John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY GUILLAUME DUROCHER IN THE UNZ REVIEW

 

“Towards Expat Nationalism

“Technological and Psychological Factors for the Rise and Decline of the Nation-State”

 

It is good to keep in mind that the nation-state as we know it has no long history.

It is largely a creation of the 19^th century. Many of the most familiar nations in Europe, for example, were created in that period – as Germany or Italy.

For most of history, we have had empires and kingdoms, large entities incorporating many kinds of people, such as the Austro-Hungarian Empire or the Holy Roman Empire.

For a while, extreme nationalists demanded that a given nation-state was for people of a certain ethnic identity, speaking a certain language, maybe even having a certain look and religion. This perhaps reflected lingering attitudes and hostilities from having rebelled against an old declining multi-national imperial group.

That notion, taken to its extreme, assisted ultimately in the birth of monstrosities such as Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

For the most part, the advanced world has moved well beyond that narrow and dangerous concept.

Israel, of course, is one of the last in the advanced world we hear still talking that way, which is a source of concern for all liberal-minded people.

The United States right now is something of an exception. There are unquestionably fascist tones in America’s contemporary political rhetoric. It is really odd when you think about it, the country being based on immigration and having been a “melting pot.”

But it has long been an undercurrent in America. The Nazi Bund was a pretty large movement in America, for example. The great journalist and writer, William L. Shirer, said once that he thought America might be the first country to go fascist voluntarily. Of course, organizations like the Klu Klux Klan and various extreme militia groups have long histories. As do fraternal organizations whose membership requires being a descendant from some early group.

Just not that many years ago, a Spanish-speaking person did a translation of America’s national anthem, and a recording of it became popular. Instead of being proud about it, certain groups of Americans became furious. There were ugly words hurled around. Even a descendent of Francis Scott Key, the man who wrote the “poem” in 1814 that would provide the words of the anthem, got quite huffy about anyone daring to sing it in Spanish. Ironically, as few Americans realize, the music to the anthem came from an old English drinking song.

America is a big ship, and any big turns take a while to make. It is not only a big ship, but one whose controls are difficult to operate. It tends to do only ‘full steam ahead.”

America also has had a good streak of arrogance and self-importance since its heydays of the 1950s when it literally was king of the planet. Its assumption of what President Putin rightly calls “exceptionalism” does fit nicely with attitudes around extreme patriotism and xenophobia.

I think the conflict between Americans with fascist tones in their speech and others is not only just one more division in a country which has always been divided, in one way or another from its very beginning, but it reflects difference in ancestry of the population, as Northern Europeans versus Southern Europeans or Latins.

There can be no question that Trump represents those people. They make up a large part of his political base because he feeds them what they want to hear, often barely disguised hatreds and contempt for foreigners and for Americans who look different. Migrants of all kinds. Muslims. Hispanics. “Shithole countries” (his exact words) in general.

As far as talk of globalism goes, it is a very confused subject, the word almost taking on different meanings with different speakers.

Here are some fundamental realities that will determine the future of “globalism.”

The growth of international trade has been an immense benefit for many decades. The United States’ golden days of the postwar period were the result of it being a great supplier of goods to all corners of the earth. It was the only undamaged major nation, and it had invested hugely for war production.

As other nations recovered and changed and made brand new investments, the United States just naturally lost its special place. It also was encumbered by its own myths about itself. When its uniquely blessed period of opportunity in the world began to fade, those myths only dragged on its ability to adjust and re-invest and compete in a changing world. Americans at all levels of society really did believe they were the best at what they did.

I think Japan’s re-emergence was the first great shock to the American ego, but there have been others since, and the overwhelmingly big one has been the miraculous rise of China, something in fact, given China’s remarkable history, which should have been predictable. But you just don’t think clearly when you believe yourself indispensable to the world.

So, today, America is reduced to dishonest and dangerous tactics of every description to “re-claim” what it foolishly believes is its and its alone, the right to be number one in almost everything. Clearly, only a kind of religious or mystical belief could engender such an expectation.  Never mind about getting down to hard work and investing to be more competitive, investing in everything from better schools to national infrastructure. And better government, too. No, we’re Americans, we’re entitled.

Large trading blocs, like the EU and others, are powerful mechanisms for increased prosperity. They may have their temporary ups and downs, but they are not going away simply because the basic economic principles underlying them are real and powerful.

Advances in technology will only continue to make international trade easier and less costly, and they will do so at an increasing rate of change.

