orientalism

Resurrecting the Ghouls: On the West's History of Hating Russians and Rehabilitating Nazis

[Pictured: The Azov Battalion, a Nazi paramilitary group that is part of Ukraine’s armed forces]

By Julien Charles

The immensely popular Swedish noir crime procedural novels by Lars Kepler are part of one of the more compelling series in Nordic crime fiction. In particular the Joona Lina series, in which police detectives track a Hannibal-esque serial killer who wreaks havoc on those he deems deserving. It only occurred to me late in the first novel that the killer is a Russian. Jurek Walter is an ex-soldier, remorselessly cynical, immune to pain, and a brutally efficient torturer and murderer of men and women alike. His feverishly demented goal is to ‘restore order’ by punishing those who have gotten away with a lot less criminal activity than murder. In short, an unimaginable psychopath of the kind that could only emerge from the ruins of the Soviet Union. The personification of evil.

The character in the novel embodied a version of Edward Said’s Orientalism, a process by which the West caricatures other regions, nations, and people in cartoonish and sophomoric ways. The better to understand them at a glance. Almost like a kind of intellectual shorthand by which to characterize and dismiss entire populations. Perform conceptual violence on them until they can be shunted into a shape that slides neatly into a western man’s conception of the world. Fits the Western cosmology, in which the U.S. and Europe shine as lodestars in a firmament of flickering blight. Everything in the heavens is of course in desperate need of guidance from the western polestar.

Examples of the dynamic of Orientalism are particularly rife in Hollywood. Countless series and movies have pitted pious Americans against a raft of crackpot Latinos, Slavs, Arabs, Persians, and Asians bent on genocide, world domination, and numberless other monomaniacal schemes. There’s of course no small amount of projection at work here in the fictional stylings of “the best minds of [our] generation”, as Ginsberg put it.

Not unlike the Kepler book, the Tom Cruise Jack Reacher films capitalize on the by now threadbare trope of a Soviet psychopath set loose in the naive and peaceable democracies of the West. The Zec is a man who escaped or survived the gulags in Siberia to wreak havoc on the West. In one scene, he describes how he once gnawed off a few fingers to avoid working in Siberian sulfur mines. A man of such exceptional capacities is no doubt useful to certain organizations, he muses. The Zec then encourages one of his low-level thugs to chew off his thumb as a show of fidelity, or some such deranged proof. The man—human, all too human—cannot do it and is summarily executed. The bloodless Zec then waxes psychopathic, wondering why westerners are so weak.

Observe the set pieces in the Jennifer Lawrence vehicle Red Sparrow. Scenes from the West are well-lit and overflowing with human emotion; scenes from behind the “iron curtain” are dimly lit, drab in color, stylistically old-world, barren of human empathy. In short, thoroughly depressing. Of course, as part of Lawrence’s character Dominika’s training in demolishing her human emotions (weaknesses all) and steeling herself in the arts of pitiless manipulation, she must appear naked before her class and satisfy the lust of a man who previously assaulted her.

 

Chronic Resentments

These are caricatures of Russians who evidently have been thoroughly dehumanized by life in the USSR. What has really dehumanized these characters is the propaganda which invented them.

Few events ignite this kind of Orientalism more than a war or proxy war with Russia, America’s bete noire. Despite the fact that the wall has been down for 30 years. Despite the fact that the West enjoyed an extended period of unrestrained looting in the Former Soviet Republics. During which time mortality rates skyrocketed for citizens of those fledgling states, thanks principally to the loss of the generous social supports that underpinned their Soviet economies. Despite the fact that Vladimir Putin is an avowed neoliberal who has repeatedly sought deeper integration with Europe and America, like a stepchild desperate to claim his birthright among a welter of siblings. Despite all this, Putin’s patriotic desire to reconstitute Russia as a viable economic and military power has damned him irreparably in the eyes of the West. He is like Kepler’s killer, the manifestation of undiluted evil. Except that Putin is real.

All this comes from a long lineage of Russophobia. It dates back to the Napoleonic Wars in Europe, which stirred fears of Russian plots to conquer Europe; to subsequent paranoia by British colonialists that Russia would steal the Indian subcontinent from its grasp; to the war to unseat the Bolsheviks and blistering responses to stories of mass slaughter under Soviet rule. In 1944, Hitler described Russians thusly, “These are not human beings: they are beasts from the Asiatic steppes, and the battle I am leading against them is the battle for the dignity of the people of Europe.” This view summarized the ideology behind Germany’s plan to murder 100 million Russians after the defeated the USSR. Likewise, we rarely hear that one of the small handful of groups energetically targeted for liquidation by the Nazis were communists. The Russians sacrificed 27 million people fighting off fascism. This loss is also infrequently highlighted.

The McCarthyite paranoia was a particularly acute instance of this chronic phobia. One can catch a whiff of the age-old bigotry in the propaganda of the present moment. The reflexive aggression toward Russia action in Ukraine (a recent article in The Times (UK) was entitled, “Russia’s casual savagery is seared into its soul”) This latest surge of bile seems in part an explosion of unresolved angst from the Russophobia of the Trump years, and perhaps a hundred years prior, though partially diffused by the fall of the wall. Yet it was still there even in the post-wall melees of capitalist looting under the doddering oversight of the Pushkin-quoting boozer Boris Yeltsin. Russians, Muscovites mostly, were freshly depicted as amoral, thieving mafiosi seduced by the flash of capital, the men brutal grotesques and the women biddable jades. Little was made of the valueless cosmos into which they’d been hurled by the blitzkrieg of capital on a society not remotely prepared for it.

(Much like the diagnosis of mental health in the West, problems of post-fall Russians were and are localized in the person, in the soul of a people, rarely traced to their societal causes. The New York Times just released a series on the “Inner Pandemic” of mental health issues, though it spends little time focusing on the circumstances that generated these crises, and which it enthusiastically supported.)

Even today one finds strains of the old Hitlerian trope coursing through the western mainstream. Recently on Germany’s ZDF channel, a guest of the Markus Lanz Show reminded viewers, with a slim smile, that, “Even if Russians look European, they are not European.” She rambled on incoherently about the Slavic view of death and noted that, “They have no concept of a liberal, post-modern life.” She may as well have said they were beasts from the Asiatic steppes and referred viewers to the Jack Reacher movie. After which, perhaps, they might donate to the latest national purity fund.

