m a n y f e s t ø

Imagine, if you will, the year 2016. It is a year of war. Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Palestine, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Ukraine, Turkey – just a handful in a long list – are under attack. Covert operations angling at “regime change” take place in the Caribbean, Central and South America. The African continent is engulfed in conflict, the threat of “regime change” knocking against even South Africa’s door. The BRICs are threatened, destabilizing. Thousands drown every year in the Mediterranean while millions more flood Europe, desperate for refuge from the violence and poverty that plagues their homelands. The right is on the rise across Europe, the US, Canada and Australia. The global economy is sagging under the weight of its own contradictions.

The United States government, that acts as the hired guns of a global class of jet-setting billionaires, imprisons 2.3 million of its own people. 3.2 per cent of its citizens are under correctional control. The descendants of those once kidnapped and enslaved are particularly tormented – one in three black males in the USA will spend some time in prison. 12,000 children in Flint, Michigan are poisoned by lead in the water. 60,000 people in New York City are homeless. Nearly 1,000 people were killed by the police in the United States last year. Thousands more are tortured – even boiled alive – in US prisons. In the state of Louisiana, black men in chains pick cotton for slave wages while overseers toting shotguns monitor them from horseback. The electoral system is rigged, disenfranchises millions, and offers the same solution, year after year: submit or be crushed.

Imagine, if you will, the year 2016 without a revolutionary movement against such conditions.

The Black Panther Party was possibly the highwater mark for American revolution in the 20th century because it existed in concert with, and gave guidance to, a broad-based antiwar movement. While the labor struggles of the working class at the turn of the century were integral in improving the lives of millions of Americans and providing a platform for revolutionary socialism, it wasn’t until the radical labor movement started to speak out against the First World War that they were persecuted in full by the government, lynched, deported and imprisoned. Likewise, the Black Panthers were most heavily targeted when they developed a line that connected the suffering of the American people to the suffering inflicted on others by the United States abroad. In both instances, the culprit was imperialism, capitalism made flesh in the form of guns and planes that could stamp out challenges to its hegemony.

That the Black Panther Party even existed should one of the greatest points of pride among radicals in the United States. Indeed, Black Panthers are still on the run from the FBI or languishing in prisons, sometimes for decades under solitary confinement. They were able to serve the people while educating them about the world we lived in. To the Black Panthers, to anyone who would call themselves a dialectical materialist, the idea that the United States Government is an institution that can be reformed is simply absurd. The United States Government, to Marxists, does not exist as a faulty waiter failing to bring free health care and universal housing with the check, but rather, to mediate class conflict in favor of the bourgeoisie – not just in the United States, but worldwide. The Black Panthers saw this, and declared themselves in solidarity with the victims of imperialism. They toured the world, meeting with revolutionaries from North Korea to Vietnam. And this, along with organizing among poor black communities in the United States, is what brought down the wrath of the state on their heads.

It is possible to say that a revolutionary movement in the United States can only exist when there is praxis that recognizes the relationship between oppression in the US and imperialism. I would further venture to say that there can be no praxis without the two elements being present concurrently, and that no honest effort at building a revolutionary movement in the US can be made without recognizing that there must be an antiwar movement to join, and that this antiwar movement must be anti-imperialist.

After all, the wars of today differ greatly from the wars of the early 20th century, the wars that threw Emma Goldman and Big Bill Haywood in jail. We no longer have the draft – the popular rage over Vietnam saw an end to that – and the US spends more time launching air strikes from unmanned drones than digging trenches or preparing for bayonet combat. Likewise, imperialism doesn’t always take place at the end of a gun. The IMF and World Bank, created at the end of World War II, helped to exert influence over economies and governments where a heavier, more direct hand was once required. The creation of NATO and the Cold War made imperialism seem a war of ideologies, rather than the ham-fisted grab at resources that it was. Now, it seems that while American bombs and bullets murder so many worldwide, we are encouraged to side with imperialism as socialists. We are expected to take on the reasoning of George W. Bush and Samantha Power so long as it is dressed up and marketed in a way that pleases us, even if we consider ourselves “Left” leaning politically. Like soda and smartphones, we are exhorted to find identity in our positions, to represent ourselves by our consumer choices.

An alarming trend is on the rise in the United States and in the English-speaking world more generally: the ubiquitous Op-Ed. What was once relegated to just one page of the newspaper (the term Op-Ed meaning something that ran on the page opposite to Editorial) now makes up large sections of online news media. I imagine it is cheaper to pay a freelancer $250 (optimistic!) for their opinion than finance a foreign bureau. Whole TV networks run on an audio-visual version of the Op-Ed. It is a form of news that directly tells its reader how to think about the current events. Many gain their information on a topic simply from reading Op-eds. Today’s columnist and pundit is a TV show, someone that we can tune into on a regular basis for entertainment and flattery. If one show is boring, if you don’t like what they’re saying – simply switch the channel. It doesn’t matter, as all are trying to sell you a ruling class agenda. And, above all else, in our 24 hour news cycle, we are never allowed to present news in a boring way. The VICE lifestyle brand turned global news channel, with its correspondents pulled from content marketing’s central casting, is a prime example of the desire to “sex-up” news by letting opinions lead coverage. It is a way to engage the youth, as it boasts openly, to not only consume brands, but also official narratives, with enthusiasm.

A narrative example from the Op-ed world of news could be as follows: In Syria, democratic protesters are fighting against a brutal regime that slaughters them with impunity. These democratic protesters, now called rebels, are always at risk of being annihilated by state violence and torture because the Western Left has “failed” them. We must all support these rebels and pressure our government to do the right thing, whatever that might be.

