Sick Britain
The Global South Stands Solid
China In Chaos?
Climate Change Inferiority for China and India?
War Until the West Runs Out of Gullible Ukrainians?
Snippets
A Very English Ruthlessness
India On The Moon
Israel – Losing Westernisation
Sick Britain
From the 1980s, Britons were tricked into voting for a system that helps only the very rich.
“Bosses at Britain’s biggest companies saw their pay rise by almost 16% on average last year as most workers’ wages were squeezed by rising prices.
“£3.91m in 2022, up from £3.38m in 2021.
“118 times more than a typical UK worker on £33,000 a year.”[1]
None of Thatcher’s promises have been met. More power for employers hasn’t boosted wealth creation in Britain or the USA. Slowed it in Italy and Japan, and in West Germany expanded as United Germany.
Brexit has made things worse.
“Millions of UK families using credit cards and loans to pay basic bills”.[2]
Promises to small businesses were unreal:
“‘It’s bleak’: string of family firms shut in Rishi Sunak’s Yorkshire seat”.[3]
Much the same in the rest of Britain.
Sensible ideas like charging interest on unpaid debts to small companies by big corporations somehow never got realised.
When rich speculators almost crashed the global economy, they were bailed out. Banks shut down many small businesses, to beef up their balance sheets.
Small businesses have always suffered from unrestricted capitalism. Few of them understand the connection. All they notice is that the state can get in their way.
The left from the 1960s also spread the idea that the government was bad news. Offered an Ideal Socialist System as an alternative, but few believed this. And unwisely rejected Labour’s push in the 1960s and 1970s for Incomes Policy and Workers Control.
We in what’s now the Ernest Bevin Society were almost alone in seeing these ideas as the best Socialist Future that might actually happen.[4]
The Populist Right sounded much more logical. The government was there just to steal your money and waste it on something foolish.
Not that governments are actually smaller or less intrusive. But the main trend was that the middle class lost its morals. Relaxing on sex, thankfully. But also moved away from social responsibility. Increasingly asocial outside of families and close friends.
It does not even match Goldsmith’s 18th century complaint: wealth accumulates and men decay. Just now, everything decays. The big financial gains come either from luck or trickery – mostly a mix. Also hard work, but for something that would have happened anyway, or was never needed.
Austerity was cruel and pointless. Money is just one measure of Real Material Wealth, and often not the best.
The New Right cripple the society with their money obsession. Disappointed critics are still unwilling to praise the denounced system of tax-and-spend. Something that actually worked quite well.
The Global South Stands Solid
The BRICS summit was an amazing triumph for China.
The Global South is content for China and Russia be major rivals to NATO. Would let Russia keeping its gains in Ukraine, just as Turkiye keeps Northern Cyprus.
They reject a world dominated by Europe and its Settlement Colonies. Settlement Colonies on lands cleared of most of their native inhabitants, with the USA the biggest offender.
Japan and South Korea are still loosely attached to this his fading ‘West’. But culturally they are very different. The link could vanish very suddenly.
And however things were in the past, ordinary Europeans are not gainers. Nor are those once defined and cherished as part of the Global White Race. The elite no longer believe in racism. Their elected politicians dangle camouflaged racism, as a lure to voters silly enough to trust them. But in the USA, many of their own kids of all colours stay uneducated or badly educated.
The elite flourish by importing all sorts of talented foreigners. Obama had a Kenyan father living in Hawaii. The current Vice-President is the child of a South Asian and a Jamaican.
It’s a bad system, and overdue to fall. Unpopular.[5] But uniting countries with little in common beyond being non-European was never going to be easy.
Admitting Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates gives BRICS a strong Muslim presence. Many doubted India would allow it.
Somehow they got a deal.
Of course Modi seeks a strong separate sovereign Hindu identity, and has some Muslims voting for him. For Muslims living in what’s now functionally Hindustan, a lesser but safe position may be their best option. It’s a world where US influence has wrecked the semi-socialist Universalism that dominated until the 1980s.
‘BRICS Plus’ must weaken external support for Muslims within the Republic of India. One more minority not actually protected by the USA’s New World Order.
Modi must also be offended by many US politicians lump India with China when it might cost them money. Demand that both make most of the big sacrifices to fix Climate Change.
But China gains the most. They build on recent success in cultivated Iran and Saudi Arabia. Persuading them that both are stronger if they do not confront each other.
Will Saudi Arabia and the UAE shifts some of their gigantic financial power to helping the Global South? Cease to be Sleeping Partners in the Western system of keeping down the poor?
