[Majorityrights News] Alex Navalny, born 4th June, 1976; died at Yamalo-Nenets penitentiary 16th February, 2024 Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 16 February 2024 23:43.
[Majorityrights Central] A couple of exchanges on the nature and meaning of Christianity’s origin Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 25 July 2023 22:19.
[Majorityrights News] Is the Ukrainian counter-offensive for Bakhmut the counter-offensive for Ukraine? Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 18 May 2023 18:55.
Posted by DanielS on Saturday, 04 March 2017 17:45.
Maybe she should be “sifted-out”, or maybe the naturalistic fallacy is cuck narrative itself.
- that nature can and OUGHT to take care of these matters unmediated by cultural (social rules) intervention.
Thank you for your understanding and support, acru ballist. I realize that unfortunately a huge percentage of Whites are used to this Jewish viral symbiosis - it seems at this point as if it is almost written into the genetic code of a huge percentage, now expressed as the Trump voter and Alternative Right - wherein Whites become more and more assimilated to Jews themselves - inasmuch as they remain HuWhite, compliantly accepting their role of being cows to breed stock that blacks and Jews can, in turn, breed with at their discretion.
But I think that this argument veers in the direction of passive naturalistic fallacy:
acru ballist: Maybe, this is evolution of the White People. A sifting out of the weak-minded, the ‘mud-sharks’, the gullible, the order-takers. Is the parasite controlling this process? It definitely does not need the strong, healthy and rebellious.
A naturalistic fallacy that Jews and Jew advocates like Brett Stevens would want us to accept as prescription - good right wing dolts, “nature” decides what is exactly good and true for us, unmediated by human, cultural intervention. At one time, when mudharkery was a rarity, I might have been more susceptible to arguments that it was me who isn’t being naturally tough enough, but then, as it became commonplace and you began to see women who could not be considered merely something for the scrap-heep, the idea of merely letting “nature” weed out those without loyalty, judgement, intelligence, whatever it is that they are supposed to lack became more obviously an insufficient position to take.
...
Continuing with my response to Stevens article, next he goes on to say:
Brett Stevens: Whether or not Jews are a symptom of this problem, they are not its source.
DanielS: One can and should say that they are not the only source, but one should also add that they are a predominant source of our problems who should clearly be looked upon as another people and NOT among our “friends”, to say the least.
Brett Stevens: Even more, whipping people up in a fury against them fails because it both distracts us from the actual cause, and inspires people to do ignoble things like genocide. We do not need to kill those who might appear to be our enemies; we need to fix ourselves, which includes excluding everyone else.
DanielS: I never said that it was our objective to genocide Jews or anyone else. Our objective is separatism from them and other non-European peoples, and sovereignty. That implies fixing our own problems for ourselves, thank you very much. We just need the Jews to butt-out.
Brett Stevens: It is the same way with the African-Americans. Some wish to blame them, but the actual cause is diversity, which in fact gets more deadly if it involves “nice” groups because then your people hybridize with them, erasing the original population. This type of soft genocide leaves behind a civilization capable of none of the great acts of the old.
DanielS: As I have said in many places, “Diversity” has been a Jewish red cape: because in a straight forward sense it would mean that different people co-exist in respect of each other maintaining their differences. However, in light of the Jewish marketing campaign of “Diversity” and the reaction to the reality of it in Jewish practice - which means imposition of alien integration against those goyim looking to maintain their difference - Jewish media disingenuously altercasts rights of display to suckers like Pat Buchanan who would argue against “Diversity” and, in effect, for integration (as opposed to “the sewer of multiculturalism and diversity” we should all speak English, be Christians, etc). Integration used to be the straight forward Jewish agenda back in the 60’s and 70’s but now they hide that agenda behind “diversity” and get Whites to react against diversity and into integration.
As far as the “nice” blacks go, I have long argued that the Uncle Tom and the Oreo are more dangerous than the ghetto thug in the long run because the thug is didactic whereas the Oreo and Uncle Tom, in “being so nice”, open the gates for the pattern, which is more the thug and destructive to Whites. As far as this leaving behind a less capable populace, well, your Jewish friends would know, that’s why they have imposed “diversity” and integration on our patterns while prohibiting it in Israel and among their more orthodox diaspora.
Katzenbach imposing integration upon Whites, in the days before that agenda was hidden behind the Jewish red cape of “diversity.”
