The Hard Drug of Hard Power

Several months ago, while looking up something on Wikipedia, I came across a striking picture.  It is a digital reproduction of a painting made in 1887 by Viktor Vasnetsov titled, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Now I know the saying that goes, "A picture is worth a thousand words", and I've just given the link to the picture so that readers can see it for themselves, but I'd still like to indulge myself in using a few words to describe the painting from my point of view.

The painting is rich in detail, yet what stands out immediately are four men riding four horses. The first is a king with a fierce face who, wielding a bow, is about to shoot someone with an arrow.  He is followed by a large, broad, thick burly guy who is wearing nothing except a loincloth (which I first mistook for an old-fashioned diaper). He is swinging a sword.  He is followed by a gaunt man with a fierce face who is carrying a pair of scales, holding them in his hand in such a way that one gets the impression that he's about to bash someone (or something) with the scales.  He is followed by a skeleton wrapped in a shroud and wielding a sickle.  All four characters are fearsome, yet although Vasnetsov made the large burly guy the central feature of his painting, I personally find the skeleton to be the most unnerving - especially since he is painted with eye sockets in the shape of a scowl and a jaw and teeth in the shape of a snarl.  (Imagine dreaming about that guy at night!)

Let's consider the large burly guy for a minute or two. This broad, thick guy is swinging a sword that looks like it must weigh as much as three or four sledgehammers. One can't help but think that if he went to chop off the head of an opponent, that opponent's head would go flying as if it were a baseball hit by a slugger.  Yet in the lower part of the painting, we see that the effect of this big guy's sword-swinging is not to directly kill men, but to induce men to kill each other.  For he and his horse (a horse that looks as if it had been scared nearly to death) are the artistic embodiment of a passage in the New Testament that reads, "And when He broke the second seal, I heard the second living creature saying 'Come.' And another, a red horse, went out; and to him who sat on it, it was granted to take peace from the earth, and that men should slay one another; and a great sword was given to him." (Revelation 6:3-4)

Today's post is not about making some predictive prophecy (after all, I'm not a certified prophet ;)), but I must say that the Scriptures which I have quoted, as well as the painting which was inspired by these Scriptures, seem to be an apt embodiment of the thinking of certain rich and powerful people in the present day.  For we have a few nations which have recently become fixated on building up their "hard power."  And while economic non-cooperation is a key element of both national hard power and of strategic nonviolent resistance, I'd like to focus on the element of hard power that most attracts the attention of nations that want to be bullies: military might.  

The point of amassing large amounts of hard power is to be able to say to other nations, "Give us what we want from you or we will ruin you."  In the case of the Axis powers prior to World War 2, this statement was usually phrased as, "Give us what we want or we will bash you." The actions of the Axis powers led to a lot of bashing and of counter-bashing as well, and the end result was that the Axis powers that started the bashing got decisively bashed themselves in the end.  Yet we can learn much from analyzing the motives which started the Axis powers on their destructive path.  For I would argue that the same motives are at work in those nations that are at present fixated on acquiring and building up hard power.

I suggest that some of those who are now seeking to build an overwhelming amount of hard power are doing so so because they feel an overwhelming sense of injury at the emergence of a world in which they can't instantly get their way, a world in which they are not worshiped as superior to all other humans and their demands are not instantly and abundantly satisfied. In the case of nations, this sense of injury is often felt by a dominant culture which loses or begins to lose its power over peoples or nations over which it had historically exercised domination. Thus, this feeling of injury is expressed in statements like, "We used to be great! We ruled over X and Y and Z! Now behold our humiliation, in that we must politely ask X and Y and Z for the things we want!  They're forcing us to say please and thank you and to wait our turn!!!!  Such humiliation is utterly unbecoming to a nation as great as ours!"

This sense of injury (an unjust sense, if I may say so) is what motivates the heads of nations which feel thus injured to begin to pursue the building up of hard power.  And the hard power they seek is almost always military hard power.  This is what motivated the arming of Japan in the early 20th century and the rearmament of Germany after World War 1. This is what motivated the Soviet Union to devote such a large percentage of its GDP to military expenditures after World War 2.  And it has been a key motivator of U.S. military expenditures from 1980 onward - especially under Republican presidential administrations. So what does the pursuit of this kind of hard power ultimately gain the pursuers? And what are the risks and costs of the pursuit of this kind of hard power?

