edited to remove 'bumps' & non-sequiturs
https://web.archive.org/web/20151017000 ... hp?t=48696
Liberalism - Straight to the source
Re: Liberalism - Straight to the source
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Liberalism - Straight to the source
The Road to Hell, Brought to You by Liberalism
Danny Haiphong, BAR Contributing Editor 04 May 2022
Elon Musk's purchase of the Twitter platform was a hotly debated topic. But neither Musk nor any other individual is the root of the world's problems. Liberalism which pretends to be oppose capitalism and US state hegemony but which is in fact an ally, is the problem.
Elon Musk successfully won his bid to purchase Twitter on April 25th just days after a rally in New York City chanted “Azov” to express support for Ukraine. While these events appear unrelated on the surface, they represent key examples of the road to hell paved by U.S. imperialism’s dominant ideology: liberalism.
Liberalism is often viewed as the most progressive political ideology of the prevailing social order in the West. In actuality, liberalism is the driving ideological force of capitalist and imperialist expansionism. Liberal ideology is characterized by the fetishization of racism, individualism, and the political preconditions necessary for the expansion of capitalism. Once a kick-starter for the explosive growth of capital, liberalism has devolved into an ideology that defends the rule of the rich at any and all cost.
Hell, of course, has religious connotations and is employed here as a metaphor for the conditions that the planet finds itself in. Musk buying Twitter is but another step toward the complete monopolization of the media, a process that has already characterized the development of social media platforms. Twitter’s top shareholders include financial titans such as the Vanguard Group, Morgan Stanley, and BlackRock. Musk himself held a nine percent stake in Twitter prior to the full purchase, which will be bankrolled in large part by Morgan Stanley and other Wall Street banks. Vladimir Lenin himself could not have produced a better example of imperialism in the modern era.
Liberals in the corporate media have voiced opposition to Twitter’s takeover. While unlikely, many in the liberal corporate media hope that Musk’s move to buy Twitter will be struck down by regulators in Biden’s Department of Justice. Fears about the fate of free speech have arisen despite the role that liberals and especially the Democratic Party have played in facilitating media monopolization. In 1996, the Clinton administration signed off on the Telecommunications Act of 1996 which eliminated nearly all restrictions to media mergers in the United States. Two decades later, Democrats led the charge in empowering big tech Silicon Valley corporations in their campaign of censorship under the guise of a conspiracy theory aptly termed Russiagate.
Russiagate prompted big tech monopolies such as Google to reconstruct their algorithms so to suppress dissenting voices. A countless number of accounts have been suspended and purged from social media platforms for voicing anti-war and anti-imperialist views. Media affiliated with Russia, Iran, China, and progressive countries in Latin America were forced to register as agents of foreign governments beginning in 2017 and repressed all the same. The censorship has only worsened during Russia’s military operation in Ukraine. Outlets such as RT America have been completely removed from YouTube, as have podcasts from prominent voices on the anti-war Left such as Lee Camp.
Liberals have cheered on this kind of censorship all along the way without taking a single breath. Now that Elon Musk has taken over Twitter, these same liberals have warned users that the platform will become a “scary place.” The New York Times flooded its opinion pages with concerns that the further monopolization of Twitter under Musk will exacerbate already existing problems with billionaire rule over social media platforms. Of course, the New York Times has shown no concern over the suppression of left-wing activists and journalists on social media platforms and has even resorted to smearing them publicly. The Daily Beast went a step further by going directly to these platforms and advocating for the removal of this author and a handful of other anti-war journalists.
The road to hell paved by liberalism is rife with hypocrisy. Under Donald Trump, liberals expressed panic over the rise of fascism. They cheered on Antifa for punching rightwing personality Richard Spencer and secured more funding for federal law enforcement following the January 6th riot at the United States Capitol building. Yet liberals have taken center stage in siding with Ukraine’s military in its conflict with Russia to the point of apologizing for the Nazi organization, the Azov Regiment. Western corporate media has whitewashed the Azov Regiment as a small, passionate group of nationalists that decoupled its “political” roots from its current military operations once it was absorbed into Ukraine’s National Guard after the U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014.
Such mental gymnastics have been exposed as farce, not least because Azov has an extensive record of war crimes . Furthermore, the Western corporate media cannot help but promote Azov in its Ukraine coverage. This contradicts the notion that Azov is a small, ineffectual organization. So too does a rally in a major U.S. metropolis emphatically chanting “Azov.” But pointing this out has its consequences. The ruling class has emphatically defended what it believes is the “good” kind of Nazis by suppressing voices that raise concern about the role that the Azov Regiment has played in the current conflict.
Liberal collaboration with censorship and fascist repression is nothing new. Operation Paperclip, a covert intelligence operation that absorbed Nazis into the ranks of American scientific institutions in a bid to gain an “advantage” over the Soviet Union, was launched during the “liberal” Harry Truman administration. So-called “liberal” U.S. President Lyndon Johnson was close with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and fully supported COINTELPRO , a massive campaign of repression that terrorized left-wing political organizations and their leaders. COINTELPRO laid the basis for the War on Terror’s surveillance regime. The assassination, imprisonment, and surveillance of left-wing political leaders set a precedent for the state-sponsored repression of dissenting voices on issues such as war and peace.
Liberalism is no antidote to fascism. In fact, liberalism has time and again paved the road to an even steeper descent to the far right. Whether it was Obama’s two-term administration expanding Bush-era policies and opening the door for Donald Trump or the Democrats wielding social media as a weapon of repression and thereby giving Elon Musk ample leverage to buy Twitter, liberalism has a proven record of covering up the crimes of capitalism under a veneer of progress. That the glorification of fascist organizations such as “Azov” and the further monopolization of the media is happening under Joe Biden’s watch should thus come as no surprise. Liberalism and its political expression in the U.S., the Democratic Party, are moribund engines of U.S. imperialism.
These engines have outlived their usefulness. Humanity has two choices: socialism or barbarism. The latter choice can only be made once the perils of liberalism are confronted by the masses in their just resistance to the oppressive conditions of imperialism.
https://www.blackagendareport.com/road- ... liberalism
Danny Haiphong, BAR Contributing Editor 04 May 2022
Elon Musk's purchase of the Twitter platform was a hotly debated topic. But neither Musk nor any other individual is the root of the world's problems. Liberalism which pretends to be oppose capitalism and US state hegemony but which is in fact an ally, is the problem.
Elon Musk successfully won his bid to purchase Twitter on April 25th just days after a rally in New York City chanted “Azov” to express support for Ukraine. While these events appear unrelated on the surface, they represent key examples of the road to hell paved by U.S. imperialism’s dominant ideology: liberalism.
Liberalism is often viewed as the most progressive political ideology of the prevailing social order in the West. In actuality, liberalism is the driving ideological force of capitalist and imperialist expansionism. Liberal ideology is characterized by the fetishization of racism, individualism, and the political preconditions necessary for the expansion of capitalism. Once a kick-starter for the explosive growth of capital, liberalism has devolved into an ideology that defends the rule of the rich at any and all cost.
Hell, of course, has religious connotations and is employed here as a metaphor for the conditions that the planet finds itself in. Musk buying Twitter is but another step toward the complete monopolization of the media, a process that has already characterized the development of social media platforms. Twitter’s top shareholders include financial titans such as the Vanguard Group, Morgan Stanley, and BlackRock. Musk himself held a nine percent stake in Twitter prior to the full purchase, which will be bankrolled in large part by Morgan Stanley and other Wall Street banks. Vladimir Lenin himself could not have produced a better example of imperialism in the modern era.
Liberals in the corporate media have voiced opposition to Twitter’s takeover. While unlikely, many in the liberal corporate media hope that Musk’s move to buy Twitter will be struck down by regulators in Biden’s Department of Justice. Fears about the fate of free speech have arisen despite the role that liberals and especially the Democratic Party have played in facilitating media monopolization. In 1996, the Clinton administration signed off on the Telecommunications Act of 1996 which eliminated nearly all restrictions to media mergers in the United States. Two decades later, Democrats led the charge in empowering big tech Silicon Valley corporations in their campaign of censorship under the guise of a conspiracy theory aptly termed Russiagate.
Russiagate prompted big tech monopolies such as Google to reconstruct their algorithms so to suppress dissenting voices. A countless number of accounts have been suspended and purged from social media platforms for voicing anti-war and anti-imperialist views. Media affiliated with Russia, Iran, China, and progressive countries in Latin America were forced to register as agents of foreign governments beginning in 2017 and repressed all the same. The censorship has only worsened during Russia’s military operation in Ukraine. Outlets such as RT America have been completely removed from YouTube, as have podcasts from prominent voices on the anti-war Left such as Lee Camp.