...and yes, just as we can “blame” (i.e., recognize) in Jews their inborn biological behaviors, uncaring and exploitative of our people to an extreme, and thus see the need to discriminate against them and separate from them, so too can we “blame” (i.e., recognize) in blacks an inborn lack of impulse control, along with an inborn tendency to aggression and hyper-assertiveness - translating to group predatory behavior as expressed typically in this episode in South Africa; and hence the need for “artificial selection”, i.e., cultural rules of discriminatory separatism.
If you notice, at the beginning of this clip, the woman and her son were completely relaxed, had inculcated and cultivated no instinctual rules in vigilance for the inborn pattern of predation that would manifest in that moment: the anti-apartheid conditioning had worked that far to their detriment.
Predators sensing prey.
Predator signaling to pack that the coast is clear for the attack. White woman’s son can now be seen in left of screen.
Predator pulls-out his weapon.
They start to attack the mother.
When the son tries to protect her, they try to hold him and aim for the back of his neck.
While they hold the mother, the son begins to put up a valiant fight.
Outnumbered, they are subject to more beating before escaping (this time).
White man and his mother subject to the natural state of black predation.
Posted by DanielS on Thursday, 02 March 2017 16:07.
RT, a propaganda organ of “Active Measures,” is pressuring a private London club to have open doors liberalism. Cirque le Soir nightclub in Soho has a policy standard for private clubs, of not allowing groups of unaccompanied males into the club. When confronted with a group of black male athletes, a bouncer for the club apparently observed their demeanor and added what was perhaps a code-reason for discrimination - “too urban.” RT jumped all over that for being racial profiling, racial stereotyping, and therefore “racist”.
Nevertheless, if “too urban” was indeed a code word for a black group with a dangerous profile, it would merely be a practical observation and precaution to take to discriminate against them. Young black males, especially in groups (including wealthy professional athletes) are statistically far more violent; and the club was exercising what should be its right as a free and private club to deny servitude, to protect its interests and protect is clients.
The freedom of London clubs to defend not only their businesses, but their patrons against profiles known to be violent and otherwise destructive is apparently of no concern to RT and Active Measures. This is a swift route to the destruction of our native European EGI and the naive among us who lack meaningful experience of blacks in numbers.
The kind of liberal “anti-racist” propaganda that RT is engaging-in goes back to the days of The Soviet Union - it put such pressure on The US to atone for its history of slavery that it empowered liberals to destroy untold numbers of innocent Whites, attempting by their sanctioned means (The Constitution and The Golden Rule), compelled by their politicians and (((those coercing))) their politicians to force them to try to live the impossible - “Thou Shalt Not Discriminate”, “Thou Shalt Not have senses and defend yourself”, “Thou Shalt Enter into involuntary contract” - “thou” must live pure in pure servitude, fresh White prey: un-hypocritical, ideologically living-up to the pure banner of “freedom and liberty for all” - non-discrimination: this has led basically to the destruction of America - America did not win the cold war. When you cannot discriminate against blacks, you are not free and you have big problems.
“Deep ecologists” may argue that blacks are returning American cities like Baltimore, Detroit and New Orleans—the city these athletes are nominally playing for—that they are returning these cities harrowed by blacks to a “state of nature.” It is a feral state indeed: let those who advocate non-discrimination against them go and live with them.
RT’s charges of “racism”, compelling Whites and White institutions to leave themselves vulnerable to black aggression - a phenomenon that any fool would instinctively know to be on guard and discriminate against - is unconscionable.
The Alt Right is incredibly naive as it continues to treat The Russian Federation as being in perfect alignment with White Nationalism - its great White hope even: what they are actually doing is serving as free propaganda for a very cynical Kremlin.
RT, “NFL players turned away from London nightclub for being ‘too urban”, 1 March 2017:
A popular London nightclub which allegedly barred a group of American football NFL stars for being “too urban” is being accused of racial profiling.
The New Orleans Saints team members had booked a table at Cirque le Soir nightclub in Soho, but said on arrival the bouncer turned them away for being “six big guys” and “too urban” – a phrase often used as a euphemism for black.
The nightclub has since denied it would turn anyone away based on ethnicity, but has a policy of not admitting all-male groups.
Mark Ingram Jr, 27, a running back, was with Sterling Moore, 27, BW Webb, 26, Vonn Bell, 22, all defensive players, and two friends when they tried to get into the club on Monday.
The players were visiting London in preparation for their game at Wembley in October against the Miami Dolphins as part of the NFL’s international series.
