Yeah, but that appears to be two sides of one coin. A year ago, a researcher from Hong Kong argued in a book that a rise in the number of autocracies “expand Chinese global influence via Belt and Road.” From the excerpt of this book:

When rulers in autocracies with semi-competitive elections […] have a weak hold on power, their desire for Chinese spending is amplified. This relates to clientelism, or the delivery of goods and services in exchange for political support.

A higher level of state control in autocracies grants political leaders greater influence over the allocation of clientelist benefits, which aids leaders’ reelection efforts.

That’s maybe a good example that democracy -not ‘the West’- is China’s real and only enemy.

What would be the alternative? One consequence of the so-called ‘multi-polar world’ will be a limited flow of capital between different blocs, limited cross-border investments across multiple industries, which might lead to market fragmentation and a divergence of technical standards. We could see degrees of globalization we had back in the 1990s.

Countries like Russia don’t seem to care about international law (or they care only if it is in their favor). This summer, some officials also discussed the seizure of China-owned infrastructure in Europe regarding Beijing’s support for Russia in its war against Ukraine. Russia and its allies will remain a threat to democracy which is their only real enemy. Russia won’t stop with Ukraine if they get what they want.

So, what’s the alternative?

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No, Chomsky and Herman don’t apply here, It was Russia that started the war. The aggressor is Putin’s Russia. The “manufactured consent” -if at all- works here only with the tankies and other derailed communities.

[Edit typo.]

How Russia prepares children in occupied Ukraine to fight against their own country

Russia is using a militaristic youth organization, Yunarmia, to foster the loyalty of teenagers in occupied parts of Ukraine and prepare them to fight in Moscow’s war against their native country […]

Russia opened the first Yunarmia branch in the occupied territories of Ukraine in Crimea months after the organisation’s official formation. By September 2016, Yunarmia had spread across the Black Sea peninsula, according to Oleh Okhredko, an analyst at the Almenda Center Of Civic Education, a Ukrainian group whose activities include documenting violations of the rights of children in wartime […]

In 2014, Russia occupied Crimea and fomented war in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in eastern Ukraine – the Donbas […]

Yunarmia “was created with the specific idea of the militarised reeducation of not only Russian [children] but also Ukrainian children from the occupied territories,” said Kateryna Rashevska, a lawyer at the Regional Center for Human Rights, which was forced to move from Crimea to Kyiv after the Russian occupation.

By January 2022, a month before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Yunarmia had 29,000 members in Crimea alone, according to the Russian Defence Ministry […]