Links and Stuff
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can, thank you.
Resources For Understanding The War Beyond The Bulletins
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map, who is an independent youtuber with a mostly neutral viewpoint.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have good analysis (though also a couple bad takes here and there)
Understanding War and the Saker: neo-conservative sources but their reporting of the war (so far) seems to line up with reality better than most liberal sources.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict and, unlike most western analysts, has some degree of understanding on how war works. He is a reactionary, however.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent journalist reporting in the Ukrainian warzones.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Yesterday's discussion post.
It's interesting that the West's economies are extraordinarily fragile right now. If China wanted to they alone could bring the West to its knees.
Seems like a good time to make big moves. Goes against their long-term plans for sure. But things happen, plans change.
I feel like any economy which isn't some combination of being self-sufficient and in a bloc is weak. China isn't really either of those things, which is why the leadership is rather scared shitless that they have something like $3 trillion in foreign reserves that could be seized, similarly to Russia, and is trying to work out what to do. As well as efforts to either become more self-sufficient or make incredibly close ties with Russia (a massive commodity supplier) and try and create its own bloc via the BRI and BRICS. Of course, having considerable state control over your industries helps that immensely. But I think it'll be a while (don't ask me to quantify that because I don't know) before they can really exert economic power in the same way that the US can and does, because they're working from a place of disadvantage right now when compared to the combined force of the West.
The West in general has depended on globalization and the exploitation and cheap labour of people in other countries, and so hasn't needed to become self-sufficient. I don't know whether this crisis has been a kick up the ass for them, or if they'll really just switch out Russia as a fuel source for Africa and the Middle East instead and then call it a job well done. As I've been trying to cover in these updates, there's also a scramble for resources like lithium and rare earth elements. China by itself supplies the majority (~80%) of REEs to the planet even though they only have about a third of the known reserves. Most of the rest of these reserves are found in Vietnam, Brazil, India, and Russia. Whereas lithium, outside of South America, is mainly produced in Australia - the combined lithium potential of South America is extraordinary, though. And demand for lithium is gonna go up massively as time goes by.
So I think on a broad timescale, China's plan (not to pretend I know any better than China's government, of course) should be to unify basically every country outside of the West under a single banner and thus strangle the West of the resources it needs for its capitalist growth, causing the economic system to shudder to a halt and then, well, revolution, hopefully. And the BRI is, I hope, a method of building up countries exploited by the West to the point where they can really start to saw through their shackles, as the West will hold onto them at all costs and will never let them go.
We had this discussion back in March with the Michael Hudson posts about the new multipolar world. Taking Russia's foreign reserves was a historical blunder nobody could ever expect because it goes against all the principles of the US order up to now.
Even what happened with Venezuela and Afghanistan would never be taken as a serious warning that the US would do this to another superpower. Like it or not both of those countries are third world backwaters.
You are right about China. They are not ready. But I would give them some credit that the US collapsing their own dollar hegemony in 2022 was like a less than 1% chance nobody could predict this. I believe China would eventually move to deal with this foreign reserve issue in the long term and they were simply stunned unprepared.
In the past holding such a huge amount of US treasury bonds would be a huge geopolitical asset. Today it is a huge liability.
I'm reminded of this article from April 22nd:
The West froze Russia’s foreign reserves. Should Asia—with its even larger dollar hoard—be worried?
...
I try not to get too into that line of thought tbh, it just ends up feeling like copium. China has their own shit, and they've made it very very clear that is mutual economic development and multipolar non interventionism. they're fine to sell ass loads to the EU or even America. and I just do not see that changing any time soon, because although Xi has a lot of influence the guy is not a god emperor whos whims change mass economic policy and global outlook like that, and a lot of the party like how things are and want to keep that on track especially in a time of economic uncertainty where although China is doing well there's no need to risk that
Some might even say, "There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen." :lenin-da: