The Money Illusions
China’s Solid Politics
Snippets
Magic Thinking Spreads Ebola
Godless and Safe
French Guilt
A Holy Land for Jews Only?
Real Historic Anti-Semitism Surfacing
IMF Defending Money
Nigeria Refines Its Own Oil
25% To Rule Them All?
Visit the Isle of New Orleans?
The Money Illusions
In a modern society, it is easy to forget that real material wealth is goods and human work. Money is just a way of exchanging goods between producers and consumers. A way of getting people to work for anyone outside their own friends and families.
For most of human history, money was gold or silver, and most people grew their own food. But it was also exchange between roughly equal humans, with a few rich land-owners taking a cut for land they did not make or keep healthy, but which the state enforced their right to. And the state taking taxes for wars, unavoidable in a world with many rival and often aggressive states.
The Industrial Revolution meant factories where vast numbers of workers produced goods that were cheaper and better than those made by independent small producers. But those workers were kept poor and overworked. The flow of new wealth went to a minority: a newly comfortable middle class.
Socialists said ‘make owners pay more to workers, and nationalise those that are inherently big or monopolies’. Communism said ‘give ownership to the workers’ – either as collectives, or by state ownership by a Workers Government.
Both systems worked much better than classical capitalism. Britain in the 19th century had amazed the world with its new factories, but its growth was around 1% per year. The USA before 1945 edged towards 2%, but had its Great Depression. Much better results were achieved in the three-decade Cold War competition in which the West borrowed socialist ideas to defeat a Soviet Union that was actually growing faster than 19th century capitalism ever had. That was overtaking the USA up to the 1960s, but was overtaken by the state-orientated societies of Japan, Italy, and West Germany. Countries that received gigantic US aid and had their consumer goods let into the USA and replaced American industries.
In those days, workers in the West were looked after, because the rich feared they might otherwise go Communist. France and Italy saw Communist Parties get a quarter or a third of the vote in open electoral systems.
Sadly, the Soviet Union spoiled its reputation by imagining it could rule the world and bend everyone to its own system. It damaged its economy with excessive military spending. And there were some spectacular new US industries that made new billionaires out of people who’d began as ordinary or moderately-rich. Lots of people imagined they could do the same.
What actually happened was 90% of Western workers found themselves worse off. Especially in the USA, where the illusion is strongest.
And Russia did not get the same aid that the former enemies in Italy and Japan and West Germany had got after 1945. They got significantly poorer with ‘reforms’ that the New Right insisted upon. Yet the idea that the former enemies were won over by generosity and the Russians alienated by meanness is one they won’t consider. It has to be an unexpected outbreak of evil, just as in all the Third World countries the USA has made enemies of from the 1980s.
We also keep being told that without the billionaires it would all fall apart. Ignoring the awkward fact that Western growth hasn’t been faster since they got lower taxes and less rules from the 1980s.
If their wealth was cut down to just a few tens of millions, would this not be enough to inspire new entrepreneurs?
And why aren’t they satisfied? I’ve seen people wonder just why millionaires want more, when they already have enough for all possible personal consumption. Overlooking that wealth also means power. Power to go to Mars rather than look after the needy. Power to buy up the media and make ordinary people scared of each other.
China’s Solid Politics
Back in 1989, I went against the Western experts and said that the Chinese Communists would remain in power for many more decades (https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/very-old-issues-images/magazine-001-to-010/magazine-012/what-tiananmen-1989-was-really-about/.)
I’d noticed at the time that when the demonstrators held Tiananmen Square, the BBC had been pinning their hopes on a man called Wan Li returning from an overseas trip and invoking the National Assembly to replace the Communist government. Similar things did later happen in several countries in Middle Europe, so I suppose it was the CIA playbook. But Wan Li chose not to do so. I later looked into this and got details. (https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/m-articles-by-topic/m99-topic-menus-from-long-revolution-website/42-china/42-1-chinese-politics/communist-chinas-1989-fight-for-survival/.)
