He demonstrated a slight of hand you didn't notice. He said the left got Iraq right for wrong reasons. No. Left was evidence based, there was no evidence of WMD. They have been consistent on that, and proven correct.
The real reason is Mike supported the Iraq war. And this is white washing of it.
He said nothing of the sort. He didn't say "the left" got Iraq right for the wrong reasons, he said "[t]he campists were right about Iraq for the wrong reasons." The campists and the left are not the same thing. The campists are a sub-group that crosses over the extremes of both the horseshoe left and right and Obama is not even remotely one of them. Obama and other persons on the left may have opposed the war for evidence based reasons related the absence of an imminent threat or WMDs, but that is not why a campist would oppose the war and he explicitly tells you what he means and who he is referring to as a campist in this context when he says a campist would oppose the Iraq War and "defend[] a brutal regime against justifiable removal" "for the same reflexive reasons they were against every American war, and the war this time was as they reflexively assumed it to be: a war for the oil, a war for the donor class."
There is no mention of the lack of evidence of WMD or an imminent threat as an evidence based rationale for the campist's opposition because that's not the why a campist would oppose the war. If WMDs are your reason, as it was for Obama and other segments of the left, then neither you, nor Obama, nor the people who make that argument would be campists by any definition, and there is no need for him to engage in any slight of hand here as those are his actual words. He never for one moment questions the correctness of general evidence based opposition from the Obama wing or other segments of the non-campist left that was rooted in the absence of evidence of any imminent threat or the rejection of the evidence proffered of WMDs as unconvincing and insufficient to justify a full scale American military invasion and all that would entail. Simply put, he doesn't call Obama or any one else who opposed the war was based on WMD rationales campists. You are the one doing that.
The reason he couldn't bring WMD is because he'd have to say the campist were right for right reasons. Thats anathema to the aim of the article. WMD is the elephant in the room he dare not bring in.
You obviously are not grasping the concept of what a campist is and what it is not. Campists do not oppose the war for evidence based geopolitical reasons related to what is or is not in the American interest, as they reject the very concept of the American interest mattering at all. They simply do not engage the argument for or against intervention in those terms, and they would not approve of U.S. intervention for any reason, including but not limited to if they were presented with conclusive evidentiary proof of WMDs and an imminent threat to use them. A campist would not consider such conclusive evidence to be a legitimate justification and basis for U.S. intervention regardless. That's obviously not Obama. Its not really any one in the Democratic Party or mainstream left that opposed the Iraq War at all.
Thats how he has been discrediting the left. He doesn't like that they hold positions he agrees with and is trying to make it 'liberal' and as his own.
Am not saying there is fringe left but they not even close to issues or influence. Heck Mike went looking and found a bunch of RW grifters.
Campists are not exclusively limited to the left. That is why his list includes grifters and extremists who would characterize themselves on both ends of the horseshoe. There are leftist campists and right wing campists. That list contains examples of both.
As I was reading this I kept thinking Hitchens was the type of person who used to call this out all the time.
When I read further I saw you had made that point. I'm very much an anarcho-syndicalist. I have my problems with liberalism but a lot of the skepticism liberals had about the Soviet Union, Communist China, and other left coded governments was correct.
"The plot is the worker, the woman, the dissident, the minority, the journalist, the gay person, the religious person, the political prisoner, the disappeared, the killed. ... The plot is the person under power. The whole plot. If your politics has lost the plot, your politics has lost."
I would say that, by this definition, the Democratic Party has, by and large, lost the plot. Certainly there are individual elements of the party trying to hold the plot (Bernie Sanders [who isn't technically a Democrat], AOC, Elizabeth Warren, Zohran Mamdani, and others), but the DCCC doesn't seem to be holding the plot; it seems more concerned with, in your terms, holding the center ground (which used to be far to the right) than walking the middle road.
I agree with your general argument that there is campism, but disagree about significant particulars. I think in your eagerness to name the imperialism of fools, you’ve brushed too broadly, ignored certain valid arguments on the left, and attempted to discredit them through guilt by association.
There is campism among the left, but also legitimate skepticism for the claims made about official enemies of the U.S. government, and conflicts the public is told may only be viewed one way without complexity or dubiety.
