You know you are a Philistine when...

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Re: You know you are a Philistine when...

Post by blindpig » Sat Jul 10, 2021 1:22 pm

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Saagar Enjeti: The Pseudo-Populist Mainlining Neocon Ideas into Progressive Politics
July 8, 2021
By Alan Macleod – Jul 2, 2021

While he is undeniably a charismatic and confident host, Saagar Enjeti’s schtick is remarkably similar to that of his former employer Tucker Carlson, who also rails against elites while being one of them.

WASHINGTON — Saagar Enjeti and Krystal Ball are the new king and queen of alternative media. After having just quit The Hill to go fully independent, their new show “Breaking Points” immediately debuted at number one in the global politics podcast charts, comfortably overtaking well-established brands like “Pod Save America” and “The Ben Shapiro Show.” They even received the ultimate plug with an appearance on and an endorsement from Joe Rogan, a veritable blessing from the pope of pop culture.

“Breaking Points” is effectively a copy of “Rising,” Enjeti and Ball’s show on The Hill. “Rising” had the look and tone of a cable news show, with two well-presented and attractive hosts chatting to guests in a brightly lit studio. But it had far more substance, featuring stories and points of view that are completely ignored in the rest of corporate media. The two invited on a range of informative guests the caliber of whom is simply not found on cable news. Thus, it had a jarringly subversive quality that appealed to viewers, as if the two were smuggling forbidden but increasingly popular ideas all while maintaining a polished, corporate feel.


Ball is a progressive while Enjeti is a conservative. Nevertheless, both present themselves as populists who have a lot in common, something that was the central message of their bestselling book, “The Populist’s Guide to 2020: A New Right and Left are Rising.” While Ball’s political outlook could be described as relatively standard, Bernie Sanders-style populism, Enjeti is more of an enigma. While he identifies as a conservative Republican, he also labelshimself a pro-worker, pro-union populist.

Key to his appeal is convincing progressive audiences that, although a conservative, he is still a political outsider with views not too dissimilar from their own. Yet a look into Enjeti’s background and professional career suggests otherwise — that he is very much an insider and is pulling a similar trick to so many Republicans of late who are rebranding as anti-elite, anti-deep state warriors, all the while mainstreaming some highly problematic viewpoints to his audience.

A neocon in the making

Before becoming a populist media personality, Enjeti appeared to be training for the role of deep state official, pursuing an undergraduate degree at George Washington University and a master’s degree in security studies at Georgetown University, both D.C.-area colleges wellknown for their connections to the national security state. Enjeti also decided to study counter-terrorism studies at Israeli university IDC Herzliya. Situated on a former military base, the university’s board boasts a former head of Mossad and ex-Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Meanwhile, its international advisory board is replete with U.S. national security leaders, such as Robert Hutchings, former chairman of the National Intelligence Council; Stephen Peter Rosen, one time director of political-military affairs at the White House National Security Council; and ex-CIA Chief R. James Woolsey.

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Enjeti, right, poses with the pope of pop culture Joe Rogan and his co-host Krystal Ball. Photo | Twitter

The master’s program in counter-terrorism studies features modules in profiling terrorists, strategy and deterrence, Arab language, Iranian studies, and a course called “Hezbollah: a hybrid terrorist organization.” This is an institution that trains Israeli and American intelligence officials, not radical populist outsiders.

The counter-terrorism studies department is headed by Dr. Boaz Ganor, an Israeli government advisor. During the latest Israeli assault on Gaza, IDC Herzliya’s president sent out a message to students condemning the Gazans’ supposed wanton aggressiveness. “These rockets were fired at a civilian population with the intent to kill,” he seethed. Luckily, he said, with the help of Dr. Ganor and coordination with the Israeli American Council and the use of ACT.IL — an Israeli government-funded app, which, as MintPress reported in May, helps Zionists artificially infiltrate online conversations and flood them with pro-Israel messages — public opinion was holding firm.

Gonna study war some more

While still in university, Enjeti landed a job at the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), writing policy briefs about the conflict in Afghanistan and analyzing the moves and strength of the Taliban. The ISW is a notoriously hawkish think tank funded by weapons contractors like Raytheon, General Dynamics and DynCorp, its board filled with retired generals and infamous neoconservative warmongers like Bill Kristol.

Robbie Martin, a filmmaker whose movie series “A Very Heavy Agenda” deals with the rise of neoconservatism, told MintPress about his misgivings:

The Institute for the Study of War is one of the most enmeshed D.C. think tanks in terms of active military policy with the U.S. government. It is probably the most influential military-centric think tank in Washington. It is always encouraging war, which should be obvious by its name.”

ISW officials were at the wheel in the drive towards war in Iraq and have since called for more aggressive actions in Syria and other nations. The organization also served as embedded advisors for Gen. David Petraeus while he was commander in Afghanistan. The ISW was created by the Kagan family, a group of the most influential hawks in Washington. As Martin explained, Donald Kagan is a neocon patriarch, helping to craft the infamous Project for a New American Century document “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” which called for a “new Pearl Harbor” and set out the neocon imperial agenda for the Bush administration. His son, Fred, was the brainsbehind the 2007 Iraq “surge” — the dramatic increase in U.S. troop numbers in the country. Fred’s wife, Kim, a military officer and historian, founded the ISW. Meanwhile, Donald’s other son, Robert is a media pundit most noted for being the driving force falsely linking Saddam Hussein to the 9/11 attacks, an assertion that helped grease the skids for the Iraq invasion.

Robert’s wife, Victoria Nuland, is arguably the most powerful neocon of the clan. Having held a host of high government positions — including Ambassador to NATO, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, and Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs — Nuland has been involved in virtually every U.S. intervention in the last 30 years, and was previously crowned “Queen of the Chicken Hawks” by writer Rick Sterling.

From the ISW, Enjeti later moved to the Hudson Institute, an equally neoconservative and pro-Iraq War think tank, where he worked as a media fellow until last year. Like the ISW, Hudson takes money from a cavalcade of weapons manufacturers, including Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin.

The Hudson Institute is a standard-bearer for establishment Republicanism, as can be seen by a mere glance at its senior figures. Hudson’s president and CEO, John P. Walters, is a longtime Republican official, serving, among other roles, as George W. Bush’s drugs czar. Its senior vice president is Scooter Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff. As soon as he left office earlier this year, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also walked into a senior position at the organization.

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Enjeti, left, talks coronavirus and the CCP with anti-China hawk, Sen. Tom Cotton for his Hudson Institute podcast. Photo | Hudson

Until recently, Enjeti’s second podcast, “The Realignment,” was an official Hudson publication. Hosted with fellow Hudson employee Marshall Kosloff, the two lob softball questions to reactionary guests like Mike Pompeo, Niall Ferguson and Douglas Murray. The concept of the show is that there is a profound political realignment happening in America right now, as old political demarcations are broken down and new ones form. In this sense, it is a similar notion to “Rising” and “Breaking Points,” except that it is being pushed by one of the most establishment-conservative organizations in America, raising questions about how genuine this realignment really is.

Fellow Hudson employee Kosloff is perhaps best known to progressive audiences for making an unwanted appearance in the documentary film, “The Lobby”, which exposed Israeli government interference in domestic U.S. politics. Kosloff is seen being paid to attend astroturfed protests against the Students for Justice in Palestine Movement. At one point he jokes to an undercover reporter that all it took was “$50,000 plus benefits” for him to sell out to Israel, a reference to his salary another conservative foundation which pays him to be, in his colleague’s words, a “foot soldier in the conservative movement.” To be fair to him, Kosloff appeared to have serious concerns about the stunt, not because of ethics, but in case he was caught on camera doing so. “This is bad for my political career” he worries. Considering where he is now, his fears were perhaps unfounded.

In Martin’s view:

Before Saagar was the co-host of ‘Rising’ with Krystal, ‘Rising’ was not a populist-themed political show at all. It was not really that progressive. And when Saagar got there it almost seemed like it became a TV-show version of this podcast.”

Enjeti presents himself as an anti-war populist. “The entire reason I am interested in politics is because of 9/11 and opposition to the war in Iraq. It is my North Star and always will be,” he said in a recent episode of “Rising.” But this is difficult to square with the fact that he chose to study counter-terrorism in Israel and to work for two of the most hawkish neoconservative think tanks in America — the very same think tanks whose principals laid the groundwork for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that Enjeti claims so vociferously to oppose. That an anti-war outsider could choose to work for the likes of the Kagan family does not compute.

RELATED CONTENT: Tanks and Think Tanks: How Taiwanese Cash is Funding the Push to War with China

A Hudson obsession
On foreign policy, Enjeti seems to have been at least partially influenced by the Hudson Institute’s stances. If there is one issue the think tank concentrates on most, it is China. In recent years, they have become almost obsessed with opposing it. The word “China” and its derivatives appear 137 times in the organization’s most recent annual report, featuring on virtually every page.

In a recent interview with Fox News, Hudson Senior Fellow and China expert David Asher demanded that the U.S. bring the country “to heel,” as if it were a dog. Treating the lab leak hypothesis as an “undisputed fact,” Asher railed, “we’ve got to hold the Chinese accountable.” We have to “fix what the Communist Chinese did to try to undermine our country and the world system, with COVID,” he explained. The friendly Fox News anchor asked if sanctioning the country and relocating the 2022 Winter Olympic Games would be enough punishment. “Probably not,” Asher replied, leaving the possibility open for war.

