The complete idiot’s guide to world affairs
The left and right take the same reality-based view of the world but respond to it in different moral terms. Liberals, on the other hand, live in an alternate universe – of pure make-believe
Sometimes it helps to pare things back to their essentials, especially when complexity is being exploited not to illuminate but to confuse. So here is my short, complete idiot’s guide to world affairs:
There are two reality-based understandings of what we call “world affairs”, or sometimes “foreign news”.
1. The first sees the United States as the beating heart of a highly militarised, global empire – the strongest ever known, with more than 800 military bases around the world. The US has divided the world into, on the one hand, “democracies” and “moderate states” that do its bidding and, on the other, “dictatorships” and “terror regimes” that won’t or can’t submit to its dictates.
The former are allies that reap some of the benefits of belonging to the empire, while the latter are presented as a threat to world peace. They must be constantly intimidated, contained, sanctioned and occasionally attacked.
The goal of organising the world this way is the control of global resources, chiefly oil. Western publics thereby enjoy limited privileges that come at the cost of deprivation for those outside the empire. These privileges are intended to keep the US empire’s publics docile and loyal. At the same time, the empire allows members of its elite to amass vast wealth from the exploitation of the world’s resources – wealth so vast that most people are incapable of grasping the extent of it.
This worldview is generally consistent with what is termed a leftwing disposition. It sees the existing system as a bad thing that needs to be ended.
2. The second worldview agrees with all of the above, except it thinks this is a the best system possible in the circumstances and must be preserved at all costs. This outlook is generally consistent with what is termed a rightwing, or conservative, disposition.
In other words, these two groups see things in largely the same way but respond to the same reality differently.
The second group, the conservatives, want to keep the world divided, justifying this to themselves on various grounds they usually refer to as “pragmatism”. In essence, they believe it’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, and it’s important that we remain the top dog. At some level this outlook rests on a barely concealed racist conceit, often that white or Christian peoples are civilisationally better than other peoples and that, were the world to be organised differently, chaos and barbarism would ensue.
The first group, the left, want to end the division of the world into two camps, “them” and “us”, arguing that this is dangerous. This empire’s logic justifies pumping money that could be spent improving the quality of ordinary people’s lives, and securing the future of the planet, into the arms industries. It reinforces the logic of the West’s war machine that relies on fomenting a permanent climate of fear. In such a febrile political climate, people are easily manipulated into backing wars or the oppression of other, usually brown peoples. The empire’s division of the world rationalises racism, selfishness and violence, and prevents cooperation. It is inherently unsustainable. And in an age of nuclear weapons, it risks driving us into a confrontation that will quickly end life on the planet.
Of course, not everyone’s outlook fits into these two categories that see the world as it is. There are also liberals who don’t understand much of this. They live in a world of make-believe, an unreality manufactured for them, both by western politicians dependent on a billionaire donor class and a western media owned by billionaires deeply invested in maintaining a divided world that keeps them fabulously rich.
What we call “politics” is chiefly a pantomime in which the West’s wealth elite work hard to maintain the illusion for liberals that the empire is a force for good, that the suffering of brown people is a necessary short-term sacrifice if history is to continue on its progression towards a perfect capitalist liberal democracy that will benefit everyone, and that in this regard the West’s wars producing even more suffering for brown people are actually “humanitarian”.
In simple terms, conservatives support the permanent oppression of brown people because they fear them, rightly understanding they will never agree to their oppression. Liberals, on the other hand, support what they assume is the temporary oppression of brown people because they think that oppression is beneficial: it eventually purges brown people of their defective ideological and cultural habits, leading them to see things our way.
If it feels like too many of your friends and neighbours are indifferent to a genocide that has been live-streamed for a year a half, that is probably because, at heart, they are – whether they identify as conservatives or liberals.
[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]
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I would add that we are clearly moving into a new phase in which the "western" countries and publiics are increasingly being stripped of any pretend privileges and being wrung out financially, as war, conflict and paranoia become pretty much the default mode of operation.
This transition is inevitable in capitalism. It can be understood in light of both Agamben's "State of Exception", as well as Coloumb and Fontanel's "War and Capitalism".
Its important to understand that, as basically an inevitable waypoint, as capitalism evolves into full blown fascism, although there might be a tendency to ascribe some specific parts of these changes to "Trumpism", or the shutdown of free speech to "Zionism" etc. But in all likelihood, this would happen one way or another in this economic and social system.
The ecological crisis is also the same: simply invevitable in a capitalist system that is grinding its way though nature in the improbable belief that it can be exploited with no limits at all. Worse yet, this damage is being done not even to eradicate poverty and want, but rather so that people like Bezos and Musk can stash so much money that they can personally colonize other planets or whatever. While some of their own staff are worked to death, and hundreds of millions of people go hungry every single day. The entire thing is insane.
Entirely new forms of social and economic organization are needed, if we are not to find ourselves all living in feudal conditions on a burning planet. Or in the worse case, this violent hunting and brutlaization of the many, for the wealth accumulation of the few, culminates in a nuclear war - and would pretty much end all human life on the planet, as Annie Jacobsen and Theodor Postol have graphically described.
I like the approach of describing world affairs in terms of world views.
I'd go further, and say that 95% of all western discussion about world affairs is all about fictional creations of the world, created to permit safe debate.
Only 5% of it is about actual world affairs.
The Perceived World Dominates. The Actual world is largely a secret.
Gaza is one of the few cracks in the Perceived world where many, most even, can see the contrast between the world as described on my BBC news, and the world as it is.
The distortion in Ukraine, Syria, trickle down economics is just as great, but remains invisible to most.
Incidentally one of the fictions is that the US is some all powerful military empire. Afghanistan, Ukraine, Yemen, even Gaza show this is clearly fake. But still a necessary fiction for western governments.