There is a left alternative between imperialism and isolationism. It's what Cuba and the USSR used to do by supporting and arming liberation groups around the world to rise up within.
The radlibs won't like to hear it though.
Ahhh I see. I do not exist on the same level of irony that the cool podcast listeners exist on.
I think in hindsight I would not really put what I said between "imperialism" and isolationism though. I implied that arming liberation groups is somehow a step closer to imperialism than isolationism is and I don't really think that's a correct assessment.
Arming resistance groups within rival nations isn't new it is what any country/empire have been doing for a long time. The discourse about intervention is once again just capitalism vs socialism discourse. Capitalist X bad, Socialist X good is the right conclusion for most of these discussions
I mean the discussion is all people who are pro withdrawal talking about hypothetical left international aid programs but go off
wow people are really desperate to enact the crabs in a bucket meme from yesterday huh?
The tweet screenshotted is from a portion whose premise is whether "intervention" in light of "human rights abuses" can be a justified position among leftists or whether "we" (Western leftists) should be "full isolationists".
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what levers of power are available for us to attempt to push. There is no "good faith interventionism" button in the US Empire. That is the lie sold to propagandized Americans, Brits, etc. as a fig leaf for self-serving imperial war. To destroy the Balkans, to support a Ugandan invasion of Rwanda and a nearly unreported and quite different, but larger scale genocide, to dispossess an entire civilian population until it is at pre-industrialization living conditions to push neoliberal privatization, to guard against a threat of new expansionist superpowers more than willing to attack the United States. These are the actual reasons or at least major ones, for US "intervention", with a concern for human rights being purely aesthetic, just for propaganda. When this does actually serve a good cause, such as the outcomes we praise in WWII, it is incidental, accidental.
I don't know why you would list the premise of a single part of the discussion and then leave out what everyone in there actually said. Like they spend the entire early part of the thing listing off examples of US corruption and war crimes in Afghanistan, talking about how it was ignored by the media and the the events of the withdrawal pale in comparison to what was happening to sustain the status quo. She brought on a bunch of lefties from the anti war movement and asked them a common questions so they could expand on what the left's actual position is much like you're doing here. They run through the exact same shit everyone here agrees with and says all the time and then she ended the discussion by asking them what can people do to help and the guest point people to left anti war orgs and ones that help refugees.
I didn't "leave out" anything, I'm talking about the explicit title and topic if the episode and the part of the video that the screenshot is covering. The rest of the podcast doesn't contradict my point about that premise, either.
I'll assume this is the case, but damn, what a bad choice to frame it this way
A common response to criticisms of imperialism is "oh you're an isolationist, I bet you would stand by if there was a genocide or a major disaster in some country, wouldn't you?" Seems to be addressing that.
Seems like you should just respond with the :gigachad: at this point or just not bring up imperialism at all, idk
You would stand by when genocide happens instead of creating a new or multi layered genocide!
Turning a big dial that says IMPERIALISM while looking back at the audience like a contestant on the price is right.
"intervention" is the imperialist papering over of aggression. The War on and occupation of Afghanistan was aggression by the foremost superpower against a sovereign state. This and other types of aggression are the dominant form of militant foreign policy taken by the US. There are no examples that qualify as here reluctant and good-hearted intervention in the entire history of the US, but at least in WWII and the Civil War the enemies were worth destroying.
These aggressions are not taken seriously enough at any level. They cause more death and collective suffering than the usual atrocities trotted out to remind us of horrors - often to even justify US aggression. They put entire nations into pre-industrial existence, keep them there, starve all of their children, kill 20% of their population, force the rest into economic servitude, set back liberalation struggles by decades.
Western chauvinists call this "intervention". No, these are war crimes at a massive scale geared to serve imperial interests. You do not need to worry yourself about a purely theoretical "just war" from the side of Western Empire, it will likely never happen in your lifetime. Even the recent examples in these libs' minds are based on an intentionally propagandized, biased, and false narrative, like in the case of Bosnia or Rwanda where the US "intervention" was self-serving and made the situation far worse because the goal was not actually to address the problems at hand but to increase the power of US strategic interests and assist in the wholesale slaughter of those getting in the way of those interests.
