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Fuel rationing looming unless Hormuz supply resumes, experts warn
(www.thetimes.com)
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this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2026
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Spain still supports the Western empire by being in it and benefiting from the exploitation of the periphery. The EU alone has done plenty to support the atrocities in the Middle East, and Spain has, at the very least, witnessed all of that (if not actively participated) and still sees fit to stay in the EU.
So it is not Britain, France, the US, the Soviet Union that destabilized the Middle East. It is the EU, that without an army, a common foreign policy and a common mandate that caused it.
And Spain obviously, those evil apathetic monsters.
NATO bombed Yugoslavia and the middle east, screw you
NATO is not EU
Full political and economic support of the US's invasion? Not even ruling out Canadian military involvement in the future? Oh sorry, "regrettable" full support. Like that makes it okay. As a Canadian, Canada's response to this has been disgusting. And especially ironic for a country whose sovereignty the US is also threatening, but I'm sure if you help the leopard hunt other prey they won't turn around and eat your face after.
Canada and every other Western country should be raising hell over this and isolating the US for its unprovoked invasion of another country. Canada got so high and mighty about sanctioning Russia for Ukraine, what makes this different? God forbid you expect moral standards your country has been on a high horse about for the last several years to be equally applied to the West.
So are you saying Canada shouldn't be sanctioning Russia because it hasn't stopped the war in Ukraine? If not, what makes it okay for Canada to not sanction the US? How are the situations different where one warrants sanctioning yet me even suggesting sanctioning the other is a sign that I'm an idiot who needs to "wake up?" Also, spare me the "wake up" talk in general, we live in this shithole world because the most powerful countries in the world are in a cabal where they ignore each other's atrocities while claiming to be a bastion of human rights. And no, I don't think we can just magically solve it by talking it out, which is why I'm calling for sanctioning and economic/political isolation of the perpetrator because that is the step after talking. Canada and other Western governments went on record to say that part of the goal of sanctioning Russia is to make it as hard as possible for them to function in general, and by extension making the war effort difficult. Regardless of whether that works in practice, that's not even a possibility being considered for one of the West's own. Why?
This is what people say to cope when they know deep down they're siding with their own selfish imperial-aligned interest over the good of humankind.
Mystical-sounding fatalist claptrap that falls apart under scientific scrutiny
Alright if you think so
The point isn't that Carney can fix it, but that they're not interested in actually opposing the US despite his recent speech on US imperialism. We get it, your economy is extremely tied to the US and you'd be hit hard if you actually took a stance, but Iran is being bombed because they took a stance, Venezuela got their president kidnapped for taking a stance, and so on. Not opposing imperialism is obviously the path of least resistance, but it doesn't make it the path we should be taking, considering people die every day for this bs even in peacetime.
Cut off the oil supply. The US is a wasteful shithole that blows through 20 million barrels/day, but only produces 13. The majority of the rest comes from Canada.
They could stop being yet another oppressive western nation and discontinue bending over for Trump/the US. This isn't new behavior, Canada's a removed.
The entire west is parasitic. Full of colonizing profiteers.
Canada is literally a settler colony that is still actively repressing indigenous populations?
Major modern colonizer countries are the United States, China, Russia, and France. Criteria for being considered a colonizer have to be a little bit more strict then "I have wasted toons of money trying to control a country between 1936 and 1941 for prestige".
The Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Angola, Mozambique, Suriname etc. would probably disagree with you.
Not to mind the fact that much of the US and France colonialism and neocolonialism is fully backed by allies.
I have said "Major" meaning the form of colonialism that have the biggest economic impact. Belgium neocolonialism and Dutch neocolonialism are not nearly on the same scale as the others I have shared.
France colonialism is not fully backed by allies. Heck, Italy nearly went into a proxy war with France in Libya after they decided that Gaddafi was not good for "humanitarian reasons" and backed LNA against UN-supported GNA. If those are allies supporting each other then I need to rethink the meaning of the world. See Meloni blasting France on national television: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NBf1C4YMNw
You said
Congo, Angola, Mozambique aren't past tense. Over half the EU built colonial systems and still benefit from their evolved forms.
Also France backed the LNA in Libya, undermined the UN-recognized GNA, and faced zero material consequences. Not an accident. Their allies sustain and support their colonialism and neocolonialism.
France remains a core member of NATO, EU, G7, UNSC. Also France maintains the CFA franc. Military bases across West and Central Africa. Corporate access secured through policy shaped in Brussels and Paris. Whether Meloni yells on TV, the structure which is supported through integration into the EU and NATO doesn't change. No sanctions. No budget cuts. No accountability.
Words don't dismantle systems. Material support sustains them. And that support never stops for the major powers. Lives on the periphery absorb the cost.
Yes, welcome to realpolitik. You face consequences if someone stronger than you wants you to face consequences.
Do you think Italy would ever sanction France and leave the EU, destroying their entire economy in the process, on principle?
