Tag: history

An Absence of Sanctions

Israel is pounding the hell out of the Palestinians in Gaza again.

Israel has bombarded Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) positions in the Gaza Strip for a third day today with 31 Palestinians killed, while militants fired hundreds of rockets back amid escalating violence.

Six children are among the dead since the conflict began Friday, while 275 people have been wounded, said health authorities in the enclave where several buildings were reduced to rubble.

Israel launched its first bombardment on Friday as part of a surprise operation named ‘Breaking Dawn’ that the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said was a ‘pre-emptive strike’ designed to thwart a planned PIJ rocket attack.

The IDF early this morning continued their intense aerial and artillery bombardment of the Iran-backed group, which has fired hundreds of rockets in return since Friday.

Now, I understand that this bombardment is probably in response to sound intelligence concerning an attack on the Israeli people. Whether the preemptive strike is proportional or not, one cannot possibly say, it almost certainly wasn’t launched without some provocation. However, it should be kept in mind that the Russian special military operation was also in response to a series of ongoing attacks on the Russian people of the Donbass for more than eight years.

It would be interesting and informative to learn how many munitions were expended by the Ukrainian military and paramilitaries over the last eight years in comparison to how many were expended by the Palestianian Islamic Jihad and the Israeli Defense Forces over that same period.

Because if there is no reason to sanction Israel over its bombardments and invasions of Gaza, there is no clearly no reason to sanction Russia over its bombardments and invasions of Ukraine.

DISCUSS ON SG

A Warning Within the Warning

It’s never a good sign when the Defense Ministry assumes responsibility for communications concerning certain matters in the place of the Foreign Ministry.

Action is the most powerful language, said the Chinese Defense Ministry on Thursday as its spokesperson stressed the sensitivity of the Taiwan question again after China issued six warnings against US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s potential visit to Taiwan island over the past few days.

The frequency of Chinese warnings and the remarks different departments use fully demonstrate China’s determination to take any necessary military measures to counter US provocations and safeguard national sovereignty and territorial integrity, analysts said.

The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) will not tolerate any “Taiwan independence” moves or interference from external forces, and will resolutely stop such attempts, Wu Qian, spokesperson for the Defense Ministry, said at Thursday’s press briefing.

The root cause of a turbulent Taiwan Straits is the collusion between “Taiwan independence” forces and external interfering forces, Wu said, urging relevant parties to learn to adapt to the new reality (PLA operations near the Straits), to reflect on their own deeds and “most importantly, to pull back from the brink.”

Though Wu was responding to a question about PLA operations on the Taiwan Straits, analysts interpreted Wu’s words as another stern warning against the US government and some US politicians who are pushing Pelosi’s possible visit to Taiwan island.

The US should not underestimate the crisis and possible disastrous results it will bring to the Taiwan Straits if Pelosi ultimately makes the trip, experts said. On edge of the cliff for bilateral relations, if the US does not pull back but keeps challenging the guardrail, the price will be beyond US capabilities to pay.

It’s an interesting historical lesson in the use of the phrase yanzhen yidai, which literally means “streamlining army formation to wait for the enemy” and has very seldom been used in the diplomatic context. It more accurately translates into modern American English as “fuck around and find out”, such as when Zhou Enlai warned the USA not to cross the 38th Parallel prior to the Chinese intervention in the Korean War.

In other words, the Chinese are no more bluffing over Taiwan than the Russians were bluffing over Ukraine.

DISCUSS ON SG

A Tale of Two Capitalisms

Michael Hudson explains the difference between industrial capitalism and finance capitalism, and how the latter has destroyed the US economy and impoverished the American people.

Most people think of all kinds of capitalism as being the same and the assumption is that industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century somehow was always financialized because there were always banks but financial capitalism is you just pointed out is a political system and as a political system it’s very different from the industrial capitalism dynamic. In industrial capitalism, the whole aim or the hope of the industrial capitalists in the late nineteenth century, especially in Germany and central Europe was that banking would no longer be just usury, it wouldn’t be just consumer lending to exploit labor, and it wouldn’t be lending to the government somehow.

The financial system would recycle the economy savings and money creation and credit into industrial production and would finance the means of production to make that productive instead of predatory and parasitic as it became and that seemed to be the way that industrial capitalism was evolving up until World War I. Everything changed after that all of a sudden you had the financial system take over as a result of the crisis caused in the 1920s by the German reparations debt that couldn’t be paid and the inter-ally debt that was insisted upon to repay the United States for the arms that have supplied Europe for a century into World War I. Well, the result was a huge depression.

