China Generals Quotes

This morning I saw a coyote walking through the sagebrush right at the very edge of the ocean ― next stop China. The coyote was acting like he was in New Mexico or Wyoming, except that there were whales passing below. That’s what this country does for you. Come down to Big Sur and let your soul have some room to get outside its marrow.

I don’t generally publicly respond to reviews, no matter how wrong-headed or perspicacious I think them. Nine times out of ten, writers’ responses to critics seem to me at best undignified.

It is very difficult to phone people in China, Mr. President,” said the Postmaster General. “The country’s so full of Wings and Wongs, every time you wing you get the wong number.

It's very difficult to phone people in China, Mr President,' said the Postmaster General. 'The country's so full of Wings and Wongs, every time you wing you get the wong number.

In league with a general called Feng Yuxiang, a Christian warlord, who entered legend by baptizing his troops en masse with a firehose,

The shrewdest of the great generals in China’s history once said that perfection in war lay in so sapping the opponent’s will that he surrenders without fighting.

1. Bangladesh.... In 1971 ... Kissinger overrode all advice in order to support the Pakistani generals in both their civilian massacre policy in East Bengal and their armed attack on India from West Pakistan.... This led to a moral and political catastrophe the effects of which are still sorely felt. Kissinger’s undisclosed reason for the ‘tilt’ was the supposed but never materialised ‘brokerage’ offered by the dictator Yahya Khan in the course of secret diplomacy between Nixon and China.... Of the new state of Bangladesh, Kissinger remarked coldly that it was ‘a basket case’ before turning his unsolicited expertise elsewhere. 2. Chile.... Kissinger had direct personal knowledge of the CIA’s plan to kidnap and murder General René Schneider, the head of the Chilean Armed Forces ... who refused to countenance military intervention in politics. In his hatred for the Allende Government, Kissinger even outdid Richard Helms ... who warned him that a coup in such a stable democracy would be hard to procure. The murder of Schneider nonetheless went ahead, at Kissinger’s urging and with American financing, just between Allende’s election and his confirmation.... This was one of the relatively few times that Mr Kissinger (his success in getting people to call him ‘Doctor’ is greater than that of most PhDs) involved himself in the assassination of a single named individual rather than the slaughter of anonymous thousands. His jocular remark on this occasion—‘I don’t see why we have to let a country go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible’—suggests he may have been having the best of times.... 3. Cyprus.... Kissinger approved of the preparations by Greek Cypriot fascists for the murder of President Makarios, and sanctioned the coup which tried to extend the rule of the Athens junta (a favoured client of his) to the island. When despite great waste of life this coup failed in its objective, which was also Kissinger’s, of enforced partition, Kissinger promiscuously switched sides to support an even bloodier intervention by Turkey. Thomas Boyatt ... went to Kissinger in advance of the anti-Makarios putsch and warned him that it could lead to a civil war. ‘Spare me the civics lecture,’ replied Kissinger, who as you can readily see had an aphorism for all occasions. 4. Kurdistan. Having endorsed the covert policy of supporting a Kurdish revolt in northern Iraq between 1974 and 1975, with ‘deniable’ assistance also provided by Israel and the Shah of Iran, Kissinger made it plain to his subordinates that the Kurds were not to be allowed to win, but were to be employed for their nuisance value alone. They were not to be told that this was the case, but soon found out when the Shah and Saddam Hussein composed their differences, and American aid to Kurdistan was cut off. Hardened CIA hands went to Kissinger ... for an aid programme for the many thousands of Kurdish refugees who were thus abruptly created.... The apercu of the day was: ‘foreign policy should not he confused with missionary work.’ Saddam Hussein heartily concurred. 5. East Timor. The day after Kissinger left Djakarta in 1975, the Armed Forces of Indonesia employed American weapons to invade and subjugate the independent former Portuguese colony of East Timor. Isaacson gives a figure of 100,000 deaths resulting from the occupation, or one-seventh of the population, and there are good judges who put this estimate on the low side. Kissinger was furious when news of his own collusion was leaked, because as well as breaking international law the Indonesians were also violating an agreement with the United States.... Monroe Leigh ... pointed out this awkward latter fact. Kissinger snapped: ‘The Israelis when they go into Lebanon—when was the last time we protested that?’ A good question, even if it did not and does not lie especially well in his mouth. It goes on and on and on until one cannot eat enough to vomit enough.

Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connection with that part of the world, would be affected upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine, first of all, express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people, he would make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labours of man, which could thus be annihilated in a moment. He would too, perhaps, if he was a man of speculation, enter into many reasonings concerning the effects which this disaster might produce upon the commerce of Europe, and the trade and business of the world in general. And when all this fine philosophy was over, when all these humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquillity, as if no such accident had happened. The most frivolous disaster which could befall himself would occasion a more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own. To prevent, therefore, this paltry misfortune to himself, would a man of humanity be willing to sacrifice the lives of a hundred millions of his brethren, provided he had never seen them? Human nature startles with horror at the thought, and the world, in its greatest depravity and corruption, never produced such a villain as could be capable of entertaining it. But what makes this difference? When our passive feelings are almost always so sordid and so selfish, how comes it that our active principles should often be so generous and so noble? When we are always so much more deeply affected by whatever concerns ourselves, than by whatever concerns other men; what is it which prompts the generous, upon all occasions, and the mean upon many, to sacrifice their own interests to the greater interests of others? It is not the soft power of humanity, it is not that feeble spark of benevolence which Nature has lighted up in the human heart, that is thus capable of counteracting the strongest impulses of self-love. It is a stronger power, a more forcible motive, which exerts itself upon such occasions. It is reason, principle, conscience, the inhabitant of the breast, the man within, the great judge and arbiter of our conduct.

