RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/imperialism-will-be-dangerous-for-china-1537225875

China’s real problem isn’t the so-called Thucydides trap, which holds that a rising power like China must clash with an established power like the U.S., the way ancient Athens clashed with Sparta. It was Lenin, not Thucydides, who foresaw the challenge the People’s Republic is now facing: He called it imperialism and said it led to economic collapse and war.

Lenin defined imperialism as a capitalist country’s attempt to find markets and investment opportunities abroad when its domestic economy is awash with excess capital and production capacity. Unless capitalist powers can keep finding new markets abroad to soak up the surplus, Lenin theorized, they would face an economic implosion, throwing millions out of work, bankrupting thousands of companies and wrecking their financial systems. This would unleash revolutionary forces threatening their regimes.

Under these circumstances, there was only one choice: expansion. In the “Age of Imperialism” of the 19th and early-20th centuries, European powers sought to acquire colonies or dependencies where they could market surplus goods and invest surplus capital in massive infrastructure projects.

Ironically, this is exactly where “communist” China stands today. Its home market is glutted by excess manufacturing and construction capacity created through decades of subsidies and runaway lending. Increasingly, neither North America, Europe nor Japan is willing or able to purchase the steel, aluminum and concrete China creates. Nor can China’s massively oversized infrastructure industry find enough projects to keep it busy. Its rulers have responded by attempting to create a “soft” empire in Asia and Africa through the Belt and Road Initiative.

Many analysts hoped that when China’s economy matured, the country would come to look more like the U.S., Europe and Japan. A large, affluent middle class would buy enough goods and services to keep industry humming. A government welfare state would ease the transition to a middle-class society.

That future is now out of reach, key Chinese officials seem to believe. Too many powerful interest groups have too much of a stake in the status quo for Beijing’s policy makers to force wrenching changes on the Chinese economy. But absent major reforms, the danger of a serious economic shock is growing.

The Belt and Road Initiative was designed to sustain continued expansion in the absence of serious economic reform. Chinese merchants, bankers and diplomats combed the developing world for markets and infrastructure projects to keep China Inc. solvent. In a 2014 article in the South China Morning Post, a Chinese official said one objective of the BRI is the “transfer of overcapacity overseas.” Call it “imperialism with Chinese characteristics.”

But as Lenin observed a century ago, the attempt to export overcapacity to avoid chaos at home can lead to conflict abroad. He predicted rival empires would clash over markets, but other dynamics also make this strategy hazardous. Nationalist politicians resist “development” projects that saddle their countries with huge debts to the imperialist power. As a result, imperialism is a road to ruin.

China’s problems today are following this pattern. Pakistan, the largest recipient of BRI financing, thinks the terms are unfair and wants to renegotiate. Malaysia, the second largest BRI target, wants to scale back its participation since pro-China politicians were swept out of office. Myanmar and Nepal have canceled BRI projects. After Sri Lanka was forced to grant China a 99-year lease on the Hambantota Port to repay Chinese loans, countries across Asia and Africa started rereading the fine print of their contracts, muttering about unequal treaties. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/jeremy-corbyn-labour-party-anti-semitism-crisis/

Corbyn is leading Labour toward anti-Semitism, and British Jews are right to be worried.

London — Brits just had their hottest recorded summer since 1976, and the political temperature is also turned up to full blast. Throughout the summer, civil wars have consumed both of Britain’s main political parties. While the Tories are now preoccupied with a looming Brexit decision and a potential leadership challenge, Jeremy Corbyn has become the focus of Labour’s all-consuming anti-Semitism row.

