This article assumes that the reader is familiar with our previous posts on All Roads Lead to Rome (Part 1) (Part 2), specifically the portion on the emergence of multiculturalism as a superstructural manifestation of neocolonialism.
In the past two or three decades now, the world’s countries and peoples have been facing a renewed cultural offensive by the foremost imperialist powers. This offensive advances in parallel with their economic and political-military offensives. This cultural offensive is led by US imperialism. It is the “soft power” aspect of the US ambition for full spectrum dominance in the economic, political, military, social and other spheres, including outerspace […] This cultural offensive is not simply one that is planned and implemented among the ideological and cultural elite of US imperialism, i.e., in the CIA-funded and big business-funded think tanks and media corporations, but more significantly, it is wired into all the economic, political-military, and cultural/media agencies of the US government and MNCs, and in the international bodies where the US exercise significant influence.
Neoliberal globalization and US global military presence are intentionally designed to drive forward this cultural offensive. Globally and especially in third world countries, Multinational Corporations conduct Corporate Social Responsibility ads or cause marketing campaigns; while US special forces undertake disaster, rescue and medical missions traditionally done by the Red Cross and charitable foundations to deliver more strongly than the latter the subliminal propaganda messages favoring US imperialism and its military forces embedded into seemingly humanitarian or charitable endeavors.
This article aims to untangle how the liberal construction of “LGBTQ Rights” is actually a form of Unconvential Warfare. The terms “pinkwashing” and “rainbow imperialism” do not capture the scope of the threat posed by the imperialist cultural warfare machine. It’s not rainbow anything—its just imperialism.
A significant component of the settler right inside the United States is a deep hatred of marginalized genders and gay people. Inside the US, such a position is reactionary and often advanced by the most outwardly xenophobic groups. However amerikan leftists and liberals extend this beyond its usefulness to say that anyone who speaks ill of feminism or gay people anywhere is equally reactionary. This is absolutely incorrect and fails to understand the primary contradiction of imperialism and their role in it.
When we speak about “LGBT” and the rainbow flag, it is important to understand its current material function. The US government waves rainbow flags on its embassy and funds “LGBT NGO’s” with the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a CIA front. High profile “LGBT” parades—sponsored by monopoly capital—occur annually in Nazi regimes like Amerika, the EU, ‘israel’ and the Ukraine.
In the collage above, the top left is an image of an IOF soldier in his underwear waving an "israeli" flag at "Tel Aviv Pride". The top center is a Pride flag at the British embassy in Moscow 2022.1 The bottom left is a Unicorn patch worn by gay Ukrainian nazi soldiers (note the Banderite Right Sektor flag above it.) The center bottom was posted by the official Kiev Pride twitter account from a Kiev Pride march; the sign says in Ukrainian “In 2025 Red square will be renamed after Stepan Bandera.”
The top right image is from "EuroPride 2022" in Belgrade Serbia, note the Ukrainian flags that say “#Pride Stands with Ukraine.” The event itself was organized by EU and US embassy and they purposefully brought in anti-Serb Ukrainian and Albanian racists to the event.2 Serbians never forgot when NATO bombed Belgrade for 78 days and killed thousands of civilians in 1999.3 Are we surprised that groups of masked Serbian nationalists came to disrupt the event? Yet, Western liberals painted them as homophobic barbarians because they were furious about an EU & US sponsored Nazi parade in their city.
Beyond public parades and flags, rainbow Nazism (not a contradiction), “LGBT rights” and NGO feminism is a specific psyop strategy pushed by the empire to sabotage its enemies.
The NED pays millions of dollars to support “feminist” nonprofits in Iran that promote regime change.4 A topic we thoroughly investigated here.
The NED and EU and Saudis finance NGO’s in occupied Palestine to “promote Human Rights.” These organizations are often deliberately designed to schism the Palestinian people away from supporting armed struggle and the true revolutionary forces there. Indeed, they were used in the 80's and 90's to sabotage resistance-based M-L parties.5
The zionist entity constantly markets itself as a “Gay Paradise” and ‘Tel-Aviv’ sacrilegiously as a “Gay Mecca.” This official government policy of Pinkwashing to portray Palestinian Arabs as barbarians (who must be destroyed).6
“Feminist” NGO’s in Ukraine that are openly fronts for Banderism.7
In Venezuela, the Canadian government financed the “Women for Democracy Movement” to support Juan Guaido's attempted coup of democratically elected president Nicholas Maduro in 2019.8
In Iraq, the US and EU flew pride flags outside their embassy and aggressively promote “LGBTI rights.” Imperialist forces murdered millions of Iraqis and continue occupy their homeland then have the audacity to wave a pride flag in their face calling them homophobic. How do you think Iraqi people are going to respond?
