Original link https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/us-and-new-imperial-order

About the authors: Joseph Massad is a professor of modern Arab political and intellectual history in the Department of Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. His academic work focuses on nationalism in Palestine, Jordan and Israel. His writings and articles have been translated into more than a dozen languages.

Translator's Statement: This translation was made with the consent of the original author. Some names in the text that are not commonly used in Chinese discussions retain their English spelling. The translator's language level and translation experience are very limited. Readers are welcome to enlighten me on the fallacies and inappropriate points in the article. When reprinting, please indicate the source of the original text and translation.

Since the 1980s and the expansion of the neoliberal order under former President Ronald Reagan to the world, the United States has redoubled its efforts to change the meaning of key political concepts used by the global left against American power.

Its purpose was to completely reshape the world's political culture, and it had been successful within the United States before the Reagan era, but less so outside the United States. While this project has brought about a major transformation within the United States since the start of the Cold War in the late 1940s, it has had little effect outside the brainwashed American population (except in Britain, Germany, and to some extent France).

Projects in the 1980s aimed to intensify these efforts globally, especially after the fall of the Soviet Union. These transitions follow two strategies.

"New Language" Era

One is to time out the specificity and theoretical implications of concepts to disengage them from their specific connection to American power, and then use them in general. Just like the "New Words" in George Orwell's novels.

As a striking example, the Marxist concept of "imperialism" has been closely linked since the 19th century with the act of extracting the resources for profit.

By the 1980s and 1990s, some American nationalist experts would admit that their country was likely to be imperialist, but they still applied the concept primarily to the Soviet Union, which Reagan, like Noam Chomsky, once applied to The Soviet Union called it the "Evil Empire".

The United States has deliberately conflated the hegemony of one country over other countries with the concept of "imperialism," and has recently begun to blame post-Soviet Russia, China, and even Iran for imperialism.

However, some scholars only care about the transformation of the political language of the United States by President Trump, and seem to be unaware of the major transformation projects in the United States since the 1940s.

In Soviet times, all the Eastern European Union states of the Soviet Union had per capita incomes equal to or higher than the Soviet Union, and were often subsidized by the Soviet Union, which imported industrial goods and exported raw materials to them in a counter-imperialist fashion, while those sophisticated The accusers seem to ignore this fact.

At the same time, many countries under the shackles of U.S. imperialism had per capita incomes that were only a fraction of that of the United States. If its income were to be raised to the same level or higher than that of the United States, then one might be able to say that there was an equivalence between the so-called Soviet "imperialism" and real US imperialism around the world. Touting the high per capita income of citizens of a handful of countries like Kuwait or Singapore (and that's minus the large numbers of foreign workers in those two countries, who earn much less), it's hard to prove the opposite.

Definition of "Democracy"

Another core concept of the left since the French Revolution is "democracy". America and its nationalist intellectuals shamelessly claim that America has been a democracy since 1776. Clearly, two centuries of colonial theft and the physical and cultural genocide of Native Americans, a century of slavery, then a century of segregation, and a century and a half of women's disenfranchisement, have nothing to do with this definition.

While at that time the United States was indeed a democracy of its master race and master gender, that was not what the word "democracy" meant in the rest of the world, let alone for others excluded from the aforementioned "democracy." American people.

Indeed, between 1965 and 2001, the United States might have been described as a mildly repressive, racialized and gendered "democratic state" - but since then it has returned to a highly repressive, racialized "Democratic country".

Yet the power of ultra-nationalism in the United States is so great that even former President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have expressed sympathy for “our founding fathers” and “we are the oldest democracy in the world”—a sure The concept of a democratic system that excludes both of them is full of praise. This is equivalent to ex-President Nelson Mandela's claiming that the founders of racist South Africa were the founders of South African democracy, which "evolved" after 1994 to include black democracy.

The discourse of American and European powers continues to describe as "civilized" white Europeans and European Americans who have killed tens of millions, enslaved and subjected them to the most barbaric tortures all over the world -- and to describe as "savage" the enslaved and subjugated populations of the world fighting for liberation -- this is an important part of the ongoing project in the United States.

Condemnation of "racism"

In fact, even terms like "racism" - which, like "imperialism", are also associated with the political and economic forces of Western Europe and the United States - have been siphoned off from specific meanings and used in general terms. Suddenly, if a non-white person holds a prejudice against white Europeans and Americans, that person is labeled "racist."

But the key to white racism in Europe and America is not just the horrific, pervasive, racially biased culture of these societies, but the persistence of this bias in the political and economic institutions of power that are based on racial prejudice Depriving people of their equal rights, including the right to work, housing, education, health care, and other social services, and discriminating against them legally, subjecting them to police oppression, etc.

