unfounded increasingly absurd australian propaganda is entertaining to see
Idk if bullshit like this belongs in the news comm
It’s such an obvious move it can hardly be called an original idea. After all to these simpletons when was the US strongest? During the cold war, when both parties were united against communism. Therefore they seek to replicate that, but it’s more than that, it’s a way to deflect internal tensions, to say instead of Democrats/Republicans being responsible for a thing it’s uh this big boogeyman, the China threat, de-escalation at home and escalation abroad. With growing internal tensions between parties it is one the powers that be may attempt to push forward full steam, to unite people against an external enemy. It’ll be full blown red scare 3.0 and probably worse than the second one. After all if you cannot unite people based on a common set of values, you attempt to unite them based on a shared goal. or in this case a shared enemy/antagonist. Something that arises out of this is that once you start it, you cannot back down, anyone who tries is labeled an enemy sympathizer, the citizenry themselves become paranoid, raving lunatics demanding that this great evil their propaganda has built up in their minds be confronted and dealt with.
The question now is can this be maintained as a popular front in the age of social media, or have the “powers that be” lost too much control over the narrative now that a lot of our media consumption is decentralized? Of course a large number are going to buy into the campaign, but we’re so atomized and polarized at this point that I don’t think it could ever be an all pervasive thing like it was in the Cold War.
Maybe I’m naïve, but I don’t think that you could create the same unified fervor today in the information age that you could create in the age of everyone watching the same national news stations. I don’t think you could get away with the same silencing of dissent, and arresting people who spoke out against the government as agents of a foreign power.
And yet even as I say that, I know that a lot of the same tactics are still used today. They’re used against BLM and anyone who points out that protest organizers keep getting burned to death in their cars in “random” acts of violence is labeled a conspiracy theorist. And that even if dissenting voices are allowed, it might not amount to anything. There were huge protests against the Iraq war, and we’re still at war in the Middle East 20 years later with no end in sight.
But I have to believe that there’s something different this time. This country is headed for an irrecoverable nose-dive off a financial cliff, and a huge part of the country is already on thin ice financially speaking. I don’t think its possible to distract from internal contradictions on the scale we’re about to see by simply scapegoating an external enemy. China isn’t even involved in any external conflicts, so how do you drum up a war fervor? I mean, you see them trying to throw things at the wall to see what sticks with the whole barrage of “look at what evil China is doing to its own citizens, they’re cracking down on Hong Kong protests, they’re torturing their Muslim citizens, they’re forcing people to work, ect ect.” But how much of that can carry a campaign to manufacture consent for war? Most people struggling through a massive recession/depression are going to look at the calls for war and say, “Why the fuck are you throwing billions into the military budget to go and meddle in China? I don’t care how bad you tell me they’re suffering over there, I’m suffering right here!”
I’m not saying it can be. But that is one of the primary plans being considered and unless very bad things happen it is a plan likely to succeed domestically in creating a very bad atmosphere. Now I’m not saying you’re going to have the same amount of people feverishly invested in this paranoid mass hysteria as you did during the second red scare. I think you’re right that to a point that’s no longer possible. However it’s also not that important. If you can get all the politically interested people invested in your witch-hunt and nationalism then it doesn’t matter if say a fourth of the country or a third that doesn’t pay attention to politics isn’t on board and aren’t constantly checking out what their Chinese neighbors are doing from behind drawn curtains. So long as you can get a certain critical mass of the country to swallow and regurgitate the opinions and propaganda, for example online you can carry out what you want.
The way to do this is two-fold in the modern age, firstly you convince the Democrat-liberals that China is a massive human rights violator, is literally murdering millions of people, whatever so you get them to carry out an actual BDS type campaign against China that inevitably spills over domestically in racism against Asian people (this also serves the dual goal of disinvestment, companies don’t want to move but with enough human rights screaming they might reconsider). Secondly you get your more Republican-reactionary minded types hyped up on the Chinese communist threat, classic red-scare, red-baiting, etc and muh “no freedom” types of stuff. Importantly you use the Republicans and their accusations of complicity or sympathy with China against the Democrats to push them towards your hyper-nationalist positions and racist rhetoric, this was done in the second red scare. Once they’ve moved there you back off with those accusations and allow only the most fringe Republicans to whisper loudly about sympathies in the Democratic party while putting on a united front in public on this matter.
