Tag: war

It’s a bit ironic that David Goldman, who was once at the forefront of the planned Leap to China, has now turned in alarm to talking up a nonexistent “American” unity between Americans, Paper Americans, Fake Americans, and Not Americans, now that the US empire has squandered its brief period of global dominance on the invasion and occupation of a few of Israel’s enemies.

There is a line of American commentary on China, argued most clearly and persistently by David Goldman at Asia Times (now apparently with Gordon Chang also on board) telling us that we Americans should consider ourselves to be in a Sputnik Moment: a moment in history where, if we don’t stop the fruitless squabbling and begin engaging in some serious, co-ordinated national effort, the ChiComs will eat our lunch, breezing past us in key technologies like artificial intelligence, big data, microchip fabrication, and quantum computing.

The problem with that prescription is that the original Sputnik Moment, to which America reacted with such spectacular success, occurred in 1957, a whole decade B.S.—”Before Sontag.”

White ethnomasochism was not entirely unknown in 1957, but it was restricted to tiny cliques of urban intellectuals.

We could make a united national response to Sputnik sixty years ago because we were a sufficiently united nation. You need that qualifying word “sufficiently” there because there was what people of the time called “the Negro Problem.”

White Americans didn’t think about black Americans any more than they absolutely had to, though, and the race issue didn’t split whites down the middle as clearly and angrily as in what I call today’s Cold Civil War.

Sputnik-wise, we were a sufficiently united nation—sufficiently to co-operate in a colossal national effort with a minimum of bickering.

The US empire is now about as well-equipped to withstand the Chinese challenge as the Austro-Hungarian military was ready to face the Russian army in 1914. No amount of talking up the value of words and ideology and paper identity is going to substitute for genuine nationalism.

Now the professional wargamers are figuring out that the US military is an overextended, technologically backwards paper tiger:

“In our games, when we fight Russia and China … blue gets its ass handed to it,” RAND senior researcher David Ochmanek said during a panel discussion at the Center for a New American Security think tank last week. “We lose a lot of people. We lose a lot of equipment. We usually fail to achieve our objective of preventing aggression by the adversary,” he added.

Ochmanek said the scenarios often end with the “red” – Russia and China – destroying U.S. fighter jets while still on the runway, sinking U.S. warships, and destroying U.S. military bases and other vital military systems.

“In every case I know of, the F-35 rules the sky when it’s in the sky,” said Robert Work, a former deputy secretary of defense and an expert war game analyst. “But it gets killed on the ground in large numbers.”

U.S. aircraft carriers are also considered more vulnerable to enemy attacks. “Things that sail on the surface of the sea are going to have a hard time,” Ochmanek said.

The Chinese would “attack the American battle network at all levels, relentlessly, and they practice it all the time,” Work said. “On our side, whenever we have an exercise, when the red force really destroys our command and control, we stop the exercise and say, ‘Let’s restart.’”

There is a widespread assumption that paints America as a leading military power who wins handily in any wartime scenario, Ochmanek pointed out.

However, he noted that this isn’t the case, and people are shocked to learn the truth – that all five warfare domains are contested.

“We do not have air superiority over the ballast space at the outset of these wars. We do not have maritime superiority. Our space assets are under attack with kinetic and non-kinetic means. Our command-and-control is under attack by electromagnetic attacks and cyber,” he continued.

The “brain and the nervous system that connects all of these pieces is suppressed, if not shattered,” Ochmanek said.

He also explained that the forward bases U.S. forces operate from are eliminated in war scenarios, taking away critical points of operation; researchers are unsure of what that means for America’s fate.

U.S. bases in Europe also pose a vulnerability due to their scattered proximity and insufficient defense capabilities.

“If we went to war in Europe, there would be one Patriot battery moving, and it would go to Ramstein [in Germany]. And that’s it,” Work noted. “We have 58 Brigade Combat Teams, but we don’t have anything to protect our bases. So what difference does it make?”

The researchers stressed that a military defeat is imminent unless the U.S. employs a major change in strategy.

