Hold on, hold on.
joemazerino wrote:
> notorious anti-Western Leftists.
deserialized wrote:
> colonial capitalist hegemony
We're running forward with a weird binary. Things are lumped together that shouldn't be, and things are put in opposition that shouldn't be.
What makes "Leftism" anti-"colonial" or anti-"Western"? Why should the words "Western", "colonial", and "capitalist" go together?
The West gave us Leftism.
Leftism, in its internationalist flavors, is a universalist ideology that tries to spread everywhere -- to "colonize" the world.
And what even is "capitalism"? Is it trade and commerce? These have been practiced ubiquitously outside the West forever. What is uniquely "Western" about them?
And if we're going to be talking about "The West", what is the other side of the dichotomy here? Are we restricting attention to Eurasia and saying "The East", like "The Occident and the Orient"? Surely there is nothing especially "Leftist" about East Asia -- yes it has China and Vietnam, but it also has Japan and South Korea. Or are we actually restricting attention to Europe, so "East" means "Russia"? Is there anything "Leftist" about that? Last I saw, their propaganda featured Orthodox icons. Or by "West" do you actually mean something like "Europe" or even "white people", in "colonial" opposition to, say, Africa, in which case the opposite of "West" actually becomes "South", as in "Global South"? Remember you're talking about Michael Moore, who is borderline unacceptable in those circles. Or, remember the phrase this started with, "private opulence and public squalor". Does this phrase not describe the very "south" that is supposedly its opponent? And isn't it Europe where there is public opulence, and where squalor is hidden and made private?
So then which people, ideas, and words actually belong together? Which are in natural opposition?
Maybe we don't need to do all this associating to "West" and "Left" and "colonization". Maybe we should just stick to the paired dichotomies in the title: "public vs. private" and "opulence vs. squalor". Surely that's enough?