MONOLOGUE WRITTEN BY CLYDE LEWIS
The other day, I received an alert in my Aftermath social media from someone named Kaje. Kaje was worried about a meme that was going around about a possible war with China and asked me what I thought it was about and whether or not it was true.
Well, the meme from what I gathered originated from a military news site and said: “Chinese State media vows military will show up at US doorstep soon and China will win.undefined
I said that this meme appeared to be agitprop used to raise awareness to the future and what might happen because of Afghanistan.
Agitprop is a term taken from the old Russian strategy of double meaning and the use of magic words, or words that the public are used to hearing and really do not know their meaning or intent.
It has always been used as a form of agitation undefined to get into the minds of people in order to agitate and create fear.
Agitprop or agitation propaganda has been called totalitarian speak as it was used primarily during the time of Karl Marx in order to bolster Marxist techniques and philosophies.
It is what Orwell called, “doublespeak,” or speech with a double meaning and a double strategy aimed at the emotional centers of the brain.
The twin strategies of agitation and propaganda were originally elaborated by the Marxist theorist Georgy Plekhanov, who defined propaganda as the promulgation of a number of ideas to an individual or small group and agitation as the promulgation of a single idea to a large mass of people.
Expanding on these notions in his pamphlet, What Is to Be Done? (1902), Vladimir Lenin stated that the propagandist, whose primary medium is print, explains the causes of social inequities such as unemployment or hunger, while the agitator, whose primary medium is speech, seizes on the emotional aspects of these issues to arouse his audience to indignation or action.
Agitation is thus the use of political slogans and half-truths to exploit the grievances of the public and thereby to mold public opinion and mobilize public support. Propaganda, by contrast, is the reasoned use of historical and scientific arguments to indoctrinate the educated and so-called “enlightened” members of society, such as party members.
The term, agitprop, originated as a shortened form of the Agitation and Propaganda Section of the Central Committee Secretariat of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union. This department of the Central Committee was established in the early 1920s and was responsible for determining the content of all official information, overseeing political education in schools, watching over all forms of mass communication, and mobilizing public support for party programs.
Every unit of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, from the republic to the local-party level, had an agitprop section; at the local level, agitators (party-trained spokesmen) were the chief points of contact between the party and the public.
Modern agitprop is still being used in political speeches and now it is also being used in the media to mold and shape an event so that the public perception is one of agitation and indignation.
The perfect time to use agitprop is during a nationwide tragedy, especially when the tragedy is to be exploited for political action and a strategy of tension.
Now, I am not saying that agitprop is fake or false or even misinformation undefined it is used in order to warn and exhort people into action undefined there is no reason to dismiss it because of perceived malicious intent or because your politics are being trampled on .
I realize the central and inadmissible truth is that everyone involved – Republican, Democrats, media, mainstream commentators – is selling exactly the same authoritarian fascist agenda, and the only difference is the color of the packaging. The “right” is sold theirs in patriotic stars and stripes and tied with a freedom bow. The left get theirs in recyclable fake caring, gun-free green, wrapped in a undefinedI am not a communist undefined box.
However, this meme of concern is a war meme and the meme magic that it generates gives one pause to investigate just how the Chinese can easily open the gate and sit on our doorstep -without anyone firing a shot.
Well let me try to break down the idea of war in pieces.
History tells us that the founders of this country were terrified of one particular thing, and that was that Presidents of the United States would be able to start wars almost single-handedly.
They looked at England and European monarchs, and one of the things they wanted most to avoid was, when the monarchs grew unpopular, they would start a war as a pretext to unite the country and get more popular — even if the war wasn’t necessary. As a result, you look at the Constitution and it says if you want a war, Congress has to give a war declaration.
But of course, that hasnundefinedt stopped Presidents from carrying out war like hits on countries and justifies them as righteous. Such is the case with the recent revelation about how we carried out a drone strike allegedly killing two ISIS-K leaders and later finding out that we killed an aid worker and his children.
Something that has been buried in the news because it shows the incompetence of our leadership. President Biden continues to be an unpopular president and it appears that there is a schism in his own party as progressives continue to put pressure on him to be more extremist.
Many people do not forget undefined nor are they forgetting what happened in Afghanistan and the sloppy way we pulled out of that country.
In one disastrous and grossly ill-conceived strategic move, Biden has armed and empowered the Taliban and elated every Muslim fanatic from Morocco to Mindanao. Not since 9/11 have events so galvanized our enemies — U.S. forces abandoning the field; the Afghan military laying down arms; and the Taliban reestablishing their Islamic Emirate.
Of greater consequence, Biden has handed over to our enemies the geographical heart of Khorasan — the historic Islamic cultural, intellectual and theological center that was overthrown by the Mongols in the 14th century. It included parts of what today are six Asian countries stretching from Iran to Kyrgyzstan. For the Salafi jihadists, the heart of Khorasan is Afghanistan. And for the last several years, the Islamic State-Khorasan (ISIS-K) has been establishing a center of operations there for its global Islamic caliphate.
