Western media have erased from history all the western provocations which led to the war in Ukraine, they only report pro-western narratives, they hide Ukrainian casualties and ignore the Nord Stream pipeline bombing, then they tell you to worry about foreign propaganda.
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Every now and then I like to highlight the fact that all this China stuff was forcast way back in 2004 by Michael Parenti, who said that the unipolarist neoconservative ideology that had hijacked US foreign policy envisioned a massive strategic confrontation with Beijing.
“The PNAC plan envisions a strategic confrontation with China, and a still greater permanent military presence in every corner of the world,” Parenti wrote in his book Superpatriot. “The objective is not just power for its own sake but power to control the world’s natural resources and markets, power to privatize and deregulate the economies of every nation in the world, and power to hoist upon the backs of peoples everywhere — including North America — the blessings of an untrammeled global ‘free market.’ The end goal is to ensure not merely the supremacy of global capitalism as such, but the supremacy of American global capitalism by preventing the emergence of any other potentially competing superpower.”
“PNAC” refers to Project for the New American Century, the wildly influential neoconservative think tank whose members played a critical role in pushing the Iraq invasion. Since that time PNAC’s vision for the future has quietly become the mainstream US foreign policy consensus.
After the fall of the Soviet Union the US government espoused a doctrine of securing US unipolar planetary domination by ensuring no rival superpowers develop, nicknamed the Wolfowitz Doctrine after the Pentagon official who supervised its drafting. Paul Wolfowitz would later become a PNAC member.
What we’re witnessing now is this doctrine of maintaining unipolar hegemony at all cost colliding with the emergence of a multipolar world order, carried largely by the rise of China toward superpower status. Parenti saw this coming because like PNAC he saw that these two factors must necessarily collide.
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The western left is absolute dogshit on war and empire. Pure fucking dogshit. Those who don’t outright cheer for imperial militarism ignore it altogether, or don’t place nearly enough emphasis on it. Those placing an appropriate amount of emphasis on it are a small minority.
And of course that’s not ultimately all their fault; they’re swimming in the same ocean of empire propaganda and psyops as everyone else. But as we’re accelerating toward a global conflict of unfathomable horror this dereliction of duty is getting less and less acceptable. This needs to change.
Sure there are other problems we’ve got to worry about, but none of those other problems are going to matter when we’re all dying in a nuclear holocaust. There’s no excuse for anyone who thinks of themselves as anti-imperialist to fail to stand against the empire’s brinkmanship. The US empire is rapidly ramping up aggressions against Russia and China simultaneously and in many sectors of the American left this is getting less attention than the fucking presidential election that’s almost two years away. This isn’t healthy, and it isn’t acceptable.
People on the left — including some pretty influential ones — used to mock me for warning that mounting Russia hysteria was being used to pave the way for reckless escalations against Moscow. Now we’re closer to nuclear war than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
This isn’t something you can just ignore. This isn’t something you can put on the back burner for when you have time. The fate of our entire species is being threatened by the empire’s campaign to secure unipolar planetary hegemony; not later on in the future, but right now.
People are watching this, and people are noticing. If the western left doesn’t step up its game on opposing brinkmanship between nuclear-armed major powers, other political factions are going to step in and fill the void. If/when that happens, we’ll have no one to blame but ourselves.
At what point are we going to wake up and start saying no to this? It has to be soon, because if you wait until a world war between nuclear powers has actually started, you’ve already waited too long. I highly recommend people get moving on this.
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There’s a tendency to look at the prospect of nuclear war as an almost philosophical or spiritual subject, probably because you have to have such a big-picture perspective to consider it properly. But it’s a very concrete matter concerning actual, physical warheads and actual, physical people.
We know that these weapons can end the world, and we know that they will do so under an increasingly likely set of circumstances. This is not religious end-times prophesying, this is an objective, scientific fact about a material situation that our leaders knowingly put us in.
The fact that we are closer to nuclear annihilation than at any point since the Cuban Missile Crisis is not some act of God or fate or something that’s passively happening like the weather, it’s the result of concrete decisions made by concrete people with names and addresses. The fact that we could all die in a nuclear holocaust and the after effects thereof is right now a solid, material reality, and it should be treated like one. We should be doing everything we can to demand our leaders change their policies to make that outcome far less likely.
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The difference between western liberals and the Proud Boys is that the Proud Boys are self-described “western chauvinists” who promote the belief that “west is best”, whereas western liberals espouse these positions without voicing them out loud.
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The most dangerous supremacist belief system in the world is American supremacism, because the belief that the US should rule the world has humanity on a direct trajectory toward hot military confrontation between multiple nuclear-armed nations.
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Spiritual enlightenment, inner work, personal psychology, journalism, political activism and geopolitical analysis are all different aspects of the same one thing. In their authentic forms they’re all just different manifestations of the human quest for truth: the quest to learn the truth and to let it inform the way reality expresses, whether that expression is in the way our own minds operate or in the way human civilization as a whole is shaped.