General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsHow Not to Oppose Imperialism: Ukraine, and the Russia Today Left
Suppose you learned some new facts about Star Wars, that could shake the narrative that the Rebel Alliance defeated imperial aggression when it destroyed the Death Star. The Rebels, in their cash-strapped infancy, received money from the National Endowment for Democracy, as American officials saw it as a way to break the Galactic Empires monopoly on shipping routes.
Intercepted diplomatic communiqués show the United States later desired a Rebel victory against the Imperial Navy, in order to introduce planetary systems into the global market. Perhaps leftists might begin to look at the Rebels with more suspicion. There are even a few who might go as far as defending the destruction of Alderaan, now that we know it was a focal point for American intervention. Darth Vader, no longer the boogieman, is now acting pragmatically against Western aggression.
This thought experiment allows us to better understand the moral breakdown on the left, when it comes to understanding global power struggles, and human rights, since Russian President Vladimir Putin made it his business to control Ukraine, a binary view that pits an alternative to Washington or Brussels as always preferable, a view that is at once intellectually lazy and insinuates that anyone who disagrees is just not reading behind the headlines.
How else are we to make sense of some of the positions of anti-imperialists in this day and age, when the autocratic leader of the petro-state, employing his own version of the Monroe Doctrine, uses a combination of militarism and debt extraction to control the affairs of another state from which it desires its untapped energy resources?
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http://souciant.com/2014/05/hownottoopposeimperialism/
GeorgeGist
(25,294 posts)NuclearDem
(16,184 posts)salib
(2,116 posts)DonCoquixote
(13,615 posts)Sticking with the examples of Moscow and Damascus, both regimes, in addition to engaging numerous and in some cases horrific violations of human rights, are reactionary in their ideology. Vladimir Putins Russia is run by an oil-rich oligarchy, and boasts tremendous levels of inequality and social repression. Bashar al-Assads Syria, is driven by crony capitalism, and keeps firmly in place what is a fascist state, run by the military, on behalf of a religious sect.
In neither case is there any objective claim of these leaders fighting for economic justice, grassroots power or a new type of global system. Instead, they are right-wing regimes willing to engage in exceptional violence (in Assads case chemical weapons) to maintain their grips on power. If the only thing that makes them appealing to the left is their willingness to snub the United States, than a genuinely leftist foreign policy vision is deservedly dead on arrival.
m-lekktor
(3,675 posts)imo