First, while it is obvious that hard power deployed in overwhelming force can achieve short-term gains, it is also obvious from the record of history that the continued deployment of such power over a long time loses its effectiveness.  In fact, eventually the continued costs of the use of such power begin to exceed any benefits reaped by those who use this power.  It can be argued that even if there had been no intervention by the U.S. in the Far East or in Europe, in the long run neither Germany nor Japan could have held onto their territorial gains which they achieved from 1930 to 1941.  This is because both nations were so fixated on bullying the people they conquered that they provoked the kind of resistance that would ultimately have destroyed their hard power.  This is the lesson of the French (and later U.S.) failure in Vietnam, the Soviet (and later U.S.) failure in Afghanistan, and the ongoing Russian failure in Ukraine. Treating people like trash while holding them at gunpoint is hardly the way to "win hearts and minds."

Second, the very process of both building up and deploying hard power is itself expensive in terms of human resources.  Fielding an army requires warm bodies to wear uniforms and carry guns.  Yet I would argue that equipping people with uniforms and guns and sending them out to try to bash their fellow humans in other countries is going to be increasingly expensive as the 21st Century continues.  The reason is that birth rates throughout the world are continuing to decline.  Those nations that are most eager to throw their weight around are among the nations whose birth rates are most steeply declining.  Thus it makes very little sense to train one's young men and women to invade other countries if it is likely that a significant number of those young men and women will get shot up during the invasion and subsequent military operations. This is especially likely in a fight between nations that are near peers.  Once those young men and women have gotten killed, who will be left to do the ongoing work of maintaining their societies at home?

Third, consider the material costs of building up and deploying hard power.  In 1983, Seymour Melman wrote a book titled Profits Without Production which accurately diagnosed many of the elements of the disease which is now destroying American industry.  He described the pernicious effect of the American military-industrial complex and how ever-increasing expenditures for "defense" were impoverishing other elements of the American economy and of American scientific and technical research.  His points were amplified and re-broadcast in a recent paper by Julia Gledhill of the Stimson Center titled, "The Ugly Truth about the Permanent War Economy."  The fact is that building war material costs some serious folding money - whether planes (~$100 million each for an F-35 fighter), ships, artillery, drones, tanks, or other instruments of mayhem.  Once natural resources and money are turned into war material, these resources can't easily be repurposed for more productive aims.  What's more, the body of knowledge needed to design and build these items frequently does not transfer well to other sectors of industrial production or of the overall economy.  (I should know - I used to work for a defense contractor who went out of business after the Cold War ended.  Later I worked for an engineering firm whose client base used to include many military agencies, yet which shrank over the years until it was designing MEP (mechanical, electrical, and plumbing) systems for fast food joints and amusement parks.)  And the money that is sunk into defense is withdrawn from other necessary elements of national infrastructure such as roads, dams, bridges, and similar civil infrastructure as well as schools and libraries.  Of course, here in the USA, the Rethuglican/conservative/libertarian organs of culture have managed to convince most of us over the last 45 years that only "sssssocialistssss!!!" and "lib-ruls!!!" want to use tax money to maintain roads, dams, bridges, wastewater treatment plants, schools, libraries, and other instruments of the public good.

So our carefully cultivated aversion to collectively contributing to the public good means that our infrastructure of the public good is falling apart. Moreover, we can't even seem to find the political will to pay down our national debt by requiring the rich people who call themselves Americans to pay their fair share of taxes. (By the way, the interest on the U.S. Federal debt now exceeds $1 trillion per year. And this does not even take into account the debt of U.S states, counties, and municipalities.)  Yet Donald Trump wants a $1.5 trillion budget for the Pentagon in FY 2027. (See also "The reality of Trump’s cartoonish $1.5 trillion DOD budget proposal," Responsible Statecraft, January 2026.) And Trump is not the only fool who wants to use a nation's declining stock of resources in order to build up one last expression of hard power.  There are other nations with declining birthrates, a depleting resource base and increasing government debt who also want to project hard power on the global stage of the 21st century. As Isaac Asimov once wrote, "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent."  It's looking more and more like the burly thick guy I mentioned at the beginning of this post has successfully addled the wits of an increasing number of national leaders by bashing them upside the head with his huge sword.  