China had a different mentality from Middle Europe, where Communists had been put in power by the Red Army and their successors were weak. Chinese leaders in 1989 had lived through a brutal and dictatorial Kuomintang regime: a party that kept the country poor. That was acceptable to the West when it cut short the 1927 Revolution and did not dare try to be a real government in Shanghai.
Chinese Communists made their own system, and were willing to kill a few protestors to secure it. And to jail more, but what broke the dissidents was the sight of once-awesome Soviet Russia descend into poverty and crime.
I was also unsurprised when new leader Xi Jinping toned down the limited criticism of Mao that had been allowed under Deng. But I now understand more after reading The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping by Joseph Torigian. Not that the author sees it so, but he is an excellent collector of raw facts. On page 492, the book explains how the elder Xi was deputy to Wan Li and made the same choice to back the party. And though the book does not say this, he might even have influenced Wan to come back to Shanghai and be won over by future leader Jiang Zeimin, rather than go to Beijing and back the protests.
Definitely the right choice. Rather than glib lawyers with skills at making a bad case look good, China’s top leaders are people who showed they could make life better for ordinary people. A lot had an engineering background. And there remains a preference for people whose experience is of how the world works, rather than how you can twist it to your advantage:
“Why leading Chinese scientists are rising to the top in the Communist Party”. (https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3350757/why-leading-chinese-scientists-are-rising-top-communist-party
Snippets
Magic Thinking Spreads Ebola
“Police fire shots in air to disperse angry crowds at DR Congo Ebola treatment centre…
“The body of a dead Ebola victim is highly infectious and can lead to the virus spreading further when prepared for burial.” (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0l22pz6nw6o).
It is an aspect of the whole anti-state attitudes that began in the 1960s and got maliciously twisted by the New Right in the 1980s. And now it has spread to topics where they’d like to keep control, but the damage they did is not easy to reverse.
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Godless and Safe
A survey on X (Twitter) showed that the top countries for atheism were China, Japan, Sweden and the Czech Republic. (https://x.com/iamisla_/status/2058258897450697035). Roughly in line with other surveys that show global atheism rising as a global trend (https://www.gallup-international.com/survey-results-and-news/survey-result/two-decades-of-change-global-religiosity-declines-while-atheism-rises).
And not a trend away from morality. Those countries are noticeably safe to visit. Places where a stranger can expect help if they need it, which happened to me in the three very different societies of China, Japan and Sweden. Nothing relevant in the Czech Republic, which was however nice to visit. Whereas in the highly-religious USA, and the US South in particular, I would have been much more at risk of violence, cheating, or being ignored or rebuffed if I needed help.
We needed religion once, but now we have moved beyond it (https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/m-articles-by-topic/040-religion-as-a-mode-of-human-existence/religions-as-imperfect-human-understanding/). And religious beliefs have far too often been an excuse for all sorts of evil.
It might seem logical for a devoutly religious person to trust to Almighty God to deal with those who merit punishment. Many of them actually do so. But significant minorities will say ‘God Wills It’ to excuse their own violence.
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French Guilt
The USA had a wave of removing statues that presented Confederate generals as admirable rather than brave fighters for an appalling cause. And Britain had it share. And now France also:
“French ‘counter-monument’ holds up a mirror to ghosts of colonial Algeria. https://www.france24.com/en/france/20251116-french-counter-monument-holds-up-mirror-ghosts-colonialism-algeria-nancy
Part of restoring a public morality that had lapsed over the past few decades. And doing it on a socialist basis.
*
A Holy Land for Jews Only?
To get at radical London mayor Ken Livingstone, a silly rule was taken up that criticism of Israel or Zionism could never be honest and must always be classed as anti-Semitic. And then the same was applied to Jeremy Corbyn when he made the Labour Party much more popular by returning to the demand for social justice that the party had been built on.
For the immediate needs, it worked. And then Hezbollah perhaps decided to get provocative in the hope of making Israel extreme enough to upset the reconciliation with Arab right-wingers that was happening at the time. And certainly it boosted those Israelis who wanted to dispossess Palestinians of the little they had left. And committed extreme acts, in the confident and correct belief that almost all the world media would reject any criticism as anti-Semitic.
