Caitlin Johnstone has been sounding the alarm against the propaganda system's ratcheting up hatred towards China lately. China and Russia together. Two nuclear-armed world powers. Somehow or other a majority of US-Americans support going to war with China to preserve Taiwan's autonomy. And the propaganda system is working overtime to convince people that Russia wants to conquer The Ukraine and that war with Russia is justified to prevent this.
I share her concern and her frustration. Don't we have enough to worry about with COVID and global warming? Why are we bothering with the Washington imperialists' hypocritical ravings about China and Russia? I have no fondness for either of those countries' governments but I also have very little concern about what they're doing. The Ukraine is presently a hell-hole. An economic basketcase governed by fascists. It makes no difference to me if Russia swallows the Donbas Region or turns it into a client statelet. And, really, nobody in Washington's foreign policy elite gives a shit about the Ukrainian people anyway. All this hysteria is meant to justify military spending (huge, private-sector profits) and to harrass Russia for daring to resist US hegemony. With Taiwan, perhaps it really is more free and democratic than the Peoples Republic of China (now). If it is, it would be a shame if it were to be absorbed by the PPR. But if it was, do we really think the results would be worse for the people of Taiwan than, say, the way the millions of people in Central and South America have suffered for decades under the neo-liberal puppets who rule those countries under the protection and leadership of the USA? The reign of corruption, non-development, death-squads?
No. This is all hypocrisy being mobilized as propaganda to justify US imperialism. And nothing else. The same goes for the idiocy of the idiots Biden and Blinken on Iran. Both of them blathering on about Iran's "danger" to stability in the Middle East. It was the USA that set the Middle East on fire, smothered people's movements for democracy and which subsidizes Israeli racism, for decades under Democrat and Republican administrations. Even before his descent into dementia Joe Biden couldn't have articulated why he was so opposed to Iran. The man has always been a soulless opportunist, a hypocrite and an imbecile. The US behaviour towards Iran has been nothing but shameful.
But these nitwits continue to hold sway over our minds. Because most of us simply don't care. We get on with our lives, with all too many of us stirring only to rage against refugees coming to our countries from the lands devastated or destroyed by this imperialism. And, as well, besides apathy, there's ignorance and short memories. For ten years, Canada participated in the occupation of Afghanistan. And both the Liberals and the Conservatives and the mainstream media all told us how we were "winning" in Afghanistan, and it was all lies. And then the USA stayed for ten more years and continued to lie about "winning" until Donald Trump (who had campaigned as an anti-interventionist) negotiated the final withdrawl of US troops from Afghanistan. He did that at the tail-end of his presidency because the Washington foreign policy apparatus would not (and did not) respond well to any shrinking of their evil, asinine interventionism. And, besides, Trump is a narcissistic coward. He just thought the wars were stupid, but he held their victims in racist contempt. But Trump needed to do something for the large numbers of his voting base that wants an end to the "forever wars." He did it because he was desperate and seeking re-election. It turned out to be Biden who would have to oversee the withdrawl. Biden didn't reverse it. He would never have initiated it but since it was now a done-deal, he probably knew he wouldn't be able to revive what had always been a hopeless failure that was now almost universally unpopular.
The corporate news media/propaganda system did its job though. Instead of spending their time apologizing for their stupidities and lies about "winning" and telling their audiences how and why the US mission in Afghanistan failed, they bewailed the fate of Afghanistan's women at the hands of the misogynist, fundamentalist Taliban. And then they moved on as if there were no further lessons to be learned. Leftists and peace activists who were right the whole time are still sneered at (when we're not ignored).
But always remember, we failed in Afghanistan because our leaders are scumbags. Their arguments for intervention anywhere are always rank hypocrisy. And listening to them is a gaurantee for misery and failure.
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