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Indefensible: Democracy, Counterrevolution, and the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperialism
Using an analysis of imperialism and case studies of Syria, Iran, Iraq, Bosnia, Russia and Ukraine, Global Democracy and the Crisis of Anti-Imperialism shows that the purported anti-imperialism of many self-professed socialists amounts to explicit or implicit support for totalitarianism, fascism, Islamist theocracy and imperialism. The analysis shows that the Russian revolution was followed by a counter-revolution, and resulted in state capitalism and the revival of Russian imperialism under cover of the Soviet Union. Thus the Cold War was actually a prolonged period of inter-imperialist rivalry between the United States and Russia. A large section of socialists who call themselves anti-imperialists oppose only Western imperialism and the despots it supports, not Russian imperialism and despots like Bashar al-Assad who are supported by it. As Russia has moved further and further to the right under Putin, they have effectively defected to the far right. They and other socialists also mistakenly believe that political democracy is organically connected to capitalism and therefore need not be defended, whereas, on the contrary, democracy is only established by mass struggles, and is an indispensable resource in the fight against exploitation and oppression. Finally, these socialists fail to understand that without internationalism, it is impossible to defeat global capitalism and its neoliberal policies. All the case studies in this book represent attempts to carry out democratic revolutions, which are supported by genuine socialist internationalists but opposed by pseudo-anti-imperialists. The book ends by suggesting steps that can be taken to promote democracy and end mass slaughter.
473 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2018
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July 10, 2018
https://hummusforthought.com/2018/07/...
Rohini Hensman starts off her book “Indefensible: Democracy, Counterrevolution, and the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperialism” with two simple questions: How has the rhetoric of anti-imperialism come to be used in support of anti-democratic counterrevolutions around the world? And what can we do about it?
The questions came about from her own experience as a Sri Lankan feminist and labour activist living in India. The daughter of “parents who consistently opposed imperialism in every part of the world” as “part of a more general support for democracy and human rights”, she wished to understand how something which is seemingly so ‘pro-human’ (anti-imperialism) could be used to justify that which is inherently ‘anti-human’ (state oppression). She structures her attempt by placing ‘pseudo-anti-imperialists’ into three categories: the first two are the tyrants and imperialists who utilise anti-imperialism to divert attention from their own crimes and the neo-Stalinists who regularly serve as apologists for Russian imperialism. As for the third tendency, it is arguably the most common one as it is capable of adopting the language of progressivism and even solidarity to downplay or support various forms of oppression. This tendency “seem unable to deal with complexity, including the possibility that there may be more than one oppressor in a particular situation”.
But more than that, Hensman argues that this tendency, which has come to dominate large segments of self-defined anti-imperialists, depends on “a West-centrism which makes them oblivious to the fact that people in other parts of the world have agency too, and that they can exercise it both to oppress others and to fight against oppression; an Orientalism which refuses to acknowledge that Third World peoples can desire and fight for democratic rights and freedoms taken for granted in the West; and a complete lack of solidarity with people who do undertake such struggles.” Here she joins those who have attempted to explore this tendency which has grown increasingly confident over the past few years. The Syrian dissident Yassin Al-Haj Saleh, who spent 16 years in prison for belonging to an opposition Communist party, argues that pseudo-anti-imperialists routinely deny Syrians “epistemological agency“. The British-Syrian anarchist Leila Al Shami calls it ‘the anti-imperialism of idiots’.
As mentioned, Hensman’s journey starts with Sri Lanka where following the end of the civil war in 2009, the ruling Rajapaksa regime “claimed to be anti-imperialist when EU nations, Canada and several others in the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) asked for an independent investigation into and accountability for the huge civilian death toll, as well as unhindered access of humanitarian agencies to hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people (IDPs) detained in military camps.” Rajapaksa used anti-imperialism and got the support of Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia and other countries including Russia and China, finally passing a resolution “commending the government for addressing the needs of the IDPs”. By 2014, when the government’s crimes in military-occupied Tamil-majority areas in the north and east as well as its brutal repression of dissent throughout the country was made clear, Evo Morales of Bolivia offered Rajapaksa a Peace and Democracy award. “When Sri Lankans did eventually manage to bring about regime change in 2015, it was no thanks to these pseudo-anti-imperialists”, Hensman continued, referring to the surprise election of Maithripala Sirisena in January of that year.
