WAR IS THE NEW NORMAL
There has never, in recorded history, been an event with more agendas, unknowns and purposes than COVID19.
They seem to go on forever: distraction from Wall Street, an excuse to clamp down on dissidents, a reset for central banking, more delightful chaos for the EU to use, derailing Brexit, an opportunity to make totalitarian surveillance acceptable, a treasure trove for billionaire nerds, a chance for the neocons to start singing for The New Normal, a wet dream for Big Pharma, and an infinite annual excuse to suspend liberal democracy.
The least known of all the factors, however, remain geopolitical: not just the whodunnit element (which remains – quite deliberately in my view – a wave-particle hiding in a fog of neutrinos) but even if anyone did do it, what the motive might have been. Opportunism, ironically, acts as a further distraction from the original Point Zero.
Only now that we have (at long last) an increase in the awareness that C19 is not the ultimate scourge of Mankind, is the geopolitical element beginning to rear its less than than attractive head. As ever, it is the social and “news” media that are the willing carriers of The Party Line.
These days, it is instructive to read the London Times, for only there will you find the quintessential clarity of Establishment Agitprop playing sweet and loud, day in and day out.
Yesterday’s effort there from Edward Lucas was predictable in both content and authorship. He is in the vanguard of the next stage of Covidaphobia: the demonisation of China. I was bitterly disappointed to see Dominic Raab joining the genre three days ago, when he entered the dick-size contest by saying there would have to be “a fundamental rethink on the way in which we do business with China in future”. In some ways, I agree with him: I harboured grave doubts from Day 1 about allowing Chinese designers into the construction of Britain’s new-generation nuclear power arrangements (they don’t want us to use Thorium, which is insane) and I have long been a fierce critic of appallingly made Chinese exports from solar garden lights to circuit boards. Further, I have some doubts – as yet, I admit, ill formed – about 5G in general…but massive reservations about it being introduced into Britain under the Huawei banner.
However, we have to be grown-up about this: the demonisation of China has begun, and it is all to do with the geopolitics of hegemony.
Ever since the laughably entitled Special Relationship came into being, the United Kingdom has been a slavish creature of US foreign policy. We have not had a Prime Minister stand up to Washington since Margaret Thatcher, and even she never had the slightest intention of falling out with the general drive of the Oil > Pentagon > State Department axis which – along with the CIA and the FBI – had been running the US since the late 1950s.
Shortly before his illness, Boris Johnson told Trump bluntly that we would go ahead with the Huawei deal….a stand that immediately unleashed every which way kind of threat from The Donald himself, and the cringeworthy Unelected State that grudgingly tolerates the President. Now we have Raab saying the Huawei deal should be the subject of, at the very least, second and third thoughts.
There is here a potential wedge between BoJo and his deputy. Guess who’s been giving Raab unqualified support in Cabinet on an early exit from lockdown and other matters? Why, none other than our old chum and Head Spook, Sir Mark Sedwill. Sedwill is an incorrigible blocist and unalloyed fan of all things NATO-American. He is a divisive piece of illiberal anti-matter. It’s what he does: it’s his metier.
Edward Lucas is a known and recognised cypher for the British secret service. I feel the need to deconstruct in detail the drivel in his latest Times article. There follow some extracts from it in italic red, with my counter-arguments in black bold:
‘The regime in Beijing does not just seek to control its own vast country, it wants to control the way other countries behave, too. Nowhere is off limits….The locations differ but the tactics are always the same. China wields its economic clout to reward submissive governments and punish unhelpful ones. It offers generous inducements to friendly China-watchers and freezes out those who ask awkward questions…’
Replace the word ‘China’ with ‘America’ there, and you’d be hard-pushed to tell the difference. Libya, Iraq, Iran…military-dominated diplomacy, and the bullying power of the Petrodollar are all well-documented case histories. The deaths of Iraq whistle-blowers and the hounding of Assanges who sought only the investigation of censored attempts to speak truth unto power…all of it reveals a narrative equally expansionist and totalitarian.
‘Corporate America is bruised by decades of Chinese state-sponsored intellectual property theft, the protectionist restrictions it faces in China’s domestic market‚ and competition from China’s business champions….’
The simplistic hypocrisy of that accusation is both routine and surreal. The cold, dead hands of the US globalist accountants moved US jobs offshore for profit and allowed the average blue-collar American to “feel” rich by consuming cheap Chinese products. Now the 3% want to blame Beijing for exploiting the greed of American Big Business. This is breathtaking stuff.
‘The pandemic has exposed how much Beijing’s thuggish foreign policy has in common with its repressive approach at home. Not only are there signs of a cover-up about the origins of the virus, China has sprayed disinformation abroad, dodging blame, claiming credit and spreading confusion. The foreign ministry spokesman went so far as to claim that it was a US military delegation that brought Covid-19 to Wuhan….’
‘Thuggish foreign policy’ is, for me, a perfect description of the US Unelected State’s approach to spraying failed-State anarchy across the middle East over the last 25 years. But setting that aside, the pathetic references to ‘sprayed disinformation and dodging blame’ are a good summation of CIA and FBI mendacity over the same period. The top example of ‘Janet & John’ persuasion in the above extract is, however, ‘went so far as to claim’. The truth of the Military Games prelude remains elusive, but several key timelines in the September-October 2019 period are at best suspicious, and at worst fully supportive of American culpability. My mind – unlike that of Edward Lucas – remains open.
‘….there are so many unresolved issues: the [Chinese] health sector is underfunded, the education sector is corrupt, pension funds are plundered by corruption….[but]….The West is waking up to the true cost of China-centred globalisation…Now we have to try again to rebuild a multilateral economic, political and security international order with enough consent and clout to contain China’s meddling.’
Where to start on this one? Western health sectors are underfunded, as indeed have Western pension funds been plundered by stealth taxes, QE and Zirp. It’s not the West that’s waking up to ‘the true cost of China-centred globalisation’, it’s the monetarist pillocks who are looking for a sacrificial lamb to appease the masses penuried by US-centred globalism.
As for the afterthought appeal to multilateral action against ‘Chinese meddling’, with respect I would add that an antidote to American nuclear & Petrodollar meddling is way overdue.
Trolls will appear at The Slog and on social media desperate to position me as an apologist for Chinese totalitarianism on the basis of this post.
There is no apology for The Brutal State typified by China. But equally, there is no excuse for accepting the fairy-tale presentation of the American Unelected State and its corporacratic allies as Snow White and seven benign dwarves.
Western diplomacy in general is a tool of American business. It seeks to damage Russia, arm the EU, crush Chinese competition and hand planetary hegemony to a nation that presents itself as a UN police force….such being the thin disguise for a military Gestapo out to put America First.
The collapsing oil price puts Russia firmly on the road to bankruptcy. The EU’s especially harsh Covid19 economic shutdown will do far more damage to China than America. If you were trying to engage in germ warfare with the West, then being completely taken by surprise (and trying to cover up) a Coronavirus outbreak in you own country would be an eccentric way to kick it off.
‘America First’ was a Trump campaign slogan three years ago. Yet the extraordinary thing is that, in today’s fifty shades of grey world, Donald Trump is still the best ally thoughtful and decent human beings have against the equally lunatic desires and assumptions of American neocons and Chinese generals.
We have a materialist ideology in the US, a Communo-fascist ideology in China, a Corporacratic ideology in the EU, a world dominatory religious ideology within Islam, and a confused UK government beset by those infected with politically correct ideology.
This is my sole observation upon the coming Sinophobia: let he who is without guilt cast the first stone.
Postscript: yet more Sinophobia bollocks from The Sunday Times today
The Slog 