This seems to be part unhinged racism, but also a psychological necessity for enemies in nation-states. And one wonders if race isn’t utilized to that end. And whether this psychological need springs from a desire for national purpose, or more from an unrelenting need of capital for new markets—and the geospatial requirements that go with it. Surely the historical Lebensraum looms large behind modern geopolitical conflicts.

 

Addicted to Conflict

But it isn’t just the xenophobic fear of Slavic people. There’s another element at work here. One is reminded of Colin Powell, former leader of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—and dissembler nonpareil—before the U.N. Security Council. He once told a reporter that he feared he was “running out of enemies” in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union. He was unwittingly disclosing a clandestine principle of Washington foreign policy. Namely, that it must always have an enemy. It cannot conceive a world of peaceful inhabitants, engaged in serene market exchange, celebrating a peace dividend while occasionally reminding new generations of the perils of conflict. This is not a conceit in the mental universe of the planners of American hegemony, be they retired generals on media networks, cabinet lieutenants sketching hemispheric takeovers, or well-compensated scriveners in beltway think tanks. And certainly not among the lurid corridors of K Street defense lobbyists. If Putin did not exist, Washington would have invented him. Much as they invented, to a surprising degree, Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda henchmen.

More often than not, the enemy must be cut from whole cloth. They do not ordinarily present themselves. Few countries are interested in going to war with the United States. At worst most nations are disinterested in submitting themselves to American rule, which manifests in numberless ways, a protean ogre extending its tentacles across the globe. Soft power, hard power, invisible power. Be it the petro dollar and the SWIFT system that places a subject nation under the perpetual threat of American sanctions. (A form of economic colonialism.) Be it bilateral security arrangements that infiltrate the country with U.S. military personnel and ensnare it in long-term weapons contracts with beltway defense contractors. (A form of military subjugation.) Be it onerous and odious loan agreements with Bretton Woods institutions that enslave generations of citizens to corrupt banks of the global North. (A form of vassalage.) From which those citizens’ meager avenues of escape include metastasizing debt service and consequent debt deflation, firesales of national patrimony, or the trauma of default, runaway inflation, and economic collapse. Choose wisely.

Rather than being enemies of the American state, such nations would really rather be left alone. To experiment with alternative economic models including socialism and its various hybrids. To trade in local currencies. To align in regional economic blocs. But this option–attempting to implement an economic structure other than western neoliberalism–is anathema to Washington. Just ask Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, Brazil, Syria, Libya, North Korea, and any other nation that wishes to forge its own path.

 

The Real Enemy

Which brings us to the real enemy of the United States. Despite reports to the contrary, it is not fascism. Fascism is merely an end-point of capitalism, which will almost assuredly emerge wherever capitalism is practiced in unregulated and unrepentant fashion. As middle class wealth craters, however broadly, and extreme wealth and privilege expands, however narrowly, it will require force to generate compliance within a resentful and restive population. We are witnessing this transition in the West right now.

All this to say that, no, fascism was never the primary nemesis. The real enemy is communism. Western capital cannot abide the notion of a workers' state full of nationalized enterprises committed to the general welfare. One which deprioritizes the profit motive and tars it with the stigma of avarice and usury. This is and has always been Washington’s worst-case scenario, which it watched materialize in the Bolshevik Revolution, a knife in the side of capital that drew blood for 74 years, and which it tried hysterically to end all the while.

Not even the shameful scourge of Nazism rising up in the heart of civilized Europe was enough to lift fascism above communism as public enemy number one. As John Steppling notes in an excellent essay on the rehabilitation of fascism, Arthur Schweitzer, author of Big Business in the Third Reich, says that many German businessmen saw virulent anti-semitism as little more than a form of “economic policy reform.”

It is instructive to read works like The Splendid Blond Beast, which outlines the myriad deceptions of the postwar era of supposed deNazification in Western Europe. As it turns out, Washington was torn on the prosecution of Nazi war crimes. Although Frederick Roosevelt and others supported harsh punishment, helped establish Nuremberg and sent principled judges like Robert Jackson, others like powerful Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles and his Secretary of State brother John Foster Dulles sought to shield German industrialists and military officers, all deeply complicit and enthusiastic collaborators in the Nazi extermination campaigns.

Then there was Operation Paperclip, a full program dedicated to repatriating Nazis in the United States and installing them in key posts in pivotal internationalist institutions like the UN. And Nato’s alleged role in Operation Gladio, code name for a series of stay behind secret armies committed to armed resistance, acts of subversion, and terror, that were to be activated in the event of an invasion of Western Europe by Warsaw Pact nations, something never on the books in Moscow, but alive in the feverish imagination of beltway anti-communists. These dispersed embedded and hastily assembled paramilitaries were actually left behind to agitate against and prevent the rise of leftist (see communist) political blocs. They operated in Italy, Greece, France, Germany, Portugal and across Northern Europe. Nato, the CIA, and various European intelligence agencies were not about to watch Western Europe go communist regardless of what the democratized masses aberrantly desired.

Much of this history suggests that the underlying need of capitalism for new markets is primary, and perhaps that race is a tool leveraged to rationalize what is at bottom base exploitation. Hence our general acceptance of fascism in Ukraine and hysteria against Russia.

 

Selective Outrage

We might argue that this is different: Russia invaded another country. On investigation the argument falters, fractures amid a sea of sharp facts: a foreign backer, a coup d’etat, an ultranationalist takeover, a Nato infiltration, a legal apparatus mobilized against its own citizens, a massacre of ethnic Russians, preparations for a final assault. And finally, a full response from Moscow.

But even if an invasion were our threshold for outrage, none of this pathos has been evident in our response to the U.S.-backed Saudi war on Yemen, or U.S. wars on Libya and Syria. Even though the western aggression is criminal and death tolls are staggering. Even though there were plenty of visuals and myths available to rouse the choler of the people: visions of rampaging soldiers on Viagra rape sprees; grotesquely thin and lifeless children in the dust of the KSA’s induced famine; the hurling of gays off rooftops in Raqqa by ‘moderate rebels’. No, our collective consciousness has definitely been conditioned to despise most of all the legatees of Soviet communism, punished for the sins of the father in the first instance and for the defense of their national autonomy in the second. War, and war propaganda, is often a kind of industrialized hatred, organized malice armed with the implements of death.

As Arthur Ponsonby says in his book Falsehoods in War Time, deceitfulness is extraordinarily useful because humanity is mendacious and credulous in near equal measure. It lies and refuses to believe it is being lied to. Ponsonby, a member of British Parliament writing after World War I, says that nations must “justify themselves by depicting the enemy as an undiluted criminal; and secondly, to inflame popular passion for the continuance of the struggle.” Obviously little has changed since our initial experience of industrial warfare. We are constitutionally and economically committed to domineering aims, are inimical to anything that might impede our expansion, and we rationalize our behavior to these ends with a healthy dose of projection abetted by racist caricature. It is a frightful concoction of pitiless greed and base prejudice.

Yet every time we think we have put these cruel rancorous sides to our human selves to rest, they reappear, refashioned in new apparel, with fresh logic, ironclad rationales. We are sold a bill of goods. Perhaps this should come as no real surprise to citizens of a country that worships a single skill, salesmanship, and a single “virtue”, wealth, as its most sacred values. Everything is a commodity and everything that has been sold in the past will be sold again. Our entertainment culture is rife with reproductions of yesterday’s stories. Why not re-commoditize fascism? Wave the colors of a new flag and herald the insignia of a new battalion. Lionize a new leader, dress him in army green and pose him on the marble stairs of the halls of power, sandbags stacked to the roofs behind him. Honor under siege.

What has been sold before will be sold again; what we have hated before we will hate again. If it isn’t quite eternal return then it surely is history recurring as tragedy then farce. This soft embrace of fascism and rabid anti-communism goes all the way back to the Bolshevik uprising. As one of Kepler’s Nordic tales is subtitled, “Sometimes the past won’t stay buried.” Yes, the graves are always rather too near the surface.

 

Julien Charles is a concerned citizen hoping to call attention to the authoritarian drift of states across the Western world, and the disingenuous narratives promoted to gain consensus for such measures.

Orientalism and the Cultural Constructions of Modern-Day Mass Tourism

By John Nightengale

Orientalism is the most extreme form of cultural imperialism as it completely restructures the colony culture. Orientalism is arguably one of the most important theories in post-colonial study. This essay will unpack and explain the nuances of the theory first developed by Said in his famous work "Orientalism," published in 1978, then later expanded upon in "Culture and Imperialism," published in 1993. In short, Said sought to explain how, through the relationship between knowledge and power, cultural representation was used to create the discursive binary between the "east" and "west" which placed the west as superior (Gilbert-Moore, 1997). The construction of knowledge was a form of cultural hegemony which facilitated the colonising of the mind, which is argued to be a prerequisite for colonial control (Burney, 2012). While formal colonisation has ended, it is argued that Orientalism is still widely seen in modern time. The second part of the essay will explore how the tourism industry has been plagued with culturally constructed narratives that seek to homogenise host countries through repetitive reduction (Bruner, 2005; Anderson, 2005; Shivani, 2006). By exploring discourses, the binary and otherness present in tourism is akin to that of colonial times (Carrigan, 2011; Bruner, 2005).

Said follows a post-structuralist model in an attempt to dismantle the binary established by imperial discourse; he tries to highlight the power structure that establishes the Occident as superior to the Orient. Said drew upon theorists of his time to construct his theory. One key theorist he drew inspiration from was Foucault; in particular his study of power (Gilbert-Moore, 1997; Lester, 2003). Foucault said that power and knowledge are intrinsically linked in that the creation of knowledge was an exertion of power (Foucault, 1991; Lester, 2003). The "Orient" was constructed through the systematic learning, discovery and practice from the west (Said 2003; Burney, 2012). Here it is seen through an imagined geography, the east was produced through travel writing, novels and poetry, which sought to bring the east into a realm of understanding (Abdul Janmohamed, 1985; Mostafanezhad, 2013). What is important to remember is that only the west was producing knowledge, the east was not able to produce literature and art about the west. This illustrates Foucault's idea that knowledge is power, in which the west has more power and therefore is producing more knowledge, thus directly demonstrating the dominance of the west over the east. The example Said (2003) gives is, Cromer referring to the Orient as "lethargic and suspicious", and "devoid of energy and initiative". This was the only representation that the people in England received of the Orient at this time (Said, 2003). This creation of "false knowledge" along with other examples of literature and art contributes to the social construct of the "east", in which meaning is ascribed onto people and place (Crang, 1998, Ashcroft, 2008). It is seen that the "real east" is reformed into the "discursive east", meaning that the east is now conformed into the imagination of west, in which the "discursive east" will always be the submissive (Moore-Gilbert, 1997).

The second key concept that Said draws from is Foucault's theory of discourse. In discourse, power is both constituted and exercised through the flow of knowledge and representation to produce objects of truth (Moore-Gilbert, 1997; Lester, 2003). Here it is seen that what is the truth, or rather the constructed knowledge, can be linked to who has power, in that, power controls what narratives are formed or blocked (Young, 1995; Bruner, 2005). Rather than the discourse forming and reforming knowledge through passive powers, it is seen that knowledge was first constructed by specialists, often bourgeoisie men, then the knowledge becomes fact and is later reinforced by society (Said, 2016; Lester, 2003). This explains how the view of the Orient as timeless and unchanging was upheld; the idea was produced and reproduced within the Western mind (Crang 1998; Burney, 2012). Western discourse representations of the Orient have been homogenised and totalized reducing the Orient to tropes and stereotypical tropes being produced as "western knowledge" (Moore-Gilbert, 1997). This in term reinforces the binary between the Orient and Occident (Said, 2003).

Orientalism through the construct of knowledge and Orientalist discourse has resulted in the binary between Orient/Occident; creating the contrast of developing/developed, promiscuous/noble (Ashcroft, 2008). Kissinger wrote of binary opposition which viewed the Orient as "lagging" behind due to the Orient retaining a pre-Newtonian view of the world as " internal" whilst the superior Occident views the word as "external" (Kissinger, 1966; Crang 1998; Erikson and Murphy, 2017). Through the production of knowledge through literature, the Occident was placed as dominant over the east, placing the western world at the centre and the Orient in the periphery (Maddox, 2014). Cromer said that Orients "acts, speaks, and thinks in a manner exactly opposite to the European"; this illustrates how the binary was represented at the time (Said, 2003). The process of ordering is said to control all aspects of the discourse (Wodak, 2005). Gramsci adds to this, with the theory of cultural hegemony, which explains how dominant ideologies are controlled by the hierarchal class to maintain control (Lears, 1985, Crang, 2013). This is done by assigning the subordinate the role of subject which in turn creates "docile bodies" which conform to normalisation (Foucault 1998; said, 2003; Woodak, 2005). The creation of the subordinate also removes their ability to speak. This silencing effect is seen by the spread of popular writing of the era which "writes out" the Orient (Aitchison, 2001). In doing so, this reinforces the Orientalist discourse as the "true east" narrative is blocked and western knowledge prevails (Young, 1995).