But the scope of Hensman’s book is more ambitious than that. Divided in three sections – “understanding imperialism”, “case studies” and “looking for alternatives” – it looks at Russia, Ukraine, Bosnia, Kosovo, Iran and Iraq as well as two chapters on Syria. With each case study, Hensman adapts her own analysis of imperialism and global capitalism made in the first section to the particularities of the countries analysed. Her goal is nothing less than to “suggest alternative narratives in each case, providing enough detail to enable genuine anti-imperialists, antiwar activists, socialists and humanitarians from other countries to identify the people with whom they should be expressing solidarity.”
In the last section, Hensman suggests five ways to fight the reactionary tendencies among the pseudo-anti-imperialist Left: (1) pursuing the truth and telling the truth; (2) bringing morality and humanity back into politics; (3) fighting for democracy; (4) bringing internationalism centre stage; and (5) pushing for global institutions to promote human rights and democracy. While four of these suggestions would appear uncontroversial, the argument for internationalism is of particular urgency. This isn’t to downplay the others; they remain necessary components of what is needed to move forward in building a serious internationalism that could ally itself with struggles for freedom and justice all over the world. Rather, bringing internationalism centre stage is a challenge to one of the most authoritarian concepts taken for granted by much of the world’s left today, namely that of economic nationalism. This includes supranational entities such as the European Union which preaches internationalism within the borders of Fortress Europe while militarising them to keep out some of the world’s most vulnerable people.
The Ukrainian Marxist Roman Rosdolsky, reflecting in 1948 on ‘the particularly devilish theoretical issue, the national question, whose horrifying actualité had just been demonstrated by Hitler’s infamous policy towards Jews and other “Untermenschen” as well as by Stalin’s less well known, and only somewhat less deadly, policies towards non-Russian nationalities in the Soviet Union” concluded, among other things, that just as the working class is not de-facto socialist or revolutionary, neither is it de-facto internationalist. In other words, we must “first acquire through arduous effort the internationalist attitude that its general, historical interests demand from it’. I say ‘we’ rather than the original ‘proletariat of every land’ used by Rosdolsky because the latter seems to have less resonance with today’s audience and is likely to be rendered outdated in our era of anthropogenic climate catastrophe and automation.
We exist within the confines of capitalist society and challenging it requires serious work on ourselves as well as with others. The absence of internationalism, as is painstakingly obvious today, is fueling the Far Right and other reactionary forces (including among self-described leftists). If leftists wish to ‘out-nativist’ the rightwing nativists by, for example, suggesting that the UK Labour Party will ‘tackle illegal immigration’, they will only become de-facto partners of xenophobia while making themselves, at best, irrelevant or, at worst, an obstacle to those whose lives are shattered by borders. The same goes with Bernie Sanders focusing so much on US workers losing jobs to workers in Vietnam, China and Latin America – (and that is putting aside the failure to acknowledge the much greater role of automation in the inevitable loss of jobs). As the late theorist Moishe Postone put it simply: the right (here, Trump) are much better nationalists than the left (here, Bernie). And internationalism-building also requires all four other components proposed by Hensman. After all, there are fascist anti-imperialists and transnational white supremacists attempting to organise with one another. They praise the ‘white‘ Assad regime for crushing dissent, they terrorise refugees from France to Australia and demonise Muslims and/or black people and/or transpeople, all the while obsessing over controlling women’s bodies, regardless of borders. If opposition to this international alt-right isn’t internationalist, how can it succeed?
