© TechcrunchA War in China painting.
For those who remember the situation during the collapse of the USSR, and the "world's only superpower" subsequently falling to bits into its present almost unbelievably obscene delusional state, history has done what it always does- replay the lesson. The USSR went bankrupt. The US is technically bankrupt.
The USSR spent its entire existence focusing on external threats. From the Revolution onwards, Lenin, Stalin and their successors pursued a gigantic lie until it destroyed the nation. The US seems hell-bent on following that path, recycling the redneck rhetoric of previous generations about external threats.
These are the issues raised to illustrate that the Yellow Peril, that bizarre fantasy of the 19th century, is now being reincarnated as working foreign policy:
1. The Chinese military program- Notwithstanding the fact that the Chinese military has been recorded as buying pigs from local farmers for food. The arsenal of weapons left over from the 70s and 80s, relics unfit for combat outside a sandpit, goes unmentioned while the US continues to spend the equivalent of the GDP of entire countries on its own weapons.
2. The value of the Chinese currency- No other nation in modern history has been subjected to this sort of browbeating, however ineffectual.
3. Sovereign wealth- This is loosely translated as direct or indirect investment by governments. It's considered unfair, despite 50 years of Western economies having a virtual monopoly on global capital, public and private.
4. Human rights- It's interesting to note that the West, in the course of "defending" human rights, has been remarkably slow to do anything about actual genocide, dictatorships, and massive abuse of human rights. The West's own poor, subject to the most common of all human rights abuses, poverty, have rarely if ever been mentioned in the crusade for human rights. Tibet is a case in point. 60 years later, anti-Chinese hot air still replaces actual results. Nothing resembling an achievement in this area is seriously expected.
5. Outsourcing of jobs to China- The very people who outsourced the jobs in the first place and are making billions are pretending to have some sort of credibility when talking about foreign outsourcing.
6. Chinese buying of US bonds- The US bonds, which are funding US spending, should obviously only be bought by Americans. The Chinese are selling them now, not buying them. Why would that be?
7. Chinese espionage stealing technology- Clearly, a country which is manufacturing all the current technology and is up to its armpits in US and Western trained scientists needs to steal technology. Why not just wait for it to get delivered? Congress has now banned scientific collaboration with China for that reason.
8. Chinese backed cyber-attacks- Every government on Earth now has cyber warfare capabilities. Why not the Chinese, and if it's so much of a threat, why is the publicly available information entirely about unsuccessful attacks?
9. Taiwan- The Chinese equivalent of Hawaii, and not particularly useful as either a target or a cinder. Taiwan also happens to be the original source of the industrial capacity of the PRC, imported direct from there in the 80s. So much for ideology.
10. Chinese foreign investment- A country turning over billions of dollars, and the only one not allowed to invest on the global market? The Chinese have been grabbing foreign assets in much the same way the US did in the post-war era.
So- How're we going with the Orwellian scenario, at this point? Who is kidding whom?
Meanwhile, freed from the threat of Soviet communism, the West has been free to prove its brilliance with:
1. The 1990s recession
2. The War on Terror
3. Iraq
4. Hurricane Katrina
5. The Iraq contracts
6. The mortgage securities crises
7. The 2008 meltdown
8. US debt
9. US crime
10. Global crime
11. UK debt
12. European debt
13. Japanese stagflation
15. The presumably temporary demise of the US space program, unless there's some damn 2000 year old non-existent dogmatic superstition about that, too
16. The sudden fall in US life expectancy from 1st to around 24th in the world
17. The general inflation brought about by "user pays/Greed is Good" economics
18. Global corruption at all levels of politics
19. Education, or the lack of same
20. You name it
Here it is folks, Manifest Destiny, 21st century style. Nobody's got a Chinaman's chance against the West. Rule Britannia, Allons enfants de la patrie.. etc., etc., The West is the best... Sure, it is. Ask the average 50% of Westerners living on various forms of insult. How many double standards can you fit in to a world view?
China is the distraction. The real game is at home, with its pitiful policies and its even more pitiful adherents to those policies. The external "threat" has its own problems, and plenty of them.
Here's a thought for those looking for threats- The French Revolution, the template for the rise of modern democracy, didn't have an ideology. It had the same sort of real-life facts as the Middle East has now- Insane, backward, power mad governments created by unelected factions within their societies and rampaging inequalities, with a healthy dose of poverty.
If the Middle East can get rid of its idiots, why can't we?
And yes we can, if we catfoodiate their MANIFE$T IN$ANITY!