by K. J. NOH
Unwilling to accept China’s rise, the US puts its lie machine on full blast and moves towards war.
It was gripping, stunning testimony . Before congress, a 15 year old volunteer nurse, Nayirah, struggled to compose her trembling voice, barely holding back tears, as she testified that marauding soldiers had thrown babies out of incubators in a hospital, leaving them to die on the floor.
Later, Amnesty International confirmed authoritatively that 312 babies had been killed this way[1]. All the news agencies ran with the story, and the country and congress were in a total uproar.
There was only problem: it was completely, utterly, totally fraudulent. It was engineered, perjured, coached testimony concocted by PR experts, designed to manufacture consent for a US war on Iraq. “The US ruling classes are desperate to erase China and its example.”
At the time, it was also crystal clear that the claims were absurd—Kuwait had a population of less than 1.5 million at the time, and given its birthrate, would have had a few hundred premature babies a year. It’s inconceivable that over 300 of them could have been clustered in a single hospital on a single day.
Nevertheless, this was the story that was sold to the US people. Representative John Porter stated , “We have never heard…[such] a record of inhumanity and brutality and sadism…I don’t know how the people of the civilized countries of this world can fail to do everything within their power to remove this scourge from the face of the earth”.
Not long afterward, the US went to war with Iraq. It would wage war again, 12 years later, doubling down with even more monstrous lies.
Today, we are facing a similar situation: the US is escalating rapidly towards a shooting war with China, and similar absurd, astonishing, and monstrous lies are being spread. In fact, the US is already engaged in “multi-domain” “hybrid warfare” with China. This is warfare just below the threshold of direct military engagement. On the ground this involves:
* Economic Warfare: trade sanctions and tariff war, as well as technological warfare: attempted seizure of Chinese companies (TikTok); attacks on China’s international 5G contracts; sanctions on the primary and secondary supply chains of key sectors of Chinese industry (e.g. Huawei’s semiconductor supply chain); attacks on Ant Finance’s IPO.
* Legal Warfare, or “lawfare,” including over 380 anti-China bills in Congress, and 14 individual and state lawsuits against China for over $30 Trillion in “Covid damages”; the long arm “legal” kidnapping of Huawei’s executive
* Diplomatic Warfare, including consulate shutdowns, harassment of diplomats, breaching of diplomatic pouches and compounds, and calls for regime change .
* Military Brinksmanship and posturing in the South China Sea, the East China Sea, the Taiwan straits; complete encirclement of China with strategic weapons, surveillance, and 400 offensive bases (“The Pacific Pivot”), the use of airbases in Taiwan for military actions, and plans to station intermediate range nuclear missiles all along China’s periphery[2].
* Civil Subversion: color revolution , urban terror, destabilization and delegitimation operations in Hong Kong (and other places where China has interests), including millions of dollars of funneled for organization and training, and encrypted communications infrastructure built to coordinate anti-government activities.
* Academic Warfare: through the FBI’s China Initiative, every 10 hours a case is opened against a Chinese student or researcher in the US (currently 2700 cases) and all Chinese students are considered potential “non-traditional” “collectors, spies” involved in a “thousand grains of sand” collection strategy.
* Information Warfare: last but not least, we are seeing total Information warfare.
The stories about so-called “massive human rights abuses,” “Chinese
concentration camps,” “Chinese-made-and-released Covid,” “China has
harmed us economically,” “China has stolen its way to the top,” “China
is oppressing independent Hong Kong,” are part of this information
warfare.
This is mass propaganda to incite people to hate China irrationally and unconditionally, to manufacture consent for war. The US military calls this information warfare, “the firehose of falsehoods ” and we are all being drenched with these lies. This is necessary to justify war against an enemy and to curtail any rational discussion or questioning.
Some of the questions that the public are kept from asking are:
* Are these allegations supported by any facts?
* Has China threatened us? Is the US at risk from China?
* Is this war justifiable by any means? Is it legal?
* Do the citizens of the US want to go to war? Could the US even fight, let alone win a war with China?
A careful, reasoned approach to these questions, would lead one to say, No.
Before we try to play whack-a-mole with the blatant war propaganda, a more useful and clarifying approach is to ask: why is the US telling these lies to go to war?
For this, we have to look at history.
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