Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Europe Page 4 of 17

France Isn’t In A Civil War Yet, But It Is Close

By

On July 4, 2023

Comments

So, the main police unions in France put out this rather deranged statement:

Now that’s enough…

Facing these savage hordes, asking for calm is no longer enough, it must be imposed!

Restoring the republican order and putting the apprehended beyond the capacity to harm should be the only political signals to give.

In the face of such exactions, the police family must stand together.

Our colleagues, like the majority of citizens, can no longer bear the tyranny of these violent minorities.

The time is not for union action, but for combat against these “pests”. Surrendering, capitulating, and pleasing them by laying down arms are not the solutions in light of the gravity of the situation.

All means must be put in place to restore the rule of law as quickly as possible.

Once restored, we already know that we will relive this mess that we have been enduring for decades.

For these reasons, Alliance Police Nationale and UNSA Police will take their responsibilities and warn the government from now on that at the end, we will be in action and without concrete measures for the legal protection of the Police, an appropriate penal response, significant means provided, the police will judge the extent of the consideration given.

Today the police are in combat because we are at war. Tomorrow we will be in resistance and the government will have to become aware of it.”

So. The bolded part is important: it’s a declaration that the police unions won’t obey the orders of the government if they don’t agree. This is something I’ve been expecting (and seeing) for a while. During the Trucker Convoy in Canada, the police refused to enforce the law and arrest the protestors. That’s why, in the end, the government froze the bank accounts of protestors, because they couldn’t get the cops to enforce the law against people they liked and agreed with.

The same sort of thing happens over and over in the US, where right wing protestors aren’t arrested, often even when they commit violence, but are protected by the police.

Now the riots in France are largely Muslim, though not entirely. The Muslim immigrants have been pushed into suburbs and left to rot, with no effective way to move up in society, and at the same time social services have been repeatedly cut and money has, in France, as in all neoliberal nations, been funneled to the top. This bleeding ulcer is old, about 50 years old, and everyone has noted that it was bound to cause problems. These aren’t the first riots, they’re just the worst.

France has had a lot of riots and protests over the past few years, notably related to Macron’s increase of the pension age and rules, which means that many people will have to work into their 70s. (Theoretically one can retire before then, but for most people, the pension will not be enough without more years of work.) Those protests and riots were mostly white.

One of the topic categories on this blog is “the age of war and revolution”. I put it up in 2000, to indicate what was to come.

The current riots will be defeated. They’re large, but not serious. The rioters are not marching on the government and government officials, which is what would be required to actually overthrow the government. It isn’t a civil war.

But the police indicating they won’t accept legal orders, not just by passive resistance (as in Canada) but in outright defiance of the government is a very dangerous sign. The usual requirements for a successful revolution are an elite faction in support, a popular protest and the defection of at least some of the enforcer class.

France is very close to meeting those requirements: part of the elite agrees with the cops, there is a right wing primarily white conservative populist movement and the police are now showing clear defiance.

So, France isn’t in a civil war yet, but it could be soon.

As for the left, this is a fulcrum point. They need to strike and strike hard as soon as possible, because France’s Fifth Republic appears to be on its last legs. If the right overthrows it, the left will be in exile for at least two generations. It’s the right or the left, and right now the right seems most likely.

More on this and the general situation soon.

This is a donor supported site, so if you value the writing, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Bruno Macaes On Putin And The World Order

By

On May 31, 2023

Comments

Macaes was a Portuguese minister and is now a member of the European Council of Foreign relations. He’s written a few books and at least two of them, on the Belt and Road and on Eurasia in general are insightful, though Bruno is definitely a Eurocrat who sometimes struggles to see the world without Eurocrat lenses. This is particularly true when it comes to Russia (remembering that these books were written before Ukraine, which he did not predict) but there are some points where Macaes “gets it.”

This is primarily when it comes to Putin’s views of the international order:

Putin doesn’t think along national lines. In thinks in terms of larger blocs, and ultimately, in terms of the world order… You cannot resist the pressures that come from the world order. So either the world order will come to mirror some elements of the contemporary Russian regime or Russia will mirror the liberal, Western political order.

Notice how Russia is called a regime. It’s a small tell, but a tell.

Later, on, the European view (where Macaes is an insider):

The Brussels bureaucracy has a very simple theory of the world. States are captured by special interests, but they may reform if there is pressure from the outside. If they do, they will certainly prosper.

