Reasons to Despair: 1) China

I and many with me were positively confident that China would take steps into democratization and leave its barbaric past bloodsheded by the "Culture Revolution" and the 1989 Beijing massacre. I applauded the take over of Hong Kong from the british colonialists and were sure that the announcement of Chinas 2008 Olympic games hostship was a proof of a autocracy slowely joining the civilized world. I was wrong! China now destroys what was left of the old Beijing from the countries rich past, arrests dissidents en masse and starts projects that will surely break the regions ecologic balance. The manners from the days of Mao still is rooting deep. With bamboo sticks under the nails and the head drenched in a ice cold water bucket it isn´t easy for Tibetan monks, freespoken culture nobilities and ecologists to express their freedom of speech. I have no hopes for a democratic (not even civilized) China for along, long time. The 2008 Olympic Games just seems like another sad show-off of Western dollar green pragmatism in symbiosis with Chinese Maoist capitalism. The only winners in this game will be greedy people like Rupert "bloody hands" Murdoch and the big bad sponsors.

The decline of the American Empire

Since Disney broke up with McDonald´s I knew that there is a paradigm shift coming up in the big blue Empire over there. What will happen next? They stop serving Coke to the Mig Mac?

Well, as we have seen in the blunders in the pan-asian (Read: the Afghan-Lebanese axis) warfare and the Katrina aftermath, the US isn´t as big and strong as we all thought. Information makes it quite sure that the US had planned the Israeli invasion in Lebanon for quite a while. The evidences and suspisions are right there in our faces: the US smuggled bunkerbombs and clusterbombs (yeah, you know the ones that blow so many civilans into slices) through UK airports before the Hezbullah incident. According to sources inside the Pentagon the US had pushed for a longer time for Israel to start a campaign to crush the Hezbullah. The campaign was planned to launch in October but the kidnapping of the Israeli soldiers came to convenient to pass so it began three months earlier instead. The plan maght have been to eliminate the Hezbullah as preparations for a greater US-lead campaign against Iran. The US has propagated in the UN for actions against Iran for its nuclear program. As if Israel don´t have nukes, yeah right!? The problem with a military campaign against Iran (and maybe Syria) would be retaliation against US allie Israel from Irans allie Hezbullah. There for Israel first had to get rid of Hezbullah as prevention.

How then, can it be that Israel with its preparations, US-built laser steered bunkerbombs, Spyplanes, Apache helicopters and Warships didn´t win against the Hezbullah, armed with old soviet AK:s and RPG:s? It might have been the same reason as why the US couldn´t crush the Talaban and Al Quaeda insurgency in Afghanistan and Iraq. The American war machine simply is created for conventional warfare against a "normal" army (read: the Soviet Red Army) and not against urban guerilla cells that play "hide and seek" dressed in civilan clothes hiding in civilian blocks? It might also have been that the Lebanon invasion started too hasty without the proper preparations.

Anyway, the invasion had to immediate effects: one, the US/Israeli gained even more badwill than before, and two, the Hezbullah shares rose in the arab/muslem world. The trust in Europe, US and rest of the world for the demagogs in the White house (Bush, Rumsfeldt, Cheney and Rice) is on a all time low. It simply doesn´t matter how many times Bush defends the war against terror if people can´t see any positive results.