The Elephant in the Room IS The Elephant in the Room
Without understanding a central fact about our world—that the US has been trying to maintain global hegemony for decades—you will be wrong about many other aspects of current political reality
The Global Hegemon
Ever since World War II, and especially since the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States has been the dominant power in the world (although obviously that dominance is fading). Having the advantage of being an ocean away from where the fighting in World War II mainly occurred, the US was spared the utter economic devastation suffered in much of Europe and Asia, and, already the world’s largest economy prior to the war, by 1945 the US accounted for 50% of the world’s GDP. From there, the economy continued to grow at a rate of 3.8% between 1946 and 1973, ultimately increasing real average household incomes by 75%.
But the US’s status as an economic colossus was not merely a product of wise economic decisions by the nation’s leaders; the US was an imperialist power from very early in its history, conquering much of North America, as well as Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, etc. over the 100 years preceding World War II, and extracting enormous sums of wealth from the spoils of these conquests. It has been at war for all but 17 years of its history, has intervened militarily in foreign territory on 469 known occasions, and has approximately 800 military bases in almost 1/3 of the world’s countries, which are generally de facto US puppet states. South Korea, Japan, and Germany have been under US military occupation for decades. The US uses political and economic as well as violent means to impose its will on other countries. US intelligence services and NGOs such as the National Endowment for Democracy have interfered in dozens of elections, and backed anti-government protests and terrorist groups in Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Ukraine, Nicaragua, and many other places. The US has also engaged in outright theft of other countries’ property, such as stopping countries’ tankers and seizing their oil, or stealing and selling oil, natural gas, and wheat from Syria. US-dominated international financial institutions such as the IMF and World Bank have imposed crushing debt on dozens of countries, and demanded that their governments implement policies that served the interests of foreign multinationals rather than the working class of their countries. Even governments not under the thumb of US-dominated lending institutions are subjected to economic pressure if they do something not to the hegemon’s liking (i.e., resist pressure to open up their natural resources and labor for plunder and exploitation): Currently, the US has imposed economic sanctions against 39 countries. And make no mistake, economic sanctions are an act of war that hurts and kills people just as surely as bombing them does. Millions of people have died over the years as a result of US sanctions, most notably in Iraq, about which the hundreds of thousands who died as a result of the combination of bombings and sanctions just during the first half of the 1990s US Secretary of State Madeline Albright famously said: “We think the price is worth it.”
Since in fact economic sanctions merely cause ordinary people to suffer and rarely create the intended effects of policy change or regime change, often the US resorts to force to get its way. Just since 1945, the US has overthrown dozens of governments, and waged proxy or direct wars that have killed more than 20 million people. More often than not, the US uses outright fascists as proxies, a practice that began in earnest under the leadership of the CIA’s first director, Allen Dulles, at the end of World War II. The US has supported fascistic/dictatorial governments that have held power at some point in dozens of countries—Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Congo, Cuba (before the revolution), El Salvador, Greece, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Indonesia, Iran, Korea, Nicaragua, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Ukraine, Zaire, etc.—purely because those governments served US financial interests. Even in countries that aren’t pawns of the US in any obvious way, the US’s effect on their political decisions can be profound. When the US says “jump,” its allies in Europe, Japan, Australia, etc. say, “How high?” EU countries are well on their way to economic devastation because they went along with the ill-fated attempt to “punish” Russia for its military operation in Ukraine through cutting off imports of gas and oil, and show no signs of reconsidering their decisions so far, despite massive protests.
“Elephant? What Elephant?”: Manufacturing Consent for Imperialist Policies
The US has not only been hegemonic politically, economically and militarily, but ideologically as well, particularly in the West—and although its brainwashing efforts are not always successful, it’s not for lack of trying. US TV networks can be seen in almost every country in the world. Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia, propaganda networks created by the CIA (as even the New York Times has acknowledged), broadcast the US government point of view to every corner of the planet, with particular focus on the Soviet Union (and subsequently Russia) and China. And as Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky as well as Michael Parenti have documented extensively, and you probably already know if you are reading this, the US corporate media are profoundly biased in terms of how they frame things (e.g., US allies are never presented as “dictators” or “authoritarian” whereas enemies are routinely presented as such, or even compared to Hitler) and what information they present or omit, and quite frequently tell outright lies. Dissenting voices are rarely allowed in corporate media.
