@ichbinilya: In an hour-long video, Glenn Greenwald gives credence to Russian claims that the Ukrainians were carrying out “emergency disposal” of dangerous pathogens they had been developing with US help. I'm going...…
This thread does a good rundown of why the whole pathogen biolab allegation is just a bunch disinformation. Like with many such claims, it’s appealing at first blush, but someone with more knowledge can spot that it’s misleading.
US could put to bed any questions regarding biolabs by answering a few simple questions:
What did they spend the $200 million on?
What kind of research was conducted on which pathogens?
What kind of sensitive information about public health cannot be shared?
Does the Ukrainian side know what the US has been working on in Ukraine?
What is it trying to hide when the US Embassy in Ukraine deleted all relevant documents on its website?
Why does the US insist on being the only country in the world to oppose the establishment of a multilateral verification mechanism though it claims to abide by the BWC?
If the US wants to prove its innocence, why doesn’t it open up these bio-labs for independent investigations by international experts?
What is it trying to hide when the US Embassy in Ukraine deleted all relevant documents on its website?
Your other questions are legitimate, but does this one even need to be asked? The same thing they always delete/shred/burn when an embassy is about to (or has the potential to) fall into foreign hands… the identity of CIA agents and assets. It’s not exactly a secret that this is the point of it.
“Assets” not necessarily being spies, sometimes these are people who once talked to an agent (even unwittingly). And, it’s even possible to intelligently speculate on why that’s sensitive… if you know who they’ve talked to, you can make smart guesses why they were talking to them. Wouldn’t want the Russians to know who they were interested in.
If the US wants to prove its innocence
But it doesn’t. There are two explanations, and I won’t give an opinion on which is worse. The first is that it’s not innocent. The second is that even though it is innocent of the specific allegations, it has (and has had) the attitude that it doesn’t need to prove anything to anyone. Which is factually true, because there exist few mechanisms to hold the government of the US to account.
The point here is that given the long history of US doing horrible things, innocence cannot be assumed and must be proven. If US sees itself as being above having to answer such questions that may play well with its allies, but it’s certainly not going to help its reputation with anybody else.
If a criminal goes to trial, he may well have to prove innocence, because (despite this being acknowledged as wrong and unjust), if he fails to do so he may be found guilty.
And punished.
Who will punish the US? It does not need to prove innocence, because you, and I, and everyone else has no leverage over it.
The truth of the matter is, on this one topic, hardly no one seriously believes that they were engineering biological weapons 250 miles away from the Russian border for shits and giggles. Those who are pro-Russian or at least anti-US would do well to focus on more credible propaganda. This stuff doesn’t pass the smell test. This allegation can be dismissed without comment, and that is what their response has been.
US geopolitical position is being eroded, and this attitude is only going to help rally countries against it. People in the west tend to disregard the rest of the world as being irrelevant. The reality is that Eurasian economic bloc around China is now comparable to the western economic bloc, and it’s likely to surpass it within a few years. US could expect the same kind of economic bullying directed against it that it’s been using to attack its enemies. Stuff like this will be used as justification for that.
So are mountains. I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting for those or US geopolitics to be ground down to sand grains though.
And it isn’t even clear what, when that day comes, you will have won. Woohoo, the US is weak, the US isn’t in charge! Yay! There is no more USSR in such a picture, it lost first. If you’re expecting some resurgence of communism at that point, I think you will be disappointed. It makes it sound like you were always more against something than for something.
I mean, what do you have? China? I think the “People’s” army showed how much for the people it was back in 1989. Cuba? Castro croaked. So have all the true believers. It’s probably the closest to being the last real holdout.
US could expect the same kind of economic bullying directed against it that it’s been using to attack its enemies.
It could. I don’t find this prediction implausible. Given what you know about China, does that make you happy somehow? It’s about as communist as the Russian Federation is, though I guess that’s easier to pretend untrue, given that the regime change was a little quieter.
If true socialism/marxism/communism did try to rise up somewhere near China, how do you think they’d react to it? Seems to be that they are at least as much your enemy as mine. I don’t suggest that makes us friends, but in other threads you don’t seem dumb or delusional… China’s bad for pretty much everyone who’s not a billionaire or high-ranking in the party.
