US Empire decline

By Leung Wing-Fai November 16, 2021 Review: Fascination mixed with fear is how many in the West culturally construct the East Apocalyptic pollution, “Asian” flu, unfettered economic growth, boot camps for internet addiction, hacker attacks on western businesses and governments:– there is no shortage of fascination mixed with fear directed towards the culturally constructed East. Yellow Peril! An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear distils and presents a collection of accounts, images and essays related to this fear. The phrase yellow peril (sometimes yellow terror or yellow spectre), coined by Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, in the 1880s, after a dream in which he saw the Buddha riding a dragon threatening to invade Europe, blends western anxieties about sex, racist fears of the alien other, and the Spenglerian belief that the West will become outnumbered and enslaved by the East. These fears became increasingly reinscribed as ideology through popular cultural products. In the late...

Carlos Martinez November 16, 2021 Since the launch of Obama’s ‘Pivot to Asia’ in 2012, the US has prioritised China containment over all other foreign policy commitments. This includes steadily increasing its presence in the South China Sea and encouraging China’s neighbours in their various territorial claims. Obama also initiated an expansion of US military, diplomatic and economic cooperation with other countries in the region. The overarching strategic goal of the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) was to isolate China and to draw East and Southeast Asia back into the US economic – and ideological – orbit. The Trump administration, while dropping the TPP due to its domestic unpopularity, escalated the Pivot in other respects: launching a trade war in January 2018, imposing a ban on Huawei, attempting to ban TikTok and WeChat, spreading conspiracy theories about the origins of Covid-19, and turning ‘decoupling’ into a buzzword. Anti-China propaganda became –...

Daniel Ellsberg November 8, 2021 Given the intellectual and ethical status of many leaders in today’s world, this is not – as it may seem – a far-fetched question. It must be raised and discussed since the shocking revelation made by Daniel Ellsberg (1) earlier this year. In 1958, the US had a president – Dwight D. Eisenhower – who was himself a military man. Military people are often more cautious about war because they know much better than politicians what it would mean to start and fight a real war. What would Western leaders do today if a hard dilemma came up? The 12-min documentary below should – together with other articles we have published on this issue – serve as a wake-up call for those who believe that nuclear war is something that belongs only to the past. Young people who engage wonderfully in climate issues seem not...

November 8, 2021 Cyrus Janssen is an American expat who has lived in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Vancouver over the past 14 years. He is passionate about showing a true insight into China and loves sharing his travels around the world. He is a very knowledgeable and competent communicator of complex issues and Janssen’s Youtube Channel has no less than 171 000 subscribers at the moment – i.e. it’s much bigger than many local newspapers around the world. It’s one of many examples of why you are wasting your time if you spend all of it on mainstream, public service or prime time news – because there is so much more interesting and truly independent information and knowledge available in places such as Janssen’s. I recommend his Channel very warmly because you will really learn something important about China – and the US – when you spend a little time...

Photo from the original article Hussein Askary November 1, 2021 According to well-documented statistics provided by American research institutions and universities the human, economic, and financial costs of all wars the United States launched since the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, are in the millions of killed, maimed, and traumatized (mostly civilians); destruction of infrastructure in the hundreds of billions; and financial cost for the war effort itself in the trillions of U.S. Dollars. Added to that is a lost economic opportunity in dozens of countries and several regions. These wars and regime-change operations started with Afghanistan (and Pakistan) in October 2001, and continued to Iraq in 2003, Libya, Syria, and Yemen, in addition to so-called anti-terror operations in Africa that are continuing to date. Originally posted on Brix Sweden’s homepage on September 6, 2021 In the meantime, China, which has been more criticized in Western media than the...

Handover ceremony at Camp Anthonic, from US Army to Afghan Special Forces, Helmand province, Afghanistan, May 2, 2021. Tom Engelhardt October 27, 2021 They weren’t kidding when they called Afghanistan the “graveyard of empires.” Indeed, that cemetery has just taken another imperial body. And it wasn’t pretty, was it? Not that anyone should be surprised. Even after 20 years of preparation, a burial never is. In fact, the shock and awe(fulness) in Kabul and Washington over these last weeks shouldn’t have been surprising, given our history. After all, we were the ones who prepared the ground and dug the grave for the previous interment in that very cemetery. Originally published at Countercurrents That, of course, took place between 1979 and 1989 when Washington had no hesitation about using the most extreme Islamists — arming, funding, training, and advising them — to ensure that one more imperial carcass, that of the Soviet Union, would be buried...

