Russia and China : The Difference

 

 

Although Russia and China are allies, they are very different nations with very different political economies. Both nations experienced proletarian revolutions, in 1917 for Russia and 1949 for China. But in the Soviet Union the revolution was first undermined by the treachery of Khrushchev and then the victory of the bureaucrats and corruption under Brezhnev; with Gorbachev delivering the coup de grace through his incredibly naive policies. Then a kleptocratic revolution from above followed with a primitive accumulation that created an oligarchy, overseen by the oligarch puppet and Western vassal Yeltsin. Putin has managed to significantly ameliorate the impact of the oligarchs, but Russia is still very much a child of the 1990s disaster. In contrast, the Communist Part of China has kept power since the revolution, although there was a real possibility of a disastrous period of shock therapy in the late 1980s, through successive stages of economic and social renewal. China is a socialist country, Russia is a significantly neoliberal capitalist one.

Western mainstream economic textbooks, and political economy and sociology assume an independent state that represents the “will of the people”, the “national interest” or the “raison d’etat”, as this is the only way that their models produce beneficial results. But in the Western nations, since their bourgeois revolutions, the state has acted as a tool of the capitalist class. The is the lie that sits at the centre of all mainstream Western social science; that there is not a capitalist class that dominates society and that the capitalist class does not control the state as a tool of its domination. Mainstream economics also masks the huge role of the state in driving industrialization and ongoing technology upgrading (e.g. the US state in the post-WW2 period).

Markets and greed are very useful tools if they are kept within a straight-jacket of control and direction by a truly independent state that can competently contain their excesses and generally direct them without picking winners; state directed market competition. The Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI) of the South American states in the post-WW2 years achieved very significant success, even though its effectiveness was reduced by clientelist relations between the state and individual capitalists; as the state picked favoured winners behind high tariff walls. Even with such shortcomings, the massive gains in industrialization could have been significantly maintained if the “shock therapy” policies of the 1980s and 1990s, which included a sudden move to free trade and a removal of government industrial support, had been replaced with a much more nuanced and gradual approach. The US forced these policies through the 1980s Latin American Debt Crisis, together with comprador elites and intellectuals (e.g. economists trained at the Chicago School), explicitly to destroy the challenge of Latin American industrialization and to return these nations to the level of vassal resource exporters.

The economic share of manufacturing in Brazil, Argentina and Chile:

• 1970: Brazil 24.63%; Argentina 31.54%; Chile 25.47%

• 1980: Brazil 33.5%; Argentina 25.48%; Chile 21.43%

• 1990: Brazil 26.79%; Argentina 26.79%; Chile 18.51%

• 2000: Brazil 15.3%; Argentina 16.49%; Chile 16.88%

• 2010: Brazil 11.4%; Argentina 15.84%; Chile 10.77%

• 2020: Brazil 12.4%; Argentina 15.37%; Chile 9.93%

• 2025: Brazil 13.7%; Argentina 13.7%; Chile 9.01% (2024)

  The Latin American development states had already been destroyed by 2000, before China had gained access to Western markets through WTO membership in 2001. The already weakened manufacturing sectors of these nations then collapsed further. While Brazil has experienced a small recovery in recent years with respect to manufacturing, Argentina and Chile have experienced further falls. But even in Brazil, very significant parts of its manufacturing sector are to all intents and purposes completely foreign owned; automobiles, tyres, chemicals/petrochemicals, machinery and equipment, appliances and electronics. Mexico’s level of manufacturing peaked in 1970 (22.04% of GDP) and fell to a low in 2009 (15.10%) before showing a small recovery since then, but foreign (mostly US) capital plays a dominant role in the manufacturing sector; with the maquiladora factories that enjoy access to duty free inputs.

  When the Chinese Party-state opened up its economy it maintained ownership of the commanding heights of the economy (finance, energy, heavy industries), maintained capital controls, and also only allowed foreign companies to operate through 50/50 partnerships with Chinese firms with a commitment to transfer technology. With the use of designated export-oriented Special Economic Zones, and a massive devaluation of the Yuan against foreign currencies, to attract foreign capital. Land was also maintained under state (urban) and local cooperative (rural) ownership. The Party-state came close to losing control in 1998, after a “big bang” price reform lead to rapidly increasing inflation. A group of Chinese economists led by Wu Jinglian, supported by the World Bank, Western and European émigré economists, pushed for the type of rapid deregulation that later destroyed the Soviet Union and pushed its successor Russia into a hyper-inflationary depression. They were proposing a:

  Completely new economic system [requiring] hard-hitting measures to supersede the dual-track system in a relatively short time … [with a privatization strategy that should] reform the legal government structure of state-owned enterprises … [such that] the government will only retain the role of overall management of society and the economy … no longer [being] the direct agent of public ownership, let alone interfere in the internal affairs of enterprises (Wu quoted in Weber 2021, p. 235).

  Thankfully, Deng rejected the path of extremist liberalism, and rolled back the previous price liberalization “and imposed a strict [economic] retrenchment policy to regain control” (Weber 2021, p. 252). The CPC resisted an intellectual neocolonization and maintained control over the commanding heights together with limitations over foreign direct investments.

  In this way, China was able to upgrade its manufacturing sector while also maintaining its domestic manufacturing base. Together with extensive investments in infrastructure and education etc., and targeted sectoral aid that did not pick winners, China was able to rapidly upgrade over a period of decades; becoming the “workshop of the world”. At all times, the Party-state maintained control, reinforced in the 2010s by Xi’s crackdown on state corruption and bourgeois elements that were attempting to amass social and political power. The state also took anti-trust very seriously, moving to maintain healthy competition between firms and to stop attempts at gaining market domination. This is why Chinese corporate profits are half the level of the highly monopolized and corruption-ridden US. China maintained its manufacturing share of above 30% of GDP in 1970 into the 2010s, with a small reduction to 25% in 2025; with a real GDP that has increased by over 70 times.

  In the 1990s, the shock therapy unleashed on Russia at the behest of Western advisors destroyed much of Russia’s manufacturing industries; greatly aided by asset stripping and kleptocratic foreign and domestic capitalists. Manufacturing as a share of Russian GDP:

• 1990: 26.5%

• 2000: 17.8%

• 2010: 12.8%

• 2020: 13%

• 2024: 13.25%

In 2024, a manufacturing share on par with Brazil or Argentina. The Western policy proscriptions had destroyed manufacturing competitors across both Latin America and the post-Soviet economies. In Ukraine, the manufacturing centre of the Soviet Union, the GDP share of manufacturing had fallen to only 10% in 2020. In Belarus, which maintained a greater role for the state, the manufacturing share still fell, but to 20% in 2024.

