RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19969/china-military-machine

Washington should be trying to end the rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It is time to declare a “people’s war” against the CCP. We are in an us-or-them fight.

The Party certainly thinks that way. In May 2019, People’s Daily, the CCP’s self-described “mouthpiece”… declared a “people’s war” against the United States.

“A people’s war is a total war, and its strategy and tactics require the overall mobilization of political, economic, cultural, diplomatic, military, and other power resources, the integrated use of multiple forms of struggle and combat methods.” — PLA Daily, an official news website of the Communist Party’s People’s Liberation Army, April 1, 2023.

Although it denies doing so, China’s regime is conducting “unrestricted warfare” against America.

Unrestricted warfare means total war. The regime’s deliberate spread of COVID-19 and support for the Chinese fentanyl gangs, for example, should be viewed in that light.

Most Americans have chosen not to see the Chinese regime’s hatred of America.

Why should Americans be concerned?

The Party, with strident anti-Americanism, is establishing a justification to strike America. As James Lilley, the great American ambassador to Beijing, said, the Chinese always telegraph their punches. They are now telegraphing punches.

[US National Security Adviser Jake] Sullivan and others are willing to impose, for instance, technology sanctions on China, but they are largely ineffective.

Xi Jinping has a policy of “military-civilian fusion,” which means that anything a civilian organization possesses can be — and is — pipelined to the Chinese military. In the Communist Party’s top-down system, every individual and entity in China must obey every Party order.

It’s a warning to America….

The U.S. Commerce Department allowed transfers of American technology to SMIC on the condition there would be no transfers to Huawei.

Why would Commerce ever think SMIC would keep that promise? The only realistic solution is to treat all Chinese parties as one and to prevent tech transfers to all of them.

Xi’s regime is mobilizing all of the country’s civilians for war. The Chinese leader never misses an opportunity to talk about it. China’s regime is clearly planning to wage “kinetic” war — the type Americans are used to seeing in the movies — on America.

Obviously, American parties, especially businesses, should not be enabling the Chinese regime to kill Americans. This means they should not be engaging in any transaction that can strengthen any part of China. We should think of all of China as military.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19963/china-xi-new-silk-road

Under China’s Mongol rulers, the Silk Road was a private enterprise scheme, an example of capitalist free trade producing prosperity. Xi’s folie, however, is an exercise in command economy of the kind known as “socialist planning.”

At a time when the Chinese economy has entered a bumpy patch, how has Xi’s folie project done so far?

Launching “white elephants” in Sri Lanka led to the island nation’s bankruptcy and produced regime change in Colombo, while turning China into number-one hate figure for people hit by economic collapse under the burden of debt.

In some places, such as Kazakhstan, infrastructure built in Soviet era has been revamped as new; a case of painting the canary to pass it on as parrot.

In what could become a domino effect, at least 20 states are on the verge of default because half of their national budget goes for servicing foreign debt, mostly to China. Ghana and Zambia have already defaulted, and Pakistan has just been saved with a $3 billion handout from the International Monetary Fund.

(China refuses to join the Paris Club of 22 countries, top global creditors, thus avoiding rescheduling of debts. Xi can demand payment of debts he grants even before contracts end.)

Xi’s belief that his global folie would benefit China alone is also wrong. If there is a railway or a port or a canal somewhere, everyone would be able to use it, everyone including China’s real or imagined rivals such as the US, the European Union and Japan.

President Xi! Please note that humans resent getting favors even if the donor is sincere.

Ingratitude is part of human rights.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19948/china-21st-century

[T]he news of the week is most likely the crash of China. Real estate, currency, stock markets, technology, demographics: it all fits together, and what lies ahead for China looks like stagnation at best.

There are an estimated 80 million unoccupied homes in China — a huge number, even for a giant country. While real estate has driven China’s growth for decades, it is now in danger of wrecking it.

