Immersed Zine

The United State’s existence as the predominant military presence in the world is an undisputed reality. With over 800 bases scattered from east to west, the face of the world weighs heavy with the grisly pock marks of US authority. The purpose of these bases was never simply to sit dormant, patrol, and await conflict. Every year across the globe, from the eastern shores of Latin America to the ranges of the Indo-Pacific region of the world, the US conducts simulations of assaults, invasions, as well as offensive and defensive military operations.   

On the US army’s official page, under an article entitled Using Wargames to Understand Sustainment in LSCO (Large Scale Combat Operations), “Wargames are well established as tools to assess plans before and during operations.” This may seem like logical military preparedness, but only for a country on the brink of war… or just one always preparing for the next one. The US military’s role as occupant police of the world is underscored by the actualities of its operations, undertaken historically (both covertly in CIA operations from Chile to the African Congo & overtly in the occupations of Afghanistan & Korea) and in our modern context via its proxies in israel and Ukraine, as well as the mounting forces off the shores of Venezuela. What is prepared for in these games is simultaneously acted out in real time.   

Provocative only begins to describe the presence of these games. It seems as if the flames of global war grow with each antagonistic stroke of the pentagon’s pen. While the US labels countries such as the Democratic Republic of Korea, China, Russia, and any country not bending to its will, as the aggressors of the world; seeking out war in some supposed imperial ambition, these war games are demonstrations of power and serve as threats to the world order at large. There can be no aims of peaceful coexistence while the threat of war is levied upon the world, and materially upheld at whatever cost, by a nation with leaders & representatives that have shown time and again (regardless of party affiliation) that they are willing to sacrifice human life; both of its own people, its allies, and of any civilian population in the way, to maintain dominance in the pursuit of expanding capital for those few at the top. 

We can make no illusions. When we invoke the ideologies of terror & violence, it is the stars and stripes of our home nation that seeps into the collective imagination & memory of the world at large. The people of this world that have lived and lost under the might of US occupation and intervention know of this truth deeper than we could in the belly of this beast. A reckoning is long past due: we must wake ourselves from the slumber of affluent neglect & passive humanity, wrestle with these truths, and meet the call to reverse course & undo that which is undoing our world.