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Six signs someone is a neocon

Neoconservatives turn America into all the things it always tried to condemn in other nations - warmongers, tyrants, torturers and enemies of freedom. Guilty of launching the Iraq War, torture programs, and mass surveillance against their own people, there is seemingly no limit to what they might try to do.

Some of these traits may be shared simply by extremists on either side of the political spectrum, but any prominent person or intellectual adopting the below views is a neoconservative. They are a neoconservative because they have the views exclusive to the neoconservative ideology, complete with its absolutistic, utopistic bloodlust.

#1 Condemning “appeasement” regularly

They like to say “appeasement” frequently when describing supposedly weak responses to international conflicts, using it with regard to virtually every war, especially wars their country was already unethically involved in.

#2 Blaming the world's problems on a single “dictator”

They keep pointing to a single person as the public enemy at all times (usually a perceived authoritarian figure e.g., Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Bill Clinton, Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin). They portray all these people almost like some reincarnating bogeyman, and the extent of their political theory is that killing or impeaching this bogeyman over and over again will save the world. They claim that political events surrounding this dictator have moral clarity and are like a movie, complete with a beginning, a middle and an end at which this “villain” is killed or defeated, by them or some hero figure, usually an American.

#3 Saying “can”, “should”, and “must” too often

Usually this is preceded by the word “America” or “we” as shorthand for the nation, or Western military alliances like NATO and US or Coalition military forces, usually accompanied by the idea that these forces are invincible in war and are only held back by weak liberals. They might personally have the physical prowess of a potato resting on a couch, but believe that their suggestions about sending soldiers into combat makes them akin to a cape-wearing hero. They also might make statements that America would have won or even did win in Vietnam and Afghanistan, but was betrayed by liberals (very similar to the “stabbed in the back” Nazi myth about World War One).

#4 Hating Kissinger and Carter

They think Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser, is a coward for not sharing their simplistic good-vs-evil view of international affairs and conflicts. They might also really hate Jimmy Carter, seeing his administration as the weakest in American history. They might think America was later redeemed by the hero Ronald Reagan, seen by them as a superhero who single-handedly destroyed the Soviet Union. They hold the false belief that the Cold War was not a complicated affair ended by agreements, and instead insist it was simple battle between good and evil, believing that the good side (the West) won this “war”, and Russia surrendered and gave up its security (a key cause of the current Ukraine war).

#5 Advocating atrocities

They are willing to go on television and just advocate killing a civilian, even if this isn't their job, and think this is socially acceptable. They might think other members of their own society or fellow citizens should be censored, detained, tortured or killed for disagreeing with them on issues such as the above, presenting their own view as an unambiguously moral or factually correct default position rather than realising they are bloodthirsty fanatics for an ideology. They have no moral problems with torturing your body and killing your entire family if they judged you to be an impediment to their ideology (yet another trait they share with Nazis).

#6 Having protagonist syndrome

Another thing all neocons have in common is that their ideas are rooted in entertainment rather than reality. Neocons have Hollywood brains that love simplicity, villains, heroes, and a lot of violence against whoever they decided is bad (even if it later becomes clear that they are not bad). To quote someone taking the neocon path, “I had no knowledge beyond what I'd learned from Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rambo”.

While many on the pacifist left see Russia as hypocritical, modelling its actions in Ukraine on US aggression against countries like Iraq, it is once again the United States that seems to have brought faulty ideas about war and victory to Ukraine.

What kept causing defeat for the United States in foreign conflicts is not a weakness in its excellent military technology, but the intellectual bankruptcy of American leaders and strategists, many of whom are little more than dullards and thugs. For all their military might, such warriors don't understand what war even is.

Americans seem to regard war as nothing more than a shooting competition, getting overly fixated on acts of killing and talking about who they have killed. This may be because of the gun culture that the lives of most American military enthusiasts revolve around.

Killing the enemy

We saw the the trigger-happy approach on display by American leaders in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the mere deaths of insurgents or even civilians were portrayed as victories in the war. It was also a major weakness in the US strategy in Vietnam, which notoriously focused on body counts. Hence, attrition is always the main American goal in wars, despite there being no obvious end to it. It offers no threshold at which one can actually be calculated to win, or even any guarantee that the conflict will ever end.

American military leaders think war is defined as shooting the enemy, and victory is defined as the enemy being dead. The depth of their military thought goes no deeper than that. There is no thought to what happens next, and even less for any agency on the part of their targets.

