#we are ideological foes china | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

mariacallous · 9 months ago

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“How much evil we must do in order to do good,” the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in 1946. “This, I think, is a very succinct statement of the human situation.” Niebuhr was writing after one global war had forced the victors to do great evil to prevent the incalculably greater evil of a world ruled by its most aggressive regimes. He was witnessing the onset of another global conflict in which the United States would periodically transgress its own values in order to defend them. But the fundamental question Niebuhr raised—how liberal states can reconcile worthy ends with the unsavory means needed to attain them—is timeless. It is among the most vexing dilemmas facing the United States today.

U.S. President Joe Biden took office pledging to wage a fateful contest between democracy and autocracy. After Russia invaded Ukraine, he summoned like-minded nations to a struggle “between liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force.” Biden’s team has indeed made big moves in its contest with China and Russia, strengthening solidarity among advanced democracies that want to protect freedom by keeping powerful tyrannies in check. But even before the war between Hamas and Israel presented its own thicket of problems, an administration that has emphasized the ideological nature of great-power rivalry was finding itself ensnared by a morally ambiguous world.

In Asia, Biden has bent over backward to woo a backsliding India, a communist Vietnam, and other not so liberal states. In Europe, wartime exigencies have muted concerns about creeping authoritarianism on NATO’s eastern and southern fronts. In the Middle East, Biden has concluded that Arab dictators are not pariahs but vital partners. Defending a threatened order involves reviving the free-world community. It also, apparently, entails buttressing an arc of imperfect democracies and outright autocracies across much of the globe.

Biden’s conflicted strategy reflects the realities of contemporary coalition building: when it comes to countering China and Russia, democratic alliances go only so far. Biden’s approach also reflects a deeper, more enduring tension. American interests are inextricably tied to American values: the United States typically enters into great-power competition because it fears mighty autocracies will otherwise make the world unsafe for democracy. But an age of conflict invariably becomes, to some degree, an age of amorality because the only way to protect a world fit for freedom is to court impure partners and engage in impure acts.

Expect more of this. If the stakes of today’s rivalries are as high as Biden claims, Washington will engage in some breathtakingly cynical behavior to keep its foes contained. Yet an ethos of pure expediency is fraught with dangers, from domestic disillusion to the loss of the moral asymmetry that has long amplified U.S. influence in global affairs. Strategy, for a liberal superpower, is the art of balancing power without subverting democratic purpose. The United States is about to rediscover just how hard that can be.

A DIRTY GAME

Biden has consistently been right about one thing: clashes between great powers are clashes of ideas and interests alike. In the seventeenth century, the Thirty Years’ War was fueled by doctrinal differences no less than by the struggle for European primacy. In the late eighteenth century, the politics of revolutionary France upheaved the geopolitics of the entire continent. World War II was a collision of rival political traditions—democracy and totalitarianism—as well as rival alliances. “This was no accidental war,” German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop declared in 1940, “but a question of the determination of one system to destroy the other.” When great powers fight, they do so not just over land and glory. They fight over which ideas, which values, will chart humanity’s course.

In this sense, U.S. competition with China and Russia is the latest round in a long struggle over whether the world will be shaped by liberal democracies or their autocratic enemies. In World War I, World War II, and the Cold War, autocracies in Eurasia sought global primacy by achieving preeminence within that central landmass. Three times, the United States intervened, not just to ensure its security but also to preserve a balance of power that permitted the survival and expansion of liberalism—to “make the world safe for democracy,” in U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s words. President Franklin Roosevelt made a similar point in 1939, saying, “There comes a time in the affairs of men when they must prepare to defend, not their homes alone, but the tenets of faith and humanity on which their churches, their governments, and their very civilization are founded.” Yet as Roosevelt understood, balancing power is a dirty game.

Western democracies prevailed in World War II only by helping an awful tyrant, Joseph Stalin, crush an even more awful foe, Adolf Hitler. They used tactics, such as fire-bombing and atomic-bombing enemy cities, that would have been abhorrent in less desperate times. The United States then waged the Cold War out of conviction, as President Harry Truman declared, that it was a conflict “between alternative ways of life”; the closest U.S. allies were fellow democracies that made up the Western world. Yet holding the line in a high-stakes struggle also involved some deeply questionable, even undemocratic, acts.

In a Third World convulsed by instability, the United States employed right-wing tyrants as proxies; it suppressed communist influence through coups, covert and overt interventions, and counterinsurgencies with staggering death tolls. To deter aggression along a global perimeter, the Pentagon relied on the threat of using nuclear weapons so destructive that their actual employment could serve no constructive end. To close the ring around the Soviet Union, Washington eventually partnered with another homicidal communist, the Chinese leader Mao Zedong. And to ease the politics of containment, U.S. officials sometimes exaggerated the Soviet threat or simply deceived the American people about policies carried out in their name.

Strategy involves setting priorities, and U.S. officials believed that lesser evils were needed to avoid greater ones, such as communism running riot in vital regions or democracies failing to find their strength and purpose before it was too late. The eventual payoff from the U.S. victory in the Cold War—a world safer from autocratic predation, and safer for human freedom, than ever before—suggests that they were, on balance, correct. Along the way, the fact that Washington was pursuing such a worthy objective, against such an unworthy opponent, provided a certain comfort with the conflict’s ethical ambiguities. As NSC-68, the influential strategy document Truman approved in 1950, put it (quoting Alexander Hamilton), “The means to be employed must be proportioned to the extent of the mischief.” When the West was facing a totalitarian enemy determined to remake humanity in its image, some pretty ugly means could, apparently, be justified.

That comfort wasn’t infinite, however, and the Cold War saw fierce fights over whether the United States was getting its priorities right. In the 1950s, hawks took Washington to task for not doing enough to roll back communism in Eastern Europe, with the Republican Party platform of 1952 deriding containment as “negative, futile, and immoral.” In the 1960s and 1970s, an avalanche of amorality—a bloody and misbegotten war in Vietnam, support for a coterie of nasty dictators, revelations of CIA assassination plots—convinced many liberal critics that the United States was betraying the values it claimed to defend. Meanwhile, the pursuit of détente with the Soviet Union, a strategy that deemphasized ideological confrontation in search of diplomatic stability, led some conservatives to allege that Washington was abandoning the moral high ground. Throughout the 1970s and after, these debates whipsawed U.S. policy. Even in this most Manichean of contests, relating strategy to morality was a continual challenge.

In fact, Cold War misdeeds gave rise to a complex of legal and administrative constraints—from prohibitions on political assassination to requirements to notify congressional committees about covert action—that mostly remain in place today. Since the Cold War, these restrictions have been complemented by curbs on aid to coup makers who topple elected governments and to military units that engage in gross violations of human rights. Americans clearly regretted some measures they had used to win the Cold War. The question is whether they can do without them as global rivalry heats up again.

IDEAS MATTER

Threats from autocratic enemies heighten ideological impulses in U.S. policy by underscoring the clash of ideas that often drives global tensions. Since taking office, Biden has defined the threat from U.S. rivals, particularly China, in starkly ideological terms.

The world has reached an “inflection point,” Biden has repeatedly declared. In March 2021, he suggested that future historians would be studying “the issue of who succeeded: autocracy or democracy.” At root, Biden has argued, U.S.-Chinese competition is a test of which model can better meet the demands of the modern era. And if China becomes the world’s preeminent power, U.S. officials fear, it will entrench autocracy in friendly countries while coercing democratic governments in hostile ones. Just witness how Beijing has used economic leverage to punish criticism of its policies by democratic societies from Australia to Norway. In making the system safe for illiberalism, a dominant China would make it unsafe for liberalism in places near and far.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reinforced Biden’s thesis. It offered a case study in autocratic aggression and atrocity and a warning that a world led by illiberal states would be lethally violent, not least for vulnerable democracies nearby. Coming weeks after Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin had sealed a “no limits” strategic partnership, the Ukraine invasion also raised the specter of a coordinated autocratic assault on the liberal international order. Ukraine, Biden explained, was the central front in a “larger fight for . . . essential democratic principles.” So the United States would rally the free world against “democracy’s mortal foes.”

The shock of the Ukraine war, combined with the steadying hand of U.S. leadership, produced an expanded transatlantic union of democracies. Sweden and Finland sought membership in NATO; the West supported Ukraine and inflicted heavy costs on Russia. The Biden administration also sought to confine China by weaving a web of democratic ties around the country. It has upgraded bilateral alliances with the likes of Japan and Australia. It has improved the Quad (the security and diplomatic dialogue with Australia, India, and Japan) and established AUKUS (a military partnership with Australia and the United Kingdom). And it has repurposed existing multilateral bodies, such as the G-7, to meet the peril from Beijing. There are even whispers of a “three plus one” coalition—Australia, Japan, the United States, plus Taiwan—that would cooperate to defend that frontline democracy from Chinese assault.

These ties transcend regional boundaries. Ukraine is getting aid from Asian democracies, such as South Korea, that understand that their security will suffer if the liberal order is fractured. Democracies from multiple continents have come together to confront China’s economic coercion, counter its military buildup, and constrict its access to high-end semiconductors. The principal problem for the United States is a loose alliance of revisionist powers pushing outward from the core of Eurasia. Biden’s answer is a cohering global coalition of democracies, pushing back from around the margins.

Today, those advanced democracies are more unified than at any time in decades. In this respect, Biden has aligned the essential goal of U.S. strategy, defending an imperiled liberal order, with the methods and partners used to pursue it. Yet across Eurasia’s three key regions, the messier realities of rivalry are raising Niebuhr’s question anew.

CONTROVERSIAL FRIENDS

Consider the situation in Europe. NATO is mostly an alliance of democracies. But holding that pact together during the Ukraine war has required Biden to downplay the illiberal tendencies of a Polish government that—until its electoral defeat in October—was systematically eroding checks and balances. Securing its northern flank, by welcoming Finland and Sweden, has involved diplomatic horse-trading with Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who, in addition to frequently undercutting U.S. interests, has been steering his country toward autocratic rule.

In Asia, the administration spent much of 2021 and 2022 carefully preserving U.S. ties to the Philippines, at the time led by Rodrigo Duterte, a man whose drug war had killed thousands. Biden has assiduously courted India as a bulwark against China, even though the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has curbed speech, harassed opposition leaders, fanned religious grievances, and allegedly killed dissidents abroad. And after visiting New Delhi in September 2023, Biden traveled to Hanoi to sign a “comprehensive strategic partnership” with Vietnam’s one-party regime. Once again, the United States is using some communists to contain others.

Then there is the Middle East, where Biden’s “free world” coalition is quite the motley crew. In 2020, Biden threatened to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” over the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. By 2023, his administration—panicked by Chinese inroads and rising gas prices—was trying to make that country Washington’s newest treaty ally instead. That initiative, moreover, was part of a concept, inherited from the Trump administration, in which regional stability would rest on rapprochement between Arab autocracies and an Israeli government with its own illiberal tendencies, while Palestinian aspirations were mostly pushed to the side. Not surprisingly, then, human rights and political freedoms receded in relations with countries from Egypt to the United Arab Emirates. Biden also did little to halt the strangulation of democracy in Tunisia—just as he had decided, effectively, to abandon Afghanistan’s endangered democracy in 2021.

Indeed, if 2022 was a year of soaring rhetoric, 2023 was a year of awkward accommodation. References to the “battle between democracy and autocracy” became scarcer in Biden’s speeches, as the administration made big plays that defied that description of the world. Key human rights–related positions at the White House and the State Department sat vacant. The administration rolled back sanctions on Venezuela—an initiative described publicly as a bid to secure freer and fairer elections, but one that was mostly an effort to get an oppressive regime to stop exporting refugees and start exporting more oil. And when a junta toppled the elected government of Niger, U.S. officials waited for more than two months to call the coup a coup, for fear of triggering the cutoff of U.S. aid and thereby pushing the new regime into Moscow’s arms. Such compromises have always been part of foreign policy. But today, they testify to key dynamics U.S. officials must confront.

THE DECISIVE DECADE

First is the cruel math of Eurasian geopolitics. Advanced democracies possess a preponderance of power globally, but in every critical region, holding the frontline requires a more eclectic ensemble.

Poland has had its domestic problems; it is also the logistical linchpin of the coalition backing Ukraine. Turkey is politically illiberal and, often, unhelpful; nonetheless, it holds the intersection of two continents and two seas. In South and Southeast Asia, the primary barrier to Chinese hegemony is a line of less-than-ideal partners running from India to Indonesia. In the Middle East, a picky superpower will be a lonely superpower. Democratic solidarity is great, but geography is stubborn. Across Eurasia, Washington needs illiberal friends to confine its illiberal foes.

The ideological battlefield has also shifted in adverse ways. During the Cold War, anticommunism served as ideological glue between a democratic superpower and its autocratic allies, because the latter knew they were finished if the Soviet Union ever triumphed. Now, however, U.S. enemies feature a form of autocracy less existentially threatening to other nondemocracies: strongmen in the Persian Gulf, or in Hungary and Turkey, arguably have more in common with Xi and Putin than they do with Biden. The gap between “good” and “bad” authoritarians is narrower than it once was—which makes the United States work harder, and pay more, to keep illiberal partners imperfectly onside.

Desperate times also call for morally dexterous measures. When Washington faced no serious strategic challengers after the Cold War, it paid a smaller penalty for foregrounding its values. As the margin of safety shrinks, the tradeoffs between power and principle grow. Right now, war—or the threat of it—menaces East Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Biden says the 2020s will be the “decisive decade” for the world. As Winston Churchill quipped in 1941, “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would at least make a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.” When threats are dire, democracies will do what it takes to rally coalitions and keep the enemy from breaking through. Thus, a central irony of Washington’s approach to competition is that the same challenges that activate its ideological energy make it harder to keep U.S. diplomacy pure.

