Unipolar Hegemony Is A Freakish Historical Aberration: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

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

The US is indisputably the most tyrannical regime on earth. Only the US is instigating wars around the world, circling the planet with hundreds of foreign military bases, starving populations with massive unilateral sanctions and blockades, and working to destroy any nation which disobeys it. No other government has spent the 21st century killing people by the millions in wars of aggression; only the US has. Continually trying to destroy anyone in the world who doesn’t obey your dictates is as tyrannical as it gets.

If you point this out you’ll get people telling you that if it wasn’t the US doing those things it would be someone else, but that’s ridiculous. There has never once been a unipolar planetary hegemon at any time in human history until three decades ago. People look at this freakish historical aberration and talk about it as though it’s some immutable quality inscribed in adamantine upon human DNA strands.

A single power structure dominating the planet is very much the exception, not the rule. A multipolar world is the norm in the same way a cancer-free body is the norm; you’d only assume cancer is the norm if you’d only ever seen one human body and it was a cancer patient. That doesn’t mean a future multipolar world order would be perfect or free from problems, it just means the expectation that the US unipolar hegemon would be replaced by another one is based on absolutely nothing and is refuted by all historical precedent. And as an added bonus we’d no longer be trapped in this horrifying situation where a planetary empire is continually trying to shore up disobedient nations like Russia and China while brandishing armageddon weapons with increasing aggression.

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People tell me, “If you lived in Russia or China you’d be thrown in prison for talking the way you do.”

If I lived in Russia or China I’d still be focusing all my energy on criticizing the US empire, because it would be the world’s most powerful and destructive regime no matter where I lived.

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The correct debate to be having is not whether Putin was right or wrong to invade Ukraine in response to western provocations on its border, the correct debate is whether Putin did anything the US wouldn’t have done in response to the same kind of provocations on its own borders.

Arguing about whether Russia’s invasion was “bad” is an infantile conversation for mental midgets. Mature adults are interested in talking about the real world as it actually exists and how governments behave in it, not how they’d behave in some imaginary hypothetical fantasy land where the US isn’t constantly making all those moral positions meaningless with its own actions and aggressions.

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Australians are not allowed to know if there are US nukes in our country and our government is forbidden to have information about US nuclear-capable subs on our shores, because this is a totally normal alliance with totally mutual respect between two totally equal nations.

Australians didn’t get to vote on any part of this. We didn’t get a vote about AUKUS, there was never any debate or consultation on AUKUS by our elected officials in parliament, and our last election was between the PM who began AUKUS and his opponent who also supported AUKUS.

Australians are barred from having any influence over the most consequential decisions made about our country. Big questions like whether we hand our national sovereignty over to the US empire’s preparations for WWIII are considered too important for Australians to have a say.

As an additional safeguard against Australians interfering in the mechanisms of the empire we also have the most concentrated media ownership in the western world, ensuring that we remain too stupid and propaganda-addled to notice anything is going wrong.

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Cornel West is morally and intellectually superior to literally every single government official in Washington and it’s not even remotely close.

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Politicians and pundits who support US warmongering should receive the same response from society as a Klansman walking around in full Klan regalia. But if they did, the entire political order structured around the US empire would collapse.

The warmonger should get the same response as the Klansman, but they don’t get the same response. This is because racism (at least the overt kind) has been abnormalized in polite liberal society, whereas the warmonger has been aggressively and forcefully normalized to protect the interests of an empire that’s held together by nonstop war.

The challenge, then, is to abnormalize the warmonger in the same way as the Klansman. We must work to make it just as socially taboo to be an open warmonger as it is to be an open racist. We do this by bringing awareness to the horrors of the empire’s warmongering, and by driving home again and again just how monstrous these freaks really are.

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Reality makes the same demands of the ego as the US empire makes of any government which disobeys it: surrender or suffer. In the case of nations which disobey the empire, suffering takes the form of sanctions, wars, and domestic unrest fomented by the CIA; in the case of the ego, suffering takes the form of continually resisting life as it is.

The difference is that surrendering to the US empire brings in subjugation and slavery, while surrendering to reality brings true freedom.

https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/unipolar-hegemony-is-a-freakish-historical