Profound. Powerful. Tears. My heart is yet again broken open with the horrors and the tragedies of these times and all times. And I am grateful for my broken heart. And for the courage and truth embodied in what is illuminated here by Jermaine Fowler. Deepest bow of respect and gratitude. And may more of us subscribe to Jermaine's substack, as I just did. And may we all be inspired seek and know and act upon the truth out of our fierce love and caring for all of life everywhere. — Molly
Jan 06, 2026
The beast of empire devours. It has always devoured. The only thing that changes is whether it bothers to wipe its mouth.
January 5, 2026. CNN studio in Washington. The lights are the color of competence. The anchor’s tie is knotted precisely. Stephen Miller, White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, sits in the chair reserved for senior officials, water glass untouched, and the question comes the way questions come on cable news, direct but already expecting deflection.
Can you rule out that the United States will take Greenland by force?
The answer: Nobody is going to fight the US militarily over the future of Greenland.
Not no. Not of course not. Not we respect international law. The answer is: who would stop us?
The anchor moves to the next question. The graphics change. Somewhere, a producer is already thinking about the commercial break.
Three days earlier, a reporter had asked about Colombia. The president of that country had criticized the Venezuela operation. The answer came back: He’s making cocaine and they’re sending it into the United States. So he does have to watch his ass.
Watch his ass. The president of a sovereign nation, a U.S. ally, told on camera to watch his ass. The phrasing of a man who knows he won’t be challenged: the lazy confidence of something that doesn’t need to be careful anymore.
That same week: Venezuela, invaded. Cuba, threatened. Mexico, warned. Greenland, claimed.
And this, on the oil: The money coming out of the ground is very substantial.
Not even the pretense of liberation anymore. Not even the costume of spreading democracy. Just the money. Just the ground. Just the flesh beneath the skin.
Florence, 1513.
They arrested him in February. The new regime suspected him of conspiracy; he had served the old republic, which made him guilty by association. They took Niccolò Machiavelli to the Bargello and hung him from a rope.
The strappado was simple. They tied his wrists behind his back, hoisted him into the air, and dropped him. The weight of his own body wrenched his shoulders from their sockets. They did this six times. Six drops. Each time the rope jerked taut, the joints separated a little more. Between drops, they asked questions he couldn’t answer. He screamed, as anyone would. He told them nothing, because there was nothing to tell.
When they finished, they released him into exile. A man who had run the foreign policy of a republic, reduced to farming outside the city walls, his shoulders never quite right again. He had time now. Time to write.
The Prince wasn’t published in his lifetime. It was a private letter to the men who had destroyed him, a manual on how power actually works, written by someone who had felt power’s instruments on his own body.
Chapter XVIII:
“You must know, then, that there are two methods of fighting, the one by law, the other by force: the first method is that of men, the second of beasts; but as the first method is often insufficient, one must have recourse to the second. It is therefore necessary for a prince to know well how to use both the beast and the man.”
Five centuries of rulers understood the lesson. You use force, but you dress it in law. You use the beast, but you speak as the man. The genius of modern power was making the violence look like policy, the conquest look like assistance, the theft look like trade.
What Machiavelli knew, because they had hung him from a rope and dropped him six times until his arms no longer worked, was that the beast was always there. Beneath the treaties, beneath the handshakes, beneath the language of diplomacy—an atmosphere of impending violence. Even when the beast rested, the tension remained. Even when it closed its eyes, the prey knew it was there.
For five hundred years, the answer was no. You kept the beast hidden. You let it feed, but you called the feeding something else.
Until now.
The Ones Who Watched
The interview aired on a Monday. Millions saw it. The question was asked, can you rule out force?, and the answer was nobody will fight us, and then the next question came, and then the theme music, and then whatever was next.
Tuesday morning, the clip circulated. Some shared it with alarm. Most scrolled past. The algorithm offered something else: a recipe, a scandal, a dog learning to skateboard. The confession of intent to annex a NATO ally’s territory by force became one tile in an infinite scroll.
Congress said nothing. The senators who would have drafted resolutions a decade ago drafted nothing. The generals who would have leaked their concerns to reporters stayed silent. The diplomats who would have resigned in protest kept their posts.
