USA: WOKE EMPIRE GOES BROKE? UNWOKE INTERNATIONALISM, UNWOKE ULTRA-IMPERIALISM AND UNWOKE WORLD PEACE?
Today we want to publish an article from the South China Morning Post that deals with Chinese racism against the woke empire of the value-liberal USA. However, wokeness as geopolitics, Han racism as a geostrategic asset and the apparent or alleged formation of a right-wing unwoke international made up of Putin, Xi, Orban, Trump, et al. It is interesting to note that there was a Pentagon study on this in 2013. It is partially blacked out. The other study, „Woke Imperium: The coming Confluence between social justice and neoconservatism“, which sees woke neo-imperialism as messianic, utopian and doomed to fail, like so-called human rights imperialism before it, should be given to Baerbock and Faeser to read.
The question remains as to whether this unwoke right-wing International would be stable and last very long as the former Communist International oder Anti- Comintern Pact, since it only refers to unwoke values, as if there are not also geopolitical, economic and then again unwoke differences in values and unwoke conflicts between the then unwoke states and great powers, if one justifies race, culture, social Darwinism and one’s own missionary exceptionalism and one’s own superiority and higher value, whether culturally or biologically chauvinistic. Can there then be an „unwoke ultra-imperialism“ and unwoke world peace and an unwoke right-wing international and New World Order along the lines of Kautsky, or will there then rather be an „unwoke imperialism as the highest stage of a social Darwinist capitalism“ along the lines of Lenin, which leads to wars and world war or even to a Clash of civilizations in the sense of Huntington?
There is also the question of whether we are dealing here with neo-conservatism or not already original fascism, whereby the transitions can also be fluid and only gradual between authoritarianism and fascism. Alex Lo also prefers to speak of Chinese culturalism rather than Chinese Han racism, especially since Han chauvinism is more culturally than biologistic and not yet by means of racial doctrines, which are not yet officially represented in China, although there are biologistic theories circulating among the population and some elite circles which sometimes are aired ater the Han Chinese hosts had drnken a few Maotais, and there are familiar comparisons between Africans and apes and other pseude Darwinist conspiracies. But the Chinese Communist Party has not yet adopted the racial ideology of National Socialism, but the Global Xivilization Initiative officially ties in with culture/civilization, promising more along the lines of Alain Benoist ethnopluralism and a seemingly inclusive, diverse dialogue of cultures and peaceful coexistence, even though China unspokenly sees itself as the chosen nation and the Middle Kingdom and now also with space programs as the Middle Kingdom in the cosmos with the mandate of heaven.
The narrative of unwoke world peace by means of an unwoke International, which, like Trump, promises to eliminate the Ukraine or other wars within 24 hours through an unwoke strong man deal, indeed through a new world order deal with clearly defined zones and spheres of influence, such as a Yalta 2.0, once all wokeness, democracy, human rights and liberalism havd been abolished in favor of unwoke social Darwinism, sounds tempting for all those who hope not to become victims of this new unwoke world order. But we can already see that unwoke axis such as Trump-Bolsonro-Milei against unwoke China are emerging, and that the conflict between major powers and world powers is not disappearing, but rather intensifying, especially as the whole thing is based on an anarchistic internation systems of nation state, even though the EU is a hybrid between supranational institutions and nation states, but due to the two world wars and history, there is nothing similar worldwide, neither in ASEAN nor in the African Union, which have by no means reached this level of integration. In addition, this is again the illusion that a New World Order could be created on the basis of shared values, this time so called unwoke conservative/fascst/sociadarwinist values – actually a Fukuyama’s end of history teleologically, but under the opposite different sign. It also sounds like Brzezniski’s vision of the G2, of Chimeria now in the form of a Trump-Xi deal to divide up the world like Spain and Portugal did back then.
