The Black-and-White Washing of Geopolitics: It’s Us Against the World

Liberal capitalism depends on producing clear enemies to justify its own contradictory existence. A tale as old as humanity itself.

Still, we live in tribes. Still, we build fortresses. Still, we fight for territory. Still, we must have enemies. Still, we dehumanize the foreign and create fictional barbarians.

What purpose do our liberal institutions serve, then?

Another violent escalation yields another equally destructive black-and-white dualism.

It is clear, they say, that Palestinians are the bad guys here and that we should support Israel, no matter the cost. Monuments around Western Europe and the US are glaring in Israeli colors, flags are being hissed, official Tweets composed, news articles and commentaries bought, bots unleashed unto the social platforms, military support promised.

“OMG. We all stand behind Israel ♥️♥️♥️,” screams the major part of the masses on Twitter/X, Reddit, and TikTok. Or, “Why can’t they just have peace? 😢😢” — Peace meaning an undisturbed continuation of the slow genocide. Atrocities committed on both sides, seemingly inevitable, regretfully, in every conflict, are subtly ‘corrected’ to present one side as the far greater evil. It is less a matter of what the news shows, but more a matter of what they don’t. Add to that a sprinkle of sensationalism.

The notion that one can condemn, with ferocity, terrorist actions by Hamas and the theocracy they wish to establish, while also, with ferocity, condemning the Israeli racist apartheid state, does not seem to enter many people’s minds. And certainly not the fact that there are material reasons for radicalization and extremism. As if one just decides one day to throw one’s life away and give up everything for fun. Try growing up in a large-scale prison without hope, freedom, barely enough food to get by, sporadic electricity, death all around, and the constant feeling of being a second-hand human on your own land. I’d like to see you being ‘reasonable,’ whatever that means:

Freedom Is Non-Negotiable

There is no such thing as an ‘unprovoked attack.’ It’s like observing a slave uprising and watching them slaughter plantation owners. Were this to happen today, the enlightened liberal, the ‘apolitical’ centrist would condemn it and support every imperial intervention. “Those barbarians,” he would say. “Why can’t they solve their problems with reason? Why don’t they utilize the ‘democratic’ institutions, the very ones that subjugate them in the first place, to make their case? Despicable!” He would likewise condemn the Warsaw Uprising, were it to happen today and were Nazi Germany slightly more parliamentarian. It’s pick and choose, and the winner writes history to its liking. We — us in the West — have been the winner for centuries now.

Most people, let’s be brutally honest, don’t care about others suffering. They just care about their newsfeed being more polluted by negativity than usual, and then the moral absolution of being publicly against war, violence, revolution, resistance, anything perceived as a threat to the status quo. That doctrine, that is no doctrine at all, of reason. And, in the background, always the intangible sense of guilt for living in such vast comfort while the rest of the world burns — and knowing, in some part, how that comfort was achieved in the first place.

When people realize they are, principally, in the wrong (or, at the very least, don’t consider the full picture), and have been about every major global issue, but it is in their material and spiritual interest to continue being in the wrong, they will not suddenly come to their senses but, instead, double-down on their beliefs, no matter how ridiculous they are. It’s like confronting a flat-earther or anti-vaxxer with clear evidence. It yields aggression, more denial, and a retreat into even more conspiracy to explain the gaps in the conspiracy.

That’s precisely what is happening with (liberal) capitalism.

The machinery works efficiently.

Because Russia must be evil — the geopolitics demand it right now — they must have always been evil. A great example is the slow but systemic erasure of the Soviet Union’s part in the defeat of Nazi Germany. In Ukraine, Poland, Slovakia, and so on, known Nazi collaborators are resurrected and presented as national heroes. Accounts of hardcore fascists who have been, rightfully, driven out from their lands and/or killed, are turned into sob stories about ‘people who have lost it all’ and ‘the unspeakable crimes of the Soviets.’ New ultra-right movements are celebrated and supported in the West because, right now, they happen to fight the correct enemy.

Again, the issue becomes a dualized affair. One side is clearly the good guy, the other the bad one. This marvelization of complex affairs serves no one but the liberal capitalist. One can, at the same time, criticize the Soviet Union for its many failures, cruelties, and mistakes, while also not celebrating anyone — mostly fascists and rich landowners— who fought against it.

Anyway.

