“Shitholegate” as the inharmonious epitomy of awkward and unpleasant world politics: Trump barks, but the caravan should move on!

The air attack warning sounds like… This is the sound.

When you hear the air attack warning, you and your family must take cover

Frankie goes to Hollywood – Two Tribes

Was the writing on the wall last week, when the Hawaiian islands were in shock at the moment that an erroneous warning for an incoming ballistic missile took the islands by surprise?!

Especially in the 30 minutes between the warning itself and the ‘all clear’ signal, the social media were litterally bursting with disbelief, shock & awe, and (unspoken) questions like “This is it?!”

Luckily, as we found out soon, this was not it! Not even close… Just one innocent person who messed up his job and perhaps career, by pushing the wrong button during a drill.

Nevertheless, the nasty feeling that remained after ‘buttongate’ in Hawaii, was the feeling that it could have been ‘it’ indeed! Just because of the current geopolitical situation.

A few days ago, the Dutch newspaper Trouw wrote a very good article about the danger for world peace, coming from the paradigm shift in the United States’ nuclear strategy and the intended investments in small, tactical nuclear warheads.

Such nuclear warheads could be mounted on short and medium range missiles or could even be fired by a powerful canon, as can be seen in a short movie from the Fifties of last century.

Here follow the pertinent snippets of this article in Trouw:

The American administration considers a drastical paradigm shift in its nuclear strategy, that strongly increases the odds for a nuclear war. The Pentagon created a report in which a number of policy proposals are made, among others with regards to so-called ‘first use’. In other words: the question under which circumstances nuclear weapons could and should be deployed.

Until recently, the policy was that the US would only consider the deployment of nuclear weapons as a reaction to nuclear or biological attacks on American soil. However, in the new policy document it is stated that also cyber attacks upon the US could serve as a foundation for the deployment of nukes. A cyber attack upon America’s communication and electricity networks, is ample ground for a nuclear counter-attack. In the document, a plea is written on behalf of a more aggressive stance against America’s rivals, like Russia and China, but also North Korea and Iran.

And this was not all. Trump did not only want a larger nuclear arsenal (initially), but also a ‘smarter’ nuclear arsenal, as the following snippets from Trouw reveal:

Instead of expansion of the nuclear arsenal, [Trump] wants to replace a number of very powerful nuclear weapons by smaller items, also called ‘tactical nukes’. This seems good news, but in reality, it isn’t!

Smaller nukes are not meant for deterrence, like the powerful ones. They are meant for real deployment. This logic goes as follows: as tactical nukes are less powerful, the step towards deployment becomes smaller. However, when small nukes are eventually deployed, the odds increase that an opponent will use more powerful ones.

This is where we are today. A blatantly lying and bragging, mentally unstable and extremely vindictive American president has lowered the threshold for deployment of nuclear arms: for himself, as well as for his adversaries.

Donald Trump did this deliberately with his political desire to build up an arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons that can be deployed at will: not as a ultimate weapon of last resort, but as a tactical discovery on the battle field. As if Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the Cold War did never happen!

And so, after only 10 years of deep economic crisis, the world managed to get itself back in a very dangerous and uncertain political situation, with a lot of possible outcomes, of which a few could litterally become the end of the world.

Nevertheless, this is something for which we cannot blame the current American president alone, as there are more protagonists in this explosive, political conundrum: 

• President Kim Young Un, the young, very brutal and unpredictable ‘rogue’ leader in North Korea, who leads his country with an iron fist and successfully built up a nuclear arsenal of his own, together with the required longe range missiles to deliver this arsenal at the home land of his enemies;
• President Vladimir Putin of Russia, the professional plotter and manipulator in the Kremlin, who set the world on fire with his stealth wars against Georgia and Ukraine and his hardly conceived threats against the former Warsaw Pact countries in the NATO;
• Xi Jinping, the sfinx-like Chinese strategist in Beijing with his repressive visions on his people and a large hidden agenda, regarding the future of China. A president who is involved in gathering a large share of the global commodities and raw materials for his domestic industries, via his ‘beads and mirrors’ policies in Latin America and Africa, his new Silk Route in Asia and his annexation of the oil-laden Spratly Islands;
• Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the narcisistic and paranoid leader in Turkey, who dreams of a revival of the Great Ottoman empire under his command, but who is afraid for the ‘mythical’ Fetullah Gülen: a former religious soulmate, who is now his most feared enemy. Turkey, as the 2nd largest country in the NATO, is currently involved in an attack against Syrian Kurds in the north of Syria, who are supported by the American army. This scenario of two NATO partners fighting with each other is even too risky for the Russians;
• And of course – as icing on the cake – there is the aforementioned American president Donald Trump himself: a genuine political amateur in the White House. An amateur with radical ideas about economic cooperation and free trade, all based upon the ‘survival of the one with the biggest mouth and the most powerful weapons’, who is supported by ultra-religious grassroots with visions of ‘Judgement Day’ and with seemingly more money than brains in his understanding of world politics. 

This is a poisonous cocktail for the world indeed.

How amateuristical, blunt, openly racist and even brainless the American President Donald Trump can operate, became clear in a recent private White House meeting. There was a debate between Donald Trump and his administration about the immigration to the United States, coming from poor countries in Africa and middle-American countries like Haiti and El Salvador. Witnesses stated that Donald Trump called these countries ‘Shitholes’ during this meeting.

