Paul Craig Roberts: The Neoconservative Threat To World Order

The Neoconservative Threat To International Relations

Paul Craig Roberts

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his week I was invited to address an important conference of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. Scholars from Russia and from around the world, Russian government officials, and the Russian people seek an answer as to why Washington destroyed during the past year the friendly relations between America and Russia that President Reagan⁽¹⁾ and President Gorbachev succeeded in establishing.

All of Russia is distressed that Washington alone has destroyed the trust between the two major nuclear powers that had been created during the Reagan-Gorbachev era, trust that had removed the threat of nuclear armageddon. Russians at every level are astonished at the virulent propaganda and lies constantly issuing from Washington and the Western media. Washington’s gratuitous demonization of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has rallied the Russian people behind him. Putin has the highest approval rating ever achieved by any leader in my lifetime.

Washington’s reckless and irresponsible destruction of the trust achieved by Reagan and Gorbachev has resurrected the possibility of nuclear war from the grave in which Reagan and Gorbachev buried it. Again, as during the Cold War the specter of nuclear armageddon stalks the earth.

Why did Washington revive the threat of world annihilation? Why is this threat to all of humanity supported by the majority of the US Congress, by the entirety of the presstitute media, and by academics and think-tank inhabitants in the US, such as Motyl and Weiss, about whom I wrote recently?

King-World-News-Roberts-I-22720151

It was my task to answer this question for the conference. You can read my February 25 and February 26 addresses below. But first you should understand what nuclear war means. You can gain that understanding here: http://thebulletin.org/what-would-happen-if-800-kiloton-nuclear-warhead-detonated-above-midtown-manhattan8023

The Threat Posed to International Relations By The Neoconservative Ideology of American Hegemony, Address to the 70th Anniversary of the Yalta Conference, Hosted by Institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Moscow State Institute of International Relations, Moscow, February 25, 2015, Hon. Paul Craig Roberts

Colleagues,

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hat I propose to you is that the current difficulties in the international order are unrelated to Yalta and its consequences, but have their origin in the rise of the neoconservative ideology in the post-Soviet era and its influence on Washington’s foreign policy.

The collapse of the Soviet Union removed the only constraint on Washington’s power to act unilaterally abroad. At that time China’s rise was estimated to require a half century. Suddenly the United States found itself to be the Uni-power, the “world’s only superpower.” Neoconservatives proclaimed “the end of history.”

By the “end of history” neoconservatives mean that the competition between socio-economic-political systems is at an end. History has chosen “American Democratic-Capitalism.” It is Washington’s responsibility to exercise the hegemony over the world given to Washington by History and to bring the world in line with History’s choice of American democratic-capitalism.

In other words, Marx has been proven “wrong”. The future does not belong to the proletariat but to Washington.

The neoconservative ideology raises the United States to the unique status of being “the exceptional country,” and the American people acquire exalted status as “the indispensable people.”

If a country is “the exceptional country,” it means that all other countries are unexceptional. If a people are “indispensable,” it means other peoples are dispensable. We have seen this attitude at work in Washington’s 14 years of wars of aggression in the Middle East. These wars have left countries destroyed and millions of people dead, maimed, and displaced. Yet Washington continues to speak of its commitment to protect smaller countries from the aggression of larger countries. The explanation for this hypocrisy is that Washington does not regard Washington’s aggression as aggression, but as History’s purpose.

We have also seen this attitude at work in Washington’s disdain for Russia’s national interests and in Washington’s propagandistic response to Russian diplomacy.

The neoconservative ideology requires that Washington maintain its Uni-power status, because this status is necessary for Washington’s hegemony and “History’s purpose.”

The neoconservative doctrine of US world supremacy is most clearly and concisely stated by Paul Wolfowitz, a leading neoconservative who has held many high positions: Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, Director of Policy Planning US Department of State, Assistant Secretary of State, Ambassador to Indonesia, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Deputy Secretary of Defense, President of the World Bank.

The neoconservative ideology raises the United States to the unique status of being “the exceptional country,” and the American people acquire exalted status as “the indispensable people.”

Paul Wolfowitz: as cynically criminal as you can find.

In 1992 Paul Wolfowitz stated the neoconservative doctrine of American world supremacy:

“Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.”

For clarification, a “hostile power” is a country with an independent policy (Russia, China, Iran, and formerly Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, Assad).

This bold statement struck the traditional American foreign policy establishment as a declaration of American Imperialism. The document was rewritten in order to soften and disguise the blatant assertion of supremacy without changing the intent. These documents are available online, and you can examine them at your convenience.

Softening the language allowed the neoconservatives to rise to foreign policy dominance. The neoconservatives are responsible for the Clinton regime’s attacks on Yugoslavia and Serbia. Neoconservatives, especially Paul Wolfowitz, are responsible for the George W. Bush regime’s invasion of Iraq. The neoconservatives are responsible for the overthrow and murder of Gaddafi in Libya, the assault on Syria, the propaganda against Iran, the drone attacks on Pakistan and Yemen, the color revolutions in former Soviet Republics, the attempted “Green Revolution” in Iran, the coup in Ukraine, and the demonization of Vladimir Putin.

A number of thoughtful Americans suspect that the neoconservatives are responsible for 9/11, as that event gave the neoconservatives the “New Pearl Harbor” that their position papers said was necessary in order to launch their wars for hegemony in the Middle East [and beyond]. 9/11 led directly and instantly to the invasion of Afghanistan, where Washington has been fighting since 2001. Neoconservatives controlled all the important government positions necessary for a “false flag” attack.

