Xinjiang Uyghur propaganda mirrors NATO’s Yugoslavia narratives

“The aim of propaganda was to split up Yugoslavia,” confessed former CIA agent Robert Baer in 2015. “I arrived in Sarajevo for the first time on the 12th of January 1991. I came by helicopter with three other agents. Our task was to observe Serbian terrorists who were supposed to attack the city. We got the information that there will be a number of terrorist attacks in the city due to the intention of B&H to withdraw from the former Yugoslavia. But that was a lie, our bosses had lied to us. Our primary task was to spread panic that there would be attacks among politicians.”

These disinformation efforts, which mirrored the CIA lies from just two years prior about how Chinese Minister Li Peng had been shot and how Deng Xiaoping was close to death, were even more effective than Washington’s efforts to manufacture destabilization surrounding Tiananmen Square. The 1989 “pro-democracy” protests in China, which were fully backed by the forces of counterrevolution, only brought the imperialists a dishonest (if widely effective) propaganda story about there having been a “massacre” by the PLA. The Yugoslavia propaganda brought the imperialists an actual reshaping of the geopolitical landscape, one that destroyed Europe’s last bastion of socialism and allowed neoliberal shock policies to bedevil a splintered Yugoslavia.

This was because after the failure of their counterrevolutionary attempt in China, the imperialists seemingly learned to add an extra element to their destabilization propaganda within Yugoslavia: ethnic hatred. It wasn’t enough for the CIA to get the nation’s people to believe their government was falling apart. The CIA also had to convince the masses that their very nation wasn’t worth defending, that the region’s contradictions between ethnicities were too severe for the borders to be able to continue to exist as they had prior. They had to convince Yugoslavians to despise each other.

This is how you kill a nation: by manipulating its people into believing that their fellow community members of differing ethnic backgrounds have committed unforgivable transgressions, and therefore must be dehumanized and killed. It’s the route the imperialists are taking in African countries like Ethiopia, where Washington is trying to incite civil war by backing a resurgence of the Tigray terrorist organization the TPLF (which the U.S. unsurprisingly refuses to even classify as a terrorist group). It’s what they’re doing in central Eurasia, where Washington has been similarly enabling the rise of the Uyghur ethnic nationalist terrorist organization the ETIM (which was suspiciously taken off the U.S. terrorist watch list last year).

To understand why we shouldn’t trust what the U.S. media is saying about Ethiopia, the Uyghurs, and other topics, we can simply look to Yugoslavia. It’s where, as the title of Michael Parenti’s book says, the imperialists managed “To Kill a Nation.” As writer Dragan Plavsic summarizes Parenti’s analysis of the charges of a Bosnian “genocide”:

Chomsky’s and Parenti’s attentions [after exposing contradictions in U.S. foreign policy] then turn to the Kosovo war itself. Their target is the claim that it was fought to prevent the mass ethnic cleansing of the Albanians by the Serb authorities. Parenti first debunks the myth that what was happening in Kosovo before the war was genocide. He quotes George Kenney, US policy adviser on the Balkans under the administration of Bush Sr: ‘The US government doesn’t have any proof of any genocide and anyone reading the press critically can see the paucity of the evidence, despite interminably repeated claims and bloodcurdling speculation.’ Parenti notes that there were plundering and summary executions by Serb paramilitaries, but rightly concludes that this was ‘indicative of a limited counter-insurgency’ typical of many conflicts across the globe.

Plavsic goes on to heavily criticize Parenti’s analysis on socialist Yugoslavia, charging that Yugoslavia was not socialist at all but a counterrevolutionary capitalist state. This narrative is just another instance of the tendency among Trotskyists like Plavsic to portray existing socialist states as illegitimate; Plavsic admits that the Serbian opposition, which according to Plavsic represented the true will of the people, had a “commitment to a free-market economy… [and] funding received from abroad, above all from the US.” It’s easy for Plavsic to decry Milošević’s repression of this opposition. But for an anti-U.S. head of state in the midst of a cold war which Washington was effectively continuing in Yugoslavia even after the Soviet Union’s fall, a strong security state was a practical necessity. 

As Parenti has said about sectarians like Plavsic, it’s “No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except for the ones that succeed.” And their exaggerated critiques of these successful revolutions assist the imperialists in spinning nation-destroying narratives.

