By Caitlin JOHNSTONE
Taiwan has remained in the news a lot lately, and it’s actually drawing out the crazy in individuals.
The mass media have been wrongly reportingthat China has actually been trespassing on Taiwan’s “air defense zone”, which gets stretchedinto the even more ridiculous claim that China “sent warplanes flying over Taiwan”. In truth Chinese planes just went into an arbitrarily designated areahundreds of miles from Taiwan’s coast it calls its “Air Defence Recognition Zone”, which has no legally acknowledged presenceand includes a significant part of China’s mainland. This is likely a response to the way the United States and its allies have actually been constantly cruising war ships into disputed watersto threaten Beijing.
As Moon of Alabama reports, United States warmongers inflamed this non-controversy even further by feeding a story to journalism about the currently public information that there are American soldiers in Taiwan training the military there, citing “issue” about the risk presented by China.
This past weekend, warships from six countries went into the South China Sea. Nearly all came from the other side of the world.
Chinese airplane likewise quickly went into the “Taiwan ADIZ”– an air defense zone unacknowledged by worldwide law.
Guess which occasion is trending?
— Ian Goodrum (@isgoodrum) October 5, 2021
Now headings are shriekingabout President Tsai Ing-wen responding to this non-event with the announcement that Taiwan will “do whatever it takes to protect its flexibility and democratic way of life.” Previous Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott simply went to Taipeito advocate that “democracies stand shoulder to take on” with Taiwan versus China. The CIA has announced the productionof a brand-new spy center that will focus exclusively on China, which CIA Director William Burns states will “additional enhance our cumulative deal with the most important geopolitical hazard we deal with in the 21st century: a significantly adversarial Chinese government”.
A recent poll says that now over half of Americanswould support sending United States troops to defend Taiwan from an intrusion by the mainland, clearly the outcome of the aggressive propaganda campaign that has greatly intensified public hysteriaabout China. In Australia the mass media are cranking out unbelievably crazy 60 Minutes episodesextremely pressing the ideathat China may attack Australia which Australians ought to want to go to war to secure Taiwan. I have actually been having numerous disturbing interactionswith individuals online who absolutely support the concept of the US and its allies going to war with China over Taiwanese independence.
This is plainly nuts, and anybody who buys into this line of thinking is a brainwashed fool.
This isn’t some sort of complex anti-imperialist concern, and it has absolutely nothing to do with which side you take in the argument over what federal government Taiwan belongs under. The United States and its allies participating in a full-scale war with nuclear-armed China over Taiwan is a prospect that should be emphatically opposed out of simple, garden variety self-preservation.
Obviously if Beijing chooses to release a military attack on Taiwan in its bid to reunify China that would be a terrible thing which would cause a great deal of suffering. I do not think that will occur unless western powers push Taipei into declaring self-reliance or otherwise upset the fragile diplomacy dance in some major way, however if it does take place under any situations that would be terrible.
But Taiwanese self-reliance is unworthy battling a world war that could eliminate millions, and possibly billions if things go nuclear. This need to be incredibly apparent to everybody.
War with China: Are we closer than we believe?
I’m three minutes into this # 60MinutesAustralia episode and they’ve already had on a senior analyst from the state-funded and military commercial complex-funded @ASPI_org.https://t.co/ZYPOk9uSNX
— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) September 21, 2021
War supporters will reference Hitler, as they actually constantly do whenever there’s talk of war against someone the United States does not like, arguing that China taking Taiwan would resemble the Nazis invading Poland after which they’ll simply keep attacking and conquering till they are stopped. But there’s no evidence that China has any interest in attacking Japan, much less Australia, still less everyone else, or that it has any aspirations on the world phase beyond reunification and securing its own financial and security interests.
The idea that China wants to take control of a lot of foreign lands, make you live under communism and provide you a social credit score is the exact same type of foam-brained bigoted othering which informed previous generations that Black men want to take control of your neighborhood so they can make love with your other halves. It’s the sort of belief that can just discover purchase in an emotionally primitive mind that lacks the ability to put yourself in another person’s shoes and comprehend that not everybody desires what you have.
The jarring quantity of pushback I’ve been getting for my really sane and moderate position that we must not want to start World War Three in between nuclear powers over Taiwanese self-reliance makes it abundantly clear that many individuals do not genuinely comprehend that beginning a war implies you have to in fact send out actual humans to go fight that war. All the big brave warrior men bloviating about the requirement to withstand China understand they’ll never find themselves on the cutting edge of that dispute since they’re too old, however they’ll gladly send my kids and the kids of many of other moms to go and combat in it. It’s like a computer game or a film to them.
Propaganda has made us so compartmentalized and removed from the realities of the horrors of war. If people could actually see what war is and what it does, really grok deep down in their guts how their own federal governments are inflicting those scaries on individuals right now, they ‘d fall to their knees in suffering and never ever again promote for such things. No sane individual would support a war of this scale if they truly understood what it would mean.