So far, the moral compromises of U.S. policy today are modest compared with those of World War II or the Cold War, in part because the constraints on unsavory methods are stronger than they were when Hitler and Stalin stalked the earth. But rules and norms can change as a country’s circumstances do. So Biden and his successors may soon face a daunting reality: high-stakes rivalries carry countries, and leaders, to places they never sought to go.

When the Cold War started, few officials imagined that Washington would conduct covert interventions from Afghanistan to Angola. Just three years ago, hardly anyone predicted that the United States would soon fight a proxy war meant to bleed Putin’s army to death in Ukraine. As the present competitions intensify, the tactics used to wage them could become more extreme.

Washington could find itself covertly trying to tip the balance in elections in some crucial swing state if the alternative is seeing that country shift hard toward Moscow or Beijing. It could use coercion to keep Latin America’s military facilities and other critical infrastructure out of Chinese hands. And if the United States is already ambivalent about acknowledging coups in out-of-the-way countries, perhaps it would excuse far greater atrocities committed by a more important partner in a more important place.

Those who doubt that Washington will resort to dirty tricks have short memories and limited imaginations. If today’s competitions will truly shape the fate of humanity, why wouldn’t a vigilant superpower do almost anything to come out on top?

DON’T LOSE YOURSELF

There’s no reason to be unduly embarrassed about this. A country that lacks the self-confidence to defend its interests will lack the power to achieve any great purpose in global affairs. Put differently, the damage the United States does to its values by engaging dubious allies, and engaging in dubious behavior, is surely less than the damage that would be done if a hyperaggressive Russia or neototalitarian China spread its influence across Eurasia and beyond. As during the Cold War, the United States can eventually repay the moral debts it incurs in a lengthy struggle—if it successfully sustains a system in which democracy thrives because its fiercest enemies are suppressed.

It would be dangerous to adopt a pure end-justifies-the-means mentality, however, because there is always a point at which foul means corrupt fair ends. Even short of that, serial amorality will prove politically corrosive: a country whose population has rallied to defend its values as well as its interests will not forever support a strategy that seems to cast those values aside. And ultimately, the greatest flaw of such a strategy is that it forfeits a potent U.S. advantage.

During World War II, as the historian Richard Overy has argued, the Allied cause was widely seen to be more just and humane than the Axis cause, which is one reason the former alliance attracted so many more countries than the latter. In the Cold War, the sense that the United States stood, however imperfectly, for fundamental rights and liberties the Kremlin suppressed helped Washington appeal to other democratic societies—and even to dissidents within the Soviet bloc. The tactics of great-power competition must not obscure the central issue of that competition. If the world comes to see today’s rivalries as slugfests devoid of larger moral meaning, the United States will lose the asymmetry of legitimacy that has served it well.

This is not some hypothetical dilemma. Since October 2023, Biden has rightly framed the Israel-Hamas war as a struggle between a flawed democracy and a tyrannical enemy seeking its destruction. There is strong justification, moral and strategic, for backing a U.S. ally against a vicious proxy of a U.S. enemy, Iran. Moreover, there is no serious ethical comparison between a terrorist group that rapes, tortures, kidnaps, and kills civilians and a country that mostly tries, within the limits war imposes, to protect them.

Yet rightly or wrongly, large swaths of the global South view the war as a testament to American double standards: opposing occupation and appropriation of foreign territory by Russia but not by Israel, valuing the lives and liberties of some victims more than those of others. Russian and Chinese propagandists are amplifying these messages to drive a wedge between Washington and the developing world. This is why the Biden administration has tried, and sometimes struggled, to balance support for Israel with efforts to mitigate the harm the conflict brings—and why the war may presage renewed U.S. focus on the peace process with the Palestinians, as unpromising as that currently seems. The lesson here is that the merits of an issue may be disputed, but for a superpower that wears its values on its sleeve, the costs of perceivedhypocrisy are very real.

RULES FOR RIVALRY

Succeeding in this round of rivalry will thus require calibrating the moral compromises inherent in foreign policy by finding an ethos that is sufficiently ruthless and realistic at the same time. Although there is no precise formula for this—the appropriateness of any action depends on its context—some guiding principles can help.

First, morality is a compass, not a straitjacket. For political sustainability and strategic self-interest, American statecraft should point toward a world consistent with its values. But the United States cannot paralyze itself by trying to fully embody those values in every tactical decision. Nor—even at a moment when its own democracy faces internal threats—should it insist on purifying itself at home before exerting constructive influence abroad. If it does so, the system will be shaped by regimes that are more ruthless—and less shackled by their own imperfections.

The United States should also avoid the fallacy of the false alternative. It must evaluate choices, and partners, against the plausible possibilities, not against the utopian ideal. The realistic alternative to maintaining ties to a military regime in Africa may be watching as murderous Russian mercenaries fill the void. The realistic alternative to engaging Modi’s India may be seeing South Asia fall further under the shadow of a China that assiduously exports illiberalism. Similarly, proximity to a Saudi regime that carves up its critics is deeply uncomfortable. But the realistic alternative to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is probably a regime that remains quite repressive—and is far less committed to empowering women, curbing religious zealots, and otherwise making the country a more open, tolerant place. In a world of lousy options, the crucial question is often: Lousy compared with what?

Another guiding principle: good things don’t all come at once. Cold War policymakers sometimes justified coup making and support for repressive regimes on grounds that preventing Third World countries from going communist then preserved the possibility that they might go democratic later. That logic was suspiciously convenient—and, in many cases, correct. Countries in Latin America and other developing regions did eventually experience political openings as they reached higher levels of development, and democratic values radiated outward from the West.

Today, unseemly bargains can sometimes lead to better outcomes. By not breaking the U.S.-Philippine alliance during Duterte’s drug war, Washington sustained the relationship until a more cooperative, less draconian government emerged. By staying close to a Polish government with some worrying tendencies, the United States bought time until, late last year, that country’s voters elected a coalition promising to strengthen its democratic institutions. The same argument could be made for staying engaged with other democracies where autocratic tendencies are pronounced but electoral mechanisms remain intact—Hungary, India, and Turkey, to name a few. More broadly, liberalism is most likely to flourish in a system led by a democracy. So simply forestalling the ascent of powerful autocracies may eventually help democratic values spread into once inhospitable places.

Similarly, the United States should remember that taking the broad view is as vital as taking the long view. Support for democracy and human rights is not an all-or-nothing proposition. As Biden’s statecraft has shown, transactional deals with dictators can complement a strategy that stresses democratic cooperation at its core. Honoring American values, moreover, is more than a matter of hectoring repressive regimes. A foreign policy that raises international living standards through trade, addresses global problems such as food insecurity, and holds the line against great-power war serves the cause of human dignity very well. A strategy that emphasizes such efforts may actually be more appealing to countries, including developing democracies from Brazil to Indonesia, that resist democracy-versus-autocracy framing because they don’t want any part of a Manichean fight.

Of course, these principles can seem like a recipe for rationalization—a way of excusing the grossest behavior by claiming it serves a greater cause. Another important principle, then, revives Hamilton’s dictum that the means must be proportioned to the mischief. The greater the compromise, the greater the payoff it provides—or the damage it avoids—must be.

By this standard, the case for cooperation with an India or a Poland is clear-cut. These countries are troubled but mostly admirable democracies that play critical roles in raging competitions. Until the world contains only liberal democracies, Washington can hardly avoid seeking blemished friends.

The United States should, however, be more cautious about courting countries that regularly engage in the very practices it deems most corrosive to the liberal order: systematic torture or murder of their people, coercion of their neighbors, or export of repression across borders, to name a few. A Saudi Arabia, for instance, that periodically engages in some of these practices is a troublesome partner. A Saudi Arabia that flagrantly and consistently commits such acts risks destroying the moral and diplomatic basis of its relationship with the United States. American officials should be more hesitant still to distort or destabilize the politics of other countries, especially other democracies, for strategic gain. If Washington is going to get back into the coup business in Latin America or Southeast Asia, the bad outcomes to be prevented must be truly severe—a major, potentially lasting shift in a key regional balance of power, perhaps—to justify policies so manifestly in tension with the causes the United States claims to defend.

Mitigating the harm to those causes means heeding a further principle: marginal improvement matters. Washington will not convince leaders in Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, or Vietnam to commit political suicide by abandoning their domestic model. But leverage works both ways in these relationships. Countries on the firing line need a superpower patron just as much as it needs them. U.S. officials can use that leverage to discourage extraterritorial repression, seek the release of political prisoners, make elections a bit freer and fairer, or otherwise obtain modest but meaningful changes. Doing so may be the price of keeping these relationships intact, by convincing proponents of human rights and democracy in Congress that the White House has not forgotten such issues altogether.

This relates to an additional principle: the United States must be scrupulously honest with itself. American officials need to recognize that illiberal allies will be selective or unreliable allies because their domestic models put them at odds with important norms of the liberal order—and because they tend to generate resentment that may eventually cause an explosion. In the same vein, the problem with laws that mandate aid cutoffs to coup plotters is that they encourage self-deception. In cases in which Washington fears the strategic fallout from a break in relations, U.S. officials are motivated to pretend that a coup has not occurred. The better approach, in line with reforms approved by Congress in December 2022, is a framework that allows presidents to waive such cutoffs on national security grounds—but forces them to acknowledge and justify that choice. The work of making moral tradeoffs in foreign policy begins with admitting those tradeoffs exist.

Some of these principles are in tension with others, which means their application in specific cases must always be a matter of judgment. But the issue of reconciling opposites relates to a final principle: soaring idealism and brutal realism can coexist. During the 1970s, moral debates ruptured the Cold War consensus. During the 1980s, U.S. President Ronald Reagan adequately repaired—but never fully restored—that consensus by combining flexibility of tactics with clarity of purpose.

Reagan supported awful dictators, murderous militaries, and thuggish “freedom fighters” in the Third World, sometimes through ploys—such as the Iran-contra scandal—that were dodgy or simply illegal. Yet he also backed democratic movements from Chile to South Korea; he paired rhetorical condemnations of the Kremlin with ringing affirmations of Western ideals. The takeaway is that rough measures may be more tolerable if they are part of a larger package that emphasizes, in word and deed, the values that must anchor the United States’ approach to the world. Some will see this as heightening the hypocrisy. In reality, it is the best way to preserve the balance—political, moral, and strategic—that a democratic superpower requires.

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battleangel · 6 days ago

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Israel's Genocidal Playbook

Israel just followed this EXACT same genocidal playbook in Palestine over the past year.

Israel is about to follow the same EXACT genocidal playbook once again this time in Lebanon.

Israel Genocidal Playbook 101

•Shut down international airport in Gaza.

•Cut Palestine off from the world — food, fuel, medical supplies, all international travel.

•Forced famine & starvation campaign due to food no longer entering the country + displacing internal farmers + disrupting countrys internal food supply.

•Airline threatened by US with economic sanctions if they fly wounded, injured & dying civilians internationally for medical treatment resulting in needless & completely unnecessary deaths.

•Millions potentially starving to death as a militaristic genocidal campaign — the literal definition of a war crime.

•Warnings to residential areas, neighborhoods, airports & public buildings of Israel Defense Force bombings literally only a few minutes before they occur not allowing any chance for an actual evacuation.

•Bombings of residential areas, schools, hospitals, airports, mosques, public buildings & "safe zones".

•Purposefully targeting civilians in a “collective punishment” scorched earth campaign for Hamas resistance (Palestine) & support of Gaza & Hezbollah resistance (Lebanon).

What can we do to stop it?

When Biden has supported, promoted, funded & provided weapons for the genocide in Palestine for over a year that has murdered 200k+ Palestinian civilians?

What can we do when Trump was elected & he very recently told Netanyahu to “finish the job” in Palestine?

What can we do when both Republicans & Democrats support Israels genocide in Palestine?

So, how do we stop the United States from funding, providing weapons for, threatening economic sanctions over, protecting, defending, justifying, rationalizing & endlessly promoting yet another genocide this time in Lebanon?

Yemen could be next — genocide is already happening.

Syria could be next.

Iran could be next.

Do you ever question why the US is always involved in “conflicts & tensions” in the Middle East?

Do you ever question what George H.W. Bush was referencing when he gave his “New World Order” speech in 1991 on the eve of the Gulf War (first Iraq war) when he declared that global alliances & enmity had shifted and that the Cold War enemies of the past — communist Russia & China — were no longer the United States’ ideological existential foes but now it was the Middle East at the time Iraq?

Do you ever wonder why Russia backed Afghanistan in the 1980s?

Why did the PLO form?

Why did Hezbollah form?

Why did Hamas form?

Why did October 7th happen?

What was the Nakba in 1948?

Why did then Senator Biden tell Congress in 1986 that if “Israel didnt exist, we would have had to create her.”

Who is “we”?

Do you ever wonder why historical references to Palestine date back thousands of years but Israel does not?

Why did Malcolm X & Muhammad Ali consider Palestinians “their” brothers & sisters?

Why is Chevron funding the building of oil wells on the Gaza Strip?

Why every 20 years or so has there been a major conflict or war in the United States dating back to WW II?

Notice a pattern?

•WW I: 1920s

•WW II: 1940s

•Korean War: 1950s

•Vietnam War: 1970s

•Gulf War (Persian Gulf I - official name): 1990s

•Iraq War (Persian Gulf III - official name): 2000s

•WW III (US & Israel & UK vs Iran/Syria/Iraq/Palestine/Lebanon/Yemen & US, Ukraine & UK vs Russia, China & North Korea): 2020s…

They are purposely crashing the economy right now.

Why?

To drive up military enlistment which is already happening.

US troops are already in Israel.

North Korea has already sent troops to Russia.

If the Middle East didnt have oil, do you think the United States would be interested in them geopolitically?

Why are there simultaneous genocides occurring in Palestine, Lebanon &:

•Congo: Cobalt - used for batteries for iPhones, electronic vehicles, tablets, laptops, computers, TVs & smart watches.

