by Caitlin Johnstone - 6 Jan 2022
Listen to a reading of this article:
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“REMINDER: We are in a dire situation now. The only thing that matters is Anti-Communism. Unless these people are defeated, we’re all toast. So the Right must unite. Every branch of it. Unite and we can win. We’ll work out the differences once the communists are defeated.”
So reads a recent viral tweet by conservative radio host Jesse Kelly, who last month told Tucker Carlson’s massive audience that American soldiers should be “Type A men who want to sit on a throne of Chinese skulls.”
This bizarre 1950s-throwback anti-communist hysteria is growing more and more common on the western right, particularly in the United States with its uniquely sophisticated and aggressive propaganda engine. This despite the fact that the US and its allies are no closer to coming under communist rule than they were in the nineties after the end of the first cold war.
Even if you believe everything the TV tells you about communism and accept it as a given that efforts to eliminate class must always necessarily lead to tyranny and suffering, those of us who live within the US-centralized power alliance are so very, very, very far from living under a communist government or seeing any communist revolution that it makes more sense to spend your time worrying about being struck by lightning or being eaten by sharks than to spend it worrying about communists.
Yet the red-under-the-bed hysteria continues to swell, aided by so-called “right populist” pundits like Carlson and the sweeping propaganda campaign that’s currently greasing the wheels for the new cold war against China. US conservatives are currently flocking to the new social media site GETTR which until recently was an anti-CCP forum owned by exiled Chinese billionaire and Steve Bannon ally Guo Wengui. The site now has, in the words of radio host Garland Nixon, “More anti-china, anti communism/socialism propaganda than CIA.gov.”
Anti-communist hysteria is also being pushed along in rightist circles by pundits spinning authoritarian Covid measures and World Economic Forum “Great Reset” agendas as evidence of a global communist takeover, despite neither of those things having anything to do with communism whatsoever; the former is a conflation of authoritarianism with communism and the latter is just capitalists doing capitalism.
A lot of the confusing of World Economic Forum agendas with communism comes from an article published on on the WEF website which received so much backlash that it was subsequently removed in which Danish politician Ida Auken imagined a future in which automation has made much work unnecessary and the ability to have items like pasta makers and crepe cookers ordered and delivered when they’re needed made keeping them in your cupboards unnecessary. Auken says she wrote the article not as a utopian ideal but “to start a discussion about some of the pros and cons of the current technological development.”
This idea was later presented in a WEF video as a forecast that in the future “You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy,” which can be spun as a communist value if you pretend that renting a waffle iron from some futuristic Amazon-like drone delivery service would be anything like an abolishment of capitalism. So I constantly run into rightists telling me that WEF Executive Chairman Klaus Schwab wants to take away everyone’s private property and install a global Marxist world order, when really it was just one article written by one person and given lots of rightist spin, and all Schwab is really doing is helping to ensure the survival and expansion of capitalism and oligarchic power.
Again, fretting about communism is a nonsensical position within the western empire. If you are reading this it’s because you speak English, and if you speak English it’s likely because you live in an English-speaking nation, and if you live in an English-speaking nation there is so much violent force holding the infrastructure of capitalism in place and so much narrative management going into preventing a communist uprising that it makes more sense for you to spend your time worrying about being harmed by lions or electric eels than by communists.
But that’s not to say your concerns about communism don’t accomplish anything; they accomplish a great deal. What they accomplish is making you so hysterical about communism that you will support anything your government wants to do to stop the rise of China on the global stage. Even if it means crippling important parts of the economy. Even if it means greatly diminishing your quality of life. Even if it means impoverishing you. Even if it means sending your sons and daughters off to war over Taiwan. Even if it means risking nuclear armageddon.
The US can only maintain its planetary hegemony by aggressively subverting China and the nations who support it like Russia, and it can only do that by manufacturing consent to ensure that the public never awakens from its propaganda-induced coma and throws off the chains of oppression. They don’t pour so much energy and wealth into manufacturing consent because it is fun, they do it because they need to.
What this means is that by joining in this mounting hysteria about communism, you are directly facilitating some of the most dangerous agendas of the most powerful people on earth. You are letting the propagandists turn you into fuzzbrained human livestock marching mindlessly along to the beat of their world-threatening game of planetary domination.
Don’t march along. Open your eyes and perceive lucidly. Don’t let them play you like that.
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