruption of energy exports from West Asia to the rest of Asia - including China - is meant to undermine and roll back Chinese industrial production and economic prosperity as a substitute for the US’ inability to compete with China directly.
The US has recently begun striking at data centers across Russia - the opening shots in a planned global asymmetric strategy to stop multipolar artificial intelligence development from permanently surpassing the US in the same manner production, military, and other technological capabilities have begun to do.
The US is also increasingly threatening waterways worldwide - both directly and by proxy - through a combination of outright wars and associated blockades, the seizure of ships “sanctioned” by the US and its European proxies, and the use of maritime drones (attributed to US proxies like Ukraine) to physically strike at and attempt to destroy the shipping of targeted nations. While it is primarily Russian shipping being targeted now - Chinese shipping has been affected with the likelihood of wider and more deliberate targeting expanding in the near future.
Together with the US effectively banning Chinese-built ships from US ports through targeted fees and the likelihood the US will force its proxies worldwide to follow suit - the US is attempting to target Chinese industry, including shipbuilding, from a multitude of economic, political, administrative, and military vectors.
Beyond these methods - the US continues political interference worldwide, in attempt to both disrupt global peace and stability and thus economic progress among the multipolar world, but also to politically capture targeted nations and transform them into proxies the US can use as armed and dangerous geopolitical “battering rams” against nations like China as the US has done with Ukraine and Georgia (from 2003-2008) vis-a-vis Russia, and the Philippines and the island province of Taiwan the US is using against the rest of China.
The combination of these approaches constitutes a multidomain war on multipolarism - which is both an admission of the failure of US power and primacy, but still an existential threat to global peace, stability, prosperity, and human progress.
In the realm of shipbuilding in particular, the US seeks to use the industrial capacity of nations like South Korea and Japan to compensate for its own failing industrial base, attempting to both boost America’s ability to put to sea additional warships, but also maintain and repair those already at sea. Unfortunately for the US - the combined shipbuilding capacity of itself and its proxies fails to amount to even half of China’s shipbuilding capacity alone.
The notion the US will leverage “new technologies” to more efficiently build, maintain, and repair ships fails to acknowledge the fact that China will just as easily use these “new technologies” to further enhance its current advantages over the US.
The only real means by which the US could close the gap in terms of shipbuilding vis-a-vis China would be to cripple or undermine China’s industrial base, and by doing so, its shipbuilding capacity - precisely through targeting the energy empowering China’s industry as well as the economic prosperity underpinning China’s national policies including continued improvement of and investment in its industrial base (including shipyards).
In other words, if the US cannot outcompete China, nor attack China’s industrial base directly, it seeks to asymmetrically target the global factors China’s growing economic might is being built on - energy and trade - both of which require peace and stability to thrive.
Only through asymmetrically sabotaging China’s ability to outproduce the US can the US ever hope to narrow the gap in shipbuilding or any other of a vast and growing number of metrics in which China matches or has far surpassed the US in.
The fear in Washington continues to be that even if the collective remaining power of the US is fully and radically leveraged toward this asymmetrical aggression - it might not only not be enough - it could supercharge China’s efforts to both overcome this asymmetrical aggression - and also collectively unite an increasingly multipolar world in purpose against the US’ pursuit of unwarranted global power.
Shipbuilding is only one of several metrics in which China has seemingly irreversibly surpassed the US. The fact the US continues seeking the means to reassert its primacy worldwide, especially against China, is not evidence necessarily that the US can succeed - but that through its efforts to attempt to do so - the US continues to pose the greatest danger to peace, stability, prosperity, and human progress on Earth today.
Not only does China and other productive forces on Earth today need to prevent the US from successfully reasserting unipolar primacy over the planet, it must also successfully prevent the US from destroying the planet in a failed effort to do so.
Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer.
wiredearp retweeted
"It would have been impossible to do Operation Epic Fury without having Europe as a power projection platform."
That's Mark Rutte, NATO Secretary General, admitting that 5,000 planes have taken off from European bases in support of the US-Israeli war on Iran since February 28th.
