Chinese Public Pushes for Full Ivory Trade Ban

china-ivoryBan-African_elephant

A full ivory ban would close the legal loophole that currently enables criminal syndicates to launder “blood ivory” from the black market into commercial circulation. Photo: Gary Stolz / USFWS

In China, civil society is pressuring the government to replace the current dual-market, mixed-message ivory legislature with a full blanket ban.

At the opening session of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference on March 3, former NBA star Yao Ming delivered a petition calling for an outright ban of the sale, import, purchase and transport of ivory and ivory products. Among the signatories were influential heads of big business – many of which belong to the ruling Chinese Communist Party – such as Wang Wenjing (Chairman and CEO of Yonyou Software) and Liu Jun (Chairman of Eagle International Holdings).

If this was adopted, it would seal the legal loophole that currently enables criminal syndicates to launder “blood ivory” from the black market into commercial circulation. Despite the worldwide ivory trade ban in 1989, the CITES Parties voted to allow China to purchase more than 60 tonnes of stockpiled ivory in a one-off sale in 2008. Reintroducing tusk trading to a market of maturing purchasing power both stimulated demand and encumbered regulation — and cultivated a thriving black market, since distinguishing illegal from legal ivory is not possible. A 2011 International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) investigation on China’s ivory markets discovered that 59.6% of licensed facilities sold illegal ivory, and unlicensed and non-compliant ivory facilities outnumbered legal ones nearly six to one.

Since the 2008 sale, elephant poaching rates have made a tragic comeback, reaching pre-1989 levels of up to 30,000 a year. Meanwhile, a 2012 survey by WildAid revealed that the Chinese knew little of the pain behind the ivory products they were purchasing. Of the 961 Beijing, Shanghai and Gaungzhou participants surveyed, more than half thought ivory came from domesticated or living elephants (11.5% and 11.3% respectively) or elephants that had died of natural causes (33.8%).

But there now are signs that awareness, and support, is spreading among the Chinese public.

Also on March 3, which was the first ever World Wildlife Day, a six-minute documentary On Elephant and Ivory was released. The film features Transformers 4actress Li Bingbing, speaking in her native Mandarin and coming face to face with the carcass of a speared female elephant – her face removed by poachers for her tusks.

And this is just the latest in a number of developments in a campaign which has seen an intensification in momentum and results recently. A series of public service announcements entitled “Say no to ivory” featuring the popular actress and basketball star have gone viral on Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter. Then on February 27, a number of big business CEOs in China – including 10 individuals from the Forbes 2013 China Rich List – released a pledge to never purchase, possess, or give ivory as a gift.

On top of this, the WildAid survey reveals that 94% of the participants support an out right ban on ivory products in China, to stop the poaching of elephants.

And the government seems to be responding. Last year, the State and National Forestry Departments launched an ongoing effort where it appeals to travelers through text message not to purchase ivory or rhino horn. In January, Chinese officials crushed more than six tonnes of its seized ivory stockpile – a symbolic move that was widely documented in national and global media. The following month, on February 13, the Chinese government took part in and signed up to a declaration at the London Conference on the Illegal Wildlife Trade, stating that they “support the existing provisions of CITES prohibiting commercial international trade in elephant ivory”.

Meanwhile Hong Kong, the gateway through which much of the ivory is smuggled to mainland China, in January took decisive action to burn its ivory stockpile, and local organisation HK for Elephants has launched a petition to ban ivory sales in territory, and will deliver this to the region’s government. Show your support and sign here.

Elephant populations have halved in the last 10 years, and the significance that extinguishing the black market in China – world’s largest demand source – would have, cannot be underestimated. It would be a monumental step towards protecting elephants themselves being extinguished from this planet – a scenario that would amount to an environmental, and moral, catastrophe.

