How To Unplug An Empire (Podcast Episode 70)

By Marc Eliot Stein, World BEYOND War, March 31, 2025

The following is a complete transcript of episode 70 of the World BEYOND War podcast. All views expressed are those of the author. The author is also responsible for the bizarre AI-generated image that seems to capture the mood, even though the prongs of the electrical plug don’t match the wall outlet.

Welcome to episode 70 of the World Beyond War podcast. I love to spend these episodes talking to other peace activists around the world. That’s my favorite thing to do on this show. But sometimes we need to get down to the basics. When I talk to friends and family and fellow activists lately, I sense such confusion and frustration out there I feel like progressive movements are becoming frightened and reactive, and we’re also failing to find common ground with each other when we need it the most. That’s why I decided to do a “How To” episode. How to take our freedom back, how to take our human dignity back, how to take our right to coexist in peace with our neighbors and on our planet back. It’s March 2025 and I’m Marc Eliot Stein, technology director of the worldwide nonprofit organization World Beyond War. I’m excited to dig into a major question today: how to unplug an empire, how to deactivate, disable and delete an empire while we are still alive to do so, before world war 3 kills us all.

The empire I’m talking about is not necessarily the so-called United States of America, the self-proclaimed premier world power with the most lethal military force on earth, which I personally have the misfortune to live in.

The empire I’m talking about is the international war machine, which is more powerful than every national government put together, and runs every national government. Do we even have national governments on this planet anymore? It doesn’t seem that way when lobbyists for Israel are an essential source of funding for both Democratic and Republican candidates in hundreds of US congressional elections every two years – but if a US congressperson like Cori Bush or Nina Turner or Jamaal Bowman dares to bravely criticize Israel’s war crimes, the Israel lobby will literally donate millions of dollars to a sanitized opponent in local congressional elections to slander and remove them.

No, we don’t have authentic governments anymore, at least not in the global north. Authentic governments would work to serve people, but governments in North America and Europe serve the interests of war profiteers, fossil fuel and extraction profiteers, prison profiteers, white supremacists and individual hoarders of wealth. We are not governed by but oppressed by countries like USA, England, France, Germany and Russia – governments that not only behave like earlier fascist nations but are lately openly signaling and encouraging an emulation of fascism, as when Elon Musk performs a Nazi salute.

Today’s wealthy and powerful nations are played like puppets by the corporations and wealthy power brokers who make up the international war machine. The international war machine doesn’t care about gender politics or abortion, but cleverly invests in stoking culture wars over gender politics and abortion in the nations it controls. The international war machine does care about white supremacy, and cleverly invests in the toxic politics of racism to stoke culture wars too. These are the devices that put Trump in power in the USA, but it’s not Trump that runs the international war machine. Big money runs the war machine – big money IS the war machine.

The war machine is at the dead center of predatory capitalism, and the entire demented business sector of banking, finance, investment and insurance has become a flimsy facade for the wealth that emanates from the war machine like radiation from a nuclear bomb. When I was a young computer programmer, it was difficult for me to find a job that wasn’t funded by the US military one way or another. Today, it’s difficult to find a place to park money in a savings account where it won’t earn interest for war profits – again, one way or another. This is why I personally try to live on as little money as possible (working for an antiwar nonprofit helps).

By the way, many people would be surprised that you can live in New York City on a small income if you know your way around, and presumably other places too. Since I’m in New York City, though, I often run into and sometimes socialize with hedge fund finance bros on Wall Street, and Park Avenue lawyers and nepo babies and insurance executive types, often very nice people, really, but living fantasies of happiness through luxury or gluttony, trying to manifest an Ayn Rand cliche into real life.

Unplugging the war machine means unplugging predatory capitalism, because the two have always been closely tied. Elon Musk is supposedly the wealthiest person on earth, but his SpaceX got rich from government military spending. We think of Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates and Peter Theil as technology innovators, but Amazon and Microsoft are major war profiteers now too, and Peter Theil’s Palantir has been an offensive privacy-invading war profiteer since day one.

The war machine is made of money but it’s also made of human bodies – not only the countless corpses of tragic victims but also the cursed souls who are forced to find employment in the business of murder for profit, whether they are bleeding to death in trenches in Ukraine or ambushing civilians in South Sudan or sitting at computers miserably pressing buttons to murder Palestinian journalists and their families with drones.

