by SCOTT FOSTER

via Asia TimesChinese smartphone company Xiaomi on Dec. 28, 2023, revealed its forthcoming electric car, the SU7 sedan. Photo: CNBC / Evelyn Cheng

Chinese electric vehicle maker NIO and smart phone maker Xiaomi have ended the year with the announcement of new products challenging NVIDIA and Apple. This marks yet another advance in China’s efforts to develop its own semiconductor technology and eliminate dependence on imports.

On December 23, NIO revealed its first autonomous driving chip, which it claims is superior to the NVIDIA Drive Orin chips it is using now. The Shenji NX9031 SoC (System-on-Chip) will be used in the company’s new ET9 executive sedan, which was also presented at NIO Day 2023. Held in Xi’an, the event attracted more than 10,000 participants and attendees.

The ET9 is a long-wheelbase, four-door luxury EV priced at about 800,000 yuan, or $113,000 at the current exchange rate. Orders for the ET9 can be placed in China now, but deliveries are not scheduled to begin until the first quarter of 2025.

The first 5-nm Chinese automotive IC, the NX9031 will probably by fabricated by TSMC, Samsung Electronics or Intel Foundry Services. In theory, it could be made by SMIC, but that would be inefficient and more expensive. Under the sanctions against the Chinese semiconductor industry, SMIC does not have access to the advanced EUV lithography systems that IC foundries outside China use to make chips with 5-nm and finer processes.

The NX9031 features an Arm 32-core CPU (central processing unit), an NPU (neural processing unit), a graphics core and more than 50 billion transistors. It comes with low power, double data-rate LPDDR5X DRAM memory (probably Korean-made) and can process lidar (light detection and ranging) data.

An NPU, which mimics the human brain, deduces optimal solutions from available data. Lidar uses laser light to survey the environment, providing autonomous vehicles with 3D images of the road and traffic. The NX9031 will work with SkyOS, Nio’s vehicle operating system, which covers vehicle control, assisted driving, cockpit systems and mobile connectivity.

According to NIO CEO William Li, the computing power of the NX9031 is comparable to four NVIDIA Drive Orin SoCs, the standard configuration currently used in NIO electric vehicles. These 7-nm chips are capable of up to 254 TOPS (trillion operations per second) each, or 1,016 TOPS in total. That is sufficient for smart driving today, says Vice President Bai Jian, but not for the next generation of autonomous vehicles.

NVIDIA has come to the same conclusion. Drive Thor, the successor to Drive Orin, is scheduled to go into production in 2025. It will have twice as much computing power as Drive Orin. What does this mean? NVIDIA Vice President Danny Shapiro explains:

“If we look at a car today, advanced driver assistance systems, parking, driver monitoring, camera mirrors, digital instrument cluster and infotainment are all different computers distributed throughout the vehicle. In 2025, these functions will no longer be separate computers. Rather, Drive Thor will enable manufacturers to efficiently consolidate these functions into a single system, reducing overall system cost.”

NIO established its IC design team in 2020. Led by Bai Jian, its purpose is to develop an independent smart driving capability including sensors, autonomous driving algorithms and now SoCs. Bai was previously an executive at Chinese smart phone makers OPPO and Xiaomi.

Xiaomi beats Apple to the draw

On December 28, Xiaomi revealed its first electric vehicle before thousands of people at the China National Convention Center in Beijing. At the event, CEO Lei Jun said that his company’s goal is to produce a dream car that can rival Porsche and Tesla.

The Xiaomi SU7 (SU stands for Speed Ultra), a four-door electric sedan designed by professionals who previously worked for BMW and Mercedes-Benz, is manufactured by BAIC (Beijing Automotive Industry Corp). It is equipped with NVIDIA Drive Orin SoCs for assisted and autonomous driving and Xiaomi’s own operating system. Videos show the SU7 avoiding obstacles on the street and parking without a driver.

Deliveries of two- and four-wheel drive models are expected to begin within the next few months. Prices have not yet been announced, but benchmarking against the Tesla’s Model S and Porsche’s Taycan Turbo suggests that they might be as high as 700,000 to 900,000 yuan range – about the same as the NIO ET9.

Xiaomi plans to invest about $10 billion in its auto business in the next 10 years. “By working hard over the next 15 to 20 years,” says CEO Lei, “we will become one of the world’s top five automakers, striving to lift China’s overall automobile industry.”

Xiaomi’s plans appear to put Apple to shame. Last September, MacRumours reported that a semi-autonomous Apple Car equipped with neural processors still might be launched in 2026 – but that there have been so many delays since the project began in 2014 and so little information provided by management that the timeline is up in the air

Apple CEO Tim Cook has said “We’re focusing on autonomous systems. It’s a core technology that we view as very important. We sort of see it as the mother of all AI projects. It’s probably one of the most difficult AI projects actually to work on.” But it was in 2017 when he said that.