This cultural hegemony is an extreme case of imperialism which colonised the mind of the Orient. Creating the viewpoint of the west as superior compared to the subordinate and silenced east led to the creation of thought, in both the Orient and Occident, that the east needs to be colonised and controlled (Lears, 1985). It is widely accepted that the process of Orientalism allowed the colonisation of the east. This is expressed by a quote from William Blake "Empire follows art and not vice versa as Englishmen suppose" (cited in Said 1993).

Orientalism is seen today in tourism, the power dynamics in the representation of the "east" mimic that seen in colonial times. Before delving into the theory, it is important to acknowledge that tourism in the modern day is laden with power inequalities from its first appearance. Mass tourism was spurred on by neoliberal organisations post-World War Two as a way for welfare states to develop (Higgins-Desbiolles, 2006; Carrigan, 2011). International financial institutes offered exploitative loans in exchange for adopting tourism development strategies (Higgins-Desbiolles, 2006). Britain helped establish the "Atlantic Charter" which sought to develop the Caribbean tourism industry, however with vested interest as the UK traded 50 destroyers for a 99 year lease on seven Commonwealth islands (Carrigan, 2011). The tourism industry is also plagued with a "leakage" in that money is commonly siphoned off from the host state following a similar pattern to colonial times (Carrigan, 2011).

It is seen that tourism seeks to commodify culture by packaging "the other" for consumption by the west (Behdad, 1994; Jamerson, 2017). This commodification of tourism is spurred on by western corporations by the production of knowledge about the host country (Mostafanezhad, 2013). What is important to understand here is that the tourist destinations are always written about, not written by; and in doing so the "native" population is silenced. Using the Caribbean as an example, their image is created through western lenses by western corporations and tourists who define the islands by comparing the differences between "east" and "west" (Shabanirad, 2015). This is done by the tourist's gaze which explains how images and stereotypes of the country are distorted and homogenised by tourists to bring the world of "other" into comprehendible reality, much like Cromer in colonial times (Katan, 2012, Urry and Larsen, 2011). This distorted reality is furthered when portrayed in the media due to repetitive reduction, seen in travel writing such as "Lonely Planet" and review sites such as "TripAdvisor" (Andreasson, 2005; Simpson, 2005). On a larger scale companies reproduce this "distorted reality" through brochure discourse by using the same rhetoric phrases and imagery to sell the destination (Carringan, 2011). Holiday destinations often evoke an image of idyllic landscapes, inscribed with emotions and feelings; this is a result of imagined geographies of the place caused by the culturally constructed narratives (Hottola, 2014). This is a result of advertisements summarising an entire nation's culture into a set of descriptors (Hottola, 2014). In doing so, it plays out a "racist fantasy" in which the "east" is homogenised and given the role of inferior; seen as feminised and backwards in relation to the western world (Carringan, 2011). A prime example of this is Thomas Cook, who advertise "Africa Holidays" as cultural experiences in which you'll be "greeted by tribal elders" and "experience life the way locals have lived for generations" (Thomascook.com). This echoes the narrative that Africa is primitive and backwards, positioned beneath the west.

Many tourists seek an "authentic experience" which Mkono (2012) critiques as upholding the "Eurocentric grand narrative". Seen through Bruners (2005) theory of "questioning gaze" travellers question if constructed sites and performances are true representations of the culture. However, by seeking "authenticity" the tourist is merely projecting their pre-understanding of place (Maddox, 2014; Bruner, 2005). Tourists that search for authenticity uphold an imagined geography of a romantic, unspoilt place which is "frozen in time" and in doing so they "define India according to their own needs" (Korpela, 2010). This upholds a binary between India and the west, which defines India as ascetic compared to the consumerist west (Maddox, 2014). The creation of binary through tourism places the west as the "norm" and defines India in comparison to the west, in that it views Indian culture as a retreat from the normal, hectic western life. In doing so they deny agency of the local population by ignoring their modernity (Philip, 2009; Korpela, 2010; Maddox, 2014).

So far, it has been seen how writing and media have created a binary between the consumerist west and the homogenised east. In order to fully illustrate Orientalism in tourism, it is important to understand how the writing and portrayal of the east affects actions of the host country and the tourist. This can be explained by exploring how narratives have produced a discourse, which in turn gives meaning to space and establishes accepted practices and norms (Bruner, 2005; Carringan, 2011). Firstly, it is seen that cultural hegemony occurs within tourism; host countries often find themselves forced to adopt the culture imposed upon them (Lears, 1985). Looking at Bali, the country is dependent on tourism and therefore upholds the enforced stereotypes (Carrigan, 2011). Secondly, through media, tourists are exposed to the imagined geography of the place, which affects their expectations of the place, which in turn affects how they experience the place (Gregory, 1999). For example, tourists are controlled where they go when they travel within a place. Travel writing "stages" places constructing them as culturally significant and in doing so signposts tourists from sight to sight. (Gregory, 1999)

To conclude, Said's theory of Orientalism highlighted the power structures that create the binaries responsible for positioning the west as dominant over the subaltern east. It was seen that through literature, narratives were created by the Occident about the Orient, which resulted in the creation of "western knowledge" which was imposed upon the Orient through cultural hegemony. Using Said's theory, this essay has highlighted how the same practices used in imperial discourse are being used in modern mass tourism. Through advertising, travel writing and reviews, cultures in host countries have been homogenised and limited to a set of descriptors. It can also be seen that this practice is intrinsically linked with power through the vested interest of IFIs and corporations based in the west. Lastly, it is important to highlight power structures so that they can be dismantled.


