The Nature of Foxes

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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Thu Feb 24, 2022 3:04 pm

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As U.S. threatens war with Russia, Biden administration unveils imperial strategy for Indo-Pacific that could lead to war with China
Posted Feb 23, 2022 by Jeremy Kuzmarov

Originally published: CovertAction Magazine (February 19, 2022 ) |

Already threatening war with Russia, the White House this month has unveiled a new imperial grand strategy for the Indo-Pacific that raises the prospects of war with China.

The new strategy starts by repeating familiar clichés about America’s supposed humanitarian intentions in Southeast Asia and role in providing the security that “allowed regional democracies to flourish,” while ritualistically condemning Chinese aggression “spanning the entire globe.”

According to the report,

…from the economic coercion of Australia to the conflict along the Lines of Actual control with India to the growing pressure on Taiwan and bullying of neighbors in the East and South China Seas, our allies and partners in the region bear much of the cost of the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC’s) harmful behavior. In the process, the PRC is also undermining human rights and international law, including freedom of navigation, as well as other principles that have brought stability and prosperity to the Indo-Pacific.

The U.S. mission over the next decade, as outlined in the report, is to stymie the PRC’s efforts to “transform the rules and norms that have benefitted the Indo-Pacific and the world.” The way to achieve this goal is to a) support a strong India—considered an engine of regional development—as a “partner in a positivist regional vision;” b) fortify the anti-China Quad alliance between the U.S., India, Japan and Australia—which the U.S. has promised to deliver nuclear powered submarines to; c) increase support for Taiwan’s self-defense and d) push for North Korea’s denuclearization while extending coordination with South Korea and Japan to respond to North Korea’s alleged provocations.

The U.S. also plans to a) promote democracy in Burma; b) expand U.S. embassies including in the Pacific Islands; c) enforce a rules-based approach in the maritime domain and promote a free press; d) deepen relationships with allies such as South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mongolia, New Zealand, Singapore, and Vietnam, and e) encourage Japan and South Korea to strengthen their ties with one another.

Pacific Deterrence Initiative

At the heart of the Biden administration’s strategy is a vow that the U.S. will “increase the scope of its military exercises and operations” in the Indo-Pacific, build greater maritime capacity, “deploy more advanced warfighting capabilities,” bolster cyber warfare, artificial intelligence and regional undersea capabilities, and work with Congress to fund the Pacific Deterrence Initiative (PDI).

Signed by President Biden in December, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) has provisioned a whopping $7.1 billion for the PDI, whose aim is to ensure that U.S. military forces “have everything they need to compete, fight, and win in the Indo-Pacific,” according to Senators Jack Reed (D-RI) and James Inhofe (R-OK),1 top ranking members of the Senate Armed Services Committee who first promoted the PDI in Congress.

Everything they need includes a new Aegis missile facility on Guam that would assist in naval operations. The PDI also calls for stationing offensive missiles, previously banned by the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, along a string of densely populated islands that includes Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines.

In addition, the PDI aims to: a) develop and launch space-based radars linked to the Aegis missile system in Guam and another system on the island of Palau, b) develop “discreet intelligence surveillance” capacities, and c) improve training ranges and joint exercises with Allies in the Pacific.

The drive.com reported that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been employing contractor-owned and operated aircraft in recent years to conduct overwater surveillance missions in the Pacific, which the PDI will further enable an expansion of.

Reductio ad Absurdium

The absurdity of the White House’s Indo-Pacific Strategy is evident in the fact that the U.S. already outspends China on the military by at least three times.

China is considered an aggressor—on a global scale—when i t has only one international military base—which it acquired in 2017 in Djibouti in response to a major U.S. military facility there—and has not invaded another country since 1979 when it invaded Vietnam.

The U.S. has at least 750 overseas military bases, including 23 in Japan alone—and has invaded at least a dozen countries since 1979, killing countless civilians in that time.

In Southeast Asia, the U.S. waged aggressive wars in Korea and Vietnam that killed millions of civilians during the Cold War, and fought covert dirty wars in Laos, Philippines, Cambodia, and Indonesia that killed many more.

The condemnation of China’s “bullying behavior” in the South China Seas ignores the fact that China’s efforts to reclaim the Spratley and Paracel and Diaoyu Islands (Senkakus to Japanese)—which the U.S. claimed the right to defend under the U.S.-Japan treaty of Mutual Cooperation—are legitimate.

The islands were effectively stolen from China as booty of Japan’s victory in the 1895 Sino-Japanese War.2 Japan has further spurned two Chinese offers—in 1990 and 2006—to jointly develop the resources of the islands which potentially include oil and gas.3

China in the report is blamed for economic coercion directed against Australia for levying tariffs—which the U.S. has done to China. China’s grievances against Australia were very real—interference in China’s internal affairs in Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Taiwan and its spearheading a crusade against China in international forum.

China is also blamed for border skirmishes with India, though China does not recognize the boundary between the two countries that was drawn up by a British colonial official Henry McMahon after signing a treaty with Tibet in 1915 that China had rejected.

India is presented in the report as a great partner for the U.S. and progressive nation compared to China, when the New York Times has reported on the incitement of Hindu violence by Prime Minister Narendra Modi towards Muslims and erosion of human rights under his rule.

The silence on India’s human rights abuses—extending to its mistreatment of Muslims in occupied Kashmir—and playing up of China’s abuses towards Muslims in Xinjiang points to a clear double standard that undermines any moral imperative behind U.S. foreign policy in the Indo-Pacific.

The Tragedy of U.S. China policy

The greatest tragedy of U.S. policy is that China has never been antagonistic to the U.S.

Premier Xi Jinping in 2015 proposed a win-wing strategy in which both the U.S. and China accommodate one another’s interests and pursue common development along with their own interests as nation-states.

Charles Freeman Jr, a thirty-year veteran of the diplomatic corps who served as an interpreter for Richard Nixon’s historical visit to China in 1972, told me several years ago that the U.S. policy of a military buildup, or Asia Pivot policy, first enacted by Barack Obama, was misdirected because it “provided a military response to an economic problem.”

The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) was focused more on internal security, the defense of the Chinese homeland against neighbors with a history of invading, and on countering the powerful U.S. naval and air forces constantly mapping and probing its coastal defenses.

“A better response to China’s economic rise,” Freeman said, “would have been to try and leverage China’s prosperity to our own,” and “build better supply chains,” which he said, “corporate America was already attempting to do.”

The Obama administration could have also “worked to settle competing claims to islands on the South China seas and negotiated on a united basis with China.” Instead, it undertook “provocative measures,” including “mock attack runs on Chinese installations,” which were “not much appreciated by the Chinese,” and led to Chinese counter-measures that included sending ships off the coast of Hawaii and Guam.”4

Little has changed in the Biden era, except that the scale of U.S. provocations has now increased, along with the dangers of World War III breaking out.

The domestic political climate has become even more Sinophobic—with the media having used the Beijing Olympics as another opportunity to rail against China and its supposed evil.

NOTES:
1.↩ Not surprisingly, both Inhofe and Reed have been lavishly funded by aerospace and defense industries, along with oil and gas in Inhofe’s case. Reed has been a strong champion of drones, having received generous financial backing from leading drone-maker, General Atomics.
2.↩ Jeremy Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars: Fronting the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2019), 200; Han Yi-Shaw, “The Inconvenient Truth Behind the the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands,” The New York Times, September 19, 2012, https://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/ ... u-islands/ In his biography Koga Tatsushiro, the first Japanese citizen to lease the islands from the Meiji government, attributed Japan’s possession of the islands to “the gallant military victory of our Imperial forces.”
3.↩ Ivy Lee and Fang Ming, “Deconstructing Japan’s Claims of Sovereignty Over the Diaoyu Islands,” The Asia Pacific Journal, December 30, 2012, apjjf.org
4.↩ Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars, 201, 202.

https://mronline.org/2022/02/23/as-u-s- ... ith-china/

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IMPERIALISM, THE ENEMY OF PEACE

Posted by Greg Godels | Feb 22, 2022 | Featured Stories | 1

BY GREG GODELS
February 14, 2022



On February 2, I wrote: “Clearly, the Biden administration is fishing in troubled waters, exploiting unjustified fears of Russian aggression to advance narrow economic goals: natural gas sales and military-armament production and sales.” The point is that US behavior can be explained and is best explained as that of an imperialist superpower in the classic Leninist sense.

It was not concern for a fragile new democracy and human rights, nor was it resistance to autocratic power that motivated the US in the Ukraine crisis, as government officials and media in the US would have it.

Nor was it a misguided foreign policy or poor political choices exhibited by US leaders, as some liberal critics and center-left analysts would maintain.

Instead, the US was saber-rattling, fomenting discord, and war-mongering in the classic late-nineteenth century fashion chronicled by Lenin in his 1917 book, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. Standing behind the high-minded, moralistic goals voiced by Biden, Blinken, and Nuland were the economic interests of the most powerful capitalist state. With his trumpeting of the war danger, Biden was carrying water for the US energy and military industrial sectors and guided by the imperatives of finance capital.

The “Western Marxists,” post-Marxists, and neo-Marxists that have seduced so many of the younger anti-capitalist activists in the West will recoil from this analysis, denouncing it as “reductionist,” reducing complex motives to simple, basic economic exploitation.

But US behavior is impossible to explain in any other way. US allies, with their own imperialist interests, have sought to defuse the US-generated crisis. As I wrote earlier, the Schönbach affair in Germany, resulting in the firing of the German Naval leader (explained in detail by Victor Grossman), along with the hectic diplomacy of France’s Macron, illustrate the depth of European resistance to Biden’s war baiting. They, along with Ukraine’s President, Zelensky, have sought to moderate Blinken and Nuland’s hysteria and slow the rush to war.

After Biden’s first formal meeting at the White House with Germany’s new chancellor, Olaf Scholtz, on February 2, Biden could only enthuse that war would suspend the development of the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline. He is quoted in The Wall Street Journal: “If Russia invades, that means tanks and troops crossing the border of Ukraine, again, then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will put an end to it… I promise you we will be able to do it.”

Scholtz, on the other hand, would not link war with the pipeline’s fate. The shameless US media saw Scholtz’s response as a sign of his newness on the job!

Those who remain skeptical of the economic motives behind the US warmongering must explain why Biden placed natural gas politics ahead of any other matter before him and his German ally in this first significant policy exchange. Biden’s glee– not shared by his German counterpart– reveals the importance the US government places on seizing the natural gas market from the Russians, their rival in the energy business.

The Ukraine crisis presents other economic advantages as well. In less than two weeks, the US has sent eight cargo planes to the Ukraine with military supplies, part of the $200 million Biden authorized in new military aid. The xenophobic, ultra-nationalist Baltic states and Poland have sent massive amounts of military equipment to Ukraine as well, much of which is sourced from US corporations and will be replaced by aid or purchases from the US.

Whether Ukraine joins NATO or not, Ukraine is being militarized and will continue to be a destination for US arms. On this front, the US military-industrial establishment will win, regardless of the crisis outcome.

Adversaries on both sides of the Cold War-like divide will be armed to the teeth and the possibility of war raised accordingly.

Now that Afghanistan is gone as a source of demand for US military hardware, Biden’s team is looking for new conflicts to generate dollars for the misnamed “defense” industry and to prime the pump on a stagnating US economy.

The old term for the linkage between US economic performance and military spending is “military Keynesianism,” the idea that economic activity can be stimulated with unending, costly, and wasteful military contracts for exotic weapons and instantly obsolescent munitions. Since it’s out of fashion to blame the swollen bi-partisan military budget for our ills (like inflation!), the floodgates for future military spending are now open.

In a recent op-ed piece, an academic and foreign policy think-tank heavyweight, who is well-situated in ruling class circles, Walter Russell Mead, makes the case for dramatically increasing military spending. Mead offers little or no compelling reasons for expanding military expenditures beyond the now conventional foes: Russia, the PRC, and Iran. Nonetheless, “America must again get serious about defense [sic] spending.”

