Information Clearing House – January 14, 2024
The Hegemon, is in a tremendous hurry: it’s all about Divide and Rule
By Pepe Escobar
As we enter incandescent 2024, four major trends will define the progress of interconnected Eurasia.
1.Financial/trade integration will be the norm. Russia and Iran already integrated their financial message transfer systems, bypassing SWIFT and trading in rials and rubles. Russia-China already settle their accounts in rubles and yuan, coupling immense Chinese industrial capacity with immense Russian resources.
2.The economic integration of the post-Soviet space, tilting towards Eurasia, will predominantly flow not so much via the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) but interlinked with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).
3.There will be no significant pro-Western inroads in the Heartland: the Central Asian “stans” will be progressively integrated into a single Eurasia economy organized via the SCO.
4.The clash will become even more acute, pitting the Hegemon and its satellites (Europe and Japan/South Korea/Australia) against Eurasia integration, represented by the three top BRICS (Russia, China, Iran) plus the DPRK and the Arab world incorporated to BRICS 10.
On the Russian front, the inimitable Sergey Karaganov has laid down the law: “We should not deny our European roots; we should treat them with care. After all, Europe has given us a lot. But Russia must move forward. And forward does not mean to the West, but to the East and the South. That is where the future of humanity lies.”
And that leads us to the Dragon – in the Year of the Dragon.
The Mao and Deng road maps
There were a whopping 3.68 billion Chinese trips by rail in 2023 – an all-time record.
China is fast on the way to become an AI global leader by 2030. Tech giant Baidu, for instance, recently released Ernie Bot to rival ChatGPT. AI in China is expanding fast on healthcare, education, and entertainment.
Efficiency is the key. Chinese scientists have developed the ACCEL chip – capable of performing 4.6 quadrillion operations per second, in comparison to NVIDIA’s A100, which delivers 0.312 quadrillion operations per second of deep learning performance.
China graduates no less than one million more STEM students than the U.S., year after year. This goes way beyond AI. Asian nations always reach the top 20% in science and mathematics competitions.
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) may be lousy on geopolitics. But at least they did a public service showing nations that lead the planet in 44 critical technology sectors.
China is number one, leading on 37 sectors. The U.S. leads on 7. Everyone else leads zero sectors. These include Defense, space, robotics, energy, the environment, biotechnology, advanced materials, key quantum technology and of course AI.
How did China get here? It’s quite enlightening today to revisit a 1996 tome by Maurice Mesner: The Deng Xiaoping Era: An Inquiry into the Fate of Chinese Socialism, 1978-1994.
First of all, one needs to know what happened under Mao:
“From 1952 to the mid-1970s, net agricultural output in China increased at an average per annum rate of 2.5 percent, whereas the figure for the most intensive period of Japan’s industrialization (from 1868 to 1912) was 1.7 percent.”
Across the industrial sphere, all indicators went up: steel production; coal; cement; timber; electric power; crude oil; chemical fertilizers. “By the mid-1970s, China was also producing substantial numbers of jet airplanes, heavy tractors, railway locomotives, and modern oceangoing vessels. The People’s Republic also became a significant nuclear power, complete with intercontinental ballistic missiles. Its first successful atomic bomb test was held in 1964, the first hydrogen bomb was produced in 1967, and a satellite was launched into orbit in 1970.”
Blame it on Mao: he transformed China “from one of the world’s most backward agrarian countries into the sixth-largest industrial power by the mid-1970s.” On most key social and demographic indicators, China compared favorably not only with India and Pakistan in South Asia but also with “’middle-income’ countries whose per capita GNP was five times that of China.”
All these breakthroughs laid down the path for Deng: “The higher yields obtained on individual family farms during the early Deng era would not have been possible had it not been for the vast irrigation and flood-control projects – dams, irrigation works, and river dikes – constructed by collectivized peasants in the 1950s and 1960s.”
Of course there were distortions – as the Deng drive produced a de facto capitalist economy presided by a bureaucratic bourgeoisie: “As has been true of the histories of all capitalist economies, the power of the state was very much involved in establishing China’s labor market. Indeed, in China a highly repressive state apparatus played a particularly direct and coercive role in the commodification of labor, a process that has proceeded with a rapidity and on a scale that is historically unprecedented.”
