J D C A O

J D C A O

zhengshugan

isa ☁️🍄 #GR1ND

Ramos Ramos 💐💐

Francisco Ve

Roberto Pedroso

jcdurbant

jcdurbant

@jcdurbant

Jun 5

IT'S JUST WRINGING THE CHICKEN'S NECK TO SCARE THE MONKEYS, STUPID ! (What strange Western blindness, from Voltaire to Jeffrey Sachs, to the weaponization of religion in both Russia and China ?) You have to wring the chicken's neck to scare the monkeys. Chinese proverb When there isn't enough food, people starve. It's better to let half of them die so that the other half can eat their fill. Mao Zedong Blood is needed. Yang Shangkun, Chinese President, 1989) The epidemic is a demon. We will not allow the demon to remain hidden. Xi Jinping The Party is like God; it is everywhere, but you cannot see it. Chinese academic What is happening today is not solely a matter of politics. It concerns the salvation of humankind, the place we will occupy to the right or left of God the Savior, who comes into the world as Judge and Creator of creation. Russian Patriarch Kirill (2022) Confutzee, known among us as Confucius (…) did not play the prophet; he did not claim to be inspired; he did not teach a new religion; he did not resort to tricks; he did not flatter the emperor under whom he lived — he does not even speak of him. He is, in short, the only one among the world’s founders who did not have women following him. (…) I have read his books with attention; I have made extracts from them; I have found in them only the purest morality, without any tinge of charlatanism. He lived six hundred years before our common era. His works were commented upon by the most learned men of the nation. (…) One must not be fanatical about Chinese merit: the constitution of their empire is in truth the best in the world; the only one entirely founded on paternal power; the only one in which a provincial governor is punished when, upon leaving office, he has not received the acclamations of the people; the only one that has instituted prizes for virtue, while everywhere else the laws are limited to punishing crime; the only one that has made its laws adopted by its conquerors, while we are still subject to the customs of the Burgundians, the Franks, and the Goths who subdued us. But one must admit that the common people, governed by bonzes, are as thieving as our own; that one sells everything very dearly to foreigners there, as with us; that in the sciences the Chinese are still at the stage where we were two hundred years ago; that they have, like us, a thousand ridiculous prejudices; that they believe in talismans and judicial astrology, as we believed for a long time. (…) But all this does not prevent the Chinese, four thousand years ago, when we did not know how to read, from knowing all the essentially useful things of which we boast today. The religion of the literati, once again, is admirable. No superstitions, no absurd legends, none of those dogmas that insult reason and nature, to which bonzes give a thousand different meanings because they have none. The simplest worship has seemed to them the best for more than forty centuries. They are what we think Seth, Enoch, and Noah were; they content themselves with worshiping one God with all the sages of the earth, while in Europe we divide ourselves between Thomas and Bonaventure, between Calvin and Luther, between Jansenius and Molina. Voltaire China, once entirely unknown, long afterwards disfigured in our eyes, and finally better known to us than several provinces of Europe, is the most populous, the most flourishing, and the most ancient empire of the universe (…) We are also assured that this vast extent of country is not governed despotically, but by six principal tribunals that serve as a check on all the inferior tribunals. Religion there is simple, and that is incontestable proof of its antiquity. For more than four thousand years the emperors of China have been the first pontiffs of the empire; they worship a single God, they offer him the first fruits of a field that they have plowed with their own hands. (…) This religion of the emperor, of all the colaos, of all the literati, is all the more beautiful because it is not soiled by any superstition. Voltaire The Enlightenment thinkers questioned everything in European society; nothing in Chinese society. Their critical spirit, so sharp on one side, was dulled on the other. The rational paradise of atheist China allowed them to denounce the hell of Europe, subjugated to the "Infamous" – the clergy. Thus, they disregarded the cruelties of the emperors, the upheavals of dynastic changes, the burning of books, the torture of opponents, and the ever-renewing rebellions, always drowned in blood. Alain Peyrefitte (1989) The new Cold War has been created in very large part by the United States. From around 2015 onward, neoconservative officials in American foreign policy concluded that American hegemony was threatened by China’s rise. Since then, the U.S. government has put in place a growing set of tools — trade barriers, sanctions, export controls, investment screening, and new military alliances in Asia — to try to “contain” China. This approach could lead to outright war, for example over Taiwan. The United States is trying to enlist Europe in its effort to contain China. Yet Europe’s deep interest is not American hegemony, but rather a genuine multilateral order in which Europe and China both play active and responsible roles — as do the United States, of course. Europe should therefore resist the new Cold War led by the United States and instead pursue active diplomatic, economic, and financial relations with China. (…) And the view that China represents a serious security threat to the United States is alarmist. Yes, China is a large and powerful country, but not one that is intrinsically militaristic or warlike. China has not fought a single war in the last 40 years, while the United States has waged countless (and apparently endless) conflicts. (…) The United States should stop playing on fear, engage in strengthened diplomacy, remain committed to the One China policy, stop provoking confrontation over Taiwan, and end the unilateral trade, technological, and financial measures that hinder the Chinese economy. China, too, should engage with the United States and the European Union in strengthened diplomacy to resolve problems of common interest. I