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The Machinery of Atrocity & the Refusal of Nihilism:
Remembering Ourselves in an Age of Empire
Settler colonialism has never sustained itself through morality, cooperation, or truth. It survives through brutality.
Its power does not come from righteousness or superiority, but from a willingness to commit the highest levels of cruelty—atrocities so extreme that most human beings cannot even imagine them, let alone carry them out. Genocide, mass displacement, starvation as policy, rape as warfare, the annihilation of languages, the theft of land, the extraction of life itself from soil and body alike—these are not unfortunate side effects. They are the foundation.
Colonial empires succeed precisely because they are willing to cross moral thresholds that intact cultures refuse to cross.
This violence is not only enacted through bombs and borders, but through bodies—especially the bodies of the most vulnerable.
Throughout history, systems of domination have granted powerful men a sense of entitlement to the bodies of those they deem weaker: women, girls, boys, enslaved peoples, colonized peoples. Sexual violence has been used deliberately as a tool of terror, humiliation, and control. The violation of bodies becomes a message: you are not sovereign; your life is not your own.
This entitlement has extended even to the sexual abuse and murder of children—acts carried out without remorse, without limit, and often without reprisal. These crimes are not anomalies committed by “bad individuals.” They are made possible by hierarchies that strip some people of personhood, entirely.
To name this truth is unbearable…and necessary.
To make such violence possible at scale, consent must be manufactured.
This is accomplished through dehumanization.
The people being invaded, occupied, or eradicated are framed as threats, animals, terrorists, savages. Their humanity is erased long before their bodies are destroyed. Once a people are no longer seen as human, anything done to them becomes permissible…necessary, even righteous.
And then comes the erasure of memory.
Histories are burned and rewritten. Cultures are caricatured. Ancestral wisdom and practice is dismissed as primitive and even forbidden. The conquerors crown themselves as benevolent heroes who “brought civilization” to those they conquered.
In truth, those who claim moral authority through domination reveal themselves as morally bankrupt.
But there is another truth we must be willing to face.
Those who design wars do not fight them.
The men in suits, boardrooms, parliaments, and corporate offices do not bleed in the dirt. They do not watch their friends die beside them. They do not carry the screams of children in their sleep for the rest of their lives.
They send other people’s children to do the killing…and the dying.
Through propaganda, nationalism, manufactured fear, and moral inversion, ordinary people are convinced to fight wars that do not serve them. Young men and women, our sons and daughters, are taught that obedience is honour, that violence is heroism, that questioning orders is betrayal.
They are trained to override empathy.
To shoot strangers they have never met.
To destroy communities they know nothing about.
To commit acts that fracture the mind and wound the soul.
And when they return home, if they return at all, they are left to carry the psychological and spiritual devastation alone.
Post-traumatic stress is not weakness.
It is the human psyche reacting exactly as it should to doing or witnessing the unbearable.
War does not only destroy those it targets…it consumes those it recruits.
And still the architects of war grow wealthier.
Weapons manufacturers post record profits.
Politicians gain power.
Corporations gain access to land, oil, minerals, labor, reconstruction contracts.
The blood never touches their hands.
Imagine, truly imagine, if every soldier said no.
If those trained to carry out violence collectively refused to become mercenaries for empire.
If they refused to commit war crimes for the enrichment of the already wealthy.
If they laid down their weapons and said:
We will not kill for your profit.
We will not destroy families for your power.
We will not sacrifice our souls for your lies.
Empires do not collapse because they are challenged by force alone.
They collapse when consent is withdrawn.
This is why propaganda is relentless.
Why dissent is punished.
Why whistleblowers are silenced.
Why conscientious objection is stigmatized.
Because the system cannot function without participation.
And this is where the deepest truth lives:
The people are not powerless.
Power has always depended on our compliance—our labor, our belief, our silence, our fear.
They want us divided—left against right, race against race, neighbor against neighbor—so we never look upward and ask who is truly benefitting.
They want us numb.
They want us hopeless.
They want us to believe nothing we do matters.
But every refusal matters.
Every act of conscience matters.
Every moment we choose humanity over hatred matters.
Because we are not isolated individuals drifting through a meaningless universe.
We are a living web.
Each thought we think, each word we speak, each action we take ripples outward into the whole.
Because I care, I love.
Because I love, I refuse dehumanization.
Because I refuse dehumanization, I choose compassion with integrity…even when it costs me.
Even if it is just me.
That matters.
And because you care…that matters too.
They want us grinding merely to survive, too exhausted to resist, too fearful to imagine alternatives.
But the truth is this:
We are the power.
Not generals.
Not politicians.
Not corporations.
We, the people, are the engine beneath every empire.
And when we say no—together, or even alone—the machinery begins to fail.
I do not consent to the nihilism they are trying to impose.
I do not consent to a world where our children are sacrificed for profit.
I do not consent to forgetting our shared humanity.
To love in the face of violence is not naïve.
To speak truth in the face of propaganda is not foolish.
To refuse despair is not weakness.
It is resistance.
And as long as even one of us continues to care—to witness, to speak, to love, to remember—the story is not over.
Not even close.
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