The Labour leader has for years now been dogged by a seemingly endless stream of scandals involving anti-Jewish bigotry. In 2009, he invited Islamist “friends from Hamas” to the House of Commons and said that the idea that the group “should be labelled as a terrorist organisation by the British government is really a big, big historical mistake.” In 2010, he hosted an event (also at the House of Commons) on Holocaust Memorial Day in which a Jewish Auschwitz survivor compared the Israeli government to the Nazi regime. In 2014, he attended a ceremony in Tunisia and reportedly laid a wreath on the grave of one the Black September terrorists who murdered eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Before the Iranian state broadcaster, Press TV, was banned in January 2012, he reportedly accepted up to £20,000 for his appearances on the channel.

In 2016, amid mounting pressure from inside and outside Labour, Corbyn announced an independent inquiry into anti-Semitism and racism in the party. The report concluded that there was a toxic environment within the party. He later apologized for the “concerns and anxiety” caused by his past appearances “on platforms with people whose views I completely reject.” But these vague gestures struck many as empty, and a war for Labour’s very soul is now being fought between the party’s moderate old guard and its Corbynite radicals.

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/isis-dressing-up-like-women-in-battle-for-deir-ez-zor-territory/

ISIS is “trying hard to preserve their remaining space” in Syria “by using tactics like burning tires, using innocent civilians as human shields, and dressing up like women,” the spokesman for Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve said today.

Speaking via video from Baghdad, Col. Sean Ryan noted that the Syrian Democratic Forces — the multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian coalition of Kurds, Arabs, Assyrians and other minority groups who have recaptured most of ISIS’ formerly held caliphate in the country — launched this month the third phase of Operation Roundup, a ground offensive to clear out stubborn ISIS pockets in the Middle Euphrates River Valley.

Phase two of the operation ran from June to September.

“Hajin and the surrounding villages are the last remaining territory acquired by ISIS in the coalition’s area of responsibility, and the victory by the Syrian Democratic Forces there will mean that ISIS no longer holds territory,” he said. ISIS fighters remain scattered throughout surrounding areas, though, and outside of the coalition’s area of responsibility.

The U.S. is “confident that the SDF will prevail” in Hajin, Ryan said. The coalition estimates there are about 1,500 to 2,000 ISIS fighters in the city.

“In both Iraq and Syria, the success of our partner forces is creating stability in areas that have not seen peace since the arrival of ISIS more than five years ago. Lives are being rebuilt again because the ISF and the SDF are providing the necessary security for residents to go back home, rebuild their lives and again hope for their future,” he continued. “However, the truth is military stabilization efforts are not enough. Security creates the space for rebuilding. Residents only gain hope for the future when their children can go to school free from harm, women go buy basic necessities in local shops, and when they can go to their jobs that allow them to support their families. Ultimately, the military cannot fight its way to stability.”

https://pjmedia.com/trending/norway-fetes-young-muslim-refugee-writer-for-trashing-norway/

I only met him in person once, many years ago. We met for beers in downtown Oslo. We didn’t agree on everything: among other things, he had an irrational hostility toward the United States, which I put down, in part at least, to the fact that he had never set foot in the U.S. and that his English was surprisingly poor (we spoke in Norwegian), so that his image of my country was shaped largely by the mainstream Scandinavian media and by various sources in his native tongue, Arabic. But never mind. What mattered was that he loved freedom, hated jihadist Islam, and was brave enough to say so. His name was Walid al-Kubaisi. Educated as a civil engineer at the University of Baghdad, he came to Norway as a political refugee in 1981 and died this past July at the age of sixty.

Walid came to Norway at a time when the Muslim population of Norway was tiny and the Norwegian cultural elite was still willing to lend a respectful ear to a severe criticism of Islam by someone who had grown up as an adherent of the faith. Kubaisi was nothing if not critical. He condemned the hijab. He recognized Tariq Ramadan as a two-faced snake who was out to Islamize Europe. He saw through the dissimulations of the Muslim Brotherhood. In 2010, after a number of other Norwegians with Muslim backgrounds had begun to make high-profile careers for themselves as politicians and commentators, he warned that despite their images as democracy-loving bridge-builders, several of the most prominent of them were nothing more or less than Trojan horses for jihadism.

