We have to be internationalist. I see many in the English speaking left moving towards reactionary pitfalls, chiefly the false anti-imperialisms of campism and antisemitism. We are betraying Palestine if we let bad actors use the Palestinian cause to move us towards embracing the imperialism of small tyrants and the reflexive suspicion of Jews, often two sides of the same coin in the campist milieu.

Campism is the idea that the world can be understood through geopolitical blocs with divergent interests and thus antagonism, these blocs being the different "camps". Campists believe that to oppose the US camp you should be supportive of, or at least not opposed to, the anti-US camp. These people often call themselves anti-imperialist, but they quite straightforward aren't. They embrace China's imperial extraction in Africa and across eastern Asia, they embrace Russia's imperialism in Ukraine, they embrace figures like Assad and Erdoğan at times as their interests are opposed to the West, even as they carry out neoliberal extraction and cultural destruction of the people they rule over. The antithesis of imperialism isn't campism; it's internationalism, the notion that all oppressed people are in struggle together, that an injury to one is an injury to all. The Uyghur child taken from their parents and sent to be "educated" by the Chinese government is facing the same terror as the indigenous American child sent to residential school. The Kurd lynched by Turkish fascists in Bakurê is facing the same terror as the Black man hanged by the American white supremacists. The Nigerian farmers alliances fighting to restore their local supply chains so that their people don't rely on fragile imported agritech systems is fundamentally connected with the struggle of European and American trade unionists trying to fight to reverse deindustrialization that has hollowed out their communities. The Palestinian struggle for liberation is woven through all international struggle, and while we are absolutely correct to put on focus on moments of acute plight and where there are particular responsibilities and opportunities because of our placement in empire, we betray the struggle if we allow ourselves to be mislead by reactionaries and thus isolated as a result of engagement in the Palestinian cause.

This is why, by the way, we can't accept the imperialism and settler colonialism of the small tyrannies. Palestine is being scourged by the horrible, awesome might of the currently most powerful empire on earth, but Kurdistan is being ravaged by far less powerful fascists of Türkiye and Syria. When a Kurd is forbidden from speaking Kurdish in public, is their plight less severe because Türkiye doesn't have as many aircraft carriers as the US empire? Ukrainians have struggled again and again and again for freedom from the Russian yolk, from the Tzars and then from the Bolsheviks and now from the petro-oligarchs; when the rich black earth of Ukraine is saturated with the blood of the people who have tilled it for centuries for the umpteenth time in history, is there less cultural loss because some of the oligarchs of Russia have divergent geopolitical interests from some of the oligarchs of the US?

The degradation of the human spirit that is inflicted by capitalist extraction is not limited to a single empire or a single camp. It is an inhuman force carried out through systems across the world, and we must fight it everywhere.

@tiotasram I don't think that recognizing modern American fascism as a distinct thing is contradictory with recognizing the failures and atrocities of America's past, but "America has always been fascist" is a thought terminating cliché that prevents deeper analysis. America hasn't always been fascist, and even the past worst moments of American government were, for the most part, bad things other than fascism. And the modern fascism arose out of the failures and contradictions of bourgeoisie democracy, which is worth understanding because if we view fascism as this bedrock continuous force that America has always embodied then that fascism is less the product of movements and forces in specific context and more the product of some sort of vague pseudohistorical mythology.

"America has always been fascist" is what the *fascists* believe, and we're suckers if we buy it.