Category: Leftist theory

The myth always starts the same. It’s a quote attributed to Che Guevara, by American antiwar activist Jerry Rubin. He visited Cuba and wrote about it in his book Do It! Scenarios of Revolution. Page 20:

“Che stood before us in the Ministry of Labor auditorium… We were 84 Amerikan students visiting Cuba illegally in 1964… As Che rapped on for four hours, we fantasized taking up rifles. Growing beards… Joining Che to create revolutions throughout Latin America. None of us looked forward to returning home to the political bullshit in the United States. Then Che jolted us out of our dream of the Sierra Madre. He said to us: “You North Amerikans are very lucky. You live in the middle of the beast. You are fighting the most important fight of all, in the center of the battle. If I had my wish, I would go back with you to North America to fight there. I envy you.”

Some questions arise.

1. Did this happen? Jerry Rubin is the sole source, and his reliability is questionable. He abandoned activism in 1972 to become a businessman, selling wellness and supplements and producing quotes like “wealth creation is the real American revolution”, and books like The War Between the Sheets: What’s Happening with Men in Bed.

2. Was Che being diplomatic? This was a diplomatic visit, after all. Che could have said this for any number of reasons – including wanting to send these Americans back home so they wouldn’t stay.

3. Is this quote a sufficient basis to build a sense of where on the globe the most strategic location for a political “fight” would be?

I’m inclined to think that Che probably said something like this, to be diplomatic, and that it has been taken much more seriously than it should be. After all, after this Che Guevara went first to Congo, and then to Bolivia, not to the US. His revealed preferences show what sites he thought were strategic and which not.

A few years after Rubin’s 1964 visit to Cuba, another Jewish American antiwar activist, in the course of setting out tasks for the American peace movement, argued in 1969 that the peace movement had not yet amounted to very much or had much influence on America’s consciousness. The more important variable, Chomsky argued, was the Vietnamese resistance. In American Power and the New Mandarins, he wrote: “Nevertheless, those who have devoted themselves to working for peace in Vietnam can only be saddened by the realization that they have failed to create the consciousness in this country that we have no right to win a military victory. It is the miraculous heroism of the Vietnamese resistance that has forced these tentative moves towards peace in Vietnam.”

On the one hand, Rubin invoked Che Guevara to argue that the US revolution was the most strategic revolution; on the other, Chomsky recognized that the US movement had no meaningful effect on the situation, that only the Vietnamese resistance had changed the equation.

In 2012, Norman Finkelstein wrote a book called Knowing Too Much: Why the American Romance with Israel is Coming to an End. In April 2026, the Jewish Electorate Institute published a poll finding that, after 3 full years of openly committing genocide, rape, and torture before the world, Israel was understood by 87% of American Jews as having the “right to exist as a Jewish homeland.” 83% of American Jews believed that criticism of Israel was antisemitic.

In his 1980 book A People’s History of the United States, writer and nonviolence advocate Howard Zinn described the American system’s genius like this:

“The American system is the most ingenious system of control in world history. With a country so rich in natural resources, talent, and labor power the system can afford to distribute just enough wealth to just enough people to limit discontent to a troublesome minority. It is a country so powerful, so big, so pleasing to so many of its citizens that it can afford to give freedom of dissent to the small number who are not pleased.”

Zinn’s conclusion is right, but one premise is wrong. America is not “a very wealthy country” because it is “rich in natural resources, talent, and labor power.” America is a very wealthy country because it is a parasitic apparatus draining the wealth and resources of the entire Global South to it. Political economists like Jason Hickel, analyzing value transfer, unequal exchange, and drain, explain the dynamics. Everything from the dollar as reserve currency and dollar recycling mechanisms, monopolies of intellectual property and patents, the (low) pricing of raw materials from poor countries and (high) pricing of services from rich ones, to US control over international institutions (including financial ones), gives the US trillions of free, drained value from Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

America didn’t get into this parasitic position through “talent”, either. It nudged its predecessor, England, off the throne and into a gentle second-hand parasitic place. That America had the resources to nudge England off came from a prior theft: the theft of the North American continent (through genocide) and the theft of millions of African people whose labor and freedom was stolen (through slavery).

He goes on to explain why America hasn’t had a revolution:

“One percent of the nation owns a third of the wealth. The rest of the wealth is distributed in such a way as to turn those in the 99 percent against one another: small property owners against the propertyless, black against white, native-born against foreign-born, intellectuals and professionals against the uneducated and unskilled. These groups have resented one another and warred against one another with such vehemence and violence as to obscure their common position as sharers of leftovers in a very wealthy country.”

Zinn adds an ideological reason to his material argument: “The idea of saviors has been built into the entire culture, beyond politics. We have learned to look to stars, leaders, experts in every field, thus surrendering our own strength, demeaning our own ability, obliterating our own selves.” Fifty years later, every TV show, cartoon, and Hollywood blockbuster is some variant of superhero, “chosen one” narrative: things have gotten far more extreme than Zinn described.

He hoped that Americans could one day unite and “succeed in doing what the system itself has never done-bring about great change with little violence.” The tactics he believed would work were nonviolent ones: “demonstrations, marches, civil disobedience; strikes and boycotts and general strikes; direct action to redistribute wealth, to reconstruct institutions, to revamp relationships; creating-in music, literature, drama, all the arts, and all the areas of work and play in everyday life-a new culture of sharing, of respect, a new joy in the collaboration of people to help themselves and one another.” Such a nonviolent movement, Zinn said, “would be a new kind of revolution, the only kind that could happen, I believe, in a country like the United States.”

Zinn believed that the US had divided its population into prisoners and guards. The title of this rousing concluding chapter to his book? The Coming Revolt of the Guards.

To these Jewish American activist-writers of the 20th century, a major, nonviolent, but nonetheless revolutionary change in the American status quo was coming, at some point in the future. 14 years after Finkelstein’s prediction of the romance coming to an end, Jewish American support for genocidal Israel is basically total. Meanwhile, 46 years after Zinn’s prediction, is it safe to say the “Revolt of the Guards” is probably not coming? And if not, could the promise that it will appear around the corner itself not some kind of pacification, release valve?

Looking at the record since, say, 1917, there have been revolutions, near-revolutions, and successfully rolled-back revolutions in many countries, but nothing close to one in the US. It could well be that a revolution in the US, forcing elites into exile in places like England and Israel to plot their return, would be the most strategic thing that could happen. But that enthusiasm has to be curbed by the record, and the record would suggest that it is much harder to have a revolution in the US (or another Western country) than in the rest of the world. It could be that the conditions in the core are the least conducive to revolution and that revolution would only occur there after a lot of revolutions in the periphery.

If it were easier, or as easy, it would have happened already.

Because we’re trying to figure out the reason for the absence of something, the truth is it’s impossible to know. A few have ventured to name the reasons over the decades.

Material Bribery. Zinn’s hypothesis, that US elites give enough wealth to enough people that they identify with elites instead of the people, is an explanation that has been offered in many different forms from Lenin (“labor aristocracy”) to Sakai (“the mythology of the white proletariat”) and many times in between.

Psychological / status bribery. Beyond bribery, the idea from Du Bois that racism gives the privileged a “public and psychological wage”, suggests that elites have more than just cash and toys to distribute, but also psychological privileges and pleasures in a racist system. Watching Israeli society and its supporters publicly enjoying the razing of cities, agriculture, infrastructure, and the torture, rape, and killing of children shows that there is some kind of “psychological wage” at work in participation in genocide.

Propaganda. One of the major industries of the West is propaganda. Propaganda for the Global South is manufactured in the north. News media, social media, high culture, pop culture, the academy – all are manufactured at massive scale and weaponized from the core outwards. The principal targets and most brainwashed by propaganda are its Western producers. Those minds would be among the hardest to free.

