In the waning light of empire, where language limps under the boot of bureaucracy and meaning dies somewhere between the memorandum and the drone strike, the United States Justice Department stands—not as a guardian of fairness, but as a stage prop in a farcical theater engineered by lobbyists, investment bankers, and men who perspire into polyester suits.
The word just—etymologically noble, semantically hopeful—has been bound, gagged, and dressed up for a grotesque carnival of impunity. If justice once meant behaving according to what is morally right and fair, then today it might be more honestly defined as the regulatory arm of imperial accounting. How else to explain the fact that the world’s most lavishly armed bureaucracy continues to underwrite a genocidal siege in Gaza, all while chanting bedtime stories about human rights and constitutional balance?
Within the sterile glass mausoleums of Washington, the operatives of empire bellow and grunt about “rule of law” with a conviction usually reserved for televangelists or mid-level cult leaders. Every press briefing becomes an incantation of righteousness. Mouths caked with verbal diarrhea, they screech through euphemisms—collateral damage, ironclad alliance, defensive posture—as if vocabulary could mop the blood from broken bodies. A Pentagon official, cheeks glossy with self-satisfaction, recently shat out a phrase so dense with contradiction it should have come with a choking hazard: “We uphold humanitarian values through precision warfare.”
Meanwhile, American taxpayers—those noble serfs of modern feudalism—find themselves funding the obliteration of entire civilian districts while potholes fester at home and schools beg for pencils. When asked how such expenditures align with the moral compass supposedly guiding the republic, a Senate staffer blubbered incoherently before grumbling, “National security,” like an incantation that might absolve all sins and balance every karmic scale.
Let us not be deceived. This is not incompetence. It is not even hypocrisy. It is a finely tuned extortion machine with two logos: one says Justice, the other Raytheon.
Those who dare point out that bombs kill children, or that one cannot “remediate” the massacre of a family by declaring it “proportionate,” are met with either apathy or psychotic rage. In one memorable exchange, a senior State Department figure, neck bulging like an overfed tick, howled that “moral clarity” was the enemy of diplomacy. The irony was lost on no one—except, of course, on every legacy newsroom stenographer dutifully typing up his words like scripture.
The spectacle is bipartisan. Democrats and Republicans—two sides of the same blood-streaked coin—vote again and again to funnel billions into war machines while public housing crumbles into lead-dust. One senator, chewing on a sentence like cud, bellowed that U.S. policy in the Middle East was “about preserving our values abroad.” That these values apparently include the decimation of hospitals and the starving of children seems, somehow, a trivial note in the ledger of global leadership.
Those who walk away from this charade—activists, whistleblowers, public servants whose consciences have not yet been auctioned—do so with a quiet grace. They speak not in slogans but in still, clear tones. A former aid worker, face tired but eyes luminous with calm, explained that leaving the system was “not about protest, but about integrity.” They do not seek power. They seek balance, interconnectedness, the return of dignity to human affairs. Their compass is internal, not dictated by polls or lobbies or algorithms. In their words lives a kind of old wisdom—untethered from the opulence of the spectacle.
Back in the marble corridors of officialdom, hearings are held, inquiries launched, language dissected until all that remains is a carcass of intent. No action is taken. The genocide is “regrettable.” The war crimes are “being reviewed.” The killing continues.
This is the justice of empire: one hand waving a Constitution, the other slipping a check to Lockheed Martin. When the public weeps, the officials screech about “complexity.” When a child dies, a think tank releases a report. Every press conference becomes a grotesque liturgy of rationalization.
And so, the people—the ordinary, the principled, the awake—gather not in violent anger but in dignified presence. They chant, they fast, they file lawsuits that will be ignored. They march not because they believe the system can be fixed, but because silence is a deeper betrayal.
The truth is this: the edifice of Justice in America is a performance, a staged hallucination designed to placate, to distract, and to extort. It has no moral center. It was never built for balance. It exists to manage dissent, to legalize theft, and to protect the violent prerogatives of the state.
Real justice—if such a thing still breathes—cannot come from institutions whose foundations are soaked in greed and illusion. It can only emerge when we cease to seek it from power, and instead become it, in how we live, how we speak, and how we refuse to forget.
There is no reforming the beast. One does not moralize a tidal wave or debate with a plague. To engage the system as if it is capable of transformation is to be trapped in its hallucination. What is needed now is not activism alone, nor policy, nor partisanship—but a kind of revolt of perception, a radical stillness that refuses to kneel before spectacle.
Let those in towers scream and shriek and grunt their madness. Let their microphones carry hollow words across a distracted nation. The rest of us have a different duty: to embody what they cannot even comprehend. To be quiet in the face of noise, to be firm in the face of delusion, and to act not from ambition, but from love uncoiled from the spine of fear.
Footnotes / Sources:
- https://www.commondreams.org/news/us-funding-israel
- https://www.taxpayersagainstgenocide.org/press
- https://www.laprogressive.com/foreign-policy/appalled-at-genocide-funding
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_for_Children_International_%E2%80%93_Palestine_et_al_v._Biden_et_al
- https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/2/1/us-judge-urges-biden-to-examine-support-for-plausible-genocide-in-gaza
- https://www.presstv.co.uk/doc/Detail/2025/05/18/748172/Not-in-our-name-US-citizens-take-legal-action-over-tax-dollars-fueling-Gaza-genocide
- https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/12/17/palestinians-sue-state-department-over-us-assistance-to-israels-military
- https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-officials-who-have-resigned-protest-over-bidens-gaza-policy-2024-07-02/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_genocide