It is another case of New Right politics and its silly New Labour variant grabbing for small advantages and not thinking things through. When any criticism of Israel is defined as anti-Semitic, then more extreme Israelis will realise they can do anything and trust the world media to refuse to react as they would if anyone else did it.
This, for instance:
“‘Some hide their crosses’: Jerusalem nun attack highlights Israel’s growing anti-Christian problem – France 24
“When a foreign nun was the victim of violent physical assault in Jerusalem last month, local activists and clergy say they were shocked but not surprised. In the past few years, anti-Christian incidents have surged in Israel – illustrating how a small minority of insular and mainly ultra-religious nationalist or ultra-Orthodox Jews are becoming increasingly emboldened to act out their anger and hate.” (https://share.google/FR4zuGTod0X5t2xDN).
Under the law of the land, you are obliged to say that even if it happened, any mention of it having happened would make you a vicious anti-Semite. No appeal, no argument. You are by definition guilty.
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Real Historic Anti-Semitism Surfacing
“The sordid history of the May 1939 British White Paper, the notorious document with which the British all but slammed shut the doors of Palestine to European Jewry, has been documented many times. Less-remembered is how the (Jewish-owned) New York Times took British prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s side the day after the White Paper was issued, incurring the wrath of Chaim Weizmann and the Zionist leadership. Virtually unknown, however, is that the Polish Jewish community had sent a desperate plea two months earlier to Chamberlain — a telegram begging him to keep the gates of Palestine open.” (https://www.timesofisrael.com/uncovered-polish-jews-pre-holocaust-plea-to-chamberlain-let-us-into-palestine/).
There were also many other places where the British Empire could have put the endangered Jews. Lots of space for white settlers – but Jews were not entirely wanted or accepted as white. I’d remarked a few times that it was odd no one considered setting aside a chunk of Australia or New Zealand as territories where Jews could be a planned majority and allowed to define the regional culture. There were Patagonian Welsh, but Latino culture has always been less conformist. Canada and Australia and New Zealand were to be New Britains. Other Europeans were expected to conform, and Jews who wanted to affirm their differences would do it at the expense of lesser humans. Uganda was a serious candidate to feed something to inconvenient importuning Zionists, and so was Madagascar. But nothing came of it.
Using DeepSeek to check my comments, I then discovered a largely-forgotten scheme for a Jewish homeland within Australia in West Australia. But the Australian government only wanted Jews who’d fit in to the dominant English-derived culture (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimberley_Plan). It’s much less known than the improbable Soviet idea of giving Jews a chunk in the east of Siberia. But the politicians upheld “the ideal of one Australian family of peoples, devoid of foreign communities.”
Within Europe, no concern was shown for Jews who’d obviously be at risk if Poland lost the war that they were being encouraged to fight against Germany. Hitler had made a reasonable offer over Danzig, a mostly-German city that Poland did not want while it was full of Germans. Poland could have been told ‘give him Danzig, and we go to war if he tries to take more’. Instead Poland was encouraged to give nothing, which is the context in which Hitler made war possible by his non-aggression agreement with Stalin.
During the war, the option to bomb railway lines leading to the death camps was ignored. It was all about power politics, and no real concern about East European Jews and the other victims.
After the war, Danzig was emptied of Germans and became Gdansk. East Prussia as a whole had Ethnic Cleansing with the full support of all the victorious powers, as did the Sudetenland in the restored Czechoslovakia. Poles and Ukrainians were encouraged to separate from each other, in view of the bitterness left behind by massacres by Ukrainian fascists. And the idea of a Jewish state carved out of the mix was considered, but would have offended the much larger nationalities that saw every last inch as exclusively theirs.
A similar lack of concern for East European Jews was shown after the war:
“Mengele was a doctor who served in Germany’s Waffen SS. He was posted to the Auschwitz extermination camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, where he selected those to be sent to the gas chambers – an estimated 1.1 million people died, including about a million Jews.
“Known as the Angel of Death, he also selected prisoners, primarily children and twins, for sadistic medical experiments, before sending them to their deaths as well.
“After the war Mengele, like many high-ranking Nazis, quickly changed both his uniform, and his name.
