abcnews | On Saturday, following
the meeting, the junta’s spokesperson, Col. Maj. Amadou Abdramane, said
U.S. flights over Niger’s territory in recent weeks were illegal.
Meanwhile, Insa Garba Saidou, a local activist who assists Niger’s
military rulers with their communications, criticized U.S. efforts to
force the junta to pick between strategic partners.
“The American bases and civilian personnel cannot stay on Nigerien soil any longer,” he told The Associated Press.
Singh
said the U.S. was aware of the March 16 statement “announcing the end
of the status of forces agreement between Niger and the United States.
We are working through diplomatic channels to seek clarification. These
are ongoing discussions and we don't have more to share at this time.”
State Department spokesman Vedant Patel said the discussions were prompted by Niger's “trajectory."
“We
are in touch with transition authorities to seek clarification of their
comments and discuss additional next steps,” Patel said.
The junta has largely
been in control in Niger since July when mutinous soldiers ousted the
country’s democratically elected president and months later asked French
forces to leave.
The
U.S. military still had some 650 troops working in Niger in December,
largely consolidated at a base farther away from Niamey, Niger's
capital. Singh said the total number of personnel still in country,
including civilians and contractors, is roughly 1,000.
The
Niger base is critical for U.S. counterterrorism operations in the
Sahel and has been used for both manned and unmanned surveillance
operations, although Singh said the only drone flights being currently
conducted are for force protection.
In the Sahel the U.S. has also supported local ground troops, including
accompanying them on missions. However, such accompanied missions have
been scaled back since U.S. troops were killed in a joint operation in
Niger in 2017.
SCF | Russian President Vladimir Putin was spot-on this week in his observation about why France’s Emmanuel Macron is strutting around and mouthing off about war in Ukraine. Putin remarked in an interview that Macron’s wanton warmongering over Ukraine was borne out of resentment due to the spectacular loss of France’s standing in Africa. One after another, France’s former colonial countries have told Paris in no uncertain terms to get out of their internal affairs. Since 2020 and the coup in Mali, there has been immense political upheaval on the continent, particularly in West and Central Africa, stretching from the vast Sahel region down to the equator. At least seven nations have undergone coups or government changes against Francophone rulers. They include Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad, Niger, Central African Republic, Gabon, and Guinea. The continent-wide changes have come as a political earthquake to France. The new African governments have adamantly rejected old-style French patronage and have asserted a newfound national independence.
Paris has had to recall unwanted ambassadors, shut down military bases, and withdraw thousands of troops. Where to put these French troops? In Ukraine, pitted against Russia? Popular sentiment across Africa is exasperated with and repudiating “Francafrique” corruption. Meanwhile, with an unmistakable end-of-era sense, French media have lamented “France’s shrinking footprint in Africa.” A former diplomat summed up the momentous geopolitical shift thus: “The deep trend confirms itself. Our military presence is no longer accepted. We need to totally rethink our relationship with Africa. We have been kicked out of Africa. We need to depart from other countries before we are told to.” Africa analysts are now watching two key countries closely. They are Senegal and Ivory Coast. Both are currently governed by pro-France presidents but the rising anti-French political tide is putting those incumbents at risk of either a coup or electoral ouster.
The blow to the French political elite cannot be overstated. The loss of status in its former colonies is conflating multiple crises tantamount to the traumatic loss of Algeria back in the early 1960s. Financially, for decades after handing over nominal independence to African nations, Paris continued to exploit these countries through control of currencies and their prodigious natural resources. Most of France’s electricity, for example, is generated from uranium ore mined in Africa – and obtained like most other African resources for a pittance. The system of neocolonial suzerainty was typically sustained by France bribing local corrupt regimes to do its bidding and offering security guarantees from the continuance of French military bases. Not for nothing did Paris think of itself as the African Gendarme.
One of the extraordinary curiosities of this neocolonial arrangement was that African nations were compelled to deposit their gold treasuries in France’s central bank. Any African nation trying to resist the neocolonial vassalage was liable to be attacked militarily through counter-coups, or its nationalist leaders were assassinated like Thomas Sankara in 1987, who was known as “Africa’s Che Guevara”. Nevertheless, the halcyon days of France’s dominance over its former colonies are over. African nations are discovering a new sense of independence and purpose, as well as solidarity to help each other fend off pressure from France to reinstate the status quo ante. The collapse of France’s status in Africa is perceived by the French establishment as a grievous loss in presumed global power.
No French politician can feel more aggrieved than President Emmanuel Macron. Macron imagines himself to be on a mission to restore “France’s greatness”. He seems to harbor fantasies of also leading the rest of Europe under the tutelage of Paris. It was Macron who proclaimed one of his grand objectives as achieving a reset in Franco-African relations, one which would renew continental respect for Paris and promote French strategic interests. How embarrassing for Macron that a whole spate of African nations are asserting that they no longer want to have anything to do with the old colonial power. Chagrin indeed.
FAIR | The United States is on the verge of a constitutional crisis, one
that enlivens the nationalist fervor of Trump America and that centers
on a violent, racist closed-border policy.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (NBC, 1/14/24):
“The only thing we are not doing is we’re not shooting people who come
across the border, because, of course, the Biden administration would
charge us with murder.”
In January, the Supreme Court,
with a five-vote majority that included both Republican and Democratic
appointees, ruled that federal agents can “remove the razor wire that
Texas state officials have set up along some sections of the US/Mexico
border” to make immigration more dangerous (CBS, 1/23/24). The state’s extreme border policy is not merely immoral as an idea, but has proven to be deadly and torturous in practice (USA Today, 8/3/23; NBC, 1/14/24; Texas Observer, 1/17/24).
In a statement (1/22/24),
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton decried the decision, saying that it
“allows Biden to continue his illegal effort to aid the foreign invasion
of America.” Paxton, a Republican, vowed that the “fight is not over,
and I look forward to defending our state’s sovereignty.”
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, also a Republican, “is doubling down, blocking the agents from entering the area,” the PBS NewsHour (1/25/24) reported. PBS
quoted Abbott declaring that the state’s constitutional authority is
“the supreme law of the land and supersedes any federal statutes to the
contrary.”
University of Texas law professor Stephen Vladeck (Houston Chronicle, 1/26/24) observed that Abbott’s position “has eerie parallels to arguments advanced by Southerners during the Antebellum era.”
For
a great many people, a Southern state invoking its “sovereignty” over
the federal government in defense of violent and inhumane policing of
non-white people sounds eerily familiar to the foundation of the
nation’s first civil war. And 25 other states are supporting Texas in
defying the Supreme Court (USA Today, 1/26/24), although none of them are states that border Mexico.
Texas media are sounding the alarm about this conflict. The Texas Tribune (1/25/24):
From
the Texas House to former President Donald Trump, Republicans across
the country are rallying behind Gov. Greg Abbott’s legal standoff with
the federal government at the southern border, intensifying concerns
about a constitutional crisis amid an ongoing dispute with the Biden
administration.
