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Mahinda Rajapaksa's return to power will be welcomed by China
by
John J. Xenakis
This morning's key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com
 |
Mahinda Rajapaksa, a close ally of China and former president of Sri Lanka until he was defeated in a 2015 election, may be making a comeback as prime minister.
Last week, in a vitriolic political dispute, Sri Lanka's current president decided to fire the current prime minister, and appoint Rajapaksa to be the new prime minister.
Note:
- President is Maithripala Sirisena,
Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP)
- Fired prime minister is Ranil Wickremesinghe,
United National Party (UNP)
- Appointed prime minister is Mahinda Rajapaksa
The fired prime minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe, has refused to leave the prime minister's residence, and hundreds of supporters gathered outside.
Meanwhile, Rajapaksa has moved into the prime minister's office, and is starting to appoint a cabinet. So there are currently two prime ministers.
The president, Maithripala Sirisena, claims that he has the right to fire the prime minister and appoint a new one. His opponents say that it's unconstitutional, and that only the parliament can fire a prime minister, and so the parliament should be called into session to decide who is prime minister.
Sirisena responded by announcing that the Parliament will remain closed until mid-November. This will give him to time to make sure that the members of parliament are aligned behind his decision. However, the speaker of the parliament said: "We need to solve this through parliament. If we try to solve this in the streets it will lead to a major bloodbath."
Wickremesinghe posted a defiant statement on Monday:
"As the Prime Minister of Sri Lanka, I call upon all parties to assemble in parliament to regain our country's peace, stability, and to vehemently defend the fundamental rights of our citizens. My expectation is that the Speaker [of Parliament] will exercise his constitutional rights and summon parliament within the next 2 days.We ask the Honorable Speaker to summon Parliament urgently- only through the parliamentary system can we can save our country from this unfortunate and dangerous situation. Let us forget our political differences and rally to re-establish democracy in our country."
The reference to a "dangerous situation" is made because there's already been violence, including one person killed.
On Saturday, a pro-Wickremesinghe minister was confronted by a crowd of supporters of the president. The minister's bodyguard opened fire on the crowd, killing one person and wounding two others. This followed the storming of two state-owned television stations by mobs of Rajapaksa supporters. Guardian (London) and NPR and Guardian
President Sirisena and fired prime minister Wickremesinghe have had a number of disagreements, especially because Wickremesinghe is "pro-India," while Sirisena is "pro-China."
In a bizarre manifestation of this difference, in mid-October Sirisena publicly accused India's intelligence services of plotting his assassination. However, he spoke to India's prime minister Narendra Modi on the phone the next day. Afterwards, Sirisena stated that the mischievous and malafide reports were utterly baseless and false, and seemed intended to create misunderstanding between the two leaders as well as damage the cordial relations between the two friendly neighbors.
Rajapaksa became president of Sri Lanka in 2005, but was defeated in the presidential election by Sirisena in 2015. The two men had maintained cordial relations, so in that sense it wasn't a surprise that Sirisena decided to bring Rajapaksa back to power by appointing him prime minister after firing Wickremesinghe.
However, there's a great deal of hostility and violence in Sri Lanka related to the 30-year civil war between the governing ethnic Sinhalese, who are Buddhist, and the minority ethnic Tamils, who are Hindu. This was actually the first generational crisis war to reach a climax in this century. This civil war climaxed in May 2009. As in the case of all generational crisis wars, especially when they're civil wars, the war was extremely brutal and blood, with atrocities committed on both sides. Mahinda Rajapaksa was president during the last years of that war, and he's been personally charged with war crimes. (Paragraph corrected, 31-Oct)
There have been sporadic surges in violence since then. Since 2014, there have been numerous hate crime attacks by Buddhists on Muslims, including arson at Muslim-owned businesses and petrol-bomb attacks on mosques. The attacks are being blamed on a radical nationalist Buddhist organization, Bodu Bala Sena (BBS - Forces of Buddhist Power).
Another important legacy of Rajapaksa's presidency is that he made Sri Lanka the poster child and the first country to become victim to China's "Debt Trap Diplomacy." The Seaport of Hambantota, a Chinese infrastructure project in Sri Lanka, was funded with a loan from China, with almost all the labor performed by Chinese workers, and all parts and services imported from China, so that the loan money never benefited Sri Lanka's industries. Rajapaksa agreed to China's demands for exhorbitant loan repayment terms. Sri Lanka was unable to repay the loan, and in December of last year, Sri Lanka was forced to give the seaport away to China. So now Sri Lanka has a large seaport owned by China, and a large Chinese enclave with hundreds of Chinese families, with no benefit to itself and to its own people.
What's more important is that the seaport is at a strategic location in the Indian Ocean, and is one of China's "String of Pearls" seaports, and is considered a major security threat to India. Rajapaksa's return to power means that China will play a dominant role in Sri Lanka's politics and development. India Today and Foreign Policy and Diplomat
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(Comments: For reader comments, questions and discussion, see the 31-Oct-18 World View -- Sri Lanka constitutional crisis represents opportunity for China thread of the Generational Dynamics forum. Comments may be
posted anonymously.)
(31-Oct-2018)
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Brief generational history of Thailand
by
John J. Xenakis
This morning's key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com
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Thailand's prime minister Prayuth Chan-ocha has announced that a new general election will be held in 2019, possibly on February 24. Prayuth himself is prime minister because he was appointed by a military junta that overthrew the elected government of Yingluck Shinawatra in 2014 in a coup. Under domestic and international pressure, Prayuth has promised five times to schedule a general election, but has always failed to do so.
It's possible that he won't keep his promise this time either. After the 2014 coup, he promised elections in early 2015, then in 2016, and then in November 2018. Now it's 2019 - maybe.
The reason that Prayuth may again kill election plans is because he knows that his side will almost certainly lose. The vast majority of the population are the dark-skinned lower class indigenous people, also called "Thai-Thai" and "red shirts," comprising about 3/4 of the population, living mostly in the northern and northeastern regions of Thailand, but who come to Bangkok mostly to work in menial jobs serving the Thai-Chinese.
The Thai-Chinese, also called "yellow shirts," are the light-skinned descendants of a wave of Chinese workers that poured into the country to find jobs in the 1930s. They comprise 1/4 of the population, live mostly around Bangkok, and are extremely contemptuous of the indigenous Thai-Thai, whom they consider to be inferior. Prayuth hates the Thai-Thai people, and knows that they'll win a general election, which is why he'll probably do all he can to avoid one. Straits Times and South China Morning Post (Hong Kong, 29-Dec-2017) and Channel News Asia
The Pheu Thai Party (Puea Thai Party), originally called the Thai Rak Thai (TRT) party, is the party of the indigenous "red shirt" people, led by Thaksin Shinawatra. Thaksin was prime minister from 2001-2006, when he was ousted by a military coup. He then engineered a series of election victories for prime ministers from hie Pheu Thai party, but in each case the army used some artifice to overthrow the elected prime minister.
In one case, the elected prime minister Samak Sundaravej was thrown out of office by a court because he previously had a cooking show on tv, and that was a conflict of interest. ( "Thailand government collapses, ending crippling riots from class war".)
In the most recent case, Thaksin's sister Yingluck Shinawatra won the 2011 election as the first female prime minister, with her election campaign scripted by her brother Thaksin, who at that time was living in exile in Dubai. ( "Thailand's Yingluck promises to use 'femininity' to resolve disputes")
However, Yingluck's use of femininity during her time in office didn't seem to work with the military junta that overthrew her in a coup in 2014. She was charged with corruption and convicted in 2017, but fled the country in August just before she was scheduled to be sentenced and jailed. Many observers believe that the army purposely looked the other way when she fled the country, fearing that if she were jailed there would be popular riots by her supporters. She was sentenced in absentia to five years in jail.
Thaksin and Yingluck are still extremely popular in Thailand, and they still yield a great deal of influence in the Pheu Thai party. According to one analyst, "You have to understand how powerful the Thaksin ‘brand’ is among his supporters. For his working class supporters he is still seen as a hero, who delivered to those people who voted for him what he promised, until he was unjustly overthrown by the ‘elite’."
Thaksin has been traveling to London, Hong Kong and Singapore, remaining out of reach of the Thai authorities. He recently gave an interview in which he said that all the "pro-democracy parties," including his own Pheu Thai, should unite behind a single candidate. "It's time for [voters] to cast their ballots ... to dump the dictatorship of Thailand."
After giving this interview, a member of the ruling military junta in Thailand, urged the Election Commission to look into whether Thaksin exercises control over the affairs of the Pheu Thai party from abroad. If a probe takes place and finds that Thaksin still retains influence, it could lead to dissolution of the party for several years. Bangkok Post and Nikkei and South China Morning Post and Al Jazeera
Part of Thailand's history was made famous by Anna Leonowens, who came from London to Siam (as it was known then) to be the governess and teacher of the many children of King Mongkut (Rama IV) in the 1860s. In 1895, she wrote memoirs that were turned into a film, "Anna and the King of Siam" in 1946, and into the 1952 Rodgers and Hammerstein Broadway musical, "The King and I."
If you have a few minutes, then watch the YouTube video of "The March of the Siamese Children," from the 1956 film, "The King and I." It depicts Anna's first meeting with the children.
The play depicts a troubled king trying to lead a small country surrounded by large enemies, and willing to use invasion, torture and other atrocities.
King Rama had fought a generational crisis war in the early 1830s when he had invaded Laos and Cambodia, but ended up losing to a Vietnamese army.
Siam's next generational crisis war occurred in what is now southern Thailand. For centuries, Siam's kings had felt that the Muslims in southern Siam were a major threat to the security of the country, mainly because resistance and rebellion against Thai government rule were so strong among the Muslim population, and in fact the southern Muslims had revolted during the 1830s crisis war.
By the late 1800s this threat had been felt to be critical, and in 1902 King Rama V invaded and annexed the Malay kingdom of Patani, consisting of the four provinces of Satun, Yala, Pattani and Narathiwat. (Note: The kingdom is spelled "Patani," while the province is spelled "Pattani.") In 1909, an Anglo-Siamese Agreement established the present border between Thailand and Malaysia.
During the next few decades, Siam (which became Thailand in 1939) was faced with the problem of trying to assimilate the southern Muslim population into what is essentially a Buddhist country. During the generational Awakening era that followed, the military coup of 1932 overthrew the absolute monarchy in Siam and replaced it with constitutional monarchy. This was a representative form of government that promised a high degree of political participation of the Malay-Muslims in the South. However, as World War II (an Awakening era war for Thailand) approached, the country became more Thai-nationalistic, and the country adopted a policy of forced assimilation towards the Muslims, which had little success, as resistance and rebellion have continued since then.
The 1930s also saw a large influx of migrants from China, coming to the country to work. Over the decades, they were able to displace the indigenous people in positions of power in government, and in control of businesses. This formed an ethnic fault line between the indigenous Thai-Thai majority and the elite Thai-Chinese minority.
The next generational crisis war was the Cambodian "killing fields" war, 1975-79, in which Pol Pot's communist Khmer Rouge government, backed by China, killed 1.7-3 million people in a massive genocide. The Cambodian war spilled over into Thailand in the form of a communist rebellion that had begun in the 1960s. King Bhumibol (Rama IX) became an essential figure in the fight against the communists, although his role became more controversial in the savage anti-leftist coup of 1976, in which dozens of students were brutally killed by the security forces and royal-backed militias, and thousands forced to flee to seek sanctuary with the Communist Party.
The Cambodian "killing fields" civil war took place on Thailand's doorstep, though not on Thai soil. Still, it caused a split along the Thai-Thai versus Thai-Chinese fault line that continues to the present time. Today, Thailand is in a new generational Awakening/Unraveling era, and we're seeing a repeat of what happened in the 1930s.
During the generational Awakening era of the 1930s, the military coup of 1932 overthrew the absolute monarchy in Siam and replaced it with constitutional monarchy that gave some power to the southern Muslims, only to have it taken away a few years later.
During the current era, the 1997 constitution guaranteed free elections for everyone, including the indigenous Thai-Thai, and now that's being taken away by a military junta.
History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. Yale: Thailand’s Response to the Cambodian Genocide and Cornell: History and Politics of the Muslims in Thailand (PDF) and Communist Party of Thailand
Related Articles
(Comments: For reader comments, questions and discussion, see the 30-Oct-18 World View -- Thailand and Thaksin Shinawatra prepare for new national elections thread of the Generational Dynamics forum. Comments may be
posted anonymously.)
(30-Oct-2018)
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Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) accepts the Egyptian-mediated ceasefire
by
John J. Xenakis
This morning's key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com
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Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) said that it's agreed to a ceasefire with Israel mediated by Egypt after a Friday night of terror.
During Friday night, 34 rockets were fired into Israel from Gaza, according to the Israeli military. It's believed that the rockets were launched by Islamic Jihad, a terror group in Gaza that is a separate entity from Hamas. Israel's Iron Dome anti-missile defense system is said to have intercepted 13 of the 34 rockets. No Israelis were reported injured by the rocket attacks.
In response, Israeli air force missile attacks struck 80 targets across Gaza on Saturday morning, including Hamas's new headquarters for General Security Services. Gaza officials say that nine Palestinians were wounded in one of the Israeli attacks and a hospital was badly damaged.
Gaza is under siege by both Israel and Egypt. Hamas, the nominally ruling government in Gaza, has disavowed the rocket activity and blames PIJ for sabotaging attempts to broker a long-term truce that would lift the siege. However, Israel holds Hamas responsible for all rocket attacks on Israel. Al Jazeera and Asharq Al-Awsat (Saudi Arabia) and CNN
PIJ official Khaled al-Batsh said that the rocket attacks were made in revenge for Israeli attacks on Gazans:
"The occupation could not have been allowed to kill four peaceful demonstrators in Gaza and two in the occupied West Bank for taking part in peaceful popular marches without responding to the crimes."
However, an Israeli army spokesman said that Iran and Syria were behind the rocket attacks: "Islamic Jihad fired dozens of missiles at Israel under the guidance of Iran and Syria. These incidents show the dangers threatening the State of Israel."
PIJ was actually formed in the late 1970s, and was inspired by Iran's Islamic Revolution. PIJ and Hamas are both Sunni Muslim terror organizations, but PIJ has always had a much closer relationship with Iran than Hamas has had.
Israeli security officials believe that PIJ is supplied with money and weapons from Iran, and also takes orders from Iran. These officials believe that Iran was influenced by two events in the last week to order PIJ to make the rocket attacks.
One event was a surprise visit by Israel's prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Oman, meeting Oman's leader Sultan Qaboos. This meeting came shortly after a similar meeting by Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas. Sultan Qaboos' objective was to initiate a new dialog between the two parties, which might have shut Iran and Hamas out.
The second event was word that Hamas and Egypt have finally agreed to the terms to restore calm in Gaza, more or less under the same parameters put in place after 2014 summer war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
PIJ has its own reasons to launch the rocket attacks -- unlike Hamas, it opposes any peace negotiations with Israel.
However, under pressure from Hamas and Egypt, PIJ agreed to the ceasefire, and there were no more rocket or missile attacks on Saturday or Sunday. According to a PIJ spokesman:
"After contacts between the Islamic Jihad leadership and the brothers in Egypt it was agreed that a comprehensive ceasefire will begin immediately. The Islamic Jihad will abide by the ceasefire if the occupation (Israel) does the same."
Israel has threatened further attacks on Iranian targets Syria if the rocket attacks resume. Ynet (Israel) and Akhbrna News (Cairo)
Related Articles:
(Comments: For reader comments, questions and discussion, see the 29-Oct-18 World View -- Islamic Jihad agrees to Egypt-sponsored ceasefire in Gaza after night of terror thread of the Generational Dynamics forum. Comments may be
posted anonymously.)
(29-Oct-2018)
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Remembering previous Syria 'peace conferences' and 'peace plans'
by
John J. Xenakis
This morning's key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com
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How many "peace conferences" and "peace plans" have there been since 2011, when Syria's president Bashar al-Assad launched his genocidal war against his historic Sunni enemies, including the Palestinians in refugee camps, targeting women and children in marketplaces, schools and hospitals using barrel bombs, missiles, chlorine gas, and Sarin gas, exterminating them as if they were termites?
The first ones began in 2012 with the UN Security Council appointing a series of UN envoys to Syria. The first was former U.N. secretary-general Kofi Annan who came up with a six-point peace plan that I described as "farcical" on the day it was announced. ( "22-Mar-12 World View -- U.N. Security Council adopts farcical 'peace plan' for Syria")
The first of the six points says that Syria commits to work with Kofi Annan “in an inclusive Syrian-led political process to address the legitimate aspirations and concerns of the Syrian people.” That's just an example of how silly it was, as if it had been written by third graders.
Al-Assad actually agreed to the plan, and then ignored it. He made a complete fool of Annan. The so-called "peace plan" actually made things worse in Syria, because it provided cover for al-Assad to continue his slaughter, while claiming to be negotiating peace. Similar things happened with all three UN envoys -- Kofi Annan, Lakhdar Brahimi, Staffan de Mistura. They were all useful idiots, played by al-Assad as complete fools, humiliating themselves and the United Nations. As I wrote in "3-Aug-12 World View -- Kofi Annan resigns in failure as Syria envoy", Annan was bitter and angry when he resigned, blaming his decision on what he described as Syrian government intransigence, on increasing militancy by Syrian rebels and on finger-pointing and name-calling by members of the United Nations Security Council.
By the way, two weeks ago Staffan de Mistura announced that he would step down. He blamed Bashar al-Assad for blocking the peace process. Totally laughable.
It was during the tenure of the envoy Lakhdar Brahimi that I learned what the term "proximity talks" means. The way this works is that the two sides don't actually talk to each other -- if they did, they'd probably end up killing each other. Instead, the two sides remain separated in different rooms, and each side only talks to Brahimi, who goes back and forth between the rooms. That's how the farcical "peace talks" worked.
Then there were the completely fraudulent so-called "Astana talks," which were led by Russia and took place in Astana, Kazakhstan, or sometimes in Sochi.
The Astana talks split western Syria into four "de-escalation zones" or "ceasefire zones." Russia promised there would be no fighting in any of these zones. In the case of three of them, al-Assad and Russia violated the agreement, and turned each of them into a full-scale genocide zone.
There's only one de-escalation zone remaining: Idlib Guardian (London) and Reuters (17-Oct)
On Saturday, Turkey's president Recep Tayyip Erdogan led peace talks in Istanbul, Turkey, with leaders of Russia, France and Germany. In addition to Erdogan, Russia's President Vladimir Putin, Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel and France's President Emmanuel Macron were present.
The peace conference was considered a diplomatic victory for Erdogan, because he believes that he can get more leverage against Russia and Syria if the Europeans support him.
Syria was not present, because Bashar al-Assad is never present at these peace conferences, since he always ignores them anyway.
The U.S. was not present at the peace conference. According to one analyst, the Europeans are furious at Donald Trump for pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal and for the tariff policy, and didn't want the peace conference to turn into a pure Trump-bashing conference, so they didn't invite the US.
