First: To my knowledge, sanctions have never lead to regime change. They didn’t in Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, Libya, or anywhere else — not even North Korea and Cuba, which are still under some seriously savage sanctions.
Second: The targeted country’s leadership can still have pretty much whatever they want, it’s the population which suffers.
Third: While, in most ways, Russia is weaker than the USSR, it has a food surplus, while the Soviets always struggled. You can’t starve them out. It also has a fairly decent medical industry and access to Chinese and Indian medicines. Also, if sanctions continue, they will break our IP.
Fourth: The USSR didn’t have the largest industrial nation in the world as its ally (that would be China, not the US).
Fifth: China and Russia are synergistic. What China needs (food (desperately), oil, and minerals), Russia has. What Russia needs (consumer goods, medium to high-ish tech), China has. Plus, for China, having Russia as an ally mitigates the whole “US Navy cutting off supplies at the Straits of Hormuz” situation that every Chinese leader since Deng has stayed up nights worrying about.
Sixth: The logical response for Russia and China is to link their payments systems and to create an alternate monetary system. Because the West has repeatedly stolen billions of dollars from countries foolish enough to keep them on reserve in the West and then get on the West’s bad side, a lot of nations will move over to that system. Honestly, I’d trust China more than I would trust US not to steal my reserves, at this point.
Nobody seems to be thinking this forward. If sanctions don’t take out Russia and force it to collapse and/or have a government we like, what are we going to do next?
And as sanctions have never taken out a government, what’s our plan? Right now, it seems like the only alternative is to have a long guerilla war in Ukraine and bleed Russia dry. This strategy might work, though the human cost will be monstrous. (But then, why would the West care? We’re fighting to the last Ukrainian, after all.)
But if sanctions don’t work, and the guerilla trap doesn’t, what’s our Plan C? It’s particularly important because these sanctions are going to do a lot of damage to ourselves including, very likely, destroying the IP system that makes our rich so rich. (I, personally, look forward to Russia, and later China, breaking our IP system, but I don’t imagine high tech firms and/or Disney are as thrilled.)
There’s a lot of nonsense going around, including talk of Russia losing the war because, less than five days into the war, they haven’t conquered Ukraine.
The German blitz of Poland took five weeks. The conquest of France took six weeks — and people were astonished. Ukraine is the largest country in Europe except for Russia itself.
The sources I respect say that Russia is taking losses, but the war is not in question, and they are advancing about as fast as the US did into Iraq. Russia will win the war, though they may take more damage than they expected (but as we have no idea what they expected, who knows?). Ukraine is a modern equipped army; it isn’t Iraq with obsolete equipment, or Libya, or Afghanistan.
The question is not whether Russia wins the war, it is who wins the peace.
What the US and Europe want is to turn Ukraine into a guerilla quagmire, like Afghanistan in the 80s, or like Iraq and Afghanistan were for the US.
What Russia wants is to turn Ukraine into a guaranteed neutral state and withdraw its troops out of the country, minus Donbas and Luhansk.
The good result for the Ukraine, which most Westerners don’t seem to get, is what the Russians want. Austria was neutral in the Cold War, and that was not horrid. A multi-year guerilla campaign will devastate Ukraine in ways that will take generations from which to recover, because if the Russians have to fight an insurgency, they will be utterly brutal, as they were in Chechnya (successfully).
Moralist yapping about “the right to choose” is off the board. The only good result for Ukraine and Ukrainians is a negotiated settlement. The West egged them on and left them to swing, as the smart people said they would.
This video, predicting this situation in 2015, is pretty much required watching.
As for the economic consequences for Russia due to sanctions, it depends on what they are. If they are stopped from selling oil, natural gas, and wheat to the West, that will hurt. Sanctions less severe than that will be painful, but not crippling.
The problem here is China. For the last six years or so, the US has declared that China is an enemy. They used sanctions to cripple the most important tech company in China, Huawei, and have slapped sanctions and tariffs on China.
Chinese leadership sees a confrontation with the US as inevitable. They had hoped to keep good relations with Europe, but European countries have bowed to US pressure to shut out Huawei based on jingoistic claims that “they’ll spy on you,” which is hilarious. “Instead of us being able to see all your info, the Chinese will!”
