One of the ways the center maintains control over the periphery is by imposing its worldview. Sometimes this happens when the official doctrines of the metropolis are faithfully adopted by local elites. At other times, the same effect emerges in a more ironic form: so-called “patriotic alternatives” uncritically recycle conspiracy narratives imported from the Anglo-American world, mistaking borrowed fantasies for independent thinking.
But the problem is not only one of general political orientation. It often appears in concrete analytical judgments as well. Consider this claim:
“From a geopolitical perspective, communism was the best thing that could have happened to the United States, because it demographically and economically crippled the two states most capable of competing with it — Russia and China.”
This is not merely superficial. It is profoundly mistaken.
Without minimizing the immense human suffering inflicted by Marxist tyrannies, it is impossible to deny that Marxism functioned in both Russia and China as a tool of accelerated modernization. Without Marxism, neither country would likely have preserved its sovereignty. Without Marxism, no industrial base capable of sustaining independence would have emerged. Both vast civilizations would have remained Western colonies — and it is far from obvious that their peoples and cultures would even have survived intact.
That historical situation bears little resemblance to our own experience in Central Europe, where industrialization and modernization had already taken place before the twentieth century upheavals.
The underlying error reflects a deeply ingrained assumption in the center: that being someone’s colony is a privilege; that colonized peoples live comfortably and prosperously; and that those who resist such arrangements are irrational or ungrateful. One finds this attitude not only among neoconservatives in the Fukuyama mold, but even in ostensibly hard-nosed realists such as John Mearsheimer. When one lives inside the imperial core, these assumptions become second nature.
The real intellectual challenge is therefore not merely to master the analytical tools produced by the center — many of them are genuinely powerful — but to resist absorbing its civilizational prejudices along with them.