•Local warlords fight each other & kill civilians in the crossfire over controlling cobalt mines given how valuable they are to Google, Apple, Samsung & Tesla.

•Sudan: United States & UAE (Dubai) control, fund & supply weapons to RSF (Rapid Support Forces) who are fighting against the SAF (Sudanese Armed Forces).

•Sudans biggest export is gold & the US & Dubai want to exploit the tensions between the RSF & SAF to keep Sudan destabilized so they can control the gold. •Both the RSF & SAF are committing genocide against their own Sudanese civilians & war atrocities & crimes against humanity including mass rapes, torture, mass graves, targeting civilians. •Over 100 Sudanese women recently committed suicide to avoid brutalistic gang rape by both the RSF & SAF.

•Eritrea

•Tigray (Ethiopia)

•Yemen

•Uyghurs

•Mali (mass rapes at border of country due to internal conflict & killings)

•Etc etc etc…

All of the above involve the same settler expansionist, resource exploiting, colonizing mindset & strategy of forced famines & starvation, forced relocations, collective punishment, targeting civilians, murdering women & children, targeting residential areas, schools, hospitals, refugee camps & “safe zones”, scorched earth tactics, breaking the will of the people, psychological torture, dehumanization, numbing & desensitizing the rest of the world, threats of economic sanctions against any company or country who resists.

Why do you think the ICC (International Criminal Court) & the ICJ (International Court of Justice) havent arrested anyone?

Why do you think the UN has not brought charges against anyone for human rights violations?

Why is western media covering up these genocides?

Why is the global community silent in their complicity?

What can we do?

Other than signing online petitions, calling our Congress members & Senator, attending marches, rallies, protests, die-ins, civil disobedience, strikes, days of rage, days of action, vigils for martyrs, volunteering for local Socialist (DSA), Party for Socialism & Liberation (PSL), Working Peoples Party, Communist, Green Party & Peoples Party community organizing events?

You can raise your voice.

You can be a voice for the voiceless.

You can refuse to look away, get tired, numb, defeated, fatigued & exhausted.

You can continue the long term fight against injustice and for liberation.

Revolution.

Redemption.

Genocides have been happening as long as humanity has existed.

Rwanda. Serbia. Philippines. Armenia.

Haiti. Native Americans.

African slavery in the United States.

Struggle! Resist! Fight!

It's a long term fight beyond any of our individual lifespans of 100 to 500+ years.

For liberation.

Choose not to distract yourself.

Bring what is being hidden in the dark to the light.

Be a light. Be a voice.

Share. Post. Reshare. Repost. Comment.

Interact. Engage. Donate if you can.

Tweet. Post videos. Stream.

Talk to your family & friends in real life.

Dont let the genocide become normalized.

Dont get used to videos & images of dead children.

Connect the dots.

Realize the ideology that is driving all of this death & destruction.

Realize that its always been the same ideology.

Realize all of this misery, pain, suffering, torture, death & destruction is for money & resources.

What every single war & genocide has ever been for.

Realize there are no “good wars”.

Realize the United States employed these same exact scorched earth tactics in WWII when they literally burned & cooked alive over 100k Japanese civilians in the Tokyo fire raids.

Yet the US was never tried for their horrific war crimes & atrocities in WW II.

Yes, its plural. No, they never apologized.

The victors never punish themselves.

Dont become numb. Dont ignore.

Dont look away. Dont distract yourself.

Raise your voice!

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postmodernmulticoloredcloak · 6 months ago

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It feels like I switched to a parallel universe at some point. I was born a few weeks after the Berlin wall was brought down. I was a baby when the USSR was dissolved. I grew up in a world that, at least on the surface, said "the 1990s was a century of atrocities and we don't want those anymore". I was very young when the situation in Ireland stabilized. When the situation in the Basque country stabilized. The accords of Camp David that seemed to stabilize the situation in Palestine. Russia was no longer a foe. Cuba was, like, there, and the US were no longer obsessed with it. China minded their own business. Nelson Mandela had succeeded. More countries in the European Union. Talks of countries like Turkey eventually in the European Union. Heck, there was a brief window there were talks to let Russia enter NATO at a certain point.

The world was still filled with horrible stuff but the idea (let me be clear: the idea, not the reality, but ideology shapes the world) was "the bad stuff is bad. The world is not perfect but it would be nice to make it better, solve international issues without wars, prevent genocides going forward". The bad things were seen as aberrations, something that belonged to a past and had no place in the future everyone wanted. The (racist, yep) idea was that places like certain areas of Africa (see Rwanda, Darfur...) were still "behind" but the world was heading to a future where those atrocities would be a thing of the past because the idea was that wars and genocides were a thing of the past. Because we didn't want them anymore, right? We had gone through the 1900s, the century of the horrors, and learnt from those horrors.

Heck, even the period of the war of terror seemed to cling to this delusion after all. Those are the bad guys, we're the good guys, we're going to beat the bad guys and things will be better! Or so the propaganda said. (I cannot stress enough how damaging the 2000s were for our civilization.)

But at some point something... broke? The illusion broke? We are hearing things that would not seem out of place in the mouths of European elites before World War 1. The big war is inevitable and coming soon, so we need to arm ourselves and be ready. The most horrific self-fulfilling prophecy in history.

We are hearing threats of nuclear war - the very thing the post-cold war, post-bipolarism, post-USSR world I grew up in was confident that would never happen because the world had grown wiser than that.

We were told our countries had learnt from the horrors!! We were told the horrors wouldn't happen again!! We were told our countries did not want the horrors to happen again.

Gen Z might feel hopeless because of climate change and all the atrocities. But personally? As a millennial, I feel a very specific sense of dread. That the world I grew up in was a lie. It's not that the 1900s was the century of the horrors. This century is also a century of the horrors. The horrors don't stop.

#marghe versus the universe #(my tag for rants about the state of the world)

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theculturedmarxist · 1 year ago

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U.S. foreign policy has set the country on a course destined to lead to a world of rivalry, strife and conflict into the foreseeable future. Washington has declared “war” on China, on Russia, on whomever partners with them.

That “war” is comprehensive — diplomatic, financial, commercial, technological, cultural, ideological. It implicitly fuses a presumed great power rivalry for dominance with a clash of civilizations: the U.S.-led West against the civilizational states of China, Russia and potentially India.

Direct military action is not explicitly included but armed clashes are not absolutely precluded. They can occur via proxies as in Ukraine. They can be sparked by Washington’s dedication to bolster Taiwan as an independent country.

A series of formal defense reviews confirm statements by the most senior U.S. officials and military commanders that such a conflict is likely within the decade. Plans for warfighting are well advanced. This feckless approach implicitly casts the Chinese foe as a modern-day Imperial Japan despite the catastrophic risks intrinsic to a war between nuclear powers.

The extremity of Washington’s overreaching, militarized strategy intended to solidify and extend its global dominance is evinced by the latest pronouncement of required war-fighting capabilities.

Recommendations just promulgated by the congressional bipartisan Strategic Posture Commission include developing and fielding “homeland integrated air and missile defenses that can deter and defeat coercive attacks by Russia and China, and determine the capabilities needed to stay ahead of the North Korean threat.”

They were endorsed by former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley in his post-retirement interview where he proposed adding up to $1 trillion to the current defense budget in order to create the requisite capabilities.

President Joe Biden, in his weekend interview on 60 Minutes, reiterated the dominating outlook with buoyant optimism:

“We’re the United States of America, for God’s sake!; the most powerful nation in the history of the world.”

This is the same country whose war-fighting record since 1975 is one win, two draws and four losses — or five losses if we include Ukraine. (That tabulation excludes Granada which was a sort of scrimmage). Moreover, the U.S. stock of 155mm artillery ammunition is totally exhausted – as is that of its allies.

No Discussion

This historic strategic judgment is heavily freighted with the gravest implications for the security and well-being of the United States — and will shape global affairs in the 21st century.

Yet, it has been made in the total absence of serious debate in the country-at-large, in Congress, within the foreign policy community, in the media and — most astonishing — at the highest levels of the government as well.

The last lapse is evinced by the superficiality of the statements issued by Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, Vice President Kamala Harris, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, Milley and their associates.

We have heard nothing in the way of a sober, rigorous explication of why and how China or Russian poses so manifest a threat as to dictate committing ourselves to an all-out confrontation.

Nor do we hear mention of alternative strategies, their pluses and minuses, nor are there candid expositions of the costs that will be incurred in their implementation. Most certainly, silence reigns as to what happens if this audacious, all-or-nothing strategy fails — in whole or in part.

The stunning rise of China along with the reemergence of Russia as a formidable power are developments apparent to attentive observers for quite some time.

For Russia, the landmark dates can be identified.

Russian Milestones

The first was Russian President Vladimir Putin’s speech to the Munich Security Conference in 2007. There, he made clear his rejection of the Western script that relegated Russia to a subordinate position in a world system organized according to principles and interests defined largely by the United States.

Whether fashioned as neo-liberal globalization or, practically speaking, American hegemony, it was unacceptable. Instead, Putin set forth the twin concepts of multipolarity and multilateralism. While emphasizing the sovereign status and legitimate interest of all states, his vision did not foresee conflict or implacable rivalry. Rather, it was envisaged demarcating international dealings as a collective enterprise that aimed at mutual gain based on mutual respect for each other’s identity and core interests.

Washington, though, interpreted it otherwise. In their minds, Putin had thrown a monkey wrench into the project of fashioning a globalized world overseen by the United States and its partners.

President George W. Bush’s administration made the judgment that an irksome Russia should be fenced-in and its influence curbed. That objective animated the campaign to bring Ukraine and Georgia into NATO, the sponsorship of the doomed Georgian attack on disputed South Ossetia, on the attempt to block the building of a new gas pipeline from Russia to Germany and on setting strict terms for commercial exchanges.

It culminated in the 2014 Maidan coup in Kiev and the bolstering of Ukraine as a power that could keep Russia in its place. The rest of that story we know.

Then, the image of Putin as a diabolical Machiavellian who works relentlessly to cripple the U.S. was given a thick layer of varnish by the Russiagate charade — a scheme concocted by presidential aspirant Hillary Clinton and her allies in order to explain how she could lose an election against somebody who started the fall campaign with a personal unfavorable poll rating of 67 percent.

The Chinese Challenge

The confrontation with China is not marked by equally clear events or decision points. Designation of China as the challenger to the U.S. position as global supremo crystallized more gradually.

It was the Middle Kingdom’s growing strength in every dimension of national power and capacity that stirred first anxiety and then fear. This challenging rival had become a threat to the foundational belief in U.S. exceptionalism and superiority. Hence, an existential threat in the truest sense.

(“This town ain’t big enough for both of us!” is a familiar line to Americans for the way it punctuates showdowns in hundreds of Westerns. Now it has spilled into foreign policy as a neat summation of Washington’s attitude toward Beijing. Instead, how about inviting the other guy for a drink at the Long Branch and a long talk? Dutch treat.)

The string of disputes over this or that issue were symptoms rather than the cause of the antagonism mixed with dread that has led the U.S. to treat China as a mortal foe. When we look at the chronology of events, it becomes evident that the U.S. bill of indictment does not come close to justifying that conclusion.

The fashionable — now official — view is that it’s all China’s fault.

President Xi Jinping & Co supposedly spurned the opportunity to join the outward-looking community of liberal nations; they have grown increasingly repressive at home — thereby, disqualifying themselves from partnership with the democracies; they have been aggressive in pushing their territorial claims in the South China Sea; they have not composed their differences with neighbors, most importantly Japan; and they have deviated from the Western (i.e. American line) toward Iran while mediating a modus vivendi with Saudi Arabia.

Closer to home, China is accused of operating extensive spying networks in the United States designed to purloin valuable high technology; of systematically manipulating commercial dealings to their advantage; and they are extending their cultural influence in a porous American society.

In this bill of indictment no reference is made to dubious actions by the United States. Washington’s record as a global citizen is less than impeccable. Specifically in reference to China, it is Washington that made what are by far the most provocative moves.

Let’s recall the jailing of Huawei’s CFO in Vancouver at the Trump White House’s insistence on specious grounds (violation of Washington’s own illegal sanctions campaign against Iran) in order to thwart the company’s success in becoming a dominant player in the IT field. Former President Donald Trump himself admitted as much in stating that the United States might refrain from pursuing her prosecution were China ready to concede to his demands in the bilateral trade negotiations.

The ultimate provocation has been the series of steps in regard to Taiwan that signaled clearly Washington’s intention to prevent its integration into the PRC. Thereby, it crossed the most indelible of red lines — one that the United States itself had helped draw and had observed for half a century. It is tantamount to an Old Europe aristocrat slapping another in the face with his gloves in public. An unmistakable invitation to a duel that precludes negotiation, mediation or compromise.

Not Just a Rival

The United States finds it far easier to deal with manifest enemies, e.g. the U.S.S.R., than sharing the international stage with countries that match it in strength whatever degree of threat it poses to American national security.

The latter is far harder for Americans to handle — emotionally, intellectually, diplomatically.

Hence, the growing tendency to characterize China as not just a rival for global influence but as a menace. That results in a caricature of China’s ambitions and a downplaying of prospects for fostering a working relationship among rough equals.

An enormous amount of energy is being put into this delusional enterprise. The target is America itself. The project is a bizarre form of conversion therapy designed to substitute a confected version of reality for the irksome real thing.

Stunning evidence of this self-administered treatment is available on a routine basis in the pages of The New York Times. Every day we are treated to two or three long stories about what’s wrong with China, its trials and tribulations. No occurrence is too recondite or distant to be exempt from being used in an exaggerated diagnosis of social or political illness. The extremes to which the editors go in this re-education program is pathological.

The threat China presents is to an exalted self-image more than to any tangible interests. At its root, the problem is psychological.

By time that the Biden administration arrived in office, the scene had been set for the declaration of war and the taking of concrete steps in that direction. But it’s odd that such a momentous commitment should be made by such a lackluster team of individuals with a diminished, distracted president as its nominal head. That can be attributed to two factors.

