The Ugly Americans

In the classic Cold War film The Ugly American, Marlon Brando plays an American ambassador neck-deep in the kind of covert operations that would later get tens of thousands of Vietnamese killed. The film gave us a phrase, but most people forgot what it actually meant. Burdick and Lederer's novel portrays the "ugly American" as Homer Atkins, a straightforward engineer who genuinely cared about the locals and actively listened to their perspectives. The real ugliness came from the polished diplomats who saw Southeast Asians as pieces on a chessboard.

Sixty years on, we've become exactly what we pretended to oppose. Only worse.

Since 1993, I have been living abroad, observing America's reputation deteriorate from an external perspective. When Snowden blew the whistle on American consulates operating as CIA spy bases, it didn't shock anyone who'd been paying attention. We've seen it up close: embassy "cultural officers" who can't speak the language, USAID workers more interested in intelligence gathering than delivering aid, and the relentless American military footprint that turns every diplomatic mission into a launch pad for the next intervention.

Did we use the domino theory to justify Vietnam? Pure projection. We said we were terrified of communist expansion, but what really scared the American ruling class was the possibility that countries might build economies that didn't funnel wealth to Wall Street. The dominoes we've actually been knocking over are governments that threaten the dollar's stranglehold: Saddam switching to euros for oil sales, Gaddafi's plan for an African gold dinar, Venezuela nationalizing its oil, and now China's BRICS system offering an escape hatch from dollar hegemony. The pattern isn't subtle-- we don't export democracy, we enforce tribute.

Look at Ukraine. Peel back the heroic narrative and you find Victoria Nuland caught on tape hand-picking Ukraine's post-Maidan government and $5 billion in American "democracy promotion" that bought regime change on Russia's doorstep. China? Same playbook. These measures, including the "pivot to Asia," AUKUS, and semiconductor blockades, do not aim to safeguard democracy. What it defends is dollar hegemony, the reserve currency status that funds the empire. When that privilege dies, so does the military machine it bankrolls.

The Descent

The ugliness has been compounding since 1945, administration after administration, a bipartisan project that makes a mockery of the idea that your vote matters when it comes to war.

Operation Condor taught torture to Latin American death squads. The School of the Americas graduated dictators who "disappeared" tens of thousands. CIA coups toppled democracies in Instead of promoting freedom in countries like Iran, Guatemala, and Chile, Trump has installed thugs who would privatize resources and open markets to American corporations. The Phoenix Program in Vietnam systematically assassinated over 40,000 civilians. Reagan armed both sides of the Iran-Iraq War while Central American death squads murdered priests and union organizers with American weapons and American training. Clinton's sanctions killed 500,000 Iraqi children-- a price Madeleine Albright called "worth it" on national television, one of the most grotesque moments in American diplomatic history. Bush's system of torture, which included Abu Ghraib, the black sites, rendition flights, and waterboarding, was rebranded as "enhanced interrogation." Obama's drone program, the "Disposition Matrix," a kill list managed from the White House every Tuesday morning like a corporate board meeting, raining Hellfire missiles on wedding parties and funerals across seven countries. The destruction of Libya, once Africa's most prosperous nation, is now a failed state with open-air slave markets. Bipartisan support for Saudi Arabia's genocide in Yemen, which has resulted in 377,000 deaths and counting, is a conflict that most Americans are unable to locate on a map. Biden circumvented Congress to send 2,000-pound bombs to pulverize Gaza's refugee camps, all the while lecturing the world about human rights.

And now Trump-- the grotesque face of empire in collapse, the logical endpoint of decades of rot. He tears apart a third of the White House for personal renovations without public consultation, treating the people's house like a garish casino renovation. He hands Elon Musk access to government databases containing millions of Americans' personal information through the DOGE program-- a private contractor accountable to nobody-- crossing the threshold Frank Church warned about in 1975. His secret domestic terrorist lists fulfill the authoritarian promise that has been building since the Patriot Act gave the surveillance state legal cover, as they target dissidents and anyone resisting the suppression of civil rights through a presidential memo. A UFC clown show will be taking place on the White House lawn for the Fourth of July. Bread and circuses meet digital authoritarianism. Caligula with a Twitter account.

