{"id":100904,"date":"2023-03-07T07:56:21","date_gmt":"2023-03-07T07:56:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/steelcityscribblings.uk\/wp\/?p=100904"},"modified":"2023-03-07T09:02:19","modified_gmt":"2023-03-07T09:02:19","slug":"the-hazard-of-oz-revisited","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/steelcityscribblings.uk\/wp\/2023\/03\/07\/the-hazard-of-oz-revisited\/","title":{"rendered":"The hazard of Oz revisited"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/h6>\n
China\u2019s military budget consistently sits at around 1.5 percent of its GDP, which is less than half of the USA\u2019s. If China were preparing to conquer the world as so many hawks falsely claim, this would not be the case. The US 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 …<\/span><\/h6>\n
… 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.\u00a0That\u2019s why we\u2019re seeing all these \u201cnews\u201d 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.<\/span><\/h6>\n
*<\/h6>\n

On February 16, in The hazard of Oz: Canberra\u2019s US nukes<\/strong><\/a>, I featured Caitlin Johnstone on the subject of her and her compatriots not being allowed to know if the USA – whose government she justly calls “the most tyrannical regime on the planet by a massive and easily quantifiable margin”,<\/em> and whose endless aggressions on multiple fronts were soberly laid out<\/strong><\/a> by China’s Foreign Ministry on February 20 – has sited nuclear weapons on Australian soil.<\/p>\n

Here she is again, responding to a Sydney Morning Herald feature which has five “experts” – all with lucrative links, undeclared by the SMH piece, to the war industries – arguing that Australia faces the threat of war with China within three years \u2013 and we\u2019re not ready<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

It is a central tenet of this site that the royal “we” of that header is a gigantic lie which conflates the interests of ordinary Westerners with those of the small group of beneficiaries – partners, junior partners, compradors and lackeys in the propaganda industries – with a stake, real or perceived, in Washington’s insanely perilous Project for A New American Century<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n

See in this regard my February 17 post, Did the crazies capture the USA? How?<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Now read Caitlin’s response to the Sydney Morning Herald’s warmongering – or listen to it on her site via the link embedded in her title.<\/p>\n

No, Australia Does Not Actually Need To Prepare For War With\u00a0China<\/a><\/h2>\n

In the latest instance of the Australian media\u2019s deluge of propaganda geared toward manufacturing consent for war with China, Nine Entertainment-owned newspapers<\/span>\u00a0The Sydney Morning Herald<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0and\u00a0<\/span>The Age<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0have brought together a panel of \u201cexperts\u201d to assess how well-prepared Australia is for a hot war with its primary trading partner. The question of\u00a0if<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0that war is necessary or should be prepared for is left completely unexamined.<\/span><\/p>\n

In a report titled \u201c<\/span>Australia faces the threat of war with China within three years \u2013 and we\u2019re not ready<\/a><\/strong>,\u201d we learn the names of the five \u201cexperts\u201d SMH and The Age have recruited to make the titular claim, and you\u2019re 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

This first \u201cexpert\u201d is Mick Ryan, whom I have\u00a0<\/span>written<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0about\u00a0<\/span>repeatedly<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0because 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.\u00a0Ryan is an<\/span>\u00a0Adjunct Fellow<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), which<\/span>\u00a0is funded<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0by military-industrial complex entities like Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman,<\/span>\u00a0and is also directly funded<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0by the US government and its client states, including Australia and Taiwan. SMH and The Age make no note of this immense conflict of interest.<\/span><\/p>\n

These five \u201cexperts\u201d conclude that Australia needs to do much more to rapidly prepare for a hot war with China, saying that \u201cThe need to dramatically strengthen our military and national security capabilities is urgent, but Australia is unprepared.\u201d They say Australia must make these dramatic changes not to defend itself from a Chinese invasion, but to fight a war over Taiwan.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe war Xi is preparing for, they say, is\u00a0one fought over Taiwan, a prosperous self-governing island of 24 million people that sits about 160 kilometres east of mainland China,\u201d the report reads.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is entirely in line with the<\/span>\u00a0appalling propaganda piece<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0put out by Murdoch\u2019s Sky News last month, which said Australia must\u00a0double its military budget<\/em>\u00a0to prepare to back the US in a hot war over Taiwan.<\/span><\/p>\n

The panelists paint Australia\u2019s participation in this war as a settled matter, an inevitability should the US wage war on China.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe have made our choice. If the United States goes to war with Taiwan, we are going to support them one way or the other,\u201d says Mick Ryan.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cNeither the Australian military nor the public are presently truly prepared for the outbreak of war and Australia\u2019s inevitable participation,\u201d says Lavina Lee.<\/span><\/p>\n

These military industrial complex-funded pundits are lying. Australia\u2019s participation in an American war against China is\u00a0not<\/em>\u00a0an inevitability, and is\u00a0not<\/em>\u00a0necessary.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019ve got no business preparing to throw our nation\u2019s sons and daughters into such a conflict, and we\u2019ve got no business stealing from our nation\u2019s most needful in order to effect that preparation.<\/span><\/p>\n

An unresolved civil war between two adjacent bodies who both call themselves \u201cChina\u201d is none of Washington\u2019s business, and it is certainly none of Canberra\u2019s. Let the Chinese sort out China, because China poses no threat to us.<\/span><\/p>\n

That last point isn\u2019t actually debatable, by the way. As Antiwar\u2019s Daniel Larison<\/span>\u00a0recently noted<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0on Twitter, China\u2019s military budget consistently sits at around 1.5 percent of its GDP, which is less than half of the USA\u2019s. If China were preparing to conquer the world as so many hawks falsely claim, this would not be the case. The US 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

In reality the US\u00a0<\/span>has been encircling China<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0with 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<\/span>\u00a0for a very long time<\/a><\/strong>. The US is plainly the aggressor here, and Australia now has an existential interest in militarily uncoupling from that aggressor before it gets us all killed.<\/span><\/p>\n

The report by the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age \u2014 which former Prime Minister Paul Keating<\/span>\u00a0just called<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0\u201cthe most egregious and provocative news presentation of any newspaper I have witnessed in over 50 years of active public life\u201d \u2014\u00a0 actually comes close to actually admitting that there\u2019s a concerted propaganda campaign designed to increase hysteria about China and manufacture consent for war. The \u201cexpert\u201d panel asserts that there needs to be a \u201cpsychological shift\u201d in the public toward this direction which they must be actively persuaded to accept.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMost important of all is a psychological shift,\u201d the report says. \u201cUrgency must replace complacency. The recent decades of tranquillity were not the norm in human affairs, but an aberration. Australia\u2019s holiday from history is over.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The report cites Seebeck as saying \u201cthe nation\u2019s leaders should trust the public enough to include them in what can be a confronting discussion,\u201d and that the public must be regarded as \u201csmart enough to talk about defence and national security.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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 weren\u2019t 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

That\u2019s why we\u2019re seeing all these \u201cnews\u201d 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

China\u2019s military budget consistently sits at around 1.5 percent of its GDP, which is less than half of the USA\u2019s. If China were preparing to conquer the world as so many hawks falsely claim, this would not be the case. … Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-100904","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-china-rising","category-politics-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelcityscribblings.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelcityscribblings.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelcityscribblings.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelcityscribblings.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelcityscribblings.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100904"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/steelcityscribblings.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100904\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":100922,"href":"https:\/\/steelcityscribblings.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100904\/revisions\/100922"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelcityscribblings.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelcityscribblings.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelcityscribblings.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}