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Russophobia and the Logic of Imperialism

By Ava Lipatti

As it stands today, the U.S./NATO imperialist bloc has its eyes set primarily on two countries: Russia and China. While NATO imperial terror, including economic sanctions and military action, in countries such as Ukraine, Syria, Iran, and North Korea constitute exploitative projects in their own right, they also function to encircle Russia and China. Given the importance of Russia as an object of imperial desire, clarity on the character of Russia is imperative in order to understand the current economic and political crisis of imperialism.

There are several important aspects to the question of Russia as it stands today.

The narrative of the Democratic Party is that "Russian hackers" rigged the "democratic" "elections" and that Trump is a puppet of the Kremlin and of Vladimir Putin in particular. There virtually no substantial evidence for this claim. But what is the significance of this narrative? What are its historical roots?

There is also the common claim by elements of the left that Russia is in fact an imperialist power in its own right, primarily for its actions in Crimea, Syria, and Chechnya. However, Russia's relatively weak economy is characterized primarily by the export of raw materials, rather than the export of finance capital as in imperialist countries. The claim that Russia is an imperialist country has been convincingly argued against both by Sam Williams and by Renfrey Clarke and Roger Annis . But does this claim come from nowhere? What is its intellectual heritage?

The purpose of this article is not to prove that Russia is not imperialist or that Trump is not a Kremlin puppet. Others have already grappled with these questions in a much more thorough way than I am equipped to do. The purpose of this article, rather, is to place these phenomena in the context of a long history of Orientalism directed at Slavic people in general, and Russia in particular.

Before proceeding, a brief definition from Edward Said's Orientalism (1978):

"Orientalism is a style of thought based upon ontological and epistemological distinction made between 'the Orient' and (most of the time) 'the Occident.' Thus a very large mass of writers, among who are poet, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and imperial administrators, have accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, 'mind,' destiny, and so on... the phenomenon of Orientalism as I study it here deals principally, not with a correspondence between Orientalism and Orient, but with the internal consistency of Orientalism and its ideas about the Orient... despite or beyond any correspondence, or lack thereof, with a 'real' Orient." (5)


Whiteness, Nazism, and Bolshevism

On the border between "Europe" and "Asia", Russians have historically maintained at best a vacillating, conditional relationship with whiteness and "European civilization". The most historically openly terroristic, revanchist manifestation of European supremacist ideology was undoubtedly Nazism. What was the relationship between Nazism, Bolshevism, and the Slavic peoples?

In War and Revolution: Rethinking the Twentieth Century (2015), Italian Marxist Domenico Losurdo seeks to reclaim the revolutionary tradition and reevaluate the character of Nazism, which he argues has been whitewashed by revisionist historians. Losurdo emphasizes several key points in relation to Nazism and Bolshevism.

Perhaps most importantly, Losurdo argues that in rejecting the revolutionary tradition (from the Jacobins through the Bolsheviks), the revisionist historians have also concealed the colonial character of the Nazi project. Even a cursory reading of Nazi ideology and its goals and practices indicates an essentially colonial dynamic with respect to Jews, Romani, Slavs, and other oppressed peoples. However, U.S. and European historians prefer to whitewash this history, ripping the Holocaust from its historical context and presenting it as an anomaly in human history, rather than an integral manifestation of colonial conquest and imperial terror.

A central aspect of the Nazi project, outlined in Hitler's Mein Kampf, was the plan to colonize Eastern Europe, specifically through exterminating Eastern Europeans and settling throughout the Soviet Union. What historians have traditionally suppressed is that this plan did not come from nowhere: it was inspired in large part by the U.S. settler-colonization of "North America" and the genocide carried out against both the Indigenous people and the people of Africa. Nazi concentration camps were influenced by U.S. concentration camps (i.e. "Indian reservations"); Nazi eugenics was largely inspired by reactionary U.S."scientists" .

Anti-Semitism, anti-Ziganism, and anti-Slavic racism fused to produce the fascist Nazi ideology of turning Eastern Europe into an Aryan settler-colony. In this process of counter-revolution, Nazi ideology racialized its most ferocious enemy: Bolshevism. Bolshevism, a revolutionary working class movement, was the primary existential threat to Nazism, the counter-revolution of big capital. The Bolsheviks, who supported the rebellion of the toiling colonized masses, were the antithesis of imperialism in general and especially its Nazi iteration. Losurdo writes:

"[Revisionist historiography] forgets that, in addition to calling for the transformation of the imperialist war into revolutionary civil war, the Bolsheviks also appealed to the slaves of the colonies to break their chains and wage wars of national liberation against the imperial domination of the great powers. Such repression makes it impossible adequately to understand Nazism and Fascism, which also presented themselves as a movement in reaction - extreme reaction - against this second appeal." (103)

Nazi demagogues painted the Russian Revolution as a "Judeo-Bolshevik" conspiracy, bankrolled by the supposedly economy-controlling Jewish capitalists. As Bolshevism, a movement born out of Russia, took on an anti-colonial character, Russian workers were increasingly racialized for "betraying" Europe and placing their lot with the oppressed rather than with imperialism and colonialism. In a way this process was the opposite that took place among ethnic minorities in the United States, particularly Italians, Poles, and Irish. While the latter groups assimilated into whiteness fully from their conditional status through embracing cross-class white supremacy (and especially anti-Black racism), the Bolsheviks embraced the toiling masses and national liberation; thus, their "whiteness" was "revoked." Hitler himself stated directly in Mein Kampf that the Tsarist Empire was a product of "the state-forming efficacity of the German element in an inferior race," whereas the "inferior" Slavic elements took power in October 1917.

The racialization of Bolshevism was a direct manifestation of historical Orientalism. Nazi SS leader Heinrich Himmler told a group of Waffen SS fascists three weeks after the invasion of the Soviet Union:

"When you, my men, fight over there in the East, you are carrying on the same struggle, against the same subhumanity, the same inferior races, that at one time appeared under the name of Huns, another time- 1000 years ago at the time of King Henry and Otto I- under the name of Magyars, another time under the name of Tartars, and still another time under the name of Genghis Khan and the Mongols. Today they appear as Russians under the political banner of Bolshevism."

