香港黃屍在英國的惡夢來了 The Yellow Hongkongers might have their worst nightmare in UK! The Guardian: Jailed for 51 weeks for protesting? Britain is becoming a police state – The government’s back-door amendments to the policing bill are tyrannical. by George Monbiot
This is proper police state stuff. The last-minute amendments crowbarred by the government into the police, crime, sentencing and courts bill are a blatant attempt to stifle protest, of the kind you might expect in Russia or Egypt. Priti Patel, the home secretary, shoved 18 extra pages into the bill after it had passed through the Commons, and after the second reading in the House of Lords. It looks like a deliberate ploy to avoid effective parliamentary scrutiny. Yet in most of the media there’s a resounding silence.
Among the new amendments are measures that would ban protesters from attaching themselves to another person, to an object, or to land. Not only would they make locking on – a crucial tool of protest the world over – illegal, but they are so loosely drafted that they could apply to anyone holding on to anything, on pain of up to 51 weeks’ imprisonment.
It would also become a criminal offence to obstruct in any way major transport works from being carried out, again with a maximum sentence of 51 weeks. This looks like an attempt to end meaningful protest against road-building and airport expansion. Other amendments would greatly expand police stop and search powers. The police would be entitled to stop and search people or vehicles if they suspect they might be carrying any article that could be used in the newly prohibited protests, presumably including placards, flyers and banners. Other new powers would grant police the right to stop and search people without suspicion, if they believe that protest will occur “in that area”. Anyone who resists being searched could be imprisoned for – you guessed it – up to 51 weeks.
Existing stop and search powers are used disproportionately against Black and Brown people, who are six times as likely to be stopped as white people. The new powers would create an even greater disincentive for people of colour to protest. Then the media can continue to berate protest movements for being overwhelmingly white and unrepresentative.
Perhaps most outrageously, the amendments contain new powers to ban named people from protesting. The grounds are extraordinary, in a nation that claims to be democratic. We can be banned if we have previously committed “protest-related offences”. Thanks to the draconian measures in the rest of the bill – many of which pre-date these amendments – it will now be difficult to attend a protest without committing an offence. Or we can be banned if we have attended or “contributed to” a protest that was “likely to result in serious disruption”. Serious disruption, as the bill stands, could mean almost anything, including being noisy. If you post something on social media that encourages people to turn up, you could find yourself on the list. Anyone subject to one of these orders, like a paroled prisoner, might be required to present themselves to the authorities at “particular times on particular days”. You can also be banned from associating with particular people or “using the internet to facilitate or encourage” a “protest-related offence”.
These are dictators’ powers. The country should be in uproar over them, but we hear barely a squeak. The Kill the Bill protesters have tried valiantly to draw our attention to this tyrant’s gambit, and have been demonised for their pains. Otherwise, you would barely know it was happening.
Protest is an essential corrective to the mistakes of government. Had it not been for the tactics Patel now seeks to ban, the pointless and destructive road-building programme the government began in the early 1990s would have continued: eventually John Major’s government conceded it was a mistake, and dropped it. Now governments are making the greatest mistake in human history – driving us towards systemic environmental collapse – and Boris Johnson’s administration is seeking to ensure that there is nothing we can do to stop it.
The government knows the new powers are illegitimate, otherwise it would not have tried to avoid parliamentary scrutiny. These brutal amendments sit alongside Johnson’s other attacks on democracy, such as the proposed requirement for voter ID, which could deter 2 million potential electors, most of whom are poor and marginalised; the planned curtailment of the Electoral Commission; the assault on citizens’ rights to mount legal challenges to government policy; and the proposed “civil orders” that could see journalists treated as spies and banned from meeting certain people and visiting certain places.
So where is everyone? Why isn’t this all over the front pages? Why aren’t we out on the streets in our millions, protesting while we still can? We use our freedoms or we lose them. And we are very close to losing them.