The skepticism is based on being informed of how the U.S. media operates, e.g. through Chomsky, Parenti, FAIR, and on direct experience with U.S. government propaganda laundered through prominent outlets, the most notorious case being the NYT and its publication on its front page of plants from Dick Cheney about WMDs before the invasion of Iraq, through Judith Miller’s byline, to which Cheney would then cite as if the plants were news. Another controlled discourse is the virtual prohibition in the U.S. media of discussion of the obvious fact that Russia was provoked by NATO even if its invasion of Ukraine was illegal.
Mistrust of atrocity allegations leveled against “empire-targeted nations”, as Caitlin Johnstone puts it, is completely justified, and the serious left does vastly more criticism of such propaganda, which is constant and ubiquitous, than it does defending oppressive regimes just because they are enemies of the U.S.
To omit this distinction is one distortion in this piece. Another is the notion that it is invalid to refuse equal opportunity criticism when speaking of imperialism, when the vast majority of it by far in the military realm, and in that of surreptitious, unauthorized interventions into the internal affairs of other countries by the intelligence agencies, has been perpetrated by the United States - while its appearance in ”respectable” discourse is as a rule inversely proportional to its occurrence.
Your general argument is also undermined by your dubious claims about some of the leftwing journalists you name whom you smear. Several times in this piece you advert to left journalists who are supposedly campists by claiming that what they produce is “content aligned with the Chinese Communist Party’s foreign policy positions”, and similarly vague, unsupported insinuations.
Aaron Mate, for example, did not defend Assad against the Syrian people. He interrogated the dominant narratives in the U.S. media about why the U.S. intervened in Syria, he cast self-evidently valid doubt on whether that intervention should have occurred given who was carrying it out, he reported, not incidentally, on U.S. support for Al-Qaeda terrorists in Syria, and he pointed to significant deceptions perpetrated by Illustrious international organizations like the OPCW, which lent its prestige to the false substantiation of the claim that Assad was responsible for the use of chemical weapons in Douma - a piece de resistance of atrocity propaganda for which Mate’s reporting has just been vindicated. That you don’t acknowledge this, and how it is different from functioning effectively as Assad’s personal media, just casts doubt over your claims about the capture by official enemies of the U.S. of:
“a substantial percentage of the English-language commentary that is currently presented to American audiences under the label independent journalism on platforms that have been built specifically to bypass the editorial gatekeeping of the legacy press.”
You might say that reporting of Mate’s sort “just happens to mirror the position of one specific imperial power on every contested question”, whatever that means, but one cannot evade the merits of what these journalists and organizations “would have done at small scale anyway” without nonproft money (which I will assume for the sake of argument is tainted) by simply declaring the proponent to be the vector of an ulterior political operation, who thus serves a larger undesirable interest (bizarrely, you included a donation to the Gray Zone from Roger Waters in the alleged tainting mix).
Such pronouncements consist simply of assertions masquerading as the obvious, and they are unfalsifiable. Any political view, movement, or discourse can be the subject of a denunciation of this nature. The charge of advancing Russian or foreign interests was, for instance, also made against the civil rights movement. Needless to say, regardless of whether the civil rights movement might incidentally have advanced Russian information interests, this fact did not invalidate the movement’s goals or anything any of its leaders said or did publicly to advance them. Nor did that consonance render civil rights activists dupes of a foreign state. This clip from Monty Python and the Holy Grail is telling indeed about the logic of such claims (https://youtu.be/zrzMhU_4m-g?si=XplcQg_47LhfxxFP).
The method, in any case, is an elaborate, roundabout, ad hominem attack. It opens the door to further contestable claims and innuendo as if they were not controversial, and it has done enormous damage to our political discourse.
Lastly, about Hitchens. I had forgotten that he had made himself a snitch during the “vast, right-wing conspiracy” against Bill Clinton’s presidency, which was a frontal attack on republican government. This was years before the Iraq War. But it helps to account, with vastly more explanatory power, for his “one-off” misjudgment, which I think you’ve minimized, about the Iraq war, and it calls into question the notion that he sacrificed anything at all by sticking to his Islamo-Fascist guns. His attempt to walk a Clinton official into a perjury snare tracks neatly with his support for the war. It makes it make much more sense that he was simply a social climber building an iconoclastic brand, and that he did not lose his tribe so much as he gained the one he really wanted. His gleeful photo with Tony Blair says it all.
