by Pepe Escobar (cross-posted with the Asia Times by special agreement with the author)
A new report on US policy toward China launched by the Asia Society in New York is another example of how supposedly bipartisan US intellectual elites, instead of offering impartial advice, do little more than parrot Washington’s talking points, failing to admit they know nothing of substance about the existential “threats” posed by Russia and China.
The report ‘Course Correction: Toward an Effective and Sustainable China Policy‘ was written in collaboration with the 21st Century Chinese Center at the University of California, San Diego. Orville Schell, one of the chairs of the Task Force Report, should be seen as one of the least biased among an uneven basket of self-declared US experts on China.
Still, he frames the report as trying to find a way between “confronting China” and “accommodating China.” That does not include “respecting” China – considering all the nation’s achievements 40 years after the reforms launched by Little Helmsman Deng Xiaoping.
Then Schell admits his experts are left “wondering what’s going on in the upper reaches of the leadership in China.” That’s even more serious, implying no intel on the ground.
So we’re left with China-bashing. We learn of devious attacks against the “rules-based global order” – which is always not so subtly equated with the “interests and values of the United States;” China’s “mercantilist zero-sum policies;”and the “lavishly funded state-led effort to build China into a high-tech superpower” – as if no country in the Global South should be allowed to go high-tech.
On foreign policy, the report warns about “expansive claims of sovereignty in the South China Sea,” which is a de facto regurgitation of the Pentagon’s master narrative.
Earlier this week, the head of the US Indo-Pacific Command, Admiral Philip Davidson, testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee that US-China competition represents “two incompatible visions of the future”, and that China is the “greatest long-term strategic threat to a free and open Indo-Pacific and to the United States.”
What about BRI?
The full report is here. The Asia Society is promoting it as the most comprehensive analysis of the state of play between the US and China – the result of two years of work. Yet it walks and talks more like a summary of the frantically repetitive news cycle always focusing on China’s “hegemonic” designs on 5G, the suspicious, technology-stealing Made in China 2025, attacks on “freedom of navigation” and China’s insidious nationalism.
As if the Trump administration was not applying myriad forms of economic pressure – and not only on China – ranging from exercises of sovereignty to unabashed protectionism.
The report recommends applying more pressure and exercising more control to “correct” Chinese behavior. So, it’s easy to imagine how this condescending, exceptionalist-based attitude is totally dismissed by Beijing.
When one looks at the signatories of the report, it’s easy to see why.
Among them, there’s Winston Lord, a former US ambassador to China and former right-hand man to Henry Kissinger; Kurt Campbell, the man who invented the “pivot to Asia,” sold it to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who convinced President Obama about it; former trade negotiator and Clinton acolyte Charlene Barshevsky; and David Shambaugh from George Washington University, who used to be reliable but has recently veered toward a Sinophobic path.
Instead of “confronting” or “accommodating” China, what passes for the upper reaches of the US intellectual elite could do worse than trying to understand China. And that means understanding the scope of an actual policy; the New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative.
BRI is the de facto foreign policy developed for a geoeconomic superpower all the way to 2049, based on trade, investment and internationalization of what is bound to become a major currency, the yuan.
Up to the end of last year, the China Development Bank, Exim Bank, the Silk Road Fund, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the New Development Bank (NDB) set up by the major emerging economies had invested at least $460 billion in myriad BRI projects.
BRI is already a global band. For all the 24/7 demonization, the absolute majority of BRI-related investments accrue China’s power projection, soft power included. That’s visible all across the Global South. Fine tunings, as in Malaysia or Sri Lanka, are inevitable. This is a massive work in progress – and it’s just beginning.
Until US elites understand what Belt and Road is all about, economically and geopolitically, expect think tank-concocted containment and accommodation strategies to flounder in irrelevance.
Capitalism means fighting over resources, markets and labor.
It seems that the US does understand what China’s “win/win” policies will lead to, diminished resources, market and labor for US and western multi-national corporations.
So the US does what it does, it uses its vast powers, i.e., the Mighty Wurlitzer propaganda apparatus, the banking/trade settlement apparatus, its vassals, and the military, to try to maintain total spectrum dominance.
It isn’t really a matter of misunderstanding, it is a matter of maintaining imperialism.
The USA and Israel, its master, operate on the supremacist doctrine pithily expressed by Gore Vidal-‘It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail’. In the eyes of the US/Israeli ubermenschen, the Chinese are racially and civilizationally inferior, lesser beings who must be put in their place, one way or another, forever. The US expends tens of billions every year openly fomenting and fostering internal subversion in China, and secessionist movements intended to smash China into numerous relatively powerless states. The US has supported the Dalai gang to rip Tibet (and areas of Gansu and other provinces bordering Tibet)from China since the 50s. It supports the bloodthirsty Uighur salafist killers from Xinjiang, who have shown themselves to be among the vilest butchers in the attack on Syria. They finance and train Hong Kong compradore traitors, have maintained the Taiwan puppet regime since 1949, and have openly expressed designs on Inner Mongolia, ‘Manchuria’ (surely they mean ‘Manchukuo’)and even, the most recent I have seen, Guangdong and Guanxi. Imagine if China spent billions every year to actively incite and aid forces wishing to detach Alaska, Hawaii. California, Texas etc, from the USA.
they did nt have to.
Montana, the far out forgotten state, is being sold out, offered in a basket to Canada for a song!
And surprisingly majority of both Monatanans and Canadians enthusiastically support the idea.
augusto
I read about that. Somebody in Montana started a petition for Montana to join Canada. It was obviously meant as a joke, but it’s turning into a very serious joke, judging by the responses. Back in 1998 Igor Panarin, Dean of the Russian Diplomatic Academy, published his famous map on the disintegration of the US into six parts. The northern and central states would end up in Canada. Not impossible. Of the current 50 states, only Dixie states have history and tradition behind them. The others are basically administrative units. Should a financial crash occur, then pragmatism would set in and Canada could well become enlarged.
Yes, but there’s one small error in that. The US would have to pay Canada $1 trillion to take Montana not the other way round.
Geographically, Montana would make a beautiful addition to Canada and the people there get on just fine with their neghbours as they are quite alike and not at all like the swamp Washington city slicker creatures.
Adding a trillion to the US debt is easily accomplished by just printing another trillion and has the advantage of advancing the eventual bubble burst.
Thousands support petition to sell ‘useless’ state of Montana
to Canada
https://www.rt.com/usa/451663-petition-sell-montana-national-debt/
Funny comments
Hey, Go Montana!!!!
If Montana becomes a Canadian province, then Wyoming is on the US-Canadian border. And if Wyoming were to then take the opportunity to join Canada, then my state has a border with Canada. And if nobody else does, I’ll quickly start a petition that we join Canada as well.
Hey, finally a Domino Theory that I like!
Free at last, Free at last, thank Gawd Almighty, we’d be free at last.
Then my state could be the answer to a trivia question. What place at different times has been a part of Mexico, the USA and Canada?
Free? Are you frickin serious? Whose free? Montana joining Canada’s war criminals? You want that assosiation? Canadian War Criminal Harper sent a fleet of CF 18s from the “Royal Canadian Air Force” to Lybia to destroy ‘evidence’ of the SNC-Lavilin Bribery Scam. It failed, and back home the Qusilings can’t jump ship fast enough. The grass may be greener…………………….the shit’s the same.
I’ve heard similar comments from North Dakota. Nothing to do with a deep desire to become Canucks, just a conviction of the need to get rid of the albatross that is today’s Washington, DC.
These secessionist sentiments seem to come and go, the particular state in question depending on the particular political party and President in power. Under Obama, one saw such sentiments in Texas, for example. With Trump in office, California is an obvious candidate. Montana is a pretty Red state. It’s difficult to imagine that they would be so dissatisfied with Trump in office. Moreover, I’ve never heard any such state seriously seeking to join Canada. I would imagine that Ottowa would be perceived as suspiciously Socialist by many Red Staters.
Mulga Mumblebrain
Yes, the US operates on the supremacist doctrine. How supremacist is it in reality ? When Nixon sent Kissinger to China to establish full diplomatic and political relations, this was done based on the “divide and conquer” tactic. The aim was to drag China into the Western orbit and turn it away from Russia, thus preventing a Eurasian economic partnership between these two countries. The opposite happened. The Chinese played along, and as one Russian analyst stated, they accepted all that was positive from the capitalistic system. However, the Chinese did not turn away from Russia, whose energy and high tech it needs. China is now an economic power house, while the Russian-Chinese partnership is turning Eurasia into the chief economic center of the world. This US “supremacist doctrine” did not work out in China. After all, the country has five thousand years of history and culture behind it. As for the Washington political establishment, it’s questionable if there is a country in the world it fully understands.
At that time, China and Russia were already having a rocky relationship on their own. I think it was in the 60’s, thus only a few years before Henry and Dick’s Chinese Adventure, that there was a border skirmish known as the Sino-Soviet War.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Soviet_border_conflict
That places it roughly three years before Tricky Dick goes to China. Kissinger didn’t invent a Sino-Soviet Split ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Soviet_split), but he was willing to take advantage of it.
And yes, those are Wikiped links, which of course is heavily edited by the deep state. But still, its basic history that they were fighting each other.
Exactly….For someone who is attempting to “maintain imperialism”, they really don’t have much choice.
These days, American elites, are incapable of understanding any people who are not on their knees, foreheads pressed to the ground, saying “Yes, Master. Yes Master. Of course Master.” The ones who try to talk back to American elites are deemed to be insane, as to do anything except to just graciously accept the wisdom offered by the Exceptional Masters is obvious insanity.
There is a level of arrogance and folly that is only seen just before the collapse of an empire.
I think that the US ‘elites’ understand perfectly well what BRI is, and that’s why they try desperately to put spokes in its wheels. What they don’t understand is that their old tricks won’t work as they did for a while in the past centuries. They did not learn anything from history. They actually can’t, enveloped in the bubble of their ‘exceptionalism’ as they are. The Chinese and Russians did.
