There’s a series called American Gods with a powerful concept: people’s beliefs and ideals are embodied as physical gods. As old beliefs fade from people’s minds, new ones take hold—giving rise to new gods. This sparks a war between the old gods, desperate to remain relevant, and the new ones, eager to dominate. The old gods, if forgotten, vanish into oblivion.
The tragedy unfolding in Gaza cannot be explained by rational arguments alone. It symbolizes the collapse of rationality as we once understood it. And yet, we might grasp its significance if we accept, as Matthew Arnold wrote, that we are “wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born.” Just like in American Gods, some belief systems are dying while others are still struggling to emerge.
The end of World War II consolidated a new nomos, in the sense used by German jurist Carl Schmitt. He defines nomos as “the immediate form in which the political and social order of a people becomes spatially visible.” This post-war nomos, based on a U.S.-led Western economic order, spread across the globe.
The United States was modeled, both symbolically and practically, after Rome. Rome claimed universality—what lay beyond its borders was chaos. But Rome’s universality was limited by the known world. The U.S., in contrast, claimed imperium over the entire planet.
Rome reached the peak of its universal claim under Emperor Augustus. Yet that peak, as historian Ronald Syme observed, also marked the beginning of its decline. Augustus’ seal was the Sphinx, a symbol rich in metaphor. Augustus was the guardian of Rome—but he was also the riddle. The enigma lay in the fact that, while the Republic’s formal structures (senators, consuls) remained intact, true power rested solely in his hands. If you couldn’t solve the riddle, you’d be devoured by the Sphinx.
The peak of visible U.S. power was, arguably, after the dissolution of the USSR. But if Augustus’ symbolic seal was the Sphinx, the U.S. symbol was the dollar—both devouring those unable to unravel the riddle.
Historian Edward Gibbon pointed to currency debasement—especially to fund foreign wars and state expenses—as one of the clearest signs of imperial decline. It’s debatable when exactly this began in the U.S., but there’s no doubt it is happening now. When an empire declines, its nomos begins to vanish.
But that nomos doesn’t disappear on its own—it is also forced by those competing to take its space. These challengers are both physical and ideological: they embody alternative visions of what society should be. Sometimes, the old order is pushed into the abyss, because that’s the only way a new one can rise.
Two major conflicts today have the potential to dismantle the U.S.-established postwar order: the war in Ukraine and the genocide in Gaza. What links them most visibly is the hand of the United States behind both. Though the conflicts appear different, each represents a different face of the same coin—a chipped one, at that.
Consider Ukraine. It’s hard to say whether the path to this war was plain stupidity, blind hubris, or a calculated strategy. The first two are intertwined, but I lean toward the second. Perhaps NATO expansionists believed Russia wouldn’t react. More likely, they believed Russia couldn’t react—as theorized by Brzezinski and his ilk.
The third possibility is even more provocative, though harder to prove: that NATO’s eastern expansion was a calculated move with two potential outcomes. Either Russia would acquiesce, becoming just another client state of the U.S.-led West. Or Russia would resist—and that resistance would mark the end of the West’s expansionary cycle, requiring its nomos to collapse so that capital could continue to grow elsewhere.
This last scenario may seem far-fetched, yet it is the one that’s materializing. The war in Ukraine cannot be resolved by reverting to the old status quo. The U.S. seems to understand that—but refuses to accept it. Europe, meanwhile, doesn’t seem to understand it—but has no choice but to accept it. And the main beneficiary of this new emerging scenario? Kapital—with Marx’s capital K.
The resolution of the Ukraine war will dismantle the previous geopolitical order. Borders will no longer be fixed. Spheres of influence will shift. Resources will grow more contested. Security agreements will have to be rewritten—and with them, new alliances will take form. Space—both geographical and political, a cornerstone of Schmitt’s nomos—will be reshaped. A new nomos is being born.
But nomos is not merely a spatial order. It is also symbolic. It demands new laws—and laws require new ideals. For the new gods to emerge, the old ones must die.
