Western creative intelligentsia are the enemies of the people of the world
"The Americans, my people, are our enemies, and you must understand that. They are our enemies!" - Dr. Haunani Kay-Trask
The Americans, my people, are our enemies, and you must understand that. They are our enemies!
- Dr Haunani Kay-Trask at a march during the centennial of the U.S. invasion of Hawai'i on January 17, 1993.
[Source: YouTube]
The Western creative intelligentsia are the cheerleaders of their empire, who reap the benefits of the bloodshed and plunder.
I notice that even while the most ardent and prolific dissidents in the West are doing analyses of Western imperialism, they too often confuse the retrofitted excuse or justification with the motive. They try to measure the actual deeds of the U.S. and the West against what it makes up as excuses in the aftermath of the crimes and atrocities, and what it supposedly professes to be about afterwards (international order, human rights, etc.) We can look at some of those another time.
What I want to talk about today is that I think they are generally too generous of the reason that Westerners do not petition their governments to stop the wars against the people of the world. They simply put it down to ignorance due to the manipulation of the media, and believe that if the newspapers just told it how it really is instead of suppressing and distorting the truth, that would be enough.
What if I told you that it wasn't ignorance? That I saw my fellow peers in the workforce, my fellow students and relatives and my teachers, in Australia, the U.S. and the West, who had absolutely NOTHING to say about headlines of documented Australian war crimes in Afghanistan and American war crimes in Iraq, both of which had been out for years, were so quick to wave the sweet blue and yellow flags for Ukraine and begin cancelling absolutely everything Russian, in the same weeks that the media put out all its headlines about Russia suddenly supposedly invading Ukraine totally unprovoked?
If it was just ignorance, you would assume that therefore awareness of what their governments are doing would shake them out of complacency, no?
Do you really think that Westerners are just unfortunately not noticing all their billions of dollars mysteriously disappearing and spent on wars abroad? That they don't actually believe that these wars are in their interests?
The illusion of ignorance was fully dispelled when we saw how the Western creative intelligentsia reacted to the news of Russia supposedly invading Ukraine unprovoked.
Of course the "petty" in "petty bourgeoisie" showed itself very well amongst those in that class. It's not like they actually did anything substantial – it was all style over substance. But their reaction over Ukraine was so visible compared to their nihilistic reaction over the Western illegal invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Suddenly people who never said anything substantial about politics were saying to go to local rallies in Australia to protest Russia's actions.
They put oh-so-cute 🇺🇦 and ☮️ emojis in their profiles and logos, while no one could say what the Afghan or Iraq flags were.
(Enjoy more of that nonsense on this FastCompany article.)
Companies put together bundles and donations for Ukraine:
Kyiv School of Economics aid fund – $10,000 This humanitarian aid campaign for Ukraine. The aim of the Kyiv School of Economics aid fund is to provide food supplies, transportation, refugees help for Ukrainian citizens affected by the war.
— from Discourse, a forum software company
I think this was one of the links shared in a social media circle I was in
They went to such ridiculous largesse to cancel Russia, to an extent that I don't think existed during the Cold War. (In this way, you can see how very easily racism and xenophobia — and über alles, a topic for another post — comes for most people in the West.)
Those were some of the things in the circles I encounter in the West in my work or study, having worked in software engineering and partially studied game design.
Russian tennis players were barred from playing under their own flag in the Australian Open from the same year that Australians were stupidly grinning from ear to ear over their home team Matildas advancing in the Soccer World Cup at home. (I laughed very hard when the Australians came 4th and all the Australians were so disappointed over that.)
Russian players were not allowed to take a $200,000 award in the Epic Games Fortnite royales:
There are many more such examples. It would be a funny, sad, pathetic and stupid spectacle. They did all these things with the most earnest of convictions about their own moral fortitude.
