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The MoA Week In Review – OT 2025-013
Last week's posts on Moon of Alabama:
Russia/Ukraine:
China:
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Other issues:
Europe:
> Meanwhile, European elites have yielded to what Todd calls the anti-ideology of “Europeanism.” It is an anti-ideology insofar as it does not allow for any active political community to emerge: the upper classes have been captivated by the belief that nations should not exist. In this respect, Europeanism is very similar to Anglo-Saxon ultraliberalism, which also dismisses the nation as a pernicious fiction.
According to Todd, this belief manifests in various ways, primarily through efforts to abolish nations via European integration or to fragment them by geographically separating minorities, ultimately increasing atomization in the name of multiculturalism. Without a shared moral compass, society disintegrates “into isolated bubbles, confined to their own problems, pleasures and pains.” In this condition, the governing establishment constitutes nothing more than another “autistic group,” says Todd, with the only difference being its greater visibility. <
Syria:
Russia:
Use as open (not related to the wars in Ukraine and Palestine) thread …
Rampant, unchecked liberalism is the source of all the ills that the West is currently facing. Western journalists torturing facts to fit the “at what cost” narrative is a manifestation of liberalism – being liberal with the truth in this case.
And before some barflies out there start hootin’ and hollerin’, Trump and the GOP are counted amongst the liberals, not just the Dems.
Both the Dems and the GOP are various shades of right wing politics. There is no popular left wing in the West.
It’s funny that despite Marxism, liberalism etc. being concepts that originated from the West, centuries of liberalism’s unchallenged dominance has warped their definitions beyond all recognition in Western public discourse.
Wikipedia, shockingly, provides an accurate description of what left and right wings in politics are ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_spectrum ). Right wing is essentially liberalism, which includes the conservative variety associated with the likes of the Republican party as well as Trump (conservative liberalism and classical liberalism), while left wing politics are communism, socialism, and social liberalism. I personally would exclude social liberalism from left wing politics even if that might make others label me as class reductionist. Social liberalization is an integral component of left wing politics (Mao’s famous “women hold up half the sky” quote comes to mind), but it is downstream of advancing class interests. Sexual minorities, racial minorities etc. can only live dignified lives if they are first afforded the same economic opportunities as everyone else.
It’s not just Wikipedia. Wen Tiejun, in one of his recent lectures ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXAqqG9sL80 in Chinese), mentioned the fallacy of examining current Western politics using the traditional left-right dichotomy because the left in the West has completely abandoned the fight for economic justice that characterize the left and have instead focused their struggles exclusively on social liberalism (the so-called woke, LGBT, DEI etc). For Wen Tiejun’s pedigree, you can search the archives of MoA for mentions of his name. Note too that these mentions occurred before right wingers have fully colonized the site’s comments sections.
Liberalism and fascism are two sides of the same coin. Fascism is the armed wing of liberalism. When the Dems call the GOP fascists and when the GOP calls the Dems fascists, they are both right. Trump is a fascist too, despite fervent believers who thinks that he is not part of the establishment. Communists attack liberalism because communists are aware of liberalism’s intellectual roots, one which takes nourishment from the blood of the oppressed.
https://english.almayadeen.net/articles/blog/two-sides-of-the-same-coin–liberalism-and-fascism
Genocide and Slavery: The Roots of Western Freedom
As an intellectual doctrine, liberalism refers to the idea of negative freedom, which is predicated on the inviolable affirmation of individual freedom under a specific mode of social and economic reproduction, more commonly known as capitalism. Under liberalism, so we are told, individuals should be free to marry whoever they want, to pursue business as much as they wish, and as they pursue their right to individual freedom, the State should step aside, and not interfere. However, a major contradiction exists between what liberalism claims to embody on an abstract level, and the socio-political praxis from which this idea emerged and has been consolidated. More simply, while liberalism claims to uphold the universal freedom of everyone, since its inception it was the freedom exclusively reserved to a well-defined community of people.
In a book titled A Counter History of Liberalism, the Italian philosopher Domenico Losurdo goes to the core of this issue. By perusing the work of the most influential thinkers of liberalism, i.e. John Locke, Alexis de Tocqueville, Isaiah Berlin, Losurdo traces how the intellectual articulation of liberalism did not cohere with its political praxis. Liberal freedom was in fact a privilege reserved to a white supremacist circle of people in the context of Britain and the stillborn United States of America.
There were two major contradictions, or what Losurdo refers to as clauses of exclusion, that reveal how liberalism failed to reconcile its ideological claims vis-à-vis the political praxis from which it emerged. These two clauses entailed: First, the genocidal killing of the natives; and second, the slavery of Black Africans. In other words, liberalism was no more than an empty claim for the world majority, whose lives remained under the bloody grip of colonial clobbering and killing. The Native Indians were clearly excluded from “modern” or “negative” freedom and were instead condemned to expropriation and deportation or outright killing. The slaves and the theoretically free blacks were still subjected to terrorist violence in the middle of the twentieth century, locked up in workhouses or lynched.
Even the very “modern” and “negative” freedom of slave owners, or the ruling class in general, was subjected to heavy limitations, which even in the mid-twentieth century was still required to respect the ban on miscegenation, a ban on interracial sexual and marital relationships.
Liberalism, in other words, regulated the lives of the powerful under colonialism, while genocide and slavery were constitutive of this ideological and political movement. Although liberalism raised the question of the limitation of power within the community of free people (the white people), this freedom went hand in hand with the imposition of absolute power over the excluded, which was the enslavement of blacks and the annihilation of the Native Americans. The freedom and the rights that a very closed community had gained were obtained through the material, social, and cultural annihilation of the Native Americans and Africans.
And so, once we understand that liberalism developed as an ideology of war and exploitation, how are we to rethink these statements from the bourgeoise media that constantly tells us that “Israel” and Ukraine must be supported in defense of liberal values?
Losurdo’s entire book is freely available ( http://acdc2007.free.fr/losurdo2011.pdf ), so there’s no reason not to educate yourself.
At what cost to the West does liberalism’s continued existence entail?
You can see many barflies openly expressing confusion about what constitutes left and right in politics, and some resorting to the invention of new terms like “top and bottom” to supplant left and right. Such inventions can only temporarily alleviate the problem, as liberals are adept at perverting terms and claiming them as their own (like what Hitler did with the word “socialist” and Trump cultists do with “decolonization”), as befitting colonizers. There are also barflies who confidently assert that China is imperialist based on a mix of vibes and uncritical swallowing of the West’s state propaganda.
If consensus on even the most basic terms cannot be reached, an effective opposition against the bourgeoisie cannot be formed.
Mao’s call to combat liberalism is meant for maintaining discipline within a Marxist party, but it is applicable to those who seek to be principled commentators with a desire to end American hegemony and to end the perpetuation of liberalism.
Posted by: All Under Heaven | Jan 19 2025 19:59 utc | 47
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