It remains an inextinguishable source of debate to what extent this fabulous economic Great Leap Forward under Deng generated calamitous social consequences.
The Empire of kakistocracy
As the Xi era definitely tackles – and tries to solve – the drama, what makes it even more complicated is the constant interference of the notorious “structural contradictions” between China and the Hegemon.
China-bashing is the number one politically correct game across the Beltway – and that’s bound to go out of control in 2024. Assuming a Democratic debacle next November, there are few doubts a Republican presidency – Trump or no Trump – will unleash Cold War 3.0 or 4.0, with China, not Russia, as the top threat.
Then there is the upcoming Taiwan election. If pro-independence candidates win it, incandescence will exponentially rise. Now imagine that compounded with a rabid Sinophobe occupant of the White House.
Even when China was militarily weak, the Hegemon could not defeat it, either in Korea or in Vietnam. There is less than zero chance Washington would defeat Beijing on a South China Sea battlefield now.
The American problem is encapsulated in a Perfect Storm.
Hegemon hard and soft power have been hurled down a black void with the imminent, cosmic NATO humiliation in Ukraine, compounded with complicity with the Gaza genocide.
Simultaneously, Hegemon global financial power is about to take a very hard hit as the Russia-China strategic partnership leading BRICS 10 starts offering quite viable alternatives to the Global South.
Chinese scholars, in priceless exchanges, always remind their Western interlocutors that History has been a consistent playground pitting aristocratic and or/plutocratic oligarchies against each other. The collective West now happens to be “led” by the most toxic variety of plutocracy: kakistocracy.
What Chinese qualify, correctly, as “crusader nations” are now significantly exhausted – economically, socially, and militarily. Worse: nearly totally de-industrialized. Those with a functioning brain among the crusaders at least have understood that “decoupling” from China will be a major disaster.
None of that eliminates their arrogant/ignorant drive for a war on China – even as Beijing has exercised immense restraint by not giving them any excuse to start another Forever War.
Instead, Beijing is reversing Hegemon tactics – as in sanctioning the Hegemon and assorted vassals (Japan, South Korea) on rare earth imports. Even more effective is the concerted Russia-China drive to bypass the U.S. dollar and weaken the euro – with full support of BRICS 10 members, Opec+ members, EAEU members and most SCO members.
The Taiwan riddle
The Chinese master plan, in a nutshell, is a thing of beauty: to finish off the “rules-based international order” without firing a shot.
Taiwan will remain the prime not-yet-engaged battlefield. Roughly, it’s fair to argue that the majority of the population of Taiwan does not want unification; at the same time, they don’t want an American-engineered war.
They want, essentially, the current status quo. China is not in a hurry: Deng’s master plan pointed to reunification sometime before 2049.
The Hegemon, on the other hand, is in a tremendous hurry: it’s all about Divide and Rule, all over again, promoting chaos and destabilizing China’s inexorable rise.
Beijing tracks literally anything that moves in Taiwan – via monumental, meticulous dossiers. Beijing knows that for Taipei to thrive in a peaceful environment, it needs to negotiate while it still has something to negotiate with.
Every Taiwanese with a brain – and there are plenty of first-class scientific brains in the island – knows they can’t expect Americans to die fighting for them. First of all because they know the Hegemon won’t dare fighting a conventional war with China, because the Hegemon will lose – badly (the Pentagon gamed all options). And there won’t be a nuclear war either.
Chinese scholars are fond of reminding us that when the Middle Kingdom was totally fragmented in the 19th century under the Qing dynasty (1644-1912), “the Sino-Manchu ruling class was incapable of relinquishing their self-image and of taking the draconian necessary steps.”
The same applies to the Exceptionalists now – even as they go on serial somersaults trying to preserve their own, mythological self-image: Narcissus drowned in a pool of his own making.
