Very enlightening talk! Tariq Ali is a gift to the people who are hungry for clear, informative discussions instead of banal, establishment slogans (available all around) Watching it today when Russia Ukraine war is going to be a year old, it is great to re-visit some aspects of WW2 which have been long pushed to the margins of history by the Western media. Thanks so much!
Happy to see Ali at 69 years of age, still full of vigor and the intelligence of a much younger man. And because of his busy life of almost 70 years he has what many younger people have not yet attained: wisdom, perception and complexity. Although I have met some younger persons who posses these qualities of an elder activist, quite rare but they are out there
Yes, he's lived in the West all his life so I think it's natural he comments on the society he is a part of. Or should he stick to criticizing Pakistan and India and Africa. Don't be one of those people who feel that if you criticize the US as a US citizen, you should criticize the Soviet Union even more because it's even more oppressive. It's the easiest thing in the world to criticize others, but it takes courage and honesty to criticize yourself or your own society.
I am a great admirer of Tariq Ali and one of the greatest intelluctual and thinker of our times. The only problem I have with Ali is all his commentary tends to be posthumous to an event or crisis instead of being prognosticator of events. I guess thats what historians do but being a ultra liberal his criticisms does not help us.
I knew him when he was a rebel rouse Marxist with Hain. He was pompous, verbose, and Utopian. He is the same now. Like Karl Marx, he is still trying to solve humanity problems by implementing non-workable solutions. Das Kapital was conceived by Engels, written by Marx, is an Economic tome oblivious to the REALITIES of life. People want to live better, have more to eat, give a better future to their children. Marxism is the opposite. Yes, I worked & lived in THE country during that time.
You guys should know you're raising consciousness immeasurably with these videos. I've talked to lots of young people and everyone wants to know the truth about what is going on, people are waking up to the reality of the situation, and I think a situation which formerly looked rigid immobile is showing signs of fluidity and breakdown.
Thanks. I worked & lived in Iceland for more than 4 years & visited your country many times. Someone made a mistake with names, just kidding. Yours is a great place albeit a little cold. Sunrises & sunsets are phenomenal, so are the snowstorms. Yes, your country is unique in many ways.
I don't really agree with the very left-wing angle of this lecture because i'm a distributist but i still think he presented some interesting information.
my problem is precisely the opposiite. he is criticizing it as the other, as if he doesnt belong. in essence perpetuating a white mans guilt. he is just a comfortable western dude, his wife is white, lived all his life in UK and then pretends to have landed just 5 minutes ago from pakistan in a ship. no i reject and deny him completely.
I read Das Kapital as a teenager, in German. It tried to answer the big question: Value of a commodity: Pearls are valuable because men dive for them is wrong. Intrinsically Pearls are valuable; therefore, men dive for them. Marxism does not provide ‘better’ living for all. I have worked & lived in: Algeria, Poland, &.Vietnam. A country is where majority is of the same ethnic origin, speaks the same language & have the same social values: Sweden, Thailand & Ethiopia. Europe is not America.
you are very correct.there is bad apples in every ethnicities and cultures.because i been treated more badly by cubans and rather i have met germans whom treated me with respect.
"The Western World doesnt make shit anymore so no industrial working class." No, if a decrease in industrial production happens in capitalist economies, it looks like Greece now. In fact, western society has been near to completely proletarianised, and as machines increasingly replace live labor, the rate of profit for the production process falls and markets are destroyed by austerity, creating structural crises as we have now.
So basically, F A Hayek was completely right. Monetary Union was a total disaster, political union (under too narrow a constitution) is becoming a disaster. The only way people can hope to live peacefully together is to engage only in voluntary exchange and have the lowest possible central control. If we had free-floating exchange rates (which Hayek proposed all his life), then the Drachma would have devalued and Greek exports would have boomed. People almost always forget that the free-market and the free-monetary system have enormous self-correcting powers. Trying to control things almost always makes them worse, governments should stick to enforcing contracts, providing courts of law, and enforcing the non-aggression principle
I am always shocked a normally functioning adult would believe in this fantasy-land conception of the world (or even find it appealing) but at the same time probably claim something like that cooperation is against human nature or Marxism or left-libertarianism or whatever the statist-enemy du jour is, is completely unrealistic. Are there any proposals you'd suggest how we'd move towards this world? Stop collecting taxes, destroy the state and the services it provides? Vote in the most pro-business right-wing liberal parties that advocate lower taxes?