“Another controlled discourse is the virtual prohibition in the U.S. media of discussion of the obvious fact that Russia was provoked by NATO even if its invasion of Ukraine was illegal.”
If the Russian invasion of Ukraine was illegal by your own admission then Russia could not have been legally provoked by anyone into doing it. Seriously calls into question your proffered thesis on that conflict where you declare something that is a legal impossibility to also be an “obvious fact.” Either way, this one is pretty straightforward and a pure example of campism on your part to suggest Russia was provoked by anyone into an genocidal war of aggression against its neighbor whose national identity and right to exist as a sovereign nation state is flatly denied by Russian leadership and a pure straightforward example of imperialist expansion while any defense is a perfect example of the anti-imperialism of fools Mr. Brock warns us about.
Of course in reality there is also no prohibition on discussing this theory of the war at all, and you can easily find it being raised all over the place online, it’s just pretty uniformly rejected as a totally horrific and invalid thesis that does not justify the Russian invasion by anyone not committed to repeating Russian propaganda.
It’s not rejected as an invalid thesis except by anyone who doesn’t want to engage with it. Yes indeed, it is obvious, and U.S. officials who were in a position to know (George Kennan, William Burns, etc.) have been pointing it out for decades.
Your rebuttal is too legalistic to take seriously. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine can be illegal and NATO, an explicitly adversarial military alliance, can provoke it to invade. These are not mutually exclusive. That’s why you incessantly heard in the media that the invasion was “unprovoked”. The same thing is happening with Taiwan and China now. I suspect you will call this campism too and will be the first to triumphantly declare that China is provoking the United States by establishing a presence in Cuba and Latin America. Be my guest.
No, actually, I am consistent with my anti-imperialism and reject great power sphere of influence nonsense for the invalid and destructive rationale it is. Chinese presence in Cuba or Latin America would not provoke the U.S. or justify the use of military force as a valid response to that presence. Neither the United States nor NATO provoked Russia into invading Ukraine and realist political theory based behavioral predictions that accurately predict potential Russian military adventurism do not validate or legitimize Russia’s indefensible imperialist aggression simply because they accurately predicted it. Moreover, it didn’t require some special boldness or foresight to nail that prediction given the pattern of Russian imperialist aggression against its neighbors for the last 20 years and their stated rejection of Ukrainian national identity and sovereignty and their belief in the imperialist right to subjugate Ukraine within a rebuilt Russian Empire. The notion that the United States and NATO provoked an event that has been one of the core goals of Putins nationalist political project for 20 years is absolutely absurd and about as prime of an example of campist apologia that exists in the world today.
By the same token the United States is in no way provoking China into invading Taiwan now, which is another long term decades old political goal and project of the CCP, and frankly I don’t expect it to happen via military force at some point now anyway bc China is historically more patient than that, and has grown powerful enough compared to a weakened United States that they can probably accomplish unification with Taiwan in the near future solely via political and economic leverage and domination and without any bloodshed. However, as with Ukraine, if that turns out to predict future events in the South China Sea, within the next 5 years, that doesn’t somehow legitimize or validate those events or their justifications just by being accurate
I guess it's good to know that you're consistent about provocation. I didn't say that NATO's provocation validated the Russian invasion. I said NATO provoked Russia. I believe that it shouldn't have because, in addition to being inherently aggressive, it made the war more likely, which it was intended to do. If you think the notion that it did provoke Russia is absurd on its face, we'll agree to disagree.
As for China, here's the proof from the horse's mouth:
Elbridge Colby, the principal author of the 2018 National Defense Strategy, and now Under Secretary of War for Policy, in his 2021 book, The Strategy of Denial, advocated a policy of goading China into military action. “Perhaps the clearest and sometimes the most important way of making sure China is seen this way [as the aggressor] is simply by ensuring that it is the one to strike first. Few human moral intuitions are more deeply rooted than that the one who started it is the aggressor and accordingly the one who presumptively owns a greater share of moral responsibility.”
Colby is a damn fool, but that observation about the moral importance of China being seen as the aggressor is not describing or advocating for a formal policy of goading China into military action in Taiwan, nor would it honestly matter much if it did. China would still need to be a willing partner in this scheme to initiate armed conflict, and they are not going to directly attack Taiwan by force any time soon when they can simply continue building on the strengths of their position and their economic influence and trade relationship, because China does not need to pursue a strategy of destructive conflict against either Taiwan or the U.S. military to achieve any of its goals at this time.