Then came the marginalization of the Chinese currency, the yuan, presented as destined to replace the dollar. Not quite yet. The yuan may or may not be weak, but above all no one wants it as an international currency because no one trusts the reliability of the Chinese regime in the long run. No one wants to buy Chinese bonds.

“It is very hard to create a reserve currency, without attractive reserve assets. China has a problem. It wants foreigners to buy bonds but they have been selling since early 2022” — Jens Nordvig, founder and CEO of Exante, Reuters, May 16, 2023.

Regarding the concept of a dedicated currency for BRICS nations, experts have expressed their skepticism. Danny Bradlow from the University of Pretoria in South Africa, cast doubt on the practicality of reverting to the gold standard — there is not enough of it if everyone wanted it a redemption — or using cryptocurrencies. He questioned their reliability in global trade. There are serious investors who regard cryptocurrencies as essentially a conceit, like the 17th century’s Dutch tulip mania. Even then, at least you had a tulip bulb.

Chris Weafer, an investment analyst specializing in Russia and Eurasia at Macro-Advisory, labeled the proposition of a BRICS currency a “non-starter.”

It is likely that Chinese Communist Party Chairman Xi Jinping does not really understand how markets work… Why would anyone want to invest in a stock market that is constantly at the mercy of a communist ‘Prince’ and his subjective whims and predilections?

According to China’s new “Anti-Sanctions Law,” just about anything can be a crime, and one’s assets seized if the Communist Party leaders want them to be. The raid on the Shanghai headquarters of Bain & Company and the colonization (seizure) of the Hong Kong financial center by China’s imperialists also had the effect, from a strictly financial point of view, of emptying the Chinese market of all reliability.

There is also the problem that in China there are no private companies: under the Chinese Communist Party’s notion of “civil-military fusion,” all companies belong to the central government and can be raided for information at any time.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19942/erdogan-putin-doctrine

Since Turkey’s economy is undergoing an unprecedented dive, Erdoğan needs European loans and investors.

Erdoğan seems to have a lot of wants…. [And] he wants the US Congress to endorse the sale of F-16 Block 70 aircraft to Turkey.

What to do? Erdoğan has resorted to his old trick of launching a hoax charm offensive hoping to deceive, once again, a few naïve Western minds. Too little, too late. He has been dancing within the Russian orbit to Putin’s tunes for several years so that, like a junior mafioso, he is being reminded by the capo that “once you’re in, you cannot get out.”

“We take Russian missile attacks as a Russian warning that reflects Russia’s discontent over a few Turkish initiatives… A Putin way to say ‘Hey, behave or else…'” — Senior Turkish diplomat to Gatestone, on condition of anonymity.

Once again, Western optimists are misreading Erdoğan, that he is “rekindling fraught relations with the West.” He just needs Western money, a few pats on the shoulder and legitimacy for his sultanship.

The Turkish company Beks Ship Management… help[s] Russia ship out its oil despite the Western sanctions, according to The Wall Street Journal.

An elephant painted in stripes does not make it a zebra. Erdoğan has never hidden his anti-Western ideology, or its depths.

Erdoğan comes from the ranks of Turkey’s militant political Islamism that emerged in late 1960s under the leadership of the ideologue, Necmettin Erbakan, Turkey’s first Islamist prime minister and Erdoğan’s mentor. In Erbakan’s rhetoric universal politics is simply about a struggle between the righteous (Islam) and a coalition of Zionists and racist imperialists — all else is just details. In his thinking, the Zionists support Turkey’s membership in the EU in order to “get Turkish Muslims to melt in a pot of Christianity.”

In a 2016 speech, Erdoğan talked of European countries: “These are not just our enemies… Behind them are plans and plots and other powers.” Also in 2016, he said that jihad is never terrorism. “It is resurrection…. It is to give life, to build… It is to fight the enemies of Islam.”

