The Toxic Family of Imperialism

I: Introduction

Much has been written about the troubles of living in a toxic family, by writers including myself. One parent, if not both, is a narcissist who bullies and manipulates the sons and daughters into playing roles that satisfy the narcissistic emotional needs of the parent(s), who fancy themselves to be the very personification of parental virtue.

The idea is to make the children into extensions of the parents, to receive projections of the (perceived to be) best and worst aspects of the parents’ personalities. One child may be pressured into being an idealized version of the mother and/or father (the golden child), while another child (the scapegoat) may be bullied into introjecting all of the aspects of the parents that they hate about themselves. Other children tend to be emotionally neglected (the lost child).

What exists in the microcosm, as it were, of human relationships also exists in their macrocosm, the world of geopolitics, which is what I’m focusing on here. I’ve discussed elsewhere the way capitalism brings out the narcissist in people, and I’ve also discussed how they manipulate the public to love and hate whichever countries they want to be loved or hated, something I’ve called ‘political gaslighting,’ a deliberate misrepresenting of the facts about those countries…a.k.a. propaganda.

I’d like to expand on these ideas here, while using the toxic family as a handy metaphor to describe the hegemony of US/NATO imperialism, and its deleterious effects on the rest of the world.

II: The Narcissistic Imperialist Parent Countries

Just as the narcissistic parent of a toxic family perpetuates the myth of being a loving, altruistic parent who is only concerned with the well-being of his or her children–a moral model to the community–so do the Western imperialist countries (the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the EU) imagine their rule over the world is for the benefit of everybody. They euphemistically call themselves “the international community,” rather than the plunderers of the Third World.

They fancy that they’re promoting ‘freedom and democracy,’ yet the US has by far the highest incarceration rate in the world, jailing more people than the Gulag (which even the CIA secretly acknowledged wasn’t so bad), many of the incarcerated being ‘guilty’ of smoking or selling a plant (on top of this is the use of these prisoners for what is essentially slave labour in private prisons). Then there’s the Australian military helping their police to enforce the wearing of masks and self-isolation, all because of a virus that is nowhere near as deadly as it’s made out to be.

Similarly, the IMF and World Bank claim to be helping the Third World by giving them loans, which of course the poor countries cannot pay back, leaving them in perpetual debt and giving the Western powers a convenient rationale to continue exploiting them.

Trump‘s bailing out of the super-rich in early 2020, yet another transfer of wealth upward when a downward transfer is what’s so especially needed, has been given the obscene name of CARES.

The NED is a sham NGO that carries out the nefarious regime-change plots of the CIA, destabilizing and overthrowing governments around the world that don’t bow to American interests.

And they call it democracy.

III: The Golden Child Countries

All those countries that have found favour with the Anglo-American empire include, of course, the NATO members, many of whom used to be Warsaw Pact members, but have since the 1990s been so invidiously absorbed by the capitalist West.

The stark contrast between these last-mentioned countries and the scapegoated ones is clearly shown in the buildup of NATO troops along the Russian border. The mainstream media portrays these East European countries as the victims in need of protection, and Russia as the aggressor, when anyone with eyes to see knows that the Anglo-American NATO alliance is mobbing Russia.

A similar situation is seen between, on the one side, the ‘golden child’ areas of East Asia such as Hong Kong and Taiwan, and on the other side, scapegoated China, where it’s assumed that the latter is bullying and oppressing the former two, when in fact these former two are fed imperialist propaganda from the US, which uses Hong Kong and Taiwan as sticks with which to beat China.

Mike Pompeo, fond of issuing threats to any scapegoated country that defies the American empire, and even joking about having lied while in the CIA, speaks warmly of his golden child island, Taiwan, whose government has for years been obsequious to the empire, gleefully imbibing all the anti-China propaganda out there without an atom of criticism. I know this because I’ve lived here in Taiwan since the summer of 1996, and the locals bash China all the time.

Little thought is given to the fact that all of this hostility to China only pushes us closer and closer to a disastrous war, which could escalate into WWIII if Russia and Iran are involved, and which could in turn go nuclear.

IV: The Scapegoat Countries

Woe to any country that dares defy the Anglo-American empire! I’ve already mentioned Russia and China, but of course there are many others: Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Syria, Cuba, and now Belarus.

In the toxic family, the scapegoat is the child who dares to blow the whistle and expose the family’s dysfunction, which must be kept a secret to prevent embarrassing the narcissistic parents, who otherwise would fly into rages. The same applies to the world of politics, but on a much larger scale.

The countries of the world are expected to bow before the empire. If they do, as such golden child countries as those in NATO do, they won’t fear the dangers of invasion, economic sanctions, and demonizing in the media. But if they dare chart their own paths, aspire to self-determination, or–egad!–adopt ideologies even distantly redolent of socialism…

The US was happy when Russia was weak in the 1990s, when unpopular Boris Yeltsin beat back attempts to restore communism in 1993, and when the US helped him get reelected. The West felt no discomfort when the Russian economy fell apart and millions were plunged into ruin; Russia was even allowed to be a part of the G8. But when Putin made Russia great again, so to speak, the Western powers grew indignant.