Houston public media KUHF (1/24/24)
said this “could be the beginning of a constitutional crisis.”
University of Texas law professor Stephen Vladeck said in an op-ed in
the Houston Chronicle (1/26/24) that Abbott’s position is a “dangerous misreading” of the Constitution.
Other legal scholars are watching with concern. Erwin Chemerinsky,
dean of the law school of the University of California at Berkeley,
told FAIR, “I think that this is reminiscent of Southern governors
disobeying the Supreme Court’s desegregation decisions.” He added, “I
agree that it is a constitutional crisis in the sense that this is a
challenge to a basic element of the Constitution: the supremacy of
federal law over state law.”
But the New York Times has not covered the issue since the Supreme Court decision came down (1/21/24). The AP (1/27/24)
framed the story around Donald Trump, saying the former president
“lavished praise” on the governor “for not allowing the Biden
administration entry to remove razor wire in a popular corridor for
migrants illegally entering the US.” The Washington Post (1/26/24) did show right-wing politicians and pundits were using the standoff to grandstand about a new civil war. NPR (1/22/24) covered the Supreme Court case, but has fallen behind on the aftermath.
The “legal expert” quoted in Fox News‘ headline (1/25/24) works for America First Legal, a group founded by white nationalist Stephen Miller to “oppose the radical left’s anti-jobs, anti-freedom, anti-faith, anti-borders, anti-police, and anti-American crusade.”
Meanwhile, Fox News (1/25/24, 1/25/24, 1/27/24)
has given Texas extensive and favorable coverage of its feud with the
White House, citing its own legal sources (from America First Legal and
the Edwin Meese III Center—1/25/24) saying that Texas was in the right and the high court was in the wrong.
Breitbart celebrated Abbott’s defiance as a states’ rights revolution, with a series of articles labeled “border showdown” (1/24/24, 1/24/24, 1/24/24, 1/25/24, 1/28/24) and several others about Republican governors standing with Texas in solidarity (1/26/24, 1/28/24).
The white nationalist publication American Renaissance (1/25/24)
stood with Abbott but lowered the temperature, saying that it is
“unclear whether this could cause a constitutional crisis, but the
optics are not great for the White House in an election year.” “This
will not be a ‘Civil War’ or anything close to it unless someone on the
ground wildly miscalculates by firing on the Texas National Guard,” the
openly racist outlet asserted. Rather, the publication saw Abbott as
recentering the immigration debate as a way to weaken President Joe
Biden’s reelection chances. “We couldn’t hope for a better start to the
election-year campaign,” it said.
The National Review (1/28/24)
admitted that Abbott is probably wrong on the constitutional question.
Nevertheless, it called him the “MVP of border hawks” for orchestrating a
public relations coup by forcing the federal government’s hand:
Abbott
has managed to get the federal government in the position of actually
removing physical barriers to illegal immigration at the border and
insisting that it is imperative that it be permitted to continue doing
so. This alone is a PR debacle for the administration, but it comes in a
controversy—with its fraught legal and constitutional implications—that
will garner massive attention out of proportion to its practical
importance.
This is impressive by any measure.
The support
of Republican states for Abbott elevates the matter further, but this
also is a relatively small thing. The backing for Abbott is entirely
rhetorical at this point and perhaps not very serious on the part of
some Republican governors. It nonetheless serves to elevate a conflict
over security on a small part of the border into what feels like a
larger confrontation between all of Red America and the federal
government.
twitter | If you ACTUALLY want to fight antisemitism, I am absolutely convinced that your foremost priority right now should be to not let the Netanyahu government and his coalition of far right extremists define Jewish identity.
This is the real battle against antisemitism right now. Anecdotally all the people I see on X who are starting to veer into antisemitic territory - and I do agree there are some - have clearly been led to believe that the absolute psychopaths currently leading the Israeli government define what Jews are.
And it's clearly not helping that many Western governments are playing along the utterly toxic game of the Israeli government to try to define antisemitism as opposition to their policies... when these policies obviously look so horribly wrong to an overwhelming majority of the world's population. What do you think the common man thinks when he's told he's an antisemite if he opposes Israel making an absolute mockery of humanitarian law? At best the notion of antisemitism loses all its meaning to him, and at worst he may even embrace it...
Thankfully most people are still smart enough to make the distinction and not to take the antisemitism accusations by the Israeli government at face value... but it is dangerous territory. The whole world is absolutely appalled - and rightly so - by what Israel is doing in Gaza. It is criminally short-sighted for the Israeli government to insist so much that their actions are done in the name of all Jewish people, and such a narrative should be resolutely opposed.
strategic-culture | American President Joe Biden likes to talk about “inflexion points”
when he is lecturing about world affairs and the supposed superiority of
the United States. This year is indeed an inflexion point.
It was the year that the entire world saw the truly hideous and criminal nature of U.S. power.
Washington’s fueling of the futile conflict in Ukraine and the
despicable slaughter in Gaza is a wake-up call for the entire world. The
United States stands barefaced and grotesque as the primary purveyor of
war. There can be no doubt about that. For many it is shocking,
scandalous and frightening.
Tragically, it seems, for the world, every year’s end is an occasion
to witness and lament conflicts, wars and suffering over the preceding
12 months. Often the causes of wars and suffering are seemingly
unfathomable.
However, this year seems to be unique. The year ends with a
horrendous massacre in Gaza that is unprecedented and perpetrated by
Israel with the full support of the United States. The scale of
deliberate mass killing in Gaza makes it a genocide. The fact that this
abomination is occurring at Christmas time when the world is supposed to
celebrate the divine birth of Jesus Christ – the Prince of Peace – in
the very place where he was born some 2,000 years ago makes the
abomination all the more profane and damning.
What is particularly wretched is that the heinous destruction of
children is happening in full view of the world. There is no remorse or
pretence. It is full-blown premeditated murder done with cruelty and
sickening impunity.
Virtually the whole world is horrified by the devastating, relentless
violence and absolute violation of international law. The butchery by
the Israeli regime cannot in any way be rationalized by the previous
attack on Israel by Palestinian militants on October 7. Those killings
by Hamas have been cynically used as a pretext for the subsequent and
ongoing annihilation of Palestinian civilians.
This genocide could not happen without the crucial support of the
United States for the Israeli regime. Financially, militarily and
diplomatically, Washington is sponsoring the horror in Gaza as well as
the Occupied West Bank.
This week saw the U.S. once again obstructing calls at the United
Nations for a ceasefire and the urgent supply of humanitarian aid to
more than two million people. The World Food Program has declared a
catastrophic famine in the coastal enclave after more than 70 days of
bombing and blockade by the Israeli regime. More than 20,000 people –
mainly women and children – have been slaughtered with up to 7,000 more
missing, presumably dead. Israeli troops are carrying out mass
executions of terrified and traumatized human beings, according to UN
rights monitors.