As Parenti rightly concludes, the “Bosnian genocide” was not a genocide anymore than Milošević was a counterrevolutionary. It was an instance of wartime atrocities that were shared by the other sides in the Balkan conflict as well as by countless other forces. These atrocities were elevated to a “genocide” in the imperialist imagination, and were portrayed in this way only when it came to one side, purely because NATO had an interest in Balkanizing the nation. And that the side which became targeted with this absurd distortion was the side of the socialist leader Slobodan Milošević is entirely predictable.

The charge that Milošević “helped foment discontent between Serbians in Bosnia and Croatia and their Croatian, Bosniak and Albanian neighbors,” as History Channel claims, also loses weight in light of the story’s full context. Whatever criticisms can be made of Milošević’s nationalist rhetoric, the main ones who fomented these ethnic tensions were the imperialists. As Parenti writes:

One of the great deceptions, notes Joan Phillips, is that “those who are mainly responsible for the bloodshed in Yugoslavia — not the Serbs, Croats or Muslims, but the Western powers — are depicted as saviors.” While pretending to work for harmony, U.S. leaders supported the most divisive, reactionary forces from Croatia to Kosovo. In Croatia, the West’s man-of-the-hour was Franjo Tudjman, who claimed in a book he authored in 1989, that “the establishment of Hitler's new European order can be justified by the need to be rid of the Jews,” and that only 900,000 Jews, not six million, were killed in the Hlocaust. Tudjman’s government adopted the fascist Ustasha checkered flag and anthem. Tudjman presided over the forced evacuation of over half a million Serbs from Croatia between 1991 and 1995, replete with rapes and summary executions…

In Bosnia, U.S. leaders supported the Muslim fundamentalist, Alija Izetbegovic, an active Nazi in his youth, who has called for strict religious control over the media and now wants to establish an Islamic Bosnian republic. Izetbegovic himself does not have the support of most Bosnian Muslims. He was decisively outpolled in his bid for the presidency yet managed to take over that office by cutting a mysterious deal with frontrunner Fikret Abdic.

But these efforts to manufacture ethnic tensions went far beyond installing racist leaders. Again, the imperialists weren’t there merely to change a political system, they were there to kill a nation. And this required poisoning the minds of the masses, required persuading them to hate and fear their own relatives and neighbors. The Balkanization process had to extend not just into the ruling institutions, but into the very psyches of those who got their futures ripped away from them. It had to be so much crueler, so much more personal, than simply a series of coups.

As anti-imperialist Balkans afficianado Julien Philippe has assessed in response to the Quora question of “Why is there so much hatred of the Serbs and Serbia on Quora,” there’s been a concerted, decades-long campaign to vilify the Serbs. One that’s gone hand in hand with NATO’s dismemberment of Yugoslavian socialism:

Imagine a Europe in which: the former local puppets of Austria-Hungary in WW1 and of the Third Reich in WW2, aka. the Croatian nationalists, later Bosnian Muslims nostalgic of the Ottoman times and sympathetic to Serbophobia, later Kosovo Albanians, and even later Montenegrin nationalists would try to secede from Yugoslavia, and embark with them more than 2,500,000 Serbs against their will…[with] propaganda calling upon the most noble values (freedom, democracy, human rights, pacification) in order to disguise these moves into positive policies aiming at bringing those values into Yugoslavia…the former allies and foes of both World-Wars allied against the Serbs, and the local puppets of the “foes” & losers of WW1 and WW2 were granted everything achievable out of destroying Yugoslavia, while the Serbs, aggressed parties and yet victors of both WW1 and WW2, were taken from them everything except central-Serbia and Vojvodina…Meanwhile, numerous foreigners, heavily brainwashed by the U.S/German/NATO war-propaganda of the 90s and post-war propaganda to legitimate retroactively those deeds, are taking their side, for they don’t know better and are too dumb to see through the whole shenanigan anyway.

You could say this is just Philippe’s opinion. And full disclosure, I just quoted a statement from within a forum, not from within a book. But it’s an entirely correct statement, one supported by those close to the events it discusses. How much should an opinion be doubted when it has the verification of a CIA agent who was involved in the Yugoslavia operations? Baer, who the Sarajevo Times reports concluded his confession by urging “people of the Balkans not to hate each other and to forget the past, which was just part of one great show,” backed up his statement by confirming the narrative manipulations alleged by Parenti and Philippe. 

