‘News’ story flood creates consent for war on China

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• Media reports China is already invading India, Bhutan and Taiwan, soon to attack Australia

• The AUKUS deal is not really about submarines

• Instead of providing ‘checks and balances’, media is enabling West’s unfair treatment of Asia

HEAR THAT? THE DRUMS OF WAR are getting louder. It should be abundantly clear by now to everyone, except those who choose not to see it, that the escalating rhetoric against China is reaching fever pitch. Major news outlets and channels from Australia to Europe and the United States of America are openly talking of and in some instances directly advocating going to war with China.

The language being used and the narrative propagated has the sole intent of manufacturing consent for the war now being engineered.  

Astonishingly, after the exposure of the lies that were blatantly manufactured to justify the second Iraq war, the same approach and propaganda manual is being drawn upon to justify this new war.

MEDIA IS COMPLICIT

How do you start a fight and blame the other guy? You need more than just an apathetic and ambivalent audience; you need to convince people that this war is utterly justified, and just, and is the only available option.

To do that, one needs a complicit Fourth Estate to deliver the messaging and engineer enough outrage to create acceptance. (“The Fourth Estate” is a political science term for the media.) For that messaging to be successfully constructed and delivered to the target audience, one needs a plan.

MOVING ALONG THE TIMELINE

Such a plan exists. And we are already several steps along its project timeline. There exists a significant number of people, some of influence, in the United States, Australia and elsewhere, who are now pursuing a concerted effort to try and push China into a limited war over Taiwan.

You don’t need to be a geo-political analyst or military strategic expert to detect the almost daily saturation by mainstream media of alleged Chinese outrages.

Channel 9 in Australia, for example, just last week showed a bombastic documentary alleging that China is about to invade Australia. “Prepare for Armageddon,” the broadcaster unashamedly announced.

Other outlets reported that China has already started to invade India and Bhutan.

Talk about stealth attacks! These are impressive by any standards, given we haven’t actually seen any indication of said events.

Surely Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi would have expressed some degree of anguish if it were true that China was invading India?

AUKUS NOT ABOUT SUBS

It is no coincidence that the American and Australian hawks in particular are driving the growing negative focus on China, with the British piling in behind them, reasserting “Global Britain” on the high seas! The outgoing head of the British Army’s parting shot was a speech warning of war with Russia and China.

Also, it is no coincidence that these three powers in particular are driving this incestuous media feeding frenzy: the trio has, after all, recently given us the AUKUS pact/  defence treaty/  or (as they would have you believe) a “nuclear submarine deal” that addresses the apparent “clear and present danger” of Chinese expansionist aggression.

Their definition of “clear and present” is definitely not the same as most of us—given that the deal will take between 25 and 30 years to deliver the product.

But there IS an actual reason for this deal.

It isn’t about submarines.

MECHANISM FOR ACTING IN CONCERT

We need to deal with reality. There is already an existing range of interlocking and underlying defence pacts, mutual defence agreements, and treaties which exist between the primary players and the local Asian partners and regional players.

But it lacked ease of use. The ability to invoke a pact or agreement as a “non-aggressor” was a complicated process and might actually meet some resistance from otherwise circumspect allies. Therefore the entire interlocking system of pacts and agreements was flawed. You can’t let technicalities get in the way of a good old-fashioned “limited and contained war” to force the pesky Chinese to simply capitulate.

So in comes AUKUS as the new tip of the spear. The development clearly defined an interlocking pact between the Australians, the UK, and the US. This simply means that if any of the three are involved in a contrived, accidental, or deliberate incident, they can call upon each other; and by default, the plethora of other pacts and agreements can be invoked. Problem solved: we have everyone on board, whether they want to be or not!

HAWKS DRIVING THE PROCESS

The stark reality of the direction in which this situation is intentionally being driven requires reflection from everyone. The hawks in Washington and Canberra and London have aligned themselves together well in advance. The other members of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance are also standing together.

The European Union, in the midst of its current identity crisis, has been sending conflicting and confusing messages. Or perhaps they’re learning from their American peers, by introducing the doublespeak of Strategic Ambiguity. 

PUBLIC BEING GROOMED

One of several unambiguous observations at the moment is the fact that we, the people, are being groomed to accept a predetermined action.

Another clear and unambiguous fact is that the Fourth Estate is deeply involved in this grooming exercise. They are displaying a stunning dereliction of objectivity.

The media is supposed to be acting as a force which provides “checks and balances” against great powers – but instead, they are simply parroting their messages. History should judge them very harshly for this.

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Phil Hynes is a regional risk analyst based in Hong Kong specializing in international geopolitics

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READ THE ACCOMPANYING REPORT, also published today: Strategists admit West is goading China into war

EARLIER REPORTS:

Taiwan tension is part of a precision-engineered plan

Asia has the world’s chips. The US wants them

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Image at the top by Max Pixels