With growing international trade, there is a growing need for international organizations to support, protect, and govern with agreed rules. That, too, is not going away, despite the bellowing of people like Trump. Such organizations are suffering right now, but they will return with strength simply because they are genuinely needed.

Every bit of trade destroyed, as with Trump’s illegal sanctions and arbitrary tariffs and threats, makes the world a poorer place than it need be. That’s basic economic science. Those who argue with scientific principles are only howling and spitting against the wind. They will not be able to sustain their destructive effort for too long, and for that we should all be glad.

As far as population and migration go, every advanced country has arrived at a point where births minus deaths cannot sustain population. This is a naturally occurring phenomenon called demographic transition. From that point, only in-migration can sustain or increase population. With absolutely no in-migration, such a nation would actually see its population shrinking, and with no end to it.

The average number of live births a woman is expected to have over her reproductive life in any given society is called the fertility rate.

Advanced countries today have fertility rates on the order of 1.5 or so. Without in-migration, a fertility rate of 2.1 is required just to sustain a population, but you will not find that in any advanced nation. There are many reasons for that, including, importantly, young modern women pursuing rewarding careers.

So, in-migration must be a part of every healthy society in the future, and this necessarily means different kinds of people arriving on your shores.

That, too, is not something new. In the distant past, it took the form of mass migrations and conquests and was not driven by demographic change. In an old familiar society like Britain, one whose people have an image we all enjoy and assume to be enduring, we actually have a history of Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, Norman French, and others creating the hybrid people we know.

Today, further change is underway in Britain as many people from former parts of the British Empire have established themselves there. And more migrants still will be needed since Britain’s fertility rate is too low to replace its population.

There’s just no avoiding the fact that in all traditional established states the future is going to look and sound different than what we have been used to.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY MARKO MARJANOVIC IN CHECKPOINT ASIA

 

“The Truth About the Iconic Tiananmen ‘Tank Man’ Photo

“It was taken more than a day after the protest had ended”

https://www.checkpointasia.net/the-truth-about-the-iconic-tiananmen-tankman-photo/

 

The “tank man” video has always been something other than what our press said it was.

Not only did the tank repeatedly avoid him, it is not clear at all what his purpose was, beyond media melodrama images.

Now, it turns out that the video was taken the day after events and that the tanks were in fact leaving the Square.

So, what was this man doing?

In the video, the lead tank works to avoid the man (a student?) who has impetuously jumped in front of it, clearly and despite the man’s repeated movements back and forth to remain in the tank’s way.

I could never see a threat there at all, just a showboat protester and a careful tank commander.

Now, compare the FBI’s use of heavy Abrams tanks at Waco, Texas.

They ended by incinerating about 80 souls, including women and children, sheltering in a flimsy compound.

The people in the cult at Waco were indeed unpleasant kooks, but they hardly deserved to die like that.

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSES TO AN EDITORIAL IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

‘”Human rights” is a Western concept that has no importance or meaning in Chinese thought.

‘Or in Islam, for that matter.’

Only partly right, and more wrong than right.

“Human rights” is a modern concept, having no long history in Europe.

Every state which reaches general prosperity and modernity comes to gradually embrace the concept.

Even in a place like Saudi Arabia, there is a growing implicit recognition.

So, too, China.

It took Europe a very long time to evolve the concept, through centuries of absolutism and religious violence.

The United States borrowed all the concepts in its founding documents from Europe, but it was a very long time until it lived up to them.

Dr. Johnson talked contemptuously of “drivers of negroes speaking of liberty!”

And we see today that ignorant fear, re-inforced by government’s special interests, can start making what we thought were well-established freedoms start disappearing under ghastly legislation like The Patriot Act.

Again, where is the concern for rights in a place like Israel with its 4.5 million people with no rights whatsoever and suffering constant abuse?
_________________________________________

The person writing this is simply ignorant of China.

China is not intolerant of religion.

Religion often in the past – as the Catholic Church of the sixteenth century – has been used by outsiders as a means of gaining power in a state.

The Chinese understand this, and much like French kings or Henry VIII’s England, they are against such efforts.

Outfits like Folun Gang fall into this category.

While I’m sure it has some sincere followers, the organization unquestionably has been driven by secret CIA funding.

And if we are going to speak of religious intolerance, may I remind you that the United States has virtually declared war on Islam, the religion of more than a billion people?

It murders literally thousands in Afghanistan and, with its drones, in Pakistan and Somalia and other places.

And not one of its victims was involved in 9/11.

