Never Again (Terms and Conditions Apply)

They used to say “Never Again” like a prayer. Like it was sacred, like it was welded to the bones of civilization. The phrase sat on plaques and monuments, spoken with trembling hands and solemn brows, as if saying it enough times would make it true. But underneath the candlelight and the solemn music, there was always a caveat—unspoken but implied.

Never again, they meant—without the proper licensing agreement.

Because cruelty has never been the problem. Cruelty is the engine. What matters is who’s driving and whether the fuel invoices are paid on time.

Gordon Gekko understood this before most. He walked onto that stage in the late '80s, slick-haired and sharper than the room, and made it plain: “Greed is good.” Not as a confession, but as a business strategy. He said it like a prophet in a tailored suit, not preaching sin but efficiency. Greed, for Gekko, wasn’t corruption. It was clarity. It separated the weak from the relevant. And the crowd—the room full of men too rich to need translation—nodded. Because they knew the truth already. He just said it out loud.

That speech never ended. It just changed speakers.

Now the voice has a Russian accent and a former reality show host’s timing. Same logic, different pitch.

Putin isn’t sending tanks across borders because of some sacred nostalgia for tsarist maps. He wants to reroute power lines—economic ones. He wants to make Europe breathe in rubles and exhale contracts. His war isn’t against democracy. It’s against unpaid leverage. He wants Brussels to depend on his pipelines the way addicts depend on dealers who still remember their birthdays. This isn’t old-world nationalism. It’s a hostile bid.

Trump didn’t want to end the empire. He wanted a seat at the table, ideally at the head. NATO was never his enemy—it was just another underperforming asset. He looked at treaties the way Gekko looked at boardrooms: bloated, sentimental, mismanaged. So he brought in a wrecking ball and called it a negotiation. Allies flinched. Markets cheered, then panicked. But for a moment, the numbers looked good. That was enough.

He gave capital what it wanted—tax cuts, deregulation, permission to forget. He gutted safety nets, sold off protections, made it easier to breathe carbon and harder to drink water. He delivered the dream in quarterly bumps. But even Gekko knew the game only works if the rules stay fixed. Trump didn't just sell chaos—he became it. He wasn’t building value. He was flipping the empire like a bankrupt casino: strip it, squeeze it, rename it, and hope someone buys before the ceiling falls.

It worked—for a minute. Then the machine started coughing. Trade wars. Sanctions. Legal collapse. The gains turned thin. Investors started hedging. He gave them Gekko’s confidence but not his discipline. Greed is only good when it's stable. When it clarifies. When it cuts clean.

Trump didn’t cut clean. He cut everything.

And that’s the thing. Greed was never just desire—it was governance. Gekko knew. You don't oppose the system; you become it, inherit it, polish its boots and rewrite its prayers. Trump and Putin know this too. They don’t want to burn down the building. They want the deed.

It’s not rebellion. It’s rebranding.

That’s what makes them dangerous. Not because they’re radicals. Because they’re not. They’re management consultants in a collapsing structure, screaming that the problem isn’t the business model—it’s the leadership team. They want to run the plantation, not torch it. They believe in capitalism the way priests believe in God: not as a theory, but as a birthright.

And like Gekko, they don't lie. They just speak the part of the truth that pays.

But here’s the other part:

Empire doesn’t punish cruelty. It rewards it—so long as it’s correctly filed.

Look back.

Hitler wasn’t crushed because he was cruel. He was crushed because he ran out of margin. He built an economy out of looting and momentum. He robbed the Jews, enslaved the conquered, ran the factories on fumes and bodies. For a while, it worked. Then the bodies got cold, the frontlines got stuck, and the oil didn’t arrive. He needed Ukraine’s wheat, the Caucasus’ fuel, Soviet industry. Not as conquest—but as collateral. Barbarossa wasn’t just war. It was debt management. And when the math failed, so did the myth.

He didn’t just lose the war. He lost the spreadsheet.

Cruelty, after all, was never his error. It was the model.

Same with the American South. They didn’t fall because they enslaved people. They fell because they tried to federalize it. They bet their entire future on a system of bondage that couldn’t be indexed to the industrial North. They believed cotton could out-muscle steel. But the banks wouldn’t bankroll it. Not because it was wrong—but because it couldn’t scale. They were treated not as rebels, but as a failed IPO. The war wasn't moral. It was logistical.

They built their house on unpaid labor. The North had already moved on to wage cages.

Empire doesn’t care if people suffer. It cares if the numbers suffer. Slavery was a feature until it became a risk.

Look around now.

In Gaza, children are shredded by U.S.-funded bombs while world leaders talk about “proportionality.” In Yemen, civilians choke under Saudi airstrikes while Western contractors count dividends. In Congo, kids dig for cobalt with bare hands so electric cars can launch on time. In Chile, Pinochet strangled democracy, but Wall Street called it stability. Indonesia, Rwanda, the Philippines—the bodies pile up, but only some of them threaten capital.

The rest are written off.

These aren’t secrets. They’re contracts. Whispered in rooms with catered lunches and plausible deniability. They’re not hidden. They’re boring. They’re technical. They come with signatures and spreadsheets. They’re filed, not buried.

Gekko knew. Greed isn’t a sin. It’s a service. And as long as you keep it dressed right and priced correctly, it’ll be worshipped like gospel.

Even fascism knows better now. It doesn’t goose-step. It signs NDAs. It doesn’t wear uniforms—it wears hoodies and startup logos. It doesn’t ban books—it changes the algorithm. It doesn’t kill openly—it lets the insurance lapse.

When it comes back—and it is coming back—it will come clean. Optimized. Subscription-based. ESG-certified. It will offer tiered plans. It will come with discounts. It will livestream the destruction in 4K and call it “content.”

Because cruelty is no longer hidden. It’s formatted.

And people don’t look away because they’re ignorant. They look away because they’ve been trained to. The disassociation is built-in. An empire doesn’t need censors when it has feed algorithms. It doesn’t need consent—just confusion.

It doesn’t conquer with armies anymore. It licenses suffering. It outsources brutality to proxies, funds both sides, and sells the footage to advertisers. It doesn’t need you to agree. It just needs you to keep scrolling.

And still, they say it.

Never Again.

Like a spell.

Like a promise that someone intends to keep.

But Never Again was never about justice. It was about stability. It meant: never again destabilize the flow of capital without a plan to make someone richer at the end of it.

It was never a moral stance. It was a legal disclaimer.

And when that illusion breaks, when even the wealthy realize they’re leasing tomorrow on a flaming note, when cruelty stops clarifying and starts disrupting—that’s when the system corrects.

Not with guilt.

With new management.

With another Gekko, waiting in the wings, rehearsing the pitch, checking the margin.