China openly and officially backs Russia

A letter from the New Kiev:
http://bread-circuses-today.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/chronicles-of-collapse-of-kiev-edition.html

Although Western students don’t learn much about history — my sense is that Chinese students study the Opium Wars — and KNOW who is and IS NOT responsible for enslaving millions of Chinese — and who will do so again if given half a chance. Anglo-Zionists have indeed been responsible for almost every travesty against humanity. It’s literally embedded in the DNA. Tick-tock.

to the Saker:

As I mentioned in another thread, because a fracking project went seriously wrong, the Saudi’s could not stop pumping from one of their biggest fields even if they wanted to. It is either pump it or loose it, perhaps up to 5 years of extra oil.

which is why, today, the Saudi’s said that even if oil goes to 20 a barrel they will not cut production. At that price even Saudi Arabia is broke.

With Russia and Iranian production being kept up (now that China is committed to support them), the supply will not abate, the price will slide and the economic fiasco will escalate in the US mid-west as fracked oil and gas will shut down. It is important to know that these wells cannot be shut down and later re-opened without serious loss of pressure. The US mid-west will have to produce the oil at a loss, or loose it. This is the the reason that shale oil could trigger a full blown economic shock.

Of course, with Chinese production up, Libyan production down, Nigerian halted due to a strike, etc, all Russia and Iran would have to do is drop production by 2 million barrels a day and the US would get reprieve – however temporary.

Talk about bargaining power!

Should Russia do this look for an immediate change in how events play out in Ukraine, Syria and Iran.

Again, may this new partnership not forget an old friend named Maduro, who with chavez championed this resistance long before the current partnership

Saka,

Linh Dinh

OT – I first came across Linh Dinh in Common Dream. Few years back. However, Common Dream no longer posted his articles. Everyone should take note. Linh Dinh an American’ Vietnamese, strong advocate for peace and fairness. Like you he continues to struggle to support his effort and share his views.

His most recent articles in March, May and August and December 2014:

The Syrian “Regime” is Guarding the Borders of Israel?

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article40523.htm

“December 20, 2014 “ICH” – In 1948, Israel had its strange birth, and the newborn was greeted immediately by soldiers from Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Saudi Arabia as they tried to snuff out the monster in its crib. They failed spectacularly, and an ink-drawn Star of David flag was raised on the shore of the Red Sea. Screw you, Arabs!…….Outside of Israel, Jordan has the largest number of Palestinians at 3,240,000, and Jordan also hosts over 600,000 Syrian refugees and 200,000 from Iraq. When Jews and Americans raise hell, Jordan is there to absorb refugees, and for this service, Jordan receives substantial aid from the United States. Working with the CIA, Jordan operates two black sites where “detainees” can be “rendered” to be “enhancedly interrogated.”

http://911blogger.com/news/2010-08-29/kill-them-linh-dinh-commondreams-going-become-911-truth-friendly-now

“Kill Them…..Michael Enright, a 21-year-old college student, slashed a NYC cab driver in the face and neck because this man was Muslim….”

http://www.hatchfund.org/project/northwest_passage_postcards_from_the_end_of_america

“Since 2009, I’ve been maintaining a blog to document the economic, political and social unraveling of the United States. Called Postcards from the End of America, it contains over 7,000 photographs and at least 200 essays. For this project, I’ve traveled across the country several times to take photographs and to talk to ordinary people…..

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article37907.htm

“I’ve been coming to Chicago forever, but always just for a day or two. The first time was when I was only a teenager and visiting an aunt in St Louis. Another time, it was to take a physical exam for now-defunct Midway Airlines. ….”

http://www.countercurrents.org/dinh010814.htm

“Though this may sound like a joke, it’s certainly no joke, for I’m not a joking type: When I came to the US in 1975, the very first American song I learnt was “Old McDonald Had a Farm.”….”

Kindest Regards

JC

“Barely known to most people, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization will
become the key Eurasian organization through which the diverse national interests
of India, Pakistan, China, Russia, Iran, and Vietnam are served in a cooperative
environment.”

But Vietman is not and is not a comming member of SCO.

Thanks for your work Larchmonter445,
I have for many decades been a fan of the Chinese culture and hope that their time in the sun has returned. They surely have been given many bad deals since their encounter with The Western Empire. I have been interested in the methods by which China was to be bled.
This also made me curious as to how an isolationist culture like Japan was transformed into a expansionist empire.

FWIW, the Lama from Langley recently visited Princeton University, he was the toast of the town. I guess he’s still trying to be destructively relevant enough to maintain his lifestyle.

