BREAKING: UN Demands Poland Release Political Prisoner Mateusz Piskorski

BE SURE TO PASS THESE ARTICLES TO FRIENDS AND KIN. A LOT DEPENDS ON THIS. DO YOUR PART.

By JAFE ARNOLD, SENIOR EDITOR, FORT-RUSS
Fort Russ is a fraternal website


On April 20th, 2018, the Arbitrary Detention Working Group of the United Nations’ Human Rights Council adopted a groundbreaking resolution to which Fort Russ has gained exclusive access ahead of its official release.

This official UN opinion document, “WGAD/2018/POL/OPN No. 18/2018”, declares the imprisonment of the Polish activist and scholar turned political prisoner, Dr. Mateusz Piskorski, to be arbitrary and in violation of international law on human and civil rights. The document thus calls on the Polish government to immediately release Piskorski and afford him appropriate reparations.

Mateusz Piskorski was arrested and his political party Zmiana’s offices and members’ homes were raided by Poland’s Internal Security Agency (ABW) on May 18th, 2016, two days after Piskorski had publicly warned that the deployment of US troops to “NATO’s Eastern Flank”, i.e., Poland, would lead to waves of political repression against dissenting voices. Piskorski, the co-founder of the European Center for Geopolitical Analysis, the founding chairman of the “first non-American party in Poland”, Zmiana, scholar of international relations and experienced international election observer, was one of the most outspoken voices against Washington-dictated Polish policy, which in a series of letters from behind bars he described as degrading Poland into a helpless battlefield between the US and Russia. 

Dr. Mateusz Piskorski

Since 2016, Piskorski has been kept “temporarily” behind bars under suspicion of working for the intelligence services of the Russian Federation and People’s Republic of China, but no such official charge was presented until nearly two years later, on April 23rd, 2018. The evidence and key case files have been kept classified from not only the public, but from Piskorski himself, who was also not even “invited” to several of his own case hearings. [The whole thing has the signature stench and high-handedness of US/NATO false flags these days, whereby judicial procedures, even those based on Constitutional guarantees, are simply disregarded.—Ed]

Fort Russ has been the only English-language news service, and one of the only independent news resources in the world, that has provided constant coverage of the Piskorski case.

The UN document, which was set to be unveiled in Poland on May 11, on the day of yet another hearing to extend Piskorski’s detention, arrived at a number of conclusions which Fort Russ and critics of the Polish government’s actions have exposed since day one.

The Working Group determined that “Mr. Piskorski’s activities clearly fall within the boundaries of the freedom of opinion and expression, and the freedom of peaceful assembly and association, protected by articles 19 and 20 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights…” (point 45), and that “his deprivation of liberty is therefore arbitrary” (point 48).

Given this violation of Piskorski’s rights, the Working Group “wishes to emphasize that no trial of Mr. Piskorski should take place in the future” (point 49). However, the report noted that “there is no apparent end in sight to the constant renewal of Mr. Piskorski’s pre-trial detention and, although his detention is kept under regular review every three months, he is effectively being detained indefinitely” (point 50).

Concerning the nature of the “case” and the allegations against Piskorski, the document also recognized that the Polish government “has failed to allow Mr. Piskorski and his lawyers fair access to classified information” (point 53) and that “Mr. Piskorski’s right to present a defence was violated as he could only participate in some hearings on his pre-trial detention” (point 54).

In conclusion, the UN Human Rights Council’s Working Group on Arbitrary Detention assessed that “the appropriate remedy would be to release Mr. Piskorski immediately and accord him an enforceable right to compensation and other reparations in accordance with international law” (point 60), and calls on the Polish government “to ensure a full and independent investigation of the circumstances surrounding the arbitrary deprivation of liberty of Mr. Piskorski, and to take appropriate measures against those responsible for the violation of his rights” (point 61).

Of extreme significance is the fact that the document mentions in multiple places that the Polish government has not responded to any of the Working Group’s requests for clarification despite the fact that on “18 December 2017, the Working Group transmitted the allegations from the source to the Government under its regular communication procedure”, “requested the Government to provide detailed information by 19 February 2018 about Mr. Piskorski’s current situation” and, despite the fact that “the Government requested an extension of the deadline for response…the Government did not submit any information” (points 38 and 39).

The fact that the Working Group’s investigation, including attempted outreach to the Polish government, has evidently been underway since December 2017 demonstrates that the document’s conclusions have been meticulously deliberated over a significant span of time, and that the Polish government still has no valid justification, whether verbal or legal, to present on its imprisonment of Dr. Piskorski.

In turn, the document spells out clearly in section (d) of point 63 that Poland’s international obligations and the compatibility of its laws and practices in line with the present opinion founded on international law are hereby in question and necessitate follow-up investigation. This is no more nor less than a questioning of Poland’s adherence to international law as a UN member over its imprisonment of Dr. Piskorski. This bears serious implications for Poland’s reputation and poses a serious dilemma out of which it will be more than difficult to maneuver.

In short, the UN Human Rights Council’s working group has confirmed what many have been saying all along, namely, that Piskorski’s detention is politically motivated, a violation of international law on human rights and civil freedom, and therefore a symptom of unjust and unlawful practices by the Polish government in the present time.

In many respects, this breakthrough is thus a confirmation of Piskorski’s own warnings that Poland is sliding down the path of political repression, fostered by its instrumentalization as “NATO’s Eastern Flank” and seeking to silence dissent under the pretexts of “Russian information and hybrid war” and “espionage,” both of which terms the document found highly questionable. The UN document clearly reprimanded the Polish government to “refrain from imposing restrictions that are not consistent with international human rights law, including restrictions on discussion of government policies and political debate; reporting on human rights, government activities and corruption in government; peaceful demonstrations or political activities; and expression of opinion and dissent” (point 46).

This resolution is an enormously important development. With the presentation of this UN-backed document, Zmiana’s General Secretary, Tomasz Jankowski, believes “with full confidence” that “Mateusz Piskorski will win first – if not today then tomorrow, and if not tomorrow then the next day.”

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
 

Jafe Arnold is Special Editor of Fort Russ, research fellow and Special Projects Director of the Center for Syncretic Studies, and founding Editor-in-Chief of Eurasianist Internet Archive.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

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Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” — acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump — a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report

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Trotkyist WSWS website delivers scathing balance sheet of left movements in Latin America.

BE SURE TO PASS THESE ARTICLES TO FRIENDS AND KIN. A LOT DEPENDS ON THIS. DO YOUR PART.

Under the signature of Bill Van Auken, a senior editor, the folks at wsws.org, a Trotskyist organisation affiliated with the Socialist Equality Party (SEP), a member of the Fourth International, have just published a scathing analysis of the admittedly disastrous course of left movements in Latin America, among which even the most promising at one time (Sandinistas, Cuban revolution, Chavismo) are now in open retreat if not downright near collapse or seriously compromised by leadership failure and the unrelenting pressures of international neoliberalism. Some, as is clear in the case of Ecuador, appear to have already switched from bourgeois left nationalism to unapologetic collaboration with US-led imperialism. As is usual with Trotkyist analyses it seems to us that while the objective situation they describe is pretty much the way they say it is, and the prospects for true revolution are now in tatters everywhere, it is the degrees of blame and causation which separate us in some critical aspects. In our view, from a dialectical perspective, and without denying the personal and organisational errors noted in the article, not to mention the effects of betrayals and corruption, wsws.org is a bit overly critical of the left forces attempting social change, attributing to these actors powers and choices they rarely had, while discounting too much the tremendous pressures and destabilising influence of world capitalism and the associated native bourgeoisies, the natural fifth column, all of which—short of total revolution—continue to enjoy formidable resources to block, sabotage, deform and in many cases ultimately defeat some of the revolutionaries' most inspired projects. Indeed, extreme criticism of revolutionary leadership is one of the chief analytical postures of Trotkyism. Criticism is certainly good and necessary, but extreme criticism bordering on idealist conceptions of reality may obfuscate as much as it reveals. We thus wonder if the betrayal of the Bolivarian revolution is so complete, as described by wsws.org, why is it that the imperialists and comprador layers in Venezuela are still seeking to overthrow and wipe out all vestiges of chavismo instead of simply forming a de facto alliance with it, as imperialism has done many times with "strongmen" and corrupt regimes in Latin America and beyond, with whom they found it easy to do business with. Fact is that, mundane as it sounds, revolution under any conditions is an exceedingly difficult thing, especially so when the world's most reactionary and criminal superpower is constantly meddling in the affairs of the nation in the process of transformation. —PG

A balance sheet of the betrayals of left nationalism in Latin America

By Bill Van Auken, wsws.org
Dateline: 14 May 2018

As we commemorate May Day and today’s 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx, the resurgence of the class struggle that is shaking political and social relations on a global scale is finding particularly sharp expression within Latin America, the most socially unequal continent on the planet.

As in the United States and elsewhere in the world, teachers have taken the lead in this renewed upsurge of the class struggle, going on strike and taking to the streets from Sao Paulo to Buenos Aires, and from Santiago, Chile to Mexico City to San Juan, Puerto Rico to fight the decimation of public education and defend their living standards and basic rights. In many instances, these struggles have been met with naked police repression.

Bill Van Auken's address at the 2018 International Online May Day Rally

The new crop of right-wing governments—Macri in Argentina, Temer in Brazil, Piñera in Chile—are no more able to resolve the crisis gripping the capitalist system in Latin America than their supposedly left predecessors. Like them, mired in filthy corruption scandals, their only answer is to shift the burden onto the backs of the working class.

