Exposing The Lies of the 20th Century | Aaron Bastani Meets Tariq Ali

Quick Overview

Tariq Ali argues that the collapse of the Soviet Union did not lead to the end of American imperialism, contrary to popular belief, and attributes the subsequent decline in Western media openness and intellectual rigor to the end of the Cold War competition, which previously necessitated showcasing dissenting voices.

Key Points: Tariq Ali organized his first demonstration at age 14 or 15 against the US execution sentence for a black man named Jimmy Wilson stealing a dollar, facing an unsympathetic American Consul General Oswald Spankler. Ali notes that the Chinese revolution of 1949 and the Vietnamese resistance against the US heavily influenced political thought in South Asia, citing an uncle naming his son Ho Chi Minh after the fall of Dien Bien Phu. The defeat of Tsarist Russia by Japan in 1905 triggered the 1905 revolution, which Lenin welcomed as weakening Tsarism considerably, demonstrating the impact of non-European victories. Ali asserts that the Second World War involved three different wars: the Japanese conflict against China starting in 1937, the Japanese defeat of the British at Singapore, and the main European conflict. The post-Cold War assumption that American imperialism would end was false; Ali warned friends that American imperial interests would receive an enormous boost after destroying their enemy, the Soviet Union. Ali pinpoints the collapse of the Soviet Union as the end of the most innovative period of British television, like Channel 4, because the West no longer needed to demonstrate superiority by permitting dissenting voices. Senior BBC staff told Ali they received pressure from Alistair Campbell and the Blair government, and one Director General, Greg Dyke, admitted Downing Street complained about too many anti-war voices on Question Time, leading them to hire pro-war Kurds to fill the audience.

Context: The conversation is an interview between Aaron Bastani and Tariq Ali, a historian, author, and co-founder of the left-wing publisher Verso and the New Left Review. Ali, born in British India in 1943, discusses his early political awakening shaped by his radical communist parents in Pakistan and key historical events like the Chinese Revolution and the US treatment of African Americans. The discussion centers on historical memory, the nature of American imperialism post-Cold War, and the decline of intellectual dissent in Western media.