This disdainful outburst caused a global commotion among journalists and (non) US diplomats, but especially among representatives of these countries themselves, who were – of course – ‘not amused’. Besides that, it proved that President Trump does not have the credit and credibility within his administration, to keep such an erratic outcry private. Even though president Trump later denied to ever have said this, it is clear that nobody actually believed him, outside a few people whose brains probably still resided in the country of The Wizard of Ozz.

And so ‘Shitholegate’ turned into the inharmonious epitomy of awkward and unpleasant world politics in 2018. A global politics that is seemingly driven by ruthless and unscrupulous egoes, who consider themselves to be the right persons to fight for the interests of their country or – even worse – their own wallets.

What makes this current political situation so particularly dangerous is not so much the strenght and political prowess of Trump’s adversaries:

The most unpredictable adversary (or in fact ally) of Donald Trump is perhaps Recep Erdoğan. His enormous pride and ego, as well as his domestically shown paranoia in combination with his NATO membership, might bring him in uncharted territory of politics very soon; just as the very unstable situation in the neighbouring countries of Turkey could do. Syria, Iraq, Iran and East-Turkey are full of political pitfalls and a gung ho politician like Erdoğan could easily step in one or two, driven by his ego and his ambitious grand scheme for Turkey’s future.

Kim Jong Un, even though seemingly a dangerous madman with nuclear toys, knows that deploying his nuclear missiles towards the United States will become the immediate end for his country and (probably) himself. On top of that, he comes from a seasoned family of Korean leaders, that knows how to tease the Americans to such a level that they become really angry, but just not enough to attack North Korea. For the rest, the meaning of North Korea for the global political spectrum is quite futile, as the country is small and has little political meaning.

Both Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping know how the global political games are played and keep a profile that does not bring them in immediate contact with the American (nuclear) forces. They make some noise and stir up some things in the global theatre, but further mind their own business.

No, first and foremost it is President Donald Trump himself and his deeply religious, right-wing administration of millionaires and billionaires, who are the most unpredictable party in today’s global politics.

His government, consisting of American exceptionalists with a lack of basic diplomatic skills and political experience, have been in a continuous battle with the media and the Democratic party about who is right, who is wrong and who is lying all the time.

When a relatively new president has come under such heavy artillery fire from the media and the opposition and has so little credibility left as Donald Trump, the obvious option in American politics has traditionally been to start a war or a conflict somewhere, in order to detract attention from the domestic situation. It has happened before and it could easily happen again. North Korea or Iran could then be obvious candidates for such a (probably very bloody and dangerous) conflict.

On top of that, Trump’s new nuclear politics, his rudeness towards other countries and his ‘America First’ economic policies, at the expense of mainly Europe and the Far East, might bring him in a confrontation with his global adversaries, but also his former allies. When the going gets really tough, these countries will also fight for their own interests in the political and economic theatres or on the battlefields.

This makes Donald Trump to these eyes the biggest and most uncontrolable risk for enduring peace in the world. And the risk may increase on a daily basis, as Trump’s politics seemed to become rather more than less erratic during the first year of his presidency.

Perhaps the best idea to get out of this dangerous stalemate situation would be when the other powerful countries just ignore Trump’s bragging and rude politics and try to establish (covert) diplomatic contacts with the other, more reasonable and less ideologically driven members of his administration.

This could be a good way to eventually improve relations with the US and prevent Trump from making catastrophical errors in global politics. In this way, Trump would become a quite powerless president ‘in name only’, with a shadow cabinet that keeps him from doing something stupid. As a political solution, this would perhaps be unprecedented in the US history, but could be the only thing to prevent the world from worse events and geopolitical conflicts.

You could then say: Trump barks, but the caravan moves on fortunately!

About alleged crime and very real retribution: Pt2, Bernie Sanders, the best President the United States never had

Ooh Superman where are you now

When everything's gone wrong somehow

The men of steel, the men of power

Are losing control by the hour.

Land of Confusion - Genesis

I couldn’t help being a fan of Bernie Sanders, one of the democratic candidates for the Presidential elections in 2016.

The man with the patient and wise charisma of a friendly, aging uncle and ideas that could be described as quite social-democrat for American standards (or “liberal” in the US vocabulary) ran for the nomination of the Democratic Party. He did this against Hillary Rodham Clinton, the dead-cert favorite for this presidential race and later candidate for the November 2016 elections.

Where Hillary attracted attention with her loud voice, her attacking style of debating and aggressive charisma, Bernie Sanders seemed quiet and somewhat shy and unassuming. Almost like President Jimmy Carter in his heyday. It seemed to be a battle between a barking, angry dachshund and a kind-hearted labrador dog. Eventually the noisy dachshund won and ran for president against Donald Trump. And everybody knows nowadays what the outcome of this battle was.

In hindsight, a lot of people thought that Bernie Sanders would have stood a much better chance in the presidential elections against the blunt Donald Trump – who turned into a working class hero in spite of his blatantly rich descent and lacking diplomatic skills – than Hillary Clinton did. Clinton seemed rather part of the problem, instead of being part of the solution, in contrary to Bernie Sanders.

This American problem was to these eyes the ubiquitous intertwinedness of politicians and officials, extremely rich Americans, multinational companies and financial institutions. This resulted in an overall extremely poor representation of less influential groups in the American political landscape. 