In any case, Xiaomi has beaten Apple to the draw, and so has Huawei, which announced its entry into the electric vehicle market in 2021. Now it is reported that Huawei plans to establish hundreds of new EV sales and service outlets in China over the next two years.

Under sanctions that have proved far from crippling, Huawei has developed its own automotive ICs and operating system. The Ascend chipset in its Mobile Data Center is capable of 352 TOPS, which enables Level 4 High Driving Automation. That means completely autonomous operation under certain conditions such as a defined route, highway driving or parking.

In the meantime, NVIDIA continues to supply more than a dozen Chinese automakers including NIO, Xiaomi, BYD, DENZA, Human Horizons, Ji Yue, Xpeng and ZEEKR (which is owned by Geely). ZEEKR was the first Chinese automaker to announce that it would adopt Drive Thor. Xpeng has reportedly asked NVIDIA to provide it with a custom designed version of Drive Thor.

At the end of November, it was reported that NVIDIA is looking to hire more than 20 specialists for its autonomous driving development team in China. That team is led by Wu Xinzhou, who joined NVIDIA last August. Before that, he was vice president of autonomous driving at Xpeng.

Chinese automaker Nio develops 5nm chip, claims a 4x advantage over Nvidia’s Drive Orin X processors, perhaps the most complex Chinese SoC to date

by Anton Shilov
via https://www.tomshardware.com

Nio, a major maker of electric vehicles from China, has developed its first 5nm processor for autonomous driving. The chip comes packing 50 billion transistors, comparable to Nvidia’s A100 processor for artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) applications. The company believes that its system-on-chip is more advanced than Nvidia’s Drive Orin X, which it currently uses for its self-driving systems. Interestingly, the SoC (A System on a Chip) is set to be made using a 5nm-class process technology, reports CnEVPost.

Nio’s Shenji NX9031 SoC was developed by the company itself and packs 32 general-purpose Arm cores in total (including both Big and Little cores), a neural processing unit, a graphics processor, and an LPDDR5X memory subsystem. The system-on-chip can process data from LiDAR, which differs from processors used by Tesla that rely on data from video sensors. Since the unit is designed for autonomous driving applications, it complies with the ASIL-D risk and safety requirements.

The automaker says that its own chip is four times more powerful than Nvidia’s Drive Orin X processor it uses today, though it has not mentioned any specific numbers. Meanwhile, it is evident that Nio wants to use its own silicon and no longer rely on Nvidia’s Drive Orin X.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect about the Nio Shenji NX9031 processor is that it is set to be made on a 5nm process technology, though it is unclear by whom. Unlike many of its Chinese counterparts, Nio is not blacklisted by the U.S. government, so it can order chips from TSMC, Samsung Foundry, or even Intel Foundry Services. Furthermore, since China-based SMIC doesn’t really offer automotive-grade leading-edge process technologies, we expect Nio to use the services of TSMC, Samsung, or IFS rather than its Chinese peers.

Nio’s Shenji NX9031 SoC will first be used for the company’s ET9, a premium sedan whose deliveries are set to start in Q1 2025, so the company will have enough time to test the processor and tailor software for it.

by M. K. BHADRAKUMAR via Indian Punchline

Prime Minister Narendra Modi (L) with Saudi Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman, New Delhi, Sept 11, 2023

European Union’s super bureaucrat Ursula von der Leyen chose April Fools’ Day last year to threaten China that it would suffer “reputational damage” in the world community for backing Russia’s Ukraine war. Being a civilisational state, China let pass that arrogant, presumptuous, egotistic remark.

The concept reeks of neo-colonial mentality. Saudi Arabia’s tryst with reputational damage has been of a different kind. The Kingdom has had spectacular success in overcoming the reputational damage related to the killing of the ex-CIA asset Jamal Khashoggi. It makes a worthy case study for India, which also is haunted by the spectre of reputational damage for allegedly committing trans-border crimes.

From an Indian perspective, there are seven “takeaways” from the Saudi experience. First, Saudi Arabia stood its ground; second, it sought no help from third parties to reach out to the power brokers in DC; third, it seized the initiative to set in motion an investigative mechanism of its own which came up with cognitive reasoning in a very short period of time; four, it followed up by sentencing the Saudi perpetrators of Khashoggi’s murder to imprisonment; five, it didn’t allow the “reputational damage” to impede normal life; six, it turned a new page so that “a new normal” became possible, which is resilient and geared for the long haul that is strengthening the Kingdom’s strategic autonomy; and, seven, in the final analysis, the “decoupling” from the US helped the Saudis to shake off the reputational damage.

