A view of anti-imperialism from the periphery
Removed by mod- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.ml
joey Ayoub works for the Center for Social Sciences Research and Action which takes money from the ITCJ which is funded by the NED.
Dana El Kurd works for two different DC based foreign policy think tanks.
Leila Al-Shami basically wrote this article once before ("The Anti-Imperialism Of Idiots") but has no digital footprint from before the Arab Spring, which their work seems to exclusively be about.
Romeo Kokriatski repatriated from New York to Ukraine because of the Maidan and runs a news website called "The New Voice Of Ukraine" that collaborates with the US embassy in Ukraine.
What I'm trying to say is that all of these people glow like the fucking sun.
The authors seem to take as axiomatic the position that NATO's "limited interventions" and "no-fly zones" can actually improve the situation in a country with an unstable and insecure government, but I'm not convinced that history bears it out.
This is some weapons grade sophistry in every paragraph.
[...] they slandered all opposition to Assad as Islamist extremists or foreign-sponsored agents advocating for Western intervention. [...] Any military or even non-military aid to the opposition was opposed, preventing them from being able to protect their communities from annihilation. Calls to hold regime figures accountable for war crimes either through sanctions or legal means were rejected, as were calls to establish a “No Fly Zone” to protect civilians from aerial assault.
It's not slander if it's true. You are foreign agents and you are advocating for military intervention. I've also got news about who a no fly zone protects: it's not civilians. And sanctions don't hold anyone accountable, they just ruin people's lives. These self-described anti-imperialist leftists sure do use the exact framing you'd hear from a White House spokesperson.
Opposing any intervention to prevent genocide and war crimes under the guise of “anti-imperialism” has rendered the term devoid of meaning
Are they deliberately trying to annoy me? Screaming "genocide" whenever you want to bomb somebody has rendered that term devoid of meaning, and is just about the most cynical shit imaginable.
Trash article written by people who still think the West rules the world. Their Palestinian section is completely laughable:
This was the explicit justification for why Palestinian political parties on the “left” and “right” supported Hamas’s decision to normalize relations with the Syrian regime (Ibrahim 2022). This is perhaps understandable for Palestinians currently facing the existential threat of annihilation in historic Palestine but is less understandable for those in more privileged positions, especially in the Global North.
How is this less understandable? Palestinians in "more privileged positions" defer judgment to the people who are facing genocide wrought by the Zionist entity, who, as the article even admits, uphold Hamas and the rest of the Axis of al-Quds.
Instead, Palestinians alienate Syrians, Lebanese, Iraqis, and more as they loudly proclaim the primacy of the Palestinian struggle and support the dictators actively murdering their people.
Are Palestinians supposed to apologize for caring about the genocide they're currently struggling against more than the "dictators" of other countries? If the Syrians, Lebanese, Iraqi compradors aren't going to do anything except beg at the feet of their Western masters for mercy, then the Palestinians will turn towards parties who will actually aid in their liberation like Iran.
Although not explicitly stated, such a view of the world speaks to a highly problematic assumption: specifically, that Palestine can somehow be excised from the issues of the larger region and achieve independence in a bubble. It is also as if these campists viewed the peoples of their region as completely tangential, without agency, and unworthy of effort in building ties or linking struggles. Such a belief is not only unethical but dangerous, as Palestinians find themselves increasingly isolated.
The world is more than the West and their various comprador governments. The Palestinian national liberation struggle is at the very heart of the Axis of al-Quds, which includes Yemen, Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran. Very telling that Yemen, a country that has faced genocide wrought by the Saudis, is not mentioned a single time in this trash article, not even to poopoo on Ansarallah for alleged anti-Semitism. I wonder why that is.
The age of multipolarity is upon us no matter how much the West and Western compradors want to believe otherwise. Here's a completely packed stadium in Niger of people supporting the coup with Russian flags. Are Nigeriens also "campists?"