Left unstated in all this is that Hudson has flourished and rapidly expanded thanks in no small part to huge donations from the independence-minded government of Taiwan. Between 2015and 2019, the organization’s revenue more than quadrupled to $57.1 million.

Hudson does not disclose how much Taiwan is giving them, except to say that the island has been on its list of highest-tier donors every year since they began divulging their sponsors in 2015. Not coincidentally, Hudson is among the most vociferous supporters of greater Taiwanese independence.

Hudson appears, however, to accept even more money from bitter China enemy Japan. In 2020, the organization’s then-CEO Kenneth Weinstein was chosen as U.S. ambassador to Japan, although the appointment later fell through. Hudson also takes money from other China-hostile countries like South Korea.

The populist’s guide to hating China

Many critics have argued that true economic populism cannot be conservative and that right-wing populist variants attempt to unite a majority around issues of religion (as in Modi’s India) or race (as in Nazi Germany), deflecting popular frustration downwards and using minorities as scapegoats for the country’s problems.

Enjeti has tried to square the circle of raging against the elites while leaving the system in place by blaming so many of America’s failings on China, combining populist rhetoric with Hudson-style foreign policy. In “A Populist’s Guide to 2020,” he claims that the malaise the country is in can be explained as in no small part due to “China’s economic warfare.”

The bad guys in Enjeti’s story of American corporations relocating eastwards to use hyper-exploited Asian workers are not the corporations themselves, nor the U.S. government, but the Chinese Communist Party, deviously convincing businesses to do so — a classic bait-and-switch maneuver.

“Corporations and the billionaire class sold us all out a very long time ago,” he states, sounding like Bernie Sanders, before claiming that doing business with China is akin to “American monopolies’ tacit cooperation with the Nazi regime before the outbreak of World War II.” He concludes:

The people who control our banks, who control what we see, what we laugh at, who we watch play sports, are all now beholden to some very bad people in Beijing. And Beijing isn’t shy about using its economic entanglements with us to try and force American citizens to behave however they’d like.”


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In this, he is borrowing a tactic often used by his former boss at The Daily Caller, Tucker Carlson:

Working-class people of all colors have a lot more in common, infinitely more in common with each other than they do with some overpaid MSNBC anchor. And if you were allowed to think about that for long enough, you might start to get unauthorized ideas about economics, and that would be disruptive to a very lucrative status quo.”

No, that was not Bernie Sanders or even Noam Chomsky. It was indeed Tucker Carlson, who often fills his audience with populist-sounding rhetoric, only to redirect legitimate anger away from capitalism and towards woke college students, gypsies or Latino immigrants. For decades, however, Carlson was a preppy, bow-tie-wearing “out-of-the-closet elitist” who describedordinary Americans as “peasants.” The stepson of the heir of the Swanson food empire and the son of Dick Carlson, the head of Voice of America and a U.S. ambassador, Tucker reveled in how “extraordinarily loaded” his family was, condemning Bill O’Reilly’s faux populism as phony, only to switch to exactly the same schtick when he replaced O’Reilly on Fox News in 2017.

While “Rising” has a distinctly progressive audience, Enjeti has been pushing the Hudson’s neoconservative talking points on foreign policy. Enjeti is an unabashed imperialist who wants the United States to control the planet. As he stated himself on “The Realignment:”

I am not for a multipolar world…I want to be the only blue water navy, I don’t want the Chinese ruling the Straits of Malacca and the South China Sea.”

In early 2020, Enjeti delighted in using the racist term “the China Virus” for COVID-19, telling“Rising” viewers that it is “the height of cynical political correctness” to get outraged at it.

In a long soliloquy about wrestler John Cena correcting his (inaccurate) statement that Taiwan is an independent country, Enjeti again tried to launder aggression against China as a progressive position. “The elites of this country do not work for us, do not really like us and are completely for sale,” he roared. For sale to whom? Not to the likes of Jeff Bezos, the government, or giant corporate interests, but to the “authoritarian and cultish” Chinese Communist Party. “The Chinese have achieved total victory,” he exclaimed; “They are able to control the very speech that comes out of the most powerful people in America’s mouths.” That Cena, an American, would apologize for such a huge faux pas — akin to traveling to Kiev to announce “Ukraine is forever Russia” — is seen only as more proof that the U.S. is secretly under Chinese control.

Undisclosed in all this is the gigantic conflict of interest inherent in the fact that Enjeti’s salary at the Hudson Institute came courtesy of piles of cash donated by the Taiwanese Foreign Ministry.


As soon as Joe Biden won the election, Enjeti was warning that he was secretly a Chinese asset, and using faux populist language to do so. “Big business is wholly in bed with the Chinese Communist Party,” he explained, warning that “China will use Wall Street to control Joe Biden,” as if the president of the United States, the most powerful man in the world, is a mere puppet of a foreign country halfway around the globe. He also praised Donald Trump for “changing the conversation around China.”

Earlier, Enjeti had tarred Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg with the same brush. In a segment entitled “Is Mike Bloomberg a Chinese Asset?” he condemned Bloomberg News for supposedly “kowtowing to the Chinese regime” and “covering up the crimes of the Chinese elite.”

If this sort of rhetoric were used against a country like Israel, it would rightly be challenged and regarded as highly suspect. Indeed, when a guest attempted to smear Bloomberg’s opponent Tulsi Gabbard as a tool of Russia, both Ball and Enjeti quickly jumped in to shut it down. Yet Ball, whose strong suit may not be foreign policy, generally stays silent or even agrees with Enjeti’s anti-China tirades.

Unsurprisingly, Enjeti has also been one of the loudest proponents of the lab-leak theory of the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, recording long monologues about the media’s failure to take it seriously for over a year while inviting neoconservative warmongers like Josh Rogin to discuss China’s guilt. Describing the lab leak as “the most likely explanation for the origin of COVID-19,” Enjeti told viewers that we should be “ten times more skeptical of the Chinese government.” If only we had this knowledge earlier, he laments, American foreign policy would be far different. “The Chinese are expanding all across South East Asia!” he exclaims, implicitly suggesting that some sort of confrontation is an appropriate response, echoing the Hudson line.

While he is undeniably a charismatic and confident host, Enjeti’s schtick is remarkably similar to that of his former employer Tucker Carlson, who also rails against elites while being one of them. Other establishment hawks like General Michael Flynn and General Robert Spalding (another Hudson employee) have also attempted to sell themselves as anti-establishment populist outsiders, but with far less success. Enjeti has been more successful partly because he is a more likable figure and partly because the others have decades-long histories in the heart of the swamp. Yet a deep dive into his background — from a counter-terrorism student in Israel to a Kagan family think tank to the Hudson Institute — shows Enjeti is also far more likely to be a run-of-the-mill conservative cosplaying as a populist than a genuine ally of anti-establishment movements. Unfortunately, people are so desperate for genuine populism that they are willing to swallow anything.

Featured image: Graphic by Antonio Cabrera – based on an edited photo

(MintPress News)

https://orinocotribune.com/saagar-enjet ... -politics/
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Re: You know you are a Philistine when...

Post by blindpig » Thu Jul 29, 2021 1:18 pm

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Western Left Intellectuals and Their Love Affair with the Attempted ‘Color Revolution’ in Cuba
July 28, 2021
By Josh Bergeron – Jul 26, 2021

Chicago, IL – Noam Chomsky, Gilbert Achcar, Paul Le Blanc, Suzi Weissman, Tithi Bhattacharya, Charlie Post, Robert Brenner, Gayatri Spivak, Alex Callinicos, Ashley Smith, Eric Toussaint, Marc Cooper, Etienne Balibar. These are a handful of the over 500 signatories on an open letter directed to the blockaded Cuban government on July 12 demanding “respect for the democratic rights of all Cuban people” and the release of “dissident Marxist” Frank García Hernández and his comrades from jail after the protests of July 11.

These signatories are high-profile academic socialists in the U.S. and Europe, featured prominently in the publication catalogue of Verso and Haymarket Books, or on the editorial boards of online journals like New Politics, Tempest, Spectre, Socialist Worker, and other ex-International Socialist Organization (ISO)-now-Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), Socialist Equality Party, or UK Socialist workers Party related outlets. Their work also frequently appears in more mainstream left outlets, such as Jacobin and the Nation. Their opinions on the left reach a wide audience and, in some cases, carry significant weight.

Their petition circulation effort drew major support on social media in the days after the initial protests in Cuba, helping to stitch together a left-reinforcement to the edifice of the mainstream press, which described the event as an uprising by “political dissidents” against an “oppressive bureaucratic regime” in the pursuit of democracy and freedom of expression. The definition of “freedom” pursued and the political orientation of the protesters in question differed between the tales spun by the New York Times and those of the Socialist Worker, but the story was the same: Repressive government arbitrarily detains political dissidents.

And while these signatories differ among themselves over their characterization of the Cuban government and its revolutionary tradition – ranging from the view that Cuba is a “state capitalist” that harbors no revolutionary potential to the view that the once-revolutionary state has become an intransigent bureaucracy that is still preferable to the neoliberal model – all seem to find common ground with co-signer Gilbert Achcar’s warning about “the anti-imperialism of fools.”

