China-Threat-myth myths (read the last sentence below)
Wednesday, July 23, 2008 Free Headline Alerts
To my search for China’s dangerous growth of its global military might, Yahoo! offered 55.9 million entries.
Let me choose as a random sample one such entry (Feb. 12, 2008). It is written by Dr. Henry Rosemont, Jr., a contributor to “Foreign Policy in Focus,” a “distinguished professor emeritus at St. Mary’s College of Maryland.”
Professor Rosemont entitled the first sentence of his article just as he did his entire article “China threat, what threat?” He says: “Several recent books on the Chinese military perpetuate this myth” [of the threat]. They cite numbers. But “when it comes to the putative Chinese military threat, the numbers simply don’t add up.”
The second section of his article is headlined: “Crunching the Numbers.” “In terms of ground forces, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has an active duty component of 2.3 million personnel.” “That’s a lot of soldiers, but the US has 1.4 million, with less than one-fourth of the population.”
The next section is entitled “At Sea” and begins: “China’s weakest link is naval.” I skip this section, since if other “links” are as weak in numbers as the professor describes them, what can be said about “China’s weakest link”?
The section “Who Fears Whom?” explains: “It should be thus clear that the Chinese have much better grounds for fearing the United States than the other way around. . . .”
So the last section “Head to Head” explains how China’s fear can be allayed by the US, and this “would not only increase the security of China and the US, but of the whole world as well.”
Let us now take as an example a West-European country, which once enriched the world with its music, philosophy, and science, but which was, since 1939, pronounced to have been the worst aggressor of the 20th century, if not of the whole millennium.
Professor Rosemont considers countries like China and the US as mechanical devices with his numbers showing their striking capacity. His numbers show that China should fear the US. What about such numbers for Germany between 1939 and 1945? They show that Germany should have feared its future adversaries. For example, it was understood in Germany that the US would develop nuclear bombs ahead of Germany, and indeed the German nuclear project came to nothing. According to Professor Rosemont, the scared Hitler should have rushed to the US, which would increase not only the security of Germany and the US, but of the whole world (and in particular that of Japan!).
Professor Rosemont does not as much as hint at the fact that freedom exists in some countries (like the US) but not in countries like Nazi Germany or like China today, and the more a country is devoid of freedom, the more aggressive it tends to be.
Once upon a time, the supreme ruling power was transmitted by heredity. The descendant was the Emperor (or Empress) because he (she) was the son (daughter) of the Emperor (or Empress). When Hitler sustained defeat in Russia, an assassin’s bomb was placed and went off at the table at which he sat, to kill him. He survived, but developed a depression that finally ended in his suicide. Anyone who would kill Stalin, could claim that he, the killer, would be now “the leader” for the same reasons Stalin was, having killed all his rivals.
Hence the phony “emperors” like Hitler or whoever else ready to show their greatness and power by wars like Hitler’s seizure of France or his invasion of Stalin’s Russia (that ended in Hitler’s defeat, which enhanced Stalin’s, not Hitler’s, glory as the greatest “leader”).
However, a war of aggression is not the only source of glory or infamy for the “leader.”
It is still remembered that a replica of the Statue of Liberty was installed in the Tiananmen Square during the uprising, and in a couple of years, such an uprising in Russia swept away the Soviet dictatorship of Gorbachev.
I was told that 200 million Chinese are not poor. But more than 1.1 billion (1.3 billion minus 200 million) are. In our age of communications, it is impossible to shut the USA and Western Europe from China. What these Chinese (1.1 billion) see makes them displeased with their life, and hence about 100,000 Tiananmen Square uprisings of various sizes occur every year in China today.
The best way out for the supreme Chinese dictator to survive is to become the Emperor of the world. Then he will be able to suppress any part of the population of the planet.
What is needed to achieve the world conquest? China or any other country that had in 1945 several hundred or thousand nuclear bombs of the kind of the two bombs the US dropped on Japan, could become the sovereign of the world. Professor Rosemont did not say a word about the nano or other post-nuclear weapon being developed in China since the 1980s. Yet post-nuclear global war requires post-nuclear global weapons.
As soon as China acquires such weapons, its rulers will be likely to launch a world war to expand their rule globally in order to preserve it in China. The Internationale is still the Marxist-Leninist anthem of China, and the sentence of the anthem worth recalling says: “The entire world in which we are nothing we shall smash to smithereens, and in our new world, which we will build, we will be everything.”