Liberalism is a disease.

I strongly support Western civilization over any other because it is the most liberal civilization and hence the richest and most powerful.

Billions of nonwhites would not exist today let alone live such good lives if not for the west inventing, basically, the modern world, modern industry and modern medicine.

The beginning of modern medicine and much scientific advancement came directly to the west from the Muslim world, which was at the time the most advanced society in the world... I really don't think the "west" can take credit for everything.

Unfortunately there is little relationship between the two. The reason why western civilization was rich and powerful is precisely because of its illiberal policies.

You really think the hundreds of years of oppression, racism and brutal colonialism can be reversed in a single generation?

The effects of colonialism are still a gaping wound to this day. Why do you think there are so many problems? Research post-colonialism.

Also I was so blinded by the ignorance of your first statement I completely ignored the second. GDP is not an indicator of "success", unless what you mean by "success" has nothing to do with human happiness, human development and standards of living...

Haitians exterminated their white populations? Am I having a bit of trouble with history here?

No it isn't. Nations which have free economies become rich; there is an obvious correlation between economic freedom and economic growth. While there are certainly illiberal countries which have built wealthy economies (I'm thinking of the gulf states and China here) they did need to implement liberal economic policies to attain that wealth.

The West did not become rich stealing from other nations; if that was the case then Russia would have been able to keep up with the USA.

And how could the USA have become rich; it didn't have a large overseas Empire?

What about post war Europe; they lost all their colonies and their economies were severely damaged- how did they become rich if not through liberal economic policy?

South Korea says yes; it was just as poor as Africa, it suffered the devastating Korean war and it had been a victim of Japanese colonialism - yet now it is one of the richest countries in Asia.

Several of the former states of the USSR and several of the former satellite states of the USSR are also coming to prosperity after only a generation - Lithuania, for example, has achieved high growth rates most years since the USSR collapsed.

Hong Kong has also become very prosperous even though it was a poor and messy place in the 1960s.

In recent years Botswana has also become relatively wealthy; it is now the richest country in Africa.

So in summary yes the wounds of colonialism can be closed, particularly five decades after the fact.

It isn't a great indicator of success but it can give some idea of how well a country is doing and if its growing that's generally a good sign. I aknowledge that this isn't always the case though; in war time GDP can remain high due to war production even though rationing will be introduced and the average citizen becomes poorer, and GDP growth doesn't mean an improvement of their quality of life. Inequalities may also need to be taken into account; in South Africa, for example, GDP was relatively high but was all concentrated on the white minority - the black majority was oppressed and hence could not increase its economic productivity.

Virtually every single succesfull economy in a state society has been heavily based around the state, just in different ways. 'Economic freedom' is just a term righties change the meaning of depending on when it suits their argument.

The gulf states are rich because they have oil and gas, not because of what system they run. Saudi Arabia is still essentially a feudal society but is incredibly rich through oil.

Russia could never have been kept up with the USA. in 1917 Russia was totally unindustrialised, it was centuries behind the US. It's surprising they managed to close the gap as much as they did.

It does have a large overseas empire.

Post-war Europe had Keynesian economic policies.

South Korea was as poor in 1945 when it was decolonised as it was when it was colonised in 1910. It pursued fascistic economic policies until the 1980s.

It's quite easy to have good growth rates when you had nothing previously - the 1990s neoliberal measures tore Eastern Europe to shreds.

The idea of Hong Kong as some laissez-faire haven is a myth - their taxes and public spending is similar to European countries.

Down largely to having a stable democracy and not kleptocrats like the rest of Africa.

Prior to the latter's colonisation, Japan was at about the same level of development as West Africa. And, to give a far closer example, the Phillipines. Yet Japan was never colonised, and look what happened.

This is why GDP can be misleading (though it's almost never a bad thing). On the surface level the change from Keynesianism to neoliberalism in the 1970s didn't do much - growth slowed, but not that much. However, since the dawn of neoliberalism, income for the vast majority have stagnated or declined, whereas previously they were rising in proportion with economic growth.