Anonymous said…@ 24 December, 2014 15:33

” an enemy and need to be subjugated”

To subjugate an entity needs to exist.

Posting a categorical imperative is a marker of an inexperienced, naive and generally unsuccessful strategist.

@ T1 …. Tibet 1/2

Larchmonter has given you the view that is promoted by the Chinese Government. To balance that I would like to add the view of the numerous Tibet-support organizations in the world (I’ve been an member in such an organization for 4 years where I was responsible for the news bulletin).

Tibet was a country with a population, language, culture and religion that was completely different from China and which during the last centuries had set itself a national priority of using meditation and Buddhism to better understand some inner forces of men. They were militarily mostly disinterested, threatened nobody and got invaded by China in 1950.

Since 1950 there was continuous repression by the Chinese because the Tibetans (and not only the monks) wanted to continue practicing their way of life. The idea that China “liberated” Tibet out of humanitarian concerns is naive (to express it politely) and doubly so for those who are familiar with the very self-centered Chinese tradition.

The repression has increased over the last years mainly because the Tibetans insist on keeping their tradition and because China has built a railway to Lhassa that brings ~3000 Han colonists/day to Tibet (the Tibetans are by now a minority in their own country)

Repression takes the following forms:
– over 90% of the monasteries in Tibet have been closed or destroyed, the remaining ones house more police than monks
– the Tibetan language is eliminated from all schools and private Tibetan schools who want to preserve it are closed.
– an increasing number of Tibetan festivals (often linked to religions or to the seasons) have been forbidden
– the Tibetan patriots who want to preserve their language, religion or culture are either shot or jailed+tortured+released as human wrecks
– torture in the jails is systematic – I’ve seen the torture rehabilitation expenses in the accounts of our pro-Tibet organisation myself and I could even quote the names of the tortures used (tiger-bench etc)
– fugitives that want to leave Tibet over the Himalayas are shot at by the Chinese forces, and if they manage to survive and reach Nepal they are forcibly repatriated to Tibet.

To Larchmonter445:

Thank you for mentioning some of the real facts about Tibet, and also for your excellent White Paper. There are a few points that I’d like to add, if I may.

The common “China invaded Tibet” narrative, repeated so unthinkingly and without details by most in the West, sneaks in the assumption that Tibet had been an independent sovereign state before 1951. This is absolutely false. Beijing’s sovereignty over Tibet had been acknowledged for centuries by the people and the ruling-class of Tibet, right from imperial times. (The Dalai Lama was believed by many Tibetans as the incarnation of one Bodhisattva, and the emperor in Beijing the incarnation of another, and it was possible–in a religious sense–for the emperor to actually prevent a “living Buddha”, of which the Dalai Lama was very far from the only one, from reincarnating.) This sovereignty was also acknowledge by all Western powers of the time, but the current Western narrative tries to sweep this under the rug. (For instance, you won’t find any U. S. government or military map from any period that showed Tibet as anything other than a part of China.)

In 1951, the representatives of the ruling class in Tibet signed an accord of with Mao’s government in Beijing, reaffirming this sovereignty. The very first sentence of the accord states that the Tibetan people is one of many ethnic groups within China. Through the 1950’s, the Beijing government allowed the old Tibetan ruling class to continue to some extent. (Image search “Dalai Mao” and you’ll find plenty of photos of the two together from that period.) It was only until 1959, when the law on social reform in Tibet–in other words, emancipation of the serfs–was passed, did armed conflict arose, and only then did the Dalai Lama flee to India.

(A more general point to mention is that China is a diverse multi-ethnic state, just like Russia. In English usage, there is a tendency (perhaps deliberately encouraged) to conflated the words “Chinese” (zhongguo ren) and “Han”, which is the majority ethnicity within China.)

I want to offer a concept with regard to China and Tibet that relates to Buddhism coming to the West. I believe this is a development on as large a scale as the partnership between Russia and China.

The great American scholar and Buddhist practitioner Robert Thurman said:

“When the eminent British historian Arnold Toynbee said in 1971 that the most important event of the 20th century was the encounter of the West with Buddhism, he did not mean merely the entrance of one more world religion onto the scene. Buddhism is more than a ‘religion’ as we currently use the term, and includes a scientific vision, a multi-faceted educational system, and a resilient ethical way of life.”

You can watch his entire lecture from a few years ago here: Buddhism as a Civilization Matrix

Robert Thurman was one of the early beneficiaries of the Tibetan diaspora that in a strange irony brought the absolute cream of Buddhist practice to the West. Buddhism, he notes, is a civilizing force. It has coexisted with the existing religions of every place it has settled, and it has civilized the institutional life of those places over time.