China needs Russia’s resources: oil, wheat, and minerals. They know that they can be cut off from most other sources, but because of geography, and because Russia needs China, Russia is a safe supplier. In turn, China can let Russia into their SWIFT equivalent, finance them, and sell that almost every manufactured good they need, with a few exceptions (primarily semiconductor based, but China’s working on that).
Further, to let Russia fall would mean that China would be encircled. The CCP isn’t that stupid.
Basically, the West wants to use sanctions to “choke out” Russia, but China believes the West will then want to use sanctions to choke them out. If they let Russia go down, they’re next (they’re next either way, really, but they can have a major ally or not).
What the US has succeeded in doing is making Europe choose to turn their back not just on Russia, but, inevitably, on China as well.
This is a strong cold war coalition (Cold War is our future, as I have been saying for about four years now), but notice that it is not as strong as the previous cold war, because China is now the primary manufacturing power and the most populous nation, not the US.
Most of Africa, the Middle East, and South America is staying out of this. Even India refused to vote against Russia in the Security Council. Three of the four gulf states refused to vote against Russia, and, in the UN general assembly, the West is struggling to get 50 percent to vote against Russia.
In the West, we have a huge propaganda bubble going on — “Russia is the worst ever, blah, blah, blah.” What they have done is certainly a crime, but no one outside the bubble can take American and European whinging seriously; they remember Iraq, and Libya, and know that the US still occupies Syrian oil fields, while US ally Saudi Arabia bombs the hell out of Yemen, and Israel has annexed land from neighbouring states (supposedly Russia’s great crime).
Russia has done something bad, but this is not about morality. It is about power. Only the US and its allies are supposed to be able to do what Russia is doing, and people outside the Western bubble recognize this hypocrisy.
The Chinese Embassy in Russia tweeted this:
Among the 248 armed conflicts that occurred in 153 regions across the world from 1945 to 2001, 201 were initiated by the #US, accounting for 81% of the total number. pic.twitter.com/Kjn81VIVXP
— Chinese Embassy in Russia 中国驻俄罗斯大使馆 (@ChineseEmbinRus) February 25, 2022
Indians I follow are noting that Russia has been a firm friend to India since independence, and that the US and Europe have not been.
So the question here is whether or not Russia gets drawn into a guerilla quagmire. If it doesn’t, the question then becomes: How hard will the sanctions hit? In the medium to long term, this leads down the road to two separate economic and political regions and a new cold war, as I have been stating for years.
Despite the hysteria, nothing here is surprising. Russia asked for Ukraine as neutral and security guarantees, and didn’t get them. So they invaded, exactly as I wrote (in advance) was likely. Measheimer predicted this in 2015 (video above), and George Kennan, the architect of the Cold War containment policy, noted that NATO expansion would lead to this back in the 90s.
Russia is not Iraq. It is not Iran. It is not Venezuela. It is not Libya. It cannot be treated as minor state who can be choked out by the West at the West’s whim, especially not when the US has been stupid enough to tell China it is also an enemy.
Even in realpolitik terms, telling both Russia and China they are your enemy, at the same time, is breathtakingly stupid.
If you want the best for Ukraine, hope they negotiate soon. The longer they wait, the weaker their negotiating position. The best case for Ukraine is now (as it was three months ago) an Austrian-style neutrality agreement. There will be overflights and inspections, but that’s just how it’s going to be.
The world, outside the West and some of its closest allies, is not in hysteria about this. They recognize it’s aggressive war, but they do not see that what Russia has done is worse than American and European behavior over the last 20 years. Indeed, at least so far, and unless the US gets its wish for a guerilla quagmire, this is not nearly as bad as Iraq.
So relax and take a deep breath. This is bad, and there is a tiny chance of a miscalculation that will kill us all in nuclear armageddon. But, mostly, this is just geopolitics playing out as anyone with sense knew it would. The US has split Europe from Russia — and soon China and Russia will be strong allies, and a new cold war will occur, though how soon this will be crystal clear to everyone is, well, unclear.
Putin recognized the breakaway regions, moved troops in, and is now attacking and bombing Ukraine — just as both Serbia and Georgie were attacked. I didn’t expect the general invasion, but I should have, especially since I wrote:
It’s ironic revenge for Kosovo and Serbia. Say there are atrocities/genocide, recognize a break-away, bomb and use troops to enforce your will.