As the Latin American working class once again moves toward revolutionary struggle, it is high time for the drawing up of an unsparing balance sheet of the betrayals of past struggles and the role played by leaderships that have done everything in their power to disorient and mislead the working class.

“The emancipation of the workers must be the act of the working class itself,” Marx and Engels famously insisted. This essential affirmation of the role of the working class as the sole consistently revolutionary class in capitalist society, and the impossibility of establishing socialism under the leadership of any supposedly radical or left section of the bourgeoisie or petty-bourgeoisie, has been confirmed again and again through tragic historical experiences in Latin America.

The International Committee of the Fourth International has insisted that defeating the attacks carried out by both imperialism and the native Latin American bourgeoisie is possible only through the independent mobilization of the working class, throughout the Americas, based upon a revolutionary socialist and internationalist program.

The ICFI has waged a decades-long battle against all those who have promoted one or another bourgeois or petty-bourgeois movement as a substitute for the decisive task of building revolutionary Marxist parties in the working class.

Left nationalism, with the fawning support of petty-bourgeois radicals in Europe and North America, has played a catastrophic role in Latin America.

This found its consummate expression in the development of the thesis that the coming to power of Fidel Castro in Cuba had opened up a new road to socialism, which no longer required either the conscious and independent political intervention of the working class, or the building of revolutionary Marxist parties.

Instead, guerrilla warfare, waged by small groups of armed men under the leadership of radical petty-bourgeois nationalists, would suffice. This myth, derived from the coming to power of Castro’s July 26 Movement, was distilled into the retrograde theories of guerrillaism, elaborated by his erstwhile political ally Che Guevara, as the model for revolutions throughout the hemisphere.

This false perspective found its most prominent proponents in the Pabloite revisionist tendency, which emerged within the Fourth International under the leadership of Ernest Mandel in Europe and Joseph Hansen in the US, subsequently joined by Nahuel Moreno in Argentina.

This anti-Marxist perspective was propagated throughout Latin America with disastrous consequences. It served to divert a layer of radicalized youth away from the struggle to build a conscious revolutionary leadership in the working class, and into grossly unequal armed confrontations that claimed the lives of thousands and helped pave the way to fascist-military dictatorships throughout the continent.

New York Times photo accompanying an "opinion" piece against the Venezuelan government by Gustavo Dudamel. Notice the flag by the protester deliberately lies, as Venezuela is NOT a dictatorship. Such little details are not mentioned nor corrected by the Times which is happy to beat the drums of "regime change" as they have been doing for years in Syria and elsewhere.

The International Committee of the Fourth International fought intransigently against the Pabloite perspective. Defending Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution, the ICFI insisted that Castroism did not constitute any new road to socialism. Rather, it represented only one of the more radical variants of the bourgeois nationalist movements that had come to power throughout much of the former colonial world in the post-World War II era.

The ICFI warned that the Pabloites’ elevation of Castro as a “natural Marxist,” entailed the wholesale repudiation of the historical and theoretical conception of the socialist revolution going back to Marx, and laid the basis for the liquidation of the revolutionary cadre assembled by the Trotskyist movement internationally into the camp of bourgeois nationalism and Stalinism.

Last month saw the formal end of the nearly six-decade rule of the Castro brothers, under conditions of mounting social inequality on the island and the attempt by the ruling strata to salvage its privileges by means of a rapprochement with US imperialism. Today, deals signed with Obama remain in abeyance, as Trump demands even greater concessions from Havana and promotes the activities of the rabid anti-Castroites in Miami, while threatening a renewal of US aggression. The fate of Cuba will be determined by the development of the class struggle and the struggle to build a new revolutionary leadership in the working class, both on the island as well as in the United States and throughout the Americas.

The same Pabloite revisionists who promoted Castroism went on to declare the Sandinista Liberation Front in Nicaragua, and the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front in El Salvador, as the basis for a new path to socialism and the foundation for a new revolutionary international. Despite the immense heroism and the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of lives in the struggle against US-backed dictatorships and CIA terrorist armies, both these movements transformed themselves into bourgeois parties, made peace with the reactionary ruling oligarchies they had previously opposed and became faithful executors of the austerity programs of the IMF.

Last month saw the Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega—who has amassed wealth and power rivaling that of the former dictator Somoza—unleash violent repression against workers and youth protesting against draconian cuts to pensions, leaving some 30 dead.

Last month also saw the jailing on trumped-up corruption charges of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the former metalworkers leader, who became president of Brazil as the leader of the Workers Party, or PT, the Partido dos Trabalhadores.

Many of the same Pabloite and Morenoite revisionists, who had previously extolled the virtues of Castroism and Sandinismo, presented the PT as a new uniquely Brazilian road to socialism. They entered and helped build the PT into what became a thoroughly corrupt bourgeois party that for a dozen years served as the preferred instrument of rule of the Brazilian bourgeoisie. It is telling that Lula’s imprisonment by the right-wing government of Michel Temer has produced no mass outcry from Brazilian workers, who saw their living standards and rights subjected to sharp attacks by PT governments, with the collaboration of its affiliated trade unions.

A tendency that learns nothing and forgets nothing, the Morenoites, having seen their Brazilian adherents long since expelled from the PT, have concentrated their efforts on a series of unprincipled electoral alliances and maneuvers within the trade union and parliamentary arenas in Argentina. The logic of this activity is directed toward the preparation of a new betrayal of the Argentine working class through the creation of a new left bourgeois party, along the lines of Podemos in Spain or Syriza in Greece.

As its principal ally in perennial unprincipled electoral alliances acknowledged, in a candid—and self-incriminating—fashion last year, the PTS [Partido de Trabajadores por el Socialismo], the main continuator of the discredited politics of Morenoism in Argentina, represents a “Podemos in diapers.”

Finally, there was the fraud of Bolivarian or “21st century” socialism, introduced with the coming to power of former army colonel Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. While able to adopt a “left” posture and provide minimal social assistance programs to the working class under conditions of rising oil prices, with the collapse of the commodity boom, this bourgeois nationalist movement, based firmly on the military, has turned sharply against the working class. Its policies have enriched a layer of financiers, commodity speculators and senior military officers, while upholding the interests of international finance capital, even as workers confront growing hunger and unemployment.

Meanwhile, the Ecuadorian government of Rafael Correa, another proponent of Bolivarianism and 21st century socialism, has given way to that of his hand-picked successor, Lenin Moreno. While introducing a series of capitalist counter-reforms, Moreno has sought to curry favor with US and British imperialism by means of a grotesquely reactionary betrayal, cutting off WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s Internet access and barring him from receiving visitors at the Ecuadoran embassy in London, where he has been a virtual prisoner for the last six years. As Moreno’s government seeks closer ties with the US military and the Trump administration, it collaborates in suppressing a man pursued by Washington for exposing the crimes of US imperialism. Such is the logic of bourgeois nationalism.

These bitter experiences with the politics of bourgeois nationalism, and its Pabloite and other petty-bourgeois pseudo-left props, underscore the necessity of forging a new revolutionary Marxist movement, based upon the independent political mobilization of the working class and the unification of workers in Latin America with workers in the United States and internationally in a common struggle to put an end to capitalism.

We appeal to our comrades in Latin America, those participating in this online rally, those who read the World Socialist Web Site and all those workers and youth seeking a revolutionary path: the history of the class struggle in Latin America is one not merely of betrayals, but of immense heroism, self-sacrifice and determination, all of which will be summoned up in the revolutionary battles to come. The decisive question, however, is to learn the lessons of the past, so that the mistakes and betrayals will not be repeated. This above all means the study and assimilation of the long history of the struggle waged by Trotskyism against revisionism and, on this principled foundation, building sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in every country.

* * *

Hacemos un llamado a nuestros camaradas en América Latina, a quienes están participando en este mitin en línea, a quienes leen el World Socialist Web Site y a todos los trabajadores y jóvenes buscando un camino revolucionario. La historia de la lucha de clases en América Latina no solo está compuesta de traiciones, sino también de inmenso heroísmo, autosacrificio y determinación, atributos que serán invocados en las batallas revolucionarias venideras. Sin embargo, la cuestión determinante será aprender las lecciones del pasado para que no se repitan errores ni traiciones. Ante todo, esto significa estudiar y asimilar las enseñanzas de la larga historia de luchas del trotskismo contra el revisionismo y, con base en estos principios fundamentales, construir secciones del Comité Internacional de la Cuarta Internacional en cada país.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bill Van Auken is a senior editor and noted activist with wsws.org, a publication of the SEP, a Marxian Trotkyist formation.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

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Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” — acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump — a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report

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Do you prefer the 1% or The Party? (Or: Why China wins)

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

2018 China: the envy of the world – just check the scoreboard.

Pres. Xi reviewing honor guard. A highly qualified statesman for our troubled times.

The Chinese communists kicked out the the Japanese, then the Europeans, held off the American neo-imperialists at Korea and then Vietnam, provided spectacular economic growth during all that time, ended rampant drug abuse, forbid ethnic quarrelling, and is the economic envy of the world in 2018.

Maybe you don’t want to live there, but you certainly wish your country was doing as well for itself as China is.

Every Third-Worlder would agree with that in a nanosecond, and only a French-style superiority/inferiority complex could cause a Westerner to deny it (or perhaps total ignorance of modern politics).

