The Fraud of Endless War

by John Rachel / March 25th, 2025

There is not a single war or serious military confrontation since WWII involving the U.S. that needed to be fought. Every conflict where soldiers and civilians suffered death or injury was — and is in the case of the ongoing fighting — unnecessary. These battles for territory, control, resources, subjugation, spite, are the direct result of greed, hubris, racist arrogance, ideological fanaticism, sometimes just pure ego. Predictably, we hear high sounding rhetoric in every instance about spreading democracy, safeguarding freedom, responsibility to protect, defending our national interests, rules-based international order, yakkety yak blah blah blah. It’s all just spin to manufacture acquiescence and consent, to get us sheeple to stand down and let the warmongers and empire builders, the MIC and the war industry, have their way.

Those in the peace movement know the specific details rendered with this next graphic well. People who are preoccupied with living life and overcoming its many obstacles might dismiss it as fake news. But very tragically, it’s entirely factual. The U.S. just can’t stop attacking others.

There are three fundamental reasons why the U.S. is a belligerent, bullying aggressor, or as Martin Luther King, Jr. famously summed it up, “The greatest purveyor of violence in the world: my own government.”

Thus there are three reasons we are perpetually at war. These are …

Ideological Drivers of Endless War

There has never been a shortage in recorded history of master race ideologies. We find them even enshrined in religious texts. The U.S. has its share of such doctrinal canons, each couched in marvelous language and noble-sounding rhetoric, promoted by a host of noted individuals and organizations, e.g. Paul Wolfowitz, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Council on Foreign Relations, Project for the New American Century, all anointing the U.S. as the indispensable nation, the world’s rightful heir as the master overlord. There is no ambiguity or nuance here. America has formally declared itself as the supreme authority over the entire planet. The latest buzz phrase is “rules-based order”, which effectively means the U.S. will make the rules to establish the order in the world, everyone else will obey or face the consequences. Those consequences take the form of economic or military terrorism, buttressed by the U.S. dollar as the world reserve currency and the awesome might of the largest military in the history of the world.

Social and Political Control Drivers of Endless War

Defending the homeland and war command our attention. They focus our energy, steel our resolve, unify us, add purpose and drama to otherwise mundane day-to-day life. They play on our most basic instincts for survival and protection of what’s dear to us. But on the flip side, they also shut down critical faculties, create a visceral bond with the worst aspects of human nature, and open the door for tyrannical control and elimination of basic freedoms and rights. War unites us alright — in fear, suffering, misery, deprivation, shame, anger, suspicion, hate, paranoia, dehumanization and death.

Economic Drivers of Endless War

There are huge fortunes to be made with war. Conquered nations can be plundered. At home, those who invest in war industries will see magnificent returns. The more war, the greater the profits. It’s no secret that military conflict is encouraged, in fact driven, by profiteers on Wall Street and from within the defense contractors themselves. There’s a rotating door between those who head up defense companies and those who sit at the seats of power shaping policy and making the decisions which countries will be demonized, intimidated and attacked. Our current economic/political model incentivizes an unruly, aggressive, confrontational foreign policy and generously rewards the creation of war zones and arenas of conflict.

It is often said that the U.S. cannot be without an enemy. This is only partially accurate. More to the point, it is the military-industrial complex that can’t be without an enemy. NATO’s massive bureaucracy and whole reason for existing cannot be without an enemy. What’s the point of the enormously bloated U.S. military, with its 800+ overseas bases, its vast fleets of battle ships and submarines, its vast array of military satellites and surveillance centers, its psyops and special ops and secret ops, its carving up the entire world into combatant command zones if there isn’t an enemy? Here’s how the U.S. sees the world.

Let’s bear in mind what all of this means by looking at the big picture.

The entire Imperial Project — world rule by the U.S. as a self-declared hegemon — is at its core and at every layer anti-democratic. It replaces self-determination in the countries we dominate with our authoritarian control — a polite phrase for totalitarian subjugation — making it ironic and odiously cynical that the U.S. claims to spread democracy in the world, when it regularly overthrows democratically-elected governments, then replaces them with despots which do our bidding.

