Even on its own terms, the “all uprisings against authoritarian ‘anti-imperialist’ states are CIA plots” narrative is so unbelievably disempowering. It’s amazing its exponents are allowed to get away with presenting it as if it’s some radical, truth-to-power analysis.
Just think about it for five seconds. If you genuinely believe that, you’re saying the security apparatus of the US state is so powerful that it can conjure up mass movements, of hundreds of thousands of people, all around the world (Belarus, Hong Kong, Lebanon...) at will.
So not only are you implying the US is so powerful as to be basically invincible, you’re also saying all these people, cumulatively totalling millions, are either dupes, or conscious militants in a war to advance US interests. Both options foreclose on the possibility of change.
If you believe you’re fighting for radical change and building popular resistance to capitalism in some sense, but you spend all your time promoting a view that massively over-inflates the power of the leading capitalist state and rubbishes popular agency... you’re confused.
Like all wild conspiracy theories, it doesn’t withstand scrutiny. The scale of the infrastructure that would have to be in place for “the CIA” to just snap its fingers and put hundreds of thousand on the streets of Minsk or Hong Kong is not something that could be kept secret.
The first step in dismantling this view and ending its influence over sections of the left is ditching the idea that radical resistance to capitalism and imperialism consists of putting a tick where “the imperialists” (which ones?) put a cross. Learn to think.