The elites have dragged the American public into every one of these wars, almost never with genuine popular support, always screaming about national security while pursuing corporate profit. The result: a Pentagon budget so obscenely bloated that we spend more on what Trump calls the Department of War than on the needs of the people forced to pay for it.

Brown University's Costs of War project documented the damage: $8 trillion thrown into post-9/11 wars through 2022, with another $2.2 to $2.5 trillion in future veterans' care-- most unpaid. At least 940,000 were killed directly. Indirect effects resulted in another 3.6 to 3.8 million deaths. Thirty-eight million displaced. Suicide claimed the lives of four times more post-9/11 veterans than combat deaths. We're killing our soldiers after we bring them home.

Every $1 million spent on the military creates five jobs. Education creates thirteen. Healthcare creates nine. We chose the least productive investment possible. From 2020 to 2024, private contractors sucked up $2.4 trillion from the Pentagon-- 54 percent of DOD discretionary spending. Corporations profiting from permanent war run a protection racket.

The Oppenheimer Revelation We Missed

When Oppenheimer packed theaters in 2023, we failed to recognize what was right in front of us. The bomb didn't end war-- it became the bludgeon America waves to keep the world in line. Since 1945, the United States has not known a single year without war. Not one. There have been eighty years of continuous military operations. More than 70 countries host over 800 military bases. The "defense" budget surpasses the combined budgets of the next ten nations.

The terrible power Oppenheimer unleashed made us arrogant. It convinced us we could reshape the world through violence and get away with it because nobody else had the firepower to stop us.

The Gaza Gaze

Imagine knowing that the camera watching you wants you dead. This is hardly just a metaphor; the camera is literally programmed to identify you as a target for elimination. The drone circles overhead, the facial recognition kiosk at the checkpoint scans you, and the algorithm churns through your phone metadata-- they're not just watching you; they're hunting you. To these systems, you are not a person. These systems view you as a probability score, a heat signature, and a data point within a targeting matrix they have savagely named "The Gospel."

This was daily life in Gaza under the world's most perfected digital panopticon-- a prison without walls where 2.3 million Palestinians live as tracked prey. Blue Wolf facial recognition logs you at every checkpoint. Lavender AI assigned you a "militant probability" score based on your associations, your location history, and the metadata trail you leave just by existing. The Gospel determines whether your home is worth destroying to maybe kill you, calculating acceptable "collateral damage" ratios that include your children. And overhead, always overhead, the drones process everything in real time, waiting for the algorithm to give the kill order.

Frank Church warned us about this phenomenon in 1975. He'd discovered that even then, the NSA had built technology capable of total surveillance. Fifty years later, that technology has evolved into an automated execution system, one that transforms visibility into death sentences and the simple act of existing into probable cause for obliteration.

This is documented reality, built largely with American technology. The surveillance architecture is American-- the software, the drones, the facial recognition databases, and the fusion centers. Israel is running the proof of concept, demonstrating to potential buyers that the Orwellian nightmare is profitable. As Antony Lowenstein documents in The Palestine Laboratory, Israel has deliberately turned occupied Palestine into a showroom for "terror capitalism."

The psychological toll satisfies all the criteria for torture as stipulated by the UN Convention Against Torture. Severe mental suffering: hypervigilance that never stops, sleep disruption from constant drone presence, and anticipatory dread knowing any moment the algorithm might tag you for death. Intentional infliction: these systems are designed to produce exactly this state of terror. State actor involvement: obvious. Specific purpose: intimidation, coercion, and collective punishment of an entire population for the crime of refusing to disappear.