Just as tragically, the decision to be an empire, the entire program of global domination, mocks the idea of democracy in America itself. It was conceived of and initiated by a tiny minority of power-drunk, monomaniacal, avaricious psychopaths, supported by a ruling elite which sees conquest and plunder as just another day at the office. Put simply and directly: We as citizens never voted for any of this. And if we understood the true nature and agenda of the Imperial Project, we would without hesitation or equivocation entirely reject it and the misery and impoverishment it ultimately entails, both domestically and overseas.

Right here at home, the Imperial Project by forcing its agenda on U.S. citizens, obliging us to underwrite it every single day of our lives with in-kind and out-of-pocket cash payments of our hard-earned dollars, coupled with the loss of freedom and opportunity, a complete silencing of the voice and priorities of everyday citizens, is at its core and at every layer anti-democratic, despotic, and exploitative. We as citizens have become an ATM machine for the warmongering lunatics trouncing other countries across the globe. We are indentured slaves to a militarized economy which requires war to function, frightened subjects of a regime that creates enemies everywhere, pawns of a power game and calculated strategy to set us against one another, a social-political climate intentionally engineered to maintain “total spectrum domination”, meaning totalitarian control even within our own borders.

Maybe the idea of a benevolent, enlightened, inspired and visionary U.S. leading the world into a new age of affluence and harmony, guided by the best principles of democracy and driven by shared humanitarian values seems appealing. But it’s an illusion. It’s an illusion fostered by massive deceptions, propaganda, brainwashing, engineered for our compliance and complicity in the madness that has overtaken our governing institutions. Read the speeches of the mentors for this type of hyper-nationalistic insanity, the architects of the Third Reich, and see how closely they align with the promises of our current batch of make-America-great-again demagogues. Creepily, ‘Aryan super race’ and ‘American exceptionalism’ are bedfellows, the spawn of the same lunatic delusions. ‘Indispensable’ is nothing but code for ‘1000 year Reich’.

Yes, that avuncular icon at the top, embraced, lauded, and emulated by the patronizers of a naive, trusting and gullible citizenry, is pointing at us, you and I, entreating us to be a part of a sinister plan to take over the world.

We better make the right choice … while we still can make a choice.

Time is running out.

Official Peace Dividend Project Website.

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John Rachel has a B.A. in Philosophy, has traveled extensively, is a songwriter, music producer, neo-Marxist, and a bipolar humanist. He has written eight novels and three political non-fiction books. His most recent polemic is The Peace Dividend: The Most Controversial Proposal in the History of the World. His political articles have appeared at many alternative media outlets. He is now somewhat rooted in a small traditional farming village in Japan near Osaka, where he proudly tends his small but promising vegetable garden. Scribo ergo sum. Read other articles by John, or visit John's website.

BARBARISM

US to execute four Death Row inmates this week

By AFP
March 18, 2025

Chris Lefkow

A 46-year-old man convicted of rape and murder is to be put to death by nitrogen gas in the southern state of Louisiana on Tuesday, the first of four executions scheduled this week in the United States.

Jessie Hoffman, who was sentenced to death for the 1996 murder of Molly Elliott, a 28-year-old advertising executive, will be the first person executed in Louisiana in 15 years.

A district court judge last week stayed Hoffman’s execution on the grounds that the use of nitrogen gas may amount to cruel and unusual punishment, which is banned under the US Constitution.

But the stay was lifted by the conservative-dominated US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, allowing the execution to proceed.

Only one other US state, Alabama, has carried out executions by nitrogen hypoxia, which involves pumping nitrogen gas into a facemask, causing the prisoner to suffocate.

The method has been denounced by UN experts as cruel and inhumane.



– ‘Plenty of execution methods’ –



The vast majority of US executions since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976 have been performed using lethal injection, although South Carolina executed a man by firing squad on March 7.

