The Fire These Times 58/ Democracy, Counterrevolution and the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperialism (with Rohini Hensman)
Today we’ll be talking to Rohini Hensman.
She is an India-based Sri Lankan labor activist and feminist and an independent scholar whose book “Indefensible: Democracy, Counterrevolution, and the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperialism” I’ve reviewed some years ago, and which will be the topic of our conversation today.
In that book, she argues that the apparent anti-imperialism of many self-professed socialists amounts to explicit or implicit support for totalitarianism, fascism, Islamist theocracy and, ironically enough, imperialism.
She goes through the examples of Syria, Iran, Iraq, Bosnia, Russia and Ukraine.
This has been a concern of mind for a few years now and I wanted to take this opportunity to bring it to a wider audience, so I invited Rohini on to explore how such a supposedly noble political position – anti-imperialism – can be so easily corrupted.
You don’t have to identify with any -ism to find this topic informative. You just need to be someone who opposes authoritarian politics.
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Music by Tarabeat.
Photo taken from ‘The Syrian People Know Their Way’