Nuland sowing intrigue in Romania. The woman is radioactive.

Neoconservative Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, who is married to another neoconservative, Robert Kagan, implemented and oversaw Washington’s coup in Ukraine and chose the new government.

The neoconservatives are highly organized and networked, well-financed, supported by the print and TV media, and backed by the US military/security complex and the Israel Lobby. There is no countervailing power to their influence on US foreign power.

The neoconservative doctrine goes beyond the Brzezinski doctrine, which dissented from Detente and provocatively supported dissidents inside the Soviet empire. Despite its provocative character, the Brzezinski doctrine remained a doctrine of Great Power politics and containment. It is not a doctrine of US world hegemony.

While the neoconservatives were preoccupied for a decade with their wars in the Middle East, creating a US Africa Command, organizing color revolutions, exiting disarmament treaties, surrounding Russia with military bases, and “pivoting to Asia” to surround China with new air and naval bases, Vladimir Putin led Russia back to economic and military competence and successfully asserted an independent Russian foreign policy.

When Russian diplomacy blocked Washington’s planned invasion of Syria and Washington’s planned bombing of Iran, the neoconservatives realized that they had failed the “first objective” of the Wolfowitz Doctrine and had allowed “the re-emergence of a new rival . . . on the territory of the former Soviet Union” with the power to block unilateral action by Washington.

The attack on Russia began. Washington had spent $5 billion over a decade creating non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Ukraine and cultivating Ukrainian politicians. The NGOs were called into the streets. The extreme nationalists or Nazi elements were used to introduce violence, and the elected democratic government was overthrown. The intercepted conversation between Victoria Nuland and the US ambassador in Kiev, in which the two Washington operatives choose the members of the new Ukrainian government, is well known.

If the information that has recently come to me from Armenia and Kyrgyzstan is correct, Washington has financed NGOs and is cultivating politicians in Armenia and the former Soviet Central Asian Republics. If the information is correct, Russia can expect more “color revolutions” or coups in other former territories of the Soviet Union. Perhaps China faces a similar threat in Uyghurstan.

The conflict in Ukraine is often called a “civil war.” This is incorrect. A civil war is when two sides fight for the control of the government. The break-away republics in eastern and southern Ukraine are fighting a war of secession.

Washington would have been happy to use its coup in Ukraine to evict Russia from its Black Sea naval base as this would have been a strategic military achievement. However, Washington is pleased that the “Ukraine crisis” that Washington orchestrated has resulted in the demonization of Vladimir Putin, thus permitting economic sanctions that have disrupted Russia’s economic and political relations with Europe. The sanctions have kept Europe in Washington’s orbit.

Washington has no interest in resolving the Ukrainian situation. The situation can be resolved diplomatically only if Europe can achieve sufficient sovereignty over its foreign policy to act in Europe’s interest instead of Washington’s interest.

The neoconservative doctrine of US world hegemony is a threat to the sovereignty of every country. The doctrine requires subservience to Washington’s leadership and to Washington’s purposes. Independent governments are targeted for destabilization. The Obama regime overthrew the reformist government in Honduras and currently is at work destabilizing Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Argentina, and most likely also Armenia and the former Central Asian Soviet Republics.

Yalta and its consequences have to do with Great Power rivalries. But in the neoconservative doctrine, there is only one Great Power–the Uni-power. There are no others, and no others are to be permitted

Therefore, unless a modern foreign policy arises in Washington and displaces the neoconservatives, the future is one of conflict.

It would be a strategic error to dismiss the neoconservative ideology as unrealistic. The doctrine is unrealistic, but it is also the guiding force of US foreign policy and is capable of producing a world war.

In their conflict with Washington’s hegemony, Russia and China are disadvantaged. The success of American propaganda during the Cold War, the large differences between living standards in the US and those in communist lands, overt communist political oppression, at times brutal [always grossly exaggerated for precisely the same longstanding purposes of anticommunist propaganda—Eds], and the Soviet collapse created in the minds of many people nonexistent virtues for the United States. As English is the world language and the Western media is cooperative, Washington is able to control explanations regardless of the facts. The ability of Washington to be the aggressor and to blame the victim encourages Washington’s march to more aggression.

This concludes my remarks. Tomorrow I will address whether there are domestic political restraints or economic restraints on the neoconservative ideology.

Paul Craig Roberts, Address to the 70th Anniversary of the Yalta Conference, Moscow, February 26, 2015

Colleagues,

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]t the plenary session yesterday I addressed the threat that the neoconservative ideology poses to international relations. In this closing session I address whether there are any internal restraints on this policy from the US population and whether there are economic restraints.

Just as 9/11 served to launch Washington’s wars for hegemony in the Middle East, 9/11 served to create the American police state. The Constitution and the civil liberties it protects quickly fell to the accumulation of power in the executive branch that a state of war permitted.

New laws, some clearly pre-prepared such as the PATRIOT Act, executive orders, presidential directives, and Department of Justice memos created an executive authority unaccountable to the US Constitution and to domestic and international law.

Suddenly Americans could be detained indefinitely without cause presented to a court. Habeas corpus, a constitutional protection which prohibits any such detention, has been set aside.