Achcar condemns those who oppose U.S. imperialism no matter its target, because he believes this misses the “nuanced” view that U.S. imperialism might be instrumentalized by popular movements in the pursuit of their own liberation. Our “knee-jerk” rejection of the notion that any positive could ever come from the machinations of empire, in Achcar’s formulation, puts us in the camp of “defending murderous regimes.” Ostensibly, sharing co-signature real estate with the likes of Achcar would suggest that the other petitioners agree with him that anti-imperialism is not always a principled position and the events in Cuba are an example of a situation in which they do not want to end up on the side of “fools.” So without further investigation, they and 500 others signed an open letter condemning the Cuban government for its “repression and arbitrary detentions” of “critical communists.”

An alternate view from the ground

On July 17, a different narrative emerged from the mouths of Frank García Hernández’s Cuban colleagues themselves. The Comunistas collective Editorial Board, of which García Hernández is a founder, published an account of events that was much more balanced and far less negative in its appraisal of the Cuban government and its response to the protests than the narrative that was promoted by the petition’s signatories. Rather than a repressive response to an organic anti-state uprising, they portray the events of July 11 as unprecedented protests with a variety of origins and compositions, some legitimate and others manufactured. In their account, the protests were composed of three flanks: a small group of U.S.-funded counterrevolutionaries with massive reach and influence, a small group of anti-state intellectuals with legitimate grievances that were co-opted by the reactionaries, and a much larger group of “non-political” demonstrators demanding an end to austerity and shortages a crisis which the Comunistas Editorial Board attributes, with some reservations, almost entirely to the exacerbating U.S. blockade and global pandemic. In short, the most explicitly anti-government slogans and orientations were crafted and carried by the U.S.-funded counterrevolutionaries, whereas the majority of the demonstrators lacked a cohesive political consciousness and simply wanted a reprieve from their very real material hardships. As the Editorial Board asserts, “The protests did not represent a majority. Most of the Cuban population continues to support the government.”

Notably, this closely mirrors the public address of Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, who stated, “The protests involve many revolutionary citizens who want an explanation for the current situation in the country, but are also contaminated by groups of opportunists who take advantage of the current crisis to undermine order and generate chaos.” And while Díaz-Canel expressed full faith in the Cuban people to engage in productive dialogue to resolve the present crises, his calls for revolutionaries to take to the streets to defend the nation against opportunistic attacks and U.S.-financed subversion campaigns was met with scorn from the self-described “anti-campist” or “third campist” Western left.

For these Western left critics of the Cuban state, Díaz-Canel’s calls for popular defense of national sovereignty represented a cynical demand by the Cuban state for its supporters to engage in vigilante violence against dissidents like Frank García Hernández. The fact that Frank’s comrades – who engage in frequent criticism of the Cuban government themselves – did not subscribe to this narrative of events nevertheless did not discourage the petitioners from propagating the perspective that Frank García Hernández’s arrest was the smoking gun evidence of Cuba’s authoritarian roundup of “critical communists.”

Arbitrary detention or safeguarding the revolution?

No such roundup took place. The arrests that did occur followed outbreaks of violence and vandalism after mostly peaceful and unharassed protests in a number of cities, which the Comunistas collective describes as: “Violent groups carried out acts of vandalism, attacking communist militants and government supporters with sticks and stones.” The Cuban police and defenders of the revolution engaged in kind. In other words, according to this collective of Cuban critics of the state, the violence was largely carried out by counterrevolutionary forces against government supporters and other communist partisans. This resulted in scattered arrests.

This is a far cry from the narratives emerging out of the U.S. corporate media and academic left circles, which characterized the violence as a one-sided repressive crackdown by an intransigent bureaucratic “regime” and its paid supporters against dissidents striving for freedom and plenty.

Nevertheless, Frank García Hernández and some others were arrested – the catalyst for the petition. Frank’s comrades at the Comunistas collective address this too. It turns out, García Hernández was not arrested for being a “dissident” participant in the protests. In fact, García Hernández is a member of the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) who merely watched but did not partake in the protests and was arrested by “confusion” as he put it. Frank García Hernández and another intellectual named in the petition, LGBTQ activist Maykel González Vivero, who did participate in the protests, were picked up after a nearby act of counterrevolutionary violence resulted in injuries and vandalism late in the night. By García Hernández’s own admission, they were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. The next day they easily proved their innocence and were released without incident. According to his colleagues at Comunistas collective, “During his little more than 24 hours of detention, Frank affirms that he did not receive physical abuse, nor any type of torture.” No other person associated with the publication was arrested or targeted.

But here a key detail emerges. Frank’s release actually preceded the publication of the open letter demanding his release by his “comrades” in the U.S. and Europe. And while Comunistas collective maintained their own criticisms of the Cuban government, their characterization of the genesis of the protests, the response of the government to the protests, and the appraisal of the revolutionary process in general, differ significantly from the ostensibly “progressive” critics of the Cuban government in the U.S. and Europe who organized the petition to release their friend who had in fact already been released. Again, these significant discrepancies have not been addressed by any of the prominent signatories and circulators of the petition.

In fact, on July 17, the day that the Comunistas blog collective published their retrospective of the protests and arrests, some of the U.S.-based petition endorsers republished the original petition in Tempest Magazine without mention of any of the above critical divergences from on-the-ground reports. Further, the editorial board of Tempest broadened the appeal to a call for the release of “all detainees in Cuba.” Even the Comunistas collective demanded only the release of the detainees “as long as they have not committed actions that have threatened the lives of other people.”

In the week that followed the July 11 protests, the Open Letter left were confronted with an excess of evidence and investigative research documenting the existence of U.S. alphabet agency subversion projects, tens of millions of dollars funneled into counter-revolutionary activities, coup-propagating social media bot farms and other examples of hybrid warfare that served as the backdrop of the unrest. And yet, they maintained their political line that all arrests were arbitrary and illegitimate. One signatory even asserted that the duty of the left in the West is to support all such protests, “whatever people’s politics involved in these struggles – against whatever states and ruling classes, even those who falsely claim the mantle of ‘socialism.’” This is, of course, a tacit endorsement of the reactionary tail that wags the dog of these astroturfed “color revolutions,” disguised as they are as organic movements of workers and oppressed peoples.

Whither opposition to empire?

Taken in isolation, a charitable reading could view signing such an open letter as a political slip-up brewed in the fog of war that is a developing foreign event. But for many of the most prominent left signatories, this was the only public statement or call to action made regarding the unprecedented events in Cuba. Too few matched their outrage of the arrests with equal outrage over the ongoing illegal blockade of the island by the U.S., and even fewer (close to none) circulated open letters or petitions calling for anti-imperialist solidarity with Cuban sovereignty against the now well-documented imperialist provocations that played an important role in the outbreak and international media coverage of the protests in Cuba.

Even after statements of support for the gains of the Cuban revolution came from all corners of the world, demanding an end to the illegal blockade and hybrid warfare, the signatories spared little attention for the very real threat of escalating imperialist intervention. When the mayor of Miami called on the U.S. government to bomb Havana, none of the open letter endorsers change their tune. None came to the defense of Black Lives Matter after the organization’s condemnation of the U.S. blockade brought them heavy backlash. At most, as in the petition itself, the blockade and imperial provocations were mentioned as an almost unrelated preamble to the real point, despite their absolute centrality. No open letter was signed and circulated by this group of Western academic leftists demanding an end to the blockade after the 29th consecutive UN General Assembly majority vote to end the economic siege in June, and neither was there an effort on their part to circulate the campaign to send millions of much-needed syringes to the island to help put Cuban-made COVID vaccines into Cuban arms. When President Joe Biden announced that he would not change course on Cuba and called the nation a “failed state” without reference to the blockade, they issued no scathing open letter. They did not collectively come to the defense of a patriotic Cuban woman who was censored on Twitter after she demanded that the UN Human Rights Council stop using her image as the symbol for the anti-government protesters, when in reality she was in the streets of Cuba defending her revolution. Similarly, their silences on the ongoing violent U.S.-backed state repression of a months-long popular uprising in Colombia, or the years-long popular uprising in Haiti, grew more pronounced with the circulation of this petition. Their priorities were laid bare.

When confronted on social media about this unfortunate discrepancy between stated ideological commitments and real political actions, many of these prominent signatories responded by blocking, unfriending, ignoring, or dismissing criticisms and questions. When they did respond, it was often full of slanders against “tankies” and “Stalinists” and strangely even one reference to Assad. Those that disagreed were accused of supporting “repression” and “ignoring voices on the ground.” No intellectually honest reference was made to the voices on the ground of the 100,000 Cubans who took to the streets of Havana in defense of their revolution. No mea culpas were issued after even Reuters was forced to admit that the media had fallen for lies and manipulations about the protests and the repression that ostensibly followed. Their perception of events, one must assume, remains the same as it was on July 12. Their own political orthodoxy, it seems, left little room for “dissident Marxists” engaging them in criticism among comrades.