Liberals have cheered on this kind of censorship all along the way without taking a single breath. Now that Elon Musk has taken over Twitter, these same liberals have warned users that the platform will become a “scary place.” The New York Times flooded its opinion pages with concerns that the further monopolization of Twitter under Musk will exacerbate already existing problems with billionaire rule over social media platforms. Of course, the New York Times has shown no concern over the suppression of left-wing activists and journalists on social media platforms and has even resorted to smearing them publicly. The Daily Beast went a step further by going directly to these platforms and advocating for the removal of this author and a handful of other anti-war journalists.
The road to hell paved by liberalism is rife with hypocrisy. Under Donald Trump, liberals expressed panic over the rise of fascism. They cheered on Antifa for punching rightwing personality Richard Spencer and secured more funding for federal law enforcement following the January 6th riot at the United States Capitol building. Yet liberals have taken center stage in siding with Ukraine’s military in its conflict with Russia to the point of apologizing for the Nazi organization, the Azov Regiment. Western corporate media has whitewashed the Azov Regiment as a small, passionate group of nationalists that decoupled its “political” roots from its current military operations once it was absorbed into Ukraine’s National Guard after the U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014.
Such mental gymnastics have been exposed as farce, not least because Azov has an extensive record of war crimes . Furthermore, the Western corporate media cannot help but promote Azov in its Ukraine coverage. This contradicts the notion that Azov is a small, ineffectual organization. So too does a rally in a major U.S. metropolis emphatically chanting “Azov.” But pointing this out has its consequences. The ruling class has emphatically defended what it believes is the “good” kind of Nazis by suppressing voices that raise concern about the role that the Azov Regiment has played in the current conflict.
Liberal collaboration with censorship and fascist repression is nothing new. Operation Paperclip, a covert intelligence operation that absorbed Nazis into the ranks of American scientific institutions in a bid to gain an “advantage” over the Soviet Union, was launched during the “liberal” Harry Truman administration. So-called “liberal” U.S. President Lyndon Johnson was close with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and fully supported COINTELPRO , a massive campaign of repression that terrorized left-wing political organizations and their leaders. COINTELPRO laid the basis for the War on Terror’s surveillance regime. The assassination, imprisonment, and surveillance of left-wing political leaders set a precedent for the state-sponsored repression of dissenting voices on issues such as war and peace.
Liberalism is no antidote to fascism. In fact, liberalism has time and again paved the road to an even steeper descent to the far right. Whether it was Obama’s two-term administration expanding Bush-era policies and opening the door for Donald Trump or the Democrats wielding social media as a weapon of repression and thereby giving Elon Musk ample leverage to buy Twitter, liberalism has a proven record of covering up the crimes of capitalism under a veneer of progress. That the glorification of fascist organizations such as “Azov” and the further monopolization of the media is happening under Joe Biden’s watch should thus come as no surprise. Liberalism and its political expression in the U.S., the Democratic Party, are moribund engines of U.S. imperialism.
These engines have outlived their usefulness. Humanity has two choices: socialism or barbarism. The latter choice can only be made once the perils of liberalism are confronted by the masses in their just resistance to the oppressive conditions of imperialism.
https://www.blackagendareport.com/road- ... liberalism
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Liberalism - Straight to the source
Political Liberalism Was Never Meant For The Masses
Roger Boyd
Jun 23, 2025
The role of liberalism, as so well detailed by Losurdo (Liberalism: A Counter History), was to free the growing bourgeoisie/merchant class from the limitations placed upon them by the sovereign and their state apparatus. That is why property was given the central mythological basis of freedom, because it was that class that was most concerned about constraints upon their usage of their property (which included slaves). In a time when the franchise was limited by property ownership and/or income requirements, the joys of democracy could also be restricted to that class only, and not the hoi polloi. Very much akin to the highly-restricted Greek democracy where those that owned, ruled.
But there was a problem, the masses decided to force themselves into the democratic arena after being used as the battering ram of revolution in Britain, France and the US. The problem for the bourgeoisie was detailed by Ishay Landa (The Apprentice’s Sorcerer: Liberal Tradition And Fascism):
But in the course of the 19th century it became clear that the demand for popular representation is a political weapon that cuts both ways: wielded by the bourgeoisie in the name of the people against the aristocracy, it was effective in bringing about and consolidating bourgeois society. But once “the people” wished to dispense with their bourgeois proxies and speak and act for themselves, demanding, as a necessary first step, that the suffrage be universally extended, popular representation threatened to encroach upon bourgeois prerogatives and interests. After wrestling the economy from the nobility, the bourgeoisie now had to defend it from “the masses”. (p. 21)
This was dealt with in two ways, firstly by sanctifying the rights of property and to separate the economic and the political realms. As the liberal philosopher John Locke insisted, property and capitalist production were not a political arrangement and therefore could not be the subject of political control. Property rights were sacrosanct and inscribed in natural law that could not be adjudicated on by the political realm. Locke was in no way a populist, rather he was an elitist rich man who was happy with labour for children as young as three and wanted criminalization of beggars and vagabonds. He considered that the masses should be kept dumb and obedient, as Landa quotes him on page 27:
Hearing plain commands, is the sure and only course to bring them [the masses] to obedience and practice. The greatest part [the masses] cannot know, and therefore they must believe. (Locke 1824: 146)
Was not this the role of establishment religion, and later fascism? As Landa also notes:
Believe and Obey. Two tenets which came, after all, more than two centuries later, to pertain to “the most well-known of Fascist slogans: Credere Obbedire Comabattere (Believe, Obey, Fight)" (Payne 1996: 215).
The second way was to create institutional blockages that severely curtailed the ability of the masses to express their will through formal democratic means. The myriad of such clever tactics was detailed by Losurdo (Democracy or Bonapartism: Two Centuries of War on Democracy). Gramsci then detailed how a modern ruling class utilizes many different instruments to manipulate and coerce the masses into political acceptance of the status quo power structure; acting against their own interests through a false consciousness backed up with coercion.
The problem for the bourgeoisie is when the masses manage to overcome these obstacles to successfully create their own counter-hegemonic project and start to gain control over the democratic levers of power; overcoming the institutional constraints and rejecting the artificial delineation between the political and the economic. As Landa so well explains, in such a case the liberals can decide to maintain economic liberalism while removing political liberalism, and are quite ready to operate within such an arrangement for extended periods of time if necessary. As Landa notes, the historian Salvemini characterized “Italian fascism as a limited planned economy deferential to capitalism … and underlined the important fact that such economic intervention was scarcely different from that witnessed by other, western economies, whose capitalist pedigree is not doubted” (p. 73). Economic liberalism sans political liberalism, just as with Nazi Germany and fascist Spain.
Only when the masses have been made safe for an elite dominated democracy that will not impinge on the rights of property will political liberalism be re-installed. One only has to look at the dictatorships of South America and South Korea to see how easily economic liberalism can be maintained alongside authoritarian, even fascist, political arrangements. Much of the underlying ideologies of these authoritarian/fascist societies come from a ruling class understanding of liberalism; freedom for the economic ubermensche and subjugation for the economic untermensche. Fascism as just another possible option for the liberal bourgeois oligarchy, with liberal tradition as the “apprentice’s sorcerer” of fascism. The Nazi philosopher Schmitt:
underlined the powerlessness of political liberalism to cope with democracy, specifically mass democracy, and consequently the need to break out of this impasse by recourse to dictatorship, that would establish once and for all who is sovereign, who is the one who can decide on the Ausnahmezustand, the state of emergency (literally: state of exception) … The entire set of fundamental questions raised by Schmitt and the well-known answers he provided, derived from this historical predicament. (p. 167)
Landa then continues to note that:
Far from being a democratic critic of liberal politics. in his analysis of “the crisis of parliamentarianism,” Schmitt displayed striking parallels with the standard, 19th century liberal critique of democratic politics.
The recourse to fascism (see American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis by Hochschild) was the decision made by US President Wilson in 1917 when faced with a population that would not do the ruling class bidding by committing themselves to a war that they did not consider to be their own. It was only after the destruction of the working class leadership of the “wobblies” (Industrial Worker of the World Union) and other socialist groups that it was agreed that the US was again “safe for democracy” and President Harding could roll-back the fascist apparatus put in place by Wilson. In Italy, the Biennio Rosso (two red years) of gains for the masses triggered the bourgeois oligarchy into fully supporting Mussolini’s brown shirt fascists. The same in 1933 in Germany when the oligarchy decided that a strong hand was required against popular agitation and the challenges of the Great Depression. The same in Spain after the masses had seized power for the benefit of the masses. In Britain the Bonapartism of the “National” government, facilitated by the treachery of the Labour leadership, worked. While in the US a new industrial coalition managed to construct a controlled democracy while fending off more radical working class demands during the Great Depression.