I will be surprised (and wrong) if there is a general occupation of Ukraine, but it is possible because of the NordStream cancellation. What will most likely happen is the Ukrainian military will be defeated in the field, as were the Georgian and Serbian militaries, to make the point that they can’t resist, they have to let Russia do what it wants, and, as Putin himself has said, to demilitarize it. (“We destroyed your military, and you will not build one up or let foreign troops in, or we will do it again.”)
If Putin does occupy Ukraine, it will be because he considers it (like Taiwan) nothing more than a breakaway province, considers Western sanctions inevitable (he said so in his most recent speech), and figures, “Fuck it, might as well take the pain now as later.”
It was wise of NATO nations to remove diplomats, as that means it won’t matter if there’s an “accidental” embassy bombing, which is what happened to the Chinese embassy during the Serbian war.
With the announcement that NordStream will not happen, Russia has very little reason to play by Western rules (we can do it, you can’t), and they won’t.
Welcome to the world I have been predicting for a few years. Russia will be increasingly cut off, China is next on the list (they will not cooperate with US and European sanctions on Russia), and the world will split into two economic areas at cold war, though it won’t be immediate unless things spiral completely out of control.
The history of capitalism and democracy shows that we need to choose one or the other. The problem is that capitalism concentrates power in the hands of a few people who aren’t chosen through democratic means. Capitalism requires those people to pursue unlimited profit, because those who don’t lose their power to those who do.
When they have that power, they then buy government, because government is both the main threat to them, and the force which by which, through use of law and means like central banks bailing them out, they can keep themselves obscenely rich — even when markets would otherwise cause them to lose their money and thus their power.
The history from the Great Depression onwards is instructive. Capitalism caused a huge, nearly worldwide, depression. Government did not bail them out, and so they lost their power. FDR came to power, and more or less following Keynes’s prescriptions, he bailed them out. He and the people working with him put in place multiple protections to make sure that capitalism couldn’t cause such a crisis again.
Capitalists hated him for it. He had rescued them, but with the cost of 90 percent top marginal tax rates, huge estate taxes, regulation and aggressive anti-trust laws. Upon his death (little could be done while he was alive, as he was so popular), they immediately started attacking all the protections he had put in place. It took them decades, but they stuck to it, and after all, even in their reduced state, they were still powerful and could afford to pay people to spend their lives working against the New Deal.
The foremost intellectual servant of these men was Milton Friedman, but many, many labored in this cause. They built a political, economic, and intellectual infrastructure and waited for their opportunity. With the oil crises, inflation, and unemployment of the 70s, they had their chance. They made sure that an egalitarian model for dealing with the crisis wouldn’t work, and they got Thatcher and Reagan elected. Then, they dismantled the New Deal and all the protections against another economic catastrophe like the Great Depression.
This allowed them to vastly consolidate wealth, pushing power into the hands of fewer and fewer people. Antitrust law was gutted, unions cut to ribbons, and regulations which protected against them were destroyed, while new ones were put in place to ensure the concentration of wealth and power.
A small example of this was given to me by an accountant, who in the 70s used to do the taxes for Indian bands. When Reagan took over, the regulations were changed so that only large companies were allowed in the business and he was frozen out. This sort of thing happened everywhere, and, indeed, continues to this day.
But, alas, the capitalists weren’t stupid, and they knew that market concentration and removal of protections against bubbles meant that one day there might be another great crisis.
So they bought up economics lock, stock and barrel and paid economists like Bernanke to figure out how to make sure they’d never lose their wealth (and thus power) in a great market collapse again. Bernanke’s academic ouvre was described to me by Stirling Newberry, back around 2005, as “how to make sure another 1929 doesn’t lead to another FDR.”
They got him into the Federal Reserve, and people like him into other central banks, and when the Financial crisis of 2007/8 happened, the Fed bailed out the rich. Without the Federal Reserve, most of them would have lost everything, but the Fed alone effectively printed and gave them 20 trillion dollars, accepted their worthless securities at near face value for loans, and so on.
Meanwhile, largely under Obama, the crimes they had committed (and there was fraud all the way down, I doubt a single senior executive on Wall Street hadn’t engaged in red-letter fraud), were forgiven in exchange for fines that were less than the amount of money they had individual earned.
Power and money consolidated even further, and the “another-FDR moment” was avoided.
Since then, they have seized further and further control and increased their wealth and power even more. Citizen’s United, which allowed unlimited money into elections was probably the red line moment, but really, once the full-faith and money-printing ability of government was behind the rich, ensuring they could never lose power as a class, it was over.