My main argument is against the scale of the operation. You could obviously have a common currency and a higher level of public services if they are administered at the local level. Also, my original comment said 'voluntary exchange', which is basically the same as 'voluntary co-operation'. People only do business when it is on mutually agreed terms, never when they are forced to. Co-operation is an intrinsic part of human nature, we are social primates, we don't need a big government to live together and co-operate. Libertarian-socialists want to abolish private property, I do think that is unrealistic. However, the current form in Europe (strong civil and individual freedom with large welfare provision) is not unrealistic, it is simply unsustainable. Europe has been living beyond its means and racking up debt for decades now. Hence the massive budget deficits in Britain, France, Spain etc. Ideally we wouldn't be moving to my idea from a place of enormous public debt. For starters, I'd stop subsidising producers of public goods (e.g. government schools) and I would start subsidising the consumers of those goods (e.g. giving the parents of children school vouchers so they can choose where to send their children to school). Give the consumers of these products the freedom to choose. Lowering tax RATES often leads to the collection of more tax REVENUE because people move their money from off-shore tax havens, and out of tax free bonds, and put it into the real economy where it can both create jobs and be taxed. Also, if you lowered the business tax RATE (and abolished the minimum wage) then it might be worth people's while to open up a business in one of the many derelict buildings on my road and they could employ people from the local community. The current government controls make it impossible to do this because they keep the fixed-costs too high. These measures are not pro-business, they simply remove anti-business legislation from the books. I don't believe that any business deserves special privileges, subsidies, or protection from competition. I am pro-Free-Enterprise, not pro-business.
IN SUM:"IF IT AINT BROKE DON'T FIX IT". but youtube/google changes things they think for the better and making it harder for the user-i.e. "breaking it"
think Tariq Ali has a kind word about the Saudi royal family and their political system. And again, you obviously think it is more worthwhile to criticize a minor regional power which is a threat only to its population but not the world's only superpower which is potentially a threat to the entire world.
you tube set up getting worse all the time. i remember when you could move your videos around in your playlists without them stopping at top of screen in edit mode. the scroll bar stops now when in the past it did not. and you could move your videos around when your playlist was at bottom of screen while watching. I remember in edit mode you just had to put the number of the video in the playlist and put it in that numbered place. i am sick of all these changes for the sake of change.
Min. 1:14:00 He is exaggerating quite a bit about Switzerland. It's true that - in an international context - much of Switzerlands wealth is contributet to the banking system which is clearly exploiting ongoing social conflicts abroad. on the other side - Switzerland's constitution and political culture is one which is very highly based on balancing and spreading power as broadly as possible. Remember that this country hasn't been founded on some ethnic identity but based on a contract. It's a nation by idea and the only successful liberal revolution of 1848. For all shortcommings Switzerland clearly has, one should not ignore this factor.
all these were poor but decent countries in the 70's.saudi money has systematically infiltrated their education system and their religious setup and completely hollowed them out.in a thousand years israel could not do as much damage as saudi has done.as for occupation saudi is also in occupation of shia majority areas which have all the oil.pakistan is in occupation of balochistan,indonesia was in occupation of timor, sudan was in occupation of south sudan. all these guys committed worse crimes.
Personally, maybe one could agree that there was a civil war, but the idea that we should somehow create a new balkan federation or confederation is completely unrealistic. I agree with Ali on most of the issues but here i would say he does not know what he is talking about. Balkan is a crossroads where for 1000 years you had different influences which created different nations with 3 religions. Maybe some parts could live together but in Balkan as a whole the differences are to great.
Basically someone whit more right wing views who disagress about the part where Ali spoke about Yugoslavija, saying it was product of 1st and 2nd WW which nobody wanted, and that there was not a civil war in former Yugoslavia but that other regions were under Serb aggression. And the part where Ali spoke about that nobody of Albanian origin was attacked in Belgrade during bombing of Serbia, saying he doesn't see anything unusual in that, like why would they destroy their own capital.
EU's club concept is the Future of Politics where Conflicts should be resolved by GIVE n TAKE than WARS. In the end it all boils down to GIVE n TAKE, so why not start with it. 'Wars to solve conflicts died at Hiroshima' said JFK, 'it shall take a long time for humanity to realize it and even longer to accept'. 'The day a Pacifist has the same adulation as a War Hero, Humanity shall come of age.' Who said it? Yours truly.