Obviously the Europeans see the “outside” as them, with an assist, perhaps, from the US. They don’t seem to have noticed that Europe has been in economic stagnation for some time, or consider that perhaps they are captured by special interests also. Macaes does later on touch on European subjugation to the US, but never really deals with it squarely.

But bottom line this is “we are the reasonable people with the right laws and regulations and way of doing things and you all should do what we say, and we will pressure you to do so.”

Europe knows best.

Back to Russia (somewhat paraphrased)

1) There are no neutral, universal rules. Neutrality is only a pretnse aimed at deceiving others. The benefits of globalization are unevenly distributed because rules are made by those with power to make them.

2) International politics is an arena of permanent rivalry and conflict.

This is, of course, similar to the first quote. The “rule based” international order is just the set of rules and institutions set up by those who had the most power, and the rules were set up to benefit those who had the power.

I don’t see how any of this could be controversial, though there are limits to it. The US did deliberately offshore its industry, for example, and this started after WWII to build up Europe, Japan and South Korea as strategic allies. When neoliberalism came to power, they then started offshoring it to what more clear-eyed people saw was a potential rival: China, because elites wanted short term profits.

But generally speaking the rules of the world order benefit the US and its satrapies like Japan, the EU nations, Canada, Australia, South Korea and so on. This was intentional and intended and anyone who thinks otherwise is nearly a candidate for an insane asylum their denial of reality is so strong.

It is the Europeans who are living in a fool’s paradise, thinking, forgive the expression, that their shit doesn’t stink and that they are mostly driven by pure motives: that their system works and is a universal model and that they have the right and duty to force it on others.

One could say the same for the Americans, except that more of the smarter ones know they’re hypocrites.

This nonsense was epitomized by Fukuyama’s “The End of History” which anyone with a lick of sense and the most minimal knowledge of history knew was absolute bullshit. But it was the bullshit that Western elites wanted to hear: they had won, their victory was eternal and everyone else would inevitably, in a pseudo-Marxist historical inevitability way, become like them.

So you could give the Chinese your industry and get filthy rich doing so and it wouldn’t matter because they were going to become a liberal capitalist democracy. There would only be one elite, a transnational one, and its enemy was its own population, not other members of the elite, no matter where they lived.

Now to be fair to Macaes he’s clearly anti-Fukuyama and by the time he wrote these books he could clearly see that obviously Capitalism and Democracy were not the same thing.

But this isn’t really about Macaes, it’s about differing views of the world order.

The West thinks, or among the more self-aware elites pretends to think that they have created a neutral world order they just happened to win, or, in more sophisticated terms, in which they had a first mover advantage, but which is basically fair.

Putin, and though it’s not dealt with here, China, plus most of the developing world see this as absolute bullshit: the world order is just the rules made by the strongest and enforced by them with their financial, economic and military might.

This is why Russia has often said that any real negotiations must be with the US. Not the Ukraine, not even with the EU, but with the US, because they are the ones who make the rules and they are the ones who decide on NATO policy. It is why the real negotiations have included the Chinese, because the Chinese are the coming superpower. It’s why China was able to make peace between Iran and Saudi Arabia: again, because China is genuinely powerful.

Putin, at least in relation to international politics, lives in the real world, not in some Fukuyama fairy-land. Seen from that point of view his actions become more understandable: to let the West continue to push NATO towards Russia and to succeed in its color revolutions and coups, is to acquiesce to a world in which Russia must be second rate at best, because none of Russia’s preferences for how the world order is set up are not implemented. Russia doesn’t need almost everything, nor does Putin believe Russia can get everything: if you want that you have to be as powerful as the US after the fall of the USSR or like the British empire at its peak.

But if Russia can’t get even the things that are most important to it, like Ukraine neutral and not in NATO, then the negotiations have to be changed: they have to become kinetic, to use the modern speak. A test of power is necessary: is the West powerful enough to impose its will or not?

And that is what is being determined in the Ukraine: can the US still just force Russia to accept what the US wants or not? Does the US still run the world order? It’s one reason why the Chinese, ultimately, are supporting Russia, because they agree about the shape of the world order. And it’s why the US and the EU have spent so much supporting Ukraine. Because this is a test and neither side feels it can afford to lose, for if it does, its preferences for world order take a huge hit: it shows that it doesn’t actually have enough power to enforce its will to the extent it desires.

