The Death of Nations

Maureen O'Sullivan 

Activist Post

We won’t see it reported in the corporate media, but nations as sovereign states with the right to chart their own course no longer exist.

An autopsy would reveal the cause of death to be the inexorable, incremental and insidious cancerous metastasis of the small global power elite that was decades, if not centuries in the making.

But while globalization’s vulture capitalists pick over the unburied remains of formerly sovereign nations at State liquidation sales and continue to go about the business of cannibalizing the planet, we are left to wonder... what’s next?

Actually, the death of nations is good and bad news.  

I’m not suggesting we overthrow or otherwise dismantle the increasingly archaic geo-political infrastructure of nations we now have. Let them continue to deliver our mail, clean our sidewalks, maintain a less than perfect but necessary criminal ‘justice’ system. 

What is required now is that we begin to restrain them from doing greater harm before their reckless greed kills us all. This can be accomplished by our withdrawing our collective energies of support from them.

This process of withdrawal must be on carried out on both inner and outer levels. On outer levels, it involves not using our collective economic power to buy what they have to sell. Stop buying food, clothes, electronics, etc., from the multi-nationals. Buy local as much as possible. Stay out of the mega-stores. Educate yourself as to what subsidiaries the multi-nationals own and do not subsidize them with your money. Take your money out of banks and put it into local credit unions.

But our inner level withdrawal is equally important. It requires acknowledging the scary truth that our national leaders are no longer allied with us -- but with the globalist agenda. We must courageously consider the implications of our situation.

The unavoidable implication is that maintaining emotional bonds to our respective nations puts us in jeopardy and these emotional ties must be severed. We must foster an attitude of vigilant wariness toward them -- not some one-sided nationalistic identification. Let the infrastructure remain until we’re united enough to replace it; in the meantime we must restrain its most dangerous activities.

Just as we have no strong emotional ties to the sanitation and sewer departments in whatever country we live, we must cut any emotional ties to these dangerous false constructs that now exist solely to control us and drive us into impoverishment. We can’t afford patriotic fervor, or continue to identify with an entity that seeks to harm us. It's time for us to evolve beyond this existing patchwork of human sub-groups, and chart a new course for ourselves.

Nations no longer have any meaning for us. The globalist greed they openly serve to advance has destroyed any credibility that their initial reason for being still exists. Continuing to perpetuate the fiction that they still exist to benefit their respective citizenry will likely lead us down the path to ruin. Today's nations are the skeletal remains of conceptual frameworks that once did exist to benefit their respective populations and were worthy of our allegiance. But that no longer seems to be the case.

The old sub-group identifications based on nationalism and ethnicity now only exists to divide and disempower us. They are false constructs; their flag-waving emotional manipulation of us is today little more than craven stagecraft for the masses.

What does it say about our gullibility when our so-called leaders brazenly place front men for Monsanto, big Pharma and the corporate media in charge of the very agencies tasked with regulating their respective industries? No doubt they regard us as easy marks.

This inner withdrawal is the most radical, but is required action we can now take. We must decide in no uncertain terms that whatever they’re selling, we’re no longer buying -- whether its propaganda or GMO foods. When they corral the parameters of public discourse with hackneyed and hollow phrases like “Our country.. our nation... our people” we can no longer afford to uncritically swallow these glossed over Big Lies, but must either internally or out loud refute them with:

We are a species 

We are united 

We are humankind

But, as is the case with all species, we have an inborn need for belonging. And as we begin to extinguish within us and renounce our former sense of belonging to sub-group nations or ethnicities, then to what do we belong?

We must now transfer our collective sense of belonging to our Earth Mother. We are evolving a much wider perspective now that our Space Age technology has given us a true image of exactly where we are. Territoriality only had meaning under the old fragmented sense of Earth derived from flat paper maps and atlases, and limited to the ground under our feet; ground we could lay claim to, and stake flagpoles in. 

