I: Introduction
Anyone who has been reading my blog for a while should know by now that I, as an avowed Marxist, get static from right-wingers from time to time. There is, however, another group of people I criticize quite a bit, and who from time to time give me a hard time, too.
Liberals.
To be fair to them, many are well-intentioned in wanting progressive change in the world, but who are also, I feel, terribly misinformed about what’s really going on in the world. Part of this problem stems from the fact that many of them have similar class interests with people on the right, and therefore they don’t want to make the uncompromising but necessary changes in our political landscape that will ensure social justice, end the wars, and reverse ecocide.
In my article, The Liberal Mindset, I went into the psychological conflicts of liberals as I see them, those of wanting to effect progressive change (motivated by the superego), and wanting to retain their class privileges (motivated by the id). The result of this conflict is, of course, a lot of hypocrisy, in particular for those liberals in the upper echelons of economic and political power.
Examples of this hypocrisy are when AOC wears a “Tax the rich” dress at a Met Gala of the wealthy and privileged, Bernie Sanders decries the oligarchs, then backs Democrats pandering to the empire and corporations, or in my country, when Justin Trudeau talks all the politically correct talk, yet backs oil drilling on aboriginal land, or in one form or another, his government has backed Ukrainian Nazis.
As for those in the lower echelons who are liberals, their fault tends to stem from merely being misinformed. This fault is not, however, squarely on them. As is the case with so many of us these days in this neoliberal hellhole we live in, one is simply too busy working, dealing with day-to-day problems, to have the time to do the hard work of researching what is really going on in the world, learning the history of how we got here, and interpreting the meaning of world events correctly. Instead, most people rely on the slime oozing out of their TV set, the lies and propaganda coming out of it.
It is my hope that this article I’ve written can help correct those misconceptions of many liberals–that is, the well-meaning ones who simply don’t realize how much they’ve been misled, as opposed to those who ought to know better, or who cynically and deliberately go along with the mass deceptions because they benefit from them.
Furthermore, I hope that through these words I can impress upon these liberals that, in order to effect the kind of change that really needs to be made, change that is meaningful and isn’t merely a facelift, certain baselines must be maintained. Nothing below them is acceptable. A discussion of the content of these red lines follows:
II: No Voting for Bourgeois Parties…Ever!
The basic principle that needs to be understood about mainstream political parties–bourgeois parties–is that in spite of all their talk about striving to do what is best for the people, and what’s right for the nation, what they really do is solely in the interests of the capitalist class. The examples I gave above about the hypocrisies of liberals saying one thing and doing more or less the opposite are examples of this problem, hence voting for any of them will do nothing to help the common people.
Such political parties include the blue and red of the bogus American two-party system, the Tory and Labour Parties of the UK, and the Canadian Tories, Liberals, and NDP, as well as the many other bourgeois parties in the rest of the world. This is true even of social democrats like AOC, Sanders, or the NDP in Canada. In spite of the left-leaning nature of some of them, these ‘progressive’ ones will choose capitalism over socialism, Zionism over Palestinian rights, and even fascism if the ruling class is being threatened.
Liberalism acts as a kind of buffer against any friction the working class feels from the dictatorship of capital. So much of controlling the people involves using psychological tactics to keep us at bay; among those tactics is sustaining the illusion of hope that, somewhere down the line, a liberal or social democrat of conscience will lead the way and end the corporate stranglehold on us. As long as we keep hoping, we’ll keep voting, and an uprising will be staved off, even though those hopes keep getting frustrated.
More and more people are waking up to what this deception is doing, and they aren’t buying into the lies they keep hearing. As a result, fewer and fewer of them are wasting their time leaving home on Election Day and voting for someone who only talks and never delivers on his or her promises.
When the deceptive tactics are no longer working for a significant portion of the population, then other forms of keeping control are used, such as brute force. It’s no accident that in recent decades, there has been a militarization of the police, and when there are protests, agent provocateurs are deployed by the powers-that-be to stir up the protesting crowds, pick fights with them, and give the riot police an excuse to beat the protestors and arrest them.
As long as there is economic prosperity, as there was from 1945-1973, bourgeois governments can be, by their standards, generous and tax the rich sufficiently to fund social programs and other benefits for the poor. But when the economy is going through bad times, as has on-and-off been the case since 2008, the dictatorship of capital shows its true colours, and nothing is done to help the increasingly immiserated poor–quite the opposite, in fact, even to the point of such injustices as criminalizing homelessness.
In the case of American politics, we can see how both parties have moved things further and further to the right, even when either party allowed for some progressive policies. FDR gave Americans the New Deal, which in itself was good for softening the blow of capitalism for the working class, but even this good thing had a shadow side: in the very softening of capitalism, the New Deal ensured that the American ruling class didn’t have to fear a socialist revolution. Social democracy prevented the rise of real socialism.
While the rationalization for FDR’s putting of Japanese-Americans in internment camps (also called concentration camps, rather like those cages ICE is putting “illegals” into now) was as a protection against possible Japanese-American spies sending intelligence back to Japan, the fact is that that internment was yet another manifestation of good-old-fashioned American racism, a time-honored tradition going back to the times of black slavery, Native American genocide, the KKK, Jim Crow, “We reserve the right to refuse service to [Mexicans, Jews, the Irish, etc.],” and coming right to our times of “build the wall” and Russophobia.
On the Republican side, the Eisenhower era may have seen high taxes for the rich, and to his credit, he warned in his farewell address to curb the growing cancer of what he called the Military Industrial Complex as an enemy to world peace (a warning that subsequent American politicians have dutifully ignored), he and his administration were responsible for the 1954 Guatemalan coup, and helping with the 1953 Iranian coup, all justified as part of the Cold War policy of containment (the ultimate counterrevolution against communism has subsequently contributed to the neoliberal disaster we’re facing today).
