A three-way conversation with Anna Chen in the UK, Robbie Barwick in Australia and Barrie Weiss (AKA Barrie V) hosting from China, 16th September 2022.
THE POWER OF PROPAGANDA PART 1: Barrie Weiss in conversation with Anna Chen in the UK and Robbie Barwick of the Australian Citizens Party discussing Australia, the UK, US, mainstream media and Rupert Murdoch.
THE POWER OF PROPAGANDA PART 2: Barrie Weiss in conversation with Anna Chen in the UK and Robbie Barwick of the Australian Citizens Party discussing the UK, US, Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party, Rupert Murdoch, the PNAC.
THE POWER OF PROPAGANDA PART 3: Barrie Weiss in conversation with Anna Chen in the UK and Robbie Barwick of the Australian Citizens Party discussing the Fall of the US Dollar, Empire: Sanity vs Insanity.
Video originally recorded and edited by Barrie Weiss at Best China Info on 16th September 2022: https://youtu.be/25Vq2RiE2TA
No Cold War online event Wednesday 25th May 2022 NATO, Ukraine and Russia: war, propaganda and censorship
The West's propaganda modus operandi: a short 21st century timeline of the race to World War III
Anna Chen's No Cold War talk @35m. I was timed out at Point 9 below, so here's the full text of my speech.
When China explored the world in the 15th century and reached as far as East Africa, they traded a bit and brought back a giraffe.
When Europeans landed in the Americas in 1492, they killed and enslaved its native peoples, stole their treasures and gave them smallpox blankets in an early form of biological warfare.
In North America, 100 million native Americans were killed, Black Africans were put through slavery, Jim Crow and imprisonment. The USA was literally built on an ancient Indian burial ground, because that’s what they’d turned it into.
And that’s pretty much been the template ever since.
Europeans sailed beyond their own lands for conquest, glory and fortune. The Chinese mostly stayed at home.
The Chinese invented gunpowder for great firework displays.
Europeans turned gunpowder into murderous weapons of conquest.
If China is the newly rich kid wearing a Rolex who’s wandered on to Mafia turf and is about to be rolled, then America is the 300lb ex-champ who’s geriatric and punch-drunk from all those fights. He’s pinned the kid against a wall, fist in his face, screaming blue murder that the kid’s about to hit him.
Australia and Britain, the Ugly Sisters of the piece, nod enthusiastically and use the opportunity to bury bad news …
like Hard No Deal Brexit fallout,
a wrecked economy,
excess Covid deaths
and a society that’s breaking down.
(There's an argument to be had that Great Britain, with the oldest secret service in the world dating back to Sir Francis Walsingham in Elizabethan times, is the Wicked Stepmother and that the US is the senior Ugly Sister. They fell out regarding control over Iran and its oil fields in the 1950s, and the US stuck to the One China policy. However, GB has at last, after decades, managed to get the US on board for Winston Churchill's balkanisation of China: "I believe in the ultimate partition of China — I mean ultimate. I hope we shall not have to do it in our day. The Aryan stock is bound to triumph.")
Asian people are scapegoated, attacked and killed, all whipped up by the crudest anti-Chinese racism that’s lain dormant as an inserted Yellow Peril memory — which is now being triggered at every level by the 4th Estate of the State, the mainstream media.
Sometimes it feels like we’re living in The Fall of the Roman Empire with Technology, and sometimes, it’s the 1930s. And someone is doing their best to pin a blood libel on the Chinese.
But the plutocrats and industry giants of the West don’t just hold the delusion of conquest of China as the endgame. They are also ridding themselves of surplus labour which is, of course, us. Pampered middle and working class westerners of the post-war liberal era who never had it so good are now being hollowed out and presented with the bill.
So how did we get from the global economy running in sync and relative peace to the West’s race towards a war on the fat, juicy prize that is China?
The Anglosphere’s propaganda wars rely on the public not joining the dots. Events are presented as mysterious disjointed acts of the cosmos without cause or effect.
Never forget the Battle of Orgreave, 18th June 1984, which rehearsed and revealed the depth of manipulation by the state.
Thousands of striking coal miners picketed the British Steel coking plant. The day erupted in violent clashes between the miners and the heavy police presence, many of whom were on horseback.
The news bulletins that night showed the miners attacking the police, who seemingly horse-charged them in response, eliciting public sympathy for the cops and outrage for the miners.