Upton Sinclair, 1934: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
But it isn’t just salary. It’s comfort. It’s position. It’s the relief of not being the one named in the threat. The ones who share the clip with a laughing emoji. The ones who hear nobody will fight us and feel, briefly, the thrill of being part of the us.
To watch a predator bring something down is a dramatic event: loathsome to some, beautiful to others who admire the precision of the action, the clinical efficiency of the moment. But predation must be judged not by how it looks but by what it does.
The beast doesn’t feed itself. It needs the ones who drive the prey toward its mouth. The ones who don’t hold the knife but clear the path. The ones who don’t speak the threat but let it pass into the next news cycle unremarked.
Every emperor has understood this. The cruelty is never the work of one man. It’s the work of all the ones who make the feeding possible by watching it and calling it something else.
A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing
We were always an empire. We just had better words for it.
The wolf in sheep’s clothing is the oldest story. The beast doesn’t change. Only the fleece it wears.
The Monroe Doctrine, 1823: The American continents are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers. That was supposed to mean protection. Keep the old empires out.
Eighty years later, Theodore Roosevelt added the corollary. December 1904: Chronic wrongdoing may force the United States, however reluctantly, to the exercise of an international police power.
The beast was always in the document. Monroe said “ours.” Roosevelt said “and we’ll take what we want from it.”
Marines in Haiti for nineteen years. The CIA in Guatemala when United Fruit felt threatened—two hundred thousand dead before it was over. Kissinger’s phone call before Pinochet’s tanks surrounded Allende in Santiago. Bombs falling on a poor neighborhood in Panama while Noriega hid in the Vatican embassy. The rationale was always different: stability, communism, Cuba, drugs. But the pattern was always the same. Stalk under cover of language, then rush.
The fleece was never for the wolf. Wolves don’t need disguises. It was for us, so we could watch the feeding and call it something else. Liberation. Stability. Peace.
“Donroe,” his word, is what happens when the fleece comes off.
Trump renamed the Monroe Doctrine after himself because he doesn’t think he needs the pretense anymore. He says we’re going to run the country and the money coming out of the ground in the same breath, on camera, because the silence has taught him he can.
Now we see the teeth. And we’re still watching.
Pituffik
Twelve hundred miles from the North Pole, on the northwest coast of Greenland, there is an American military base. It used to be called Thule. Now it’s called Pituffik Space Base. It’s the northernmost U.S. installation on earth.
Fifty-six thousand people live in Greenland. Most are Inuit. They woke up one morning to learn they were being discussed as an acquisition.
A fisherman in Nuuk heard it on the radio while mending nets. The signal always cuts in and out near the harbor. The Danish came first, then the translation, breaking up: ...formal position... United States... Greenland should... His hands kept working. The word for this place is Kalaallit Nunaat—the country of the Greenlanders. Nobody asked the Greenlanders.
The ice sheet is two miles thick in places. Underneath it: rare earth minerals, uranium, oil, the resources that wars are made of. The permafrost is melting. What was frozen is becoming accessible. What was worthless is becoming valuable. This is why the beast turns its head north.
The people who live there were not consulted. They are being talked about the way you talk about the contents of a house you’re planning to buy.
Nobody will fight us. The answer to a question about sovereignty. The answer that assumes the people who live there don’t count as somebody.
____________
The interview ended. The lights dimmed. The anchor moved on to the next segment: something about markets, or weather, or the thing that would hold attention until the next commercial break. The words hung in the studio air for a moment, then dispersed, joining all the other words that had been spoken there and forgotten.
Nobody is going to fight the US militarily.
Somewhere in Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, it was already night. The temperature had dropped below freezing. The harbor was quiet. The fishing boats were tied to the docks, rocking slightly in water that would not freeze this year, though it had frozen every year before.
The ice sheet continues its ancient calving into the sea, indifferent to the men who want what’s underneath. Chunks the size of city blocks break off and drift south, melting as they go.
The beast of empire has always been hungry. It has torn through continents, swallowed nations whole, licked its teeth clean and called it civilization. It radiates a lazy, lordly power, the carelessness of knowing nothing will challenge it. What’s new is not the appetite. What’s new is the salivating in public.
The eyes are open now. And the silence answers.
Please go here for the original article, notes, and sources: https://thehumanityarchive.substack.com/p/the-beast-of-empire
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