Also in 2020, Erdoğan wished that “God grant this nation many more happy conquests” at a celebration where he recited from the Quran, a salute to the Ottoman invasion of Christian lands. To European leaders, he said: “You are fascists in the true meaning of the world. You are veritably the link in the Nazi chain.”

Erdoğan’s anti-Western ideology has not changed. What changes from time to time is how much Western money and favors he needs.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19946/china-preparing-for-war

Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping is rapidly militarizing his country and has instructed its army to “prepare for war” and “fight and win” it.

“Chinese ruler Xi Jinping replaced the senior leadership of China’s Rocket Force, which is responsible for almost all of China’s 400 or so nuclear warheads. These personnel changes are part of what is almost certainly the most ominous development of this time. It looks like Xi is contemplating using or at least threatening to use his most destructive weapons. In other words, China is planning to go to war.” — Gordon Chang, China expert, Newsweek, August 14, 2023.

“Xi sacked Rocket Force commander, Li Yuchao, and its political commissar, Xu Zhongbo. Neither has been seen in public since. Li’s deputy, Liu Guangbin, has also disappeared, along with Zhang Zhenzhong, a former deputy. At about the same time, Wu Guohua, deputy commander of the Rocket Force, reportedly took his own life in early July.” — Gordon Chang, Newsweek, August 14, 2023.

Xi is doubtless weighing the risk-reward ratio of launching an aggressive operation against Taiwan during US President Joe Biden’s term of office. Xi is doubtless aware that his “window of opportunity” may be closing in 18 months, accompanied by a felicitously distracting US presidential election.

The timing of any Chinese assault on Taiwan will most certainly be determined by Xi’s assessment of the domestic political strength of the Biden administration as well as the possible need for a strong diversion from his own imploding economy. Xi is also doubtless assessing the US president’s resolve to back up his repeated declarations that US forces would come to the defense of Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion, as opposed to the US State Department’s immediate walk-back of the promise.

The Chinese Communist Party claims that the US is treating Taiwan as an independent state and these VIP visits violate its “One China Policy.” The truth, most likely, is that the CCP’s repeated transgressions against Taiwan’s air and maritime sovereignty, after then Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s August 2022 visit to Taiwan, are actually just part of the CCP’s military invasion exercises on its way to an all-out assault.

The CCP’s Eastern Theater Command has, in addition, established a Joint Operations Command Center, responsible for coordinating all phases of an actual invasion of Taiwan. Military moves suggestive of the CCP’s hostile intent toward Taiwan, included recent deliveries of wheeled armor vehicles to China’s coastal province of Guangdong, an area with several natural launch points for an invasion of Taiwan.

Xi Jinping and former Foreign Minister Qin Gang both warned the US about interfering in what China claims is an internal problem, and Xi added: “Western countries led by the United States have carried out all-round containment, encirclement and suppression of China, which has brought unprecedented severe challenges to China’s development.” Xi has stressed that “the Taiwan question is the core of China’s core interest” and has described as “wishful thinking” any expectation that China might compromise on the eventual incorporation of Taiwan into Communist China.

China has also rolled out a campaign of intimidation that shows China calling the shots. These began with the berating the US in Alaska, to which the State Department’s response was “deep concerns” and continued with smuggling over the US border fentanyl and other drugs that have killed an estimated 200,000 civilians.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/iranian-regime-on-edge-as-protest-anniversary-looms/

As Iran edges closer to the anniversary of the September 2022 uprisings laden with historic significance, the regime faces an unsettling reality: the prospect of renewed massive street protests reminiscent of the seismic upheavals of September 2022. Within Tehran’s inner sanctums of power and among its suppressive forces, an uneasy apprehension looms.

Against this backdrop, an intricate web of orchestrated actions and narratives by the Iranian regime against its principal opposition, is captivating global attention. The regime’s strategic orchestration of these narratives unveils a profound storyline—one that crumbles under the weight of scrutiny, exposing the regime’s underlying vulnerability and growing desperation.

