Peter Boyle argues AUKUS, the new military alliance between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, represents a deliberate and dangerous escalation of the US-led confrontation with China that must be challenged.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
Asia Pacific Report newsdesk
An editorial in the Chinese English-language mouthpiece Global Times has accused Australia — and the United States — of “conniv[ing] with and even encourag[ing] the unrest” in the Solomon Islands after three days of rioting last week destroyed much of Chinatown in the capital Honiara.
“Even though [100] Australian troops and police were sent to keep order in the Solomon Islands,” said the tabloid newspaper at the weekend.
“What is right and what is not is obvious. Hence, aren’t [Prime Minister Scott] Morrison’s remarks of ‘not indicat[ing] any position’ actually a support for the evil doings?“
The editorial was headlined “Australia has fomented riots in Solomon Island”.
The Global Times is published under the umbrella of the Chinese Communist Party’s official flagship publication People’s Daily and is viewed by critics as often publishing disinformation.
“Defending against China’s influence into the South Pacific has been an outstanding geopolitical consideration of the US and Australia, which has been welcomed and longed [for] by the Taiwan authorities, because four of the remaining 15 countries that keep ‘diplomatic ties’ with Taiwan are in the South Pacific — and the future to consolidate such ties is uncertain.”
The editorial said:
Rioters ‘stormed Parliament’
“The capital city of the Solomon Islands has been under riots for days. The rioters have stormed the Parliament, set fire to a police station, and attacked Chinatown and other businesses there.
“Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare on Friday blamed foreign interference for instigating the anti-government protests over his government’s decision to cut ‘diplomatic ties’ with the island of Taiwan and establish diplomatic ties with the Chinese mainland. Though, he didn’t specify who is among the ‘other powers’ that fomented the violence.
“Sogavare emphasised that the choice to establish diplomatic ties with Beijing conforms to the trend of the times and international laws.
“The Solomon Islands is a country with nearly 690,000 people in the South Pacific region. After Sogavare assumed office in 2019, his administration made a choice to set up diplomatic ties with Beijing. However, the island of Malaita [in] the country, where most of the rioters are reportedly from, has maintained its relations with the island of Taiwan.
“The New York Times said the Solomon Islands has been in a ‘heightened political tug of war’, citing a former Australian diplomat stationed in the Solomon Islands saying that the US has been providing Malaita with direct foreign aid. Such analysis is representative of the US and Australia.
“Defending against China’s influence into the South Pacific has been an outstanding geopolitical consideration of the US and Australia, which has been welcomed and longed by the Taiwan authorities, because four of the remaining 15 countries that keep ‘diplomatic ties’ with Taiwan are in the South Pacific — and the future to consolidate such ties is uncertain.
“The South Pacific countries and the Chinese mainland have a strong capacity to cooperate under the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative. Over the years, many small nations have, on their own, chosen to have closer ties with Beijing.
‘Dollar diplomacy, coercion’
“The measures taken to prevent these small countries from establishing diplomatic ties with China have included ‘dollar diplomacy’, coercion, and inciting unrest within these countries to topple local governments.
“Australia has been offered a hand to maintain security in the Solomon Islands. Recently, Canberra has again deployed more than 100 police and defense force personnel to the country. Against this backdrop, it is not hard to imagine how easy it will be for an external force to wreak havoc there.
“Australia, the US, or the Taiwan authorities haven’t admitted to being behind the ‘foreign interference’ condemned by Sogavare. Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison insisted that Australia’s ‘presence there does not indicate any position on the internal issues of the Solomon Islands’. Canberra even alleged the move was in response to a request from Sogavare.
“Nonetheless, the Associated Press cited observers as saying that ‘Australia intervened quickly to avoid Chinese security forces moving in to restore order’. More importantly, neither Canberra nor Washington has condemned the riots in the Solomon Islands so far, despite the fact that the unrest has violated the basic spirit of democracy and the rule of law.
“Media coverage of the riots in the US and Australia was ‘matter-of-fact’ and highlighted the rioters’ political opposition to diplomatic relations with China.
“It is clear that Australia’s overall attitude, and that of the US, is to connive with and even encourage the unrest, even though the Australian troops and police were sent to keep order in the Solomon Islands. What is right and what is not is obvious. Hence, aren’t Morrison’s remarks of ‘not indicate any position’ actually a support for the evil doings?
“The government of the Solomon Islands and their people know what is really going on there. It is also not hard for the outside world to know. Prime Minister Sogavare noted there were other powers fomenting the riots, shouldn’t the international community believe the words of this legitimate leader of the Solomon Islands?”
And the PNG
Honiara
community out on the streets today for a cleanup session
Pictures by Rodney Arofasei pic.twitter.com/HnRS3Pji6o
— Georgina Kekea (@ginakekea) November 28, 2021
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
THE VILLAGE EXPLAINER: By Dan McGarry in Port Vila
One of the key characteristics of Melanesian politics is its ability to remain formless and chaotic right up until the point where, after a strange and often obscure catalysing moment, it abruptly transforms itself.
More than a few people will attribute Solomon Islands’ recent tragic political confrontation to Manasseh Sogavare, his decision to end diplomatic relations with Taiwan, and his intolerance in the face of Malaitan grievance.
Sogavare has a reputation for intransigence. He can be downright pugnacious when confronted. More than a few people have laid at least part of the blame for the 2000 coup at his feet.
But that misunderstands who he is, and how he’s managed to remain one of the most enduring characters on the Solomon Islands political scene.
Sogavare began his career as a tea boy smartly saluting the White-socked British administrators. He is extremely proud to have become the one they salute.
The diplomatic switch
Those who insist on seeing the current crisis in geopolitical terms misunderstand his role in the diplomatic switch, and his approach to politics.
Sogavare is two things:
When Solomon Islands held the chair of the Melanesian Spearhead Group in 2015, he played a decisive role in brokering the awkward compromise that saw the MSG simultaneously elevate Indonesia’s status in the organisation and welcome the United Liberation Movement for West Papua, or ULMWP, into the fold.
If he had allowed it, the matter of membership would have gone to a vote, and the vote would have split the organisation irrevocably. Instead he found a consensus solution, albeit one that defies an intellectually consistent explanation.
This is precisely the pitfall that, if backchannel accounts are accurate, Australia led the Pacific Islands Forum into when they called for the selection of the next secretary-general to be put to a vote.
Always an outsider
Born in Papua New Guinea to missionary parents from Choiseul province, he’s always been an outsider and an individualist. His lack of constituency has become his stock in trade. It’s precisely because he’s not burdened by party or policy that he continually bobs to the top of the Solomon Islands political elite.
If you had asked anyone about his stance toward China in the lead-up to the diplomatic split from Taiwan, you would likely have heard that he opposed recognition of China. But that didn’t stop him from unreservedly attacking Taiwan for its failure to address his country’s development needs.
The critique wasn’t unmerited. For decades, Taiwan elevated its ties to the political elite over its role as a development partner. The much-maligned Constituency Development Funds that have gained outsized influence over national politics were seeded by Taiwan.
CDFs are one of the key drivers of electoral corruption in the country. A close observer of Solomon Islands politics recently told me that to get elected in Solomon Islands now, you have to be either rich, or an MP.
Incumbency rates increased markedly since the CDFs were made a core component in the budget process.
It took Taiwan years to begin unhitching itself from this albatross. When they did, they left an opening for China to fill. And, in spite of their own reluctance to become stuck in the same corruption and mire that Taiwan had only just emerged from, the prize was too big to forego.
Claiming that Sogavare drove this process ignores the power of Parliament. He knew which way they were going, and he knew what he had to do if he was going to keep his hand on the wheel.
And that’s why he did what he did.
Distrust of Malaitan politicians
His distrust of senior Malaitan politicians, and his apparent willingness to use dirty tricks to remove them, are well known. It’s hard to defend many of the decisions he’s made along the way.
But it is possible to understand and explain them.
Manasseh Sogavare is a party of one. He retains his hold on the highest office not in spite of this, but because of it. He presents no ideological or policy threat to any of the other MPs.
It’s precisely because of his mechanistic, arguably amoral approach to politics that he remains one of the most enduring faces on the Solomon Islands political scene.
That hardly raises him above criticism. But it should serve as a caution to anyone who naively thinks that removing him will solve the nation’s problems — or that the nation’s political problems can be solved by a policy, a party or a single man.
The question is not who can salve this wound afflicting Solomons society, but how these peoples can heal themselves.
The divisions that have fuelled this most recent rupture are deep. They span decades. To think that a bit of parliamentary musical chairs will be sufficient to fix it is folly. To think that some other smart, independent man of deep conviction is going to be able to put things to rights is to ignore the evidence right in front of our eyes.
How will history judge Sogavare? I’ll leave the last words to him. When I asked him back in 2015 about the prospect for continued violence and unrest, he said:
“We’ve been through this three times now. And if I haven’t learned anything from 2006, then… I have myself to blame.”
Dan McGarry was previously media director at Vanuatu Daily Post/Buzz FM96. The Village Explainer is his semi-regular newsletter containing analysis and insight focusing on under-reported aspects of Pacific societies, politics and economics. His articles are republished by Asia Pacific Report with permission.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
In this week’s News on China in 2 minutes: economic changes in China; increased share of the wealth pie garnered by the richest 10%; curbing groundwater exploitation; Chinese entertainment achieving international popularity.
The post News on China | No. 77 first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Listen to a reading of this article:
❖
Every day there’s more propaganda banging the drums of war between nuclear-armed nations a little louder. Western media are churning out reports about Russia preparing to invade Ukraine any minute now and China preparing to invade Taiwan any minute now, saying the response to each is obviously to move a lot of high-powered weaponry to both of those locations, and none of them are questioning whether these allegations are true or whether those responses are wise.
This is so dangerous. This whole two-front nuclear brinkmanship game is so very, very dangerous, and they keep finding ways to make it more dangerous. And hardly anyone notices it, because the news media outlets that people look to to understand the world aren’t telling them it’s dangerous.
The only danger you’re allowed to discuss in mainstream western reporting about Russia and China is their scary aggressive expansionism, like this new Newsweek propaganda piece here. Nowhere are you allowed to question if it’s true, or to even breathe a word about the possibility of detente.
Literally the return of the domino theory, which proved inaccurate and harmful the first time, when it was significantly more plausible than it is now. https://t.co/lIwrpWF3ME
— Stephen Wertheim (@stephenwertheim) November 26, 2021
It’s official empire doctrine that the borders of Russia and China will necessarily keep expanding unless militantly held in place by The Good Guys. It’s taken as a given that those nations are essentially mindless cancers that can only metastasize to other parts of the body unless aggressively treated. At no point is it permissible to ask if perhaps we are heading in a direction that could literally end the world and if that could not be easily avoided by simply working to scale down tensions. At no point is it permissible to question if these nations might be reacting defensively to western aggressions and discuss the possibility of working toward detente.
Australian journalist John Pilger was already sounding alarms about this years ago. This article about the shocking escalations against Russia and China by western powers was written all the way back in 2016, and it’s gotten so much worse than that since then. Yet it’s still taken as a given by Serious News Reporters in the west that Russia and China are these reckless aggressors and the US is responding defensively to their aggressions.
You can tell people who freak out about Russia and China are either acting in bad faith or regurgitating propaganda because they all act like detente is not a thing. They don’t even acknowledge the existence of that concept. Many literally don’t even know the meaning of the word.
At no time does it ever even enter their minds that hey, maybe these nations might be acting defensively to blatantly imbalanced military realities like the one illustrated below, and that the sane thing to do would be to move toward de-escalation.
