JEFF J. BROWN—It’s sad, but like the bogus Muslim concentration camp Big Lie, it works every time (https://chinarising.puntopress.com/2018/08/27/time-to-get-real-about-chinas-25-million-muslims-china-rising-radio-sinoland-180827/). The problem is 99% of Westerners mistakenly believe they have a “free press”, barely read beyond the well-orchestrated, sensational headlines, swallow it all as gospel truth, post it on their Facebook and Twitter pages, then are “experts” at the dinner table and around the water cooler at work – Hey, look at me, I subscribe to the Economist and the New York Times! This, while they are equally brainwashed that socialist, communist, anti-imperial media are all “totalitarian” and unworthy of consideration. What the BLPM does is ingeniously and diabolically effective: psychological reflection/deflection of all its planetary psychopathy and tyranny onto its anti-imperial enemies. No wonder they call it psyops.
CHINESE WAY OF LIFE
-
-
John Bellamy Foster: Capitalism Has Failed—What Next?
132 minutes readJ BELLAMY FOSTER—For many people on the left, the answer to neoliberalism or disaster capitalism is a return to welfare-state liberalism, market regulation, or some form of limited social democracy, and thus to a more rational capitalism. It is not the failure of capitalism itself that is perceived as the problem, but rather the failure of neoliberal capitalism.
-
Modernization has been a dream of China’s for a century. After the Great Cultural Revolution, the Chinese government joined most developing countries in treating modernization as its goal. China’s achievements on this path, such as its fast GDP growth, have amazed the world. However, the price has been extremely high, including environmental problems, an increasing gap between the rich and the poor, and growing disenchantment with growth within the populace as a whole. Is there any alternative to the current form of modernization? “Constructive postmodern thinking proposes such an alternative.”81 Kang Ouyang, a leading Marxist scholar in China and vice president of Huazhong University of Science and Technology, has explored the positive and negative sides of modernization. For him the negative includes: treating economic growth as the ultimate goal; neglecting ecology, the value of tradition, and aesthetic wisdom as complements to scientific knowledge; rejection of the positive role that religion can play in human life; and overemphasis on individuality at the expense of community.
-
CHRISTIAN MUELLER—In politics, words are deeds. The words used to describe political decisions indicate the mindset of what actors perceive as possible or impossible, desirable or undesirable. In 1899, China identified its course of action in terms of historical analogies, while the European powers largely ignored this rationale. Today, Europe would be ill-advised to ignore the role that narratives of Chinese history play in the official rhetoric and conceptualisation of politics in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
-
Bangladesh Railway: see if you can find the train
14 minutes readEach year in January Bangladesh hosts the three day Bishwa Ijtema festival. It is held at Tongi beside the river Turag a short way north of Dhaka. This is the worlds third largest gathering Muslim pilgrims with up to 5 million attending. To transport this number of people, the Bangladesh Government puts on for free special trains. The grossly overcrowded trains create a spectacular sight. However despite what has been written elsewhere, this is not the usual state of affairs on Bangladesh Railways. Regular trains are crowded and some passengers ride on the roof but nothing like the festival trains. The video shows trains taking pilgrims to the festival in the morning and returning back to the city at the end of the last day.