From the 1970s onwards, neoliberalism was implemented by the elites across the West. Firstly in the UK and the US, and then in a post-crash Japan, and also facilitated by the deeply undemocratic nature of the European Union power structures. The financial and economic failures of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis only lead to a deepening of neoliberalism within the West. After five decades of neoliberalism and offshoring driven by wage arbitrage, the masses of the Western populations have been significantly immiserated through falling real wages, massive asset price inflation, large cuts to state social services, labour market deregulation, deregulation of the financial system, and increases in corporate concentration.
With the rise of the hyper-competitive and sovereign China, together with greater independence within other nations, the Western elites were faced with a crisis in their ability to extract profits from other nations. While at the same time escalating levels of imports, especially from China, threatened their profitability at home. Their “Hail Mary” play was to trigger a war between Russia and Ukraine which could be used as a pretext to economically and financially crush Russia through sanctions and trigger a friendly regime change in that country. Then the West could return to the mass looting and exploitation of Russia that it had had a free hand to do during the 1990s; with independence movements being supported/created to drive a break up of Russia into more manageable chunks, as with Yugoslavia in the 1990s. The removal of Russia as an ally of China would also greatly strengthen the West with respect to China, facilitating its weakening and opening up to Western control and exploitation.
But things did not work out as planned, with the world outside the West refusing to take part in the destruction of Russia and with Russia showing a much greater level of strength and resilience than the Western elites had assumed. Three years later and Russia remains strong, and is now most certainly on its way to winning the war against Ukraine. At the same time, China has displayed the success of Xi’s focus on technological upgrading by taking the lead on one industry after another. Selling its own brands at home and around the world rather than just making things for Western corporations which take the vast majority of the profits. Russia’s resilience and China’s increasing strength have also facilitated greater and greater levels of rejection of Western pillaging and profiteering in other parts of the world, for example West Africa.
Faced with this new reality of a reducing ability to extract wealth from other nations, and the increasing competitive challenge of Chinese corporations (e.g. the major automakers), the Western oligarchs have to look for new avenues for profit. In an environment made worse by the boomerang effects of the anti-Russia sanctions that have both raised domestic energy prices and forced a retreat of from the lucrative Russian market. So the Western oligarchs have decided to turn the screws even tighter on their own populations through tariffs to lock out foreign competition and raise regressive taxes. With increased military Keynesianism to provide easy profit making activities, and increased authoritarianism to keep an increasingly unhappy population at bay.
An economic liberalism with an increasingly restricted political liberalism, with the rich “donor class” being the true electorate. In extremis, the political liberalism for the demos will be completely removed through a move to outright fascism. This is what Weidel and the AfD are kept in the wings by the German oligarchy for, and the same for Farage and Reform UK, and for Bardella and the National Rally in France. In the US, the issues of illegal immigration and “anti-semitism” are being used as excuses for greater authoritarianism and limitations on free speech. The consolidation of power over time within an “Imperial Presidency” already gives a US president much access to dictatorial style powers.
In contrast to the lies that we are told in the class room, through the media, and by the politicians, liberalism has very little to do with universal suffrage style democracy. Political liberalism is to be reserved for the bourgeoisie, and in the case that it is captured by the masses it can be quickly withdrawn until circumstances have been changed. The masses must be kept ignorant and obedient, taught to believe rather than think through the means of religion and other ideologies, together with the dumbing down of mass political discourse. Significant chunks of society, such as the economy and foreign policy, should also be considered “naturally” off limits for political consideration; e.g. the sanctity of property rights and the “market”. Economic liberalism works wonderfully for the bourgeoisie as long as political liberalism is kept in its “proper” place.
https://rogerboyd.substack.com/p/politi ... ever-meant
Roger Boyd
Jun 23, 2025
The role of liberalism, as so well detailed by Losurdo (Liberalism: A Counter History), was to free the growing bourgeoisie/merchant class from the limitations placed upon them by the sovereign and their state apparatus. That is why property was given the central mythological basis of freedom, because it was that class that was most concerned about constraints upon their usage of their property (which included slaves). In a time when the franchise was limited by property ownership and/or income requirements, the joys of democracy could also be restricted to that class only, and not the hoi polloi. Very much akin to the highly-restricted Greek democracy where those that owned, ruled.
But there was a problem, the masses decided to force themselves into the democratic arena after being used as the battering ram of revolution in Britain, France and the US. The problem for the bourgeoisie was detailed by Ishay Landa (The Apprentice’s Sorcerer: Liberal Tradition And Fascism):
But in the course of the 19th century it became clear that the demand for popular representation is a political weapon that cuts both ways: wielded by the bourgeoisie in the name of the people against the aristocracy, it was effective in bringing about and consolidating bourgeois society. But once “the people” wished to dispense with their bourgeois proxies and speak and act for themselves, demanding, as a necessary first step, that the suffrage be universally extended, popular representation threatened to encroach upon bourgeois prerogatives and interests. After wrestling the economy from the nobility, the bourgeoisie now had to defend it from “the masses”. (p. 21)
This was dealt with in two ways, firstly by sanctifying the rights of property and to separate the economic and the political realms. As the liberal philosopher John Locke insisted, property and capitalist production were not a political arrangement and therefore could not be the subject of political control. Property rights were sacrosanct and inscribed in natural law that could not be adjudicated on by the political realm. Locke was in no way a populist, rather he was an elitist rich man who was happy with labour for children as young as three and wanted criminalization of beggars and vagabonds. He considered that the masses should be kept dumb and obedient, as Landa quotes him on page 27:
Hearing plain commands, is the sure and only course to bring them [the masses] to obedience and practice. The greatest part [the masses] cannot know, and therefore they must believe. (Locke 1824: 146)
Was not this the role of establishment religion, and later fascism? As Landa also notes:
Believe and Obey. Two tenets which came, after all, more than two centuries later, to pertain to “the most well-known of Fascist slogans: Credere Obbedire Comabattere (Believe, Obey, Fight)" (Payne 1996: 215).
The second way was to create institutional blockages that severely curtailed the ability of the masses to express their will through formal democratic means. The myriad of such clever tactics was detailed by Losurdo (Democracy or Bonapartism: Two Centuries of War on Democracy). Gramsci then detailed how a modern ruling class utilizes many different instruments to manipulate and coerce the masses into political acceptance of the status quo power structure; acting against their own interests through a false consciousness backed up with coercion.
The problem for the bourgeoisie is when the masses manage to overcome these obstacles to successfully create their own counter-hegemonic project and start to gain control over the democratic levers of power; overcoming the institutional constraints and rejecting the artificial delineation between the political and the economic. As Landa so well explains, in such a case the liberals can decide to maintain economic liberalism while removing political liberalism, and are quite ready to operate within such an arrangement for extended periods of time if necessary. As Landa notes, the historian Salvemini characterized “Italian fascism as a limited planned economy deferential to capitalism … and underlined the important fact that such economic intervention was scarcely different from that witnessed by other, western economies, whose capitalist pedigree is not doubted” (p. 73). Economic liberalism sans political liberalism, just as with Nazi Germany and fascist Spain.
Only when the masses have been made safe for an elite dominated democracy that will not impinge on the rights of property will political liberalism be re-installed. One only has to look at the dictatorships of South America and South Korea to see how easily economic liberalism can be maintained alongside authoritarian, even fascist, political arrangements. Much of the underlying ideologies of these authoritarian/fascist societies come from a ruling class understanding of liberalism; freedom for the economic ubermensche and subjugation for the economic untermensche. Fascism as just another possible option for the liberal bourgeois oligarchy, with liberal tradition as the “apprentice’s sorcerer” of fascism. The Nazi philosopher Schmitt:
underlined the powerlessness of political liberalism to cope with democracy, specifically mass democracy, and consequently the need to break out of this impasse by recourse to dictatorship, that would establish once and for all who is sovereign, who is the one who can decide on the Ausnahmezustand, the state of emergency (literally: state of exception) … The entire set of fundamental questions raised by Schmitt and the well-known answers he provided, derived from this historical predicament. (p. 167)
Landa then continues to note that:
Far from being a democratic critic of liberal politics. in his analysis of “the crisis of parliamentarianism,” Schmitt displayed striking parallels with the standard, 19th century liberal critique of democratic politics.
