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The ‘Free World’ or Justifying Imperialism and Murder

Blinken and co should “talk less about the rules-based international order and more about defending the free world. That is a more accurate and comprehensible description of what western foreign policy is actually about… As in the cold war and the earlier struggles of the 20th century, the world’s democracies do not need to apologise for being ruthless in defence of free societies.” —Gideon Rahman, Financial Times, 27 May 2024 

‘Democracy’ instead of capitalism or at as, his colleague Martin Wolf calls it, ‘democratic capitalism’.

Manipulation of history: the 20th century was a struggle netween ‘democracies’ and non-democracies. In fact, the 20th century saw struggles between empires, advanced capitalist state, and movements of national liberations, class struggle in the heart of bourgeois democracies, even struggles against dictatorships such as in Brazil, Spain, Portugal, Greece … to overcome capitalism and aiming at establishing genuine democracies.

‘Defending the free world’ also implies that Israel is part of that world. Thus the justification of the ruthless support of ‘free societies’ of Israel. The latter is defending the ‘free world’ like what NATO is doing in Ukraine or it did in Libya.

Furthermore, the use of ‘free world’ or ‘free societies’ obscures what is happenning in those societies: exploitation, regulated and unregulated, corruption on a big scale, i.e. the freedom to launder money, to transfer funds to tax havens, legal prostitution, discrimination, institutionalised racism, repression of social movements, e.g. Occupy, Black Lives Matter, pro-Palestinian protests. 

The ‘free world’ is so free to the extent that it denies real freedoms to others: support of reactionary regimes that oppress and repress their people and reactionary movements in different countries. The ‘free world’ has had for at least two hundred years a free hand in plunder and destruction of the environment, without even counting the wars and military interventions. The ‘free world’ normalises hypocrisy and double standard. One example suffice: there were no sanctions, for example, against the brutality of the Russian regime during the two Chechen wars*.

The ‘free world’ also imposes its economic policies and sets terms and conditions on loans provided to many countries. The ‘free world’ enslaves entires countries through the mechanisms of debts, monopolises technologies so that other cannot break free. From iphone to coffee the ‘free world’ exploits the other to passify the ‘free’ at home.

And since the ‘free world’, especially its leader, has not been able to uphold ‘international law’, there is no other solution, but to be ruthless in defending the same regimes that has broken the world order, blaming the advance of authoritarian regimes. It is Brecht again: we need need to be barbarian so that that the barbarians do not monopolise barbarism. 

The non-dit, however, is that the free world is not only experiencing an ideological crisis, it has always had that contradiction embedded in the capitalist system. What gurus like Rahman do not say is that the ‘free world’ might lose or is loosing in capital accumulation and in technological edge to rivals. 

Note

*IA’s summary: “During the Chechen Wars, particularly the Second Chechen War, the West primarily responded with strong criticism and condemnation of Russia's human rights violations, including targeted sanctions against individuals within the Russian government, rather than large-scale economic sanctions due to concerns about the potential for wider geopolitical repercussions; the international community, including the UN and Council of Europe, issued resolutions condemning the brutality of the Russian military campaign against Chechnya, but did not impose significant economic sanctions.”



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