Despite the rhetoric from sycophantic bootlickers, the US government funds and commits more terror than any other country in the world. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, in 2015 the US spent $597 billion on military expenditures, about as much as the next 8 top military spenders combined.This is enough money to end world hunger, homelessness, and dehydration and to fund medical care and education globally. In 2009 the US had more than 900 military bases around the world and soldiers in 148 countries. In 2011 the US government sold weapons to 172 countries, (including countries rife with military and police violence, such as Sudan, Saudi Arabia, the Congo, Egypt, Israel, Mexico, Niger, Nigeria, Pakistan, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Turkey, and Ukraine. The US military openly targets hospitals, schools, mosques, UN centers, and other civilian infrastructure in Afghanistan and Yemen and various other countries and has the gall to blame their targets for using “human shields.” The US government operates CIA black site prisons like Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, Stare Kiejkuty in Poland (formerly an outpost for the Nazi intelligence service) and black-site prisons like them on American soil like Homan Square in Chicago where human beings are being held, humiliated, confined, raped, and tortured without trial, representation, or the light of day, most having never committed a crime across the world. It funds dictatorships like Saudi Arabia’s “Royal Family” that offer resources valuable to US corporations like oil and executes democratically elected leaders like Patrice Lumumba (In December 2013, the U.S. State Department admitted that President Eisenhower authorized his murder and his killers received CIA funding and weapons) when they stand in the way of corporate America’s profits. The US has fueled genocides across the world in South Sudan, Niger, Chad, Nigeria, the Congo, East Timor, Yemen, Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Palestine and many more countries. Every single US President in history has committed crimes against humanity. US police and prison guards detain, harass, beat, torture, incarcerate, and kill without due process. Their word is always trusted in courts. Savage, bloodthirsty prosecutors and judges side with killer cops. Almost none are convicted.

Yet xenophobic, jingoist half-wits across America still wave their stupid little flags and praise America as “the greatest country on Earth” Budweiser and McDonald’s apple pie in hand, sporting their ill-fitting NASCAR tank tops and condemning immigrants and minorities as the root of their woes. Even moderate liberals who rightly criticize the system do not fully understand the absolute hell that is this government and their “solutions” don’t go nearly far enough. They offer reforms and advocate nonviolent protest in response or contacting Congress. But nonviolent protest rarely works alone nor does contacting Congress as they couldn’t care less about us. The tyrants of the world don’t have the conscience for nonviolent protest to work. They only understand force. This country would have to care about right and wrong for it to work. At best, nothing happens. At worst, you are fined, beaten, or even killed and painted in the media as a “violent rioter.” The world needs more fighters; not martyrs who already number in the billions.

This system isn’t broken. It was set up this way. This is what the rulers of this country want because it profits them, ideologically and financially. James Madison in the Constitutional Convention said that the government’s utmost imperative is to “protect the opulent minority from the majority.” That hasn’t changed. This land was stolen from Native Americans who were all but wiped out by this government and its infrastructure and economy were built by African slaves kidnapped from their homeland. America continues its legacy of slavery and supremacy and maintains the largest prison population in the world. 2.4 million Americans are in prison on any given day, (making up 25% of the world’s prison population, despite the fact that the total US population is only about 4% of the world’s total population) and 1.7 million are there for non-violent drug offenses. Congress is beholden to American corporations and the wealthiest, ruling class. Former executives of billion-dollar, Wall Street firms run the Treasury and the Federal Reserve. US elections are rigged. Our votes make no difference because of the electoral college, gerrymandering, the influence of super PACs and unlimited corporate donations, the difficulty of registering and on and on. The government is an alien force that terrorizes us without end. The myth that they rule with our consent or that this government in any way resembles a “democracy” is one of the most terrible, ubiquitous lies that will not seem to die. We are born on land that is governed and we don’t get to pick where to be born, of course. We are not even capable of giving consent (legally) when we are born and yet right out of the womb we are immediately governed by a myriad of laws and the inclinations of those with the law on their side. And leaving this country costs money not everyone has.

Soldiers and cops are painted as heroes. But, for the most part, they are terrorists. They inflict far more terror than ISIS, Boko Haram, Al’shabb, AQIM, or Al Qaeda combined. When will we openly declare war on the state and the ruling billionaire class, not with sit-ins or by writing letters to Congress but by destroying the operations of billion-dollar corporations that are wiping out our forests, demolishing mountains for their minerals, fracking the land, polluting the water-table and the air we breathe, and contributing to the Holocene Extinction Event, which has wiped out half of all species on the only known habitable planet in the universe? When will we dismantle the nuclear weaponry, military bases, and police stations of the US and the world at large? When will we save our planet? The US government will call it terrorism. In fact, they often call nonviolent protesters like those of the Occupy movement terrorists. They call their terrorism “freedom fighting” and any attempts to resist it “terrorism” just as they call any attempts to stop corporations from destroying the environment “eco-terrorism”. Let this not stop us. They can paint us with whatever brush they would like so long as we do what is right. The Black Panther Organization is listed by the FBI as a terrorist organization, yet the KKK is not. This tells you all you need to know. It is a moral imperative that this government is dismantled in its entirety. There can be no reforms to a system that was never meant to work for us.

*Featured image is US soldier Jeremy Morlock posing with the body of civilian Gul Muddin immediately after killing the boy.