Needless to say, the last point is the crux of the matter. Saudi Arabia’s assertion of strategic autonomy has taken myriad forms that caught the Biden Administration by surprise. This was not how Saudi Arabia was expected to behave under pressure with its ponderous decision-making process, the statecraft moving at a glacial pace, its comprador class among the elites only too eager to capitulate and the ruling elite’s unipolar predicament and so on.

But the “new normal” also dictated that Saudi Arabia did not get into an acrimonious brawl with the Biden Administration but instead subjected the latter to benign neglect of a kind that was most hurtful for the US’ interests and regional influence and bruised its vanities of being the only game in town in the Middle East.

In reality, Saudis had no alternative, given the profoundly troubling geopolitical reality that Khashoggi was being groomed by the Deep State in the US for a higher political destiny than that of a mere dissident — and that was something Riyadh couldn’t have tolerated, as the stability of the regime was being threatened from America, which was ironically the Kingdom’s provider of security and a strategic ally of several decades.

It takes years or even a decade to lick into shape a mole so that it can perform as a strategic asset like Khashoggi for the US intelligence, and the fury over his untimely murder surged in media attacks on the Saudi regime — targeting Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

However, as months passed, it became more and more difficult to demonise the Crown Prince under whose watchful eyes, the Kingdom embarked on a historic path of reform. Three major achievements through the past 5-year period can be seen as game changers. First, Vision 2030, the transformative and ambitious blueprint to unlock the potential of the people and create a diversified, innovative, and world-leading nation. The reform programme has already begun to show impressive results.

Two, OPEC+ which was the brainchild of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has liberated the world oil market from the US’ clutches through the past 5-year period and in turn put the two energy superpowers on the driving seat. The transition is hugely consequential in geopolitical terms. Incredibly enough, the new matrix fine-tuning the global market is taking place independent of American leverage. OPEC+ is working effectively, overcoming all external attempts to undermine it.

Three, Saudi Arabia’s induction as a full member of the BRICS — again, with Russian backing — is expected to carry forward the new impulses of the Kingdom’s independent foreign policy, which in turn is expected to galvanise the creation of a new international trade and financial architecture.

Although a sub-plot in this context becomes the normalisation with Iran, which at one stroke created a paradigm shift in the geopolitics of the Middle East region with the regional states steadily doing away with American midwifery in settling their intra-regional issues. A natural consequence of it has been the sharp decline in the US’ regional influence which has become evident during the current Israel-Palestine conflict.

All in all, the Saudi compass is laying the foundations for an emerging regional power that is destined to contribute to the international system and the world order. The US has understood that it lost the plot and is moving with alacrity to mend fences with Saudi Arabia. Biden’s visit to Saudi Arabia in June last year came tantalisingly close to an act of atonement. That was only to be expected.

A few examples from the last month alone testify to the dynamism of Saudi diplomacy and the total collapse of the US’ strategy to “isolate” the Kingdom — visit by Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, president of Brazil (a BRICS member state, which is due to join OPEC+ in January); winning the bid in a landslide in secret ballots to host the World Expo 2030 (Saudi Arabia won 119 of the 165 votes, easily defeating South Korea and Italy thanks to the huge backing by the Global South); the $7 bn local currency swap agreement with China’s Central Bank (latest sign of strengthening relations with China and a step toward delinking from the petrodollar); leading by example the OPEC+ decision on voluntary cuts of oil production “to ensure a stable and balanced oil market” (revealing at the grouping’s virtual meeting on November 30 that it would be continuing its 1 million barrels per day reduction, ie., roughly 45 percent of total production cut of 2.2 million bpd envisaged); and, of course, placing itself at the front and centre of high-stakes public diplomacy over the Gaza war, with China again as its preferred partner (while a Saudi-Israeli normalisation, which might have been a major foreign policy win for the Biden Administration, has become politically radioactive for Riyadh.)

The moral of the story — especially for countries like India — is that firmness tempered with tact and patience pays. The Saudi secret lies in avoiding nasty confrontation but instead quietly, systematically shaking off the critical dependence on the US by diversifying the Kingdom’s external relations.

The mother of all ironies in all this is that the US not only assassinated a senior Iranian general in a third country and the then president in the White House even bragged about it. Equally, the US took revenge on Osama bin Laden and dumped his corpse in the high seas.

