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BELAFONTE IN THE SUN

June 4, 2023 – 7:12 am

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A tribute to Harry Belafonte. By David Yearsley.

After the first installment of my planned two-part tribute to Harry Belafonte, who died on April 25, 2023 at the age of 96, two weeks of nonsense intervened. First came the coronation of Charles III - the pomp and circumstance troubled only slightly by a gaggle of boisterous protesters outside Westminster Abbey and a furtive cameo within the church from another Harry (Windsor).

Belafonte’s parents were born in Jamaica as subjects of the British Empire. They emigrated to the United States, where their son was born in 1927. Belafonte spent most of the 1930s living with his grandmother back in Jamaica and thought of himself as Jamaican “native son of sorts”.

The French knighted Belafonte a year-and-a-half before he died. The British didn’t, conveniently couldn’t because he wasn’t a citizen of the United Kingdom or of a Commonwealth country that allowed such honors. Had some new protocol been concocted so as to enable a knighthood for Belafonte, I’ll bet he would have refused it, not least on account of Britain’s brazen rejection of Jamaica’s repeated petitions for reparations: No Sir, Harry.

The weekend after the royal foolishness in Westminster Abbey, the Eurovision Song Contest landed on the Island Kingdom. That over-hyped, over-amplified spectacle of extremes was light years and sonic parsecs away from Belafonte’s brand of cool calypso. His warmth was human not phantasmagorical.

Both coronation and contest required comment from the Musical Patriot. But with those costume dramas done, let’s return to Harry (Belafonte, not Windsor) in British realms: on Barbados and Grenada in 1957 before independence from Britain. (Still a full member of the Commonwealth, Grenada sent troops to march in the endless coronation military parade; a republic since 2021, Barbados kept its soldiers at home.)

In 1957 Belafonte was one of the world’s most popular entertainers, selling more records that year than either Elvis or Sinatra.

Less than a decade earlier Belafonte had been a struggling actor about to give up on his stage dreams, when he catapulted to fame thanks to a stint singing at a Manhattan bebop emporium called the Royal Roost, his unlikely debut abetted by none other than Charlie Parker. Nearly a decade on from that lateral career move, Belafonte’s celebrity now made possible a return to acting, not in the experimental theater of New York as before, but on the wide technicolor screen in Island in the Sun.

In 1957, Harry Belafonte was one of the world’s most popular entertainers, selling more records that year than either Elvis or Sinatra.

In 1953 he had acted in Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones, an adaptation of Bizet’s opera sung in English by an all-Black cast. No operatic tenor, Belafonte’s singing voice was dubbed over with that of Levern Hutcherson, who had recently sung Porgy in the first American tour of Gershwin’s musical, a work vehemently criticized by many Black intellectuals, among them W.E.B. Dubois and Duke Ellington.

Though his voice was silenced in post-production, Belafonte did sing along in Carmen Jones, as one can see in his shirtless performance of “Dis Flower.” Having a phantom voice seem to emanate from the body of the world’s most famous singer still counts as an uncanny indignity, especially perplexing when one listens to Hutcherson’s quaverings:

Three years after Carmen Jones, Belafonte had become still more famous, an even more bankable star. It was Hollywood that would send him back to the Caribbean and his voice would no longer be silenced.

In 1956 Alec Waugh (Evelyn’s older brother) published a blockbuster novel of race and romance set under the late-colonial sun shining down on the fictitious island of a Santa Marta, which Belafonte would come to see as stand-in for Jamaica. While Island in the Sun stood atop the best-seller list, Belafonte’s Calypso spent thirty-one weeks at number one on the Billboard charts. It was the first LP to sell over a million copies. As Belafonte put in his autobiography, My Song, “the Caribbean was hot” - figuratively and literally.

The imperious chief of Twentieth Century-Fox, Darryl Zanuck, bought the film rights to Waugh’s novel and beseeched Belafonte to join the production. The producer was sure that Belafonte was the only person who could take the role of the firebrand political activist, David Boyeur. If Belafonte didn’t accept, Zanuck wouldn’t make the picture at all. The singer signed on: in My Song, Belafonte described Boyeur as a “mirror image” of himself.

Something of a mess, Island in the Sun is nonetheless a landmark in Hollywood’s treatment of race. Early on in the picture, Belafonte’s Boyeur cools his relationship with an educated Black islander (Dorothy Dandridge again) and turns his romantic attentions to Mavis Norman (Joan Fontaine), a daughter of the island’s still-dominant planter class.

While Alec Waugh’s Island In The Sun stood atop the best-seller list, Belafonte’s Calypso spent thirty-one weeks at number one on the Billboard charts. It was the first LP to sell over a million copies. As Belafonte put in his autobiography, My Song, “the Caribbean was hot” - figuratively and literally.

Belafonte believes that Fontaine, who was not well paid for her work in the movie, took the role because of its depiction of an interracial relationship, one of two such love affairs in the overburdened plot. After the film’s release, Fontaine dealt bravely and wisely with the KKK threats that followed, but her career, or at least her star status, was effectively extinguished because of her appearance in Island in the Sun. The segregationist outrage and related controversies fueled receipts, especially in the American South. The movie returned more than double its budget.

The racist condemnation of Island in the Sun came in spite of the fact that there was no kissing across the color line or even a passing embrace. The director Robert Rossen, whom Belafonte loathed for naming names for HUAC a few years before, was a raving alcoholic. His drunken negligence made it possible for Belafonte and Fontaine to dream up and insert a sultry scene with a coconut that he cuts open with a manly machete and gives to Fontaine to drink, fixing his thirsty gaze on her lips as they touch the fruit’s flesh. He takes the coconut and drinks greedily from the same spot.

At a press conference in Trinidad organized by Zanuck before shooting began, Belafonte was accused by a local reporter of co-opting calypso. Belafonte’s response, recalled in his memoir, was that the recording industry had dubbed him the King of Calypso, a title he hated but couldn’t free himself from.

But Belafonte went still further: “Even if I could be the true King of Calypso, I wouldn’t want to be, because although I admire how clever and how interesting calypsonians can be in the songs they write and sing, I also find that most of those lyrics are not in the best interests of black people, because their songs are always filled with the need to make Europeans laugh at us. They glorify and dig deep into promiscuity, they go into genitalia… I’d rather sing to the honor and glory of the region, and the beauty and dignity of our women.”

The first image seen in Island in the Sun is a made-up 18th-century style map of the made-up island. There is a compass prominent in the upper left corner: the world has been divided up amongst the seafaring, enslaving powers. The blare of martial trumpets and the clash of cymbals in Malcolm Arnold’s fanfare confirms, if inadvertently, the brutality of conquest and the persistence of colonial power even during the transition to home rule. It’s a European vision of, and sonic introduction to, Santa Marta and therefore to British holdings in the Caribbean.

Then the screen goes black and we hear Belafonte’s unmistakable singing voice, insistent but not strained, accompanied only by a guitar. The melody is unshackled from the beat, the freedom and ease proceeding leisurely, elegant contrast to the lyric: he sings,

“This is my island in the sun/Where my people have toiled since time begun,” as we get a high aerial shot of the rugged, lush of “Santa Marta” clung to be dawn shadow - or is it twilight? The sun plays on the water, but the island is dark.

Belafonte always recognized the irony that his music was most popular with white audiences, but even in this version there is an authenticity that defeats such aesthetic demographics as well as the silly musical arrangement and staging. Beneath the suave surface of his voice, gracious but not ingratiating, there is pride. Still farther down there is anger.

Unlike in Carmen Jones, Belafonte sings and is heard, now in his own music. (The song was co-authored by his sometime collaborator, Lord Burgess, another native New Yorker with a Caribbean mother.) The film’s title song, released first on Belafonte Sings of the Caribbean, was especially popular, ironically perhaps, in Europe.

The camera descends from the airy heights to skim over the sea and reef and to the beach as the percussion swings into its genial groove. We witness men and women washing their clothes in a river and toiling in the fields. This opening documentary footage accompanied by Belafonte’s song makes for the most memorable and moving images in the film. Harry sings gently but ardently of his people in a rejoinder to the local critics of this reluctant King of Calypso: “I see woman on bended knee/cutting cane for her family.”

Belafonte performed the song later in 1957 in a television appearance. Here it’s slower and cheesier than in the movie, but his voice cuts through the saccharine sheen cast by the electrified studio scrim of ersatz steel drums and warbling flutes. Though some cast doubt on his bona fides, his imaginary island in the sun is rendered real by his voice. Belafonte always recognized the irony that his music was most popular with white audiences, but even in this version there is an authenticity that defeats such aesthetic demographics as well as the silly musical arrangement and staging. Beneath the suave surface of his voice, gracious but not ingratiating, there is pride. Still farther down there is anger.

The movie’s last scene was shot on a seaside bluff in Grenada, the Atlantic waves heaping relentless white below. The anti-climax of the Belafonte-Fontaine on-screen affair is fully exposed to sun, surf, and wind: “Do you care what stupid and prejudiced people think?” Mavis asks Boyeur, and he responds: “You’ve never had to fight stupidity or prejudice.”

