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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/03/07/no-australia-does-not-actually-need-to-prepare-for-war-with-china/

No, Australia Does Not Actually Need To Prepare For War With China

In the latest instance of the Australian media’s deluge of propaganda geared toward manufacturing consent for war with China, Nine Entertainment-owned newspapers The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age have brought together a panel of “experts” to assess how well-prepared Australia is for a hot war with its primary trading partner. The question of if that war is necessary or should be prepared for is left completely unexamined.

In a report titled “Australia faces the threat of war with China within three years – and we’re not ready,” we learn the names of the five “experts” SMH and The Age have recruited to make the titular claim, and you’re never going to believe this but it turns out they tend to work in professions that are intimately intertwined with the western imperial war machine.

This first “expert” is Mick Ryan, whom I have written about repeatedly because he seems to feature in literally every single Australian news media piece geared toward propagandizing Australians into accepting war with China as an inevitability which must be prepared for. Ryan is an Adjunct Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), which is funded by military-industrial complex entities like Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, and is also directly funded by the US government and its client states, including Australia and Taiwan. SMH and The Age make no note of this immense conflict of interest.

The second “expert” is Peter Jennings, who is a Senior Fellow at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), where he was the executive director for ten years. Like CSIS, ASPI is a think tank that is funded by US-aligned governments and the military-industrial complex. It has played a major role in manufacturing consent for the foreign policy agendas of the western empire, particularly in escalations against China. ASPI has been described as “the propaganda arm of the CIA and the US government” by Australian diplomat Bruce Haigh.

The third “expert” is Lavina Lee, an academic who is a Council Member with ASPI and an Adjunct Fellow with CSIS, so when it comes to pro-war punditry she’s what they call a twofer.

The fourth “expert” is Australian defense insider Lesley Seebeck, a regular ASPI contributor. Seebeck is the chairperson of a swampy warmongering think tank of unclear funding called the National Institute of Strategic Resilience, which publishes woke-imperialist articles with titles like “First Nations Drone Network Project Initiation,” “Solomon Islands – time to take an Indigenous perspective,” “Building Australia’s Strategic Resilience: A Spotlight on Military and Gender in the Pacific Region,” and “Key to Australia’s Strategic Resilience: An Australian Feminist Foreign Policy,” the latter two authored by Seebeck herself.

The fifth is Alan Finkel, a scientist who works for the Australian government.

Again, none of these conflicts of interest were mentioned by The Sydney Morning Herald or The Age, which as we’ve discussed previously is an egregious act of journalistic malpractice. This is a little like gathering Ronald McDonald, Colonel Sanders and the Taco Bell chihuahua to discuss whether the government should employ fast food outlets to supply school lunches. Except these guys aren’t selling junk food — they’re selling mass murder, human suffering, ecological disaster, and the violent deaths of our children.

There are rivers of tax money at stake here; delicious, Reserve-backed dollars straight into the old bank account, mountains of them! And essentially these people are the forward-facing public representatives of those companies whose job it is to sell the public on an outcome that directly benefits their backers. This is an elaborate advertorial and it is incredible that The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age not only ran it as news, but hosted it.

These five “experts” conclude that Australia needs to do much more to rapidly prepare for a hot war with China, saying that “The need to dramatically strengthen our military and national security capabilities is urgent, but Australia is unprepared.” They say Australia must make these dramatic changes not to defend itself from a Chinese invasion, but to fight a war over Taiwan.

“The war Xi is preparing for, they say, is one fought over Taiwan, a prosperous self-governing island of 24 million people that sits about 160 kilometres east of mainland China,” the report reads.

This is entirely in line with the appalling propaganda piece put out by Murdoch’s Sky News last month, which said Australia must double its military budget to prepare to back the US in a hot war over Taiwan.

The panelists paint Australia’s participation in this war as a settled matter, an inevitability should the US wage war on China.