Coincidently, I’m celebrating the 27,000 dead Russian soldiers and a bakers dozen dead GENERALS! How embarrassing for you!!#SlavaUkraine https://t.co/6n8F66y4ch
— Adam Kinzinger (@AdamKinzinger) May 22, 2022

In the American military mind, if you kill the enemy, and you keep killing the enemy, eventually they will all be dead and the war will be won. It does not matter what anyone is trying to do, or who goes where, as long as the enemy is being shot. Based on the reports bragging about the allegedly killed Russian generals and high Russian casualties, this idea is now being applied by American warmongers to Russian forces in Ukraine, even though Russians are far better equipped and able to defend themselves than other factions the US and its allies failed to defeat when applying the same philosophy.

No-one needs to die

Although it will surprise people who play computer games, making sure enemy soldiers won't go home to their mothers is not in tune with how wars are really won. No-one is keeping a score, and it is very often the loser that manages to achieve more 'kills' before losing (just look up deaths in the American Civil War or World War Two). This is because war is not even about killing anyone.

As Clausewitz famously stated, war is the continuation of politics by other means. And we also cannot forget Sun Tzu’s formulation, “He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight”. In other words, winning wars is as much to do with not killing people as it is to do with killing them. For Russians to learn that they are being killed by American weapons will not make Russians think they live in a safe world where they do not need to apply military force, and should seek peace.

Imagine if the situation was reversed. This would mean Russia bragging about causing American troop deaths in a war, and expecting America to then withdraw from foreign conflicts and give up on military solutions to threats around the world. Imagine, also, that this foreign conflict is happening just across the border to the mainland United States, and could spill over into American cities or include artillery being fired at such cities, the way the war in Ukraine threatens Russian cities. Would Americans cave in to the pressure, maybe deciding that their military is not very good, and give up?

In fact, needlessly killing an enemy and threatening them with death is not only absolutely irrelevant to waging a war effectively but just complicates the ability to wage it by making the enemy double down, because now they are even more emotionally invested in the conflict and the war is more personal. This approach produces fiercer and more numerous people willing to fight, especially when the war is waged close to home, as the Ukraine war is for Russians.

Understanding how to win a war is all about defining victory, which is actually nothing to do with killing or dying and can be accomplished with no casualties (like Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea, which has no parallel in the pointlessly bloodthirsty history of the United States).

Russia brings rulebook for winning

From the start of its intervention, Russia took the opposite view to American warmakers, with no particular interest in how many people it would kill in Ukraine. Even just getting started in what may be a long war, Russia has been just as interested in rebuilding infrastructure as destroying it. The West, on the other hand, tells of Russian brutality and talks up the West's supposedly humanitarian approach to war, but this is drivel. Rebuilding the cities they destroy is something the US and UK never do, and would never do. People in the West are okay with Ukraine becoming a desolated boneyard, as we have no attachment to the country. It isn't our neighbour, we don't know anyone there.

The second reason the US cannot win wars is because it sets no realistic objective, resulting in 'mission creep' as politicians and military leaders continuously imagine how they can hurt their opponent, with no clear idea of where the process ends. This is already a criticism of the US approach to the war in Ukraine.

Defining victory

The objective of wars is to win them, not necessarily to kill anyone. This means putting the opponent at your mercy, whether now or in the future, and then negotiating the end of the war.

The Taliban, through superior endurance, put the American military and the American people at its mercy in Afghanistan and won. It did this not through might, but through endurance: America lost the will to go on, yielding to pressure, while the Taliban did not. It may take a long time, but the side that has the staying power will always win, and the other side will eventually be put at its mercy. Russia has the staying power to stay where Russia and Russians are, and Ukraine is a neighbour of Russia and home to 8 million Russians – more people than the population of Finland. The West's attachment to Ukraine and the need to prop the country's regime up is a recent scheme from 2014 onwards, as fake as our attachment to the cardboard cut-out Afghan regime that collapsed in Kabul.

The United States will lose for the same reason it always loses: disinterest in the people on the ground or the need to win their hearts and minds. The US is involved for its own glory and its need to kill people it sees as bad. US weapons will always kill people, but the end result will not be a favourable political outcome any more than it was in Vietnam, Afghanistan or Iraq.

With the creation of the so-called Disinformation Governance Board in the United States, let us recall how social networks betrayed their purpose.

They tried to pry open your eyes and set them back to looking at the old faces that formerly monopolised your television screen, rather than letting you select your own information sources. Those other information sources are to be buried, suppressed, cancelled.

The very appeal of social media from day one was that it contained user-generated content, not approved by the establishment. That very feature, the central appeal of social media, is now berated as some sort of bug. It is "disinformation", now sidelined by the platforms, in deference to the content produced for television networks, as if all of Twitter is meant to be a substitute for the television screen.

The spread of “disinformation”, first and foremost conspiracy theories, was presented as an extraordinary evil that descended upon us like a thunderbolt from a clear blue sky, in 2016 and then during the pandemic when it arguably had the potential to do harm.