Boyeur rejects his would-be lover because he believes he must serve his people. He seethes with poised anger at slavery and its legacy but also, one suspects, at himself for his own dogmatic fury. Like waves, historical forces crash down on these two people of the present.

The production designers must have wanted Belafonte’s body to appear as dark as possible by fitting him in a laundered white shirt. Fontaine wears pearl earrings and a light pink dress, her bottle-blond hair safeguarded in a bun from the fierce breeze buffeting the palms. She couldn’t be whiter. Still hoping to win him over somehow, she conjures the possibility of fleeing the island they were both born on. The imperial administration readies for its withdrawal and she with it, but he cannot leave and won’t take her even if she stays: “My skin is my country.”

Note: David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest book is Sex, Death, and Minuets: Anna Magdalena Bach and Her Musical Notebooks. Email him here. The above article was posted at CounterPunch.

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WHAT WOULD ARISTOTLE SAY ABOUT THE STAR TREK EPISODE ‘THE ENEMY WITHIN’?

May 28, 2023 – 7:04 am

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Star Trek “a great way to learn about moral philosophy”. By Roger Thompson.

In “The Enemy Within”, Captain Kirk is divided into two beings by a transporter malfunction. One of them is good but irresolute and weak, the other is the embodiment of evil and all the negative aspects of humanity. Dr McCoy and Science Officer Spock must come up with a plan to reunify the two beings before a landing party consisting of Helmsman Sulu and several other crew members freeze to death on the planet below. In the book ‘The Ultimate Star Trek and Philosophy’, here is how McCoy tries to help Kirk understand that we are not capable of being pure:

KIRK: I have to take him back inside myself. I can’t survive without him. I don’t want him back. He’s like an animal, a thoughtless, brutal animal, and yet it’s me. Me.

McCOY: Jim, you’re no different than anyone else. We all have our darker side. We need it! It’s half of what we are. It’s not really ugly, it’s human.

KIRK: Human.

McCOY: Yes, human. A lot of what he is makes you the man you are… Without the negative side, you wouldn’t be the Captain. You couldn’t be, and you know it. Your strength of command lies mostly in him.

In the eyes of Professor Judith Barad, author of ‘The Ethics of Star Trek’, Aristotle would say that neither Kirk follows “the Golden Mean”. Therefore they are incapable of virtuous action, which is of great importance to a starship captain. Aristotle’s virtue ethics taught us that we should avoid extreme behavior, which is now clearly impossible for the two Kirks because they are polar opposites. To achieve the Golden Mean and perform virtuous actions, three conditions must be met:

1) “The person must know the quality of the act he or she performs. He must know what he is doing and know that it is a good thing to do.” Barad concludes that neither Kirk has what it takes to meet this condition.

2) “The action must be the result of choice and be chosen for itself. An act can hardly be called good if the person is forced to do it, or if he or she does not decide to do it.” Again, she says, both Kirks don’t make the cut.

And lastly;

3) “A truly good action must reflect a firm and settled character.” This is also impossible under the prevailing circumstances. (pp. 99-100)

The only solution was not to simply kill evil Kirk, for as Spock observed “We have no previous experience” and no idea what might happen to good Kirk should his evil doppelganger die. So they use the newly repaired transporter to reintegrate the two men, and our normal, beloved and virtuous Kirk returns. Our Kirk follows The Golden Mean and is therefore capable of virtue, and would meet with Aristotle’s approval.

Dr Barad concludes that Kirk’s ethical code is based on both Aristotelian Virtue Ethics and Prima Facie Duty Ethics, the first of which was on display in this compelling episode (p. 331). I only wish Spock had not made that horrible comment to Yeoman Rand, who was sexually assaulted by evil Kirk early in the episode. As he had the nerve to say “The imposter had some interesting qualities, wouldn’t you say, Yeoman?” Blame that on the era in which the script was written! Despite the poor choice of words, this episode remains a classic and a great way to learn about moral philosophy.

Note: Roger Thompson is a research fellow at Dalhousie University’s Centre for the Study of Security and Development, the author of Lessons Not Learned: The US Navy’s Status Quo Culture, a former researcher at Canada’s National Defence Headquarters and Korea’s first Star Trek professor. The above article was posted at CounterPunch.

Kevin S. Decker and Jason T. Eberl (eds.).The Ultimate Star Trek and Philosophy: The Search for Socrates (The Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series). Wiley, 2016. Kindle Edition.

Judith Barad with Ed Robertson The Ethics of Star Trek (New York: Perennial, 2001).

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THE RISE OF CHINA (AND THE FALL OF THE U.S.?)

May 21, 2023 – 7:11 am

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Beijing has concentrated on the slow, stealthy accretion of investments and influence across Eurasia from the South China Sea to the North Sea. By changing the continent’s underlying geopolitics through this commercial integration, it’s winning a level of control not seen in the last thousand years, while unleashing powerful forces for political change. By Alfred W McCoy.

>From the ashes of a world war that killed 80 million people and reduced great cities to smoking rubble, America rose like a Titan of Greek legend, unharmed and armed with extraordinary military and economic power, to govern the globe.

During four years of combat against the Axis leaders in Berlin and Tokyo that raged across the planet, America’s wartime commanders - George Marshall in Washington, Dwight D Eisenhower in Europe, and Chester Nimitz in the Pacific - knew that their main strategic objective was to gain control over the vast Eurasian landmass.

Whether you’re talking about desert warfare in North Africa, the D-Day landing at Normandy, bloody battles on the Burma-India border, or the island-hopping campaign across the Pacific, the Allied strategy in World War II involved constricting the reach of the Axis powers globally and then wresting that very continent from their grasp.

That past, though seemingly distant, is still shaping the world we live in. Those legendary generals and admirals are, of course, long gone, but the geopolitics they practiced at such a cost still has profound implications. For just as Washington encircled Eurasia to win a great war and global hegemony, so Beijing is now involved in a far less militarized reprise of that reach for global power.

And, to be blunt, these days, China’s gain is America’s loss. Every step Beijing takes to consolidate its control over Eurasia simultaneously weakens Washington’s presence on that strategic continent and so erodes its once formidable global power.

A Cold War Strategy

After four embattled years imbibing lessons about geopolitics with their morning coffee and bourbon nightcaps, America’s wartime generation of generals and admirals understood, intuitively, how to respond to the future alliance of the two great communist powers in Moscow and Beijing.

In 1948, following his move from the Pentagon to Foggy Bottom, Secretary of State George Marshall launched the $13 billion Marshall Plan to rebuild a war-torn Western Europe, laying the economic foundations for the formation of the NATO alliance just a year later.

After a similar move from the wartime Allied headquarters in London to the White House in 1953, President Dwight D Eisenhower helped complete a chain of military bastions along Eurasia’s Pacific littoral by signing a series of mutual-security pacts - with South Korea in 1953, Taiwan in 1954, and Japan in 1960. For the next 70 years, that island chain would serve as the strategic hinge on Washington’s global power, critical for both the defense of North America and dominance over Eurasia.

To constrain the communist powers inside that continent, the US ringed its 6,000 miles with 800 military bases, thousands of jet fighters, and three massive naval armadas - the 6th Fleet in the Atlantic, the 7th Fleet in the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, and, somewhat later, the 5th Fleet in the Persian Gulf.

After fighting to conquer much of that vast continent during World War II, America’s postwar leaders certainly knew how to defend their gains. For more than 40 years, their unrelenting efforts to dominate Eurasia assured Washington of an upper hand and, in the end, victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War.

To constrain the communist powers inside that continent, the US ringed its 6,000 miles with 800 military bases, thousands of jet fighters, and three massive naval armadas - the 6th Fleet in the Atlantic, the 7th Fleet in the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, and, somewhat later, the 5th Fleet in the Persian Gulf.

Thanks to diplomat George Kennan, that strategy gained the name “containment” and, with it, Washington could, in effect, sit back and wait while the Sino-Soviet bloc imploded through diplomatic blunder and military misadventure.

After the Beijing-Moscow split of 1962 and China’s subsequent collapse into the chaos of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, the Soviet Union tried repeatedly, if unsuccessfully, to break out of its geopolitical isolation - in the Congo, Cuba, Laos, Egypt, Ethiopia, Angola, and Afghanistan.

In the last and most disastrous of those interventions, which Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev came to term “the bleeding wound”, the Red Army deployed 110,000 soldiers for nine years of brutal Afghan combat, hemorrhaging money and manpower in ways that would contribute to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

In that heady moment of seeming victory as the sole superpower left on planet Earth, a younger generation of Washington foreign-policy leaders, trained not on battlefields but in think tanks, took little more than a decade to let that unprecedented global power start to slip away.

Toward the close of the Cold War era in 1989, Francis Fukuyama, an academic working in the State Department’s policy planning unit, won instant fame among Washington insiders with his seductive phrase “the end of history”. He argued that America’s liberal world order would soon sweep up all of humanity on an endless tide of capitalist democracy. As he put it in a much-cited essay: “The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident… in the total exhaustion of viable systemic alternatives to Western liberalism… seen also in the ineluctable spread of consumerist Western culture.”

