When referring to the events happening in Palestine and Ukraine, the Western bourgeoise media—that is, the news and information apparatus that operates as an extended arm of the ruling classes—constantly makes sure to remind its audiences that what is happening in these regions of the world is a fight to protect European “liberal and democratic” values.

We are told that Ukraine wants to join the European Union and become a liberal democracy, against the wishes of “dictatorial” Russia because the latter “has imperial ambitions over Ukraine, if not Europe as a whole”. As for "Israel", the West used to indulge the Zionist entity, believing it must be defended at all costs because it already embodies “liberal democratic values”. After all, "Israel" is considered by the West as the only “liberal democratic country” in a region of “crazy Muslim and Arab dictators”, according to Western discourse. Every once in a while, this propagandistic tirade is adopted to frame the struggle that the people of Taiwan are allegedly waging against another dictatorship, one with Communist characteristics, the so-called People’s Republic of China.

This premise is important for our readers because it aims to demonstrate that the narrative continuously presented by Euro-American ruling classes and their media agents revolves around two key concepts: liberalism and democracy, sometimes combined as liberal democracy.

However, the world has probably gotten used to the West parroting these two words over and over, so much that our readers might have forgotten their meaning, and how these two concepts emerged historically. That is, we have forgotten the historical facts and struggles that cumulatively determined the rise of liberalism. To put it interrogatively, if the West vaunts itself as being a ‘liberal’ democracy, what is liberalism? How does liberalism emerge? Can Europe or the US liberal be considered societies? The short answer is no. The West is a land of fanatics, whose entire ideological and material wealth is built on genocide, slavery, and plundering of the world’s majority.

Genocide and Slavery: The Roots of Western Freedom

As an intellectual doctrine, liberalism refers to the idea of negative freedom, which is predicated on the inviolable affirmation of individual freedom under a specific mode of social and economic reproduction, more commonly known as capitalism. Under liberalism, so we are told, individuals should be free to marry whoever they want, to pursue business as much as they wish, and as they pursue their right to individual freedom, the State should step aside, and not interfere. However, a major contradiction exists between what liberalism claims to embody on an abstract level, and the socio-political praxis from which this idea emerged and has been consolidated. More simply, while liberalism claims to uphold the universal freedom of everyone, since its inception it was the freedom exclusively reserved to a well-defined community of people. 

In a book titled A Counter History of Liberalism, the Italian philosopher Domenico Losurdo goes to the core of this issue. By perusing the work of the most influential thinkers of liberalism, i.e. John Locke, Alexis de Tocqueville, Isaiah Berlin, Losurdo traces how the intellectual articulation of liberalism did not cohere with its political praxis. Liberal freedom was in fact a privilege reserved to a white supremacist circle of people in the context of Britain and the stillborn United States of America.

There were two major contradictions, or what Losurdo refers to as clauses of exclusion, that reveal how liberalism failed to reconcile its ideological claims vis-à-vis the political praxis from which it emerged. These two clauses entailed: First, the genocidal killing of the natives; and second, the slavery of Black Africans. In other words, liberalism was no more than an empty claim for the world majority, whose lives remained under the bloody grip of colonial clobbering and killing. The Native Indians were clearly excluded from "modern" or "negative" freedom and were instead condemned to expropriation and deportation or outright killing. The slaves and the theoretically free blacks were still subjected to terrorist violence in the middle of the twentieth century, locked up in workhouses or lynched.

Even the very "modern" and "negative" freedom of slave owners, or the ruling class in general, was subjected to heavy limitations, which even in the mid-twentieth century was still required to respect the ban on miscegenation, a ban on interracial sexual and marital relationships. 

Liberalism, in other words, regulated the lives of the powerful under colonialism, while genocide and slavery were constitutive of this ideological and political movement. Although liberalism raised the question of the limitation of power within the community of free people (the white people), this freedom went hand in hand with the imposition of absolute power over the excluded, which was the enslavement of blacks and the annihilation of the Native Americans. The freedom and the rights that a very closed community had gained were obtained through the material, social, and cultural annihilation of the Native Americans and Africans.

And so, once we understand that liberalism developed as an ideology of war and exploitation, how are we to rethink these statements from the bourgeoise media that constantly tells us that "Israel" and Ukraine must be supported in defense of liberal values?

Our Freedom, Their Defeat

The answer lies in understanding the historical and socio-political conditions that led to the abolition of slavery. Slavery was overcome—to the extent that it was really abolished—not by a spontaneous endogenous process within liberalism. Liberalism did not reform itself. Rather these conditions primarily came about in the wake of the challenges represented by the gigantic struggles for emancipation and recognition developed by the excluded people. It was the Haitian anti-colonial revolution in 1791 that abolished slavery, it was the October Revolution in 1917 that allowed a redistribution of wealth to the people, as much as it was the 1979 Revolution in Iran that kicked the imperialists out of the country. 

In other words, armed resistance, communism, and the struggle for national liberation were the engine of history that spearheaded change, forcing the imperialists to accommodate their demands. The so-called liberal world was forced to accept those material victories, often gained through feisty guerrilla battles, plane hijackings, and the expulsion of foreign forces from indigenous land.

Yet, every single time these socio-political formations rose up, they were always accused and demonized. Most importantly, what one must remember is that the imperialists did all they could to suppress these movements, and this is where we come to understand that liberalism and fascism are two sides of the same coin. The Western ruling classes fought Communism in Europe by establishing a comfortable alliance between liberalism and Nazism. In fact, the Nazis were inspired by the US segregation laws to design their supremacist project. For them, the US law had innovatively crafted racism into law, and so they were really inspired by decrees that restricted immigration to the free white person or the ideas of forced emigration of Black people, which Lincoln and Jefferson had put forward.

On the other hand, the liberals ended up recruiting the Nazis to fight Communism, i.e., through Operation Gladio, and they cozied up with the most reactionary forces in the region of West Asia (Zionists and Wahabis) to make sure that their interests were preserved. 

Hence, circling back to our initial question, the nature of these wars is simple. This is a fight between the majority of people’s freedom vis-à-vis the privileges that a white minority and the ruling segments of the South of the world hold. This is a fight against those fanatics who are ready to hop on a Zionist or Banderite train under the banner of freedom. Their vision of freedom is one that requires the majority of the world to be exploited. But the Palestinians, and so the Nigeriens or the Russians, are repeating resistance history once again. They are fighting back against this material and ideological project of war and world domination. The only difference, this time, is that liberalism is starting to collapse.