How did we get here? Divine intervention? Cultural superiority? The dumb luck of an electron’s random path?

Somebody is running political-economic policy on this earth, and the West European (bourgeois) system and socialist-inspired Chinese system answer that question quite clearly in their parts of the world. This is the 7th part in an 8-part series which essentially compares the two systems via comparing two leading English-language literary lights of either one.

And if you’ve read this far you know all that already, so I’ll spare you the preambles and get right down to the nitty gritty.

So who’s your Daddy?

Everybody's got a vanguard party. Democracy is not perfect (only God is), but this does not mean there are not varying degrees of perfection which we can analyse and attain.

In the West, your modern-era vanguard – after decades of money-grubbing, back-stabbing, standing on daddy’s rich shoulders, and exploiting those who work for them – is the economic 1%.

To add journalistic balance: they also got to be the vanguard via the admirable, ethical business practices of Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, the genius of people like Warren Buffett to support the growth of private, abusive monopolies, and the incredible skills of being phony in public by actors like Ronald Reagan…these are whom have been chosen in the West – via both informal and formal democratic consensus – as their vanguard party.

According to the author of the top English-language university textbook on China, John King Fairbank and his China: A New History, China has always been culturally predisposed towards rejecting that type of a vanguard.

“Once the literati who set the tone of ruling class opinion became convinced that the dynasty had lost its moral claim to the throne, little could save it. This is a factor in Chinese politics today.”

If I said that Chinese literati ran China I’d be called “romantic”, but that’s the view from a pair of Western eyes, which can usually only imagine the army, money, or an only-negative, reactionary clergy to be the the deciding factor in politics.

However, we can say that there certainly was a literati in charge in Revolutionary War-era America – it was bourgeois and slave-owning, but they often talked the right anti-imperialist talk and walked it, too. But nobody can say that about America’s leadership today: I don’t know what the 9th century Chinese theatre equivalent of Bedtime for Bonzo was, but I don’t think the lead actor got very high on their political ladder.

In France, every politician must write at least one book, but…c’mon – they are imperialists, cultural chauvinists and fake-leftists, or somehow all three at the same time quite often. However, at least France is not American, eh?

China may or may not have a “literati” in charge today…but you certainly cannot possibly rise in the Communist Party without being literate in modern political and economic theory. You can call me “Confucian”, but the best way to lead is by example – so what example does their current vanguard party give us?

Just how good is China’s economic planning? There’s a reason we aren’t told.

At 7 parts I’m starting to feel bad for my readers, even though you have paid me nothing, and 98% of you not even paid me a comment compliment!

Regardless of your shameless taking advantage of my labor, I’m going to put the juicier section – China’s economic planning – ahead of the “as painless as possible” very quick recap of the Chinese political structures which permit such a juicy economic policy.

The reality is that people are right to fear rule by the Party – it’s radically new. In human history it has been the 1%, 99% of the time. Even in aboriginal societies, how often were women and the disabled allowed to make major decisions? Therefore, we have almost no data to rely on regarding what happens when an 99%-inspired Party rules.

Common sense tells us that public opinion can’t rule 100% of the time….but just once every 4 years? The scientific method tells us that data and testing are important – we should use them in politics and not just the chemistry lab, no?

[dropcap]A [/dropcap]great thing about Jeff J. Brown’s China is Communist, Dammit!, just released last year, is that he gives us plenty of evidence which leaves no doubt that China’s system uses data on what the People think: it is a People’s democratic dictatorship, after all, and they absolutely cannot have democracy without compiling data on what the people say they need, want and generally opine on important subjects.

The reality is that China compiles and actually draws from this “Peoples’ data” hugely impressively. It is also a reality that Western parliaments care very little about public opinion on seemingly all policy making, and certainly Western executive branches are not constrained by it either, nor is the European Union or Eurogroup (which runs the Eurozone).

The disparity between China’s reality and image is startling: a “5 year plan” is portrayed as pure dictatorship, but here’s how it’s actually compiled:

“These five-year plans are not done in a vacuum. A vast hierarchy of information speeds up from village committees to county, district, provincial and then national levels. These statistics are based on surveys and polls of the masses. The Communist Party of China is one of the largest polling organizations in the world, obsessively interested in what citizens think about, the good, the bad and the ugly, from garbage services, to medical care, to the ability to buy food or a car.

Computers have made a huge improvement in collecting and analyzing all this information but still thousands of statisticians, actuaries, database experts and technicians who studied at university in urban, rural, agricultural, environmental and economic planning, hundreds of thousands of collective work hours to interpret and analyze this soon army of data statistics and information….Needless to say, for a continent-sized country with over 1 billion citizens, it takes hundreds of thousands of people involved to develop each five-year plan.”

It is not “needless to say”, however, because such facts about China’s governmental and economic process are never uttered in the West. They must fear that we would be contaminated by such democratic common sense. “China is an unfeeling totalitarian system…and they’re capitalist, too. End of story!!!”

This is where new China scholarship by Brown should revolutionise the conceptions of China for those who are honest; Brown has lived there for nearly two decades and is involved in normal, everyday life as an active immigrant-citizen, as his book repeatedly demonstrates. He relates how he knows that polls of all types, and of all demographics, are taking place because he sees constant flyers for them in his regular-class neighborhood. Fairbank will always be “Harvard’s first China scholar”, but he can never outclass Brown on “new”, living China scholarship, though he probably does outclass Brown on old, outdated, scholarship of dead Chinese.

In the West public opinion is polled just one time: during election time, and then is totally ignored. French President Emmanuel Macron and others pride themselves on not listening to public opinion once reaching office, and he is steadfastly implementing whatever the hell he wants; during election campaigns candidates like Hillary bend anyway the latest poll is blowing. Among the People of the West there is abundant proof of support for leftism, and certainly majority support for many socialist-inspired policies, but they are totally ignored because they are unable to play a role in their money-centered, 1%-created and supported, bourgeois, individualistic political process.

Not so socialist China….

“Compared to Western countries, what is amazing is the lack of serious influence that China’s private sector has on the process of developing each five-year plan and budget. The idea of having thousands of lobby and special interest groups, let’s be honest, with hundreds of millions of dollars and euros in hand to essentially buy legislation for their direct benefit, is alien to Chinese governance.

Do various, aforementioned government entities contact the offices of Jack Ma (Alibaba), Robin Li (Baidu), Wang Jianlin (Dalian Wanda Group), and others among China’s elite business world? Of course. But the idea that any of these CEOs or their companies go to the state planning commission or National People’s Congress, with checkbook in hand, to write and buy their own laws, which is standard practice in Eurangloland (European Union, NATO plus Australia, New Zealand and Israel), is unthinkable in Communist China. Their wishes and suggestions are surely known by everyone concerned, but they are trumped by Baba Beijing’s overriding priority of maintaining social stability, called wending in Chinese, and keeping the Heavenly Mandate for the long term. And these Chinese movers and shakers in the business world are in total agreement. No wending is very bad for business, unless you sell arms and weapons, and almost all of these in China are state-owned.”

Brown clearly does not have red-colored glasses about the increased access of China’s 1%, but he demonstrates that the real project of modern socialism is to not to destroy capitalism 100% but to limit it and harness it for the benefit of the 99%.

“Suppose Baba Beijing declared a serious funding issue or the masses began to turn on their superrich 1% class, which is now looked upon with a certain amount of national pride? The National People’s Congress might feel compelled to pass a law requiring all fortunes over $1 billion dollars to pay a 10% or 25% wealth tax to the state treasury. China’s 1% may grumble and complain, but the checkbooks would necessarily be whipped out. They know the only reason they have accumulated the wealth they possess is due to the Communist Party of China’s strategic, long-term, five-, and now essentially 10-year economic plans, and all the well-thought out strategies, subsidies, targeted tax cuts, etc., that were bestowed upon them. There is no sense of thankfulness on the part of Western capitalists for what their governments do for them, because they now they own the process in the first place. How can you be thankful for something which you already consider yours by right?”

The key is that, when it comes to economic planning, socialist-inspired countries have huge leverage to force their economic direction in a way which guarantees – guarantees – to be pointed in a way which is at least primarily intended to help the 99%. Nobody can guarantee economic growth, perhaps, but central planning is a far, far more secure system than trickle-down economics and the boom-bust cycle of capitalist democracies.

In the West public opinion is polled just one time: during election time, and then is totally ignored. French President Emmanuel Macron and others pride themselves on not listening to public opinion once reaching office, and he is steadfastly implementing whatever the hell he wants; during election campaigns candidates like Hillary bend anyway the latest poll is blowing. Among the People of the West there is abundant proof of support for leftism, and certainly majority support for many socialist-inspired policies, but they are totally ignored because they are unable to play a role in their money-centered, 1%-created and supported, bourgeois, individualistic political process.

Undoubtedly, what the above quote demonstrates is how China is able to end to “individually planned” economies – like Macron’s France or the Eurogroup for the Eurozone – which are a clear betrayal of the ideals of Western democracy and certainly socialist democracy, which insists on some equality instead of unrestrained individualist rights.

“In the West, the politicians and policymakers owe their allegiance and existence to the one percent, with their vast sums of money. In China, it’s one percent owes its allegiance, existence and vast sums of money to the Communist Party of China, its politicians and policymakers.” 

That is socialism – it is the opposite of individualism; greatly undermining rampant individualism – not all individualism – is the only way to socialism.