In reality, nonsense conspiracy theories were abundant on the internet ever since it began, and possibly even worse prior to 2016, when it only began to upset the wrong people, because it might have slightly affected the results of a US presidential election. They had no care for people believing false realities until it affected their power in some way.

Journalists and politicians have spectacularly managed to fool many users into believing that the very things they were looking for on the internet - those alternative views and products that grew after people became hostile to the mainstream - are actually some new inconvenience to the users. According to them, we must now suppose, the internet was actually just meant to be television 2.0, with the same ugly talking heads of authority speaking via it, telling us what opinions are acceptable. Why ever did we need to listen to normal or random people on the internet, when we could focus solely on the special people with crumpled foreheads and lucrative sponsors to tell us what to think?

Of course, in reality, people fled those rich journalists and talking heads to the internet because they were sick of them, and wanted rid of the mainstream media. They wandered the desert, searching for an oasis where people spoke their mind rather than a paid agenda.

Unfortunately, the journalists followed the audiences that had fled them, until they finally appeared on social networks and began to receive blue tick marks and favourable treatment. They pursued their desire to recapture their captive audience, to firmly strap the television sets back onto the audience’s heads and prevent them from escaping again like runaway beasts.

In short, once upon a time, realising what a parasite and a villain the modern “journalist” was, people fled to the internet. The mocking forms of “alternative media” and lackadaisical memes were born. People created their own news and conspiracy theories, and derided the establishment. However, like monsters, the mainstream media followed, transforming social media into but another television screen, and now they have you back in their clutches again.

Keir Starmer recently pointed out that Boris Johnson is a liar and has broken the law, pitching himself once again as a more moral character, an alternative to Johnson.

This seems to be Starmer’s main platform now. He is not Boris Johnson, in the same way Biden’s platform was to not be Donald Trump. It represents, in some ways, our descent as a country into American levels of immaturity.

Protesting too much

Starmer does not commit himself to anything and has broken his pledges. He is in some ways worse than Boris Johnson, because he refuses to apologise or acknowledge any fault, which makes him more like Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton than Johnson is. This is a type of person who sells his own moral character as his only redeeming quality, but that product is ultimately a dud.

Boris Johnson broke the law, but is paying penalties accordingly. As such, it is hard to agree with Starmer's calls that he should step down, much less that Starmer himself is the ideal replacement product. The reality is that we let people with power get away with some things, and it will be the same for Starmer if he becomes PM, and he would expect nothing less.

There is no reason to think that the loss of his job, even if it is the top job, is somehow also necessary. Johnson breaking lockdown rules did nothing to mismanage the country. If he did not mismanage the country, as appears to be the case from Starmer’s inability to locate the fault or give any argument other than saying the PM is a knave, then Starmer’s kind of political opposition really has nothing to offer.

Whose fault is this?

We are left with some questions.

Has politics and systemic political opposition in the UK become Americanised, to a point that it now focuses entirely on the character of the Prime Minister and the supposed alternative to him? Are we all going to vote for "not Boris" at the next general election, only to elect a plank of wood?

Whose fault is this deterioration, if it is so? The American political culture affects us, to a large part, thanks to a shared English-speaking media. People cannot be blamed, if their ability to think maturely about politics has been ruined by their consumption of American media and stupid debates that amount to nothing more than name-calling sessions.

The second round of the French presidential election is due on 24 April, and the imperilled identity of the country is the one indisputable thing that a majority of French seem to agree on.

Both rival candidates, Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, are controversial, especially when it comes to their relations with French Muslims. Who is perhaps worse is not entirely clear.

Two demagogues?

Marine Le Pen compared Muslims praying in the streets, with the German occupation of the country. Emmanuel Macron stigmatises Muslims and cracks down on those who raise their voices in opposition to this. In addition, who can forget his steadfast defence of offensive drawings of the Islamic Prophet Mohammed?

Worst of all for French Muslims could be Macron's goal to rewrite Islam to be more liberal and appropriate to his vision of France. He also made an effort to close the French Council of the Muslim Faith, dissatisfied with it and with any perceived foreign influence, including simply the international communion that exists between believers across the world.

Unfortunately, France should simply be considered hostile to Islam. Between the two presidential candidates, Macron might be the more insidious, trying to actively distort Islam and interfere in the freedom of conscience.

Le Pen, despite probably having a more negative reputation with Muslims (similar to Trump), is just old-fashioned rather than insidious. She would not likely try to interfere in and pervert other people's faith, even if her policies would be more directly confrontational with France’s Muslim community, with such absurd measures as fines for wearing headscarves. It is also noticeable that Macron is a zealous Israel-supporter, going as far as to label Israel critics as enemies of the Republic, a bizarre attack that strikes directly at the consciences of Muslims more than Le Pen has done.