Well, Walid is dead now — and those Trojan horses are still alive. And while there don’t seem to be any new Walids on the horizon — the Norwegian media are no longer as open to such voices as they they used to be — there are plenty of new Trojan horses. One of them is a hijab-wearing young woman named Sumaya Jirde Ali. Born in 1997, she came to Norway from Somalia at age six. Two years ago, she stepped onto the national stage with an opinion piece in Aftenposten. She had just been in London, and was impressed by the “diversity” on display there. By contrast, she charged, Norway is way behind. “During the last few decades Norway has become more multicultural,” she wrote. “Why is it that in 2016, there aren’t more non-ethnic Norwegians in advertisements, movies, magazines, and in government agencies?” She maintained that “for integration to work, it must go both ways. It’s not enough for immigrants to adapt.”

No, there was nothing new about it. By 2016, her argument was an embarrassing cliché, a platitude. But in 21st century Norway, the cultural elite eats this sort of thing up, at least if it’s under the byline of a teenage girl in a hijab. If Sumaya had written a piece about how grateful she was to have been brought up in a free and prosperous Norway rather than in her native Somalia, would Aftenposten even have published it? No, too sappy. And anti-African! What if she’d submitted an article critical of female genital mutilation in her community? Or honor killing? No, that’s old hat. But her familiar whining about insufficient Muslim visibility in today’s Norway was right up their alley. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13004/sweden-election-immigration

Swedish police received more than 2,300 reports of potential crimes linked to this year’s election, including voter intimidation and threats of violence against property or persons. An international team of observers found irregularities in 46% of the polling stations visited. The team expressed particular concern over the lack of secrecy in voting. Swedish authorities allow more than one voter (normally from the same family) to enter the polling booth together, ostensibly to ensure that the more literate family member can assist the less literate ones to correctly fill in the ballot paper.
“We are concerned about the significant level of family voting where women, older voters and the infirm can be guided or even instructed how to vote by another family member… We feel this may be a way of suppressing some voters from freely choosing their own choice.” — Statement on the Swedish election from Democracy Volunteers, election observers.

With tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of migrants receiving welfare payments without having made any contributions, Sweden’s current welfare system seems destined to collapse, according to Sweden Democrats leader Jimmie Åkesson.

A strong showing by the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats in the Swedish elections on September 9 drained away so many votes from the establishment parties that the two main parliamentary blocs were left virtually tied and far short of a governing majority.

The Sweden Democrats won 17.5% of the vote and emerged as the third-largest party in the country, according to the official election results released on September 16. The result, a 4.6% improvement on the 12.9% it won in 2014, placed the Sweden Democrats into a situation of holding the balance of power in the next parliament.

Incumbent Prime Minister Stefan Löfven’s center-left Social Democrats came in first, with 28.3% of the vote — the party’s worst result in more than 100 years. The center-right Moderate party came in second, with 19.8% of the vote, a 3.5% drop from 2014.

With eight political parties in the Swedish Parliament, the establishment parties traditionally have organized themselves into two rival parliamentary blocs: On the left, the Social Democrats and their allies garnered 40.7% of the vote. On the right, the Moderates and their allies won 40.3% of the vote.

Although the Sweden Democrats are now in a position to play kingmaker in Parliament, the mainstream blocs have vowed not to cooperate with them because of their “nationalist” positions on immigration and the European Union.

Sweden, with a largely homogenous population of around 10 million people, received nearly 500,000 asylum seekers from Africa, Asia and the Middle East since 2010. The arrival of so many overwhelmingly male migrants from different cultural and religious backgrounds has created massive social upheaval, including a surge in sexual assaults and gang violence in cities and towns across Sweden.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/09/18/trump-and-bolton

Twenty years ago—the night of July 17-18, 1998 at the United Nations conference in Rome establishing the International Criminal Court (ICC), to be exact—an American amendment to restrict the role of this new supranational global court had just been overwhelmingly defeated. An observer remarked, “the delegates burst into a spontaneous standing ovation which turned into a rhythmic applause that lasted close to 10 minutes.”

