Americans don’t even know they’re continually ingesting US empire propaganda to inform their worldview, and they live under the most abusive regime on earth.
The US government is far more abusive, destructive and tyrannical than the Chinese government and Americans are far more indoctrinated by propaganda than Chinese people. Americans don’t even know they’re continually ingesting US empire propaganda to inform their worldview, and they live under the most abusive regime on earth.
There’s this weird propaganda two-step being performed where westerners are being told over and over and over again that Chinese people live in a freakish backwards mind-controlled dystopia, but somehow we westerners do not.
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“Chinese people live in a freakish backwards mind-controlled dystopia where dissenting thought is crushed and everyone’s brainwashed by propaganda.”
“Oh yeah? How do you know?”
“Come on man, it’s all over the news all day every day!”
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Point 1: It’s bad to be racist.
Point 2: Being a warmonger is worse than being a racist.
Neither of these points should be controversial, and saying them both should draw no objection whatsoever. But the entirety of the mainstream synthetic left — and a substantial percentage of the authentic socialist left — quietly disagree with Point #2.
You know this is true because if they actually agreed with Point #2 no mainstream western government official would ever be able to show their face in public, because all mainstream western government officials are warmongers. Mainstream media reporters and pundits would not be able to appear in polite company, because mainstream media reporters and pundits are warmongers. Anyone publicly supporting the western empire and its foreign policy in any way would be the main villain on social media for the day, and would be confronted by angry protesters wherever they appeared. The New York Times would become as socially rejected as The Daily Stormer unless it stopped churning out war propaganda.
The entire empire would crumble. That’s why Point #2, despite being self-evidently true, is shoved outside the Overton window of acceptable debate by mass-scale psychological manipulation. And that’s why there are people reading this doing all kinds of mental gymnastics to find a way to make what I’m saying here wrong. But it is definitely undeniable and worth pointing out that warmongering is far more accepted than racism throughout the synthetic left and much of the authentic left, when really both should be rejected with maximum force.
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The authentic left opposes the ruling power structure, opposes imperialism and opposes economic injustice. The mainstream synthetic left does everything it can to build left-wing credibility without opposing any of those things. It opposes racism, sexism and discrimination against LGBTQ people just like the authentic left does, but whenever there’s an opportunity to actually act against the interests of the capitalist imperialists it’s nowhere to be found.
And it’s important for the authentic left to be aware of this, not least because it will often fool itself about its power and its numbers by conflating the left-wing issues that are amplified by the mainstream synthetic left with successes of the authentic left. It was easy to make the mistake, for example, of thinking that the BLM protests of 2020 were a sign of a surging socialist zeitgeist, or that the opposition to Trump and January 6 was a sign of rising anti-fascist sentiments, when really they were both only getting the mainstream traction they were getting because they were supported by the mainstream synthetic left as well. Members of the authentic left hitched their wagons to those impulses in a big way hoping to see a major authentic shift to the left, but nothing meaningful actually happened as a result of them. The traction was coming almost entirely from the mainstream synthetic left, who have vastly greater numbers and vastly louder amplification.
Contrast that with the traction gained by movements driven solely by the authentic left without the support of the synthetic left, and the picture looks far more bleak. Antiwar rallies with a hundred people. Communist meetings with a couple dozen people. The only traction we ever really get is online, because the internet lets us all find each other around the world and network. But it doesn’t translate to real-world movement.
That’s not our fault of course; a tremendous amount of effort has gone into stomping out the authentic left and diverting all energy to the synthetic left for generations. But it’s important to be real about it, because we can’t begin to address the problem if we don’t understand it. And we definitely don’t understand it if we’re mistaking the successes of the mainstream synthetic left for our own successes.
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Nothing will shatter your dreams of a broad left-right antiwar coalition faster than publicly opposing US warmongering against both Russia and China simultaneously.
One of the most brilliant innovations of modern empire propaganda has been splitting the population into two groups who argue about WHAT KIND of warmongering should be supported, rather than IF warmongering should be supported.