Nothing to do with extracting cheap resources from subjugated colonies? Installing corrupt dictators to sell us cheap oil? Designing the Bretton-Woods system, the reserve currency, international systems of trade, WTO, IMF etc to benefit only 1st world countries? Forcing 3rd world countries to accept the domination of foreign corporations, their systems of exchange, their neo-liberal economics, huge unpayable loans and invading them if they refuse?
I guess those little things don't exist to you...

Correlation is not causation.

The US does have a large overseas empire.... what are you talking about? Are you completely oblivious to what's been going on the last hundred years?

The US has had control over the M.East, the most valuable resource in the entire world, Israel, Lebanon, Iran and eventually Saudi Arabia, gulf states and Egypt. plus Japan, South Korea, Haiti, Panama, Guatemala, Colombia, Cuba for a while.

You have a very skewered picture of history. W.Europe was already developed after using years of slavery, colonialism and industrialisation to enrich themselves. Then they relinquished direct political control and installed pro-West governments over the world but the corporations stayed. Then they benefited from having the already built up infrastructure and know-how to manufacture goods, only possible from forcing the extraction of cheap resources from the 3rd world, giving them a huge advantage because manufactured goods were worth many times more than the raw materials extracted to make them. Plus I guess you never heard of the billions of dollars Marshall Plan given to Europe, possible only because US profited greatly from WWII.

Now we don't manufacture anything. Hence China.

I think maybe you need to read a little bit about this...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_theory

The so-called western liberal countries have only become rich from enslaving the third world and keeping them in a perpetual state of dependence, debt and domination. Freedom of an economy isn't going to help much against that.

South Korea only escaped through it's poor natural resource endowment so there was no need for western countries to exploit them. Like other western countries it was helped to concentrate on manufacturing giving it a huge advantage from exploited raw material rich countries and had a huge inflow of foreign capital and foreign aid as it served as the US military outpost in Eastern Asia. It benefited from making armaments, being in the mostly heavily militarised place in the world. Nothing to do with what you were saying...

The wounds of colonialism are as much psychological as they are economical. Let's not pretend imperialism ended 50 years ago...

Not really. An economy could be "growing" by spending billions on palaces and toy war ships and being billions of dollars in debt. Which would show it having a great GDP, not much use to its impoverished people though...

We have a growth fetish, where growth is somehow seen as a universal magical cure of all of society's ills, which is unsustainable and ultimately does not improve anyone's life...

Those things are economically damaging; the only advantage colonialism ever gave us was that it prevented someone else from getting resources. Even Adam Smith wanted Britain to give up its colonies. If there had been no colonialism every country would be richer including the old colonial powers. All the things you refer to benefit individuals and corporations at the expense of both Western and third world economies. Cutting Africa's productivity to 1% of its potential did not help Europe's economy.

The USA had a monopoly on nuclear weapons and the world's largest airforce in 1945; if it had wanted to take over Earth it could have done so then. The USA is not running an Empire; it cannot make the same demands to its so-called colonies that Britain or France or Germany or Italy or Spain or Portugal or Russia or Japan could have made to theirs.

Those relationships are for the most part trade relationships and military alliances (except Iran and Cuba; it just plain doesn't control them). Japan has restricted military spending and the USA is withdrawing from South Korea but both of those countries have control over their own economies; Japan's economy is par with the USA's. Israel is allied to the USA because it doesn't get on with its neighbours; it is not controlled by the USA.

Europe is substantially richer now than it was after the war. And why did Russia remain poor; it had massive natural resources and many satellite states? And the Marshall plan did not drive European recovery.

Except that UK and USA manufacturing output reached an all time high just before the recession.

A country can only be kept in such a state through control of its government; if the government doesn't borrow money and enforce laws for a particular corporation then the problems can be overcome.

From those arguments we could predict that North Korea should have a large economy. Observe:

North Korea only escaped through it's poor natural resource endowment so there was no need for Russia to exploit them. Like other Eastern countries it was helped to concentrate on manufacturing giving it a huge advantage from exploited raw material rich countries and had a huge inflow of Soviet capital and Soviet aid as it served as the USSR military outpost in Eastern Asia. It benefited from making armaments, being in the mostly heavily militarised place in the world. Nothing to do with what you were saying...

South Korea's economy is large because it is more free; nothing to do with what you were saying.