Hoffman, a parking lot attendant, was convicted in 1998 of abducting Elliott in New Orleans as she went to retrieve her car and join her husband for dinner.

Hoffman forced Elliott to withdraw $200 from an ATM machine, before raping and killing her with a single shot to the head.

He was 18 years old at the time.

Elliott’s nude body was found by a duck hunter the next day on a makeshift dock by the Middle Pearl River.

Hoffman’s lawyers have appealed to the Supreme Court to halt the execution on the grounds that the nitrogen gas would “interfere with Jessie’s ability to practice his Buddhist meditative breathing.”

“The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that prisoners must be allowed to practice their religion as their lives are being taken by execution,” said Cecelia Kappel, one of Hoffman’s attorneys.

“There are plenty of execution methods Louisiana could adopt that would not interfere with Jessie’s ability to practice his Buddhist meditative breathing, and only one, nitrogen gas, that makes it impossible for him to do so,” Kappel said.



– Arizona, Florida, Oklahoma executions –



Three other executions are scheduled in the United States this week — in Arizona, Florida and Oklahoma.

Aaron Gunches, 53, is to be executed by lethal injection in Arizona on Wednesday for the 2002 murder of Ted Price, his girlfriend’s ex-husband.

Gunches has dropped legal efforts to halt his execution, which would be the first in the southwestern state since November 2022.

Wendell Grissom, 56, is to be executed by lethal injection in Oklahoma on Thursday for shooting and killing Amber Matthews, 23, in 2005 during a home robbery.

Edward James, 63, is to be executed by lethal injection in Florida on Thursday.

James was sentenced to death for the 1993 rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl, Toni Neuner, and the murder of Betty Dick, her 58-year-old grandmother.

There have been six executions in the United States this year, following 25 last year.

The death penalty has been abolished in 23 of the 50 US states, while three others — California, Oregon and Pennsylvania — have moratoriums in place.

President Donald Trump is a proponent of capital punishment and on his first day in office called for an expansion of its use “for the vilest crimes.”

 

Mexico City’s Trolleybus Workers Took on Austerity and Won

By Natascha Elena Uhlmann

March 12, 2025

Source: Labor Notes

Workers marched from their union's headquarters to the city's labor courts and pledged to strike should they need to. Photo: ATM

The 1,970 rail, trolleybus, and cable car workers who make Mexico City run could go out on strike as soon as March 13.

Their union, the Tram Workers Alliance of Mexico (Alianza de Tranviarios de México, ATM), secured vital investments in green transportation and saved hundreds of jobs in a 2016 “Save the Trolleybus” campaign that brought public transit users into their funding fight.

Now workers want the uniforms and safety equipment that they’re owed under their contract but haven’t received in three years, as well as the tools they need to do their jobs: hydraulic jacks, pliers, and wrenches.

They also want more training. The city invested in a fleet of new electric trolleybuses following the “Save the Trolleybus” campaign, but many workers haven’t been trained in their upkeep. And they want system maintenance improvements—for example, staff mechanics have no means of re-treading tires as they wear down.

“We’re not asking for opulence,” said Jorge Luis Peña González, who maintains the overhead wires that power trolleybuses and trains. “We’re not asking for a jacuzzi in every bathroom. Just what’s fair: dignified work, dignified pay, a job where we receive the materials and equipment necessary to do our work.”

From its inception in 1900, Mexico City’s mass transit system has been an emblem of progress. Tram lines played an integral role in the growth of what is now the largest city in North America. As new lines were established, neighborhoods settled around them.

Over time, those trams were replaced with a network of electric trolleybuses, cable cars, and a light rail line that serves 2.5 million passengers a day, all without generating emissions—essential in what 30 years ago was known as the most polluted city in the world. And it does all that for under 50 cents per ride. Seniors ride free.

Sewing on Reflectors

The union had originally set a strike date of January 21, but extended the deadline to February 21 after the employer, Servicios de Transportes Eléctricos (STE, a publicly owned transport authority), was ordered to bargain.

