By Pepe Escobar – posted with permission
Hegel saw history moving east to west – ‘Europe thus absolutely being the end of history, Asia the beginning’
Immanuel Kant was the first thinker to actually come up with a theory of the yellow race. Photo: Google Images
Fasten your seat belts: the US hybrid war against China is bound to go on frenetic overdrive, as economic reports are already identifying Covid-19 as the tipping point when the Asian – actually Eurasian – century truly began.
The US strategy remains, essentially, full spectrum dominance, with the National Security Strategy obsessed by the three top “threats” of China, Russia and Iran. China, in contrast, proposes a “community of shared destiny” for mankind, mostly addressing the Global South.
The predominant US narrative in the ongoing information war is now set in stone: Covid-19 was the result of a leak from a Chinese biowarfare lab. China is responsible. China lied. And China has to pay.
The new normal tactic of non-stop China demonization is deployed not only by crude functionaries of the industrial-military-surveillance-media complex. We need to dig much deeper to discover how these attitudes are deeply embedded in Western thinking – and later migrated to the “end of history” United States. (Here are sections of an excellent study, Unfabling the East: The Enlightenment’s Encounter with Asia , by Jurgen Osterhammel).
Way beyond the Renaissance, in the 17th and 18th centuries, whenever Europe referred to Asia it was essentially about religion conditioning trade. Christianity reigned supreme, so it was impossible to think by excluding God.
At the same time the doctors of the Church were deeply disturbed that in the Sinified world a very well organized society could function in the absence of a transcendent religion. That bothered them even more than those “savages” discovered in the Americas.
As it started to explore what was regarded as the “Far East,” Europe was mired in religious wars. But at the same time it was forced to confront another explanation of the world, and that fed some subversive anti-religious tendencies across the Enlightenment sphere.
It was at this stage that learned Europeans started questioning Chinese philosophy, which inevitably they had to degrade to the status of a mere worldly “wisdom” because it escaped the canons of Greek and Augustinian thought. This attitude, by the way, still reigns today.
So we had what in France was described as chinoiseries — a sort of ambiguous admiration, in which China was regarded as the supreme example of a pagan society.
But then the Church started to lose patience with the Jesuits’ fascination with China. The Sorbonne was punished. A papal bull, in 1725, outlawed Christians who were practicing Chinese rites. It’s quite interesting to note that Sinophile philosophers and Jesuits condemned by the Pope insisted that the “real faith” (Christianity) was “prefigured” in ancient Chinese, specifically Confucianist, texts.
The European vision of Asia and the “Far East” was mostly conceptualized by a mighty German triad: Kant, Herder and Schlegel. Kant, incidentally, was also a geographer, and Herder a historian and geographer. We can say that the triad was the precursor of modern Western Orientalism. It’s easy to imagine a Borges short story featuring these three.
As much as they may have been aware of China, India and Japan, for Kant and Herder God was above all. He had planned the development of the world in all its details. And that brings us to the tricky issue of race.
Breaking away from the monopoly of religion, references to race represented a real epistemological turnaround in relation to previous thinkers. Leibniz and Voltaire, for instance, were Sinophiles. Montesquieu and Diderot were Sinophobes. None explained cultural differences by race. Montesquieu developed a theory based on climate. But that did not have a racial connotation – it was more like an ethnic approach.
The big break came via French philosopher and traveler Francois Bernier (1620-1688), who spent 13 years traveling in Asia and in 1671 published a book called La Description des Etats du Grand Mogol, de l”Indoustan, du Royaume de Cachemire, etc. Voltaire, hilariously, called him Bernier-Mogol — as he became a star telling his tales to the royal court. In a subsequent book, Nouvelle Division de la Terre par les Differentes Especes ou Races d’Homme qui l’Habitent, published in 1684, the “Mogol” distinguished up to five human races.
This was all based on the color of the skin, not on families or the climate. The Europeans were mechanically placed on top, while other races were considered “ugly.” Afterward, the division of humanity in up to five races was picked up by David Hume — always based on the color of the skin. Hume proclaimed to the Anglo-Saxon world that only whites were civilized; others were inferiors. This attitude is still pervasive. See, for instance, this pathetic diatribe recently published in Britain.
Two Asias
The first thinker to actually come up with a theory of the yellow race was Kant, in his writings between 1775 and 1785, David Mungello argues in The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500-1800.
Kant rates the “white race” as “superior,” the “black race” as “inferior” (by the way, Kant did not condemn slavery), the “copper race” as “feeble” and the “yellow race” as intermediary. The differences between them are due to a historical process that started with the “white race,” considered the most pure and original, the others being nothing but bastards.
Kant subdivided Asia by countries. For him, East Asia meant Tibet, China and Japan. He considered China in relatively positive terms, as a mix of white and yellow races.
