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The Extreme ‘Centre’

 

Liberalism

 “ I think we can get too distracted by minor doctrinal disputes between self-proclaimed centrists and right-wingers and miss the fact that the default intellectual culture in Anglo-America is overwhelmingly right wing. It tends to take reactionary and anti-left positions and has done so for a long time. The names can change. People can switch institutional affiliations. But the defense of the establishment and the US-led liberal order and other Cold War verities such as classical liberalism, Western values, the Enlightenment, and Zionism remains their primary task. This is the legacy of the lucrative conformism noted by Alfred Kazin and Czeslaw Milosz.” The Liberal Establishment is ‘a Stranger to Self-Examination’

“War on Terror”

 Barack Obama’s Kill Lists Related

Australia

“When we murder, it is a ‘tragic accident’. When they murder, it is cause to light the Eiffel Tower in solemn remembrance and to commemorate the dead on Twitter with hashtags expressing human solidarity.  “Guilty of state-sponsored terrorism”

Vaccines

India, the EU, the US, Canada and the UK are among the countries which have reserved the most doses of the vaccine, according to the latest data. It would be insane if the vaccines were to be put under a democratic health organisation that distributes the doses worldwide according to those who need them first, i.e. the frontline workers, the aged and the vulnerables. But we live in a world of nation states, capitalist competition and profit and intellectual property. And that’s the ‘rational’ and ‘natural’ order of things.

Afghanistan

After 19 years the most powerful military power in the world and history, with the biggest annual GDP and powerful wealthy allies, has failed to defeat the Taliban, stabilise the country and ‘liberate women’. And it is leaving behind a weak government. 26,000 Afghan children killed or maimed since 2005