First is the dogmatic worldview of the principals. Their outlook represents an absorption of Paul Wolfowitz’s notorious memo of 1992 laying out a manifold strategy for consolidating and extending U.S. world dominance in perpetuity.

Second is the neocon passion to shape other countries in the U.S. image. That blend was laced with a dash of old-fashioned Wilsonian idealism along with a drizzle of humanitarianism from the Responsibility to Protect movement (R2P).

[Related: Chris Hedges: R2P Caused Libya’s Nightmare]

This potent brew had become orthodoxy for nearly all of the U.S. foreign policy community. In addition, a rudimentary version has gained the adherence of the political class and has shaped the thinking of Congress to whatever extent its members do any thinking about external relations beyond habitual resort to convenient hackneyed slogans.

Alternative No. 1

Objectively speaking, alternatives did exist.

The first we might call inertial ad-hocism. Its features would have been the continued segmentation of the country’s external dealings into more-or-less discrete packets — geographical and functional.

The Middle East’s two sub-categories: Israel and the Gulf; the desultory “War On Terror” wherever; the aggressive promotion of neo-liberal globalization featuring the ensconcing of a heteroclite corporate/technocratic/political elite as guides and overseers; bilateral relations with new economic powers like India and Brazil to bring them into the neo-liberal orbit; business-as-usual with the rest of the Global South.

As for China and Russia, one would be treated as a formidable rival and the other as an overreaching nuisance to be stymied in places in Syria and Central Asia. Concrete steps to counteract the Chinese commercial and technological challenge would have been taken either unilaterally or in hard-nosed direct bargaining. Support for Taiwan would have increased but stopped short of ruffling Beijing’s feathers by calling into question the One-China Principle.

The foundational premise of this approach is that an ever-deepening neo-liberal system would pull China into its field as a politico-economic centrifugal magnet. Hence, by an incremental process a potential challenge to American-Western hegemony would be gradually neutralized, avoiding a direct confrontation.

Russia, for its part, could be treated more roughly: the post-2014 sanctions tightened, its approaches in Syria and on other matters rebuffed and the quiet build-up of Ukraine continued. This, in essence, was the tack taken by former President Barack Obama and Trump.

Today’s uniform assumption that a momentous battle with the Chinese is written in the stars, the culmination of a zero-sum rivalry for global dominance, is of relatively recent vintage.

Not so long ago, the consensus was that the most sensible strategy composed two elements.

The first was peaceful engagement emphasizing economic interdependence leading to China’s participation in a more-or-less orderly world system whose rules-of-the-road might have to undergo some modification but where power politics was restrained and contained.

(Regarding the restructuring of existing international organizations, the IMF stands out. Since its post-war founding, the United States has held veto power over any or all of its actions. It adamantly refuses to relinquish it despite the drastic shifts in the constellation of global financial and monetary power. Hence, the IMF serves as a de facto subsidiary of the State Department. This state of affairs soon will prove absolutely unacceptable to China and the BRICs.)

The second was a measure of military balancing to remove any temptation as might exist in Beijing for empire-building while reassuring neighbors. The open question focused on exactly where and how the balance should be struck.

That was the prevailing perspective until roughly the second Obama administration. These days, that approach has lost its place in the mainstream of foreign policy discourse. There is no fixed day or event, though, that marks the abrupt and sharp change of course.

This disjointed incremental line of approach has its advantages despite its leaning toward conflict. Paramount is that it avoids locking the United States into a position of implacable hostility vis a vis China. There is no embedded logic propelling us toward armed conflict. It implicitly leaves open the possibility of U.S. thinking moving in a more positive direction.

Whatever the odds of such an evolution occurring, and on the arrival in the White House of a president with the bold vision of a true statesman, such a development would not be excluded as it is by the current mobilization for generational “war.”

Alternative No. 2

There is another, radical alternative grounded on the belief that it is feasible to fashion a long-term strategy of nurturing ties of cooperation with Russia and China. Taking some form of partnership, it would be grounded on a mutual commitment to the maintenance of political stability and fashioning mechanisms for conflict avoidance. This is by no means as far fetched as first glance might suggest — in concept.

The idea of a great power concert comes to mind. However, we should envisage an arrangement quite different from the historic Concert of Europe that emerged at the Conference of Vienna in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars.

One, the objective would not be a buttressing of the status quo by the dual strategy of refraining from armed conflict among the underwriting states and suppressing revolutionary movements that could endanger existing monarchies. Its attendant features were the concentration of custodial power in the Big 5 co-managers of the system; the stifling of political reform across Europe; and the disregard of forces appearing outside their purview.

By contrast, a contemporary partnership among the major powers would presume a responsibility for taking the lead in designing a global system based on the mutually reinforcing tenets of openness, sovereign equality and the promotion of policies that deliver plus-sum outcomes.

Rather than rule by a directorate, international affairs would be structured by international institutions modified in terms of philosophy, multilateral decision-making and a measure of devolution that empowers regional bodies. There would be an established pattern of consultation among those governments whose economic weight and military capacity quite naturally should be expected to play an informal role in performing system maintenance functions and facilitating the involvement of other states. Legitimacy would be established through conduct and performance.

The drastic fall in respect for U.S. world leadership will facilitate that process — as the BRICs’ successes already demonstrate.

The crucial starting point for such a project is a meeting of the minds among Washington, Beijing and Moscow — accompanied by dialogue with New Delhi, Brasilia et al.

There is reason to believe that conditions, objectively speaking, have been conducive to an undertaking of this order for several years. However, it was never recognized in the West, much less seriously considered — an historic opportunity lost.

“The threat China presents is to an exalted self-image more than to any tangible interests. At its root, the problem is psychological.”

The most significant sufficient factor is the temper of Chinese and Russian leadership. Xi and Putin are rare leaders. They are sober, rational, intelligent, very well informed and capable of broad vision.

(China’s traditional goal always has been to exact deference from other countries while bolstering their own strength — not to impose an imperium on them. Much less do they share the American impulse to arrange the affairs of the entire world according to a universalization of their own unique civilization. Therein lies an opportunity to avoid a “war of transition.”

However, there is no American leader on the horizon who recognizes this overarching reality and who seems prepared to grasp the opportunity to “bend the arc of history.” Obama briefly toyed with the idea — before relapsing into the stale rhetoric of American exceptionalism: “We’re number One — you better believe it. Nobody else is even close!”)

While dedicated to securing their national interests, above all the well-being of their peoples, neither Xi nor Putin harbor imperial ambitions. And both have long tenures as heads of state. They have the political capital to invest in a project of this magnitude and prospective. Washington, unfortunately, has not had leaders of similar character and talents.

As for U.S. allies, no counsel of restraint can be expected from that quarter. Those loyal vassals have moved from being craven irrelevancies to active, if junior, partners in crime.

An Odious Spectacle

It is stomach-churning to observe the leaders of Europe lining up for slap-on-the-back meetings with Bibi Netanyahu in Tel Aviv while he inflicts atrocities on Gazans. Barely a word of concern for 2 million civilians, just the hurried dispatch of more weapons diverted from the Ukrainian killing fields. This odious spectacle was eclipsed by Biden’s disgraceful performance this week in Jerusalem.

Summit meetings by Bush, Obama, Trump or Biden always have concentrated on either small-bore issues or instruction on what their opposite number should be doing so as to conform to the U.S. view of the world. Both are wastes of precious time insofar as the imperative to foster a long-term, common global perspective is concerned.

The sensible approach to inaugurate a serious dialogue might be a president with statesmanlike qualities who sits down alone with Putin and Xi for an open-ended session and asks such questions as: “What do you want, President Putin/President XI? How do you see the world 20 years from now and your country’s place in it?”

Would they be prepared to expound an articulate response? Putin certainly would. That is exactly what he has been proposing since 2007 — on numerous occasions vocally or in his writings. Instead, he was stonewalled, and — since 2014 — treated as a menacing pariah to be defamed and personally insulted.

Here is Barack Obama’s take:

“The Russian President is a ‘physically unremarkable’ man, likened to ‘the tough, street-smart ward bosses who used to run the Chicago machine.”

This comment from Obama’s first volume of his published memoirs, The Promised Land, says more about his own inflated yet vulnerable ego than Putin’s character.

In fact, it was the Chicago machine along with money and encouragement from the Pritzker network that made Obama what he became.

Contrast: when Bismarck met Disraeli at the 1878 Berlin Conference — going so far as to invite him, a Jew, home twice for meals — he did not nag the British prime minister about trade restrictions on German exports of textiles and metallurgical goods or the systematic British abuse of tea plantation workers in Assam.

Nor did he comment on the man’s physique. Bismarck was a serious statesman, unlike the people in whose custody we place the security and well-being of our nations.

The upshot is that Putin and Xi seem puzzled by feckless Western counterparts who disregard the elementary precepts of diplomacy. That should be a concern as well — except by those who intend to conduct the U.S. “war” in a linear manner that pays little attention to the thinking of other parties.

The vitriol that is thrown at Putin with such vehemence by his Western counterparts is something of a puzzle. It is manifestly disproportionate to anything that he has done or said by any reasonable measure — even if one distorts the underlying story of Ukraine.

Obama’s condescension suggests an answer. At its core, their attitude reflects envy. Envy in the sense that he is subconsciously recognized as clearly superior in attributes of intelligence, knowledge of contemporary issues and history, articulateness, political savvy and – most certainly – diplomatic skill.

Try to imagine any U.S. leader emulating Putin’s performance in holding three-hour open Q & A sessions with citizens of all stripes — responding directly, in detail, coherently and with good grace. Biden? Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau? German Chancellor Olaf Scholz? British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak? French President Emmanual Macron? Ursula von der Leyen, president of the EU Commission? Estonia’s Prime Minister Kaja Kallis?

Even Obama, from whom we’d get canned sermons cast in high-minded language that distills into very little. That’s why the West’s political class assiduously avoids paying attention to Putin’s speeches and press conferences — out of sight, out of mind.

Act in reference to the make-believe cartoon instead of the real man.

The Ukraine Era

These days, in the Ukraine era, the rigid Washington consensus is that Vladimir Putin is the quintessential brutal dictator — power mad, ruthless and with only a tenuous grip on reality.

Indeed, it has become commonplace to equate him with Hitler — as done by such leading lights of the U.S. power elite as Hillary Clinton and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi along with “opinion makers” galore. Even 203 noble Nobels lend their collective brains and celebrity credentials to an “open letter” whose second sentence pairs Russia’s attack on Ukraine with Hitler’s assault on Poland in September 1939.

Sadly, the idea that those who make those decisions should bother to know what they are talking about is widely deemed as radical if not subversive.

In regard to Putin, there is absolutely no excuse for such painful ignorance. He has presented his views on how Russia visualizes its place in the world, relations with the West and the contours/rules of a desired international system more comprehensively, historically informed and coherently than has any national leader I know of. Shouted declarations “we’re No. 1 and always will be – you better believe it” (Obama) are not his style.

The point is that you may be troubled by his conclusions, question his sincerity, suspect hidden strands of thought, or denounce certain actions. However, doing so has no credibility unless one has engaged the man based on what is available — not on cartoon caricatures. So, too, should we recognize that Russia is not a one-man show, that it behooves us to consider the more complex reality that is Russian governance and politics.

President Xi of China has escaped the personal vilification thrown at Putin — so far. But Washington has made no greater effort to engage him in the sort of discourse about the future shape of Sino-American relations and the world system for which they are destined to be primary joint custodians.

Xi is more elusive than Putin. He is far less forthright, more guarded and embodies a political culture very different from that of the United States or Europe. Still, he is no dogmatic ideologue or power-mad imperialist. Cultural differences too easily can become an excuse for avoiding the study, the pondering and the exercise in strategic imagination that is called for.

Shaping the World Structure

The approach outlined above is worth the effort – and low costs that it entails. For it is the understandings among the three leaders (and their senior colleagues) that are of the utmost importance.

That is to say, agreed understandings as to how they view the shape and structure of world affairs, where their interests clash or converge, and how to meet the dual challenge of 1) handling those points of friction that may arise, and 2) working together to perform ‘system maintenance’ functions in both the economic and security realms.

At the moment, there is no chance that American leaders can muster the gumption, or have the vision, to set out on this course. Neither Biden and his team, nor their Republican rivals are up to it.

In truth, American leaders are psychologically and intellectually not capable of thinking seriously about the terms for sharing power with China, with Russia or with anybody else – and developing mechanisms for doing so over different timeframes.

Washington is too preoccupied with parsing the naval balance in East Asia to reflect on broad strategies. Its leaders are too complacent about the deep faults in our economic structures, and too wasteful in dissipating trillions on chimerical ventures aimed at exorcising a mythical enemy to position ourselves for a diplomatic undertaking of the sort that a self-centered America never before has faced.

A drive to revalidate its presumed virtue and singularity now impels what the U.S. does in the world. Hence, the calculated stress placed on slogans like “democracy versus autocracy.” That is a neat metaphor for the uneasy position in which Uncle Sam finds himself these days, proudly pronouncing enduring greatness from every lectern and altar in the land, pledging to uphold a standing as global No. 1 forever and ever.

But the U.S. is also constantly bumping its head against an unaccommodating reality. Instead of downsizing the monumental juggernaut or applying itself to a delicate raising of the arch, it makes repeated attempts to fit through in a vain effort to bend the world to fit its mythology. Invocation of the Concussion Protocol is in order — but nobody wants to admit that sobering truth.

This is close to a condition that approximates what the psychologists call “dissociation.” It is marked by an inability to see and to accept actualities as they are for deep-seated emotional reasons.

The tension generated for a nation so constituted when encountering objective reality does not force heightened self-awareness or a change in behavior if the dominant feature of that reality is the attitudes and expressed opinions of others who share the underlying delusions.