The Coercive Power of Withdrawal

As many readers know, in those posts on my blog which deal with strategic nonviolent resistance, I have cautioned against relying solely on protest rallies and marches as a tactic of resistance.  I have also emphasized that tactics of noncooperation - especially economic noncooperation - are far more powerful, as these tactics can impose far more painful costs on an oppressor than mere mass protest.

So we come to the tactics which have been deployed against American businesses which have supported the fascist, racist, supremacist regime of Trump and the Rethuglican party.  I don't have time to go into an exhaustive analysis today, but I can definitely tell you that boycotts have definitely hurt the Target chain of big box stores.  Target was targeted (no pun intended) by boycotts because in 2025 it rolled back its employee diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in order to please Donald Trump. As a result, by September 2025, Target stock had lost 33 percent of the value it held at the beginning of 2025.  This drop in stock value erased over $20 billion in shareholder value.  By October 2025, Target had eliminated 1,800 corporate jobs.  And Spotify is starting to lose stock value.  Boycotts do indeed bite.

Boycotts should be part of a larger strategy of decoupling from existing oppressive systems in order to create smaller, local alternative institutions and arrangements that are more equitable.  So instead of hoping merely to "apply pressure" in order to try to "change" Spotify, why not go for broke and create arrangements which don't require the use of any streaming music service?  Does anyone remember CD's and CD players?  If you haven't thrown your old CD player away, you can always fish it out of the attic or garage, dust it off and fix it up, and enjoy great high fidelity music without ever again subscribing to Spotify.  In doing so, you will help small indie artists in the process.

And as far as boycotts and creating alternative institutions and arrangements, here's something the international community can do to help those of us in the U.S. who still remain decent people and not fascist monsters.  You in the international community can help us by ending your buying of U.S. debt.  You can also help us by getting rid of the U.S. Treasury bills that you already have.  Think about this: the U.S. is already over $38 trillion in debt.  The interest on the U.S. debt has begun to exceed $1 trillion per year.  Whatever debt you buy, I think it's safe to say that a point will come when the interest on the U.S. national debt exceeds the annual tax receipts of the U.S., or at least that portion of annual taxes which the U.S. government is able to dedicate to paying the interest without collapsing due to the starving of other sectors of government spending.  Then you may never see your money again.  And by continuing to buy U.S. debt, you will be financing a huge buildup of the U.S. military (for Trump wants to boost war spending to $1.5 trillion in FY 2027).  That money will be used to build the capability to bully and threaten the entire world with violence so that the fascist, supremacist element in the U.S. can get its way. Please, for the sake of all of us, decouple from the U.S.  The sovereignty you save may be your own.

A Minor Symptom of American Breakdown

Car crash in 2018. By Charles Edward Miller from Chicago, United States - Car Crash 7-1-18 2246, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=71153146

一个汉语文功课的问："Comment [in Chinese] on how you drive, and how you drive on the highway...Comment on how people drive in your city..."

我的回答：“我开车开得不错。我开车开得有一点慢。因为我不喜欢超速罚单，所以我开车开得有一点慢。我遵守限速规定和交通法规。很多司机不遵守交通规则，他们开车开得特别快，所以我的城市（和美国）有很多交通事故和死亡事件。我觉得很多美国的司机都想死或者他们觉得他们是超人 （"Superman"）。我从前坐公共汽车和轻轨，可是我现在只开我的电动汽车。”

Aaand, the rest of the world is starting to notice! See this: "美国：法律视各州而定，一般为：东海岸普遍为非城区65mph（105km/h）城区50-55mph（80-89km/h）；中西部普遍乡村70mph（113km/h）城镇65mph（105km/h）市区50-55mph（80km/h-89km/h）部分市区（芝加哥为例）45mph（72km/h）；西部（怀俄明州等）非城镇80mph（129km/h)城镇山区65-75mph（105-120km/h）；西南部（德州亚利桑那等）非城区75-80mph（120-129km/h）；西海岸：非城区70mph（113km/h）；近郊：55-65mph（89-105km/h）；夏威夷州：60mph（97km/h）。现实是，美国普遍存在超速现象。。。" (https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-hans/%E9%AB%98%E9%80%9F%E5%85%AC%E8%B7%AF, retrieved 13 January 2026)  还有看 "The Uniquely American Epidemic of Traffic Deaths," Deutsch, 2023.