Japan is neither willing nor able to conclude the war at present, nor has her strategic offensive yet come to an end, but, as the general trend shows, her offensive is confined within certain limits, which is the inevitable consequence of her three weaknesses; she cannot go on indefinitely till she swallows the whole of China.

We now know, from Henry Kissinger’s memoirs, that the decision to pursue an opening with the United States came not from China’s civilian leaders, but instead from a committee of four Chinese generals.6

I spent 33 years and 4 months in active military service . . . And during that period I spent most of my time as a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. Thus, I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927, I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Our boys were sent off to die with beautiful ideals painted in front of them. No one told them that dollars and cents were the real reason they were marching off to kill and die.

Attempts to locate oneself within history are as natural, and as absurd, as attempts to locate oneself within astronomy. On the day that I was born, 13 April 1949, nineteen senior Nazi officials were convicted at Nuremberg, including Hitler's former envoy to the Vatican, Baron Ernst von Weizsacker, who was found guilty of planning aggression against Czechoslovakia and committing atrocities against the Jewish people. On the same day, the State of Israel celebrated its first Passover seder and the United Nations, still meeting in those days at Flushing Meadow in Queens, voted to consider the Jewish state's application for membership. In Damascus, eleven newspapers were closed by the regime of General Hosni Zayim. In America, the National Committee on Alcoholism announced an upcoming 'A-Day' under the non-uplifting slogan: 'You can drink—help the alcoholic who can't.' ('Can't'?) The International Court of Justice at The Hague ruled in favor of Britain in the Corfu Channel dispute with Albania. At the UN, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko denounced the newly formed NATO alliance as a tool for aggression against the USSR. The rising Chinese Communists, under a man then known to Western readership as Mao Tze-Tung, announced a limited willingness to bargain with the still-existing Chinese government in a city then known to the outside world as 'Peiping.' All this was unknown to me as I nuzzled my mother's breast for the first time, and would certainly have happened in just the same way if I had not been born at all, or even conceived. One of the newspaper astrologists for that day addressed those whose birthday it was: There are powerful rays from the planet Mars, the war god, in your horoscope for your coming year, and this always means a chance to battle if you want to take it up. Try to avoid such disturbances where women relatives or friends are concerned, because the outlook for victory upon your part in such circumstances is rather dark. If you must fight, pick a man! Sage counsel no doubt, which I wish I had imbibed with that same maternal lactation, but impartially offered also to the many people born on that day who were also destined to die on it.

Separate but Not Equal The only places on earth not to provide free public education are communist China, North Vietnam, Sarawak, Singapore, British Honduras—and Prince Edward County, Virginia. —US ATTORNEY GENERAL ROBERT F. KENNEDY, MARCH 19, 1963, LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY

It is America (or Israel) at war, not just any war, that disturbs the Left. That is why there have been few demonstrations, and none of any size, against the mass murder of Sudan’s blacks; the genocides in Rwanda, Cambodia, or Congo; China’s crushing of Tibet; or Saddam Hussein’s wars against Iran, Kuwait, and Iraq’s own Kurds. Though there are always admirable individual exceptions, the Left has not been nearly as vocal about these large scale atrocities as it is about America’s wars. One additional reason is that, in general, atrocities committed by non-whites rarely interest the Left—and therefore ‘world opinion,’ which is essentially the same thing as Leftist opinion.

In the military context, shi connotes the strategic trend and “potential energy” of a developing situation, “the power inherent in the particular arrangement of elements and… its developmental tendency.”38 In The Art of War, the word connotes the ever-changing configuration of forces as well as their general trend.

The cultural and political backgrounds of the two sides diverge in important aspects. The American approach to policy is pragmatic; China’s is conceptual. America has never had a powerful threatening neighbor; China has never been without a powerful adversary on its borders. Americans hold that every problem has a solution; Chinese think that each solution is an admission ticket to a new set of problems. Americans seek an outcome responding to immediate circumstances; Chinese concentrate on evolutionary change. Americans outline an agenda of practical “deliverable” items; Chinese set out general principles and analyze where they will lead. Chinese thinking is shaped in part by Communism but embraces a traditionally Chinese way of thought to an increasing extent; neither is intuitively familiar to Americans. China

the United States has a single core policy in Eurasia—preventing any power from dominating Eurasia or part of it. If China weakens or fragments and the Europeans are weak and divided, the United States will have a fundamental interest: avoiding general war, by keeping the Russians focused on the Balts and Poles, unable to think globally.

Like it or not, philosophy or intellectual activity in ancient China was distinguished from manual labor, and thus philosophical texts were not only political in nature (because they normally addressed the issue of good government and social order) but also “esoteric.” They were not meant to contribute to general education, but to be studied only by a small fraction of the population, i.e., by those who had access to learning and power. If we want to understand the Laozi historically, we have to accept this context and thus also the fact that, as a philosophical treatise, it did not attempt to be generally accessible. It was originally a text for the few—and it clearly shows.

It is very difficult to phone people in China, Mr. President,” said the Postmaster General. “The country’s so full of

When sovereignty first expands to become the general organizing principle of a society, it is by turning violence into kinship. The early, spectacular phase of mass killing in both China and Egypt, whatever else it may be doing, appears to be intended to lay the foundations of what Max Weber referred to as a ‘patrimonial system’: that is, one in which all the kings’ subjects are imagined as members of the royal household, at least to the degree that they are all working to care for the king. Turning erstwhile strangers into part of the royal household, or denying them their own ancestors, are thereby ultimately two sides of the same coin. Or to put things another way, a ritual designed to produce kinship becomes a method of producing kingship.