But the fact of famously documented Australian war crimes in Afghanistan and American war crimes in Iraq and so on never moved these people. If invasion of other countries and war crimes in other countries mattered to them, they here in Australia would all be rallying behind the whistleblower for Australian war crimes in Afghanistan, military lawyer David McBride. They would all be rallying behind Australian citizen Julian Assange for his role in the widespread dissemination of American war crimes in Iraq, among the many other things that he and WikiLeaks have done for the world.
(In fact, look at these people on Crikey finding time to poke McBride after everyone else will hardly cover him and his persecution.)
Bernard Keane
Australia is in a dim state of affairs
They would not be mentioning President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin's name 10 times in conversation while never uttering former Australian prime minister John Howard's name, who led Australia into the still recent illegal invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.
They said nothing as Israel bombed and killed hundreds of people in Gaza and media buildings in May 2021. They said nothing as the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan in August 2021 and froze Afghanistan's $7 billion in assets while more than 90% of the population was suffering from hunger and people were forced to sell their organs.
If those people weren't going to do anything when Israel killed 200+ people in Gaza in May 2021, it's no wonder that most of them aren't going to do anything either about Israel killing 30,000+ people in Gaza in recent months.
For the Australian war crimes in Afghanistan, it's not like it was secret or even censored. The former Australian prime minister Scott Morrison indignantly protested when a Chinese junior diplomat posted a manipulated photo showing an Australian soldier holding a knife to the throat of an Afghan child, after the release of the Brereton report. 'ScoMo' made a lot of brouhaha over this and basically said that this photo defamed Australian soldiers and he would not tolerate this disrespect – but really, I really don't know what better way to tarnish the reputation of Australian soldiers than to commit war crimes, to say the least.
Even after the lull after first reports about Australian war crimes in Afghanistan were published in the Fairfax papers and on the ABC, for months Australians again saw headlines about their decorated soldier Ben Roberts-Smith suing The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald papers for defamation after they reported on how he had ordered for an Afghan to be killed and kicked off a cliff, how he had drunk beer from the prosthetic leg of a killed person and more. There were jokes about how Ben Roberts-Smith defamed himself even more by suing for defamation, as highlighted in this satirical article by The Chaser.
So even with all these headlines, there was nowhere near the kind of reaction over Afghanistan in Australia as there was over Ukraine in Australia. Did Australians start dramatically cancelling their country from every aspect of cultural life and denouncing it in every form? No way.
There was NOTHING more that you could have said to these people to try and make them pay attention to what happened in Afghanistan and Iraq and Palestine before.
They made so much noise over Ukraine.
They rushed to cancel Russian culture.
Imagine if they had made the same level of noise about Afghanistan or Iraq or Palestine.
One of these quotes from journalist Stan Grant on Australia stands out in my mind:
What a shame it is that a nation reveals what it is by what it cares about. — Stan Grant
(I'm also going to explore in future the original context in which that quote was said, about the white bourgeoisie in Australia going hysterical about the rights of women only when allegations of rape appear in Parliament House and in private schools.)
The neocons have largely reigned victorious in the minds of my generation in the West, after the ""end of the Cold War"" (I put this in double air quotes while the West is fighting a hot war with Russia right now, and hatred of Russia has never been more visible). Their twisted narratives are simply the truth, to my generation.
As a result, I am the only person in my twenties left in my Russian language classes — everyone else is above 50.
As a result, when I go to an event for Assange, a few people brought up with me that I am quite young, and that everyone else is quite older here. One of the organisers asked me for ideas on how to engage young people.
As a result, when I chatted with someone on the train with a Marxist tote bag, and joined him in a rally in early October 2023 for Palestine, and we were talking about the rallies against the invasion of Iraq and now there had been nothing on Ukraine, I said that my generation was a disappointment.
Don’t mistake my generation for those who protested the war against Viet Nam, decades back. I think pretty much like artist George Burchett wrote:
I don’t know what evil pact Henry Kissinger made with the Chinese leadership in the 70s. But it worked. Not only did Vietnam become an international pariah [in the eyes of the western Left], but the western Left split, disintegrated and made itself irrelevant.