Implicit in this tense atmosphere is the understanding that the oppositional group, the MEK, remains a potent catalyst behind such monumental social movements. During the 2018 uprising, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei himself conceded, based on internal intelligence assessments, that MEK activists had meticulously planned for months to orchestrate the widespread demonstrations that reverberated across the nation.

The subsequent 2022 protests further underscored the MEK’s influence, as the commander of Iran’s State Security Force candidly asserted that “rioters, led by the MEK, are willing to instigate chaos.” Such declarations, along with acknowledgments of MEK-orchestrated protests, expose Tehran’s alarm and its recognition of the MEK’s role as the main architect of unrest.

As the Iranian regime stares down this impending milestone, it artfully maneuvers its tactics to counteract the potency of the MEK during this critical juncture.

Among the recent measures, the regime has invoked INTERPOL mechanisms to apprehend MEK members. July bore witness to Tehran’s announcement of summoning 107 MEK leaders and officials for prosecution, while spreading rumors that the MEK is unsafe and scrambling to relocate to Canada. A thread of “suspicious deaths” among MEK members at Ashraf-3, the group’s residence in Albania, was deftly woven into the regime’s propaganda. Even Iran’s Judiciary Chief publicly proclaimed the regime’s determination to repatriate MEK members from foreign jurisdictions.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19945/india-child-labor

A large number of Indian children… are still subjected to bonded labour and forced employment. India today has more than 33 million children under the age of 18 in work requiring hard labour.

The welfare of children has long been a concern in India. Aware of this need, the founding fathers of independent India in 1949 wrote a Constitution that prohibits employing children under the age of 14 in factories and other hazardous work (Article 24).

India’s Parliament has also tried to safeguard children’s rights by passing legislation . The Child and Adolescent Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act of 1986 makes employing a child a criminal offence.[1] Parliament has also enacted other laws to prohibit, identify and prosecute child labour.

India’s agriculture sector accounts for the majority (70%) of employed children. Child labour, regrettably, is used in almost all of the informal sectors of the Indian economy, including coal mining, and the diamond, fireworks, silk and carpet industries.

A 2003 Human Rights Watch report claims that children as young as five work for up to 12 hours a day, six to seven days a week, in the silk industry.

Official estimates for children working as domestic labourers and in restaurants is more than 2.5 million; some NGOs estimate the figure to be around 20 million.

As of September 2022, the US Department of Labor lists India in its “List of Goods Produced by Child Labor of Forced Labor,” with 25 types of goods produced by child labour.

The main reasons for child labour, clearly, are poverty, illiteracy and malnutrition. Out of India’s 217 million children, 49.9% are poor. Children in this category have little choice but to join the labour force.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/09/globalists_resurrect_roman_censor_to_police_public_morals.html

One of the most powerful and prestigious offices in the ancient Roman Republic was the censor.  It was the censor’s duty to conduct the census — an account of all the citizens and their properties, an appraisal of an individual Roman’s qualifications for certain honors and ranks, and a division of the people into distinct social classes.  Having the authorities both to assess tax liability and noble rank made the two censors who shared this office inherently powerful.  For this reason, the patricians (the ruling class) originally precluded the plebeians (the commoners) from ever obtaining the office.  The ruling class was not keen on empowering a commoner to decide who is worthy of being a patrician!

Over time, this duty to conduct an official census expanded to include other substantial powers.  Having the sole authority to determine whether a Roman citizen qualified for distinguished ranks and to adjudicate whether that citizen had committed any social infractions rendering him unworthy of retaining those ranks, the censors became de facto wardens of the public morals (the regimen morum).  The jurisdiction to regulate proper Roman character and habits and to judge those Romans found wanting made censors both revered and feared.  They were known as castigatores (chastisers) for their power to create and enforce public opinion through their granting or withholding of noble rank.  They were, in other words, ancient Rome’s original enforcers of “political correctness.”  This authority to regulate both the public and private lives of Roman citizens gave rise to the modern meanings of “censor” and “censorship.”

