Why CounterVortex? The planet is spiraling into a vortex of ecological collapse, permanent war, and totalitarianism—whether of the techno-security state or the religious and ethnic fundamentalisms that ostensibly oppose it. Through our resistance, we create a counter-vortex, generating movement toward sustainability, peace, and popular democracy.
While we advance a ruthless criticism of all existing reality, this is not an invitation to mere nihilism: in negating the leviathan that is itself negating human freedom and autonomy, we ultimately seek a negation of the negation.
CounterVortex is an evolution of World War 4 Report, the news service and digest launched by Bill Weinberg in the aftermath of 9-11. Our fundamental mission is unchanged, although our focus has evolved with the world situation since then….
Our origins: deconstructing the GWOT
The project began monitoring the Global War on Terrorism and its implications for human rights, democracy and ecology in the immediate aftermath of 9-11. Developing an international network of contacts and correspondents, we scanned the world press and Internet for important stories overlooked by the mass media, and examined the headlines with a critical eye for distortion, deceit and propaganda. We sought to report on the forgotten wars outside the media spotlight, and seek out unexamined contexts beyond mainstream sound-bite coverage. We endeavored to expose the corporate agendas behind the new military interventions, and to find pro-autonomy, anti-militarist voices we can support in the countries under imperialist assault. We sought to loan a voice to the secular, progressive anti-imperialist and pro-democracy forces in the Middle East that reject the spectacularized “jihad-vs-GWOT” duality. We especially sought to loan solidarity to land-rooted, stateless, and indigenous peoples—the “Fourth World.”
We changed the name to CounterVortex in 2016, in light of our expanding areas of coverage (beyond our original mandate of the Global War on Terrorism), and to emphasize resistance and positive alternatives to the deepening dystopia. Hence our new kicker: “Resisting Humanity’s Downward Spiral.”
Why World War 4?
The “World War III” envisioned in the Cold War was a devastating conflict between two monolithic superpowers. The Cold War, thankfully, never reached this climax. But in the aftermath of 9-11, we entered its chilling sequel: the age of “asymmetrical” or “molecular” warfare, in which a single globalized superpower faced an invisible, hydra-headed enemy which is everywhere and nowhere; in which the expansion of “free markets” was an explicit aim of military campaigns; and in which indigenous peoples, stateless ethnicities and localist/autonomist political models—the “Fourth World”—were increasingly targeted and conflated with the “terrorist” threat. To emphasize that this new world situation requires a new kind of thinking, we joined with those on the left and right alike that have calle this global conflict World War 4. See World War 4 Report #106
But this conflict, the “GWOT,” is no longer the hegemonic paradigm for the global struggle, as it was for the first decade or so following 9-11. With Russia’s recovery as a superpower and the US embarking on a New Cold War with China, the potential has again emerged for a “World War III” scenario—which now could be considered World War 5. We similarly advance a neither/nor position vis-a-vis the US and its imperial rivals. We assert that the advent of a multi-polar world must necessarily imply a critique of the “other” poles.
The Obama interregnum: from GWOT to “Overseas Contingency Operations”
With the election of Barack Obama, our kicker changed from “Deconstructing the War on Terrorism” to “Deconstructing Overseas Contingency Operations.” There were some indications that with Obama, we had entered the post-GWOT era. Although the US military remained massively overstretched, the nomenclature, at least, changed. The Obama administration formally abandoned the Bush-era phrase “Global War on Terrorism.” The new term was the dryly clinical and antiseptic “Overseas Contingency Operation.” Was this an improvement—or a switch from a hubristic and bellicose rallying cry to an Orwellian euphemism? In any case, it was clear that our project had not outlived its mission.
Resisting Trumpism: anti-fascist imperative
With the first election of Donald Trump, the US returned to a more openly bellicose stance, the enemy now explicitly identified as “radical Islamic terrorism.” Trump’s “isolationist” rhetoric predictably failed to manifest in a withdrawal of US military commitments—occasional appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. The de-Trumpification seen under Joseph Biden was predictably inadequate, both in terms of dismantling the domestic police-state apparatus and global military machinery.
Trump’s return to power has dramatically deepened the global crisis. His at least seeming contraction of US military commitments in Europe, and connivance with Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, have been concomitant with frighteningly escalated bellicosity in the traditional US sphere of influence in the Americas—pointing to an ultra-dystopian manifestation of “multipolarity” that we identify as an emerging fascist world order.
The anti-immigrant backlash that began in the US with 9-11 is being globalized in the current crisis of capitalism, and wedded more blatantly than ever to white nationalism and other manifestations of ethno-supremacism. Trumpism is of a piece with Putinism and “Xi Jinping Thought.”
Against campism, for pluriethnic autonomy
We will continue to oppose regimes that keep down peoples struggling for autonomy and liberation, regardless of where they fall in the geopolitical camps—whether it is the Palestinians under Israeli occupation, the Kurds of Turkey and Syria, the Tuaregs and Berbers of the Sahel states and North Africa, or the Mapuche of Chile and Argentina. Some of these regimes have in recent years moved from one camp to another (e.g. the Sahel states shifting from Franco-American to Russian orbit) without ever lifting the pressure on their “Fourth World” internal colonies. In repudiation of both the increasingly “campist” consensus on the establishment left and the ugly ethno-supremacism on the globally ascendant right, we uphold an ethic of what indigenous movements in the western hemisphere have called “pluriethnic autonomy” or “plurinationalism.”