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I'm not denying that under some circumstances you can find lot of impressive freedom of speech in the west. The idea is that the outcome is not different in the

I'm not denying that under some circumstances you can find lot of impressive freedom of speech in the west. The idea is that the outcome is not different in the causes that actually matters! Even your point about the Iraq war proves my point, despite all the fight back, the US was able to manufacture the consent and execute the plans, similar thing happened in the Syrian war and in many other places. Even in the Ukrainian war this is happening again, you don't need to be on the Russian side (and I'm not) to understand that there is manufactured consent in the whole western bloc to move forward with the war (you can view this war as pure Russian offence, or as Geo-political provocation by the US to fight Russia and even China to stop it's decline or something in between those extremes). Of Course you will find many anti US leftists and Pro Russian voices in the west, but those are demonized(even pointing some nuance can make you a Russian bot/agent) so they have no to little effect in the grand scheme of things. I'm from a "third wold" country that have lot of freedom of speech, you can even curse many political leaders on the TV without consequences, but I know that this is not real freedom of speech because the power structures make this irrelevant mostly (not that I want to give up on this freedom). At some point in the future, when the western bloc already declined in power enough this will be clear, we will be talking about how the freedom of speech and democracy was mostly a facade that hides the real power structures and didn't make big effect on the important causes of the world. Decades of scandals, coups, and wars orchestrated by USA (what Snowden and Assange revealed is only one episode of long list) didn't stop many (most?) US people from thinking that they're the "good people in the room" despite some mistakes.

marvin 4y ago
Well, you've got a view that's in some ways refreshing since it's really far removed from what the mainstream narrative says. But we're either discussing subtly different topics, or I don't agree with your central point. Not entirely sure which. Democracy, freedom of speech, rule of law mostly a facade that hides the real power structures regarding the most important questions of the world? If we decide that "the most important questions of the world" is something other than what the citizens of democracies really care about, then sure, you can run a supertanker through that rhetorical opening. There's plenty of space for dubious foreign policy that supports a small group of people, outside of the space of topics that most people care about. As long as the country in question is so rich that it can afford a powerful military with only a small fraction of its tax revenue. In that case, the foreign policy becomes just a budgetary rounding error that most people don't care about. Both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars could arguably fit that definition. But the USA couldn't have afforded those (and maintained enough public support) if it wasn't stupidly rich compared to everyone else. The reason rule of law, democracy and civil liberties won out over totalitarianism after World War two is that those values turn out to produce societies that have more economic power. Not that they're inherently morally superior, although I know what sort of society I'd prefer to live in. I'm ignoring for the moment that the Soviet Union was one of the victors; they wouldn't have been if the USA hadn't been shipping them an incredible amount of home-produced weapons and equipment. It's hard to understate the power of the incentive of retaining most of the value of the valuable thing you created. Regarding Ukraine, if we accept the extreme view that the USA in fact deliberately managed to goad Putin the idiot into making the biggest strategic mistake of the 21st century (invading Ukraine), the mistake is still on Putin. I'll agree it wouldn't have been a nice thing to do, but the moral calculus isn't easy to untangle. Wars are hell, but I have no illusions about what moral transgressions Russia is capable of, and an expanding empire with great power is certainly not a force of great net good in the world. Maybe it could be a net force for good in general, just by default, if the progress of civilization does not stagnate. But it certainly could stagnate and make a net negative. And it's hard to believe it would do a better job than a civilization with great individual freedoms. If the most important questions of the world are greater quality of life for everyone, sustainably, then Western values certainly play a role in achieving that. But the calculus would be a challenge to figure out. The majority of the world's population doesn't live in liberal democracies, after all. Most scientific and engineering achievement has come from liberal democracies, but it's not completely obvious if that's just because what became the liberal democracies had a big head start with industrialization.
- aiProgMach 4y ago
  For World war 2, the major winner who caused the most destruction for the nazi empire and made most of the sacrifices is the USSR, like the USSR or not (and I don't mostly) but that is the fact. Now trying to make a direct relationship between Western prosperity and the "democracy" is very famous opinion (after all this the official ideology of US, and it's the brand/image that they want to sell to the world). But there are many different variables here, for example the west has a long history of colonialism that allowed them to make fortunes off the resources and the power of other people, even what looks like peacefull countries now, benefited from this. I'm not saying that having freedom of speech is not necessary, but it's merely a catalyst. Actually USSR (and even Nazi Germany) made huge jumps in the scientific and technological fields but the western bloc won eventually. You can probably make a direct link between the US control over the oil industry (by means of very dirty wars and alliances, see for example KSA relation with the British Empire then the US). There is a nice critic for the marxist prediction that the working class will make a revolution in the capitalist world and the working class is one unified entity in all the world, the critics said that this didn't happen because the colonialism allowed the capitalist regimes to give the working class in their countries more money / value that's extracted from the colonised countries. Now apply this logic to the western bloc and it you will have altrnative view, the western bloc is not ruling because it's democratic, and it's not stable becuase it has freedom of speech and not rich because of the magic of the free market, it's because of those countries being rich and able to control the other countries they were able to pump fortunes and make even the poor worker much better than his colleagues in the 3rd world countries. If my prosperity and my cheap energy was dependent on making a war in a far place called the middle east and making alliances with any dirty tyranny there then I'll be more prepared to buy into the official propganda that we're going there to fight for our values. So while technically there is good amount of freedom of speech, but in practice there is rarely deviation from the main narrative and even the alternative naratives are too weak or they're not radically different from the mainstream ones, this is one of the reasons that the west countries had been relatively stable, in our Third world countries we're always in active fight about the big choices to take so we're mostly on the edge of civil wars and revolutions and wars with external enemies. P.S I'm really in no position to defend Russia, but just imagine that US faced similar danger on it's border similar to Russia with NATO backed Ukraine, actually no need to imagine, this happened multiple times From Cuba to Venezuela to many south american countries, the thing is the US in most cases didn't need to go into direct war instead it needed to orchestrate coups and civil wars and then convince the world it's all about democracy.

