Episode 75: Crackpot Wokeism
Added 2022-09-26 14:52:20 +0000 UTCAaron is joined by Christopher Mott to discuss his recent article, “Woke Imperium: The Coming Confluence Between Social Justice and Neoconservatism.”
Christopher Mott is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Peace & Diplomacy and the author of The Formless Empire: A Short History of Diplomacy and Warfare in Central Asia. Follow Christopher on Twitter and check out his personal website: geotrickster.com.
Special thanks to Dana Chavarria for the sound engineering!
Music: "Stuck In" by Mock Orange
Comments
This was therapeutic for me, as I am watching and listening as my "liberal" friends lose their cotton picking minds over Putin and Ukraine. I know now that there's not a lot of room for persuasion, perhaps some gentle questioning, and try not to get riled by their accusations that I am a closet Trumpist and Putinist. Thank you, Aaron...
David Bradvica
2022-09-27 21:33:45 +0000 UTCWokeism is a bourgeois psyop designed to sidestep the class struggle as well as to generate a predictable right-wing backlash. It does nothing to actually help the most oppressed and exploited workers. Btw, I actually remember that during the early naughts the left would still speak of their constituency as being "the workers." Nobody talks like that anymore.
Cultus Daemon
2022-09-27 19:42:57 +0000 UTCThanks for having Chris Mott on, brilliant thinker, great piece, and critically important topic. I grew up intellectually during the mid-2000s when some of this stuff was initially developed on the post-9/11 left; it was extremely disorienting to see a liberal anti-islamophobia politics that had developed to oppose Bush and Cheney's wars redeployed just a few years later under Obama and Clinton to justify their wars. It's a pity to see Mott's work misinterpretted as an indictment of the liberal cultural politics he himself holds. Something he doesn't emphasize enough (and I get why, but I think it's a mistake on his part) is how toxifying it is for Western imperialists to instrumentalize feminism, LGBT rights, environmentalism, etc. as a pretext to maintain imperial hegemony. It turns progressive activists into traitors in their own country and completely poisons the well for people legitimately working on these issues. This is one of the most evil things that Western imperialism does in these countries. It's heartening to see the recent news about the family law referendum in Cuba. It's possible for principled anti-imperialists to respond to this mass psychological manipulation in a smart way, but it takes a sturdy intellectual backbone.
JK
2022-09-27 13:19:45 +0000 UTCBasically, woke reasons for intervention become the social setting/ news q&a judo move against the question, "why are we supporting/invading...". Even better if they can micro target the answer by essentially saying, "oh, honey, don't you know they persecute/kill people like you in (insert country)?"
William
2022-09-27 11:17:03 +0000 UTCSo, in brief, the "wokeism" is just the latest generic humanitarian cause that has the power to justify action and garner support among the least hawkish parts of the liberal establishment so that the power elite can continue to intervene in places where there is resistance to its agenda
William
2022-09-27 11:05:39 +0000 UTCGreat episode. Thanks for this.
dogsbeout
2022-09-27 01:14:23 +0000 UTCI am enjoying your show so much! How about the French, or, er, NATO, defending the Timbuktu airport? Crazy stuff.
Arielle Curtin
2022-09-26 22:59:08 +0000 UTC@AmEx When I asked you before about Dugin, I wasn't trying to troll. I know he said some pretty fascistic and messed up things in the 80s and 90s and that he was a Soviet "dissident," but according to folks like Mark Sleboda he has since disavowed those positions. I just don't know all that much about him, but has he made any fairly recent statements that would lead you to consider him a fascist or far right type?
Cultus Daemon
2022-09-26 19:29:14 +0000 UTC@Johnny I understand your frustration, bro, but we need to punch up - all the way up. Don't forget who the real enemy is.
Cultus Daemon
2022-09-26 19:16:59 +0000 UTCDo refrain from calling people "sub-human." Also, I think you are assigning way too much power to these people. The point is that the policy of imperial hegemony does not change even with the new woke branding of recent years. I'm generally just interested in the cynical use of postmodern wokeism to facilitate imperial oligarchy. I don't have any beef with harmless non-conforming individuals and would like to see them treated fairly and with compassion. This even applies to people whose personality seems to be centered on this or that aspect of their identity such that they might be perceived by some as "annoying." There's probably a lot to say about how our culture has scrambled and stunted people's self-perceptions and their perceptions of social and political reality, but that is not squarely in my wheelhouse.
Aaron Good
2022-09-26 16:35:54 +0000 UTCGreat great listen. Workism and the Wokists are the Primo Fascists of the 21st-century. Nothing else even approaches their insufferable stupidity, narcissism, ignorance, and laughable sense of superiority. The VERY OPPOSITE of egalitarianism and community. I mean what sort of sub-human entirely defines himself/herself/itself/she-self/he-self/them-self/trans-self etc etc etc by who they want to sleep with and what sort of equipment they care to carry around as part of their bodies? (Or their racial genetic makeup.) After all, these nature killers are smarter than all humans who came before. For aren't the Wokists the geniuses who discovered all 57 varieties of sexual embodiment? They are smarter than God himself/herse;f/itself!! Make sure to punch a Wokist in the mouth at least once per day.
Johnny Case
2022-09-26 16:02:38 +0000 UTC
