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Showing posts with the label “Gideon Rachman”

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 ...

Misinformation: ‘Trump Risks Turning the US Into a Rogue State’

Gideon’s liberal take on Trump falls within filtering and selective reading of history by making Trump look like an abnormal and an unprecedented product of the American society. Fundamentalist liberals are in the defensive because people like Trump upsets their staus quo and their own way of ‘democratic genocidal killings’, destruction of nature, plunder, capital accumulation, massive inequality, economic domination, demonising the Other, commodification of everything … Trumps upsets liberals because his barbarism might outdo theirs. It is another belief system that a guru like Martin Wolf, another FT columnist, keeps defending what he calls ‘the free market democracy’. No, Gideon. The US has been a rogue state for decades. Even if someone has only heard of the victims of its wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and its support of the genocidal Israeli regime would be able to question why only now the term rogue is being used.  Back in 2000 William Blum had already mapped why the US is a rog...