The words ‘terrorism’ and ‘authoritarianism’ lost all their meaning on September 11, 2001, everyone knows, and are now wielded against anything and all that challenges established Western ideology. One day, one is bombarded by articles about how the new far-right Israeli government is undermining democracy and exterminating Palestinians, on the next we must unite under their banner, for they are fighting the barbarians in the name of the entire Western world. One day, the Taliban are the good guys, allies of America, for they fight Soviets, on the other they are fanatic, inhuman religious extremists who must all be killed. Saudis are somehow both allies and religious fanatics. People from the Balkans, such as me, underwent a transformation from Slavic barbarians — in the times of Yugoslavia — to members of the white liberal elite — when Yugoslavia was broken apart and its member states joined the neoliberal doctrine. Croatians are ‘good’ because they joined the EU and NATO, Serbs ‘bad’ because they didn’t. We support Kosovo’s independence (as we should), but not Palestine’s or Catalonia’s. We promote peace, but expand NATO and wage constant, never-ending wars. We want democracy, but sabotage every socialist effort around the globe. We abhor slavery, but our products are made by children. We care about the climate, but growth must continue, continue, continue. Pick and choose, again. Internal contradictions and cognitive dissonance all over.

And, of course, every foreign military intervention, often thousands of miles away, is necessary to deliver freedom to the subjugated peoples of the world, for they do not know better. We must help them. They are so fucking stupid and underdeveloped. How can they not see that we just want to help them? Open your economies, and you will become one of us. For we believe in human rights and democracy and freedom and all that.

(I refuse to censure such pictures. This is reality and there is no turning away.)

All complexity and intricacy are enthusiastically shorn away. The enemy must be clearly and unequivocally dehumanized. So happened first to black slaves and indigenous peoples, then many others, then Germans, then Russians, then Arabs, then Chinese, Arabs again, the poor and homeless in one’s own country, any and all migrants (except white ones, sometimes), ad infinitum. Even when in the right (it happens occasionally), the liberal capitalist feels the need to dehumanize.

Chinese are not able to think for themselves. They are all, they must be, brainwashed automatons with no opinions and no feelings. Incidentally, the Chinese have just now overtaken our economies. Pure chance. Even good things like lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty are met with statements such as, “At what price, though?” This question is never brought up when we think about our own material wealth; for example, by glorifying Nordic countries. They must just be better. Better humans. It never enters the ‘progressive’s’ mind that Scandinavia is built on colonial exploitation, even if not directly engaging in it. And all social-democratic concessions have been fought for, often with violence, by unions, workers, and others. Read some of

Joshua P. Hill

’s works.

It is also ironic, in a macabre sense, that Israelis, a people who have suffered themselves unimaginable crimes under Nazi rule (as well as before and after), are now out — and have been for decades — to exterminate another nation, committing war crimes on live TV. Supported, financed, backed, outfitted by our liberal governments.

The ideology of liberalism is supposed to be about democracy, order, peace, freedom, and so on. All of those concepts have been turned inside-out and mean nothing now. They never have, truthfully. It’s all about power and money. It always is, no matter how hard they try to package it into nobility. Every state that exists is violent by nature and eager to preserve its monopoly on said violence.

From the very beginning, liberalism, contrary to the word, was a tool for dominance, held up by militarized police forces (which were founded to capture escaped slaves) and standing armies unprecedented in size and capability. Liberalism was invented by the Bürger, the bourgeois merchant, who overthrew aristocracy to claim the throne for himself. Over decades, social-democratic concessions, enabled by plundering the rest of the world, were granted to keep the masses from revolting. They can be taken away at any point and for any reason. As soon as the system is under threat, it will revert to fascism, its natural state, to reestablish what it calls order. This process is happening right now, as ecological realities and increasing inequality are shedding light onto the inner contradictions of the machine. Far-right parties are gaining traction all over the Western world.

We will ignore it all until it becomes too obvious to discount.

Like the crusaders of ancient history, who thought themselves in the right, guided by God himself, the liberal capitalist, too, will fight for his divine status. Fortress Europe and the American stronghold will stand at whatever cost. Let them all drown in the Mediterranean, for all we care.

We must become conscious of living in an imperial empire, as

Caitlin Johnstone

often emphasizes. And much like every empire that came before, it is supported by a certain set of illusions and lies that hold it all together. External enemies must constantly be produced to prevent the people from noticing the glaring inconsistencies and to distract them from discovering that it’s all slowly breaking down. Like Rome, when it was already in the process of decline, the liberal-capitalist system will double down until it’s all over. With tragic consequences not only for the rest of the world but also for the masses of ordinary people within.

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