The Invisible Power of Geopolitics

Amid such triumphalist rhetoric, Zbigniew Brzezinski, another academic sobered by more worldly experience, reflected on what he had learned about geopolitics during the Cold War as an adviser to two presidents, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. In his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard, Brzezinski offered the first serious American study of geopolitics in more than half a century. In the process, he warned that the depth of US global hegemony, even at this peak of unipolar power, was inherently “shallow”.

Sir Halford Mackinder observed that, for the past 500 years, European imperial powers had dominated Eurasia from the sea, but the construction of trans-continental railroads was shifting the locus of control to its vast interior “heartland”… “Who rules the Heartland commands the World Island; Who rules the World Island commands the World.”

For the United States and, he added, every major power of the past 500 years, Eurasia, home to 75 per cent of the world’s population and productivity, was always “the chief geopolitical prize”. To perpetuate its “preponderance on the Eurasian continent” and so preserve its global power, Washington would, he warned, have to counter three threats: “the expulsion of America from its offshore bases” along the Pacific littoral; ejection from its “perch on the western periphery” of the continent provided by NATO; and, finally, the formation of “an assertive single entity” in the sprawling center of Eurasia.

Arguing for Eurasia’s continued post-Cold War centrality, Brzezinski drew heavily on the work of a long-forgotten British academic, Sir Halford Mackinder. In a 1904 essay that sparked the modern study of geopolitics, Mackinder observed that, for the past 500 years, European imperial powers had dominated Eurasia from the sea, but the construction of trans-continental railroads was shifting the locus of control to its vast interior “heartland”.

In 1919, in the wake of World War I, he also argued that Eurasia, along with Africa, formed a massive “world island” and offered this bold geopolitical formula: “Who rules the Heartland commands the World Island; Who rules the World Island commands the World.” Clearly, Mackinder was about 100 years premature in his predictions.

But today, by combining Mackinder’s geopolitical theory with Brzezinski’s gloss on global politics, it’s possible to discern, in the confusion of this moment, some potential long-term trends. Imagine Mackinder-style geopolitics as a deep substrate that shapes more ephemeral political events, much the way the slow grinding of the planet’s tectonic plates becomes visible when volcanic eruptions break through the earth’s surface. Now, let’s try to imagine what all this means in terms of international geopolitics today.

China’s Geopolitical Gambit

In the decades since the Cold War’s close, China’s increasing control over Eurasia clearly represents a fundamental change in that continent’s geopolitics. Convinced that Beijing would play the global game by US rules, Washington’s foreign policy establishment made a major strategic miscalculation in 2001 by admitting it to the World Trade Organization (WTO).

“Across the ideological spectrum, we in the US foreign policy community,” confessed two former members of the Obama administration, “shared the underlying belief that US power and hegemony could readily mould China to the United States’ liking… All sides of the policy debate erred.” In little more than a decade after it joined the WTO, Beijing’s annual exports to the US grew nearly five-fold and its foreign currency reserves soared from just $200 billion to an unprecedented $4 trillion by 2013.

In 2013, drawing on those vast cash reserves, China’s new president, Xi Jinping, launched a trillion-dollar infrastructure initiative to transform Eurasia into a unified market. As a steel grid of rails and petroleum pipelines began crisscrossing the continent, China ringed the tri-continental world island with a chain of 40 commercial ports - from Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean, around Africa’s coast, to Europe from Piraeus, Greece, to Hamburg, Germany.

In launching what soon became history’s largest development project [the Belt and Road Initiative], 10 times the size of the Marshall Plan, Xi is consolidating Beijing’s geopolitical dominance over Eurasia, while fulfilling Brzezinski’s fear of the rise of “an assertive single entity” in Central Asia.

Unlike the US, China hasn’t spent significant effort establishing military bases. While Washington still maintains some 750 of them in 80 nations, Beijing has just one military base in Djibouti on the east African coast, a signals intercept post on Myanmar’s Coco Islands in the Bay of Bengal, a compact installation in eastern Tajikistan, and half a dozen small outposts in the South China Sea.

In launching what soon became history’s largest development project [the Belt and Road Initiative], 10 times the size of the Marshall Plan, Xi Jinping is consolidating Beijing’s geopolitical dominance over Eurasia, while fulfilling Zbigniew Brzezinski’s fear of the rise of “an assertive single entity” in Central Asia.

Moreover, while Beijing was focused on building Eurasian infrastructure, Washington was fighting two disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in a strategically inept bid to dominate the Middle East and its oil reserves (just as the world was beginning to transition away from petroleum to renewable energy).

In contrast, Beijing has concentrated on the slow, stealthy accretion of investments and influence across Eurasia from the South China Sea to the North Sea. By changing the continent’s underlying geopolitics through this commercial integration, it’s winning a level of control not seen in the last thousand years, while unleashing powerful forces for political change.

Tectonic Shifts Shake US Power

After a decade of Beijing’s relentless economic expansion across Eurasia, the tectonic shifts in that continent’s geopolitical substrate have begun to manifest themselves in a series of diplomatic eruptions, each erasing another aspect of US influence. Four of the more recent ones might seem, at first glance, unrelated but are all driven by the relentless force of geopolitical change.

First came the sudden, unexpected collapse of the US position in Afghanistan, forcing Washington to end its 20-year occupation in August 2021 with a humiliating withdrawal. In a slow, stealthy geopolitical squeeze play, Beijing had signed massive development deals with all the surrounding Central Asian nations, leaving American troops isolated there.

To provide critical air support for its infantry, US jet fighters were often forced to fly 2,000 miles from their nearest base in the Persian Gulf - an unsustainable long-term situation and unsafe for troops on the ground. As the US-trained Afghan Army collapsed and Taliban guerrillas drove into Kabul atop captured Humvees, the chaotic US retreat in defeat became unavoidable.

Just six months later in February 2022, President Vladimir Putin massed an armada of armoured vehicles loaded with 200,000 troops on Ukraine’s border. If Putin is to be believed, his “special military operation” was to be a bid to undermine NATO’s influence and weaken the Western alliance - one of Brzezinski’s conditions for the US eviction from Eurasia.

But first Putin visited Beijing to court President Xi’s support, a seemingly tall order given China’s decades of lucrative trade with the United States, worth a mind-boggling $500 billion in 2021. Yet Putin scored a joint declaration that the two nations’ relations were “superior to political and military alliances of the Cold War era” and a denunciation of “the further expansion of NATO”.

Whether from a customs embargo, incessant naval patrols, or some other form of pressure, Taiwan might just fall quietly into Beijing’s grasp.

As it happened, Putin did so at a perilous price. Instead of attacking Ukraine in frozen February when his tanks could have maneuvered off-road on their way to the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, he had to wait out Beijing’s Winter Olympics.

So, Russian troops invaded instead in muddy March, leaving his armored vehicles stuck in a 40-mile traffic jam on a single highway where the Ukrainians readily destroyed more than 1,000 tanks. Facing diplomatic isolation and European trade embargos as his defeated invasion degenerated into a set of vengeful massacres, Moscow shifted much of its exports to China. That quickly raised bilateral trade by 30 per cent to an all-time high, while reducing Russia to but another piece on Beijing’s geopolitical chessboard.

Then, just last month [March 2023], Washington found itself diplomatically marginalized by an utterly unexpected resolution of the sectarian divide that had long defined the politics of the Middle East. After signing a $400-billion infrastructure deal with Iran and making Saudi Arabia its top oil supplier, Beijing was well positioned to broker a major diplomatic rapprochement between those bitter regional rivals, Shia Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia. Within weeks, the foreign ministers of the two nations sealed the deal with a deeply symbolic voyage to Beijing - a bittersweet reminder of the days not long ago when Arab diplomats paid court in Washington.

Finally, the Biden administration was stunned this month when Europe’s preeminent leader, Emmanuel Macron of France, visited Beijing for a series of intimate tête-à-tête chats with China’s President Xi. At the close of that extraordinary journey, which won French companies billions in lucrative contracts, Macron announced “a global strategic partnership with China” and promised he would not “take our cue from the US agenda” over Taiwan.

A spokesman for the Élysée Palace quickly released a pro forma clarification that “the United States is our ally, with shared values.” Even so, Macron’s Beijing declaration reflected both his own long-term vision of the European Union as an independent strategic player and that bloc’s ever-closer economic ties to China.

The Future of Geopolitical Power

Projecting such political trends a decade into the future, Taiwan’s fate would seem, at best, uncertain. Instead of the “shock and awe” of aerial bombardments, Washington’s default mode of diplomatic discourse in this century, Beijing prefers stealthy, sedulous geopolitical pressure.

In building its island bases in the South China Sea, for example, it inched forward incrementally - first dredging, then building structures, next runways, and finally emplacing anti-aircraft missiles - in the process avoiding any confrontation over its functional capture of an entire sea.