People think this way because they are programmed to, and they are programmed to think that way because easing off of aggressions rather than escalating them would permit the end of US planetary hegemony and a move into a multipolar world. The empire cannot tolerate such a thing.
It was established after the fall of the Soviet Union that another multipolar world must be avoided at all cost; even if it means imperiling the whole world to maintain supremacy. Easing tensions would mean ceasing to do everything you can to prevent the rise of China as a global superpower. That’s what all the hysterical shrieking about Russia and China has really been about these last few years: manufacturing consent for this aggressive campaign.
If things were permitted to take their natural course, China would rise and the US would officially move into post-primacy and we’d have a proper multipolar world. This has been deemed so undesirable that they’re willing to risk the life of every terrestrial organism to stop it.
There are no checks or balances on this insane agenda. It’s supported by all mainstream parties and all mainstream media outlets. We’re sleepwalking into nuclear war. Nobody’s awake to the danger. Not the public, not the media, and most frighteningly not the empire managers actually driving these agendas.
_____________________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
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The Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC) announced on its official WeChat social media account on 21 November that its new FL-64 wind tunnel testing facility has completed the first stage of commissioning trials, paving the way for formal use. According to AVIC, the FL-64 system has a diameter of 1 m and is designed […]
The post AVIC progresses new FL-64 hypersonic wind tunnel development appeared first on Asian Military Review.
This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.
If you thought western mass media have been brazenly pushy with their anti-China propaganda, wait til you see The Hill’s appalling new opinion piece titled “America must prepare for war with China over Taiwan“.
“China’s massive investment in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) may show China is preparing to fundamentally change the status quo and preparing for possible war with the United States over Taiwan,” the piece begins. “To deter China, the United States must rapidly build up its forces in the Pacific, continue to strengthen military alliances in the region to ensure access to bases in time of conflict, and accelerate deliveries of purchased military equipment to Taiwan.”
The article goes on to narrate about Taiwan’s importance on the global chessboard and why we should all expect a full-scale invasion by Beijing quite soon, casually discusses a direct military conflict between two nuclear-armed nations like it’s no big deal, and calls on the Biden administration to “articulate to the American people why Taiwan’s defense is critical to the United States.”
"America must prepare for war with China over Taiwan" (@TheHillOpinion) https://t.co/oOvTwqle05 pic.twitter.com/EM0iAuDQMf
— The Hill (@thehill) November 25, 2021
Then at the very bottom of the article you get to the part that really matters: the information about the author.
“David Sauer is a retired senior CIA officer who served as chief of station and deputy chief of station in multiple overseas command positions in East Asia and South Asia.”
Ahh, okay.
The CIA used to have to infiltrate the media. Now the CIA is the media.
Apparently this “retired” senior CIA officer has been spending his “retirement” churning out war propaganda articles for The Hill with titles like “The US cannot allow China to think it will abandon Taiwan” and “The next US president has a tall order: Keeping China in check“, as well as acting as an expert source for virulent anti-China propaganda rag The Epoch Times.
Would you like to know what this big brave warrior looks like? Would you like to see a picture of this mighty hero who has no fear of leading us all into a third world war?
Now that’s the face of a man who’d be first to volunteer for duty on the front lines in defense of what he believes in. You look at that man and can’t help but imagine him charging into Taipei bleeding red white and blue firing an M4 carbine for freedom and democracy. He’s not just talking about sending our sons and daughters into this war, no siree.
Why is it that all the worst warmongering narrative managers are always weird-looking little nerds who plainly wouldn’t know how to hold their own dicks, much less a gun? Were they bullied so bad in school that they just have to act out their pent-up aggression by helping to incinerate families in the global south over crude oil or something? What the hell is wrong with these freaks?
Anyone who supports the idea of the US and its allies entering into a third world war against a nuclear-armed nation to determine who governs an island off the Chinese mainland is an enemy of humanity. Such a war could easily kill tens of millions of people if engaged with full commitment, which could turn into billions at any time if it went nuclear. I hope Beijing never launches an unprovoked attack on Taiwan (unlikely), and I hope the US doesn’t provoke it into doing so (far more likely), but if all this brinkmanship spins out of control and that does indeed happen then entering into such a war to stop it would benefit nobody but a few sociopaths in Washington, Langley and Arlington. And quite possibly not even them.
Contrary to what propagandists like Sauer keep implying, the US is not even treaty-bound to defend Taiwan militarily and hasn’t been since 1979 when the only such treaty was annulled during Washington’s campaign to coax Beijing away from the Soviet Union. Yet because of their steadily escalating propaganda campaign, for the first time ever a majority of Americans surveyed on whether they’d support going to war with China over Taiwan now reportedly say yes.
Citing US Threats, #Russia and #China Agree to Expand Military Cooperation
US pressure has pushed the two countries closer together
by Dave DeCamp @DecampDave https://t.co/gmhn52PgKh pic.twitter.com/lfSssnID2Z— Antiwar.com (@Antiwarcom) November 24, 2021
At best all these manipulations are geared toward manufacturing consent for pouring vastly increased military resources into the US empire’s ongoing pivot to Asia, which just by itself will necessarily include myriad provocations against the Chinese government which can easily escalate into war at any time. These people are playing games with the lives of every living organism on this planet, and they are suffering no consequences for doing so.
And now Moscow and Beijing are moving further into a military partnership that seems to be getting closer by the year in response to aggressions from the US and its client states, which, I dunno, I’m no historian but maybe might be cause for alarm when you’ve got world powers splitting into two increasingly hostile global alliances. Could that lead to something bad? It seems like maybe that could lead to something bad.
Cornered animals are dangerous, especially ones with fangs and claws. Dying empires are dangerous, especially ones with nuclear weapons. We’re being aggressively propagandized into consenting to insanely dangerous agendas geared toward maintaining US unipolar hegemony in defiance of the natural movement we are seeing toward a multipolar world. We are seeing signs everywhere that the drivers of empire are preparing to do some very, very crazy things in order to stop that movement and maintain their dominance. The fact that they are still ramping up their propaganda campaign is concerning, to say the least.
_________________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
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This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.
ANALYSIS: By Transform Aqorau
The riots in Honiara yesterday, disturbing the city’s normally quiet atmosphere, were unexpected but not surprising.
Someone made reference to a possible protest that would coincide with the convening of Parliament, but details were sketchy and social media was tightlipped about a protest for a change.
Arguably, the riots are a culmination of a number of flashpoints that have been ignored these past few months.
At a “Tok Stori” Conference jointly held by the Solomon Islands National University and University of Melbourne on Wednesday, 17 November 2021, on the environment, conflict and peace, I spoke about unmasking the faces of those who control the Solomon Islands economy.
I argued that even though 80 percent of land in Solomon Islands is owned by Solomon Islanders, they are largely bystanders, while outsiders, mainly Malaysian, Filipino, and Chinese loggers and mining companies control the resources and the political processes involving our politicians.
People might elect our members of Parliament, but it is the logging companies, mining companies and other largely Asian-owned companies that underwrite the formation of government, influence the election of the Prime Minister, and keep ministers and government supporters under control after the elections.
In return, if they want anything, or need special favours, they go directly to ministers and even the Prime Minister.
Indigenous owners shut out
Indigenous Solomon Island business owners do not have the same access to our leaders. The political governance arrangements in Solomon Islands are shaped by the cozy co-existence between foreign loggers, miners and businesses.
The influence of non-state actors in shaping political undercurrents in Solomon Islands cannot be ignored.
Yesterday’s protest is said to have been instigated by supporters from Malaita, but the frustration with the national government, the attitude of the Prime Minister and ministers to provincial governments and provincial politicians, and the sense of alienation and disenfranchisement, is arguably shared across a wide spectrum of the country.
People feel resentful when they see the national government giving a Malaysian company preferential tax status by virtue of an Act of Parliament, or $13 million as a deposit towards the construction of what are purportedly poor-quality prefabricated houses, while Solomon Islanders have to sleep on the floor in the emergency department of their hospital.
Such things are inevitably bound to fuel resentment. When people see the government bypass local, indigenous contractors for the Pacific Games, it makes them antagonistic, and feel neglected.
This sense of alienation, disempowerment and neglect has been building for some time.
Yesterday’s protest is intertwined with the complexity of the China-Taiwan, and national-provincial government political dynamics that have been well publicised.
Shoddy treatment of Premier
Malaitans in Malaita generally have been sympathetic to their Premier. The shoddy way the national government has been treating their highly respected Premier Daniel Suidani, starting with arrangements for his overseas travel, and then blocking every single attempt he made at appointing ministers while he was away, has not been lost on Malaitans.
The unprecedented welcome he received at Auki when he returned from medical leave was testament to the high regard in which he is held.
Not even the Prime Minister would have come anywhere near size of the crowd that welcomed him that day. Notably absent were the Malaitan members of the national Parliament.
The thousands of supporters who showed up in truckloads from all wards in Malaita to stop the vote of no-confidence against Daniel Suidani should have sent a signal to national parliamentarians and the Prime Minister that it was time to set aside their differences.
Perhaps they underestimated the people’s resolve, thinking that the bribes that were allegedly paid to the Malaita provincial members would have been sufficient to topple Daniel Suidani.
Where the money originated from remains a mystery. However, Daniel Suidani’s vocal opposition to the switch to China, and his courting of Taiwan, might give a clue.
Throughout the past months, there has been little dialogue between the national government and the Malaita provincial government. A great opportunity to avoid today’s protests would have been for government ministers from Malaita to attend a reconciliation ceremony that was held in Aimela, a village outside Auki, last week.
They were not seen. Diplomacy and dialogue are not confined to international relations. They are very important attributes for politicians to have when they deal with each other.
Drifting to self-destruction
Solomon Islands has been drifting to self-destruction. It is one of the most aid dependent countries in the world.
Significant donor support is given to its health and education sector. Yet, its ministers and senior government officials treat its people poorly, and allow them to be exploited by loggers and miners.
Yesterday’s protest and riots are evidence of serious underlying currents that have been neglected. There has to be reform to the political system, including making the government more inclusive.
Those that rioted today probably don’t get anything from government. This has to change, otherwise Solomon Islands could be on the pathway to implosion.
Dr Transform Aqorau is CEO, iTuna Intel and founding director, Pacific Catalyst and a legal adviser to Marshall Islands. He is the former CEO of the Parties to the Nauru Agreement Office. This article was first published on DevPolicy blog at the Australian National University and is republished here under a Creatiuve Commons licence.
A sad day indeed when a school building was also torched and burnt down. My former school, Honiara Senior High School now being burnt down this evening. The science lab is now gone and the fire moving towards the assembly hall. A sad time for the students & teachers
— Georgina Kekea (@ginakekea) November 24, 2021
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
The pathway that Australia’s major political parties are putting us on is one where tensions in the region are escalating. But it does not have to be this way, argues Jordan Steele-John.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
The Committee to Protect Journalists press freedom 2021 video removed by Facebook, but still available on YouTube and Twitter. Video: CPJ (Hongkong crackdown at 32m:05s)
Pacific Media Watch newsdesk
The Committee to Protect Journalists has called on Facebook to restore a video honouring the winners of the International Press Freedom Awards (IPFA) at CPJ’s annual awards ceremony held on November 18 and streamed on social media during the event.
Less than an hour after the stream ended, Facebook notified CPJ that the video had been withheld worldwide because of a “copyright match” to a 13-second clip owned by i-Cable News, a Hong Kong-based Cantonese-language cable news channel, reports CPJ.
CPJ emailed i-Cable Communications Limited on November 24 requesting details but received no immediate reply.
