"Chinese Aggression" Sure Looks An Awful Lot Like United States Aggression by Ms Caitlin Johnstone!
(2023-01-24 at 20:19:34 )

"Chinese Aggression" Sure Looks An Awful Lot Like United States Aggression by Ms Caitlin Johnstone!

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Punchbowl News reports that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is planning a trip to Taiwan, which will be yet another incendiary provocation against Beijing if it occurs. The previous House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, sparked a significant escalation in hostilities with her visit last year, the consequences of which are still reverberating today.

Antiwars Dave DeCamp explains:

Ms Pelosis visit to Taiwan was viewed in Beijing as a major provocation, and it sparked the largest-ever Chinese military drills around the island. The exercises included China firing missiles over Taiwan and simulating a blockade of the island, both unprecedented actions.

China has kept up the military pressure on Taiwan since Ms Pelosis visit, and its warplanes regularly now cross the median line, an informal barrier that divides the two sides of the Taiwan Strait. Before Ms Pelosis trip, China barely crossed the line. Now, it is an almost-daily occurrence.

Beijing views the United States House speaker visiting Taiwan as an affront to the one-China policy and the understanding the United States and China reached in 1979, when Washington,D.C. severed formal relations with Taipei.

Report: House Speaker Kevin McCarthy Plans to Visit Taiwan
Nancy Pelosis visit when she was House speaker provoked the largest-ever Chinese military drills around Taiwan by Dave DeCamp-Antiwar.com (Antiwarcom) January 23, 2023

United States-led provocations and escalations against China are becoming a regular occurrence, both from the United States itself and from its imperial assets like Australia and Taiwan. Yet according to the western political-media class, the urgent threat of our day is "Chinese aggression".

After the House of Representatives voted to approve the new Select Committee on China - a Republican initiative designed to increase internal pressure in the United States government to ramp up the new cold war - the committees chairman Mike Gallagher put out a statement saying that it is "time to push back against the Chinese Communist Partys aggression in bipartisan fashion."

Mr. Gallagher is a particularly noxious warmonger who says urgent efforts must be made to stop China from "destroying the capitalist system led by the United States in order to make way for the triumph of world socialism with Chinese characteristics." He advocates the "selective decoupling" from specific sectors of the Chinese economy and says the United States is in "the early stages of a new cold war" against China. He advocates pouring weapons into Taiwan in much the same way the United States did in the lead-up to its proxy war in Ukraine, and asserts that the United States needs to be preparing for a direct hot war with China in the near future.

Mr. Gallaghers hawkishness on China is quickly becoming the mainstream consensus position in the western political-media class as the United States-centralized empire ramps up aggressions while continually complaining about Chinese aggression.

The Select Committee on the CCP will expose the CCPs strategy to undermine American leadership and work on a bipartisan basis to identify common sense approaches to counter CCP aggression.

There is no more critical challenge facing our nation.-Rep. Gallagher Press Office (RepGallagher) January 11, 2023

The United States empire has been increasingly positioning its war machinery around China since the Obama administrations "Pivot to Asia" in ways that would have led to an immediate third world war if the roles were reversed, and its aggressions have escalated with each subsequent administration.

Just in the last couple of months we have had news that the United States is planning on returning to its Subic Bay base in the Philippines as part of its encirclement campaign against China, and also intends to station missile-armed marines along Japans Okinawa islands.

The United States is also reportedly working on building a network of missile systems on a chain of islands near the Chinese mainland, explicitly for the goal of countering China. The United States and its allies have dramatically increased their naval presence in disputed waters near China, viewed as acts of aggression by Beijing.

None of this would be tolerated by the United States if China were openly moving its war machinery into adjacent areas with the stated goal of "countering the United States". If China were doing this, it would be a near-unanimous consensus throughout the western world that China was engaged in hostile provocations and was clearly the aggressor. Nobody would listen to China if it claimed it was militarily encircling the United States for defensive purposes.

But that is exactly what happens with United States aggressions against China.

It is just taken as matter of fact when the United States says it is moving more and more war machinery into the waters around China as a defensive precaution to deter Chinese aggression.

Because the narrative is coming from the most effective propaganda machine ever devised, we hear "No bro, the United States is militarily encircling its number one geopolitical rival on the other side of the planet defensively. Because like what if China tries to do something aggressive?"

Assembling an Asian anti-China containment coalition, kneecapping Chinas economy, engaging in an arms race, aligning local regimes to encircle Beijing & demanding countries choose between China & US lead to regional fracture & war, not stability.-Richard Heggie (RichardSHeggie) January 16, 2023

In a surprisingly decent Foreign Affairs article titled "The Problem With Primacy," Van Jackson argues that the United States is behaving in such a transparently aggressive manner toward China that it can not possibly claim to be acting in the interests of preserving peace and stability in the region.

"This is not the rationale of a country that is simply balancing Chinese power or trying to stop Beijing from creating a sphere of influence," writes Jackson of the recent United States semiconductor export ban against China. "It is not the strategy of a state trying to decouple from the Chinese economy. It is containment in all but name."

"The Pentagon has promised that 2023 will be "the most transformative year in United States force posture in the region in a generation," a line likely meant to be reassuring but that comes off as ominous," Jackson writes. "The Department of Defense is making good on this promise by modernizing its large traditional presence in Northeast Asia while increasing its footprint in the Pacific Islands and Australia-areas that the Chinese military cannot seriously contest."

Jackson argues that Washington,D.C.s efforts to halt Chinas rise will likely achieve nothing besides provoking China into militarizing against it, saying, "There is no reason to believe that spending over a trillion dollars modernizing the United States nuclear arsenal or selling submarines to Australia will cause China to do anything but continue arming itself as quickly as possible."

This aligns with the warnings of an anonymous United States official cited in a November article by Bloomberg, who said that "the hawkish tone in DC has contributed to a cycle where the United States makes the first move, interprets Chinese reactions as a provocation, and then escalates further."

It is the United States making the first move every time.

Why does China keep aggressively surrounding itself with United States military bases?-Caitlin Johnstone (caitoz) November 25, 2022

Taiwan is an odd case because empire apologists will openly tell you that Beijing must never control the island as it is a geostrategically crucial location with essential semiconductor manufacturing, and then turn around and still try to tell you that Washington,D.C.s interest in Taiwan is because it wants to protect freedom and democracy. It is even more transparent than when they were pretending to yearn for the liberation of nations that just so happened to sit on a lot of oil.

I do not know if Beijing will ever launch an attack on Taiwan or some other future flashpoint, but if it does it seems a safe bet that it will be because the United States empire kept ramping up aggressions and provocations until it got to the point that China felt it was losing more from inaction than it would from action. And then empire apologists will spend all day shrieking at anyone who tries to talk about those provocations.

Because that is the rule now, if you were not aware. As of February 2022 we are all meant to pretend that the concept of provocation is not a commonplace idea that everyone understands and learns about as children, but that "provocation" is rather a nonsensical propaganda word that was invented by Vladimir Putin last year. It is now no longer permissible for you to talk about the aggressions that led up to a nation going to war; we must all pretend that history began the day their troops crossed the border.

History is being re-written with Ukraine, and if war erupts over Taiwan it will probably be re-written there as well. But note to the future: the road to war was paved by mountains of United States aggression!!!

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Ah, the Buddha Ms Caitlin speaks the truth!!! - Cousin Lucky