“We have made our choice. If the United States goes to war with Taiwan, we are going to support them one way or the other,” says Mick Ryan.

“Neither the Australian military nor the public are presently truly prepared for the outbreak of war and Australia’s inevitable participation,” says Lavina Lee.

These military industrial complex-funded pundits are lying. Australia’s participation in an American war against China is not an inevitability, and is not necessary.

In reality, the best way Australia can protect itself from China is not to prepare for war with China. A hot war with our primary trading partner would destroy our economy and would likely cut off most of the imports we require to function as an island nation. We’ve got no business preparing to throw our nation’s sons and daughters into such a conflict, and we’ve got no business stealing from our nation’s most needful in order to effect that preparation.

An unresolved civil war between two adjacent bodies who both call themselves “China” is none of Washington’s business, and it is certainly none of Canberra’s. Let the Chinese sort out China, because China poses no threat to us.

That last point isn’t actually debatable, by the way. As Antiwar’s Daniel Larison recently noted on Twitter, China’s military budget consistently sits at around 1.5 percent of its GDP, which is less than half of the USA’s. If China were preparing to conquer the world as so many hawks falsely claim, this would not be the case. The US is a nation with an interest in global domination, and its military budget reflects this. China is not a nation with an interest in global domination, and its military budget reflects this.

In reality the US has been encircling China with more and war machinery for years in ways it would never permit itself to be encircled, and has been preparing for a confrontation with Beijing for a very long time. The US is plainly the aggressor here, and Australia now has an existential interest in militarily uncoupling from that aggressor before it gets us all killed.

The report by the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age — which former Prime Minister Paul Keating just called “the most egregious and provocative news presentation of any newspaper I have witnessed in over 50 years of active public life” —  actually comes close to actually admitting that there’s a concerted propaganda campaign designed to increase hysteria about China and manufacture consent for war. The “expert” panel asserts that there needs to be a “psychological shift” in the public toward this direction which they must be actively persuaded to accept.

“Most important of all is a psychological shift,” the report says. “Urgency must replace complacency. The recent decades of tranquillity were not the norm in human affairs, but an aberration. Australia’s holiday from history is over.”

The report cites Seebeck as saying “the nation’s leaders should trust the public enough to include them in what can be a confronting discussion,” and that the public must be regarded as “smart enough to talk about defence and national security.”

The reason they are saying the public needs to be spoken to and persuaded to psychologically accept hawkish escalations against China is because no sane person would consent to such madness if they weren’t psychologically manipulated into it. No sane person would consent to agendas which threaten to kill our sons and daughters, impoverish us all, and even turn us into nuclear targets without copious amounts of propaganda.

That’s why we’re seeing all these “news” reports about how urgent it is to prepare for war with China all of a sudden. Not because China poses a threat to us, but because we are allied with an empire that is planning to start a war of unfathomable horror.

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https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/02/09/ballonacy/

Balloonacy

Can an empire sink itself through self-generated ridicule?  Will America’s floating a daffy, brainless notion so shallow and infantile that its only intention seems to have been the wish to humiliate itself have consequences?  One wonders, since even the Noise Makers of the Ministry of Information and our Federal Confederacy of Dunces have backed this moronic pratfall.

The Empire has managed to continue intact to date, dispensing sleazy, transparent lies and howling fabrications to its sadly hoodwinked, floundering, irascible people, without dissolving in its corrosive bile.  This affirms that selling lies and deceptions is effective as national policy but we may be excused for wondering if it can sell rank absurdities quite as easily.

The facts are simple.  A weather balloon, admittedly Chinese, drifted over us, with no effort made to conceal it.  The reaction by the media, government and military has been so preposterously out of scale, so panty-wadded hysterical, as to defy belief.

It was instantly anathematized as a “spy balloon”—a category not seriously cited in annals of espionage since the Franco-Prussian War—and an anguished convulsion of moral outrage seized the body politic.  There was suspicion, then conviction, that this flaccid, ungainly, drifting entity was nefariously engaged in probing into our deepest national security secrets.