The clip, featuring Jimmy Lai taking a bite from an apple, was taken from an advertisement for the now-shuttered Apple Daily dating from the 1990s when he founded the newspaper.
Currently imprisoned by Chinese authorities, Lai has become a powerful symbol of press freedom as the Chinese Communist Party seeks to gain control over Hong Kong’s media and was honoured during CPJ’s award ceremony for his work.
It is not clear if Facebook applied the action automatically, or whether i-Cable News complained in an attempt to suppress the video.
The news group, i-Cable, signed an agreement in 2018 with China Mobile Limited, a state-owned telecommunication company, allowing China Mobile to use its content for the next 20 years.
“It is beyond ironic that a platform which trumpets its commitment to freedom of speech should block a video celebrating journalists who risk their lives and liberty defending it,” CPJ deputy executive director Robert Mahoney said.
“Facebook must restore the video immediately and provide a clear and timely explanation of why it was censored in the first place.”
A lawyer at Donaldson and Callif, which vetted the IPFA video for Culture House, the production house that cut the video, told CPJ in an email that the firm was of the opinion that the clip of Lai “constitutes a fair use as used in this IPFA video”.
The full awards video — and its comments, views and share — remains unavailable to Facebook users worldwide. The IPFA video is still available on YouTube and Twitter.
CPJ contacted Facebook on November 19 and again on November 22 outlining CPJ’s concerns about the video’s removal but has yet to receive an explanation for the action by the company.
CPJ has documented examples of US copyright laws being used to censor journalism globally.
The press freedom organisation has held IPFA award ceremonies since 1991 as a way to honour at-risk journalists around the globe and highlight erosions of press freedom.
Republished from Committee to Protect Journalists.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
As Democrats in Congress struggle to pass the $1.75 trillion Build Back Better Act, there is large bipartisan consensus in the U.S. Congress to spend over $7 trillion over the next 10 years in military spending. The United States spends more each year on defense than China, Russia, India, the U.K., Germany, France, Japan, South Korea, and Australia combined. “Democrats have to engage in theater about human rights and international law and due process, but they ultimately, at the end of the day, are just as aggressive as Republicans,” says investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill of The Intercept. His most recent piece is titled, “The War Party: From Bush to Obama, and Trump to Biden, U.S. Militarism Is the Great Unifier.” We also speak with Scahill about the Biden administration’s ongoing persecution of military whistleblowers, including Daniel Hale.
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, Democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman with Juan González. The United States is on pace to spend over $7 trillion over the next ten years for the Pentagon. To put that number in perspective, the U.S. spends more each year on the military than China, Russia, India, the U.K., Germany, France, Japan, South Korea and Australia combined.
While Republicans and Democrats are in sharp disagreements over the much smaller Build Back Better legislation, there is largely a bipartisan consensus when it comes to the military budget and foreign military intervention. We end today’s show with investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill of The Intercept. His latest article is headlined The War Party: From Bush to Obama, and Trump to Biden, U.S. Militarism Is the Great Unifier.
Welcome to Democracy Now! Welcome back, Jeremy, former producer at Democracy Now! Why don’t you lay out your thesis?
JEREMY SCAHILL: Oh the anniversary of 9/11, I was being asked to write pieces and to make media appearances because of the work that I had done throughout the War on Terror that culminated with the film and book Dirty Wars where I was investigating the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command and this expanding drone program and how the United States under Barack Obama in particular had moved toward a radical attempt to normalize and legitimize assassination as a central component of American national security policy. Of course, you and Juan know well that the U.S. has long engaged in assassination and political assassination but presidents have found a way around actually owning the fact that they were authorizing assassination. Under Obama, the term du jour was “targeted killing.” Now under Joe Biden we see them increasingly use the phrase “over-the-horizon operations.”
I hesitated to write anything on the 9/11 anniversary because I sort of came to the conclusion that we obsess far too much about the way in which 9/11 impacted the world. It is indisputable that the U.S. response to the 9/11 attacks altered geopolitical realities in the world and certainly altered the future of countries like Iraq and Afghanistan and the broader Middle East. But ultimately, I concluded that there is a sort of an inherent intellectual dishonesty to pretending that the United States was not already on this trajectory prior to 9/11.
So what I am trying to do in this piece is just establish some basic facts that we can use as a basis for discussing the U.S. role in the world, and that is that prior to 9/11, the U.S. was already on a course to do regime change in Iraq. In 1998, the bipartisan Iraq Liberation Act was passed that codified regime change as the official policy of the United States government. It was largely the product of the work of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century. But even then-Congressman Bernie Sanders voted in favor of making regime change the law of the land in the United States.
Bill Clinton had already moved toward small wars, as they say, and using remote lethal strikes, although there were not really using weaponized drones under Clinton. They were being developed, but they didn’t use them. They were using more legacy systems like cruise missiles to attack Afghanistan under Clinton, Iraq on an average of almost once every three days under Bill Clinton. Of course, the first attempt to kill or assassinate Osama bin Laden that we are aware of happened under Bill Clinton. So you had a foreign policy that was already moving toward a very radical embrace of this notion that the U.S. has the sovereign right to bomb any country anywhere regardless of what the U.S. Congress had to say about it. In fact Joe Biden as a senator in the late 1990s was the chief congressional architect of Bill Clinton’s 78-day bombing campaign of then-Yugoslavia, which was done by Clinton over the explicit objection of the U.S. Congress.
So on 9/11, you have these neocons come to power, the Bush-Cheney administration, with real veterans of Washington. They knew how to move the levers of power. They also knew how to exploit the fear, the anger of the American people at the 9/11 attacks. What we saw, Amy, was the Democratic Party just fall in line behind the Bush administration at every turn. Throughout the eight years of Bush-Cheney, the Democrats would raise holy hell about certain war issues and the Iraq War, but when it actually mattered, when it was the Patriot Act, when it was the authorization for the use of military force, when it was the Iraq War, the kingpins and queenpins of the Democratic Party aided and abetted a militant neocon agenda.
We could talk a lot about Barack Obama but in short, Barack Obama, when he campaigned in 2008 against Hillary Clinton in the primary and then against the notorious militarist John McCain in the general election, one of the main reasons why his campaign caught such fire was this notion that he represented something different than the bipartisan war party. Of course what ended up happening when Obama comes into power is he lets the CIA off the hook, he lets Donald Rumsfeld and the other torture architects off the hook and then he radically expends some of the worst aspects of the so-called War on Terror and uses his credibility as a constitutional law scholar, as the first Black president, as a sort of guy that was perceived as being a different kind of politician to push the U.S. imperial agenda on a militarist level beyond what a John McCain would have done, because he got the Democratic Party to support it.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Are there any discernible differences that you can tell in the approaches to this imperial policy of the United States between the recent Democratic presidents—we are talking about obviously Clinton, Obama and Biden—and the Republican ones, the two Bushes and Trump? Are there any different approaches from them in terms of imperial rule?
JEREMY SCAHILL: Yeah. Let’s start with what I think is the most obvious issue that I think you could say it’s a good thing that Joe Biden did this, and that is the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Certainly, there are serious questions about the tactical withdrawal and the bloodshed that was witnessed and the scene at the Kabul Airport. Congress is going to spend endless time looking at that span of a few days. In fact, I will predict they are going to spend more time looking at Biden’s withdrawal than they are going to spend looking at the catastrophic 20-year policy in Afghanistan.
There was an enormous amount of pressure on Joe Biden to keep the war in Afghanistan going from within his own party, certainly from the military brass. I think Biden deserves credit for standing up to them. I am not sure that if Barack Obama had been the commander-in-chief during this period he actually would have followed through as Biden did on a total withdrawal of conventional American forces. I do think someone who is this career politician specializing in foreign policy, I think Joe Biden knew the history well enough to know that he would have been taking a catastrophic gamble by keeping U.S. troops in Afghanistan. I think outside of Bernie Sanders, I think there were almost no Democratic candidates that would have had the spine to follow through on Trump’s withdrawal plan.
Regarding China, I think it is a bit of a wash because you have both the Democrats and Republicans taking an increasingly hostile posture. When you have someone like Trump engaging in the rhetoric that he engaged in, I think some world leaders can sort of recognize that this guy is a bit of a lunatic. But when you have Biden and his Secretary of State Tony Blinken staking out very radical position on Taiwan and then saber-rattling and doing military exercises, it takes on a different level. I think the Democrats have to engage in kind of theater about human rights and international law and due process but they ultimately at the end of the day are just as aggressive as Republicans albeit with some tweaking of the machinery.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Given all of this emphasis now in the early days of the Biden administration on the threats from China, but even now in terms of Russia and Ukraine, the Soviet Union collapsed more than two decades ago and China, despite its socialist veneer, has become the manufacturing linchpin of world capitalism. Isn’t this renewed fear-mongering on the supposed threat from China and Russia simply a way to justify greater, as you say, government expenditures on the military complex, which then privatizes this stuff for the consumer market? I’m thinking, for instance, of drones. Drones are now becoming a major consumer market when it started out as a military tool.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Oh, absolutely. And I think if you look at the recent comments of Xi Jinping, particularly after his virtual summit with Joe Biden, he has been really hitting the talking point that what is happening is that the United States is taking this neo-Cold War posture. I think he is entirely right. But I sort of see it in the same vein as you. China, the United States and Russia in particular are engaged in a classic capitalist battle for control of natural resources all throughout the world. Look at what is happening on the African continent. You have China engaging in large-scale construction projects. You are also starting to see Chinese manufactured drones popping up in a variety of conflicts. You have the United States essentially agitating to bring down the Ethiopian government albeit through sort of quieter diplomatic or back channels. But the United States and China and Russia are engaged in a very serious strategic battle over control of natural resources in a variety of regions around the world.
What I think is happening as a result of NATO expansion, of Biden being a tremendously hawkish figure on Ukraine and basically daring Vladimir Putin to stand up to NATO expansion, is that you run the risk of what is ultimately the elite business class of the world having their battles spilling over into overt military conflict. I think China in particular is very concerned about the aggressive U.S. stance because I think China would be very happy to find a way to just sort of divvy up the world for domination in various regions. The United States is not going to accept that. The U.S. posture is pushing China and Russia into an even closer alliance akin to the relationship during the Cold War.
AMY GOODMAN: We are talking to Jeremy Scahill and I just want to note that Jeremy is sitting in front of perhaps the most famous antiwar painting ever, antiwar, anti-fascist painting, and that is Pablo Picasso’s Guernica the destruction of a Spanish town, city, Guernica, by the German and Italian fascist forces in support of the fascist Spanish general, Franco. Although Picasso was Spanish, he lived in Paris and said his painting could never go back to Spain while Franco was still in power. But that’s not what I want to ask you about, Jeremy. I wanted to ask you about that other piece you wrote headlined U.S. Absolves Drone Killers and Persecutes Whistleblowers. Can you talk about the last drone strike that we know of in Afghanistan during the U.S. withdrawal and what whistleblowers have to do with that?
JEREMY SCAHILL: Joe Biden made clear when he announced his withdrawal from Afghanistan that the United States was going to still have the capability to strike remotely. It is a harrowing grotesque flashback to many of the incidents we saw during the Obama era where the Biden administration authorized a drone strike on what they claimed was a vehicle carrying ISIS operatives. And you just recently had this terrorist attack at the Kabul Airport during the withdrawal. On the surveillance feed that the drone operators were looking at, we now know that they saw clearly at least one child and still went forward with the strike. Seven of the ten people killed in that strike were children. Ten of the ten people were civilians.