Europe kept being dependent on Russia giving them money fueling their war of conquest in Ukraine for years, and they still do that despite the sanctions and billions of euros spent to arm Ukraine. Do you really think they are not willingly letting the shadow fleet exist? Are you really that naive?
You realize what you're saying just confirms my point? Supporting colonialism because it serves your national interest is still supporting colonialism. Realpolitik is simply the justification.
The EU and NATO are led by imperialist powers and their allies. The social, economic, and military stability of the West is built directly on neocolonial extraction from the periphery. Of course they support it. The system reproduces itself.
And lol at "naive." I don't expect those who benefit directly from imperialism to take meaningful steps to stop it.
My issue is with you pretending colonial powers are something they're not. I'm just pointing out the reality.
Plenty of rapists justify their crimes to themselves. Doesn't make them not rapists.
No I am not confirming your point at all. Not attaching another country that is exploiting neocolonialism is not the same as supporting: it is tolerating an abuse. Thats it.
The social, economic and military stability of the West is absolutely not built on neocolonial extraction. That is utterly absurd. You need to frame this statement. If a german company is providing capital, jobs and infrastructure to a developing country via foreign direct investment is it neocolonial extraction for you? What exactly is the neocolonial extraction of Spain for example? Are we talking bought assets of telephone companies and banks in latin America?
The West is rich because it developed a highly productive, technology advanced, well-governed domestic economy. Germany was one of the strongest industrial economy by 1880 without a single colony. The same was true for Italy.
Nobody deny that some western and non western countries have some strong form of control and direct power projection on developing countries (as I said already, mainly US, Russia, China and France). But that comes with being a powerful country (or powerful company) that has the means to impose themself on other. That has always been the case.
That is a distinction without a material difference. If your economy runs on cheap resources secured by French military bases, and your banks profit from CFA franc transactions, and your corporations get preferential access through EU trade deals shaped in Paris and Brussels, you are not "tolerating" anything. You are benefiting. That is support.
This is propaganda slop. Germany industrialized on cotton from colonized Africa, rubber from the Congo, minerals from occupied territories. Its banks financed colonial ventures. Its firms sold into colonial markets protected by British and French guns. Italy likewise. No direct colonies does not mean no colonial benefit. The entire European system was integrated. Extraction in the periphery subsidized accumulation in the core. That is the material record.
When that investment secures resource access, repatriates profits, shapes local policy to favor foreign capital, and leaves the host economy dependent, yes. That is the form extraction takes now. It does not need flags or governors.
Yes. Exactly that. Spanish banks and telecoms dominate markets in Latin America not because of superior efficiency, but because of historical ties, language, and financial structures that replicate colonial patterns. Capital flows one way. Profits flow back. Local development stays constrained. That is not coincidence. It is continuity.
You are not wrong that powerful countries impose themselves. But that power was built on centuries of extraction. To pretend the West got rich by being smarter, better governed, or more innovative while ignoring the enslaved labor, stolen land, and plundered resources that funded that rise is either naive (the irony) or dishonest.
I know you probably have a thought terminating cliche to dismiss what I'm about to say but, you really should read Lenin, Fanon, Walter Rodney, Kwame Nkrumah, Samir Amin, and Aimé Césaire.
So in the end of all of this discussion we are more or less agreeing on reality.
The only difference is that you think that somewhat private companies should refrain from increasing their value by any means that could introduce a dependency between two separate countries, and that means in practice you want to ban foreign direct investment globally. I simply say that there is no support for this in the current capital based society by both the companies and the countries receiving the investment. There is nothing forced in China neocolonialism for example. That is pure foreign investment exploitation.
But just to clarify some points, Europe is actually richer because it was smarter, better governed and more innovative. How the fuck do you think was possible for an island of 10 million people to control half the world? Why does the world let them do it? Do you think that this was not the same as the time Rome, a city state in the middle of Italy, controlled the entirety of Europe and Nord Africa? Colonialism is a consequence of being richer, innovative and better governed, not a driver.
No, the material record says that most important drivers for early Germany industrialization were coal and steel, railways, chemical and electrical engineering and agriculture. Raw materials import on the global market accounted for at most 10% of the GDP. Certainly relevant, but to say that Germany industrialization was built on colonialism is simply false. It was built on locally sourced pure german coal mined by poor german people.
No. You are describing the appearance. I am pointing to the essence.
This is pure idealism (a fairytale). Ideas do not float above material conditions. Innovation is not spontaneous. It is produced by specific relations of production. Britain did not control half the world because of superior governance. It controlled half the world because it had accumulated capital through enslaved labor, stolen land, and plundered resources. That capital funded the railways, the factories, the universities you credit for "innovation." To reverse this is to confuse effect for cause.
This is a core error. Colonialism was not a side effect. It was a primary mechanism of primitive accumulation. The enclosure of commons, the transatlantic slave trade, the extraction of rubber, cotton, minerals, these were not incidental. They were foundational to the rise of European capital. The periphery was not "left behind." It was actively underdeveloped to serve accumulation in the core. Again you should read Walter Rodney.
