[The TPLF] was founded by young radical Marxist Leninist intellectuals who bitterly fought their fellow school mates about the primacy of the "National Question" in Ethiopia as opposed to "Class Struggle."... Then there is the ascetic, self-effacing, Front idolizing culture where the organization itself occupies a mythical status and those that died in the struggle sat on a pedestal as "martyrs" of the revolution. In fact, the language of political violence in TPLF is awash with biblical terms such as "sacrifice", "shedding blood", "salvation" [harinet] etc. One wonders if the millennia old Christian traditions of Tigray melted with its nationalist cum Marxist import. Even after three decades of incumbency, TPLF old guards do not relent to remind us that they "shed their blood" and "sacrificed their brothers and sisters" to accede to power.
Now the imperialists have used the TPLF to start a civil war in Ethiopia, motivated by reactionary desire to restore Tigrayan ethnic supremacy to a country that recently shook it off. The destabilization campaign these terrorists are carrying out, launched to try to destroy the BRI's presence within the horn of Africa, fits with the ideas of the western ultra-leftists who share ideological kinship with the TPLF. These ideas are race reductionism, the romanticization of violent struggle for the sake of it, and opposition towards anything that doesn't live up to the ultra-left standards for what's "revolutionary." They're reactive, rather than dialectical. They leave no room for historical materialism, a Marxist analysis of contradictions, or the other pragmatic facets of communism. And this leads their adherents to embrace militant antagonism towards whatever things are deemed the enemy, which imperialist atrocity propaganda is now painting Ethiopia, Eritrea, and China as.
These psyops come from the same place QAnon came from, and use the same emotional tools. They exploit popular discontent to create cults that threaten revolutionary progress. The underlying factor is false consciousness, where the targets of the psyops are led to believe they've found the solution to society's ills. The way to immunize yourself from these deceptions is to realize that if a political ideology's conclusions are informed not by empirical evidence and social practice, but by assertions that can only be traced back to more assertions, then it's not a scientific-belief framework. It's a cult. These controlled opposition groups gain followers not through rigorous examination of conditions and ideas, but through emotional appeals that leave out the information that discredits their demagogic claims.
This is what we must keep in mind as we train and equip our cadres for physical resistance against the violence that the revolution's enemies seek to bring upon us. Militancy is indispensable, but the idea of militancy can be twisted into something that serves these wrecker cults. You can be as armed and trained as you like, but if you're informed by poisonous ideas, your strength will end up being used against the revolution's interests. We must avoid this kind of error at all costs if we want to survive the purge.
Importing U.S. imperialism's model for picking off enemies
When I say "at all costs," I'm talking about costs that can be genuinely difficult to accept. When you choose not to enable wreckers, you reject the potential for relationships with groups and individuals who can appear on the surface to be incredibly attractive. Movement infiltrators are trained to be charismatic, and to preach ideas that make the members of the cause feel inspired. When these wreckers form organizations, these organizations provide their members with the benefits of a cult: community, guidance, the sense that one is validated.
These psyop-engineered cults can be so big that they're not even organizations, but millions-strong communities, QAnon being an obvious example. The important thing is that those drawn into the rabbit holes feel like they've found their path in life, and they can't imagine what they would do if they decided to accept all the evidence showing their leaders are con artists. Their psychological dependency can run so deep that even when they know about this evidence, they simultaneously disbelieve it, because they see those positive things the cult brings them as unbearable to part with.
When these psychological-control tactics are applied to people who've already attained class consciousness, but who haven't learned how to see the warning signs for a con, it gives agents of reactionary intrigue extremely dangerous amounts of power. It makes the targets of the infiltration emotionally bound to the malicious actor, and this goes double if that actor has managed to create an entire organization dedicated to promoting their psyop. Fill a person's need for connection, and when you display red flags to that person, their impulse won't be to cut you off, even if that's the principled thing to do. It will be to give you the benefit of the doubt, and to even be more grateful for the relationship precisely because of the ways in which you've mistreated them. That's called trauma bonding, where the manipulation target is conditional to construct a mental narrative in which the relationship's negative aspects are merely obstacles to be overcome to make the bond stronger.