The deadline was extended again to March 13 at the request of Mexico City’s Secretary of Finance, following movement at the bargaining table. Workers won the swift payment of a 3.5 percent raise, which had been agreed to in their 2024 contract, but which STE had refused to pay to many of the low-paid workers. They will now see that raise, along with accrued back pay, by the end of March.

Essential supplies are inconsistently supplied. “There are times when because of a single [missing] screw, the overhead wires aren’t functional,” González said. Some workers only have one fire-resistant uniform, despite working with live wires on a regular basis.

“So you get workers looking for a uniform so they can work. At night, those of us doing maintenance work have a beige uniform. It’s not that it’s completely visible, but it helps you out at night. We’re sewing on reflectors on the arms and legs so they can see us at night.”

Héctor Cortés Silva helps maintain the trolleybus antennas, which connect to overhead power lines. That involves climbing as high as 130 feet in the air, navigating strong winds that make the antennas move haphazardly. “If you make a minor mistake, it can be fatal,” he said. He relies on his safety belt lanyard, a strap that secures him to an anchor point, but there aren’t always enough of the second line of protection: safety lifelines, which would catch him if the harness failed.

‘Save the Trolleybus’

2015 was a time of crisis for the union, as a dissident group attempted to oust then-president Benito Bahena y Lome, forcing him to resign under threat of violence. Many suspect the ouster was orchestrated by transport authority boss Eduardo Venadero. But Bahena y Lome was ultimately reinstated.

Meanwhile the city had been disinvesting in the transit system, leading to insufficient maintenance and a dwindling fleet. By 2016, only 210 of 350 trolleybuses were operational. Between 1987 and 2018, trolleybus lines were slashed from 30 to eight.

Mexico City’s government soon proposed replacing its aging trolleybus fleet with battery-powered buses. But these would have been both more expensive and less eco-friendly, since the country had no means of recycling the batteries.

The plan also put workers’ jobs at risk. González said a shift to battery-powered buses would have eliminated his work entirely. “It was a tense time,” said Violeta Sofia Méndez Mosqueda, a phone operator who routes incoming calls for the transit authority.

Out of that crisis emerged “Save the Trolleybus,” a public pressure campaign that brought transit riders and environmentalists into the union’s funding fight.

The Zero Emissions Coalition, which included Bicitekas (which advocates for bike-friendly infrastructure) and Los Mosquitos (The Mosquitoes, a bike taxi cooperative) surveyed commuters. They found that many preferred green transit, yet often opted to drive or take a taxi because they were faster.

They also found that 81 percent of frequent riders relied on the trolleybus. Many were concerned about the city’s poor air quality and recognized vehicle emissions as a crucial contributor.

Mosqueda knew the trolleybus network was worth fighting for: “It produces zero emissions. It transports thousands of people throughout the city. And beyond all that, it’s safe,” she said.

Besides, “I think riders feel nostalgic,” she said, since the trolleybuses emerged from Mexico City’s emblematic tram system. “Our parents and grandparents travelled through the city in this beautiful way. On top of being safe and climate-friendly, it’s rooted in tradition.”

“Even though we had units that were more than 40 years old, people still felt good about the service,” González said. “People flyered and put on information sessions. The role of riders was really indispensable.”

“Imagine that Mexico’s historic center is a greenhouse,” said Miguel Maximiliando Durán, president of Los Mosquitos. “You hook up… several hoses to that greenhouse, with machines that are burning gasoline, and that smoke ends up inside that greenhouse. That’s basically Mexico City’s historic center.” Air pollution causes about 9,000 deaths per year in Mexico City, and car emissions are a significant contributor.

Los Mosquitos sprang into action. “The majority of people in this city rely on public transit,” says Durán, “which gave us the push to say, ‘We have to defend the trolleybus,’ which has for years been not just an eco-friendly means of transportation, but also one of the city’s most affordable options.”