These developments examined by Pepe Escobar, and others, are reactionary responses of an increasingly corrupt and decadent West and their stooges, to the crumbling dissolution of their predatory hegemony (control/stranglehold) over global power. It is inconceivable to these power elites that they will no longer be overlords, determining the global agenda, manipulating the major international institutions, setting the international rules and standards of behaviour (which they flout at their whim), and stealing the wealth and resources of peoples and countries that fall under their domination.
Chalmers Johnson, before his passing, provided significant insights into this process, and John Perkins, John Pilger, Catherine Austin Fitts, Pepe Escobar, and several other insightful observers continue to elucidate ongoing developments.
For the ruling global elites, this is a battle for “all the marbles “, indeed for their (perceived) very existential raison detre. For this reason, it is very likely that they would be willing to make the “ultimate sacrifice”, certainly of their stooges, fellow-travellers and dumbed-down populations (turning large numbers of them into cannon fodder, again!!!) and, perhaps (in much smaller numbers), even of themselves. In their view, the East and the South cannot “stand up”, without the West “standing down.” And for them this would be an unbearable humiliation.
But it would be incomparable to the humiliation, suffering and destruction that they have wrecked around the globe for the last two to three centuries — of course, in the causes of “the white man’s burden”, “freedom”, “democracy”, “human rights”, “capitalism”, “higher economic growth and better living standards”, “feminism”, “LGBTQI”, “climate change”, and many other dubious justifications. Bah, humbug!!!
As numerous observers have attested, and as commonsense tells us, there are no anthropogenic climate destabilisation deniers in power in Beijing. The Chinese elite are mostly technocrats promoted according to merit and ability. Such people can read and understand scientific theories, research and evidence. The level of anti-intellectualism, irrationality and paranoia required for being an anthropogenic climate destabilisation denier would see them weeded out as unfit for purpose long before they reached any level of real responsibility. It’s one of the prime reasons for China’s phenomenal advances over the last 70 years.
Mumblebrain asserts that it is anti-intellectual, irrational and paranoid to be an “anthropogenic climate destabilisation denier”. Let’s just refer to it, less pretentiously, as the questioning of the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) hypothesis, as, when you dissect the guts of how (it is claimed) climate change (the terminological fudge introduced by the notorious IPCC) is generated, the mechanism is the same (!!!) as that for AGW. That is, (in great summary) the burning of fossil fuels releases CO2 into the atmosphere, which warms the globe excessively, which causes myriad weather disasters, that portend the end of human civilisation (or worse).
As Mumblebrain claims that he resides in “Austfalia”, he may have noted that a front page article in the Weekend Australian, “Heat on BoM for records rewrite”, (16-17/2/2019, pp.1, 10) had reported the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) had (again!!!) “rewritten Australia’s temperature records for the second time in six years, greatly increasing the rate of warming since 1910 in its controversial homogenised data set.” This points (again!!!) to the manipulated character of many data sets — from the fabrications of improvements in (un)employment and inflation statistics, to the 6 million Jews gassed in the holocaust, etc. To be labelled a “denier” is to be ostracised, or worse! It is regretful for Mumblebrain to apply such tactics here. It is a dishonest attempt to control the narrative by implying that the science is settled!
Well, in Mumblebrain’s own Austfalia, emeritus professor Iain Plimer at the University of Melbourne vociferously contests (at significant cost to himself) that the science is NOT settled! For example:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ljUg2D-vBak
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5fZrRG6E_3I
(Follow the links to the testimonies of a range of other dissenters/”deniers”, and their out-of-bounds evidence and arguments.)
The relevance of this issue is that just as Pepe Escobar claims that US elites remain incapable of understanding China, and seek to control the narrative to portray China in general, and the BRI in particular, in a negative light, so too, the champions of (corrupted) mainstream Economics, Politics, and Science (including Climate Science) seek to demonise dissenters as evil heretics! But it should have been clear to Mumblebrain that China’s (not anti-intellectual, not irrational and not paranoid) elite technocrats are NOT deterred from promoting the BRI by any concerns about “anthropogenic climate destabilisation” (AGW). China continues to import large quantities of coal from Austfalia to feed its steel industry, to support BRI infrastructure construction and other development efforts in Eurasia, and further abroad.
In contradiction to these efforts, Austfalia is devoting large sums to build a “defence industry” to confront China, its largest trading partner. Austfalian elites are captive to US narrative and rhetoric on China and the BRI. And Mumblebrain too, in his captivity to the “anthropogenic climate destabilisation” hypothesis, stands as an obstacle to clear thinking on this and related important development issues. In the day of Galileo Galilee, Mumblebrain would havd been an ally of and advocate for the Pope. Afterall, simple observation and his cited “commonsense” would demonstrate that the sun (rising in the East and setting in the West) revolves around the Earth. Only a heretic would claim otherwise! Other heretics would like to halt the rise of the East and delay or freeze the setting of the West.
The Science about the physical basics of the GH-effect is settled. It’s the same as any other scientific discovery. It has been proven myriad times.
Now take the earth. The climate can only change due to radiative forcing, since the sun is, what drives our climate. Now you can eliminate factors, because they don’t change or change in insignificant ways.
1) Sun: Activity rebounded after the Maunder-minimum (little ice age) and peaked in the 70s. After it has been declining a little.
2) Volcanic activity: Nothing out of the ordinary
3) Human GHG emissions: increasing since industrial age, sharp increase since 1950s
The climate is an equilibirum, a precarious dynamic balance of various subsystems. Our GHG release is the initial push. Now the ball is rolling and the feedback systems start to accelerate it.
1) Warmer Oceans: Oceans absorb 93% of the current warming. That means even if we somehow stop all GHG-release, it will take a long time to lose that accumulated heat. Also it means the Oceans will release more H2O vapour, which is also a GHG.
2) Iceloss: Glaciers and poles are losing ice rapidly. That means the albedo will decrease, more radiation will warm up the surface/ocean.
3) Permafrost: There are huge amounts of CH4 and CO2 stored in those. CH4 is a very strong , albeit shortliving (decades) GHG. They are beginning to thaw, once this process begins in earnest it will amplify the GH-effect by a large factor.
The gist of this is: The climate was in balance for 100.000s of years. A globally active humanity which is extracting and converting resources on an industrial scale has an equally global and large effect due to emissions.
Ah, another captive of the AGW hypothesis! Who asserts that only YOUR facts and arguments matter. And ignores/dismisses all contrary evidence and arguments (they DO exist, you know; and they aren’t going to go away — remember that Galileo “lost the battle, but he won the war,” so to speak. Who now remembers the name of the Pope who subjected him to punishment?).
Obviously, this is not the place to conduct a deep analysis of the (non)merits of the AGW hypothesis. I have sought to keep my earlier remarks brief and relevant to Escobar’s article, and to the topic of China and the BRI. In this regard, 2 further points may be raised:
1. Escobar highlighted the fact that “US elites remain incapable of understanding China”. This points to issues that transcend rational discussion — perhaps originating in personal failings of the key leaders/decision-makers; behind-the-scenes control or manipulation by the “deep state” or other powerful lobbies/vested interests, etc. Similarly, the captives of the AGW hypothesis may be incapable of rationally confronting contrary evidence and arguments. In this situation, the passing of time may provide firmer verification, one way or another (at least, you did not throw the “denier” epithet/insult — one must be grateful for small mercies).
2. It must be presumed that you and others of similar persuasion will be making a strong case to China (and India, Africa, and all developing countries) to stop using fossil fuels (coal from Australia, Brazil and domestic sources; oil and gas from the Middle-east, Russia, Central Asia, Nigeria, Venezuela, etc.), and to commence a serious de-industrialisation process; forgo BRI infrastructure development around the globe, and be satisfied with the status quo, relative to Western living standards and power structures. Alternatively, would you and other AGW champions be campaigning for a substantial transfer of wealth, power and resources from the West to the East and the South, to ameliorate the gross inequities in living standards, and to promote a greater sharing of the benefits of development, as well as the miseries of the lack of development? No? Why not?
China and its BRI project, in combination with Russian resources, and the WILLING cooperation of other participating countries, offers the prospect of significant GLOBAL development, through their own local as well as collaborative international efforts. That would transcend, in tangible ways, the duplicitous promises of “freedom”, “democracy”, “human rights”, “capitalism”, “free trade”, “higher economic growth and better living standards”, “humanitarian aid”, and “responsibility to protect”. Remember that Libya, the most developed country in the African continent has been destroyed, its infrastructure wrecked, and its population turned into refugees or traded in slave markets — because its ruler was a “dictator”, like Saddam in Iraq, Assad in Syria, and now Maduro in Venezuela. In this context, is AGW just another duplicitous component of the pervasive information warfare to keep the East and the South subjugated? In this light, are you (in)capable of appreciating the fuller/deeper ramifications of the AGW hypothesis?
The difference between my post and yours is:
a) I present arguments and logical conclusions.
b) your side: nothing scientific, only conjectures and political stuff
In now way I touched the topics of deep state and elitist propaganda. The problem are the facts.
There is a measurable and increasingly recognizable increase in global mean tempetrature. There is no significant change in the major factors sun/earth. There is major change in the factor human influence.
I leave it to you to draw the conclusion.
Present me logical explanations for the current measurable increase in mean temp, glacial and (ant)arctic ice loss and measureable increase in extreme local weather phenomena.
Please be specific and scientific.
Oh, dark, it’s a wasted effort. The denialist will just come back with the usual paranoid garbage that all the temperature figures are faked, and the bizarre untruths that ‘glaciers are advancing, not retreating’, ‘Arctic summer sea ice and Antarctic ice-cover are increasing’, or the more bizarre, like old-time favourites ‘CO2 is not a greenhouse gas’, and, my personal pick, ‘how does a gas that only comprises 0.0041 % of the atmosphere cause warming’. And that all the Academies of Science and scientific societies on Earth and the vast majority of scientists are either idiots and fools, or engaged in a gigantic conspiracy to make Al Gore even richer, or take their SUVs, Jetskis and assault rifles away. It is truly mind-boggling to see ignorance in fanatic action.