This is only a few examples but these insidious strategies play out in most countries around the world. The strategies don’t always have the same methods but they always have the same goal.
What the NGOs push with this nonsense “LGBTQ Rights” is at its core an individualist slant that universalizes Eurohumanist constructions of gender and sexuality.9 Every society around the world had significantly different conceptions of gender and sexuality before European colonialism waged a war on the entire planet, but none of those culturally specific phenomena are “LGBTQ”. “LGBTQ” is an ahistorical construction that serves monopoly capital. This, however, is beside the point. The discursive function is far less important than the material function. Concretely, it is a psyop designed to fracture communities and split nations.
They target gays and marginalized genders with a narrative: “Actually your nation is the REAL oppressor, life is better over here in the global village.” This narrative is backed by the enforced poverty of economic warfare. Why else would someone, whose is country under siege from the empire, be convinced that “LGBT asylum” in ‘israel’ or amerika is actually an acceptable choice?
Heightening pre-existing social contradictions to promote distrust and suspicion is an old tactic of imperialist psychological operations. The imperialists know that their campaigns push masses of people towards hating anyone associated with “Feminism” and “LGBT”—indeed this is partially the point.
Case Study 1— Iran:
authors note: this section contains content that may be emotionally disturbing to some readers
A particularly disturbing example of this phenomenon plays out as unconventional warfare against the Islamic Republic of Iran. In 2009, Scott Long of Human Rights Watch (HRW), wrote an article about how Western LGBT activists have routinely labeled convicted sexual predators as “gay victims.”10 (note: HRW is a regime change NGO so this can hardly be dismissed as "Iranian state propaganda".)
He describes the case of two teenagers (18 & 17) who sexually assaulted a 13 year old child and were tried, convicted and executed for the crime. A British ‘gay rights’ organization worked with the propaganda wing of the Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) to "reshape the narrative to maximize indignation."11 This is despite the fact that "no source until that point had given the slightest suggestion that the youths were 'gay' or had consensual sex."12 Soon afterwards hundreds of “LGBTQ organizations” were spreading the story like a game of telephone.
Another example cited in the article describes 2 pairs of adult men who were executed by the Iranian judiciary in 2005 and were uplifted as “gay martyrs” in the West. But in reality “two of the men were convicted of robbing and raping a woman, and two of raping three young girls.”13 The Western media with their NCRI/MEK 'sources' never included these facts but instead called for international outrage. This led to such absurd claims as a Spanish newspaper declaring an “a genocide in Iran of homosexuals.”14
Aside: (Those in the West who are shocked that such things could happen in Iran should look in the mirror: 97% of women between the ages of 18-24 in the UK report being sexually harassed15 and 1 in 6 women in Amerika are sexually assaulted in their lifetime.16 Most of this sexual violence goes unreported and unpunished because of pervasive sexism in Western Judicial System. In both the US & UK it is very common for minors to die "accidental deaths" in jail.17)
With those histories in mind we can clearly see the same situation happening today 17 years later. The Western media screams that Zahra Seddiqi Hamedani is a “gender non-conforming human rights defender” who is imprisoned “solely in connection to her social media posts and statements in defence of [LGBT] rights”.18 Any english internet searches with her name will find the same narrative and her face plastered up as a victim.
And yet, the Iranian judiciary actually tried and convicted her, based on witness testimony, of running an operation that trafficked hundreds of Iranian women and girls into Europe through northern Iraq.19 Zahra and two traffickers were sentenced to death for Mofsed-e-filarz or "spreading corruption of the earth." Imperialist media plays to islamaphobic tropes to pretend this is about sexuality. However, the term has a specific jurisprudence in Islamic law in Iran and in the case of Zahra, the designation was specifically because she was "organizing the widespread sale and prostitution of Iranian girls."20
Ask yourself, if the Iranian judiciary were actually convicting her for simply being homosexual, then why not be open about that? Why create a false story with fake witnesses and compromise the legitimacy of their entire criminal justice system?21
These twisted narratives aren’t just in English media either, Saudi news source “Iran International”, “Iran Wire” and VOA Persian spread the same lies in Persian media. We have already seen the horrific consequences of their information warfare apparatus in Iran. We would ask, how are Iranians supposed to interpret this narrative of “LGBTQ Rights” when the people being propped up by western infowar as “gay rights defenders” are sex traffickers and child rapists?