The USA’s total failure in Afghanistan and then callous neglect of their Afghan friends must count. They might have kept the Taliban more moderate by not cutting them off from overseas funds.
They preferred to make angry demands that the Taliban should not act as if they’d won decisively.
At least some people in the US government must have known how things would then go.
China In Chaos?
Back in December 2021, Western media were already bad-mouthing the Chinese economy. So I. blogged ‘Putting Your Money Where Your Mouth Isn’t’.[6] Pointing out that the elite did not act as if they believed it.
Saudi Arabia and the UAE see China as a good partner. On this matter, their money and mouths are in harmony.
China’s property crisis means that some foreign investors have lost, and so have many rich or speculative Chinese. But isn’t that just what should happen, if you read the market wrongly?
The reality from the 1940s and down to the present moment has been a Mixed Economy, with no serious effort to restore the lightly-regulated capitalism of the 19th century.[7] The real capitalists never allowed it.
Ayn Rand thought differently, but ‘Ayn Rand’ was a displaced Russian Jew, born as Alisa Rosenbaum. She concealed her Jewishness as far as she could, and ended up needing US government welfare.
Such inconvenient truths get covered up by well-paid experts. But the big problem with lying is that it’s not true. Live in a fog of comforting lies, and you will keep bumping into unwelcome realities.
(For the philosophically inclined, I did a detailed explanation of why subatomic physics does not actually support the old and foolish notion that we can make reality what we want it to be, just by wishing hard enough. See https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/problems-magazine-past-issues/in-a-hole-in-a-hole-dwelt-a-nothingness/.)
To most of our Western pundits, it is literally unthinkable that a successful economy would not give maximum protection to members of the elite. After the West’s 2008 crisis, the state picked up their gambling debts under the confusing label of ‘quantitative easing’.
To keep ‘sound money’, spending for the rest of the society was cut.
The New Right logic is to make the poor suffer to protect the rich. Even to strangle the real economy, to avoid damage to fancy financial games.
They may also believe stories about China having been ruined by Mao, and generously saved by Nixon and Kissinger teaching them how to be good capitalists. The actual China experts know better. They mention that China was still poor when Mao died in 1976. But not that it had been a failed state and extremely poor back in 1949. That it had been growing faster overall than the USA or Britain.[8] Fast even during most of the now-denounced Cultural Revolution years.[9]
China has a problem with rising unemployment for new workers under 24.[10] But what’s kept obscure is that unemployment for those 24 or over is both low and stable. The young people are likely to get jobs in time, though mostly more modest than they had hoped for.
I also found this in the middle of a general denunciation of China:
“Under the banner of ‘common prosperity’, Mr Xi has aimed to increase social mobility and reduce inequality. But much of this has backfired. In going after property developers, tech firms and the tutoring industry, he has harmed new graduates’ most reliable employers.”[11]
Pain, but pain with gain.
Climate Change Inferiority for China and India?
Most US politicians are saying that China and India must make the big cuts in Greenhouse Gases. The USA should sit on its hands until those disobedient foreigners start behaving.
Those fast-growing economies do count. India comes third in total greenhouse gases, with a staggering 2.5 thousand million tons of CO2 per year in 2016. China comes first, with 10.4. The USA only 5.0.
But India’s population is 1.3 billion – far larger than the USA, though the USA has ‘bulked up’ with vast numbers of diverse immigrants. Individual Indians are among the least guilty, with a mere 1.89 tons per head.[12]
China has a middling 7.44 tons.
Per head, US citizens average 15.32 tons. And vastly worse, if you consider all of the decades when they and we Europeans pumped out most of the damaging gases.
The US wants each US citizen to go on doing twice the climate damage as each Chinese. Over eight times the allowance for each citizen of India. And expects them to cut first.
The West’s politics from the 1980s have extended the privileges of those who already had more than their fair share. The rich within Western nations, and Western nations lording it over the rest of the planet.
They want Chinese, in particular, to accept permanent inferiority. But also want India in an even more inferior position. Which must have helped Mr Modi decide which way to jump, when he had the option of not letting BRICS expand.
Probably every other major Indian politician will think the same.
War Until the West Runs Out of Gullible Ukrainians?
From 2014, I’ve insisted that it is a Ukrainian Civil War. Russia stepped in to defend ethnic Russians. A Russia-orientated minority who are a majority in the regions Russia now holds.
People left vulnerable by Yeltsin’s carelessness or callousness. (Do people remember how he insulted the leaders of Ireland, by refusing to get off his aircraft when they were waiting to greet his arrival.)