Mark Ingram II
✔
@MarkIngram22
Is this what 6 big “too urban” guys look like?! @CirqueLeSoir @TheVonnBell7 @SterlingMoore @OhGi_3Dawg3 @burtleyc @Flintsbadguy #AllSmiles
2:10 AM - 28 Feb 2017
Ingram tweeted: “We pull up to Cirque le Soir where we have reservations and this is what they tell us. They told us we were ‘six big guys’ that are too ‘urban’ but nobody taller than 5’11!”
Following the tweet, the hashtag #TooUrban began trending on Twitter. Many have accused the club of racial profiling.
Suzanne @girls_with_guts
@MarkIngram22 one of the #toourban “big guys” next to my 5’7” daughter…ooooh he’s so scary. @CirqueLeSoir your moms didn’t
Thanks to everyone for support! Historical socioeconomic and racial prejudices still impact society. I’m from Flint, proud to be #TooUrban
10:47 PM - 28 Feb 2017
Sly Gemstone @SlyGems
Thanks to everyone who has reached out to us! Stereotyping and discrimination are real in our world. Never let anyone define you! #TooUrban
7:23 AM - 1 Mar 2017
Gillian ‘Slick’ E. @SlickEToffee
#TooUrban So are white British celebs gonna boycott @CirqueLeSoir or do they only stand up against American racism?
12:46 PM - 1 Mar 2017
The club is a favorite with US music stars including Rihanna, Lady Gaga and Kanye West, and actor Leonardo DiCaprio.
In response to criticism, a nightclub spokesperson said: “All of the team at Cirque le Soir are really upset by the suggestion that there was anything malicious in our turning away of Mark Ingram and his friends. We proudly celebrate diversity, not only as part of our shows, but as part of who we are.
“We would not dismiss anyone as ‘too urban’ and we would not turn anyone away on the basis of their ethnicity, sexuality or any other characteristic, other than those expressed in our door policy.
“Admitting an all-male group goes against our policy and is clearly stated on Facebook and all reservation confirmation emails.”
Posted by DanielS on Wednesday, 01 March 2017 15:45.
At “Killer Culture” Peter Quiggins (Tierney) has put together this very caring and painstaking compilation of native Britons killed by migrant peoples, murders which have not received a fraction of the attention that the rare instance of a murder of a black, Steve Lawrence, by native Britons, has received. It is a quibble compared to this travesty that Quiggins addresses, but something to note nevertheless, that entitling the piece “Diversity Kills!” is a bit of mistake. Just like arguing “against equality” is bad tact, arguing against “diversity” is a trick that the YKW have set up deliberately because by default, under the powers that be, you are arguing for integration - the last thing that we’d want. Diversity should not be argued against at this point, the circumstances being what they are, with massive immigrant populations among, or in close proximity to ours not going away any time soon; in some cases, never - and all the more reason to take the cause of diversity for ourselves. However, his subtitle is quite fine stand alone: Britons murdered in Britain since the death of Stephen Lawrence:
Stephen Lawrence has been mentioned over 2,000 times in Parliament.
Posted by DanielS on Monday, 27 February 2017 17:13.
Backgrounding & Taken For Granted - Resistance is Futile. Add from Det Nya Landet - translation “Big Mulatto Brother”?
Below is another marketing campaign advert suggesting that “resistance is futile” - this one coming from the EU is a bit more subtle: It is an EU add run in Poland, and it is as if to suggest that blacks are to be taken for granted as a significant component of European history. However, in this instance, the “resistance is futile” message is not spoken, it is in the background - two blacks comfortably sit in the background of the same restaurant scene and a mulatto girl is fore-fronted; thus, backgrounding and taking for granted the interracial relationship of her parents.
The EU is backgrounding the racial integration of blacks, presenting to naive audiences (naive as to the bio-power of an invasive species) or audiences perhaps aware, but not in a position to voice objections (literally the case when these images are whisked-by semi-subliminally), that the place of blacks among them is something to be taken for granted. Resistance is futile, nobody will agree with your objection, it is taken for granted already.
This is a screen shot from a quick add distributed by The European Union and shown in Poland to promote The EU’s “My European History” program. Of seven people in the add, 3 are black. Of the blacks, a mulatto girl is centrally featured in the add, while the other two blacks are placed in the background, taking for granted their place in Europe and its history. The girl’s mulattoness is also a form of backgrounding and taking for granted.
