Ok, just wondering what qualifies you to comment?

Got me again.

I notice you also commenting on Afghanistan(again) yesterday and not about horses.

Passing Through wrote: I notice you also commenting on Afghanistan(again) yesterday and not about horses.

Shrunk in the Wash wrote: Passing Through wrote: I have posted it many times already. Wont be repeating for the slow ones. Arrogance personified  Oh and you’re clearly to scared to expose your theories

Don't assume What you don't know Shrunk , I've never been part of that topic And I have expressed my anti china stance on bullying on smaller nations a number of times on here eg , Tibet , Nepal etc , get it right old boy , apology not needed .

Thanks for your reply Shrunk  irrespective of our different views on things I find PT excellent value and quite intelligent on a wide variety of stuff , it should not worry you as we live in a democratic society , you may challenge me on any subject that we have an opinion on as long as there is no BS .  Cheers .

Carioca wrote: Thanks for your reply Shrunk  irrespective of our different views on things I find PT excellent value and quite intelligent on a wide variety of stuff , it should not worry you as we live in a democratic society , you may challenge me on any subject that we have an opinion on as long as there is no BS .  Cheers .

From Nicaragua to China, reckless autocrats betray the promises of revolution

o revolutions always end in betrayal? Sudanese citizens are but the latest group to see a democratic dawn blotted out by the forces of reaction. It’s an age-old story. Napoleon subverted the French Revolution, imposing an imperium where freedom briefly reigned. Stalin purloined the power of the proletariat to build a totalitarian dictatorship.

From southern Africa to Cuba to Myanmar, today’s ruling heirs to revolutionary political struggle dishonour their inheritance. European peoples who joyfully cast off the Soviet yoke watch liberties erode anew. The Arab spring swiftly wilted. The 1776 “American revolution” was arguably no revolution at all – more a white middle-class taxpayers’ revolt dressed up in fancy language.Developments last week in countries as far apart as Nicaragua, Ethiopia and China are a warning of how radical change may be halted and reversed, how hard-won revolutionary gains are easily lost. In all three, as throughout history, a single, self-aggrandising individual squats at the heart of the problem.

Nicaragua has never been anything but poor. Yet the victorious Sandinista revolution of 1979 initially brought reform and hope of a better future. The defeat of the Somoza family dictatorship became the left’s biggest cause célèbre since the Spanish civil war. Volunteers flooded in. Fighting off US-backed Contra rebels, Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega became a political superstar.

Yet Nicaraguans eventually tired of the war and tired of Ortega, too. In 1990 I watched as he toured the countryside atop a flatbed truck, trying to revive flagging belief in the revolution’s promise. To his surprise, Ortega lost the election that year. Defeat soured him. He vowed to regain the presidency – by any means.

He achieved his aim in 2007 and, abolishing term limits, has clung to power ever since. Abetted by his wife and vice-president, Rosario Murillo, his regime has become “an insular dynastic tyranny that eerily resembles the one he fought decades ago”, wrote journalist and author Stephen Kinzer.

Political opponents and old comrades have been locked up, the press and judiciary silenced, and protesters killed and abused. Last week’s presidential election, won by a “landslide”, was widely condemned as a sham. But Ortega, 76, seems impervious to criticism. He’s expected to rule until his death, when he hopes Rosario or one of their sons will succeed him.“He seemed a reasonably promising leader. Few could have imagined that he would degenerate into a hermit dictator,” Kinzer lamented. “How did this soft-spoken, introverted, even self-effacing revolutionary, who was a Boy Scout and once considered entering the priesthood, ultimately emerge as the most brutal ruler in his country’s history?”

That’s a cautionary conundrum Abiy Ahmed, Ethiopia’s embattled prime minister, would do well to ponder. Like Ortega, Abiy has morphed from global pin-up, winning the 2019 Nobel peace prize, to international outcast, after his disastrous invasion of northern Tigray province last year.

Abiy’s war of choice now threatens to engulf the capital, Addis Ababa, shatter Ethiopia’s fragile unity, and further destabilise the Horn of Africa. Like Ortega, his personal ambition and poor judgment have jeopardised the considerable gains made since the 1991 revolution that ended the Marxist Derg military regime.

