Power and Empire

It has been very difficult not to feel overwhelmed by the World about us all, and I’ll try to explain this by harking back to my youth. When I grew up World War II was not so very far behind my in time — my father served in the Army, though he never ever spoke about his wartime experiences. Though the Vietnam War began and continued during my maturation, it was a horror that occurred far, far away until the maimed began to return to a hospital close to my neighborhood.

The assassinations had been and continued to be in full swing: JFK, MLK, RFK and the many others I doubtless knew nothing about, organized by a shadow State-within-a-State, in which the CIA played a very prominent but not exclusive role. I knew early on that Lee Harvey Oswald was a probable CIA asset and that the lone gunman theory of JFK’s murder was as absurd as the Warren Commission itself.

I mention this because the recent release of the JFK files held no particular interest for me when it came to the nuts-and-bolts of a killing that marked a milestone on the nation’s journey to Hell. But the release of the files is indeed consummately significant because there, in black and white, we see that the Shadow State has been wreaking havoc within America and without, for decades.

Our ‘conspiracy’ theories have been confirmed as reality, for all the world to see. I give President Trump a great deal of credit for this development and I hope it augurs a process of ongoing revelation about the nature of just how governments, people, and institutions have interacted.

In my youth the World was a vast place of many countries, great distances, excitingly different cultures and languages and fascinating opportunities. I took the opportunity to travel across the Atlantic to study abroad, and that sojourn has stood me in great stead for my life.

Yet now, since 2020 to be perfectly exact, this notion of a Great World has been transformed into an oppressive suffocating Small World run by a few entities wielding unimaginable power — at least it was unimaginable until they locked us down and shoved so many phony narratives down our collective throats that we were too stuffed to be able to vomit.

This tightening of the screws was accompanied, in the West at least, by dicta advising all of us to hew to a Uniparty Globalist Line that promoted the extirpation of individual liberties, national borders and the rights of national sovereignty, an idolatry of faux-enlightened cultural mores heralding, on the surface, the eradication of differences of race, creed and gender and the distinction between men and machines. Yes, I kept hearing from the Mouthpiece Media, we are all One, all Same — and all Subjects to the controlling elites and their apparent vision of a far less populated globe.

My friends the Breggins have just published an excellent analysis of empire here, and their remarks prompted me to address this matter from my own angle. To do so I will have to venture a bit into the terrain of psychoanalysis, that much misunderstood domain, and the implications of its findings, which are not connected to ideologies, but to the uncovering of the deep netherworld of the unconscious, and drives that move individuals and groups, which are themselves related to the powerful physical experiences of our development. This Netherworld is one very few people are willing to address, mostly because it comprises the gamut of human ideation and desire, full of sensual longing and destructive impulses twined and intertwined and ever-present.

In the process of conducting a psychoanalytic treatment — or in the process of following the rule of free association oneself independently — wherein censorship is abolished, one can get glimpses of these drives and wishes in all their astonishing and bewildering variety and power.

One may also see their derivatives in the perverse realms of popular culture and politics. The ‘civilized’ individual is one who refrains from acting upon dark desires. A very simple example is one provided by Freud himself, who once quipped that his happiness would be complete if he could look outside his window and see his enemies hanging — I am paraphrasing, but you get the picture.

I will call attention to the vast difference between thinking and action — a difference that seems to be becoming more honored in the breach these days. In the peculiar environment of psychoanalysis, no thought is verboten. At its essence psychoanalysis brings the notion of free speech to a kind of ideal: yes, one is allowed to think anything, and in doing so one may be led to self-discoveries. But only a firm wall between thought and deed can ensure that one may, by freely associating, gain access to one’s unconscious.

To sum up: thinking about wanting to murder somebody is not criminal — actual murder is. In the rich fantasy life of a mind, anything goes, but fantasy is not to be confused with actual behavior.

This has been a circuitous way to bring me to my primary purpose in this essay, which is to make some kind of sense of our geopolitical environment, in which Power is a principal motivating factor, and the State capabilities of wielding Power are becoming exponentially easier.

Several imperial powers are currently jostling among each other. Because power seeks to grow and enhance itself, these entities will expand unless checked. When I observe what has been occurring in the West — open borders, the attempted dissolution of national sovereignty, the suppression of individual rights — I cannot help but conclude that a coalition of Shadow States with a military arm has been at work.

It is important to understand that with virtually any country there is the visible government, some more democratic than others, and there is a secret and relatively opaque shadow group whose aspirations have little to do with a country’s actual citizenry. The CIA, USAID and like entities, tethered together and operating only in accordance with their own rules, rogues and renegades all, have been destroying the United States, its election systems, and the governments and elections of countries around the world for many decades. I suspect that they have formed an alliance with elements of both the American and Chinese military to achieve their ends, an alliance was brought to the surface in Wuhan.

The Globalist Shadow State uses political puppets, hence the real-time self-destruction of Europe that is occurring before our very own eyes — the Europe whose leaders are fomenting more and more war while gutting their own economies, industries and resources. Opposing it is Populist America, where some notion of individual liberty remains. It is a vicious and multi-pronged War, and the more I ponder it the more I recognize the Shadow War that has been raging for many years before. The three-letter agencies were never America, they were and still are America’s enemies, and a list of their crimes is both heinous and nearly interminable.

Agencies and institutions are ultimately run by people, real, actual people, who themselves must contend with the destructive and perverse and megalomaniacal impulses lurking within their breasts. My greatest fear is that when healthy populism marches inexorably to defeat the Elite, these very Elites, still clinging to the keystrokes of Power, would prefer to take us all down rather than face an appointment with Justice. Call it masochism, the death drive, or a grandiose apotheosis of self-immolation, but the danger is unfortunately very real. Power is nourished by blood.

Few understand how close to the end we came in the early Sixties, how the respective Deep States of America and Russia pushed for a nuclear exchange, and how it was the magnificent covert cooperation of Kennedy and Khrushchev that prevented it. Think about it: two leaders who had to fight against the crazed forces within their own lands to preserve that large wonderful infinitely mysterious World that has since so shrunk.

I am optimistic, however, because so many signs point to the awakening of people generally to the conflict that has been waged against them, and because someone in power will recognize what perhaps is the greatest virtue of all — restraint — and exercise it.

The blandishments of power may be immense, but thoughtfulness can prevail over impulse, and the more enduring charms of doing good will hold greater sway. And our World will once again regain its true dimension.

Emanuel E. Garcia, M.D.

March 2025