Highly recommend reading The Changing World Order from Ray Dalio. It does a good job explaining where US empire is at in a historical context. https://ca1lib.org/book/17400989/38bcf4
Meanwhile, China prevented the horrors I lived through when USSR collapsed in 1989. China would in now way have been better off once US ran a color revolution there. Again, recommend some reading on the subject https://redsails.org/another-view-of-tiananmen/
Given what you know about China, does that make you happy somehow? It’s about as communist as the Russian Federation is, though I guess that’s easier to pretend untrue, given that the regime change was a little quieter.
Given what I know about China, I completely disagree with that assessment. Once again, I recommend actually reading up on what China is actually like.
Seems to be that they are at least as much your enemy as mine.
You appear to have a deep misunderstanding of what China is actually like. China has plenty of problems, and their system is obviously not perfect. However, this system has proven itself to be very stable and to consistently work in the interest of the people.
China is a state governed by the Communist party where Marxism-Leninism is the official state ideology. 87.6% of young Chinese identify with Marxism, and the party has 95 million members. I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that these people do in fact understand what socialism is and what sort of system they have.
Having special economic zones where capitalism is allowed does not make China capitalist any more than having some social services make Canada communist. One key difference with China is that all the essential industry is state owned, and capitalists do not appear to be in charge of the government. However, even Marx argued that capitalism is likely a necessary stage for developing productive resources needed for socialism and communism to be possible.
One simple test to consider is that China doesn’t suffer from regular crashes seen under capitalism. An inherent contradiction within capitalism is that the capitalists always want to cut pay for their employees to minimize the costs, while they also require consumers with enough spending power to consume the commodities they produce. This is why capitalism results in regular economic crashes when wages fall below the point where consumption can keep up with the rate of commodity production. At that point you end up with overproduction and a crash. If China was capitalist then it should be experiencing these kinds of crashes regularly just like actual capitalist nations are in the Western world.
And a related point is that quality of life in China continues to steadily improve and the government is actively working on doing things like eliminating poverty, creating public infrastructure, providing healthcare, housing, food, and education for all citizens. Chinese government practically eliminated poverty, and in fact China is the only place in a world where any meaningful poverty reduction is happening. If we take China out of the equation poverty actually increased in real terms:
China also massively invests in infrastructure. They used more concrete in 3 years than US in all of 20th century, they built 27,000km of high speed rail in a decade. 90% of families in the country own their home giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans. Real wage (i.e. the wage adjusted for the prices you pay) has gone up 4x in the past 25 years, more than any other country. This is staggering considering it’s the most populous country on the planet. Social mobility in China is also higher than western capitalist regimes.
And then there’s the handling of the pandemic where it’s all but eliminated in China with life getting back to normal and the economy growing. On the other hand, we anxiously look at our fourth wave where our government left people out to dry in order to protect business interests as one would expect a capitalist state to do.
This is something that simply does not happen under capitalism. We can also compare China to India to see a stark contrast in their development with India going the capitalist route.
Did you read through the whole linked thread? About how the type and amount of activity is so small as to be completely inconsistent with bioweapons research? Russia knows this, so they are just spreading conspiracy theories in the West to weaken the resolve around sanctions.
I did and it makes a ton of assumption such as the idea that all of the research was done there. Furthermore, we know those a bioweapon labs because some of them are left over from USSR days.
As I’ve noted in my comment, US could easily dispel all allegations by answering a few simple questions and allowing international inspection. I simply can’t think of any reason not to do that.
Meanwhile, western resolve around sanctions is going to be weakened by western economies crashing, no need to create conspiracy theories for that. The people in the west don’t seem to understand the seriousness of the economic blow back they’re facing.