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About the Author
Astrid Andersson is an Annamiticus contributor and passionate wildlife enthusiast. Originally from Sweden, she grew up in Hong Kong and has spent the last five years working as an editor and journalist in both Hong Kong and Thailand’s media industry, after graduating with a BA in International Development and Politics from the University of Leeds, England. Being based in Southeast Asia – a veritable highway for the global traffic of endangered animal parts – she hopes to influence the trade and market in that region.

Ukraine and the Great Asian Enclosure

Russia Crosses an Important Rubicon in the Crimea
by ALEXANDER REID ROSS

Armed paramilitary policemen patrol near the Kunming Railway Station in Kunming, in western China’s Yunnan province Sunday, March 2, 2014. More than 10 assailants slashed scores of people with knives..The attackers were Uighurs, a separatist ethnia from Xinjiang that has received assistance from the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED), an outfit which also helped the Maidan in Ukraine. Registered as an NGO, NED is an underhanded tool to advance US interests and create turmoil in any country that tolerates its activities.

The Cornerstones of Eurasia

When Pravy Sektor’s Dmitry Yarosh called on the Chechen liberation fighters to join Ukrainian nationalists in global struggle, he accented the North Atlantic’s energy politics better than anyone before him. Although Pravy Sektor blamed hackers for the call to arms, we ought to take the connection between the Caucasus and the Crimea extremely seriously.

The US and UK support Chechen moves for independence based on the vision of a “liberated region of the Caspian Sea,” which would turn over its vast energy resources to “the global marketplace.”

This vision has been thwarted by Putin’s devastating grip on Chechnya, as well as Moscow’s involvement on behalf of Abkhazia and South Ossetia during the Russia-Georgia War of 2008. The outcome of the Kremlin’s maneuvers has secured Russia’s energy corridor from Central Asia into Europe through Ukraine. Hence, Pravy Sektor’s manifesto for cross-cutting resistance in infrastructural cornerstones appears to connect North Atlantic’s interests while also exposing the general strategy of provoking separatism in order to overthrow competing circles of influence.

It seems surprising, then, that Yarosh left out the rebels in that other Western infrastructural cornerstone—Syria—in his sabre rattling. Syria under Assad seeks to become a “four seas” hub, uniting the Caspian, Black Sea, Persian Gulf, and Mediterranean. Currently, Russia dominates the Caspian Sea, and holds the weight of power in the Black Sea after grabbing the Crimea. With Assad’s Syria in place, the Kremlin has a strong foothold in the Mediterranean as well.

As in Chechnya and Ukraine, the US and allies such as Turkey support militants in Syria for a variety of reasons—not least of all, to pry hegemony from China and Russia. In the case of Syria, a gas pipeline from Iran through Iraq stands to generate capital and sovereignty for those powers that the US seeks to oppress. It also connects the Persian Gulf to Russia’s encircling network. Critical within this network is also the nearly-concluded Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline, which could be linked up to the Russia-China Central Asian pipeline labyrinth that spans more than 6,500-miles.

Southern Lines of Contention

While China and Russia are lassoing in the Asian steppes one pipeline at a time, the US has its own pipeline in mind—one that runs from Turkmenistan into India via Afghanistan and Pakistan (the TAPI), and provides a possible counterbalance to the Iran-Pakistan pipe. To secure its TAPI, the US famously entered into deals with the Taliban in 1998, and the Taliban are again being called upon through what RusEnergy analyst Mikhail Krutikhin calls an “informal tripartite union” with Pakistan and China to keep the pipeline safe. Business as usual.

While the Taliban is called upon for “protection” of TAPI in South Afghanistan and Central Pakistan, Baloch insurgents have been reportedly commissioned by the CIA to run down the Taliban in southern Pakistan. Meanwhile, the US army has attempted to mediate between the different factions of the Baloch liberation movement, against the interests of Pakistan. According to Sharat Sabharwal, India’s former High Commissioner to Pakistan, the Quetta Shura and Haqqani network have been regarded as assets by Pakistan’s military, as “they have political links and have been used by the security establishment to settle scores with Baloch nationalists.” However, the settling of scores does not rule out collusion. Leading Balochistan separatist groups like the Jundullah are also part of the Taliban, so Pakistan’s sheltering of the latter has only fed the former.