Posted by DanielS on Sunday, 26 February 2017 04:42.
Adam W. Purinton: It’s too late to instruct him on Schmittian lines of proper friend/enemy distinction.
Denver Post, “He yelled ‘Get out of my country,’ witnesses say, and then shot 2 men from India, killing one”, 24 Feb 2017:
A 51-year-old man faces first-degree murder charges after shooting three men in an Olathe, Kan., bar Wednesday night, police say, reportedly telling two of them, local Garmin engineers from India, to “get out of my country.”
One of the Indian men, Srinivas Kuchibhotla, 32, died in the hospital later from his gunshot wounds.
Authorities would not classify the shooting as a hate crime, but federal law enforcement officials said Thursday they are investigating with local police to determine if it was “bias motivated.”
Adam W. Purinton, 51, of Olathe, was also charged with two counts of attempted first-degree murder for shooting two other patrons at Austin’s Bar and Grill: Alok Madasani, 32, of Overland Park, Kan. and 24-year-old Ian Grillot, who tried to intervene.
Madasani had been released from a hospital Thursday and Grillot continued to recover.
Witnesses told the Kansas City Star and The Washington Post that Purinton was thought to have been kicked out the bar Wednesday night before the shooting took place.
“He seemed kind of distraught,” Garret Bohnen, a regular at Austin’s who was there that night told The Post in an interview. “He started drinking pretty fast.”
Denver Post, “Some witnesses say Kansas shooting was racially motivated”, 24 Feb 2017:
A bartender at Austins Bar and Grill in Olathe, Kansas, said that Adam Purinton used “racial slurs” before he started shooting on Wednesday night as patrons were watching the University of Kansas-TCU basketball game on television.
Srinivas Kuchibhotla, 32, died at an area hospital, police said. Alok Madasani, 32, and Ian Grillot, 24, were hospitalized and are in stable condition, they said. The Linkedin accounts for Kuchibhotla and Madasani say that they were engineers working at GPS-maker Garmin and had studied in India.
A whole bar in cuck attendance to the coddled black American basketball player but Adam W. Purinton decides to take his final stand to try to kill two or three people he thought were Middle Eastern - “terrorists hanging out in the bar? routing for the wrong team of black athletes?” or, was Purington “drawing the line”, and saying “damn it! I’m not having those sand-Negroes supporting Negro ball too!” Not likely. Nor is it likely that Purinton was taking the H1B Visa angle into account, since his rage was directed toward people he took to be Middle Eastern and for their Middle Easternness and its imposed displacement of White Americans; not for any alleged affirmative action or salary undercutting importation of Indians whose nepotism would further exacerbate the displacement of White IT specialists.
This serves to illustrate that not only do many would-be White Nationalists need to learn to sublimate their grievances better, but need to do that in line with becoming MUCH more articulate about friend / enemy distinctions - who is who and what is what.
The crusade against racial discrimination and categorization of peoples is much to blame in keeping people inarticulate about proper friend / enemy distinctions. The only “consolation” in this instance is that one White guy used the “non-discrimination” principle to try to come to the aid of two people, Indians, who should be in the friend category.
Ibid, Denver Post, “He yelled ‘Get out of my country!”, February 24, 2017:
He reportedly came back into the bar and hurled racial slurs at the two Indian men, including comments that suggested he thought they were of Middle Eastern descent. When he started firing shots, Grillot, a regular at the bar whom Bohnen called “everyone’s friend,” intervened.
AFF, “Breaking News, 1 Dead, Three Shot, Including Marine”, 24 Feb 2017:
Srinivas Kuchibhotla (center), 32, died at a hospital, while 32-year-old Alok Madasani (left) and 24-year-old Ian Grillot (right) are hospitalized in stable condition, police said.
According to Local News KCTV 5.
Grillot said in an interview from his hospital bed that when the gunfire started, he hid until nine shots had been fired and he thought the suspect’s gun magazine was empty.
“I got up and proceeded to chase him down, try to subdue him,” Grillot said in a video from the University of Kansas Health System. “I got behind him and he turned around and fired a round at me.”
Grillot said that the bullet went through his hand and into his chest, just missing a major artery.
“It’s not about where (the victim) was from or his ethnicity,” Grillot said. “We’re all humans, so I just did what was right to do.”
Posted by DanielS on Wednesday, 22 February 2017 07:29.
