RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/indias-battle-against-jihad/

Despite historical persecution, ethnic cleansing campaigns, as well as ongoing pressure at the hands of jihadists supported by Pakistan, Jammu and Kashmir remains part of India, whose sovereignty in the region helps improve the civil rights of the residents, enables it to battle the Islamist threat, and enhances stability in South Asia.

Today, Jammu and Kashmir is demographically majority-Muslim, but it is within the borders of India, which has millennia-long historic and spiritual ties with the region.

Indigenous Hindus are the original inhabitants of Kashmir and possess a unique ethno-religious culture existing for more than 5,000 years. Kashmir had a majority Hindu population ruled by Hindu kings until the 14th century when Muslims from Central Asia invaded the region.

Under Islamic rule, Hindus in Kashmir were subjected to persecution. In the early 1800s, Sikh rulers controlled the region, and then a Hindu dynasty from the mid-1800s through 1947.

In 1947, the Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir became part of the secular Republic of India. Shortly thereafter, Pakistani Armed Forces invaded the area. In response, Indian Forces deployed to counter Pakistan’s attacks. In Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, the areas of Kashmir which remained outside of India, thousands of Hindu families were forced to flee for their lives.

In 1948, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 47 urging the Pakistani military to withdraw. Pakistan, however, refused.

Since then, Pakistan has increased its military presence and fomented unrest and terrorism in the region. Thousands of civilians have been killed in terrorist acts carried out by militant groups supported by Pakistan.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/08/25/the-china-century-is-over/

For decades we’ve heard that China will some day, very soon, be the world’s hegemon, both through its stunning economic growth and its rising military might. Move over, America, here comes China. Just as the 1900s were the “American Century,” the 2000s would be the “China Century.” Not so fast.

Google “The China Century” and you get 1 billion hits. It’s that ingrained as an economic truism.

But in recent years, China has entered a kind of doom loop of debt accumulation, population shrinkage and a productivity slowdown that is eroding its once powerful economic growth and threatens to halt many of the economic advances it made over the last 50 years.

We’ve watched as decades of 10% annual GDP growth, a result of Deng Xiaoping’s 1979 market-oriented reforms, began dropping sharply under Chairman Xi Jinping, China’s born-again Communist leader. The nation’s traditional growth engines of soaring government debt, consumer spending, and foreign investment are now sputtering.

There are two big reasons for this.

One, is China’s single-child policy. Soon the nation of 1.4 billion will shrink outright. Economic growth usually follows population growth.

Two, the return to communist principles under Xi, whose totalitarian policies and crackdowns on dissent and human rights since 2012 have led to an exodus of foreign investment and know-how, and created a stagnant domestic economy.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/08/24/mercenary-chief-prigozhin-dead-wagner-boss-plane-putin/

“Never strike a king,” Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “unless you are sure you shall kill him.” Good advice, but it comes too late for Yevgeny Prigozhin, Russian leader of the Wagner mercenary army.

Vladimir Putin, that old KGB man, already knew Emerson’s message, deep in his guts. He also knew the unstated part: if you try to kill the king and you fail, you will be the dead one.

And so Prigozhin was.
 
Prigozhin, once Putin’s ally, should have known the limits of their ties

The leader of the Russia’s most effective mercenary force had once been Putin’s chef and ally. He had the Kremlin’s support when he formed Wagner. He had it, too, when he led his soldiers in the grinding, brutal battle for the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, where Wagner lost tens of thousands of soldiers in the house-to-house fighting. As the fighting wore on, however, Prigozhin learned the limits of Putin’s support.

The Kremlin’s fear was that, if Prigozhin and his mercenaries got credit for this prominent victory in Bakhmut, Wagner’s success would undermine the prestige of the regular Russian army and ultimately threaten Putin’s own power.

Preventing that erosion is why the regular military’s two leaders, Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu and military chief of staff Gen. Valery Gerasimov, ultimately denied Wagner the ammunition and supplies they needed to complete their victory. Then Shoigu and Gerasimov, presumably at Putin’s direction, tried to deny Wagner credit for taking the city.

Prigozhin’s Fatal Decision to March on Moscow
 
Prigozhin was furious at this betrayal and said so repeatedly on his widely-circulated social-media posts. When his PR campaign failed, Prigozhin took much more drastic—and ultimately fatal–action. He mobilized his troops to march on Moscow.