How can Tariq possibly say that the EU was organised along the lines of what Thatcher wanted? Thatcher fought tooth and nail against the establishment of a European Political Union. It's one of the main reasons that was stabbed in the back by the Toffs in her own party (i.e. the 'Wets').
john laird Hardly. It's a political union which strongly regulates the finance sector, and which continually tries to override the decisions of its own member states. The EU attack on Ireland over its tax policy being an excellent example.
bell191991 sorry bell I kind of agree kind of disagree. true they override the will of independent nations but they are still working for bankers in a financial sector rigged in their favour which is exactly what Thatcher wanted
john laird I agree that there is a reciprocal relationship between big banks/finance and the EU (Barrosso just got a cushy, well-payed job at Goldman Sachs). But that's because the EU regulates them so much, it's worth the banks while to buy off the regulators. I think you're wrong to claim that is what Thatcher wanted. She generally wanted the finance sector to operate without government putting the wrong incentives around them and basically poking their head where it didn't belong. Thatcher's Big Bang legislation deregulated the finance sector in London and took away the big established banks monopolies and traditional privileges. As a result, the established institutions were actually forced to compete for their customers business
what i meant by utopian was that it was too idealistic, that it sounds beautiful in theory but it's unacheivable. i hope it is acheivable, or at least that some radical alternative is acheivable but maybe the system is now just too powerful - i heard recently that the US has a huge number of military bases all over the world and that the media is just one huge propaganda machine working for corporate interests - and the politicians are put there by the corporations - so what chance do we stand?
To any professional sophist, preaching in duration of soccer game ninety minutes unchallenged, is ample time to score again and again the benefits of cultivating cockroaches, as ample source of honey !
Real expressions of objective criticism of the elitist must develop intellectual resistance to invested bureaucracy by a spiritual community with respect to the fear of God that is demonstrate in the Bible. A community of conscience is utterly necessary to winnow the popular narrative.
Wonder why he does not stick to his favorite topics, Islam, and Che Guevara since both eliminated opposite point of views. If he is saying the new generation of Europeans are looking forward to Burkas, Mosques at every street corner and complete elimination of free elections he has lot to learn. Nusrat Rizvi Palm Beach Gardens, FL
The west is not a place full of angels, it has been involved in a lot of things around the globe in the last 300 years and continues to be so. Discussing these things does not equate a person to hating the west.
MatrixOfDynamism a person llike tark who always sees negative things about the west, and slanders an every occasion the US probably hates the west. he never mentions its positive sides, and idolizes horible third world places.
Bank bail outs aren't capitalist. They are the redistribution of wealth, which is a socialist idea. This current economic situation is caused precisely by the merging of state and economy, which is closer to Ali's Marxism than to capitalism. But socialists will always have that knee-jerk 'blame capitalism' impulse even when the problems are actually ones born of socialist ideas. The EU being another example; an institution centering on regulation, centralisation, control of the market and the redistribution of wealth among European nations.
Merging of state and business is fascism, not communism. Also, did you hear the Koch brothers intend to spend 800mil on next elections? Talking about fascism. 98% in US elections the guy with more money wins...
Stewiehleba Ah, you must be thinking of that low-regulation, free market communism. Forgot about that, my mistake. And the Koch brothers, eh? The 'libertarians', eh? Well, considering the US probably has about the biggest government in the world I'd say all their billions have been well spent. ;D
lopperz You come across as staggeringly childish, and also engage in intellectually-inferior ad-hominem attack. You also appear to be confused and entirely miss the point; regardless of whether or not I 'regurgitate' Hitchens' terms, the point is, an I right? The answer; yes.
lopperz Sure, Hitchens supported the removal of the fascist Saddam Hussein, and supported the socialist Patriot Union of Kurdistan in its long-stand opposition on the fascistic Ba'ath party. The likes of you, of course, shamefully and disgracefully decided to abandon the people of Iraq and instead act as a figurative human shield for the mass-murder, genocide and fascism of the Ba'ath Party. The shame is all yours, and you're welcome to it. Ali, in October 2001 in the pages of Counter Punch magazine, called for Hitchens to join him in supporting the 'revolutionary' figure of Osama Bin Laden. I'd also advise to drop the infantile name-calling too, as it only serves to make you look like an uneducated, emotionally-unhinged immature buffoon. I sense we have a planetary difference of intellectual either way, though...
