There isn't a day that goes by that one doesn't run into blatantly Orientalist garbage on the Internet regarding the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea. And that's what it all is—the image of the nation of North Korea as being full of a bunch of brainwashed, terrified citizens ruled by an egomanical baby overlord? That's just the United States projecting its bulls*** onto a nation resisting imperialism. It's what they want you to believe, and it's racist as hell. I'm not here to argue against the propaganda you've likely swallowed, nor am I going to tell you that the DPRK shouldn't have nuclear weapons. I know plenty of other writers who've tirelessly documented the efforts of scholars to debunk the State Department line, who break down why disarmament is idealistic at best, and paternalistic at worst.

What I want you to do, those of you who are listening to one Guatemalan-American whose father already suffered his country being looted, is oppose war against the people of North Korea. I don't frankly care about your opinion of their government, their ideology or their culture. The foreign policy of the United States has been over 200 years of building up an empire of White supremacy, ensuring that no "alien entity" is a threat where white people hold power and wealth and the ruling ideas about how to live as human beings. The sooner that we who live in these United States realize that we are the Empire, the sooner we can work to dismantle it and ensure that peoples across the world live in peace. Neither the people of North Korea, nor their government, are the primary threat to world security. They just aren't.

In the new Star Wars trilogy, the old Galactic Empire collapsed, only to return in a new fascist guise as the First Order. Gifted with technological might and unflinching martial devotion, as of "The Force Awakens," they've struck a decisive blow against the nominal force of democracy in the galaxy, the New Republic. We are not #TheResistance. We are the stormtroopers cheerleading the destructive power of Starkiller Base. If we fail to heed warnings from those voices in the darkness, surely our fate will be the same as that of the Sith who came before their sequel trilogy inheritors—irrelevance and implosion.