The allies said, well, we didn’t expect to actually have to pay the United States. If we have to pay the United States, then we have to charge reparations on Germany and for a decade there was a debate between John Maynard Keynes and Harold Moulton and others saying that these debts can’t be paid. How are you going to handle a situation where the debts can’t be paid?

The finance capitalists then were the basically the ancestors of today’s neoliberals and they said any amount of debt can be paid by any country if it just lowers the living standards and squeezes labor enough and that’s what basically the philosophy of the IMF ever since world war II when third world countries can’t pay the debt, the IMF comes in with an austerity program and say you have to lower wages, you have to break up labor unions, if necessary you have to have a democracy, and you can’t have a democracy unless you’re willing to assassinate and arrest the labor leaders and the advocates of land redistribution because a democracy means basically rule by the financial sector centered in the united states. And so finance capitalism ever since WWI and especially WWII and especially since 1980 is the nationalistic doctrine of American banks and the American one percent, and the American financial sector that is sort of merged into a symbiotic unit with the finance insurance and real estate.

In other words, finance capitalism instead of trying to promote overall economic growth for the 99 percent, instead of financing the industrialization of an economy with rising productivity and rising living standards, is now cannibalizing the industrial sector, cannibalizing the corporate sector. As you’re seeing in the U.S., finance capitalism is the economic doctrine of deindustrialization that has occurred in America in England and is now occurring in Europe.

Well, the problem is how do you survive if you’re not industrializing, if you’re not producing your own means of subsistence and how are you going to get this from other countries? Well, the answer is you don’t go to war with them like countries used to go to war with each other to grab their money and their land, you use finance as the new means of war so finance capitalism is the tactic of economic warfare by the United States against Europe and the global south to sort of draw all of the economic surplus of these countries in the form of debt service and the debt service is supplied by basically economic rent seeking from land rent, natural resource rent, and just plain interest charges on economy. So, none of these are really the result of industrial profits that are made by employing labor and uh selling its products at a markup.

Finance capitalism is not based on surplus value like industrial capitalism was. In fact, it destroys industry and in this cannibalizing of industrial capital, it basically dries out the economy and makes it unable to break even or even to function and in the United States today, for instance, if you look at the balance sheets of corporate revenue much of it is spent on stock buybacks. You buy back your own stock or dividend payouts. Only eight percent of corporate earnings are spent on new capital investment research and development: factories, machinery, and means of production to employ labor.

How did General Electric (GE) go broke? Basically, Jack Welch said let’s use our income not to continue to invest in making more electronic goods and services and appliances, let’s use it to buy our own stock that’ll push up our stock and essentially, we’ll just sell off our divisions and we’ll use the money of selling off our washing machine companies and stoves and sell it off and we’ll just pay it to the stockholders. That’ll push it up and by the way his salary was based on how much he could push up the stock of GE and he was paid in the form of stock options. Well, all of this is now the normal corporate behavior in the United States and corporations are no longer led by industrial engineers as they were a few centuries ago in the nineteenth and twentieth century.

They’re led by financial engineers of the chief financial officer and the ideal of these corporations is to make money financially not by industrial investment….. so on the narrow microeconomic level finance capitalism is a way of basically selling out a company and giving the proceeds to the stockholders and the bondholders but as a political system, because it is so destructive of the economy as you’ve seen in the United States and you’ve seen in Britain through de-industrializing it, it becomes belligerent in an attempt to make other countries just as equally paralyzed by making these countries pay tribute to the U.S. and England and the financialized economies by means of financial engineering, by means of debt service, by means of selling their mineral resources, their public utilities, their land, their roads all to foreign investors–basically to who borrows the money that’s just simply created in the U.S. and to save all of their money in their central bank reserves in the forms of loans to the U.S. treasury holding treasury bonds which is how the international monetary system worked until just a few months ago when everything changed.

So if you’re England and America right now you can look at President Biden’s speeches and he said well, China is our number one enemy because it’s competing unfairly. China is actually subsidizing industrial development by having its own infrastructure. It gives free education instead of privatizing education and making its labor pay for it. It has public health instead of privatizing social medicine like we do in the United States and making employers and workers pay for it.

Well, industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century was all in favor of strong government infrastructure. The ideal of industrial capitalism was to keep the wage costs of production down not by reducing wages but having government provide a basic infrastructure to cover the basic
needs of employees. The governments would provide free education so that employers didn’t have to pay for it. The governments would provide medical care so that employees didn’t have to pay for it and employers wouldn’t have to pay employees enough money to cover the education costs and to cover the medical care costs. The government would build roads and infrastructure and everything to facilitate the overall cost of doing business by industrial capital.