Worse still, the NATO countries then use these falsified stories and other narratives to justify increased sanctions and to expel Iran from multilateral institutions such as the UN Commision on Women’s Rights.22
One point must be made clear though. It would be absurd to pretend that all 85 million Iranians feel the same way about anything and that there is no internal debate about the role of women in society. In fact, the University of Tehran has a Women and Family Studies program that holds workshops on things like promoting women’s empowerment or combating domestic violence—all within an Islamic, Iranian, context. On state-funded media there are debates between respected public figures about the role of mandatory Hijab.23 The government also funds media and film showings about transgender Iranians.24
Iranians will work out their own social contradictions without the invasive imperialist brand of “LGBTQ Feminism”.
"Quite simply, those who claim to advocate for Human Rights in the West will not pay attention to you when you are killed; but they will come to the defense of human rights when you resist your colonizers, and then they will be forced to hear your voice. Hence we realize that what will achieve peace for the Palestinians is the defeat of colonialism, not correcting the narrative of those who are biased against them, because the usefulness of resistance is always pulled out of the margins of history to correct the narrative and write revolutionary history.
In a study by (Ghassan) Kanafani, he says that the media battles in the West take the form of confrontation between the right and the left in the country concerned, and that what we can do is take advantage of these contradictions to push the left towards resisting reaction. However, what differs in this battle, for us, is the change in the shape of the western left in our current era. It has shifted away from its ability to engage in the struggles of the global south and join the ranks of the resistance, to instead engage in activities to preserve the environment and organize campaigns to waste milk in shops. In Palestine in particular, we see the image of the most progressive Western activist, who comes with human rights organizations built from a network of plundering our wealth, to live in a house that the Palestinians themselves do not own the price of renting, and then organizes an angry diplomatic stand in front of a Palestinian house that is being demolished before his eyes."
-Raghad Zaakhir; The Nakba in the American Media: Methods of Distortion and Denial (Source)
Case Study 2— Cuba:
On September 25th, 2022 the Cuban people voted 2-1 in support of the updated Family Code. The updated Family Code is a new set of rights and government responsibilities that includes25:
“increased rights to children, gays, disabled people… guarantees the right of all people to form a family without discrimination, legalizing same sex marriage and allowing same sex couples to adopt children. Under the new code, parental rights will be shared among extended and non-traditional family structures that could include grandparents, step parents and surrogate mothers. …[It] establishes the right to a family life free from violence, one that values love, affection, solidarity and responsibility. It codifies domestic violence penalties, and promotes comprehensive policies to address gender-based violence.”
The US government, however, cannot tolerate the advancement of Cuban society. Iroel Sanchez writes26:
In its anti-Cuban propaganda war, Washington is now putting all the machinery of terrorism 2.0 in digital networks, which it finances for regime change on the island, to promote a vote against a Code that will allow, among many things, equal marriage and solidarity motherhood [surrogacy without exchange of money]. Experts say that in terms of sexual and family rights it is one of the most advanced legislation in the world and deals a hard blow to patriarchy.
One of the primary groups that was against the updated Family Code were Evangelical Churches who said it was “harmful for families and the nation.”27 These groups hold a lot of social power in Cuba and previously, in 2018, were able to block a proposed constitutional amendment to legalize same-sex marriage. Unsurprisingly the US government has a long history of funding Evangelical churches inside of Cuba to escalate social contradictions. Even the imperialist 'journalists' at Vice News admitted28:
Over the last decade, discrimination against LGBTQ people in Cuba has been waning and there have been tangible gains in the area of LGBTQ rights, led largely by Mariela Castro, Raúl Castro’s daughter and longtime director of CENESEX (the National Center for Sex Education). In 2008, the government made gender confirmation surgery free under the national healthcare system, and in 2013, it banned workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. But that was before the recent uptick in evangelism in Cuba, partly aided by financial and ideological support from the U.S.
USAID has sent millions of dollars to conservative and anti-gay “Christian programs” in Cuba. One such organization, the Evangelical Christian Humanitarian Outreach for Cuba (ECHO Cuba), received over 2.3 million dollars over the last decade to “fight Biblical poverty” in Cuba.29
The ECHO organization was created by Teo A. Babún Jr. whose father was a Gusano landlord during the Batista regime. Babún senior fled to the United States during the communist revolution; he was also a financier for the anti-communist Cuban-Amerikan terrorist organization Alpha 66 that carried out over half a dozen attacks against the Cuban people.30
Many of these Evangelical groups are not just anti-gay, they are also counter-revolutionary. During July 2021 a two day protest emerged in Cuba. The western media and DOD-controlled social media networks immediately began promoting #SOSCuba a regime-change hashtag. Imperialist NGO’s bragged that “Cuban Evangelicals powered the J11 Revolution”.