That Iranian coup reinstalled the Shah, a puppet of Western imperialism and someone very unpopular among the Iranian people. This problem resulted in the 1979 Iranian Revolution, resulting in turn in Iran being another target for regime change, which has led to the recent hostility to and banging of the war drums against the country.
To his credit, LBJ signed legislation to promote African American civil rights, and by liberal standards, he helped fight the war on poverty. He also, however, helped escalate American involvement in Vietnam based on the bogus Gulf of Tonkin Incident; a quagmire ensued in Vietnam, a most unpopular war that brought about such atrocities as the My Lai Massacre. Once again, the rationale was to contain communism, without any consideration for what the Vietnamese actually wanted, they who had just shaken off French colonial rule by the mid-1950s. So much for the ‘progressive’ Democrats.
Nixon’s administration helped with the 1973 Chilean coup d’état, replacing the democratically-elected socialist Salvador Allende with the far-right strongman Augusto Pinochet, whose Chicago Boys‘ “free market” economic policies can be seen as a testing ground for the neoliberal scourge that began under Reagan and Thatcher.
What people need to understand about all these coups d’état and other interventions is that they’re meant to keep the empire’s grip of power on the affected countries. The empire will never accept any country going its own way and finding its own path to improve the quality of life for its people.
The intentions of the governments that the CIA and/or MI6 have overthrown are to do such things as the nationalization of industry (oil, etc.) and land reform so the workers and farmers of these countries can gain control over their working lives, gain the full fruits of their labour, and use the profits from their work to fund social programs for the poor. The imperialists, however, know that allowing these reforms to happen will reduce, if not obliterate, the profits they’ve been stealing from these countries.
When the Western imperialists meddle in the affairs of these Third World countries in the ways I’ve just described, they try to rationalize their interference by claiming they’re promoting “freedom and democracy” and thwarting the “Red menace.” Such talk of wanting “democratic freedoms” for these developing countries is just, to use a psychoanalytic term, a case of reaction formation, or hiding one’s true, not-so-noble motives behind a mask of supposedly benevolent ones. The last thing the imperialists care about is the right of the Third World poor to have freedom and self-determination. One doesn’t achieve such a goal by installing the likes of the Shah or Pinochet.
Imperialism is not just some abstract word we leftists throw around to sound dramatic or to feel self-righteous. It’s a living, breathing menace that destroys the lives and crushes the hopes of millions of people around the world. It is also used by all bourgeois political parties, not just the ‘conservative’ ones. The red and blue in the US do it. Tory and Labour do it in the UK. Tories, Liberals, and the NDP do it in Canada. The Renaissance (En Marche) party and the National Party (or National Front) do it in France. And so on and so on.
Western liberals have to stop thinking that the whole world revolves around themselves and start looking into what happens in these other parts of the world, for our suffering and their suffering are interlinked.
To get back to my ‘history lesson,’ if you will–which of course is far from exhaustive–another example of US imperial meddling in another country’s affairs, one that would ultimately bite Americans in the ass (our suffering and theirs is interlinked, recall), is when Afghanistan was trying to implement socialism with the aid of the Soviet Union. Such things as the promotion of women’s rights were on the agenda…but the American government would never tolerate that agenda.
The Carter administration, with Zbigniew Brzezinski‘s influence, provoked the USSR into invading Afghanistan (as they provoked Russia’s invasion of Ukraine) in the manner I discussed in my analysis of Charlie Wilson’s War. During this proxy war, the Soviet-Afghan War of the 1980s, the US government armed the mujahideen to the teeth. These fighters were fundamentalist Muslims, people who could be called the Islamic equivalent of fascists. Reagan had some of them visit him in the White House. One of the mujahideen was Osama bin Laden. We all know what his involvement eventually led to.
Once the US government had achieved their goal of weakening the Soviet Union through this long war that ended in 1989, Afghanistan was abandoned, since the country was no longer politically useful to US imperialism. The result of this abandoning of the war-torn country to Muslim fundamentalists was the rise of the Taliban, whose ideology was the diametrical opposite of that of the original socialist/feminist plan.
There is a long history of the US government backing a country at first, then abandoning or even being outright hostile to them later. This is true not only of Afghanistan, but also of Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War, when the US backed the latter, giving them (or at least allowing them to acquire) their chemical and biological weapons, and Donald Rumsfeld was recorded on video shaking hands with Saddam Hussein), Panama (Manuel Noriega was a CIA asset for many years until the US government turned on him and invaded his country to apprehend him), and now, Ukraine, to name but a few examples. Recall Kissinger’s words on being friends with the US.
Once the USSR and Soviet Bloc were dissolved and Russia was plunged into economic turmoil in the 1990s, with most Russians never having wanted the Soviet system to end, and majorities of them consistently seeing its end as a bad thing, the Western ruling class no longer feared that their oppression of the working class would lead to a socialist revolution. So it was only a matter of time before NAFTA was signed into law, Welfare was gutted, and the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was enacted, allowing mergers and acquisitions in the media to lead eventually to 90% of the US media to be controlled by six corporations, meaning that most of Americans’ access to information would be controlled by the superrich and narrated by their bourgeois agendas.
By the mid-1990s, the Russians disliked their alcoholic president Yeltsin so much that many tried to vote the Communist Party back into power. But the US, under the Clinton administration, liked their Russian puppet so much that they helped manipulate things during the 1996 Russian election so Yeltsin could be reelected. This interference in that election was openly admitted to at the time…on the cover of Time magazine. The US government likes it when Russia is weak, not when she’s strong, as she would become under Putin–hence his demonization in our media.
The situation has been similar with regard to China, which brought back the market in the mid-1980s under Deng Xiaoping. The Western ruling class was content to have China be their factory, where they could outsource labour and pay for it with much lower wages; but now that China has risen economically and politically enough to challenge the global hegemony of the “rules-based international order,” the Western powers don’t like the country anymore, and in selling them billions of dollars in weapons, the US wants to use Taiwan against mainland China the same way they used Ukraine against Russia, as a stick with which to beat the offending country.
Remember that all the mainstream Western political parties support these aggressive policies, with few exceptions. Once the socialist states had been either dissolved, weakened, or made to revert to the market, the Western imperialists knew they could do anything they wanted to any country, and generally get away with it. This is why these political parties, whether right-wing or “left-wing,” should never be voted for by people who care about the working class and the global poor.
Part of thwarting all those countries that won’t bow to the will of the Western empire is to smear them with propaganda hostile to them. A tried-and-true tactic has been to identify ‘evil, tyrannical dictators,’ and insist on the need to remove them and replace them with ‘democratic’ ones (translation: replace them with leaders willing to cater to imperialist interests).
In recent history, we saw this in the first Iraq War against Saddam. Then it happened in the “humanitarian war” against Slobodan Milosevic in Yugoslavia. Then it happened to Saddam again in the 2000s. Then it happened to Gaddafi, who was, contrary to Western propaganda, actually a benevolent dictator who provided lots of social programs that helped Libyans; the resulting US/French/NATO intervention turned the once-most prosperous nation in Africa into a failed state with an open slave market. Then a protracted “civil war” in Syria destroyed the country and replaced the ‘tyrant’ Bashar al-Assad with an Al Qaeda/ISIS affiliated strongman.
Now, none of this is to say that these scapegoated and toppled heads of state were completely blameless. They don’t have to be, though, for us to be justified in opposing their being overthrown. The point is that it is the citizens of their respective countries who should be allowed to decide for themselves whether or not their leaders should have been removed, and not the empire. Furthermore, whoever is to replace them should be people who represent the genuine interests of the citizens of those countries, not the interests of the empire.
The same judgements apply to Iran, Russia, and China, the current targets of imperial aggression. Again, there are many aspects of the governments of these three countries that I, and many others on the left, find fault with. Such faults, however, do not justify starting wars with them.
A big problem with all the mainstream political parties is that they all, to at least some degree, advocate regime change, or have advocated regime change, in all or almost all of these countries with scapegoated governments. For this reason–as well as the reason I gave at the beginning of this section, that none of these parties do anything substantive about capitalist exploitation of the working class and immiseration of the poor–one should never vote for bourgeois political parties if one wants to see genuine progress for the common people. By now, people should know that capitalism and imperialism are inextricably intertwined.
III: Stop Uncritically Believing the Mainstream Media
I mentioned above how Bill Clinton’s signing of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 into law resulted in mergers and acquisitions in the media that in turn have led to 90% of American media being controlled by six corporations, and that this means that most of Americans’ access to information is being controlled by the wealthy and powerful. This means that the superrich, not representatives of ordinary people, decide what ‘the truth’ is and isn’t for us.
This problem is not limited to American reporting. There is a global network of media sources that reports essentially the same news stores with basically the same–typically pro-US/NATO–slant, just liberal and conservative variations on them, at most (note in this connection that ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal,’ properly understood, are just right-wing infighting). The reason for this bias is that the bourgeoisie all over the world have the same interests, in spite of such things as inter-imperialist conflict: they all want more for themselves and less for everyone else; this is why genuine leftist opinions are marginalized, if they’re even represented at all.
Even more fraudulent is that what is understood to be “left-wing” reporting is actually just liberalism: it caters to the interests of the Democratic Party (AOC, Sanders, Obama, “the Squad,” etc.), the Canadian Liberal Party (Justin Trudeau, as unapologetically avowed a Zionist as Biden is), the British Labour Party (whose Tony Blair, recall, backed George W. Bush in invading Iraq and promoting imperialism and neoliberalism in general), etc. Because of all of this deception, a huge swathe of the Western population doesn’t even know what the left actually represents ideologically. I’ve known people who call themselves “left-wing,” and in the same breath said they were going to vote for Kamala Harris!
The ruling class finds such political ignorance to be extremely useful. Let the masses believe the left is only about identity politics (‘The ascent of Obama and Harris means we have racial equality!…doesn’t it?’), vaguely defined notions of raising taxes (which 1., aren’t generally raised on the rich, and 2., are generally used to fund the military), ‘girlbosses’ (while one ‘girlboss,’ Hillary Clinton and her State Department, helped to oppose a pay raise from going to garment workers in Haiti), and…last, but not least…anti-Trump!
Now, I don’t like Trump any more than the average liberal, but if you’re going to oppose him, do so for the right reasons, not the partisan ones presented by the Democratic Party and the mainstream bourgeois liberal media. There is, of course, an epic catalogue of perfectly legitimate reasons to oppose the Trump agenda, but many of these are ignored by the blue side because, to be blunt, the blue supports them, too (or at least doesn’t have the guts to oppose him on them): the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine, no provision for the poor, banging the war drums against China, etc.
While Trump has obvious fascist tendencies (to put it mildly), his proper place in contemporary politics is as controlled opposition. The American public, and the West in general, are being manipulated by the media into believing that he, the GOP and Musk are the only things wrong with American politics, rather than the entire system as a whole, which I’ve been arguing. The entire system created the conditions that gave rise to Trump, and liberals need to confront this reality.