The panopticon Jeremy Bentham dreamed up was a circular prison where inmates would internalize the watcher's gaze and police themselves. Foucault saw how that logic metastasized beyond prisons into schools, hospitals, and factories-- anywhere power needed to discipline bodies without visible force. But Gaza takes it further. This isn't just disciplinary surveillance; it's necropolitical-- the deployment of technology to determine who lives and who dies and whose existence is tolerable and whose must be erased. Achille Mbembe's term "necropolitics" describes exactly this: sovereign power expressed through the decision over death, creating zones where certain populations are marked for elimination while others watch from safety. For a more academic read on this, see my paper in the journal Torture, "The necropolitics of Gaza: Architectures of controlled space, surveillance, and the logic of psychological torture."

The cruelty is the product. These systems are designed to produce trauma, to make existence itself unbearable, and to break people's capacity to resist or even to hope. And the technology doesn't stay in Gaza. It never does. Every system field-tested on Palestinians gets packaged and sold to police departments in Los Angeles, border control in Arizona, and surveillance networks in dozens of countries whose governments want populations that are docile, terrified, and too psychologically shattered to organize opposition.

The surveillance metastasizes wherever Palestinians exist. The NSA calls this the --panspectron-- "surveillance encompassing not just visible light but also radio, radar, microwaves, cellular communications, and every part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Ships patrol the coast. Spy balloons map tunnels. Suicide drones strike displacement camps. Checkpoints harvest biometrics. Online, every keystroke is monitored, every connection is mapped. All of this feeds into systems that calculate whether you should be allowed to continue breathing.

Brown University documented another dimension: At least 232 journalists and media workers have lost their lives in Gaza since October 7, 2023. More people were killed in this conflict than in the U.S. Civil War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Yugoslav wars, and the entire post-9/11 Afghanistan war combined. Both World Wars together killed 69 journalists. Gaza kills an average of thirteen per month. The Committee to Protect Journalists calls it simply "the worst ever conflict for reporters."

Israel banned foreign journalists from Gaza, ensuring the only witnesses are local Palestinian reporters who can be killed with impunity and then smeared as Hamas operatives. Kill the journalists, control the narrative and make sure nobody with a camera documents what happens when algorithms decide someone should die.

The American fingerprints are everywhere. The technology is ours. The funding is ours-- $17.9 billion in military aid to Israel just in the year after October 7, 2023. The diplomatic cover is ours. We built this machine. Israel just operates the franchise.

And it's coming home. The fusion centers are already here. Algorithms for predictive policing already determine which neighborhoods receive a heavy police presence. Facial recognition already scans protesters. The infrastructure for American-style necropolitics is being assembled, tested first on Palestinians, refined for global export, and is waiting for the next "emergency" to justify full domestic deployment.

Playing God Without Permission

The ugliness goes deeper than surveillance. America's military-industrial-intelligence complex is pursuing total control over the fundamental building blocks of existence-- synthetic biology, artificial general intelligence, quantum computing, and geoengineering-- and doing it in the shadows, contracted out to private companies beyond public scrutiny.

Jeffrey Sachs, chair of the Lancet's COVID-19 Commission, has stated he's "pretty convinced" COVID-19 came out of US lab biotechnology. The evidence: scientists at the University of North Carolina, EcoHealth Alliance, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology submitted a grant proposal to DARPA in 2018-- one year before the pandemic-- explicitly proposing to insert furin cleavage sites into SARS-like viruses. DARPA didn't fund the grant, but it's possible that they used other resources to carry out the research. Sachs's theory: the virus was engineered at UNC, then sent to Wuhan for testing. UNC is now refusing to release work emails from 2019-2021, fighting to keep them from public scrutiny.

If a pandemic kills seven million people and the likely origin involves American gain-of-function research exported to evade oversight, that should dominate headlines for years. Instead: near silence. NIH leaders, including Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci, repeatedly misled Congress about gain-of-function research, keeping dangerous genetic manipulation of SARS-related coronaviruses hidden from public view.

This is the pattern. DARPA and its contractors are actively pursuing technologies that can be compared to acts of divine intervention, such as rewriting genomes, constructing artificial superintelligence, creating brain-computer interfaces for cognitive control, and enhancing human longevity. All of it is in classified facilities, funded through black budgets, and is accountable to no one. Billionaires like Peter Thiel fund longevity research aimed at letting the wealthy live forever, while most humans can't afford insulin. We're watching the future being built for a tiny elite while the rest of us remain disposable.