Even these gloomy predictions are optimistic. The truth is that the F-35 does not rule the skies, as the 5th-Gen Russian fighters are proving to be superior in practice to the USAF’s ill-designed superplane. The US empire is failing and will collapse within 13 years, most likely within 10, although the core polity should survive until 2033.

That may still sound shocking now, but it probably won’t even strike most intelligent observers as much of a surprise by the time it happens.

It’s not a good sign that every argument in support of the USA’s continued global ascendancy is based on pure theory:

In a recently published book, Why Nations Fail, economists Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson characterize China’s ruling elites as “extractive”—parasitic and corrupt—and predict that Chinese economic growth will soon falter and decline, while America’s “inclusive” governing institutions have taken us from strength to strength. They argue that a country governed as a one-party state, without the free media or checks and balances of our own democratic system, cannot long prosper in the modern world. The glowing tributes this book has received from a vast array of America’s most prominent public intellectuals, including six Nobel laureates in economics, testifies to the widespread popularity of this optimistic message.

First, there is no ruling elite as extractive and parasitic, and few as observably corrupt, as the current US ruling elite.. Second, these theoretical strengths are mostly imaginary and based on the historical American posterity rather than actual US demographics. Consider the reality:

Over the last few years one of the most ambitious Chinese projects has been a plan to create the world’s largest and most advanced network of high-speed rail transport, an effort that absorbed a remarkable $200 billion of government investment. The result was the construction of over 6,000 miles of track, a total probably now greater than that of all the world’s other nations combined.

Meanwhile, America has no high-speed rail whatsoever, despite decades of debate and vast amounts of time and money spent on lobbying, hearings, political campaigns, planning efforts, and environmental-impact reports. China’s high-speed rail system may be far from perfect, but it actually exists, while America’s does not. Annual Chinese ridership now totals over 25 million trips per year.

Of course, the most significant development of the last decade is one that has gone almost entirely unnoticed by everyone, which is of course, the Chinese rejection of one faction of the US ruling elite’s gracious offer to transfer the benefits of their wise and impartial guidance from the USA to China. It would appear the Chinese elite is content with their extant extractive abilities.

It increasingly appears that Ron Unz had it right back in 2012 when he cast his vote with Richard Lynn:

Richard Lynn, a prominent British scholar, has been correct in predicting for a decade or longer that the global dominance of the European-derived peoples is rapidly drawing to its end and within the foreseeable future the torch of human progress and world leadership will inevitably pass into Chinese hands.

I don’t know about you, but I, for one, hope that other dark meat tastes a lot better than it looks.

But, as Ron Unz has observed, in matters of international import, the Chinese government and media have repeatedly been proven to be more honest than the US government and media:

Few Americans remember our 1999 attack upon the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, and if not for the annual waving of a bloody June 4th flag by our ignorant and disingenuous media, the “Tiananmen Square Massacre” would also have long since faded from memory. Neither of these events has much direct importance today, at least for our own citizens. But the broader media implications of these examples do seem quite significant.

These incidents represented two of the most serious flashpoints between the Chinese and American governments during the last thirty-odd years. In both cases the claims of the Chinese government were entirely correct, although they were denied by our own top political leaders and dismissed or ridiculed by virtually our entire mainstream media. Moreover, within a few months or a year the true facts became known to many journalists, even being reported in fully respectable venues. But that reality was still completely ignored and suppressed for decades, so that today almost no American whose information comes from our regular media would even be aware of it. Indeed, since many younger journalists draw their knowledge of the world from these same elite media sources, I suspect that many of them have never learned what their predecessors knew but dared not mention.

Most leading Chinese media outlets are owned or controlled by the Chinese government, and they tend to broadly follow the government line. Leading American media outlets have a corporate ownership structure and often boast of their fierce independence; but on many crucial matters, I think the actual reality is not so very different from that in China.

