Beyond Spectacle
The empire is burning, but destruction isn't liberation.
After posting about the disastrous fires in the Pacific Palisades and their connection to ongoing genocide—because the Palestinian issue remains the litmus test of our times, the frontier of the collapse of the White Supremacist Imperialist Fantasy—I received a message from a privileged man:
"I am just in a good mood to see it all burn! Hope we get some guillotine action."
It is self-evident within the empire’s decay and self-inflicted envy: truth and power never arise from superficial dominance but from the resilience of those the empire derides as the “Global South.”
As the empire burns from within, some watch with glee. Some cheer the destruction, romanticizing collapse as liberation. But there is no triumph in suffering—not even that of our oppressors. This nihilistic glee, this detached joy at destruction, perpetuates the same individualist fantasy that underpins imperialist logic. It disavows the collective effort required to dismantle oppressive systems and ignores the countless lives and ecosystems already sacrificed to sustain them.
This fantasy of the dramatic, violent revolution is not power. It is a shallow, entitled caricature of resistance, mirroring the logic of domination it claims to oppose. This mindset reduces transformation to a spectacle like imperialists who extracted labor and resources while dismissing the people and environments that sustained their systems. It fails to grasp the collective work necessary for genuine change.
The Fetishization of the Individual
The same goes for the fetishization of Luigi Mangione. He is emblematic of the fantasy. He is a man of privilege—wealth, whiteness and elite education—who performed an act of violence that was misinterpreted as revolutionary. He is as revolutionary as Bruce Wayne / Batman. Mangione’s actions do not challenge the system; it is the reinforcement of the system. By focusing on him, we are seduced into a narrative of individual heroism or villainy, distracting us from the structural realities that produce the same results.
Manginoe is not unique. He is no different from white men like Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber who waged a bombing campaign against technological society), Anders Breivik (who killed 77 people in Norway in a far-right anti-immigration attack), and Elliot Rodger (who murdered six people in Isla Vista, motivated by misogyny and social rejection). Each is a white man of privilege whose alienation—whether they have resentment towards society, culture, religion, or female rejection—led to ideological radicalization and acts of violence. These men adopt the guise of revolutionaries or saviors but uphold the same systemic structure. Their violence is not aimed at dismantling oppressive structures but at reasserting their fantasies of entitlement or superiority.
Even if their external politics might differ, they all share the same profound alienation, grievances reframed as grand ideological missions, and an obsessive fixation on martyrdom or legacy. Their narratives distract the systemic realities. They reduce complex dynamics of oppression to simplified tales of isolated resentment and rebellion.
Notice also that we think nothing of the snitch who worked at McDonald’s and turned in Mangione for the lure of a $10,000 reward. This “snitch” is the actual working class, oppressed by the system, that has to take on this job and even be lured by the cash reward. Why are we so quick to ignore the structures of this oppression? What desperation or injustice compelled such a choice? Instead, we are lured by the spectacles and distractions, as opposed to the economic violence endured by billions of people, of which the violence by Mangione, with all his privilege, cannot begin to comprehend. After this one assassination, where is the ensuing revolution? What has changed to the corporate entities? There are more CEOs to replace the assassinated.
Further, we now fixate on superficial spectacles and attentions of Mangione—his race, fashion, and elite pedigree- which reveal where we are as a society. Had he been a Muslim, a racialized person, or disabled, would his actions be viewed with the same fascination? This selective empathy exposes the biases that continue to prioritize whiteness and privilege, even in narratives of rebellion. By centering these figures, we perpetuate the myths of lone genius or tragic antiheroes while ignoring the structural forces that enable and produce the ongoing oppression.
We have become so lazy in our thinking that we believe one dramatic action can then inspire a mass movement to emerge fully formed because of one heroic act or martyrdom. The system survives because it convinces us that only dramatic gestures can challenge it. This is a lie designed to distract us from the collective power that we already possess.
The fetishization of violence, be it through Mangione or fantasies of guillotines, only serves to reify the system’s power. It is a distraction away from structural changes, and it serves only our fantasy enjoyment. History has shown that even successful revolutions replace one form of domination with another.
This is the false binary of revolution. Focusing on just replacing individual CEOs and acts of destruction ultimately falls into this false binary: the tyrannical king or the ‘nice’ king. It’s the same with Trump / Harris. It’s the same with wanting more female CEOS; we end up getting psychopaths like Elizabeth Holmes. Either way, it’s still the same system of control. The “nice” king wins favor through holidays and gifts, only to lose it when he enforces his authority through violence. The tyrannical king rules through fear, pardoning a rebel here and there to appear merciful. In both cases, the system remains the same. It robs class consciousness. It induces apathy.
To truly change, we have to refuse the same binary game. We must reject the notion that suffering—ours or that of our oppressors—is ever something to celebrate. We must demand a third option: one that entirely dismantles the structures of power rather than assassinating individual CEOs.
The fires of the empire’s collapse are nothing to celebrate. The death of any individual, whether corrupt or innocent, is not justice. It’s easy to revel in the spectacle, to cheer as the empire burns or to mistake the assassination of a CEO for meaningful resistance. But this excess of enjoyment blinds us to the lives truly affected. We fail to connect the flames consuming California to the same machinery that murders in Palestine. We ignore those whose livelihoods have gone up in smoke, erased by the same logic of disposability.
Meanwhile, where is the outrage over California’s decision to slash the fire department’s budget by $17 million while pumping an additional $160 million into the LAPD? This isn’t governance; it’s an empire in decline. It’s a calculated choice, a deliberate declaration that preserving life and land matters less than fortifying power—against dissent, against protest, against its own restless population.
Real power remains within collective action and change. It’s the solidarity of movements that refuse to center on individual figures. It is the patience to build accountability structures and the courage to imagine a world beyond an insecure mode of dominance. It requires rejecting the violence of imperialism and destruction that it tries to lure us into its same logic. We must refuse the easy logic in which colonial capitalism replicates and projects onto us.