Winning elections had become extremely expensive in the USA over the years, so every private person and company that had much funding money on offer for the candidates, got a lot of listening ears to talk to. Hillary Clinton seemed much more contaminated with this American modus operandi than Sanders.

On top of that Hillary Clinton had made a bad mistake, with respect to receiving state secrets on her private email account. This and other things in her behaviour made her very vulnerable for below-the-belt attacks, by a candidate who had made his bluntness into a weapon of vocal mass destruction.

The reason that I loved Bernie Sanders so much, was that he really seemed determined to do something about the widening gap between the haves and the have-nots in American society.

There had been almost ten years of this depression-like crisis in the United States. Years, in which the American middle and lower classes had suffered badly from the consequences and lost almost all their built-up wealth. This turned their sheer survival in a day-to-day business. 

Especially the circumstances in which the poor classes in the US had to live, had been deteriorating very rapidly. Hence the Flint water crisis and the generally lackluster way in which the American government reacted to crises of nature, that smashed the futures of many poor people to pieces.  And nobody in charge really seemed to care about this, as those poor people were not decisive for their (re-)election and for the remainder of their political career.

And at the same time, there had been five years of sturdy economic growth for the rich parts of American society, due to the flooding of the American market with cash money coming from the Fed (i.e. quantitative easing) and the ample availability of borrowing money against near-zero interest rates.

This made borrowing large sums of money almost for free for the people with access to the money and capital markets: extremely wealthy Americans, multinational companies and the financial wizards of the hedgefunds and the private equity companies.

Hence, a situation had emerged in which the wealthy part of American society could avoid litterally everything, while Joe and Jane Sixpack had to deal with a stabilizing or even dropping real income and more private and public crises than they could stand.

The American society always had a religious, almost fundamental hate towards anybody, who they saw as a “commie bastard” (i.e. a communist) and against everybody carrying the reputation of being a social-democrat (i.e. sneeringly called “a liberal”). Nevertheless, there seemed to be more room for a social-democrat president than in the nearly fourty years before.

It seemed that Bernie Sanders could have become the right president at the right time and place, in order to restore the confidence of the poor and middle class citizens in their political leaders. Just like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman had done three quarters of a century before him… But Bernie did not get the nomination eventually and had nothing else to do than withdrawing from the presidential race.

Hillary’s campaign, however, was destined to end in tears, frustration and incomprehension about what went wrong! Especially for all the people who did not see this trainwreck campaign coming and wondered where Donald Trump came from and what he had done to win the elections from a seemingly hopeless position…

Roughly two weeks ago, a story emerged that made clear that Hillary Clinton had not won the Democratic candidacy just by coincidence or as a consequence of the fact that she was so much better and more experienced than her liberal adversary Sanders.

The writer of this shocking story was the unsuspected chairwoman of the Democratic Party, Donna Brazil. She claimed that Hillary Clinton “wheeled and dealed” herself into getting the democratic nomination, by using “every dirty trick in the book” and lots of other cunning tricks.

The following pertinent snippets came from the political magazine Politico and were written bij Donna Brazil, the chairwoman of the American Democratic Party:

I had promised Bernie when I took the helm of the Democratic National Committee after the convention that I would get to the bottom of whether Hillary Clinton’s team had rigged the nomination process, as a cache of emails stolen by Russian hackers and posted online had suggested.

Debbie [Wasserman Schultz, the previous chairman of the Democratic National Party - EL] was not a good manager. She hadn’t been very interested in controlling the party—she let Clinton’s headquarters in Brooklyn do as it desired so she didn’t have to inform the party officers how bad the situation was.

“What?” I screamed. “I am an officer of the party and they’ve been telling us everything is fine and they were raising money with no problems.”

That wasn’t true, he [Gary Gensler, the Chief Financial Officer of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign – EL] said. Officials from Hillary’s campaign had taken a look at the DNC’s [Democratic National Committee] books. Obama left the party $24 million in debt—$15 million in bank debt and more than $8 million owed to vendors after the 2012 campaign—and had been paying that off very slowly. Obama’s campaign was not scheduled to pay it off until 2016. Hillary for America (the campaign) and the Hillary Victory Fund (its joint fundraising vehicle with the DNC) had taken care of 80 percent of the remaining debt in 2016, about $10 million, and had placed the party on an allowance.

Gensler described the party as fully under the control of Hillary’s campaign, which seemed to confirm the suspicions of the Bernie camp. The campaign had the DNC on life support, giving it money every month to meet its basic expenses, while the campaign was using the party as a fund-raising clearinghouse. Under FEC law, an individual can contribute a maximum of $2,700 directly to a presidential campaign. But the limits are much higher for contributions to state parties and a party’s national committee.

Individuals who had maxed out their $2,700 contribution limit to the campaign could write an additional check for $353,400 to the Hillary Victory Fund. The money would be deposited in the states first, and transferred to the DNC shortly after that.

“Wait,” I said. “That victory fund was supposed to be for whoever was the nominee, and the state party races. You’re telling me that Hillary has been controlling it since before she got the nomination?”

Gary said the campaign had to do it or the party would collapse.

Right around the time of the convention, the leaked emails revealed Hillary’s campaign was grabbing money from the state parties for its own purposes

The agreement—signed by Amy Dacey, the former CEO of the DNC, and Robby Mook with a copy to Marc Elias—specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.