The war machine is all of this – an international horror that fully owns the United States and England and France and Germany and Russia and South Korea and Taiwan and Japan. We can get a glimpse of what the war machine looks like on a planetary scale by looking at the map of thousands of military outposts polluting the world today, most of them run by the USA. You can see this map on the World BEYOND War website. This war machine is the empire we must unplug.

I’m talking about unplugging from the war machine as if this were something we could simply do because I have a weird suspicion that toppling these powers that claim authority over us will be easier than we think it will be once we begin working together around the world with a shared vision of what it means to coexist in peace, and how much better all our lives can be once we start doing so.

Let’s look at some examples from history to see what people can do once they understand fully that they must carry out a revolution to save their lives. There are so many vital lessons from history – and whenever we feel defeated or hopeless because of the unique turmoil our societies are suffering through, it really helps to look at the past and realize that there’s nothing new about cataclysmic societal breakdowns.

I don’t know why Americans in particular seem so stunned at the collapse of the facade of American democracy. You know, it’s not like we haven’t all always known that there was deep sympathy for fascism and for the politics of male dominance and white supremacy all over the USA. We’ve always known this, and yet we allowed the fascists to take power. That’s the situation my own country is in, and I’m watching the stunned reactions from people who never thought USA’s democracy could possibly collapse in 2025, even after our Supreme Court was stolen by puritan psychos pretending to be “Christian”, even after a violent putsch took place in our capital city in 2020. Sure, I guess it is shocking that American democracy has so thoroughly revealed itself as a rotten servant of wealth, even though we spent our lives making sardonic jokes about the fact that our government was a rotten servant of wealth. We need to get real with ourselves and with each other that we have no good reason to be surprised at the rise of Trump.

Maybe the reason so many Americans I know look stunned lately is that we are seriously suffering through deep and painful conflicts with our neighbors and friends and relatives, and this is causing its own kind of trauma. It’s interesting to realize that we never expected this to happen, and I never even expected it to happen, and yet this is something that many societies that thought of themselves as safe and united have suffered with before. Every person in history who lived through a war has lived through some version of a shocking societal breakdown. What was it like to live in Paris in 1789, or 1815, or 1830, or 1870, or 1914, or 1940? What was it like to live in Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos as France and America devastated and bombed peaceful villages? What was it like to live through the first American civil war, when brother fought against brother? What is it like in poor Ukraine today, torn to shreds just like Korea had been by the greedy powers that stomped on it for a proxy war.

The people who lived through all these disasters had to find ways to rebuild something new. I hate to say that I have no idea where the latest Trump disaster is going and what kind of horrors we may be facing. Well, facing up to the reality of where we are right now is the challenge before us: taking a square look and thinking rationally together – together – about how to save our lives once we realize the complete irresponsibility, the complete toxicity of every militarized national government in North America and Europe today.

We need to look for positive examples of how to unplug an empire. Well, luckily there are plenty. Vietnam defeated France and America on the battlefield, but that’s not a story I find very helpful since I really think a peaceful revolution, not a victory on the battlefield, is what we need. A better story, and a really amazing story, is the end of apartheid in South Africa in the early 1990s. There’s no simple story to tell here – the end of apartheid and the election of more representative bodies of government to replace a racist tyranny was the culmination of decades of incredibly, agonizingly painful protest, sacrifice and boycott, enduring violence and unjust imprisonment until the righteous opposition finally prevailed. We can strengthen our own resolve for success by looking at what the people of South Africa had to go through before apartheid could be unplugged.

The ending of apartheid in South Africa is one of many encouraging examples of peaceful revolution through protest and negotiation. There’s another example of this in Ireland’s coming to peace in the 1990s, and amazingly this seems to be a peace negotiation where the United States actually helped do something good. I don’t know how that happened, must have slipped through. Anyway, I’ve enjoyed reading about various revolutionary periods in Ireland’s history, and the most fascinating story is what happened in Ireland in 1918, when Irish voters worked together to use a British election to force the sudden end of British rule. This is a complicated story and I will link to a Wikipedia page on the show notes. Of course the Irish struggle against British oppression goes back centuries, but I just want to point to this remarkable thing that happened on election day in 1918. Following the calamities of World War One, an increasingly angry populace united all over Ireland for this election to elect a slate of candidates to British Parliament who pledged to do something, once elected, that members of British Parliament were not supposed to do. They pledged to withdraw Ireland from British Parliament – and they won the election and did exactly that, thus announcing the end of Ireland’s acceptance of British rule.

