None are more hypocritical than the Americans who say that Russia is waging an imperialist war. The same goes for when they say China is carrying out a colonial genocide, or when they say the DPRK violates its people’s human rights, or when they say Cuba is anti-democratic. The biggest of these projections is the one in which Americans say the PRC is carrying out neo-colonialism. Because not only are the U.S. and its wealthiest allies themselves guilty of neo-colonialism, but the central motive behind their cold war escalations is to maintain this neo-colonial extraction.
The Ukraine proxy war is about maintaining parasitism
“Stand with Ukraine” is a euphemism for “we must defend neo-colonialism.” The perpetual robbery of Africa, Asia, and Latin America is the indispensable economic basis for the USA, and for all the countries that have joined in the USA’s effort to use Ukraine as a cudgel to destabilize Eurasia. Their riches aren’t built off of their own merits, but off of the continuation of colonialism’s siphonings from the vast majority of the global population. Since 1960 alone, $152 trillion have been transferred from the Global South to the imperialist countries, obviously without any transfers in the other direction apart from predatory loans. This has followed centuries of theft from these countries which was so extreme that Africa, an unfathomably rich continent, had come to be one of the world’s “poorest” places by the standards of the colonial thieves who pretend Africans handicapped their own civilizations. With the emergence of neo-colonialism, in which capital rather than material goods is the primary export from the core countries, even the outlying colonial resistor Ethiopia got assimilated into the global market structure which makes up modern imperialism.
So was the case for countries like Haiti, which had managed to fight off domination by slavers during imperialism’s previous era. No one was spared this new paradigm of enslavement. In the age of New Imperialism, the only way for an exploited country to escape its exploitation is by refusing to comply with the policy demands of foreign capital. Which comes at the cost of the imperialists using sanctions to try to starve its people, and bringing war to it if that’s what’s needed to subdue the disobedient government. The material assets that the imperialist powers find so much pride in possessing, from the USA’s unparalleled wealth to the British Crown’s jewels, all come from theft. And for the settler colonies among them, that includes theft via internal imperialism in addition to the external kind. The oil that U.S. executives are making great profits off amid the resource cutoff from the Russia sanctions is being extracted within occupied indigenous land. While the inhabitants of the exploited countries bear the humanitarian costs from the economic crisis the war has created, and the U.S. empire’s internal colonies suffer the most from the wartime sacrifices, these parasites build their personal empires from the catastrophe’s byproducts.
The liberal academics, activists, NGO members, and commentators who provide the “progressive” side of the Ukraine proxy war’s narrative backing don’t dispute that neo-colonialism is real. Yet their recognition of the existence of U.S. imperialism is rendered inconsequential by their promotion of imperialism’s propaganda. The fact that they know imperial extraction is happening makes their pro-imperialist stances all the more reprehensible, because they’re consciously complicit in the warfare which keeps global exploitation going. They would say that they’re merely concerned about “human rights,” or whatever other slogan the State Department is using. But they’re not being truthful. They know the wars Washington is waging in the name of these “concerns” are what prop up the neo-colonial structure, as not even the most elite of the imperialists believe Washington invests its resources for altruistic reasons. It invests its resources in the hope to benefit capital.
Not only does their stance enable Washington’s sanctions, backing of terrorists, support for genocidal proxy war states, military occupations, bombings, drone strikes, propagations of disinformation designed to sow violence, outright resource theft from places like Syria, and other criminal actions, but it enables the enforced poverty of billions. All of these crimes make the Global South vastly less equipped to absorb the climate crisis, which these liberals claim to take seriously.
The current imperialist scheme to break up Russia and recolonize China isn’t going to work, as these powers are too strong and united to be beaten at this point. But the fact that liberals are backing this pathetically desperate maneuver, with all the human costs it’s having, shows they’ll do anything to try to preserve their share of imperialism’s dwindling spoils. That includes condemning the working class in the core countries to further deterioration in their conditions from the sanctions blowback, even after half a century of neoliberal attacks on their livelihoods. It also includes exploiting the conflict to impose more privatization and austerity onto the Ukrainian people, even after they’ve suffered especially badly among those impacted by the post-Soviet corporate shock policies.
