Greatest threat to global peace is not China, it’s Washington

Don’t be sucked in by the new antireds, our US ties are the real worry, writes Greg Barns

BACK in 1950s and 1960s Australia there were dire warnings about the evil of communism, how it was going to end up on Australia’s doorstep if it was not stopped in Vietnam, and of course that this outpost of the Washington empire must support the American killing machine whenever and wherever it decided to intervene in the name of containment of Russia and China.

We are back there again. The fanatics who run ASIO and the other security shops in Canberra, along with government-funded think tanks and friendly media types, think China is an existential threat.

Last week a former soldier now MP Andrew Hastie sought to characterise the rise of China as being akin to that of Nazi Germany. Hastie obviously knows nothing about history.

What is so frightening about the return of the 1950s mentality among the security and defence establishment is that they have willing propagandists all too ready to believe every thesis or conspiracy theory about how China is going to swallow us all up and end civilisation as we know it.

So let’s put this on the table. The greatest threat to global peace is Washington, not China. This has been the case since the end of the Second World War. The US has instigated more conflicts, supported more odious regimes, and flagrantly interfered in the running of nations across the globe than any other country.

And Australia is a willing, forelock-tugging outpost of the empire, rather like Trajan, one of the “obedient provinces” described by Edward Gibbon in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Here are the facts about what the Washington war machine and the American empire has given the world over the past 70 years. Dominic Tierney, a professor specialising in the study of US wars at Swarthmore College, says that since 1945, “the United States has very rarely achieved meaningful victory [but] has fought five major wars — Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, Iraq, Afghanistan — and only the Gulf War in 1991 can really be classified as a clear success.”

We can add to this the disastrous US led destruction of Libya — a Hillary Clinton failure. Then there were the dirty conflicts of Central America in the 1980s, and numerous proxy wars in Africa.

And let’s not forget the USbacked terrorist outfits in Syria. Since the founding of the US in 1776, the nation has been involved in meddling overseas in every decade.

Since the Washington war machine got its biggest boost in years with the attacks of 9/11 it has killed between 408,000 and 507,000 people, military, security and civilian, according to Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. More than 200,000 civilians have been killed in Iraq, nearly 40,000 in Afghanistan and more than 23,000 in Pakistan. In the Vietnam war about 1 million people died.

And when it comes to interference in the domestic

affairs of other countries, which is apparently what China is doing every day here according to the paranoid spooks in Canberra, the US has no peer.

According to Dov H. Levin, from Carnegie Mellon University, between 1946 and 2000 the US was involved in overt and covert election influence in 81 cases. As Levin told the New York Times on February 17 last year when asked about alleged Russian influence on the 2016 US elections, “It was completely wrong of Vladimir Putin to intervene in this way. That said, the methods they used in this election were the digital version of methods used both by the United States and Russia for decades: breaking into party headquarters, recruiting secretaries, placing informants in a party, giving information or disinformation to newspapers.”

But China is crushing its own people, serious human rights abuses are occurring and look at Hong Kong say the ‘new anti-reds’, the heirs to the 1950s fanatics.

Well let’s take a look at the US propping up the apartheid regime in South Africa for decades or its long-term commitment to the serial and systemic oppression of the Palestinians by apartheid Israel. That’s just for starters.

But here in Australia we are easily cowered and frightened by the ‘hordes from the north’ nonsense. So when the US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, like a consul from Rome, visits obedient Trajan (Australia) recently he issues the instructions and the provinces’ regional governors in the form of the Morrison Government and the Washington-huggers in the ALP agree that of course we will join a bloodbath in Iran if that’s what Washington wants.

One wouldn’t mind some criticism of China’s ambitions if Australia was not a far-flung province of the Washington empire.

If it was a country that could make up its own mind and was not ruled by paranoid conflict junkies in Canberra.

But it’s not of course. But here is a fact. Washington is the real enemy of humanity, not China.