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Short answer: In the Roman sense, a freedom to exploit and subjugate others.
People like Losordo have pointed out the “dual birth” of Slavery/Colonialism with Liberalism/Democracy. I would argue it’s not even a contradictory dual birth, they are one and the same. Like you said, it’s not just some oversight that the American constitution claims to be a huge protection of human rights while also explicitly outlining the right to own slaves. It’s the point.
Slave owners saw in America an emancipation, a step into freedom, no more pesky British bureaucrats to hold us back from our full potential. Unlimited massacres, unlimited theft, unlimited slavery is the high ideal that was aimed for. For them, America was a massive democratic experiment precisely because it was a massive slavery system. Because, not in spite of.
These are people who have no conception of equality. They believe themselves inherently superior, and they are only truly free if they are allowed to subjugate and dominate and exploit to their hearts content - but only against the rightfully designated targets. Don’t offend other white gentlemen.
It’s this one
- Liberty (lemme do what I want, fuck you government)
- Equality (I refuse to recognise that there may be differences in the material and social conditions into which we are born, and assume that we are all starting with a clean slate, so anything that happens after birth must be attributable to moral character and hard work i.e. bootstrap git gud nub)
- Fraternity (it’s a big boys’ club and you ain’t in it)
Constitutional Calvinism
In between the joke answers here that are nonetheless very accurate, it’s international white hegemony as mediated through a specific set of property rights.
If an aristocrat in, like, England loses property overseas due to a revolution, they can claim compensation and that compensation can be inherited. If an aristocrat in Vietnam loses property, the only way they can be compensated is by hitching their wagon to “The West”, and their claims are not taken seriously if the way they lose property is by opposing “The West”.
This isn’t even private property as a universal, just private property as interpreted by a pedigree of white property (and particularly, the white ruling class. While being white and working class does have its privileges, my god will The West not give a shit about your property damages or your life if you oppose “Western Values”)
If you do not value this, you do not value “Western Values.”
(partially formed essay pitch)
GOOD comment
What they say:
Democracy, Freedom, Prosperity, Hard Work, International Law
What they mean:
Fascism, Sanctions, oligarchy, war, unilateral hegemony, colonialism
They are champions of human rights. Too bad they don’t consider you human.
Pretending to have morals and care about human rights and marginalised peoples whenever those groups can be used to justify imperialist foreign interests.
Forgetting about all of the above whenever human rights or marginalised peoples get in the way of capitalist interests.
“Western Values” is just code for “Whatever helps the interests of our empire and by extension the pockets of the ruling class of it.”
Imperialism.
Maybe a vague sense of superiority
The Devil saw me with my head down and thought he’d won… Until I said Amen!!
Hog: Cranked
Pants: Shid
Debbie: Left
Libs: Owned
Gob: Blessed
Hawk: Tuah
WESTERN values:Be rootin’
Be tootin’
But most of all, be kind.
melted cheese
Ahem.
Melted American cheese
White supremacy. Calvinism. Main character syndrome. Greed.
Trying to find out on my own, but I can’t. I’d seriously love to know too!Hey I saw this comment yesterday but was too tired after posting to look for it; I made a big effort-thread above https://hexbear.net/comment/5475137 if you didn’t see it, where I posted a bunch of excerpts from Edward Said and Frantz Fanon, linking to the books (which I recommend, required reading imo) that might hem in some of your thinking along the aspects you’re looking for. It’s an insanely complex topic which grew out of and continues evolving in a universe of dialectical history and relations with all that is deemed “not Western” — as well as the dialectical history and relations within and between-these-worlds, of the evolving definition of what is deemed such, and how that has been and is determined; and the “values” and “attitudes” and the constantly redisposed and redefined definitions that are produced in the respective outcomes and perspectives in and regarding the antagonistic contradictions between “the superior and familiar Us” and “the exotic and inferior Other” and the relations and struggle between them on its various fronts and levels.
What is “not-West” defines what “is West” just as much as what the hegemony of “the West” itself defines as “not-West;” and the “not-West” is relied upon as necessary for “the West” to be itself as a construct," with the power imbalance between “the West” and “the Other” defining the starting and primary direction of the dialectic. Because in reality the world is a globe and everyone is both “east” and “west” of each other (and also south and north!). The same as how in the colonial relationship the colonizer only exists because there is a colonized and vice versa; and just as in the invention of racial categories, for which there is no material basis beyond what became self-organized as an invented practical reality and super-structural body of theory and practice in white supremacy from and out of the material history and power relations which created it — the artificial construct of “whiteness” only exists in contrast to what is and has been made into the construct of “blackness.”
Just as there is in reality no biological basis for race; there is no singular world of objectively defined “Western values” any more than there is a unified culture and consensus in all of Asia and Africa to make an “Eastern values” against which “the West” can be defined. In fact to make a “the West” is to force a categorization and definition on all fronts; from geographical to cultural and religious, to social and economic, to political and military, to the scientific and historiographical; of “the East” and “Eastern values,” upon and regardless of those people and their lives, cultures, histories, beliefs, attitudes, etc. who live and have lived in “the East” — which in the historical dynamic of power and lack of consent to this categorization inherently suboordinates “the East” to "the West in a interdependent-and-opposing dialectical relationship; which is all what happened in history to make what we know as “the West” and “the East” as a living evolving social phenomenon. linked again https://hexbear.net/comment/5475137
white
“Work sets you free”