[Source: People's Information Bureau]
And Joe Bageant wrote in Waltzing at the Doomsday Ball years back, shared to me via retired teacher Jim Kable:
Pity the poor American left, who would be considered right-wing moderates in most of the world; in America, being against any war makes you a far leftist.
[…]
When America supplies Israel with cluster bombs to kill Palestinian children and grandmothers, you don’t see rallies against Israel or American arms cartels.
You see yet another exercise of free speech on behalf of those things that the politicians and corporations [couldn't] care less about, and thus grant us permission to “dissent” upon. Issues such as gender and identity, or just about anything related to sexual freedom: “Go ahead, parade and rant about your own p*****s and v****s. Just don’t challenge the banks, the war machine, or the fraudulent democratic process by which we manage the people. Remember, f*****g with these things is called terrorism.
I put this to those people I knew — articles highlighting the hypocrisy of Westerners on Ukraine vs. other invasions — and my teacher admitted that they probably should have been as outraged on those previous wars as they were on Ukraine.
Arwa Mahdawi
But there's more to it. It's not mere hypocrisy.
Yes, that their attention on Ukraine is just skin-deep, as Marxist historian, journalist and Director at the Tri-Continental Institute, Vijay Prashad put it to journalist Rania Khalek at BreakThrough News:
VIJAY PRASHAD: You got to include many of these liberals for whom their liberalism is skin deep — and I'm using the word skin purposely — it's skin deep. They are worried about what they call blue-eyed blond-haired children in Ukraine suffering. They think it's perfectly normal for our children in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in the Congo, and so on, to die. I'm going to ask your listeners, Rania, very quickly — we saw the flag of Ukraine. People may not have known the flag before. But suddenly yellow and gold became common. I want your listeners to admit honestly how many of them know what the flag of the Democratic Republic of the Congo looks like. Millions of people killed in the Great Lakes War in the Congo — millions of people. How many of you know what the flag of the Congo looks like and how many of you have posted it on Facebook? I believe it's zero.
RANIA KHALEK: Right, and of course millions of people killed in many cases due to the actions of companies, corporations, that are connected to Western countries and of course that's why it doesn't get attention — there's no imperial benefit to publicizing the killings in a place like the Democratic Republic of Congo.
But more than that: dear reader, when the citizens of a country don't know and don't care about the wars and atrocities that their empires commit, which they provide financial resources and ammunition for, they are putting themselves up for committing any and the very worst of atrocities without them having to actively know about it. Such a society is a very dangerous society. I feared this for a long time and this is exactly what is happening with the genocide in Palestine. That is one aspect.
But yet more again: what was clearest of all in these people's reaction over Ukraine was that they actually happily play their role alongside the neocons. The war in Ukraine is a Western war on Russia.
There are many examples of the subsequent cover-up in the West whereby Western media outlets talked about war in Ukraine prior to 2022 and then suppressed it all after, but for example the ABC mentioned in 2019 how there was a war in Ukraine, while talking about the sorry state of the surrogacy industry there (which is a result of the war). Poor women in Cambodia and the Donbass — places which have been bombed by the West or bombed with Western help — are carrying babies for rich Westerners. They mentioned that Donetsk was "war-torn" in 2019:
She was carried by a Ukrainian surrogate mother from the war-torn area of Donetsk. Her twin died at birth.
Of course this dispels the lie that suddenly war in Ukraine began in February 2022, but if you point that out to people you know here who were so suddenly outraged from 2022, none of them care. None of them care that this was a war with 14,000-15,000 people dying prior.
In this Donbass Diary, the journalist Fergie Chambers interviewed people in the Donbass, and in discussion with Rania Khalek, they both talk about how the people both in the Donbass and Syria actually similarly wanted the Russian and Syrian government respectively to help protect them from extremists.
Instead, at least 10,000 people take the streets, in a procession led by a column of Red Army veterans, many of whom fought in the World War II Battle of Stalingrad. The jubilation is contagious; tears stream down the eyes of people of all ages, including both those who lived through World War II, and those who have only lived through this one. It is an experience unlike any other.
