In a statement, Access Now says it was “told that diplomats from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) were putting pressure on the Government of Zambia because Taiwanese civil society participants were planning to join us in person.”
In a statement, Access Now says it was “told that diplomats from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) were putting pressure on the Government of Zambia because Taiwanese civil society participants were planning to join us in person.”
You correctly pointed out an example of soft power and how it could be used for evil proposes. USAID also used soft power to the same ends. Therefore Trump did something positive by cutting it down.
This is such a privileged and ghoulish way to justify the deaths caused by the removal of that aid.
Such as?
You’ll have to provide a better source than just indignation.
It’s not like he did it, or has any effect on it. Trump and Musk gutted USAID because they though foreign aid was woke, either not realizing that it was a key pillar of US soft power, or also thinking that soft power is woke. In the short term this will kill a lot of people, but in the long term, USAID, being a means by which the US kept control over the global south, caused more harm than good.
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Let me put it this way: if I were the president of the United States I would increase foreign aid rather than gutting it, and the aid would primarily be for development so that in the future, they would not be reliant on foreign aid. This was not the purpose of USAID, all the good that it did was just a byproduct of keeping the developing world as dependent resource extraction colonies.
Allow me a metaphor. If you give a man a fish, he’ll be fed for a day; if you teach a man to fish, he’ll be full for his whole life. Obviously the just thing would be to give him enough fish to eat until he’s learned to fish, and then teach him to fish. USAID was more like giving the man a bare-minimum amount of fish to keep him from dying, but the fish is dosed with little bit of fentanyl to keep him dependent and compliant while you steal his stuff.
USAID was a trojan horse. The supposedly benevolent acts were always a cover for undermining governments the US is hostile to. USAID had a literacy program in Afghanistan in the 80s that promoted violent jihad, in order to undermine the Soviets and the Soviet-aligned government. They used an HIV prevention workshop in Cuba to organize anti-communist dissidents.
The fact that the USAID cuts have already killed hundreds of thousands of people is testament to the amount of dependence the US had nurtured. They prop up right wing kleptocratic governments that do nothing for the people, which keeps wages low and resources cheap, and made up some of the shortfall with aid since people who are dead of starvation or disease can’t extract resources. This was a trap.
The current crop of right wingers are too stupid to understand this and thought it was just woke liberals giving stuff away for free to be woke. Out of what they thought was merely an act of selfish cruelty (what they refer to as “based”), they are actually undermining the American empire. The proximate effect of this is in the literal sense mass murder (and if you combine this with the fact that they nurtured dependence on aid and then abruptly cut it off, could be argued to be genocide) and it should be punished accordingly. The ultimate effect, however, will be the liberation of the third world.
One can use power to do good, depends on the person who yields it.
Edit: corrected spelling mistake thanks @Muehe@lemmy.ml
I think you mean *wields.
Although *yields would also make sense in this particular context. :D
Do you truly believe that the United States used its power for good more than otherwise? More than China?
No I believe it can be used for good. US and China has both done more bad than good.
…is his substitute really better though?