Our dysfunctional, half-assed, puerile shambles of a government, driven like a spavined donkey by the War Machine that owns it, is so pathetically determined to provoke animosity with China that it   attacked the slow, soft gas bag with jets to shoot it down.  TDY Seals are presumably bobbing for latex even now though their likely finds will not be hygrometers and pressure censors but Things That Have To Be Kept Secret for national security’s sake, like all that stuff stacked in Trump’s and Biden’s garages.

Do we Americans have an unplumbed tolerance for abuse?   Is there really no limit to the shit we’ll eat when dispensed by dirty old Aunt Sam?  Those who run us, and our yoyo, yahoo “Democracy”, believe there isn’t, and with good reason.

As a people we have been lied to, conned, deceived, and interred in bullshit by the Capitalist financial oligarchy that has owned this country and run it like a slave plantation or concentration camp from our earliest beginnings.  Since the first, last, and only time this country was ever attacked, in 1941, our War Machine has taken us to war so often on the basis of flagrantly transparent lies that this predictable practice has become a hallowed tradition.

War, once substantially based on political rivalry, has become the final phase of American Capitalism.  In the long experiment in the exploitation of earth and Man that has refined it, war has proven to be far and away the economic enterprise with the least true cost and the hugest profit margin to the system.  It has replaced all other sources of buccaneering larceny as Capitalism’s favorite, superior even to recently favored bank fraud and insider bailouts.

It has its ancillary downside, yes.  Masses of humans and their countries have to be destroyed, even in small wars, but those are in the nature of externalities which can be safely ignored and need not trouble the system.

The Empire has had a string of unbroken successes in its small wars, each of them ending in what to the naive eye might appear to have been disastrous failures.  To see retreat, withdrawal, and hightailing it from a tidy, contained little war as evident defeat, is to miss utterly the point of war as Macro Economics.  War, as a category of Capitalist industry, must be judged on the strict basis of profit and loss and, so judged, these wars provided massive, near incredible profit to the owners of the War Machine.

Yet another piece of naivete is the idea that the American people have any right to benefit from the War Machine’s efforts. They don’t.  They work for it.  They don’t own it, and only owners are entitled to benefits.  Workers don’t get profits.  They get to have freedom, instead.  You know… freedom… which, well, we all know what Janis sang about it.

There is a caveat in this, though.  Wars, in order to maximize the profit from them, need to stay small.  That is, they must not become so large as to be uncontrollable.  This is easy to manage with small, poor countries with no defenses, such as Iraq, Syria, Libya, or Afghanistan where you destroy them and leave, but it becomes problematic with countries that can defend themselves.

The Ukraine war, to the extent that it is a war, has been a work of genius for the War Machine in that it offers the best opportunity in decades for the endless supply of very costly equipment which is then rapidly destroyed and must be replaced.  It does so while avoiding the death and maiming of American grunts, substituting Ukrainians themselves for that unpleasant function.

There is some concern that Russia, on whose border this nifty little warlet is being conducted by our dear friends and allies, the Ukies, will grow weary of conducting their half of the game, and do something rash, such as blitzing our proxy team and reducing their ruined home to a sort of open-air gulag, but no one in power in The Empire gives that a serious thought.  Of course, when preparing for a war with China, why would they?

If all goes well—and when hasn’t it?—there is good hope we may be able to draw China into a similar mini-warlet, like Ukraine.  If the Taiwanese will just do the dying for us, we can pester the Chinese to madness while the War Machine continues to make untold reams of money.  We may be already launched on this quest.  After all, what fiercer act of aggression can one country commit toward another than to shoot down its weather balloon?

