Note on edits: I’m autistic, and part of that means I tend to revise my published work. I even paid for Twitter Blue just to get that one-hour editing window. Once something’s out, I can finally read it as an outsider—and see its flaws. My promise: I’ll never alter the core meaning without signaling it. This isn’t retreat—it’s deeper fidelity to what I meant to say.
Of Narrative Battles and Psychological War
In a recent conversation on Justin Podur’s Anti-Empire Project , Laith Marouf of Free Palestine TV made a crucial distinction: narrative battles are not the same as psychological war.
Narrative battles are what we used to call propaganda: competing efforts to shape public perception, legitimize one’s cause, and discredit the enemy. Behind every narrative lie material interests—not truth for truth’s sake.
We keyboard warriors mostly fight on the narrative battlefield.
Historically, Marxists embraced propaganda and advanced the concept of agitprop. As per Georgy Plekhanov (1891), propaganda aims to spread many ideas to a few; agitation to spread one idea to large masses. Both are central to advancing the cause of human emancipation.
Yet today, “propaganda” has become a dirty word—but only when our side does it. The Empire’s media spew lies 24/7 while painting as propagandists those of us who debunk their Lying BS.
But propaganda need not be a dark art. Its Latin root simply means “to propagate”. Propaganda simply serves to propagate a worldview. You can’t be a conscious human and not have a worldview. And you may have legitimate reasons to propagate your worldview.
Each and every one of our perspectives and worldviews arises from material conditions. These include the type of society we’ve grown up in, the social relations that govern our society and the type of individual and collective identities they maintain, our interactions with the natural environment, etc.
No one gets to be neutral, and no one gets to be 100% factual in the sense that no human mind as any chance of ever grasping reality outside of the ever-evolving ways our minds experience it.
This does not mean everything is a lie and that propaganda is necessarily built on lies and deception. Unless, of course, you’re a Zionist propagandist, in which case your stipend will get cut if you ever spread anything remotely true.
Personally, I happen to believe there is a reality outside of our experiences and outside of our minds, even though I believe we can never grasp what it really is like, outside of the activity of our minds or, to be more precise, outside of the constant dynamic retroaction loops between our experiences and the activity of our minds, which one Karl Marx, Esq., termed Praxis.
This would be obvious to most if our minds weren’t so arrogant as to think that they possess some special conduit to that real reality beyond the great beyond of human experience. Anyway, enough of the abstract philosophizing already.
The history of all hitherto existing society
Different groups with different material interests that stem from the way society is organized and the way stuff is produced (which we Marxists refer to as classes) advance different narratives so as to maximize the chances their material interests may prevail.
The ruling class also uses narrative to legitimize the way society is organized in the eyes of those they rule and who frequently get the short end of the stick.
From a Marxist perspective, material interests can also include ideas, ideologies, ways of seeing the world, values, culture, etcetera. To a consistent Marxist, these are all parts of material reality, seeing as language, complex cognition, human consciousness, and individual and collective identities are seen as emerging from the material interactions and social relations of human beings and are thus not made of different stuff.
All this means the truth of societal narratives emerges through struggle, not divine revelation. (And no, gentle reader, this isn’t a dismissal of spiritual belief—Marxism need not claim to hold all of the answers.)
Grounding in Resistance
To ground in resistance is to reach psychological rock bottom, realizing we’ve been herded into identities that assign more-than or less-than fundamental human worth. We ground in resistance when something fundamental in us rejects such identities and commits to resisting such vile debasement of our common humanity.
As a clinical psychologist in the settler colony of Quebec, my bread and butter is clients trapped in less-than self-concepts. Most of my clients are settlers who inhabit collective identities that ascribe more fundamental value to them than to members of the Indigenous Nations Canadian settler colonialism genocided and still oppresses to this day.