Gaza is where the old gods are dying. International law, the laws of war, humanitarian principles—they are being shattered with every hospital reduced to rubble, every school obliterated, every child killed by a drone or a sniper. More than that, the very foundation of liberal democratic legitimacy is being corroded by the complicity—and, often, the silence—of the U.S.-led West. After Gaza, the world we’ve known will have morphed into something else: the beginning of a new one.
We are witnessing it in real time. Europe is on a path to dismantle its social structures—the last remnants of working-class resistance against the encroaching force of capital. It is also unraveling the sovereignty of its nation-states, replacing them with a supranational governing entity. This process is not new, but it is being accelerated by the war in Ukraine. Re-arming Europe is not merely a military endeavor; it is an economic strategy designed to deliver the coup de grâce to national sovereignty.
The United States is already far ahead in this mutation. The White House even circulated a meme depicting Trump as a king. A joke, perhaps—but as if proving true Polybius’ cycle, it represents the next logical stage. New economic power, or, better, a rising oligarchy, needs to upend the previous order in order to establish its own. That is Ronald Syme’s thesis in his book The Roman Revolution.
This is evident in the rise of what economist Yanis Varoufakis calls technofeudalism—a system where tech-lords inch ever closer to the centers of global power. Despite his recent fall from grace, Elon Musk remains one of them. So do Sam Altman and Peter Thiel. And Palantir—Thiel’s fief—is, by its own admission, deeply involved in the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
Israel—modeled as the last Western-style colonial project—is now leading the West toward its own demise. Like the protagonist of a Greek tragedy, its defining trait—the claim to nationhood—is the very force that propels its downfall. And it is dragging the old gods with it into the grave.
If Ukraine is offering the geopolitical justification for a reordering of space, Gaza is providing the ideological justification for a transformation of spirit. Gone are the days when freedom of speech was even pretended to be an ideal, when human dignity was considered universal, or when equality before the law was a shared aspiration. Now, technology allows governments and corporations to efficiently censor thought and speech, accuse without real proof, and detain without due process.
Yet one force remains unchallenged: capital’s relentless drive to invent new ways of living. In its Freudian compulsion to replicate and expand, capital is reshaping not just markets, but space itself. It is forging a new nomos.
The question is not whether this is happening—I trust readers will agree that it is—but what form this new nomos will take. If we allow capital to dictate its terms, cloaked in the garments of new technologies, then we will all become—if we are not already—subservient to it.
“the immediate form in which the political and social order of a people becomes spatially visible.”
And how deep is the merely visible? Some of us would contend that the more things change the more they remain the same–all baked in the cake. What has changed would be our power, over nature and over each other. This may require yet another nomos, or something deeper.
I agree with you expression of di Lampedusa strategy. And perahps the subject of another article!
” Re-arming Europe is not merely a military endeavor; it is an economic strategy designed to deliver the coup de grâce to national sovereignty.”
Indeed. Rutte told us that we are not allowed to have any welfare-state.
The only reason why the elite allowed the Northern European nations to have a welfare state was thanks to the ”threat” of communism. Unfortunately, now Russia is as neoliberal as your Western European country. If you are a real left-wing warrior, you need to get out on the black market buying the weapons the Ukrainians are selling if you are serious about implementing socialism or anything left of that. The rearmament is to be used on you, not Ivan and Svetlana.
We’ve reached the stage where the majority of the world us questioning why they dig up their resources to send to the West. Why they work to the death in factories to send manufactured goods to the West. And in exchange for what? Rapidly devaluating currency.
Tragic.
“Israel—modeled as the last Western-style colonial project—is now leading the West toward its own demise. Like the protagonist of a Greek tragedy, its defining trait—the claim to nationhood—is the very force that propels its downfall. And it is dragging the old gods with it into the grave.”
Very poignant.
“Duty to protect” in Libya, the war of choice championed by Hilary Clinton, seems like a last gasp of the United States’ attempting to project a benevolence hand upon the world, as if by then anyone outside of the West actually believed it, but the charade was surely for Western audiences, not the global South.
Trying to give discredit where discredit is due.
Libya was a joint promotion of Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice and Samantha Power.
