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Peace is a cliché: When the West cannot control the world unopposed, it means war

Andre Vltchek

Dedicated to my friend, a philosopher, John Cobb Jr

The West likes to think of itself as a truly “peace-loving part of the world”. But is it? You hear it everywhere, from Europe to North America, then to Australia, and back to Europe: “Peace, peace, peace!”
It has become a cliché, a catchphrase, a recipe to get funding and sympathy and support. You say peace and you really cannot go wrong. It means that you are a compassionate and reasonable human being.
Every year, there are “peace conferences” taking place everywhere where peace is worshipped, and even demanded. I recently attended one, as a keynote speaker, on the west coast of Denmark.
If a heavy-duty war correspondent like myself attends them, he or she gets shocked. What is usually discussed are superficial, feel-good topics.
At best, ‘how bad capitalism is’, and how ‘everything is about oil’. Nothing about the genocidal culture of the West. Nothing about continuous, centuries-long plunders and benefits that virtually all Westerners have been getting from it.
At worst, it is all about how bad the world is – “all people are the same” cliché. And, also, there are increasingly, bizarre, uninformed outbursts against China and Russia which are often labeled by Western neo-cons as “threat” and “rival powers”.
Participants of these gatherings agree “Peace is Good”, and “War is Bad”. This is followed by standing ovations and patting each other on the back. Few heartfelt tears are dropped.
However, reasons behind these displays are rarely questioned. After all, who would be asking for war? Who’d crave for violence, terrible injuries and death? Who’d want to see leveled, charred cities and abandoned, crying infants? It all appears to be very simple, and very logical.
But then, why do we not hear too often that “peace speech” pouring from the devastated and still de facto colonized African or the Middle Eastern countries? Aren’t they suffering the most? Shouldn’t they be dreaming about the peace? Or are all of us, perhaps, missing the main point?
My friend, a great Indian writer and thinker, Arundhati Roy wrote, in 2001, reacting to the Western “War on Terror”: “When he announced the air strikes, President George Bush said, “We’re a peaceful nation.” America’s favourite ambassador, Tony Blair, (who also holds the portfolio of Prime Minister of the UK), echoed him: “We’re a peaceful people.” So now we know. Pigs are horses. Girls are boys. War is Peace.”
When it comes from the lips of the Westerners, is ‘peace’ really peace, is ‘war’ really a war?
Are people in that ‘free and democratic West’, still allowed to ask such questions? Or is the war and peace perception just a part of the dogma that is not allowed to be questioned and is ‘protected’ by both the Western culture and its laws?
I’m not in the West, and I don’t want to be. Therefore, I’m not sure what they are allowed to say or to question there. But we, those lucky people who are ‘outside’ and therefore not fully conditioned, controlled and indoctrinated, will definitely not stop asking these questions anytime soon; or to be precise, never!

*

Recently, through Whatsapp, I received a simple chain of messages from my East African friends and Comrades – mostly young left-wing, revolutionary opposition leaders, thinkers and activists:
“Free Africa is a socialist Africa! We are ready for war! The young Africans are on fire! Death to the imperialist forces! Viva Bolivarian revolution! South-South Cooperation! Today we take the battle to the streets! Africa Must Unite!”
Such statements would sound almost ‘violent’ and therefore could be even be classified as ‘illegal’, if pronounced openly in the West. Someone could end up in Guantanamo for this, or in a ‘secret CIA prison’. A few weeks ago, I directly addressed these young people – leaders of the left-wing East African opposition – at the Venezuelan Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya. Yes, they were boiling, they were outraged, determined and ready.
For those who are not too familiar with the continent, Kenya has been, for years and decades, an outpost of the British, US and even Israeli imperialism in East Africa. It was playing the same role that West Germany used to play during the Cold War – a window shopping paradise, stuffed with luxury goods and services.
In the past, Kenya was supposed to dwarf the socialist experiment of Tanzania under the leadership of Nyerere.
Today, some 60 percent of Kenyans live in slums; some of the toughest in Africa. Some of these ‘settlements’, like Mathare and Kibera are housing at least one million people, in the most despicable, terrible conditions. Four years ago, when I was making my documentary film, in these slums, for South American network TeleSUR, I wrote:

“…Officially, there is peace in Kenya. For decades, Kenya functioned as a client state of the West, implementing a savage market regime, hosting foreign military bases. Billions of dollars were made here. But almost nowhere on earth is the misery more brutal than here.