‘Putting [enter country] first’ erases the working classes who happen to not be within the borders of the state and, in the process, makes Trump/Orban/Modi/Netanyahu’s [and so on] arguments that ‘we aren’t winning anymore’ for them. As Hensman argues: “Capitalism is inherently global, and it has become even more so over the past half-century; unless the opposition to it is equally global, capitalism will always win. Globalising the opposition even to neoliberalism, in the first place, requires organising across national borders, which is facilitated by freedom of movement across those borders. Closing borders, as the far right wants to do, only sabotages the struggle against neoliberalism.” This fundamental notion is too often ignored by those who already have the privilege of freedom of movement. And the same goes for anti-imperialism. An anti-imperialism that is not internationalist cannot be effectively anti-imperialist. Just as anti-capitalism will always fail without internationalism, so will anti-imperialism. Rather than viewing those on the Left who fail to oppose authoritarian regimes across the planet as exceptions to be dismissed, we should be asking why they are so effective in silencing anti-authoritarians in the first place.
Hensman’s work will hopefully help make the case for introspection, one which demands community-building and solidarity regardless of borders. “It is absolutely necessary to rebuild an intellectual and political foundation for criticism and seeking change in the world, but metropolitan anti-imperialism is totally unfit for this job”, Al-Haj Saleh once wrote. “It has absorbed subordinating imperialistic tendencies, and it is fraught with eurocentrism and void of any true democratic content. A better starting point for criticism and change would be to look at actual conflicts and actual relationships between conflicting parties.”
Rohini Hensman starts off her book “Indefensible: Democracy, Counterrevolution, and the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperialism” with two simple questions: How has the rhetoric of anti-imperialism come to be used in support of anti-democratic counterrevolutions around the world? And what can we do about it?
The questions came about from her own experience as a Sri Lankan feminist and labour activist living in India. The daughter of “parents who consistently opposed imperialism in every part of the world” as “part of a more general support for democracy and human rights”, she wished to understand how something which is seemingly so ‘pro-human’ (anti-imperialism) could be used to justify that which is inherently ‘anti-human’ (state oppression). She structures her attempt by placing ‘pseudo-anti-imperialists’ into three categories: the first two are the tyrants and imperialists who utilise anti-imperialism to divert attention from their own crimes and the neo-Stalinists who regularly serve as apologists for Russian imperialism. As for the third tendency, it is arguably the most common one as it is capable of adopting the language of progressivism and even solidarity to downplay or support various forms of oppression. This tendency “seem unable to deal with complexity, including the possibility that there may be more than one oppressor in a particular situation”.
But more than that, Hensman argues that this tendency, which has come to dominate large segments of self-defined anti-imperialists, depends on “a West-centrism which makes them oblivious to the fact that people in other parts of the world have agency too, and that they can exercise it both to oppress others and to fight against oppression; an Orientalism which refuses to acknowledge that Third World peoples can desire and fight for democratic rights and freedoms taken for granted in the West; and a complete lack of solidarity with people who do undertake such struggles.” Here she joins those who have attempted to explore this tendency which has grown increasingly confident over the past few years. The Syrian dissident Yassin Al-Haj Saleh, who spent 16 years in prison for belonging to an opposition Communist party, argues that pseudo-anti-imperialists routinely deny Syrians “epistemological agency“. The British-Syrian anarchist Leila Al Shami calls it ‘the anti-imperialism of idiots’.
As mentioned, Hensman’s journey starts with Sri Lanka where following the end of the civil war in 2009, the ruling Rajapaksa regime “claimed to be anti-imperialist when EU nations, Canada and several others in the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) asked for an independent investigation into and accountability for the huge civilian death toll, as well as unhindered access of humanitarian agencies to hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people (IDPs) detained in military camps.” Rajapaksa used anti-imperialism and got the support of Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia and other countries including Russia and China, finally passing a resolution “commending the government for addressing the needs of the IDPs”. By 2014, when the government’s crimes in military-occupied Tamil-majority areas in the north and east as well as its brutal repression of dissent throughout the country was made clear, Evo Morales of Bolivia offered Rajapaksa a Peace and Democracy award. “When Sri Lankans did eventually manage to bring about regime change in 2015, it was no thanks to these pseudo-anti-imperialists”, Hensman continued, referring to the surprise election of Maithripala Sirisena in January of that year.