US influence in the region boils down to a deeper purpose of US-Saudi hegemony: use the militants to protect the TAPI in Southern Afghanistan and Central Pakistan, but keep the Pakistan-Iran pipeline in the danger zone. Only a week ago, a pipeline from the southern field of Quadirpur exploded, killing two security guards. The explosion was likely the result of an attack by militants, as was another attack a month before, which destroyed part of a pipeline in the Southwest. Suspicions of Sunni Baloch separatists in the service of US-Saudi hegemony are intensified by a smattering of recent revenge attacks on the border of Iran in response to, among other things, reports of massacres carried out by Iran’s overseas elite squad, the Quds Force, in Syria on the side of Assad.

The idea for an independent Balochistan has high-powered public support in the US vis-à-vis a faux-camarilla surrounding Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, who declared last year, “It is time Washington stopped aiding Pakistan and developed a closer friendship with India and, perhaps, Baluchistan.” Rohrabacher’s less public allies include retired Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters, who hopes for the dissolution of Pakistan in tandem with Baluchistan’s self-determination. Peters’s ambitiously redrawn map of West Asia, which includes a Sunni Iraq partitioned from a new “Arab Shia State,” along with a vastly reduced Pakistan, has been used in a training program for senior military officers at the NATO Defense College and likely the National War Academy.

Running Up North

What is most at stake in Balochistan is not only the gas pipeline network, but the strategic deep sea Port of Gwadar, which the US and Saudis have sought in vain to keep from Chinese hegemony. At the end of last month, China approved $1.8 billion to nine projects destined to develop road, rail, and fiber links between China and Pakistan via an “oil city” in Gwadar including a refurbished oil refinery. Pakistani authorities have followed up by insisting on the need to develop a strong naval base.

China has another $10 billion it is looking to spend on projects in Pakistan, including an oil pipeline running crude from Dubai through Gwadar, and sweeping north up the Karakorum Highway, the highest paved international road and the shortest distance from Pakistan to Western China. The pipeline would likely complete its journey in Xinjiang—the symbolic starting point of China’s “march west.”

Xinjiang is the site of massive development projects currently underway to bring “prosperity” into the mountains and deserts once dominated by Uighurs. The US Congress, of course, was only five years ago found to be giving $200,000 per year via the National Endowment for Democracy to the World Uigher Congress, which has been blamed for intense rioting and uprisings that have marked the Uigher separatist movement in Xinjiang. (Incidentally, the Uigher separatist movement made an inglorious reappearance in the form of a rampaging knife attack at a train station just days ago.) Xinjiang is also a critical stopping point for the Kazakhstan-China oil pipeline running from the Caspian, which would complete the circle of pipelines.

Within this great ring lies a huge amount of investment that China is making in Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan. Kyrgyzstan’s Bukhara-Tashkent-Bishkek-Almaty pipeline, operated by KyrKazGas (a joint venture of KazTransGas and Gazprom-owned Kyrgyzgas), will be connected to China, and a new pipeline from Turkemistan to China through Tajikistan will be built in the ongoing development of the China-Central Asia gas pipeline.

The Enclosed

Last month, China also set into operation an oil refinery in Kara-Balta, Kyrgyzstan, run by Zhogda. Billed as taking Kyrgyzstan off of Siberian oil dependence, the refinery ran into problems from the early stages of construction. While Kyrgyz Prime Minister, Jantoro Saptybaldiyev, encouraged a hasty construction, the refinery fell behind schedule, and the site began to rack up violations. Meanwhile, China began to construct a new refinery in Tokmak connected via Soviet-era railway to Chinese-owned oil fields in Kazakhstan.