Under Putin, there was some rebalancing between the oligarchs and the state, with those not accepting their reduced power being jailed and/or exiled, with their stolen wealth confiscated (e.g. Khodorkovsky, Berezovsky). The state owns a very significant part of the manufacturing sector through state-owned industries such as Rostec and and Almaz-Antey. The oligarchs still control significant economic sectors though, such as metals and chemicals (e.g. Mordashov, Lisin and Abramov in steel; Potanin in nickel; Deripaska and Vekelsburg in aluminum; Michelson and Timchenko in natural gas and chemicals; Melnichenko and Mazepin in chemicals and fertilizers). The oil company Lukoil is owned by foreign investors (e.g. Blackrock) as well as the oligarch Kerimov. In 2026, the combined wealth of the 155 Russian billionaire was US$696.5 billion. In China, the sources of economic rents are either owned by the state or strictly limited (e.g. anti-trust), in Russia much of those sources are in oligarch hands.

There has been some limited ISI due to Western sanctions, but that has done relatively little to increase the share of manufacturing in GDP. The manufacturing sector is very heavily concentrated within both state-owned and private behemoths that have very limited competition; especially with US sanctions removing much of the foreign competition. In many area, the exit of Western companies has been offset by Chinese suppliers (e.g. automobiles) rather than domestic ones. Outside of the military industrial complex (MIC), Russian manufacturing is dominated by second industrial revolution industries, lacking a presence in digital and green technologies.

The Russian central bank is run on neoliberal principles, with high real interest rates used to tackle any inflation rather than government fiscal policies directed at the better off. The government is also predominantly run along neoliberal principles, with a very low level of government debt (20% of GDP) that is funded through the banking system and even in war a budget deficit of only around 2.5% of GDP. There is no Chinese style 5-year comprehensive planning, and state-directed lending to designated industries (as in the case of Japan, South Korea etc. during their manufacturing takeoffs). The government is run by a troika of Putin’s own group (most from his days in St. Petersburg), the oligarchs and the siloviki (security and military sector), skillfully balanced by Putin. This balancing creates stability, but also a great deal of inertia with respect to any attempts to change the composition of the industrial sector; e.g. Putin’s attempt to pass climate change legislation was defenestrated by the oligarchy and liberal elements within the state.

Individual taxation in China is progressive, going from 3% to 45% (top tax rate kicks in for income over US$132,000), with corporate taxation going from 5% to 45%, and VAT of 13% with exceptions for necessities (9%) and services (6%). Also, the state receives significant income from its own corporations in finance, energy and heavy industry etc. Thus, profits from these sectors are not available to capitalists. Individual taxation in Russia runs from 5% to only 22% (for income over US$690,000), corporate taxation maximum is 25%, and VAT is 22% (with VAT providing 37% of government revenues). The Chinese income and value added tax system is much more progressive, especially with a much lower level of the highly regressive VAT. The capital gains tax in Russia is 15%, in China 20%, but China has an exemption for citizens trading in domestic A-shares and corporate capital gains are taxed at 25%; Russia is more regressive, but both countries tax capital gains at less than the income rate - which is regressive.

China is run by a highly competent Party-state that has successfully driven the technology upgrading and competitiveness of the country over many decades, through a combination of effective central planning and the maintenance of highly competitive domestic markets; with its exports being overwhelmingly of manufactured products at greater and greater levels of technological complexity from corporations that are increasingly Chinese. Russia sits with the legacy of the collapse and primitive accumulation of the 1990s, with Putin managing to rebalance power somewhat but having to share power with the oligarchs. There is no equivalent of the Party-state that was destroyed in the late 1980s and early 1990s. There is also an ideological resistance to anything “communist”, with the economy being run on significantly neoliberal grounds with limited government redistribution. Russian exports are overwhelmingly made up of fossil fuels, minerals and agricultural products. As Chinese incomes continue to increase, and the Chinese currency appreciates, Russia could become a “Mexico” to China; offering a relatively highly skilled but cheap workforce to Chinese corporations. That is probably a best outcome as the move away from fossil fuels in transportation accelerates over the next decade.

 

 

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 Without Firing a Single Shot

Beijing just sanctioned the companies America is counting on to stay armed. This is not a trade dispute. This is a targeting operation 

 

 

Most Americans woke up on Monday, June 22, 2026, and went about their day without knowing that China had just executed one of the most strategically significant economic operations in the history of the United States-China rivalry. There were no explosions. There were no troops on the move. There were no emergency press briefings from the Pentagon or urgent addresses from the Oval Office.

Two ministries of the Chinese government simply published lists of American companies. Within hours, the action was buried beneath Iran negotiation updates, Keir Starmer’s resignation, and midterm horse race coverage.

That is exactly how Beijing intended it to happen.

What China did on June 22 was not a trade dispute, not a tariff retaliation, and not a diplomatic brushback. It was a coordinated targeting operation against the American defense industrial base, executed in broad daylight while the world’s attention was pointed elsewhere. Beijing sanctioned drone manufacturers supplying the U.S. military’s most ambitious autonomous weapons program. Beijing sanctioned the two rare earth companies in which the United States Department of Defense holds direct equity stakes. Beijing banned its government from purchasing products from virtually every major American weapons platform builder that exists.

Fifty-six American defense firms. One morning. Zero shots fired.

This is what war looks like when two nuclear powers have decided, for now, that they respect each other enough to keep the guns holstered. It is not peaceful. It is not stable. It is a sustained campaign to establish structural leverage over American military production before any kinetic confrontation becomes necessary, prosecuted through economic instruments, supply chain coercion, and the patient exploitation of dependencies that America spent four decades building and never bothered to fix.

Every fact in this analysis is verified against primary sources. Every company named, every dollar figure cited, every regulatory mechanism described is drawn from official government announcements, Defense Department filings, and independent reporting from multiple outlets. What you are about to read is not speculation about what China might do. It is a documented account of what China has already done, why it matters, and what America must do about it.