This is a notable case where a very smart political party came up with a plan to use electoral politics to declare independence and throw off the yoke of British oppression. So this certainly is an example of a peaceful revolution – a decisive step forward in a revolution conducted entirely at the ballot box. The lesson here, I think, is that it sometimes takes ingenuity to make a peaceful revolution happen.

As my own country collapses into constitutional crisis and the fear of a second American civil war spreads, I wonder how successful we could be with a new political party running a slate of Congressional candidates whose only agenda is to diminish and disempower and defund the predatory US government. Hey, it worked for Ireland in 1918. I’ll vote for that.

So here are two different examples of peaceful revolution, and there are so many more we could look at. My favorite of all example of an amazing and powerful and incredibly impactful peaceful revolution is the breakup of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact from 1989 to 1991.

I’ve talked about this amazing example of a peaceful revolution on this podcast before. I’ve read a few books about the former leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, who began his career as one of many regional Russian politicians but ended it with a stunning decision: under Gorbachev’s leadership, the militarized empire known as the Soviet Union truly did unplug itself from existence. Gorbachev, along with many associates, realized that both the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact (binding nations like East Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia) served no purpose anymore and allowed it all to dissolve. It is a decision of stunning magnitude.

Perceptions of Gorbachev’s legacy vary wildly, and maybe it’s a case of “too soon” that he isn’t more widely celebrated as one of the most visionary leaders in the history of planet Earth. To allow his own bloated and toxic nation to simply dissolve – well, that’s my idea of visionary leadership, even though he obviously had a complicated career, and Russia and the former Soviet states obviously had a complicated future after the Soviet Union split.

Still, in my opinion Mikhail Gorbachev should be more widely mentioned as one of the greatest political leaders of all time. There are more buildings named after Henry Kissinger than Mikhail Gorbachev, and that’s just wrong. The dissolution of the Soviet Union should be studied as a model for what the world needs today, and I think a leader who can show the courage and truthfulness that Mikhail Gorbachev showed between 1989 and 1991 is badly needed in 2025.

History doesn’t point to just a few different ways to unplug a toxic empire. Rather, history shows that the future never fully follows a pattern defined by the past, and that absolutely anything is possible. If we’re going to talk about methods to possibly unplug an empire, we have to talk about economics as well as government. The cryptocurrency movement has always held the promise to offer a badly-needed alternative to the world dominance of the US dollar. We’ll have to do a whole episode with updates on this topic soon, but let’s just remember that unplugging an empire means unplugging a rotten government and a rotten economy, and that’s no small task.

A few years ago there was a USA presidential candidate named Andrew Yang who urged a policy of universal basic income. I didn’t really have time to follow Andrew Yang’s candidacy at the time, but it’s worth noting that a policy of universal basic income would blunt the power of the billionaire class. The billionaire class sure doesn’t like inflation, but maybe regular people like us should stop allowing economic policies that prioritize fighting inflation over letting people eat and get medical care and go to school and live. If a universal basic income helps make the asymmetrical wealth of billionaires less malignant, then I’m all for it.

So how are we going to unplug the war machine? Of course there are no easy answers, I’ve just listed five avenues worth exploring: historical examples of highly impactful peaceful revolutions in South Africa, Ireland and the Soviet Union, and two examples of economic concepts that could disable the power of predatory wealth.

Of course, the future is a wild unknown and it’s not easy to decide which of these ideas could be relevant for our collapsing societies. Let’s not fixate on any one idea, but instead let’s simply realize that unplugging the war machine is the goal – that a peaceful revolution is the goal.

It’s a goal we must work on together, no matter where we live. I keep hearing this bizarre idea – an idea that’s bizarre but also widely held – that people in any country, say the United States of America, should care more about the well-being of other people in the same country than about people in different countries. This hideous idea has been stamped onto all our foreheads so vigorously all our lives that we can fail to see how wrong it is to think that I as a citizen of USA should care more about other USA-ans than about human beings in South America or Europe or Africa or Australia or Asia. Why? Why on earth, literally why on earth would I?