Claudia Sheinbaum, then the incoming Head of Government of Mexico City under Mexico’s left MORENA party, campaigned on the issue and pledged to invest in the trolleybus system in her inauguration speech. Within a year, units began arriving.

By 2024, when Sheinbaum became Mexico’s president, the city had a fleet of 500 new trolleybuses and had created a new trolleybus line and a (soon to be connecting) cable car network.

“I think people want clean transport that’s accessible and convenient,” said Martha Beatriz Merlos Aguilar, an executive assistant who helps process employment letters and payroll. “I think the routes we have are strategic. They get a lot of use. Over time, lines were cut, and there are people who to this day keep asking for certain routes to be reactivated. I think people love it, and that’s why they supported it.”

Union Boxing Classes

As the strike date approaches, the Tram Workers Alliance is well positioned to achieve its demands. The union is operating under a city government that, unlike in previous years before MORENA took power, is not hellbent on privatizing the transit system—that instead sees it as a public good.

The union is mounting a visible, escalating campaign. In January, members marched from union headquarters to the city’s labor courts and pledged to strike if needed. They hung a towering 10-foot banner decrying STE’s violation of their collective bargaining agreement.

The 2026 World Cup, whose opening match will be held in Mexico City’s Estadio Azteca (Aztec Stadium), also offers leverage: 5.5 million tourists are expected to visit the city during the tournament. To prepare for this surge in demand, the city has pledged $348 million towards public transit improvements centered around the commute to Azteca Stadium.

The ATM has built a strong union culture partly through social events, from soccer leagues and kids’ summer camp to religious gatherings and altar decorating for Day of the Dead. “They’re really thorough,” said Aguilar, who recently began attending the union’s boxing classes. “They help with nutrition, they teach you the necessary exercises… You get to meet people from other areas of work who maybe you haven’t seen before.”

This interaction fosters solidarity. “I don’t care what area you work in, what shift you’re on, where you come from,” González said. “That camaraderie, it’s essential.”

The “Save the Trolleybus” campaign similarly brought organizations together, creating lasting bonds. “It’s about having those alliances, and that commitment to the common good,” Aguilar said. “Coalitions will always have a stronger fight if they have a shared concept of what they want to win, what they want to protect.”

 

Why The War on Dreams Must Inspire Us to Build the Greatest Desire Machines the World Has Ever Seen

By Rob HopkinsFebruary 28, 2025

Source: Rob Hopkins blog\

Image via Robhopkins.net

When I was about 18, I read Angela Carter’s extraordinary 1972 novel ‘The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman’, and in these dark days as my 57^th birthday approaches it comes back into my imagination often. It tells the story of the diabolical evil genius Doctor Hoffman who, at war with an unnamed South American city, has developed a weapon, a kind of ray gun which when fired at the city, unleashes mass hallucinations, causing the dreams and desires of the population take physical form and the whole city begins to turn mad, what Carter describes as “this phantasmagoric redefinition of a city”.

“Cloud palaces erected themselves then silently toppled to reveal for a moment the familiar warehouse beneath them until they were replaced by some fresh audacity”, she writes. “A group of chanting pillars exploded in the middle of a mantra and lo! they were once again street lamps until, with night, they changed to silent flowers. Giant heads in the helmets of conquistadors sailed up like sad, pained kites over the giggling chimney pots. Hardly anything remained the same for more than one second and the city was no longer the conscious production of humanity; it had become the arbitrary realm of dream”.

Doctor Hoffman also used his weapon to disrupt time. As Carter writes “tricks with watches and clocks were pet devices of his, for so he rubbed home to us how we no longer held a structure of time in common”. “We”, she added, “that is, those of us who retained some notion of what was real and what was not – felt the vertigo of those teetering on the edge of a magic precipice”.

When I first immersed myself in the world painted by Carter, a world in which nothing was as it seemed, in which monsters and ghosts appeared from nowhere and distinguishing between reality and nightmare was impossible, it was hard to square that with the real world around me. It felt like something that existed between the pages of the book and nowhere else. I no longer feel like that.

