Jason Hickel

"Neo-colonialism is the worst form of imperialism. For those who practice it, it means power without responsibility, and for those who suffer from it, it means exploitation without redress." --Kwame Nkrumah

Very similar to what they are currently doing to Venezuela, Cuba and Iran.

Pressure on Nkrumah ramped up after he published his book "Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism" in 1965, which openly criticized precisely those forces that ended up orchestrating his demise.

The US and UK began discussions about ousting Nkrumah in 1961, and set about suffocating the Ghanaian economy by cutting off international finance and driving down the price of Ghana's main export, cocoa, hoping to create internal tensions.

on the 24th of Feb, 1966, Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of independent Ghana and co-founder of the Non-Aligned Movement, was deposed in a coup backed by the US and UK. The coup was part of a coordinated effort to destroy socialist and Pan-Africanist movements on the continent.

Every single politician, editor, journalist and random poster on this site that tried to discredit the MoH death count as "too high" should be exposed and hounded out of polite society for running cover for genocidaires.

It is reasonable to assume this is a conservative estimate, as the further crippling of MoH capabilities during 2025 would have increased the distortion ratio.

That's 1.7058 times more than the 49,090 deaths reported by the MoH figures as of that date.

As of Feb 16, 2026, the MoH was reporting 72,063 deaths. If the same ratio holds, total deaths would be 122,925.

Here is the relevant data:

The Lancet study found 75,200 violent deaths, plus 8,540 indirect deaths in excess of projected mortality, for a total of 83,740 deaths as of January 5, 2025.

If that same ratio has continued to hold, it means total deaths will have reached 123,000. Truly apocalyptic violence.

Violent and non-violent death tolls for the Gaza conflict: new primary evidence from a population-representative field survey This first independent population survey of mortality in the Gaza Strip shows that violent deaths have substantially exceeded official figures whereas the demographic composition of casualties aligns ...

The new Lancet study on the genocide in Gaza finds that total deaths were 1.71 times higher than reported by the Gaza Ministry of Health as of January 2025.

www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

All this in the name of "democracy" and "freedom". The absurdity is so extreme you couldn't make it up if you tried.

And they want to do an illegal invasion in order to crush Iran's sovereignty and install the son of the previous dictator as a literal monarch, who will run the country as a playground for US capitalists.

Now the US is imposing sanctions that are *explicitly* designed to starve and immiserate ordinary people.

Remember, the US orchestrated a coup against Iran's democratic Prime Minister in 1953, and propped up a dictator who ruled as a stooge of the US and brutally repressed political dissent for the next 26 years. That's how much they care about democracy and political freedom in Iran.

The US does not care about the people of Iran. It does not care about democracy, or political freedom, or human rights, at all. Zero. It is pure propaganda.

The vast majority of US Americans oppose a war of aggression against Iran. If your ruling class chooses to perpetrate an illegal invasion, and in the face of this kind of opposition, you don’t live in a democracy. It’s really as simple as that.

Rubio is now dispensing with the propaganda, and in the process reveals the reality... that the West is doubling down on imperialism, once again with openly fascist ideology, and they recognize the only real force that has ever held them in check: socialist and anti-colonial movements.

The fact that the US represented itself this way - through an aggressive propaganda strategy - is testament to the popularity and prestige that socialism held.

Of course, this was a lie: the US was created through violent colonization, complete with fascist ideology (which they leveraged to justify ethnic cleansing, genocide, mass enslavement and apartheid).

Socialism was so popular at the time that the US, as the rising imperial power seeking to consolidate hegemony, tried (falsely) to paint itself as a champion of anti-colonialism and anti-fascism.

which was spawned within and promoted by the capitalist core and inflicted brutal violence not only within Europe but much more extensively in the colonized territories.

And this prestige was further cemented when the socialist countries (mainly the USSR and China) played a decisive role in defeating fascism,

It is crucial to understand that socialism gained *enormous* global prestige with the success of the anti-colonial revolutions.

and organize them around human needs and development rather than around servicing capital accumulation in the core. Socialist ideas provided a method for achieving this, and with remarkable results.

The national liberation movements - and the masses of workers and peasants they mobilized and represented - understood that they needed to regain control over their resources and productive capacities,

The hammer and sickle... the symbol of the workers and peasants - overwhelmingly in the global South - whose labour creates the world's wealth...

Rubio referred to "anti-colonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map in the years to come."

Namely, the anti-colonial movement, which was one of humanity's greatest moral and political achievements, was led in large part under the banner of socialism.

But it also shows he understands an important historical fact that most people do not grasp, and which the US has spent the past half century trying to erase and obscure.

Rubio's speech was obviously imperialist and repulsive (and all global South states should take note, and plan deterrence accordingly).