However, this was not the first time that the Soviet Union faced an invasion of reactionary terror. After October 1917, the Bolsheviks fought a "Civil" War against the pro-Tsar White Army, the latter enjoying military support from 14 countries. As Losurdo notes, the anti-Semitic pogroms and lynchings carried out by the anti-Bolshevik White Army against Russian Jews and other ethnicities was "a chapter of history that seems to be a direct prelude to Nazi genocide." Anti-Bolshevism, anti-Slavic racism, and colonialism thus became intermeshed in the anti-Semitic Nazi program of extermination. Losurdo explains:

"Denunciation of October [1917] as a Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy now reached its most tragic conclusion. General Blum communicated the orders received: 'Eastern Jewry constitutes the intellectual reserve of Bolshevism and hence, in the Führer's opinion, must be destroyed.' As well as building the new colonial empire, the crusade in the East now aimed to detect and destroy the bacillus of dissolution wherever it was to be found. The 'poison of dissolution' that acted via Bolshevik cadres was to be neutralized once and for all, but without forgetting that 'the chief "carriers of the Bolshevik infection"' were the Jews. In Goebbels' words, 'Jewish terror' was the core of 'eastern Bolshevism', that mortal enemy of civilization. The Jews were doubly Oriental and doubly barbarous. They were an 'Asiatic people' alien to Europe and the West, as had been stressed by Houston Chamberlain and the anti-Semitic tradition that fed into Nazism; they therefore formed part of the 'native' populations. Furthermore, they were the inspirers of 'eastern Bolshevism' - were, in fact, the ethnic basis of the virus eroding civilization that was to be eliminated for good." (190)

This racist ideology of anti-Semitism provided the ideological narrative for the Nazi colonial project, which killed millions of Jews, Slavs, Romani, people with disabilities, LGBTQ+ people, and other oppressed groups. According to Nazism, Russia, far from being a bastion of "Aryan civilization", was a "host body" of the "Judeo-Bolshevik virus" that "infected" Europe.

The relationship that Russians and other Slavic peoples have with whiteness today cannot be evaluated in isolation from the history of Nazism and the racialization of Slavs and Bolshevism that went hand-in-hand with anti-Semitism and the entire Nazi project, a project deeply rooted in settler-colonialism, directly inspired by the United States and Canada.


Hannah Arendt and "Totalitarianism"

Most bourgeois historians have suppressed the colonial character of Nazi Germany and its conquest of Eastern Europe. Instead, they have gone as far as to conflate the USSR under Stalin and the Third Reich under Hitler as equally oppressive dictatorships. They conceptualize World War II and surrounding geopolitics as the struggle between "democracy" (imperialist U.S., Britain, etc.) and "dictatorship" ("Stalinism", Nazism).

One of the most popular ideologues of this argument was the Heideggerian philosopher Hannah Arendt for the theory of "totalitarianism", which equates Nazism with Communism (or "Stalinism"). Other proponents of this theory included George Kennan, Arthur Koestler, and George Orwell. In effect, this framework asserts that despotism "infected" the "civilized world" (Europe) through the "uncivilized" and "barbaric" peoples of Africa and Asia.

In The Post-Colonialism of "Cold War" Discourses (1988), William Pietz asserts that Cold War discourse displaced colonial discourse in the aftermath of World War II. Note that George Kennan located "totalitarianism" in the "Oriental mind" of Russians:

"[Russian] fanaticism, unmodified by any of the Anglo-Saxon traditions of compromise, was too fierce and too jealous to envisage any permanent sharing of power. From the Russian-Asiatic world out of which they had emerged they had carried with them a skepticism as to the possibilities of permanent or peaceful coexistence of rival forces. Here caution, circumspection, flexibility, and deception are the valuable qualities; and their value finds natural appreciation in the Russian or the oriental mind."

Hannah Arendt followed suit, asserting that "totalitarianism" was something "learned" from African tribes:

"When the Boers, in their fright and misery, decided to use these savages as though they were just another form of animal life they embarked upon a process which could only end with their own degeneration into a white race living beside and together with black races from whom in the end they would differ only in the color of their skin. They had transformed themselves into a tribe and had lost the European's feeling for a territory, a patria of his own. They behaved exactly like the black tribes who had roamed the Dark Continent for centuries.

"My point is not the awful, Conradian diction or even the stark conceptual separation between the European and the African. It is the effect upon the Boers and thence - so the retrograde diffusionist argument goes - upon Europe. We "degenerate" into a race-based, primitive and nomadic, rootless 'tribe' (or 'race organization') no better than them. Thanks to this contact with the primitive, not only do we come to think in terms of race (i.e. in a racist way), but this mode of thinking later morphs into a tribal nationalism that, in turn, becomes modern anti-Semitism and totalitarianism ('a whole outlook on life and the world'). This last phenomenon 'lies in the nature of tribalism rather than in political facts and circumstances.'"

Instead of locating the origins of fascism in the colonial violence of capitalism, it is located in the mind of the Oriental despot who, like a virus, has spread from the East into Aryan civilization. Pietz elaborates:

"It was Arendt's signal achievement to frame a set of historically grounded political concepts capable of locating the origin of 'totalitarianism' in general and modern European anti-Semitism in particular - and by implication, the responsibility for the Nazi holocaust - outside Europe, in the savage 'tribalism' of 'the Dark Continent.'"

The colonized are blamed for an outgrowth of colonialism itself; the socialist tradition is condemned as the catalyst for the very system most antagonistic towards it, fascism. Pietz states:

"American cold war discourse about totalitarianism served a double function: in regard to the Soviets, it justified a policy of global anti-communism by reinterpreting all struggles for national self-determination in terms of the geopolitical contest for zones of power against totalitarian Russia; in regard to Nazi Germany, it saved the traditional pre-war faith concerning 'the values of Western civilization' held by post-war foreign-policy 'wise men' by displacing the human essence of fascism into the non-Western world... The necessary conscience-soothing exorcism was achieved by affirming the equation of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, combined with an historical interpretation of the essential Orientalness of the Russian mentality. The basic argument is that 'totalitarianism' is nothing other than traditional Oriental despotism plus modern police technology. The appearance of the first truly totalitarian state in the heart of Europe was thus an accident, explainable by the fact that the technology permitting totalitarianism was invented by Western science and was thus first accessible in the West. Moreover, Germany's totalitarian moment is characterized by Kennan as a 'relapse' into barbarism; far from showing a flaw in Western culture, it proved the need for constant alertness in preserving our distinctly Western values."

