In other words, if we don’t collectively choose to fundamentally change how things work, the future is medieval, if we have a future at all, that is.
No, hegemony and fascism are not synonymous, although they do both require violence in order to maintain. But it is pointless to espouse all of these high-minded ideals about safety and security and human rights when they remain practically unachievable throughout most of the world because the multinational system is not actually constructed to achieve them (neither are most domestic systems, including so-called democracies), but rather to protect an anarchic multi-polar political and military cooperative competition, led by an oligarchic class of people who, in pursuit of their various small and conflicting goals, cause perpetual outbreaks of suffering and cruelty, intermingled with short periods of what is called ‘peace’ but which is rather a cooperative exploitation of those without power everywhere. If we are not going to make the beautiful, safe, just world that we go on and on about, and it would require a lack of entanglements and a renunciation of our aversion to force to achieve that, it would be much more honest to simply admit that most of us, or at least the powerful among us, like things just as they are (violent, chaotic, brutal, and disingenuous) and that the entire post-war order, either in the ‘free’ world or in the authoritarian one (the distinction is meaningless in this context because they all play the same game at the international level), is little more than a structure of hasty stability for the interests of capital, and that our present structures of security are for the security of the stakeholders (the rich and powerful in any country) and not for that of the greater balance of humankind. This will become even more apparent as the ravages of climate change further destabilize the multinational system. You will begin to see a consensus forming about which strata of human society matter and which do not, and these will be applied consistently, regardless of what ideological alignment a given state chooses to telegraph, because the rulers are the same everywhere. They have the same sources of power, and the same class goals. At present, conflict only erupts between them when one becomes a destabilizing force on the whole, and then only to the extent required to contain that disruption. The talk of ‘rights’ and justice is largely performative, not for all people, but as a function of the multinational system itself, because its goal is not progress, but rather the perpetuation of a status quo that was established following the second world war, which is a model of neoliberal capitalism layered over all states, regardless of how they may choose to govern their own populations politically. Apparently that’s good enough for everybody. That’s what everybody chooses to call peace and order. Ironically, it is also what will likely be the end of the present iteration of human civilization.