The United States is arming Israel to the hilt and enabling it. U.S.
President Joe Biden has pointedly refused to join international demands
for a ceasefire. The United Nations has voted by an overwhelming
majority for a cessation of the violence. Washington has repeatedly
rejected the world’s pleas because the Biden administration is obscenely
amplifying Israeli lies and distortions. “Unwavering, unshakable
support” is how the White House arrogantly boasts about it without a
hint of shame that it is self-indicting.
Tens of thousands of tonnes of munitions have been flown to Israel to
carry out “indiscriminate bombing” (Biden’s own admission). One-tonne
bunker-buster bombs have been dropped deliberately on refugee camps and
hospitals. And still, the Pentagon shamelessly refuses to impose any red
lines on the use of its munitions.
This genocide has Israeli fingers on the triggers but it is
ultimately an American-sponsored genocide. Based on Nuremberg
principles, Joe Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu would be both in the dock,
accompanied by Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Lloyd Austin and their
counterparts in Tel Aviv.
If there were previous international doubts about Washington’s systematic criminality, the whole world knows for certain now.
pacemaker | I've been waiting for today, knowing it was pre-planned and coming. Today in Riyadh at the China-Arab Summit President Xi of China formally invited the Arab nations to trade oil and gas in yuan on the Shanghai Exchange. Now the way diplomacy works (because it seems to have been forgotten in the West) is that Xi would not have made the invitation unless all the Arab states gathered in Riyadh - and particularly Saudi Arabia as host - had already agreed as a matter of joint policy to take action accordingly. Oil and gas will price in Shanghai and in yuan, breaking the dollar monopoly the US has imposed and enforced since 1974. Since the dollar-for-oil monopoly was the lynchpin of Bretton Woods II stability, it follows Bretton Woods II ended today.
To
refresh memories, President Nixon unilaterally repudiated the US treaty
obligation under the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement to redeem dollars for
gold in 1972. The chaos in foreign exchange markets that followed led
to instability, made worse with the inflationary OPEC oil embargo of
1973-74.
In July 1974 the US Treasury Secretary William Simon and US Secretary
of State Henry Kissinger made a top-secret flight to Riyadh to meet
King Fahd. They offered a deal: sell Saudi oil exclusively for US
dollars and buy US Treasuries with the proceeds, or we kill you, your
entire family, and occupy the oil fields with the US military. Unsurprisingly, they left with a secret agreement.
The
same deal was more or less extended to all of OPEC. Leaders like Saddam
Hussein of Iraq and Muammar Gaddafi of Libya who strayed from the US
dollar were killed, their countries destroyed and destablilsed, as an
example to others. Iran, Syria, and Venezuela have resisted more
successfully, but have been badly destabilised by US occupation, oil
theft, attempted coups, attempted assassinations, and economic
sanctions.
So today marks a big and admirably brave shift. After sending all the
weaponry it could spare to Ukraine all year, ending oil and gas trade
with Russia under sanctions, weakening allies with surging inflation,
and depleting the Strategic Petroleum Reserve of a record amount of oil
to blunt inflation before the midterm elections, the US is not in an
ideal position to launch wars in every Arab state at once. In fact, it
probably can't launch a war or coup even in Saudi Arabia because Saudi
Arabia will have prepared and provided for that risk. In any event, a
new war in the Middle East would make the inflationary shock of the
Ukraine war pale in comparison.
Signs of a shift have been in the wind all year. The fist bump and
low-key reception of President Biden compares poorly to the lavish state
reception of President Xi. Then Biden's attempt to get GCC states to
sanction Russia was unanimously rejected.
And
OPEC's outright refusal to defer oil production cuts until after the
American midterm elections was a further sign Saudi and OPEC+ no longer
take orders from Washington. Saudi took the unusual step of officially
rejecting the US request in public.
When
a presidential state visit by Xi to Saudi began leaking in the fall I
began to watch for confirmatory signs of OPEC moving East. There were
quite a few, but nothing as momentous as the extravagant welcome for
President Xi to Riyadh and the China-Arab Summit. President Xi and King
Salman signed a 30-year Strategic Partnership Agreement for cooperation
on virtually all forward economic plans yesterday: energy, telecoms,
investment, trade, infrastructure, regional development, Belt & Road
Initiative, etc. Significantly, the Agreement bars interference in
domestic affairs by either nation, a principle China has urged widely
for many years.
off-guardian | The first group of privatizations occurred in the first fascist nation, Italy, in the 1920s; and the second group of privatizations occurred in the second fascist nation,
Germany, in the 1930s. Privatizations started under Mussolini, and then
were instituted under Hitler. That got the fascist ball rolling; and,
after a few decades of hiatus in the wake of fascism’s embarrassing
supposed defeat in WW II, it resurfaced and then surged yet again after
1970, when fascist forces in the global aristocracy, such as via the
CIA, IMF, Bilderberg group, and Trilateral Commission, imposed the
global reign of the world’s main private holders of bonds and of stocks:
the world’s aristocrats are taking on an increasing percentage of what
were previously public assets.
Privatizations, after starting in fascisms during the pre-WWII years,
resumed again in the 1970s under the fascist Chilean leader Augusto
Pinochet; and in the 1980s under the fascist British leader Margaret
Thatcher (a passionate supporter of apartheid in South Africa) and also
under the smiling fascist American leader Ronald Reagan (who followed
the prior success of Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” of White
domination in the by-then resurgent-conservative U.S., and might even be
said to have been America’s first fully fascist President); and in the
1990s under several fascist (formerly communist) leaders throughout the
former Soviet Union, under the guidance of Harvard University’s fascist economics department,
which transferred control from the former nomenklatura, to the new
(Western-dependent) “oligarchs,” all under the virtual guidance of its
former head, Lawrence Summers, who then was serving as the World Bank
President.
Mussolini was the man-of-the-future, but — after Franklin Delano
Roosevelt died, and finally Thatcher and Reagan and other
‘free-marketeers’ came into office — Mussolini’s “future” has
increasingly become our own “now”: the Axis Powers’ ideology has
actually been winning in the post-WW-II world. Only, this time, it’s
called instead by such names as “libertarianism” or “neo-liberalism,” no
longer “fascism,” so that only the true-believing fascists, the
aristocrats, will even know that it’s actually fascism. It’s their Big
Con. It’s their Big Lie. Just renaming fascism as “libertarianism” or
“neo-liberalism,” has fooled the masses to think that it’s
pro-democratic. “Capitalism” has thus come to be re-defined to refer to
only the aristocratically controlled form of capitalism: fascism. The
ideological battle has thus apparently been won by a cheap
terminological deceit. That’s all it takes for dictatorship to be able
to win.