It would be nice to reach the ideal of no private property and total equality among citizens – that is communism – but, to paraphrase Fidel: we must change today that which can be changed.

But that is what the experience of the Chinese Communist Party has done: to insist on the unity and brotherhood of all peoples by cutting off at the knees the false idea of the self-made man. Truly, anywhere, everywhere and at all times in history people have made fortunes thanks to help – subsidies, protectionist policies, corruption, favourable loans, favourably-frothing electrons, etc. We are all connected, whether mighty yang CEOs or soft housewife yins.

This acknowledgement – inherent in socialism – is why the Chinese are winning, economically.

Even though I have quoted him liberally, Brown goes into these vital insights in far greater detail, making his book a tremendously valuable read. Governments DO change – all systems are NOT alike – China’s system and practices are stunningly effective, obviously, and stunningly modern as well.

Document and Parliament – Both are shinier, newer and more reflective

But to get so stunningly stunning, there must be a legal foundation to promote and protect such stunningness.

There is a hugely important mistake many people commonly make about life: People in the past were younger (and thus stupider) – those of who are living today are actually older, and thus the repositories of more experiences, maturity and human intelligence.

So why on earth would anyone think a country with a constitution 200 years younger (the US, written 1787) than China’s (written 1982) is somehow “more modern”? The world was so much younger and stupider then?

China Rising remains a fundamental text for those wishing to understand China in a comparative framework with the West.

Part of the problem is the use of the phrase “the people’s dictatorship” – whoever sired it, dictatorship is always undesirable to modern ears. However only the Western media uses this two-word phrase! It is truly foreign to Chinese ears – the preamble of the Chinese constitution uses a very different term: “the people’s democraticdictatorship”. This is not a small nuance at all.

China is not really totally ruled by the Party: You never hear this in the West, but there are eight other political parties known as the “Democratic Front”. As their name implies (democracy currently being more associated with personal freedom than equality, for some reason) they are more capitalist and personal freedom-oriented. Far from being a token, they account for some 30% of seats in the largest national legislative body or parliament – the National People’s Congress.

Just as I always say Iran’s PressTV is more diverse and open than Western media – because even though our editorial line is clear we have rabid pro-Zionist analysts all the time, whereas the West doesn’t even have Arab analysts when they are talking about Palestine, (much less Palestinian analysts, LOL) – China’s top legislature has far more ideological balance than the English-speaking world does. The 30% is not in charge – by law – but they are there, and they do make a difference.

There is no such ideological political tolerance in the English-language world, where Hillary passes for a leftist; Corbyn is a very new phenomenon; Canada and Australia have totally lost their sense of self and are US-apers, and I would not have written that 30 years ago.

Continental Europe does not merit being lumped in with them..but not by much, as their non-mainstream / true leftist parties have dwindled greatly.

My overall point is: There IS ideological balance in China’s top legislative body, but it is not a perfect balance NOR should it be. The West has 50-50 balance between left and right regularly…and it produces total gridlock. Probably because it’s a balance of “bad” and “worse”, ideologically!

China also outdoes socialist Cuba in this area: In Cuba’s brand-new parliament – just the 2nd female-majority parliament globally, and with 40% Black or Mestizo members – only 10% of members are not members of the Communist Party. I’m sure that’s never reported either….

But, socialist fanatic that I am repeatedly imagined to be, both China and Cuba (and Iran and Vietnam) have succeeded because they allow more ideological balance at the top then is given credit for. We socialist fanatics like to remember that those horrid souls called “the opposition” do have some valid ideas to implement.

Lobbies are not really democratic – China puts those pigs in a pen

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hy should you have more influence just because you are rich and well-connected? You should not be able to “pay” for more free speech just because you have the money to do so. If this is considered a lamentable inevitability, then structures are needed to limit it, or simply eliminate it entirely.

That’s why China has another national body which is designed to formally harness an uncontrollable force in the West: special interest groups. Indeed, if you find any nonsensical legislation in the West – the root cause is always a lobby.

Thus, parallel to their parliament, China has the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, which contains all the different types of lobbies – private industry, farmers, youth, pensioners, etc. This body meets at the same time as China’s Congress (Parliament), so they are democratically present at the key time and can do their best to influence opinion.

And I think I have been able to explain – quickly and without boring you – China’s top legislative bodies and how they work. Clearly it is superior in conception, composition and practice to West European (bourgeois) democracy…and if you can just hang in there a tiny bit longer I can sum up China’s modern advantages in the other two branches of government.

China had enough of warlords, but the West loves ‘liberal warlord judge’ Macron

China also differs in the executive branch: in the West it is personified by Emmanuel Macron, the new “liberal (free market / non-racist) strongman”. Macron rules by decree even though his Party has an absolute majority in Parliament! That’s because the open debate of his far-right economic policies would inspire a lot of bad press. Truly, an emperor in the old Chinese mould…minus the conscience-pricking Heavenly Mandate, of course.

China’s system, instead, spreads out the power of the executive branch in order to safeguard the control of the vanguard party – the Communist Party – which has been democratically installed by their 1949 popular revolution. This decentralisation of individual power to preserve the power of an entire Party is what socialism is all about: no more strongmen (and certainly not during non-wartime).

Thus the 300-member Central Committee (of the Communist Party) is the first step above the Congress, but the members are voted for by Congress. That is indirect election, and the US has this (electoral college), as does France (500 mayors are required to sign your petition to run for president). Cuba just elected Canel-Diaz and their Central Committee via the same system. You can call it “not democratic”, and the socialists can call the capitalist system “not democratic”, and that will allow me to move on with this analysis….

The Central Committee elects the members of the Politburo, Military Commission (Party control over army) and General Secretary (leader of Politburo and the top post in China). The Politburo is often described as an “executive cabinet” but it’s much more powerful: of course, in Western cabinets they all serve the will and at the consent of the king. Macron’s cabinet has absolutely no real individual power; Hollande had four prime ministers in 5 years.

There is no public debate within a cabinet and there is no public debate with the Politburo, but the latter’s members are undoubtedly known to wield much more power than Western cabinet members. France’s Prime Minister actually was known for having significant power in shaping domestic policy, historically, but Macron has changed that drastically.

Within the Politburo is the Politburo Standing Committee, which is chosen by Politburo members, and which is best described as similar to a West cabinet, as it includes the president, premier and the nation’s top 5 to 9 advisors. And that’s it.

To sum up: The people vote for Congress, and then you have these committed Party members winnowing themselves down democratically via three smaller rings.

The key is: there is tremendous democratic discussion within these rings, though it is not public. This is something which Western media either cannot or will not understand. But this is why most of the decisions are unanimous – consensus is agreed upon before a vote via discussion. Why on earth should public policy be a “winner take all” situation – China’s solution is clearly more democratic because it actually produces more compromise.

Brown goes into Chinese “face saving” as a reason for not publicly filibustering like a blowhard, and it makes sense, but Cuba’s negotiations are private as well because, again, it actually produces compromise. Yes, odd gadflies cannot pore over every word, but the proof is in the pudding of China and Cuba’s long-term success amid decades of Western blockades.

Back down at the local level, China has the inhabitants of one million villages vote by secret ballot for mayors and city councils. This is the exact same in the West. It differs above this in that China switches from direct to indirect representation after the municipal level: those directly elected at the municipal level vote for township, in turn for county, in turn for province, and then province votes for national assembly.

So we see the same principles of direct and indirect democracy are undoubtedly at play – as they are in Cuba, Iran, etc. – and are at play at different levels. But both principles are used and accepted in both the capitalist and socialist democratic systems.

The major difference is that decades of freedom-fighting and leadership caused the Chinese people to insist on a single vanguard party to oversee the country in order to preserve democracy, and not to hand it to one liberal strongman warlord.

Iran is the same way: our vanguard party, which provided decades of freedom-fighting and leadership – which is the only way such a party can possibly have the credibility and influence needed to mobilise the masses – was the clergy.

To sum up this recap of the structure of Chinese socialist democracy – a quick note about the judicial branch:

China’s judicial history is longer than anyone’s, and is pretty interestingly rendered by Brown. It had explicit civil and penal codes predating not just the Magna Carta but Jesus Christ; has an informal/communal justice system which is the same as the one being hailed as groundbreaking in Northern Syria; and has notes of French and German civil law.

Undoubtedly there are Muslim influences as well, given that many Khans were Muslim and were favoured by the Ming dynasty. This is an area which merits further scholarship, as it is certainly a mine which will produce. It would also provide counter-illumination for self-understanding in many Muslim countries, because countries like Iran were controlled by the Mongols for quite a long era and thus have many “Chinese”-origin policies, thought they may not know it.

The main difference between China and West in the judicial branch is quite simply: the judicial branch is explicitly under the leadership of the Communist Party – a group is the ultimate judge.

In places like the US and France: The ultimate judge is the president. State of emergency or not, they routinely subvert justice simply by claiming “terrorism”. This is not new: before that it was by claiming “communism”. Before that it was by claiming “White superiority”.

So, from Chinese eyes, someone like Macron has made himself into a “liberal warlord judge” even more than previous French warlords.

There is another vital difference: In the West, the inhabitants are encouraged to believe a fiction that their judiciary is completely unaffected by politics, wealth, religion or ethnicity. The West also believes in Santa Claus, but that’s mainly their children.