Everything China does is labeled as bad by US & Western Empires / Here Comes China: From Clichéd Debt Trap to Democracy Trap with peripheral hot spots. By Amarynth for the Saker Blog 11-30-2021
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” ― Buckminster Fuller
My thesis is that this is the best and most reasonable position for a Geo-political watcher and analyst to take, now that we are as a world deeply into both breakdown of single, unlilateral polarity and the changes around such an implosion and the beginnings of the establishment of true multipolarity. Here is an example of obsoleting the existing model:
Some will remember that the empirical hegemon broke the system of artibration of the World Trade Organization by refusing to appoint arbitrators. China is getting around this definitively now, by setting up a regional arbitration center with the Asian-African Legal Consultative Organization (AALCO) in Hong Kong to provide more accessible and efficient dispute settlement mechanisms to Asian and African countries. The WTO is being decapitated. (Source, The Sirius Report Source China Xinhua News).
We have never seen what we are seeing today. So, history cannot be taken as a true analog to the move to multi-polarity. We’ve never done this before. The existing models are being obsoleted while new models are being built instead.
A Quick catch up: We had the virtual meeting Biden*/Xi. This is what happened afterward. It is course a cluster bleep as most hegemonic efforts are these days.
In this virtual meeting, China did not yield a centimeter, held fast to their red lines and the 1992 consensus on Taiwan. Biden* again unambiguously reiterated US acceptance of the One China policy. Although generally accepted that the meeting calmed down some tension, it lasted only as long as the publication of the two respective readouts, which were as different as day is from the night. The US readout quoted US law, specifically their own Taiwan Relations Act to continually attempt to define and control their own relationship with Taiwan, as well as the Chinese relationship with Taiwan, and through that vector, China itself. Hegemony wants to keep this issue hot.
Immediately the ‘war against the winter Olympics’ started, and calls for a boycott became ubiquitous in the western press. There is a big joke here, as the US with the UK following is making noises about a ‘diplomatic boycott’ (apparently the important people will not attend), and anyone that wants a moment in the press says they will attend or not. But the thing is, most of them were not invited in their professional capacity. The way this works is that the local country puts forward a recommendation for an invitation to their local Olympics committee, which in turn approaches the overarching Olympics committee and host country for an invitation. So, much of the bravado that you see, is cheap pretense from cheap politicians that were never invited, not even put forward by their own countries. Of course for this one, it’s fertile Mike Pompeo propaganda territory:
The CCP has disappeared reporters writing about Wuhan virus, docs telling the truth about CCP labs, a prof tennis player, Uighurs, Hong Kongers & the head of Interpol. Let’s disappear the Olympics from them & hold it in a place the world can be proud of.
** A short update on these accusations at the end.
Before moving onto Taiwan which still is the story of the moment, take a look at highlights from Xi Jingping’s speech on the ASEAN-China special summit. With China joining the ASEAN as a full member, the Quad has been denuded of any implicit teeth (or outmaneuvered). These are the highlights:
Taiwan, the South China Sea and threatening military action remains the main story of the day, with similarities to the Ukraine and Russia, not in terms of legal issues, but in terms of the pressure points being utilized. From day to day one cannot decide which theater is more immediately pressing.
For those that are still not sure of the history, this is a blisteringly fast 45-minute short history. Yet, these histories are not short as the civilizations are old. For those that want to dig deeper, there is an 8-hour lecture on Patreon from this same historian.
And if you doubted for one moment that China will reintegrate Taiwan, take a listen at the military posture.
And if you think that China is leaving this to stew and brew, you would be mistaken. The Chinese people asked for ‘punishment’ for the Taiwanese secessionists and now we have this: Tsai in hot water for allegedly forging doctoral dissertation, credentials of UK’s LSE
China will not be resorting to military action to reunify Taiwan if they can help it. But the secessionists will receive their ‘punishment’ one by one. This does not mean that China is not ready for military action, it is just that they do not need to do that.
The Hot Spot Category
Honduras
Honduras, one of the only 15 remaining countries with “diplomatic relations” with the island of Taiwan, held its presidential election on Sunday. Xiomara Castro, presidential candidate for the opposition Libre Party who leads in the latest polls, vowed in September that she would “immediately open diplomatic and commercial relations” with the People’s Republic of China if she wins in November, according to the AFP. Her remarks threw Taiwan authorities into panic and made the US uncomfortable. The election meddling squad immediately was out in full force, except that the inexorable pink tide in the Latin Americas now know what to expect and they fought for their candidate.