With Central Asia’s oil-by-rail already in its nascence, a new pipeline is in the planning stages. Upstream, downstream, and infrastructural control means Xi Jinping is becoming a new oil baron in Central Asia. But protests against the Kara-Balta refinery within Kyrgyzstan have also occurred on a regular basis. Residents insist that the refinery is too close to rivers and residential areas, and that it pollutes the air. Indeed, the state environmental agency’s test showed local petroleum levels in soil 175-times the limit. Many also fear the intrusion of Chinese influence. For now, the Kara-Balta refinery is suspended.

Enormous enclosures do not come without a price. The growing global tumult is a symptom of the global land grab—the expropriation of land and resources by competing international powers to suit the needs of a rapidly expanding global consumer culture. As China and Russia broaden the belt around Asia, the impotence of the US’s strategy of aiding fascists, Islamists, and separatists in attempts to “liberate” natural resources and infrastructure becomes apparent. This is why Russia crossed an important Rubicon in the Crimea: not only have they proved that they aren’t bluffing in Syria, but they have exposed proxy wars by engaging in open conflict, thus heightening the visibility of the interconnected and ongoing game of global domination.

Alexander Reid Ross is a contributing moderator of the Earth First! Newswire. He is the editor of Grabbing Back: Essays Against the Global Land Grab (AK Press 2014) and a contributor to Life During Wartime (AK Press 2013). This article is also being published at earthfirstjournal.org/newswire.

How do you plead? Saving the megaspecies—rhinos, elephant, tigers—the debate heats up

By Simon Jenkins
The Guardian, Thursday 13 February 2014

London conference of Cites, the world wildlife organisation, saw panjandrums from 46 countries meet with British royalty in the painted halls of Lancaster House. Previous Lancaster House conferences liberated Africans from bondage. This one put them back. The Prince of Wales and the Duke of Cambridge pledged to “end the ivory trade” and “secure the future of these iconic species”, notably the rhino and the elephant. Never were words so futile.

The problem with the author’s proposal is that it’s pretty disgusting, reeking with a realistic acceptance of speciesism, but what alternatives do we really have?

The futility would not matter if it were not so counterproductive. Cites is to wildlife what the US Drug Enforcement Administration is to narcotics. Its chief, John Scanlon, talks like a hardline cop about the need for ever more “undercover operations and harsher penalties“. But however many NGOs and bureaucrats it takes fill a luxury hotel, you cannot defy the law of economics. You cannot stifle demand by banning supply. You merely raise price. One rhino horn can be worth as much as $300,000. That figure is a death sentence on every rhino.

Few people care deeply enough about distant wildlife to challenge those who offer to make them feel good. Hence the ghoulish PR that precedes Cites conferences, of members destroying quantities of ivory in fires and crushers. This time Barack Obama ordered the US to crush six tons and China duly crushed the same. France crushed three tons. This appalling waste merely increases poachers’ profits and insults Africa, to which the value of the ivory properly belongs. It is like medieval princes burning food to taunt starving subjects.

When Cites first began flexing its muscles in the 1980s an argument took place between ivory-producing southern Africa and western wildlife charities. The Africans, notably South Africa, Namibia and Tanzania, argued that conservation was best achieved if local people had a vested interest in it – whether from tourism, controlled hunting or ivory sales. As long as people craved ivory, the alternative was massive poaching.

The American writer Raymond Bonner, in his book At the Hand of Man, described how US charity fundraisers overwhelmed the Africans. Big money required “charismatic megaspecies” to be saved from imminent extinction. The elephant was declared endangered when it was not. The world was flooded with pictures of mangled animals and in 1989, the trade in ivory and horn was banned.

Every prediction made by the Africans was right. Prices soared. In 10 years elephant numbers halved, and have continued to plunge by another two thirds. An estimated 22,000 African elephants are killed annually in industrial massacres. The Asian elephant faces extinction. Rhino deaths have gone from a handful a year to more than a thousand, with horns the price per kilo of gold.