Today military planners in Moscow and Beijing openly discuss a whole range of unconventional means to reduce America’s military advantage and influence in peacetime and, if need be, in war. For them hybrid warfare is not just asymmetric, it is never-ending. As General Gerasimov wrote, ominously, Russia’s strategy involves creating “a permanent front through the entire territory of the enemy state.

Generally speaking, Americans cussed, smoke, and drank, and the Shamys had it on good authority that a fair number of them used drugs. Americans dated and fornicated and committed adultery. They had broken families and lots of divorces. Americans were not generous or hospitable like Uncle Abdulla and Aunt Fatma; they invited people to their houses only a few at a times, and didn't even let them bring their children, and only fed them little tiny portions of food they called courses on big empty plates they called good china. Plus, Americans ate out wastefully often... Americans believed the individual was more important than the family, and money was more important than anything. Khadra's dad said Americans threw out their sons and daughters when they turned eighteen unless they could pay rent--to their own parents! And, at the other end, they threw their parents into nursing homes when they got old. This, although they took slavish care of mere dogs. All in all, Americans led shallow, wasteful, materialistic lives.

Of students’ papers: ‘I am generally very benevolent [said Shade]. But there are certain trifles I do not forgive.’ Kinbote: ‘For instance?’ ‘Not having read the required book. Having read it like an idiot. Looking in it for symbols; example: “The author uses the striking image green leaves because green is the symbol of happiness and frustration.” I am also in the habit of lowering a student’s mark catastrophically if he uses “simple” and “sincere” in a commendatory sense; examples: “Shelley’s style is always very simple and good”; or “Yeats is always sincere.” This is widespread, and when I hear a critic speaking of an author’s sincerity I know that either the critic or the author is a fool.’ Kinbote: ‘But I am told this manner of thinking is taught in high school?’ ‘That’s where the broom should begin to sweep. A child should have thirty specialists to teach him thirty subjects, and not one harassed schoolmarm to show him a picture of a rice field and tell him this is China because she knows nothing about China, or anything else, and cannot tell the difference between longitude and latitude.’ Kinbote: ‘Yes. I agree.

I have come to see that the benefits produced by eating a plant-based diet are far more diverse and impressive than any drug or surgery used in medical practice. Heart diseases, cancers, diabetes, stroke and hypertension, arthritis, cataracts, Alzheimer’s disease, impotence and all sorts of other chronic diseases can be largely prevented. These diseases, which generally occur with aging and tissue degeneration, kill the majority of us before our time.

My grandest boyhood ambition was to be a professor of history at Notre Dame. Although what I do now is just a different way of working with history, I suppose.”) He told me about his blind-in-one-eye canary rescued from a Woolworth’s who woke him singing every morning of his boyhood; the bout of rheumatic fever that kept him in bed for six months; and the queer little antique neighborhood library with frescoed ceilings (“torn down now, alas”) where he’d gone to get away from his house. About Mrs. De Peyster, the lonely old heiress he’d visited after school, a former Belle of Albany and local historian who clucked over Hobie and fed him Dundee cake ordered from England in tins, who was happy to stand for hours explaining to Hobie every single item in her china cabinet and who had owned, among other things, the mahogany sofa—rumored to have belonged to General Herkimer—that got him interested in furniture in the first place.

Tuesday, March 3 [Meetings with economist Arthur Burns regarding China, and with President Ford on economy; message from Pope John Paul II expressing general greetings; VFW reception for Senator Laxalt (R-NV); dinner party.] During day I did a 1 hr. interview with Walter Cronkite—his last for CBS. He spent the 1st 20 min’s. on El Salvador. He didn’t throw any slow balls but the reaction was favorable. Because of our dinner we couldn’t watch the show but I was treated to another W.H. service. They taped the program & played it back to us later in the evening.

Even in former days, Korea was known as the 'hermit kingdom' for its stubborn resistance to outsiders. And if you wanted to create a totally isolated and hermetic society, northern Korea in the years after the 1953 'armistice' would have been the place to start. It was bounded on two sides by the sea, and to the south by the impregnable and uncrossable DMZ, which divided it from South Korea. Its northern frontier consisted of a long stretch of China and a short stretch of Siberia; in other words its only contiguous neighbors were Mao and Stalin. (The next-nearest neighbor was Japan, historic enemy of the Koreans and the cruel colonial occupier until 1945.) Add to that the fact that almost every work of man had been reduced to shards by the Korean War. Air-force general Curtis LeMay later boasted that 'we burned down every town in North Korea,' and that he grounded his bombers only when there were no more targets to hit anywhere north of the 38th parallel. Pyongyang was an ashen moonscape. It was Year Zero. Kim Il Sung could create a laboratory, with controlled conditions, where he alone would be the engineer of the human soul.

The argument that “people now have more freedom than ever” is based on the fact that we are allowed to do almost anything we please as long as it has no practical consequences. See ISAIF, §72. Where our actions have practical consequences that may be of concern to the system (and few important practical consequences are not of concern to the system), our behavior, generally speaking, is closely regulated. Examples: We can believe in any religion we like, have sex with any consenting adult partner, take a plane to China or Timbuktu, have the shape of our nose changed, choose any from a huge variety of books, movies, musical recordings, etc., etc., etc. But these choices normally have no important practical consequences. Moreover, they do not require any serious effort on our part. We don’t change the shape of our own nose, we pay a surgeon to do it for us. We don’t go to China or Timbuktu under our own power, we pay someone to fly us there. On the other hand, within our own home city we can’t go from point A to point B without our movement being controlled by traffic regulations, we can’t buy a firearm without undergoing a background check, we can’t change jobs without having our background scrutinized by prospective employers, most people’s jobs require them to work according to rules, procedures, and schedules prescribed by their employers, we can’t start a business without getting licenses and permits, observing numerous regulations, and so forth.