Some articles might be run in conjunction, many that might contradict this narrative. We might learn from respected journalists with years of experience and lauded professional histories that things aren’t so simple. We might learn from State Department press transcripts that these brave rebels take quite a lot of money from the US Government. But it doesn’t matter if half of the paper contradicts the other half. When we are told how to read the news, through the eyes of these pundits, we are happily oblivious of whatever facts might contradict our chosen authority. After all, Thomas Friedman is far more influential and famous than some no-name stringer for The Times. Anyone who might disagree with the official narrative, even if they are respected journalists, scholars or activists, are now called conspiracy theorists, “hacks” or worse.

But while journalists are still nominally held to professional standards, the pundit owes no such thing to her audience. After all, this is just her opinion, and she is not expected to have thoroughly researched differing narratives – nor is she obligated to present opposing views, or to present anything evenly – when publishing her Op-ed. This is not unexpected, nor is it dishonest to the job description of a “pundit”. It’s up to the publication to decide how much of its material is news, and how much of it is entertainment packaged as Op-eds.

Yet, there is danger when a pundit or entertainer decides to call herself a journalist without having been subjected to the same standards we would expect from the NYT stringer. Facts are not checked and sources are not vetted. So-called journalists, such as Michael Weiss or Molly Crabapple, rely heavily on anonymous sources who slip them scintillating information or photographs. And yet, I am unsure who these sources are, who has vetted them, and how they did so. Indeed, as this new generation straddles the line between journalist and pundit, the means by which they communicate are themselves in question. My own WhatsApp number is from Iraq, though I have not lived there since October 2015. So, I think it’s natural to ask how these sources are processed, especially if the Op-ed writers posing as journalists are writing whole books based on their testimony, appearing on talk shows as experts, and building careers off promoting wars. While the content may be biased and one-sided, laden with marketing copy and convenient omissions, we should be incredibly wary on how we define, protect, but also how we verify the “source”. Indeed, I would ask how these pundits find, vet and receive information, but as many already tried to have me fired from my last job for asking such questions, it’s pointless to attempt from my position – though I welcome corrections and inputs from editorial.

As it stands, The Guardian admitted last week that it had been fed stories on Syria by the UK Home Office operating from behind a PR firm that was operating a Syrian advocacy campaign. Breakthrough Media joins its American agency Purpose (via The Syria Campaign) in pushing advocacy for pro-intervention narratives on the Syria conflict. What is left out of the discussion of whether or not public funds are being used to propagandize war to the tax-paying public is the disclosure of who the freelance “journalists” are that are being paid or otherwise lobbied to write on Syria. We would expect that journalists taking money or in kind contributions from campaign staff disclose such information when writing on the election – why not the same expectation from those who write on foreign policy matters? Perhaps it is because, in the long run, such issues are far weightier than whatever new jab a candidate throws on social media or a cable news talk show. One of the more chilling revelations from The Guardian, one seemingly lifted straight from my book, is that some of the journalists reported they were unaware that they were being utilized in this way.

If we knew that Fred Hampton or Emma Goldman were taking money from public relations firms (who may or may not have been receiving marching orders from governments) when speaking or writing on the wars they opposed, wouldn’t that change the way we see their positions? And certainly, if we were to discover that some of our favorite, cherished personalities who regularly tell us how to read the news were taking money from PR firms, to confuse, mislead, attack or threaten activists who might otherwise try and build a case against the US government’s wars abroad and at home, wouldn’t that be a scandal?

There may be no antiwar movement today because we live in a media environment that seeks to destroy it in its nascence. Andrew Bacevich, in his recent instructive essay for Harper’s called “American Imperium”, makes the case that:

The trivializing din of what passes for news drowns out the antiwar critique. One consequence of remaining perpetually at war is that the political landscape in America does not include a peace party.

Indeed, before there can be a peace party, there must be an antiwar critique. And the “trivializing din” that Bacevich speaks of is not simply drowning out antiwar critique, it is merciless in seeking to destroy and discredit ideas such as the fact that the United States enjoys unprecedented military, economic, ideological and strategic domination over the entire world. Such ideas, when voiced publicly, are met with derision and laughter. As if, with dozens of bases and tens of thousands of soldiers surrounding Russia, one could seriously argue that Russia is imperialist, or an equal threat to world peace as the US. There are no Russian bases and no Russian soldiers garrisoned on our borders. We cannot even know, as the numbers are not publicly available, how many US soldiers and bases are currently in the Middle East – indeed, how many are currently in Iraq and Syria, where much conflict is currently taking place. Whereas before, reliable journalists and their supportive editors might have been successful in discovering such figures, they are now too focused on revenue and survival. This opens wide the door for propagandists who wish to deride and discredit any remaining “Left” antiwar sentiment in the US. Until this is resolved, building an anti-imperialist antiwar movement will remain an uphill battle, even among smaller groups, as subjectivity and sophistry continues to be taught and promoted over objectivity, materialism, serious study and clear thinking.

I spent a considerable amount of time in my 20s living in cities where terror was a daily occurrence. I remember celebrating July 4th 2009 with my sheet pulled up to my chin, listening to familiar “Israeli debke” at 3:30am: a crescendo of dogs barking, flash bang grenades, the sounds of doors being busted in. The sudden silence of the streets of Cairo in curfew as armored personel carriers rumbled by. Black billowing smoke from car bombs. Rockets, checkpoints, arrests, guns, grenades – that’s life for billions of oppressed people worldwide.

I was reminded of this when I’m in Paris two weeks ago, watching the gendarmes walk with automatic rifles through the streets, commonplace as you please. It’s a racist dreamscape when people don’t think this encroaching militarism will touch all. It’s a racist dreamscape when the people of the English-speaking world and the people in Europe and the United States think their lives are worth any more to the ruling class than the people the ruling class regularly torment abroad because their passport is a different color.