Mead goes to great lengths to unfavorably compare the current share of GDP devoted to the military budget with that of past periods: the Cold War, the so-called War on Terror, the Reagan era, and even World War II. By these standards alone, we are not spending enough! A rather arbitrary and self-serving argument!

But that is just window dressing for Mead’s real purposes:

Increased defense spending wouldn’t be a drag on economic growth. The capacities America needs to add to its defense arsenal are mostly high-tech and have civilian as well as military applications. Just as Israel’s investments in cybersecurity and high-tech weaponry helped it become a startup nation with the most dynamic civilian economy in its history, a renewed commitment to national defense can increase the competitiveness of American industry while boosting national security [my emphasis].

So, behind the facade of national defense and serving America is the economic advantage that Mead sees from pouring hundreds of billions more into military spending.

The Ukraine crisis should underscore lessons about US foreign policy that the often disoriented US left should have long drawn from our history.

The US media functions like every other monopoly-dominated industry: driven by profits and expediency, while serviced by and serving the state. It’s trusted service to the state is rewarded with front-row seats in the state’s propaganda circus and full access to its ministers of misinformation.

CNN, a network swamped with turmoil and scandal, demonstrated the depths of state servility with a recent bizarre public scolding of Putin for his vulgarity in the gentlemanly and gentlewomanly diplomatic process– an indulgence in triviality.

The Guardian, the supposed left flank of the mainstream media, expressed alarm over French President Macron’s energetic diplomatic initiative to de-escalate the crisis over Ukraine, accusing him of “freelancing” and expressing “his particular view of Russia as a European nation, and lofty talk of new security guarantees…” which “will have set alarm bells ringing” in the exclusive NATO club.

Both commentaries are all too fitting and predictable from a lapdog capitalist press.

It should also be obvious to opponents of war that this risk and all risks of conflict in the era of imperialism spring from the clash of imperial powers or the pressing of their interests on other nations. While the anti-war movement is and should be a big tent, it will be limited in its success if it fails to grasp this point. Moralistic arguments or appeals to the political parties committed to imperialism, like the US Democratic Party, will have little effect. The long established bi-partisanship of the two parties on foreign policy and aggression, except in periods of a severe crisis of policy like late in the Vietnam war, should shine the necessary light on that fact.

Further, a genuine left committed to building a mass anti-war movement must not link the fortunes of such a movement to the fortunes of pro-capitalist, pro-imperialist (they are the same thing!) political parties like the Democratic Party.

With the Democrats holding power, fear of disrupting their rule disables the effort to avert war, as it does today.

https://mltoday.com/imperialism-the-enemy-of-peace/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Mon Feb 28, 2022 2:11 pm

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The U.S. is preparing war with China and Russia at the same time
Posted Feb 27, 2022 by Deborah Veneziale

This was originally written for a Chinese audience and adapted and published in Guancha. —Eds.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recognition of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics on 21 February means that tensions in Eastern Ukraine are likely to continue to rise, which is exactly what U.S. foreign policy wants to promote. Three days ago, Foreign Policy published an article on its website titled “Washington Must Prepare for War with Both Russia and China.” According to the article,

The United States remains the world’s leading power with global interests, and it cannot afford to choose between Europe and the Indo-Pacific. Instead, Washington and its allies should develop a defense strategy capable of deterring and, if necessary, defeating Russia and China at the same time.

Matthew Kroenig, the author of this article, is from the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security-Atlantic Council, which published the Longer Telegram last year and advocated for comprehensive containment of China. As a key U.S. defense think tank, this article by the Scowcroft Center reflects the current mainstream U.S. diplomatic and military view of China and Russia, to which China should pay attention.

Fighting two wars at the same time

According to Kroenig’s article, “A major war in Ukraine may cross international borders and threaten the seven NATO allies bordering Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine…while other vulnerable Eastern European countries, Poland, Romania, or the Baltic states, may be the next target”, despite the fact that both Russia and Ukraine have stated that they have no desire in starting a war. Philip Davidson, a former commander of the U.S. India-Pakistan Command, was quoted in the article as saying that “China may invade Taiwan within the next six years…If China succeeds in gaining control of Taiwan, it will continue to undermine the American-led Asian order”. The U.S. feels threatened by the vacillation of its “global security commitment” with these possibilities.

In the eyes of the U.S., China and Russia are the two most important adversaries: their vast territory, long history, profound national culture, and strategic nuclear weapons are all threats to American global hegemony. According to the U.S., the only way to eliminate the threat is that the two great powers’ submit to U.S.’ global hegemony. As regards Russia, which has yet to recover from its weakness, the U.S. hopes to completely dismantle it and destroy its nuclear weapons, causing it to lose all global influence. As regards China, which has a more united people, a more stable ruling party, and a healthier economy, the U.S. hopes to overthrow its leaders through a “color revolution” and gradually erode the Chinese people’s faith in communism. Maintaining military containment of both countries is, in Kroenig’s view, a non-negotiable premise.

“The U.S. will not be forced to make distressing strategic choices about its national security due to limited resources”, Kroenig asserted. In order to support “defeating Russia and China in overlapping timeframes”, Kroenig proposes that the U.S. increase its defense spending. At market prices, although not in real terms, measured in purchasing power parities (PPPs) the U.S. accounts for 24% of global GDP, while China and Russia together account for only 19%. Against the backdrop of the recent withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, Kroenig not only argues against any cuts to military spending, but to double it to 5.6% of U.S. GDP, close to the percentage of the GDP spent on defense during the Cold War, because “this new Cold War is just as dangerous as the last one”.

Another proposal is to include U.S. “key allies in military planning, sharing responsibilities, and streamlining the division of labor for weapons procurement”. With the U.S. and its formal treaty allies accounting for nearly 60% of global GDP, Kroenig suggests that the U.S. supplement existing alliances (e.g., NATO, bilateral alliances in Asia) with new arrangements like the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QUAD) to “more easily mobilize resources and maintain military superiority over China and Russia”. He suggested that U.S. European allies invest in armor and artillery, while Asian allies purchase mines, harpoon missiles, and submarines, and the U.S. Army prioritizes Europe while the U.S. Navy handles the Indo-Pacific.

Kroenig finally put nuclear weapons on the table. “Relying more on nuclear weapons to offset our adversary’s local conventional advantage [is necessary]”, he states. He goes on to explain that “The U.S. can rely on threatening non-strategic nuclear strikes as a deterrent and as a last resort to thwart China’s amphibious invasion of Taiwan or Russia’s tank invasion of Europe”.

A continuation of decades of strategy toward Russia
The current U.S. policy towards Russia is not a blip on the radar, but a continuation of a decades-long Cold War strategy. In 1972, shortly after Kissinger’s secret visit to China, he told President Nixon that the Chinese were “just as dangerous as the Russians, and even more dangerous in certain historical periods”. He hoped that Washington could take advantage of Moscow and Beijing by playing “an unemotional balance of the power game”. In Kissinger’s view, 20 years later, the U.S. would lean towards Russia to restrain China, if it could first use China to weaken the Soviet Union. Subsequent U.S. administrations (both Democrat and Republican) followed through on this strategy, working with China and weakening the Soviet Union, hastening its collapse.

But the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 did not fully satisfy the U.S. During Yeltsin’s administration, the U.S. failed to persuade Russia—like Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan—to give up its nuclear weapons altogether. After the U.S. withdrew from the 1972 ABM Treaty in 2001, Russia also withdrew from the START II Treaty. At this time, Russia still deployed more than 5,000 strategic nuclear warheads and maintained a strong influence in Eastern Europe. The goal of the U.S. is to further weaken or destroy Russia economically, destabilize its politics, confuse the Russian people, and eventually dismantle Russia into smaller countries, and most importantly, eliminate its nuclear arsenal.

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Dismembered Russia in Western Conception.

Washington, however, underestimated the patriotic sentiments of the Russian people. Historically, Russia has suffered many invasions by Western European countries, including Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812, the 14-state alliance’s armed intervention in the nascent Soviet regime in 1918, and the German fascist invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II, which resulted in tens of millions of military and civilian casualties. The Soviet Union and China made the greatest sacrifices in the world war against fascism, shaping strong nationalism and patriotism in both countries at the same time. Patriotism became the most important factor influencing Russian politics, and every political party was judged by how they defended their country. Especially after the difficult period following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian people today are not as easily deceived as the U.S. might expect, and President Vladimir Putin has always enjoyed a high approval rating. Despite prolonged U.S. economic sanctions and domestic “color revolutions,” the Russian regime has remained stable for a long time. Eventually, the U.S. decided to escalate tensions in Ukraine on its own initiative, imposing the threat of war on the people of Eastern Ukraine and forcing Russia to defend itself, thus finding a pretext to launch a larger round of hybrid war and economic sanctions against Russia.

Contrary to Kroenig’s alarmist remarks in his article, Russia never claimed invasion amidst the Eastern Ukraine tensions, but complete self-defense. Donetsk and Luhansk, the two affected regions, have, historically, closer ties to Russia than to Ukraine. In the mid-18th century, Tsarina Ekaterina II developed the area into an industrial town, renamed it “New Russia” and migrated a large number of ethnic Russians to the land. Western Ukraine was occupied by Lithuanians, Poles, Austrians, Russians, and Germans for centuries, thus different from Russia ethnically, linguistically, and religiously. Its inhabitants have a lower sense of identity and even deep hostility towards Russia. In recent years, neo-Nazi forces have grown stronger in Western Ukraine, as exemplified by torchlight parades in cities like Kyiv and Lviv to commemorate the birth of Stepan Bandera, a Nazi leader. During the previous conflicts, ultra-nationalists in Western Ukraine raised Nazi banners and threatened to kill all Eastern Ukrainians and pro-Russians. Ethnic Russians in Eastern Ukraine had to organize resistance and seek assistance from Russia. Public opinion in Russia also agreed that Putin should help their Russian compatriots in the Eastern Ukraine region.

NATO’s eastward expansion has pushed the security issue in Ukraine to a boiling point. Prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. promised Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand eastward because its original mission—to confront the Soviet Union and contain communism in Europe—had come to an end when the Cold War ceased. However, NATO reneged on this “gentleman’s agreement” after the Cold War by adopting 14 more member countries, including some former members of the Soviet Union. In 2018, Ukraine amended its constitution to make attaining NATO and EU membership its primary national strategy, which posed a serious threat to Russia’s national security. As Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, is only 760 kilometers in a straight line from Moscow, giving permission to NATO to deploy ultra-high-sonic nuclear weapons in Ukraine would almost certainly mean the total military surrender of Russia.

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NATO’s Eastward Expansion.

After the end of the Cold War, the driving forces behind U.S. diplomatic strategy have gone beyond the containment of communism, coveting unquestionable and permanent hegemony in the military and economic arenas. In the strategic vision of the U.S., Russia should be disarmed to become part of Europe as a “sidekick” and a bridgehead to contain China, the “more dangerous enemy” as Kissinger described it. But the Russians’ history and current international status have made it unacceptable for them to be a “sidekick” to follow a U.S.-led Europe. Moreover, Putin is already suspicious of U.S. credibility in international affairs. There is no question that the Russian government had no desire in starting a war, not only because of the inevitable U.S. and Western European economic sanctions, but also because Putin does not want to put China in a dilemma. The tension in Eastern Ukraine today is a microcosm of U.S.-Russian relations: the U.S. is pressing forward, and Russia has no space to retreat.

Consensus of U.S. elite

When the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security released its report The Longer Telegraph last year, Chinese intellectuals accurately pointed out that the report was rife with antiquated worldviews, outdated methodologies, and poor-quality content. However, this does not mean that this report, and Kroenig’s recent article, should not be taken seriously by China.

