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Robert Schwierkus
Robert Schwierkus@RDisarray·
This has got to be one of the most absurd books I ever came across when it comes to international politics after the First Cold War. And I came across some of them. It's core thesis apparently resembles the nonsense Marco Rubio tried to sell the world at the recent MSC.
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Robert Schwierkus
Robert Schwierkus@RDisarray·
@chibuikeobi19 It's obscene. These people are trying to sell the idea, that the West was simply too benevolent and naive in its approach with the rest of the world.
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chibuike obi
chibuike obi@chibuikeobi19·
@RDisarray I suppose it's encouraging that fewer people are buying their bs hence their increased stridency. As a middling chess player immoderately awed by chess grandmasters, I wonder how the brain of Kasparov could have become so broken.
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Robert Schwierkus
Robert Schwierkus@RDisarray·
@chibuikeobi19 Outside of the political West, I have no doubt that their narrative is increasingly weak. On the inside it's another matter though. Regarding Kasparov I'm unsure. He's one of those Russian exiles in the West who hate Putin's guts. Maybe he's become an intelligence asset.
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chibuike obi
chibuike obi@chibuikeobi19·
@RDisarray x.com/i/status/20326… It was tweets like this that made me think that even in the West, more people were seeing through their narrative but you may be right. A prominent hack complained that Trump's boorish bluntness was undermining their narrative so post-Trump may restore it.
Prof Francois Balloux@BallouxFrancois

For my entire life, I believed in the values of the West, the enlightenment, democracy and human rights, and I feel so disappointed right now.

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Robert Schwierkus
Robert Schwierkus@RDisarray·
@chibuikeobi19 My experience is, that a lot of people are either incapable or unwilling to see through it. On the one hand, it's easier to believe the propaganda. On the other, it feels better, because it's quite painful for people to accept that their worldview is based on logical fallacies.
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chibuike obi
chibuike obi@chibuikeobi19·
@RDisarray My experience too. In Nigeria, the people least willing to change their worldview about the West are the educated ones who have always looked up to the West. . One can almost see their psychic pain as they stubbornly reject the only logical interpretation of current events.
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Robert Schwierkus
Robert Schwierkus@RDisarray·
@chibuikeobi19 This is another and equally fascinating phenomenon. Have most of those people been educated in the West, or does your domestic academy also produce such pro-Western attitudes?
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chibuike obi
chibuike obi@chibuikeobi19·
@RDisarray The domestic academy was built by the UK/US and so is overwhelmingly pro-Western. The exception is Muslim-majority Northern Nigeria where the UK deliberately prevented missionary education to help the feudal aristocratic Muslim class they co-opted as compradors rule both the
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chibuike obi
chibuike obi@chibuikeobi19·
@RDisarray region & the country. So a Nigerian, whether educated locally or abroad, is pro-Western except for those in Northern Nigeria who run to the Osama Bin Laden-type, anti-Western and fanatically Wahhabist. Two exemplars of this type are the Underwear Bomber, Abdulmutallab, and a
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chibuike obi
chibuike obi@chibuikeobi19·
@RDisarray communications minister in the last presidential administration. Generally though, the leaders of this type are like Saudi Arabian and UAE rulers who manipulate their educated and uneducated followers. The pro-Western Nigerians educated in the West before the '70s experienced
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chibuike obi
chibuike obi@chibuikeobi19·
@RDisarray enough racism to temper their often embarrassing idealization of the West. But from the 80s, the weaponization of identity politics by the Western center-left and the extinction of the left from the domestic academy as a result of brain drain and USSR collapse made those
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chibuike obi
chibuike obi@chibuikeobi19·
@RDisarray Nigerians educated either locally or abroad to strongly identify with the West. For e.g., the current crop of lawyer and journalist-activists in their 30s have courageously endured brutalization by Nigeria's kleptomaniac rulers. Problem is that these activists look up to the West
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chibuike obi
chibuike obi@chibuikeobi19·
@RDisarray as the ideal to which Nigerians and their rulers must follow. So their entire activism and opposition is predicated on unfavourably contrasting corrupt Nigerian rulers to principled Western rulers. That's why asking them to change their beliefs causes such psychic pain.
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Robert Schwierkus
Robert Schwierkus@RDisarray·
@chibuikeobi19 I see. A situation which also doesn't sound easy to overcome. How are Nigerians conceiving of the way Ibrahim Traoré is acting toward the West?
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chibuike obi
chibuike obi@chibuikeobi19·
@RDisarray Much like what you would expect. The pro-Western Nigerians vilify him as a wannabe Russian and Chinese-style despot blaming Western imperialism for his own errors while the anti-West extremist Nigerian Muslims are for him even though, like Butch Ware, they buy Western propaganda
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chibuike obi
chibuike obi@chibuikeobi19·
@RDisarray on China. Ofc, this is not to say that only extremist Nigerian Muslims are anti-West. As I said earlier, fewer people are buying the narrative of Western imperialism apologists and this includes educated Nigerians who, pre-Oct 7th 2023, at the worst took the West as flawed but
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chibuike obi
chibuike obi@chibuikeobi19·
@RDisarray well-intentioned actors. In fact, most of them had gone so far as to believe any charlatan in Nigeria claiming to be anti-Western imperialism. Nigeria is a country where the southern part wants to be more white Christians than the Whites and the northern part more Arab Muslim
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chibuike obi
chibuike obi@chibuikeobi19·
@RDisarray than the Arabs. Ofc, the reality is more complex but that's the essential picture. Ironically, the only time Nigerians are willing to rebel against their masters is when they are liberalizing. E.g, the Anglican primate of Nigeria rebelled against Canterbury on gay ordination
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chibuike obi
chibuike obi@chibuikeobi19·
@RDisarray while the extremist Muslims in Northern Nigeria destroy the properties of Christian and pagan alcohol businesses the more the Gulf monarchies are liberalizing their alcohol laws. Unfortunately, there are no Nigerian Michael Parentis or Perry Andersons to help guide Nigerians
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chibuike obi
chibuike obi@chibuikeobi19·
@RDisarray awakening Nigerians to the reality of Western imperialism. And how could there be when the Nigerian identity is meaningless bc it was never rationally articulated and debated. The first post-independence Nigerian ruler was a self-confessed comprador and yet taken seriously as a
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chibuike obi
chibuike obi@chibuikeobi19·
@RDisarray nationalist. His other two main opposition contemporaries were Christians who for all their anti-colonialist bluster were essentially Anglophiles. The Nigerian left has always been class-reductionists primarily concerned with demonstrating their mastery of abstruse Marxist theory
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chibuike obi
chibuike obi@chibuikeobi19·
@RDisarray These screenshots are from a LRB article by the Nigerian-British writer Adewale Maja-Pearce. Perhaps, bc of his British half, he's one of the few who doesn't feel the need to justify himself before a Western audience like virtually all Nigerians of whatever ideological stripe.
chibuike obi tweet mediachibuike obi tweet media
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Robert Schwierkus
Robert Schwierkus@RDisarray·
@chibuikeobi19 Thank you for taking the time to respond that explicitly. Actually I didn't expect a situation like that in a country like Nigeria. Isn't it due to be a dominant force within Africa? Honestly? Your general knowledge appears impressive to me. Why not try yourself to become a
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