It is hard to think of a more desperate failure of world government. Yet those responsible gather at Lancaster House to call for more of the same. Reducing consumption of any product requires reducing demand. Birds of paradise were hunted close to extinction until they went out of millinery fashion. Ivory demand did decline in Japan in the 1980s and China in the 1990s, leading to lower prices and less poaching. The market soon recovered with economic liberation. Illegal suppliers now hold 90% of the Chinese market and rule their empires like Afghan drug lords.

The survival of wild animals depends entirely on those among whom they live. Elephants eat up to 453kg of vegetation a day and, in India, kill up to 200 people a year. They may be glorious creatures but they are destroying their ever-shrinking habitats. Unless local people want to save them, they will be poached to the point where just a few remain in fortified reserves.

The movement for African “community conservation” gained ground in the 1990s, with such ventures as Campfire in Zimbabwe and regulated hunting in Tanzania and Namibia. It has gained little purchase with western conservationists. Tanzania’s wildlife director, Alexander Songorwa, had to plead with the US in the New York Times recently “on behalf of my country and all our wildlife” not to ban trophy hunting. His $75m revenue supports 26 game reserves.

Meanwhile Namibia auctions up to five ageing rhinos a year for culling, recently fetching $350,000 each. This is far more than photography tourism could ever generate, and goes straight into wildlife protection and breeding. While more than 1,000 rhinos a year are reportedly poached in South Africa, Namibia’s population is rising. Yet the auctions are vilified in the US. Richard Conniff, author of The Species Seekers, wonders that Americans who struggle to preserve the prairie dog “should be telling Namibians how to run their wildlife”.

But hunting will not deliver the sort of money for conservation that could come from sales. Here Cites has an example from elsewhere. The killing of wild crocodiles has virtually ceased, demand for skins being met from captive breeding. The South African conservationist Michael ‘t Sas-Rolfes has already made a powerful case for “ranched horn” from rhinos to underpin their protection.

Vague promises to get tough with ivory and horn dealers will have no more impact than getting tough with drugs growers. Animals will not be protected in the wild unless some value can be imputed to them. They will go the way of the European bear and the American bison. That value must accrue to those who alone can save them – Africa’s hard-pressed farmers, now increasingly inclined to turn to poaching. They and China’s consumers have a shared interest in wildlife conservation. Why criminalise them both?

________

Obama’s ProtoWar Against Russia and China

Nuclear Brinksmanship

One of China’s Air Force strategic bombers. Far more advanced craft is being developed. China is no longer a backwater nation in weapons designs. (Public domain)

by ERIC SOMMER

[dropcap]R[/dropcap]ussia and China are both under attack by a multi-pronged U.S.-led ‘proto-war’ which could erupt into ‘hot war’ or even nuclear war. ‘Protowar’ or ‘proto-warfare’ is the term I have coined to describe the use of multiple methods intended to weaken, destabilize, and in the limit-case destroy a targeted government without the need to engage in direct military warfare.

Protowar methods include threats against the targeted country; economic sanctions; military encirclement around its borders. cyber-warfare, drone warfare, and use of proxy forces from within or from outside the country for political and/or military action against the local government.

U.S.-led protowars also invariably include propaganda campaigns against the targeted governments. The media campaigns are waged by the five giant media conglomerates which now control 90% of the U.S. media and which are directly linked to the U.S. foreign-policy establishment through various means including corporate memberships in the Committee for Foreign Relations.

You can recognize these media campaigns because they frequently employ the words ‘human rights’ or ‘democracy’ as the pretext for U.S. state protowars against other countries. Sometimes, of course, these words cannot possibly be applied at all, as in the massive support currently given to the murderous military dictatorship in Egypt or the midevilist kingdom of Saudi Arabia. In these cases the U.S. media and government substitute the words ‘U.S. National Interest’ for ‘human rights’ as the pretext for targeting another country.