In the field of U.S. foreign policy, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Atlantic Council, and the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) are three of the most important U.S. think tanks, and all three consistently adopt a Cold War perspective on China and Russia. The CFR, the most influential in the diplomatic field, has produced an eye-opening timeline of “U.S.-China Relations: 1949-2021,” in which the vast majority of nodes reveal confrontation rather than—as many Chinese scholars would have it—friendly cooperation. CNAS was founded in 2007 when the U.S. political elite began to realize that China’s future leaders would not be the next Gorbachev or Yeltsin, and therefore needed to “design a path for U.S. engagement with China…to encourage a more responsible Chinese regime”—a euphemism for “containment” or “color revolution.” During the subsequent Obama term, CNAS played a key role in the Asia-Pacific rebalancing strategy. As for the Atlantic Council, which is mentioned several times in this article, it is a direct supporter of U.S. military hegemony. In the recent conflict in Eastern Ukraine, this think tank was the first to predict that Russia would “invade” Ukraine. The Atlantic Council has been involved in the war in Afghanistan, the Jasmine Revolution in North Africa, and the “Occupy Central” movement in Hong Kong. These think tanks are deeply integrated with the traditional military-industrial complex, forming a complete chain of inciting, manufacturing, and implementing hybrid warfare.

Despite the current deep bipartisan divide in the U.S., there is a high degree of agreement on foreign policy: Russia must be weakened and dismembered; China is the greatest threat to U.S. imperialist hegemony. While the U.S. economy has not recovered from the 2008 Financial Crisis and has recently been hit by the pandemic, China’s remarkable performance in these two rounds of global disasters makes it a strong challenger to U.S. economic hegemony. In purchasing power parity terms, China’s GDP has surpassed that of the United States in 2013; even in market exchange terms, China’s GDP will surpass that of the United States in 2028. The U.S. political elite is well aware that it will be difficult to defeat and contain China economically, so they have every incentive to resort to hybrid wars (including economic sanctions, legal wars, propaganda wars, etc.) and even hot wars to maintain U.S. hegemony.

John Bellamy Foster of the Monthly Review points out that the United States faces many intractable internal conflicts today, and that Trump, elected to the presidency by disaffected Americans, represents not populism but a brutal, war-hungry neo-fascism. And Biden and the Democratic Party have no contradiction with the Republican Party on the point of being anti-Russian and anti-Chinese. Pompeo, who served as secretary of state in the Trump administration and is likely to run for President in 2024, is a more rational and efficient neo-fascist, ready to plot a war in Taiwan; he will reportedly visit Taiwan this March to meet with “President” Tsai. It looks like he is already pushing the Atlantic Council’s proposed strategy of “defeating Russia and China in overlapping timeframes”.

The U.S. political elite may seem foolish and arrogant compared to China’s governance model of “selecting the noble and appointing the capable,” but our friends in China need to understand that these political elites have the will, resources, and power to wage two wars against China and Russia at the same time and are not afraid to use nuclear weapons. Their danger is not lessened by their stupidity and arrogance. Many Chinese still regard Nixon and Kissinger as “old friends of the Chinese people” after even 50 years since President Nixon visited China. But the reality is that relations between China and the United States are entering a long, cold winter, and the American political elite is already in cold war mode and are ready for a hot war.

https://mronline.org/2022/02/27/the-u-s ... same-time/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Tue Mar 01, 2022 4:14 pm

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America defeats Germany for the third time in a century
Posted Feb 28, 2022 by Michael Hudson

Originally published: Michael Hudson Blog (February 28, 2022 )

My old boss Herman Kahn, with whom I worked at the Hudson Institute in the 1970s, had a set speech that he would give at public meetings. He said that back in high school in Los Angeles, his teachers would say what most liberals were saying in the 1940s and 50s: “Wars never solved anything.” It was as if they never changed anything—and therefore shouldn’t be fought.

Herman disagreed, and made lists of all sorts of things that wars had solved in world history, or at least changed. He was right, and of course that is the aim of both sides in today’s New Cold War confrontation in Ukraine.

The question to ask is what today’s New Cold War is trying to change or “solve.” To answer this question, it helps to ask who initiates the war. There always are two sides—the attacker and the attacked. The attacker intends certain consequences, and the attacked looks for unintended consequences of which they can take advantage. In this case, both sides have their dueling sets of intended consequences and special interests.

The active military force and aggression since 1991 has been the United States. Rejecting mutual disarmament of the Warsaw Pact countries and NATO, there was no “peace dividend.” Instead, the U.S. policy executed by the Clinton and subsequent administrations to wage a new military expansion via NATO has paid a 30-year dividend in the form of shifting the foreign policy of Western Europe and other American allies out of their domestic political sphere into their own U.S.-oriented “national security” blob (the word for special interests that must not be named). NATO has become Europe’s foreign-policy-making body, even to the point of dominating domestic economic interests.

The recent prodding of Russia by expanding Ukrainian anti-Russian ethnic violence by Ukraine’s neo-Nazi post-2014 Maiden regime was aimed at (and has succeeded in0 forcing a showdown in response the fear by U.S. interests that they are losing their economic and political hold on their NATO allies and other Dollar Area satellites as these countries have seen their major opportunities for gain to lie in increasing trade and investment with China and Russia.

To understand just what U.S. aims and interests are threatened, it is necessary to understand U.S. politics and “the blob,” that is, the government central planning that cannot be explained by looking at ostensibly democratic politics. This is not the politics of U.S. senators and representatives representing their congressional voting districts or states.

America’s three oligarchies in control of U.S. foreign policy

It is more realistic to view U.S. economic and foreign policy in terms of the military-industrial complex, the oil and gas (and mining) complex, and the banking and real estate complex than in terms of the political policy of Republicans and Democrats. The key senators and congressional representatives do not represent their states and districts as much as the economic and financial interests of their major political campaign contributors. A Venn diagram would show that in today’s post-Citizens United world, U.S. politicians represent their campaign contributors, not voters. And these contributors fall basically into three main blocs.
Three main oligarchic groups that have bought control of the Senate and Congress to put their own policy makers in the State Department and Defense Department.

First is the Military-Industrial Complex (MIC)—arms manufacturers such as Raytheon, Boeing and Lockheed-Martin, have broadly diversified their factories and employment in nearly every state, and especially in the Congressional districts where key Congressional committee heads are elected. Their economic base is monopoly rent, obtained above all from their arms sales to NATO, to Near Eastern oil exporters and to other countries with a balance-of-payments surplus. Stocks for these companies soared immediately upon news of the Russian attack, leading a two-day stock-market surge as investors recognized that war in a world of cost-plus “Pentagon capitalism” (as Seymour Melman described it) will provide a guaranteed national-security umbrella for monopoly profits for war industries. Senators and Congressional representatives from California and Washington traditionally have represented the MIC, along with the solid pro-military South. The past week’s military escalation promises soaring arms sales to NATO and other U.S. allies, enriching the actual constituents of these politicians. Germany quickly agreed to raise is arms spending to over 2% of GDP.

The second major oligarchic bloc is the rent-extracting oil and gas sector, joined by mining (OGAM), riding America’s special tax favoritism granted to companies emptying natural resources out of the ground and putting them mostly into the atmosphere, oceans and water supply. Like the banking and real estate sector seeking to maximize economic rent and maximizing capital gains for housing and other assets,, the aim of this OGAM sector is to maximize the price of its energy and raw materials so as to maximize its natural-resource rent. Monopolizing the Dollar Area’s oil market and isolating it from Russian oil and gas has been a major U.S. priority for over a year now, as the Nord Stream 2 pipeline threatened to link the Western European and Russian economies more tightly together.

If oil, gas and mining operations are not situated in every U.S. voting district, at least their investors are. Senators from Texas and other Western oil-producing and mining states are the leading OGAM lobbyists, and the State Department has a heavy oil-sector influence providing a national-security umbrella for the sector’s special tax breaks. The ancillary political aim is to ignore and reject environmental drives to replace oil, gas and coal with alternative sources of energy. The Biden administration accordingly has backed the expansion of offshore drilling, supported the Canadian pipeline to the world’s dirtiest petroleum source in the Athabasca tar sands, and celebrated the revival of U.S. fracking.

The foreign-policy extension is to prevent foreign countries not leaving control of their oil, gas and mining to U.S. OGAM companies from competing in world markets with U.S. suppliers. Isolating Russia (and Iran) from Western markets will reduce the supply of oil and gas, pushing up prices and corporate profits accordingly.

The third major oligarchic group is the symbiotic Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector, which is the modern finance-capitalist successor to Europe’s old post-feudal landed aristocracy living by land rents. With most housing in today’s world having become owner-occupied (although with sharply rising rates of absentee landlordship since the post-2008 wave of Obama Evictions), land rent is paid largely to the banking sector in the form of mortgage interest and debt amortization (on rising debt/equity ratios as bank lending inflates housing prices). About 80 percent of U.S. and British bank loans are to the real estate sector, inflating land prices to create capital gains—which are effectively tax-exempt for absentee owners.

This Wall Street-centered banking and real estate bloc is even more broadly based on a district-by-district basis than the MIC. Its New York senator from Wall Street, Chuck Schumer, heads the Senate, long supported by Delaware’s former Senator from the credit-card industry Joe Biden, and Connecticut’s senators from the insurance sector centered in that state. Domestically, the aim of this sector is to maximize land rent and the “capital’ gains resulting from rising land rent. Internationally, the FIRE sector’s aim is to privatize foreign economies (above all to secure the privilege of credit creation in U.S. hands), so as to turn government infrastructure and public utilities into rent-seeking monopolies to provide basic services (such as health care, education, transportation, communications and information technology) at maximum prices instead of at subsidized prices to reduce the cost of living and doing business. And Wall Street always has been closely merged with the oil and gas industry (viz. the Rockefeller-dominated Citigroup and Chase Manhattan banking conglomerates).

The FIRE, MIC and OGAM sectors are the three rentier sectors that dominate today’s post-industrial finance capitalism. Their mutual fortunes have soared as MIC and OGAM stocks have increased. And moves to exclude Russia from the Western financial system (and partially now from SWIFT), coupled with the adverse effects of isolating European economies from Russian energy, promise to spur an inflow into dollarized financial securities

As mentioned at the outset, it is more helpful to view U.S. economic and foreign policy in terms of the complexes based on these three rentier sectors than in terms of the political policy of Republicans and Democrats. The key senators and congressional representatives are not representing their states and districts as much as the economic and financial interests of their major donors. That is why neither manufacturing nor agriculture play the dominant role in U.S. foreign policy today. The convergence of the policy aims of America’s three dominant rentier groups overwhelms the interests of labor and even of industrial capital beyond the MIC. That convergence is the defining characteristic of today’s post-industrial finance capitalism. It is basically a reversion to economic rent-seeking, which is independent of the politics of labor and industrial capital.

The dynamic that needs to be traced today is why this oligarchic blob has found its interest in prodding Russia into what Russia evidently viewed as a do-or-die stance to resist the increasingly violent attacks on Ukraine’s eastern Russian-speaking provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk, along with the broader Western threats against Russia.

The rentier “blob’s” expected consequences of the New Cold War

As President Biden explained, the current U.S.-orchestrated military escalation (“Prodding the Bear”) is not really about Ukraine. Biden promised at the outset that no U.S. troops would be involved. But he has been demanding for over a year that Germany prevent the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from supplying its industry and housing with low-priced gas and turn to the much higher-priced U.S. suppliers.

U.S. officials first tried to stop construction of the pipeline from being completed. Firms aiding in its construction were sanctioned, but finally Russia itself completed the pipeline. U.S. pressure then turned on the traditionally pliant German politicians, claiming that Germany and the rest of Europe faced a National Security threat from Russia turning off the gas, presumably to extract some political or economic concessions. No specific Russian demands could be thought up, and so their nature was left obscure and blob-like. Germany refused to authorize Nord Stream 2 from officially going into operation.

A major aim of today’s New Cold War is to monopolize the market for U.S. shipments of liquified natural gas (LNG). Already under Donald Trump’s administration, Angela Merkel was bullied into promising to spend $1 billion building new port facilities for U.S. tanker ships to unload natural gas for German use. The Democratic election victory in November 2020, followed by Ms. Merkel’s retirement from Germany’s political scene, led to cancellation of this port investment, leaving Germany really without much alternative to importing Russian gas to heat its homes, power its electric utilities, and to provide raw material for its fertilizer industry and hence the maintenance of its farm productivity.