 

 

WHAT HAPPENED ON JUNE 22, 2026

Two ministries of the Chinese government moved simultaneously on Monday, June 22, 2026, against the American defense industrial base. This was not an impulsive reaction from a rattled adversary. It was a coordinated two-ministry strike, executed with precision, timed to maximum effect, and aimed directly at the companies America needs to stay armed.

China’s Ministry of Commerce placed 10 U.S. companies on its export control list, barring Chinese exporters from supplying dual-use goods to those firms, and extending that prohibition to any organization or individual anywhere in the world that might attempt to transfer Chinese-origin materials to them. China’s Ministry of Finance simultaneously banned Chinese government entities from procuring products from 46 additional U.S. defense companies, effective immediately.

Fifty-six American defense firms. Two Chinese government ministries. One coordinated operation.

When a government mobilizes two separate agencies to execute the same strategic objective on the same morning, that is not retaliation. That is a campaign.

 

 

THE TARGET LIST IS A TARGETING PACKAGE

Understanding what China did on June 22 requires understanding who China targeted and why. Beijing did not select 10 random companies from a telephone directory. Every company on that Ministry of Commerce list represents a specific node in the American defense industrial architecture that Beijing has spent years studying, mapping, and waiting to squeeze.

Placed on China’s export control list are AVEOX in Simi Valley, California; Red Cat Holdings and Teal Drones, both in South Salt Lake, Utah; IMSAR in Springville, Utah; Jaia Robotics in Bristol, Rhode Island; Ball Aerospace and Technologies in Broomfield, Colorado; Oshkosh Defense in Oshkosh, Wisconsin; L3Harris Maritime Services in Norfolk, Virginia; MP Materials in Las Vegas, Nevada; and USA Rare Earth in Stillwater, Oklahoma.

Read that list again slowly. AVEOX produces precision motors for military drone propulsion systems. Red Cat Holdings and Teal Drones manufacture unmanned aerial platforms for the U.S. military. IMSAR produces synthetic aperture radar systems used in airborne reconnaissance. Jaia Robotics builds autonomous underwater vehicles. Ball Aerospace produces space and defense systems. Oshkosh Defense builds military trucks, tactical wheeled vehicles, and the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle. L3Harris Maritime Services provides ship repair, overhaul, and combat systems integration for the United States Navy.

MP Materials and USA Rare Earth are the two companies that the United States government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars, and in the case of MP Materials, a direct equity stake, building into domestic alternatives to Chinese rare earth dominance.

Beijing did not sanction hardware retailers and civilian tech startups. Beijing sanctioned drone manufacturers, radar developers, naval vessel maintenance contractors, autonomous systems producers, heavy military vehicle builders, and the two firms at the center of America’s effort to break Chinese control over the materials that keep American weapons flying, sailing, and firing.

That is a targeting package. Call it what it is.

 

 

THE PENTAGON’S EQUITY PARTNERS ARE NOW ON CHINA’S ENEMY LIST

One detail in the June 22 action has gone almost completely unnoticed in mainstream coverage, and it may be the most significant data point of the entire event.

MP Materials and USA Rare Earth are not simply private companies that happen to work with the military. In July 2025, the Department of Defense entered into a landmark partnership with MP Materials that included a $500 million equity investment, making the Pentagon a direct shareholder with approximately a 15 percent stake in the company. That agreement also included a $150 million loan for heavy rare earth separation expansion and a price floor guaranteeing MP Materials at least $110 per kilogram of neodymium-praseodymium output if market prices fall below that threshold.

Four days before China’s June 22 action, on June 18, the Department of Defense committed up to $725 million in senior-secured debt financing to Energy Fuels Inc. for the construction of a domestic metallization facility, the precise processing step that converts rare earth oxides into the pure metals and alloys that weapons systems actually require.

China saw that June 18 announcement and responded within 96 hours.

Beijing just placed on its export control list two companies in which the United States government holds direct financial stakes. That is not a trade action. That is a direct challenge to American sovereign investment in its own defense industrial base.

 

 

RARE EARTHS: THE WEAPON AMERICA HANDED ITS ADVERSARY

To understand why the rare earth targeting in this action matters more than anything else on the list, you need to understand what rare earths actually power.

An F-35 fighter jet contains 920 pounds of rare earth materials. A Virginia-class submarine requires 9,200 pounds. An Arleigh Burke-class destroyer needs 5,200 pounds. Rare earth magnets are present in F-35 flight control actuators, Tomahawk cruise missile guidance packages, Virginia-class submarine propulsion motors, Predator drone systems, radar arrays, and Joint Direct Attack Munition smart bomb guidance kits. At minimum, 80,000 components across 1,900 U.S. weapons systems depend on Chinese-sourced rare earth inputs.

That is not a supply chain vulnerability. That is a strategic dependency that Beijing can weaponize without launching a single aircraft.

China controls approximately 60 percent of global rare earth mining output, 91 percent of refined production, and 94 percent of permanent magnet manufacturing. More specifically, China controls 99 percent of global heavy rare earth separation capacity. Heavy rare earths, dysprosium, terbium, holmium, erbium, are not interchangeable with light rare earths. Every major U.S. weapons program requires them. America currently operates zero scaled heavy rare earth separation facilities.

China did not stumble into this position accidentally. Beijing spent four deliberate decades building vertically integrated rare earth infrastructure from mine to magnet, subsidizing production at a loss to drive out Western competitors, and systematically acquiring the processing knowledge that made non-Chinese alternatives structurally nonviable. America allowed it to happen. American companies sourced from China because Chinese materials were cheaper. American policymakers accepted the dependency because the threat remained theoretical. Now the threat is operational.

In October 2024, a single phone call from a Chinese government official to a battery supplier in Dongguan severed the power source for Skydio, America’s largest drone manufacturer. The company was grounded overnight. One component. One supplier. One phone call. Beijing has since demonstrated the same capability over infrared sensors, rare earth magnets, and drone motors. What happened to Skydio was not a warning shot. It was a proof of concept.

 

AMERICA’S DRONE AMBITION IS RUNNING INTO A SUPPLY CHAIN WALL

Rare earth targeting on June 22 collides directly with the most ambitious military procurement program the United States has launched in decades.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth authorized the purchase of 30,000 one-way attack drones as part of an aggressive autonomous systems buildup. FY 2026 defense budget allocations directed $13.6 billion specifically toward autonomous systems. Plans call for scaling past 300,000 drone platforms by early 2028. These are not aspirational figures. These are active procurement commitments.