The recourse to fascism (see American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis by Hochschild) was the decision made by US President Wilson in 1917 when faced with a population that would not do the ruling class bidding by committing themselves to a war that they did not consider to be their own. It was only after the destruction of the working class leadership of the “wobblies” (Industrial Worker of the World Union) and other socialist groups that it was agreed that the US was again “safe for democracy” and President Harding could roll-back the fascist apparatus put in place by Wilson. In Italy, the Biennio Rosso (two red years) of gains for the masses triggered the bourgeois oligarchy into fully supporting Mussolini’s brown shirt fascists. The same in 1933 in Germany when the oligarchy decided that a strong hand was required against popular agitation and the challenges of the Great Depression. The same in Spain after the masses had seized power for the benefit of the masses. In Britain the Bonapartism of the “National” government, facilitated by the treachery of the Labour leadership, worked. While in the US a new industrial coalition managed to construct a controlled democracy while fending off more radical working class demands during the Great Depression.
From the 1970s onwards, neoliberalism was implemented by the elites across the West. Firstly in the UK and the US, and then in a post-crash Japan, and also facilitated by the deeply undemocratic nature of the European Union power structures. The financial and economic failures of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis only lead to a deepening of neoliberalism within the West. After five decades of neoliberalism and offshoring driven by wage arbitrage, the masses of the Western populations have been significantly immiserated through falling real wages, massive asset price inflation, large cuts to state social services, labour market deregulation, deregulation of the financial system, and increases in corporate concentration.
With the rise of the hyper-competitive and sovereign China, together with greater independence within other nations, the Western elites were faced with a crisis in their ability to extract profits from other nations. While at the same time escalating levels of imports, especially from China, threatened their profitability at home. Their “Hail Mary” play was to trigger a war between Russia and Ukraine which could be used as a pretext to economically and financially crush Russia through sanctions and trigger a friendly regime change in that country. Then the West could return to the mass looting and exploitation of Russia that it had had a free hand to do during the 1990s; with independence movements being supported/created to drive a break up of Russia into more manageable chunks, as with Yugoslavia in the 1990s. The removal of Russia as an ally of China would also greatly strengthen the West with respect to China, facilitating its weakening and opening up to Western control and exploitation.
But things did not work out as planned, with the world outside the West refusing to take part in the destruction of Russia and with Russia showing a much greater level of strength and resilience than the Western elites had assumed. Three years later and Russia remains strong, and is now most certainly on its way to winning the war against Ukraine. At the same time, China has displayed the success of Xi’s focus on technological upgrading by taking the lead on one industry after another. Selling its own brands at home and around the world rather than just making things for Western corporations which take the vast majority of the profits. Russia’s resilience and China’s increasing strength have also facilitated greater and greater levels of rejection of Western pillaging and profiteering in other parts of the world, for example West Africa.
Faced with this new reality of a reducing ability to extract wealth from other nations, and the increasing competitive challenge of Chinese corporations (e.g. the major automakers), the Western oligarchs have to look for new avenues for profit. In an environment made worse by the boomerang effects of the anti-Russia sanctions that have both raised domestic energy prices and forced a retreat of from the lucrative Russian market. So the Western oligarchs have decided to turn the screws even tighter on their own populations through tariffs to lock out foreign competition and raise regressive taxes. With increased military Keynesianism to provide easy profit making activities, and increased authoritarianism to keep an increasingly unhappy population at bay.
An economic liberalism with an increasingly restricted political liberalism, with the rich “donor class” being the true electorate. In extremis, the political liberalism for the demos will be completely removed through a move to outright fascism. This is what Weidel and the AfD are kept in the wings by the German oligarchy for, and the same for Farage and Reform UK, and for Bardella and the National Rally in France. In the US, the issues of illegal immigration and “anti-semitism” are being used as excuses for greater authoritarianism and limitations on free speech. The consolidation of power over time within an “Imperial Presidency” already gives a US president much access to dictatorial style powers.
In contrast to the lies that we are told in the class room, through the media, and by the politicians, liberalism has very little to do with universal suffrage style democracy. Political liberalism is to be reserved for the bourgeoisie, and in the case that it is captured by the masses it can be quickly withdrawn until circumstances have been changed. The masses must be kept ignorant and obedient, taught to believe rather than think through the means of religion and other ideologies, together with the dumbing down of mass political discourse. Significant chunks of society, such as the economy and foreign policy, should also be considered “naturally” off limits for political consideration; e.g. the sanctity of property rights and the “market”. Economic liberalism works wonderfully for the bourgeoisie as long as political liberalism is kept in its “proper” place.
https://rogerboyd.substack.com/p/politi ... ever-meant
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Liberalism - Straight to the source
Liberalism's Death Rattle
Nate Bear
Aug 26, 2025
The September deadline set by France, the UK, Australia and Canada for Israel to stop its genocide and commit to a two-state solution is fast approaching. And looming alongside this deadline is a final crisis of legitimacy for western liberalism.
Firstly, let’s just reflect on how utterly absurd these conditions are: we’ll recognise your right to your own independent state ONLY IF YOUR HOLOCAUSTERS KEEP HOLOCAUSTING YOU. They are making the creation of an entity which, legally, according to the 1948 partition agreement should have existed for the last seventy seven years anyway, contingent on more slaughter.
The pitiful centrist impulse to triangulate every issue has never been more pathetically, tragically and infuriatingly on show. The belief that you can carrot-and-stick your way to a liberal sweet-spot solution on every issue, even an actual holocaust, is such an odious reflex.
Gaza should, and I believe will, mark the end of liberalism. You can't support an openly declared final solution, announce two years later that recognition for the victims is literally contingent on the final solution proceeding, while continuing to trade on the same old lines about human rights, equality, justice.
Gaza has shown it all up as a sham. The events of the last nearly two years have driven a stake through the dank, rotten heart of this liberal ideology.
The truth is that (neo) liberalism encases supremacist attitudes in pro-social language and symbols despite being, today, an inherently and aggressively anti-social, racist and violent ideology. I don’t particularly want to get into history, definitions and changing use here. You can argue that classical liberal thinkers like Thomas Paine or John Locke would be horrified by genocide, permanent war and the surveillance state.
But what is inarguable is that liberalism in the twentieth century, particularly the second half of the twentieth century, has been dominated by violent centre-right and centre-left liberals. These groupings and their acolytes broadly agree on free markets, freedom of suffrage (what they call democracy), some forms of social justice and equal rights, and they agree on a geopolitical story of the world. They both identify the same good guys and the same bad guys and also believe in the need to forever expand the military and surveillance state to defeat the bad guys. And both these parties, from those in western Europe to those in North America, believe that to do this, killing lots and lots of people is frequently justified.
No one with any understanding of recent history could deny this.
Over the last eighty years, liberals of the centre-right and centre-left, Democrats and Republicans, Labour and Conservative parties, have dropped nuclear bombs on Japanese cities, sanctioned the murder of one million civilians in Indonesia, and from Vietnam to Korea to Libya to Iraq have invaded, raped and pillaged.
And while Gaza is of a piece with recent liberal history, I don’t think we can see it as simply another mass murderous episode in western imperialism. Because what has emerged over the past two years is something unique.
Gaza breaks what was already an ultra violent mold.
Never in the modern era have we seen two million people be cut off from the outside world, trapped, unable to leave, starved and systematically murdered while made homeless and living in tents. Never in the modern era have we seen everything be taken from a people, every university, bakery, school, cafe, office, park, restaurant. Every standing home. We’ve not seen a state destroy so much infrastructure that it has ended the ability of an entire society to function as such. No running water, no sewage systems, no grid electricity. Almost everything in Gaza has been turned to dust and rubble. Never have we seen a starving people trapped in a tiny patch of eviscerated land and watched as their holocausters baited them with food, only to gun them down for fun. Guns supplied by our governments, with our money. Never have we seen so many doctors, nurses and journalists torn apart by jets from the sky while holding nothing but the tools of their work, their stethoscopes and cameras. Jets supplied by our governments with our money.
No, this is heinous and new, even by western imperialism's barbarous standards.
You have to go back to ancient Greece or the crusades and the sacking of cities to find something comparable.
The fact that the resistance continues to inflict casualties on the invaders under these conditions is a marvel of the human spirit and should be celebrated as such.
And we certainly haven’t seen violence, war crimes and unspeakable atrocities on this scale captured so frequently on camera in such fine-grained graphic detail.
On top of this, every single stage of this genocide was openly declared by Israel. Israeli politicians said there were no civilians in Gaza, that everyone was guilty, that they’d starve them, burn them and destroy everything. They said the goal was to drive them out of Gaza, to ethnically cleanse Gaza. They said it brazenly, week after week. And then they did it. And they did it with the support of liberals. Trump has overseen eight months of genocide. Biden and Harris oversaw fifteen months. The Conservative party oversaw nine months of genocide. Starmer’s Labour Party has supported Israel through thirteen months of slaughter. The liberals in Australia and Canada don’t even have the excuse that it started on someone else’s watch. They’ve backed this genocide from the start.