Well finance capitalism is just the reverse. Finance capitalism wants to privatize and take education, medical care, roads, turn the roads into toll roads, and take all of these and privatize them and make them financial corporations that will essentially pay out their economic rent to the bondholders and the stockholders and this economic rent adds to the cost of education and everything else that workers need to live on so the result is to make it a high cost economy and that’s why Biden has said China and Russia are America’s enemies because the only way that America can succeed given our privatized economy, given the fact that Americans have to pay up to forty three percent of their income for rent, given the fact that eighteen percent of America’s GDP is for medical care, given the heavy student loan debt–only if other countries tie themselves in the same knot, only if other countries impose the same economic overhead on their labor force and on their industry can there be equal competition.

If other countries have a mixed economy and are more efficient because they have an active government providing basic needs, that’s “autocracy” and that’s the opposite of “democracy.” Democracy is where everything is privatized and ultimately the one percent own everything.

Autocracy is any government that’s strong enough to have its own public investment. Any government strong enough to tax or regulate the financial sector is called “autocracy” so the U.S. in the 19th century would be called an autocracy as I guess the Austrian school called it – civilization is basically an “autocracy.”

There never has been an unmixed economy without government regulation, without a government investment, although Rome began to get to that point at the end of its empire and we all know what happened to it. So basically, finance capitalism is a predatory international economic policy aimed at draining the rest of the world all to pay the leading one percent of wealth holders in the U.S. and their satellite oligarchy in England and a few European countries.

Notice how, as always, evil lurks in the endless redefinitions and word spells. The inversions, subversions, and perversions are endless, and remember, we have been told that the root of all evil is the love of money. Therefore, it should be no surprise that an economic system entirely focused on money would prove to be unmitigated evil.

DISCUSS ON SG

The American Century Debacle

As even its advocates now admit that the American Century is over, it’s worth looking back and seeing exactly what it was for which Americans abandoned the country founded by their forefathers:

What specific steps can the United States take, however, to reach Luce’s goal? We have already mentioned one of the steps – it must embrace internationalism over isolationism. But Luce provides us with other steps to follow. First of all, the United States must share its Bill of Rights, its Declaration of Independence, and its Constitution with the world—America’s principles of freedom largely rest on reverence to these documents, and although they may not be applicable to all peoples, other nations could learn quite a bit from them. Sharing them, however, is not enough; Americans must have a passionate devotion to the great American ideals embodied in those works for them to be effective – they must be devoted to freedom, the equality of opportunity, and a tradition of self-reliance, independence, and cooperation. By showing the citizens of the world that they are dedicated to the same ideals expressed in their documents, Americans will set an example that other peoples can follow.

Second, the United States must be willing to provide its industrial products and technical know-how to the world. In many ways, Luce writes, the United States is already doing this. After all, it sells its industrial products abroad and other peoples are consumers of the products of American scientific, artistic, and intellectual life. But the United States must be willing to do more than just export the products it creates. It also must be willing to provide the skills and training for others to create successful artistic, intellectual, and scientific products of their own. Luce guarantees his readers that such training will be needed and welcomed around the world, but only if Americans have the imagination to see it and “the sincerity and good will to create the world of the 20th century.”

Third, and related to the last, the United States must ensure that its vision of the international economic order is the dominant one—without that economic order, American prosperity could stagnate, and the idea of the “American Century” would fall flat. Pursuant to ensuring that its ideas of economy become (and remain!) dominant, the United States must be willing to defend a principle that Americans have long held dear: the freedom of the seas. Only by guaranteeing free trade among the nations of the world can this vision be fulfilled.

Fourth, and finally, Americans must become the good Samaritans of the world, sending out an “army of humanitarians” to feed the world wherever it is needed. And why not? This kind of action would, Luce seems to argue, foster good will among the nations of the world that need it most, and it is certainly possible in light of the United States’ overwhelming prosperity. Feeding the world is not simply something the United States should think about doing, either. Rather, it is the “manifest duty” of America “to undertake to feed all the people of the world who as a result of this worldwide collapse of civilization are hungry and destitute.” If the United States can spend millions of dollars on weapons of war, it can surely spend some money on food for the people displaced by weapons: for “every dollar we spend on armaments we should spend at least a dime in a gigantic effort to feed the world.”

It probably sounded very high-minded and inspirational at the time. Now, it sounds like a horrifically bad, obviously stupid recipe for disaster. Feeding the world and free trade… did Henry Luce never read the historical aphorism that once you pay the Danegeld, you will never be rid of the Dane?