Co-optation. America is also the epicentre of the production of ideologies specifically to capture and redirect dissent and revolutionary energy: the ideology of democracy and electoralism (in which parties all work for the same goals), the ideology of human rights and the rule of law (for some), the belief that free speech and awareness alone can make revolution, the idea that nonviolence can be a substitute for armed struggle, all work to ensure every movement fizzles. Co-optable movement leaders are promoted into electoral and non-governmental organization (NGO) machinery.

Murder and Prison. But the emphasis on, to put it crudely, the bribery of a privileged minority (Zinn’s argument), even when added to the world’s most comprehensive and sophisticated propaganda apparatus (Chomsky’s argument), and co-optation engine (through electoralism, nonviolence and free speech ideologies, etc.) can take emphasis away from a major factor that has been openly on display especially in the past three years: violent repression.

Chomsky used to claim that violent repression was something that happened in the Global South, but in the Global North the consequences of dissent were less severe because of past struggles and won freedoms. But that isn’t true. When the co-optation engine fails, George Jackson wrote (in Blood in My Eye, quoted in an MROnline article by Colin Jenkins): “Take protest too far, however, and they will show their other face. Doors will be kicked down in the night and machine-gun fire and buckshot will become the medium of exchange.”

Movement leaders in the US are assassinated before they can amass a large following (as occurred as recently as BLM in the 2020s). The US doesn’t just have a big middle class, it also has the world’s biggest prison population in a system of prison camps, surveillance, house arrest, parole, and custody. US police train in Israel and kill thousands of Americans every year. American tech companies, the foundation of the economy, have surveillance as their core business. Student encampments were crushed through force. Police raid, entrap, and infiltrate activist spaces as one of their core functions. Polls might show majorities want health care or are against a war – but majorities don’t get what they want. In the words of George Jackson: “The ultimate expression of law is not order–it’s prison.”

When leftists from the global north and the global south argue online, Westerners might end up getting shut down with something like: “Shut up and go make a revolution where you are.” Fine. Shut up, Westerner. It’s as good a way as any to end a pointless argument.

But those who would take that advice ought to know that while the global north is unequivocally more materially comfortable because of all the stolen wealth, it is not an easier location to “go and make a revolution”. Based on the lack of one in history, we can conclude it’s harder.

If Che Guevara wasn’t merely being diplomatic, if he really did envy Rubin, his envy was misplaced.

The war began with the US assassinating Iran’s Supreme Leader and murdering 168 schoolgirls in class.

Assassinations and attacks on schoolchildren are now a normal part of the way the US and Israel act in the world. Still, it was jarring to see online that in places like Toronto and Beverly Hills, people celebrated these murders. Even in North America, which is full of diasporas who call for the overthrow of the countries from which they came, seeing – from non-Israelis – celebrations of genocidal bombing is rare, surprising – even baffling. After all, when Israeli Jews celebrate deaths, they’re celebrating the deaths of Palestinians, Lebanese, and Iranians – never other Jewish people.

What explains these dancing monarchists? Why no solidarity for their fellow people back home?

There is only one answer: those dancing see themselves as racially distinct from the people being bombed. They have no more solidarity with the bombing victims in Iran than Israeli Jews have for Palestinians. How is that accomplished? The same as it is with Zionists: over generations, through school textbooks and media saturation. It turns out these dance moves have their roots in an unexpected place: dusty academic texts from a century and a half ago.

As one racist president of the Eugenics Society, JM Keynes, put it memorably a century ago: “Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”

To whose academic tune are these monarchists dancing? The melody of Aryan race theory, of course. Orientalist Sir William Jones, founder of the Asiatic Society in Calcutta in 1784, first coined the Aryan term. Around 1786, Jones wrote about these Aryans (1).

“… we Europeans, together with the Persians and the Hindoos, however wide may be the apparent and superficial differences between us, are, nevertheless, members of a close and common brotherhood in the great families of nations. First westward and northward, afterwards east- ward and southward, the Aryans extended…”

Jones’s contemporary, Freidrich von Schlegel in Germany, took this up, putting Germany and the Indo-Iranians together in the Aryan race in 1819: “everything, absolutely everything, is of Indian origin”, he said. To Schlegel, who coined the word ‘Aryan’ from Greek and Sanskrit words, it was the Aryan race who brought civilization to India, Egypt, and Europe (2).

From the beginning, these European racial anthropologists were as anti-Arab as they were pro-Aryan. French orientalist Ernest Renan (3) wrote in 1852:

“Imprisoned as all Semitic people are in the narrow circle of lyricism and prophetism, the inhabitants of the Arabian peninsula never had the slightest idea of what can be called science or rationalism. It is when the Persian spirit, represented by the Abbasid dynasty, vanquished the Arab spirit, that Greek philosophy penetrated Islam. Although subjugated by a Semitic religion, Persia always maintained its rights as an Indo-European nation.”

Renan believed that Arabs and Aryans were “perfectly distinct… two different species having nothing in common in the manner of thinking and feeling.”

Racism is an academic theory with many filthy contributors but one of its main founding fathers must be Arthur de Gobineau. The author of the 1855 Essay on the Inequality of Human Races taught that race was the motor of history, that all good things came from the pure white race, and that purity of race and blood were the key to everything. Gobineau wrote that Aryans were pure and unadulterated, that Jews were the chosen race and superior to all others, and that Arabs, Africans, and Asians were degenerate races. (4) As Iranian-Canadian academic Alireza Asgharzadeh describes Gobineau (5):

“Seeing racial crossbreeding as central to the decay of civilizations, Gobineau argued that civilizations mixing with peoples incapable of civilizing will be ruined eventually. In his view, “the blood” was the source of all human ability, power, intelligence, creativity, imagination, and resourcefulness. These qualities were passed on through blood from one individual to the next, and from one racial generation to another. If a race’s blood was contaminated, then the entire race and its civilization would be contaminated. Gobineau insisted that different races were innately unequal in talent, worth, and ability, and only the “white Aryan races” were capable of creating culture and civilization. The non-Aryans and “darker races” could not produce higher forms of culture and civilization; they could only borrow from the white races.”

In Gobineau’s own blood-quantum words (6):

“The white race originally possessed the monopoly of beauty, intelligence, and strength. By its union with other varieties, hybrids were created, which were beautiful without strength, strong without intelligence, or if intelligent, both weak and ugly. Further, when the quality of white blood was increased to an indefinite amount by successive infusions, and not by a single admixture, it no longer carried with it its natural advantages, and often merely increased the confusion already existing in the racial elements.”

Gobineau’s 1855 book arrived in time to inspire a Persian-flavored version of Aryan race theory from playwright Fath’ali Akhundzadeh (7). In his 1860 book, the Maktubat, Akhundzadeh argued that the Arabs are to blame for everything. He quotes a medieval-era play, Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh: “From drinking camel milk and eating lizard / The Arab’s fortune has reached the point / That he wishes for the Persian crown.”

Akhundzadeh mocked the Islamic tradition of charity, arguing that Persians should not “bear expenses of 100 or 200 tomans to go to Hajj and feed hungry Arabs.”

He mocked the foundational Shia story of martyrdom, summarizing it as: “a thousand and two hundred and something years before, ten or fifteen Arabs killed ten or fifteen other Arabs in the Kufa desert [allusion to the yearly Shi‘ite commemoration of the martyrdom of Imam Hussein ibn Ali, who was murdered in Karbala and not Kufa].”

Akhundzadeh’s most virulent hatred was always for Arabs: “The Arab tribe is unique among the tribes of the world in its capacity to weave lies and create tales, and the people of Iran are unmatched in their propensity to believe lies and tales.”

