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Caitlin Johnstone
ROGUE JOURNALIST
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Another Nation Absorbed Into The Blob Of The Empire
And now the imperial blob rolls on to absorb its next target, having grown one Syria-sized increment larger after spending years digesting that nation via proxy warfare, sanctions, relentless bombing campaigns from Israel, and a military occupation designed to steal its food and fuel.
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
Bashar al-Assad has fled Syria to Moscow, where he has reportedly been granted asylum by Russia. The al-Qaeda affiliates who drove him out have declared victory for the “mujahideen” in Damascus. Both Biden and Netanyahu have publicly taken credit for assisting in the regime change, and of course Turkey’s Erdogan deserves a heavy share of credit as well.
And yet there’s still a bit of a taboo in mainstream western discourse around calling this a regime change operation backed by the US and its allies. We’re all meant to pretend this was a 100 percent organic uprising driven solely and exclusively by the people of Syria despite years and years of evidence to the contrary. We are meant to pretend this is the case even after we just watched the US power alliance crush Syria using proxy warfare, starvation sanctions, constant bombing operations, and a military occupation explicitly designed to cut Syria off from oil and wheat in order to prevent its reconstruction after the western-backed civil war.
People get mad if you say this, but it’s true. It’s just a fact that major world events do not occur independently of the actions of the major world powers who have a vested interest in their outcomes. If my saying this makes you feel uncomfortable, that discomfort is called cognitive dissonance. It’s what being wrong feels like.
Maybe it bothers you when people point out the involvement of the US power alliance in Syria, and maybe you would prefer to believe that a plucky band of heroic freedom fighters bravely overthrew an evil supervillain dictator all on their own like some Hollywood movie. But real life doesn’t move in accordance with your preferences. In real life, the globe-spanning empire that is centralized around the United States will reliably be deeply involved in such events.
When I say this you may want to believe I am “denying the agency of Syrians,” and that “denying agency” is the worst sin a person can possibly commit. But nothing I’m saying actually contradicts the idea that Syrians have their own agency. Obviously there were many Syrians who wanted Assad gone, and obviously there were many people who had their own reasons for fighting him which had nothing to do with the US empire. There is no contradiction between this obvious fact and the well-documented reality that the US-centralized power structure has been balls deep in Syria from the very beginning of the violence in 2011, and that its involvement led to the events we are seeing today.
The claim isn’t that the US empire controlled the minds of Syrians and forced them to turn against their government with no agency of their own. The claim is that the empire put a big fat thumb on the scale to ensure that one group of Syrians got their way instead of a different group.
You can argue that western regime change interventionism will lead to positive results this time (so long as you’re prepared to ignore mountains of historical evidence consistently demonstrating the opposite), but what you cannot do on any rational basis is deny that western regime change interventionism occurred in Syria.
Western liberalism is funny in that its adherents lean heavily on their ability to psychologically compartmentalize away from the actions of the western empire, and indeed away from the very existence of that empire. The western liberal lives in an imaginary alternate universe where western powers pretty much mind their own business and western leaders passively watch violence and destruction unfold around the world whilst pleading for peace and diplomacy from their podiums. They pretend the empire does not exist, and that it is only by pure coincidence that conflicts, coups and uprisings keep occurring in ways which favour the strategic interests of Washington.
In reality, it is impossible to understand what’s going on in the world unless you understand that the US is the hub of an undeclared empire which has been working tirelessly to bring the global population under a single power umbrella over which it presides. The few countries who have successfully resisted being absorbed into this imperial blob are the Official Bad Guys we westerners are all trained to hate: China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and a few socialist states in Latin America. I used to include Syria in this list, but that’s over now. Syria has been absorbed into the blob of the empire.
And tomorrow the imperial blob will move its crosshairs on to the next unabsorbed nation. That’s the underlying dynamic behind all the major conflicts on earth. This dynamic gets redacted from the mainstream western world-view with the assistance of the western propaganda services known as the mass media, as well as the western indoctrination system known as schooling. This dynamic is redacted from our world-view and hidden from our attention by the plutocrats and empire managers who work to manipulate our information systems, because otherwise we would realize that the US empire is the most tyrannical and abusive power structure on this planet today.
And it unquestionably is. No other power structure has spent the 21st century killing people by the millions in wars of aggression while circling the planet with hundreds of military bases and working continuously to crush any group which opposes its dictates anywhere on earth. Not China. Not Russia. Not Iran. Not Cuba. Not Bashar al-Assad. Only the US empire has been tyrannizing and abusing the world to this extent in modern times.
And now the imperial blob rolls on to absorb its next target, having grown one Syria-sized increment larger after spending years digesting that nation via proxy warfare, sanctions, relentless bombing campaigns from Israel, and a military occupation designed to steal its food and fuel.
Our world cannot know peace as long as we are ruled by an empire that is fueled by endless rivers of human blood. Here’s hoping the end of that empire comes sooner rather than later.
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All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
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This is a dispatch from our ongoing series by Caitlin Johnstone
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1 comment
‘The few countries who have successfully resisted being absorbed into this imperial blob are the Official Bad Guys we westerners are all trained to hate: China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and a few socialist states in Latin America. I used to include Syria in this list, but that’s over now. Syria has been absorbed into the blob of the empire.’
This passage reminds me of another, penned over five years ago by the late Andre Vltchek:
‘ On both sides of the Atlantic, the establishment is in panic. Their world is in crises, and the ‘crises’ arrived mainly because several great countries, including China, Russia, Iran, but also South Africa, Turkey, Venezuela, DPRK and the Philippines, are openly refusing to play in accordance with the script drawn in Washington, London and Paris.’ And his remedy: ‘ Let us [put] the people of Russia first … China first! And, Asia, Africa, Latin America first!’ (Global Research, June 03, 2019)
Lenin wrote tellingly of Russia in 1918: ‘reality says that state capitalism would be a step forward for us; if we were able to bring about state capitalism in a short time it would be a victory for us’ (The Chief Task of Our Time). In his Report of an Investigation into the Peasant Movement in Hunan (1927), Mao admitted that the coming revolution would not be socialist: ‘To overthrow these feudal forces is the real objective of the revolution’. Iran is a theocratic dictatorship, and North Korea a family-run cult cum kleptocracy. ‘Maduro recognizes Venezuela is still a capitalist-based economy…’ (Popular Resistance newsletter, 27 May, 2018). Capitalist hallmarks, such as class society, commodity production, profit motive, exploitation of wage labour, markets, etc., are found worldwide.
‘…The poor have no country, in all lands, they suffer from the same evils, and they, therefore, realise that the barriers put up by the powers that be the more thoroughly to enslave the people must fall’ (International Working Men’s Association, 1866).