The Chinese have shown remarkably long patience in matters of international relations, and there is no reason to believe they would not do that again. They can afford patience and restraint, and they lack a Chinese adversary that is remotely interested in starting an armed conflict with the U.S. or in taking Taiwan by armed force. Both can be strategically waited out and I expect that's exactly what China will be doing for the foreseeable future.
The problem is the expectations game. Nobody is the least bit surprised that China has concentration camps. It's been known to have them for its entire existence in one form or the other, and reporting on their present day conditions is emphatically not news.
The United States, however, is not expected to have concentration camps. So as it moves closer and closer to having them (we can debate whether an ICE detention center qualifies, and in what percentage of cases) the response is surprise, focused attention, and indignation.
We can point this out as a double standard. But it's going to take some time for people of the left to accept that they're actually living under an authoritarian regime, as opposed to rhetorically living under one, and their default response is misplaced.
Don't be ridiculous. He quite obviously was not. The absence of evidence of WMD or imminent threat is not the reason why a campist would oppose the Iraq War in any event, because it would imply that actual affirmative evidence of an imminent threat and the presence of WMD would in fact justify U.S. intervention in Iraq. A campist would never, ever agree with that position.
In otherwords its all hypothetical and thats enough to paint the left as campist by mere projection. Even if they were right for the right reason you can handwave away using ridiculous projections.
He isn't painting "the left" as campist. Campist beliefs are clearly defined at multiple points in the article and include people who fall on both the fringe left and the fringe right. You are the only one trying to use the term campist as synonymous with the broader left despite everything he wrote that says otherwise.
Thanks. You've expressed what I have thought for many years in words clearer than I've been able to find. Happily my natural state is one of disbelief about much of what happens in this world. It's helped me in many situations.
The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend
Great piece. Thank you 🙏
He basically called Obama a campist and gets applauded for it.
Really? Below par.
He demonstrated a slight of hand you didn't notice. He said the left got Iraq right for wrong reasons. No. Left was evidence based, there was no evidence of WMD. They have been consistent on that, and proven correct.
The real reason is Mike supported the Iraq war. And this is white washing of it.
He said nothing of the sort. He didn't say "the left" got Iraq right for the wrong reasons, he said "[t]he campists were right about Iraq for the wrong reasons." The campists and the left are not the same thing. The campists are a sub-group that crosses over the extremes of both the horseshoe left and right and Obama is not even remotely one of them. Obama and other persons on the left may have opposed the war for evidence based reasons related the absence of an imminent threat or WMDs, but that is not why a campist would oppose the war and he explicitly tells you what he means and who he is referring to as a campist in this context when he says a campist would oppose the Iraq War and "defend[] a brutal regime against justifiable removal" "for the same reflexive reasons they were against every American war, and the war this time was as they reflexively assumed it to be: a war for the oil, a war for the donor class."
There is no mention of the lack of evidence of WMD or an imminent threat as an evidence based rationale for the campist's opposition because that's not the why a campist would oppose the war. If WMDs are your reason, as it was for Obama and other segments of the left, then neither you, nor Obama, nor the people who make that argument would be campists by any definition, and there is no need for him to engage in any slight of hand here as those are his actual words. He never for one moment questions the correctness of general evidence based opposition from the Obama wing or other segments of the non-campist left that was rooted in the absence of evidence of any imminent threat or the rejection of the evidence proffered of WMDs as unconvincing and insufficient to justify a full scale American military invasion and all that would entail. Simply put, he doesn't call Obama or any one else who opposed the war was based on WMD rationales campists. You are the one doing that.
The reason he couldn't bring WMD is because he'd have to say the campist were right for right reasons. Thats anathema to the aim of the article. WMD is the elephant in the room he dare not bring in.
You obviously are not grasping the concept of what a campist is and what it is not. Campists do not oppose the war for evidence based geopolitical reasons related to what is or is not in the American interest, as they reject the very concept of the American interest mattering at all. They simply do not engage the argument for or against intervention in those terms, and they would not approve of U.S. intervention for any reason, including but not limited to if they were presented with conclusive evidentiary proof of WMDs and an imminent threat to use them. A campist would not consider such conclusive evidence to be a legitimate justification and basis for U.S. intervention regardless. That's obviously not Obama. Its not really any one in the Democratic Party or mainstream left that opposed the Iraq War at all.
