An Editorial Note on the Necessity of Dead-End Resistance

By Peter Dimock

The US government now stands blatantly in breach of both national and international laws prohibiting wars of aggression and complicity in genocide—an undeniable reality that has been livestreamed daily since October 2023. All legal and institutional protections against the impunity that enables and fosters fascist rule and normalizes permanent war have so far proved unavailing. With this absolute failure as precedent, who truly believes that citizens can elect themselves out of this condition that now sustains the so-called “global order”?

The complicity of the US government in the crimes of genocide and ethnic cleansing was clearly established by the findings of the International Court of Justice in its ruling of January 24, 2024. Why do these crimes continue unabated while spreading their intensifying lethality almost three years later? Why can’t Americans of intellectual good faith take responsibility for their parts in averting their gaze and evading their continuing responsibilities in relation to their illegitimate government’s protracted commission of these unspeakable crimes?

These seem both obvious and urgent questions, yet they go largely unaddressed. Most American public discourse assumes an American exceptionalist entitlement to the luxury of moral hand wringing over “the tragedy” of intractable international conflict rather than engagement with US responsibility for genocide, the increasing acceptance of impunity as a necessary condition for order, and the destruction of international law and the horizon of peace as a norm of politics. Our detachment incorporates a privileged distance from the conditions of suffering and feigned horror at the disruption and breach of etiquette by citizens who cannot sit with the contradictions.

The acknowledgment of the illegitimacy of the current American state in private thoughts and in public debate entail disorienting shifts in self-understandings. The present American project of dominance through global authoritarian military primacy, once assumed by many to be a natural position, now is clearly failing.

It is now obvious to most people—if not to most Americans—that this project has no long-term strategic coherence or sustainable social or moral goal. While many of us have always recognized the illegitimacy of this project, this cognitive dissonance for many others is new and profoundly unsettling.

We hope Cul-de-sac will provide a space in which to emphatically and unapologetically refuse norms of “acceptable” and mainstream political, social, and esthetic discourse that tacitly re-produce tolerance for the intolerable and collusion in the fascism intrinsic to militarized empire.

As the name of our journal suggests, we will not be deterred by the knowledge that by conventional standards of publishing success, we will be perceived by many to be pursuing an arrival at, rather than an emancipative analysis of, “dead ends.”