At the narrative level, all systems of domination rely on personal and collective identities based on these more than/less than human worth hierarchy. White Supremacy, Aryanism, Jewish Supremacy—they’re psychological identification systems built on dehumanization. Franz Fanon brought to light these basic attributes of the colonizer mind (“more-than”) and the colonized mind (“less-than”).
Resistance begins when you refuse both less than and more than. It begins when you simply recognize that humanity cannot be earned, proven, or denied—it can only be recognized. The moment you choose to grant equal worth to one and all, you become one of the Free and Noble People of the World—free because you reject imposed identities, noble because you affirm universal dignity.
That choice joins you to global resistance. But it’s not cost-free.
The Inevitable Costs
White Empire demands you to be subservient to its more-than/less-than identifications. It denies your sovereign right to refuse such dehumanized and dehumanizing identities.
The moment you resist, you become its enemy, and it becomes yours.
Be sure that it will punish your resistance—differently, depending on your position. The likely costs I face as a white professional in Canada pale beside those facing Palestinians under bombardment, undocumented folks, or Global Majority activists living under the yoke of Western satrapies.
Costs are scariest to those who’ve never faced any yet.
Not only will White Empire exact costs, it needs you to fear those costs.
Remember Dubya Bush and Killary’s post-9/11 near identical declarations: to the effect that “You’re either with us or against us”? White Empire meant it then, and it still means it today.
Refuse to be herded into any of their more than/less than identities and you’re “against them”—and they will make you pay. The Empire may field ever more grotesque clowns to front its Circus of Death, but they are not joking.
The price to pay is the cost of remaining human. It is the cost of true freedom. I’m willing to pay it because I mean to remain human and free. And so should you.
Psychological War as War’s Natural Extension
War, as the 19th century Prussian general, Klaus von Clausewitz, famously wrote in the first chapter of his On War, is the continuation of politics (or policy depending on the translation) by other means. Klaus further opined that War, therefore, is an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfill our will. Further down, he added, the aim of all action in War is to disarm the enemy, and […] this, theoretically at least, is indispensable.
Two hundred years later, Prussian General C remains the OG of Western war doctrine.
Klaus von C. OG of White Empire’s war strategists. Notice the black cross under his collar. It would, not entirely coincidentally, make its way into Russia in 1941…
Politics (and policy) are the processes by which we humans organize our social systems. At various times since the beginning of recorded history, disputes about said organization have come to blows. Humans fight with their fists and with increasingly sophisticated weapons, and they also fight with their minds and ideas.
Traditional warfare is mostly about fists and ordnance; psychological warfare is mostly about minds and ideas. As Clausewitz never got to write, psychological warfare is the continuation of warfare by other, psychological, means. Its aim is to compel an opponent’s psychology to fulfill our will. Disarming the enemy’s psychology is, theoretically at least, indispensable.
According to Karl Marx, another 19th century German, humans come to blow about politics and policy as a result of contradictions between the interests of different classes and nations. When these contradictions heighten, societies can go through periods of war, i.e. particularly violent ways to settle disagreements about how to organize our living together. As we are currently witnessing in Palestine, some visions of living together can, in actual fact, involve a hell of a lot of dying together, aka genocide.
Marx’s piercing analysis of the inherent dynamics of capitalism uncovered how capital had turned a class of humans, the bourgeoisie, into the agent of its inherent dynamics. Capital’s logic is to turn nature and human labor into commodities that are sold to yield more capital, before being wasted to make room for more commodities (made from nature and human labor) that after being sold to yield yet more capital, will, in turn, be wasted in pursuance of what is a self-perpetuating algorithm.
Left to its own devices, the unthinking algorithm will eventually turn every living thing, every atom of matter, and every human experience into a commodity before being turned into waste. In fact, according to Marxist Ali Kadri, capital has now turned waste itself into a commodity.
As my friend Indrajit Samarajiva thinks that Marx’s Capital is the first natural history of an AI. White Empire (as Indi came to call it in another one of his strokes of genius) is the 500 year-old concrete historical embodiment of the ever accelerating unfolding of Capital on Planet Earth.