Now the person who has been convicted of leaking top-secret documents and secret documents on the drone program, Daniel Hale, who is serving almost four years and is now in a Kafkaesque communications management unit in federal prison, one of the revelations that Daniel Hale was convicted of making that was published by The Intercept stated that at a certain period of time, U.S. so-called targeted killing operations in Afghanistan, as many as nine of ten people killed in the strikes were not the intended target. We do not know who they necessarily were. They could have entirely been innocent civilians or they could have just been people the United States didn’t know, but that the United States would preemptively categorize them as enemies killed in action. That was initially what happened in this strike as well except ten of ten were civilians. The one name that everyone knows is the individual who worked for a U.S. aid organization was one of the people killed in this strike.
What happened after that is that the Pentagon did its own investigation of itself and exonerated itself of any crimes. This is the bipartisan self-exoneration machine that has long fueled U.S. military operations around the world. Joe Biden was part of the Obama administration, of course, which operated as a global octopus with lethal tentacles that could strike anywhere. Daniel Hale should be freed. He is an American hero for revealing what we now see continuing under Joe Biden.
AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy, we want to thank you so much for being with us and we are going to link to your piece. He’s a senior correspondent and editor at large at The Intercept. The latest piece,
The War Party: From Bush to Obama, and Trump to Biden, U.S. Militarism Is the Great Unifier as well as his piece U.S. Absolves Drone Killers and Persecutes Whistleblowers.
Tune into Democracy Now! on Thursday when we mark our 25th anniversary with an hour-long special looking at show highlights over the past quarter of a century. And on Friday, we speak to Mansoor Adayfi who was imprisoned at Guantánamo for more than a decade. I’m Amy Goodman with Juan González. Thanks so much for joining us.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
© Mandel Ngan
If a dialogue produces positive results then of course such dialogue should be pursued earnestly. That’s a general rule. But what about in the case of dialogue between the US president Joe Biden and his Russian or Chinese counterparts?
Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, is due to hold a virtual face-to-face meeting with Biden in the coming weeks. No date has been set yet. The format will be similar to the one held last week between the American leader and Xi Jinping, the Chinese president.
Of course, at a time of mounting tensions between the United States and both Russia and China, one would think that any outreach between the leaderships is unquestionably a good thing which should be enthusiastically welcomed.
Nevertheless, the question needs to be asked: what are the fruits of dialogue so far? Frankly, there’s not much to show.
Following Biden’s meeting with Xi last week, the United States has not shown any substantive moves to reduce tensions. On a personal level, the US president said he did not want to see relations “veering towards” confrontation with China. Right, well if that is to be believed, then why is Biden talking now about boycotting the Winter Olympic Games in Beijing in what is evidently a continuation of the US provocative policy to designate China a pariah? Why is Washington continuing to militarize the seas around China with warships and submarines and fomenting incendiary tensions over the breakaway Chinese island-territory of Taiwan?
Given the unyielding hostile US attitude following the summit with Xi you do wonder what is the point of talking with Biden?
As regards US-Russia relations, President Putin met Biden in person for lengthy discussions in a one-on-one conference in Geneva earlier this summer. One of the topics was the conflict in Ukraine. Biden reportedly agreed with Putin that the only viable way towards finding a peaceful settlement was through upholding the 2015 Minsk Accords.
So where’s Biden’s practical commitment to the espoused principle on that topic?
Since the June summit in Geneva, the security situation in Ukraine has gravely deteriorated. The US-backed Kiev regime has received more lethal weaponry from the United States and its NATO partners, including anti-tank Javelin missiles and attack drones. Now the US is mulling sending military advisers to the region.
Washington and its European allies, principally Germany and France, have allowed the Kiev regime to systematically undermine the Minsk Accords in flagrant violation of its international obligations. It is steadily militarizing the conflict rather than seeking a political solution with the restive Donbass region. And remember this eight-year war has been running since the West backed a coup d’état in Kiev in 2014 against an elected government, which then brought to power a rabidly anti-Russian regime that glories in past Nazi collusion and crimes against humanity.
The United States is fueling the present war and inciting the Kiev regime to escalate the violence.
Biden reportedly tells Xi Jinping US doesn’t support “Taiwan’s independence”
Furthermore, Washington has embarked on a full-on propaganda campaign claiming that Russia is planning to invade Ukraine. Moscow has rejected these claims as “absurd” and indeed has expressed concern that the disinformation is actually serving as a cover for the Kiev regime’s own plans to launch an assault on the ethnic Russian population in the Donbass region.
In other words, since Putin met Biden in Geneva the tensions between the US and Russia have significantly increased, not decreased. There has been no discernible effort by the Biden administration to establish a productive dialogue that underpins peace and security, not in Ukraine nor more generally with Russia. Ukraine is the proof of US duplicity or at least ineffectuality in delivering on a dialogue that is presumed to be premised on seeking mutual peace.
Unfortunately, the same critical assessment can be made of Biden’s outreach to China’s Xi. Talk is cheap, if not meaningless, when practical policies fly in the face of rhetorical commitments.
We have to realize that Joe Biden – and any other would-be president – is but a figurehead on a ship of state that is charted for collision with Russia and China. The US system is geared for confrontation because it cannot abide anything less than hegemonic domination.
Thus, there is little point talking with Biden and pretending that a friendly relationship can be produced from individual dialogue. Russia, like China, has repeatedly told the United States of its red lines. Washington must therefore desist from fomenting tensions over Ukraine and Taiwan. The proof of proper respect is for those red lines to be avoided. Clearly the United States, as currently ruled, is incapable of reciprocating with Russia or China.
It’s not going to get any better by having a chummy meeting with Biden for the media circus. Indeed, that could only make things worse because it indulges the pretense that the United States is seeking a reasonable peaceful coexistence, when in fact its governing system does not know the meaning of peaceful coexistence, nor want it.
• First published in Sputnik International
The post Is There Much Point in Putin or Xi Talking With Biden? first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Listen to a reading of this article:
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While mainstream western media have been spending their time concern trolling about a “missing” Chinese tennis player who is not actually missing, hardly any coverage has gone toward NATO’s announcement that if the new German government does not continue to allow US nuclear weapons on its soil those weapons will be relocated to the east of Germany. This would put them closer to Russia’s border, a major provocation of Moscow and yet another step forward in the western empire’s steadily escalating game of nuclear brinkmanship.
“Germany can, of course, decide whether there will be nuclear weapons in (its) country, but the alternative is that we easily end up with nuclear weapons in other countries in Europe, also to the east of Germany,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said last week.
“Should NATO decide to move U.S. nuclear weapons to Poland, for example, that would likely be seen as a step towards angering Moscow by bringing them closer to the Russian border,” Reuters reports.
Meanwhile the US is considering sending more weapons to Ukraine as tensions mount between Moscow and Kiev, and Vladimir Putin is warning that western powers are ignoring Russia’s red lines which are meant to serve as a deterrent to prevent escalation into full-blown nuclear war. The cold war against China has been continually ramping up as well and appears likely to continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
Half of Americans would now reportedly favor going to war against Russia in defense of Ukraine and a majority would now favor going to war with China in defense of Taiwan. These drastic spikes in opinion are not an accident; the consent has been forcefully manufactured by an aggressive propaganda campaign against those two nations. They are not manufacturing that consent for fun; they are doing it for a reason.
A majority of Americans support going to war with Russia over Ukraine, and to war with China over Taiwan. Church attendance may be down sharply, but millenarian dreams are stronger than ever here. And who can blame us? Shit jobs, shit lives—who wants to go on living like this? pic.twitter.com/OszuFZd0Sw
— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) November 22, 2021
And I just keep tripping on how weird it is that so few people see the US empire’s headlong charge into cold war conflict with two separate nuclear-armed nations as the single most urgent concern of our day. It probably doesn’t even make most people’s top ten. Very few people seem to believe the most pressing threat to humanity might be all those armageddon weapons we’ve been stockpiling and how increasingly irresponsibly our leaders are treating them.
I write about this issue a lot because to me it seems obvious that when you really look at the facts of the matter it’s the most worrying thing of all worrying things in this world. It is entirely possible that climate chaos causing heat spikes and flash freezes which destroy plant life could be the thing which sends us the way of the dinosaur, or it could be the reckless development of weaponized artificial intelligence, but those fates are a bit further down the track. There’s only one threat facing us which could technically wipe us all out tomorrow, and it’s the rapidly increasing likelihood of boring old nuclear holocaust.
I write about it a lot, but it’s never shared particularly well. I could get a lot more traction telling people the most urgent threat of the day is government abuses related to Covid, or white supremacists, or one of the two mainstream political factions which so much energy goes into amplifying the enmity between. But when I write about what I see as the actual greatest threat to our world it’s like yelling into the wind. People don’t want to hear it. My words get swallowed up by a big black hole in the ground and their energy just kind of fizzles.
A big part of it is probably due to the fact that this isn’t something which fits neatly into any of the partisan filters we’ve been trained to view the world through. Detente is no longer an issue promoted by the mainstream parties which present themselves as the “left” end of the spectrum; when aggressions against Russia or China come up it’s usually in an argument over which one we should hate more. Nobody’s self-reinforcing ideological social media echo chamber is going to help them amplify the message that we’re getting way too close to nuclear war; it’s even a back burner issue for most socialists and anti-imperialists.
Detente: The Vital Word Missing From Discourse On Russia And China
A recent 60 Minutes interview with Tony Blinken illustrates the way the concept of detente (the easing of hostilities between nations) is being deliberately hidden from public awareness.https://t.co/CvrodmLr8H
— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) May 5, 2021
Another reason is that people simply aren’t being told about the rising threat of nuclear war with any regularity. Western mass media exist first and foremost to protect and promote the interests of the US-centralized empire, and it’s in that empire’s interests not to have the public too keenly aware of the fact that it is gambling the life of every terrestrial organism on geostrategic agendas of unipolar global domination.
Another part of it is just garden variety psychological compartmentalization from an uncomfortable idea; nobody likes to think of everyone they know and love being vaporized or dying of nuclear radiation.
Another part might be because people simply cannot wrap their heads around the idea of billions of people dying and what that would mean. It’s been pointed out that most people lack an intuitive understanding of how much more a billion is than a million, which is often cited to highlight the extreme difference between a billionaire and a common millionaire. But it also applies to human lives; we can barely wrap our minds around the idea of a million lives having been snuffed out in the Iraq invasion, much less billions perishing in nuclear war.
People don't have a strong intuitive sense of how much bigger 1 billion is than 1 million. 1 million seconds is about 11 days. 1 billion seconds is about 31.5 years.
— Paul Franz (@Paul_Franz) August 3, 2018
Perhaps the biggest part of it, though, is the fact that this threat has been around a long time. I can’t tell you how many older people I’ve had pish-poshing my concerns saying “Bah, I remember doing duck-and-cover drills as a kid! Turned out to be a whole lotta nothing.”
But it was never nothing. We came extremely close to wiping ourselves out multiple times in the cold war between the US and the Soviet Union because nuclear brinkmanship is an inherently unpredictable affair with far too many small moving parts to control, any one of which could set off an apocalyptic chain of events due to something as simple as miscommunication, technical malfunction, or misinterpretation by any of the thousands of individuals involved amid the chaos and confusion of escalating aggressions.
It just doesn’t sit well with people’s understanding of the world that it could all end through the same nuclear armageddon scenario their grandparents used to worry about. If two men were holding guns to each other’s heads it would be experienced as very dangerous at first, but after a while if nobody pulled the trigger the emotional tension would begin to diminish. If years went by and the men got older it would diminish even further. If they got so old they couldn’t hold the guns anymore and had their children take over for them, and then their children’s children years later, the emotional experience of the standoff would be all but forgotten.