What is normal and acceptable about classifying our connectedness to other people, and our concern for the well-being of other people, based upon the Napoleonic concept of militarized national citizenship? This is actually a form of hatred, of dehumanization. We need to stop normalizing it.

When we speak of the peace movement as a revolutionary movement, we must realize that this offends some progressives who are already alienated by the aggressive, rapid actions of our familiar warmongers, especially Trump and Netanyahu and Putin. All of these sociopaths like to paint themselves as bold leaders, and fascist movements always mimic the revolutionary language of the left. It seems to me that the Trump administration in 2025 is a right-wing counter revolution, a fascist revolution, and following the classic fascist playbook the Trump administration is using fast action for the shock and awe effect, because it makes their opponents disoriented, incoherent, scared.

Well, we peace activists don’t ever copy anything from the fascist playbook. Never. No thanks. But fascists didn’t invent boldness – progressives did. Nobody needs to tell a peace activist how to be bold, how to be decisive, how to take every opportunity to push forward for what we know is right.

It’s natural that some people feel anxious about revolutionary change. Societal change can be traumatic, economic change can be traumatic, technological innovation can be traumatic. But let’s remember that as peace activists we are urgently on the side of change, because it’s the status quo that’s rotten, and it’s the rotten status quo that fascism with its imitation of revolutionary politics actually protects.

As peace activists we put ourselves forth as leaders within our communities. We can’t be serious peace activists and also hide under the umbrella of hoping things will stop changing so fast around us.

We must not react to the chaos of the Trump clown car by becoming advocates of soft political nostalgia, by morphing into a movement that only seeks to bring us back to where we had been before. The disastrous Joe Biden presidency’s only message was nostalgia for a mythical past USA that never existed. No peace activist should feel nostalgic for the country that started the Iraq War in 2003, among so many others.

A friend from Ireland recently asked me why Donald Trump is popular in the United States. I told him that Donald Trump is absolutely not popular here. The reason Trump and Rubio and Vance and Musk are empowered in this fallen country is that the so-called opposition, the Democratic party, exposed itself as so completely craven and corrupt under the Biden administration. It is obvious that mainstream Democrats like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are more aligned with the Trump agenda than, say, the Bernie Sanders agenda or AOC agenda, and when the Democratic party turned into the war party under Joe Biden it left American voters with nothing to vote for.

When I said this to my friend in Ireland he immediately understood. There are a lot of rotten governments out there in Europe too, and a lot of two-party or three-party systems where all parties have revealed themselves to be so thoroughly corrupt that an election is not a choice at all.

I find it very helpful to talk about the level of danger we’re in, because once we’re honest about this, new pathways seem to open up. The example of what Ireland did in 1918 really sticks in my mind, because it was a sudden change with great popular support. I think there’s great popular support for getting rid of many of our rotten governments.

If we had the choice together that we could deactivate and disable and delete our corrupt governments the way we would delete a bad app off our phone, would we take that choice? I think we would.

To use a more physical metaphor, what if we could make a choice together to pull the plug on our broken runaway governments the way we’d pull the plug on a runaway power tool, like a big drill or saw that’s acting erratically, to keep it from doing damage or being accidentally switched on? I think we would make the right choice together to pull that plug.

It’s amazing to realize how easily we’d be able to live and prosper and coexist and even build together without our militarized mass national governments. We have various other kinds of state governments, province governments, city governments and town governments that perform similar services. There’s one key way these local governments are better than national governments. They aren’t awash in bribes from war profiteers and fossil fuel profiteers. At least I hope they’re not. If they are, that’s a big problem too. But at least where I live, no local or regional government is as unaccountable or as deeply and romantically enmeshed at the revolving door level with McDonnell Douglas, Boeing, Northrup Grumman, General Dynamics and AIPAC as the United States federal government.

When I think of the future that faces us today, I think of a horseshoe crab on a beach by the ocean – a horseshoe crab that molts several times in its life as it grows, each time leaving a larger and larger shell behind on the beach. We have these horseshoe crabs on our beaches around New York. Well, what if a horseshoe crab got stuck inside its rigid exoskeleton, and couldn’t molt, couldn’t get out of this hard shell, couldn’t grow? That’s what it feels like to be stuck living inside a militarized country like the United States of America right now – it feels like being stuck inside a useless rigid exoskeleton that is choking us to death because we’re trying to grow and it won’t let us grow.