Michael Brenner is a professor of international affairs at the University of Pittsburgh. [email protected]

#us imperialism #us foreign policy #xi jinping #vladimir putin #russia #china #brics #american exceptionalism #multipolarity

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anthonybialy · 2 years ago

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Policy of Errors

Claiming everyone else gets everything wrong is just another error. The worst violators are mad about misinformation and don’t even have a sense of humor about irony. People who never get anything right failing to smirk about it is not even the worst part. Noting what they do believe here in reality hurts feelings and causes, which is sufficient proof for them.

Every single hoax confirms the liberal worldview. Those are a fun few days for true believers. Trifling details like accuracy are for the intolerant. Noting the constant stream of hate crimes in contemporary America is backed up about everything but the facts. The feeling is what motivates Democrats, as it sure isn’t results. Guardians against fascist racists are still convinced a MAGA Hate Squad is roaming Red State hive Chicago. Jussie Smollett was attacked by everything but attackers.

Every charge against cops is believed by those who don’t believe any against criminals. It only seems backward if you believe the entire criminal justice system is a farce designed to oppress the underprivileged.

Overwrought liberals act reflexively in a way they claim those they impugn do. It’s surely not the first time they think everyone else holds the same bleak personality characteristics they actually do. Meanwhile, their belief system causes the problems they claim to remedy. Proclaiming cops do bad makes stopping actual abuse harder. It’s not the first time incentives go haywire because those who don’t grasp them encourage perverse ones.

Sneak in if you want to be treated like royalty. Border sob stories reflect how Democrats only have sympathy for people in America who aren’t allowed to be here. Uncannily, the pattern is the same with legal criminals. The few things retailers manage to stock get stolen.

Foes of mean arrests and prosecutions enjoy acting like shoplifting is no big deal and just a way of coping with poverty, anyway. You don’t want children to starve, do you? Everyone struggles to make sure minors get enough calories during the era of Bidenomics.

The president’s grifting crackhead brat has to rip off others: how else would he make money in Dad’s economy? Genetics indicate there are no useful skills no matter where one climbs the family tree. Hunter Biden is just like his dad, and they both think they’re being complimented. That bit where he was caught establishing a new standard for corruption showed us a lot about his defenders, too.

Eager suppressors assured us they were protecting the world against falsehoods as they violated the concept of open speech to promulgate one. You’re now free to tweet regarding the scandal about the scandal.

Don’t be racist by noting the commie cabal which inflicts horrors upon citizens and the rest of the world as policy is responsible for what it did. Chinese despots have to pretend China behaved. I’m unsure what excuse Americans excusing a monstrous regime have. Are they ideological allies, bravely fearful that legitimate criticism will provoke bullies, or unable to distinguish between ethnicity and autocracy? The answer doesn’t matter when the options are all repulsive.

The lengths America’s noisiest homegrown critics will go to defend a particularly appalling tyranny couldn’t serve as a more blatant example. Perhaps those indignant on behalf of schemingly incompetent commies who infected the world are secretly admire the control of information in defiance of alleged absolute truth.

Gender is a whim. Believe it or get treated like a witch. Complicating the simplest observations is the cause of those most opposed to how things are. Foes of the rather easy way to determine who’s a male or female are surely as dedicated to evidence on other issues. Fanatical practitioners smugly announce they believe in science, which is the least scientific notion possible.

The presumption government will help can safely be classified as misguided. It’s been disproven consistently enough that we can call it a lie if we’re feeling less generous. The excuse of ignorance means not knowing a thing about current events, which is sadly likely among those whose reply to regrettable news about their ideology is “Fox News!” Wondering what possible evidence could be on the side that figures every interaction requires political guidance is irrelevant, as they’ve made up their minds.

Those who get everything wrong are deeply concerned that you’re spreading lies. The First Amendment’s whole point is that we can sort it out ourselves, which frightens control freaks who neither tolerate differing opinions nor challenges to what they risibly deem cold cases. Jittery censors don’t believe in any sort of open market or natural right, and consistency is not always admirable.

Controlling alleged hate speech means anyone who disagrees. There’s an ulterior reason just like everything else woke sputterers claim, namely that they’re as disconnected from the truth as they are productivity.

Psychological projection is the only productive liberal industry. Business sadly thrives. Making a show of calling everyone else a fibber is intended to distract from their own bouts with truth. Robbers call tip lines blaming others. I’m sure investigators will be thrown off by the blatant distraction.

If you didn’t want coercion with the sheen of legality, you should have thought about that before being bossed around. A politician should decide everything except if babies get to be born, according to those obsessed with accuracy. Lecturing about biology while averting their eyes from sonograms is merely the most egregious hypocrisy by those who commit sins they accuse everyone else of transgressions. Everyone else is a phony, according to the most prominent examples.

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tinyshe · 3 years ago

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Interview with Alexander Dugin – ‘Welcome all newcomers!’

Prof. Alexander Dugin, philosopher and geopolitical expert from Russia, sees the world changing: the old liberalism is being replaced by a new, aggressive, globalist mutation. Manuel Ochsenreiter's interview with Dugin gives a fascinating insight into the globalist future.

Published: June 18, 2021, 11:42 am

Prof. Dugin, in your latest essay you wrote about “Liberalism 2.0”. Is liberalism changing?

Dugin: Of course! Every ideology is a subject to constant change, including liberalism. Right now we are witnessing a dramatic shift in liberalism. It is now becoming even more dangerous, even more destructive.

How do you even recognize such a change?

Dugin: We can observe a certain “rite of passage”. As such, I interpret the situation in which Donald Trump’s presidency culminated, namely in his fall by hand of the globalist elite, represented by Joe Biden. This is nothing more than a “rite of passage” – embodied by gay parades, BLM uprisings, imperialist LGBT + attacks, the worldwide uprising of extreme feminism and the spectacular arrival of post-humanism and extreme technocracy. There are profound intellectual and philosophical processes going on behind all of this. And these processes have an impact on culture and politics.

You write that liberalism has become “lonely”…

Dugin: Modern liberalism seems to have lost its enemies after the collapse of the Soviet Union. This is fatal for this ideology, as it is primarily defined by its demarcation. In my “Fourth Political Theory”, liberalism is defined as the first theory to fight the two “main enemies” – communism (second theory) and fascism (third theory). Both had challenged liberalism: for liberalism claims to be the most modern and progressive theory. But both communism and fascism made the same claim. In 1990 communism and fascism were considered defeated.

This is usually called the “unipolar moment” (Charles Krauthammer) and it was prematurely, as we now know – even raised by Francis Fukuyama to the “end of history”. In the 1990s, however, it seemed that liberalism no longer had any opponents. Smaller burgeoning anti-liberal right, left, and “national Bolshevik” alliances were no real challenge. The absence of its “enemies” for liberalism also meant that it had lost its self-affirmation. Here we see very clearly the “loneliness”, which of course I don’t mean in a melancholy sense. Therefore, the transition to Liberalism 2.0 with a “new impetus” was almost inevitable.

How would you describe that?

Dugin: An opponent had to come back. But actually only the weak, illiberal alliances that can be described as “national Bolsheviks” were offered – even if the so-called movements themselves do not see it that way. Perhaps it is more understandable if one divides the new political camps into globalists (Liberalism 2.0) and anti-globalists. One must not forget: Liberalism 1.0 will not be “reformed”, it will also become the “enemy” of Liberalism 2.0. We can perhaps even speak of a “mutation”. Because there are also old-style liberals who are now more drawn to the camp of anti-globalists because they reject the limitless, hedonistic and total individualism of Liberalism 2.0.

So liberals against liberals?

Dugin: [laughs] Liberalism 2.0 can be seen as a kind of “fifth column” within liberalism. And the new liberalism is brutal and unyielding, it no longer discusses, it does not invite debate. It is a “cancel culture”, it stigmatizes its opponents, it excludes them. “Old” liberals also fall victim to this, as can be seen almost regularly in Europe today. Who are the victims of the “cancel culture”? Maybe fascists or communists? Most of the time it is artists, journalists and authors who have been completely in the mainstream waters – but who are now suddenly targeted. Liberalism 2.0 lets the hammer go round.

Your country, Russia, is seen today as a great opponent of globalism – especially under President Vladimir Putin…

Dugin: The resurgence of Putin’s Russia can be understood as a new mix of the Soviet-style strategy of anti-Western politics and traditional Russian nationalism. On the other hand, the Putin phenomenon remains a mystery – even to us Russians. Certainly, one can recognize “national Bolshevik” elements in his politics, but also a lot of liberal elements. Incidentally, this also applies to the Chinese phenomenon. Here we see again the special Chinese communism mixed with perceptible Chinese nationalism. The same can be said of the growth of European populism where the distance between the left and the right is increasingly disappearing to the point of the symbolic creation of the left-right alliance in the Italian government: I am talking about the agreement between the “Lega Nord” (right-wing populist) and the “5-star” movement (left-wing populist). We see the same phenomenon prefigured in the populist revolt of the “yellow vests” against President Emmanuel Macron in France, in which the supporters of Marine Le Pen fought together with the supporters of Jean-Luc Mélenchon against the liberal center.

The “left-right” alliances you mentioned only existed for a certain period of time, often they fought each other again more than the liberal center…

Dugin: That’s a key point. Since the anti-globalist, right-left alliances are the greatest opponents of Liberalism 2.0, it must constantly fight them, keep them small and also infiltrate them. If anti-globalist left and right in Europe fight each other more than the center, then liberalism 2.0 is the laughing third party. What is more: there is even a certain tendency on the part of the fringes to make pacts with the center in the fight against the other fringe. I think you can see such a situation in all European countries. Thus, Globalism fragments the camp of its opponents and prevents a possibly powerful alliance.

What could such a “powerful alliance” look like?

Dugin: If Putin from Russia, Xi Jinping from China, the European populists and the anti-Western movements in Islam, the anti-capitalist currents in Latin America and Africa had been aware that they are opposing liberal globalism from a somewhat united ideological position and would have adopted left/right and integral populism as their basis, this would have increased their resistance considerably and even multiplied its potential. So in order not to let this happen, the globalists have left no stone unturned to prevent any ideological movement in this direction.

In your essay you refer to Donald Trump as the “midwife of Liberalism 2.0”. What do you mean?

Dugin: I have already said: a political ideology cannot exist if the “friend-foe antagonism” is erased. It loses its identity. To have no more enemy is to commit ideological suicide. So an obscure and undefined external enemy was not enough to justify liberalism. By demonizing Putin’s Russia and Xi Jinping’s China, the liberals could no longer be convincing. More than that: the assumption of the existence of a formal, structured ideological enemy outside the liberal zone of influence (democracy, market economy, human rights, universal technology, total network, etc.) after the onset of the unipolar moment in the early 1990s on a global level would have been tantamount to acknowledging a serious mistake. Logically, an enemy from within had to appear. This was a theoretical necessity in the development of ideological processes during the 1990s.

This enemy from within appeared just in time, at the exact moment when it was needed most. And it had a name: Donald Trump. He embodied the boundary between Liberalism 1.0 and Liberalism 2.0. Initially, attempts were made to establish a connection between Trump and “red-brown Putin”. This seriously damaged Trump’s presidency, but was ideologically inconsistent. Not only because of the lack of real relations between Trump and Putin and Trump’s ideological opportunism, but also because Putin himself is, in fact, a very pragmatic realist.

Much like Trump, Putin is a poll populist, and like Trump, he’s most likely to be an opportunist with no real interest in a worldview. The alternate scenario portraying Trump as a “fascist” is just as ridiculous. Because it has been used by his political rivals too often, it has caused trouble for Trump, but it has also been inconsistent. Neither Trump himself nor his staff consisted of “fascists” or representatives of any right-wing extremist tendency which had long ago been marginalized in American society and only existed as a kind of extreme libertarian fringe or kitsch culture.

How can you then ultimately classify Trump?

Dugin: Trump was and is a representative of Liberalism 1.0. If we put aside all foreign regimes that oppose liberal ideology in their political practice, there will only be one real enemy of liberalism left – liberalism itself. So in order to move forward, liberalism had to carry out an “internal cleansing”. And it is precisely this old liberalism that has been identified with the symbolic figure of Donald Trump. He was the ultimate enemy in the election campaign of Joe Biden, who stands for the new liberalism 2.0. Biden spoke of the “return to normal”. Liberalism 1.0 – national, capitalist, pragmatic, individualistic and to a certain extent libertarian – was thus declared an “abnormality”.

Liberalism focuses on individualism, that is, the individual human being. Other ideologies speak in terms of collectives like the people or the class. What does Liberalism 2.0 do?

Dugin: Right. The figure of the individual plays the same role in the social physics of liberalism as the atom in scientific physics. Society consists of atoms/individuals, who are the only real and empirical basis for subsequent social, political and economic constructions. Everything can be reduced to the individual. That is the liberal law. So the struggle against all kinds of collective identity is the moral duty of liberals, and progress is measured by whether or not this struggle is successful.

A look at Western societies shows that the struggle was largely successful…

Dugin: At that point, when Liberals began to realize this scenario, despite all their victories, there was still something collective, some kind of forgotten collective identity that also needed to be destroyed. Welcome to gender politics! To be a man and a woman means to share a collective identity which dictates strong social and cultural practices. This is a new challenge for liberalism. The individual must be liberated from biological sex, since the latter is still viewed as something objective. Gender must be purely optional and seen as a consequence of a purely individual decision. Gender politics starts here and changes the very nature of the concept of the individual. The postmodernists were the first to show that the liberal individual is a masculine, rationalist construction. Simply equalizing social opportunities and functions for men and women, including the right to change gender at will, does not solve the problem. The “traditional” patriarchy still survives by defining rationality and norms. Hence, it has been concluded that the liberation of the individual is not enough. The next step consists in the liberation of the human being or rather the “living entity” from the individual.