Or like Thomas Barnett and John Milligan Whyte’s idea of a US-China axis for the final enforcement of globalization as a common goal and the elimination of the gap states by the core states, also with a joint US-Chinese globalization army for globalization wars, whereby Milligan-Whyte additionally demanded that the USA only had to rewrite its constitution in the sense of Deng Xiaoping and sinicize something. Maybe a Han civilized and cultivated Trump could also be a solution as the there is no need for a constitution anymore. Now people seem to be hoping that if Trump drives out wokeness, democracy, morality and human rights from the USA, everything will be fine between the USA and China. Apart from whether Trump can establish a dictatorship so quickly, even without plunging the USA into chaos or half a civil war, whereby China could exploit the resulting power vacuum and any paralysis, the question would still be whether the Sino-American power struggle for world power would then be resolved, even if the Communist Party of China emphasizes that there is enough room in the world for both the USA and China. Perhaps for an interim phase, but China’s goal remains to be the world’s No. 1 power, even if not tomorrow, but the goal of pushing the USA out of the Indo-Pacific and then also worldwide remains, just as Putin’s goal of pushing the USA out of Europe and controlling the Eurasian bloc, the Eurasian heartland, which Brzezinski or Mac Kinder, Mahan and Homer Lea have always warned against.
The question is whether the USA is prepared to withdraw isolationalism to its world island, perhaps to have the two Americas as the last sphere of influence of a new mono-doctrine, whereby China is already also disputing the USA’s former American backyard. In the end, all that remains is an isolationist clerical-nationalist or fascist USA along the lines of Magareth Atwood’s „The Handmaid’s Tale“, a kind of Trump North Korea with nuclear weapons? Whether Trump wants this Make America Small Again (MASA instead of MAGA) himself or whether he understands world power and America first to mean something more ambitious – the latter seems more likely. But the former could turn out to be an unintended effect in the long term. Especially if he does not trust in nuclear deterrence and prefers splendid isolation in Mare Al Mago. Or with the still existing anarchic competition between nation states in a world capitalism, the often praised „healthy patriotism“ will likely escalate into an ever-increasing unwoke social Darwinism, militarism, nationalism and chauvinism due to possible escalation and momentum of the unwoke narcistic exceptionalism on all sides.
My Take
by Alex Lo
Is Han ‘racism’ a geopolitical asset in China’s rivalry with the US?
- Putin and Xi think their countries need ‘manly men’, racial unity is a strength, and ‘wokeism’ is destroying the West. A pioneering decade-old Pentagon study agrees with them
Published: 9:00pm, 20 Feb, 2024
Everyone and their dog has by now commented on Tucker Carlson’s controversial interview with Vladimir Putin. So I am very late to the game. My poor excuse is that what I am about to comment on is not urgent, like where the war in Ukraine is headed or whether Donald Trump 2.0 will shut down US support for Kyiv, but something much longer-term.
One big reason I can think of – there were of course many others – why the Russian strongman was happy to sit for hours with Carlson was because the former Fox News star anchor and now online influencer is closely associated with America’s far right.
There is even a rumour circulating – one which Carlson has never denied – that if Donald Trump secures the Republicans’ choice for him to be their presidential candidate, Carlson could be his running mate.
Putin has long tried to cultivate relationships with far-right leaders in Europe and the United States, whether it’s Marine Le Pen in France or Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban, even before the Ukraine war. Certainly many such far-right leaders and parties have been demanding an immediate end to the war.
Putin would consider Trump as part of the gang, as the former and possibly future US president has consistently expressed admiration for Putin. Trump’s latest row, probably meant as a joke, was to call on Russia to attack Nato member states who did not pay their dues.
Advertisement
What Putin wants, as one policy wit in Brussels once observed, is a “far-right International”, something like, but ideologically opposite to, the old communist International.
Over the years, Putin has repeatedly attacked Western wokeism. And Carlson had no trouble playing up Putin’s pet peeve.
One thing that the American far right opposes is “diversity, equity and inclusion”, a phrase most closely associated, in their minds, with “wokeism” or woke ideology.
What is woke?