Similarly, when China was the factory of the world, supplying cheap labour to foreign businesses, all was well, in the opinion of the West. But now that China is about to overtake the US economically…

There are those countries that are scapegoated now, and there were those scapegoated countries of the past, particularly those of the past one hundred years or so. These include the much-maligned USSR, Mao‘s China, Ho Chi Minh‘s Vietnam, the former Yugoslavia, East Germany, and the rest of the Soviet Bloc. Space doesn’t permit me to go into detail about these countries, so if you’re skeptical, Dear Reader, of my defence of them, please check out the links provided.

More recent casualties of imperialist smear campaigns and coups (attempted or successful) include Bolivia and Venezuela, where Morales and Maduro are portrayed in the bourgeois media as dictators, even though they’ve held perfectly democratic elections, they are loved by most of their people, and the right-wing opposition (including its violence and sabotage of these countries’ economies) is backed by the US, the OAS, and the super-rich (who covet the countries’ oil and lithium). The same kind of imperialist aggression is seen in the Hong Kong protestors being backed by the US and UK, and Taiwan receiving American weaponry with which to threaten China.

As far as the faults of these scapegoated governments were and are concerned, these faults, though they shouldn’t be denied, should be understood and dealt with in the same way a scapegoat’s faults should be in the context of a toxic family. Their right to be safe from abuse mustn’t be dependent on their perfection or near-perfection.

There’s much to criticize in the current governments of Russia, China, Vietnam, Venezuela, Syria, and Iran, just as there was in the Libyan, Bolivian, Iraqi, and Soviet governments. But none of this gives US/NATO imperialism the right to impose their way of doing things on these criticized states, just as the toxic family has no right to impose their way on the scapegoat, just because he or she has a list of irritating faults.

Whatever is to be corrected in the scapegoated countries is to be done by the people of those respective countries, not to be imposed from outside. Similarly, even the voices of the Western left, often smug in their disdain for states whose socialism isn’t deemed sufficient, should not be in any way aiding the toxic countries’ wish to overthrow these states, as a Trotskyist might want to do.

Just as the toxic family isn’t helping the scapegoat, neither are the Western powers helping the targeted countries.

V: The Lost Child Countries

These are the countries whose needs aren’t acknowledged, and are left to fester in poverty and misery. The media has far too little to say about the suffering of the people of these countries. They’re just as controlled, exploited, and manipulated by the toxic countries as are the ‘golden’ and scapegoated countries; but their masters don’t show appreciation for their subservience. Still, the ‘lost children’ are far less defiant to their masters, so they aren’t so demonized in the media.

They’re just treated as if they don’t exist.

This is the Third World.

A huge foreign, especially American, military presence has been in Africa for some time now (the rationale being counterterrorism, though the obvious solution to terrorism is an end to imperialism), but it gets little media coverage. Yemenis are starving and suffering a cholera epidemic thanks to a war waged on them by Saudi Arabia (with weapons sold to the Saudis by the US, Canada, the UK, France, etc.), but these horrors don’t get enough acknowledgement in the media.

The oppression of the Palestinians, an ongoing genocide that after decades only worsens, isn’t discussed in the mainstream media to anywhere near the proportion that it should be.

VI: Conclusion

So, what is to be done?

I ended my post, The Narcissism of Capital, with a recommendation of going NO CONTACT with these sociopathic leaders, but I didn’t mean that to be taken literally. I just meant that we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be influenced by them anymore. Much more will have to be done than just ignoring them, if we’re to save ourselves and our planet.

When the Western powers speak of the need for regime change in the scapegoated countries, they are like the toxic family who project their faults onto the scapegoated children. The toxic countries narcissistically fancy themselves to be the guardians of freedom and human rights, yet someone like Assange is persecuted for simply exposing their crimes, as all journalists should be free to do.

The toxic countries project the guilt of their human rights abuses onto the scapegoated countries, while being allies and business partners with other corrupt human rights abusers like Saudi Arabia (more ‘golden child’ countries). Since the toxic countries demand regime change for those countries onto which they project their faults, then we can say, with a clear conscience, that it’s high time for some ‘regime change,’ if you will, for the toxic countries. It’s time for revolution.

Taking the power from the toxic countries doesn’t mean we, the revolutionaries, are ‘no better’ than they are, as one idiot commented on my conclusion in this post; only if we replaced the toxic regimes with equally toxic ones would we not be better. We must replace them with workers’ states, effecting a transition from bourgeois rule to real democracy.

If words like ‘communism,’ ‘Marxism,’ and ‘socialism’ make you uncomfortable, Dear Reader, then call the new system ‘daffodils’ instead. There, that doesn’t sound so ‘totalitarian,’ does it?

The way things are going now, whether we end up with a Trump or a Biden win, it can’t get much more totalitarian than it is these days.