Ethan Young is a moderator of the fabulous website Portside. In this interview, the second of two parts, we continue our prior conversation about the Sputnik Left and Young offers thoughts on how today’s Left can move out of its current freakish cul-de-sac of sectarian idiocy.
Young and I sometimes disagree on tactics, but we share a fundamental philosophical aversion to the Sputnik Left’s de facto notion of anti-imperialism, which boils down to the false tautology that all targets of American imperialism are hunky dory. Furthermore, the governments of China, Iran, Syria, Venezuela and North Korea are all wildly different from one another. Each respective country has mountains of problems.
Pretending that we are back in the Cold War and that they all have the same economy and governing system, as was the case with the countries of the Soviet Union’s Warsaw Pact, is delusional. The world is far more complicated than it was back then and the problems that we now confront, among them climate change and the unbridled rampage of globalized capitalism, are far larger and difficult to unravel than the Cold War era challenges.
So here you go with the conclusion of my interview with Young, and his brutal dissection of RT, The Grayzone and the rest of the Sputnik Left.
Episode 11: Ethan Young (Pt. 2)