But the scope of Hensman’s book is more ambitious than that. Divided in three sections – “understanding imperialism”, “case studies” and “looking for alternatives” – it looks at Russia, Ukraine, Bosnia, Kosovo, Iran and Iraq as well as two chapters on Syria. With each case study, Hensman adapts her own analysis of imperialism and global capitalism made in the first section to the particularities of the countries analysed. Her goal is nothing less than to “suggest alternative narratives in each case, providing enough detail to enable genuine anti-imperialists, antiwar activists, socialists and humanitarians from other countries to identify the people with whom they should be expressing solidarity.”
In the last section, Hensman suggests five ways to fight the reactionary tendencies among the pseudo-anti-imperialist Left: (1) pursuing the truth and telling the truth; (2) bringing morality and humanity back into politics; (3) fighting for democracy; (4) bringing internationalism centre stage; and (5) pushing for global institutions to promote human rights and democracy. While four of these suggestions would appear uncontroversial, the argument for internationalism is of particular urgency. This isn’t to downplay the others; they remain necessary components of what is needed to move forward in building a serious internationalism that could ally itself with struggles for freedom and justice all over the world. Rather, bringing internationalism centre stage is a challenge to one of the most authoritarian concepts taken for granted by much of the world’s left today, namely that of economic nationalism. This includes supranational entities such as the European Union which preaches internationalism within the borders of Fortress Europe while militarising them to keep out some of the world’s most vulnerable people.
The Ukrainian Marxist Roman Rosdolsky, reflecting in 1948 on ‘the particularly devilish theoretical issue, the national question, whose horrifying actualité had just been demonstrated by Hitler’s infamous policy towards Jews and other “Untermenschen” as well as by Stalin’s less well known, and only somewhat less deadly, policies towards non-Russian nationalities in the Soviet Union” concluded, among other things, that just as the working class is not de-facto socialist or revolutionary, neither is it de-facto internationalist. In other words, we must “first acquire through arduous effort the internationalist attitude that its general, historical interests demand from it’. I say ‘we’ rather than the original ‘proletariat of every land’ used by Rosdolsky because the latter seems to have less resonance with today’s audience and is likely to be rendered outdated in our era of anthropogenic climate catastrophe and automation.
We exist within the confines of capitalist society and challenging it requires serious work on ourselves as well as with others. The absence of internationalism, as is painstakingly obvious today, is fueling the Far Right and other reactionary forces (including among self-described leftists). If leftists wish to ‘out-nativist’ the rightwing nativists by, for example, suggesting that the UK Labour Party will ‘tackle illegal immigration’, they will only become de-facto partners of xenophobia while making themselves, at best, irrelevant or, at worst, an obstacle to those whose lives are shattered by borders. The same goes with Bernie Sanders focusing so much on US workers losing jobs to workers in Vietnam, China and Latin America – (and that is putting aside the failure to acknowledge the much greater role of automation in the inevitable loss of jobs). As the late theorist Moishe Postone put it simply: the right (here, Trump) are much better nationalists than the left (here, Bernie). And internationalism-building also requires all four other components proposed by Hensman. After all, there are fascist anti-imperialists and transnational white supremacists attempting to organise with one another. They praise the ‘white‘ Assad regime for crushing dissent, they terrorise refugees from France to Australia and demonise Muslims and/or black people and/or transpeople, all the while obsessing over controlling women’s bodies, regardless of borders. If opposition to this international alt-right isn’t internationalist, how can it succeed?
‘Putting [enter country] first’ erases the working classes who happen to not be within the borders of the state and, in the process, makes Trump/Orban/Modi/Netanyahu’s [and so on] arguments that ‘we aren’t winning anymore’ for them. As Hensman argues: “Capitalism is inherently global, and it has become even more so over the past half-century; unless the opposition to it is equally global, capitalism will always win. Globalising the opposition even to neoliberalism, in the first place, requires organising across national borders, which is facilitated by freedom of movement across those borders. Closing borders, as the far right wants to do, only sabotages the struggle against neoliberalism.” This fundamental notion is too often ignored by those who already have the privilege of freedom of movement. And the same goes for anti-imperialism. An anti-imperialism that is not internationalist cannot be effectively anti-imperialist. Just as anti-capitalism will always fail without internationalism, so will anti-imperialism. Rather than viewing those on the Left who fail to oppose authoritarian regimes across the planet as exceptions to be dismissed, we should be asking why they are so effective in silencing anti-authoritarians in the first place.