Akhundzadeh’s protege, Mirza Aqa Khan Kermani (d. 1896) built on that rotten foundation, with two books written in the 1890s, Seh makhtub and Sad khatabeh. Kermani “calls Arabs “bare-arse, savage, hungry, vagabonds.” He goes on:

“I spit on them . . . naked bandits, homeless rat-eaters . . . vilest humans, most vicious beasts . . . camel-riding thieves, black and yellow scrawny lot, animal-like and even worse than animals.”

Kermani also “affirms that “the philosophers of Europe write that we have never seen two nations more antagonistic and opposed to each other in character than [Aryan] Iranians and [Semitic] Arabs.”

His dehumanization of Arabs is so excessive that he even implies that they may deserve no less than extermination.

“If it was not for the ruthless ulama of Iran,” he warns, and their relentless praising of the Arabs, Iranians would have taken revenge over their ancestors’ blood, and they would not have spared “one single tribe of the barbarian Arabs on the face of the earth.””

Everything was fine for Aryan race theory until the 20th century, when British and German racists realized they didn’t actually want to be in the same race as Indians and Persians. So the British changed their theory, and the poor Indo-Iranian racists were left behind. As Asgharzadeh puts it (pg. 92): “This was a major blow, particularly to the overexcited Aryanist elements in places such as Iran and India who were preparing their own versions of Nazism, based on the presupposition that they were biologically related to the same “superior race” as Hitler’s Aryan race.”

In Asgharzadeh’s summary (pg. 102):

“All this discursive/ideological confusion, disharmony, and Aryanist mumbo jumbo means that notions such as the Aryan myth, the superior Aryan race, pure blood, and superior civilization were nothing more than powerful ideological/discursive tools to facilitate the desire and aspirations of certain groups for power and domination.”

Academics need infrastructure – ideally state power – to get their ideas across, from journals to university students and teachers, to textbooks and children’s education (and now, Western-sponsored Persian language satellite television, Western-run Persian language social media…) The ideas found an eager patron in Reza Shah Pahlavi, a Cossack officer who’d come to power in a coup in 1921, and the German Nazis (8) sponsored a number of journals in the 1930s to disseminate Aryan race theory. Iran-e Bastan, Iranshahr, Mehr-e Iran, Partow e-Iran, Anahita, Takht-e Jamshid, were the top journals in Iran’s literary scene. Asgharzadeh (pg. 111):

“The Nazi propaganda machine advocated the (supposedly) common Aryan ancestry of “the two Nations.” In order to further cultivate racist tendencies, in 1936, the Reich Cabinet issued a special decree exempting Iranians from the restrictions of the Nuremberg Racial Laws on the grounds that they were “pure-blooded Aryans” (Lenczowski, 1944, p. 160). In 1939, the Nazis provided Persians with what they called a German Scientific Library. The library contained over 7,500 books carefully selected “to convince Iranian readers . . . of the kinship between the National Socialist Reich and the ‘Aryan culture’ of Iran” (Lenczowski, 1944, p. 161). In various pro-Nazi publications, lectures, speeches, and ceremonies, parallels were drawn among Reza Shah, Hitler, and Mussolini to emphasize the charismatic resemblances among these leaders (Rezun, 1982, p. 29).”

Without reviewing what’s happened in the literature from the 1950s-1979, you get the idea (see my two sources, Asgharzadeh and Ebrahimi, for that history). Suffice it to say that the monarchists are the intellectual progeny of this body of work. As surely as Zionism flowed from the pens of Herzl and Jabotinsky, the Iranian monarchists Aryanism flows from the pens of Gobineau, Akhundzadeh, and Kermani. The interlocutors, the explainers, the informants for the US/Israel adventure currently upending the world order, are readers of this work and its derivatives. They see the world divided into races, they see themselves as Aryans, and they see the Iranians in Iran as impure, adulterated by Arabs.

Iran meanwhile has moved on, with a state and society that are the product of a revolution that occurred in 1979, sending their children to win medals in things like math olympiads and wrestling. The 1979 revolution affirmed everything despised by the Aryan race intellectuals: Shia Islam, justice for oppressed Arabs in Palestine, confrontation with the European masters.

Steeped in these readings and ideas, the monarchists dancing to celebrate the deaths of 168 schoolgirls and an 86-year old religious leader see themselves as purer, superior beings to those killed.

But there are no chosen peoples or superior races. Just like their Zionist masters, it turns out the people who believe they are Aryans are mere mortals like the rest of us.

Notes

1. Alireza Ashgharzadeh. Iran and the Challenge of Diversity: Islamic Fundamentalism, Aryanist Racism, and Democratic Struggles. Pg. 85. Cites Farrar 1878 (Farrar, 1878, pp. 306–307) citing William Jones.

2. Asgharzadeh: “In a book titled Essay on the Language and Wisdom of the Indians (1808/1849), Schlegel asserted that the Sanskrit-speaking Aryan race had brought civilization to India, Egypt, and Europe from their Himalaya homeland. In 1819, Schlegel used the term Aryan to identify this discursively emerging Indo-European race who had presumably brought culture and civilization to the world. The term Aryan had been derived from Herodotus’s Arioi and Sanskrit’s Ariya. He associated the root Ari with Ehre, the German word for honor and gave a new dimension to the rising importance of language by connecting it to racial and national issues.”

3. Renan, quoted in Reza Zia Ebrahimi’s 2016 book, The Emergence of Iranian Nationalism: Race and the Politics of Dislocation.

4. Quoted in Ebrahimi pg. 114.

5. Asgharzadeh pg. 69

6. Gobineau, 1915/1967, pp. 209–210 quoted in Asgharzadeh

7. Akhundzadeh and Kermani are the main subjects of Ebrahimi’s book. All quotes from these two over the next paragraphs are from Ebrahimi.

8. Asgharzadeh: “As early as 1933, the Nazis began to publish a racist journal titled Iran-e Bastan [The Ancient Iran]. The journal was financed by Siemens-Schuk-kert, and Major von Viban of the Political Department of the NADFA in Berlin handled the editorial issues. A pro-Nazi Iranian intellectual named Sheikh Abdul-Rahman Seif worked as coeditor of the journal (Blucher, 1949, p. 137)… “Iran-e Bastan played a very important role in advocating Persian racism among the Iranian elite and intellectuals. It provided a starting point for Persian nationalists to launch their chauvinistic attack on whoever they did not see as Aryan. Following the Nazi journal, all kinds of chauvinistic magazines, journals, and newspapers such as Iranshahr, Mehr-e Iran [The Love of Iran], Partow-e Iran [The Light of Iran], Anahita, Takht-e Jamshid [The Seat of Jamshid, imaginary Ancient Persian King] dominated the Persian literary scene. All these publications highlighted the past and the pre-Islamic glories of the Persian nation and blamed the supposedly “savage Arabs and Turks” for the backwardness of Iran.” (pg. 11).

[Note: if you didn’t watch me and Nick Estes talking about the Book of Joshua on Red Nation, that discussion and the books therein – the Joshua Generation, Laying Down the Sword, and Canaanites, Cowboys, and Indians – might be good to check out before or after reading this one.]

Human progress is over. We’re in the Book of Joshua genocidal timeline

The history of the next thousand years is being decided in our time. Will the species survive? Should it? We certainly won’t solve climate change if we can’t stop a genocide. We won’t be reviving nuclear non-proliferation with nuclear-armed states whose leaders quote genocidal passages of the bible and name their doctrines (“Samson Doctrine”, “Gideon’s Chariots”) after the book’s most violent plot points.

The changes happening go way beyond shifts in the locations of borders. We are far past the question of which corrupt ruling party will animalistically feed at the trough.

These are changes in religion, ideology, the basis of belief and how we decide what’s true and false.

The old world was one of a hypocritical liberal facade.

That world is gone.

You thought that science and technology were governed by a progressive spirit of open inquiry? Actually they are governed by ruthless, racist Darwinism.