Open your eyes, some western people fond of accusing China of being “coercive.” should take a look at what coercive diplomacy truly looks like: A visiting US delegation made clear to Honduran presidential candidates that the US wants Honduras to maintain its long-standing “diplomatic” relations with the island of Taiwan. Thus Honduras better play its role as the US’ cannon fodder well, no matter who wins the election, by carrying on its ties with Taiwan, an island the US has no “diplomatic” ties with and which is an inalienable part of China’s territory, to stir up trouble for China, a country the US does have diplomatic relations with. (No, this sentence is not confused, or generated, it truly is the state of affairs and the situation from the entity that now wants to throw a big Democracy party, but cannot get their diplomatic relations straight.
(Although the election is over, the meddling has not ceased and it is still a touch and go issue in Honduras. Election stealing is an art and this art can be seen now.)
Lithuania
On November 18, Lithuania, in disregard of China’s strong protest and repeated representations, allowed Taiwan island to set up a “representative office” in the name of Taiwan instead of Taipei, which apparently went against the one-China principle. Lithuania’s move undermines China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and grossly interfered in China’s internal affairs, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said in a statement on November 18.
China Foreign affairs warned them, and then quickly and immediately downgraded consular relationships to only that of Chargé d’affaires – seriously impacting any Lithuania/China trade.
Solomon Islands
The Solomon Islands burst into anti-China rioting and Australia sent troops to help. It is like sending the wolf to guard the henhouse. In an interview with ABC, Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare said the “only issue” behind the conflict was a disagreement over the country’s switch of diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China in 2019. “Unfortunately, it is influenced and encouraged by other powers,” he said. “I don’t want to name them, we won’t — but we all know who they are.” “Those are countries that don’t want a relationship with the People’s Republic of China”
On Thailand and Myanmar you may follow Brian Berletic on his Twitter and Youtube channel. Myanmar would fall into this hot category, yet, it is more complicated so we will leave Myanmar for another time.
The incessant process of gathering supposed cause based issues to get others to fight empire’s fight, is clearly visible. Given the examples of Taiwan, Honduras, Lithuania, the Solomon islands and Myanmar demonstrates a cold war wanting to go hot on some level, on the periphery.
With this as a backdrop, we look at the Oh My How Glorious Democracy Summit.
The only way that this makes sense is that the word democracy is spectacularly wrapped up as a gift and offered to a list of invitees in order to shore up and strengthen the supposed allies of the hegemon and possibly recruit a few more. But, on opening that gift, there is nothing inside. I will state now that we are probably looking at a spectacular failure for this initiative, but propped up by meaninglessly spectacular propaganda. The hegemon has few cards left to deal outside of the military sphere. The invitee list contains countries that are non-aligned and belong to the non-aligned group of nations. In addition, some of them are full members of Belt and Road. The word ‘democracy’ itself as practiced by the west has reached its ‘sell by’ date.
Moon of Alabama calls it the ‘Democracy Circus’
It is a fact that more than half of the world’s media is owned by the US and the strength in propaganda is disproportionately more powerful than almost anyone. Yet China is catching up.
China followed quickly with their description of a people oriented democracy which is not a one size fits all, as well as the slogan, democracy trap of course in opposition to the many accusations of their work in Africa, generally described by the west as a debt trap. They are following through on this and the English Chinese media is full of descriptions of work in various areas of Africa. The Africa coverage is wall to wall at this time. China’s State Council Information Office released a white paper titled China and Africa in the New Era: A Partnership of Equals. Take a look at the infographics.
China has been modest and in their media always described the US as the biggest economy in the world. They never over-hyped their economic growth vis a vis the US. It is thus not a good message for the hegemon if we now see China overtakes US as the richest country in the world, and to boot, from India.
We end with China’s indictment of the western concept of democracy
From these hot spot countries, as well as the pressure around the Ukraine, one can then start documenting the current destabilization menu of the west as follows:
First, the hackneyed phrase of ‘all options are on the table’ is accurate here. It does not state ‘all honest and ethical options’ are on the table and any goon action will suffice.