Turning us and our planet into a giant heap of (dead) toxic waste is the plan, folks. It is White Empire’s political and policy objective, and in pursuit of this objective, it will go to war on all fronts, economic, political, military and psychological, and against each and every one of us.
White Empire is a Vampire. It Means to Suck the Life Out of You, Literally.
As I write this on Halloween, what better day for quoting Marx’s prescient warning? Capital is dead labor that acts like a vampire: it comes to life only when it drinks living labor, and the more living labor it drinks, the more it comes to life. […] When a worker uses his disposable time for his own purposes, he is stealing from the capitalist.
Do you get it now? Capital is dead labor, meaning it’s not alive and means to unalive us all. This vampire artificial intelligence means (as much as a dead algorithm can ever truly mean anything) to suck the life out of every living thing, literally, not metaphorically. Like on Halloween night, but for real.
Every living thing includes your desires, moods, opinions, privacy, intimacy, spirituality, most dearly held values, and even your ingrown toenails. Every. Thing.
Now you know why White Empire’s elite vanguard storm troopers, the Peter Thiels and Elon Musks of this world have such a hard-on for transhumanism and colonizing other planets. As vanguard mouthpieces for the AI that is Capital, they’re simply saying the quiet part out loud.
The plan is to eliminate humanity as we know it and turn Planet Earth into a giant heap of toxic waste so as to then fuck off to Mars to keep the show on the road.
Your Beautiful Mind is Their Target, Babe
On the psychological front, as on all others, White Empire’s psychological warfare aims to disarm the spirit of resistance: that innate sense that humanity is inherent, not conditional.
The spirit of resistance will only disappear once the last human is killed. So long as there are humans around, its seed will endure, buried in the deepest recess of our psyches, ready to spring anew in the hearts of anyone. It can spring from under the rubble of the crushed hopes of the oppressed, from the rage burning in the heart of their children, from the soul-stirring horror of the witnesses, it can even pierce through the strangled conscience of the oppressors, or break through the shame piercing through the eyes of the genociders’ children.
As we all learn that we are human from that instant of recognition of common humanity in the eyes of another human, humanity can never be earned, nor can it ever be denied. Humanity can only ever be recognized. This will remain the foundation of what it means to be human for as long as there are humans.
Which is why no human can ever be trusted never to resist. And why humanity is Capital’s mortal enemy.
And it’s also what makes the spirit of resistance, that which is most beautifully and preciously human in all of us, Capital’s number one psychological warfare target.
White Empire is a Big Club, and You Ain’t in It
Some folks organize behind our collective backs to serve this artificial intelligence, aka capital, for which they get richly rewarded. Come to think of it, they also organize right under our noses. They have all programs in which they and train to lie and steal from us. And the worst of it is we’re the ones paying for it.
Once you understand this, you’ll stop wasting your one precious life abseiling down any number of conspiracy rabbit holes that are meant to get you off the scent of the mother of all conspiracies, which sits right in front of our eyes. The global bourgeois conspiracy aka. White Empire is a matter of fact.
On the world scale, White Empire conspires to colonize, exploit, rape, plunder, expropriate, and generally destroy anything and everything, and all that just so as to produce more commodities to waste. In Clausewitzian fashion, it seeks to impose its will on anyone who opposes it so as to fulfill the bourgeoisie’s will and completely disarm them, including by conspiring to genocide and exterminate, if this is what it considers it will take.
The bourgeoisie isn’t a conspiracy theory—it’s the global conspiracy in plain sight. Call it White Empire: a brotherhood of shape-shifting vampires hell-bent on colonizing, exploiting, and destroying everything to feed capital’s insatiable thirst for your and your children’s blood.
Neither you nor I are part of this big club. But you wouldn’t really want to be part of it anyway, would you? If in doubt, have a look at Peter Thiels’ eyes and get back to me.
I wonder how this man ever became obsessed with the Antichrist? Inexplicable, truly.
