By Caitlin Johnstone
April 07, 2023:
Information Clearing House
-- - "China is
preparing to kill Americans and we've got to
prepare to defend ourselves," empire
propagandist Gordon Chang
told Fox Business during an interview on
Monday.
Chang, who has
famously spent more than two decades
incorrectly predicting the imminent collapse
of China, bizarrely made these comments
while discussing a future attack on Taiwan.
Taiwan is of course not the United States and
any potential war between Taiwan and the
mainland would be an inter-Chinese conflict that
needn't involve a single American, and Chang is
most assuredly not part of any "we" who will
ever be engaged in combat with the Chinese
military under any circumstances.
Chang frames his narrative as though China is
menacing Americans in their homes, when in
reality only the exact opposite is true: the US
has been militarily encircling China for
many years, and is rapidly accelerating its
efforts to do so.
Just the other day the Philippines announced
the locations of four military bases the US will
now have access to in its ongoing encirclement
operation, most of them in the northern
provinces closest to China.
Antiwar's Dave DeCamp
writes:
Three of the Philippine bases will be
located in northern Philippine provinces, a
move that angers China since they can be
used as staging grounds for a fight over
Taiwan. The US will be granted access to the
Lal-lo Airport and the Naval Base Camilo
Osias, which are both located in the
northern Cagayan province. In the
neighboring Isabela province, the US will
gain access to Camp Melchor Dela Cruz.
The US military will also be able to
expand to Palawan, an island province in the
South China Sea, disputed waters that are a
major source of tensions between the US and
China. The US will be granted access to
Balabac Island, the southernmost island of
Palawan.
The new locations are on top of five
bases the US currently has access to,
bringing the total number of bases the US
can rotate forces through in the Philippines
to nine. The expansion in the Philippines is
a significant step in the US effort to build
up its military assets in the region to
prepare for a future war with China.
So it's very clear who the aggressor is here
and who is preparing to attack whom. Imperial
spinmeisters like Gordon Chang are just lying
when they frame China's militarizing to defend
itself against undisguised US encirclement as
China militarizing to attack Americans.
Fun fact: US officials used to pretend China
was crazy and paranoid for saying this
encirclement was happening. In the 1995 book "Killing
Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since
World War II," William Blum wrote the
following:
In March 1966, Secretary of State Dean
Rusk spoke before a congressional committee
about American policy toward China. Mr.
Rusk, it seems, was perplexed that "At times
the Communist Chinese leaders seem to be
obsessed with the notion that they are being
threatened and encircled." He spoke of
China's "imaginary, almost pathological,
notion that the United States and other
countries around its borders are seeking an
opportunity to invade mainland China and
destroy the Peiping [Peking] regime". The
Secretary then added:
"How much Peiping's 'fear' of the United
States is genuine and how much it is
artificially induced for domestic political
purposes only the Chinese Communist leaders
themselves know. I am convinced, however,
that their desire to expel our influence and
activity from the western Pacific and
Southeast Asia is not motivated by fears
that we are threatening them."
Another fun fact: thanks to a
2021
revelation by Daniel Ellsberg, we now know
that the secretary of state's comments about how
crazy and paranoid China was for thinking the US
wanted to attack it came just eight years after
the US had seriously considered acting on plans
it had drawn up to launch a nuclear strike on
the Chinese mainland.
Mainstream western imperialists of all
stripes have long recognized that a hard
conflict with China will be necessary at some
point in the future if they're to continue their
domination of the world. In his 2005 book
"Superpatriot", Michael Parenti wrote that the
unipolarist neoconservative "PNAC" (Project
for the New American Century) ideology that
had by that point taken over US foreign policy
was ultimately geared toward a future conflict
with China:
"The PNAC plan envisions a strategic
confrontation with China, and a still
greater permanent military presence in every
corner of the world. The objective is not
just power for its own sake but power to
control the world's natural resources and
markets, power to privatize and deregulate
the economies of every nation in the world,
and power to hoist upon the backs of peoples
everywhere — including North America — the
blessings of an untrammeled global 'free
market.' The end goal is to ensure not
merely the supremacy of global capitalism as
such, but the supremacy of American global
capitalism by preventing the emergence of
any other potentially competing superpower."
But you can see the twinkle of this looming
conflict in the eyes of western imperialists
long before any of this. In
a 1902 interview (which was
not published until 1966 — a year after
Churchill's death), Churchill candidly voiced
his support for partitioning China at some point
in the future in order to preserve the dominance
of the "Aryan stock" over "barbaric nations":
The East is interesting, and to no one
can it be more valuable and interesting than
to anyone who comes from the West.
I think we shall have to take the Chinese
in hand and regulate them. I believe that as
civilized nations become more powerful they
will get more ruthless, and the time will
come when the world will impatiently bear
the existence of great barbaric nations who
may at any time arm themselves and menace
civilized nations. I believe in the ultimate
partition of China—I mean ultimate. I hope
we shall not have to do it in our day. The
Aryan stock is bound to triumph.
The word "partition"
here means breaking a nation up into smaller
nations, i.e. balkanization. To this day we see
western imperialists pushing for the
partitioning of disobedient nations like
Russia and
Syria, and we still see this with China in
the push to permanently amputate regions like
Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Taiwan from Beijing.
China's sheer size, social cohesion and
geostrategic location have long been recognized
as a potential problem in the future for western
imperialists who wish to ensure their ability to
dominate and control, and now we're seeing that
all come to a head. Churchill said of a future
confrontation with China "I hope we shall not
have to do it in our day" because that
confrontation has always been certain to be
horrific, and today in the Atomic Age this is
far more true than it was in 1902.
And in fact we do not have to do it in our
day, either. We don't have to do it in any day.
The only reason we're being pushed toward a
profoundly dangerous conflict with China is
because it's the only way for western
imperialists to maintain their hegemonic control
of this planet, but their hegemonic control of
this planet has brought us to a point of
endlessly escalating nuclear brinkmanship and
looming ecosystemic collapse. It hasn't exactly
been working out great, is what I am saying.
There's no reason the west can't simply
accept the existence of other powers and stop
trying to dominate everyone on earth. We have
long been ruled by tyrants who continually push
our world toward suffering and death in the name
of securing more power and control, but we don't
need to accept their rule. They do not have a
healthy vision for our species, and there are a
whole lot more of us than there are of them.
Their rule is done as soon as enough of us
decide it is.
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https://caitlinjohnstone.com
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reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
in this article are
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