The denialists often whinge that they do not like the ‘denialist’ description, citing the fact that ‘denialist’, which, of course, is precisely what they are, is insulting, and echoes the charge of ‘Holocaust denier’. However, in my opinion, anthropogenic climate destabilisation denialism is far worse than ‘Holocaust’ denialism. First the scale of victims is vastly different. Six million Jews as against billions of human beings who will be killed by four degrees Celsius increase in global average temperatures, an outcome made vastly more likely by the actions of the denialist industry. Indeed, beyond four degrees the risk of total human extinction becomes ever more possible, indeed probable.
And while the victims of the ‘Holocaust’ are long dead and beyond hope or salvation, the victims of the anthropogenic climate destabilisation Holocaust are still alive or yet to be born, and might yet be saved, just so long as the denialist industry and its fossil fuel and hard Right political allies and financiers are defeated.
Well said dark, but the denialists cannot, ever, be impressed by mere science, facts, rationality and a humane concern for Life on Earth, including our descendants. They are utterly immune to rational, evidence-based, thought, and have their own factless facts, canards, myths and reassuring group chants. They know, a priori, what they want to know, and nothing, ever, will make them change. Even when the water is lapping at their door, the temperature outside is 50 degrees Celsius and wild-fires are approaching, they just be screeching, ‘The climate always changes’, ‘It’s the ozone layer’, or, their favourite, ‘Al Gore! Al Gore! Al Gore!’.
People still believe in man made global warming? So the government, media, and deep state are lying about everything, EXCEPT global warming?
China is building vast new coal capacity, at home and abroad. China’s CO2 emmisions are skyrocketing. They clearly are not concerned with man made global warming.
how`d we get from “understanding China” to Global warming?
Kemosabe, ‘understanding China’ morphed into the ‘Global warming’ from misunderstanding China. China not allow interference in economy, that warmists want. Economy scales with emissions. China not sign on. Warmists are global interventionists. Warmists are globalists. Warmists can’t make China obey. Elmo reads smoke signals right.
I stated that there are no anthropogenic climate destabilisation denialists in Government in China. China is moving rapidly to renewable energy, energy efficiency, electric vehicle, high speed trains, massive reforestation etc, because their rulers understand the science. They cannot afford to give up fossil fuels yet, and are gambling that the hour is not too late. I hope they are correct, but the evidence tells me that they are wrong. ‘Warmist’ is a silly insult, with the last five years the warmEst in recorded history.
” So the government, media, and deep state are lying about everything, EXCEPT global warming?”
“settled science” worshipers actually believe what you stated above imho.
google “armstrongeconomics Al Gore’s Global Warming Deliberate Fraud to Increase Governmental Power”
“Gore set out to enact policies that would alter government and our future by placing humankind in harm’s way. Gore directed all funding to ensure that the climate change agenda became a top priority for the United States Government. Gore created the President’s Council on Sustainable Development. The Charter was revised on April 25, 1997, and the “Scope of Activities” was dramatically altered. Gore directed that the agenda was to be EXCLUSIVELY a global warming agenda to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. He claimed there would be NO DEBATE regarding the science behind the new agenda. Gore deliberately silenced all opposition.”
so we see that the science is indeed settled, settled by a repugnant lying slimeball it seems..
Ahhh-the delicious ‘Gorecentric’ view of the Universe. A wonder to behold. What a shame that ALL the Academies of Science and scientific societies and 99% of actively publishing climate scientists agree with the anthropogenic climate destabilisation theory. Are they all on Al Gore’s payroll? Where did my cheque go?
Actually, in many countries including the USA and Austfailia, the regimes are active denialists. In others they pretend to accept the science, but do nothing concrete to upset the fossil fuel industry, the richest by far on Earth. And much of the Rightwing fakestream media is also denialist, particularly the Murdoch cancer, and much of the rest radically downplays the dangers. Do you think that ‘they’ are lying about gravity and the other Laws of Physics, too?
Phodges on February 18, 2019
“China is building vast new coal capacity, at home and abroad. China’s CO2 emmisions are skyrocketing.”
No, they are not building vast new coal capacity, and no, their CO2 emissions are not skyrocketing. Actually, their CO2 emissions per unit GDP (the better metric) are improving rapidly, and they are phasing-out coal. Greenpeace put out a very good report on China and coal a few years ago, you should read it, but you won’t, will you?
Why do climate denialists feel the need to lie to support their case?
alan, the pathopsychology of the lumpen denialists is a horror to behold. The fossil fuel and Rightwing ideology driven denialist industry made a number of clever moves twenty-five or so years ago, when they launched their campaign against Truth, Reason, Science and Life on Earth. The success of that Evil Crusade sealed humanity’s fate.
First, they declared climate science to be a ‘Leftwing’ cause, immediately gaining the grunting support of Rightwing dullards who will oppose anything ‘Left’ with fanatic fury, even up to the level of violence. Our former PM, Howard, in my opinion a loathsome racist imbecile and recidivist liar, was ‘convinced’ by US Rightwingers that ‘climate change’ was a ‘Communist plot to destroy capitalism’, so his regime spent ten precious years in full denialist action.
Second, denialists are generally ‘Rightwing authoritarians’ as Altemeyer describes them, so concern for others, including our descendants, is not high, and greed and egomania is hypertrophied. Despite being generally stupid and ignorant, their egomania makes it impossible for them to admit error and grow intellectually. That also makes them easy to manipulate by Rightwing denialist pseudo-science, and paranoid to the ghastly extent of believing that the global scientific community, the UN, and most enlightened opinion outside the Anglosphere, are all engaged in a gigantic conspiracy to lie about basic science, peer-reviewed research, paleo-climate research and the observations from reality of rising temperatures, melting ice-fields, the spread of pests and diseases, melting permafrost, record deluges and floods, spreading mega-fires etc, all of which evidence they believe is faked. We are dealing with the detritus of humanity, but it is a garbage layer that has WON, and we have no future, thanks to these denialists, beyond 2050, but probably much earlier.
Its no myth that now Russia is opening sea routes across the top of the continent that used to be closed by Artic ice. People can spin all the alternate facts they want, but the Arctic ice cap is shrinking and big chunks are breaking off of the Antarctic ice cap. I don’t really care, since I live a mile above sea level and the only thing we need to worry about is watching out for incoming arks. But still, it seems rather odd to live in a world where something as big and noticeable as the ice caps shrinking and melting isn’t acknowledged by many.
I still say, put your money where your mouth is. If you believe that Global Warming is a myth, buy land at the seashore below the one meter contour line. And since the same people don’t believe in government, I’m sure they would never claim flood insurance when they end up underwater.
Dear me-someone who takes notice of Murdoch’s chief media cancer, the ‘Austfailian’, ground zero for the most fanatic, and moronic, anthropogenic climate destabilisation denialism in the country. And who quotes Ian Plimer. the utterly discredited renegade geologist. Sad indeed. And then there is the denialists’ favourite trope, besides ritual intoning ‘Al Gore’ over and over again-the question of terminology. Is it ‘global warming’, or ‘climate change’? Why, it’s both, but don’t strain your brain trying to comprehend that truth. Intellectual insufficiency knows no bounds for the denialists.
All one needs to be a denialist, apart from the necessary IQ and requisite contempt for the lives of our descendants, is to ignore the firmly held and oft expressed opinion of all, ie every single one, of the Academies of Science and scientific societies on Earth, and 99% of actively publishing climate scientists. But you still have Ian Plimer, and you’ll always have Ian Plimer. Meanwhile all the montane glaciers of the world, the northern permafrost and the ice-caps of Greenland and east and west Antarctica are all in on the conspiracy, melting away in a clear conspiracy by ‘Leftwing nanny-state do-gooders’ (to quote your beloved ‘Austfailian’)to fool the public and allow Al Gore to build another wing on his mansion. Who would have thought that the forced auto-genocide of humanity would be so deliciously dumb?
Leave it to the Malthusian freaks to hijack a discussion of Western incomprehension of Chinese principles and motivation for the undead “anthropogenic climate change” canard with which they hope to bring about the Club of Rome’s oligarchical plan to genocide the human species to a “sustainable” population of about a billion, dredging up the fraudulent “carrying capacity” theories of Giammaria Ortes and every zero-growther since then to support an entropic view of the universe in which the human species can only grow at the expense of “nature.” Chinese science is comfortable with both sides of the issue and need not engage in fruitless, sterile blame games over who is changing our climate, as they are already addressing it on every level. Notice also that the Russians don’t waste much time arguing about this, and instead deploy resources in every area to multiply the power and diversity of their industrial and technological base. They have no problem with “green” technology because it is, in fact, quite useful for certain applications, and the deeper issues of principle are not worth discussing with fanatics. At the same time, they are the world’s leading producer of nuclear power plants. It is only the self-mutilating West that feels a need to choose one or the other.
The necessary advent of thermonuclear energy as a clean, reliable and virtually inexhaustible alternative to fossil fuels (leveraged in the meantime by fission power whose detractors lie poses unsolvable waste problems) proceeds apace with the landmark Chinese achievement of 100,000,000°C plasma temperatures last November, an effort now involving Third-World economies such as Thailand, which received from China an HT-6M tokamak research reactor in August to expand and accelerate this fundamental breakthrough across a broader and more diversified talent pool. Not to mention the recent Chinese announcement of solar collector arrays to be placed in near-space orbit as relay stations to stream power to Earth, using microwave and other means of transmission, at a far greater density and fuller use of the electromagnetic spectrum than solar power as collected at the surface, with no weather interference. China also leads the world in sales of electric vehicles as a percentage of the overall fleet, and green cities in which energy savings and recycling are an integral part of architectural and urban design. To them, it’s simply another technological challenge, similar to 5G. Why would they engage in colossal fusion and space programs if they thought the answer is contraction, that civilization is approaching a fixed upper limit?