And now it comes to the barbarians of the West. Imagine if the US simply collapsed one day into a gradual fall of exhaustion and became poor and perhaps humble and who knows maybe even Buddhist. How the world would rejoice, in a fit of relief. Suppose that were happening? Suppose it could?

Merry Christmas!

Not So Fast and Grieved,

I appreciate your differing points of view concerning Tibet. This is the spirit Saker encourages, as do I.

I won’t argue another round with either.

Merely, nothing I said is untrue. The facts are the facts. I have seen the photo and film record of the theocratic feudal system and the record of preservation and improvement of the Tibetan economy. It is similar to the truth of Nanking the Japanese refuse to admit to. Painful truths, just like the Tiananmen decision the Central authorities refuse to become transparent about.

Governments do bad things. I pointed out Hu Jintao led a brutal crackdown years ago.

But separatist movements are exploited by the foreign Intel agencies and bankrolled by elites who would come back as oligarchs. That’s a simple pattern to observe in nearly all cases.

Don’t we see the bloody hands of oligarchs in Donbass?

That is so in Xinjiang and Tibet. The difference in Tibet is the elites wear robes and meditate, so we are fooled when they instruct young people to set fire to themselves.

In Hong Kong, 1000 students were trained over two years to prepare the “spontaneous” umbrella revolution” and “Occupy Central, Admiralty and Mong Kok.

It’s an old game with the same game plan each time.

No argument from me with either of you. I appreciate the discourse. We can’t ever assume any one person has all the truth. I never have that feeling and try hard not to project it (though I may fail when folks have little or no information, and thus, think I speak with total knowledge on some topic).

On Tibet, for me, feudalism is the crucial fact.
Just like in Cambodia, when the Vietnamese went in to save the people from Pol Pot. The rest of the world did nothing about the genocide. The Vietnamese stopped it. Yes, they stayed, but Cambodia had been a staging area against Vietnam for many years. They were entitled to protect their flank.

I see China protecting themselves from the US in Tibet. The history of operations by OSS and CIA to this day are copious. It is an ideal electronic listening post overlooking the nuclear testing and Space program in China because of the elevation.

They aren’t in there for democracy. They are in there for American hegemonic security, and destabilization efforts.

Best wishes for a great New Year. Keep up the comments. You are always interesting.

A few additional notes on the Tibetan question, that have not been touched upon in the discussion above but are, I would think, of some significance for a proper understanding of a very complex issue.

– It is unfortunately true that very many, perhaps most Tibetan monasteries have been ransacked, destroyed or burned down. This however took place not in the framework of any specific anti-Tibetan policy, but rather during the atrocious years of the “Cultural Revolution”, when a ferocious hate of cultural and religious relicts was raging all over China. China itself suffered far more serious damage from that crazy than Tibet.

– The Dalai Lama is most certainly NOT the “religious [or spiritual] leader of Tibet”, and even less so of “all Tibetans”. He rather is the TEMPORAL (not spiritual!) head of the “Yellow Hats”, one of several (fiercely rival) Tibetan Buddhist sects. The “Yellow Hat” managed to subdue their rivals and to govern portions of Western Tibet (on behalf of China) from the 17th Century until 1959. That the current Dalai Lama has managed to rise from his original position as a local administrator at Beijing’s sufferance to an exalted global status as an “enlightened spiritual leader” has more to do with his function as a CIA asset than with anything else.

– The Han Chinese have a deep dislike for the particular Tibetan version of Buddhism, which is rooted in historical facts. Tibetan Buddhism was the official court religion of the last imperial dynasty, the Qing. These were Manchu (Mongolian) invaders, not Chinese, and they treated the Han Chinese very much like animals (the Han were forced to wear a pigtail just to stress this point, as all animals have a tail). During that period, Tibetan monks were very much part and parcel of a foreign occupation system, and the Chinese have not forgotten of forgiven that.

– Some of the comments above seem to equate Tibetan Buddhism with Buddhism as such, and more specifically to give a supposed Tibetan enlightement the credit for the Buddhist virtues of compassion and understanding. This is, to put it mildly, rather removed from truth. Traditional Tibetan Buddhism (“Vairayana”, i.e. “The Way of the Diamond”) does incorporate practices of extreme yoga and tantric magic (including sexual magic) that most Buddhists would regard as senseless when not abhorrent.

From UK the ISP server returns DSL not available when using normal access to your blog. Have to use a proxy.

Something smells.

JimZ