Worse than that, they may have smear campaigns launched against them; be banned from social media platforms; have their YouTube channels or other social media content censored, demonetized, or algorithmically suppressed; have their content taken off of cable networks; be fired from jobs; be beaten, assaulted, or shot with rubber bullets or teargas; be sanctioned for reporting on things that the Western establishment would rather not have reported; be imprisoned based on trumped-up (or even no) charges; or even be executed. And although mainstream, overtly corporate-sponsored media are the main culprits in disseminating imperialist/pro-war/pro-corporate propaganda, independent media and even human rights groups can do so as well, and some of them have shady (i.e., ruling class) funding. Even Democratic Party politicians who dissent in some important respect from elite consensus (e.g., opposition to regime change wars or support for single-payer healthcare) have smear campaigns launched against them, or are driven out of office.
Whatever countries are the “enemy of the day” for the US government because they resist being under the US’s thumb—and are thus targeted for bombing, sanctions, coups, invasion, or whatever—get “the treatment” from the US propaganda machine, so as to justify and get public support for its imperial aggression against them. In the early 2000s, Iraq was the principal target of the propaganda machine. A study by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting found that 75% of the US guests on network news shows during a week 2 months prior to the March 2003 US invasion of Iraq were either current or former government or military officials, and only one, Sen. Edward Kennedy, expressed (tepid) opposition to it. Only three of the 393 interviewees were unequivocally anti-war. This was at a time when a poll found that 61% of the American public expressed opposition to or reservations about an impending US invasion.
Protests against the war, which were the largest anti-war protests since the Vietnam War, received scant coverage, and a New York Times article that did cover a major protest claimed that the “thousands” of attendees were a turnout that was disappointing to the organizers, while an NPR reporter estimated that fewer than 10,000 had attended—when according to police estimates there were 100,000 attendees and the organizers themselves estimated 200,000. (In contrast, US corporate media gave Americans “sanitized” coverage of the war itself, seldom showing or talking about civilian casualties—markedly in contrast to many foreign media.)
In addition, critics of the drive to war were overtly censored. Talk show host Phil Donahue had his show cancelled by MSNBC because of his opposition to the war, even though it was among the most popular shows on the network at the time; Jesse Ventura had his show yanked by MSNBC before it even started. NBC reporter Peter Arnett was fired for expressing reservations about the war. (And years later, journalist and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was imprisoned for the “crime” of exposing US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.) Bush Administration officials repeatedly claimed, and the media dutifully reported, that the Iraqi government had ties with the terrorists who carried out the 9/11 attack, despite the lack of evidence that the secular Hussein government had any such connections. And, of course, politicians and the corporate media claimed over and over again that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction” even though there was no evidence that it did.
This propaganda onslaught worked like magic. In the months leading up to the US invasion, a poll found that 69% of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was involved in perpetrating the 9/11 attack (even though the Iraqi regime was actually hostile to al-Qaeda), while another poll found that 93% of Americans believed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and the majority supported an invasion of Iraq. The impact of the US corporate media’s propaganda campaign was so profound that a large percentage of Americans continued to believe in the months and years after the invasion that Iraq had had weapons of mass destruction (or even believed that they had been found) despite the media acknowledging that no such weapons had been found and even in some cases apologizing for their misleading claims about that issue (though denying that they lied about it).
There are countless other examples of how US corporate media have presented a skewed picture of other nations. You’d never know from the number of times President Bashar Al-Assad has been described in the West as a “brutal dictator” that both informal interviews and observations and opinion polls suggest that most Syrians support him, that international observers deemed him to have been legitimately re-elected in both 2014 and 2021, or that some of the very countries deeming Syrian elections unfair prevented Syrian citizens living abroad from voting in Syria’s election. You’d never know from the Western media’s endless repetition, a la “Iraq has weapons of mass destruction,” of claims about “Syrian gas attacks” that the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons has certified that Syria has destroyed all of its chemical weapons, or that investigations suggest that no chemical weapons attacks were carried out by the Syrian government.
Of course that doesn’t mean the Assad government is beyond reproach; like Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq, it has engaged in significant political repression. There is evidence that Syria is one of the countries to which the Bush administration “rendered” individuals alleged to be terrorists to be tortured. The point is that when the US wants to destabilize and overthrow a government, it doesn’t merely criticize real flaws; it invents claims about the wrongdoing of Regime X so as to paint its leader as some sort of demon. The US media and government literally compared Saddam Hussein to Hitler. Meanwhile, the general public in the target country is dehumanized, primarily by essentially rendering them invisible, only talking about the “demon” head of state. And one rarely hears the government of, for instance, US ally Saudi Arabia described as a brutal dictatorship, even though it clearly is.