The funding arrangement with HFA and the victory fund agreement was not illegal, but it sure looked unethical. If the fight had been fair, one campaign would not have control of the party before the voters had decided which one they wanted to lead.

I told Bernie I had found Hillary’s Joint Fundraising Agreement. I explained that the cancer was that she had exerted this control of the party long before she became its nominee.

There you have it. The to these eyes most suitable candidate for the American presidency was sidelined before he even stood a chance. And this happened by a candidate that was as close to being charged with corruption as she could be. That is at least when everything that Donna Brazil stated, is indeed true.

It is stated by the red and bold snippets from Donna Brazil, that the victory fund was not eventually for the official winner of the nomination, but was used instead as a private piggy bank at the disposal of Hillary Clinton. And Clinton also purchased a make or break decision with respect to the party’s communications manager and the decisive vote with respect to the other executive staff and anything else important in the DNC. No questions asked…

The candidacy of Bernie Sanders was now in fact a car with four empty tyres and no gasoline on board. The race was over before it even started.

Bernie Sanders was an “unamerican”, almost European candidate in his charisma. No self-inflicted, overly brown tan, no “wintersports” teeth, no voice that could shatter glass in a jiffy and no $1000 haircut. Summarized, he was a little bit older looking and not so smooth as the Clintons, but with the battle scars of a few decades in politics. He seemed an elderly politician with a lot of experience and (to these eyes) the wisdom to make the right decisions and not one who would start yet another useless war.

I  am convinced that Bernie Sanders would have been a really good president and a very acceptable candidate for the overlooked workers and poor people all over America, who had suffered dearly from the Second Great Depression. 

He was not hit so hard by scandals and not so contaminated with the stench of Wall Street money as Hillary Clinton was. On top of that he seemed a nice and honest guy to these eyes and a decent chap. But we all saw what happened in the months before the official nomination of Hillary Clinton as presidential candidate in the national elections. By controlling the money flow from the victory fund and by increasing her influence within the executive levels of the Democratic party itself, Hillary Clinton could “rig” the democratic elections, without acting illegally.

Hillary Clinton, however, was not liked and sometimes even hated by many low class workers and “white trash” and also by many – normally democratic voting – middle-class people within the party’s grassroots. People, who hated her husband’s filandering and his shameless lying about it. 

Or people who disliked Hillary’s arrogant charisma and distractedness from the likes of Joe and Jane Sixpack, in favour of the ‘fat cat’ bankers on Wall Street. In spite of the fact that Hillary Clinton could count on the black votes in the United States, it was not enough to save her from the angry majority, even though everybody anticipated that in advance. I believe that many votes for Donald Trump were in fact votes against Hillary and Bill Clinton and against everything she stood for in reality...

So many Americans – including the very religious Republican voters from the deep South and South-East and the Democratic “pentitos” who were deeply disappointed in their own party’s candidate – decided to vote for “Pied Piper” Donald Trump. 

Trump told them his stories about shutting out the Mexicans with a wall. And he promised them to tell their truths and opinions, about mass production outside the US and dumping of iron on the American market, to the Chinese government. And, last but not least, he promised to bring factories and jobs back to the United States, away from the low wage countries.

The fact that Trump himself was an accident-prone businessman at best and was not very diplomatic in his utterings against women and minorities, did not scare his voters away. And so Donald Trump became the 45th president of the United States and scared the shit out of many people all over the world. 

We will never know if Bernie Sanders would indeed have become a better president than either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. Nevertheless, I think that Bernie Sanders is the best president the Americans never had.

Will Xi Jinping become the new Mao Zedong? And how worrisome is that for the rest of the world and especially Taiwan?

When you look at the face of Chinese President and Chairman of the Communist Party, Xi Jinping, you don’t see the face of a potentate or a powerhungry epicure, in my humble opinion. It is rather the face of a friendly, somewhat shy and restrained, but nevertheless smart uncle, who knows a lot about life.

Yet, this man is responsible for arguably the greatest political revolution in recent Chinese history, since the days of legendary leaders Deng Xiaoping and Mao Zedong. And also for the most aggressive Chinese foreign policy since decades.

In his recent speech as Chairman of the Communist Party, in the eve of his second term as Chinese President, President Xi has officially made his grand visions on the development of China part of the official lecture of this Communist Party. And that was something that no Chinese Chairman/President ever managed during life, since Chairman Mao. Not even Chairman Deng Xiaoping did that. Het Financieele Dagblad wrote the following snippets about this extraordinary event:

With a formerly unheard of anti-corruption campaign, Xi got rid of the culture of bribery and self-enrichment within the [Communist] Party. He also managed to get his opponents out of the way. Xi, who has shown himself as a strong advocate of free trade this year, has used his first five year stint as Chairman to get everybody on the same page again within the party. A strong party also offers him the chance to let China shine again on the global theatre.

Last week, Xi’s visions were recorded in the constitution of the party; an honour that was only granted to Mao during his government. Also his Silk Route initiative and his 'Theory of Reforms at the Supply Side' are now official part of the foundations of the party. And now that a large share of the seats in the 25-headed Politbureau is filled with confidants from the so-called ‘Zhejiang faction’, nothing stands in Xi’s way anymore to shape the future of the country to his image.

Xi Jinping, as a guardian of free trade. Will that be good news for the rest of the world?

