The United States is what happens when the type of settler-colonial project which Israel is carrying out has succeeded at assimilating an entire continent. The racial inequities, right-wing terrorist attacks, growing militarization of police, deeply paranoid political climate, and systemic dysfunction that this country is afflicted with are all symptoms of the genocide that the U.S. was built upon. They reveal the deeply unstable foundation that lies beneath all the propaganda about us living in some kind of cohesive “American nation.”
This is the type of phony nationalistic propaganda that’s being proliferated by the parallel genocidal projects which U.S. imperialism is carrying out in Palestine, eastern Ukraine, and the other locations where Washington’s geopolitical interests demand for the destruction of additional nations. The colonization of the indigenous First Nations on this continent has served as the origin point for these global national erasure campaigns, both in terms of the imperialist interests behind them and in terms of their ideological justifications.
The annexation of Native land was done through proto-Zionism, where American exceptionalist religious groups like the Mormons carved out European settlements throughout the 19th century under the Zionist goal of reconstructing the Jewish nation to its Old Testament state. This tactic of manufacturing a perceived mandate for colonialism via biased interpretations of the Bible has since been adopted by the Zionists within Palestine, who’ve used this superstitious rationale for land grabs as a foundation for the “Israeli” national identity that they’ve constructed.
This nationalism claims to represent Jewish identity, yet the dark-skinned Jews within Israel are deprived of the rights that the light-skinned Ashkenazi Jews have. Zionism is not Jewish supremacy, but white supremacy that co-opts the cause for Jewish sovereignty. And as Al Jazeera’s Yoav Litvin writes, Zionism’s fascist goals are further apparent in the fact that it’s seen by fascists as a tactic for isolating the Jews to Israel:
Early Zionists syncretised many aspects of European fascism, white supremacy, colonialism and messianic Evangelism and had a long and sordid history of cooperating with anti-Semites, imperialists and fascists in order to promote exclusivist and expansionist agendas. In fact, throughout the past century, anti-Semites and Zionists have worked towards the mutual interest of concentrating Jews in Israel; the former as a means of scapegoating and expelling an unwanted population, and the latter to combat the “demographic threat” posed by native Palestinians. Further, both anti-Semites and Zionists construct Jews as a biological race, which needs to be segregated as part of a utopia of global apartheid.
It’s this synthetic national identity, one where the world’s Jews are meant to live in one place and where some Jews are more equal than others, that’s built atop the indigenous nations — both Palestinian and Jewish — which already exist within the area. Like American patriotism, this nationalism is based around the glorification of an oppressor nation. It incentivises regular Israelis to form a cultural consensus that genocide of the Palestinians is necessary. It lets Israeli settlers feel comfortable with seeking out front row seats to the bombings of Gaza. It cultivates right-wing extremist elements which whip up crowds in support of mass murder. It’s a nationhood that’s centered around reaction to perceived threats, parallel to how movements like “Back the Blue” emerge within the U.S. in response to black expressions of resistance to America’s racist police state. The objective within both of these manufactured cultures is to wage perpetual war against the colonized nations.
In Ukraine, the imperialists are cultivating something which mirrors this. Since the 2014 U.S. coup that installed a Nazi government in Ukraine for the purpose of scoring a cold war point against Russia, ultranationalism and war fever have forced themselves onto the country. The fascist government has held up Ukraine’s Nazi collaborators and Holocaust perpetrators as heroic founders of the country, and has illegalized the mere act of publicly challenging these glorifications. Nazi-fabricated Soviet atrocities like the “Holodomor” have been aggressively pushed by the government as part of its justification to outlaw communist organizing. And militias have been unleashed to carry out ethnic cleansing against the one-third of the people within the country who hold ethnic ties to Russia. Jews, Romas, and the LGBT community have been targets of these terror campaigns as well.
As Moscow-based international affairs analyst Mark Sleboda assessed last month in response to the Ukrainian government’s recent escalations of the anti-Russian proxy war, these internal acts of ethnic cleansing and repression are “an attempt to rewrite the political DNA, the geopolitical orientation of Ukraine permanently to the West. And they needed this blank slate without any political representation of East Ukraine to do that. This is a nation-building project. Nations are largely built, they have some limited amount of organic elements. But they do require a historical basis. In order to create an anti-Russian Ukraine, the only real period of history they have to fall back on to create this is these World War II-era Nazi collaborators.”