Proto-warfare often precedes, or leads up to, hot wars, as when a decade of economic sanctions, media demonization, and media-supported lies about ‘weapons of mass destruction’ led up to the Iraq war. Thousands of young American men and women were sent over to kill and be killed, or to be injured or traumatized, to say nothing of the up to a million Iraqis who died as a result of the war. However, Iraq did not possess nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction, so there was no danger of a nuclear conflagration. Matters are much different with respect to Russia and China, both nuclear powers.

The ProtoWar Against Russia and China

U.S.-led proto-warfare against Russia and China has a number of elements. To begin with, it conforms to two popular doctrines in U.S. foreign policy circles. The first doctrine states that the U.S. must never allow another super-power to emerge, and must remain the unchallenged dominant force on Earth. This doctrine is clearly set-out in the original version of the U.S. Defence Department policy document known as ‘the Wolfowitz doctrine:

“Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.”

The document containing this statement and similar notions was changed for public consumption after the original provoked an outcry when it was leaked to the press.

The second doctrine underpinning proto-warfare against Russia and China is that U.S. dominance of the planet depends on control of the Eurasian land mass, on which Russia and China occupy key positions. This doctrine has been heavily promoted by former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. “For America,” he has written, ” the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia… Eurasia is the globes largest continent and is geopolitically axial. A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the worlds’ three most advanced and economically productive regions… Eurasia is thus the chessboard on which the struggle for global primacy continues to be played.

In pursuit of Eurasian dominance a whole gamut of protowar tools are now being used by the U.S. in its campaigns against Russia and China. Militarily, the U.S.-led Nato military alliance has progressively squeezed Russia’s’ strategic space by enlisting one former Russian aligned state in Eastern Europe after another. Now, with a U.S.-supported coup-imposed government in power in Kiev, there is open talk of Nato also incorporating Ukraine, a country right on Russia’s’ border.

To help U.S. readers understand the significance of Natos’ movement around Russia, imagine that from South America, up through central America, and up to Mexico and Canada, one country after another was being integrated into a Russian-dominated military system.

Russia’s Sukhoi Su-34 is an advanced tactical strike fighter. Russia currently has many more advanced planes, some surpassing the US designs. (Wikimedia)

Other current protowar actions against Russia include economic sanctions; the use of the Ukraine crisis as a pretext to mobilize more U.S. and other Nato forces in Eastern Europe for purposes of intimidating or threatening Russia; and the publication by the U.S. media conglomerates of an unending series of lies, half-truths, and obscurantism’s regarding the Ukraine, in order to demonize Russia and prepare the U.S. public to accept whatever actions the U.S. state and military chooses to take.

On the other side of Eurasia, U.S. military encirclement of China has also recently proceeded apace. Military bases and transfers of billions of dollars in military equipment have been positioned around China for years in areas such as South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan.

Now, with the Obama administrations’ so-called ‘pivot to Asia’, a new more ambitious program called ‘Air-Sea battle plan’ involves deployment of large amounts of very hi-tech military systems and equipment in the pacific area all aimed at China.

At the same time, new U.S. military bases are being opened across the Pacific arena, from the Philippines to Australia, with no other conceivable target but China.

In conjunction with this Pacific military build-up, the U.S.state is attempting to use previously minor disputes over ownership of maritime resources to turn a number of smaller Asian nations into proxies to help it destabilize China. These nations include Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, and the Philippines. By offering its support, and in some cases promises of military assistance in any maritime conflict with China, the U.S. has stoked the ambitions and aggressive nationalist tendencies of these smaller nations vis-a-vis China.

Coinciding with the military build-up against China is extensive cyber-penetration of China by the U.S. NSA (National Security Agency), as revealed by whistle-blower Edward Snowden.

This penetration includes wholesale capture of hundreds of thousands or millions of Chinese mobile text messages; the monitoring of mobile phone conversations of Chinese leaders; and serious intrusions into the computer network backbone system of Beijings’ Tsinghua university, which is linked to large numbers of Chinese research centers including labs engaged in sensitive military-related work.