For the US that is that Russia be a “gas station with nukes” at most and preferably be broken up, “de-colonized.” For Russia it is that a military alliance aimed at it can’t push further against its borders, and that its allies or satrapies can’t just be taken away (as Libya and Ukraine were) without great cost.

In the real world you get what you have the power to get. It shouldn’t be that way, but that’s how it is, at least for the time being. Perhaps we’ll change that at some point in our history, but it is the way the US and Europe have lived, it is how they rose to power and it is how they have retained their power. To say “no more war now that we’ve won the major wars and made the world in our image” is laughable.

Putin is just playing their game, because it’s the only game.

Donors and subscribers make it possible for me to write, so if you value this writing, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE

China Has A Huge Lead In Patents

By

On May 16, 2023

Comments

Larger than I realized:

Now, per capita, it’s actually South Korea, Japan, USA, China and I wouldn’t say that doesn’t matter: it’s why Japan and South Korea stay prosperous (though life in South Korea, I gather, is rather nasty for workers.) Still, the bulk matters more: who’s in the lead.

The common rebuttal is that Chinese patents are low quality. So, let’s say that half of Chinese patents suck. They’d still be slightly in the lead.

It’s also interesting that Japan gets almost as many patents as the US. You don’t hear about Japan much these days (unlike the 80s when everyone was terrified) but they haven’t lost their game.

This chart echoes what I’ve been saying for years: the tech lead moves to where the manufacturing floor is. And that’s in China. Happened when it moved to the US from Britain and the US is not immune to the rule.

TechxManufacturing=Power in the modern world. If the US wants to change this, they have to re-shore industry, not just make half-hearted “friend-shoring” moves.

It’s also interesting how bad Europe does here. Germany+France+Britain=5%, which is half of South Korea. Europe is living off its legacy, and that means its decline is damn near certain if they don’t reverse this. Given the US is now poaching European industry, and Europe is letting it out of fear of Russia, well, the future doesn’t look bright.

My writing is made possible donors and subscribers so if you value this writing, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE

Europe Needs To Re-evaluate Its Importance And Its American Vassalization

By

On May 10, 2023

Comments

Europe lives in a delusion:

What Europe thinks about China matters little. China needs Russia, which supplies food, fuel and minerals far more than it needs Europe. Further, Europe cannot be a reliable partner to China, because European countries are American satrapies. They don’t actually have independent foreign policy if the US puts pressure on, and the Ukraine war has tied them far closer to America. At the same time Europe is losing chunks of its industrial base to America due to increased input costs due to the cut-off from Russian resources.

Europe is an important trading partner for China, particular a buyer of Chinese exports, but the lesson of Russia/Ukraine is that such ties are not reliable. As the US puts more and more sanctions on China (who has invaded nobody) and Europe cooperates such ties become clear sunk costs: nice to have, but nothing to count on.

The US is treating China as its main threat, and girding for war, while trying to “friend-shore” industry away from China. They are arming Taiwan, and sending senior politicians to Taiwan. Sanctions proliferate. Europe does not stand against this.

So, Europe cannot be relied on, they cooperated with sanctions even before the Ukraine war. Russia, on the other hand, can be relied on because they need China as much or more than China needs them.

Further, the reason the US hasn’t gone full trade war with China is simple: the results for America would be disastrous. Many important items are now made entirely or predominantly in China. China would hurt from losing its second biggest customer (after ASEAN)  but the US would be crippled overnight. This applies as well to the EU. Shipping basic industry to someone you then decide to treat as an enemy is like handing someone your gun, then saying “I hate you and I want to kill you.”

Not smart.

China has the US and Europe over a barrel. Decoupling is not possible right now without catastrophe. Either the decoupling efforts succeed over a period of years (ten to fifteen at a minimum) or they don’t work, but China either gets time or if decoupling happens before that, it starts with the advantage of actually having physical plant and with its enemies crippled.

But Europe will have no real sway with China for as long as it is clearly a bunch of American vassal states. There is no way to make a deal with Europe which will be kept, because Europe does not have autonomy. Everyone knows that if America shoves hard, the Europeans will side with the US.

In any case, China has become the world’s premier auto exporter. Its first commercial jets are now rolling out. It is catching up in semiconductor manufacture. It is expanding trade with Africa and South America and now trades more than the US or Europe on both continents. It has made friends with both Iran and Saudi Arabia. Europe is losing exports and losing its technological advantage. Soon there Europe will mostly a customer, not a necessary supplier and in any case Europe, cooperating with American sanctions on China has already shown it is not a reliable supplier.