Edit: PS you can drive liberals insane by noting that such aggressions are considered the highest affront to the UN charter, a treaty to which the US is a member and therefore the highest law of the land per the US Constitution. Every act of aggression against a sovereign nation is blatantly unconstitutional, though the US court system and common law have made sure to neuter that portion of the law.
The answer is back off and let China do it, maybe learn a thing or two
The two genders :
Murder everyone for anything because of money
OR
Go away I'm just doing self care, okay?
I think it's because when you say you're opposed to one bad thing (imperialism), you'll frequently get attacked as supportive of another bad thing (isolationism). Maybe there's a better way to put it, but I can see why it's phrased this way.
Isolationism within the context of US Empire is essentially the only lever leftists here can attempt to push. The imperialists are in power and they don't give you a "just and righteous intervention" lever, or they do so so rarely and when their hands are forced for other reasons that we should treat them as unique, rare, one-off situations. We should consider those unicorn situations cynically, on their merits, and within the specific context of what a self-serving empire, the most violent state on the planet, will do with the situation. The last "just war" by that empire was WWII (in a period where it morphed from British to American) and while it accomplished much immediate good and we can't and never should argue against sparing the Nazis/Imperial Japanese or liberating those they oppressed and murdered, that same empire immediately rehabilitated the pro-Japanese forces in Korea, genocided North Korea in its effort, killed millions of Vietnamese, and supported a genocide killing over a million in Indonesia. In the West, they created NATO to undermine and eventually successfully destroy the first socialist state, set up a brutal sanctions and paramilitary violence regime around the planet to crush and isolate decolonization/liberation movements to prevent that socialist power from having any amount of breathing room. The coups and violence and death on the scale of entire continents, the "this list is too long" Wikipedia article on US coups and similar actions, are a direct consequence of that war and the leverage it gave the American Empire.
At minimum, Western leftists must understand that they are talking about a machine with completely different interests from yours and from that of the vast majority of people on the planet and it will act accordingly, so 999 times out of 1000 we must simply oppose it as best we can and fight for revolution. And that 1 in 1000 time will not be anything like a victory, just harm reduction, and we will probably misidentify it more than we choose "correctly".
Your description of U.S. imperialism is correct, but about the only people who would accept it are already leftists. I think Bad Faith is more intended as a vehicle for pulling non-leftists left than as a platform for preaching to the choir. A message of "what we're doing is imperialism, and here's what some leftist alternative might look like" might land with some non-leftists because it doesn't require you to already have the leftist take on America's long, horrid list of atrocities. A lot of non-leftists don't even know about much of the awful shit the U.S. has done. If you bring that record up, you're going to run up against the foreign policy version of "those were a few bad apples." People really don't want to believe their country is the bad guy! If you push too hard on the "we're an evil empire" argument too early, they're more likely to reject you than they are to reject the idea that America at least has good intentions.
I think the only levers leftists can push on foreign policy are (1) calling imperialism what it is and (2) presenting an alternative that doesn't seem utopian or naive to persuadable people -- and to most non-leftists isolationism comes off as just that. They'll say "but I saw Hotel Rwanda, you're telling me you wouldn't even stop genocide?" Ultimately, all we can do right now is move persuadable people left. We're way too far from any real influence over foreign policy (let alone enough influence to dismantle the empire) for these conversations to mean much else.
Absolutely, I mean my audience is you hexbears and BJG's is the American blurring of the SocDem/DemSoc crowd, of course. But liberals can also be anti-imperialist, just look at our main man Gravel.
Being anti-imperialist to that audience doesn't require meeting them at the falsehood that there are well-intentioned / helpful US interventions, the premise BJG actively chose to spread and treat as legitimate. You can just have discourse in the absence of that premise and keep the show basically the same otherwise. The episode's premise could be the tiniest tweak: The War on Afghanistan and how that "intervention" was incredibly harmful to Afghans for deep systemic reasons, that "fighting terrorism" is not actually accomplished that way and not the real reason the war happened, and hey what if those apply to past and future interventions? They already touched on some of these ideas, or were almost there. One of the guests in particular highlighted that things by context but still tried to be careful about using language that would make liberals more comfortable, an abstract debate about the value of interventionism.