The importance is the invention of the new reality and the manufacturing of consent for that reality. You don’t have to have the citizenry themselves engaged in the kind of witch hunts you saw back then, you just have to have them convinced that feds wiretapping, surveilling, harassing, arresting, prosecuting Chinese and Asian people in the US on dubious grounds is a necessary evil and one they’re not going to push back against. Liberals will boycott Chinese brands while reactionaries lynch the Asian managers of the same companies, liberals of course washing their hands of the blood on them, of the inciting language like calling business people genocide enablers or whatever.
But how much of that can carry a campaign to manufacture consent for war?
You underestimate the propagandized, bloodthirsty, self-righteous temperament of most Americans. One of the liberal rationales for why we had to fight Hitler was to stop the Holocaust, one of the rationales for why the civil war was necessary was to stop slavery. If these liberals are convinced that China is committing atrocities, their history class has already primed them for what the solution to that is, that we must be morally brave, we must confront them before they become a greater evil and kill even more just as Hitler had to be stopped and so on. As to reactionaries, they don’t need much of an invented reason. You point them at the CPC, at China, tell them that it’s run by a Marxist-Leninist communist party, tell them that they took their jobs, that they used corrupt politicians and trade deals to take their jobs, their money, their country’s pride and power and that those commies are killing people and are an asiantic horde on the verge of washing over other nice anglo or anglo-puppet nations? They’ll be champing at the bit to take them down. They’re already racist, they’re already rabidly anti-communist. They’re already rabidly nationalist.
One question is desperation on the part of the bourgeoisie and the imperialists. Do they think that the gamble of attacking China either militarily or with much more open and hostile economic actions will result in a victory or at least better conditions and a truce with the Chinese bowed in submission? Or do they calculate as they have so far that it’s not a winnable scenario and they have to keep trying the atrocity propaganda and other slower, less direct methods because any overt attacks would hasten their own decline? Right now they are desperately trying to gather support for moving manufacturing and other critical operations out of China and to other countries. Because as long as we’re as economically entangled with them as we are we cannot afford to blockade them or stop trade, it would hurt us as much or more than them. But if we can move that stuff out and keep Chinese tech down, then you’ll see some really upfront moves, blockades, embargoes, real strong-arm “do not trade with China or we’ll fuck you up” type stuff.
The second of course is, are internal hatreds between parties too great to bridge at this point even with a full media propaganda blitz? It’s possible the US has maneuvered itself into a situation where while their politicians from AOC to Ted Cruz are in solidarity about destroying China, their voters are too busy ranting about the other party and its members to get whipped up successfully into a united nationalist front.
I don’t necessarily agree with the comparisons to World War 2. We were happy to not take sides and even financially support Nazi Germany for most of the war until there was an attack on US soil. Joining the war then became a matter of national defense. The county wasn’t whipped into a war frenzy out of sympathy for victims of the holocaust, that’s largely a narrative that was created after the fact that was used to craft a mythology where we were the heroes.
There was absolutely groups within the US that were pushing for intervention, and calling for the US to join the war because of the ongoing Holocaust, but these were largely on the fringes. You also had a fairly popular American eugenics movement that was supportive of Nazi Germany, but by and large the mainstream position was that of non-intervention and “America first,” up until Pearl Harbor.
But I know that doesn’t really reflect the larger point that the idea of the American military as heroes that go out and save the world from evil is a powerful narrative that is used for propaganda and manufacturing consent for war all the time. The idea that Saddam is an evil dictator, the idea that Gadafi is gassing his own people, the idea that the DPRK is literally a parody of every Disney villain, and that therefore we must go in and save these countries from these terrors is a huge part of the popular consciousness.