The purpose was to make the ceasefire in Idlib permanent. There are over three million people in Idlib, and half of them are displaced people who fled al-Assad's violence in the other three de-escalation zones. Of the three million civilians, there are an estimated 60,000 or so anti-Assad rebels in Idlib, including both "moderate" rebels and jihadists in al-Qaeda linked Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), formerly the al-Nusra Front.
Bashar al-Assad has made it clear that he plans an assault on Idlib, and is willing to kill three million people to do so, since he considers them all the be "terrorists." If there is an assault on Idlib, there will be a massive humanitarian disaster, and hundreds of thousands or millions of people will pour across the border into Turkey, which is already hosting 3.5 million Syrian refugees. Some of the Idlib refugees will undoubtedly continue on into Europe, resulting in a new European migrant crisis.
That's why Merkel and Macron are at the meeting, calling for a political solution that makes the Idlib ceasefire permanent. And that's why the meeting is considered a diplomatic victory for Erdogan, since he thinks that Merkel and Macron will pressure Putin into agreeing to a permanent ceasefire.
On September 17, Erdogan and Putin met in Sochi, and they reached an agreement to stabilize Idlib. A buffer zone would be set up, with the Syrian army on one side, and the rest of Idlib on the other. Turkey would guarantee that all rebel weapons would be removed from the buffer zone, and that Turkey would patrol the buffer zone and guarantee that it is weapons-free.
Since then, there are been sporadic violations of the buffer zone on both sides, but Turkey claims that it has succeeded in clearing the buffer zone. So the purpose of Saturday's peace conference was to agree to make the ceasefire permanent.
No such agreement was reached, of course. A secondary objective, to form a constitutional committee for Syria, was rejected by al-Assad. In fact, the meeting was a failure except for a few laughable expressions of hope and change.
At the press conference after the meeting, Macron said, "We should be vigilant that the ceasefire in Syria will be long lasting." Merkel said, "A political solution is necessary besides military solutions. We will not tolerate the use of chemical weapons in Syria." Haha.
We've seen this movie several times before. Al-Assad and Putin commit to some kind of ceasefire, with absolutely no intention to keep the commitment, and use the negotiations as cover to launch a new genocidal offensive. Sooner or later, something will happen that al-Assad can use as an excuse, and the assault will begin.
This time it will be different, however. In Aleppo, Ghouta and Daara, there were a few hundred thousand people, and many of them were permitted to escape to Idlib.
In Idlib, there are over three million people, and they have no place to escape to. As I wrote at length earlier this month, this situation has all the makings of a traditional tragedy in the classical Greek sense. There are three major protagonists, al-Assad, Putin and Erdogan, and they're headed for a massive, tragic, calamitous ending that cannot be prevented by them or anybody else. Daily Sabah (Turkey) and Deutsche Welle
Related Articles:
(Comments: For reader comments, questions and discussion, see the 28-Oct-18 World View -- Syria peace summit issues delusional call for political solution in Idlib thread of the Generational Dynamics forum. Comments may be
posted anonymously.)
(28-Oct-2018)
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China and Japan's 'marriage of convenience' limited by bitter history
by
John J. Xenakis
This morning's key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com
 |
There have been numerous reports in the last three months that, with the Trump administration imposing reciprocal tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of Chinese exports to the US, China has been scrambling to find new markets for its exports.
One of those new markets appears to be Japan. As Japan's prime minister Shinzo Abe visited China's capital city Beijing on Friday, the two countries signed several deals, and declare a new era of cooperation between the two countries.
China’s President Xi Jinping on Friday rolled out the red carpet for Abe, and said:
"Our relationship has encountered a lot of obstacles. It was not a smooth ride. But with our joint effort, the relationship has become more normalized. A healthy relationship between China and Japan serves the basic interests of both countries."
Abe responded by saying that he hoped his trip would elevate the China-Japan relationship from competition to cooperation. "China and Japan are neighbors and partners, and we will not be a threat to each other."
One of the deals was a currency swap deal. Under the deal, the People’s Bank of China and the Bank of Japan will be able to exchange up to 3.4 trillion yen for 200 billion yuan (about $29 billion) and vice versa over the next three years – a design that will help to ensure financial stability and facilitate financial ties, and allow commercial trade involving the two currencies without needing to go through the US dollar as an intermediary.
The sides also signed about 50 agreements on boosting cooperation in third-party countries, while companies agreed more than 500 business deals. The third-party country deals are said to be cooperative infrastructure projects related to China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
The two sides also agreed to open a hotline “as soon as possible” to prevent accidental clashes at sea and in the air in the East China Sea, where Chinese ships have been harassing Japanese ships near the Senkaku Islands. South China Morning Post (Hong Kong) and Japan Today and South China Morning Post and Deutsche Welle
China and Japan have a long, bitter history going back centuries. In recent times, the Sino-Japanese war (1894-95) was a major humiliation for China, which was forced to cede Taiwan to Japan as a colony.
Even more recently, in December 1937 Imperial Japanese troops in China perpetrated the Nanjing (Nanking) Massacre. This event, along with the Japanese army's use of Korean and Chinese women as "comfort women" during World War II. Japanese troops did not leave China until they were defeated by the Americans at the end of World War II.
During the last ten years, Chinese ships have been constantly harrassing Japanese ships around the Senkaku Islands. These islands, in the East China Sea, are governed by Japan. Like many places belonging to other countries across Asia, China is threatening to annex them by force. However, this would trigger a war with the US under a Japan-US mutual defense treaty.
China has its own concerns about Japan. Under Shinzo Abe, Japan has all but abandoned its defense-only policy adopted after World War II, and been strengthening its military for the first time in decades, which China sees as a threat.
The hatred that many Chinese people viscerally feel for the Japanese runs deep. There have been frequent anti-Japan protests in China. One of the biggest occurred in 2012, when more than 70,000 Chinese staged rallies Saturday in at least 28 cities to demand that Japan surrender the Senkaku islands to China. The largest demonstration, in Qingdao, Shandong Province, attracted as many as 30,000 people and evolved into rioting as protestors torched as many as 10 Japanese enterprises, including a Panasonic factory. The protests and violence appeared to have the tacit approval of China's government.
The current rapprochement between China and Japan may be a marriage of convenience, but the core issues separating the countries runs deep. Generational Dynamics predicts that Japan and China will fight a new generational crisis war as part of the Clash of Civilizations world war that will pit the US, India, Russia and Iran versus China, Pakistan and the Sunni Muslim countries. Deutsche Welle and National Interest and BBC and Diplomat
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(Comments: For reader comments, questions and discussion, see the 27-Oct-18 World View -- China, facing Trump's trade challenge, appears to mend ties with Japan thread of the Generational Dynamics forum. Comments may be
posted anonymously.)
(27-Oct-2018)
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Post-war speeches by Churchill and Kennan defined 'containment' policy for Soviet Union
by
John J. Xenakis
This morning's key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com
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On October 4, VP Mike Pence gave a speech on US policy towards China. Since then, the speech has taken on a great deal of importance, and it's being compared to speeches by Western officials after World War II to "contain" the Soviet Union.
On March 3, 1946, Winston Churchill gave a speech he called "The Sinews of Peace." It contained the following well-remembered excerpts:
"From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow. Athens alone-Greece with its immortal glories-is free to decide its future at an election under British, American and French observation. The Russian-dominated Polish Government has been encouraged to make enormous and wrongful inroads upon Germany, and mass expulsions of millions of Germans on a scale grievous and undreamed-of are now taking place. The Communist parties, which were very small in all these Eastern States of Europe, have been raised to pre-eminence and power far beyond their numbers and are seeking everywhere to obtain totalitarian control. Police governments are prevailing in nearly every case, and so far, except in Czechoslovakia, there is no true democracy. ...However, in a great number of countries, far from the Russian frontiers and throughout the world, Communist fifth columns are established and work in complete unity and absolute obedience to the directions they receive from the Communist centre. Except in the British Commonwealth and in the United States where Communism is in its infancy, the Communist parties or fifth columns constitute a growing challenge and peril to Christian civilisation. These are sombre facts for anyone to have to recite on the morrow of a victory gained by so much splendid comradeship in arms and in the cause of freedom and democracy; but we should be most unwise not to face them squarely while time remains."
On February 22, 1946, America's ambassador to Moscow George Kennan sent a "Long Telegram," 8,000 words long, to the US State Department, describing his recommended policy towards the Soviet Union. The text was made public in a 1947 article in Foreign Affairs magazine as "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," by "X" (no relation to me).
Kennan described the ideology of the Soviet Union, and by changing a few words, the same description would apply to China today. He described the history of Marxist ideology and how it led to the Bolshevik revolution. "[T]he capitalist system of production is a nefarious one which inevitable leads to the exploitation of the working class by the capital-owning class; ... capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction; ... imperialism, the final phase of capitalism, leads directly to war and revolution." However:
"Now it must be noted that through all the years of preparation for revolution, the attention of these men, as indeed of Marx himself, had been centered less on the future form which Socialism would take than on the necessary overthrow of rival power which, in their view, had to precede the introduction of Socialism. Their views, therefore, on the positive program to be put into effect, once power was attained, were for the most part nebulous, visionary and impractical, beyond the nationalization of industry and the expropriation of large private capital holdings there was no agreed program. ...Let it be stressed again that subjectively these men probably did not seek absolutism for its own sake. They doubtless believed -- and found it easy to believe -- that they alone knew what was good for society and that they would accomplish that good once their power was secure and unchallengeable. But in seeking that security of their own rule they were prepared to recognize no restrictions, either of God or man, on the character of their methods. And until such time as that security might be achieved, they placed far down on their scale of operational priorities the comforts and happiness of the peoples entrusted to their care.
As things stand today, the rulers can no longer dream of parting with these organs of suppression. The quest for absolute power, pursued now for nearly three decades with a ruthlessness unparalleled (in scope at least) in modern times, has again produced internally, as it did externally, its own reaction. The excesses of the police apparatus have fanned the potential opposition to the regime into something far greater and more dangerous than it could have been before those excesses began."
So Kennan is saying that once these people have won the civil war and created their Socialist paradises, they turn into cruel, ruthless despots that retain power by any means possible.
Kennan's description is so well written, and sounds so familiar, because applies to so many countries today. Of course we can see it in Venezuela, but we've also seen it in non-Socialist Paradise countries, including Cameroon, Burundi, Iran and Cambodia. This is a statement of the finding of Generational Dynamics that whenever any country experiences an ethnic civil war which is also a generational crisis war, then in the aftermath, the winning ethnic group oppresses the losing ethnic group, using torture, beatings, rape and slaughter to keep the other ethnic group in line. It also applies to all the other Communist countries that were formed during and after World War II.
Kennan, writing in 1946, says that the Soviet leaders are still struggling to complete the 1917 Revolution:
"As things stand today, the rulers can no longer dream of parting with these organs of suppression. The quest for absolute power, pursued now for nearly three decades with a ruthlessness unparalleled (in scope at least) in modern times, has again produced internally, as it did externally, its own reaction. The excesses of the police apparatus have fanned the potential opposition to the regime into something far greater and more dangerous than it could have been before those excesses began.But least of all can the rulers dispense with the fiction by which the maintenance of dictatorial power has been defended. For this fiction has been canonized in Soviet philosophy by the excesses already committed in its name; and it is now anchored in the Soviet structure of thought by bonds far greater than those of mere ideology."
Kennan says that this dictatorial power, with all its oppression and atrocities, is so ingrained in the Kremlin's ideology that they believe they have to use force to spread the same ideology to other countries. In 1946, this observation was already to clear to many people, as described in Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech.
In response, Kennan describes his policy of containment:
"In these circumstances it is clear that the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies. ...In the light of the above, it will be clearly seen that the Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the western world is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and maneuvers of Soviet policy, but which cannot be charmed or talked out of existence."
Kennan went on to describe details of how the Soviet Union could be contained. Kennan's "Long Telegraph" had a huge impact on Washington policy, and was debated for years. Winston Churchill (5-March-1946) and History Guide - George Kennan (22-Feb-1946)
VP Mike Pence's October 4 speech gives a scathing criticism of China's behavior. Pence's speech is being described as a "containment" speech, like those of Churchill and Kennan, but directed at China.
From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, it's important to remember that there's a big difference. In 1946, WW II had just ended, and the US, Russia and China were all war-weary, in a generational Recovery era, with absolutely no desire to fight another war. There was a war in Korea in which all three countries fought, but that war was fought so half-heartedly that it ended in a ceasefire, with no conclusion. Technically, the Korean War has never ended.
But today, we're all in a generation Crisis era, with xenophobia and nationalism at a peak in all three countries. If there were a new Korean war today -- and it's a definite possibility -- then it would also certainly spread to a wider war and a world war.
Pence says that Donald Trump's administration has adopted "a new approach to China, ... grounded in fairness, reciprocity, and respect for sovereignty."
Pence reminded the Chinese that America has always supported China, during the so-called "Century of Humiliation" and World War II, and in the decades after World War II, when "America ensured that China became a charter member of the United Nations, and a great shaper of the post-war world." America has opened its markets to China, and "American universities began training a new generation of Chinese engineers, business leaders, scholars, and officials."
Pence said that "After the fall of the Soviet Union, we assumed that a free China was inevitable." As I've written many times, China's reaction to the fall of the collapse of the Soviet Communist Party was not to emulate it, but to become paranoid about it, doubling down on violence and atrocities, for fear that the same thing would happen to the Chinese Communist Party. So today, says Pence, "The dream of freedom remains distant for the Chinese people"
Pence went through a list of Chinese policies that have harmed the Chinese people.
Pence went on to describe American's responses to these Chinese actions, including strengthening the military and implementing reciprocal tariffs.
In the view of many Chinese, Pence's speech indicates that the United States has finally dropped its hypocritical mask and shown its true colors, which is to contain China’s rise just like it did to the Soviet Union at the beginning of the Cold War, and that the United States and China are on an irreversible course of conflict in the coming years. White House and Diplomat
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(Comments: For reader comments, questions and discussion, see the 26-Oct-18 World View -- Mike Pence's China 'containment' speech signals more contentious US-China relations thread of the Generational Dynamics forum. Comments may be
posted anonymously.)
(26-Oct-2018)
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Imran Khan considers the options in asking the IMF for a loan
by
John J. Xenakis
This morning's key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com
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The bizarre story of the gruesome death of Saudi-born Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Arabian embassy in Istanbul, Turkey, seems to be settling down in the last couple of days, largely because Turkey's president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has so far refused to accuse Saudi's crown prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) of being personally involved. Now, MBS is saying that it was "a heinous crime that cannot be justified" and that "those behind this crime will be held accountable... in the end justice will prevail." It may be that Erdogan is holding back some evidence for use as leverage against MBS at some future time.
MBS has been holding a three-day conference called the Future Investment Initiative, whose purpose is to invite investments from countries around the world. Thanks to the Khashoggi scandal, many world leaders are boycotting the conference, although many of those have sent high-level representatives in their place. Reports are that the conference is going well for MBS, despite the boycott.
However, one national leader did attend the conference: Pakistan's new prime minister Imran Khan.
Khan described Khashoggi's death as “sad beyond belief”, and indicated that he did not consider credible the latest official Saudi account of what happened:
"What happened in Turkey was just shocking. What should I say? It shocked all of us. The Saudi government will have to come up with an answer… We wait for whatever the Saudi explanation is. We hope there is an explanation that satisfies people and those responsible are punished."
However, Khan has described his situation as "desperate," and that he is is attending the conference because of Pakistan's deep debt crisis:
"The reason I feel I have to avail myself of this opportunity [to speak to the Saudi leadership] is because in a country of 210 million people right now we have the worst debt crisis in our history.Unless we get loans from friendly countries or the IMF [the International Monetary Fund] we actually won’t have in another two or three months enough foreign exchange to service our debts or to pay for our imports. So we’re desperate at the moment."
Khan had previously visited Saudi Arabia in July to try to get aid, but came away empty handed. However, Khashoggi's death has changed things, and the Saudis are "desperate" as well, needing support from someone like Imran Khan. So Khan was rewarded for attending. MBS is providing $6 billion in aid to Pakistan, $3 billion in foreign currency support and another $3 billion in loans.
Another issue is Saudi Arabia's war in Yemen. In the past, Pakistan has refused to provide military support for the war, but now it may turn out that Khan had to promise something to MBS in return for the $6 billion in aid. So it's interesting that Khashoggi's murder has provided the opportunity for all sorts of extortion and blackmail among the countries in the Mideast and Asia. BBC and CNN and Middle East Eye
When Imran Khan took office as prime minister in August, Pakistan had only enough foreign reserves to pay for imports for two months. Since then, Pakistan's "all-weather friend" China has loaned Pakistan enough additional money so that they can pay for imports into December. Now the $6 billion in aid from Saudi Arabia should give Khan several months' more breathing room.
Khan, a Pashtun born in 1952, is extremely popular and charismatic. He was one of Pakistan's greatest cricket players of all time. In the 1990s, he was voted as the "Sexiest Man of The Year" by the Australia Magazine Oz. He's anti-American, has promised to distance Pakistan from the United States. He's been particularly critical of previous governments for borrowing from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and having to accept their austerity rules in return.
Now that Khan is prime minister, all his previous silver-tongued promises are ignored. Pakistan has received over a dozen IMF programs in the last 30 years, and now he says he's going to ask for another one. Pakistan formally applied for IMF assistance early in October.
Pakistan is about $90 billion in debt, with $19 billion of that owed to China, mainly because of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). China needs CPEC as part of its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in order to have a cheap way to transfer commercial and military goods and people between China and the Indian Ocean.
As usual, the terms are nothing but a debt trap for Pakistan. China lends the money to Pakistan. Pakistan must use the loan money to purchase goods and services from China, and to pay the salaries of the workers on the project, almost all of whom will be Chinese. So, as usual, Pakistan will have to repay the loan twice, once to pay for Chinese goods, services and salaries, and once to repay the loan, plus interest.
So there's a lot of bad dealing going on here. Saudi Arabia is providing $6 billion in aid to Pakistan, but a lot of that money will go, in one way or another, to China in debt repayments.
China would like Pakistan to borrow from the IMF. Since most of the IMF's money comes from the US taxpayer, tht means that the US taxpayer will be paying for the CPEC project.
That's why US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said that the administration will oppose any IMF loan to Pakistan, and said, "There's no rationale for IMF tax dollars — and associated with that, American dollars that are part of the IMF funding — for those to go to bail out Chinese bondholders or China itself."
China would love having the US pay for Pakistan's debts. According to China's foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang said, "As a member of the IMF, China supports the organization in making an objective evaluation of Pakistan based on professionalism and earnestly helping it properly address the current difficulty."
State Dept. spokesman Heather Nauert said:
"Pakistan has formally requested assistance from the International Monetary Fund. In all cases, we examine that closely from all angles of it, including Pakistan’s debt position, in evaluating any type of loan program. ... I think part of the reason that Pakistan found itself in this situation is Chinese debt and the fact that there is debt that governments have incurred that they maybe thought wouldn’t be so tough to bail themselves out of, but has become increasingly tough."