The important thing to understand is that this structural. If capitalism is hegemonic (that is, dictates how most economic decisions are made and how power is parceled out), then this pattern repeats. FDR made the best effort in the history of capitalism to stop it form happening again, and he failed, buying only a few decades of relative egalitarianism and control of democratically-elected government over business rather than business over government.
There can be no peace between democracy and capitalism. They are in direct opposition to each other. Democracy requires egalitarianism to work, and capitalism requires money and power to be concentrated in a few hands.
We can have democracy, or we can have capitalism and we need to stop pretending that democracy can control capitalism sufficiently to stop it from doing vast damage. Indeed, the terrible timing of having capitalists take over democracy in the core industrial nations just as action on climate change and ecological collapse became necessary will cause billions of lives, and wipe out about half of all known species on Earth.
Because democracy also failed, democracy is now on the firing line. As things get worse (and they will get MUCH worse), every political arrangement and ideology which failed to deal with climate and ecology will be discredited.
Either democracy blames capitalism and kills capitalism, finding a new way to organize the economy, or democracy is likely to die with capitalism. And it will deserve to do so.
In the joint statement released by the Kremlin, Putin and Xi called on NATO to rule out expansion in eastern Europe, denounced the formation of security blocs in the Asia-Pacific region, and criticised the Aukus trilateral security pact between the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia.
I don’t expect Russia to invade, but what it can and will probably do is recognize the breakaway regions in the Ukraine, Donbass and Luhansk, and help them enforce their borders.
This will trigger sanctions, including personal sanctions against Putin. China will, indeed, help Russia “evade” the sanctions, and China, Russia, and other states will move forward with their own payments area.
Trade will become more difficult, so will travel, and another huge step towards the on-rushing Cold War will occur.
This isn’t rocket surgery, the US is moving hard towards “containment” of Russia & China, and those countries recognize that they have interests in common. Because neither of them can make a separate peace — the US won’t allow that. The US effectively won’t negotiate with Russia at all (saying no to everything the Russians have asked for isn’t negotiation), so they may as well continue preparing for what they know is coming.
This is certainly the stupidest world. American elites, backed by European subject states (they all are), don’t seem to get that it isn’t 1947 or 1991. They no longer control the world’s most important economies, and their states are dysfunctional, incapable of even handling a pandemic, let alone rallying the necessary social support to win a two-generation economic war while in the midst of ecological collapse, climate change, and with a huge proportion of their populations suffering from health problems due to Long Covid, as well as a pandemic that goes on and on.
China and Russia combined are stronger than the USSR was, and the US and Europe are weaker than they were during the Cold War.
Putin also believes that Russia has an absolute right to a sphere of privileged interests in the post-Soviet space. This means its former Soviet neighbors should not join any alliances that are deemed hostile to Moscow, particularly NATO or the European Union. Putin has made this demand clear in the two treaties proposed by the Kremlin on December 17, which require that Ukraine and other post-Soviet countries — as well as Sweden and Finland — commit to permanent neutrality and eschew seeking NATO membership. NATO would also have to retreat to its 1997 military posture, before its first enlargement, by removing all troops and equipment in central and eastern Europe. (This would reduce NATO’s military presence to what it was when the Soviet Union disintegrated.) Russia would also have veto power over the foreign policy choices of its non-NATO neighbors. This would ensure that pro-Russian governments are in power in countries bordering Russia — including, foremost, Ukraine.
This is, of course, the maximalist Russian position, but it is very tiresome to have it presented as “take it or leave it.” What it is, is a negotiating position. In negotiations, one traditionally asks for more than one expects to get. But Washington has responded to this negotiating position by refusing everything. Every single thing.
There are three possible elements to a compromise with Russia, two of which the West has in effect already conceded. The first is either a treaty of neutrality or a moratorium of ten or 20 years on Ukrainian membership of NATO. The West loses nothing by this, as it is clear that Ukraine cannot, in fact, join NATO with its conflicts with Russia unresolved. In any case, the U.S. and NATO have made it absolutely clear that they cannot and will not defend Ukraine by force.
The second element is a return to the (Adapted) Conventional Forces in Europe Agreement limiting NATO forces in eastern Europe and Russian forces in contiguous territories. And the third is internationally-guaranteed autonomy for a demilitarized Donbas within Ukraine, according to the Minsk II agreement of 2015 brokered by Germany and France but since, in effect, rejected by Ukraine.
