JEFF BROWN—One of the great fabrications of Western mainstream media, among academics and on Wall Street is that China, starting in 1978 with Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms, became a capitalist country. The favorite Western shibboleth bandied about is that, China’s authoritarian regime (it’s almost never called a government) runs a system of state capitalism.
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STEPHEN GOWANS—The Stone and Kuznick view is, really, rather quite silly. They believe that Mao and Kim decided to become guerrillas, and Stalin, a Bolshevik, because these were routes to the acquisition of personal power, self-aggrandizement, and iron-fisted control. Yet, at the time, guerrilla and underground revolutionary were hardly the most promising career paths for people who lusted for power and self-aggrandizement. If Stalin really lusted after these things, why didn’t he link up with Tsarist forces, rather than the Bolsheviks, which until mid-1917 were a minor political force that no one (including many Bolsheviks) expected to take power?
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Glenn discusses the recent origins of AOC’s political career, and how much she has already distanced herself from her initial anti-establishment positions. The charitable interpretation is that AOC could not resist the forces of corruption that define the US duopoly, but that would require us to see at least some attempt on her part to oppose such forces, instead of simply caving in almost at once. The fake left co-optation rhetoric continues, of course. And the same goes for the rest of the “Squad” and the notorious Bernie Sanders.
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John J. Mearsheimer, the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor in Political Science and Co-director of the Program on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago, assesses the causes of the present Ukraine crisis, the best way to end it, and its consequences for all of the main actors. A key assumption is that in order to come up with the optimum plan for ending the crisis, it is essential to know what caused the crisis. Regarding the all-important question of causes, the key issue is whether Russia or the West bears primary responsibility.
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CHRIS HEDGES—The belief that the Democratic Party offers an alternative to militarism is, as Samuel Johnson said, the triumph of hope over experience. The disputes with Republicans are largely political theater, often centered around the absurd or the trivial. On the substantive issues there is no difference within the ruling class. The Democrats, like the Republicans, embrace the fantasy that, even as the country stands on the brink of insolvency, a war industry that has orchestrated debacle after debacle, from Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq, is going to restore lost American global hegemony. Empires, as Reinhold Niebuhr observed, eventually “destroy themselves in the effort to prove that they are indestructible.” The self-delusion of military invincibility is the scourge that brought down the American empire, as it brought down past empires.