Saudis, the folks helping engineer the violence in Syria, very much were.

And what of Israel’s 4.5 million victims, the Palestinians, people of many faiths actually, including significant numbers of Christians?

 

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

This entire business is overblown nonsense – puffed up in the press owing to American efforts to make this resemble something from the Cold War.

In fact, neither this man nor his family has ever been in any serious danger.

He has managed to leverage the propaganda possibilities into free emigration to the United States.

With all the genuine horrors in the world – the United States is killing innocent people every day in half a dozen countries – it is pathetic to see the press giving any play to this non-story.

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

Well said, Mr. Crook.

And I think this points to an underlying truth about the government of America.

If a man as intelligent, optimistic, and hard-working as Obama can get things so wrong, who possibly can get them right?

He is being torn apart in the world’s mightiest, most unforgiving force-field,a set of demands from scores of directions, many or most irrational and unforgiving.

America’s national politics have many similarities to being caught in the gravitational pull of a black hole.

The force cannot be resisted, and there is only one possible end to the event: the object caught will be reduced to its constituent atomic particles.
_________________
From another reader:

‘Another question: Is not “productivity” even more of an empty mantra than “competitiveness”?’

Empty mantra?

Productivity is a real and measurable quantity.

Unfortunately, in the popular mind, higher productivity means just something like just working harder, but that is not at all the case.

Take the example of two small farmers, one still using a hoe and spade and the other using a new small tractor.

No matter how hard the farmer with the hoe works, he can barely compete with the farmer who has a tractor. Indeed, the tractor makes such increases in productivity that its owner will be ready to buy more land since his tractor enables him to work more without a huge increase in time and other inputs. Or he may choose to do still other work with his tractor in his time freed up.

Productivity is the ratio of the amount of output (the product) to the amount of an input – often called a factor of production, as capital or labor, but most often measured in terms of labor. The ratio may be in terms of hours or dollars or still other measures.

It is possible to substitute up to a point more labor for capital goods like tractors if you have an economy with huge surpluses of underemployed labor, as has been the case of China or India, since hiring from this pool of labor does not raise costs.

Competitiveness is a nation’s (or a company’s, within a nation) ability to produce goods and services at lower cost, so long as that cost has adequate returns to the factors used in producing it.

The adequacy of the returns to factors of course varies from country to country and industry to industry: we know interest rates, the price of capital, and wages, the price of labor, vary.

The United States remains competitive in areas of high-technology and advanced services, but in all traditional industries it is pretty well uncompetitive.

Its car industry, for example, is just holding on through various artificial barriers and helps. Within a few years, China is going to come crashing into North America with quality products at lower cost.

We have already seen the results in recent decades: American real wages have dropped for decades.

But even in areas of high-technology and advanced services, countries like China and India are catching up. They invest in education and technology, and they appear to have natural intellectual gifts making them very comfortable with computers and engineering.

China today produces the world’s fastest super-computer and is entering areas like high-speed trains or advanced aeronautical products. India, with its language gift from the British Empire, is busy in areas like finance and banking and on-line computer services.

The world does not sit still. The rate of change in technology, which over the long term, drives economic growth, is on a steep rising curve, which means the rates of change we see will only continue to come faster and with greater impacts. America in no way possesses a unique grasp of technology or of the ability to adapt to its changes.

Indeed, it could well be argued that the ancient adaptations Asian people have made to group cooperation and civility are superior qualities for a rapidly changing world. Just so, their clear superior average endowment in mathematical ability – measured on many international tests – gives them a powerful underlying advantage.

America’s postwar period of easy superiority, a time when all serious competitors were prostrate, is now over – that is, the so-called American Dream, that glib, largely meaningless political slogan, is dead.

On top of those realities, America has so over-extended itself with debt and waste on war in every direction, there is a huge price to be paid before an equilibrium can be reached to even start new competitive efforts. Obama and other American leaders are not willing to say any of this.

It’s just more of the same-old, same-old blubbering and slogans, whether from Obama or the Tea Party.

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY KONRAD YAKABUSKI IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Competitiveness and innovation are never affected by government exhortations, nor indeed are they affected by any other exhortations, including those of business schools or “inspirational” speakers.

They come from the underlying real economic and financial conditions of a country and of the world in which it functions.

One can only look at the United States’ position in the world and offer a bitter smile at Obama’s empty words.

Debts of monumental proportions in every accounting from international balances to personal finance, idiotic pointless wars, and mindless military and security expenditures – all at the same time new competitors like China, India, Brazil, and even Russia grow to new strengths.

