TeleSUR invites Atilio Boron, Political Scientist and Sociologist from Argentina, to provide his insight into the historical significance of China’s War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War, especially in the geopolitical context of today, 80 years after its end. teleSUR
00:00Once again, we are going to contact once more Atilio Borón, our special guest, in this special coverage that we are bringing to your screens today, political analyst from Argentina, Atilio Borón. Hi, once more, welcome.
00:16And it shows the great development of the Chinese military forces. Let me, if I have one minute to say, 20 years ago, China was a minor military power.
00:38If you look at the complexity of the world, you have the Americans, of course, with the largest military budget, and then you have the French, the British, etc., etc. And China was well below that level.
00:54Today, China is by far the second military budget in the world. And of course, it's much less than the American budget. The American budget is about one trillion now, about one trillion.
01:09And the Chinese is 300 billion dollars. So, still, there is a very great difference. But there is another difference, which is qualitative. The Chinese armed forces are much more modern and technologically sophisticated than the American ones.
01:31That is something which produces this nervousness in the Pentagon, because they see that in a very short period, less than one generation, China jumped from the sixth or seventh place in the ranking of military investment to the second one, and much bigger than the Russian, the Indian, the Iranian, and, of course, the European countries.
02:01So, that is a major factor. So, that is a major factor, which explains why the diplomacy of China, which is very effective. And we have to consider that China has a millenary diplomacy. It's not a new country which is starting to meddle into the international affairs.
02:20China has a new country. China has a new country. China has a new country. China has been basically the center of the world for more, almost, I would say, 2,000 years. And the diplomacy of the Chinese is really extremely, extremely sophisticated.
02:34China has a new country. It's totally different. Totally different from what we see, for instance, in the very brutal diplomatic efforts or attitudes that the Americans tended to use. We are seeing that all this, the deployment of the U.S. Navy and the Marines into the Caribbean, just sinking a boat,
03:03in a boat, which supposedly was a boat, bringing cocaine to the U.S. There is no evidence of anything like that. But this is the sort of ideological school of the Americans said, peace by force. And what the Chinese do is peace by agreement.
03:25Peace by common winning. This is a favorite attitude of President Xi Jinping is to make our agreement win-win. Everybody wins. OK? It's not as zero soon as we have with our experience in Latin America with Americans. They win and we lose.
03:51But China says, no, no, no, no, no, no. The way in which we can rebuild the international system is on the basis of a new, a renewal of the international law, a new international order in which all countries enjoy safety.
04:12And if we see one of the problems we have today in the world, especially in Europe, the war in Ukraine, is because Russia was denied the right to national security, which is not denied to other countries.
04:28Nobody discusses that the United States. Nobody discusses that the United States has to have the right of national security. That means that the borders of the country are not in a region in which it can be attacked by enemy forces.
04:44But Russia cannot do that. If Russia requests from the international community, this sort of national security, they refuse to concede to the Russians the right which is not deprived to all the countries in the world.
05:03And Chinese have learned the nation very well. And not only Chinese, the North Koreans, which are there. OK? Because we have to ask ourselves why is it that North Korea has resisted all the enormous pressures from the West and also from Japan.
05:20And the answer is quite clear because they have atomic bombs. That's all. Unfortunately, this is the reality of the international system today and we have to deal with that.
05:33And you were mentioning Russia and it is important to highlight that President Vladimir Putin is taking part in this celebration and I wanted to ask you, taking the opportunity that you mentioned, how would you describe the current bilateral relations between these two nations, Russia and China,
05:49that played actually a key role in the victory against fascism and also in the current political scenario marked by Zionist genocide, unilateral sanctions, also as you mentioned, the U.S. economic war on countries worldwide and their hostilities?
06:04Well, according to what it was said today, early time, the relationship between China and Russia are at its height. Never the relationship were so intense, so productive, so multifaceted as they are today. And the reason is quite clear. All the documents, official documents of the U.S. government,
06:31declare China as the U.S. government, declare China as the enemy to defeat. China is no longer a competitor in economic terms. If you look at the older documents, what do you mean? When I say older, I'm not talking about 50 years ago, just let's say 10, 15 years ago, China was seen as a powerful economic competitor.
06:55However, however, in the last, late years of the Obama administration, there was a change, a very significant change, in which China became just no more a commercial competitor, economical competitor, but the enemy.
07:14And this is the word. And this is the word. And this is the word which is used when you use in an official document enemy to designate a country where you are almost declaring war, right?
07:26And there is a widespread belief in the U.S. administration and there is a widespread belief in the U.S. administration, in the upper ranks of the U.S. administration, that China is the real enemy of the U.S.
07:39China. China has a project and has the capability to impose a new international world order. Whereas Russia may have the intention of creating a new international order, but has lacks the strength to be able to complete that job.
