Civility [none/use name]
Justifying imperialist proxy wars with nationalism to own the libs.
The Hong Kong independence movement has absolutely been hijacked and fostered by the CIA and opposing US imperisalism is cool and good but recognising a “soveriegn” claim of the PRC to Hong Kong is an incredibly bad take. It requires either recognising the Qing Empire’s ownership of the land and people of Hong Kong which the PRC somehow inherited by overthrowing them, the British Empire’s ownership of the land and people of Hong Kong and their right to give it away to a state they’ve never been a part of without their consent or a sovereign claim of the PRC to govern states which are majority ethnically Han which is either imperialism, imperialism, or fascism respectively.
Except Paul.
Fuck Paul and his “Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ” slaveowner radlib bullshit.
Thanks for taking the time to explain your thinking :)
I understand Lenin’s definition. I’d also call Qin Shi Huang’s conquest of the Kingdom of Nam Viet in order to establish a literal empire qualifies as imperialist by the more common definition of the term. Which isn’t to say that the kingdom of Nam Viet had any actual right to govern the territory or people in the first place.
I definitely need to read more Lenin but I think you need to critically examine your preconceptions that nationalism and nation states are inherently justified.
I strongly disagree with your assertion that nationalism is inherently anti-colonial or anti-imperial and would go so far as to say that while nationalist movements can sometimes have good material outcomes nationalism itself is reactionary, unjustified, inherently violent and often nonsensical. There is no inherent good in each group of people with the same “history, culture and language” being goverened by a different state with the territory and resources they have traditionally possessed. The idea that they should only serves to cementing historical inequalities along “cultural and language” (often ethnic and racial) lines making it racist, reactionary and anti-marxist.
Furthermore national identities (which you’ve defined as being “cultural, historical and language” based but often have other components) are not natural or static. They are almost always manufactured and imposed often brutally by a state as a mechanism of social and cultural control. The artificial selection of which parts of “history, languange culture” and not to ignore the elephants in the room, race, ethnicity and occaisonally class and how these change to meet the needs of the ruling class at various times and the mechanisms by which they are imposed have been well studied and if you want some links to papers/pdfs I’ll be happy to point you to them and so many countless atrocities have been committed to introduce and reinforce these mechanisms that I’m sure I don’t have to link you them.
Anti-imperialist/decolonial/“communist” nationalism is a slightly more complex subject but I’d argue that while it can certainly have very positive material outcomes in the short/mid term when used as a mobilising force/mechanism of control for a vanguard party to get people to act against their personal best interests for the sake of their “nation” rather than the communist ideal of the common good of all people it contains most of the roots of Ur Facism especially when used to mobilise people to war and can very easily evolve into full fascism as has happened in India. It also provides nationstates with an alternative ideological framework to communism by which they can justify their actions to their people, which can be very dangerous. Additionally, once the colonial/imperial oppressors are expelled establishing and maintaining a nation state usually requires brutal nation building and reinforcing excercises to ensure the state maintains control of what national identity means and can propogate that national identity to each of its citizens.
Coming back to the situation of Hong Kong and China viewed through the lense of nationalism, we can see two different states using nationalism and the ideal of national self determination to justify what is effectively a proxy war in Hong Kong. The national identity of most of the people who live in Hong Kong diverged significantly from the national identity the Communist Party of China is propagating. Instead of just trying to make a Marxist Leninist Hong Kong the Communist Party of China is using brutal measures to impose their national identity on the people of Hong Kong and the CIA used the arguably justified opposition to this to forment a reactionary colour revolution.
tl;dr nationalism is reactionary and a fucking spook.
Can you please edit your post/title to indicate this is something from a reddit chud you’re dunking on?
For people who don’t open the thread to view comments this just looks like an unironic chud post.
Come now comrade, I didn’t expect to find revisionist Sith propaganda on my favourite trainposting forum.
Palpatine was absolutely that bad. He wasn’t building the Empire because he wanted to save the galaxy from the Yuuzhan Vong. He was a megalomaniac sadist who believed he was the living embodiement of the Dark Side of the force and wanted to turn the galaxy into a hellscape where dark side users ruled supreme and the dark side of the force was the only power worth having. He even wanted to eventually destroy most of the tech in the galaxy to make sure dark side users couldn’t be challenged by normies with cool toys.
Palpatine never really gave that much of a shit about the Yuuzhan Vong, that was just a lie he told to get Thrawn to kill Jedi for him and Thrawn believed Palpatine because Thrawn, his writers, and a disturbing amount of his fans are the sort of fashy fucks who like to jerk off to the idea of a genius general “unifying” the galaxy under a horrific tyrant to save it from being conquered by a rapist coded outside threat.
The Yuuzhan Vong were intergalactic Nomads. They didn’t have any planets so the Death Star, whose main feature was a laser used for vaporising planets, clearly wasn’t built to combat them. If he was actually worried about the Vong he’d have used those resources to build experimental anti-biotech weapons or just more Star Destroyers.
The Death Star was a terror weapon that was there to destroy any world that dared rebel against the increasingly horrific shit Palpatine was planning to plunge the galaxy into. They literally spell it out in ANH when Tarkin says “Fear will keep the local systems in line. Fear of this battlestation.”
There’s even some cool kinda lefty stuff in the EU where they explicitly associate the Tarkin doctrine with the War on Terror by having Palpatine go on space Ellen and say he was sad about blowing up Alderaan but he had to do it because they were terrorists stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.
There’s enough material in the Star Wars EU that you can read pretty much anything into it, but to justify a “Palpatine did the Empire to stop the Vong” take you have to ignore that Palpatine was planning to take as much power as he possibly could from the time he was a small child, started the clone wars despite already knowing the Vong were infiltrating the galactic rim, that once Palpatine seized power he poured significant portions of his Empire’s massive industrial power into manufacturing planet killers which would be useless against the Vong, that he wasted entire fleets trying to cultivate dark side masters who would be far less effective against the Vong than those fleets, and eventually planned on dismantling the Empire’s tech and replacing it with dark side users who the Vong are naturally resistant too, while believing fascist rhetoric which is explicitly stated in universe to be manipulative lies.
Palpatine’s personal immorality, explicitly fascist goals, assault on the republic’s “liberal democracy” and obvious personal sadism and megalomania means there isn’t really a liberal “palpatine did nothing wrong” take. You have to be coming from a “contrarian” proto/crypto/fullblown fash position.
The lib take is that the slaver empire known as the “Galactic Republic” and their child abusing mind raping theocratic enforcers the “Jedi Order” are cool and good.
The only true lefitist take on the Star Wars universe is of course to advocate for solidarity between the enslaved droid and organic proletariats and agitate for an immediate and protracted pan-Galactic peoples war against their bourgeois oppressors and the Bio-Supremacist force “gods” who enable them.
Ah RIP. I guess nobody’s perfect. Still, it seems she at least manages to mix legitimate leftist/thirdworldist criticisms in with her antivax/5G brainworms.