Idealism vs. Materialism
Bourgeois ideologues, Musk, Thiel, Pinker, Giddens, Fukuyama, Huntington, Rand (yes, even Ayn Rand and her cod “objectivism”) et al. carry the torch of bourgeois idealist political philosophy. At heart, they believe ideas, especially their superior ideas, create reality. A quote widely attributed to Dubya’s evil genius, Karl Rove spelled it out: “We’re an empire now… we create our own reality.”
It did not start with Abu Naranja kids. They’ve been that way since pretty much forever.
On the other side of the aisle are historical materialists—folks like Ibn Khaldun, Marx, Lenin, Mao, Cabral, Sankara and your humble servant. We see ideas as arising from and in response to particular material conditions. To materialists, the ideas that arise from material conditions can serve as tools that can, in turn, serve to shape these conditions. We don’t see ideas as stuff floating into the air or unaccountably popping into the oh-so-superior minds of geniuses or rulers (who coincidentally tend to think of themselves as geniuses). To us materialists, the world is not changed by thought alone, nor by wishing it to change, but by acting on the contradictions identified through correct analysis of its concrete material and psychological contradictions.
Because it looks at the constant and interdependent interactions between mind and matter, materialism tends to nurture a healthy humility and turn us toward finding ways of adapting to our environment, without ever imagining that we can come to dominate it to such a point as to negate its reality. Confucianism is a form of materialism which enjoins us to find the middle path, of which the most important aspects are the proper balance between mind and matter and between speech and action.
Being idealists at heart, the bourgeoisie has naturally been hyper invested in the realm of ideas and has done all in its power to buttress its material dominance over the planet through unceasing ideological production and legitimation. And that’s where the narrative war piece comes in.
Idealism inflates the ego and leads to narcissism and solipsism materialism cultivates humility. One seeks domination; the other, balance.
Nothing Quiet on the Psychological Front
In fact, since reading Gustave Le Bon’s The psychology of crowds (1895), which is effectively a manual for the manipulation of mass psychology. Since Gustave Le Bon’s, the bourgeoisie has weaponized mass psychology. WWI birthed atrocity propaganda—a tactic Zionists have since perfected.
The 40 bayoneted babies of those barbaric Germans as per WWI atrocity propaganda
In war, you need both material resources and psychological resolve. Imperialism, being totalizing, turns every psyche into a battlefield. Hence “fifth-generation warfare”: economic sanctions, regime change, genocide—and relentless psychological operations to convince us resistance is futile.
Mark Fisher called this Capitalist Realism the fake-realistic state of mind in which : “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” He died by suicide—possibly because he mistook fake capitalist realism for reality.
Here’s the test: Does any content—tweet, video, analysis, whatever—make you feel resistance is fertile or futile?
If futile, it serves Empire—even if unintentionally, and you surely don’t need more of it.
If fertile, it fuels resistance, and you should seek more of that.
Your body will know how that difference feels. Trust it. But only if you’re grounded in resistance.
Otherwise, you’ll fall for “lesser evilism”—the very same gaslighting that keeps people in abusive relationships and voting for imperial Democrats or, outside the US, for various shades of social democrats.
Gaza as Litmus Test
You can run the Fertile/Futile test on everything you consume about Palestine:
Fertile: Uncompromising Palestinian voices, verified fundraisers, anti-imperialist education, amateur resistance montages.
Futile: Graphic victim imagery without context, doom-mongering, liberal hand-wringing, sectarian leftism, algorithm-fed shorts.
White Empire doesn’t care if you “agree” with them. They only care that you lose the will to resist. Your psyche is a target. Neutrality strengthens the oppressor.
Below is a quick and dirty list I made:
Make your own and see if your own psychological resistance resources increase or decrease.