Civilisation anxiety justified?

Regardless of the outcome of the presidential election, France will struggle to reconcile the consequences of its imperialism and its attempts to maintain a culturally uniform nation-state. This could eventually result in separatism and violence in decades to come.

France’s differences from Britain are that Britain is not a secular state, and Britain accepted its overseas people as distinct cultures, with little interest in assimilation, as there is no Britishness to assimilate into (all aspects of our identity, from food to flags and even the Union itself, are the cumulative imperial booty acquired by Norman conquerors, so there is no core Britishness to be anxious about, like the core Frenchness).

Regardless of the passing novelties of culture, falling like leaves in the autumn, there are indispensable riches that transcend even a dead civilisation or social order, to persist. The essential heirlooms of a civilisation are protected and planted again, like acorns.

The origin of the term "radical" came from the Latin word for "root". Those who were radical would hack at the root, or get to the root of the problem. They would, to use an expression favoured by Jean-Paul Marat, bring the hatchet (or ax) to their root.

Inevitable moral decay?

Far from needing to be hacked down, trees eventually die by themselves. If nothing else brings illness to the tree, its death can occur when it becomes so large that it can no longer support its own weight. Then, however majestic it may seem, it will collapse. A tree may even rot while it stands, such that its great size and apparent triumph over other trees may mean nothing.

There have been successive civilisations that were at the centre of the economic life of the world. Sumeria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Rome, and the more vaguely defined "Western civilisation" of the present day, with its multiple centres in London, Washington DC, Paris and elsewhere. There is no disputing that each of them collapsed, nor can we dispute that the collapse was necessary for the continued excellence of humanity, although the modern one cannot countenance its own ultimate fate as anything similar.

Many people of a conservative persuasion believe they see things rotten about our society, things that are continuously changing for the worse. They may point to increased sexual liberty and rights that were not typical of the higher and more accomplished stages of a civilisation. It has been argued that a higher civilisation adopts puritanical moral structures and a focus on scientific and artistic accomplishments in order to impress, and that denying excessive sexual liberty assists in this because it helps to keep humanity focused on human excellence rather than primitive joy. Those of a liberal persuasion, on the other hand, welcome any increase in personal liberty, and will only laugh at the above, but their response likely isn't any newer than the views of people during other declines.

It is difficult to form a rational case in relation to the idea of the moral corruption of society, because the outcome depends on one's pre-existing values. The very process of analysing flaws in the moral character of society requires first of all adopting values without rational justification, such as the view that excellence and intellect are better than laziness and pleasure.

How to detect decadence

Decadence, the steady loss of what gave a culture its value, may manifest in worsening cultural products and art forms that are not worth saving, in contrast to the creations of what would have been considered the works of a higher civilisation in its golden age. Everything is just a passing, worthless thing. This may result in a decreased ability to identify with any kind of culture and eventually, with other people in society. Even still, we may still have powerful governments, reminiscent of empires of old, dependent on the inertia of past accomplishments, up until the moment of their failure.

The idea of decadence implies that those who succumb to it either don't recognise it or don't recognise a problem with it, maybe instead being pleased with it. The concept suggests that a society can become sick without even realising it, because its own capacity to recognise goodness or judge itself is also being corrupted, succumbing to the same cultural and intellectual sickness it cannot see.

Decadence also signifies age. If it is a real sickness, it is inescapable and everyone is somewhat infected. Where the conservative is wrong might, then, not be in his dismay at the diminishing of moral or cultural value, but in his delusions that he can do anything to reverse it. A dead tree cannot be restored to a living one, and the clock cannot be turned back on society. Only a fresh acorn, planted elsewhere, has any potential after that.

To fell the tree

It is possible to appreciate both the progressive and the conservative, to see their roles in history.

The believers in progress perform a necessary role in the life of a civilisation, allowing the adoption of new ideas, new scientific models, and new technologies, but any kind of utopia may ultimately prove impossible or harmful, and so the reactionaries also have a valid role. If indeed a civilisation collapses, those who depended on its present state are not going to be the seeds of a new tree; only conservatives could create new civilisations or establish the next outposts of progress. Think what you like of them, but they bear with them a tried and tested formula for how to construct a society and civilisation, whereas the modern liberal only bears faith in the progress of the existing model and will refuse to go back to past traditions or simplicity.

The conclusion that necessarily follows from identifying what is considered decadent is that a thing is unworthy of respect or loyalty, once it is sufficiently debased that you no longer identify with it. It follows that a decadent culture or civilisation imperils those outside of it, like a rotten tree that threatens to fall when it might be inconvenient and should therefore be felled with all urgency. Its destruction, like that of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Bible, can eventually be justified.