Suddenly people could be tortured into confessions in violation of the right against self-incrimination and in violation of domestic and international laws against torture.

Suddenly Americans and Washington’s closest allies could be spied on indiscriminately without the need of warrants demonstrating cause.

The Obama regime added to the Bush regime’s transgressions the assertion of the right of the executive branch to assassinate US citizens without due process of law.

The police state was organized under a massive new Department of Homeland Security. Almost immediately whistleblower protections, freedom of the press and speech, and protest rights were attacked and reduced.

It was not long before the director of Homeland Security declared that the department’s focus has shifted from Muslim terrorists to “domestic extremists,” an undefined category. Anyone can be swept into this category. Homes of war protesters were raided and grand juries were convened to investigate the protesters. Americans of Arab descent who donated to charities–even charities on the State Department’s approved list–that aided Palestinian children were arrested and sentenced to prison for “providing material support to terrorism.”

All of this and more, including police brutality, has had a chilling effect on protests against the wars and the loss of civil liberty. The rising protests from the American population and from soldiers themselves that eventually forced Washington to end the Vietnam War have been prevented in the 21st century by the erosion of rights, intimidation, loss of mobility (no-fly list), job dismissal, and other heavy-handed actions inconsistent with a government accountable to law and to the people.

In an important sense, the US has emerged from the “war on terror” as an executive branch dictatorship unconstrained by the media and barely, if at all, constrained by Congress and the federal courts. The lawlessness of the executive branch has spread into governments of Washington’s vassal states and into the Federal Reserve, the International Monetary Fund, and the European Central Bank, all of which violate their charters and operate outside their legal powers.

Jobs offshoring destroyed the American industrial and manufacturing unions. Their demise and the current attack on the public employee unions has left the Democratic Party financially dependent on the same organized private interest groups as the Republicans. Both parties now report to the same interest groups. Wall Street, the military/security complex, the Israel Lobby, agribusiness, and the extractive industries (oil, mining, timber) control the government regardless of the party in power. These powerful interests all have a stake in American hegemony.

The message is that the constellation of forces preclude internal political change.

Hegemony’s Achilles heel is the US economy. The fairy tale of American economic recovery supports America’s image as the safe haven, an image that keeps the dollar’s value up, the stock market up, and interest rates down. However, there is no economic information that supports this fairy tale.

Real median household income has not grown for years and is below the levels of the early 1970s. There has been no growth in real retail sales for six years. The labor force is shrinking. The labor force participation rate has declined since 2007 as has the civilian employment to population ratio. The 5.7 percent reported unemployment rate is achieved by not counting discouraged workers as part of the work force. (A discouraged worker is a person who is unable to find a job and has given up looking.)

A second official unemployment rate, which counts short-term (less than one year) discouraged workers and is seldom reported, stands at 11.2 percent. The US government stopped including long-term discouraged workers (discouraged for more than one year) in 1994. If the long-term discouraged are counted, the current unemployment rate in the US stands at 23.2 percent.

The offshoring of American manufacturing and professional service jobs such as software engineering and Information Technology has decimated the middle class. The middle class has not found jobs with incomes comparable to those moved abroad. The labor cost savings from offshoring the jobs to Asia has boosted corporate profits, the performance bonuses of executives and capital gains of shareholders. Thus all income and wealth gains are concentrated in a few hands at the top of the income distribution. The number of billionaires grows as destitution reaches from the lower economic class into the middle class. American university graduates unable to find jobs return to their childhood rooms in their parents’ homes and work as waitresses and bartenders in part-time jobs that will not support an independent existence.

With a large percentage of the young economically unable to form households, residential construction, home furnishings, and home appliances suffer economic weakness. Cars can still be sold only because the purchaser can obtain 100 percent financing in a six-year loan. The lenders sell the loans, which are securitized and sold to gullible investors, just as were the mortgage-backed financial instruments that precipitated the 2007 US financial crash.

None of the problems that created the 2008 recession, and that were created by the 2008 recession, have been addressed. Instead, policymakers have used an expansion of debt and money to paper over the problems. Money and debt have grown much more than US GDP, which raises questions about the value of the US dollar and the credit worthiness of the US government. On July 8, 2014, my colleagues and I pointed out that when correctly measured, US national debt stands at 185 percent of GDP. http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2014/07/08/deteriorating-economic-outlook/

This raises the question: Why was the credit rating of Russia, a country with an extremely low ratio of debt to GDP, downgraded and not that of the US? The answer is that the downgrading of Russian credit worthiness was a political act directed against Russia in behalf of US hegemony.

How long can fairy tales and political acts keep the US house of cards standing? A rigged stock market. A rigged interest rate. A rigged dollar exchange value, a rigged and suppressed gold price. The current Western financial system rests on world support for the US dollar and on nothing more.

The problem with neoliberal economics, which pervades all countries, even Russia and China, is that neoliberal economics is a tool of American economic imperialism, as is Globalism. As long as countries targeted by Washington for destabilization support and cling to the American doctrines that enable the destabilization, the targets are defenseless.

If Russia, China, and the BRICS Bank were willing to finance Greece, Italy, and Spain, perhaps those countries could be separated from the EU and NATO. The unraveling of Washington’s empire would begin.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

[box] Dr. Paul Craig Roberts The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West and How America Was Lost. [/box]

NOTES

^{(1) While Reagan did indeed sign off on those agreements with Gorbachev, he had been a lifetime re-baiter propagandist, a professional Russia basher, and a man that had no compunction enforcing the imperialist dictates of US foreign policy wherever the corporate managers desired.}

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The Dragon-in-the-Room: The Inexorable Rise of ‘Four-to-One’ China

Herbert Salit

All Chinese cities are experiencing a reblooming, even Hong Kong.