Lest we forget, Beijing has built its formidable economic-political-military power in little more than a decade. If its strength continues to increase inside Eurasia’s geopolitical substrate at even a fraction of that head-spinning pace for another decade, it may be able to execute a deft geopolitical squeeze-play on Taiwan like the one that drove the US out of Afghanistan. Whether from a customs embargo, incessant naval patrols, or some other form of pressure, Taiwan might just fall quietly into Beijing’s grasp.

Should such a geopolitical gambit prevail, the US strategic frontier along the Pacific littoral would be broken, possibly pushing its Navy back to a “second island chain” from Japan to Guam - the last of Brzezinski’s criteria for the true waning of US global power. In that event, Washington’s leaders could once again find themselves sitting on the proverbial diplomatic and economic sidelines, wondering how it all happened.

Note: Alfred W McCoy, a TomDispatch regular, is the Harrington professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power. His newest book is To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change (Dispatch Books). The above article first appeared at TomDispatch, it was also posted at CounterPunch.

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CHINA IS BIGGER. GET OVER IT

May 14, 2023 – 7:27 am

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In category after category, China outpaces the United States, and often by a very large margin. By Dean Baker.

It is standard for politicians, reporters, and columnists to refer to the United States as the world’s largest economy and China as the second largest. I suppose this assertion is good for these people’s egos, but it happens not to be true. Measuring by purchasing power parity, China’s economy passed the US in 2014, and it is now roughly 25 per cent larger.[1] The International Monetary Fund (IMF) projects that China’s economy will be nearly 40 per cent larger by 2028, the last year in its projections.

The measure that the America boosters use is an exchange rate measure, which takes each country’s GDP in its own currency and then converts the currency into dollars at the current exchange rate. By this measure, the US economy is still more than one-third larger than China’s economy.

Economists usually prefer the purchasing power parity measure for most purposes. The exchange rate measure fluctuates hugely, as exchange rates can easily change 10 or 15 per cent in a year. Exchange rates also can be somewhat arbitrary, as they are affected by countries’ decisions to try to control the value of their currency in international money markets.

By contrast, the purchasing power parity measure applies a common set of prices to all the items a country produces in a year. In effect, this means assuming that a car, a television set, a college education, etc. cost the same in every country. Applying common prices is a difficult task, goods and services vary substantially across countries, which is makes it hard to apply a single price. As a result, purchasing power parity measures clearly have a large degree of imprecision.

Nonetheless, it is clear that this is the measure that we are more interested in for most purposes. If we want to know the quantity of goods and services a country produces in a year, we need to use the same set of prices. By this measure, there is no doubt that China’s economy is both considerably larger than the US economy and growing far more rapidly.

Just to be clear, this doesn’t mean the Chinese people are on average richer than people in the United States. China has nearly four times the population, so on a per-person basis, the US is still more than three times as rich as China. But, it should not be a shock to us that a country with more than 1.4 billion people would have a larger economy than a country with 330 million.

For the folks who need more convincing, we can make comparisons of various items. We can start with auto production, a standard metric of manufacturing output. Last year, China produced more than 27.0 million cars, the United States produced a bit less than 10.1 million. (China also leads the world by far in the production and use of electric cars.) The cars made in the United States undoubtedly were better on average, but they would have to be an awful lot better to make up this gap.

As a practical matter, it doesn’t matter whether we like China or not. It is here, and it is not about to go away. We will need to find ways to deal with China that do not lead to military conflict.

To take a more old-fashioned measure, China produced over 1,030 million metric tons of steel in 2021. The United States produced less than 90 million metric tons.

China generated 8,540,000 gigawatt hours of electricity in 2021, nearly twice the 4,380,000 gigawatt hours generated in the United States. The gap is even larger if we look at solar and wind energy production. China has 307,000-megawatt hours of installed solar capacity, compared to 97,000 in the United States. China has 366,000-megawatt hours of installed wind capacity versus 141,000 in the United States.

We can look to some more modern measures. China has 1,050 million Internet users. The United States has 311 million. China has 975 million smartphone users, the United States has 276 million. In 2016, China graduated 4.7 million students with STEM degrees. In the US the number was 330,000 for the same year. The definitions for STEM degrees are not the same, so the numbers are not strictly comparable, but it would be difficult to make the case that the US number is somehow larger. And the figure has almost certainly moved more in China’s favor over the last seven year.

In terms of impact on the world economy, China accounted for 14.7 per cent of goods exports in 2020. The United States accounted for 8.1 per cent. In the first nine months of last year, China was responsible for $90 billion in foreign direct investment. This compares to $66 billion for the United States.

We can pile on more statistics, but in category after category, China outpaces the United States, and often by a very large margin. If people want to put on their MAGA hats and insist the US is still the world’s largest economy, they are welcome to do so, but Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, and China’s economy is bigger.

Size Matters

The issue here is not just a question of bragging rights. China is clearly an international competitor economically, militarily, and diplomatically. Many people want to take a confrontational approach to China, with the idea that we can isolate the country and spend it on the ground militarily, as we arguably did with the Soviet Union.

At its peak, the Soviet economy was roughly 60 per cent of the size of the US economy, and China’s economy is already 25 per cent larger. And this gap is expanding rapidly. China is also far more integrated with the world economy than the Soviet Union ever was. This makes the prospect of isolating China far more difficult.

As a practical matter, it doesn’t matter whether we like China or not. It is here, and it is not about to go away. We will need to find ways to deal with China that do not lead to military conflict.

Ideally, we would find areas where we could cooperate, for example sharing technology to address climate change and dealing with pandemics and other health threats. But, if anyone wants to push the New Cold War route, they should at least be aware of the numbers. This would not be your grandfather’s Cold War.

[1] I have included both Hong Kong and Macao in this calculation since both are now effectively part of China.

Note: Dean Baker is the senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. The above article first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog. It was also posted at CounterPunch.

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BELAFONTE’S EARLY SONGS WERE AUDACIOUS… AND SEXUAL

May 7, 2023 – 7:06 am

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Long before Marvin Gaye, Teddy Pendergrass, Barry White and Prince, there was already Harry Belafonte singing about sex. By Martha Rosenberg.

The great, late musician Harry Belafonte is being remembered as a civil rights leader, movie actor and a best friend of the late great actor Sidney Poitier - all true. He is also acknowledged as serving as an avatar of Caribbean culture with such hits as “Day O,” (The Banana Boat Song) “Island in the Sun,” and “Jamaica Farewell” - also true. [Harry Belafonte passed away on April 25, 2023 of heart failure. He was 96.]

But few reporters have reached back into the breadth of his 1950s recordings for RCA Victor (“RCA Victory” as one young reporter termed it) which were shocking at the time for their audacity, sexuality and versatility. Belafonte was not only one of the first black singers to exude sexuality - with his good looks and his notorious shirts cut down to the navel - but also one of the first to sing about it! Consider the lyrics from his tune, “Man Smart (Woman Smarter)” which suggest a sexual freedom not often admitted in the 1950s (and even cut in some versions.)

I was treatin’ a girl independently
She was makin’ baby for me
When de baby born and I went to see
Eyes was blue
It was not by me.

And how about the song “Tongue Tie Baby” in which Belafonte promises marriage to a woman just to consummate a passionate encounter. [The mission failed]

How to make the fruit fall off the tree
If I want a chance to integrate me situation
I got to talk some other talk for she
Right away marriage talk was coming out me mouth
She smiled the conquest is no long in doubt
But before she reach insanity,
With the last chance whisper she telling me

And speaking of marriage, early Belafonte songs did not have very progressive views. In the song Angelique-O, he sings that “Mama’s got to take you back,” because Angelique-O was a poor housekeeper. ( “You never learned how to make a stew/your biscuits Lord I can hardly chew.”)

In the song, Cordelia Brown, Belafonte confesses that he’s “yearned this long for your [Cordelia’s] caress” but since her “head’s so red” [not in keeping with local beauty standards], “I think I will marry Maybelle instead.” Ouch.

And what are we to make of the arguably racist song, “Brown Skin Girl,” who is told in the song to “stay home and mind baby?”

Versatility in Song Choices and Voice

In his early recordings, Belafonte’s voice was amazingly versatile. While it gallops with light-hearted tunes like “Scratch” and “Monkey” (“My girl came over to have a drink/I came downstairs and what do you think?/The monkey had run and he let her in/He poured her a glass of me favorite gin”), it is reverential on tunes like “Love, Love Alone,” about the English monarch King Edward’s throne abdication and the Hebrew dance hit “Hava Nagila.” (What influenced his choice of material one wonders?)

Belafonte’s musical soloists on early recordings on woodwinds and horns and his backup singers were remarkable and culturally true but mostly took a backseat to their famous lead singer. (Nor did Belafonte’s fun and satirical Calypso songs, occlude his apparently strong faith showcased on an entire album of spirituals and his Christmas-timed “Mary’s Boy Child,” which is still a treasured holiday favorite.)