White Empire is Losing. Therefore, We Are Winning
White Empire is in terminal decline. Just look at the scoreboard:
Lost economic supremacy to China (circa 2020)
Lost military supremacy to Russia (circa 2015), China (circa 2019), and Iran (2025)
Lost naval dominance to Yemen (2024)
Lost moral supremacy through two years+ of 4K live-streamed genocide (2023 and ongoing)
Yet as idealists, imperialists will fight their last battle in the realm of narrative—tweeting “Resistance is futile” as they take their last breath, even as they decompose under the accumulated rubble of their own narcissism.
Old-timey commie fellow-traveler Ernest Hemingway said it best.
As regards guerrilla resistance, as even depraved imperial war-criminal Henry Kissinger is said to have admitted, the guerrilla wins if they do not lose, while a conventional army loses if they do not win.
Gaza’s resistance was not wiped out → victory
Yemen blocked Red Sea traffic → victory
Hezbollah did has not been disarmed → victory
Iran forced Israel to beg for ceasefire → victory
Given that in asymmetric war, the guerrilla wins by not losing, resistance is winning on the battlefields.
In addition, even in terms of conventional warfare, the Empire is losing its attrition campaign in Ukraine, in which Russia is effectively demilitarizing NATO.
As for China, to see that it is winning, we Westoids must set aside the ways we conceive of war, i.e. beating people to a pulp. Where the West is all Prussian Clauzewitz, China is all Sun Tsu: Know thyself and know thy enemy. Plan carefully so that you win the supreme war, the one in which you subdue the enemy without fighting.
You could say that whereas for the West war is the continuation of policy by other means, for China policy is the continuation of war by other means.
It’s zero sum objective of imposing your will on the other guys vs. cornering your enemy into win-win dynamics rather than annihilating them. Guess which one claims to be the most civilized of the two.
Sun Tsu’s Art of War: A decidedly non-Prussian view of war. Who’ll win I wonder?
Don’t expect Westoids to get that point anytime soon, with rare exceptions. Thankfully, it does not matter whether we Westoids get it or not.
In a way, it serves China’s objectives as, per Sun Tsu: If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. And when you consider that White Empire barely knows itself these days…
The main point is that if all those actors are able to materially resist the empire, then it materially means that the empire can be successfully resisted.
From a materialist perspective, it follows that, if White Empire can be materially resisted, it can also be resisted psychologically.
Loose Lips Sink Ships, as well as Hearts and Minds
As White Empire is getting its backside handed to it on a material plate, the philosophical idealists that pilot it will double down on the narrative and psychological battlefields in the deluded belief that this is how they’ll be able to create a new reality in which they win.
And that’s where we come in. We need to be ready. We urgently need to become more conscious of the psychological warfare dimension of all things, and never forget that we are indeed winning the war.
This means that every time we say anything in public or on social media, every time we publish a blog post, every time we provide analysis on video, we must think of ourselves as resistance fighters executing a sortie on the narrative battlefield.
And here’s the rub brothers and sisters—and this is especially addressed to you, fellow anti-imperialist activists, content creators, analysts, and political strategists. Everything we say, everything we write, every tweet and video we put out is going to have some effect in terms of either weakening or strengthening the psychology of either or both sides.
It’s either going to make those who are part of the resistance psychologically stronger, or psychologically weaker. In terms of psychological warfare, it’s all ammo.
Whatever you say or put out there will impact these four dimensions. Don’t you ever forget it.
I actually believe that we should all tattoo this matrix on our forehead so that when we look in the mirror, for those of us who do that (meaning not me), we will consider it before we open our big mouth, hitting our keyboard or pressing that record button.
Neutrality is not an option because neutrality strengthens the ruling side being White Empire.
At least it’s not an option for those of us who are grounding in resistance.
The Trap of “Correct” Analysis
Cool-headed analysis is vital—but, on social media, two traps await us all:
Pessimism bias: “Empire always wins, so it will again.”
Fear of looking naive: “I expect the worst so I’m never disappointed.”
Both demoralize. Both serve Empire.