In recent years, as personal memories have faded, another perspective is beginning to make a tentative appearance in China. This view acknowledges the colossal wrongs committed during the Cultural Revolution, but it begins to inquire whether perhaps Mao raised an important question, even if his answer to it proved disastrous. The problem Mao is said to have identified is the relationship of the modern state—especially the Communist state—to the people it governs. In largely agricultural—and even incipient industrial—societies, governance concerns issues within the capacity of the general public to understand. Of course, in aristocratic societies, the relevant public is limited. But whatever the formal legitimacy, some tacit consensus by those who are to carry out directives is needed—unless governance is to be entirely by imposition, which is usually unsustainable over a historic period.

1. Bangladesh.... In 1971 ... Kissinger overrode all advice in order to support the Pakistani generals in both their civilian massacre policy in East Bengal and their armed attack on India from West Pakistan.... This led to a moral and political catastrophe the effects of which are still sorely felt. Kissinger’s undisclosed reason for the ‘tilt’ was the supposed but never materialised ‘brokerage’ offered by the dictator Yahya Khan in the course of secret diplomacy between Nixon and China.... Of the new state of Bangladesh, Kissinger remarked coldly that it was ‘a basket case’ before turning his unsolicited expertise elsewhere.

The Communist party, under General Secretary Xi Jinping, has tried to label anyone who tries to oppose China’s crackdown as “separatists” or “terrorists,” designations punishable by life imprisonment or the death penalty, just as they did with pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong and peaceful Buddhist monks in Tibet.

Is it possible that chemical carcinogens, in general, do not cause cancer unless the nutritional conditions are “right”? Is it possible that, for much of our lives, we are being exposed to small amounts of cancer-causing chemicals, but cancer does not occur unless we consume foods that promote and nurture tumor development? Can we control cancer through nutrition?

During forced exercise one day, Louie fell into step with William Harris, a twenty-five-year-old marine officer, the son of marine general Field Harris. Tall and dignified, with a face cut in hard lines, Harris had been captured in the surrender of Corregidor in May 1942. With another American,* he had escaped and embarked on an eight-and-a-half-hour swim across Manila Bay, kicking through a downpour in darkness as fish bit him. Dragging himself ashore on the Japanese-occupied Bataan Peninsula, he had begun a run for China, hiking through jungles and over mountains, navigating the coast in boats donated by sympathetic Filipinos, hitching rides on burros, and surviving in part by eating ants. He had joined a Filipino guerrilla band, but when he had heard of the American landing at Guadalcanal, the marine in him had called. Making a dash by boat toward Australia in hopes of rejoining his unit, he had gotten as far as the Indonesian island of Morotai before his journey ended. Civilians had turned him in to the Japanese, who had discovered that he was a general’s son and sent him to Ofuna. Even here, he was itching to escape.

A woman in combat? Yes. Since when? Since Native American warrior Buffalo Calf Road Woman knocked that prick General George Custer off of his horse. Since Pantea Arteshbod propelled herself to become one of the greatest Persian commanders during the reign of Cyrus the Great. Since Hua Mulan disguised herself as a male to engage in combat and became one of China’s most respected heroines.

DURING THE PAST TWO TO THREE DECADES, we have acquired substantial evidence that most chronic diseases in America can be partially attributed to bad nutrition. Expert government panels have said it, the surgeon general has said it and academic scientists have said it. More people die because of the way they eat than by tobacco use, accidents or any other lifestyle or environmental factor.

There is a birch-rod kept behind the looking-glass in the schoolroom, and every now and then it is brought out and used, for no reason that really matters. This generally happens when there is a yellow wind. . . . Most people in North China suffer from nerves during the winter months, when the air is so dry that one gets an electric shock every time that one touches metal, or takes off ones furs. The nervous tension becomes greater before a dust storm, known locally as a 'yellow wind.

Westerners came in with guns, they made the native governments sign agreements not to raise their import tariff over 5 percent and in one case 8 percent. Japan didn’t get free from that tariff until the 20th century. In China and in the Ottoman Empire they didn’t get rid of it until well in the 20th century. And this 5 percent tariff made it impossible for them to keep European industrial goods out and preserve the handicraft of their own peasantry. Well, now, the transportation and communication revolution requires capital. Where are they going to get it? There is no development ahead of it which would provide it. It requires labor. Where are they going to get that? Their economic system, their agricultural system, is already producing hardly enough. Well, the way they got these skilled technologists, where they got these inventions, where they got the capital was, of course, from Europe, generally by borrowing it and building railroads and so forth. But they were not paying for it themselves.

The Gini coefficient, devised by the Italian sociologist Corrado Gini in 1912, is a measure of income or wealth disparity in a population. It is usually expressed as a fraction between 0 and 1, and it seems easy to understand, because 0 is the coefficient if everyone owned an equal amount, while 1 would obtain if one person owned everything and everyone else nothing. In our real world of the mid-twenty-first century, countries with a low Gini coefficient, like the social democracies, are generally a bit below 0.3, while highly unequal countries are a bit above 0.6. The US, China, and many other countries have seen their Gini coefficients shoot up in the neoliberal era, from 0.3 or 0.4 up to 0.5 or 0.6, this with barely a squeak from the people losing the most in this increase in inequality, and indeed many of those harmed often vote for politicians who will increase their relative impoverishment. Thus the power of hegemony: we may be poor but at least we’re patriots! At least we’re self-reliant and we can take care of ourselves, and so on, right into an early grave, as the average lifetimes of the poorer citizens in these countries are much shorter than those of the wealthy citizens. And average lifetimes overall are therefore decreasing for the first time since the eighteenth century. Don’t think that the Gini coefficient alone will describe the situation, however; this would be succumbing to monocausotaxophilia, the love of single ideas that explain everything, one of humanity’s most common cognitive errors. The

Putin was a new modern “strongman,” Peskov said, an archetype who was spawning imitations across the globe. “People around the world are tired of leaders that are all similar to each other. There’s a demand in the world for special sovereign leaders, for decisive ones who do not fit into general frameworks,” the Kremlin spokesman explained. “Putin’s Russia was the starting point.” Others that fit the mold included Viktor Orban in Hungary, Xi Jinping in China, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Recep Tayyip Erdog˘an in Turkey.

