The White Anti-Imperialism of Scott Ritter and George Galloway

Scott and George are done showing solidarity with "the Arabs".

I will start with a candid disclaimer, as I may hurt some feelings. It's important to acknowledge that some of my most cherished comrades in the anti-imperialist struggle, including the most beloved person in my life, my mother, are white. Esteemed figures such as Michael Hudson, Miko Peled, Matt Kennard, and my friend Peter Beattie also share this racial identity. Despite these deep personal connections, we cannot overlook a glaring and persistent issue: the insidious blind spot many white anti-imperialists have towards their own ingrained racism and supremacist leanings.

It is a pathology akin to liberal racism - the paternalistic, infantilizing discrimination that ostensibly uplifts while insidiously denigrating. White anti-imperialists veer between this neo-colonial "white savior" condescension and the cruder, denigrating racism of the far-right.

The recent bigoted outbursts of Scott Ritter and George Galloway about "giving up on the Arabs" lay this prejudice bare. Their public renunciation of supporting half a billion Arabs reeks of deluded self-importance - as if these Westerners are such indispensable saviors that an entire ethno-religious group is imperiled by losing their favor.

Ritter and Galloway’s Transcendent Wisdom

In a recent video posted on X, George Galloway tells a caller that he has given up on "the Arabs" since the Syria debacle, with Scott Ritter expressing agreement. This revelation is particularly telling about the type of anti-imperialism both gentlemen espouse. Some Arabs have expressed their approval of Assad's overthrow—a sentiment they are entitled to hold. For Ritter and Galloway, however, this was reason enough to label “the Arabs” as Al-Qaeda supporters who did not deserve their sympathy or efforts.

This stance came shortly after a post in which Scott Ritter criticized some Palestinians who congratulated Syrians on overthrowing Assad, stating that “the greatest threat to a Palestinian state are Palestinians themselves.” Apparently unaware of the complexities of surviving amid imperial violence, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, Scott presumes to know what is best for them regarding the intricacies of intergroup strife in West Asia.

More critically, Scott decries that some Palestinians hold a different view on Assad’s role in West Asia and the resistance. He argues that because of this difference in opinion, it is the Palestinians themselves who pose the greatest threat to their own cause of liberation from Western (US/Israeli/EU/UK) imperialism in West Asia.

Let's flip the script: I would argue that it is the failure of Scott Ritter and other Westerners to stop their 'democratically' elected governments from bombing innocent people in Palestine and neighboring Arab countries that truly threatens the Palestinian cause. It is people like him—and us—who are the real dangers, as we consistently fail to stop our leaders. But, of course, this kind of self-reflection is unlikely to occur to a supremacist Western anti-imperialist who is accustomed only to dictating and pointing fingers, without ever looking in the mirror.

"Giving up" on a vastly diverse populace spanning secularists and believers, Christians and Muslims, North Africans and Levantines, gays and straights, men and women, young and old - the intense racism in this colonial mindset of giving up on a monolithic "Arab" world is remarkable. It sweeps 500 million individuals into a crude Hollywood stereotype of backwards would-be terrorists "too stupid" to grasp Ritter and Galloway's transcendent wisdom.

‘Woke’ and the White Dismissal of Racism

I was warned by anti-imperialists of color, from Malcolm X to average people like myself, to be cautious in placing faith in white anti-imperialists. Not because they are consciously racist, but because of a glaring blind spot that comes with being white in the West - never fully grasping the insidious nature of racism that shapes the existential reality for people of color and the Global South.

This blind spot is why whites so often dismiss the primacy of race as a "woke distraction" from "more important" issues like class and economics, oblivious to how these are inextricably intertwined with race in the modern world's 600-year trajectory of racial capitalism and colonialism.

It is why white anti-imperialists repeatedly express sympathy for overtly racist figures like Viktor Orbán, the AfD, Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson and, most galling, Tulsi Gabbard - often sneakily offering disclaimers about "not agreeing with everything they say, but" or “Tulsi ain’t perfect, but” before revealing a deep admiration for their bigotry and ethnic supremacism packaged in semi-anti-imperialism.

For years, Muslims and people of color raised alarm over the rehabilitation of Gabbard, whose Islamophobic rhetoric reeks of George W. Bush's "radical Islam" obsession and whose Hindu nationalist leanings align with the fascistic BJP's project of isolating, subjugating and ethnically cleansing India's Muslim minority.

Yet the blind spot persisted, even among white leftists, appearing at times like a mental deficiency - an inability to recognize what is so plainly visible to those of us who face these existential racial threats firsthand.

People warned that no matter their anti-imperialist credentials, white figureheads would eventually fall back into the European racism deeply conditioned into them in the West. Scott Ritter and George Galloway's repugnant dismissal of "the Arabs" reaffirms this premonition.

Don’t You Dare Reject My White Saviorism

Their support, it is clear, is contingent - extended only to those who obediently conform, but instantly revoked should the subjugated masses dare form independent mindsets. "How dare you Arab simpletons defy my dictates," their statements scream with barely-veiled supremacism. The moment of deviation becomes a legitimization to cast off the entire ethnic group as inherently intransigent children in need of colonial correction.

For too long, anti-racist people of color have suppressed this gnawing truth out of pragmatic solidarity with white anti-imperialists. But Ritter and Galloway's unabashed bigotry breaks this polite detente. Their ideological kinship with European racism is undeniable, no matter their posturing against Western militarism.

As anti-racists, we can no longer avert our eyes from this rot within our movement. To permanently uproot imperialism, we must uproot its bedrock of white supremacist thinking in all its insidious manifestations. The facade of many white anti-imperialist "comrades" has dropped - it is time to build a truly emancipated future without their checkpoint at the gate.

- Karim

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