Though Obama has always been a darling of the media, portrayed as all grace, style, and class, with no scandals, the very object of liberal idolatry, what is given short shrift in the media is how he extended the Patriot Act, bailed out the banks just as Dubya did, enabled mass surveillance of American citizens, drone-bombed many, wrecked Libya (check the links above), enabled the genocide in Yemen, was the Deporter-in-Chief, and had seven countries bombed in 2016.
Conservatives made their own idiotic misrepresentations of Obama in the media, calling him a “socialist” and a “communist,” when in reality he was anything but. Apart from this distortion of the facts about him, it also reinforces the false narrative that the Democrats are “left-wing,” when as I explained above about LBJ, the left-leaning Democrats of the 1960s weren’t even all that left-leaning (which goes double for JFK, during whose administration the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion and Cuban Missile Crisis occurred).
Another thing orchestrated during Obama’s administration was yet another CIA-backed coup d’état in 2014 in Ukraine, which the mainstream bourgeois liberal media has called a ‘spontaneous and peaceful Euromaidan “revolution” by freedom-loving people.’ US neocon fingerprints were all over this catastrophe, the evidence including a recorded phone conversation between Victoria Nuland and US Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, in which they discussed their plans for the future of the country and she infamously said, “Fuck the EU.”
Why did this coup have to happen, for the sake of the neocon imperialist agenda? The democratically-elected Viktor Yanukovych had wanted to make arrangements with Russia to sort out Ukraine’s financial problems without needing to resort to loans from the IMF and thus be saddled with crushing debts and neoliberal policies putting the country in economic chains. Working with Putin’s Russia, of course, is absolutely verboten with the US/NATO empire, so Yanukovych had to go.
And who’s played a huge role in the government replacing that of Yanukovych? Ukrainian neonazi groups, including Svoboda, the Azov Battalion, and other Nazi sympathizers who idolize Stepan Bandera, of whom again the mainstream Western media speaks euphemistically as being mere ‘nationalists.’ Prior to the Russian intervention in Ukraine in late February of 2022, there were liberal media sources that would acknowledge Ukraine’s Nazi problem, though they tried to downplay it as best they could. Since the Russian intervention, though, the Western media has suddenly developed amnesia about the Ukrainian Nazis, and instead engages in denial and dismisses the issue as mere “Russian propaganda.”
Contrary to these denials, though, there has been a consistent strand within a significant minority of the Ukrainian population that has sympathized with fascism, a strand that goes back to around WWII. In the West’s Cold War against communism, the CIA gave aid to anti-Soviet resistance groups in Ukraine, including Bandera’s OUN, as can be seen in Operation Aerodynamic.
To get back to Obama’s sweeping deportations of ‘illegal’ immigrants, a policy continued during the Biden administration, the mainstream media says little of their guilt in the problem, while screaming hysterically when the Trump administrations have been guilty of the evil.
Similarly, when the Biden administration was arming and enabling the Israeli genocide of Gaza, little criticism in the mainstream media was given against the Democrats. When Trump, however, announced that he planned to have the surviving Gazans moved to either Egypt or Jordan so he could transform the devastation of Gaza into a kind of Monaco (also an egregious and outrageous continuation of the ethnic cleansing of the area), only then was the mainstream media in a furor over the plan.
The same can be said of Trump’s repressing of pro-Palestinian protestors: the Biden administration, in various forms, was trying to silence protest of the genocide, too.
The larger hypocrisy surrounding the whole Israel-Palestine problem, however, is in how up in arms the media has been about the Russia-Ukraine War–demonizing Putin for intervening in what, as of 2022, had already been going on for about eight years (more on that later)–while being mostly silent about the war crimes of Netanyahu and the IDF. Recall the warm reception that Netanyahu got in Congress, with only one Democrat, Rashida Tlaib, taking a principled stand against him in the room for the sake of the Palestinians.
What both ‘standing with Ukraine’ and being a Zionist have in common is supporting the interests of the Western empire, whether these supporters are consciously aware of it or not. As a racist, apartheid ethno-state, Israel is a crucial ally to the Western imperialists, as I’ve argued elsewhere, helping them gain a foothold in an area that’s extremely important to them geo-strategically and financially (all that Middle Eastern oil!). Because Israel epitomizes the evil of settler-colonialism (which has already caused devastation to the indigenous peoples of such places as what’s now the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand), Israel, to put it bluntly, should not exist. A one-state solution, Palestine–where communities of Jews may live with Muslims and Christians with full equal civil rights–is the only viable one to lead to a lasting peace in the region.
Similarly, a lasting peace in Eastern Europe will come only when the US and NATO stop provoking Russia; one wouldn’t know this, however, from listening to the lies and biased reporting of the Western media on the issue. It’s not the job of the Western media to inform us properly on what’s going on in the world. It’s their job, as mandated by their corporate bosses, in cahoots with the imperialist powers-that-be, to manufacture consent for all these wars, not only to advance the interests of managing the globe-spanning empire, but also to sell weapons so that defence contractors like Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, Raytheon, Northrup Grumman, etc., can keep their profits up. After all, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall necessitates this perpetuating of war for the sake of business.
It’s not that the average American consumer, or any Western consumer, of all this media propaganda is stupid: it’s that the manipulation of emotions has gotten that effective. Media manipulation has reached an amazing level of sophistication. It can toy with the fears, anger, and hopes of ordinary people, often enough reasonably intelligent people, in ways that we should find disturbing. For all of us, intelligent, simple, or everything in between, have emotional weaknesses that the ruling class can exploit with the media they own.