CLICK ON IMAGES TO EXPAND (ABOVE: HONG KONG VIEW VIA TREY RATCLIFF, FLICKR)

Over 500 years of brutal, rapacious Western Menace imperial world domination soon will be just a fading (bad) memory, as China emerges as the world’s ‘sole superpower.’

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he world is changing in fundamental ways as Western empire-states lose their 500-year-long grip on the planet, and uplifting societies, comprising most of our species, become ‘the main countries,’ none more so than ‘Four-to-One’ China, the soon-to-emerge ‘sole superpower’ of the planet.

Were Uncle Sam and the other ‘Western Powers’ non-delusional, considerations of China would be front-and-center in all their thinking.

Within each Western Menace homeland, especially from their corporate-government-controlled ‘news’ media, there remains much chatter about the United States (truthfully, The US Empire Menace) and its role in each and every aspect of today’s world, for the Yankee imperium still is said to be ‘the sole remaining superpower,’ the ‘indispensable,’ ‘exceptional’ nation and society, without which the world as we know it could not function and would not even be. Yet, to honest, non-feeble-minded observers, this lofty characterization seems to be the wisdom of yesteryear, and largely a fable, at that. Events in this 21st century have shown – clearly, demonstrably and absolutely – that The US Empire Menace is in major, actually terminal, decline and retreat, as are all of its Western Menace puppet-vassal empire-states.

At the same time, this unprecedented, ongoing Occidental crumbling-down and inexorable ‘slide’ into oblivion has been, and continues to be, matched by equally great and remarkable uplift and development of so many of the former colonial victims of Western Menace imperialism, such that any number of these Non-Western societies now are among the healthiest and wealthiest of all, none more so than China. China, today, the world’s most-industrialized nation, rapidly gaining ground in high-technology, is by far the wealthiest society on the planet, and, also has the best-educated citizenry, especially in math and science. For example, from many published accounts, one can gather that China annually graduates well more than ten times the number of engineers as the entire Western Menace combined!

China’s new bullet trains put to shame America’s railroads and those of many other nations. Such investment in infrastructure contrasts markedly with the attitude seen in most advanced capitalist nations, where social investment is in decline. (Pictured: Beijing/Tianjing express. Credit: Ivan Walsh, via flickr / click images to expand)

This rapid, almost mushrooming, rise in China’s overall development – which already has lifted many hundreds of millions of their people out of grinding poverty, the legacy of Western Menace imperialism – when combined with the steady dumbing-down of Western Menace populations, and the terrible crumbling of Western Menace homeland infrastructures, means that China soon will achieve ‘per-capita-parity’ in overall development with every society in The Western Menace. Let’s stop to appreciate what this will mean. As China is home to more than four times the number of people than is The US Empire Menace Homeland, soon, such as by 2030, China – ‘Chung Gwo,’ or Center Country – will exceed the Yankee imperium by over four times in all areas: economy, wealth, industry, education, innovation and, of course, military power.

Bullet train, I. Walsh, via flickr.

Just the other week, ‘think tanks’ in The Empire’s Homeland conceded that, on a (correct) purchasing-power-parity basis, China’s economy now is at least as large as Uncle Sam’s, while it is growing much faster and more-sustainably. The real truth is that ‘The US Economy’ mostly is a ‘Potemkin’ fake (please see my piece of 18Oct2013), and China’s economy now is, by-far, the world’s largest. Also, The Pentagon has admitted (privately) that China has indeed attained overall military parity, and this is reflected in the gross mis-match of the blustering, hot-air, tough talk by Uncle Sam in his ‘pivot to Asia,’ in which, as usual, he is just bluffing, with the obvious fact that he has taken no real steps towards a military confrontation in East Asia, which China would win, handily. To help remind everyone of the coming massive preponderance of China, alone, over all things Western Menace, I have coined the useful moniker of ‘Four-to-One’ China.

Clearly, the world will be a very different place once Center Country has achieved ‘Four-to-One.’ However, even well before that major changes will ensue. Thus, by the early 2020s – the not-far-off next decade – China likely will exceed and outgun Uncle Sam by a minimum of two-to-one. Does anyone suppose that the senescent and rapidly sinking, shrinking Yankee Empire then will get away, unchallenged, with bombing, droning and sanctioning other countries around the globe, at will? Even given China’s non-imperialist, non-militarist history and nature, I don’t think so. By the 2020s, China, clearly, will be the world’s ‘sole superpower,’ fully capable of containing, defeating, and, if necessary, destroying everything Western Menace, especially with the help of their Non-Western strategic partners such as Russia, India, Brazil, South Africa and many other nations in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

The lesson for today is that in every discussion, of everything, about every Western Menace society – all of whom have lived, and continue to live, since Columbus sailed, as parasites off of the entire rest of the Humanity – ‘Four-to-One’ China, the great, new reality of the world, must be considered, at every turn. The coming ‘sole superpower’ of China, thus, is ‘The-Dragon-in-the-Room,’ who soon will have major influence on all of the globe’s happenings and events. To a significant extent, this already is so today, though the arrogant, head-in-the-sand Western Menace empire-states carry-on as if it is still the era of their long-departed heyday and hegemony of the 19th- and 20th-centuries. [The short-lived, berserk fantasy ‘New American Century’ of the late 1990s, which never achieved reality, overlooked, among so many other huge things, the now, nearly-total Western Menace de-industrialization and fraudulent ‘financialization,’ which have bankrupted all Occidental societies, rendering them terminal ‘short-timers.’]