When we speak of solidarity, they tell me I sound cold. Perhaps it’s because I’ve spent years of my life in war zones and only days in Paris and I know very well in which instance I will receive phone calls when people get blown up in public. I vividly remember sitting on a couch in the United States, watching television and crying as Israelis reinvaded Nablus in 2009. I vividly remember bald racism thrown around the room like a football. “This is normal for them,” people insist.

It isn’t normal for anyone. They cope differently because it happens more, but it’s not normal.

A Palestinian boy shot in the spine cries in fear and pain as his blood runs over Jerusalem’s light rail tracks. A settler circles him like a vulture, filming the boy’s fear, mocking him. A Palestinian girl tackled by strangers on the street in Tel Aviv receives a kick to the head, delivered almost-casually as the assailant keeps walking. In despair, a girl douses herself in kerosene and lights a match. A neighborhood, historically black churches, a refugee camp go up in flames. At least 1,566 young men – sons, husbands, fathers, uncles, brothers – brutally murdered face down in trenches at Camp Speicher in Iraq. This is not normal, but this is what is treated as normal by people elsewhere, by the capitalist media.

If every human life really holds the same weight, why are we told to cry for some and not for others? Qui bono?

The Ukranian government has been accused of using cluster munitions in Donetsk as it seeks to take control of Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine.

Bizarre, malicious disinfo everywhere. As Russia steps in publicly to support the Syrian and Iraqi governments with airstrikes against NATO/GCC-funded contras, the cold soup of Cold War era hysteria has been warming up on the stove. As the Italians say – it’s not a soup that reheats well. Narrative scripts stashed away for a decade were brushed off somewhat during the Maidan Putsch in Ukraine. Young Russian-Americans I knew confessed to me that they had never felt such living hostility in the United States before in their lives. Yet, the referendums and Russian-speaking minority of the country were firm in their resolve, and the tropes quieted down as the West turned it attention again towards the Middle East, always the barbaric and hysterical Middle East, with its head-chopping fanatics funded by the United States, NATO and its clients.

But with Russia stepping into Syria and Iraq, the irrational cacophony of ahistorical disinfo has once again ballooned. Lines are being drawn not just on the battlefields of the Middle East, but also in ideological circles worldwide. One one side, we have those grateful for pre-packaged op-eds railing against “Russian Imperialism”, and on the other side, those who understand there is no comparison between Russia, a country where 6.7 million Russians died as a result of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and the United States, which has engineered, funded and caused the disintegration of countries worldwide as an important part of a  foreign policy dedicated to domination and looting, especially after the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

from Against Hayek, Paul Cockshot

These hysterics are to be expected. After all, the antagonism between the United States and Russia has been intense ever since the United States decided to invade on the side of capitalism in 1918. What continues to confound me is the unwillingness of self-professed anarchists and leftists to build a challenge to the US empire. In Syria and Iraq, the lies were immense. One was labelled a conspiracy theorist to say that the CIA was funding the so-called Syrian opposition to the Syrian government, as opposed to the terror being wrecked on the people of Iraq and Sham was homegrown, a product of an inherent violence of the besieged Arab. As the “left” we were suddenly demanded, for the first time in my life anyway, to rally for the violent overthrow of the Syrian and Iraqi governments, vis-a-vis a NATO no fly zone in Syria, arming the “rebels” and in some cases, even invasion. Meanwhile, the United States began dumping thousands of pounds of munitions in Iraq and Syria that hit targets such as “motorcycles”, “trenches” and “bulldozer”. Barack Obama admitted himself that:

The reason, the president added, “that we did not just start taking a bunch of airstrikes all across Iraq as soon as ISIL came in was because that would have taken the pressure off of [Prime Minister Nuri Kamal] al-Maliki.” That only would have encouraged, he said, Maliki and other Shiites to think: ” ‘We don’t actually have to make compromises. We don’t have to make any decisions. We don’t have to go through the difficult process of figuring out what we’ve done wrong in the past.

• From his August 2014 interview with Thomas Friedman, NY Times (emphasis mine)

After Russia’s open involvement began (they were assisting the Syrian government before), the curtain was lifted and those who were calling against NATO intervention in Syria were vindicated – the Syrian “civil war” had been funded and supported by a NATO/GCC coalition led by the United States. Lightning-fast, however, the narrative was shifted. Now that Russia was on the scene, the same people who had called for a movement that would beg for war now demanded that anti-imperialists denounce Russian intervention in Syria and start an anti-war movement against Russia.

As most Americans remain, however, uninformed or apathetic about the going-ons of the US empire, if not quietly in support of it, the real target of this onslaught of anti-Russian propaganda, which is documented problematically by Gary Brecher here, is probably those who would raise objection to the fact that the United States has been exposed, has admitted it is responsible for the actions of their contras in the Middle East and North Africa.

There are those who understand history and those who do not. There are those who can look at the world through the lens of class warfare and those who are unable or unwilling to do so. The goal of the media as it interacts with those who would seek to become informed of the US’s rampage across the world is to discombobulate, disorient and misinform. This will necessitate a rewriting or complete ignorance of history.

Charles Davis, an editor at teleSur, writes today on the Cold War:

For developing countries, though — for much of Asia and the Americas, or rather: the world — the friendly competition between the globe’s leading imperialist powers was a festering sore that promoted the forces of reaction wherever its influence was felt (“left” as well as right) and often enough led those who fought for progress and social justice to a mass grave.

More bombs (and chemical weapons) were dropped on Vietnam than were used during the entirety of World War II.