Many enjoyed Belafonte’s entertaining movie appearances and appreciated his civil rights work. But Belafonte’s early musical work was unprecedented in creativity and audacity and should not be forgotten.

Note: Martha Rosenberg is an investigative health reporter. She is the author of Born With A Junk Food Deficiency: How Flaks, Quacks and Hacks Pimp The Public Health (Prometheus). The above article was posted at CounterPunch.

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WAITING FOR THE END OF THE WORLD

April 30, 2023 – 7:02 am

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Catch the right wave, and you’ll be sitting on top of the world. By Pepe Escobar.

We were waiting for the end of the world
Waiting for the end of the world, waiting for the end of the world
Dear Lord, I sincerely hope You’re coming
‘Cause You really started something
- Elvis Costello , Waiting for the End of the World, 1977

We cannot even begin to fathom the non-stop ripple effects deriving from the 2023 geopolitical earthquake that shook the world: Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, [on March 21] in Moscow, de facto signaling the beginning of the end of Pax Americana.

This has been the ultimate anathema for rarified Anglo-American hegemonic elites for over a century: a signed, sealed, comprehensive strategic partnership of two peer competitors, intertwining a massive manufacturing base and pre-eminence in supply of natural resources - with value-added Russian state of the art weaponry and diplomatic nous.

From the point of view of these elites, whose Plan A was always a debased version of the Roman Empire’s Divide and Rule, this was never supposed to happen. In fact, blinded by hubris, they never saw it coming. Historically, this does not even qualify as a remix of the Tournament of Shadows; it’s more like Tawdry Empire Left in the Shade, “foaming at the mouth” (copyright Maria Zakharova).

Xi and Putin, with one Sun Tzu move, immobilized Orientalism, Eurocentrism, Exceptionalism and, last but not least, Neo-Colonialism. No wonder the Global South was riveted by what developed in Moscow.

Adding insult to injury, we have China, the world’s largest economy by far when measured by purchasing power parity (PPP), as well as the largest exporter. And we have Russia, an economy that by PPP is equivalent or even larger than Germany’s - with the added advantages of being the world’s largest energy exporter and not forced to de-industrialize.

Together, in synch, they are focused on creating the necessary conditions to bypass the US dollar.

Cue to one of President Putin’s crucial one-liners: “We are in favor of using the Chinese yuan for settlements between Russia and the countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America.”

A key consequence of this geopolitical and geoeconomic alliance, carefully designed throughout the past few years, is already in play: the emergence of a possible triad in terms of global trade relations and, in many aspects, a Global Trade War.

Eurasia is being led - and largely organized - by the Russia-China partnership. China will also play a key role across the Global South, but India may also become quite influential, agglutinating what would be a Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) on steroids. And then there is the former “indispensable nation” ruling over the EU vassals and the Anglosphere rounded up in the Five Eyes.

Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, with one Sun Tzu move, immobilized Orientalism, Eurocentrism, Exceptionalism and, last but not least, Neo-Colonialism.

What the Chinese really want

The Hegemon, under its self-concocted “rules-based international order”, essentially never did diplomacy. Divide and Rule, by definition, precludes diplomacy. Now their version of “diplomacy” has degenerated even further into crude insults by an array of US, EU and UK’s intellectually challenged and frankly moronic functionaries.

It’s no wonder that a true gentleman, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, has been forced to admit, “Russia is no longer a partner of the EU… The European Union ‘lost’ Russia. But the Union itself is to blame. After all, EU member states… openly declare that Russia should be dealt a strategic defeat. That is why we consider the EU to be an enemy organization.”

And yet the new Russian foreign policy concept, announced by Putin on March 31, makes it quite clear: Russia does not consider itself an “enemy of the West” and does not seek isolation.

The problem is there’s virtually no adult to talk to on the other side, rather a bunch of hyenas. That has led Lavrov to once again stress that “symmetrical and asymmetrical” measures may be used against those involved in “hostile” actions against Moscow.

When it comes to Exceptionalistan, that’s self-evident: the US is designated by Moscow as the prime anti-Russia instigator, and the collective West’s overall policy is described as “a new type of Hybrid War.”

Yet what really matters for Moscow are the positives further on down the road: non-stop Eurasia integration; closer ties with “friendly global centers” China and India; increased help to Africa; more strategic cooperation with Latin America and the Caribbean, the lands of Islam - Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt - and ASEAN.

And that brings us to something essential that was - predictably - ignored en masse by Western media: the Boao Forum for Asia, which took place nearly simultaneously with the announcement of Russia’s new foreign policy concept.

The Boao Forum, started in early 2001, still in the pre-9/11 era, has been modeled on Davos, but it’s Top China through and through, with the secretariat based in Beijing. Boao is in Hainan province, one of the islands of the Gulf of Tonkin and today a tourist paradise.

One of the key sessions of this year’s forum was on development and security, chaired by former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who is currently Boao’s president.

There were quite a few references to Xi’s Global Development Initiative as well as the Global Security Initiative - which by the way was launched at Boao in 2022.

Yet what really matters for Moscow are the positives further on down the road: non-stop Eurasia integration; closer ties with “friendly global centers” China and India; increased help to Africa; more strategic cooperation with Latin America and the Caribbean, the lands of Islam - Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt - and ASEAN.

The problem is these two initiatives are directly linked to the UN’s concept of peace and security and the extremely dodgy Agenda 2030 on “sustainable development” - which is not exactly about development and much less “sustainable”: it’s a Davos uber-corporate concoction. The UN for its part is basically a hostage of Washington’s whims. Beijing, for the moment, plays along.

Premier Li Qiang was more specific. Stressing the trademark concept of “community of shared future for mankind” as the basis for peace and development, he linked peaceful coexistence with the “Spirit of Bandung” - in direct continuity with the emergence of NAM in 1955: that should be the “Asian Way” of mutual respect and building consensus - in opposition to “the indiscriminate use of unilateral sanctions and long-reaching jurisdiction”, and the refusal of “a new Cold War”.

And that led Li Qiang to the emphasis on the Chinese drive to deepen the RCEP East Asian trade deal, and also advance the negotiations on the free trade agreement between China and ASEAN. And all that integrated with the new expansion of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), in contrast to trade protectionism.

So for the Chinese what matters, intertwined with business, is cultural interactions; inclusivity; mutual trust; and a stern refusal of “clash of civilizations” and ideological confrontation.

As much as Moscow easily subscribes to all of the above - and in fact practices it via diplomatic finesse - Washington is terrified by how compelling is this Chinese narrative for the whole Global South. After all, Exceptionalistan’s only offer in the market of ideas is unilateral domination; Divide and Rule; and “you’re with us or against us”. And in the latter case you will be sanctioned, harassed, bombed and/or regime-changed.

Is it 1848 all over again?

Meanwhile, in vassal territories, a possibility arises of a revival of 1848, when a big revolutionary wave hit all over Europe.

In 1848 these were liberal revolutions; today we have essentially popular anti-liberal (and anti-war) revolutions - from farmers in the Netherlands and Belgium to unreconstructed populists in Italy and Left and Right populists combined in France.

It may be too early to consider this a European Spring. Yet what’s certain in several latitudes is that average European citizens feel increasingly inclined to shed the yoke of Neoliberal Technocracy and its dictatorship of Capital and Surveillance. Not to mention NATO warmongering.

As virtually all European media is technocrat-controlled, people won’t see this discussion in the MSM [mainstream media]. Yet there’s a feeling in the air this may be heralding a Chinese-style end of a dynasty.

In the Chinese calendar this is how it always goes: their historical-societal clock always runs with periods of between 200 and 400 years per dynasty.

For the Chinese what matters, intertwined with business, is cultural interactions; inclusivity; mutual trust; and a stern refusal of “clash of civilizations” and ideological confrontation.

There are indeed intimations that Europe may be witnessing a rebirth.

The period of upheaval will be long and arduous - due to the hordes of anarco-liberals who are such useful idiots for the Western oligarchy - or it could all come to a head in a single day. The target is quite clear: the death of Neoliberal Technocracy.

That’s how the Xi-Putin view could make inroads across the collective West: show that this ersatz “modernity” (which incorporates rabid cancel culture) is essentially void compared to traditional, deeply rooted cultural values - be it Confucianism, Taoism or Eastern Orthodoxy. The Chinese and Russian concepts of civilization-state are much more appealing than they appear.

Well, the (cultural) revolution won’t be televised; but it may work its charms via countless Telegram channels. France, infatuated with rebellion throughout its history, may well jump to the vanguard - again.

Yet nothing will change if the global financial casino is not subverted. Russia taught the world a lesson: it was preparing itself, in silence, for a long-term Total War. So much so that its calibrated counterpunch turned the Financial War upside down - completely destabilizing the casino. China, meanwhile, is re-balancing, and is on the way to be also prepared for Total War, hybrid and otherwise.