The United States is simply not competitive in so many areas of its economy. Nor is there any reason to believe that it can become so before undergoing a great deal of painful adjustment, the kind of adjustment its government works tirelessly to avoid.

Their government ignores reality because Americans are on average surely the world’s greatest whiny babies when it comes to painful adjustments.

It is their sense of boundless entitlement, fostered by countless dumb politicians blubbering in Fourth of July speeches about the American Dream and passing laws and budgets, year after year, which are completely irresponsible.

That is simply a one-way trip to nowhere, no matter how big your economy and how great some of its past performance.

But Americans are suckers for tent preachers, in everything from new product advertising to politics and self-help gurus helping themselves to people’s pocket books, and Obama is really starting to sound like one more of a tiresome breed.

The answer, of course, is for America to shut-up and roll its sleeves up – even then there are no guarantees of the same kind of future as it has enjoyed in the past – but you never fire America’s imagination by truth and reality.

Miracles, sermons, sugar plums, and fairy stories are always in demand.

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

You have put many of the relevant points very well, Clive Crook, and I think this an inevitable development.

America’s sweeping power and matchless affluence after WWII were temporary phenomena, the result all the world’s major competitors being flattened by war and America’s industries having just reached remarkable levels of output as the armory of democracy.

But all those competitors – Germany, Britain, Italy, and Japan – are today back and thriving.

Not only are they thriving but new remarkable competitors have emerged, especially China. And now we even have countries like Brazil and Russia starting to emerge.

Trade and economics are of course not zero-sum games, but competition always means there are relative winners and losers.

Americans, even the most humble of them, over the last half century have formed an iron-clad sense of entitlement. Their leaders have only force-fed them in this with jingo nonsense like “the American dream,” and the new (new in the postwar period) phenomena of mass marketing and advertising with new penetrating media have only further fed this fantasy belief.

Americans’ naïve religious propensity, the inheritance of Puritan genes, makes many of them extremely gullible to such nonsense as being special.

This entire set of beliefs and expectations works strongly against American competitiveness, and America simply is not competitive in many areas. It is living off its accumulated fat, as it were, in many respects.

Real wages for the middle class have done nothing but fall for decades. Americans have adjusted by such efforts as two spouses working and moving out to elephantine houses thrown-up on the deserts and in the cornfields. Both these strategies have pretty well been exhausted.

I would add, too, the important factor that American education has, on average, become inflated and lost a good deal of value. High graduation is practically guaranteed even for someone who barely reads.

Undergraduate degrees have suffered exactly the same decay in value. You can get an English degree in America without ever reading Shakespeare. You can get a degree in television studies or circus. You can get a degree just by playing basketball.

What these educational trends represent is the consumer portion of education taking over to a considerable extent from the human investment portion of education, a reflection surely of the postwar feelings of American entitlement, as in “my kids goin’ to college” even if the kid involved has no academic talent. Such education makes you competitive with precisely no one and only wastes resources in a form of consumption.

Another absolutely crucial area contributing to America’s decline is its long series of pointless, costly wars. Nothing is more wasteful than the military, but America’s sense of entitlement has fooled it into believing it can manipulate the world to its narrow interests and quite frankly uninformed prejudices.

America’s titanic investments in the pointless slaughters in Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and in many lesser efforts has been as unproductive as its decayed system of education.

You can’t keep doing stupid things – all the while pressuring everyone else to pretend that they are not stupid – forever, and I genuinely believe America has reached the limits. Our greatest future danger is America’s not recognizing these truths and adjusting appropriately, instead taking the John Wayne approach to the new world emerging, especially towards China.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY JEREMY WARNER IN THE TELEGRAPH

Jeremy Warner, you have it exactly right.

Americans have never been free traders at heart.

And I believe that is because the impulse to dominate, very much part of American culture and tradition, is not comfortable with it. Americans raised for generations with Manifest Destiny and “Empire of Liberty” have an instinctive repulsion around compromise with others.

And, following from the same roots, Americans are largely repulsed by the rule of international organizations so necessary to a better-ordered world. Thus everything from the United Nations to various International treaties are viewed with suspicion or even contempt.

Indeed, America often uses free trade, in the form of free trade agreements, as a weapon for political domination.

After all, classical economics tells us that it is the smaller partner who has the most to gain from free trade.