An excellent article by investigative journalist Alan Macleod describes a whole network of US funded groups and individuals who were paid to support the protests-cum-riots:31
"For many years, under the banner of regime change, organizations like USAID have tried to infiltrate Cuban rap groups and fund covert operations to provoke youth protests."
They infiltrated music groups and art communities to specifically provoke minority groups like Gay Cubans and Black Cubans.32 So of course, once the protests came out there were all sorts of hit pieces written in imperialist media about how terrible Cuba is and that “Black and Gay Cubans are revolting”.
The contemporary and historical elected leadership of the Cuban revolution, among them Raúl Castro, have also exposed and condemned the US imperialist "program of subversion and ideological and cultural influence [which] has been redoubled.”
In Summary:
The US finances organizations that promote anti-gay politics and work to undermine Cuban social programs.
The US also finances artists and musicians to sow discontent amongst Cuban youth and other specially targeted communities.
At the same time it runs international media campaigns accusing Cuba of being a “racist homophobic machista dictatorship.” This is in tandem with psyop social media campaigns designed to turn Cubans against their government.
And all of this is happening in the greater context of a genocidal economic embargo on Cuba that is designed to impoverish and kill the Cuban people.
In spite of all of this, the Cuban nation was able to implement a new Family Code and democratically agree to a sovereign socialist process through which they may resolve many of their own social contradictions. This new Family Code is not about “Feminist LGBTQ Rights,” it is about rights for all Cubans (including men).
More than Pinkwashing
The imperialist cultural offensive behind “LGBTQ feminism” plays out differently in different countries based on their own unique circumstances and characteristics. Iran and Cuba are very different countries but both are targetted by imperialist sanctions and hybrid warfare strategies designed to fracture the nation. And both countries are working to resolve their own social contradictions in their own context, in spite of the empire sabotaging them every step of the way. The reason we chose these two examples is because they have a relatively high degree of sovereignty ( ie. not controlled by empire) which is what has enabled these advancements in the first place.
Many anti-imperialists outside of the West see what the empire is doing with “LGBTQ feminism” and are correctly observing the enemy strategies of neocolonialism, pinkwashing, and liberalism. When a person in Donetsk or Baghdad or Gaza or Tehran is actively hostile to “LGBT feminism”, it is because they oppose manifestations of NATO-Nazism. Building internationalist relationships with the forces of anti-imperialism will mean accumulating points of unity from a position of humility and not disdaining and condemning anti-imperialist forces that, at this juncture, may espouse anti-”LGBT/Feminist” ideology.
It’s no mistake that the entire western left is obsessed with “Palestine Solidarity” but speaks nothing of the forces of revolution and armed struggle there. They slander Hamas as “Islamists” and “homophobes” and reduce Palestinians to being victims-in-need-of-saving rather than a diverse nation engaged in centuries of protracted armed struggle. The forces of revolution in Palestine are winning. They won the battle of Seif Al Quds in 2021 and they will liberate Palestine.
This is in no small part because of robust alliances with regional allies such as Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah. How can anti-imperialists in the West ever engage in genuine internationalism with Palestine when they call the revolution and its allies “Islamists” “Patriarchal Theocrats” “Genocidaires” and “regimes”?
In reality, the only governments that are not accountable to their nation are the fascist-imperialist countries and their neo-colonial puppet regimes. Those governments are accountable only to monopoly capital. Governments who are under siege from empire must be accountable to their nation otherwise they could not hold power—they cannot afford to be anti-people. Westerners who claim otherwise are largely projecting their own weakness.
There is NO PLACE for the US government, its NGO’s, or its false internationalist Left to dictate the social relations of other nations. Oppressed nations will resolve their own contradictions in their own ways; and they can only truly be resolved when global imperialism is defeated. Perhaps then the kind of genuinely internationalist exchanges can take place which can facilitate ongoing internal discussions in each nation on the social content of their self-determination.
This conversation on “LGBT rights” as imperialism—and especially as Unconvential Warfare—is forbidden by the Western left. But it must be spoken on. The inability and unwillingness of anti-imperialists in the West to grapple with this contradiction leaves them useless at best and actively advancing counterrevolutionary forces at worst.
The essential task of progressive and revolutionary forces all over the world today is developing unity, cooperation and coordination of all peoples and raising the level of struggle against imperialism and reaction, in particular against imperialist plunder and war led by US imperialism the number 1 terrorist power.
The unseen but extremely significant battle going on today between the West and the East is a conceptual and moral battle. The West continues to flex its muscles and send more money and weaponry to zones of conflict, while the East is addressing hearts and minds in a serious effort to chart a better and safer path for future humanity.