Since the 1999 Bolivarian Revolution, Venezuelan heads of state have been similarly demonized by the US, and Venezuelan elections have been characterized, without evidence, as fraudulent. Even “socialist” US Senator Bernie Sanders characterized deceased President Hugo Chavez as a “dead communist dictator” and similarly characterized his successor, Nicolas Maduro, as authoritarian, while implying that its elections were rigged. You would never know that both Chavez and Maduro are highly popular political figures within Venezuela who helped bring about many improvements in Venezualans’ lives despite the unfortunate success of US efforts to decimate Venezuela’s economy through brutal sanctions, or that international observers have repeatedly characterized Venezuela’s elections as very free and fair, and even “the best in the world.”
In recent years, the US has continued its longstanding tradition of attempting to demonize and undermine dozens of countries. However, its hostility toward its largest rivals, Russia and China, has been very much ramped up on both an overt and covert level, to the point that many people say we are now in a “New Cold War,” even though unlike the Soviet Union, Russia is not a socialist country.
Russia was accused in 2016 by Hillary Clinton and her associates of interfering in the US Presidential election and supporting her opponent, Donald Trump. Specifically, the claim was that Russia, with collusion from the Trump campaign, hacked the Democratic National Committee’s and Hillary Clinton’s emails and released them to Wikileaks, which did in fact publish leaked emails from the DNC, Clinton, and campaign associates such as John Podesta. The claim snowballed after a January 2017 report by US intelligence agencies “assessed” that Russia’s intelligence agency had hacked into DNC computers and passed the material on to Wikileaks. Despite their providing no evidence to back up this claim (and bizarrely devoting 1/3 of the report to bashing Russian media outlet RT’s reporting, but presenting no evidence that it was particularly favorable to Trump), a years-long US media feeding frenzy ensued, with the media saturating its airtime with breathless reporting of each new rumor regarding Trump’s supposed ties to Russia. (Ironically, the election interference was actually the other way around: In 1996, the US, with Clinton’s husband as President, massively interfered in Russia’s election to ensure that its puppet, Boris Yeltsin, was re-elected.) And as I discussed in detail recently, the Russian military operation in Ukraine that began in February 2022 has been presented as an “unprovoked attack” despite numerous provocations by the US and the Ukrainian government, and eight years of violence and ethnic cleansing of Russian Ukrainians. Meanwhile, the latter is seldom discussed.
Although there have certainly been efforts to portray China and Chinese people in a negative light for a long time, the propaganda offensive against China and its governing party has really ramped up within the last few years. A Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting study that looked at news coverage of protests around the world in 2019 was very revealing: Although major protest movements occurred in several countries that year, as shown in the figure below, by far the most coverage was given by major media outlets such as CNN and the New York Times to protests in Hong Kong.
Moreover, CNN and the Times sympathized with the protesters in Hong Kong (where protests were sparked by a proposed extradition treaty motivated by a Hong Kong murder suspect who fled to Taiwan) but not in Ecuador, Haiti, or Chile, despite the fact that the protesters were most violent in Hong Kong (killing one man, nearly burning another alive, assaulting or threatening numerous people, and causing massive property damage), and despite the fact that police and security forces killed 42 people in Haiti, 26 in Chile, 8 in Ecuador, and none in Hong Kong. Protesters in Hong Kong were called “pro-democracy protesters” despite the fact that they threatened anyone who disagreed with them and allied themselves with far-right forces in the US and Ukraine; protests in Ecuador were described as “violent” and those in Chile as “riots” involving “looting and arson.”
Another major focus of US propaganda efforts—heavily promoted and funded by the US government’s National Endowment for Democracy and US military contractors as well as by various other Western governments—has been the province of Xinjiang. The US and its allies have accused China of committing “genocide” against the Uyghur ethnic group that comprises the majority of Xinjiang’s population, and of practicing “forced labor”and engaging in religious oppression against Xinjiang’s Muslim majority (who are predominantly Uyghur). (As if the US actually cared about Muslims!) However, even the US State Department has acknowledged that it has no evidence of genocide having occurred in Xinjiang. In fact, the population of Uyghurs in Xinjiang province grew by 25% between 2010 and 2018. Moreover, contrary to claims of “cultural genocide,” all schools in Xinjiang teach the Uyghur language (a Turkish dialect that is the predominant language spoken by most Uyghurs) and conduct much of their instruction in that language; restaurants generally serve halal food; the number of mosques has increased threefold since 1980; all road signs are in both Uyghur and Mandarin; and in general, traditional Muslim and Uyghur cultural practices are readily apparent. Skechers, a US shoe manufacturer with factories in Xinjiang, conducted an unannounced audit and found no evidence of forced labor in its factories.