Just like how the Poles are constantly living in fear of being invaded by the Germans or Russians?

I agree that a big GDP isn't always good; hence why one should look at levels of government spending and on the goods being produced. That said, economic growth is a good thing and we can sustain it.

Liberalism is something I strongly believe in. Basic freedoms should be universal, and I feel every person has a right to democracy, free speech, education and social mobility. This makes me a liberal.
However, this does not make me an America-bashing capitalist-loathing Israel-hating Islam-pandering moron who complains about everything the West has given us. That would make me what I know as a liberal fascist. These are the type of people who protest when the Israeli Davis Cup tennis team visits Sweden, who join mobs calling for a Holocaust in the Middle East, who refuse to accept that the Rochdale groomings are a religious issue, who agree with the EU slowly but surely homogenizing the European people. These people are the disease.

So you believe basic freedoms should be "universal" when the most basic freedoms and rights are denied to the Palestinian people and by American imperialism to the rest of the world? Contradiction much?

Iran, Venezuela and Nigeria (and several other West African countries) also have a lot of oil and gas. I agree that the oil does help, as does the immigration, but it isn't the only factor involved.

I agree that every economy is heavily influenced by the state but I disagree that the state helps the economy.

It wasn't "centuries" behind the US; the US was not heavily industrialised in 1800.

A country with the resources of Russia could have attracted huge amounts of foreign investment. They would have done better with a liberal government than with the Soviet government.

It has a lot of military bases and a lot of allies; that is not the same as having an empire.

But they were not the policies which brought about recovery.

But it wasn't until the '80s that its economy really took off.

Not in every case; the outcomes of the various states in Eastern Europe varied dramatically.

Their public spending is below 20% of GDP. In contrast UK government spending is about 50% of GDP.

Democracy alone doesn't guarantee stability or economic growth.

I agree that colonisation was bad but it is useless to assign all blame to colonialism; we need to look at why countries have not recovered rather than why they ended up wrecked in the first place. Ethiopia was only under the control of Italy briefly during World War II and yet it is very poor.

Is it a neoliberal or a Keynesian policy to hold government spending at 50% of GDP?

What about Israeli rights? You don't think Jews have a right to a homeland

when Arabs like the Palestinians have an entire continent to call their own.

If arabs are such nice people they should allow the palestinians to emigrate into their lands, instead the arabs are using them to attack Israel.

Homeland =/= Separate exclusive state that has explicit privileges based on ethnicity.



Saying Palestinians have all the Arab world to live in because they're Arabs is like saying that Germans have all Europe and North America to live in because they're white.



Which Arabs are 'using the palestinians to attack Israel' exactly?

What do you mean 'allow the palestinians to emigrate into their lands'? That's not the Palestinians' home. It's someone else's. Palestinians, unsurprisingly, come from Palestine.

Palestinians are identical to all the other arabs in the region. Arabs were a single nation who conquered a large amount of land that then became independent countries. They're still all arabs. Germans are obviously very different in culture and origin to, say, Swedes who are Viking in origin, to Italians (romans and all), and french (gallic). So you're wrong on that point.

Nations have always been about ethnicity. Germany is for germans, China for Chinese, Japan for Japanese... etc. The Jews don't have a nation, I think they deserve one. Palestinians can gtfo.

Palestinians are by no means identical to other Arabs. It's a very ignorant, and frankly racist, to say so. Iraqi culture, for example, is heavily Persian-influenced, a far cry from say, Libya, a country which considers being seen as 'African' to be very important to their identity.

And even if the Palestinians were the same, so what? That doesn't change that it's their home. I can't throw you out of your house on the basis that there's another identical one down the road that you can have.



No, nations have never been about ethnicity. They've always been about power. Usually, that means imperial power (though national liberation movements can often be about power to an oppressed people).

Though, if you want to talk about ethnicity, prior to Zionism most Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews were very integrated within Arab society - in fact, many of the early Askenazi Zionists referred to them indiscriminately as 'Arabs', regardless of whether they were Jewish or not.

And the Jews do already have somewhere apart from Israel. At least, on the same level that the Palestinians have Algeria or Yemen. It's called New York.