These immense powers to assess property, tax liability, qualification for noble rank, and general “political correctness” naturally established an additional power: the censors were responsible for administering Rome’s finances and overseeing public works.  As custodians of the public morals and regulators of the public’s taxes, the censors were given broad discretion to decide how to spend public money on roads, aqueducts, bridges, theaters, and temples.  They had a say over which Roman businessmen would be awarded lucrative contracts from the State and which kinds of laborers would benefit from new public works projects.  By controlling the flow of money and jobs, the censors could choose the “winners” and “losers” in the economy.

If these authoritarian powers sound remarkably familiar to Westerners today, that’s because Western governments have fully embraced the role of the ancient Roman censors — dividing society into deserving and undeserving classes, promulgating and enforcing “woke” public morals, and engaging in partisan tax-and-spend policies that reward certain industries and workforces over others.  Just as with Rome’s censors, our censors ostensibly work for the “public good.”  Unlike many of the illustrious Roman censors from two and a half millennia ago, though, today’s censors are not known for exhibiting exceptional character or honor.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19941/starvation-armenians-artsakh

Several watchdog organizations… are accusing Azerbaijan of committing genocide against the 120,000 Armenians living in Nagorno-Karabakh. Historically known as Artsakh, this ancient Armenian region was brought under Azerbaijani rule in 2020.

Modern day hostilities between Armenia, an ancient nation and the first to adopt Christianity, and Azerbaijan, a Muslim nation that was created in 1918, began in September 2020, when Azerbaijan launched a war to capture Artsakh….

Once the September 2020 war began, Turkey quickly joined its Azerbaijani co-religionists against Armenia, even though the dispute did not concern it.

These Muslim groups committed massive atrocities. One included raping an Armenian female soldier and mother of three, before hacking off all four of her limbs, gouging out her eyes, and sticking one of her severed fingers inside her private parts.

The war ended in November 2020, with Azerbaijan gaining control of a significant portion of Artsakh.

“In the extreme southeastern part of Europe, known as the Caucasus, a silent genocide is looming. The Lachin Corridor that connects Armenia to Artsakh, the region in Azerbaijan where mainly Christian Armenians live, has been closed by the government for eight months. Supermarket shelves are empty; there is hardly any food, fuel, or medicine for the 120,000 Armenian Christians who live there, including 30,000 children and 20,000 seniors… a convoy of food and medicine has been standing in front of the border since July 25 [a month], but the International Red Cross is not allowed access to the inhabitants of Artsakh. According to journalists living in the area, most residents only get one meal a day. People in Artsakh queue for hours at night for bread, waiting for their daily rations. At the same time, sources within Artsakh report shooting at Armenians trying to harvest the land… in all probability bread will also soon be unavailable due to the shortage of fuel… Bakers can no longer heat their ovens.” — Sonja Dahlmans, Dutch journalist, ongehoordnederland.tv, August 24, 2023.

“There is an ongoing Genocide against 120,000 Armenians…[A] blockade… by the Azerbaijani security forces impeding access to any food, medical supplies, and other essentials should be considered a Genocide under Article II, (c) of the Genocide Convention: ‘Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction.’….Without immediate dramatic change, this group of Armenians will be destroyed in a few weeks.” — Luis Moreno Ocampo, former Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, August 7, 2023.

Muslim regimes regularly make life intolerable for Christian minorities, apparently to force them to abandon their properties and leave.

A few weeks ago, the president of Iraq revoked a decade-old decree that granted Chaldean Patriarch Cardinal Louis Raphael Sako powers over Christian endowment affairs. “This is a political maneuver to seize the remainder of what Christians have left in Iraq and Baghdad and to expel them.” — Diya Butrus Slewa, human rights activist from Ainkawa, aina.org, July 13, 2023.

