As the Country Falls Apart, It’s Time for Our Revolution

A call to arms from Ted Rall’s new book, “Anti-American Manifesto.”

November 10, 2010 | The following is an excerpt from Ted Rall’s new book, The Anti-American Manifesto (Seven Stories, 2010).

You can feel it. Or maybe you can’t.

It doesn’t matter whether you feel it or not. It’s happening. The story of the United States of America as we know it — not merely as the world’s dominant superpower, but as a discrete political, economic, and geographic entity — is drawing to a close due to a convergence of emerging economic, environmental, and political crises.

Nothing lasts forever, empires least of all. And this one, which only began to expand in earnest circa the year 1900, doesn’t feel like it has the staying power of ancient Rome.

Not at all.

But we’re not here to talk about the vague possibility of collapse at some point in the future. We are here — in this book and within this historical moment — because the collapse feels as though it is currently in progress.

We are here because the U.S. is going to end soon. There’s going to be an intense, violent, probably haphazard struggle for control. It’s going to come down to us versus them. The question is: What are you going to do about it?

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Fuck Patience

The final piece from END:CIV is both a reality check and a call to arms. Can we really expect the power structures to change their destructive ways by asking nicely? Do we have unlimited time to stop the destruction of the planet? The answer to both questions is no. If we are serious about defending the biosphere and abolishing the institutions responsible for the hyper exploitation of the land, we have to become a resistance movement and go beyond “feel good” symbolic actions.

Music by stig inge oy. and Omar Torres

Communiqué from an Occupied Moment

“Capitalism is a system of relationships, which goes from inside to out, from outside to in, from above to below, and from below to above. Everything is relative, everything is in chains. Capitalism is a condition both of the world and of the soul.” -Franz Kafka

There is nothing left; nothing that hasn’t been molded, molested, or completely crushed; nothing that has managed to escape the network of power as it scours every inch of the earth, lodging itself into every crevice. Crowding each moment, the omnipresent asphyxiation provides ample evidence to this all-encompassing totalization. Heads bowed, backs bent, we bear the weight of the day in our beleaguered entrails.

Now taking on increasingly monstrous qualities, a vampire-likeness of achieved full nocturnality, even the sleeper finds his dreams inhabited. Robbing us of expectations, snatching away our latent potential, Capital has acquired the speculative capability to recuperate futures and integrate things before their invention. After colonizing the entire world, the enemy now works to conquer the collective realm of our imaginations where we once plotted and, consequently, envisioned its very demise.

Government of Occupation

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This is the first test I did to see if the film idea for END:CIV would fly. The aspect ratio is 4:3 which I will adjust to 16:9 in the coming months. Derrick Jensen came to Vancouver in 2007 and I taped him giving his powerful “Endgame talk” in front of a green screen at VIVO. The archival footage is from Archive.org.