The 11th Hour US Imperialism, Israel’s “Mein Kampf in Reverse”, Palantir’s Oligarchic Techno-Fascism: Unprecedented Challenges to Peace-Thinkers/Makers

EDITORIAL, 4 May 2026

#949 | Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service

All news these days are bad news for average persons.

Millions grit their teeth and pin their/our hope in the acts of resistance from below against corporate, statist and ideological forces — “the Epstein Class” – that are prime drivers behind daily bad news, or one feels resigned in the face of overwhelmingly powerful state and corporate actors.

Here is my cursory glance at everyday news over an early morning cup of coffee:

• Israel’s “permanent wars” in its biblical neighbourhoods of Lebanon, Syria, and occupied Palestine, in pursuit of “Mein Kampf in reverse”, in Gaza, as the former Chief of General Staff of the “Israeli Death Force” (IDF) Moshe Yaalon put it last year, or Israel’s own “Holocaust” as observed by former Mossad chief Padri last week;
• Washington’s war of aggression against the oil rich, geographically important and politically resistant Iran, both at the behest of Israel, and as a last-ditch American effort to shore up their evaporating monopoly over world affairs;
• the sinister American tech-oligarchy made up of sadistic and neo-Fascist megalomaniacs who line their pockets with billionaires in CEO pays while their AI is destroying the livelihoods of thousands of their skilled labourers;
• the continuing genocidal calamity in Sudan;
• the clear indications of German-led European militarism tinged with Western Europe’s signature Russophobia post-Bolshevik Revolution;
• NATO’s frozen proxy conflict with Moscow in Ukraine;
• the deepening economic instability worldwide triggered by the war-shocked flow and supplies of oil, natural gas, fertilizer, and helium on which the livelihoods of billions of humans depend;
• the discernible neo-Fascist transformation of relatively liberal democratic states in the West where Israel-First policies, increasingly misframed as “anti-Semitism”, are deployed to accelerate the neo-Totalitarianisation all public institutions including universities and colleges and hitherto independent judiciary;
• the near total eclipse of any public or policy discussion, let alone pursuit, of measures to address the very real challenge of Global Warming, and its predictable consequences for all living species, not just humans;
• the ever-present threat of the use of the so-called “tactical nuclear weapons”, when the two nuclear-armed rogue states such as the United States and Israel openly demand and pursue a total defeat and destruction of any of its adversaries – states and non-state actors, namely Iran and the Lebanese resistance Hezbollah;
• and finally, against this backdrop, international law, the United Nations and its constitutive organs including the Security Council and the International Courts of Justice have proven utterly impotent to confront, manage and resolve any of the unprecedented crises which are identified here.

Beyond the post-World War II global governing institutions and the architecture, the so-called Global South, or more accurately, the Global Majority, as this bloc of states in formerly Euro-colonized world represent the majority of human populations on earth in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Understanding these interlocking challenges, let alone finding viable solutions, demands a tremendous daily amount of self-educational efforts even from those who are privileged enough to concern him- or herself -with public or world affairs.

Israel – and the “settler-colonized” Palestine –is a perfect case of causal relations between what goes in in genocidal killing fields of Gaz and, increasingly, the West Bank and the neo-Totalitarianization of democracies in the West – not to mention the already authoritarian states globally, where many of us live and work.

“Palestine-tested” killer AI and surveillance technologies either by the Silicon Valley’s Palantir (or developed by Israeli Death Force’s electronic intelligence Unit 8200), among others, are globally marketed for huge profits.

It is worth pointing out that the old perspective that technology is inherently neutral, but it is the users who put these presumably innocent technologies to nefarious ends is no longer valid.

Peter Thiel, the founder of Palantir, whose AI-generated target is vital for Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, was on the record articulating his unilateralist/totalitarian vision for the Dark New World as early as 2010, at Libertopia conference.

Here is the young Mr Thiel in his own chilling words:

But the basic idea was that we could never win an election on getting certain things.   Because we were in such a small minority.  But maybe you could actually unilaterally change the world without having to constantly convince people and beg people, or plead with people who are never going to agree with you through a technological means.  This is where I think technology is the alternative to politics.

