I once held all the conventional liberal views, looked down on the countries I was supposed to, and waited patiently for improvement. But curiosity was my undoing. I read the people they condemned and found out they were actually cool.

Conventionally, you are supposed to support diversity, equity, and inclusion within Empire, but you have to ask inclusion in what? If DEI means gay people dropping bombs, brown people lying about it, and Black people rapping at the Superbowl while the same jets fly above, count me out. But you're not supposed to ask these questions, you're supposed to just clap for ‘representation’ in the reprehensible. Recently I saw brown girls happy that a South Asian was in the Victoria's Secret fashion show, not knowing (or caring) that Jeffrey Epstein only really had one client, Les Wexner, the owner of Victoria's Secret. But hey, representation in our underwear for sex slavers, bully for us. Too many people like me are still eager to become colonizers, clambering up the imperial ladder, following the only rule of the rules based order, always be kicking down. I was on the ladder to Whiteness once, but I guess I made the mistake of looking down.

Convivially, I used to hate who I was supposed to hate, uttering all the pious platitudes about Democracy™, Human Rights©, and Freedom®. I used to be biased and downright disrespectful towards China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and anyone else who shared the ideology of independence, based simply on what the worst people in the world told me about them. But then I made the mistake of taking Empire's condemnations as reading recommendations, and I began reading these people directly. I discovered that these were culturally rich, rational, civilizations who largely wanted to be left alone. Any ills in their societies were certainly not helped by starving their people and dropping bombs. Everything I'd been told was wrong, and as the Empire began to accelerate the genocide in Palestine, the battle lines were well and truly drawn. And I knew which side I was on. Curiosity led me right where conviviality led me wrong.

Conversationally, I used to stay within the white lines, to say that America should do better, not that America itself was wrong. This was the rational, serious position, that America did bad, but the American idea was good and just needed more appealing to. So I used to appeal to America's conscience, not knowing that it had none, as Kwame Ture told us long ago. It embarrasses me how late curiosity dawned on me, when people had been saying the obvious all along. I listened to Rage Against The Machine, but only for the songs. My later curiosity about the obvious evils America was committing led me to reread history, which I saw was full of omissions and outright falsehoods. Now I can't even begin a conversation with most White people because I disagree with them at such a deep level. I feel like Goldfinger when James Bond asked him what he wanted to talk about. Nothing, Goldfinger said, I expect you to die. That's how I feel about Whiteness and White Empire, which is a conversational non-starter with people that still hold that identity which again is entirely optional. As Noel Ignaetiv said, treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity, but try saying that in casual conversation.

Convention, conviviality, conversation. Those were the three Cs of what was membership in the polite KKK, in hindsight. Kill the natives slowly and out of the way, then do a land acknowledgement over their graves. Once I saw the three Cs I couldn't unsee them and became impolite company. But do we really owe politeness to those killing us softly? I now have more contempt for liberals than conservatives, because the latter at least kill us loudly and proudly.

What led me right was not education or any special intelligence but simple curiosity. Reading the people they condemn in the news, and reading the people they tried to write out of history. Looking beyond the news to peruse a book or two about the subject, and digging up statements from people never invited to interviews. I feel there was nothing special in this, though it took me years to overcome my Western education and what I thought was superior intelligence. I realize now it was just propaganda and a superiority complex, revealed upon the slightest examination. But I still find this basic curiosity lacking within the Empire itself.

I was recently in Oxford, for example, and the conventional belief is still that Ukraine good, Russia bad, Palestine good but Hamas bad. In fact, you can't even say Hamas there, the UK arrests you for that. Nobody sees the utter uselessness of their conventional positions and convivial hypocrisy. Oxford is really built around this willful blindness, there's an entire class of servants running the place, and nobody connects the people serving them in the canteen or kebab stands to the violence they so casually spread overseas.

But I notice. They're served in the canteen by Slavic women driven north from Ukraine while the military base not far from Oxford trains Slavic men to kill themselves. In fact, in the UK you get Internet ads for nice Ukrainian brides. They're literally taking the women and killing the men, and calling themselves friends. Nobody sees the corruption and complicity in front of them, they're like Romans in a Colosseum, voting thumbs up or thumbs down like they control anything when they might as well sit on them. These people really don't see what's right in front of them and what's behind them is palimpsest, a document of overwritten over and over, of war crimes and ruined 'allies' all over the world but somehow this time is different.

All the places they claim to help they corrupt, and all the people they claim to support just become their slaves driven north, to be DEI'd to death and slowly turned to White people, who can in turn oppress others. This could be understood by reading anything about the wild corruption in and of Ukraine, or the history of Afghanistan, or South Vietnam, but no, this time it's going to be different. Again and again, which is one definition of insanity. These are supposedly the smartest people in the Empire, in Oxford. But they, in my experience, have little curiosity beyond their narrow fields and both accept and perpetuate conventional wisdom, which is monstrous.

In the same way, the convivial position is to support the Palestinian people and condemn their Resistance movements. As the saying goes, those who are with our corpses and not our rockets are hypocrites and not of us. This is the position across Empire, indeed the only legally allowed one. Sympathy with Palestinians as victims, but condemnation if they ever defend themselves. It's a logically incoherent position which appeals to a gentler white supremacy which doesn't exist, so the people just get genocided slower. People condemn Hamas without reading anything from or about Hamas, and casually deride Islam without reading the Quran. Nor does anyone question why their government which is terrorizing colored people is in any position to judge who is a terrorist or not. These people are just Diet Nazis. Zero calories for them, but still supporting Coca-Cola.

Conversationally, of course, all of these insights make me a terrible conversationalist within the White Empire where I sadly, exist. I try to keep my mouth shut, but if I open it I question things on such a fundamental level that it's really awkward for everybody. The starting point of any conversation in or with the West is that the West is best, or at least improving, whereas the point we're at now is that Western Civilization is irredeemable and needs exploding. We're literally in different worlds now, me and the people I grew up with. Barack Obama offered the brief hope that what's wrong with America can be fixed by what's right with America but then he turned into just another bomber. That hope was revealed as just more dope.

I see the No Kings protests in America and think, that's not your problem. America would have been better with a king, those places (like Canada) abolished slavery earlier. The genocide and slavery coming out of their system now is because the system was build on genocide and slavery from the beginning! There is no redeeming American democracy, kings are not your problem. These people really don't see that their system was rotten rule by property owners from the beginning and that it hasn't gotten better with more DEI varnishing. They appeal back to some past to save them when that past was even more genocide and slavery and oppression. There's no there there. America cannot evolve, it simply needs to be disemboweled. The best thing these protestors could do is what's recommended for us in the Dirty South. Overthrow your governments and greet us as liberators.

So how did I get here? Unpledging allegiance to the flag I grew up pledging allegiance to? It wasn't great intelligence, nor great morality, but simply a deep sense of curiosity that led me to read beyond what I was told. To read books beyond the news, to try and understand condemned people's views, and to not be another rube in the Cable Colosseum, throwing thumbs up or thumbs down like I knew something, and like my views were important. People just believe whatever they're told about places they read no further about, hate whoever they're told to hate without hearing them out, and appeal to the conscience of an Empire that's entirely without. But if you interrogate any of the conventional, convivial, conversational claims you're surrounded by, you'll find they're all false. It doesn't take much. Just a little curiosity and, in my case, nearly a decade.