“Because I’ve got a brain!”

15 Mar

That’s the reply given by former leader of the Australian Labour Party, Paul Keating, when asked on Sky News, “what makes you so sure China isn’t a military threat to Australia?”

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For the eternally credulous, whose name is Legion, the unanimity of all sections of Western media on the threat from China rising is proof that “it must be right then”.

No, stupid! It’s evidence that however many urbane and thought-provoking Guardian or New York Times articles you read on matters that do not threaten core power interests, on matters that do these media can  – for reasons set out here and here – be relied on to advance the agendas of power. Since the rise of China threatens US hegemony, and since those who rule Australia and Britain are obedient servants of Washington, it is criminally naive to expect ‘quality’ and ‘liberal’ media to be any less hostile to China than are Murdoch’s mouthpieces.

In her question to Mr Keating, that Sky News anchor-woman stands reality …

The USA rings the planet with 800 military bases, outspends on weaponry the next ten spenders put together, has been at war for almost its entire history and has slaughtered millions – by bombs, invasions, murderous ‘sanctions’ and terror unleashed – in this century alone. Mostly in far off lands.

In what universe can anything remotely similar be said of China or Russia? 

… on its head. China has no reason to attack Australia. Australia has good reason to remain on friendly terms with its most important trading partner. Alas, these truths are trumped by one factor – fear of  Washington. Beneath a fast-thinning veneer of democracy at home, and with a record of ceaseless and bloody aggression thousands of miles from its coastlines and borders, every US government advances the interests of an oligarchy whose exacting of global tribute, by way of dollar rule underwritten by armed might, is threatened by China’s economic rise.

This really is not rocket science. See Caitlin’s piece yesterday, On War With China, Australia Is Caught Between A Rock And A Pentagon. Its essence is held in this one simple paragraph:

Australia is not arming itself against China to protect itself from China. Australia is arming itself against China to protect itself from the United States.

  1. On the Aukus pact see my September 2021 post, Nuclear subs go down under
  2. Incidentally, is being able to eat – and see your children eat – a human right?

  3. For the benefit of those who think in Overton Binary, I’m not endorsing the tangerine narcissist here. Trump’s vision of working with Russia, when he hadn’t the political capital to pull that off even if theoretically possible, was not solely aimed at ISIS. Trump was arguably the last advocate for that current within the US ruling class which still thought Russia could be co-opted to the greater project of containing China. All the signs since Trump point to a ruling class more or less united in accepting that it can’t drive a wedge between Moscow and Beijing, and there’s nothing to be gained by trying.
  4. Just 13 of the world’s 193 countries, disproportionately Caribbean or Latin American, recognise Taiwan as sovereign. These are states not known for defiance of Washington so my guess – no more – is that the latter is having its cake and eating it. Not quite ready to revert to its pre 1979 position of Taiwan being indeed sovereign, it may suit the US to keep that pot on the back-burner in the knowledge it can swiftly be brought back to the boil by adding to its baker’s dozen the many states which – like Australia, Britain and a craven EU – will do whatever Washington tells them to do.

9 Replies to ““Because I’ve got a brain!”

  1. Excellent piece! I’ve read all our friend Caitlin’s recent contributions on the insanity of Australia’s warmongering against China and the standout sentence is the one about Australia fearing the US, not China.

    And while that piece of excrement Sunak is in the US posing with the other two warmongering monstrosities announcing billions more to be splurged on weaponry, some of his own sick and disabled citizens here at home are contemplating suicide because they can’t survive on the pittance they have for the obscene costs of energy, food and the rest.

    Then we have Starmer’s Labour nodding along with the “Stop The Boats” poison, complaining that the tories aren’t deporting enough refugees and asylum seekers fast enough! (Illegal immigrants is a sickening lie).

    Sorry again for the language but we’re fucking doomed, not just this country but the entire world.

    I’m losing hope for our world.

