Today’s working class people have been robbed of their voice, and that’s made the ruling class able to speak for them. When our government says that “the nation” is glad to experience heightened standard of living costs to fight Washington’s adversaries, the working people who are truly being hurt by this can’t say how they feel. They have no voice in the popular media, they have no voice in government. Even the politicians who say they speak for the workers are advancing the military adventurism project that’s destroying the lives of these workers.
Almost two-thirds of Americans are now living paycheck to paycheck because of the inflation that Biden’s proxy war has caused. This is not a trivial issue for them, it’s not something that can be framed in dry statistical terms. It means tens of millions of lower income people, especially the ones from marginalized groups like the transgender community and the black community, are being subjected to scarcity that’s to get worse for the foreseeable future. The claims from the Democratic Party to be in solidarity with these groups are ultimately lies. Aiding the war machine is the priority of these liberal politicians, and if that entails condemning the most vulnerable parts of society to deepening poverty, they’ll always choose the war machine.
These politicians will say whatever they can to hide their own responsibility for what’s happening to the people. Biden is protesting that inflation was already there when the war started, a defense he made invalid when he promised four years ago that “nothing will fundamentally change” under him. If Biden knew the way things are run is destroying the ability of proletarians to live, then why did he say from the start that he doesn’t plan to fix this? He’s intended neither to undo the half-century of austerity policies that wage war against the working class, nor to make the diplomatic decisions that would halt these war escalations which have accelerated our economic chaos. At every opportunity, he’s made the choices that he’s known will harm our material interests.
The ruling elites, along with their narrative managers in our media and academic institutions, will never admit that this conflict is their fault. They’ll keep minimizing or hiding the realities of the U.S.-perpetrated Ukraine coup, of the Kiev fascist regime’s atrocities in the Donbass region, and of this regime’s intentions for ethnically cleansing the Russian speakers. NATO’s broken promise to not expand towards Russia isn’t even the strongest argument for why Russia was justified in taking action. U.S. imperialism had engineered a genocide threat in what used to be eastern and southern Ukraine, and this called for action on Russia’s part.
These regions have broken away because their people have needed to protect themselves from a 21st century Reich. If not for NATO’s aid, Russia would months ago have fulfilled its objective: to militarily exhaust Kiev too much for the regime to any longer pose a threat towards the Donbass and Crimean populations. Operation Z is a mission to take away the tools for violence from a government that lacks the right to use those tools, due to its being racist on the same level as the original Nazis. Russia hasn’t wanted anything more than to destroy this government’s military, as well as the fascist militias that the government directly backs. It hasn’t planned to occupy all of Ukraine, only the parts that act as a refuge from the fascists. The war’s having started, and having lasted this long, was the choice of the imperialists and the imperial lackeys. They’re the ones who’ve made Russia do the things that any country in its situation would do. Putin is nothing more than the one who happened to be in charge of Russia when these circumstances appeared.
Those truly responsible for the war make Putin into a reflection of their own moral sickness. They say he’s a new czar who wants to conquer the globe for imperial riches and glory. The truth is that interests in economic domination and pathological love for war are only to be found in the USA and its imperial partners. To see imperial intent behind Russia’s decision, you have to choose to see it. The trick of imperialism’s myth-makers is to invent “evidence” for their myths. The human mind has an innate vulnerability where it by default believes an assertion so long as that assertion appears to be supported by “proof,” regardless of that proof’s factual validity. A NATO-funded neuroscience study is where this phenomenon was identified, and NATO has been exploiting that vulnerability to make the Ukraine narrative appear unquestionable in the view of most of society.
So far this cheap manipulation strategy, where the propagandists concoct fabricated Russian mercenary Nazi ties or publish skewed statements from imperialist academics about how Russia is “fascist,” has succeeded at keeping the people passive amid their being robbed by the war machine. People’s default reaction has been to figure that because Ukraine is the “democratic” country—even though Ukraine’s executive power is at this point consolidated far more than Russia’s—the military aid and sanctions at least advance a worthy cause. If Russia is seen as the aggressor, or at the least of a comparable moral status to Ukraine, then mobilizing against the war machine isn’t taken into consideration. I don’t fault the average working class person for being in this state of ignorance, it’s all they know. The ones I do fault are those who, after becoming political, decide to still believe in the imperialist lies and fight against those who seek to stop the empire.
America’s left, broadly speaking, are betrayers because of this. They’ve presented themselves as the ones to come to when seeking out avenues for advancing economic justice, then hindered the struggle for working class victory by embracing the empire’s psyops. And they haven’t even necessarily done it out of naivete. The average consumer of imperialist media is naive, the political actor who promotes this media’s lies is corrupt. The left has been corrupted by opportunism, of both a domestic and global scale. It’s decided to embrace neocon ideology out of fear that being principled on anti-imperialism would alienate too many liberals, who only exist because our imperial system cultivates liberal ideas. It also fears anti-imperialism because the left’s defining figures, and so many of the smaller leftist actors, will never accept an outcome where neo-colonial extraction has ended. They don’t want to stop living off the poverty of the majority of the world, an exploitative dynamic that imperialist war is instrumental for maintaining.
Those obstinate about upholding the Ukraine psyop, slandering the DPRK, demonizing China, maintaining the lies about Syria, and advancing the other narratives imperialism uses to justify its destructive schemes have made their choice in which side of this power struggle they want to fight for. Those who presently believe imperialism’s lies for no other reason than that they’re working class, and have so far been exposed exclusively to these lies as they try to survive under a cruel system, have not yet had the chance to make that choice. It’s the job of anti-imperialists to bring our ideas to this silent majority, and rally them to become vocal. They have more of an incentive than ever to receive our calls, because their defying the empire is what’s needed to save them from the inflationary hell the empire has doomed them to.
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