Opposing The Western War Machine Is The Most Important Thing You Can Do

If there’s one thing this past year has made clear, it’s that opposing the foreign abuses of the western empire is the most important task you can undertake if you care about truth, justice, and human rights. There are other important fronts upon which this struggle takes place, but opposing western warmongering, militarism and empire-building is the most important.

It’s the most important because it’s the most consequential. Western warmongering is responsible for the most death, destruction, displacement and human suffering out of any of the abusive policies our governments inflict upon people.

As abusive as domestic issues can be, nobody here at home has to worry about western bombs being dropped on their houses.

Foreign abuses get less attention than domestic issues because they are inflicted upon strangers in other countries instead of upon our friends and neighbors, and because the imperial media work tirelessly to convince us that those foreign abuses are good and necessary. But they are the worst.

Foreign abuses also get less attention than domestic issues because opposing foreign abuses puts you at odds with all mainstream western political parties and everyone who supports them. Your progressive friends who might be on your side with regard to racist policing policies or LGBT rights will be uncomfortably at odds with you when you start calling Kamala Harris a genocidal monster. This makes standing against the imperial war machine less fun than other more widely supported expressions of activism.

It’s also less egoically gratifying. In a western “left” that generates so much of its energy from identity politics, where everyone wants to see themselves as part of some marginalized minority who can finger-wag about the privilege of non-marginalized groups, it’s a bit deflating to realize that as a westerner you’re a part of the problem, and that you receive a fair amount of privilege yourself just from living where you live.

Depending on what your politics are like, it can be a kick in the ego to get real about the fact that however underprivileged you might see yourself, you still directly materially benefit from the imperialist extraction of the global south that all this warmongering is meant to protect. It can be a hard pill to swallow that even if you’re an autistic biracial trans pansexual, you’re still sitting a lot more comfortably than any straight cis man in Gaza, and your concerns for your safety and security are much less urgent than his.

But the biggest reason why foreign abuses get less attention than domestic ones is because of the propaganda. War is the glue that holds the empire together, so our rulers do everything they can to keep us arguing about domestic policy and ignoring foreign policy. The imperial spinmeisters wildly exaggerate the differences between the two mainstream political factions while downplaying the empire’s foreign abuses as normal and nothing to worry about, because the last thing they want is the rise of a robust antiwar movement in powerful western countries.

If you take your stand against the imperial war machine, you are standing against the very most abusive and tyrannical injustices in our world — but you are also standing against what everyone around you has been trained to believe is the truth. If you oppose the imperial war machine consistently and forcefully, you are setting yourself up to look like a kook, a traitor, or a weird contrarian in the eyes of other westerners. Not because anything you are saying is wrong, but because they have been indoctrinated to believe the opposite of what you are saying about the nations and groups that are being targeted for destruction by the western empire.

The other day some liberal American author retweeted an anti-war thing I wrote with the comment, “This is one of the most fascinating accounts on Twitter. She’s like an AI programmed to say the opposite of what everyone agrees makes sense. Everyone crazy on the left AND right follows her. 400k people! The replies people are like her — well-considered, reasonably informed, and totally off the rails.”

This stood out for me, because it’s like a condensed version of all the criticisms I’ve received from denizens of the western empire over the years. Look at this weirdo! She’s saying the exact opposite of everything we all agree is the truth!

At no time has it ever occurred to this person to seriously examine why it is that everyone he knows agrees with the narratives which support the geostrategic objectives of the US government and its allies, thereby making anyone who contradicts these narratives look like a deranged nut. He just takes it as a given that all the information he ingests about international affairs aligns perfectly with the foreign policy objectives of his government because his government is simply on the side of truth and virtue. The well-documented fact that the mass media administer propaganda to advance the information interests of the US empire never crosses his mind as a real possibility.

That’s the current you are swimming against when you take your stand against western warmongering. The current of the most sophisticated propaganda machine that has ever existed.

It can be challenging to consistently speak the truth in this way to a civilization that is deeply indoctrinated to believe in lies. But it is also the very most important work you can do, because it helps spread awareness of the single most urgent and egregious injustice in our world today.

And that’s how you change the world: spreading awareness. Problems don’t get fixed until enough people see them and understand them. Once enough people do, using the power of our numbers to force real change becomes a real possibility. And there is nothing more urgently in need of real change than the end of western warmongering.

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/opposing-the-western-war-machine