TNO, “Mass Rapes: Islamic Weapon of Conquest and Domination”, 18 Feb 2017:
By Yolanda Couceiro Morín. Since the sordid episode of the massive New Year’s Eve rape of 2015 in Cologne and other German cities (more than a thousand complaints), cases of sexual assaults against European women by immigrants and “refugees”, overwhelmingly Muslim, have multiplied throughout Europe, especially in Germany and the Nordic countries.
Seeing what happened at the last end of the year celebrations, rapes are becoming part of the European folklore of these dates: together with the nativity scenes, the Christmas markets and the Three Kings’ cavalcades, we will now have Massive Rapes New Year´s Eve.
Traditions change from the usual gift of red underwear to the latest chastity belts. This is the march towards the progress of our battered Europe.
We witness a retreat from civilization, the decline of an entire society, a rupture of the anthropological foundations of our societies. Es el regreso a la caverna. It is the return to the cave.
This social collapse, this degradation of coexistence norms, is not only a change of culture, but the implantation of a savagery that we could call prehistoric.
We all have in mind the classic caricature of the relations between the sexes of those antediluvian times in the scene of a troglodyte, with a club on the shoulder, dragging by the hair to its pair.
This typical image of cartoons represents in a comic sense the terrible situation to which we are forced to march, with the importation of populations manifestly unfit for modern and civilized society.
From the peaks of the highest and most refined civilization that the Earth has carried on its surface, we have fallen into a state of semi-fearlessness.
We must be clear that these are not simple criminal acts, however reprehensible they may be.
Among the European population, of race and native culture, this type of aggression also occurs, although in quantitative terms much lower than this wave of savagery that has invaded us.
But it is the qualitative nature of these violations that should be the object of special attention.
In these cases we are not in front of habitual criminal acts, but in front of cultural facts.
Among us, abuses and sexual assaults against women are considered a social scourge, a highly reprehensible behavior, an improper indignity of decent people, an extreme violation of people´s freedom and dignity.
In the Islamic world, where women are considered inferior to men, abusive treatment and aggression of all kinds against women do not deserve the same reprobation and condemnation as among European, Christian and modern civilized nations: are accepted and justified facts. Therein lies the difference.
[...]
The scarce intellect of these individuals who, in fact, believe that we are all “human beings”, and that culture is something that is put on and removed, as if it were a dress or shoes, is enough to justify these events as something inherent to the human race.
Posted by Kumiko Oumae on Sunday, 19 February 2017 20:34.
Wow, such a breadth of choice
The Germans are non-ironically having an election in which Angela Merkel and Martin Schulz are the two front runners.
The choice seems to be quite simple.
Either you vote for Angela Merkel’s CDU and face the death by demographic replacement which will surely arrive by the year 2050 as things continue as they are, or alternately you vote for Martin Schulz’s SPD and face the death by demographic replacement which will surely arrive by the year 2050 as things continue as they are.
There are some policy disagreements that they have on other issues and usually I would actually go to the length of highlighting them and describing them, but when it comes to the issue of Germany it frankly doesn’t even matter anymore. After all, if Germany is going to seriously cease to exist as a nation then making projections about a nation which will not even be populated by the same people would be a pointless exercise from the perspective of ethno-nationalism. It is extremely sad.
In any case, let’s see how the situation looks in the polls at present, for this thoroughly pointless election:
Germany’s Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) have slumped to second place in an opinion poll conducted by the Emnid institute, with the Social Democrats (SPD) in the top spot for the first time since 2006.
The SPD’s climb comes after the party picked the former President of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz, as its candidate for chancellor.
Emnid’s poll of 1,885 voters found that the SPD would get 33 percent of the German vote, while Chancellor Angela Merkel’s CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, would get 32 percent.
Schulz’s party has gained 12 points in the last four weeks, according to German newspaper Bild am Sonntag.
The SPD’s surge in the polls will add more pressure on Merkel, as she seeks her fourth term as chancellor within an uneasy CDU/CSU alliance. Merkel has faced tough criticism from the sister party over the controversial decision to temporarily open Germany’s borders to refugees in 2015.
This the latest in a series of polls that shows SPD’s rapidly rising popularity among German voters. Emnid’s poll chimes with separate findings by Politbarometer, a long-standing German election poll from German broadcaster ZDF, which showed Friday that only 38 percent of voters would like to see Merkel carry on her job as chancellor and that 49 percent preferred Schulz.
