Posted by: bevin | Dec 11, 2018 2:08:23 PM | 201
“China launched an offensive in response to Vietnam’s invasion and occupation of Cambodia in 1978.”
That, whether justifiable or not, can hardly be described as an unprovoked invasion of another country.
You mean like,
“The US launched an offensive in response to Iraq’s invasion and occupation of Kuwait in 1990.
That, whether justifiable or not, can hardly be described as an unprovoked invasion of another country.”
Wow, this really is exactly like years ago when I wasted time trying to get Dembots to understand that the Democrat Party is identical to the Republican. Well, I learned my lesson then about trying to convince fundamentalists who are absolutely impervious to evidence or reason. I’m done with this idiotic subject.
US imperialism bad! China imperialism good! Hallelujah!

Posted by: Russ | Dec 11 2018 19:28 utc | 203

russ 202
‘dink 193 [sic]
*Believe me, you couldn’t possibly hate the US government, economic system, ecological despoliation, media, culture, scientific establishment, educational system, and partisan electorate anywhere near as much as I. No one could. I’ve spent (what seems like) a long life hating it. (Having to live amid the worst of it, seeing it every day.) I hope to live to see not just the empire but the whole US system destroyed. ‘*
but honey,
How do you expect me to read your mind, when in previous and current thread, your obcession is ]
with ‘rapacious Chinese land grab’
‘China’s rape of Africa’, ‘China the pure evil of our time’….?
————-
*And it didn’t build the Three Gorges Dam at incalculable human and ecological cost.*
How’s building a dam for flood control within
China’s own territory, any worse than fukus grabbing all those UNESCO world treasure sites 2000 miles from home, turn it into monstrous
naval base serving its global imperial project ???*
Exhibit Diego Garcia.
The 1000 lb elephant that mr Russ studiously
manage to miss,, hehhehe
P.S.

Posted by: denk | Dec 11 2018 19:49 utc | 205

Russ @202–
I very much agree and sympathize with your sentiments, but found the descent into Hatred of Them All unproductive and uncomfortable; so, I sought another path. I looked at others who know more about the evil doings of the Outlaw US Empire to see how they coped with their knowledge and the moral dilemma in which they find themselves. Most everyone sought to communicate their knowledge to others while muting their hatred and loathing, to instead let the facts, figures and photos speak for themselves in meticulous documentation ironclad against refutation. Yes, not everyone or every institution is ready/capable of acceptance of such information. My efforts during the 2016 election got me banned from commenting at CommonDreams.org, which at the time was a very active site but had submitted to D Party control, a move that came close to killing the site.
In my conclusion, I said the difference is ideological. Adam Garrie at EurasiaFurture expands upon why that’s so and concludes thusly:
“A world that is made more interconnected through Belt and Road will be a world where common destinies of peace through prosperity replace the animal tendencies of those who perversely thrive in a spirit of violent competition that ought to have died in 1918. The moral message of Belt and Road is that it is possible to maintain one’s national dignity, uphold human rights and become more materially wealthy without having to travel down the dark paths of violence, provocation or war.
“These messages have always been an implicit part of the Belt and Road mentality, but now that the US has so clearly chosen another path, the rest of the world must choose peace over the tyranny of hegemony and this means looking with optimism at Belt and Road.”
IMO, you’d see this as a Lesser of Two Evils argument, for which you have a sound basis. From the POV of Ecological Economics, the concept of “sustainable development growth” is a chimera as growth cannot continue infinitely on a finite planet. But the gross inequality of outcomes currently existing is also immoral and unjust; so, how to rectify them peacefully? How does humanity advance beyond its current state of primitiveness when it comes to interrelations as exemplified by Donald Trump and those surrounding him? While I’d like to see giant strides taken to resolve those two primary problems, I’m resigned to the lessons of the past that the best that can be hoped for currently are small incremental steps, which I personally find very annoying but also unavoidable.
IMO, we should continue to promote and pursue our Ideals while also remembering that Reality moves much slower and that it does us no good to allow that to fluster us.

Posted by: karlof1 | Dec 11 2018 20:17 utc | 207

Truly when it comes to greed, brutality and environmental distruction USA & UK win the prize ! And to what extent has there curuption infected the over country’s in question here, and the entire world.
I’m no academic but what I do know is — like rot /disease if left to fester it will ‘infect’ all around it !
If your at a card table with a cheat morally should one play by the rules?
I far from condone that but it’s the reality we see now, country’s world wide decaying from us uk led curuption.
The cure is surgery !!!