Repost - Touching The Oppressor's Wound

I'd like to point my readers to a post which I wrote back in 2017.  The title of that post is "Touching the Oppressor's Wound."  That post lays out the theoretical basis for weakening the power of the oppressor by showing his agents how their oppression is hurting not just the oppressed, but the oppressor's agents as well.  That may sound like a crazy and impractical approach to dealing with an oppressor, but allow me to give a simplified summary of the points I wanted to make in my original post.  That summary is as follows:

• First, we know that when a tyrant or dictator recruits men to serve as his armed henchmen, he tends to select such recruits from the most violent, deviant, and psychopathic members of society.  This must be so, because the tyrant will want to use these men as agents of terror both against his own citizens and against the peoples of foreign nations whom the tyrant wants to conquer.  
• Second, in order to make these recruits even more effective as instruments of terror and violence, the tyrant will subject these recruits to the kind of training that greatly amplifies their viciousness and violent tendencies.  In other words, their training will amplify their tendency to act like monsters.
• Third, this violent viciousness will become such a pervasive part of the character and personality of these people that it will essentially be "on" at all times, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  This means that they will be very hard people to live with!  Indeed, there are multiple studies which show highly elevated levels of domestic violence among U.S. military and law enforcement personnel.
• Fourth, this tendency to violence and cruelty will actually turn out to be a weakness of their families and intimate partner relationships, as it can become a motivator for their spouses and children to seek some way of escape from relationships with these people.  
• Fifth, and most important: Therefore, a viable tool of resistance against a tyrant and his agents of oppression can be for trained volunteers and mental health professionals to offer counseling, help, and especially outreach to the spouses and children of these men.  For in offering such counseling and help, the volunteers and mental health professionals will be communicating to the spouses and children that their situation is not normal or acceptable, and that the men perpetrating this domestic violence are not normal or acceptable.  This will weaken the ability of the tyrant to continue to use these men as a pillar of support of his oppressive regime.
• The weakening starts with the volunteer, friend, or mental health professional getting the victim of domestic violence to admit that she is in a destructive relationship and that she (and any children she has) are in danger of serious harm.
• The volunteer, friend, or mental health professional must then bring the victim to see that her spouse's monstrous behavior is a direct consequence of his choice to do the violent dirty work of the oppressor.  The victim must be brought to see that her spouse has been turned into a monster precisely because being a monster is part of the requirements of his job.
• The victim must then be shown that there are righteous, legitimate ways of escaping from her monstrous situation, and she must be gently led to choose between staying in a harmful (and potentially fatal) situation versus walking away into a more healthy life.

I suggest that in the United States at this time, there's no shortage of potential victims who could be helped by this kind of intervention.  For we have a military that has come unhinged from any moral restraints, a military which allowed itself to be deployed against its own citizens in 2025, and which is now busily killing people in other countries in order to take over those countries for Trump.  (First, Venezuela, then Cuba, then Denmark and Greenland, then...?) And we have domestic bullies like the ICE agents who have been shooting unarmed U.S. citizens lately.  (I'm a man and not a woman - yet I cringe at the thought of what it must be like to be the spouse of Jonathan Ross! Or one of his kids.  It truly must be a living hell...)  The kind of domestic violence interventions I am suggesting might be a pivotal tool in showing the men of ICE and of the U.S. military what monsters they have become by showing their spouses and children how impossible it is to live with these men any longer.

P.S. Those who read the original post will encounter comments from a few rather wacky and unhinged commenters.  These commenters spouted a bunch of right-wing talking points in their comments.  I believe two of the comments are from the same person even though one of them was posted anonymously.  Feel free to take the comments with a grain (or more) of salt.