Not per sé, when we have closely followed the events surrounding the Spratly Islands, quite recently occupied and confiscated by China, based upon the notion “that China has the biggest navy in the region and can kick anybody’s *ss at will”.

And we must also not forget the increasingly shrill tone-of-voice that China utters in the direction of Taiwan, the “renegade province”, eternally belonging to the Chinese motherland in China’s vision. Taiwan is also a very good example of China’s recently refound self-confidence and increasingly ‘assertive’ behaviour against the rest of the (Western) world.

Already for years now is China building upon their network of ‘vassal states’ in Africa, Latin America and even Europe (Greece!), via their (in)famous soft power and influence. With gifts in the form of ‘beads and mirrors’ for the local rulers, new roads and infrastructure (mostly in favour of China's mining companies and traders itself) and engineering and agricultural knowledge (again mostly to the advantage of China), they have put those local rulers in their debt. 

Through these vassal states and trading partners, the Chinese powers-that-be secured their own country of food, other agricultural produce and invaluable raw materials for their huge domestic “production apparatus”, that must keep on running to keep potential domestic unrest under control.

Even the most developed and civilized countries, like The Netherlands, fall for the tinsel that China has to offer. In the Dutch case this Chinese tinsel was formed by two giant pandas, that could be rented for a limited period of time and after meeting numerous constraints and (financial) conditions [i.e. link points to a Dutch-spoken documentary about the Dutch-Chinese Panda Lobby- EL].

Even though this black-and-white coloured ‘favour’ was disguised as a gift to celebrate the good mutual relations between China and The Netherlands, it is probably used as a bait to reel the Dutch hearts and minds in. We are your friend with great power and might. Don’t talk with us boldly and don’t criticize us for our human rights, or else we take your toy away...

One reason why especially the local rulers in Africa and Latin America love China so much, is that the country does not interfere in local politics. It does not lecture them about human rights, widespread corruption, violence and intimidation around elections or about excessive differences between the poor and the rich and other utterly annoying stuff for these rulers. 

“You simply supply the goods and raw materials that we want and you let us lay down the infrastructure that we need to ship everything out. And you don't ask any hard question. We supply then the money, infrastructure and weapons that you want and need. That’s the whole deal...”. This seems to be China’s vision on foreign politics. 

And this works both ways: China loves doing business with these “dubious” regimes, because they don’t ask any questions about the very limited and even diminishing personal freedom in China or about the hampered human rights situation. 

  

This in contrary to Western governments and NGO’s, that constantly bang the drum about the human rights in many African and Latin American countries, but also about the human rights situation in China itself, with respect to the own population and also Tibet. 

In case of the Chinese visit to the United Kingdom in 2015, this 'blahblah' about freedom for the Tibetans and human rights almost led to a diplomatic ‘situation’, when Prince Charles refused to visit the official state banquet, offered by the Queen to honour the Chinese President Xi Jinping and his entourage. Such incidents could lead to loss of face for the Chinese leaders and must be avoided at all cost.

So both China and their vassal states in Latin America and Africa are probably very satisfied about the current diplomatic and political situation between them. However, what the rulers of these states might forget, is that China operates with solely one purpose in mind: China’s wellbeing, economic growth and secured future, via a leading role in the world. China has a long term vision in mind, in which China and China only prevails. All else is of less importance.

The soft way or the hard way, China always gets what it wants. 

And China still do so from the position of ‘a benevolent, but misunderstood underdog with a good heart, but with a lot of enemies in the world’. In their own vision, China has a good heart, but the bad people in the rest of the (Western) world constantly force this ‘sleeping giant’ to defend itself in any which way.

The Financial Times wrotes the following upon Xi’s and China’s foreign policy for the imminent future:

Winning “hearts and minds” at home and abroad through United Front [the official Chinese organization charged with the execution of China’s foreign policy] work is crucial to realising the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese people”, Mr Xi has said. Yet the type of power exercised by the cadres who work behind the neoclassical façade of 135 Fuyou Street is often anything but soft.

A teaching manual for [United Front’s] cadres, obtained by the Financial Times, sets out at length and in detail the organisation’s global mission in language that is intended both to beguile and intimidate.

It exhorts cadres to be gracious and inclusive as they try to “unite all forces that can be united” around the world. But it also instructs them to be ruthless by building an “iron Great Wall” against “enemy forces abroad” who are intent on splitting China’s territory or hobbling its development.

“Enemy forces abroad do not want to see China rise and many of them see our country as a potential threat and rival, so they use a thousand ploys and a hundred strategies to frustrate and repress us,” according to the book, titled the “China United Front Course Book”.

Merriden Varrall, director at the Lowy Institute, an Australian think-tank, says that under Mr Xi there has been a distinct toughening in China’s soft power focus. The former emphasis on reassuring others that China’s rise will be peaceful is giving way to a more forceful line. “There has been a definite shift in emphasis since Xi Jinping took over,” says Ms Varrall. “There is still a sense that reassuring others is important, but there is also a sense that China must dictate how it’s perceived and that the world is biased against China.”

The red and bold text says it all: “Reassuring others about China peaceful politics is still important, but not so important anymore. Most important is now that we get what we want and that other (non-Western) countries buy our story about good China versus the bad and hostile Western world”.

This new, more aggressive and slightly envious and frustrated foreign policy stands not on its own these days. 