I tend to doubt that Chinese leaders have any overwhelming commitment to the truth, and the reasons for their greater veracity are probably practical ones. American news and entertainment completely dominate the global media landscape and they face no significant domestic rival. So China recognizes that it is vastly outmatched in any propaganda conflict, and as the far weaker party must necessarily try to stick closer to the truth, lest its lies be immediately exposed. Meanwhile, America’s overwhelming control over global information may inspire considerable hubris, with the government sometimes promoting the most outrageous and ridiculous falsehoods in the confident belief that a supportive American media will cover for any mistakes.

These considerations should be kept in mind as we attempt to sift the accounts of our often unreliable and dishonest media in hopes of extracting the true circumstances of the current coronavirus epidemic. Unlike careful historical studies, we are working in real-time and our analysis is greatly hindered by the ongoing fog of war, so that any conclusions are necessarily very preliminary ones. But given the high stakes, such an attempt seems warranted.

Read the whole thing, as it is a very good analysis of the present situation regarding the coronavirus and some of the vagaries concerning what is believed to be the original outbreak in Wuhan. The big difference today, an important factor that Unz did not include in his analysis, is that the US government and media are no longer in alignment as before, since the Deep State + US media is in direct conflict with both the Trump administration and the Chinese government + Chinese media.

Unz’s conclusion is that the virus was a nominally US biological attack on China and Iran that hit the US as an unintended backlash. He notes, significantly:

One intriguing aspect of the situation was that almost from the first moment that reports of the strange new epidemic in China reached the international media, a large and orchestrated campaign had been launched on numerous websites and Social Media platforms to identify the cause as a Chinese bioweapon carelessly released in its own country. Meanwhile, the far more plausible hypothesis that China was the victim rather than the perpetrator had received virtually no organized support anywhere, and only began to take shape as I gradually located and republished relevant material, usually drawn from very obscure quarters and often anonymously authored. So it seemed that only the side hostile to China was waging an active information war. The outbreak of the disease and the nearly simultaneous launch of such a major propaganda campaign may not necessarily prove that an actual biowarfare attack had occurred, but I do think it tends to support such a theory.

But we cannot and should not rule out evil intent and the possibility that the “unintended backlash” was actually an intended bonus. Because another element that needs to be explained is the bizarre “incompetence” of the CDC, which has repeatedly acted in a manner guaranteed to enhance rather than restrict the spread of the virus, as well as the strange attempts by Democratic governors in New York and Michigan to criminalize medical treatments and reject medical equipment. And it is this purported incompetence, in combination with the strange tangential transmission to the Iranian leadership, that tends to indicate the coronavirus as a coordinated Deep State attack on China, Iran, the Trump administration, and the American people.

It would appear the Chinese have inadvertently discovered how to break the chains of global US hegemony, as both Pat Buchanan and The Saker are both contemplating the same potential consequences of Corona-chan:

Seeing what happened on the carrier Theodore Roosevelt, the coronavirus could have a major impact on U.S. global commitments.

Americans were already coming home from the Middle East, drawing down our 12,000 troops in Afghanistan after a deal with the Taliban, and moving our 5,000 troops in Iraq into fewer bases.

We have disengaged from the Saudi war against the Houthi rebels in Yemen and are drawing down our forces in Syria.

In Libya’s civil war, it is Russians, Turks, Egyptians and Gulf Arabs, not Americans, who are the supporting actors.

American soft power is also in retreat from the world.

Some 10,000 Peace Corps volunteers have been brought home. Scores of thousands of U.S. citizens have been repatriated by the State Department. We have shut the door to Europe, China, the world.

What now becomes of the U.S. geostrategic “pivot,” the shift of planes, troops, ships and bases from the Middle and Near East to the Indo-Pacific theater to contain a rising China?

And contain China with what?

The Roosevelt has been ravaged by the coronavirus. As of Tuesday, 589 cases of COVID-19 were reported from a crew of 4,800. Four thousand sailors in Guam are in various stages of a 14-day isolation period in hotels and spare rooms across the island.

But it is not just the Roosevelt. Every U.S. warship — carriers, cruisers, frigates, destroyers, subs — has cramped quarters conducive to the spread of the coronavirus.

