The GrayZone “anti-imperialist” types really reminds me of two different sections in two different books:

Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s “Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History” and Edward W. Said’s “Culture and Imperialism.”

(Thread)

The anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot, within “Silencing the Past,” writes how a predominant view of the white plantation classes throughout the “Age of Revolution” was that Africans could not possibly grasp any ideas of popular revolt. As one French colonist in

Saint-Domingue put it, “our Negroes” are “very tranquil and obedient. A revolt among them is impossible.” For who could actually conceive of such things as African liberation by Africans? “Freedom for Negroes is a chimera.” Of course, a few months later the most significant

slave insurrection in recorded history occurred.

It’s almost comparable to how Bashar al-Assad, in early 2011, denied that any revolt could occur in Syria. Ever since that moment, neo-Stalinist GrayZone-types have concurred. Rather than a revolt, a “continued

conspiracy” was aimed at Syria in toto, with the State’s “enemies work[ing] every day in an organised, systematic and scientific manner in order to undermine Syria’s stability” (Assad).

Once again, this mimics how the various white plantation classes viewed the “Non-Event”

of the Haitian Revolution. “When reality does not coincide with deeply held beliefs,” Michel-Rolph Trouillot observes, “human beings tend to phrase interpretations that force reality within the scope of these beliefs.” When slavery was the “natural order” for Africans, then

it made no sense for them to revolt. Not even the radical Left within England had a frame of reference for what was happening in Haiti. Silence over such events reigned, only to subsequently be trivialized when denial couldn’t hold up. These latter efforts involved

“conspiracy theories,” Trouillot’s words, that involved such assertions that the uprising “must have been ‘prompted,’ ‘provoked,’ or ‘suggested’ by some higher being than the slaves themselves: royalists, mulattoes, or other external agents.” Such sophisticated things as

popular action are relegated to mere footnotes, if mentioned at all. The “unthinkable” must be repressed and “brought back within the realm of accepted discourse.” Sound familiar, specifically with Syria?

The “Non-Event” of the Syrian uprising and its relation to White

“anti-imperialism” thus brings us to Edward W. Said’s classic, “Culture and Imperialism.”

Within this text, Edward W. Said is discussing Joseph Conrad’s “Nostromo,” set in a Central American republic that is dominated by outside interests because of its immense

silver mine. In contrast to these outside interests; who arrogantly predict that they shall “run the world’s business whether the world likes it or not. The world can’t help it—and neither can we, I guess”; Conrad forecasts unstoppable unrest and “misrule” of these

nations.

As Edward W. Said points out, however, “it would be a mistake to read Conrad’s great work simply as an early prediction of what we see happening in twentieth-century Latin America”: the rise of fascism, corporate exploitation, and right-wing bloodbaths financed

by a dominant imperial metropole.

Rather, Joseph Conrad is also a precursor to a number of novelists, intellectuals, travel writers, journalists, filmmakers, and polemicists, “whose speciality is” *still* “to deliver the non-European world either for analysis and

judgement or for satisfying the exotic tastes of European and North American audiences.” Indeed, “For if it is true that Conrad ironically sees the imperialism of the ... silver mine’s British and American owners as doomed” by its own arrogance, “it is also true that

he writes as a man whose *Western* view of the non-Western world is so ingrained as to blind him to other histories, other cultures, other aspirations”:

“All Conrad can see is a world totally dominated by the Atlantic West, in which every opposition to the West

only confirms the West’s wicked power.”

There is no alternative to this cruel tautology for Conrad. “He could neither understand that India, Africa, and South America”, in addition to the Middle East, etc., “also had lives and cultures with integrities not totally

controlled by the gringo imperialists and reformers of this world, nor allow himself to believe that anti-imperialist independence movements were not all totally corrupt and in the pay of the puppet masters in London or Washington.”

In a very crucial sense, this applies

to the GrayZone, with a special reference to Syria, Hong Kong, etc. In a sense, so goes the narrative, these popular forces and peoples do not have histories and aspirations, cultures and lives with integrities. “They” only “confirm” the “West’s wicked power,” to the cruel

detriment of the States that rule over them.

In some way, it is an example of a certain idea: anti-imperialism =/= decolonization.

One is a political stance, ever malleable, that is often noble, sometimes co-opted. The other is an entire network of epistemologies, reordering

the ways in which we think, the voices we give primacy to, as well as the relations between land and power.

Africans in the “Age of Revolution,” Central Americans in “Nostromo,” were silenced: people went *to them* in order to *represent them* for Western audiences. Likewise,

the GrayZone privileges itself as a Western institution representing peoples for largely Western audiences. In doing so, it reproduces a colonizing epistemology.

@InvisiblesMuros @areidross
@Marusya_1312 @GrayzoneES