It has kidnapped dozens of Russian nationals travelling abroad and locked them up in prisons in an attempt to persuade them to work for the US intelligence. Now, in June, with a similar objective, the US intelligence kidnapped an Indian transiting through Prague. Evidently, the US intelligence was stalking him on Indian soil.

It is a frightening thought that the Five Eyes may have penetrated the core of the Indian security establishment. Yet, state secretary Blinken vows not to let go India, the US’ indispensable partner for the undoing of China. It almost seems as if he knows something about Indian statecraft that we do not. Indian diplomacy has truly tied itself in knots.

They were kept together, Hamas tried to provide medicine daily, food was scarce and they were not subjected to torture or ill-treatment.

Recommended: the prolific work of Prof. Michael Hudson. His early seminal work ‘Super Imperialism’ was ignored by the left (its intended audience) and instead was adopted by the CIA as a manual on how to drive its hegemony. It made him the highest paid analyst on Wall St and, among other things, he showed how the US Global Military Industrial Empire expenditure exactly mirrored the US Current Account Deficit.

Further study with Harvard Anthropology Department placed his work within a broader context and a much longer timescale, examining the history of debt and financial organization in the Ancient Near East. There autocratic rulers were established to protect the 95% from the inevitable emergence of a wealthy oligarchy who would expropriate and turn them into debt-slaves. As no economy on the planet has ever managed to grow faster than compound interest on debt, regular ‘debt jubilees’ or wiping the slate clean of private debt obligations, kept the oligarchs down and the state functioning long-term. With the population both able and willing to transfer resources to the centre for infrastructure and self-defense, the Debtors Rights were paramount, based on ability to pay.

This changed in the Hellenic and Roman Empire which provide the foundations of Western Law. Creditors Rights became paramount, and oligarchies emerged which, once they had exploited the 95%, dispossessing them and forcing them to work as serfs on their latifundia (plantations), then needed to look to move beyond the domestic frontiers.

Until eventually the oligarchs found that everyone, including the mercenaries hired to defend the Empire, hated them. So much so that the Roman Senate itself ended up supporting the so-called ‘barbarians’ to come and destroy these oligarchs.

It is no coincidence that the Western elite and their public architecture, White House, Capitol etc. mirror the creditor-based Roman Imperial models.

https://michael-hudson.com/2023/05/the-arc-of-time-pro-creditor-history/

https://michael-hudson.com/2019/06/food-blackmail-the-washington-consensus-and-freedom/

The michael-hudson.com site is a goldmine, maintained by his students, is extremely searchable using tags.

Uncritical support for the American stance on the Israel-Hamas war will prove to be some Western governments’ downfall

by Graham Hryce via RT
Graham Hryce is an Australian journalist and former media lawyer, whose work has been published in The Australian, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age, the Sunday Mail, the Spectator and Quadrant.

Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party is on the verge of splitting, as yet another political crisis has engulfed Britain – and over the past few weeks it has become apparent that major political parties in the West are paying a heavy price for uncritically supporting America’s latest proxy conflict in Palestine.

Prime Minister Sunak sacked Home Secretary Suella Braverman because she sought to ban pro-Palestinian protest marches. Her disagreement with the PM over this issue came hard on the heels of serious disagreements between them over other “culture war” issues, namely immigration policy and multiculturalism.

Sunak’s dismissal of Braverman and his appointment of David Cameron (now Lord David) as Foreign Secretary were desperate and ill-judged acts, of the kind to be expected from a fourth-rate politician like Sunak.

Braverman has not gone quietly. Her resignation letter accuses Sunak of incompetence, treachery and lack of principle, amongst other failings, and some Conservative MPs have already fired off letters to the 1922 Committee expressing their lack of confidence in Sunak.

The prime minister’s extraordinary decision to bring back Cameron from his richly deserved political exile simply beggars belief.

Cameron created the entire Brexit debacle, led the unsuccessful Remain campaign, helped turn Libya into a failed state, and was hell bent on invading Syria until the UK parliament stopped him. Since petulantly retiring from politics after the Brexit referendum succeeded, he has occupied his time by getting involved in shady financial deals.

Peter Hitchens, the conservative commentator, described Sunak’s actions as “an open declaration of defeat and purposelessness” – and journalist John Crace characterised Sunak and the Conservatives as “a Prime Minister and a government in a death vortex”.

Surely Sunak cannot remain prime minister for much longer, and a split within the Conservative Party now seems inevitable – with Braverman and her right-wing supporters leaving the party at some point to perhaps join forces with Nigel Farage and the Reform Party to form a new Trump-like populist movement.

Nor has Kier Starmer’s Labour Party escaped unscathed from the acute emotive divisiveness engendered by the Israel-Palestine conflict that has torn the Conservative party apart over the past week.

