Notes on the News

By Gwydion M. Williams

Immigration – the Left’s Suicidal Unrealism

Good News from Germany

China Now Allows Less Capitalism

Snippets

Drowning Japanese and Central Europeans Best Ignored?

How Ukraine Invented Itself

China’s Excellent Science

End homelessness and save money

Class Issues

Immigration – the Left’s Suicidal Unrealism

Social justice is never free. And it is unjust to dump most of the cost on those who are already stretched.

A world centre for refugees would have been a good idea – just not in Rwanda. If the elite hadn’t started a war by encouraging pro-Western Ukrainians to purge themselves of everything Russian or Soviet, Siberia might have been a good choice.

It was just that for hundreds of thousands of Jews in World War Two:

“During World War II, large numbers of Polish and Soviet Jews fled eastwards from German-occupied Europe or were deported by the Soviet Union. The majority of exiled Polish Jews lived in various labor camps and labor colonies in Central Asia and Siberia for the duration of the war. At the end of the war, Jews displaced in the Soviet Union were the largest group of surviving European Jews, as most of those left behind died in the Holocaust.”^[1]

One book I read had a Jewish woman returning from Siberia and thinking she’d had a tough war, until she met other Jewish women who had survived as forced labour for the Nazis. Their comment was “you still have children? Ours have all been murdered.”

For modern ‘displaced persons’, what we have now are dishonest liberal policies that hold that everyone is much the same, except that some must have a lot more money. More income and much more ownership. And it is also essential that individual wealth be passed on to offspring who have not earned it. But the advantage of being born into a country which modernised itself should be freely shared with people from all over the world.

The arrival of new populations with different social habits will strain any society. Make it different, but perhaps more interesting.

Being radical-minded, indifferent to ‘race’, always employed, and with a well-off family who could help me during setbacks, I always took a positive view towards immigrants. But I recognise also that others are suffering.

Immigrants from much poorer societies work for lower wages. People grandly say that none of those born here would do those jobs at those wages. Missing the point that if those jobs really had to be done, employers would offer a decent wage.

The left had already paid a price for the best thing that Labour under Blair actually did. Equal opportunities for women and for non-white individuals are also a loss of white privilege and male privilege. A cost for those with the modest good luck to be one or both. It can be justified as simple fairness, but it is silly to pretend that no one was a loser.

The common habit among leftists is to pretend and to evade.

Definitely worth mentioning that the main loss has been the draining of wealth from ordinary people and towards a global elite of multi-millionaires. An estimated 20 million with a total wealth of 80 trillion dollars.^[2] It’s best to talk about them rather than billionaires: less than 3000, and a total net wealth of $14.2 trillion.^[3]

The super-rich have a much bigger share of wealth than they had before the 1980s. More than in the year 2000, when 7.2 million owned a mere 27 trillion.

But total wealth creation was at least as good before the super-rich were given extra powers.

And you can say all that without pretending that massive immigration is not also a problem for ordinary workers in rich countries.

And that may have been a right-wing strategy all along.

Did the centre-right might intentionally leave issues unresolved, while stoking fears? All to gain votes that allow the channelling of more money to the multi-millionaire class? There has certainly been a remarkable lack of solutions. Also accusations of having too few government officials to clear a backlog of asylum seekers.^[4]

The same in the USA. Republicans vote down sensible schemes for limiting illegal immigration.

Good News from Germany

By talking sense about immigration, Sahra Wagenknecht’s new party has won between 11.8% and 15.8% in three recent regional elections.^[5]

She gives a coherent account of what’s gone wrong:

“Racism must always be combated, not just avoided, but combated. But to point to real social shortages—demand outstripping capacity—is not xenophobic. These are just facts. For instance, there is a housing shortage of 700,000 units in Germany. There are tens of thousands of teaching jobs unfilled. Of course the sudden arrival of large numbers of asylum seekers fleeing wars—a million in 2015, mainly from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan; a million from Ukraine in 2022—produces a huge surge in demand, which is not met by any rise in capacity. That creates intense competition for scarce resources, and that does fuel xenophobia. That’s not fair for the new arrivals, but it is also not fair for the German families who need affordable housing, or whose children go to schools where the teachers are completely overwhelmed because half the class don’t speak German. And this is always in the poorer residential areas, where people are already under stress.