How many of these vessels will soon be doubling as hospital ships?

The same question might also be asked of the U.S. Army and Marine barracks in South Korea, Japan, Australia and Okinawa.

There are allegations that the coronavirus did not originate in the Wuhan “wet market” where bats are sold for food but instead escaped through a horrible blunder in a Chinese bioweapons laboratory a few miles away.

Whatever the truth, the Wuhan virus appears to have become the most effective means of disabling U.S. hard and soft power that we have encountered in many a decade.

The Saker observes that carrier diplomacy is no longer an option when an entire carrier group can be disabled by arranging to infect a single sailor on shore leave.

First, the obvious: USN carriers cannot operate effectively under a bio-attack (a truly weaponized virus would both be much more transmissible than SARS-COV-2 and it would be far more deadly). This also indicates that they would probably do no better under a real chemical warfare attack either.

Considering that in reality USN carriers are a instrument of colonial repression and not ships to be engaged against the USSR (which had real biowarfare capabilities), this makes sense (while most university labs & the like could produce some kind of virus and use it as a weapon, truly weaponized viruses, the kind effectively used in special delivery systems, can only be produced by a limited list of countries). However, in theory, all the formations/units/subunits/ships/aircraft/armor/etc of a military superpower should be trained to operate in case of a nuclear, chemical and biological attack. Clearly, this is not the case with US carriers, most likely because nobody in the USA really expected such an attack, at least not during the Cold War.

For the current situation, however, I think that the lesson is clear: the USN simply does not have an effective capability to operate under NBC attack conditions.

Hint: he’s not talking about Corona-chan….

The Chinese do not appear to be inclined to maintain the globalist media’s nonsensical cover stories concerning corona-chan and other matters:

A Chinese foreign ministry official pushed a conspiracy theory the U.S. army may have had a role in spreading the virus, highlighting growing tensions between the world’s biggest economies as both governments seek to deflect blame for the outbreak.

“It might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan,” Zhao Lijian, a foreign ministry spokesman, said in a tweet. “Be transparent! Make public your data! US owe us an explanation!”

He later followed up with another tweet urging his 284,000 followers to share an article arguing that the virus originated in the U.S. It was posted on a website promoting conspiracy theories, including articles lambasting the “Vaccine Deep State” and questioning whether Osama bin Laden ever existed.

On Friday in Beijing, Geng Shuang, another spokesman for the foreign ministry, said that “international society, including the U.S., has different opinions about the source of the virus. But China always believes that this is a matter of science which requires professional and scientific assessment.”

Geng was asked twice if the earlier tweets by his colleague, Zhao, represented the view of the Chinese government. “I think you may want to ask certain senior U.S. officials — did they speak on behalf of the U.S. government when they attacked and smeared China recently?” he said in response to one question.

“What I said represents the Chinese government’s attitude,” he said, in response to the other.

With the coronavirus spreading from China into the U.S. and around the world, both nations are trading tit-for-tat claims about its origins. While it’s unclear whether Zhao was being facetious, earlier this month he became the first official in China to suggest that the virus didn’t originate there, even though he hasn’t provided any evidence for that claim.

Conspiracy theorists are well aware that the COVID-19 virus wasn’t made in China. And it would be very interesting to see how well the globalists are able to maintain their ever-shifting narratives if the Chinese government – which knows perfectly well how fake those narratives are – decides to systematically demolish them.

Because worldwide pandemics starting because someone ate a bat, no, wait, a pangolin, are so much more convincing than biowarfare.

The recent Turko-Russian war you didn’t hear about:

Over the course of a week, from February 27 through March 5, Syria’s Idlib province transitioned from being ground zero for a war between the Syrian army and allied forces, and heavily armed groups opposed to the rule of Syrian President Bashar Assad, into a geopolitical powder keg that threatened to pull the Turkish and Russian militaries into direct conflict with one another. On March 1, Turkey, following up on threats previously made by President Erdogan to drive the Syrian Army and its allies back to the line of demarcation set forth in the original Sochi Agreement, unleashed a major offensive, dubbed “Operation Spring Shield” and involving thousands of Turkish troops fighting alongside anti-Assad formations.

