The Evil Empire
No forces have shaped the last three hundred years of world history more than imperialism and nationalism. Nationalism is not just the will of a people to achieve self-determination. Understood in a world-historical Hegelian sense, nationalism is the essence of group consciousness, the unified thinking that springs from any linked set of identities and voices. Drawing on the work of theorist Fredric Jameson, we can see how the popular press and the growth of nationalism are intrinsically linked. You don't need to watch the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics or the North Korean Mass Games to see what nationalism looks like. The roots of nationalism can be observed at any punk rock show or the 300 level of an NFL game. Nationalism is what happens when the crowd gets big and reaches a boil.
The "we" of the editorial page, the mob, and the nation-state--anonymous, collective, omnipotent--are one and the same. Nationalism begins when the "I" fully identifies its political interests with a larger "we." For the third segment of the Arcadia Project, I chose nationalism as my subject.
With Evil Empire, my polemic against Britain, I attempted to rekindle the original fires of nationalism laying dormant in the American heart. Like the popular press at the dawn of American nation, I adulterated truths with half-truths. I salted my arguments with ad hominem attacks. These were blatantly inflammatory attempts to inspire hatred of America's mother country. I tried to linguistically represent the violence that comes with independence, that moment when the Enlightenment desire to see the world anew achieves full self-consciousness, demanding a sudden and painful break with the old order of sovereignty.
I demanded an absurdly large sum--more than thirty trillion dollars--in "reparations" from the British government for the misdeeds it has inflicted upon America and the world. I formed a group called the International Committee for British Reparations, which held a press conference and launched an online campaign demanding payment of the thirty trillion. We collected thousands of signatures from aggrieved citizens all over the world. Once again I showed how easy it is to obtain legitimacy in a 24-hour news cycle world with an insatiable desire for content.
With a website and a microphone, I established myself as a bona fide international mediator within a few weeks. We quickly won a tremendous amount of attention from the British media. I appeared on the BBC five times and was a guest of the hit television program, the Richard and Judy Show. The Daily Mail wrote about my ideas in a two-page spread. Back home, I began receiving hundreds of angry email and letters from British citizens, some threatening me with death. The hatred and hypersensitivity laying dormant in Britain's nationalist/empirialist ego spilled out all over the Internet, with loyalist bloggers attempting to refute my charges and calling for my head. It felt like 1776 all over again.
By challenging the virtuous reputation of one of the world's wickedest nation-states, I suggested that history is far more nuanced than the comic-book version that we've been fed. Because they are so close to the ideological heart of the Western intellectual establishment, Britain's crimes have generally escaped our notice. The numerical atrocities the British people have committed in the name of nationalism dwarf those of Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda; and yet they have escaped our notice. By challenging the dominant narrative of history's heroes and villains, Evil Empire points the way towards a more anarchic, open-source method of historical inquiry, where there are no sacred cows, no absolute facts, no point within the consensus so established that it need not be challenged. Like the Wikipedia, an open-source, collectively edited set of facts, Evil Empire flattened the hierarchy of who gets to decide what is true.
Where Nietzsche forged an individual morality "beyond good and evil," I drained the tired moralizing out of foreign affairs. Grudges, so far as I can tell, are the driving force behind most of our contemporary geopolitics. By airing and demanding amends for past grievances, Evil Empire hinted at a future where we are masters, not slaves, of our own history.
I commissioned Penny Rimbaud, the vocal anarchist and drummer for the band Crass, to write the forward to Evil Empire. I find it interesting that I, someone who has made tens millions of dollars profiting from the capitalist system, found common ground with Rimbaud, who has advocated the abolishment of state rule and property itself. We shared a common hatred for British rule. Together we mourned the countless lives lost to the excesses of nationalism. The text of Evil Empire was marketed in Britain and the United States and a hardcover book. It sold tens of thousands of copies. Evil Empire showed a way forward from the cynicism and despair expressed at points by the Arcades Project.
Like the rest of my Arcadia Project, Evil Empire demonstrated that the public wants more than mindlessness and commodities. Apparently there is significant demand for new histories, new evaluations of so-called historical truths, and new works of outside imagination. Like Evil Empire, these works can be promoted, hyped, and brought to market through existing market structures. Thanks to digital technology, it has never been cheaper or easier for a lone genius to push his ideas forward. Evil Empire proved that the consensus can be played like a game, and invited every citizen of the world to partake in the fun of rewriting history.