You thought that education, law, journalism and medicine were governed by professional standards and ethics about truth? In fact they are governed by insider-group corruption in which lying is as easy as breathing.

You thought that warfare was governed by the United Nations charter and UN resolutions with the force of law, with its doctrines on the responsibility of occupiers, the right of resistance? In reality, warfare is governed by the Torah and the Book of Joshua’s entreaty to wipe out the memory of Amalek – men, women, draft animals, and especially children.

You thought that the treatment of prisoners was specified in the Geneva Convention? The truth is, it is specified in religious texts on the treatment of slaves and in Hollywood tropes about how funny sexual violence is when committed against “criminals”.

It is sadder and sadder to watch people of conscience raised in the old system continuing to appeal to international law, screaming into the void that US / Israel actions are illegal.

They’re not illegal in the book that matters, my friends, and that book is the Book of Joshua, a book of massacre and genocide.

The world is ruled by elites educated in the Bible + Race Science

What you believe is what you were taught at an early age. That’s why, for all the neoliberal restructuring, for all the austerity of constant budget cutting and degradation of the student experience, education will never be completely privatized. Elites will never abandon the chance to propagandize students from an early age, even if they wouldn’t dare send their own kids to those schools. What they want (and what they have) is a situation where they control what kids are taught in public school and they control what their own kids are taught in private school. Their kids are to learn superiority. Yours are to learn their place.

Israeli academics wrote a study, Scenes from School Life, (in Hebrew) in 2014 (reported in Ha’aretz) going into schools and writing what they saw. The title of the Ha’aretz article: “Israeli teenagers: racist and proud of it.” Given how fast one rises through the ranks in the Israeli military, the teenage subjects of that book are likely in the middle- and upper echelons of the genocidal Israeli establishment. They learned a doctrine of their own ethnic supremacy and they learned to hate others – leftists, Arabs, and especially Palestinians.

In Beverly Hills, the schools are flying the Israeli flag. North American educational institutions have adopted the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism. Kids whose parents take them to church are taught that God will bless them if they bless (the state of) Israel and will pull the plug if they don’t.

Outside of the West it’s much the same. Evangelical churches are everywhere in Latin America and Africa and their progenies march under the Israeli flag.

Muslim kids in Asia learn that there is an Ummah, a Muslim nation, of billions, but the educational network financed by Gulf monarchies teaches them that their true enemies are other Muslims.

The White Empire is a disciplined empire. It presents a united front to defend genocidal Israel. Western countries are willing to sacrifice honor, dignity, even handy underwater pipelines and cheap energy, for the greater genocidal good. Meanwhile those it rules like animals of burden are not united, but easily turned – until their turn comes to be slaughtered – against the enemies it selects.

The genociders’ only book is the bible, their only science is race science and their only language is total violence.

Reject it all: the lies of their old world and the depravity of their new one

The only possible starting point to defeat them is to reject every element of their world view and all of the objects they created to fool you.

Appeals to international law or courts, the UN, diplomatic channels, humanitarian rules, the human spirit or the transformative power of truth are, at this point, stupidity.

No matter how minimal, they will never grant your demands. No matter how sound, they will never be persuaded by your arguments. They rule. And they will never be overthrown by international law or nonviolence.

The fight for the future is not against a liberal ideology that doesn’t live up to its idealism.

It is a fight against an ideology – propagated in schools, church, the movies and TV – that combines the most genocidal books of the Bible with the most vicious genetic Darwinism. They believe they have every right to kill and enslave you. To bring about the future they want, they have to believe that.

You don’t.

Liberals have discredited themselves supporting genocide, loosening their control over the public discussion. Right-wingers have rushed in to fill the vacuum, but the America First (& Israel A Close Second), antiwar right will not lead the US out of support for genocide. Facing massive public disgust, the antiwar right have been put forward by a Zionist media establishment as a shield for conservatives. They are here to save the right-wing from deserved contempt, not lead their people to an anti-genocide struggle. Serving as a rhetorical curtain to hide authentic anti-imperialist voices from the public, ultimately, they too, serve the racist, Zionist agenda.

The controversy is fake. It isn’t the enemy of my enemy – they aren’t enemies at all.

Over the past few weeks, something called a “civil war” on the “antiwar right” unfolded online, in which far-right and farther-right influencers went on one another’s talk shows and then streamed, saying mean things about one another.

Much of it was ad hominem; a lot of it involved globally irrelevant insider US political discussion. But a portion of it was about US foreign policy. That latter portion involved these right-wingers discussing the source of their criticism of US support for Israel’s genocide and trying (and failing) to find enough common ground to work together, before crashing and burning calling one another federal agents (unusual since all are supporters of police and of federal agencies).

Let’s put some time into understanding

1. how this “antiwar”, right-wing position is manufactured;

2. how the things these figures have said might be satisfying to listen to for those fed up with Israel’s genocide and liberal support for it; and

3. why there will be nothing of any anti-genocide value coming from any of these figures – indeed, there is good reason to think that the whole thing is contrived – and to the benefit of the genociders.

1. Manufacturing the “antiwar right”: Genocide debate culture and the antigenocide bloc’s abusive relationship with Piers Morgan

Before he went on Piers Morgan’s show, George Galloway told his viewers that Piers Morgan was irrelevant and no one should go on there and give Morgan relevance. But Morgan, a right-wing TV broadcaster who, pre-2023-genocide, was known outside of the UK for his commentary on various celebrities, reinvented himself as the host of debates about Gaza.

Initially, he was famous for belligerent hounding of pro-Palestine guests with “DO YOU CONDEMN HAMAS?” (a practice he still follows like praying the rosary).

But when Egyptian-American comedian Bassam Youssef went on the show and achieved some viral moments, mainly through the use of his comedic talent of mockery, anti-genocide viewers started to join the game, watching and looking for “gotcha” moments in the debates to share. Many, including Galloway, eventually went on the show, producing more viral clips to send around.

In the process, Morgan managed to position himself, through the selection of guests and his treatment of them, as the arbiter of legitimate voices on both sides, pro- and anti-genocide. When the anti-genocide audience neared exhaustion of Morgan’s incitement and abuse of pro-Palestine guests, Morgan would throw in an adversarial interview with an Israeli official or paid agent. This is part of the abusive relationship between leftists and Morgan: these dramatic moments of confrontation with Israeli genociders keep leftists hoping Morgan will find humanity. He won’t, but his keeping up the act keeps the viewers from giving up.

The Oxford Union, and now Jubilee’s show Surrounded, have also used the debate format as engines for the production of viral video clips, with explosive success during this genocide. The debate form is itself a type of propaganda, because of what it assumes: two or more people, acknowledging one another’s humanity and a good-faith framework of rules, using argument and counter-argument to try to help the audience determine the truth, sharpening and discovering their own positions in the process.

Morgan (and Oxford and Jubilee) exploits those assumptions to hide what is actually happening: a production stage-managed by the genociders, who win regardless of whether their side wins or loses.

Morgan chooses who debates whom, and irrespective of who “wins” on that day, the person setting up the debate (Morgan in this case) who holds the power to promote or de-emphasize specific voices. In this way the debate host (or the host of a big podcast) holds the power to control the opposition*.

[*Anti-imperialists will still go to these debates because the calculation of whether to boycott or attend is a tactical one, which is probably why Galloway first boycotted and then attended. We need visibility to make our points too and have to trade that against all the benefits the genociders get from these debates. It’s a powerful propaganda system indeed if you’re willing to participate in it even knowing what it is.]

With one exception (Fuentes, whose brand is based on being excluded and supposedly leading a movement of the excluded) every one of the antiwar right voices discussed in this article has been on Morgan’s show.

A right-wing figure can be created as an antiwar voice by the simple expedient of Morgan hosting a debate and putting them in that position.