The imperialists are creating more neo-colonies in eastern Europe, while bringing those in the core ever closer to the conditions of the neo-colonies, in the hope that this will stop capital’s demise. They also hope the Nordic states joining NATO will restore U.S. hegemony. In reality, these developments have accelerated the decay of the imperialist bloc, subjecting more places to militarization and austerity that will intensify capitalism’s contradictions. Imperialism needs a social base of well-bribed labor aristocrats in the core to function, and neo-colonial extraction is the only way to maintain that social base. The more the imperialists lose control over the neo-colonies, the more they’ll be forced to contract their capital, and the more those in the core countries will experience the harm from imperialism’s inward turn. The great oil, arms, and financial profits our ruling class is enjoying can’t reverse the system’s decline as long as its global extractive base keeps disappearing. Imperialism’s benefactors are living on borrowed time.
Washington’s proxy war in Ukraine, which is only one among a series of destructive U.S. projects to counter the emergence of a multipolarity, was launched to try to maintain that neo-colonial equilibrium. The hope of the imperialists is that Russia will be destabilized. That would leave China vulnerable to getting subdued, and eliminate the BRI’s threat towards neo-colonialism’s enforced underdevelopment. The opposite will happen. When the exploited countries gain the ability to stand on their own feet economically, they’ll be freed from the predatory relationship to the core which perpetuates their exploitation. This scenario would mean a drastic weakening of capital, so capital’s allies from all parts of the ideological spectrum will never stop supporting imperialism’s machinations. That’s why this country’s “left” has consistently united with the neoconservatives not just on the current funneling of weapons to Ukraine, but on the bombings of Syria, the murders of Libya and Yugoslavia, the coup attempts against socialist governments across Latin America, and Washington’s hybrid warfare tactics against China.
U.S. & its proxies on the verge of being even further discredited
It’s crucial that the benefactors of this parasitic global order foist the blame for our crises onto Washington’s adversaries, because otherwise the truth of the situation would be apparent. Under no circumstances can the context of U.S. meddling that led up to the Ukraine conflict be recognized, or else the myths they depend on will become impossible to ignore. The 2014 phone call showing Obama’s team facilitated Ukraine’s transition towards an ultra-nationalist government can’t be discussed. Neither can the evidence that the protests leading up to the power transfer were U.S.-backed. Neither can the over eight-year-long U.S. backing for self-described National Socialists in Ukraine. Neither can the stated intentions of post-coup Kiev officials to ethnically cleanse the Donbass, which (along with the regime’s already consistent racial war crimes pattern) is what compelled Russia to intervene on behalf of the Russian-speaking population.
Apologia for neo-colonialism, in which the western economic and political model gets fetishized as the only proper option for the entire globe, is at the root of this denial of the U.S. interference in Ukraine. The reason behind why deposed Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych declined to join the EU, provoking a U.S.-backed uprising by kulak descendants, is because the EU had offered Ukraine a deal of neoliberal restructuring. The imperialists were trying to turn Ukraine into a neo-colony, which they’ve ultimately succeeded at through their coup and the conflict it led up to. They’ve manufactured a domino effect of crises within the country, and then within the world more broadly, in order to force through their desires for full Ukrainian economic subjugation and Eurasian instability.
Ukraine has already been thoroughly looted by western corporations, so all the imperialists can now wring out of it is labor surplus from an increasingly destitute population. All while Zelensky turns Ukraine into a “big Israel,” where the country’s notoriously brutal National Guard gets inserted into daily life. Creating this police state is the only way the ultra-nationalists can hope to maintain control in the next few years, now that Ukraine’s economy has been almost cut in half and Ukraine’s military has been so effectively reduced in number. When Zelensky is freeing convicted torturers and child molesters so that they can fight, you know the Ukrainian imperialist compradors are getting desperate. Their blatant disregard for the laws of war, in which they’ve needlessly placed combat locations in places that put civilians at risk, has already discredited them to the point where even Amnesty International is talking about their war crimes.
The war will drag on through the winter, picking off ever more of Ukraine’s generation of fighters as Europe suffers from the sanctions blowback. How long the imperialists will be able to keep it up after then is dubious. At some point, a breaking point will be reached. The conflict will be forced to shift towards an irregular kind, where the CIA’s neo-Nazis carry out random terrorist attacks in place of any actual military strategy. NATO’s propagandists will endlessly insist that the war can still be won, while manufacturing more atrocity stories to rally sympathy for their defeated fascist project. Ukraine will be a shell of itself even more than it is already, economically crippled and without the tools it needs to fulfill Washington’s scheme for wider chaos.