To the contrary: it fits very well in the current, disturbing trend of the ‘political roosters’, that are nowadays leading the world’s largest and most influential nations. Leaders that seem to operate from an alleged inferiority complex within themselves or their country and don’t tolerate opposition from domestic sources, as well from abroad.

President Donald Trump, Rodrigo Duterte of the Phillippines, Recep Erdoğan of Turkey and Vladimir Putin of Russia are just a few textbook examples of such political roosters, just like 'spiritual leader' Lech Kaczynski of Poland, and President Viktor Órban of Hungary. 

President Xi Jinping, in spite of his soft, slightly aloof and shy appearance, has just become one of these roosters too. And the rest of the world will know this very soon...

What could be the consequences of this new Chinese policy for the rest of the world? I expect not only stronger bonds between China and its vassal states, but also between China and the aforementioned, like-minded leaders at the periphery of the Western world.

President Duterte of the Phillippines, President Erdoğan of Turkey and President Putin of Russia are among the leaders, with whom I expect China to want a stronger connection, just as with the leadership of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Iran and (perhaps also) Syria. 

Those are countries with (allegedly) a strong bias against the Western world and with the oil, gas or other raw materials that China needs. And very important: with the political influence in their region that makes them potentially important strongholds for China.

And in Europe I expect the same to happen with Greece, Hungary, Poland, the United Kingdom (i.e. in spite of ‘Charlesgate’) and perhaps even Spain and Ukraine. Those are all countries that have their ‘issues’ with the European Union, due to the domestic political situation or due to their exit from the EU, in case of the UK. There is nothing wrong with a good handshake, when this hand is filled with a fistful of dollars or yuans.

At the other side of the spectrum there are the countries that dare to oppose to China’s will and political ambitions. Taiwan, the United States (the Spratly Islands(!)), North Korea and Vietnam are all among the countries that could have to deal with China’s increased self-confidence and pizzaz soon.

Especially, when they refuse the Chinese need for ‘Lebensraum’ (i.e. the contaminated German word from the Second World War for ‘living space’) and unification of the mother land, with respect to Taiwan. Or when they don't listen to China closely enough (i.e. North Korea and especially its stubborn leader Kim Jung-Un). 

The first (luckily verbal) scrimmages between the American and Chinese navy, regarding the Spratly's, could act as a warning that China plays for keeps and does not draw back automatically anymore, when somebody shouts ‘stop’.

Together with the concealed forest fire, which is the North Korean situation and the tensions in the Middle East (Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq) and Eastern Europe (Russia vs Ukraine and the Baltic States), the new Chinese ‘assertiveness’ could lead to an explosive mixture on a global scale. Especially now that the White House in Washington is inhabited by a short-fused, utterly inexperienced and impulsive political rookie in the form of American President Donald Trump.

There is, however, one big advantage: the Chinese empire thinks in a scale of hundreds, if not thousands of years. This means that Xi Jinping, as a true son of this empire, will probably not fall in the pitfalls of the unexperienced Western leaders, by wanting too much too soon. He and his country have time and can be patient.

Even the new “Mao Zedong Light” understands that his power is limited, when he doesn’t use it wisely and with restraint. I therefore expect that President Xi will be patient indeed, as he understands that he will have nothing left, if he blows up everything on a global scale. That is a sort of relief for Taiwan and for the United States.

Even though Taiwan may be put under more economic and political pressure to give up their ‘rogue nation’ attitude (i.e. in the eyes of the Chinese) and return to the lap of the People’s Republic of China, I expect that this is all what will happen within the coming years. 

The stakes of an armed (or even nuclear) conflict with the United States are simply too high for China to run this risk.

And that is slightly comforting in these roaring years...  

“You have to believe in us, because we say so! We are benevolent companies, that keep a keen eye on your interests, even if you can’t control us!”. Welcome in the Information Black Hole of Google and Facebook

What goes around, comes around!

A few days ago, my dear, hardworking neighbour Anita approached me. She was crying and at the brink of mental exhaustion.

Anita was a woman, who was struck hard when her husband divorced from her more than ten years ago. He left her behind with three (just) teenage children to care for, with no job and seemingly a grim future full of heartship ahead.

But when the going got tough, the tough kept going: Anita started an online company in sports lingerie, which she built into a success, due to excellent quality lingerie, working days of 15+ hours and a customerfriendliness that was second to none.

However, one year ago Google changed “the rules” regarding SEO (i.e. Search Engine Optimization). Her previously reliable website, that served her well and generated many satisfied customers, was suddenly obsolete meaning that she did not end high enough in the search results anymore. And everybody with a mom-and-pop online store knows what that means: no ranking means no customers!

She was forced to redesign her whole website to the tune of tens of thousands of Euro’s. And a lion share of this money was consumed by consultants for new and improved SEO, in order to get the good ranking back that would bring her new customers.

Already then she was complaining that the expenses for the new website were eating a large chunk off her annual sales. But when she would not have done it, she would have been out of business soon. Not due to failing quality of her products or dissatisfied customers, but for online invisibility, as no-one cares about the third page of the search results.

And then came last Friday, with our small meeting on the street… 

Anita bursted into tears when we talked: she was still struggling with the new website and due to the continuing problems with SEO on her website, she had missed 40% in sales in one single month. A disaster… 

She would like to take a break, as she had worked so hard for such a long time, but she couldn’t do so, as there were so many things to do every day.