2. The temptations of the antiwar right and the creation of the mirage

Given that the right-wing is (in the US) big, richly resourced, and actually controls state power, it may give (false) hope that the rise to hegemony of an antiwar right could stop the genocide. Given that part of the right-wing presents itself as anti-establishment and wanting to overthrow the system, it might give the (false) hope of an anti-system alliance of right and left to overthrow the genocidal system.

Here’s how the antiwar right created and nurtured these false hopes, creating an antiwar mirage that leads to nowhere in the weeks leading up to this “civil war”.

Tucker Carlson. He rightly ridiculed Ted Cruz’s use of the text of the Book of Genesis (12:3) – where God told Abraham that he would bless those who blessed him – to support the 1948-created Zionist project. By interviewing Iranian President Pezeshkian, he rightly demystified the idea of an American journalist talking to a head of state designated as an enemy (Iran).

But like Bernie Sanders, AOC and others, he sees what he’s doing as ultimately looking out for Israel. “I’m not even anti-Israel,” he said. “I like Israel.” If Tucker is America First, then like the liberals he opposes, his America includes Israel (A Close Second).

Candace Owens. She rightly called Israel’s atrocities against children “demonic” and “satanic”. Full of righteous contempt for the Israel lobby’s work to silence all opposition, she has modeled the courage of not backing down in the face of name-calling and cancellation efforts. She’s been bringing details of the Epstein network of sexual violence to her large audience. And while she supported Israel for many years, she “will never support Israel again.” Unlike many online influencers she also reads. Actual books. And changes her views based on new information, which fills anti-imperialists with the (false) hope that she might be brought to that position, becoming a powerful communicator for the cause (she won’t).

But she also presents to her audience the imperialist invention of “Judeo-Bolshevism” and tells them that the Nazi holocausts were equalled or surpassed by Bolshevik atrocities. In her discussion with Nick Fuentes, she said she’s increasingly skeptical of the whole history she’s been taught (to which Fuentes’s only retort was “you sound like a leftist…”), but doesn’t recognize that anti-communist atrocity propaganda is also a huge part of the history she’s been taught (lies about Indigenous peoples genocided by the Anglo-Americans, about Haitians during their 1804 revolution against French slavers, about Indian sepoys during the failed 1857 war against Britain, about Africans resisting the Scramble for Africa…) When it comes to this genocide, this means she has no way to investigate the false atrocity propaganda about October 7. Indeed, she argues that the whole event was orchestrated by Netanyahu (on whom Candace, like liberals, hyperfocuses, and therefore, like other Zionist liberals, fails to recognize the breadth and depth of support for atrocity in Israeli society).

Dan Bilzerian. Most anti-imperialists saw Bilzerian for the first time when he took an interview with Piers Morgan and argued that mainstream Jewish religious beliefs include a belief in the innate superiority of Jewish people, mentioning references in the Talmud about Jesus burning in excrement for eternity and insults about Mary. Bilzerian challenged Morgan’s lies about October 7, pointed out that most Israeli settlers are in fact from Europe (while Palestinians are from the region and likely descendants of West Asian Jewish people), and remained unfazed in the face of Piers’s accusations of anti-semitism.

But, like Candace, Bilzerian’s opposition to Israel is connected to opposition to “Judeo-Bolshevism”, and he cites incorrect figures about Bolshevism being fundamentally a Jewish movement and a falsified history of Bolshevik massacres. He cites Winston Churchill on “Judeo-Bolshevism”, as if he does not understand that the reason Churchill (a Zionist and keen genocider himself) made this claim was to explain his support for Zionism! Like Candace, he questions imperialist and liberal talking points about Israel and is skeptical about what liberals say about Hitler, but shares liberals’ (and Hitler’s, and Churchill’s) talking points about communism and Russia. Bilzerian notes his own Armenian origin and the fact that the Young Turks (the 20th century regime, not the liberal youtube channel) committed a genocide against Armenians in 1916, but ignores the facts that a) it was Turkish and Kurdish personnel who committed that genocide b) that the current Turkish government denies that genocide, emphasizing instead that Israel joins Turkey in that denial.

Bilzerian’s main business is the sale of scammy lifestyle courses which are marketed using photo and video montages of him doing high-end tourist activities surrounded by models and expensive items. He wants nothing to do with anti-imperialists, who want nothing to do with him.

Andrew Tate. Tate was one of the early people to debate Piers Morgan on the genocide and expressed righteous anger at the atrocities committed by the Israelis.

For people who had watched Piers Morgan bullying his pro-Palestine guests, watching Piers, who was obviously physically afraid of Tate, trying and failing to take up his usual bully role, was at least different.

But Tate – like Bilzerian – is ultimately on the web to create a funnel to his business, which is also selling scammy courses about how to get rich, as is apparent from even a quick glance at his twitter feed. If you like what he says about the immorality of genocide, you have the opportunity to help make Tate richer by taking one of his courses about how to get more money. In a live stream with Nick Fuentes, Tate said that he was concerned that conservative support for genocide was discrediting the conservative movement as a whole. People may lose interest in demeaning women if the messengers are genocidal: “Stop supporting genocide! It’s a bad look for conservatives!”

These political positions are nothing more than market niches for these people, internet funnels to different businesses and different age demographics (with Tucker and Candace marketing to older, Tate and Bilzerian to younger demographics). Tucker and Candace present a conservative lifestyle, while Tate and Bilzerian follow what conservatives call a “degenerate” one.

All of these flaws and worse come together with Nick Fuentes. Fuentes leads a movement, which he calls the groypers, who self-identify as racist/racialist, white nationalists, and take the posture of being downtrodden and excluded by the establishment right (they are neither downtrodden nor excluded). He is a believer in Race/IQ, believing that the origin of inequality is the biological dysfunction of the oppressed, arguing with Candace, who believes the origin of inequality is cultural dysfunction of the oppressed*. As a racial darwinist, Fuentes isn’t motivated by solidarity, humanitarian considerations, or empathy – in the hours I watched I didn’t hear him call it a genocide or express any human lament about the atrocities. His world view is of a darwinian struggle of races, and his complaint is that a “race” other than the one he identifies with is deciding on matters of war and peace when it’s his “race” that should be making those decisions.

*Speaking of selling courses, I do have a hundreds-of-hours-long podcast which is sort of a course on all of history since 1492. Among other topics, we did an episode on scientific racism, and on social darwinism, 19th century inventions to justify the Scramble for Africa. Plenty of references there too. Cost of my course is $0.

Fuentes seeks to lead a movement of what he calls white people which he thinks need to take over all the institutions and loci of power, presenting this as if it were a novel strategy and not the history of the Anglo-American Empire from the 1750s to the 1950s. Fuentes hasn’t specified how highborn he is in this rarefied multicentury hierarchy, but self-made successes are extremely rare and most people with millions of followers are better connected than they care to admit. Regardless, Fuentes’s analysis is based on false claims about science, history, power, and ideology. He’s claimed that one reason right-wingers are flocking to his channel is because he was the first to see (in June 2025) that Trump was under Israel’s control and was going to go to war with Iran. This was a commonplace insight among anti-imperialists since the breakdown of the last ceasefire in March 2025.

3. Keeping anti-imperialism behind a thick curtain of right-wing noise

Historically Zionists have always preferred the anti-Jewish right – with whom Zionists share the same racial darwinism and the same biblical references to armageddon – to the anti-imperialist left, with its internationalist connections to the Global South.

Anti-imperialists want a stop to the plunder and genocide; when the right fight among themselves, it’s about how to divide the spoils. The left believes in equality: the right, in natural hierarchy. This is the irreconcilable difference and it makes the antiwar right a mirage.