Meanwhile, China’s positive achievements are overlooked or framed as something negative. You’d think that of all things, China’s world-leading status in building high-speed rail (with 2/3 of the world’s total mileage), which saves travelers in China enormous amounts of time and is vastly more energy-efficient than traveling by car or air, would be impossible to frame in a negative light, a US-based think tank (the Information Technology Innovation Foundation) found a way to do so, complaining that the Chinese government’s massive investment in high-speed rail “damaged innovation” by privileging state-owned and domestic firms over foreign corporations. Meanwhile, the People’s Republic of China’s complete elimination of extreme poverty by late 2020 (after having begun as one of the poorest countries in the world in 1949), though confirmed by the World Bank and the UN, has been disputed by many media outlets in the West, where poverty continues to grow. And mainland China’s highly successful efforts to control the spread of COVID, which have resulted in it having 1/900th the death rate of the US, have been used as an opportunity to attack the Chinese government as “authoritarian,” or falsely portray them as having caused draconian economic damage despite China having the best economic performance in the world during the recession-plagued COVID era. And, as I have written about here before, right-wing corporate media and politicians and, later, many Democrats have promoted the claim that the COVID epidemic originated through a leak from a Wuhan lab rather than animal markets, despite a lack of evidence that this was the case.
Like the past portrayals of Iraq as a sponsor of terrorism that possessed weapons of mass destruction, these portrayals of Russia and China appear to have strongly impacted public perceptions of them. A recent poll found that fewer than 10% of Americans had a favorable view of Russia or its President, Vladimir Putin. Likewise, views of China were overwhelmingly negative, with 77% of Americans expressing negative views of China and 78% placing “a great deal or fair amount” of the blame for the pandemic on China’s handling of the initial outbreak. Belief in the claim that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from a lab increased from 30% in mid-2020 to 52% a year later, despite the growing body of evidence that the COVID outbreak originated in Wuhan animal markets. Meanwhile, Russia’s and China’s own citizens have highly favorable views of their own governments. Vladimir Putin’s approval ratings have been consistently high (recently more than 80%). Similarly, Chinese citizens express a high level of satisfaction with their government (95% “relatively” or “highly” satisfied) and with their government’s response to COVID (more than 90% satisfaction).
Elephant on a Rampage
As I’ve already suggested, the reason the US government and corporate media (as well as some “independent” media) tell lies about certain other countries is that in one way or another, these countries’ governments stand in the way of US imperial interests, and misrepresenting their nature makes it easier to justify bombing them, invading them, sanctioning them, etc. Speaking of that, well over half (251) of the 469 military interventions the US is known to have launched since 1798 occurred after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. As Tufts University’s Military Intervention Project put it, “With the end of the Cold War era, we would expect the US to decrease its military interventions abroad, assuming lower threats and interests at stake. But these patterns reveal the opposite—the US has increased its military involvements abroad.”
Similarly, with the transformation of the US’s chief political rival, the Soviet Union, into a political ally, the Russian Federation, governed by US puppet Boris Yeltsin, a so-called “Peace Dividend”—the dialing down of the US military budget—was widely expected, but instead the US military budget substantially increased over the next 30 years (particularly after 2001), ultimately reaching a level roughly equal to that of the next 10 nations combined. That discrepancy is somewhat deceptive, because there is an enormous amount of waste in the US military budget, but the point is that there was no peace dividend whatsoever.
There was also a ramping up of “globalization”—i.e., the global imposition of neoliberal economic policies that increased the superexploitation of the world’s working class through the implementation of “free trade agreements,” the World Trade Organization, increased predatory lending by the IMF and World Bank, etc. Nowhere was this neoliberalization of the world economy more apparent than in Boris Yeltsin’s Russia, where there was massive privatization of former Soviet state assets (likely the largest privatization of state economic assets in world history), resulting in the vast enrichment of domestic and foreign kleptocrats alike, and the colossal immiseration of the Russian people. Hyperinflation rendered Russians unable to afford even the most basic of goods. Within a few years, Russia’s GDP had fallen 42%, industrial output 46%, and life expectancy by five years.