ISIS-K isn’t alone. The Afghanistan-Pakistan region hosts the largest collection of terrorist organizations in the world, including 20 of 61 groups designated by the U.S. State Department as foreign terrorist organizations. All of them — including Al Qaeda and the Islamic State couldnundefinedt be happier with all of the assets or spoils of war that they have acquired.
Afghanistan is evolving before our eyes into the Asian epicenter of the global Islamic jihad — exactly what we set out 20 years ago to stop, and did stop for 20 years. Now, we’re left watching the slow train wreck that U.S. strategy set in motion.
The ultimate winner of 20 years of war in Afghanistan is likely China. The aircraft and armored vehicles left behind when U.S. forces withdrew will give China—through their eager partners, the Taliban—a broad window into how the U.S. military builds and uses some of its most important tools of war. Expect the Chinese military to use this windfall to create—and export to client states—a new generation of weapons and tactics tailored to U.S. vulnerabilities, said several experts who spent years building, acquiring, and testing some of the equipment that the Taliban now controls.
To understand how big a potential loss this is for the United States, look beyond the headlines foretelling a Taliban air force. Look instead to the relatively primitive pieces of command, control, and communication equipment sitting around in vehicles the United States left on tarmacs and on airfields.
Now think about how Biden literally has opened the Gates of Hell.
Take the radios and communications equipment aboard the Afghan Air Force C-130 transport plane captured by the Taliban. The Pentagon has assured that the equipment was disabled. But if any of it remains on the plane our Chinese adversaries with time could pick those pieces apart one by one.
You now have some or all of the electronic components on that system and itundefineds a representative laboratory; it’s a playground for building, testing, and iterating on cyber-attacks where maybe the adversary had a really hard time” until he obtained actual copies of the gear,
Breaking down the war in pieces gets you thinking about that agitprop in a whole new light.
The Indo-Pacific region is soon to the focus of either a cold war or a red hot intensifying and guaranteed war,
How soon is anyoneundefineds guess.
China, the United States, Taiwan, Japan, Australia, and even the UK are engaged in a dangerous, escalating game. Each is contributing to an ever-escalating cycle of threatening moves and countermoves that could lead to war.
The primary catalyst for this growing danger is the struggle between the United States and China. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. has been the world’s sole superpower. Facing a world that adds China as a major power (along with a strengthening Russia), is something few in Washington are willing to passively accept.
According to War Historian, Daniel Davis, China has not been much of a factor in great power competition. In fact, China was virtually taken off the global stage at the end of World War II because of the severe damage they had suffered at the hands of Japan during the war and the destructive 20-year civil war they inflicted on themselves.
The U.S. and China fought each other in a sharp but brief period during the Korean War—but once the armistice was signed in 1953, things between the two populous countries moved to the back burner, especially given the ascendancy of the Cold War between the United States and Soviet Union.
After the initial Soviet nuclear test in 1949, Moscow and Washington began an arms race that included massive land armies and exploding numbers of nuclear weapons. The world quickly divided into two camps around the Americans and Soviets. China was then a backwards, undeveloped country that was more concerned with trying to feed its people – amidst Chinese leader Mao’s slaughter of millions of his own people – than playing any role in the international stage. The Cold War balance of power was roughly stabilized until the 1990s when everything changed.
Middle East to fight Iraq in Desert Storm, crushing what at the time was the fifth largest army in the world. Barely a year later the USSR imploded and collapsed, exiting the world stage. That left the United States as the winner of the Cold War and in the position of undisputed global supremacy in both economic and military terms. China was then only just beginning to emerge into global markets. Now 30 years later, things have changed.
Following Desert Storm, China made a concerted effort to study the American way of war to build a force that could someday defeat the U.S. military. Over the past 20 years, China has been increasing its defense spending an eye-popping average of 10% per year.
According to the Department of Defense’s most recent annual report to Congress on Chinese military capabilities, China has militarily reached near parity with the U.S. in the region, and indeed, as this report shows, China is already ahead of the United States in certain areas.” By 2049, the DoD report goes on to say, China intends on producing a “world class” military. As is crucial to note in this period of rising danger, however, military capacity does not equal intent.
For example, during the Cold War the USSR had upwards of 50,000 tanks in Europe, tens of thousands of fighter and bomber aircraft, a massive navy, and thousands more nuclear weapons than the U.S. (by 1986 the USSR had mind-boggling 45,000 nuclear warheads) – yet were successfully deterred without having to ever fire a shot. There is every reason to believe that China can likewise be perpetually deterred from launching an unprovoked attack against America.
The continued advancement of China’s conventional military power makes it entirely reasonable for Washington DC to maintain its high caliber global military power and even to strengthen our readiness capacity. But we must be very careful to guard against the mindset that war with China is inevitable, because as humans we realize that such fears can often lead to self-fulfilling prophesies. Already we are dangerously close to such a place and the potential for catastrophic war keeps rising every day.