The same policy of: “A claim of objectivity is laughably unmodern, and also cannot be more important than our overall Party principles” applies to China’s fourth estate – the press. The West also believes their press achieves objectivity, but that is not only among their children.

What have you done for me lately, or let me do?

[dropcap]G[/dropcap]erman, French and English leaders have spent the last 150 years leading horrifically bloody battles against each other. Therefore, is it any wonder that the current European leadership – exemplified by the corrupt, undemocratic Eurogroup – is so reactionary, and so unable to provide the standard of living their people deserve: Europe is perhaps only at the tail end, or perhaps even still in the midst, of a major era of warlordism?

This is probably why there are so many protests in the age of austerity in France. China thinks that’s great, and surely encourages France’s very cute, very comparatively petite efforts at modern democracy.

Protests are good because they let a government know about urgent problems which need to be resolved. These are problems which have not been headed off beforehand, say, by…I don’t know…public polling?

Protests are important to the Chinese Communist Party because they care about corruption, to the point of execution (like Iran), and protests let the public and the Party know which officials are corrupt / inept, and which companies are not following labor laws.

Thus the Communist Party actually encourages pubic protests, which is how China has an average of 3-500 daily protests. That’s a mind-blowing statistic, and I’ve used it before, but this is how new scholarship blows apart previous paradigms, thankfully. France has 10, and they are considered the most protest-happy Western country – proportionally, France has half as many protests as China. I also doubt Chinese protests feature as much alcohol and scatalogical protest signs.

The US has essentially no protests, and the ones I have seen on Youtube have been thwarted by two cops on bicycles, LOL.

Protests in Iran are far, far more common than Westerners think. There is no way for Western media to cover every Iranian protest with the breathless anticipation of the fall of the Iranian Revolution like last January. Protests need permits, just like in France, and I’m not sure what if the US requires a permit or not before some 130-kilo once-a-month National Guard member gets to don $100,000 of equipment before stepping into his assault vehicle. Iran is not China, nor is it France, but it is also not Cuba.

Cuba, does not have any protests other than the Ladies in White. Cuba, being so close to the United States, simply can’t afford to mess around – not with protests, not with the media, not with drugs, not with crime, not with corruption, not with focusing your meager tourist dollars on anything but food, housing, education and medical care (and that’s for the medicines which are not part of the embargo). They have no oil, have a pack of rabidly capitalist Scarfaces glaring at them from Miami, and yet are a helluva lot more successful societally than any non-socialist inspired government.

France, which is assumed to be so very, very socially successful, keeps putting tear gas in my eye. I am not crying tears of liberation, and I have narrowly avoided worse. They also have a delusion that one day of protest does anything to an uncaring government, although maybe that is changing in France’s currently ongoing: “May ’68, 50 years later”.

I just found this protest stuff interesting, and I’m down to just one more part – I’ll wrap this up.

The excellent news is that the 1% has no chance against the Party…any Party

Jeff Brown: Certainly NOT reviewed by the New York Times, which proves his worth to independent minds.

Brown reads off the tale of the tape simply and perfectly:

“Xi commandeers a centrally-planned state-owned economy being guided by the Communist Party of China, all of whom are planning years and decades into the future, with a clear vision and solemn mission statement. Meanwhile, Obama has packs of rabid hyenas circling him, the spydom pack, the military pack, corporate pack, bankster pack, not to mention the Zionist pack. Then he has to deal with a huge flock of vulture legislators on Capitol Hill, venal, fatted and corrupt to the core.”

That is the 1% in a nation of any colour or of any religion which is capitalist and multi-party.

And if you believe THAT is superior to an enlightened vanguard Party working to enforce the People’s will, then…your problem is structural; your blindness is cultural; your individualism is grating to me.

The idea that what Brown has failed to report is that: in China there is a 1% and Deep State-guided industrial-military-banking-media Complex on the exact same model of the West is…absurd. But I can see why the West would think that: humans often project their own experiences onto others, as it is far easier than seeing others as individuals.

Beyond not having this Complex burden, another reality is that the West’s 1% is not burdened by any mandate of good governance or equality, either cultural or found int the structures of their 200-year old founding documents.

Furthermore, the idea that in the modern era of capitalism known as neoliberalism, the West’s 1% has any solidarity with even their own government runs directly contrary to their vision of globalisation.

These last three points are all rather enormous issues, no?

Not the Party’s problem….

It is lazy stereotyping to say that China has this superior leadership because of the Confucian focus on correct, virtuous conduct of the ruler, of which there is nothing like in the West. Islamic Socialist Iran certainly has this ideal omnipresent in their government. However, this idea denies Westerners the chance to see that China’s socialism is both modern and open to all for adoption – it is not culturally predicated, but is a political choice.

Trump just pulled out of the JCPOA on Iran’s nuclear energy program, but all he will do is cause short-term economic pain: Iran, like China, has a modern government which has 5-year plans and can actually act in the long term. I hope Iranian officials are reading Brown’s book and adopting certain Chinese strategies, of course, but Iran has a People’s Democratic Dictatorship Under God, and I am truly comfortable with our long-term success (Inshallah). Anybody who loves socialism, Islamic or not, and the right of People to choose, should be pleased to hear that I and many Iranians actually feel secure in our future despite Trump’s decision, which is quite in keeping with the aggressive policies of Obama, the Bushes, Clinton and Reagan.

In the short-term…well, the US making problems and killing people with blockades -there is nothing new about this, nor does this make Iran special, sadly.

All the West can do is threaten to invade – to repeat their warlordism – but I am not worried at all for places like China and Iran. They can never invade (much less hold) either of these two – they haven’t even been able to invade far, far, far poorer Cuba!

And also: for all the reasons so superbly enumerated by Brown, socialism’s victory is deserved and assured, if not expected right today.

The success of the Chinese Communist Party – and the socialist vanguard parties in places like Cuba, Iran, Vietnam, etc. – are an acknowledgment of their People’s modern refusal to reject the self-aggrandizing nonsense of bourgeois West European political thought. That will bring success, as much as humans can determine it for themselves.

The inherent truths of this statement is clear to any observer, and is the reason why Western media is so against any victory of socialism anywhere in the world, and why they have no choice but to try and falsely claim the credit for China’s success despite have two economic plans which have tremendously few parallel structures.

Brown has some pretty fascinating passages when it comes to the interplay between China’s government and its economics, and I really must stress that I have only given a sample. His debunking of the Western propaganda theme of “ghost cities” makes such propaganda pretty laughable.

Or rather, I’m laughing…and then I’m left rather envious!

You should be too. Certainly, any thinking person starts responding to the question posed by this article’s headline with: “Well I sure don’t want the 1%….”

***********************************

This is the 7th article in an 8-part series which compares old versus new Western scholarship on China.

Here is the list of articles slated to be published, and I hope you will find them useful in your leftist struggle!

Old vs. new scholarship on the continent of China – an 8-part series

Daring to go beyond Western propaganda on the Great Leap Forward’s famine

When Chinese Trash saved the world: Western lies about the Cultural Revolution

Mao’s legacy defended, and famous swim decoded, for clueless academics

The Cultural Revolution’s solving of the urban-rural divide

Once China got off drugs: The ideological path from opium to ‘liberal strongman’ Macron

Prefer the 1% or the Party? Or: Why China wins

China’s only danger: A ‘Generation X’ who thinks they aren’t communist

About the author
 RAMIN MAZAHERI, Senior Correspondent & Contributing Editor, Dispatch from Paris •  Mazaheri is the chief correspondent in Paris for Press TV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. His work has appeared in various journals, magazines and websites, as well as on radio and television.

 Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

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Ecuador to Expel Assange from its London Embassy?

BE SURE TO PASS OUR ARTICLES ON TO KIN, FRIENDS AND COLLEAGUES

one of its own citizens.

The unlawful incarceration of Assange, and Theresa May's cynical framing of Russia, irrefutably confirm the disappearance of the rule of law in Britain.

In August 2012, Ecuador granted WikiLeaks founder, director and editor-in-chief Julian Assange asylum in its London embassy – granting him citizenship in December 2017. He’s been there since June 2012.

If he steps out of the embassy, Washington wants him arrested and extradited to America.  Whistleblowers exposing government wrongdoing are endangered in the US. Anyone exposing its high crimes and/or other dirty secrets is vulnerable. Challenging the nation’s policies, no matter how heinous, risks severe punishment.

As CIA director, neocon extremist Mike Pompeo falsely accused Assange of causing “great harm to our nation’s national security.” He lied calling WikiLeaks “a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia.”

In 2012, a secret grand jury convened. A sealed indictment followed, allegedly accusing Assange of spying under the long ago outdated 1917 Espionage Act, enacted shortly after America’s entry into WW I – used to prosecute, convict and imprison Chelsea Manning.

Neocon Attorney General Jeff Sessions prioritizes arresting, prosecuting and imprisoning Assange, earlier saying:

“(I)t is a priority. We’ve already begun to step up our efforts and whenever a case can be made, we will seek to put some people in jail” like Assange for whistleblowing. In late March, his Internet access was cut off. New restrictions limit his outside communications – his phone privileges and visits from colleagues and others banned, according to WikiLeaks. Last Wednesday, Ecuadorean Foreign Minister Fernanda Espinosa said talks between her government and Britain are ongoing to decide Assange’s fate, adding:

“There is a dialogue. There is a will and an interest to move forward in the solution of that matter.”