The democratically controlled form of capitalism, such as in some
northern European countries, has commonly been called “socialism”; and,
of course, it’s opposed to all forms of dictatorship, both communist and
fascist. Socialism is the democratic form of capitalism. It’s not the
dictatorial form of socialism, which is Marxism. It’s the form of
capitalism that serves the public, instead of the aristocracy, at any
point where the two have conflicting interests. It subordinates the
aristocracy to the public. Fascism instead subordinates the public to
the aristocracy, which is the natural tendency (because the “World’s Richest 0.7% Own 13.67 Times as Much as World’s Poorest 68.7%,” and the “World’s Richest 80 People Own Same Amount as World’s Bottom 50%”).
commondreams | An under-the-radar report by U.S. President Joe Biden's National
Infrastructure Advisory Council should not go unnoticed, said the
national watchdog Food & Water Watch
on Thursday, as buried in the document is a call for the privatization
of U.S. water systems, which progressive lawmakers and civil society
groups have long opposed.
On page 15 of the 38-page report, the advisory council said
the federal government should "remove barriers to privatization,
concessions, and other nontraditional models of funding community water
systems in conjunction with each state's development of best practice."
Food
& Water Watch (FWW) suggested that the recommendation goes hand in
hand with the panel chairmanship of Adebayo Ogunlesi, who is the
chairman and CEO of Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP).
GIP is
"an infrastructure investment bank with an estimated $100 billion in
assets under management that targets energy, transportation, digital,
and water infrastructure," said FWW, making the takeover of public water
and wastewater utilities by a private corporation—often under the guise
of improving aging systems and lowering costs—financially beneficial
for the bank.
"Instead of relying on Wall Street advisers, President Biden should support policies that will truly help communities."
Mary Grant, Public Water for All campaign director at FWW, called the recommendation "a terrible idea."
"President
Biden should have never appointed an investment banker to chair an
advisory council for the nation's infrastructure," said Grant. "Wall
Street wants to take control of the nation's public water systems to
wring profits from communities that are already struggling with
unaffordable water bills and toxic water."
FWW has analyzed
water privatization schemes for years, finding that they it often leave
communities "with higher water bills, worse service, job losses, and
little control to fix these problems."
A 2018 report by the group titledAmerica's Secret Water Crisisfound
that out of 11 privatized water utilities across the U.S., all but one
refused to provide data about shutoffs for nonpayment. The group's 2011
brief Water = Lifeshowed
that low-income households are disproportionately affected by water
price hikes by private owners, as privatization turns a resource
recognized by the United Nations as an "essential human right" into a
commodity.
"Privatization would deepen the nation's water crises,
leading to higher water bills and less accountable and transparent
services," said Grant. "Privately owned water systems charge 59% more
than local government systems, and private ownership is the single largest factor associated with higher water bills—more than aging infrastructure or drought."
Grant noted that the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law
passed in 2021 was "a step forward" as it invested $55 billion to
expand water infrastructure, but pointed out that "it provided only
about 7% of the identified needs of our water systems."
"Instead
of relying on Wall Street advisers, President Biden should support
policies that will truly help communities by asking Congress to pass the
Water Affordability, Transparency, Equity, and Reliability (WATER) Act
(H.R. 1729, S. 938)," she added.
statista | Even with the share of renewables in electricity production rising continuously over the past years, oil
remains the world's most important energy source when factoring in
transport and heating. 29 percent of the world's energy supply in 2020
came from oil, according to an analysis by the International Energy Agency (IEA). As our chart based on the Energy Institute Statistical Review of World Energy 2023 shows, two countries were particularly heavy oil consumers in 2022.
The
United States consumed 19 million barrels of oil per day, followed by
its fiercest economic and political competitor, the People's Republic of
China, with 14 million barrels per day this past year. The usage of
other countries pales compared to the two superpowers: The rest of the
top 8 consumers combined only amounted to two thirds of the amount used
by the U.S. and China.
When looking at the change in oil
consumption between 2012 and 2022, the picture changes significantly.
U.S. oil usage only increased by about nine percent, with China and
India emerging as growth leaders with 42 and 41 percent consumption
growth, respectively. All in all, four out of the five BRICS countries
are featured in the top 8 oil-consuming countries, and three out of
four have shown a considerable increase in appetite for fossil fuel over
the past decade.
BAR | One of the most positive things to emerge from the Collective West's
war in Ukraine is that it helped to expose elements of the U.S. left
that have always had a soft, sentimental spot for the West. The
arrogance of these Westerners who signed on to this call for more war
(see below) is reflected in the fact that they don't even feel compelled
to explain how their morally superior commitment to Ukrainian
self-determination against "Putin's" war is reconciled with the various
statements from former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, former French
President Francois Hollande and before them, former Ukrainian president
Petro Poroshenko revealing that the Minsk agreement was just a delaying
tactic to prepare for war.
We ask the Network as we have been asking Zelensky and Biden, the
co-coordinators of the White Lives Matter More Movement, how this phase
of the conflict that started in 2014 became Putin’s war? Do we just
dismiss as Kremlin propaganda that the Russian Federation felt
threatened by what appeared to be the de-facto incorporation of Ukraine
into NATO as the Ukrainian army was built into the most formidable
fighting force in Europe outside of Russia?
Did the Russians not have any legitimate security concerns with NATO
missiles facing them from Romania and Poland, a mere six minutes away
from Moscow, and that Ukraine was also making a pitch for “defensive”
missiles in Ukraine? And how does the Network characterize the conflict
in Eastern Ukraine that started in 2014 and produced over 14,000 deaths
when the Ukrainian coup government attacked its own citizens, if the
current conflict started in February 2022? What happened to the fascist
issue in Ukraine that was written about for years but with even more
urgency after the coup in 2014? Did the Kremlin plant those stories in
the Western press?
We understand that these are questions that the organizers of the
Ukrainian Network will never answer because they do not have to. As
Westerners they can just postulate an assertion and it is accepted. The
Network and the Western bourgeoisie declare that the war in Ukraine is
Putin’s war and it becomes objective truth - because that is what the
West can do and can get away with. It’s called power – white power
perhaps?
The Ukrainian Solidarity Network is the ultimate expression of social
imperialism that has become so normalized in the U.S. and Western
Europe that it is no longer even recognized. An example from the
statement makes the argument that Ukraine has the “right to determine
the means and objectives of its own struggle.” That is a recognized left
position. But the social imperialists of the West do not extend that
principle and right to nations in the global South. In fact, we ask the
signers of this call to explain when the coup government of Ukraine
became the representatives of the Ukrainian nation and recognized the
sovereign will of the people?
Therefore, it is not a mere coincidence that the main signatories of
this Network statement pledging undying support to Ukraine and its
project, are also some of the same “left” forces in the forefront of
giving left legitimacy to the charge leveled by Western imperialism that
the struggling socialist oriented national liberationist states like
Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia are nothing more than “authoritarian”
states more interested in power than socialist construction. Some of
those forces also cheered on the NATO attack against Libya, passionately
defended Western intervention in Syria and have been silent on Western
plans to violently invade Haiti.
