Strange Bedfellows: The India/Pakistan/China Triangle
They say politics makes for strange bedfellows, and if that’s the case then perhaps we don’t have to look any further than the images coming out of Astana last week for proof of that dictum.
Astana, of course, is the capital of Kazakhstan, and last weekend it played host to the annual leaders’ summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), an intergovernmental body that until this month had just six permanent members: China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. But this summit, the group’s 15th annual meeting, marked a special occasion: the accession of two new members to the organization. And not just any members. India and Pakistan have officially moved up the ranks from observer states to permanent members of the SCO.
That’s right, after years of talks and one year of waiting, India and Pakistan have finally become full-fledged SCO members…
…which means two nuclear-armed nations who are bitter archrivals and who have unresolved border disputes that very well could erupt in all-out war (even nuclear war) at any moment are now working together in an international security organization. Like I said: Talk about strange bedfellows.
So what is the SCO, and what does it mean now that India and Pakistan are both members? Find out more about the China/India/Pakistan triangle in this week’s edition of The Corbett Report Subscriber.
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Gill Bates? Epic, sounds like a parody.
“Brookings Institute stooge Bates Gill”
That also brought my own reading to a jarring halt, and I considered a possible transposition error. After a quick re-read, though, I moved on, but it was an interesting moment.
Yes, my brain moved the letters around for me, leading to me initially reading it as Bill Gates!
Edit ? – In his book, Brzezinski wrote that[:]. currently part of initial quote… just a thought.
Also, is the second quoted para actually part of your text?
Perhaps you are quoting yourself – apologies…
Gill Bates, I too thought James was playing with us. Cames Jorbett?
Hey James, interesting article and videos. Another name that popped up in one of the videos was that of one of the people listed in the credits of ‘How to send an email’; the guys surname was “Boffin”! Also, great to see a Curtis Stone vid come up in Recommended Viewing. As a fellow permie ( permaculturalist) I’ve been watching his vids with interest for quite some time.
Urban Farmer Curtis Stone – I had never watched him before. The guy really knows how to relay the tech (techniques / successful actions / details) of doing things. I am very impressed!
He is a real “guerilla gardener” and has tremendous good will towards people.
He makes some profound, philosophical pragmatic points.
Example:
Social Capital under A VISIT FROM THE BY-LAW ENFORCER!!!
(7 minutes) – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfdYNG6MbCo
That “Social Capital” aspect reminds me of James Corbett’s What Are You Going To Be When You Grow Up?
https://www.corbettreport.com/what-are-you-going-to-be-when-you-grow-up/
Here James brings up…
Catallaxy or Catallactics – …a community based on exchange and friendship… …Cooperation and exchange are the very basis of human civilization. Economy and central planning are their antitheses…
…The catallactician describes the order of human activity, quantifies and examines it. But directing that order? Managing it? Controlling it? Coercing its participants into a unitary plan of action? This is not even conceivable to the catallactician….
https://www.corbettreport.com/why-economists-are-always-wrong/
I like …a community based on cooperation, exchange and friendship.
As part of that mindset, I feel like we all can help promote to others folks like James Corbett or Curtis Stone or whomever.
An exchange we each can do is to spread the word about the CorbettReport.
And think about it…
…our promotion of CorbettReport is more than just being altruistic. A personal benefit which we receive is the very low cost of becoming a member. Corbett makes his living from the volume of members. Helping to ensure that he has a high volume of members helps to keep the cost of membership down.
“Pakistan to be the font of all terrorism” – typo?
Nope!
http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2013/08/poll-results/
That’s an interesting site (bookmarked now)… educated me in short order on terms like: sororal, sistern, and misandrist.
Except for sororal having an obvious common root with sorority, I would never have imagined the meaning of the other two. Without appropriate context, I probably would have dismissed sistern as a misspelling.
While we’re playing word games, I want to share something I found today.
In my personal lexicon the term portmanteau has meant a large suitcase, but I just learned of another meaning. It also refers to a new word created by the popular co-joining of two or more other words. Eg. motel = motor + hotel.
This line of thought led to my considering the term gerrymander. I’d always wondered where that word came from. I now take a circuitous route to an explanation.