Putin had to keep Crimea, which was part of Russia until 1954. He needs it to keep safe the vital Black Sea Fleet.
Putin didn’t particularly want the Donbass, or the anti-Kiev regions that now form a bridge between the two regions.[13] But nor could he sit back and allow vast numbers of Russian-speakers to be ethnically cleansed. Not let them share the fate of ethnic Serbs cleared from Croatia, and now at risk in Kosovo.
Historically, Ukrainians never managed a successful fight for their own independence. Cut lose when the Soviet Union collapsed, they failed to turn their vast potential into actual prosperity. Now they invent an heroic past for themselves, with Russians as foreign oppressors. Past hatreds of Poles and Jews are set aside, at least for now.
Also previous oppression and slave-raiding by Crimean Tartars. And since most Westerners know those Tartars just as victims of Stalin, though also pro-Nazi, I’ll give you a source detailing their historic sins:
“Until the beginning of the 18th century, Crimean Nogays were known for frequent, at some periods almost annual, slave raids into Ukraine and Russia. For a long time, until the late 18th century, the Crimean Khanate maintained a massive slave trade with the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East which was one of the important factors of its economy.”[14]
This is worth mentioning in debates over slavery. Black Africans were just the final wave of victims. Unusually badly treated: the commercialised slave trade to the New World worked to death most of those it purchased. Only a minority left behind modern descendants. But the ‘heroic’ Vikings were also major slave traders, with the rich Muslim world as major customers. And the British elite before the Roman invasion was happy to sell ordinary Britons as profitable exports.[15]
In our own times, Yeltsin did a deal with sympathetic elected rulers of Ukraine and Byelorussia, to end the fading power of Gorbachev as ruler of the Soviet Union. And being a loud-mouthed fool, he didn’t get written promises that NATO would not move eastward. Got no binding promises of cultural and language rights for Russian-speakers outside of Russia. Many other sovereign nations accept such things: he saw no need.
Sadly, Ukrainians left free to choose their own rulers never could elect a decent government. They’ve had a string of Presidents elected with enthusiasm, but widely despised by the end of their term. And keep continuous stifling corruption, whereas Putin by authoritarian methods recovered modest prosperity. So many preferred to return to Moscow’s authority:
“I became a witness to a number of Ukrainians, some of them entire families, trying to cross the border and to immigrate to Russia. Indeed, the only other type of passport (besides my U.S. passport) I saw amongst those held over for questioning and processing was the blue Ukrainian passport. This is evidence of an inconvenient fact to the Western narrative of the war that portrays Russia as an invader of Ukraine. In fact, many Ukrainians have an affinity for Russia and have voluntarily chosen to live there over the years.
“Between 2014—the real start of the war when the Ukrainian government began attacking its own people in the Donbas—and the beginning of Russia’s intervention in February 2022, around one million Ukrainians had already immigrated to Russia.”[16]
They feel closer to Russia, now that Kiev has defined itself as a bitter foe of all things Russian and everything from the Soviet era. Prefer to identify with a Red Army that did more than half the work of breaking the formidable German Army,[17] rather than a bunch of chancers who swung between working for Hitler and trying to be a third force.[18] Who achieved little beyond mass murder, but were kept in Canada by the CIA until a use was found for them.
It is unreasonable to hold citizens to choices made when Kiev governments were more moderate. When its prospects were not obviously worse than those of the Russian Federation.
Snippets
A Very English Ruthlessness
Channel 4 recently showed Becoming Elizabeth,[19] with the future Tudor Queen learning to lie and flatter during the reign of her brother Edward 6th.
It ends with his health failing, and dread among the Protestant Lords. Mary the daughter of Catherine of Aragon was heir in a nation that had a majority inclined to traditional Catholicism. Though not fond of the Pope or the Counter-Reformation, as Mary was to discover.
There were plans for a second season, which would have opened with the failed bid to make Jane Grey queen. She is given a lot of build-up, and more as offender than victim.
It looked likely to continue to show the real affection between Mary and Elizabeth – something I had independently noted as significant.[20]
Sadly, it was cancelled with just the one season. Maybe it was too realistic to be acceptable. ‘Bloody Mary’ is honest and loyal, while Elizabeth is increasingly cold and scheming. And not actually a virgin.
*
India On The Moon
Did China give India a free run at being first to soft-land at the lunar south pole? China has already done harder tasks – the far side, and flying moon-rocks back to Earth. Their own south pole landing will come later, and should return samples to Earth.