Thats how he has been discrediting the left. He doesn't like that they hold positions he agrees with and is trying to make it 'liberal' and as his own.
Am not saying there is fringe left but they not even close to issues or influence. Heck Mike went looking and found a bunch of RW grifters.
Campists are not exclusively limited to the left. That is why his list includes grifters and extremists who would characterize themselves on both ends of the horseshoe. There are leftist campists and right wing campists. That list contains examples of both.
As I was reading this I kept thinking Hitchens was the type of person who used to call this out all the time.
When I read further I saw you had made that point. I'm very much an anarcho-syndicalist. I have my problems with liberalism but a lot of the skepticism liberals had about the Soviet Union, Communist China, and other left coded governments was correct.
Lenin had a more pithy phrase for these people: "Useful idiots."
"The plot is the worker, the woman, the dissident, the minority, the journalist, the gay person, the religious person, the political prisoner, the disappeared, the killed. ... The plot is the person under power. The whole plot. If your politics has lost the plot, your politics has lost."
I would say that, by this definition, the Democratic Party has, by and large, lost the plot. Certainly there are individual elements of the party trying to hold the plot (Bernie Sanders [who isn't technically a Democrat], AOC, Elizabeth Warren, Zohran Mamdani, and others), but the DCCC doesn't seem to be holding the plot; it seems more concerned with, in your terms, holding the center ground (which used to be far to the right) than walking the middle road.
I agree with your general argument that there is campism, but disagree about significant particulars. I think in your eagerness to name the imperialism of fools, you’ve brushed too broadly, ignored certain valid arguments on the left, and attempted to discredit them through guilt by association.
There is campism among the left, but also legitimate skepticism for the claims made about official enemies of the U.S. government, and conflicts the public is told may only be viewed one way without complexity or dubiety.
The skepticism is based on being informed of how the U.S. media operates, e.g. through Chomsky, Parenti, FAIR, and on direct experience with U.S. government propaganda laundered through prominent outlets, the most notorious case being the NYT and its publication on its front page of plants from Dick Cheney about WMDs before the invasion of Iraq, through Judith Miller’s byline, to which Cheney would then cite as if the plants were news. Another controlled discourse is the virtual prohibition in the U.S. media of discussion of the obvious fact that Russia was provoked by NATO even if its invasion of Ukraine was illegal.
Mistrust of atrocity allegations leveled against “empire-targeted nations”, as Caitlin Johnstone puts it, is completely justified, and the serious left does vastly more criticism of such propaganda, which is constant and ubiquitous, than it does defending oppressive regimes just because they are enemies of the U.S.
To omit this distinction is one distortion in this piece. Another is the notion that it is invalid to refuse equal opportunity criticism when speaking of imperialism, when the vast majority of it by far in the military realm, and in that of surreptitious, unauthorized interventions into the internal affairs of other countries by the intelligence agencies, has been perpetrated by the United States - while its appearance in ”respectable” discourse is as a rule inversely proportional to its occurrence.
Your general argument is also undermined by your dubious claims about some of the leftwing journalists you name whom you smear. Several times in this piece you advert to left journalists who are supposedly campists by claiming that what they produce is “content aligned with the Chinese Communist Party’s foreign policy positions”, and similarly vague, unsupported insinuations.
Aaron Mate, for example, did not defend Assad against the Syrian people. He interrogated the dominant narratives in the U.S. media about why the U.S. intervened in Syria, he cast self-evidently valid doubt on whether that intervention should have occurred given who was carrying it out, he reported, not incidentally, on U.S. support for Al-Qaeda terrorists in Syria, and he pointed to significant deceptions perpetrated by Illustrious international organizations like the OPCW, which lent its prestige to the false substantiation of the claim that Assad was responsible for the use of chemical weapons in Douma - a piece de resistance of atrocity propaganda for which Mate’s reporting has just been vindicated. That you don’t acknowledge this, and how it is different from functioning effectively as Assad’s personal media, just casts doubt over your claims about the capture by official enemies of the U.S. of:
“a substantial percentage of the English-language commentary that is currently presented to American audiences under the label independent journalism on platforms that have been built specifically to bypass the editorial gatekeeping of the legacy press.”