So, even as The Western Menace now plots and plans to combat ‘ISIS’ as ‘the greatest threat the world has ever known,’ China and most Non-Western societies are watching, with disdain, for they are well-aware that it was the mendacious, imperialism-based Western Menace ‘war on terror’ that actually created ISIS and the nearly-identical Al-Qaeda before that. So far, no one has moved to block today’s renewed round of Western Menace military aggression (very-modest air-bombardments), but that forbearance won’t last. In the next decade, with ‘Four-to-One’ China as the world’s ‘sole superpower,’ the ever-smaller-scale, rapidly-aging air fleets of NATO would be quickly and firmly cleared from the skies.

Thus, Uncle Sam and all other leaders of his Western Menace puppet-vassal empire-states would be very uncharacteristically wise to acknowledge and consider ‘The-Dragon-in-the-Room,’ at all times, in all of their ‘thinking,’ lest these Occidental, parasitic societies inadvertently kick-off sudden blow-back changes to the world’s current, fragile ‘international order’ that still grossly favors them and enables their stolen ‘Western way of life. Of course, nothing that anyone or anything in The Western Menace might do today, or in the future – such as fomenting more ‘revolutions,’ bombing campaigns, drones, ‘fifth column actions,’ cyber attacks, secret financial ploys or sanctions, – would be able to stop or even measurably slow the inexorable, massive tectonic changes embodied in Western Menace decay and simultaneous Non-Western, especially Chinese, uplift.

As things now stand, Western Menace societies don’t have all that much time left, but if they want to live, at all, into the 2020s and beyond, they’d better quit acting like they’re still ‘kings-of-the-hill.’

***

Given ‘Four-to-One’ China’s probable place as a ‘Center Country’ for Humankind’s foreseeable future, it is quite likely that over the long-run, it will become generally-accepted that the single most-significant event in 20th century Human history was the founding of The People’s Republic of China.

Also, given that China and Russia clearly will be very important societies in Humanity’s soon-to-come Post-Western Menace future, is it really true that ‘communism’ failed?

***

Herbert Salit
Los Angeles, CA

[box] ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Herbert Salit is a writer living in Los Angeles. He can be contacted at herbsalit@roadrunner.com.
Author’s Website: http://blackagendareport.com/blog/11280 [/box]

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People’s Republic of China Announces Aid to Laos

Is This Beneficial? Is China Imperialist?
Laos army in formation, during ceremonies.

By Steven Argue (Written Sept. 2013)

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he People’s Republic of China has just announced it is providing Laos with $49 million (US dollars) in aid and an additional $32 million (US dollars) in interest free credits.

This will help keep Laos free of some of the debt slavery suffered under the loans countries are given by the World Bank and the International Development Bank. Under those imperialist capitalist loans, poor countries subsidize the wealthy ones with exorbitant interest rates on unpayable loans, causing the flow of wealth to be from poor countries to the rich. Robin Hood in reverse. In addition, restructuring is contingent on harmful policies of austerity and privatization. A form of colonialism.

Laos is a deformed workers state, with gains built on the defeat of U.S. imperialism in South East Asia in the so-called “Vietnam War” and the subsequent overthrow of capitalism in Laos. Yet, Laotian socialism is also built on the foundations of poverty and underdevelopment caused by imperialism, neo-colonialism, and a devastating war that dropped more bombs per capita on the people of Laos than have ever been dropped on any other country in the world while Agent Orange destroyed valuable forests and cropland. In addition, Laotian socialism was built on a deformed model, lacking real workers democracy and lacking an internationalist program to break out of isolation and free the world from imperialism and capitalism through world socialist revolution. Leninist-Trotskyists defend the Laotian Revolution from imperialist attacks and internal capitalist counterrevolution while recognizing its faults, advocating workers democracy, and recognizing the need for the world revolution to break Laos out of its shaky economic foundations.

Lao People’s Army marches to celebrate 65th Anniversary

For many on the left, China’s investments bringing development to numerous underdeveloped countries are seen as a form of imperialism. This ignores a few basic facts. First of all, the vast majority of these investments are by the Chinese mainland state run banks or other state owned sectors. Instead of being short-term speculative investments based on the profit motive, as imperialist capitalist investments are, they are investments that seek needed commodities for China’s economy which is still largely planned and socialist. Unlike the USSR’s planned socialist economy, which was built in a resource rich country, China is now building up its economy, largely through the vast advantages of socialist planning, in a country that is relatively resource poor. To do so they must invest in other countries in order to import needed resources for their collectivized enterprises back in China.

To extract these resources China makes investments. For many in Africa and Asia these investments in schools, roads, railroads, and other needed infrastructure and enterprises are generally seen as a welcome change from the neglect and underdevelopment imposed by the imperial capitalists. This is not to say that there have not been abuses, but these well known abuses have come from the small minority of private Chinese enterprises functioning abroad.