Britain refused to grant Assange diplomatic status or legal immunity as an Ecuadorean citizen, allowing him to leave the embassy without fear of arrest and extradition to America. If expelled from the embassy, it’s virtually certain. Washington wants him arrested, prosecuted, imprisoned and silenced. WikiLeaks publishes countless volumes of leaked US documents and other damning material, exposing imperial lawlessness by America and its rogue allies, along with other information everyone has a right to know.

According to UK-based lawyer Jennifer Robinson, Assange’s “health situation is terrible. He’s had a problem with his shoulder for a very long time. It requires an MRI, which cannot be done within the embassy.” 

“He’s got dental issues. And then there’s the long-term impact of not being outside, his visual impairment. He wouldn’t be able to see further than from here to the end of this hallway.”

WikiLeaks is involved in whistleblowing investigative journalism, publishing material supplied by sources, unidentified for their protection.  It’s not an intelligence operation – nor it it connected to Russia or any other country.  Earlier Assange said WikiLeaks has the right “to publish newsworthy content. Consistent with the US Constitution, we publish material that we can confirm to be true…”

Media freedom in America and other Western societies is threatened. If Assange and WikiLeaks are silenced, it’ll be another blow to truth-telling on vital issues at a time it’s vitally needed.

Independent journalism is essential to protect and preserve. Doing the right thing has risks. The rewards are priceless.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
 Screen Shot 2016-02-19 at 10.13.00 AMSTEPHEN LENDMAN was born in 1934 in Boston, MA. In 1956, he received a BA from Harvard University. Two years of US Army service followed, then an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 1960. After working seven years as a marketing research analyst, he joined the Lendman Group family business in 1967. He remained there until retiring at year end 1999. Writing on major world and national issues began in summer 2005. In early 2007, radio hosting followed. Lendman now hosts the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network three times weekly. Distinguished guests are featured. Listen live or archived. Major world and national issues are discussed. Lendman is a 2008 Project Censored winner and 2011 Mexican Journalists Club international journalism award recipient. His new site is at http://stephenlendman.org

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Once China got off drugs: the link between opium and ‘liberal strongman’ Macron

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON.

he link between Chinese opium money, monarchies, and rich Western families (Astor, Forbes, Kerry, Delano, Roosevelt, etc.) is already well-known, though it’s not publicised enough in the Mainstream Media.

One of many images of the time, depicting the Boxer rebellion. Most of the time the Westerners saw the uprising as a form of insolence.

What is even less publicised is how in 2018 the drug trade creates a country - Colombia, Mexico, even Afghanistan, certainly the United States, etc. - which becomes so socially, culturally, financially and politically dysfunctional that the current neoliberal ideal of being anti-government starts to appear…rather sensible.

And thus, neoliberalism wins converts among the 99% who should be promoting socialism, with its insistence on significant government control to promote their needs over those of the 1%.

The era 1841-1949 is called the "Century of Humiliation" by the Chinese, but Western histories call it the "Treaty Century", the treaty primarily being the forcing in of Indian opium. Therefore, a far more accurate term would be the “Drug Treaty Century”…but that wouldn’t be effective Western capitalist propaganda, would it?

What’s interesting about China’s opium wars is how very, very modern they are - China’s forced drugging was not a millennium ago, but during the birth and installation of our modern political era.

Therefore, aside from birthing modern fortunes, drugs also birthed modern ideologies.

In a sense this article is a bit of a digression in this 8-part series, but it is in many ways the most practical: We can quite clearly chart how in 19th century China drug money fostered a nouveaux riche which in three generations (a generation being roughly 33 years) became the key driving force behind the armed obstruction of China’s socialist and democratic reforms after World War I.

This article goes into much greater detail sociological detail, but here’s a brief description:

If this sounds undesirable…then you are in agreement with the constantly-rebelling Chinese of this era.

HOLLYWOOD TO THE RESCUE The 1963 blockbuster 55 Days at Peking, focusing on the Chinese nationalist Boxer rebellion, largely glorifies the European powers and Japan, hiding the main reason for the uprising, the British desire to keep the opium trade going in China.

But if we dispense with the racist, chauvinistic notion that the Chinese somehow deserved all that because they were “incapable” of “modernising" due to “backwards” or “unscientific” ideas (feel free to insert your own preferred nonsense here), then we are freed up to realize: Drugs were the grease which powered this society-undoing machine.

It’s interesting to recall that drug money was not a factor in the 1917 Russian Revolution - so when they toppled their imperial monarchy, socialism was immediately installed. China was not so lucky. This article examines the political consequences of this historical difference, and it concludes that the “Drug Treaty Century” created a new “druglord bourgeoise” which created obstacles that required a much longer march to socialism than in Russia.

But, more interestingly (I think) is how this article also shows how 19th century China proves that the drug trade can create a social situation so dysfunctional that all governments appear inherently ineffective, producing a situation where everyone in the 1% and the 99% is led to believe that the ideals of big-government democratic socialism are just a recipe for guaranteed social incompetence.

But there’s a reason they call it “dope”, dope.

The drug trade: A simple Western recipe for nation-destroying

Drugs are not good, and we all know this. The ability of Westerners to get nearly 100 million Chinese people - 1 out of every 4 - on opium in the 19th century was…not good. (I take that estimate from the incomparably valuable new tome on Chinese history, China is Communist, Dammit! by Jeff J. Brown.)

Understatements aside, is there any product which is more superbly capitalist than drugs? There is no regulation, competition is cutthroat without limitation, and the profit margins are in the hundreds of percent - it’s better than arms dealing.

But it is no overstatement to say that it is profoundly shocking to list the macro-level, societally-destabilising consequences drugs had in 19th century China, and which occurred in just a single generation:

Drug money increased the resources and thus the success of foreign warlords (foreign imperialists). Of course, they were the first ones to profit, as they were the “first movers” in the Chinese drug business. Drug funding allowed the English and French warlords in East Asia to occupy Beijing in 1860. They installed the totally ineffective Empress Dowager Cixi, who ruled for almost 60 years (1861-1908), and they “forced open” (invaded and occupied ports and railroad towns) China to “modernity”.

Because drugs are so much more profitable than anything else, the drug trade also created the resources to pay for establishing overly-powerful regional Chinese leaders (warlords), who reduced the power of the central government.

These warlords, to protect the power they took from the central authority, created their own armies and the professionalized military class, elevating it as never before in Chinese history.

Opium is still trade, even if it is opium, and it necessarily requires mid-level merchants: this meant the rise of a bourgeois gentry as never before in China. Merchants and soldiers composed the bottom two rungs on their classical Confucian hierarchy (and soldiers are not even officially granted the status of the bottom rung). This is the opposite of Western society, and we see how Westerners upended Chinese culture upon their very first contact.

Drugs exacerbated the pernicious rural-urban divide: Increased money for “traders” meant the ability to buy more land and become even richer, which meant the ability to move to the cities and run your affairs from far away via a local bully, which dissolved the ancient, much-needed bond between landlord and tenant. This may have been the deepest socio-economic effect.

Drugs provide cheap spirituality, and dangerous religious cults sprouted up. Christianity was introduced, but for every one Chinese person converted forty more became addicted to opium (not just consumers). Hardly a moral proselytisation to an Abrahamic faith….

Concurrent with all of this, and also amazingly clear, is how drugs fueled not just poor governance, but ultimately the anti-government sentiment which is now a hallmark of today’s neoliberal form of capitalism. If the government “sucks”, to use the parlance of our times…then getting rid of it as much as possible is smart, right? China’s government certainly started to really suck:

By the 1860s the drug trade allowed for a new tax on this “trade” - but this new source of income for the central government meant they no longer were pressured to rely on receiving taxes in return for providing good governance or adequate public services, thus deteriorating the quality of governance in China. The foreign-provoked drug trade essentially rewarded the central power with money for not governing (ignoring laws against drugs, ignoring the decreasing health, stability and quality of life of their citizens, etc.).

Chinese in an opium den. Many were considerably more sordid than this one.

The rise of drug money created the resources for traders and the gentry to bribe officials at all levels, further reducing the central government's ability to govern properly. And that’s even among those pubic servants who actually tried: For example, when the central government tried in 1884 to fix the tax system it was quickly abandoned. The only reason for such poor policy is corrupt, inept government - corruption techniques clearly permitted the interests of the new local druglord bourgeois to win out.

The trade was also so lucrative it provided local “warlords” with resources to provide their own government services, making them appear superior to the central government. Thus "big government” begins to be fairly disparaged as being staffed by lazy, incompetent and / or immoral people - echoing today’s complaints - even though these new local “leaders” made their money off drugs, instead of real work.

This repeated weakening of the imperial prestige due to this bad governance encouraged some support for local warlords, who are the ultimate capitalist supporters. This further eroded the national / central authority and thus their ability to govern well.

All these combined social catastrophes culminated in multiple rebellions and civil war: the "Taiping Rebellion" (1851-1864) was a multinational affair, which the English and French took advantage of to prop up their puppet, and which gutted Chinese society as significantly as the American Civil War and over roughly the same time period. These rebellions also caused government to respond by militarising of the countryside for the first time since the Qin era (221-206 BC). The war effort also caused the rise of new taxes on peasants, which never endear one to the government.

That’s quite a few kicks in the teeth to the idea of good governance, no?