Then a few weeks ago, when this dishonest threat to recognise Palestine was made, Israel’s finance minister said they’d step up the holocaust in response and make sure there was nothing left to recognise. Knowing they wouldn’t be stopped, they proceeded to do just that, with zero reaction from the complicit liberal cowards in London, Ontario, Canberra and Paris.
Liberalism doesn’t have a future after this. Not an energised one, at least. Gaza signals the final crisis of legitimacy for liberalism and its supposed international order. Spiritually, it’s over. It will take time for pro-genocide liberals to face the consequences, time for their political groupings to be defeated and made irrelevant. International institutions ruled by liberals will not evaporate over night. But no one will now take their orders from liberals. No one will be lectured to about democracy, human rights, and freedom. The global multilateral institutions run by pro-genocide western liberals will find it increasingly difficult to maintain their legitimacy in the post-Gaza holocaust era. The global south has been watching, and through the expansion of BRICS and the formalisation of new agreements, is now organising. Domestically, as we saw in the US last November, liberal bases in the west will no longer come out in sufficient numbers to keep reanimating the corpse of liberal technocratic management.
The centre could never hold. Among the dead of Gaza lies the liberal project, the only deserved victim of this genocide.
We are left then with two possible futures: a radically pro-social and communitarian one, focused on justice and equity for all, or an authoritarian cesspit of racism, war, and eugenics, administered by the tools of the outsourced surveillance state. We know these are the choices, because we’ve already seen it play out. Trump’s victory was in fact the first sign that Gaza heralded these binary futures. The causes of Harris’s loss were contested by liberals, but the polls in the weeks after were clear: her support for genocide was a priority issue for enough people who otherwise would have voted for her, and Trump snuck through.
Without viable pro-social, anti-imperial alternatives, expect this pattern of pro-genocide liberals losing to proto-fascists to be repeated throughout the west.
The answer in the face of these frightening dynamics is, obviously, not to run back to the genocidal warmongering liberals who landed us here.
The answer is to help shape those radical alternatives.
The stakes couldn’t be clearer, the lines sharper than ever.
https://www.donotpanic.news/p/liberalisms-death-rattle
Nate Bear
Aug 26, 2025
The September deadline set by France, the UK, Australia and Canada for Israel to stop its genocide and commit to a two-state solution is fast approaching. And looming alongside this deadline is a final crisis of legitimacy for western liberalism.
Firstly, let’s just reflect on how utterly absurd these conditions are: we’ll recognise your right to your own independent state ONLY IF YOUR HOLOCAUSTERS KEEP HOLOCAUSTING YOU. They are making the creation of an entity which, legally, according to the 1948 partition agreement should have existed for the last seventy seven years anyway, contingent on more slaughter.
The pitiful centrist impulse to triangulate every issue has never been more pathetically, tragically and infuriatingly on show. The belief that you can carrot-and-stick your way to a liberal sweet-spot solution on every issue, even an actual holocaust, is such an odious reflex.
Gaza should, and I believe will, mark the end of liberalism. You can't support an openly declared final solution, announce two years later that recognition for the victims is literally contingent on the final solution proceeding, while continuing to trade on the same old lines about human rights, equality, justice.
Gaza has shown it all up as a sham. The events of the last nearly two years have driven a stake through the dank, rotten heart of this liberal ideology.
The truth is that (neo) liberalism encases supremacist attitudes in pro-social language and symbols despite being, today, an inherently and aggressively anti-social, racist and violent ideology. I don’t particularly want to get into history, definitions and changing use here. You can argue that classical liberal thinkers like Thomas Paine or John Locke would be horrified by genocide, permanent war and the surveillance state.
But what is inarguable is that liberalism in the twentieth century, particularly the second half of the twentieth century, has been dominated by violent centre-right and centre-left liberals. These groupings and their acolytes broadly agree on free markets, freedom of suffrage (what they call democracy), some forms of social justice and equal rights, and they agree on a geopolitical story of the world. They both identify the same good guys and the same bad guys and also believe in the need to forever expand the military and surveillance state to defeat the bad guys. And both these parties, from those in western Europe to those in North America, believe that to do this, killing lots and lots of people is frequently justified.
No one with any understanding of recent history could deny this.
Over the last eighty years, liberals of the centre-right and centre-left, Democrats and Republicans, Labour and Conservative parties, have dropped nuclear bombs on Japanese cities, sanctioned the murder of one million civilians in Indonesia, and from Vietnam to Korea to Libya to Iraq have invaded, raped and pillaged.
And while Gaza is of a piece with recent liberal history, I don’t think we can see it as simply another mass murderous episode in western imperialism. Because what has emerged over the past two years is something unique.
Gaza breaks what was already an ultra violent mold.
Never in the modern era have we seen two million people be cut off from the outside world, trapped, unable to leave, starved and systematically murdered while made homeless and living in tents. Never in the modern era have we seen everything be taken from a people, every university, bakery, school, cafe, office, park, restaurant. Every standing home. We’ve not seen a state destroy so much infrastructure that it has ended the ability of an entire society to function as such. No running water, no sewage systems, no grid electricity. Almost everything in Gaza has been turned to dust and rubble. Never have we seen a starving people trapped in a tiny patch of eviscerated land and watched as their holocausters baited them with food, only to gun them down for fun. Guns supplied by our governments, with our money. Never have we seen so many doctors, nurses and journalists torn apart by jets from the sky while holding nothing but the tools of their work, their stethoscopes and cameras. Jets supplied by our governments with our money.
No, this is heinous and new, even by western imperialism's barbarous standards.
You have to go back to ancient Greece or the crusades and the sacking of cities to find something comparable.
The fact that the resistance continues to inflict casualties on the invaders under these conditions is a marvel of the human spirit and should be celebrated as such.
And we certainly haven’t seen violence, war crimes and unspeakable atrocities on this scale captured so frequently on camera in such fine-grained graphic detail.
On top of this, every single stage of this genocide was openly declared by Israel. Israeli politicians said there were no civilians in Gaza, that everyone was guilty, that they’d starve them, burn them and destroy everything. They said the goal was to drive them out of Gaza, to ethnically cleanse Gaza. They said it brazenly, week after week. And then they did it. And they did it with the support of liberals. Trump has overseen eight months of genocide. Biden and Harris oversaw fifteen months. The Conservative party oversaw nine months of genocide. Starmer’s Labour Party has supported Israel through thirteen months of slaughter. The liberals in Australia and Canada don’t even have the excuse that it started on someone else’s watch. They’ve backed this genocide from the start.
Then a few weeks ago, when this dishonest threat to recognise Palestine was made, Israel’s finance minister said they’d step up the holocaust in response and make sure there was nothing left to recognise. Knowing they wouldn’t be stopped, they proceeded to do just that, with zero reaction from the complicit liberal cowards in London, Ontario, Canberra and Paris.
Liberalism doesn’t have a future after this. Not an energised one, at least. Gaza signals the final crisis of legitimacy for liberalism and its supposed international order. Spiritually, it’s over. It will take time for pro-genocide liberals to face the consequences, time for their political groupings to be defeated and made irrelevant. International institutions ruled by liberals will not evaporate over night. But no one will now take their orders from liberals. No one will be lectured to about democracy, human rights, and freedom. The global multilateral institutions run by pro-genocide western liberals will find it increasingly difficult to maintain their legitimacy in the post-Gaza holocaust era. The global south has been watching, and through the expansion of BRICS and the formalisation of new agreements, is now organising. Domestically, as we saw in the US last November, liberal bases in the west will no longer come out in sufficient numbers to keep reanimating the corpse of liberal technocratic management.
The centre could never hold. Among the dead of Gaza lies the liberal project, the only deserved victim of this genocide.
We are left then with two possible futures: a radically pro-social and communitarian one, focused on justice and equity for all, or an authoritarian cesspit of racism, war, and eugenics, administered by the tools of the outsourced surveillance state. We know these are the choices, because we’ve already seen it play out. Trump’s victory was in fact the first sign that Gaza heralded these binary futures. The causes of Harris’s loss were contested by liberals, but the polls in the weeks after were clear: her support for genocide was a priority issue for enough people who otherwise would have voted for her, and Trump snuck through.
Without viable pro-social, anti-imperial alternatives, expect this pattern of pro-genocide liberals losing to proto-fascists to be repeated throughout the west.
The answer in the face of these frightening dynamics is, obviously, not to run back to the genocidal warmongering liberals who landed us here.
The answer is to help shape those radical alternatives.
