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Some thoughts:
She’s an extreme right, USA establishment person there to shill her book about how ‘the West is good, everybody else bad’
Some comrades will criticise Bastani for not giving her a harder time, but I don’t think that’s quite fair. Interviewing someone is not the same as debating her. It’s his job as an interviewer to let her talk, not ‘call out’ everything. Let her talk, she’ll hang herself with her own rope.
AND Bastani actually does pwn her in a humiliating way, timestamp 54:08-55:04, she is exposed as being wrong. (Basically she is claiming The Bad Guys don’t respect international law, and Bastani asks have the West not proven they do not either in Israël, and she is mentally defeated, resorts to just saying the word “nuance” again and again.)
Her criticisms of the West are right: they use shadow-banking in places like London to help kleptocrats from places like Russia. Bastani says that at 1:40 too. They’re missing an explicit class-analysis of course: the billionaires from non-Western countries are allied with the haute bourgeoisie from the West, and against, say, the working class of the West.
She might have a point about 3:30 that Russia-China-Iran-Venezuela share technology and help each other stay in poewr.
Wrong at 4:22 that Navalny was some sort of liberal democrat.
Her main point is articulated 12:25 to 13:21 and the hypocrisy is obvious. It’s that The Bad Guys don’t respect the rules-based international order, feel they can commit crimes around the world. The obvious hypocrisy is that Applebaum’s regime does the same: coups around the world, extraordinary rendition, all that stuff.
It’s his job as an interviewer to let her talk, not ‘call out’ everything.
I don’t agree with this at all, giving softball “interviews” to reactionaries is basically just giving them free PR.
Thanks for your perspective
Compare this interview to the Just Stop Oil interview or the George Galloway interview. I have plenty of criticisms of both but Anne Applebaum is on a different level entirely.
Bottom line: she comes out looking bad
I get that if you’re trying the be a serious media site it’s good to not let only people you agree with come onto your show, but when that viewpoint is just what’s repeated by liberal media ad naseum there’s no value in repeating it on your supposedly leftist website.
Everyone who’s interested in politics have heard applebaum’s western chauvinist viewpoints a thousand times because it’s what all the pro-capitalist media houses have been pushing forever. We already know this is what liberals believe. There’s zero value in repeating it to a left-wing audience other than being annoying and making it appear like more serious arguements than they actually are.
🍎💣
Historian Mark Tauger’s review of Applebaum’s book Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine:
The auto-generated subtitles so it’s searchable: https://pastebin.com/artTNANh
00:52:05.280 --> 00:52:13.160 the reasons I mean Israel is one of those I I don’t think Israel I don’t think the situation in the Middle East fits into the Paradigm of my book I mean
00:52:13.160 --> 00:52:19.119 you can see how the contest of ideas is playing out there but it’s it’s more
00:52:19.119 --> 00:52:25.359 it’s it’s a more complicated Nuance story it’s not like there’s good guys versus bad guys in that in that same
00:52:25.359 --> 00:52:31.839 sense there um but but but yes Israel is you know is at risk of becoming it’s
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