The NSA has also penetrated and compromised the server computers made by Chinese Huaweii, a giant telecommunications equipment and networking company, whose equipment is used throughout China and around the world.

Russia's strategic deterrent comprises the submarine fleet armed with ICBMs. (Photo: Russian Pacific Fleet).

Russia’s strategic deterrent comprises an advanced submarine fleet armed with ICBMs. (Photo: Russian Pacific Fleet).

It should be noted – and emphasized – that the U.S. government has never apologized or stated that these cyber-attacks on China will stop.

Other U.S.attempts to destabilize China include political and economic support for separatist movements by some members of ethnic minorities in the Chinese provinces of Xinjiang and Tibet. Since the 1950’s, first the CIA and later the so-called “National Endowment for Democracy’, which is funded by the U.S. government, have transferred millions of dollars to the so-called Tibetan government-in-Exile in India. Both sets of money transfers are in the public domain, due to the U.S. Freedom of Information Act.

At the same time, a so-called ‘East Turkistani Government In Exile’ claiming to represent XInjiang province was formed in Washington DC in 2004. On his way to the Beijing Olympics in 2008l, then President George W. Bush stopped by the see one of the leaders-in-exile of the Xinjaing separatist movement.

To put all these U.S. protowar actions against China in perspective, we need to consider who is really the aggressive actor in Asia. The U.S. has over 650 military bases in other peoples’ countries, including Asia, while China has none. The U.S. is impinging militarily and politically in China’s backyard; China is not interfering in U.S. relations or military activities in the U.S. backyard. The U.S. has a doctrine of global supremacy; China has no such doctrine and basically wishes to be left alone to develop economically and to engage in economic trade with other nations.

Russian BUK anti-aircraft battery.

The danger of the U.S.Eurasian protowar erupting into hot war – or even nuclear war – stems from a single factor: Previous U.S.-led protowars which erupted into hot wars were against countries like Serbia, Iraq, or Libya. Those countries did not have nuclear weapons and could not effectively defend themselves against U.S. military and other pressures Russia and China are in a different category – they are nuclear- armed and can defend themselves.

The U.S. state presumably does not intend to provoke a hot war with Russia and China.. But directing intensive protowar against powerful nuclear-armed states is to risk the possibility of ‘sleep walking’ into the abyss through miscalculation, or through a gradual hightening of conflicts which finally go out of control. In 1914, with the European powers of the day already on edge, it took just the assassination of a minor duke in a peripheral country to trigger World War I. As an old adage has it, “If you play with fire, you may get burned.”

Eric Sommer is an international journalist.

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The revival of Japanese militarism

Abe: Too much of a willing tool for US designs in the Far East.

Abe: Too much of a willing tool for US imperial designs in the Far East.

Peter Symonds, wsws.org

Nearly seven decades after the end of World II, the right-wing government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is rapidly remilitarising Japan, freeing its armed forces from any legal or constitutional constraints and revising history to whitewash the past crimes and atrocities of Japanese imperialism.

Abe has been engaged in an ideological offensive that was marked by his visit December 26 to the notorious Yasukuni Shrine to Japan’s war dead, including 14 convicted class A war criminals. The same month, he appointed four right-wing figures to the board of governors of Japan’s public broadcaster NHK in order to shift its political orientation.

The purpose of the appointments has quickly become apparent. In late January, the new NHK chairman, Katsuto Momii, triggered a public furore by justifying the systematic abuse of hundreds of thousands of women as sex slaves by the Imperial Army in the 1930s and 1940s. Momii apologised for expressing his private view in his role as chairman, but did not retract the remarks.

This week, another Abe appointee, Naoki Hyakuta, declared that the Rape of Nanking, one of the worst atrocities of the twentieth century, “never happened.”

In 1937, Japanese troops entered the city and over a period of weeks engaged in an orgy of rape, murder and destruction in which up to 300,000 Chinese civilians and soldiers were killed.