Herder was definitely mellower. For him, Mesopotamia was the cradle of Western civilization, and the Garden of Eden was in Kashmir, “the world’s paradise.” His theory of historical evolution became a smash hit in the West: the East was a baby, Egypt was an infant, Greece was youth. Herder’s East Asia consisted of Tibet, China, Cochinchina, Tonkin, Laos, Korea, Eastern Tartary and Japan — countries and regions touched by Chinese civilization.
Schlegel was like the precursor of a Californian 60s hippie. He was a Sanskrit enthusiast and a serious student of Eastern cultures. He said that “in the East we should seek the most elevated romanticism.” India was the source of everything, “the whole history of the human spirit.” No wonder this insight became the mantra for a whole generation of Orientalists. That was also the start of a dualist vision of Asia across the West that’s still predominant today.
So by the 18th century we had fully established a vision of Asia as a land of servitude and cradle of despotism and paternalism in sharp contrast with a vision of Asia as a cradle of civilizations. Ambiguity became the new normal. Asia was respected as mother of civilizations — value systems included — and even mother of the West. In parallel, Asia was demeaned, despised or ignored because it had never reached the high level of the West, despite its head start.
Those Oriental despots
And that brings us to The Big Guy: Hegel. Hyper well informed – he read reports by ex-Jesuits sent from Beijing — Hegel does not write about the “Far East” but only the East, which includes East Asia, essentially the Chinese world. Hegel does not care much about religion as his predecessors did. He talks about the East from the point of view of the state and politics. In contrast to the myth-friendly Schlegel, Hegel sees the East as a state of nature in the process of reaching toward a beginning of history – unlike black Africa, which he saw wallowing in the mire of a bestial state.
To explain the historical bifurcation between a stagnant world and another one in motion, leading to the Western ideal, Hegel divided Asia in two.
One part was composed by China and Mongolia: a puerile world of patriarchal innocence, where contradictions do not develop, where the survival of great empires attests to that world’s “insubstantial,” immobile and ahistorical character.
The other part was Vorderasien (“Anterior Asia”), uniting the current Middle East and Central Asia, from Egypt to Persia. This is an already historical world.
These two huge regions are also subdivided. So in the end Hegel’s Asiatische Welt (Asian world) is divided into four: first, the plains of the Yellow and Blue rivers, the high plateaus, China and Mongolia; second, the valleys of the Ganges and the Indus; third, the plains of the Oxus (today the Amur-Darya) and the Jaxartes (today the Syr-Darya), the plateaus of Persia, the valleys of the Tigris and the Euphrates; and fourth, the Nile valley.
It’s fascinating to see how in the Philosophy of History (1822-1830) Hegel ends up separating India as a sort of intermediary in historical evolution. So we have in the end, as Jean-Marc Moura showed in L’Extreme Orient selon G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophie de l’Histoire et Imaginaire Exotique, a “fragmented East, of which India is the example, and an immobile East, blocked in chimera, of which the Far East is the illustration.”
To describe the relation between East and West, Hegel uses a couple of metaphors. One of them, quite famous, features the sun: “The history of the world voyages from east to west, Europe thus absolutely being the end of history, and Asia the beginning.” We all know where tawdry “end of history” spin-offs led us.
The other metaphor is Herder’s: the East is “history’s youth” — but with China taking a special place because of the importance of Confucianist principles systematically privileging the role of the family.
Nothing outlined above is of course neutral in terms of understanding Asia. The double metaphor — using the sun and maturity — could not but comfort the West in its narcissism, later inherited from Europe by the “exceptional” US. Implied in this vision is the inevitable superiority complex, in the case of the US even more acute because legitimized by the course of history.
Hegel thought that history must be evaluated under the framework of the development of freedom. Well, China and India being ahistorical, freedom does not exist, unless brought by an initiative coming from outside.
And that’s how the famous “Oriental despotism” evoked by Montesquieu and the possible, sometimes inevitable, and always valuable Western intervention are, in tandem, totally legitimized. We should not expect this Western frame of mind to change anytime soon, if ever. Especially as China is about to be back as Number One.
There can only be One.
Sinophobia 101.
Thanks Pepe for the brief course that shows us the historical and intellectual path of development of racism and envy.
Ban Confucianism centuries ago, ban Confucius Centers now.
Some of the greatest minds of Western Civilization laying the foundation for today’s dread of the ‘Yellow Race’ and the meme of the ‘Sick Man of Asia’ rebranding.
Mais um artigo extraordinário de Pepe Escobar.
Aos ocidentais nada há que mais os aterrorize do que a incontornável supremacia chinesa. É um mundo – o da civilização-país chinesa – que eles, à excepção de alguns casos pontualíssimos, não entendem: um mundo com uma cultura antiquíssima que jamais se vergou ao colonialismo e que, uma e outra e mais outra vez, renasceu das cinzas da História para fazer, novamente, a História.
Se o peso dos verdadeiros factos da História é insuportável à arrogância racista ocidental, mais insuportável para essa arrogância é a constatação de esses factos serem a substantiva negação chinesa da agressão e da rapina multi-seculares do Ocidente: não consta que, na sua extensa viagem na costa oriental africana, o almirante Zheng He tenha escravizado um africano que fosse e muito menos se tenha apoderado de um centímetro quadrado de solo africano em benefício do Império do Meio. Não consta também dos registos históricos o eco de os “déspotas” chineses alguma vez terem feito do seu “despotismo” a geral e sempre disponível absolvição de todos os pecados de pilhagem, violação e genocídio em terra alheia à semelhança do que fizeram (e continuam a fazer) os ocidentais com a sua sacrossanta “democracia”.
Pepe Escobar referiu a metáfora do Sol. Deixemos as metáforas e olhemos para a pura evidência da Mãe Natureza: o Sol nasce a Oriente e põe-se a Ocidente. Por mais lanternas a pilhas que o Ocidente compre para tentar espantar a escuridão que dele se aproxima neste presente ocaso civilizacional, todas elas serão “made in China”.
Por último, que Deus nos livre ( a nós, no Ocidente) de os psicopatas que nós tomamos por estadistas quererem iluminar a noite de breu que se aproxima com as fogueiras da guerra: a República Popular da China fará parecer a hecatombe ocidental às mãos dos Japoneses na última Grande Guerra uma brincadeira de jardim infantil. Quem nada aprende com a História paga essa ignorância com rios de sangue.
Google translation,MOD:
Another extraordinary article by Pepe Escobar.
There is nothing more terrifying to Westerners than unavoidable Chinese supremacy. It is a world – that of the Chinese country-civilization – that they, with the exception of some very punctual cases, do not understand: a world with an age-old culture that never bowed to colonialism and that, over and over and over again, has risen from the ashes. of History to make History again.
If the weight of the true facts of history is unbearable to Western racist arrogance, more unbearable for this arrogance is the fact that these facts are the substantive Chinese denial of the multi-secular aggression and prey of the West: it does not appear that, in its extensive journey on the East African coast, Admiral Zheng He enslaved an African who was, let alone seized a square centimeter of African soil for the benefit of the Middle Kingdom. There is also no echo in the historical records that the Chinese “despots” ever made their “despotism” the general and always available absolution of all the sins of plunder, rape and genocide in a foreign land similar to what they did (and continue to do) Westerners with their sacrosanct “democracy”.
Pepe Escobar referred to the metaphor of the Sun. Let us leave the metaphors and look at the pure evidence of Mother Nature: the Sun rises in the East and sets in the West. For more battery operated lanterns that the West buys to try to scare away the darkness that is approaching it in this present civilizational decline, all of them will be “made in China”.
Finally, may God forbid (to us in the West) from the psychopaths that we take as statesmen wanting to light up the pitch-black night that comes with the fires of war: the People’s Republic of China will make the western hecatomb look like the hands of the Japanese in the last Great War a game of kindergarten. Whoever learns nothing from history pays for this ignorance with rivers of blood.
China is definitely the World leader now, because the kind of brutal, depraved totalitarianism on display after the epidemic began in China, is now being copied across the World. I have been an admirer of China for the past decade or so … no more.
Unfortunately our own leaders seem to be of a like mind. So, I expect we can see a lot more of police officers viciously ordering a woman to not allow her daughter to go on a ‘playdate’. Bossing her around like she is some lowly serf. The kind of brutal suppression against the ‘yellow vests’ in France by Macron, is now what we are all enjoying. The grotesque propaganda that we hear night and day, (drones yelling at us to ‘separate’ … or else?). Governors of US States acting like little mini-Stalins, with no respect for the law, the Constitution or common decency (or should I say Mao?)
“Fasten your seat belts: the US hybrid war against China is bound to go on frenetic overdrive”
Yup, in frenetic overdrive it certainly has gone into.
I take it you don’t like China? Is anyone forcing you to live there? This is how powerful states defend their interests, as they see them. China is surrounded by numerous and powerful enemies who are committed to destroying them; so their somewhat heavy-handed approach should be seen in this light. We live in an imperfect world and have enough problems of controlling our own corrupt elites without worrying about how other states control theirs. It might be a good idea to stopped poking our noses in other peoples business – R2P – and try to make sense of our own problems. How do we feel about the way the ‘government’ of Paraguay runs their country? I have absolutely no idea, and I suspect neither do you. If you can find a rational, democratic state which rules on behalf of the people I’d be very happy to hear about it and mighty even consider living there. Until then …
Think by your post that you are in a state of confusion,your trying to play the blame game that the ones in Washington plays so well,now what ever is done in China is China’s business(because we never get the truth) none of our affair, and the actions in America are the actions of the depraved who always must have someone else to blame, and a population to lazy to change it.And of course the problem in France is the same problem that we have, a fight between labor and the 1% which has gone on since the founding of the country and a constitution written up by the 1% at the time,so the best advise is to clean up our own yard and then things will look altogether different.!!!!
