Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
You can’t separate agendas of sovereignty and self-determination from the massive global power structure which backs those stated agendas for its own interests. You have to be real about this.
You can’t separate the agenda of national sovereignty and self-determination for the Jewish people from the US-centralized empire’s agenda to dominate and destabilize the middle east. You have to be real about the fact that those agendas are inseparably intertwined, and about the fact that Israel being a permanent part of the US power structure isn’t actually independence and self-determination. And you have to respond to this reality accordingly.
You can’t separate the agenda of national sovereignty and self-determination for the Ukrainians from the US-centralized empire’s agenda to weaken Russia and absorb it into the imperial power structure. You have to be real about the fact that these agendas are intertwined, and that the empire actually wants to dominate Ukraine for itself. You can’t just psychologically compartmentalize away from this reality to make your infantile Good Guys vs Bad Guys view of this conflict make sense.
You can’t separate the agenda of national sovereignty and self-determination for Taiwan from the US-centralized empire’s agenda to weaken, balkanize and subjugate China. You have to be real about the fact that the powerful people claiming to want Taiwanese “independence” actually want a vassal state off mainland China’s coast from which Beijing can be undermined and encircled, and that the salami tactics we’re seeing to pull Taiwan into the western power structure are inseparably intertwined with the advocacy for an independent Taiwan.
You can’t separate the agenda of national sovereignty and self-determination for the Kurds from the US-centralized empire’s agenda to balkanize, regime change and absorb Syria. You have to be real about the fact that this imperial agenda is inseparably interwoven with the agenda to create the “Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria” aka Rojava, which is being carved away from Syria at immense cost to Damascus with the direct facilitation of the US war machine. You can’t just pretend this isn’t happening and act like there’s some kind of organic anarchist movement there that is somehow separable from these agendas.
If you desire the sovereignty and self-determination of any group of people, your first and foremost task is to seek the dismantling of the US-centralized empire, because that’s the power structure that is doing the most around the world to undermine this possibility. As long as a population is in any way intertwined with the agendas of a globe-dominating empire that’s doing everything it can to bring everyone under its control, then there is no possibility of that population gaining any real self-determination. If they remain aligned with those agendas, all they can ever hope to be is subjects of the empire.
Anyone who refuses to be real about this fact is acting in service of the empire, either knowingly or unknowingly. They’re either knowingly acting to facilitate the interests of the empire and its managers, or they’re avoiding facing the inconvenient realities of the situation in order to have a simpler, more easy-to-digest worldview.
Part of coming into maturity is forming a fact-based relationship with the realities of our world. To whatever extent you are failing to be real about the facts of our situation here, your worldview is based on lies.
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Caitlin Johnstone 