Polemics and Western Journalism -Part 2
What is a state?
In part 1, we determined if there was a credible claim that all the movements featured in my thread, for being fascist and had an American flag, which I believe I showed above and beyond what is required.
Mr. Richards, merely insulted me twice, and labeled me as “unread” without ever critiquing the thread. Once again, the most illustrative part of their piece is to see the kind of person that is allowed to work in mainstream western publications like the New York Times and write for other mainstream publications like The New Republic.
He decided to conclude that none of the groups, including the one from Belarus, where at least two soldiers sport Hitler tattoos are in fact fascist. Of course, anyone allowed inside of the halls mainstream media in America, are not allowed to independently fact check the fascist nature of any governments or movements. They are given instructions on what to label groups based on the State Department and their jobs it to properly apply the label. Because I didn’t apply the state department label, but checked these movements against pre-established criterea of fascism, I must be automatically wrong.
His work is ideological (in the Gramscian sense of building hegemony). It is to show, how the far left and far right are equally dangerous when given the opportunity and without actually reading a single article of mine, going through even a single tweet, decided that I am unread and unintellectual. Obviously, World War 2 should disprove this horseshoe forever. There is absolutely a huge difference between being a fascist and a fighter against fascism.
The most pedantic part of his lecture came at the end, when he himself, had misread the tweet:
Krishnaswamy’s argument ignores the reality of an America that is complicated, whose image abroad is not as cloistered and monolithic as the one she herself maintains. It is not that America’s reputation is good—one has only to look at opinion polls to know that it often is not—but rather that it is complex, and that in some places, to borrow Friedman’s phrase, even the use of the U.S. flag itself has relatively little to do with America’s own demons. To a protester in Hong Kong agitating against the takeover of a fledgling democracy by China’s authoritarian government, the American flag may need to represent little more than a symbol of opposition to the Chinese Communist Party.
A tactic commonly used by the liberal who refuses to do the hard work of actually finding out about the world is to smother the argument in a cliche. The previous paragraph said nothing about the facts on the ground. What exactly does an American flag represent to someone in Hong Kong, would be an interesting investigation to undertake. But, he does not engage in this. Instead, the cliche is supposed to be the fact-finding mission and we are supposed to accept that “American represents a symbol of opposition to the Communist Party of China”
But, if we were to really understand the intricate history of China, United Kingdom, the Opium War, Gunboat Diplomacy and Hong Kong, this cliche falls apart.
Later on, Mr. Richards Continues:
Writers on the left all too often reject entirely the belief that anyone could ever see America as a bastion for hope and opportunity—but they hate us, the refrain goes, we are the oppressor.
In this section, Mr. Richards ends up doing the opposite. He takes an absolutely, incontrovertibly established fact: “USA is an imperial oppressor” and tries to turn it from the realm of economic treaties, war and sovereignty, into the realm of preferences. We are supposed to analyze whether or not the US is an imperial oppressor, as if it were subjective and open to the whims of my taste. As if it were a movie one would enjoy on a Friday, or an ice cream one would eat for dessert.
Because Mr. Richards failed to understand or care to understand imperialism, he is now free to use jingoism, despite the reality of US imperialism in Latin America.
Despite that, it is a simple reality that this country still represents hope for many—those fleeing violence in Latin America
Finally, after critiquing DSA for their overly tepid take on the Russia-Ukraine war, he decided to try to make a case for “an amoral state.” After misquoting many good authors that he partially read, and thoroughly misunderstood, he begins this sanctimonious lecture about the nature of states
There is nothing evil in a country in itself, nor anything inherently good. Instead, we have only an amoral nothing, a blank canvas, upon which we can choose to act—or choose only to allow others to act.
A state is not a blank canvas. Logistically, in order to sustain a state, one needs an army, to be able to coin money, have some kind of police force, so forth. Instead, a state is a structure to facilitate the modes of production.
Lenin, summarized Karl Marx, in State And Revolution, where he said,“According to Marx, the state is an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another; it is the creation of “order”, which legalizes and perpetuates this oppression by moderating the conflict between classes.”
Therefore, if a state exist, it exists as an organ of class rule. A cursory examination of the history of the United States, with perhaps a glance at the Declaration of Independence and Federalist Papers, should make it clear, that the United States exists to “protect those with property” from “those without”(James Madison’s actual words).
As Lenin showed us in practice, and Karl Marx in theory, A dictatorship of the Bourgeoise is not the be-all end-all that a society can be. We can have a society that is more just, where people are quantifiably better off. But, that would require opening the minds of the people to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat: something that no newspaper or magazine would ever allow.
As the author continues with his “knowledge” about societies and how they change,
It takes more than a belief in an America that is good for America to become good. We cannot imagine righteousness and thus live it. But—and this is the tricky part—we cannot make America a force for good if we believe it is fundamentally incapable of goodness.
We should end with my favorite quote during all this, “Do not listen to losers.” Since the author has not successfully changed any governments, he is a loser at his goal, therefore, his advice is not worth listening it.
Now, for those of you who are serious, and are wondering, “Where to begin?”… well you just answered your question:
Where to Begin was written by Lenin, as a preparation to his bigger work on the topic “What is to be done?”
Someone so concerned with political violence should not be burning strawmen in ways that have had warlords the world over dragged into The Hague — nor should one so self-reportedly concerned with whether people are politically informed employ such disingenuous rhetorical tactics in a feeble attempt to confine their audience to the ideological borders they've drawn for them."
The language about an "amoral " state is worth exploring in more detail, both as to what it says about the United States and about this Richards individual.