Now the moment is approaching for the final replacement of the individual by the gender-optional entity, a kind of network identity. And the final step will eventually be to replace humanity with creepy beings – machines, chimeras, robots, artificial intelligence and other species of genetic engineering. The line between what is still human and what is already post-human is the main problem of the paradigm shift from Liberalism 1.0 to Liberalism 2.0. Trump was a human individualist who defended individualism in the old style of human context. Perhaps he was the last of his kind. Biden is a representative of the arriving post-humanity.

So far, it all sounds like a smooth march for the globalist elite. Can one counter that?

Dugin: One cannot avoid the realization that both old-fashioned nationalism and communism have been defeated by liberalism. Neither right-wing nor left-wing illiberal populism can win the victory over liberalism today. To be able to do this, we would have to integrate the illiberal left and the illiberal right. But the ruling liberals are very vigilant about this and always try to prevent any movement in this direction in advance.

The short-sightedness of the radical left and radical right politicians and groups only helps liberals to implement their agenda. At the same time, we must not ignore the growing chasm between Liberalism 1.0 and Liberalism 2.0. It seems as if the internal cleansing of modernity and postmodernism is now leading to brutal punishment and excommunication of new species of political beings – this time the liberals themselves are being sacrificed.

Those of them who do not consider themselves as a part of the Great Reset strategy and the Biden-Soros axis, those who refuse to enjoy the final disappearance of good old mankind, good old individuals, good old freedom and the market economy. There will be no place for any of these in Liberalism 2.0.

It will become post-human, and anyone who questions such a new concept will be welcomed to the Unity of Enemies of the Open Society.

And then we, Russians, will be able to tell them: “We have been here for decades and we feel more or less at home here. So we welcome you to hell, newbies!” Every Trump supporter and ordinary Republican is now seen as a potentially dangerous person, just as we have been for a long time. So let Liberals 1.0 join our ranks! To do this, it is not necessary to become illiberal, philo-communist or ultra-nationalist. Nothing like that! Everyone can keep their good old prejudices for as long as they want. The “Fourth Political Theory” presents a unique position where true freedom is welcomed: the freedom to fight for social justice, to be a patriot, to defend the state, the church, the people, the family – and to remain a human.

Prof. Dugin, thank you very much for the interview.

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katchwreck · 3 years ago

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“The factionalist sycophants rose in reckless revolt on May 30 in eastern Manchuria to serve only their factional ends. They had neither a detailed plan nor organizational preparation for the revolt. They merely set up the “Uprising Headquarters,” rousing peasants in every village to attack towns. As a result, a violent struggle began on May 30, 1930. In the major areas of eastern Manchuria such as Longjing, Toudaogou, Erdaogou, Nanyangping, Jiemandong, Yanji, Tongfosi they destroyed or set fire to the Japanese consulate, the office of the Association of Korean Residents, the Financial Agencynof the Oriental Development Company, and public schools, power stations and railway bridges, and liquidated fellow-travellers of the Japanese, landlords and capitalists.

In the streets there were bloody struggles between the Japanese imperialist army and police forces and the unarmed rioters. Our numerous comrades were killed and the masses bled under the bayonets of the enemy. Meanwhile, the Japanese imperialist police and their minions ransacked every village, rounded up many Korean youths, jailed them, subjected them to cruel torture, and murdered them barbarously.

The reactionary Chinese warlords, hoodwinked by the national estrangement policy of the Japanese imperialist aggressors, and at their instigation, massacred many people under the pretext of “arresting Korean communists.” The Jilin provincial government appointed Wang Shutang, commander of the 7th Regiment stationed in Dunhua, the commander of the “punitive force,” and sent out thousands of troops to arrest, imprison and kill innocent Korean peasants indiscriminately.

Last year alone the number of young and middle-aged Koreans arrested and imprisoned by the Japanese imperialists and Kuomintang warlords amounted to tens of thousands, of whom those shot on the spot numbered hundreds. In addition, hundreds of Korean communists who had been arrested were transferred to Sodaemun Prison in Seoul. The total casualties of young and middle-aged Koreans, if those killed in action on the day of revolt, those who died under enemy torture and the wounded are combined, number several thousand.

As a result, today in eastern Manchuria the Korean villages are stricken with terror. Revolutionary organizations have been destroyed, some comrades who narrowly escaped are at their wits’ end, and the peasant masses shrink under the enemy’s terrorism.

We must save this critical situation promptly, restore the revolutionary organizations and heighten the revolutionary spirit of the masses so as to revitalize the Korean revolution. To this end, it is important to analyse and sum up correctly the rash and adventurous May 30 Uprising, and to draw correct lessons from it.

What, then, was the main reason for the failure of the May 30 Uprising?

First, it lay in the dogmatism and petty-bourgeois heroism of the factionalist sycophants. The factionalists demolished the Korean Communist Party, founded in 1925, by indulging in factional strife. Instead of learning the right lessons, they hung out the signboard of “Party reconstruction” even in Manchuria, and were engrossed in the mere expansion of their own factions, only to split the revolutionary forces. When their factional activities were criticized by the Comintern, they rose in the adventurous and foolhardy May 30 Uprising with the preposterous ambition of fostering trust through what they called struggle and thus joining the Communist Party of China on the principle of one party for one nation. The factionalist sycophants who had wormed their way into the leadership of this movement did not care whether the revolution failed or the masses perished, but attempted to win the trust of the Comintern and guarantee their factions’ hegemony, acquiring fame for individuals or their own groups in the uprising. Blinded by fame-seeking and worship of great powers, the factionalists unavoidably fell into the dogmatic error of dancing to others’ tunes.

They had seen the temporary predominance within the party of another country of the “Left” adventurist line of revolt, and without a clear idea as to whether the line was correct or relevant to the specific reality of our revolution, they incited great numbers of the revolutionary masses to revolt, thus causing useless sacrifices and harming the revolution greatly. Second, the uprising progressed in an ultra-Leftist way. The factionalist sycophants had neither a correct understanding of the present stage of the Korean revolution nor any scientific strategy and tactics. But out of a mere subjective desire, they started the revolt under an infeasible, ultra-Leftist slogan of struggle. Regardless of the anti-imperialist, anti-feudal democratic character of the Korean revolution, the organizers of the revolt used the ultra-Leftist slogans, “Let us build a worker-peasant Soviet power!” and “Down with the branches of the Jongui-bu, the Singan Association and the Kunu Association!” and forced the masses to smash all the landlords and capitalists, whether they were pro- or anti-Japanese. Even in some areas the “Leftist” error was committed of setting fire at random to the grain stacks of those who were landlords and rich peasants only in name, and liquidating even the waverers who could have been won over, labelling them minions. These “Leftist” acts prevented the masses in revolt from displaying their revolutionary enthusiasm and participating voluntarily in the struggle. These acts caused confusion particularly among many of the anti-Japanese masses who could have been won over to the side of the revolution, and instead made them waver. Third, the uprising was an adventure, inadequately prepared and without scientific calculation. A revolt is only successful when the subjective and objective situations mature and the revolutionary forces are sufficiently prepared for a determined attack with an elaborated plan and correct strategy and tactics. However, the organizers of the May 30 Uprising did it in a risky and reckless way, without correct analysis and judgement of the revolutionary situation, without taking proper account of the balance of forces between friends and foes and without correct plans and adequate arrangements.

At that time, the revolutionary organizations in eastern Manchuria were young and still weak. The masses lacked organizational training. This notwithstanding, the masses were goaded to revolt without sufficient revolutionary education. Therefore, some of them, who were not awakened, joined in the revolt without a clear understanding of its purpose and significance. Even in some areas the revolt did not enjoy positive support from the revolutionary masses since mass organizations had only just been formed and the uprising was organized through intimidation and threats. In these areas, therefore, the uprising organizations could not withstand the enemy’s white terror and were soon dissolved. Thus, the reckless “Leftist” May 30 Uprising ended in failure, causing numerous deaths, under the armed suppression by thousands of crack troops of Japanese imperialism and the reactionary Kuomintang warlords.

What, then, have been the consequences of the May 30 Uprising?

First of all, it weakened the relations between the revolutionary organizations and the masses, and separated the latter from the former.

As the revolt was put down and the enemy intensified suppression and widespread massacres, the rioters, who lacked organizational training and had insufficient ideological preparation, lost confidence in victory and regretted having been involved in the struggle. Some of them even went so far as to believe that “the Communist Party is to blame for our ruin” as the enemy’s pillage of innocent people became intolerable. This damaged the reputation of communists among the masses and had such a serious impact that quite a few people, seized with fear, quit the revolutionary organizations. Furthermore, as the struggle was waged in a “Leftist” way, large sections of the masses who could have been involved in the anti-Japanese national liberation revolution fighting side by side with us, went over to the enemy. Next, it resulted in the collapse of fledgling revolutionary hard core, especially of the revolutionary leadership hard core in different regions.”

– Kim Il Sung

• LET US REPUDIATE THE “LEFT” ADVENTURIST LINE AND FOLLOW THE REVOLUTIONARY ORGANIZATIONAL LINE

– Speech Delivered at the Meeting of Party and Young Communist League Cadres Held in Mingyuegou, Yanji County May 20, 1931.

Note: At the time of this speech, Kim Il Sung was only 19 years old, and it is only short segment of the full speech.

#kim il sung #Left adventurism #Ultra leftism #Sycophancy #dogmatism #1931 #quote

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megathethirdfork · 4 years ago

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To The People of Arizona Republic

To say that I was deeply heartened when I saw you turn down an endorsement of Donald Trump, is an understatement. And here’s why:

As an immigrant who grew up in a socialist country in Africa (Ethiopia), I have come to have a high regard for facts, as they were, and a higher regard for those who uphold them—especially while facing a potential foe such as the personality that is Donald Trump, and the position he finds himself in presently as President-elect.

During my formative years, as I witnessed the Berlin-Wall come down, the Warsaw Pact disperse, China rocked at Tiananmen square and my own country’s Communists loose power to forces talking of a market-economy, there was only one thing that I could think of: why it took so long for a political, economic system that is based on lies to finally come undone.

That question would lead to studies in History in an American Liberal arts college and many conversations ruminating on the subject. And this is what I can tell you as a person who witnessed first-hand how lies borough deep into a nation’s core, leaving it empty from the inside out, dear folks of the fourth estate:

It takes time for an idea, good or bad, to sometimes work its way through a state’s political, economic system and prove itself—or come apart at the seams. Lies take time to work their way and be found for what they are: terrible descriptions of reality meant to hide the facts or lead those who follow, astray.

When I witness the modern Republican party of the US, I see some earie similarities with my dear comrades, my nemesis of my childhood, the Commies.

The similarity is in one, specific aspect: a fast and loose relationship with the facts (staying away from the troublesome “truth”), which leads to delusions of greatness or perceived threats; a tendency to construe or misconstrue facts in ways to divide or incite the populous, or re-shape reality in a manner conducive for political gains.

One of the things I highly appreciate about the United States, is that in its firmaments lies a deep and abiding reverence for reason lodged by the framers.

This nation is a beautiful offspring of The Enlightenment and the founders an epitome of that period. Reason is under the hood of this car, not religiosity or ideology.

I have often attributed the US’ greatness to this when speaking to foreigners like me: Americans are not a sanctimonious people, I often say; they tend to have an affinity for the practical, the “down-to-earth,” the “what works”—and a repulsion for the philosophical, the impractical and the fanatical.

It is for this reason that I am motivated to write this letter—because facts are under attack. Oxford dictionary just added the term “post-truth” to its dictionary, stating said term has had 2700% more popularity since the Brexit vote and the Trump election as the Republican candidate. One can only imagine what has happened since the Trump presidential win.

A group of people have correctly identified that in western, democratic nations, the way to victory for certain political movements is to undermine facts and to deploy on the masses a barrage of information that is, on the out-set, hard to discern but has the added benefit of bamboozling the precious facts, the descriptions of reality that we should all endeavor to protect and cling to.

If facts were shares of an important US company (such as GE), then facts are penny stocks in America today. Like a Zimbabwe currency, facts have been discounted while style and fiction are on the ascendency, thanks to a visual media culture that is moving away from the written word.

Somewhere in this battle lies the present Republican Party, unassumingly delivering a platform to the manipulators.

What I appreciated about what you did in your non-endorsement of Trump (along with other intrepid souls and a handful of conservative media outlets), is that you stood for facts and consequently for its kin—reason.

This is a great country right now. And it has the potential to be greater still, provided its leaders don’t go down the path of lies, delusion and reality manipulation—the known tools of all despots, including the Commies I grew up, from Ethiopia to the former Soviet Union and the satellite nations of yesteryear. When facts are sacrificed for political gains, then something else is foisted on the masses, which will, sooner or later, eat-up that system, entity or nation. This, too, shall be proven in time—but at great cost. For confirmation, you only have to observe what takes place outside your borders.

Please understand that this is not in any shape or form an endorsement of Hillary Clinton or the Democratic Party in general. But as I look to the current American Republic Party and how it seems to have become a conduit for purposeful fiction (the fond term of my childhood Commies was propaganda), I see a party that has negotiated a terrible deal with the facts for political ends. And that, I believe, is tinkering with the firmaments of this great nation.

I will be looking for such a stand for reason from regional papers such as yours’, who are, I believe, the critical pillars of the American Civilization.

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nodynasty4us · 5 years ago

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From the January 21, 2020 analysis:

The impeachment inquiry focuses on Trump’s apparent effort to leverage state power to discredit and undermine a political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden. A leader targeting political opponents with trumped-up charges or selective investigations is textbook authoritarian behavior. ... But there’s a wrinkle in Trump’s case: He tried and failed to wield the American justice system against other enemies (James Comey and Hillary Clinton) and so resorted to leaning on the mechanisms of power of a foreign nation—one much more vulnerable to corruption and influence. Tellingly, he has also called on China, an authoritarian state, to investigate the Bidens.