Two of the fundamental psychological defence mechanisms we have that they can take advantage of are projection and splitting. I’ve already mentioned the use of reaction formation to trick us into thinking that our governments’ intention is to spread “freedom and democracy” to countries like the former Soviet ones, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, and–in their future schemes–Russia and China. What they’ve actually done is wreck those countries and aggravate the oppression there. By “reaction formation,” recall, I mean the pretense of good intentions to mask evil ones.
Allied with reaction formation is psychological splitting, or black-and-white thinking. The fake good intentions of our ruling classes are the “white,” while the intentions of the governments of the countries targeted by imperialism are the “black.” Note how in this black and white, there is no grey area. Good is essentially all good, and bad is all bad. We’re not given the opportunity to explore moral ambiguity or nuance on either side.
Next, we see where projection comes into the mix. All the “black” of our own Western governments gets projected onto the targeted countries. They’re all the bad guys: we could never possibly be the bad guys. They tyrannize their people, so their governments have to be overthrown. Oh, sure, our governments have their share of problems, but they don’t need to be overthrown–they just need to be ‘reformed.’ It doesn’t even occur to us that the governments of the other countries just need reforms to fix what’s actually wrong with them.
Part of the appeal of splitting and projection of our problems onto those other countries is our own collective narcissism, as well as xenophobia towards all those…strange…countries that we actually just don’t know much about. Part of our susceptibility to splitting and projection is in how these defence mechanisms are among our most primitive and infantile emotions.
Melanie Klein noticed how babies of around four to six months old engage in what she called the paranoid-schizoid position–“paranoid,” because of the persecutory anxiety one feels towards those (the mother who frustrates her baby by not, for example, providing milk or other forms of care when the baby wants it) whom we split off as bad, fearing they’ll retaliate; and “schizoid,” referring to the spitting into absolute good and bad, this latter being projected onto the ‘bad’ one.
The paranoid-schizoid position (PS) doesn’t end in infancy, though: it returns again and again, from time to time, throughout one’s life, as does its opposite, the depressive position (D). As Wilfred Bion would put it in his shorthand, we oscillate between the two positions throughout life like this: PS <–> D.
Now, when we apply Kleinian psychoanalysis to our current political situation, in which what is wrong with our Western governments is split off and projected onto countries like Russia, China, Iran, etc., to realize that there’s a mix of good and bad in both Western and Eastern governments (just as a baby soon realizes that its mother is also a mix of good and bad) is a truly depressive position to take.
The West in modern history has always looked for enemies in other parts of the world to scapegoat and project onto: in the 20th century, the enemy was communism; in the 2000s, it was Islamic terrorism; by the 2010s, leaders like Gaddafi and Assad were fingered, while the propaganda against Putin was building; and now, all eyes are on China. This has all gone on while neoliberal capitalism has been tightening its grip on our necks, enabled by both conservative and liberal political parties in the West. It is depressing to realize how depraved the corruption is in our own countries, and how much we must focus on that, rather than what’s going on elsewhere.
Let’s look at what the Biden administration did, and what liberals consider an ‘acceptable’ alternative to Trump. He did little, if anything, significant in terms of improving the American healthcare system, and this is when the pandemic was killing off so many. Instead of using taxpayer money to help the American poor, billions were pumped into providing weapons to Ukraine to fight an unwinnable war with a country armed to the teeth with thousands of nuclear weapons, risking WWIII. Worst of all, his administration also sent millions of dollars worth of weapons to Israel to aid it in its genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
We can’t just blame this on one man’s ineptitude. In his mounting dementia, Biden probably didn’t do much more than just sign the paperwork and approve the decisions that those working with him (Harris, Blinken, etc.) made. How much worse does the Democratic Party have to get (nuclear brinksmanship, genocide, widening the gap between the rich and the poor, etc.) before liberals finally face the truth that they aren’t even a “lesser evil” than Trump? The entire system is the problem.
Now, as far as Putin is concerned, he is far from being my political ideal. He’s a bourgeois reactionary politician with obvious authoritarian tendencies, and I disapprove of his conservative stance on LGBT issues. That said, though, people need to grow up and stop seeing him as some kind of comic book villain. He doesn’t have horns or hooves. The Western media has been saturated with scary images and narratives about how ‘evil’ he is and that he wants to build an empire out of Eastern Europe. There is no proof of such ambitions. The annexation of Crimea was supported in a referendum by the great majority of people living there, ethnic Russians who know better than to live in a country with Russophobic Nazis in its government and military. I don’t care that the Western media dismissed the referendum results as ‘illegitimate.’ I’ll believe the Russians before I believe US/NATO propaganda any day, and here’s why:
IV: The Ukraine Debacle
Recall earlier what I said about projection. It applies perfectly to this situation about Putin’s seeming ambitions over dominating Europe, and the way some people idiotically call him “Putler.” It is the US that has had territorial ambitions over Europe, and NATO is used for this purpose, for NATO is an extension of US imperialism.
NATO was originally formed in 1949 as a reaction to the rise of the Soviet Bloc after the end of WWII. When the USSR and the Soviet Bloc had dissolved by the early 1990s, one would have thought that NATO wouldn’t be needed anymore.
But here we are now, with more NATO than ever.
It must be emphasized that NATO was never a friend to Russia, so expanding the alliance closer and closer to Russia’s borders was not going to go over well, and those pushing for NATO’s enlargement would have known Russia’s objections to it better than anyone…but they still pushed for it, which should tell you something about their real motives.
The US, though not formally called an empire, is the real empire of the world, with hundreds of military bases in countries spanning the globe, including many all over Europe, which were put there at the end of WWII. The Marshall Plan further cemented Europe’s economic dependence on the US, as well as the European capitalists’ fears of Soviet revolutions on the continent.