Of Monkeys, Gourds, and Peanuts

I've been pleased to learn over the last few weeks that Donald Trump is losing the support of his base, as reported in such articles as "Three Polls That Show Donald Trump Is Losing His Base" (Newsweek, December 2025), "Trump's Support is Collapsing. But why?" (Vox, December 2025), and "How divides emerged at the heart of Trump’s Maga world" (BBC, December 2025). It is interesting to see that among the reasons for the collapse of Trump's support among white American males is the fact that MAGA Trump-ism has begun to seriously hurt the economic prospects of the people who comprise his base.  This is due to such factors as the costs of Trump tariffs to ordinary Americans, the harms to American industries and businesses from the international backlash against Trump-ism, and the negative economic impacts of Trump's mass deportations on America's farming sector.  But it must also be acknowledged that some of the negative economic impacts are due to the boycotts of businesses whose owners support Trump-ism.  Consider, for instance, how badly Elon Musk's businesses were hurt by boycotts in early 2025.  Consider also the decrease in revenue suffered by Amazon, Target, and Home Depot over their abandonment of workplace diversity, equity, and inclusion policies in their bid to curry the favor of Donald Trump.

So today I'd like to write a bit more about the agenda of Donald Trump and his supporters, and the necessity of economic noncooperation from those who are the intended victims and targets of Trump and his supporters.  To be quite plain and blunt, Donald Trump is one of the de facto leaders of a revanchist movement among white supremacists.  He and his supporters want to bring back a world which is the undisputed empire and sole possession of a small group of fat, privileged, evil people who have Made Themselves Great Again at the expense of all the other peoples on earth.  This is the goal of his international policy, which is why he is engaged now in violently trying to conquer other people's countries.  It is also his domestic policy, a policy whose goal is to return the United States to being a paradise for one privileged group of people while turning the rest of us into the domestic servants of this privileged group.  

But he and his supporters depend on an economic machinery which in turn depends on the support and patronage of large numbers of the very people whom he wants to dispossess and subjugate.  In this he and his supporters are like the British were in relation to India and China in the 19th and early 20th centuries.  India was a supposed British "possession", yet the prosperity of the British economy depended on Indians buying British goods.  This fact was expertly used by Mohandas Gandhi to hurt the British economy during India's struggle for independence.  For Gandhi persuaded his fellow Indians to stop buying British goods and to begin to develop their own self-sufficiency.  This drastically raised the costs of empire for Britain and was one of the factors that led to India's independence from Britain.  As Marshall Ganz once said, systems of oppression always depend on the people whom they exploit.  One powerfully effective, yet nonviolent way for the oppressed to hurt the owners of these systems of oppression is to deny them the payoff they are hoping to gain from their oppression.  Don't feed the beast.

A more-than-likely fictional example may be helpful.  I'm going to repeat a story I heard long ago when I was a member of an abusive church, and which I've seen repeated since in the evangelical-o-sphere.  Supposedly there are countries in the developing world in which villagers go out day by day to hunt monkeys.  They are supposedly able to trap these monkeys by spreading hollowed-out gourds on the ground.  Each gourd has a small hole in its shell, and inside the gourd are a few peanuts.  When monkeys find the gourds, they reach inside and grab the peanuts as the hunters watch.  When the hunters come to seize the monkeys, the monkeys are so fixated on the peanuts that they won't let them go - even though by holding the peanuts they are unable to remove their hands from the gourds.  The gourds in turn are so big and heavy that the monkeys cannot run away from the hunters.  Thus the hunters are able to catch the monkeys and crack their skulls, and the monkeys are turned into monkey stew.  One note: I personally don't know whether most monkeys anywhere in the world would fall for such a trick, as I've never owned a monkey as a pet.  I specialize in cats.  I also suspect that the originators of this story have never seen a monkey in their lives, except in pictures or on TV. But let's assume for the moment that this story is true.

Now consider a person who is a member of a historically marginalized group, or a group which is targeted for oppression by a rich, powerful piece of garbage like Trump or like one of his supporters.  If the person who has been targeted for oppression continues to buy things made and sold by the Trump-oids, isn't he financing the very people who want to bash his brains out and turn him into cooked monkey meat?  How many of us allowed ourselves to be made into monkeys during this past holiday season?  How many of us splurged in our spending during Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, and New Years? How many people of color bought Teslas in 2025?  How many will want to buy a Tesla in 2026? How many of us will watch the Superbowl in 2026? How many of us will join the military in 2026 even though the U.S. military is likely to be deployed against our brothers and sisters in foreign lands?  How many of us are signed up for Amazon Prime and YouTube and Hulu and Fox and Netflix and ESPN and HBO? How many of us are still using Spotify (which has for a long time been involved in cheating musicians out of their earnings, and which in 2025 ran recruitment ads for ICE)? Boycotts and other forms of economic noncooperation mean letting go of the peanuts. Don't let the present system of oppression make a monkey out of you.

