Comment on The crusade against Lemmy devs, lemmy.ml, and so-called "tankies"
CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 6 hours agoplus Western corporations with large presences around the world, still extracting wealth to this day.
Not as much as you’d think, honestly. For things like resources, there are corrupt deals that get funneled through places like Saychelles, but if you actually look at the savings that come out of it it’s like pennies on the Western end. Uh, [here’s one of the reports I think I read]. They’re really screwing the global poor for nothing. Meanwhile, the low-end manufacturing jobs are popular because they tend to pay better than anything else available, and are arguably lighter work than going out in the fields; nobody’s really losing there.
Western wealth comes from other Western wealth, for the most part. Solid institutions, high education rates and lots of capital, which allows all kinds of complicated industries to exist. That got started on colonialism and slavery, but it doesn’t need it to exist now.
The West cares about human rights and democracy mostly for propaganda
I’m also involved in politics. There’s legit ideology there, just like there was legit ideology in the Soviet Union.
Although the far right is a different beast, obviously. These days the US is a lot like a second China, from a Canadian perspective.
The West has overthrown democratically-elected governments and installed human-rights violating dictators plenty of times, up until recently
What are you thinking of there? I can’t really come up with anything past the 80’s. Some leaders will blame the West for their own domestic protesters, but it’s always BS. If the US couldn’t find one guy for that long they certainly can’t whip up an entire nation.
To the rest, I’ll say we both know the earlier history, and I’d probably agree the West needs taking down a peg circa 1920. The Cold War is a bit murkier, because the USSR liked a good puppet or intervention as well.
Cricket@lemmy.zip 5 hours ago
Okay, I don’t have numbers to back up my claim, but the strong impression I have is that any country that tries to implement any government system the US doesn’t like or especially if they try to nationalize some industry or make their markets or their resources more difficult for American companies to access get swiftly overthrown, either overtly or covertly. The only reason to take a step like that would be if those companies had a sweeheart deal in the first place, i.e., wealth extraction.
Sure, I don’t doubt that many people who get into for instance the State Department have legit ideology. But the fact remains that the foreign policy of the US has remained fairly stable across multiple administrations from both parties, which essentially amounts to saying “promoting freedom and democracy” but in actuality promoting expanding military power around the world and expanding economic power as a result of that military presence at just about any cost.
See en.wikipedia.org/…/Foreign_interventions_by_the_U… and worldpopulationreview.com/…/united-states-involve…
Those are only the ones that we know about, which is very likely a fraction of the recent ones because most of this stuff is secret and will continue to be so for 50 years. I don’t agree at all that it’s always BS. If you’re talking about Bin Laden, that’s a completely different kind of case that’s unrelated to intelligence efforts to manipulate other countries and also because as far as I know the US didn’t have any presence in Afghanistan before 9/11.
US-friendly governments keep coming to power in different places, especially in Latin America, and often under contentious circumstances. Do you think that that keeps happening because the people of those countries love the US? I would be more inclined to believe that the CIA was involved in overthrowing governments when those governments claim that than not. Because it’s happened dozens and dozens of times in the last 80 years. There’s a strong pattern there, almost like a habit.
Here’s a good quote from that Wikipedia article: