Ukraine Is The First Major War Of The “Age of War and Revolution”

I think with resource wars, and the century of what I call “The Bugs Fight Back”, (maybe using so much antibiotics wasn’t wise…) we have probably hit Peak People. Not a bad thing from the ecosystem’s point of view, but going to be a mess to live through.

William Gibson calls it “The Jackpot”, and it looks like we are well into Chapter One.

While there is no really good place to go if you leave the US, I do agree with those who chose China (or at least Asia). Not that they won’t have problems too, but they seem much more competent about addressing them and also their governments (be they democratic or not) seem to have much greater genuine concern over the welfare of their peoples.

Our leadership, who spent all their youth drooling over Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead sees the rest of us as mere “useless eaters” even though it’s them, not us, who really lack any tangible or meaningful skills.

The Neo-Liberal/pillage/resource outstripping/inequality clearly couldn’t hold. Good to see this overview for perspective, because when you’re in it it seems like it will go on forever.

I would suggest that understanding the story of C19 is critical to understanding a key aspect of these brave new days.

“Wars will rage: there will be less resources; food and water will be scarce and per-capita food consumption is going to drop for at least 70 or so years, maybe longer.”

70 years. Woof. I don’t think humans will last that long in a large-scale anarchistic scenario. We have created so many letho-toxic toys, and minds, and it’s such a little planet.

Here is what the progressive press is writing concerning the latest Russian missile attacks against civilians. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/10/ukraine-to-demand-step-change-in-western-aid-after-russian-missile-blitz

“The Age of Wars and Revolutions”

Huh. Another paradigm shift so soon after the last one. Well, but that’s how it goes. Relatively long periods of stability then bam-bam-bam, one quick forced change after another. Chaos reigns. And then… well, things settle down again for however long on a new foundation.

The wars have been part of our nonstop reality for the last 20 years and more. Whole regions of the globe have been broken by them, and none so far as I know have recovered. The wars have been the impetus for the reconstitution of some version of the Anglo-American Empire, or maybe that has been the impetus for the many wars, I don’t know.

Revolution though, I don’t know. Where is it? Uprisings there have been many, practically nonstop, but they don’t seem to coalesce into a Revolution unless you want to count the numerous rightist uprisings (color revolutions and such) leading to coups, overthrows and sometimes electoral victories for proto-and-post-fascist regimes.

The People have rarely chosen to take matters into their own hands except under extreme duress, or the wide perception of it whether real or not, and their ability or desire to persist beyond the moment is very limited. How many “monster demonstrations” of millions taking to the streets and rallying have we seen dissipate almost immediately once the last speaker finishes? Even the Trumpist MAGAs are fading out.

I think about China’s predicted population crash (halved by the end of the century) and the lifespan declines in more than the US. The cull is well under way. Partly deliberate, partly happenstance. At some point the decline becomes precipitous. Maybe within 20-30 years or so. By then, it will be a different world, no? And our tech bros will have achieved their fondest desires. Full spectrum dominance.

The desire for nuclear holocaust among some of our rulers has an upside you know. All out nuclear annihilation, so the thinking runs, not only reduces population quickly and in places thoroughly (and who can be against that, right?) but when done properly, it blankets the earth and skies in ash causing something we used to know as Nuclear Winter, actually reversing Catastrophic Global Warming — temporarily or permanently, hard to say — at least in the Northern Hemisphere, probably world wide, and who could be against that, also?

The Age of Chaos is a net good?

The Guardian changed into a dedicated establishment mouthpiece after GCHQ agents showed up at its offices in 2013 demanding the hard drives containing the Snowden files which they took into the basement where staff were directed to degauss them and destroy them with angle-grinders. A symbolic (and bizarre) act as the Guardian surely had backup copies stashed away elsewhere, but the message was clear.

Soon after this incident longtime chief editor Alan Rusbridger resigned and was replaced by Katherine Viner who has faithfully toed the neoliberal, Atlanticist and Zionist lines ever since.

You know what? My aging brain just realized that the phrase I wanted was probably ” Philosophical Objectivism” rather than ” Logical Positivism”.

So I should have typed . . . ” will explain Philosophical Objectivism for food”. Oh well . . .

@Soredemos,

I remember reading somewhere that in the very latest 1800’s, China invaded the “Eastern-ish” zone of Turkestan and killed about a million Eastern-ish Turkestanians as part of that conquest effort. But today’s search obstruction engines prevent me from finding specific links to that invasion. The best I can do is this . . .
https://dfrac.org/en/2021/09/22/fact-check-china-has-never-invaded-or-bullied-others-says-xi-jinping-at-the-un-is-it-really-true/

By the way, its a New China now. The whole Chinese Leadership says so. Part of the New China goal is to secure enough access to survival resources from everywhere to keep surviving at the level to which the Leadership would like to remain accustomed.
That will mean “stealth-colonization” of many places beyond China’s borders to keep the raw materials flowing. You don’t have to believe me now. You can watch the process unfold over the next few decades. I will repeat my prediction that China will make itself the most hated country in all of Southeast and South Asia by pre-empting all the water that falls on the Chinese side of the border on the headwaters of all the great rivers, so that the rivers cease to function as viable river ecosystems downstream from China . . . . and then cease to even deliver enough water for the downstreamers to even survive. Perhaps the ChinaGov will deign to sell the Downstream Barbarians enough river water flow to just barely survive . . . for a price.
That’s a prediction too. And the next few decades will prove me right or wrong.

