The devil you know, and the devil you don’t

The next crisis being prepared for us by our Western media and governments, it seems, is the inevitability of war with China. We’re being told that China is preparing to take over the world (from us, I suppose – what a diabolical liberty!), so that Taiwan is being groomed as a flashpoint, whilst Tik-Tok is being banned for spying on us, or corrupting us, or something.

Not that it’s an entirely new fear. Back in 1973 the Christian singer Larry Norman wrote, sarcastically:

The man on the news said “China’s going to beat us –
We shot all our dreamers and there’s no-one left to lead us.
We need a solution, we need salvation.
Let’s send some people to the Moon to gather information.”

Indeed, there are a number of astute analysts saying that the war in Ukraine, long-prepared by NATO to engender regime change and the dissolution of the Russian Federation as a geopolitical rival, was only ever the first stage of a plan aimed primarily at the far more powerful enemy, China.

What is somewhat taken for granted in these discussions is that China, and indeed Russia, are enemies. That is to say, they are intrinsic enemies bent on ruling us and the world, rather than being made into enemies by constant provocation of one sort or another. Indeed, it is sufficient that China’s economy, based on manufacturing rather than debt and mirrors, begins to outstrip America’s for it to be deemed a threat, even though its economy has grown largely because we buy most of our stuff from it at knockdown prices.

Once again analysts have pointed out the irrationality of this way of thinking, for to insist that our small percentage of the world’s population should, axiomatically, possess the largest economy is to condemn most of the world to relative poverty in perpetuity. Since the Western economy is itself shrinking, our dog-in-a-manger insistence on economic hegemony ensures worsening poverty for everyone else. It is not surprising if China wants to shake off such a yoke.

But it’s easy to fear China, because it’s a long way away, most of us have not been there, they look different from us, they’re Communists, and all we know about them comes from our manipulated media. It’s easy to forget that China has been a civil state for 4,000 years, and a literate one for most of that time.

Now, I don’t know enough about the cunning Chinese political mind to know whether they have any plans to take over the world by force. I do know that they have historically concentrated on defensive weapons that could not do so. And I do know that they and Russia between them have, perhaps, 20 military bases on foreign soil compared to the US and Britain’s 900 or so.

The Belt and Road initiative is said to be a way of increasing China’s power in the world, and perhaps it is. But so far it seems to have offered useful aid to developing countries without the threats and economic exploitation of our own economic colonialism, if the current rush of poor nations to abandon the dollar and join BRICS is any indication. I know a little about Sri Lanka, having a friend there, and in our press Chinese involvement there was blamed for their debt crisis. But in fact Western debt far out-stripped anything Chinese, and it was to meet Western environmental demands that Sri Lanka’s government instituted the calamitous ban on nitrate fertilisers.

Here, though, I want to concentrate on what are deemed the issues that directly affect us in the “Collective West,” and that justify trade boycotts, sanctions and, potentially, a proxy war we can fight to the last Taiwanese. These perceived threats persuade even much of the sceptical community that blames Western elites for COVID, the mainly European WEF for loss of civil freedoms, the US Neocons for Russiagate and, for a majority, the Ukraine war, and the Church of England for promoting gay marriage.

Yet somehow all of these issues, and more, are simultaneously blamed indirectly, and often more culpably, on the Chinese. This to me appears a little double-minded.

And so even as US intelligence agencies and rogue virologists are exposed as being the prime movers in developing COVID and its responses, the Chinese military is held to be responsible for a lab leak in Wuhan, yet without this being seen as one big international conspiracy. Fauci, Daszak and Co outsourced illegal research to China, and apparently patented most of the molecular trademarks of SARS-CoV-2 long in advance.

So did the CPC outwit them to gain a strategic advantage, or simply smile as they were handed biological weapons on a plate by evil morons? Or, tell it not in Gath, were they telling the truth when they said the US introduced the bug at the Military Games in Wuhan as part of their long-term plan to groom China as a bogeyman? Has it, perhaps, taken them this long to realise that the West was actually a wolf in sheep’s clothing? Could the CPC even have been covering up its gullibility rather than its guilt?

It has become proverbial that the WEF/Gates Foundation/Rockefeller initiatives on vaccine passports and digital identities are similar to, and by implication the offspring of, China’s oppressive social credit system. Except that when you talk to those living in China, the mass surveillance turns out to be, at best, exaggerated. It is even seen as a welcome social advance – and if that seems unlikely, consider that Britain has the highest concentration of CCTV cameras in the world, facial-recognition and all, without most people batting an eyelid. It is homegrown surveillance that produces homegrown repression.

Even if President Xi did nobble the WHO leadership, or Klaus Schwab, to initiate these things, he can hardly be blamed for the enthusiasm with which American, British and European governments jumped on the repression bandwagon. I didn’t see a single Chinese face spinning the disinformation at our COVID press conferences or in the House of Commons. Those wielding the batons at lockdown demonstrations were Europeans.

Perhaps it is possible that the undoubted funding of Western Universities by China is so persuasive that academics and administrators alike rush to promote woke causes and censor truth at their behest. But given that even academics are not too stupid to see that woke ideology has no traction whatsoever in China itself, and therefore know that any pressure from China to apply it here would be pure sociological sabotage, then the problem is one of willing treason by Westerners, not subversion by China.

Perhaps most pernicious of all is the supposed threat of espionage and influence from Chinese electronics. Theresa May was pressured by her US masters to ban Huawei here, though nobody has been able to point to actual backdoors that send secret data to the CPC. It’s all innuendo about what might happen, assuming that these wily orientals are out to destroy us. But I suppose it’s at least plausible, given that all governments spy on all other governments when they can. The CIA, after all, funds “independent“ British media to the tune of millions of dollars.

But as for the banning of Tik-Tok because Chinese disinformation might corrupt the population, or worse still be used to surveil and control us, it’s now completely clear, from the work of Elon Musk, that both things are routinely done by our own governments. And it’s not for our good but for the interests of our home-grown elites. I suppose a few malcontents could be persuaded by Chinese blackmail over their private data to become spies. But it’s a far greater issue that our own governments hoover up our personal communications to detect dissidents and silence them if they gain a following, or suppress information that affects the democratic governance of our own countries now, rather than facilitating some purely hypothetical future Chinese invasion.

In short, I smell the familiar odour of projection when increasingly totalitarian elites here warn us about dangerous powers far away. That’s even more troubling when the far off country is becoming increasingly prosperous, and (by first hand accounts) most of its people are happy, whilst over here we have widespread unhappiness and economic and social collapse.

Now, I’m fully aware that there is suppression of non-compliant people in China, including Christians unwilling to endorse atheism, and therefore suspicious to an atheist one-party state. But there are few countries where Christianity is free – churches are burned down in Canada, women are arrested for silent prayer in England, and Christian schools are shot up by trans activists in America.

So I know there are abuses of house church members across China because they regard God as higher in authority than the State. I’m less convinced about the universally-cited genocide of Uyghurs (a claim resorted to by both sceptics and Christians here), because the more you investigate the claims, the more you see the hand of Western propagandists, funded by the CIA’s National Endowment for Democracy. It cannot be coincidental that the experienced UN official sent to investigate the matter found no significant abuse of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, but resigned without explanation immediately afterwards, before an condemnatory report was issued without her name. Was she in the pay of Beijing, or was she ousted because she undermined the Neocon agenda by telling the truth?

No, for my money the most immediate threat to our flourishing is that of our own political system, corrupt and oppressive, and showing no evidence of concern for truth or virtue, let alone people. Once that log is taken out of our eye, maybe we’ll see more clearly what’s wrong with the rest of the world.