 Welcome to the Empire, where genocide is self-defense and peace rallies are genocide, where war criminals are the victims and the hospitals are Hamas, where calls for freedom are hateful and ceasefires are anti-Semitic, where civilians get called terrorists and real terrorists get Nobel Peace Prizes, where the propaganda is journalism and the journalism is propaganda, where the democracy is real and the apartheid is imaginary, where the corporations are people and the people are corporate resources. Welcome to the Empire, whose bombs are humanitarian and whose provocations are invisible, whose veterans are heroes and whose victims are forgotten, whose wars are always just and whose enemies are always Hitler, whose cause is always righteous and whose critics are always Russian, whose sufferings are unforgivable and whose crimes are erased from history, whose atrocities are always an unfortunate accident and whose enemies kill civilians for fun, whose disastrous interventions are always innocent mistakes no matter how often they happen. Welcome to the Empire, ever the victim of unprovoked attacks from the people it has been strangling, ever the shining city on a hill made of human corpses, ever the defender of the poor helpless plutocrats of Wall Street, ever the savior of the families incinerated by missiles made by Raytheon, ever the protector of natural resources in the soil of foreign nations, ever the upholder of the rules-based order of a world with a boot on its throat, the Empire loves you with a heart made of dollars and oil, the Empire watches over you through your smartphone and your computer, the Empire is your only friend, the Empire is the only one who will ever love you, you can't leave, you can't get rid of the Empire. If you get rid of the Empire, this world will be taken over by tyrants.