Yet Hyakuta claimed that the Nanking massacre was fabricated in order to cover up the crimes of the US in dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is an argument that until now has been confined to extreme right-wing fringe groups. They justify the horrific crimes of Japanese imperialism in the 1930s and 1940s by pointing to those of US imperialism during World War II.

The denial of crimes on the scale of the Rape of Nanking has only one meaning—it is the ideological preparation for new wars and new atrocities.

The Japanese government is not alone. Five years after the eruption of the 2008 global financial crisis, capitalism is mired in economic slump and financial turmoil, fuelling inter-imperialist rivalries, neo-colonial interventions and diplomatic intrigues in every corner of the world.

It is no accident that as Abe is refurbishing Japanese militarism, the new grand coalition government in Germany is repudiating its previous policy of military restraint. Nor is the Japanese government the only one rewriting history. The British and Australian governments, among others, are seizing on the anniversary of World War I to glorify the bloodbath that claimed the lives of millions in the inter-imperialist struggle for colonies, markets and strategic dominance.

The chief destabilising factor in world politics is the eruption of US militarism. US-led neo-colonial interventions have devastated Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. Now, in the name of Obama’s “pivot to Asia”, the US is engaged in an all-out diplomatic offensive to undermine China and encircle it militarily.

The Obama administration is responsible for encouraging Japan to take a more aggressive stand against China, creating a dangerous new flashpoint in the East China Sea—the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu islands. Yesterday, US Secretary of State John Kerry met with his Japanese counterpart and affirmed again that Washington would back Tokyo in a war with Beijing over the rocky, uninhabited outcrops.

Having pressed Japan to remilitarise, the US has set political forces in motion that it does not control. The Abe government, while affirming the US-Japan alliance, is determined to defend the interests of Japanese imperialism.

Since coming to power in December 2012, Abe has boosted the military budget and established a National Security Council to concentrate foreign and defence policy in his hands. He is pushing to end constitutional restraints on the involvement of the armed forces in aggressive wars.

This revival of militarism is both to prosecute the interests of Japanese imperialism abroad and project outwards, against a foreign “enemy”, the tensions produced by the growing social crisis at home. Abe came to power promising to end two decades of deflation and economic stagnation. However, his “Abenomics” has proven to be a chimera, boosting share markets but failing to produce sustained growth.

Abe set out his agenda very clearly at the World Economic Forum at Davos last month. He made clear that Japanese imperialism was not about to relinquish its position as a leading power in Asia.

Dismissing those who described Japan as the “land of the setting sun”, Abe insisted that “a new dawn” was breaking. His portrayal of China as an aggressive new power comparable to Germany prior to World War I went hand-in-hand with an outline of pro-market restructuring designed to turn Japan into one of the “most business-friendly places in the world.”

There is no significant opposition in the Japanese political establishment to Abe’s rightward lurch to militarism. While voicing tepid criticisms of the government, the opposition Democratic Party of Japan, along with the Japanese Communist Party, fully backs Japan’s claims to the disputed islands in the East China Sea—the central issue in mounting tensions with China.

The working class, however, has a long history of opposition to Japanese militarism. The crimes of the wartime regime in the 1930s and 1940s were not confined to atrocities abroad such as the Nanking massacre. The Tokkō, or “thought police”, were as ruthless as the Nazi Gestapo in Germany in eliminating all forms of criticism or opposition, especially among workers. Abe’s recently enacted secrecy law provoked widespread opposition in Japan precisely because it recalled the 1925 Peace Preservation Law that greatly expanded the role of the Tokkō.

Abe’s provocative attacks on China, the comments by his NHK appointee denying the Rape of Nanking, and related developments constitute a sharp warning to workers and youth in Japan and every other country. The preparations for war are accompanied by a campaign of lies and jingoism that presages class war against the working class. Workers can halt the drive to war and the assault on their living standards and democratic rights only by unifying their struggles internationally on the basis of a socialist program to put an end to the bankrupt profit system.