On July 22, U.S. President Joe Biden announced a new round of sanctions on Cuba, which he promised were “just the beginning.” The Biden administration’s intransigence – and its cynical hypocrisy in denouncing “mass detentions and sham trials” in Cuba that presumably does not describe the U.S,-run torture camp known as Guantanamo Bay – saw a rapidly organized response in the pages of the New York Times on July 23. In a full-page advert, the People’s Forum, Code Pink, the ANSWER Coalition and over 400 “former heads of state, politicians, intellectuals, scientists, members of the clergy, artists, musicians and activists from across the globe,” issued an open letter to the U.S. government demanding the end to its economic warfare against the Cuban people. Here is an example of the kind of public statement with prominent endorsers that places the responsibility for human rights abuses at the feet of U.S. imperialism and that expresses solidarity with the working and oppressed people of the globe who resist empire. A rare few signatories of the July 12 petition directed against the Cuban government did sign the “Let Cuba Live” letter in the New York Times, including Noam Chomsky. One can only wonder what the political priorities are of those who condemn the imperialism of their own government only after first making demands and criticisms upon the targets of that imperialism.

Beware the “anti-anti-imperialist left”

File this away as one more example of Western academic socialists and progressives being captured by the ideological manipulations of U.S. State Department propaganda and their own internalized colonial chauvinism toward revolutionary projects in the Global South. Other targets of these petitions and open letters in recent years and months have been Venezuela, Nicaragua, Ecuador and Bolivia. Notably, all are targets of ongoing and well-documented subversion operations, economic sanctions and electoral interference by the United States, something that is rarely remarked upon by the signatories. The outraged open letter from prominent leftist intellectuals making demands upon anti-imperialist counties and other targets of Western imperialism is one of the most insidious and effective propaganda efforts by non-state actors in the imperial core, as it serves to confuse and disorient the broader left within the belly of the beast, weakening our capacity to collectively undermine and resist the U.S. empire, thus relegating the burden of the struggle against imperialism to the revolutionary peoples of the Global South alone. This is a dereliction of our revolutionary duties.

As progressives and revolutionaries living within the empire, we must express an unqualified and unwavering solidarity with Cuba and all targets of U.S. imperialism, and we must organize to put an end to U.S., aggression, political interference and economic strangulation so that Cuba and all working and oppressed peoples of the world can breathe.

https://orinocotribune.com/western-left ... n-in-cuba/

I'll take Door #2, ' internalized colonial chauvinism', Alex. If these jerks were serious socialists they wouldn't be so easily maneuvered by boilerplate red baiting.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: You know you are a Philistine when...

Post by blindpig » Thu Sep 02, 2021 2:24 pm

You know you are a Philistine when your notions of socialism and solidarity do not extend beyond national borders.

We Can No Longer Avoid Raising the Contradiction of the Western Imperial Left’s Collaboration with the Western Bourgeoisie
​​​​​​​ Ajamu Baraka, BAR editor and columnist 01 Sep 2021

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We Can No Longer Avoid Raising the Contradiction of the Western Imperial Left’s Collaboration with the Western Bourgeoisie

As the Western left has become more aligned with their imperialist bourgeoisie in the destabilization of the Global South, the radical Black tradition provides a clear approach to “turn imperialist wars into wars against imperialism."

Changes in historical conditions can elevate a secondary contradiction to a primary, and antagonistic contradiction, in an instant. The rightist collaboration with the Pan-European colonial/capitalist project on the part of the social-imperialist left in the United States and Europe did not occur instantly but has been evolving for decades. The contradictory nature of that relationship has sharpened as a result of the current crisis of global capitalism and the U.S. led Western imperialist project fueled by two interconnected elements: the devastating social-economic conditions that workers and the laboring classes now face as result of monopoly capital’s neoliberal turn over the last forty years in both the imperialist center and global South; and the intensifying challenge to neoliberalism from states and social movements in the global South, with the corresponding response from U.S. and European capital that has ranged from economic sanctions meant to punish whole populations to direct and indirect political subversion and military interventions, all illegal and morally indefensible.

And while political opposition to neoliberal policies have been fragmented and inconsistent in the Northern capitalist countries, the peoples and nations in the global South confronted neoliberal globalization and Western imperialism in various forms, from culturalist rejection of Westernization to sophisticated political opposition that resulted in the nominal capture of neocolonial states by left forces, in particular in Latin America.

The response from capital to those challenges was predictable. Murderous sanctions, wars of aggression and political repression. Yet, over the last two and a half decades there has been a change in how these interventions and illegal actions have been presented to the public. While U.S. and Western innocence was always a component of the propaganda to justify colonialist aggression, the ideas of humanitarian intervention and its corollary, the responsibility to protect, emerged in the 1990s as one of the most innovative ideological weapons ever produced since the end of the second imperialist war in 1945.

That framing that evokes an ideologically-embedded liberalism that infects the consciousness of most Westerners and the Western-orientated left to “instinctively” oppose something called “authoritarianism,” has created a perfect storm of counterrevolutionary ideological reaction. Its liberalism and subconscious assumptions of Western civilizational superiority has transformed large sectors of the Western left into collaborators with the white supremacist, Pan European colonial/capitalist patriarchy, from which it has also benefited materially.

Appealing to “white saviorism,” Western interventions are now framed as “humanitarian.” Already corrupted by material privileges and infused with assumptions of white supremacist biases, elements of the Western left fell into alignment with neoliberal justifications for imperialist actions in the global South.

This sentiment is being captured dramatically with the situation unfolding in Afghanistan. The decision on part of elements in the U.S. foreign policy community to redeploy U.S. forces from Afghanistan has sparked an ahistorical and hypocritical cry from liberals and the pro-war corporate press that the U.S. and the West are abdicating their “responsibility to protect” “oppressed” populations. This fantastic flight from reality by liberals is compounded by an equally, and even more absurd stance taken by large sectors of the radical left in the U.S. and Europe who also seem to believe, like some of their predecessors from the second international that supported Western colonialism, that the West and Western imperialism can have some beneficial results for the natives in the global South.

While this short commentary will not attempt to delve into the complexities of how the radical left ended up as collaborators with their imperialist bourgeoisie, I will discuss the divergent approaches to the current crisis by the international bourgeoisie and the Western left, with a particular focus on the U.S. left.

Having a clear understanding of the objective interests of U.S. led imperialism and the strategies being deployed to protect and advance those interests is imperative for colonized and oppressed peoples and classes. We do not have the luxury of confusion. The Western bourgeoisie still under the hegemony of U.S.-based finance and corporate capital has demonstrated through practice that, notwithstanding secondary conflict of interests among them, they have a common objective interest to act as a block to counter political challenges from the global South to the Pan European colonial/capitalist white supremacist patriarchy.

Biden and the Post-Trump reconsolidation of Global White supremacy

As a result of the incessant propaganda from neoliberal corporate press in the U.S., Biden and democrats are considered to be the nice, rational friends of people of color globally, and Trump the mean massa, the proto fascist at the head of a violent, irrational movement committed to white supremacy and capitalist hegemony.

Of course, as I have said on many occasions, the reality is much more complex, with neoliberalism actually representing a more dangerous threat to colonized and working-class peoples in the U.S. and globally. This is because within the context of the U.S., Democrats have been successful in perpetuating the myth that they represent “progressivism.” This perception usually leads to substantial demobilization and actual liberal – left alignment with neoliberalism objectively when Democrats occupy the Executive Branch.

Yet, as the late Glen Ford said on numerous occasions, the democrats are nothing more than the more effective evil, especially when it comes to advancing a white supremacist imperialist agenda.

Just a cursory examination of the rhetoric of the Biden campaign and his political objectives after assuming office reveals his quite obvious commitment to white unity and global white supremacy.

Restoring the historic alliance between the U.S. and Europe was announced by Biden as a major objective of his administration. His “America is Back” slogan was supposed to signify that the U.S. was ready to reassume its leadership of the Western alliance. Biden proudly identified himself as an “Atlanticist,” and indeed a number of the members of his foreign policy team were plunked from the “Atlantic Council.” Similar to the Council on foreign Affairs (CFA), the Atlantic Council is a neoliberal think tank that is funded by a cross-section of the ruling class but significantly by neoliberals associated with the democrat party.

The Atlantic Council was a severe critic of the Trump administration, not because of any concerns about its “racism” but because the Council opposed Trump’s unilateralist approach to foreign policy and his dangerous ideas like pulling out of NATO, a desire to draw down U.S. troops and his insufficient hostility to Russia. Plus, the Council and the neoliberal ruling class never forgave Trump for his scuttling of the Trans-Pacific Partnership because it pulled the rug out from under the Trans-Atlantic Investment Partnership that was supposed to be the next agreement after TPP and would have solidified the hegemony of U.S. capital in Europe for next few decades.

Biden and the Council believed that unity among the G-7 nations during the current global capitalist crisis was imperative. Consequently, Biden’s aggressive stance toward Russia, Venezuela, blind support for Israel and general hostility toward the progressive governments in Latin America signaled that belligerent U.S. policy would continue, but with an Obama-like smile.

What has been response from the U.S. and Western left to Bourgeois Destabilization in Global South?

Bolivian President, Evo Morales, faced a right-wing coup and instead of unrestrained mobilization the left engaged in a debate about the Bolivian process. In Europe, the liberal-left parliamentarians in the European Union awarded their Sakharav human rights prize to the Venezuelan right-wing opposition, an opposition known for burning alive dark-skinned Venezuelans assumed to be “Chavistas.” Bernie Sanders declares Hugo Chavez a “dead communist dictator” and most respectable liberal-left elements in the U.S. would not get caught dead at a pro-Venezuela demo as long as the new “authoritarian dictator,” Nicholas Maduro, is in power. Gaddafi deserved to die, Assad is a bloodthirsty tyrant, China is capitalist, and a human rights violator, and Haiti is a S…hole country that does not merit much thought or energy, let alone mobilization for.

