I’ve spent more energy than I would have liked over the past few days responding to someone here who was stanning for China, bigging up the Belt & Road initiative as a fraternal and “socialist” gift bestowed out of boundless generosity, and ascribing Han anti-Blackness to the wicked Europeans. Let’s all be crystal clear, though, that in its obliteration of Tibetan culture, in its attempted physical erasure of the Uyghur people, in its own deep, organic racism, China is an empire like any other.
And what I will never understand, if I live to be one thousand years old, is why some people, out of a perfectly justified desire to hold “the West” or “the global North” or NATO or the United States up to critique, wind up embracing one of the planet’s other bloodthirsty, extractive empires, and rationalizing away its vile deeds. This isn’t a binary choice, you know? You can do better than being a useful idiot for a power that cares nothing for your fate. Putin-senpai will never notice you.
@adamgreenfield The invasion of Ukraine was a brutal acid test for whether someone's convictions are based in humanity or the geopolitical equivalent of supporting a football team. So many people I stopped listening to after that.
@gwil@adamgreenfield and from some people who really should know better (hello Chomsky and opposing sending US weapons to Ukraine as it would lengthen the conflict)
@gwil@Nicovel0 Uncle Noam has not precisely covered himself in glory these past few years (see also: reacting with prickly defensiveness when questioned about Epstein, as if that of all things is a hill worth dying on). It’s a shame.
@Nicovel0@gwil As a matter of fact, his experience moves me to articulate as a general principle: Endings are such delicate times. You can maybe not erase outright, but certainly obscure, a lifetime of clear thought and principled action by beclowning yourself in your final phase.
Chomsky was denying the Bosnian genocide because NATO was antagonistic to Milosevic years ago. He didn’t exactly wait until the end of his life to adopt geopolitics-as-team-sport in lieu of class analysis or liberatory politics.
Also remember when he gave an interview to the Washington Examiner right after Charlottesville about how antifa shutting down Nazi talks was bad, and the right would definitely win because they were meaner and tougher than us lmao.
And do not come at me with some line about how the transcendently-justified patriarchal hierarchy of Tibetan culture needed to be smashed. Ethnic cleansing is odious wherever it is practiced, and can never be justified, and if this is not an absolute, non-negotiable baseline for you then I’m afraid I’m not interested in anything else you have to say.
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