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I hear the news. Khamenei has been killed. There is a sense of disbelief, but alongside it is a sense of weariness. Empire endures, and its actions take a heavy toll regularly, physically on some bodies and emotionally on those condemned to watch from the sidelines. Empire here is not simply a state acting abroad, but a system in which military force, media language, diplomatic legitimacy and racial hierarchies converge to determine whose violence is intelligible and whose suffering remains background noise.

I listen to the news and catch a few social media discussions. I hear the same arguments rehashed: Empire trots out the familiar cliches about the Iranian regime being evil (authoritarian, certainly, but invoked selectively within a world where allied authoritarianisms remain politically manageable). The media plays its usual games, using language to show Empire’s violence as normal, even necessary. I see how the news presents what happened: The US and Israel launched missile strikes on Iran on Saturday, February 28, after weeks of failed nuclear negotiations. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed in the strikes.  As if he was not deliberately targeted and assassinated in those strikes, but just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. What if Iran had attacked the US or Israel while nuclear negotiations were on? That would have been again presented as an act of extreme evil, their leaders described as ‘assassinated’, while what the US and Israel did is presented in this news item as inevitable, almost politically neutral, an outcome of a failed negotiation. A negotiation that can be termed a failure now, but it behoves us to consider which party was participating in bad faith. The one which attacked and killed the leader of the other, or the one which is accused of acting in bad faith retrospectively to justify the actions of the other? By default, those negotiating with America and Israel are always acting in bad faith, while no matter how much evil they perpetuate, they remain the good guys and the saviours of the world

I hear some news stories cover the strikes following the killing of Khamenei. Empire continues to attack hospitals and schools (are we really still surprised that they are?) while Iran attacks sites of US power, often evacuated by the time of the strike. I hear some journalists asking the question: what if Iran had attacked a school in America and killed school girls, would our understanding of this event still have been similar, as just another brutality of war? How is it that some people can keep killing children over and over again, and still make the claim to morality? Why does that claim continue to be acceptable in certain circles? It was once ‘weapons of mass destruction’, today it is ‘nuclear weapons’– why is it that we are to be afraid of those who may possibly acquire these weapons, but not of those who already possess them and have used them in the past?

The world often appears divided between those who recognise imperial narration as narration and those for whom it arrives already as common sense. They cannot question these narratives any more than they can question the ground they stand on. In my more charitable moments, I understand that histories of colonialism, its continuation in the American empire in the 20^th century, and its complete disregard of the lives of people of colour need to be taught to become visible. In my less charitable moments, I think of the people who fail to see the terror wrought by Empire as determined not to see rather than simply unable to see. I keep returning to the former, able to see the cruelty that lies at the heart of Empire, reading their tweets, posts, books – their words of anger, despair or simply mourning – as a way of holding on to sanity, if not hope. I derive comfort from what comes my way of people calling out settler-colonialism and Empire for what it is, clearly articulating incisive analyses of the way in which colonialism and the racism engendered by it continue to structure which lives around the world matter and which do not.

To combat my emotional exhaustion, I return to the Indigenous authors who have been at the forefront of the battle against settler-colonialism and Empire for a very long time. Chelsea Watego teaches me to forego hope and find joy in black nihilism. She accurately points out the problems with hope and reminds me that the victory is in Black living. Sometimes all you can do is look Empire in the eye and refuse to be deceived by it. So, you watch it, tired but clear eyed, and return to fight another day.