The transhumanist agenda is operational. DARPA's Neural Engineering System Design program works on direct neural interfaces. The Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative maps neural circuits for potential manipulation. Gain-of-function research continues at labs we're not supposed to know about, creating pathogens that don't exist in nature, ostensibly for "preparedness" but functionally indistinguishable from weaponization. Geoengineering experiments that could alter climate patterns affecting billions proceed without international oversight or consent from the populations who'll suffer the consequences.

And it's all privatized. Moderna developed a platform for reprogramming cellular biology that DARPA helped fund years before COVID. The technology exists to deliver genetic instructions to human cells to alter how our bodies function at the molecular level. The military applications are obvious: enhanced soldiers, targeted bioweapons that kill specific genetic profiles, and cognitive enhancement or suppression delivered through viral vectors. The surveillance state is just the surface. Beneath it is a biological control grid being assembled by contractors who answer to generals and intelligence chiefs, not to Congress or courts.

Quantum computing threatens to break all existing encryption. The NSA races China to quantum supremacy for total information dominance. Whoever gets there first can read everyone else's encrypted archives going back decades. Every secret ever transmitted becomes retroactively compromised.

AGI-- artificial general intelligence-- is being developed by Silicon Valley companies with deep Pentagon ties. OpenAI, despite its name, is neither open nor democratic. When these systems become capable of recursive self-improvement, we're handing control of our technological future to algorithms we don't understand, guided by profit and military applications we're not allowed to know about. The Gospel targeting system in Gaza is a primitive preview.

None of this has been put to a public vote. These decisions are being made in corporate boardrooms and classified facilities by people who believe they're entitled to reshape reality because they're smart enough and rich enough to do it.

The transhumanist fantasy-- humans enhanced beyond recognition, some achieving effective immortality through genetic engineering or consciousness uploading-- serves the same function as all utopian promises from the powerful: it justifies present crimes by promising future paradise. But the paradise is only for those who can afford the upgrades. Everyone else gets the surveillance, the targeting algorithms, the genetically engineered pathogens, the climate manipulation that goes wrong, and the neural interfaces that make you more productive at the cost of your autonomy.

AI-ism extends to its logical conclusion here: algorithmic and technological capability treated as sufficient justification for deployment, the expertise of engineers and generals positioned as superior to the consent of the governed. If the surveillance state is learning to hunt us, synthetic biology is learning to remake us, and we have no say in either process.

The MAGA Con and the Machines We're Training

Here's the bitter irony: there's nothing inherently wrong with the sentiment behind "Make America Great Again" if you trace it back to what it used to mean. Once, America was genuinely isolationist, genuinely focused on taking care of business at home. George Washington warned against foreign entanglements. That America is dead. The elites killed it, starting with World War I, dragging us into wars ever since, always against public sentiment, always promising quick and necessary victories.

The budget tells the story. More money flows to the Pentagon than to education, healthcare, and infrastructure-- all the things that would benefit the people paying the taxes. The American worker observes their wages stagnating as $8 trillion disappears into the Middle East.

The MAGA voters, who believed Trump would bring an end to the empire, were misled. He's not ending anything-- he's making it more nakedly authoritarian, stripping away democratic oversight, and handing government functions to oligarchs like Musk. The forever wars continue. The bases stay open. The surveillance expands. The only thing that's changed is the packaging.

The presidency has become more tyrannical by the year. Executive orders replace legislation. The war powers granted after 9/11 never expire; they just get stretched to cover new countries and new operations. Congress does nothing because Congress is bought: 950 lobbyists as of 2024, millions in campaign donations, and the revolving door spinning between the Pentagon and Raytheon.

We are training machines to kill humans, with the unwavering confidence that we will always control the targeting parameters. The autonomous targeting systems, such as the Gospel and Lavender and Where's Daddy?, are not mere science fiction; they are in operation. These systems make decisions about whether to kill or not in milliseconds. The human in the loop is increasingly a formality, a button-pusher rubber-stamping algorithmic conclusions.

