Sam Kolitch: What is the root cause of the United States’ desire to confront China?

Chas Freeman: I think the rudimentary driver of the United States’ confrontation with China is psychology, not strategy. We became the world’s largest economy sometime in the 1870s. That’s 150 years ago. Now we’ve either already been eclipsed, or we’re about to be eclipsed, by China. So we’re afraid of not being number one and we’ve decided that we will hamstring the rise of China. No one on the American side has described where this confrontation is supposed to take us—it’s just an end in itself. Also, we have exercised military primacy in the Asia-Pacific region since 1945. Now, we confront the return of China to wealth and power in the region. And our position in the Asia-Pacific is precarious. What does that mean? It means that we object to things like China’s anti-access and area denial weapon system (A2/AD), otherwise known as defense. The Chinese now can stop us from running through their defenses. So this is a threat: we’re not all-powerful anymore. We are in danger of losing primacy.

But there’s not much evidence of China wanting to replace us. They are displacing us in some spheres because they’re big and growing and successful. Do they want to take on our global dominion and hegemony role? No, but we assert that they do. We posit that China thinks and behaves like us: “We had Manifest Destiny and it took us across the Pacific to the Philippines. Therefore, China must have a Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny in mind.” This is wrong. Things don’t work like that. So I would argue that we have inhaled our own propaganda, and we are living in the appropriately stoned state that that produces.

dizastar posted:

im readin Sultan Galiev, le père de la révolution tiers-mondiste (sultan galiev, father of third worldist revolution).

a translation of this would be insanely cool ive been curious about this book for years!! practically no english literature of any depth available on him

marknat posted:

he was purged by Stalin for pan-turanist conspiracy, wasnt he?

http://ml-review.ca/aml/MLRB/Sultan-Galiyev-FINAL.htm

not surprising one bit hahaha

liceo posted:

this is one of the best websites i have ever looked at.

https://www.foundalis.com/

definitely click on every single link that he has because they all stay in-house lmfao

An Open Letter to My Northern Neighbors
Dear nationals who insist to call yourselves — and only yourselves — “Macedonians”:

Why do you deny this right from me?

I am a Macedonian. At least, that’s what I want to call myself. I was born in Greek Macedonia, specifically in the city of Edessa, and so I identify myself as follows: an Edessian, a Macedonian, a Greek, a Balkan, and a European. Do I have this right? Do you grant me this right?

Aren’t you the champions of the idea that people must have the right to determine by themselves what they want to be called? Yes, right? Then why do you deny that I, too, am a Macedonian?

dizastar posted:

im readin Sultan Galiev, le père de la révolution tiers-mondiste (sultan galiev, father of third worldist revolution). history book surrounding sultan galiev, his theory of national liberation and his relation towards the CPSU. I just started it but i feel like its gonna be an important read to me, its never been translated into english and i dont know if theres much reading material about him in english so i'm even thinking about translating it for my pals at tHE rHizzonE and compiling it into a thread. poster parenti if u read this and you're interested i could scan it and we'd divide the chapters in half for translation work

The book is available on libgen already, so there's no need for a scan (http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=ADF9A632C43EB4CAF1774407D030219D) -- a translation would be extremely valuable however, as there's not much of his work been translated beyond excerpts and the like, and a full book on him is missing (albeit the book "Muslim National Communism in the Soviet Union: A Revolutionary Strategy for the Colonial World" discusses him extensively, and is very good)

Sunday posted:

i am reading about the first world war, as an event it was very bad, tragic in fact, but the book i am reading about it is very good,

cars posted:

seems like a great and not terrible idea to ascribe an absurd caricature point of view to all "Cuban communists" en masse because of this Web site you don't like. also to insult that entire group under the pretense that you've deduced the cause of their unified hive-mind opinion, again as dictated by this one Web site you read.

You're right I'm being a bit dramatic, I really mean the people who edit the wiki. I'll back away from typing some statement about the general ideological state of Cuba and simply say that a good amount of the editors of the wiki are of a radical liberal flavor but who knows how many people in Cuba even care about it. I was also being a bit dramatic when I called it more anti-communist than Wikipedia, there's definitely many things on there you would never read on Wikipedia. The North Korea article for example is positive, although brief. Ignore the my more dramatic statements but I just really don't like that website.

ribaraca posted:

if anyone has any recommendations for books on yugoslavian history...

BannedThought recently added a section on Yugoslavia, but there's no books on it's collapse unfortunately