U.S. v Bosnia Highlights the Past Atrocity, Present Impunity, and Infrastructural Backbone of U.S.-backed Genocides and Ecological Warfare
Today, July 1st at 8pm EST, the United States faces Bosnia and Herzegovina in a Round of 32 knockout match in the shadow of Silicon Valley. Bosnian supporters have filled stadiums chanting "Free Palestine" in several matches so far during the World Cup. Bosnians know genocide: the 1992–95 war claimed over 100,000 lives, culminating in Srebrenica, where 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were murdered. For a nation that survived ethnic cleansing and genocide, cheering for Palestine evokes a shared memory. Accordingly, this match highlights the moral gap between a people motivated by shared humanity, and an imperialist host nation hell-bent on wasting human life and ecological viability in its quest for full-spectrum dominance.
U.S.-led imperialism, which aspires to this dominance and is founded in settler-colonial expansion, is the logical expression of the capitalist world-system that generates phenomenal waste – human, material, and ecological – in pursuit of profit and monopoly control. This is the anti-humanity at the heart of U.S. empire, and it is clear from the fast-paced military-driven genocide in Gaza to the slower genocide of starvation and deprivation against Cuba. The violation of our People(s)-Centered Human Rights are a key function of the system. The geopolitical architecture of extraction, militarism, and imperial domination actively accelerates environmental annihilation and human suffering while immunizing its architects (governmental, corporate, paramilitary) from accountability.
In Gaza, the United States plays as the chief financier and military arm of the zionist state of Israel's ongoing genocide, the latest chapter in 250+ years of settler colonialism, from the Americas to West Asia. U.S. military aid, diplomatic cover, and the U.S. tech sector providing digital infrastructure sustain the genocide. Data centers are the physical backbone of the tech economy and are tools of ecocide and slaughter. Project Nimbus ($1.2 billion from Google and Amazon) supplies cloud and AI infrastructure to the Israeli military. Microsoft data centers store 13.6 petabytes of data feeding "Gospel" and "Lavender"— AI kill lists that rank Palestinians by likelihood of being militants. Cisco earns $40–50 million annually from Israeli military networking contracts. Oracle leases underground Jerusalem data centers for AI processing. Dutch activists have scaled Microsoft roofs to protest 11,500 terabytes of intercepted Palestinian audio, hundreds of millions of hours of surveillance.
Looking at the U.S. blockade of Cuba, maintained for over six decades and recently expanded, economic sanctions function as instruments of ecological warfare. The blockade hinders Cuba's acquisition of technologies needed for sustainable development, limits financial opportunities for environmental protection projects, and prevents access to international financing for initiatives such as coastal resilience programs and mangrove restoration. The denial of resources for environmental protection in a highly vulnerable island nation constitutes a direct assault on both human populations and ecological systems, a form of slow violence that unfolds over decades while remaining largely invisible to international attention. The same logic operates across the global South, where U.S. sanctions regimes systematically deny targeted populations the resources necessary for sustainable development and ecological protection, killing millions.
The U.S. imperialist military machine exemplifies this logic with brutal clarity as it increasingly integrates ecological devastation into its strategy of economic and kinetic warfare. Capital's survival depends on the continued wasting of human life and ecological sustenance, and the U.S. military serves as its primary instrument. The digital machinery that powers this structure extracts water, energy, and labor from occupied land, deepening ecocide while enabling the bombing of civilian infrastructure like water treatment, hospitals, schools. The proliferation of data centers, essential to the digital infrastructure of global capital and imperialist militarism, exemplifies how capitalist waste-making operates through the relentless consumption of energy, water, mineral, and displaced labor resources.
Data centers, concentrated in regions with access to cheap electricity, available water for cooling, and lax land use or tax policies, generate phenomenal environmental costs that remain largely invisible to users of digital services, highlighting the connection across multiple scales of extraction – from the global to the hyperlocal. The concentration of these facilities in specific geographic locations represents a form of extractive violence that redirects essential resources from local populations to the imperatives of global capital.The same technology that powers Silicon Valley and the broader tech sector’s profits is itself a weapon of annihilation against oppressed peoples. Meanwhile, the United States and its corporate allies repeat the history of IBM supplying Nazi death camps, firms bankrolling apartheid South Africa—profit before humanity. The International Court of Justice has ruled Israel's actions a plausible genocide as we watch tonnes of toxic munitions drop on children, a documented ecocide; and yet the data centers keep humming, powered by U.S. tax dollars and Wall Street investment.
These threads tie back to Bosnia itself. Israel's Supreme Court has repeatedly blocked disclosure of defense exports to Serbia during the 1990s—weapons that found their way to Bosnian genocide perpetrators. Ratko Mladić's diary explicitly cites Israeli-Serbian ties. Fragments of Israeli mortar shells were found on Sarajevo's airfield. Israel, a state born from genocide, chose to fuel another. Today, that same state, armed by the same empire, commits genocide with algorithms built in California, funded in New York, and housed nationwide.
This same US empire maintains a six-decade blockade on Cuba, causing blackouts, medical shortages, and quadrupling inflation. It bombs fisherpeople in Caribbean waters, terrorizes Black and brown communities through ICE kidnappings and militarized police violence, and holds Nicolás Maduro and Cillia Flores captive in New York. Amid this global gangsterism and against the wasting of human life and ecological sustenance, the Black Alliance for Peace understands that organized sustained resistance to the interlocking systems of oppression must be our response. We call for:
Our Americas to be a Zone of Peace—free from U.S. intervention, imperialism, militarism, and capitalist domination – so that ecologically balanced systems based in People(s)-Centered Human Rights can emerge
The international community to Boycott the World Cup and Boycott the U.S. The United States defiles human rights and has no place hosting the beautiful game.
No War on Cuba! For peace in the Americas, we must defend Cuba against all forms U.S. imperialist warfare
An End to Economic & Environmental Warfare of data center construction and resource theft
No Compromise, No Retreat!