The anti-anti-imperialism of a Eurocentric armchair commentator like Gilbert Achcar neatly captures the inanity of this approach, dressed-up as nuanced and sophisticated analysis. Grounded in Western chauvinism and completely suspended from the contradictory structures and class forces in the specific, concrete realities of this historical moment, it condemns the left projects that don’t correspond to the imagery of Western leftists who see revolutionary change as some pristine project. These leftists do not seem to notice or don’t care that they are usually on the same side of an international issue as the international bourgeoisie.

Why? Because ideologically they don’t make a distinction from that of a David Lidington, Chair of the Royal United Services Institute and a former deputy Prime Minister of the UK, who argues the benefits of association with the West by states that are supposedly committed to something called a liberal international order. He proudly states that "What made support from the West so attractive to countries around the world was the underpinned commitment to helping countries build liberal, open democracies and a society grounded in the rule of law."

From Achcar and the “leftists” amplifying the pro-war sentiments being pushed by liberal corporate press in response to the chaos from Afghanistan to Lidington, there is a unity of worldviews that sees stability and a safe normalcy in a world administered by Western powers.

The safe, materially comfortable, latte-left may be able to indulge in these kinds of delusional beliefs, but for the colonized still fighting for national liberation and independence against the real coterie of capitalist nation-states that conquered our lands and enslaved our peoples, it would be suicidal for us to embrace that view.

For the colonized, the terms of the fight are between imperialism and national independence from the very same nations that “leftists” like Achcar give ideological cover to. The sophisticated Western left not only provides a “left” legitimation for alignment with reaction, but also supports the bourgeois ideological attack on the very idea of revolutionary change — a support that confuses and demobilizes activists from coming to the aid of movements and nations who find themselves in the crosshair of vicious U.S. state violence.

The African Response to What must be Done

Lenin was crystal clear on the importance of the struggle for anti-colonial national liberation in the South. But contemporary Eurocentric Western radicals have abandoned the simple and strategically clear positions of their progenitors that the struggle for national liberation continues and that was never any “post-coloniality,” and that every victory in that struggle alters the international balance of forces against the international power of imperialism.

The peoples’ movements for national liberation from imperialism are not necessarily asking Western radicals for ideological or political support but instead are demanding that they target their national bourgeoisie in order to put a brake on their attempts to undermine anti-imperialist national projects. We (they) say, stop giving legitimacy to the white supremacist concepts of “humanitarian intervention” and the “responsibility to protect.”

To counter the collaborationism and opportunism of the U.S. and Western left, Black revolutionaries must re-center the anti-colonial struggle that addresses the dialectics of the national and class issues produced by the colonial/capitalist system.

This re-centering of anti-colonial struggle is not new. It has been the broad theoretical framework for African/Black radical tradition for decades — from Black socialists in Harlem like Hubert Harrison and the African Blood Brotherhood in the teens and the 1920’s to the revolutionary Pan African tradition. It was also reflected in the articulations of Lenin on the “National Question” and the assemblies of colonial peoples leading to the 1928 declaration on the right to self-determination on the part of colonized peoples and the declaration that Africans in the U.S. constituted an oppressed nation with the right to self-determination.

The radical Black tradition provides an invaluable approach for how a left should address its bourgeoisie. We say that concretely it means that authentic Western leftists must join us to “turn imperialist wars into wars against imperialism.” Specifically for African revolutionaries in the U.S. we must build bottom-up organic black unity and an anti-colonial, pro-socialist movement anchored in the Black working class that must assert leadership of this movement and to the broader radical movement in the U.S.

Biden and the neoliberal, neo-fascists are committed to countering the movements for national liberation and socialism by any means, including destroying the planet to maintain European imperialist power.

The Western social-imperialist left that is still addicted to its material privileges and illusions of being a part of something called the “West” has a choice that it must make: either you abandon privilege and whiteness and join as class combatants against your bourgeoisie, or you will be considered part of the enemy.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/we-ca ... on-western
This is an issue not just with official 'left' leaders like Bernie Sanders but with much of the rank and file too. Too often there is just plain ignorance about what goes on beyond the borders. There is a kneejerk tendency, especially among us old farts who were in play in the 60s &70s, that any demonstrators are automatically the good guys, regardless as to whether they are Ukrainian fascists, 'dissident' Cuban artists in the US's pocket or thugs hired by the Nicaraguan or Venezuelan Chamber of Commerce. (I think the origin of this mindset goes back to those wretched philosophers like Sarte who ranked 'authoritarianism' as the Great Evil, regardless of whose authority it was. A juvenile and petty bourgeois attitude) The MSM pushes that button relentlessly. It is mindless and easy, avoids arguments with your liberal friends, and because your government is on the side of these de facto 'angels' this restricts one's criticism to internal matters, which while certainly important cannot be separated from what goes on in the big old world. The same for select oppressed minorities(hello Samantha Power...) who just happen to inhabit national territory of this week's 'enemies of democracy' while genocides from Brazil to Yemen to Congo go unremarked...

'Neoliberal' implies there is another sort of liberal but that's just hair-splitting, and while there may be a superficial facade of difference push come to shove you know which way they will fall, every time. Let's not give liberals any room to dilute and distract what 'left' is, 'which side are you on, boys?'
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: You know you are a Philistine when...

Post by blindpig » Sun Apr 17, 2022 2:08 pm

National liberalism according to Fukuyama
April 17, 13:14

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The singer of the "end of history" Fukuyama again changed his shoes and replaced the failed historical globalism and neoliberalism, he proposes to introduce the ideology of national liberalism. Read, a modern edition of fascism, where, under the guise of old mantras about liberalism, the need for systemic nationalism and a strong state is justified.
But what about the neoliberal globalism that they have been feeding the rest of the world for the past 30 years? And that's it, he's no more. I died in a historical ditch. Now we have to invent such ideological constructs as national liberalism. Modern Ukraine, constructed by the United States, with Nazism integrated into state institutions, is cited as an example of "the success of national liberalism."

National liberalism according to Fukuyama

Liberalism is in danger. Liberal societies are based on tolerance for differences, respect for individual rights and the rule of law. And all of this is now under threat as the world is going through what might be called a democratic recession or even a depression. According to Freedom House, political rights and civil liberties around the world have been shrinking every year for the past 16 years. The decline of liberalism is seen in the growing strength of autocracies such as China and Russia, the erosion of liberal—or nominally liberal—institutions in countries such as Hungary and Turkey, and the retreat of liberal democracies in countries such as India and the United States.

In each of these cases, the rise of illiberalism was fueled by nationalism. Illiberal leaders, their parties, and their allies have used nationalist rhetoric in an effort to exert tighter control over their societies. They denounce their opponents as "elites out of touch with life," as pampered cosmopolitans and globalists. They claim to be the true representatives of their countries and their true guardians. Sometimes illiberal politicians portray their liberal counterparts simply as a caricature, as people who can't do anything "out of this world." Often they call their liberal rivals not just political opponents, but something more sinister: enemies of the people.

The very nature of liberalism makes it susceptible to such attacks. The main fundamental principle enshrined in liberalism is the principle of tolerance: the state does not prescribe beliefs, notions of human identity, or any other dogmas. Since its then feeble emergence in the seventeenth century as an organizing principle of politics, liberalism has deliberately reduced its political goals from achieving the "good life" that religions, moral doctrines, or cultural traditions have always called for, to the preservation of life itself in conditions where the population is not can agree on what this "good life" is. This agnostic nature of liberalism creates a kind of spiritual vacuum as people go their own ways and experience only a faint sense of community. Liberal political orders do require shared values ​​such as tolerance, compromise, and common sense, but they do not foster the strong emotional bonds that characterize tightly knit religious and ethno-nationalist communities. Indeed, liberal societies have often encouraged man's aimless pursuit of material self-satisfaction.

Liberalism's greatest strength remains its centuries-old pragmatism and its ability to create diversity in pluralistic societies. However, there are also limits to the diversity that liberal societies can handle. If enough people themselves reject liberal values ​​and seek to restrict the basic rights of others, or if citizens resort to violence to get their way, then liberalism alone cannot maintain political order. And if societies move away from liberal principles and attempt to base their national identity on the categories of race, ethnicity, religion, or some other notion of the "good life," they are provoking a return to potentially bloody conflict. A world full of such countries will invariably be more divided,

That is why it is all the more important for liberals not to abandon the idea of ​​the nation. They should recognize that nothing really makes the universality of liberalism incompatible with the world of nation-states. National identity is malleable and can be shaped to reflect liberal aspirations while instilling a sense of community and purpose in the general public.

As proof of the enduring importance of national identity, one need only look at the challenges Russia faced in launching its military sting operation in Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that Ukraine does not have its own national identity distinct from Russia and that the country will collapse as soon as the operation begins. Instead, Ukraine stubbornly resists Russia precisely because its citizens are committed to the idea of ​​an independent, liberal-democratic Ukraine. They signaled that its citizens are willing to die for liberal ideals, but only when those ideals are rooted in a country they can call their own.

Liberal societies have great difficulty presenting their citizens with a positive vision of national identity. The theory behind liberalism has difficulty in drawing clear boundaries around communities and explaining what people can have inside and outside those boundaries. This is because liberal theory is built on the concept of universalism. As stated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights." And further: "Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, place of birth, or whatever." Liberals are theoretically concerned about human rights violations wherever they occur in the world. Many liberals do not like the nationalistic biases of the nationalists and imagine themselves to be "citizens of the world."

