In the DPRK, those convicted of crimes can live their lives out of prison without any further punishments or discrimination. For this and other reasons, the DPRK is an immovable object on the international stage that will continue to build socialism despite Washington's inhumane economic warfare against it. Its people won't rise up, because even though they're largely deprived, their government consistently shows itself to be on their side, and their problems are therefore clearly the fault of the sanctions. In the core of imperialism, the government can't gain this kind of perceived credibility, because it consistently acts against the interests of the masses. No amount of propaganda to scapegoat Washington's rival superpowers can negate this gargantuan trust deficit that keeps growing within its borders. Settler-colonialism has made the colonized masses hate our government from the beginning, and neoliberalism has turned increasing portions of the white masses towards this sentiment of hating the system.
According to Oriola, it's those millions of persecuted parolees and probation victims who will form the nucleus for the anti-colonial revolt that's to gain prominence in the coming decades. And the deteriorating living standards of the broader masses will provide the initial rebels with enough public support for the rebellion. Writes Oriola:
Some of these men may gradually be reaching the point where they believe they have nothing to lose. Some will join for revenge, others for the thrill of it and many for the dignity of the people they feel have been trampled on for too long. Although 93 per cent of protest against police brutality is peaceful and involves no major harm to people and property, there is no guarantee that future protests about new police killings will remain peaceful. The legitimacy of grievances of Black Americans among their fellow citizens is also an important variable. Their grievances appear to have found strong resonance and increasing sympathy within the broader population. Many Latino, Native American and white people see the injustices against Black people and are appalled. Black Lives Matter protests are now major multicultural events, particularly among young adults.
U.S. imperialism is cultivating the circumstances for its own ultimate demise, driving its own people to a desperation that can only lead to revolution. The reason I believe the abolition of the United States to be feasible, despite indigenous people being a small minority, is that the United States simply doesn't have the capacity to function as an entity which most can tie their own interests to. The last half-century's rise in inequality, due to accelerate unprecedentedly during the coming decades of climatic catastrophe, is reorienting the interests of the majority towards those of the very most oppressed peoples-whether they're the impoverished First Nations indigenous peoples or the victims of the penal system. Solidarity behind the cause of returning full jurisdiction to the First Nations, and towards building socialism on a post-colonial continent, absolutely can be created under these conditions.
We know this because U.S. imperialism won't enact the internal reforms which would take away the social backing for such a revolution. It won't because it can't, because it's too overcome by its own deficiencies to invest resources in its own people. Faced with the unraveling of U.S. hegemony and the decline of profits, its only plan is to continue driving the masses into destitution through austerity, and to keep building up the national security state. We can tell this from looking at the ways U.S. military officials talk about the crises the country is facing-and their opinions are so decisive because the U.S. is an imperialist oligarchy that's effectively run by the military-industrial complex.
Their consensus on how to respond to our society's collapse can be summarized as one of taking the orthodox military mentality towards defeating an enemy, and applying this mentality to the country's own people. It's an approach that's single-mindedly fixated on subduing some nebulous foe, and that's not willing to question the conditions behind the potential for unrest. We can see this in the 2019 Pentagon report which is best known for considering that the U.S. military could collapse within 20 years due to climatic disasters, but that should also be noted for the alarmingly myopic attitude it reveals military elites have towards our crises. Nafeez Ahmed, who wrote the Vice article with the title famously describing the "collapse within 20 years" prediction about the military, summarized how much of a hands-on approach the military aims to take on global warming and other destabilizing events:
Their report not only describes the need for massive permanent military infrastructure on US soil to stave off climate collapse, but portends new foreign interventions due to climate change. The authors argue that the Syrian civil war could be a taste of future international conflicts triggered by climate-induced unrest. There is "no question that the conflict erupted coincident with a major drought in the region which forced rural people into Syrian cities as large numbers of Iraqi refugees arrived," they say. The resulting conflict "reignited civil war in Iraq," and heightened military tensions between the US and Russia. "The Syrian population has declined by about 10 percent since the start of the war, with millions of refugees fleeing the nation, increasing instability in Europe, and stoking violent extremism," the report concludes.
The U.S. empire's attitude towards the crises it's created is not pragmatism, but reaction. Its strategists are paranoid towards the U.S. population, drawing both implicit and explicit plans for occupying U.S. cities to preempt an internal revolt. This fear of insurrection will turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy, where the empire loses the loyalty of its people due to its own propensity towards using mindless violence as a "solution" to problems. The step following the breakdown of national unity, where much of the public turns against the state out of practical necessity, will be a breakdown of unity among the military's own ranks.
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