Economic sabotage (Syria’s oil and Afghanistan’s money)
Military aggression and threats
Attempts at political and social isolation of countries
Clear racism most visible toward China Lawlessness (sanctions on the 3rd of the people in the world)
Anything is a target and the hegemon tries to appoint leaders for others (Juan Guaidó, NATO coup puppet Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya)
Desperately trying to stand up new alliances AUKUS, QUAD, and Democracy Summit.
And one does worry when at the time of writing, the Swiss Foreign Minister’s airplane gets rerouted to Russia because of technical issues. The Swiss government adopted a brand new China strategy and the minister was due to cover “many areas of Swiss–China cooperation,” including bilateral trade, human rights and multilateral cooperation. https://www.rt.com/russia/541418-swiss-minister-plane-reroute-moscow/. It may just be only a technical fault of course.
To return to the thesis, and the building of a new world while the old is imploding, I ask this question:
So, is the invited list of democracy summit circus attendees a warning to many of those countries, or a real summit?
**Needless to say, Pompeo was not invited and is persona non grata in China. And of course, reporters did not disappear and the documents are available and the Professional Tennis Player is in public doing her work and the Uighurs have a faster population growth rate than anyone else in China and the new Head of Interpol has been appointed. https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202111/1239993.shtml
More fake news propaganda and repeated lies on China. Ted Snider – Antiwar.com: Antony Blinken Attacks China in African Speech, If it didn’t contribute to a second cold war, it would be comical. Dec 02, 2021
He may not have meant it. But that would require an abysmal ignorance of history. Sounding more like a stand-up comic than a Secretary of State, Antony Blinken finished his Africa tour with a verbal assault on China.
There’s nothing new there because the true purpose of the tour was to try to pull Africa away from China and into the American camp in the important new African theater of the Second Cold War.
According to reporting by The New York Times, China has invested $7.5 billion since 2018 in Nigeria alone, one of the countries Blinken visited. He drove on roads that were built as part of China’s Silk Road Economic Belt, a belt that Blinken hopes to cut.
What was bizarre about the verbal assault on China was Blinken’s case that Africa should abandon its growing partnerships with China in favor of partnering with the US because Chinese projects and investment in Africa will leave China’s African partners in debt to China.
In a speech in Nigeria that didn’t name China, but was clearly referring to China, Blinken criticized “major powers” for “Too often” partnering with African nations on “international infrastructure deals [that] are opaque, coercive” that “burden countries with unmanageable debt. . . .”
The comedy is that that deliberate creation of debt has been a major feature of American foreign policy since at least 1955.
The strategic concept was born a hundred years ago. After World War I, during the Wilson administration, foreign policy planners began to realize, what was for them, the exciting idea that to colonize a country, you didn’t actually have to control their territory. All you had to control was their markets and resources.
The weapon now was not bullets but the International Monetary Fund and their ammunition of structural adjustments that used debt to capture a country. The US would provide major loans to a country, then drive up interest rates, forcing the debt shackled nation to turn to the IMF for loans that came with conditions featuring structural adjustments that opened their economy up to American markets.
Third world countries, adopting a word that may have been coined by Indonesia’s President Sukarno, called this new kind of colonialism in disguise “neocolonialism.” Neocolonialism is a new kind of colonialism that does not require controlling a territory. In The Jakarta Method, Vincent Bevins defines it as “the enforced conditions of imperial control without formal rule.”
In 1955, at the Bandung Afro-Asian Conference that would shape the formation of the Cold War non-aligned movement, Sukarno poetically implored his colleagues to “not think of colonialism only in the classic form which we of Indonesia, and our brothers in different parts of Asia and Africa, knew. Colonialism also has its modern dress, in the form of economic control. . . . It is a skillful and determined enemy, and it appears in many guises.” Sukarno was not talking about China.
The dangerous new US strategy was most fully described by Ghana’s President, Kwame Nkrumah. Nkrumah was opposed to Western imperialism and he wanted to rebuild the world economy so that it did not exploit the formerly colonized countries of the world. According to Bevin, by the 1960’s, Nkrumah “rivaled Sukarno on the world stage as the man who most loudly railed against ‘neocolonialism’.”