The claim of universalism is sometimes difficult to reconcile with the division of the world into nation-states. For example, there is no clear liberal theory about how to draw national boundaries, which is a huge flaw in liberal theory that has led to intra-liberal conflicts based on separatism in regions such as Catalonia, Quebec and Scotland, and disagreements over migration policy and attitudes towards refugees. Populists such as former US President Donald Trump have exploited this tension between the universalist aspirations of liberalism and the narrower claims of nationalism to great effect.

Nationalists complain that liberalism has destroyed the bonds of national unity and replaced them with a global cosmopolitanism that cares about people in distant lands as well as its fellow citizens. Nationalists in the 19th century based national identity on biology and believed that national communities were based on a common biological origin. This continues to be an important topic for some contemporary nationalists as well, such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who defined the Hungarian national identity as based on the Magyar ethnicity.
Other nationalists, such as Israeli scholar Yoram Hazoni, seek to reconsider 20th-century ethno-nationalism, arguing that nations are unified civilizational units that allow their members to share strong traditions of food, holidays, language, and the like. American conservative thinker Patrick Deneen has argued that liberalism is a form of "anti-culture" that has dissolved all forms of pre-liberal culture, using the power of the state to infiltrate and control every aspect of a people's private life.

Significantly, Deneen and other conservatives broke with economic neoliberals and openly accused market capitalism of undermining the values ​​of the family, human community, and tradition. As a result, the categories of the 20th century that defined the political left and right in terms of economic ideology do not quite correspond to modern reality, since right-wing groups are ready to approve the use of state power to regulate both public life and the economy.
There is considerable overlap in viewpoints between nationalists and religious conservatives. Among the main traditions that modern nationalists want to preserve are religious ones. For example, the Law and Justice party in Poland was closely associated with the Polish Catholic Church and deeply took the latter's statements against abortions and same-sex marriages supported by liberal Europe. Likewise, religious conservatives often see themselves as patriots. This applies to, say, the American evangelists who formed the core of Trump's "Make America Great Again" movement.

It must be admitted that the main idea of ​​the critique of liberalism by conservatives, that liberal societies do not provide a solid common moral core around which a human community can be built, is quite true. But this is a feature of liberalism, not a defect. The question for conservatives is whether there is a realistic way to turn back the clock and restore a tougher moral order. Some American conservatives hope to return to an imaginary time when virtually everyone in the United States was Christian. But contemporary societies are much more religiously diverse than during the religious wars in Europe in the sixteenth century. The idea of ​​restoring a common moral tradition, determined by religious beliefs, is futile. leaders, who hope to achieve this kind of recovery, such as Narendra Modi, the Indian nationalist prime minister, are calling for oppression and communal violence. Modi knows this all too well: he was the chief minister of the western state of Gujarat when he was rocked in 2002 by communal riots that killed thousands of people, mostly Muslims. Since 2014, when Modi became prime minister, he and his allies have sought to tie Indian national identity to the pillars of Hinduism and the Hindi language, in stark contrast to the secular pluralism of the founders of Indian liberalism. when in 2002 it was rocked by intercommunal riots that killed thousands of people, mostly Muslims. Since 2014, when Modi became prime minister, he and his allies have sought to tie Indian national identity to the pillars of Hinduism and the Hindi language, in stark contrast to the secular pluralism of the founders of Indian liberalism. when in 2002 it was rocked by intercommunal riots that killed thousands of people, mostly Muslims. Since 2014, when Modi became prime minister, he and his allies have sought to tie Indian national identity to the pillars of Hinduism and the Hindi language, in stark contrast to the secular pluralism of the founders of Indian liberalism.

Illiberal forces around the world will continue to use calls for nationalism as a powerful electoral weapon. Liberals might be tempted to dismiss this rhetoric as jingoistic and rude. But they still should not cede the nation to their opponents.
Liberalism, with its universalist pretensions, may feel awkward side by side with seemingly limited nationalism, but they can be reconciled. The goals of liberalism are fully compatible with a world divided into nation-states. All societies must use force both to maintain internal order and to protect themselves from external enemies.A liberal society also does this by creating a strong state, but then limiting that state's power to the rule of law. The power of the state is based on a social contract between independent people who agree to give up part of their rights to act freely in exchange for the protection of the state. If we are dealing with a liberal democracy, then this power is legitimized both by the universal adoption of the law and by popular elections.

Liberal rights are meaningless if they cannot be secured by the state, which, according to the well-known definition of the German sociologist Max Weber, is a legal monopoly of force over a certain territory. The territorial jurisdiction of a state usually corresponds to the territory occupied by a group of persons who have signed a social contract. People living outside this jurisdiction can also expect their rights to be respected, but the state is not always obliged to ensure their observance.

Thus, states with well-defined territorial jurisdiction remain important political players, as they are the only ones able to exercise the legitimate use of force. In today's globalized world, power is exercised by institutions ranging from multinational corporations to non-profit groups, from terrorist organizations to supranational bodies such as the European Union and the United Nations. And the need for international cooperation to address issues such as global warming and the fight against infectious disease pandemics has never been more evident. But the fact remains that one particular form of power, namely the ability to enforce rules through the threat or actual use of force, remains under the control of nation-states. Neither the European Union nor does the International Air Transport Association use its own police or military to enforce their rules. Such organizations are still dependent on the power capabilities of the countries that have given them the appropriate powers. Of course, today there is a large body of international law, which in many areas replaces the law of the national level. Think, for example, of the European Union's acquis communautaire, which serves as a kind of common law for regulating trade and resolving disputes. But ultimately, international law still relies on law enforcement at the national level. When EU member states disagree on important policy issues, as was the case during the 2010 euro crisis and the 2015 migrant crisis, the problems are not solved by European legislation, but by the relative power of member states. In other words, supreme power is still the prerogative of nation-states, which means that control of power at this level remains critical.

Thus, one should not look for a contradiction between liberal universalism and the need for nation-states. While the normative value of human rights may be universal, enforcement power is not. This is a scarce resource, which is necessarily used in a clearly defined area. And the liberal state has every right to grant different levels of rights to citizens and non-citizens, because it does not have the resources or authority to universally protect the rights of all people. All people on the territory of the state enjoy equal protection of the law, but only its citizens are full participants in the social contract, with special rights and obligations, in particular the right to vote.

(c) Francis Fukuyama

https://inosmi.ru/20220417/liberalizm-253821826.html - цинк
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles ... sm-country - оригинал

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/7563273.html

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Hardly a brave prescription: we're almost already there.

The ruling class will grasp this with both hands...After all, he predicted the 'END OF HISTORY'....
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: You know you are a Philistine when...

Post by blindpig » Thu May 12, 2022 1:57 pm

The Extraordinary Supremacy of the Hyperwealthy
RALPH NADER

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New York Times Magazine (4/7/22)

Consumer advocate Ralph Nader wrote to the New York Times Magazine in response to its “Money Issue” (4/10/22), which focused on billionaires.

Your engrossing issue on megabillionaires—their road to riches and influence—devoted little attention to billionaire CEOs directly running their giant corporations. For example, how did CEO Tim Cook of Apple get his board to pay him $50,000 an hour or $850 a minute, while Apple store workers are making under $20 per hour? Apple’s wealth draws from a million serf laborers in China making iPhones and computers they cannot afford to buy.

Under Cook, Apple decided to pour over $400 billion of excess profits into unproductive stock buybacks. How fascinating would have been the Times covering how these decisions were made, in place of raising wages, thorough recycling, reducing prices for Apple’s expensive consumer products, bringing some production back to the USA or, heaven forbid, paying its fair share of income taxes.

While the hyperwealthy do attract celebrity treatment, it is when they manage multinational companies that their extraordinary supremacy becomes clearer.

Ralph Nader

Washington, DC

https://fair.org/home/the-extraordinary ... erwealthy/

Ralph Nader is worth $6M. By pointing the finger at the handful on top of the heap, who surely have disproportionate effect upon us all, he distracts from the more pervasive issue of the economic disparity which is a functional essence of capitalism. Do you know anyone who actually works for a living worth a tenth of that? Ralph is 'fighting' for his place in the class structure, not that of the vast majority.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: You know you are a Philistine when...

Post by blindpig » Mon Sep 19, 2022 2:09 pm

oh boy...........

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Occupy 2.0
By Adbusters (Posted Sep 14, 2022)

Originally published: Adbusters on September 2022 (more by Adbusters) |

Dear Activists everywhere,
Are you ready for Occupy 2.0? Hell Yeah!

Eleven years ago we sparked a wave of revolutionary fervor that swept the world. Now it’s time to do it again. Are you ready for Occupy 2.0?

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The original Occupy resonated because the moment was so hot. The wounds inflicted by the financial crash were deep and widespread. Everyone now knew what the 1% had gotten away with. The Arab Spring provided the prototype. The fuel was fresh, raw, homegrown fury.

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Now, as we face the prospect of extinction, the conditions are in place for another monumental heave.

