Afternoon Comrades.
Like most of you I would wager the ongoing slaughter in Palestine is not giving me much room to think of much else. When I woke up this morning I was going through the subjects I will cover this week but I kept coming back to this picture I saw online late last week:
The UK parliament was voting whether to call for ceasefire whilst thousands of people in Westminster were protesting outside. As the vote for said ceasefire was denied this really struck me - for one, as I have seen this so many times before in the last 25 years of war but also how desperate the ruling classes are in maintaining their hegemony whilst being so utterly removed from not only what is right but the people they are, technically, meant to represent.
Whilst we have talked about the obvious and growing disconnect here in the Capitalist Heartland ( please do read that with all intended angry sarcasm ) we will kick off this week with an important aspect of this democratic rulership- and that is is indispensable need for our rulers to have an external ( and these days internal as their narrative fails to unify “us” ) enemy that justifies any and all measure to “protect” us.
There was a very brief moment in my youth right after the “end” of the Cold War when the Warsaw Pact broke up and a few years later the Soviet Union was overthrown by Yeltzin and Clinton when the Western Powers were so flabbergasted at the notion of not having an external enemy to rally everyone behind whilst they fleeced us all dry. Between 1990-1994/95 the capitalist apparatus was truly in free fall in the sense that there was no one on a global scale they could point their finger at to justify their insanity, hence a lot of the anti-capitalist organisations that started out of the anti-racist/fascist movements here in Europe gaining foot and my subsequent involvement in them. To understand, there was always a boogeyman and this was used to disrupt and stop any and all dissent against the Capital Narrative. Especially, during the Cold War, and then as the War in Yugoslavia broke out, it was tried with Serbia, failed somewhat, but then 9/11 happened. A new boogeyman was here, Islam.
We have lived with that creation here in the West and I don’t need to explain let alone list the insane levels of racism since then. The call for “but do you condemn Hamas?” is then just another logical progressions in this spun narrative, and this had me thinking about not just this idea but more importantly, how to counter it all. How much do any of us actually know about the rich history of dissent, liberation, marxism, art in the region? Going forward I will be spending sometime these liberation movements in the region, for the sole purpose of education to counter this revolting “othering”, the necessary racism of capitalism.
Western capitalist democracies have historically demonstrated a pattern of relying on external enemies to serve a dual purpose: to justify their aggressive foreign policies and to construct a simplistic narrative of good versus evil. This strategic use of perceived threats helps consolidate domestic support, maintain social cohesion, and advance geopolitical interests.
Throughout history, various external enemies have played a pivotal role in shaping the foreign policy narratives of Western capitalist democracies. From the Cold War era, where the Soviet Union served as the archetypal adversary, to more contemporary examples involving terrorists and Arab liberation forces, these external threats have been instrumentalized to garner public support for interventions and military actions.
The existence of an external enemy provides a convenient rationale for the implementation of aggressive foreign policies. By framing these adversaries as imminent threats to national security, governments can justify military interventions, increased defense budgets, and the erosion of civil liberties at home. This, in turn, allows for the consolidation of power and the pursuit of strategic interests under the guise of protecting the nation from external dangers.
The construction of a binary moral narrative, often simplifying complex geopolitical issues into a dichotomy of good versus evil, serves the purpose of galvanizing public opinion. By painting the external enemy as an embodiment of evil, Western capitalist democracies create a moral imperative for their actions, framing interventions as a virtuous defense against an existential threat. This black-and-white narrative can lead to a sense of unity among the populace and discourage dissent.
There is ample evidence to suggest that external threats are manufactured or exaggerated to serve political interests. Governments may selectively emphasize certain aspects of a situation, manipulate intelligence, or use propaganda to portray a targeted entity as a clear and present danger. This manufacturing of external enemies contributes to the perpetuation of a cycle where new adversaries are constantly identified to sustain the narrative of perpetual threat.
It is something to be utterly aware of and hopefully I can shed some light on what is what this week. We all know they lie, we all know they invent the wildest of adversaries to cow us into quiet submission and fear and mostly, it is all bullshit. The more we know the more we can grow to understand the similarities between all us and that the fear they manufacture exists only to cow us into submission. Fuck that.
We serve the Revolution.
Yours,
Steven