And:

A useful framework for our current moment is suggested by the Dutch political scientist Marlies Glasius, who proposes that we devote less attention to identifying authoritarian regimes and more on authoritarian practices. Freely elected leaders like Rodrigo Duterte, Narendra Modi, and Donald Trump are not “authoritarian” in the same way as leaders of China, Saudi Arabia, or Russia, where opposition groups are barred and elections are either fraudulent or nonexistent. But that doesn’t mean that they can’t take authoritarian actions. Recent events in India, where widespread protests have broken out against a proposed law that bars Muslims from the same path to citizenship enjoyed by migrants of other religions, makes this very clear. India is still “the world’s largest democracy” and Modi enjoys popular legitimacy. ...

...

Why is authoritarianism globalizing? For one thing, countries are more economically interdependent than ever before. During the Cold War, East bloc countries sought to prevent their citizens from having access to American consumer goods. Today, China and the United States are strategic and ideological foes but deeply enmeshed in each other’s economies. China is both making and consuming those consumer goods. This interdependence creates leverage: Countries like China can use the size of their markets to induce foreign firms and governments to play by its rules, even when those rules run contrary to those other countries professed political values.

#authoritarianism #donald trump #china #ukraine #india #russia #saudi arabia

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fuckyeahmarxismleninism · 6 years ago

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Carrying portraits of Mao and singing socialist anthems, they espoused the very ideals that the government fed them for years in mandatory ideological classes, voicing grievances about issues like poverty, worker rights and gender equality — some of communism’s core concerns.

“What we are doing is entirely legal and reasonable,” said Chen Kexin, a senior at Renmin University in Beijing who took part in the protests. “We are Marxists. We praise socialism. We stand with workers. The authorities can’t target us.”

But they have. On the morning of Aug. 24, police officers wearing riot gear raided the four-bedroom apartment the activists were renting in Huizhou and detained about 50 people. As the police burst through the door, the activists held hands and sang “L’Internationale.”

Though some have been released, 14 activists and workers remain in custody or under house arrest, according to labor rights advocates. The local police accused the workers of acting on behalf of foreign nongovernmental organizations.

#youth

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gerryconway · 6 years ago

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If you're not worried about Russia's military intelligence service, you haven't been paying attention the last few years.

We're in an undeclared war with a post-ideological foe and as a country we've chosen to ignore that fact. Without the easy label of "Communism" to label our enemies, we think we're the undisputed masters of the world. The truth is, after decades of a relatively peaceful Cold War and Post Cold War international order, we're settling back into 19th Century Big Power politics, and if that doesn't terrify you, then you never learned enough history to know those politics led directly to World Wars I and II. In the 19th Century, the Big Powers were England, France, Germany and Russia, with Italy and Japan as junior partners. Today, they're the United States, China and Russia, with the European Union and the Arab States as junior partners. What happened before can happen again. Human nature hasn't suddenly matured in the last century, and neither have the political forces that make nations compete for power. Russia, like Germany in the early 20th Century, is an aggrieved power that wants more influence over world events. Like Germany it's led by a reckless, angry man who's shown a willingness to commit reckless acts of provocation against his perceived national enemies. The sooner we face that fact as a country the sooner we'll develop a strategy to handle the threat he presents.

#Russia #War #History

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samuelcarveraccidentman · 6 years ago

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IT HAS FOR so long been a country of such unmet potential that the scale of Pakistan’s dereliction towards its people is easily forgotten. Yet on every measure of progress, Pakistanis fare atrociously. More than 20m children are deprived of school. Less than 30% of women are employed. Exports have grown at a fifth of the rate in Bangladesh and India over the past 20 years. And now the ambitions of the new government under Imran Khan, who at least acknowledges his country’s problems (see Briefing), are thwarted by a balance-of-payments crisis. If Mr Khan gets an IMF bail-out, it will be Pakistan’s 22nd. The persistence of poverty and maladministration, and the instability they foster, is a disaster for the world’s sixth-most-populous country. Thanks to its nuclear weapons and plentiful religious zealots, it poses a danger for the world, too.

Many, including Mr Khan, blame venal politicians for Pakistan’s problems. Others argue that Pakistan sits in a uniquely hostile part of the world, between war-torn Afghanistan and implacable India. Both these woes are used to justify the power of the armed forces. Yet the army’s pre-eminence is precisely what lies at the heart of Pakistan’s troubles. The army lords it over civilian politicians. Last year it helped cast out the previous prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, and engineer Mr Khan’s rise (as it once did Mr Sharif’s).

Since the founding of Pakistan in 1947, the army has not just defended state ideology but defined it, in two destructive ways. The country exists to safeguard Islam, not a tolerant, prosperous citizenry. And the army, believing the country to be surrounded by enemies, promotes a doctrine of persecution and paranoia.

The effects are dire. Religiosity has bred an extremism that at times has looked like tearing Pakistan apart. The state backed those who took up arms in the name of Islam. Although they initially waged war on Pakistan’s perceived enemies, before long they began to wreak havoc at home. Some 60,000 Pakistanis have died at the hands of militants, most of whom come under the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). The army at last moved against them following an appalling school massacre in 2014. Yet even today it shelters violent groups it finds useful. Some leaders of the Afghan Taliban reside in Quetta. The presumed instigator of a series of attacks in Mumbai in 2008, which killed 174, remains a free man.

Melding religion and state has other costs, including the harsh suppression of local identities—hence long-running insurgencies in Baloch and Pushtun areas. Religious minorities, such as the Ahmadis, are cruelly persecuted. As for the paranoia, the army is no more the state’s glorious guardian than India is the implacable foe. Of the four wars between the two countries, all of which Pakistan lost, India launched only one, in 1971—to put an end to the genocide Pakistan was unleashing in what became Bangladesh. Even if politicking before a coming general election obscures it, development interests India more than picking fights.

The paranoid doctrine helps the armed forces commandeer resources. More money goes to them than on development. Worse, it has bred a habit of geopolitical blackmail: help us financially or we might add to your perils in a very dangerous part of the world. This is at the root of Pakistan’s addiction to aid, despite its prickly nationalism. The latest iteration of this is China’s $60bn investment in roads, railways, power plants and ports, known as the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). The fantasy that, without other transformations, prosperity can be brought in from outside is underscored by CPEC’s transport links. Without an opening to India, they will never fulfil their potential. But the army blocks any rapprochement.

Mr Khan’s government can do much to improve things. It should increase its tax take by clamping down on evasion, give independence to the monetary authority and unify the official and black-market exchange rates. Above all, it should seek to boost competitiveness and integrate Pakistan’s economy with the world’s. All that can raise growth.

Yet the challenge is so much greater. By mid-century, Pakistan’s population will have increased by half. Only sizzling rates of economic growth can guarantee Pakistanis a decent life, and that demands profound change in how the economy works, people are taught and welfare is conceived. Failing so many, in contrast, really will be felt beyond the country’s borders.

Transformation depends on Pakistan doing away with the state’s twin props of religion and paranoia—and with them the army’s power. Mr Khan is not obviously the catalyst for radical change. But he must recognise the problem. He has made a start by standing up to demagogues baying for the death of Asia Bibi, a Christian labourer falsely accused of blasphemy.

However, wholesale reform is beyond the reach of any one individual, including the prime minister. Many politicians, businesspeople, intellectuals, journalists and even whisky-swilling generals would far rather a more secular Pakistan. They should speak out. Yes, for some there are risks, not least to their lives or liberty. But for most—especially if they act together—the elites have nothing to lose but their hypocrisy

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syedrezaabbas · 7 years ago

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What World Personalities Quote about Imam Hussain (as)

Mahatma Gandhi (Father of the Nation – India)

“My admiration for the noble sacrifice of Imam Hussein (a.s) as a martyr abounds, because he accepted death and the torture of thrust for himself, for his sons, and for his whole family, but did not submit to unjust authorities.” “I learnt from Hussain how to achieve victory while being oppressed.”

“My faith is that the progress of Islam does not depend on the use of sword by its believers, but the result of the supreme sacrifice of Hussain.”

“If India wants to be a successful country, it must follow in the footsteps of Imam Hussain (as).

“If I had an army like the 72 soldiers of Hussain, I would have won freedom for India in 24 hours.”

Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru (1st Prime Minister of India)

“There is a universal appeal in his martyrdom. Hazrat Imam Hussein (a.s) sacrificed his all, but he refused to submit to a tyrannical government. He never gave any weight to the fact that his material force was far less in comparison with that of an enemy; the power of faith to his greatest force, which regards all material force as nothing. This sacrifice is a beacon light of guidance for every community and every nation”

“Imam Hussain’s sacrifice is for all groups and communities, an example of the path of righteousness.”

Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1st President of Pakistan)

“The world is unable to present an example finer and brighter than the personality of Imam Hussein (a.s). He was the embodiment of love, valor and personification of sacrifice and devotion. Every Muslim, in particular, must learn a lesson from his life and should seek guidance from him.”

Reynold Alleyne Nicholson (Eminent English orientalist scholar of both Islamic literature and Islamic mysticism)

“Hussain fell, pierced by an arrow, and his brave followers were cut down beside him to the last man. Muhammadan tradition, which with rare exceptions is uniformly hostile to the Umayyad dynasty, regards Hussain as a martyr and Yazid as his murderer.”

Edward Gibbon (English historian and member of parliament)

“In a distant age and climate the tragic scene of the death of Hussain will awaken the sympathy of the coldest reader.” [The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, London, 1911, volume 5, pp391-2]

James Corne (Author of History of China)

“Hussain and his companions faced eight kinds of enemies. On the four sides the army of Yezid was their enemy which was ceaselessly raining arrows; the fifth foe was the sun of Arabia that was scorching the bodies; the sixth foe was the desert of Karbala the sands of which were scorching like a heated furnace; the seventh and eighth foes were the overpowering hunger and the unbearable thirst. Thus on those who fought with thousands of infidels in such conditions has ended bravado; on such a people no gallant (hero) can ever have pre-eminence.”

Rabindranath Tagore (Indian Nobel Prize in Literature 1913)

“The world of things in which we live misses its equilibrium when its communication with the world of love is lost. Then we have to pay with our soul for objects which are immensely cheap. And this can only happen when the prison walls of things threaten us with being final in themselves. Then it gives rise to terrible fights, jealousies and coercions, to a scramble for space and opportunities, for these are limited. We become painfully aware of the evil of this and try all measures of adjustment within the narrow bonds of a mutilated truth. This leads to failure. Only he helps us who proves by his life that we have a soul whose dwelling in the kingdom of love, and things lose the tyranny of fictitious price when we come to our spiritual freedom.”

“In order to keep alive justice and truth, instead of an army or weapons, success can be achieved by sacrificing lives, exactly what Imam Hussain did.”

“Imam Hussain is the leader of humanity.”

“Imam Hussain (a.s.) will warm the coldest heart.”

“Hussain’s sacrifice indicates spiritual liberation.”

Dr. Rajendra Prasad (1st President of India)

“The sacrifice of Imam Hussain is not limited to one country, or nation, but it is the hereditary state of the brotherhood of all mankind.”

Dr. Radha Krishnan (Ex President of India)

“Though Imam Hussain gave his life almost 1300 years ago, but his indestructible soul rules the hearts of people even today.”

Swami Shankaracharya (Hindu Religious Priest)

“It is Hussain’s sacrifice that has kept Islam alive or else in this world there would be no one left to take Islam’s name.”

Sarojini Naidu (Great India Poetess titled Nightingale of India)

“I congratulate Muslims that from among them, Hussain, a great human being was born, who is revered and honored totally by all communities.”

Thomas Carlyle (Scottish historian and essayist)

“The best lesson which we get fromthe tragedy of Cerebella is that Husain and his companions were rigid believers in God. They illustrated that the numerical superiority does not count when it comes to the truth and the falsehood. The victory of Husain, despite his minority, marvels me!”

Charles Dickens (English novelist)

“If Husain had fought to quench his worldly desires…then I do not understand why his sister, wife, and children accompanied him. It stands to reason therefore, that he sacrificed purely for Islam.”

Edward G. Brown (Professor at the University of Cambridge)

“…a reminder of that blood-stained field of Karbala, where the grandson of the Apostle of God fell, at length, tortured by thirst, and surround by the bodies of his murdered kinsmen, has been at anytime since then, sufficient to evoke, even in the most lukewarm and the heedless, the deepest emotion, the most frantic grief, and an exaltation of spirit before which pain, danger, and death shrink to unconsidered trifles.” (A Literary History of Persia, London, 1919, p.227)

Sir William Muir (Scottish orientalist)

“The tragedy of Karbala decided not only the fate of the Caliphate, but also of Mohammadan kingdoms long after the Caliphate had waned and is appeared.” (Annals of the Early Caliphate, London, 1883, p.441-442)

Ignaz Goldziher (Hungarian orientalist)

“…Weeping and lamentation over the evils and persecutions suffered by the ‘Alid family, and mourning for its martyrs: these are things from which loyal supporters of the cause cannot cease. ‘More touching than the tears of the Shi’is’ has even become an Arabic proverb.” (Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law, Princeton, 1981, p.179)

Dr. K. Sheldrake

“Of that gallant band, male and female knew that the enemy forces around were implacable, and were not only ready to fight, but to kill. Denied even water for the children, they remained parched under the burning sun and scorching sands, yet not one faltered for a moment. Husain marched with his little company, not to glory, not to power of wealth, but to a supreme sacrifice, and every member bravely faced the greatest odds without flinching.”

Antoine Bara (Lebanese writer)

“No battle in the modern and past history of mankind has earned more sympathy and admiration as well as provided more lessons than the martyrdom of Husain in the battle of Karbala.” (Husain in Christian Ideology)

Washington Irwing (American author, essayist, biographer and historian)

“It was possible for Hussein to save his life by submitting himself to the will of Yazid. But his responsibility as a reformer did not allow him to accept Yazid’s Caliphate. He therefore prepared to embrace all sorts discomfort and inconvenience in order to deliver Islam from the hands of the Omayyads. Under the blazing sun, on the parched land and against the stiffing heat of Arabia, stood the immortal Hussein.”

