China: Using the virus to bash Beijing could trigger a new cold war - by Simon Tisdall

 It’s natural to seek scapegoats to hide your mistakes. But the steady barrage of accusations and threats directed at China by rightwing politicians in the US and Europe, and China’s defiant response, is about more than deflecting blame for the coronavirus disaster.

Pent-up resentments on both sides are suddenly bursting into the open. The danger is that escalating mutual antagonism could, if unchecked, provoke a permanent east-west rift, even a second cold war.

Under pressure to curb the pandemic, Donald Trump has agreed a temporary ceasefire with Beijing. His anti-China jibes and barbed comments about the “Wuhan virus” have stopped. Chinese officials are also stressing bilateral cooperation rather than name-calling.

The European right is piling in, too. In Italy, the xenophobic populist Matteo Salvini issued his own warning about China and Covid-19. “If the Chinese government knew and didn’t tell it publicly, it committed a crime against humanity,” Salvini told parliament.

American conservatives long hostile to China are also using the crisis to bash Beijing. They accuse China of creating the problem, then exploiting its apparent success in suppressing the virus to boost its image and propagate anti-democratic ideas.

They are intensely irritated that China, which has sent aid to about 100 countries, is taking over America’s traditional global leadership role as the US visibly struggles to contain the outbreak.

“The Chinese communist party’s list of transgressions is long and shameful,” wrote James Jay Carafano of conservative thinktank the Heritage Foundation. It included failing to act sooner, lying about numbers infected, and propaganda suggesting the US started it, Carafano said.

Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign policy chief, says the virus has produced a “global battle of narratives”. China portrays itself as a reliable, disease-conquering partner for Europe and the wider world, in contrast to an untrustworthy US. Trump administration hawks and allies cast China, meanwhile, in the Soviet Union’s old role of contagious “evil empire”. Both narratives are parodies of the truth. But many on each side will believe them.

Europe, meanwhile, is caught in no-man’s land. EU leaders are struggling to collaborate amid competing national imperatives. A recent video summit saw Germany reject a French-led plan for “coronabonds” to bail out the eurozone. Italy, Hungary and Greece are among member states that have welcomed pandemic assistance from China, consistent with their pro-Beijing stance and entrenched Euroscepticism.

In the Netherlands, where a decision on allowing Huawei to help build 5G networks is due in June, the Chinese telecoms giant has donated 700,000 face masks. While this may win over the Dutch, Britain looks poised to review its Huawei links, along with other investments from China.

Read more at: Using the virus to bash Beijing could trigger a new cold war | Opinion | The Guardian

Russia, EU and Britain: What to make of the Putin fan club? - Thomas E. Ricks

US and European far-right party leaders praising Putin

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump recently went out of his way to praise Vladimir Putin as a man “highly respected in his own country and beyond,” and “a leader, unlike what we have in this country.”

Trump is not alone. Trump’s views echo those of a number of other political figures in the United States. In 2013, former Republican presidential candidate Pat Buchanan asked on his blog, “Is Putin One of Us?” Putin has a point, he wrote, when he asserts that the “’destruction of traditional values’” has been “imposed undemocratically.” Putin, he wrote, “may be seeing the future with more clarity than Americans still caught up in a Cold War paradigm.”

Putin also has many admirers on the right in Europe. Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, cites Russia (and China and Turkey) as models of the “illiberal state,” based on “national foundations” and achieving economic success. Nigel Farage, leader of Britain’s UKIP party, called Putin the world leader he most admired, “as an operator, but not as a human being.” French National Front Leader Marine LePen, Geert Wilders of the Dutch Freedom Party, and other leaders of European far-right parties have condemned the European Union and the United States for “encircling” Russia. LePen’s party has acknowledged receiving a $10 million loan from Russia, suggesting that her sympathies are requited.

Russian oligarchic funds have also been lavished on allies in Greece and elsewhere. What’s in this for Putin? Russia’s efforts to cultivate support among Europe’s anti-EU fringe movements are not part of an effort to propagate a “Putinist” ideology, but rather are aimed at weakening and dividing the European Union.

But more is going on than geopolitics. Many on the right project their idealized conception of leadership onto Putin: decisiveness, ruthlessness, pragmatism, manliness. In truth, Putin does have many skills as a political leader.

He is extremely well informed on a wide range of subjects (indeed, he would put many American candidates to shame) and he is capable of explaining difficult issues to the public in a simple and persuasive way. He has a quick, acid wit, and immense self-discipline. He is a skillful tactician, maintaining ties with the multiple factions competing for power and wealth (as they say in Russia, “the Kremlin has many towers”) and keeping opponents off balance with unexpected initiatives.

Read more: What to make of the Putin fan club? | Foreign Policy

US Politics and Religion: Pope Remarks:"You Can't Serve Two Masters"- Provokes Free-Market Right-Wing Freakout-by RM

Following the Catholic Pope Francis’s much-publicized Joy of the Gospel document, which critiqued uncontrolled capitalism and insinuated that thoroughly discredited trickle-down economics is naïve and just plain wrong,  right-wingers outdid themselves in hitting back at the Pope .

But lets face it  : what is so wrong with what the Pope wrote: "Just as the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say “thou shalt not” to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills. How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points? This is a case of exclusion. Can we continue to stand by when food is thrown away while people are starving? This is a case of inequality. Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape. Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded. We have created a “throw away” culture which is now spreading. It is no longer simply about exploitation and oppression, but something new. Exclusion ultimately has to do with what it means to be a part of the society in which we live; those excluded are no longer society’s underside or its fringes or its disenfranchised – they are no longer even a part of it. The excluded are not the “exploited” but the outcast, the “leftovers”.

Fox Business host Stuart Varney was just stewing about the pontiff’s remarks. “Capitalism, in my opinion, is a liberator,” he lectured Pope Francis from his television pulpit. “The free choice of millions of people is the essence of freedom. In my opinion, society benefits most when people are free to pursue their own self-interest. I know that sounds like a contradiction, but it is not.” It isn’t. It just isn’t." 

"Oh, yeah, and another thing. The pope has no business mixing politics with religion. Especially when his political views diverge with those of Fox."

Said Varney, “I go to church to save my soul. It’s got nothing to do with my vote. Pope Francis has linked the two. He has offered direct criticism of a specific political system. He has characterized negatively that system. I think he wants to influence my politics.”

Varney said Pope John Paul II was much more to his liking because as he said  Pope John Paul II was very much against communism, and far more into private property. Farney said Pope John Paul II never made rich people feel bad for having too much, while millions of others went without.

But whatever way you turn it, Pope Francis does not seem to mince words, which is going to make life very difficult for Catholic politicians (and many Christians), who want to trumpet their faith while at the same time bowing to the Golden Calf of Wall Street.

Gone, it seems, are the days when a Conservative politician could say “I’m pro-life” and that would be the end of the discussion as far as the Catholic/Christian hierarchy in the world were concerned.

There’s a new "shepherd" in town and he seems to be very concerned about the present deteriorating structure of the world economic system and the behavior of The Powers That Be within it.

Jesus once told a story about The Powers That Be of his day, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a Pharisee (equivalent of a today's Priest) was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. . . .and did not help him.

Francis, based on what he wrote in his Joys of the Gospel seems to be a much different kind of priest than the one in the biblical story, and he wants the TPTB's of today to sit up and listen.

Pope Francis's statements certainly are a wake-up call for all those "Bible pounding Christians" and politicians, who believe they are holier than holy and  "talk the talk, but don't walk the walk".

As the bible says in Matthew 6-verse 24 "No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money".


EU-Digest