So the most pressing U.S. strategic aim of NATO confrontation with Russia is soaring oil and gas prices, above all to the detriment of Germany. In addition to creating profits and stock-market gains for U.S. oil companies, higher energy prices will take much of the steam out of the German economy. That looms as the third time in a century that the United States has defeated Germany—each time increasing its control over a German economy increasingly dependent on the United States for imports and policy leadership, with NATO being the effective check against any domestic nationalist resistance.

Higher gasoline, heating and other energy prices also will hurt U.S. consumers and those of other nations (especially Global South energy-deficit economies) and leave less of the U.S. family budget for spending on domestic goods and services. This could squeeze marginalized homeowners and investors, leading to further concentration of absentee ownership of housing and commercial property in the United States, along with buyouts of distressed real estate owners in other countries faced with soaring heating and energy costs. But that is deemed collateral damage by the post-industrial blob.

Food prices also will rise, headed by wheat. (Russia and Ukraine account for 25 percent of world wheat exports.) This will squeeze many Near Eastern and Global South food-deficit countries, worsening their balance of payments and threatening foreign debt defaults.

Russian raw-materials exports may be blocked by Russia in response to the currency and SWIFT sanctions. This threatens to cause breaks in supply chains for key materials, including cobalt, palladium, nickel and aluminum (the production of which consumes much electricity as its major cost—which will make that metal more expensive). If China decides to see itself as the next nation being threatened and joins Russia in a common protest against the U.S. trade and financial warfare, the Western economies are in for a serious shock.

The long-term dream of U.S. New Cold Warriors is to break up Russia, or at least to restore its Yeltsin/Harvard Boys managerial kleptocracy, with oligarchs seeking to cash in their privatizations in Western stock markets. OGAM still dreams of buying majority control of Yukos and Gazprom. Wall Street would love to recreate a Russian stock market boom. And MIC investors at happily anticipating the prospect of selling more weapons to help bring all this about.

Russia’s intentions to benefit from America’s unintended consequences

What does Russia want? Most immediately, to remove the neo-Nazi anti-Russian core that the Maidan massacre and coup put in place in 2014. Ukraine is to be neutralized, which to Russia means basically pro-Russian, dominated by Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea. The aim is to prevent Ukraine from becoming a staging ground of U.S.-orchestrated anti-Russian moves a la Chechnya and Georgia.

Russia’s longer-term aim is to pry Europe away from NATO and U.S. dominance—and in the process, create with China a new multipolar world order centered on an economically integrated Eurasia. The aim is to dissolve NATO altogether, and then to promote the broad disarmament and denuclearization policies that Russia has been pushing for. Not only will this cut back foreign purchases of U.S. arms, but it may end up leading to sanctions against future U.S. military adventurism. That would leave America with less ability to fund its military operations as de-dollarization accelerates.

Now that it should be obvious to any informed observer that (1) NATO’s purpose is aggression, not defense, and (2) there is no further territory for it to conquer from the remains of the old Soviet Union, what does Europe get out of continued membership? It is obvious that Russia never again will invade Europe. It has nothing to gain—and had nothing to gain by fighting Ukraine, except to roll back NATO’s proxy expansion into that country and the NATO-backed attacks on Novorossiya.

Will European nationalist leaders (the left is largely pro-US) ask why their countries should pay for U.S. arms that only put them in danger, pay higher prices for U.S. LNG and energy, pay more for grain and Russian-produced raw materials, all while losing the option of making export sales and profits on peaceful investment in Russia—and perhaps losing China as well?

The U.S. confiscation of Russian monetary reserves, following the recent theft of Afghanistan’s reserves (and England’s seizure of Venezuela’s gold stocks held there) threatens every country’s adherence to the Dollar Standard, and hence the dollar’s role as the vehicle for foreign-exchange savings by the world’s central banks. This will accelerate the international de-dollarization process already started by Russia and China relying on mutual holdings of each other’s currencies.

Over the longer term, Russia is likely to join China in forming an alternative to the U.S.-dominated IMF and World Bank. Russia’s announcement that it wants to arrest the Ukrainian Nazis and hold a war crimes trial seems to imply an alternative to the Hague court will be established following Russia’s military victory in Ukraine. Only a new international court could try war criminals extending from Ukraine’s neo-Nazi leadership all the way up to U.S. officials responsible for crimes against humanity as defined by the Nuremberg laws.

Did the American blob actually think through the consequences of NATO’s war?

It is almost black humor to look at U.S. attempts to convince China that it should join the United States in denouncing Russia’s moves into Ukraine. The most enormous unintended consequence of U.S. foreign policy has been to drive Russia and China together, along with Iran, Central Asia and other countries along the Belt and Road initiative.

Russia dreamed of creating a new world order, but it was U.S. adventurism that has driven the world into an entirely new order—one that looks to be dominated by China as the default winner now that the European economy is essentially torn apart and America is left with what it has grabbed from Russia and Afghanistan, but without the ability to gain future support.

And everything that I have written above may already be obsolete as Russia and the U.S. have gone on atomic alert. My only hope is that Putin and Biden can agree that if Russia hydrogen bombs Britain and Brussels, that there will be a devil’s (not gentleman’s) agreement not to bomb each other.

With such talk I’m brought back to my discussions with Herman Kahn 50 years ago. He became quite unpopular for writing Thinking about the Unthinkable, meaning atomic war. As he was parodied in Dr. Strangelove, he did indeed say that there would indeed be survivors. But he added that for himself, he hoped to be right under the atom bomb, because it was not a world in which he wanted to survive.

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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Fri Mar 04, 2022 3:14 pm

Imperialism as an abiding phenomenon
Posted Mar 03, 2022 by Prabhat Patnaik

Originally published: Peoples Democracy (February 27, 2022 ) |
)
THERE is a common misconception that while the immediate aftermath of political decolonisation was marked by attempts by metropolitan powers to retain control over the resources of the erstwhile colonies, for which they used all kinds of instruments from coups to armed interventions against the newly independent governments, that period got over after a time. The metropolitan powers are now reconciled to the fact of political independence of their colonies; and whatever international arrangement prevails at present is the outcome of voluntary negotiations between countries, not of coercion exercised by some over others.

While the concept of neo-colonialism, it is argued from this, was an appropriate one for the period of the fifties and sixties, and represented an attempt by the metropolis to perpetuate the colonial arrangement, the subsequent years have been quite different. The more recent years therefore cannot be covered under the term imperialism, even though the neo-colonial period must be counted as belonging to the era of imperialism. In other words, the term imperialism, while it may be defined to cover the period of colonialism and neo-colonialism, is no longer relevant now.

This is a misconception because it identifies imperialism exclusively with the exercise of violent coercion, rather than with the substance of the relationship between the metropolis and the countries of the periphery. It defines imperialism in terms of “form” rather than “essence”, mistaking “form” for “essence”. The fact that the essence of the relationship that constitutes imperialism no longer requires violent coercion and can be made to prevail apparently voluntarily, does not detract one iota from the fact of its prevalence; and that is what matters.

The essence of the relationship of imperialism lies in the control over the world’s resources, including land-use, by the metropolitan powers. The erstwhile colonies had acquired control over their resources after much struggle, precisely during the period described as neo-colonialism; in fact it is this struggle that defined neo-colonialism. But neo-liberal globalisation has meant that control over these third world assets have been returned to metropolitan capital without the need for any such struggle.

This is also what has happened in India. The idea of natural resources remaining with the State, being owned and developed by the State, was incorporated in the 1931 Karachi Congress resolution that had for the first time provided an outline of what a free India would look like. What the Karachi resolution envisaged remained the official policy in India right until “liberalisation”. But under the neo-liberal regime, foreign capital was invited once again to develop natural resources in the country (alongside domestic monopolists).

This reversal in the attitude towards metropolitan capital that characterised not just India but a host of other third world countries was forced upon them by three international organisations working at the behest of globalised finance: the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO. The roles of the IMF and the World Bank in this process are well-known, but less is known about the role of the WTO. Using the utterly infamous theory that free trade is beneficial for all trading partners, despite the fact that the long colonial experience had clearly shown the destructive, de-industrialising consequences of “free” trade, the WTO imposed a trade regime on the third world that was entirely to the advantage of the metropolis. One consequence of this trade regime, the only one we shall be concerned with here, is to destroy foodgrain self-sufficiency in the countries of the periphery, so that they provide markets for the surplus foodgrains grown in the metropolitan countries, while turning land-use within their own territories towards the production of a whole range of crops, from greens and vegetables to fruits and flowers, that cannot be produced at all, or in sufficient quantities, in the metropolis. The destruction of foodgrain self-sufficiency, as has happened in African countries, makes the third world vulnerable to famines on the one hand and imperialist arm-twisting on the other.

But if the destruction of foodgrain self-sufficiency in the third world is dangerous, the instrument used for this purpose is irrational beyond belief. The first element of irrationality is the distinction that the WTO draws between “permissible” and “impermissible” transfers by the government to the farmers: direct cash payments by the government to farmers are “permissible” but payments through price-support are “impermissible”. Now, in a country like the USA where famers constitute a minuscule percentage of the total population, direct cash payments are easy to make; but in a country like India, where there are millions and millions of farmers, the only feasible way in which they can at all be supported is through price-support. Hence the very distinction between “permissible” and “impermissible” transfers, defended by invoking some entirely illegitimate strand of economic theory, is inherently biased against farmers in countries like India.

The second element of irrationality arises from the mode of calculating the magnitude of “impermissible” transfers. To illustrate the point let us take the specific complaint made by the U.S. against India to the WTO. In the base year, which is the average for 1986-88, there was a certain international dollar price for rice and for wheat; these multiplied by the base year exchange rate of the rupee against the dollar, give us the base year benchmark rupee prices of these crops. The excess of the current year’s minimum support prices declared by the government of India for these crops over these benchmark prices, multiplied by the entire outputs of these crops, gives, according to the U.S., the subsidies to the producers of these crops, which, if they exceed a certain proportion of the values of these crops’ outputs, are supposedly against WTO rules. On this basis the U.S. claims that in 2013-14, the benchmark price of wheat in India should have been Rs 360 per quintal compared to an MSP of Rs 1390.

We do not want to discuss here the validity of the U.S. complaint, or suggest that this is what the WTO actually said. The matter is sub judice and the precise WTO rules will be clarified in due course; but the very fact that the U.S. could complain in this manner suggests a lacuna in the WTO rules, on two issues. First, why should the entire output be deemed to have been purchased at the MSP, and the “subsidy” calculated on that basis, when in fact only a small fraction of the output is purchased? In other words, the fact that much of the foodgrains produced by farmers is for their own consumption is completely ignored by the WTO; that is, the specificity of the foodgrain economy in a country like India does not figure in WTO rules. And, second, the very idea of a base “benchmark” price, indeed of any base year price, whether a base dollar price or a base exchange rate, which abstracts from inflation (that would in practice raise both), is grossly unrealistic. It biases the WTO rules against food production for self-sufficiency in the third world, promoting a shift of land-use in a direction desired by the metropolitan countries.

Thus it is not just the World Bank and the IMF that promote “free trade” and then use the balance of payments difficulties of third world countries arising from the pursuit of “free trade” as an argument for “austerity” which serves to release primary commodities for metropolitan use at non-increasing prices; the WTO too shifts third world land-use towards non-foodgrains that serve the interests of imperialism.

What the armed intervention by metropolitan powers in the immediate post-decolonisation period was meant to achieve, namely a drastic change in the ownership, pattern of use, and the relative prices of the natural resources, including land, located in the third world, is now being imposed through “peaceful” means upon the third world, by international institutions acting in the interests of imperialism. In fact the period of neo-colonialism characterised by armed intervention can in retrospect be seen as a transitional phase before appropriate institutions in the place of direct colonial rule could be devised. Now that they have been, there is no need for any armed intervention, and no manifestations of neo-colonialism; to see in the absence of such manifestations an absence of imperialism, is to miss the point completely.