Jan Oberg October 27, 2021 I’m 70 now and all my life, I’ve heard that the Russians would one day make a surprise attack and, within 48 hours, occupy the Eifel Tower. Fait accompli! We in the West were weak – perhaps not right now but we would be within the next 5 years if we did not invest much more in ”defence”. Well, these damn Russians haven’t come yet – another reason we shouldn’t trust them, I assume! The latest variation on that bizarre and irrational theme is that Swedish military spokespersons maintain that Sweden has to plan for an isolated Russian attack on the island of Gotland – and that China aims to conquer Taiwan and Biden telling the world that the US is committed to defend Taiwan. This is a slightly revised version of an editorial for the Transcend Media Service, October 25, 2021 The time when...

[bswise / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0] See the deeply moving photos from Motel Lorraine on Gordon Belray’s page. By Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon October 22, 2021 The anniversary of his assassination – April 4, 1968 – always brings a flood of tributes to Martin Luther King Jr., and this year will surely be no exception. But those tributes — including from countless organizations calling themselves progressive — are routinely evasive about the anti-militarist ideals that King passionately expressed during the final year of his life. You could call it evasion by omission. Originally published at Scheerpost on April 4, 2021 The standard liberal canon waxes fondly nostalgic about King’s “I have a dream” speech in 1963 and his efforts against racial segregation. But in memory lane, the Dr. King who lived his last year is persona non grata. The pattern is positively Orwellian. King explicitly condemned what he called “the madness of militarism.” And...

A Critical Analysis Of A Report By The Newlines Institute And The Raoul Wallenberg Center On March 8, 2021, the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy in Washington published a report, The Uyghur Genocide: An Examination of China’s Breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention in cooperation with the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights in Montreal. It states that ”This report is the first independent expert application of the 1948 Genocide Convention to the ongoing treatment of the Uyghurs in China. It was undertaken by the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy, in cooperation with the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, in response to emerging accounts of serious and systematic atrocities in Xinjiang province, particularly directed against the Uyghurs, an ethnic minority, to ascertain whether the People’s Republic of China is in breach of the Genocide Convention under international law.” The Report – hereafter The Report – has been produced with the contributions of, and upon...

Introduction by Jan Oberg October 14, 2021 Here’s how Monthly Review presents itself: “Monthly Review began publication in New York City in May 1949. The first issue featured the lead article “Why Socialism?” by Albert Einstein. From the beginning, Monthly Review spoke for a critical but spirited socialism, independent of any political organization. In an era of Cold War repression, the magazine published pioneering analyses of political economy, imperialism, and Third World struggles, drawing on the rich legacy of Marxist thought without being bound to any narrow view or party line. The McCarthy-led inquisition targeted MR‘s original editors, Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman, who fought back successfully. Against these odds, the magazine’s readership and influence grew steadily, and in 1952, Monthly Review Press published its first title, I. F. Stone’s Hidden History of the Korean War. TFF has published Einstein’s article here. But what we want to highlight right here is the MR Volume...

Bright Line Watch polling results by region. Question: “Would you support or oppose [your state] seceding from the United States to join a new union with [list of states in new union]?” This article was originally published on July 16, 2021 Andrew Tanner October 9, 2021 Since 2016, I have watched America’s slow march over a cliff with a mix of fascination and horror. But the results of recent polls by Bright Line Watch have provided the first hard and frighteningly conclusive evidence that Americans are moving fast down the road I predicted—towards a national divorce. I have unfortunately been right about almost every major development in America since Trump won the Republican Party nomination in 2016. Originally published at gen.medium.com Like many observers, I didn’t take Trump’s campaign seriously at first. His first attempt at a campaign in 2012 collapsed before the first primary. The second defied every rule I had learned...

Meryem Betul Kebap October 5, 2021 Following the Cold War, the victorious USA became the hegemony power of the world. Unrivalled in many respects, the United States played a role as a superpower in international politics. As a result of the policies, it put into practice in the 1950s, China gained the power to compete with the USA in many aspects as a rising commercial power against the USA today. Originally posted on Asia Today on August 4th, 2021 This led the two powers to compete in slew parts of the world. Furthermore, relations between the two states have been stretched during the reign of former US President Donald Trump. However, with Joe Biden’s administration assuming power, there was a softening in bilateral relations. Recently, US Deputy Secretary of State visited China and met with the Chinese Foreign Minister. Although this visit was expected to reduce the tension between the...