« Nous sommes un empire maintenant et quand nous agissons nous créons notre propre réalité »

Attributed to Karl Rove, a close adviser to Bush junior, “Nous sommes un empire maintenant et quand nous agissons nous créons notre propre réalité” condenses the passage’s account of imperial power into a claim that action can make its own reality. The novel places the statement amid a critique of United States military and political dominance, making it a pointed expression of the worldview the narrator condemns.

Attribution and Context

The passage invokes Rove’s statement while describing the course of history after the September 11 attacks. It links United States wars in the Middle East and elsewhere to efforts against countries opposed to Israel and rich in oil, then presents this hegemonic drive as continuing from one president to another, reaching as far as the coup in Ukraine and the resulting war on Russia’s borders. Within that sequence, the statement functions as an emblem of power that treats its interventions as self-authorizing.

Function in the Narrative

The quotation’s force comes from the gap between its confident assertion and the passage’s judgment of its consequences. Rather than treating the declaration as neutral political rhetoric, the narration connects it to an accelerating history of war and to a wider sense of approaching apocalypse. Loïc’s growing sense of himself as a dissident and an internal resister extends that criticism to mass media, which he sees as eager propagandists for an empire held together by military intimidation and financial coercion. The phrase thus anchors the passage’s movement from political action to control over the story told about that action.