ERIC ZUESSE—A recent poll of Americans showed that “74% think America is a dictatorship; only 21% think it’s not.” Perhaps Americans are more realistic about the government than about the ‘news’ media. Although one can reasonably debate the degree to which any nation is a democracy, the United States certainly stands rather low on that factor, and stands well below China, and perhaps is lower than Russia, but none of these countries is among the world’s worst — except, perhaps, the U.S., for its having the highest percentage of its people in prison.
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DANNY HAIPHONG—The imperial war on Syria is legitimate to the cruise missile left because it allows them to express white supremacy as a civilizing crusade. It was no different during the US-NATO invasion of Libya. Gaddafi was painted by the cruise missile left as a barbaric and despotic dictator who armed his Black mercenary army with Viagra to rape women and children. Assad has faced the same treatment as Gaddafi. The political legitimacy that collaboration with imperialism affords means much more to the cruise missile left than solidarity.
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KUMARAN IRA—The NPA’s (NEW ANTICAPITALIST PARTY OF FRANCE) criticisms of the military strikes are hypocritical; they are aimed at protecting the NPA from the anger of French workers, 70 percent of whom are hostile to the bombing of Syria, according to various online polls. And the organizations to which the NPA is seeking to tie French rail workers and university students striking against Macron’s austerity policies make no effort to conceal their enthusiasm for the military aggression of Macron, Trump and May in Syria.
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GREGORY BARRETT—I want to tell you that there was some serious panicking and freaking out going on here in Europe the morning after election day 2016. Europeans don’t often run around shrieking their fears in public, a cool façade is the preferred mode here, but they did that day, and for many weeks afterward.
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JEFF J. BROWN—Notice that the West’s red owners have been getting richer since 1949, immediately after World War II and you blue peasants increasingly poorer ever since. Sorry to break it to you, but nothing’s changed for 500 years of Western colonial imperialism. The elites regurgitate just enough crumbs to keep the masses from revolting and when the downtrodden finally get to cut off a few diamond bedecked heads, the surviving elites hand out some extra tidbits for a generation, then start to claw it all back and still more. Bingo. Your postwar economic history lesson in a nutshell.