It’s possible to advance that the Year of the Dragon will be a year where Sovereignty reigns. Hegemon fits of Hybrid War rage and collaborationist comprador elites will be obstacles constantly hampering the Global South. Yet at least there will be three poles with the spine, the resources, the organization, the vision and the sense of Universal History to take the fight towards a more equal and just system to the next level: China, Russia and Iran.
https://informationclearinghouse.blog/2024/01/13/chinese-masterplan-is-a-thing-of-beauty/14/
Countercurrent – January 14, 2024
If Xi-Jinping Reminded that Martin Luther King Called
U.S.”Greatest Purveyor of Violence in World?”
by Jay Janson
If, during the three day Martin Luther King birthday holiday, a world attention getting source, for example, a high enough profiled Chinese government official, pointed out that the government of the United States of America was condemned as the most violent in the world by America’s own idol, this writer believes it would be a sensation, and a most difficult moment for the U.S. government and America’s wars supporting mainstream media which has for 57 years totally suppressed all mention of King’s condemnation of his government’s wars to protect predatory investments.
What If the African-American Community Was Made Aware of Criminal Mainstream Media News&Entertainment Conglomerates’ 57 Year Blackout of King’s Condemnation of US Wars by an International Voice Too Prestigious for CIA-overseen Western Media to Be Able to Suppress Reporting?
(How strange it is that the African American community has either openly or indifferently been supportive of white racist regime change, imperialist bombings, invasions and bloody occupations in small nations of people whose skin color is of various hues even though MLK condemned those wars as
“atrocity wars and covert violence on three continents since 1945 to maintain unjust predatory investments in countries overseas,” – )
King’s 1967 New York sermon, ‘Beyond Vietnam – a Time to Break Silence’ made bold headlines in newspapers across the world:
KING CALLS U.S.“GREATEST PURVEYOR of VIOLENCE in WORLD”
In his sermon, which was vilified in the U.S. press, King did not speak to his government, but to all Americans, and agonised over his not having spoken up sooner.
So what would Rev. King say to or about Americans since his death as they have continued bringing massive death and destruction to so many more small countries and more specifically what would he have said about the recent ongoing wars on the innocent citizens and their children in Yemen, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan?
Martin Luther King had cried out“A time comes when silence is betrayal.And that time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.”
And Now Has? “that time when silence is betrayal come for Americans in relation” to Gaza and Palestinians?
Israel is using an awesome quantity of U.S. provided weaponry in a genocidal wiping out of entire cites of Palestinians after generations long murderously holding Palestinians captive under illegal UN denounced military occupation.
One can only imagine the bitterly stern outcry King would have made about the difficult to stomach horrific and eye rebounding obvious genocide of now nearly 24,000 murdered encircled and blockaded captive illegally military occupied Palestinians, 70% of whom are women and children? There are another 3,000 buried under the ruble of their homes and other buildings that the American warplanes, bombs and shells that Israel has used to level the cities of Gaza.
However, there is no need for us to imagine what King thought and publicly stated during the last year of his life about the inhumanly unfair situation of Palestinians after Isreal’s Six-Day War against Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, which killed about 800 Israelis and around 18,000 Arabs in two weeks. gaining territory the entirety of Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, West Bank and the Sinai peninsula, four times the amount of land it had before.
On June 18, 1967, On ABC Sunday’s TV “Issues and Answers”, King said,
“I think for the ultimate peace and security of the situation it will probably be necessary for Israel to give up this conquered territory because to hold on to it will only exacerbate the tensions and deepen the bitterness of the Arabs.”
King’s powerful insight reveals his belief in what was and still is key to achieving peace in the Middle East.
Post Script
People that were fortunate enough to catch the intentionally vastly unreported news that the Memphis Circuit Court of Tennessee had officially found that King was “assassinated as a result of a conspiracy that included governmental agencies,” have been aware that King’s condemnation of imperialist war madness and the capitalist genocidal insanity of putting profit above humanity cost him his life – and cost America the loss of his much ‘too effective’ leadership.[1] In 1967, the huge investments in the Vietnam War were threatened by the second March on Washington King was planning to connect poverty at home with the huge expenditures of human and financial resources on the genocidal war in Vietnam – for which King held all Americans, including himself, responsible. But King was shot dead one year to the day after his blistering sermon in New York, ‘Beyond Vietnam – a Time to Break Silence.’ (Four years after his ‘I have a Dream’ speech at the first and only March on Washington.)
