Empire's Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Rodriguez and Mangione are Just the Beginning
When a society forces you to watch genocide in real-time and punishes you for not applauding the killers, why act surprised when that violence comes home?
The blood on the Washington sidewalk has barely dried as the machinery of imperial propaganda roars into full operation. A German-Israeli diplomat and his girlfriend, shot dead in the capital of the American empire. The alleged shooter reportedly shouted "Free Palestine" as police wrestled him to the ground. Within hours, a constellation of think tanks, politicians, and media outlets had their polished statements ready - each word carefully calibrated to exploit this moment, to transmute these deaths into political currency, to claim moral capital from convenient corpses.
The Death of Peaceful Resistance
We stand now at the terminus of peaceful resistance. For nearly two years, we have watched the methodical extermination of Gaza unfold on our smartphones - 18 months of high-definition genocide, streamed directly into the palms of our hands. Each day bringing new horrors: Palestinian children incinerated by American-made bombs, hospitals reduced to rubble, innocents sexually tortured on video, diplomats fired upon by Israeli troops. Netanyahu, with a clarity that would make Goebbels blush, repeatedly declaring his intent to eradicate Palestinian existence while receiving standing ovations in the Hallowed Halls of Empire.
What happens to a society forced to witness such barbarity while simultaneously being told to celebrate it? What fractures form in the global psyche when peaceful protest is criminalized, when boycotts are banned, when students are suspended for uttering "Free Palestine," when every nonviolent avenue of dissent is systematically blocked?
The shooting in Washington DC - regardless of whether it was the desperate act of a lone gunman or something more manufactured - represents the inevitable outcome of a system designed to funnel rage into violence. Rodriguez, the alleged suspect, follows the same desperate logic as Luigi Mangione, whose assassination of the CEO of a health insurance company emerged from a similar cauldron of societal desperation. These are not isolated aberrations but the predictable harvest of seeds planted with meticulous care.
“Violence is not merely an American problem but an American instinct, honed through generations of imperial practice”
Moral Schizophrenia
America has cultivated violence as its national religion. It worships at the altar of the gun while pretending shock at its consequences. It teaches violence through every medium - films, video games, foreign policy, drone strikes, police brutality, empire - then affects surprised indignation when its citizens absorb the lesson. Violence is not merely an American problem but an American instinct, honed through generations of imperial practice.
What we witnessed in Washington was not the disease but the symptom. The disease is a civilization built on moral bankruptcy, a society that forces us to watch a livestreamed genocide while demanding applause for the killers. The disease is a system that makes empathy a crime, protest illegal, and justice unreachable.
This cognitive dissonance - this profound moral schizophrenia - has been imposed on an American population already fractured by economic precarity, mental illness, and social atomization. Americans are barely clinging to sanity in a society that increasingly resembles a vast psychological experiment testing how much gaslighting, emotional abuse, and dysfunction human beings can endure before imploding or exploding.
The Washington shooting is merely the latest data point in this experiment. Whether orchestrated or organic, it represents the predictable outcome of a system that has methodically eliminated every nonviolent path to change.
Claiming Moral Capital from Corpses
For a regime founded on myth and maintained by deception, claiming moral capital from corpses is not an aberration but standard operating procedure. The alchemy of transforming dead bodies into political leverage has been perfected over decades—each casualty carefully cataloged, each coffin draped in rhetorical significance, each death repackaged as proof of victimhood rather than consequence of policy. These two victims in Washington will be no exception—their deaths will be meticulously transformed into a rallying cry against “antisemitism”, while the root causes of violence remain deliberately unexamined.
This necropolitical economy requires a constant supply of selective grief to sustain itself, harvesting sympathy only for those deemed worthy of mourning. The pain of the privileged — the worthy victims — becomes currency, exchanged for diplomatic cover, military aid, and immunity from accountability. Meanwhile, the unworthy—Palestinians, Black Americans, Arabs, Muslims, Africans, Asians, all those relegated to the category of "unpeople" or “non-whites”—can perish by the thousands — millions — without meriting so much as a headline. Their mass graves remain unmarked, their names unspoken in corridors of power, their deaths merely statistical background noise to the empire's ongoing narrative of its own victimhood.
Embodiment of Evil
The American empire is the embodiment of evil. It does not get to cry terror when it has institutionalized terror in every corner of the planet. It does not get to moralize about acceptable speech, violence, or ethics while funding the bombing of refugee tents, the torture of grandmothers and the kidnapping of innocent children. It does not get to demand civility while criminalizing nonviolent resistance. It does not get to invoke the sanctity of life while bankrolling its desecration.
If America wants peace, it must stop manufacturing war. If it wants nonviolence, it must stop punishing nonviolence. If it wants respect, it must become respectable.
Until the empire confronts its own moral rot, until it stops infecting the world with its pathological hypocrisy, it cannot feign shock when that sickness inevitably returns home to consume its host.
- Karim
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Well said. I agree with every word.
Once again, an outstanding article Karim. It is difficult to imagine that Americans cannot see reflections of themselves in the gratuitous violence inflicted upon the Palestinians: the endless gun violence, the police brutality against black people, the silencing of dissent, the racism and ineluctable rise of white supremacism, the deportations without due process, the audacious duplicity, deceit, gaslighting, vituperation, character assassinations and calumny…the list goes on and on.