IMF director Christine Lagarde has said that any IMF loan to Pakistan would need to determine the debt sustainability of the country by having "a complete understanding and absolute transparency about the nature, size and terms" of its debt, both public and private, and including the details about the relationship between Pakistan and China.
However, all the information about Pakistan's Chinese debt is secret, and even the State Bank of Pakistan is not privy to it. China has already signaled that the secrecy should not be breached. China welcomes IMF loans to Pakistan, but they must not affect economic cooperation between China and Pakistan. Dawn (Pakistan) and Daily O (India) and CNBC (31-Jul) and Dawn and Committee For The Abolition Of Illegitimate Debt and International Monetary Fund (IMF)
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(Comments: For reader comments, questions and discussion, see the 25-Oct-18 World View -- Pakistan's 'desperate' Imran Khan attends Saudi investment summit amid Khashoggi crisis thread of the Generational Dynamics forum. Comments may be
posted anonymously.)
(25-Oct-2018)
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Greece's elderly still face possible pension cuts in January
by
John J. Xenakis
This morning's key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com
 |
It's like writing a letter to your bank and saying that you'll be making only half your mortgage payments for three years, and that they should understand because you need the money. Your bank would have to reject your statement forcefully.
On Monday, Italy's Economy Minister Giovanni Tria sent a letter to the European Commission (EC), clearly saying that Italy intended to violate EC budget rules from 2019-22:
"As regards the path of the structural balance, the Italian Government is aware of having chosen a budgetary policy approach that is not in line with the application rules of the Stability and Growth Pact. It was a difficult but necessary decision ally of the persistent delay in recovering pre-crisis GDP levels and the dramatic economic conditions in which the most disadvantaged strata of the Italian society are found. The Government also intends to implement the qualifying parts of the economic and social program on which it has obtained the confidence of the Italian Parliament. The Update Note of the Economic and Financial Document, and the attached Parliament Report, clarify that the Government plans to deviate from the structural adjustment decrease in 2019 but does not intend to further expand the structural deficit in the following two years and undertakes to return the structural balance towards the medium-term objective starting from 2022. If it were to return to pre-crisis level before the forecast, the Government intends to anticipate the return path."
This is a direct, and possibly unprecedented challenge by an EU member state to the European Commission, and it required an unprecedented response. The EC firmly rejected Italy's proposed 2019 budget, and demanded a compliant budget within three weeks.
Readers may recall that when Italy held nationwide elections in March, the elections failed to produce a majority party. Two particularly bitter rivals were the left-wing Five Star Movement (M5S) that got 32% of the vote, and the right-wing La Lega (The League) that got 17% of the vote.
Incredibly, these two parties got together and formed a governing coalition. They're far apart on many issues, but they do share similar attitudes on three issues: a nationalistic anti-euro attitude, a xenophobic anti-immigrant attitude, and a complete lack of fiscal discipline. Much to everyone's surprise, they formed a governing coalition based on these three principles.
This new governing coalition announced a list of policy proposals, including a completely delusional list of economic proposals.
Italian debt stands at around €2.3 trillion ($2.7 trillion), or 133% of gross domestic product (GDP), the worst in Europe. The new government does have a way of reducing the debt: spend a lot more money, and drastically reduce taxes. (As I wrote at the time, I wish I could tell you that this is a joke, but it isn't.)
Specifically, the government would like to do the following right away:
So now the time has come for Italy to submit a 2019 budget to the EC to fulfill these delusional campaign promises, and the budget far exceeds EC rules, as well as Italy's previous commitment to fiscal discipline.
What we can say at this point with certainty is that, with the EU already buried in problems from Brexit and immigrants, Italy's budget is sure to create an additional huge new fracas.
It seems pretty clear that Italy's government is out of control fiscally, and that they will be unable to stop themselves from going into more and more debt. But as the saying goes: If something can't go on forever, then it won't.
According to an analysis by Silvia Ardagna of Goldman Sachs, Italy will not become fiscally responsible until some event forces them to be:
"Financial market participants understand there is value in correctly pricing not just the 'end game,' but also the path to that 'end game' and the risks around it.From this perspective, our view is that market tensions would need to intensify in order to exert sufficient pressure on the Italian political system to trigger a change in the policy path and the political rhetoric around it.
On that basis — and even if Italy does ultimately remain part of the Euro area — the market situation may need to get worse before it gets better."
Some people are speculating that the event will be "Italexit," with Italy leaving the euro currency and possibly the European Union. However, prime minister Giuseppe Conte said, "I can assure that this executive will not accompany this country, Italy, out of Europe. We feel very comfortable, we feel at home in Europe and we think that the euro is our currency and will be our currency, the currency of my kid, he’s 11 years old, and the currency of my grandchildren."
Commissioner Pierre Moscovici said that "this is an unprecedented situation, and the decision should not be surprising to anyone as the Italian government’s draft budget represents a clear and intentional deviation from the commitments made by Italy last July." Italy's Economic Ministry (PDF) and European Commission and Business Insider and Politico (EU)
Greece's elderly may not face pension cuts in January after all. The planned pension cuts are part of the austerity program that the EU and the ECB imposed on Greece in return for years of bailouts to prevent the country from becoming totally bankrupt. The pension cuts are necessary to increase the sustainability of Greece's social security system, but apparently most members of the European Commission are willing to put this measure on hold. The final decision on whether to cancel the pension cuts will be made on December 3, but in fact the pension cuts may be made anyway, since Germany opposes canceling them.
I tell this little story to remind readers that even though Greece's financial crisis has been out of the news for a while, it has not been resolved, and there could be a renewal of the crisis at any time.
Greece had to be bailed out in 2010 because the country was essentially bankrupt. Greece was borrowing and spending way beyond its capability to repay throughout the 2000s decade. According to one analyst,
"The history of [Greece's National Statistical Service (NSSG)] reveals that its chief officer (general secretary) was replaced whenever a new party was elected to power. The main objective behind this practice was to control the flow of information; in this respect, the personal or political allegiance of the chief officer was the most crucial factor for the appointment."
We can also say with certainty that if Italy goes on the spending binge, the country will be deep trouble. I don't know why it's so hard for people to understand that it's fun to borrow and spend money, but it's extremely painful when you have to pay it back.
In order to fund its spending binge, Italy will have to borrow money, and Italy will do that by selling government bonds. Moody's last week downgraded Italy's bond rating to Baa3, which is the lowest possible rating that they can have without becoming "junk bonds." In fact, a lot of people breathed a sigh of relief because the downgrade was anticipated, and it was feared that it would be to junk status.
Each time a bond's rating goes down, the value of the bond goes down, and the yield goes up. The yield is the interest rate that the government has to pay to investors who buy the bonds. So during Greece's financial crisis, the yield on Greek bonds went to 5%, to 7%, to 20% to 30% to 40%, and even more. Holders of Greek bonds eventually had to take a 75% "haircut" -- which means that they lost 75% of their entire investments.
This hasn't happened to Italy yet. Italy's ten-year bond yields have gone from 2% at the beginning of the year to about 3.5% recently. If Italy's spending binge continues, then the yields will increase to 5%, 7%, 10%, and so forth, and Italy's debt will become unsustainable.
Even worse, many other banks in Europe have purchased Italian bonds. About 20% of Italy's government bonds are held in other eurozone countries. If yields go up and values go down, then these banks will also be in trouble. That's called "contagion," Dear Reader, and the fear of contagion will cause the European Commission to be very critical of Italy's 2019 budget.
"It is tempting to try to cure debt with more debt, but at some point the debt [becomes] too heavy and at the end of the day, you end up having no freedom at all," Valdis Dombrovskis, vice president of the European Commission, said during a press conference on Tuesday. Kathimerini (Athens) and Kathimerini and CNN and CNBC
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(Comments: For reader comments, questions and discussion, see the 24-Oct-18 World View -- European Commission rebukes Italy, after blatant budget rules violation thread of the Generational Dynamics forum. Comments may be
posted anonymously.)
(24-Oct-2018)
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China warns that the decision will 'cause many negative effects'
by
John J. Xenakis
This morning's key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com
 |
Donald Trump has announced that the US will will leave the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces treaty (INF), that the US signed with Russia in 1987, and has been called a historic arms control treaty.
The treaty was signed by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. It was a response to a growing missile standoff in Europe, where Soviet and American nuclear short range and cruise missiles were pointed at each other. The treaty ended a dangerous standoff.
Both Barack Obama and Donald Trump have accused the Russians of violating the treaty in the last decade with new developments of cruise missiles. According to Trump on Saturday:
"Russia has violated the agreement. They’ve been violating it for many years and I don’t know why President Obama didn’t negotiate or pull out.We’re not going to let them violate a nuclear agreement and do weapons and we’re not allowed to. We’re the ones that have stayed in the agreement and we’ve honored the agreement but Russia has not unfortunately honored the agreement so we’re going to terminate the agreement, we’re going to pull out. ...
Unless Russia comes to us and China comes to us and they all come to us and they say, ‘Let’s all of us get smart and let’s none of us develop those weapons,’ but if Russia’s doing it and if China’s doing it and we’re adhering to the agreement, that’s unacceptable. So we have a tremendous amount of money to play with with our military."
Russia has accused the US of also violating the agreement pointing, for example, to unmanned drones that can serve the same functions as cruise missiles. This may well be a valid argument, but what it shows is that, after 30 years, the treaty is out of date anyway.
Russian senior lawmaker Konstantin Kosachev said on Sunday said that Trump's announcement means that "Mankind is facing full chaos in the nuclear weapons sphere."
Leonid Slutsky, who leads the Foreign Affairs Committee said that Trump is placing “a huge mine under the whole disarmament process on the planet.”
The real risk will be borne by European allies, according to Kingston Reif, director for disarmament and threat reduction policy at the Arms Control Association, a think tank. “This removes all constraints on the production and fielding of Russia’s illegal missile, thereby increasing the threat to our allies in range of the missiles, leaves the United States holding the bag for the treaty’s demise, and creates another source of division between us.”
Mikhail Gorbachev said that the announcement "is not the work of a great mind." He added:
"Do they really not understand in Washington what this can lead to? [The decision] will undermine all the efforts that were made by the leaders of the USSR and the United States themselves to achieve nuclear disarmament.[A]ll agreements aimed at nuclear disarmament and the limitation of nuclear weapons must be preserved for the sake of life on Earth."
Russia Today and Time and CNBC and AP
Since the announcement, it's become increasingly clear that the real target of Trump's announcement is China. According to a CIA analysis in 1983:
"China's position on arms control is dictated by its interests in: 1) maintaining a free hand to expand its nuclear deterrent capabilities; 2) exercising some influence over US-USSR strategic arms talks that could adversely affect Chinese security; and 3) enhancing China's status and influence in the Third World. The Chinese also have sought to promote their commercial interests through the sale of conventional arms."
China has indeed taken advantage of its refusal to join any arms control agreement. As we've been reporting for years, China has developed one nuclear ballistic weapons system after another with no purpose except to attack American cities, American bases, and American aircraft carriers. It really doesn't make sense that an aggressive, imperial, militaristic China should have no restrictions developing nuclear missiles, when other countries are bound by arms control treaties.
In particular, China has had a free hand developing and deploying intermediate-range nuclear missiles of its own, including missiles designed to take out US aircraft carriers patrolling the waters of the Western Pacific. China is estimated to have 2,000 ballistic and cruise missiles in its inventory, almost all of which would be in violation of this treaty.
According to Stephen Nagy, a senior associate professor at the International Christian University in Tokyo:
"China has not signed the agreement and has been producing mid-range missiles and so-called carrier killers to asymmetrically increase the costs of an American-led naval containment strategy. The US is likely withdrawing to send a message to Beijing that the US can and will produce mid-range nuclear weapons that can erode away China’s existing asymmetric advantage."
China's Foreign Ministry spokesman said the following:
"The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty is an important treaty on arms control and disarmament signed by the United States and the former Soviet Union during the Cold War. It has played an important role in easing the international relations, moving forward the nuclear disarmament process and safeguarding global strategic balance and stability. It is still highly relevant today. Unilaterally withdrawing from the treaty will cause many negative effects.What needs to be stressed is that making an issue out of China on withdrawing from the treaty is totally wrong. We hope that the relevant country can cherish the hard-won outcomes achieved over the years, prudently and properly handle the issues related to the treaty through dialogue and consultation and think twice before withdrawing from the treaty."
So China wants the US and Russia to be bound by the treaty, while China is not. No surprise there. However, when she talks about causing "many negative effects," we might ask, What is she referring to?
Whenever I talk about various policies, everything from tariffs and trade to canceling a North Korea meeting, that completely baffle the mainstream media, I always come back to the same point. Trump is aware of the Generational Dynamics analysis and predictions that China is preparing for full-scale war with the United States. Trump is aware of this because he was educated by Steve Bannon, who is an expert on both military history and Generational Dynamics.
So as I always point out, Trump's policies, whether trade or arms control, have the objective of trying to end China's plans for a preemptive attack on the United States. And as I always point out, a war with China is 100% certain, but I'm not going to criticize Trump for trying to prevent a world war.
But all of these policies are dual-edged. Yes, these policies might cause the Chinese to postpone their plans, but it might also cause them to bring these plans forward. Those might be the "negative side effects" that China's Foreign Ministry is talking about.
Generational crisis wars are not based on rationality and reason. They're based on desperation and panic. China has numerous domestic problems -- increasing numbers of "mass incidents," a highly-imbalanced economy being centrally managed but poorly managed, numerous bubbles and financial distortions -- and a restive population that, along with Winnie the Pooh, strikes terror in the hearts of the Communist central committee. These are more than enough to cause desperation and anxiety, and could trigger a military panic at any time. CIA (1-Sep-1983) and Bloomberg and Russia Today and China's Foreign Ministry
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(Comments: For reader comments, questions and discussion, see the 23-Oct-18 World View -- Trump targets China by cancelling arms control treaty with Russia thread of the Generational Dynamics forum. Comments may be
posted anonymously.)
(23-Oct-2018)
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China's deal with the Vatican stirs concerns in Taiwan
by
John J. Xenakis
This morning's key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com
 |
Thousands of pro-independence demonstrators rallied in Taipei, Taiwan's capital city, on Saturday to pressure the government of president Tsai Ing-wen to be more confrontational with mainland China and to move faster towards independence.
Tsai Ing-wen leads the governing Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which was formed as a reaction to the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre in Beijing, where several thousand peacefully protesting students were brutally murdered by Chinese security forces in a huge bloodbath. They have been "pro-independence" from the beginning, but in official government positions when winning elections, they've adopted the 1992 "One China Consensus" which says that China and Taiwan are one country, but which leaves the meaning of that phrase ambiguous.
However, since winning the presidential election early in 2016, Tsai Ing-wen has gone farther than previous DPP politicians by refusing to endorse the 1992 consensus, instead saying that she "respected ... the common understanding" between China and Taiwan, without saying what that means. Her refusal to endorse the 1992 consensus has triggered the usual stream of hysterical screaming threats from Chinese officials, and relations between China and Taiwan have been deteriorating steadily.
The rally was organized by a new pressure group called the Formosa Alliance. The rally actually represents a split in the pro-independence movement because Tsai has been taking a relatively cautious approach to China, while the Formosa group want to take steps toward independence more quickly.
In 2005, China passed the Anti-Secession Law, which orders the army to invade Taiwan if any Taiwanese official makes any move toward independence, whether by word or by deed. Taiwanese officials have said many things since 2005 that, arguably, could trigger the anti-secession law, and Saturday's independence rally adds one more.
Because China's armed forces are several times bigger than Taiwan's, it's generally believed that China would easily defeat Taiwan in a war, especially if the US did not honor its commitment to mutual defense. The quick win would be achieved first by a barrage of missiles striking government and military targets, followed quickly by special forces ferried across the strait for a quick kill.
However, Foreign Policy has published a detailed analysis by which Taiwan can win a war with China. The Taiwanese, Japanese and American leaders will have 30-60 days' notice of an impending invasion, because China will have to make preparations. So the Taiwanese will be prepared with booby traps, explosives, sea mines, and the Taiwanese soldiers will be far better prepared than their Chinese counterparts.
China has been using money and extortion to force a number of countries and international companies to declare that Taiwan is a province of China. Since Tsai became president, five countries have ended diplomatic relations with Taiwan and begun diplomatic relations with China: Sao Tome and Principe in 2016, Panama in 2017, and the Dominican Republic, Burkina Faso and El Salvador in 2018. Only 16 countries plus the Vatican now recognise Taiwan under its formal name: the Republic of China. China has also pressured international companies, including airlines, to remove "Taiwan" from their company web sites, or replace it with "Taiwan, province of China," if the companies want to continue doing business in China.
With China and the Vatican having concluded a historic agreement on
the appointment of bishops in China, people in Taiwan are now
concerned that the Vatican will also switch diplomatic relations from
Taiwan to China. Channel News Asia and
By one estimate, China’s Christian population has swelled from a few million in the early 1980s to 100 million this year – in comparison, the Communist Party has 90 million members.
China this year has become increasingly bloody and violent against the four supposedly approved non-indigenous religions, Islam, Buddhism, Catholicism, and Protestantism, as I described in a recent article: "14-Oct-18 World View -- China defends million-prisoner 'reeducation camps' and Sinicization of Islam in Xinjiang"
In that article, some commenters criticized me for implying that Islam and Christianity are equivalent in some way. Actually, the article in no way implies that. The point was that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) considers Islam and Christianity to be equivalent, and the same for all of the non-indigenous religions.
In China's multi-millennial imperialistic history, China has always been at war or close to it -- invading neighbors to exterminate them and take their land, or planning and preparing for such an invasion, or being invaded by a neighbor, or in the midst of a massive internal civil war. China's indigenous "religions" -- Sun Tzu's Art of War, Confucianism and Daoism -- are all aimed at unifying behind the government and winning wars.
Each one of the non-indigenous religions has been used at one time or another, sometimes successfully sometimes not, as a belief system to create a populist movement to overthrow a dynasty or a government.
This became particularly frightening to the CCP on June 4, 1989, when tens thousands of students from all over China traveled to Beijing and rallied in Tiananmen Square, causing the CCP to vicious murder thousands of them, creating a bloodbath. This show of mass protest showed the Chinese leadership how easy it would be for them to be toppled by a mass movement, and so they've been extremely vicious towards all non-indigenous religions. And then when the Soviet Communist Party collapsed in 1991, they went into full-scale panic.
So to the CCP, Islam and Christianity are exactly the same, as are all the non-indigenous religions. And they all must be subject to "Sinicization," which means that they must conform to Chinese government policies or face jailing or destruction.
In April of this year, China's government issued its Sinicization decree, called by the Orwellian name "China's Policies and Practices on Protecting Freedom of Religious Belief."
There are six areas of Sinicization: intensifying political identification, integrating religion into Chinese culture, establishing theological thought with Chinese characteristics, setting up a management system for the church with Chinese characteristics, exploring liturgical expression with Chinese elements, and using Chinese aesthetics in church buildings, pictures and sacred music.
According to the decree:
"It also means guiding religious groups to support the leadership of the CPC and the socialist system; uphold and follow the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics; develop religions in the Chinese context; embrace core socialist values; carry forward China’s fine traditions; integrate religious teachings and rules with Chinese culture; abide by state laws and regulations, and accept state administration in accordance with the law."