Failing at least initial moves towards such a compromise, it does indeed look likely that there will be some form of new Russian attack on Ukraine, though by no means necessarily a large-scale invasion.
Putin isn’t insane, and he doesn’t expect to get everything he wants. But he is old, like me, and the three of us –me, Putin, and the Time writer — remember that George Bush Sr. promised NATO wouldn’t expand past a reunited Germany.
So much for Negotiation 101. Let’s move on to the world model. I think this is somewhat accurate (from the Foreign Affairs article).
The modern Kremlin’s interpretation of sovereignty has notable parallels to that of the Soviet Union’s. It holds, to paraphrase George Orwell, that some states are more sovereign than others. Putin has said that only a few great powers — Russia, China, India, and the United States — enjoy absolute sovereignty, free to choose which alliances they join or reject. Smaller countries, such as Ukraine or Georgia, are not fully sovereign and must respect Russia’s strictures, just as Central America and South America, according to Putin, must heed their large, northern neighbor
Now, here’s the thing: I’m Canadian.
So I KNOW that Canada is not a fully sovereign nation. When the US really gets serious about cracking the whip, we buckle, because we have a population one-tenth of that of the US, and a much smaller military and economy, and Americans are savage warmongers who have invaded or hurt the nations around them (and nowhere near them) hundreds of times in the past couple hundred years.
No South American or Central American nation is under any illusion they have full sovereignty. They don’t. The US is clear about it, too, from its actions and words. Hell, the US is currently holding on to 90 billion dollars it stole from Afghanistan as Afghans starve, nowhere near the US. The US is holding Venezuelan assets, and seizes other countries merchant ships on the high seas, then sells the contents if it feels like.
The US is a fully sovereign nation. No nation in Central or South America is. I would say that no one in Europe is, either, given that Europe is still an American protectorate (if barely). The EU could be a fully sovereign nation if it ever chooses to grow up and accept responsibility, but it isn’t now, though it’s more sovereign than anyone other than the US, China, and maybe Russia. (India might be fully sovereign, I suppose, but I don’t consider them a true Great Power yet.)
Is this “how it should be?” I’d say no. I’d prefer a world full of fully-sovereign nations. I don’t like being under the American boot, personally, and I’m not interested in trading that for some other taste of boot leather.
But this is the way the world is, and US foreign policy “professionals” refuse to admit it, while Putin is clear.
All that is being argued about here is whether almost everyone will be under the US boot, or whether or not there will be three boots: China, Russia, and the US — with perhaps the EU putting on some nice German black leather boots itself, if it ever decides to take responsibility for itself again, and the rest of the EU decides that they’re okay with even more German rule, eased a bit by the French.
The Foreign Affairs author understands this:
Weakening the transatlantic alliance could pave the way for Putin to realize his ultimate aim: Jettisoning the post–Cold War, liberal, rules-based international order promoted by Europe, Japan, and the United States in favor of one more amenable to Russia. For Moscow, this new system might resemble the nineteenth-century concert of powers. It could also turn into a new incarnation of the Yalta system, where Russia, the United States, and now China divide the world into tripolar spheres of influence. Moscow’s growing rapprochement with Beijing has, indeed, reinforced Russia’s call for a post-West order. Both Russia and China demand a new system in which they exercise more influence in a multipolar world.
The nineteenth- and twentieth-century systems both recognized certain rules of the game. After all, during the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union mostly respected each other’s spheres of influence. The two most dangerous crises of that era — Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s 1958 Berlin ultimatum and the 1962 Cuban missile crisis — were defused before military conflict broke out. But if the present is any indication, it looks as if Putin’s post-West “order” would be a disordered Hobbesian world with few rules of the game.
But every time I see “rules-based international order,” I reach for my gun, because I know what that means is the US seizing ships and invading countries and slamming everyone in sight with financial sanctions while fomenting fake revolutions and engaging in coups. Oh, other countries have been bad actors too, but really the “rules-based international order” means “there’s only one superpower.”
So yes, Putin, and for that matter Xi, want a multipolar great-power world. So does Iran, Venezuela, Iraq, Libya, and most African countries. (Though I suppose Putin might acknowledge the US right to crush Venezuela given his own rights are respected.)