Posted by: Mark2 | Dec 12 2018 0:50 utc | 209

@ Karlof1 209
Thanks for your reply. I can appreciate what you say, and god knows for many years I tried to find some position which could reconcile what I know intellectually and feel morally, with still being able to find something possible to believe in within the civilizational framework, and where I wouldn’t keep hearing the screaming of Gaia which I’ve heard so loudly since I was a child.
Trouble is the screams only kept getting louder, and meanwhile anywhere I tried to find integrity I found only different permutations of the same corruption, double-standards, lies, and vileness. (I just replied to someone here who thinks the physical destruction of millions of African community farmers is “giving the customer what he wants.”) I’d say to myself, why not just chuck out all human integrity, since none seems to exist, and become a fascist?
Well, I decide that the better path is simply to look to nothing but the assured suicide of the anti-ecological civilization and pray that it happens fast enough (and without nuclear war) that Gaia, including true natural humanity, has something to salvage. Of course that’s a long-shot (I’m totally pessimistic about avoiding nuclear war), but I guess that’s my version of looking with hope to Belt and Road. Though as you can see it hasn’t yet quenched all my fires, which I agree is something I need to do, especially at my age.
I didn’t subject myself to Common Dreams in 2016, figuring it would be like that. (I’ve never commented there but go through spates of reading. Lately the comment threads on the climate crisis pieces have usually been pretty good, better than the anodyne pieces themselves.) Not surprised to hear they were going through one of their censorious phases. Fact is, these days MoA is the only place I know of which has good non-Disqus (I could never figure it out) comment threads.

Posted by: Russ | Dec 12 2018 8:14 utc | 211

karlof1 209
I replied but it must be stuck in the spam filter and should show up later.

Posted by: Russ | Dec 12 2018 8:50 utc | 213

Russ @213–
Thanks for your response! It appears we’re both engaged and aware, doing what we can to try and make a difference. We got an unexpected but timely “gift” from the legal system when a Federal Appellate Court ruled that laws outlawing helping homeless are unconstitutional, although none such exist in Oregon, as that’s an issue we can hands-on do something about. Pompeo also provided an unexpected gift thanks to his massive pomposity and arrogance when he chided Russia for using taxpayer monies to support projecting power internationally thus also rightly condemning Outlaw US Empire policy without knowing he was doing so. The kids Climate Suit against the federal government continues to move ahead in the legal system despite Trump’s continuing Obama’s attempts to derail the process.
IMO, as the year comes to a close, more people are aware and actively engaged, but much of their efforts aren’t known thanks to suppression by BigLie Media. The emergence of the Outstanding Caitlin Johnstone as a voice of acutely perceptive conscience along with the expansion of social media into more traditional media thus providing platforms to people who were previously denied access are great strides forward. And there are other positives I could point to what IMO made 2018 a positive year in the fight against Big Money and its forces of reaction. Yes, much remains to do, but I don’t see any reason to descend into despair. Solstice will come and life will begin another cycle of renewal. Lovelock showed that Daisyworld’s biota was capable of adapting to changes forced upon it–resilience and perseverance being key. If the Spirit in the Gene doesn’t destroy us first, IMO we will too.

Posted by: karlof1 | Dec 12 2018 17:28 utc | 215

Russ says:
Meantime I’m having lots of fun with Derrick Jensen’s Myth of Human Supremacy
yeah, that’s the spirit…throw in dmitry orlov’s, Collapse and the Good Life

Posted by: john | Dec 12 2018 19:23 utc | 217

@Russ | Dec 12, 2018 2:53:30 AM | 212
If you consider the land-grabbing onslaught …
Hah. As I said, the West — and especially the U.S. — blames China for doing what the West is actually doing. Someone who actually looked into the “land grab” stories says “colonial powers like Britain and France grabbed nearly [all of Africa].”
The story also says a third of the “land grab” stories are false. Of the remaining, it turns out that China or Chinese firms have acquired only four percent of the land they were accused of grabbing.
So you are spreading fake news, Russ.
… which is driving scores of millions of Africans off their land to starve and die of epidemics in shantytowns (and outright exterminating many indigenous tribes)
More fake news? Even if it were happening, was that caused by China or the U.S.?
then you are not only the ultimate master of Orwellism, but vile beyond measure
That’s you, Russ. And no thanks for spreading fake news.

