Like, this may come as a shock to people like Tumblr liberals who are totally stuck in the Western anglophone neoliberal ideology echo-chamber but like, outside of the west, out there where the majority of the worlds people live, Kwame Nkrumah’s thought is taken more seriously than Milton Friedman’s. So why will left liberals engage with Friedman’s thought, even if only to debunk it, but not engage at all with Nkrumah’s writings on neocolonialism, and just write it off?
There’s a common charge leveled by supposedly “open-minded” liberals toward anti-imperialists, that we just ‘blindly’ support any force that’s contravailing US the US on a regional or global scale, but how am I supposed to take this seriously as anything but projection?
We anti-imperialists often make specific, verifiable claims about happenings in global geopol, such as that the so-called “Free Syrian Army” consisted mostly of salafi jihadists allowed into Syria through their northern border with Turkey, and that it doesn’t make sense that a civil war could simply Materialize in a country like Syria which right before the war started had one of the lowest ratios of guns to people in the world, or that the Maidan coup regime that swept into power in Kiev in 2014 was heavily infiltrated with fascists, and would not have been able to consolidate power without the instrumentalisation of fascist gangs and paramilitary organizations.
The liberal response to these specific claims, then, is to point to reports from corporate media with every incentive to lie, themselves doing no independent investigation but instead parroting verbatim the word of the State Department as fact, and dismissing all independent media investigations out of hand with no further thought.
In a situation such as this, can that response really be considered “open-minded”? It seems that time and time again intellectual rigor is reserved for discussions of technocratic tinkering within the west’s iron curtain, and not the lives of people outside of it.
There’s plenty of brain-juice to be expended on justifying why the US economy is actually in good shape and the people saying they’re struggling more than before are just stupid, but when it comes to considering why African heads of state choose the China Development Bank over the IMF as an economic partner or Russia over the NATO states as security partners, these leaders of millions are dismissively written off as histrionically anti-Western, paranoid, and too mentally weak to see through Russian and Chinese propaganda. Is it this really a 'rational’ way to look at the world?
Personally, I think not.