It’s no surprise that Israel has been sending rifles to the Azov Battalion, the neo-Nazi militia and terrorist organization that’s been carrying out the post-2014 Ukrainian government’s warfare against both Russia and against internal undesirables. These fascist powers are collaborating to solidify the national identities which they depend upon for perceived legitimacy. And Washington is eager to export its own genocidal nation-building model to these places, spreading the disease of colonialism to the doorsteps of imperialism’s latest expansionist war zones.
This campaign to export Americanism’s evils extends to the nonprofit-industrial complex, which as Al Jazeera’s Azeezah Kanji writes is letting U.S. colonialism aid colonial projects both in Israel and in fascist India: “Americans are among those who donate the most to Israeli legal organisation Honenu — which specialises in securing exculpation for settlers who attack Palestinians and providing financial support to their families…A similar Goliath-as-David inversion complex is manifest by Hindutva and Buddhist nationalist organisations, which depict themselves as bravely standing up to Muslims and other minorities being crushed underfoot by the Indian and Myanmar states. The US is the new virtual homeland of the Hindu Rashtra ‘nation.’” The manufacturing of this “nation,” which has involved India’s colonization of Kashmir, also entails an ever-escalating genocideagainst the country’s Islamic population where Hindutva fascists regularly murder random Muslims — especially Muslim children.
The patterns within imperialism’s modern fascist nation-building project is clear: propaganda campaigns designed to create perceived credibility for genocidal nations, the crushing of opposition, ethnic and cultural cleansing against disfavored groups. There’s a reason why Israel has some sort of tie to every one of these projects: Zionism is a laboratory in necro-politics, where intensive policing, mass extermination, and nationalistic propaganda have gotten innovated on to fulfill the ever-challenging task of preserving Israel’s existence. This laboratory’s findings have then gone into strengthening the tools of repressive governments around the world, from the Gulf monarchies to the United States itself.
Perhaps the most direct example of a colonialist regime that’s taking direction from Zionism is Colombia, which has been massacring anti-austerity protesters during the same time that Israel has been carrying out its genocidal invasion of Gaza. Hugo Chavez has called Colombia the “Israel of Latin America,” speaking to parallels between the two like extrajudicial killings and forced displacements of indigenous communities. The Colombian colonists take pride in these similarities. Belen Fernandez of Middle East Eye writes that Colombia has “been a privileged collaborator with the Israeli arms industry, and former Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos — Duque’s predecessor — starred in a 2011 promotional video for an Israeli private security firm. This same Santos issued an upbeat response to Chavez’s critique: ‘We’ve even been accused of being the Israelites [sic] of Latin America, which personally makes me feel really proud.’”
Zionism’s doctrine for crushing Palestinian resistance, which centers around slaughtering Palestinian civilians, is being replicated within Colombia with help from the same types of Nazis who are leading Ukraine’s war for the establishment of an anti-Russian “nation.” The neo-Nazi Lopez Tapia, the former leader of the disbanded Chilean fascist party the New Homeland Society, has been advising Colombia’s police on how to maximize violence against protesters while laying out a doctrine for the country’s military on how to crush a hypothetical lower class uprising.
Alvaro Uribe, the former president who’s masterminding the campaign of police terror, has had this Nazi-inspired doctrine resonate with him, expanding upon it to reference the “Dissipated Molecular Revolution” framework for suppressing revolts. This framework, which was formulated by the Colombian fascist propaganda innovator Alexis Lopez, has been described by Uribe along the lines of:
-Strengthen the armed forces of the colonial government, while weakening the armed forces of the anti-colonial groups by equating them with terrorists and with Cuba’s communist government
-Portray the threat of this “terrorism” as greater than previously imagined
-Accelerate the social engineering of the country in a reactionary direction, which can be accomplished with anti-communist propaganda, aggressive nationalism, and the erasure or censorship of the organs of class struggle
-“Resist” the “Dissipated Molecular Revolution,” which means spin a narrative about the forces of class struggle being part of a broad-reaching conspiracy that originates from “Castro-Chavismo” and “gender ideology” so that these forces can be coherently demonized and therefore snuffed out on a “molecular” level.
This is the sense of nationhood that U.S. imperialism cultivates, both within its borders and within the nations it seeks to build around the globe: a wildly paranoid worldview that demands obsessive and perpetual warfare against perceived enemies of the nation, whether ethnic, religious, or political. As the forces of capitalist reaction converge within the United States amid imperialism’s deepening crises, a fanatical Christian nationalism will fill the role of America’s internal Azov Battalion, Zionism, Hindutva fascism, or Dissipated Molecular Revolution doctrine.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pinch during late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here.
No comments:
Post a Comment