HE ZHAO—When a state has been under ceaseless and constant destabilisation campaigns from an exponentially richer and more powerful enemy that uses every opportunity at subversion, sabotage, colour revolution, funding extremists, arming opposition, regime change, and coup d’etats to destroy their government by any means necessary, this government implements defensive measures such as censorship of enemy-dominated global media, and censorship of political content in culture, which sometimes, without consideration of this history, seem unreasonably harsh.
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CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—“Why don’t you ever criticize RUSSIA’S warmongering?” is a question I am often asked with great indignation. People cannot comprehend why I would spend all my time criticizing the warmongering of the power structure I live under without spending any time criticizing the government they’re used to hearing criticisms of. It’s a question born of delusion and propaganda brainwashing, and it has several good answers. Here are some of my favorites.
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A GARLAND NIXON ESSAY—As Iran, not to mention Russia or China, have amply demonstrated, the Anglo-American empire is no longer the sole possessor of superior and lethal military technology, says Garland Nixon. This new balancing of military power is now clearly limiting the use of US military muscle in the criminal manner the Washington elites and their accomplices around the world had grown accustomed to. This is a welcome and long-awaited development for humanity, but, reminds us Garland, “the US empire is still a massive economic and military superpower that has fallen into the hands of psychopaths.”
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CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—The assumption that because a disaster has not happened in the past it will not happen in the future is a type of fallacious reasoning known as normalcy bias. The assumption that because a disaster has not happened in the past it will not happen in the future, even though you keep doing things to make it increasingly likely, is just being a fucking idiot. It’s like Wile E Coyote jumping up and down on the land mine until it explodes because it didn’t explode when the Roadrunner ran over it.
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ANDREI RAEVSKY—The title of this article is a quote by the famous Chinese general, strategist, philosopher, and writer Sun Tzu who lived 2500 years ago. And while it is true that warfare has dramatically changed over the past millennia (for example, operational art was added as an intermediate level between tactics and strategy), the fundamental logic of Sun Tzu still applies. To grossly oversimplify this issue, you could say that tactics are the means toward an end that has to be defined and the definition of that end goal is strategy. Again, this is ridiculously oversimplified, but for our purposes that is good enough.