A supposedly anti-racist theory reveals its racism in its implied upholding of "Western values", a distinctly fascistic, colonial ideal. As "European civilization" faces an existential threat of "barbarism", it tightens its ranks and purges itself of all but the purest elements. According to the Orientalist worldview, Russians have only been able to masquerade as white due to their frequent contact with Europe. However, once the veil is lifted, an essentially Oriental mind is revealed. Pietz again writes:

"History - specifically the pre-modern geopolitics of the Eurasian 'ecumene' which produced the 'Russian-Asiatic world' - explains the Oriental essence of the Russian mind. This mentality is distinguished by its ability, after centuries of direct contact with Europe, to appear civilized and to use this facade of civility for its own barbaric ends."

Not only was Cold War discourse anti-communist; it, in effect was also deeply racist, Orientalist, and provided cover for Nazi terror and its colonial origins. While Russians may have enjoyed conditional whiteness under Tsarism via participation in European imperialism, this privilege was quickly revoked upon the world-historic Bolshevik revolution for its anti-colonial character. The facade of whiteness evaporated, and all that was left was Oriental despotism, or so the racists argue.

On the one side there is Bolshevism, national liberation, and revolution; on the other, Nazism, colonialism, and imperial conquest. To reject the former is to provide tacit support for the later.


Russian "Exceptionalism" and Eurocentrism

A Eurocentric view of history asserts that, while Europe exists as a dynamic, linearly progressing bastion of "civilization", the "uncivilized" world (Africa, Latin America, Asia, and other places) is static and dormant. The "uncivilized" people have no history, existing as a feature of nature itself rather than as an active agent within it.

This teleological worldview attempts to measure all social formations by the standard of the development of industrial capitalism that took place in Europe. Of course, it sidelines the fact that western Europe developed the way it did precisely because of colonialism and genocide enacted on the rest of the world.

Even Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, in their earlier works, fell into this trap with the concept of an "Asiatic mode of production" separate from the slave, feudal, and capitalist modes of production as they developed in Europe. This idea is based on an understanding of Georg Hegel's concept of The Oriental Realm .

Marx outlines several basic features of this supposed mode of production in Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations (1857-58):

"...as is the case in most Asiatic fundamental forms, it is quite compatible with the fact that the all-embracing unity which stands above all these small common bodies may appear as the higher or sole proprietor, the real communities only as hereditary possessors...

"Oriental despotism therefore appears to lead to a legal absence of property, in most cases created through a combination of manufacture and agriculture within the small community which thus becomes entirely self-sustaining and contains within itself all conditions of production and surplus production."

This unfortunately aligns with the common racist myth that the "Orient" has a tendency towards despotism and dictatorship, which has intellectual roots dating all the way back to Aristotle .

Not only was this concept for the most part dropped by Marx and Engels, but Samir Amin (a Marxist) has theorized a "tributary mode of production" that encapsulates both European feudalism and economic systems based on land ownership in east Asia. However, the "left" has latched onto this "exceptionalism" for the East, continuing to characterize Russia as a timeless, supernatural social formation of Oriental despotism.

The Soviet Union, formed on the basis of the Russian Revolution of 1917, was quickly denounced by left communists as non-socialist, especially under Stalin. However, these theorists were unable to argue that the USSR was a capitalist formation in the traditional sense, because it clearly functioned like no capitalist society to ever have existed. Thus, "left" detractors of the Soviet Union resorted to creating ad hoc economic categories much like the way "Asiatic mode of production" was used to characterized the "exceptional" nature of the "Orient".

Raya Dunayevskaya characterized Soviet Russia's economy as "state capitalism":

"Since under the specific Russian state capitalism legal title to the means of production as well as the competitive market for such means have been abolished, how is appropriation achieved?

"Inasmuch as private property in the means of production has been abolished in Russia, it is a deviation from the juridical concept to permit accumulation within any enterprise since the state aims to increase only 'national capital'. Nevertheless, with the establishment of 'ruble control', enterprises were permitted to accumulate internally...

"The Stalinist Constitution of 1936 recognized the intelligentsia as a special 'group', distinct from workers and peasants. With this juridical acknowledgement of the existence of a new ruling class went the guarantee of the protection of state property from 'thieves and misappropriatiors.'"

Compare this with Marx's statement above that "Oriental despotism therefore appears to lead to a legal absence of property"; compare "national capital" and "new ruling class" with "the higher or sole proprietor". The Asiatic mode of production makes a reappearance, in so many words. Again, the despots of the Orient have achieved the impossible: capitalism without capital, and a ruling class with no legal property rights. Stalinist totalitarianism thus became the latest iteration of Oriental despotism.

Hillel Ticktin called the Soviet Union's economy a "non-mode of production"; yet again, Asiatic production exists outside of history, time, and space. It is a static, non-society without a mode of production and subsequently a political and cultural life. Italian "socialist" Bruno Rizzi and later a faction of the U.S. Socialist Workers Party (SWP) characterized the Soviet Union's economy not as socialist but rather as "bureaucratic collectivist":

"In the USSR the 'nationalisation' of property came in one swoop following the October revolution, but, since the concept of nationalisation has no scientific validity in Russia, in effect this was the generalisation in one swoop of state capitalism and its foster brother statism.

"What has happened to the economy? Has it become socialist? No, says Trotsky. Is it still capitalist? No, we say, precisely because of the law of the transformation of quantity into quality; it is Bureaucratic Collectivism."

Dunayevskaya, Ticktin, and Rizzi thus all latched onto the idea of an Asiatic mode of production. An Oriental despot (Stalin) has appropriated the (collective) means of production through totalitarian rule, absent legal property ownership. This application of the so-called Asiatic mode of production to the Soviet Union was put forth even more explicitly by Karl August Wittfogel in Oriental Despotism (1957), in which he "observed a transition from the old despotic governments to a new form of despotism represented by communist Russia, which could be considered as a new version of industrial-bureaucratic despotism."

The ghost of Oriental despotism and the Asiatic mode of production made an appearance yet again with the theory of Soviet "social-imperialism," which Albert Szymanski argued against . This charge that the Soviet Union was "socialist in words, imperialist in deeds" was first asserted by the Communist Party of China, and subsequently taken up by the Party of Labour of Albania and numerous U.S. Maoist groups in the New Communist Movement. Yet again, the Slavic despots have achieved the impossible: an imperialist version of socialism, and yet another (imperialist) ruling class with no legal property rights.

