And how COVID is bringing their empire down

Americans like to think they’re not an empire. It’s like asking a fish what’s water, only the water is blood. Violence is just the soup they swim in. Americans sacrifice their own children to AR-15s. Of course they kill brown people abroad. They don’t even protect their own children.

American troops are deployed in 165 countries and 12 territories, more than any empire in history. America has a presence in 85% of the nations of the world. They operate from 800 foreign bases. They actively kill in 14 countries. Despite losing every war for decades, Americans ‘train’ over 80 countries in their failed tactics of abduction, torture, and murder.

Thanks for that.

Not only do you kill and torture, you train our governments to kill and torture too. It’s like a franchise opportunity for war crimes. The American dream: a McDonald’s and a Black Site on every corner.

Americans like to think they’re the good guys but they’re really not. You’re the baddies.

Just look at a map.

The game of Risk

To hideously over-complicate the map above, I’ve mapped actual-ish* troop levels as a bunch of Risk pieces. If you’re on mobile this may be well-nigh unreadable, try this:

Whereas Risk takes 8 hours to play, America has been playing for 8 decades. Since World War II, American forces have been spreading across the globe. This accelerated with their Terror War and now it’s a global cancer, spreading across Africa. The occupation drones on and on. Literally.

You can see the full map above, but it’s a bit much (imagine living under it).

Let’s go through it.

The pieces

Risk is played with infantry, cavalry, and artillery. I’ve added a castle because Americans tend to stay for a while. Here’s how the pieces work:

Infantry - 10 each
This could just be a normal Defense Attaché, but only America does this everywhere. Roughly* 122 countries are occupied with these pieces.

Cavalry - 100 each
100 troops is enough to run a base, and that’s often what they do. 36 countries

Artillery - 1,000 each
1,000 troops is basically the Bay of Pigs. If you're lucky they're just droning your neighbors or raping a bit. 9 countries.

Castle - 10,000 each
10,000 troops is war. Americans don't declare war anymore, but that's what it is. 10 countries.

Those are the pieces of war. If you’re a glutton for zooming you can calculate troop deployments from the map itself, or just look at the spreadsheet. Now let’s look at the bloody board.

The board

The board is the world. The world contains real people. People that don’t enjoy having their weddings droned, children who now fear blue skies, fathers tortured and taken away forever, women raped, entire communities corrupted and destroyed.

I’m using Risk as a metaphor, but please don’t forget that there are real humans on the board. Occupation is theft. War is murder. All of this is evil. Americans have said this is for our own good, but it’s decades later and things are shit.

Worst of all, it’s all pointless. American taxpayers spend trillions and get what? It’s just human sacrifice to the gods of military industrialism. While Aztec human sacrifice was vastly exaggerated, we are not talking about American sacrifice enough. The ancients at least left pyramids, American empire is just a pyramid scheme.

America is the only empire built on losing wars. It is both the most successful and the most stupid empire in history. America has pieces all over their board, but their own society is in pieces.

But I digress. Let’s get to the bloody game.

World War 2 Long

The die was cast in World War II. European and Japanese colonial bastards killed themselves and America picked up the pieces. Literally, American are placed where older empires used to be.

The only empire left standing was the USSR, and so America and them continued fighting for another 46 years. What we call the Cold War was really just World War II taking forever to tie up loose ends.

Hence Americans (via NATO) are permanently garrisoned in Europe and Japan and there was outright war in Korea, Vietnam, and fuckery all over the globe. We only call this is a Cold War because it didn’t kill white people. In truth, it was plenty hot. Ask Cambodia you bitches. ASK CAMBODIA.

This is still the least offensive part of the map. Vietnam thrashed America and Afghanistan trounced the USSR. The rest of WWII occupations are of rich/white countries who do not see the brute end of empire. Japan is periodically like ‘stop raping us’ but that’s about it.

Until really 2001, this aftermath of WWII was frozen in time. If you defied the US in the 60s or 70s, congratulations, you’re fucked forever. For places like Cuba and Iran, America will deny their great-grandchildren food and medicine. Everybody else sort of moved on, with this military furniture in place.