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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Wed Mar 09, 2022 3:08 pm

NOTES FROM THE EDITORS
April 2022 (Volume 73, Number 11)
by The Editors
(Mar 07, 2022)

In light of the current events in Ukraine we have decided to make the Notes From the Editors for the April 2022 issue of Monthly Review immediately available. —Eds.

As we write these notes at the beginning of March 2022, the eight-year limited civil war in Ukraine has turned into a full-scale war. This represents a turning point in the New Cold War and a great human tragedy. By threatening global nuclear holocaust, these events are also now endangering the entire world. To understand the origins of the New Cold War and the onset of the current Russian entry into the Ukrainian civil war, it is necessary to go back to decisions associated with the creation of the New World Order made in Washington when the previous Cold War ended in 1991. Within months, Paul Wolfowitz, then under secretary of defense for policy in the George H. W. Bush administration, issued a Defense Policy Guidance stating: “Our policy [after the fall of the Soviet Union] must now refocus on precluding the emergence of any potential future global competitor.” Wolfowitz emphasized that “Russia will remain the strongest military power in Eurasia.” Extraordinary efforts were therefore necessary to weaken Russia’s geopolitical position permanently and irrevocably, before it would be in a position to recover, bringing into the Western strategic orbit all of those states now surrounding it that had formerly either been parts of the Soviet Union or that had fallen within its sphere of influence (“Excerpts from Pentagon’s Plan: ‘Preventing the Re-Emergence of a New Rival’,” New York Times, March 8, 1992).

The Wolfowitz Defense Policy Guidance was adopted by Washington and all the leading U.S. strategic planners, whose views at that point increasingly reached back to the classical geopolitical doctrines introduced by Halford Mackinder in imperial Britain before the First World War, and that were further developed by Karl Haushofer in Nazi Germany and Nicholas John Spykman in the United States during the 1930s and ’40s. It was Mackinder who in 1904 introduced the notion that geopolitical control of the world depended on domination of Eurasia (the main land mass of the European and Asian continents), which he referred to as the Heartland. The rest of Asia and Africa together with the Heartland made up the World Island. Thus arose his oft-quoted dictum:

Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland:
Who rules the Heartland commands the World Island:
Who rules the World Island commands the World.


Image
The War in Eurasia. Image credit: “Twilight: The Erosion of US Control and the Multipolar Future,” Dossier 36, The Tricontinental, January 4, 2021.

This geopolitical doctrine was, from the first, aimed at world dominance and has governed the imperial strategy of the leading capitalist nations ever since, in the form of what is commonly referred to as “grand strategy.” But while it dictated the thinking of such U.S. national security figures as Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, geopolitics was for a long time downplayed in the public sphere due to popular identification of it with the doctrines of Nazi Germany. Nevertheless, with the demise of the Soviet Union and the growth of the United States as a unipolar power, geopolitics and the Heartland doctrine were once again openly avowed by U.S. strategic planners, generating a new post-Cold War imperial grand strategy (John Bellamy Foster, “The New Geopolitics of Empire,” Monthly Review 57, no. 8 [January 2006]).

The most important architect of this new imperial strategy was Brzezinski, who earlier on, as Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, had laid the trap for the Soviets in Afghanistan. It was under Brzezinski’s direction, following a secret directive signed by Carter in July 1979, that the CIA, working together with the arc of political Islam stretching from Muhammad Zia-ul Haq’s Pakistan to the Saudi royals, recruited, armed, and trained the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. The CIA’s buildup of the Mujahideen and various terrorist groups in Afghanistan precipitated the Soviet intervention, leading to an endless war that contributed to the destabilization of the Soviet Union itself. To queries as to whether he regretted establishing the arc of terrorism that was to lead to 9/11 and beyond, Brzezinski (who posed in photos with Mujahideen fighters) responded by simply saying that the destruction of the Soviet Union was worth it (Natylie Baldwin, “Brzezinski’s Mad Imperial Strategy,” Natylie’s Place, August 13, 2014; Ted Snider, “Living with Brzezinski’s Mess,” Antiwar.com, August 26, 2021, “Brzezinski’s Prophecy About Ukraine,” Teller Report, February 15, 2022).

Brzezinski remained a key advisor to subsequent U.S. administrations but did not have a prominent official role, given his hawkish reputation and the extremely negative view of him in Russia, which, in the early 1990s under Boris Yeltsin, had a close, puppet-like connection to Washington. Nevertheless, more than any other U.S. strategic thinker, it was Brzezinski who articulated the U.S. grand strategy on Russia that was enacted over three decades by successive U.S. administrations. The NATO wars that dismembered Yugoslavia in the 1990s overlapped with the onset of NATO’s eastward expansion. Washington had promised the Kremlin under Mikhail Gorbachev, at the time of German reunification, that NATO would expand “not one inch” to the East into the former Warsaw Pact countries. Nevertheless, in October 1996, Bill Clinton, while campaigning for reelection, indicated that he favored the expansion of NATO into the former Soviet sphere and a policy was put into motion the next year, followed by all subsequent U.S. administrations. Shortly afterward, in 1997, Brzezinski published his book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, in which he declared that the United States was in a position “for the first time ever [for] a non-Eurasian power” of becoming “the key arbiter of Eurasian power relations,” while also constituting “the world’s paramount power.” In this way, the United States would become the “first” and the “last” global empire (Brzezinski, Grand Chessboard [Basic Books, 1997], xiii, 209; Diana Johnstone, Fool’s Crusade [Monthly Review Press, 2002]; “NATO Expansion: What Gorbachev Heard,” National Security Archive, George Washington University; “President W. J. Clinton to the People of Detroit,” United States Information Agency, October 22, 1996).

In order for the Atlantic Alliance under U.S. leadership to dominate Eurasia, it was first necessary for it to gain primacy over what Brzezinski called “the black hole” left by the Soviet Union’s departure from the world stage. This meant seeking to diminish Russia to the point that it could no longer claim great power status. The key “geopolitical pivot” on which this turned, Brzezinski insisted, was Ukraine. Minus Ukraine, Russia was irrevocably weakened, while a Ukraine that was incorporated as part of NATO would be a dagger at Moscow’s heart. Yet, any attempt to turn Ukraine against Russia, he warned, would be seen as a major security threat, a red line, by Russia itself. This then required the “enlargement of NATO,” extending it all the way to Ukraine, shifting strategic weapons to the East, with the object of eventually gaining control of Ukraine itself. The enactment of this grand strategy would likewise make Europe, notably Germany, more dependent on the United States, undercutting the independence of the European Union (Brzezinski, Grand Chessboard, 41, 87–92, 113, 121–22, 200).

There were, of course, hazards to the great game. Although the United States, Brzezinski argued, should support the expansion of NATO all the way East into the former Soviet Union, penetrating into Ukraine, with which Russia shared a 1,200-mile border, he noted that, if this succeeded, it would inevitably force Russia in the arms of China. China and Russia might form an “antihegemonic bloc” opposed to the United States, possibly including Iran as well. The result would be a geopolitical situation akin to the early Cold War in the days of the Sino-Soviet bloc, though this time with a much weaker Russia and a much stronger China. The answer to this, in Brzezinski’s mind, was to pressure China via Taiwan and Hong Kong, and also on the Korean Peninsula, and through the promotion of an expanded alliance centered on Japan and Australia. This would place the United States in a favorable position to combat both China and Russia.

However, in all of this, according to the Brzezinski doctrine, the key to the checkmate of Russia, and the weak link with which Washington could gain dominion over Eurasia, remained Ukraine. Complete U.S./NATO dominance of Ukraine was a virtual death threat to Russia, possibly even pointing, under further pressure, to its own breakup into lesser states. China then would also be destabilized from its Far West (Brzezinski, Grand Chessboard, 103, 116–17, 164–70, 188–90).

The relation of Brzezinski’s “grand chessboard” strategy to the actions actually taken by Washington over the last three decades should be obvious. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, NATO has absorbed fifteen countries, all to the East, which were previously part of the Warsaw Pact or were regions within the Soviet Union. On its East, along the borders of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine, NATO has seen a major military buildup. It currently has an air presence in Estonia, Lithuania, and Romania. U.S. troops and NATO multinational troops are massed in Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, and Romania. NATO missile defense facilities are located in Poland and Romania. The object of all of these forward military installations (not to mention those in Central and Western Europe) is Russia (“Here’s Where Alliance Forces Are Deployed Across Eastern Europe,” CNN, February 10, 2022; “Why Russia Wanted Security Guarantees from the West,” Strategic Culture Foundation, February 27, 2022).

In 2014, Washington helped engineer a coup in Ukraine overthrowing democratically elected president Victor Yanukovych. Yanukovych had been friendly to the West. But in the face of financial conditionalities imposed by the International Monetary Fund, his government turned to Russia for economic help, enraging the West. This led to the Maidan coup only months afterward, with the new Ukrainian leader being hand-picked by the United States. The coup was carried out in part by neo-Nazi forces, which have historical roots in the Ukrainian fascist troops that assisted in the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. Today, these forces are concentrated in the Azov Battalion, now part of the Ukrainian military supported by the United States. The domination of Ukraine by right-wing Ukrainian ultranationalist forces and Russophobe groups as a result of the coup led to rebellions in the Eastern Donbass region of the country and to a brutal repression, with more than forty people burned alive in the public Trades Union building in Odessa, to which they had fled, at the hands of right-wing forces (Bryce Green, “What You Should Really Know About Ukraine,” FAIR, February 24, 2022; David Levine, “Council of Europe Report on Far-Right Massacre in Odessa,” Word Socialist Web Site, January 19, 2016).

Following the coup, the predominantly Russian-speaking Crimea decided to merge with Russia through a referendum in which Crimean people were also given the option of going forward as part of Ukraine. The largely Russian-speaking Donbas region in the Eastern part of the country meanwhile broke away from Ukraine, in response to the violent repression against ethnic Russians that had been unleashed by the new right-wing government. This resulted in the formation of two peoples’ republics of Luhansk and Donetsk in the context of the Ukrainian civil war. Luhansk and Donetsk received military backing from Russia, while Ukraine (Kyiv) received ever-greater Western military support, effectively commencing the longer-range process of incorporating Ukraine into NATO (Arina Tsukanova, “So Who Annexed the Crimean Peninsula Then,” Strategic Culture Foundation, March 28, 2017; “What Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics Are,” Strategic Culture Foundation, February 28, 2022).

In the war of Ukraine on the Russian-speaking population in the breakaway republics of Donbass, some 14,000 people were killed, and 2.5 million people displaced, most of them taking refuge in Russia. The initial conflict ended with the signing in 2014–15 of the Minsk Agreements by France, Germany, Russia, and Ukraine, and endorsed by the UN Security Council. According to these agreements, Donetsk and Luhansk were to be given the right to self-government, though remaining in Ukraine. Nevertheless, the military conflict continued and eventually intensified again. In February 2022, there were 130,000 Ukrainian troops besieging and firing on Luhansk and Donetsk, effectively tearing up the Minsk Agreements (Abdul Rahman, “What Are the Minsk Agreements—And What Are Their Role in the Russia-Ukraine Crisis,” February 22, 2022; “Who Is Firing at Whom And Who Is Lying About It?,” Moon of Alabama, February 20, 2022).

Russia insisted on adherence to the Minsk Agreements along with a demand that Ukraine not be brought into NATO and that the rapid U.S.-backed military buildup in Ukraine directed against the Donbas republics cease. Vladimir Putin declared that these demands were all “red lines” for Russia’s security, which if crossed would force Moscow to respond. When Ukraine and U.S.-dominated NATO continued to cross the red lines, Russia massively intervened in the ongoing civil war in Ukraine in alliance with Donetsk and Luhansk.