No non-white nation or people has the ability to oppress whites as a group, even if they hold prejudice against whites. While the condemnation of racism is primarily about institutions of power, imperialist and neoliberal new definitions of "racism" have reduced it to mere personal prejudice.

In fact, since the 1980s, some Arab, Israeli and Western intellectuals (including Sadiq Jalal al-Azm, Fawwaz Traboulsi, Avishai Margalit, Ian Buruma, etc.) began to refer to "Occidentalism" as "Orientalism" the opposite of . It is as if there is an Arab country with powerful institutions, filled with hatred of the West, which it uses to oppress all Europeans, just as European imperialism institutionalized Orientalism through its colonial and imperial policies in the eastern colonies.

By casting "Occidentalism" as a sign of prejudice against Westerners, these intellectuals did not see "Orientalism" as something deeply embedded in a powerful imperial system (as analyzed in Edward Said's classic work), And just as mere individual or group prejudice, its connection to power becomes irrelevant.

Collaborator's "Rights"*

The second strategy of the United States is to appropriate the concepts of the left as the official norms of the United States, turning the concepts of the left used to condemn American policy into opposition to the left itself. These principles include support for “civil society” and political “activism” in the Third World, support for minority and women’s “rights” (agency) within and outside the United States, support for “revolutionary” and “legitimate” government, and opposition to “foreign occupation”— — unless the occupation is by American or Israeli forces.

Since the 1980s, thousands of U.S.- and European-funded NGOs serving the political agendas of their funders have been transformed into local “civil groups,” with well-paid employees portrayed as mere “activists.”

In addition, rhetoric about the "agency" of the oppressed began to be used to protect those who used imperialist and racist ideas to harm their own kind - those chosen by the United States to speak for them.

Thus, on the one hand, to condemn the anti-Arab, pro-imperialist propagandist Fouad Ajami is to deny his agency; to attack the neoliberal, racist views and legal decisions of Clarence Thomas, a black U.S. Supreme Court Justice, is to Denies his agency, etc.

On the other hand, for many NGO human rights workers in the third world who are falsely called "activists", "agency" should only belong to those who claim to rebel against local institutions and political power and gain access to Western NGOs support people. To accuse those working with imperialist institutions and NGOs of collaborating with imperialism is likewise "denying" their agency - when in fact it is acknowledging their role as imperialist collaborators agency.

At the same time, NGO "activists" often deny the agency of those who resist U.S. imperialism in their home countries, criticizing them only as "agents" of so-called "imperialism" of Russia, China or Iran .

On "Legality"

In Arab news and television media - almost entirely owned by this or that Gulf regime or prince - this has become a valid discourse. Questioning the neo-hegemonic connotations of these terms can bring all sorts of accusations to the questioner, especially by the cyber army on social media, conscripted by the neo-imperialist culture.

On the "legitimacy" discourse, we find that the Fatah coup leader of the Palestinian Authority, who took over the West Bank and ousted Hamas from the government in 2007, was the "legitimate" party, while maintaining the Gaza Strip Hamas, which has elected an elected government and opposed the illegal coup, is seen as the party "taking" Gaza away from the legitimate power of the Palestinian Authority.

In Venezuela, the insignificant Juan Guaido became the country's legitimate leader, while the actual elected leader became "illegal". Bolivia's democratically elected president, Evo Morales, is outlawed, while the U.S.-backed coup leader who ousted him is considered legal.

Strategies to shift the meaning of political concepts have also been applied: "revolution," to applaud any mass demonstration against a government that America doesn't like; "terrorism," to describe any action by Muslims against U.S. interests, whether military It is still civil, but does not include any crimes committed by white people; "ideology", anyone who criticizes the policies of American and Western imperialism is "ideological", and those who support them are "objective", "" Pragmatic" and "moderate".

The success of this American project can be measured by how many renegade intellectuals have emerged in the United States and around the world. They now adopt the US-imposed definition and insist on labelling themselves "leftists". In fact, perhaps it is the term "left" that has undergone the greatest transformation.

"Left" has come to refer to all those who espouse the new meaning of the old leftist vocabulary in America, and those who still insist on exposing this insidious American cultural project are condemned as "anti-leftists, if not outright reactionary" ".

Welcome to the new imperial order.

*The key word in this paragraph is Agency, which may be more accurately translated as "Agency", but it doesn't read as smoothly. Here, it is temporarily translated into "right", "right to speak", etc. and marked in brackets. If there is a more appropriate translation, please advise the reader.