If some salient voice of world renown could point out to the criminal media mesmerised world that the government of the United States of America was condemned as the most violent in the world by America’s own idol, civil rights leader Martin Luther King, this writer believes it would be a sensation, and a most difficult moment for the U.S. government and America’s wars supporting mainstream media – which has for 57 years totally suppressed all mention of King’s condemnation of his government’s wars to protect predatory investments. Ending or a least reducing CIA-overseen Western media[2] outlets would contribute immensely to the world (and the U.S.) being released from the awful life taking grip of wars promoting U.S. grand corporate private capitalism.
End Notes
1.The jury that heard the case took only one hour of deliberations to reach a unanimous verdict: that King was assassinated as a result of a conspiracy. They found that “governmental agencies” were among the conspirators. Coretta Scott King said after the verdict: “There is abundant evidence of a major, high-level conspiracy in the assassination of my husband.” The jury found that the mafia and various government agencies “were deeply involved in the assassination. … Mr. Ray was set up to take the blame. [“Assassination Conspiracy Trial | “The Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change”. thekingcenter.org. Archived from the original on 2012-05-03.]
[Yellin, Kevin Sack With Emily (December 10, 1999). “Dr. King’s Slaying Finally Draws A Jury Verdict, but to Little Effect”. The New York Times.]
2. “Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the C.I.A,” December 26, 1977, New York Times
Jay Janson is an archival research peoples historian activist, musician and writer; has lived and worked on all continents; articles on media published in China, Italy, UK, India and in the US by Dissident Voice, Global Research; Information Clearing House; Counter Currents and others; now resides in NYC; First effort was a series of articles on deadly cultural pollution endangering seven areas of life emanating from Western corporate owned commercial media published in Hong Kong’s Window Magazine 1993; Howard Zinn lent his name to various projects of his; Weekly column, South China Morning Post, 1986-87; reviews for Ta Kung Bao; article China Daily, 1989. Is coordinator of the Howard Zinn co-founded King Condemned US Wars International Awareness Campaign, and website historian of the Ramsey Clark co-founded Prosecute US Crimes Against Humanity Now Campaign, which contains a history of US crimes in 9 countries up to 2006 9 countries up to 2006Jay Janson is an archival research peoples historian activist, musician and writer; has lived and worked on all continents; articles on media published in China, Italy, UK, India and in the US by Dissident Voice, Global Research; Information Clearing House; Counter Currents and others; now resides in NYC; First effort was a series of articles on deadly cultural pollution endangering seven areas of life emanating from Western corporate owned commercial media published in Hong Kong’s Window Magazine 1993; Howard Zinn lent his name to various projects of his; Weekly column, South China Morning Post, 1986-87; reviews for Ta Kung Bao; article China Daily, 1989. Is coordinator of the Howard Zinn co-founded King Condemned US Wars International Awareness Campaign, and website historian of the Ramsey Clark co-founded Prosecute US Crimes Against Humanity Now Campaign, which contains a history of US crimes in 9 countries up to 2006 9 countries up to 2006
Russia Attacks Facilities of the Ukrainian Military-Industrial Complex
The Russian Armed Forces also hit five Ukrainian brigades in the Donetsk area
The Russian armed forces launched this Saturday a group attack with long-range and high-precision maritime and air weapons, including the Kinzhal hypersonic missile system, against facilities of the military-industrial complex (MIC) of Ukraine, which produce projectiles, gunpowder and unmanned aerial vehicles
In a statement, the Ministry of Defense stressed that the attack was against the military-industrial complex of Ukraine, which produces 155, 152 and 125 mm shells, gunpowder and unmanned aerial vehicles.
It should be noted that the objective of this operation was achieved. All the designated targets of the military-industrial complex were achieved, he said.
The Russian Armed Forces also hit five Ukrainian brigades in the Donetsk area over the past 24 hours, with Kiev losing up to 320 soldiers killed and wounded in the area.
Just in Donetsk area, the Ukrainian military also lost four tanks, two infantry fighting vehicles and eight pickup trucks, as well as one Strela-10 surface-to-air missile system, one Gvozdika self-propelled howitzer and two D-30 howitzers, the Russian Defense Ministry said.
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