DISCUSS ON SG

The West’s Fatal Flaw

If Michael Hudson is correct, Western Civilization will ultimately fall because Christians failed to understand what “forgive them their debts” actually meant:

The greatest challenge facing societies has always been how to conduct trade and credit without letting merchants and creditors make money by exploiting their customers and debtors. All antiquity recognized that the drive to acquire money is addictive and indeed tends to be exploitative and hence socially injurious. The moral values of most societies opposed selfishness, above all in the form of avarice and wealth addiction, which the Greeks called philarguria – love of money, silver-mania. Individuals and families indulging in conspicuous consumption tended to be ostracized, because it was recognized that wealth often was obtained at the expense of others, especially the weak.

The Greek concept of hubris involved egotistic behavior causing injury to others. Avarice and greed were to be punished by the justice goddess Nemesis, who had many Near Eastern antecedents, such as Nanshe of Lagash in Sumer, protecting the weak against the powerful, the debtor against the creditor.

That protection is what rulers were expected to provide in serving the gods. That is why rulers were imbued with enough power to protect the population from being reduced to debt dependency and clientage. Chieftains, kings and temples were in charge of allocating credit and crop-land to enable smallholders to serve in the army and provide corvée labor. Rulers who behaved selfishly were liable to be unseated, or their subjects might run away, or support rebel leaders or foreign attackers promising to cancel debts and redistribute land more equitably.

The most basic function of Near Eastern kingship was to proclaim “economic order,” misharum and andurarum clean slate debt cancellations, echoed in Judaism’s Jubilee Year. There was no “democracy” in the sense of citizens electing their leaders and administrators, but “divine kingship” was obliged to achieve the implicit economic aim of democracy: “protecting the weak from the powerful.”

Royal power was backed by temples and ethical or religious systems. The major religions that emerged in the mid-first millennium BC, those of Buddha, Lao-Tzu and Zoroaster, held that personal drives should be subordinate to the promotion of overall welfare and mutual aid.

What did not seem likely 2500 years ago was that a warlord aristocracy would conquer the Western world. In creating what became the Roman Empire, an oligarchy took control of the land and, in due course, the political system. It abolished royal or civic authority, shifted the fiscal burden onto the lower classes, and ran the population and industry into debt.

This was done on a purely opportunistic basis. There was no attempt to defend this ideologically. There was no hint of an archaic Milton Friedman emerging to popularize a radical new moral order celebrating avarice by claiming that greed is what drives economies forward, not backward, convincing society to leave the distribution of land and money to “the market” controlled by private corporations and money-lenders instead of communalistic regulation by palace rulers and temples – or by extension, today’s socialism. Palaces, temples and civic governments were creditors. They were not forced to borrow to function, and so were not subjected to the policy demands of a private creditor class.

But running the population, industry and even governments into debt to an oligarchic elite is precisely what has occurred in the West, which is now trying to impose the modern variant of this debt-based economic regime – U.S.-centered neoliberal finance capitalism – on the entire world. That is what today’s New Cold War is all about.

It’s not socialism to forgive debt. It’s not irresponsible to forgive debt. It’s not economically unsound to forgive debt. To the contrary, debt forgiveness is Christian, it is civilized, and it is absolutely necessary on a regular basis in any society that permits legal usury.

DISCUSS ON SG

The USA’s Last War

Paul Fahrenheidt reluctantly comes to terms with the inevitability of the USA’s dissolution and theorizes about how it will proceed.

Depending on when/how this war pops off, I predict casualties just shy of (possibly breaking) 100 million. This is all casualties, including civilian deaths caused by war-related disease, malnutrition, and collateral damage.

The current urban population of the United States is just shy of 275 million. The supermajority of it is concentrated in a half-dozen cities and metropolitan areas on both coasts of this country, most in the projected territory of Team Blue. While I hold that the Civil War will not be “Urban v. Rural,” to say the divide will play no part is dishonest.

Team Red and Team Blue will face different problems, and in all likelihood, different casualty counts. While Team Blue will not have sufficient hinterlands for its massive population (provoking an inevitable starvation crisis that will lop off a significant number of people in said cities,) Team Red will not have enough people to work its own hinterlands, causing a similar (though much less pronounced) food crisis.

The fact of the matter is that the supermajority of food planted, harvested, and distributed by the United States is so automated that a food crisis will occur no matter which way the states go, until smaller man-powered farms can fill the deficit. Either way, we’re looking at tens of millions dead (at least) within the first few months. This is to say nothing of the interrupted power grid, scarcity of medical supplies, outbreaks of cholera, typhus, polio, etc., and any other number of monsters unleashed by kinetic warfare.