Two years earlier, while filming my “Tumaini” near Kisumu city and the Uganda border, I saw entire hamlets standing empty like ghosts. The people had vanished, died – from AIDS and hunger. But it was still called peace.
Peace it was when the US military medics were operating under the open sky, on desperately poor and sick Haitians, in the notorious slum of Cité Soleil. I saw and photographed a woman, laid on a makeshift table, having her tumor removed using only local anesthetics. I asked the North American doctors, why is it like this? I knew there was a top-notch military facility two minutes away.
“This is as close as we get to real combat situation”, one doctor replied, frankly. “For us, this is great training.”
After the surgery was over, the woman got up, and supported by her frightened husband, walked away towards the bus stop.
Yes, all this is, officially, peace.

*

In Beirut, Lebanon, I recently participated in discussion about “Ecology of War”, a scientific and philosophical concept created by several AUB Medical Center doctors from the Middle East. Doctor Ghassan ‘Gus’ Abu-Sitta, the head of the Plastic Surgery Department at the AUB Medical Center in Lebanon, explained:

The misery is war. The destruction of the strong state leads to conflict. A great number of people on our Planet actually live in some conflict or war, without even realizing it: in slums, in refugee camps, in thoroughly collapsed states, or in refugee camps.”

During my work, in almost all devastated corners of the world, I saw much worse things than what I described above. Perhaps I saw too much – all that ‘peace’ which has been tearing limbs from the victims, all those burning huts and howling women, or children dying from diseases and hunger before they reach their teens.
I wrote about war and peace at length, in my 840-page book Exposing Lies Of The Empire”.
When you do what I do, you become like a doctor: you can only stand all those horrors and suffering, because you are here to help, to expose reality, and to shame the world. You have no right to decompose, to collapse, to fall and to cry.
But what you cannot stand is hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is ‘bulletproof’. It cannot be illuminated by correct arguments, by logic and by examples. Hypocrisy in the West is often ignorant, but mostly it is just self-serving.
So, what is real peace for the people in Europe and North America? The answer is simple: It is a state of things in which as few Western people as possible are killed or injured. A state of things in which the flow of resources from the poor, plundered and colonized countries is pouring, uninterrupted, predominantly to Europe and North America.
The price for such peace? How many African, Latin American or Asian people die as a result of such arrangement of the world, is thoroughly irrelevant.
Peace is when the business interests of the West are not endangered, even if tens of millions of non-white human beings would vanish in the process.
Peace is when the West can, unopposed, control the world, politically, economically, ideologically and ‘culturally’.
“War” is when there is rebellion. War is when the people of plundered countries say “No!”. War is when they suddenly refuse to be raped, robbed, indoctrinated and murdered.
When such a scenario takes place the West’s immediate reaction ‘to restore peace’ is to overthrow the government in the country which is trying to take care of its people. To bomb schools and hospitals, to destroy supply of fresh water and electricity and to throw millions into total misery and agony.
As the West may soon do to North Korea (DPRK), to Cuba, Venezuela, Iran – some of the countries that are being, for now, ‘only’ tormented by sanctions and, foreign -sponsored, deadly “opposition”. In the Western lexicon, “peace” is synonymous to “submission”. To a total, unconditional submission. Anything else is war or could potentially lead to war.
For the oppressed, devastated countries, including those in Africa, to call for resistance, would be, at least in the Western lexicon, synonymous with the “call for violence”, therefore illegal. As ‘illegal’ as the calls were for resistance in the countries occupied by German Nazi forces during the WWII. It would be, therefore, logical to call the Western approach and state of mind, “fundamentalist”, and thoroughly aggressive.

A shorter version of this essay originally appeared on RT.com
Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Three of his latest books are his tribute to “The Great October Socialist Revolution” a revolutionary novel “Aurora” and a bestselling work of political non-fiction: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire”. View his other books here. Watch Rwanda Gambit, his groundbreaking documentary about Rwanda and DRCongo and his film/dialogue with Noam Chomsky “On Western Terrorism”. Vltchek presently resides in East Asia and the Middle East, and continues to work around the world. He can be reached through his website and his Twitter.