Given all this, European politicians, acting as if it is still 1970 or 2000, can croak and threaten and scold all they want. More sanctions are coming, China needs Russia and if China abandoned Russia, Europe would not be a reliable ally anyway.

This being the case, the odds of China abandoning Russia are essentially zero.

As for the Europeans, they need to understand that if they act as American vassals they will be treated as American vassals, which means no one who the US considers an enemy, and the US definitely considers China an enemy, can ever trust any deal with them.

Europe has made its bed. It had chances over the last twenty years to become its own power bloc, to declare itself free of American domination. It chose not to. It rises and falls with America, except that America has already shown it will cannibalize European industry and concerns whenever there is benefit to America.This is not the post-war “shared prosperity” period for the Western powers, it is dog-eat-dog and Europeans are living in a fantasy world. Even within Europe nations are acting against group interest.

The European garden is set to be filled with weeds and Europeans need to figure out a way to do more than manage decline. They might start by realizing that their interests and America’s interests are significantly different, and they might wish to stop with the ridiculous sanctimonious speeches to the Chinese. The Chinese are not abandoning a reliable ally who provides what they can’t make themselves for a few more years of not-very good relations with a Europe who obeys their enemy.

My ability to write these articles depends on donors and subscribers so if you value this writing, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Is France Near A New Republic?

By

On March 27, 2023

Comments

This video is worth watching, though I have no idea whether the bit about dead cops is true:

The situation is simple: Macron unilaterally raised the pension age by two years from 62 to 64. This is after it was increased to 62 from 60 in 2010. He couldn’t get it past the legislature, so he used a clause which allows him to do so without legislative approval. Macron one the final round of the last election by 17%, but he had no mandate for this sort of reform. People voted for him to keep LaPen (the far right candidate) out.

This has caused an explosion of protests which is not abating.

A little more background is useful. The standard talking point is that France can’t afford the current pension system and thus MUST push back the qualification date and that this is reasonable because people have longer life spans than when the pension system was created and because the age pyramid has changed: there are proportionally fewer younger people and more older people.

Here’s the French GDP per capita char from 1980 to 2021:

So, it rose pretty consistently till about 2008 (surprise) and since then is flat to slightly rising depending.

Next chart. Labor productivity.

Same basic pattern.

One more, inequality.

That last table, in particular, deserves a good looking at if you have time.

But for current purposes, what is important is simply this: France is richer than it used to be and more productive and more of its income and wealth is held by the rich, and if France wants to keep its retirement age at 62 it can certainly afford to do so, it just might have to tax rich people a bit more and maybe not give billions to Ukraine and so on.

Of course France can afford an early retirement age of 62 or 60. It can only not afford it if you “hold everything equal” in the sense that you assume doing so is not a priority.

So, Macron is full of shit. The government can easily afford the current French pension age and should probably even drop the age a couple years if the majority of the population want that.

Meanwhile while what Macron has done is constitutional, it clearly shows that the constitution is broken: he’s doing something the majority of the population and the majority of the legislature oppose, which in a democratic society shouldn’t be possible.

Since he’s shown that the constitution itself is broken and that majority will cannot be accommodated because doing so would require the government to tax rich people who have been doing very well over the last forty odd years, French citizens are entirely justified to get out in the streets and not just stop this bill but overturn the Republic and institute the next one.

As for Macron, he’s always been insufferably sure that he’s right about everything (I am aware of the irony of me of all people writing this) and that it’s OK to make the majority of the population suffer to keep neoliberal orthodoxy running. He’s a true believer, a genuine ideologue, his ideology is just neoliberalism and neoliberalism doesn’t work any more.

France should be a model for more countries. When your rich people screw you over, take to the streets.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

 

 

 

Dog Bites Man: The US (With Foreign Allies) Did Blow Up The Nord Stream Pipelines

By

On February 9, 2023

Comments

I mean, I feel kind of lame for even posting about this because unless you were stupid (or on the payroll) you knew it was either the US or an ally, and if an ally the US was involved.

Turns out it was the US and Norway. Seymour Hersh.

Of course he had to post this on his substack because not a single mainstream outlet will publish it.

