The Democratic Party’s commitment to backing the genocide by “Israel” against Gaza has accelerated a transition within our political culture that was already taking place; it’s forced the imperialist narrative managers to find a new strategy for preventing the emergence of an effective popular movement against war and austerity.
Up until the developments of this last month, it was expedient for the U.S. empire to use “wokeness”—which here means posturing about wanting to rectify systemic injustices—as its primary means for narrative control. Since the empire’s pivot towards Obama-style “humanitarian intervention”; and the solidification of the Democratic Party as the primary driver of the new cold war; the traditional jingoism of American militarism has been substituted with the idea that U.S. foreign policy exists to advance social progress. Now that Biden is supporting a genocide which the mainstream elements of the left can’t ignore (like they could ignore the Donbass genocide which Biden backed), that idealistic image of the Democratic Party can’t be maintained.
The new cold war was already making this image increasingly hard to keep up; that’s because when the Democrats decided to make the new cold war their central focus, they thereby made a pivot away from the nonwhite and working class parts of their base. Chuck Schumer declared in 2016 that the Democrats now felt appealing to well-off traditional Republican voters was best, which created a contradiction; because the Democrats still want to keep support from the Black community, and from the other demographics which have been largely alienated from the right.
With Biden’s increases in military aid to police departments, continuation of neoliberal austerity, and engineering of a proxy war whose economic effects have especially harmed Black workers, the Democratic Party’s old base has become more apathetic about the party than ever. And Israel has made this problem bad enough that it could lead to another 2016; Muslim voters in key states have come to feel betrayed by Biden due to his facilitating an extermination campaign against their people. That the Democrats have joined with the far-right in such a visible way means wokeness can’t survive, at least not in the form that it’s had for the last decade.
The main ideology the ruling elites put forth is going to have to transform; to become something that can better sell the empire’s war operations during this new phase, wherein the empire’s brutal nature is as noticeable as it was during the Iraq invasion. This transition was going to happen at some point; imperialism’s strategists have been planning to shift towards a war against Mexico when Ukraine needs to be fully abandoned, and such a war would force the propaganda’s character to change. What the Gaza genocide has done is force the narrative managers to try to carry out the ideological pivot which they would have to pursue when Mexico became the main target.
Whereas the hegemon has been able to disguise its warmongering as humanitarianism when carrying out proxy wars against Syria and Russia, it can’t do the same with Palestine. The narrative that Israel is “only defending itself” can only convince so many when the Zionist state’s genocidal actions are readily apparent; and when the historical context of a century-long colonization project is thereby easily recognizable to anyone who researches only a little further.
In this new phase of imperial decline, society within the imperial center is divided between those who support the Gaza genocide and those who oppose it—with the latter element including more left-leaning people, and less right-leaning people, than the opposition towards the Ukraine proxy war did. This anti-Israel element isn’t exclusively left-wing, though; Ukraine helped many more of the libertarian-leaning conservatives make fighting the war machine their central priority, which translates to being against all imperialist wars. The new primary ruling class ideology hasn’t been fully formed yet, as the elites are needing to scramble at the moment; what this ideology is no doubt going to include, though, are a set of ideas designed to divide the “left” wing of the antiwar element from the element’s “right” wing. As that’s the only way the elites can hope to prevent the emergence of a successful resistance to their next policies.
The “anti-Zionism is antisemitism” narrative can’t succeed under circumstances like these ones, any more than the “USA is a protector of sovereignty” narrative will work when Washington tries to invade Mexico. So the most important narrative the elites are going to need to sell; both during the present phase, and after they’ve started more seriously propagating the anti-Mexico psyop; is a narrative that portrays the resistance effort against Zionism and imperialism as fundamentally problematic. The narrative managers can’t discredit the arguments against Zionism and imperialism; so they have to make it look like the people fighting these evils are white supremacists, Russian agents, sexual predators, and the other things anti-imperialists have been getting accused of being.
These character assassination methods both let the pro-Zionist, pro-imperialist voices portray the anti-imperialist cause as wrong; and let the “leftists” who have an interest in gatekeeping organizing spaces weaponize widely propagated smears. We’ve been seeing this phenomenon for years. It’s a dynamic where the mentality and the talking points of Russiagate translate from the legacy media outlets to the activist spaces, where cynical actors are always looking for ways to discredit their rivals. As long as the opposition towards Zionism is defined by opportunists who are selective in their solidarity; who repeat imperialist propaganda either when it comes to certain countries (like Russia) or to the antiwar organizers who act outside the “leftist” niche; the cause isn’t going to succeed.
That’s what the elites hope the anti-Zionists do: prove too weak in character to be able to mobilize the people against the next war operations, or lead the workers to victory. The ruling institutions prefer that the antiwar and labor movements are led not by the forces which seek to get out of the movement and into the masses; but by the types of leftists who try to gain influence within left-liberal spaces by posturing in the same ways Democrats have throughout capitalism’s “woke” era. And even though these leftists aren’t going to give up the original version of wokeness throughout this new era (as these leftists are appealing to an audience that will only embrace leaders who utilize such rhetoric), they’re going to mirror the language of the Democrats when it comes to attacking the “bad” kinds of anti-imperialists. They’re going to intensify their attempts to discredit those who’ve sided with Russia during the Ukraine conflict, and who are working to build an authentic anti-imperialist coalition which reaches beyond the “left.”
The pro-Zionist figures who’ve previously utilized wokeness aren’t going to be able to use wokeness to win the present narrative battle, nor the coming narrative battle over Mexico. That’s because with how overwhelming the global support for Palestine has shown itself to be, no Zionist propaganda strategy—whether liberal or rightist—is capable of neutralizing the backlash towards Israel’s crimes against humanity. Because of this momentary defeat in the narrative war, the best option of the elites is to put even more effort into marginalizing and crushing the anti-imperialist elements which are ideologically capable of winning the people.
That’s why there’s a media blackout around the Uhuru case: if the majority of the people became familiar with the Uhuru org, it would gain a great amount of new supporters, even if the media were to present it in a vilifying way. Most Americans share a primary material interest in the defeat of imperialism and the building of a new social system, so they’ll join with the committed anti-imperialists when they find out about our efforts. And though the elites are going to do all they can to put forth an effective cultural narrative during this intensified new phase of the struggle, should we do the work required for building a movement, they’ll fail. The narrative managers now need to try to replace their woke rhetorical model—which was already failing amid the empire’s narrative defeat over Ukraine—with a hastily concocted substitute that’s guaranteed to be less effective.
All the elites have to rely on now are a broad series of smear campaigns, which recent history shows could fail; ultimately, the empire couldn’t succeed at convincing the world that Julian Assange is a predatory Russian agent, making his inhumane incarceration another thing that’s shrunk public faith in our institutions. We must give the tens of millions of Americans who are sickened by the atrocities our government is funding an alternative to bourgeois politics, and to the insular modern version of “left” organizing. We have the potential to bring more left-leaning people into the anti-imperialist struggle than we could when Ukraine was the main narrative; as well as to bring more of the libertarian-leaning conservatives into the anti-Zionist cause. The key is to generate enough momentum for our cause that the anti-revolutionary forces can’t neutralize our efforts.
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