A woman sees me capturing footage of the procession, and beckons me over. She says, “You tell them over there, we are Russian, and we have always been Russian. We defeated fascism then, and we will do it again.”
I asked many people there if they had criticisms of the Russian government, or of Putin’s decisions. There is one refrain that I heard, over and over, maybe best articulated by Svetlana Valkovich, of the aforementioned “Aurora” group: “Putin, yes, made many mistakes. Most of all, he waited far too long to come to help us here in Donbas. We begged Russia to come for years, but at least they have come now.”
- Fergie Chambers in A Donbass Diary
And then of course there were other sentiments that had this sort of narrative that would be blasphemy in the west, but it's this narrative of like the government in Kiev are the bad guys and they're actually the occupiers, and then Moscow is seen as the liberator. And of course of course you know obviously what's happening in Ukraine is not the same as Syria, but at the same time you know it just reminded me of talking to people — like you mentioned — Aleppo, after the Syrian government took it back from these collection of jihadist groups that the US and the Gulf States were backing. And the sentiment actually was that "of course the government's coming to liberate us from these crazy people who've been shelling us". But also there was an anger at the government for not doing enough and not doing it harder, and I saw that you quoted some people there too who were upset the Russians hadn't come in sooner, right?
- Rania Khalek (video below)
And you see that, and you understand that these people are saying that the Western-backed extremists are attacking them, then you realise that Australia is among the largest non-NATO contributor for weapons in the West's war in Ukraine and the Donbass, against these people — our current prime minister, Anthony Albanese, happily highlights this fact.
When you combine this with the regime change in Ukraine in 2014 orchestrated by the West which precipitated this war, as well as the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2005 before that, alongside all the other things…
And you see all these petty people in the West who don't even care about refugees from these wars that they have waged — who are struggling in their own society (another story here too for another time) — then these people are cheering for the West's war on Russia, and commanding all means at their power to do so. I noticed all of this BEFORE what is happening with Palestine.
When you combine all this with the fact that these people then happily also actively SILENCE dissidents who try to tell what is really going on with the Western war on Russia, and paint them as pro-Putin propagandists or traitors, you really cannot paint them as simply ignorant.
This censorship reaches many people, ranging from journalist Glenn Greenwald, who gets hit pieces saying that he is either far-right or "a pro-Putin propagandist", to Professor Norman Finkelstein (who said, "Russia has the historical right to invade Ukraine") to Chairman Omali Yeshitela of the African People's Socialist Party (APSP), part of the Uhuru 3, being opportunistically indicted on bogus charges by the Biden Department of Justice as being "Russian agents" after making a very bold anti-war statement against the U.S. and in support of Russia.
While the fascists in power in Ukraine ban the Russian language and shoot people for speaking Russian, the Western creative intelligentsia acts alongside them to ban Russians from international sporting, gaming, music, arts and other cultural events. While the fascists in Ukraine describe the Donbass as a "cancerous tumour" and while Africans and people from the Middle East who lived, studied and worked in Ukraine get blocked along European borders, the Western liberal intelligentsia embraces the Ukrainian liberals.
Events in Ukraine
Events in Ukraine
"Minsk part II: Ukrainian liberals against the reintegration of proletarian Donbass"
By the way, in fact even Ukrainian men mock the liberal Ukrainian women safe in Europe while their entire generation is being sacrificed for the West:
Problems with manpower are a popular topic. Bogdan Krotevich, an Azov commander, claimed in a February 22 (2024) interview that Ukraine lacks the sufficient amount of troops to halt a second Russian offensive, a statement which was echoed by the mayors of northern Ukrainian towns. […]
On this topic, a new meme has emerged in Ukrainian social media: OlyaUA in Poland. It emerged after a real comment by a user with this name and photo, who commented ‘WHY AREN’T YOU AT THE FRONT YOU ABOMINATION?’ on a TikTok video that wasn’t sufficiently patriotic. Now, thousands of TikTok users have renamed themselves to this username and with the same patriotic profile picture, and ironically spam comment sections with ‘WHY AREN’T YOU AT THE FRONT’ and ‘WHY AREN’T YOU IN A TRENCH’, ‘WHY AREN’T YOU SPEAKING THE STATE LANGUAGE’, ‘YOU ARE JUST A DRAFT DODGER WHILE I HOLD THE FRONT IN EUROPE’. The idea is to make fun of overly patriotic Ukrainians, often young women, who comfortably live in the EU and condemn Ukrainian men who try to escape mobilization or are otherwise insufficiently patriotic.