The stakes couldn’t be clearer, the lines sharper than ever.
https://www.donotpanic.news/p/liberalisms-death-rattle
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Liberalism - Straight to the source
What Do You Fear the Far Right Will Do That You Have Not Already Done?: The Thirty-Fifth Newsletter (2025)
The passivity – and complicity – of Global North liberals and social democrats has paved the way for the global rise of the far right of a special type.
28 August 2025
Samar Abu Elouf (Palestine), Mahmoud Ajjour, Aged Nine, 2025.
Dear friends,
Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
On 12 August, Samar Abu Elouf, who won the 2025 World Press Photo of the Year for the picture above, posted on her Instagram account that her son’s close friend Sami Shukour had been killed while he ‘went to look for flour to feed himself and his family’. Samar had taken Sami’s graduation photographs just before the genocide began in October 2023. Sami’s family owns one of the most famous companies in Palestine, which made halawa with tahini. ‘Among the best in Gaza’, Samar wrote. Sami, she added, ‘was killed under a hail of bullets; the sound was very terrifying… We are not just numbers; each one of us is a story’.
We have now entered the last quarter of 2025, the days galloping rapidly toward another year. The image of being chased by horses is not idle, for these are not the wild horses whose beauty stuns the landscape of the meadow – these are the horses of the apocalypse. Everywhere we turn, there is the sniff of the far right of a special type at the gates of power, its leaders riding their horses at full sprint. None of these leaders have a programme to solve our crises; rather, they throw an accelerant onto them, stoking the fires of hell to burn faster and hotter. They deny the existence of climate change and the importance of human dignity. They want to deepen austerity and encourage war. They promote irrationality and social suffocation.
Across the world, people of conscience are appalled by the rise of this far right and its appeal to large sections of our societies. At Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, we have studied the growth of this far right. We have examined how its political base is rooted in the atomisation of society, in the growth of institutions and other groups that favour their political orientation – such as new forms of religious fellowship and off-the-books economies – and in the collapse of class organisations in working-class and peasant communities. Part of our conclusion is that the political collapse of social democrats and liberals through their adoption of neoliberal austerity policies has created the conditions for the mass base of the far right. Without an acknowledgment of this fact, and without a renewal of their pre-neoliberal agenda, we cannot expect the social democrats and liberals to be significant allies in the fight against the far right of a special type.
Struck by the failure of the social democrats and liberals across the globe to conduct this kind of renewal, and by the failure of liberals in the Global North particularly to stop their support for the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians, I have written a ‘letter’, which I share below, to those who remain committed to these social forces. It is addressed to social democrats and liberals, to people who sit in parties named with words that they demean – Labour (in the United Kingdom), Green (in Germany), Democratic (in the United States), and Liberal (in Japan).
Lobsang Durney (Chile), Brexit Consequences, 2019.
You have surrendered whatever limited ‘neutral’ function the state had in the class struggle between capitalists and workers. The oligarchy now runs the state, with regulations set to a minimum and worker rights set to near zero.
You have watched as the oligarchy has set fire to society, breaking up the old factories, sending the machines to countries where labour is cheaper, and making money off the factory land through speculation. There are no jobs left in the wasteland, only servile jobs to tend to the whims of the oligarchy and uberised jobs to provide mediocre quality services to each other.
You have urged the compromised state to cut taxes and reduce its social services at the same time as unemployment and poverty have increased. Old liberal ideas of helping the less fortunate have dissolved in the acid of individualism and personal ambition, the money that used to be spent on social welfare now vaporised into the financial markets for the oligarchs’ race to become the first trillionaire. What would have been recycled through the tax system is now mired in the casino-like money markets, the whoops and razzle of the monied concealing the howls of the poor.
Anurendra Jegadeva (Malaysia), On the Way to the Airport, 2017.
You have encouraged the state to build up its diabolical attachment to arms merchants and their wares. Weapons eat the commitments to society, breaking whatever bonds had been promised by the modern state to its citizens. There are families on the streets begging for food, and then high above them in the boardrooms there are ugly deals being made with the people’s money and the weapons companies. The values of a people are not in their constitutions – which have been hollowed out – but in their budgets, which are so heavily biased toward weapons that there is almost nothing left for social welfare.
You have allowed for the growth of a culture of cruelty, monstrous behaviour by the police against citizens, by angry men against women, by the hound of starvation against the cry of the hungry belly. All of this is now normal – the nature of modern civilisation. You have encouraged it. You have authorised it. You have hidden behind your social attitudes, your liberalism toward this or that social behaviour, your occasional appearance at a Pride Parade or at an International Women’s Day stroll, but you care nothing for the gay man who is dying of HIV/AIDS and cannot access drugs, or the woman who has no shelter to go to with her children when her home has become unbearable.
Dana Al Rashid (Kuwait), On the Demolition of al-Sawaber, 2020.
Your liberalism has collapsed. There are no liberal philosophers who are not merely analytical, their moral compass trapped in an academic argument that has little relevance to this world. Your thinkers are made for television, the foundation on their face designed to prevent the light from shining on them but also to prevent the light of reason from coming out of their mouths. Your liberalism is advertising, not philosophy.
Classical fascist culture was a dead culture. It was a culture of fake glory and genuine violence. It made a genuine break from the liberal culture that preceded it, and a break from the culture of the working class and the peasantry that had grown stronger through decades of struggle and institution building. The culture of the far right of a special type, on the other hand, is a refraction of neoliberal culture. It has no culture of its own but is a replica, a broken mirror of neoliberal fantasies and desires, an inflation of desire. Trump is not Hitler, but the host of The Celebrity Apprentice, the tag line being, ‘You’re fired!’
The Global North, the epicentre of the far right of a special type, is marinated in decadence and danger. There is no new philosophy emanating from it. It has no intellectuals who lead it, not even of the type of Nazi intellectuals such as Ernst Krieck, Martin Heidegger, or Carl Schmitt. It is dangerous because it commands a military that has the capacity to destroy the world: close to 80% of world military spending is done by the Global North and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies, with the United States in possession of over 900 military bases, including many on European soil.
Francisco Vidal Jr. (Angola), Untitled, 1996.
Leadership from the Global North’s liberals and social democrats is a false hope. We must seek leadership from ourselves, from our own traditions and our movements. We fight to bring vitality back to our cultures, to deepen our own theories and philosophies, to seek references amongst our own thinkers. This is a deeper struggle than an electoral one alone. We must build our confidence to reject the vain national glory and the borrowed clothes that come to us from the tarnished liberalism of the Global North. The far right is terrifying, but it is only a twist in the dial more terrible than the technocratic liberals and warmongering Greens who would prefer to spend more money on militaries and debt payments than on the needs of humanity.
Warmly,
Vijay
https://thetricontinental.org/newslette ... iberalism/
The passivity – and complicity – of Global North liberals and social democrats has paved the way for the global rise of the far right of a special type.
28 August 2025
Samar Abu Elouf (Palestine), Mahmoud Ajjour, Aged Nine, 2025.
Dear friends,
Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
On 12 August, Samar Abu Elouf, who won the 2025 World Press Photo of the Year for the picture above, posted on her Instagram account that her son’s close friend Sami Shukour had been killed while he ‘went to look for flour to feed himself and his family’. Samar had taken Sami’s graduation photographs just before the genocide began in October 2023. Sami’s family owns one of the most famous companies in Palestine, which made halawa with tahini. ‘Among the best in Gaza’, Samar wrote. Sami, she added, ‘was killed under a hail of bullets; the sound was very terrifying… We are not just numbers; each one of us is a story’.
We have now entered the last quarter of 2025, the days galloping rapidly toward another year. The image of being chased by horses is not idle, for these are not the wild horses whose beauty stuns the landscape of the meadow – these are the horses of the apocalypse. Everywhere we turn, there is the sniff of the far right of a special type at the gates of power, its leaders riding their horses at full sprint. None of these leaders have a programme to solve our crises; rather, they throw an accelerant onto them, stoking the fires of hell to burn faster and hotter. They deny the existence of climate change and the importance of human dignity. They want to deepen austerity and encourage war. They promote irrationality and social suffocation.
Across the world, people of conscience are appalled by the rise of this far right and its appeal to large sections of our societies. At Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, we have studied the growth of this far right. We have examined how its political base is rooted in the atomisation of society, in the growth of institutions and other groups that favour their political orientation – such as new forms of religious fellowship and off-the-books economies – and in the collapse of class organisations in working-class and peasant communities. Part of our conclusion is that the political collapse of social democrats and liberals through their adoption of neoliberal austerity policies has created the conditions for the mass base of the far right. Without an acknowledgment of this fact, and without a renewal of their pre-neoliberal agenda, we cannot expect the social democrats and liberals to be significant allies in the fight against the far right of a special type.