To derive from any of this that Chinese science is PRO “anthropogenic climate change” is as intellectually disingenuous (and, frankly, stupid) as the argument constantly made that anyone denying or merely qualifying the human causes of such change is a heretic proposing that no such change is taking place, a religious argument almost always followed by moralistic browbeating, virtue-signalling and glib mockery of the mental faculties of said heretic. While skeptics deny that climate change is caused entirely by human economic activity, true believers, for whom the “science is settled,” misrepresent that position to mean that we deny change itself, even though it has been a constant for millions of years. The idea of a “balance of nature” as a system in static equilibrium that cannot be disturbed, under penalty of extinction, has been debunked not only by human existence itself at an exponential rate over previously unsustainable land areas, but by actual environmentalists like Vladimir Vernadsky who posited the evolution of the biosphere into a “noosphere” primarily driven by the action of human reason (which goes a little beyond simplistic “common sense”, or “sense certainty,” as the British—always British—reductionists put it).
If China thought the reason for environmental degradation were an excess of population or of industrial development, instead of raising 500 million people from poverty in a few short decades and becoming an industrial, technological and scientific powerhouse, they would have put the brakes on and reduced their population to more “manageable” numbers. However, they appear to be doing the opposite, while making the planet cleaner and more habitable in the process. Why else such interest in the Transaqua project in the Lake Chad basin to bring agriculture back to that rapidly desertifying area? Chinese lands three times larger than Spain have already been set aside for “smart” agriculture involving the artificial production of rain (the water, I’m sure, is quite natural H₂O). Has it occurred to our anti-growth detractors that the increase in photosynthesis and oxygen production implicit in that effort will initiate a trend of POSITIVE anthropogenic climate change? A change that can be extended to every similar area on the planet, such as the North American badlands and deserts that extend from Canada to Mexico and could be rehydrated by the long-forgotten NAWAPA project to flip over surplus precipitation from the Pacific Northwest? Is there some mystical “balance of nature” unknowable rule that prevents us from doing this and will lead to further impending doom, instead of better organized weather cycles and temperature stabilization? It was already done on a small scale in California’s Imperial Valley, which is the richest agricultural land in the US—and a very nice place to live in.
Has it occurred to these Chicken Littles that the very “solutions” they propose will merely slow down the rate of collapse of the remaining unfortunate humans who must live in the downgraded remains of a world economy, a process made irreversible once the energy-density threshold for real solutions is passed, and will bring about our extinction anyway? Why is China so interested in establishing a presence on the FAR SIDE of the moon, where further exploration into the solar system, including Mars, must necessarily be based? Fusion-powered cities able to produce their own food, power and atmosphere are obviously a first draft for space-faring communities reaching far into the universe beyond our little (but by no means yet exhausted) blue planet, with new exoplanets constantly being discovered around stars that could be reached within a few generations once fusion-derived means of propulsion are developed—some of which are already on drawing boards. “Oh, no! Nature would never allow that, it’s not achievable! What anthropocentric, arrogant hubris! Let’s slow down right now and live with what little we can preserve of nature’s original state, or at least the few of us the planet can still afford to sustain at that level (we, who are its saviours, will obviously be spared from the culling).” Scratch a bit below the surface, and every one of these noble crusaders for Mother Earth, beginning with Prince Philip of the World Wildlife Fund, will describe the human species as a cancer. Good going, Mumblebrain. I thought you’d learned something.
Sorry, Paracletus, but Elmo started it with a gratuitous attack on science and rationality, on 18th February, and I replied that the Chinese leadership, being meritocratic technocrats, contain no obscurantist and irrational denialists.
As for your contribution, might I begin by asking what you see as the planet’s optimum, or maximum sustainable human populations? As for the Club of Rome, whose ‘Limits to Growth’ report of the 1970s is coming true, right before our eyes, particularly in relation to pollution, they do not propose ‘Malthusian’ solutions. People like you are, because your refusal to acknowledge the undeniable truth that there is such a thing as ‘carrying capacity’, ensure the true Malthusian outcome, ie that the population grows until it outgrows necessary resources, particular food and water, whereupon the population crashes. And it is particularly misguided, to be polite, to deny that human population growth has not been at the expense of Nature when 90% of large pelagic fish are gone, the population of large, non-domesticated, animals has crashed by 60% in the last forty years, forests are being devastated by clearing, the spread of pests and diseases and mega-fires, insect populations, the basis of food-chains and plant pollination, are crashing, and we are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction event in planetary history. But I’m sure you’ll just deny it all.
Your attitude to energy resources is quite bizarre, given that solar and wind are now cheaper than any fossil fuels, and orders of magnitude cheaper than nuclear, and without the toxic waste, threats of Fukushimas and Chernobyls and nuclear weapons proliferation and the huge amounts of water required for their operations.
You get a bit tongue-tied later by asserting that one ‘…denying…the human causes of such (anthropogenic climate) change…is a heretic proposing that no such change is taking place…’, which is rather sadly self-contradicting, but we all get a little confused when carried away by ideological fervour, don’t we. And, of course, the old ‘the climate is always changing’ pseudo-argument is one of the denialists’ most banal refuges. It is, of course, the RATE and EXTENT of climate change that is vital, and both are now and will be, in the next few decades, centuries and millennia, driven by the forcing of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, unprecedented for 55 million years, at least. The ‘balance of nature’ is often disturbed, which is when some species go extinct and are replaced by others better fitted to the new conditions. However, when the changes are too extreme and rapid, the number of species going extinct grows greatly, biodiversity crashes and it takes millennia or even millions of years for biodiversity to be re-established. Such occasions are marked by ‘mass extinction events’, five before the current, anthropogenic, occurrence, one at least caused by a meteor or comet that took off the dinosaurs, and the others mostly suspected to have been caused by greenhouse warming events, although at rates at least one order of magnitude slower that the current event.
Your later advocacy of remedial actions to restore devastated lands makes more sense than usual, but will be to no avail as long as greenhouse gas forcing is driving climate change and oceanic heating and acidification. The humane and gradual reduction of the human population, to three billion or so, is achievable, given female emancipation and education, poverty eradication and the will to do so. Your preference for neoplastic growth at all costs, simply mimics cancer, and must, inevitably, kill the host, and soon. But at least I’m not at all surprised by your contribution here, as the most die-hard denialists, I have always found, are ineducable, but capable of great prodigies of wishful imagination.
The smug, habitual and condescending “don’t we?” fails to disguise the guileful use of ellipses and parenthetical insertions to present a statement as something which it isn’t, namely a distinction between climate change and anthropogenic climate change. Such conflation shows plainly that the “ideological fervor” lies in the reading rather than in the writing, as the reader cannot get around the death-grip of a closed-system thermodynamics in which entropy must always prevail, albeit at a slower pace if this thanatological resignation is adopted as the long-term approach to survival of our species, or rather its certain death over a slightly extended time frame. Who says a population of “three billion or so” would continue to be sustainable, as its ability to “terraform” the Earth, so to speak, continues to decline and further reductions are required, since every fixed resource base is definitionally finite? Just as increasing the number of sides of a polygon makes it seem more and more like a circle, until an infinite-sided polygon could be perceived to be one, a fact indeterminable by mere sense-certainty is that nothing could be farther from an actual circle, which has only one side and no vertices. Thus reductionism is a flawed metric of mankind’s growth potential: the more desperately you cleave to its axiomatic boundaries, no matter how artfully you shuffle them, the blinder you become to the actual nature of the physical universe, and any open-ended alternative to the inherent limitations of your own optics will seem like “wishful imagination,” because you have rejected a universal identity for man and have become ineducable (which is, of course, how you will see anyone who disagrees with you). I’ll take “wishful imagination” over “humane” genocide any time.
I confidently expected that you would deny your error of expression, and project your ideological fervour back on me. Same old, same old. I’m sorry about the ‘..don’t we”, because it was a crude trap, designed to annoy, and you took the bait, as expected, but it was not a nice tactic. I feel some shame over it.
Your ruminations regarding entropy are interesting. In the long-term (when, as Keynes observed, ‘We’ll all be dead’, including our Sun, our galaxy etc)entropy must win, unless we have things completely wrong in all our physics. But our problem is the next few decades, where the complexity built up on this planet, most plainly evidenced by the biodiversity of Life on Earth, is being rapidly destroyed by human activities, which you simply deny. That is not a great way to argue your position, no matter how much it is camouflaged by empty persiflage, flutters of rhetoric and illogical denials of reality. The catastrophe is happening right now, not ‘…over a slightly extended time-span’.
Your denial that three billion could be a sustainable human population, because ‘…every fixed resource base is definitionally finite’, (so how could we sustain your ideal, and no doubt greater, population, whatever it is?-I note you didn’t dare answer that question), simply ignores the ability of natural systems to repair themselves, without the loony sci-fi pipe-dreams of ‘terra-forming’. The natural would could be repaired, if it is not too late thanks to you denialists, with agroecology, permaculture and organic farming rather than the terra-forming of industrial agri-chemical saturated agriculture. Then there is ‘re-wilding’ where large areas could be returned to their pre-‘civilizational’ state as biodiversity refuges. We can recycle ‘rare’ resources, we could mine asteroids or the moon, (sorry for the drift into sci-fi, but it looks more plausible than ‘terra-forming’ to me) we can downsize our material greed for useless junk and not engage in activities where ecological carnage is ignored, by capitalist diktat, as ‘externalities’. In short, of course, capitalism, with its cancerous insistence on external growth, primarily of profits and the wealth and power of the parasite classes, on a finite planet, already choking on polluting filth of every kind, must be extirpated, entirely, and a human economy based on recycling, low consumption, radical material egalitarianism and global comity and amity, not incessant aggression and genocide, be instituted instead. I doubt that you could be against such a future.
