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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.

  • SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]M19•2 years ago

    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.

    • BynarsAreOk [none/use name]13•2 years ago

      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.

      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.

      • SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]M7•2 years ago

        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?

        In Asia, the size of a country's foreign reserves is a source of pride. No conversation on economics is possible without someone boasting about how large their nation's hoard of foreign currency is.

        But the U.S. Treasury gave Asia’s bankers a rude awakening when it cut off access to about half of Russia’s $630 billion in reserves held in foreign banks, an action that should force Asian central bankers to re-evaluate their reserve holding strategy, and how that connects with their country's foreign policy.

        Any Asian central banker would likely tell you that the best protection against a potential economic or political crisis is their formidable holdings of foreign reserves—mostly in dollars, but increasingly in the Chinese yuan as well.

        Asian countries have the world’s largest holdings of dollar reserves, a legacy of the 1997 Asian financial crisis where policymakers fretted about dollar shortages and free-falling local currencies. In reserve holdings, China towers above them all with a cash pile above $3 trillion but peers in the region have also been formidable accumulators, predominantly in the US dollar. They include Japan ($1.4 trillion), Singapore ($426 billion), India ($604 billion), and Taiwan ($550 billion).

        ...

        Some commentators have even pronounced the war to be a distant conflict with few direct implications for the region. ... But the Asian commentariat is wrong on the one metric that really matters to the region: economics. The U.S. and Europe have deployed tools of economic warfare—crippling sanctions that cut Russia’s financial system from the dollar-based global economy. Tools like these, regardless of who wields them, will have wide ramifications for Asia, a region even more connected with the world than fossil-fuel-addled Russia. More trade and investment flows into and out of Asia—even if you exclude China—than any other region in the world.

        In any future conflict, will the region be forced to take sides? If tensions between the U.S. and China really accelerate, what will Asia do—and will it be ready to incur the wrath of either the U.S. or China in the process? ... While Asian leaders may declare that they don’t wish to take sides in a future U.S.-China conflict, sitting on the fence could compromise their ability to access hundreds of billions of dollars in reserve holdings. That would test the longstanding Asian inclination to stay neutral.