this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2024
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It's an international poker game and everyone is cheating. To see politics through a campist lens helps no one.
Acknowledging that the US has been the leader of the imperial core — the countries that have been colonizing the rest of the world for 500 years now — since WW2 is the realistic, materialist view.
Only difference now is that it's changed form to mainly the economic subjugation (neocolonialism) of "former" colonies through unequal exchange under capitalism rather than direct military subjugation — though the US still has a major actual settler colony committing a genocide in Palestine right now.
Any country that tries to escape this system (by nationalizing its resources to prevent extraction by unequal exchange, usually by establishing a socialist state) is sanctioned (DPRK, Vietnam in the past, Zimbabwe etc), embargoed (Cuba), overthrown (Chile, Burkina Faso etc), or invaded (Vietnam, Libya, Korea, etc).
I acknowledge the US has been the "imperial core". The thing I take issue with is the finger pointing.
As if the United States is unique in seeking out and pursuing its interests. China and Russia may not be the "imperial core" but, all nations will do what's in their best interest.
That's the flaw with nations, the campist lens of "America bad, Russia and China good" isn't productive. Das all I'm saying.
No other country controls the global financial system like the US, and imperial core countries in general, does through its dollar hegemony and global monopolies.
Which is natural, since the entire modern world, its institutions and trade systems, are built on the past few centuries of brutal colonization of the rest of the world by western europe and japan.
Acknowledging reality isn't "finger pointing".
Given the same opportunity would Russia and China not do the same things?
But they don't, so talking about those "what if"s are pointless. China's current interests — and, broadly speaking, those of capitalist Russia even after the USSR has been overthrown — are mostly in line with the Global South's against imperial core countries. There's a reason sentiment like this is common across the developing world.
Many of western countries' victims, like Cuba, DPRK, Burkina Faso, Palestine, etc., would not be able to function right now, or perhaps even exist, if they did not have China and Russia's support. Of course, alot of them like Libya aren't able to function anymore.
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I wouldn't consider alot of those countries "functioning". They don't engage in the same actions because they aren't able to. Not for any moral reasons. China and Russia support those countries for extractive and political reasons.
Countries don't have allies because they like each other. Countries ally when it's beneficial to their interests.
Yes, the United States government has done/continues to do, many terrible things in the name of protecting economic interests. But to sit here and say russia and China some how have the moral high ground is unacceptable to me.
Some information might change your point of view:
I once thought that the US had made mistakes but generally was trying to do the right thing. But the more I read and learned history, the more damning it was towards America.
Thing is, there is no "trying" to do something on a national scale. What nations do — what they can do — and how they react entirely depends on their mode of production and material conditions. And that mode of production for the US is imperialist capitalism.
It really does explain so much history. Why were you and I able to see through the charade, and why do others have trouble? I was watching Jonas Ceika’s newest video essay on Urban Guerrillas and left wing terrorism, and it made me think about how left wing groups have trouble translating into mass movements. Something about the conditions being right; and how the conditions will never be right in America.
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Jonas Ceika’s
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