marvin 4y ago

Well, you've got a view that's in some ways refreshing since it's really far removed from what the mainstream narrative says. But we're either discussing subtly different topics, or I don't agree with your central point. Not entirely sure which. Democracy, freedom of speech, rule of law mostly a facade that hides the real power structures regarding the most important questions of the world? If we decide that "the most important questions of the world" is something other than what the citizens of democracies really care about, then sure, you can run a supertanker through that rhetorical opening. There's plenty of space for dubious foreign policy that supports a small group of people, outside of the space of topics that most people care about. As long as the country in question is so rich that it can afford a powerful military with only a small fraction of its tax revenue. In that case, the foreign policy becomes just a budgetary rounding error that most people don't care about. Both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars could arguably fit that definition. But the USA couldn't have afforded those (and maintained enough public support) if it wasn't stupidly rich compared to everyone else. The reason rule of law, democracy and civil liberties won out over totalitarianism after World War two is that those values turn out to produce societies that have more economic power. Not that they're inherently morally superior, although I know what sort of society I'd prefer to live in. I'm ignoring for the moment that the Soviet Union was one of the victors; they wouldn't have been if the USA hadn't been shipping them an incredible amount of home-produced weapons and equipment. It's hard to understate the power of the incentive of retaining most of the value of the valuable thing you created. Regarding Ukraine, if we accept the extreme view that the USA in fact deliberately managed to goad Putin the idiot into making the biggest strategic mistake of the 21st century (invading Ukraine), the mistake is still on Putin. I'll agree it wouldn't have been a nice thing to do, but the moral calculus isn't easy to untangle. Wars are hell, but I have no illusions about what moral transgressions Russia is capable of, and an expanding empire with great power is certainly not a force of great net good in the world. Maybe it could be a net force for good in general, just by default, if the progress of civilization does not stagnate. But it certainly could stagnate and make a net negative. And it's hard to believe it would do a better job than a civilization with great individual freedoms. If the most important questions of the world are greater quality of life for everyone, sustainably, then Western values certainly play a role in achieving that. But the calculus would be a challenge to figure out. The majority of the world's population doesn't live in liberal democracies, after all. Most scientific and engineering achievement has come from liberal democracies, but it's not completely obvious if that's just because what became the liberal democracies had a big head start with industrialization.

aiProgMach 4y ago
For World war 2, the major winner who caused the most destruction for the nazi empire and made most of the sacrifices is the USSR, like the USSR or not (and I don't mostly) but that is the fact. Now trying to make a direct relationship between Western prosperity and the "democracy" is very famous opinion (after all this the official ideology of US, and it's the brand/image that they want to sell to the world). But there are many different variables here, for example the west has a long history of colonialism that allowed them to make fortunes off the resources and the power of other people, even what looks like peacefull countries now, benefited from this. I'm not saying that having freedom of speech is not necessary, but it's merely a catalyst. Actually USSR (and even Nazi Germany) made huge jumps in the scientific and technological fields but the western bloc won eventually. You can probably make a direct link between the US control over the oil industry (by means of very dirty wars and alliances, see for example KSA relation with the British Empire then the US). There is a nice critic for the marxist prediction that the working class will make a revolution in the capitalist world and the working class is one unified entity in all the world, the critics said that this didn't happen because the colonialism allowed the capitalist regimes to give the working class in their countries more money / value that's extracted from the colonised countries. Now apply this logic to the western bloc and it you will have altrnative view, the western bloc is not ruling because it's democratic, and it's not stable becuase it has freedom of speech and not rich because of the magic of the free market, it's because of those countries being rich and able to control the other countries they were able to pump fortunes and make even the poor worker much better than his colleagues in the 3rd world countries. If my prosperity and my cheap energy was dependent on making a war in a far place called the middle east and making alliances with any dirty tyranny there then I'll be more prepared to buy into the official propganda that we're going there to fight for our values. So while technically there is good amount of freedom of speech, but in practice there is rarely deviation from the main narrative and even the alternative naratives are too weak or they're not radically different from the mainstream ones, this is one of the reasons that the west countries had been relatively stable, in our Third world countries we're always in active fight about the big choices to take so we're mostly on the edge of civil wars and revolutions and wars with external enemies. P.S I'm really in no position to defend Russia, but just imagine that US faced similar danger on it's border similar to Russia with NATO backed Ukraine, actually no need to imagine, this happened multiple times From Cuba to Venezuela to many south american countries, the thing is the US in most cases didn't need to go into direct war instead it needed to orchestrate coups and civil wars and then convince the world it's all about democracy.