The Terminator was a blueprint. The autonomous killing systems are being assembled right now, distributed across contractors and agencies. Nobody calls it Skynet because that would sound insane. But the function is identical: machines making life-and-death decisions, learning from each iteration, and getting better at identifying targets and neutralizing resistance before it can organize. Call it AI-ism-- the ideology that algorithmic decision-making beats human judgment, especially when the decisions involve who lives and who dies.

The surveillance infrastructure feeds it everything. Every byte collected becomes training data for systems designed to find and eliminate threats. Right now those systems target Palestinians, Yemenis, or whoever the Pentagon designates. But algorithms don't care about borders. They care about patterns, probabilities, and threat scores. And we've given them data on everyone.

When a crisis arises, such as a climate collapse, economic breakdown, or mass unrest, the systems we developed for counterterrorism will instinctively turn inward. The definitions will slide: protester becomes agitator becomes extremist becomes domestic terrorist becomes legitimate target becomes. The algorithms will map resistance networks, identify organizers, and neutralize opposition preemptively.

We think we're safe because we're American, because we're inside the empire, because the violence always happens somewhere else. But tools of imperial control always come home. The Romans learned this. The British learned this. We're currently observing the construction of our subjugation in real time, all the while debating the futility of the culture war.

The ugly Americans? That's all of us who watched this happen and did nothing to stop it. We normalized the surveillance. We accepted permanent emergency. We let contractors replace accountability. We allowed the presidency to become a throne. We stood by while journalists were slaughtered, children starved, and entire populations were converted into data points in automated kill chains.

Now we act surprised that machinery built to dominate the world might turn our direction. We are unaware that algorithms designed to target Palestinians could also target anyone who poses a threat to the stability of the system. Our ugliness has become so routine, so systematized, so thoroughly integrated that we stopped seeing it decades ago.

Oppenheimer should have taught us something. The real danger was the permission structure. The belief in the overwhelming superiority of technology justified any action. The belief that American exceptionalism exempted us from moral constraints was gaining traction. We believed that we could use violence to reshape the world without facing any consequences.

That permission structure is collapsing. The world sees us now. They see the genocide we fund. They see the journalists we helped murder. They see the surveillance systems we built and marketed. They see the obscene hypocrisy of human rights lectures delivered while we supply bombs for refugee camps.

Soon we'll see it too. We built these systems with the intention of turning external control inward. Musk's databases will begin to generate target lists for potential domestic threats. Drones circling overhead observe protests in American cities rather than wedding parties in Yemen. When we finally understand we weren't building security infrastructure-- we were building our own prison, automated and inescapable, with ourselves as inmates and algorithms as wardens.

Jeffrey Epstein keeps surfacing because his story won't die. His death in federal custody opened the floodgates on documentation showing a sex trafficking operation with tentacles reaching into intelligence agencies across multiple countries. Epstein's black book and flight logs read like a who's who of American power-- politicians, scientists, corporate titans, and academics-- all potentially compromised, all possibly controlled through the oldest intelligence technique in the book: kompromat.

This act wasn't just some rich pervert's private depravity. The evidence suggests something uglier: a systematic operation involving the American deep state, Israeli intelligence, and Saudi connections working together to create leverage over powerful men. Keep underage girls in coerced situations they can't escape, film what happens, and use the footage to ensure compliance when you need votes, favorable coverage, scientific expertise, or just silence. White slavery dressed up in the language of "party culture" and "networking," operating with apparent impunity for decades while intelligence services from multiple nations traded favors and information.

When this story finally breaks open completely-- and it will-- America will look exactly as ugly as we are. We will decry how one wealthy predator exploited vulnerable girls because the institutions that should have stopped him protected him instead. Because he was useful. The value of the leverage he provided outweighed the destruction he inflicted on the girls.

The panopticon is complete. We're all inside it now. The Gospel is coming for us next. And the machines we trained don't care how exceptional we thought we were.