this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2026
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"As revolutionaries, we don't have the right to say that we're tired of explaining. We must never stop explaining. We also know that when the people understand, they cannot but follow us. In any case, we, the people, have no enemies when it comes to peoples. Our only enemies are the imperialist regimes and organizations." Thomas Sankara, 1985
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Dehumanizing yourself doesn't help other peoples who are being dehumanized. Again, this is trying to mimic the conditions of the oppressed to assuage guilt, not helping them live in better conditions.
The west has a real problem with thinking itself special/uniquely talented/uniquely important/etc. Basically a huge ego problem on a system level as a side effect of the west being positioned as "better than" and its targets as "less than" in order to justify the exploitation and the killing and so on. Dismantling that does not mean reversing the polarity. For the westerner side of things, it means dismantling the systems of exploitation and coming back down to Earth; and yes, that includes when thinking of yourself as uniquely "evil" and needing punishment by association.
If you, personally, have committed terrible crimes, you should try to make amends for those crimes, especially with the people those crimes most directly impacted. If you think you're to blame by association for every crime the empire has committed because it happens to be where you were born, you're still thinking with the western ego. But you don't need to shoulder the blame for things out of your control in order to want to liberate oppressed peoples and to take action towards that goal.
I don't see it as rude, I'm just telling you, it is not a helpful or healthy train of thought. Let me put it this way: If you think loathing the empire as an entity is inseparable from loathing yourself, that shows how much you still identify with the empire as a part of you. But why would you? Are you working for its military or something? Do you feel kinship with committing genocide? What is it about the imperial practices that you still feel connected to? Identify those and unlearn them. Learn from the east, from Socialist China and others like them. Learn from those who have succeeded in liberation. It's a good anti-ego exercise to learn from the very sort of people who the west normally condemns as lesser and they have a lot they do well that the west as a whole ignores, or refuses to learn from, due to its insistence they are "savages".
the terrible crime is being born in the core and existing, i fear
And I'm telling you, that's how imperialists think when they want to justify their murderous policies; this is embedded in what the intelligentsia reproduces as cultural thought, from hundreds of years of colonialism, some of which developed into global imperialism. You're taking that lens and turning it inward, toward the imperial core.
You're far from the first to do this and you won't be the last. Because changing loyalties doesn't instantly change your paradigm. But the good news is, it is possible to change your paradigm over time.