War is a crime against humanity and today war between the great powers threatens total annihilation. The only answer is to give peace a chance, which requires finding a solution that guarantees the security of all parties to the civil war in Ukraine as well as Russia. In the longer view, we must recognize that war is endemic to capitalism, and both Russia and the NATO powers are capitalist. Only a return to the socialist path in both Ukraine and Russia can offer a lasting solution.

—March 5, 2022

https://monthlyreview.org/2022/03/07/mr ... 2022-04_0/
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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Sun Mar 13, 2022 10:05 pm

Trump and Biden: Two war strategies, same goal
March 13, 2022 Chris Fry

White male supremacist Donald Trump described his foreign policy “dream” to a group of his admirers on March 5th, according to an article from the Guardian newspaper:

In a speech to Republican donors in New Orleans, Donald Trump said the US should put the Chinese flag on F-22 jets and “bomb the shit out of Russia” in retribution for its invasion of Ukraine.

The Washington Post reported the remarks, which were made on Saturday night.

To laughter, the paper said, the former president said: “And then we say, ‘China did it, we didn’t do it, China did it,’ and then they start fighting with each other and we sit back and watch.”

According to the Post, Trump also called NATO a “paper tiger”, said the US military had won “skirmishes” against Russian troops while he was president, and claimed to have been tougher on Vladimir Putin than any other US leader.


Trump’s speech, however crude, reveals that there are two different U.S. imperialist strategies against capitalist Russia and socialist China being considered on Wall Street and in the Pentagon, both designed to retain U.S. imperialist world-wide hegemony: 1) the current Biden strategy to line up the U.S.’s junior NATO “partners” to make economic war (sanctions) and, if necessary, actual military war to effect regime change in Russia, a strategy dating back to post-World War II, and then to “copy” that same strategy to Asia to have its subordinates there attack China, and 2) the Trump strategy that guided his regime, to entice or coerce the Russian leadership to attack China, while waging economic war against China and its people.

Both gambits are catastrophic for the global working class and oppressed and are terrible threats to world peace.

Pre-war capitalist appeasement and post-war confrontation

Despite all the distortions currently promoted by the capitalist media, Russian President Putin is not Hitler. He is head of a capitalist regime whose ruling class seeks independence from the whims and wishes of Wall Street. That’s why he is a target of their machinations to remove him from power.

Before World War II, fascist military officers led by Franco sparked a deadly civil war in Spain against an elected republican government. The capitalist governments in Europe and the U.S. had no objections to that and declared their “neutrality”. The German bombers who destroyed the Spanish town of Guernica, famously depicted by Picasso, were illegally fueled with Texas Oil (now called Texaco) gasoline supplied to them on credit.

Hopes were high among the capitalist elite in the West that Hitler would turn his eyes and his tanks on the Soviet Union. But to prepare for that war, Stalin signed a pact with Hitler, who in turn attacked Poland, then Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France. Only after that, realizing that “their backs were against the wall”, did they ally themselves with the Soviet Union, who in June 1941 was attacked by some 3.5 million German and nearly 700,000 German-allied troops (Romanians, Finns, Hungarians, Italians, Slovaks, and others).

At least 27 million Soviet lives, both military and civilian, were lost in the struggle, which finally ended in victory in May 1945.

In 1974, Richard Nixon knew that he lost his campaign to hold onto his office in the midst of the Watergate scandal when right-wing Senator Barry Goldwater told him he must go. Goldwater opposed Nixon’s rapprochement with the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which Nixon and Kissinger believed could lead to a Soviet-China conflict. Taking sides with the PRC was just too much to the radical right at the time, just as it was in 1979 when Carter agreed to the “One China” policy. And so it is today to the Trumpist wing of the ruling class and the “mad dog” generals in the Pentagon.

From the first days in office in 2017, Trump placed billions in tariffs on imports from the PRC, even as his crony Steve Bannon predicted war with China would occur within five or six years. First economic war, then military conflict: that was and is the Trumpist dream.

Trump repeatedly denounced NATO. Whether or not Trump used that in his negotiations with Putin to entice Russia to join the U.S. in a war with China is unknown, since Trump went to extraordinary lengths to keep the subject of those talks secret.

Right-wing and ultra-militarist author Tom Clancy, who had extremely close Pentagon contacts, wrote a popular novel in 2000 called “The Bear and the Dragon”, precisely describing this war and how the U.S., after inviting Russia to join NATO, would come to aid Russia against a Chinese invasion, from which Russia would somehow reap huge wealth.

Fortunately, the Russian leadership has never fallen for this imperialist pipedream.

The Biden administration presents a different gambit, more in line with “standard” imperialist post World War II strategy to isolate economically and militarily first the Soviet Union, and now the Russian Federation into accepting U.S. domination and control over its vast natural resource and labor pool.

And it plans to continue to apply that same strategy to China, and has continued and amplified the Trump tariffs and sanctions, as well as continued naval fleet “parades” through the South China Sea. However, the Chinese leadership has so far seen right through this imperialist plan:

A March 7th AP article reports:

BEIJING (AP) — China’s top diplomat on Monday accused Washington of trying to create an Asian version of the U.S.-European NATO military alliance and said it is up to the Biden administration to improve relations with North Korea.

It [China] also has said Washington is to blame for the [Ukraine] conflict for failing to take Russia’s security concerns into consideration.

The United States is playing geopolitical games under the pretext of promoting regional cooperation,” Wang said. He said this “runs counter” to regional desires for cooperation and “is doomed to have no future.”

Wang complained Washington is organizing U.S. allies to “suppress China.”

Beijing is irritated by growing military ties among the Quad nations of the United States, Japan, Australia, and India. China criticized a U.S. decision last year to supply technology for Australia to field its first nuclear-powered submarines.

“The real purpose of the ‘Indo-Pacific strategy’ is to create an Indo-Pacific version of NATO,” he said. The Western alliance’s expansion was cited by Russian President Vladimir Putin as one reason behind his invasion of Ukraine.


Imperialist war drive: trillions for the billionaires, devastation for the workers and poor

The Russian intervention that the U.S. has forced the Russian Federation into has already caused immense suffering among both Ukrainians and Russians. And on March 8th, Biden announced that the U.S. would ban all oil purchases from Europe:

[Biden] warned Americans that the decision would inevitably mean painful, higher prices at the gas pump.

“I said I would level with the American people from the beginning,” Mr. Biden said. “And when I first spoke to this, I said defending freedom is going to cost. It’s going to cost us as well, in the United States.”

And he warned oil companies in the United States not to take advantage of the decision by arbitrarily raising prices.

“Russia’s aggression is costing us all,” he said. “And it’s no time for profiteering or price gouging.”


Yeah, right. Workers here and abroad are already facing a record spike in gasoline prices. In California, fuel prices have already hit $7.00 a gallon. This comes in the midst of an unprecedented jump in the inflation rate, even while the parasite collection of billionaires rakes in trillions more in profits, particularly Big Oil.

A March 10th article in the Guardian reported:

Oil and gas companies are facing a potential bonanza from the Ukraine war, though few in the industry want to admit it, and many are using soaring prices and the fear of fuel shortages to cement their position with governments in ways that could have disastrous impacts on the climate crisis.

So far, Biden has not persuaded his European “partners” to ban their Russian oil and natural gas purchases. Only Britain has announced a gradual reduction of its Russian oil purchases, taking full effect by the end of the year.

A March 8th article on the CNN Business website, titled “Your toilet paper roll is slimming down”, describes another technique corporations are using to squeeze out extra profits from the workers and oppressed besides simply raising prices:

Product downsizing, also known as “shrinkflation,” is happening with toilet paper, said Edgar Dworsky, a former assistant attorney general in Massachusetts who is a consumer advocate and editor of website ConsumerWorld.org.

For example, Procter &Gamble’s (PG) Charmin’s ultra soft toilet paper 18-count mega package now contains 244 two-ply sheets, down from a previous 264 double-ply sheets per roll. And super mega rolls of the brand now display 366 sheets versus a previous 396 sheets per roll.

“That amounts to losing the equivalent of about a roll and a half in the new 18-count package,” he said.

Proctor and Gamble executives have found a new way to put “lipstick on this pig” – calling it “innovation”.

In an email to CNNBusiness, Procter & Gamble pointed to various reasons for variations in sizes of its products and that store prices are determined solely by retailers.

“There is a cost element to innovation — adjusting the count per pack or the package size is one way of reinvesting in this innovation while maintaining a competitive price point,” the company said.


As U.S. imperialism fails to maintain a sufficient standard of living for us producers of all the wealth in our society; U.S. imperialist hegemony over Russia and China offers us nothing but inflation and more “belt tightening”, as well as the danger of war, perhaps even nuclear war. But our position in the “belly of the beast” does give our class the opportunity to unite with our sisters and brothers around the world and transform our society to end wars and to put people before profits.

Source: Fighting Words

https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2022/ ... same-goal/
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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Fri Mar 18, 2022 2:02 pm

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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Sat Mar 19, 2022 2:00 pm

Image
West Germany joined NATO in 1955, which led to the formation of the rival Warsaw Pact during the Cold War. (Photo: Bundesarchiv, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

For Washington, war never ends
Originally published: Consortium News by Diana Johnstone (March 16, 2022 ) | - Posted Mar 19, 2022

It goes on and on. The “war to end war” of 1914-1918 led to the war of 1939-1945, known as World War II. And that one has never ended either, mainly because for Washington, it was the Good War, the war that made The American Century: why not the American Millenium?

The conflict in Ukraine may be the spark that sets off what we already call World War III.

But this is not a new war. It is the same old war, an extension of the one we call World War II, which was not the same war for all those who took part.

The Russian war and the American war were very, very different.

Russia’s World War II

For Russians, the war was an experience of massive suffering, grief and destruction. The Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union was utterly ruthless, propelled by a racist ideology of contempt for the Slavs and hatred of “Jewish Bolsheviks.” An estimated 27 million died, about two thirds of them civilians. Despite overwhelming losses and suffering, the Red Army succeeded in turning the Nazi tide of conquest that had subdued most of Europe.

This gigantic struggle to drive the German invaders from their soil is known to Russians as the Great Patriotic War, nourishing a national pride that helped console the people for all they had been through. But whatever the pride in victory, the horrors of the war inspired a genuine desire for peace.

America’s World War II

America’s World War II (like World War I) happened somewhere else. That is a very big difference. The war enabled the United States to emerge as the richest and most powerful nation on earth. Americans were taught never to compromise, neither to prevent war (“Munich”) nor to end one (“unconditional surrender” was the American way). Righteous intransigence was the fitting attitude of Good in its battle against Evil.

The war economy brought the U.S. out of the depression. Military Keynesianism emerged as the key to prosperity. The Military-Industrial-Complex was born. To continue providing Pentagon contracts to every congressional constituency and guaranteed profits to Wall Street investors, it needed a new enemy. The Communist scare–the very same scare that had contributed to creating fascism–did the trick.

The Cold War: World War II Continued

In short, after 1945, for Russia, World War II was over. For the United States, it was not. What we call the Cold War was its voluntary continuation by leaders in Washington. It was perpetuated by the theory that Russia’s defensive “Iron Curtain” constituted a military threat to the rest of Europe.

At the end of the war, the main security concern of Stalin was to prevent such an invasion from ever happening again. Contrary to Western interpretations, Moscow’s ongoing control of Eastern European countries it had occupied on its way to victory in Berlin was not inspired so much by communist ideology as by determination to create a buffer zone as an obstacle to repeated invasion from the West.

Stalin respected the Yalta lines between East and West and declined to support the life and death struggle of Greek communists. Moscow cautioned leaders of large Western European Communist Parties to eschew revolution and play by the rules of bourgeois democracy. The Soviet occupation could be brutal but was resolutely defensive. Soviet sponsorship of peace movements was perfectly genuine.

The formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the rearmament of Germany confirmed that for the United States, the war in Europe was not entirely over. The lackadaisical U.S. “de-Nazification” of its sector of occupied Germany was accompanied by an organized brain drain of Germans who could be useful to the United States in its rearmament and espionage (from Wernher von Braun to Reinhard Gehlen).

America’s Ideological Victory
Throughout the Cold War, the United States devoted its science and industry to building a gigantic arsenal of deadly weapons, which wreaked devastation without bringing U.S. victory in Korea or Vietnam. But military defeat did not cancel America’s ideological victory.

The greatest triumph of American imperialism has been in spreading its self-justifying images and ideology, primarily in Europe. The dominance of the American entertainment industry has spread its particular blend of self-indulgence and moral dualism around the world, especially among youth. Hollywood convinced the West that World War II was won essentially by the U.S. forces and their allies in the Normandy invasion.

America sold itself as the final force for Good as well as the only fun place to live. Russians were drab and sinister.

In the Soviet Union itself, many people were not immune to the attractions of American self-glorification. Some apparently even thought that the Cold War was all a big misunderstanding, and that if we are very nice and friendly, the West will be nice and friendly too. Mikhail Gorbachev was susceptible to this optimism.

Former U.S. ambassador to Moscow Jack Matlock recounts that the desire to liberate Russia from the perceived burden of the Soviet Union was widespread within the Russian elite in the 1980s. It was the leadership rather than the masses who accomplished the self-destruction of the Soviet Union, leaving Russia as the successor state, with the nuclear weapons and U.N. veto of the U.S.S.R. under the alcohol-soaked presidency of Boris Yeltsin–and overwhelming U.S. influence during the 1990s.

The New NATO

Russia’s modernization over the past three centuries has been marked by controversy between “Westernizers”–those who see Russia’s progress in emulation of the more advanced West–and “Slavophiles,” who consider that the nation’s material backwardness is compensated by some sort of spiritual superiority, perhaps based in the simple democracy of the traditional village.

In Russia, Marxism was a Westernizing concept. But official Marxism did not erase admiration for the “capitalist” West and in particular for America. Gorbachev dreamed of “our common European home” living some sort of social democracy. In the 1990s, Russia asked only to be part of the West.

What happened next proved that the whole “communist scare” justifying the Cold War was false. A pretext. A fake designed to perpetuate military Keynesianism and America’s special war to maintain its own economic and ideological hegemony.

There was no longer any Soviet Union. There was no more Soviet communism. There was no Soviet bloc, no Warsaw Pact. NATO had no more reason to exist.

But in 1999, NATO celebrated its 50th anniversary by bombing Yugoslavia and thereby transforming itself from a defensive to an aggressive military alliance. Yugoslavia had been non-aligned, belonging neither to NATO nor the Warsaw Pact. It threatened no other country. Without authorization from the Security Council or justification for self-defense, the NATO aggression violated international law.

At the very same time, in violation of unwritten but fervent diplomatic promises to Russian leaders, NATO welcomed Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic as new members. Five years later, in 2004, NATO took in Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Slovenia and the three Baltic Republics. Meanwhile, NATO members were being dragged into war in Afghanistan, the first and only “defense of a NATO member”–namely, the United States.

Understanding Putin–Or Not



Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin had been chosen by Yeltsin as his successor, partly no doubt because as a former KGB officer in East Germany he had some knowledge and understanding of the West. Putin pulled Russia out of the shambles caused by Yeltsin’s acceptance of American-designed economic shock treatment.

Putin put a stop to the most egregious rip-offs, incurring the wrath of dispossessed oligarchs who used their troubles with the law to convince the West that they were victims of persecution (example: the ridiculous Magnitsky Act).

On Feb. 11, 2007, the Russian Westernizer Putin went to a center of Western power, the Munich Security Conference, and asked to be understood by the West. It is easy to understand, if one wants to. Putin challenged the “unipolar world” being imposed by the United States and emphasized Russia’s desire to “interact with responsible and independent partners with whom we could work together in constructing a fair and democratic world order that would ensure security and prosperity not only for a select few, but for all.”

The reaction of the leading Western partners was indignation, rejection, and a 15-year media campaign portraying Putin as some sort of demonic creature.

Indeed, since that speech there have been no limits to Western media’s insults directed at Putin and Russia. And in this scornful treatment we see the two versions of World War II. In 2014, world leaders gathered in Normandy to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings by U.S. and British forces.

In fact, that 1944 invasion ran into difficulties, even though German forces were mainly concentrated on the Eastern front, where they were losing the war to the Red Army. Moscow launched a special operation precisely to draw German forces away from the Normandy front. Even so, Allied progress could not beat the Red Army to Berlin.

However, thanks to Hollywood, many in the West consider D-Day to be the decisive operation of World War II. To honor the event, Vladimir Putin was there and so was German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Then, in the following year, world leaders were invited to a lavish victory parade held in Moscow celebrating the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II. Leaders of the United States, Britain and Germany chose not to participate.

This was consistent with an endless series of Western gestures of disdain for Russia and its decisive contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany (it destroyed 80 percent of the Wehrmacht.) On Sept. 19, 2019, the European Parliament adopted a resolution on “the importance of European remembrance for the future of Europe” which jointly accused the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany of unleashing World War II.

Vladimir Putin responded to this gratuitous affront in long article on “The Lessons of World War II” published in English in The National Interest on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the end of the war. Putin answered with a careful analysis of the causes of the war and its profound effect on the lives of the people trapped in the murderous 872-day Nazi siege of Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg), including his own parents whose two-year-old son was one of the 800,000 who perished.

Image
The siege of Leningrad, 1942. (Av Boris Kudojarov/RIA Novosti arkiv. Lisens: CC BY SA 3.0)

Clearly, Putin was deeply offended by continual Western refusal to grasp the meaning of the war in Russia. “ Desecrating and insulting the memory is mean,” Putin wrote.

Meanness can be deliberate, hypocritical and pretty much intentional as in the situation when declarations commemorating the 75th anniversary of the end of the Second World War mention all participants in the anti-Hitler coalition except for the Soviet Union.

And all this time, NATO continued to expand eastward, more and more openly targeting Russia in its massive war exercises on its land and sea borders.

The U.S. Seizure of Ukraine

The encirclement of Russia took a qualitative leap ahead with the 2014 seizure of Ukraine by the United States. Western media recounted this complex event as a popular uprising, but popular uprisings can be taken over by forces with their own aims, and this one was. The elected president Viktor Yanukovych was overthrown by violence a day after he had agreed to early elections in an accord with European leaders.

Billions of U.S. dollars and murderous shootings by extreme right militants enforced a regime change openly directed by U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland (“F___ the EU”) producing a leadership in Kiev largely selected in Washington, and eager to join NATO.

By the end of the year, the government of “democratic Ukraine” was largely in the hands of U.S.-approved foreigners. The new minister of finance was a U.S. citizen of Ukrainian origin, Natalia Jaresko, who had worked for the State Department before going into private business. The minister of economy was a Lithuanian, Aïvaras Arbomavitchous, a former basketball champion. The ministry of health was taken by a former Georgian minister of health and labor, Sandro Kvitachvili.

Later, disgraced former Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili was called in to take charge of the troubled port of Odessa. And Vice President Joe Biden was directly involved in reshuffling the Kiev cabinet as his son, Hunter Biden, was granted a profitable position with the Ukrainian gas company Barisma.

The vehemently anti-Russian thrust of this regime change aroused resistance in the southeastern parts of the country, largely inhabited by ethnic Russians. Eight days after more than 40 protesters were burned alive in Odessa, the provinces of Lugansk and Donetsk moved to secede in resistance to the coup.


The U.S.-installed regime in Kiev then launched a war against the provinces that continued for eight year, killing thousands of civilians.

And a referendum then returned Crimea to Russia. The peaceful return of Crimea was obviously vital to preserve Russia’s main naval base at Sebastopol from threatened NATO takeover. And since the population of Crimea had never approved the peninsula’s transfer to Ukraine by Nikita Khrushchev in 1954, the return was accomplished by a democratic vote, without bloodshed. This was in stark contrast to the detachment of the province of Kosovo from Serbia, accomplished in 1999 by weeks of NATO bombing.

But to the United States and most of the West, what was a humanitarian action in Kosovo was an unforgivable aggression in Crimea.

The Oval Office Back Door to NATO

Russia kept warning that NATO enlargement must not encompass Ukraine. Western leaders vacillated between asserting Ukraine’s “right” to join whatever alliance it chose and saying it would not happen right away. It was always possible that Ukraine’s membership would be vetoed by a NATO member, perhaps France or even Germany.

But meanwhile, on Sept. 1, 2021, Ukraine was adopted by the White House as Washington’s special geo-strategic pet. NATO membership was reduced to a belated formality. A Joint Statement on the U.S.-Ukraine Strategic Partnership issued by the White House announced that “Ukraine’s success is central to the global struggle between democracy and autocracy”–Washington’s current self-justifying ideological dualism, replacing the Free World versus Communism.

It went on to spell out a permanent casus belli against Russia:

In the 21st century, nations cannot be allowed to redraw borders by force. Russia violated this ground rule in Ukraine. Sovereign states have the right to make their own decisions and choose their own alliances. The United States stands with Ukraine and will continue to work to hold Russia accountable for its aggression. America’s support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity is unwavering.

The Statement also clearly described Kiev’s war against Donbass as a “Russian aggression.” And it made this uncompromising assertion: “The United States does not and will never recognize Russia’s purported annexation of Crimea…” ( my emphasis). This is followed by promises to strengthen Ukraine’s military capacities, clearly in view of recovery of Donbass and Crimea.

Since 2014, the United States and Britain have surreptitiously transformed Ukraine into a NATO auxiliary, psychologically and militarily turned against Russia. However this looks to us, to Russian leaders this looked increasingly like nothing other than a buildup for an all-out military assault on Russia, Operation Barbarossa all over again. Many of us who tried to “understand Putin” failed to foresee the Russian invasion for the simple reason that we did not believe it to be in the Russian interest. We still don’t. But they saw the conflict as inevitable and chose the moment.

Ambiguous Echoes

Putin justified Russia’s February 2022 “operation” in Ukraine as necessary to stop genocide in Lugansk and Donetsk. This echoed the U.S.-promoted R2P, Responsibility to Protect doctrine, notably the U.S./NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, allegedly to prevent “genocide” in Kosovo. In reality, the situation, both legal and especially human, is vastly more dire in Donbass than it ever was in Kosovo. However, in the West, any attempt at comparison of Donbass with Kosovo is denounced as “false equivalence” or what-about-ism.

But the Kosovo war is much more than an analogy with the Russian invasion of Donbass: it is a cause.

Above all, the Kosovo war made it clear that NATO was no longer a defensive alliance. Rather it had become an offensive force, under U.S. command, that could authorize itself to bomb, invade or destroy any country it chose. The pretext could always be invented: a danger of genocide, a violation of human rights, a leader threatening to “kill his own people”. Any dramatic lie would do. With NATO spreading its tentacles, nobody was safe. Libya provided a second example.

Putin’s announced goal of “denazification” also might have been expected to ring a bell in the West. But if anything, it illustrates the fact that “Nazi” does not mean quite the same thing in East and West. In Western countries, Germany or the United States, “Nazi” has come to mean primarily anti-Semitic. Nazi racism applies to Jews, to Roma, perhaps to homosexuals.

But for the Ukrainian Nazis, racism applies to Russians. The racism of the Azov Battalion, which has been incorporated into Ukrainian security forces, armed and trained by the Americans and the British, echoes that of the Nazis: the Russians are a mixed race, partly “Asiatic” due to the Medieval Mongol conquest, whereas the Ukrainians are pure white Europeans.

Some of these fanatics proclaim that their mission is to destroy Russia. In Afghanistan and elsewhere, the United States supported Islamic fanatics, in Kosovo they supported gangsters. Who cares what they think if they fight on our side against the Slavs?