lopperz Iraq had met four very important conditions that resulted in its loss of sovereignty- 1. Iraq had invaded a neighbouring nation, Kuwait (a sovereign nation and member of the UN, Arab League and Non-Align Movement), occupied it and attempted to annex and absorb it 2. Iraq had committed genocide, known as the 'Al-Anfal' genocide campaign (the UN Genocide Convention, by the way, MANDATES ACTION BE TAKEN to either 'prevent or punish' any state or nation guilty of the crime) 3. Iraq has harboured known and wanted terrorists, such as Abu Nidal, Abdul Rahman Yasin and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (all in Iraq BEFORE the 2003 intervention) 4. Iraq had violated the NPT and was, in 2003, attempting to obtain Yellow Cake from Niger (and on the WMD issue, former Iraqi chief government scientist Medi Abedi confirmed in his book 'The Bomb In My Garden' he hid parts of a centrifuge in his garden) On the WMD point, I suggest a reading and analysing of the following, taken from a UN WMD report on Iraq; --"We have now commenced the process of destroying approximately 50 litres of mustard gas declared by Iraq that was being kept under UNMOVIC seal at the Muthanna site." "In my earlier briefings, I have noted that significant outstanding issues of substance were listed in two Security Council documents from early 1999 (S/1999/94 and S/1999/356) and should be well known to Iraq. I referred, as examples, to the issues of anthrax, the nerve agent VX and long-range missiles, and said that such issues "deserve to be taken seriously by Iraq rather than being brushed aside...". "At the meeting in Baghdad on 8 and 9 February, the Iraqi side addressed some of the important outstanding disarmament issues and gave us a number of papers, e.g. regarding anthrax and growth material, the nerve agent VX and missile production" "The Iraqi side suggested that the problem of verifying the quantities of anthrax and two VX-precursors, which had been declared unilaterally destroyed, might be tackled through certain technical and analytical methods." www.theguardian.com/world/2003/feb/14/iraq.unitednations1 On a general note, if you provide another single, solitary ad-hominem attack laced with profanity you'll be blocked/muted. I've no time to waste with people who are so mind-bogglingly childish that they cannot disagree with someone without resorting to juvenile personal attack laced with foul and abusive language. I operate at a much higher intellectual level than that. Oh, and voting-up your own comments is another sign of contemptible yet laughable immaturity.
Matthew Singh-Dosanjh People still defend the criminal war in Iraq, despite the fact that (According to serious unembedded journalists like Scahill, Cockburn and Dahr Jamail, as well as many pollsters from Thinkprogress and other outlets ) most Iraqis are worse off after the invasion and occupation? That's news to me. Continue seeking solace in your revisionist leader C.Hitchens and forget about the millions that have been displaced and the hundreds of thousands that have died, rather pointlessly in fact, given that Iraq has recently seen some of its worst violence in years. My condolences to you sir.
***** Utter dismantling of this Useful Idiot's argument. Kudos to you! He's simply a defender of a guy who acted as The Bush administration's amanuensis for the last decade of his life.
Elaborately constructed? My comment? What a feat, and you must've slaved over dissecting it. People en masse don't have objective perspectives on reality I think, I was just introducing the kinds of concepts elucidated by Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent and other, older left-leaning literature. I agree with you on right-wingers, but clearly civil society is rife with systemic ills and our political system is at their roots, an impasse to liberty and speech, intellectual involvement, etc.
ali don't know shit about balkan war. did he asked himself why germany's position was opposite to eu-s? because position of EU was: lets just watch the serbs kill all other zulus, and let's put embargo on arms, to prevent arming of any opposition to serbized yugoslav army When people were dying they put their "observers", at tha time known as "ice-cream men", to the front, as if this changes anything. so german move was only after killing was going on for 3 months, and vukovar was obliterated
You, sir, are presumptuous who appears to know little as to what is happening in European towns from Malta to Norway and inbetween. I know not where you live or whether have you ever been assaulted? Let me tell you that you cannot walk in many neighbourhoods in London without being verbally abused & even physically assaulted. I have seen it happened in broad day light. I am not a hatemonger. I accept what my eyes see. Many of European cities are powder kegs in the waiting. It will happen.
Very enlightening talk! Tariq Ali is a gift to the people who are hungry for clear, informative discussions instead of banal, establishment slogans (available all around) Watching it today when Russia Ukraine war is going to be a year old, it is great to re-visit some aspects of WW2 which have been long pushed to the margins of history by the Western media. Thanks so much!
Happy to see Ali at 69 years of age, still full of vigor and the intelligence of a much younger man. And because of his busy life of almost 70 years he has what many younger people have not yet attained: wisdom, perception and complexity. Although I have met some younger persons who posses these qualities of an elder activist, quite rare but they are out there
Watching this almost a decade later, and it is much more relevant even today than it was at the time of Tariq Ali's presentation in Zagreb
I never tire of listening to this man speak. Oh that world leaders felt the same way.
Thanks for uploading and sharing. I am glad that there are still intelligent decent people out there.
Wow Tariq is amazing. Thank you for recognizing his brilliance and posting this video.
Yes, he's lived in the West all his life so I think it's natural he comments on the society he is a part of. Or should he stick to criticizing Pakistan and India and Africa. Don't be one of those people who feel that if you criticize the US as a US citizen, you should criticize the Soviet Union even more because it's even more oppressive. It's the easiest thing in the world to criticize others, but it takes courage and honesty to criticize yourself or your own society.
I am a great admirer of Tariq Ali and one of the greatest intelluctual and thinker of our times. The only problem I have with Ali is all his commentary tends to be posthumous to an event or crisis instead of being prognosticator of events. I guess thats what historians do but being a ultra liberal his criticisms does not help us.
I knew him when he was a rebel rouse Marxist with Hain. He was pompous, verbose, and Utopian. He is the same now. Like Karl Marx, he is still trying to solve humanity problems by implementing non-workable solutions. Das Kapital was conceived by Engels, written by Marx, is an Economic tome oblivious to the REALITIES of life. People want to live better, have more to eat, give a better future to their children. Marxism is the opposite. Yes, I worked & lived in THE country during that time.
Oh! Grande mestre! VIVA TARIQ ALI !
You guys should know you're raising consciousness immeasurably with these videos. I've talked to lots of young people and everyone wants to know the truth about what is going on, people are waking up to the reality of the situation, and I think a situation which formerly looked rigid immobile is showing signs of fluidity and breakdown.
Thanks. I worked & lived in Iceland for more than 4 years & visited your country many times. Someone made a mistake with names, just kidding. Yours is a great place albeit a little cold. Sunrises & sunsets are phenomenal, so are the snowstorms. Yes, your country is unique in many ways.
min 14.30 - thankyou for speaking it out.
I don't really agree with the very left-wing angle of this lecture because i'm a distributist but i still think he presented some interesting information.
Did you know: EU still have 28 overseas colonies.
why are so many islamic people obsessed with living in europe/USA instead of trying to make their own country better?
cos America and Israel won't allow development in the middle east
Playing 'victim' is the professional qualification of the mid-east Muslims ..
sehr schöne sprech hier danke schön
my problem is precisely the opposiite. he is criticizing it as the other, as if he doesnt belong. in essence perpetuating a white mans guilt. he is just a comfortable western dude, his wife is white, lived all his life in UK and then pretends to have landed just 5 minutes ago from pakistan in a ship. no i reject and deny him completely.
I read Das Kapital as a teenager, in German. It tried to answer the big question: Value of a commodity: Pearls are valuable because men dive for them is wrong. Intrinsically Pearls are valuable; therefore, men dive for them. Marxism does not provide ‘better’ living for all. I have worked & lived in: Algeria, Poland, &.Vietnam. A country is where majority is of the same ethnic origin, speaks the same language & have the same social values: Sweden, Thailand & Ethiopia.
Europe is not America.
True words. A warning, not to completely crazed leadership, including currently the Serbian, but to the people: Rise up!
As a Greek I have to say that he said some realities pertaining to the politics of my country
thanks, i'll check it out
Well done ! And well said !!!
This is almost exactly the kind of defense American Southerners would fall back on during Jim Crow.
Wonderful lecture.
you are very correct.there is bad apples in every ethnicities and cultures.because i been treated more badly by cubans and rather i have met germans whom treated me with respect.
"The Western World doesnt make shit anymore so no industrial working class." No, if a decrease in industrial production happens in capitalist economies, it looks like Greece now. In fact, western society has been near to completely proletarianised, and as machines increasingly replace live labor, the rate of profit for the production process falls and markets are destroyed by austerity, creating structural crises as we have now.
So basically, F A Hayek was completely right. Monetary Union was a total disaster, political union (under too narrow a constitution) is becoming a disaster. The only way people can hope to live peacefully together is to engage only in voluntary exchange and have the lowest possible central control.
If we had free-floating exchange rates (which Hayek proposed all his life), then the Drachma would have devalued and Greek exports would have boomed. People almost always forget that the free-market and the free-monetary system have enormous self-correcting powers. Trying to control things almost always makes them worse, governments should stick to enforcing contracts, providing courts of law, and enforcing the non-aggression principle
I am always shocked a normally functioning adult would believe in this fantasy-land conception of the world (or even find it appealing) but at the same time probably claim something like that cooperation is against human nature or Marxism or left-libertarianism or whatever the statist-enemy du jour is, is completely unrealistic. Are there any proposals you'd suggest how we'd move towards this world? Stop collecting taxes, destroy the state and the services it provides? Vote in the most pro-business right-wing liberal parties that advocate lower taxes?
My main argument is against the scale of the operation. You could obviously have a common currency and a higher level of public services if they are administered at the local level.
Also, my original comment said 'voluntary exchange', which is basically the same as 'voluntary co-operation'. People only do business when it is on mutually agreed terms, never when they are forced to.
Co-operation is an intrinsic part of human nature, we are social primates, we don't need a big government to live together and co-operate.
Libertarian-socialists want to abolish private property, I do think that is unrealistic. However, the current form in Europe (strong civil and individual freedom with large welfare provision) is not unrealistic, it is simply unsustainable. Europe has been living beyond its means and racking up debt for decades now. Hence the massive budget deficits in Britain, France, Spain etc.