The accelerated deindustrialization of North America, Europe, and Japan, and the shift of manufacturing to Asia in general and to China in particular, has been the leading reason for this reappraisal.[93] This manufacturing switch has brought changes ranging from risible to tragic. In the first category are such grotesque transactions as Canada, the country with per capita forest resources greater than in any other affluent nation, importing toothpicks and toilet paper from China, a country whose wood stocks amount to a small fraction of Canada’s enormous boreal forest patrimony.[94] But the switch has also contributed to tragedies, such as the rising midlife mortality among America’s white non-university-educated men. There can be no doubt that America’s post-2000 loss of some 7 million (formerly well-paying) manufacturing jobs—with most of that loss attributable to globalization, as most of that production moved to China—has been the principal reason of these deaths of despair, largely attributable to suicide, drug overdose, and alcohol-induced liver disease.

Type for type, ships in general, and warships in particular, have always been bigger than their land-bound equivalents, often representing by far the largest and most complicated movable machines produced by, and at the disposal of, a given society at a given time and place. This was true in regard to the junks of pre-modern China, the galleys and sailing ships of the ancient Mediterranean, and the cogs of medieval Europe. As even a casual glance at a nuclear-propelled aircraft carrier of 90,000 tons burden will confirm, that still remains true today.

We heard the United States had a new president, that she was arranging for a loan from the Commonwealth to bail us out. We heard the White House was burning and the National Guard was fighting the Secret Service in the streets of DC. We heard there was no water left in Los Angeles, that hordes of people were trying to walk north through the drought-ridden Central Valley. We heard that the county to the east of us still had electricity and that the Third World was rallying to send us support. And then we heard that China and Russia were at war and the US had been forgotten. Although the Fundamentalists' predictions of Armageddon grew more intense, and everyone else complained with increasing bitterness about everything from the last of chewing gum to the closure of Redwood General Hospital, still, among most people there was an odd sense of buoyancy, a sort of surreptitious relief, the same feeling Eva and I used to have every few years when the river that flows through Redwood flooded, washing out roads and closing businesses for a day or two. We knew a flood was inconvenient and destructive At the same time we couldn't help but feel a peculiar sort of delight that something beyond us was large enough to destroy the inexorability of our routines.

The hotbed of innovation was initially southern China, because the wars against the Mongol overlords of the mid-fourteenth-century Yangzi Valley would be won by storming fortresses and sinking big ships fighting in the constrained space of a river. For both these jobs, early guns were excellent. But when the fighting ended in 1368, the main theater of war shifted to the steppes in northern China. Here there were few forts to bombard, and slow-firing guns were useless against fast-moving cavalry. Chinese generals, being rational men, spent their money on extra horsemen and a great wall rather than incremental improvements in firearms.

The wonder was, it was there at all. It had been ruined so often, that it was amazing how it had borne so many shocks. Surely there never was such a fragile china-ware as that of which the millers of Coketown were made. Handle them never so lightly, and they fell to pieces with such ease that you might suspect them of having been flawed before. They were ruined, when they were required to send labouring children to school; they were ruined, when inspectors were appointed to look into their works; they were ruined when such inspectors considered it doubtful whether they were quite justified in chopping people up with their machinery; they were utterly undone, when it was hinted that perhaps they need not always make quite so much smoke. Besides Mr Bounderby's gold spoon which was generally received in Coketown, another prevalent fiction was very popular there. It took the form of a threat. Whenever a Coketowner felt he was ill-used -- that is to say, whenever he was not left entirely alone, and it was proposed to hold him accountable for the consequences of any of his acts -- he was sure to come out with the awful menace, that he would 'sooner pitch his property into the Atlantic'. This had terrified the Home Secretary within an inch of his life, on several occasions.

General Jacques de Bollardière, a distinguished soldier who had fought in Norway, at El Alamein, with the maquis in the Ardennes as well as at Dien Bien Phu, and who was shortly to find himself seriously at odds with army policy in Algeria, criticises the professional army after Indo-China because: “instead of coldly analysing with courageous lucidity its strategic and tactical errors, it gave itself up to a too human inclination and tried — not without reason, however — to excuse its mistakes by the faults of civil authority and public opinion”. He was reminded of the young Germans of post-1918 seeking to justify a notion of a “generalised treachery”.

Only portions of the globe still enslaved by the enemies of the people refrained from congratulating President Zingu and Premier Villiers-Kolama upon the astounding successes of their masterly general and his incomparable popular forces. The tyrants may live to rue the day when they ignored the might of revolutionary Hamnegri. These reactionary elements include, of course, the oligarchs of the United States, Perfidious Albion and her sattelites, decadent France, the Latin-American serfs of the United States, corrupt Formosa, brutal Zanzibar, absurd Malaysia, unspeakable Liberia, middle-ages Morocco, bloody-handed South Africa, hypocritical China, barbarous Albania, and the treacherous Limkono Confderation.