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vexarb
vexarb
Jun 21, 2018 7:41 PM

@Fair Dinkum. Yes, Darwin’s masterful prose style has invested the earthworm with somewhat exaggerated agricultural prestige as a tiller of the soil. (According to my Encyc.Britt, 1967)

vexarb
vexarb
Jun 20, 2018 3:46 PM

From today’s Saker Vineyard, green shoots in the African desert that the West created and called Peace:
Russia Squeezes Out The West From Africa Without a Fight
4052 Views June 19, 2018 9 Comments
By Evgeny Krutikov
Translated by Ollie Richardson and Angelina Siard
http://www.stalkerzone.org/russia-squeezes-out-the-west-from-africa-without-a-fight/
source:
https://ria.ru/analytics/20180601/1521817838.html
The Central African Republic “is captured by Russian mercenaries”. Mozambique “relaunches” relations with Russia and considers the list of weapons that it wants. The Democratic Republic of the Congo suggests to Russia to “enter” into military cooperation. Somewhere negotiations on building a Russian military base in Djibouti are being conducted.
These aren’t the paranoid headlines of the BBC. This is the reality of the last two months. It isn’t so close to our public as, say, the events in Kiev, and remains somewhere on the periphery of attention. But our American and European partners are already seriously disturbed by the “Russian invasion” of Black Africa, which in terms of geographical coverage already exceeds the memorable times of the peak of Soviet influence. And it is being built on a completely different principle.

vexarb
vexarb
Jun 20, 2018 8:30 AM

Canthama BTL SyrianPerspective update on the Axis of Resistance against us Westerners “who create a desert and call it peace”:
The battle for Southern Syria is coming and it will be massive: preparations are done, skirmishes, probing is on going, shelling into certain areas has started; the only missing piece is Russian AF presence.
@ejmalrai brings new light to the up coming battle, a must read.
https://ejmagnier.com/2018/06/19/the-battle-of-daraa-is-happening-al-ridwan-hezbollahs-special-forces-will-participate/
+4 2hr ago

Antony
Antony
Jun 20, 2018 7:12 AM

” To guard journalists from falling prey to false news stories, Google India on Tuesday said it will provide training to 8,000 journalists in English and six other Indian languages in the next one year.”
http://www.ianslive.in/index.php?param=news/Google_to_train_8000_Indian_journalists_on_fact_checking-591463/SCIENCE%20&%20TECHNOLOGY/36

Robbobbobin
Robbobbobin
Jun 19, 2018 5:39 PM

Regardless of any other economic consideration, the almost total failure (in human history so far) of any combatant to factor in anything like the real cost of all the consequences of a war rather than just the cost of its prosecution ensures that it will not be the last.

binra
binra
Jun 19, 2018 10:19 PM
Reply to  Robbobbobin

Perhaps the incitements and lures to war are induced by those who identify on the other side of the balance sheet.
To whom are the bankrupt indentured?

Idiot Savant
Idiot Savant
Jun 19, 2018 1:55 PM

We as individuals are the cause of all suffering. We can blame others, blame politicians, blame industries, and demonise everything in ourselves that we project on to others. Every harsh word, every criticism, every slander or defamation of others at the microcosmic level, will inevitably get transmuted at the macrocosmic level into the expression of hate-based righteousness that, with the endorsement of the “God” of our choosing, justifies this barbarity, this carnage, this waste of humanity for the sake of satisfying our rampant egotism and the anger, greed and sheer folly that is borne of the darkness of our life condition dominated by the influences of hell, hunger, anger and animality. Throughout history we have witnessed many ‘revolutions’ none of which have worked in any way to avoid a miserable destiny, and the outcomes are exactly what we see around us today. Until we change ourselves at the most fundamental level, perceiving the dignity and worth of each and every human life – even of those we detest – then this cycle of suffering will be perpetrated without end. There is an answer here – and that is for each and every. one of us to undertake our own ‘human revolution’ and by so doing we can change anything – and nothing will be impossible to overcome. This is not utopia – far from it, it is more the collective will to prevent a dystopian destiny for our species – and furthermore to prevent our imminent extinction.