The notion of decadence, the eventual degeneration of a society or civilisation due to its own failings, once fascinated scholars. However, such a notion is now virtually unheard of except to some conservatives.

Interest in the idea of civilisational deterioration and collapse could have diminished because the idea was offensive to believers in the creed of perpetual social progress and development. Western campuses have, for a long time, been unfriendly to any idea that could align with reactionary rhetoric, such as a theory about moral decline, so most eminent thinkers in the West will avoid the topic completely.

Those of us most likely to talk about some form of civilisational decadence or moral deterioration gripping the developed and so-called "civilised" countries, namely the West, are likely to be of the reactionary mindset. This was not always the case.

There was a Marxist-Leninist notion of decadence, although it had no social or moral meaning and was only an economic observation. This was simply the theory that the epoch of capitalism could come to the end of its life, as capitalism could exhaust itself as a model of progress and from then on, only destroy its own accomplishments through war or turn into imperialism.

Civilisational longevity

In liberal and secular humanist thought, there seems to be no heed given to the longevity of one's culture or civilisation at all. All rational discourse is focused on the welfare, happiness and rights of individuals in the here and now. There is no thought for the morrow, as everything is invested in just doing what is right today. This is miraculously subverted when the issue of human survival is brought up. As soon as scientists suggest building settlements on Mars as a long-term investment against an extinction on Earth, the modern liberal is likely to support that endeavour, apparently forgetting that it does nothing for the welfare or rights of the individual.

People of the liberal persuasion are inhibited from investing in civilisational survival as any kind of priority, because it entails a kind of collectivism that could clash with individual rights. If investing in the distant future of humanity or our civilisation is made into any kind of priority, it could result in restrictions on behaviour that are offensive to individual liberty. It could, for example, result in social pressure to reproduce, which the liberal ideology prefers to treat as being solely the concern of the individual, not of the society or species.

It could be that a civilisation with a liberal monoculture could persist indefinitely, because it might gain traction with everyone on our planet, and hence there would be no threat from inside or outside. However, against a civilisation that has a sense of its own survival and longevity, a liberal civilisation may be an inadequate competitor.

While the Chinese civilisation could have a very strong awareness of itself and its needs, a liberal civilisation in the West may simply be a swarm of wandering individuals who are increasingly disparate, self-interested, and have no thought for whether their own civilisation could or should survive to tomorrow. Invariably, there will be those who will cry out now and claim that the Western liberal civilisation must be defiantly preserved and fought for, but is that not contrary to its own thesis, placing the focus on the individual's happiness? By being synonymous with liberalism, the West is unable to cast off its liberal preferences or put the civilisation's longevity ahead of the individual.

Cultural liberalism as decadence

Perhaps the granting of inordinate liberty to people is indeed decadence, a celebration of vice, which undermines the bonds that held society together and once made it anything worth fighting for. That is certainly what those of a conservative religious mind will tell us. There will always be those of that mind, and their greater moral certitude and reliance on a proven path of tradition may be a kind of inoculation against any peril that could originate from the excessive fixation on individual liberty.

The answer as to whether our current society or civilisation is destined for collapse due to moral decay cannot be asserted by me, but such a situation, even if real, may not be as troubling as it sounds. There are enough reasons to suspect some sort of civilisational collapse could occur, but it is unlikely to happen on a truly global scale or simultaneously in multiple countries.

Despite the globalisation, the world is actually becoming too fragmented for any kind of global failure of society and civilisation, and may even be too fragmented for a shared economic collapse. Countries and regions even within the West are taking quite different courses socially (the French and British approaches to how to manage cultural diversity, or the differences between individual US states on LGBT rights and birth control, for example, are very different).

If conservative worriers about a moral collapse are right, then, to use the metaphor of the Titanic, there is still reason to think the West is large enough and divided into enough compartments to stay afloat in some form. It won't be going down, in whole, even if the worst predictions of moral decay are valid.

The European Union's attempt to impose a liberal monoculture on all member states risks destroying the entire EU project.

Unelected EU authorities, in this case foreign judges at the European Court of Justice (ECJ), have clashed with the parliaments of sovereign states that represent nations comprised of millions of people, threatening them with funding cuts.

Progress forced

Far from "democratic values", what the EU says it wants to impose on Poland and Hungary using funding cuts as a weapon amounts to some specific cultural changes. It is in the hope of changing their stubborn attitudes to LGBT content and immigration, that resistant countries are to undergo this forced conversion to the Euro-liberal ideology. Even if one supports this ideology and considers it to be a fulfilment of social progress, funding cuts seem like an awful way of achieving it.

