China Firing Back in New Cold War

The question of why China would let the Libyan resolution pass through the UN Security Council without exercising its veto is a good one, and one that I didn’t answer adequately in that short segment. The full answer involves an understanding that the “war” in “cold war” is more analogous than literal.

The Chinese are not stupid, and they understand that the fall of the Soviet Union was not due to a grand military confrontation but an economic collapse. That collapse, in hindsight, was inevitable: the Soviet economy was broken and pathetic, and a greater and greater percentage of that economy was being shunted off into the unwinnable, never-ending war in Afghanistan The people were tired of decades of repression and deprivation and they cheered on the overthrow of the Soviet empire.

Similarly, the American economy has long been teetering on collapse, saved only by the petrodollar hegemony that has ensured the Treasury’s ability to sell as much debt as it needs to keep the empire running. Now the dollar is a reserve in name only, and the unbelievable lengths that Geithner and Bernanke are going to in order to keep the economy limping along—from buying up their own treasuries to selling puts on those treasuries to threatening default if the Congress cuts off their debt-supply—signals the last gasp of a financial system in terminal decline. Add to that a defense budget that is now topping $1 trillion a year and the idea that the Chinese are happy to let America continue expanding their military commitments around the world begins to make sense.

The truth is that the Chinese are not sitting idly by while NATO destabilizes Africa and attempts to create the turmoil that would justify a stronger AFRICOM. They have already fired their shots in this cold war. Last week alone, the BRICS countries were turning up the heat on the US dollar, and the China Development Bank, for one, struck out. They announced a new 10 billion yuan loan fund for their BRICS allies denominated in local currencies, not dollars. More and more bilateral trade agreements, oil bourses and markets are being set up without any need for Federal Reserve Notes. And the Chinese still hold over a trillion dollars in US treasuries, the dumping of which could be the final nail in the coffin for the dollar. 

The False Choice: The Enemy of Your Enemy is Not Your Friend

Average observers of these geopolitical manoeuvres and economic power plays—that is, the vast majority of the public of every nation who are not invested in the corporate-financial-military oligarchy—might find themselves at a loss as to what to do about this global spectacle, or even what to think about it. Should Americans be rooting for the bombing of Libyan civilians? If not, does that mean they should be with the Chinese (and let’s not forget the Russians) in trying to encourage the collapse of the American financial empire? But what about the hundreds of millions around the world who will inevitably be thrust further into poverty by this economic turmoil, and the millions who are expected to die as food prices continue to rise in line with oil?

The trick, of course, is that this entire line of thinking, the either/or that is generally presented as the only alternatives in these situations, is a false choice. In a shell game it doesn’t matter which shell you pick; you’re going to lose in any event. Similarly in a false conflict it doesn’t matter which side you support: you’re going to suffer in the end.

This is not just a situation that has come about by happenstance; the entire West-East conflict that seems headed toward a grand confrontation and World War III has been engineered by the international financiers who are interested in nothing but increased control for themselves. This is nowhere more evident than in China.

“Whatever the price of the Chinese Revolution, it has obviously succeeded not only in producing more efficient and dedicated administration, but also in fostering high morale and community of purpose. The social experiment in China under Chairman Mao’s leadership is one of the most important and successful in human history.” — David Rockefeller, The New York Times, August 10, 1973.

In truth, Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” was one of the greatest slaughters in human history, with an incomprehensible 45 million Chinese being “worked, starved or beaten to death” in the four years from 1958 to 1962 alone. But in the eye of the Rockefeller-fronted American financial power elite, a man who slaughters tens of millions of his own people should be lauded for “efficient and dedicated administration” and “fostering high morale” while Libyan civilians need to be bombed for Qaddafi’s mortal sin of fighting back against the US-funded, Al Qaeda-linked insurgency attempting to overthrow him.

The seeming paradox of this hypocrisy vanishes when one realizes that the Communist Chinese (like Soviet Russia before it) is the apple of the globalists’ eye, something that they have fostered, funded and promoted since its inception and deliberately positioned to be the leader of the world economy in our current era.

In January 1969, shortly after taking office, Richard Nixon met with Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller’s chief underling, and got word that the establishment desired the “normalization” of relations with China. Immediately, Nixon abandoned years of hard-line anti-communist rhetoric and began working toward the historic 1972 visit and the resumption of diplomatic relations between the two countries. The year before that visit Kissinger had secretly visited China to soften the way, and the year after Rockefeller himself visited as Chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank to establish the first U.S. correspondent bank to the Bank of China. Time Magazine wrote an article about that visit that noted that Chase had also become the first U.S. bank to open an office in Soviet Russia earlier that same year, noting that “the Communists, who like to deal with the topmost people, are captivated by the very name of Rockefeller.”

When Rockefeller visited Chinese President Jiang Zemin in the wake of 9/11, he called the U.S.-China relationship “the most important bilateral relations in the world” and the Chinese press noted that Zemin “expressed appreciation for Rockefeller’s contributions to Sino-U.S. relations.”

In the 1990s, even as the international trade agreements that would see the rise to dominance of China were being hammered out, the Clinton Administration helped a Chinese-owned shipping company in its bid to lease the old U.S. Naval base in Long Beach, California, a deal that Congress nixed. Clinton also personally approved the transfer of radiation-hardened chip sets in 1996, advanced technology that could be used in nuclear warfare.

Throughout the decade, as the Chinese economic juggernaut began to grow, international financiers like George Soros began promoting it as the economic model for the rest of the world (see this and this and this and this). And a full decade and a half (at least) after tax breaks and other perks helped to incentivize the outsourcing of jobs from the industrialized world to China, a new study has just “discovered” that America has lost most of its jobs to China.

The Chinese threat is just another version of the red scare, or the Nazis, or Al Qaeda, or any of the other “menaces” to the West that have sprung up in the past century: an enemy fostered, funded and propped up by the international financial elite in order to provide the opposition in this geopolitical shell game. The public is then presented with two choices as a fait accompli: side with the NATO forces of imperial militarism, or choose to side with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. 

The Only Way to Win the Game is Not to Play

When we pull back from the geopolitical grand chessboard we find that it is in fact one player, the global financial elite, playing both sides. Whether you root for black or white, the elite will win in the end. In the face of such a false choice, the only real choice is not to choose at all.

Surely we can’t condone the bombing of Libyan civilians, and it makes no sense to side with a brutal communist dictatorship that enforces one child policies with forced abortions and harvests the organs of its prisoners. So we must identify ourselves as not being on either side. Depending where we live, who we work for, and how we spend our money, we may be tied to one side or the other, whether financially or socially, but that does not mean that we must continue to give our allegiance to any of these global power players in their Machiavellian manipulations of the planet.

Although it may not be as fundamentally satisfying to us as human beings, geared as we are to confrontation and battle as a way of resolving our problems, the best thing we can do is in fact to ignore the big players all together, withdraw ourselves from their system, and begin constructing our own self-sufficient communities. Everyday we make a conscious decision of our own free will to shop at their stores, to bank at their banks, and to eat the foods they process in their factories. With changes in lifestyle, we can detach ourselves from all of their levers of control over our lives and at the exact same time starve their war machine of the funds and the support that it needs to function.

As others have pointed out time and again, every community garden, every farmer’s market, every solar panel, every community currency, every neighborhood mutual aid society is a monkey wrench in the plans for the global war and a nail in the coffin of the ambitions of the globalists.

Unhooking ourselves from the system that is oppressing us is not an easy task, nor will it be an overnight one, but it seems that time is running out before the elite manipulate us into another big war. The consequences of a third world war, doubtless a nuclear one, are horrific. The elite are hoping to bring about this conflict in order to create a new, further centralized, truly global system of government from the ashes of the old world order. But they need our support in order to do it.

Let’s not give it to them.

James Corbett is an independent journalist who has been living and working in Japan since 2004. He has been writing and producing The Corbett Report, an online multi-media news and information source, since 2007. His forthcoming book, Reportage: Essays on the New World Order, will be available for purchase in early 2011.

For more information about Corbett and his background, please listen to Episode 163 of The Corbett Report podcast, Meet James Corbett