Mulga Mumblebrain
Mulga Mumblebrain
Jun 20, 2018 9:15 AM
Reply to  Idiot Savant

That, in my opinion, is a moral and spiritual nihilism that completely ignores the fact that many human beings throughout history have been morally good, and lived good lives, and many others have not. There is no equivalence between the victim of the carpet-bombing and those who commit it and those who order it. And for some reason, probably the morally malevolent’s greater preference for violence and murder, the morally repellent and destructive have triumphed.

binra
binra
Jun 20, 2018 12:16 PM

Such is the worship and manipulation of guilt and sacrifice as the determiner of morality.
Jesus taught differently – and did not assign good to persons – including his own – but only to God.
Recognizing the God in others is ‘the Father’s Will’ or indeed the Holy Spirit. These terms can and have been misused but there is an impersonal love in the recognition of self in another and of the whole in all its parts. The morally corrupted are those who have aligned in a disintegrity of self as if to appease or escape a personal sense of fear and guilt that MUST be projected onto others to ‘survive’.
This is the basis for the morally self-righteous society of vengeance and sacrifice masking as ‘good’ by accusing the evil in ‘others’.
This persists terror and tyranny as an illusion of power and protection.
“The whole danger of defenses lies in their propensity to hold misperceptions rigidly in place. This is why rigidity is regarded AS stability by those who areoff the mark.” ~ (ACIM)
Jesus regarded such assertion of personal goodness as the temptation of deceit itself – regardless how ‘good’ the person saying it may seem to be or seem to intend.
The realm of personal judgement is the rejection and denial of the hated and feared and the acceptance and according of worth only to the meeting of rules and qualifying conditions.
It is also the ‘private subjective consciousness’ associated with the ”all or “Separation’.
To the rigid and blind rule-bound mind – Jesus MUST be killed (and subverted) and can only be perceived or interpreted as threat to the moral order of an attempt to hold stability within an upside down rule.
The assigning of blame to behaviours is the projecting of evil or hateful intentions on them and assigning punishment. But behaviour’s ‘control’ is expression or suppression. The behavioural impulse is Life – filtered through the beliefs and definitions of accepted (and identified) thought.
As you perceive so will you behave.
The recognition of the primacy of thought accepted and lived as true is a major facet of the attempt to engineer reality as a new world order – but in the image of the thoughts and beliefs of the would be controllers!
The reason why rational communication does not open change is in part because rationality is subordinated to defence.
“The whole danger of defenses lies in their propensity to hold misperceptions rigidly in place. This is why rigidity is regarded AS stability by those who areoff the mark.” – ACIM
Integrity communicates without any pretence of apology or appeal to ‘moral authority’ for justification.
But it takes one to know one.
Moral derivatives that no longer connect to or extend true worth are like the financial derivatives of hedged bets running in place of tangibles. They are running the mind of systems-control in place of Life in fake substitutions of negative incentives that make a carrot out of lesser evils.
The idea of good lives and bad lives is arbitrary. You are living the life given you – by what you choose to make of it. You have to live with yourself – because you cannot really be anyone else – but you can make image of yourself and be-live it true. You can then experience conflict and lack and hate it. Such self-hate can become rage that seeks vengeance for a sense of being wronged that is both blind and blinding.
If you opened the moral integrity of an innate worth you would never frame an evil in terms of triumph for its is self-defeating. Thus your perception is the measure of the ‘battle of good and evil’ within yourself projecting as your own interpretive perception. When you cease to use evil to define the good against it, you will shift to the discernment of the true and false – because the basis of a split self is false – and yet is heavily defended by the arts of darkness – not least of which is to hide in the forms of ‘goodness’ or acceptability and set against the… (insert fear symbol here).

Mulga Mumblebrain
Mulga Mumblebrain
Jun 21, 2018 1:27 AM
Reply to  binra

A maundering appeal to deny the fact that some people are and act like monsters of destruction and murder, and others are not. That is not ‘…the assigning of blame to behaviours is the projecting of evil or hateful intentions on them…’, it is the mere appreciation of Evil in action. There is no ‘projection’ at all-just recognition.

binra
binra
Jun 21, 2018 12:02 PM

You can and do judge and select to reinforce and ‘prove’ your predicate.
You can and do assign behaviours to persons and evil status to such persons without addressing the ideas and beliefs that shape persons and thus behaviours – expressed to reactive conflict or repressed to leak out in passive aggressive conflict.
The simplistic good v evil narrative is the ‘sickness or evil’ of a refusal to look within – to watch our own thought and recognize the nature of our conditioning as habits that come into the realm of choice by being recognized – and are hidden from such a freedom by the hate and blame culture of the ‘moral self-righteous’ judgement.
I am writing in and to the curiosity and desire to ‘re-cognize’ or resonate in a true insight.
The technocratic replacement of human relationship with targets and checkboxes of narrative-cum-system control runs upon the mind that is captive to moral guilting. I am not suggesting you should ‘love the sin’, but that the zeal with which you ‘hate the sinner’ says more about you that the ‘sinner’.
Due process of law, as the correction of error properly engaged, would reveal a systemic corruption of human society to address, but this is blocked by private self interests. A lack of transparency and accountability is both protective of and defensive against a blame culture, it is also the conditions in which split thinking runs unchecked to operate masked agenda of deceit that then justifies defences against deceits. “Those who know not what they do” for they are split from knowing, by seeming.
There is a pattern here. The defences of the mind-in-hiding are not to be underestimated in the ability to deceive – and accusing (hating and attacking) in the other what one seeks to keep hidden in oneself, may run as a socially supported (invisible) habit – or a guile of diversion or false-flag.
The mind is automatically operating a gesture of self-protection to who you think or accept yourself to be. This acceptance or choice as ‘your mind’ is providing the thought and belief your behaviours embody.
I invite waking from a guilting tyranny of a self-deceit – (seeking and finding social reinforcement) – to freedom of being. Freedom under true authorship instead of illusions of freedom under false and tyrannous ‘authority’. This calls for expanding responsibility from behaviour-controls to aligning activity of thought as a natural outcome of the release of self-guilting.
The shift from manually ‘managed’ behaviours to a flow of a know of being, is a release of ‘fig-leaf thinking’ AND the self-lack or self-guilt that drives it.
I have no interest in a personal right/wrong contest – but every interest in sharing perspectives in willingness to heal. The idea that hate can purge evils to ‘cleanse’ is but a reset to the same old ‘game’.
Evils are put behind us by no longer pulling or attracting them into embodiment in our experience. by wholly embracing the ‘Good’.
In the sense of Biblical Good, ‘evil’ is the wish and result of division of a wholeness of being and the ‘Princes’ of such a world rule only from the predicate of ruling out wholeness.
And so of course within the framework of such a world is a hierarchy of rules that run as if Wholeness (and the relational communications that are natural to wholeness) is lost, broken, stolen, false, and deceitful from the oppositional intent of a private thought creation of mis-identified self-image.
A scientific symbol of Good might be the Coherence of Implicate Order, or more simply what is – as it is.
Once you accept a mind of asserting or imposing will, you also engage in possession and thus being possessed or dispossessed, conflict, reaction, loss of communication, guilt and attempts to overcome, escape, redefine or block out. The forms that this takes for each of us, and the roles we enact or assign and react to are particular to our own separation experience.
In some sense I see a separation trauma as operating like a shaped charge – to the proportion and priority of different elements. You have your life. You do not have anyone else’s. You cannot truly judge your self. How then can you judge another? I hold that evil is a deceit and a deceiver and has no life but that to which we give sacrifice by false worth-ship.

binra
binra
Jun 19, 2018 1:53 PM

The attempt to evade conflict is masked or justified in terms of a desire for peace.
As if peace is the absence of specific symptoms or conditions.
War management, sickness care – these all operate a doublespeak mind because they are negatively defined to seem to be opposite to the feared or hated outcome.
Peace is an attribute within you and not a condition outside you.
The masking of conflicted agenda under form or association of moral authority is simply the way the mind works when a loss of peace activates a defensive sense of self conflict. This is where the true resolution and reconciliation is accepted – not in attempts to re-enact our grievance or sense of lack and fear of loss in externalised displacements or diversions from ‘trouble at home’.
Manipulative intent is communicating a lack of substance as attempt to seem real. Giving to Caesar and God as is their due is not to forget to serve the living even if they are temporarily lost to the fascinations of self-conflict – or we lose our awareness of true worth to the joining in what we say we hate.

writerroddis
writerroddis
Jun 19, 2018 11:17 AM

Powerful piece. Excellent.

USAma Bin Laden
USAma Bin Laden
Jun 19, 2018 11:02 AM

The more the Anglo Americans or their “democratic allies” run their mouth about peace, the more people they will slaughter throughout the world.
In fact, the greatest war criminal nations on this planet justify their crimes behind the greatest of their lies … freedom and democracy.
As long as a nation can masquerade as a democracy, it can wage wars of aggression, however murderous, and never be held to account.
This reality has become an axiomatic principle of international politics
Hell, American war criminals like Donald Trump are nominated for the Nobel “Peace” Prize. And former US Regime officials like Henry Kissinger and Barack “Predator Drone” Obama actually won this oh-so-revered Peace Prize.