A year earlier in 2009, Thiel wrote an essay for Washington DC-based libertarian Cato Institute, that he no longer believed that freedom and democracy are compatible.  Five years earlier in 2004m Thiel identified the U.S. Constitution as the obstacle for “any single ambitious person from reconstructing the old Republic.”

On his Substack (dated 21 April 2026), Dean Blundell has detailed the ideological root of the terrifying new technology with built-in totalitarian orientation in an essay entitled,

Peter Thiel’s “Palantir,” the Company That Owns the Trump Regime, Just Published Their 22-Point Manifesto for America and It’s Terrifying

To belabour the obvious, the ruling class of policy and decision-makers in the United States have long been captured by “Israel-Firsters”, not just Trump’s real estate buddy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner but also by the Zionist billionaires who are the real Whips behind the majority of the American politicians and officials in the legislature and the executive branches.

In 2026, the United States, importantly the world’s biggest economy with the biggest imperialist killing machine, is undergoing a neo-Totalitarian transformation along Fascist lines, led by powerful megalomaniacs who do NOT believe in dialogue, democracy, or civil liberties.

The earth-shattering events (mass firing, wars, genocides, insider trading, nuclear-threats, etc.) that we are all living through today, with varying degrees of impact on our lives result from men like Peter Thiel. Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Benjamin Netanyahu, all of whom are part of the Epstein Class.

Among this overwhelming majority of only modestly ambitious humans on earth are activists and scholars, like us, who write for, read or support our late friend, mentor and colleague Johan Galtung’s TRANSCEND Media Service weekly updates, and, needless to say, the 99% of fellow earthlings.

Despite the numbers, frequencies of protests and numerous acts of non-violence resistance against the aforementioned Dark Actors with disdainful views towards moral sentiments of the human majority, we the resisters are finding ourselves on our backfoot as the techno-politics of men with totalitarian Fascist values relentlessly pursue their values and material interests, be they revenues, contracts, land, strategic resources, data or deadly new technologies.

I feel sure that even our late friend and teacher Johan would find peace-making exceedingly difficult in this deeply distressing chapter of human follies. As TRANSCEND community worldwide this might be a time for us to bang our heads together to process many of these interlocking challenges that have, in effect, brought our collective humanity on the brink of conceivable catastrophes, mostly Made in Israel-First USA.

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A Buddhist humanist from Burma (Myanmar), Maung Zarni, nominated for the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize, is a member of the TRANSCEND Media Service Editorial Committee, of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment, former Visiting Lecturer with Harvard Medical School, specializing in racism and violence in Burma and Sri Lanka, and Non-resident Scholar in Genocide Studies with Documentation Center – Cambodia. Zarni is the co-founder of FORSEA, a grass-roots organization of Southeast Asian human rights defenders, coordinator for Strategic Affairs for Free Rohingya Coalition, and an adviser to the European Centre for the Study of Extremism, Cambridge. Zarni holds a PhD (U Wisconsin at Madison) and a MA (U California), and has held various teaching, research and visiting fellowships at the universities in Asia, Europe and USA including Oxford, LSE, UCL Institute of Education, National-Louis, Malaya, and Brunei. He is the recipient of the “Cultivation of Harmony” award from the Parliament of the World’s Religions (2015). His analyses have appeared in leading newspapers including the New York Times, The Guardian and the Times. Among his academic publications on Rohingya genocide are The Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingyas (Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal), An Evolution of Rohingya Persecution in Myanmar: From Strategic Embrace to Genocide, (Middle East Institute, American University), and Myanmar’s State-directed Persecution of Rohingyas and Other Muslims (Brown World Affairs Journal). He co-authored, with Natalie Brinham, Essays on Myanmar Genocide.

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 4 May 2026.

Anticopyright: Editorials and articles originated on TMS may be freely reprinted, disseminated, translated and used as background material, provided an acknowledgement and link to the source, TMS: The 11th Hour US Imperialism, Israel’s “Mein Kampf in Reverse”, Palantir’s Oligarchic Techno-Fascism: Unprecedented Challenges to Peace-Thinkers/Makers, is included. Thank you.

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