Conflicting War Aims

For Russian leaders, their military “operation” is intended to prevent the Western invasion they fear. They still want to negotiate Ukrainian neutrality. For the Americans, whose strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski boasted of having lured the Russians into the Afghanistan trap (giving them “their Vietnam”), this is a psychological victory in their endless war. The Western world is united as never before in hating Putin. Propaganda and censorship surpass even World War levels. The Russians surely want this “operation” to end soon, as it is costly to them in many ways. The Americans rejected any effort to prevent it, did everything to provoke it, and will extract whatever advantages they can from its continuation.

Today Volodymyr Zelensky implored the U.S. Congress to give Ukraine more military aid. The aid will keep the war going. Anthony Blinken told NPR that the United States is responding by “ denying Russia the technology it needs to modernize its country, to modernize key industries: defense and aerospace, its high-tech sector, energy exploration.”

The American war aim is not to spare Ukraine, but to ruin Russia. That takes time.

The danger is that the Russians won’t be able to end this war, and the Americans will do all they can to keep it going.

https://mronline.org/2022/03/19/for-was ... ever-ends/
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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Mon Mar 21, 2022 1:58 pm

Their oligarchs and ours
March 20, 2022 Stephen Millies

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Jeff Bezos’ $500 million yacht was a hot news item back in February. The ship was so large that in order to move it from a Dutch shipyard a bridge in Rotterdam would have to be disassembled.

That obscene display of wealth by the union-busting Amazon boss could easily have built housing for over a thousand homeless families. Yet the media is now silent about Bezos’ yacht.

Instead the internet is buzzing about yachts belonging to Russian billionaires being seized. Why are rich Russian scoundrels called “oligarchs” while U.S. billionaires are treated like movie stars?

The different treatment even extends to dictionaries. The Oxford dictionary featured by the Google search engine gives this definition for oligarch: “(especially in Russia) a very rich business leader with a great deal of political influence.”

Who has more political influence than U.S. billionaires? They control the U.S. government from the top to bottom.

They often run for office themselves like the former money bags mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg. Supreme Court justices are groomed in their corporate law firms and Ivy League law schools.

The wealthy and powerful have been running the U.S. since before 1776. Nearly three out of four signers of the Declaration of Independence owned enslaved Africans.

The U.S. Constitution was largely written by those who had a financial interest in the government taking over the debts of the states. This was shown by historian Charles Beard in “An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States.”

Red, white and blue oligarchs are immensely richer than the Russian variety. The 400 richest U.S. billionaires last year had a total wealth of $4.5 trillion.

That’s 12 times as much as the $375 billion stash of Russia’s billionaires.

Wall Street’s empire controls vast areas that the Roman emperors never even knew existed. The U.S. Navy’s Seventh Fleet threatens China while throttling the Pacific Ocean like it’s Lake Michigan.

Fortunes are theft

The French novelist Balzac allegedly wrote that “behind every great fortune lies a great crime.” Gustavus Myers wanted to see if that was true.

Apologists for the super rich claimed that they got their dough honestly by hard work and smarts. Myers found otherwise in his “History of the Great American Fortunes,” published a century ago.

U.S. tycoons got to the top of the heap not only from slavery, child labor, low wages, broken strikes and dangerous working conditions. Myers’ investigation proved that just as crucial for the captains of industry was breaking laws and stealing from other capitalists.

John D. Rockefeller ― the founder of Big Oil who became the world’s first billionaire ― had his brother bomb a rival oil refinery in Buffalo, New York.

The Astors become the hemisphere’s biggest slumlords by taking the profits stolen from Indigenous nations in the fur trade and investing it in New York City real estate. Also necessary was bribing Michigan territorial governor Lewis Cass. New York city council members were paid off in a waterfront land grab.

A whole series of U.S. billionaires are war profiteers. The Du Ponts’ fortune hit the big time with World War I. They used the profits to buy up General Motors.

In the years leading up to his presidency, Donald Trump was so tied in to organized crime that the state of New Jersey refused at first to give him a gambling license.

The Hearst family’s media fortune includes the San Francisco Chronicle, 23 other newspapers, dozens of TV stations and ESPN, which is jointly owned with Disney. These outlets attack Russia and ignore the neo-Nazi gangs in Ukraine that function like a Ku Klux Klan.

According to “Citizen Hearst,” by W. A. Swanberg, the Hearst riches began before the U.S. Civil War in a Missouri lead mine. George Hearst didn’t hire miners; he bought miners who were enslaved Africans.

If an honest title search was conducted into the origins of the biggest fortunes it would find that they were based on theft. It’s tens of millions of unpaid and underpaid workers who actually produced their wealth.

Birth of the oligarchs

Karl Marx pointed out that it was the African Holocaust and the genocide of Indigenous peoples in the Americas that jumpstarted the capitalist world market. He described capitalism’s birth as “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”

The origin of the Russian billionaires is much more recent. It was the U.S. capitalist government that’s responsible. The Pentagon spent at least $5.5 trillion on nuclear weapons aimed at the Soviet Union.

Under this unrelenting pressure, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev threw in the towel. The door was open for overthrowing socialism. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund demanded the privatization of the industries that had been built by the working class.

Russian oligarchs never would have been able to steal trillions of dollars of socialist property without Boris Yeltsin’s assault on the Congress of People’s Deputies. Hundreds of people were killed there in October 1993.

The U.S. media either applauded the massacre or were silent about it. Their attitude was much the same about the bloody U.S. wars against Panama, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and Yemen.

Yet we’re supposed to believe them when they tell us the Russian Federation is committing war crimes in Ukraine.

The 1993 massacre allowed a fire sale of Soviet assets that were gobbled up by the new Russian tycoons. One of the reasons the wealthy hate Belarus is that it was the only former Soviet Republic that didn’t give away the bulk of its nationalized property.

The Russian billionaires have invested hundreds of billions in London and New York City money markets. This flight of capital helped prop up the U.S. dollar and British pound.

The oligarchs in the former Soviet Republics are justly hated by the poor and working people there. The working class there will have to deal with them like the workers did in the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.

We have our own oligarchs to deal with. They own half the earth and are the enemies of humankind.

Don’t let our struggle against racism and poverty be derailed by a war drive against Russia.

https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2022/ ... -and-ours/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Wed Mar 30, 2022 2:29 pm

THE EMPIRE OF PHOBIAS
Maria Fernanda Barrett

Mar 29, 2022 , 1:41 p.m.

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Xenophobia has served as a spearhead for US military intervention (Photo: Eniola Odetunde / Axios)

In 1829, six years after the famous proclamation of the government of James Monroe, Simón Bolívar referred with great political clarity to the North American power, pointing out in a phrase, now famous, that the United States seemed destined "to plague America with misery in name of Liberty. That statement was not a premonition but the product of a very successful analysis of the Liberator on Anglo-Saxon expansionism and white supremacism, which were already expressed in American politics at the beginning of the 19th century.

The young power, paradoxically made up of migrants from various countries, grew up marked by deep racism and the idea of ​​being an exceptional nation, with a "Manifest Destiny" that, after World War II, empowered it to take the reins of the world. capitalist. To the structural racism of Western culture that despises Latin American, African and Asian cultures, an anti-communist phobia promoted by the United States was added in the more than four decades of the Cold War.

Once the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) disintegrated, that destiny that they thought they had achieved ran up against rebellious peoples and emerging powers.

To sustain its economic and political power, it invades countries in Africa and the Middle East and stimulates "Islamophobia" with a cultural tool to accompany the supremacist discourse against the invaded countries.

The new millennium begins with the consolidation of a large anti-imperialist Latin American bloc, a Russia that gradually rebuilt itself politically and economically from the ashes of the USSR, and a China that had quietly become a power that today disputes the first place as a world economy. .

Now, faced with the slow collapse of imperialism and its unipolar world, the United States is willing to generate new wars, rather than accept being one more power in a multipolar world. As we have already said, these conflicts require you to plant more fears and phobias. The question is how to justify an American supremacist discourse on two powerful cultures, and particularly on the ancient Chinese culture, cradle of many of the greatest inventions of humanity, and whose root lies in avoiding conflicts that put peace at risk. that the Chinese people know how to value.

THE USE OF THE PANDEMIC TO AWAKEN “SINOPHOBIA”

As soon as China announced the appearance of a contagious virus in its territory that little by little became a pandemic, the United States began to promote this phobia against China, which it needs to fertilize the ground for war.

Donald Trump, one of the most representative American presidents of white supremacism, began to speak of the "Chinese virus" instead of using the scientific name that had been assigned to it.

Trump fed the thesis that the new coronavirus had been created by China to establish a kind of global control based on the death of millions of people.

The thesis of the then American president fell under its own weight. First, because it is illogical and almost ridiculous to think that China has launched a biological weapon on its own territory and, second, because, as the World Health Organization (WHO) later confirmed, it was very unlikely that this virus had originated in China. a laboratory. But, even so, this accusation achieved great media impact.

A study published a few months ago by the North American Public Health Association managed to establish a relationship between Trump's first tweet using the words "Chinese virus" with an increase in anti-Asian racist and xenophobic expressions on social networks, and the execution of crimes of hatred against the Asian community residing in the United States.

A few months after assuming the presidency, Joe Biden ordered his country's so-called "intelligence community" to prepare a report on the origins of the virus. According to the final report, there was no consensus among intelligence agencies on the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes covid-19. The investigation concluded that it had not been designed as a biological weapon and that it was not possible to ensure that it had come from a Chinese laboratory, but, in the same way, the discourse of the new US government continued to point to China as responsible for this pandemic.

In both cases, the aforementioned mass communication posters were responsible for spreading these theories that were so useful to promote the long-awaited "Sinophobia" in Western countries. First fueling uncertainty about the origin of the pandemic and then stigmatizing even the culinary customs and traditional medicine of the Asian giant.

The reason for this campaign, which, as we have pointed out, is maintained in various ways, no matter who is in charge in the White House, is due precisely to the need to reaffirm the racist and xenophobic idea of ​​US supremacism in order to justify the aggressions that they have carried out and those that probably they plan to execute soon against China.

WHO PRODUCES BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS

Meanwhile, in this struggle, Washington has chosen to focus first on Russia to try to displace it from the geopolitical table, so that it can later focus on the definitive dispute with China.

For this reason, the United States has pushed the war in Ukraine using NATO to sacrifice all of Europe, which will also serve to reissue a Marshall Plan that guarantees the continuity of its subordination. Consistent with all that has been said here, an unprecedented censorship against Russia is being imposed today and a terrible “Russophobia” is being stimulated.

At the beginning of March of this year, the Russian government denounced the existence of biological laboratories in Ukraine in which dangerous research is being carried out and biological weapons are being produced. Evidence on the leading role of the United States Department of Defense over these laboratories was presented by a Bulgarian journalist and tacitly assumed by the US Undersecretary of State, Victoria Nuland, who confirmed the existence of said laboratories and expressed the US government's concern about that the materials found there do not "fall into the hands of the Russian forces", before the Senate of his country, which proves that these laboratories have military importance.

As a result of this information, the spokesman for the Ministry of Defense of the People's Republic of China recalled in a press conference that his country was the victim of attacks with biological weapons in the past and that is why he has always advocated the complete prohibition and eradication of this type of weapons of mass destruction, for which he called on the United States to respect the "Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction" signed in 1972; Similarly, he asked the US government to clarify before world public opinion what it does in the 336 biological laboratories it owns in 30 countries around the world.

Recently in Our America, for example, the Colombian opposition demanded that the Duque government reveal whether US nuclear or biological weapons are stored in the country, since after his meeting with Joe Biden on March 10, the Colombian president publicly stated that Colombia "can store in our territory equipment for the United States that can be used in any risk situation."

But in the face of all this evidence about the production of biological weapons by the United States that puts the entire world at risk, the big media corporations have chosen to downplay these serious reports or simply remain silent. This makes it clear that these communication cartels are at the service of the American supremacist discourse to promote their phobias and justify their wars, and reminds us that world peace also requires great battles in the field of communication.

https://misionverdad.com/opinion/el-imp ... las-fobias

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"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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