After just a few weeks of the Trump administration, the world feels very much to me as though Doctor Hoffman, like Trump, has returned from exile, and now we find ourselves in the sights of his new and improved Desire Machine. Nothing seems real anymore. The title of Carter’s book when first published in the US was ‘The War of Dreams’. Sound familiar?

Our enemies are now our friends. Our friends are our enemies. Scientists and government officials in the US can’t use the words ‘climate change’ and ‘social justice’ anymore, as if somehow the existential problems they are naming will magically disappear if we just stop talking about them. Trans and non-binary people are being forced out of public life.

After a summer of the worst forest fires in US history, the people who protect the nation from those fires are being laid off en masse, like the people who detect pandemics early, or the people who protect us from the predations of billionaires and large corporations. And that’s just this week!

It’s a 1+1=3 world, where Presidents turn into Emperors, where ‘alternative facts’ are prioritised over actual facts, where Nazi salutes pop up in the middle of talks as if it’s completely normal. It’s bewildering, and exhausting. It’s classic Doctor Hoffman, that “vertigo of those teetering on the edge of a magic precipice” Carter wrote of. David Graeber once said “this feeling of hopelessness that everyone has is a manufactured product, and that’s what Neo-Liberalism is really about … it’s a political program designed to produce hopelessness and kill any future alternatives”. What we’re experiencing is that on steroids. It’s a punch-drunk feeling of overwhelm, the result of what Steve Bannon once referred to as “flooding the zone with shit”, or what Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur, calls “psychological overwhelming”, a ‘shock and awe’ approach which leaves us all reeling.

We’re left clutching for the familiar, unable to cling to even the basic things we assumed we would always be able to take for granted as insane Executive Order after insane Executive Order fly past us. Putin is now the good guy, and which bathroom trans people get to use is of far greater importance than the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. Oh, and Ukraine started the war apparently. Is it us going mad, or the world around us? What can we cling onto as being real anymore?

Resistance to this is taking many forms. Challenging the Trump administration in the courts is going to be vital, as is organising by trades unions and many different parts of civil society. Boycotts of Elon Musk and Trump’s enterprises will hurt for sure (do support ‘Everyone Hates Elon’s crowdfunder to expand on their brilliant ‘0-1939 in 3 seconds’ posters across London recently). But I want to suggest something else that needs to sit alongside those things.

In Carter’s novel, the protagonist Desiderio is sent on a secret mission to find Doctor Hoffman and destroy his Desire Machines. I can’t helping wondering how the book might have played out if, instead, he had decided to stay put and pull together the city’s finest minds to build a Desire Machine of his own. We need to out-engineer Doctor Hoffman and find the new ways to work together to create the most powerful desire machines the world has yet seen. It’s true that we don’t have platforms like X and Facebook at our disposal, but that doesn’t mean we are powerless.

I’ve spent the past 2 years writing a book called ‘How to Fall in Love with the Future: a time traveller’s guide to changing the world’ (to be published in May 2025) which argues that one of the key shifts that those of us in the resistance need to make is to become far better at the cultivation of longing, or what Prentis Hemphill, in her book What It Takes to Heal, describes as ‘that vulnerable, stomach-dropping craving’. How can we, urgently and at scale, bring alive for people what a future rooted in care, compassion, equality, social justice and doing everything we can to rapidly reduce our carbon emissions would look like, smell like, taste like? And how can we tell stories of that future that help people create a new North Star in their lives?

I already see glimpses of what this could look like in the work of activist and artists like Black Quantum Futurism, Moral Imaginations’ ‘Imagination Activism’, in the work of artists like Camille Turner and Cauleen Smith, in movements like Afrofuturism, Muslim Futures and Black Utopias, in artists like Sun Ra who talked of being an angel from Saturn who travelled through space with “both unshakable certainty and deadpan humour”, Aisha Shillingford’s writing on the Black Imagination, in local authorities and schools building time machines, in activists crewing imaginary spacecraft, Thrutopian storytelling such as Manda Scott’s novel ‘Any Human Power’, in community organisations creating and holding powerful ‘What If’ spaces. A positive futurism movement is emerging, and at pace. I already get people sending me photos of time machines they’d building. Here’s one created by my friend Annaig in France.