This presupposes several untruths: first, that the Cold War was in fact a “friendly competition”, that the Soviet Union was “imperialist” and that the people of the world were not better off in a world where the Soviet Union existed as a check to capitalism’s endless appetite for exploitation, rape and war. At one point, Davis mentions one million Vietnamese died during the US’s imperial onslaught, where more munitions were dropped on a poor developing country than during World War II and where people still die from Agent Orange exposure. Conservative estimates were always around 2 million, with 3 million being reported by the Vietnamese government and the U.N. World Health Organization reporting 3.8 million. These numbers only refer to violent death, not death by chemical weapons such as Agent Orange or other war-related deaths.

But the idea that the Cold War was a “friendly competition” is simply historical revisionism. A child can understand that pointing 9,000 nukes at someone does not indicate a friendly competition of any kind. Actively seeking to undermine a worker’s state through infiltration, sabotage and clandestine operations, as well as simply all-out war, is not how one would describe “friendly competition”. This bizarre, ahistorical view seems to be right out of Guy Richie’s new film which reboots a tired bumbling romantic comedy between CIA, MI6 and KGB agents.

Those who were persecuted for being communists worldwide, including in the United States, would hardly say that the rape and pillage of their communities and their persons was a result of a friendly competition. To most, this is taken for granted as historical fact.

As for the “festering sore” comment, that the Cold War was not a boon for oppressed people, this is yet another lie, as well as an obfuscation. Davis is really referring to communism – is the existence of communism a boon for the world’s oppressed majority? Absolutely – this is a truth without a shadow of a doubt. The world’s oppressed were (for once) able to develop governments and economies not dictated by the interests of the rich, build pan-Africanism and pan-Arabism, the black power and civil rights movement, make remarkable gains in labor and against racism and sexism worldwide. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the so-called “End of History”, these gains were almost immediately rolled back at a terrific speed. People worldwide enjoyed new public infrastructure, safer streets and better jobs during the Cold War. While the United States was relentless in trying to turn back these gains for humanity while engaging in the Korean and Vietnam wars, as well as the bloody coups in South America, Asia and Africa, massive gains were made. Losurdo is quite clear:

The genocide in Gaza is only possible thanks to an Empire that backs it every step of the way.

After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, George H.W. Bush was not puffing himself up when he declared a “New World Order” – one that was exclusive to the American desire to reshape the world to easier drain of life and resources. The first target for the American military was the Republic of Iraq, not incidentally in a constant state of war, bombardment and immiseration since then. Russia, meanwhile, has watched the gains a good proportion of its population once lived, fought and died for be rolled back worldwide.

But there is a red line for Russia, which still retains some degree of military and economic ability after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, which still sits on a great percentage of the world’s natural resources, including 20% of the world’s unfrozen fresh water and what will probably, in the coming decades as the earth’s temperature continues to destabilize, be prime land for farming. As its last allies in the Middle East were destroyed – Libya, Syria, and Iraq, with Iran in constant crosshairs – it has selfish reasons to keep US bases as far as possible from its borders. It has selfish reasons to want to make sure that most of the world’s oil doesn’t come under the control of the United States. Yet, when Patrick Cockburn, who Davis is answering in with his essay on the Cold War, says that there is a possible benefit to the Russians becoming involved quite directly in what has become a messy war between a democratically elected government and dozens of armed gangs, he is not incorrect. This intervention will probably lead to a shortening of the conflict, unless the United States decides to turn Syria into a new Afghanistan and continue to torture the Syrian people.

To thinking people, it’s clear that the same people who would deny US involvement in Syria and Iraq (a proven lie), accuse Russia of not taking action against ISIS (a proven lie), and call for a cruise-missile left movement based on promoting the interests of those who sustained the conflict for so long (the actual goal of this disinfo) would not be reliable arbiters of history. It pains me greatly to even have to correct what should be common knowledge to most people. Yet, it should be done anyway, as this kind of reaction should not be allowed to masquerade as anything left of Reagan. Facts are still important, especially in this environment of disinfo married to imperial war.

Recommended: Domenico Losurdo, History of the Communist Movement: Failure, Betrayal, or Learning Process?

Summer is heating up for the millions of people violently displaced from their homes in the Middle East. Clocking 44c in Baghdad (111f), the tens of thousands quite suddenly fleeing Ramadi face this heat and oncoming Ramadan without a choice otherwise. On the run from empire’s rockets and explosions, the contras’s IEDs and suicide bombers, they join those in Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Yemen and Palestine who are suddenly refugees. See, if you have eyes to see:

Libya thrown into chaos at the end of a NATO onslaught in 2011 remains not only a failed state in certainly the most academic sense of the word, but a source of people on the run, people drowning in the Mediterranean and dying in the deserts.

Syria, the jewel of the Arab world, a name that brings tears to the eyes when people speak of how it was just four years ago. Her people filling camps in every neighboring country.

Yemen, the people poor, starving and screaming under chemical weapons. The poorest, most helpless country in the region torn to pieces by the richest and most powerful.

Palestine, a long burning fire in the stomach, a constant humiliation.

Egypt – cruelly disciplined.

Iraq, now 35 long years suffering from war.

It’s impossible to express in human language the absolute horror in this part of the world. It’s more expressed in the nine-day fever of a child at a refugee camp, the terror of not knowing where the planes dropping bombs on your head are coming from. The nihilistic certainty, as you flee your home, that no one who is responsible for this cares about you, because no one who is responsible will ever taste this sort of pain.

To get letters from home is surreal, as people care and care and care about a Bernie Sanders run for president of the United States. They care about a television show. They care about food allergies and vaccines. The core adopts a posture of hipster indifference while the periphery writhes under the knife of empire.