The EU wants the power to ensure that the next generation in places like Poland are educated and inculcated in such as way that they will share the EU bureaucrats' cultural opinions, and will help stamp out their own local Catholic traditions and values. Without the monolithic liberal monoculture, which the Pope referred to as one-track thinking, the ideological righteousness and uniformity of a superstate can be in jeopardy.

Siege against the majority

What is happening is a basic failure of statecraft that creates significant division in even one country, let alone a confederation of multiple nation states. It is a rejection of the sovereignty of a people, which always leads to the oppression of that people. One cannot impose compliance with a set of cultural norms on a region or nation without oppression, such as as this financial siege the EU now threatens on disobedient countries.

Action by the EU is also unlikely to improve the situation for minorities the EU supposedly wants to make life easier for. They too will be hit by indiscriminate financial punishment of a country. As well as being morally problematic, financial punishment of a country due to the majority sentiment against a minority is folly from a pragmatic point of view. It may only increase acts of hostility by majority against minority, with the latter being now associated with a foreign siege against the nation, thereby having the opposite effect to what the EU hoped, even if the nation eventually yields.

Disregard for sovereignty

The utter disdain for the self-determination of nations, the very basis of democracy, being displayed by the EU is yet another manifestation of a familiar colonial arrogance. This disdain is part of the same mindset that brought Western armies to Afghanistan, only to cause more suffering and problems before falling back in retreat after twenty years of failed vision.

Many people value their national culture and identity more than any economic benefit, which drove Brexit against unheeded warnings of empty shelves and queues. Rather than give in, people in places like Poland should be prepared to endure significant hardship to resist and abandon an imperious confederation

If the Poles eventually decide they have had enough of the EU, they can always look to the seas, learn from Britain, and count on us as a trading partner. In addition, it would not take long for other countries to leave.

While originating as a positive term, "woke" could become a pejorative used by the political right. It conflates a number of different things, and isn't useful.

Woke, like the other pejorative SJW (social justice warrior) points at all kinds of things at once, many of them being entirely appropriate or essential to a good state and receiving support from all across the political spectrum in every country.

The #MeToo movement

For example, the #MeToo movement entirely fits the descriptions of "woke" and "SJW" and represents the same generational change of values, and is responsible for bringing down both Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein. No one will dispute that this is a good thing.

Will anyone, even the most extreme reactionaries, step forward to defend these men against the "woke" women who stood up to them? No-one? In fact, many right-wing Republicans love the #MeToo movement because it incriminated some specific Democrats. Therefore, by their own admission and by their own definition, even members of the extreme right are "woke", at least on this issue.

Anti-racism

Anti-racist activists mix with, and are often the same people as, anti-war activists, as is the case with the many in the Green Party of the United States. Anti-racism should not even be considered left-wing and is in fact simply responsible statecraft when one's country accommodates multiple races. It is bizarre that combating racism is even considered controversial. Most countries in the world accommodate multiple races and cultures, and preventing sectarian and ethnic tension is absolutely essential to maintaining the state.

Where anti-racism backfires, however, is when it increases tension and decreases community cohesion. If any ostensibly anti-racist policy increases tension or decreases community cohesion in any way, it is potentially damaging both to workers' rights and to the stability of the state and is bad policy. This is why the issue has to be handled sensitively, as it is in the UK, unlike the US.

Cancel culture

Cancel culture is the tolerance towards another person or group using their position in a company or organisation to arbitrarily deny and suppress points of view, perhaps with pressure from riotous groups and threats. It is increasingly done in companies and academic bodies.

Of course, some ideas are too fringe to be accepted, and the internet has created false expectations that even the most absurd ideas must be taken seriously and deserve time. The fringe ideologues will invariably shout about some extraordinary "censorship" and "cancel culture" destroying civilisation, despite the fact it would be entirely impossible for them to voice their ideas prior to the internet and current platforms existing.

Cancel culture is problematic due to its arbitrary and top-down nature. All it takes is for executives at the top of an organisation to deem even a valid statement as unacceptable (for example, Facebook might deem that criticism of Facebook is unacceptable disinformation). Then, it is completely scrubbed from public view. Control of virtual environments and control of platforms can allow things to be completely denied. It can be argued that the exercise of such power is of significance to the state, and therefore mandates the state taking it over instead of leaving it to private individuals.

As an example of what can go wrong, cancel culture has the potential to eventually come into conflict with the first example of the so-called "woke" politics, the #MeToo movement. If executives who happen to be in charge of influential platforms were accused on those platforms, they would be able to silence everything against them. Any arbitrary power eventually results in arbitrary enforcement of arbitrary rules and can create a group of people exempt from all the rules they force on others.