As any peoples would, protect their own before protecting different country’s peoples, China should be looked at no different. Spying and deception has been the rule of the west for centuries, but now they complain and say so and so must pay.
But isnt payback a bitch? might not have the non western world been saying this in private for quite some time, but now just dont have the balls to say it in public for what ever reason.
The west never admitted to deception, collusion, conspiracy, but it has been the rule and not the exception for a strong century.
I’ll have no pity when the time comes to admonish this country leaders, they deserve it, they earned it, and so they will get it, from me, in public, in due time, trust me, b/c i’ve been trusted by the system one too many times.
A great civilizational divide appeared some 5000 years ago when empires solidified their reproduction in time.
History observes that all empires were assemblies of kingdoms by the “men of power” generally through force. But force was not sufficient to reproduce an empire over the long haul of many generations. So the “men of power” associated with “men of knowledge” in order to glue the minds of the citizens around a common worldview (a religious or philosophical narrative about the working of the whole). This fusion of force with “knowledge” is what powered the reproduction of empires over the long haul of many generations.
This process of fusing power with knowledge gave way to axioms of civilization that act like the foundations of civilizational houses. It is at this point that the Middle-East and the Far-East diverged in very fundamental ways. In summary in the ME power annihilated the past worldview of animism, that had formed and developed over the prior tens of thousands of years, replacing it with creation stories. In contrast China pursued a centralization trip on the existing road of animism by developing it ever further stacking add-ons on top of its knowledge base.
As a result China is an animist civilization whose axioms of civilization rest on the foundational idea of “polarism” (yin-yang interactions giving life to the whole by creating the process of change) while all the empires in the ME and those that originate their knowledge from there, like Europe for example, rest on the foundational idea of “dualism” or good versus evil. Over time these axioms of civilization became integrated so deeply in the minds of the citizens that they hid in the subconscious and started to act as automatisms.
A deep societal divergence between East and West was initiated by these axioms of civilization that continues to impact life on earth to this very day :
– Western dualism posits that the West is positioned on the side of good, which is given by god, while “the other” who is different is positioned on the side of evil and as such she/he must be reformed in the image of the West or must be eliminated… Does this not ring some bells in our present context ?
– Chinese polarism views “the other” as being an integral part of the different possibilities that are expressed by the interactions of the polarities. So the Chinese view themselves as equals to “the other” on the level playing field of a continuum of change…
This explains the divergent attitudes of China and the West in their encounters with the rest of the world which are best exemplified by the different attitudes of Zheng He and Columbus. The kind of other-worldliness observed in their attitudes is still in play today. Daily culture appears indeed to be nothing else than the adaptation, of a society’s particular contextual setting in the present, to its axioms of civilization and worldviews…
The West thinks linearly while the East thinks in cycles. That is why the West fears climate change, because they think that the temperature is going to go up indefinitely, whereas the universe runs in cycles and the warming will reverse course, because the Sun has infinitely more power than the speck of humans on this planet.
The West views the universe as consisting of solids which is an illusion, because there is so much space inside atoms themselves, and all solids, including elementary particles are collapsed energy waves. The waves reflect the cyclical nature of the universe and a wavy line separates the yin and yang.
The West is led by evil people who cannot afford to let humanity see reality, to see the light, and they do their evil acts, like deceptions and wars, to enslave humanity and suck in the negative energy for their nourishment. The Abrahamic religions are false, because they reinforce this “solid” view of the world and keep people enslaved.
If I am not mistaken, Russia has been Christian – Orthodox, to be precise – long before the Bolshevik revolution. Also, isn’t Islam an Abrahamic religion as well?
I had Myself Noticed that about the west (particularly Anglo-countries) and China.The difference is a deep one based mostly on mentality.The westerners generally push for others to take their culture and institutions regardless of whether they work or not(generally seem to fail even in the west-free market economics and democracy anyone?) and they are undeterred in their perceptions regardless the mounting evidence of their obvious flaws, they quickly dismiss working approaches of others if outside their approach (or “best practices” or any other stupid terms in which they refer to their ways).The Chinese don’t seem to matter the diversity of the world and from time to time they take Ideas approaches and ideologies from outside(etc Buddhism or Communism) and discard what doesn’t work for them while making the most of what does) is like If they were supremely confident of who they are whether westerners come across as having a desperate need to reaffirm their systems through forcing others to adopt them.Westerners are binary in their thinking whereas the Chinese are more prone to appreciate nuances and hence are better equipped to navigate our complex world.I perceive the Western mentality as a source of weakness that will prevent those societies to reform timely.Even as their fortunes decline I agree with pepe they are unlikely to change their mindset.Theyare howver likely to fail in this””hybrid wars”.