Its advocates call it social justice. Their opponents derisively label it as woke. I have no good definition of the wokeism of “diversity, equity and inclusion”, so yours is as good as mine. I will just cite some examples to make sure we are talking about the same things.
If you are woke, you believe there are not only two genders, namely male and female but several, or even many. Like genders, racial differences don’t exist except as social constructs. It’s sometimes called critical race theory.
Advertisement
Some mental conditions such as autism are “neurodivergent”, but just as acceptable or desirable as any other commonly accepted condition. Beauty is also a social construct, so you can be morbidly obese and still consider yourself a top beauty. If you don’t accept these beliefs, you are racist, sexist and/or discriminatory against others, even if you don’t consider yourself as such.
Generally, diversity in whatever form is the name of the game. It’s considered a strength to an organisation, a government or a society. Many North American companies and government departments now have powerful “diversity, equity and inclusion” offices that can hire or fire staff on the strength of their diversity compliance.
Advertisement
But for the more hardcore woke ideologues, there are supposed privileges enjoyed by white people, who hang on to those discriminatory notions – such as there are only male and female sexes – and practices for exactly that reason, their privileges.
They believe it’s OK to subvert traditional institutions, beliefs and religions to achieve true diversity. This includes banning, rewriting or censoring any number of literary classics, and policing public or online speeches considered inappropriate or hurtful to someone or some groups.
Wokeism and geopolitics
Wokeism is usually discussed as a domestic phenomenon within many Western societies. In contrast, many social developments and orders imposed by the governments of Russia and China domestically are “anti-woke”, from a Western perspective. We certainly know what Putin and Xi Jinping think about Western wokeism, or its sometimes Japanese and South Korean equivalents.
Advertisement
The Chinese internet and TV, for example, have long banned “sassy men” such as effeminate influencers who imitated those in Japan and South Korea.
But such contrasting approaches and attitudes towards “woke” issues are starting to have obvious implications in their foreign policies as their rivalry and confrontations turn increasingly bitter.
One fascinating Pentagon study – written in 2013 and subsequently compelled to be released by a US court order after freedom-of-information litigation – examines one key aspect of “diversity”, that is race. More exactly, it asks whether “Chinese racism” or Han supremacy offers a geopolitical advantage or disadvantage against the US.
Advertisement
Its title gives the game away: “The Strategic Consequences of Chinese Racism: A Strategic Asymmetry for the United States”. It’s a fascinating read. Many of its observations and conclusions may also apply to Russia. “This study examines … the strategic consequences of Chinese racism,” it declared at the outset.
The following are some choice quotes.
“[The] Chinese do not even recognise their racism as a problem. They believe that racism is a Western phenomenon and that Westerners are obsessed with race. This obsession is seen by the Chinese to be a strategic vulnerability of the West, whereas China is not affected by racism.”
“The Chinese believe that states are good to the degree that they are unicultural. They have a strong, implicit, and racialist view of international politics, and an equally dominant view of the racial balance of power.”
“The Chinese see multiculturalism as a sickness that has overtaken the United States, and a component of US decline.”
“From the Chinese perspective, the United States used to be a strong society that the Chinese respected when it was unicultural, defined by the centrality of AngloProtestant culture at the core of American national identity aligned with the political ideology of liberalism, the rule of law, and free market capitalism.”
In the West, diversity is strength. In China, unity is strength, and that applies to Han “racism” particularly.
Consider this long quote: “Racism is a cohesive force for the Chinese. Racism does benefit the Chinese in four major ways. First, the Han Chinese possess a strong in-group identity with a polarised and tightly defined out-group. This allows the Chinese government to expect sacrifice as well as support from a considerable majority of the Chinese people.
“Second, based on this identity, the government has the ability to focus with great willpower on the demands of the state. All governments make patriotic appeals, but the Chinese government is able to do so effectively because any entreaty is based on patriotism as well as nationalism. When we reflect on the tools the Chinese government has to extract support and 20 resources from the population, only one conclusion is possible, they are formidable.