The reason we can’t get out of our skeleton is that war and fascism and culture war politics have so poisoned our public discourse that we can’t even get our act together to build a society that we can stand to live in.

One reason we can’t stand the status quo is that we need free speech, but free speech is never compatible with militarism. This is an important basic truth: if the country you live in or the country you are a citizen of is currently at war, you don’t have free speech. Hell no – speaking against your country in a time of war can be considered treason. And since my own so-called United States of America has been at war so much of my own life, I’ve never really had free speech, even though free speech is something my country advertises itself as a champion of.

Lately, and this is a new development that’s raging pretty loudly in USA as we speak, we all know nobody has free speech after the shocking arrests of student protestors including Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, Badar Khan Suri, Yunseo Chung, Momodou Taal, Alireza Doroudi and Ranjani Srinivasan. The list of arrested student protestors is growing. Of course our corrupt government’s goal here is not so much to silence these individual college students from expressing their horror at Israel’s genocide in Gaza and USA’s participation in this genocide. The goal is to frighten and silence every college student, and every human being, and the fascists are succeeding in this goal with the complicity of top college administrators at Columbia and Tufts and other universities who were apparently chosen for their cowardice in the face of tyranny.

How are we standing up to this assault right now? Our governments deny our bodily autonomy, invade our privacy, surround us with hostile, weaponed-up police forces who bring guns where guns are not wanted or needed, and now literally arrest college students for free speech. What can we do – what can each of us do on our own, and what can we do together? We know what tools we have: organizing and protesting and striking and writing and creating and speaking out.

We need to stay positive even as we are increasingly asked to conform to Kafkaesque and humiliating bureaucracy constantly in our everyday lives, because the fascism of our highly militarized nations seeps into everyday life in depressing ways. I tried to go to the Department of Motor Vehicles in downtown Brooklyn a few days ago and two cops with machine guns stopped me at the entrance and yelled at me that I can’t get in without an appointment. What the hell? I’m treated like this on my way to renew my driver’s license?

Fascism works through fear and intimidation and enshittification, so we must embody the opposite: politeness, generosity, humility, integrity. Let’s paint a world where these values have a chance – a world where we are allowed to live our lives and have our relationships and raise our families with these values, without being embarrassed and humiliated by the toxic masculinity, white supremacy and garish materialism of our so-called government, which puts itself constantly on display. A world where nobody hoards extreme wealth and uses is it to poison our government. A world where we are all completely free, and no government claims any right to invade our privacy.

We are absolutely living in revolutionary times right now. Accept it or stick your head in the sand. Don’t stay inside, don’t be afraid to go to a protest and stand at a safe distance, don’t be afraid to go to a protest and throw yourself into the center of it and maybe even help other vulnerable protestors or risk arrest yourself. Don’t be afraid to organize on the Internet. Don’t be afraid to meet new people, don’t be afraid of people from other so-called countries, because we are all sharing this planet together. Don’t be afraid to put your own feelings of hatred and anger and depression aside, and lead with expressions of trust and hope and optimism and love.

This episode of the World Beyond War podcast is dedicated to the great peace activist David Hartsough, who was one of the special guests in the very first episode of the World Beyond War podcast, when we kicked off this whole show with the three founders of the organization I work for: David Hartsough, David Swanson and Leah Bolger.

David Hartsough was also my interview guest on this show in January 2023 in an episode well worth listening to called “We Shall Overcome Was Not Just Words”. David Hartsough could speak with authority about Martin Luther King and other 1960s era civil rights protestors because he marched with them as a very young person. He wrote about his life’s work in the book “Waging Peace” and I’ll put links into the show notes.

David Hartsough was an active member of World Beyond War’s board of directors up until the most recent meeting earlier this month, when he had visionary and optimistic thoughts to share as always. We knew he’d had cancer and we’re so glad we all had a chance to work with him in his final days – what an honor for all of us. Thanks David Hartsough for being a co-founder of World Beyond War, without which this podcast would not exist, and a whole lot more of good things wouldn’t be getting done. Thanks to all my listeners and we’ll be back with a new guest interview next month.

Musical excerpt: “Broken English” by Marianne Faithfull.

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