For the contemporary neocons in the leadership of the Ukrainian
network, their commitment to abstract principles, and certainty that
they know more than everyone else, objectively place them in the same
ideological camp with Obama, Biden, NATO strategists, the Zelensky
clown, and Boris Johnson. But they will argue that their positions are
different, since they represent something they call the left.
For a number of individuals who signed on to this pro-Western,
pro-war letter, they are in a familiar place. However, I suspect a few
of the individuals on that list were probably confused or not paying
attention, not thinking about who they would be affiliated with when
they signed on.
That of course, is not the case for some of the key supporters of
this initiative. Individuals like the Green Party’s Howie Hawkins, Eric
Draitser of Counterpunch, and Bill Fletcher who normally I would not
name specifically but because these individuals and the tendency they
represent embody the worst of the arrogant, Western left that in so many
cases (not all) objectively provides ideological cover ( rightism with
left phraseology) for the imperialist program of Western capital - they
should not be allowed continued left respectability without challenge.
These individuals certainly have not hesitated in offering criticisms
of those of us who never wavered from our strategic priority to defeat
our primary enemy - the Western white supremacist colonial/capitalist
patriarchy. For us everything else represents secondary contradictions
at this specific historical moment. And is why we reject the arguments
these forces advance about fighting dual imperialisms as
anti-dialectical nonsense and a political cover.
aurelian |These problems are coming together, to some extent, with the
widespread diffusion of automatic weapons, and the spread of ethnic
organised crime groups in the suburbs of major European cities. Together
with the increasing hold of organised Islamic fundamentalism on the
local communities, this has created a series of areas where governments
no longer wish to send the security forces, because of the fear of
violent confrontation, and where these groups exert an effective
monopoly of violence themselves. Again, it’s not clear what current
military or paramilitary capabilities would be of any real use in
dealing with such situations, and there is the risk of other, non-state,
actors intervening instead. (It’s worth adding that we are not talking about “civil war” here, which is a quite different issue)
So
the existing force-structures of western states are going to have
problems coping with the likely domestic security threats of the near
future. Most western militaries are simply too small, too highly
specialised and too technological to deal with situations where the
basic tool of military force is required: large numbers of trained and
disciplined personnel, able to provide and maintain a secure
environment, and enforce the monopoly of legitimate violence.
Paramilitary forces can only help to a certain extent. The potential
political consequences of that failure could be enormous. The most basic
political question, after all, is not Carl Schmitt’s infamous “who is
my enemy?” but rather “who will protect me?” If modern states,
themselves lacking capability, but also with security forces that are
too small and poorly adapted, cannot protect the population, what then?
Experience elsewhere suggests that, if the only people who can protect
you are Islamic extremists and drug traffickers, you are pretty much
obliged to give your loyalty to them, or if not, to some equally strong
non-state force that opposes them.
In a perverse kind of
way, the same issues of respect and capability also arise at the
international level. I’ve already written several times about the parlous state of
conventional western forces today, and the impossibility of restoring
them to something like Cold War levels. Here, I just want to finish by
talking about some of the less obvious political consequences of that
weakness.
At its simplest, relative military effectiveness
influences how you view your neighbours and how they view you. This can
involve threats and fear, but it doesn’t have to. It means, for example,
that the perception of what regional security problems are, and how to
deal with them, is going to be disproportionately influenced by the
concerns of more capable states. (Thus the influential position enjoyed
by Nigeria in West Africa, for example). This isn’t necessarily from a
crude measure of size of forces either: in the old NATO, the Netherlands
probably had more influence than Turkey, though its forces were much
smaller. Within international groupings—formal alliances or not—some
states tend to lead and others to follow, depending on perceptions of
experience and capability.
Internationally—in the UN for
example—countries like Britain and France, together with Sweden, Canada,
Australia, India, and a few others, were influential because they had
capable militaries, effective government systems and, most importantly,
experience of conducting operations away from home. So if you were the
Secretary-General of the UN, and you were putting together a small group
to look at the possibilities for a peace mission in Myanmar, who would
you invite? The Argentinians? The Congolese? The Algerians? The
Mexicans? You would invite some nations from the region, certainly, but
you would mainly focus on capable nations with a proven track record.
But in quite complex and subtle ways, patterns of influence, both at the
practical and conceptual level, are changing. The current vision even
of what security is, and how it should be pursued, is currently
western-dominated. That will be much less the case in the future.
This
decline in influence will also apply to the United States. Its most
powerful and expensive weapons—nuclear missiles, nuclear submarines,
carrier battle groups, high performance air-superiority fighters — are
either not usable, or simply not relevant, to most of the security
problems of today. We do not know the precise numbers and effectiveness
of Chinese land-based anti-shipping missiles for example, but it’s clear
that sending US surface ships anywhere within their range is going to
be too great a risk for any US government to take. And since the Chinese
know this, the subtle nuances of power relations between the two
countries are altered. Again, the US has found itself unable to actually
influence the outcome of a major war in Europe, because it does not
have the forces to intervene directly, and the weapons it has been able
to send are too few and in many cases of the wrong kind. The Russians
are obviously aware of this, but it is the kind of thing that other
states notice as well, and then has consequences.
Finally,
there is the question of the future relationship between weak European
states in a continent where the US has ceased to be an important player.
As I’ve pointed out before,
NATO has continued as long as it has because it has all sorts of
unacknowledged practical advantages for different nations, even if some
of these advantages are actually mutually exclusive. But it’s not
obvious that such a state of affairs will continue. No European nation,
nor any reasonable coalition of them, is going to have the military
power to match that of Russia, and the US has long been incapable of
making up the difference. On the other hand, this is not the Cold War,
where Soviet troops were stationed a few hundred kilometres from major
western capitals. There will actually be nothing really to fight about,
and no obvious place to do the fighting. What there will be is a
relationship of dominance and inferiority such as Europe has never
really known before, and the end of such shaky consensus as remains on
what the military, and security forces in general, are actually for.
I suspect, but it’s no more than that, that we are going to see a
turning inward, as states try to deal with problems within their borders
and on them. Ironically, the greatest protection against major
conflicts may be the inability of most European states, these days, to
conduct them. Weakness can also have its virtues.
kunstler | In 2011, relations between the US and
Russia soured when President Putin accused the US of fomenting protests
in Russia over its parliamentary elections. And from there, our State
Department decided that Russia and the USA could not even pretend to be
friendly.
Jump ahead to 2014: Neocons in the
Obama administration figured it was time to cut Russia back down to
size. That effort crystalized around the former Soviet province,
Ukraine, and blossomed into the US-sponsored-and-organized Maidan
Revolution, utilizing Ukraine’s sizeable Stepan Bandara legacy Nazi
forces in the vanguard, to foment violence in Kiev’s main city square.