The inestimable Michael Hudson, fresh from his latest book, The Collapse of Antiquity, where he deftly analyzes the role of debt in Greece And Rome, the roots of Western civilization, succinctly explains our current state of play:

“America has pulled a color revolution at the top, in Germany, Holland, England, and France, essentially, where the foreign policy of Europe is not representing their own economic interests… America simply said - We are committed to support a war of (what they call) democracy (by which they mean oligarchy, including the Nazism of Ukraine) against autocracy… Autocracy is any country strong enough to prevent the emergence of a creditor oligarchy, like China has prevented the creditor oligarchy.”

So “creditor oligarchy”, in fact, can be explained as the toxic intersection between globalist wet dreams of total control and militarized Full Spectrum Dominance.

The difference now is that Russia and China are showing to the Global South that what American strategists had in store for them - you’re going to “freeze in the dark” if you deviate from what we say - is no longer applicable. Most of the Global South is now in open geoeconomic revolt.

Globalist neoliberal totalitarianism of course won’t disappear under a sand storm. At least not yet. There’s still a maelstrom of toxicity ahead: suspension of constitutional rights; Orwellian propaganda; goon squads; censorship; cancel culture; ideological conformity; irrational curbs of freedom of movement; hatred and even persecution of - Slav - Untermenschen; segregation; criminalization of dissent; book burnings, show trials; fake arrest mandates by the kangaroo ICC; ISIS-style terror.

But the most important vector is that both China and Russia, each exhibiting their own complex particularities - and both dismissed by the West as unassimilable Others - are heavily invested in building workable economic models that are not connected, in several degrees, to the Western financial casino and/or supply chain networks. And that’s what’s driving the Exceptionalists berserk - even more berserk than they already are.

Note: Pepe Escobar is a Eurasia-wide independent geopolitical analyst and author. His latest book is Raging Twenties (Nimble Books, 2021). Follow him on Telegram at @rocknrollgeopolitics. The above article was posted at Information Clearing House. This article is the English original of a column specially commissioned by leading Russian business daily Vedomosti (click here).

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IRAN AND SAUDI ARABIA: A CHINESE WIN-WIN

April 23, 2023 – 6:53 am

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Iran and Saudi Arabia choose peace. By Pepe Escobar.

The idea that History has an endpoint, as promoted by clueless neoconservatives in the unipolar 1990s, is flawed, as it is in an endless process of renewal. The recent official meeting between Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan al-Saud and Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian in Beijing on April 6 marks a territory that was previously deemed unthinkable and which has undoubtedly caused grief for the War Inc. machine.

This single handshake signifies the burial of trillions of dollars that were spent on dividing and ruling West Asia for over four decades. Additionally, the Global War on Terror (GWOT), the fabricated reality of the new millennium, featured as prime collateral damage in Beijing.

Beijing’s optics as the capital of peace have been imprinted throughout the Global South, as evidenced by a subsequent sideshow where a couple of European leaders, a president, and a Eurocrat, arrived as supplicants to Xi Jinping, asking him to join the NATO line on the war in Ukraine. They were politely dismissed.

Still, the optics were sealed: Beijing had presented a 12-point peace plan for Ukraine that was branded “irrational” by the Washington beltway neocons. The Europeans - hostages of a proxy war imposed by Washington - at least understood that anyone remotely interested in peace needs to go through the ritual of bowing to the new boss in Beijing.

The irrelevance of the JCPOA

Tehran-Riyadh relations, of course, will have a long, rocky way ahead - from activating previous cooperation deals signed in 1998 and 2001 to respecting, in practice, their mutual sovereignty and non-interference in each other’s internal affairs.

Everything is far from solved - from the Saudi-led war on Yemen to the frontal clash of Persian Gulf Arab monarchies with Hezbollah and other resistance movements in the Levant. Yet that handshake is the first step leading, for instance, to the Saudi foreign minister’s upcoming trip to Damascus to formally invite President Bashar al-Assad to the Arab League summit in Riyadh next month.

This single handshake signifies the burial of trillions of dollars that were spent on dividing and ruling West Asia for over four decades.

It’s crucial to stress that this Chinese diplomatic coup started way back with Moscow brokering negotiations in Baghdad and Oman; that was a natural development of Russia stepping in to help Iran save Syria from a crossover NATO-Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) coalition of vultures.

Then the baton was passed to Beijing, in total diplomatic sync. The drive to permanently bury GWOT and the myriad, nasty ramifications of the US war of terror was an essential part of the calculation; but even more pressing was the necessity to demonstrate how the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), or Iran nuclear deal, had become irrelevant.

Both Russia and China have experienced, inside and out, how the US always manages to torpedo a return to the JCPOA, as it was conceived and signed in 2015. Their task became to convince Riyadh and GCC states that Tehran has no interest in weaponizing nuclear power - and will remain a signatory of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

Then it was up to Chinese diplomatic finesse to make it quite clear that the Persian Gulf monarchies’ fear of revolutionary Shi’ism is now as counter-productive as Tehran’s dread of being harassed and/or encircled by Salafi-jihadis. It’s as if Beijing had coined a motto: drop these hazy ideologies, and let’s do business.

And business it is, and will be: better yet, mediated by Beijing and implicitly guaranteed by both nuclear superpowers Russia and China.

It was up to Chinese diplomatic finesse to make it quite clear that the Persian Gulf monarchies’ fear of revolutionary Shi’ism is now as counter-productive as Tehran’s dread of being harassed and/or encircled by Salafi-jihadis. It’s as if Beijing had coined a motto: drop these hazy ideologies, and let’s do business.

Hop on the de-dollarization train

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) may exhibit some Soprano-like traits, but he’s no fool: he instantly saw how this Chinese offer morphed beautifully into his domestic modernization plans. A Gulf source in Moscow, familiar with MbS’ rise and consolidation of power, details the crown prince’s drive to appeal to the younger Saudi generation who idolize him.

Let girls drive their SUVs, go dancing, let their hair down, work hard, and be part of the “new” Saudi Arabia of Vision 2030: a global tourism and services hub, a sort of Dubai on steroids.

And, crucially, this will also be a Eurasia-integrated Saudi Arabia; future, inevitable member of both the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and BRICS+ - just like Iran, which will also be sitting at the same communal tables.

>From Beijing’s point of view, this is all about its ambitious, multi-trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). A key BRI connectivity corridor runs from Central Asia to Iran and then beyond, to the Caucasus and/or Turkey. Another one - in search of investment opportunities - runs through the Arabian Sea, the Sea of Oman, and the Persian Gulf, part of the Maritime Silk Road.

Beijing wants to develop BRI projects in both corridors: call it “peaceful modernization” applied to sustainable development. The Chinese always remember how the Ancient Silk Roads plied Persia and parts of Arabia: in this case, we have History Repeating Itself.

ASEAN is already actively discussing how to bypass the dollar to privilege settlements in local currencies - something unthinkable even a few months ago. The US dollar has already been thrown into a death by a thousand cuts spiral.

A geopolitical revolution

And then comes the Holy Grail: energy. Iran is a prime gas supplier to China, a matter of national security, inextricably linked to their $400 billion-plus strategic partnership deal. And Saudi Arabia is a prime oil supplier. Closer Sino-Saudi relations and interaction in key multipolar organizations such as the SCO and BRICS+ advance the fateful day when the petroyuan will be definitely enshrined.

China and the UAE have already clinched their first gas deal in yuan. The high-speed de-dollarization train has already left the station. ASEAN is already actively discussing how to bypass the dollar to privilege settlements in local currencies - something unthinkable even a few months ago. The US dollar has already been thrown into a death by a thousand cuts spiral.

And that will be the day when the game reaches a whole new unpredictable level.

The destructive agenda of the neocon leaders in charge of US foreign policy should never be underestimated. They exploited the 9/11 “new Pearl Harbor” pretext to launch a crusade against the lands of Islam in 2001, followed by a NATO proxy war against Russia in 2014. Their ultimate ambition is to wage war against China before 2025.

However, they are now facing a swift geopolitical and geoeconomic revolt of the World’s Heartland - from Russia and China to West Asia, and extrapolating to South Asia, South-East Asia, Africa and selected latitudes in Latin America.

The turning point came on February 26, 2022, when Washington’s neocons - in a glaring display of their shallow intellects - decided to freeze and/or steal the reserves of the only nation on the planet equipped with all the commodities that really matter, and with the necessary nous to unleash a momentous shift to a monetary system not anchored in fiat money.

That was the fateful day when the cabal, identified by journalist Seymour Hersh as responsible for blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines, actually blew the whistle for the high-speed de-dollarization train to leave the station, led by Russia, China, and now - welcome on board - Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Note: Pepe Escobar is correspondent-at-large at Asia Times. His latest book is 2030. Follow him on Facebook. The above article was posted at Information Clearing House.

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THE WEST HAS BEEN PLANNING TO CRUSH CHINA FOR A VERY LONG TIME

April 16, 2023 – 6:50 am

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For any peace to come, America must be willing to share power with other nations. By Caitlin Johnstone.

“China is preparing to kill Americans and we’ve got to prepare to defend ourselves,” empire propagandist Gordon Chang told Fox Business during an interview on Monday [April 3, 2023].