vexarb
vexarb
Jun 19, 2018 9:30 AM

[Meanwhile in Syria, the current epicentre of resistance to the AZC’s New World Order.]
Canthama 6hr ago:
“As mentioned yesterday, the battle for Southern Syria is about to begin, anytime now. The clean up of ISIS in the desert is half way done, only ISIS in Homs desert pocket is still yet to be eliminated, but they already have been pushed away from T2, for the first time in years.
More elite troops are mounting near Humaydah for a final push, happening this week.
On southern Syria massive force has gathered, some sources suggesting anywhere from 60-80,000 soldiers with heavy equipment [now] available in quantities yet unseen in this 7 year [NATZO] war of aggression against the Syrians. Shelling has begun; we have not yet seen the air force active, when the latter engage then zero hour will be close.
Count down to the annihilation of [NATZO] terrorists from [Israel and from UKU$A via Jordan] in southern Syria.
+19

rtj1211
rtj1211
Jun 19, 2018 8:17 AM

Reality is that the only way peace will exist is if every nation on earth, forevermore, has peaceful leaders.
As soon as one warmonger emerges, the House of Cards falls. They invade and conquer neighbours, so others must rearm to limit the conqueror in future.
Arms dealers profit from sales, so they make more profits when there is war or threat of war. Does suggest nationalising the arms industry may (only may) contribute to peace, as then they supply as needed rather than scheme for sales. But even that does not stop politicians being blackmailed.
The extractive industries appear to be the drivers of foreign coup, global imperialism etc. Right now, the MSM says coup in Venezuela is about the US capturing the oil there. Afghanistan is atop huge mineral deposits, DRC, Iraq etc etc the same. Do those profit-obsessed CEOs have humanity? I do not know, I have not met them. But the profit motive encourages them to get others to murder for their access to extraction licenses. Anyone ever asked Exxon Mobil to pay 20% of Iraq war costs?! Do I hear you all rolling on the floor with laughter?! I am serious: let they who profit invest for profit, right now taxpayers take equity in vehicles which never pay a dividend whilst management bleeds the firm dry…..
Financiers seek to destabilise hugely to buy very cheap, before stabilising to sell very high. Do they profit from coup, from warmongering? Of course they do. Retail banking is probably their least profitable arena. Says mutualised local lenders will be more interested in SME finance…
War happens continually because a critical mass of people only make money because it is happening continually.
It is not solely caused by capitalism, just that capitalism does not prevent it. Capitalism does not count dead bodies and ruined lives, it only counts money. That is why drugs is such big business, because it makes trillions by destroying lives.
If you want to stop war, then economics must be subservient to whatever societal morality people demand as the minimum acceptable framework.
The minimum acceptable is what determines outcomes: utopias do not exist in the real world.

vexarb
vexarb
Jun 19, 2018 9:34 AM
Reply to  rtj1211

@rtj: “Arms dealers profit from sales, so they make more profits when there is war or threat of war.”
Confirmed by a RockerFella: “The best time to make money is when there is blood on the streets”.

Schlüter
Schlüter
Jun 19, 2018 7:32 AM
Zara Ali
Zara Ali
Jun 19, 2018 6:53 AM

Loved it…powerful thoughts and words… Thank you for sharing… powerful…

Antony
Antony
Jun 19, 2018 6:08 AM

The present UK establishment prefers dictatorial Chinese speaking PR China over democratic English speaking India for student visa: http://www.thehindu.com/news/international/exclusion-of-indian-students-from-visa-reform-amounts-to-self-harm-british-think-tank/article24195091.ece
In numbers: in 2008-9 ~ 300,000 Chinese & ~ 250,000 Indian students were allowed in; in 2016-17 that changed to ~700,000 for China & just ~150,000 for India.
China will eat Brexit UK for breakfast, without physical war.

Mulga Mumblebrain
Mulga Mumblebrain
Jun 19, 2018 8:55 AM
Reply to  Antony

‘Democratic, English-speaking (are you unaware that millions of Chinese do speak English, and hundreds of millions of Indians do not?) India is currently ruled by the Hindutva fascist, Modi, and the murders of journalists, innocent Moslems and women, even little girls, in horrific sex attacks, often linked to caste and religion, are growing like topsy. Then there is the situation in Kashmir, where an entire population is imprisoned and subjected to hideous brutality, including the deliberate blinding of victims using bird-shot to disperse rioters. As to why the UK is trying to ingratiate itself with China, while being one of the Western powers slavering for war over the China seas, beats me. I guess it’s just hypocrisy and duplicity-as ever.

