The Post-Partisan Emporium

 Thanks to Saint Jimmy (Russian American) for recommending this essay... Who’s Winning? By FABIO VIGHI ‘The West has become a totalitarian space – the space of a self-defensive hegemony defending itself against its own weakness.’ (Jean Baudrillard) One of the most frequently referenced scenes in Arthur Penn’s  Night Moves  (1973) features a despondent Gene Hackman slumped in front of a small black-and-white television, half-heartedly watching a game of American football. When his wife walks in and asks, “Who’s winning?”, he mutters: “Nobody. One side’s just losing slower than the other.” As consciously depressing Hollywood films like  Night Moves  foresaw, the crisis of the 1970s was already signalling the end of capitalist socialisation: a structural and soon-to-be global socioeconomic, cultural, and psychological debacle that is now entering its phase of rapid escalation (though Hollywood this time is in full denial). As it’s becoming increasingly clear, the system today survives onl

  How a BRICS Trio Is Staring Down Israel Pepe Escobar   The Global Majority is fully aware that the genocidals in Tel Aviv are trying as hard as they can to provoke an apocalyptic war – with full US military support, of course. Contrast that combative mindset with 2,500 years of Persian diplomacy. Iran’s acting Foreign Minister, Ali Bagheri Kani, has recently remarked how Tehran is trying hard to prevent “the Israeli regime’s ‘dream’ of triggering an all-out regional war.” But one should never interrupt the enemy when he is in total panic. Sun Tzu would have approved this maxim. Iran certainly won’t interfere as the US and G7 members pull out all stops to come up with some semblance of a Gaza ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel to prevent a serious military retaliation by Iran and the Axis of Resistance. Earlier this week, that warning bore fruit: Hamas representative in Lebanon, Ahmed Abdel Hadi,  reported  yesterday that Hamas will not show up at the tentative negotiation round

  China Throws Clout Behind Palestine Pepe Escobar   HONG KONG – The  Beijing Declaration , signed earlier this week, constitutes yet another stunning Chinese diplomatic coup, but the document goes far beyond affirming China’s pull. The  gathering  of representatives of 14 Palestinian factions to commit to full reconciliation showed the entire world that the road to solving intractable geopolitical problems is no longer unilateral: it is multipolar,  multi-nodal , and features BRICS/Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) member China as an inescapable leader. The concept of China as a peacemaking superpower is now so established that after the Iran–Saudi Arabia rapprochement and the signing of the Beijing Declaration, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba chose to tell his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi in Beijing that Kiev is now finally ready to negotiate the end of the NATO–Russia proxy war in Ukraine. Palestinians who came to Beijing were beaming. For Fatah Vice Chairman Mahmoud a

  China Has Achieved Escape Velocity: It Is Now Unstoppable PEPE ESCOBAR The 21 st  century is shaping up to be the Asian, Eurasian, Chinese century. The four-day, twice-a-decade plenum of the Communist Party of China that took place last week in Beijing,  designing an economic road map all the way to 2029,  was a stunning affair in more ways than one. Let’s start with continuity – and stability. There’s no question after the plenum that Xi Dada, or The Big Panda, will stay on the helm until 2029 – the end of the current five-year economic drive. And if Xi is healthy enough, he stays up to 2035: the fateful and uber game-changing target year for China to exhibit a GDP per capita of $30,000, with massive around-the-world reverberations. Here we see the confluence between the progression of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and the defining contours if not of a Pax Sinica, at least of the non-Hegemon-centric,  multi-nodal  world (italics mine). The proverbial U.S. Think Tankland/S