The Fascist Rebranding of Empire

The removal of the 44-year-old vigil is a tangible loss representing the destruction of a living monument to a long history of resistance.

Here is a rewritten version of your essay. I have preserved its intensity and imagery while tightening clarity, sharpening continuity, and making explicit the fascist character of the program you describe. I reframed several sections so that fascism is not an implied analogy but directly analyzed as the logic binding the acts together.

The Fascist Rebranding of Empire

Trump’s purge of a four-decade peace vigil and the revival of “war” branding reveal fascism’s reliance on erasure, spectacle, and militarized obedience.

A tent once stood across from the White House, quiet but insistent. It was not decoration; it was indictment. It posed the oldest political question in its simplest form: why must power rest on the threat of organized death? For forty-four years it embodied memory against forgetting, conscience against empire. Its destruction was not housekeeping but political theater. By dismantling the vigil while simultaneously rebranding the “Department of Defense” as the “Department of War,” the state announced its direction openly. Dissent will be cleared. War will be celebrated. The sequence is not coincidence, it is fascist choreography.

Fascism thrives on erasure. It scrubs public squares of inconvenient reminders, redefines care as clutter, and rebrands conquest as destiny. The tent mocked imperial spectacle by existing outside monetization, outside the script of national security. It testified to human endurance and to the ongoing insanity of nuclear annihilation. Its removal declared that peace itself was intolerable in the empire’s mirror. The renaming of the bureaucracy revealed the deeper logic: war is no longer disguised as defense but exalted as identity. This is fascism in practice, not only violence, but violence ritualized, aestheticized, and made into the grammar of national belonging.

Liberalism once masked its wars with soft euphemisms. “Defense” pretended reluctance even as bombs fell across continents. Fascism discards the mask. It celebrates cruelty as candor, turning open violence into proof of strength. This honesty is not virtue but performance. It trains the public to see perpetual mobilization as common sense, dissent as sabotage, and security as the ability to destroy. The vigil interfered with this pedagogy because it represented another tempo of politics: patience, remembrance, refusal. Its eradication was an instructive humiliation, one of fascism’s favorite tools. It told pacifists they would be crushed, told the poor their presence was dirt to be swept, told the colonized that America will always choose war as its grammar.

Authoritarian beautification, tidy surfaces masking wreckage, is the oldest colonial trick. Declare people debris, cultures disorder, and sweep them away under the banner of improvement. The vigil was reclassified as litter. Fascism thrives on this bureaucratic reclassification: protest becomes nuisance, community becomes security risk, rights become paperwork shuffled until irrelevant. Administrative violence performs legality while producing predetermined outcomes. The same grammar animates the Department of War. It institutionalizes emergency as normalcy. It makes conquest not a strategy but a permanent state of being.

Pay close attention to who profits and the fascist rebrand reveals itself further. Budgets bloom for arsenals while wages stagnate. Procurement contracts masquerade as patriotic duty. A new insignia is not stationery, it is a sales pitch. Fascism fuses capital and state into a machinery of war, guaranteeing profit through organized destruction. The vigil’s modest presence exposed this fusion by anchoring memory of bodies beneath contracts. Its elimination removes the last competing narrative from the national stage.

Fascism also depends on spectacle. It loves parades, helicopters, and staged swagger because they substitute movement for legitimacy. Where empire feels brittle, fascism answers with volume. It masks decline with permanent drumbeats. The tent’s refusal to march, its stubborn stillness, was intolerable precisely because it broke the choreography. It showed that politics need not march to the state’s drumline. It modeled a different time: conversation, endurance, and care. Its destruction militarizes time itself. Listening becomes weakness, memory becomes disrespect, and doubt becomes treason.

The renaming of “defense” to “war” collapses the distinction between foreign empire and domestic policing. Chicago becomes as much a battlefield as Baghdad. Neighborhoods are theaters for counterinsurgency. This migration of military grammar into municipal space is textbook fascism: the empire comes home, and the colony is reborn in the capital. Fanon’s divided colonial city, sectors of light and sectors of shadow, appears now in Washington itself. The vigil had been a light. Its erasure pushes the shadow forward.

Fascism is not only repression but also memory management. Monuments and names are weapons. They rewrite history to glorify domination and erase refusal. The Department of War recasts conquest as pride, transforming coups into lectures on order. The vigil was a living monument against that curriculum, a counter-syllabus of memory. Fascism cannot tolerate such syllabi, because they make forgetting impossible. Erasure is not collateral, it is strategy.

What, then, is the counter-strategy? If fascism brands war, we must brand community, not as logo but as lived infrastructure. Municipal assemblies, neighborhood councils, public systems rooted in care rather than patrol, Bookchin’s libertarian municipalism, offer the antidote. These are not slogans but material programs that dismantle fear and build solidarity. The vigil gestured toward this by organizing shifts, sharing food, repairing signs. It practiced the politics of presence. Fascism thrives on spectacle; community thrives on persistence. One is loud, the other stubborn. One parades, the other endures. The endurance of community is the real threat to fascism’s theater.

The struggle now is to make memory un-evictable. Schools, unions, libraries, and rituals that enshrine refusal can institutionalize what the tent embodied. They can outlast the fascist theater of renaming and parades. Fascism seeks spectators, but we must build participants. Its method is to rename, reclassify, remove, and rehearse victory. Our method must be to persist, to build rooted institutions of care, to turn refusal into daily structure.

The fascist rebranding of empire is not subtle. It is deliberate candor wielded as intimidation. It renames conquest as destiny and calls dissent debris. It is brittle power staging itself as swagger. The tent is gone, but its lesson remains: persistence is politics. The task is not only to remember that lesson but to multiply it into every square, every block, every council where people decide for themselves. Fascism teaches obedience through spectacle. We must teach disobedience through presence. Fascism requires applause. We will give it refusal.