Three video shorts, average duration twelve minutes, hand-picked by The Steel City Elders for your enlightenment and ongoing edification. They begin with the significance of Kazakhstan, western neighbour to Xinjiang, north-eastern neighbour to Afghanistan – I do wish folk would study maps before buying into empire narratives that weaponise ‘human rights’ in geostrategic hotspots – and scene of the failed US coup of January 7, 2022.
Xianjiang rather than Kazakhstan is highlighted because this is a repurposed map
From there to the fast rising influence of both Russia and China in postcolonial but imperialised Africa, and for a finale, Xinjiang having been mentioned, why Piers Morgan applies the t-word to Hamas, and the g-word to Beijing’s alleged treatment of the Uighurs, but neither to Israel’s conduct in Gaza.
In that order. And so to Kazakhstan, where business/geostrategic analyst Cyrus Janssen takes just eleven minutes-forty-three to make the case for this Central Asian ‘stan’ as the one most critical, in the face of strong competition, to the New Silk Road arm of China’s Belt and Road initiative (BRI). Why watch? Because our political and media classes are in full-on denial of a reality alluded to in a footnote to my previous post …
this year’s elections in Europe and America have ignored entirely “the most important and urgent issue of our time” – the irreversible decline of Western supremacy and failure of any mainstream leader to acknowledge and articulate the beginnings of a grown-up response to the same. Rather, to intone with bog standard vacuity the mantra – as economically suicidal as it is evidence defiant, and as reality inverting as it is WW3 scary – of Beijing, Moscow and Tehran as threats to your wellbeing and mine when what they in reality threaten is the licence of ‘our’ elites to loot the planet for their enrichment, not yours or mine.
… and because BRI, even more than BRICS and de-dollarisation, is the clearest marker to date of how rapidly that licence is being revoked.
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‘Our’ war against Russia in the Ukraine being a proxy one, it is not at this time of writing an act of treason to make explicit my opinion, implied in scores of posts on the subject, that a Russian victory – hastening the imperial decline already alluded to – is in the best interests of humanity.
I am more adamant still that China’s productive capitalism, as opposed to the casino variant pursued by the West’s rentier oligarchs at the expense of people and planet, offers a glimmer of hope for that same humanity where otherwise I see only darkness.
I’m sure there’s a name for the false argument – not the relative privation fallacy but that neck of the woods – whereby the indefensible is defended on the basis that something else might be worse. The obtusely belligerent Guardian columnist Simon Tindall is an acute case in point:
Evidently, the US often messes up. Yet do critics of American “hegemony”, deeply flawed, self-serving and arrogant though it undoubtedly is, really believe autocratic bullies such as Xi or war criminals such as Putin would do a better job as global policeman? Pull the other one, it has bells on. (The whataboutery of Simon Tisdall)
Reams could be written on such ‘thinking’. Seldom do so few words enshrine so many howlers: not just whataboutery and the fallacy whose name eludes me but, absent a shred of evidence of Xi or Putin as wannabe global gendarmes, straw-mannery to boot. And since the putative need for such a gendarme assumes but does not make the case for the superiority of unipolarity over Westphalia-style balance of power, we can add ahistoric ignorance to the charge sheet. Most important of all, in any positive sense of the word ‘policeman’ means enforcer of the rule of law. Yet America’s ‘policing’ is by Tisdall’s own admission, ‘self-serving’. Or as I would put it, a flouting of international law wherever that is inconvenient – Iraq 2003 for instance – in favour of a “rules based order” to serve, however self-defeatingly, the preservation of a dying empire.
Reams more could be written on the debunked pot-kettle-black trope that it is China and BRI – not the limitless benevolence of the IMF – which ensnares the global south with “debt trap” finance. But, being lazy, I bypass that rabbit hole with an argument much beloved (in theory if not always in practice) of the driest of neoliberal pundits.
I’ve long welcomed the rise of China not because of its intrinsic features – of which, like most Westerners across the political spectrum, I knew little – but because I saw as A Good Thing any check to US Exceptionalism’s pursuit of full spectrum dominance. A simple ‘market discipline’ analogy may help. Under capitalism a town with only one food store is worse for its people than a town with two. Provided they aren’t in cahoots, this holds even if the second owner is just as venal as his rival. (An open letter: isn’t China “just as bad”?)
Now see what this 14:01 Fastepo offering has to say about the rising presence of China and Russia on the continent more trespassed than any other by the rapacity of ‘Western values’.
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Finally the always impressive – even when I don’t agree with him, and here I do – Mehdi Hasan. Ignore the caption, written by one of those little boys masquerading as adults who specialise in belligerently sensational clickbait verbs – humiliated … trashed … destroyed … owned …
Piers Morgan – who within the painfully constricted limits of his unconscious orientalism does try IMO to be ‘reasonable’ – is not humiliated. Simply outclassed – his lazy thinking exposed as such – by the razor sharp reasoning of his interlocutor. Never more so than when taken to task over his inconsistent use of two of the most emotive terms of all – terrorism, and genocide.
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