This is what I wrote about in my NATO 3.0 essay. This is what I said in the two interviews I did this month — one with Dae-Han Song for @NoColdWar , one with Felix Marquardt @Feleaks and Alexis Poulin @Poulin2012 for The Modern Elephant. And it is what the structural analysis predicted. Not even predicted. This is what the structural analysis is describing as a process that has been under way for around a decade (if not more).
I must admit that what frustrates me a little is that this is now treated as breaking news. For months, European leaders said publicly that they were not involved in the Iran war. And many analysts took those statements as fact. They reported on the political discourse as if it described the actual situation. Indeed, as if this was about the "transatlantic split" between the US and Europe. As if...
But the actual situation was and is determined by the infrastructure.
NATO has defense planning cycles that run years in advance. Infrastructure, logistics corridors, pre-positioned equipment, legal frameworks, command arrangements, all of it is set up before any political decision is made (and more so with that which I call the Bunker State). When a war begins, the bases are already there. The runways are already certified. The fuel is already stocked. The airspace is already coordinated. The legal status of forces agreements are already signed.
A European head of government can stand at a podium and say "we are not involved." And it can be true that they meant it. But, it just doesn't matter. The structure does not require their consent to function.
This is hyperdependency. In other words, the ability to say no has been transferred, incrementally, over decades, through treaties, basing agreements, interoperability standards, procurement contracts, command integration, and technological dependency. (Yes, also through things like Nord Stream.) What remains at the national level is the rhetoric of sovereignty. What remains at the structural level is the reality of integration.
I wrote about this. I traced the mechanisms — NATO Front Door, NATO Edge, PEARL, the Baltic air defense transfer to US command authority, the US general taking operational command in the German army. I showed how the 5% GDP pledge at The Hague was implemented at Ankara as a binding financial and industrial architecture. I argued that Europe was being converted into the factory and the attritional node, while the US retained the command layer.
And now Rutte has confirmed it, in his own words, with a number of 5,000 planes.
I will admit something. My work gets little reach. I am mentioning this because it shows me that the gap between what is happening and what is being discussed is widening, and the analysts with platforms are still working from frameworks that doesn't allow them to see the structure and the processes taking place.
If the people who write and talk about geopolitics cannot see that European involvement in the Iran war was structurally guaranteed, then they won't be able to see what is coming either. They will keep reporting on political statements as if they were descriptions of reality. They will keep being surprised.
Three pieces, if you want the argument in full:
NATO 3.0: The Transatlantic Cage and the Rise of the Bunker State: the essay. The structural analysis of Ankara, the division of labor, the bunker state, the multi-layered cage.
No Cold War with Dae-Han Song: on the mechanisms, the elite co-optation, and the vulnerabilities of the US-led empire.
The Modern Elephant with Felix Marquardt and Alexis Poulin: on the colonial origins of NATO, the reorganization of empire, and what disentanglement would require.
Links below.
Read them if you want to understand the next thing before it happens or if you want to understand the processes that are already taking place. Share them if you think the analysis is worth the reach it hasn't gotten. Thank you.
🇪🇺🇮🇷 NATO Chief Mark Rutte boasts about European complicity in Iran:
“You could argue that it would have been impossible to do Operation Epic Fury without having Europe as a power projection platform for the U.S. 5,000 planes have taken off from European bases in support of Epic Fury since February 28th this year”
wiredearp retweeted
Just found out about the existence of the website busification.org/en, which has archived nearly 10,000 clips of Ukrainian civilians documenting the shocking reality of forced conscription in Ukraine. This should dispel any lingering doubts anyone may have about the nightmare Ukrainians are experiencing at the hands of Zelensky’s brutal Western-backed, Nazi-supported regime.
wiredearp retweeted
Beyond the Madman: Psychologism, Empathic Projection, and Empire
Karim’s essay from BettBeatMedia strikes at one of the most pervasive pathologies shaping contemporary geopolitical analysis: psychologism, which is the methodological process of reducing structural, systemic, and historical-material imperatives to the interior psychological weather of individual actors.
By exposing how even the sharpest anti-imperialist analysts routinely retreat into clinical diagnoses ("Trump is deranged," "Biden is senile," "MBS is megalomaniacal"), the essay identifies that individualizing the crimes of imperialism functions as an ideological alibi. It preserves the comforting illusion that the machine through which our world currently functions itself is rational, and that the horror before us is therefore a malfunction of the steering wheel rather than the usual trajectory of the engine.
Yet, I want to add some thoughts on the sociology of knowledge that could clarify a bit more.
Treating Personifications as Persons
What do I mean by confusing a personification with the person?
It means we are reading structural behavior as personal motive, and applying the epistemology (or the assumptions) of ordinary life to a structure whose logic is not the logic of ordinary life.
Marx gave us a better formulation: the capitalist is "capital personified." The capitalist's will is not just a personal will; it is the will required by the position of capital. The person (or capitalist in this case) is a bearer of a structural logic.
This essay applies this then to the imperial core: the ruling strata are personifications of the imperial system. Their psychology is one required by their structural position.
Furthermore, the political (but also corporate, military, and so on) ruling strata occupy a material position that is structurally different from ordinary social life, and this difference is not one of kind.
In ordinary life, human subjectivity is shaped by the requirements of social reproduction: mutual dependency, reciprocity, the vulnerability of the body, and the biological limits of the self.
In the executive suites of the imperial core, subjectivity is governed more by the cold mechanics of extraction, multi-domain control, and compound accumulation.
Why is that? Because the system selects, promotes, and metabolizes only those whose psychological profiles can execute the systemic mandate without flinching.
The Epistemology of Empathic Projection
Drawing on Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge, all human epistemology ( that is, the philosophy that studies the nature, origin, scope, and limits of human knowledge) is grounded in the material and historical conditions of the knower. We, all of us, have a persistent epistemological lag, a clouding by our own experiences, whereby we project the immediate, localized reality of our own daily survival onto macro-historical structures.
Because a "normal" person experiences extreme aggression, deceit, and disregard for life as aberrant, anti-social, and "insane," they project those moral and diagnostic categories onto the imperial state. When we watch the imperial core deliberately immolate an entire country, sever its own allies' industrial lifelines, or starve millions through secondary sanctions, our localized epistemology of daily life fails us. Unable to map the systemic rationality of the slaughter, we say: "They have lost their minds!"
But the problem is that this projection blinds the analyst and the observer, us, to the true nature of imperial statecraft. It assumes that states seek equilibrium, peace, and mutual survival because we, ordinary people, seek equilibrium, peace, and mutual survival. Therefore, we fail to grasp that for the imperial core, equilibrium is stagnation, and peace is an unacceptable concession (only granted when existentially threatened, to be precise).
The Material Genesis of the "Dark Triad" Meta-Framework
When we observe and see the imperial core behaving with what looks like clinical psychopathy, Machiavellian deception, and narcissistic supremacy, we reach for the psychiatric manual.
What, then, appears in psychological terms as the "Dark Triad" is in this context a material byproduct of managing an unbraked global extraction machine:
Structural Elimination of Empathy: The global market operates through logistical chains that reduce human populations to "objects of security" and labor variables. An imperial manager who experiences genuine empathy for the casualties of structural adjustment or drone strikes is structurally incompetent and will be immediately purged by the system.
Structural Instrumental Coercion: In a system governed by competition, norms and international laws become instruments of warfare. Hence, treaties are signed to buy time; alliances are maintained to outsource attrition; international forums are captured to enforce compliance.
The Supremacist Total Ideology: To staff the coercive apparatus and mobilize the "specialists of violence," the ruling strata requires a dichotomous meta-framework: the "Garden versus the Jungle." The belief in the core's civilizational superiority is the psychological armor that allows the technocrat and the drone operator to enforce global apartheid with an unburdened conscience.