Former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback referred to the blockade as the latest attempt at “religious cleansing” of Christian Armenia… in his testimony, [he] said that this latest genocide is being “perpetrated with U.S.-supplied weaponry and backed by Turkey, a member of NATO.” If the U.S. does not act, “we will see again another ancient Christian population forced out of its homeland.” — catholicnewsagency.com, June 21, 2023.

Not only has U.S. diplomacy been ineffective for the besieged Armenians; it has actually exacerbated matters by allowing the aggressors to continue their atrocities.

“[T]he only thing the Washington-backed talks appear to have produced is the emboldenment of Azerbaijan’s aggression…. For over eight months, the region’s 120,000 Indigenous Armenians…have been deprived access to food, medicine, fuel, electricity, and water in what is nothing less than genocide by attrition…. When Washington-based talks resumed in June, Azerbaijan began shelling the region. In the months since, the International Committee of the Red Cross has been denied access to Karabakh—and later reported that an Armenian patient in its care had been abducted by Azerbaijani forces en route to Armenia for treatment. This is the predictable consequence of Washington’s insistence on negotiations amid Azerbaijan’s blockade of Artsakh and occupation of Armenian territory. It has signaled to Baku that its strategy of coercive diplomacy is working, disincentivizing de-escalation…” — Alex Galitsky and Gev Iskajyan, Armenian National Committee of America; Armenian National Committee of Artsakh, Newsweek, August 14, 2023.

Indeed, part of the façade of diplomacy is that Azerbaijan insists that the Christian Armenians of Artsakh are being treated no differently than Muslim Azerbaijanis—since all are citizens of Azerbaijan.

Clearly, negotiating simply bought the Azerbaijanis more time in which to starve the Armenians, and possibly another way for the United States to pretend it was “doing something” without actually doing anything –apart from allowing more savagery.

The results are clear: nearly every Armenian who fell into Azerbaijani captivity after the 2020 war has been persecuted, imprisoned, tortured, mutilated, decapitated or murdered. None of these acts has ever been punished. To the contrary, those who kill Armenians receive medals and are glorified in Azerbaijan.

“The Western press rarely writes about the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Most reactions follow the line that it is not a religious conflict, but a claim by two countries over a disputed territory. Given the many examples that exist in which precisely religious buildings, tombs and inscriptions are systematically destroyed, it is difficult to maintain that this is the case.” — Sonja Dahlmans, ongehoordnederland.tv, August 24, 2023.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19940/france-democracy-crisis-authority

Marseille, France’s second-largest city and biggest port, is depicted as a European version of Chicago in the Prohibition times with gang warfare, shootings, protest strikes by police and tension among “communities” routine features of daily life.

The usually tame French media describe the situation as a “challenge to law and order”… President Emmanuel Macron goes further by warning about a “loss of authority” that he intends to correct by as yet unknown measures.

Loss of authority isn’t limited to Marseille gangs engaged in war over a bigger share of the drug market… Authority is also under constant challenge in Paris itself, where one could see numerous shop windows shattered by protesters in the recent riots against a two-year increase in the legal minimum retirement age. Even once sleepy cities such as Nîmes and Limoges have been affected by “loss of authority”.

However, Macron’s first moves and the ideas his entourage are circulating look more like dancing around the issue rather than addressing its root causes.

Where does authority come from?

The classical answer is that it comes from the two key tools of persuasion and coercion that a properly constituted government has for imposing its decisions. Beyond that, however, one may argue that authority emanates from continuity of rules and mores, the accumulation of a cultural, including religious, heritage that transcends here-and-now considerations.

Macron tries to address that problem by talking of “duties” as opposed to “rights”, something that contradicts the core values of the French Revolution. In the French Revolution’s worldview, citizens, regardless of whether they do their duties or not, have inalienable rights. In Macron’s redefinition, a citizen’s rights may look like rewards for duties performed.

But who sets those rights and duties?

Can one talk of duties in the service of an autocratic regime that one hasn’t chosen?