And Anita was bothered by the enormous influence that Google had on her company. Not only by changing the rules for SEO, forcing her to make vast investments, but also by putting the results of its own affiliated webshops in the top of the search results. Just because they can…

Personally, I have always wondered about Google and the products and services that it delivers:

• Why are so many people – including yours truly – willing to offer free content on Blogger, turning it into a huge success and source of income for Google?
• And why do none of the vast revenues coming from Blogger flow back towards their unpaid bloggers, except for income generated by the Adwords ads?
• Why can Google charge so many bills for clicks to their advertizers, while I as a blogger got hardly any clicks in the time when I still had ads on my site? And that in spite of the fact that I wrote new, original content on a day-to-day basis (in those days)?!
• Of course, I did not write clickbait and as a blogger I probably made every mistake in the 'successful writer’s book', which has cost me a lot of potential clicks. But still, where do all the clicks go and who gets them?! Am I just to suspicious about this and is everything fair and square?!
• And last, but not least: Who controls Google as a near monopolist in the online advert business and checks if they indeed do what they promise to do to their countless corporate customers?!

The answer to the last question is that probably nobody and no company can ever check and control Google, except for Google itself. In other words: it is their Information Black Hole and every online writer, webshop, news media outlet and online storechain is trapped in it!

When – in the days before online –  normal persons and (SME) companies put an advert in a newspaper, they always got a free copy as proof that the advert indeed existed and was displayed according to the preliminary agreed conditions and formats.

The same was true for radio or TV commercials. These commercials were aired on radio or TV and every company could check itself if its commercial was broadcasted correctly and at the right time.

But with Google?

“Yes, we targeted your online advert to your target groups. We did that exactly as you wanted. You can’t check that, unless you belong to your own target group. Only then you can see your own adverts. That is the way we work!

You simply must believe us, because we say so! We are benevolent companies, that keep a keen eye on your interests, even if you can’t control us… at all! So please pay us our money and don’t bother to investigate things further. We are totally honest and the fact that we manage all the data at places and times invisible for you, does not say you can’t trust us”. 

Or something like that…

Even if you do feel confident about the trustworthiness and reliability of Google – which I use at this very moment, I admit – you must agree that near-monopoly positions seldomly lead to better quality, better service, more customerfriendliness and more confidence among its customers. Especially when such companies are hiding between walls of unapproachability and meaninglessness for the average Joe Sixpack, when it comes to their goals, targets and business model.

Sometimes companies are simply too big to NOT fail in the end and Google may very well be one of them!

And then there is the elephant in the room. A company that is so influential and so opaque in structure and modus operandi via its news feeds, pushed messages distribution and search possibilities, that even the company itself can hardly crack its own code: Facebook!

I always had a love/hate relation with Facebook: I loved to hate it very much, because of its mainly dull content (“I have boring friends, y’know”), the overflow of pictures and videos of shiny, happy and successful people having a ball every day and the manipulative way the news and messages from my friends were put (or not put) in my timeline.

I want to choose my news and interesting information myself and I don’t want my news and interesting information to choose me! 

That is why I stick to my online newspapers (at least six per day) and my mostly Dutch and British news outlet websites.

After a few years in which I looked at Facebook very seldomly, but still got a more and more uncomfortable feeling from the company, I abandoned Facebook roughly two years ago. Since then I am careful to not be lured into another subscription, out of curiosity for certain information. Do I miss a lot of stuff? Probably, but it was worth it.

Yesterday I read an utterly disturbing and interesting article in The Atlantic, about the influence of Facebook on the last United States Presidential Elections. It was an absolute must-read and a reading hour very well spent. He are a few interesting snippets of this article:

The Trump campaign was working to suppress “idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans,” and they’d be doing it with targeted, “dark” Facebook ads. These ads are only visible to the buyer, the ad recipients, and Facebook. No one who hasn’t been targeted by then can see them. How was anyone supposed to know what was going on, when the key campaign terrain was literally invisible to outside observers?

[…]

But the point isn’t that a Republican beat a Democrat. The point is that the very roots of the electoral system—the news people see, the events they think happened, the information they digest—had been destabilized.

In the middle of the summer of the election, the former Facebook ad-targeting product manager, Antonio García Martínez, released an autobiography called Chaos Monkeys. He called his colleagues “chaos monkeys,” messing with industry after industry in their company-creating fervor. “The question for society,” he wrote, “is whether it can survive these entrepreneurial chaos monkeys intact, and at what human cost.” This is the real epitaph of the election.

The information systems that people use to process news have been rerouted through Facebook, and in the process, mostly broken and hidden from view. It wasn’t just liberal bias that kept the media from putting everything together. Much of the hundreds of millions of dollars that was spent during the election cycle came in the form of “dark ads.”

The truth is that while many reporters knew some things that were going on on Facebook, no one knew everything that was going on on Facebook, not even Facebook. And so, during the most significant shift in the technology of politics since the television, the first draft of history is filled with undecipherable whorls and empty pages. Meanwhile, the 2018 midterms loom.

The first red and bold text is to these eyes the million dollar question. A question that is just as applicable to Google with its own targeted ads, as it is to Facebook.

