What's the deal with The Deprogram's guest this week?
What's the deal with The Deprogram's guest this week?
Konstantin Syomin has weird takes sometimes. Aside from being super pessimistic, he actually called China imperialist on the show with no pushback (well, maybe a subtle comment from Hakim). It was weird since during his previous appearance he really didn't talk about NATO or the US. Like I get he was talking about Russia since that's where he's located, but it came off as indirectly/unitentionally supporting Ukraine. At least he mentioned NATO in this newest episode, but he just shifted to China. It's one thing to have people on the show that have different views on things, but this guy just comes off as an ultra if anything.
I also kinda felt like he was self-censoring so much that it wasn't really worth having him on.
Permanently Deleted
The problem with the deprogram is that they're all too polite to interrupt one of their guests
People go on about China being imperialist when they can't even point to a single Chinese (neo)colony. And no, gesturing vaguely at Africa doesn't count. Africa is a continent with 40+ countries. Which one of those 40+ countries is the Chinese neocolony? "But China exports capital!" Yeah, and the fifth criterion from Imperialism is that the imperialist powers would territorially divide the world, which in the modern era means neocolonies. A cursory glance at how neocolonies are managed show that the colonizer constantly deploys troops into their neocolony to "restore order" or fight against separatists who are (not so) secretly funded by the colonizers. We see this right now in Niger where French troops are still in Niger and France is making a big fuss about how their French ambassador is "held hostage" by the Nigerien coup government, serving as possible casus belli for French troop deployment in order to "rescue" the ambassador. In truth, the Nigeriens want those French losers to gtfo Niger but the French ambassador refuses to do so and is now crying about being a hostage after the Nigeriens cut off their food and water supply. When was the last time you see Chinese troops involved in overthrowing a democratically elected government or assassinating anti-Chinese politicians?
They'll just say xinjiang is the colony
China is settler-colonialist.
I liked his episode. And I don't think his view is necessarily wrong, he said that there are 2 poles of imperialist powers China and the US which is true. Chinas approach is a "unity of opposites" thing whether you believe it or not, which means they are integrated into the imperialist world system. This also means that as other imperialist powers continue to be upset at China weakening their grip, there will inevitably be conflict as these are contradictions that can't be resolved amicably.