JohnRawls wrote:1) It is 2021, all of the countries had enough time to get their shit together and make a functioning state.
2) You just said that the West doesn't help much so I told you that the West donated the most in the world and now you are saying that the West is interfering. The West gives aid and donations almost for free compared to China providing them in the form of loans which then Chinese companies use to build the infrastructure.
3) You are just shifting the bar further and further. The West is not responsible for what is going on in Africa, Middle East, Central Asia or South America etc with some exceptions like Lybia, Iraq and Afganistan. That is it. You can say cry imperialism here and there but reality is that we are in 2021 and not 1850.
1) Europe and the US have yet to stop interfering.
2) This is a flat out falsehood - Western aid has significant strings attached, especially developmental loans through the World Bank or IMF. Furthermore, this entire discussion is within the context of 'is the Western system responsible for 20,000,000 preventable deaths from malnutrition alone'.
3) Stop ignoring the context of the criticism. I take specific issue with the idea that Mao is responsible for the systemic failures of the society he tried to create in China, while the West is absolved of the failures their own world order has produced.
Rugoz wrote:Silly. The West wasn't worse than any other empire in history. I don't remember the Russians, Ottomans or Chinese ever apologizing for their imperialism.
Again, this argument is within the context of: if we will say that communism as a system is a failure because of avoidable deaths during the administration of communists states, I can equally blame the West for the avoidable millions of deaths due to systemic failure annually under its global leadership, especially recognizing that globalization is central to the Western liberal democratic ideology.
In this message, JohnRawls made the that famines/malnutrition in the Western led world is not due to systemic failure, but individual state failures. This is incorrect. It absolutely is a systemic failure, and a failure which a 'rational self-interest is a virtue' liberal capitalist order, such as the one actively promoted by Western states,
cannot ever address. This world view promotes the idea of a global, interconnected society of independent and rational self-interested actors, whether states or individuals. This world view is also hegemonic - it refuses to tolerate dissent and isolates or undermines societies which reject it.
The failure is
systemic: it is not in the rational self-interest of Western powers to subsidize, freely, the development of societies in the Global South. They benefit from the disparity in a myriad of ways - environmentally (the entire world cannot sustainably survive at Western levels of consumption, and it wouldn't be in the self-interest of Western individuals or states to sacrifice their own quality of life); economically (consumer capitalism demands that there exist a permanent underclass of societies that can provide resources or manufacture goods as cheaply as possible); and politically (there are many more non-Westerners than Westerners; a equal world would see their political power/voice diminished). Because the system promotes the value of self-interest, and because resolving these avoidable deaths are both physically and economically possible - but not necessarily in the interest of the West - these failures are systemic. They are "baked into" the system itself.
The West is also hegemonic. Attempts by states or individuals to operate outside the system are met with outright hostility, to this day. The Western-led world order actively seeks to maintain the totality of its control, being unwilling to go back to a pre-1991 era of multipolarity, and in doing so, by actively perpetuating an unjust and unequal and
totalitarian* system, it becomes morally responsible for the outcomes it creates on a global scale. As long as Western states continue to interfere (economically, politically, and on occasion militarily) in the Global South to promote this worldview - the concept of a global liberal and capitalist community led by a hegemony of the United States and other Western states - then they are, in part at least, morally responsible for these systemic failures.
*Totalitarianism (n) is a form of governing order that permits no individual freedom and seeks to subordinate all aspects of individual life; in this example individual is referring to states rather than people, and the order referring the global hegemonic Western led order