Maintaining hatred for Washington’s rivals is the only way this failing cold war endeavor can keep up its charade as something viable. False flags must routinely be directed against Russia, like they were against Serbia, Syria, and Washington’s other past prolonged war psyops. As the imperialists routinely shift the focus of their propaganda between Russia and China, the same demonizing lens must be held up to the Belt and Road Initiative, and to China’s policies in the crucial BRI node of Xinjiang. However conclusively the narratives of “rogue states” and “human rights abuses” can be debunked, the State Department’s propagandists will never stop repeating their lies, as these lies are what hold together the extractive setup.
If these lies get sufficiently exposed, as the momentum of history amid U.S. imperial decline will ultimately make happen, the illusion of NATO’s role as an innocent justice enforcer will be irreparably shattered. The Iraq and Afghanistan invasions have already cost the imperialists so much narrative ground that they’ve had to resort to concealable warfare tools, and a discrediting of NATO’s fighting capacity in Ukraine would expose them even more damningly.
When the Kiev regime loses, Washington’s TPLF terrorists in Ethiopia will become less able to propagandize for their own destabilization project, which has been floundering as is. U.S. anti-Chinese militarization, which is intensifying a new occupation of historically colonized places like Africa, will get placed under more scrutiny. Imperialism’s warfare, whether in direct military form or in proxy form, will get fully revealed to be being nothing more than one big terrorist operation. This is because if Washington and NATO can’t win against Russia, when they’ve insisted they can, there’s no reason to support them, or to believe anything they say. As far as the Global South is concerned, Washington lost credibility as the “humanitarian” enforcer a long time ago; the formerly colonized countries have rejected Washington’s call for sanctioning Russia because whereas Moscow has a history of aiding decolonial struggles, Washington has an even more recent history of murdering millions for the sake of profit. The false human rights pretenses the U.S. has used in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and so many other places have cost it the respect of everyone besides its imperial allies, and even those allies are now having to be coerced into going along with its cold war escalations.
By instigating the war in Ukraine, Washington made a risky geopolitical chess maneuver. When this maneuver backfires, it will lose credibility not just as a humanitarian actor, but as a military power. From there its economic hegemony will crumble as well, destroyed by the further shift away from the dollar which Ukraine’s conflict has been bringing closer. With Iran and Venezuela’s pivots away from the petrodollar, Washington has found its status at unprecedented risk of being lost. So it’s used absurdly expanded sanctions as a desperate bid for subduing these and the other disobedient countries. The endless assertions that Ukraine is winning are about covering up the reality of this strategy, which is that when you sanction a gargantuan section of the world, that section is able to become economically self-reliant. When Ukraine is lost, and Russia comes out from the crisis even stronger, that fantasy about imperialism engaging in some masterstroke against multipolarity will be shattered. There’s no way the rise of the post-American world can be reversed, and to try to reverse it only speeds up the process.
The signs become more apparent every day that such a narrative collapse is approaching. We can see it in how the imperialist narrative managers, despite their supposed assuredness that Ukraine’s recent counteroffensive represented confirmation that Kiev will win, are now frantically calling for more NATO weapons infusions in response to Russia’s military involvement expansions. The truth is that Kiev’s regaining of that one stretch of territory was not a strategic victory, but a purely PR-motivated decision. A decision which gave Russia pivotal new advantages. Operation Z was never about gaining land for the sake of it, that’s what the colonial powers want from the wars they wage. It’s been about taking away Kiev’s military tools for violating the sovereignty of the independent Donbass republics, and about eliminating the Nazi militias which also menace the Donbass people. It’s been about ensuring the wellbeing of the Russian people, without asking for anything more.
Russia continues to be on track to achieve this. It doesn’t aim to occupy all of Ukraine, but to make Ukraine lose its ports on the Black Sea while making the breakaway of the Donbass permanent. The Kiev regime’s fixation on gaining soil for the sake of it, at the cost of intelligent military strategy, has sealed its fate as another fascist relic, like the Third Reich or Mussolini’s fascist government. This absurd warfare practice is directly informed by the deficient counterinsurgency strategy of the U.S. empire, which drives Kiev’s actions both politically and ideologically.