The socialist character of Chinese investments was even recognized by U.S. State Department official Princeton Lyman in a 2005 presentation to the Congressional U.S.-China Commission, who said:

“China utilizes a variety of instruments to advance its interest in ways that western nations can only envy. Most of China’s investments are through state-owned companies, whose individual investments do not have to be profitable if they serve overall Chinese objectives. Thus the representative of China’s state-owned construction company in Ethiopia could reveal that he was instructed by Beijing to bid low on various tenders, without regard for profit. China’s long term objective in Ethiopia is in access to future natural resource investments, not in construction business profits.”

This has produced radically different ways of operating that have been highly praised by important African academics. Chinese investments in Laos, which includes aid and interest free loans, are no less likely to prove mutually beneficial.

-Steven Argue of the Revolutionary Tendency

On Facebook see:

Imperialist Reparations For Laos (New group I’ve just started)
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Imperialist-Reparations-For-Laos/419136358240087

Revolutionary Tendency
https://www.facebook.com/RevolutionaryTendency

[Photo: March 25, 2013 celebration of 58th founding anniversary of the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party (LPRP) in Vientiane, Laos]

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Growing the Russia-China New Relationship

F. William Engdahl | New Eastern Outlook

Chinese bullet train (NEO)

[dropcap]WHILE[/dropcap] the Obama Administration is preoccupied with keeping an increasingly unhappy EU firm on further economic sanctions against Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Putin is busy outflanking an increasingly desperate Washington. Rather than fixate on the deliberate US and NATO provocations in Ukraine, Russia is deepening its strategic ties with the other Great Eurasian land-power, the Peoples’ Republic of China. Far from Putin going begging to Beijing for money, the two powers are weaving a closer strategic counterweight to an Anglo-American elite gone bonkers as its empire slips from its hands.

Unimportant are all diplomatic declarations by Chinese deputy Prime Ministers and others in recent weeks about how China so deeply respects the unique role of the United States as sole superpower. The reality on the ground shows that a tectonic and well-thought-through change in the geopolitical world order is underway. Not only are Russia and China signing gigantic oil and gas agreements that insulate Russia from the negative effects of a potential loss of the EU energy markets in coming months.

Now the two powers have agreed on one of the world’s largest-ever infrastructure projects that will create huge new markets across Eurasia.

Transforming Eurasia

Russia and China have agreed to build a 7,000-kilometer high-speed rail link from Beijing to Moscow, at a cost of $242 billion, almost a quarter trillion dollars, according to the Beijing city government. The journey from Beijing to Moscow would take two days on a route passing through Kazakhstan. It will take eight to 10 years to build. The rail project is the most ambitious rail infrastructure project in the Eurasian history, even surpassing the Trans-Siberian Railway project across Russia.

The new Beijing-Moscow highspeed rail corridor shown in yellow will transform the economic space of Eurasia

Projected route between Beijing and Moscow. A genuine wonder to match all previous ones, and perhaps surpass them.

In October, 2014, China and Russia signed an agreement to build the first leg of the Beijing-Moscow high-speed rail link. That specified that Chinese firms and their Russian partners will construct a 770-km high-speed line connecting Moscow and Kazan, an important metropolis on the Volga River, en route to Beijing.

Then last November as US sanctions and the US-engineered oil price collapse added a new urgency to the project, Alexander Misharin, vice-president at state-owned OAO Russian Railways, said a section would cost $60 billion to reach Russia’s border, and would cut the Beijing-Moscow journey from five days to 30 hours. Misharin at the time compared the new transport network to the Suez Canal “in terms of scale and significance.” In reality, it has the potential to far exceed the Suez Canal as it serves to unify a high-speed transport network integrating vast new markets across Eurasia from Beijing to Moscow that draw in some 4.4 billion of the world population.

A close look at the new railway map by German politicians might be useful, in order for them to graphically realize where the future of Germany and of the European Union lies. A hint: it doesn’t lie with a dying American debt-bloated economy that only offers Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment scams to Europe. From Berlin, the four horses atop the historic Brandenburg Gate are symbolically pointed east, to Moscow. Sanctions cut German industry from participation in one of the largest construction projects in world history. One might ask why?

A Russian Renaissance?

The new Moscow-Beijing rail link is arguably the most significant infrastructure project in Eurasia since the brilliant Russian Railways Minister, later Finance Minister and finally Prime Minister, Count Sergei Witte, built the Trans-Siberian Railway to unify the vast expanse of Russia in the 1890’s.

Witte, a student of the long-forgotten German national economist, Friedrich List, realized the central role that rail and other infrastructure had played in the emergence of Germany after creation of the Customs Union in the 1830s, and of the United States with the construction of the first Transcontinental Railway.

Witte’s economic policies were well on the way to create a genuine economic renaissance within the Russian Empire, with peasant reforms, economic development and other policies that won him the hatred of the City of London and Wall Street. Witte argued to Czar Nicholas II on the eve of World War I that it would be a disaster for Russia to join the British in going to war against Germany. He was right and, symbolically or not, died of a brain tumor just after the Czar was pulled by various intrigues to declare war on Germany.

That disastrous war a century ago, which led to the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, hindered the development of the enormous economic potentials of Russia and Eurasia until the present. That is now undergoing a transformation, a new kind of Russian revolution based on peace and economic stability, ironically under the pressures of the ongoing NATO war, financial and military, against Eurasian integration.