Quotes attributed to Elbridge Thomas Gerry (1744-1814) who was an American statesman and diplomat, and Vice President of the USA under James Madison:
“What, sir, is the use of a militia? It is to prevent the establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty. Now, it must be evident, that, under this provision, together with their other powers, Congress could take such measures with respect to a militia, as to make a standing army necessary. Whenever Governments mean to invade the rights and liberties of the people, they always attempt to destroy the militia, in order to raise an army upon their ruins.”
“A standing army is like a standing member. It’s an excellent assurance of domestic tranquility, but a dangerous temptation to foreign adventure.” (I really like this one)
Today he is more subtly known as giving his name to the first part of the term gerrymandering, meaning the political redrawing of an electoral district map to obtain perceived demographic advantage in an election.
As governor of Massachusetts, Elbridge Gerry signed an 1812 law that established an odd-shaped Congressional district. It was redrawn by political cartoonists into a salamander-type creature and thus the term gerrymander was born.
That’s really interesting. Too bad the people didn’t come up with some coinages of their own. Like gerrygotstuckwithapitchforkuphisuranus and decided to trackback on his gerrymandering.
[hands on face] you said “uranus”
Mkey, I laughed so hard I wet myself. Shame shame shame that was so funny! More cilantro bro.
Personally, I’m more familiar with the use of ‘font’ as an abundant source, or fount – as James intended it here, rather than a typeface, or an ecclesiastical bowl.
Over time I have met, or at least talked on the internet with, people born and living now, or having largely grown up in, both India and Pakistan. It has been my distinct impression that there’s a lot of deeply felt animosity between the two countries. Whether this is a legacy of Partition, or the festering sore of Kashmir, I’m not really sure.
Any rapprochement would be a thorny issue, and would create a lot of noise in the respective public arenas.
I’m somewhat skeptical about a real independent policy for either country given their history of political and military leanings to the US. Although India, I think, has usually struck a fairly sovereign approach to its affairs, and managed to remain reasonably non-aligned during the Cold War.
Significant change often needs a calamity, so I’m left wondering what Sharif and Modi know that we don’t.
I waded into deeper waters than I can properly navigate here. Mea culpa: “the festering sore of Kashmir” IS a legacy of Partition. Taken together, along with the ongoing irregular skirmishing, and military artillery duels, there is more than enough grist for the provocation mill.
Pakistanis probably still blame India for causing the eventual separation of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in 1971. Although the initial civil unrest was a domestic Pakistani issue, when hundreds of thousands of former East Bengalis fled into India, Indira Ghandi eventually came out in support of the protesters. Indian armed forces were allied with other forces that defeated the Pakistani army in East Pakistan.
Herrqles, still laughing. Montique ? No Montbatten deserved every bit of what he got!
My key takeaway from this article is that India and Pakistan are coming together and are doing their own thing without Washington’s lead.
In other words, it appears as though the US is no longer regarded as the leader of the Free-world, and all this is happening as Trump is steadily removing the US from international agreements, much like the Paris agreement, further reducing and accelerating US influence throughout the world .
India and Pakistan may make strange bedfellows, whereas the US is looking to divorce itself from the new international order that’s taking shape.
What remains to be seen however…will the US act like a pouting child, dwelling in isolationism and seek to sow discord among the new international order, in the hopes of keeping its hegemony from crumbling down, or will it simply come to accept that their hegemonic dollar exceptionalism has run its course and embrace playing second fiddle within a new international order?
PeaceFrogs, valid point. lets go one more step towards the hands that move the pieces on the proverbial board. The American peoples opinion still must be manipulated. We are the biggest threat to their pivot to the east. Our treasure is exhausted. Our will has intuitively been our greatest defense against the propaganda that constantly bombards us. I believe we are wiser than one generation past and have successfully thwarted the grand design. So the collective ‘they’ have moved to others. In doing so, now we must be careful not to be sucked in to an over reaction or repulsion to this pivot. Have we lost something or have we gained something. I believe the American psychopaths can’t set idle in peace for long, unfortunately its not in our conditioned nature. We allowed all this destructive force to be created so why must we use it or market it to others to use? We can correct the illegetiment power that has brain washed our citizens. A good place to start is #unrig.
