• China President Warned Biden Democracy Is Dying: 'You Don't Have the Time' Newsweek

President Joe Biden revealed that after being elected to the White House, Chinese President Xi Jinping cautioned him that democracies are on the decline and that one day "autocracies will run the world."

Xi Jinping went on to discuss the latest innovations in Orwellian strategies to be the most powerful totalitarian dictator possible, then told Biden that he was late to his eldritch ritual where he snaps Ughyur children in half and drinks their spinal fluid, and had to go.

• As U.N. Rights Chief Visits China, Some Fear She’ll Become Part of the Spin NYT

The news was given prime placement in Chinese state media: The United Nations’ human rights chief, on her long-awaited visit to the country, had spoken with China’s leader, Xi Jinping. An article plastered across the website of Xinhua, the state news agency, relayed Mr. Xi’s declaration that the Chinese people were enjoying “unprecedented” rights. Then the article quoted the U.N. official, Michelle Bachelet.

“I admire China’s efforts and achievements in eradicating poverty, protecting human rights and realizing economic and social development,” she said, according to Xinhua.

But within hours, Ms. Bachelet’s office issued a rebuttal. It pointed to “her actual opening remarks,” which made no mention of admiring China’s record on rights.

...

The government, before agreeing to allow Ms. Bachelet’s tour, which includes Xinjiang, insisted that the visit be “friendly.” Chinese officials have threatened Uyghurs overseas who asked Ms. Bachelet to seek information about their relatives. Even Ms. Bachelet has privately acknowledged the challenge of securing meetings free from official surveillance.

What Ms. Bachelet is able to see, and what she says about it, could have major implications for attempts to hold China accountable for its alleged abuses. Critics say a highly choreographed tour would only lend legitimacy to the government’s denials of wrongdoing in Xinjiang.

“This visit is already being used by China as propaganda to conceal its ongoing, heinous crimes,” said Mehmet Tohti, executive director of the Ottawa-based Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project.

Good Takes that are Dope

• The European Union Was Designed to Stifle Democracy Jacobin

Today, the structures of European capitalism and the transatlantic alliance should be under scrutiny like never before. After more than a decade of intense economic and political crisis, Western European powers and their US sponsor are now facing off against Russia in a brutal proxy war in Ukraine.

Amid the maelstrom, European powers are rearming at an incredible rate. Germany, so long reticent to commit to its full military potential, has broken its long postwar militarist taboo and tripled its defense budget. At the Conference on the Future of Europe in April, leading politicians voted to deepen integration and launch a joint European armed force, indicating the trend toward even less democracy and even more militarism.

Developments are now underway that will shape the future of European and, indeed, world civilization. However, the appreciation of the European Union from much of the Left has been ambivalent, confused, and ultimately self-destructive.

This failure of reckoning has consequences. Many of those who advanced the most overwrought fantasies about the possibility of EU reform have expressed similar confusions (or rather allegiances) in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, though now concerning another pillar of the Western order — NATO.

What are the intellectual roots of this stupefaction? Ever Closer Union? Europe in the West is the latest book of essays by Perry Anderson about Britain, Europe, and the United States. It seeks to examine the intellectual world of those sympathetic to the prevailing order. Although he completed the book before the February 2022 Russian invasion, the dangers of Euro-American overextension in Eastern Europe were already apparent to Anderson (giving the lie to the idea that the gruesome assault on Ukraine came from nowhere but Vladimir Putin’s black heart).

What emerges from Ever Closer Union? is a devastating criticism of the ruling liberal hegemony in European society: a chauvinistic worldview with an almost cultic belief in the rights of the powerful and a disdain for democracy. Socialists who want to understand the EU would do well to know the backdrop to this rapidly mutating behemoth.

It's a long article, so I'll stop there, but that's the gist of it.

• Arsenal Of Autocracy? Popular Resistance

These are good times to be an arms maker. Not only are tens of billions of dollars in new military spending headed for the coffers of this country’s largest weapons contractors, but they’re being praised as defenders of freedom and democracy, thanks to their role in arming Ukraine to fight the Russians. The last time the industry gained such a sterling reputation was during World War II when it was lauded as the “arsenal of democracy” for fueling the fight against fascism.

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The president has just approved a new $40 billion aid package for Ukraine rushed through Congress — an even higher figure, you’ll undoubtedly not be surprised to learn, than he asked for. More than half of that package will go for military purposes, which means the outlook for firms like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin couldn’t be brighter. Add to that new sales to NATO allies beefing up their military budgets in response to the Russian invasion, as well as the Pentagon’s own astronomical budget — slated to exceed $800 billion for 2023 — and the opportunities for profit seem nothing short of endless.

And it’s true that Ukraine does indeed need weapons to defend itself. In the context of a policy in Washington designed, as Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently put it all too bluntly, to “weaken Russia” rather than simply end the war, there is, however, a danger in sending too much, too fast. After all, escalating the conflict in this way could possibly lead to a direct confrontation between the U.S. and Russia, two nuclear-armed nations.

As someone who has followed Washington’s arms production and its global weapons sales for decades now, my answer would be: far from it. At best, those firms are opportunists, selling their wares wherever they’re allowed to, regardless of whether their products will be used to push back a Russian invasion of Ukraine or fuel the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophe of this century in Yemen.

If they were truly to become part of an “arsenal of democracy,” those militarized mega-firms would have to trim their client lists considerably. I suspect, in fact, that if we were looking at their global sales in a more clear-eyed way, we would have to come up with a more apt term for them entirely. My own suggestion when it comes to Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, and similar firms would be “arsenal of autocracy.”

The article continues, discussing US arms companies.