But Germany hasn’t completely fallen out of love with Merkel. ZDF’s poll also found that 71 percent of Germans think that the current chancellor is doing a good job, despite her party’s drop in popularity.
German elections are scheduled for September.
Such vibrant campaigning
Meanwhile, the way that Martin Schulz is conducting his campaign has drawn criticism from Wolfgang Shaeuble, a very strange-looking criticism at first brush:
Martin Schulz, the German center-left’s candidate to be chancellor, is behaving like U.S. President Donald Trump, according to German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble.
“If Schulz calls upon his supporters to chant ‘Make Europe great again‘ then that’s almost literally [like] Trump,” Schäuble told Der Spiegel in an interview published Friday.
He said Schulz, a former European Parliament president, was acting in a “populist way.”
Schäuble said Schulz needed to “think a little [bit more].” He warned that in times when there is a surge in populist movements, politicians should be careful with their language.
The SPD’s move to nominate Schulz as their candidate for chancellor in the September 24 federal election led to a surge in party membership applications. Opinion polls show that backing Schulz helped the party to its highest approval rating since 2013.
At first a person would think, “Hmm, something is very wrong here, in what important way does Martin Schulz resemble Donald Trump, aside from the use of a similar campaign slogan?”
Surely Schaeuble is just a ridiculous old man who is approaching senility, and he has begun to make even less sense than usual in his statement?
Nevertheless I decided to actually give Schaeuble’s statement some thought. Could I manage to find some unintended ‘sense’ in Schaeuble’s seemingly nonsensical statement?
After about twenty milliseconds of deep thought – which in neurological terms is basically ‘instantly’ – I arrived at the answer. First, take a look at this quote concerning Schulz:
[...] Martin Schulz, the president of the European Parliament, is a close friend of mine. On most issues connected to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict we disagree. He is closer to the Israeli mainstream, and his positions resemble those of Labor Party chairman Isaac Herzog. He once told me, during a frank and stern conversation, “For me, the new Germany exists only in order to ensure the existence of the State of Israel and the Jewish people.” [...]
Secondly, take a look at this quote concerning Trump:
President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday morning ripped the Obama administration’s treatment of Israel and pledged to end the “disdain and disrespect” for the country.
“We cannot continue to let Israel be treated with such total disdain and disrespect. They used to have a great friend in the U.S., but not anymore. The beginning of the end was the horrible Iran deal, and now this (U.N.)! Stay strong Israel, January 20th is fast approaching!” Trump wrote in a series of tweets. [...]
If you look at it from that angle, then Schaeuble accidentally spoke a kind of truth in the midst of his babbling, somehow.
There indeed is a resemblance between Schulz and Trump. From the perspective of Jewish Zionists in the global sense, the two individuals are almost completely identical.
Posted by DanielS on Sunday, 12 February 2017 08:49.
TomDispatch: “Is President Trump Headed for a War with China?” All Options Are “On The Table” - Rajan Menon, 12 Feb 2017:
Forget those “bad hombres down there” in Mexico that U.S. troops might take out. Ignore the way National Security Adviser Michael Flynn put Iran “on notice” and the new president insisted, that, when it comes to that country, “nothing is off the table.” Instead, focus for a moment on something truly scary: the possibility that Donald Trump’s Washington might slide into an actual war with the planet’s rising superpower, China. No kidding. It could really happen.
Let’s start with silver-maned, stately Rex Tillerson, Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of state. Who could deny that the former ExxonMobil CEO has a foreign minister’s bearing? Trump reportedly chose him over neocon firebrand John Bolton partly for that reason. (Among other things, Bolton was mustachioed, something the new president apparently doesn’t care for.) But an august persona can only do so much; it can’t offset a lack of professional diplomatic experience.
That became all-too-apparent during Tillerson’s January 11th confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He was asked for his view on the military infrastructure China has been creating on various islands in the South China Sea, the ownership of which other Asian countries, including Taiwan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Brunei claim as well . China’s actions, he replied, were “extremely worrisome,” likening them to Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, an infraction for which Russia was slapped with economic sanctions.
The then-secretary-of-state-designate — he’s since been confirmed, despite many negative votes — didn’t, however, stop there. Evidently, he wanted to communicate to the Chinese leadership in Beijing that the new administration was already irked beyond measure with them. So he added, “We’re going to have to send China’s leaders a clear signal: that, first, the island building stops and, second, your access to those islands is not going to be allowed.” Functionally, that fell little short of being an announcement of a future act of war, since not allowing “access” to those islands would clearly involve military moves. In what amounted to a there’s-a-new-sheriff-in-town warning, he then doubled down yet again, insisting, slightly incoherently (in the tradition of his new boss) that “the failure of a response has allowed them to just keep pushing the envelope on this.”