You might say that reporting of Mate’s sort “just happens to mirror the position of one specific imperial power on every contested question”, whatever that means, but one cannot evade the merits of what these journalists and organizations “would have done at small scale anyway” without nonproft money (which I will assume for the sake of argument is tainted) by simply declaring the proponent to be the vector of an ulterior political operation, who thus serves a larger undesirable interest (bizarrely, you included a donation to the Gray Zone from Roger Waters in the alleged tainting mix).
Such pronouncements consist simply of assertions masquerading as the obvious, and they are unfalsifiable. Any political view, movement, or discourse can be the subject of a denunciation of this nature. The charge of advancing Russian or foreign interests was, for instance, also made against the civil rights movement. Needless to say, regardless of whether the civil rights movement might incidentally have advanced Russian information interests, this fact did not invalidate the movement’s goals or anything any of its leaders said or did publicly to advance them. Nor did that consonance render civil rights activists dupes of a foreign state. This clip from Monty Python and the Holy Grail is telling indeed about the logic of such claims (https://youtu.be/zrzMhU_4m-g?si=XplcQg_47LhfxxFP).
The method, in any case, is an elaborate, roundabout, ad hominem attack. It opens the door to further contestable claims and innuendo as if they were not controversial, and it has done enormous damage to our political discourse.
Lastly, about Hitchens. I had forgotten that he had made himself a snitch during the “vast, right-wing conspiracy” against Bill Clinton’s presidency, which was a frontal attack on republican government. This was years before the Iraq War. But it helps to account, with vastly more explanatory power, for his “one-off” misjudgment, which I think you’ve minimized, about the Iraq war, and it calls into question the notion that he sacrificed anything at all by sticking to his Islamo-Fascist guns. His attempt to walk a Clinton official into a perjury snare tracks neatly with his support for the war. It makes it make much more sense that he was simply a social climber building an iconoclastic brand, and that he did not lose his tribe so much as he gained the one he really wanted. His gleeful photo with Tony Blair says it all.
“Another controlled discourse is the virtual prohibition in the U.S. media of discussion of the obvious fact that Russia was provoked by NATO even if its invasion of Ukraine was illegal.”
If the Russian invasion of Ukraine was illegal by your own admission then Russia could not have been legally provoked by anyone into doing it. Seriously calls into question your proffered thesis on that conflict where you declare something that is a legal impossibility to also be an “obvious fact.” Either way, this one is pretty straightforward and a pure example of campism on your part to suggest Russia was provoked by anyone into an genocidal war of aggression against its neighbor whose national identity and right to exist as a sovereign nation state is flatly denied by Russian leadership and a pure straightforward example of imperialist expansion while any defense is a perfect example of the anti-imperialism of fools Mr. Brock warns us about.
Of course in reality there is also no prohibition on discussing this theory of the war at all, and you can easily find it being raised all over the place online, it’s just pretty uniformly rejected as a totally horrific and invalid thesis that does not justify the Russian invasion by anyone not committed to repeating Russian propaganda.
It’s not rejected as an invalid thesis except by anyone who doesn’t want to engage with it. Yes indeed, it is obvious, and U.S. officials who were in a position to know (George Kennan, William Burns, etc.) have been pointing it out for decades.
Your rebuttal is too legalistic to take seriously. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine can be illegal and NATO, an explicitly adversarial military alliance, can provoke it to invade. These are not mutually exclusive. That’s why you incessantly heard in the media that the invasion was “unprovoked”. The same thing is happening with Taiwan and China now. I suspect you will call this campism too and will be the first to triumphantly declare that China is provoking the United States by establishing a presence in Cuba and Latin America. Be my guest.
No, actually, I am consistent with my anti-imperialism and reject great power sphere of influence nonsense for the invalid and destructive rationale it is. Chinese presence in Cuba or Latin America would not provoke the U.S. or justify the use of military force as a valid response to that presence. Neither the United States nor NATO provoked Russia into invading Ukraine and realist political theory based behavioral predictions that accurately predict potential Russian military adventurism do not validate or legitimize Russia’s indefensible imperialist aggression simply because they accurately predicted it. Moreover, it didn’t require some special boldness or foresight to nail that prediction given the pattern of Russian imperialist aggression against its neighbors for the last 20 years and their stated rejection of Ukrainian national identity and sovereignty and their belief in the imperialist right to subjugate Ukraine within a rebuilt Russian Empire. The notion that the United States and NATO provoked an event that has been one of the core goals of Putins nationalist political project for 20 years is absolutely absurd and about as prime of an example of campist apologia that exists in the world today.