Self-destruction & cannibalization are the system’s responses to its decline
Ukraine’s ultra-nationalists have been trying to forcibly relocate the Donbass Russian speakers, and then let those deemed to be the real “Ukrainians” settle the leftover land, because like Hitler before them, they’re taking example from America’s model for colonial genocide. They embrace U.S. settlerism’s sick philosophy that might makes right, and that the supposedly superior nation must grab up land from the savages to enable its own development.
It’s a medieval, if not neolithic, worldview. It’s rooted in the idea that earth’s natural resources being finite justifies whatever actions a people take to gain more of those resources. Such a barbaric way of thinking encourages a country to treat those outside the “superior” population as detritus, to view them as nothing more than irritating obstacles in the chosen people’s quest for dominance. When one’s counterinsurgency strategy is based around terroristic brutality towards the local population, of course it fails. The U.S. failed to nation-build in Iraq because Iraq’s people didn’t want to be colonized, as Ukraine has been met with a successful separatist revolt because the Russian speakers don’t want to be ethnically cleansed. And since Ukraine’s fascist takeover has been another U.S. nation-building project, it counts as a direct loss for U.S. imperialism.
The ancient empires, like Rome, lasted so long because they understood the need to facilitate societal development within their colonies to avoid provoking unmanageable revolt. The U.S. empire, being based in the wildly unsustainable system of capitalism, doesn’t build anything. All it does is destroy and loot, which becomes truer as Washington desperately spreads chaos to try to stop the BRI. As a consequence, it’s unable to keep a stable social contract with any of the peoples it’s colonized or tried to recolonize. The only reason why Latin America isn’t already fully socialist is because the CIA has had to carry out dozens of coups throughout it, so the empire can maintain neo-colonial control over the hemisphere. The same goes for Africa and Asia, with imperialism’s tactics for delaying revolution in those places morso involving direct invasions. Now that imperialism’s means for exacting such counterrevolutionary violence are growing weaker, more and more countries are breaking from its control. Their worker movements are able to gain growing amounts of leverage, while the BRI spreads its development projects.
Even successful recent U.S. coup efforts, like the recent one in Sri Lanka, haven’t produced sustainable political projects. Sri Lanka continues to be a powder keg for mass economic discontent, one whose class contradictions are now being furthered by its new neo-colonial regime. It’s also undergoing an anti-Chinese militarization process at the expense of its people. This applies to the rest of the neo-colonies, which have in the last couple years been hit by even more privatization, austerity, and wage cuts. The IMF has exploited the pandemic to impose these policies onto 81 struggling impoverished countries, and has in the process dug its own grave. The peoples of these countries will rise up. Between the pandemic and the climate crisis, they have no choice.
The equivalent crisis is happening in Europe, especially Germany, which has undergone U.S. meddling that’s forced it into rejecting Russia’s Nordstream pipeline. Because of the sanctions blowback, Germany is now in a depression, sure to get more damaging as the energy crisis combines with a climate-impacted winter. Washington’s closest allies are being strong-armed into acting against their own interests, placing ever more pressure on their leaders to cease the sanctions. Stalin assessed that the three big contradictions of imperialism are antagonism between the exploiting and exploited countries, the intensification of class contradictions caused by global monopoly capital, and division among the imperialist powers. We’re seeing these cracks within the system get bigger as Washington takes reckless actions to try to reverse its decline.
Imperialism is a dying order with a shrinking global social base, which was always tiny to begin with. Mao predicted that upwards of 90 percent of the global population will ultimately rise up against imperialism, and that remaining less than 10 percent are who’s cheering on NATO. These warmongers are stubborn in their desire to see their parasitic lifestyles continue, because they can’t see any other way society can be set up. They’re stuck in that ancient, barbaric mindset, in which someone always has to be trampling over another. In the modern age, in which we can point to working examples of societies successfully developing towards communism, this philosophy of inevitable human competition lacks credibility on its face.
Socialist China has lifted a record amount of people out of poverty, with Vietnam following a parallel path. Laos and Cuba are progressing towards such a point of economic development. The DPRK has already developed so far along the path to communism that it’s abolished taxation, and hasn’t even needed to carry out market reforms like the other workers’ republics. Existing socialism has proven wrong the reactionary argument that history can only involve one group subjugating another. The big lie the imperialists tell, propagated through their narrative about “imperialist” Russia and China, is that if the U.S. weren’t exploiting and murdering the peripheral peoples then another player would be doing so. Communism, and the multipolar order more broadly, are showing a cooperative economic and global model is possible.
