Caitlin JOHNSTONE
“What we know is that the nation’s top intelligence official says that the US has evidence that China is conducting biological experiments on its soldiers to enhance their capabilities,” said CIA asset and reporter Ken Dilanian on a recent MSNBC segment designed to keep you nice and terrified of the west’s current Official Bad Guy.
“I was somewhat skeptical about this claim, but when I started poking around I found that private American military experts in the think tank world have actually studied this issue and written about it and they have found that there is ample evidence that Chinese scientists are very interested in applying bio-technology to the battlefield,” Dilanian continued. “Picture super strong commandos who can operate on three hours’ sleep, or a sniper who can see twice as far as a normal person. This is the kind of thing that the Chinese aspire to doing, and you know, it’s problematic because in the west we consider that to be unethical, to tamper with the genes of healthy people.”
Dilanian was referring to a claim made in a freakish screed of cold war smut recently published in the Wall Street Journal by US Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe titled “China Is National Security Threat №1”. The piece includes an illustration of a red serpent shaped like the Great Wall squeezing the world in its coils, much like the globe-strangling tentacled beasts traditionally used in propaganda to drum up fears of communists and Jews taking over the world.
Ratcliffe claims that “China poses the greatest threat to America today, and the greatest threat to democracy and freedom world-wide since World War II,” asserting that there are “no ethical boundaries to Beijing’s pursuit of power” and its “efforts to drag the world back into the dark”.
Completely unburdened by any need to provide evidence or even anything resembling subtlety, Ratcliffe lists as reasons we should all be afraid of China’s sinister desire to “subordinate the rights of the individual to the will of the Communist Party” such things as intellectual property theft and the fact that China (like all major nations) often seeks to influence US politics. Slipped in among these mundane and unimpressive claims, Ratcliffe writes that “China has even conducted human testing on members of the People’s Liberation Army in hope of developing soldiers with biologically enhanced capabilities.”
A claim without evidence made by a spy chief about the world being threatened by Chinese supervillains with extraordinary powers given to them by unethical Chinese mad scientists should of course be dismissed with a scoff and a vulgar gesture. Instead, CIA assets like Dilanian are leading the charge to throw the entire might of the plutocratic media into driving this nonsense as far into western consciousness as possible. This ridiculous story has been picked up not just by Murdoch outlets like The New York Post, but by outlets like The Guardian and NBC as well.
Every day there’s more dehumanisation of Chinese people in the MSM. Today, @adamgabbatt presents Trump appointee John Ratcliffe’s racist ranting undigested.
“China conducting biological tests to create super soldiers, US spy chief says” ???https://t.co/F8KUnCJc9R— Anna Chen (@MadamMiaow) December 4, 2020
Truth, as they say, is the first casualty in war. With its emphasis on global narrative control in lieu of conventional military tactics, this is doubly true of cold war.
Painting the Chinese government as a cartoon villain willing to perpetrate any evil to conquer the world and drag it into the darkness, opposed only by the plucky forces of light in our own government, is as transparent a propaganda construct as it gets. If we had an actual news media this idiocy would be called out, questioned and and scrutinized for all the world to see, and the public reminded of the US intelligence community’s extensive history of lying to promote pre-planned agendas against targeted governments.
What we will get instead is a steady stream of increasingly incendiary claims about China being parroted without evidence by the mass media who serve as mouthpieces for the most sociopathic government agencies on this planet. This is because China, like Russia, Iran, Venezuela and the other nations which have resisted absorption into the US-centralized empire, insists on its own self-sovereignty and has therefore found itself in the imperial crosshairs.
There is no evidence that China wants to take over the world. There is only evidence that it wishes to create a multipolar world, which has been the norm throughout the entirety of human history minus the last three decades. People have been told that China is trying to replace America as the global hegemon so many times that they simply accept it as a basic fact, but there is no actual evidence anywhere that the Chinese government has any interest in ruling over a bunch of random foreigners with whom it has little in common.
“One myth I think really that needs to be dispelled is that somehow China is aiming to replace America and going to run the world, and it’s not,” said Chinese venture capitalist and social scientist Eric Li in the John Pilger documentary The Coming War on China. “First of all, the Chinese are not that stupid. The west, with its Christian roots, are about converting other people into their beliefs. The Chinese are not about that. It’s just that–again, I’m not degrading the western culture, I’m just pointing out the inherent nature, the DNA of two different cultures–the Chinese two thousand years ago built the Great Wall to keep the barbarians out, not to invade them.”
Ratcliffe’s screed of sinophobic cold warrior porn includes an illustration of a red Chinese dragon shaped like the Great Wall squeezing the world in its coils, much like the globe-strangling tentacled beasts historically depicted in anti-communist and anti-semitic propaganda. pic.twitter.com/VthDgOXnG4
— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) December 5, 2020
Whenever I criticize the US empire’s aggressions toward and propaganda about China my social media notifications are quickly flooded with blithering imbeciles who claim I love the CCP and think it’s awesome and wonderful. I don’t know what species of brain worm makes people think if you oppose western imperialism it means you love the governments who are being targeted by western imperialism, but it would be good if it went extinct. I simply wish to live in a world where armageddon weapons aren’t being brandished about in steadily escalating acts of insane brinkmanship.
There is no sane reason we should have to live on a planet where governments are waving nuclear weapons at each other in increasingly aggressive battles for global domination. There is no reason the western empire and China cannot pursue detente and work to peacefully coexist on this planet. Most of the rank-and-file public you see babbling hysterically about China online are completely unaware of the existence of the word “detente” and don’t even know it’s an option; they’re so saturated in brain-melting propaganda that they think these standoffs which are seeing more and more military buildup near China’s borders are the only possibly course that can be taken.
Well it’s not the only possible course. We humans, as a species, can use the power of our numbers to force an end to the collision course with disaster we’ve been set on by a changing world order meeting with the perverse neoconservative ideology that US hegemony must be preserved at all cost. It absolutely is possible for humanity to live in a state of healthy collaboration with itself and with its ecosystem, if only we can pry loose the fingers of the ruling sociopaths from the steering wheel and turn our world toward peace and harmony.
With the incoming Biden administration being packed to the gills with ravenous China hawks, it is clear that this multi-front cold war and its accompanying propaganda campaign is only going to get crazier and crazier. Be a voice beckoning the world to sanity.