I haven’t even addressed the fighting yet.

In a purely military sense, the Second American Civil War will closer resemble the First World War than the First American Civil War. What I mean is that a number of new weapons have been developed by the U.S. Government in the last twenty years, and have only been deployed in limited quantities overseas. Like the advances of weapons prior to WWI, commanders will have very little idea how to properly use them at first, which will contribute to a massive amount of casualties on the front end of the war. Except the otherwise competent WWI Generals will be replaced by careerists, amateurs, and (more likely than not,) women.

I won’t speculate on the tactical particularities of the Second American Civil War. At the war’s beginning, I suspect America’s forces in being to split (unevenly) between Red and Blue. Depending on whether both sides claim to be the Government, or a Government (the difference is important,) you’ll see Active and National Guard units stack on either side of the fence. State Defense Forces, State & Local Police Departments, and Paramilitaries of both stripes will generally go the way their state or sensibility goes.

No matter which way you slice it, I suspect the war will turn into a variety of sieges of Blue cities by Red armies. This is exasperated by the fact that every state in Team Red is geographically contiguous, while every state in Team Blue is split into about three or four islands. The Republicans in the Spanish Civil War faced the same problem, and Franco’s plan to defeat in detail was made the path of least resistance by the drawing of the battle lines.

These sieges will be an absolute bitch. Not only will the massive concentration of urban buildings act as a natural fortress, the United States Interstate System was built to simultaneously serve as military infrastructure and urban fortifications. Ever notice how the Interstates loop around major cities like walls? Ever notice spaces dug for mortar pits, ammo dumps, staging areas for motor-pools (rest stops,) and that each major city has an international airport within that loop of Interstate wall? This is to say nothing about Air Defense assets, which combined with the International Airport will almost assure local air superiority for the defenders of blue cities. Also consider that the Urban battlefield has become 4d, as metro systems and other such tunnels will need to be fought through and won.

The war’s outcome will never be in doubt. But it will be long, and it will cost more lives than we’ve ever thought possible. I can assure the dear reader that America will never be the same afterwards.

Although this time, it’s much more likely that the centrifugal forces will triumph over their centripetal rivals.

I’m always a little puzzled when people asked me why I left the United States more than two decades ago. Yes, of course, I saw this coming. I didn’t know precisely when it would happen, but it didn’t require a great brain to discern that a) it could happen within my lifetime and b) it would almost certainly be something my children would witness.

Consider this: when “the movement of peoples” is synonymous with “war and genocide” in the eyes of regular historians, and when the greatest military historians literally regard “immigration” as being essentially equivalent to “war”, what else could possibly be the result of the greatest movement of peoples in human history to date.

As for what will set it off, while I had previously considered both economic and diversity factors, at this point, it appears more likely that it will be a consequence of WWIII. The partition wars of India and Pakistan may prove a timeline guide in this regard; if we’re correct to assume that WWIII began with the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, that would put the onset of the Dissolution War in 2030, only three years prior to my original estimate of 2033 for the collapse of the political entity.

DISCUSS ON SG

China Holds the USA Accountable

For all that it makes Americans extremely uncomfortable and quick to cite a panoply of irrelevant tangential facts that don’t excuse their ancestors’ actions, the absolute historical fact is that the European colonists – English and Spanish – committed imperialist genocide against the various American Indian tribes. And China is now utilizing these historical facts to great rhetorical effect to undermine the USA’s false claim to the moral high ground; for all the horrific crimes of the Mao era, at least the Chinese only victimized their own people.

CRI: We noticed that a report from the US Department of the Interior last month said a large number of Native American children died at Indian boarding schools. After that, more and more survivors and their descendants have spoken out and accused the US government of genocide against American Indians. Do you have any comment?

Zhao Lijian: We are deeply sympathetic to the tragic experience of the Native American children. Those so-called boarding schools that carried the motto “Kill the Indian, save the man” were in essence crime scenes of the US cultural genocide against Native Americans. What happened at these schools is also important evidence of the racial genocide committed by the US against Native Americans. More and more facts have come to light and shown that the US committed systemic genocide against Native Americans in three dimensions, which has lasted hundreds of years and continues to this day. 