“It doesn’t help to deny or gloss over these problems. That’s what the other parties tried to do, and in the end, it simply strengthened the AfD. Migration will always take place in an open world, and often it can be enriching for both sides. But it’s essential that the scale of it doesn’t get out of hand and that sudden surges of migration are kept in check…

“If you consider people only as factors of production, and society just as an economy defended by a police force, this need not bother you a lot. We want to avoid a spiral of mutual distrust and hostility…

“The Greens’ approach to environmental policy is economically punishing for most people. They are in favour of high CO₂ prices, making fossil fuels more expensive in order to create an incentive to get off them. That may work for well-to-do people who can afford to buy an electric car, but if you don’t have much money, it just means you’re worse off. The Greens radiate arrogance towards poorer people and are therefore hated by a large part of the population. That’s something the AfD plays on—it thrives on hatred of the Greens, or rather of the policies the Greens pursue…

“Die Linke itself had changed. It now wants to be greener than the Greens and copies their model. Identity politics predominates and social issues have been pushed to one side. Die Linke used to be quite successful—in 2009, it got 12 per cent, over 5 million votes—but by 2021 the vote had fallen below the 5 per cent bar, with only 2.2 million votes. Those privileged discourses, if I may call them that, are popular in metropolitan academic circles, but they’re not popular with the ordinary people who used to vote left. You drive them away…

“Left-wing parties were traditionally anchored in the working class, even if they were led by intellectuals. But their electorate has changed. Piketty traces this in great detail in Capital and Ideology. A new, university-educated, professional class has expanded massively over the last thirty years, relatively unscathed by neoliberalism because it has a good income and rising asset wealth, and doesn’t necessarily depend upon the welfare state. Young people who have grown up inside this milieu have never known social fear or hardship, because they were protected from the outset. This is now the main milieu of the Greens, people who are relatively well off, who are concerned about the climate—which speaks in their favour—but who aim to solve the problem through individual consumer decisions. People who have never had to go without, preaching renunciation to those for whom going without is part of everyday life…

“Marx used to be a major influence on me and I still find his analyses of capitalist crises and property relations very useful. I’m not in favour of total nationalization or central planning, but I’m interested in exploring third options, between private property and state ownership—foundations or stewardships, for example, that prevent a firm from being plundered by shareholders.”^[6]

The racists have advanced, which our media notes with hoots of alarm. But they almost ignore the emergence of a new opposition on the left.

Both Die Linke and the Greens have lost heavily. Greens deservedly lost all their seats in Thuringia and Brandenburg.

China Now Allo ws Less Capitalism

“As China celebrates Deng Xiaoping’s legacy, the country is again at a crossroads

“Deng and his ‘true heir’ Xi Jinping differ in strategies and approaches, but closer examination reveals many core similarities…

“Both Deng and Xi embarked on a zealous mission to restore China to its position as a great world power, and they shared a conviction that the Communist Party is indispensable to achieving that goal.

“Deng was the first to warn that China must chart its own reform path and not blindly copy the Western model. He sneered at Mikhail Gorbachev’s ‘perestroika’ reforms in the Soviet Union, even as they were widely praised in the West.

“‘My father thinks Gorbachev is an idiot,’ Deng’s younger son, Deng Zhifang, once told a friend.

“By dismantling the Communist Party’s power structure, ‘he [Gorbachev] will lose the power to fix the problems before people kick him out’, the younger Deng recalled his father predicting, ahead of the Soviet Union’s eventual collapse in 1991…

“The cardinal principles required Chinese leaders to adhere to the socialist path, the people’s democratic dictatorship, the party’s leadership, and Mao Zedong’s Thought and Marxism-Leninism principles – the same message that Xi likes to stress…

“A developing country like China would not rise if its people had no national dignity or the country lost its independence,’ Xi said. ‘We should not belittle ourselves, forget our heritage or betray the motherland.’…

“When Deng and his colleagues emerged from the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, the party and the country were on the brink of collapse. The decade-long anarchy had left the party’s structure fragmented and ideologically divided.