Abiy declared a nationwide state of emergency last week, urging citizens to take up arms. African Union and UN ceasefire calls have been rejected. Human rights groups document ongoing war crimes allegedly committed by Abiy’s forces as well as by his foes and allies.

Meanwhile, his policy has brought famine back to Ethiopia – a horribly symbolic failure, given still vivid memories of the 1980s. The UN says 400,000 people in Tigray face a food emergency. Millions are displaced.

What kind of leadership is this? How may one reckless man, refusing to admit error and resign, retain the power to trash three decades of achievement and incinerate a nation’s future? It’s a question that should also be asked of China’s autocratic, over-reaching leader, Xi Jinping.

He spent last week securing internal Chinese Communist party (CCP) backing for an unprecedented third term as president, beginning next year. Xi is now the most powerful politician since Mao Zedong, to whose brutally authoritarian style he closely adheres. Official media sing his praises with sickly sycophancy. Critics keep mum out of fear of their lives. In Xi’s surveillance state, techno-fascism rules.Yet what connection truly exists between Xi’s power politics and personality cult and the aspirations of the founding CCP revolutionaries who, meeting 100 years ago in Shanghai and inspired by Russia’s revolution four years previously, pledged to fight oppression? After decades of steady progress, what price might China’s people yet pay for Xi’s aggressive ambitions?

Facing a slowing economy, a growing debt crisis, a degrading environment, an ageing population and a widening array of external antagonists, Xi has but a few years to realise his “China dream” of global pre-eminence, geographical reunification, internal consolidation, strict political monogamy and stifling social conformity.With one eye on history and another on the future, Xi gambles on glory. It could go either way. A China crash could lead to conflict or worldwide recession or both. Yet a China triumphant under Xi could be fatal, too, for global democracy, civil rights, free speech and international law. Hong Kong is the grim portent.

How do such rulers justify their betrayals of the people, the ideals and the struggles that brought them to where they are? Perhaps, like Ortega and Abiy, Xi believes only he can rule effectively, that he’s irreplaceable, unique. Perhaps they confuse confidence with hubris. They seek to secure fatuous “legacies”. They grow addicted to power.

In truth, there is no justification. Such traitors to reformation are a toxic blight. Like Mao’s one thousand blossoms, they seed across the modern world – not as flowers but as weeds.eguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/14/from-nicaragua-to-china-reckless-autocrats-betray-the-promises-of-revolution

Typical obscure djebal post

There's a short book, and even an animated movie of it, that says all that needs to be said: Animal Farm by George Orwell. The same pattern that the book describes happens every time, regardless of place or time. It's just human nature.

Friendship from behind a gun.

It comes less than a week after his summit with Joe Biden.

No friendly politician is too obscure for insecure China, not even Barry Gardiner

he Chinese Communist party appears utterly deluded. Hasn’t it learned in its 100-year history that some politicians aren’t worth buying? Wasting its money, or rather the money of the subjugated Chinese people, on Barry Gardiner, of all MPs, seems more silly than sinister. Why bother?

If you’ve never heard of him, Gardiner is an unremarkable Corbynista, who has continued the far left’s tradition of excusing anti-western dictatorships. The Labour MP took £420,000, a large whack even by the lax standards of Westminster, from Christine Ching Kui Lee, an influence-peddler MI5 said had “established links” for Beijing with British politicians.Suddenly, Gardiner had to find excuses for himself rather than a regime that is terrorising the Uyghur people, occupying Tibet and crushing democracy in Hong Kong. He said he didn’t know Lee had links to a hostile foreign power – presumably, he thought she was rewarding his stand on renationalising the railways. And in any case he had been “critical of the Chinese government on many occasions”. This was news to the journalists who recorded the revolting moment when Gardiner was in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet and deplored on the BBC, “the escalation of violence between protesters in Hong Kong and ordinary people in Hong Kong”, as if the threat to “ordinary people” is not a dictatorial superpower that stamps their rights into the dust. But when Gardiner said he was a “very poor investment” from a Chinese point of view, he was right, and he brought back my original question: why bother?The answer is that, as Xi Jinping turns China from a one-party state into a one-man imperium, everything matters. No detail is too small to sweat. No sympathetic politician too obscure to ignore. With opponents, Xi demands a gangster’s respect by unleashing retaliation out of all proportion to the original offence. China explodes at trivial examples of opposition a stable superpower would have the self-confidence to ignore.

If you want to know why Muslim countries stay silent about the persecution of fellow Muslims in Xinjiang or why scientists were so quick to dismiss the theory that the Covid pandemic began with a leak from a Wuhan lab, look at China’s willingness to use overweening force to secure conformity with the party line. Filippa Lentzos, of the Centre for Science and Security Studies at King’s College, London, was describing Covid scientists when she said they did not talk about lab leaks “because they feared for their careers [and] their grants”. But she might have been describing businesses and governments, too.

Last year, I heard the Czech politician Zden?k H?ib explain to the leaders of European cities how he had learned the hard way why they should not allow Chinese technology in their infrastructure or have any dealings with the organs of the Chinese state. He discovered when he became mayor of Prague in 2018 that the city had committed itself to supporting Xi’s one-China policy, as part of an apparently harmless twinning agreement with Beijing. H?ib abandoned the policy because he was a liberal who did not agree with forcing Taiwanese people into a communist state against their wishes. In any event, he thought it ridiculous for a central European city to take a position on conflicts in the far east. China reacted as if he had declared war. It banned cultural contacts. Czech oligarchs with Chinese interests hired hack journalists and PR shills to attack him. Miloš Zeman, who was then the Czech republic’s Trumpian president, warned him and Prague of “unpleasant consequences”.

Today it is Lithuania’s turn. China is blocking imports and threatening multinationals with punishments if they do business with the tiny Baltic country, solely because it trades with Taiwan.

We should bother, not out of admiration for this government’s apparent policy of committing British forces to fight alongside the US in a war over Taiwan, but because of what China is doing to Britain. The Chinese embassy showed why when it responded to the spying claims by accusing the security service of “smearing and intimidation against the Chinese community in the UK”.

Muslims, Jews, Chinese people and others undoubtedly worry about blowback when global politics turns national attention towards minorities. But in this instance there is no greater intimidatory threat to Chinese people in the UK than the Chinese Communist party. Or, for that matter, to Chinese people in China. Within hours of the Gardiner story breaking, a contact who works for the pro-democracy movement told me that, even after they have found asylum in the UK, Hong Kong activists communicate through encrypted apps because they worry about what could happen to them here and to their families in China. Just before Christmas, two activists who dared to speak publicly described their “never-ending fear” to the New Statesman. You could see why they were frightened. Anonymous spies had offered £10,000 on the Chinese social media platform WeChat for their work or home addresses.

Meanwhile, universities, so quick to atone for the slavery of the past, show little concern for modern-day slavery in Xinjiang as they hoover up Chinese money. They say they want safe spaces to protect students from the tiniest of micro-aggressions, and yet allow the Chinese state, via its on-campus Confucius Institutes, to keep tabs on Chinese students and their teachers. The government should close them, as the Swedish government has, and act to build the UK’s resilience against dictatorial enemies. But there’s the rub. It’s not just that the collapsing Johnson administration is incapable of taking serious measures. Even when the Tories were in their pomp, they showed no inclination to damn the sources of corruption.

Honourable MPs and whistleblowers have warned for years that the openness of the City, the libel law, estate agency and indeed the Conservative party to dubious Russian money undermined national security. Last summer, I wrote that all the professional services a dictatorship could want was on open sale in the capital, and warned that if Putin’s allies did not worry ministers, they “should reflect on what will happen when the Chinese Communist party realises what London has to offer”.

No worthwhile reforms followed, for a reason I should have grasped at the time. Worthwhile reform is impossible for as long as the Conservatives remain in power.

 Nick Cohen is an Observer columnist