"the London Economist, the European organ of the aristocracy of finance, described most strikingly the attitude of this class.” - Karl Marx
“The Economist, a journal that speaks for the British millionaires.” - Vladimir Lenin
Having both Marx and Lenin speak out against a publication shows how this rag has been consistently on the wrong side of any struggle for the past two centuries. Their modern flashy r/designporn-bait cover designs and tidy site UI hides the sociopathy of their publication history.
For starters, the modern day sinophobia of the Economist is no surprise. They’re the original China haters, and I mean that with zero exaggeration. They’ve been calling for war and imperialism against China for two centuries now. They lobbied in the UK for the Second Opium War using sociopathic mercantilist justifications:
“We may regret war … but we cannot deny that great advantages have followed in its wake”
It’s an unsurprising stance when their founder literally earned his fortune from the forced opium trade imposed against China following the First Opium War.
The British capital-centric profit driven agenda they’ve followed puts them even on the wrong side of a “liberal” perspective of history. They’ve historically opposed the UK abolitionist movement, protesting that “the boycott they proposed of all goods made using slave labour would hurt British consumers and punish slaves.”
They were the only British publication to support the Confederacy, arguing that:
“It is in the independence of the South, and not in her defeat, that we can alone look with confidence for the early amelioration and the ultimate extinction of the slavery we abhor.”
In a mask-off moment, they said that the slavery issue was secondary compared to the lucratively low cotton tariffs the Confederacy could offer, which made Marx himself ridicule the rag when he wrote for the New York Daily Tribune, saying that the Economist was finally: ‘honest enough to confess at last that with it and its followers sympathy (for American emancipation) is a mere question of tariff’
Their chief editor at the time, the Confederacy apologist Bagehot, still has a “cutesy” little column named after him to this day.
Showing that they’ve learnt nothing in the centuries since, in a 2014 book review on a book about the trans-Atlantic slave trade, they unironically complained without a shred of self-awareness that:
“Mr Baptist has not written an objective history of slavery. Almost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains. This is not history; it is advocacy.”
For more further reading, the Citations Needed podcast had an episode on “The Refined Sociopathy of The Economist.” https://citationsneeded.medium.com/episode-98-the-refined-sociopathy-of-the-economist-4966767e1688
The truth is that much of the leadership and policy groups in the Global North have come to the implicit decision to see the “bright side” of climate change. Going from the US to Canada to the UK to Russia, there’s been numerous environmental studies published in those countries on how they would “benefit” from climate change. This is why there’s a fixation on Greenland and the Arctic. They’ve come to understand the unspoken truth about climate change, which is that the same Global North which has contributed the most historical emissions is also the same region estimated to be set to suffer the least through the coincidence of their geography. They’re more excited about the potential Italian vineyard country climates that the Midlands and Minnesota are estimated to develop towards as climate change is more and more exacerbated than the apocalyptic scenarios slated for elsewhere, like the submerging of Jakarta or the wet-bulb temperatures of South Asia.
SE Asia, Africa, Latin America are likely to suffer severe climate-induced hardships, but the most that the West needs to worry about (apart from the submerging of places like the US Eastern Seaboard, Florida, and the European Low Countries, which they believe they’ll always retain the national wealth to spam dikes and levees and sea walls) is “climate refugees,” which is telling in of itself. The arrogant conceit displayed here is also potentially backed by the current climate estimates, which is the danger of it all. You can see the falsehood that “everyone will suffer equally together so we must all work together, we’re in the same boat” that climate scientists have tried to defend starting to be pierced with climate change-enthusiast leadership like Trump coming to power. From a relativistic sense, so long as your enemies suffer more than you, this is acceptable for them. They don’t need to be better off than themselves in the past (and the Global North is absolutely not completely unscathed from climate-induced catastrophes like they want to believe) but they must be better off than the rest, which is enough for them.