- Events in Ukraine on Substack
When you combine the role of the elites — who coordinate pipeline bombings, sanctions, the freezing of Russian assets, funding for weapons, coups and all the rest of it — with the role of the creative intelligentsia — who silence and ostracize dissidents, cancel Russian culture, make it look cute to support Ukraine — you get a deadly combination.
And you actually start to get a very clear picture of what Western society is. If this is what they're doing to Russia, who was a world superpower and is an emerging world power again, imagine how it is for all the countries that don't have the resources to fight back.
You fundamentally don't understand what the Western creative intelligentsia is until you look back to see what author Mark Twain wrote in his visits to Australia in the 1890s. Here is an established American author who wrote florid descriptions of the Australian landscape as easily as he backed the savagery of a fellow colony.
Here is what I wrote in Pearls and Irritations on what Mark Twain said in his memoir Following The Equator:
Of the myth of Tasmanian Aboriginal people being driven to extinction, he expressed a vindictive gladness:
“Passing between Tasmania (formerly Van Diemen’s Land) and neighbouring islands—islands whence the poor exiled Tasmanian savages used to gaze at their lost homeland and cry; and die of broken hearts. How glad I am that all these native races are dead and gone, or nearly so. The work was mercifully swift and horrible in some portions of Australia. As far as Tasmania is concerned, the extermination was complete: not a native is left.”
Of black people being poisoned at Christmas from a pudding laced with arsenic by a squatter, he mused that swift death by poison was actually more merciful than starving them, hunting them, or making them slaves:
“The squatter’s judgment was bad—that is plain; but his heart was right. He is almost the only pioneering representative of civilisation in history who has risen above the prejudices of his caste and his heredity and tried to introduce the element of mercy into the superior race’s dealings with the savage. His name is lost, and it is a pity; for it deserves to be handed down to posterity with homage and reverence.”
Like Mark Twain back then, the Western creative intelligentsia today are still the cheerleaders for their empire. They happily cheer for the carnage committed by their empires, or tentatively look the other way while reaping its rewards.
I noticed with games that we studied in the West that there was such a volume of first-person shooters that we were expected to learn various game design techniques from. I always felt very sick watching this footage and I don't get why anyone else didn't feel the need to say even "content warning".
When I first watched the footage for Collateral Murder, I was crying. Those were my people. But more than that, it just looked exactly like the games we watch in class. Where you shoot people down without a second thought.
There was a good quote where British MP Tony Benn said what fools we are to live in a generation where war is a computer game for our children, when protesting against the bombing of Iraq in 1998:
What fools we are, to live in a generation for which war is a computer game for our children, and just an interesting little Channel Four news item!
A few years after studying game design (I didn't finish the course), I started thinking again about why was it just an unquestioned expectation that first-person shooters are just regular games. Like this is not the lived experience of most people in the world. Like if I asked everyone in my class: have you ever walked around holding a gun and started shooting down everyone in sight? The answer would be no. And the question that follows is: then why is this such a common game idea?
They all dream to make it big, but when you see what their dreams are — often working at some big name company or cute indie company, and then making their own stuff, all that while spending years isolated from most of what is going on in the world — you start to understand what role they play in society.
So I understood that the gamemakers aspire to make interactive propaganda for the warmongers, the writers aspire to write propaganda for the warmongers, the artists strive to make pictures for the warmongers and so on.