In 1965, Nkrumah published Neocolonialism: the Last Stage of Imperialism. In his book, he said that “neo-colonialism is the worst form of imperialism.” He explained that “foreign capital is used for the exploitation, rather than for the development of the less developed parts of the world.”
A few months after the book was published, the neocolonialists offered their rebuttal in the form of a coup. In 1966, Nkrumah was taken out in a military coup that was backed by the US. In Killing Hope, William Blum describes the CIA’s complicity in the coup, which took the form of financing, advising and supporting the coup plotters.
Neocolonialism has continued into the present generation. John Perkins, whose job it was to “justify huge international loans” for massive projects that would assure the borrowing county’s “long-term financial dependence and therefore political loyalty” describes the process in The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.
Perkins says that American neocolonialism ensnares countries “in a web of debt that ensures their loyalty.” They make projects look profitable and sell them on loans “so large that the debtor was forced to default on its payment.” In their debt, the US and the IMF could now set terms and make demands on the debtor nation that are favorable to the US. Those demands might take the form of control of or access to resources, military bases or political loyalty and loyalty in voting at the United Nations.
They can also take the form of political or economic restructuring. According to Naomi Klein, when countries were forced to go to the World Bank or the IMF, those institutions saw their “economic catastrophes not as problems to solve but as precious opportunities to leverage. . . .” Seeking debt relief and emergency loans, “the fund responded with sweeping shock therapy programs” that required the country “to revamp its economy from top to bottom.” US aid was only available if the country signed off on those demands. An IMF senior economist who designed structural adjustment programs in Latin America and Africa would later confess that “everything we did from 1983 onward was based on our new sense of mission to have the south ‘privatize’ or die; towards this end we ignominiously created economic bedlam in Latin America and Africa. . . .”
The US made investments and entered into projects that indebted African nations and “created economic bedlam” in Africa. Whatever China is or is not doing in Africa, Antony Blinken and the US have a lot of nerve telling the countries of Africa to trust the US and partner with them because partnering with China will burden them with debt.
Ted Snider has a graduate degree in philosophy and writes on analyzing patterns in US foreign policy and history.
It is rather strange when we ask the jokers, the American politicians we voted in office to provide health and welfare for our people, they always said no money!
But when they send weapons of mass destruction to kill people overseas costing 10s of millions at US taxpayers expenses, they never said no money or asked for our approval. Are US politicians mercenary-for-hire by our Fortune 500 companies? 真的是天太笑話！我们投票選出的美國政客每次人民要求提供健康,教育和福利包括對抗新冠病毒時，他們總是說沒有錢！ 但是，當他們用大規模殺傷性武器殺死海外地區人民時是要花費美國納稅人的錢而且數字巨大數以千萬計時，我们選出來的政客從來沒有說没有錢，也沒有要求美國納税人批准。 美國政客是否像僱傭兵是替《財富》 500強公司工作呢？
A blow back due to our ignorance refused to help Global South, now come back to haunt us big time. Who could expect Kama coming back so fast like a high speed train.
Video: The truth behind US’s Freedom Democracy & Human Rights – GT investigates: US war-mongering under guise of ‘democracy’ inflicts untold damage on the world. 美國自由民主與人權背後的真相 – GT 調查：美國打著“民主”幌子的戰爭販子給世界造成了無法估量的傷害.
How many evils have been committed in the name of democracy?
Exporting wars, launching “color revolutions,” fomenting extremist ideologies, and promoting economic instability…the US has left countless trails of bloodshed and turmoil around the world. While the “model of democracy” lose its shine, the US still attempts to establish exclusive cliques through the so-called democracy summit. To expose the nature of “American democracy,” the Global Times is publishing a series of stories to unveil the US’ four democratic hegemony sins. This is the first piece.
“War is the American way of life,” said US historian Paul Atwood, noting that the US was born, grew, and became a superpower out of war, slavery, and human slaughter.
In its more than 240-year-long history since declaring independence on July 4, 1776, there have only been 16 years in which the US was not at war. From the end of World War II (WWII) to 2001, the US has initiated 201 of the 248 armed conflicts in 153 locations, accounting for over 80 percent of total wars fought. Since 2001, wars and military operations by the US have claimed more than 800,000 lives and displaced tens of millions of people.