In a WebTribune interview on the psychological operations he describes, he explicitly admits that the CIA deliberately inflamed Serbophobia—a type of bigotry which Western intellectuals typically dismiss as nothing more than Serbian propaganda. But as Baer states, Serbophobia was and is real:

Many CIA agents and senior officers disappeared simply because they refused to conduct propaganda against the Serbs in Yugoslavia. Personally I was shocked at the dose of lies being fed from our agencies and politicians! Many CIA agents were directing propaganda without being aware of what they were doing. Everyone knew just a fraction of the story and only the one who created the whole story knew the background – they are [the] politicians.

In response to the question of “So there was only propaganda against the Serbs,” he answers:

Yes and no. The aim of the propaganda was to divide the republics so they would break away from the motherland Yugoslavia. We had to choose a scapegoat who would be blamed for everything. Someone who would be responsible for the war and violence. Serbia was chosen because in some ways it is a successor to Yugoslavia.

The imperialists are now replicating this tactic of picking out a scapegoat in regards to Ethiopia, which the U.S. wants dismantled for trading with China. In U.S. headlines, Ethiopia’s government is being entirely blamed for the country’s growing humanitarian crisis. Washington’s tightening sanctions on Ethiopia, and meddling efforts to resuscitate the TPLF, get no mention in these stories. 

The Yugoslavia model of propaganda is also being directed towards the Communist Party of China, which the U.S. is accusing of “genocide” against the Uyghurs. We must expose the flimsiness and fraudulence behind this charge. If the imperialists can get away with this new Big Lie, central Eurasia could undergo the same ethnic conflicts and instability that they manufactured within the Balkans.

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Guerrilla warfare has key advantages over U.S. imperialism

Mao assessed that U.S. imperialism is at the same time a real tiger, and a paper tiger. It’s capable of doing great damage, but it has key weaknesses that can be exploited by the world’s liberation movements.

The post-9/11 era, which just reached a pivotal point with the defeat of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, has shown one of imperialism’s most important weaknesses at this stage: the hubris of the empire and its proxy states. The Taliban has managed to drive out the vastly more militarily powerful U.S. forces, and the Palestinian resistance has managed to remain competitive with the vastly more equipped Israelis, because the oppressor countries overestimate their strength. Having more firepower isn’t necessarily enough to win. Asymmetrical warfare grants rebels key strengths, namely the ability to get the masses on the side of the rebels by pointing to the massive atrocities of the oppressors.

The imperialists are always trying to turn the situation around, to use asymmetrical warfare for their own benefit. And they’ve succeeded at times, like when they got the Mujahideen to overthrow Afghanistan’s socialist republic through guerrilla tactics like sabotaging the country’s infrastructure. But as Mao also observed, the imperialists are divorced from the masses. So these counterrevolutionary wars they wage, even when dressed up in the veneer of popular revolutions via “freedom-fighting” terrorist proxies like the Mujahideen, always produce popular backlash. In Afghanistan’s case, the theocratic regime the imperialists installed went rogue, became the Taliban, and deprived the empire of the $1 trillion in minerals that U.S. capital desperately seeks to extract from Afghanistan.

By backing Afghanistan’s East Turkestan Islamic Movement, the Uyghur nationalist terrorist group that’s posing a growing threat to China, Washington is seeking to carry out a guerrilla insurgency against the PRC. The hope of the imperialists is that the ETIM’s growing violence will spill across the border into Xinjiang. 

But the agitation propaganda that this attempted weaponization of the Uyghurs relies on—namely the narrative that China is committing a “genocide” in Xinjiang—is so diametrically opposed to the actual conditions of China’s ethnic minorities that Washington’s envisioned Chinese civil war can never be realized. Xinjiang’s Uyghurs are sharing in the benefits from the economic growth from Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, as is the case for every other ethnic group in China. And the U.S. State Department’s charges of human rights abuses within China’s Uyghur terrorist deradicalization facilities are so baseless that Xinjiang Uyghurs have themselves publicly shamed Washington officials for lying.

In contrast to these forces of counterrevolutionary asymmetrical warfare, which rely on fabricated atrocity propaganda to justify their terroristic actions, the forces of revolutionary asymmetrical warfare can point to actual injustices within capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism. 