To recap: The West’s (drug) “Treaty Century” was - in the span of just one generation - able to 1) totally discredit the central government, 2) discredit all government, 3) discredit the longstanding cultural and religious authorities, 4) foster the rise of self-interested, unpatriotic, extremely violent local governments, 5) create new classes of super-landed rich, who turned into an out-of-touch, absentee, uncaring urban elite, 6) foster corruption at all levels, 7) create spiritual chaos, 8) create political-cultural chaos and elitism, because who can have faith in the democratic ideal of the self-governing abilities of one’s neighbours when 1 out of every 4 of them is on drugs? 9) Actually create situations of open rebellion against the government, 10) Create situations of the societally-draining need for armed resistance to invading powers.

And things only got worse in the two coming generations!

The link between drugs and capitalism, and thus anti-democracy, is thus clearly illuminated in modern Chinese history: Imperialism, drugs and bad governance clearly have a synergistic effect, like the sky-high cancer rates of people who worked with asbestos and also smoked.

Indeed, the history of socialist-inspired countries which have true wars on drugs - China, Iran, Cuba - illuminate this link, and also explain why their zero tolerance efforts are so strong and their punishments so harsh.

I imagine that the Dutch would not have been so content to be drug-happy if a foreign power had been the one controlling its influence in the Netherlands….

Again, this clear cause-and-effect between Western-backed drug schemes and the end of non-Western society as we know it is obviously not limited to just China, but has been replicated in countless societies in 2018:

One may not support the ideals of the Taliban, for example, but what chance did they have to improve Afghan society when the US invaded and made opium production higher than ever? Indeed, many Afghans undoubtedly say the Taliban are much better than living in a state of US imperialism. Opium has, once again, been used to totally create a dysfunctional, divided society which doesn’t know what is up or down, just as it did in China pre-1949.

By Generation 2, the taint of drug money is gone & cultural revolution is underway

The various effects of drug money - quite logically - totally reduced support for any government by making them appear incompetent…which they were.

By the 1890s China was so weakened that the Japanese invaded, and China lost the Sino-Japanese War. Payments required to fund this failed war caused the monarchy to become heavily indebted to the West.

Clearly, by just the 2nd generation of the “Drug Treaty Century” China had totally fallen apart politically, morally and culturally.

The drive to remodel China’s political culture began in this 2nd generation. We must strive to put ourselves in the shoes of the Chinese back in that era:

Just as the ideals of socialism are being heavily discussed in Europe and Russia, there is one generation in adulthood and another one growing up with the idea of government as a completely-negative force. Monarchy is on the way out, but socialist ideals are being heavily discredited from the get-go, with resources being stored up to fight against it:

“Socialism and this new guy Karl Marx?! Government by and for these drug-addled bozos?! No thanks - I’ll get and keep mine by any means necessary. ”

This 2nd generation sees China changing from a “China with Chinese characteristics” to a “China with West European (bourgeois) characteristics” - it’s a cultural revolution.

The new Chinese druglord bourgeois were - being bourgeois - ultimately a class loyal only to themselves, their power and their money. They had unprecedented means to reshape classic Chinese culture in the Western bourgeois mold, and they did.

This nouveaux riche class will sound quite modern:

They worked with foreigners for personal gain at the expense of the nation's 99%.

They claimed to be “philanthropists” who supported charities with unpaid taxes that should have gone the central authority. However, these charities did not capably replace the reduced central government services, of course.

They denigrated the state bureaucracy as incapable.

They claimed to be "activists" who promoted modernity, but were mere individualists promoting their own interests.

They remade society’s most important instructional force - education.

In 1901 major school reforms started, adopting the Japanese system which - unlike Vietnam and Korea - was not strongly influenced by China’s civil service test. (Japan is, in my mind, a Western country: “Western” is a culture, and Japan went over whole hog, as evidenced by their decades of imperialism - this did permit them to avoid getting the fast-drip China Drug Torture treatment….)

The government examination system was unwanted by the new drug-money elite because it was meritocratic: its existence directly challenged the new concept of the “private school” (a foreign concept imported to China) which the 1% use today to maintain their dominance.

The privatisation of schools - the loss of state control - serves to transfer control of schooling to the 1%, and schools henceforth exist to indoctrinate a new technocratic class - one which is loyal to their privileged class and not their own People or their own State. And what is the the biggest anti-union drive in Anglophone countries today? The drive to privatise schools: if capitalists can get that instituted, one of the biggest remaining unions will be no more, and a huge percentage of the government will also disappear.

So we should not be surprised to see how John King Fairbank, Harvard’s first China scholar and the author of the leading English-language university textbook on the country, China: A New History, celebrates the end of the Chinese civil service tests:

"Alas, it was soon found that students would continue to aim mainly at the old examinations as a more prestigious and much cheaper route of advancements, bypassing the difficult modern curriculum and greater cost of the modern schools. There was nothing for it but to abolish the classical examinations entirely in 1905. This great turning point stopped production of the degree-holding elite, the gentry class. The old order was losing its intellectual foundation and therefore its philosophical cohesion….The neo-Confucian synthesis was no longer valid, yet nothing to replace it was as yet in sight."

The gentry class - who had previously earned their status via merit (the meritocratic examination system - was “stopped”, while this new gentry class earned their status via the drug trade. The “neo-Confucian synthesis was no longer valid” only to foreign invaders and drug barons.

But Fairbank, being unsympathetic and unknowledgeable of Chinese culture (and certainly unwilling to allow it to stand strongly and in opposition to Western dominance), celebrates the death of thousands of years of native culture because he wants to replace it with neoliberal capitalism. Revolutions in learning are fine, but not when they are not focused for the benefit of foreign capitalists and the local bourgeoisie, whether China’s drug lords or modern Brussels’ technocrats. Indeed, then these changes are not “revolutions in learning”, but reactionary, stultifying and impoverishing changes. Ultimately, these schools were remembered for producing the "warlord generation" of 1916-27: indeed, China became most Westernised in this.

What’s hugely important to realize is that the 99% of the second generation of the “Drug Treaty Century” certainly did not agree that nascent neoliberalism had brought local benefits. The people hated this switch to “local governance”, and thus they had major rebellions, of which I only mentioned the two biggest as is common. Fairbank admits this, but doesn’t really care (as a capitalist and neoliberal):

“'Local self-government,' despite its happy resonance in the minds of Western advocates of democracy, had its own rather different meaning for the Chinese common people. The term in reality usually designated a managerial agency of the local elites, which they used to secure their villagers’ taxes to support modern improvements. Road building, setting up modern schools, and paying for police were improvements desired by the modernizing elite, but paying higher taxes to secure them increased the villagers’ burden faster than it benefited them. There were many peasant protests against ‘reform’.”

By 1908 the drug profit-fueled gentry had too much money, too much land and too much power: the Empress declared a constitutional system, with 0.4% of the population (all men) allowed to vote in a bourgeois system. This 0.4% were not just drug dealers, but European-apers in every way - they were the bourgeois, selfish merchants and militarists (whether in open or secret) which Western society is based on.

The monarchy - gutted by foreign debt from the Boxer Rebellion Against Foreigners And Arrogant Christians, unable to restore power usurped by the provinces, out-spent by the new bourgeois class, unable to create a unified army - abdicated in 1912 and was replaced by the Chinese Republic.

Bourgeois constitutionalism in the context of a monarchy is - history, and also today’s newspaper, repeatedly proves - a pact between the monarchy / aristocracy and the bourgeois traders against the 99%. However, even Fairbank admits the 99% wanted no part of this change, because the Chinese imperial system - where a Heavenly Mandate rested upon demonstrably good governance and not mere bloodlines like in Europe - was arguably superior to Western Europe’s “modern” democracy despite being a monarchy, because China ostensibly switched from a pact between the monarchy and the 99% for a pact between the 1% themselves.

For nations without popular, socialist-inspired revolutions…a monarchy-1% pact, or a pact to self-deify the 1% and boot out the monarchy, is where history effectively ends and their present is found.

But for Western academics like Fairbank, the clear tragedy which was the first two generations of the (Drug) “Treaty Century” could never be lain at the feet of obvious collusion between a new Chinese free trade-loving, drug lord upper-class and Western warlords. Instead it was the natural result of the inherent stupidities of Chinese culture and, that old standby, the “passive” character of the average Chinese person (which I noted that Fairbank also employed as a politically-scientific explanation to explain both the Great Leap’s famine and the Cultural Revolution):

"These inadequacies of the old regime in administration and finance were deeply rooted in Chinese custom, political values, and social structure. It became apparent that the Qing government had been superficial, passive, and indeed parasitic for too long. It could not become modern."

Fairbank - like all Americans - may be against monarchical rule, but he is definitely not against aristocratic-technocratic-1% rule….

Clearly, by the birth of the third generation China’s drug-fueled failures had destroyed seemingly everything, and of course the bourgeois are all-too happy to pick up (and keep) the pieces.

Early Chinese drug barons were truly just ‘modern conservatives’

Just as Westerners inaccurately call it the “Treaty Century”, it is also inaccurate to call this 3rd generation the “Warlord Era”, as is common: these warlords were not tribal savages, as the name implies, but instead the supporters of West European (bourgeois) democracy and modern conservatism.

And yet despite the crystal-clear similarities, I have never read of an early 20th century Western small town or big city politician demoted to a “warlord”, much less even Hitler or Mussolini?

Chiang in full regalia: As head of the Kuomintang, he always put ruling class interests above China's masses, thereby endearing himself to the Western powers.