This paragraph gives complete administrative control of the religion to the CCP, and permits the CCP to monitor all religious activities. The crackdown has been particularly brutal this year.
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Several months ago, China's storm troopers demolished a massive evangelical church using bulldozers and dynamite. The Jindengtai ("Golden Lampstand") mega-church, which reportedly had a congregation of 50,000 people, was demolished. Last month, the Zion Protestant Church in Beijing was banned because the administration refused to install closed-circuit television cameras that the CCP could use to monitor all activity.
In other cases, Chinese police have stormed into people's homes and replaced the pictures of Jesus Christ and other religious symbols with pictures of Xi Jinping, with the implication that people should be worshipping Xi Jinping as God.
Any person who violates the government's rules can be tortured or jailed or sent to reeducation camps. The most extreme example of this so far is Xinjiang province, where a million ethnic Uighurs are being tortured, raped and beaten in reeducation camps.
I was listening to a BBC report a couple of days ago, interviewing someone who had a number of Uighur friends living in Xinjiang province. He rattled off a list of the offenses that could get you sent to a reeducation camp, things like not saying "hello" to a Chinese official when you pass him in the street. He also mentioned "giving up smoking." It turns out that if you give up smoking, then it means that you're planning to become an extremist and terrorist, so you have to be sent to a reeducation camp. State Council Information Office - Protecting religious freedom and Deutche Welle (19-Jan-2018) and Reuters and China Today
Another section of the sinicization document says the following:
"Religious groups and religious affairs are not subject to control by foreign countries.... This principle is a historic choice made by Chinese religious believers in the Chinese people’s struggle for national independence and social progress, as Catholicism and Protestantism, which were known as foreign religions in China, had long been controlled and utilized by colonialists and imperialists."
This rule has been particularly applied to Catholics, since Catholics have allegiance to the Pope in the Vatican, and the Pope is presumably either a colonialist or imperialist.
There are about twelve million Catholics in China. Seven million of them belong to the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, which is actually a CCP political organization, and is "Catholic" in name only. The other five million belong to "underground" Catholic churches, which are barely tolerated by the government, but which retain allegiance to the Pope.
In the last few decades, many Catholic priests in China have gone to jail for years and been tortured for their refusal to reject their vows and the guidance of the Pope.
So many of these people feel betrayed by the Pope, because the Vatican last month agreed to a "compromise" where the Vatican recognized seven bishops who were ordained by the CCP without the approval of the Vatican. There was another part to the deal, where China promised to accept some bishops in the "underground" church who had been ordained by the Vatican, but China has so far not fulfilled that promise.
It appears that the Vatican has completely given in to China in order to gain approval from China.
This has raised concerns in Taiwan that the Vatican will go further in giving in to China by cutting ties with Taiwan.
Taiwan has about 300,000 Catholics, and Taiwan, unlike China, has complete freedom of religion. The Taiwanese government apparently does not fear that the Catholics will form a secret society whose purpose is to overthrow the government, which is what has happened many times in China. If, as many fear, the Vatican withdraws its recognition from Taiwan, then the Pope will lose all credibility with the Catholics in Taiwan, and will be held in contempt by millions of people in "underground" Catholic churches in China. SCMP (22-Sep) and Diplomat (21-Sep) and South China Morning Post (30-Mar) and Free Catholics in China and South China Morning Post
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(Comments: For reader comments, questions and discussion, see the 21-Oct-18 World View -- Pro-independence rallies in Taiwan press for faster separation from China thread of the Generational Dynamics forum. Comments may be
posted anonymously.)
(21-Oct-2018)
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Israel adopts a go-slow strategy with new 'rules of the game'
by
John J. Xenakis
This morning's key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com
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At 3:43 am on Tuesday, a sleeping mother and father heard warning sirens, woke up their three children, and pulled them into a safe room just before a Grad rocket fell through the roof of their Beersheba home and landed in one of the second story bedrooms, almost completely destroying the structure.
Hamas and Islamic Jihad on Tuesday denied that they were responsible for the missile attack, but their denials were not considered credible, since no one else has the type of Grad missile that struck the home.
Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman publicly called for a powerful military response to Hamas:
"Before going to war, we need to exhaust all other possibilities, because when we’re sending soldiers to battle we know that some of them aren’t returning home. We’re obligated to exhaust every other way, every other option.Upon entering the Defense Ministry I said — Israel has no right, no option, no luxury to conduct wars of choice. We can conduct only wars of no choice. In the last months we made every effort, we’ve overturned every stone and at this point ‘no choice’ is behind us.
We have arrived at the point where we have to land as strong as possible a blow on Hamas."
Israel's Security Cabinet had convened for a midnight emergency session on Thursday morning, and many Israelis believed that they would be at war with Gaza by morning.
However, there was no war. According to reports, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided that no such military attack would take place. Israel has invaded Gaza three times in the last ten years to put a stop to missile attacks, most recently in the 67 day summer war in 2014. Each of these wars has ended in a ceasefire, and than after another period of relative calm, another round of fighting begins.
Generational Dynamics predicts that there will never be a resolution until there's a full-scale regional war between Jews and Arabs.
I posted my very first Generational Dynamics analysis on May 1, 2003, when president George Bush published his "Mideast Roadmap to Peace," which described the details of a two-state solution. I wrote that Generational Dynamics predicts that the plan would fail because the Jews and the Arabs would be refighting the 1948 war that followed the partitioning of Palestine and the creation of the state of Israel. Here's what I wrote:
"We are now in the early stages of replaying the extremely violent, bloody wars between the Jews and the Palestinians that took place between them from 1936 to 1949. So far the war has been little more than a series of skirmishes, as it was in the late 1930s. The full-fledged violent, bloody war is awaiting a generational change.There's an incredible irony going on in the Mideast today, in that the leaders of two opposing sides are, respectively, Ariel Sharon and Yassir Arafat.
These two men hate each other, but they're the ones cooperating with each other (consciously or not) to prevent a major Mideast conflagration. Both of them remember the wars of the 1940s, and neither of them wants to see anything like that happen again. And it won't happen again, as long as both of these men are in charge.
The disappearance of these two men will be part of an overall generational change in the Mideast that will lead to a major conflagration within a few years. It's possible that the disappearance of Arafat alone will trigger a war, just as the election of Lincoln ignited the American Civil War. (It's currently American policy to get rid of Arafat. My response is this: Be careful what you wish for.)"
Since that time, Yassir Arafat died, and was replaced by Mahmoud Abbas, who was also a survivor of the 1948 war and remembered its horrors. Since then, Abbas has lost control of Hamas, which has been run by much younger leaders.
Since 2006, there have been five wars involving Israel and Palestinians: the war between Israelis and Hezbollah, fought largely on Lebanon's soil in 2006; the war between Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah in Gaza in 2008, that led to Hamas control of Gaza; Operation Cast Lead, the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza early in 2009; the two wars between Israel and Hamas in Gaza in November, 2012 and July-August 2014.
These on-and-off clashes cannot go on forever. At some point, they'll be resolved by a full-fledged generational crisis war that engulfs the region. In the meantime, there is no chance whatsoever that any sort of Israeli-Palestinian "peace process" will succeed, and that's just as true today as it was in 2003. Jerusalem Post and World Israel News and Bloomberg
By Thursday morning, after the emergency midnight meeting of cabinet ministers, the fiery rhetoric had softened. Housing Minsiter Yoav Galant said:
"I can’t address the content of cabinet discussion but I can say one thing very explicitly — the rules of the game are going to change.We won’t accept more fire and [border] fence terror."
However, the cabinet meeting decision not to launch a military operation was condemned by other government leaders. According to Regional Council head Gadi Yarkoni:
"We had every reason to deliver a serious response in a way that they would understand the message. We should have taken advantage of what happened in Beersheba to restore deterrence, but unfortunately that did not happen."
I googled Gadi Yarkoni, and learned that he was born in 1967, which would put him in Israel's equivalent of Generation-X, much younger than Netanyahu, born in 1949, or Mahmoud Abbas, born in 1935, or Hamas head Khaled Mashal, born in 1956. When there's an all-out war between Jews and Palestinians, it will be launched by younger people, such as Yarkoni and a young Palestinian leader.
Although no full-scale war is imminent, Israel's army has been cleared to follow more aggressive tactics. This includes a green light for troops to fire at Gazans who are farther away from the fence than previously allowed, as well a more forceful response to incendiary balloon launches. According to reports, the army will ramp up the severity of its responses gradually, but ultimately adopt a zero-tolerance policy toward rocket attacks, arson balloons and rioting along the Israeli border. Times of Israel and Jerusalem Post
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(Comments: For reader comments, questions and discussion, see the 20-Oct-18 World View -- Israel backs down from full-scale attack on Gaza after family escapes rocket thread of the Generational Dynamics forum. Comments may be
posted anonymously.)
(20-Oct-2018)
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The most likely deal: 'Extend and Pretend'
by
John J. Xenakis
This morning's key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com
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Ever since the referendum passed on June 23, 2016, Brexit, the UK exit from the European Union, was never going to be anything but a disaster for the UK, and almost as much for the EU, and increasingly there's a search to mitigate the disaster as much as possible.
A month ago, Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), said:
"I’m a desperate optimist, and I very much hope and pray that there will be a deal between the European Union and the UK.Let me be clear, compared with today’s smooth single market, all the likely Brexit scenarios will have costs for the economy and to a lesser extent as well for the EU.
The larger the impediments to trade in the new relationship, the costlier it will be. This should be fairly obvious, but it seems that sometimes it is not."
Lagarde said that the IMF will issue its latest forecast for global economic growth in November, and that "clouds on the horizon have not become lighter but darker."
The UK is leaving the EU on March 29, 2019. The most severe consequences for the UK economy would occur if the UK "crashed out" of the EU with no deal whatsoever. In this case, there would no longer be a "smooth, single market," no "frictionless trade" at all between the UK and EU. Instead, there would be a "hard border" between the UK and EU, which would damage tens or hundreds of thousands of individual trading relationships that for years have depended on frictionless trade.
The main stumbling block in the negotiations is and always has been the problem of Northern Ireland. After Brexit, the (southern) Republic of Ireland would be in the EU, while Northern Ireland would not, but would still be in the UK. That means that there could be a frictionless border between Northern Ireland and Ireland (which everyone says they want) or a frictionless border between Northern Ireland and Britain (which the UK wants, but the EU couldn't care less about), but not both.
UK politicians in London, led by prime minister Theresa May, have for months been in chaos debating this issue, with the "Remainers" wanted as close a relationship to the EU as possible, and the "Brexiteers" wanting a full and complete break. But as the weeks and months have gone by, the London fog finally seems to be clearing, well enough that we can begin to make out the shapes of what the final deal is most likely to be. Reuters and Irish Times
Readers may recall what happened with Greece's financial crisis, when it was clear that Greece could not meet its debt payments, and would in fact never be able to do so. The EU and the European Central Bank came up with an "extend and pretend" policy, which lowered the interest rates and stretched out the debt payments to decades, and then pretended that by 2100 Greece would be able to repay its debts. Extend and pretend.
So everyone in the EU and the UK, not counting the hardcore Brexiteers, is in favor of a two-year Brexit transition period -- lasting until December 31, 2020. This was agreed in March, and now appears to be set in stone. It's back in the news because on Wednesday, both Theresa May and the EU said they were discussing extending it for an additional year.
The transition period will be pretty much the worst of all worlds. The terms will be as follows:
So the whole point of why the Brexiteers wanted Brexit was to get away from the EU regulations, EU taxes, and the ECJ. In the transition period, all of these will remain, with the additional restriction that the UK will have to obey all the regulations and pay all the money, but will have no say in changing them. That's what I meant by "the worst of all worlds."
According to Liberal Democrat Brexit spokesman Tom Brake saying the extension was merely “kicking the can further down the road and delaying, by a bit, driving off the cliff.” iNews (London)
But wait! How does the transition period solve the Northern Ireland problem? Well, it doesn't, but it gives the politicians 2-3 more years to find a solution. And yet, no one that I've heard or read believes that an extra 2-3 years will solve the problem any more than the last two years have.
That brings us to the "backstop." That's an "insurance policy" that the EU is insisting on. They want the UK to commit to a specific plan to preserve the frictionless border between Ireland and Northern Ireland when the transition period end. And they've already rejected every UK backstop proposal, including the delusional hope that in 2-3 years the technology will have been developed to enforce customs rules on the Irish border without requiring commercial vehicles to stop for inspection. Well, maybe in 2-3 years some technology will develop, but no one really believes that will happen.
The backstop that the EU wants is that at the end of the transition period, Northern Ireland will be part of the EU customs union and single market. That means that there will be a hard border between Northern Ireland and Britain. That means that UK citizens traveling between Northern Ireland and Britain will have to go through customs, and it means that goods shipped between the two will have to be inspected.
Britain's prime minister Theresa May says that this is unacceptable because it would split the sovereignty of the United Kingdom.
This is still a seemingly unsurmountable obstacle to achieving any sort of deal before the UK leaves the EU on March 29. Guardian (London) and BBC and Irish Times
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(Comments: For reader comments, questions and discussion, see the 19-Oct-18 World View -- Brexit appears headed for worst of all possible worlds for UK thread of the Generational Dynamics forum. Comments may be
posted anonymously.)
(19-Oct-2018)
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Violent school massacre in occupied Crimea kills 19 people
by
John J. Xenakis
This morning's key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com
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Readers who remember ancient history (2014) may recall a war between Russia and Ukraine. Russia invaded Donbas (eastern Ukraine) and is still occupying it, and then Russia invaded, occupied and annexed Ukraine's Crimea peninsula.
The war in Donbas has not ended, as there have been regular clashes between Ukrainian and Russian forces. These clashes have occasionally been severe enough for observers to raise concerns that Russia was planning a new offensive for Russian forces to attack and occupy the seaports at Mariupol and Berdyansk, and then continue to move west in order to create a land bridge between Russia and occupied Crimea.
That hasn't happened, but many observers believe that Russia is making preparations to accomplish the same objective through a naval attack from the Sea of Azov. In the last three years, the Russians have been doing the following:
Many observers believe that these steps are all in preparation for a naval assault on Mariupol, Berdyansk, and other Ukrainian ports along the Sea of Azov, with the objective of creating a land bridge between Russia and occupied Crimea, and to taking full military control of the entire Sea of Azov. US State Dept. and RFE/RL and RFE/RL (7-Aug)
Following years of neglect, Ukraine is hurriedly tying to reinforce its naval capabilities in the Sea of Azov. Ukraine is considering buying three Danish Standard Flex 300 patrol vessels for $117 million, and has received two Island-class Coast Guard cutters from the United States. These vessels will be upgraded and deployed in the Sea of Azov.
However, this attempt to stand up an "Azov Flotilla" will not be enough to challenge Russia's overwhelming naval presence, consisting of around 50-70 Russian "coast guard" vessels.
For that reason, Ukraine is also formulating a diplomatic and political strategy to challenge Russia. This would include seeking support from Nato and the European Union, and lodging a complaint against Russia at the Permanent Court of Arbitration.
With both Ukraine and Russia becoming increasingly aggressive, the Sea of Asov is becoming an increasingly important flash point that could lead to a new conflict.
From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, both Russia and Ukraine are in a generational Crisis era. In 1932-33, millions of innocent Ukrainians – men, women, and children – starved to death as a result of the deliberate policies of the regime of Joseph Stalin. The genocidal atrocity is known as the Holodomor, which means "death by hunger." Stalin's regime seized crops and farms across Ukraine, leaving the population to starve to death. It's quite possible that Russia's president Vladimir Putin would like to find a way to repeat Stalin's achievement. Jamestown and Daily Signal and Sputnik News and Government of Ukraine and (Trans)
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An 18-year-old Russian student, Vladislav Roslyakov, on Wednesday exploded a homemade nail bomb and then went on a shooting rampage, killing 19 others before killing himself in the school library.
The mass school shooting at occurred at the Kerch Polytechnic College, in the city of Kerch in occupied Crimea. The city is located on the eastern shore of Crimea on the Black Sea near the Kerch Strait.
Russian officials initially went into their usual spin and deception mode, trying to hide what happened, or put the blame on anyone but themselves. They first reported it as a gas explosion, and then said it was a terrorist bombing.
Russian politicians in Crimea's parliament then tried to put the blame on Ukrainian nationalists, saying, "The entire evil inflicted on the land of Crimea is coming from the official Ukrainian authorities." But friends of the shooter said that the teenager hated the school and that he wanted revenge against his teachers.
There are similarities between this school shooting and the April 20, 1999, massacre at Columbine High School, in Columbine Colorado that killed 13 people. Roslyakov was dressed in an outfit similar to that of Eric Harris, one of the killers in the Columbine massacre. Furthermore Roslyakov killed himself in the school library, just as Harris and his partner killed themselves in the school library. CBS News and Daily Mail (London) and AP
(Comments: For reader comments, questions and discussion, see the 18-Oct-18 World View -- Ukraine counters Russia's military buildup in the Sea of Azov thread of the Generational Dynamics forum. Comments may be
posted anonymously.)
(18-Oct-2018)
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Google repudiates its 'Don't Be Evil' conduct clause, and sides with China
by
John J. Xenakis
This morning's key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com
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At a time when employees of high tech companies like Google and Microsoft are adopting holier-than-thou attitudes about defending the United States of America, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said on Monday that Amazon is going to work with the Pentagon, and that other high-tech companies should do the same. He said in an interview:
"If big tech companies are going to turn their back on US Department of Defense, this country is going to be in trouble. We are going to continue to support the DOD and I think we should."
In recent months, Google has been almost enthusiastic in its willingness to provide technology to the Chinese government and the Chinese military, while at the same time management has given in to demands that Google not supply technology needed by the US military to defend the country.
Bezos acknowledged that Donald Trump is unpopular among some workers, and particularly expressed disapproval of Trump's immigration policy, but pointed out that this proves why America is still the best in the world:
I like this country. I know everybody is very conflicted about the current politics and so on. This country is a gem.There aren't other countries where everybody is trying to get in. I'd let them in if it were me. I like 'em, I want all of them in. But this is a great country and it does need to be defended."
Amazon is in the process of bidding for a major DoD contract call "The Joint Enterprise Defense Initiative," or JEDI, a $10 billion development project that will make a cloud computing and storage platform available to all of DoD.
Last week, Google issued a statement saying: "we are not bidding on the JEDI contract because first, we couldn’t be assured that it would align with our AI Principles...." This might actually be a blessing in disguise. Google has said that it will accede to China's demand that all cloud passwords for Chinese citizens and businesses will be made available to the Chinese government and military, and this would represent a possible security risk to US DoD data on Google's servers. As a Senior Software Engineer, I've worked on development of these extremely large, complex systems, and I'm aware how easy it is for bugs and systemic failure to permit data and services to be hacked.
Microsoft is being pressured to move in the same direction as Google. A recent letter by employees describes Jedi as "a secretive $10 billion project with the ambition of building 'a more lethal' military force overseen by the Trump Administration," and concludes, "Microsoft, don’t bid on JEDI." However, Microsoft management has not yet acceded to these demands.
