It is difficult not to feel a sense of vertigo—tinged with a certain disgust—at the speed with which grim news multiplies week after week. Especially regarding international policies emanating from the West. Once again, a brief chronicle of imperial USA decline unfolds amid preparations for a potential war against Iran, with European allies. The empire will die while it destroys other people’s lives, and it is not short of loyal followers.
Recent events show how old colonialism reinvents itself. Remarks delivered by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference to the upper ranks of Europe’s Atlanticist elite illustrated this.. I Rubio blamed immigrants for Europe’s decline and called for joint reindustrialization between Europe and the United States. He also evoked, with unmistakable imperial nostalgia, the colonial era when the West expanded across the globe, bringing “prosperity” and “civilization” to the so-called barbarian world. After 1945, he argued, a weakened postwar Europe was struck by atheistic communists and decolonial movements. Now, Rubio concluded, this decline must be confronted “together.” In his speech, Rubio said: „This is the path that President Trump and the United States has embarked upon. It is the path we ask you here in Europe to join us on. It is a path we have walked together before and hope to walk together again. For five centuries, before the end of the Second World War, the West had been expanding — its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers pouring out from its shores to cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires extending out across the globe“
His message amounted to a call for the regroupment of former postcolonial powers and a declaration of confrontation against those unwilling to align with imperial policy/ This was a pointed signal to the Global South and to blocs such as the BRICS. The speech was saturated with imperial longing, and it was met with applause from an audience of compliant European elites.
Geopolitical commentator Ben Norton wrote on “X”:
“What the US empire is doing now with Gaza, Venezuela, and Cuba is what awaits most of humanity, and European elites applaud enthusiastically.”
With such leaders at the helm, and with an indifferent, intimidated, and complacent population, little can be expected from Europe. In Germany, shameless political support for the genocide in Gaza continues, even as politicians tour a territory reduced to ruins. Meanwhile, prominent artists. prefer silence. This was the case with the German director Wim Wenders, who, during a press conference at the Berlin International Film Festival, was confronted with a question about the genocide in Gaza. Wenders replied that the festival was „not political,” contradicting himself from years earlier. His response provoked the Indian writer Arundhati Roy to cancel her visit to the festival in protest at his remarks.
Meanwhile, Germany deepens its ties with Israel.Inside Germany the repression of pro-Palestinian protest persists, through repressive measures that have been declared unconstitutional in both Germany and England. At the same time, the political class has sought to deny the genocide in Gaza, as noted by the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention. This is particularly troubling in a country where Holocaust denial is punishable by law.
Added to this is the pressure exerted by governments allied with Israel(France, the United Kingdom, and Germany)which call for the resignation of the courageous UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese. She is a leading voice documenting the genocide in Gaza, but has been slandered by the circulation of a manipulated video. These governments attacked Albanese with a troubling hypocrisy and a lack of intellectual honesty, as they did not attempt to verify the material’s authenticity. In this climate, truth itself has been discarded. What we are witnessing is, quite simply, a war.As Yanis Varoufakis recently wrote:
“Today, Francesca Albanese’s detractors, those who seek to shield Israel from her well-documented, factual, legitimate criticism by getting her fired or by forcing her resignation from her position of UN Special Rapporteur – these people do not understand one thing:
Francesca will NEVER stop! She will continue to expose Israel’s crimes whether she is the UN’s Special Rapporteur or not. My message to them is simple: Francesca Albanese may be even more successful in shining light on Israel’s genocide if you strip her of her UN role. Beware what you wish for!”
As the genocide in Gaza continues and Israel prepares the de facto annexation of the West Bank in violation of international law once again, yet another spectacle of horror arises from the Epstein files. It turned out that the much-maligned “conspiracy theorists” were right to point out the profound moral decay of global capitalist elites. Beyond the moral outrage provoked by the actions of this bunch of unscrupulous torturers, murderers, and pedophiles, I suspect that the exposure of these cruelty-laden archives also contributes to the normalization of violence against the vulnerable. Is this not one of the central messages of Trump and his supremacist allies? Hatred and contempt for the weak—be they immigrants, Latinos, Black people, homosexuals, or anyone who does not fit into the racist imaginary of MAGA politics.
Thus, I invite readers to interpret this “scandal” differently: Epstein and his vast network of Zionist pedophiles are not merely another sign of elite corruption and impunity. Rather they expose the staggering violence that underlies this economic and political system, its structural foundation. Given the level of dehumanization and destruction of human lives in Gaza, this should not come as a surprise. Cruelty advances. The Epstein files simply reaffirm what we already know—that power and money go hand in hand. The relationship between the system and these figures is not incidental. These are neither the system’s “black sheep” nor exceptions to the rule; they are expressions of the system itself. Indeed, the system is a machine for producing such monsters. Epstein, Trump, politicians, aristocrats, scientists, and Mossad intelligence agents—all those who appear within that network—embodied the violence of this order; they are its defenders, its products, and its guardians. Should we really be surprised by imperial violence against Venezuela, attempts to starve Cuba, renewed aggression against Iran, or the near-total destruction of the Gaza Strip?
It seems that the so‑called “culture war,” as the far right likes to call it, has now reached the boundaries of geopolitics and international relations. What now prevails is raw, unadulterated imperial violence, with the clear complicity of its European lackeys. Munich provided us with another example of this will to death and nihilism at the heart of the European elites.
Meanwhile, those annoying elements who dare to denounce this violence—the genocide in Gaza, the criminal blockade of Cuba, the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro, the imminent war against Iran—are declared the new enemies. Enemies of the wonderful Western civilization, the so‑called “cradle” of democracy and the free market. Because of the wickedness of those Others—whether Arabs, Chinese, critics, communists, anti‑imperialists, decolonialists, etc.—the empire and its lackeys will be forced to resort to violence for their own preservation, both inwardly and outwardly.This is not only an expression of imperial nostalgia but also a desire to restore an old colonial order in which the West rules again. We on the other side cannot expect to be treated well by people with great power and few scruples. Rubio’s speech shows us with striking clarity that the coloniality of power—as a particular system of domination characterized by Aníbal Quijano—is more alive than ever. Europe is nostalgic for its dissipated imperial power, far from resisting this decadent narrative. Indeed Europe seems willing to climb aboard the wagon of (self‑)destruction that these riders of the apocalypse are prepared to inflict on the world.