“With the help of his false identity, he was issued Red Cross travel documents at the Swiss consulate in Genoa in northern Italy, and used them to flee to South America.
“The Red Cross intended the documents for thousands of people across Europe who had been displaced or made stateless by the war, but Nazis seeking to escape prosecution also managed to acquire them, something for which the Red Cross has subsequently apologised.” https://share.google/khwywR0PVBiAe4z2w
Another example of how the West’s elite viewed the war with fascism as an unfortunate accident. How they never believed most of their own propaganda.
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IMF Defending Money
“A world going broke: IMF says America’s $39 trillion national debt is actually a global problem—and AI may be the only rescue…
“The world economy is being tested again with the consequences of the war in the Middle East—and this is a world that has less degrees of freedom as public finances are more stretched in many, many countries…
“AI could fundamentally transform how governments operate by boosting productivity, tightening tax administration, and improving delivery of health and education services.” (https://fortune.com/2026/04/16/imf-national-debt-world-structural-problem-ai-uncertainty/
The USA has plenty of wealth that could fund its public spending. But Republican presidents have repeatedly run up the deficit by cutting taxes for the rich. And Democrats, heavily dependent on campaign funds, have been weak in opposing it.
Now the IMF idea is to balance things by destroying more good jobs. Replacing them with AI systems that often fail to understand or send you round in circles.
The International Monetary Fund are Dedicated Worshipers of Money
They cannot admit that the grand New Right experiment did absolutely nothing to improve overall growth in the West. And arguably damaged it.
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Nigeria Refines Its Own Oil
“Fuelling a continent: how China’s engineering prowess built Africa’s biggest oil refinery
“Nigeria has turned into a net exporter of refined petroleum products”
The West has been drawing raw materials from Africa and then doing the more profitable refining at home. Not helping African development. But China has not forgotten the global Leninist mission that the People’s Republic was created as part of. Yet have the wisdom not to set themselves up as a Superior Authority as Russia did before the Soviet collapse.
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25% To Rule Them All?
The latest YouGov poll for 17th May gives Labour 17%, Conservatives 18%, ‘Reform’ 25%, Liberal Democrats 14% and Greens 15% (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_United_Kingdom_general_election).
Since all of those parties are likely to stand in every single English seat at the next election, this could give ‘Reform’ an absolute majority in the House of Commons.
They already gained many seats in the recent Local Government polls. In most places, only one-third of the seats were contested, so they didn’t gain control of many councils. But next year’s elections are likely to give them more.
Naturally, existing Labour MPs are worried. With some system of Proportional Representation, they could assume that Greens and Liberals and even some Conservatives would switch votes to them if they came second to Reform in the first round. Likewise for sitting Conservative MPs: a clear majority of voters would not vote Reform even if The Evil Lord Sauron was the only other candidate. But as things stand, Reform would get those seats.
More than 60 Labour MPs have called for a review. But what’s really odd is that party leaders are rejecting it. Even Andy Burnham has said ‘not before the next election’, arguing that it was not in the manifesto. And ignoring the obvious point that if Reform get a House of Commons majority they would try to stop PR ever happening.
Are some of our leaders so caught up serving the rich and ‘Upper London’ that they would allow Reform to come to power? Prefer it than to risk progress by the Greens and other leftists who might start taxing the rich? Is that their greatest fear?
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Visit the Isle of New Orleans?
That would be a nice travel poster for an SF film set a few decades in the future. Such a big and culturally deep city is unlikely to be abandoned. But the land around it might be lost:
“‘Point of no return’: New Orleans relocation must start now due to sea level, study finds…
“Ongoing sea-level rise and the rampant erosion of wetlands in southern Louisiana will swallow up the New Orleans area within a few generations, with the new paper estimating the city “may well be surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico before the end of this century”.
(https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/04/new-orleans-sea-levels-relocation-climate-crisis).
I write regular blogs – https://www.quora.com/q/mrgwydionmwilliams. I also post a lot on X (Twitter): https://x.com/GwydionMW
Copyright ©Gwydion M. Williams.
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