The confusion is bad

Rather than assigning labels, positive or negative, like "woke", people should use proper descriptions of what they're talking about. A lot of polarisation is probably the result of abject confusion, with people rallying around words that mean nothing.

People opposed to cancel culture may find themselves bitterly arguing with people opposed to sexism, without realising they hold the same views. They became attached to meaningless words they found on the internet, and wanted to hurl these words around.

And now the whole world is infected.

The United States' values, exported so confidently to the world, may be contradictory and confused when practised by such a powerful central state. They really are the values of a non-state militia, which the US government originated as.

The United States was founded by people who committed treason and riots. Since then, America emerged from a long isolation and into the fortunes of war and conquest, and then began presenting its anti-state values as a model for states. As such, not just modern liberal interventionism but even the values of 1776 are at fault for confusing and undermining other countries.

US allies like Britain, dependent on American military and economic power to look strong, pretend we share American values. We don't, and even promoting them verbally and repeating the rhetoric is incredibly foolish of British authorities, but that is a matter for another time.

America's presidents are encased in bullet-proof glass to protect themselves from their own ideology.

The right to overthrow tyrants

The American right to bear arms is, in the current view of Americans, meant to defend against an abusive government. In keeping with it, America stands ready to provide arms to people in other nations to help them overthrow their apparently oppressive rulers.

To teach someone that your country (the state) is for freedom (revolt against the state) produces such problems for a state as whistle-blowers who expose its war crimes and gunmen eager to shoot politicians. Although the former can be obviously beneficial to the community, neither are conducive to a super-state's effectiveness or power.

Even Julian Assange and other "anti-American" publishers, silenced by the US government, acted on values related to countering excessive government authority. Those are values that originated in the creation of the United States. They are eating one of their own children. Assange isn't motivated by the values of Russia, China, Germany or even Britain. In these countries, if you break the law, you are bad, and that is the end of it.

British authorities reacted more harshly to whistle-blowers and activists than even the Americans, just as they act more harshly towards any mockery of the government. The British authorities really are horrified simply at the idea that anyone might break the law under any circumstances, even if nobody gets hurt.

Only Americans, or those influenced by them, debate whether breaking their own laws is okay. Admittedly, though, America's influence is so vast that it now reaches all of us - even those who prefer not to admit it.

The "traitor" Edward Snowden was in fact a highly patriotic individual and, on a darker note, so were every American implicated in the treason of the January 6 Capitol Attack. They were firm believers in the US ideology, and it led them to become the biggest betrayers of the US government.

Domestic terrorist land

Unlike in other countries, American seditionists all think they are loyal to the nation, and they are doing as they were told. They were not indoctrinated by a foreign power or terrorists, but by their own constitution, their own government's rhetoric.

Even the wording of the pledge of allegiance allows for Americans to seemingly identify their own politicians as traitors. It does so by stating that you are not pledging allegiance to the state but to a written constitution that has enemies "foreign and domestic".

The US government makes a conscious attempt to avoid its values undermining itself, by shifting all the emphasis on freedom and liberty to an aggressive foreign policy against tyrants abroad while encouraging loyalty and obedience at home. The problem is that these are polar opposite values, and everyone at home is listening to the foreign policy rhetoric too.

If they want, Americans can just turn off the TV when the government appeals for loyalty and obedience, and watch the TV when their government celebrates the death of state officials and "tyrants". People are then left with a lust for the government's blood, thanks to its irresponsibility.

At least on social media, you are likely to find a significant overlap between those Americans who supported the Capitol Attack and those who voiced approval of uprisings in Iran, Venezuela and Cuba in keeping with US aims.

Every time the US government opens its mouth to talk about liberty and rising up against oppression, it is accidentally encouraging its own population to overthrow the government. Such messaging also pervades American culture. American movies extolling the virtues of overthrowing the state encourage them to overthrow the state.

While most states are accustomed to hypocrisy and breathe it to survive, normal citizens aren't. Most people try to stick to the values they hold in their hearts, and Americans are very much like that. They can't help trying to destroy the government if they have been taught an ideology that endorses destroying the government.

This explains the "domestic terrorism" problem. It isn't really new or alien to America, but is what made the country. From the moment those first domestic terrorists took up arms against Britain to gain independence, America was destined to be domestic terrorist land.

Loyalty or liberty?

The contradiction in how the US handles "freedom" is evident in the role the US played in creating the internet and encouraging it in other countries, and the extent to which it now fears foreign influence feeding back through the internet to America.

American engineers and entrepreneurs, who really believed in the values their state preached, actively created ways to encourage freedom and bypass censorship. The US state, however, turned out to be one of the biggest complainers about the internet and independent media, whining that Russians and others were using tiny social media accounts to undermine US democracy in 2016.

