The real background to the dispute between China and the USA

It is not about politics. It’s not about the eternal struggle between Chinese pseudo-communism (with the capitalist tinge) and American pseudo-capitalism (with the neo-Marxist face). It’s all about raw materials and semiconductors.

Last week, a meeting took place between US President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping. Among other things, it was agreed that contacts between the US military and the Middle Kingdom should be resumed.

It should be remembered that the military dialog was broken off following the visit of Nancy Pelosi (then Speaker of the House of Representatives) to Taiwan at the beginning of August last year. This was the first visit by such a senior US politician to Taiwan in 25 years. China protested strongly against the visit and even threatened the US with a military response. Well, Biden’s team has always behaved like a bull in a china shop when it comes to diplomacy (see the flight of US soldiers from Afghanistan and their approach to Russia).

Although a few gestures are now being made after the meeting between Xi and Biden that could indicate a de-escalation in mutual relations, the war on the semiconductor front continues. In the middle of the year, for example, China decided to restrict exports of gallium and germanium, two important raw materials for the semiconductor industry. This was in response to the American decision to deny China access to the equipment needed for chip production. Incidentally, China is the world’s leading producer of gallium and germanium. The Middle Kingdom controls no less than 98% of the supply of gallium and 68% of the supply of germanium.

In October, Joe Biden’s administration announced that the United States would shorten the list of semiconductor types that US companies are allowed to sell to China. With this move, Washington wanted to further cut off Beijing from chips, which triggered an immediate reaction in the Middle Kingdom. This time, however, China decided to strike on a different front by announcing a restriction on the export of graphite, a raw material that is essential for the production of batteries for electric vehicles, among other things. It is worth remembering that China controls 2/3 of the world’s graphite supply. This raw material is the largest component of electric car batteries by weight. Each vehicle contains an average of 50 to even 100 kg of graphite. That is about twice as much as lithium, the processing of which is also controlled by the Chinese worldwide.

Quelle: constructafrica.com

Since many of the raw materials that are indispensable for the green revolution preached by Western decision-makers are mined in Africa, China has been focusing on colonizing the Dark Continent with the help of cheap loans and direct investments since the New Silk Road initiative began in 2013. The regimes of black dictators are happy to go into debt to their Chinese friends because they don’t talk about human rights and environmental protection. Meanwhile, Americans are investing billions in AI and high-tech, which cannot function without Asian and African raw materials. They disregard the potential collapse of supply chains that has been underway since the start of this trade war and which the Chinese can exploit as a weapon.

Gefira 78: Something is rotten in the state of Denmark

Yes, something is rotten. Not in the state of Denmark – as Shakespeare’s Hamlet is known to have said – but everywhere in the white man’s world. Yes, we are enjoying advanced stages of sophisticated technology, but everything apart from it is spiraling downwards. Indeed, technology itself can one of these days become our own undoing.

To see the state of the affairs it is best to take a few steps back: to relocate to fifty-seventy years ago. Only then will we be able to see both the huge changes and the distinct trends. What was the white man’s world like fifty-seventy years back?

Well, families were families (a man and a woman and a bunch of children); churches were relatively full, decency was abided by, so there were no parades with mocked copulations between the same sexes; children were protected against anything having to do with sex (let alone homosexuality); men were masculine while women were feminine (or at least such was the ideal, the model); the French were the French while the Italians were the Italians and no one would think that yesterday’s Nigerian or Somali can be today’s Englishman or German; abortion, even if practised, was not propagated while euthanasia was not considered yet, at least on a large scale; no one was discouraged from eating meat or travelling by car; the natural environment was appreciated but not venerated or worshipped; ministers (especially ministers of defence), prime ministers, presidents were male rather than young female models and they were not berated by a teenager girl; terms like stakeholder capitalism, migrations (except for bird migrations), Europeans of African origin or black Europeans, cancel culture, black lives matter, lockdown, ableism, systemic racism, gender reassignment, gender mainstreaming, man-made climate change, de-growth, parent A/parent B, neutral personal pronouns, and so on, and so forth were not known; British, French, German, Swedish etc. towns and cities were governed by white, Christian British, French, German, Swedish etc. men, sometimes women; children were not taken away from their parents under fancy pretexts; no one was obliged to wear safety belts while driving or helmets while cycling; historical white characters in the movies were impersonated by white actors and actresses and nobody would have elected a black woman Miss Ireland or Miss England; there were no streams of “refugees” entering a white man’s country when they pleased; the pope (the head of the Catholic Church) did not preach environmentalism; tattoos were worn by inmates of prisons and even then they did not cover most of the skin area as it happens nowadays; not even homeless beggars would have worn tattered trousers; you could say most of the things without fear of being ostracized or prosecuted; the canons of beauty, truth and goodness were commonly recognized as right and worthy of striving for; younger generations would have looked up to older generations rather than the other way round; shame and decency were some of the virtues imbibed at an early age; single mothers, divorce and the practice of couples living without being married were rare…

…all of this is gone, subverted, inverted, turned upside down and inside out almost without anybody’s noticing, anybody’s protesting. Indeed, not even the French (1789) or the Bolshevik (1917) revolutions wreaked such havoc with the civilization as existing in the respective years.