An example of European subservience to the US can be seen in their timid reaction to the Nordstream pipeline bombing, an act of eco-terrorism that was so obviously the result of scheming in the US government (with help from Norway) that Biden and Nuland practically confessed their guilt. Seymour Hersh did so thorough an investigation of what happened that he detailed exactly how the sabotage was carried out. The motive? to get Germany to stop buying Russian oil and instead buy the more expensive American oil. Barely a peep of complaint against the US was made by those in power in Europe, so in the thrall of US hegemony are they; Hersh’s article, of course, has been dismissed, or at least doubted, by the mainstream media.
But to get back to Russia, NATO, and Ukraine, our story really begins back at the time of the reunification of Germany. Gorbachev was promised by the Americans that the absorption of all of Germany into NATO would result in the Western alliance not moving “one inch” eastward. This wasn’t just a promise that would later be broken. It was an outright lie.
In the late 1990s, that move eastward would begin with the inclusion of the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary; Russia was already making their displeasure with this enlargement known. Russia was particularly upset when, in 2004, the three Baltic States–Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania–joined NATO; they were originally part of the Soviet Union, and thus once part of the Warsaw Pact. NATO was creeping closer and closer to Russia’s borders.
Things really came to a head by the late 2000s, when the Bush administration pushed for the inclusion of Ukraine and Georgia in NATO, two countries right on Russia’s border, and thus a red line for Putin.
All of these provocations, combined with the 2014 coup in Ukraine that I discussed above in Part III, give us the needed historical context in which to understand why Russia invaded the country in late February of 2022. The invasion didn’t happen because ‘Putin bad, Putin bad.’ It didn’t happen because Putin has imperialist ambitions to take over Europe. Indeed, though there are some ulterior motives behind the Russian invasion–those of the mundane capitalist sort involving the taking of Ukraine’s natural resources–such an imperialism, if it can even be called that, is minuscule in comparison to that of the US and NATO.
No–the real, essential reason for the Russian intervention is what happened during the years between the 2014 coup and the 2022 intervention. The Nazis, who since the coup became a part of the Ukrainian government and military, hate the ethnic Russians of the eastern Donbass region of Ukraine, and they enacted discriminatory legislation against those Russians, including banning their right to use their language. Naturally, those Russians rebelled against the Nazis’ bigotry, and a civil war began.
The Donbass Russians tried to establish autonomy, similar to the breaking-away of Crimea. The Ukrainian Nazis responded with an eight-year attempt at ethnic cleansing, resulting in turn with the killing of thousands of ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine. These provocations and atrocities are what distinguish Ukrainian fascism from that of other countries, including even Russia. Was Putin just supposed to sit back and let this killing go on undeterred?
Note that eight years of that civil war went on before he sent his troops in. In the meantime, he acted in good faith with European leaders to work out a peace agreement, the Minsk Accords. During this time, those on the other side of the bargaining table were actually buying time so that a sufficient number of weapons could be sent to Ukraine…including the Javelins that Trump sent!…so the Ukrainians could be ready for war. If it had really been Putin’s intention to invade just for the sake of invading, why wait eight years to do so? Why not go in much sooner, before Ukraine got all the weapons?
It was the US and NATO who wanted this war, not Russia. Because a direct war between Russia and the US/NATO would have meant WWIII and possible nuclear annihilation, even the psychopaths leading the Western governments didn’t want that, so they opted for a proxy war instead, getting the Ukrainians to do their dirty work for them…just as they’d used the mujahideen to bleed the Soviet Union dry in the 1980s, and for the exact same reason.
To understand what’s really going on in the world, one must see it from a global perspective, not just from that of our local area. It is a reality we learn from history that all empires rise and fall: Persia, Ancient Greece, Rome, the Ottoman Empire, Britain, and now, the American empire. The US has been losing a number of wars over the past several decades, two of the prominent ones being Vietnam and, recently, Afghanistan. De-dollarization has played a role, too.
As the US empire is falling, new powers are rising, including Russia and China. The psychopathic leaders of the Western governments will never accept this supplanting of their global hegemony (such a refusal to accept it is implied in the existence of PNAC). This changing global reality, the emergence of BRICS to create a new, multipolar world order, is the real reason for all of this hostility in the media against Russia and China.
Hence, the caricaturing of Putin and Xi Jinping as evil schemers bent on world domination–a projection of that same lust for power that our own Western heads of state have. It’s painful to face the fact that it’s our own leaders in the West who are the bad guys, but it’s a fact that we must face.
A number of Western political pundits have been warning for years that a provocation of war between Russia and Ukraine would not end well. These pundits include John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs: these two men are Americans, and their opposition to the US/NATO agenda, blaming it for having caused the war, is not “Russian propaganda.” It’s basic common sense. We have seen in recent months (as of this article’s publication) how Mearsheimer’s prediction that Ukraine would “get wrecked” has come all too true.
Now, agreeing with Trump that an end to this war should be sought is not the same as viewing him as a ‘good guy.’ Ending this war is a no-brainer: even an asshole like Trump can see that. Him wanting peace, in and of itself, is a case of broken clocks being right twice a day. To use another clarifying metaphor, Trump’s wish to end the Russia/Ukraine war is a small island of good in an ocean of all the evil things his administration is doing. I assume you already know what many, if not most, of what those evil things are, Dear Reader, so I won’t enumerate them here.
As for Trump’s agenda on Ukraine, though, I feel I should point out a number of the bad things here. His removal of military aid to the country to end the war is not, of course, out of compassion for the suffering Ukrainians; he’s being tight with money, just as he is with making the other NATO members pay ‘their share’ into NATO, or with allowing Musk to cut funding to many American government programs. It’s all part of the whole neoliberal culture of cutting spending, regardless of whether people need that spending or not, that has been plaguing the US and the rest of the world since the Reagan and Thatcher years.