Yes, you have an impregnable shield against any challenge to the finite paradigm—which is wrong, indeed, both in Keynesian economics and in Newtonian physics (which share reductionist DNA). Christians have a great saying, attributed to Jesus: “Let them hear, who have ears, and see, who have eyes.” Or as the Americans say, pragmatically: “You can lead a horse to water…” As to “loony sci-fi pipe dreams,” it’s been less than a century when most people would say that about going to the Moon. Here, have some water:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciStnd9Y2ak&t=853s
Apparently the disease is particularly acute in Australia:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O00ZkL5fb5A
So you simply deny the finitude of the Earth system. Well, that’s cleared that up. And, consequent to that mistaken belief, you, above, denied all the dreadful destruction visited on the planet and Life on Earth that I outlined a very small sample of. It doesn’t add much rational, intellectual or evidentiary heft to your beliefs-I won’t call them ‘arguments’. And, what, really, is your ideal number of human inhabitants of the planet. I reckon three billion is a maximum, and the lower, down to say one billion, that figure, allied to a more rational economic system, new technologies for recycling and non-destructive energy production, agro-ecological agriculture, ‘re-wilding’ and reforestation on a wide scale and radical material egalitarianism, the better it will be for humanity and the rest of Life on Earth. Unfortunately the degree of destruction already wrought, that you seem dedicated to denying, means it will take centuries to restore biospheres to their pre-Industrial state.
Since Mr. Mumblebrain enjoys my prose so much, and I’m weary of the endless drone of “anthropogenic climate change” with which Malthusian eco-fascists believe they can justify oligarchical plans to implement a neo-feudal “re-wilding” and depopulation of the world, I’ll further contribute this part of a comment, cross-posted from an American YouTube channel, in response to raging howls against “socialism” by juvenile reactionaries who don’t understand capitalism, either. Since it involves a better understanding of China’s present purpose in the world, and the inability of the West to understand it, we may return to a more useful conversation about Pepe’s original article, briefly interrupted by monomaniacal “green” propaganda:
[China is no longer socialist, claims the Gringo vulgarian, as justification for “humanitarian” regime change in Venezuela, where “socialism” is supposedly causing, as always, “starvation and genocide.”]
China did not stop “going down that path.” The “one party” that runs China is the Chinese Communist Party, a fully communist organization, meaning, according to their own theory, the highest stage of socialist development. CCP Secretary General Xi Jinping is also President of China, a post that is now renewable for life (which Trump, only partially tongue-in-cheek, finds an appealing proposition). The West plays down the fact that it is, indeed, a socialist system, but with “Chinese characteristics” since the economic reforms introduced by Deng Xiaoping in 1978, also known as “socialist market economy.”
By this means much basic economic activity (retail, trades, etc.) and even large-scale investment is delegated to private enterprise beholden to state-defined national interests, whose successful management may be rewarded with considerable personal wealth. In the early days of Marxist theory communism was defined, in fact, as “capitalism of state,” and was presented as a more effective way to direct economic development. Trivializing that concept into the leftist mantra of populist redistributionism overlooks the self-destructive effects of vulture capitalism, hedge fund speculation and Third World looting which is in fact the antithesis of what the American System set out to be under Alexander Hamilton, Mathew Carey, Henry Clay and others who actually laid the foundation to make America great the first time.
With Lincoln’s assassination by British agents-of-influence, the Specie Resumption act of 1875, the establishment of Wall Street as a fully integrated subsidiary of the City of London and the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank in 1913 (not to mention all the crazy wars since then), the United States turned away from its founding principles and was left with nothing but the delusion of “American Exceptionalism” as a fig leaf to hide the fact that we’ve become a modern extension of the British Empire we fought a revolution against. “Conservative” economists and think tanks now even label Hamilton et al. as early “socialists” or at best naïve idealists who didn’t know shit about the tough realities of capitalist economics—a myth that Marx himself fell for in misidentifying capitalism as the monetarist, zero-sum dogma with which Adam Smith and David Ricardo attempted to discredit the American Revolution.
British monetarism has always been the exact opposite of an American System that Marx knew little or nothing about—another reason his present-day followers are so clueless. China’s “win/win” development strategy of growing markets around the world by investing in the prosperity of its trading partners instead of finding ways of looting them with debt traps (as alleged by its detractors), very much approximates the Harmony of Interests (actual book title) proposed by Henry Carey, one of our most brilliant anti-British economists, and also the role of the state in economic development as explained by Hamilton in his 1792 Report to Congress on the Subject of Manufactures. Precisely such a strategy has allowed China to lift 500 million people out of poverty in less than four decades—a feat unmatched, ever, by any “capitalist” country (though again, by definition, communist China practices “capitalism of state.”) Is there any objective reason why a country like Venezuela couldn’t do that?
May I further add that one of my favorite African musicians, Salif Keita from Mali, has gone on record against American-style “democracy” in Africa, where most countries would be better served, he says, by a “benevolent dictator like China.” I saw this on the 21SilkRd Facebook page, a worthwhile visit for China watchers.
Paracletus, I see that you, as expected, refuse to answer any of my refutations of your ideologically and, therefore, pathopsychologically driven, anti-scientific, irrational and omnicidal denialism. You, of course, refuse to state your ‘ideal’ or maximum global human population, despite repeated requests to do so, thereby cruelly robbing us of the opportunity to enjoy some gallows humour. And your utterly incorrect, (which doesn’t do it justice)assertions that human expansion and population and industrial production growth has not affected the natural world and Life on Earth badly, and more human expansion to your beloved, apparently infinite, future Nirvana of countless billions (trillions)remain unamended and unapologised for. A true devotee of Julian Simon, a cornutopian living in Cloud Cuckoo Land, as the sixth mass extinction event unfolds around us. I take it that you deny that cataclysm, too.
As for the rest of your latest missive, I hate to tell you but I find it interesting and cogent, although there is much that I know little or nothing about. It is encouraging to see that you are capable of rational thought, in the right circumstances, after all. Perhaps there is hope for you yet, but, I’m afraid that the hour is very late.
Good article, good comments!
It really does not matter,however, whether the “misunderstanding” is a result of willful lack of understanding to support the exceptionalism stupidity and raw arrogance or whether they do try but lack the ability or capability to understand the other side of the table. Bottom line, from the elites’ point of view, is I’ve got mine, no change, compromise, or flexability is needed, and off we go.
It really is quite concerning how far this arrogance goes and how damaging it is-good example in Munich (and Warsaw) recently, a totally dictatorial attitude, arrogance, and stupidity. I do not know of any country in the world, or its govt, or its people where this works. It shows a total lack of common sense.
It is almost as if these clowns are intent on speeding up the collapse of the empire or possible it is just signs of desperation and panic.
Sun Tzu taught that overconfidence in one’s enemy should be taken advantage of. Washington’s continued condescension towards China is a good thing. It means they will keep making missteps and bungling by underestimating China as she continue to rise. It is when the warhawks cast off their over confidence to see things clearly that causes much more worry. In fact it is in Russia’s and China’s long term interest to throw in a few apparent victories here and there; just enough to keep the Neocon hubris going strong.
”BRI is the de facto foreign policy developed for a geoeconomic superpower all the way to 2049, based on trade, investment and internationalization of what is bound to become a major currency, the yuan.”
To the Zionazis and the West’s proud ’anti-authoritarians’ alike this represents a truly Bad Rotten Initiative. And I have to admit this is a justified verdict — I mean: how is Humanity going to survive without Western genocidalists and their awesome bobo:s?
One should not view China and Russia as the same, because they are distinctly and vastly different, which is not surprising since they are 2 differet countries, with different leadership, different economic systems, and different cultures.
I have respect for the Chinese people, but the Chinese governmnt, Xi in particular, do not desrve the favorability that Russia deserves. We should not try to bring China under control, because it would be entirely stupid, however, choosing to have as little to do with China as possible, would be what
i would prefer, because China is controlling the U.S., more than the U.S. is controlling China, and China has benefitted more than any country on earth from America, at America’s own peril, providing the Chinese governent with U.S. technology national secrets, it is not a surprise at all that they would prefer to manufacture this technology themselves, and keep everything for themselves, after U.S. companies built factories, trained employees, and provided the Chinese government with the blue prints for the technology.
Additionally, as far as the South and East China sea manmade islands, they are not worth starting a war over, but are in violation of international law, have upset Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.
When one thinks of one belt one road, all that can possibly come to mind, is Ghengis Kahn. Why people would like to replay that, appears to be very short-sighted.
The Chinese governent is even more authoritarian than the U.S. government.
Oh the wonderful effects of Western propaganda…..China was an amazing and technologically advanced civilisation 3000 years before anyone thought of invading the land , now called America !
yes. The technological invention of paper was a truly wonderous contribution to civilization.
Actually, PePe Escobar, the overwhelming majority of American elites are staunchly pro-China to the extreme, which is the primary readon for their disdain of Trump.
Actually, they are pro Chinese slave labor. And they are mad at Trump for putting obstacles in their way of hiring a work force for less than a dollar a day.
Twenty, probably thirty, years out of date. Chinese wages have grown strongly for many years, hence the burgeoning Chinese middle class, their consumption and massive foreign tourism.
Actually, since America started dealing with China under Nixon, and increased it under Clinton, the average Chinese family is no longer in destitute poverty as they were, the tech companies can find cheap labor in hundreds of countries, much cheaper than China, the companies built the factories, and trained the work force, so leaving would be expensive for them, but I actually wish that they would leave, and return to America, there are many cost saving and quality control advantages for manufacturing here, because it is easier to managing a company when you live in the same country.
The US provided China with technology?
I think you meant to say, the US moved factories to China to take advantage of their cheap labor and lack of environmental controls, and thought that they would be able to bully the Chinese into not advancing technologically, under the rubric that human advances can be kept for the profit of only a few, using US patent laws.
I guess not.
https://wagelaborer.blogspot.com/2019/01/intellectual-property-and-war-on-china.html
that is not what I had meant to say. It is a fact that the Chinese government demands the blue prints for the technology. Of course the U.S. companies manufactured in China for lower wages and lower environmental restrictions, again, this was all at Ametica’s own peril, causing a mass migration of manufacturing, an enomrmous trade deficet, and the deterioration of American knowledge, which was also a primary reason that the technology was made in China. The tech companies attempt to preserve data supremacy by manufacturing in numerous countries. South Korea and Taiwan manufacture parts that are not made in China. I will not submit to the 3 nos or 1 China policy.
