Gaslit by the Olympic flame

We’ve been told forever that everything is on the verge of collapse. We await anxiously for collapse of the US dollar and collapse of the US Empire.

Collapse may portend disaster, but that in itself won’t do; the world is rife with disaster right now, so perhaps collapse is underway. The world, that is, is not set to collapse but is rapidly collapsing all around us, every day.

Yet “collapse” is also becoming conventional. All of us write papers, blogposts, articles, books portending some coming future disaster. Such a posture, of a future doomsday scenario, is a version of “holier than thou” prophesizing and immediately entails two (bogus) presuppositions.

The first is that if we just make the disasters at present known (to anyone within earshot), the world will collectively “wake up” and, once awakened, real change will follow. All of your typical alt-influencers on social media who record podcasts and sit comfortably in a sound studio begin with this assumption—as if they are saying the unsayable or blazing new trails.

We may hear more these days about how awful Jews are, for example, suggesting that people are finally facing the obvious. Yet simply stating the obvious is no reason to celebrate because these alternate discussions are easily locked up in local echo chambers. The Big Lie Propaganda Machine (BLPM) responds not by shutting these chambers down but by expanding them indefinitely. This is the easiest and most effective way to defang them.

The second is that these disasters are unprecedented. They are not. They have been happening for decades and even centuries. Rather than peel backwards to entertain the notion that we have never lived under a time of peace, equality or justice under the auspices of capitalism, we look forward to a coming collapse that will never materialize. Disaster capitalism has always been the norm. Moreover, the methods of managing disaster have now improved. So no reason to suppose that just because we are now more aware of more disasters that, in the aggregate, there really are more disasters.

False-flags, fake news, patsies, rigged elections, currency manipulation, extractive wars, exploitation, surveillance, have always been the norm going back centuries. If you were to take a snapshot of headlines of any given year of America’s existence since 1776, you could easily find evidence of all of these things. This idea of “discovery” (of evils afoot) is a form of gaslighting. You are made to believe that change is imminent simply because the news cycle (even the alt-news cycle) now has new content in circulation that threatens the entire system. This is a total illusion.

Look at the current uproar in China these days over the obviously rigged doping protocols forwarded by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) which is (lo and behold!) unfairly targeting Chinese athletes.

China pretends (and possibly believes) that this is something new. Have you been paying attention? The Russian Federation has been banned from the Paris Olympic games for the exact same reason. They say it’s because of the war in the Ukraine, but we all know this is a croc. Russia is banned because they are a non-Western country with the ability to actually win the games.

Yet this part of the story never fits into any discussion about the so-called “doping scandal” in China. The average Chinese who complain about unfair treatment at the hands of WADA seem to have no idea that the smears against China first started against Russia and date back to Soviet dominance of Olympic sport, which makes the problem not a new one but a tiresomely old one. Yet we pretend that if we (China or whoever) just make it known, things will change, the world will come to its collective senses and realize that sport has been weaponized.

Yah no shit!

Russia has been totally humiliated at the last four Olympic games, including the 2022 winter games in Beijing, the 2020 summer games in Tokyo, and the 2018 winter games in Pyeongchang. At each of these events, Russian athletes could not wear their national colors, could not man the podium under the banner of their own flag and national anthem, and could not even call themselves members of the Russian federation! (For anyone keeping score in Paris, Russia was allowed to send a paltry 15 athletes and won a total of zero medals.)

Do you know that Russia has been retroactively stripped of a total of 51 Olympic medals? Are you going to be outraged and aghast at the injustice when WADA and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) begin doing the same thing to China?

Do you also know that accusations of doping have been hurled at Russia since 1976 when they dominated the summer Olympic games in Montreal and were set to continue doing so at the subsequent gathering in Moscow in 1980? Not only did the Americans begin their smear campaign in the fallout of being destroyed by the Soviet Union, they proceeded to boycott the games in 1980, supposedly over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Are you seeing now how history repeats itself? Are you seeing how and why it is important to peel back? Or will you continue feigning outrage moving forward?

I don’t mean to pick on China exclusively here; the whole world feigns this sort of outrage. But I will say that China under Mao would have had no such illusions. The depoliticization of politics that has occurred in China since Deng in the 1980s has placed reality on the backburner. Over the course of China’s 30-year transformation to become what it is today, it has certainly succeeded in securing for itself a greater share of the world’s surplus wealth.

But concomitant with “opening up and reform” is the import of the same chicken-shit victimary protestations that is par for the course in the West. We all remember after 9-11 how the majority of the depoliticized American middle-class could only shed hot tears in consternation and wonder, “Why do they hate us?”

China’s middle-class has now fully adopted the same cry-baby stance that has been exported to Russia and beyond. Why would Russia, as a self-respecting nation, that is, continue to send athletes to the Olympic games at all? Because a fair slice of their population still wants to be part of the cosmopolitan global-middle-class club. They believe they can “work with” their accusers and eventually get them to come to their senses. They believe that eventually, under the auspices of Western institutions like the IOC and WADA, truth and justice will indubitably prevail.

China similarly believes that if it honestly and forthrightly circulates news briefs of its own about the injustice of it all that eventually, the world will see through the blatant lies and hypocrisy of the West. China will plead to the very propaganda colossus that maligns it that it is being treated unfairly.

Good luck with that. I liked China much better under Mao, when every Chinese citizen knew for a fact that they were in the imperialist crosshairs and would not be surprised in the least to be singled out for unfair persecution. Nor would they care. China under Mao would be uninterested in making overtures to an imperialist system that accepts them as legitimate human beings only when they are losing. They wouldn’t care all that much about winning a rigged games to begin with.

But now, China falls all over itself in love with the idea that they “won” an Olympic games in which Russia, their supposed ally, wasn’t even allowed to compete! They are then amazed to face so much hostility from the West and can only wonder, “Why do they hate us?”, as if just waking up to the fact that sports has something to do with politics!

The Olympics is just one example of how countries all around the world continue to gaslight themselves. They gaslight themselves into believing that it is just a matter of knowledge—that if they simply tell their story fairly and correctly to some third party adjudicator, justice will surely triumph and institutions of injustice will surely collapse (or, even more ridiculously, “reform”).

No such third-party adjudicator exists. Feign outrage if you want; no one is listening. Sports, like politics, is a fight and getting nastier by the day with no end in sight.

Lastly I’ll say, leaving the Olympics aside, China continues to gaslight itself over Ukraine. Chinese people cannot fathom that the Ukraine crisis can and likely will be transposed onto China in replica. They cannot understand (clearly enough for my liking) that Ukraine is Taiwan. It doesn’t help of course that the Chinese Foreign Ministry puts out rather befuddling statements like

“Taiwan is not Ukraine. Taiwan has always been an inalienable part of China. This is an indisputable legal and historical fact.”

But the same smear campaign that Russia is undergoing in the aftermath of its supposed “invasion” of the Ukraine is a carbon-copy of what China can expect if they are ever drawn into a conflict in Taiwan. China will immediately be expelled from any future Olympic competition as an “aggressor” nation. President Xi will be assailed in a concerted global media campaign as a “brutal dictator” and Chinese all over the world will suddenly find that the vast majority of Westerners suddenly hate them.

I’m not sure if I will personally be more disgusted by this rather predictable Western onslaught against China or by China’s equally predictable sense of victimary outrage and shock at the injustice of it all.