Ideally we wouldn't be moving to my idea from a place of enormous public debt. For starters, I'd stop subsidising producers of public goods (e.g. government schools) and I would start subsidising the consumers of those goods (e.g. giving the parents of children school vouchers so they can choose where to send their children to school). Give the consumers of these products the freedom to choose.
Lowering tax RATES often leads to the collection of more tax REVENUE because people move their money from off-shore tax havens, and out of tax free bonds, and put it into the real economy where it can both create jobs and be taxed. Also, if you lowered the business tax RATE (and abolished the minimum wage) then it might be worth people's while to open up a business in one of the many derelict buildings on my road and they could employ people from the local community. The current government controls make it impossible to do this because they keep the fixed-costs too high. These measures are not pro-business, they simply remove anti-business legislation from the books. I don't believe that any business deserves special privileges, subsidies, or protection from competition. I am pro-Free-Enterprise, not pro-business.
***** Congratulations, you did not address any of the points or suggestions that I made with evidence, logic, or argument.
I'm taking this as evidence of your intellectual defeat. Excellent.
IN SUM:"IF IT AINT BROKE DON'T FIX IT". but youtube/google changes things they think for the better and making it harder for the user-i.e. "breaking it"
could people please stop being abusive on RUclips? Get a grip, guys, aren't we all on the same side?
Not so. I have listened to plenty of Ali's older talks and he has predicted many things correctly.
Wistle blows indicating infrigement there goes the embargo ,torture chamber ....
Spectators observers analysis questions private thought
think Tariq Ali has a kind word about the Saudi royal family and their political system. And again, you obviously think it is more worthwhile to criticize a minor regional power which is a threat only to its population but not the world's only superpower which is potentially a threat to the entire world.
you tube set up getting worse all the time. i remember when you could move your videos around in your playlists without them stopping at top of screen in edit mode. the scroll bar stops now when in the past it did not. and you could move your videos around when your playlist was at bottom of screen while watching. I remember in edit mode you just had to put the number of the video in the playlist and put it in that numbered place. i am sick of all these changes for the sake of change.
Min. 1:14:00
He is exaggerating quite a bit about Switzerland. It's true that - in an international context - much of Switzerlands wealth is contributet to the banking system which is clearly exploiting ongoing social conflicts abroad. on the other side - Switzerland's constitution and political culture is one which is very highly based on balancing and spreading power as broadly as possible. Remember that this country hasn't been founded on some ethnic identity but based on a contract. It's a nation by idea and the only successful liberal revolution of 1848. For all shortcommings Switzerland clearly has, one should not ignore this factor.
+JosipRadnik1
Power mongers, hes correct.
+Eye opener 321
what exactly do you mean?
Given the choice I wonder where most people would rather live Switzerland or South America!
why and how should we intervene in iran?
all these were poor but decent countries in the 70's.saudi money has systematically infiltrated their education system and their religious setup and completely hollowed them out.in a thousand years israel could not do as much damage as saudi has done.as for occupation saudi is also in occupation of shia majority areas which have all the oil.pakistan is in occupation of balochistan,indonesia was in occupation of timor, sudan was in occupation of south sudan. all these guys committed worse crimes.
Personally, maybe one could agree that there was a civil war, but the idea that we should somehow create a new balkan federation or confederation is completely unrealistic. I agree with Ali on most of the issues but here i would say he does not know what he is talking about. Balkan is a crossroads where for 1000 years you had different influences which created different nations with 3 religions. Maybe some parts could live together but in Balkan as a whole the differences are to great.
🙏
Basically someone whit more right wing views who disagress about the part where Ali spoke about Yugoslavija, saying it was product of 1st and 2nd WW which nobody wanted, and that there was not a civil war in former Yugoslavia but that other regions were under Serb aggression. And the part where Ali spoke about that nobody of Albanian origin was attacked in Belgrade during bombing of Serbia, saying he doesn't see anything unusual in that, like why would they destroy their own capital.
EU's club concept is the Future of Politics where Conflicts should be resolved by GIVE n TAKE than WARS. In the end it all boils down to GIVE n TAKE, so why not start with it. 'Wars to solve conflicts died at Hiroshima' said JFK, 'it shall take a long time for humanity to realize it and even longer to accept'. 'The day a Pacifist has the same adulation as a War Hero, Humanity shall come of age.' Who said it? Yours truly.
How can Tariq possibly say that the EU was organised along the lines of what Thatcher wanted? Thatcher fought tooth and nail against the establishment of a European Political Union. It's one of the main reasons that was stabbed in the back by the Toffs in her own party (i.e. the 'Wets').
like he said she wanted a Europe of bankers and that is exactly what happened
john laird
Hardly. It's a political union which strongly regulates the finance sector, and which continually tries to override the decisions of its own member states.