This summer marked a terrifying new low-water-mark in the human project. Ecosystems crashed. Wars raged. Nations imploded. The iconic rivers of civilization—the Colorado, the Rhine, the Thames, the Danube, the Yangtze, the Ganges, the Nile—began to dry up. Others, swollen by flash floods, jumped their banks and displaced millions. Meanwhile, fires raged, supply chains failed, electricity grids blew up and water treatment plants ground to a halt.

Given the gravity of the catastrophe, you’d expect nothing less than a full-scramble response from world leaders.

Yet, unbelievably, that hasn’t happened. They’re doing almost nothing. The oil keeps flowing, the glaciers keep melting, the seas keep rising. It’s as if our leaders are hoping some magical solution to materialize out of the Egyptian desert at COP 27. Which it almost certainly won’t.

Our climate crisis will not be solved by the business-as-usual strategies of the past. None of the marching and pipeline blocking, the techno-fixes, conferences or Green New Deals will get this done. The only thing that can save us now is ourselves. We the people of the world must rise up and unleash a tsunami of rage so emotionally explosive that our leaders will simply have to listen and act.

Download Print Version

Whack this ULTIMATUM up on every lamppost in every city. Make it go viral, online and IRL. Hold it up before every intellectual, artist, writer, banker, politician, philosopher, poet and punk. Thrust it in the face of every world leader every chance you get.

This last-ditch effort to win the planetary endgame begins on Saturday September 17, and continues unabated until we break through the suicidal inaction of our leaders.

https://mronline.org/2022/09/14/occupy-2-0/

More distraction and misdirection.

Like The Man said, ' first tragedy, then farce.'
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: You know you are a Philistine when...

Post by blindpig » Wed May 03, 2023 2:59 pm

Bono Is Doing Illustrations For The Atlantic Now, Because Everything’s Fake And Stupid

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So U2 singer Bono is literally just doing illustrations for the imperialist propaganda rag The Atlantic now, because that’s the sort of thing that happens in a dystopian civilization during the death throes of a globe-spanning empire.

A Washington Post article titled “Bono likes to sketch Atlantic covers, so the magazine hired him” reports that “Bono is into Atlantic cover fanfic — so much so that he was invited to illustrate the magazine’s June cover featuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.”

Bono’s latest contribution to the mountain of cringe-inducing Zelensky moments we’ve been seeing for the past year provides a cover image for an article by lifelong war propagandists Anne Applebaum and Jeffrey Goldberg. The article endorses a Ukrainian offensive to recapture Crimea, which experts largely agree would be the move most likely to trigger a nuclear war in this conflict.

Here’s a paragraph from Applebaum and Goldberg’s article, just to give you a taste of the infantile “Good Guys vs Bad Guys” framing that western liberals are being fed by mass media war propagandists these days:

“Sometimes, the war is described as a battle between autocracy and democracy, or between dictatorship and freedom. In truth, the differences between the two opponents are not merely ideological, but also sociological. Ukraine’s struggle against Russia pits a heterarchy against a hierarchy. An open, networked, flexible society—one that is both stronger at the grassroots level and more deeply integrated with Washington, Brussels, and Silicon Valley than anyone realized—is fighting a very large, very corrupt, top-down state. On one side, farmers defend their land and 20‑something engineers build eyes in the sky, using tools that would be familiar to 20‑something engineers anywhere else. On the other side, commanders send waves of poorly armed conscripts to be slaughtered—just as Stalin once sent shtrafbats, penal battalions, against the Nazis—under the leadership of a dictator obsessed with ancient bones. ‘The choice,’ Zelensky told us, ‘is between freedom and fear.’”


Many westerners felt their first stirrings of youthful rebellious passions while listening to U2 songs like “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and “Pride (In the Name of Love)”, but nowadays Bono’s voice is heard saying that he has “grown very fond” of war criminal George W Bush, praising capitalism at the World Economic Forum, teaming up with warmonger Lindsey Graham to promote US empire narratives about Syria, and singing “Stand by Ukraine” in support of US empire narratives in a Kyiv subway. And just when it looks like he can’t become any more of a tool of the empire, he gets hired by one of the world’s worst militarist smut rags to draw a cover image of Zelensky.

Because that’s just how things go in a highly controlled society where mainstream culture is designed to serve the powerful. A society where the minds of the public are continually being shaped by mass-scale psychological manipulation to ensure that they keep thinking, speaking, working, consuming and voting in ways which serve the rich and powerful. Everything that gets elevated to the top of mainstream attention facilitates this agenda (or is at least harmless to it), and as soon as it becomes potentially threatening to this agenda it is either corrected or marginalized away from mainstream attention.

This dynamic can cause some truly jaw-dropping flotsam and jetsam to surface in the roilings of our cultural waters, like Simpsons characters waving Ukrainian flags, or an opera about a drone operator sponsored by General Dynamics.


Here’s Responsible Statecraft’s Connor Echols on that last one:

This fall, DC denizens will be treated to the world premiere of “Grounded,” an opera following an Air Force ace named Jess whose unexpected pregnancy forces her to leave behind her beloved F-16 and join the “chair force.”



Throughout the show, the “hot shot” pilot wrestles with the mental impact of firing rockets from a drone in Afghanistan from a trailer in Las Vegas. “As Jess tracks terrorists by day and rocks her daughter to sleep by night, the boundary between her worlds becomes dangerously permeable,” an ad tells us.



The production is brought to you by presenting sponsor General Dynamics, one of the world’s largest weapons companies (and, wouldn’t you know it, the maker of Jess’s favorite plane). Playwright George Brant wrote the libretto, which will be brought to life by mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo and Tony-winning composer Jeanine Tesori.


You’ll also see things like “humanitarian intervention” champion Samantha Power enthusiastically tweeting about the collaboration between the Sesame Street franchise and the CIA cutout USAID in Iraq:
Great to hear from Basma & Jad about the new friends they’re making in Iraq through Ahlan Simsim—a @USAID & @SesameWorkshop early learning activity that promotes inclusion, respect, and understanding by showing children from all different backgrounds coming together.
[youtube]https://twitter.com/i/status/1648659595856846848[/youtube]
You see things like this all the time under the shadow of the US empire, and individually they don’t look like much, but once you start noticing them you come to recognize them as symptoms of the profoundly diseased civilization that we are living in. One where our heart strings are pulled in the most obnoxious ways imaginable to get us to support capitalism, empire and oligarchy, where we are manipulated into espousing values systems which benefit powerful sociopaths under the cover of noble-sounding causes. Where we are trained like rats to support systems that are driving our species toward extinction because our rulers gave lip service to humanitarianism and waved a rainbow flag.

This is what dystopia looks like. Like a bunch of thought-controlled automatons mindlessly marching toward ecocide and omnicide to a beat played out by screens who tell them every day and in every way that there is no higher purpose than this. Like military industrial complex-funded feminist rock operas about drone operators and Cookie Monster helping Samantha Power psychologically colonize Iraqi children. Like Bono coming home from singing a heartfelt number about the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr to illustrate a cover for a war propaganda piece in The Atlantic.

It’s like they’re pouring concrete over our hearts. Sewing blindfolds over our souls. Numbing us, distracting us, sedating us, so that the local riff raff won’t interfere in the workings of the imperial machine. They’re killing off something beautiful and sacred in humanity, and they’re doing it to roll out some of the ugliest visions this planet has ever seen.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/05/03 ... nd-stupid/

If it's 'Bono' it must be philistine.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: You know you are a Philistine when...

Post by blindpig » Tue Feb 13, 2024 4:59 pm

Anti-Imperialism in the US Today: What It Is and Is Not
FEBRUARY 12, 2024

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Democracy Now’s anchor Amy Goodman. Photo: Democracy Now.

By Stansfield Smith – Feb 10, 2024

Fidel Castro, the world recognizes as a historic anti-imperialist figure, repeatedly warned that the main danger to humanity is US imperialism: “There is an enemy that can be called universal, an enemy whose attitude and whose actions…threaten the whole world, bully the whole world, that universal enemy is Yankee imperialism.” He fought to build a world united front against imperialism, of the world’s peoples and countries to oppose the barbarous actions of US imperialism. We see that anti-imperialist unity right now with United Nations votes and worldwide protests against the US-Israeli slaughters in Gaza, in what the New York Times in 2003 called “a second superpower.”

The US empire is opposed to not just revolutionary movements, but to any struggles that place national sovereignty above the interests of the US corporations. The US may pretend the issue is the defense of democracy and human rights, but its only concern is obedience to its dictates.

Imperialism uses human rights and democracy issues in countries it targets for “regime change” as a rationale for foreign interference. It cooks up human rights horror stories – killings of students in Nicaragua in 2018, Qaddafi’s plans for mass rape and murder in Libya, Hamas mass killing and rape of civilians on October 7, Chinese genocide in Xinjiang, Iran’s killing of Mahsa Amin in 2022, Evo Morales stealing an election in 2019, Cuba’s repression of mass protests in 2021, Russia’s “unprovoked” intervention into Ukraine, Syria’s Assad chemical weapons attack on his own people, Venezuela’s President Maduro fixing elections, Chavez’ supporters killing protestors in 2002, and on and on. The only truth is that the US corporate media constantly lies to us to win support for their interventions.

How Progressives Legitimize Imperialist “Regime Change” Propaganda

Many progressive people swallow and even join in these disinformation campaigns in countries the US targets for regime change. They are not simply calling out human rights abuses “from the left,” but help legitimize US propaganda stories, becoming witting or unwitting conveyor belts for them into our movement. As a result, people come to believe that a country targeted for “regime change” may be unworthy of our solidarity against US aggression. Cast aside is the key issue: the US empire has no right to intervene in other countries, period.