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20201015-three-women-loads-of-lies-and-the-destruction-of-libya/
So much for the image of a nurturing female class advocating for peace.
They didn’t call them Hillary’s Harpies for nothing.
Another term I heard was “Hillary’s Harem.”
There is nothing irrational about it, and it also has very little to do with “capitalism”. This is the classic go-out-and-exterminate-your-neighbors-then-take-over-their-land stuff that has been the essence of evolutionary intra- and iterspecies competition since long before there were even humans on this planet. It is also quite explicitly enshrined as the guiding principle in the Old Testament in this particular case.
If you have the capability do it without suffering consequences, and the Israelis have very skillfully built that capability, then it is perfectly rational to do it. It will also not end with Gaza. Which leads us to:
Has it really? Look at the map of the world and compare it to the one from 50 years ago. And think about it.
The first thing to note that is always overlooked is that just the directly controlled Anglo-Saxon empire was always much bigger than even the USSR ever was. Just the five countries have five million km^2 more than the USSR and they control most of the trade routes. Then you consider that Latin America has largely always been under US control. Then you go back to circa 1975 and look at how much of the globe was either directly affiliated with Moscow or relied on it for protection, and you compare to now.
We have practically everything up to the very diminished current Russian borders being not just a direct vassal of the US, but actively militantly hostile to Russia. Including some of its own former core territories. Half a century ago the line of demarcation ran 1500 km to the west…
And in the Middle East everything that resisted Israel has been destroyed, piece by piece, with the events of late 2024 meaning that now only (half of) Yemen and Iran are still standing as “resistance”.
Objectively the Empire has never been this powerful in its control over the globe — the forces resisting it have shrunk to half of the core Eurasian landmass and they are not exactly resisting it very fiercely either. China is not doing anything, Iran is mostly talk, so is Russia.
It was a masterfully executed long-term calculated strategy.
Can’t attack Russia directly, have to find a proxy. And it has to be a proxy Russia cannot just squash. What better proxy than carving a piece of Russia itself, meaning Russia cannot just wipe it off the map, even if just for sentimental reasons, then turning that into an anti-Russia and using it to defeat Russia?
So far everything is working perfectly. Was Russia being bombed daily with hundreds of light cruise missiles (which is what “drones” actually are) in 2021? No, that was unthinkable, everyone thought that the moment someone tries that, the source of the threat would be immediately physically annihilated. But here we are, the frog was slowly and very successfully boiled. The attack on the airfields marked a qualitative shift to aiming at Russia’s strategic destruction. And there is still no response from Russia, even though it has been nearly two weeks. Which means that more serious such attacks will follow. There are four or five things remaining to be attacked:
1) Early warning radars, but not the way it was done last year, which didn’t do much damage, but comprehensively and for total destruction, the way the bombers were attacked. I am not quite sure how that can be done technically though, because those are very big installations of modular design, with not much there to burn.
2) Road-mobile ICBM TELs, which can be disabled with small drones too, just like the bombers.
3) ICBM silos, but those are hardened to withstand tactical nuclear explosions (up to a point), so they are largely immune to sabotage attacks
4) SSBNs in port, which can be substantially damaged with conventional explosions. Or even sinking some while on patrol, there will be no knowing who exactyl did it.
5) Political and military leadership. These are soft fleshy targets, not hard to take out.
Some combination of 2), 4) and 5) can be expected soon.
Combined with commencement of strategic, even if for now conventional, bombing of Russian industry with heavy cruise missiles.
This will all inevitably follow unless the Kremlin makes the cost of trying it prohibitive for the aggressor, which at this point means literally nuking some of the NATO countries. Nothing else has remained as a viable option to make this stop.
The problem is that the Kremlin is deeply compromised by a combination of pro-Western mental colonization, the mandate to maintain the current domestic political system, and genuine ideological commitment to capitalism. None of these things can survive or are compatible with fighting a total war against the West. They have to go if Russia is to survive, but it’s probably too late at this point.
So yeah, well calculated strategy, very well executed too.