A Dalek commented how surprising the CIA’s competence was in this operation, but what I find interesting is how effective media control is now: if no one will cover it, did it even happen? The level of control over the media is astounding, and the majority of it is tacit, I doubt the CIA had to call outlets and say “don’t publish Hersh”, the people in charge know what their job is and do it without any threats, then see themselves on the same side as the CIA and if a truth is too inconvenient, well, it isn’t important.

It really does remind me of the early post 9/11 and Iraq War period, where you just couldn’t tell the truth and be heard on anything mainstream, and trying was a career death sentence.

And yeah, I do think this is worse than it was in the past. The old media was corrupt and often complicit, too often, but it wasn’t this bad. A combination of almost every media asset being owned by just a few companies and the Ivy League takeover of journalism jobs, which used to be working class, has made the vast majority of the media little more than collaborators with the powers that be.

I’m a bit of a broken record on this, but I still find it extraordinary that they lied about Corbyn about 80% of the time. Amazing.

Anyway, Norway (who made 40 billion more a year from taking sales from Russia) and the US who has also made a mint selling Europe natural gas, turn out to be the nations responsible for destroying Nord Stream, which I’d say was an act of war. Turns out the nations with the most to gain were the criminals. What a surprise. (Though I did think Poland might have been involved, as they had other things to gain. Turns out greed was the primary factor, not ideology.)

Dog bites man. It is tedious that this had to be proved. The amount of cycles wasted by intelligent people proving what is obvious to anyone who isn’t a moron or dishonest is pathetic. (And this nonsense is why I rarely bother proving the obvious any more. It’s just meant to waste cycles and anyone asking for proof of the obvious is not an honest interlocutor.)

Note: corrected “cover” to “publish”, which was my original intent.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

What Hungary’s Purge of Senior Military Officers Can Teach Us All

By

On January 31, 2023

Comments

Victor Orban is not a stupid man even though I disagree with him on a great deal:

Hungarian military leadership is receiving a purge. Over 170 generals and high-ranking officers were fired in a matter of a couple days. A deNATOization is occurring in the Hungarian command purging those that were socialized in NATO and international partnerships.

Now, it’s easy to reflexively say this is bad, but imagine you were a left-wing South American leader.

Yeah, you’d be an idiot not to purge the military of those trained by “NATO” and the US, because those are the guys who resist and who launch coups. The only question is how to do it without causing a purge. If you want to run your country in ways the West doesn’t approve of, this is what you have to do. It may be you want to do things that are worse or better (or a mix of both), but whatever you want to do, if it doesn’t agree with the US, you can’t leave those military officers in command.

This is more broadly true, of course, military officers who are loyal to a different ideology are poison. This is why the Angl0-American ideology was supposed to be that career military men don’t have political opinions; or at least don’t share or act on them. More violated in the breach, etc…

In Turkey Edrogan spent years purging the military, and used the failed coup to finish the job. But if he hadn’t already been purging, it wouldn’t have failed. In Brazil, Lula is currently cleaning at least some house, though nowhere near as much as Orban.

And some may remember that in Britain, there were threats of a coup if Corbyn became Prime Minister.

The military and paramilitary forces, police and secret police in particular, are always a problem. But there’s an argument that the worst are those who were foreign trained and whose loyalty isn’t truly to their home country. And given how senior officers in NATO countries are trained and socialized, well, their loyalties must always be suspect. Is it their own country their loyalty is with, or America?

Within a country, the question is “loyal to which faction.” In the US, for example, if push had come to shove it’s safe to say that the border cops would have sided with Trump and will side with any future “strong man.” Those watching the storming of the capital will remember how restrained the police were: if it had been a bunch of blacks, would they have been so considerate?

Brazil had an attempted coup during the election, and Lula, the new President is treating it very differently than Orban: he’s not just going after the foot soldiers, but after the people behind them. But then Lula went to prison on trumped up charges designed to stop him from running in the previous election: he understand the stakes viscerally.

American elites, internally, operate by a simple rule that if a member doesn’t betray the class, they don’t go to prison and they don’t lose their cushy lifestyle, even if they lose their power. There’s been some movement to hold Trump to account, but it’s half-hearted, simply because elites don’t want “their” president to be the one on the chopping block next. They all do things which could be considered illegal, after all, they’re little better than Mafia dons.

But if the stakes are “I keep power or I lose everything” then the game changes. The problem is that knowing they essentially have immunity, crimes in the elite class  have become worse and worse over time.