Every one of those drones runs on a rare earth magnet. Goldman Sachs has assessed that China controls approximately 98 percent of rare earth magnet manufacturing, including drone motors. Chinese inputs dominate five critical layers of the drone production stack: magnets, batteries, semiconductors, carbon fiber, and infrared sensors. In each category, non-Chinese alternatives either do not exist at scale or would require years to develop.

MP Materials is building a $1.25 billion rare earth magnet campus in Northlake, Texas. That facility will not reach full production capacity until 2028. NDAA prohibitions on Chinese-origin batteries in defense applications also take effect in 2028. America’s procurement ambition and its domestic production capacity are on a collision course, and Beijing placed two of the companies meant to resolve that collision on its export control list on June 22.

Ukraine, for context, currently produces five million drones per year. America’s 500 domestic drone manufacturers produce fewer than 100,000 units combined.

 

 

THE PENTAGON’S 1260H EXPANSION: WHAT STARTED THIS ROUND

China’s June 22 action was presented by Beijing as a response to American provocation. Understanding whether that framing holds requires understanding what the Pentagon actually did.

On June 8, 2026, the Department of Defense expanded its Section 1260H list of Chinese military companies to 188 total designated entities, adding 65 new firms in a single update. Section 1260H of the National Defense Authorization Act requires the Pentagon to identify Chinese companies with direct or indirect ties to the People’s Liberation Army. A 1260H designation does not impose immediate sanctions, but it bars the Pentagon from contracting directly with listed entities starting June 30, 2026, and from procuring their products through third parties beginning in June 2027.

Among the newly added companies were Alibaba, Baidu, BYD, NIO, WuXi AppTec, Unitree Robotics, TP-Link, battery makers CALB and EVE Energy, lidar producers Hesai and RoboSense, display manufacturer BOE Technology Group, and solar firms JA Solar and Trina Solar.

Critics and the companies themselves immediately pushed back, with Alibaba, Baidu, NIO, and WuXi AppTec all issuing formal denials and threatening legal action. Beijing called the designations a violation of the diplomatic understanding reached at the May 2026 Trump-Xi summit in Beijing.

That objection deserves a direct answer, because it is the analytical core of why China’s civil-military fusion strategy matters.

Alibaba’s cloud computing infrastructure is available to the People’s Liberation Army for logistics optimization. Baidu’s artificial intelligence and autonomous navigation research feeds directly into Chinese military autonomous systems development programs. BYD’s battery and electric motor manufacturing is the same industrial base that produces components for Chinese military electric vehicles and drones. Unitree Robotics manufactures humanoid robots that have been publicly demonstrated operating alongside PLA units.

Pentagon definitional logic has shifted precisely because China’s strategic doctrine has shifted. Beijing no longer separates its civilian and military innovation ecosystems. China’s 15th Five-Year Plan for 2026 through 2030 institutionalizes Military-Civil Fusion as the primary mechanism for defense modernization. Under that doctrine, a company does not need to build artillery pieces to be a military company. It needs to participate in the integrated innovation ecosystem that ultimately produces military capability. Alibaba, Baidu, and BYD all do exactly that.

America is not wrong to designate them. China’s furious response confirms the designations have strategic weight.

 

 

THE FINANCE MINISTRY’S PROCUREMENT BAN: 46 MORE COMPANIES

China’s Ministry of Commerce action on the 10 export control companies drew most of the press coverage. Beijing’s Ministry of Finance simultaneous procurement ban on 46 additional companies is, in some respects, the more structurally significant move.

Beijing’s Finance Ministry ban prohibits all Chinese government entities from purchasing products manufactured by those 46 firms, effective immediately. Included on that list are Lockheed Martin Corporation, Raytheon Missiles and Defense, General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, General Dynamics Land Systems, Boeing Defense Space and Security, Teledyne FLIR, Cubic Global Defense, Dedrone by Axon, AeroVironment, BAE Systems, Sierra Nevada Corporation, Shield AI, Anduril Industries, Epirus, and Elbit Systems of America.

This is the complete roster of American advanced defense manufacturing. Beijing, in a single proclamation, banned its government from purchasing products from virtually every major weapons platform builder the United States fields. That ban is largely symbolic in the immediate term, because the Chinese government does not purchase F-35s or Tomahawk missiles. Symbolism in strategic competition, however, is not trivial. This is Beijing formally signaling to the world that it treats the entire American defense industrial base as an adversarial entity.

One exemption was deliberately built in. Chinese subsidiaries of these American companies, U.S.-funded enterprises physically operating inside China, are excluded from the ban. That carve-out is not an oversight. Beijing is maintaining commercial leverage through the American companies’ domestic Chinese business interests while publicly blacklisting their parent organizations. That is a hostage structure, not a trade policy.

 

 

THE MAY SUMMIT AND THE DIPLOMATIC COVER STORY

China’s Ministry of Commerce explicitly stated that its June 22 actions violate the diplomatic understanding reached during the Trump-Xi Beijing summit in May 2026. Both administrations emerged from that summit publicly committed to what they described as a new framework of constructive strategic stability. Dialogue mechanisms were established covering trade, investment, agriculture, aviation, and military communications.

Within weeks of that summit, the Pentagon published the largest expansion of its 1260H Chinese military company list in the program’s history. Within weeks of that expansion, China executed its two-ministry targeting operation against the American defense industrial base.

That summit did not pause the competition. It clarified where the competition would continue. Craig Singleton, senior China fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said the 1260H list’s publication served as a post-summit reality check. “The Xi-Trump meeting did not pause competition,” Singleton assessed. “It clarified where competition will continue.”

Beijing is using the May summit as diplomatic leverage against further American escalation while conducting the escalation it accuses Washington of initiating. This is not inconsistency. It is the documented operational pattern of Chinese gray zone conduct: use the negotiating table as rhetorical cover for the offensive operation that is running simultaneously.

America should not be fooled by it.

 

 

WHAT COMES NEXT: THE JUNE 30 DEADLINE AND THE NOVEMBER WINDOW

Two near-term dates define the next phase of this conflict.

June 30, 2026 is when the Pentagon’s 1260H designations formally take effect, barring direct defense contracts with the 188 listed Chinese companies. It is the date that transforms the 1260H list from a reputational designation into an enforcement mechanism with legal consequences for American companies that fail to scrub listed entities from their supply chains.

