Away from the often complicated nuances of theory, I would say that socialism is simply the attempt to artificially inject a greater degree of justice and fairness into our myriad goings on. Its success depends on the notion that 'justice' and 'fairness', though abstract concepts, must be forced, through our own labours, to be given real concrete existence in the world. Of course, any government or monarchy or even a tyranny may claim that their form of governance is permeated by considerations...

The victims of terrorist strikes in London and New York are just as innocent as all those whose lives have been claimed in the Middle East and beyond by the often cold calculus of geopolitics. The CIA have long had a term to describe the unintended consequences of it's covert operations - it's called 'blowback' and it's principle applies just as readily to innocent peoples impacted negatively by American foreign policy decisions.

Confining ourselves to the Middle East and only to recent...

The revolutionary Cubans needed little enticement from Khruschev to allow delivery and stationing of Russian warheads on their newly reclaimed soil. The Bay of Pigs invasion was only the precursor to ongoing CIA attempts to destabilise and ultimately bring an end to the new regime; assassination attempts of the Castro brothers and Guevera were likewise being constantly toyed with so anything that furthered their own security even and especially a nuclear deterrent was seen as a positive boon. It...

The argument over abolition usually splinters on whether the British Slave Trade Act (1807) came about as the result of moral campaigning rather than that harder interface of realpolitik; ie that there were economic motives at play. I think both of these responses are valid and need not be mutually exclusive. Just to situate ourselves a bit and maybe pick an example that certainly makes sense to me - in 1775 at the beginning of the American war of independence British crown forces promised freedom...

Foreign aid is one of many solutions to the multi-faceted problem of global poverty and would of course make a more telling difference than present if it were properly administered, divorced from political praxis (arms transfers to client states), specifically targeted (white elephant projects), untied from ideologically determined conditionalities (the push for privitisation in the water sector) and moreover, actually in accordance with internationally agreed commitments (the famously defunct .7%...