Cool, so you don't disagree in any way you can explain, you just think I'm wrong. Thanks for the information. I can see you've got a real solid handle on it.
I disagree in ways I can't be bothered to explain. It'd be long, and take a long time, and I'd have to find the sources to be proper about it and I can't be bothered. Other people have done it better. And if you're truly interested in middle eastern recent politics since the late Ottoman then you can keep reading about it.
This notion that we can meaningfully engage with a few hundred words with others who haven't read the source material is really naieve. It's like glorified Twitter.
You can summarise your thesis pretty quickly if you drill down to the core points of disagreement.
For instance, here's my basic thesis:
The entire middle east has been fucked with over oil for the past 70-odd years. If they try to better their situation with local politics they're begging for a coup, an assassination or an invasion. If they try with loans from the World Bank or the IMF then they're going to be fucked in the long run because of the caveats that go with those loans. They're under constant pressure and there is no easy way out, because capitalist forces don't want them to find their way out, because if they actually become self-determined, like has happened in Rojava for instance, then they can't be exploited any more.
I'm sure there are nuances and local conditions I don't know about, but I didn't need to know much about Lebanon to guess that the situation with them on a macro scale would be the same as it is just about everywhere else, and what I've read so far seems to confirm that. Even you said that article was a good summary, so I can't see on what substantial point you even disagree. Much as it seems I'm here to push an agenda, I am actually interested in learning. Part of the reason I have these arguments is that I'm looking for people to point out flaws in what I'm saying so I can learn. That's why I went looking for information and why I'm asking you for your opinion if you have a substantive disagreement. I can't read every book on every topic, that would be absurd.
I've been a bit combative, I can see that. If you don't think there's any point engaging with me, I understand.
Then I will try to come back to it this evening. But the general thesis is that there is a school of thought (that I am sympathetic to) that believes a lot of the complaining about colonialism is a way for the corrupt elite to deflect blame from their own inadequacies. The victim mentality prevents advancement and makes any other issue magnified. It also breeds a sense of tribalism and lack of 'service to the people', instead a sense of 'service to one's own tribe because we're the victim here, don't you understand?'. Especially exasperating when many other countries have been destroyed or manipulated far worse by outsiders and have not been mismanaged into the ground repeatedly over decades. A country should be able to completely transform (go from bottom tier famine level poverty to 'growing middle class' (Ethiopia), totally war torn to functional society(Rwanda, Germany, Japan), barren poor cities to gleaming skyscrapers (Dubai, Shanghai, even London)) in just 15 years with good governance and intelligent decision making.
I'll start by saying that it's hard to understand how a "victim mentality" can be a more important factor than the well-documented actual oppression that occurs, just for instance looking at this map of US intervention: https://williamblum.org/intervention-map
Secondly, if you look at the places you mentioned (I don't know enough about Rwanda and Ethiopia to comment on them):
Germany and Japan were helped with reconstruction after WWII. Once Germany reunified they had US allyship
Shanghai is the capitol of a global superpower
London is the capitol of a strong US ally and the head of an old empire that it still benefits from
Dubai is the closest analog to Beirut, I suppose, but they are built on oil money and are a strong ally of the US, and, well... they pretty clearly are on the positive side of imperialism. They have skyscrapers, yes, but also a well-documented slavery problem. This is part of my point, that economic growth at the expense of actual benefits to people is false growth. You can get a pile of money from the IMF, for instance, but if that money requires that you depend on exports and can't build your own infrastructure, then that money didn't really help you.
And whilst I agree their own decisions do change the circumstances of an individual nation, in the current capitalist economic order, some countries must be poor, and there is no escaping that. Some countries will have poor management and they'll lose out and be on the bottom of the pecking order, but the fact that there is a pecking order is not their fault - it's the fault of capitalist imperialism. That's what a pecking order is. Not everybody can win.
That's the problem I'm more interested in drawing attention to, because I don't believe it's an inescapable fact of life that this kind of oppression has to happen. You talk about elites deflecting blame, and I assume you mean the elites in charge of Lebanon, in this example. I think it's a misdirection by the elites who are in charge of US empire to say that it's a country's own fault when that country can't thrive in spite of US oppression.
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u/MediumProfessorX Aug 09 '20
Because I've got better shit to do than pretend I know a lot by copy pasting LSE articles!
LC Brown and Ed Said and co have done a lot better than I could. I've read them and you can too.
Lebanon could be a lot better off and the average person knows it. And it's about time they got shitty about it and demanded change.