The hope is for water-ice in craters that stay in eternal shadow. Oxygen to breath and hydrogen for fuel; a lot cheaper than bringing it from Earth. But it’s just a hope.
India getting there is still a fine achievement, done cheaply.
India is doing fine, with its own equivalent of fascism. Tough for non-Hindu minorities, but Congress failed to create a strong national identity.
I think it regrettable that Indira Gandhi’s spell of secular authoritarian rule in the 1970s was cut short.[21] It was the most likely way of making a successful Indian Republic that remained close to Western values. I can’t now see that happening, even if Modi loses the next election.
*
Israel – Losing Westernisation
You can’t hold a man down without staying down with him. Booker T. Washington explained this to Southern Whites.[22] Sadly, they preferred to be under Northern Whites, but above Southern Blacks.
Covered it with blather about being heroic upholders of Christian Civilisation. I’d rate them as the worst instance of whatever’s positive in Anglo values.
For Israel, a minority of secular European Jews had a dream of a restored Israel as a place they’d be at home in. The awkward fact of vast numbers of non-Jews living there was mostly evaded, but did get one neat summary;
«The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man.»[23]
But everything changed after Hitler’s mass killing of Jews. I’m puzzled why no one thought of carving out a specifically Jewish nation from parts of Europe where Jews had been large minorities, though clearly this would have been difficult and unpopular.
What actually happened was that Europeans and the USA preferred to dump the problem on the Arab World. They took up a half-hearted British scheme that had defined a specific Palestine from parts of several Ottoman Empire provinces.
Partition could have worked, but only if Israel had allowed a real sovereign Palestine to exist alongside Israel. And sadly, when the Soviet collapse made this acceptable to the main Palestinian leaders, it also seemed feasible to most Israelis that they could take more.
Israel always had a tension between the Europeanised founders and Jews from the Muslim world. These now dominate, and ignore the minority who protest about stopping the judges from overriding the majority will.
None of them take note of the extreme danger if the rival forces within the Islamic world stop fighting each other. This is being brokered by China, and accepted by India for ‘BRICS Plus’. Neither of these have strong feelings about Jews or Israel. But they are likely to do little if some strong anti-Israel coalition emerges.
If joined by Pakistan, which has nuclear weapons to match those that Israel secretly possesses, they could force some harsh partition on Israel.
Or it might be much worse than that.
*
Old newsnotes at the magazine websites. I also write regular blogs – https://www.quora.com/q/mrgwydionmwilliams
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66574218.amp
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/jul/30/millions-of-uk-families-using-credit-cards-and-loans-to-pay-basic-bills
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jul/31/its-bleak-string-of-family-firms-shut-in-rishi-sunaks-yorkshire-seat
[4] https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/very-old-issues-images/magazines-010-to-019/magazine-019-xx/interview-with-barbara-castle/
[5] https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/problems-magazine-past-issues/the-west-fails-in-five-civilisations/the-west-fails-in-five-civilisations-2/
[6] https://mrgwydionmwilliams.quora.com/China-Putting-Your-Money-Where-Your-Mouth-Isn-t
[7] https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/problems-magazine-past-issues/the-mixed-economy-won-the-cold-war/
[8] https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/recent-issues/2019-11-magazine/2019-11/
[9] https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/problems-magazine-past-issues/how-mao-greatly-strengthened-china/
[10] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/08/business/china-youth-unemployment.html
[11] https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/08/17/why-are-chinas-young-people-so-disillusioned
[12] https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-per-capita/
[13] https://mrgwydionmwilliams.quora.com/Ukraine-Mariupol-and-the-War-for-the-Oblasts
[14] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_Tatars#Golden_Horde_and_Crimean_Khanate
[15] https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/past-issues/isolated-labour-affairs-pages-before-2015/slavery-in-the-british-empire/
[16] https://covertactionmagazine.com/2023/08/10/russia-donbass-and-the-reality-of-conflict-in-ukraine/
[17] https://www.quora.com/q/mrgwydionmwilliams/Nazi-Germany-Was-Defeated-in-Russia
[18] https://mrgwydionmwilliams.quora.com/Ukraine-Western-Media-in-2014-Reported-Nazi-Links
[19] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Becoming_Elizabeth
[20] https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/past-issues/labour-affairs-before-2014/mary-tudor-and-elizabeth-almost-a-beautiful-story/
[21] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emergency_(India)
[22] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Booker_T._Washington
[23] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_bride_is_beautiful,_but_she_is_married_to_another_man
Labour Affairs 