Fortunately, there are still some American companies not being run by children. Amazon is expected to be the lead contender for Jedi, but Oracle and IBM are also expected to bid, and Microsoft may do so as well. Wired and BBC and TechCrunch and Medium
When Google was launched in 1998, it's unofficial slogan was "Don't be evil." It was a corporate principle that "you can make money without doing evil," and "Don't be evil" was part of the company's official code of conduct until this year.
With no fanfare, Google removed "Don't be evil" from its code of conduct sometime between April 21 and May 4, when it simply disappeared from the Google web site.
Shortly after that, in May, Google announced that would not renew its contract with DoD for Project Maven, which provides AI technology for analyzing drone footage, because its employees objected to doing any work for the American military.
But in December of last year, Google announced that it would open a state of the art AI development center in Shanghai, where the most advanced AI technology would be made available to the Chinese government and the Chinese military.
The biggest public scandal this year occurred when word leaked out in July that Google for almost two years had 200 programmers working on an advanced AI search engine for China called Dragonfly that would detect users who made requests that violated Chinese Communist Party (CCP) censorship rules, and would make personal identifying information about such users available to the Chinese government and Chinese military.
Google has refused comment about Project Dragonfly, saying that it's an experimental system, with no current plans to deploy it. But in fact, Google's search engine chief, Ben Gomes, told an internal meeting in July that the plan was to launch the search engine as soon as possible — and to get it ready to be "brought off the shelf and quickly deployed" once approval from Beijing was received.
On Monday of this week, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, an American who was born in India, defended Project Dragonfly. He said that Project Dragonfly will still be able to answer "well over 99% of the queries” put to it and that “there are many, many areas where we would provide information better than what’s available." I'm not even sure that he understood the message he was sending with that remark, but it implies that the other 1% would be subject to arrest by China's police.
As China continues to prepare to launch a war against the United States, it's hard to avoid the impression that Google has already chosen the side that it wants to win that war, and it's not the United States.
And somebody ought to tell Sundar Pichai that those same super-intelligent weapon systems that Google is helping the Chinese military to build will also be used against his native India. Perhaps that thought never occurred to him.
And finally, Chinese employees working in America should realize how dangerous Google's policy is for them personally. During World War II, Japanese Americans were interned. After 9/11, Muslim Americans were jailed without trial. The path that Google is on will adversely affect all Chinese-Americans, and an anti-Chinese public mood could materialize overnight. Gizmodo (18-May) and Gizmodo (1-Jun) and CNBC (13-Dec-2017) and NY Times (16-Aug) and The Intercept (9-Oct) and Washington Post
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(Comments: For reader comments, questions and discussion, see the 17-Oct-18 World View -- Amazon's Jeff Bezos says America must be defended, while Google repudiates its 'Do No Evil' policy thread of the Generational Dynamics forum. Comments may be
posted anonymously.)
(17-Oct-2018)
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American CDC Ebola experts have been blocked from the outbreak zone in DR Congo
by
John J. Xenakis
This morning's key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com
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It has now emerged that American Ebola experts from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) have been withdrawn from the outbreak zone in North Kivu province in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). This will make the new outbreak more difficult to contain.
There are experts on the ground from other organizations, including the World Health Organization (WHO), Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières, MSF), and The Alliance for International Medical Action (Alima).
The CDC experts are among the most experience Ebola experts on the planet. According to Tom Inglesby, director of the Center for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health:
"CDC has responded to nearly two dozen filovirus outbreaks in its history and has people who’ve been working on these issues for 30 years. It doesn’t make sense to have those people hundreds or thousands of miles away from where the disease is actually spreading.It would provide a lot of value to have experienced leaders at CDC who’ve been in the situation before contributing what they can to the larger effort. I think it’s an important moment to think about that."
Instead of being on the ground in the outbreak zone, CDC experts are being given other assignments thousands of miles away, such as advising DRC's ministry of health in the capital city Kinshasa.
News stories are providing few details about why they're blocked from the outbreak zone, except that it's related to the attack in 2010 in Benghazi, Libya, that killed US ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. The inference that we're to draw, apparently, is that Americans in the North Kivu war zone would be targets of attacks similar to those against ambassador Stevens. Stat News and CNN
The World Health Organization (WHO) announced on Monday that it will hold an emergency committee meeting on Wednesday in Geneva. According to a statement: "The committee will meet on October 17 in Geneva to ascertain whether the outbreak constitutes a public health emergency of international concern."
The designation "public health emergency of international concern" refers to a pandemic that is so serious that it might spread to other countries. There are now concerns that it could soon spread to Uganda and Rwanda.
WHO has resisted that designation so far in eastern DRC, but over the weekend a "second wave" of the Ebola virus was confirmed. There are now 211 registered cases of Ebola, 176 confirmed and 35 probable, with 135 deaths. The number of cases has been expanding rapidly, more than twice as fast as in September. There were six new cases over the weekend.
Many new cases come out of funerals for previous victims. Even if a funeral is conducted in a secure manner, the risk for Ebola transmission is high, because viral loads are at their highest level at the time of death.
The situation in North Kivu province is the worst possible scenario. There is a major ethnic war in progress, and Ebola is now spreading in the densely populated city of Beni, which has become the epicenter of the pandemic.
The entire region is a war zone, and over one million people have been driven from their homes by armed rebel groups, the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), fighting government troops. The fighting is preventing doctors and experts from reaching infected people, in order to educate the population and do contact tracing. Without contact tracing, there is no way to stop or slow the spread of the disease. AFP and Reuters and Center for Infectious Disease Research (CIDRAP)
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(Comments: For reader comments, questions and discussion, see the 16-Oct-18 World View -- WHO considers declaring Ebola outbreak as an international emergency thread of the Generational Dynamics forum. Comments may be
posted anonymously.)
(16-Oct-2018)
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Negotiations follow the pattern of N. Korea's 2010
torpedoing of S. Korean warship
by
John J. Xenakis
This morning's key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com
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Saudi officials appear to be in a state of shock over the harsh international reaction to the disappearance of xxx Khashoggi almost two weeks ago.
Khashoggi was once a close adviser to the Saudi government, but has become persona non grata since criticizing the human rights record of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), and his pursuit of the Yemen war, which has been a major humanitarian disaster. The excommunication was complete when Khashoggi exiled himself to the United States, and began publishing his criticisms of MBS as a Washington Post reporter. Recently, he needed Saudi government papers in order to marry his fiancé, a Turkish citizen, Hatice (Khadija) Cengiz. He made two visits to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, and he completely disappeared during the second visit, on October 2.
Turkey's government has officially taken the position that it's still investigating, but numerous leaks to the Turkish media indicate a belief that Khashoggi was killed inside the consulate, and that his body was dismembered, packed up in suitcases, and taken back to Saudi Arabia in private Saudi planes. It's also believed that MBS ordered the killing, and Turkism media are claiming that officials have audio recordings of Khashoggi being interrogated and killed in the embassy.
Many people are shocked by the apparent brutality of the alleged murder, but it seems that the biggest shock of all is that international outrage is continuing and may be growing. MBS has been ruthless in committing human rights abuses, arresting and imprisoning hundreds of people without trials. There have been numerous complaints that he decreed that women would be permitted to drive, but then he ordered the arrest of some of the women who did drive. And of course he's pursued the Yemen war mercilessly. He's done all this with impunity and little uproar. What's surprising is the uproar in this case.
There have been international public demands for the Saudis to explain what happened, and there have been threats from the White House and from officials in Britain, France and Germany, including threats of sanctions by Donald Trump. Saudi Arabia has angrily denied the accusations, and threatened sanctions in return -- presumably to use oil as a weapon. AP and CNN and Reuters and Al Jazeera (Qatar)
What's becoming increasingly clear is that despite all the international uproar, nobody has the stomach for an all-out war -- not a military war, not a financial war, and not a sanctions war. The US and the Europeans have demanded explanations and investigations, but haven't made any explicit threats.
There's a recent historical event that provides an analogy to the diplomatic pattern that's emerging.
On March 26, 2010, the North Koreans launched a torpedo at the South Korean warship Cheonan, causing an explosion that killed 46 people. Everyone knew immediately that the explosion was caused by a North Korean torpedo, almost certainly ordered by Kim Jong-il, the father of the current child dictator, but South Korean President Lee Myung-bak refused to say so. Instead Lee continued to call for more and more investigations.
The reason was simple. If Lee had formally accused North Korea of sinking a South Korean warship, then South Korea would have been forced to retaliate militarily, or even declare war. Lee did not want to have to declare war.
The disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi today has created a similar situation, where nobody wants to let the Saudis completely off the hook, but nobody wants a full-on financial or sanctions war.
Since the 1930s, America and Saudi Arabia have had a very specific core understanding: That Saudi Arabia will guarantee to supply all the oil that America and the West need, and, in return, America and the West must guarantee the security of Saudi Arabia.
The exact details of the US-Saudi relationship have had to change from time to time, based on international events such as Iran's revolution, Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, the Iraq war, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Obama's nuclear deal with Iran, Syria's civil war, the rise of ISIS. The 1973 oil embargo, which came out of Israel's war with Egypt, cemented the US-Saudi relationship.
Today, Saudi Arabia plays a crucial role in US and Western strategy. Saudi Arabia is important for Trump's strategy with Iran, and in Trump's peace plan proposal for Israel and the Palestinians.
The core has always remained the same: The Saudis will guarantee oil, the Americans will guarantee security. The Khashoggi disappearance is just one more event that threatens the US-Saudi accords that have been in place since the 1930s, but all signs are that the parties will find a way to keep the Khashoggi crisis under control. Daily Sabah (Ankara) and BBC and Al Arabiya (Riyadh) and Reuters and Washington Examiner
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(Comments: For reader comments, questions and discussion, see the 15-Oct-18 World View -- Saudi Arabia tries to recover from Khashoggi disappearance disaster thread of the Generational Dynamics forum. Comments may be
posted anonymously.)
(15-Oct-2018)
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Brief history of China's religions
by
John J. Xenakis
This morning's key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com
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Since the end of World War II, China's atheist government has been on a "Sinicization" program of all religions. Typically this means brutal suppression of followers who display allegiance to anything not approved by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). For example, in April of this year, the CCP declared:
"The core and soul of Sinicization of Christianity are the Sinicization of theological thought. Only by the realization of Sinicization of theological thought will there be Sinicization in the true sense. Otherwise, the Sinicization of Christianity will be empty slogans like trees without roots, water without a source."
In practice, China's storm troopers in recent years have invaded churches and torn down posters of Jesus and replaced them with posters of Xi Jinping.
As has been widely reported, the Sinicization of Islam in has meant sending millions of Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang province to "reeducation centers," where they are imprisoned, raped, tortured, and forced to recite Chinese Communist propaganda at the tops of their lungs. When the existence of these camps was first reported, the Chinese vehemently denied that they existed. But in the last few days they've admitted their existence, but say that the camps are necessary, for the same reason that they give for the violent suppression of all religions: to prevent "extremism" and "splittism," and to promote ethnic solidarity and religious harmony.
In August, China declared a war against "halalization." Everyday halal products, such as food and toothpaste, must be produced according to Islamic law.
As part of the sinicization of Islam, the government is pulling down mosques that have Islamic domes that look too much like Arab mosques. All Arabic script must be removed. The mosques must look like Chinese religious temples, presumably Daoist temples.
Books on Islam and copies of the Koran have been removed from souvenir shops. Private Arabic schools have been forced to shut down. It's also forbidden to have a long beard.
Although Islam is the main current target, the same kinds of harsh measures are being applied to the other non-indigenous religions -- Catholicism, Protestantism and Buddhism. According Xi Jinping last year, "[We] should adhere to the direction of Sinicizing religion in our country, and actively guide religion to adapt to a socialist society." Reuters and CNN and South China Morning Post (14-May) and Al Jazeera
Recently I've been doing my own research on China's teachings and religions, and this is a summary of what I've learned so far.
As an imperialistic country throughout its multi-millennial history, China's religions have always been heavily tied in with war -- either wars of conquest or internal civil wars.
China's core cultural teachings, developed around 500 BC, are Sun Tzu's The Art of War and Confucius' Analects. These teachings tell the harsh rules for winning wars, and the harsh rules for maintaining a "Mandate from Heaven" for a unified, harmonious society. Insofar as they can be called religions, they are the pro-government religions.
Daoism as a religion was a reaction to Confucianism. It teaches peasants how to maintain harmony with nature without the harsh Confucian rules, whether you're pro-government or anti-government, and so Daoism has sometimes been the core of anti-government protests.
Buddhism: As a religion imported from India, not indigenous in China, Buddhism has historically been the most important vehicle for anti-government protests. Subjugated people in particular have adopted Buddhism, because in Buddhism all people are equal, and someone who is evil in this life will be punished when he is reincarnated in the next life. Major historical anti-government branches of Buddhism were the White Lotus Society, Tibetan Buddhism, and Falun Gong, all of which have been violently suppressed by the government as major threats.
Catholicism has existed in China since the 600s AD. It became very popular in China, thanks to Jesuit missionaries, but the Chinese government has always considered it a major threat because it requires allegiance to an outsider -- the Pope. Since 1949, the government has been harshly hostile to Catholicism, and has demanded to control all functions, including appointments of bishops and priests. So today, there are two Catholic churches in China, the Chinese Catholic Church, and the underground Catholic Church, with allegiance to the pope.
Chinese leaders fear Protestantism because the massive Taiping Rebellion (1850-64) was launched by a Protestant convert who believed he was the brother of Jesus. Since 1949, China has harshly controlled Protestantism, even to the point of replacing worship of Jesus with worship of Xi Jinping.
Islam: China's wars with the Mongols and the Turkic tribes in Central Asia have been against Muslims. Today, the Chinese government has opened "reeducation camps" for millions of Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang province, and Uighurs are regularly raped, tortured and slaughtered.
Throughout Chinese history, all the internal rebellions or external invasion have had as their underlying motivation a widespread popular religious belief. Therefore the non-indigenous religions (Buddhism, Protestantism, Catholicism, Islam) have been permitted only when carefully (and violently controlled by the government.
Starting in 1949, China's government has controlled the non-indigenous religions, but the control took a turn and became extremely harsh starting in the early 1990s, because of two traumatizing events.
The first traumatizing event was the June 4, 1989, Tiananmen Square massacre, a massive peaceful student anti-government demonstration that China's security forces brutally repulsed, killing thousands of innocent students, creating a bloodbath. Today, a Chinese person can be thrown into jail for even mentioning the Tiananmen Square massacre.
The second traumatizing event was the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. This terrified the CCP because they realized that the same thing could happen in China, and the massive Tiananmen Square protests showed the way.
So today Xi Jinping is terrorized by Winnie the Pooh, because he looks like Winnie the Pooh, and he's terrorized by all the uncontrolled religions, since they could lead to an internal rebellion. He fears Islam because it might be used in an invasion of China from Central Asia. He fears Tibetan Buddhism because the Tibetans have never accepted Chinese rule since China viciously invaded the nation of Tibet in the 1950s.
Xi Jinping and the CCP feel a special terror of the Falun Gong spiritual movement. This is an offshoot of Buddhism that began in 1992 in reaction to the government's bloody crackdown in Tiananmen Square. In 1999, when there were tens of millions of practitioners, China began to arrest, torture, rape and kill practitioners. Human rights advocates claim that hundreds of thousands of practitioners have been killed for the purpose of organ harvesting -- to provide fresh organs to be transplanted into other people. China's State Council Information Office and Union of Catholic Asian News and Council on Foreign Relations and US State Dept.
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(Comments: For reader comments, questions and discussion, see the 14-Oct-18 World View -- China defends million-prisoner 'reeducation camps' and Sinicization of Islam in Xinjiang thread of the Generational Dynamics forum. Comments may be
posted anonymously.)
(14-Oct-2018)
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Growth of Ebola cases suddenly surges in DR Congo, threatening Uganda, Rwanda
by
John J. Xenakis
This morning's key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com
 |
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo traveled to North Korea's capital city Pyongyang on Sunday, for a meeting with the child dictator Kim Jong-un.
A smiling Kim was driven to the meeting in a new black Rolls Royce Phantom limousine. The car costs $500,000, with an additional $200,000 investment to provide security.
This car could not have been acquired without violating United Nations sanctions, probably with delivery from China. Ostentatiously driving this car to the meeting appears to have been a slap in the face to Pompeo.
Not surprisingly, the meeting appeared to accomplish little.
North Korea is demanding that the US sign a peace treaty that would officially end the 1950s Korean War, and offered in exchange to destroy a nuclear test site that was unusable anyway. Signing the peace treaty might lead to the withdrawal of American troops from South Korea, which Pompeo refused.
Pompeo demanded demanding a list of all nuclear and ballistic missile development and test sites in North Korea, in return for reducing or eliminating sanctions, and Kim refused.
South Korea, China and Russia are increasing international pressure on the Trump administration to agree to reduce sanctions on North Korea, despite the fact that the North has made no irreversible concessions. The US has made a reversible concession, by suspending all military drills with South Korea.
The objective of the North Korean regime from the beginning has been to use reversible concessions, a charm offensive and international pressure to force the Trump administration to reduce or eliminate sanctions. That would be an enormous victory for North Korea and a total humiliation to America, as it was when a similar North Korea strategy worked against the Bush administration in 2007. Chosun (Seoul) and UPI and CNN
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The World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday that there are now 200 cases of Ebola in the eastern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), with 165 of them confirmed, and the other 35 considered probable.
There were 33 new cases between October 1-9, compared with 41 cases in the entire month of September. The number of new cases each day has more than doubled in October, compared to September.
There are a couple of reasons for the sudden surge in the growth of the number of cases. The main reason is that Ebola is spreading into a war zone for a major ethnic war in DRC's North Kivu province, and so it's often impossible for WHO health workers to even enter these areas or, if they do, they're receive opposition from the local population, who fear and distrust them.
A second, related reason, is that most of the new cases are now in the densely populated city of Beni, and Beni is also in the war zone.
Sometimes health workers are targeted by armed opposition groups, but even when they're not, they may be forced to stay out of an infected area because of continuing gunfights or because of protests by groups opposing the violence.
The city of Beni is near the border with Uganda, and it seems increasingly likely that Ebola will spread into Uganda, and possibly into Rwanda, Burundi, and South Sudan. World Health Organization (WHO) and Relief Web and Punch (Nigeria) and AFP and Canadian Broadcasting
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(Comments: For reader comments, questions and discussion, see the 13-Oct-18 World View -- N. Korea's Kim Jong-un met Pompeo in a new Rolls-Royce Phantom, violating sanctions thread of the Generational Dynamics forum. Comments may be
posted anonymously.)
(13-Oct-2018)
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Russia says that Constantinople's decision is 'catastrophic'
by
John J. Xenakis
This morning's key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com
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Orthodox Christian Patriarch Bartholomew I, leader of the Constantinople Patriarchate and "first among equals" leader of all Orthodox Christian churches and of the world's 300 million Orthodox Christians, announced on Thursday that he will be issuing a "Tomos of autocephaly" (charter of independence) to the Orthodox Christian Church of Ukraine in Kiev.
Ukraine's president Petro Poroshenko quickly hailed the decision. "This is a victory of good over evil, light over darkness," he said, adding that Ukraine has been waiting for this "historic event" for more than 330 years.
The "330 years" refers to another part of the Bartholomew's announcement:
"4) To revoke the legal binding of the Synodal Letter of the year 1686, issued for the circumstances of that time, which granted the right through oikonomia to the Patriarch of Moscow to ordain the Metropolitan of Kyiv, elected by the Clergy-Laity Assembly of his eparchy, who would commemorate the Ecumenical Patriarch as the First hierarch at any celebration, proclaiming and affirming his canonical dependence to the Mother Church of Constantinople."
In granting independence to Ukraine's church, Bartholomew it taking control of Ukraine's church from the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC). This has infuriated the Russians, and is a political and financial disaster for the ROC and for Russia's Patriarch Kirill, since about a third of the parishes controlled by Kirill are in Ukraine.
In anticipation of Thursday's announcement, the ROC last month broke all relations with the Constantinople. ( "16-Sep-18 World View -- Russian Orthodox Church in historic split with Constantinople over Ukraine issue")
Thursday's announcement is the culmination of decades of tension between the Ukraine and Russian churches since the time of the Soviet collapse in 1991. The ROC took control of the Ukrainian church, which was headed by Ukrainian Patriarch Filaret Denisenko, an ardent proponent of independence from the ROC. The ROC excommunicated Filaret, who formed his own unrecognized Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which is now the second largest in Ukraine.
Thursday's announced by Bartholomew also reverses the excommunication of Filaret:
"3) To accept and review the petitions of appeal of Filaret Denisenko, Makariy Maletych and their followers, who found themselves in schism not for dogmatic reasons, in accordance with the canonical prerogatives of the Patriarch of Constantinople to receive such petitions by hierarchs and other clergy from all of the Autocephalous Churches. Thus, the above-mentioned have been canonically reinstated to their hierarchical or priestly rank, and their faithful have been restored to communion with the Church."
It is now considered likely that Filaret will be chosen to lead the new Ukraine Orthodox Church.
The Constantinople Patriarchate and the Moscow Patriarchate are two of several dozen Orthodox Patriarchates in the world, but they're the two most influential. The city of Constantinople was renamed Istanbul when it was conquered by the Ottoman Muslims in 1453, bringing an end to the Byzantine Empire. The offices of the Constantinople Patriarchate are located in today's Istanbul.
According to Ukrainian media, a scholarly study of the history of the ROC reveals that it never received a "Tomos of autocephaly," and therefore may itself not be a legitimate church. Constaninople Patriarchate and AFP and Russian Today and Unian (Ukraine)
There are thousands of churches in Ukraine that have pledged allegiance to the Moscow Patriarchate, and who will now be under pressure to pledge allegiance to the new Ukrainian Church.
Bishop Hilarion Alfeyev, spokesman for the Russian Orthodox Church, calls the decision "catastrophic," and says, "Of course, people will take to streets and protect their sacred sites." Hilarion in the past has warned,
"If the schismatics begin to seize the laurels, thousands of people will gather, they will defend these monasteries, blood will be shed, ... If, God forbid, there will be a legitimization of the split, it is difficult even to imagine what consequences this can lead to. This would mean a split, similar to the split of 1054."
This alludes to the historic, bloody split between the Catholic Church, led by Rome, and the Eastern Othodox Church, led by Constantinople, in 1054. In 1204, in a new Crusade, the Catholic army sacked sacked Constantinople, starving and murdering its citizens, and plundered the Orthodox Church's treasures accumulated over the centuries, capping the deed by placing a prostitute on the Emperor's throne at the church of St. Sophia, at that time the most beautiful church in Christendom. It was not until the year 2001, after facing large anti-Catholic protests in Athens, that Pope John Paul apologized to the Greeks for the incident, and made a plea for forgiveness.
So Hilarion's warning that Constantinople's Ukraine decision is similar to the split of 1054 illustrates how furious the Russians are that this decision was made. It's expected that Kiev and Moscow are going to be fighting for control of every one of the churches affected by the decision, but whether those fights lead to violence between the parishioners remains to be seen.
Another consequence might be Russian violence against the Churches in Russian-occupied Crimea. Russia may attack these churches in retaliation for Kiev's attempts to control the churches in mainland Ukraine. AFP and Tass (Moscow) and Unian (Kiev) and Washington Post
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(Comments: For reader comments, questions and discussion, see the 12-Oct-18 World View -- Constantinople grants Ukrainian Orthodox Church independence, causing historic split with Russia thread of the Generational Dynamics forum. Comments may be
posted anonymously.)
(12-Oct-2018)
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The island of Bhasan Char - 'floating island' - rose from the sea 20 years ago
by
John J. Xenakis
This morning's key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com
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Bangladesh last week again postponed plans to begin relocating 100,000 Rohingyas from refugee camps on the Burma (Myanmar) border to the remote island of Bhasan Char in the Sea of Bengal, about an hour's boat trip from the mainland. However, planning and implementation is continuing, and a new start date announcement is expected soon.
Today, there are over one million Rohingyas living in refugee camps near Cox's Bazar in Bangladesh -- the world's largest population of stateless people, not citizens of Burma, not citizens of Bangladesh. The Buddhists in Myanmar have been incredibly successful in committing almost complete genocide and ethnic cleansing, though they're still in second place this century, behind the genocide and ethnic cleansing being committed by Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
Since 2011, Burma's mostly Buddhist security forces have been committing mass atrocities on mostly Muslim ethnic Rohingyas living in Rakhine State, in what the United Nations says is "a textbook example of ethnic cleansing," and which some Western governments are calling genocide. The atrocities by Buddhist security forces include gang rape, violent torture, execution-style killings and the razing of entire villages, in a scorched earth campaign. Myanmar's genocide is reminiscent of the Buddhist on Buddhist genocide that occurred in Cambodia in the late 1970s, under Pol Pot. Burmese Buddhist leader Aung San Suu Kyi has become the 21st century Pol Pot.
In August 2017, Rohingya terrorists took revenge by killing several Burmese security forces in attacks against 30 Burmese police outputs. Using this attack as an excuse, the Buddhist Burmese army began conducting massive slaughter and atrocities against the Rohingyas, causing hundreds of thousands to flee across the border into Bangladesh.
The refugee camps around Cox's Bazar have been extremely crowded, and are subject to large mudslides during monsoon season. When refugees started arriving several years ago, the Bangladeshis initially welcomed them with sympathy, but have been getting increasingly resentful.
The plan to relocate 100,000 refugees to the island of Bhasan Char was originally proposed in 2015, but it has been postponed several times. In the most recent attempt, prime minister Sheikh Hasina was scheduled on October 3 to officially open newly-constructed shelters for the refugees on Bhashan Char, but the announcement was postponed again. Finance Today (Bangladesh) and Daily Star (Bangladesh) and Quartz (27-Feb)
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Bhashan Char, which means "floating island" in the Bengali language, emerged from the sea about 10-20 years ago. It was formed in the last 20 years by silt from Bangladesh’s Meghna River.
According to some reports, half the island goes underwater every time there's a full moon, and 60% of the island is underwater during a monsoon.
So Bangladesh's navy has fast-tracked construction of shelters and water barriers. Each shelter will be a metal-rooted brick building, raised on pylons, to house 16 families. Each family (4 people) will be allotted a 3.5x4 meter room for sleeping, with bathrooms and kitchens down the hall. There will be solar panels on the roof, and water filters below deck.
Chinese and British engineers are building a 13 km embankment, with the entire habitable area surrounded by a wall 2.47 meters high. An offshore structure will protect the structures from the waves.
The construction is only partially complete, which is probably the reason for the latest postponement.
Many NGOs are objecting to plan to transfer 100,000 refugees to Bhasan Char. Human Rights Watch gives the following reasons: 1) it is not sustainable for human habitation; 2) it could be seriously affected by rising sea levels and storm surges; 3) it likely would have very limited education and health services; 4) it would provide extremely limited opportunities for livelihoods or self-sufficiency; 5) it would unnecessarily isolate refugees; 6) the Bangladeshi government has made no commitment to allow refugees’ freedom of movement in and from Bhasan Char; 7) it is far from the Myanmar border; and 8) the refugees have not consented to move there.
Nonetheless, construction on the island is continuing, and Bangladesh will probably announce a new relocation date soon. Dhaka Tribune/AFP (18-Sep) and Reuters (22-Feb) and NewsClick (24-Feb) and Human Rights Watch
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(Comments: For reader comments, questions and discussion, see the 11-Oct-18 World View -- Bangladesh continues plans to relocate 100,000 Rohingya refugees to Bhasan Char island thread of the Generational Dynamics forum. Comments may be
posted anonymously.)
(11-Oct-2018)
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Venezuela migration crisis continues to grow
by
John J. Xenakis
This morning's key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com
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In mid-August, Nicolás Maduro, president of the Socialist government of Venezuela, announced a new package of economic reforms that were supposed to stop the country's slide into economic disaster. ( "19-Aug-18 World View -- Socialist Venezuela introduces new fantasy currency and new Socialist changes")
At that time, Maduro said:
"I want the country to recover and I have the formula. Trust me."
To the surprise of few if any people, his "formula" has only sped up the economic disaster.
The first part of Maduro's formula was to devalue the bolivar currency by 96%, and then introduce a new currency, the Bolivar Soberano ("sovereign bolivar"). Well, that doesn't seem to have stopped inflation.
There are no longer any official Venezuelan government figures on inflation, because the figures were so embarrassing to the Socialists there, they decided to stop publishing them three years ago. So the opposition congress has been computing its own figures, and publishing them.
According to opposition legislator Angel Alvarado, daily inflation is now 4%, which comes to 1.7 million percent per year. During the past year, prices rose a mere 488,865%, but the inflation rate continues to accelerate.
On Tuesday, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) issued its own estimate of Venezuela's inflation rate, saying that it would rise 1.4 million percent in 2018, and up to 10 million percent in 2019.
The second part of Maduro's magic formula was to raise the minimum wage by 3000%. Maduro has raised the minimum wage 24 times since 2013. I always have to blink my eyes in disbelief when I read stuff like this, since apparently Maduro and his Socialist acolytes are too stupid to understand that when you increase wages then you increase inflation proportionately. So that's one more reason why the inflation rate increase has been accelerating.
But it's worse than that, in this case. Within a month it was clear that the minimum wage increase was causing an additional economic disaster: Few companies or shops were able to pay the increased minimum wage, so massive numbers of people lost their jobs.
In September, Maduro paid a visit to Xi Jinping in Beijing, and apparently came back home to Caracas with a lifeline.
China agreed to invest an additional $5 billion, and the investment would boost oil production, and nearly double its oil exports to China. "We are taking the first steps into a new economic era," said Maduro. Reuters and Reuters and Bloomberg (19-Sep) and Al Jazeera (19-Sep)
Some six million people have fled from Syria since the war began in 2011, and that's currently the worst migration crisis in the world. The second worst is the Venezuelan crisis, where some 2.3 million Venezuelans have fled from the Socialist paradise.
Unable to feed their children or provide medicines for illnesses, or running from violence, there are 4,000 more Venezuelans crossing the border into Colombia each day. Colombia has called for a regional response, saying the migrant crisis was costing it about 0.5% of GDP – around $1.5m. Thousands travel on to Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Mexico, Brazil, This has placed an enormous financial burder on neighboring countries, and many have been closing their borders. The migrants are willing to work for little pay, and so they take the jobs of each country's citizens, further destabilizing the region. UNHCR and Guardian (London) and Merco Press and Fair Observer
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(Comments: For reader comments, questions and discussion, see the 10-Oct-18 World View -- China aids Venezuela as inflation rate exceeds one million percent thread of the Generational Dynamics forum. Comments may be
posted anonymously.)
(10-Oct-2018)
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Fallacies in the climate change story
by
John J. Xenakis
This morning's key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com
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According to a new report issued on Monday by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), climate change scientists are saying that the world is approaching climate change catastrophe much faster than climate change scientists have said in the past.
In the past, the climate change scientists were saying that the temperature of the earth would increase by 3 degrees by 2100, if nothing changes. They said in the past that we have to cut carbon emissions so that the temperature of the earth would only increase by 2 degrees. But according to Monday's report, even a 2 degree increase leads to world catastrophe.
Typical media headlines read, "UN report on global warming carries life-or-death warning" and "Planet has only until 2030 to stem catastrophic climate change, experts warn" and "Trump ‘poses the single greatest threat’ to our climate, bombshell UN report makes clear."
What to do? What to do? The BBC World Service interviewed Christiana Figueres, a Costa Rican diplomat, a key architect of the 2015 Paris climate change agreement. Figueres was asked what people should do now, and she listed "four things that we all can do":
I wonder if it ever occurs to anyone at the United Nations how ridiculous and incompetent it looks to have this spokesman making these truly idiotic statements. Nobody's going to give up meat because this lady says so. Nobody's going to give up their cars for her.
Donald Trump withdrew the US from the Paris Climate Treaty because, among other things, it allows China, the biggest polluter in the world, to continue polluting, while imposing enormous financial burdens on the United States and Western Nations.
The principal purpose of the Climate Change Treaty is to specify money payments from "developed countries," like the United States, to "developing countries" like Costa Rica. Christiana Figueres is a Costa Rican diplomat, so we can assume that Costa Rica will benefit financially from the treaty, and she may even personally benefit financially from the treaty, and we can assume that's why she supports it. United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and CNN and Vox and Mining Global
Climate change treaty supporters like to claim that anyone who disagrees with them is denying established facts.
So let's assume that all the climate change assumptions are true:
Let's assume that all of this is true. Then there are still major fallacies in the climate change argument.
There are two major flaws in the climate change argument that I've pointed out on several cases to climate change advocates. They do not make any attempt to respond, but all these people just blow me off.
If they had a response, they would respond. By just ignoring me or blowing me off, they prove that they don't have a response.
The climate change scientists say that if nothing changes, then the earth's temperature will increase by 3 degrees. We're assuming that's true, but the climate change scientists are failing to take into account things that will certainly change.
First, there's war. There were two world wars in the last century, as well as numerous other massive wars (Russian civil war, Spanish civil war, Cambodian civil war, Rwandan genocide, etc.) on every continent, and in every region.
The 20th century was not unique. In every century for millennia, there have been massive wars on every continent in every region, such as China's Taiping rebellion, Africa's Mfecane, India's sepoy rebellion, the 30 years war, 100 years war, and so forth.
It's 100% certain that there will be massive wars, including one or two world wars, before 2100. A world war in the 21st century will kill 20-50% of the population, through nuclear war, ground war, starvation and disease. Since we're assuming that carbon emissions are caused by human activities, that means that carbon emissions will be reduced by 20-50%.
When I ask climate change scientists about this, they just blow me off.
Climate change scientists won't even consider this, but it completely blows away their theories. If you don't believe me, then ask them about it, and see them duck the question.
There are probably hundreds of thousands of companies, big and small, around the world, developing solutions to carbon emissions, because everyone knows that a working solution will make billions of dollars. In the United States, emissions are down to their lowest point since 1991, thanks to many new technologies, including everything from fracking to better windmills to better batteries. Climate change scientists can't stand to even think about new technologies, because it blows all their theories out of the water.
Several years ago, when thousands of East Anglia e-mail messages by climate change scientists were hacked, I did a search for the word "Singularity," and it never appeared once. You'd think that these scientists would have at least asked one another, "Hey, what about the Singularity?" But apparently it was such a forbidden subject that it couldn't be mentioned.
Even if you've decided that the Singularity won't occur, there will still be nanotechnologies, materials technologies, advanced artificial intelligence algorithms, and lots of new technologies that will tackle the emission problem.
So go ahead and ask climate change scientists how new technologies will affect their climate change predictions. What they'll answer is: Climate change is 100% certain, and world war is 100% impossible, and new technologies are irrelevant. Once again, you'd have to be a complete idiot to believe that.
At the start, I said we would assume that all the climate change scientist conclusions are true, including the one that says that if nothing changes, then the earth's temperature will increase by 3%.
Well, we've identified two changes that are 100% certain, and will affect their conclusions: technology and war. Here's a riddle: How do you make a climate change scientist run for his life? Answer: Ask him about war and technology.
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(Comments: For reader comments, questions and discussion, see the 9-Oct-18 World View -- UN: We have just 12 years to prevent global warming catastrophe thread of the Generational Dynamics forum. Comments may be
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(9-Oct-2018)
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Khashoggi incident threatens Saudi relationship with the West
by
John J. Xenakis
This morning's key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com
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Turkey's media are now saying with increasing certainty that that the Saudi journalist who visited the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on Tuesday and never came out was murdered by the Saudis and that his body was removed by a group of 12 Saudi officials.
The sequence of events was as follow. Jamal Khashoggi, 59, is a Saudi journalist who writes for the Washington Post, and who has been increasingly critical of Saudi's participation in the war in Yemen, and of the human rights record of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who has been running the country since 2015. Fearing for his life, Khashoggi has lived in self-imposed exile in the United States for the last year.
On September 28, he visited the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to get marriage documents related to his planned marriage to his fiancé, a Turkish citizen, Hatice (Khadija) Cengiz. On Tuesday of last week, October 2, he returned to the consulate. Before entering the consulate, he told his fiancé, who was going to wait in the car, that if he wasn't out within 20 minutes, she should alert the Turkish authorities.
He didn't come out, and she raised the alarm. The situation reached the top diplomatic levels between Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia claimed that Khashoggi had left the embassy without anyone noticing. Turkey's forensic analysis examined all the CCTV footage for the consulate entrances and exits, for the area around the consulate, and at the airport, and could find no sign of Khashoggi.
On Sunday, Turkey's president Recep Tayyip Erdogan called Khashoggi a "journalist and a friend," and said,
"God willing, we will not be faced with an undesirable situation we do not want. His fiancé hopes the same. Whatever comes of this, we will be the ones to declare it to the world. It is very, very upsetting for us that it happened in our country."
However, according to media reports, Turkish officials are increasingly convinced that the Saudis killed Khashoggi. Investigation revealed that on Tuesday morning, the day when Khashoggi was scheduled to return to the consulate, 12 Saudi officials arrived in Istanbul in two private jets, and went to the consulate. Shortly after Khashoggi entered the consulate, never to be seen again, the 12 Saudi officials returned to the airport and flew back to Saudi Arabia.
Turkish officials reportedly believe that those 12 Saudi officials killed Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, and then transported his dead body back to Saudi Arabia.
The president of Turk-Arab Media Association, Turan Kislakci, said on Sunday that his organization has confirmed through multiple sources that Khashoggi was murdered:
"There is evidence that he was murdered. We initially thought Jamal Khashoggi was kept at the guest house [at the consulate] and that he was taken out afterwards. However, we have confirmed through multiple sources that he was killed. The details will be explained."
However, a Saudi official is saying that the Turkish accusations are "baseless," and that a team of Saudi investigators will take part in the investigation.
In addition, Saudi media are claiming that the woman named "Khadijah" is "promoting herself as Jamal’s fiancé," but is not known to Jamal's family and she is not his fiancé. Hurriyet (Turkey) and Globe Post (Turkey) and Washington Post and Saudi Gazette
The Turks are furious at this, and if it's true that the Saudis performed an assassination of a journalist on Turkish soil, then they expect to treat it as a major international incident.
Turkey and Saudi Arabia relations are already at a deep low.
Recall that in June of last year, several Arab states, including Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt and United Arab Emirates (UAE), broke relations with Qatar and imposed an air, sea and land blockade on Qatar. Amazingly enough, that blockade is still in place. International attempts at mediation have failed, and the rhetoric has, if anything, gotten worse.
From the beginning, Turkey has been highly critical of the blockade, and has helped Qatar by sending troops to Qatar in support, and by increasing trade with Qatar, circumventing the blockade.
Saudi Arabia has made a number of demands on Qatar to end the crisis. These include ending all relationships with Iran and Turkey, ending support for the Muslim Brotherhood, and shutting down al-Jazeera, which has been highly critical of Saudi Arabia -- things that are never going to happen.
In the current febrile atmosphere in the Mideast, the Khashoggi incident could have larger implications. It could cause the US and Europe to reevaluate their relationships with Saudi Arabia, and with Turkish officials so enraged by this, it could trigger a more serious response. Al-Jazeera and France 24 and Al Monitor and AFP
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(Comments: For reader comments, questions and discussion, see the 8-Oct-18 World View -- Suspicious disappearance of Saudi journalist in Turkey threatens to upset Mideast relations thread of the Generational Dynamics forum. Comments may be
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(8-Oct-2018)
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Bond note currently on the path to inflation or hyperinflation
by
John J. Xenakis
This morning's key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com
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Shops in Zimbabwe have bare shelves as people, fearing a new round of hyperinflation like the one in the 2000s decade, are panic buying beer, bread, cooking oil, and other essentials.
Pharmacies have run out of medication for diabetic patients, high blood pressure patients. There are long queues of cars at petrol stations, with drivers hoping to get petrol before the station runs out.
The panic was triggered when Zimbabwe's "bond note" currency crashed to 2.5 bond notes to the dollar, at the end of a week when the government imposed a new 2% tax on all electronic transactions. The result all week was protests and panic over the price increases and shortages of goods.
Zimbabwe's central bank governor on Saturday John Mangudya blamed himself for the panic:
"The problem is that we did not explain things. This economy is a sentiment driven economy so we need to communicate more with the society."
Mangudya, told reporters that people should not be worried and that he expected an improvement in the next 48 hours.
At the same time, there is a new cholera epidemic in Zimbabwe, and 49 people have died so far. Independent Online (South Africa) and Reuters and Eyewitness News (South Africa
Readers may recall that in 2016 then-president Robert Mugabe introduced a new currency called the "bond note." Each bond note would be worth exactly one US dollar. This was necessary because Zimbabwe's banks were running out of US dollars with with to purchase imports.
In the 1990s, Zimbabwe used to be the breadbasket of southern Africa, growing much more food than the country needed and exporting the rest. Then in 1999 Robert Mugabe instituted a "land reform" plan just like the one that South Africa and Namibia are planning are now planning confiscating white-owned farms and giving them to his cronies in the Shona tribe who knew nothing about farming. Within ten years, Zimbabwe was an economic disaster, with mass starvation, a worthless currency, and massive million percent inflation.
By 2009 the Zimbabwe currency was more worthless than toilet paper, and so the US dollar became the official currency. But Mugabe continued with his destructive racist policies, and by December 2016, Zimbabwe was running out of US dollars. So Mugabe introduced the bond note, with each bond note worth $1.00.
This cause large street demonstrations by Zimbabwe's public, because they knew that the bond notes would suffer the same inflation or hyperinflation that Zimbabwe's original currency did. But Mugabe promised that wouldn't happen, since no more than $200 million in bond notes would ever be printed, so hyperinflation was impossible.
During 2017, Zimbabwe's central bank printed more and more bond notes, and by August 2017, the value of the bond note fell 50% compared to the US dollar. The central bank announced that it would print another $300 million in bond notes, bringing the bond note total up to $500 million, or half a billion.
Since then, Robert Mugabe has been ousted, and has been sent to his palatial farm, where he has plenty of money at his disposal. Zimbabwe now has a new president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, who is left to clean up the 40-year mess that Mugabe left behind. So far, things have only gotten worse. Maybe the Chinese will give him some money if he sells them a part of the country. Daily News (Zimbabwe) and Bulawayo24 (Zimbabwe) and News24 (South Africa, 3-Aug-2017) and eNews Channel Africa
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(Comments: For reader comments, questions and discussion, see the 7-Oct-18 World View -- Zimbabweans on panic buying spree as 'bond notes' crash thread of the Generational Dynamics forum. Comments may be
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(7-Oct-2018)
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Google is repeating the mistakes that IBM made in helping the Nazis
by
John J. Xenakis
This morning's key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com
 |
The announcement this week by Bloomberg News that an investigation has found that China is installing backdoor chips on server motherboards is making the public aware of a major security issue that will affect a wide variety of electronic products, from iPhones to televisions to automobile components.
The attack worked as follows:
Apple and Amazon initially denied they were victims of this attack, but apparently later confirmed that they were.
China's foreign ministry denied that they would ever do such a thing, but said that they were victims of such attacks themselves.
These revelations have exposed only a tiny part of the problem, which is being described as the "supply chain problem." These days, any electronic device contains chips and components from many sources, and those components themselves may be made up of chips from many sources. A complex electronic device might contain over 100 chips, sourced from different locations. If just one of those chips has been infected by China's military, then the entire device could be compromised. As soon as the device is turned on, then the malware chip "calls home" to the Chinese military, which then has access to the entire device, whether it's an iPhone or a helicopter. Bloomberg and Bloomberg and Krebs on Security and Mashable
For months, American intelligence agencies have been advising Americans not to do business with Chinese chip manufacturers Huawei Technologies Co. or ZTE Corp.
China goes out of its way to tempt Americans to buy their products, by offering a lot of features and setting very low prices. The Chinese undoubtedly lose money on these sales, but the sales support a national effort for China to control as many American electronic devices as possible, for future warfare.
As a Senior Software Development, I've developed embedded operating systems for chips, and I personally know how easy it would be for the Chinese to implement this policy. Huawei could develop a chipset that works fine during tests, but Huawei could install a "backdoor" into the chipset. When the chip receives, say, a secret 1024-bit code, then it will execute commands sent to it by China's military. Thus, the Chinese are then in control of any devices with Huawei or ZTE chips. This is not only doable, it's easy to do. The "backdoor" could not be detected until an attack had been launched, and then it would be too late. So there's never been any doubt in my mind that China COULD do this, and if China CAN do it, then they WILL do it, because they've engaged every part of the nation to prepare for war with the United States.
That's a different kind of situation than the one that's been revealed this week. In this week's case, the hacking was done not by "invisible" software, but by a visible but tiny piece of hardware.
SecurityWeek took a survey of reactions by security experts to the announcement of China's spy chips, and what was remarkable is that no one was the least surprised.
Sanjay Beri, CEO, Netskope, said: "Chinese cyber infiltration is nothing new, as proven by ongoing recent attacks from elite Chinese institutions diligently working to gain access to assets from the west."
Itzik Kotler, CTO and Co-Founder, SafeBreach, said: "Like many recent attacks, this is low-level, stealthy, and widespread. The combination of these three makes it especially frightening at first, and it certainly is rare to see such an attack in the wild."
Rick Moy, Chief Marketing Officer at Acalvio said: "While there’s a lot of denial about the attacks, it’s completely plausible that China did in fact seed certain hardware with these backdoor chips. One can imagine the liabilities that firms would rather not take on by admitting this kind of a breach. However, it is entirely within the capabilities and mission scope of nation state intel armies to infiltrate supply chains in this way."
Joseph Carson, chief security scientist at Thycotic said: "We are one step away from a major cyber conflict or retaliation that could result in serious implications. This could be one of the biggest hacks in history. What is clear is that it is a government behind this cyber espionage and I believe it is compromised employees with privileged access that are acting as malicious insiders selecting specific targets so the supply chain has been victim of being compromised."
Malcolm Harkins, Chief Security and Trust Officer, Cylance: Unfortunately the only surprising element about this attack is that it’s taken so long to be uncovered in a report." Security Week
In the late 1930s, Thomas Watson, the founder of IBM Corp. had to decide whether to sell Hollerith card tabulating equipment to the German Nazis, at a time when they were persecuting Jews and even dropping bombs on London. Nominally, the equipment was to be used to count things like cars and cows, but it was obvious that it could also be used to count Jews. Watson did business with the Nazis even during the war, and helped the Nazis with the Holocaust.
Now Google appears to be making the same mistake with China.
Google recently announced it would not help the Department of Defense with AI technology, even for purely defensive purposes. (Paragraph corrected, 13-Oct)
At the same time, Google announced a major new Google AI research center in China. “I believe AI and its benefits have no borders” said Dr. Fei-Fei Li, Chief Scientist at Google Cloud. Well that's a lie. Google's AI technology will only be used outside the United States border, and inside China's border.
China is preparing for war with the United States, and has developed numerous weapons systems with no other purpose than to attack American cities, bases and aircraft carriers. Google is willing to provide AI technology to China that can be used in these weapons to attack the United States, but refuses to allow the U.S. to use its AI technology to defend itself from China's weapons. That's verging on treason.
A separate issue is Google's Dragonfly project. Google is using AI technology to develop a search engine for the Chinese government that will automatically track Chinese citizens who make unapproved searches, and then report those individuals to the government. Vice President Mike Pence this week called on Google this week to stop development of Dragonfly, because it would "strengthen Communist Party censorship and compromise the privacy of Chinese customers."
China's persecution of the Uighurs and Tibetans in China is worse than the Nazi persecution of the Jews. Recent reports indicate that over a million Uighurs are imprisoned in reeducation camps. AI software provides facial recognition capabilities that permit China to track the movements of all Uighurs in Xinjiang province (or other Chinese citizens) for arrest or persecution.
My guess is that during the 1930s it was young German-Americans who promoted selling IBM technology to the Nazis. Today, with Google located in Silicon Valley, it's probably young Chinese who are promoting selling AI technology to the Chinese military, but opposing its sale to the U.S. military. These Chinese workers will certainly come to grief for this betrayal of America. Guardian (London, 29-Mar-2002) and Atlantic (April 2001) and Task and Purpose (19-Jun) and The Verge
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(Comments: For reader comments, questions and discussion, see the 6-Oct-18 World View --China's spy chip attacks shock the computer industry thread of the Generational Dynamics forum. Comments may be
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(6-Oct-2018)
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The inevitable clash of the protagonists
by
John J. Xenakis
This morning's key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com
 |
For months, international observers have been fearing a massive humanitarian disaster in Syria, as the regime of Syria's president Bashar al-Assad prepares to launch an attack on Idlib province, the last stronghold of the opposition rebels, backed by Russia, Iran and Hezbollah.
The al-Assad regime has already recaptured Aleppo, Ghouta and Daara, using Vladimir Putin's "Grozny Model," which forces all the women and children out into the open so that they be slaughtered en masse. Al-Assad enhanced and upgraded the technique into what we might call "Grozny Model 2.0," using chlorine gas to force women and children out of their basement hiding places, and then use Sarin gas and barrel bombs as needed to slaughter as many as possible.
Many of the civilians and opposition forces in Aleppo, Ghouta and Daara fled with their families to Idlib province, as possibly the only safe place left in Syria, with the result that the population of Idlib province doubled to about 3 million people. Turkey already hosts 3.5 million Syrian refugees, and an assault on Idlib would create a massive humanitarian problem, with perhaps a million people flooding across the border into Turkey, and from there into Europe, creating an international crisis.
Turkey was desperate to stop al-Assad's Idlib assault because it would be a disaster for Turkey, so Turkey's president Recep Tayyip Erdogan lobbied Putin to cancel the assault. Turkey, Russia and Iran held a meeting in Tehran on September 7, but Turkey's proposal was rejected by the other two parties. ( "8-Sep-18 World View -- Turkey fails to prevent Russia and Iran from mass slaughter in Idlib, Syria") Reuters and Irin News and Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI)
However, on September 17, Erdogan and Putin met in Sochi, and they reached an agreement:
"The Republic of Turkey and the Russian Federation, as guarantors of the observance of the ceasefire regime in the Syrian Arab Republic, ... in order to stabilize the situation in the Idlib de-escalation area as soon as possible, have agreed on the following:1. The Idlib de-escalation area will be preserved and Turkish observation posts will be fortified and continue to function.
2. The Russian Federation will take all necessary measures to ensure that military operations and attacks on Idlib will be avoided and the existing status quo will be maintained.
3. A demilitarized zone, 15-20 kms deep in the de-escalation area will be established.
4. The delineation of exact lines of the demilitarised zone will be determined through further consultations.
5. All radical terrorist groups will be removed from the demilitarised zone by October 15.
6. All tanks, MLRS, artillery and mortars belonging to conflicting parties will be withdrawn from the demilitarised zone by October 10, 2018.
7. Turkish Armed Forces and the military police of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation will conduct coordinated patrols and monitoring with UAVs along the boundaries of the demilitarised zone. ...
8. Transit traffic on the routes M4 (Aleppo-Latakia) and M5 (Aleppo-Hama) will be restored by the end of 2018.
9. Effective measures will be taken for ensuring sustainable ceasefire regime within the Idlib de-escalation area. In this regard, the functions of the Joint Iranian-Russian-Turkish Coordination Center will be enhanced.
10. The two sides reiterated their determination to combat terrorism in Syria in all forms and manifestations."
Bashar al-Assad and the Syrian government were not part of this agreement, but it has become Russia's responsibility to hold al-Assad back from launching the assault.
The heart of this agreement is that it places an enormous responsibility on Turkey. All rebels in the demilitarised zone must withdraw heavy arms by October 10, and radical groups must leave by October 15, and Turkey is reponsible for making that happen. Unfortunately, with only 5 days left until the first deadline, little has changed on the ground since the September 17 agreement except for contentious negotiations among the groups in Idlib. There's been almost no handover of weapons or territory.
Of the 3 million people in Idlib, it's estimated that about 60,000 are in anti-Assad militias controlling different cities and villages. Some of the moderate rebel groups have begun withdrawing their forces and heavy weapons from parts of the buffer zone. But the biggest jihadi group, the al-Qaeda linked Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which controls 60% of Idlib, has not yet agreed to withdraw, although it's still negotiating with Turkey. The National (UAE) and Sputnik News (Moscow)
The Greeks invented tragedy, and three of four great tragic artists of all time were Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides of ancient Greece, with the fourth being Shakespeare. As a Greek, I understand tragedy very well. The essence of Greek tragedy is that the tragic event it not random, but is inevitable, because of the nature, the personality, the character of the protagonists. A true tragedy cannot be prevented, even by those who foresee it, because the forces bringing about the tragedy are too powerful for anyone to stop.
We can see those powerful forces in Syria today.
First we have Bashar al-Assad, a psychopathic monster and a member of the Shia/Alawite community in Syria, a group that has had many wars with Sunni Arabs, including Turks. Al-Assad has repeatedly made it clear that he considers all Sunni's in Idlib, even the women and children, to be terrorists who much be exterminated like cockroaches. Al-Assad is the most Shakespearean of the protagonists in that he's driven to commit a bigger genocide than his father, Hafez al-Assad.
Reports indicate that the al-Assad regime has been massing its army on the border with Idlib. Putin has been holding al-Assad back from assaulting Idlib, and al-Assad is looking for any excuse to attack. If the agreement deadlines pass and Turkey has not completed its tasks, then al-Assad will have the excuse he needs.
Second, we have Russia's president Vladimir Putin. I don't get the feeling that Putin has any particular animus against either side in Syria. He seems to view the war in Syria the same way that Henry David Thoreau watched in astonishment the war between the two armies, one army of red ants and another army of black ants.
Instead of ethnic animus, Putin seems to be have an entirely different kind of motive for supporint al-Assad. Russia was completely shut out of the Mideast in the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Now, for the first time in decades, Russia has two military bases in the Mideast -- the Tartus naval base, and the Hmeimim airbase, both of them in Syria, in return for supporting al-Assad.
So Russia is holding al-Assad back for now, but when the dam breaks and the Syrian army pours into Idlib, Russia will support al-Assad in order to continue to control the two military bases.
And the third major protagonist is Turkey's president Erdogan. Al-Assad and Erdogan share a deep vitriolic hatred of each other, as do their respective populations. Erdogan truly wants to prevent al-Assad's assault on Idlib because it will be a disaster for Turkey.
Iran is like Russia, having little vitriolic hatred for either side in Syria, but wanting to establish an overland route from Iran through Baghdad through Damascus to the Mediterranean Sea. For that, Iran is supporting al-Assad.
Hezbollah is like a mindless puppet, where Iran is the puppetmaster. Hezbollah will do whatever Iran tells it to do.
There are also lesser forces in Syria, including the United States and Saudi Arabia. They play their parts in support of one group or another, but they're subordinate to Syria, Russia and Turkey.
One day soon, all of these forces will clash and the inevitable final act of the Greek tragedy will begin. Al Jazeera and Digital Journal and Deutsche Welle and Al Jazeera
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(Comments: For reader comments, questions and discussion, see the 5-Oct-18 World View -- As October 25 deadline approaches, Syria's Idlib is set up for a classic Greek tragedy thread of the Generational Dynamics forum. Comments may be
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(5-Oct-2018)
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Iran blamed on the foiled June 30 attack on anti-Iran MEK group
by
John J. Xenakis
This morning's key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com
 |
On Monday, a German court agreed to extradite Assadollah Assadi, an Iranian diplomatic, who is accused accused of handing a bomb to the attackers who were planning a June 30 bombing of a meeting near Paris of an anti-Iran regime group, the MEK. Although Assadi is based in Vienna Austria, his actions took place while he was on vacation in Germany, so the German court stripped him of his diplomatic immunity, and allowed him to be extradited to Belgium.
Assadi is an Iranian diplomat and intelligence agent. He is accused of meeting a Belgian husband and wife sleeper cell in Luxembourg, where he handed them the explosives. The explosives were discovered in Beligum by Belgian police when they stopped a Mercedes car driven by the Antwerp-based Iranian couple and found the explosives hidden inside a toiletries bag. The police took the husband and wife team into custody, and requested extradition of Assadi from Germany.
The planned target of the June 30 attack was in Villepinte, northeast of Paris, and another man, accused of being an accomplice, was arrested in Paris on Monday.
France also seized assets in Paris belonging to Tehran's intelligence services and the Iranian husband and wife arrested in Belgium.
A French official said that Iran's deputy minister and director general of intelligence, Saeid Hashemi Moghadam, had ordered the attack and Assadollah Asadi, who is still in Germany to be extradicted to Belgium, had masterminded the plot. According to the official:
"Behind all this was a long, meticulous and detailed investigation by our (intelligence) services that enabled us to reach the conclusion, without any doubt, that responsibility fell on the Iranian intelligence ministry."