“Third, they have strong societal unity and purpose, which supports Chinese power. The Chinese do not have a culture that is self-critical or one that ponders its fundamental faults.
“Fourth, China’s racism and ethnocentrism serves China’s teleological world view. History, in the Hegelian sense, is moving in China’s direction and the future belongs to it, China’s political beliefs, civilisational culture, and economic might triumphed over the West.
“The lack of any desire by the Chinese to self-reflect on the profound faults of their society means that there is no motivation to solve these faults. Accordingly, a powerful message may be that China will not change because it has no desire to do so. In essence, with China, ‘what you see is what you get.’ The country is a civilisation, and that yields them great strength.”
Weaponising unity and diversity, Chinese and US-style
We are perhaps looking into the heart of the difference between China and the West. For the Chinese, national unity, racial unity and a unitary state are and have long been the basis of national strength. I prefer to call it Chinese culturism rather than racism, though the heavy racist elements are undeniable. Racial cohesion is considered essential to societal cohesion.
By contrast, in the US, diversity – and a federal and divided state – guarantees freedom and is considered the raison d’etre of state.
The study concludes in the end, as you do for a Pentagon study, that diversity puts the US on “the right side of history”.
But it dares to consider Chinese racism as a possible “strategic asset” for Beijing, and makes a far more convincing argument than that for the US diversity style being essentially the right thing to do.
Certainly the Chinese and even some Americans consider worsening racial tensions as a divisive and polarising force within US society, and the situation may be worse now than when the study was written a decade ago. Coolheaded Chinese and Russian strategists probably don’t think the country could win in a hot war with the US. Far better to let the US devour itself because of all its many internal contradictions such as racial conflicts.
Woke as US foreign policy?
What the Pentagon study didn’t consider but which a 2022 study does is how Washington is already weaponising woke ideology to further foreign policy goals.
I have previously commented on this fascinating study, “Woke Imperium: The Coming Confluence Between Social Justice and Neoconservatism”, produced by the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy, so I won’t go into details.
Suffice to say that Washington can weaponise and has done so with “woke” values just as it does with human rights previously, for example, by interfering in a country’s domestic affairs and sanctioning its government officials for being “anti-gay” or repressing women or minorities, say, China!
The Pentagon study is certainly not definitive. I am not even sure if its characterisation of Han “racism” is correct. But it certainly makes me think about racism and anti-racism as strategic assets and weaknesses in international politics. And that’s something new to me!
Alex Lo has been a Post columnist since 2012, covering major issues affecting Hong Kong and the rest of China. A journalist for 25 years, he has worked for various publications in Hong Kong and Toronto as a news reporter and editor. He has also lectured in journalism at the University of Hong Kong.
Why America goes woke and broke
- ‘Woke’ moralism in US foreign policy will provoke a global backlash while encouraging polarisation and extremism from the ‘unwoke’ at home
22 May 2023
Opinion | Why America goes woke and broke | South China Morning Post (scmp.com)
The Strategic Consequences of Chinese Racism: A Strategic Asymetry for the United States
Litigation Release – The Strategic Consequences of Chinese Racism 201301.pdf (whs.mil)
NAZI GORENG- RASSISMUS IN ASIEN
25. März 2019 Ralf OstnerNazi Goreng- Rassismus in Asien – Global Review (global-review.info)
WOKE IMPERIUM: THE COMING CONFLUENCE BETWEEN SOCIAL JUSTICE AND NEOCONSERVATISM
- JUNE 27, 2022
WRITTEN BY: Christopher Mott
DOWNLOAD:
Key Findings
- The advocates of American primacy within the United States foreign policy establishment historically rely on prevailing ideological trends of the time to justify interventionism abroad. The new ‘woke’ face of American hegemony and projects of empire is designed to project the U.S. as an international moral police rather than a conventional great power—and the result is neo-imperialism with a moral face.