Hensman’s work will hopefully help make the case for introspection, one which demands community-building and solidarity regardless of borders. “It is absolutely necessary to rebuild an intellectual and political foundation for criticism and seeking change in the world, but metropolitan anti-imperialism is totally unfit for this job”, Al-Haj Saleh once wrote. “It has absorbed subordinating imperialistic tendencies, and it is fraught with eurocentrism and void of any true democratic content. A better starting point for criticism and change would be to look at actual conflicts and actual relationships between conflicting parties.”
June 26, 2019
a powerful and succinct analysis of multiple international conflicts since the 1990s and the strange transformation of some western anti-imperialist politics into what Hensman describes as "pseudo-anti-imperialism" and neo-Stalinism.
July 19, 2024
Kind of amazing how much history is packed into this book. Hensman gives nuanced context on imperialism and military conflicts from Bosnia to Syria. Included is much needed criticism of sloppy and disingenuous pseudo “anti-imperialism”, although less than I was expecting. The book reads as more of a corrective history than a critique.
September 11, 2018
Indefensible: Democracy, Counter-Revolution, and the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperialism is one of those books that make a reader sigh and say, “At last!” Rohini Hensman is a human rights activist and Marxist from Sri Lanka whose personal history rebukes anyone who tries to dismiss her work as pro-imperialism. Her argument is so many people on the anti-imperialist left are really pseudo-anti-imperialists. They will oppose imperialism and intervention from the West while defending and applauding Russian imperialism, Iranian Islamist imperialism, and the spread of authoritarian oppression.
To make her case, she recounts the history of unrest, revolution, counter-revolution, and intervention in Ukraine, Bosnia, Kosovo, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. She also discusses in lesser detail Chechnya, Libya, and even in the elections in UK, Europe, and the United States. She provides granular detail that makes her case painfully and sometimes grotesquely clear. The oppression, torture, arrest, and murder of people throughout the world seem to be fine with some people so long as the oppressor is Assad, Putin, or other authoritarians. I had to laugh because when I read her main argument, I thought of specific publications and journalists and sure enough, they were named by her late in the book.
Indefensible: Democracy, Counter-Revolution, and the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperialism is not for the faint of heart. The text is dense with information and much of it is painful and heartbreaking. Hensman does not flinch from the most disturbing details. She is also parsimonious in her writing, using words with precision. This means she can summarize a few chapters of someone’s book in a sentence, saying a lot with few words because each word is chosen so precisely. She assumes you will know what a rentier state is.
I was less interested in getting into the weeds of Marxism than in the history and the failures of those who should be on the side of justice choosing injustice out of reflexive anti-Western imperialism. She points out the need for a truly internationalist commitment to human rights, for people in the Middle East, not just in the West. When the Syrian people protest and demand the end of their government and Iran and Russia step in to prop up Assad, it’s a disgrace that people on the left stand with Assad. She also challenges the anti-imperialist left for their position opposing intervention in Libya. An important distinction she makes that sets her apart from the pseudo-anti-imperialist left is between globalization and neoliberalism. They are not the same, though they are treated as such by many leftists which leads them to support protectionism, a nationalist position that puts workers in other countries in the position of being enemies.
Her prescriptions should be familiar to anyone paying attention. Pursuing the truth and telling the truth including not falling for false narratives pumped into the zeitgeist by troll farms. Making politics about values, about morality and humanity, including fighting for democracy. We must become more internationalist in our values and support global institutions such as the International Criminal Court and the United Nations in pushing for human rights and democracy. Certainly, these institutions are weaker and often more feckless than they should be, in large part because the great powers have hamstrung them from their inception.
I am so glad to have read this book and value the many days I spent reading it. It was not easy, it was hard work and oh-so-painful sometimes, but it was so worth the time. I have been talking about incessantly to friends and encouraged them to read it, but I will warn anyone thinking of it. it is a commitment. Reading about torture and genocide is not easy. Reading a text with such precision can be challenging. But, wow, it’s worth it.