That which we perceive as individual madness is part and outcome of the system. (Which is not to say that this or that person does not suffer from any affliction at all.)
The Context of Creation vs. The Context of Use
This brings us to a point in this essay where I want to add another food for thought:
"Empires do not fall because their leaders are mad. Empires produce mad leaders because they are falling. The pathology is downstream."
By attributing the apparent "madness" of the leadership to the fall of the empire, we are using the metaphor of the “flailing, dying beast, the drowning person,…etc.”
Why? Because there is a contingency of concepts, and here we tend to confuse the context of creation with the context of use:
During the Cold War (the context in which our contemporary definitions of "diplomatic sanity" were created), the imperial core was forced to wear a mask of rationality. It faced an existential, near-peer, systemic rival in the Soviet Union and an organized global anti-colonial movement. Under the discipline of existential threat, the imperial ruling class made concessions: it constructed the welfare state, accepted the UN Charter, tolerated the Non-Aligned Movement, and spoke the language of mutual coexistence.
In other words, both Eastern and Western scholars are analyzing the 2026 Bunker State using the intellectual hangovers of the Cold War and the 1990s. During the Cold War anomaly, leaders seemed to matter more because statesmanship was required to balance a bipolar world. However, we are psychologically bound by our most recent historical experience, blinding us to thestructural logistics of the present moment. We end up applying the contingency of the past to the reality of the present.
Ever since, the historically contingent mask of sanity has been mistaken for the "normal" state of international relations.
But we are not in the Cold War era anymore, nor in the 1990s. Today, that existential threat is absent. The contemporary world system is more defined by a Relational Void. There is no coherent resistance at scale. Multipolar powers are engaging in "reactive shielding" inside the capitalist market. A shared political horizon that would also generate organized resistance in the imperial core itself is also lacking.
Organized violence is the default setting of capitalism. It is required for market expansion and unequal exchange. The monetization of friction, the militarization of chokepoints, and the reduction of continents to attritional theaters are, therefore, the ruthless, calculated optimization of extraction in the absence of a global counter-hegemonic and anti-imperialist force.
Moving Beyond the Theater
The ruling strata are neither madmen who can be cured by therapy and elections, nor panicked animals stumbling into their own graves. They are the disciplined personifications of an unbraked imperial system that will continue to metabolize the biosphere and turn entire societies into rubble—all because, under the brutal logic of capital, coercion is the most profitable enterprise on earth.
And to end on a positive note:
All of this gives us political implications: We cannot appeal to the empire's conscience, because the empire has no conscience. But we can change the structure. Which means building countervailing power. Which means preparing for a mixed-economy project. Which means constructing a shared horizon.
The personification fallacy is an ideological trap keeping every part of the nascent resistance appealing to a conscience that doesn't exist and waiting for the bars of the cage to rust and become brittle.
(Link to the essay below:)
wiredearp retweeted
🇺🇸🇨🇦 US-Canada "Split" Ends with Canada Doubling Down on US "Burden-Sharing" Directives
▪️The staged "trade war" between the US and Canada, much of Canada's essential industries being controlled by US corporations in the first place, has been used to generate public anger against US President Donald Trump and blind emotionally-driven support for Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, both men representing the exact same corporate-financier interests;
▪️As part of this theater which includes Canada supposedly reducing Canada's dependence on the US (which is absolute), Canada seeks association with the EU, a US-created bloc used to undermine European sovereignty and maximize dependence on the US!
▪️Part of Canada's plan to "reduce dependence on the US," is to DOUBLE DOWN on funding and support for the US-engineered and led proxy war on Russia in Ukraine;
▪️In other words, what really happened was the US used emotionally charged hatred of President Trump to convince Canadians to rally around PM Carney, another US proxy, to double down on US interests at Canada's own expense;
▪️Back in reality, Canada's economy and especially trade still remains almost entirely dependent on the US - dependence the US is likewise expanding over the EU and its Asia-Pacific proxies;
wiredearp retweeted
China refused to bail out the Evergrande CEO because he crossed the three red lines established by Xi Jinping.
These three red lines are a practical application of dialectical materialism, which the Communist Party of China employs to arrest unchecked capitalism. Here is what they entail:
wiredearp retweeted
The legal dam just broke 👍
🇨🇳 China's 2021 Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law was always a sword waiting to be drawn
China's Supreme People's Court (SPC) just officially stamped the first ruling as a "representative case" mandatorily applying the Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law — and the message is surgical: "US sanctions are not a defense in our courts" — and every multinational with a China contract just felt the ground shift!
A Singaporean carrier refused to ship electronics from Shanghai to Panama because the Hong Kong client was on a US sanctions list. They returned the cargo. Caused losses. The Shanghai Maritime Court said: pay RMB 4.99M in damages. Article 12 of China's AFSL is an overriding mandatory provision — it doesn't matter what your contract says, what law you chose, or how scared you are of America's OFAC. If you help enforce foreign "discriminatory restrictions" against a Chinese party, you're liable. Full stop. No appeal filed. Judgment is final!
This isn't one case. This is precedent being set at the highest level. The SPC just told every lower court in the country: sanctions compliance is not a defense.
The geopolitical architecture here is the real story. Washington's entire sanctions toolkit relies on secondary sanctions — threatening third-country companies into compliance through fear. Beijing just flipped the board: comply with US sanctions in a Chinese jurisdiction, and YOU get sued. The "fear of OFAC" is no longer a shield. It's a liability!
For decades, Western especially U.S. sanctions were the gravity that global commerce orbited around. Companies and Banks built entire compliance departments around it. Sanctions clauses were automatic, unnegotiable, baked into every template.
Now there's a counter-gravity well. And it has teeth.
If you're a carrier, a bank, a supplier — you can't just flip the switch on a Chinese counterparty because Washington says so. Not if you have assets or operations in Greater China. Not if you ever want to litigate or do business there again.
The BLOWBACK is exquisite. The US built an entire extraterritorial enforcement regime on the premise that its domestic law has global reach — "long-arm jurisdiction," as the SPC itself called it. China is now deploying the same logic in reverse, but with actual statutory authority and now judicial precedent to back it.
We're watching the fragmentation of global commercial law and compliance in real time. Two competing legal gravity centers. No neutral ground
scmp.com/economy/china-econo…
wiredearp retweeted
On NATO 3.0
I just published a long essay I've been working on for weeks. It's called NATO 3.0: The Transatlantic Cage and the Rise of the Bunkerstate, and honestly, it started as a much simpler piece and then kept growing as I dug into the documents.
What I found, in short: the NATO summit in Ankara was the formal ratification of a qualitative shift in how the alliance functions. Europe is being systematically restructured as an operational node, a self-funding, self-industrializing garrison that will absorb the conventional burden of attritional warfare on the continent, while the U.S. ruling strata retain the command layer, the nuclear umbrella, the digital brain, and the strategic direction.
I trace this shift through the NATO declarations, through the Army War College monograph that calls for Europe to abandon "fragmented industrial nationalism" and shift to a "positional-defense framework," through the financial mechanisms (the NATO Innovation Fund, the ESG rewrites, the long-term procurement guarantees) that are channeling private capital into the defense sector, and through the historical record, the 1959 memo that already described this division of labor, the 1995 Libicki text on "vertical coalitions" that reads like a blueprint for today.
I also try to connect this to the Bunkerstate framework I've been developing. NATO 3.0 is the Bunkerstate at the transnational level, the same logic of securitization, the same hollowing of the civilian sphere, the same reorientation of the state toward war preparation, now scaled across a continent.
It's a long read. I don't apologize for that since the topic demanded it. But I tried to make every section earn its place. If you're interested in the (NATO-)machinery behind the headlines, I think it's worth your time.
As always, I welcome comments and questions. These are just frameworks through which we can see the world, but let's think and build together. (Link below)
wiredearp retweeted
On this day in 1961, the US started spraying Agent Orange in a campaign called “Operation Ranch Hand,” which would last 10 years. The program entailed the spraying of 19 million gallons of defoliants and herbicides over rural South Vietnam. Its alleged aim was to deny the Vietcong access to food and concealment provided by vegetation. In reality, it was to punish and deprive the Vietnamese people for their resistance.
De "svenske bander" lokker børn på sociale medier til mord via "krypterede beskedtjenester" og derfor legaliserede Hummelgaard ansigtsgenkendelse. Nu gør "sadistnetværk" det samme, og Wammen præsenter sin straf-uden-dom. Men hvem "groomer" og "radikaliserer" reelt vores børn? 1/x
Det er så det jeg snart bliver straffet uden dom for at sige, så det er sidste chance for at bemærke det som pressen altid "overser," nemlig at justitsministrene tracker amerikanernes program for bekæmpelse af Antlfa som styrer de venstreorienterede.
open.substack.com/pub/counte…
Men kan jo efterhånden ikke undgå at forstå at regeringen arbejder for Palantlr, så derfor bør vi snart sætte os ind i deres forretningsmodel. Pressen kommer ikke til at bemærke at "Minority Report policing" til bekæmpelse af os allerede er vedtaget i USA.
open.substack.com/pub/kenkli…
wiredearp retweeted
There's a special irony in The Economist, which Lenin himself described as a "journal which speaks for British millionaires", now conceding that firms under capitalism "stand little chance against a Leninist developmental state."
wiredearp retweeted
US plans for destroying nations like Russia, Iran, and China have been publicly published, talked about, and implemented for decades.
Politicians do not make these policies. They simply sell it to the public or distract the public away from these policies.
Multinational multi-billion dollar corporations don't sit there every 4-8 years leaving their future/fate and US policy to "voters" and the clowns they pick for office.
Instead they have created a political system to serve as an "explanation" for and/or a distraction away from their own continuity of agenda.
Corporations fundamentally pursue the maximization of power and profit - and therefore their collective agenda driving US policy is to maximize US power and profit - hence endless exploitation at home and hegemonic war worldwide no matter who you vote for.
This should be beyond commonsense.
But instead of understanding this as the fundamental nature of the US system and going on from there - people cannot help but to indulge in the daily political circus and attempt to cobble together fictional narratives to explain why "Obama" or "Trump" or "Biden" are doing the things they're doing - essentially continuity of agenda - without actually acknowledging continuity of agenda itself and the real interests driving it.
Instead, the "reason" Trump is continuing wars the corporations have planned and implemented for decades is because "he's blackmailed" or "has bad advisors," or "lost his temper" and not because the US political system is a deliberate system of control rather than a process of self-determination.
If you understood continuity of agenda and that unelected corporations drive it - BEFORE the 2024 elections you would have known these wars would continue and others would be started - just as they now have been - regardless of who won.
These people ignoring continuity of agenda and doing "analysis-by-official narrative" or "analysis-by-political party" are constantly wrong precisely because of this.
They are the same ones who said Trump would end all these wars in the first place (simply because he "said" so) or that Iran "won" and the US would leave West Asia (because the Western media suggested it), and are still looking for reasons to explain US policy in terms of "Trump," his "emotions," and the circus performed by him and those around him and even those "opposing" him.
And because they are doing this - they will continue to be wrong.
Truth is arrived at through first principles and scientific analysis and an understanding of material reality.
Like a math problem, if you don't get it right from the very start - everything you do onward will drift further and further from the right answer.
Go back to the beginning and start over until it all actually adds up.
wiredearp retweeted
We were taught the story of WWII wrong. This is the main reason many of us are so confused (at least on the West).
You see, we were told that in the Second World War, two major armies were fighting the Nazis: the Red Army and the American-led army, uniting France, Britain and other countries.
The only problem is, the Nazis and the American-led coalition of nations were in perfect agreement on everything the world except one issue.
Both the Americans and the Germans believed in the values of colonialism, ethnic cleansing and genocide. Both believed that black people were subhuman, and that Asians, Arabs, native Americans, and Slavs (read: all indigenous people on earth outside Western Europe) were inferior races - beliefs that now unite Europe, the US and other white colonies around the world.
Both believed their whiteness represented a divine right to rule and subjugate all of humanity, and own all its resources.
The only difference between the two sides was the Jewish question: Americans idolized them, and Germans demonized them. That's the entire difference. It is a minor dispute in an otherwise perfect harmony.
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The punchline is this: the story of WWII was not the USSR and the US fighting one Nazi amy. The real story was the USSR fighting two Nazi armies.
And the Soviets made amazing gains and had heroic achievements, but eventually they lost the war when the Soviet Union was brought down in the early 1990s.
What we are seeing today is THIS WWII - the real WWII - still being waged, with Russia and China still fending off the Nazi attack (of which Japan is still a part, and Zionist is a central spearhead).
The war never ended. It just evolved.
The big difference now, which guarantees the defeat of the white supremacist, Jew-idolizing Nazis, is the reemergence of new-old anti-Nazi forces: China as the biggest and most powerful military and industrial power on earth; Iran as a major native power sitting on top of the world's energy reserves, and Russia regaining its confidence and power after the trauma of the 1990s (Yemen and North Korea add depth and weight to this alliance).
Additionally, the US has lost momentum and steam, and the white supremacist civilization is clearly the intellectual and military underdog that will never be able to subjugate all of humanity, and therefore has to collapse under the weight of its own insane delusions and megalomania)
If you look at things this way, everything make perfect sense, without gaps and inconsistencies.
wiredearp retweeted
Now we completely understand exactly why a soft regime change was quietly carried out in the United Kingdom to forcefully remove Keir Starmer from power. Under Starmer's administration, the British government restricted the United States military from using its strategic island bases, deepwater naval ports, and Royal Air Force airfields to launch offensive, deep-penetration airstrikes targeting critical Iranian military capabilities.
The "Schrödinger's ceasefire" was obviously nothing more than a strategic breathing window for America to re-arm, re-target, and regroup. A part of Washington's operational blueprint during this ceasefire period included orchestrating the forced resignation of Starmer, bypassing democratic norms, and handpicking a far more loyal, completely submissive Prime Minister who would obediently do the absolute bidding of the Pentagon and the CIA.
And indeed, we are currently witnessing the devastating material results of this political transition in real time. Heavy American B-1 bombers carrying thousands of tons of heavy conventional payloads, precision-guided munitions, and bunker-buster bombs are taking off directly from RAF bases. Furthermore, specialized electronic warfare aircraft and tactical jamming platforms have been aggressively deployed to the UK to blind integrated air defense systems, jam military communications networks, and disrupt satellite navigation systems deep inside sovereign Iranian territory.
Of course, this is absolutely not to suggest that Keir Starmer was an innocent, anti-imperialist saint who refused to serve the transatlantic empire; he was ultimately removed simply because he failed to show total, absolute, and blind compliance to Washington's timeline. We historically witnessed this exact same ruthless dynamic during the chaotic Arab Spring: most of the regional leaders who were violently toppled, publicly disgraced, or ousted in CIA-backed operations had loyally done the bidding of Washington for decades. But the very second they showed the slightest hesitation, questioned imperial directives, or displayed minor signs of prioritizing their own domestic stability and national interest over the profit margins of the Western military-industrial complex, they were instantly declared obsolete, systematically targeted, and permanently removed from office.
B-1 bombers are launching from the U.K. for the first time, and Iran is now warning the British bases hosting them are legitimate targets.
The U.S. says more than 50,000 American troops are now in the region as additional personnel, including combat medics, deploy to support operations.
At the same time, U.S. forces carry out a 12th straight night of strikes on Iranian military targets, while President Trump warns civilian infrastructure could be targeted if Iran continues threatening commercial shipping.