However, when the original film was examined, it emerged that the the TV news outlets had shown the news footage in reverse order, reversing cause and effect, when it had been the police on horseback who'd attacked the peaceful and legally picketing miners.
They cut up the narrative, respliced it, started it at Act 2, slashed the backstory entirely, recast heroes as villains and villains as heroes.
Attackers became victims and victims attackers.
2) China begins to buy US debt in 2000. In 2006, the value of the US dollar falls by a third because of Iraq war inflation. Meantime, an alarming housing bubble is being pumped up. When China complains, the US tells them to suck it up.
3) Two years later, America’s economic shenanigans lead to a breakdown of their system with the financial meltdown in the US Great Crash of 2008. A global Depression is feared. Deficiencies in Western capitalism are exposed and the system discredited in the eyes of many around the world. China steps in to act as a shock-absorber and rescues the world economy by allowing global currencies to devalue against the yuan, taking a massive economic hit themselves. They buy even more huge amounts of US debt until China holds over a trillion dollars’, and they stimulate domestic consumption because 1.4 billion Chinese can buy a lot of goods.
4) So China saves the world economy from devastation. And how is China thanked for this?
In October 2011, only three years after China saves us all from America’s Great Crash, Hillary Clinton — Obama’s Secretary of State — writes her notorious piece urging US control of the “Western Pacific” (South China Sea!) and the Central Eurasia landmass.
Three huge countries lie in a straight line across the landmass from Europe to Asia: they are, from West to East, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Mongolia, plus the little known region of China called Sinkiang in ancient times, now known as Xinjiang – China’s back door into Central Asia and Europe. Taiwan claims Mongolia as part of China, so let’s hope President Tsai isn’t made Empress of all the Chinas as the USA seems to want.
The title of Hillary Clinton’s piece is America’s Pacific Century and basically lays out the aims of the Project for the New American Century (began in 1997).
Hillary writes: “… there should be no doubt that America has the capacity to secure and sustain our global leadership in this century as we did in the last.
“The future of politics will be decided in Asia, not Afghanistan or Iraq, and the United States will be right at the center of the action.”
The same year, a NATO coalition attacks Libya and destroys the country.
5) A year later, in 2012, President Obama Pivots to Asia, removing US military from the Middle East and pouring it into Asia where America has about 400 bases surrounding China. By doing so, America takes the first step in existentially threatening China.
2013: US-Australia practise war on China in the exercise “Talisman Saber,” involving 22,000 American and 10,000 Australian personnel and 27 warships.
2014: The US and Philippines begin annual military exercises over the pretext of disputed islands and shoals. Vietnam already started militarising their reclaimed islands back in the 1970s.
6) Obama revives military exercises in the Malacca Strait, situated between Indonesia and Malaysia, threatening to fence in China. Previous massive US exercises had been held in 2006 and 2007, prompting China to take defensive measures. Around 80 per cent of South China Sea traffic is China sending us their goods.
7) Donald Trump is elected in 2016, partly in fear of Killary's enthusiasm for World War. Trump launches a Trade War on China on spurious grounds. He imposes crippling trade tariffs on Chinese imports (paid for by the American consumer), claiming a huge trade deficit but when you factor in the American corporate giants providing sales and services inside China — like Apple, Microsoft, MacDonalds, Nike, Coke and Starbucks — the deficit is actually a surplus of about $24 billion.
8) Around the same time as Trump’s Trade War, there’s a slew of Thucydides Trap articles warning us not to have a war just because Athens is catching up with Sparta. The trap refers to the situation in history when an upcoming power (ancient Athens) rivals the existing power (Sparta) and the result is a devastating war that wrecks both sides. China negotiates trade in good faith, increasing their purchase of US farming produce and machinery, but refuses to buckle.
11) Everyone forgets the Thucydides Trap warnings about conflict between the established superpower and the rising one as the US of Amnesia goes to work.
12) Manufacturing consent for war is started by various military thinks tanks: ASPI, CIMSEC etc. This will involve transferring our collective horror of America's war atrocities and trail of dead on to a country that hasn't had a war since 1979.
13) Western mainstream media such as the Guardian close to opposing views by the time of Hong Kong riots and the CoVfefe outbreak in 2019. The Guardian's sister paper, The Washington Post, is owned by oligarch Jeff Bezos whose Amazon juggernaut runs the Pentagon's Cloud. Capitalism now openly runs the state.
