Personally, I view those groups as fellow travellers and not as comrades. For me, the only distinction between those two terms being that we can both talk about the destination down the road we’re heading to, but I will tune you out if you start talking about how we should be riding donkeys rather than driving the EV.
Until world communism has been achieved, there’s no simple “choice” between nationalism or internationalism, even then there will be new problems in the new world order.
Fair enough.
I’ll also add that “nationalism” is one of those spooky words the West likes to trot out to beat the Global South with simply on the premise that because Western nationalism was an absolute clusterfuck (and here they’ll usually point to the “nationalism as reason for WWI and WWII so it must be bad” gimmick which is agnostic of the Marxist discourse on the role of capital and imperialism in those wars), it must mean that Global South nationalism must transitively be bad as well.
Similar to how Western sexpats post pictures on Reddit of Buddhist swastikas trinkets in Asian flea markets and the comments use it as a sign that Asians don’t care about the Holocaust. Yes, places like Modi’s India show that Global South currents of nationalism can be warped into profound fascism and cultural chauvinism, but this should not be seen as the prima facie character of Global South nationalism, particularly for AES states.
In essence, nationalism in the Global South operates on a different register from how it is seen in the West and this distinction should not fail to be appreciated. The reason why the West itself downplays nationalism is because the entire bloc is now more or less subordinated to American hegemony not unlike how their propaganda once portrayed Comintern/Cominform Internationalism. Countries with flare-ups of nationalistic (or “patriotic”) state character like right-wing Hungary interfere with the ease of coordination to Washington directives and thus are a distinctly problem child for US state interests, which is why nationalist currents are generally suppressed today in the West.
The truth is that there’s some straight up freaks that pose as MLs and the unfortunate thing about the marginalization of the left in the non-AES world and the need for leftist “unity” is that we have to suffer their presence in our discourse. It’s been the state of things back when the USSR still endured and it’s still the case today as seen with “ML” takes on China.
I remember reading Keeran and Kenny’s work on the dissolution of the USSR, how the capitalist restoration led the greatest humanitarian disaster since the Second World War, still ongoing today through legacy conflicts like Ukraine. K&K observed how some sociopathic Western “MLs” actually celebrated its collapse at the time because “now that the USSR was gone, real socialism could finally begin.”
Absolutely, but it’s difficult to translate that into anything actionable that sympathetic countries like China on the other end of Asia, or even nearby Iran, can enact in practice. Global South countries simply don’t have the capacity or logistical infrastructure for intervention that the enablers of Western imperialism like the US with its military bases occupying every region of the globe and eleven aircraft carriers has.
The truth is that there is nothing substantive that China could do and in fact, the small amount China could do would actually make the situation worse.
Currently, the only thing holding back the West from being completely rabid mask off in their support for Israel (like the EU reversing the aid ban) is because it would completely alienate the Arab world, which they started to care about once again due to their fear that the people they’ve bombed for three decades would now side with China. This conflict being currently seen as an Israel vs. Arab/Muslim world confrontation is the only thing restraining the West and preventing their anti-Palestinian propaganda from really reaching the Global South.
If China fully sides with Palestine, they’d be able to claim the Palestinians are just Chinese puppets (they recently tried this already by claiming Palestine is just an Iranian lackey) and that’ll allow them to push propaganda that this (and all the atrocities they’re abetting) isn’t an anti-Muslim thing, this is just another part of confronting China (they might even claim “saving the real Palestine from the Chinese influence controlling it”).
Another thing is that adding China into the mix and letting the West reframe this with their old Cold War rhetoric would eliminate the substantive progress Gaza’s sacrifice has bought on the world stage. One important thing that hasn’t been recognized is that the material outcome of Gaza’s uprising is that it has been a massive blow against Saudi normalization efforts with Israel. The enemy of the Palestinian cause isn’t just the West and Israel, but also the sellout Muslim states like Saudi Arabia, who has basically outright revealed in the past month that they’d happily abandon Palestine if it meant the US would reward them with an expanded military pact and nuclear energy development.
MBS doesn’t give a fig about Palestinian suffering and he actually threw Palestine under the bus right before the uprising. Just this month, there was a rumor in the Western press that the Saudis wanted to pause the normalization talks due to Israel’s refusal to give concessions for Palestine and MBS was so desperate for normalization that he literally personally went on an US interview to deny the rumor. However, his dilemma is that he has to pretend to care about Palestine because the Saudi reputation as the “Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques” and the “leader” of the Islamic world is contingent on appearing to defend Palestine. Part of the consequence for this uprising is ruining the Saudi attempt at treachery. If the Saudis managed to normalize with Israel, the Palestinian movement is effectively over, because a domino effect would take place. Undoubtedly, the other Gulf monarchies like Qatar, Oman and Kuwait are waiting in the wings for the Saudis to act as the windbreaker to justify their own normalization with Israel. Gaza’s uprising brought all of that to a halt and here as well, if China intervened, US propaganda that Palestine was just acting on Chinese orders would give MBS plausible deniability to resume his normalization goals.
@[email protected] @[email protected] Having gone through my own reading rabbit-hole on UN diplomacy in the past, I can clarify: The vote was on passing the “important question” scheme that the US first devised in 1961. Every time a motion in the UNGA was put forth to restore the UN seat to China, the US inserted a preliminary amendment to have the motion considered a “important question,” which would require a supermajority rather than a simple majority for it to then pass. This blocked China’s membership for 10 years until 1971. This is why the vote in the video has the US and its underlings voting in the affirmative and why the Assembly laughed, because by the US’ turn to vote, it was already clear that the UNGA majority would reject the supermajority amendment and thus be able to restore China’s membership.
The end came abruptly for the Taiwanese delegation. On October 26, 1971, the General Assembly narrowly rejected the “important question” resolution, which would have required a two-thirds majority to replace Taiwan with the Communist government. Anticipating the inevitable next step, the Taiwanese delegation walked out of the General Assembly moments before the lopsided vote that formally evicted them. In that instant, Chiang Kai-shek’s government lost all rights at the United Nations, including the coveted council seat. It was just as well that the Taiwanese had left. Many delegations broke into wild applause—and even dancing—as the results were announced. Finally, after twenty-five years of exclusion. Communist China would be in the inner sanctum.
Bosco, D. 2009. Five to Rule Them All: The UN Security Council and the Making of the Modern World. Oxford.
That there is, but there is also no rule that denies the capacity of any non-ML struggle from achieving good or combating imperialism and the philosophical distinction I gave above were made precisely for those groups.