Australian War Propaganda Goes Off the Rails

In a blatant advert for arms sales masquerading as news, 60 Minutes tries to tie Taiwan to the fantasy of China randomly invading a continent of white foreigners thousands of miles away, writes Caity Johnstone.

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By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com

60 Minutes Australia has churned out yet another fear-mongering war propaganda piece on China, this one so ham-fisted in its call to beef up military spending that it goes so far as to run a brazen advertisement for an actual Australian weapons manufacturer disguised as news reporting. 

This round of psychological conformity-making features Australian former major general Jim “The Butcher of Fallujah” Molan saying that in three to ten years a war will be fought against China over Taiwan and that Australians are going to have to fight in that war to prevent a future Chinese invasion of the land down under.

He argues Australia will need to greatly increase its military spending in order to accomplish this, because it can’t be certain the United States will protect it from Chinese aggression.

“Australia is monstrously vulnerable at the moment; we have this naive faith that American military power is infinite, and it’s not,” says Molan, who is a contributor to government/arms industry-funded think tanks Lowy Institute and Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

Decrying what he calls “panda huggers” (meaning people who aren’t China hawks), Molan claims that “the Chinese Communist Party’s aim is to be dominant in this region and perhaps dominant in the world.” Asked when war might break out, he claims “Given the power that they have in their military they could act any time from now on, and that’s what frightens me more than anything.”

“The next war is not going to be ten or twenty years away, it’s going to be in the next three to ten years,” Molan asserts.

“My estimate is that in a serious fight the Australian Defense Force only has enough missiles for days. This is not going to be resolved in days. And of course we’re not big enough. We should expand the defense force significantly… We should fund defense now based on our assessment of the national security strategy which is based on the war that we want to win.”

“In short do you think Australia needs to prepare for war tomorrow?” the interviewer asks Molan.

“Absolutely,” he replies.

Molan makes the ridiculous argument that if Australia does not to commit to defending Taiwan from the mainland then it won’t be long before they can expect a Chinese invasion at home, as though there’s any line that could be drawn between the resolution to a decades-old Chinese civil war and China deciding to invade a random continent full of white foreigners thousands of miles away.

“Suppose we said okay Taiwan you’re on your own up there and the Chinese snapped it up, and the Chinese started looking around the world and they might snap up other liberal democracies like Australia,” Molan argues. “And we might then turn to America and say America well could you give us a bit of a hand here? And the Americans might say what we said to Taiwan. Where do you draw the line? This situation that is developing now is an existential threat to Australia as a liberal democracy.”

Incredibly, the 60 Minutes segment then plunges into several minutes of blatant advertising for Australian defense technology company Defendtex which manufactures weaponized drones designed to be used in clusters, saying such systems could handily be used to defeat China militarily in a cost-effective manner.

The segment also promotes bare-faced lies which have become commonplace in anti-China propaganda, repeating the false claim that Chinese fighter planes have been “breaching Taiwanese airspace” and repeating a mistranslation of comments by Xi Jinping which it used in a previous anti-China segment made to sound more aggressive than they actually were.

This segment follows a cartoonishly hysterical fear porn piece on China put out by the same program this past September which featured Australian Strategic Policy Institute ghouls insisting that Australians must be prepared to fight and die in defense of Taiwan and that a Chinese invasion of Australia is a very real threat. That 60 Minutes segment was preceded by an equally crazy one in May which branded New Zealand “New Xi-Land” for refusing to perfectly align with U.S. dictates on one small foreign policy issue.

To be perfectly clear, there is no evidence of any kind that China will ever have any interest in an unprovoked attack on Australia, much less an invasion, and attempts to tie that imaginary nonsense threat to Beijing’s interest in an island right off its coast which calls itself the Republic of China are absurd.

As we’ve discussed previously, anyone who’d support entering into a war against China over Taiwan is a crazy idiot. In the unfortunate event that tensions between Beijing and Taipei cannot be resolved peacefully in the future there is no justification whatsoever for the U.S. and its allies to enter into a world war between nuclear powers to determine who governs Taiwan.

The cost-to-benefit ratio in a conflict which would easily kill tens of millions and could lead to the deaths of billions if it goes nuclear makes such a war very, very, very far from being worth entering into, especially since there’s no actual evidence that Beijing has any interest in attacking nations it doesn’t see as Chinese territory.

There’s so much propaganda going toward generating China hysteria in westerners generally and Australians in particular, and it’s been depressingly successful toward that end.

Watching these mass-scale psyops take control of people’s minds one after another has been like watching a zombie outbreak in real time; people’s critical thinking faculties just fall out their ears and then all of a sudden they’re all about cranking up military spending and sending other people’s kids off to die defending U.S. interests in some island.