First, the US has committed physical genocide against the Native American population. Statistics show that since its independence in 1776, the US government has launched over 1,500 attacks on Indian tribes to slaughter the Indians. Before the arrival of white settlers in 1492, there were five million Indians, yet the number plummeted to 600,000 by 1800 and only 237,000 in 1900. Among them, more than a dozen tribes, such as the Pequot, Mohegan, and Massachusetts, were completely extinct. The US government also applied forced sterilization to Indians. Between 1930 and 1976, the US Bureau of Indian Affairs forcibly sterilized approximately 70,000 Indian women through the “Indian Health Service program”. In early 1970s, more than 42% of Indian women of childbearing age were sterilized.

Second, the US has committed spiritual and cultural genocide against Native Americans. They have long suffered hostility, discrimination and oblivion. The inter-generational inheritance of indigenous spirits and culture of Native Americans have long been hindered. In the 1870s and ’80s, the US government adopted a policy of “forced assimilation” to obliterate the social fabric and culture of Indian tribes and destroy the ethnic and tribal identity of the Indians. To attain the dual goal of cultural assimilation and taking Indian lands for itself, the US government began with forcing Native American children into the Indian boarding schools, banning them from speaking their native language, wearing their traditional clothes, or carrying out traditional activities. The children also suffered serious abuse and torment. US-based scholar Preston McBride estimates that the total number of deaths could be as high as 40,000, adding that “basically every school had a graveyard.” Even today, the US is still trying to deliberately obliterate the historical memory and information of the indigenous people in education and media reports. According to a report by National Indian Education Association, 87% of state-level US history textbooks do not mention the post-1900 history of indigenous people. 

Third, the US has committed deprivation of the rights of Native Americans. The US has systematically deprived Native Americans and other ethnic minorities of a wide range of their rights, leaving them mired in a crisis of survival and scarcity of rights. A report by the Indian Health Service shows that Native Americans born today have a life expectancy that is 5.5 years less than the national average, and they have the highest infant mortality rate. The suicide rate of Native American adolescents is 1.9 times that of the national average. By June 2022, the COVID-19 mortality rate among Native Americans is about 2.1 times that of the White population. From 1969 to 2009, the US government conducted 928 nuclear tests in the Shoshone tribal region, resulting in nuclear fallout of around 620 kilotons. Cancer incidence rate in Native Americans’ reservations is far higher than other areas. High levels of radioactive substance has been detected in the systems of about a quarter of Navajo women and infants. According to 2018 US Census Data, the poverty rate among Native Americans was 25.4%, far higher than 8.1% among the White population.

Genocide against Native Americans is an original sin of the US that can never be erased. The untold tragedies of Native Americans should never be forgotten. The US government has every reason to admit its crimes of genocide against Native Americans, and offer sincere apologies and repentance to the victims and their descendants. The US government should also credibly make up for the trauma Native Americans are suffering, and seriously face up to grave human rights issues and crimes of racism that exist within the US.

Zhao Lijian, Foreign Ministry, 29 June 2022

Before you react like a Pavlovian dog hearing a dinner bell, please remember this, White American: YOU ARE THE INDIAN NOW.

All of the lies and twisted truths you repeated in order to try to rationalize the sins of the past are now being told to justify your dispossession. The only difference is that the replacement peoples are unlikely to treat your great-great-grandchildren quite as kindly as your great-great-great-grandfather treated some of my ancestors. Imagine the lies and twisted truths that will be accepted as historical fact by the Post-Americans once Americans are a statistical minority similar to the American Indian population today.

Contemplate how many of your Asian and African great-grandchildren will be in my position, with most of their Asian and African peers refusing to believe that they have any European ancestors. After all, they won’t LOOK white…

What is happening today is directly traceable to the sins of the founding fathers and their abominable behavior toward “the merciless Indian Savages”, as the Declaration of Independence described them. Note in particular that the very concept of racism, upon which the entire American population has been condemned and crucified, was specifically coined by an American in order to destroy the American Indian. It is, therefore, both ironic and fitting that “racism” has been the primary weapon utilized in the rhetorical demolition of America.

I don’t remind you of these historical wrongs because I want revenge for my Indian ancestors or because I dream of Chung Kuo. What is done is done, and nothing is going to change that. To the contrary, I remind you of them because I do not wish for the American to go the way of the American Indian.

Perhaps, unlike the American Indian tribes, Americans can put all their ideological and individual differences aside in time to unite against the foreign peoples invading their lands and prevent their replacement. But most likely, as Sitting Bull and the Ghost Dancers learned to their dismay, it is already too late. It may be worth noting, in this regard, that while in 1890, the population of the United States, excluding the Indian and Negro minorities, was around 55 million, the post-1965 foreign population resident in the USA is presently about twice that number.