That Eurasian integration, formal via Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union and the Sino-Russian led Shanghai Cooperation Organization, as well as informal via an escalating series of bilateral economic and military cooperation agreements between the two Eurasian Great Powers—Russia and China—is precisely what NATO and the neo-conservative war-hawks of the Obama Administration desperately tried to prevent in Ukraine and with the Obama military Asia Pivot against China. The problem, for those poor loveless souls in Washington and Wall Street, is that wars don’t work the way they used to. The world is getting fed up dying in the wars of the One Percent.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
F. William Engdahl is an strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

First appeared: http://journal-neo.org/2015/01/31/growing-the-russia-china-new-relationship/

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Half of Humanity Now Forms the ‘Resistance’

Kashmir is Bleeding

Kashmiri Intifada: It’s happening, and Delhi can’t seem to stop it. (Photo by the author)

ANDRE VLTCHEK

[dropcap]A day before[/dropcap] leaving Srinagar, in the ‘Indian administered Kashmir’, my comrades asked me to address a small gathering of local as well as progressive visiting Indian intellectuals. They mainly wanted to hear about the state of the resistance against Western imperialism. And Western imperialism is what India is now trying to join so eagerly and shamelessly.

It was dark outside, literally and metaphorically. Kashmir has been bleeding horrifically. At least 80,000 people have died, most of them from the terror spread by the fascist Indian state. The victims have been mainly civilians. At least 8,000 people have been “disappeared”. There have been countless, predominantly unreported, rapes and cases of beastly, unimaginable torture. Much of it has happened in just the last two decades.

I am going to write about this, soon, next week. But before I do, let me tell this story.

During that dark night, several men and women were gathered in a cramped room, asking me one simple and essential question: “Could the brutality of the Empire be prevented, and if not prevented, could it be stopped?”

I replied that “Yes!” And “Yes!” again.

Because no matter how dark the night appears to be, no matter how hopeless the struggles seems to be, the world had changed in the last several years; and it had changed profoundly.

***

When I stood in the middle of the street on 26th January 2015, just with my camera, right between stone-throwing youth and heavily armed Indian security forces, I was the only person willing to report the event. Later a Kashmiri human rights activist explained to me: “Foreigners don’t dare to do this, local reporters would be, as always, beaten up by the Indian security forces, and if Indians were to dare and come, they would encounter the wrath of those indignant stone-throwing youth.”

And so I was alone there.

But was I really?

Behind me – not visibly behind – but psychologically not too far away, stood a comrade who has been working for a huge international press agency. He couldn’t be here with me, but before I went, he offered his support, contacts, and expertise. Without his help and backing, my work would be next to impossible, or at least much more dangerous than it already was.

The struggle for justice, for true freedom, and above all, for the survival of humanity, is becoming increasingly broad, joined by countries located on all the continents and by individuals from all walks of life.

Two decades ago we lived in a totally different world. The lackeys of the West, with Boris Yeltsin leading the pack, boozed the Soviet Union out. Eastern Europe was mostly led by the children of former elites, such as Vaclav Havel. China was still very far from reversing its moderately toxic pro-market ‘reforms’ introduced by Deng Xiaoping. And Latin America: it was in total disarray, either engaged in civil wars and conflicts, recovering from monstrous pro-Western dictatorships, or run by the market-fundamentalists, or all the above. In Africa and in the Middle East, right-wing dictatorships were consolidating their power, and in many Asian nations, the elites were busy re-grabbing power, applauded by their own private press, as well as by the Western mainstream media.

Language and terminology, the linguistics, had been totally perverted or at least confused. Fascism was called ‘democracy’. Terms like ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’ were determinedly and constantly smeared.

What a world it used to be!

But no more: everything has totally changed.

***

“Language and terminology had been totally perverted or at least confused. Fascism was called ‘democracy’. Terms like ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’ were… constantly smeared.”

Just two months ago I was invited to Eritrea, a great and brave African country that is fighting the direct intimidation and embargoes of the Empire. The lady who hosted me, used to work in South Sudan, for the World Bank. She got so disgusted with what she was expected to do – destroying her fellow African people – that she left her highly paid job, just a year ago, in order to set up her own progressive organization, defending the Horn Of Africa. She set up its headquarters in the capital of her native Eritrea, Asmara. Since then she has been courageously fighting for her people, and for those in this totally abused and tortured part of the world.

I have met and worked with countless staff-members of the United Nations: educators and statisticians, academics, economists and other professionals. Some are just lamenting about how the dream of the “World Government” degenerated and gone to the dogs. But others are actively fighting, often behind the scenes, breaking countless rules and regulations.

Some quit, unwilling to compromise.

Rwanda's Western henchman Kagame. (Via Veni, flickr)

Rwanda’s Western henchman Paul Kagame. (Via Veni, flickr)

I have to mention my deceased friend, Australian lawyer Michael Hourigan, a former UN genocide investigator from ICTR, who managed to identify those who shot down the airplane carrying the Presidents of Rwanda and Burundi, in 1994. He was forced to fly to The Hague, and literally ordered to shut up, by a high UN official. That was because all the evidence was pointing at the Rwandan President Paul Kagame and his Tutsi army, RPF. Kagame has been a brutal Western implant, responsible for millions of dead people in the plundered Democratic Republic of Congo.

The shooting down of the Presidential ‘Falcon’ jet triggered the epic 1994 violence, and terrible inter-tribal bloodletting.

Michael Hourigan resigned, in disgust, and returned to his native Adelaide in Australia. He passed the evidence on to me, during the filming of my feature documentary, “Rwanda Gambit”.

Another horror story I was asked to tell to the world, was by Ms. Masako Yonekawa, a former UNHCR head in Goma, perhaps the most tattered and terrorized part of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and of Africa in general.

Ms. Yonekawa resigned from the UN, and then went on record, testifying in my film, about the brutality of the RPF, about the Western support for the RPF, and about the UN staff, particularly the Indian peacekeepers, who had been involved in the smuggling of raw materials from the DRC.

There were others, many others, who managed to identify the genocide in the DR Congo, particularly those UN staff members who wrote and consequently ‘leaked’ the reports (including the ‘Mapping Report’) on the involvement of both Rwanda and Uganda in the genocide in Goma and other parts of the DRC.

Two UN statisticians helped me, when I was writing my book on the horrors of modern, post-Suharto Indonesia, “Indonesia – Archipelago of Fear.”

Not everyone has the guts to ‘go public’, or to resign. But I know: whenever great matters are at stake, there are thinkers and teachers, doctors and pilots, UN experts, economists, lawyers, even some government officials and soldiers, who are ready to risk their careers, and support me, or people like me, and therefore directly or indirectly joining the struggle.

These days I never feel desperate or hopeless. Some of the greatest individuals are on our side.

Just look at the “Brussells Tribunal”! Or look at the ‘composition’, the list of those who are writing for Counterpunch or The Greanville Post.

Of course, the journey, the process, is not without those who betray it. There are always people who put their petty fears and interests above the great struggles. They betray individuals, the fighters, and they also betray entire concepts. But nothing is, or should be ‘perfect’.

Those who betray will, one day, face their own conscience, if they have any at all. They will not be at peace with themselves. As for the honest fighters, traitors will certainly hurt them, but after a while, they will get up, straighten themselves again, and march forward.

***

There is great hope, everywhere. And not too see it, not to sense it, would take truly great ‘discipline’.

Russia got up from its knees and confronted the Empire. China did the same, in many ways returning to Socialist, even Communist designs. Both big nations are increasingly ‘internationalist’ when it comes to their foreign policy. Both are also deeply concerned with the lives of their people.

Latin America broke the shackles of Western imperialism and of the racist and cynically self-serving ‘Monroe Doctrine’. Each one of these great nations: Cuba, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil, is going its own way, but in brilliant solidarity with each other, and as a bloc. Each one is also forging closer and closer links with China and Russia.

Those nations that have been overrun by the West, recently: Paraguay and Honduras are seen clearly as scarecrows. Nobody in their sane mind would like to follow their ‘examples’.

Africa, the most injured continent on Earth, is standing tall at least at its two extremes: South Africa and Zimbabwe in the South, and Eritrea in the north.

As complex as the situation is there, North Korea, Vietnam and Laos are still in the camp of the rebels, and have to be taken seriously.

Were India not to betray the BRICS, were it not to jump into an horrific embrace of the West and Israel, as well as its own grotesque religious and cast-driven nationalism, at least one half of the planet would now be standing firmly against the Empire and its sinister design to fully control the world.

***

I spoke to my Kashmiri friends about all of this.

But Kashmir is bleeding, from torture and rape, from extra-judicial killings. There, India is conducting joint exercises with both the US and Israel. It is learning how to massacre, control and torture, and it is often outdoing its gurus.

The victims of the bestiality committed by the Empire and its client states are our allies. We will not hide the facts! We will not maneuver. We will speak openly and clearly. If we have any ‘ideological differences’, we will take care of them later. But our message, for now, is clear: enough of torture, enough of rape, enough of genocides.

I told them, to my friends: “Kashmir is not alone. We will stand by you, we will struggle with you, and if needed, we will risk our lives for you!”

The era of cowardice is over. A new age of solidarity has arrived.

As Indian guns were pointed at me, I felt calm. “If anything happens to me, many others will take my place”, I thought. I am not a hero, I don’t believe in heroism, but I am not a coward, either. And after learning what has been taking place in Kashmir, every pore of my body was supporting the victims.

In Kashmir I felt that Leningrad and Beijing, Caracas, Havana, Asmara and Quito are behind me. The songs of resistance from Srinagar were the songs of resistance of the Russian, Chinese, African and Latin American people.

We are all connected. And that is why I was standing there, in the middle of the road, in Srinagar, facing the soldiers of the Indian state – those lackeys of the Empire.

“He is really coming with us!” one of the boys said, in disbelief.

“Yes!” I said, squeezing my camera. As always, I wanted to survive. I wanted to survive so much! But not by all means! Not as a slave, not as a lackey.

“Half of humanity is now with us”, I thought, as the bandits, those security forces of India, trained openly by US and Israeli began closing in on us, firing teargas canisters, not into the air but directly at people’s heads. “And many more will be joining, soon.”

Point of No Return is now re-edited and available. Oceania is his book on Western imperialism in South Pacific. His provocative book about post-Suharto Indonesia and market-fundamentalist model is called “Indonesia – The Archipelago of Fear” (Pluto). He just completed a feature documentary, “Rwanda Gambit”, about Rwandan history and the plunder of DR Congo. After living for many years in Latin America and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides and works in East Asia and Africa. He can be reached through his website, or at andre.vltchek@greanvillepost.com

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