“Deng realised that his first task was to pull the party out of a quagmire of ideological infighting and shift the focus to economic growth. He opted for collective leadership – a consensus-building mechanism that gave the different factions seats at the table…

“The principle of collective leadership was designed to revitalise the party, as well as to prevent any faction from total domination.

“While it proved useful, its shortcomings gradually become apparent. The striving for superficial unity eventually led to extreme caution, inertia and a breakdown of party discipline.

“Later party chiefs would increasingly struggle to assemble a support team of their own choosing or to carry out reform programmes that would upset entrenched interest groups.

“This was most apparent under former president Hu Jintao, who expanded the powerful Politburo Standing Committee’s membership to nine to accommodate conflicting factional demands.

“The decision-making body was half-jokingly referred to as the ‘nine dragons ruling the rainfall’, in reference to an idiom observing that when power is shared, no one is powerful enough to effect a downpour.

“With no strong leadership at the top and responsibility spread across the team, party discipline broke down, breeding rampant corruption as well as abuses of power and even insubordination.

“Xi responded to the crisis by launching the largest anti-corruption campaign in the party’s history and a drive to recentralise power. In the process, the unwritten rules – such as the exemption from prosecution of former top leaders – were shattered…

“Xi’s move to recentralise power was based on his view that the party was in danger of losing its cohesion and being hijacked by powerful interest groups, in a repeat of Gorbachev’s Soviet Union…

“Deng’s reforms transformed China in just 30 years … from one of the poorest countries to the world’s second-largest economy.”^[7]

At the time, most experts in the West assumed that Deng was lying to his own people, and ‘truthing’ with them. Not a very smart assumption. Part of the mental fog caused by electoral politics that rewards liars.

But this Chinese account is inaccurate about what existed when Deng took over. There was factionalism, but the economy was growing faster than the USA. Mao’s China was still poor, but making excellent progress.^[8]

China in 2024 is in danger of falling below their target of 5% growth. But certain to get more than 4%, which would be an amazing success anywhere else.

China continues to grow faster than any of the developed Western economies. The main rival is India, which grows with much cheaper labour. Has gross inequalities, and an intensification of radical-right Hindu values.

The Financial Times insists that China must lose its grand advance into high technology if it treats its entrepreneurs as mere ordinary humans.^[9] I am content to watch and wait. I expect this warning of China’s immanent doom to be as false as those made regularly for the past 10 or 15 years.

Sn ippets

Drowning Japanese and Central Europeans Best Ignored?

Climate change is a complex business. A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture. But we also have waves of cold air coming down from the arctic. Shifting jet streams no longer confine it there.

Europe’s floods were caused by some of this cold air bumping into warm wet air that had been moving north:

«Immediate analyses of the central European floods suggested most of the water vapour came from the Black Sea and Mediterranean Sea, both of which have grown hotter as a result of human-induced climate breakdown, resulting in more water evaporating into the air.

“‘On average, the intensity of heavy precipitation events increases by 7% for each degree of global warming,’ she said. ‘We now have 1.2C of global warming, which means that on average heavy precipitation events are 8% more intense.’”^[10]

Denialists make a huge song-and-dance about small numbers of climate-warners who exaggerate the evidence. Ignore a far vaster mass of warners who were spot on. Or who actually underestimated the danger.

How Ukraine Invented Itself

«I’m Ukrainian but my first words were in Russian. In fact, all of my words were in Russian until I started school. Like many other Ukrainian families, mine used to be Ukrainian-speaking once, but was Russified over recent generations.

«Our bookshelves were filled with Russian literature. Our TV showed Russian and Ukrainian channels, which I didn’t distinguish – both aired mostly in Russian. Every new year we raised our glasses twice – first, on Moscow time, and an hour later, on Kyiv’s. »^[11]

That’s a woman writing in The Guardian, and not acknowleging that Ukraine messed itself up by trusting Western advice. That it remained poor and very corrupt when Russia under Putin was recovering.

