Caitlin Johnstone: TV War Games Over Taiwan

Whenever I discuss the realities with most folks I meet, they stalk off angrily at having the propaganda bubble burst.

What happened to rebuilding our highways and infrastructure? I remember joyful Dems telling me about how great the Biden national healthcare system would be. I asked why the leopard would change it’s spots and give us national health care, they told me “You got to have hope!”

Well, I expected more of the same, and sure enough, we now have a proxy war, not better roads or national health care. :-(

Their plan is to avoid the catastrophe of a climate crisis by having a preventative nuclear war first.

Now that’s entertainment!

The bad news for the US is that we haven’t won a war in so long it’s amazing for a country with a military the size and power of the US military. Truly demonstrating the maxim that war is an extension of diplomacy. No successful diplomacy, no successful war effort.

“neocon think tank CNAS”

I immediately thought of PNAC when I first read “Center for a New American Security”.

So, if this Russia/Ukraine war is actually a proxy war for the US and Russia, and this proxy US/Russia war is actually a proxy war for the US and China, then how on Earth is the US media ever going to figure this out in time in order to save a lot of innocent lives? Sort of makes you wish that China and Russia would have stayed out of Iran/ISIS war, which was a proxy war for…damn those neocons.

Has no one noticed how closely Taiwan’s economy is linked with the mainlands?

Clearly the American public is being groomed for nuclear war with both Russia and China. It gets nothing but false narratives, distortions of reality and dead air where memory-holed facts should be broadcast. “Russiagate” was a previous example of the clueless American audience being conned into believing that Russia was subverting American interests, that President Trump was that country’s marionette, and that together he and Vladimir Putin stole the presidency from Hilary Clinton. Of course, none of this was supported by a shred of evidence as made clear in the Mueller Report headed by a member of the same intel agencies conspicuously supporting the Clinton faction. The facts didn’t matter. The American people largely still believed the slanders.

This is what the Saker means every time he says that although Russia may be winning the war in Ukraine on the battlefield, they are being routed in the entire Western media. And, what the media says the American people believe as though it were the gospel truth. Finally, in this confected string of reality, what the people profess to believe in the opinion polls is what Washington takes as consent for and a license to make war against any target of its choosing, whether Congress weighs in with a formal vote or not. Often Washington will act to make war even in the absence of a public consensus on deployment of its military. It’s a stone cold fact that the Congress has never formalized any war with an actual “declaration of war” as is its sole responsibility under the US Constitution since 1941. I guess we have not been operating under that document for the past 77 years, when that war officially ended on 2 September 1945.

Fifty billion dollars and more is serious walking-around money that Washington has gifted (our of your pocket, without ever asking you) to Ukraine to fight its proxy war against Russia. So, Washington is quite serious about continuing to stoke the flames of this war they started back in the Maidan in February of 2014. And that traunch of money is just the first installment on the blank check Zelensky has been promised to fight till the last Ukrainian. Soon Ukraine’s military budget will vastly outstrip that of Russia itself. None of the billions in intel, training and advisory services that the US and Nato provide to Ukraine are even considered in this budget.

This is the kind of wild spending that governments engage in when they see no escape or off ramp from the predicament they’ve gotten themselves into. This also bodes really bad when a government contemplates the use of nuclear weapons to cut themselves out of the tangled mess into which they’ve entrapped themselves. Russia finds itself in the same predicament–an inability to extricate itself from an existential threat, though this was not a war of CHOICE for them as it was for the US. In fact, insane war games such as depicted in this television propaganda piece suggest that the Americans consider such nuclear madness among their first options to end the crisis and pretend they’ve won when, in fact, they will have just engineered the extinction of civilisation and perhaps of the entire human species, whether they know it or not. Clearly this is psychopathic thinking, yet the American government, the mass media and the indoctrinated audience will all vociferously consider YOU to be the crazy one if you should dissent from their mad consensus.

Meanwhile, back at the Aussie ranch…, another interesting CNAS link, vis-a-vis the bidding war between beam-me-up Scotty and a ‘potential reset’ via election of his Labor contender:
hxxps://www.cnas.org/press/in-the-news/australias-khaki-election-campaign-centres-on-fears-of-china

But Lisa Curtis, head of the Indo-Pacific programme at the Center for a New American Security, said: “While some conservative Australian groups may try to scare Australian voters into equating a vote for Labor as a vote for a softer China policy, I don’t think that is necessarily going to be the case.” So, Ms. Curtis knows more than the average bloke, right? Quite symbolically, their link to the original Financial Times article invokes a paywall.

At any rate, a rush to the China war front is on, led by none other than ‘western, defense’ NATO head Jens Stoltenberg. It does seem that ASEAN as well as other area nations are quite comfortably engaged, economically and diplomatically, with the real China, while the sole new belligerent, ‘liberal democrat’ Japan, remains isolated from the friendlier bloc.

Should it be presumed the U.S. is preparing to fight China down to the last Taiwanese? It is not well understood that it is the Americans who are proposing to overturn the current “regional order” by undermining the One China policy. It is also difficult to fathom a “defence” of Taiwan as it is an island very close to the mainland – how are supply lines maintained? How conceivable or realistic is reliance on stand-off missiles from Okinawa or Guam, and how far into a hot conflict do these planners imagine these bases to survive? Is the purpose simply one of provocation – to induce the Chinese to act, and then be condemned/sanctioned/isolated same as the Russians? In general, the military-political complex in the West is a bit more clever than it is smart, and a bit more hubristic than it is clear-thinking.