Manufacturing "Inevitability"
The tell of empire isn’t its power, but the sheer work required to maintain its appearance of inevitability. If war and repression were truly destiny, they wouldn’t need a sprawling architecture of propaganda, censorship, and threat to seem unavoidable. A truth doesn’t need this much work. Only a lie does.
That labor is history’s clearest confession. Britain in 1914 didn’t drift into war; it jailed dissenters, censored newspapers, and staged unity theater to make slaughter appear necessary. Washington in 2003 didn’t stumble into Iraq; it manufactured evidence, sidelined inspectors, and saturated the media with mushroom clouds.
Israel today doesn’t just “find itself” at war; it drafts new slogans by the week, bans words from classrooms, arrests protesters, and relentlessly drills the claim that there is “no alternative.”
The goal is not persuasion but resignation. It is to exhaust the public into believing peace was never an option. That exhaustion requires constant maintenance, and its methods repeat across centuries.
Ceasefires get dismissed as naïve.
Diplomacy is mocked and called appeasement.
Inspections are declared failures before they conclude
Every alternative is deliberately strangled in its cradle so that empire can stand amid the corpses and claim it had no other choice.
Washington in 2003 insisted UN inspections had failed even as inspectors reported they were working. Israel today insists there is “no alternative” to bombardment even as ceasefire proposals circulate. The lie works by foreclosing possibility and then rebranding the foreclosure as destiny. The claim of inevitability, as I argued in Evil Is Irrelevant, always depends on deleting alternatives from memory.
Empire welds its violence to its excuse, creating the abuser’s “You made me do this” logic:
“We invaded Iraq to stop WMDs.”
“We are bombing Gaza to destroy Hamas.”
The act and its rationale are fused so tightly that to question the flimsy justification is to be branded a terrorist sympathizer or a denier of reality.
Language is systematically laundered to numb the conscience. Torture becomes “enhanced interrogation.” Dead children become “collateral damage.” The ethnic cleansing of Gaza is chillingly rebranded “mowing the lawn.” As I argued in Seemingly Neutral Systems, euphemism is not decoration; it is infrastructure that keeps brutality palatable. History is given the same treatment. Munich 1938 is invoked endlessly to justify aggression, while the ghosts of the Nakba, Vietnam, or Chile are exorcised from the record. The archive is ruthlessly managed to ensure only one lesson remains: more force is always the answer.
The bully perfects the art of playing the victim. Nuclear-armed states claim they “have no choice.” Global empires with bases on every continent insist they are besieged. Military occupiers portray themselves as being under siege. This inversion is reinforced domestically. Decline stories — like those insisting people are getting dumber — recast structural sabotage as natural decay. Claims about consensus work the same way, like body-language pseudoscience, where projection masquerades as science.
Beneath the performance of “security” is a balance sheet. War is a business model, and the books are balanced in blood and cash. Contractors profited from Iraq. Occupation turns stolen land into real estate. Exclusion has been a safe investment strategy for centuries.
Empire doesn’t just budget for bombs; it budgets for the lies that make bombs usable. Abstractions about “complex systems” are used not as explanations but as evasions, making violence seem agentless when outcomes always have authors.
The final lie is the monster role: colonized peoples branded as savages, Black Panthers as predators, Palestinians as terrorists. These caricatures are not description; they are preparation for slaughter. We must name them as such.
If inevitability were real, it would not require euphemism mills, curated histories, unity theater, decline alibis, and financial scaffolding. The sheer labor of maintenance is the tell. Empire must manufacture its inevitability because it is not inevitable.
What is maintained so desperately is not fate. It is a system of our creation, and thus, is a thing that can be dismantled.
