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8 Feb, 8 tweets, 3 min read
I wrote this piece back in December, but the plea for consistency was strictly rhetorical: I never expected the NYT and kindred spirits to learn any lessons from Trump. Now they're at it again in their Trumpian reporting on Ecuador's election. 1/

jacobinmag.com/2020/12/trump-…
The fact that Latin American left-wing politicians were "accused of corruption and authoritarian overreach" tells us nothing; Biden and the Democrats have been accused of the same by Trump and the Capitol Hill mob. The question is whether those charges have any substance. 2/ Image
Brazil's PT leaders were "accused of corruption" by a rabidly partisan magistrate who went on to take a cabinet post under Bolsonaro after paving the way for his electoral triumph. 3/

jacobinmag.com/2020/08/lava-j…
Morales and the MAS were "accused of authoritarian overreach" by unpopular right-wing politicians who could never have won a free election, and who proceeded to govern by force and fraud for a year before the Bolivian people sent them packing. 4/

jacobinmag.com/2020/10/evo-mo…
The clearest case of "fraud" in Ecuadorian politics came from Lenin Moreno, who ran for election promising to continue with Rafael Correa's policy agenda, then governed as a hard-line conservative. 5/

jacobinmag.com/2019/10/ecuado…
Predictably, the NYT's story presents Moreno as a kind of statesman-like hero for lying to the people of his country while seeking their votes, and even as a champion of democratic values. 6/ Image
In reality, it was Moreno who posed a clear threat to democracy with his lawfare campaigns against his former allies and his violent clampdown on protests. 7/

jacobinmag.com/2020/09/equado…
A lot could happen between now and the run-off, but for now it looks as if the authoritarian tactics of Moreno and his backers have suffered a setback. As in Bolivia, the liberal-centrist media have been on the wrong side of the barricades. 8/

nytimes.com/2021/02/07/wor…

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Daniel Finn Profile picture
19 Dec 20
This Rachel Shabi article is the first proper attempt, I believe, to articulate in detail a certain line (“Corbyn shouldn’t have been suspended, but his statement on the EHRC report was still wrong”). So it’s worth looking at properly. 1/
Shabi takes the EHRC and its report entirely at face value: a “sobering verdict”, no less. This is not the first time she’s done this: she also uncritically endorsed the claims made in the BBC’s Panorama documentary in July 2019. 2/
She then scolded the Labour leadership for stating that the central claims made in that documentary were demonstrably untrue and indeed the opposite of the truth, something that has become even more obvious since. 3/
Read 21 tweets
Daniel Finn Profile picture
15 Dec 20
I have no issue with people disliking the Canary—it's never been my cup of tea, either. But I've never seen any coherent argument to explain why left figures should no-platform it while still engaging with Britain's commercial newspapers, whose record is incomparably worse.
Corbyn published this post-election piece in the Observer, for example, which not only supported the Iraq war, but ran a batch of fake stories about WMDs to sell it in advance (Nick Davies has a great account of how that happened in Flat Earth News).

theguardian.com/politics/2019/…
If you put together all the sins of the Canary since it first appeared, it wouldn't come close to matching the harmful impact of those Observer stories on Iraq. Should Corbyn have boycotted them, too?

(They stitched him up with the headline, but that's another story)
Read 5 tweets
Daniel Finn Profile picture
10 Dec 20
I think this passage, from Open Labour's Euston 2.0 pamphlet, should kill off the "walk and chew gum" formula once and for all. It's a perfect example of mealy-mouthed equivocation about the complicity of one's own state in war crimes, dressed up as high principle. 1/
"The character of the Saudi intervention" (an aggressive war deliberately targeting civilians) isn't the only thing at stake here. The direct participation of British forces in that war makes it a moral imperative to oppose such complicity. 2/

theguardian.com/world/2019/jun…
In 2016, about 100 Labour MPs refused to support a motion calling for an end to Britain's direct participation in the Saudi war on Yemen. Some, like John "Mainstream" Woodcock, openly flaunted their support for that war. 3/

theguardian.com/politics/2016/…
Read 5 tweets
Daniel Finn Profile picture
8 Dec 20
Love to be lectured about hard-headed thinking from people whose view of geopolitics has all the flinty realism of a letter to Santa Claus. One of the authors helped workshop the "talking about capitalism is antisemitic" into British media discourse, so no surprise there.
"The hard left, which condemns the 'West' and condones the 'rest' regardless of circumstances"—I would say "citation needed", but that's a bit like asking for more peer-reviewed articles in the footnotes of a Harry Potter book. It would be a category error.
Bold move to stress the unquestionably positive results of hypothetical "humanitarian interventions" in the Middle East after 2011 without so much as mentioning the word "Libya".
Read 5 tweets
Daniel Finn Profile picture
30 Nov 20
Unfortunately, this article evades the main issues at stake. It tacitly urges the left to revert to a failed strategy of unwarranted concessions and apologies that just added fuel to the fire, instead of challenging the false narrative around “Labour antisemitism” directly. 1/
Corbyn’s statement was right in every sense: empirically, politically, morally. The idea that basic questions of truth and justice should be subordinated to expediency is unacceptable. That’s part of what allowed this false narrative to take hold in the first place. 2/
A poll in July 2019 showed the vast majority of Labour members agreed with Corbyn’s thoughtful, measured perspective (or went further still). It’s fair to wonder if all those expressing negative views about his statement today even know exactly what he said. 3/
Read 10 tweets
Daniel Finn Profile picture
25 Nov 20
The headline on this HP article about John McDonnell's interview is tendentious, but this verbatim passage is a surrender to irrationality. The nature and extent of antisemitism in the Labour Party under Corbyn *is* the issue—it always has been.

huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/john-mcd…
The media narrative claimed that there was a dramatic increase in antisemitism under Corbyn's leadership, to the point that it became endemic in the party, and that this upsurge was actively encouraged by the Labour leadership. That narrative was provably false in every respect.
McDonnell obviously doesn't think that he was part of a project that posed an "existential threat to Jewish life in Britain". He should say so bluntly & unambiguously instead of allowing this false narrative to stand by default. "Stay and fight" has to involve actually fighting.
Read 4 tweets

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