Historically, Ukrainians only escaped from Polish domination and raids by Turkish slave-takers because Moscow had an army that could win. Ukrainian uprisings involved massacres of Jews and Poles, and always lost.

A militant minority of Ukrainians who wanted to purge themselves of everything Russian showed no tolerance for those who wanted a balance. So the elected government of Crimea seceded and asked Russia to annex them.

The elected governments of the Donbass sought autonomy if a majority would vote for it. Kiev agreed, but used the time gained to build an army of conquest. Something like the Croat force that purged their Tito-defined territory of all Serbs.

We have a war, because far too many Ukrainians cannot see themselves as anything other than victims. Forgive themselves for their efforts to give Hitler victory in World War Two.

China’s Excellent Science

“A team of [Western] scientists say it is ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ the Covid pandemic started with infected animals sold at a market, rather than a laboratory leak.”^[12]

Had China wished to try germ warfare – something suspected of almost all the major powers– they could safely do it in the vastness of their dry lightly-populated west.

Yet the story will probably go on being told, just as many US citizens are keen to deny their grand achievement in putting humans on the moon. Anti-China policies are irrational.

“Loss of top science talent by the United States is a gain for China…

“Hundreds of scientists who had collaborated with institutions in China were put under investigation, their lives and careers turned upside down even if they weren’t charged in the end. Others pleaded guilty just to end the nightmare. Nearly 90 per cent of those charged under the China Initiative were ethnic Chinese, including Chinese-Americans and immigrants from mainland China, Taiwan and Southeast Asian countries, according to a survey by the MIT Technology Review in 2021.

“The chilly atmosphere has caused hundreds of ethnic Chinese scientists to switch their academic affiliations from American universities to institutions in China, with some of them being leading researchers in their fields with an international reputation.”^[13]

End homelessness and save money

“Manchester turns to ‘housing first’ scheme to eradicate rough sleeping

“Inspired by Finnish success story, mayor Andy Burnham says unconditional homes policy ‘saves public money’”^[14]

He rejects the shrink-the-state obsession that Thatcher began, and New Labour copied.

The failure of the liberal-left personal approach.

If you are the government of a modern society, then everything is potentially your problem. Saving in one area mostly causes expense elsewhere and in the longer run.

Class Issues

In Britain, the Labour membership wanted Corbyn. The bulk of the Parliamentary Party sabotaged him.

This included many former radicals – but what sort of radicalism?

With all of the quotas for MPs by gender and race, there was never a quota for class origin. Under Blair, John Prescott was one of the few with an ordinary origin, and not a very solid one. A steward and waiter in the Merchant Navy.

Also no quota for the job they did before becoming an MP. Overwhelmingly lawyers and journalists and people who went straight from student radicalism to working for existing politicians. What I call the Opinions Industry, because Truth can be whatever the powerful wish it to be.

Skilled university-educated technical workers whose jobs make them respect objective truths are almost absent.

Old newsnotes at the magazine websites. I also write regular blogs – https://www.quora.com/q/mrgwydionmwilliams

^[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exile_of_Jews_in_the_Soviet_interior_during_World_War_II

^[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-net-worth_individual

^[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World%27s_Billionaires#2024

^[4] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/aug/30/james-cleverly-accused-aggravating-uk-asylum-backlog-crisis

^[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%BCndnis_Sahra_Wagenknecht#Election_results

^[6] https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii146/articles/sahra-wagenknecht-condition-of-germany

^[7] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3275339/china-celebrates-deng-xiaopings-legacy-country-again-crossroads

^[8] https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/recent-issues/2019-11-magazine/2019-11/

^[9] https://www.ft.com/content/1e9e7544-974c-4662-a901-d30c4ab56eb7 – pay site

^[10] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/sep/16/climate-scientists-troubled-by-damage-from-floods-ravaging-central-europe