Evil Empire 121a war to rid the galaxy of the aliens. Everyone cheers. There is not even
a pretense of reluctance to undertake this “humanitarian intervention”
because sometimes it really is necessary to commit interstellar genocide
in order to prevent interstellar genocide. There is just no end to the killing
in sight—especially since the film’s box-office performance was so poor
that the intended third entry in the series was cancelled. And so we are
left suspended, without resolution, without possibility of surcease.even when the aliens invade the entire world, the movies tend
to focus on the military of an individual nation—usually the United
States—defending against border incursions. At best, they imagine
the global in terms of relations between nations. There is rarely any
sense of Empire, of the transnational regime of finance capitalism. Its
world-spanning network of information and communications technol-
ogies. Its marshalling of resources, including human labor. Its recourse,
when necessary, to some nation or other’s drones in the air and troops
on the ground. This Empire envisions a post-historical future of peace—
that is, of unperturbed accumulation—through perpetual terror and
pacification. Through manufactured and managed crises, structural
adjustments, capital flight, austerity, precarity, dispossession, enclosure,
and debt. Through the entire repertoire of structural violence and slow
violence—as well as the quicker, more spectacular kinds.
And now, it seems, through Space Force.
Vice President Mike Pence’s August 9 Space Force press junket made
clear that this great big bullying blustering pussy-grab for space, this effort
to Make America Great Again and recover all that was lost to the perfidy
of previous administrations is about just one thing: occupying the high
ground. Getting out of the gravity well so as to be able to rain down shit