08:02But if both Russia and China are together in a very close alliance, as they are today, and if they are able even to bring, to appeal to India, as we have seen in these recent events, today and yesterday, in the great activity of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization,
08:31the European Cooperation Organization, that means that there is already a new trial in the international system, a triangle formed by China, Russia and India, which is taking a very, very significant step in the reformulation of the international scenario.
08:53And that is already something which is already happening. It is not that it is going to happen. It has already happened. And this is why the reaction of the U.S. has been, why? What reaction? To reinforce the grasp on the countries in Latin America, trying to revitalize the Monroe Doctrine and reinforcing the attack against the countries which in Latin America,
09:22and the Caribbean have said no to the interest of the U.S., starting with Cuba, following with Venezuela, following with Nicaragua, and also including countries which don't, are not confronting openly with the U.S., but which are responding with dignity to the pressures of the U.S.
09:46take the case for instance of Brazil, okay, which rejected in a very stark terms, the tariff war declared by Trump, okay. President Lula was very, very clear, straightforward in that. President Petro in Colombia, President Xiomara Castro in Honduras,
10:14has given lessons that the situation in the Western Hemisphere has changed and that all these bravuconadas, as we say in Spanish, this, that President Trump is so inclined to express are not having the result that used to have in the past.
10:38And following the idea that you mentioned about Latin America, also Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel is assisting this larger scale parade.
10:46What's the meaning that there is a representation of Latin American leaders in this celebration, especially amid the ongoing U.S. attempts to destabilize peace in the Latin American and Caribbean region, as you mentioned?
10:58What's the importance of this presence in China?
11:02It's very important because, you know, our country, you mentioned Cuba, Venezuela, especially these two countries, have been subject to a tremendous aggression, an economic aggression, because the war is not only what we used to be in the past, in which you have firearms and you then kill the population.
11:26You can produce enormous penalties and sufferings to the population without firing one shot, okay? An economic blockade, for instance. Take the case of Cuba. Cuba is a case absolutely unique in which a country was subjected to 65 years of economic blockade.
11:52This has devastating effects. And there are no countries that have suffered the same. Venezuela has been under that situation in the last ten years. And, for instance, there are economists, American economists, which have been making some calculations about the cost, the human cost in human lives, okay? Of the blockade. For instance, in the case of Venezuela, which is a shorter period,
12:20which is a shorter period, Professor Jeffrey Sachs and other colleagues calculated that just in the first four or four years of this aggression against Venezuela, which started with President Obama, when Obama issued an executive order, saying that Venezuela represented an exceptional and imminent threat to the national security of the U.S., which was really ridiculous.
12:48Okay, but that was the policy was carried out. And what this American economist said is that in those first four or five years, in the application of this policies of blockade and economic sanctions against Venezuela, the minimum estimate is 40,000 people who died because of the shortage of medicines and especially
13:17in the context of the COVID pandemic, okay? So, today there are many forms of war. And the commercial, a commercial blockade, a financial blockade is also a war. This is a war which is fight with another method, not using firearms, but having tremendous effects on the population,
13:46producing the population, producing the suffering of the population, and all this is coldly calculated by some of the more reactionary sections of the American administration, which happen to be civilians and not the military, which is something which should be a good theme to develop in other days, no?
14:08At the beginning of our conversation, you mentioned that after the World War II, as the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union intensified, Washington chose to support Japan as a strategic counterweight in Asia.
14:24And in doing so, the remnants of the Japanese fascism were not fully eradicated. There are even some forces in Japan that today seek to deny and whitewash its aggression and distort history. What impact does historical denialism in Japan have on regional stability in East Asia?
14:43Well, you know, this is really a major mistake, even for the West, Western powers and the American, because when you help to develop a fascist force in those countries, it usually ends in wars.
15:07In wars, in wars, in wars in which the Western nations will be involved in one way or the other. This is why when President Putin talks about the denazification of Ukraine, he's making a very, very clear point, which has to be considered very, very seriously, because the remnants of the fascism are likely to reborn once again,
15:36as it is happening in Germany, as it is happening clearly in Germany, in which there is an increasing weight of the alternative for democracy, for Deutschland, the AFD, which is a fascist force.
15:53And, you know, if you have these fascist forces, the outcome, the outcome, unintended outcome, is very likely to be worse. And what happened is that, for instance, a country like Japan, you have mentioned Japan in the example.
16:12Japan was a country which, because of the constitution imposed by the US, by General MacArthur in 1946, that Japanese constitution, which was imposed by the US, prevented, forbidden, the military forces of Japan to leave the national territory.
16:37Now, we are going to take a second, a third pause in our conversation, and we are going to retake our dialogue in a few moments. We are now to continue seeing live images from Beijing amid this large scale parade.