Surely there’s some truth to some of your assertions: “and China has benefitted more than any country on earth from America, at America’s own peril, providing the Chinese governent with U.S. technology national secrets, it is not a surprise at all that they would prefer to manufacture this technology themselves, and keep everything for themselves, after U.S. companies built factories, trained employees, and provided the Chinese government with the blue prints for the technology.”
But it would be foolish to swallow them whole. Consider the POV of Apple’s Tim Cook today:
Apple CEO Tim Cook: This Is the Number 1 Reason We Make iPhones in China (It’s Not What You Think)
China is much more than a source of low-cost, low-skilled labor.
12/18
At the Fortune Global Forum in Guangzhou in early December (my firm, McKinsey & Company, was the Knowledge Partner), I listened to Cook as he explained why Apple continues to favor China as it central base for manufacturing iPhones:
“The number one reason why we like to be in China is the people. China has extraordinary skills. And the part that’s the most unknown is there’s almost 2 million application developers in China that write apps for the iOS App Store. These are some of the most innovative mobile apps in the world, and the entrepreneurs that run them are some of the most inspiring and entrepreneurial in the world. Those are sold not only here but exported around the world.”
Highly skilled software developers developing apps for the App Store are one reason Apple likes to be in China. But the depth of highly skilled labor in the manufacturing space is why Apple makes its iPhones there:
“China has moved into very advanced manufacturing, so you find in China the intersection of craftsman kind of skill, and sophisticated robotics and the computer science world. That intersection, which is very rare to find anywhere, that kind of skill, is very important to our business because of the precision and quality level that we like. The thing that most people focus on if they’re a foreigner coming to China is the size of the market, and obviously it’s the biggest market in the world in so many areas. But for us, the number one attraction is the quality of the people.”
Citing an example of the type of a highly-skilled supplier Apple works closely with, Cook talked at length about recently visiting one company that it has collaborated with for several years:
“I visited ICT–they manufacture, among other things, the AirPods for us. When you think about AirPods as a user, you might think it couldn’t be that hard because it’s really small. The AirPods have several hundred components in them, and the level of precision embedded into the audio quality–without getting into really nerdy engineering–it’s really hard. And it requires a level of skill that’s extremely high.”
And the idea that Apple simply hands over the design to a company like ICT, which just manufacturers according to spec, is simply untrue, says Cook:
“It’s not designed and sent over, that sounds like there’s no interaction. The truth is, the process engineering and process development associated with our products require innovation in and of itself. Not only the product but the way that it’s made, because we want to make things in the scale of hundreds of millions, and we want the quality level of zero defects. That’s always what we strive for, and the way that you get there, particularly when you’re pushing the envelope in the type of materials that you have, and the precision that your specifications are forcing, requires a kind of hand in glove partnership. You don’t do it by throwing it over the chasm. It would never work. I can’t imagine how that would be.”
Addressing the designed-in-California, made-in-low-cost-China impression that many people have–an impression reinforced by the tagline that is printed on every box containing a new iPhone–Cook had this to say:
“There’s a confusion about China. The popular conception is that companies come to China because of low labor cost. I’m not sure what part of China they go to but the truth is China stopped being the low labor cost country many years ago. And that is not the reason to come to China from a supply point of view. The reason is because of the skill, and the quantity of skill in one location and the type of skill it is.”
And China has an abundance of skilled labor unseen elsewhere, says Cook
. . .
“The products we do require really advanced tooling, and the precision that you have to have, the tooling and working with the materials that we do are state of the art. And the tooling skill is very deep here. In the US you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I’m not sure we could fill the room. In China you could fill multiple football fields.”
Cook credits China’s vast supply of highly skilled vocational talent:
“The vocational expertise is very very deep here, and I give the education system a lot of credit for continuing to push on that even when others were de-emphasizing vocational. Now I think many countries in the world have woke up and said this is a key thing and we’ve got to correct that. China called that right from the beginning.”
I’m 59, lived in China for 13 years, ’05-’18, 11 years in Nanjing & 2 years in Lhasa. I saw Lhasa both before and after the events there in 2008.
During my two years in Tibet, I was a VIP guest, the only American, of Xi Jinping for dinner and some other activities in Lhasa. (I’ve also met HH The Dalai Lama, in Atlanta ’96.)
The US gov’t doesn’t understand China and neither do Americans. Nor do the Chinese understand us.
Kipling was right: “East is East, West is West, and never the twain shall meet…”
Anon, it would be nice if you would give your views of the two sides or/and at least point us to some written material, something that expands on what you have seen and understand.
Your knowledge and insight is needed!! Please??!!
the seagull
Write an article for this Vineyard. Saker would gladly consider publishing your POV on the experience and the reality of the geopolitics.
Especially, Tibet has been a topic here among commenters, most with no facts but strong opinions.
Please share your take in more detail.
What do the initials ‘HH’ before the Dalai’s name mean? Heil Hitler? That would not be a surprise seeing that the Dalai was heavily influenced as a youth by the SS officer Heinrich Harrer, during his ‘seven years in Tibet’. Fascism would be a good fit with the odious theocratic, serf, society that persisted in Tibet until liberation by the PLA.
From memory the Chinese “liberation” of Tibet was a less than pleasant experience for those in Tibet. I sincerely hope my country will never be so fortunate to experience such liberation at the hand of the Chinese.
Many assume the Dalai Lama to be the highest Buddhist figure in Tibet, however many believe it was actually the Panchen Lama, who was liberated by the Chinese as a child and never heard from again.
Being opposed to the evils the US instigates doesn’t make the wrongs others do better ignored or re-spun desirable.
Rancid,
Many of my work mates wish their country had never been ‘liberated’ by the USA. What the USA did to the Philippines in the late 1800’s would be considered a war crime by any modern standard. The reason most non-US people hold up the mirror to the USA is due to the fact that the USA, being the self-proclaimed ‘indispensable nation’ and having trained the populace into parroting so, slaughter people without conscience. Review Madeline Albrights comments on dead Iraqi children. You can’t be the ‘beacon of democracy and champion of laws’ if it doesn’t apply to all circumstances.
You may not know this but the Sino-Tibetan war started with Tibets attack on China: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Tibetan_War
Tibet was allegedly under Ming rule although this is debated, but there is no debate that the Qing ruled Tibet from 1720 until Tibet was removed under forcibly signed and later altered treaties by the British Empire.
Yes, very ‘unpleasant’. The end of theocracy, serfdom and barbaric punishments inflicted on the serfs must have been really traumatic. The ending of illiteracy was surely a dreadful burden, and the emancipation of women for the first time in Tibetan history-shocking! And don’t get me on to the introduction of electricity, modern healthcare, education and modern communications. Truly beastly!
Please, (Removed insult that violates the blog rules.MOD)
HH = His Holiness
It is the official title of all the Dalai Lama
I recently saw a video talk by the Dalai Lama, in which he described favorably his meeting with Mao in 1955. He saw Mao as a dedicated revolutionary who wanted the best for his people. He has also expressed the notion that democratic socialism is an optimal form of state organization.
However, his brother was working on a rebellion at the same time. This leads me to believe that the Dalai Lama was caught in the middle of wanting to get along with Beijing, while the CIA and Tibetan feudalist and theocratic elites wanted to destroy China, by capturing Tibet, a sort of precursor to Ukraine, 2014.
The CIA ‘helped’ the Dalai Lama escape when the rebellion took place and the Dalai Lama has been both physical and psychological hostage ever since. They paid him a very nice stipend and used him with his probable compromised consent. When he, who has advocated a Free Tibet for years, was asked why he wouldn’t take a stand on Iraq and the war against it, which was far more intense than anything the Chinese have done in Tibet, he demurred saying, “It’s complicated”. That is, he is owned by the US and the West.
Of course, if he admitted as much, he would lose his stature and position, which he is not willing to do. So he now has made an effort to depoliticize his position. A sort of backhanded attempt to free himself.
At this point, positions have changed drastically. Some say that the Tibetan people are much better off than they were under the theocratic feudalism pre Chinese Revolution. On the other hand, it’s said that Tibet has basically been invaded by the Han Chinese and are in danger of losing their culture.
The remarks of the previous commenter who lived in Tibet would be very helpful in clarifying this.
The fact is that Tibetan Buddhism is avidly studied nowadays by ethnic Chinese, which I have seen with my own eyes (I once visited a Chinese home in Shanghai where they follow a Tibetan teacher and where they were practicing a Tibetan ceremony. The police showed up and were not happy to see a pale face. Even though I had nothing to do with it. Fortunately, nothing happened.
You don’t want to give any credence to what the old faker says. He was probably already a CIA asset by1955.
“I’m 59, lived in China for 13 years, ’05-’18, 11 years in Nanjing & 2 years in Lhasa.”
I second larchmonter’s suggestion that you write something on China for the Saker…I would love to hear what you have to say about the country, and what was it like to have dinner with the Emperor?
I don’t see how the Chinese could fail to understand Americans. The Chinese are clever, and Americans are exceedingly simple.
Like a laboratory monkey that ignores everything but the lever that, when pressed, delivers a reward, they are relentlessly focused on “making” (i.e. taking) money.
I think that the Chinese would find it childishly simple to manipulate such crude psyches.
Sorry Anon,
My wife is Chinese, direct from China, not a 2nd generational. The culture is easy enough to understand – but you must first understand their philosophy and history. This involves dropping your cultural conditioning – and that is difficult when you have been conditioned to believe you are ‘lord and master’ over all like most USAns.
The issue the US government has that the ingrained hubris will not allow them to understand. Shortly after I first met my wife we talked about that. Her company and several of her friends had met USAn’s – her comment was generally the same, “I don’t like them, they laugh at my culture.” Her comments regarding me were ‘you try understand’. We’ve been together many years now.
Some light reading for you: https://www.veteranstodayarchives.com/2011/12/09/the-incarnations-of-china/
Compare that to this: https://www.veteranstodayarchives.com/2011/09/12/manifest-destiny-to-pnac/
Cheers!