Posted by: Cyril | Dec 12 2018 21:00 utc | 219

Spreading fake news? You’re the one whose source is the Washington Post.
My sources, as I cited earlier, are actual farmers, actual grassroots organizations fighting for food sovereignty. Your source is a corporate Goebbels sheet.
Between the oligarchs (both US and Chinese) and the people, we see which side you’re on.

Posted by: Russ | Dec 12 2018 21:40 utc | 221

RE: Posted by: Cyril | Dec 12, 2018 4:40:03 PM | 222
Europe built infrastructure in Africa too. Because we needed it to extract those resources. China is lending Africa the money so Africa can pay China for the infrastructure, and the African people will get to pay it back with hard labor extracting resources for pennies and living day-to-day while the African oligarchs live luxurious lives. This is the way the game is played. Nobody does anything without a profit margin.
When it comes to land-grabbing… China is not importing agricultural products from Africa as much as they are importing raw mineral resources which they use in manufacturing products for the West. This enables them to use the same mechanisms as the United States and Europe used to wildly enrich themselves after slavery ‘ended’. The Chinese now serve the consumer markets and are using that globalist soft power to influence the world (through money, media, and manufacturing – just like the United States and Europe).
If you consider this to be a boon to them – including what they’re doing in Africa – then you are a supporter of globalism. Yes, you can make the argument there is less straight-up brutality involved. This has been the way of the world with increased media presence. In the past, the globalists would literally enslave people (also with the help of local oligarchs) or carpet & fire bomb places (look at Japan & Dresden in the 40s, North Korea in the 50s, Vietnam in the 60s, etc). While nowadays, the globalists are ‘more limited’ to using the power of banking, targeted drones and terrorists proxies and such to get the job done.
China has yet to use drones or terrorists, but they are using banks. They’re also gathering data (the new oil) just like the Western globalists. They’re undoubtedly building AI in an attempt to rule the new world. It is unfortunately the nature of society: regular entrepreneurial & inventive people work to advance the world, while the globalists fund & utilize everything they can get their grubby little paws on in order to gather power created by that entrepreneurial spirit to themselves.
I imagine that before the turn of the century, the terrorists and drones of NATO will effectively be replaced with a combination of AI, data and (social) credit in order to keep people in line & subservient. It might take another world war (which could already be underway in the form of hacking and propaganda) to achieve this new power structure, but we’re well underway. China is not the enemy of globalists, they’re a partner. If you see globalists raging against China, it’s part of a pretense to rile up people. Just like before (with WW1 and WW2), the globalists will orchestrate people to hate some foreign countries when they need that to happen, while at the same time funding those armies, etc.

Posted by: flayer | Dec 13 2018 0:21 utc | 223

> EIB
Indeed, it’s as I said. China is taking the same modern approach to globalism as Europe is these days. Things change over time. Straight up taking people as slaves and colonialism as the Europeans did is mostly a thing of the past (exceptions exist), it’s global migration and wage slavery (based on loans) now. It is also only a matter of time until China begins utilizing and selling their mass manufactured military drones. And globalism continues marching on…

Posted by: flayer | Dec 13 2018 4:00 utc | 225

If you’re genuinely suggesting that the BRI is for the benefit of the world rather than for China, I’ve got a seat on a merchant ship to sell you. Don’t worry, the chains are just there to keep you safe.
There’s no talking to you. I’m just going to leave this here and then depart from this monstrous thread:
台湾是一个独立的国家
钓鱼岛是日本的
西沙群岛是越南的
南沙群岛是菲律宾的
长白山是韩国的
藏南是印度的
达赖喇嘛万岁
东突厥斯坦会取得独立

Posted by: flayer | Dec 13 2018 5:32 utc | 227

There is a downtrend of participants in the recent demonstrations and an uptrend of arrests.
192.168.0.1