Experts and observers reached by the Global Times said that the US, ignoring the objective reality of its own shambolic democratic record, instead attempts to use “democracy” as a pretext to wage war and as a cover for its numerous crimes such as causing humanitarian disasters and destroying sovereign order, is the real culprit threatening the world.
The US’ obsession with exporting war will leave the US with an indelible shame, experts noted.
Complete devastation
For a long time, the US war machine has rumbled across the world, leaving countries in disarray, and people’s livelihoods decimated.
The Korean War (1950-53) resulted in the deaths of more than 3 million civilians and approximately 3 million refugees. During the war, US forces strafed hordes of refugees due to fears that North Korean intelligence agents had infiltrated the refugees, and carried out notorious No Gun Ri and Sinchon Massacres resulting in the deaths of more than 30,000 innocent civilians.
The Vietnam War, which took place from the 1950s to the 1970s, was equally bloody and brutal. The Vietnamese government estimates that as many as two million civilians died in the war, many of whom were systematically slaughtered by US forces in the name of fighting Viet Cong communists.
Data show that US forces dropped more than three times as many bombs on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia as were dropped by all sides during WWII.
According to the New York Times, since the war officially ended in 1975, nearly 40,000 Vietnamese have been killed by land mines, cluster bombs, and other ordnances, and 67,000 have been maimed.
Worse still, 20 million gallons of Agent Orange which contained the deadly chemical dioxin, were dropped by the US army during the war, causing cancer or other diseases in much of the local population.
In the Middle East, the US’ flames of war also lasted for decades.
In 1991, US-led coalition forces attacked Iraq to start the Gulf War, directly leading to about 2,500 to 3,500 civilian deaths and the destruction of approximately 9,000 civilian homes in air strikes. The war-inflicted famine and damage to local infrastructure and medical facilities has caused a huge humanitarian crisis, even resulting in the deaths of about 500,000 children, according to United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimates.
In 2001, the US sent troops to Afghanistan in the name of fighting terrorism. The war has not only killed at least 100,000 civilians and led to 2 million people becoming refugees, but has also left the country with difficulties in rebuilding its economy and political system.
In 2003, the US invaded Iraq on trumped-up charges, despite widespread international opposition, resulting in an estimated 200,000 to 250,000 civilian deaths, of which more than 16,000 were directly caused by US forces.
The US-led coalition also extensively used depleted uranium bombs, cluster bombs, and white phosphorus bombs in Iraq, and did nothing to reduce harm to civilians, Sun Degang, professor and director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Fudan University, told the Global Times.
The United Nations estimates that Iraq still has about 25 million landmines and other explosive ordnances that need to be removed today.
Since 2001, the US has declared at least 91,340 strikes, including operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, which may have directly killed at least 22,679 civilians and possibly as many as 48,308, according to a September report by a British investigate organization Airwars.
“War is one of the key means by which the US executes its foreign strategy and achieves global hegemony,” Li Haidong, a professor at the Institute of International Relations of China Foreign Affairs University, told the Global Times, noting that in the historical process of its rise, the US has always adhered to a militarization mentality and attached great importance to the joint machinations of military alliances in the diplomatic field, repeatedly relying on war to achieve the strategic need to consolidate the country’s sphere of influence.
The ‘prosperity’ arms dealers want
“The US is the most warlike nation in the history of the world,” former US president Jimmy Carter once confessed. The Global Times found that, since WWII, almost all US presidents have waged or intervened in foreign wars during their terms of office, with a variety of reasons for waging wars.
Many countries believe that war is highly destructive and should be avoided, but in the US’ view, war can bring prosperity, and a war can sweep away the inertia of American society, thus keeping the US vital and dynamic, which is an inherent concept and tradition of the elite group formulated in the 240-year development history of the country, Li said.
Behind the militarism of the US is the interest appeal of intertwined domestic special interest groups.
According to data released by the Security Policy Reform Institute, an independent US think tank, between 2001 and 2021 the top five weapons companies -Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman – received a total of $2.02 trillion in US congressional appropriations.