And although most of Eastern Europe did not suffer quite the same level of utter catastrophe as Russia did, the collapse of the Eastern Bloc socialist states definitely harmed the economies of these states and the well-being of their people, and gave Western investors a new opportunity. Furthermore, as Michael Parenti noted in his outstanding 1997 book Blackshirts and Reds:
In fact, the capitalist restoration in Eastern Europe seriously weakened the numerous Third World liberation struggles that had received aid from the Soviet Union and brought a whole new crop of right-wing governments into existence, ones that now worked hand-in-glove with U.S. global counterrevolutionaries around the globe.
In addition, the overthrow of communism gave the green light to the unbridled exploitative impulses of Western corporate interests. No longer needing to convince workers that they live better than their counterparts in Russia, and no longer restrained by a competing system, the corporate class is rolling back the many gains that working people in the West have won over the years.
Shortly after Parenti wrote these words, the US and its NATO allies, having dismembered the socialist governments of the Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc allies, went on to finish the job of dismembering what had formerly been the socialist state of Yugoslavia with an intense bombing campaign in Serbia, misrepresented in the West as a “humanitarian intervention” against alleged genocide by Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic. In reality, it was the culmination of a years-long campaign to dismember Yugoslavia that involved US and British funding of reactionary Muslim separatists.
And that was—and remains—the plan for many US imperialists, such as former Vice President Dick Cheney, for Russia as well. It did not suffice to dismantle the Soviet Union; they wanted to do the same to Russia. During the early 2000s, in what has long been a standard practice in western Asia, the US funded separatist terrorists in Chechnya, a province of Russia. US-backed “color revolution” coups occurred in neighboring Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine in 2004 and of course in 2013-14. Both countries’ militaries have been armed and trained by the US, and both have engaged in deliberate attacks on civilians in separatist regions right on Russia’s border. Moreover, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the Soros Foundation, and other US-associated NGOs have spent millions of dollars funding Russian opposition groups, until the Russian government banned the practice in 2015. In addition to the steady eastward expansion of NATO over the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US encircled Russia with military bases, and conducted frequent military exercises in close proximity to its border. And of course, as previously noted, the US propaganda campaign against Russia has been relentless over the past few years. Given all this, it can hardly be a surprise that the Rand Corporation, a Pentagon-funded US think tank, openly declared in a 2019 report that regime change in Russia, followed by the unrestrained pillage of Russia’s vast natural resources by foreign predators, is a central goal of US foreign policy. And US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin publicly stated that the goal of the US’s proxy war in Ukraine was to “weaken Russia.”
Meanwhile, following Obama’s “Pivot To Asia” (a plan to militarily encircle China and attempt to undermine it economically and politically), the pressure on China has also been ramped up. US military bases now encircle China as they do Russia, and the number of US navy ships and aircraft patrolling near China has increased considerably in recent years. I’ve already mentioned how the US has backed protests, and/or separatists, in Hong Kong and Xinjiang (terrorists who killed hundreds of people in the latter case), and that’s also been the case in Tibet and Taiwan. As with Russia, with China the goal is destablization, dismemberment (i.e., getting Xinjiang, Tibet, Taiwan, or Hong Kong to overtly declare their independence from China), and/or regime change. As is the case with Russia, these goals are sometimes stated quite explicitly in the case of China.
And while it has been openly admitted by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin that a goal of the US proxy war in Ukraine and US sanctions against Russia is to weaken Russia, it’s becoming increasingly clear that weakening European countries, who are imperialist allies but are also economic competitors with the US, is also a goal. Even after it has become clear that the economic sanctions against Russian natural gas were economically hurting European countries, which have depended on Russia for about half of its natural gas supply, far more than they are hurting Russia, the US has shown no sign of reconsidering this policy.
And recently the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines, the main routes through which Russia has supplied (in the case of Nord Stream 1) or could supply (in the case of Nord Stream 2) Europe with natural gas, were sabotaged—deep in the Baltic sea—to such an extent that the damage could take months or years to repair, meaning the majority of European countries are now 100% certain to be without what has historically been their main supplier of natural gas for the foreseeable future. Now, who could have done such a thing? Looking at it rationally, there is only one country that has both the technical means and the motivation to have done this: the United States. And although he didn’t say how, President Biden told a reporter back in early February that the US would find a way to stop the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from going online if Russia invaded. A Polish legislator even tweeted “Thank you, USA” with a picture of the gas bubbling out of the ocean, openly admitting what US and European officials
are keen to hide, the likelihood that the US, which stands to gain in a huge way if Europe greatly increases its imports of US liquified natural gas to make up for the loss of supplies from Russia, and if European industries relocate factories to the US because their energy costs have become unaffordable in Europe. Russia, meanwhile, has lost billions of dollars’ worth of natural gas and additionally is facing either a huge repair bill or the prospect of losing these pipelines, which cost tens of billions of dollars to build, permanently, as well as any prospect of selling a significant amount of natural gas to Europe any time soon. Despite this, the US and its Western allies have preposterously claimed that Russia blew up its own pipeline! Whoever believes such a thing is deeply brainwashed and/or an utter fool.
