A particularly odious thing happens with sickening regularity when peoples legitimately rise up against the authoritarian regimes that repress them: many otherwise vocal human rights defenders fall silent, or worse, shrilly denounce mass popular resistance as an “imperialist plot”.
We have seen this recently with the awful abyss of silence around the West’s creeping betrayal of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) that defended global civilised values by routing Islamic State fascists in a territory the size of Belgium – and with the cowardly keyboard warriors who have turned on the valorous youth of Iran for taking the torch to their theocratic-terrorist elite.
In the midst of appalling atrocities committed by their regimes, Syrian and Iranian résistants have been achingly begging the question: where are the Greta Thunbergs of the world, who over the past two years so loudly virtue-signalled their positions via social media on the destruction of Gaza?
This is not a mere difference of political perspective: there is a deep philosophical rot at the root of much supposedly progressive discourse. And it results in not a mere moral dissonance, but in a yawning vacuum entirely sanitised of humanity.
What I prefer to term “anti-social media” has empowered remote and callously uninterested personalities to pretend to a geo-political erudition that usually turns out to be troll-farmed by noxious regimes under which they themselves would shudder to live.
The sheer pace of current events and the avalanche of propaganda they generate is of such an overwhelming volume that one can perceive behind the wall of voodoo the kind of “accelerationist” doctrine that, whether pushed by Yanqui alt-rightists or Saudi fundamentalists, aims literally at civilisational collapse: some sort of end-times purge.
The first notable activist to adequately describe the phenomenon then spanning the globe in the wake of the Berlin Conference that had carved up Africa was the Japanese anarchist Kōtoku Shūsui in his Imperialism (1901), with Lenin only catching on fifteen years later.
False claim
What enabled the Stalinists, and the Maoists in their wake, to falsely claim that the USSR and red China were not imperialist was that their countries’ colonial expansion had occurred within their vast home continent.
But it was the weird degeneration of Trotskyism that, I argue, lies at the heart of the rot that has infected progressive movements globally when it comes to how empire and resistance are perceived today, in a nominally post-colonial world.
Trotskyism arguably started unravelling at the 1957 Congress of their Fourth International, during which an imaginary “world revolution” was conjured up, valorising a shifting rogues’-gallery of any movement or regime, no matter how reactionary, which opposed Western imperialism, and which thus had to be unconditionally supported.
Leading post-war theorist Ernest Mandel defended Pol Pot’s genocidal regime by arguing in the crudest form of Manichean two-camp-ism that “a workers’ state has come into being, independently of the conditions under which this occurred”. This was regardless of the 1,3-million dead in the killing fields.
This blanket endorsement of terror and massacre was subsequently applied to the mad mullahs of Tehran after their 1979 counter-revolution, to the Al Qaeda whack-jobs who flew into the Twin Towers, and to Islamic State jihadis so off the charts of humanity that it took battalions of SDF women to put them down, like the rabid dogs they are.
All of which would be only the distasteful distortions of a marginal political sect – if its infection hadn’t got under the skin of mainstream progressivism.
Unprecedented libertarian quality
The West was happy to let the SDF take care of Isis and institute an “Autonomous Administration,” a bottom-up democracy in north-eastern Syria of unprecedented libertarian quality, in which a woman and a man combine to occupy each elected post.
But now that the civil war is over, in shrill echo of the corrupted left, the US-backed Radio Free Syria has been running an endless propaganda campaign against the SDF; and with an ex-Al Qaeda regime now installed in Damascus, is letting its forces in Syria stand idle as that regime starts dismantling the Autonomous Administration, setting Isis prisoners loose, and committing atrocities as it advances.
Any true humanitarians, any true democrats of whatever stripe, should be explicitly clear that they stand with the people, and not with the regimes of a free Syria and a free Iran.
[Image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/62/Raqqa_Syrian_Democratic_Forces_3.jpg]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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