Yes. And where did the capital for those railways come from? Who bought the chemicals and electrical goods? German industry developed within a global system structured by colonial extraction. The "10% of GDP" argument is a fetish of the statistic. Capital is not just raw inputs. It is profit, reinvestment, market access, financial infrastructure. All of which were shaped by colonial relations. To isolate one variable is to ignore the totality.
This is propaganda slop. Chinese investment operates differently. No structural adjustment programs. No conditionalities demanding privatization, austerity, or deregulation. No regime change tied to loans. Debt renegotiations happen without military intervention. That is a material difference. It does not mean China is "pure." But to equate it with Western neocolonialism is to ignore how power actually functions in each case.
Western capital extracts through institutions it controls: IMF, World Bank, WTO. These enforce rules that reproduce dependency. Chinese capital operates through bilateral contracts. The mechanism matters. The outcome is not identical. To conflate them is either ignorance or bad faith.
False equivalence. Rome was a pre-capitalist empire extracting tribute. European colonialism was capitalist imperialism restructuring entire economies for accumulation. Different mode of production. Different logic. Different relation to the periphery. Conflating them erases the specificity of capitalist exploitation.
You are not wrong that companies and recipient countries accept FDI. But acceptance under structural constraint is not consent. It is survival within a system not of their making. That is not a defense of the system. It is a description of how power operates.
You are an idiot for peddling this "smarter Europe" nonsense (one level removed from phrenology style nazi race science). The facts are not on your side.
I'll say again you really should read Lenin on imperialism, Fanon on colonial violence, Walter Rodney on how Europe underdeveloped Africa, Kwame Nkrumah on neocolonialism, Samir Amin on unequal development, Aimé Césaire on the dialectic of civilization and barbarism, CLR James on the black Jacobins. After that you may have enough of an understanding to have a proper conversation instead of what you are doing now.
You are just stating that colonial relationship is the main driver of capital accumulation. Your entire argument depend on this. And I do not see enough evidence to justify this. Can you provide factual evidence that is necessarily the case and not something that happen sometimes? Lacking that this entire discussion is based on nothing.
I will happily say "smarter Mongols" when they were in an hegemonic position (because of innovative military technology, strong administrative capacity and command of economy and trade). There is nothing racist in that sentence. I am not claiming that European people are biologically more intelligent. That is absurd. I am saying that the cumulation environmental, cultural and historical events made it so in that moment in time they made choices we now consider smart because enabled objective we now consider valuable. You are an idiot for interpreting something so clear, in a "race" kind of way.
You are fighting straw man and making unjustified assumption about what I think. Should I read on how Europe underdeveloped Africa to have this conversation? That is an universal truth that most sane person agree on. Why are you fighting me on opinion we share already?
Ok again for the 3rd time:
Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery: profits from the transatlantic slave trade directly financed British industrialization. Textile mills, the leading sector of the Industrial Revolution, ran on cotton produced by enslaved labor in the US South and Caribbean. That is not "sometimes." That is the foundation.
Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa: documents how colonial infrastructure was built to extract, not develop. Railways went from mines to ports, not between African cities. Capital flowed out. Profits repatriated. Local industry stifled.
The Belgian Congo: rubber and mineral extraction under Leopold II generated massive surplus. That surplus funded Belgian industry, public works, financial institutions. Same pattern across French West Africa, Portuguese Angola, British India.
Capital accumulation is not just about raw input percentages. It is about profit rates, reinvestment capacity, market control, financial infrastructure. Colonial trade provided protected markets for European manufactures. It supplied cheap inputs. It generated super-profits that funded further innovation. That is how the system worked. Please actually engage with what I'm saying and the books I am recommending.
But those "choices" were materially conditioned. You cannot separate "innovation" from the capital that funded it. That capital came from extraction. To credit "smart choices" while ignoring the material basis of those choices is idealism. It is the same logic that says a factory owner is "smart" for getting rich while ignoring the workers who produced the value.
Major example of this is Elon Musk, by all accounts a complete fucking idiot, yet thanks to his parents apartheid mine he had the material basis to reach where he is now. Remove that foundation and all his "genius" disappears, same with the EuroAmerikan hegemony.
Because you are not sharing the opinion. You said colonialism is a consequence of being richer, not a driver. That reverses cause and effect. You equated Chinese investment with Western neocolonialism, ignoring the material difference in mechanism. You framed "tolerating abuse" as distinct from support, ignoring how benefit constitutes complicity.
If we actually shared the analysis, you would not be defending the "smarter Europe" framing. You would not be asking for evidence after I already recommended multiple books that cover these points in far more detail than I can in a comment.
Read the sources like I said last comment.
https://cosmonautmag.com/2025/01/the-repression-of-palestine-solidarity-in-canada/