  2. Whilst Keating’s four word line clearly implied those taking this ridiculous line are severely lacking in that department what was left unsaid and which needed to be added is he also has what in our part of the world (Steel City) is known as ‘bottle.’

    What the Americans prefer to call ‘cojones’. Or, to utilise ‘industrial’ language, ‘balls’.

    The kind of bottle discussed here on the Rokfin Duran Channel:

    https://www.rokfin.com/post/127795/African-leaders-collective-west-is-not-the-only-game-in-town

    Discussing two recent videos of visits to Namibia and the DRC in Africa by Western political elites still stuck in a mindset which treats African’s (and to be frank, again, anyone outside the West) as untermenschen – the external version of the domestic ‘deporables’ – to be lectured on what they should and should not be doing and the way their high handed arrogant and ignorant attitude got them their arses handed to them by African leaders.

    Assuming they retain some degree of self-awareness it must be a source of acute embarrassment (the Scots prefer the more descriptive term ‘Cringe’) to both Australian elites and the average citizen that States in Africa which are far worse off economically than they are have the bottle to tell these numpties where to go with their colonial us and them attitude.

    In contrast to Australia which plays the part of, what the late Malcolm X described in January 1963 as, ‘the house negro’…

    https://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/mmt/mxp/speeches/mxa17.html

    …..snapping to attention in abject submission as soon as the colonial master snaps his fingers.

    When the petro-dollar free ride Ponzi scheme collapses – and this could be sooner rather than later – the only armaments and munitions Australia and the other Patsies are likely to receive for their money will be a few crates of rocks/stones and a consignment of bamboo sticks.

    On present form the indigenous Aboriginal peoples would put up a better fight than the present descendants of convicts.

    As Ricky Tomlinson would doubtless observe in his own inimitable way; ‘Crocodile Dundee my arse’!

  3. Another constant refrain of the propaganda is that, as noted above from the Guardian “China sees Taiwan, a self-governed democracy of 24 million people, as a wayward province” . . . and the corollary of course, as per usual, is no mention of the fact that ‘officially’ the US has the same position.

    But even the few remaining countries which recognise Taiwan are diminishing. I read this morning that another SA country is moving to recognise China instead of Taiwan. Unfortunately I can’t find the link to the article, but that won’t affect the process. Soon Taiwan will only be recognised by the inhabitants of Rockall.

  4. More on this one sided deal from MoA:

    https://www.moonofalabama.org/2023/03/the-worst-deal-ever-australia-to-pay-us-for-nuclear-insecurity.html#more

    Australia will spend billions to upgrade naval base HMAS Stirling in Western Australia so the U.S. and UK can use it for their rotational stationing there. It will ‘invest’ more billions in nuclear shipyards in the U.S. and UK. It will pay billions for the Virginia class boats over which it will have little sovereignty.

    Submarine designs are long complicate programs. It took 35 million labor hours design the first batch of Virginia-class boats and it took nine million labor hours to build the first one. The new SSN-AUKUS will have similar costs and issues. I for one expect that none will ever be build. Neither Australia nor the UK have the money for them.

    Still – the political fallout will come from all sides.

    With this deal Australia is essentially paying the U.S. an exorbitant price to confront Australia’s biggest customer, China. Its neighbors are unhappy. Indonesia is making noise about the proliferation risk as is Malaysia. Europe is miffed that Australia scrapped the deal with France and rejected the new French offer. The deal does not increase Australia’s security.

    Labor party members, who saw the interview with Keating (vid), will come to understand that their party leaders made the wrong decision.”

    • Then there’s the stiffing of France – these days we must get our comic relief wherever it is to be found – over Aukus. Granted, next to how the EU, Germany especially, has been stuffed over Ukraine, Oz’s ‘fuck off Paris’ is small potatoes. All the same, it can be filed in the bulging folder of examples of what Dr Kissinger had in mind:

      To be an enemy of America can be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal.

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