Posted by: Tomas | Dec 13 2018 7:37 utc | 229

Cyril, so your favorite source is the Washington Post, and your second source is a think tank funded by seed oligopolist Limagrain? (Don’t bother with propaganda about them being a “cooperative”. They’re a globalized corporation which sells GM seed for industrial commodity farming. Right up your alley, the way you want to partition Africa between Chinese corporations and the likes of Monsanto and Cargill.)
Really, I don’t know why a corporate troll like you is bothering here. By now I can only assume you’re a paid China bot or something similar.
Your betray your real agenda here @222:
“China is building infrastructure all over Africa — roads, trains, power plants, bridges, electrical grids, etc etc.”
All the things which have proven so horrifically destructive of humanity and the Earth and benefitted no one but elites. And Africa is your last frontier for this power and capital accumulation, and you’ll do all you can to perpetrate one last industrial massacre.
That must also be why I’ve seen you denying the climate crisis. Nothing can get in the way of profit and power for your corporate masters, whether they reside in China or the US, right?
Why don’t you and the rest of the parasite scum die and get off the planet already?

Posted by: Russ | Dec 13 2018 7:45 utc | 231

4/ Because you appear to be unaware-“The United States would immediately and without hesitation use it a pretext for war”- that the US government never attacks countries able to defend themselves, except by sponsoring terrorists as among the Uighurs. And that war has been going on for years.
Posted by: bevin | Dec 11, 2018 1:53:19 PM | 200
Yes.
In the early post-9/11 days of the FWOT a mouthpiece for the Exceptional Nation blustered about the occasional necessity to…
“grab some crappy little country and smash it against the wall to show them who’s boss”
Google can’t find a source for that rant, and I can’t remember who it was, so the wording isn’t sufficiently precise to jog Google’s memory. However, my version personifies the cowardice portrayed therein.
i.e. there are smarter ways to project unassailable power (if such a thing exists).

Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | Dec 13 2018 17:31 utc | 233

@flayer | Dec 13, 2018 2:45:04 AM | 232
I thought you were gone; I almost missed your comment.
Oh, and what am I, Cyril?
I’ll let your rabid anti-China propaganda speak for itself.
I support people’s independence everywhere. From Crimea to Ukraine – both East and West. From Texas to California, Taiwan and Kashmir. I don’t care who it is as long as they’re disobeying some State claims somewhere. If some guy in Arizona wants to start his own State then more power to him, I say.
And yet you chose to mention only anti-China topics in #229.
What I don’t support is foreign interference by States. I don’t support the US interfering in Ukraine. I don’t support Russia interfering in Ukraine. I don’t support the US or China interfering in Taiwan or Syria or Australia or anywhere else.
Fine if true.
Also, the notion that African countries need “money” at all simply to build infrastructure in their own countries is ridiculous. All they should need is local resources, which I’m inclined to believe they have plenty.
If the West stays out, the Africans could probably develop themselves in peace.
But I doubt the West will ever cease looting Africa, until they are forced to stop. The reality is that they need China. The Europe-Africa Infrastructure Trust Fund is very proud of investing $70 million a year in the big continent. That is laughably small; it is probably what China puts into Africa in a month.
And there is a very good chance that the Chinese will not break even. And they probably know it. Yet they continue to help the Africans, probably because the Chinese were just as poor a few decades ago, and they know how it feels. China’s involvement in Africa is on an entirely different level than the West.

Posted by: Cyril | Dec 13 2018 18:17 utc | 235

@Russ | Dec 13, 2018 1:44:54 PM | 238
Two “independent sources”, both neoliberal globalist, both owned by oligarchs, both applying globalist “methodology”. IOW one source completely dependent on the global elite NWO.
The point is, they used completely different methodology to debunk your propaganda. China is not “land grabbing” as you so falsely claimed.
But since you prefer to impose your lies on the world, here’s another article:

We look at the issue of land grabbing by China based on the existing literature. The literature review shows that there is nothing new to using land in other countries. In the empirical part it turns out that China is only number 19 in Africa and that it does not make sense to single it out.

And yet another one, this time from Sweden:

… the Chinese agriculture technological demonstration farms produce mostly for the local market.
There is widespread misreporting on Chinese agricultural land acquisitions in Africa, hence there is a pressing need for reliable data and for claims of “land-grabbing” to be verified by authoritative sources.

“Misreporting” is a nice way to say what you are doing: you’re flat out lying about China’s alleged land grabs.
How does it feel to be a member of an Orwellian Ministry of Truth?
I’d have no idea, but since you were born there and have spent your life, you tell me.
I’ve certainly no relationship with the Orwellian Ministry of Truth, I just know a liar when I see him spouting lies.

Posted by: Cyril | Dec 13 2018 21:38 utc | 237