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The MoA Week In Review – OT 2021-068
Last week's posts at Moon of Alabama:
The Taliban are now near Rokheh.
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Other issues:
Ziofacism:
Fake incidents in Syria:
Covid-19:
Use as open thread …
‘It Will Divide Europe’: NATO Chief Fumes Over Concept of European Army
How should we view rising tough voices against China in Europe: Global Times editorial
With the US becoming a less reliable ally, Britain needs to make friends in Europe
I remember two decades ago there was a lot of hype with the creation of the Euro. It was clearly and unequivocally expected that the European Union would become a superpower on par with the USA in some decades. The EU was China before China was China (with the difference there was enthusiasm about the fact in the West).
After one decade of a somewhat promising start (but below the hype), it became clear there was no chance the EU would ever come even close to the USA in terms of geopolitical power. The watershed moment came in the 2008 crisis, where it suffered more than the USA itself: it was clear it was a province of the American Empire, not an equal partner. The last nail on the EU’s coffin came with Greece’s collapse of 2011 (a continuation of the fallout of the 2008 crisis), which put to rest any serious imperialist ambitions of Germany. Brexit (2016) represented the collapse of the EU in itself, materialized in concrete terms (loss of a member, loss of population and territory to the American Empire).
The situation in Europe continues to deteriorate. My opinion is that the EU (European Peninsula) will tend to become more and more like SE Asia: a geopolitically important/strategic area with a lot of leverage, but peripheral nonetheless; as a result, we should expect a correspondent shift of style in European foreign policy: from an ambitious (imperial) one to a “throw one superpower against the other in order to achieve balance and stability in the region” one, as is already traditional in SE Asia.
Europe will tend to be increasingly thorn in half by the one-and-a-half superpowers, USA and China (I still don’t consider China to be a true superpower yet, it is still a 3rd World country at heart, but it can get there if it continues to follow the socialist path).
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More Western Marxist/Social-democrat masturbation, this time brought by the one an only The Nation:
What’s Left of Communism in China? Capitalists, once detested, are now welcomed into the Chinese Communist Party. by Jérôme Doyon
Those “edgy” post-2008 Western leftists/socialists think they’re cool with their “China is to our right” speeches, but this is actually old news: when the Bolsheviks existed and did the Revolution in Russia, they were completely despised and mocked by the German Social-Democrats. The Bolsheviks were considered to be butchers of Marx, an oriental version (therefore a bastardization) of Marxism. They considered Lenin a freak, a chimera from the mixture of Marxism with the backwards condition of feudal Russia. It has vanished from History, but Bolshevism was the original “Socialism with ________ characteristics” (in this case, Russian), it was considered an intrinsically Russian interpretation of Marx. Russians were not even considered to be Western by the German Social-Democrats (and French, and British, etc. etc.), to them, the Russians (Bolsheviks) were essentially monkeys; Bolshevism being an abortion of Marxism.
It would be only after 1923 – after the revolution attempts in the West failed spectacularly – that Comintern (Third International) would consolidate itself and the Russian model would be considered as the “universal” formula of Marxism/Communism. But leftist/Marxist Westerners like to erase the first two decades of the 20th Century so they can keep proselytizing to fascinated rich college students and selling books while enjoying their cushy university jobs.
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World Insights: U.S. poorer, more militarized, more polarized 20 years after 9/11 attacks, say scholars
Not gonna lie: the 21st Century has not been kind to the American Empire so far.
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Good News: There’s a Labor Shortage.
Fool’s Gold. This “aggregate demand” circular logic is Keynesian propaganda, and has no empirical backing.
Yes, when labor shortage is sudden (e.g. during a plague, as is the case now), wages go up (by how much, it depends on a myriad of factors, specially the scale of the shortage). But, overtime, wages tend to stagnate and then get depressed in purchase power terms – even when the labor shortage increases. That’s the case of Japan, which has essentially full employment for decades now but see wages actually decreasing in purchase power terms.
This happens because time is a true factor in any social system, specially capitalism. When things happen slowly and gradually, capitalism gains power of prediction, which allows it to perfectly adapt to the situation through the simple process of insurance and passing the extra costs to the final consumer. In the labor market, that means increased automation: the capitalist senses those workers are not coming back, so he has time to automate, even if slowly and gradually.
Time and frequency is extremely important in capitalism. A natural catastrophe is only a natural catastrophe for capitalism when it is not predicted; when it is predicted, it becomes a feature, part of the “cost of production”.
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Is Zelensky the new Saakashvili? Western armchair revolutionaries are now making the same mistake in Ukraine they did in Georgia
My opinion is that Ukraine has become Afghanistan but with an accelerated metabolism. The Ukrainians have managed to do in five years what it took the Afghani 30 years.
Russia will not allow that giant turd from the Black Sea to prosper in its shady and crazy plans.
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West to hoard 1.2bn doses of spare vaccines by year’s end, analysis says, as pressure mounts to share with poor & outdo China
You know how the great empires fall: pressure from without, pressure from within, at the same time.
Europe has barely 50% of its adult population fully vaccinated; USA has just reached 70%. They’re now having to stop vaccinating their own peoples to try to compete with China in the “vaccine diplomacy” wars.
Meanwhile, the Delta variant will continue to devastate the West’s economy.
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New take on the fall of the USSR:
Khasbulatov named the real culprit of the collapse of the USSR
Khasbulatov blames the food shortages caused by the Perestroika for the fall of the USSR.
He has a point: statistically, food shortages (famines) are the main cause for revolutions, revolts, collapses et al. It was an acute food shortage followed by a famine that caused the French Revolution, just to give an example.
Posted by: vk | Sep 5 2021 15:55 utc | 6
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