So when the U. S. signs a free trade agreement with some relatively small countries in South America or the Caribbean (as it has recently), it obtains effectively a sledge hammer over the affairs of those countries: don’t get out of line or we’ll abrogate the treaty benefiting you.

Further still, when the U.S. enters into a large and complex free trade agreement – as, for example, the North American Free Trade Agreement – it flexes its muscle whenever it is uncomfortable with a situation rising out of the terms of the agreement.

Students of that historic agreement will know the U.S., on a dozen issues, has simply declared it will not comply, and that is after going through the entire dispute-settling process established by the treaty and losing every decision. For Canada this high-handed behavior has included everything from trade in pork to soft-wood lumber, and for Mexico, it has included many agricultural products plus important services.

Americans, many of them, simply believe they have the best of all possible worlds under the best of all possible governments, and anything which appears to say otherwise is rejected out of hand.

Paul Krugman, despite the Noble Prize, is contaminated with strains of the same thinking we see in Thomas Friedman or Pat Buchanan or a large fraction of the United States Senate.

That is why, in my book about the decline of the American Empire and the rise of China, one of my most important themes was whether the United States would peacefully allow China to compete. I do believe if China is allowed to peacefully compete, it will unquestionably become the world’s most powerful economy in not many decades.

United States’ history puts the odds against it. The rise of Japan was met with immense hostility which eventually caused the Japanese to go to war against the United States, something they had had no intention of doing.

But the American expectation to keep the Pacific Ocean as an American lake made it take policies extremely hostile to Japan. The same motive was still at work only a few decades ago with the American holocaust in Vietnam.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY JAMES MANICOM AND ANDREW O’NEIL IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

This is pure anti-Chinese rubbish.

Look at our glorious relationship with the United States.

They deport our citizens to dark places for torture.

They never honor their business agreements when it is to their advantage not to do so: as we see in everything from softwood lumber to pork.

They launch savage, illegal wars like that in Iraq or Vietnam, and then accuse us of not being good neighbors when we don’t join them in the bloodshed.

They persist in dangerous ignorance about us, as only shown recently by both the Secretary for Homeland Security and Senator John McCain claiming the 9/11 crew or some of it came through Canada.

They now fill the border with rude, ignorant people, destroying a once-civil relationship.

They refuse to recognize our Northern border, sending ships as they please and even leaving their official maps altered, constituting in fact the greatest single threat to sovereignty there.

They pressure us like a bully on almost every trivial issue they care about.

Their various ambassadors talk down to us like missionaries teaching savages about the Truth.

Unfortunately, we have a shabby government that swallows it all and just smiles, doing their bidding on matters like foreign investment dutifully – including importantly, keeping out Chinese investment that could greatly help our economy.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO AN EDITORIAL IN THE TORONTO GLOBE AND MAIL

No, it is this editorial that is telling.

It forcefully brings home the fact that its writer does not understand the situation in China.

China is a land of great ethnic diversity. No government there can afford to have groups making inordinate demands and creating unrest, which is exactly what the original crack-down in Tibet was in response to.

Tibet has been part of China for many centuries. It enjoyed a brief, brief period of a degree of independence.

Most critics of China are not even aware of this history.

I don’t know about the editorial writer, but I vividly remember Detroit being “locked down” with armed forces killing something like 44 rioters in the street and marching around with bayonets.

I also remember a large part of Los Angeles being locked down and more than 20 people being shot by armed forces in the street.

The same for a portion of Chicago.

Oh, and I’d like to see what happens to people who organize a party to give back the Hawaiian Islands or New Mexico or Texas. Believe me, the terror laws would be applied swiftly.

China has done nothing – absolutely nothing – you would not see in the United States under similar circumstances.

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE TORONTO GLOBE AND MAIL

Sorry, but human rights do mean something in China. It is simply ignorant to say otherwise.

And as China continues her climb to a place in the sun, human rights will become increasingly important. That is the story of human civilization.

The average Chinese today enjoys freedoms not known there in the modern era.

Most people going on about Tibet do not even understand what happened, and they utterly fail to have any perspective on world affairs.

Our colossal neighbor to the South is running a CIA International Torture Gulag plus disgraces like Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. It has murdered the best part of million people in Iraq and destroyed the economy of a progressing country.

They also left three million dead in Vietnam and left a legacy of land soaked with Agent Orange and cluttered with landmines to continue killing and crippling for decades.

China has lived in relative peace for half a century. Today it is rising out of the Dark Ages of Maoism and giving the opportunity to hundreds of millions to better their lives.

All who understand human progress should applaud this.