They can point to the fact that 100 million people throughout the capitalist world have been driven into poverty during the pandemic, as opposed to how poverty has decreased in socialist China during the same months. They can point to how the U.S. empire’s military is the largest institutional polluter, making Washington imperialism to blame for the world’s 21.5 million climate refugees. They can point to how the U.S. empire has driven Afghanistan back into an unstable feudalism, and how the country had overcome feudal rule during its era of being a socialist republic. They can point to how Washington is backing Zionism, Hindutva fascism, Bolsonaroism, Uribismo, and so many other brutal ruling ideologies.

It’s because of this advantage of the anti-imperialists that foreign policy analyst Fareed Zakaria wrote this about anti-imperialist asymmetrical warfare in his 2008 book The Post-American World: “The United States has the most powerful military in the history of the world. And yet it has found it difficult to prevail in Iraq. The Israeli military is vastly superior to Hezbollah’s forces. But it was not able to win a decisive victory over the latter in its conflict with it. Why? Because the current era is one in which asymmetrical responses have become easier to execute and difficult to defeat.”

This vulnerability in capital and empire is continuously being proven, and not just by ultra-reactionary forces that happen to be anti-imperialist like the Taliban. In Colombia, the new revolutionary guerrilla organization Segunda Marquetalia has been gradually growing in membership, and has garnered perceived legitimacy among the masses it so far holds jurisdiction over. This increasing success comes in spite of Plan Colombia, the scorched-earth counterinsurgency model that’s been viewed as a victory route for counterinsurgencies from Mexico to Afghanistan.

Colombia’s neo-colonial regime has been riding off the successes of Plan Colombia to regain more territory from the guerrillas, but at the same time it’s been losing support from the people, who’ve granted Segunda Marquetalia its victories. Once again, the reactionaries are at the same time real tigers and paper tigers, simultaneously strong and weak—with their weakness being what may decide the war.

This has become especially true throughout Colombia’s anti-austerity protests of recent months, wherein the Uribismo-controlled regime has carried out world-shocking repressive violence. This last week, the anti-guerrilla Latin American publication InsightCrime lamented the resilience of the insurgency in the face of this year’s assassination of a top rebel leader, declaring: “New Guerrilla Boss, Same as Old Guerrilla Boss in Colombia…The death of a top guerrilla commander in southern Colombia has unveiled an all-too-familiar situation: the leaders of criminal groups may be replaced, but this rarely leads to any meaningful change in the security situation.”

In Yemen, the imperialists have faced a similar situation of pro-Washington security strategists anticipating military victory by the U.S. and its proxies, then being slapped by the reality of guerrilla strength. As researcher Michael Horton wrote this summer:

The defeat of the Houthis has, according to many analysts and think tanks, been imminent for much of the past five years. The better equipped militaries of the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and their various proxy forces were supposed to rapidly defeat the Houthis and their allies. Great emphasis was placed on the technical superiority of the Western-equipped militaries of Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Yet despite the expenditure of vast sums on weapons and materiel by Riyadh and the Abu Dhabi, the Houthis have consolidated their control of northwest Yemen and are poised to capture the governorate of Marib. The Houthis’ ability to defy and defeat technologically superior forces is a reminder that, as the military strategist and fighter pilot Colonel John Boyd argued, “machines don’t fight wars, terrain doesn’t fight wars. Humans fight wars. You must get into the minds of humans. That’s where the battles are won.” The Houthis excel on the battlefield and this is unlikely to change, no matter how much Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and their backers spend on the war in Yemen.

Despite these growing strategic weaknesses of the imperialists, we must be ever vigilant of how they can still exploit the weaknesses of the liberation forces—whether militarily, socially, or narratively. Horton also points out that the contradictions within the power structure of the Houthis—whether real or exaggerated by imperialist propaganda—have the potential to fracture Yemen’s anti-imperialist alliance. The imperialists are eager to inflame whatever tensions, legitimate or manufactured, exist within this and all other anti-U.S. coalitions. 

This is why as we in the center of the empire build up our revolutionary cadres, we must consistently expose the empire’s propaganda about other anti-imperialists while maintaining international solidarity. Unity and proper research, combined with the strengths of our modern revolutionary tactics, can bring us to victory.

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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.