Added to this problem is the fact that Trump wants Ukraine to give the US its rare earth minerals as ‘compensation’ for all the military aid the Biden administration gave to the war-torn country. This is tantamount to a colonizing of Ukraine, imperialistically stealing its natural resources for the profit of the US. The US covets these resources so they can be used for producing electronics, including smartphones, batteries, and electric cars; it also covets them because China has so many of its own rare earth minerals.
So what we see here is yet another example of the American empire in its toxic relationship of ‘idealize, devalue, discard’ in its attitude towards other countries. Ukraine was useful to the US for a time, hence the idolizing of Zelenskyy as a ‘hero’–indeed, provoking Russia with this war has meant that Russia was too busy to continue helping Syria, and now that Assad has been overthrown, replaced with Jolani and his band of murderers killing such groups as Alawites in a new genocide, and Israel is free to capture a big chunk of Syrian land–but now that Ukraine is no longer useful to imperialist interests, the US no longer feels a need to “stand with Ukraine,” and we’ve seen how Zelenskyy has been tossed aside.
So with Ukraine now abandoned, as have so many other puppet states, reminding us of Kissinger’s words about the lethality of friendship with the US, the GOP under Trump can focus on the war that they feel is the urgent one: the coming war on China. As I said above, the US/NATO empire cannot bear to let any other country rise above it, and China’s miraculous rise from the once ‘sick man of Asia’ to an economy to rival that of the US simply cannot be tolerated, hence the Western media’s demonizing of Xi Jinping no less than Putin.
Now, part of Trump’s plan has been to make a deal with Russia so it will team up with the US against China. This is idiotic wishful thinking on Trump’s part. Say what you like against Putin–he isn’t a stupid man, though. After the US has fucked over Russia so many times over the decades, why would Putin trust Russia’s sworn enemy? Speaking of enemies, though…
V: China is Not the West’s Enemy
To be frank, I find a lot to criticize about ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics.’ While I can understand China’s need to bring back the market in order to build up the country’s productive forces, the country’s economic rise has demonstrated that it is ready now to return, in some sense, at least, to its MLM roots. Though the lifting of millions of Chinese out of extreme poverty is both commendable and impressive, and the punishing of Chinese billionaires by the government for fraudulent actions and corruption is a sign that the will of the people is being acknowledged, the very continuing existence of billionaires in the country, a socialist state, with extreme wealth inequality, still sticks in my gut.
That all said, though, the last thing we need is for China to be yet another target for regime change, especially by the American empire. The CPC being the CPC (as opposed to the GOP or the DNC), can be reformed to make the changes I wish to see in the country; its government doesn’t need to be overthrown, as do those of…certain other countries. As with Russia, any changes to be made in the political system of China are to be decided by the locals themselves, not by Western imperialists.
Now that the American empire is turning its gaze away from Russia and Ukraine (having wrecked the latter), it is now aiming its predatory instincts on China. The propaganda machine is going to say that China means to invade Taiwan, so the West must intervene to save the island I live on. Bullshit.
As I said above, the real issue that the US imperialists are worried about is the rise of China as a new global power. Such a rise will compromise American hegemony and preeminence, and the US ruling class cannot tolerate such a sharing of prestige.
Of course, there is the idea that the US and China could simply learn how to cooperate and make business deals that would be mutually beneficial for everyone; but there’s always this mentality that the American political right has to be better than everyone else, they have to compete instead of cooperate, and so a partnership with China is out of the question. Hence, Trump’s tariffs and trade wars, and all the needless destructiveness, price rises, and other problems these will cause.
One thing that particularly upsets the American ruling class is the possibility that China will take control of, and capitalize on, TSMC in Taiwan. This is why a new TSMC foundry is being built in Arizona. It will take a very long time before this new American branch can be brought up to speed so it can be on a level comparable to the Taiwanese foundry, so they can’t outright replace the original any time soon.
Still, there has been contemplation, if a war between China and the US over Taiwan breaks out, of the idea of the US destroying the Taiwanese TSMC so that China can’t take advantage of it at the expense of the US. Such a move on the part of the US would be foolish in the extreme, given how important the Taiwanese foundry is to the world economy and the making of so much of our tech; but the psychopaths in the Western governments are just that desperate to thwart China’s rise.
Regardless of whether or not the US is planning to destroy the Taiwanese TSMC, still, a war with China would still be an utterly insane thing to do. Not only would it be needless–contrary to all the propaganda, China has no desire to invade Taiwan; they want a peaceful reunification with the island, which most countries worldwide have acknowledged as already being a province of China, and they have been amazingly patient about waiting for this reunification, meaning to use military force only as a last resort–it would also be terribly destructive to the world economy, and with China’s hundreds of nuclear weapons, there’s once again the risk of nuclear war, just as there is with hostility to Russia.
As a resident of Taiwan, I naturally want to prevent my home from turning into a war zone. It’s so easy for Westerners to sit at their computers and phones in the safety of their homes there, putting up Ukrainian, or, in this case, Taiwanese flags on their online profile pages, saying “I stand with (either place),” yet they won’t be in the places where the fighting and bombing is going on. I, on the other hand, will be in one of those places.
The fear that foreign forces, be they communists, Islamic terrorists, Russians, Chinese, etc., are trying to come in and destroy the US is not only a right-wing idea, but it’s also another example of projection. As I’ve tried to demonstrate with my many, but far from complete, examples is that it’s the US imperialists and their NATO lackeys who have been going into other countries, interfering with their political processes either through manipulating the vote (Russia, 1996–showing the hypocrisy of the thoroughly debunked ‘Russiagate’ conspiracy theory) or through coups d’état, and bombing and destabilizing them. American conservatives and liberals have to start recognizing their hypocrisy when they imagine others trying to destroy them, while turning the other way when their own leaders destroy other lands, like Syria, Gaza, Libya, Yemen, etc.
And while I have no love for Trump whatsoever, I can also see the idea of him being pals with Putin as yet another wish to project American-born evil out of the US and put it in Russia. Trump’s bigotry and insensitivity to the needs of marginalized people and to those of the Earth are clearly a result of his having been raised in, and receiving the enculturation of, American capitalism. Putin didn’t need to teach Trump any new vices. Trump is no aberration in a country founded on black slavery and the genocide of the Native Americans. He personifies the culmination of centuries of these vices. Trump is the naked empire, as opposed to the clothed Democrats–smooth, glib talkers like Obama. Trump isn’t the entire problem or even the bulk of the problem–the system as a whole is.
VI: Conclusion–What is to be Done?
When we begin to understand that the problem is not this personality vs that one (e.g., Trump vs Biden, or Trump vs Sanders), nor is it this political party vs that one (GOP vs DNC, Tory vs Labour, Conservatives, Liberals, or NDP, etc.), and we realize instead that it’s the entire capitalist/imperialist system that is the problem, then we can orient our thinking towards a real, meaningful solution. Part of that orientation is understanding that voting doesn’t work.
To paraphrase what George Carlin once said, the politicians aren’t worth thinking about because the only reason they’re there is to create the illusion that voters actually have a choice in the direction their government is going…they don’t. They have owners–the capitalist class, who own the politicians, the media (conservative and liberal), the police, the banks, etc.
Multinational investment companies, or “shadow banks,” like BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, etc., own trillions of dollars each and invest in everything from weapons-making companies to the media to pharmaceuticals to our food. They control just about everything. Do you really think they’re going to allow you to vote in someone who will tax them out of their wealth?
And these considerations bring me to my next point, which I’m sure will be a sensitive one as far as the liberal supporters of Bernie Sanders are concerned. We all know how passionate he is in his denunciations of Trump, Musk, and the rest of the American oligarchy. He has done some good in galvanizing the masses, so I’ll give credit where credit is due.
Still, where Sanders could be a start for many of the left-leaning liberal persuasion, he cannot be the end. He is weak on US foreign policy, he supports Zionism, and he backs a number of, if not most or all of, the establishment policies I critiqued above. To make real, substantive changes in American domestic and foreign policy, and to take down the oligarchs in a way that all his fiery rhetoric against them cannot even come close to doing, liberals must go beyond Bernie Sanders: this article explains why in minute detail, far beyond the scope of my blog post.
What is needed is not another fiery speaker who just denounces Trump, Musk, and the GOP in general, then leads the masses by the nose and at the last minute drops out of the race and tells his followers to go behind the next Democratic corporate whore. Sanders has done this twice already, as I mentioned above, with the awful Hillary Clinton, then with Biden, the worst president the US has had so far (though, to be fair, in Trump’s first few weeks, he has already worked hard to out-worse Biden’s worst, but still…). Sanders is the sheepdog of the US left, and liberals need to face this fact if change is really what they want. He’s betrayed us before; he’ll do it again.
Even if…par miracle!…Sanders, AOC, Jill Stein, or anyone like that got voted in, someone like that in the US, or their equivalents in any of the other countries of the Anglo/American/Western world, there is simply no way that the oligarchs would allow them to legislate them out of their wealth. Nobody knows this reality better than the left-leaning politicians themselves, who are so enmeshed in the corruption of the system. The rhetoric of someone like Sanders is there to raise people’s hope, then in the end, to let us all down.
What the people need to do instead is to start a grassroots political movement, one outside of the corrupt establishment completely. First, we educate, agitate, and organize. Build up the unions. Do a few general strikes. The ultimate goal, however, is not to have a political party to vote for, since as I said above, voting won’t stop the oligarchs by even the weight of an atom.
The political party must prepare for revolution.
Revolution is not voting. It’s not “working within the system.” It isn’t “reforming” the system. It isn’t a dinner party. Revolution is doing something I don’t dare say on FB for fear of enduring the annoyance of FB jail.
Revolution means overthrowing our governments.
I’ve never once said that this would be easy. With militarized police and AI-enhanced surveillance, accomplishing such a feat will be desperately hard.
But there is no other way.
In my heart, I don’t like violence any more than the next person; but it isn’t a matter of liking violence–it’s simply the only way to end our oppression. If we try to keep alive the fruitless hope of voting for the liberal parties again and foolishly thinking we can nudge them to the left by even a millimetre, we’ll only be enabling them, conservative or liberal, to move even further in the direction of fascism.
Young, able-bodied people are going to have to fight this fight. As for people like me, in our mid-50s, we’ll have to pull a Ben Kenobi here: “I’m getting too old for this sort of thing.” The young must go to the gym–work out, lift weights–and get training in the use of weapons and guerrilla tactics. I wish it hadn’t come to this, but it has. They must do this because the right-wing, fascist sympathizers have already been doing this for years, and our side must be ready for them.
Whatever we do, we can no longer afford to fool ourselves with thinking that only the conservatives are the problem (e.g., replace Trump and Musk with another Democrat, and we’ll build from there). The system is the problem. If we want our world to avoid ecological and societal collapse, and avoid nuclear war, the entire global system must be overthrown as soon as possible.
This isn’t about dreaming of a lofty, impossible-to-attain utopia. It’s about our basic survival. Either the system dies, or we die.
Infinite Ocean 
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