P.S. Historically these people have been both very brave and extremely cowardly. Brave in the sense that they are very good at seizing the moment, but also cowardly because they will rarely fight openly unless the odds are overwhelmingly stacked in their favor. They prefer to use dirty tactics, sabotage, subversion, proxies, etc.
That has a corollary — if they are attacking someone openly, it usually means that the outcome has already been decided, otherwise they would not be attacking openly.
Which does not bode well for Russia and Iran at all…
Thank you for your thoughtful response. From a fact-based analysis, much of what you point out could indeed be interpreted that way. Precisely one of my key arguments in the article is that Rome was at its strongest when Augustus consolidated power—yet that very moment also marked the beginning of its decline. However, I was also poiting to something of a different nature, but it only holds if we share that the history of humankind it more than evolutionary biology.
I’ll take up the question, what form will the new nomos take? I’m not sure capital has a mind, rather the oligarchs who possess (or maybe better to say “are possessed by”) capital are attempting to define the new world order. I don’t think this is particularly new. Since the USA was itself founded by the wealthy of the day, there has always been a strong influence from the most wealthy. Perhaps by the end of the world wars the takeover was pretty secure, with a bit of a hickup from 1929 to 1946 or so. I do think that that influence has become particularly overt in recent years and even more so in recent months.
That said, what is coming our way?
The Dark Enlightenment philosophy as well as Accelerationism in their most extreme forms make overt what we see in Gaza today. Gaza is the future for most of humanity. As with Gaza today, the oligarchs future plans to ignore the climate crisis, embrace overshoot and collapse of most human support systems. Of course enough will be preserved through “adaptation” to keep say 100 million of the most loyal subjects alive. The rest of us (currently around 8.25 billion – 100 million = 8.15 billion) are headed for a dieoff, as in Gaza most will starve. It’s much more cost effective than bullets or even toxic gas.
The nation states will probably wither (as is the plan per the oligarchs philosophy mentioned above). Currently nations are controlled by the oligarchs who are in the process of making sure they cease to function for the benefit of the majority. As they collapse, corporate city states run by the oligarchs and their lieutenants will be one of the few places that have food, water, security, and escape from extreme heat.
Speculative for sure but based on what I see happening and read. Certainly hope I am wrong!
add in rampant and multifoliate warlordism, as a form of resistance….mainly outside what the Latoc guy, “Old Horseman” termed “Fedgov” in his , similar, vision of the futue, almost 20 years ago….imperial cities, connected by corridors of rail and freeway and electicity and pipes.
the rest of us left to our own wherewithal…to die, to be conscripted, to be pressganged to work the high tech ring of “farms” around the imperial cities….
so all the hinterlands will be like south central LA in the 80’s.
thats the future ive been preparing for, as best i can with my limited means, for more than 20 years.
Old Horseman was the first to lay it out in a coherent narrative form, for me(Wulf Zendik did, long before, but his hepcat jive talk kinda lessened the impact,lol)
t was easy to see this coming, although the details have surprised me.
Thanks I’ll check that out
defunct site…so hard to find.
he had a website/blog, but he was pretty old, way back then.
wulf zendik is still available, tho…my fave rant is “Drop Out”.
as in “Dropping Out is a Revolutionary Act”.
Add “Tune In, Turn On” and “Keep Your Ammo Dry”
Remember “Max Headroom Twenty Minutes Into The Future” ?
A lot of us would like to end up being one of the blanks like “Reg Blank”.
Reg has been my role model for decades! It took me two weeks to set up a new phone to avoid all the evil bits before I put a sim card in it.
It may be in archive dot org, but we’d need a URL to get started.
These techlords and bipartisan neocons running the show are basically the human versions of Crazy Eddie.
Right now we probably are heading for the phase where civilizations tear themselves apart through various resource wars much like the Moties do in the Mote in God’s Eye before a big population collapse from warfare only for the cycle to begin again a few decades later.
I hope that we can avoid a nuclear confrontation as we go further along into our post-empire kleptostate phase, but the US is not taking its fall from power lightly, and there might be one final temper-tantrum in the form of a nuclear missile launch at Russia or China courtesy of our neocon policy heads.
