Thread by @sjmmcd

It's a sad commentary on the state of political discourse that comments like this are generally still acceptable. This tortured reasoning is based on debunked, phony science and bad history, and contributes to accelerating our march toward mass death and destruction

Just the phrasing that some places are poor "due to the fact that some countries achieved growth and others not" is steeped in a propagandistic misunderstanding of history that covers up atrocities, but also a deeply unsettling interpretation of what growth means

This reasoning suggests that by some random natural accident, some places "achieved growth" and others didn't, and the only solution is for more countries to "achieve growth". There are so many problems with this, like

1) Those countries that "achieved growth" did so by stealing resources from the countries that didn't "achieve growth"
2) GDP growth since the invention of GDP and the modern definition of "growth" has been inextricably tied to (plundered) resource throughput and fossil fuels

Both of these things are rushing civilization toward a global and possibly permanent collapse scenario, and the idea that any countries will be able to decouple their growth from these things is a fantasy eeb.org/decoupling-deb…

The only thing growth fetishism achieves is to justify the continued hoarding of concentrated wealth, continued despoliation of ecologies, and continued reproduction of extractive relationships

Also it's extremely insidious to be using justice language, as the original tweet does, to justify the continuation of processes that have resulted in some of history's greatest injustices

Somebody's afraid of the facts