believe China is quite ready to do so. (…) This war [Putin’s war with Ukraine] could have been avoided if the United States had not pushed for NATO enlargement to Ukraine and Georgia, and had not participated in the overthrow of Viktor Yanukovych in 2014. France and Germany should also have pushed Ukraine to comply with the Minsk II agreements. There are already several hundred thousand dead in Ukraine because of this war. If Ukraine tries to retake Crimea, I think we will see massive escalation, even nuclear war. The idea that Ukraine will defeat Russia is a reckless gamble on the apocalypse. The United States and Ukrainians should have agreed to Ukrainian neutrality, Russia’s de facto control of Crimea, and the implementation of the Minsk II agreements. Instead, they are recklessly betting on military victory against a country that possesses 1,600 nuclear weapons. (…) In both cases [the origin of the pandemic and the sabotage of Nord Stream], the U.S. government maintains and manipulates an implausible narrative, and does so with remarkable acceptance in Europe. On Covid-19, it is clear that the United States funded very dangerous research in China based on advanced genetic manipulation of SARS-related viruses. And it is also clear that the U.S. government refused to investigate its own research programs that may have contributed to the creation of SARS-CoV-2. Instead, the U.S. government promoted the scientifically weak story of a “natural” outbreak at the Huanan market in Wuhan. On Nord Stream, Joe Biden promised on February 7 that if Russia invaded Ukraine, Nord Stream would be finished. When asked how the United States would do this, he replied: “I promise you we will be able to do it.” Even Sweden is hiding the results of its investigation into Nord Stream from Germany and Denmark, in the name of national security! I believe European leaders know that the United States and other allies did this, but they simply will not comment on or explain the truth to the public. We do not know for certain that SARS-CoV-2 came from a laboratory and that the United States blew up the pipeline, but we do know that the public has not yet been informed of the real facts regarding these two cases. Jeffrey Sachs (2022) The idea of a naturally peaceful China, serenely enthroned in the middle of its own backyard which it has no intention of enlarging, is a fiction. The imperial idea, of which the Communist regime has made itself the heir, carries within it a hegemonic will. Power politics requires “securing the periphery.” Yet China’s periphery includes several of today’s major economic powers: China’s “protection” of its periphery directly collides with global stability. All the more so because it is tormented by a thousand internal ills that serve as so many incitements to external adventures and nationalist mobilization. What does the People’s Republic want? To restore China as the Middle Kingdom. (…) Standing in the way of this glorious future and of vassalization by China are first and foremost the United States. China does not want military confrontation; it wants to intimidate and deter, and to force the United States to back down. (…) Beijing has recovered Hong Kong — the money, finance, communications. The next step is Taiwan — advanced technology, industry, enormous monetary reserves. If Beijing manages to impose reunification on its own terms, if a “Taiwan coup” succeeds today, tomorrow, or the day after, all hopes would be permitted in Beijing. From then on, the rich and influential Chinese diaspora would have to put all its eggs in the same basket; there would no longer be any alternative center of power. The PRC would then control the technological and financial resources of the entire “Greater China.” It would have reached the critical mass necessary for its grand Asian design. Militarily outclassed and lacking regional counterweights, the ASEAN countries, Singapore, and the others would then come under Chinese control — without friction, but bag and baggage. Beijing could then attack its “first island chain of defense”: Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia. Korea? (…) What the now-discomfited advocates of “Asian values” failed to understand, in their pro domo pleas for a despotism they claimed was enlightened, is that the counter-powers and counterweights — an active opposition, a free and critical press, powers separated according to Montesquieu’s rules, the existence of a civil society and multitudes of associative organizations — are part of the necessary diffusion of power that can thus integrate different skills, interests, and opinions. But to do this, one must renounce the Chinese model, that is, internal monolithism. Renunciation of external monolithism is no less indispensable: China must participate in a world whose rules it did not create, and these rules are foreign to the very spirit of its multi-millennial politics. China still lives under the curse of its own political culture. The shape that the century will take will depend largely on whether China maintains or abandons this culture and its curse. Laurent Murawiec (2000) It is impossible to understand the form of current Chinese governance without looking at archaic and imperial China. (…) Archaic Chinese myths frequently stage a founding murder. Thus Tang the Victorious, founder of the Shang dynasty, is both considered the one who put to death Jie, the last sovereign of the Xia — China’s first dynasty — three millennia ago, and, after taking power, as a scapegoat himself, accused of exactly the same ills as Jie in his time. During a drought, conflicts multiplied and Tang offered himself in sacrifice to bring rain. Both Tang and Yu the Great, founder of the Xia, were cripples bearing the marks of election proper to scapegoats. Tang was “parched,” like the sorcerers at the heart of rain-making rites, and Yu the Great limped. The “Yu step” remains one of the main Taoist rituals today. (…) It was through sacrifices that the emperor could make order and harmony reign! Before being a political figure, the emperor was “Son of Heaven.” The sacrifice to Heaven, which was his prerogative until 1912 and the founding of the Republic, was a bloody ritual that no foreigner could attend. If the sacrifices were performed correctly, it meant the world was in order. If the emperor agitated to try to