When you search for voices that are against Israel’s genocide, you’ll see these viral debate clips and enter the right-wing marketing funnels. The internet is flooded with them for a reason: to make it much harder to find anything real. Debates where the pro-Israel side routinely gets trounced and where the anti-Israel side gets one “gotcha” moment after another – are still wins for Morgan. These successes are as valuable for the propaganda system as algorithmic suppression or banning the phrase, “I support Palestine Action.”

Right-wingers can look super-insightful saying obvious things that leftists know because unlike right wingers, actual leftists are almost entirely boycotted by the mainstream*.

*You’re thinking of exceptions. I know the exceptions. What’s important is the quantity and the pattern.

There’s a solid incentive for liberals and right-wingers alike to create and promote a very visible antiwar right: to ensure that someone that isn’t a leftist is out there saying every possible thing, so that you can hear any specific viewpoint from someone other than a leftist.

In the video where Fuentes defends himself from Tucker and Candace’s accusation that he’s working for the police, he shows a supposedly exculpatory video of himself at the January 6 protest telling the crowd to advance and disregard the police. People who have been to Palestine protests have a good idea how it would legally go for someone who did that. At least he wasn’t supporting Plasticine Action…

Another subtle note from that video, is when Fuentes is praising Trump’s 2016 term, he says “we achieved some modest reforms”. Among them? Moving the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. “We achieved some modest reforms”, he says in his video. “He cut the corporate tax rate, moved Israel’s Embassy, did some minor stuff on the border, it was negligible.” (9:22).

Fuentes, now positioning himself as the foremost and original critic – not only of Zionism as he emphasizes, but of Jewish people racially – nonetheless calls it a modest (positive, by implication) reform for Trump to have moved the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a “reform” that Israel had desperately wanted for decades. Perhaps it’s a meaningless slip. Or perhaps it’s a slip that reveals that for Fuentes, like the rest of these people, anti-Israel positioning is fake, just seeking a slice of the audience to turn into revenue.

In the interview with Candace, Fuentes explains and endorses the idea that slavers didn’t believe that slavery should be abolished because Africans have low IQs. With his level of knowledge and intellectual curiosity, even if he was morally on the right side of history (he’s not), he would be a liability to whatever side he’s on. Tucker argued that he is a liability – to the anti-war right.

This is “shit-coating”: the carving off of an actual insight, mixing it with toxic and ultimately pro-establishment lies, and presenting it so that no one can recognize the unvarnished truth. The algorithm wants to distract you, and these people have, with the resources of the Anglo-American, Zionist oligarchy behind them, mastered the algorithm. The truth? They can only give you the shit-coated version.

For anti-genocide work, the supposedly anti-war right is another distraction. The same way that Bernie Sanders and AOC turned out to be pro-Israel empty suits, the so-called antiwar right is of no use to any just cause.

The Roman Empire collapsed when the city of Rome fell to the Visigoths in 410 – or did it? By the time of the sack, Rome was no longer the capital of the Western Roman Empire – other cities had played that role for over a hundred years (Milan and then Ravenna). What’s called the Eastern Roman Empire, with its capital in Constantinople, which everyone simply called the Roman Empire, continued for a thousand more years, until it fell to Turkey in 1453.

The British Empire, a going concern since the East India Company was chartered in 1600, also never collapsed. A multi-decade, somewhat friendly, struggle for primacy with the United States over primacy over the globe-spanning financial, productive, and military arrangements of the Empire began in the 20th century. After World War 2, the capital of the Empire moved from London to Washington.

There was plenty of brutal continuity to the transfer. But with the change of capital came a change in philosophy and mode of operation.

The British Empire, whose crown jewel was India, was based on mass famines, a global grain market, manipulation of gold and silver standards, naval power, a balance of power in Europe, strict racial hierarchy taught at the universities that trained the elite, and the use of subject races to fight one another.

When it moved to America, the Empire’s crown jewel was the whole American continent. The post-WW2 version was based on fossil fuels, a dollar standard, air power, the subordination of allies, a military-industrial complex that encompassed science, engineering, and industrial might, coups d’etat, and increasingly, sanctions regimes.

Racial ideology in the US-led version was full of contradictions: co-opting decolonization struggles and the ideological battle with communism required a nominal disavowal of racial hierarchy, even as racism motivated many elite actions and underpinned the system of neocolonial theft of resources from the Global South and from Indigenous lands. No longer colonies, nominally sovereign nations were led by local elites who put their lands and their peoples to work to make the rich countries richer. Those who refused would see their countries bombed, sanctioned, or both, until an overthrow could be effected and a compliant local elite installed.

The smooth functioning of the US Empire occurred through a host of multilateral institutions: the United Nations, headquartered in New York, showed that the world was united under US leadership, with the UN Security Council guaranteeing that wars could be stopped by the will of the world’s powers. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund promised development to those Global South countries that followed America’s rules. The International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice, and the World Trade Organization promised that international disputes could be resolved without violence.

Elections, in the US and throughout the world, let off tremendous amounts of steam when the masses got angry – no need for revolution when you can vote the bastards out.

The change of imperial capital was announced to the world in 1956 during the Suez Crisis. The story is familiar: Egypt asserted sovereignty over the Suez Canal. Britain, France, and Israel invaded. The United States ordered them to stand down, and they did. The imperial capital had moved. If the British wanted to do something, they would have to ask America first.

In the 21st century, we are living through an analogous, multi-decade, friendly struggle that has moved the imperial capital from Washington to Tel Aviv.

We are living through the Suez Crisis of our time, our own announcement that the capital has moved. At several moments during this genocide, the US announced a ceasefire – including, at one point, not even vetoing a ceasefire resolution at the UN Security Council. Biden announced a ceasefire in May 2024, Witkoff announced one in January 2025. The Israelis ignored the first, rolled back the second. The message for the US: Israel will decide when the war ends, and the US will have to accept it, like the US decided that the Suez Crisis would stop and the British had to accept it.

In the new, Israel-led version of the empire, West Asia is the crown jewel. Like the wars of the East India Company to make India into British India, like the Indian Wars of US land theft and genocide, the Middle East today suffers endless wars for the goal of Greater Israel.

In the Israeli-led version of Empire, racial hierarchy is back with a vengeance: Cecil Rhodes’s most racist pronouncements can’t compete with the daily posts of the average pro-Israel twitter user. The disobedient are punished not with a coup d’etat that brings a pliant leader to power, but with genocide against the whole population. Surrender is irrelevant: the surrendered are genocided along with the defiant. Air power remains the principal hard power tool, while ground operations are basically anti-civilian terror operations on medium (assassinations, raids) or mass (gaza genocide) scale. Media and psychological operations have a growing primacy. Inducing psychological collapse is the main objective, in the hope that physical collapse will follow so that genocide can proceed. All the US-built multilateral institutions have been discredited: International courts, the security council, can issue rulings that are then ignored. The atomic energy agency passes intelligence on to Israel to help their assassination planning. Elections have been shown to make no difference, as genocide proceeds through changes of political party.

Different imperial premises, different kinds of resistance.

The Global South’s peoples fought British colonialism wielding the ideology of national sovereignty and the construction of nation-states to replace the colonies. They fought the American Empire with guerrilla warfare and resistance to military occupation.

The people of West Asia are fighting by not surrendering, enduring the assassinations, sieges, bombings, and psychological operations, defeating the ground forces, and developing missiles to retaliate for attacks made by Israel’s airpower. Those inclined to direct action in the West resort to attacking the fragile and still very important nodes of weapons production. For the Resistance, defense is based on endurance, without trying to match the empire’s specialty of assassination. Attack is based on physical attrition, without trying to match the empire’s specialty in psychological warfare.

Israel specializes in assassination; Iran in missile technology. The missiles can’t stop the assassins from killing and the assassinations can’t stop the missiles from landing. Who made the right investment?