I would be remiss if I didn’t say a bit more about the US’s imposition of sanctions on other countries. No other country has imposed more economic sanctions on more countries (currently 39) at any point in history. And when you look at some of the countries that are on the list—Afghanistan, Belarus, China, Cuba, Iran, Nicaragua, North Korea, the Palestinian territories, Russia, Syria, Venezuela—there’s an obvious pattern. These are countries that, irrespective of what sort of government they have, have resisted US hegemony in some way or another. It is to that subject that I now turn.
The Mice, A Dragon, and A Bear Are Beginning to Roar
The good news is that US hegemony is well on its way to ending and, short of a catastrophic move such as launching a nuclear war (which would end human civilization as we know it), there is nothing the US can do about it. The reason for that and the reason the US has attacked country after country with sanctions, sabotage, theft of resources, backing of coup attempts, etc. are one and the same: There are many nations that are resisting US efforts to dominate them and interfere in their affairs, and pursuing their sovereign right to develop their economies independently.
A prime example of this is Russia. After having essentially been a US vassal state during the tenure of Boris Yeltsin as President, over the past 20+ years that Vladimir Putin or Dmitry Medvedev have been the Russian Presidents, Russia, though clearly a capitalist country, has protected its vast supply of natural resources and its economic assets assiduously, and reversed the neoliberal deindustrialization policies of the ’90s. A large share of the economy is under state control, including 37% of the utility sector, 47% of the oil and gas sector, and 64% of the banking sector, as well as sizable shares of the airline and other mass transit industries, weapons manufacturing, media, mining, and medical research sectors. Careful financial management and aggressive development of its colossal natural resources (Russia is #1 in the world in natural gas reserves, #2 in coal reserves, #8 in oil reserves, and has an abundance of a wide variety of metals) has resulted in strong economic growth during the vast majority of the 21st century, with real GDP in terms of purchasing power parity tripling, and Russia becoming the world’s leader in natural gas and wheat exports. To be sure, as would be expected of any capitalist country, there is a great deal of corruption and economic inequality, with the wealthy being the primary beneficiaries of Russia’s growth. Nonetheless, the point is that Russia’s reassertion of control over its resources after the abysmal Yeltsin years has made Russia a much stronger country economically—and, concomitantly, earned it the enmity of the imperialist West.
Russia has also challenged the US in terms of foreign policy. When the US and its Middle Eastern allies organized an effort to overthrow the Assad government of Syria, using al Qaeda- and ISIS-affiliated terrorists to do so, Russia intervened in 2015 to prevent the “moderate rebels” from accomplishing their task. Russia has close diplomatic and trade ties, and has given economic aid to, a veritable “who’s who” of countries on the US’s “shit list”: China, Cuba, Iran, Nicaragua, North Korea, Syria, and Venezuela. And of course, most famously, Russia intervened in the eight-year-long Ukrainian civil war on the side of the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk in February of this year, at the request of their governments when the Ukrainian military’s shelling of them dramatically increased and plans for a Ukrainian army invasion were allegedly uncovered. Ukraine’s government, of course, has been a close US ally ever since a fascist-led US-backed coup took place in 2014. Rather than rehash discussion of this affair here, I will refer you to my previous post on the topic.
China has pursued a quieter but arguably even more effective path toward challenging US hegemony. It has harnessed its gigantic population and abundant natural resources, through state control of the commanding heights of the economy, astute investment in infrastructure development, and cooperative economic relations with dozens of other countries to achieve the fastest economic growth in the world over the last four decades, and (contrary to the US-created myth of “debt trap diplomacy”) to boot it has provided massive amounts of aid to other countries for their development, including developing vital infrastructure through its Belt and Road Initiative. In addition, like Russia, it has close relations with all the other countries on the US’s “shit list.” At its current rate of growth, China will likely surpass the US as the world’s largest economy within the next few years.