However, after Belgium announced on June 30 that they had foiled the Iranian bombing operation, Iran's foreign minister Javad Zarif tweeted the following:
"How convenient. Just as we embark on a presidential visit to Europe, an alleged Iranian operation and its "plotters" arrested. Iran unequivocally condemns all violence & terror anywhere, and is ready to work with all concerned to uncover what is a sinister false flag ploy. 3:57 PM, Jul 2 2018"
Zarav and the Iranians have continued to deny any connection to the June 30 plot, but Monday's arrests indicate that police in France, Belgium, Germany and Luxembourg now believe that they've connected the dots to prove the Iranian terror plot.
On Tuesday, the French government issued the following statement:
"An attack attempt was foiled in Villepinte [near Paris] on June 30. This act of extreme severity planned on our soil could not remain without response. By an October 2, 2018 order from the Minister of State, the Minister of the Interior, and the Minister of Economy and Finance... France has taken ... preventative measures by freezing the assets of Iranian nationals Assadollah Asadi and [Iranian deputy minister of Intelligence in charge of operations] Saeid Hashemi Moghadam, as well as of the Directorate of Internal Security of the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence. In taking this decision, France reiterates its determination to fight terrorism, especially on its own soil."
On Tuesday, French police raided the al-Zhara mosque in the small town of Grande-Synthe near Dunkirk in northern France. Police had been monitoring the activities of the mosque, especially its leader, Yahia Gouasmi, who is known for anti-Zionist views and ties to Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas. However, it's not clear whether this arrest is also related to the June 30 bombing attempt.
This series of arrests across Europe is going to bring Iran-EU relations, especially Iran-France relations, to a new low. This is highly significant at a time when Iran is begging the Europeans to find a way around the US sanctions on Iran that the Trump administration imposed after withdrawing from the nuclear agreement. BBC and The National (UAE) and Deutsche Welle and Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI)
The foiled June 30 attack was targeting a meeting of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), which is the political arm of the dissident group People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI / Mujahideen-el-Khalq, MEK), which Iran says is a terrorist organization -- as did the US State Department from 1997 to 2012.
The MEK was formed in the 1960s to overthrow the Shah of Iran. As I described in my new book, Iran's Struggle for Supremacy: Tehran's Obsession to Redraw the Map of the Middle East, the MEK helped Ruhollah Khomeini overthrow the Shah in the 1979 Islamic Revolution, but then turned against Khomeini because he was worse than the Shah.
In July 1988, Khomeini's ordered the massacre of tens of thousands of political prisoners and political enemies, especially those in the MEK. He issued this decree:
"Whoever at any stage continues to belong to the PMOI must be executed. Annihilate the enemies of Islam immediately! ...Those who are in prisons throughout the country and remain steadfast in their support for PMOI are waging war on God and are condemned to execution. ... It is naive to show mercy to those who wage war on God."
It's laughable for Khomeini to compare himself to God. I described in my book how he did this -- modifying Shia Islam theology by naming himself to the be modern version of Shia Islam's infallible Imams. However, the infallible Imam Khomeini used his power to conduct torture, rape, multilation and slaughter of his political enemies, including members of the MEK.
In my article on the December protests in Iran, I listed about 20 of the protests that were being chanted, many of them quite vicious. These chants were collected and publicized by MEK activists.
The MEK has remained an anti-government protest organization, and it's not at all surprising that Iran would sponsor explosions and other terror attacks on the MEK in Paris and elsewhere. The MEK has been extremely effect in exposing the hypocrisy of the Iranian regime, and in encouraging anti-government protests within Iran. Al-Jazeera and AFP and Washington Examiner and Euro News
John J. Xenakis is author of the book, Iran's Struggle for Supremacy: Tehran's Obsession to Redraw the Map of the Middle East, available on Amazon for $5 for the digital version or $7 for the paperback version.
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(Comments: For reader comments, questions and discussion, see the 4-Oct-18 World View -- Iran diplomats and sleeper cells arrested in France and across Europe thread of the Generational Dynamics forum. Comments may be
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(4-Oct-2018)
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Brief generational history of Namibia
by
John J. Xenakis
This morning's key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com
 |
Namibia's president Hage Geingob announced on Monday that he would push ahead with "land distribution," following the example of the announcement by its close neighbor, South Africa.
According to Geingob, the practice of expropriating land with "fair compensation" will be revisited, since it hasn't delivered results, and that 43% of farmland will be transferred from white farmers to "disadvantaged blacks" by 2020. In making the announcement, Geingob said:
"Many Namibians were driven off their productive land. The fundamental issue is the inequality. We also share a burning land issue and a racialized distribution of land resources with South Africa.This comes from a common history of colonial dispossession. What we also agree to is that the status quo will not be allowed to continue."
The phrase "colonial dispossession" refers to genocide and ethnic cleansing by German colonists of tens of thousands of ethnic Herero and Nama people from roughly 1895 to 1907. According to published statistics, white Namibians today own 70% of agricultural land and blacks 16%. The rest, about 250 farms, are under foreign ownership, mostly by Germans.
Geingob added that by redistributing land from white farmers to blacks, it will reduce inequality, and will be "an investment in peace":
"We need to revisit constitutional provisions which allow for the expropriation of land with just compensation, as opposed to fair compensation, and look at foreign ownership of land, especially absentee land owners.It is in all our interest, particularly the 'haves,' to ensure a drastic reduction in inequality, by supporting the redistributive model required to alter our skewed economic structure. We should all be cognizant of the fact that this is ultimately an investment in peace."
According to Geingob, the "willing-buyer, willing-seller" approach has not worked to redistribute the land, and now a more aggressive approach must be used. Deutsche Welle and The South African and Al Jazeera
The proposal for land confiscation without compensation is being made at the Second National Land Conference, held in the capital city Windhoek. Opposition figures have called for a boycott of the conference because documents leaked prior to the conference indicated that the outcomes were predetermined, and because opposition parties, including representatives of white farmers, were not even invited. Prime minister Saara Kuugongelwa-Amadhila denied that the outcomes were predetermined, because all delegates coming to conference will "share their honest views towards the debate to help our country make progress towards the land reform program."
None of the news reports that I read about this proposal even mention the Zimbabwe experience, so apparently that experience has been forgotten. In the 1990s, Zimbabwe used to be the breadbasket of southern Africa, growing much more food than the country needed and exporting the rest. Then in 1999 Robert Mugabe instituted a "land reform" plan just like the one that South Africa and Namibia are planneg. Within ten years, Zimbabwe was an economic disaster, with mass starvation, a worthless currency, and massive million percent inflation.
The lack of transparency, and shutting out of the opposition are signs that Zimbabwe's experience will be copied in another way. When Mugabe confiscated the white farmers' farms, they were supposed to go to poor blacks, but instead went to Mugabe's wealthy political cronies, people who didn't even know how to farm. That's why Zimbabwe faced such a financial disaster.
Namibia's new land reform program is supposed to confiscate white farmers' farms and give them to "disadvantaged blacks," but the lack of transparency and shutting out of the opposition indicates that Geingob will do what Mugabe did -- give the farms to his élite wealthy political cronies, who know nothing about farming. Why would anyone expect anything else? Those cronies worked hard to get Geingob elected, so shouldn't they be rewarded with all the farmland? It's only fair.
So that's what happened to Zimbabwe when it was a relatively wealthy country in the 1990s. But Namibia is not a wealthy country. As of the second quarter of 2018, Namibia's economy had shrunk for nine consecutive quarters. Earlier this year, the government had to stop feeding the army, or paying the water and electricity bills for its military bases.
Namibia is a mineral-rich country, and was considered to be stable and democratic. But when president Hage Geingob took office in 2015, he borrowed money and went on a spending spree, greatly expanding the public sector, with a huge wage bill for 100,000 civil servants. Geingob has also taken on billions of dollars in debt from China, where the terms of the deal are being kept secret, raising fears of yet one more Chinese debt trap.
Namibia has been hit with other problems. A drought across southern Africa has been disastrous for the Namibian economy. The fishing industry has suffered due to overfishing and depletion of fish stocks. The mining industry suffered because of the fall in the prices of minerals, particular uranium, which Namibia relies on.
So Geingob is going to solve all of Namibia's economic problems by confiscating the farmland from productive people who produce food for people to eat, and give the farms to his cronies who don't have a clue. Sounds like a great plan. Namibian (21-Sep) and The Villager (Namibia, 24-Sep) and Deutsche Welle (1-Feb) and Namibian (14-Sep)
Archeological evidence shows that people inhabited Namibia for at least 25,000 years. Little was known about life there until the colonists arrived and started writing things down. The first known European to visit Namibia was the Portuguese Diogo Cao in 1485.
The most valuable real estate in Namibia to the colonists was Walvis Bay, a large deep water port on the Atlantic Ocean. The Dutch Authority took control of Walvis, and Britain took control of it in 1797.
The Europeans in Namibia lived in relative peace with the dominant tribe, the Herero, until the "Scramble for Africa" among the European colonists occurred in the late 1800s. In 1886, Germany and Portugal negotiated the border between Angola and German South West Africa. By 1890, the German colonists had been a military fort in Windhoek, which became Namibia's capital city.
Things changed in 1897 when the rinderpest, an ancient plague dating back to at least Roman times, arrived in South West Africa and devastated the flocks of cattle owned by the Herero, who depended on cattle for their livelihood. Many Herero sold their land to the Germans for a very low price. This situation backfired in 1904, when there was a Herero uprising against the German colonists, killing over 100 Germans. This triggered a generational crisis war, and genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Herero.
Another tribe, the Nama, rose up in support of the Herero, but the Germans rounded them up and sent them to labor camps to work on the railways. All in all, about 80% of the Herero were killed, and 50% of the Nama. It's sometimes call the first genocide of the 20th century. Germany only lost control of South West Africa at the end of World War I, when the Treaty of Versailles gave control to South Africa.
The Herero have filed a lawsuit in the US against Germany over the genocide and demanded reparations. Germany acknowledges that a genocide occurred, but the government denies that it is under any legal obligation to reparations. Deutsche Welle (28-Jul) and RhinoAfrica and SAHistory and HistoryWorld
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(Comments: For reader comments, questions and discussion, see the 3-Oct-18 World View -- Namibia may follow South Africa with land confiscation without compensation thread of the Generational Dynamics forum. Comments may be
posted anonymously.)
(3-Oct-2018)
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Cameroon Anglophone separatists act to block 86 yo Paul Biya's reelection
by
John J. Xenakis
This morning's key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com
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Cameroon’s Francophone (French-speaking) President Paul Biya is the favorite to win reelection as president on Sunday. A poll reveals that none of the nine opposition candidates would be able to defeat Biya, even though the economy is tanking, and most voters are opposed to Biya's war and atrocities on the Anglophone (English-speaking) population in the Southern Cameroons region of the county.
The atrocities began in November 2016, when the Francophone (French-speaking) Cameroon government security forces began beating and killing peaceful anti-government demonstrators in the South Cameroons, the Anglophone (English-speaking) regions of Cameroon. The demonstrators were protesting systematic bias, discrimination and marginalization towards Anglophones by the Francophone government. For example, schoolteachers in the Anglophone regions were forbidden from teaching any courses in English. Court cases had to be held in French, and it was against the law to provide English translations of the laws.
The level of atrocities ticked up considerably in October 2017, when the Anglophone separatists demanded independence for the Southern Cameroons, calling it Ambazonia. A video emerged purporting to show Francophone soldiers forcing Anglophone teenage girls to crawl through mud in front of the Cameroon Protestant College, as the men jeer at the girls and refer to them as Ambazonians.
The Anglophones began forming their own army called the Ambazonia Defense Forces (ADF), with about 1,500 people spread around 20 camps in the Anglophone regions. In most cases, the people are farmers who had been forced to leave their villages, armed with hunting rifles that are made in Nigeria. In September of last year, activist separatists began using small bombs to target local security forces.
In December of last year, Biya declared full scale war on the separatists, with this announcement:
"I learned with emotion of the murder of four Cameroonian soldiers and two policemen in the south-west of our country. I think that things are now clear to everyone. Cameroon is the victim of repeated attacks by a band of terrorists claiming to be part of a secessionist movement.Faced with these attacks of aggression, I assure the Cameroonian people that all measures are being taken to end these criminals’ ability to do harm."
Human Rights Watch issued a report in July saying that the violence in Cameroon has reached a crisis level, and could still get much worse. The report Abuses by Government and Separatist Groups in Cameroon’s Anglophone Regions":
"found that both government forces and armed separatists have abused civilians in the western part of the country, displacing over 180,000 people since December 2017. Anglophone separatists have extorted, kidnapped and killed civilians, and prevented children from going to school. In response to protests and violence by armed separatists, government forces have killed civilians, used excessive force against demonstrators, tortured and mistreated suspected separatists and detainees, and burned hundreds of homes in several villages."
According to claims by the separatists, within the last month the Francophone army has been burning down villages, and killing anyone from 13 years to 50 years old.
Cameroon's last generational crisis war was the "UPC Revolt," 1956-1960, which was a bloody civil war by communists attacking the French government in the Cameroun colony. It has now been exactly 58 years since the ending climax of the UPC Revolt. Generational Dynamics research shows that 58 years is the point where the generations of survivors of the previous crisis war have retired or died in sufficient number that they no longer hold enough power to stop the excesses of the younger generations. Cameroon is spiraling into a full-scale generational crisis war, and there is nothing to stop it. Journal du Cameroun and Africa News and Human Rights Watch and Vice News
Paul Biya has been campaigning in Francophone Cameroon for a seventh term in office, which he has held since 1982.
Cameroon's Francophone government has declared a 48-hour curfew in the Southern Cameroons region, occupied by the Anglophones. October 1 is the first anniversary of the day when tens of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets, triggering an army massacre that killed hundreds of people.
Separatist activists have vowed to block the presidential election in any of the Anglophone regions. On Thursday, separatist militants raided a prison and freed about 100 inmates, claiming that the prisoners were innocent people that the army arrested at random on the street.
Separatists have set up check points blocking traffic on major roads, helping to paralyse activity across the region. According to Cho Ayaba, a separatist leader, "There will be no election in Ambazonia. We want to make sure there is no movement from Cameroon into Ambazonia, including election materials." The Nation (Kenya) and AFP and Reuters
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(Comments: For reader comments, questions and discussion, see the 2-Oct-18 World View -- Cameroon's Paul Biya continues ethnic cleansing of Anglophones in Southern Cameroons thread of the Generational Dynamics forum. Comments may be
posted anonymously.)
(2-Oct-2018)
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Russia says that UK violates its commitment to the Arctic Council
by
John J. Xenakis
This morning's key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com
 |
At a time when tensions between the UK and Russia are extremely high because of the poisoning of the March 4 poisoning of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, using a Russia-developed nerve agent Novichok, UK's defense secretary Gavin Williamson on Sunday announced that British armed forces will confront Russia in the Arctic.
Williamson said that Russia was reopening Soviet-era bases in the arctic and he warned that Britain's military must assert itself in the newly navigable region.
According to Williamson:
"We see Russian submarine activity very close to the level that it was at the Cold War, and it's right that we start responding to that.If we could turn back the clock 10 years many people thought that the era of submarine activity in the High North, in the North Atlantic, and the threat that it posed did disappear with the fall of the Berlin Wall. This threat has really come back to the fore. If we want to be protecting our interests in what is effectively our own back yard, this is something we need to be doing."
Well, the Berlin Wall fell 30 years ago, not ten years, but who's counting?
Williamson indicated that global warming was exposing Britain to new military threats from Russia:
"As the ice melts and new shipping routes emerge, the significance of the High North and Arctic region increases.Russia, with more submarines operating under the ice and ambitions to build over 100 facilities in the Arctic, are staking a claim and militarising the region. We must be ready to deal with all threats as they emerge."
Britain is planning to open a new military base in the northern part of Norway and deploy 800 Royal Marine and Army troops to the country every winter for 10 years from 2019. They are to operate with the US and Dutch troops there. Together with 3,000 commandos, sent to take part in the NATO drills, the total number of the deployed troops will top 40,000. In addition, four Royal Air Force Typhoon fighter planes will patrol Icelandic Skies.
"Our Poseidon aircraft submarine hunters, based in Lossiemouth, will track Russian submarines. They will keep us safe at home and assist our NATO allies," said Williamson. That should be reassuring. Daily Mail (London) and UK Government and Sputnik News (Russia)
Russia's embassy in London criticized Britain's announcement, promoting the idea of a threat from Russia. In fact, Russia claims that Britain is violating its own policy statement as an observer at the Arctic Council. According to a spokesman:
"These speculations are yet another attempt to promote the idea of military build-up in the Arctic under imaginary pretexts. They run counter to the existing international legal framework and completely undermine huge efforts undertaken in the Arctic Council, where the UK is an observer state.We hope the British media notices the impressive prospects for trade, economic and infrastructural cooperation in the Arctic and stops echoing those who can’t wait to engage in saber-rattling in this part of the globe."
According to the US State Department:
"Established by the Ottawa Declaration in 1996, the Arctic Council is the preeminent intergovernmental forum for addressing issues related to the Arctic Region. The members of the Arctic Council include the eight countries with territory above the Arctic Circle (Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, the Russian Federation, and the United States) plus six Permanent Participants (PP) groups representing the indigenous people of the Arctic, which include Aleut International Association, Arctic Athabaskan Council, Gwich’in Council International, Inuit Circumpolar Council, Russian Arctic Indigenous Peoples of the North, and Saami Council. The Arctic Council is not a treaty-based international organization but rather an international forum that operates on the basis of consensus, echoing the peaceful and cooperative nature of the Arctic Region. The Council focuses its work on matters related to sustainable development, the environment, and scientific cooperation; its mandate explicitly excludes military security. Traditionally, the Council is chaired by the foreign minister of the country holding the chairmanship. Its day-to-day work is carried out by the eight Senior Arctic Officials (SAO) and six PP representatives, with input from working groups, expert groups, and task forces."
Although the mandate of the Arctic Council specifically excludes military security, Russia claims that an observer state like the UK must "recognize Arctic States’ sovereignty, sovereign rights and jurisdiction in the Arctic," and that the UK Foreign Office specifically committed to doing so in 2013.
From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, Russia and Britain are not headed for war. Historically, the Russians love the British, and the British have no particular ill feelings towards any Russians except Putin and his cadre of officials who are going around poisoning people on British soil with the nerve agent Novichok. However, eastern Europe is extremely volatile, and it's possible at some point that Russia will be involved in a war with Ukraine or other east European countries, as has happened many times in the past few centuries. For that reason, Britain's decision to set up a new military base in northern Norway could be quite significant. Russia Today and US State Dept. and Arctic Council and Sputnik News (Russia) and Daily Express (London)
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(Comments: For reader comments, questions and discussion, see the 1-Oct-18 World View -- UK to challenge Russia in Arctic, at time of tensions over Skripal poisoning thread of the Generational Dynamics forum. Comments may be
posted anonymously.)
(1-Oct-2018)
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