The Roman Republic was founded around 509 BC. The capital was moved to Constantinople around 900 years later and the Empire lived on for another thousand years, until 1453. The British Empire was shorter-lived, around 345 years between 1600-1945, its American incarnation lasting around 80 years from 1945-2023. The Israeli-led iteration is burning itself out quickly. From here it doesn’t look like it will last long.

How does one join the dizzying heights of the elite? Not the 10%, the 2%, or the 1% of professional or business success, but the billionaire class, the House of Representatives, Governor of a major state or mayor of New York City? Is it by proving your merit in school, a bit of good luck, perhaps a grinding mindset as aspirants are taught to hope? Or by family connection and bloodline, as those doomed to fail may fear?

Certainly it’s the latter. But there is a missing ingredient that aspirants should know before they set out to try to join this genocidal Western club.

In the book Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate, Italian political scientist Diego Gambetta talks about how in certain circumstances it is rational for subordinates (say, enforcers who are collecting extortion money from businesses) to display to their superiors how incompetent they are (at, for example, actually running a business). This is a display of loyalty: an incompetent subordinate can only survive at the boss’s whim, and is therefore going to be loyal. Taking some irreversible action can also show loyalty: the importance of tattoos to criminal organizations is an example. Getting a specific tattoo permanently affiliates a criminal with others in the group, a valuable display of loyalty.

The codes of the underworld help answer the question: why did the whole elite, Republicans and Democrats, Hollywood and Wall Street and Silicon Valley, go to the private island of convicted-then-assassinated child abuser Jeffrey Epstein?

Epstein’s activities were the proclivity of some, others were ensnared through the normal methods spies use, but for others it was probably understood as the equivalent of getting a tattoo: one must make oneself reputationally destroyable as a condition of getting into the elite. When this kind of thing blows up, with members accusing one another and people like Epstein or his mentor Robert Maxwell meeting with fatal accidents, it reveals the pattern in sufficient detail for researchers like Whitney Webb to document them (in the two-volume One Nation Under Blackmail). Neither sexual abuse nor blackmail are the point: the point is to undergo rituals that prove your subordination is absolute, and that you can therefore be trusted to exercise your power according to (genocidal) principles.

The greater the power sought, the greater the display of submission required.

For lower rungs, public words of submission could suffice.

https://www.middleeasteye.net/trending/do-you-think-israel-has-right-exist-nyc-mayoral-debate-question-sparks-backlash-over

Sometimes an elite member will survive (or be allowed to survive) a revelation with a warning.

Or the revelation will have the effect of keeping things in line.

But where scandal fails to have the desired effect, there are other, more murderous options.

As genocide subordinates all other Western goals, these messy rituals of humiliation become more public. As revealing them becomes a valid tactic for intra-elite disputes, we may all be subjected to a more comprehensive view of the mess.

We already have a picture: This is an elite that wants nothing more than to continue a genocide against children, bound together by fear of exposure of the crimes they’ve personally committed in private.

Can they be trusted to solve the problems of the world?

The word “tankie” was coined by British Trotskyists for use against leftists who did not oppose the USSR intervention in Hungary in 1956 and resurrected after 2011 by pro-regime change leftists who used it to mock leftists who opposed the destruction of the Syrian state.

But the self-definition of “tankie” can be derived from Lenin’s advice to the socialists in WWI. When most of the socialists of Germany, Russia, and France were lining up with their own governments, Lenin advocated what was called at the time revolutionary defeatism. He wrote: “During a reactionary war a revolutionary class cannot but desire the defeat of its government.” He wanted socialists, rather than celebrating their countries’ achievements in overt or covert war, to take up the struggle in their own countries: “one cannot be a sincere opponent of a civil (i.e., class) truce without arousing hatred of one’s own government and bourgeoisie!”

In my view, this is no different from what Chomsky has advocated for decades. As he was wont to do, he repeated this message constantly in the hopes that it would stick (it didn’t):

“…One of the most elementary moral truisms is that you are responsible for the anticipated consequences of your own actions. It is fine to talk about the crimes of Genghis Khan, but there isn’t much that you can do about them. If Soviet intellectuals chose to devote their energies to crimes of the U.S., which they could do nothing about, that is their business. We honor those who recognized that the first duty is to concentrate on your own country. And it is interesting that no one ever asks for an explanation, because in the case of official enemies, truisms are indeed truisms. It is when truisms are applied to ourselves that they become contentious, or even outrageous. But they remain truisms. In fact, the truisms hold far more for us than they did for Soviet dissidents, for the simple reason that we are in free societies, do not face repression, and can have a substantial influence on government policy*.”

This idea – that we’re supposed to think about the effects of our work and therefore focus on the crimes of Western imperialists, not the crimes of their enemies – is one Western tankies take seriously.

If you’re wondering why the small group of us on social media around my podcast (the Anti-Empire Project) and Sina’s (The East is a Podcast) affectionately call each other “tankies” and the politics behind it, read on.

For the purposes of this post, a tankie is someone who doesn’t want the destruction of states that are currently targeted by the US.

Tankies are glad that Stalin defeated Hitler in WWII and that the Red Army stopped the Holocaust. Tankies didn’t want Syria, Libya, Yugoslavia, or Iraq destroyed. Tankies don’t often get what they want, as you can see. Tankies don’t want Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, Russia, or China destroyed.

There are other causes on which tankies and other kinds of leftists agree, like wanting a Free Palestine. But on the question of regime change in Syria and other countries, we split.

There are three main premises to being a “tankie”.

1. The US Empire, and the British Empire that it took over, which could be called the Anglo-American Empire, is the only empire today. To tankies, Russia, China, and Iran – the only countries really ever accused of also being imperialists – are not.

2. The Anglo-American Empire is uniquely genocidal and destructive. There are other bad things that happen in the world, but in almost every international political situation, with brief and occasional anomalies that quickly revert to pattern (like when they supported Stalin in WW2 or fought their own ISIS creations briefly in Syria and Iraq), victory for the Anglo-American imperialists will lead to more death and destruction than defeat.

3. No matter how much imperial propaganda you have managed to cut through, you are more propagandized than you think. It’s a safer assumption that every single claim made by the imperialists is a lie and work from there.

A few points about the reasoning behind these premises:

Premise 1: There’s only one empire. The hundred-year long debate about imperialism goes back to when Lenin used the concept, which he’d read in Hobson, to explain the origins of the First World War. The Great Powers – England, France, Germany, Japan, the US, Austria-Hungary (not really in the game any more) – had divided the whole world up into colonies from which they drained resources and which they used as captive markets. The whole world being divided up, the game had become zero-sum and the only way these powers could advance was by taking colonies from one another. The strongest powers would take the most, but relative strength would change and the only way to truly test strength was to go to war, hence imperialist war was inevitable. So argued Lenin about a century ago. But another way of looking at World War I (and WWII, and the Cold War) is as a war successfully waged by the Anglo-American Empire to subordinate potential rivals into a global system. Today Germany and Japan host US bases, the Five Eyes and France are subordinate to the US. The Western elite is disciplined, willing to subordinate local interests for US or Israel’s interests, and 100% behind Israel’s holocaust in Gaza.

Another definition of imperialism that I like, that you don’t have to listen to a 100+ hour history podcast to get a handle on, is arrived at by studying value transfer, for example through Jason Hickel et al.’s work, “Imperialist appropriation in the world economy: Drain from the global South through unequal exchange, 1990–2015”. The imperial countries are the ones receiving the value transfer, the colonized are those whose wealth is drained by trillions every year. The Global North / the Golden Billion / the Combined West, is the metropole. The Global South is the colony.

What of China, with its dealmaking in Africa, Pakistan, and elsewhere? If you’re not willing to listen to 50+ hours about the genocidal insanity that the West brought to Africa during the Scramble, you should at least know that China isn’t in Africa chopping children’s hands off or killing ⅓ of all Congolese: they’re building roads and custom phone networks and buying minerals. That’s not what the West did – or does – in Africa.