I came across a wonderful book highlighting the creation of all our modern(since 1947) wows. Thinking of HomeRemidySupply as I read it. “A Texan Looks At Lyndon ; A study in illegitimate power” by J. Events Haley. 1964 Paulo Duro Press.
The grand game is to play the dialectic ends against the middle; the result is confusion for the citezen in the middle.
Last point from -Kuehnelt-Leddihn “… power,well established and entrenched, claiming authority but methodically destroying the values of the common good , is dioblic in character. The satanic aspects of such government combining power ( a divine attribute) with wickedness and irrationality are usually underscored by a quality of confusion.”
Hey there generalbottlewasher,
I’m assuming when you say “pivot to the East” your talking about China!?
If so, I don’t believe that’s 100% accurate necessarily, meaning I don’t think in the grand scheme of things that the hands that move the pieces on the proverbial board want to replace the US with China as the leader of the world.
Instead, I’m thinking they’re moving away from the US, yes that’s true, however not towards China but towards an International Order, led by the US, France & Germany, England, China and also Japan.
Think about it, when Trump says he wants to make “America Great Again” he’s basically saying he wants the US to keep its dollar hegemony over other nations. A position they’ve enjoyed since 1945’s Bretton Woods.
However the world has changed… the Berlin Wall fell, we had the reunification of Germany, the creation of the EURO, the fall of Communism, China has entered the SDR’s etc…in other words, the world has incrementally moved away from the US dollar.
So the American people that are being manipulated at the moment are Trump supporters, thinking isolationism is gonna make the rest of the world some how beg for another 100 years of American hegemonic control. Obviously, judging from the article, India and Pakistan aren’t buying it and have decided to do their own thing with or without US approval, but I wouldn’t say China will replace the US.
Trump is more or less following the PNAC blue print.
(Project for the New American Century) and this is destined to fail, instead I believe an International Order will emerge.
Peacefrogs, you may be correct in some of what you say is valid and worrisome. I think the game in the east( SCO ) the countries in waiting and the declared members will become pawns for the collective order to destroy their individual culture. Much as they have destroyed the culture of the pre-1905 America. Quigley talked about the designs of the power elite in Tragedy and Hope. I agree with Joe Plummer and I believe Quigley expressed that the history of these psychopaths and eugenicists is there is no ‘Hope’ in the record for the average American. Im curious about bloodlines in these euro-asiatic countries that the collective ‘they’ want to ‘Balkanize’. You are not even recognized as elite until you have 5 to 7 generations of selective breeding to rule. Culturally these countries unique identity is a complete mystery to me, but you can bet that must and will be destroyed to harvest all the natural resources as has been done throughout the world. Think Cecil Rhodes on steroids. The world has not changed. The generations have changed but the family business continues on without deviating from the goal of one world religion, law and order. Look at the macro don’t be distracted by the micro. Bread and circus, bread and circus.
Worrisome? I don’t know, I’d rather it be a balanced International Order instead of some hell bent American Empire warring every oil rich nation in order to prop up its debt ridden economy.
Not to worried about bloodlines or the so called elites either…money doesn’t really rule my life, I like the simple life.
Well I wouldn’t trade my life for diamonds or jewels
I never was one of them money hungry fools
I’d rather have my fiddle and my farmin’ tools
Thank God I’m country boy
Yee Haa!
Haha!
I enjoyed this Strange Bedfellows article.
I learn a lot here.
Including “how to use a dictionary”.
Corbett’s Just For Fun links under the above “Recommended Reading and Viewing”.
Interesting looking back at those era’s.
I remember when Star Trek first came out. My brother even received a signed photo from Spock in the mail after writing a letter.
We would look at Star Trek devices such as the flip-phone style communicator and think that a real life phone like that would never occur in our lifetime.
Our house …the rotary dial. One phone had a long coil cord to the handle so you could stretch it to a nearby room from the hallway.
I don’t see India and Pakistan becoming close allies anytime soon. There are some real issues and now even China and India are facing off each other on the border.
India has a ambition for a long time to become the regional power and it pretty much is, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan are under Indian influence. The only country standing in the way is Pakistan, who’s political leadership is corrupt to the bone I might add. They can’t wait to sell out to Indians and US but are stopped by military hence the demonizing of army in sold out Pakistani media which is heavily funded by abroad, Geo TV, Dawn news to name a few.