US could put to bed any questions regarding biolabs by answering a few simple questions:
Here’s the list of documents that have been scrubbed right after the allegations from https://ua.usembassy.gov/embassy/kyiv/sections-offices/defense-threat-reduction-office/biological-threat-reduction-program/
https://web.archive.org/web/20170130193016/https://photos.state.gov/libraries/ukraine/895/pdf/dtro-kharkiv-eng.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20210511164310/https://photos.state.gov/libraries/ukraine/895/pdf/dtro-luhansk-eng.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20170221125752/https://photos.state.gov/libraries/ukraine/895/pdf/dtro-dnipropetrovsk-eng.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20210506053014/https://photos.state.gov/libraries/ukraine/895/pdf/dtro-vinnitsa-eng.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20170221125752/https://photos.state.gov/libraries/ukraine/895/pdf/dtro-dnipropetrovsk-eng.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20170207122550/https://photos.state.gov/libraries/ukraine/895/pdf/dtro-kherson-fact-sheet-eng.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20170223011502/https://photos.state.gov/libraries/ukraine/895/pdf/dtro-ternopil-fact-sheet-eng.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20170208032526/https://photos.state.gov/libraries/ukraine/895/pdf/dtro-zakarpatska-fact-sheet-eng.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20170208032526/https://photos.state.gov/libraries/ukraine/895/pdf/dtro-zakarpatska-fact-sheet-eng.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20170202040923/https://photos.state.gov/libraries/ukraine/895/pdf/dtro-lviv-dl-eng.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20170201004446/https://photos.state.gov/libraries/ukraine/895/pdf/dtro-lviv-rdvl-eng.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20161230143004/https://photos.state.gov/libraries/ukraine/895/pdf/dtro-eidss.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20210506212717/https://photos.state.gov/libraries/ukraine/895/pdf/dtro-pathogen-asset-control.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20170207153023/https://photos.state.gov/libraries/ukraine/895/pdf/dtro-dnipropetrovsk-rdvl_eng.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20170211022339/https://photos.state.gov/libraries/ukraine/895/pdf/kiev-ivm-fact-sheet-eng.pdf
Your other questions are legitimate, but does this one even need to be asked? The same thing they always delete/shred/burn when an embassy is about to (or has the potential to) fall into foreign hands… the identity of CIA agents and assets. It’s not exactly a secret that this is the point of it.
“Assets” not necessarily being spies, sometimes these are people who once talked to an agent (even unwittingly). And, it’s even possible to intelligently speculate on why that’s sensitive… if you know who they’ve talked to, you can make smart guesses why they were talking to them. Wouldn’t want the Russians to know who they were interested in.
But it doesn’t. There are two explanations, and I won’t give an opinion on which is worse. The first is that it’s not innocent. The second is that even though it is innocent of the specific allegations, it has (and has had) the attitude that it doesn’t need to prove anything to anyone. Which is factually true, because there exist few mechanisms to hold the government of the US to account.
The point here is that given the long history of US doing horrible things, innocence cannot be assumed and must be proven. If US sees itself as being above having to answer such questions that may play well with its allies, but it’s certainly not going to help its reputation with anybody else.
If a criminal goes to trial, he may well have to prove innocence, because (despite this being acknowledged as wrong and unjust), if he fails to do so he may be found guilty.
And punished.
Who will punish the US? It does not need to prove innocence, because you, and I, and everyone else has no leverage over it.
The truth of the matter is, on this one topic, hardly no one seriously believes that they were engineering biological weapons 250 miles away from the Russian border for shits and giggles. Those who are pro-Russian or at least anti-US would do well to focus on more credible propaganda. This stuff doesn’t pass the smell test. This allegation can be dismissed without comment, and that is what their response has been.
US geopolitical position is being eroded, and this attitude is only going to help rally countries against it. People in the west tend to disregard the rest of the world as being irrelevant. The reality is that Eurasian economic bloc around China is now comparable to the western economic bloc, and it’s likely to surpass it within a few years. US could expect the same kind of economic bullying directed against it that it’s been using to attack its enemies. Stuff like this will be used as justification for that.
So are mountains. I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting for those or US geopolitics to be ground down to sand grains though.
And it isn’t even clear what, when that day comes, you will have won. Woohoo, the US is weak, the US isn’t in charge! Yay! There is no more USSR in such a picture, it lost first. If you’re expecting some resurgence of communism at that point, I think you will be disappointed. It makes it sound like you were always more against something than for something.
I mean, what do you have? China? I think the “People’s” army showed how much for the people it was back in 1989. Cuba? Castro croaked. So have all the true believers. It’s probably the closest to being the last real holdout.
It could. I don’t find this prediction implausible. Given what you know about China, does that make you happy somehow? It’s about as communist as the Russian Federation is, though I guess that’s easier to pretend untrue, given that the regime change was a little quieter.
If true socialism/marxism/communism did try to rise up somewhere near China, how do you think they’d react to it? Seems to be that they are at least as much your enemy as mine. I don’t suggest that makes us friends, but in other threads you don’t seem dumb or delusional… China’s bad for pretty much everyone who’s not a billionaire or high-ranking in the party.
Highly recommend reading The Changing World Order from Ray Dalio. It does a good job explaining where US empire is at in a historical context. https://ca1lib.org/book/17400989/38bcf4
Meanwhile, China prevented the horrors I lived through when USSR collapsed in 1989. China would in now way have been better off once US ran a color revolution there. Again, recommend some reading on the subject https://redsails.org/another-view-of-tiananmen/
Given what I know about China, I completely disagree with that assessment. Once again, I recommend actually reading up on what China is actually like.
You appear to have a deep misunderstanding of what China is actually like. China has plenty of problems, and their system is obviously not perfect. However, this system has proven itself to be very stable and to consistently work in the interest of the people.
China is a state governed by the Communist party where Marxism-Leninism is the official state ideology. 87.6% of young Chinese identify with Marxism, and the party has 95 million members. I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that these people do in fact understand what socialism is and what sort of system they have.
Having special economic zones where capitalism is allowed does not make China capitalist any more than having some social services make Canada communist. One key difference with China is that all the essential industry is state owned, and capitalists do not appear to be in charge of the government. However, even Marx argued that capitalism is likely a necessary stage for developing productive resources needed for socialism and communism to be possible.
One simple test to consider is that China doesn’t suffer from regular crashes seen under capitalism. An inherent contradiction within capitalism is that the capitalists always want to cut pay for their employees to minimize the costs, while they also require consumers with enough spending power to consume the commodities they produce. This is why capitalism results in regular economic crashes when wages fall below the point where consumption can keep up with the rate of commodity production. At that point you end up with overproduction and a crash. If China was capitalist then it should be experiencing these kinds of crashes regularly just like actual capitalist nations are in the Western world.
And a related point is that quality of life in China continues to steadily improve and the government is actively working on doing things like eliminating poverty, creating public infrastructure, providing healthcare, housing, food, and education for all citizens. Chinese government practically eliminated poverty, and in fact China is the only place in a world where any meaningful poverty reduction is happening. If we take China out of the equation poverty actually increased in real terms:
China also massively invests in infrastructure. They used more concrete in 3 years than US in all of 20th century, they built 27,000km of high speed rail in a decade. 90% of families in the country own their home giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans. Real wage (i.e. the wage adjusted for the prices you pay) has gone up 4x in the past 25 years, more than any other country. This is staggering considering it’s the most populous country on the planet. Social mobility in China is also higher than western capitalist regimes.
And then there’s the handling of the pandemic where it’s all but eliminated in China with life getting back to normal and the economy growing. On the other hand, we anxiously look at our fourth wave where our government left people out to dry in order to protect business interests as one would expect a capitalist state to do.
Chinese government has recently passed massive regulation on big business and released a a five-year blueprint calling for greater regulation of vast parts of the economy. The government has also openly stated that the era of capital expansion is over and the interests of the majority outweigh the interests of shareholders.
This is something that simply does not happen under capitalism. We can also compare China to India to see a stark contrast in their development with India going the capitalist route.
Did you read through the whole linked thread? About how the type and amount of activity is so small as to be completely inconsistent with bioweapons research? Russia knows this, so they are just spreading conspiracy theories in the West to weaken the resolve around sanctions.
I did and it makes a ton of assumption such as the idea that all of the research was done there. Furthermore, we know those a bioweapon labs because some of them are left over from USSR days.
As I’ve noted in my comment, US could easily dispel all allegations by answering a few simple questions and allowing international inspection. I simply can’t think of any reason not to do that.
Meanwhile, western resolve around sanctions is going to be weakened by western economies crashing, no need to create conspiracy theories for that. The people in the west don’t seem to understand the seriousness of the economic blow back they’re facing.