What is the range of the F-16s? I suppose they take off from Western Ukraine, and could potentially conduct a very short period bombing run before returning to base? Clearly they cannot do mid-air refueling on the Ukrainian airspace.
To be clear, I don’t disagree with you.
However, you have to understand that China has no permanent allies. Its only two allies are the People’s Liberation Army and the PLA Navy.
China has no problem allying with the imperialist America to destroy the USSR when it perceives itself to be under threat from Soviet encirclement, and it has also no problem with helping Russia but only to the extent of turning Russia into a cannon fodder while distracting the US empire attention away from China itself.
Say whatever you want of China, but the strategy of playing both sides and win has served China very well over the past 50 years, and turned it from one of the poorest countries to one of the wealthiest in the world.
How the heck did the Ukrainian Air Force manage to make a come back? Didn’t Ukraine receive the old F-16 variants and had trouble with their pilot training? How did they manage to evade Russian air defenses?
And there are still Ukrainian MiGs and Sus with their pilots around? I don’t know if that’s an indictment against the Soviet air defenses system (often boasted to be the best in the world) or a commendation to the build quality of Soviet jets.
China doesn’t need Russia lol. But Russia would be useful as a cannon fodder to keep the imperialist attention away from China.
On Chinese internet, a popular phrase is “a half-dead bear is a good bear”. Understand what it means?
I have never met a Trotskyist irl before in my life.
My friend, the Trotskyists have long been integrated into the US government in the form of neocons.
The whole regime change strategy was derived from Trotsky’s exporting revolutions to the third world countries to foment world revolution, except here they want to export regime change to the third world countries to ensure America’s interest in the region.
Michael Hudson talked about the Fed actively recruiting Trotskyists in the 20th century to fight the USSR:
MICHAEL HUDSON: You always had to be aware that most of your followers are going to be FBI plants pretending to be people who they weren’t and would be writing up reports that were not usually very accurate, as I later found from the FBI files on my father and my friends.
They wouldn’t talk so much about the future change. They talked about where things went wrong. Especially how Stalinism had really destroyed Russia and what Russia really would have done if it would have been a truly socialist country as it set out to be instead of the way that it actually went.
So it was really where things had gone wrong. It wasn’t how to do it right. It was an awareness of all the things that can go wrong and all of the dangers.
KARL FITZGERALD: Just on McCarthyism — what was it like living through that period?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, none of my friends or people we knew were attacked. That was basically against the Stalinists at that time and gradually, by the time I wrote Super Imperialism, as I mentioned before, I was amazed when I was given a top-secret security clearance, because the FBI said they’d gone over my report and they knew for sure that I wasn’t Stalinist and wasn’t pro-Russian.
So all of a sudden all the McCarthyism sort of knocked out the Stalinists, and many of the liberals I knew were all standing up to the Stalinists, imagining that they were wrongly prosecuted like the Rosenbergs, and yet it was the Rosenberg’s cousin that had introduced Trotsky’s assassin, Jackson, to Trotsky, as his girlfriend.
So I was not very sympathetic with the Stalinists who were being attacked at that time.
…
spoiler
All you have to do is set up a group of non-governmental organizations to begin grooming future leaders like Ms. [Annalena] Baerbock in Germany. You set up something like the World Economic Foundation that appoints leaders like presumably the George Soros Foundation. And you’ll get people that look like they’re very smart but also very corruptible and basically who want a really good greedy life.
In the early 1970s the Catholic Church had sent me around the country. They were one of my first backers, for various reasons. I had gone to New Mexico and had a plan for state and local finances. And a man came up to me afterwards and said, “I’ve never heard a banker talk like that. That’s wonderful. Will you come to the Ford Foundation? I want to meet you next week. Let’s have lunch.”
He explained that he worked with the CIA and the Ford Foundation basically was a front for the CIA to recruit people. So I went and met with him and I found it was quite cool. I found that he was quite cool. I found that his demeanor had suddenly changed.
This was early in the 1970s, before the Carter election by about five years. He began by trying to impress me, and he said, “We’re trying to create future presidents of the United States. When I first met you I thought that you could be material. But we decided that a southern governor is basically the kind of person that fits. Somebody who’s progressive. Somebody who can sort of not be an anti-Black racist, but somebody who, being southern, has all of the ways of thinking that a southerner has.”
Today we would call that neoliberal, basically. Non-socialist.
He said that he had been brought up by Malcolm Moos who had written the part of the (unintelligible) Eisenhower farewell address warning about the military-industrial complex. And so of course that’s what we’re doing, we’re all here [at the Ford Foundation] to support the military-industrial complex.