I received an e-galley of Indefensible: Democracy, Counter-Revolution, and the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperialism from the publisher through Edelweiss.
Indefensible: Democracy, Counter-Revolution, and the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperialism at Haymarket Books
Rohini Hensman articles
https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpre...
To make her case, she recounts the history of unrest, revolution, counter-revolution, and intervention in Ukraine, Bosnia, Kosovo, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. She also discusses in lesser detail Chechnya, Libya, and even in the elections in UK, Europe, and the United States. She provides granular detail that makes her case painfully and sometimes grotesquely clear. The oppression, torture, arrest, and murder of people throughout the world seem to be fine with some people so long as the oppressor is Assad, Putin, or other authoritarians. I had to laugh because when I read her main argument, I thought of specific publications and journalists and sure enough, they were named by her late in the book.
Indefensible: Democracy, Counter-Revolution, and the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperialism is not for the faint of heart. The text is dense with information and much of it is painful and heartbreaking. Hensman does not flinch from the most disturbing details. She is also parsimonious in her writing, using words with precision. This means she can summarize a few chapters of someone’s book in a sentence, saying a lot with few words because each word is chosen so precisely. She assumes you will know what a rentier state is.
I was less interested in getting into the weeds of Marxism than in the history and the failures of those who should be on the side of justice choosing injustice out of reflexive anti-Western imperialism. She points out the need for a truly internationalist commitment to human rights, for people in the Middle East, not just in the West. When the Syrian people protest and demand the end of their government and Iran and Russia step in to prop up Assad, it’s a disgrace that people on the left stand with Assad. She also challenges the anti-imperialist left for their position opposing intervention in Libya. An important distinction she makes that sets her apart from the pseudo-anti-imperialist left is between globalization and neoliberalism. They are not the same, though they are treated as such by many leftists which leads them to support protectionism, a nationalist position that puts workers in other countries in the position of being enemies.
Her prescriptions should be familiar to anyone paying attention. Pursuing the truth and telling the truth including not falling for false narratives pumped into the zeitgeist by troll farms. Making politics about values, about morality and humanity, including fighting for democracy. We must become more internationalist in our values and support global institutions such as the International Criminal Court and the United Nations in pushing for human rights and democracy. Certainly, these institutions are weaker and often more feckless than they should be, in large part because the great powers have hamstrung them from their inception.
I am so glad to have read this book and value the many days I spent reading it. It was not easy, it was hard work and oh-so-painful sometimes, but it was so worth the time. I have been talking about incessantly to friends and encouraged them to read it, but I will warn anyone thinking of it. it is a commitment. Reading about torture and genocide is not easy. Reading a text with such precision can be challenging. But, wow, it’s worth it.
I received an e-galley of Indefensible: Democracy, Counter-Revolution, and the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperialism from the publisher through Edelweiss.
Indefensible: Democracy, Counter-Revolution, and the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperialism at Haymarket Books
Rohini Hensman articles
https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpre...
August 30, 2025
4,5/5 stars
A critical analysis about (a part of) the left by someone from the left and it deals with issues I have been thinking about a lot the past years. While this book is already from 2018 and in that sense a bit 'dated' but none the less still very relevant and a lot of the insights here can put to use in conflicts of 2025. Her thesis can be summerised as followed: being anti-western is not the same as being anti-imperialist and at times you are gonna be an useful idiot ( or devious collaborator) for other imperialisms ( read Russian or Iranian etc.). She asks for consistency and opposition to all types of imperialism and at the same time the books contains a passionate plea for human rights, internationalism and democracy. At times I might personally quibble with some of her historical interpretations and examples but otherwise I think this is just a great read.
A critical analysis about (a part of) the left by someone from the left and it deals with issues I have been thinking about a lot the past years. While this book is already from 2018 and in that sense a bit 'dated' but none the less still very relevant and a lot of the insights here can put to use in conflicts of 2025. Her thesis can be summerised as followed: being anti-western is not the same as being anti-imperialist and at times you are gonna be an useful idiot ( or devious collaborator) for other imperialisms ( read Russian or Iranian etc.). She asks for consistency and opposition to all types of imperialism and at the same time the books contains a passionate plea for human rights, internationalism and democracy. At times I might personally quibble with some of her historical interpretations and examples but otherwise I think this is just a great read.