But the guns never got any less deadly. And now the grandchildren of those who initiated the standoff are starting to get careless.
The Day The World Ended
"Then it happened. A nuclear weapon was deployed by one side, setting off a chain reaction that had been set in place ready to be triggered long ago, from which there was no coming back.
And the funny thing is, it was an accident."https://t.co/JzMKlrV4oY— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) April 27, 2021
I keep having this scene go through my head where something happens and the nukes start flying and everyone’s surprised, because of all the things they’ve been herded into worrying about the idea that actual nuclear war could happen was nowhere near the forefront of their awareness. And someone looks out the window and sees a mushroom cloud growing on the horizon and says “What?? This is how it all ends? With all those weapons we’ve been deliberately building with the full knowledge that they can end it all?”
I mean, how stupid would we feel for having missed that one?
And now there’s a massive push to weaponize space to stay ahead of Russia and China, opening up a whole new dimension of unpredictable moving parts where things can go cataclysmically wrong. You’d think our place on such a precipice would be drawing us all together, but because we’re so manipulated by such deeply malignant forces, we’re instead more divided than ever.
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This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.
3 Mins Read Oatly has opened its first factory in China to accelerate growth across Asia. Oatly has just opened its first factory in China, just months after it established its first Asian production site in Singapore. The Swedish oat milk giant described the new factory in the Eastern Chinese city of Ma’anshan as part of its “wider […]
The post Oatly Opens Its First China Factory To Double Down On Asian Market appeared first on Green Queen.
This post was originally published on Green Queen.
Human rights activists step up calls for diplomatic boycott of Beijing Winter Olympics
Chinese authorities must answer serious concerns about the tennis star Peng Shuai’s welfare, the Australian government has said.
The intervention comes as human rights activists and an independent senator step up calls for Australia to join a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics over broader allegations of rights abuses against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang.
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Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
The border between post-coup Ukraine and the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, based on the Minsk Agreements. Map credit: Wikipedia
The People’s Republics of Donetsk (DPR) and Luhansk (LPR), which declared independence in response to the U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014, have once again become flashpoints in the intensifying Cold War between the United States and Russia. The U.S. and NATO appear to be fully supporting a new government offensive against these Russian-backed enclaves, which could quickly escalate into a full-blown international military conflict.
The last time this area became an international tinderbox was in April, when the anti-Russian government of Ukraine threatened an offensive against Donetsk and Luhansk, and Russia assembled thousands of troops along Ukraine’s eastern border.
On that occasion, Ukraine and NATO blinked and called off the offensive. This time around, Russia has again assembled an estimated 90,000 troops near its border with Ukraine. Will Russia once more deter an escalation of the war, or are Ukraine, the United States and NATO seriously preparing to press ahead at the risk of war with Russia?
Since April, the U.S. and its allies have been stepping up their military support for Ukraine. After a March announcement of $125 million in military aid, including armed coastal patrol boats and radar equipment, the U.S. then gave Ukraine another $150 million package in June. This included radar, communications and electronic warfare equipment for the Ukrainian Air Force, bringing total military aid to Ukraine since the U.S.-backed coup in 2014 to $2.5 billion. This latest package appears to include deploying U.S. training personnel to Ukrainian air bases.
Turkey is supplying Ukraine with the same drones it provided to Azerbaijan for its war with Armenia over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh in 2020. That war killed at least 6,000 people and has recently flared up again, one year after a Russian-brokered ceasefire. Turkish drones wreaked havoc on Armenian troops and civilians alike in Nagorno-Karabakh, and their use in Ukraine would be a horrific escalation of violence against the people of Donetsk and Luhansk.
The ratcheting up of U.S. and NATO support for government forces in Ukraine’s civil war is having ever-worsening diplomatic consequences. At the beginning of October, NATO expelled eight Russian liaison officers from NATO Headquarters in Brussels, accusing them of spying. Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, the manager of the 2014 coup in Ukraine, was dispatched to Moscow in October, ostensibly to calm tensions. Nuland failed so spectacularly that, only a week later, Russia ended 30 years of engagement with NATO, and ordered NATO’s office in Moscow closed.
Nuland reportedly tried to reassure Moscow that the United States and NATO were still committed to the 2014 and 2015 Minsk Accords on Ukraine, which include a ban on offensive military operations and a promise of greater autonomy for Donetsk and Luhansk within Ukraine. But her assurances were belied by Defense Secretary Austin when he met with Ukraine’s President Zelensky in Kiev on October 18, reiterating U.S. support for Ukraine’s future membership in NATO, promising further military support and blaming Russia for “perpetuating the war in Eastern Ukraine.”
More extraordinary, but hopefully more successful, was CIA Director William Burns’s visit to Moscow on November 2nd and 3rd, during which he met with senior Russian military and intelligence officials and spoke by phone with President Putin.
A mission like this is not usually part of the CIA Director’s duties. But after Biden promised a new era of American diplomacy, his foreign policy team is now widely acknowledged to have instead brought U.S. relations with Russia and China to all-time lows.
Judging from the March meeting of Secretary of State Blinken and National Security Advisor Sullivan with Chinese officials in Alaska, Biden’s meeting with Putin in Vienna in June, and Under Secretary Nuland’s recent visit to Moscow, U.S. officials have reduced their encounters with Russian and Chinese officials to mutual recriminations designed for domestic consumption instead of seriously trying to resolve policy differences. In Nuland’s case, she also misled the Russians about the U.S. commitment, or lack of it, to the Minsk Accords. So who could Biden send to Moscow for a serious diplomatic dialogue with the Russians about Ukraine?
In 2002, as Under Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, William Burns wrote a prescient but unheeded 10-page memo to Secretary of State Powell, warning him of the many ways that a U.S. invasion of Iraq could “unravel” and create a “perfect storm” for American interests. Burns is a career diplomat and a former U.S. ambassador to Moscow, and may be the only member of this administration with the diplomatic skills and experience to actually listen to the Russians and engage seriously with them.
The Russians presumably told Burns what they have said in public: that U.S. policy is in danger of crossing “red lines” that would trigger decisive and irrevocable Russian responses. Russia has long warned that one red line would be NATO membership for Ukraine and/or Georgia.
But there are clearly other red lines in the creeping U.S. and NATO military presence in and around Ukraine and in the increasing U.S. military support for the Ukrainian government forces assaulting Donetsk and Luhansk. Putin has warned against the build-up of NATO’s military infrastructure in Ukraine and has accused both Ukraine and NATO of destabilizing actions, including in the Black Sea.
With Russian troops amassed at Ukraine’s border for a second time this year, a new Ukrainian offensive that threatens the existence of the DPR and LPR would surely cross another red line, while increasing U.S. and NATO military support for Ukraine may be dangerously close to crossing yet another one.
So did Burns come back from Moscow with a clearer picture of exactly what Russia’s red lines are? We had better hope so. Even U.S. military websites acknowledge that U.S. policy in Ukraine is “backfiring.”
Russia expert Andrew Weiss, who worked under William Burns at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, acknowledged to Michael Crowley of The New York Times that Russia has “escalation dominance” in Ukraine and that, if push comes to shove, Ukraine is simply more important to Russia than to the United States. It therefore makes no sense for the United States to risk triggering World War III over Ukraine, unless it actually wants to trigger World War III.
During the Cold War, both sides developed clear understandings of each other’s “red lines.” Along with a large helping of dumb luck, we can thank those understandings for our continued existence. What makes today’s world even more dangerous than the world of the 1950s or the 1980s is that recent U.S. leaders have cavalierly jettisoned the bilateral nuclear treaties and vital diplomatic relationships that their grandparents forged to stop the Cold War from turning into a hot one.
Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, with the help of Under Secretary of State Averell Harriman and others, conducted negotiations that spanned two administrations, between 1958 and 1963, to achieve a partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty that was the first of a series of bilateral arms control treaties. By contrast, all that Trump, Biden and Under Secretary Victoria Nuland seem to have in common is a startling lack of imagination that blinds them to any possible future beyond a zero-sum, non-negotiable, and yet still unattainable “U.S. Uber Alles” global hegemony.
But Americans should beware of romanticizing the “old” Cold War as a time of peace, simply because we somehow managed to dodge a world-ending nuclear holocaust. U.S. Korean and Vietnam War veterans know better, as do the people in countries across the global South that became bloody battlefields in the ideological struggle between the United States and the U.S.S.R.
Three decades after declaring victory in the Cold War, and after the self-inflicted chaos of the U.S. “Global War on Terror,” U.S. military planners have settled on a new Cold War as the most persuasive pretext to perpetuate their trillion dollar war machine and their unattainable ambition to dominate the entire planet. Instead of asking the U.S. military to adapt to more new challenges it is clearly not up for, U.S. leaders decided to revert to their old conflict with Russia and China to justify the existence and ridiculous expense of their ineffective but profitable war machine.
But the very nature of a Cold War is that it involves the threat and use of force, overt and covert, to contest the political allegiances and economic structures of countries across the world. In our relief at the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, which both Trump and Biden have used to symbolize the “end of endless war,” we should have no illusions that either of them is offering us a new age of peace.
Quite the contrary. What we are watching in Ukraine, Syria, Taiwan and the South China Sea are the opening salvos of an age of more ideological wars that may well be just as futile, deadly and self-defeating as the “war on terror,” and much more dangerous to the United States.
A war with Russia or China would risk escalating into World War III. As Andrew Weiss told the Times on Ukraine, Russia and China would have conventional “escalation dominance,” as well as simply more at stake in wars on their own borders than the United States does.
So what would the United States do if it were losing a major war with Russia or China? U.S. nuclear weapons policy has always kept a “first strike” option open in case of precisely this scenario.
The current U.S. $1.7 trillion plan for a whole range of new nuclear weapons therefore seems to be a response to the reality that the United States cannot expect to defeat Russia and China in conventional wars on their own borders.
But the paradox of nuclear weapons is that the most powerful weapons ever created have no practical value as actual weapons of war, since there can be no winner in a war that kills everybody. Any use of nuclear weapons would quickly trigger a massive use of them by one side or the other, and the war would soon be over for all of us. The only winners would be a few species of radiation-resistant insects and other very small creatures.
Neither Obama, Trump nor Biden has dared to present their reasons for risking World War III over Ukraine or Taiwan to the American public, because there is no good reason. Risking a nuclear holocaust to appease the military-industrial complex is as insane as destroying the climate and the natural world to appease the fossil fuel industry.
So we had better hope that CIA DIrector Burns not only came back from Moscow with a clear picture of Russia’s “red lines,” but that President Biden and his colleagues understand what Burns told them and what is at stake in Ukraine. They must step back from the brink of a U.S.-Russia war, and then from the larger Cold War with China and Russia that they have so blindly and foolishly stumbled into.
The post The High Stakes of the U.S.-Russia Confrontation Over Ukraine first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Analysis: Olympic committee is accused of engaging in a ‘publicity stunt’ by taking part in video call
As human rights organisations and the world’s media questioned the whereabouts of the Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai, the International Olympic Committee opted for a “quiet diplomacy” approach, arguing that was the most effective way to deal with such a case.
“Experience shows that quiet diplomacy offers the best opportunity to find a solution for questions of such nature. This explains why the IOC will not comment any further at this stage,” the Lausanne-based organisation said in an emailed statement on Thursday about the case of Peng, who disappeared from public view after she made an accusation of sexual assault against a former senior Chinese official.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Peng Shuai, a highly successful tennis player from China is currently at the center of a western media maelstrom. This maelstrom stems from a 2 November post on the Chinese social media platform Weibo. Peng is said to have publicly accused the former Chinese vice premier Zhang Gaoli of raping her in 2018.