My friend Annaig’s time machine…

My own contribution to the building of Desire Machines is working with ambient music artist Mr Kit and light projection wizard Tim Dollimore on a project called ‘Field Recordings from the Future’, where we are creating an immersive multimedia Time Portal which combines live music and real recordings we captured on recent time travels with video projections in order to create a tear in the fabric of time to allow people to step through into the future that turned out the best it possibly could. A world of car-free neighbourhoods, bicycle rush hours, landscapes rewilded by beavers, of the urgent installation of community renewables on every street, of regenerative farms, of underground mushroom farms that are transforming urban economies.

I feel like we are working to build an optimist-generating machine in a time desperate for optimists. We think of it as ‘a Cirque du Soleil for the Radical Imagination’. We want it to be staged everywhere, for time portals to be created everywhere, and fast.  We will very soon be launching a crowdfunding campaign to enable the unleashing of this powerful device … watch this space.

We believe that if humanity is to hospice modernity and race towards a future we’d be proud to leave to the generations yet unborn, a critical mass of us need to experience something so profound, so genuinely mind-blowing, so awesome and multi-sensory, that it rips apart the ‘yes, but…’ narratives that tell us there is no alternative to the current system—and sweeps open doorways to a new way of being. This is the level of ambition we’re working at.

The nurturing of longing is not necessarily an approach or a skillset that comes naturally to those of us in the resistance. Our work is usually rooted in the present (“What do we want? When do we want it? Now!”) rather than in the future or the past, or in moving at will between temporalities. The people in our culture who are great at nurturing imagination tend not to be activists, rather they are street artists, poets, designers, people who write TV series, people who work in advertising, people who design wildly imaginative festivals such as Boomtown. If we are to build Desire Machines more powerful than those that currently have us bewitched, bewildered and bedazzled, we need to encourage a communion of artists (in the widest sense of that word) and activists on a scale we’ve never seen before.

We might imagine actors in public spaces, acting out scenarios from the future that turned out OK, ‘pop up tomorrows’ that touch people emotionally, creating ‘utopian moments’ in which, as Ben Anderson puts it, the present “overflows with what is not-yet”, providing tastes, glimpses, infusions of utopias in the present, through music, art, activist events…all manner of creative expressions that show us how our future could be so much better than anything we’re living through now.

Street art can bring that future into the present. Street artists like Sophie Mess, ATM and Mona Caron, to name just three, use large, vibrant, beautiful murals to create images Doctor Hoffman would be proud of; images that give us a taste of a different future in the here and now. As the great jazz musician and space traveller Sun Ra put it, ‘The future is obvious, but the potential impossible is calling softly and knocking gently.’

We’re done with dystopias. We’re awash with them. They paralyse us: we’ve had enough. Cast them out of our cinemas and toss them from the bookshelves. Rather, let’s turn to political theorist Wendy Brown who says:

“Only a compelling vision of a less frightening and insecure future will recruit anyone to a progressive or revolutionary alternative future – or rouse apolitical citizens for the project of making that future. This vision must be seductive and exciting, and it must be embodied in seductive and exciting leadership and movements…”

Fascists like Musk and Trump hate creativity, imagination, daring, playfulness, people who speak of dreams and build pictures of a future predicated in decency, compassion, courage, connection. Our ability to organise and resist is vital, but I believe now more than ever that our true strength lies in our ability to cultivate longing, to build awesome Desire Machines. After all, as Don Delillo once wrote, “longing, on a large scale, is what makes history”. Don’t you ever forget that. I’m digging out my toolbox and heading to the garage to start building a Desire Machine. Who’s joining me?