The current US military-industrial complex has become the “deep state” of the US, controlling the policy direction of the federal government through the “revolving door” mechanism. They also spend heavily on lobbying Washington’s politicians and contributing to their campaigns in order to win military funding for profit, Sun noted.
“The goal is to use Afghanistan to wash money out of the tax bases of the US and Europe and back into the hands of a transnational security elite. The goal is an endless war, not a successful war,” Julian Assange, the prolific founder of Wikileaks, said in 2011.
The paper, “Capitalizing on conflict: How defense contractors and foreign nations lobby for arms sales” shows that over the past 20 years, US arms dealers have spent a total of $285 million in campaign contributions and $2.5 billion in lobbying spending, and in hiring more than 200 former government lobbyists, in order to lobby Washington politicians.
“The US military-industrial complex has formed a huge special interest group by acquiring weapons contracts to gain great wealth in the war, which has formed a vicious circle of war, hijacking domestic economic growth and is an important reason why the US is mired in war and cannot extricate itself from it,” Li said.
Li pointed out that US foreign policy has never represented the will of the people because it has long been hijacked by the military-industrial complex and Wall Street corporations.
“The plutocrats are the masters of the country and the people actually have very little influence on American national policy, which is also a classic tragedy of the democratic practice,” he noted.
The spillover of disaster
Many wars the US has waged and participated in have not only left many countries in the position of “failed states,” but have also caused increased regional instability.
Although the Vietnam War ended decades ago, the prolonged war has led to economic collapse, inflation, soaring prices, and dangerous living conditions for the people of Vietnam. The war has also caused a serious imbalance in the gender ratio of Vietnam’s population, with a severe shortage of males, which has constrained Vietnam’s economic and social development.
In the Middle East, the epicenter of US military intervention, the situation is more serious and complex.
According to France 24, in 2019, one fifth of the Iraqi population was living below the poverty line and 25 percent of its young people were unemployed.
And despite enjoying vast oil wealth, nearly 60 percent of Iraq’s 40 million people live on less than $6 a day, the Al Jazeera reported in November 2019.
But in the early 1980s, Iraq was one of the richest countries in the Middle East. At the time, Iraq’s GDP per capita was higher than China’s and it already had good infrastructure such as highways. After the war, Iraq has become a poor country where people’ s livelihood has deteriorated and ethnic conflicts have intensified, Sun said.
Afghanistan is the latest example. According to Al Jazeera’s report, before the COVID-19 pandemic, at least 54.5 percent of the country was living below the poverty line, while in August, the figure estimates reached up to 72 percent.
More seriously, the US’ intervention has shattered the system of sovereign states in the Middle East, making it difficult for these countries to rebuild their national identity. During the war, the US supplied arms to the pro-American faction and labeled the anti-American faction as “terrorists”, Sun said.
“In countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya, the US turned sectarian and ethnic conflicts that were not as prominent in the past, into national issues, leading to the disintegration of the entire national systems,” he added.
The disaster has also spilled over as the chaos caused by the US invasion of the Middle East continues to fester, with millions of refugees flooding Europe, creating not only many socio-economic problems, but also opening the door for extremist threats to be imported into the European Union.
At the same times, although the US has been fighting terrorism for years, terrorism still remains a real threat. As The Times editorial noted on September 11, America’s war on terror has in fact fostered a generation of radicals whose ideology has spread from the Middle East to Africa, where new terrorist cells plot new attacks on the West.
Facts have proven that the US willfully interferes militarily in other nations and seeks hegemony by imposing its “democratic values” on other countries by force. This is bound to bring about its own bitter consequences, Li warned.
Global North (except China) withheld COVID19 vaccines to Global South now experiencing the blowback. 地球北方（中國除外）拒絕向地球南方提供新冠病毒疫苗，現在正在經歷反彈, 自食惡果, 真的是報應, 想不到來得那麼快.
After Oakland Mayor kills defund police efforts, restored full budget, Oakland police established tactical teams to counter “$950 or less, 100% discounts” thieves, robbers and terrorists.
Johnson Choi Biz 