Continuing that analogy “on the gripping hand,” our new Space Force can start to drop asteroids on “uncooperative” locales, as did the Moties. A near future Terra pocked with impact craters is not too far-fetched an idea. For that matter, the People’s Republic “taikonauts” can do the same. If that happens, we’re all in for a world of hurt.
There is a science fiction novel from the 90’s, I think by Stephen Baxter, in which China brings down a large asteroid, with the sacrifice of one taikonaut, as a prelude to WWIII, though that is actually not central to the plot. I don’t really recommend that book, but I did like The Mote in God’s Eye. In another story, space colonies were dropped on the Earth. “WWIII” used to be imagined as far in the future, but now it is supposedly scheduled to begin by 2029 or has already begun. WWII could be said to have begun years before 1939 in some places. Or maybe it wouldn’t be like the previous great inter-imperialist wars. I think some have called the Cold War the third world war. And where does the “War on Terror” fit?
Sounds like what William Gibson was describing in the “Peripheral”
The Jackpot
For the survivors, this will be a return to very old historic times — 3000 years ago or so. And their standard of living will be similar.
A long time ago, when the Internet was young, I followed a discussion in a message board about the question of “how large should the population be to support the current standard of living with all its technological basis?” The general agreement was that the current population could perhaps be reduced by 20%, but beyond that the level of development would inevitably be reduced.
In other words, all those SciFi scenarios of a relatively small, self-contained community able to maintain a high standard of living with the corresponding advanced technology are entirely unrealistic. Reduce the world population to about 100 million, and the best you can hope is probably to live like the Near Eastern populations just before the collapse of the Bronge Age.
yep. we have a “native” sunflower, here…a Maximillian Sunflower, thats really from somewheres else, but some fool got some seed for some reason an 100 years ago, and its rampant.
my number one weed.
well, attempting to grow the large eating sunflowers…and doing my usual seed saving thing…i ended up with 15 foot small sunflowers that are an apparently stable hybrid between the two.
turns out, those tiny seedheads are just full of oil.
a limestone rock or two, one made into a basin,with a drain…and bob’s yer uncle.
cooking oil, lamp oil…
some of us have been thinking about these things for a long, long time.
i reckon a certain class of intolerant redneck will suddenly learn how to tolerate my idiosyncrasies at some point in the near to medium term.
because i’m the guy that knows how to do shite like that.
and a lot of people know it, out here…based on the occasional text i get with an ask for advice about truly esoteric things.
Yo, Amfortas, that is way cool, esp bc one parent is an annual and one is perennial. Are the tiny seedhead progeny perennial? Just asking for a friend, Wes Jackson. Check out the Piteba oil press for small scale extraction. If you would like to share seed, please lmk.
Do keep that old .44 lever action oiled and ready, plus plenty of ammo. A lot of those so called “Progressive liberal” thinkers will go all in for feudalism, with them as the parasite class. (They ‘deserve’ it, dontchano? The credentials prove that, peasants.)
Truly, stay safe.
I share with you the desired to be wrong and well as the thought that capital has no mind, but oligarchs do.
Gaza Tribunal in Sarajevo Documents How Genocide Has Eroded International Law
Gaza became a “graveyard of international law” not just for Palestinians but for all people, says a Palestinian lawyer.
https://truthout.org/articles/gaza-tribunal-in-sarajevo-documents-how-genocide-has-eroded-international-law/
I’ve read that this is the point. That by letting the Israelis to break every international law and every humanitarian consideration, they they are giving the west what amounts to precedents to do the same in future conflicts to give them a veneer of legalistic cover. Hegemons do not like to be hemmed in by international law the same way that neoliberals do not like business to be hemmed in laws such as human rights and anti-child labour laws.