DISCUSS ON SG

The War for the Future of Man

An extremely important interview about WWIII with the man who could not unreasonably be considered Russia’s Wang Hunin, who forecast the current conflict after 2008. Definitely read the whole thing.

RUSSTRAT Institute presents a transcript of the speech of Sergey Glazyev, Member of the Board (Minister) for Integration and Macroeconomics of the EEC, at the round table “Russia” held on June 1, 2022 in IA REGNUM: what image of the future meets the goals of national development?”, organized by the RUSSTRAT Institute and REGNUM News Agency.

We are now addressing the fundamental questions of our existence. And a special military operation is a catalyst for this process of understanding our place in the world, and of course, we need an image of the future. I would like to draw your attention to the fact that the special military operation, which was initially announced as denazification, demilitarization – we understand what this means for Ukraine – is now gradually raising the stakes on this front.

Everyone is already saying that this is a global hybrid war, although it was clear from the beginning that the special operation should be considered in a much broader context. Now many people believe that this is a civilizational war, where different worldview systems are opposed. It is clear that this is a war of good and evil and a war for the survival of humanity in the end.

Before we talk about the image of our future, I would like to draw your attention to the patterns of long-term socio-economic and political development. We – I mean a group of scientists from the Academy of Sciences who work in long cycles of economic and social development-first of all, we managed to foresee this particular war in 2022. Back in the 14th year, it was clear that the challenge that we faced and the result of which was reunification with the Crimea, will necessarily affect the entire Russian world, including the territory of Ukraine. I even published a book, The Last World War.

Somewhere, what we see today was absolutely and almost precisely formulated, including the number of Ukrainian Armed Forces and the role of the Americans and the British in this occupation of Ukraine, as well as the cultivation of Ukrainian Nazism. All this was predicted almost to the last detail. We are continuing our research. According to which the peak of the confrontation falls on 2024. This is the forecast that my colleague gave 10 years ago, even before the current military operation and even before 2014. And then there were no new political seven-year cycles.

Why 2024 and why are we in such a situation of hybrid warfare? The fact is that the modern period is characterized by two simultaneous revolutionary events. The first is the technological revolution, which used to be talked about a lot. It is called differently, we say that it is a change of technological structures. And always this change in technological patterns occurs through the economic depression, which in this cycle began in the world in 2008 – with the beginning of the global financial crisis.

And during this transition phase, a new technological order has already been formed, a well-known complex of nano-engineering information and communication technologies, which is evolving not only into the economy. But also in the ways of conducting military operations, too. We actually see that we are facing more than just an enemy based in the Pentagon and Mi6. Our troops are facing artificial intelligence. This is already a war of a new technological order.

But a more important point is the change in world economic patterns in the context of our current topic. The change of national economic structures is a process that occurs once a century and during which the management system changes. Previously, we would call this the process of socio-political revolution, but, speaking in a modern way, this is a radical change in the institutions of world economic relations, industrial relations and the entire system of managing socio-economic development, which is also accompanied by a change in the centers of the world economy.

The global economy is rapidly shifting to Southeast Asia, which already accounts for more than half of gross domestic product growth. And in this new center of the world economy, a completely different management system has been formed compared to the one in which we live today. I must say that the change in world economic patterns, as you can see in this picture at the top. These are world economic patterns with a once-in-a-century shift cycle. And at the bottom are technological ones, the change of technological structures, which have a cycle of change phases of about 50 years.

Technological patterns are well known in the literature as long Kondratiev waves, more precisely, the life cycles of technological patterns and their growth phase are a long “Kondratiev wave”. The growth phase of the world economy is a century-long cycle of capital accumulation.

Once a century, there is a dangerous resonance when we simultaneously face a technological revolution, a socio-economic revolution, and a socio-political revolution. In the course of this process, not only the technology changes, but also the mindset changes. The ideology is changing, if you will. As an example, we will cite the previous phase of changing world economic patterns. 

This is a process that always, unfortunately, occurs through world wars. World wars in this case are caused by the fact that the ruling elite of the previous center of the world economy does not want to part with its hegemony and tries with all its might to keep it, up to the outbreak of a world war. 

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Continue reading “The War for the Future of Man”

Remember Who Told You the Truth

The Saker has a reasonable request for his readers:

Please remember who told you the truth and who lied to you over the past months. There were many, many such liars, ranging from the official propaganda machine (aka the “free press”) to the “Putin has lost it all” emo-Marxists and assorted 6th columnists who, whether they understood it or not, served the purpose of the Empire’s PSYOPs. Also please remember that Andrei Martynov, Bernard and Gonzalo Lira not only spoke truthfully, but they were right and their detractors totally wrong. We all owe them an immense debt of gratitude!

