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Cake day: September 20th, 2025

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  • List of wars involving Norway include Libya and Afghanistan, I specifically mentioned armed forces and Libya in my previous comment. Yes, being part of the west by association means that you’re complicit in all of this shit as a nation, including the genocide of Palestinians.

    I’ve explained the tools western economies, including Norway, use to oppress poorer global south nations. If you want to read about the economic aspect of it, there’s a lot of literature regarding Unequal Exchange, I’m currently reading a book on a review of unequal exchange recently published by Iskra books and published for free as PDF on their website, just to point you to a resource.


  • It’s not like they govern the foreign countries of international businesses they trade with for raw materials

    Not directly, perhaps, but that’s how neocolonialism works. 14 countries in Africa use currency whose central bank is in Paris, western nations keep military forces in many African countries and support only the governments that they want, and when a nation rejects complete exploitation by western corporations, they either apply sanctions (with the explicit aim of “creating hunger, desperation and overthrow of government”), or organize coups to democratically elected leaders, or directly bomb the fuck out of them.

    More subtle means include IMF loans conditioned to applying neoliberal economic policy. In his 100-page resignation letter from the IMF, former IMF senior economist Davison Budhoo described the extensive and systematic statistical fraud used by the IMF to impose its policies on developing countries, and explained that the consequences of these policies led to massive poverty and starvation. In the letter, Budhoo wrote that the IMF’s policies are made in “utter disregard to local conditions” and lead countries to “self destruct” and “unleash unstoppable economic and social chaos” and also compared the IMF’s structural adjustment policies to a “terrorist attack”. He also stated that the routine policy packages of the IMF “can never serve, under any set of circumstances, the cause of financial balance and economic growth” and that “the ill-gotten, inadvertent power that we revel in wielding over prostrate governments and peoples - can only serve to accentuate world tensions”

    Is your argument that they shouldn’t trade internationally for raw materials?

    My argument is that these countries aren’t allowed to industrialize in their own terms with their own companies. It’s either western corporations controlling everything and extracting the wealth to Europe and North America, or murder.


  • Norway doesn’t produce cocoa beans. Norway doesn’t produce cotton, or bananas, or iron ore, or cobalt, or gold, or most basic raw materials you need to run a society. Neither do Spain, or Germany, or France, or the USA. Instead, these countries focus on the production of high value-added goods and services, which they can do because they are historically highly industrialized, developed, and have high levels of education, infrastructure and concentration of productive capital.

    In this manner, Germany imports iron ore from poor countries in the global south at low prices, and exports cars at high prices. In the international market, therefore, one hour of German/French/Norwegian work is exchanged often for tens of hours of work from India, or Congo, or Mexico. This is unequal exchange, and is the pillar of neocolonialism.

    Through political, economical and military powers, the western world has ensured that the global south remains underdeveloped. IMF predatory loans and neoliberal policy impositions, support for fascists or monarchists, coups, or outright military invasions are some of the most common tools the west uses to maintain these countries underdeveloped and with cheap labor.