By the same token the United States is in no way provoking China into invading Taiwan now, which is another long term decades old political goal and project of the CCP, and frankly I don’t expect it to happen via military force at some point now anyway bc China is historically more patient than that, and has grown powerful enough compared to a weakened United States that they can probably accomplish unification with Taiwan in the near future solely via political and economic leverage and domination and without any bloodshed. However, as with Ukraine, if that turns out to predict future events in the South China Sea, within the next 5 years, that doesn’t somehow legitimize or validate those events or their justifications just by being accurate
I guess it's good to know that you're consistent about provocation. I didn't say that NATO's provocation validated the Russian invasion. I said NATO provoked Russia. I believe that it shouldn't have because, in addition to being inherently aggressive, it made the war more likely, which it was intended to do. If you think the notion that it did provoke Russia is absurd on its face, we'll agree to disagree.
As for China, here's the proof from the horse's mouth:
Elbridge Colby, the principal author of the 2018 National Defense Strategy, and now Under Secretary of War for Policy, in his 2021 book, The Strategy of Denial, advocated a policy of goading China into military action. “Perhaps the clearest and sometimes the most important way of making sure China is seen this way [as the aggressor] is simply by ensuring that it is the one to strike first. Few human moral intuitions are more deeply rooted than that the one who started it is the aggressor and accordingly the one who presumptively owns a greater share of moral responsibility.”
Colby is a damn fool, but that observation about the moral importance of China being seen as the aggressor is not describing or advocating for a formal policy of goading China into military action in Taiwan, nor would it honestly matter much if it did. China would still need to be a willing partner in this scheme to initiate armed conflict, and they are not going to directly attack Taiwan by force any time soon when they can simply continue building on the strengths of their position and their economic influence and trade relationship, because China does not need to pursue a strategy of destructive conflict against either Taiwan or the U.S. military to achieve any of its goals at this time.
The Chinese have shown remarkably long patience in matters of international relations, and there is no reason to believe they would not do that again. They can afford patience and restraint, and they lack a Chinese adversary that is remotely interested in starting an armed conflict with the U.S. or in taking Taiwan by armed force. Both can be strategically waited out and I expect that's exactly what China will be doing for the foreseeable future.
Perhaps, but that’s not necessarily what the U.S. will be doing.
The problem is the expectations game. Nobody is the least bit surprised that China has concentration camps. It's been known to have them for its entire existence in one form or the other, and reporting on their present day conditions is emphatically not news.
The United States, however, is not expected to have concentration camps. So as it moves closer and closer to having them (we can debate whether an ICE detention center qualifies, and in what percentage of cases) the response is surprise, focused attention, and indignation.
We can point this out as a double standard. But it's going to take some time for people of the left to accept that they're actually living under an authoritarian regime, as opposed to rhetorically living under one, and their default response is misplaced.
Great slight of hand. You never once mentioned the absence of imminent threat or evidence of WMD as reasons for lefts position on Iraq.
To put it bluntly you're calling Obama a campist.
Don't be ridiculous. He quite obviously was not. The absence of evidence of WMD or imminent threat is not the reason why a campist would oppose the Iraq War in any event, because it would imply that actual affirmative evidence of an imminent threat and the presence of WMD would in fact justify U.S. intervention in Iraq. A campist would never, ever agree with that position.
In otherwords its all hypothetical and thats enough to paint the left as campist by mere projection. Even if they were right for the right reason you can handwave away using ridiculous projections.
He isn't painting "the left" as campist. Campist beliefs are clearly defined at multiple points in the article and include people who fall on both the fringe left and the fringe right. You are the only one trying to use the term campist as synonymous with the broader left despite everything he wrote that says otherwise.
this is hilarious. you found more right wingers and classical liberal than people of the left. lmao.
not Piker, not Seder, not Joy, not Kulinski, not Ball, not Blakeley. you spelt ink on them and found nothing.
Thanks. You've expressed what I have thought for many years in words clearer than I've been able to find. Happily my natural state is one of disbelief about much of what happens in this world. It's helped me in many situations.