“They were killing woman and children.”

“We’ve been waiting for six days sleeping in the street here, but so far we haven’t got permission to enter Kurdistan,” he said, lowering his voice as the checkpoint commander approached.

The commander declined to give his name but was quick to offer an explanation for the delay.

“We respect them. We give them food. We deal with them like humans,” he said. “But we’ve got to investigate before we let them through.”

– RUDAW

Are there communists forgotten in Ukraine? Are there communists alive today? A red banner hangs from a fence surrounding an impromptu refugee camp not a mile from where I write these words. It’s an accusatory shade of red. There is no argument that we have been outmaneuvered. The question is: how do we win at a game of Go in which we have been cornered?

(The matrix of control) works like the Japanese game of Go. Instead of defeating your opponent as in chess, in Go you win by immobilizing your opponent, by gaining control of key points of a matrix so that every time s/he moves s/he encounters an obstacle of some kind.

And this perhaps explains this brief interlude. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off again.

“I’m a journalist,” she said.

“No, you’re not. You’re a propagandist. People in your position lost the privilege to call themselves journalists long ago.”

“I tell important stories,” she insisted.

“You tell important stories, through your own eyes. Literally. The appeal of reading your stories is that you’re the one telling them, right? You crowd-fund trips abroad, you offer the most milquetoast analysis on the tamest of issues, and people buy it because you make them feel like they’re fighting The Man through you. But you’re not fighting The Man. You’re being used – being misled and misleading your followers as well.”

“You’re nuts.”

“They send you on an all-expenses paid vacation to a CIA black site where they torture and murder, where people like me disappear, and you are going to show everyone how transparent our government is while glossing over everything they won’t show you, leaving all the juicy parts out because you just good-faith assume people are going to tell you everything, because you’re so damn earnest and cute, right?”

“I blew the lid off the NYPD getting panthers.”

“You did not. But even then, a few days later, your source is off the street and in jail. You did all the footwork for the pigs, broadcasting everything about this guy to God knows who.”

“Menendez was selling heroin,” she said, her voice growing too quiet for the bar.

“Bullshit, he was one of the best organizers they had out there. And he thought he was doing something smart in talking to you.”

“How dare you.” Caroline was developing a furious flush.

“You’re all a bunch of fucking spooks. And look at your face. You don’t even know it.”

Now available via Amazon, or by emailing the author for a free copy.

The 1976 film Network is the story of a failing television channel and its scheme to improve ratings by putting a crazy man on television. Howard Beale is driven out of his mind after he’s laid off to shield the bottom line. He is a widower, no real friends – a victim of the economic rearrangement of the 1970s. Promising to blow his brains out on live TV, Beale is suddenly the savior of the network as the ratings are higher than ever as a result of this outburst. He appears on television and delivers emotive appeals to his audience, reasoning that while he doesn’t know what do to fix the situation, he at least encourages everyone to “get mad”. But no mass movement erupts. Once his shares start to dip, the network assassinates him to pull their ratings out of the fire.

This is the usual synopsis you’ll receive. Network’s other story lines, the ones about Faye Dunaway’s sexually aggressive yet sexually vacuous character, the cynical manipulation of Black Power politics, are usually ignored. Everyone loves a story about a maniac street preacher. But Network is also about how the media is manufactured, how our pain and frustrations regarding the state of the world are manipulated for ratings, and how legitimate grievances are monetized under capitalism.

It’s a shame we miss out on that, because the media we consume today is just as cynically manipulated. It’s just as weaponized against the population as the media of a hundred years ago, but has now adopted new marketing techniques to sell, promote, and defend imperialism and capitalism. This is not to say that older techniques are not still used – some corruption is still as blatant as taking money or gifts – but other techniques have not been as examined, as thoroughly condemned. While sex and race are just as common as ever in the media’s worship of imperialism and capitalism, the new neoliberal strategies of atomization and the cult of the individual gives the old tropes of manipulation a fresh coat of paint:

We live in an era of flux. The old model of a creator or creative type—a person who does one thing well, and depends on institutions for support—is falling by the wayside. The creator of the future is a super-connected trans-disciplinary mutant: engaged and intellectually rebellious. Molly Crabapple has created everything from Occupy Wall Street posters and arts journalism of collapsing countries to murals on the walls of the world’s most exclusive nightclubs.  On stage, she delivers an energizing, take-no-prisoners talk on how creators—how everyone—can create a life of their own design, without asking permission. (Emphasis mine, from Lanvin Agency)

Atomization is the isolation of a person from their “institutions of support”, meaning, essentially, not just their fellow human being, but also the traditional ways of reading and perceiving knowledge, through history or dialectical reasoning. The atomized individual is “intellectually rebellious”, cut off from the ability to reason correctly and confused by constantly shifting parameters – relying on their own atomized and manipulated environment in order to successfully parse reality. A strategy as old as time is to successfully make the person feel like they came up with the idea to oppress themselves. The fresh coat of paint here is to make everyone relate to their own oppression in an intimate, ego-shaping way. The individual’s decision – once they choose oppression, of course – is a sacred decision; their reasoning and their motivations are private and autonomous. The oppressed are oppressed whether they choose to be or not – but the propaganda encourages the oppressed to accept it anyway, because it makes things easier for domination and atomizes society faster.

Imperialism, too, wants invitations for military advisors, trade agreements, and foreign direct investment. Wars and battles can be disagreeable. Usually it’s preferable both morally and logistically when the oppressed ask for their own subjugation, argue for it themselves. Likewise, patriarchy seeks to subjugate by invitation. Women are told that patriarchy really does have nothing but the best intentions, that she can cleverly twist patriarchy on her own to make it “work for her”. In this way, we can compare the woman who feels violent pornography is empowering to the country which feels monoculture depending on the imperial markets is empowering. Under this paradigm, we the audience, must believe that if they are asking for it, we must respect their agency. Systems of oppression, however, do not simply disappear because they are somehow passively (or actively!) accepted by the oppressed. Indeed, systems prefer the acquiescence of the oppressed to conflict. This is why it is so important for us to be told that women love being prostitutes and how much happier developing countries are under capitalism. In many cases, this functions as a sort of shield for oppression – it’s their choice, after all! And we must respect that. And if not their choice, well then, certainly NATO has their best interests as individuals at heart. An argument about imperialism successfully becomes an argument about agency.

All of this is not just a successful tool for atomization, it is also a savvy marketing strategy for oppression. For this essay, I am going to write mainly on how imperialist-marketing techniques specifically corrupts feminism. While women who stand against oppression and imperialism are often excluded from public platform, or labeled as “crazy” otherwise, when standing for imperialism, misogyny, racism, and capitalism, women are seen as strong and independent-minded. When their representations of the aforementioned are attacked, these otherwise “modern” women simply melt back into stereotypical gender roles, and are posited as victims. I will present three case studies for this phenomenon that will seek to make this connection between feminism, traditional gender roles, agency and imperial aggression.

For the first case study, let’s take a look at a so-called feminist, modern group of women: FEMEN. The marketing strategy of this Ukrainian group is pretty simple to grasp. A photo of any FEMEN action usually includes a half naked blonde woman, political slogans scrawled across her breasts, her face contorted in pain and fear as a police officer or soldier, generally a man, attempts to tackle and arrest her. Here we have a twofold approach: one strategy is that instead of holding placards, these women use their bare breasts as “weapons” (their word, not mine) to trick an otherwise apathetic and disinterested male population into buying whatever it is they’re selling, while courageously doing this as wielders of their own agency, allegedly wielding it in the name of atomized feminism (what I call elsewhere “postfeminism“). This is greatly analogous to marketing strategies which seek to utilize female sexuality – we can see examples of this on any convention showroom floor.  They are simultaneously empowered by using their sexuality to sell their politics, while at the same time cynically bowing to traditional gender roles. The second part of the marketing strategy is to usually include the police. Their groping hands put these lovely blonde ladies in danger. They roughly claw at their exposed flesh. Like King Kong, these women are generally presented as helpless against their attackers, suspended in midair by the ruddy paws of the enemy who seeks to destroy us all. We are winked at by the titillating vision of half-naked attractive white women, offering their politics on their breasts as a way of appealing to the so-called essential nature of of piggish men, appreciative of their strong choices, angry that a man would stand in their way. 

For sure, while I have lived both in worlds where women wear very little and quite a lot to promote their sexuality, I take no offense to either approach. But I am critical to an extreme when I see this sexuality weaponized, used to beat not just Russia over the head, but all of us, to crush discussion and promote unquestioning acquiescence in the name of agency, feminism and sexual liberation. The image of white breasts crumpled roughly in the dark hands of state violence – what’s there to safely discuss without stepping in a minefield?

Odessa: FEMEN spokeswoman Ievgeniia Kraizma throwing a salute while 40 people are lynched and burned behind her in May 2014.

It didn’t surprise me to discover that FEMEN is represented by a smarmy Ukrainian neo-fascist, or that FEMEN has connections to Svoboda and dirty US money. It didn’t surprise me to see FEMEN photographed posing near the burning House of Labor in Odessa during a brutal lynching of red and left activists. What did surprise me was how successfully the FEMEN brand and their tactics have so far avoided a total exposure as fascist frauds. I suppose that many of my male comrades, and some of the female ones, feel uncomfortable discussing this, as many of us (as good Leftists) have been inoculated against discussing how a woman should display her sexuality. The dominant discussion about a woman’s choice simply forbids me from approaching a half-naked woman and calling her out on reactionary posturing. It will melt into my being a prude or jealous of her beauty. I cannot say if these women were expressing their honest-to-God sexuality while participating in these actions. I’ve never been to bed with them, I don’t know their hearts. I can just clearly see how their bodies, their bare skin, are weaponized towards reaction. As a woman, the marketing scheme disgusts me – a scheme to sell imperialism, patriarchy and racism. It’s a marketing scheme that results in the uncritical nodding along of so many while reds burn in Odessa. 

In a way, FEMEN’s schtick is much like Nazi pornography: the woman simultaneously representing sexual availability, traditional values, and also under threat by the dark barbarian other. The main difference here is that the woman herself is now an individual. It’s not just her body that must be protected from the barbarian horde; it is also her choice to portray herself thus that must be defended. Her reasons for being presented in this way are hers and hers alone – if she believes she is being counter-culture when being anything but, we cannot argue with this or else we are little worse than the cops clawing at her body. The defense is thus sealed against all criticism of tactics and ideology. 

Their biggest applause line was “Be Pussy Riot! Anyone can be Pussy Riot!”

Another example of this paradigm in action is the Russian group Pussy Riot. What started as an anarchist-type art collective in Russia, with public fucking, sexual battery against women, and desecration of sacred spaces, soon became a cause célèbre for spook organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Their combined sexiness and intellectual rebelliousness were worshiped by unofficial Occupy spokespersons, their pouting faces immortalized as they were hauled off to a dreaded work camp. After their early release, as part of a general amnesty for mothers (my goodness – what a concept!) they went on tour of American prisons, grimly meeting with Bill DeBlasio and speaking on how much the prisons in Russia could be improved, perhaps to become more like the prisons in the US, where the rate of incarceration is historically unprecedented.