Chang, who has famously spent more than two decades incorrectly predicting the imminent collapse of China, bizarrely made these comments while discussing a future attack on Taiwan. Taiwan is, of course, not the United States and any potential war between Taiwan and the mainland would be an inter-Chinese conflict that needn’t involve a single American, and Chang is most assuredly not part of any “we” who will ever be engaged in combat with the Chinese military under any circumstances.

Chang frames his narrative as though China is menacing Americans in their homes, when in reality only the exact opposite is true: the US has been militarily encircling China for many years, and is rapidly accelerating its efforts to do so.

Just the other day the Philippines announced the locations of four military bases the US will now have access to in its ongoing encirclement operation, most of them in the northern provinces closest to China.

Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp writes:

“Three of the Philippine bases will be located in northern Philippine provinces, a move that angers China since they can be used as staging grounds for a fight over Taiwan. The US will be granted access to the Lal-lo Airport and the Naval Base Camilo Osias, which are both located in the northern Cagayan province. In the neighboring Isabela province, the US will gain access to Camp Melchor Dela Cruz.

“The US military will also be able to expand to Palawan, an island province in the South China Sea, disputed waters that are a major source of tensions between the US and China. The US will be granted access to Balabac Island, the southernmost island of Palawan.

“The new locations are on top of five bases the US currently has access to, bringing the total number of bases the US can rotate forces through in the Philippines to nine. The expansion in the Philippines is a significant step in the US effort to build up its military assets in the region to prepare for a future war with China.”

Imperial spinmeisters… are just lying when they frame China’s militarizing to defend itself against undisguised US encirclement as China militarizing to attack Americans.

So it’s very clear who the aggressor is here and who is preparing to attack whom. Imperial spinmeisters like Gordon Chang are just lying when they frame China’s militarizing to defend itself against undisguised US encirclement as China militarizing to attack Americans.

Fun fact: US officials used to pretend China was crazy and paranoid for saying this encirclement was happening. In the 1995 book “Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions since World War II,” William Blum wrote the following:

“In March 1966, Secretary of State Dean Rusk spoke before a congressional committee about American policy toward China. Mr Rusk, it seems, was perplexed that “At times the Communist Chinese leaders seem to be obsessed with the notion that they are being threatened and encircled.” He spoke of China’s “imaginary, almost pathological, notion that the United States and other countries around its borders are seeking an opportunity to invade mainland China and destroy the Beijing regime”. The Secretary then added:

“How much Beijing’s ‘fear’ of the United States is genuine and how much it is artificially induced for domestic political purposes only the Chinese Communist leaders themselves know. I am convinced, however, that their desire to expel our influence and activity from the western Pacific and South-East Asia is not motivated by fears that we are threatening them.”

Another fun fact: thanks to a 2021 revelation by Daniel Ellsberg, we now know that the secretary of state’s comments about how crazy and paranoid China was for thinking the US wanted to attack it came just eight years after the US had seriously considered acting on plans it had drawn up to launch a nuclear strike on the Chinese mainland.

Mainstream western imperialists of all stripes have long recognized that a hard conflict with China will be necessary at some point in the future if they’re to continue their domination of the world. In his 2005 book “Superpatriot”, Michael Parenti wrote that the unipolarist neoconservative “PNAC” (Project for the New American Century) ideology that had by that point taken over US foreign policy was ultimately geared toward a future conflict with China:“The PNAC plan envisions a strategic confrontation with China, and a still greater permanent military presence in every corner of the world. The objective is not just power for its own sake but power to control the world’s natural resources and markets, power to privatize and deregulate the economies of every nation in the world, and power to hoist upon the backs of peoples everywhere - including North America - the blessings of an untrammeled global ‘free market.’ The end goal is to ensure not merely the supremacy of global capitalism as such, but the supremacy of American global capitalism by preventing the emergence of any other potentially competing superpower.”

But you can see the twinkle of this looming conflict in the eyes of western imperialists long before any of this. In a 1902 interview (which was not published until 1966 - a year after Churchill’s death), Churchill candidly voiced his support for partitioning China at some point in the future in order to preserve the dominance of the “Aryan stock” over “barbaric nations”:

“The East is interesting, and to no one can it be more valuable and interesting than to anyone who comes from the West.

“I think we shall have to take the Chinese in hand and regulate them. I believe that as civilized nations become more powerful they will get more ruthless, and the time will come when the world will impatiently bear the existence of great barbaric nations who may at any time arm themselves and menace civilized nations. I believe in the ultimate partition of China - I mean ultimate. I hope we shall not have to do it in our day. The Aryan stock is bound to triumph.”

The word “partition” here means breaking a nation up into smaller nations, that is, balkanization. To this day we see western imperialists pushing for the partitioning of disobedient nations like Russia and Syria, and we still see this with China in the push to permanently amputate regions like Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Taiwan from Beijing.

“I believe in the ultimate partition of China - I mean ultimate. I hope we shall not have to do it in our day. The Aryan stock is bound to triumph.” - Winston Churchill

China’s sheer size, social cohesion and geostrategic location have long been recognized as a potential problem in the future for western imperialists who wish to ensure their ability to dominate and control, and now we’re seeing that all come to a head. Churchill said of a future confrontation with China “I hope we shall not have to do it in our day” because that confrontation has always been certain to be horrific, and today in the Atomic Age this is far more true than it was in 1902.

And in fact we do not have to do it in our day, either. We don’t have to do it in any day. The only reason we’re being pushed toward a profoundly dangerous conflict with China is because it’s the only way for western imperialists to maintain their hegemonic control of this planet, but their hegemonic control of this planet has brought us to a point of endlessly escalating nuclear brinkmanship and looming ecosystem collapse. It hasn’t exactly been working out great, is what I am saying.

There’s no reason the west can’t simply accept the existence of other powers and stop trying to dominate everyone on earth. We have long been ruled by tyrants who continually push our world toward suffering and death in the name of securing more power and control, but we don’t need to accept their rule. They do not have a healthy vision for our species, and there are a whole lot more of us than there are of them. Their rule is done as soon as enough of us decide it is.

Note: Caitlin Johnstone’s articles are entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking her on Facebook, following her antics on Twitter, checking out her podcast, throwing some money into her hat on Patreon or Paypal, or buying her book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. New book! Lao Sue And Other Poems, available in paperback or PDF/ebook.

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GROWING UP DINGO: THE EVOLUTION OF JAZZ

April 9, 2023 – 6:43 am

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“It was me and Miles at the Savoy.” By Richard Schulman.

I used to say that if I had seen Coltrane, I would have seen them all.

Why so many people tried to play his notes is not a mystery. It is the same reason so many basketball players try to be like “Mike” (Michael Jordan). Everyone wants to meet greatness head on. Sometimes it is a challenge, sometimes it is just to understand its meaning. Either way, it is not a life for everyone.

There are many stories about those who try to rise to profound heights and accomplishments. We are raised to do the best we can. We are not educated about the limits of our capabilities: we should never have that education.

We merely need to understand that in our ambitions to reach someone else’s pinnacle, we may feel that we have to cheat life a bit to get there. If we think that our goal is to be the envy of our worlds, be careful how high you might get: too close to the sun, you might burn and crash: “Poof” like Icarus.

My first introduction to jazz was in my parents den listening to Benny Goodman’s version of Louis Prima’s “Sing, Sing, Sing (With a Swing)”. It might have been the first “78” record I had listened to. I think I can still see that eight-year-old swing to it.

The Watts’ Riots; I saw Count Basie, Joe Williams and Ella Fitzgerald at the “Watts Concert” to revitalize the neighborhood. Then there were gun shots, and a crowd dispersement interrupted the engagement.

There are turning points in every young adult. The turning points change as we evolve. Revisiting the past is a time machine: It can only be a magical ride.

My first public beer I had with my father: San Francisco 1971. I was seeing Gerry Mulligan. I will never forget the waitress asking this underaged teen, “what would the gentleman like to drink tonight”. I remember a low cut dress as she leaned closer to my eyes. I might have said, “A Heineken”. She smiled “Coming right up”. Wow, some sax player, a beer with my dad and uncle. A great evening was shaping up.

I remember sitting in the Hollywood Bowl listening and watching Sun Ra’s huge orchestra of his jazz army toying with the crowds’ passion for music. I ate from the picnic basket. I had something to drink. Most importantly, with eyes closed and friends abound, Jazz was becoming part of my DNA.

I remember I was supposed to meet a friend at a jazz club under an overpass in West Los Angeles.

He never showed. I couldn’t find a seat. I went to the back of the club that was designed like an amphitheater. The organist Jimmy Smith played two sets. I walked out that night remembering my happy face and feeling Jimmy performed just for me.

I landed one night at the Savoy on West 44th street in Manhattan. I was shooting for a small music magazine. I had seen Miles Davis at the Santa Monica Civic in California. But tonight, I was using the stage to rest my cameras and stare and listen to the greatest name in jazz history.

Later that year I was the only white guy at the Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach. I went to see Stanley Turrentine perform Sugar, Cherry, Salt Song and… Two sets later, I exited wearing the same sunglasses that I entered the club with. I can still hear the voices; “Who does that white kid think he is?”

