MATT TAIBBI—The article, which rails against the “warped idea of freedom… populism, and misinformation being sprayed all over social media,” reads like all the tsk-tsking editorials in the West you’ve read since Trump, which used every crisis to hype the idea that freedom = danger. It wasn’t long ago that a person couldn’t go outside without having the word “freedom” jammed in his or her ear, whether it was Mel Gibson yelling it over his hair extensions in Braveheart or Republican congressman Bob Ney engaging in a Pattonesque invasion of the House cafeteria so he could rename your potato-based side dish “Freedom Fries.”
LEFT-LIBERALS
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CHRIS HEDGES—Liberals like Chris Hedges are almost always extremely efficient and eloquent in their diagnoses of what ails society. In this talk, Hedges provides, for example, a good anatomy of what constitutes the main working parts of the imperialist organism, currently managed by Joe Biden (the collective Biden, not the real, physical Biden). This, Hedges insists, is just an army of professional bureaucrats dedicated to the design and implementation of policies conducive to the perpetuation of a global, deeply undemocratic oligarchic cabal, with HQ in Washington. The problem with Chris is that his analysis does not advance much in the manner of solutions, aside from recommending extra-electoral mass mobilizations (something we certainly agree with). And Chris’s anti-communism and anti-Sovietism do not help matters much, either.
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CALEB MAUPIN—Forerunners of the “color revolutions”, Caleb discusses the CIA-supported Hungarian uprising of 1956 and the Czech “Prague Spring” of 1968, the latter term symbolising the coming in from the frozen cold of communist tyranny. Every nation that heeded the capitalist siren song of the West became a corrupt neoliberal regime, warns Caleb. And each of these regimes were at the time of their birth hailed as great improvements over communism by many people who still define themselves as being anti-imperialist and “on the left”.
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BRUCE LERRO—But what excuse do left-liberals have? Most left liberals are upper middle-class. They have the resources to build a party. Why don’t they? What keeps left liberals from pouring resources into the Green Party, which has always been at least truly left-liberal? Clearly the number of people in the United States who are for Bernie Sanders convinces me that the population would welcome such as party.
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BRUCE LERRO—Thus DSA, Jacobin magazine, Socialist Alternative and Global Exchange will always find a welcoming ear on the radio waves and journals of the Left Gatekeepers. Noam Chomsky, proclaimed anarchist, can come onto Democracy Now whenever he wants. But Michael Parenti, who will defend the Soviet Union or China and who is quite capable of matching Noam Chomsky, rarely gets on the air.