Starmer has had to endure a revolt from 56 of his MPs (including a number of shadow cabinet members) who strongly disagree with his unwavering support for America’s refusal to accept an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.

These Labour MPs openly defied their leader, and voted in the House of Commons in favour of a failed motion brought by the Scottish National Party (SNP) – yet another major UK party recently rent asunder by internal divisions and corruption – calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.

In Australia, bitter political divisions have also emerged over the conflict in Palestine, with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s Labor government deeply divided over the ceasefire issue (even though it formally supported America’s opposition to a truce) and coming under concerted attack from the conservative opposition parties, who uncritically support America’s position on Gaza.

The opposition has branded Labor politicians who have called for a ceasefire as antisemites, and insisted that pro-Palestinian protest marches – there have been many in major Australian cities over the past few weeks – be banned.

PM Albanese, who won an election in May last year, now finds himself in charge of a fractured government that appears increasingly unlikely to win a second term in office.

There seems to be a very strict correlation between craven support for American foreign policy and political incompetence amongst politicians in the West.

Similar bitter political divisions, accompanied by mass pro-Palestinian protest marches, have emerged recently in most Western countries, including America – and Germany, France, Austria and Hungary have now banned pro-Palestinian rallies altogether.

It is a curious circumstance that purportedly liberal democratic governments that uncritically support America’s foreign proxy conflicts find themselves curtailing free speech and the right to protest in their own countries.

Be that as it may, it is clear that the Hamas terrorist attacks on 7 October, and the Netanyahu government’s ongoing response to them, have deeply destabilised Western democracies and exacerbated deep-seated, pre-existing ideological and political divisions within them.

How has this self-destructive political chaos come about?

Palestine, unfortunately, has now become a classic “culture war” issue in the West, as a result of almost all Western governments uncritically supporting the blank cheque that the Biden administration has given to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition government in respect of Gaza.

Rational debate on the topic has become virtually impossible in the West, with both sides hurling emotive charges of ”antisemitism” (redefined so as to encompass any support for the Palestinian cause or any criticism of Netanyahu’s actions) and “genocide” at each other, whilst at the same time ignoring the complex historical context that gave rise to the current phase of the conflict.

In fact, when the UN secretary general recently pointed out that the October 7 attacks had an historical background – a demonstrably true statement – the Israeli Ambassador to the UN demanded that he be sacked immediately. So much for rational debate.

It is inevitable that a ceasefire in Gaza will have to take place, and a political settlement will have to be negotiated at some point. It is most unlikely, however, that the Netanyahu government will be in power long enough to negotiate such a settlement.

Recent polls in Israel show that support for Netanyahu is collapsing, and media outlets within Israel that previously supported him are now calling for him to step aside – not only because he failed to prevent the Hamas terrorist attacks on October 7, but because he has no realistic strategy for negotiating a peaceful resolution to the conflict.

Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert – who, unlike Netanyahu, is committed to a two-state solution to be negotiated between the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli government – said recently in an interview with ABC in Australia that Netanyahu “has to be fired… he is not fit to govern, and has no strategy to work towards peace”.

Olmert – who is a fierce opponent of Hamas – has accused Netanyahu of empowering the militant group since becoming prime minister by refusing to negotiate with the Palestinian Authority – on the grounds that Netanyahu, just like Hamas, refuses to accept that a negotiated settlement between Israel and the Palestinians is possible.

Olmert has also condemned Netanyahu for refusing to distinguish between Hamas terrorists and innocent civilians in Gaza, and causing international support for Israel (he means in the West because such support does not exist elsewhere) to rapidly dissipate since the October 7 terrorist attacks.

Olmert’s criticisms of Netanyahu are substantially correct. Members of Netanyahu’s government have recently stated that Israel intends to occupy Gaza after the present conflict ends, and that the two million Palestinians that reside in Gaza should be driven out of the territory.

And behind this unedifying global spectacle stands a bloated and declining American empire, still committed to promoting proxy foreign conflicts – notwithstanding the debacles it has created in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria in recent decades.

Major Western political parties and politicians now have a clear choice: they can stop uncritically supporting America’s disastrous proxy foreign wars, or risk being torn apart by the bitter internal conflicts that such ill-judged backing inevitably gives rise to.

President Macron of France is the only Western leader who seems to appreciate this.

Recently Macron bravely called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, and strongly condemned Netanyahu’s ongoing killing of innocent civilians and blatant disregard for international and humanitarian law.

Whether or not other political leaders in the West will have the courage and intelligence to heed President Macron’s example is extremely doubtful. But events in the UK last week make perfectly clear the fate that awaits those politicians who refuse to do so.

American Forces in Syria attacked local militia in “Self Defense” – What? And that is being said with a straight face by all pundits in the US and it’s vassals. 

Such abominable claim is never challenged by the prestitute media in the mainstream and most of the alternative media. Only rare voices of sanity bring this false claim to the public scrutiny.

by Thierry Meyssan via Voltairenet

For the first time, the world is witnessing a crime against humanity live on television. The United States and Israel, who have long since joined forces, will both be held responsible for the mass massacres in Gaza. Everywhere except Europe, Washington’s allies are withdrawing their ambassadors from Tel Aviv. Tomorrow, they will do the same in Washington. Everything is happening as it did when the USSR broke up, and it will end the same way: the American Empire’s very existence is threatened. The process that has just begun cannot be stopped.

The United States and Israel are perceived as a single entity. They will have to answer for their crimes together.

While our eyes are riveted on the massacres of civilians in Israel and Gaza, we fail to perceive the internal divisions in Israel and the USA, or the considerable change this drama is provoking in the world. For the first time in history, civilians are being massacred live on television.

Everywhere – except in Europe – Jews and Arabs unite to cry out their grief and call for peace.
People everywhere realize that this genocide would not be possible if the United States did not supply bombs to the Israeli army in real time.

States everywhere are recalling their ambassadors to Tel Aviv and wondering whether they should recall those they sent to Washington.

It goes without saying that the United States only reluctantly agreed to this spectacle, but they didn’t just allow it, they made it possible with subsidies and weapons. They are afraid of losing their Power after their defeat in Syria, their defeat in Ukraine and perhaps soon their defeat in Palestine. Indeed, if the Empire’s armies are no longer frightening, who will continue to transact in dollars instead of their own currency? And in that eventuality, how will Washington make others pay for what it spends, how will the U.S. maintain its standard of living?

But what happens at the end of this story? That the Middle East revolts, or that Israel crushes Hamas at the cost of thousands of lives?

We’ll remember that President Joe Biden first warned Israel to abandon its plan to move the Palestinian people to Egypt or, failing that, to eradicate them from the face of the earth, and Tel Aviv didn’t obey him.

The “Jewish supremacists” are behaving today as they did in 1948.

When the United Nations voted to create two federated states in Palestine, one Hebrew and one Arab, the armed forces self-proclaimed the Hebrew state before its borders had been fixed. The “Jewish supremacists” immediately expelled millions of Palestinians from their homes (the “Nakhba”) and assassinated the UN special representative who had come to create a Palestinian state. The seven Arab armies (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and North Yemen) that tried to oppose them were quickly swept aside.

Today, they are no more obedient to their protectors and massacre again, without realizing that this time the world is watching and no one will come to their rescue. At a time when the Shiites accept the principle of a Hebrew state, their madness is jeopardizing the very existence of that state.

We remember how the Soviet Union collapsed. The state was unable to protect its own population during a catastrophic accident. 4,000 Soviets died at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant (1986), saving their fellow citizens. The survivors wondered why, 69 years after the October Revolution, they continued to accept an authoritarian regime. Mikhail Gorbachev, First Secretary of the CPSU, wrote that it was only when he saw this disaster that he realized his regime was under threat.

Then came the December riots in Kazakhstan, independence demonstrations in the Baltic states and Armenia. Gorbachev amended the Constitution to remove the Party’s old guard. But his reforms were not enough to stop the fire spreading to Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldavia, Ukraine and Belarus. The uprising of the East German Young Communists against the Brezhnev doctrine led to the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989). The crumbling of power in Moscow led to the cessation of aid to allies, including Cuba (1990). Finally came the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the break-up of the Union (1991). In just over 5 years, an Empire that everyone thought would last forever has collapsed in on itself.

This inevitable process has just begun for the “American Empire”. The question is not how far Benjamin Netanyahu’s “revisionist Zionists” will go, but how far the US imperialists will support them. At what point will Washington decide it has more to lose by allowing Palestinian civilians to be massacred than by correcting Israel’s leaders?

The same problem faces him in Ukraine. The military counter-offensive by Volodymyr Zelensky’s government has failed. Russia is no longer seeking to destroy Ukrainian weapons, which are immediately replaced by weapons donated by Washington, but to kill those who wield them. The Russian armies are behaving like a gigantic crushing machine, slowly and inexorably killing all Ukrainian soldiers who approach the Russian defense lines. Kiev can no longer mobilize fighters, and its soldiers refuse to obey orders that condemn them to certain death. Its officers have no choice but to shoot the pacifists.

Many US, Ukrainian and Israeli leaders are already talking about replacing the Ukrainian “integral nationalist” coalition with the “Jewish supremacist” coalition, but the wartime period does not lend itself to this. But it will have to be done.

President Joe Biden has to replace his Ukrainian puppet and his barbaric Israeli allies, just as First Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev had to replace his insensitive representative in Khazakhstan, paving the way for widespread challenges to corrupt leaders. Once Zelensky and Netanyahu have been dismissed, everyone will know that it is possible to get the head of a Washington representative, and everyone will know that they must flee before they are sacrificed.

This process is not only inevitable, it’s inexorable. President Joe Biden can only do what he can to slow it down, to make it last, not to stop it.

The peoples and leaders of the West must now take the initiative to get out of this predicament, without waiting to be abandoned, as Cuba did at the cost of the privations of its “special period”. This is a matter of urgency: the last to react will have to foot the bill for everyone else. Many states from the “rest of the world” are already fleeing. They are queuing up to join the BRICS or the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

Even more than Russia, which had to break away from the Baltic States, the United States must prepare for domestic uprisings. When the US is no longer able to impose the dollar on international trade, and its standard of living collapses, the poorer regions will refuse to obey, while the richer ones will become independent, starting with the republics of Texas and California (the only ones legally able to do so, according to the Treaties) [1]. The break-up of the USA is likely to result in civil war.

The disappearance of the USA will lead to the disappearance of NATO and the European Union. Germany, France and the U.K. will find themselves faced with their old rivalries, having failed to respond when the time was right.

Within a few years, Israel and the “American Empire” will disappear. Those who fight against the direction of history will provoke wars and unnecessary deaths in their numbers.

Translation
Roger Lagassé

by Gilbert Doctorow via Gilbert Doctorow

The 19th century American showman P.T. Barnum is best known for his aphorism “There’s a sucker born every minute.” This is precisely the kind of cynical card cheat who epitomizes America’s political establishment today in the view of Russian expert observers and legislators appearing on the widely watched talk show Evening with Vladimir Solovyov. They have in their crosshairs not just what they call “the Collective Biden,” meaning the senile, disoriented fool who has his finger on the red button plus the Deep State that writes his speeches and steers him to and from his speaking engagements. It also takes in scoundrels in the U.S. Senate like Chuck Schumer, my classmate (Harvard ’67) Mike Blumenthal and the ever notorious Lindsey Graham. Their sound bites are very frequently put up on the screen for the audience to better understand what Russia’s erstwhile “partners” abroad are saying.

Those of you who had experience watching RT (Russia Today) have never been exposed to this kind of trenchant analysis and utter contempt for the American political classes. This goes much farther than what you might imagine when Western mainstream media concede that ‘there is little trust between the sides.’

If we dig a bit deeper, the contempt of the Russian political commentators, many of whom hold advanced academic degrees, is built on their conviction that American politicians, like their European Union counterparts today, are poorly educated if not simply ignoramuses. By a curious irony of fate, the Americans appear to Russian sophisticates to be the conniving rubes that Americans once saw in the Soviet leaders of Khrushchev’s time in power.

We all may have had a laugh at the expense of the utterly stupid German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock who said several months ago that “Vladimir Putin must change his course by 360 degrees.” But then in Moscow the biggest laughs have come at the expense of the seemingly well-turned out, Yale-educated Jake Sullivan, National Security Adviser to the President, and his never to be lived down quote from a couple of weeks before the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel that “the Middle East is quieter now than it has been in two decades.”

However, these Russian panelists are laughing through their tears. The value of an Ivy League education, once considered the nec plus ultra by ambitious oligarch parents in Moscow, has been shown to be nil. More to the point, they see no alternative to preparedness for the worst atrocities to be unleashed by the United States against Russia’s allies, like Iran, at any moment. That is the unsubtle hint they read into the stationing of a nuclear-armed U.S. submarine in the Red Sea at present. They foresee the outbreak of direct warfare with Washington at any moment. Hence, the Russians are determined to further increase military expenditures and to boost the military industrial complex several times over in the immediate future. To put things in the perspective of Lev Tolstoy in his Epilogue to War and Peace, Vladimir Putin is the instrument of Russian elites as much or more than he is their pathfinder.

I mention all of the foregoing to help readers appreciate how the Russian political elites and the Kremlin look at the suggestions now surfacing in U.S. and Western media that the Russia-Ukraine war has reached an impasse and that it is time for the sides to negotiate a peace.

The Russians take this to mean that the United States has shifted its priorities to the conflict in the Middle East and to preparing for the coming armed confrontation with China. Kiev can now be let go without calling undue attention to America’s unreliability as defense guarantor, because global media are focused on the Hamas-Israel fight.

However, from the standpoint of Russian elites the war in Ukraine has tilted decisively in Moscow’s favor now that Kiev has largely exhausted its human and material reserves for waging war. These elites have no interest whatsoever in a Korea-like solution, in a ‘frozen conflict’ that could be warmed up again at some time in the future when Washington so decides. No, they will not sit down at a negotiating table until and unless Kiev capitulates and accepts what amounts to neutrality and removal of the neo-Nazi directed Zelensky regime. Moscow is ready to fight on ‘as long as it takes’ to achieve its objectives.

by Fan Anqi via Global Times

Antony Blinken Photo:AFP

The swift rejection by Israel of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s call for a humanitarian pause in Gaza has been seen as a reflection of the diminishing influence of the US in the Middle East and the failure of its global governance, experts said on Saturday, as anger mounts with the US launching of a military exercise in the Mediterranean Sea, which could further inflame tensions in the region.

Arriving in Tel Aviv for the fourth time in a month and reiterating continued support for Israel, Blinken issued one of the Biden administration’s strongest warnings to Israel in a blunt call to pause military operations in Gaza to allow for the immediate and increased delivery of aid.

However, the call was rebuffed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu only a few minutes later, who said Israel would be “going with full steam ahead.”

The embarrassing moment came as Israel announced its troops have encircled Gaza City, and its offensive involving air strikes and ground forces by far killing more than 9,200 people, among whom some 3,800 were children, media reports said.

Despite Israel’s outright refusal of Blinken’s appeals, the US is showing its support by holding a three-day drill in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea, deploying two US aircraft carriers in the area for the first time in decades, joined with more than 11,000 personnel, US 6th fleet announced on Friday.

It “sends a clear signal about our commitment to deter aggression and promote stability throughout the region,” said Thomas Ishee, commander of the fleet.

The US finds itself in a predicament where it is excessively accommodating toward Israel, primarily due to the overwhelming influence of the Jewish community on US’ domestic politics. “This has led to a lack of principle in the US’ Middle East policy, resulting in the consequence that Israel is essentially leading the US rather than the other way around,” Tian Wenlin, a professor at School of International Studies of the Renmin University of China, told the Global Times on Saturday.

Furthermore, Israel’s outright refusal demonstrated the diminishing influence and a collapsing credibility of the US, ranging from its failure to persuade Saudi Arabia to raise oil prices to the situation of now.

Experts further noted that with the limitless support for Israel, the US is burying its Middle East policy as well as its global strategy.

“Washington is caught between the need to support Israel and the desire to gain favor from the Arab world. And now, with its excessive leniency toward Israel, a growing distance is seen between the US and its Arab allies, who are well aware that Israel’s ability to act with impunity is primarily due to American support. In other words, the US has offended the entire Islamic world for the sake of Israel,” Tian said.

From a global perspective, the US is also losing ground on a moral front, given it has long championed itself as having values based foreign policy. Now with the blatant display of a double standard, the US has undermined its own credibility, the expert said.

Furthermore, from a geopolitical perspective, the US’ involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is affecting its global strategy, either in its support for Ukraine in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, or efforts to contain China in the Asia-Pacific region, observers said.

The US’ fanning of flames in the Middle East that is already on the brink of collapse has fueled the anger and chaos within America, as seen in the Port of Oakland when hundreds of protesters blocked a US military supply ship from leaving on Friday by locking themselves to the vessel, as the ship was bound to aid Israel after being loaded with weapons and military equipment, according to CBS News.

An ever-deepening rift is not only happening between the public and elected officials, but within the government too. CNN called the House’ Israel aid drama “the latest failure of American governance,” as the House struggles with a vote to send $14 billion in emergency aid to Israel, which “leaves America looking like a divided superpower unable even to rush help to a friend that believes it’s fighting an existential war,” reported CNN on Thursday.

Across the world, many more have raised their voice and condemned the killing of civilians in the war. Soon after Blinken announced to add Turkey to his Middle East trip following Israel, Ankara said Saturday it was recalling its ambassador to Israel and breaking off contacts with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in protest at the bloodshed in Gaza.

Honduras’ Foreign Affairs Minister announced on Friday the recall of its ambassador to Israel in light of “the serious humanitarian situation the civilian Palestinian population is suffering in the Gaza Strip.”

Honduras became the latest Latin American country to take diplomatic actions against Israel following Bolivia, Chile and Columbia.

UN experts warned on Thursday that “time is running out” to prevent genocide and humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, expressing deep frustration with Israel’s refusal to halt plans to decimate the besieged Gaza strip.