How to tell whether someone represents a genuine threat to our ruling institutions? See how far they’re able to get within the platforms these institutions control, or how much organizing work they can do until getting targeted by state repression. These individuals and organizations naturally aren’t able to gain great resources or reach, but this sacrifice of their short-term influence is ironically the cost of their defining history in the long term.
It’s only when you refuse to compromise your stances and practice that the centers of power act like you’re an existential threat towards them. And when you unite with the others who’ve committed to fighting U.S. hegemony, as the members of the Rage Against the War Machine coalition have done this year, you ultimately can gain a kind of platform which the imperialism-compatible actors don’t even want to attain: a platform that lets you appeal to a majority of the people, and nurture their anti-imperialist impulses.
That’s the context which can provide us with hope as we see NATO’s censors intensify their assaults upon journalists and journalism. This month, the online imperialist censorship campaign reached a potentially unprecedented degree when it shut down an entire website: Strategic Culture, the platform for anti-NATO commentary run by the Strategic Culture Foundation. One day this site, which had given me and others so many important resources on geopolitics, simply ceased to be accessible. And according to the Foundation’s statement about this, censorship was absolutely to blame.
I got this statement from someone who sent it to me on Facebook, which appropriately made the site’s name have to itself be censored due to being blocked from U.S. social media:
Today, our website, ***ic-***e.org has been denied access to the .org domain, run by the U.S.-based Public Interest Registry. This comes in the wake of numerous cyberattacks aimed at the website’s infrastructure. There is no doubt that this act of cyber warfare is an attempt to silence another independent media critical of the American empire. Currently, all our materials are accessible on Telegram and we will resume the operation of our website soon. Stay tuned! Sincerely, Strategic Culture Foundation.”
What had the site done to provoke these cyberattacks? This kind of thing doesn’t simply happen to sites at random; these attacks have everything to do with how Strategic Culture is countering NATO’s narratives on the conflict in Ukraine, at a moment when Ukraine is an extremely sensitive topic for our ruling institutions. Far more sensitive than they want anyone to be aware of, because they seek to maintain the perception that the war is still seen by the pro-Kiev side as winnable.
The reality is that Ukraine’s summer counter-offensive was a failure, and this has had catastrophic consequences for Washington’s strategic interests. Not necessarily because of Ukraine’s military defeat itself, but because this defeat has made it more difficult for Washington to hide the larger economic defeat which it’s been experiencing for around a year now. Last fall, when the sanctions started visibly failing to bring the outcomes that the experts said they would, the only way the empire could keep the Ukraine psyop going was by maintaining a story about Ukraine being perpetually close to driving out Russia. The longer things have carried on, the more it’s become a problem that Ukraine no longer has armed forces capable of being effective without outside help. And as the war has accelerated the rise in inflation while sustaining an energy crisis, the mass support the imperialists depend on for their war has shrunk.
That Strategic Culture has been bringing attention to the empire’s failures makes it a danger to the war machine’s stability, so it had to be crushed, and the censors will start trying to crush it again after it comes back. The same level of danger comes from The Grayzone, as we’ve seen from how the NATO agents have targeted it this week. GoFundMe, one of the payment companies that’s been working to advance the Russia sanctions by cutting services off from anti-NATO voices, has made The Grayzone unable to get its recent donations. Max Blumenthal has explained why it’s totally reasonable to connect this with the campaign against anti-imperialists:
The FBI’s effort to ban Twitter accounts at the behest of Ukrainian intelligence offers a clue into the identify of those responsible for raising the “external concerns” with Gofundme. Since 2014, when a US-backed coup installed a nationalist government in Kiev, our contributors have been at the forefront of exposing the role of Washington in pushing Ukraine toward all-out war with Russia. The Grayzone has also provided extensive documentation of the overwhelming influence of neo-Nazi forces over Kiev, triggering angry tirades from Ukrainian diplomats while landing our staff members on Myrotvorets, a semi-official SBU assassination target list…while we have no concrete information on the identity of the “external forces” that have successfully lobbied Gofundme to freeze our donations, we have strong reason to suspect interference by the Ukrainian government and its sponsors in Washington is at the root of the sabotage.
These two developments are further indications that another, much larger attack against the anti-imperialist movement is coming. The raiding and indictments of Uhuru’s members in retaliation for their combating the Ukraine psyop have been attempts to suppress anti-imperialist organizational efforts, particularly ones which bring in the Black working class, at a time when these efforts have posed a serious threat to the empire’s most important psyop. As this psyop becomes further untenable; and the empire is forced to create narrative pretexts for more desperate measures, like a hybrid war on BRICS or an effort to destroy Africa; the state will try to manufacture consent for even greater repression. Potentially by carrying out a false flag, one which involves implicating anti-imperialist journalists and groups in supposed foreign election interference.
The hegemon has growing logistical limits to how much damage it can do abroad. It can’t start destabilization campaigns against all the countries that are embracing multipolarity, that would destroy the USA itself in the process. It needs to choose its next targets with care and caution, making the wishes of certain pro-NATO agents for balkanizing places like Brazil too absurd to take seriously. This last werk Günther Fehlinger, president of NATO’s European Development Committee, called for breaking Brazil into many different countries, using the rationale that Lula is partnering with the supposed “genocide” perpetrator Putin. Whether or not we should believe the Twitter fact check feature’s statement that Fehlinger’s opinion doesn’t represent the view of NATO itself, there’s no way the hegemon can actually do this. If the USA tried to destroy Brazil, it would only succeed at fully demolishing its own economy.
The imperialists still have some tools for hindering the rise of BRICS, and these tools can only be taken away via a new wave of workers revolutions. When France convinced India’s fascist regime to block Algerian entry into BRICS this month, it showed the anti-revolutionary effectiveness of the Indian deep state’s maneuver to install the BJP into power. Ultimately, the fight against imperialism can only be won when the worldwide proletarian struggle is. The hegemon has still overall been declining, though; the latest series of BRICS decisions succeeded at adding numerous new members to the grouping, and Venezuela is seeking to join it at the next opportunity.
Because the hegemon is experiencing such immense losses simply due to the unavoidable processes of history, the agents of international monopoly capital have more reason to be more concerned than ever. They’re trying to prolong the Ukraine proxy war as much as they can, even taking advantage of the crises their own socioeconomic order has created to attempt to gain leverage. Biden has inserted his failing latest Ukraine aid proposal into the bill for Maui fire relief, showing that the imperialists will blackmail the people if that’s what they need to do to keep up their war operations.
Should we succeed at mobilizing the people against the war machine and the capitalist order behind it, these wars will become truly impossible for our rulers to wage. We have to survive the growing attacks against our movement, and become the winners in the class conflict.
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