Putin vs Ukraine….Again…oh and China is on Board too

The most beautiful bromance in my lifetime has to be that between Putin and Xi. Before my time we had Stalin and Mao Zedong, but that was long ago and far away. Somehow the two great Communist nations drifted apart, and Nixon went to China, and Gorbachev tried to be nice and his military stabbed him in the back.

And there was a partridge in a pear tree.

The United States has been the big dog pretty much all of my life, but I suspect our day is done. We rely way too much on Chinese production, and Putin seems to be the better executive in comparison the the last few we have had in USA. You can say what you want about Putin….he gets shit done.

According to Wikipedia, “Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin^[c] (born 7 October 1952) is a Russian politician and former intelligence officer who is the current president of Russia. He has been serving in this position since 2012, and he previously held this office from 1999 until 2008.^[7][d] He was also the prime minister from 1999 to 2000, and again from 2008 to 2012. Putin is the second-longest current serving European president after Alexander Lukashenko.”

I’ve been trying to make sense of the Chinese article, but I’m afraid it is beyond me. It really seems like the Communist Party in China basically tell you who to vote for, and you either vote for said President or not…..

Citing Wikipedia, “Since 1993, apart from brief periods of transition, the top leader of China simultaneously serves as the president, the leader of the party (as General Secretary), and the commander-in-chief of the military (as the chairman of the Central Military Commission). This individual then carries out different duties under separate titles. For example, the leader meets foreign dignitaries and receives ambassadors in his capacity as president, issues military directives as Chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), and upholds party rule as the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

During the Mao era, there were no term limits for the presidency. Between 1982 and 2018, the constitution stipulated that the president could not serve more than two consecutive terms. In 2018, term limits were abolished, without changing its powers.

The current president is Xi Jinping, who took office in March 2013, replacing Hu Jintao. He was re-elected in March 2018.”

After World War II, the great powers were basically (in no certain order) the United States, USSR, and People’s Republic of China. It’s not that there were no other important nations, but those were the big three Superpowers.

I think it’s interesting that they are also the Big Three in the book 1984. There is Oceania (basically the US combined with Latin America and the United Kingdom), Eurasia (continental Europe dominated by USSR) and East Asia (most of non Siberian Asia dominated by China). They eternally fight for the resources of Africa and the Middle East. While Orwell was not a hundred percent right in this prediction, he wasn’t altogether wrong. The next seventy years were largely dominated by USA, USSR, and the People’s Republic of China.

At least on the surface, the US has (until the last twenty years) at least tried to defy the Orwellian construct in our efforts to stand for freedom. We made lots of mistakes, there were plenty of times when we were hypocrites, but that was our stated aim since the 1770’s. The US stood for liberty, freedom, and the right’s of humanity.

The aims of the USSR according to Wikipedia: “The ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) was Marxism–Leninism, an ideology of a centralised command economy with a vanguardist one-party state to realise the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Soviet Union‘s ideological commitment to achieving communism included the development of socialism in one country and peaceful coexistence with capitalist countries while engaging in anti-imperialism to defend the international proletariat, combat capitalism and promote the goals of communism. The state ideology of the Soviet Union—and thus Marxism–Leninism—derived and developed from the theories, policies and political praxis of Lenin and Stalin.”

And the aims of the People’s Republic of China? Again, quoting Wikipedia: “The communist victory in 1949 brought to power a peasant party that had learned its techniques in the countryside but had adopted Marxist ideology and believed in class struggle and rapid industrial development.”

So here we are. Freedom versus Marxist ideology, class struggle, and rapid industrial development, centralised command economy, one party versus two party, the dictatorship of the proletariat versus Democratic/Republican principles.

So we thought we won when the USSR fell. But did we? Are we right back where we started? And will the third world war we thought we avoided fall on the generation we hoped we had spared? Please leave your comments.