Imperialism’s weakening grip, & how we in the core can throw it off
The emergence of the new cold war’s alliance between Russia and China, which has lately been deepening despite Washington’s attempts to use Ukraine as a wedge issue between the two, reveals how ineffectual Washington’s hand has become. No longer can it successfully stoke division among its challengers, whether Russia and China, Iraq and Iran, or China and Vietnam. The imperialists have been attempting to do so with their coup efforts in the former Soviet states, which have failed apart from the proxy warfare fiasco of Ukraine. Kazakhstan has been defended from NED terrorists by Russia’s peacekeeping forces, and Washington’s more recent coup attempt in Uzbekistan hasn’t succeeded either. It’s in Uzbekistan where Russia and China have been working to strengthen their ties, following a Chinese diplomatic meeting with the Uzbeks themselves. Eurasia’s unity, and collective economic vitality, only grow stronger.
The “big Israel” the Ukrainian compradors aim to create will be a tiny sliver of the landmass, next to a Donbass breakaway area that will likely soon vote to become part of the Russian Federation. It’s only a matter of time before this state fully collapses, along with much of the rest of the capitalist world during our age of intensifying climate chaos. And Israel itself will have to try to navigate a new order where its biggest ally Washington has largely pulled out of southwest Asia, in order to expand a desperate anti-Chinese military buildup in the Indo-Pacific. The Zionist criminals have been empowered by this emergence of a more anarchic international order, but so have the states that oppose them. Iran has become more influential than ever, Assad’s government has survived, Lebanon continues to be ruled by the same Hezbollah entity which fought off Israeli occupation, and Yemen has been won by the anti-Zionist Houthis. As a favor to their Zionist proxy, the imperialists are attempting a color revolution in Iran. But color revolutions these days invariably fail within countries that are strongly part of the anti-U.S. bloc.
The parasites are undermining themselves. Their system of destruction and violence is being replaced by a new world. The tasks of revolutionaries in the core are to lift the people up to the knowledge level of a trained cadre member, better educate and train our own cadres, and build solidarity with those fighting imperialism abroad. Crucial to this is defending imperialism’s targets from the slanders that constantly get brought upon them. Not just because this helps these peoples counter Washington’s violence, but because this is essential for equipping us in our own struggle against the U.S. empire. Be a chauvinist, and the consequences of this will come back to you. If socialists in the core only focus on their own local conditions, without standing up for anti-imperialist countries or studying how the empire operates, they’ll be wiped out by what’s coming.
During the Cold War, the last time the imperialists were struggling against an existential threat, they reacted by orchestrating genocides within numerous Global South countries they feared would break from neo-colonialism. Indonesia’s “Jakarta Method” of suppressing communism involved the systematic mass murder of every person suspected to as much as have socialist sympathies. This method got exported to Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Guatemala, Bolivia, and the other victims of the CIA’s coup spree. Since then, it’s evolved into violence campaigns like Plan Colombia, the Zionist-assisted effort to pick off political dissidents that could be revitalized should the fascists replace Colombia’s current centrist government. As long as the fascist military leadership and personnel remain, capitalist reaction will have the tools to carry out new mass exterminations.
The equivalent is on its way to happening in the United States, but here the fascist backlash will look different. So far, during its early stages, it’s resembling not the Jakarta Method, so much as the Kiev coup regime’s anti-communist suppression model. This is a model where fascist terrorists are given the tools to exact massive bloodshed, and where these terrorists gain the protected status to do so with impunity. Crucial to instigating the counterrevolutionary terror are psyops, designed to demonize the targeted groups and identify these targets in the eyes of the fascist terror agents. Anti-communist hoaxes were used to stoke Indonesia’s reactionaries into a violent frenzy, but here the process is subtler. Our spooks have refined their manipulation tactics, learning how to infiltrate revolutionary groups in an insidious fashion that can’t be detected by an untrained mind. They’ve come to weaponize our revolutionary passions against us, manufacturing cults that claim to oppose the system while leading us into peril.
We must learn the nature of the counterinsurgency we face, and proceed with vigilance. The foundation of this education on revolutionary cadre intelligence is to study what the empire is doing abroad, so we can avoid falling victim to its destructive campaign. Only then can we hope to destroy the enemy from within.—————————————————————————
If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pinch during late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here.