I take this quote here from Fairbank to describe the ideology of this group of neo-bourgeois, which he applied to the first generation but which obviously holds true to the the third generation:

”From the perspective of modern times they were conservatives. Their eventual alienation from the effete Manchu ruling house would be based on the cultural nationalism of Chinese patriots determined to preserve not only their country but also their own social leadership and domination.”

If one insists that Fairbank would not have used that quote to describe the 3rd generation, that’s fine with me: I agree that modern Western conservatism is equal to what passed for modern in 1860s China. I certainly agree modern conservatives are that backward! But, clearly, the quote holds true into the 1940s.

“Warlord Era”, and the like, allows Westerners to picture the Chinese as an unchangeable Yellow Horde, when they were really just plain-old modern conservatives. This is a common tactic of not just Fairbank but all pre-Politically Correct Western academia: repeatedly dehumanising non-Whites and making it appear unthinkable that modern Westerners can feel kinship with modern non-Whites.

But China’s druglord bourgeois were indeed all in favor of the harsh repression of modern conservatism’s targets: of socialist, labor and feminist movements. Make no mistake: These social trends had obviously reached China too, and no more so than in Shanghai, where Chiang massacred the communists and made the Kuomintang dedicated modern fascists.

“At Shanghai Chinese merchants soon stood opposed to the new and leftist labor movement. In this stance they had foreign support. In reflecting many years later on his raising funds at Shanghai for crushing the labor movement Chen Guangfu stated the aim had been to topple militarism, the warlords, and support a modern government.”

Fairbank quotes and elevates Chen Guangfu, one of Shanghai’s most powerful US-allied entrepreneurs and high financiers. He was clearly part of the new druglord bourgeoisie which opposed the many anti-capitalist aspects of 20th century fascism - Chen was truly a modern, small-government, no-nation neoliberal, and thus Fairbank is trying to exonerate his funding of the massive massacres of human beings for being leftist. This is modern conservatism, of course.

However, repressing “the new and leftist labor movement” - which certainly included feminist, racial-equality and other socialist-inspired popular movements - can never be considered “modern”.1849 China was not “modern”. Indeed, this is only a “modern government” to West European (bourgeois) neoliberals like Fairbank, who is clearly are the same ideologically as Chinese warlords (and from 1849 or 1948 - your choice).

The monarchy-free drug lord gentry would have been quite happy if the Chinese Republic still existed today instead of the People’s Republic of China, of course.

Macron the ‘liberal warlord’, tool of drug barons (and spouse of one, too?)

Somewhat thankfully, President Yuan dissolved parliament in 1913, setting off civil war.

Or to use another racist Western term employed by the likes of Fairbank: “civil warlordism”. LOL, certainly the United States battle between Lincoln and the Confederacy’s aristocrats was a far more totally barbaric “civil warlordism” - one side was defending slavery, after all. “Civil warlordism” is only reserved for China not only because of the ruthless effectiveness of the ancient Mongols, but because Mao and other Chinese socialist leaders were nothing but lying warlords to the likes of Fairbank, even though they fought to end China’s human bondage.

But China's less than decade-long experience with bourgeois constitutionalism before rejecting this West European invention thus parallels the Russian experience:

The difference being that Russia was fortunate enough to have a drastically revolutionary concept to implement - socialism - whereas China was not as much at the crest of the wave of progress, and that China was further from the geographic centre of this movement in an era of limited communication abilities. And, again, 25% percent of Russia was also not using drugs.

But make no mistake - Yuan, in collaboration with the druglord gentry, ended the Chinese Republic specifically in order to forestall socialist-inspired changes:

"Having initiated the 1911 Revolution that ended the imperial check on their power, the provincial elite (which did not exist in the imperial era, and which only rose to power recently during the Drug Treaty Era) resumed their stance for stability and so 'gave a pivotal support in 1913,' says Esherick (Joseph Esherick, one of Fairbank’s own proteges), for Yuan's assumption of dictatorial powers. Their instinct was to save China from the chaos that they feared further change would create. In this way conservatism thwarted any social revolution.

That is exactly what modern conservatives do in 2018 - use dictatorial powers to thwart social progress.

We clearly see the antecedents of today’s "liberal strongman" like French President Emmanuel Macron, who is using rule by executive decree - i.e., the dictatorial power of one person - to deconstruct socialist policies and programs which existed before he came into office?

Therefore, “liberal warlord” should be the term used by those historians who come from the opposite side of the political spectrum as Fairbank to describe modern France.

(It’s too bad I came up with this phrase on the final edit of this article - it would have made this article’s title more interesting than ‘liberal strongman’, LOL! Too late to change it now though….)

Macron is indeed equivalent to a Chinese / Taiwan warlord: Not only is he waging imperialist wars (in Africa and the Middle East), but he is waging war against his own people (normalized the police state of emergency) and is repeatedly and profoundly undermining the prestige, services and reach of France’s central government.

Scientists, and many women, might even say he is also a true drug baron: he married into a chocolate empire!

But the straight line is clear: Anglophone golden-boy and neoliberal darling Macron is the clear ideological inheritor of these drug baron bourgeois. 1849, to a Chinese (and an Iranian) was not that long ago - this line is straight and clear and now proven.

Both Macron and China’s druglord gentry want a bourgeois ruling class, which lives apart from a continually-impoverished 99%, and which has no problem denying modern democratic changes and suppressing popular rebellions: “Modern conservatives” and “liberal warlordism” indeed….

Show me a country awash in drugs, and I’ll show you a capitalist-imperialist nation

Unlike a typical drug crash, we can still finish on a high note!

It is impressive how short this bourgeois, Western republic stood: the Chinese people quickly saw that socialism was needed but - unfortunately - that required a long civil war provoked by modern conservatives and liberal warlords.

Fairbank, a modern conservative himself, must have known he was on the wrong side: He even relates how Mao knew the problems caused by West European, bourgeois, “modern”, “multi-party” democracy, all of which are similar today. Fairbank cites Mao in 1926:

"Peasants are oppressed, he said, by (1) heavy rents, half or more of the crop, (2) high interest rates, between 36% and 84% a year, (3) heavy local taxes, (4) exploitation of farm labor, and (5) the land owners cooperation with the warlords and corrupt officials to exploit the peasantry in every way possible. Behind this whole system laid the cooperation of the imperialists, who sought to maintain order for profitable trade in China.”

(Ya can’t say Mao didn’t see things clearly….)

We see how applicable this is to modern times (indeed, our elderly were living in this recent era!):

The EU, as I have proven and as was already-well known, is a series of structures which are defined by being corrupt, anti-democratic, anti-socialist and unrepentantly neoliberal.

And in drug trade nations, they are pushing in this negative direction as well. Compare the differences between Columbia and Venezuela: One nation is the leader of Latin neoliberalism and the biggest tool of Washington in the region, the other is the leader of Latin socialism - despite being neighbours and being in regular contact, their peoples and cultures couldn’t be more different. Indeed, I have yet to meet a Columbian who isn’t anti-Chavismo - this can only be explained by the fact that A) I have only meet Columbians from the 1%, and that is certainly not the case, or B) Many of Columbia’s 99% have been duped into believing that big government and socialism is bad via drug-induced powers.

So, above all, I hope this article showed that pre-socialist China illustrates how drug money created a situation where the idea that all government is corrupt becomes embedded at truly all levels of society, and that this has elevated the neoliberal model of anti-governance to higher prominence and success.

Just as Chinese opium created riches in places far from China, so it impoverished political thought in both faraway lands and faraway times as well.

Indeed, I am certain that if an outside imperialist force were to be applied to the paradigm of Western societies (which are militarily impregnable), we would certainly see how neoliberalism would immediate descend into chaotic “civil warlordism” - because that is what happened in modern China.

And it was only socialism which was able to defeat that corrupt, elitist, capitalist system.

The reason for this may be because the visions of earthly paradise in capitalist and socialist societies are very, very different:

The capitalist view is clearly quite drug-addled: their goal is to retire rich at 40, live in sensual pleasure, free from societal constraints, and to have the ability to rule their tiny empires like petty dictators.

Modern socialism’s vision is superbly expressed in China’s President Xi’s lovely, enchanting phrase a “moderately prosperous society”. I love that modest ambition for materialism! And it so obviously implies ethical self-restraint in order to promote equality.

What is far more important than preserving the right for an individual to completely satiate their materialist ambitions is to have the universal stability required to do the good works necessary to always preserve an ethical, harmonious society.

If you disagree with that: what are you…on drugs?

***********************************
This is the 6th article in an 8-part series which compares old versus new Western scholarship on China.

Here is the list of articles slated to be published, and I hope you will find them useful in your leftist struggle!

Old vs. new scholarship on the continent of China - an 8-part series

Daring to go beyond Western propaganda on the Great Leap Forward’s famine

When Chinese Trash saved the world: Western lies about the Cultural Revolution

Mao’s legacy defended, and famous swim decoded, for clueless academics

The Cultural Revolution’s solving of the urban-rural divide

Once China got off drugs: The ideological path from opium to ‘liberal strongman’ Macron

Prefer the 1% or the Party? Or: Why China wins

China's only danger: A 'Generation X' who thinks they aren't communist

About the author
 RAMIN MAZAHERI, Senior Correspondent & Contributing Editor, Dispatch from Paris •  Mazaheri is the chief correspondent in Paris for Press TV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. His work has appeared in various journals, magazines and websites, as well as on radio and television.

 Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

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