Until 9/11. In the greatest piece of military jiu-jitsu in history, one day has caused America to fuck itself (and the world) for decades.

America’s Terror War

America has been getting its ass kicked by nouns for 50 years. Poverty, drugs, terrorism. America’s reaction to 9/11 has created more terrorism and made global terrors out of them.

Just look at this map. It’s an abomination.

WTF has Iran done to anybody, and why is Niger getting drawn into this? America’s Terror War is just a transparent grudge match against Iran for not getting quietly couped and giving up the oil decades ago. There’s a joke that Iran had the audacity to place their country between American bases. It’s not funny.

Note that I’ve stretched this map out to note that the US inherited every colonial island and atoll on Earth, from Diego Garcia to Ascension to Gibraltar. They are the true heirs of colonialism.

Anyways, America’s occupation of the Middle East has A) killed hundreds of thousands of people B) entrenched dictators now versed in ‘counter-terrorism tactics’ (ie, using military on civilians) and C) DOESN’T FUCKING WORK. Iran is still standing, has more influence in Iraq than ever, and terrorism has spread all over.

If I declare a war on rats and end up with 8x more rats, you can safely say that whatever I’m doing doesn’t work and please stop. For a pyramid scheme, however, this doesn’t matter. In fact, it probably helps. More terrorism? Have you tried more counter-terrorism? Didn’t work? How about some more? This goes on, ad nauseum. You don’t want to solve the problem, because then what would you sell? So America marches on, always looking for a new sucker.

Now American terror has spread to Africa. Of the 14 countries where America is involved in active combat, 9 are in Africa. I cannot even find clear numbers for the AFRICOM troop strength or bases in Africa, I’ve just divided a rough figure of 6,000 by the countries with major bases, but this is almost certainly an underestimation.

American troops are everywhere in Africa. The result is more terrorism, hence more demand for American ‘training’, more money, more bases, more corruption, and creeping, galloping militarization across the continent.

The entire premise of counter-terrorism is rotten, it’s just the American predilection to kill or imprison their way out of every problem. Counter-terrorism is fundamentally the adaptation of military tactics to civilian targets, ie, busting down doors, kidnapping, torturing and murdering. It is indistinguishable from what a police state does to its citizens and, indeed, that’s what this training ultimately produces. America doesn’t train governments in counter-terrorism. They train them in terror.

Congratulations, you played yourself

Thankfully, it’s all coming down. This whole project coasted on America’s reputation, and that reputation is gone. Their nurses are wearing trash-bags and their post office doesn’t work. Literally every empire since the start of empire has had a postal service. The whole world can see that the empire is naked. The emperor has no PPE.

As the latter day Palestinian poet DJ Khaled would say, congratulations, you played yourself. While the rest of the world was investing in health and human beings, Americans were investing in weapons and death. That’s literally all they did as lone superpower — spend $6 trillion killing Muslims for sport. Now they’re faced with a problem they can’t torture or nuke and they’re screwed.

Who cares if America has 800 bases now? An American citizen is banned from traveling almost anywhere in the world. Who cares about American counter-terrorism when they can’t even counter an uncommon cold? An empire can survive many things, but it cannot become a laughingstock. That’s how it ends.

Endgame

The game of Risk seems to go on forever, but it does end. People fold up the board and go back to their separate lives. Every empire ends. The British, the Soviet, the Sith, and now the American. Good riddance. For people that point to the Chinese as a bogeyman, please. “Since the 1970s, China has not once gone to war; the U.S. has not spent a day at peace”.

Americans like to think that they’re not an empire, and they’re almost right. They won’t be an empire for long. In truth, American empire is already dead, it’s just taking the signal a while to reach their meagre and distant brain. Ding dong bitches. The wicked witch of the west is dead.

*The exact occupation figures are off because the disclosure is not complete. The DoD excludes ongoing operations (a lot) and marks nearly 10,000 troops as ZZ-UNKNOWN, which they must know, unless troops are occupying ZZ Top. This is especially true for Africa, where I have included really rough estimates based on news reports. Numbers are almost certainly an underestimation. If you want to see my messy annotation of the DoD numbers, here it is. The other sources are linked above or printed on the map.