November 10, 2026 is when China’s partial suspension of its most aggressive rare earth export controls expires. China introduced extraterritorial rare earth export licensing requirements in October 2025, covering seven heavy rare earth elements and extending to any product anywhere in the world containing more than 0.1 percent Chinese-origin rare earth material by value. That expansion was suspended through November 10. When the suspension lifts, Beijing can reimpose extraterritorial controls on rare earth inputs moving through Germany, Japan, South Korea, or anywhere else on the planet, with 30 days’ notice.

Even under the current partial suspension, exports of yttrium, dysprosium, and terbium to the United States are running approximately 50 percent below pre-restriction baseline levels, with no confirmed timetable for normalization. America is already experiencing the effects of Chinese rare earth leverage. November 10 is when Beijing can turn the valve significantly tighter.

Chinese analyst Cameron Johnson described the June 22 action as Beijing’s brushback pitch. “This is a reaction to the U.S.’ recent blacklisting by the Pentagon,” Johnson assessed. “This also serves as a warning against any possible sanctions, such as ones targeting China’s open-source AI tools that are currently being discussed in the U.S.”

Beijing is not finished. This is a warning about what comes next if Washington continues down its current path.

 

 

WHAT AMERICA MUST UNDERSTAND

Analysts in Washington and in American media face a persistent temptation to categorize every Chinese economic action as a “trade dispute” or a “tit-for-tat escalation” and then move on to the next news cycle. That framing is both analytically insufficient and strategically dangerous.

What China executed on June 22, 2026, is a component of a long-running campaign to establish economic coercive leverage over the United States defense industrial base before any kinetic confrontation becomes necessary. Beijing is not trying to win a trade war. Beijing is trying to ensure that if a kinetic confrontation ever does occur, America’s weapons systems cannot be sustained, resupplied, or expanded at the scale the conflict would require.

Consider the architecture of what China has built. Forty years of subsidized rare earth processing investment created a global monopoly in the materials that power American weapons. A decade of Military-Civil Fusion policy integrated China’s commercial technology stack into its military innovation ecosystem, ensuring that every major Chinese technology company is, whether it wishes to be or not, a contributor to PLA modernization. Export licensing systems for rare earths, gallium, germanium, antimony, tungsten, and magnets created legal mechanisms to weaponize that monopoly with 30 days’ notice.

Madison wrote in Federalist No. 41 that the security of a republic depends not only on its capacity to defend itself but on the wisdom of its leaders to recognize threats before those threats mature into crises. America is not facing a theoretical threat. America is facing an adversary that has spent four decades engineering structural leverage over the industrial base that keeps American military power operational, and that is now exercising that leverage in graduated, calibrated steps designed to test American resolve without triggering a response that would accelerate decoupling.

President Trump’s administration deserves credit for accelerating the response. Pentagon equity in MP Materials, the $725 million commitment to Energy Fuels, the $13.6 billion autonomous systems budget, and the 1260H expansion are all evidence that Washington has recognized the problem and is moving to address it. Recognition is necessary but not sufficient. A fully integrated domestic rare earth supply chain capable of supporting American weapons production at scale will not exist before 2028 at the earliest. China’s November window closes in five months.

America needs to move faster than its adversary’s calendar.

 

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR THE AMERICA FIRST AGENDA

At its core, this story is not about trade policy or tariff structures or diplomatic communiqués. It is about whether the United States can build, sustain, and field the weapons systems that protect American sovereignty and project American power in a world where our most capable adversary has deliberately positioned itself to make that impossible without Chinese cooperation.

That is an America First issue in the most fundamental sense. No sovereign nation can claim genuine independence when its fighter jets, submarines, missiles, and drones depend on materials controlled by a rival power that has openly stated its intention to supplant American global leadership.

Beijing has been patient, systematic, and strategically disciplined in building this leverage over decades. America’s response must match that patience with urgency, that system with a counter-system, and that discipline with the kind of long-term industrial commitment that the Trump administration has begun but that must be deepened, sustained, and protected from the political pressures that have historically allowed Washington to deprioritize strategic industrial policy the moment a crisis recedes.

China is waging this war whether America acknowledges it or not. On June 22, Beijing made the war a little harder to ignore.

America should not look away.

 

 

 

 The Climate Scenario Behind A Decade of Alarmism Is No Longer Considered Plausible

The most alarming projections of climate change have been built upon a scenario known as RCP 8.5 and its successor, SSP5-8.5, which climate scientists now admit are “implausible” parameters 

 

 

For years, some of the most alarming projections of climate change were built upon a scenario known as RCP 8.5 and its successor, SSP5-8.5.

The public rarely heard those technical labels. Instead, they encountered the conclusions. Headlines warned of climate catastrophe. Studies projected severe economic losses, rising mortality, agricultural disruption, sea-level rise, and increasingly extreme weather. Governments cited such projections when developing policy. Courts referenced them in climate litigation. Businesses incorporated them into risk assessments.

Yet a significant development has received remarkably little public attention.

In the official CMIP7 ScenarioMIP design paper published in 2026, Detlef van Vuuren and more than forty climate-scenario researchers wrote:

For the 21st century, this range will be smaller than assessed before: on the high-end of the range, the CMIP6 high emission levels (quantified by SSP5-8.5) have become implausible….

The significance of that statement is difficult to overstate.

The shift became explicit in 2026 during the development of the CMIP7 climate-scenario framework that will help inform the IPCC’s Seventh Assessment Report. Researchers involved in designing the next generation of official climate scenarios concluded that the highest-emissions pathway widely used in previous climate assessments should no longer be regarded as a plausible representation of the world’s likely future.

This does not mean climate change has disappeared. Nor does it mean the IPCC has formally withdrawn SSP5-8.5 from climate modeling. The scenario remains available for analytical and stress-testing purposes.

What has changed is its status.

A pathway that was frequently presented to the public as a plausible “business as usual” future is increasingly being treated as an extreme scenario rather than a realistic baseline forecast.

That distinction matters.

For years, critics such as Roger Pielke Jr. argued that RCP 8.5 was being misused as a representation of where society was naturally heading. They argued that the scenario depended upon assumptions that were detached from observable trends.

Now many of the scientists responsible for developing future climate scenarios appear to be reaching similar conclusions.

The implications extend far beyond an academic dispute among climate researchers.

RCP 8.5 was never merely another modelling exercise. It became one of the most influential scenarios in the history of climate science.