As left communists and U.S. Maoists alike have noted, legal property relations are secondary to productive relations, which underlie the economic life of a given society. Of course this is true; but to assert that the two can be wholly incongruent is an exercise in metaphysics. In this model, the Superstructure has a life wholly independent from the Base; form has transcended content.

In The 'State Capitalist' and "Bureaucratic Exploitative' Interpretations of the Soviet Social Formation: A Critique (1978), David Laibman produces an incisive critique of all of these trends:

"The power of capital, then is exercised through a heterogeneity of institutional structures no one of which, taken in isolation, manifests that function… Adequate comprehension of capitalism requires this complex structuring of concepts in which the capitalist function is determinant at the level of production relations but is simultaneously constituted by the proximate forms in which it is manifested. This approach must be contrasted with rationalist methodology of ideal types which focuses on 'essences' or 'deep structures' as uniquely 'real' and the proximate forms as mere illustrations 'at a lower level of abstraction' No more than the Hegelian Absolute Idea can the capital concept exist in disembodied form. Capital is not reducible to its form of existence; but neither is it separable from these forms…

"Capitalist production relations, and in particular the existence of a capitalist class or bourgeoisie, are not like a disembodied spirit that can inhabit one or another juridical form - i.e., state vs. private property - at will. As an important application of the dialectic of the production relations as a complex structure, one can neither merge the property form and the 'social process of appropriation' and mistake the form for the real relation itself; nor separate them, and speak of the underlying class relation as one of real 'appropriation' etc., without explaining the source and reproduction of the power appropriate."

In other words, Marxist dialectics allow us to understand the underlying relations of production in a given society through the really existing institutions and mechanisms that facilitate and reproduce them. Capitalism cannot persist without means by which to maintain and reproduce the accumulation of Capital. Capitalism is not some "inner essence" that invisibly persists in the DNA of a given society; it is a real process involving real actors and real mechanisms and institutions. Legal institutions are not identical with capitalist exploitation as such but they cannot be an isolated phenomenon wholly separate from the economic system of a given society.

Laibman aptly locates these critiques not in Marxism, but in Hegelianism, a philosophy of teleology, rationalism, and Eurocentrism. The Asiatic mode of production and the ruling class without legal property rights are wholly alien to Marxism. While those who call themselves Marxists have continuously put forth the arguments of Dunayevskaya and Rizzi as it applies to Russia, their arguments are both anti-Marxist and Orientalist in essence.


"Russian Imperialism"?

It is within this intellectual tradition that the new thesis emerges: since the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation has developed into a modern imperialist power, some claim even in the Leninist sense. While the form (Stalinist totalitarianism) is long gone, the content (Russian despotism) has lingered on. Tsarism, Stalinism, and Putinism are each manifestations of Oriental despotism, an inherent feature of the ahistorical Slav.

It would be quite difficult to argue that Russian Federation can be characterized as an imperialist power in the Leninist sense. Economic arguments aside, the "Russian imperialism" thesis cannot be separated from the theses above: state capitalism, bureaucratic collectivism, and the Asiatic mode of production. If the Russian Federation, boasting an economy based on the export of raw materials, constitutes an imperialist power, it would be the strangest one to ever exist.

Yet again, the Slavs have transcended reality: a ruling class without legal property ownership, capitalism without capital, socialism with imperialism; and now, imperialism without finance capital. Clearly, at least among the liberal left, arguments about "Russian imperialism" are based much more on racist fears and imperial chauvinism than a sober appraisal of Russia's economic situation.

The liberal media projects constant fear about Russian encroachment onto NATO territories, and has blasted Russia's air assistance to the Syrian government. They have also condemned Russian "interference" in Crimea and the Donbass, despite the high concentration of ethnic Russians in these territories and Crimea's landslide vote to join Russia . The spectre of "Oriental Despotism" has returned to Europe, the United States, and the rest of the "free world", hellbent on undermining Aryan civilization.

All of this is very ironic, given that NATO has been quietly deploying thousands of troops to the Russian border in Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Estonia for months now; and given that a far-right, NATO-backed military junta rules over Ukraine, persecuting ethnic minorities such as Jews, Romani, and Russians. This continuous uptick in anti-Russian hysteria has most recently manifested in the charges by the Democratic Party and its supporters that in fact Donald Trump is a puppet of the Kremlin in its plot to expand its Empire's influences across the globe.

The Democratic Party and Imperial Decay

In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), Marx famously noted:

"Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."

If Cold War conspiracies were a tragedy, the contemporary anti-Russian conspiracies of the Democratic Party are a farce. It is obvious, and thus has been widely noted, that the smear campaign against Russia reeks of McCarthyism and Cold War hysteria. This hysteria is in no way limited to the Democratic Party elite. Rachel Maddow spent over half of March talking about Russia. Newt Gingrich has even called for the establishment of a new House Un-American Activities Committee. The bourgeois T.V. news has gone as far as to "accidentally" refer to the Russian Federation as the Soviet Union. While the Soviet Union has been gone for over 25 years, the spectre of "Asiatic despotism" continues to haunt the paranoid Western powers.

Yet again, Arendt-esque Cold War discourse comes into play, this time perhaps through an even more openly Orientalist form. U.S. society cannot come to terms with the fact that President Donald Trump is a direct product of centuries of settler-colonialism and white supremacy. So, it blames Russia for "infecting" "American culture" with Asiatic despotism, this time in the form of Putinism. The racist logic of this argument is no different than Arendt's and the original Cold War fear-mongering. Therein lies the basis for re-asserting "American values", which in itself constitutes an ideology of white supremacist terror.

The red scare is being replayed through a broken projector; while the original McCarthyist witch hunts were an ascendant imperialist power's expression of fear of socialism, today's Russophobia is the desperate sigh of U.S. imperialism in utter decay. Russia is threatening to U.S. imperial interests because the U.S. is failing. Recent U.S. imperial conquests, especially in Syria, have been largely unsuccessful, and all the oppressed of the world continue to fight as the economic and political crisis of imperialism only deepens.



Ava Lipatti is a Marxist, anti-imperialist, feminist activist and writer. Her blog can be found at lonelyhourreflections.wordpress.com .