The US shoved out elected Ukraine President Yanukovych — who angered
America by pledging to join Russia’s Custom’s Union instead of the EU —
and installed its own puppet Yatsenyuk, who was ultimately replaced by
the candy tycoon, Poroshenko, replaced by the Ukrainian TV star,
comedian Volodymyr Zelensky. Ha Ha. Who’s laughing now? (Nobody.)
From 2014-on, Ukraine, with America’s
backing, did everything possible to antagonize Russia, especially
showering the eastern provinces of Ukraine, called the Donbas, with
artillery, rockets, and bombs to harass the Russia-leaning population
there. After eight years of that, and continued American insults (the
Steele Dossier, 2016 election interference), and renewed threats to drag
Ukraine into NATO, Mr. Putin had enough and launched his “Special
Military Operation” to discipline Ukraine. Once that started, American
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin stated explicitly to the world that
America’s general policy now was to “weaken Russia.”
That declaration was accompanied by
America’s policy to isolate Russia economically with ever more
sanctions. Didn’t work. Russia just turned eastward to the enormous
Asian market to sell its oil and gas and utilized an alternate
electronic trade-clearance system to replace America’s SWIFT system.
Sanctions also gave Russia a reason to aggressively pursue an
import-replacement economic strategy — manufacturing stuff that they had
been buying from the West, for instance, German machine tools critical
for industry.
Russia did sacrifice more than
$50-billion in financial assets stranded in the US banking system — we
just confiscated it — but, ultimately, that only harmed the US banking
system’s reputation as a safe place to park money, and made foreign
investors much more wary of stashing capital in American banks. Net
effect: the value of the ruble increased and stabilized, and Russia
found new ways to neutralize American economic bullying.
Europe was the big loser in all that.
For a while, Europe could pretend to go along with the US / NATO
project, pouring arms and money into Ukraine, and at the same time
depend on Russian oil and gas imports. Eight months into the
Ukraine-Russia conflict, the US blew up the Nord Stream One and Two
pipelines, and that was the end of Europe’s supply of affordable natgas,
to heat homes and power industry. In a sane world, that sabotage would
have been considered an act of war against Germany by the USA. But it
only revealed the secret, humiliating state of vassalage that Europe was
in. Europe had already made itself ridiculous buying into the hysteria
over climate change and attempting to tailor its energy use to so-called
“renewables” in history’s biggest virtue-signaling exercise. Germany,
the engine of the EU’s economy, made one dumb mistake after another. It
invested heavily in wind and solar installations, which fell so short of
adequacy they were a joke, and it closed down its nuke-powered electric
generation plants so as to appear ecologically correct.
So now, Germany, and many other EU
member states, teeter on the edge of leaving Modernity behind. They
managed to scramble and fill their gas reserves sufficiently this fall
to perhaps squeak through winter without freezing to death, but not
without a lot of sacrifice, chopping down Europe’s forests, and wearing
their coats indoors. Now, only a few days into Winter, it remains to be
seen how that will work out. We’ll know more in March of the new year.
France had been the exception in Europe, due to its large fleet of
atomic energy plants. But many of them have now aged-out, some shut down
altogether, and “green” politics stood in the way of replacing them, so
France, too, will find itself increasingly subject to affordable energy
shortages.
Prediction: Europe’s industry will
falter and close down by painful increments. The EU will not withstand
the economic stress of de-industrialization. It will shatter and leave
Europe once again a small continent of many small fractious nations with
longstanding grudges. Some of these countries may break-up into smaller
entities in turn, as Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Russia did in the
1990s. Keep in mind, the macro trend world-wide will be downscaling and
localization as affordable energy recedes for everyone. Since the end of
World War Two, Europe was the world’s tourist theme park. Now it could
go back to being a slaughterhouse. The Euro currency will have to be
phased out as sovereign bankruptcies make the EU financial system
untenable, and animosities and hostilities arise. Each country will have
to return to its traditional money. Gold and silver will play a larger
role in that.
The USA poured over $100-billion into
Ukraine in arms, goods, and cash in 2022. That largesse will not
continue as America sinks into its Second Great Depression. In any case,
much of that schwag was fobbed off with. The arms are spent, the
launchers destroyed. A lot of weapons were trafficked around to other
countries and non-state actors. Russia is going to prevail in Ukraine.
The news emanating from American media about Ukraine’s military triumphs
has been all propaganda. There was hardly ever any real doubt that
Russia dominated the war zone strategically and tactically. Even its
withdrawals from one city or another were tactically intelligent and
worthwhile, sparing Russian lives. The Special Military Operation wasn’t
a cakewalk because Russia wanted to avoid killing civilians and refrain
from destroying infrastructure that would leave Ukraine a gutted,
failed state. Over time, the USA proved itself to be
negotiation-unworthy, and Ukraine’s president Zelensky refused to
entertain rational terms for settling the crisis. So, now the gloves are
off in Ukraine. As of December 29, Russia shut off the lights in Kiev
and Lvov.
The open questions: how much
punishment does Ukraine seek to suffer before it capitulates? Will
Zelensky survive? (Even if he runs off to Miami, he may not survive.)
What exactly will be left of Ukraine? In 2023 Russia will decide the
disposition of things on-the-ground. Failed states make terrible
neighbors. One would imagine that Russia’s main goal is to set up a rump
Ukraine that can function, but cease to be an annoying pawn of its
antagonists. Ukraine will no longer enjoy access to the Black Sea; it
will be landlocked. The best case would be for Ukraine to revert to the
agricultural backwater it was for centuries before the mighty
disruptions of the modern era. Perhaps Russia will take it over
altogether and govern it as it had ever since the 1700s — except for
Ukraine’s brief interlude post-USSR as one of the world’s most corrupt
and mal-administered sovereign states.
Bottom line: Ukraine is and always was
within Russia’s sphere-of-influence, and will remain so. The USA has no
business there and it will be best for all concerned when we bug out.
Let’s hope that happens without America triggering a nuclear World War
Three. (Yeah, “hope” is not a plan. Try prayer, then.) Mr. Putin’s
challenge going into 2023 is to conclude the Ukraine hostilities without
humiliating the USA to the degree that we do something really stupid.
LATimes | On Wednesday, OPEC+ announced a dramatic reduction
in production quotas, by 2 million barrels per day. According to oil
ministers, the goal is to boost crude prices and “encourage investment”
in the sector — making it sound like they are doing the world a favor.
In fact, this is an extraordinarily harmful step that will push oil
prices up — when the global economy is in a precarious state amid
persistent inflation pressures.
Americans may first notice the effects at the gas pump, especially Californians already affected by some refinery shutdowns. Gasoline prices hit record highs in Los Angeles this week. A cut to global oil supply usually translates into even steeper increases in fuel prices and rising costs for goods.
The
Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries has no incentive to
drive the world into deep recession, so what are its members thinking?
