Majorityrights News > Category: Globalisation

From the exiled dissident news outlet Moscow Times:

Residents of the town of Valdai in Russia’s Novgorod region said they neither heard nor saw signs of a large-scale drone attack overnight on Monday despite official claims that nearly 100 Ukrainian drones targeted President Vladimir Putin’s residence there.

Fourteen residents told the independent outlet Mozhem Obyasnit that they received no text alerts warning of a drone threat and did not hear any buzzing sounds or explosions characteristic of a drone attack.

“There was no noise that night, no explosions, nothing,” one resident was quoted as saying. “If something like that had happened, the whole town would have been talking about it.”

Putin’s Valdai residence, known as Dolgiye Borody, lies northeast of the town and is separated from it by Lake Valdai.

Residents told Mozhem Obyasnit that they usually know when the Russian president visits his residence due to the heavy helicopter traffic accompanying his arrival.

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Monday that Ukraine’s armed forces had attempted a “massive” drone attack on Putin’s residence using 91 drones, all of which were allegedly destroyed by air defense systems.

The Russian Defense Ministry’s official report said only 18 drones were shot down over the Novgorod region during the night.

Lavrov said the alleged attack would prompt Russia to revise its negotiating position on Ukraine, though he added that Moscow did not plan to withdraw from talks with the United States.

He also warned that the incident would not go unanswered, saying Russian forces had already selected targets and timing for retaliatory strikes.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called Lavrov’s allegations “fake” and “extremely dangerous,” arguing that Moscow was trying to sabotage diplomatic efforts to end the war and justify continued strikes on Ukraine.

Shortly after Lavrov issued his statement, the White House said U.S. President Donald Trump concluded a “positive” phone call with Putin about Ukraine.

Trump then criticized the alleged Ukrainian drone attack, saying it was “not the right time” given the ongoing talks to end the war.

This morning Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov said that Russia’s negotiating position towards Ukraine will become tougher.  So the lumbering, lying Kremlin machine clunks into gear to prevent Donald Trump from moving forward on the basis of Zelensky’s 20-point peace plan.  It had been 95% agreed, Trump had said.  Now nothing will be agreed.

So, a question.  Does Trump actually believe that Ukrainian armed forces chose this most critical moment, of all moments, to launch a 91-drone attack on one of Putin’s palatial homes, but failed to get a single one past the creaking Russian anti-aircraft defences?  Or does he, in fact, understand perfectly well that Putin told him the most obvious, bare-faced lie, but his policy-aim of making American corporations great again requires him to smile on the Russian dictator all the same and in all things?

A residential apartment block in Dnipro hit by a Russian missile on 14th January 2023

This morning the DT’s live Ukraine feed carried a brief report of comments by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s, revealing the Kremlin’s real interest in peace talks with Ukraine, ie, it doesn’t have any.  The war is for empire and geopolitics, not for ethnic Russians in Ukraine (or in Russia).  The Kremlin’s interest is that the United States “negotiates” giving up of its status as global hegemon in exchange for Putin making nice with Zelensky for five minutes.  Lavrov actually means that American maintenance of the rules-based international order has to be ended so Russia can upgrade its non-rules-based, eurasionist model of imperial power to a global level.

I would remind readers that the Kremlin power elites define multipolarity as a collection of economic blocs, each led by a dominant power.  The model allows the Kremlin to piggy-back (with “no limits”) off the China’s inevitably global hegemony - as close as it can get to hegemon itself.

Here is the report:

Any Ukraine peace talks should be about ‘new world order’

Moscow wants any Ukraine peace talks to focus on creating a “new world order”, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on a visit to Turkey on Friday.

He also threatened to abandon a landmark grain deal, which Turkey helped broker, if obstacles to Russian exports remain.

“Any negotiation needs to be based on taking into account Russian interests, Russian concerns,” Lavrov said.

“It should be about the principles on which the new world order will be based.”

He added that Russia rejects a “unipolar world order led by ‘one hegemon’”.

The following quotes are from an interesting (paywalled) article at the Telegraph, and speak to the impact of Putin’s failure in Ukraine and the resurgence of Western confidence.

China has extended the olive branch to Western democracies and global capitalists alike, promising a new era of detente after the coercive “wolf warrior” diplomacy of the last five years.

Vice-premier Liu He, the economic plenipotentiary of Xi Jinping’s China, told a gathering of business leaders and ministers in Davos that China is back inside the tent and eager to restore the money-making bonhomie of the golden years. 

“We must let the market play the fundamental role in the allocation of resources, and let the government play a better role. Some people say China will go for the planned economy. That’s by no means possible,” he said.

“All-round opening-up is the basis of state policy and the key driver of economic progress. China’s national reality dictates that opening up to the world is a must, not an expediency. We must open up wider and make it work better,” he told the World Economic Forum ...

It is a subtle way of telling the world that the neo-Maoist fever of Xi Jinping’s second term has subsided since the 20th Party Congress in October. Xi’s third term is going to be a giant pivot back to international harmony.

China is calling off its ruinous assault on technology companies – the country’s most dynamic entrepreneurs, but also the regime’s most powerful political foes ...

Vice-premier Liu He’s conciliatory pitch is also a signal that China will return to its longstanding position as a stakeholder of the existing Davosian global order rather than a revisionist power determined to overthrow it.

“We need to uphold an effective international economic order. We have to abandon the cold war mentality,” he said, pledging a push for “economic re-globalisation”. There was not a whiff of criticism of the US or the West. No speech of this kind has been delivered by a top Chinese leader for years ...