Please don’t become a zombie. Keep your brain. Stay conscious.

Caitlin Johnstone is a rogue journalist, poet, and utopia prepper who publishes regularly at Medium. Follow her work on FacebookTwitter, or her website. She has a podcast and a book, Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.” 

This article was re-published with permission.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

8 comments for “Australian War Propaganda Goes Off the Rails

  1. Moi
    November 18, 2021 at 18:20

    What do you expect?

    The world has transitioned into a TL:DR society. If it can’t be described with a 3 word slogan like “China is bad” then we just don’t want to know about it.

    The Australian MsM can’t say “America is bad” so what other black/white option is there?

  2. Andy Brady
    November 18, 2021 at 07:22

    I think we all sense this pressure developed in some military think tank, and illustrates the almost implausible situation as described.
    These leaders do not have the ability to see the narratives flowing thru a matrix. I would suggest to all readers, who have not, to revisit Ms J’s series beginning with “Narratives” and follow her delineation of (including a narrative of herself to explain the notion)
    Next, if you have a few minutes, is to make a study, if you will of her notions of a matrix. It is not a maze, nor two stacked mazes, but something staggeringly different. It WILL give you something to think about.

  3. Eddy
    November 18, 2021 at 01:29

    As a Vietnam Veteran, I fell for this bullshit claim made by the very same organisations and people supporting these organisations, that the Communists would be invading Australia and soon we’d all be speaking Vietnamese ect, ect, to avert this happening, it was neccessary to step up and fight for our country, take the fight over there instead of fighting it here. Within 6 weeks of arriving in South Vietnam, I discovered EVERYTHING we had been told by Australian Government and authorities were a LIE. In fact the Vietnamese Government did not even have a NAVY, so how they were supposed to invade Australia was never adequately explained. Nor did they know Australia even existed, so why would they want to invade a country they didn’t even know existed ??? Incredibly, Australians swallowed all this without question. From that day henceforth, I have never accepted or believed anything promulgated by the Australian Government or it’s accomplices the media.
    Amazing, that some people have the Chutzpah, to try repeating the same scenario they used back then, to hype up the Australian people to again throw their lives away just so a small group of traitorius Australians can enrichen themselves. It worked once, so why not try it again ?

  4. davidofalaska
    November 17, 2021 at 17:29

    Oi, Caity. You are speaking some hard truth. As ever.

  5. Rex Williams
    November 17, 2021 at 16:36

    An excellent identification of the people and organisations behind Australia’s never-ending campaign against China, designed as it is to encourage the USA to make the Australian continent, the large island off the coast of Asia, a home for further US bases, all to further their hegemonic ambitions.
    Caitlin’s description of the program on 60 Minutes, a network now almost as bad as the Murdoch empire for rightwing philosophies, shows the influence of the ASPI and Lowy organisations on a weak federal government who will likely succumb to allowing further US use of this country for military bases, the one single fact that will make a grovelling Australia a certain future target for attack. The likes of ex-General Molan represent all that is wrong with this country also represented by ex-General Michael Hindmarsh running the criminal war against Yemen for the UAE in full UAE uniform, still no doubt as an Australian passport holder.
    Subservient still to the UK and their Queen, a weak Australia now takes its orders directly from the world’s most power hungry criminal, the USA.

    • Andrew Nichols
      November 17, 2021 at 18:16

      Canberra would enthusiastically attack itself if Washington declared Australia its latest designated enemy. Its utterly depressing how easy it is to keep fooling the masses.

    • Eddy
      November 18, 2021 at 01:40

      Rex, I take issue with your claim that as a direct result of Australia’s stance towards China, we make ourselves a target. The FACTS are, Australia is on that target list whether we like it or not. We have been on the list ever since the installation of the spy base near Alice Springs, which is hallowed American ground, as our Ex Prime Minister found out to his detriment. On top of that, we have a massive communications base at Exmouth, W.A. allowing direct communications with the U.S. nuclear submarine fleet anywhere on the planet, then we also have the electronics vaccum cleaner facility based just outside Geraldton, Western Australia, sucking up all electronic transmissions and passing them on to the U.S. for filtering, and lastly but not the least, the U.S. bases established in Darwin. Each and everyone of these bases is important to the hegemony aspirations and communications of the U.S. military machine, which cannot function without them. Thus, rest assured, each one of these facilities is already targeted, and IMHO would not last a day, if hostilities were to break out. Every Australian death which would result from such a hit, can be laid directly at the feet of our Politicians who green lighted these bases making us all a target. Notice how none of these bases are anywhere near Canberra, Victoria or N.S.W. clearly, the rest of us are expendable

      • Andy Brady
        November 18, 2021 at 07:44

        You have done your homework! Great little info piece!

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