Gefira Financial Bulletin #78 is available now

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark
A slide into the abyss
Ray Dalio, or: Whether China will be the new superpower
The situation on the markets

Pushkin or how to cover up a feeling of impotence

The Kyiv Independent proudly reports that another Ukrainian monument to Alexander Pushkin, this time in Ukraine’s capital, has been dismantled, following the demolition of similar monuments in the towns of Zhytomyr, Kharkiv, Mykolaiv and Ternopil. Obviously, that’s one of the many victories that Ukraine has pulled off during the war against Russia. Monuments to Alexander Pushkin are regarded as a sign of Russian colonization. The term “Russian colonization” has been coined in the West as has the practice of dismantling monuments. But then hang on for a moment: if Russia colonized Ukraine (which is absurd, see below), then what right does the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand have to occupy the territories that they occupy? They had better pack up and leave.

At the time when Alexander Pushkin lived and worked there was hardly any notion of Ukraine as a region, still less of Ukrainians as a nation. The territories of present-day Ukraine were known as Little Russia (Russia!) while the slightly different Russian speech was viewed just as a Russian dialect. Yes, Russian has dialects just as English or German or French do.

Russia’s territories centered around Moscow are to the territories centered around Kiev like the German territories centered around Berlin to those located along the Rhine or at the foot of the Alps. Russia was born in Kiev, but then due to historical developments like the invasion of Tartars (Mongols) and the annexation of its westernmost territories by Lithuania and Poland, Russia’s centre of authority moved to the town of Moscow (later also for approximately two centuries to St Petersburg). Nothing out of the usual: neither Berlin used to be Germany’s capital from the get-go. Before it became Germany’s capital (as late as 1871) it was the capital of the German state of Prussia. A note of interest here: before becoming the capital of Prussia and eventually of Germany, Berlin was a… Slavic city, founded by Western Slavs and inhabited by them for a couple of centuries in the Middle Ages. Consider the pronunciation of the Slavic name of Berlin with it stress and the final syllable, quite unlike is the case with town or village names of Germanic origin. Proof enough that Germans are colonizers of the territories east of the Elbe, are they not?

If such is the case – and it is so, if we apply the same yardstick to Germany as we apply to Russia – then the monument to Frederick the great and Bismarck and, and, and… that are located in Berlin ought to be dismantled! Down with colonizers! Why should the rule apply to Ukraine/Russia alone? Why should it apply selectively?

Alexander Pushkin authored an epic poem Poltava, which by means of historical characters tells a love-story between Ukrainian military leader (hetman, derived from the German word Hauptman meaning captain) Ivan Mazepa and a Russian woman. The Ukrainian chieftain (both the protagonist of the story and the real historical figure) goes on to betray the Russian tsar and fights on the side of the Swedish king, suffering a defeat together with him at the battle of Poltava, 1709 (hence the title of the poem). By the way, George Gordon Byron picked the same protagonist and historical figure of Ivan Mazepa in his narrative poem Mazeppa, where, however, the Ukrainian military leader falls in love with a Polish noblewoman and betrays the Polish king. The fact that Alexander Pushkin depicted Ivan Mazepa as a traitor to Russia (which clearly means that Pushkin regarded Mazepa and other Ukrainians as Russians) might partly explain the hatred that some Ukrainians feel towards the poet. For all that, Alexander Pushkin modelled vast swaths of his text on Ukrainian folk poems, so Ukrainians might think twice before tearing down a monument to him.

To Russians is the figure of Mazepa an example of high treason, repeated more than a hundred years later by Soviet General Andrey Vlasov, who fought along with the Third Reich against the Soviet Union, and was caught and executed after the war.

But back to the dismantling of the monument(s). It is not only Pushkin that has been ravaged. Other historical figures commemorated as monuments or in plaques across Ukraine (Little Russia) have also fallen prey to this practice. It is to be expected that the less successful Ukrainians are on the battlefield, the more monuments to Russian “colonizers” are going to be done away with. What do psychologists call this phenomenon? Is it not compensation, i.e. “a strategy whereby one covers up, consciously or unconsciously, weaknesses, frustrations, desires, or feelings of inadequacy or incompetence in one life area through the gratification or (drive towards) excellence in another area”?

Good comeuppance!

A couple of days ago four Polish deputies to the European Parliament – Beata Kempa, Beata Mazurek, Patryk Jaki and Tomasz Poręba – had their immunity lifted, which was a requirement to put them on trial. Why does the European Union want the four Polish deputies to be put on trial? Why, the European Union does not like the party that had been governing Poland before the latest parliamentary elections and so the EU’s managers were oh too pleased to take a stab at the “nationalistic” party that happened to hold the reigns of power in Poland. What did the four deputies do to deserve being prosecuted? Did they kill, steal, rob, forge money, blackmail, rape…? Well, five years ago they dared to press the I-like-it button on one of the social media presenting an election spot of their party. What did the election spot show? The election spot warned of mass immigration to Poland of the people from the Third World, which could happen if the opposition party were to win the elections.

To sum up: the four deputies lost their immunity and are likely to be prosecuted by the European Union because they liked a spot run by a party that is one of the many legal parties operating within the European Union. What is the charge? Yes, you guessed it right: hate speech, or something to that tune.

Yes, there are many, MANY Europeans, especially in the Western part of the Union, who approve of the step taken by the European parliament. Those Europeans have been programmed all their lives to think that anything that diverges from the point of view accepted by the mass media is evil: fascist, Nazi, racialist, you name it. Yet, people with brains formatted by the dominant ideology of the Western world (which includes the European Union) should be reminded of an observation made by the German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the social-democrats, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a social-democrat.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Sadly, they most probably could not be bothered to consider these words. They need to learn them the hard way.

As for the four prosecuted deputies – Beata Kempa, Beata Mazurek, Patryk Jaki and Tomasz Poręba – good comeuppance! They all desperately wanted Poland to be joined to the European Union and most probably regarded opponents of Poland’s membership as “enemies of the people”. They wanted so badly to be part of the European Union that they themselves did all they could to become EU deputies. Now, of course, they might have second thoughts but… far be it from them to call for Polexit! They will call for rectifying the European Union, they are highly likely to use phrases like “Yes to the EU, no to EU’s malpractices!” or “Let us put a human face on the EU!” They will not need to invent those phrases: they have them at their disposal in the vocabulary inventory of the former Polish United Workers’ Party – the socialist (or communist, if you will) party that ruled Poland in the years 1944-1989. As it soon turned out that socialism did not work as it had been promised, Polish socialists went to great lengths to explain why. Why did socialism not work? Ah, because some individuals abused their positions of power, because some individuals distorted the noble ideals of socialism, because some individuals… but socialism as such was to be regarded as the bright future with no alternative. those socialists came up with the phrases to be chanted by the masses of people: “Yes to socialism! No to malpractices!” “Socialism needs a human face!”

Now the same is going to happen in relation to the idea of the European Union. It is the only bright future for the Old Continent with absolutely no alternative, and the wrong things are just distortions, malpractice, faults of individuals in positions of power, and so on, and so forth. So the world goes.

Chat Control 2.0 – big brother sees you

These days, almost everyone uses email or instant messaging applications such as Messenger. But have you ever wondered whether you would enjoy using these applications as much if you knew that every message or photo you send is being monitored?

This is exactly what the European Commission’s Chat Control 2.0 law is all about – in practice, the end of privacy when sending messages via email, SMS or uploading content to cloud storage services. Applications that offer encrypted messaging, such as WhatsApp or Signal, would also be controlled. Signal has already announced that it will leave Europe if this happens. The European Union’s proposal violates human rights, the Convention on the Rights of the Child and also the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. As always, lofty aims such as protecting young people, combating child pornography etc. are intended to disguise the real aim – total control.

At this stage, it looks as if a number of countries, including Germany, Austria, Poland and Estonia, are clearly opposed to the controversial bill. The problem, however, is that the bill has not been rejected, only its vote postponed. It is very likely that the bill (at least in a somewhat abridged version) will eventually be adopted. If this is the case, it will be possible to develop this law “quietly” over the coming years, and such changes will slowly and quietly begin to invade our privacy.

The European Union, which should offer its citizens a better standard of living, freedom and democracy, is slowly turning into a police state that wants full access to our private conversations and photos. As if surveillance by officials should make children safe!

This raises a question: should the Union be addressing these issues at all? Did the people who once voted in favour of joining the EU, for example in Central and Eastern Europe, approve the abolition of privacy?

Forward presence

How they love coining new phrases! Planned parenthood, pro-life, pro-choice, women empowerment, migrations, Euroscepticism, Anti-Europeanism, MAID (medical assistance in dying)… They all serve the purpose of painting white black and the other way round.

Planned parenthood is a code name for abortion on demand. The terms pro-life and pro-choice have been designed to remove a black-and-white distinction (good versus evil) and replace it with two positive choices. What a sleight of hand! Women empowerment is another word for disapproval of manhood and the role of men in society. Migrations obscure the fact that we are dealing with IM-migrations (of the Third World people into the white man’s world). The term Euroscepticism enfeebles the attitude that is antagonistic (not sceptic) towards the idea of uniting the Old Continent while the term Anti-Europeanism mendaciously suggests that there are weird Europeans who do not like themselves… through not liking the European Union! MAID is a contortion of the understanding of the word assist (with synonyms like help, support, save): it does not stand for saving, helping or supporting but for… putting an end to someone’s life! The association with the common word maid – a girl, a woman, who serves (but does not terminate the life of) the sick, the needy, the weak, the dying – has been hijacked and made to serve an entirely opposite purpose: the purpose of helping and advising someone how to die. One feels tempted to quote a poet who wrote:

One of these days when I die,

I won’t be expecting your help,

nor will I need your advice:

I’m sure I can do it myself.

(Władysław Broniewski)

Have you heard about such terms as forward presence and framework nation? Take forward presence. How does that term differ from the ordinary word presence? Maybe the difference is like that between democracy (i.e. the rule of the people) and people’s democracy (i.e. the people’s rule of the people). That’s at least the way the socialists or communists in eastern Europe before 1989 referred to the political systems that they had created and ran, and that’s the way they wanted to stress the difference between their system and that of the so called Western democracies. Forward presence in turn is a term coined by NATO masterminds who indicate with it a stronger (or enhanced, as they love to say) presence of the alliance’s troops in Eastern Europe, within the borders of the alliance’s eastern members. But why should this presence be called forward rather than eastern?

This forward presence is divided into a number of battlegroups made up of contingents from the host nation (the one where a battlegroup is deployed), contributing nations (those whose troops are deployed to the host nation) and a framework nation, which appears to be the nation in charge of a battlegropup. Why can’t a framework nation be referred to as simply a nation in charge or a leading nation or a commanding nation, i.e. why can’t a framework nation be known by the term that actually corresponds to reality? Host nations are those eastern countries that are closest to Russia, while framework nations are (apart from Czechia and Hungary) the countries of the old NATO, western European countries along with the United States and Canada. Obviously, Germany or France or the United Kingdom as framework nations by sheer economic, financial and military clout occupy political high ground: the host and contributing nations can only comply with what the framework nations decide. Not that the eastern European nations have anything against this subordination: with their deep-seated inferiority complex towards the West, submission comes naturally.

So, why the term forward presence rather than deployment of NATO troops as close to Russia as possible? Precisely for the purpose of concealing the fact of this (enhanced) deployment. The troops are not hostile, nor are they deployed: they are merely forward present. Were the Soviet missiles in 1962 also forward present in Cuba? What a pity this term did not have currency then. Imagine the then CIA director notifying the president of the United States of the (enhanced) forward presence of the missiles and military advisors from the framework nation of the USSR in the host nation of Cuba! JFK would have had a hard nut to crack, or would he? Something tells us that the CIA director did not mince words then; something tells us that the CIA director would have informed the president in no uncertain terms about the military threat and would have urged the resident to take action.

A further seventy years of inaction?

In the Middle East we have – as usual – more and more of the same. Regardless of how old you may be, from time to time you will have heard about clashes, assaults, wars, conflicts – you name it – between Israel and the rest of the Arab – Muslim – world happening there incessantly. On and on and on. Since 1948, since the year when the state of Israel was founded. Even people who are not conversant with politics will have heard about Hamas or Hezbollah, about the Six-Day War (of 1967), about the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights or the West Bank (of the Jordan), about PLA (the Palestinian Liberation Army) or the Yom Kippur War (of 1973), or, or, or. You may not be able to say much about the events or people or places – where the heck is Jordan or Syria or Lebanon – but you will have heard about all of them, so that by now you will have doubtless associated the Middle East with a forever war interspersed with longer or shorter periods of ceasefire. The events of the 7th of October and the following retaliatory measures are yet another (latest but by no means last!) link in this never-ending chain of clashes.

Now why have we all been hearing about the ongoing, never-ending, incessant conflict between Israel and the rest of the Arab world, especially between Israel and Palestinians for these more than 70 years?