The Pentagon has added new military bases in the region, requested $27 billion from Congress to expand military capacity in the Indo-Pacific region, and has warned that China will seize Taiwan in the near future; many leading figures in the U.S. openly advocate for giving direct security guarantees to Taiwan. Australian military leaders privately believe a war with China over Taiwan is a “high likelihood.” Japanese leaders openly say they would consider a Chinese invasion of Taiwan to be an existential threat and would join any U.S. war against China.
China regards the recent deal between Washington, London, and Canberra to build nuclear submarines in Australia as a direct military challenge to Beijing. The continued military enhancement of ‘The Quad’ is likewise focused on a potential military clash between Western powers and China – while China continues to build militarized islands in the South China Sea, cracks down on freedoms in Hong Kong, and dramatically increases combat air sorties near Taiwan.
Each move by one party spawns an increase in rhetoric by the opposing side, often accompanied by a corresponding counteraction of their own – which in turn prompts the first party to angrily react and take yet another escalatory action. And the cycle continues.
This is how major wars transpire undefined this is how unpopular presidents use sabor rattling and even all out war to regain their popularity.
But the question is whether or not this will work for Biden and whether or not the people of the United States believe that false flag attacks and the machinations of war are obvious maneuvers to create a strategy of tension that will unite the country as we are completely divided politically.
I wonder if the people are that cynical or if they will fall in line and believe that this is the best for all of us undefined it seems that America has this preoccupation with death undefined and we go from one obsession to another because we are being wired that way.
We all need to be crystal clear on one thing: a large-scale conventional war that pits the United States and its allies on one side against China on the other will be catastrophic for all, beyond what anyone can presently imagine.
Both the United States and China have modern missile forces with enormous range and explosive power, surface and sub-surface warships that can attack targets thousands of miles away, and air power that delivers death from great distances. There would be no “winning” such a war; one side will eventually emerge less damaged than the other – or it could go nuclear, and both could be devastated. Millions could perish as a result.
You may say that you have heard this all before but there is more that is apart from the threat that China has become because of bad mistakes made by this administration and past administrations.
Five years ago, the UK journal The Sun claimed that WWW III is closer to us that at any time in sixty years. “Russia and China, both of which are pumping vast amounts of money into their military, could soon rival the US in terms of power and prestige.
All three nations want to remain a global superpower - if not the only one - and are preparing for war.
Experts have identified several flashpoints across the globe which are today the most likely triggers for such a war. Among those flashpoints are Syria, NATO weakened by Brexit, the South China Sea, the Baltic States and Russia, the Pakistan/India (both nuclear powers) troubles and others.
Two and a half years ago the American Media Group stated that “The Whole World is Training and Preparing For a ‘Mega War’-Russian and Chinese Elites are Preparing For a Nuclear Apocalypse or a Natural Disaster” and added that “World War III will likely be a Nuclear war, involving nuclear warfare, nuclear warheads being launched with launch codes and nuclear bombs being detonated all over the world causing a nuclear winter of apocalyptic proportions” with a mention that the worlds super elites are preparing for just an occurrence.
Not even a year ago we thought we had the problem in North Korea contained, but the screw-ups in D.C. have botched that with Dictator Kim announcing his nuclear programs are back online and recently test firing new rail mounted mid-range missiles over Japan.
Last February the New York Post told the story of a US admiral that warned of a real possibility of nuclear war with Russia and China. “Adm. Charles Richard warned that Moscow and Beijing have “begun to aggressively challenge international norms” in “ways not seen since the height of the Cold War.”
“There is a real possibility that a regional crisis with Russia or China could escalate quickly to a conflict involving nuclear weapons, if they perceived a conventional loss would threaten the regime or state,” he wrote in the February issue of Proceedings, the US Naval Institute’s monthly magazine.
“Consequently, the U.S. military must shift its principal assumption from ‘nuclear employment is not possible’ to ‘nuclear employment is a very real possibility,’ and act to meet and deter that reality.”
The New York Times put it this way, “China is swelling into a military superpower. India, Vietnam and Singapore are spending more on defense. Japan is leaning to do the same. Now Australia, backed by the United States and Britain, has catapulted the military contest with Beijing in Asia into a tense new phase.
Their deal last week to equip Australia with stealthy, long-range nuclear-powered submarines better able to take on the Chinese navy could accelerate an Asian arms buildup long before the submarines enter service.”
Although the new subs won’t hit the water for at least 10 years, it is very worrisome to the Chinese and those weapons they will carry even more so. The recent agreement with Australia did a lot more than just piss off the French; it is a direct slap in the face of the Chinese and directly affects their view as to how they are going to survive in the coming years without taking out their worst enemy.
And we are that enemy.
