Don’t Confuse Landback with Balkanization

Imperialists have intentionally blurred the line between Landback and Balkanization. Well-meaning progressives and even many on the anti-imperialist left have enthusiastically championed both causes without realizing that some causes being presented as “decolonial” are playing directly into the hands of regime change operatives seeking to balkanize global south countries. Indigenous rights activists from the USA to Palestine are facing a battle in which their movements have been conflated with the bogus genocides and color revolutions sponsored by the US State Department with the intent to overthrow governments such as Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, and China. Countless activists believe Palestinian liberation is the same battle as Uyghur liberation. Others will talk about Land defenders and indigenous Hawaiian water protectors as though they have the same struggle as CIA-backed protestors in Hong Kong. At its core, atrocity propaganda that makes use of Landback is an effective tool to increase support for US imperialism toward its enemies, and also to distract from the atrocities we suffer every day under capitalism.

Nowhere do we see Landback weaponized more obviously than the nearly 50 years the US has spent trying to balkanize China. Even a cursory glance at western media’s coverage of China’s minorities paints a bleak, depressing image. They must be suffering under an Orwellian suppression of their rights and culture! Their religions are being crushed and they are being sent to camps! They are being forced to abandon their indigenous languages and learn a colonizing language!

The LA Times believes that Cantonese, a language that has more speakers than the entire population of Britain, is “under threat” and in need of rescue by Stanford, an English-speaking university that is built on stolen land

Presenting an enemy state as a zombielike monster that eats up local cultures is nothing new: Red Scare propaganda used the alleged suffering of ethnic minorities in the Soviet Union to create outrage toward socialism and distract the public from the very real racial abuses of the Empire toward Black communities. After the breakup of the USSR and the Yugoslav Republic, where has Balkanization left them? Are they better off as a large mass of weak, neoliberal republics in perpetual conflict with each other? Are these ethnic groups doing so much better now that they have been violently uprooted and forced into some of the largest migrant crises on earth, as they try to make their way to the homeland they happened to find themselves living outside of? Are they really doing so well in landlocked, resource-poor nation-states that must depend on powerful neighbors for virtually all imports and exports? Today, liberals have renewed the push to balkanize Russia even further after its involvement in the Ukrainian war.

Note how much of Russia’s territory is being given to violent colonial oppressors such as the United States. Would the locals in those regions fare so much better under American occupation?

People are being sold the impression that wherever minorities exist, they need independence. Whenever there is a protest against any government, that protest needs our support. Wherever a language is not the majority language, it must have been the victim of violent suppression. Whenever there are cops in any country, regardless of what kinds of people they are arresting, they must be pigs. We always say ACAB, even when those protestors are wearing swastikas and pocketing vast sums of cash from the US State Department. The anti-cop movement cannot afford to sacrifice optics for a nuanced view of what policing looks like in the Global South! All cops. People who live and suffer under fascist governments are projecting their own experiences with killer cops and minority repression onto other countries they have no knowledge of, outside of the media they consume. It’s hardly a surprise that they believe others suffer the same way they do, when their only context is US State Department funded media.

This is the breed of leftist that bases their entire worldview on catchy slogans that you yell at rallies while holding signs. Absolutely no nuance, investigation, or interest in anything other than viewing the whole world as Murica

The truth is, the segregation of all races and ethnic groups into their separate “homelands” is a fascist idea at its core. It essentializes race and ethnicity and ignores the fact that ethnic groups always live among each other instead of along cleanly cut political borders. Whenever Balkanization happens, millions of people are uprooted and inevitable conflicts will occur between newly formed governments who often had no say in how the borders were drawn by their colonizers. People who were part of a majority ethnicity in one republic but are currently living in a different republic will be forced to move out or face ethnic violence. Ethnonationalists and neo-Nazis thrive in these types of political climates, leading to even more violence and attacks against people who are caught on the wrong side of the border.

And then there’s the practicality of creating these Balkanized lands. Where will they trade? How about their access to the sea? Will they grow their own crops or import them? How about members of this ethno-nation who live outside of it? Will they be given a right of return such as what the false settler-state of Israel provides so it can more effectively colonize Palestinian land?

There is something truly disgusting about using the Japanese name for the region we know as Wuyue, a region in which Chinese people have lived for at least the last 4000 years. The Imperial Japanese colonizers considered Chinese people subhuman and slaughtered us in droves, murdering 20 million Chinese people during the war. What does using the Japanese name for Chinese territory say about this person’s intentions?

Much of the landback discourse targeting China is really a thinly veiled push to tear China apart and make China’s rapidly-growing minority regions face the same bleak future as what once was Yugoslavia. Taking China as an example once again, the loudest calls for Balkanization appear to center on the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and the Tibet Autonomous Region, with variably muted calls to balkanize Inner Mongolia, Hong Kong, and the former Manchukuo. With Xinjiang, Tibet, and Inner Mongolia, their feasibility to exist as truly independent states is extremely limited. They would be landlocked and have to depend almost entirely on powerful neighbors like Russia, India, or China for all imports and exports. Their people would have no direct access to the sea, and would have to rely on either flights out of their country (very harmful to working class residents who cannot afford to fly) or legal entry to neighboring countries for road-based travel out of their country. Xinjiang, Tibet, and Inner Mongolia are also mostly arid, mountainous, and desert climates that are rich in mineral and fossil fuel resources but poor in arable farmland and access to water. If these sound like the perfect country for the US to exploit for oil or minerals, that’s because they are. There’s a reason the US is so vocal about the rights of ethnic Uyghurs in Xinjiang but they have made no mention of Yanbian (mostly ethnic Koreans) or Liangshan (mostly ethnic Yi) which are both ethnic autonomous prefectures in the east of China. The US wants an easy target that can be kept poor and dependent on the US for its basic needs, and there’s no easier way than isolating these parts of China from the agriculturally productive and densely populated eastern portion of the country.

The corporate press takes advantage of white guilt and the desire of whites to be aggressively anti-racist and anti-imperialist, ironically selling them a white-savior narrative. Many on the left still believe that only liberal democracy and regime-change intervention from trusted, western governments like the US can save the Uyghurs and Tibetans from the oppressive, authoritarian regime of the Chinese. Once again, it’s whiteness that will save one group of POC half a world away from another group of POC who they have thrived with for centuries. Through atrocity propaganda, the mainstream is guilted into supporting imperialist causes through fake or exaggerated claims of human rights abuses.

As with most aspects of the United States, this was copied from their predecessors. The British and other European imperialists drew borders to deliberately split up members of the same ethnicity among several states, while forcing people of disparate groups into the same borders. This would foster ethnic conflict and infighting, keeping these newly decolonized areas weak and ripe for exploitation. This continues today, with the British colonial legacy strongly felt in Palestine, India, Cyprus, Ireland, Hong Kong, and countless territorial disputes between decolonized states.

The British Partition of India created one of the largest refugee crises in recorded history. Ethnic and religious violence spiked as Muslims and Hindus found themselves on the wrong side of the border. Up to 2 million people died, and 20 million people were displaced in these calamitous events. In subsequent wars, the British ruling class have continued to benefit from the exploitation of their former Indian colony. We can take lessons from these historical events and learn not to support them when the same colonizers call to Balkanize existing countries like China or Russia. Let’s not be unwitting tools of empire.

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