In contrast, anti-imperialists focus on uncovering and bringing to light US disinformation and interference in the national sovereignty of other countries. For instance, what was sold as a popular uprising against Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega “dictatorship” was financed with hundreds of millions of US government dollars, or that the White Helmets, alleged “humanitarian” group in the Syrian “revolution,” was funded by the British and US governments and its leader connected to British intelligence MI6.

Some progressives’ back-handed apologetics for imperialist regime change date back at least to Leon Trotsky, who proclaimed, for example, “I consider the main source of danger to the USSR in the present international situation to be Stalin and the oligarchy headed by him.” (Stalin After the Finnish Experience, March 13, 1940) Whatever your view on Stalin’s conduct in the 1930s, the world knew that Hitler planned to annihilate Soviet Russia, welcomed by imperial Britain, France, and the US, before, and even after the Soviet Union was a World War II ally. But to Trotsky, the main danger to Russia and the revolution was the dictatorship, not imperialism. This approach of criticizing leaderships of targeted countries, not imperialist aggression, and not organizing movements against it, is too common among progressives today. It portrays an elementary lack of anti-imperialist consciousness.

Anti-imperialists understand that no country can have any real democracy – whatever you imagine that is – because the US is constantly working to impose subservient governments throughout the world. The empire regards the world as its domain, possessing 800-900 military bases outside its own borders. US imperialism is ever vigilant looking for a chance to overturn a “disobedient” government. “History teaches too eloquently that those who forget this do not survive the error,” said Castro. When targeted countries live under this ever-present threat, how can freedom and democracy flourish? They are forced to take measures to protect their people’s human right to national sovereignty.

Do targeted countries commit actual abuses? How could peoples ruled for centuries by imperial overlords, who treated them as human animals, not commit abuses when suddenly they came to power and had to deal with constant imperial pressure to overthrow them again? Even with outstanding revolutionary leaders such as Cuba’s Fidel, or Russia under Lenin, abuses were committed. Anti-imperialists place the blame where it primarily belongs: not on targets of US imperialism, but on centuries of imperialist abuse of their peoples – which only continued once those peoples came to power.

Many Progressives’ Failure to Grasp US Imperialism’s Tools for Intervention

The US uses many tools to interfere in countries, turning to military invasion as a last resort when all else fails. The world’s leaders constantly experience this US meddling. Yet US people, even progressives, have little grasp of its scope. Julian Assange, who remains imprisoned for his invaluable work, gave us some idea of how the US rulers operate behind our backs.

The US also intervenes through CIA-involved coups – at least 27 operations just in Latin America in the 21st century, almost all unknown to the public. The CIA and military spy agencies possess a publicly admitted budget of $100 billion for coups, assassinations, and other undercover terrorist actions against countries the corporate media lambasts as “human rights violators”.

US corporations bribe foreign government figures to sell out their people’s well-being to US interests. We know very little about how they constantly squeeze and blackmail governments, though Confessions of an Economic Hitman provides examples.

Few progressives understand how the US rulers weaponize their control of the international banking and trade system to wreck other economies. They have the power to shut down a country’s foreign trade and foreign funding. The US blockades countries, and forces other nations to comply – North Korea since 1950, and Cuba since 1962. It blockades Syria, Iran, Russia, and Venezuela, even kidnapping their businesspeople as “money launderers” for engaging in legal trade. It employs economic warfare on 30 more countries, causing genuine human rights problems. Clearly, no country fighting to survive under these conditions can permit unrestricted freedom and democracy. That was first brought home by the benevolence and democracy of the Paris Commune, which enabled its enemies to crush it, slaughtering over 30,000 Communards.



The US uses its domination of the world media to paint targeted governments as nefarious actors. It controls nine of the top ten media companies, along with the internet and social media, such as Google, Twitter, and Facebook. Worldwide, they spread disinformation packaged as “news,” often a more effective weapon than US military might. Caitlin Johnstone noted, “Before they launch missiles, they launch propaganda campaigns. Before they roll out tanks, they roll out narratives.” These form an integral part of war campaigns, softening up our opposition to interventions, often so skillfully that they garner support for intervention among anti-war forces – witness the Libya, Syria, and Ukraine wars.

We know little of their use of US and foreign NGOs, both government and corporate funded ones, to influence a targeted nation’s community and popular organizations, as it did with environmental and indigenous groups seeking to overthrow Ecuador’s Rafael Correa and Bolivia’s Evo Morales. Even the “Arab Spring” of 2011 was manipulated to impose pro-imperialist regimes.

We know even less of this government and corporate funding and manipulation of alternative and progressive media outlets in our own country.

The proper work of anti-imperialists is uncovering and educating other working people about US coup attempts and terrorist actions, corporate arm-twisting of foreign figures, the weaponizing of international banking and finance through the dollar’s continued dominance, and the use of NGOs as regime change tools. This is authentic anti-imperialist work, not critiquing victimized countries’ real or concocted human rights abuses or their responses to US aggression.

The Rulers tell us in Advance who they Plan to “Regime Change”

It is no mystery for progressive people who the US empire will target for “regime change” – it is typically well-publicized in advance with media propaganda onslaughts about abuses in some countries. Or we are given direct statements, as when Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman interviewed General Wesley Clark in 2007, who revealed the US had planned in 2001 not just to attack Afghanistan, but seven other countries: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran, which it then did. Or, in 2008, Congress publicly approved President Bush’s request for $400 million “to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran.” A year later, the anti-government Green Movement broke out, followed by US-backed protests in 2017-19 and 2022. In 2012, Ron Paul detailed in Congress military plans to overthrow the Syrian government. Oliver Stone’s widely viewed 2016 film Ukraine on Fire examined the US-instigated coup by anti-Russian fascists, which overthrew a neutral government and installed a pro-NATO government threatening Russia.

Yet those public forewarnings did not stop many in the movement from supporting wars on these countries, including Amy Goodman herself. They often disguised both the US role and their support, even adapting the language of the empire itself: not as imperial wars against “disobedient” countries, but as popular democratic movements against dictatorship. In fact, many who declare themselves sworn enemies of the US empire nevertheless oppose the same governments as our imperial overlords: Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Russia, China, Iran, Syria, and North Korea. Building a united world front against imperialist brutality seems alien to them.

These progressive people’s approach to imperial war: initial opposition to imperial warmongering, then later support as the war propaganda heightens, camouflaging US-backed intervention as democracy and self-determination movements, harkens back to Marxist parties’ conduct a century ago, when they opposed imperial war until it broke out in 1914. They then squirreled around creating justifications for their betrayal.

While this illustrates the lack of anti-imperialist consciousness of many First World progressives, it also highlights corporate media’s power to sway peace advocates to support US imperial regime change – even while believing they are not. It shows the ease US rulers can still manipulate anti-war sentiment.

Anti-Imperialists must be vigilant in defending National Sovereignty against US Empire’s Operations

Anti-imperialists oppose US meddling in the national sovereignty of other countries. It is the business of the peoples of other lands to solve their own problems, their fundamental democratic right to decide their country’s future by themselves. We must forever demand that the US leave them alone, so they can carry out their task. That is the most effective way we can defend their human rights.

Our task is building a movement that moves the Pentagon’s now over one trillion dollar budget from wrecking other countries to ending homelessness and hunger here, providing free national health care, affordable housing, and free education through university, often human rights enjoyed by the peoples in countries the US seeks to overthrow.

The anti-imperialist, anti-war, and human rights movement here would be much more developed, more powerful, more tied to world revolutionary struggles if the time progressives spent on the defects of countries the US targets were instead devoted to exposing US interference in those peoples’ lives. We need to explain to our fellow working people the methods the US rulers use behind our backs for “regime change,” and for manipulating progressive and working-class movements here at home.

We see an inkling of a world united front against imperialism with the movement against the US-Israeli barbarity in Gaza, one which also exposes the habitual deceit of corporate media. The $18 billion the US provided to maintain Israeli apartheid in 2023 was almost the $20 billion needed to end homelessness here. The $111 billion spent just since 2022 for Ukraine war, which many progressives did support – with Biden wanting $60 billion more – could make public university free ($79 billion a year) and end hunger ($25 billion as of 2016). UN climate scientists say $300 billion a year would stop the rise in greenhouse gases, a mere quarter of the US military budget. We can never achieve these humanitarian goals while the US rulers know they can sway progressives with their regime change propaganda. But we can achieve them by developing an anti-imperialist stand of unconditionally opposing all US empire’s schemes for “regime change.”

https://orinocotribune.com/anti-imperia ... nd-is-not/

Too easy on the so-called Progressives, in particular those who have attained government offices. The substantial pay(to any working class person), not to mention the availability to bribery and graft automatically puts these people into the upper middle class and gives them different class interests than those who voted them into office. Just look at the catastrophe caused by the elected Social Democrats throughout Europe on the eve of WWI.

And by the way, Amy Goodman's net worth is $3M. What are her class interests? Can't let those 'opinion-makers' off the hook, hell no.
https://www.celebritynetworth.com/riche ... net-worth/

The information necessary for correct judgement is out there if one cares to put the effort into looking. Ignorance is no excuse.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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