The case for overthrowing the West – an outline

I’m still working on this but want to start fleshing out my writing on this matter. Eventually I hope I can get it to a stage where the writing is straightforward as the matter itself and not even seem at all controversial even to colonisers, and it must be especially compelling to those who live in the rest of the world. I must write this as a backup plan for the peoples of the world. 

The case for overthrowing the United States should hardly be any more eyebrow-raising than the case that the white bourgeoisie, slaveholders, and colonialists of the nascent United States had for overthrowing the British.

The United States constitution even provides their citizens with the basic means to overthrow the United States, as a result of that. In the wake of the bourgeois & colonial American revolution, the first and second amendments of their constitution provide the basic means for overthrow: the right to criticise the government and the right to arm oneself — since these were essential to the overthrow of the British in the U.S. colony.

The case for overthrowing the U.S. as a world empire should be plain and is long overdue. Both for oppressed colonised people within the United States, and the colonised peoples of the world.

There are revolutionaries within the US colonial borders who have reached the same conclusion that I have:

Empire via war and colonialism

Among the most barbaric and brutal in human history have been the West. 

25-30 million slaves were transported from Africa to the building of the Americas. 

Every single continent on which there are humans have been subject to brutal colonisation by the West — Africa, Asia, Australia, North and South America.

This has hardly stopped. The West today launches and sponsors brutal wars and occupations to uphold their rule. They torture people, kill people, decimate entire populations without remorse.

To combat this, revolutionaries absolutely must be prepared to arm themselves.

Here is a tweet by Niko House:

Revolutionaries must also make sure that their bonds within themselves and with other peoples are strong. If you can be degraded to kill your neighbour, the West will absolutely push you to it.

Empire via finance

Money is tightly linked with war and violence. It functions the same way by getting someone to do something that they wouldn’t have wanted to do otherwise, especially if the risk is poverty.

This debt-military-coinage system has occurred across civilisations for thousands of years (see Debt: The First 5000 Years by the late anthropologist David Graeber)

Colonialism and capitalism are essentially the same thing — colonialism just primarily occurs cross-border and deploys more violence, and those in colonial societies tend to benefit implicitly from the rewards that it reaps.

In some recent terms, in Iraq, British Petroleum have occupied oil fields (BP fuels our cars in Australia). In Syria, the U.S. has stolen at least $100 billion worth of oil. European colonial settlers occupy Palestine.

BP extracted Iraqi oil worth £15bn after British invasion

Despite UK ministers denying the war was about oil, the flagship British company reaped a bonanza upon its return to Iraq after the 2003 invasion, Declassified has found.

Declassified Media LtdMATT KENNARD

Syria demands US pay for ‘stolen’ oil

In a letter to the UN, Syria demands that the US be made to compensate for the Syrian oil and natural resources it has ‘plundered’

RTRT

Washington steals over 80 percent of Syria’s oil output per day

The losses incurred by the trafficking campaign surpass $100bln, according to Syria’s oil ministry

The Cradle

Here is a tweet by Richard Medhurst, as well as a video:

The U.S. also simply prints more money whenever it needs it. The debt has reached $30 trillion while colonised countries bend over backwards to pay back their own money.

And what is the aim of acquiring money — billion dollars is so useful only if there are people willing to take it to build your mansions.

I explore this more in-depth here:

I fear what the capitalists will do

In a monetary economy, capitalism is an unbeatable strategy, if not THE unbeatable strategy.

Lê Thanh TrúcLê Thanh Trúc

To combat this, revolutionaries absolutely must have societies that can function without money.

IF everyone has enough for their needs, and no one tells anybody else what to do, AND no one will do anything for money because they are content, THEN no one can compel populations with money, and there should not be any incentive in acquiring money especially by manipulation.

Indigenous societies can be learned from. And there is another way that complex systems can have many components exchange the materials they need without financial obligations — this can be extrapolated from nature and computing, which I hope to elaborate on in future. This element is crucial (the other three are widely known in revolutionary circles) and will be explored in future pieces.

Empire via democracy

The United States promotes a particular model of democracy around the world, not so much merely as a cynical act of hypocrisy as many western dissidents like to nonetheless correctly point out, but because this model of democracy is among the easiest to orchestrate coups in. 

Whether you are called a democracy or autocracy boils down to this:

If we can orchestrate a favourable coup in your country, you’re a democracy. 

If not, you’re an autocracy.

In 2006 — and that's where we get to the current situation — in January 2006 there were parliamentary elections in the Occupied Palestinian territories and Hamas won those parliamentary elections. Jimmy Carter was in Gaza — our former president, the former American president — Jimmy Carter was in Gaza at the time of the elections, and he called them “completely honest and fair elections.” They were so honest and fair that they deeply disappointed Senator Hillary Clinton, who said at the time, “we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win.” That's the US idea of a democratic election. 

— Norman Finkelstein

This form of democracy has very little to do with actual self-governance. 

In Australia, I think each member of parliament has circa 400,000 constituents. They will almost never talk to most of their constituents, but they will talk often with lobbyists, etc. How can someone make decisions affecting your life if they don’t ever even talk to you? 

This distance is a large factor in what enables western elites to initiate and contribute to wars that the populace or mildly benefit from and doesn’t need to really know about. In my lifetime, these have included Afghanistan and Iraq. It also includes the fact that Australia is the largest non-NATO contributor to weapons funding for Kyiv.

This distance is also what allows deals like AUKUS to take place, whereby the United States essentially dictates a country’s foreign policy. The lack of high-level protest in Germany after the bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines is another example, this time with NATO being a mechanism for countries to become United States vassals.

And finally this distance is what enables flawless coups, ranging from Australia in 1975 and possibly 2010; Ukraine in 2014 and everywhere else.

To combat this, revolutionaries must preserve person-to-person relationships in self-governance.

Empire via education

Paraphrasing Karl Marx and Chris Hedges:

The Pedagogy of Power

The ruling classes always work to keep the powerless from understanding how power functions. This assault has been aided by a cultural left determined to banish “dead white male” philosophers.

The Chris Hedges ReportChris Hedges

The energies of the intellectual class of the West are essentially directed in the efforts of maintaining a ruling class. They serve to legitimise, distract from and consolidate this rule.

The West also facilitates a brain drain by which the academically-inclined from the colonised parts of the world travel to form part of the Western creative intelligentsia, thereby using their skills to subdue the rest of the world population and maintain the state of poverty that they left in the first place.

To combat this, revolutionaries must have strong agitations and propaganda.

A repost of my article on Substack from 8 October 2023:

The case for overthrowing the West – an outline

I’m still working on this but want to start fleshing out my writing on this matter. Eventually I hope I can get it to a stage where the writing is straightforward as the matter itself and not even seem at all controversial even to colonisers, and it must be especially compelling to those who live in the rest of the world. I must write this as a backup plan for the peoples of the world.

Lê Thanh TrúcLê Thanh Trúc

An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the U.S. had stolen more than $200 billion worth of oil from Syria. The corrected amount is over $100 billion.