Mercenaries in U.S. borders: a sign of a rapidly declining empire

More keeps getting revealed about the contractors from the mysterious mercenary company—or, as we’ve found out, companies—that have shown up in Minneapolis during this summer’s Black Lives Matter protests. The most widely recognized of these companies, whose contractors have been reported to profile, inflict head trauma upon, grab, and surveil peaceful demonstrators, initially didn’t have its name known to the public due to the contractors refusing to reveal what their employer is called. But as I’ve seen reported by one Minneapolis resident who has personal experience with this mercenary occupation’s effects, the company’s name is Critical Response Group, or CRG.

“CRG Security is a mercenary security group currently deployed like a couple miles from my house in Minneapolis,” the resident wrote on Twitter this last week. “They are known for brutalizing locals and surveilling us.” They wrote about one podcast’s commentary on the situation that “if anything, this coverage kind of undersells how startlingly violent these dudes have been in my community. Folks getting grabbed off the sidewalk for ‘appearing to record CRG staff,’ etc etc. Absolutely wild. Like these dudes sit in a parking garage and spy on everyone with binoculars and then sometimes send out groups of like three guys to snatch someone and ziptie them until cops come and arrest the ziptied person.”

These details, despite being anecdotal, are entirely consistent with what was reported about CRG’s activities last month by public testimonies from mercenary violence victims who spoke to Unicorn Riot. Unicorn Riot posted a picture of a CRG contractor, standing in the window of a building that indeed resembled a parking garage, snapping photographs of the demonstrators while they were giving their testimonies. 

I tried to speculate on what the mercenaries’ intentions were with this policy of monitoring community members, and now we know: to cultivate an environment of arbitrary detentions. One where paramilitary members regularly apprehend people who are deemed a threat, then the police go right along with these haphazard extra-legal judgments the paramilitary makes. With the constant surveillance being a way to strike paranoia into the local and keep people on their toes.

It’s an expansion of the arbitrary detentions that unidentified federal agents carried out in Portland a year ago, wherein people were randomly shoved into unmarked vehicles without any provocation for the sole purpose of terrorizing the community into not demonstrating. Except now we know that the unmarked personnel are working for a paramilitary organization with even less accountability than official police forces, and with a strategy for perpetuating the climate of intimidation and fear: surveil the population and detain those passing by even for seemingly non-political reasons.

Isn’t this almost indistinguishable from the mercenary occupations that the U.S. empire has put in place abroad throughout the War on Terror? It brings to mind the CIA death squads that have regularly executedentire Afghan families simply for being suspected to associate with the Taliban. The only difference is that the CRG hasn’t killed anyone in Minneapolis. At least not yet, since the company’s contractors have shown they have no conflict de-escalation strategy whatsoever. It’s an environment of uncertainty, one that’s going to continue in Minneapolis indefinitely and that will be expanded into more U.S. localities as private mercenaries take on a wider role within domestic policing. 

If laws haven’t stopped mercenaries from being increasingly used abroad, nothing can stop the U.S. from subjecting its own people to these unaccountable forces. As Politics Today’s Tallha Abdulrazaq has assessed about the precedent the empire has set for mercenaries in its forever wars:

Despite numerous national laws forbidding mercenary activity in the militarily advanced Western world, mercenaries have continued to flourish and thrive in the battlefields and cities of Iraq and Afghanistan – the two countries who suffered the most from the American imperial footprint in the 21st century. With the United States now openly stating that it intends to disengage from both countries, it is likely that, rather than reduce the number of mercenaries deployed, it will instead increasingly rely on its army of private military contractors to secure its interests…The American oil giant had to evacuate its employees on several occasions, including after rocket attacks struck their compound near Basra in 2019. These compounds are guarded not by U.S. combat troops, but by mercenaries – or, as they like to be known, private military contractors. The use of the word “contractors” is intentional as it is vague enough to cover numerous operations, whether that be training, logistics, or even the use of deadly force.

Now, just as some professional observers of Washington’s War on Terror mercenary trend predicted during the first years of the Iraq war, these same private military companies that have been used to give an extra layer of impunity for foreign U.S. war crimes are getting unleashed upon the American population itself. Increasing use of mercenaries is a historical fixture of dying empires, so this became easy to anticipate once Washington sabotaged its own international standing by recklessly invading Afghanistan and Iraq. What perhaps wasn’t so predictable was how easily those anti-mercenary laws within the West just became discarded in Minneapolis.

It’s fitting that within weeks of the recent imperial blowback from Washington’s Afghanistan decision, wherein the sudden victory of the Taliban has discredited American military power in the eyes of the world, the empire has been turning these terror tools against its own people. It’s like an attempt to psychologically compensate for Washington’s waning influence abroad.

The fact that the Conflict Resolution Center—another mercenary army that’s been operating seemingly alongside CRG—has previously operated in imperialist intervention hotspots like Syria and Iraq supports this perception. According to a description by the Minneapolis Reformer, the CRC’s methods for providing security for a Minneapolis mall are in effect counterinsurgency tactics, with the local population being treated as the insurgents:

The Legal Rights Center — a nonprofit law firm — says it is “extremely troubled” by reports that employees of a company called Conflict Resolution Group have used “needless and excessive force on multiple occasions, causing severe injuries to innocent people.” The Legal Rights Center raised the possibility that the city of Minneapolis is coordinating with the private security contractor, recalling grim accounts of American interventions overseas in places like Iraq…Andrew Gordon, deputy director of community legal services for the Legal Rights Center, said he’s never seen an arrangement like this. “I have no experience with a city or its law enforcement effectively working in collaboration with a private security group to enforce laws in public,” he said. Gordon said based on the interactions that have been reported to him, the company is employing tactics that appear to come from military training. Gordon alleges that people were being assaulted, with police officers “standing by doing nothing” and then swooping in to complete a citizen’s arrest. If someone is hurt, victims can’t go to their city council member or the mayor or MPD — who are “seemingly divorced from this,” Gordon said.

This is the first stage of the U.S. military’s explicitly stated plans to invade and occupy America’s urban areas in the coming years and decades. These plans are motivated by the class and anti-colonial struggles that are sure to arise from the country’s ever-growing wealth inequality, deteriorating infrastructure, expanding unemployment, systemic neoliberal failure to address the pandemic, climatically exacerbated societal dysfunction, and nonwhite community tensions with an increasingly deadly and militarized police state. Sending in the mercenaries is how the empire is normalizing the environment the military wants within these areas. An environment where civil liberties are nonexistent, where people can be detained for any reason the occupying authorities choose, and where someone is always watching.

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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.

Solidarity and Time: A Review

This was written by Meg Sherman, a Twitter friend who’s reviewed my short story Never Again (linked below)

https://rainershea.com/f/never-again-a-dystopian-short-story

Like all great Marxist thinkers, Rainer Shea has the rare gift of being able to perfectly distil ideas in words, a translator between the realm of pure thought and worldly things. His dystopian short story “Never Again” is a free-wheeling embrace of trans-civilisational histories that portrays the inherent fallibility of humanity. The story’s distinction between the adverse agendas of different species warring for hegemony mirrors the contemporary world’s distinction between civilisations, vying either for unilateral dominance – the US – and peaceful multilateral coexistence – in the solidarity of the BRICs. The story’s unifying theme, climate change to the extent it is an existential threat, is deftly used to demonstrate how the possession of vast wealth creates clevages within species that render the working classes and the rich alien to one another, the possessors of vast wealth insulating themselves while letting the workers die.

The story plays with the presence of inevitable sabotage of imperial projects, the imperial project that comes to fruition being an expression of techno-fascism that relies on a corporate stranglehold on digital dissent. This reflects the essential fact of the coming revolution, that it consists of the opposing forces of techno-fascism, like Google, and an aggregate of citizens using technology to create glitches in the matrix, like Julian Assange. The spirit of free will is evergreen, tyranny deciduous, breaking down seasonally.

By far the most impressive part of the story is the way the ruling classes create a solution for climate change which involves blocking out the sun. If, platonically, the sun is viewed as a symbol of the truth, Shea’s invocation of its demise is an allegory for the relegation of fact and evidence in the rule of tyranny. Russell Brand said that tyranny is the removal of nuance and the powerful people in the society Shea invokes make public involvement in politics pivot around centrally administered information that makes false binary distinctions between good and bad, devoid of nuance.

Marx’s legacy is sustained by the poets of his philosophy. The world is a bright clean canvas ready for the ink of our imaginations. I implore you to read Shea with an open mind and embrace the magic of revolution.

