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UK: Starmer Has Returned British Imperialism to the Core of Labour

I think ‘Western imperialism’ in the title is an overstretch. The article does not deal with Western imperialism. Nor does it mention economic imperialism. “Starmer’s flame-war against the left has become so extreme that, as some critics have pointed out, both Pope Francis and Amnesty International would face expulsion from Starmer’s Labour Party were they members. ”
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Trezor

A story during the Hungarian uprising against the Stalinist regime and the Soviet invasion in 1956. The movie is not about the uprising itself and it actually never gives a voice to the socialist and democratic demands of Hungarian revolutionaries . Neither of the two characters who exchanged their views about the system represented the revolutionaries.  Trezor (Hungary, 2018 )
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Legacy of Violence

A new book by Caroline Elkins. A review “ With its enormous breadth and ambition, it amounts to something approaching a one-volume history of imperial Britain’s use of force, torture, and deceit around the world. As devastating as the details of these tactics are, even more damning is Elkins’s account of what she argues has been the persistent and perverse misuse of law to cast a veneer of justice and respectability over the remorseless exploitation of others. “As its title suggests, Elkins’s book argues that violence was not just an incidental feature of the British Empire, not simply its midwife, so to speak. Rather, it was foundational to the system itself, a fact borne out in considerable detail.” But Elkins’s “most original argument lies not in the violence itself but rather in London’s use and abuse of the notion of the rule of law, much touted by Britain as an elevating feature of modern Western civilization and a pillar of democracy. “ Elkins convincingly demonstrates that duri...
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The US-China Trade War

The projects, mapped across the Middle East, are an effort to consolidate the influence of American capital and rebuff competition from China by creating a physical, economic bulwark that strengthens American and European supply chains. It is about to hit the Middle East
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We Need a Few Good Dictators

A liberal with a different colour. Some countries are not mature, global capitalism, uneven development, imperialism, etc. have nothing to do with the plights of these countries. Thus, Robert Kaplan in this article echoes what some of my white Western students once said: “a benevolent dictator is a good thing for countries the Middle East and Africa,” or what a Canadian suggested when she said “we should stop talking about democracy in those countries.” What those students and Kaplan have in mind when they speak about ‘democracy’ is ‘democracy’ within capitalist social property relations. Capitalism for them is not the fundamental determiner and the fundamental problem.  Some countries are just unfit or ‘we’ – major Western regimes, corporations, international financial institutions, colonial and neocolonial powers - have not played any role in the predicaments of those countries. Furthermore, the arrogant ignores that the historical processes of Western Europe,  industrialisa...
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