September 10, 2018
This is an excellent volume, and couldn't have come at a better time, what with the fascist Assad Regime preparing an assault on Idlib that likely will involve chemical weapons against the masses of approx. 1.5 million internally displaced people, among a total population of 3m. Hensman deftly clears the cobwebs of obscurantist, ideological support provided by many who claim leftism to Bashar al-Assad, Vladimir Putin, and the Islamic Republic of Iran in recent years. She has tremendously important insight into the meaning of internationalism, and we can consider her book to be an intervention directed toward the end of reinvigorating a strong, authentic, and consistent internationalism which opposes imperialism, occupation, and militarism from all powers, not just the U.S./NATO, as in the 'campist analysis' which has apparently and quite unfortunately become hegemonic among many in the U.S. left. Before discussing Russia and the Middle East, Hensman considers the Bosnian wars, implicitly making many parallels to the contemporary situation in Syria (that is, Sunni Muslims threatened with genocide by expansionist-revanchist State power, Srebrenica as tantamount to Eastern Aleppo/Eastern Ghouta, debate on the global left as to whether US/NATO should intervene to protect Muslim lives, interest in intervention limited by relative lack of geopolitical 'value' in doing so [due in no small part to anti-Muslim bigotry and atrocity-denialism]). Then, as now, neo-Stalinists and fascists rush to back up the war criminals responsible for genocide, because 1) the victims are Muslim and 2) the perpetrators are supposedly 'resisting' US/NATO imperialism through their crimes. See Fools' Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions. To think that Noam Chomsky considered Johnstone's perspective credible, and that he denied the Srebrenica genocide! 🤢
I am very appreciative to Hensman for this work and plan to write a full review soon. I will say that I disagree with her seeming admiration for Lenin, as compared to the clearly chauvinist/nationalist Stalin, as she seems to overlook the rather imperialist policies pursued by Lenin in Central Asia, to say nothing of Ukraine! In terms of the The Experiment: Georgia's Forgotten Revolution 1918-1921 led by Mensheviks (1918-1921), though its invasion and dispossession took place officially while Lenin was still in power, it was Stalin and Ordzhonikidze who ordered the occupation of Georgia; Lee claims that Lenin and Trotsky didn't know about it. 🤔
Of course, I recognize that this is being published on Haymarket, so the pro-Lenin orientation is pretty customary, orthodox, and therefore expected.
I am very appreciative to Hensman for this work and plan to write a full review soon. I will say that I disagree with her seeming admiration for Lenin, as compared to the clearly chauvinist/nationalist Stalin, as she seems to overlook the rather imperialist policies pursued by Lenin in Central Asia, to say nothing of Ukraine! In terms of the The Experiment: Georgia's Forgotten Revolution 1918-1921 led by Mensheviks (1918-1921), though its invasion and dispossession took place officially while Lenin was still in power, it was Stalin and Ordzhonikidze who ordered the occupation of Georgia; Lee claims that Lenin and Trotsky didn't know about it. 🤔
Of course, I recognize that this is being published on Haymarket, so the pro-Lenin orientation is pretty customary, orthodox, and therefore expected.
April 29, 2021
An in-depth analysis to a lot of instances of pseudo-anti-imperialism that has arisen out of the Ukrainian Revolution, Bosnia Genocide, Syrian Revolution, Iranian Revolution to name a few events. The conclusion was lacking, though. It suggests that the answer to every problem, well, ever, is to restructure the United Nations. That's naive at best. I wish there was more of a solution because I was disappointed. I feel like on the left, there are so many great case studies and such a thorough understanding of international relations but as usual, they lack a solution for the world we want.
August 5, 2021
An imperative perspective on the necessity and potential of principled internationalism.
Read
June 21, 2024Class
December 10, 2024
Good reference, poor thesis
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews