I am so tired of China being used to stoke American jingoism, of politicians making a contest of who is really 'tough on China' and, most horrifyingly, of seeing other USians online practically salivate as they fantasize about a war with China. It's some cold war boogieman horseshit. And it's depressing to watch here on Hacker News, too, any comments that question the beating of those war drums go dead. Yesterday I h…
China is not simply rolled out as a boogeyman. Apart from any of their ambitions, at minimum the worlds reliance on them for various resources and manufacturing capacity almost exclusively has, in the last 2.5 years, been revealed as an extreme flaw and risk to global economic stability when that resource and manufacturing pipeline is disrupted. That is, at a bare minimum, a serious problem that will take years to so…
And God forbid a country outside the west hasn't been completely subjugated by it. Why exactly do you think China's goals aren't aligned with the West? Have you read anything about what imperialism was doing to China (and literally everywhere else on Earth not being settled by Europeans with few exceptions) during the 100 years of humiliation? Do you honestly expect a nation to take that in stride without retribution? I think a lot of younger folks like myself forget that colonialism was alive and well until around 50 years ago, which is the blink of an eye in the long-run.
Sure, you can point to Tibet and Xinjiang as signs of hypocrisy, but I counter: where did all the native americans go in the USA and canada? What was done by the Belgians in the Congo? What was done by the French in Indochina? At least the Uyghurs and Tibetans are actually still alive in large numbers of healthy individuals. Even in China, minorities get special treatment. For example, they were exempt from the One-Child Policy. I don't think there's any example of that in western nations. In the US, black people get the privilege of seeing their children murdered at the hands of the police for minor offenses and disobedience! :)
The war drums are beating and it's fascinating to see otherwise brilliant people fall victim to what is very clearly the propaganda being turned up to manufacture popular support for the genocide of billions under the name of "freedom", "democracy" and a "rules-based system". Let's do an exercise: which nuclear states have the weakest policies preventing the use of nuclear weapons? It's the United States, France, the UK, and Pakistan. Even Putin has stated multiple times on the record (even in late 2022) that Russia will not be the first to use nuclear weapons. India and China are strictly under a policy of no first-use.
Let's remember history: the United States is the only state to ever have used nuclear weapons to deliberately kill people. And remember doubly: those bombs were dropped for demonstration purposes, not out of necessity, even a USA general said so.
Clearly, greed and arrogance will be the downfall of Western imperialism. South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, etc. are all de facto USA asian tributary states under USA hegemony, but nobody wants to acknowledge that.
I hope that in the coming 5 - 10 years once you have the luxury to bear witness to western militaries indiscriminately genociding billions of civilians in the name of "maintaining a rules based order" that you realize you cannot wash the blood from your hands.