Mr. JackJC,
If your Chinese wife is like most of the Chinese I know, then you’re a lucky man, good for you…
Though I’m American, my remark that Americans didn’t understand China wasn’t meant to necessarily include myself; it was meant as a people generally.
By “…you must first understand their philosophy and history. This involves dropping your cultural conditioning…”, and “…you have been conditioned to believe you are ‘lord and master’ over all like most USAns.”, you mean me, or rhetorical ‘you’?
I wrote nothing about any judgement, any suggestion at all that anyone is “lord and master” over anyone, nor anything about my knowledge of anyone’s history or philosophy. That would be reading something that isn’t there.
I wrote simply that Americans and Chinese don’t understand each other.
Yes, it’s rather vague and generalized, and should be elaborated on as a few others have suggested, and I should since I bothered to comment at all, but am very busy these days…..I’ll try to put something together, but because of the subject matter, it would be lengthy and involved, considerably more than just a posted comment.
It’s something I’ve been dwelling on for a long time….but it would be a great deal of work that would take a lot of time. I’ve been avoiding it.
(There’s a great deal I saw and experienced (& photographed) in my 13 years in China, particularly during my two years in Tibet. Many, many, many Americans have spent far longer in China than I so this is nothing particularly special, but far fewer have been in Tibet for 2 years, and only one American, myself, was a guest of Xi Jinping in Lhasa. But, I’ve shared these things with essentially no one. My own family has little interest; I’m otherwise a relatively private person. I have almost zero internet presence, no web site or anything like that, no facebook, twitter, linkedin, etc. nor any other social media (other than Chinese Wechat on my phone out of necessity in China). I almost Never even post comments on web sites such as I’m doing here.
I do have a great deal to share and say; I just haven’t done it. I suppose I should. Being the only American to have had dinner and other things with Xi Jinping in Lhasa is uniquely distinctive…..it was certainly interesting, as were many other things there. I guess I ought to get it all organized and begin putting it all down on paper. I do have a history degree, so I can at least compose a sentence, I think.)
Thank you.
Anon,
Take the ‘you’ as a royal you, specifying USAns in general, and not personal. My comment regarding ‘lord and master’ is generally related to the way I observe USAns behaving overseas. I remember a time in Shenzhen when my wife and shared a brief elevator ride with a yank, he looked at me asked ‘where are you from?’ I told him and he smirked and said ‘I’m an American’. My response ‘I know, I can tell by your deportment’ with all the distaste I could muster. He stomped off muttering to himself.
The two articles I linked were written several years ago and outline the historical development of two very different nations. It’s in your very nature to be different, but the gap can be bridged if the USA wants it.
You should write your article, maybe it will wake up some of your countrymen. I look forward to reading it.
Fascinating. I was in Atlanta in 1996. Sometime around then, I remember some monks setting up in the ground floor of the hotel/food court and doing a beautiful sand painting. It took them several weeks of painstaking work and detail. Then, it was completed and left for viewing for a few days, then the monks swept it away. I always felt fortunate that I was able to see that during my lunchtimes as a capitalist wage slave.
About the huge Chinese BRI project: some voices reports that China is actually rethinking about it due to worstening of economy. Here an interesting article in Italian (you can easily translate by google, it turns more or less understandable) that seems to contradict, at least in some parts, the optimistic Pepe opinion. Have a look:
https://www.startmag.it/mondo/via-della-seta-pei/?fbclid=IwAR39srHxH04w-K317IEb1ir6hpD6D7RJ7tSv4hJQcZara2N4frQzCTCrHe0
I just love it: ”China’s zero-sum mercantilist policies.” Of course the United States would never stoop to such practices.
Hmmm. According to one Ulysses Simpson Grant, ex C-in-C of the Union Army of the Potomac then elevated to President the following:
”For centuries England has relied on protection, has carried it to extremes and has obtained satisfactory results from it. There is no doubt that it is to this system that it owes its present strength. After two centuries, England has found it convenient to adopt free trade because it thinks that protection can no longer offer it anything. Very well then, Gentlemen, my knowledge of our country leads me to believe that within 200 years, when America has gotten out of protection all that it can offer, it too will adopt free trade.” (Quoted in ‘Kicking Away the Ladder’ Ha-Joon Chang – 2003)
In point of fact the mercantilist policy was operationalised and never reversed. The first systematic arguments for infant industry protection were developed by American thinkers Alexander Hamilton and Daniel Raymond in the teeth of Thomas Jefferson who was a free trader. The US government put this logic into practice more diligently than any other country from 1816-1945. During this period the US had one of the highest tariff rates than any manufacturing imports in the world. Given that the country enjoyed such a high degree of natural protection due to high transportation costs at least until the 1870s, it seems reasonable to say that throughout its industrial catching-up the US industries were the most protected in the world. When the maverick conservative populist, Patrick Buchanan, says free-trade is an ‘Un-American’ thing he has a point.
Whilst it is certainly true that US industries did not need all the protection which were put in place, and that many tariffs outlived their usefulness, it is also clear that the American economy would not have got where it is today without strong protection in some key industries. Then of course there were/are non-tariff barriers. A type of soft mercantilism whereby the role of the US government has been to support infrastructural development by supporting R&D, tax exemptions for exporters, and currency manipulation as well as the advantage of controlling the world’s reserve currency.
In never seems to amaze me how Americans seem oblivious to their own history.
Interesting comment from Pepe Escobar about professor D. Shambaugh (in Chinese: 沈大伟 ~Sham Davy):
.
“(…)and David Shambaugh from George Washington University, who used to be reliable but has recently veered toward a Sinophobic path.”
.
This countryman of Davy Crockett was in the coed dorms for foreign students/scolars af BĕiDà(Peking University) famed as “The midnight rambler” in the mid eighties. David C. ended up fighting for negro slavery in Texas and independence from abolutionist Mexico. And Davy S. has US thinkless tanks as a final refuge and as his Alamos.
“Schell admits his experts are left “wondering what’s going on in the upper reaches of the leadership in China.” That’s even more serious, implying no intel on the ground.”
I’ve been studying China for 55 years and its famed ‘government opacity’ is fictional. There is no more transparent government on earth: from its published (pre- and -post-polled) 5 Year Plans to it published bios and track records of the top 1000 politicians–no country comes close.
The US established a then-plausible official narrative about China in the 1950s and has invested so much in sustaining it (billions of dollars) that three generations of Americans have grown up accepting it.
Darkmoon,
The earth’s climate has not “been in balance for 100,000 years”. We were in the early Wisconsin ice age at that point with most of Canada covered in ice until full retreat 10,000 years ago. Immediate and drastic action on GHG emissions could potentially produce multiple outcomes. It could even produce dramatic uncontrolled short-term warming (as shielding particulates fall out) followed by dramatic uncontrolled longterm cooling into a new ice age given reduced solar inputs that are currently falling due to predictable orbital and rotational fluctuations.
The science is not “settled”, it never is, and you are fooling yourself if you think a scientific community of boundless arrogance understands the complex climate system well enough to predict what our blind tinkering does.
Dark Moon probably meant 10,000 years, ie the late, lamented, Holocene, now ended by anthropogenic greenhouse gas forcing. And, with the US National Academy of Science declaring the theory ‘settled’, a description you plainly do not understand, but ‘sad canuck’ declaring, from his lofty intellectual perch, that it is not, who do we believe? A not very hard question to answer.
I was trained in glacial pre-history in the 1980s and preparations for the next ice age was “settled science” at that time. There is no such thing. I’m not suggesting that GCC does not exist. I’m saying we do not understand the system enough to make absolute pronouncements and develop far-reaching policies based on this ignorance. At this time any drastic action could potentially make the outcome worse, not better, so caution and modestly should be our watchwords until we have a better understand of what we are doing. We learn, make mistakes, revise. That’s science. Not pronouncements on settled science from academic and political popes. Anyone who suggests that a definitive answer to this issue is currently available is arrogant beyond words given our pitiful understanding of the global climate system and its inter-relationships with the lithosphere, biosphere, and socio-economic system created a certain violent species of hairless ape.
There was certainly NO ‘settled science’ in the 1980s that we were heading towards an imminent Ice Age. Already the consensus that we were warming and risking catastrophic climate destabilisation was marked. There had been one or two incorrect media reports in the 70s regarding an imminent Ice Age, caused by cooling caused by particulate pollution from 1940s-80s, but even then it was the consensus that warming was far more likely. This canard has been refuted over and over again, but denialists are nothing if not nostalgics.
There is a confusion of time scales here. It’s long been believed that the Earth is in an interglacial period. However, to this day there is no consensus on when this period will end. In terms of the geological time scale “imminent” could mean 1000-10000 years. This is still a very long time compared to our normal human frame of reference. The remainder of your post is very odd. You would seem to be reaching a conclusion opposite to your own stated points of argument. The fact is that large scale perturbations to the global climate (“drastic action”) are currently occurring now. Caution should call for limiting the potential effects of these perturbations, not in allowing them to continue unabated and hoping for the best. Controlling carbon emissions would therefore seem to be the prudent strategy if in fact we do not know the result of these effects.
You are twisting my argument. Of course prudence is warranted and controlling carbon emissions sensible. We need to stop what we are doing and learn about the system. Essentially holding in place is the most prudent approach (and likely the only practicable approach). The EU has been modestly successful doing this so the is some track record of success. It was only very recently that we learned about the impact of particulates on reducing solar inputs, and the significant likely warming that would result from their removal through CO2 controls. We do not understand the system. There is also almost zero understanding of feedback and the complex linkages between social and climatic systems.
The pontifications of the scientific community that it’s all “settled science” and that they know what to do is arrogant BS spouted people who have been, and will be, proven to be wrong on all manner of issues great and small. If only one thing is certain in the world of environmentalism over the past generation, it is that groups of self-righteous people showing up and telling others that they are bad and need to change will fail, and fail spectacularly. Some humility and recognition of our ignorance would be helpful but not expected from this group. They are too busy jetting back and forth across the globe attending conferences telling other people they need to change their lifestyles to save the world.