The state of Israel, as you may know, was established in 1948. Its creation was brought about by no less an international organization than the United Nations (an organization that unites sovereign political entities – countries, states – but, by Lord, not nations as such, but never mind the detail). The genesis (Genesis!) of Israel could not have been more legitimate, could it? The point is that the same United Nations Organization stipulated that also a Palestinian state was to be created along with the state of Israel. Now more than seventy years have passed and although we have had the state of Israel for these more than seventy years, the Palestinian state is nowhere to be seen. Supposedly American presidents have always wanted to have both Israel and Palestine as sovereign countries in the Middle East. Supposedly, because somehow the United States has never been able to convince, persuade, compel Israel to recognize Palestine as a separate, independent political entity, and to release the Palestinian lands that Israel has grabbed. How is that possible that the UN resolution was implemented half-way only? How is it possible that the big United States has not been able to make the small Jewish state comply with the ruling of the United Nations? Especially, if you consider that the ruling of the United Nations overlaps with Washington’s interests in the Middle East because these interests are STABILITY. You may say that the United States is no international bully and respects the sovereignty of even the smallest of states, so if Tel Aviv has for all these years refused to comply, the Hill has been helpless.

The claim that the United States has not been able to persuade or compel Israel to comply with the United Nations’ decision because Washington respects the sovereignty of even small states is – yes – laughable. Of the numerous examples showing unequivocally how the United States has enforced its will on other nations, let us choose Yugoslavia. What Israel is to Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine and Egypt so was Serbia to Croatia, Bosnia, Slovenia, Macedonia and Albanians in Kosovo. They all wanted to become independent of Belgrade, so – stepwise – they broke away from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and they were assisted in it by the United States. Whenever Serbia wanted to keep a republic inside the fold or claimed small pieces of a break-away republic’s territory, the United States would step in and by hook or by crook force Serbia to comply with “international” dictates. It did not take the United States seventy years to make the former Yugoslavian republic obey “international law”.

The comparison is even more to the point if we set our sights on Kosovo because Albanians in Kosovo invite a comparison with Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Just as Serbia views its territory as comprising Kosovo with little regard for the fact that it is predominantly inhabited by Albanians, so, too, Tel Aviv would like to view Gaza and the West Bank as part of (the Greater) Israel with little regard that these territories are inhabited by Palestinians. Somehow, in the former case Washington (and America’s client states) was efficient in tearing Kosovo away from Serbia and establishing there a state that is recognized by a large number of countries. How much time did it take? A couple of years? Somehow, the same solution in reference to Palestine (i.e. Gaza and the West Bank) is hard to implement by the same United States, which is so efficient elsewhere in the world. Why? Is it because the Israelis don’t want such a solution and they have influential friends on the Potomac?

Why what was possible and relatively easy to enforce as a many-state solution in Yugoslavia (which was broken up into 1 Slovenia, 2 Croatia, 3 Bosnia and Herzegovina, 4 Serbia proper, 5 Republika Srpska, 6 Macedonia, 7 Montenegro, 8 Brčko District (look it up!) and 9 Kosovo) cannot be enforced in the Middle East? If we can have such a bizarre solution like that of having the sovereign state of Serbia (outside Bosnia and Herzegovina), the sovereign state of Bosnia and Herzegovina and that of Republika Srpska (not to be confused with Serbia proper!) inside Bosnia and Herzegovina (did you know about it?), why can’t we have a Palestinian state straddling Israel with its one part located in the West Bank and the other in Gaza? If we can have Brčko District, why can’t we have the City of Jerusalem turned into something similar i.e. a “self-governing administrative unit with a special status reflecting the multi-ethnic nature of the region” to quote Wikipedia’s words?

The Hamas attacks from October 7, 2023 and the ongoing war keep reminding politicians across the board about the necessity of creating a Palestinian state, but we may be sure that nothing whatsoever will be done, just as it has not be done for over seventy years.

It’s even worse than that. During the many fratricidal fights in the former Yugoslavia, the West (read: the United States) was quick to spot war crimes and to hold the “guilty” accountable for them by putting many (mainly Serbian) political and military leaders on trial. Why nothing of the kind is happening now or has been happening for the many years of the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis? It is somehow hard to imagine that Serbs committed many war crimes against Albanians (and Croats) within a few years whereas Israelis have not committed any atrocities within more than seventy years! It looks like Serbs had to be intimidated by show trials while Israelis do not.

No wonder then that if nations of the world see this partisan approach in the Middle East (and elsewhere), they resort to arms rather than to international organizations, and (like Palestinians nowadays) they prefer to fight rather than talk.