The timing, of what effectively becomes a trial by western media, is most inauspicious for China. TSN points to the looming winter Olympics slated for Beijing and then adds in the ludicrous allegation of crimes against humanity.
It is most unbecoming to whimsically write of alleged crimes against humanity without offering an iota of evidence. That China welcomes people to visit Xinjiang, that the Uyghur population increased 25 percent from 2010 to 2018, that there is no mass emigration from Xinjiang, that absolute poverty is eliminated would make China the laughingstock of inept genocidaires. Nonetheless, such extraneous allegations are obviously an attempt to cast China as a miscreant responsible for the “missing” Peng Shuai.
Reappearance
But now the “missing” Peng is no longer missing, as photos posted on Weibo by the China Open attest. Still China is depicted in a negative light: “The ruling party appears to be trying to defuse alarm about Peng without acknowledging her disappearance.”
The insinuation is that the Communist Party was behind her “disappearance.” But did she “disappear”? It takes only a little brain matter to realize that few of us would like to be in the spotlight for being the victim of an alleged rape. There are other possible explanations for why Peng was supposedly not seen. But this writer will not jump to any conclusions.
Without clarity on what has and is actually transpiring in the Peng saga, the Women’s Tennis Association and its CEO Steve Simon had threatened to pull the WTA’s events out of China. British politicians and Joe Biden talked about a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Olympics.
US deputy secretary-of-state Wendy Sherman had tweeted: “We are deeply concerned by reports that tennis player Peng Shuai appears to be missing, and we join the calls for the PRC to provide independent, verifiable proof of her whereabouts. Women everywhere deserve to have reports of sexual assault taken seriously and investigated.”
It is well within the bounds of credulity that one politician in a country of 1.4 billion might commit a crime. China has had its share as evinced by chairman Xi Jinping’s corruption crackdown having purged many tens of thousands, including high-ranking officials and military officers.
However, one cannot condemn a country or political party for the alleged unlawful acts of one person. If so, then this would be the case for virtually every country on the planet.
If China’s Olympics should be boycotted or tennis tournaments yanked because of an unsubstantiated allegation, then this should apply equally to the United States where a sitting Supreme Court judge and a sitting president have faced allegations of sexual misconduct.
President Joe Biden — who once said, “For a woman to come forward in the glaring light of focus, nationally, you’ve got to start off with the presumption that at least the essence of what she’s talking about is real” — was accused of sexually assaulting a former Senate aide, Tara Reade. The #MeToo movement and Democrats abandoned Reade.
Previously, the Democrats and #MeToo had supported Christine Blasey Ford who publicly accused a Republican Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, of attempted rape.
What to do
It is hard to pronounce upon what Peng ought to do. Without all the requisite facts, one cannot know with certainty why she was “missing.” Was she dealing with trauma from a rape? Then all sympathy goes to her. If, however, the public allegation was a “mistake,” then by avoiding the media crush, she leaves an aspersion cast on the man she wrongly called out as a rapist, and she has dragged her country into the vitriol that China-bashers are now heaping on China. However painful or humiliating, if it was a “mistake,” then surely she has an obligation to clear up this situation as soon as possible.
Peng was lucky to have her friends and colleagues in the tennis world to express concern about her safety. That is what good colleagues and friends do. It is laudable to stick up for one’s own. But I submit that a deeper morality would state that an injustice against one is an injustice against all.
Disappointingly, I have never heard Serena Williams, Ashleigh Barty, Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic, or any other star tennis players speaking out about the safety and human rights of the tortured political prisoner Julian Assange. Top tennis players through their on-court brilliance have garnered a large following. Is there not an onus upon them to make their voices heard for the good of fellow humans?
The post Jumping to China-bashing Conclusions first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
On 20 November 2021 Pacific Media Watch reported that the 2021 Reporters Without Borders (RSF) Press Freedom Awards have been given to Chinese journalist Zhang Zhan in the courage category, Palestinian journalist Majdoleen Hassona in the independence category, and the Pegasus Project in the impact category.
RSF president Pierre Haski announces the 29th RSF Press Freedom Awards in Paris. Video: RSF
RSF’s press freedom prizes are awarded every year to journalists or media that have made a notable contribution to the defence or promotion of freedom of the press in the world. This is the 29th year they have been awarded. The 2021 awards have been given in three categories — journalistic courage, impact and independence.
Courage Prize
The 2021 Prize for Courage, which aims to support and salute journalists, media outlets or NGOs that have displayed courage in the practice, defence or promotion of journalism, has been awarded to Chinese journalist Zhang Zhan.
Despite constant threats, this lawyer-turned-journalist covered the covid-19 outbreak in the city of Wuhan in February 2020, live-streaming video reports on social media that showed the city’s streets and hospitals, and the families of the sick. Her reporting from the heart of the pandemic’s initial epicentre was one of the main sources of independent information about the health situation in Wuhan at the time.
After being arrested in May 2020 and held incommunicado for several months without any official reason being provided, Zhang Zhan was sentenced on 28 December 2020 to four years in prison for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”. In protest against this injustice and the mistreatment to which she was subjected, she went on a hunger strike that resulted in her being shackled and force-fed. Her friends and family now fear for her life, and her health has worsened dramatically in recent weeks. See also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2021/11/06/chinese-journalist-zhang-zhan-at-imminent-risk-of-death/
Independence Prize
The 2021 Prize for Independence, which rewards journalists, media outlets or NGOs that have resisted financial, political, economic or religious pressure in a noteworthy manner, has been awarded to Palestinian journalist Majdoleen Hassona.
Before joining the Turkish TV channel TRT and relocating to Istanbul, this Palestinian journalist was often harassed and prosecuted by both Israeli and Palestinian authorities for her critical reporting. While on a return visit to the West Bank in August 2019 with her fiancé (also a TRT journalist based in Turkey), she was stopped at an Israeli checkpoint and was told that she was subject to a ban on leaving the territory that had been issued by Israeli intelligence “for security reasons”. She has been stranded in the West Bank ever since but decided to resume reporting there and covered the anti-government protests in June 2021 following the death of the activist Nizar Banat.
Impact Prize
The 2021 Prize for Impact, which rewards journalists, media outlets or NGOS that have contributed to clear improvements in journalistic freedom, independence and pluralism, or increased awareness of these issues, has been awarded to the Pegasus Project.
The Pegasus Project is an investigation by an international consortium of more than 80 journalists from 17 media outlets* in 11 different countries that was coordinated by the NGO Forbidden Stories with technical support from experts at Amnesty International’s Security Lab. Based on a leak of more than 50,000 phone numbers targeted by Pegasus, spyware made by the Israeli company NSO Group, the Pegasus Project revealed that nearly 200 journalists were targeted for spying by 11 governments — both autocratic and democratic — which had acquired licences to use Pegasus. This investigation has made people aware of the extent of the surveillance to which journalists are exposed and has led many media outlets and RSF to file complaints and demand a moratorium on surveillance technology sales. See also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2021/11/10/palestinian-ngos-dubbed-terrorist-were-hacked-with-pegasus-spyware/
“For defying censorship and alerting the world to the reality of the nascent pandemic, the laureate in the ‘courage’ category is now in prison and her state of health is extremely worrying,” said RSF secretary-general Christophe Deloire.
“For displaying a critical attitude and perseverance, the laureate in the ‘independence category has been unable to leave Israeli-controlled territory for the past two years. “For having revealed the scale of the surveillance to which journalists can be subjected, some of the journalists who are laureates in the ‘impact’ category are now being prosecuted by governments.
This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki reaffirmed Joe Biden’s stance that he was not an “old friend” of Xi Jinping before the summit between the two leaders last week. This was big news. And the media play it received was quite disturbing to Psaki, as it turns out.
Seeking to clarify matters, she wrote a statement to read to the press corps explaining her stance on China-US relations. She planned to read it to the press during Thanksgiving week. Presidential advisors, however, put the kabosh on the statement – and reportedly tried to put the kabosh on Psaki herself after they saw her draft. From reliable sources, who asked to remain anonymous because of the sensitivity of the situation, we have obtained portions of the statement which has come to be known among Washington insiders as the PPP, Psaki’s Psecret Pspeech.
Here is the text of Psaki’s scuttled statement planned for delivery to the White House Press Corps:
Hello everyone.
Before we begin today’s press briefing, I wish to say once again that it is great to be back here with all of you after my bout with Covid-19. I learned a lot while thinking about things during my illness, and I will return to that.
But first I want to reflect on the events of the last week including the President’s meeting with President Xi of China and the signing of the infrastructure bill. And in part I will address my remarks directly to China.
To begin with – and let us not mince our words – the American people owe China a great debt of gratitude for the infrastructure bill. On behalf of all Americans, I wish to thank China. Without you we could not have done it. For decades we have had potholed roads, lead laced drinking water, and the narrowest of broadband especially out in the countryside. Now that will change if only a tiny bit. And you China deserve the credit.
In fact the New York Times, mouthpiece of our foreign policy Establishment, made that very point two days after the signing of the bill:
“President Biden on Tuesday began selling his $1 trillion infrastructure law, making the case that the money would do more than rebuild roads, bridges and railways. The law, he said would help the United States regain its competitive edge against China.
“‘We’re about to turn things around in a big way,’ Mr. Biden said, ‘For example because of this law, next year will be the first year in 20 years that American infrastructure will grow faster than China’s.’”
You see, China, getting some federal funds for things we need is an uphill battle. But when our politicians see things in terms of an enemy, they scurry about like industrious little beavers getting things done.
Now, China, I recognize that you begged to differ on the size of the infrastructure bill. Your daily, Global Times, which occupies the same niche in China as do the New York Times or WaPo in the US, labelled the bill “a feeble imitation of China.” That is true; you, China, spend about 5.1% of GDP on infrastructure and we spend 1.5%. As a wordsmith myself, I would choose the word “puny” to describe the bill – at least compared to our whopping national security budget. But hey, when you are starving, crumbs can look like a banquet. And without you, China, we would not even have the crumbs.
Next, China, I want to talk about another big problem we are facing – inflation. Without you, it would be far worse. Because you handled the Covid-19 pandemic so well, your economy kept plugging along and we Americans got a bigger supply of cheap goods which of course helps to keep prices in line. Unfortunately, our leaders, namely The Donald and now The Joe, are laying tariffs on your goods, making them more expensive for our own people. You give us a gift and we destroy it. You probably think us inscrutable or at least ungrateful – and I don’t blame you for one moment.
I could go on with this praise, but no one is perfect, China. There is one area where I must level a criticism, and it comes of my personal experience with Covid. And here I fault you for your propaganda performance – and I speak as part of the most expert propaganda team on the planet. Quite frankly you are lousy propagandists. You contained Covid with fewer than 5000 deaths and fewer than 100,000 cases – total. And the “draconian” lockdowns after the initial 76 day lockdown in Wuhan were not so massive nor so widespread as we made them out to be.
I mean your public health achievement is awesome, and I reflected a lot on it as I was in quarantine with Covid, thankfully not very sick. But you let the news coverage be dominated by every trivial event including the inevitable missteps at the outbreak of a new pathogen for which the local officials were sacked. (Good for you, China – we have many governors who deserve punishment for their behavior during the pandemic – not the least of which is Mr. Cuomo who stuffed Covid patients into nursing homes.) But if you were more effective at getting the word out, perhaps the American people would have risen up and demanded the same results that you got. Perhaps I would not have fallen ill, and perhaps 760,000 Americans would still be alive. Honestly, China, you have to step up your information campaigns – a lot is at stake.