14) In January 2020, just as the world is waking up to the Covid pandemic, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo calls the Communist Party of China the “central threat of our times.”
Most people have heard Pompeo’s notorious boast that he lies, cheats and steals and runs entire courses on it. How many know this is the exact wording of the Honor Code of the West Point Military Academy he attended … but in reverse: “A Cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do”. They are laughing AT you, not with you.
15) Biden is elected President in November 2020 and raises America's military spend to $780 BILLION a year. On top of this he places a fat bounty on China's head when he budgets $500m a year specifically on anti-China propaganda.
After promising he won't start World War 3, Biden forms AUKUS with Australia, and UK, bringing nuclear war to Asia.
In May 2022, Biden will lash up with Japan in preparing for a war on China on the pretext of "defending" Taiwan despite paying lip-service to the One China policy. Constant sabre-rattling provocations — supplying military arms, sending trainers and politicians to the island, sailing entire warfleets off the coast and sending submarines and airplanes into China's territorial waters and airspace — fail to provoke China into hot conflict with its own territory. America and the West are denied their casus belli and it enrages them.
16) In January 2022, a colour revolution attempt in Kazakhstan (nestled between Russia and Xinjiang) is swiftly ended by Russia and China in cooperation. It becomes clear that, in order to defeat China, the US axis will have to cut the legs out from under it - prime target, Russia.
18) Putin sends his military into the Ukraine. Biden gets his war at last.
19) So … Obama launches the war on China after Dubbya Bush sets it up.
Trump and his Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight find the plans and try to play it clever.
Biden becomes Trump Lite, gets a taste for it and eclipses even the Donald’s hideousness. He’s unable to fulfil even his promise of ending student debt.
I look at the richest country on the planet and see what they’ve done with their wealth. It has been one long looting spree until the top 0.1 per cent own as much as the bottom 90 per cent and the top 0.01 per cent own 11.2 per cent of America's total wealth. Having sucked their own country dry, a tiny stratum of oligarchs, plutocrats, Military Industrial Complex, fossil fuel companies, tech giants and gun-lobby enthusiasts are now creating new hunting grounds in order to replenish and reinvigorate their imploding economy.
And the mainstream media, the Fourth Estate whose role it is to hold the power of the first three estates — legislative, executive and judicial — to account, are right in there with them.
No Fourth Estate, no democracy.
The Europe-Asia landmass
No Cold War online event 25th May 2022 NATO, Ukraine and Russia: war, propaganda and censorship
Speakers:
Andrew Feinstein - Author, campaigner and former African National Congress MP
Camila Escalante - Journalist and presenter for Kawsachun News
Asa Winstanley - Journalist and political commentator
Anna Chen - Writer, poet and broadcaster
Kayla Quesada - Academic and geo-political analyst
Steve Sweeney - International Editor of the Morning Star
Chair: Sequoyah De Souza - No Cold War Britain
Reviews at A Very Public Sociologist and Harpy Marx cover the Dr Who Easter special so I'm spared that particular chore. But I will add my alarm that, as we slip silently into Surveillance Britain, even this innocent series, beloved of our childhood, has been inducted into the government's Planet Paranoia.
Maybe I'm being a sensitive flower, but just as our armed forces ratchet up horror after horror in illegal wars, and our police are revealed to relish stormtrooper tactics in matters of democratic protest, it seems our media are ushering us into an era where we are militarised drones.
We are all Morlocks and Eloi now.
It's bad enough when Army Recruitment ads are styled as shoot-'em-up video games to attract a generation whose lights have dimmed through a life at the computer. I got to the end of Doom II! it's potent stuff. (And, incidentally, said to have been originally used as combat training for US soldiers.) I still remember travelling through the West End after an all-nighter, and noticing that the buildings looked not quite real. I suppressed my own urge to go up and hit the space-bar but not before checking for Revenants and other non-humans — in this dimension, that means everyone.
I loved it. I loved the feeling of unreality, defamiliarising your old environment and giving you a new vista from which to explore the real world.
But I could tell the difference, Philip K Dickian head-fuckery aside. I knew concrete reality with live human beings occupying their own universes was the default mode, and that my existence is more than a binary life-or-death, good-versus-evil struggle decided at the point of a gun.