No need to lead with, "Amerikkka must be destroyed" or something, ha. You can drop hard facts with the right framing and some sympathetic characters and let the audience synthesize an emotional conclusion. Citations Needed does a lot of this and it's part of the reason we can recommend it to our liberal friends even though they talk a lot about US Empire and its evils.
Of course, we don't control BJG's podcast in any way. We're not really even in community with BJG, she's a public figure we sometimes follow. But we can formulate a consistent community understanding of imperialism here and how liberal narratives form in support of it even when they make their own attempts to debate generally against it. And with that understanding, we can go out into our orgs and work against that discourse, do our little bit of community vanguardism (while talking like normal people, fingers crossed). The DSA recently had a fuckload of drama regarding many of the people doing good work with the international committee and my read of it is a very direct attack from a combination of social imperialists and a handful of ultras who were very much convinced of US-sponsored propaganda against AES. One of the few things this site could actually do is have a multiplier effect against that kind of crap by simply joining an org and convincing comrades of some core positions of this site.
Starting with the importance of sicko emojis, of course (jk).
Yeah, total agreement on the primacy of being anti-imperialist. That's the big conceptual leap for non-leftists to come around to. I'm a little hesitant to put too much stock in Gravel's approach (I'm trying to remember if he uses anti-imperial framing, or if he's more just a strict anti-interventionist), though, because it's fed into him being portrayed as "crazy idealist who might say some good things but ultimately isn't taken seriously." That's the risk I see from leaving "well what about genocide"?" and similar questions unanswered.
Having some sort of positive policy vision -- rather than simply criticizing what already exists -- really seems to help leftist ideas go mainstream. For example, there were tons of longstanding criticisms of the U.S. healthcare system, but "take Medicare and give it to everyone" galvanized that into a useful political movement. Similarly, there were tons of longstanding criticisms of the criminal legal system, but positive policy suggestions like "stop imprisoning people for marijuana possession" or "end cash bail" have been where we've seen mainstream interest and then actual change.
So I can see the reasoning behind discussing what a leftist foreign policy would look like in addition to talking anti-imperialism. I think it's OK to have that conversation in the abstract, and then oppose individual U.S. interventions as the possibility of them comes up (and criticize every intervention we've done before, outside of WWII). We never have to worry about getting stuck in a position of supporting some sort of anti-genocide intervention because the U.S. will never do that lol. The closest we'd get is when there's some claimed genocide being used as a pretext for imperial meddling, and we can call that out if the situation arises.
I think the only positive policy set that could oppose US imperialism is one of multilateralism that breaks the mould of "the world"'s consent being Europe, Japan, and South Korea. But I can't imagine that this can be motivated as a rallying cry like something like Medicare for All without already doing the work of making people anti-imperialist, which requires making them marginally international anticapitalist and is still a necessarily negative process. The imperial core is in a very different situation than the imperialized, where you can draw a straight line between US interventionism and the difficulties in their lives. It will always have to be motivated in solidarity and working on behalf of shared humanity, not nationalist politics that improve domestic policy. Imperialism actually leverages their position to improve their lives through importing the spoils and keeping their prices down, it's in contradiction of the usual material interest narrative. In addition, the USD's dominance and austerity politics means that government spending is fairly magical already, so decreasing funding for the military or IC does not actually increase funding for anything domestically.
In short, I don't think there's any way for those in the imperial core to move forward on the topic of interventionism without directly attacking US interventionism and the dominant narratives. I don't think we can shoehorn in a positive rallying cry like we can for domestic policy due to the contradiction in self-interest and the strength of capitalist propaganda in lieu of a direct challenge. Indirect challenges could help, but are risky precisely because of how easy it is to convince liberals of cynical human rights narratives, hell even simple narratives about loss of stature. Germans care not just about the cost of war but their place in NATO. This is what they think about Afghanistan. Not the incredible death and destruction of Afghans. NATO narratives handed down by imperialists.
it's so insane that under that funny tweet it just serves up tons of anti-vaxx covid hoax anti-mask tweets from all around the world. insane. what a fucking piece of shit website that is.
