No, Australia Does Not Actually Need To Prepare For War With China by Ms Caitlin Johnstone!
(2023-03-07 at 00:50:13 )

No, Australia Does Not Actually Need To Prepare For War With China by Ms Caitlin Johnstone!

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In the latest instance of the Australian medias 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 are not ready," we learn the names of the five "experts" SMH and The Age have recruited to make the titular claim, and you are 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 United States government and its client states, including Australia and Taiwan. SMH and The Age make no note of this immense conflict of interest.

Mick Ryan is a fellow at CSIS, a think tank funded by the military-industrial complex, arguing that Australia should funnel more money into the military-industrial complex via Ukraine. The Age neglects to inform us that this is effectively an advertorial for Northrop Grumman.-Caitlin Johnstone (caitoz) October 5, 2022

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 United States-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 Central Intelligence Agency and the United States 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 is 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 Australias Strategic Resilience: A Spotlight on Military and Gender in the Pacific Region," and "Key to Australias 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 have 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 are not selling junk food - they are 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!

Nine Entertainments SMH editorial effectively places Australias sons and daughters in our military in harms way by its front page declaration of imminent war with China. This is poor journalism. It is war mongering for commercial gain (ad $s from arms traders).-Quentin Dempster (QuentinDempster) March 6, 2023

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 Murdochs Sky News last month, which said Australia must double its military budget to prepare to back the United States in a hot war over Taiwan.

The panelists paint Australias participation in this war as a settled matter, an inevitability should the United States 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 Australias inevitable participation," says Lavina Lee.

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

Murdoch Propaganda Pushes Australia To Double Its Military Budget For War With China

"In its promotional clip for the special, Sky News Australia tinged all footage pertaining to China in red to show how dangerous and communist they are."-Caitlin Johnstone (caitoz) February 16, 2023

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 have got no business preparing to throw our nations sons and daughters into such a conflict, and we have got no business stealing from our nations 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,D.C.s business, and it is certainly none of Canberras. Let the Chinese sort out China, because China poses no threat to us.

That last point is not actually debatable, by the way. As Antiwars Daniel Larison recently noted on Twitter, Chinas military budget consistently sits at around 1.5 percent of its GDP, which is less than half of the USAs. If China were preparing to conquer the world as so many hawks falsely claim, this would not be the case!

The United States 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 United States 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 United States is plainly the aggressor here, and Australia now has an existential interest in militarily uncoupling from that aggressor before it gets us all killed.

Paul Keating blasts Age and SMH for "provocative" China war story-Guardian news (guardiannews) March 7, 2023

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 is 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. Australias holiday from history is over."

The report cites Seebeck as saying "the nations 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 were not 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 is why we are 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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Ah, the Buddha Ms Caitlin speaks the truth!!! - Cousin Lucky