And I could see that I was not going to have any future with the Ford Foundation and it was obvious to me that he’d gone to the FBI and said, “Look I think I got someone here, could you give me his file?” and then he read the file on me and said, “Uh oh.”
So his advice to me was that if I wanted, since I was at a PhD in economics, that if I wanted to rise in economics I should attach myself to some prize winner — a Nobel Prize winner ideally — it was just beginning to be given — and try to just jump up and find a backer among the prize winners.
I realized that, wait a minute, the Nobel Prize is going to be given to people who — what we know now is neoliberalism, in the Chicago School, the one thing that I don’t want to do is take this guy’s advice, and indeed the only Nobel Prize winner that I ever was friendly with was the Swedish prize winner of the second Nobel Prize who wrote An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, [Gunnar Myrdal].
He invited me to come and work in Sweden and be his successor, but it turned out that almost all the Swedes in that group were mainly into disarmament and tended to fall asleep in an alcoholic daze at the end of each meal, so I never did follow him up there.
So I wasn’t groomed, to make a long story short.
Support for socialism (and a nostalgia for the USSR) is still fairly high across the board among Russians. If Russia were to suddenly adopt socialism tomorrow, most people would accept it. They may not like it, they may even be critical of communism, but most would still accept it over the current system. The same cannot be said for any of the Western capitalist countries.
The biggest hurdle is how are you going to convince the people that a second USSR won’t turn into another disaster.
Remember that most people today who have lived through the USSR period also lived through its most corrupt and inept period during the late USSR. The older generations who grew up in the 50s-early 70s had great memories of it, but many people growing up in the 80s have a very different view of what the USSR meant to them.
Besides, and perhaps even more importantly, those who lived through the nightmare of the 1990s do not want to return to that period any longer. They would rather have stability, even if it meant a more deteriorated material condition but still rather comfortable and safe, than to risk plunging the country into another mass poverty and crime-ridden era. Putin played a very important role in stopping that madness, which is a fact that many have come to accept despite criticisms of him.
Read up what happened to Russia in the 1990s and you will very quickly understand that the living memories of the period still haunt every Russian to this day.
Don’t get me wrong, they’re both extremely bad, it’s just one is more blatant than the other.
Initially I didn’t believe they would let Trump win, but now it’s even more clear what the intention is.
Trump is going to do all the unpopular policies that the Democrats want but are too afraid to do on their own. If any of these cause a backlash, Trump and the Republicans will be the ones to face the consequences.
Meanwhile, the neocons firmly have Trump in control now. The MAGA clowns have retreated into obscurity. The first Trump term was a surprise, but after 8 years, the bourgeois elite surely have found more than one way to keep him on a leash.
they would rather lose than win with a socialist
It’s just priorities. Would they rather lose the voter base or lose the billionaire Zionist donors? The choice is simple.
I mean, Biden’s interest rate hike is arguably even more regressive in terms of wealth transfer ($1 trillion free interest to the rich every year, higher than the annual defense spending, while the poor have to endure even more expensive debt repayment burden) than Trump’s massive tax cuts and welfare cuts.
It’s just that interest rate operates “invisibly” so people don’t notice as much as the blatant Republican policies, but if you look into the data, it’s just as regressive, if not more so.
Just to point out it’s still the Israeli model though: have to register overseas.
The effect was more pronounced in countries with larger Communist Parties. Capitalism did not reduce working hours on its own.
Saw this on twitter.
Link to the book pdf: Reforming to Survive: The Bolshevik Origins of Social Policies
Chinese academia is way too competitive and exhausting for your American scientists. How many American grad students and postdocs are willing to work 6-7 days a week and have their lab meeting held on Sunday, which is becoming a common occurrence now?
These are some of the most hardworking people out there (and you can see them carrying their work ethic overseas as grad students and postdocs in Western universities) and churning out top tier scientific publications every year. These are the people you are going to compete against. If you think the “publish or perish” pressure is bad in Western academia, then in China this is ramped up to the next level.
Finally, connections are very important in China, even more so than in America and Europe. Much of the institute’s funding is going to be received by the heads of the departments, who then distribute the funds to the individual labs underneath them. Unless you are already a well-renowned scientist, you are going to be competing against your peers who have actual connections to the senior figures in the department.
Chinese science is very well funded, but the competition is also extreme, just like most industries in China. You don’t publish well, you won’t survive. Europe may be lacking in their funding, but their work culture is also more relaxed and suited to Westerners.
I have several friends with PhD who emigrated to the US and loved it there because, according to them, at least it is nowhere near as exhausting as they had it in China. They actually have the time to enjoy their weekends, a luxury you won’t get in Chinese academia.