From the delegations of the European Union and from human rights organizations including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and a group now called Human Rights First (all of whom were staffed with many American citizens) came wild cheers and applause throughout the night, as the Rome conference rejected a series of amendments proposed by the United States to place checks on the court.

Nineteen years later in November 2017, ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda officially requested permission from the court’s pre-trial chamber to proceed, for the first time, to investigate U.S. soldiers and officials for alleged “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity” in Afghanistan. Human Rights Watch praised the ICC move as a “potential, if long-time overdue, path to justice.” Amnesty International lauded the global prosecutor’s request as “a seminal moment for international justice.”

On September 10, at a Federalist Society luncheon, National Security Advisor John Bolton, speaking for President Trump, responded: “This administration will fight back to protect American constitutionalism, our sovereignty, and our citizens.”

Bolton’s speech was both hard-hitting and highly principled. Rich in historical and constitutional detail, the speech examines the actions of the International Criminal Court in the context of the core principles of American constitutional democracy and the principle that the only legitimate government is government by the consent of the governed. The speech was a tour de force that should be used in classrooms as a clear example of our constitutional morality and democratic sovereignty in action.

Shocked, Appalled, and Principle-Free
Critics immediately launched attacks on Bolton’s speech, but they never responded to his principled arguments in defense of democratic self-government. A hysterical headline on the front page of the New York Times declared “On War Crimes Court, U.S. Sides with Despots, Not Allies.” Human Rights First issued a short statement that Bolton’s announcement was “reactionary fear-mongering.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271349/playing-hardball-hungary-bruce-bawer

Criticize the government of Viktor Orban, prime minister of Hungary since 2010, all you like. But the European Union’s despotic and disgraceful attempt to bring him to heel, which came to a head with a vote in the European Parliament on September 12, has nothing whatsoever to do with the purported “erosion of democracy” in his country.

First, let it be said that the vote itself was a result of a report by Judith Sargentini, a Dutch MEP who belongs to her country’s GreenLeft Party. In the report, Sargentini accused Hungary of “a serious breach…of the values on which the Union is founded,” namely “the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights.” She proceeded to reel off dozens of complaints about the way things work in Hungary.

For example: “Patriarchal stereotyped attitudes still prevail in Hungary with respect to the position of women in society.” (Well, yes, compared to the Netherlands.) She accused Hungarian authorities of prejudice against Roma, or gypsies, because an inordinate percentage of gypsy children are placed in special-education classes. (She gave no indication of entertaining the possibility that the children in question might actually require such classes.) Another grievance was the domination of Hungary’s media by pro-government voices. (As if you couldn’t say the same thing about the media in much of Western Europe.)

Sargentini also cited Orban’s supposed interference with academic freedom. In fact, when Orban took power, many of Hungary’s universities were so insular and ill-managed that the government had to step in and appoint competent rectors; meanwhile some of the new colleges that sprung up in post-Communist Hungary were shady, unaccredited foreign rackets that required oversight and regulation. Last month, the Hungarian government proposed a ban on gender studies, arguing that they were valueless on the job market. You may regard this either as an inappropriate violation of ivory-tower autonomy or as a sane and practical response to inane developments in higher education.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/haley-russian-corruption-is-like-a-virus-could-sicken-un-security-council/

UN Ambassador Nikki Haley tore into Russia at the UN Security Council today for blocking a report showing that the Kremlin and Beijing are “actively working” to undermine the sanctions regime against North Korea.

Haley said the U.S. sought the briefing for “the chance to examine the difference between words and deeds” and to see whether the Security Council’s “efforts to eliminate North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs are being honored and enforced and, if not, why.”