The EU attack on Ireland over its tax policy being an excellent example.
bell191991 sorry bell I kind of agree kind of disagree. true they override the will of independent nations but they are still working for bankers in a financial sector rigged in their favour which is exactly what Thatcher wanted
john laird
I agree that there is a reciprocal relationship between big banks/finance and the EU (Barrosso just got a cushy, well-payed job at Goldman Sachs). But that's because the EU regulates them so much, it's worth the banks while to buy off the regulators. I think you're wrong to claim that is what Thatcher wanted. She generally wanted the finance sector to operate without government putting the wrong incentives around them and basically poking their head where it didn't belong.
Thatcher's Big Bang legislation deregulated the finance sector in London and took away the big established banks monopolies and traditional privileges.
As a result, the established institutions were actually forced to compete for their customers business
There are of course many players in a complex history , but it was planned and organized by I G Farben industrialist combine , 1940 .
Can any one translate the Serbian question/comment at the end ?
what i meant by utopian was that it was too idealistic, that it sounds beautiful in theory but it's unacheivable. i hope it is acheivable, or at least that some radical alternative is acheivable but maybe the system is now just too powerful - i heard recently that the US has a huge number of military bases all over the world and that the media is just one huge propaganda machine working for corporate interests - and the politicians are put there by the corporations - so what chance do we stand?
You always have to fight tyrants...power to the people!
To any professional sophist, preaching in duration of soccer game ninety minutes unchallenged, is ample time to score again and again the benefits of cultivating cockroaches, as ample source of honey !
Real expressions of objective criticism of the elitist must develop intellectual resistance to invested bureaucracy by a spiritual community with respect to the fear of God that is demonstrate in the Bible. A community of conscience is utterly necessary to winnow the popular narrative.
true...
Wonder why he does not stick to his favorite topics, Islam, and Che Guevara since both eliminated opposite point of views.
If he is saying the new generation of Europeans are looking forward to Burkas, Mosques at every street corner and complete elimination of free elections he has lot to learn.
Nusrat Rizvi
Palm Beach Gardens, FL
is it true that, according to jesus, a rich capitalist can forget about getting into heaven?
what is utopian about what he says here?
i've heard about this resourc based economy but isn't it utopian?
totally incorrect
with all his beautifull phrases tarik is still tarik- a muslim who wishes to wicken the USA and the west in general.
I think you might want to know Tariq is not a muslim, he's an ateist.
He is an ATHIEST
MatrixOfDynamism he expresses himself just like a militant muslim, he's filled with hatred to the west.
The west is not a place full of angels, it has been involved in a lot of things around the globe in the last 300 years and continues to be so. Discussing these things does not equate a person to hating the west.
MatrixOfDynamism a person llike tark who always sees negative things about the west, and slanders an every occasion the US probably hates the west. he never mentions its positive sides, and idolizes horible third world places.
am i right in thinking you don't like immigrants?
Tariq Ali = europe's noam chomsky : )
Bank bail outs aren't capitalist. They are the redistribution of wealth, which is a socialist idea. This current economic situation is caused precisely by the merging of state and economy, which is closer to Ali's Marxism than to capitalism. But socialists will always have that knee-jerk 'blame capitalism' impulse even when the problems are actually ones born of socialist ideas. The EU being another example; an institution centering on regulation, centralisation, control of the market and the redistribution of wealth among European nations.
Merging of state and business is fascism, not communism. Also, did you hear the Koch brothers intend to spend 800mil on next elections? Talking about fascism. 98% in US elections the guy with more money wins...
Stewiehleba
Ah, you must be thinking of that low-regulation, free market communism. Forgot about that, my mistake. And the Koch brothers, eh? The 'libertarians', eh? Well, considering the US probably has about the biggest government in the world I'd say all their billions have been well spent. ;D
Tariq Ali makes excuses for theocratic fascism, and was wonderfully, brutally and factually called-out on it by Christopher Hitchens.
lopperz
You come across as staggeringly childish, and also engage in intellectually-inferior ad-hominem attack. You also appear to be confused and entirely miss the point; regardless of whether or not I 'regurgitate' Hitchens' terms, the point is, an I right? The answer; yes.
lopperz
Sure, Hitchens supported the removal of the fascist Saddam Hussein, and supported the socialist Patriot Union of Kurdistan in its long-stand opposition on the fascistic Ba'ath party. The likes of you, of course, shamefully and disgracefully decided to abandon the people of Iraq and instead act as a figurative human shield for the mass-murder, genocide and fascism of the Ba'ath Party. The shame is all yours, and you're welcome to it.