I moved to New York to pursue my photography career. I thought shooting musicians was an interesting place to start.

A friend introduced me to Marian McPartland. I was not aware of her NPR series. When I went to her home to shoot her, the first thing she said was, “Why don’t you sit by me on the bench?”

For about 30 minutes I had forgotten why I was there. I just listened to her play. She would whisper, ”Turn the page please”. I was completely oblivious to time. When I came to my senses I realized I had just a few moments to make a snap. There is such a wow factor in a snap.

I never saw her again. It is impossible to forget the keys playing and the window light and just me listening to the ivories.

I landed one night at the Savoy on West 44th street in Manhattan. I was shooting for a small music magazine. I had seen Miles Davis at the Santa Monica Civic in California. But tonight, I was using the stage to rest my cameras and stare and listen to the greatest name in jazz history.

Yes there is Coltrane, Cannonball, Parker and a whole list of magnificent desirables. But this was me. This was Miles.

There is a fuse that catches fire when I am this close to greatness. My heart danced a bit differently that night. I was in the presence of a great artist. I will always wonder what he thought of the print I sent him. Maybe it doesn’t matter: it was me and Miles at the Savoy.

I remember shooting Dizzy a few months later at the Blue Note.

I remember shooting Freddie Hubbard at the Blue Note.

I remember shooting Nat Adderley and Ron Carter at the Vanguard.

I remember dozens of jazz moments. Sometimes I think all those moments crystallized when I was listening to Lonnie Liston Smith at the Bandshell in Central Park: Every musical Jazz moment seems to be connected to the family of Jazz: The family of Jazz that possibly evolved with every performance across the globe. With every performance the practitioners are sharing keys to notes performed generations earlier and for generations to follow.

Today I look at my archives and reflect on all of the venues where I have seen Jazz musicians. If you take all of those names and places and throw them into a magician’s hat, what you will see is my evolution. My evolution is certainly a reflection of my experiences. The influences in my life from the live music opportunities I have had are embraceable. They are like living in Fantasia’s celluloid. Then there is Dingo.

The movie is not great cinema. To see Miles. To hear the voice of a genius is a reward unto itself.

What captured my soul was to hear Miles sell: “When you feel you are ready, come to Paris”. Dreams are made from those few words. Jazz dreams.

Note: Richard Schulman is a photographer and writer. His books include Portraits of the New Architecture and Oxymoron & Pleonasmus. He lives in New York City. The above article was posted at CounterPunch.

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CRIMINALS AT LARGE: THE IRAQ WAR TWENTY YEARS ON

April 2, 2023 – 7:07 am

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‘Liar, liar, pants on fire’. That’s what the West were (are?) good at. By Binoy Kampmark.

The arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for Russian President Vladimir Putin came at an opportune moment. It was, if nothing else, a feeble distraction over the misdeeds and crimes of other leaders current and former. Russia, not being an ICC member country, does not acknowledge that court’s jurisdiction. Nor, for that matter, does the United States, despite the evident chortling from US President Joe Biden.

Twenty years on, former US President George W Bush, former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, and Australia’s own John Howard, the troika most to blame for not just the criminal invasion of a foreign country but the regional and global cataclysm consequential to it, remain at large. Since then, Bush has taken to painting; Blair and Howard have preferred to sell gobbets of alleged wisdom on the lecture circuit.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq by the US-led Coalition of the Willing was a model exercise of maligning the very international system of rules Washington, London and Canberra speak of when condemning their latest assortment of international villains.

It recalled those sombre words of the International Military Tribunal, delivered at the Nuremberg war crimes trials in 1946: “War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone but affect the whole world. To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

Twenty years on, former US President George W Bush, former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, and Australia’s own John Howard, the troika most to blame for not just the criminal invasion of a foreign country but the regional and global cataclysm consequential to it, remain at large.

The invasion of Iraq defied the UN Security Council as the sole arbiter on whether the use of force would be necessary to combat a genuine threat to international peace and security. It breached the UN Charter. It encouraged instances of horrendous mendacity (those stubbornly spectral weapons of mass destruction) and the inflation of threats supposedly posed by the regime of Saddam Hussein.

This included the unforgettable British contribution about Saddam’s alleged ability to launch chemical and biological weapons in 45 minutes. As Blair declared to MPs in September 2002: “It [the intelligence service] concludes that Iraq has chemical and biological weapons, that Saddam has continued to produce them, that he has existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, which could be activated within 45 minutes.”

Putin, not one to suffer amnesia on this point, also noted this fact in his speech made announcing Russia’s attack on Ukraine. Iraq, he noted, had been invaded “without any legal grounds.” Lies, he said, were witnessed “at the highest state level and voiced from the high UN rostrum. As a result, we see a tremendous loss of human life, damage, destruction, and a colossal upsurge of terrorism.”

In the immediate aftermath of the [Iraq] invasion, the infrastructure of the country was ruined, its army and public service disbanded, leaving rich pools of disaffected recruits for the insurgency that followed. The country, torn between Shia, Sunni and Kurd and governed by an occupation force of colossal ineptitude, suffered an effective collapse, leaving a vacuum exploited by jihadis and, in time, Islamic State.

As Tony Blair declared to MPs in September 2002: “It [the intelligence service] concludes that Iraq has chemical and biological weapons, that Saddam has continued to produce them, that he has existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, which could be activated within 45 minutes.”

Since the invasion, a number of civil society efforts have been undertaken against the dubious triumvirate of evangelist warmongers. The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal, convened over four days in November 2011, invoked universal jurisdiction in finding Bush, Blair and their accomplices guilty of the act of aggression.

Despite its unmistakable political flavour - the original body had been unilaterally established by former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad - its reasoning was sound enough. The invasion of Iraq could not “be justified under any reasonable interpretation of international law” and threatened “to return us to a world in which the law of the jungle prevails over the rule of law, with potentially disastrous consequences for the human rights not only of the Iraqis but of the people throughout the region and the world”.

The Sydney-based SEARCH Foundation also resolved to submit a complaint to the ICC in 2012, hoping that the body would conduct an investigation and issue a warrant for Howard’s arrest. In September 2013, a complaint was filed by Peter Murphy, Secretary of the Foundation, alleging, among a range of offences, the commission of acts of aggression, breaches of international humanitarian law and human rights, and crimes against peace. The effort failed, leaving Howard irritatingly free.

In two decades, the United States still finds itself embroiled in Iraq, with 2,500 troops stationed in a capacity that is unlikely to stop anytime too soon. That said, the parallels with Afghanistan are already being drawn. In 2022, the outgoing head of US Central Command, Marine Gen Frank McKenzie, trotted out his dream about what would happen. “You want to get to the state where nations, and security elements in those nations, can deal with a violent extremist threat without direct support from us.”

Ironically enough, such violent extremist threats had more than a little help in their creation from Washington’s own disastrous intervention. Eventually, the Iraqis would simply have to accept “to take a larger share of all the enabling that we’re doing now.”

The calamity of Iraq is also a salutary warning to countries willing to join any US-led effort, or rely on the good grace of Washington’s power. To be an enemy of the United States might be dangerous, but as Henry Kissinger reminds us, to be a friend might prove fatal.

Note: Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email him here. The above article was posted at CounterPunch.

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In 1957, Harry Belafonte was one of the world’s most popular entertainers, selling more records that year than either Elvis or Sinatra.

Whether from a customs embargo, incessant naval patrols, or some other form of pressure, Taiwan might just fall quietly into Beijing’s grasp.

As a practical matter, it doesn’t matter whether we like China or not. It is here, and it is not about to go away. We will need to find ways to deal with China that do not lead to military conflict.

Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, with one Sun Tzu move, immobilized Orientalism, Eurocentrism, Exceptionalism and, last but not least, Neo-Colonialism.

For the Chinese what matters, intertwined with business, is cultural interactions; inclusivity; mutual trust; and a stern refusal of “clash of civilizations” and ideological confrontation.

This single handshake signifies the burial of trillions of dollars that were spent on dividing and ruling West Asia for over four decades.

ASEAN is already actively discussing how to bypass the dollar to privilege settlements in local currencies - something unthinkable even a few months ago. The US dollar has already been thrown into a death by a thousand cuts spiral.

Imperial spinmeisters… are just lying when they frame China’s militarizing to defend itself against undisguised US encirclement as China militarizing to attack Americans.

“I believe in the ultimate partition of China - I mean ultimate. I hope we shall not have to do it in our day. The Aryan stock is bound to triumph.” - Winston Churchill

I landed one night at the Savoy on West 44th street in Manhattan. I was shooting for a small music magazine. I had seen Miles Davis at the Santa Monica Civic in California. But tonight, I was using the stage to rest my cameras and stare and listen to the greatest name in jazz history.

Twenty years on, former US President George W Bush, former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, and Australia’s own John Howard, the troika most to blame for not just the criminal invasion of a foreign country but the regional and global cataclysm consequential to it, remain at large.

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