This can be detected if we follow carefully and intelligently what President Xi Jinping and President Putin are saying and doing at every juncture and compare it with what Western leaders are saying and doing. What is notable is that what American and European officials are stating runs most of the time against the interests and the natural feelings of most people all over the world. It is obvious that Western leaders are intent on slowing down the scientific and technological progress of China, besides prolonging a war of attrition against Russia in Ukraine, and in the meantime leading efforts to create regional blocs in the Pacific and solidify the existing ones in the West.
But despite all these efforts and what may seem to be as important battles being won here and there with huge glorification in the Western press, the West is drowning in its own ocean while the world is sailing away from it, creating its own hemisphere, its own vision and its own values derived mostly from the natural path that humanity has been treading for thousands of years away from genocide, racism, occupation, and terrorism.
Images:
NED in Iran (Archived Source)
NED in Iraq (source)
Beyond Propaganda: Pinkwashing as Colonial Violence
Israeli settler-colonialism works by breaking apart and eliminating Palestinian communities, whether through the military violence of occupation and siege, the legal regimes of apartheid, or the denial of refugees’ right of return. Yet it also divides Palestinians internally and psychologically, in the personal realms of self-perception and collective identification. In order to understand the nature of this struggle, we also have to understand ourselves, and how colonization impacts our inner lives.
Pinkwashing pushes the racist idea that sexual and gender diversity are unnatural and foreign to Palestinian society. When this idea is internalized within Palestinian communities, it alienates queer and gender non-conforming Palestinians and isolates them as a social group. These compounding social pressures tell queer Palestinians that they must give up on some part of their identity or experience: we can either be queer and not accepted as a Palestinian, or we can be Palestinian and not accepted as queer. The destructive effects of internalized pinkwashing reverberate throughout Palestinian communities, strengthening myths that associate queer Palestinians with Israeli collaborators or Westernized native informants and propagating feelings of hopelessness that narrow our political imaginaries.
"Feminist Workshop” Banderite NGO — founded in 2014
Canada Propped Up Venezuelan Astroturf Group Linked to Crumbling ‘Interim Government,’
Almost no online media coverage of WDV mentions the Canadian funding that led to the creation of the group. One article, published by Latina Republic last November, included a tweet from Canada’s World Trade Organization (WTO) mission in Geneva, which noted that it was “proud” to co-sponsor the event at which WDV was created. Similarly, tweets posted by officials at the event on Oct. 21, 2021 thanked the Geneva mission for supporting the event.
…
Leading members include Maria Teresa Belandria, a member of the so-called “interim government” and international co-ordinator of the right-wing Vente Venezuela political party, which has openly supported the idea of foreign military intervention to oust Maduro. Canada’s UN representative in Geneva, Leslie Norton, was also at WDV’s launch event.Barrios said the group is incapable of representing Venezuelan society beyond a very small group of “upper class” women.
"The unique development of gender in the colonized world has started to encounter new realities. The queer movement intensified in the western world, marked by radical events such as the Stonewall riots. Such changes created further reform within western capitalist societies, but as capitalism has not necessarily moved out of the stage of imperialism, it continues to maintain its exploitative relationship with large parts of the world through the tactic of neocolonialism. Imperialist finance capital continues to distort the realities and the question of queer rights in the ‘developing’ world has become a prominent point. …
The presence of NGOs as the leadership of the queer movement has led to the movement opting for a legal reformist approach, wherein it attempts to first speak the language of the law, seeing the state as an ultimately progressive force. This is on par with the larger structure of NGOs themselves, which provide a perfect space for the class of academics and professionals to take leadership of progressive struggles and subvert them in the service of capital. This has seen the introduction of an inorganic western nomenclature onto the understanding gender within Indian society. Suddenly, pre-colonial gender groups are now falling into the terms non-binary, third gender or transgender in various legal documentation. But there is also a material aspect to how this movement distorts and reproduces further violence, originating from its driving force that is imperialist capital.
Imperialism at the Wheels: Re-evaluating the Indian Queer Movement by Shri Rishi
Long, Scott. (2009). Unbearable witness: how Western activists (mis)recognize sexuality in Iran. Contemporary Politics. 15. 119-136. 10.1080/13569770802698054. (full article)
Scott, L. Page 123
ibid.
Scott, L. Page 126
ibid.
At this point, its unclear if homosexuality is even outlawed in Iran at all. The same sources making this claim are also claiming that the Iranian government hates transgender people, when we know for a fact that is not the case.
This debate includes the daughter of Qassem Soleimani defending mandatory Hijab.