By employing these toxic-relationship dynamics to recruit radical organizers into their operations, and by creating entire pseudo-revolutionary ideologies to sell their destructive agenda, wreckers are wielding great psychological weapons. Weapons that can lead radicals into getting themselves picked off, or into assisting in efforts to pick off other targets. Setting up targets for assassination has always been a tactic of infiltrators, but with the intensification of class conflict, violence is getting more common as the thing that these wrecking missions are intended to end in.
"This is an injustice to those who developed sound theory which is then warped for maximum negative impact and sold to young minds as truth," writes Media for Justice in an analysis on how infiltrators use disinformation and twisted "liberation" theory to manipulate psychologically vulnerable individuals. To the counterinsurgency's orchestrators, you're either a weapon or a target. And by employing these perverted types of theory, self-described socialists can be turned into weapons as easily as reactionaries can. In Ukraine, this phenomenon is shown by the anarchists who are fighting alongside Nazis to frustrate Russia's anti-fascist operation.
If these anarchists have been won over towards this task, they can no doubt be compelled to follow the Ukrainian government's implicit instructions for tracking down and murdering hundreds of individuals who support Russia. Ukraine has doxxed a list of people whom it's supposedly found to be Russian assets, opening up the possibility of a mass murder campaign in the vein of Jakarta. Should any murders happen, these Azov-aligned "revolutionaries" will at the very least be complicit, and could be among the direct participants in the crimes.
There are countless ideas that the counterinsurgency's agents use to promote their agenda of destruction, and there are countless types of people whom these agents either pretend to be or started out as before being recruited. But there are underlying characteristics that can be identified among these bad actors. One is that they have class interests that make them detached from the means of production. This category includes both the petty bourgeoisie (who tend to be drawn to reactionary psyops) and the lumpenproletariat (which as Marx said can get drawn into their own types of reactionary intrigue). Someone of any social class can have revolutionary potential, but it's the proletariat that's the most reliably revolutionary class, because it's the class with the clearest material interest in establishing socialism. So the ruling class seeks to weaponize those both above and below the proletariat against the socialist cause.
As the lumpen and the petty bourgeoisie have fundamentally different conditions--with the lumpen being divorced from the proletariat due to dispossession and the petty bourgeoisie being divorced from it due to being exploiters--the psyops targeted at them take on different characteristics. Think of a white Christian paranoid fantasy, versus an ultra-leftist fantasy that fetishizes gangs and "revolutionary" violence. (Predictably, when members of the lumpen become reactionary intrigue agents, they tend to be the gangster types of lumpen.)
These are the two broad types of narratives that destabilization agents put forth. Which one of them someone falls for depends on whether they're predisposed towards right opportunism or ultra-leftism. Whichever forms these psyops take, their goal is to discredit the essential idea of Marxism, that being class struggle. They obscure the indispensable role that proletarian revolution has in attaining society's liberation, and claim that "liberation" means something else. Whether that's vacuously glorifying "America," some identitarian-obsessed version of "communism" that excludes the white proletariat, or a vague plan to have the criminal enterprises lead "the revolution." These "revolutionary" plans are anything but, and can only end in further destabilization.
When you've been led to discard scientific socialism, when you're being fed ideas that a serious examination shows to be ahistorical, when you've been persuaded to ignore your better judgement by defending somebody who has the red flags for being a wrecker, you've put yourself at serious risk. Especially in our current environment where the forces of reaction are increasingly out for blood. Operation Phoenix used infiltration to "neutralize" 81,740 members of the Viet Minh, with 26,369 among them having lost their lives. And the U.S. empire has carried out parallel mass-extermination operations against liberation movement members in the core.
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