East meets West: De-Imperialization and Multipolarity

[zazen]

A thread to explore how the Global South, Middle East, and Far East are strategically positioning to hedge themselves against Western hegemony. We’ll examine the imperial mindset that has long driven Western dominance and how much of the world has experienced the consequences of this legacy, now seeking to distance themselves from it - with few exceptions.

Africa and the Middle East, in particular, are crucial to understand. The Middle East serves as a geographical bridge between East and West, and both regions are rich in resources and demographics, making them regions with global ripple effects. Additionally, with a sizable and growing population of Muslims living in the West, especially in Europe, it’s vital to grasp how Muslims generally perceive the West and the wider world. Many discussions about de-imperialization and the shifting global order involve Islamic nations or societies deeply connected to Islamic thought.

Gaza has become a pivotal and symbolic moment in this broader shift. The brutality of the situation has forced many Westerners, myself included, to reflect on our governments complicity and behaviour. It raises questions about the drive for survival, the moral bankruptcy, and the cultural decay that fueled past colonial genocides - and that now underpins what the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has ruled as a plausible ongoing genocide requiring measures to prevent it from becoming a certified one. Despite this, the West continues to support Israel with impunity.

I’ll be sharing a variety of videos from The Middle Nation channel, which offers a unique perspective from an American born revert to Islam. His style, reminiscent of Malcolm X, bridges the gap between cultures with thought provoking critiques of the West. While his views can at times feel overly critical, they are worth considering - if only to challenge our own biases, or perhaps his, which may reflect a broader generalization of Muslim perspectives.

Understanding these perspectives can help us make sense of a fast changing world.

The first video: The Pathology of America - Dehumanization, greed and the decline of empire

 

Edited October 17 by zazen

[zazen]

Corporations and imperialism differ in their mechanisms but share the same ethos of exploitation and domination. Corporatism is an evolved form of imperialism that operates in systemic silence. The invisible hand of the market as the capitalists say - but it’s more like the invisible jaws of a hungry beast.

Imperialism wears a suit today. It’s a trans-national empire with no flag that expands endlessly, unmoored from the soil that birthed it. We like to think corporations are just companies, but a company is like a house - rooted, defined, and tethered to the community it serves. A corporation is an estate - a sprawling, insatiable entity that devours farmland, gobbles up neighbouring plots, and stretches across oceans to seize distant lands. It’s not just bigger, but a different beast altogether.

Even the language we use to describe corporations betrays us. In the UK, these imperial estates are registered under an entity quaintly named Companies House. The term “house” implies stability, stewardship, something manageable and local. It evokes the image of a family business expanding its walls or a neighbourhood shop opening a second location. But corporations have no walls or roofs - they have no limits unlike a house. It’s a juggernaut that steamrolls over everything in its path for the sake of accumulation.

Corporations begin as seeds of economic growth, promising prosperity to the lands they emerged from. But they’ve since outgrown those lands. They’ve transcended the nations that gave them life, severing any ties of loyalty in their quest for endless expansion. Their purpose isn’t to serve but to conquer - to expand markets, exploit labor, privatise commons, and monopolise resources. They’re now global juggernauts leeching off the global South with ruthlessness.

That imperial reach has turned inward, preying on their own people. The same extractive mindset that drains other nations also hollows out the domestic working class. Corporations see no distinction between the factory worker in Bangladesh and the single mother in Ohio drowning in credit card debt. Both are resources to be extracted, exploited, and discarded. They close factories, outsource labor, and inflate urban centres into unlivable nightmares.

Corporatism isn’t just imperialism with a new face - it’s the metastasis of imperialism into something far more insidious. It no longer needs armies to conquer when it has supply chains, and no longer needs colonies when it has markets. The world it envisions isn’t divided by borders but by balance sheets, and the only war it wages is against the powerless, wherever they may be found.

It may not come with flags, banners or drums, but the conquest is unmistakable. The estate keeps growing, the farmland keeps disappearing, and the people both at home and abroad are left disillusioned after being preyed upon.

Luigi Mangione & the American System Meltdown

Quotes from the above video:

“The killer (Luigi Mangione) and the killed (Unitedhealth CEO) in this case are both men from the same class and economic strata.

A lot of the working class are justifying Mangione’s actions, which should terrify the ruling class.

I do not believe that non-violent means of communication and peaceful protest, economic protest, is useless. And I don't believe they are ignored, in fact. I think that the idea that these types of efforts are futile is propagated precisely because power does not want people to engage in them, because they are useful and can be useful and effective.

In theory, his privileged position in the society puts him within the power structure, but he took the action of someone who's outside the power structure, beneath the power structure, which means that even he has been made to believe that the power structure is invincible, and he's not the only one.

Being from the Tik Tok generation, he has grown up on a less controlled narrative and he's been exposed to the perspectives of people outside his class strata, and perspectives about his class strata, meaning people subject to the power structure that he's a part of. So he's exposed to the experiences and the views and the attitudes and opinions of the people that he's never supposed to be exposed to, while also growing up within the power structure. That amounts to an infiltration. Because you can no longer control the narrative that the children of the elite consume, you can no longer ensure that they will have been successfully educated and indoctrinated to carry on with the preservation of your system. This is a very serious problem for the system.

The system has to deny the effectiveness of what is effective. They never want people to think that they have a viable option of resistance and change because the fact is almost every single successful social movement in America has actually improved the lives of people and has been achieved through non-violent methods, through patient long-term strategies.

Because the system has an uncivilised predatory mentality, because the power structure is tyrannical, they need everyone to feel overpowered and to feel helpless. But when you have such an adversarial relationship with your own people, and at the same time have implanted in them a Darwinian concept of human animals into their heads, eventually with no other options being regarded as plausible, you make violence inevitable. It's not inevitable because it has to be. It's not inevitable because there really are no other options in reality, but because you have insisted to make people believe that there are no other options. And you've done that because you would rather turn your society into a bloody conflict zone than accept changing or accept power being held accountable.

Luigi Mangione is from that demographic group that's supposed to be invested in the system he's from, that class that's supposed to protect the system because they benefit from it, but you're losing control even of the stakeholders of your own power structure. I don't think you can even comprehend how dangerous that is for you, because Luigi Mangione is also from that demographic and class in your society that was raised to feel entitled to take matters into their own hands. Furthermore, he's from the class and demographic in your society that, as I said, is a part of the power structure, which means that he also comes from the most ruthless, calculating, and most capable demographic in America for efficient and targeted violence. That's the class he comes from and he has the qualities of that class, the predatory class, the dominating class, and he's just one of many from that class who are turning on their own.”

Edited December 15 by zazen

[Bobby_2021]

I do not know man. The future for BRICS is quite uncertain to be honest. Their intentions are on point. But I do not think they have the firepower to pull it off.