solve the problems facing the country, he risked sowing disorder in the community instead. The “Mandate of Heaven,” a notion whose first occurrence appears in 998 BC under the Zhou dynasty, allowed the justification of the power in place. The emperor constantly had to face risks of subversion and inspire greater fear than he himself felt toward collective violence. The threatening gaze of the “ten thousand beings” (the crowd) constantly weighed on the “unique being” that was the emperor, “more to be pitied than a leper,” as the Legalist Han Feizi said. For Mencius, the fallen tyrant must face the common will of Heaven, the people, and the one who expelled him, who then becomes the new holder of the Mandate of Heaven but may tomorrow be a new sacrificial victim. Isn’t it interesting to see how, at the 20th Congress, Hu Jintao, Xi Jinping’s predecessor, was publicly excluded from the assembly? His successor did not bat an eyelid. Since the advent of the Communist Party, the “Mandate of Heaven” is called “historical mission” and founds the Party’s legitimacy. If the name changes, legitimacy still comes from Heaven. As long as they hold power, the leaders are legitimate. (…) Theology still plays its role in today’s China. (…) The return of an imperial figure with Xi Jinping fundamentally marks a return to normal. (…) [But] Christianity, present in China since the 17th century, makes sacrificial closure on the scapegoat more difficult. Christianity is synonymous with freedom. It is thanks to it that women gained access to education and began to free themselves from foot-binding, a progress moreover claimed by the Communist Party. Today, despite sometimes bloody persecutions against Christians until the 1970s and the measures taken today to ban access to worship, conversions are growing. We lack reliable statistics, but Christians are around 100 million, mostly Protestants. It is in this pool that many human rights activists are recruited. It is therefore no coincidence that the authorities want to “Sinicize” Christianity. In 2019, it announced a project to rewrite the Bible, which should be completed within ten years. It has however given up including in a civic education manual its version of the adulterous woman episode (Gospel of John), in which Christ himself participates in the stoning! (…) [Chinese historiography] is not based on truth, but on the self-justification of power, which is always pacifying while the victims are “troublemakers” responsible for what happens to them.The current China, despite its official “atheism,” shares with imperial China the same tropism that leads it not to distinguish the political from the religious. The Chinese Communist Party acts more and more as an institution that positions itself as guardian of what is sacred for China and that external forces, political or religious, constantly threaten — in the same way that the “celestial bureaucracy of the Empire was the guardian of a dogma against the heresies” that threatened it. (…) The “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” (…) is the heart of the metanarrative of contemporary China according to which China closed in 1949 a parenthesis of a long century stretching from the beginning of the first Opium War in 1839 to the creation of “new China,” a century during which it was “humiliated” by Western and Japanese powers that took advantage of its weakness, its naïveté, and an intrinsic pacifism of its culture. Without renouncing what it essentially is — a peaceful and harmonious civilization — it will not repeat the mistakes of the past and will know how to defend itself if attacked. (…) The sometimes aggressive and irascible posture of contemporary China is thus paradoxically explained by the feeling that Chinese civilization is more peaceful than others. It therefore needs to become strong to become again what it imagines it was: a model of virtue for itself and for the world. (…) Foreigners, when they criticize the Chinese regime, attack ideologies or sociopolitical systems — capitalism or communism — that originate in the West, as if Chinese culture were untouchable. A strange consensus emerges not to seek precisely the links that might exist between the increasingly totalitarian governance of the Chinese regime and Chinese civilization. At the same time, (…) the West (…) becomes a universal scapegoat (…) attacked on both the domestic and external fronts, accused of being the almost unique cause of all the misfortunes of the contemporary world. (…) Even as they are the work of deeply hierarchical and inegalitarian civilizations, these denunciations skillfully and even perversely rely on Western “values”: political freedom, freedom of expression, equality of conditions, and the latest of these values whose fortune we will see in China: “inclusivity.” If its regime is subjected to fierce criticism, particularly in Western countries, China as a civilization is the object of a strange complacency, as if slavery, wars of religion, genocides, and colonialism were foreign to Chinese culture. (…) Moreover, (…) a myth dating from the Enlightenment, which has even infected current Chinese leaders as well as some of the most influential commentators on contemporary China, asserts that Chinese civilization is intrinsically peaceful and tolerant. If it arms itself today at an impressive speed, it would only be because it is forced to align itself with Western ideologies that make the balance of power the alpha and omega of international relations. (…) By avoiding examining the cultural sources of Sino-totalitarianism, we deprive ourselves of truly understanding what is happening in China. The “social credit” system for evaluating the virtue of legal and private persons, China’s will to “Sinicize” religions, its obsession with ideological “purity” and the fight against corruption or against the “demon” of the pandemic, the disconcerting mixture of good conscience and ferocity that characterizes its governance, its conception of war and trade conflicts, the nature of its relations with its neighbors, the form taken by its will to domination — all these elements, and others, can only be understood if we accept to look without shame at what traditional culture of this country is and the way it informs contemporary China. Emmanuel Dubois de Prisque (2022) jcdurbant.wordpress.com/2023…

4,128