Therefore, it is believed that the ancestors return after a lapse of tiem as if to a general and spiritual reservoir from which they will sooner or later unite once more with human bodies and human souls as their stimuli and impulses to life. ... Such is more or less the idea of Confucianism. And the only exception is that all human beings are not viewed as equally immortal. Whoever has harmonized his nature and caused his existence to be so effective as to emanate magical powers because they can transform and act creatively, such a person will not return after death. He will not be a Kuei, but a Shen. Shen means someone divinely effective -- man as hero, who is connected with the entire cultural complex. The duration of the culture is also his duration, because his life endures in the pantheon of this culture.

Retrospectively, American statesmen realized the rashness of their oil embargo. As the later secretary of state Dean Acheson put it, America’s misreading of Japanese intentions was not of “what the Japanese government proposed to do in Asia, not of the hostility our embargo would excite, but of the incredibly high risks General Tojo would assume to accomplish his ends. No one in Washington realized that he and his regime regarded the conquest of Asia not as the accomplishment of an ambition but as the survival of a regime. It was a life-and-death matter to them.”146 Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor was a partial success in the short term, and Japan went on to enjoy great tactical victories against America and Britain, but the conflict eventually led to its almost total destruction by 1945. Its wars in East Asia cost tens of millions of lives.

As it was in Mao’s China with the Red Guard, it is a political crime in today’s Republican Party to appear well educated. So we find Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri tweeting a rant about “unelected progressive elites in our govt.”16 The senator went to Stanford, taught at St. Paul’s School in London (founded in 1509), and graduated from Yale Law School. Senator Ted Cruz denounces “coastal elites who attack the NRA.”17 Cruz was born in Calgary, Canada, graduated from Princeton and Harvard Law School, was a Supreme Court clerk, worked in the Bush administration, and is a former assistant attorney general. His wife was born in the coastal town of San Luis Obispo, California, and holds a BA from Claremont McKenna College, an MA from Université Libre de Bruxelles, and an MBA from Harvard Business School. She works as a managing director at Goldman Sachs.

the Big Three own, which include America’s major airlines (American, Delta, United Continental), much of Wall Street (JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citigroup) and car makers such as Ford and General Motors. Together, the Big Three are the largest single shareholder in almost 90 per cent of firms listed in the New York Stock Exchange, including Apple, Microsoft, ExxonMobil, General Electric and Coca-Cola. As for the dollar value of the Big Three’s shares, it has too many zeros to mean much. At the time of writing, BlackRock manages nearly $10 trillion in investments, Vanguard $8 trillion and State Street $4 trillion. To make sense of these numbers: they are almost exactly the same as the US national income; or the sum of the national incomes of China and Japan; or the sum of the total income of the eurozone, the UK, Australia, Canada and Switzerland.

Even the cinema stories of fabulous Hollywood are loaded. One has only to listen to the cheers of an African audience as Hollywood’s heroes slaughter red Indians or Asiatics to understand the effectiveness of this weapon. For, in the developing continents, where the colonialist heritage has left a vast majority still illiterate, even the smallest child gets the message contained in the blood and thunder stories emanating from California. And along with murder and the Wild West goes an incessant barrage of anti-socialist propaganda, in which the trade union man, the revolutionary, or the man of dark skin is generally cast as the villain, while the policeman, the gum-shoe, the Federal agent — in a word, the CIA — type spy is ever the hero. Here, truly, is the ideological under-belly of those political murders which so often use local people as their instruments. While Hollywood takes care of fiction, the enormous monopoly press, together with the outflow of slick, clever, expensive magazines, attends to what it chooses to call ‘news. Within separate countries, one or two news agencies control the news handouts, so that a deadly uniformity is achieved, regardless of the number of separate newspapers or magazines; while internationally, the financial preponderance of the United States is felt more and more through its foreign correspondents and offices abroad, as well as through its influence over inter-national capitalist journalism. Under this guise, a flood of anti-liberation propaganda emanates from the capital cities of the West, directed against China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Algeria, Ghana and all countries which hack out their own independent path to freedom. Prejudice is rife. For example, wherever there is armed struggle against the forces of reaction, the nationalists are referred to as rebels, terrorists, or frequently ‘communist terrorists'!

The welter of major policy decisions taken by American leaders between May and August 1945 were among the most complex in the nation’s history. Purely military strategy was amalgamated into high considerations of foreign policy; all minds, including those of senior generals and admirals, were turning toward the postwar order. The president’s men were absorbed in the day-in, day-out skirmishes with Stalin over the Yalta accords, the occupation and reconstruction of Germany, the political claims of Charles de Gaulle in France, and the charter of the United Nations. They were just beginning to think about the future of Asia, the status of former Japanese territories, the fate of British colonies, the red insurgency in China, the future of Japan under Allied occupation, and the still-uncertain matter of whether Japan’s overseas armies would lay down arms if ordered to do so by Tokyo, or if they would have to be beaten in the field even after the home islands were subjugated.

After the plates are removed by the silent and swift waiting staff, General Çiller leans forward and says across the table to Güney, ‘What’s this I’m reading in Hürriyet about Strasbourg breaking up the nation?’ ‘It’s not breaking up the nation. It’s a French motion to implement European Regional Directive 8182 which calls for a Kurdish Regional Parliament.’ ‘And that’s not breaking up the nation?’ General Çiller throws up his hands in exasperation. He’s a big, square man, the model of the military, but he moves freely and lightly ‘The French prancing all over the legacy of Atatürk? What do you think, Mr Sarioğlu?’ The trap could not be any more obvious but Ayşe sees Adnan straighten his tie, the code for, Trust me, I know what I’m doing, ‘What I think about the legacy of Atatürk, General? Let it go. I don’t care. The age of Atatürk is over.’ Guests stiffen around the table, breath subtly indrawn; social gasps. This is heresy. People have been shot down in the streets of Istanbul for less. Adnan commands every eye. ‘Atatürk was father of the nation, unquestionably. No Atatürk, no Turkey. But, at some point every child has to leave his father. You have to stand on your own two feet and find out if you’re a man. We’re like kids that go on about how great their dads are; my dad’s the strongest, the best wrestler, the fastest driver, the biggest moustache. And when someone squares up to us, or calls us a name or even looks at us squinty, we run back shouting ‘I’ll get my dad, I’ll get my dad!’ At some point; we have to grow up. If you’ll pardon the expression, the balls have to drop. We talk the talk mighty fine: great nation, proud people, global union of the noble Turkic races, all that stuff. There’s no one like us for talking ourselves up. And then the EU says, All right, prove it. The door’s open, in you come; sit down, be one of us. Move out of the family home; move in with the other guys. Step out from the shadow of the Father of the Nation. ‘And do you know what the European Union shows us about ourselves? We’re all those things we say we are. They weren’t lies, they weren’t boasts. We’re good. We’re big. We’re a powerhouse. We’ve got an economy that goes all the way to the South China Sea. We’ve got energy and ideas and talent - look at the stuff that’s coming out of those tin-shed business parks in the nano sector and the synthetic biology start-ups. Turkish. All Turkish. That’s the legacy of Atatürk. It doesn’t matter if the Kurds have their own Parliament or the French make everyone stand in Taksim Square and apologize to the Armenians. We’re the legacy of Atatürk. Turkey is the people. Atatürk’s done his job. He can crumble into dust now. The kid’s come right. The kid’s come very right. That’s why I believe the EU’s the best thing that’s ever happened to us because it’s finally taught us how to be Turks.’ General Çiller beats a fist on the table, sending the cutlery leaping. ‘By God, by God; that’s a bold thing to say but you’re exactly right.

In 1962, the clouds of war against China darkened the nation. I got a call from the Prime Minister’s office asking me to come to Delhi for an urgent meeting. Also present at the meeting were some Generals and a senior bureaucrat, Shivaraman. I was informed that the Indian Army needed milk powder, and they asked me how much we could provide and how soon. I said, ‘A thousand tons and within six months.’ One of the Generals looked at me and said, ‘That’s not enough.’ I said, ‘Okay, then 1,500 tons.’ They said that, too, was not enough. ‘I suppose we stop wasting time, and you tell me the quantity that you need?’ I asked. ‘We need 2,750 tons,’ came the reply. I asked for a piece of paper as an idea began forming in my mind. I was aware that there was another milk powder plant in Rajkot, which belonged to the Government of Gujarat. It was a small plant, but I knew that if we put together all the powder and gave it to the army, sacrificing the entire civilian market, then we could fulfil this commitment in six months.

We aren’t simply looking at a demographically induced economic breakdown; we are looking at the end of a half millennium of economic history. At present, I see only two preexisting economic models that might work for the world we’re (d)evolving into. Both are very old-school: The first is plain ol’ imperialism. For this to work, the country in question must have a military, especially one with a powerful navy capable of large-scale amphibious assault. That military ventures forth to conquer territories and peoples, and then exploits said territories and peoples in whatever way it wishes: forcing conquered labor to craft products, stripping conquered territories of resources, treating conquered people as a captive market for its own products, etc. The British Empire at its height excelled at this, but to be honest, so did any other post-Columbus political entity that used the word “empire” in its name. If this sounds like mass slavery with some geographic and legal displacement between master and slave, you’re thinking in the right general direction. The second is something called mercantilism, an economic system in which you heavily restrict the ability of anyone to export anything to your consumer base, but in which you also ram whatever of your production you can down the throats of anyone else. Such ramming is often done with a secondary goal of wrecking local production capacity so the target market is dependent upon you in the long term. The imperial-era French engaged in mercantilism as a matter of course, but so too did any up-and-coming industrial power. The British famously product-dumped on the Germans in the early 1800s, while the Germans did the same to anyone they could reach in the late 1800s. One could argue (fairly easily) that mercantilism was more or less the standard national economic operating policy for China in the 2000s and 2010s (under American strategic cover, no less). In essence, both possible models would be implemented with an eye toward sucking other peoples dry, and transferring the pain of general economic dislocation from the invaders to the invaded. Getting a larger slice of a smaller pie, as it were. Both models might theoretically work in a poorer, more violent, more fractured world—particularly if they are married. But even together, some version of imperialist mercantilism faces a singular, overarching, likely condemning problem: Too many guns, not enough boots.

Hybrid warfare particularly appeals to China and Russia, since they are much more able to control the information their populaces receive than are their Western adversaries. A 1999 book, Unrestricted Warfare, written by two People’s Liberation Army colonels suggests that militarily, technologically and economically weaker states can use unorthodox forms of warfare to defeat a materially superior enemy – and clearly they had the United States and NATO in mind. Rather than focusing on direct military confrontation, the weaker state might succeed against the dominant opponent by shifting the arena of conflict into economic, terrorist and even legal avenues as leverage to be used to undercut more traditional means of warfare. The subtitle of their book, Two Air Force Senior Colonels on Scenarios for War and the Operational Art in an Era of Globalization, notes a core truth of the early twenty-first century: an increasingly globalized world deepens reliance upon, and the interdependence of, nations, which in turn can be used as leverage to exploit, undermine and sabotage a dominant power. The two colonels might not be happy with the lesson their book teaches Westerners, which is that no superpower can afford to be isolationist. One way to keep America great, therefore, is to stay firmly plugged into – and leading – the international system, as it has generally done impressively in leading the Western world’s response to the invasion of Ukraine. The siren voices of American isolationism inevitably lead to a weaker United States.

Researchers interviewed nearly 150 thousand people in 26 countries to determine the prevalence of generalized anxiety disorder to find, had excessive and uncontrollable worry adversely affected their life. They found that richer countries had higher rates of anxiety than poor ones. The authors wrote, "The disorder is significantly more prevalent and impairing in high income countries than in low or middle income countries." The number of new cases of depression world-wide increased 50% between 1990 and 2017. The highest increases in new cases were seen in countries with the highest sociodemographic index income, especially North America. Physical pain too is increasing. Over the course of my career, I have seen more patients, including otherwise healthy young people presenting with full-bodied pain despite the absence of any identifiable disease or tissue injury. The numbers and types of unexplained physical pain syndromes have grown. Complex regional pain syndrome, fibromyalgia... [], and so on. When researchers ask the following question to people in 30 countries around the world. "During the past four weeks, how often have you had bodily aches or pains"...[]. They found that Americans reported more pain than any other country. 34% of Americans said they experienced pain often or very often, compared to 19% of people living in China, 18% of people living in Japan, 13% of people living in Switzerland, and 11% of people living in South Africa. The question is, "Why in an unprecedented time of wealth, freedom, technological progress, and medical advancement, do we appear to be unhappier and in more pain than ever?'. The reason we're all so miserable may be because we're working so hard to avoid being miserable.

In 1962, the clouds of war against China darkened the nation. I got a call from the Prime Minister’s office asking me to come to Delhi for an urgent meeting. Also present at the meeting were some Generals and a senior bureaucrat, Shivaraman. I was informed that the Indian Army needed milk powder, and they asked me how much we could provide and how soon. I said, ‘A thousand tons and within six months.’ One of the Generals looked at me and said, ‘That’s not enough.’ I said, ‘Okay, then 1,500 tons.’ They said that, too, was not enough. ‘I suppose we stop wasting time, and you tell me the quantity that you need?’ I asked. ‘We need 2,750 tons,’ came the reply. I asked for a piece of paper as an idea began forming in my mind. I was aware that there was another milk powder plant in Rajkot, which belonged to the Government of Gujarat. It was a small plant, but I knew that if we put together all the powder and gave it to the army, sacrificing the entire civilian market, then we could fulfil this commitment in six months. So I did a swift calculation on a piece of paper and said, ‘It will be done. Now, can I go?’ The General expressed apprehension, ‘Supposing you let us down?’ ‘That is not the way to speak to Mr Kurien,’ Shivaraman said. ‘We have the highest regard for his words. If he says that he will do it, he will certainly do it. And besides, may I know what other alternative you have?’ That quietened the General. Then Shivaraman asked me, ‘What can the government do for you?’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘Loans? Grants? Anything you want?’ I said, ‘Mr Shivaraman, you said there is an emergency, and if Amul uses this emergency to squeeze money out of the government, then it is an unworthy organisation. I want nothing.’ From that day onwards, Shivaraman was an ally.

El coche se había ido, pero había dejado tras él una tenue onda que fluía por las tiendas de guantes, las sombrererías y sastrerías a ambos lados de Bond Street. Durante treinta segundos todas las cabezas apuntaron en la misma dirección - la ventanilla. Mientras escogían un par de guantes - ¿hasta el codo o más arriba, color limón o gris pálido? - las señoras se interrumpieron; al terminar la frase algo había ocurrido. En algunos casos algo tan nimio que su vibración no la podía registrar ningún instrumento matemático, por muy capaz que éste fuera de transmitir sacudidas y terremotos hasta China; y eso que era impresionantemente rotundo y a la vez emotivo por cuanto que su efecto se dejaba sentir en todo el mundo; porque en todas las sombrererías y sastrerías los clientes, extraños entre sí, se miraron y pensaron en los muertos; en la bandera; en el Imperio. En la taberna de una callejuela un alguien de las colonias profirió insultos contra la Casa de Windsor, lo cual derivó en improperios, jarras de cerveza rotas y una algarabía general que, singularmente, resonó como un eco al otro lado de la calle, hasta llegar a los oídos de las chicas que estaban comprando lencería blanca, de lazos de seda pura, para sus bodas. Porque la agitación superficial que el coche provocaba a su paso, tocaba y rasgaba algo muy profundo. Deslizándose por Piccadilly el coche dobló por St. James's Street. Unos hombres altos, de físico robusto, hombres trajeados, con sus chaqués y levitas, sus pañuelos blancos y pelo peinado hacia atrás, que por razones difíciles de dilucidar, estaban de pie en el mirador de White, las manos tras la cola del chaqué, vigilando, percibieron instintivamente que la grandeza pasaba ante ellos, y la pálida luz de la presencia inmortal descendió sobre ellos, como había descendido sobre Clarissa Dalloway. Inmediatamente se irguieron más si cabe, retiraron sus manos de la espalda, y parecía que estuviesen en disposición de acatar las órdenes de su Soberano, hasta la misma boca del cañón, si fuera necesario, igual que sus antepasados lo hicieran en otros tiempos. Parecía que los bustos blancos y las mesitas, en segundo plano, con algunas botellas de soda encima y cubiertas de ejemplares del 'Tatler', asentían; parecía que señalaban la abundancia del trigo y las casas de campo de Inglaterra; y que devolvían el tenue murmullo de las ruedas de coche, como los muros de una galería humilde devuelven el eco de un susurro convertido en voz sonora debido a la fuerza de toda una catedral.