BUT, this is the maximal position. The US “rules-based international order” is doomed. That’s simply a fact; the US is no longer powerful enough to support it. You can’t have that after you’ve given up your position as the primary manufacturing state to another country. It’s impossible. Britain didn’t keep it, and neither will the US — the only question is how many hundreds of millions of people will die creating the international order.
If the US wanted a fair world order, truly, then it would have to actually acknowledge and genuinely respect the autonomy of other states. But Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Venezeula, Iran, and, yes, Russia, among many others indicate it doesn’t. If it did, the US would have vast numbers of allies.
But that order wouldn’t be the “rules-based international order” of today. You wouldn’t be able to unilaterally cut nations out of the payment systems and invade other countries with the acquiescence of only a few core European allies.
So what’s being argued over isn’t about a choice between a “good system” versus a “bad system,” despite the author’s mutterings about Hobbesianism, but a choice between two bad systems.
And in that case, it’s just a question of the power of those who want to keep the status quo and those who want the new state. And in that case, it’s not clear that the US can keep its precious privilege to hurt everyone else because it’s the only real great power. If you want to the only hegemonic state, you have to have the power and enough lackeys who are willing to fight with you.
If the US does, and is willing to fight, then maybe it can keep its order.
But I doubt it, again for the simple reason that US primacy was based on economic primacy, and the US doesn’t have that any more. (Their military primacy, since the Industrial Revolution, has been based on industrial primacy.)
Given that US elites decided to give China their industrial core in exchange for a few pieces of silver (so they could kick the shit out of the poor and the middle class internally), they’ve already made their choice. They got their money and their internal supremacy. The price is going to be their international primacy.
That was always the price. US international primacy was based on power and benefit-sharing at home. When US elites decided that they’d rather be oligarchs, they decided they’d also rather not rule the world.
Putin and Xi are just pointing out the consequences of decisions already made.
“Radical” is a slur word in most of our discourse. “A radical” is someone who thinks society needs truly fundamental changes. If you are a democrat in a monarchy or a one-party state, you’re a radical. If you believe in equal rights in a state with rights based on rank, you’re a radical. If you believe in fascism in a democratic state, you are also a radical, and if you want to go back to women not having the vote and blacks only being able to vote in theory, you’re a radical, though we tend to call that style of radical a reactionary or sometimes a Republican.
Another kind of radical, perhaps the most common in our society, though still rare, is the type that believes that capitalism has to go away; that fundamental economic relationships shouldn’t be determined through markets controlled by capitalists. (You can be for markets, and against capitalism, weirdly, though it’s rare.)
It’s clear our societies have failed. We pretend they haven’t because the final collapse hasn’t happened, but that’s like saying that the Titanic hadn’t sunk after it hit the iceberg. Technically true, but believing it will get you hurt, bad. Might be good if other people believe it, though, while you sprint for the lifeboats.
The argument for this is tedious, and I’ve made it many times so I won’t bother here.
In the face of a failed society, trust in leaders is insane. Crazed. They’ve obviously run society off a cliff, and they either are okay with that or are incompetent, or both. (And the smart ones are selling you the line that everything is okay while they sprint for the lifeboats: a.k.a., New Zealand.)
For over ten years now I’ve been telling Americans to get out. Oh, it’s not that the US is the only developed nation heading for failed state status — for all intents and purposes there are no exceptions, not even Sainted New Zealand, but the US is one of the leaders in the failed-state race (Britain’s another), and I have a lot of American readers. If you’re going to have everything go sideways into a propeller, better later than sooner.
But most Americans won’t or can’t get out, and Musk and Bezo’s dreams of escape to space aren’t going to happen for humanity en-masse, not in time.
We’re all in a big ship, and it’s going down. Some areas are already underwater, others will be soon, and the entire thing is going to sink.
And we have no lifeboats. We could, perhaps, have built some, if we’d started 30 to 40 years ago with massive investments, but we didn’t, and if our leaders were that able, they’d have been able to save the ship, since that’s when they had to act.
But this article isn’t about how “we are fucked,” it’s about how “too many of us refuse to admit it and that it means we need radical change.”
And one of the big reasons for this is the need for “Daddy.” One of the big hurdles preventing radicalization is that becoming radicalized means you realize you can’t trust your leaders at all. That they have fucked up, betrayed you, or both. That they are bad, evil people who not only aren’t acting in your best interest, but are your enemies.