All systems have written and unwritten norms, but all systems have in and out groups. The norms apply to some people, and not to others. If any regular employee had treated classified documents the way Trump, Clinton and Biden did they’d be in prison, that’s just a fact. Blacks are treated worse than whites; but poor people are treated worse than rich people. Kinda shitty to be poor and black.

And some people and groups are considered legitimate in power and others aren’t. Corbyn wasn’t, which is why the media lied about him 80% or so of the time and why a nonsense anti-semitism scandal was whipped up (there was anti-semitism in the party, but Corbyn isn’t one, and the party is less anti-semitic than the Conservatives, which is what you would expect.)

And it’s why the British military might have couped Corbyn if he won and it’s why Orban, and his dispute with the EU heats up because of his refusal to go along with the consensus in the Russian war, on top of his various other policies, is getting rid of those officers committed to a different ideology, who might feel that he is illegitimate, and that he needs to go.

 

The Death Throes Of The World Europe Made

By

On January 18, 2023

Comments

Most people don’t really get just how extensive European conquest of the world was.

The map’s a bit inaccurate over in Russia: most of Russia is “not Europe” and was conquered — most of it should be green, like North America. Likewise, Japan was conquered by the US, which is a European colony. Leaving aside their brutal war crimes, they were stupid to pick a fight with an industrialized continental power: there was never any chance of winning against the US, as Admiral Yamamoto told them.

But the point is fairly simple: Europeans made the modern world. Wiped out almost all the natives in North America; conqured all of Africa and South America, and almost all of Asia. We went around and imposed our form of capitalism. We destroyed local industry, as in India (which was at least as industrialized as England before the conquests) and forced the natives to trade with us on negative terms, the most famous example being the two Opium wars to make China allow the Opium trade, since England had almost nothing else the Chinese wanted to buy.

World War I and II were a competition between the European powers (which include the US, who had by then essentially completely wiped out the natives) and the US and USSR, the peripheral continental powers won the war, divided Europe between them, “de-colonized” and then ruled the world between them till the USSR collapsed, at which point the US got to tell almost everyone what to do and how to do it for a good twenty-plus years.

A few nations managed to sort of resist: Cuba, Venezuela, Iran and North Korea, but they were made to suffer vastly for their defiance.

The era ended, I would argue, when Russia sent troops to Syria. They defied the US directly, and fought, and the US backed down. One could argue for Georgia, but it was on Russia’s border. Syria was an assertion that the US could not overthrow any government it wanted and that it didn’t control the Middle East minus Iran.

But Russia, important as it is, is now a junior ally to China. They have the nukes, but they don’t have the economy to stand up to the West and NATO without China’s support, and they know it. The competition is not really between Russia and NATO or Russia and the Ukraine, but China and the US, even though neither side has anything more than observers on the ground.

The Russians have chosen their side: chosen not to be Europeans but to be Asians. They say this frequently, it’s a deliberate choice. If this century is to be the Asian one, Russia will be Asian. This change from looking to Europe and being essentially European is massive, and it’s what makes it possible for China to win. Losing Russia, with its vast resources and land ties to China makes it nearly impossible to use American sea-power to “choke out” China thru trade interdiction.

The coming cold war, and possible hot war (or a series of proxy wars) with China is about whether a non-European power will be allowed to remake the world Europe made. Everyone recognized that the US was Britain’s heir, ruling indirectly, but ruling nonetheless. It is about a different, non-EuroAmerican elite being powerful: people who don’t believe in exactly the same things as the trans-Atlantic rulers.

It is an existential threat to European rule, and it is being treated as such. The “yellow peril” has arrived.

In 30 years, will Mandarin be the the new English? The new lingua-Franca? The language everyone has to know and that you can, if clumsily, get by on almost everywhere?

Absent a major war, likely nuclear, or civilization collapse, I find it hard to see a scenario where China doesn’t become the most important global power. Oh, they have problems–but so does everyone.  Cries of how they can’t do it because of culture seem weak to me: China was the civilization leader for most of the last 2,000 years, the idea that Chinese culture can’t produce science, music, arts and all the other flowers of civilization is absurd and they’ve certainly been able to adopt our innovations, just as we previously adopted gunpowder and the printing press from them.

Everything ends. We Europeans had our day in the sun (though my Irish ancestors missed most of it) and now the sun sets, as it always does.

SUBSCRIBE OR DONATE TO IAN’S 2022 FUNDRAISER

Page 4 of 17

Previous

Next

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén