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'Horrifying' Footage Shows IDF Killing Two Gazans, Burying Their Bodies With a Bulldozer
(www.commondreams.org)
this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2024
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But then you can't call the US a liberal democracy in any way as they aren't hands-off at all. Time and time again they meddle in other countries' business to exert influence and power and to advance their interests.
Israel itself was created by the West as Palestine was a British colony before and the US has since given more support to Israel than they would usually grant an ally. The continuous protection (political and militaristic) makes Israel almost a vassal state of the US. This is the real reason why "liberal democracies" have not reacted much (yet, hopefully).
Before we low-key split from Pakistan, they had a similar symbiotic/parasitic relation as the US does with Israel. Seen as a good ally/possible partner diplomatically and with military utility for bases and CENTCOM power projection. And though Pakistan was never really ‘on side’ for a couple of reasons, they kept themselves under the radar and out of our ire - until we found Taliban militants regularly getting refuge and medical care over the Afghan-Pak border, and capped off with discovering Bin Laden in Pakistan.
Israel is hardly a ‘vassal’ or even protectorate. The US has significant leverage, but Israel has remained cordial with Russia and China even if that means snubbing the US - Israel refused to export anti-ship and cruise missiles to Ukraine, in deference to Chinese and Russian interests. Israel has options now to split from the US (painful as it may be) unlike in the 60/70s when the Soviets were funneling weapons to Egypt and Syria, and Israel required US support.
All that to say, Israel can (and may yet) tell the US to kick rocks again, and I don’t think the west is ready for the reality of what enforcing a ceasefire/no-fly zone would mean.
There is nothing about Liberalism that excludes this practice as anything but an inevitability.
If you agree that liberalism does nothing to prevent the accumulation of power, how does liberalism not inevitably lead to economic imperialism? Honest question.
It really just seems like liberalism is being used here as a way to white-wash what is by most measures an extremely broken system.
I'm happy that you see this, but I wish you could see how that accumulation happens. A system that doesn't have a way of addressing or acknowledging power differentials begotten by the accumulation of capital is bound to lead to that inevitability. And that doesn't even address the GEOPOLITICAL problems we started with. How the fuck does liberalism address the gigantic power differential of the United States against literally every other country on the planet?
Liberalism assumes that individuals entering into agreement are on equal footing. It ignores the coercive conditions of capital (between individuals and between nation states) and preaches 'self-determination'.
So you don't see a problem or otherwise don't see a solution for economic imperialism...? I'm confused by this statement. Liberalism offers only voluntary exchange as a guiding principle, am I right in assuming you're OK with economic imperialism?
Ok.... so do you have a problem with social democracies as opposed to liberal democracies? Anarcho syndicalism? What makes liberalism preferable to a democratic system that's socially oriented instead of individually oriented?
You misunderstand. Economic imperialism isn't simply companies working overseas, it's a nationstate wielding it's economic advantage to establish market dominance over other countries. To my knowledge this is not a domestic policy issue but an international/Geopolitical issue. How would you go about breaking up a country that's gotten too big? In this regard (and In regard to your first comment), liberalism is absolutely not "hands-off" or neutral, at best it's ambivalent, but that sure as he'll doesn't mean it's "hands-off". You're correcting an alleged misunderstanding with your own.
As for anarchism or social democracies or even communism, I'm not sure you really understand the terminologies. Anarchism doesn't preclude a military, I'm not sure why you'd think that unless you took Anarchism to mean literally no governance at all. I don't want to assume you haven't, but I'd really recommend reading some lit on socialist economic structures, or even just some Locke and Rousseau to understand liberalism a bit better.
Sure. In this context, 'ambivalence' means having an internal inconsistency, whereas a true-neutral system would give no preference for a particular relationship. I mean it as liberalism claiming to support voluntary engagement and mutual consent in relations, but is ambivalent (i.e. internally inconsistent) about the relative power/influence between 'consenting' parties, to the extent that one party may not have any choice but to enter into a contract. Even though liberalism depends on the concept of mutual agreement, it has no answer to one party having outsized leverage against another, especially since its alleged benefit is mutual consent as a system of self-regulation.
It is the difference between 'social contracts' as a neutral observation of power dynamics generally, and 'liberalism' as an idealistic system of self governance.
Maybe if you take the US military as a standard, but even the founders envisioned a military comprised of independent militias. Besides, anarchosyndicalism traditionally acknowledges the need for a centralized government to ensure mutual security, even if they have strong feelings against a standing military the size of the current US one (with which I agree).
Anyway, I only posed that question to gauge your understanding of liberalism, since it seemed as if you understood it as something like "democracy". I wanted to see what you thought the difference between liberal democracy and social democracy was. I haven't been convinced you understand
Fair enough.
I'll stand by my earlier assertion, that liberalism is anything but neutral, perhaps not in the way that you understand it as being hands off.
In practice, liberal states end up being self-serving (as liberalism encourages), and since capital is allowed to accumulate, the state apparatus ends up being used in pursuit of capital interests. Even if 'hands off' is accurate when it comes to domestic economic policy (it is usually anything but), at the Geopolitical level that power dynamic is amplified.
Which is why people argue Israel is a vassel state: Israel's strategic function (to the US's economic interests) is to project power in the oil-rich middle east. It's why the US puts up with and runs cover for them even as they are objectively the aggressors in a lopsided conflict. Any other ally in any other conflict would have been given the boot at this point. They've clearly overshot defense and are squarely in genocide at this point. The US has every excuse to end that alliance, but they don't because they have financial interests through them.
Maybe I wasn't clear; those allies are only allies because of what they provide us, and what Israel provides us is control and influence over the middle east. They represent our interests in exchange for us propping them up as a regional power (e.g. a VASSEL state). Sometimes barons form their own alliances and rebel, but they are still barons in the first instance.
They would get the boot if their behavior is in misalignment with the US's interest, but coincidentally, genocide is not incomparable with what interests we have in the region. It's just a bit 'inconvenient' to our brand.
Which is why it is not 'neutral', it quite consciously gives advantage to hierarchical structures outside the state.
It's not a semantic disagreement, it's a metaphysical one. A fundamental principle of philosophy is that no system is truly neutral, ALL systems advantage certain outcomes. Claiming a system as neutral is as ideological as claiming something as 'natural'. But rather than doubling down on my own perspective, I'll let William James put the debate to rest:
If you agree that liberalism advantages external power structures and enables the consolidation thereof then there remains no disagreement between us.
A claim I never made. The geopolitical significance of the middle east is its large oil deposits, as well as its geographical proximity to major trade routes. Whether we source our own oil from there is immaterial to the point I was making.
because our interest in the region isn't for oil for ourselves, it's influence over all the nations in the region, and that entire region revolves around the power that oil grants those countries.
Lol a third of the world's oil is produced in the middle east, and most of it is moved across boarders through pipelines and by sea.
I don't think it's conspiratorial to say that is extremely valuable, even if it's only marginally less-so after the shale revolution. Hell, the entire current phase of conflict in the red sea was because Yemeni Houthies, (a relatively tiny military power) were targeting trade routes.
Whatever you want to believe I guess, I'm pretty bored with whatever this is.
fucking LMAO. They're a western-aligned nuclear superpower with the 4th strongest military in the region, behind 2 other (far, FAR bigger) western-aligned countries. That, and they occupy a large stretch of the Mediterranean sea in front of a nexus of oil pipelines and trade ports.
You do you though.
it doesn't matter if "we" have nukes, it matters that the power occupying that strategic position has it. The US isn't going to launch nukes if Iran marches into Israel, but Iran isn't going to march into Israel so long as they have them themselves. You said it yourself: it is a vulnerable position for global trade. The US stands to loose the most, and all our opposition to gain the most, by a disruption there.
I don't even know why you're still harping on this, it seems pretty unimportant even by your own apparent worldview.
If it were true that Israel means nothing to our strategic objectives, and that our continued alliance weakens us to criticism, then why the fuck would the US continue to support them? Israel offers them influence over the region, otherwise there's no point in supporting their genocide. I would be seriously concerned if the US continued to support them if they didn't have strategic interests through them. I'd love for you to venture a guess as to why you think the US continues supporting Israel, if you think that we'd actually be better off if we didn't have them as an ally.
Make it make sense. You're certainly not a stickler for internal consistency, that's for sure.
That's not a reason to do anything, it's simply a reason not to think about it
Those commitments mean nothing if they are indifferent to abuses, that goes both ways.
Try again. US support for israel's military action in Gaza is at 36%. If this was real, it'd be an explanation as to why we stopped support.
Because they have material benefits to our interests.
You think the US supports Israel despite their engagement in genocide simply on principle? You think there's no material benefit to the US?