Social networks themselves showed signs of becoming state-like despite their anti-state origins too, and are provoking states to wrestle with them. Still, America and American companies demand other countries be "open" to their supposedly benign media influence, while America itself slams its doors to any other country's influence, labelling it as malign.

Militias are present in the US, and talk of opposing the government is commonplace. The groups see themselves as counterparts to fellow Reagan-style "freedom fighters", contras and protesters supported overseas by the machine of the American state.

Repeated US encouragement of overthrowing corrupt regimes and dismissing election results must have at least helped encourage the Capitol Attack on themselves, and the conflicted ideology encouraging disloyalty and loyalty makes it certain to happen again. Many Americans perceive their own government as a pretender, helped by their belief in values that always dismissed authority and celebrated mutiny.

Past isolationism and minimisation of the government's role allowed a country to exist despite its destabilising insurrectionist values. Thanks to their aggressive assertion across the world, such values are louder than ever but risk backfiring.

Maybe as long as ten years ago, I heard about the problem of items and fat accumulating in the sewage system, forming what is known as fatbergs. However, more than just being the problem of the infrastructure - of the state - a similar build-up in plumbing threatens the homes of those causing the problem, so they ought to care.

This problem was always the problem of the individual, in the sense that individuals are causing the problem by what type of waste they attempt to wash away and in the sense that ultimately it will have repercussions for the individual if the infrastructure suffers. However, is it possible that the threat to individual homes is somewhat exaggerated? Authorities sometimes exaggerate or even lie in order to move individuals to action, where they were unmoved by the plight of the collective.

Your country needs you

In the past, it was possible to move people to action through patriotism or some notion of the collective good. The call to do something for your country was one that could motivate people. As the appeal of selfish individualism grew globally, likely through the spread and normalisation of American popular culture, appeals to national wellbeing may have fallen on increasingly deaf ears.

As a result, we now have people in countries like Britain, who fundamentally cannot grasp that problems affecting the state and the infrastructure could have any effect on them. They instead view the state as an unwelcome and intrusive authority, whose problems don't concern a citizen - some sinister big brother with his own agenda.

The ability to maintain infrastructure such as roads and the sewage system, and the ability to provide emergency and medical services are things anyone can scoff at and say they don't need them. Maybe they have a big off-road capable car, so they don't need the roads. Maybe they have experience of camping in the wild, so they don't need the sewage system. Maybe they carry guns and first aid kits, so they don't need the police or any medical workers. Such a person is rare, and they likely still are dependent on something maintained by the state, without being aware of it. The point of this post, though, is not to deride libertarianism or minarchy; most of the work done by states could hypothetically be provided by non-states in a possible future. The point is that many people bafflingly believe a problem isn't theirs until it directly affects them.

You don't need your country?

In the case of the selfish individualist, they soon realise they need a hospital if their child becomes ill, but most of the time this isn't happening, so reading about hospitals closing down probably doesn't bother them. They hear of other people's children getting ill, but their own child seems very healthy, so they don't need hospitals. This kind of thinking is exactly the problem.

Governments do not manage your life, but manage the lives of millions of people. As such, you can say you don't care what the government wants, but the state is built in such a way that you will suffer the consequences of that attitude if the infrastructure and services break down. The state won't be so rude as to say it does not care about you, but it indeed does not care, and it suffers no consequences for that attitude. Although your life ends with you, the state's life continues with everyone else, so it will always be more concerned about the wellbeing of the collective than an individual's sob story. This is at the heart of the debate over the current pandemic and the issue of vaccinating the population.

An immunised population

The state wants the population vaccinated against this pandemic. It is absolutely sensible, from the point of view of those authorities who manage millions of lives, to do what is best for that mass of people, including those millions who are vulnerable to disease. For an individual with no medical disorder putting them at risk, however, the state's goal appears intrusive.

You, you may say, are not individually at risk. But, the state retorts, what of one person's risk to others? And what of the risk of failing to efficiently manage the health of many millions of people? What of the risk to the medical services, if they should fail? 'Not my problem,' you may then say.

Then, enter the exaggerations and (possibly) the lies.

Noble lies

The state's advocates, being tasked with the health and wellbeing of millions of people rather than the comfort of the individual, are pushed to be economical with the truth in order to convince the individual to do something. If people are too selfish to see the value in any kind of collective or state wellbeing, it is inevitable that authorities will eventually try to convince them that their individual wellbeing is more at risk than it really is.

None of this should be necessary, but it seems as though it is. We are faced with the modern citizen's immature selfishness, poseur individualism and anti-establishment bias, all accidentally inspired by the American global pop culture.

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