Irrespective of whether or not their economies or governments can be characterized as socialist, the same “sin” of pursuing economic sovereignty characterizes other countries targeted for sanctions, regime change, etc. by the angry elephant. Iran, Bolivia, Libya, North Korea, Cuba, China, Russia, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and many other countries all incurred the US’s wrath because they insisted on having governmental control of key national resources.
Resistance to US hegemony is manifest on the diplomatic front as well. Routinely, votes at the UN on various issues (condemnation of Israeli policy or sanctions against Cuba, etc.) go massively against the US and its relatively small circle of strong allies. Recently, for example, fewer than 1/3 of the UN’s member countries voted to support a Ukrainian resolution condemning Russia for its military action in Ukraine. Only 13% of the world’s countries have backed US and NATO-led efforts to impose sanctions on Russia. And at the recent UN General Assembly annual meeting, numerous countries’ heads of state or diplomats essentially called out the US for being a global bully, and called, in the words of Nicaraguan foreign minister Denis Moncada, for a global rebellion against the “imperialist and capitalist system” that is “bleeding the world dry.”
In short, the elephant is still throwing its weight around, kicking sand in the faces of everyone in its path—including even its own alleged allies in the imperialist core. But the other animals in the room are growing increasingly irritated with its behavior, and unafraid of expressing their discontent. More importantly, they are organizing more and more effective efforts to resist its hegemony. Trade is increasingly being conducted in currencies other than the dollar. Alternatives to the US-dominated banking payments system and alternatives to the dollar as an international currency are being constructed. China in particular has played a pioneering role in making low-interest loans to developing countries, in some cases forgiving these loans entirely. Mutual aid has taken place on a colossal scale during the COVID pandemic. Relatively wealthier countries that are not part of the imperial core (i.e., China and Russia) are investing heavily in infrastructure development in less-developed countries. Cuba has sent teams of doctors and advanced medical technology to countries throughout the world. Thus, 30 years of utterly unipolar imperial dominance by the US is gradually (but, lately, not so gradually) giving way to a much more multipolar world, a world where no single power rules the roost. Of course, there is no guarantee that multipolarity will bring about a better world, but it is a beacon of hope in a world where unipolarity provides none.
Overlooking the Elephant: The “Second Internationalization” of the Western Left
In 1997, Michael Parenti wrote about “left anticommunism,” the tendency for Western leftists to have nothing good to say about existing socialist governments, if they even acknowledged them as such at all—the term “state capitalism” has been quite popular in some left circles even though there has typically been far less economic inequality in socialist societies than in capitalist ones, and the majority of productive assets were publicly owned and not run on a for-profit basis. Those of us who acknowledge that the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Nicaragua, etc. accomplished many good things are labeled as “Stalinists” or “tankies” by many of these “no true Scotsman” types
even if we disliked Stalin and his autocratic system of rule and believed there were things seriously wrong with existing Soviet society. Our real sin was that unlike many on the Left we refused to uncritically swallow U.S. media propaganda about communist societies. Instead, we maintained that, aside from the well-publicized deficiencies and injustices, there were positive features about existing communist systems that were worth preserving, that improved the lives of hundreds of millions of people in meaningful and humanizing ways. (Parenti, 1997, p. 45-46)
Thus, it is not surprising that the overthrow of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies was cheered by many Western leftists, who naively thought that it would usher in an era of “democracy” rather than the rapacious neoliberalism that actually ensued, and overlooked the extent to which the USSR’s support for revolutionary movements and socialist governments in the Global South was crucial to their success or even survival.
This sort of perspective on an existing socialist regime was expressed to me recently. A comrade told me that he believed that “China is an imperialist country dominated by private billionaires and a ‘Communist’ party that rules dictatorially on their behalf,” and that “the Chinese CP and state impose the Han culture coercively everywhere.” Nowhere in this worldview is it acknowledged that China lifted 800 million people out of extreme poverty during the last four decades, that it has successfully dealt with the COVID pandemic to an extent not rivaled by any capitalist country, that the commanding heights of the economy are controlled by the government and utilized to facilitate economic growth that has been more rapid than in any capitalist country in history, or that it has invested in an ecologically sustainable future to an extent unrivaled by any capitalist country, with a fraction of the per capita greenhouse gas emissions of European countries or the US despite producing 30% of the world’s manufactured goods. As for the claim that Han culture is “imposed coercively everywhere,” to say the least this claim has a hard time accounting for the facts that ethnic minorities were exempted from the one-child policy China pursued until 2015, that Xinjiang province has one of the highest concentrations of mosques in the world, or that education is conducted in minority groups’ native languages as well as in Mandarin.