I’ve been pounding this issue for a couple years, and some regular readers are probably sick of it. I am.
But it matters. If you don’t accept, psychologically and intellectually, who your enemies are, you can’t protect yourself from them. If you don’t accept, psychologically and intellectually, that your leaders are your enemies, you can’t properly take action on your own, with friends, family, and other groups — because at some level, you’re still thinking that government or corporations will come through and take care of things.
All your life, government and corporations have taken care of you. They’ve often been abusive parents, but they have made sure there’s food available to buy, streets to walk and drive on, laws, jobs, etc, etc. They run almost everything and you’re dependent on them for almost everything just like you were dependent on your parents and teachers when you were a child.
Bad parents still feed and house you. They’re monsters, but monsters who kept you alive. Children love their abusive parents even as they fear and hate them, and the same screwed up psychology pertains to business and government leaders, and those they lead.
An entire life’s conditioning works against radicalization in anyone for whom the system has even slightly worked.
But the fact of the matter is that if we want to handle climate change, environmental collapse, or any of our other problems (“handle” doesn’t mean “stop,” but many problems are essentially trivial, and could be fixed any time our leadership wants to, like health care or spam calls), that means we need radical change. We need to change our system completely, and we need to get rid of our entire current leadership class, all of whom have proved their incompetence and ill will.
That’s radical. That’s a leap.
And that’s hard.
But acknowledging that there will be no real help from above until radical change happens is necessary, for the world, and if we can’t change them before they defenestrate themselves after trying to shove us all out the window first, to protect and care for yourselves in the face of a malign government and corporate class.
Corporate and government daddies and mommies aren’t going to save you. They’re the ones hurting you. They’re the ones making your life hell and destroying your world.
China's economic plan these days reads like a massive security plan. Food security. Energy security. Raw materials security. Supply chain security. Data and tech security. Behind the security obsession is a fundamentally changed relationship w/US https://t.co/1gvtF2DwLG via @WSJ
The article itself is a bit foolish. China can’t, and knows it can’t, be entirely self-sufficient. But it can reduce its dependency, in particular on US and Western sources, and that’s what it has to do. Unlike with Venezuela and Iran, seizing Chinese freighters routinely is a no-go (and, if necessary, China can send military escorts). But US sanctions can bite, and hard, as they did with semiconductors, and the US showed its teeth under Trump and continues to growl under Biden.
What Americans don’t seem to understand is that China could easily retaliate: It is the sole source for a huge number of manufactured goods and is the world’s largest manufacturing power. So far it has chosen not to; it wants the status quo to limp on for as long as possible, but if the US decides to start a real trade war, it’s likely the US will be hurt badly. This isn’t the USSR vs. the US, where the US was the clear, superior industrial power. The US has the lead in a few areas, its allies in others (it’s Taiwan that makes semiconductors), but China is the lynchpin industrial economy.
Still, the Chinese have decided that the US is determined to have a cold war, and they are right, and they are preparing for it.
US propaganda has become particularly unhinged of late. My favorite being this from the NYTimes:
NYT used a quote from one Weibo user w/ 87 followers to justify comparing China's Zero-COVID policies to the Holocaust & public health workers to Nazis. This is beyond repugnant. @nytimes & @LiYuan6 need to issue a public apology.@ADL@AuschwitzMuseumhttps://t.co/J9pZ7NB6kS
It seems more apt to describe the “herd immunity” policies followed in the West, especially since Omicron, as Holocaust-like, as official US death figures are 800K, and likely real figures are twice that and Covid isn’t close to over yet.
But “they are very strict at lockdowns and the work is exhausting but they’ve saved millions of lives” seems like an odd thing to criticize China for, but US elite lack of self-awareness continues to be the marvel of the world.
Western elites can’t admit basic facts. Covid could be controlled. They chose not to control it because letting it rip made them rich. Millions died as a result. They are responsible for more deaths than the Holocaust due to their refusal to handle the pandemic (and it will be many more by the end). The “evil, totalitarian Chinese Communist Party” are the ones who went all out to save lives, not the “good, wonderful, free democratic governments of the West.” (With, yes, a few minor exceptions.)
Western elites, through their actions and lack of actions, in effect, murdered millions of people. Covid could be controlled, China proves it, and so they hate China even more.
Hopefully they won’t let their hate reach such a peak they toss nukes around when the Cold War they are so determined to have goes hot.