Frankly, before my forced break, I was getting really frustrated trying to prove to misinformed or even fully brainwashed commentators that the official narrative (produced by the biggest strategic PSYOP in history) was a load of bull, based on lies and/or on a total “misunderstanding” (and I am being kind here!) of the real world outside the “mental Zone A”. Now most of that narrative has collapsed.

I am also confident that a month from today, things will be even more obvious than they are today.

I think it’s time to rehash that old bit of triumphalist doggerel.

Of all the words of screen and pen,

The saddest are these:

Vox was right again!

The current war was never about Ukraine, or Putin’s ego, or reconstructing the Soviet Union, or the tsardom of Peter the Great or Ivan the Terrible. It’s always been about the incessant encroachments of Clown World forcing Russia to choose between submission and war. And thanks to the genius and leadership of Vladimir Putin, Russia found itself in a position to not only go to war, but do so with a very reasonable prospect of winning.

It will probably take at least six years to resolve World War III, and quite possibly an entire decade given the way in which it is more truly global than either of its two predecessors. But we can be optimistic that the world that has been remade by the conflict will turn out to be a better one than the one ruled by the wicked Empire of Lies.

Also, a piece of advice: stop paying attention to those who a) have lied to you and/or b) have been reliably wrong. Just stop!

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Knock Off the Retardery

The war in Ukraine is not a “distraction”. China is not going to use the “distraction” to invade either a) Australia or b) the USA. The very idea is so prodigiously stupid that anyone suggesting the idea with a straight face should never be taken seriously again.

China is even less likely to invade the West Coast than Japan was, and the historical records show that neither the Japanese Navy nor the Japanese Army ever even contemplated the notion beyond briefly looking at the possibility of invading Hawaii before concluding that they lacked a) the transport capability, b) the logistical capability, and c) the airpower to even bother putting together an actual warplan.

For crying out loud, the military strategists who pay attention to this sort of thing aren’t even sure China has the capability to successfully invade Taiwan island. They do, but the point is the mere fact the issue is even potentially in doubt renders the other hypothetical invasions very highly improbable.

To have any chance of conquering Taiwan, China might need to transport as many as two million troops across the rough 100 miles of the Taiwan Strait and land them under fire at the island’s 14 potential invasion beaches or 10 major ports.

That’s a lot of people—far, far more than the People’s Liberation Army Navy can haul in its 11 new amphibious ships. To transport the bulk of the invasion force, Beijing almost certainly would take up into naval service thousands of civilian ships.

To that end, the Chinese Communist Party has created a legal and bureaucratic framework for taking over control of commercial shipping. Meanwhile, naval engineers have begun modifying key vessels to make them better assault ships.

All that is to say, the vast flotilla that would be both the vehicle for China’s assault on Taiwan—and the biggest target of Taiwanese forces and their allies—is taking shape.

“If the PLA invasion force was a million or more men, then we might expect an armada of thousands or even tens of thousands of ships to deliver them, augmented by thousands of planes and helicopters,” Ian Easton, an analyst with the Project 2049 Institute in Virginia, wrote in a recent report.

The PLAN’s eight modern Type 071 landing docks and three Type 075 big-deck assault ships together can haul around 25,000 troops. A drop in the bucket. To transport the balance of the invasion force, the Chinese navy can take up around 2,000 large commercial vessels crewed by around 650,000 mariners.

The legal framework is a new one. On Jan. 1, 2017, China’s National Defense Transportation Law went into effect. “Among other things, the law mandated that all of China’s basic infrastructure and related transportation platforms would henceforth be treated as military-civil fusion assets,” Easton explained.

“At the CCP’s discretion, they were now legally required to be designed, built and managed to support future military operations. In the event of conflict, they would be pressed into wartime service. Now they had to prepare accordingly in peacetime.”

According to Easton, the roughly 1,000 large vessels belonging to China COSCO Shipping Corporation could comprise the backbone of this improvised fleet.

For what it’s worth, the USA doesn’t have the ability to invade China either, despite its air and naval superiority. Hence the loss of its sole superpower status even if nuclear weapons are left out of the equation.

This really isn’t that hard and requires nothing more than a modicum of military history and basic math. So please, just stop already.

If you want to worry about something that is a genuine threat to the USA and its European satrapies, worry about China one-upping Russia by exiting the neoliberal economic order voluntarily without waiting for sanctions.

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