“Fasten your seat belts: the US hybrid war against China is bound to go on frenetic overdrive”
About to? The zio-bugger-bro set is already in full fenzy mode. And then some.
CIA & MI6 put together ‘scientific’ dossier ‘targeting China’s Covid-19 cover-up’ – as West readies to demand Beijing COMPENSATION
https://www.rt.com/news/487661-china-covid-dossier-leaked/
“The West’s wish to pin the blame on China (and probably the bill too) for the Covid-19 pandemic has been reportedly incarnated in a 15-page dossier compiled by intelligence agencies, which has now leaked, according to reports.
The leaked dossier is yet to be made public for independent scrutiny. But the dramatic tone of the quotes in the Telegraph and the far-fetched implications indicate that it is along the lines of infamous intelligence assessments and media leaks by anonymous officials, which have been the staple of Western foreign policy for decades. Remember how Saddam Hussein secretly obtained yellowcake uranium and was ready to strike Europe with his missiles in 45 minutes? Or the Russian bots that swayed the 2016 election with memes? If true, we can expect many ‘revelations’ in months to come.”
And right after that “leak” another magically appears:
ANOTHER leaked intel report accuses China of ‘intentionally’ concealing coronavirus danger to hoard medical supplies
https://www.rt.com/usa/487680-dhs-china-concealed-coronavirus/
“The Department of Homeland Security has backed the US administration’s criticism of Beijing’s early response to the coronavirus outbreak with a new intelligence report, which has already been leaked to the media.
The new leak further reinforces Washington’s case against Beijing, which seeks to pin the bulk of the blame for thousands of American deaths and the US economic meltdown on its rival. It follows another “intelligence dossier” leak (which has also yet to be made public for independent scrutiny) just the day before, that analysed China’s “Covid-19 cover-up.”
While war criminal bush jr. will be known for his regime’s Iraq wmd zio-fakery, war criminal trump will be remembered for his “Wuhan lab leak” zio-fakery.
I very much enjoyed reading this article from PE. He appears to be a philosophy enthusiast and is well versed in this subject. He refered to Heraclitus in an earlier piece. A relatively obscure Greek philosopher more similar in views to Chinese/Indian philosophical understanding than that of the western (european) sort.
Not all ‘Europeans’ viewed China through the glasses of Kant, Herder, Schlegel, Hegel. And that in Germany itself. The last true philosopher of Europe, the polymath, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, had a different view.
In 1697, Leibniz wrote: “I consider it a singular plan of the Fates that human cultivation and refinement should today be concentrated, as it were, in the two extremes of our continent, in Europe and in China, which adorns the Orient as Europe does the opposite edge of the Earth. Perhaps Supreme Providence has ordained such an arrangement, so that, as the most cultivated and distant peoples stretch out their arms to each other, those in between may gradually be brought to a better way of life. And I think it is likewise not accidental for the Russians, who through their huge empire connect China with Europe, and who rule over the far north of the uncivilized area along the coasts of the Arctic Ocean, that with the help and the engagement of their present ruler, they will follow on the pathway of our discoveries.”
He didn’t stop at abstract concepts, but worked incessantly to translate them in practice. Saddened that his project fell of deaf ears in ‘Europe’, he looked far ahead. He wrote ‘that he would rather that his vision win a ruler like the czar of Russia or the emperor of China, whose decisions could contribute to the well-being of millions of men, than to suffocate in the mediocrity and smallness of territorial princes’.
And he found that open ear, Peter the Great, to whom he wrote:
“The consequences of that would be, that Your Majesty could place his immense power, which God has granted you and your land and people, towards the glory of God and to the use and benefit of all Christendom. And this is so much the more important, because thus China and Europe—as the two most extreme ends of this world—would be brought together through the mediation of the czar.
By this means, Chinese products and news from China would come to Europe, and on the other hand the Christian faith would spread to China, indeed through Moscow as mediator. The prerequisite for this would be, that we bring to Moscow all the institutions which we have in Europe. Moreover, the czar must be able to get capable people from the most diverse occupations. He must teach his subjects”.
The reforms of Peter were geared toward the realization in practice of this vision, the real ‘Eurasianism’, that “community of shared destiny” that the Anglo-Zionist Empire tries in vain to sabotage.
Don’t forget the great American poet Ezra Pound, who with his mega-publication ‘Cantos’ and his Confucian ideas offered a lot to this Eurasian future. Before the Anglo-Zionists put him in a cage out of revenge.