I realize that technically-speaking, none of these examples cover the Island Barbarians to China’s East in the narrowest technical sense. But the New China has that covered too. Claiming the entirety of the China Sea from the Island Barbarian nations to the East who mistakenly think they own some of it too is motivated by a deep survival interest in all the lootable resources in and under the entirety of the China Sea. After the New China has strip-pumped the very last barrel of oil and gas from under the China Sea . . . and has strip-mined the very last fish from the waters of the China Sea, then China might lower its interest in owning the China Sea. And maybe not even then. And the Eastern Island Barbarians will join Southeast and South Asia in holding China close to their hearts as the most hated nation in Asia.

By that time, America should be so deeply declined as to be not even a factor at all.
Except perhaps as the New China’s Great Overseas Tibet, its Great Eastern Golden Mountain Treasure House, its Water Tower Number Two.

” So long, its been good to know ya “

Well, the wars have been ongoing forever, more or less. There was a brief quiet period in the 1980s. The frequency of occurrence has increased, but that’s because they are easier to start. Everything has sped up.

Wars are always about resources, always have been, no matter what they say. From refilling the royal coffers to stealing land, to now oil, profits, political power in order to grab foreign resources, and especially land for polluting small countries so as to extract maximum profit. Nothing much has changed except they learned how to profit from the wars themselves (selling arms and intel), too. So here we are. Or maybe they always did, and no one recorded it.

Resource shrinkage is what’s happening which means even more wars over anything from potable water to the rare earth minerals necessary for the surveillance network. Might even be over food sooner rather than later.

Their activities aren’t sustainable, but who knows who will last the longest and keep the deprivation going for the rest of us.

Concerning non-violence: Hopefully people will be less ideological, more pragmatical. But the question of violence is highly pragmatical. It’s a matter of who will gain from violence and who will loose.

And the direct producers mostly loose from violence because violence is what states are best at.

Sure, there will always be those who gain from violence because they aim not at raising poor people, but at organizing mafias. But mafias mostly live from plundering the direct producers; states may loose some taxes if mafias abound, but they can live with that.

@DifferentClue and @Soredemos
What you are looking for is the Dzungarian Genocide by the Qing in the 1700s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dzungar_genocide

China suffered the century of humiliation from the 1840s until 1949, but a major cause of this was the century of conquest to the west. About half of China’s land mass (but the far less populated half) was conquered by the Qing in the 1700s. But to do so, they ignored clear signs of vulnerability along their coast.
Important to know about the Century of Humiliation because it is central to contemporary China’s sense of itself. Important to know about the Century of Conquest to the West because it isn’t.

@Jessica

Show me any evidence that China has demonstrated any desire to (attempt to) invade and occupy an island of 125 million people. Further, show me any evidence that they remotely have the capability of doing so. It’s not clear China could even take and hold Taiwan, an island with about a sixth of the population.

Claims that Japan itself has any reasons whatsoever to worry about annexation by China are the height of absurdity. The two countries will continue to have their insipid nationalism fueled spats over inconsequential islands, but I will buy and eat a hat if anything remotely like Japan becoming the newest province of Wa or similar ever happens.

Japan will ultimately have to resign itself to becoming a kind of periphery state to a resurgent middle kingdom that has resumed its role as the center of gravity in the far east, instesd of a US client state, but that’s far different from conquest or control. Traditionally Japan managed to avoid even becoming a Chinese tributary client state, instead doing things like arrogantly claiming to have its own parallel Emperor.

I’m not familiar with the view of the Qing relaxing its vigilance against the West because of its expansions into Inner Asia.

For example, the earlier Ming expended a great deal of financial resources fighting the Japanese to help the Koreans, as well as relaxing its focus from the northern borders, and I guess different viewpoints can be had about how that related to the loss of the Central Plains about a half century later. It would be natural to see links, but not as obviously a direct cause as the Byzantines and Sassanids knocking each other out over centuries and leaving themselves open to the Arab conquests. Especially when there were other more important conditions for decline.

About Han Chinese diplomacy –

I concur with some of the others here about China’s expansions. Speaking as a Korean, it is quite remarkable that the last time Korea had a war with a Chinese dynasty – that was founded by Confucian ethnic Hans – was 1,300 years ago. And even then one can argue that it was border settling between a Korean nation undergoing ethnogenesis and a revitalized Chinese empire led by a vigorous Han-Xianbei mixed elite that was (aggressively) defining its place in the world after centuries of existential ruin and absolute chaos.

After the 7th century there have not been wars between Han Chinese and Koreans for over a millennium. Not discounting shrewd Korean diplomacy, but it is still remarkable given their proximity to each other and the power disparity. The only cases that come close would be incursions by the Red Turban rebels (a non-state group), and the Chinese coming to the aid of their North Korean allies to fight South Korea and her allies.

(All the numerous invasions from the north after the Silla-Tang War were by steppe peoples at very early stages of Sinicization, or not even that. And even those peoples mellowed out once they became culturally Chinese.)

One can argue the Song period does not count for Chinese non-aggressiveness, since the Song and Koryo did not share a border, blocked off from each other by the “barbarian” kingdoms in Manchuria and northern China. That is a fair point, but it also leads to another remarkable fact of (Han) Chinese foreign relations. The near complete lack of interference in domestic affairs.

The Chinese did play barbarians vs barbarians games with real threats like the Mongol tribes, but once a dependable tributary relationship was established with fulfillment of required displays of respect, it was basically hands off.

This was remarkable in the case of the Song since it needed and explicitly asked for help from the Koreans to fight as civilizational brothers against the northern hordes. Yet it stopped short at asking and did not push its tributary privileges to the point of coercion.

It was even more remarkable in the case of the Ming since, 1) it was a powerful dynasty, 2) it shared a border with Korea, and 3) the Chosun dynasty was constantly wracked by ideological and factional conflicts (i.e. susceptible to foreign manipulation). Yet it never played off one Korean faction against another. Even when it looked 50/50 between the Ming and the Manchus, the Ming’s request for help from Korea was more in the form of reminding them of their debts to the Ming during the Japanese invasions rather than outright coercion.

Contrast this with the current coercion of Korea by the US into the chip alliance, and the recent shameless export controls which affect Korean companies. Or the earlier coercion of Korea to participate in the laughable-were-it-not-so-sad “Coalition of the Willing” in invading Iraq.

By the way, the tributary relationship, though problematic by modern standards, was not exploitative. Chosun Korea successfully negotiated INCREASED number of tributary missions, to the ire of the Chinese, because the give-and-take terms were so profitable. (Caveats that early Ming-Chosun relationships did have quite a bit of tensions, extending to some exploitative tribute requests; but the overall point stands.)

A note about the Qing conquests. Aside from the salient points that they do not quite reflect Han Chinese tendencies, they can also be viewed as an early-modern Chinese state solidifying its hinterlands (via the leadership of an aggressive steppe people). As the US expanded westward and Russia to Siberia, so China into Inner Asia earlier than either of the two. All three had to give up some holdings in the modern era. The British, on the other hand and to name a few, failed to keep their near hinterland in Ireland and far-off one in India. So the US supporting Xinjiang independence or dreaming of partitioning Russia reeks of hypocrisy to the high heavens.

(Especially given Xinjiang is a geographically and demographically complex region with the Han Chinese, after the various and few Pamiri peoples, as the second oldest ethnic group to continually be involved there, albeit intermittently, for over 2,000 years. The Eurasian Turks, Uyghurs, in southern Xinjiang descend from older-than-Chinese Indo-Europeans mixing with more-recent-than-Chinese Asiatic Turks.)

PS My opinions about China actually diverge a lot from other South Korean, who are now comfortable with membership in the West and have adopted much of its attitudes. West-identifying Asians – such as South Koreans, Japanese, anti-communist Garden Grove Vietnamese, or Shah supporting and Aryan identifying Westwood Persians – will have narratives much more pleasing to Western ears. Sad that the great millennium-old amity between Korea and China has been replaced by the satisfaction of becoming first world and accepted by the conventional civilizational standard.

Astrid,

I’m flattered someone whose postings I enjoy reading liked it.

I rushed the reply while at work and can see now that it has quite a bit of rough spots.

If you’re interested, I’ve recently begun putting up stuff in a similar vein on Twitter, under the same handle as my name for the posting here. I only post replies – accessible under “Tweets & replies”. If you don’t have an account, you can just search under “from:uphillbend” in the search bar.

It’s pretty weak material w/ no technical insights and often teetering towards frustrated moralizing via short threads. My bi-cultural background seems to give them some interest, but only by going against the grain of both.

Working full-time self-employed in a wholesale business, the tweets have the same rough flaws as the above. And after only 200 plus tweets, I’m already thinking I should spend much less time on it.

Anyway, I just posted to this site on a spur of the moment motivation. I’m experiencing such unpleasant excitement often these days, as both my Korean and American backgrounds leave me open to similar US / West triumphalism and Sinophobia. So much bigotry dressed up in respectable outfits.

And gratitude to Ian for running a fine website for reasoned and illuminating discourse in these difficult times.