Of course, while Pussy Riot enjoys a rockstar reception in the United States, the same is not true for the Russian Federation, where the majority of the population regards the beautiful young women of Pussy Riot as deserving of punishment. In fact, a rarely-reported twist to the story is that the two women seen most as representing Pussy Riot, Nadezhda Tollokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina, were in fact expelled from their group. But this is irrelevant to the media in the United States, who are basically the managers and promoters of the group in the West, who seek instead to paint these women as dissidents who redeem our bad qualities (Rikers, etc) through their earnest, qualified eyes. We cannot get the same redemption from Chelsea Manning, rotting in prison now for four years with no general amnesty coming for her, as her acts did not exist to propagate empire, but rather to expose and destroy empire. Chelsea Manning’s inhumane imprisonment is not viewed with the same comradely concern as Pussy Riot, who pose for Vanity Fair once free and clear in New York City. Despite their strength of character and bravery in risking their lives (!) to tell the truth about Putin’s Russia, Pussy Riot remain fragile, petite girls who are in need of saving.

And here, generally, is where female sexuality is most successfully deployed against critical thought. In reading the objections as being about the bodies themselves, as opposed to the systems of power they represent in tension with one another, we are effectively silenced. We read critique of Pussy Riot and FEMEN as being attacks against their bodies themselves. Even their agency is pushed aside in moments of crisis. This is misogyny. Despite their right-wing stances, their cheering for imperialism, these women have successfully infiltrated modern protest movements such as Occupy Wall Street and piggy-backed onto a variety of causes, such as that of prison reform, refugee crises, LGBT liberation, and Cecily McMillan’s trial. They have entered these movements seamlessly, propagating disinfo and sowing division among actual activists, while going relatively unchallenged. The critics of their positions become “haters” or “stalkers”, or send them rape threats.

Laurie Penny and friends

Our new young female pundit class is the final example of this phenomenon of weaponized naked girls. Writers such as Molly Crabapple, Laurie Penny, and Natasha Lennard have become new icons for a “counterculture” feminist-journalist ideal. But a quick look at the CVs of these women reveal them not as actual politically minded activists, but rather as ambitious pop-culture icons. Laurie Penny frames herself as a Harvard fellow and feminist voice for the “underclass” while cheering on the NATO attacks on Libya in 2011, Natasha Lennard smears anti-war activism as useless and boring, and Molly Crabapple now regularly reports dispatches from the Middle East, arguing for NATO intervention in Syria and the arming of foreign mercenaries there while chiding the Left for being against these things. Proving that naked photos of oneself are no barrier to success in the mainstream, Crabapple in particular has successfully turned her burlesque franchise into a platform to broadcast political propaganda, and is regularly printed in VICE, the New York Times, and invited on news channels such as MSNBC to opine on MENA foreign policy issues.   

I asked the question, why is a young woman like Molly Crabapple chosen to write about Syria, and not a young woman like Eva Bartlett? We could say it’s as simple as the fact that Crabapple supports NATO intervention in Syria, weaving a case for the need for intervention by bravely “risking her life” going 100 meters into Syria to report on the need for the Syrian government to be overthrown by foreign forces. Bartlett does not agree with this, but let’s also look deeper at what disqualifies her: she has worked as a regional organizer for ISM in Gaza, speaks Arabic, and has a firm grounding in the region. She has worked as a human shield for the Palestinian people against imperialist bombs. While this first-hand knowledge might qualify her to some, it would probably disqualify her from taking a job in professional journalism, as this would require a level of “objectivity” she clearly no longer possesses. 

Commie-chic: all the chic, none of the commie

Crabapple, on the other hand, runs a burlesque franchise (“Dr. Sketchy’s”)  that features imperialist, racialized shows for the entertainment of a mainly-white male audience. Instead of this disqualifying her from a platform, it endears her to publications such as VICE, an imperialist, racialized burlesque show in its own right. She is a self-described mercenary entrepreneur and former naked girl who seemed to earn her credentials on reporting the topic of Syrian “revolution” by way of her being an unofficial spokeswoman and artist for Occupy Wall Street.

This position also offered her the opportunity to visit the prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, where hundreds of prisoners are denied basic rights as human beings and are currently on mass hunger strike. The stories of torture and mistreatment out of Guantanamo are not hard to find, including reports of a  CIA murder cover up, but these are conspicuously absent from Crabapple’s reporting. She instead spends most of her time with the guards and wardens of the prison camp, drawing pictures of the idyllic scenery and the equipment they use to torture the prisoners. She draws Guantanamo as overgrown and mysterious, lush and abandoned, a sort of Tim Burton set. It is no longer threatening, merely an uncomfortable afterthought. When questioning the purpose of this visit, I was asked “What could someone REALLY dig up on such a trip?” What indeed. So then the question becomes: why was this woman who did no journalism of note, who left out actual journalism of note from her report, allowed to visit such a blight on humanity if not to present an acceptable and non-threatening version of it to her audience?

It’s clear then, that a woman such as this is not qualified to be considered a journalist, much less a “leftist” by any serious standards. She is simply a pop-culture propagandist, marketed to young leftists as an acceptable and attractive alternative to Thomas Friedman. Yet, when confronted with criticism on her position or credentials, Crabapple retreats into a victim’s shell. Her critics are “haters”, “jealous”, or “obsessed with her [sexually]”. Refugee Palestinian children become her sexual molesters while she simultaneously and bravely calls for their betterment – not through BDS or armed resistance, but *some*how. Likewise, the “left” pelts her with alleged rape threats while she is only trying to help them win broader exposure. Her sexuality as a woman simultaneously promotes and shields her. She even went as far as to paint a portrait of herself with various criticisms painted over her face – few of them were threats to her body, most of them to her politics, but certainly all one and the same in her artistic representation.

The racialized clarification to this scam is Crabapple answering for her profiting off imperialist burlesque by bringing out a performer from the show, to argue that what was seen – women dressed in “traditional” savage garb with tampons in their ears, killing one another for the sexual pleasure of the audience, was actually highly-developed satire or criticism of racism and imperialism in its own right. While Crabapple herself would not answer my questions regarding this show, how this sort of thing developed her brand, and its contribution to her views on imperialism, the performer she featured thanked her profusely for the opportunity to reinforce stereotypes next to racist copy written by a white man, implying that if she did not, this would be censoring women of color. This was a disclaimer added five years after the fact and only after I raised the issue. Again: we have racist, imperialist, misogynist discourse that is justified by agency, implying that to disagree with profiting off of these representations would in fact be racism or misogyny in its own right. This is neoliberalism at fever pitch.

Racism and female sexuality have long been utilized to sell imperialist war. The Spanish American war, the mobilization of the KKK to protect white females from rape, the hijab-wearing beauties constrained by “Islamofascism” – these are all examples. For any case imperialist warmongering, I will show you a pretty young woman in danger. Not as if these women are in danger because of imperialist war, of course. They are almost always in argument of imperialist war. The brutal gang rape of young teenage girls by  American soldiers in Iraq  is simply not covered in the same way as Ghadaffi’s alleged Viagra-fueled rape squads. The gruesome blackmail used against females  and LGBT people by Mossad is simply not news compared to honor killings.

In addition, there is a tendency in yellow journalism to present female sexuality as a way to sell papers. It works so well for nearly every other facet of capitalist consumerism. And there is a tendency in journalists of all stripes and shapes to be connected to intelligence services, also in service of imperialist intervention and war. From a desire to access to simple laziness, journalists play into the hands of the government on nearly all fronts, but particularly when it comes to imperialism. Why keep a foreign bureau open when you can get information from the government and send pundits along embedded with soldiers and State Department coordinators? All of this together creates a situation ripe for exploiting the entire public, but throw in the parts about feminism, and now reds and other sorts of anti-imperialists will be lured by this siren’s call. It’s not hard to conjure up desired personalities to deliver your message in this system, not hard to produce the actors needed to play all the parts of the media narrative. It’s not just spooks sneaking around recruiting people for their schemes, it’s a whole society that’s been primed to loathe communism and national liberation.

Women with guns in their hands fighting against imperialism are mostly absent from this kind of imperial discourse, except to mock, pity or belittle them. I mean, look at that last link. It’s to an article about FARC’s female soldiers and it’s titled “Jungle Fever”. In this discourse, all women are victims and silly dupes – wandering children, looking for someone to help them. The ones with a voice are loud and proud about their imperialist message, and then it is their bodies under attack if their message is objected to – not imperialism, not capitalism. 

But I reject this. These expressions of female sexuality are not earnest, and are just as false as any other patriarchal representation of women, not because the women and their actions are themselves false necessarily, but because these presentations have been weaponized by third parties to serve imperialist and patriarchal ends. They are mediated expressions. I cannot speculate on whether or not these individual women are knowingly complicit in this. I can only struggle against the broader tendency to use female bodies in this grotesque manner.

Today’s young female journalist-pundits have created the perfect storm for this sort of discourse, and it is their presence that introduces groups like Pussy Riot and FEMEN to the rest of us, helpfully putting it all in context. Their support of imperialism, combined with their self-promotion as empowered savvy “burlesque dancers” or “naked girls”, combined with their self-portrayal as frightened women under attack, is effective in triggering silence from the left. Professionally donning the sheep’s wool of just-another-activist-chick while quite literally endorsing capitalism and its products, they fold criticism of their work and their marketing strategy into criticisms of themselves, and as they have been crafted to appeal mainly to a certain demographic, the attack is not just on themselves, but also on their fans and their sense of taste. These women are not just sexy, hinting at their sexual availability, but also vulnerable to attack. Like Clemencia Arango, they are young, innocent, beautiful, naked and must be saved.

So, the nakedness, while making these women appealing yet vulnerable, also shields them – their openness and frankness alluding that their presentation of themselves as coy young ladies is of their own agency, that it was their decision to market themselves thus. Therefore, it would be anti-women, certainly anti-female sexuality, to attack the media as using the nakedness as a screen for pro-NATO positions. No consideration is given, perhaps, that their rising to the top is a result of imperialism and patriarchy, a deeply integrated media propaganda machine.

They are, in a strange way, much like the young, innocent, beautiful and naked women who NATO must intervene to “protect” – at least, they are both supported and promoted by the same paradigm of patriarchal imperialism and capitalism. And since the marketing appeal is clearly not just their excellent reporting, but also their packaged sexuality and so-called “girlfriend experience” complete with Instagram photos and voyeuristic members-only performances, this means that an attack on them is not just an alleged attack on their sexuality, but on their male audience as well.

And I must stress here, before I receive backlash, that I have no idea who any of the above women are on an individual level. I don’t know what drives them. I cannot say for one way or the other that they are aware of how they are being weaponized against the world’s oppressed majority; I can only say that they are. Neoliberalism lays out its demands in a simple way for white women who want to make it in this world: we are to be subservient, our consent made available for public sale, and for our hearts to go out to our men and women in uniform as they fight to keep the barbarians at bay who would throw a hijab over our nakedness. As for fighting women of color and women battling on imperial fronts – if they do not exist to arouse or be laughed at, they simply do not exist at all. And while we wrestle with our deeper questions of identity, atomization, feminism and racism, imperialist bombs quicken their pace, spreading their destruction over the rest of the world.