Saturday, January 14, 2017

Fake Leftists: The Infantile Disorder of Dying Empires

Casey Michel hits it out of the park with How Putin Played the Far Left.

The fake Leftists of the 21st century all share one feature: they love empire -- just not the one they live inside and benefit from, but cannot be bothered to actually resist.

Instead of critiquing their country's own imperialism, understanding its past and present history, grasping their own complicity in its structures, and joining with the collective resistances against all empires -- that is, against the looting spree of Wall Street, against the toxic austerity of the euro-empire, against the machinations of Chinese, Indian, Indonesian and Brazilian plutocrats, etc. -- they ignore all these struggles and instead swear fealty to some other empire they know nothing about.

Then they project their most lurid neocolonial/Orientalist/Occidentalist fantasies on that foreign empire. Anything from their own empire is coded as evil, anything from the foreign empire is coded as good.

Here in the US, the result has been the fake journalism of Julian Assange, a paranoid creep who believes that only he should have secrets, the fake dissent of Ed Snowden, a minor sysadmin who is now regularly trotted out to Putinist press events like the pet hamster of the FSB he is, and the fake campaign of Jill Stein -- because if you are for ecological sanity and social justice, you must be against imperial war, and that includes Putinism's criminal aggression against and occupation of Ukraine.

The time has come for those of us who comprise the real Left -- and this means anyone who believes in and works for more fairness and less exploitation, more schools and fewer missiles, more sharing and less greed -- to repudiate the fake Left, and call them out for what they are: perfectly ordinary Rightists.

If the fake Leftists love empires so much, they can have them. The rest of us have empires to resist, and social movements to build.

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