However, these are all conflicts we’ve entered into from a position of strength against much weaker foes. They’ve never required much political capital because they don’t cost much, at least relatively speaking. Most people just don’t think about these conflicts because they’re just business as usual for the American empire. Whatever small amounts of backlash our government does face as a result of this aggression can be managed by these rationalizations about how these are evil regimes that we must interfere with, and that if you aren’t supporting us then you’re supporting the evil dictators! But I think it’s safe to say that for most of these modern conflicts our government doesn’t really ask for permission or even care whether the public approves. They just do whatever they were going to do anyway and drown out whatever small bits of criticism comes from the few people that care about and pay attention to these sorts of things.
But conflict with China would cost a lot. First, because they are much more militarily and economically powerful, and second because as you mentioned our economies are deeply intertwined. As great of a metaphor manufacturing consent is, we don’t actually do a lot of that. We just carry out our foreign policy with very little oversight or scrutiny from the public, and then drown out little bits of dissent here and there. But the scale and resources required to enter into conflict with China would actually require consent to be manufactured on a large scale, and I don’t think you can do that on the back of atrocity propaganda alone. Even getting involved in World War 2 required an attack on US soil first.
And this need to manufacture consent is coming at a time of ongoing domestic crisis. Committing the resources that conflict with China would represent at a time when over a third of Americans are out of work, massive eviction crises are looming, we have a pandemic that’s still not under control with new mutations that might render the current vaccines ineffective, no economic recovery in sight, on top of all the normal and continually worsening contradictions of capitalism, conflict with China becomes a really tough sell. I don’t think that’s a recipe for people tuning out of politics and not bothering enough to care about foreign policy, I think that’s a recipe for major backlash.
The kind of Cold War hyper-nationalism against a rival economic superpower was likely only maintainable because it happened at a time where the US was the undisputed economic and military superpower. I’m skeptical that the same kind of opposition can be maintained by an empire in decline.
I think that every option available to the ruling class leads to failure at this point. I don’t think there’s any way for America to retain its status as a global hegemony for much longer, and I don’t think America can avert its fate as an empire in decline.
However, being an empire in decline brings with it a fresh set of new potential horrors. There’s the very real threat of fascism being turned in on our own population instead of it just being something we export. Or, more accurately there’s a risk of more extreme kinds of fascism being unleashed, since fascism is as American as apple pie and we always have some flavor of fascistic rule here in the States.
But I don’t even know what that would look like. It’s not like we can be more militarily expansionist than we already are, we’re already collapsing under the weight of maintaining all of our current global conflicts. There’s no national industry to revive so that you can allow it to be dominated by whichever flavor of white supremacy comes to power, because our economic frailness comes from the fact that most industry has been moved overseas. And most corporations in the modern era are multinational rather than national, so I’m not sure how many existing corporations would be willing to hitch their capital to the sinking boat of America, and how many would rather jump ship to more stable markets.
I’ve joked at times that America is the vanguard of the international capitalist class, but there’s a lot of truth to that idea. These corporations certainly have a class interest in maintaining the American military empire. But individually, they’re still in competition with one another, and most of them are going to make decisions based on what’s best for their next quarterly earning report. The more unstable America becomes, the more capital flight you’ll start to see. And if America starts squeezing more out of its domestic capital to fund the military industrial complex, that capital flight will only accelerate.
Of course, up till now America hasn’t really had to deal with this problem. The government could deal with liquidity problems by essentially conjuring money out of thin air. But that power to create new money without massive inflation is tied to the USD’s status as a global reserve currency, and that status is also rapidly coming into question. The biggest blow to the power of US imperialism might be the establishment of the digital Yuan as a competing standard for conducting international trade.
I’m rambling a bit at this point, but I don’t see a lot of positive directions for America in the near future. The best silver lining I can hope for is that as the US empire collapses the rest of the world finally has the breathing room for self determination without American intervention. But there’s still a lot more damage that can be done between then and now.