It goes well beyond the first signs of a tentative thaw at a US-China summit late last year, suggesting that China’s 20th Party Congress marked a watershed moment in Chinese strategic thinking. Whether it is authentic or tactical remains to be seen.

In a sense, the new policy is a recognition by the Communist Party that the democracies are not as weak as they looked a year or two ago. The West still controls the machinery of global finance, technology transfer, and maritime trade. The war in Ukraine has revealed that it can be remarkably unified and has a backbone of steel when seriously provoked.

Xi’s profession of friendship “without limits” for Vladimir Putin is surely an embarrassment he would rather forget – though there are some advantages for Beijing in a dependent Russia with nowhere else to turn. Russia’s military has been exposed as a paper tiger. Its value as an ally is enormously degraded.

Above all, Xi Jinping discovered that the US controls the global supply of advanced semiconductor chips, the primary fuel of the 21st century technological economy.

Without that you are nothing. China’s repeated efforts to close the chip gap have all faltered, and the latest has just been abandoned due to prohibitive costs ...

Deng Xiaoping long pursued a policy of “bide your time and hide your strength”. When Xi Jinping abandoned this restraint and switched suddenly to a posture of impatient menace he revealed what China might be like as the global hegemon.

This reached its apotheosis in pandemic triumphalism. It was not an attractive spectacle. Switching back even more suddenly to global happy talk will be a hard sell.

As to the Western feeling about Xi’s “impatience”, compare the above with the following boilerplate from the Daily Mail, published on 19th October last year:

Get ready for China ‘on steroids’: Xi Jinping will complete his totalitarian spy-state, take on the US and aim to break Western world order if he is given historic third term as leader, experts predict
● Xi Jinping set to become Chinese leader for third term this week, the first since Mao to rule for so long.
● Experts predict he will use term to complete ‘totalitarian’ spy-state using technology to repress all opposition.
● Xi will also take aggressive stance with the West and try to put China on equal footing with the US, they added.
● Ultimate aim is to break Western world order and establish another system with China at the centre, they said.

My immediate take on the change of strategy?  This pivot is almost certainly the result of Putin’s big gambit in Ukraine and the surprise of the West’s unified response to it, allied to the (for Beijing) straitening success of the Western economies in surviving Putin’s energy war.  Since the party’s 20th conference last October, when the threat to Taiwan was at its height, there appears to have been a decision that Putin has failed and there are costs to forging ahead with that “unlimited friendship” which a pragmatic Chinese leadership is unwilling to pay.  Probably at this time.  Probably because formal international support elsewhere for Putin is limited to Iran, North Korea and some fly-blown African place.  Support for Glazyev’s dollar reserve replacement is strong across the southern hemisphere, and probably now includes Lula’s Brazil in addition to Saudi.  But then the Western elites are not at all hostile to it, either.  Quite the contrary.  So Beijing is returning to geo-economics, because it is a stronger suite to play.  I don’t think that the Middle Kingdom goal has or will be dropped.  But the Chinese are good at patience.

The German Chancellor at the delayed Davos shindig, as reported by the DT:

Olaf Scholz has warned that the era of globalisation that powered the German economic miracle is “coming to an inevitable end” after Vladimir Putin’s “thunderbolt”.

The German Chancellor admitted that Europe’s largest economy faces a “very special challenge” as the industrial powerhouse is hit by soaring energy prices.

Mr Scholz launched a defence of globalisation at the World Economic Forum in Davos but admitted that its era is drawing to a close as inflation rises.

He said: “We are experiencing a watershed; history is at a turning point.”

Germany’s huge manufacturing base has benefited from an interconnected world and cheap energy from Russia. However, the war in Ukraine and trade chaos caused by Covid has forced governments and businesses to rethink supply chains and energy security.

Mr Scholz, the only G7 leader to speak at Davos this year, said that Europe had been struck by a “thunderbolt” from the war in Ukraine and a new “multipolar world” is emerging.

He said: “The special phase of globalisation we have experienced in North America and Europe during the last 30 years, with reliable growth, a high level of added value and low inflation is coming to an inevitable end.

“One reason for this is that the low cost producers of the global south are gradually becoming thriving economies with their own demand, which aspire to the same level of prosperity as we have.

He admitted that globalisation had created losers and said it needs to become more “intelligent”.

This is, actually, big news, not because of the scramble to replace Russian gas and oil or because of the other scramble to keep to the international climate dictates.  No, globalisation is the key condition in which Western globalism in its present technocratic form can function.  A contraction to it implies a contraction to Western globalism.  How that will play out is far too early to say.  But such a vast correction cannot be accommodated by the current Davos model.

I have not been able to interest myself in the Super-League debacle, largely because I would have preferred the game of African kick-ball which English professional football has become to die out, to be honest.  But here, anyway, is a pretty good, historically-grounded and factually accurate analysis by NativistConcern of the attempt to take the Big Six truly global, and destroy the rest of African kick-ball in the process.

It’s just a pity that the video-maker is another one lost to the poetic lie of heroism and the life of glory - and more a pity because, actually, he has a real feel for the life and culture of the old working-class.

The Future of Germany is Unclear

Red Pill Germany 28 Nov 2020

Israel Blamed! Iran Vows to Avenge Assassination of Nuclear Scientist

Zionist Report 28 Nov 2020:

“Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani on Saturday accused arch-foe Israel of acting as a “mercenary” for the US, blaming it for the assassination of prominent nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.”

       

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