"If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy." - James Madison
US Carrier Group
© Alex Krainer's TrendCompass / Substack
Empire's proxy war on Russia is rapidly coming to a head in Ukraine and the imperial guard might urgently need a new war. Their next target is China and once more we witness a relentless escalation of provocations and hostility. In his Wall Street Journal column this week, former National Security Advisor John Bolton laid out his "grand strategy" to confront Russia and China. His genius idea is to give Taiwan "much more military aid" from western nations and "embed Taipei into collective-defense structures."

Preparations for war

Bolton's warmongering is only the last in the long sequence of proclamations by US officials indicating the direction of their foreign policy. Last month, U.S. Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth told an audience at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) that the United States has "to prepare, to be prepared to fight and win that war" against China. This is not just idle talk: they really are preparing.

On Sunday, 10 January, Lieutenant General James Bierman, the commanding general of the Third Marine Expeditionary Force gave an interview to the Financial Times in which he said that his command is working hard to replicate the empire's military success (!) in Ukraine. Bierman explained that the US and its allies in Asia were recreating the groundwork that had enabled western countries to support Ukraine's resistance to Russia in preparing for scenarios such as Chinese invasion of Taiwan:
"Why have we achieved the level of success we've achieved in Ukraine? ... because after Russian aggression in 2014 and 2015, we earnestly got after preparing for future conflict: training for the Ukrainians, pre-positioning of supplies, identification of sites from which we could operate support, sustain operations. We call that setting the theatre. And we are setting the theatre in Japan, in the Philippines, in other locations."
In other words, the US is creating the same conditions to draw China into a war over Taiwan in order to replicate the success they've had in Ukraine. Truly, whom gods would destroy, they first make them mad.

The war addiction

Jest aside, why is the US establishment ever so keen on waging wars? Consider the finding that,
"Since the end of World War II, there have been 248 armed conflicts in 153 locations around the world. The United States launched 201 overseas military operations between the end of World War II and 2001, and since then, others, including Afghanistan and Iraq."
Stated otherwise, one nation has launched more than 80% of all overseas military operations since WWII. Is this because the American people are so consistently belligerent? That's clearly not the case: for as long as I'd observed American politics, the people always vote for anti-war candidates. Somehow however, they always get more war. How can that be? In fact, causes of war are systemic and they emanate from the fraudulent money system that's been foisted on us all. This can't be explained in just a few paragraphs, but for all who are inclined to explore this relationship further, I summarized it in this article: "Deflationary gap and the west's war addiction."

China, China, China!

Alongside military preparations, the imperial guard is also working hard to create consent for war with relentless anti-China propaganda. The unsubtle messaging is that the CCP is coming for our freedoms and has evil designs to dominate the world. Much of the commentariat blames the Chinese for all the dark globalist agendas to enslave humanity.

The relentless fearmongering often resorts to propagating outright fabrications which are then replicated ad nauseum as hard facts. Repetition turns these fabrications into culturally accepted truths. The most dismaying example of this is the western invention of the "Chinese Social Credit System."

Here's how Arnaud Bertrand, a Frenchman living in China, commented on this in a Tweet: "The Chinese social credit system is easily one of the most egregious disinformation narratives peddled on China by western media. Even myself I couldn't believe the extent to which they totally invented a system that had no basis in reality."

Twitter Post
© Alex Krainer's TrendCompass / Substack
Geopolitical blogger Brian Berletic (whose commentary is invariably excellent and well researched) provided a more in-depth contrast between the Chinese realities and western fearmongering in this 26-minute video report: China's "Social Credit Score System" - Fact or Fiction? (Spoiler alert: it's fiction).

Unfortunately however, the demonization has had its effect and many in the west have by now embraced this fear of China to the point that they are inclined to believe almost any story that demonizes China and disbelieve anything to the contrary. The glaring fact that the government, the think tanks and the media have lied to us about pretty much everything doesn't seem to detract them. This time they're telling the truth.

US China Opinion
© Alex Krainer's TrendCompass / Substack
In the resulting atmosphere of fear and loathing, the population might acquiesce to yet another reckless military adventure on any pretext. Another Gulf of Tonkin incident - real or fake - could quickly escalate out of control. Suddenly, the independence of Taiwan might become the red line that no decent person could allow to be crossed.

It's not really about China...

The biggest problem with all this is that the ruling establishment already knows for certain that they stand no chance of winning a war against China. Pentagon's own war simulations concluded that their Pacific fleet would be destroyed in short order in such a conflict. So why do they want this war so badly? What could possibly justify such a reckless gambit?

... it's about the American people

The important thing to realize here is that the primary target of the war against China would not really be China. It would be the American people. The shiny new world war in the Pacific would deflect people's attention from the metastasizing crises at home, direct their anger at a foreign enemy, and for the same high price also provide the government with an ideal smokescreen for radical crackdown on dissent against all the racists, nazis, enemy sympathizers, deplorables, domestic extremists, insurrectionists and all other kinds of thought criminals.

James Madison rightly warned us that, "If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy." Well, the United States has been fighting foreign enemies pretty much non-stop since the end of World War 2 and throughout, the civil rights and liberties at home have been steadily rolled back. Unless we like the prospect of our children knowing even fewer freedoms, we should reject the lies and the fear and try instead to identify the real enemy with better discernment. "Truth eludes us," spoke Solzhenytzin, "if we do not concentrate our attention totally in its pursuit."

It can be as simple as following a few people on Twitter who actually live in China - see what they say. As an Irish friend of mine who spent a good chunk of his life living in China says that, when it comes to China, there are two kinds of people in this world: those who hate China and those who've been there. Indeed, it's as Heraclitus famously put it: "Dogs, also, bark at what they do not know."

China is not the enemy and consenting to a war against China would be the greatest possible gift we could give to the occult oligarchy that rules in the west and has been in charge for over a century. It is they who have given us a century of perpetual wars. The reason why the American people are under such relentless attacks is because they are still one of the most important bulwarks of freedom.