Struck by the failure of the social democrats and liberals across the globe to conduct this kind of renewal, and by the failure of liberals in the Global North particularly to stop their support for the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians, I have written a ‘letter’, which I share below, to those who remain committed to these social forces. It is addressed to social democrats and liberals, to people who sit in parties named with words that they demean – Labour (in the United Kingdom), Green (in Germany), Democratic (in the United States), and Liberal (in Japan).
Lobsang Durney (Chile), Brexit Consequences, 2019.
You have surrendered whatever limited ‘neutral’ function the state had in the class struggle between capitalists and workers. The oligarchy now runs the state, with regulations set to a minimum and worker rights set to near zero.
You have watched as the oligarchy has set fire to society, breaking up the old factories, sending the machines to countries where labour is cheaper, and making money off the factory land through speculation. There are no jobs left in the wasteland, only servile jobs to tend to the whims of the oligarchy and uberised jobs to provide mediocre quality services to each other.
You have urged the compromised state to cut taxes and reduce its social services at the same time as unemployment and poverty have increased. Old liberal ideas of helping the less fortunate have dissolved in the acid of individualism and personal ambition, the money that used to be spent on social welfare now vaporised into the financial markets for the oligarchs’ race to become the first trillionaire. What would have been recycled through the tax system is now mired in the casino-like money markets, the whoops and razzle of the monied concealing the howls of the poor.
Anurendra Jegadeva (Malaysia), On the Way to the Airport, 2017.
You have encouraged the state to build up its diabolical attachment to arms merchants and their wares. Weapons eat the commitments to society, breaking whatever bonds had been promised by the modern state to its citizens. There are families on the streets begging for food, and then high above them in the boardrooms there are ugly deals being made with the people’s money and the weapons companies. The values of a people are not in their constitutions – which have been hollowed out – but in their budgets, which are so heavily biased toward weapons that there is almost nothing left for social welfare.
You have allowed for the growth of a culture of cruelty, monstrous behaviour by the police against citizens, by angry men against women, by the hound of starvation against the cry of the hungry belly. All of this is now normal – the nature of modern civilisation. You have encouraged it. You have authorised it. You have hidden behind your social attitudes, your liberalism toward this or that social behaviour, your occasional appearance at a Pride Parade or at an International Women’s Day stroll, but you care nothing for the gay man who is dying of HIV/AIDS and cannot access drugs, or the woman who has no shelter to go to with her children when her home has become unbearable.
Dana Al Rashid (Kuwait), On the Demolition of al-Sawaber, 2020.
Your liberalism has collapsed. There are no liberal philosophers who are not merely analytical, their moral compass trapped in an academic argument that has little relevance to this world. Your thinkers are made for television, the foundation on their face designed to prevent the light from shining on them but also to prevent the light of reason from coming out of their mouths. Your liberalism is advertising, not philosophy.
Classical fascist culture was a dead culture. It was a culture of fake glory and genuine violence. It made a genuine break from the liberal culture that preceded it, and a break from the culture of the working class and the peasantry that had grown stronger through decades of struggle and institution building. The culture of the far right of a special type, on the other hand, is a refraction of neoliberal culture. It has no culture of its own but is a replica, a broken mirror of neoliberal fantasies and desires, an inflation of desire. Trump is not Hitler, but the host of The Celebrity Apprentice, the tag line being, ‘You’re fired!’
The Global North, the epicentre of the far right of a special type, is marinated in decadence and danger. There is no new philosophy emanating from it. It has no intellectuals who lead it, not even of the type of Nazi intellectuals such as Ernst Krieck, Martin Heidegger, or Carl Schmitt. It is dangerous because it commands a military that has the capacity to destroy the world: close to 80% of world military spending is done by the Global North and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies, with the United States in possession of over 900 military bases, including many on European soil.
Francisco Vidal Jr. (Angola), Untitled, 1996.
Leadership from the Global North’s liberals and social democrats is a false hope. We must seek leadership from ourselves, from our own traditions and our movements. We fight to bring vitality back to our cultures, to deepen our own theories and philosophies, to seek references amongst our own thinkers. This is a deeper struggle than an electoral one alone. We must build our confidence to reject the vain national glory and the borrowed clothes that come to us from the tarnished liberalism of the Global North. The far right is terrifying, but it is only a twist in the dial more terrible than the technocratic liberals and warmongering Greens who would prefer to spend more money on militaries and debt payments than on the needs of humanity.
Warmly,
Vijay
https://thetricontinental.org/newslette ... iberalism/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Liberalism - Straight to the source
Dear Western Liberal,
Saying “I support a two-state solution” does not release you from your moral obligation to ferociously oppose a genocide backed by your own government.
Caitlin Johnstone
August 30, 2025
Dear western liberal,
Saying “I support a two-state solution” does not release you from your moral obligation to ferociously oppose a genocide backed by your own government.
Saying “I oppose Netanyahu” does not release you from your moral obligation to ferociously oppose a genocide backed by your own government.
Saying you find the Gaza holocaust “heartbreaking” and “terrible” does not release you from your moral obligation to ferociously oppose a genocide backed by your own government.
Saying “I want there to be peace” does not release you from your moral obligation to ferociously oppose a genocide backed by your own government.
Saying you think “both sides” should cease their aggressions does not release you from your moral obligation to ferociously oppose a genocide backed by your own government.
Saying “it’s complicated and I don’t understand it” does not release you from your moral obligation to ferociously oppose a genocide backed by your own government.
Saying “Hamas attacked on October 7” does not release you from your moral obligation to ferociously oppose a genocide backed by your own government.
Saying “the Jews deserve a homeland” does not release you from your moral obligation to ferociously oppose a genocide backed by your own government.
Saying “I’m busy” does not release you from your moral obligation to ferociously oppose a genocide backed by your own government.
Saying “I’m overwhelmed” does not release you from your moral obligation to ferociously oppose a genocide backed by your own government.
We are all morally obligated to do everything we can to oppose a live-streamed genocide that’s being facilitated, supported and defended by the western power structure under which we live. Nothing besides tooth-and-claw ferocious opposition satisfies that moral obligation.
Don’t tell me about your feelings. Don’t tell me what political positions you support. Don’t tell me what thoughts you privately think to yourself. Do everything you can to stop the genocide that’s being facilitated by your government and its allies.
Nothing else qualifies. Nothing else is defensible. Nothing else will satisfy the questions you’ll be asked by younger generations about what you did during the Gaza holocaust.
https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2025/08 ... n-liberal/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Liberalism - Straight to the source
The Liberal Abandonment Of Greta Thunberg
Nate Bear
Oct 06, 2025
The Swedish activist Greta Thunberg has been detained by Israel and reportedly maltreated by her Israeli captors after she was kidnapped, along with hundreds of other activists, from Gaza’s territorial waters on Friday.
World leaders who just a few years ago lauded Thunberg and rushed to share stages and photo-ops with her have said nothing. The climate scientists who hailed her moral clarity and feverishly retweeted her have ignored her. The prime minister of her own country has been silent.
Thunberg has been abandoned by a fake progressive liberal class that hailed her courage and valorised her strength just a few short years ago.
Obama and Thunberg meeting in 2022
Why? Because to confront Israel isn’t the sort of strength the liberal class lauds. To put your body on the line against a genocide backed by the west isn’t the sort of courage they applaud. By displaying a moral consistency that to her no doubt seemed obvious, but to the liberal class is a mortal sin, Thunberg exposes every professed liberal value as a lie. Because Thunberg has stepped outside of her lane and transgressed against the only true values the liberal elite class understand: imperial values. The values of war and conquest, colonialism and militarism, and the profits to be gleaned therein.
The rank stench of cowardice emanates from the rotting husk of the liberal body politic as it stumbles around, diseased and dying.
This liberal body politic was perfectly content for Thunberg to challenge an amorphous, eight-billion-person-strong industrial civilisation that fuels ecological disaster. But now she’s challenging something very concrete: the people and hardware of a genocidal occupation government and its army. And in doing so she’s defying the militarism practiced by the west’s colonial golden child and the billion dollar contracts that flow between the two.
For the liberal class, Greta doesn’t understand some fundamentals. She doesn’t understand that for all Israel’s genocide it is an essential bulwark against Iranian terror. She just doesn’t understand that Israel is the Only Democracy In The Middle East®™ and this is a de facto signature of superiority regardless of anything else it does. Doesn’t she understand it’s better to do a genocide as a democracy than not do one as a one-party state?
Naive child.
Of course I joke, but I imagine these lines of reasoning are not far from their thought processes.
Greta has transgressed by refusing to reproduce imperial narratives, and by refusing to be controlled.
She could have picked Aspen fireside chats with Hillary Clinton about the necessity of stepping up climate progress. She could have been contained by yearly Davos invitationals where she excoriates the liberal class for their lack of climate action. Restorative on-camera flagellation achieved, she then could have gone and enjoyed a Châteauneuf-du-Pape 2004 with Barack Obama. She could have picked non-confrontational NGO-style corporate-branded activism like her Gen Z golden child compatriot Malala. She could have had the lucrative career of performative activism she was being lined up for. But by shunning this path, she shows up so many liberals for the frauds they are. She also puts a spotlight on all the big climate scientists who’ve never once said genocide is bad for the environment.
These people are really shameful.
Israel’s extermination campaign has been devastating to human beings, but it has also been devastating for local ecosystems and the planet itself. By January this year, the war machinery used to murder hundreds of thousands and pummel Gaza to dust had released more carbon dioxide than Costa Rica or Estonia does in a year. The amount of carbon emitted to power the lives of millions was instead used by Israel to ruin the lives of two million people. On top of this, hundreds of olive groves have been torched, and the soil and groundwater have been poisoned for generations by bullets, bomb residue and the toxic stew from the tens of thousands of flattened buildings. Who knows how many animals and how much wildlife has died. Yet the big names of climate science, from Michael Mann to Katherine Hayhoe and many others, haven’t uttered a word between them.
A Palestinian woman hugs an olive tree in a grove destroyed by Israel
Thunberg shows them up, as she shows up all those who not so long ago rushed to proclaim her a planetary saviour.
Greta exposes a bankrupt centrism.
It seems likely that she understood these ideological lines fairly quickly. It seems likely that she understood it was euro-centred privilege to proclaim the impending end of the world without recognising the world has already ended for many peoples and is currently ending for others.
This isn’t at all to say her original stance was misguided. It is to say that she recognises genocide and ecocide come from the same root. Systems of power that destroy ecosystems also destroy people, also destroy planets, also destroy worlds. She is in many ways simply displaying a logical consistency, as much as a moral one, about the interconnected nature of the evils that plague our civilisation. And this is where she broke with a liberal class who see evils selectively and in terms framed and dictated by empire. A class who backed the evil doers while insisting they were backing the good guys.
And now the most grotesquely evil outgrowth of the colonial enterprise might be coming to an end, if you believe the reports about a ceasefire. But the occupation and the killing won’t end until Israel is brought to heel and Zionism dismantled.
We only to have to look at the West Bank to understand this.
From October 2023 to April this year, more than 900 Palestinians were murdered by Israel in the occupied West Bank, with scores kidnapped to be placed into Israeli torture prisons without charge or trial, according to a UN report from April. In the West Bank there’s no Hamas, no weapons, no ‘war,’ no inciting excuses. There’s just pure Israeli barbarism and impunity, sanctioned and backed by western governments.
As an affront to humanity, justice, human rights and international law, Israel must be dismantled. But even the dismantling of Israel won’t be good enough. Israel is merely a colonial output, the tip of the spear. True restorative justice requires the end of the throwing arm.
And given her transformation from liberal darling to prisoner of conscience in an Israeli dungeon, I expect Greta is on board with that idea too.
https://www.donotpanic.news/p/the-liber ... t-of-greta
Nate Bear
Oct 06, 2025
The Swedish activist Greta Thunberg has been detained by Israel and reportedly maltreated by her Israeli captors after she was kidnapped, along with hundreds of other activists, from Gaza’s territorial waters on Friday.
World leaders who just a few years ago lauded Thunberg and rushed to share stages and photo-ops with her have said nothing. The climate scientists who hailed her moral clarity and feverishly retweeted her have ignored her. The prime minister of her own country has been silent.
Thunberg has been abandoned by a fake progressive liberal class that hailed her courage and valorised her strength just a few short years ago.
Obama and Thunberg meeting in 2022
Why? Because to confront Israel isn’t the sort of strength the liberal class lauds. To put your body on the line against a genocide backed by the west isn’t the sort of courage they applaud. By displaying a moral consistency that to her no doubt seemed obvious, but to the liberal class is a mortal sin, Thunberg exposes every professed liberal value as a lie. Because Thunberg has stepped outside of her lane and transgressed against the only true values the liberal elite class understand: imperial values. The values of war and conquest, colonialism and militarism, and the profits to be gleaned therein.
The rank stench of cowardice emanates from the rotting husk of the liberal body politic as it stumbles around, diseased and dying.
This liberal body politic was perfectly content for Thunberg to challenge an amorphous, eight-billion-person-strong industrial civilisation that fuels ecological disaster. But now she’s challenging something very concrete: the people and hardware of a genocidal occupation government and its army. And in doing so she’s defying the militarism practiced by the west’s colonial golden child and the billion dollar contracts that flow between the two.
For the liberal class, Greta doesn’t understand some fundamentals. She doesn’t understand that for all Israel’s genocide it is an essential bulwark against Iranian terror. She just doesn’t understand that Israel is the Only Democracy In The Middle East®™ and this is a de facto signature of superiority regardless of anything else it does. Doesn’t she understand it’s better to do a genocide as a democracy than not do one as a one-party state?
Naive child.
Of course I joke, but I imagine these lines of reasoning are not far from their thought processes.
Greta has transgressed by refusing to reproduce imperial narratives, and by refusing to be controlled.
She could have picked Aspen fireside chats with Hillary Clinton about the necessity of stepping up climate progress. She could have been contained by yearly Davos invitationals where she excoriates the liberal class for their lack of climate action. Restorative on-camera flagellation achieved, she then could have gone and enjoyed a Châteauneuf-du-Pape 2004 with Barack Obama. She could have picked non-confrontational NGO-style corporate-branded activism like her Gen Z golden child compatriot Malala. She could have had the lucrative career of performative activism she was being lined up for. But by shunning this path, she shows up so many liberals for the frauds they are. She also puts a spotlight on all the big climate scientists who’ve never once said genocide is bad for the environment.
These people are really shameful.
Israel’s extermination campaign has been devastating to human beings, but it has also been devastating for local ecosystems and the planet itself. By January this year, the war machinery used to murder hundreds of thousands and pummel Gaza to dust had released more carbon dioxide than Costa Rica or Estonia does in a year. The amount of carbon emitted to power the lives of millions was instead used by Israel to ruin the lives of two million people. On top of this, hundreds of olive groves have been torched, and the soil and groundwater have been poisoned for generations by bullets, bomb residue and the toxic stew from the tens of thousands of flattened buildings. Who knows how many animals and how much wildlife has died. Yet the big names of climate science, from Michael Mann to Katherine Hayhoe and many others, haven’t uttered a word between them.
A Palestinian woman hugs an olive tree in a grove destroyed by Israel
Thunberg shows them up, as she shows up all those who not so long ago rushed to proclaim her a planetary saviour.
Greta exposes a bankrupt centrism.
It seems likely that she understood these ideological lines fairly quickly. It seems likely that she understood it was euro-centred privilege to proclaim the impending end of the world without recognising the world has already ended for many peoples and is currently ending for others.
This isn’t at all to say her original stance was misguided. It is to say that she recognises genocide and ecocide come from the same root. Systems of power that destroy ecosystems also destroy people, also destroy planets, also destroy worlds. She is in many ways simply displaying a logical consistency, as much as a moral one, about the interconnected nature of the evils that plague our civilisation. And this is where she broke with a liberal class who see evils selectively and in terms framed and dictated by empire. A class who backed the evil doers while insisting they were backing the good guys.
And now the most grotesquely evil outgrowth of the colonial enterprise might be coming to an end, if you believe the reports about a ceasefire. But the occupation and the killing won’t end until Israel is brought to heel and Zionism dismantled.
We only to have to look at the West Bank to understand this.
From October 2023 to April this year, more than 900 Palestinians were murdered by Israel in the occupied West Bank, with scores kidnapped to be placed into Israeli torture prisons without charge or trial, according to a UN report from April. In the West Bank there’s no Hamas, no weapons, no ‘war,’ no inciting excuses. There’s just pure Israeli barbarism and impunity, sanctioned and backed by western governments.
As an affront to humanity, justice, human rights and international law, Israel must be dismantled. But even the dismantling of Israel won’t be good enough. Israel is merely a colonial output, the tip of the spear. True restorative justice requires the end of the throwing arm.
And given her transformation from liberal darling to prisoner of conscience in an Israeli dungeon, I expect Greta is on board with that idea too.
https://www.donotpanic.news/p/the-liber ... t-of-greta
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."