All right, so maybe a novice had a bad day. Maybe the secretary-of-state-to-be simply ad-libbed and misspoke… whatever. If so, you might have expected a later clarification from him or from someone on the Trump national security team anyway.
That didn’t happen; instead, that team stuck to its guns. White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer made no effort to add nuance to, let alone walk back, Tillerson’s remarks. During his first official press briefing on January 23rd, Spicer declared that the United States “is going to make sure we defend our interests there” — in the South China Sea, that is — and that “if those islands are in fact in international waters and not part of China proper, then yes, we are going to make sure that we defend international territories from being taken over by one country.”
And what of Trump’s own views on the island controversy? Never one to pass up an opportunity for hyperbole, during the presidential campaign he swore that, on those tiny islands, China was building “a military fortress the likes of which the world has not seen.” As it happened, he wasn’t speaking about, say, the forces that Hitler massed for the ill-fated Operation Barbarossa, launched in June 1941 with the aim of crushing the Red Army and the Soviet Union, or those deployed for the June 1944 Normandy landing, which sealed Nazi Germany’s fate. When applied to what China has been up to in the South China Sea, his statement fell instantly into the not-yet-named category of “alternative facts.”
Candidate Trump also let it be known that he wouldn’t allow Beijing to get away with such cheekiness on his watch. Why had the Chinese engaged in military construction on the islands? Trump had a simple answer (as he invariably does): China “has no respect for our president and no respect for our country.” The implication was evident. Things would be different once he settled into the White House and made America great again. Then — it was easy enough to conclude — China had better watch out.
Standard campaign bombast? Well, Trump hasn’t changed his tune a bit since being elected. On December 4th, using (of course!) his Twitter account, he blasted Beijing for having built “a massive military complex in the middle of the South China Sea.” And it’s safe to assume that he signed off on Spicer’s combative comments as well.
In short, his administration has already drawn a red line — but in the way a petulant child might with a crayon. During and after the campaign he made much of his determination to regain the respect he claims the U.S. has lost in the world, notably from adversaries like China. The danger here is that, in dealing with that country, Trump could, as is typical, make it all about himself, all about “winning,” one of his most beloved words, and disaster might follow.
A military clash between Trump-led America and a China led by President Xi Jinping? Understanding how it might happen requires a brief detour to the place where it’s most likely to occur: the South China Sea. Our first task: to understand China’s position on that body of water and the islands it contains, as well as the nature of Beijing’s military projects there. So brace yourself for some necessary detail.
As Marina Tsirbas, a former diplomat now at the Australian National University’s National Security College, explains, Beijing’s written and verbal statements on the South China Sea lend themselves to two different interpretations. The Chinese government’s position boils down to something like this: “We own everything — the waters, islands and reefs, marine resources, and energy and mineral deposits — within the Nine-Dash Line.” That demarcation line, which incidentally has had ten dashes, and sometimes eleven, originally appeared in 1947 maps of the Republic of China, the Nationalist government that would soon flee to the island of Taiwan leaving the Chinese Communists in charge of the mainland. When Mao Ze Dong and his associates established the People’s Republic, they retained that Nationalist map and the demarcation line that went with it, which just happened to enclose virtually all of the South China Sea, claiming sovereign rights.
This stance — think of it as Beijing’s hard line on the subject — raises instant questions about other countries’ navigation and overflight rights through that much-used region. In essence, do they have any and, if so, will Beijing alone be the one to define what those are? And will those definitions start to change as China becomes ever more powerful? These are hardly trivial concerns, given that about $5 trillion worth of goods pass through the South China Sea annually.
Then there’s what might be called Beijing’s softer line, based on rights accorded by the legal concepts of the territorial sea and the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). Under the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which took effect in 1994 and has been signed by 167 states (including China but not the United States), a country has sovereign control within 12 nautical miles of its coast as well as of land formations in that perimeter visible at high tide. But other countries have the right of “innocent passage.” The EEZ goes further. It provides a rightful claimant control over access to fishing, as well as seabed and subsoil natural resources , within “an area beyond and adjacent to the territorial sea” extending 200 nautical miles, while ensuring other states’ freedom of passage by air and sea. UNCLOS also gives a state with an EEZ control over “the establishment and use of artificial islands, installations, and structures” within that zone — an important provision at our present moment.