What of Iran, which exercised influence in Syria until recently and exercises influence in its neighbouring country, Iraq? Historically Persia was incorporated into the Anglo-American global empire as a “semi-periphery”, like China, then became a firm member of the Global South, complete with at least one CIA overthrow in 1953, and is now back in the Global South as a sanctioned country whose economy is targeted for destruction. Not looking for colonies, not draining anybody’s wealth, not imperialist.

Russia? The USSR supported anti-imperialist struggles, notably Cuba and Vietnam, while it lasted from 1917-1991. The post-Soviet Russian Federation has shrunk from the USSR borders, with former members of the USSR increasingly hoisting the US flag over military bases that encroach on Russia and US-sponsored covert operations trying to regime change Russia and break it up (notably starting with Chechnya). Like Iran, Russia had some brief influence in Syria, but it gave that up. The war between Russia and Ukraine is akin to a Western-sponsored civil war, which the US explicitly says it is using to try to destroy Russia. As an economy, Russia spent decades recovering from the destruction wrought by the end of the USSR and the privatization of the USSR’s assets (what author Austin Murphy called the Triumph of Evil). Russia isn’t draining the Global South. It’s not imperialist.

Premise 2. The Anglo-American Empire is uniquely genocidal. The Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch empires are the only empires that could compete with the sheer horrors of the Anglo-Americans, but the scope and scale of the Anglo-American genocides is worse and only the Anglo-American Empire is effectively threatening to end human civilization either through environmental collapse or nuclear war (or both). The worst things in human history were the genocides of the Americas, the enslavement of Africans, and the colonization of Africa and Asia. All were conducted by the Anglo-Americans – where others like France, Belgium, and Germany, eagerly participated, they did so in a system organized by the Anglo-Americans. The German Nazis were sponsored by the Anglo-Americans until WWII started, then these Allies briefly fought the Nazis, then as soon as the war ended the Allies rehabilitated the Nazis and brought them into the heights of Western research, industry, and military coordination through Operation Paperclip. In all the major post-WW2 holocausts, the US was either doing them directly or deeply involved. The Rwandan genocide could not have occurred if the US had not organized the war and invasion of Rwanda the way it had. In the DR Congo, millions died in a war in which abusive local militias faced truly genocidal invaders from Rwanda. The abusive militias were bad; the genocidal invaders were qualitatively worse. As you would expect, the Americans supported the genocidal invaders. The ongoing Gaza holocaust by Israel could not be conducted without daily airlifts of weapons from the US and fuel and food sent daily to Israel by allies organized by the US.

Opposing the Anglo-American empire is opposing genocide. Tactically supporting any western-led regime change campaign is supporting the most genocidal system that has ever existed, and it’s beneath contempt.

Principles vs Campism: Regime changers claim to be loyal to higher principles than anti-imperialist “campists”. Campists, they claim, support authoritarianism, just not if the Anglo-Americans are doing it. Whereas regime changers, with their exalted principles, are against authoritarianism regardless of who’s doing it. Let’s leave aside the fact that “authoritarianism” is itself a term only ever applied to official enemies. Based on Premise 2, it is true that the authoritarianism of targeted regimes is the lesser evil.

Regime changer principles applied to the real world amount to endorsements of the greater evil – dismemberment of countries and genocides of populations. Politics isn’t about abstractions, but how principles are applied on the ground. And they are applied unevenly. Regime changers can perform the mental operations necessary to oppose Iran on women’s rights principle and endorse HTS removing all female judges from their jobs in Syria in practice. The regime changers’ claim to higher principles is empty.

Premise 3. You’re more propagandized than you even think. Leftists who have come to understand that the US empire is a force for evil in the world but then think that all the people the US are trying to destroy are also evil, have half-emancipated their own minds and given imperial propagandists a loophole to win them back: by lying about the targets, they win potential anti-imperialists back to pro-imperialism or useless nihilism.

The lies are voluminous, systematic, repetitive, mutually contradictory, uninterrupted, flexible, and intense. You watched them do it throughout this genocide in Gaza. Lies about beheaded babies, mass rape, human shields, Palestinians bombing themselves, and tireless ceasefire efforts. But after watching the whole campaign of lies about Gaza, and the genocide continue through it all, regime changers have nonetheless readily accepted fantastical stories about Syria under Assad and the virtues of those occupying, partitioning, and destroying Syria now. Regime changers criticize Venezuela’s economic policies, or Cuba’s, or Iran’s, as if these countries aren’t being sanctioned by the US with the open purpose of destroying their economy.

If you’ve broken the grip on your mind that tells you that the West is uniquely benevolent, or benevolent at all, congratulations. But your work isn’t done. You have to look at what else the West is telling you (to hate all its enemies on its schedule) and break those grips too. Believe nothing they tell you about official enemies. Make that your default stance and change it only if there is overwhelming evidence.

The regime change left exists to wreck antiwar work – and for no other reason

I’m not here to own liberals in online debates. I don’t want to talk to regime changers at all.

But the regime change leftists do want to talk to us. That’s all they want to do, in fact.

Why? Because their only value in the world is their value to imperialists and they provide this value by disorganizing and disorienting antiwar potential.

Imperialists don’t care what pro-Palestine leftists think. It doesn’t matter whether these leftists are tankies or regime changers. Leftists are in no position to materially help the assassins and mercenaries assembled at various border points preparing to destroy imperial targets. Regime change leftists’ only value is in harassing and disrupting any potential antiwar movement. As Jean Bricmont wrote a decade ago in his article about the “Wishful Thinking Left” (also about Syria):

“the main defect of… the humanitarian interventionist Left… is: to whom are they talking? The rebels in Syria want as many sophisticated weapons as possible… Those rebels want Western governments to provide them with such weapons – they couldn’t care less what the Western Left thinks. And those Western governments hardly know that the wishful thinking Left even exists. And if they did, why would they listen to people with no serious popular support, and so no means of pressuring governments? The best proof of that is given by the cause to which so many signatories have devoted a good part of their lives: Palestine. Which Western government pays any attention to the demands of the “Palestine solidarity movement”?

The main effect of the regime change left is to undermine antiwar work. It

“weakens and confuses what is left of antiwar sentiments, by stressing that “our” priority must be empty gestures of solidarity with a rebellion that is already militarily supported by the West. Once this mindset is acquired, it becomes psychologically difficult to oppose U.S. intervention in the internal affairs of Syria, since intervention is precisely what the revolutionaries that we must “support” want.”

Bricmont continues: regime changers

“will probably say that “we” must denounce both U.S. imperialism and the oppressive regimes against which the “people” revolt. But that only shows the depth of their delusions: why claim doing two things at once, when one is not capable of doing either, even partly?”

Regime change leftists will lie, scream, use identity politics, hijack left-wing rhetoric, and smear us relentlessly. What they won’t do is set out what it is they want to achieve, nor their strategy. Because what they want to achieve is screwing anti-imperialists up and their strategy is simply to wreck everything we try to do.

On the other hand, I can tell you exactly what we want: An end to these genocides and regime change wars, a world where sovereign Global South countries keep the fruits of their own labours, where Indigenous peoples take care of their own lands. I can tell you our strategy too. It is to try to develop a constituency inside the West that is strong enough to stop imperialism.

I admit, it’s not going all that well. While we let regime changers pretend they’re on our side (but with some nuance), it will keep not going well.

The best we can do now is try to find our friends, exclude our enemies, and avoid distractions.

A thread on things tankies oppose.

French in Cote d’Ivoire… tankies oppose this.

Americans in the War on Terror… tankies oppose this.

Israelis in Occupied Palestine… tankies oppose this.

Note:

*Watching the way this genocide has unfolded, I am no longer so sure that we “can have a substantial influence on government policy” and still working out what that means… but let’s leave that for future exploration.