Al Fakhri (Famous Arab Historian)

“This is a catastrophe whereof I care not to speak at length, deeming it alike too grievous and too horrible. For verily, it was a catastrophe than that which naught more shameful has happened in Islam…There happened therein such a foul slaughter as to cause man’s flesh to creep with horror. And again I have dispersed with my long description because of it’s notoriety, for it is the most lamented of catastrophes.”

Maulana Mohammad Ali Jauhar (Pioneer of the Khilafat Movement and a dauntless fighter in the struggle of independence)

“In the murder of Hussain, lies the death of Yazid, for Islam resurrects after every Karbala”

Allama Iqbal (Famous Poet)

“Imam Hussein uprooted despotism forever, till the day of Resurrection. He watered the dry gardens of freedom with a surging wave of his blood, and indeed he awakened the sleeping Muslim nation. If Imam Hussein (a.s) had aimed at acquiring the worldly empire, he would not have traveled the way he did. Hussein weltered in blood and dust for the sake of truth. Verily, therefore he becomes the foundation of Muslim creed. ‘La Ilaha Illallah’, meaning there is no deity but Allah (God).”

Josh Malihabadi (Shaayar-e-Inqilaab or The Revolutionary Poet)

“Let humanity awakens and every tribe will claim Hussain as their own.

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xtruss · 3 years ago

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Tony Blair, The War Criminal Ghoul: Why We Must Not Abandon the People of Afghanistan – For Their Sakes and Ours

— August 21, 2021

The abandonment of Afghanistan and its people is tragic, dangerous, unnecessary, not in their interests and not in ours. In the aftermath of the decision to return Afghanistan to the same group from which the carnage of 9/11 arose, and in a manner that seems almost designed to parade our humiliation, the question posed by allies and enemies alike is: has the West lost its strategic will? Meaning: is it able to learn from experience, think strategically, define our interests strategically and on that basis commit strategically? Is long term a concept we are still capable of grasping? Is the nature of our politics now inconsistent with the assertion of our traditional global leadership role? And do we care?

As the leader of our country when we took the decision to join the United States in removing the Taliban from power – and who saw the high hopes we had of what we could achieve for the people and the world subside under the weight of bitter reality – I know better than most how difficult the decisions of leadership are, and how easy it is to be critical and how hard to be constructive.

Almost 20 years ago, following the slaughter of 3,000 people on US soil on 11 September, the world was in turmoil. The attacks were organised out of Afghanistan by al-Qaeda, an Islamist terrorist group given protection and assistance by the Taliban. We forget this now, but the world was spinning on its axis. We feared further attacks, possibly worse. The Taliban were given an ultimatum: yield up the al-Qaeda leadership or be removed from power so that Afghanistan could not be used for further attacks. They refused. We felt there was no safer alternative for our security than keeping our word.

We held out the prospect, backed by substantial commitment, of turning Afghanistan from a failed terror state into a functioning democracy on the mend. It may have been a misplaced ambition, but it was not an ignoble one. There is no doubt that in the years that followed we made mistakes, some serious. But the reaction to our mistakes has been, unfortunately, further mistakes. Today we are in a mood that seems to regard the bringing of democracy as a utopian delusion and intervention, virtually of any sort, as a fool’s errand.

The world is now uncertain of where the West stands because it is so obvious that the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan in this way was driven not by grand strategy but by politics.

We didn't need to do it. We chose to do it. We did it in obedience to an imbecilic political slogan about ending “the forever wars”, as if our engagement in 2021 was remotely comparable to our commitment 20 or even ten years ago, and in circumstances in which troop numbers had declined to a minimum and no allied soldier had lost their life in combat for 18 months.

We did it in the knowledge that though worse than imperfect, and though immensely fragile, there were real gains over the past 20 years. And for anyone who disputes that, read the heartbreaking laments from every section of Afghan society as to what they fear will now be lost. Gains in living standards, education particularly of girls, gains in freedom. Not nearly what we hoped or wanted. But not nothing. Something worth defending. Worth protecting.

We did it when the sacrifices of our troops had made those fragile gains our duty to preserve.

We did it when the February 2020 agreement, itself replete with concessions to the Taliban, by which the US agreed to withdraw if the Taliban negotiated a broad-based government and protected civilians, had been violated daily and derisively.

We did it with every jihadist group around the world cheering.

Russia, China and Iran will see and take advantage. Anyone given commitments by Western leaders will understandably regard them as unstable currency.

We did it because our politics seemed to demand it. And that’s the worry of our allies and the source of rejoicing in those who wish us ill.

They think Western politics is broken.

Unsurprisingly therefore friends and foes ask: is this a moment when the West is in epoch-changing retreat?

I can't believe we are in such retreat, but we are going to have to give tangible demonstration that we are not.

This demands an immediate response in respect of Afghanistan. And then measured and clear articulation of where we stand for the future.

We must evacuate and give sanctuary to those to whom we have responsibility – those Afghans who helped us, stood by us and have a right to demand we stand by them. There must be no repetition of arbitrary deadlines. We have a moral obligation to keep at it until all those who need to be are evacuated. And we should do so not grudgingly but out of a deep sense of humanity and responsibility.

We need then to work out a means of dealing with the Taliban and exerting maximum pressure on them. This is not as empty as it seems. We have given up much of our leverage, but we retain some. The Taliban will face very difficult decisions and likely divide deeply over them. The country, its finances and public-sector workforce are significantly dependent on aid notably from the US, Japan, the UK and others. The average age of the population is 18. A majority of Afghans have known freedom and not known the Taliban regime. They will not all conform quietly.

The UK, as the current G7 chair, should convene a Contact Group of the G7 and other key nations, and commit to coordinating help to the Afghan people and holding the new regime to account. NATO – which has had 8,000 troops present in Afghanistan alongside the US – and Europe should be brought fully into cooperation under this grouping.

We need to draw up a list of incentives, sanctions and actions we can take, including to protect the civilian population so the Taliban understand their actions will have consequences.

This is urgent. The disarray of the past weeks needs to be replaced by something resembling coherence, and with a plan that is credible and realistic.

But then we must answer that overarching question. What are our strategic interests and are we prepared any longer to commit to upholding them?

Compare the Western position with that of President Putin. When the Arab Spring convulsed the Middle East and North Africa toppling regime after regime, he perceived that Russia’s interests were at stake. In particular, in Syria, he believed that Russia needed Assad to stay in power. While the West hesitated and then finally achieved the worst of all worlds – refusing to negotiate with Assad, but not doing anything to remove him, even when he used chemical weapons against his own people – Putin committed. He has spent ten years in open-ended commitment. And though he was intervening to prop up a dictatorship and we were intervening to suppress one, he, along with the Iranians, secured his goal. Likewise, though we removed the Qaddafi government in Libya, it is Russia, not us, who has influence over the future.

Afghanistan was hard to govern all through the 20 years of our time there. And of course, there were mistakes and miscalculations. But we shouldn’t dupe ourselves into thinking it was ever going to be anything other than tough, when there was an internal insurgency combining with external support – in this case, Pakistan – to destabilise the country and thwart its progress.

The Afghan army didn’t hold up once US support was cancelled, but 60,000 Afghan soldiers gave their lives, and any army would have suffered a collapse in morale when effective air support vital for troops in the field was scuttled by the overnight withdrawal of maintenance.

There was endemic corruption in government, but there were also good people doing good work to the benefit of the people.

Read the excellent summary of what we got right and wrong from General Petraeus in his New Yorker interview.

It often dashed our hopes, but it was never hopeless.

Despite everything, if it mattered strategically, it was worth persevering provided that the cost was not inordinate and here it wasn't.

If it matters, you go through the pain. Even when you are rightly disheartened, you can't lose heart completely. Your friends need to feel it and your foes need to know it.

“If it matters.”

So: does it? Is what is happening in Afghanistan part of a picture that concerns our strategic interests and engages them profoundly?

Some would say no. We have not had another attack on the scale of 9/11, though no-one knows whether that is because of what we did post 9/11 or despite it. You could say that terrorism remains a threat but not one that occupies the thoughts of a lot of our citizens, certainly not to the degree in the years following 9/11.

You could see different elements of jihadism as disconnected, with local causes and containable with modern intelligence.

I would still argue that even if this were right and the action in removing the Taliban in November 2001 was unnecessary, the decision to withdraw was wrong. But it wouldn’t make this a turning point in geopolitics.

But let me make the alternative case – that the Taliban is part of a bigger picture that should concern us strategically.

The 9/11 attack exploded into our consciousness because of its severity and horror. But the motivation for such an atrocity arose from an ideology many years in development. I will call it “Radical Islam” for want of a better term. As a research paper shortly to be published by my Institute shows, this ideology in different forms, and with varying degrees of extremism, has been almost 100 years in gestation.

Its essence is the belief that Muslim people are disrespected and disadvantaged because they are oppressed by outside powers and their own corrupt leadership, and that the answer lies in Islam returning to its roots, creating a state based not on nations but on religion, with society and politics governed by a strict and fundamentalist view of Islam.

It is the turning of the religion of Islam into a political ideology and, of necessity, an exclusionary and extreme one because in a multi-faith and multicultural world, it holds there is only one true faith and we should all conform to it.

Over the past decades and well before 9/11, it was gaining in strength. The 1979 Iranian Islamic Revolution and its echo in the failed storming of the Grand Mosque in Mecca in late 1979 massively boosted the forces of this radicalism. The Muslim Brotherhood became a substantial movement. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan saw jihadism rise.

In time other groups have sprung up: Boko Haram, al-Shabab, al-Qaeda, ISIS and many others.

Some are violent. Some not. Sometimes they fight each other. But at other times, as with Iran and al-Qaeda, they cooperate. But all subscribe to basic elements of the same ideology.

Today, there is a vast process of destabilisation going on in the Sahel, the group of countries across the northern part of sub-Saharan Africa. This will be the next wave of extremism and immigration that will inevitably hit Europe.

My Institute works in many African countries. Barely a president I know does not think this is a huge problem for them and for some it is becoming THE problem.

Iran uses proxies like Hizbullah to undermine moderate Arab countries in the Middle East. Lebanon is teetering on the brink of collapse.

Turkey has moved increasingly down the Islamist path in recent years.

In the West, we have sections of our own Muslim communities radicalised.

Even more moderate Muslim nations such as Indonesia and Malaysia have, over a period of decades, seen their politics become more Islamic in practice and discourse.

Look no further than Pakistan’s prime minister congratulating the Taliban on their “victory” to see that although, of course, many of those espousing Islamism are opposed to violence, they share ideological characteristics with many of those who use it – and a world view that is constantly presenting Islam as under siege from the West.

Islamism is a long-term structural challenge because it is an ideology utterly inconsistent with modern societies based on tolerance and secular government.

Yet Western policymakers can't even agree to call it “Radical Islam”. We prefer to identify it as a set of disconnected challenges, each to be dealt with separately.

If we did define it as a strategic challenge, and saw it in whole and not as parts, we would never have taken the decision to pull out of Afghanistan.

We are in the wrong rhythm of thinking in relation to Radical Islam. With Revolutionary Communism, we recognised it as a threat of a strategic nature, which required us to confront it both ideologically and with security measures. It lasted more than 70 years. Throughout that time, we would never have dreamt of saying, “well, we have been at this for a long time, we should just give up.”

We knew we had to have the will, the capacity and the staying power to see it through. There were different arenas of conflict and engagement, different dimensions, varying volumes of anxiety as the threat ebbed and flowed.

But we understood it was a real menace and we combined across nations and parties to deal with it.

This is what we need to decide now with Radical Islam. Is it a strategic threat? If so, how do those opposed to it including within Islam, combine to defeat it?

We have learnt the perils of intervention in the way we intervened in Afghanistan, Iraq and indeed Libya. But non-intervention is also policy with consequence.

What is absurd is to believe the choice is between what we did in the first decade after 9/11 and the retreat we are witnessing now: to treat our full-scale military intervention of November 2001 as of the same nature as the secure and support mission in Afghanistan of recent times.

Intervention can take many forms. We need to do it learning the proper lessons of the past 20 years according not to our short-term politics, but our long-term strategic interests.

But intervention requires commitment. Not time limited by political timetables but by obedience to goals.

For Britain and the US, these questions are acute. The absence of across-the-aisle consensus and collaboration and the deep politicisation of foreign policy and security issues is visibly atrophying US power. And for Britain, out of Europe and suffering the end of the Afghanistan mission by our greatest ally with little or no consultation, we have serious reflection to do. We don’t see it yet. But we are at risk of relegation to the second division of global powers. Maybe we don’t mind. But we should at least take the decision deliberatively.

There are of course many other important issues in geopolitics: Covid-19, climate, the rise of China, poverty, disease and development.

But sometimes an issue comes to mean something not only in its own right but as a metaphor, as a clue to the state of things and the state of peoples.

If the West wants to shape the 21st century, it will take commitment. Through thick and thin. When it’s rough as well as easy. Making sure allies have confidence and opponents caution. Accumulating a reputation for constancy and respect for the plan we have and the skill in its implementation.

It will require parts of the right in politics to understand that isolation in an interconnected world is self-defeating, and parts of the left to accept that intervention can sometimes be necessary to uphold our values.

It requires us to learn lessons from the 20 years since 9/11 in a spirit of humility – and the respectful exchange of different points of view – but also with a sense of rediscovery that we in the West represent values and interests worth being proud of and defending.

And that commitment to those values and interests needs to define our politics and not our politics define our commitment.

This is the large strategic question posed by these last days of chaos in Afghanistan. And on the answer will depend the world’s view of us and our view of ourselves.

— War Criminal Ghoul Tony Blair: Former Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and Executive Chairman of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change

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