tubularsock
tubularsock
Jun 19, 2018 2:48 AM

“After all, who would be asking for war? Who’d crave for violence, terrible injuries and death? Who’d want to see leveled, charred cities and abandoned, crying infants?”
Well, Dick Cheney, Henry Kissinger, Gen. Cutis Lemay, John Bolton, H.R. McMaster, Bush, Obama, Clinton and that is just off the top of Tubularsock’s head!
The u.s. is the major terrorist nation on earth and the more terror we orchestrate the more we claim to be humanitarian. There are not enough horses on earth to produce that amount of American Horse Shit.
So we now have to rely on Artificial-Intelligent-Horses built in China to keep that horse shit coming! (ok, that may be fake news, so be careful).

binra
binra
Jun 19, 2018 2:19 PM
Reply to  tubularsock

What would become of a negative economy run on negative self definitions serving a sense of separateness under scarcity as a means of personal power and salvation, if Peace broke out?
Persons would not accept it.
War is the necessary sacrifice of truth that idols of a false power and protection demand.
Persona investment fears loss of its investment as loss of self – and hides the fear under a mask of power.
Defining everything in terms of hate persists the identity invested in hating while masking in terms of love. And gives power to a false sense of protection.
Hatred is born of hurtred. Perhaps we feel we cant abide or tolerate feeling it within our experience – and must recoil, shut down and project away. But in the hot emotion or even cold calculated fire of hate is no freedom to see anything but the escape from or eradication of the hated.
Effects are assigned as causes and everything is turned upside down.
But true cause is not changed by a false assertion – no matter how intensely asserted or believed.
Who identifies in self-image has asked for war. But has no consciousness of having done so.
War is the ruling out of awareness of truth by division.

Fair dinkum.
Fair dinkum.
Jun 19, 2018 1:38 AM

Thousands of years of war, waged by men.
Is it because their Mothers didn’t Love them?
Is it because sex is no substitute for Love?
Is it because avarice becomes a substitute for equanimity?
Is it because we do what we’re told, without question?
God knows.

vexarb
vexarb
Jun 19, 2018 9:15 AM
Reply to  Fair dinkum.

@Fair Dinkum. God knows because She invented the system: “From war, famine, disease arise beings most wonderful” — Darwin, Origin of the Species. As Vitchek says, “… you can only stand all those horrors and suffering, because you are here to help, to expose reality, and to shame the world. You have no right to decompose, to collapse, to fall and to cry. But what you cannot stand is hypocrisy. …. Hypocrisy in the West is often ignorant, but mostly it is just self-serving.”
Which is why TB.Liar’s soul is trapped in a deeper Inferno than Hitler’s; the latter slayed his tens of millions, the former only killed his handful of millions — but he did it with his mouth full of Christian compassion: therefore the Children of the West shall make TB.Liar our King (or the modern equivalent of a king, viz Director in House of Rothschild).

rilme
rilme
Jun 19, 2018 12:43 PM
Reply to  vexarb

War-criminal Tony B. Liar: worse than Hitler. I can agree with that.

vexarb
vexarb
Jun 19, 2018 7:31 PM
Reply to  rilme

@Rilme. Thank you, most modern people are puzzled by this judgment because it goes against quantitation — and a quantitative rannking is the essence of the modern outlook. But then, most modern people do not take Dante’s Inferno seriously, with its descending circles where sophisticated Financial Manipulators, Hypocrites and Traitors (the sins of perverted intellect) sink nearer to Satan than primitive Men of Blood — because that would be a Mediaeval outlook.

Robbobbobin
Robbobbobin
Jun 19, 2018 5:21 PM
Reply to  vexarb

‘”From war, famine, disease arise beings most wonderful” — Darwin, Origin of the Species’
(1) Origin of Species (no ‘the’ in title).
(2) No such sentence in ‘Origin of Species’.

vexarb
vexarb
Jun 19, 2018 7:53 PM
Reply to  Robbobbobin

Robbobbobbin. Thank you, that passage ends the Harvard Classics edition of 1909. Having mislaid my copy I quoted from memory, so have not done justice to the rolling periods of the full glorious original. Not for nothing was Darwin rated alongside Francis Bacon as one of the great masters of English prose.

Fair dinkum.
Fair dinkum.
Jun 20, 2018 12:52 PM
Reply to  vexarb

And very fond of worms.