A relay station of the western propaganda apparatus: Response to Alfred McCoy

 By KJ Noh

Oct 28, 2024

In ‘Powder keg in the Pacific’ Alfred McCoy is wrong from the very first sentence. He confounds cause and effect, revises history, reverses belligerent and defender, and hard-packs his article through and through with US state department mendacity.

China is militarising defensively because the US is encircling it in serious preparation for war, a war that the US neocon establishment has actually been planning strategically since 2009. These war plans are an outcome of the US drive for global hegemony, itself mapped out in the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance document (“Wolfowitz doctrine”), incorporated into the Project for a New American Century, and which forms the foundational basis of current US grand strategy, its “grand chess game”. The coming out party for this was Obama’s “Pivot to Asia”.

What changed in 2009? Prior to 2009, an important grouping of the neocon ruling elite believed that China would collapse and it could be conveniently exploited until them. China was a Potemkin state, like the USSR, just waiting to be asset-stripped and neo-colonized. Its long term socialist agenda was just “Jello nailed to wall”.

Then a strange thing happened. The Western global financial system collapsed around its own ears in 2008–and Hank Paulson had to ask China for a bailout. That’s when the daggers came out in earnest. No good deed could go unpunished. War, not neocolonial absorption, became the standout agenda.

The war doctrine drafted then, of which there is a public-facing version, is called AirSea Battle. AirSea Battle, commissioned by the Office of Net Assessment from the Center for Budgetary and Strategic Assessment, was derived from AirLand Battle, itself derived from Israeli war doctrine of the Yom Kippur War. AirLand Battle is also known as “Shock and Awe”. (We are seeing flashes of it in Lebanon and Palestine right now). Put it simply, the US has been planning out a shock and awe campaign against China for over a decade. It’s this agenda that China has been cautiously responding to, by slowly building out a defensive perimeter and creating defensive capacities primarily to ward off US invasion, while continuing to try to engage peacefully. China wants peace and win-win relations, but the US wants war. But China will not allow itself to be destroyed, choked out, ravaged by the Imperial powers as it had been for 150 years in the past. It will defend itself.

But what about the terrible Chinese aggression? Well, China has not been at war since 1979, a war that lasted all of five weeks. The US has been at war non-stop, ravaging country after country and overthrowing leaders and governments, especially those that would seek to throw off the US yoke. How about China’s overseas bases? One, in Djibouti, under a UN anti-piracy mandate shared with 5 other countries. The US has at least 330 bases encircling China, bristling with troops, missiles, hardware, and most likely nuclear weapons. How in God’s sake did China put its country so close to our bases? How on earth can we tolerate such aggressiveness?

The South China Sea, you say? You got me. Let’s see, there are 6 claimants to the ocean territory, all six of them have built militarized structures on islands, 5 with airstrips. Let’s take a single point of comparison regarding China’s purported “belligerence” and “bullying”: Indonesia, also a claimant, has fired on (with bullets) and sunk 370 ships belonging to other countries in the South China Sea. How many ships has China sunk? Zero. But watch out for that Chinese belligerence!

They spray water!

It’s only western propagandists–such as McCoy–who are focused on finding fault with China that give us such a skewed and out-of-context picture. China began building its first SCS installation in 2013, 2 years after the US began the pivot and 4 years after AirSea Battle, in response to US plans. But McCoy would have you believe that the US began the pivot in response to Chinese “belligerence”, and that all the subsequent militarization of US “allies” was in response to that. For that to be true, he needs only to enfold space-time over itself, reverse cause and effect, and believe that militarily occupied quislings (Japan, Korea, Philippines) set their own military agenda.

But why the South China Sea? The South China Sea (SCS) is the geostrategic choke point where the US intends to strangle out China and bring it to its knees. Most of China’s fuel, and approximately $5 trillion dollars worth of Chinese trade transit through the SCS. In a paper commissioned by the Pentagon 9 years ago, RAND war gamed this out and suggested that the US needed to go to war sooner–ideally before 2025–and to start it in the South China Sea (part of AirSea Battle). A shooting war in the SCS, according to RAND, would reduce China’s economy by 25-35% and create the conditions for a total collapse.

I could go on, but there’s no end to this impacted colon of mendacity. McCoy is functioning as a relay station of the western propaganda apparatus. The message: “As the US was distracted in the Middle East–trying to bring about democracy–,China took advantage and belligerently expanded and militarized. What’s an innocent Hegemon to do in the face of such extreme authoritarian expansion?” These are fairy tales: Iraq and Afghanistan were part and parcel of the same drive to hegemony, as is the war in Ukraine, not a distraction. What was distracting was the quagmire, not the plan itself.

As the Empire sunsets, McCoy seems to think his job is to hasten a moral dusk, where wolves and dogs are indistinguishable, aggressors and targets are mutually responsible, where overt US belligerence and Chinese defensive measures are equal partners in crime. Under a pasted-on coda of peace-building, pack in as many lies blaming the target as possible. This article is a paradigmatic example of what the liberal manufacture of consent looks like: lie, lie, lie, and then dust the steaming mendacity with a nice sprinkle of sugar at the end.

https://johnmenadue.com/a-relay-station-of-the-western-propaganda-apparatus-response-to-alfred-mccoy/