Pushing
up oil prices at this moment is an expression of support for OPEC+
member Russia, presumably aiming to build a deeper relationship between
this major oil producer and core OPEC member states, most of which are
in Africa and the Middle East.
That strategy already appears
thoroughly wrongheaded. The likelihood of Russian defeat in Ukraine,
increasing daily with Ukrainian advances, will change the global picture
for oil considerably, and OPEC members need to decide whose side they
are on for what comes next.
If you question Russia’s fate on the
battlefield, look carefully at reports from the front lines from Russian
military bloggers on Telegram and other messaging channels. It is an
interesting irony that Ukraine, a free country with a free press, has
strong operational discipline when it comes to the use of social media
close to the conflict — and it’s from Russia, an authoritarian country
with tightly state controlled and censored media, that we see a flood of
videos, text updates and maps that show what is really going on.
If
OPEC’s leaders were paying attention, they would see that Russian
forces are in the process of being defeated in several regions in the
air and on the ground. The Ukrainians have more drones, better armor,
longer-range artillery and higher morale. Russian forces are greatly
depleted and increasingly in danger of becoming trapped and overwhelmed
on multiple fronts.
businessinsider | Saudi Arabia is raising oil prices for the US market again, while
lowering them for Europe and leaving them largely unchanged for Asia.
November
shipments of Arab Light crude to Asia from state-run producer Saudi
Aramco will remain steady at $5.85 per barrel above benchmark prices. A Bloomberg survey estimated prices in Asia, the kingdom's top market, would rise by $0.40 per barrel.
Elsewhere,
Saudi Aramco hiked prices by $0.20 a barrel for all US grades, while
northwest Europe and the Mediterranean saw declines. While Asian prices
for the company's light oil was flat, its medium and heavy-grade crude
prices ticked up in Asia by $0.25.
Last month, Saudi Aramco also lowered prices in Europe and raised them in the US.
The
latest shakeup in prices comes a day after OPEC+ slashed its production
quota by 2 million barrels per day, or roughly 2% of global oil supply.
The
cut was seen as a defeat for President Joe Biden, who has been pressing
OPEC's de facto leader Saudi Arabia for an output boost that would ease
fuel prices.
On Wednesday, the White House accused OPEC+
of "aligning with Russia" by lowering its quota, which comes at a time
when "maintaining a global supply of energy is of paramount importance."
Analysts
are noting the heightened political environment of OPEC's moves, as
fresh European sanctions on Russian oil loom later this year as well as a
price cap on Moscow's crude.
"This
is hugely political and a very clear signal of OPEC's discontent
regarding the price cap," Amrita Sen, chief oil analyst at Energy
Aspects, told the Financial Times. "Regardless of whether the price cap is actually effective, they see this as a dangerous precedent."
gilbertdoctorow | The United States and Collective West are in open conflict with
Russia for its insubordination, for its insistence on being itself and
not following a diktat from anyone. The Collective West is intent on
Russia’s destruction, its break-up into smaller units easier to control
and colonize. The spoliation of Russia by the West at the time the
country was flat on its back in the 1990s amounted to 1 trillion
dollars.
Putin characterized the information war and lies propagated by the
West about Russia as worthy of Goebbels, following the principle that
the more outrageous is the lie, the more it is repeated, the greater the
likelihood it will be believed and accepted.
The speech had very little content drawing on current events, aside
from the referendums in the respective territories which have now become
‘subjects of the Russian Federation.’ He did mention the destruction
of the Nord Stream pipelines in one sentence, as the work of the
‘Anglo-Saxons,’ which in the context we may take to mean the United
Kingdom. It will be interesting to see in the coming days whether
Russian diplomats put forward this allegation in international forums
like the United Nations.
As for the speaker, he was in top form. His delivery was self-assured and smooth. He looked radiant and in good health.
Judging by the faces of those who were repeatedly captured by the
cameramen, the mood of the audience was predominantly, almost
exclusively somber, similar to when Putin delivered his announcement on
recognition of the sovereignty of the Donetsk and Lugansk republics in
the days leading up to the 24 February launch of the ‘special military
operation.’ I call out in particular Prime Minister Mishustin, chief of
the presidential administration Kiriyenko, speaker of the Federation
Council Matviyenko, Speaker of the State Duma Volodin, former president
and head of the Security Council Medvedev, head of the Just Russia party
Mironov, head of Foreign Intelligence Naryshkin, head of the foreign
affairs committee of the Federation Council Kosachev, minister of
foreign affairs Lavrov. The weight and responsibility before history
for the fate of the country at this critical time could be read on all
these faces.
Curiously, the party leader of the Communists, Zyuganov, was not
picked out by the cameras; presumably, he would have been in a more
celebratory mood. And the only major Russian politician who surely would
have smiled broadly, Zhirinovsky, has been dead now for six months. Oh,
yes, there was on the dais one man who was clearly in very good
spirits: the leader of the Donetsk Republic, Pushilin.
Where does the campaign in Ukraine go from here? There was
absolutely nothing in Putin’s speech to answer that question. The only
mention of Kiev in this connection was his insistence that Russia stands
ready to enter into negotiations on condition that the status of the
four new ‘subjects’ of the Russian Federation not be discussed, since
their fate was solved now once and for all.
For the world at large, Vladimir Putin has set out a broad and vastly
damaging condemnation of the Collective West which no one can ignore.
He has thrown down his gauntlet.
From the beginning of the ‘special military operation’ there has been
speculation among expert observers of all political stripes that Russia
would never have dared to invade Ukraine had he not had the backing of
China’s president Xi. It was assumed by others that the stress of the
war and of the sanctions imposed by the West has made Russia a junior
partner of China, with all the loss of independence that implies.
However, I would maintain that with this speech the Russians have both
the Chinese and the Indians by the tail, not the other way around.
There is no way that either of these great powers can walk away from
Russia without losing all credibility in the Global South as champions
of a multipolar world and challengers to the rapacious collective West.
nakedcapitalism | The greatest challenge facing societies has always been how to
conduct trade and credit without letting merchants and creditors make
money by exploiting their customers and debtors. All antiquity
recognized that the drive to acquire money is addictive and indeed tends
to be exploitative and hence socially injurious. The moral values of
most societies opposed selfishness, above all in the form of avarice and
wealth addiction, which the Greeks called philarguria– love of
money, silver-mania. Individuals and families indulging in conspicuous
consumption tended to be ostracized, because it was recognized that
wealth often was obtained at the expense of others, especially the weak.
The Greek concept of hubrisinvolved egotistic behavior
causing injury to others. Avarice and greed were to be punished by the
justice goddess Nemesis, who had many Near Eastern antecedents, such as
Nanshe of Lagash in Sumer, protecting the weak against the powerful, the
debtor against the creditor.