Russia voted for sanctions, she noted, and now wants to ease sanctions on the Kim regime as it wants to pursue economic projects in North Korea. “The question one should ask is why? Why, after voting for sanctions eleven different times, is Russia now backing away from them? We know the answer. It is because Russia has been cheating. And now they’ve been caught,” Haley declared.

“Despite its repeated support for UN sanctions, Russia is actively working to undermine the enforcement of the Security Council’s sanctions on North Korea. Its violations are not one-offs. They are systematic,” she added. “Russia has not simply looked the other way as its nationals and entities engage in activities explicitly prohibited by UN sanctions. Russia has engaged in a concerted campaign in the Security Council to cover up violations of sanctions, whether they’re committed by Russia or citizens of other states.”

Haley said the U.S. “has evidence of consistent and wide-ranging Russian violations” that “should offend every current and former member of the Security Council who knows how difficult it was to gain passage of these sanctions.”

“And it should offend every country that has felt the looming threat of North Korean nuclear weapons,” she added.

One example, she said, was a Russian vessel filmed in April conducting a ship-to-ship transfer of oil with a North Korean tanker.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/09/south_africa_weve_seen_this_sort_of_chaos_before.html

Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, Zaire/Congo, Bangladesh, Angola, Mozambique, Somalia. All victims to the bloody rise of communism in Africa.

To paraphrase Agent Smith of The Matrix: “You hear that, South Africa? That is the sound of inevitability. It is the sound of your death. Goodbye, South Africa.”

There appears to be no stopping the descent. And as S.A. goes, so goes the continent.

Dave Blount posts an eye-opening piece on the current status of S.A. in his blog, Moonbattery.

The tragedy unfolding in South Africa is relevant to all of us because it indicates the fate of the West in general if political and demographic trends continue. However, few people in the USA have any understanding of South Africa and its history other than the narrative the liberal media hammered through people’s heads during its campaign to bring down Apartheid.

He cites horrific details of brutal torture, rape, and murder of white citizens (primarily farmers in the north regions) at the hands of black mobs that are rarely brought to justice by the socialist ANC government. The S.A. constitution is in the process of being revised to allow the government to seize any lands owned by white farmers without compensation, which will inevitably lead to greater bloodshed. Dave further reports:

Seventy-one percent of children live in households where no one is employed. Fewer work than receive welfare. Democracy under these circumstances is a dysfunctional form of slavery. The state is failing. The straightforward communism that Apartheid defended against is only a step away.

You can’t bring this topic up in public, as you will be branded a racist and a liar for lying about the black-on-white violence in S.A. Everyone is getting along fine there, you see. None of the leftist news outlets report any of this, so lefties don’t believe that it is happening. The media won’t touch the forbidden topics of failing socialism, rising communism, and black racism.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/brexit-dilemmas-top-agenda-at-eus-salzburg-summit-1537144448

European Union leaders will hold their first serious discussions on Brexit since March at a summit in Austria on Thursday as both the U.K. and the rest of the bloc step up preparations to reduce major economic disruptions if a deal isn’t reached.

On the face of it, negotiators are advancing toward an agreement that must be settled, drafted and ratified before Britain leaves the bloc next March 29. In reality, progress toward a deal has been minimal since April.

The informal gathering of EU leaders in Salzburg—the first of three likely summits over as many months at which Brexit will be discussed—has been preceded by warm words from the EU side, and British Prime Minister Theresa May could hear more of them once she gets there.

EU leaders are aware that Mrs. May is under pressure from anti-EU lawmakers in her Conservative Party. That has intensified after a proposal for future relations with the EU was agreed by her cabinet in July at the prime minister’s country retreat at Chequers, prompting the resignation of two prominent ministers. European leaders want to help Mrs. May ahead of a Conservative party annual conference starting Sept. 30, hoping to ward off more British political chaos that could further set back negotiations.

Behind the scenes, however, many in the EU say Mrs. May’s proposal—which aims to give British firms frictionless access to the EU market in goods—is unacceptable.