Who wants a war with China over Taiwan?

From Caitlin Johnstone’s blog yesterday.

The correct response to someone who supports going to war if China attacks Taiwan is “Are you enlisted?” The correct response when they say “no” is “Then shut the fuck up.”

The decision to go to war with China would be the most consequential in history. You’d have to weigh it against millions to billions of deaths. Defending Taiwan’s preference of government clearly wouldn’t weigh enough to justify that cost.

The empire’s greatest weapon is its propaganda machine. There’s never been anything like the global narrative control of western news media, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood. The military fights wars, the propaganda machine wins them long before they start.

A lucid and well-informed examination of the world’s problems will keep bringing you back to this one fundamental issue: that Earth’s inhabitants are being psychologically manipulated at mass scale into organizing themselves in ways that serve the powerful instead of the people.

Taiwan’s colonial name, Formosa, means “the beautiful island”. That’s an accurate description and besides having the great pleasure of hosting several young Taiwanese here in the UK, I’ve twice visited their beautiful island and hope to do so again. But personal stuff aside, here’s what I wrote in my recent takedown of a Guardian editorial:

Taiwan is part of China, recognised as such by the UN. … As the tide of WW2 shifted to the Allies, so did the tide of China’s war against its rulers and their failure to repel the Japanese invader shift to the communists … Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek was driven from the mainland. Imposing himself on [Taiwan] he ruled there without mercy.

(Chiang saw his routing as a tactical retreat. To his dying day he insisted that all of China would be retaken and reunited. So much for Taiwan as a separate nation!)

… the US changed its tune on Chiang Kai-shek. Initially it loathed him … but cold war imposed new priorities … And as with US genocide on Korea, and Palestine’s Nakba, mid-twentieth century history has been air-brushed so effectively that events still within living memory might as well have occurred in Homer’s day.

So the Guardian may speak, with little fear of reader pushback, of China ‘threatening’ Taiwan. Millions of Westerners, including an intelligentsia kept historically and geographically illiterate while believing itself well informed by ‘quality’ media, will buy it.

That last is the point Caitlin was making yesterday. Let’s hear her again:

1. See also Those nights in Tiananmen Square, written two days after this post.
2. The enormous power of the entertainments industry, with lead roles for Hollywood and now Netflix, in shaping our deepest political understandings has been sorely neglected on this site. I hope to address the deficiency but the task is daunting. Our perceptions of China are shaped as much by Animal Farm and 007, with the recent submarine drama Vigil a case in point, as by the propaganda from news and overtly political commentary.
3. This second video has one major omission. It pays no attention to the truth, examined in this post, that advertising reliance – usually direct but sometimes indirect, as with the BBC – is as big a negator of media independence as oligarch ownership. That said, the video makes too many powerful points to be ignored on this count.
4. I do not suppose many of the West’s rulers consciously want war with a China which, like Russia, can ably defend herself. (Some do, however. And as with war on Russia, that DC contingent which believes a nuclear war can be won has moved from lunatic fringe to mainstream if minority status within the US ruling class.) I sense a far greater danger from the brinksmanship currently played out by three of the Five Eyes – USA, UK, Australia – triggering a miscalculation on either side. Nuff said.