Thousands of academic papers relied upon it. Researchers used it to estimate future economic damages, heat-related mortality, agricultural disruption, sea-level impacts, and extreme weather losses. Studies based upon the scenario influenced adaptation planning, climate litigation, ESG investment frameworks, and government policy discussions throughout the Western world.

The distinction between a severe hypothetical scenario and a likely future became blurred.

This is where the controversy begins.

Imagine a pharmaceutical company promoting a drug using a risk model that later came to be regarded as unrealistic.

Imagine financial regulators restructuring the banking system around stress tests built upon assumptions later acknowledged to be implausible.

Imagine military planners justifying vast expenditures using threat projections that their own analysts no longer considered likely.

There would be serious questions.

How were the assumptions chosen?

How were the projections communicated?

Were policymakers given a balanced understanding of the uncertainties involved?

Yet when one of the most influential climate scenarios of the last decade loses credibility, there is remarkably little discussion.

There are no front-page reassessments by the media organisations that amplified the most alarming projections. There are few reflections from the institutions that used those projections to advocate sweeping policy changes. The climate narrative largely continues unchanged.

Consider some of the consequences.

Governments across the Western world declared climate emergencies.

Net-zero commitments were incorporated into legislation.

Public and private institutions adopted ESG frameworks.

Climate litigation expanded.

Schoolchildren were repeatedly told that they faced an existential crisis.

Entire sectors of the economy were reorganised around projected future risks.

Whether one supports or opposes those policies is ultimately a matter for democratic debate. The more immediate question is whether the assumptions underlying some of the most influential projections were communicated honestly and accurately.

There is nothing controversial about scientists revising a scenario when new evidence emerges. That is exactly what scientists should do. The question is why the public is hearing so little about a revision involving one of the most influential climate scenarios of the past decade.

The problem arises when institutions spend years promoting a particular narrative and then show little interest in examining whether the assumptions underpinning that narrative remain valid.

The issue is not simply climate science. It is what happens when worst-case scenarios and flawed assumptions migrate from technical modelling exercises into public policy, media narratives, court decisions, and investment strategies.

For years, projections derived from SSP5-8.5 were treated not merely as one possible future but increasingly as the future. The distinction matters.  Models are useful tools, but a model is not reality. Its conclusions depend upon assumptions, and when those assumptions change, the conclusions deserve re-examination.

That is precisely what appears to be happening with SSP5-8.5.

One of the most underreported climate stories of 2026 is that the scenario underpinning many of the most alarming projections is no longer regarded as plausible by those developing the next generation of climate models.

It may be the growing recognition among climate-scenario researchers themselves that one of the most influential pathways used to shape public understanding of climate change no longer represents a plausible picture of the future.

If so, policymakers, journalists, and citizens alike should be asking a simple question:

What else was built upon assumptions that no longer hold?

Mark Keenan is a former United Nations technical expert and an independent writer examining the intersection of science, technology, finance, and power. His work focuses on how dominant narratives are formed—and what lies outside them. He is the author of Climate CO2 Hoax, When Models Replace Reality, The Planned Pandemic, The Debt Machine, and Demonic Economics, where he examines the intersection of history, finance, and systems of power. His essays are read internationally and published on Substack (markgerardkeenan.substack.com). He writes to challenge assumptions, encourage critical inquiry, and invite readers to examine the structures shaping modern life. His work is archived at Reality Books.

 

 

 

 

 Keir Starmer has Gone. Britain’s Crisis has Not

 

 

So, it’s official: Keir Starmer has resigned.

Millions of British people will be celebrating right now. And rightly so.

Keir Starmer never understood Britain. And he never understood the British people.

He was not only the worst prime minister of my lifetime, but will now go down as one of the most unpopular prime ministers in British history.

Keir Starmer promised change but delivered continuity.

He promised competence but oversaw stagnation and the ongoing managed decline of our once great country.

He promised growth but has only pushed our economy further into the abyss.

He promised higher standards in public office but presided over a string of embarrassing scandals that have further eroded public confidence in politics.

He promised renewal but leaves Britain poorer, weaker, less secure, and as the subject of humiliating jokes on the international stage.

And he promised unity while pushing Britain and the British people to the very edge, into a state of ‘anarcho-tyranny’ with a visibly fraying social contract.

This is why millions of ordinary British people will be celebrating today.

But before we uncork the champagne, we should be realistic about what’s coming.

Because the deeper crisis, the deeper malaise that underpins Britain was never the result of one politician, one prime minister, even one government.

It reflects a system.

The truth — as I’ve been highlighting for a long while in this newsletter — is that Britain is trapped inside a failing political, economic, and demographic model that’s been decades in the making and still has a way to run before it completely implodes.

A mounting and looming debt crisis, which few in Westminster are even prepared to acknowledge. The highest tax burden in peacetime. Deteriorating public services as the political class pushes us further and further into a ‘population trap’, whereby the state can no longer provide functioning public services, or protect its own people, amid a rapidly exploding population.

Rising unemployment, especially among the young, as one government after another, whether Labour or Tory, clobbers business with spiralling taxes, business rates, energy costs, and regulation.

The constant selling out of British workers and the British people through the very deliberate policies of mass immigration and rampant globalisation that routinely prioritise importing cheap migrant labour over investing in our own people.

The continual refusal to address our country’s collapsing birth-rate and unfolding demographic crisis that now looks set to leave our country and its population completely unrecognisable within just one lifetime from now.

The tearing up of an already-fragile social contract through a refusal to fix Britain’s broken borders, root out two-tier policies in our taxpayer-funded public institutions, and prioritise those who contribute to British society, over those who do not.

Changing leaders will not change any of this. Changing leaders will not see any major change of direction so that we avoid the political, economic, and demographic crisis that is intensifying beneath the surface of British society, like a ticking bomb.

If anything, the Labour Party will now move to appoint a successor to Keir Starmer — most likely Andy Burnham —who will shift even further leftwards and make this crisis even worse, while having no democratic mandate from the people.

Expect more spending, more borrowing, more taxes, more state intervention, more regulation, more immigration, more opposition to reforming welfare and fixing the borders, and hence more panic in financial markets as Labour MPs continue their departure from reality by doubling down on the same dreary project while having no consent from the people.

This will only make our politics more febrile, more combative, and more polarised, as millions of people now start to call for a fresh general election, realising that no matter who is in charge the political class has no interest whatsoever in departing from the dreary status-quo that has been imposed on our country for much of the last thirty years.