How can people know what is going on within the data warehouses of Facebook and Google, if nobody has control over the data flows that these companies process? And what about the protection of democracy and the truth in (Western) countries, when so much (deceptive) information is hidden and distributed below the radar to anonymous people that nobody knows?!

That brings us to the second red and bold tekst: will societies survive the way Facebook collects and distributes news, ads and (dis)information to unknown people and at what human cost will that be?!

Personally, I don’t care so much about the sheer fact that Russia and Russian agents have meddled into the US public opinion with (fake) news and targeted ads and, as such, have influenced the outcome of the American elections. 

What goes around, comes around!

It is hardly a secret that the United States via CIA, DEA, NSA and the whole alphabet soup of American secret services have meddled in countless elections in Latin America, Middle America, the Far East and Middle East and even Europe. 

And when the elections did not yield the preferred candidate after all, a small revolution was easily organized in the Fifties and Sixties of last century; especially in Latin America and the Middle East. All-in the name of the American defence against communism, aka the Domino Theory! 

So dear Americans: please stop with the whining and the crocodile tears about the interference of Russian President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin into your presidential elections with your own ICT companies and simply cut your losses!

What was worrisome about the United States presidential elections, however, is the fact that a conspicuously deranged and dangerously narcissistic president like Donald Trump has been elected from it, due to both the alleged Russian disinformation campaign surrounding the elections and the extraordinary influence on the average, religious and conservative Joe Sixpack, that the alt-right site Breitbart had acquired via Facebook.

Of course the Americans have the legal right to choose their next president at will, even though people outside the United States would rather see that differently sometimes. 

Nevertheless, the fact that people have been (negatively) influenced and mis-/disinformed at such a scale is very dangerous. As if Pandora's Box has been opened. And it happened in a way that was totally invisible and out of grasp for other people and/or the authorities, due to Facebook's extremely targeted adverts and tailormade news, that are not disclosed to the general public. That's what makes this so bad.

When presidential candidates turn their opponents into black sheep by spreading blatant lies or disinformation in a public debate or publicly broadcasted commercials (e.g. think about the slanderous “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (SBVT)” group from the George Bush Jr. campaign), the opponents can publicly react and debunk such stories. In the worst case, they can go to court with a complaint for slander or libel done by their opponent.

However, when such influencing all takes place under “a cloak of invisibility ”, directly into the minds of common people sitting behind their computers and doing their stuff on Facebook, it can turn into an uncontrollable and dangerous phenomenon. The Russians and Steve Bannon’s Breitbart discovered that already during the Donald Trump campaign, just like a bunch of Macedonian kids (see the aforementioned articles).

Who will be next to pull the same tricks? Xi Jinping? Kim Jung Un? Ayatollah Khamenei? Benjamin Netanyahu? Or one of Saudi Arabia’s ethically backwarded kings or princes?! It’s your pick!

As that is the main risk that Facebook, and the filter bubble they created, form: that people become influenced and ‘brainwashed’ to a point of no return. 

Nobody and nothing can influence their opinions with different news and different opinions anymore, simply due to these people being out of reach, living in their Facebook filter bubble.

It is like a hamburger lover who is forced to eat at McDonalds every single day, because all other restaurants are closed for him. He may still like it after a while, but in the end it might kill him.

That is the same with the filter bubble that Facebook introduced: when people don’t hear news and opinions anymore that counter (and even might throw over) their own opinions and dogma’s, they become brainwashed by their own truths and opinions in the end and stop thinking for themselves at all. In the end they become sheep, all listening to and obeying their demagogue leaders and opinion makers.

Hence the story of the German people in the time before and during the Second World War. These people were not all per sé bad or murderous (i.e. most weren’t in fact), but they all lived in their own filter bubble, presented to them by Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels and their utterly demagogue speeches and radio news. They all thought to fight for a good cause, as it was the only cause they had heard of.

It is a ‘blessing in disguise’ that Facebook at this moment is “only” hunting for your money via personalized ads and personalized services, as well as for all(!) your personal data and your deepest secrets, via your likes, your click and reading behaviour, the news feed that you like and via their sophisticated, deterministic software.

And it is a blessing in disguise too that Mark Zuckerberg – even though slightly creepy and robotic in his behaviour – is not a bad person (at least not now).

But we all should fear the day that Facebook ends up in the hands of people with less noble motives (i.e. like the Chinese or Russian goverment(?) or mob groups from all over the world). Then the massive stockpile of very personal information, coming from more than one billion people, might very well turn itself against us and threaten us in our very existence.

That is the reason that Facebook (and also Google) should perhaps been split up, like ITT and the Bell company in earlier years. And that for the simple reason that there is now too much information and too much power in only a few hands.

Competitors have only the slightest chance to survive the purchase and competitive power of Facebook and Google unharmed; when there is a new market, these companies will inevitably take it over. 

The fact that the global information and advertisement market is almost solely in these two hands and that Google and Facebook control the distribution of nearly all the ad money in the world(!), is eventually killing for the old ‘dead tree’ media, in their role as defenders of democracy and society of last resort.

And when there are no independent and unfiltered media anymore for the people of the world, all the truths and topical knowledge in the world will be sucked up into the Information Black Hole of Facebook and Google, to be distributed at their will.

And besides that: think about the small mom & pop webshops like the one of my neighbour Anita. All these webstores feel that their future is in the choking hands of the information supergiants Facebook and Google.

Think about that, when you entrust all your secrets to Facebook and Google...