But in the end it is unlikely that humans are mature enough to actually manage anything at a global scale. The first step toward this would be for the scientific GCC community to be vocally and aggressively anti-war. They are not, and until they are, their impact is likely to be almost zero. In the end it is likely that Gaia will have to take care of herself and put this arrogant, troublesome species in its place.
I do love it when denialists go full anti-science. Having failed, comprehensively, to refute the science with their handful of corrupt ‘scientists’, most on the Rightwing and/or fossil fuel industry payrolls and many veterans of the tobacco harm denial industry and other noble but lucrative, endeavours, they turn to abusing all scientists as ‘…proven to be wrong on all manner of issues great and small’. And what of the vastly greater number of issues where they get and got it right? And what of the fact that science is based on getting it wrong, on the principle of falsifiability, (not ‘falsification’)where any hypothesis is only tentative, even the Newtonian Laws, able to be refuted or improved at any time? Anthropogenic climate destabilisation science has stood that test for 200 years, constantly improving its theories, testing them by observations in the real world eg melting glaciers, rising sea-levels, melting permafrost, increased atmospheric water vapour, greater deluges and floods, raging mega-fires, record global average temperatures, the spread of diseases and pest species, biodiversity loss etc, and paleoclimate studies eg ice-cores, the study of ancient geological and hydrological features, dendrochronology, mud-cores and pollen studies from lakes and rivers etc and improved computer modeling (‘Always wrong but often useful’ as the joke goes) etc. And this is not some mundane question concerning an issue that might inconvenience or harm some restricted population, but the greatest danger to human existence in all our history, and efforts to deny its existence or hinder attempts to avert a gigantic catastrophe that will take millions, probably billions of lives, and increasingly possibly, all humanity, is, to say the least, regretable.
What a pompous load of self-serving hot air (joke intended).
Your attitude is exactly the reason that environmentalism has gone absolutely nowhere for a generation. Instead of trying to understand complex situations, build coalitions, and work with diverse groups to make real change, you call people names and denigrate their opinions. Denialist – wonderful – an epitaph worthy of Pope Urban VIII. I’m way left of any politics you live by and likely produce a carbon footprint that’s a small percentage of yours. I get it, you believe you are smarter than everyone else, but are denied your rightful place making decisions for all of us. You are in fact enthralled in a cult where any form of decent is attacked. Hope it makes you feel noble while the world burns down.
Done with this……
I am a working scientist and labor activist, but yourbut you don’t beleive in intellectual debate, you
The reason that the environmental movement has gone nowhere (you’re being generous) and, consequently, humanity, including any offspring of yours, will go extinct, certainly by 2050 but probably earlier, is because the most Evil swine in history, the anthropogenic climate destabilisation denial industry, has won. The billions spent in lying, anti-scientific, anti-rational propaganda, by the fossil fuel industry and the ideological Right, has won. Crucial to this dark victory has been the fanatic, anti-Life, fervour of the lumpen denialists, who delight in lying stupidity and impressive hypocrisy, as if destroying Life on Earth is somehow a sacred duty for them.
Mulga: “the most Evil swine in history, the anthropogenic climate destabilisation denial industry, has won. The billions spent in lying, anti-scientific, anti-rational propaganda, by the fossil fuel industry and the ideological Right, has won.”
Here here!
And I might add that this is but a part of a massive, well-organized and concerted, very-well-funded backlash — the backlash of corporatists and fascists — that began after the gains of the New Deal. Their efforts were set back a bit during WWII, but then went super-charged again in the McCarthy era of the 50s, accompanied by the initial meetings of the Mt Pelerin Society (ideologic spearhead of the new fascist international), and later in the 1970s (kicked-off with the Powell Memo of 1971) with the growth of the neoliberal right wing think-tanks and other aspects of the new lying/propaganda apparatus. The climate denial industry is a small albeit important sub-set of this apparatus. The right has been in FULL ATTACK mode for many decades, and it has WON, COMPLETELY, in the West, especially in the U.S. Absolute hegemonic triumph. Full spectrum dominance. The trade unions, the socialist movement, the left in general, advanced social democracy — all were smashed, and now do not exist AT ALL in the U.S., and are being rolled-back elsewhere (e.g., for but one example, the deliberate undermining, toward destruction, of the U.K.’s NHS). What remains of it has been reduced to identity political rubbish with a smidgen of post-modernism thrown in. The Occupy and Bernie Sanders phenomena were half-assed attempts to re-introduce some measure of sane social democracy, mostly on behalf of middle-class 10%-ers disgruntled at not being given as large a slice of the pie as their parents got (children of the labor aristocrats, who became middle-class wealthy at the price of imperial depredations). We are seeing more of same this election cycle. But things will have to get much worse, economically, before a left can reconstitute itself in the U.S. And one of the side effects of this collapse of the left, and slow (if ever) reconstruction of it, is climate disaster, possibly catastrophe. The right WON the great battle for minds of the 20th century (and early 21st), and hence the earth — or at least our decent existence upon it — is probably doomed.
International irrelevance is today, Tuesday, February 19, 2019, is the US intent is to reverse international law permanently to US Exceptionalist Law or Uni-Polar Hegemony. See Jean-Claude Paye, “Global War On Liberty”.
Psychological Projection is one of the defining attributes of the America mentality.
The United States instinctively projects its own malign and aggressive nature onto its “enemies” in a pathetic attempt to convince itself and indeed the world that it is the Land of the Free, Beacon of Liberty, Leader of the Free World, and indeed the Essence of All That is Good and True. (Don’t laugh)
As such, the USA’s assorted pronouncements and “analysis” proclaiming this or that country a threat (in this China) reveal more about USA’s own warped perceptions than it does about the targeted country.
The America Mentality is captured by the words of that great American sage, George W. Bush: “Evil-Doers Hate Our Freedoms.”
For the USA,
America=Freedom=Goodness.
As such, any nation that opposes America=Evil.
This kind of fundamentalist mentality is essential to the USA as the self-proclaimed Exceptional Nation and Indispensable People.
This belief system serves a particular function, however, as it allows the United States to avoid admitting guilt to the massive crimes against humanity that the “Leader of the Free World” is guilty, as suggested in the quote below:
“Please understand that the USA cannot become a “normal” country without that being forced on it externally.
Since the end of WWII the USA has genocided literally millions of innocent people. While Americans are all in denial about that, asserting that the slaughter in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia, Iraq, Nicaragua, Rwanda, el Salvador, Yugoslavia, Ukraine, and so on were not their fault and that America had nothing to do with those horrors, the fact is that all Americans deep down know that they are responsible for these crimes against humanity. Indeed, they are proud of those crimes, though they know it is the patriot’s duty to feign ignorance of them. But, Americans can maintain this pride in their horrendous crimes only so long as they can maintain belief in their own exceptionality. Naturally, America can never approach anything like normalcy without abandoning their delusion of exceptionality.
You can easily see the Catch-22 bind here. If Americans attempt to become normal and try to ditch their exceptionality delusion then the harsh reality that they have actually been for many decades the biggest and most evil monsters on the entire planet comes crashing down on them. All of America’s mass murder and destruction remains justified and excused only so long as America is not normal.
Americans are simply not morally strong enough to look in the mirror and see what they really are without the imaginary superhero capes and masks. America cannot vote its way to normalcy. A genuine revolution might provide a sufficient break from America’s history for Americans to salvage real self respect, but that remains unlikely and nothing short of it can wash the blood off America’s hands.
The rest of the world is going to have to get used to the idea of either kneeling to America’s psychopathy or digging their heels in and fighting it.”
/the-tulsi-gabbard-phenomenon-as-a-diagnostic-tool/?replytocom=614427#respond
Precisely. Psychopathic megalomania driven by ‘religious’ delusions of Universal Supremacy and ‘Chosenness’, drive the USA, its Master, Israel, and the Western puppet-state stooges. How we escape the grip of death of these diabolical and morally insane monsters is beyond my abilities to comprehend. They would happily destroy the world if they are no longer able to rule it totally.
Are the US elites capable of understanding Asia, Africa, Europe, Latin America, the American people? Do they care if they aren’t?
The Sino-American crisis is moving towards confrontation not accommodation – and certainly not understanding. Accommodation would require Beijing to reduce its economic programs to the benefit of the US, hitting the prosperity of its people. It would bring instability and disorder among the nationalistically proud race, and once-again the spectre of humiliation visited upon them in the 19th century. Such a course will threaten the territorial integrity of China and pose an existential threat. That will lead to world war – nuclear war. That is how the Chinese will view it. There seems to be very little understanding of history in the west. That’s leading humanity towards world war three.
https://www.ghostsofhistory.wordpress.com/
It doesn’t take much investigation to see that the hyper-aggressive (as ever) US attack on China (as with Iran, Venezuela, Russia etc)is driven by the Zionazis, although that is probably redundant as the control US politics totally, and Western politics near absolutely. The Zionazis hate China for the usual racist and supremacist reasons that drive their detestation of all goyim, even their Sabbat Goy stooges like the Guardian sewer in the UK, and fear it, because it is a great civilization that they know that they will never control as they do the West. The Chinese have the impudence to see Jews as just another type of humanity, like all other states, societies and tribes. The Chinese have the audacity to see the detested Palestinian untermenschen, the ‘human cancer;, ‘lice’, ‘human dust’, ‘drugged cockroaches in a bottle’ etc of Zionist hate speech, as the human equivalent of the ‘Chosen’ Herrenvolk, and that is ‘antisemitism’, as interpreted by the ‘Guardian’ and the other Sabbat Goy stooges, at its worst.
The U.S. elites are gung ho on China! It is the non elites that are against China. The elites manufacture in China, and want further access to China’s banking system.
China is extremely authoritarian, which is why the elites also love China. Social credit scores and AI are taking over. Drones will make decisions without human input. There is now an entire newscast of robots. Employees are forced to wear helmets with brain scanning technology.
What’s to like about China?