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https://brownstone.org/articles/the-real-threat-of-15-minute-cities/

The Real Threat of 15-Minute Cities

The Guardian’s Oliver Wainwright recently discussed a new “international socialist conspiracy” that has taken the world by storm. “Fringe forces of the far left,” he noted, “are plotting to take away our freedom to be stuck in traffic jams, to crawl along clogged ring roads and trawl the streets in search of a parking spot.” The name of this “chilling global movement?” he asked, sarcastically and somewhat contemptuously: The “15-minute city.” Wainwright believes these cities are simply part of a “mundane planning theory.” He’s wrong.

A few days after Wainwright’s piece was published, three academics called 15-minute cities (FMCs) “the hottest conspiracy theory of 2023.” In a truly elitist manner, they poked fun at those who dared to question the motive behind FMCs.

One needn’t be a card-carrying QAnon member to have fears over these Trojan-like creations. Before going any further, it’s important to get our definitions in order. As the political scientist Kelly M. Greenhill has noted, not all conspiracy theories are wacky, and not all conspiracy theories are wrong. Take the Watergate conspiracy theory, for instance, or the fact that Edith Wilson made most of the executive decisions after her husband, President Woodrow Wilson, suffered a stroke. Quite often conspiracy theories turn out to be accurate.

Also known as smart cities, FMCs are places where everything imaginable, from your place of work to your favorite pizzeria, is accessible either by foot or bike (not by car, though; they will be verboten) in 15 minutes or less. What’s so bad about this?

On first inspection, very little. We are, after all, creatures of comfort. We live in a world where the mantra “Too Long, Didn’t Read (TL;DR)” now reigns supreme. We crave convenience; we crave expediency. However, expediency isn’t always a good thing; sometimes it’s downright dangerous. This is especially true when people, either consciously or otherwise, trade their freedom for ease of access to certain services. FMCs may make it easier for citizens to get from A to B, but these creations will also make it easier for those in power to spy on us, to harvest our data, and enable Big Brother to become Bigger Brother.

As I write this, FMCs are being actively championed by the World Economic Forum (WEF), the group behind the “Great Reset” and the idea of owning nothing, having absolutely no privacy, and being very happy. This fact alone should concern all readers.

Want to discuss the WEF?

To many, I’m sure FMCs sound incredibly cool. But don’t be fooled by the name. FMCs are actually “smart cities.” As I have noted elsewhere, the word “smart” is really just a synonym for surveillance. These ultra-modern, tech-saturated monstrosities use hundreds of thousands of sensors to vacuum up copious amounts of personal data.

FMC policies are currently being rolled out in cities such as Barcelona, Bogotá, Melbourne, Paris, and the dystopian wasteland known as Portland. What do these cities have in common? Surveillance technology. Between now and 2040, cities right across the United States (and beyond) are predicted to spend trillions of dollars on the installation of additional cameras and biometric sensors. Sure, surveillance is bad now. But, as Randy Bachman famously hollered, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

By 2050, more than two-thirds of the world’s population will live in closely surveilled urban centers, like glorified rats in cramped cages. Contrary to popular belief, we no longer live in a panoptic society. When Jeremy Bentham, the English philosopher and social theorist, put forward the idea of this prison system, there was no internet. In truth, there weren’t even cars. We now live in a post-panoptic world—a digital panopticon, if you will—with huge social media platforms collecting personal user data before selling it to the highest bidder.

The companies running these platforms often work closely with government officials, identifying supposed sinners and punishing them in the swiftest of manners. As the writer Kylie Lynch has noted, these companies know absolutely everything about you; they have instant access to your browser history, your activity online, and now, rather worryingly, even your biometrics. Not surprisingly, these Big Tech companies will have a big impact on the FMCs of the future, by providing the underlying digital infrastructure needed to monitor us and ensure mass compliance.

FMC are wolves in sheep’s clothing. Don’t believe the countless stories telling you otherwise. It has become common for elitist, mainstream outlets to poke fun at those who dare to question the “we have your best interests at heart” narratives. We have been burned too many times before.