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I say with more empathy than you can know that your perspective is entirely cope for being socially maladapted. You don't know how intelligent most people are. You don't know how much empathy they actually have. You're just like a channer writing monologues online about how "normies" don't have internal monologues [citation needed!] and therefore are "NPCs". Society has hurt you and you've grown estranged from it, and in bitter loneliness you tell yourself stories of their inferiority (which, not coincidentally, implies your superiority) in order to sooth yourself. But you aren't superior and they are not the wretched creatures you have portrayed them as in their absence.
It seems to me unlikely that you will be able to outgrow this mindset without confronting it directly, which is why I am broaching the subject so directly. My access to a device to write these things is irregular, but I strongly encourage you to a) try talking to more people and b) actually read Mao.
https://afe.easia.columbia.edu/special/china_1900_mao_speeches.htm#foolish
I’m really enjoying this discussion, my question is, for imperial countries like the USA, wouldn’t the two mountains that need to be removed in this case be the Americans themselves? I can understand having little to no faith in westerners, but I will never lose my faith in humanity.
I’ve also been thinking a lot about population these days. Fascists obsess over white replacement, but maybe there is actually something to this. It’s obvious, but colonial projects tend to fail sooner when they have smaller proportions of “white” people. I think for instance that Korea never had more than five or at most ten percent of its population being Japanese during the colonial period, and the portion of Americans now living in the south is much less than 1% (which kind of negates this idea). Algeria was ten percent French, apartheid was officially swept away when South Africa’s population was ten percent white, and now Israel is disappearing when half its population consists of settlers. The USA however is about 70% settler, which makes it a much tougher nut to crack, since settlers almost always think of themselves as their nationality first and barely if ever conceive of themselves as workers.
I feel like this is a very boring answer, but it still needs to be given:
I think the main issue here is that you are starting from a lens of what borders on racial essentialism. The different historical examples you give have wildly different contexts (for example, the occupation of Korea being much more heavily military than the others you list, while white South Africans were overwhelmingly civilians -- whatever else might be said of them). I think the greater through line here is the one that any Marxist would point to first: class. Fundamentally, these societies of brutally exploited underclasses were setting themselves up for revolt by the very fact of their exploitation itself. What sets the US apart from these societies then is not the racial divide (though of course US society is highly racialized and it factors in to things) but that it is not primarily the site of the exploitation it carries out, i.e. it is imperialist, and therefore is able to temporarily "circumvent" the consequences of the basic principles of social stratification that all capitalist systems are bound by.
As imperial decline accelerates, more and more of the population you identified as settler (idk where you got 70% specifically from, but that doesn't really matter) is going to find themselves on the "brutally exploited" side of the above dichotomy, and from there, and with the necessary construction of dual power, it should not be difficult at all for them to be turned to the side of the colonized population as fellow exploited people.
So I believe that, in the framework of Mao's metaphor, the American people are still our God, and the mountains are capitalism and imperialism.
I'm far underread for this discussion but I think for most americans the mental/superstructural blocks to over come are the structure of race and whiteness and the perception of everyone as consumers.
Common GS W.
That's quite flattering, though expectations honestly terrify me