Ali, in October 2001 in the pages of Counter Punch magazine, called for Hitchens to join him in supporting the 'revolutionary' figure of Osama Bin Laden.
I'd also advise to drop the infantile name-calling too, as it only serves to make you look like an uneducated, emotionally-unhinged immature buffoon. I sense we have a planetary difference of intellectual either way, though...
lopperz
Iraq had met four very important conditions that resulted in its loss of sovereignty-
1. Iraq had invaded a neighbouring nation, Kuwait (a sovereign nation and member of the UN, Arab League and Non-Align Movement), occupied it and attempted to annex and absorb it
2. Iraq had committed genocide, known as the 'Al-Anfal' genocide campaign (the UN Genocide Convention, by the way, MANDATES ACTION BE TAKEN to either 'prevent or punish' any state or nation guilty of the crime)
3. Iraq has harboured known and wanted terrorists, such as Abu Nidal, Abdul Rahman Yasin and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (all in Iraq BEFORE the 2003 intervention)
4. Iraq had violated the NPT and was, in 2003, attempting to obtain Yellow Cake from Niger (and on the WMD issue, former Iraqi chief government scientist Medi Abedi confirmed in his book 'The Bomb In My Garden' he hid parts of a centrifuge in his garden)
On the WMD point, I suggest a reading and analysing of the following, taken from a UN WMD report on Iraq;
--"We have now commenced the process of destroying approximately 50 litres of mustard gas declared by Iraq that was being kept under UNMOVIC seal at the Muthanna site."
"In my earlier briefings, I have noted that significant outstanding issues of substance were listed in two Security Council documents from early 1999 (S/1999/94 and S/1999/356) and should be well known to Iraq. I referred, as examples, to the issues of anthrax, the nerve agent VX and long-range missiles, and said that such issues "deserve to be taken seriously by Iraq rather than being brushed aside...".
"At the meeting in Baghdad on 8 and 9 February, the Iraqi side addressed some of the important outstanding disarmament issues and gave us a number of papers, e.g. regarding anthrax and growth material, the nerve agent VX and missile production"
"The Iraqi side suggested that the problem of verifying the quantities of anthrax and two VX-precursors, which had been declared unilaterally destroyed, might be tackled through certain technical and analytical methods."
www.theguardian.com/world/2003/feb/14/iraq.unitednations1
On a general note, if you provide another single, solitary ad-hominem attack laced with profanity you'll be blocked/muted. I've no time to waste with people who are so mind-bogglingly childish that they cannot disagree with someone without resorting to juvenile personal attack laced with foul and abusive language. I operate at a much higher intellectual level than that.
Oh, and voting-up your own comments is another sign of contemptible yet laughable immaturity.
Matthew Singh-Dosanjh People still defend the criminal war in Iraq, despite the fact that (According to serious unembedded journalists like Scahill, Cockburn and Dahr Jamail, as well as many pollsters from Thinkprogress and other outlets ) most Iraqis are worse off after the invasion and occupation? That's news to me. Continue seeking solace in your revisionist leader C.Hitchens and forget about the millions that have been displaced and the hundreds of thousands that have died, rather pointlessly in fact, given that Iraq has recently seen some of its worst violence in years. My condolences to you sir.
***** Utter dismantling of this Useful Idiot's argument. Kudos to you! He's simply a defender of a guy who acted as The Bush administration's amanuensis for the last decade of his life.
Elaborately constructed? My comment? What a feat, and you must've slaved over dissecting it. People en masse don't have objective perspectives on reality I think, I was just introducing the kinds of concepts elucidated by Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent and other, older left-leaning literature. I agree with you on right-wingers, but clearly civil society is rife with systemic ills and our political system is at their roots, an impasse to liberty and speech, intellectual involvement, etc.
ali don't know shit about balkan war. did he asked himself why germany's position was opposite to eu-s? because position of EU was: lets just watch the serbs kill all other zulus, and let's put embargo on arms, to prevent arming of any opposition to serbized yugoslav army
When people were dying they put their "observers", at tha time known as "ice-cream men", to the front, as if this changes anything.
so german move was only after killing was going on for 3 months, and vukovar was obliterated
Shit no voice... Why?..
He's a lying Stalinist too?
You, sir, are presumptuous who appears to know little as to what is happening in European towns from Malta to Norway and inbetween.
I know not where you live or whether have you ever been assaulted? Let me tell you that you cannot walk in many neighbourhoods in London without being verbally abused & even physically assaulted. I have seen it happened in broad day light.
I am not a hatemonger. I accept what my eyes see.
Many of European cities are powder kegs in the waiting.
It will happen.