We are the first generation to actually ’see” and begin to integrate the wider perspective of our Earth in totality. From this more encompassing perspective, the old internalized maps in all our heads that holds the conceptual framework of nation states has no place. It must be consciously renounced and replaced with an internal map of Mother Earth as viewed from space. Gratitude and planetary belonging must begin to replace commodification and territoriality. Our generation’s space explorations are a historical turning point not only technologically, but in our collective human consciousness as well. They’ve  provided us with incontrovertible proof of where we truly are, and where our allegiance and sense of belonging truly lies.

Placing ourselves on Earth, rather than ‘in’ nations is an act of growing up, just as children eventually have to give up believing in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Fairy tales can be comforting, but we eventually outgrow them because their enchanted magical landscapes don‘t really exist. As adults, we can’t pretend we live in them. So too, it’s time for us to give up the fantasy that nations are still independent sovereign entities that we live within.

For one thing, doing so will end the increasingly dangerous sense of insularity we now have. This perceived insularity is born out of the false notion that we’re separated from others of our kind who are ensconced in their  respective nations. Grounding ourselves together on Mother Earth is an evolutionary ‘growing up’ that will empower us as a species by strengthening within the mass of humankind a newly emerging supra-organization seven billion strong that budded in the Arab Spring and is now blossoming and flourishing in our American Autumn as groups of us across the planet stand together in solidarity.  Though oceans may separate us; we protest the run amok corporate greed that now threatens us all --  as well as all of Earth creation and our Earth Mother.

We can advance and support this new planetary unity not just with our bodies, but in our consciousness, by internalizing a new conceptual framework of planetary presence and belonging and avowing a new allegiance to each other, Earth and all of Earth creation -- or we can have its bizarro world opposite - the globalization nightmare of der Bilderbergers.  In other words, we can choose our form of unity, rather than permit the globalists to order it for us.

The choice is ours.

With the death of nations, as we begin to no longer primarily identify through our national affiliations, then just who are we? How do we identify ourselves if we‘re no longer 'Indian' or 'Nigerian' or 'Chinese'? What do we say we are? We need a new ‘Us’ to confront the new ‘them‘. To continue to identify with moribund nations only renders us vulnerable to continued emotional manipulations and engineered squabbling among ourselves. It distracts us from realizing that ‘We’ now all face the same enemy.

This new ‘We’ is all of us. All of humankind. Only this larger ’We’ is powerful enough to confront the new ‘Them’. In spite of all the fear mongering, our worst enemy isn’t the Taliban or al Qaeda. The Taliban isn’t recklessly tampering with the global food supply through GMO foods and a market-based, agri-business mindset. It isn’t endangering all ocean life with frankenfish. Al Qaeda isn’t driving subsistence farmers around the world off their land, or to suicide through multi-national land grabs. No terrorist group is buying up all the seed banks in the world and forcing farmers to cultivate ever more expensive GMO seeds and the increasing amounts of herbicides and pesticides needed to make them grow. No crime syndicate is responsible for the grand scale usury loan sharking that is driving once sovereign nations into crippling debt and subsequent IMF technocrat takeover. No insurgent group -- foreign or domestic -- has taken responsibility for the worst attacks of eco-terrorism in our lifetimes: the BP Gulf oil spill, Fukushima, and WMD's.

The only fanatical religion our enemy embraces is greed. The only ideology they strive to advance is one of total control. Attila the Hun, the Vandals and every thug horde throughout history put together never committed the extent of planetary pillaging and plunder the new regime has already gotten away with. They’re destroying natural resources at an alarming rate. Through bogus, deceptively boring sounding trade agreements that benefit the power elite and the multi-national corporations they own, they’re dismantling our environmental, health, and worker protections. They’re siphoning off the national wealth of once independent countries through WTO and IMF strong-arm tactics. (First they came for Greece, and no one said anything, etc., etc..). Through structural adjustment policies they’re privatizing our infrastructures, water and other necessities of life and extracting the last drop of life energy they can from us by raising retirement ages higher and higher, lowering wages and gutting retirement funds and collective bargaining rights. They are the enemy we must all be wary of and resist, not al Queda, the Taliban or infidels of any stripe and persuasion.

Do the math:  Seven billion of us vs. a few hundred of them.

An emerging species-wide 'Us’ is the best leverage we have to overcome the enemy’s global over-reach. For the first time in history, our social networking tools make this new ‘Us’ possible. A new planetary discourse and sharing of information for ’Us’, and by ’Us’, has already begun. Many of today’s news and political commentary Internet sites are already more relevant and newsworthy than the daily inundation of info-tainment  and electronic slop and swill that washes over us 24/7 from the corporate media. No matter what language they broadcast in, the corporate media everywhere now all exist for the same purpose -- not to create an informed citizenry, but to distract us, and misdirect our attention from the creeping neo-feudalism on our doorsteps.

Self-identified as a species, one among many; we can also once again feel our kinship to the rest of creation. Our alienation from our Earth and all other living beings has led to the de-sacrilized commodification of life we see today. Future generations may well view us not as the Age of Space Exploration, but as the Age of Exploitation. That the very same mindset of exploitation is now extending to us was inevitable from the outset. What we reap, we sow. We must re-weave ourselves meaningfully once again into the web of life.

It’s really not “all about us”. We can do this once we transfer our primary sense of belonging and loyalty from dead nations to our living, vibrant Earth and all of creation. We must everywhere begin to openly and passionately pledge our allegiance to Earth, life, and to each other if we want to survive.

As ‘We’ grow in solidarity, we can keep each other informed about what ‘they' are doing, and coordinate a collective resistance to ‘them’. This new planet-wide solidarity among Us will be established not by outer political overthrow, but by dialogue, re-framing and new conceptualizations.

We were born into a conceptual framework of nations and programmed to feel an emotional bond and belonging to them. But just because we were born into something, doesn’t mean we have to keep buying into it when our own best interests, our very survival, lie elsewhere.

Now that autonomous nations are dead by any meaningful measure of sovereignty, we must stop buying into the fallacy that our fates are still tied to them, or that the agenda of the globalization advance-men who pose as national leaders share our values and priorities. To continue to assume that they are on our side, rather than the side of dehumanization, at this point is just wishful thinking and willful naiveté.

As children in whatever nation we were born into, we were all taught The Glorious Story of our nation’s birth. We were taught to believe that it was our story, too, and learned to reckon all meaningful time from its beginning. Historical events prior to this heroic narrative were just footnotes to the main text. Throughout our childhoods, we were tested over and over again on our knowledge of our respective Glorious Story’s details, military battles, and main characters. Murders in the hundreds of thousands -- even millions -- were glossed over in its telling and re-telling. If the lands of indigenous peoples were stolen to establish our nation, that was only prologue to The Glorious Story. Their genocidal killing was only given passing reference, explained away under the rubric of ‘Manifest Destiny', or some such term equally dismissive and exculpatory.

With the death of nations, we must begin to tell a new story. Maybe we’ll start it from the time our forebears roamed the African savannah. Then at some point, some of us wandered out of Africa in little bands to every landmass on Mother Earth. Over time, we evolved differently colored eyes and skin to more successfully adapt to whatever local eco-system in which we settled. Noses narrowed in places of frigid air. Chests expanded in thin mountain atmospheres.

At some point in this new narrative, mention must be made of how we eventually found each other again after many, many generations had passed. Our coming together was not always non-violent, but through it we learned of the rest of our kind who was with us here on Earth.

Mention must also be made of our human propensity for tinkering and tool-making. It is this trait that eventually enabled us to harness electricity; and through it we began to talk to each other at the planetary level. Our dialog deepened. Our unity grew.

In social networking sites, without the mediation of any elites to control the parameters of our discourse, we soon began to realize that we were all in the same situation; we all faced the same enemy. We began to enmass not physically -- but in consciousness -- a unity born of shared peril and shared allegiance to Earth, life, and each other.

The true story of nations began not with the Glorious Stories we were told, but with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which brought into being the first nation states. Nations had a 350-odd year run. Hardly a blip on the radar screen of human history. The Medieval world of royal courts and kingdoms lasted longer than that. 

The chapter on nations is ending. It’s time for us to begin a new one . . . on our own terms. 

Maureen O'Sullivan is an eco/feminist artist/poet living in Kingston New York in the Hudson River Valley. A number of her recent articles appear on her website (under Writings). She grew up in Queens, NYC and was very inspired by the great visionary Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.