U.S. Empire Reacts To Its Loss In Afghanistan By Sowing Further Global Chaos & Brutality

Ugandan dictatorship forces beat journalist during the election protests of this last year

As imperialism has run its machinations within the different conditions of the world, it’s turned these places into different types of tools for innovating in necro-politics. Israel is the U.S. empire’s laboratory in repression, with the brutal anti-Palestinian tactics of the Zionist forces being used to train police in the U.S. and Colombia. Latin America is the empire’s laboratory in the paramilitary facets of this repression, with the death squads in countries like Colombia being replicated in domestic U.S. militias like the Proud Boys and the Three Percenters. And Africa is the empire’s laboratory in destabilization, along with the partitions, Balkanizations, manufactured ethnic tensions, terrorism, dictatorship-building, and economic warfare which this chaos allows the imperialists to wreak upon the continent.

Now that the empire has lost neo-colonial control over Afghanistan with the Taliban’s defeat of the U.S.-installed regime, the imperialists are fully applying their tactics for Africa to Afghanistan. Washington is scrambling to freeze Afghanistan’s wealth, with the existing sanctions on the Taliban now being applied to the country as a whole. This has further deprived one of the world’s poorest countries of the ability to gain humanitarian aid for its population, which comes at a moment when Afghanistan is facing catastrophic hunger, homelessness, and economic ruin due to global warming and twenty years of war.

The imperialists have applied the same strangulation approach to Syria, using economic warfare as a means to sabotage the post-war rebuilding effort. This will no doubt be what comes from the sanctions expansion within Afghanistan. And they aren’t even done wrecking Afghanistan’s infrastructure, businesses, and housing; despite the narrative that the war is over, private U.S. mercenaries have replaced the official troops and are there to stay within the country. The imperialists are also fomenting new (and old) terrorist proxies within the country.

Such is the approach that Washington is applying to African countries like Ethiopia, which has come under U.S. sanctions due to its government’s infrastructure projects with China. These sanctions, currently being intensified through the recent additional economic restrictions which Washington falsely claims only target military elites, come after the imperialists have partitioned the country as a means for stoking terror. Following Ethiopia’s formation of Marxist-Leninist governance in the 1970s, the U.S. rallied the forces of counterrevolution to fight for the breakup of the country, which they succeeded at with the Ethiopia-Eritrea partition following the Soviet Union’s fall.

Now the U.S. is backing the terrorist organization the Tigray People’s Liberation Movement, which seeks to regain the control it had over Ethiopia for two decades following the Ethiopia-Eritrea partition. This isn’t speculation. This is something Eritrea’s foreign minister has saidthe U.S. is doing, stating that the Biden administration is “stoking further conflict and destabilization” via interference and intimidation throughout the region.

The goal of these transgressions, he said, is “to resuscitate the remnants of the TPLF regime.” The fact that the U.S. is refusing to classify the TPLF as a terrorist organization, and treating it as belonging on equal footing with the Ethiopian government, makes this destabilization campaign even clearer.

These maneuvers give a sinister context to the recent propaganda pieces that NATO’s media outlets have been putting forth about Ethiopia. This year, the BBC published a call for further action against the Ethiopian government, written by one of the counterrevolutionary fighters who helped destroy the country’s socialist development. The piece, titled Eritrea viewpoint: I fought for independence but I’m still waiting for freedom, even goes so far as to glorify the author’s acts of violence against the revolutionary gains the masses had made:

I joined the liberation army as a 16-year-old in 1982 after hearing tales about Ethiopian aggression and jealous of the glamorous image of the freedom fighters with their long hair, shorts and AK47s. I received a few months of training in the Arag valley. We learned how to attack and retreat, how to camouflage ourselves, and how to use weapons — including grenades and RPGs. Our training was good. It was backed up by political education, including how we would establish a democratic government…Official statistics show that healthcare and education have improved since independence but it is difficult to believe them. With limited job prospects and the prospect of years of compulsory unpaid military service, many young people continue to leave the country, seeking asylum in other African states or Europe. But many of us have not given up hope. We believe change is inevitable and Eritrea will realise the promises made by its martyrs.

Whatever contradictions exist within the Ethiopian government — and there are obviously many, since it’s a capitalist neo-colonial state despite trading with China — they won’t be addressed by these fomenters of anti-communism, Balkanization, and destabilization. The country’s growing hunger is in spite of what China has done for the country, and Washington’s sanctions are exacerbating the Ethiopian government’s failures to mitigate the effects of global warming and civil war.

What the imperialists want to come from their agitation propaganda and economic strangulation is a situation that parallels the breakup of Yugoslavia, where ethnic tensions were manufactured through the CIA’s strategic propaganda designed to sow mistrust among the different ethnicities.