This is the uncomfortable reality that many people do not want to confront today. But it is the truth. Replacing Keir Starmer with another manager of decline will not reverse Britain’s decline. On the contrary, it will only accelerate this decline.

So yes, acknowledge the significance of Keir Starmer’s departure today. Celebrate it, even. But do not mistake it for victory or a fundamental change of direction.

Because it is none of those things. A prime minister has finally gone. But the underlying system and the underlying crisis it is producing remains very much in place.

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 It's The Culture Stupid

Race is not culture. Pretending otherwise helped create this mess 

 

“Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.” – Bertrand Russell

One of the great stupidities of the British state today, though we see the same across much of the West, is that it has conflated race with culture. This would ordinarily be called a category error, although that makes it sound like a miscalculation rather than what it is: a useful dogma that the managerial class can hide its failures behind. We call it multiculturalism.

Many hear that word and conjure up a society where cultures intermingle happily and enrich the whole. “Look at the wonderful festivals and cuisines”, they say. “Chicken tikka masala is your national dish now. Isn’t it brilliant how multiculturalism has saved the native British from the distress of eating their own food?”

Sure, okay. I mean, I love Indian food. I would take it over fish and chips any day of the week except Sundays, when I opt for Chinese. I’m fine with festivals, too. I’ll pass on Notting Hill Carnival because it’s a little “vibrant” for my taste, but I’m happy for others to parade through London and celebrate their cultures.

None of those things is multiculturalism in the sense I’m talking about in this essay. The cuisine and mixed marriages, the freedom to practise your religion within the law, everybody rubbing along – that’s the soft version of multiculturalism, and almost nobody objects to that. I certainly don’t.

I’m talking about the hard version of multiculturalism, the one written into state policy. It’s the doctrine that says the state should treat some groups differently rather than expect them to assimilate into a shared civic culture. It says, in effect, that the liberal principles which are the bedrock of the free and open societies we enjoy in the West must adapt to imported customs, even when those customs conflict with those same principles. It’s the multiculturalism that defers to “community leaders” and treads on eggshells every time it asks a group to adapt a bit to British norms, maybe rein in the cousin marriage stuff, that sort of thing. It’s the sort of multiculturalism that has critics talking about “failures to assimilate” and “integration problems”. That’s the version I’m talking about in this essay.

And let’s be honest about what “integration problems” really mean. We’re not usually referring to Poles or Nigerian Christians. Nobody seriously worries that the Hong Kong diaspora will refuse to adapt to liberal norms or demand that the local supermarkets stock dim sum.

We’re talking about Islam, and specifically the cultures around some of its more conservative interpretations. Many Muslims integrate perfectly well, of course, and that matters. Where things go wrong is in the immovable religious injunctions that treat secular law, female equality and free expression as problems to be managed rather than rights to be upheld. Conservative Muslim men are not taking their cues from On Liberty but the Koran, and the two sets of ideas, liberalism and literalist Islam, are (shall we say) pulling in opposite directions – the latter producing men who regard women as property and, as we are all too aware today, view girls outside the group as fair game.

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This week saw the release of the Rape Gang Inquiry report1. You already know about this unless you’ve landed on this post by accident and have paid no attention to one of the darkest episodes in modern British life.

The report describes how, for decades, organised networks of overwhelmingly Pakistani-heritage men abused and exploited working-class girls, many of them children, across towns and cities in the UK. We already know the rest: that the police, social workers and media looked away for years, and that even when Elon Musk dragged the scandal into the global spotlight, the government's first instinct was to resist – voting down a national inquiry before grudgingly conceding one much later. The sentient filing cabinet that is Keir Starmer previously accused critics of “jumping on a bandwagon” and “amplifying what the far-right is saying” – because that’s simply the script he pulled from the shelf, one written down long before he came into power.

We also know that the children who reported what had happened to them were treated as the problem; that those whose first duty should have been to listen to these children and care for them instead treated them with suspicion and even contempt. Why? Because they were terrified, above all, of looking racist.

Just think about what that means for a moment. The organised abuse of white English working-class girls mattered less in their moral calculations than the perception of racism. Not actual racism, which is stupid and wicked, but “racism” in the sense a bureaucrat uses it, which amounts to: please stop noticing patterns because your noticing is creating paperwork and I might lose my job if we make a fuss about it.

The governing class understands all this well enough, which is why it puts so much emphasis on crisis management and on holding a tight rein on the mainstream media – not that the latter need much restraining. This is just another institution staffed by the same university cohort that was taught Britishness is somehow morally defective, that it must pay for colonial sins and the rest. Even Britain's feminists, who can detect patriarchy in a manspread, fell silent.

All of them understand the difference between attacking people for their skin colour and criticising ideas, customs and practices. They simply discovered that conflating the two categories was useful, because it made awkward questions easier to dismiss and dissent easier to pathologise. It also preserved their self-image as moral sophisticates, which is why they return to the slogans again and again, like a dog proudly returning to its vomit. The rest of us, meanwhile, see a poisonous mess in urgent need of clearing up, although few have wanted to say so out loud.

Decades of nudge tactics and propaganda have trained the public to respond in very particular ways to questions of race. People learned to self-censor because the charge of racism became the second-worst thing you could be called after paedophile – unless, of course, the paedophiles belong to a protected group, in which case mentioning it is “divisive”. We learned that noticing patterns was the sort of thing the “far-right” do, so we pretended not to see them, or at least not to mention them in polite company.

Who can blame anyone for avoiding these discussions when speaking up costs them their reputation or even their job? And what if going along with it has the opposite effect: a promotion, a status bump, the applause of a handpicked BBC audience? This is the kind of social engineering that has been operating on the general public for two decades or more.

It was Times reporter Andrew Norfolk who, in 2011, broke the "conspiracy of silence" over the abuse of vulnerable girls by organised groups of men. The man who exposed it was promptly accused of racism and received death threats, which tells you everything about what he was up against2. His investigations eventually forced an inquiry, but only after the state had switched on the fog machine at full blast. It’s why we kept hearing about “Asian men”, a group so broad it could mean anyone from Istanbul to Tokyo. The people who could distinguish between 72 genders suddenly couldn't identify a relevant subculture, for the same reason others looked away from the girls who needed protecting: the fear of seeming racist.