Image courtesy of Craiyon (craiyon.com). Created 17 October 2025.

(Yes, yes, I know - this is a picture of an ape and not a monkey.

But you can't expect too much from the free version of an AI service!)

Boycotts Have Begun to Bite

Truly this is an age in which those people who have been historically marginalized, disenfranchised, oppressed and enslaved by dominant powers are being called on to rise up and resist their continued mistreatment.  That means that this is the time for us to resist the Trump administration and its attempts to revive exploitative supremacy.  Over the last eight years much of my writing for this blog has therefore focused on the theory and practice of strategic nonviolent resistance.  As I have repeatedly stated, this kind of resistance consists of much more than merely staging mass protest marches and rallies.  As noted in Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy, there are at least 198 methods of strategic nonviolent action.  (His book lists only 198 methods, but he himself acknowledged that there are actually many more methods than these.)

One of the categories of tactics of strategic nonviolent resistance is the category of economic and political noncooperation.  This kind of noncooperation - especially of economic noncooperation - can impose extremely painful costs on a would-be oppressor or dictator (such as Trump) and on those rich and powerful people who comprise the dictator's pillars of support.  I'd like to suggest that the use of boycotts has begun to catch on in this year, 2025.  A number of large retailers who terminated their diversity, equity and inclusion programs this year are now feeling the bite of consumer boycotts.  Such retailers include Amazon, Target, and Home Depot (or, as I like to call them, Home Cheapo).  This year's holiday season may not be a very merry Xmas for such retailers as these.  You can read more about these holiday boycotts here: "Can Holiday Shopping Boycotts Make a Difference?", Yale Insights, December 2025.  Note that even though the cited article seeks to cast doubt on the effect of these boycotts, the fact remains that the boycotts are having enough of an effect to force the mainstream organs of power to take notice.  

The Advice of Benjamin

I must apologize to any readers who might wish that I had posted more frequently over the last several months.  Admittedly, my posting has been light.  In particular, I have stepped back from regular updates to my series of essays on the subject of economic precarity.  This is not because this subject has become less relevant.  Indeed, it has become increasingly relevant as the governments of many nations are being taken over by the Global Far Right.  However, my eyes are on a number of trends which have yet to come to full fruition.  Until those trends mature fully, I think it best to keep quiet.  To quote from one of the characters in A Canticle for Leibowitz, "Probing the womb of the future is bad for the child."

And like that fictional character, in a manner of speaking I too have chosen in these days to live a somewhat anchorite life at the top of my metaphorical desert mesa, wrapping myself evening by evening in my metaphorical prayer shawl.  However, I am not so detached that I haven't noticed recent news reports about the global wave of protests against corrupt and conservative governments around the world this year.  These protests have been led predominantly by the members of Generation Z, or Gen Z for short.  I am more than a little too old to be part of the Gen Z cohort, yet if Gen Z'ers don't mind, I'd like to offer some advice.  First, although mass protest is not without effect, I would strongly caution you all NOT to base your activism solely on mass protest marches.  In other words, don't have just one tactic in your suite of tactics. The scholar Gene Sharp identified at least 198 tactics of strategic nonviolent resistance.  These methods include both protest and much, much more than just protest.  Study his writings.  Read his book From Dictatorship to Democracy to learn how to think strategically.  Read the writings and watch the videos of Jamila Raqib.  Use the resources offered by Srdja Popovic and his organization CANVAS.  Learn how the widespread practice of radical frugality can disrupt the holders of concentrated wealth and power.  Learn the power and necessity of maintaining nonviolent discipline in your struggle.  And if you feel so inclined, please read the posts I have written for this blog from the end of 2016 until now, particularly the posts titled "From D to D" which I wrote as a study guide for Gene Sharp's book.  In solidarity I wish you all the best.