China, I also want to thank you for the event in Beijing at the very time of Xi-Biden confab, a refreshing change from the unrelenting hawk talk hereabouts. Again, let me quote the New York Times:
“Even as the two leaders met virtually, another meeting was taking place in Beijing, commemorating the American pilots known as the Flying Tigers who aided China during its war against Japan in 1941 and 1942.
“‘The story of the Flying Tigers undergirds the profound friendship forged by the lives and blood of the Chinese and American people,’ Qin Gang, China’s ambassador to the United States, said during the event. Acknowledging the tensions in the relationship, he added that the two countries ‘should inherit the friendly friendship tempered by war.’”
Finally, I wish to conclude with the words of Chief Justice Earl Warren, “Everything I did in my life that was worthwhile, I caught hell for.”
OK. Questions?
The post The Secret Speech of Jen Psaki first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The outcome at COP26 doesn’t bode well for the future of the planet, but then again, no one remotely aware of the history of international climate talks should have expected anything but a failure at Glasgow.
As a matter of fact, given what we already know about the science of climate change (fossil fuels are the primary culprits behind global warming), and, in light of our experience with the catastrophic effects of global warming (heat waves, wildfires, floods, droughts, melting glaciers, rising sea levels, habitat loss and species extinction), COP26 must be regarded as a “monumental failure.”
Indeed, it is quite shocking to see reports and commentaries from certain quarters trying to convince the public that COP26 represents a step forward in the fight against the climate crisis.
Why? Because for the first time in nearly three decades the world “coal” was used in a COP climate agreement? Or because of the pledge to end deforestation by 2030? Or could it be because world leaders agreed to end “inefficient” subsidies for fossil fuels?
Hypocrisy reigned supreme at COP26 in Glasgow. Leaving aside the presence of the fossil fuel industry with a bigger delegation than any country, most world leaders were there to defend their national economic interests rather than the sustainability of the planet.
Let’s start with President Joe Biden. He argued that “there is no more time to hang back or sit on the fence,” and then sought to convince everyone present that the U.S. will “lead by example” in the fight against global warming. How? By leasing over 80 million acres of public waters in the Gulf of Mexico to fossil fuel companies for oil and gas extraction immediately after his rhetorical posture at COP26.
And let’s not forget his urgent plea to OPEC just a few months ago to increase oil production.
Perfect samples of leading by example!
How about Australia, whose current government vows to keep using and selling coal for decades to come?
Countries such as China, Russia, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, to name just a few, worked hard during the negotiations to weaken as much as possible the final COP26 pact.
Of course, wealthy nations, which are primarily responsible for the climate crisis, bear the vast majority of the blame for climate impasse.
Their failure to honor a pledge of $100 billion in climate financing a year to poor nations, which are hit hardest by the consequences of global warming, speaks volumes of their commitment to the transformation of a sustainable and just future. So does their position on the issue of financing for “losses and damages” at COP26, which was deliberately couched in very vague terms and was left to be addressed in future climate talks.
But that’s what international climate diplomacy amounts to in the end: governments fighting for a climate agenda that won’t harm the specific interests and needs of their own ruling classes. This is exactly the reason why world leaders have been kicking the can down the road for nearly three decades now when it comes to taking drastic measures to combat global warming.
The truth of the matter is that whatever progress has been made so far in our fight against the climate crisis has been greatly due to activism on the part of individuals and a wide array of organizations such as community groups, labor unions, non-governmental organizations, and Indigenous groups. Youth voices on the climate crisis have been, of course, most instrumental in raising public consciousness and building momentum for the formation of a global climate movement, which is our only hope left towards securing the goal of sustainability for all life on Earth.
The irony is that actually no sober and rational thinking human being could possibly have any illusions about the challenge humanity faces in the 21st century. It requires an indubitably high level of ignorance, in conjunction with a heavy dose of misanthropy, to pass over the fact that the world is faced with a titanic struggle over how to save the planet.
Moreover, there is no mystery about how humanity can avoid a possible collapse of civilized order as we have known it. A global Green New Deal is our only hope to save the planet from the disastrous effects of global warming caused by the burning of fossil fuels. Decarbonization in conjunction with natural climate solutions such as reforestation are key to making sure that humanity doesn’t get trapped in a conundrum the “the gates of hell are locked on the inside.”
There is no other choice at the present juncture. It is still not clear to what degree technology can be part of the solution at some point in the future, and we surely have no luxury in waiting to find out whether emerging technologies can solve the climate crisis.
Also, let’s have no illusions about the global Green New Deal project. This is not some sort of a utopian dream, as its opponents seem to suggest. The research, for instance, conducted by economists at the renowned Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst shows with unquestionable clarity that the implementation of the Green New Deal project will not only spare us from the worsening effects of global warming, but will also ensure sustainable development and a just transition.
But, perhaps more important, there are already scores of organizations in places all over the world working hard to turn the Green New Deal vision into reality. For example, ReImagine Appalachia, a collection of individuals and organizations seeking to “built a sustainable 21st century Appalachia,” is restoring damaged lands and water, refashioning the electric grid, building a sustainable transportation system, reforesting the region, while at the same time promoting union rights and ensuring that workers in extractive industries remain vital elements of the workforce in the post-fossil fuel economy.
Mass organizing is central, of course, to the attainment of the goals set forth by Reimagine Appalachia. Amanda Woodrum, Senior Researcher, Policy Matters Ohio, and Co-Director, Project to ReImagine Appalachia, says ReImagine Appalachia “reaches out and engages a wide variety of stakeholders – labor, faith, enviro, racial justice, criminal justice reform advocates, local electeds and others.”
Indeed, participation from below is the key to ensuring a societal transformation towards sustainability. As Amanda Woodrum so eloquently expressed to Truthout, this is the only way that “Appalachia stays on the climate table, otherwise it will be on the menu.”
In addition, ReImagine Appalachia appears to have developed a very effective local elected outreach strategy, which, according to Amanda Woodrum, “has secured a number of endorsements from local electeds and passed community resolutions in several communities.” Equally important, the organization has launched BLAC, the Black Appalachian Coalition, an initiative led by Black women, as Black Appalachians have been hit hardest by the downward mobility of the neoliberal project since the 1980s.
The outcomes of international climate summits are very discouraging, but the work done at the grassroots level by researchers and activists alike in the fight against humanity’s greatest existential crisis is quite inspiring.
So, yes, the struggle ahead promises to be hard and brutal, but the “general will” can always prevail in the end even under the most gruesome of circumstances if people are willing to fight for the right cause. And no cause can be more sacred than saving planet Earth.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Chairman Xi Jinping and president Joe Biden met despite the US imposing new sanctions on Chinese firms Huawei and ZTE a few days prior.
Nonetheless, Taiwan was affirmed as a part of China.
The post News on China | No. 76 first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
You can choose to like or not China’s millennial system of justice and redress, nonetheless this is what you need to know about tennis star Peng Shuai and why she disappeared.
Peng Shuai is a world ranked tennis player in the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA), with Wimbledon (2013) and French Open (2014) doubles championship trophies to her name. She is a household name in China and revered as the first national to achieve international tennis stardom.
On 2 November 2021, she posted a 1,600-word open letter on her Chinese Weibo account (like Twitter), for China’s 1.4 billion citizens to read. In it, she accused a retired Chinese official, Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli of raping her around three years ago, meaning 2018.
Seventy-five-year-old Zhang is very high-level, having served in the most powerful leadership group, the Politburo Standing Committee, 2012-2017, this being President Xi Jinping’s first term in office, whereupon Zhang retired in 2018.
Her letter was removed by Baba Beijing (my name for China’s leadership/government) and her 500,000-follower Weibo account then shut down. She has since been absent from public view, the WTA is threatening to sever ties with China (a $1 billion market for them) unless Peng is accounted for, while the West’s bloviating Big Lie Propaganda Machine (BLPM) and talking heads are starting to pontificate and make demands.
For Westerners and the #MeToo movement, what Peng did was absolutely normal. Take it public, shout it out to the world. Create a media storm to garner attention.
Nevertheless, that is not how it is done in Chinese culture, going back thousands of years. If you want a really good explanation, read The China Trilogy, where during my many years in-country, on a number of occasions I was the accuser and the accused, so I’m speaking from feet-on-the-ground experience.
In China’s Confucian-Daoist-Buddhist society, keeping face and maintaining social stability and economic prosperity for the people takes precedence over individual needs and demands. Going to Tiananmen Square to hold up a sign saying Xi Jinping is a bad leader is not considered to constructive in Chinese culture. But, I can go to my local town hall, complain all I want and if many, many people do the same, Baba Beijing is going to take notice and ask what they are doing that is unsatisfactory to the public. As I have written much about, freedom of expression is very broad, from far left to far right, in local meetings, in groups and social media – not on street corners.
As well, justice is first expected to be gained at the local level, between the two conflicting parties and if that fails, within the community. If that fails, for millennia, Chinese citizens have had the right to go to their village/nearest government offices, state they want to talk to the judge and then are afforded the opportunity to make an official complaint for redress. If credible, investigations, interrogations, testimonies and evidence are assembled for a court trial in front of said judge. For serious crimes, if the judge ordered the death sentence and it was later discovered that the now-dead accused was in fact innocent, the judge was liable to be executed for the mistake.
What Peng Shuai did is 180 degrees against these longstanding civilizational traditions. She may very well be telling the truth, but she did it Western style, which means a huge loss of face for the Chinese Nation. She must have known that it would drag in sanctimonious, evangelical Eurangloland (NATO, Five Eyes, EU and Israel), preaching and pointing fingers – now at the whole country. Did she think her national and international celebrity would allow her to snub thousands of years of established mores and rituals?
Peng’s timing was also strangely maladroit. She posted her letter right as the country was getting ready to celebrate a big government meeting, enshrining President Xi as the latest great national leader, along with Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. This brought added loss of face for the whole country and the people.
To be aligned with Chinese customs, and given her privileged status, Peng could have avoided the local level, hired lawyers or on her own made an official complaint straight to several key members of the 3,000-member National People’s Congress (NPC), or the 300-member executive branch Central Committee, which is where contested citizen complaints end up anyway. Given Xi Jinping’s and the Communist Party of China’s (CPC) zealous control of corruption, Zhang Gaoli would have probably had to face the music, come clean if guilty and paid the price. At the very worst, Peng’s complaint would not be addressed by these high-level bodies, yet as it stands now, proceedings will likely not happen, since Eurangloland is baying for blood and has already appointed itself as humanity’s global arbitrator, which Baba Beijing will not allow.
Zhang is not too powerful to get off the hook. During Xi’s presidency, other Politburo members, generals and many other big names have gone down in judicial flames, for corruption and other assorted crimes. Had Peng done it the Chinese way, she could have gotten the satisfaction of gaining justice in a trial and eventual conviction, both which would have likely been announced in the national media. The West’s arrogant, hubristic, greater-than-thou BLPM chest beating will surely keep this from happening.
Like Jack Ma, who also went into hiding after getting too big for his britches, Peng will resurface in the near future, whereupon Baba Beijing will do its best to maintain Confucian-Daoist-Buddhist social harmony and economic stability for the people. Same as it has been for thousands of years.
The post Women’s Tennis Association and the West Will Make a Mess of Peng Shuai’s Disappearance first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
RSF president Pierre Haski announces the 29th RSF Press Freedom Awards in Paris. Video: RSF
The 2021 Reporters Without Borders (RSF) Press Freedom Awards have been given to Chinese journalist Zhang Zhan in the courage category, Palestinian journalist Majdoleen Hassona in the independence category, and the Pegasus Project in the impact category.