- This is an iterative and systemic process with an internal logic, not one controlled by a global cabal: when the older rationalizations for primacy, hegemony, and interventionism appear antiquated or are no longer persuasive, a new rationale that better reflects the ruling class norms of the era is adopted as a substitute. This is because the new schema is useful for the maintenance of the existing system of power.
- The rise of a ‘woke’ activist-driven, social justice-oriented politics—particularly among the members of academia, media, and the professional managerial class—has provided the latest ideological justification for interventionism, and it has become readily adopted by the U.S. foreign policy establishment. These groups now have an even greater level of symbiotic relationship with state actors.
- Professional selection and advancement under these conditions require elite signaling of loyalty to ‘progressive’ universalism as the trending state-sanctioned ideology, which further fuels the push towards interventionism. This combination of factors encourages a new institutional and elite consensus around trending shibboleths.
- The emerging hegemonic posture and its moral imperialism are at odds with a sober and realistic appraisal of U.S. interests on the world stage, as they create untenable, maximalist, and utopian goals that clash with the concrete realities on which U.S. grand strategy must be based.
- The liberal Atlanticist tendency to push moralism and social engineering globally has immense potential to create backlash in foreign, especially non-Western, societies that will come to identify the West as a whole with niche, late-modern progressive ideals—thus motivating new forms of anti-Westernism.
Executive Summary
The primacist, interventionist wing of the United States foreign policy establishment—’the Blob’—has a long history of using prevailing moralist trends to serve as ideological justifications for expansionist and hawkish policies. From Presidents William McKinley and Woodrow Wilson on through the militant democracy promotion of the George W. Bush administration, this process often mutated to accommodate the de jour proclivities and entrenched biases of the policy-making class. The newest iteration of this process is the adoption of social justice causes and rhetoric as the explicit goals of the United States’ foreign policy. Such use and weaponization of the language of justice to advance the foreign policy objectives of the liberal Atlanticist Blob is particularly evident against regions and countries the West believes actively challenge the Liberal International Order (LIO) status quo or where it seeks to justify military and economic interventions on normative grounds.
Rather than a coordinated conspiracy directed from a central organization or even a conscious desire on the part of the participants however, this process of adopting, incorporating, and cultivating new rationales to sustain what is an idealist and internationalist strategic culture in the United States has become routinized. This entrenchment of systemic moralism in the American national security apparatus has been facilitated, and is at least partly driven, by a highly competitive professional class vying to secure their position in the system by using virtue signaling to demonstrate class solidarity to their higher ranks. This mimetic mechanism incentivizes pushing the envelope and chasing trending causes (normative mimicry)—but always in service of the imperial needs of the state where expansionism and primacy are viewed as the triumph of a universalized American conception of virtue over those forces which are viewed as being on ‘the wrong side of history’. Under such moralistic conditions, prudence, moderation, and narrower conceptions of interest—provisos of realism—could be effectively vilified as enabling oppression and injustice.
This process of adopting, incorporating, and cultivating new rationales to sustain what is an idealist and internationalist strategic culture in the United States has become routinized.
The current Wokeist incarnation of American globalist evangelism seeks not only to change the governments of other nations, but engineer their very cultures according to the Western progressive model. Its universalist framing of human values could be readily applied to violate or undermine the sovereignty of alternate political or cultural systems and justify those interventions for the domestic Western audiences in the name of ‘moral responsibility’.
This white paper seeks to elucidate the often hidden processes and mechanisms that have led to the consolidation of this “woke imperium” of moralistic cosmopolitanism: its historical roots, present day trends, and possible future evolution. It is also intended as a guide for advocates of realism and restraint: to help realists understand the nature of the resistance they are likely to encounter from certain sectors of the foreign policy establishment and their sympathizers as they try to realign U.S. foreign policy goals with more limited and concrete national interests.
WRITTEN BY:
Christopher Mott
Dr. Christopher Mott is a Research Fellow at IPD and a former researcher and desk officer at the U.S. Department of State.