You're Not Actually Helping When You "Support" Protesters In Empire-Targeted Nations
Listen to a reading of this article:
Truthout has a recent article titled "The Left Can Support Protesters in China Without Shilling for US Imperialism" with a subtitle asserting that "Chinese workers and Uyghurs need solidarity from leftists worldwide," and it at no point attempts to defend either one of those titular claims.
The article features comments from New York University's Rebecca E Karl and is replete with leftist-sounding phraseology like "heteronormative patriarchy" and "the hegemonic hold of white power," but what it does not contain is any attempt to substantiate the claim that the left can support protesters in China without shilling for US imperialism or the claim that they need solidarity from leftists worldwide.
This is because those claims are entirely baseless. I run into such claims all the time and often challenge them when I encounter them, and nobody has ever once been able to logically and coherently explain to me what is gained by leftists in the English-speaking world displaying "support" or "solidarity" with protesters in nations like China and Iran that are targeted for regime change by the US-centralized empire. Nobody has ever once been able to provide me with a good explanation of how leftists can throw their weight behind narratives that are being exploited for propaganda against empire-targeted governments without assisting those propaganda campaigns.
This is because no good explanation exists.
And I don't mean to single out Truthout for this; pushing leftists to help decry empire-targeted governments is something that's done all the time by western leftist and leftish media. Jacobin ran an article last month insisting that "the international left must formulate a way to effectively express solidarity" with protesters in Iran, and Shock Doctrine author Naomi Klein was recently making the same case regarding Chinese protesters as well. Any time there are protests in an empire-targeted country, we are presented with Official Leftists admonishing us that we must add our voices to the mainstream fray in cheering them on.
And it's always for unclear, inarticulately argued reasons. It's generally framed as something that leftists should just assume is inherently true because it's presented with leftist-sounding jargon like "solidarity", but nobody ever clarifies what actual, concrete benefits are delivered to protesters in empire-targeted governments by expressions of solidarity from the west, or how those benefits outweigh the negative drawbacks of helping to amplify condemnations of a government that the empire is trying to manufacture consent for aggressions against.
They generally don't even explain what they mean by "solidarity". Presumably they don't mean flying to those countries and providing them with hands-on assistance or they would have said that, so what do they mean? Tweeting your support with the relevant hashtags? Feeling feelings of solidarity in your feely bits? Is the claim that if people voice expressions of "solidarity" with their voices and on the internet and feel feelings of solidarity in their feely bits, something good will happen? What is the good thing that will happen? What specifically is the material benefit being delivered? They never say.
I could see the argument being made if we were talking about an issue that's not receiving adequate attention. Palestinian rights, for example, is an issue that has for generations been both ignored and actively propagandized against, and grassroots efforts to drag that issue into the spotlight have made it much harder for Israeli apartheid to continue with the kind of support it's going to need going forward.
But when you're talking about protests in an empire-targeted government like Iran or China, you're talking about an issue that's already receiving maximum coverage from all the most powerful media and government institutions in the anglophone world. This is because western media give wildly disproportionate coverage to protests in nations the US doesn't like compared to protests in nations it favors.
You can't just conduct yourself as though these propaganda campaigns aren't a thing. If you live in one of the member nations of the US-centralized power alliance, you can't just pretend your expressions of support and solidarity mean the same thing as if they were coming from someone in Latin America, Asia, or Africa. You're not the same. You're speaking from within the most powerful empire that has ever existed, and you are always necessarily in some kind of relationship with that empire's campaign of global conquest and the propaganda operations which grease its wheels.
And you need to be responsible with that relationship. If you live in the US or any of its imperial member states like the UK, the EU, Australia or Canada, it simply is not possible for you to lend your voice to the cause of protesters in empire-targeted nations without facilitating the empire's propaganda campaigns about those protests. It cannot be done. You either have a responsible relationship with this reality or an irresponsible one.
Western leftists who go out of their way to amplify protests that are part of an ongoing imperial propaganda operation have an irresponsible relationship with that reality. They're not doing anything that actually helps the people in those countries, but they are absolutely doing something that could end up hurting them. And if they're really honest with themselves they know this. But they do it anyway because it looks good in front of their propaganda-addled leftish friends and followers.
Before they drop bombs, they drop narratives. Before they launch missiles, they launch propaganda campaigns. Before they roll out sanctions, they roll out perception management. If you choose to help them do this by participating in their propaganda campaigns, then you are just as complicit in their consequences as the military personnel who carry them out. Regardless of whatever leftist-sounding justifications you might spin for yourself about why you did it.
This isn't a fucking game. The world isn't a catwalk for you to strut your fashionable lefty expressions of "solidarity" on to win likes and retweets. If you live inside of the empire, then you need to be responsible with your relationship with its propaganda. Otherwise you're just a garden variety imperialist with a cutesy story about yourself.
A westerner "supporting" an uprising in an empire-targeted nation is like someone covered in raw sewage coming into your house to help you clean. Stop helping and go clean the shit off yourself, mate.
"The Left Can Support Protesters in China Without Shilling for US Imperialism." No they can't. Knock it off.
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Not only does it not help, it actually makes it worse for them. Any help from Westerners for these movements only reinforces narratives -- by the Chinese or Iranian authorities, for example -- that protesters or dissidents are tools of American interference. And the result is a tightening of the screws, and less freedom. Hong Kong is a perfect case. Western solidarity only makes things worse. As a Hong Konger, I beg you -- please, please, do NOT give me solidarity!!!
Caitlin,
You're one of the few people that I can tolerate reading anymore. You're among the few that aren't reactive, but are proactive, and can see what's occurring and going to occur, unlike most everyone else that "finally figure things out" after they become blatantly transparent.
I'm incredibly saddened by the lack of people desiring to learn more about how best to preserve our/their future liberty, who seem to have plenty of time to spend on mindless immoral amusements in the entertainment arena, at the expense of the former.
I've grown weary of attempting to educate them. They claim to want to know and understand, but if you cannot explain the equivalent of decades of learning and volumes of info into a handful of Twitter/Instagram/etc. sound and media bites, they're attention span vaporizes.
Meanwhile, they walk into their homes, and on goes the TV on "news" channels. It's gotten to the point where I get mad when I see this shit called "news" on anywhere, and that people actually believe what a bunch of people reading off of telescripts are re-reading to them. For starters, what, they can't go read it for themselves, the all but literally have to have their thoughts spoon-fed to them.
Anyway, sorry about the rant, but you're among the very few people that I can even tolerate reading anymore.
- Long time reader and partner in exposing the truth