This operation soon fizzled; not only was the Turkish advance halted in its tracks, but the Syrian Army, supported by Hezbollah and pro-Iranian militias, were able to recapture much of the territory lost in the earlier fighting. Faced with the choice of either escalating further and directly confronting Russian forces, or facing defeat on the battlefield, Erdogan instead flew to Moscow.

The new additional protocol, which entered into effect at midnight Moscow time on Friday, March 6, represents a strategic defeat for Erdogan and the Turkish military which, as NATO’s second-largest standing armed force, equipped and trained to the highest Western standards, should have been more than a match for a rag-tag Syrian Army, worn down after nine years of non-stop combat. The Syrian armed forces, together with its allies, however, fought the Turks to a standstill. Moreover, the anti-Assad fighters that had been trained and equipped by the Turks proved to be a disappointment on the battlefield.

One of the major reasons behind the Turkish failure was the fact that Russia controlled the air space over Idlib, denying the Turks the use of aircraft, helicopters and drones, while apparently using their own aircraft, together with the Syrian Air Force, to pummel both the Turkish military and their allied anti-Assad forces. In the end, the anti-Assad fighters were compelled to take shelter within so-called ‘Observation posts’– heavily fortified Turkish garrisons established under the Sochi Agreement, intermingling with Turkish forces to protect themselves from further attack. Operation Spring Shield turned out to be a resounding defeat for the Turks and their allies.

This marks the second time in two years that Russia has orchestrated the defeat of a concentrated anti-Assad military action, and done so without triggering the US-Russian war that the neocons are desperately hoping to spark.

It also offers more evidence that the US military’s capabilities are more limited than anyone presently understands. The US military and its allies have been heavily dependent upon air supremacy since 1944, but that is no longer necessarily the case.

What part of the tautology is hard for people to understand?

Europe has been put to test after Turkey provided free passage for scores of migrants heading westward, Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said, describing Ankara’s move as an “attack on the EU.”

The latest move by Turkey to allow migrants to leave its territory over the weekend was an attack “on the European Union and Greece,” and also a “test for the EU,” Kurz said on Tuesday. If European countries cave in to Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s pressure, then 13,000 migrants desperately waiting at the EU border will only be “the beginning,” the Austrian Chancellor warned. According to Kurz, the migrants that amassed on the Greek border didn’t come from the war-ravaged parts of Syria as their exodus was “deliberately organized” by Turkey.

Germany’s former defense minister and European Commission’s sitting chief Ursula von der Leyen said that allowing potentially millions of migrants to enter Europe “cannot be an answer or solution” to Turkey’s problems in Syria.

Meanwhile, Greek authorities who struggled to hold back the wave on their borders, described it as “an invasion.” Greek police fired tear gas at migrants attempting to storm the border fence, while the coast guard tried to stop refugee dinghies by pushing them away outside the country’s southern islands.

Immigration has always been war. Whether it was the Mongols migrating to India, the Germans migrating to Italy, the Goths migrating to Byzantium, the Normans migrating to England, the Europeans migrating to the Americas, the Japanese migrating to China, the Germans migrating to Eastern Europe, or the Jews migrating to Canaan, the result has always been military occupation, followed by the large-scale slaughter and suppression of the native population.

And because immigration is war, open borders is surrender.

The globalist media is attacking Greece for defending its borders against hundreds of thousands of hostile invaders:

Greek border police have shot dead a Syrian migrant attempting to reach Europe as clashes grow following Turkey’s announcement that the border was “open.”

The Greek border is being besieged by thousands of migrants convinced they can reach EU welfare havens following Ankara’s decision to stand down. Following clashes that saw migrants pelt police with rocks and other objects, one victim was shot through the mouth and died at the scene.

 “Open war is upon you whether you would risk it nor not.”