As regards passing judgment on military tactics and strategy from the uninformed comfort of your keyboard warrior gamer chairs, just don’t. You don’t have all the information and, unless you’re in the armed resistance, don’t critique their tactics. Even if you are, you’ll never critique their tactics publicly because you don’t want to be a traitor, do you?
Even if you’ve read every single imperial think-tank paper and read daily the NYT from cover to cover, you lack crucial intel—and airing doubts aids the enemy. (Looking at you, Brian Berletic.)
You, Too, Are a Droplet in the Flood
We at RIF only have a tiny platform. Before being banned by YouTube, we had just reached 2.4k subscribers since launching in Jan 2025. Our swiftly growing Substack only has 1k followers to date.
In one of many strokes of strategic brilliance, martyr Yahya Sinwar named the most remarkable anti-colonial military operation to date Al-Aqsa Flood. What is a flood? A flood is a large mass of water coming together the force of which clears everything in its path until all that was on the surface is washed away and what was hidden is revealed for all to see. And what are floods composed of? Water, of course. And what is water composed of? Droplets of water, of course. In fact, there is no mass of water that is not composed of droplets.
There are 8 billion human droplets currently existing on this Blue Earth.
Every one of us is as much of a droplet of water as anyone else. See, we’re back to the fundamental equality in basic human worth between all of us humans. No droplet is more of a droplet than any other droplet. Ideally, we organize collectively.
We are all droplets of water.
You’re one of them. And I’m one of them.
You’re one. I’m one. No droplet is “more” than another. Organize. Connect. Speak.
White Empire is waging total psychological war because it knows it’s mortal. That’s why we’re all drafted.
We have nothing to lose but our so-called mental disorders—depression, anxiety, and self-loathing.
And we, the Free and Noble People of the World, have a world to win.
If this resonated, share it. Restack. Comment. Subscribe. And remember: your voice is not negligible. It’s part of the flood.
While you’re here please, sign the petition to get YouTube to reinstate the Resistance is Fertile channel!
Ah Laith Marouf --- such a devil working all the time. LOL. I say that in all the best ways. A catalyst is a catalyst no matter what. Marouf knows what he's doing every time he opens his mouth during each interview/conversation.
Really liked your chart organizing. I can relate to that content. For example regarding Chris Hedges for one. As a war reporter on the ground in some very nasty "conflicts" I think he did some excellent work. But regarding Palestine he drives me up the wall these days. Now I seldom pay attention except if he has a guest of interest. Otherwise--he'd have us all hiding under rocks awaiting the very worst. Same for Brian of the New Atlas. He still offers some interesting intel but clearly has no grounding in fertile resistance. Then there's Dimitri Lascaris-- who, UNLIKE most of the talking heads of the alternative media actually goes to Lebanon and Palestine. Though he was denied entry to the occupied West Bank by the genocidal maniacs on his most recent effort. Even so his support for Palestinians is ongoing and grounded --consider his pro bono legal work for Palestinians in Canada against the "fake" route to Canada which helped almost NO one. He definitely belongs in the positive producer column.
Tank toast and Yemen--hmmm---.
Thanks for the though provoking read.
Thanks for this great read! I read it a couple of days ago, and I couldn't stop thinking about this:
English is not my first language, and I never lived in the west. Maybe I am reading too much into it but, one thing I have been thinking about since reading the article, is the concept/practice/phrase of "bearing witness". Even though I am Muslim, and in Islam the Shahada is "'I bear witness that there is no deity worthy of worship but God, and I bear witness that Muhammad is the Messenger of God.". The first image that came to my mind with this phrase is bearing witness to atrocities while staying helpless on the side. I researched a little bit and although I am not very well versed in theology, I can see similar themes in Christianity and Judaism, where you bear witness to the truth, instead of bearing witness to injustice. When has this changed happened? And why is it that it is usually used in the negative way?
Could it be part of the matrix or is it just me thinking in this weird way? For example:
Fertile: bear witness to the truth, with conviction in its truthfulness.
Futile: bear witness to injustice with helplessness/shame.