 

 

 But culture is not race. This is not a difficult concept, and a child can understand it. Indeed, it takes a certain kind of education to make people stupid on this point, and perhaps it should not surprise us that the most educated societies on earth have produced managerial classes so obsessed with race and gender that they seem to need to renegotiate terms with reality itself.

For everyone else, not bamboozled by tertiary-level groupthink, the difference between race and culture is clear enough: one is inherited, the other is learned. Skin colour by itself tells us nothing about what someone believes, any more than eye colour does. Culture, on the other hand, can tell you quite a lot, especially on questions related to the treatment of women, whether daughters are protected or policed, attitudes to religious dissent, and the moral status granted to girls outside the group.

White girls, for instance.

That is the category error that has now become a rape statistic. The girls who should have been protected by the state – and what other duty could come before protecting its own children? – were treated as an inconvenience instead. Their suffering pointed to a pattern the state had decided not to see, because scrutinising cultural practices had been ruled a form of bigotry. The liberal state, having substituted multicultural values for liberal ones, decided that clarity was more dangerous than abuse.

There is another layer to all this that rarely gets mentioned, and which complicates the simple narrative around Islam. As the commentator Richard North argued recently3, many of the grooming gangs appear to have operated within criminal networks underpinned by the biradari (meaning brotherhood), a clan-based kinship system from Pakistani Kashmir that predates the arrival of Islam in the region by centuries. There is very little online about British biradari culture, except, ironically, a BBC article from 2015 that describes how clan politics emerged in Bradford, home to one of Britain’s largest Muslim communities4. Arrivals to Britain from Pakistan in the 1950s sought out those among them who had a basic understanding of the political system. These men then acted on their behalf, becoming their representatives – what we now call “community leaders”.

“Once the biradaris realised they held a degree of power,” the article noted, “they decided it would be ideal for them to put up their own man, who could relate to them and effectively become a puppet. Deals and bargains were struck between rival clans to secure positions of power.”

If that sounds a bit like the mafia, North has the same thought. Many of these biradari networks, he suggests, have morphed into crime syndicates, not dissimilar to the Mafia crime families in the United States. Law enforcement cannot begin to deal with the rape gang phenomenon until it understands that what confronts it is not merely individual criminality, but organised crime bound by a complex social architecture.

The larger point, and the one that matters for our purposes here, is that none of this is about race. Skin colour explains nothing. If North is right, the rape gangs are woven from several strands – theology, clan loyalty, organised crime – not reducible to any one of them. A competent state would have studied and recognised these variables. Instead, it switched on the obfuscation machine and hoped the whole thing would disappear into the fog, while declaring that any criticism of ideas and customs was motivated by racism. All any of them had to do – the clerical bully, the clan operator with a cousin on the council – was shout “racism”, and half the British establishment would step back in a panic.

The tragedy of all this is that the British state, in its effort to make multiculturalism work, failed in its first duty, which is to protect the citizens, the children, who paid the price for that doctrine. It failed those British Muslims who did assimilate, and especially those reformers inside those communities who challenge regressive practices and should be the state’s best asset in making integration work, but who are instead sidelined at the behest of “community leaders”. And it failed the rest of us by treating the public as a problem to be managed through propaganda, and where that didn’t work, smeared as bigots and racists by the BBC and every other cultural arm of the establishment tied to the same agenda.

The backlash we are seeing today is inevitable, the anger palpable and growing. And the more that anger is met with name-calling, institutional contempt, and eventually jail sentences, the more it seeds darker elements.

Enter the far right, the stupidest possible answer to a real problem. If you make the truth unsayable for decent people, then fascists will gladly pick up the baton. A walk through Twitter/X reveals elements at the margins becoming increasingly fanatical and insane, as I mentioned a few days ago. I’m not talking about angry posts saying “deport them now”. I mean talk of “race traitors” and “lynchings” and the inevitable cretins who have decided “the Jews” must somehow be behind the Pakistani grooming gangs – and these are the posts that make it through whatever filters are meant to catch death threats and calls for mass murder.

The governing class has not even begun to understand the monster it is creating through its refusal to deal properly with rape gangs and related issues. It has spent decades making the term “far right” close to meaningless. Now that something genuinely ugly is stirring, it has no word left for it.

And that, in turn, has allowed the establishment to point at the monsters it helped produce and say: “See, this is why we couldn’t let ordinary people talk about it”. The whole system has become conveniently self-vindicating. First, lie to the public. Then manage dissent by labelling it “far right”. When this radicalises the margins, use that as evidence that the public cannot be trusted with the truth.

We will learn the cost of this dishonesty in ways that demoralise us further. You can almost sense the ruling class and their apologists in the media praying for some far-right atrocity to take the public’s eyes off their own incompetence and justify their assertion that the problem is something other than themselves. That is how low we have got in Britain. Or we might see another Islamist atrocity that flips the switch on the rage already simmering. From one direction or another, Britain – I’m sorry to say – feels on the edge of violence.

There’s no obvious solution to any of it, though it looks simple enough on paper: a return to old-fashioned liberal principles. Defend individuals, judge practices. Protect minorities from hatred, but do not protect bad ideas from scrutiny. Punish actual criminals – rapists, not wrongthinkers – and do it swiftly and without apology.

Britain has spent decades wrestling with the questions of race and multiculturalism. On one side are the state and its enforcers, desperately trying to manage perceptions and police speech. On the other side, a population that feels managed, insulted and ignored. At the centre of all this is a lie that has betrayed children, protected cowards, abandoned reformers and poisoned public trust.

Today, we’re seeing what that looks like when the heat is turned up, and the lid comes off – a racial politics edging towards violence because one side found it easier to smear good people than to take their concerns seriously. Keir Starmer will call them racists, but their complaint isn't about race. It's the culture, stupid.

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As I read back through this piece, fixing the typos and moving things around, I can hear my youngest playing in his room. In a moment, he’ll wander in and ask what I’m doing, and whether I want to come and kick a ball about. He’s ten. He looks a little different from me. I’m as white as a polar bear that’s been kept indoors. His skin is soft brown. My eyes are blue, his are almost black. It barely ever occurs to me that he’s mixed race. It’s the least interesting thing about him, and I suspect that’s true of anyone.

I thought that was supposed to be the point. What happened to judging people by how they think and act towards others, rather than the colour of their skin? We used to call the other thing racism. How tragic that so many people chose to prise this open again – some profiting from it, others swept up in grievances they never knew they had until someone went to the trouble of teaching them.