Our era’s anti-communist propaganda campaign is the ideological facet of the great reactionary drive that’s taking place amid the growing crises of capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism. Animated by a frenzy of hatred and lies that’s being directed against socialist countries like China and the DPRK, it’s designed to permeate all parts of our political spectrum, media, and ruling institutions. But however much the ruling class tightens its grip in these ways, the U.S./NATO empire’s socioeconomic system is going to continue on its path towards ruin, ultimately driving its supporting imperialist and colonialist structures towards instability.
The warning signs of capitalism’s further descent into economic anemia, especially within the imperial center the United States, become more apparent as Biden fruitlessly tries to bring about a recovery from our current depression. The country’s elites have set us up for a financial crash that will be worse than the one from 2008, tying our economy into a debt bubble which has made it so that this time the entire market — not just the housing market — has effectively been “subprimed.” As the Federal Reserve desperately tries to compensate for this by printing record amounts of money, the material basis for the economy’s functionings fails to meet the ephemeral profit numbers that Wall Street has created for itself. The economic shocks we’ve experienced this last year are just the beginning of a wave of bigger ones, which unlike this one likely won’t even be marginally recoverable. And that’s to say nothing of the ways the climate crisis will throw the economy (and capitalist civilization in general) into dysfunction in the coming decades.
It’s this reality of the bourgeois order’s terminal economic shrinkage, of a deficiency in capitalism’s ability to maintain its own essential faculties despite its best efforts at self-fortification, that’s provoking a reaction of militaristic paranoia from the system’s defenders. The country’s far-right — which in the long term will be the political faction that takes full control over the U.S. as the country’s process of decline continues — has taken up the policy of blaming China and communism for every death that’s been caused by Covid-19. Last year Kuzzat Altay, president of the hate group-affiliated Uyghur American Association, claimed that “China Purposefully, intentionally exported the virus to cause the pandemic. 550,000 people died. No war has killed more people than China’s Virus war.”
These kinds of garbage conspiracy theories, which have been inspiring a spate of anti-Asian hate crimes within the U.S. like March’s shooting where eight Asians died in Atlanta, serve to create an ideological buffer for the ultra-nationalism that figures like Altay seek to propagate. This week Altay tweeted, “Many Muslims around the world blame America. America is not an enemy. Ignorance (Jahiliyyah) is.” The campaign of violence that the U.S. continues to unleash upon the Muslim world, with Biden sustaining the drone wars which are known to regularly kill Muslim civilians, means nothing to people like Altay. All they care about is trying to fortify the capitalist-imperialist power structure, which they know can only be done through massive violence.
Despite a declaration from U.S.-funded Uyghur activists last month at a Stop Asian Hate rally that they’re going to “wipe out China,” China won’t be subdued like the Soviet Union was. The closest that Washington can get to realizing its vision for Balkanizing China through the formation of a jihadist Uyghur ethnostate in Xinjiang is to inflict economic damage to Xinjiang through sanctions, a maneuver that’s already backfired; the Chinese masses have united in outrage against Washington’s slanderous charges of a Uyghur “genocide” and its economic warfare against the Chinese people, destroying all internal political influence the U.S. may have once had over China.
Plus, China’s jihadist deradicalization program has ended the paradigm of U.S.-inflicted Uyghur separatist terror attacks within Xinjiang, so the Chinese civil war that far-righters like Altay dream of starting will only grow ever more out of reach. The only recourse for these bitter stooges of empire is to turn their violent campaign inwards, to bring the kind of terror they want to inflict upon China into the U.S. itself.
They’ve been doing this in the form of domestic right-wing terrorist attacks like the Capitol Hill riot, which Kuzzat’s brother Faruk Altay has seemingly tried to rationalize as justifiable. Faruk is the leader of Altay Defense, an organization that seeks to train members of the Uyghur separatist movement in combat. Altay Defense’s associations with the fascist fighting wing of the U.S. capitalist state are apparent in that it receives instruction from James Lang, a former U.S. Army Ranger who also operates an organization which provides tactical training and firearms to law enforcement officers and security professionals.
The xenophobic, conspiracy-minded, virulently pro-MAGA, and U.S. military-glorifying ideas that both Altay brothers have frequently expressed reveal the fighting force that they and their UAA paramilitary members will eventually join in on. This is the force of fascist militias that will be unleashed upon American society during the coming decades of social turmoil, when class and anti-colonial struggle escalates within the U.S. and the state decides to send in its affiliated far-rights gun-toters to try to crush dissent. Like the neo-Nazi groups that have been organizing secretive paramilitary training around the country in recent years, they want to take on the same role of Ukraine’s U.S.-backed fascist militias: a network of terrorists who can carry outpolitical, ethnic, and anti-LGBT violence with impunity in a near future where America has become as much of a failed state as Ukraine.
This campaign of terror will be carried out in partnership with America’s ruling institutions, and will be tied in with Washington’s endless paradigm of military buildup against China and other rising U.S. rivals. “Far from a lone wolf, Faruk Altay has been joined by leading figures of the Uyghur separatist movement,” Ajit Singh wrote in March. “Social media posts show UAA President Kuzzat Altay, Murat Ataman, and Bahram Sintash, among others attending Altay Defense training sessions. Murat Ataman is affiliated with the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) — the funding engine of the US government’s regime change apparatus — UAA offshoot Uyghur Human Rights Project. A veteran of the Uyghur separatist movement, Ataman works for US military and intelligence contractor General Dynamics, and has previously held positions at the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security and Department of Veteran Affairs.”
All of this makes me think of Mao’s analysis about the imperialists and capitalists being paper tigers. On the surface, assessed Mao, the global bourgeoisie and their fighting forces appear strong, since they have the weapons to take the lives of many people. But at their core, they represent a dying socioeconomic system, a system that’s doomed to implode as a consequence of its own contradictions. The reactionaries may be able to inflict a lot of damage, but ultimately they’ve tethered themselves to a capitalist-imperialist order which is rapidly losing geopolitical influence to powers like China and is unable to overcome its growing internal economic dysfunction.
The U.S. bourgeoisie’s fighting wing is going to be stuck defending a system that’s in decay, and that can maintain rising profits only through further imposing austerity or through exploiting the economic and environmental crises capitalism is creating. The masses won’t consent to a continuation of this paradigm where engineered poverty forever keeps expanding. More and more of the masses will become open to helping the communist movement within the U.S., which offers a way out of this world of darkness and hatred that the reactionaries perpetuate. For all their bluster and brandishing of arms, people like the Altay brothers will in the end be swept away by the forces of history, which favor socialism.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
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