Very interesting article. Brings to mind “East and West” by Northcote Parkinson. The book starts with an invocation by Alexander the Great calling for the struggle between East and West to develop into cooperation. Parkinson sees the two rising and sinking in tandem, like pistons in a huge steam engine. Obviously we in the West are now in the sinking phase.
The conceited arrogance of the West seen by Pepe Escobar and Ramin Mazaheri on this blog is expressed by its selfproclaimed elite leadership. That leadership is crumbling and doing its best to divert public attention from this process, which in my mind is unstoppable.
You can be suffering from a superiority complex or an inferiority complex. Both lead to violence. I see an emerging popular power emerging driven by neither of the complexes, a third way. This popular power will be smarter due to lack of need to victimize or be sees as victim.
The stormy waves on the surface may look terrifying but are nothing when the great current starts moving.
This is how the BS is spread, and I do not mean by you or Pepe. They could not quote (Alexander the Great – MA) saying those words, because anyone who really knows the Pelasgic history in the east would know that MA’s ancestors going back to many a thousands of years before him “namely Poseidon, Hercules, Apollon” went to Yunan, Tybet, India and Mesopotamia and built their first Cities. (Those Arkadian kings/heroes who became Olympian gods after their deaths originated from Arkadia, just as MA’s immediate ancestor Perdikas I, did) MA always said that his lineage goes back to Hercules and he wanted to retrace the steps of his great ancestor.
Prof. Hatzigiannakis explains some of the Pelasgic expansion in the East.
as an example Sumer, part 1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89CW2XFiwvo
Sumer part 2:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_aNpHdeJwA
You can find many other of such videos at Pelasgic playlist:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXQMxenHfpj2iqOEYbcYOsb28xVgB817m
I’m left scratching my head over this article. I feel like I accepted a voyage based on false advertising and I was taken on a trip to the middle of nowhere. Then the journey suddenly ended and left we looking around, wondering where I am.
It probably didn’t help that Pepe annoyed me right off the bat by talking about what ‘the Church’ has done in the world. How ‘the Church’ viewed and treated the nonwhite world. Christianity originated in the east. The Church to which he refers must mean the Roman Catholic Church of the west, given his several references to Jesuits. They long ago deserted the east and their original Apostolic teachings and thinking. Their Protestant daughters are more like them than most would be willing to admit.
This leaves me with the philosophers from the west. Those bloated egos who fancy themselves as having something earth-shattering to tell the world. How is any of what they think relevant in the western world now? I’m certain that the average citizen, Joe six-pack who thinks by voting he came make a difference, never considers Hagel in forming his views about China. Public views are formed by the propaganda we are bombarded with on a daily basis. Following the view which states “If you tell a lie one time, it remains a lie. But tell it a thousand times and it becomes the truth”, we keep hearing it stated as fact that China manipulates their currency. China tricks other countries into trade deals and then abuses and steals from them, basically enslaving them. China is a brutal communist dictatorship that slaughters the innocent and harvests their organs for sale on the open market. China is intent on conquering the world. On and on it goes. Look up two related outfits in Canada and prominent on social media: Canada Proud and Ontario Proud set up by Jeff Ballingall. He posts crap almost daily against China who is responsible for making the entire world sick! It is this sort of constant exposure to lies that forms public opinions about other groups of people, not some philosopher. And when Trump and his gang of criminals representing their global masters start a war against China, Russia, Iran etc all the people will cheer, not because of Hagel but because they have come to believe they are better than the others.
And perhaps I shouldn’t say this, but it causes me sadness to see on social media a priest from GOA join in more than once in support of such bashing, yet I’ve never seen him once confront the evils of his own government and nation.
This was not nearly one of Pepe Escobar’s best articles.
There is no philosophy or wisdom in the west, we’re just a sorry bunch of self-centred, hedonistic consumers with very little morals. Besides why does one need wisdom or principles when god, human rights and all that garbage is on his side? Instead of holding our government and ourselves responsible for arriving at this situation (no real industry, no real economy, no sovereign state, no health infrastructure, no long term strategy) we rather blame other nations like the “alt-right comic book geeks turned political commentators on youtube” for whom China seems to be the source of all evil instead of their own idiocy and complacency these last decades. Exactly the same gullible idiots who were blindly banging the drums of war over Irak 20 years ago btw. We’ve moved from Saddam and Bin Laden to Bill Gates, “big government” and China now. If western populations keep blaming others for their own stupidity and servility and can’t acknowledge their own mistakes than we can’t move forward and we deserve to disappear. China demonisation is a symptom of our weakness. Napoleon warned us 200 years ago: “China is a sleeping lion. Let her sleep, for when she wakes she will shake the world.” Instead of letting it sleep these past 3 decades, western politicians have offered China all their aces for a quick profit (industry, manufacturing, distribution, sovereign debt etc…) and China took these aces all the while sacrificing a whole generation of it’s people in sweatshops and factories to make up for the time lost against the west on the geopolitical checkerboard. We can’t blame the chinese for playing their cards right but we can surely start blaming ourselves for being passive greedy complacent idiots.
“the industrial-military-surveillance-media complex”
What a monster term, especially when we realize that we soon have to add ‘-pharma-vaccination’ to its tail.
: )
Kudos to Pepe, this is a vector in East/West history I was unfamiliar with.
I do remember reading a quote once, I believe it was Kipling although an internet search has failed to turn up the origin, to paraphrase; ‘When the East bites a man of the West, he can never lose it! It will never let him go!’
I used to think that was hogwash – until I was bitten. Eastern and Western philosophy are more complementary than our current Western political ‘leaders’ would want us to believe.
Article incorrect on Kant and slavery. I’ve read passages in Kant where he refers to slaves as “our brothers” while lamenting their slavery.
@Keenan
You have part of Kant correct. As does Pepe.
It looks like Kant had two POVs on the subject of slavery.
Read the section on Kant in this source.
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/linguistics-and-philosophy/24-01-classics-of-western-philosophy-spring-2016/lecture-notes/MIT24_01S16_SES23.pdf
@ Kennan
“If one compares with this the inhospitable behaviour of the civilised, primarily acting states of our part of the world, the injustice which is proved by the visits of foreign countries and peoples (which is of the same importance to them as the conquest of the same) goes far to the point of horror.
When they discovered America, the Negro countries, the Spice Islands, the Cape, etc., they saw them as countries that belonged to no one, for the inhabitants reckoned them for nothing. In the East Indies (Hindustan) they brought in foreign warring nations, under the pretext of merely intended trade defeats, but with them oppression of the natives, incitement of the various states of the same to widespread wars, famine, riots, disloyalty, and whatever else the litany of all evils that oppress the human race may continue to read.”
Kant: “For everlasting peace”
@ Kant, Pepe, Keenan, Larchmonter
Kant’s ethics are based on autonomy, the categorical imperative is just that: How can I decide for myself what is reasonable self-decisive action.
Heteronomy rejects Kant: Sapere aude! Have the courage to use your mind. Everything else is “self-inflicted immaturity”. This applies to every human being; slaves are those who do not break their chains imposed from outside.
Ok so they want “China to pay” what’s the worst they can do?
I mean it’s not like China is going to pay 200 300% of its gdp to from US to Vietnam.
The last dog barking in the Usa deep.state.media.warmongering places is to punish those pesky chinese with nothing less than default. Not paying them a cent for their trillion plus dollar denominated reserves.
Simply that.
Of course those ballooners will change course and words right by the next corner. Because the beijing smiling guys have a dozen forms by which to slap back in ways the exceptionalists cannot afford.
They can build twenty warships a year to sail them thru the pacific.They can grant a big military assistance to Venezuela, negotiate two or three naval bases in Africa, buy their oil just from Iran , venezuela and russia, limit operations in US dollars, They can start business with Germany with more than one unrejectable offer, shift their soybean purchases from US to Argentina and many so ons.
They can make public fresh information on what happened in 9/11. And many others. Above all they can attract nearly all their asian neighbors to their definite orbit.
Above all they will talk to each other, because neither is so mad as to tearing up a $100 bill.
The yellow skin, the complex language and the ingenuity of the Chinese give way to a mystery in the mind of the west. The West confronts mystery in unsavory ways: open hostility, herd mentality that becomes aggressive and abusive.
The sad thing is when such paranoid attitude is taken by the power of the State. In USA the Chinese had a tough time going through the immigration system. They were denied citizenship, detained in Angel island for years in order to achieve residence as opposed to Ellis Island where Europeans went through in matter of minutes.
The USA Constitution did not consider a child born from Chinese parents a USA citizen. The Chinese Americans had to go to court to achieve such recognition and that is when the US Constitution had to be amended as to protect babies born of European immigrants from being expelled due to the treatment US Constitution wanted to give Chinese babies born in USA of Chinese parents.
Our relationship with the Chinese in the Old West was to treat them as a weird tools of heavy labor. They can build railroads and even lived in the city (San Francisco) but they didn’t have the person hood to be USA citizens! We applied the same approach as we abused their cheap labor and we enjoy the clean product available at Walt Mart but they are still mysterious and they need to stay away and be punish.
I am grateful to Pepe for his rational approach in terms of naming the big name philosophers which give elegance to our putrid approach to mystery in treating the stranger. We need to call on our Christian roots in dealing with strangers they just may be Christ coming to give us abundant life.