But the warping of Western leftists’ views by the ideas of the ruling class can extend far beyond relatively uncritical acceptance of at least a big chunk of the anticommunist conventional wisdom of the societies they have lived in throughout their lives, as exemplified by the support of self-described socialists (particularly members of the Second International) for their respective ruling classes during World War I (along with their reformism and electoralism). We see history repeating itself in many respects over the past few decades. The German Green Party supported the Iraq War. Self-described “socialist” Bernie Sanders has supported the NATO bombing campaign in Yugoslavia in 1999, the sanctions and bombing of Iraq in the ’90s, military aid to Israel, and a host of other aspects of US foreign policy, and routinely denounces the leaders of official US enemy countries as “authoritarian” or “dictators” even when they are popularly elected. Democracy Now!, once a pillar of the US anti-war movement, now uncritically repeats US government/corporate media propaganda about Syria used to justify US-backed regime change efforts there, interviewed a rabidly anticommunist opponent of the Venezuelan government in an uncritical manner, and features anti-China propagandists such as Adrian Zenz in its almost uniformly negative coverage of China. The 2019 Socialism Conference, backed by an assortment of US socialist groups and media outlets, featured speakers who advocated regime change in Nicaragua, Syria, and Cuba and/or were funded by the National Endowment for Democracy. More recently, many of these same forces have characterized Russia’s intervention in Ukraine as unprovoked, imperialist aggression, completely omitting any mention of the 2014 US-backed, fascist-led coup in Ukraine, the 8-year war waged against its largely ethnically Russian eastern provinces for their desire to seek independence from a government hostile to them, or the reign of terror and persecution that has ensued in Ukraine for ethnic Russians, communists, Roma people, etc. (I discussed this historical context in detail here recently.) The Green Party’s 2020 Presidential candidate Howie Hawkins has supported the US’s and NATO’s arming of the Ukrainian government, characterizing its purpose as supporting Ukraine’s “self-defense and national liberation” and attacking those of us who oppose US/NATO intervention in Ukraine as supporting “a ‘peace’ that brings the violence of Russian colonial domination and a ‘peace’ of the graveyard for many Ukrainians who are and will be victims of it.” It is curious that the right of self-determination of (now former) eastern and southern Ukrainians who no longer wanted to be associated with a government that has oppressed and violently attacked them for eight years is airbrushed out of existence by Howie and the other “NATO socialists.”
Even though they may see the elephant in the room of US hegemony, many Western leftists fail to appreciate the significance of its influence on the world (including sometimes on their own political views) or, conversely, the extent of opposition to its hegemony outside the imperialist West. A comrade recently told me that he believed that “we…know enough about the undemocratic processes of the Chinese regime [sic]” to deem the recently issued UN Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights report on alleged human rights abuses in Xinjiang province (which he had not read) credible unless there is evidence to the contrary. I asked him what he thought we “knew” about the Chinese government’s lack of democracy, but got no response. In any case, forgive my bluntness, but it seems very naive to begin with the assumption that a UN OHCHR report on a country whose stability and sovereignty the US has been attempting to undermine would be likely to be unbiased. And in fact, former OHCHR staffer Alfred de Zayas has written that the report was very biased (a topic I will cover in detail some other time), that it was hardly the first time the OHCHR had put out a biased report on a country the US is hostile towards, and that the OHCR is routinely—including in this case—put under extreme pressure to issue a report that reinforces US propaganda narratives about such countries. Those narratives, in turn, are driven by the US ruling class’ desire to portray its rivals as evil and sinister (and obscure its own aims and actions), so as to justify its illegal and violent efforts to thwart challenges to its global dominance.
The bottom line is that the US continues to be the “elephant” on the world stage militarily, politically, economically, and ideologically. Equally importantly, there are growing challenges to US hegemony, and in fact China is poised to become the world’s leading economy within the next few years. We cannot understand any important aspect of what is going on in the world politically—the conflict in Ukraine, the US’s ramping up of tensions with China, allegations in the media or supposedly independent international bodies about human rights violations in this or that country whose government the US ruling class openly expresses a desire to overthrow, etc.—without keeping these central facts in mind, and trying to work out the role they play in world events as well as how we understand them. Otherwise, we are like the proverbial blind men trying and failing to identify what an elephant is by touching it. The elephant is there for us all to see. All we have to do is open our eyes.