What makes all of this so much more complicated is that many of the islands and reefs in the South China Sea that provide the basis for defining China’s EEZ are also claimed by other countries under the terms of UNCLOS. That, of course, immediately raises questions about the legality of Beijing’s military construction projects in that watery expanse on islands, atolls, and strips of land it’s dredging into existence, as well as its claims to seabed energy resources, fishing rights, and land reclamation rights there — to say nothing about its willingness to seize some of them by force, rival claims be damned.
Subi Reef, being built into an artificial island-landing strip in 2015
Moreover, figuring out which of these two positions — hard or soft — China embraces at any moment is tricky indeed. Beijing, for instance, insists that it upholds freedom of navigation and overflight rights in the Sea, but it has also said that these rights don’t apply to warships and military aircraft. In recent years its warplanes have intercepted, and at close quarters, American military aircraft flying outside Chinese territorial waters in the same region. Similarly, in 2015, Chinese aircraft and ships followed and issued warnings to an American warship off Subi Reef in the Spratly Islands, which both China and Vietnam claim in their entirety. This past December, its Navy seized, but later returned, an underwater drone the American naval ship Bowditch had been operating near the coast of the Philippines.
There were similar incidents in 2000, 2001, 2002, 2009, 2013, and 2014. In the second of these episodes, a Chinese fighter jet collided with a US Navy EP-3 reconnaissance plane, which had a crew of 24 on board, less than 70 miles off Hainan island, forcing it to make an emergency landing in China and creating a tense standoff between Beijing and Washington. The Chinese detained the crew for 11 days. They disassembled the EP-3, returning it three months later in pieces.
Such muscle flexing in the South China Sea isn’t new. China has long been tough on its weaker neighbors in those waters. Back in 1974, for instance, its forces ejected South Vietnamese troops from parts of the Paracel/Xisha islands that Beijing claimed but did not yet control. China has also backed up its claim to the Spratly/Nansha islands (which Taiwan, Vietnam, and other regional countries reject) with air and naval patrols, tough talk, and more. In 1988, it forcibly occupied the Vietnamese-controlled Johnson Reef, securing control over the first of what would eventually become seven possessions in the Spratlys.
Vietnam has not been the only Southeast Asian country to receive such rough treatment. China and the Philippines both claim ownership of Panatag (Scarborough) Shoal/Huangyang Island, located 124 nautical miles off Luzon Island in the Philippines. In 2012, Beijing simply seized it, having already ejected Manila from Panganiban Reef (aka Mischief Reef), about 129 nautical miles from the Philippines’ Palawan Island, in 1995. In 2016, when an international arbitration tribunal upheld Manila’s position on Mischief Reef and Scarborough Shoal, the Chinese Foreign Ministry sniffed that “the decision is invalid and has no binding force.” Chinese president Xi Jinping added for good measure that China’s claims to the South China Sea stretched back to “ancient times.”
Then there’s China’s military construction work in the area, which includes the building of full-scale artificial islands, as well as harbors, military airfields, storage facilities, and hangars reinforced to protect military aircraft. In addition, the Chinese have installed radar systems, anti-aircraft missiles, and anti-missile defense systems on some of these islands.
These , then, are the projects that the Trump administration says it will stop. But China’s conduct in the South China Sea leaves little doubt about its determination to hold onto what it has and continue its activities. The Chinese leadership has made this clear since Donald Trump’s election, and the state-run press has struck a similarly defiant note, drawing crude red lines of its own. For example, the Global Times, a nationalist newspaper, mocked Trump’s pretensions and issued a doomsday warning: “The U.S. has no absolute power to dominate the South China Sea. Tillerson had better bone up on nuclear strategies if he wants to force a big nuclear power to withdraw from its own territories.”
Were the administration to follow its threatening talk with military action, the Global Times added ominously, “The two sides had better prepare for a military clash.” Although the Chinese leadership hasn’t been anywhere near as bombastic, top officials have made it clear that they won’t yield an inch on the South China Sea, that disputes over territories are matters for China and its neighbors to settle, and that Washington had best butt out.
Maybe she should be “sifted-out”, or maybe the naturalistic fallacy is cuck narrative itself.
Adam W. Purinton: It’s too late to instruct him on Schmittian lines of proper friend/enemy distinction.
