August 22, 2023
One of the most brilliant propaganda maneuvers the managers of
the US empire have pulled off lately is splitting the debate over US military
policy along partisan lines, with one side supporting aggressions against
Russia and the other preferring to focus aggressions on China. In this way
they’ve ensured that mainstream discourse remains an argument over how US
warmongering should occur, rather than if it should.
Senator Bernie Sanders has a new article out in The Guardian
titled “The US and China must unite to fight the climate crisis, not each
other,” in which he argues in favor of de-escalation measures comparable to
those reached between Washington and Moscow after the Cuban Missile Crisis.
“Instead of spending enormous amounts of money planning for a
war against each other, the US and China should come to an agreement to
mutually cut their military budgets and use the savings to move aggressively to
improve energy efficiency, move toward sustainable energy and end our reliance
on fossil fuels,” Sanders argues.
Which is a fine sentiment as far as it goes, and it’s not the
first time Sanders has expressed this view; last month in The Guardian he
argued that the US government should be focused on resolving the climate crisis
“instead of fomenting a new cold war with China.” But it’s worth noting that
while acting as a dovish detente proponent with regard to China, Sanders has
for years been acting as a hawkish cold warrior with regard to Russia.
Sanders has unequivocally stated that he supports the Biden
administration’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. Within hours of
criticizing the “bloated and wasteful Defense Department that cannot even pass
an independent audit” on Twitter last month, Sanders had voted against a
special inspector general audit of billions of dollars in Ukraine war funding.
Prior to the Ukraine war Sanders had spent years pushing cold war Russia
hysteria and lending the illusion of credibility to the baseless mainstream conspiracy
theory that the highest office of the US government had been infiltrated by the
Kremlin.
It’s not uncommon to see mainstream liberals of the
political/media class pushing back somewhat against the China hawks, even while
they cheerlead fanatically for nuclear brinkmanship with Russia. Mass media
pundits like CNN’s Fareed Zakaria have been vocally oppositional to the mad
rush into a new cold war with China while remaining enthusiastically supportive
of the proxy war in Ukraine and new cold war escalations against Moscow.
In the same way and to the same extent, you see the
political/media class of the mainstream right pushing back against the war in
Ukraine while enthusiastically advocating hawkish escalations against Beijing.
Tucker Carlson has been one of the most virulent anti-China propagandists in
the western world for years, but he’s been critical of US escalations against
Russia and the Ukraine proxy war. Republican Senator Josh Hawley is always on
conservative media arguing that the US needs to de-escalate against Russia in
order to more effectively escalate against China. Republican presidential
candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has been campaigning on the platform of making peace
with Russia to pull it away from its alliance with China, whom he paints as a
tremendous threat and accuses of waging “a modern opium war against the United
States of America” using fentanyl.
This partisan rhetoric from pundits and politicians has had an
effect on the opinions of ordinary Americans. A recent CNN poll found a
significant split between Republicans and Democrats over funding for the
Ukraine war, with 71 percent of Republicans opposing additional proxy war
funding and 62 percent of Democrats in favor of it.
We saw these two partisan warmonger positions clash head to head
in a recent appearance by Ramaswamy on CNN Tonight with the reliably pathetic
Jim Acosta. Ramaswamy said he would freeze the current lines of control in
Ukraine leaving parts of the Donbass with the Russian Federation in exchange
for Putin renouncing Moscow’s partnership with Beijing, while Acosta huffed
indignantly and accused him of letting “authoritarian leaders off the hook”.
“That sounds like a win for Putin,” Acosta said of Ramaswamy’s
plan.
“The real threat we face today is communist China, which is that
much stronger when Vladimir Putin is in Xi Jinping’s camp,” Ramaswamy retorted.
Meanwhile normal human beings whose brains haven’t been turned
to clam chowder by propaganda from either mainstream faction would much prefer
to avoid giant world-threatening confrontations between any nuclear-armed
nations. Economic warfare between nations of immense economic consequence will
hurt ordinary people all around the world, proxy conflicts will amass mountains
of human corpses, and nuclear brinkmanship leaves us dangling over a horror too
terrible to even imagine by a thread that gets thinner and thinner the more
tensions escalate.
Which is precisely why so much propaganda manipulation goes into
emphasizing the debate about how these conflicts should occur, rather than if
they should. It’s not a normal human impulse to support such things, so
manipulation is required to manufacture their consent.
And of course it’s really the same conflict; Russia and China
are in an increasingly intimate partnership because they’re both being targeted
by the US empire, as they both refuse to relinquish their national sovereignty
and refuse to recognize Washington as the unofficial capital of the entire
planet. Both nations are targeted for subversion and subjugation, and both will
be the on the receiving end of US aggressions for the foreseeable future, while
people are duped into cheering for one or the other by sociopathic empire
managers who want to rule the world.
This manipulation by the way is exactly what Noam Chomsky was
talking about when he said that the smart way to keep people passive and
obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow
very lively debate within that spectrum. The empire will happily let everyone
scream their heads off at each other all day long about whether to ramp up
aggressions against Russia or China, so long as they don’t ever start
questioning the need for aggressions at all.
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