Pepe’s article reminds me of story I heard in my boyhood. It goes like this; “Seven blind men were allocated specific areas of an Elephant for sensing and Identification by association (reference memory for “similar”experience ). The blind men gave back 7 different descriptions , each corresponding to the specific part of the Elephant. All their answers were correct but none came close to talking about The real Elephant.
I am of the opinion that human psychology and/or mind is one.. Over ‘Identification’ with a ‘Virtual(arbitrary/assumed) entity called “Self'(I/me) is a barrier that inhibit our ability to realize it.. Unfortunately when “self’ meets “Other”, the “House gets divided in two, resulting in conflict. This happens because ‘self” is incapable of looking at ‘self’ ,preferring the less painful act of looking outside. Manifestations like; individuality, family, society, class, race, nation, and constructs like; war exclusivity, scarcity and authority are tools that exist and reflect on status of human consciousness. It takes a certain level of sincerity to realize that segregation is an unconscious act at the behest of ‘yoke’ like dictates of the inner psycho-god called “self’ .
Pepe’s article is incomplete (fragmentary) and should be taken with a bit of sobriety. No triumphalism The East & the West are two sides of the same coin. What man requires is a return to “Humanity”. It really does not mater whether its a Yankee or China-man they are Human and how great can it be if they evolve be “beings”.Civilizations come and pass but growth requires mastery of the ‘Self”
I agree with Pepe Escobar about the AngloZionism demonization on China. However, I cannot agree with Pepe Escobar on whitewashing China imperialism nature especially their current action right now by using the demonization on China to excuse or ignore their action.
First, about COVID-19:
We don’t have any single proof to prove that US or China is the creator of the COVID-19. Western demonization of China will not excused on their imperialism and opportunism and save them from being suspected.
Let me tell you about my country Vietnam: Vietnam knew about the existence and how danger COVID-19 is not because China warn Vietnam like some or many people believe but because Vietnam Intelligence Agency had found out about this and they found out that China had hidden the information about COVID-19 since the beginning without telling everyone so Vietnam had prepared the COVID-19 since the beginning thank for the spying on China.
Second and pretty short: remember China funding on Mujahideen and Polpot during 80s and never forget their crimes.
Third:
China right now control Philippine electric power
https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/3038655/china-can-turn-philippine-national-power-grid-officials-say
China invaded the Scarborough
https://thediplomat.com/2019/11/report-chinese-warship-warned-commercial-vessel-away-from-scarborough-shoal/
Hint: Chinese 5th Column power in the South East Asian Coutries.
Fourth and final:
China right now go around mess up our EEZ again and even trying to banned our fisher come out to fishing. Please don’t tell that this is “Chinese Deity Unique Thought, Trust Chinese Because Chinese Have Plans To Save Humanity From AngloZionism” or anything like that to me because this freaking non-sense in many level.
By the way, I still remember China accuse Vietnamese Wood Fishing Boats rammed the Chinese Coast Guard in the Paracel Islands. If someone else believe that non-sense, then something wrong with their head.
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/military/article/3078452/china-says-vietnamese-fishing-boat-rammed-coastguard-ship
This is the commenter who lauded the b.a.r.t. public transportation as something to admire as an efficient service, and even randomly chose a photo of its Richmond station to prove its point. :-D
@vot tak on May 04, 2020 · at 10:49 pm EST/EDT
First:
Are you suspecting me that I am an oversea Vietnamese who live in California?
Second:
Can you tell me why you think my report about the stupid metro in Hanoi is wrong?
Third and final:
Can you enlighten how can you let your ad-hominem get away like this so easily?
http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/Article_87646.shtml
Proof that Covid-19 was NOT an accidental release from Wuhan lab
By Jim White | Empty Wheel
from Popular Resistance
Thursday, Apr 30, 2020
On Saturday, I took a deep dive into the origin of SARS CoV-2, the virus that is the cause of the deadly COVID-19 pandemic. That post was the result of several long days of deep reading and thinking. Somehow, I missed that Scientific American had put out an update on Friday of their profile of Dr. Shi Zhengli, the scientist responsible for much of what the world knows about bat coronaviruses, including isolating the bat coronavirus from Yunnan Province that is the closest relative to SARS CoV-2 that has been seen in a laboratory. Even worse, commenter Zinsky linked to the Scientific American article in one of the earliest comments on my post.
Good article you linked. Thanks. Everyone should read the entire article.
I posted a comment in the Disqus thread below it.
Dear Pepe. The founder of the real United States, Benjamin Franklin, considered himself a Confucian and Leibniz, Benjamin Franklin’s orientation through Cotton Mather developed the idea of Scientific Academies in Europe from the Chinese scholar tradition. Why don’t you mention this other tradition in the West instead of denigrating it?.