I think this one is for you, today from German JUNGE WELT, a short ironic piece (some of the irony gets lost in the translation):
https://www.jungewelt.de/artikel/501877.spleenbrite-des-tages-timothy-garton-ash.html
Spleenbrite of the Day: Timothy Garton Ash
By Reinhard Lauterbach
One quality for which British culture is praised, especially abroad, is so-called common sense – a certain elementary realism and common sense. But even this is not present in all representatives of British culture. Take Timothy Garton Ash, an Oxford professor and, as such, a recognized luminary of transatlantic cultural life, who, by his own admission, is also a graphomaniac and activist on the journalistic front against Russia. He was recently a guest at a “media forum” in Lviv, western Ukraine, where the Kyiv-based portal Ukrainska Pravda interviewed him in detail. The key sentence of the conversation, which went from one thing to the next and praised Ukraine to the skies for its fighting spirit, concluded with an unconventional proposal to rid Moscow of “imperialism”: “The best thing that could happen to Russia would be a complete defeat followed by a fifty-year occupation – like in Germany after 1945.”
He said this quite seriously, Ash explicitly stated. But unfortunately, the outside world would be afraid of Russia’s nuclear weapons. Although it had already lost wars: the Crimean War of 1853–56, the war against Japan in 1904/5, the war against Finland almost in 1939/40, and the one in Afghanistan. So why not try again? Ash didn’t say it that explicitly, but his list suggested it. It’s not like you’d have to tell a professional historian that all the example wars he cited took place without the use of nuclear weapons. But that’s what happens when defending the “liberal world order” becomes a whim. As the old Hegel said: The only thing you can learn from history is that no one ever learns from it. Especially not if you earn your fame by fomenting war.
Comrade Ash received the Karls-prize in 2017, which is more or less reserved for corrupt lunatics, slimy bureaucrats and eager propagandists; insofar Comrade Ash was an obvious choice for the Karls-prize. Fanatic advocates of the liberal-democratic order and the establishment of an European State like Ash are poised to sacrifice the lives of million people in order to achieve their utopian aim.
Yeah that´s pretty adequate a description. No wonder Russians don´t want him in RU. (I don´t side with sanctioning or banning people but as far as sympathy or lack thereof goes…)
“to give them a veneer of legalistic cover”.
There is no such thing offered. What is offered so far are only lies and obfuscation. And a full condemnation of Israel is blocked by the US in the UNSC. That is not legalistic in any sense of the term. It is just the embodiment of the old 2500 years old quote:
“Right, as the world goes, is only in question for those equal in power, while the strong do what they can and the week suffer what they must.”
The period of outsized influence by the western edge of Eurasia is drawing to a close and the center of gravity of world civilization is shifting back to the eastern and southern corners of that great land mass, is another perspective. The old gods of industry are alive and flourishing but are no longer worshiped in Oceana, where death cults are ascendent.
“Either Russia would acquiesce, becoming just another client state of the U.S.-led West. Or Russia would resist—and that resistance would mark the end of the West’s expansionary cycle, requiring its nomos to collapse so that capital could continue to grow elsewhere.”
I think that “elsewhere” was supposed to be China, but China has kept its capital controls intact so there are no opportunities to roll-up the industries into a few giant monopolies. Investing in China is just too unpredictable. It also seems rather late to restart World War I (again), since Russia has already won the arms race this time, and it has already formed alliances with China and Iran. South America? Probably the best we can get.
Greetings to Curro from el Algarrobo :-)
seconded!
good first(to me, at least) post, Curro.
bienvidos.
Thirded!
Mucho gusto por nosotros!
Excelent post! The kind worth rereading every year! Welcome, Curro!
Thank you to all, I am relieved it was not a terrible first.
Surely a good place to be!
Hedges interviews Patrick Lawrence–transcript.
https://scheerpost.com/2025/06/12/journalists-and-their-shadows-w-patrick-lawrence-the-chris-hedges-report/
I guess we can add the Israel/Iran war in that mix. God help us.
Just got to that part. Maybe Trump needs a war to cement the rising authoritarian rule. War time powers would give him significant domestic leverage.
Thank you Curro, talk about a timely (and prescient) post.
Isn’t it striking how the ‘riots’ in LA have coincided with the strike on Iran? If the US openly backs Israel (and there are signs that it is doing just that, whilst bleating about the strikes not being undertaken with the explicit imprimatur of Washington), then that will enrage the MAGA base. Or would enrage the MAGA base, were its attentions not directed towards LA.