RSF’s press freedom prizes are awarded every year to journalists or media that have made a notable contribution to the defence or promotion of freedom of the press in the world.
This is the 29th year they have been awarded.
The 2021 awards have been given in three categories — journalistic courage, impact and independence. Six journalists and six media outlets or journalists’ organisations from a total of 11 countries were nominated.
Courage Prize
The 2021 Prize for Courage, which aims to support and salute journalists, media outlets or NGOs that have displayed courage in the practice, defence or promotion of journalism, has been awarded to Chinese journalist Zhang Zhan.
Despite constant threats, this lawyer-turned-journalist covered the covid-19 outbreak in the city of Wuhan in February 2020, live-streaming video reports on social media that showed the city’s streets and hospitals, and the families of the sick.
Her reporting from the heart of the pandemic’s initial epicentre was one of the main sources of independent information about the health situation in Wuhan at the time.
After being arrested in May 2020 and held incommunicado for several months without any official reason being provided, Zhang Zhan was sentenced on 28 December 2020 to four years in prison for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”.
In protest against this injustice and the mistreatment to which she was subjected, she went on a hunger strike that resulted in her being shackled and force-fed. Her friends and family now fear for her life, and her health has worsened dramatically in recent weeks.
Independence Prize
The 2021 Prize for Independence, which rewards journalists, media outlets or NGOs that have resisted financial, political, economic or religious pressure in a noteworthy manner, has been awarded to Palestinian journalist Majdoleen Hassona.
Before joining the Turkish TV channel TRT and relocating to Istanbul, this Palestinian journalist was often harassed and prosecuted by both Israeli and Palestinian authorities for her critical reporting.
While on a return visit to the West Bank in August 2019 with her fiancé (also a TRT journalist based in Turkey), she was stopped at an Israeli checkpoint and was told that she was subject to a ban on leaving the territory that had been issued by Israeli intelligence “for security reasons”.
She has been stranded in the West Bank ever since but decided to resume reporting there and covered the anti-government protests in June 2021 following the death of the activist Nizar Banat.
Impact Prize
The 2021 Prize for Impact, which rewards journalists, media outlets or NGOS that have contributed to clear improvements in journalistic freedom, independence and pluralism, or increased awareness of these issues, has been awarded to the Pegasus Project.
The Pegasus Project is an investigation by an international consortium of more than 80 journalists from 17 media outlets* in 11 different countries that was coordinated by the NGO Forbidden Stories with technical support from experts at Amnesty International’s Security Lab.
Based on a leak of more than 50,000 phone numbers targeted by Pegasus, spyware made by the Israeli company NSO Group, the Pegasus Project revealed that nearly 200 journalists were targeted for spying by 11 governments — both autocratic and democratic — which had acquired licences to use Pegasus.
This investigation has made people aware of the extent of the surveillance to which journalists are exposed and has led many media outlets and RSF to file complaints and demand a moratorium on surveillance technology sales.
“For defying censorship and alerting the world to the reality of the nascent pandemic, the laureate in the ‘courage’ category is now in prison and her state of health is extremely worrying,” said RSF secretary-general Christophe Deloire.
“For displaying a critical attitude and perseverance, the laureate in the ‘independence category has been unable to leave Israeli-controlled territory for the past two years.
“For having revealed the scale of the surveillance to which journalists can be subjected, some of the journalists who are laureates in the ‘impact’ category are now being prosecuted by governments.
“This, unfortunately, sums up the situation of journalism today. The RSF Award laureates embody the noblest journalistic qualities and also pay the highest price because of this. They deserve not only our admiration but also our support.”
Chaired by RSF president Pierre Haski, the jury of the 29th RSF Press Freedom Awards consisted of prominent journalists and free speech defenders from across the world: Rana Ayyub, an Indian journalist and Washington Post opinion columnist; Raphaëlle Bacqué, a leading French reporter for Le Monde; Mazen Darwish, a Syrian lawyer and president of the Syrian Centre for Media and Freedom of Expression; Zaina Erhaim, a Syrian journalist and communication consultant; Erick Kabendera, a Tanzanian investigative reporter; Hamid Mir, a Pakistani news editor, columnist and writer; Frederik Obermaier, a German investigative journalist with Munich’s Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper; and Mikhail Zygar, a Russian journalist and founding editor-in-chief of Dozhd, Russia’s only independent TV news channel.
Previous winners of this prize, which was created in 1992, have included Russian journalist Elena Milashina (2020 Prize for Courage), Saudi blogger Raif Badawi (Netizen category prize in 2014) and the Chinese Nobel Peace laureate Liu Xiaobo (Press Freedom Defender prize in 2004).
Pacific Media Watch works in association with Reporters Without Borders.
*(Aristegui Noticias, Daraj, Die Zeit, Direkt 36, Knack, Forbidden Stories, Haaretz, Le Monde, Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, Proceso, PBS Frontline, Radio France, Le Soir, Süddeutsche Zeitung, The Guardian, The Washington Post and The Wire)
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Taiwanese shipyard CSBC Corporation has reportedly laid the keel of first indigenous diesel-electric submarine (SSK) under construction for the Republic of China Navy (RoCN) at its purpose-built submarine construction facility in Kaohsiung, several local news agencies have claimed. However, no imagery of the ceremony – purportedly attended by senior RoCN officials – were released because […]
The post Taiwanese submarine development programme reaches key milestone appeared first on Asian Military Review.
This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.
A ‘sponge city’ is a nature-based solution which uses the landscape to retain water at its source, slow down water flow and clean it throughout the process. The focus is to retain rainwater in urban areas by waterproofing the paved floor so that part of it evaporates and the rest is gradually drained. As well as proofing the roads and pavements, more trees are planted and smart buildings are constructed to adapt to the city’s sponge. This means roofs are covered in grass for greater absorption of water and buildings are also painted in light colours to reflect more heat instead of absorbing it.
The post China’s Sponge Cities Are A ‘Revolutionary Rethink’ To Prevent Flooding appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
Biden administration may not send official delegation to Beijing 2022, in protest at human rights abuses
The US is going to stage a diplomatic boycott of the Winter Olympics in China and will not send an official delegation in protest against human rights abuses, according to a report on Tuesday.
The report comes the day after a virtual summit between Joe Biden and Xi Jinping, in which multiple policy issues were raised but the Olympics were not mentioned, despite some earlier reports that Xi would deliver an invitation to the games.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
INTERPOL is going to have its General Assembly on the 23 – 24 November 2021 in Lyon. The election of both its President and a member of the Executive Committee look terrible. Already in 2017 there was a problem: see https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2017/04/20/interpol-headed-by-chinese-police-official-human-rights-defenders-fearsome/. (The former chairman of Interpol Meng Hongwei was also a ministry of public security official, serving as vice-minister. However, Meng’s Interpol term ended prematurely in 2018 when he disappeared during a visit to China and was later jailed for 13 years on bribery charges, amid Xi Jinping’s anti-graft campaign targeting millions of officials.)
Several prominent members of the European Parliament (MEPs) have warned that the appointment of the Emirati official Major General Ahmed Nasser Al-Raisi to the position of president of Interpol would “undermine the mission and reputation” of the global police organisation. In a letter sent to the European Commission president, three MEPs urged European Union (EU) states to elect an Interpol chief that comes “from a country with an established criminal justice system and longstanding respect for human rights”.
The Gulf Center for Human Rights (GCHR), the French League for Human Rights and the International Federation for Human Rights are also concerned about the candidacy of Major General Ahmed Nasser Al-Raisi call to reject him.
Ahmed Al-Raisi has been Inspector General of the UAE’s Interior Ministry since 2015 and is also in charge of the UAE police force. Under his leadership, forces have carried out repeated and systematic arbitrary detentions and tortured prisoners of conscience and human rights defenders with complete impunity. One of the most emblematic cases concerns human rights defender Ahmed Mansour. Winner of the 2015 Martin Ennals Award and member of the GCHR steering committee, Ahmed Mansour has been imprisoned since March 2017 and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment in 2018 for, according to the authorities, criticising the Emirati government and tarnishing his country’s image on social networks. Since 2017, he has been held in solitary confinement in Al-Sadr prison, in a 4m2 cell, without access to medical, hygiene, water or sanitary facilities. The inhumane conditions of Ahmed Mansour’s imprisonment have been the subject of several appeals without any favourable response from the Emirati authorities. [see: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/tag/ahmed-mansoor/]
According to reports of several NGOs, torture is used systematically in detention centres in order to obtain confessions of guilt or testimonies against other detainees, particularly in the prisons of Al-Razeen, Al-Wathba and Al-Sadr. In addition, some prisons, such as Al-Awair prison and the Al-Barsha police detention centre, are overcrowded and unsanitary, making it extremely difficult to comply with social distancing and recommended hygiene practices in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic….In addition, prisoners are regularly denied medication and medical treatment for pre-existing health problems or illnesses developed during detention. Several UN experts have condemned these practices and expressed their concerns to the UAE authorities in recent years, but the authorities have not changed their practices.
Such inhumane treatment is recurrent in the UAE and is in flagrant contravention of international law and the Nelson Mandela Rules on the Treatment of Prisoners. While Major General Al-Raisi is, by virtue of his office, responsible for investigating complaints of abuse by the police and security forces in his country, none have been conclusively investigated. In the absence of any enforceable accountability mechanisms in the UAE, the GCHR has filed a complaint in France, against General Major Al-Raisi for acts of torture.
Another problematic candidate is Hu Binchen, the deputy director-general of the Chinese Ministry of international cooperation department, who is one of three candidates vying for two seats as Asia delegates on the committee.
The 13-member executive committee oversees the work of Interpol’s general secretariat and helps set future policy. Interpol controls a number of databases containing identifying details of people and property, which assist in global policing. It also operates the system of red notices, which are requests “to locate and provisionally arrest an individual pending extradition”.
However, there are long-running concerns over governments or authorities misusing the system to track down dissidents. While there are clear rules against the use of red notices on refugees, high-profile cases have shown countries are repeatedly able to obtain red notices, against Interpol policy.
Activists and advocacy groups, as well as 50 members of an international cross-party group of legislators, the Inter-parliamentary Alliance on China, have lodged their objections at Hu’s potential election to the committee, noting alleged attempts by China to use the red notice system to target exiled Uyghur activists.
“By electing Hu Binchen to the executive committee, the general assembly would be giving a green light to the PRC government to continue their misuse of Interpol and would place the tens of thousands of Hong Kong, Uyghur, Tibetan, Taiwanese and Chinese dissidents living abroad at even graver risk,” said the letter from the Alliance, citing the July detention of Uyghur activist Idris Hassan in Morocco.
“Allowing Interpol to be used as a vehicle for the PRC government’s repressive policies does great harm to its international standing.”
The human rights group Safeguard Defenders said the Chinese ministry’s international cooperation department, in which Hu is a senior official, oversaw operations named Sky Net and Fox Hunt, chasing down fugitives overseas. It alleged “teams were sent by the ministry “to intimidate and harass ethnic Chinese to force them to return to China ‘voluntarily’”. In a report also released on Monday, Safeguard Defenders said there had been a tenfold increase in the issuance of Chinese red notices between 2000 and 2020.
This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.
2 Mins Read V-Planet, the San Francisco-based dog food brand, has just entered the Chinese market. It has partnered with Hong Kong vegan pioneer Green Monday to launch its plant-based dog food range in its Shanghai Green Common stores. V-Planet has made significant inroads into Asia recently, with its China expansion marking its fifteenth international market. V-Planet will […]
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