The media, however, is changing the terrain. Seismic shifts are going undetected. The BBC Easter Special, like the wheedling witch and her gingerbread house, like the wolf in the red-hooded granny disguise, like every other con artist throughout history, is out to devour you.
The latest episode uses a trusted figure, David Tennant as the Doctor, to tell kids to join the army, or as it is incarnated here, the Unified Intelligence Taskforce (UNIT). An army, mind you, made up of characters who are prepared to kill their scientific dissidents. Okay, it WAS Lee Evans (and therefore vaguely understandable) and not Dr David Kelly, but mitigating circumstances notwithstanding, homicidal behaviour legitimised by a uniform is being further naturalised in the culture.
Once our heroes have returned to Earth aboard the flying Routemaster bus (I hope they got permission from the Ministry of Thoughtcrime to film it), the Doctor encourages the two young male passengers, Nathan and Barclay, who happen to be of squaddie age, to join UNIT, the very force whose incompetence and dependence on expediency to the exclusion of the softer human qualities, almost led to disaster. We've already seen what terminal measures they are prepared to take with anyone who follows their conscience when the female officer threatens to shoot the scientist who doesn't immediately obey her order.
Is that Dr Who's Easter special message? The meek don't inherit the earth, they go silently and uncomplainingly to their fate.
This stuff isn't playing to adults who can more or less fend for themselves; it's going out to children whose worldview and sense of self is still malleable. The social model being presented to them as normality is a worrying one where you kill people instead of making things to keep our way of life going. As if this is how things are and was ever thus, even in the world of the imagination.
Reviews at A Very Public Sociologist and Harpy Marx cover the Dr Who Easter special so I'm spared that particular chore. But I will add my alarm that, as we slip silently into Surveillance Britain, even this innocent series, beloved of our childhood, has been inducted into the government's Planet Paranoia.
Maybe I'm being a sensitive flower, but just as our armed forces ratchet up horror after horror in illegal wars, and our police are revealed to relish stormtrooper tactics in matters of democratic protest, it seems our media are ushering us into an era where we are militarised drones.
We are all Morlocks and Eloi now.
It's bad enough when Army Recruitment ads are styled as shoot-'em-up video games to attract a generation whose lights have dimmed through a life at the computer. I got to the end of Doom II! it's potent stuff. (And, incidentally, said to have been originally used as combat training for US soldiers.) I still remember travelling through the West End after an all-nighter, and noticing that the buildings looked not quite real. I suppressed my own urge to go up and hit the space-bar but not before checking for Revenants and other non-humans — in this dimension, that means everyone.
I loved it. I loved the feeling of unreality, defamiliarising your old environment and giving you a new vista from which to explore the real world.
But I could tell the difference, Philip K Dickian head-fuckery aside. I knew concrete reality with live human beings occupying their own universes was the default mode, and that my existence is more than a binary life-or-death, good-versus-evil struggle decided at the point of a gun.
The media, however, is changing the terrain. Seismic shifts are going undetected. The BBC Easter Special, like the wheedling witch and her gingerbread house, like the wolf in the red-hooded granny disguise, like every other con artist throughout history, is out to devour you.
The latest episode uses a trusted figure, David Tennant as the Doctor, to tell kids to join the army, or as it is incarnated here, the Unified Intelligence Taskforce (UNIT). An army, mind you, made up of characters who are prepared to kill their scientific dissidents. Okay, it WAS Lee Evans (and therefore vaguely understandable) and not Dr David Kelly, but mitigating circumstances notwithstanding, homicidal behaviour legitimised by a uniform is being further naturalised in the culture.
Once our heroes have returned to Earth aboard the flying Routemaster bus (I hope they got permission from the Ministry of Thoughtcrime to film it), the Doctor encourages the two young male passengers, Nathan and Barclay, who happen to be of squaddie age, to join UNIT, the very force whose incompetence and dependence on expediency to the exclusion of the softer human qualities, almost led to disaster. We've already seen what terminal measures they are prepared to take with anyone who follows their conscience when the female officer threatens to shoot the scientist who doesn't immediately obey her order.
Is that Dr Who's Easter special message? The meek don't inherit the earth, they go silently and uncomplainingly to their fate.
This stuff isn't playing to adults who can more or less fend for themselves; it's going out to children whose worldview and sense of self is still malleable. The social model being presented to them as normality is a worrying one where you kill people instead of making things to keep our way of life going. As if this is how things are and was ever thus, even in the world of the imagination.
