I don’t know how many of us are familiar with what right wingers say. And by right wingers I mean the far-right wingers, not outright fascist yet, that believe in conspiracy theories but also distrust the government so much they don’t believe in it anymore.
So with that said, we don’t have the monopoly on anti-imperialism. And you’d be surprised sometimes how progressive right-wingers can seem on those issues.
You wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve seen something from fox news on Twitter that, if I didn’t read the account name, I could agree with (e.g. US blowing up nordstream).
Or how many times (not that many, but still) conservatives liked one of our tweets as prolewiki – I mean, we have the red and gold, we’re called prole wiki, ML is in our bio… what more do they need?
But let’s not get carried away. We have to remember they are anti-imperialist for entirely different reasons.
Truthfully, they are contrarians. Remember the conspiracy theories in the first paragraph? This is what leads them to distrust authorities, which are politicians, capitalists, police, etc.
Contrarians, if I have to explain it, are people that always follow the opposite of what authorities tell them.
Their politically progressive stances (anti-imperialism, self-determination, etc) do not go any deeper. If we had a socialist gov they would be contrarians there too and follow the counter-revolution.
So the message I want to convey here is: be careful who you follow. Wolves in sheep’s clothing and all that.
Yes. They are usually very easy to notice though, since unavoidably in just few sentences they just say something racist, homophobic or anticommunist. Usually it’s like that:
They: “EU must be destroyed”
Me: “Yay”
They: “Just as every other communist organization”
Me: “Wait what”
Person: “the false zionist state state of Israel must be stopped”
Me: yo
Person: “the jews are taking over the world”
“The Holocaust was a Jewish plot to establish the state of Israel” (yes, I’ve actually run into that one)
Richard Spencer was against the bombing of Syria IIRC. Isolationists and “paleo-conservatives” often parrot the line that “the U.S. are not the world’s police”. Of course some far-rightists levy an insidious misunderstanding of the Palestinian liberation struggle in their favor via antisemitic conspiracy theories etc.
That sums up pretty well the type of people that frequent sites like unz, they’ll decry western imperialism and at the same time directly pin it on the Jewish or some other minority group…
My observation of many rightists is that, what a lot of them refer to as “globalism” is largely the same imperialism that us Marxists talk of. The big difference however, is that rightists believe the problem lies only with a specific group of oligarchs and that capitalism should be fair were it not for the few powerful elites who have corrupted this system, whereas Marxists view the entire system as the problem and understand it is designed so that a powerful elite can take control as they have. Rightists also fail to see past the culture wars bullshit which keeps up infighting amongst the proletariat
I dont quite find this to be the case. I think their problem with globalism is exactly the same as the old classical conservatives had with the old school liberals. Too much change too fast. “Our values are being eroded by the eternal march of history and its because liberals keep changing everything up! We are heading for mob rule!” They dont see past culture wars because it is one of their top strategic priorities. They want elites with white/colonial, patriarchal, values so that the colonial empire can be properly maintained. It is a question of how the colonial empires should be ruled. Their opposition to imperialism is opportunism.
The right is being absolutely opportunistic in this regard. It is basically local small capital thinking that bringing down the hyper elites in Washington and dismantling their international grasp will level the playing field for themselves so as to again out compete those elites and likely replace them if the market is willing.
For all their anti imperialist bluster, it boils down to them not being the absolute peak beneficiaries of the colonial project. Listen to them condemn globalism and then INSIST that taxes need to be cut, government spending needs to be cut, and regulations need to be rolled back. They have no vision of state craft whatsoever and uses the sheild of “liberty” as an excuse to undermine any collective and popular moment that MIGHT use the means of the state to correct course for the masses.
And on a finer point. Im getting DAMNED fed up with leftists saying the right has a point or that the right’s “look what you made me do” populist politics is at the fault of progressivism.
It’s enough to make someone buy means of self defense, prepare for open violent exchange with fascists and opportunistic bad faith tailist leftists.
And low key, it’s really starting to look like everyone is trying to come up with their own excuse to have an open season on society’s most vulnerable.
Some people on the right come to the same conclusions about certain things. It’s just the how and why they come to these conclusions that is fundamentally different from our ideology. As much as a non-argument the horse shoe theory is, there is some truth to it that we might sometimes sound the same on certain topics. Support for Russia is one of them, for example. The party in Belgium gets put on a pile with far right parties because of it. Only we reason from a very different POV.
Someone I know on the internet is an anti-imperialist socdem who can’t stand cpc
He says he doesnt like NATO but then parrots their talking points about 🇨🇳 and 🇰🇵 “muh hoomin whites” and “Both nato and seeseepee bad in their own ways”
He also believes that we need a “mix of capitalism and socialism” and prolly believes that socialism is when government enterprise
He used to be mean to me because I am an ML but he apologized
He does support 🇵🇸 but says they should not be “oppressive like 🇨🇳🇰🇵”, also compares 🇵🇸 to 🇺🇦
What centrism does to a mf
A lot of them are genuine libertarians. They don’t want foreign policy at all beyond control and defend the borders. Sometimes no borders at all.
Libertarians, at their rare best, can be kind of like utopian socialists. More frequently, they’re just perpetual adolescents.
I once thought someone was based bcs I liked their take on Donbass, but then I saw a fash dogwhistle in their username ._. Speaking of which, the hashtag #FreeDonbass just has a bunch of fash videos from some Berlin pegida offshoot (If u don’t know what pegida is, it’s a group of fashies who whine all day about the “Islamicization” of Europe)
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