The most basic function of Near Eastern kingship was to proclaim “economic order,” misharumand andurarumclean
slate debt cancellations, echoed in Judaism’s Jubilee Year. There was
no “democracy” in the sense of citizens electing their leaders and
administrators, but “divine kingship” was obliged to achieve the
implicit economic aim of democracy: “protecting the weak from the
powerful.”
Royal power was backed by temples and ethical or religious systems.
The major religions that emerged in the mid-first millennium BC, those
of Buddha, Lao-Tzu and Zoroaster, held that personal drives should be
subordinate to the promotion of overall welfare and mutual aid.
What did notseem likely 2500 years ago was that a warlord
aristocracy would conquer the Western world. In creating what became the
Roman Empire, an oligarchy took control of the land and, in due course,
the political system. It abolished royal or civic authority, shifted
the fiscal burden onto the lower classes, and ran the population and
industry into debt.
This was done on a purely opportunistic basis. There was no attempt
to defend this ideologically. There was no hint of an archaic Milton
Friedman emerging to popularize a radical new moral order celebrating
avarice by claiming that greed is what drives economies forward, not
backward, convincing society to leave the distribution of land and money
to “the market” controlled by private corporations and money-lenders
instead of communalistic regulation by palace rulers and temples – or by
extension, today’s socialism. Palaces, temples and civic governments
were creditors. They were not forced to borrow to function, and so were
not subjected to the policy demands of a private creditor class.
But running the population, industry and even governments into debt
to an oligarchic elite is precisely what has occurred in the West, which
is now trying to impose the modern variant of this debt-based economic
regime – U.S.-centered neoliberal finance capitalism – on the entire
world. That is what today’s New Cold War is all about.
By the traditional morality of early societies, the West – starting in classical Greece and Italy around the 8thcentury
BC – was barbarian. The West was indeed on the periphery of the ancient
world when Syrian and Phoenician traders brought the idea of
interest-bearing debt from the Near East to societies that had no royal
tradition of periodic debt cancellations. The absence of a strong palace
power and temple administration enabled creditor oligarchies to emerge
throughout the Mediterranean world.
Greece ended up being conquered first by oligarchic Sparta, then by
Macedonia and finally by Rome. It is the latter’s avaricious
pro-creditor legal system that has shaped subsequent Western
civilization. Today, a financialized system of oligarchic control whose
roots lead back to Rome is being supported and indeed imposed by U.S.
New Cold War diplomacy, military force and economic sanctions on
countries seeking to resist it.
campusreform |Professor
Glenn Loury of Brown University shredded racial activists for
"bluffing" as they turn a blind eye to black-on-black crime and other
issues in the black community.
Loury
said that the forced silence of black people in talking about these
issues will prompt more non-blacks to speak up, eventually exposing
Ibram X. Kendi and others as an “empty suit.”
Glenn Loury, a Brown University economics professor,
shredded racial activists for "bluffing" as they fail to address
Black-on-Black crime and other issues plaguing the Black community.
On an episode of his podcast, The Glenn Show, Loury told co-host and Columbia University professor John McWhorter that certain issues in the Black community are neglected.
"We're
in an equilibrium, as economists might say,” explained Loury. “We're in
a stable, ongoing situation where there are tacit agreements not to
talk about certain things. Not to talk about Black-on-Black crime as the
scourge that it is. Not to talk about affirmative action as being
necessary because of Black mediocrity, not measuring up on the
competitive edge."
"People
don't want to talk about the Black family,” he continued. “It's an
absolute catastrophe that two-thirds to three-quarters of Black kids are
being raised in a home without a father present in the home, in terms
of the social cohesion of the community. People don't want to say that."
Loury
also explained that the forced silence of Black people in talking about
these issues will prompt more non-Blacks to speak up.
According to Loury, Americans will eventually realize that Boston University Center for Anti-Racist Director and author of How to Be An Anti-Racist Ibram X. Kendi is an "empty suit." At that point, "the jig is up, the bluff is called, and they don't have any cards."
In his book, Kendi teaches readers that "the only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination."
patrickwyman | The assumed subject of this culture is a straight, young-ish (18-40)
dude who’s kind of into fitness of some kind, whether that’s lifting
weights, a little jiu-jitsu, or what have you. He probably played sports
and currently enjoys watching them. He’s familiar with but not super
dedicated to video games and likes beer and maybe some weed from time to
time. He may or may not have a college degree, but either way has a
solid but not extremely high-paying job. He probably lives in the
suburbs, exurbs, or a rural area, rather than a dense metro. He’s
probably but not necessarily white. He’s disproportionately likely to
have served in the military, and if he hasn’t, he knows people - family
or friends - who do or did.
These various demographic, and
therefore cultural and social affiliations, don’t exist in isolation
from one another. Put together, they form a relatively stable melange,
an ecosystem with its own influencers and heroes, values and principles,
and connections to other social, cultural, and political phenomena.
It’s
rooted in physicality and the body, self-ownership through activity.
While it doesn’t necessarily eschew the life of the mind - Jocko
Willink, for example, constantly discusses and advocates the reading of
books on his podcast - that’s simply not the main focus for
self-actualization or identity. If you want to talk about intellectual
pursuits, you can do it while pulling 500 pounds or beating the hell out
of a heavy bag.
Some aspects of this are obviously new, like social media and the
role of influencers. But others aren’t. Fitness culture, one of Bro
Culture’s constituent pieces, has been around in various guises for a
long time; weightlifting came to prominence in the 1960s and 70s,
Crossfit in the 2000s, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu in the last decade, but other
manifestations - like respectable men’s Muscular Christianity
around the beginning of the 20th century - have been around for much
longer. Bare-knuckle boxing was a manifestation of rough-and-tumble, working-class manhood
in later 19th century America. That working-class manhood revolved
around taverns and drinking, gambling on fights and races, a combination
of activities familiar to any self-respecting Bro today whether he
participates in them or not.
One parallel that’s particularly striking to me, though I wouldn’t take the comparison too far, is with medieval chivalry.
Hear me out.
The
popular conception of chivalry, as a moral code guiding the behavior of
honorable knights, is flat-out, laughably wrong. That’s a creation of
19th-century authors like Walter Scott, and the popular fantasy authors
(basically up until George R.R. Martin) who built on their worldview in
the 20th.
In reality, chivalry was all about one particular version of Guys Being Dudes.
Chivalry could refer to a few different things, but the most common
meaning was simply battlefield deeds, executed with some style. This,
what knights referred to as “prowess,” was at the core of the broader
ideology of chivalry: raw, bloody, physical performance, violence done effectively and to an agreed-upon aesthetic standard.
The second major concern of chivalry, honor, grew directly out of the
first. Honor wasn’t an abstract concept to medieval knights; it was a
possession, a recognition of their particular status and place in the
social hierarchy, which they were well within their rights to violently
defend and assert through their prowess. Piety was the icing on the
cake, but no knight really doubted that God approved of their actions.
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