If it’s successful, Washington will have an excuse to reopen the drone operations site within Ethiopia that it closed down in 2016. This would parallel the situation Washington has created in Somalia, where U.S. and U.K. meddling has created the same terrorist groups Washington is now targeting with bombs and drone strikes. This is a situation where Washington’s militaristic solution to the very extremism it produced is only worsening Somalia’s humanitarian crisis, and where the empire can carry through its true goals for Africa: expand AFRICOM as a buffer against Chinese and Russian influence, while deliberately keeping the region unstable so that China won’t be able to fully implement its Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure plans.

What further shows that Washington can’t bring “democracy” to Ethiopia is the fact that it’s backed African dictatorships from Côte d’Ivoire to Uganda, the latter of which recently massacred dozens of demonstrators and publicly beat journalists to crackdown on pushback to its sham electoral process. The dictatorship’s police forces did this with U.S. training and firepower. And Washington has responded to Ethiopia’s real or alleged abuses with vastly more severity than it’s applied to Uganda after these world-shocking human rights abuses, paralleling how Biden has barely responded to this year’s police massacres of protesters by the neo-colonial Colombian regime.

Dictatorship, or “democracy” so absurdly rigged that it’s functionally indistinguishable from dictatorship, are the only forms of government which U.S. imperialism brings when it succeeds at building states.

In the age of imperial decline, climate catastrophe, and pandemic, state-building is a prospect that Washington can’t manage as much as it used to. So in places like southwest Asia, the horn of Africa, and Latin America (where countries like Haiti and Nicaragua have been getting destabilized by U.S. meddling), they’re instead simply leaving the people without functional states after destroying their nations. If they succeed at a Yugoslavia nation-killing project in Ethiopia, they’ll make it like Libya, which has been experiencing decade-long civil war and refugee slave trades.

“This is a moment to seize,” said Tony Blair after 9/11. “The Kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us re-order this world around us.” The order they’ve since created is an engineered anarchy, a disorder.

Blair, who’s now being paid £1 million a year by a United Arab Emirates organization called the Mubadala Development Fund, has an interest in deepening the disorder; Mubadala has been developing a plan to mine Afghanistan’s $1 trillion worth of natural resources. With the narrative backing of the U.S. media, the imperialists are now supporting a second Mujahideen insurgency, this time against the Taliban that the original U.S.-backed Mujahideen evolved into. They’re also covertly backing the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, which Washington took off the terrorist group list last year to the effect that it’s since undergone a massive rise in manpower, arms, and funds. The new Mujahideen are there to steal the minerals for imperialists like Blair, and the ETIM is there to perpetrate chaos so that the BRI can’t develop in Afghanistan — and, the imperialists hope, make their violent Uyghur ethnic nationalism spill across the border into Xinjiang.

Terrorism is all the imperialists have, especially now that their loss in Afghanistan has further shaken the world’s faith in Washington’s ability to project power compared to China. As China’s Global Timeshas assessed, Washington’s demonstrable failure in Afghanistan has made other countries, especially in Asia, less willing to go along with the empire’s cold war on China:

The image of the US debacle at Kabul airport is worth a thousand words. It is believed the Southeast Asian countries which have undergone enough geopolitical tests are clear about this….So far, none of the countries in Southeast Asia, which have sharp insight, show willingness to take the lead in provoking China. The US’ coercion and coaxing in this region have come to show signs of failure…The “Afghan effect” is, in fact, already starting to take effect in Southeast Asia. Singapore’s stance has become more neutral compared to years ago when it used to tilt toward the US, while Vietnam has separated the South China Sea issue from the overall Vietnam-China relations. All these prove that Southeast Asian countries are prepared for the “Afghan effect” in advance, let alone Vietnam that has vivid memories of the “Saigon moment.”

As the Biden administration’s attempts to diplomatically strong-arm China continue to fail, with the strategically important powers in the Oceanic hemisphere growing neutral or even anti-U.S. in the Washington-Beijing cold war, the imperialists will expand their destabilization campaigns to these countries as well. They’ve already done this in Myanmar, where the imperialists are sowing conflict and systemic breakdown in parallel to Libya. But this will serve to further discredit Washington on the international stage, leaving the imperialist powers with less allies and more global proletarians who see revolution as a practical necessity.

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