Moreover: the artist in the West is happy to draw so long as others mix their pigments. The chef in the West is happy to cook so long as others toil to harvest the cacao beans and fruits at dismal wages. The game maker in the West is happy to code and design so long as others toil to mine the rare minerals in dangerous conditions.
While British Petroleum (BP) occupies oil fields in Iraq and the people of Iraq continue to pay the toll in form of leukaemia and more for that occupation, BP is everywhere in Australia for Australians to top up their cars for their sweet weekend trips with the family. (Not only that, but BP forms part of monopolies in Australia as reported in The Monthly.)
MATT KENNARD
Joe Sandler Clarke
It's not mere hypocrisy. These are parasites. And the world, the host, must throw off the parasites. (As I thought APSP Chairman Omali Yeshitela put it. But I can't find the quote.)
And when viewed in that light, this is a struggle that we, the rest of the world, have been waging for the past few centuries as the West sought to plunder all other continents.
I will finish with quotes from the powerful Black is Back Coalition 2023 Call To Action (which includes the APSP):
The struggle of African people has always represented the most serious, existential threat to a global capitalist economy originating from African colonial enslavement in Africa and every other arena of our forced dispersal.
This is what the German revolutionary philosopher Karl Marx recognized with his observation that the development and progress of the white world stemmed from the imposition of a world economy, a colonial mode of production, that he dismissed as the “primitive” accumulation of capital with these words:
“The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre…”
They wrote in 2010:
We recognize the current imperialist involvement in Africa and the African world as continuation of the initial assault on Africa. In addition, the colonization of the African continent that transformed Africa into a source of stolen labor and resources, resulted in the export of African misery and colonization to the far reaches of the earth that include North and South America and the Caribbean where Haiti continues to be a glaring example of the consequences of this relationship.
In fact, the current expression of capitalist exploitation and oppression, known as imperialism by some, is but the development of capitalism and the relations of exploitation that were born of the first accumulation of capital stemming from our enslavement and colonization and the accompanying rape of Asia and what is now known as the Americas.
This is why the Black is Back Coalition is uniquely positioned to assume a leadership role in the struggle against the current expressions of U.S. imperialist aggression being directed against the struggling peoples of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq. This is why we stand in solidarity with the Mexican people, the indigenous people of the U. S., the people of Cuba and Venezuela, etc.
It is because we recognize their struggles, like our own, are simply efforts to reverse the verdict of imperialism that requires the vast majority of the world’s peoples to live in perpetual misery and poverty for its success.
[…]
While many have been moved to protest the U. S. foreign and domestic policy agendas for a variety of reasons, the Black is Back Coalition is motivated by a genuine hatred of imperialism that is responsible for most of the misery being experienced by the majority of the peoples within the U.S. and around the world.
We protest the wars and injustices directed at the peoples of the world by U.S. imperialism, but more important, our existence represents the reentry of our people into political life as an organized, conscious act of anti-imperialist resistance that has its basis in circumstances similar to those that have motivated the peoples of Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
Our coalition is uniquely positioned and has a special responsibility to provide leadership in the resistance against U.S. foreign and domestic policies. The fact that Obama represents the latest, most desperate ploy of imperialism by allowing the oppressor to represent himself in the guise of the oppressed would have confused and paralyzed many opponents of imperialism if not for our intervention.
We have not simply called for ‘peace’ as much of the U.S. anti-war opposition has done. More importantly we have been able to express solidarity with those who resist U.S. imperialism, to the victims of imperialism.
Our list of demands does not assume that peace and social justice can be conferred on the world by simply demanding the resources going to make imperialist war be diverted to ‘domestic’ use. We are opposed to imperialism itself. Our existence as a coalition marks the initiation of united resistance to imperialism, a resistance that advances the interests of oppressed and exploited African people within the U.S. and worldwide.
It is from building this international anti-colonial, anti-imperialist vanguard, rooted in decades and centuries of revolution, that we can fight imperialism. That is why I joined Uhuru and their movement.
