A Bridge Burning in Its Own Flame
On the night of July 4th, flames rose from the Brooklyn Bridge. At the height of Macy's Independence Day fireworks display, the fireworks on the bridge's launch pad began to burn the bridge itself. Black smoke billowed over the East River, and spectators initially thought it was part of the show. A 24-year-old tourist from France said, "At first I thought it was intentional, but then I was afraid the bridge might explode." The fire was extinguished within a minute, and fire authorities declared the bridge "safe and structurally sound." The 143-year-old bridge survived. But the symbol remained. On the 250th birthday night of the empire, the empire's most iconic bridge was set ablaze by the empire's own celebratory fireworks.
This scene is the most vivid image of the same contradiction that appeared in the diary entries of the past three days. On July 3rd, the Philadelphia parade was canceled due to extreme heat, and the Great American State Fair in Washington closed early in the afternoon. Nature had disrupted the empire's party. But the Brooklyn fire on the night of July 4th was different. This was not nature's counterattack. The party itself had set the fire. The bridge was the platform for the fireworks, and the fireworks burned the bridge. It was not an external enemy, nor nature's retaliation, but a structure where the mechanism of self-celebration damages its own symbol. At the very same hour that President Trump declared in Washington that "America is the most exceptional nation" and denounced communism as "a greater threat than World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, and 9/11 combined," the most exceptional symbol of the exceptional nation was burning in its own flame. This is the dialectical point that the empire's 250 years have reached. The moment when the tool of self-praise transforms into the tool of self-harm.
On the same day, in Erfurt, Germany, the far-right party AfD held its party congress, and thousands of protesters clashed with police. The AfD has grown into Germany's largest opposition party, and at this congress, it reelected its co-leaders, flaunting its strength. The "firewall" of the mainstream parties is cracking. The clashes in Erfurt and the flames in Brooklyn, though manifested in different forms on different continents, are two faces of the same phenomenon. In Germany, a key ally of the imperial order, the political center is contracting toward the far right, while in the empire's own capital, a festival is turning into a crisis. Not only is the buffer zone collapsing—as analyzed in the previous diary—but the center itself is eroding from within. As signs of geopolitical realignment emerge across Eastern Europe, on the streets of Germany anti-far-right protesters clash with police, and on a bridge in New York, fireworks burn the bridge.
All of this is not distant news unrelated to the Korean Peninsula. Our division system exists as part of this same imperial order. The sight of a bridge burning in its own fireworks is a condensed image of the future of the comprador-monopoly system that depends on the empire. For now, it is a platform for launching fireworks, but the structural stability of that platform depends on external conditions beyond its own control. It is a historical commonplace that when the empire collapses due to its own contradictions, the periphery most deeply embedded in that order receives the greatest shock. The comprador-monopoly system is no exception to this structural law. In the previous diary, I wrote that there is no buffer zone. Today, I add: the empire's platform is not safe either.
This scene is the most vivid image of the same contradiction that appeared in the diary entries of the past three days. On July 3rd, the Philadelphia parade was canceled due to extreme heat, and the Great American State Fair in Washington closed early in the afternoon. Nature had disrupted the empire's party. But the Brooklyn fire on the night of July 4th was different. This was not nature's counterattack. The party itself had set the fire. The bridge was the platform for the fireworks, and the fireworks burned the bridge. It was not an external enemy, nor nature's retaliation, but a structure where the mechanism of self-celebration damages its own symbol. At the very same hour that President Trump declared in Washington that "America is the most exceptional nation" and denounced communism as "a greater threat than World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, and 9/11 combined," the most exceptional symbol of the exceptional nation was burning in its own flame. This is the dialectical point that the empire's 250 years have reached. The moment when the tool of self-praise transforms into the tool of self-harm.
On the same day, in Erfurt, Germany, the far-right party AfD held its party congress, and thousands of protesters clashed with police. The AfD has grown into Germany's largest opposition party, and at this congress, it reelected its co-leaders, flaunting its strength. The "firewall" of the mainstream parties is cracking. The clashes in Erfurt and the flames in Brooklyn, though manifested in different forms on different continents, are two faces of the same phenomenon. In Germany, a key ally of the imperial order, the political center is contracting toward the far right, while in the empire's own capital, a festival is turning into a crisis. Not only is the buffer zone collapsing—as analyzed in the previous diary—but the center itself is eroding from within. As signs of geopolitical realignment emerge across Eastern Europe, on the streets of Germany anti-far-right protesters clash with police, and on a bridge in New York, fireworks burn the bridge.
All of this is not distant news unrelated to the Korean Peninsula. Our division system exists as part of this same imperial order. The sight of a bridge burning in its own fireworks is a condensed image of the future of the comprador-monopoly system that depends on the empire. For now, it is a platform for launching fireworks, but the structural stability of that platform depends on external conditions beyond its own control. It is a historical commonplace that when the empire collapses due to its own contradictions, the periphery most deeply embedded in that order receives the greatest shock. The comprador-monopoly system is no exception to this structural law. In the previous diary, I wrote that there is no buffer zone. Today, I add: the empire's platform is not safe either.