War of wills? An absolutist China vs. an egocentric U.S.
Wednesday, May 14, 2008 Free Headline Alerts
Chris Ruddy, President and CEO, NewsMax Media, Inc., has kindly drawn my attention to the essay “Stealing Weather” by William Langewiesche in the May issue of the U.S. magazine “Vanity Fair.” The essay is highlighted in red in the top left corner of several pages of the article as a “letter from China.”
However, the author is not a Chinese living in China, and this shows. He is too much of a Western gentleman—gentle man—to be taken for a Chinese, struggling desperately either for his dictatorial power or for his defenseless life.
The author begins his essay with several sentences by way of introduction:
In 1946, three G.E. scientists found that seeding clouds with dry ice or silver iodide could affect precipitation. The Pentagon soon had hopes of weaponizing the sky. Now it’s the Chinese whose artillery is aimed at controlling the weather.
This is very good for an “American in China.” But the harsh Chinese reality is the global survival-or-death war that imposes on the enemy an outage of water and hence of food, for food cannot be produced without water. Animals eat vegetables, and their life without water is also impossible.
The fact is that so far wars were largely ceremonial: military men used firearms (or bombs, despite the enemy anti-aircraft fire) as an aristocrat used arms to kill his opponent in a duel. But an opponent may die from myriads of causes. The now famous book, published by the Chinese military in 1999, is justifiably entitled “Unrestricted Warfare.” Exactly! Death is unrestricted —f rom the absence of food and/or water to numberless chemicals and bacteria.
Incidentally, while using chemicals in his genocide, Hitler forbade the chemical and bacteriological weapons research. The “Unrestricted Warfare” is ahead of him, and, indeed, mentions him as one of the Western military men who had not “successfully mastered war.”
Of course, it is possible to begin from the end, that is, by annihilation of the enemy with the latest nano dust, which destroys everything it is assigned to find and destroy. It is to the development of this super-equivalent of the nuclear weapons of 1945 that a major Chinese military effort is applied.
But to be on the safe side of overall destruction, it is necessary to be able to destroy life at its primary source of water and food. Important in the outage of water supply on the enemy territory are those cloud-controlling techniques.
Like many other Western observers of China, the author of the “letter from China” sees China as an eternal province and the West as an eternal locomotive of history.
Let us recall, however, the European barbarians, destroying Rome. In Western Europe, including Rome, there were no firearms: the fighters were cutting one another with blades of various shapes, while China had behind itself millennia of sophisticated science and regarded West-Europeans as savages, close to the cavemen of the Stone Age. Yes, later to Western Europe came the “industrial revolution,” which the Emperors of China had intentionally kept out as ugly and dirty. What now?
China has enough population to skip the products of the West-European “industrial revolution” and go over to the post-machine age—to sciences beyond machine-guns, which the “British imperialist” Kipling considered synonymous with world colonial domination or beyond tanks, which the Nazi Gen. Heinz Guderian considered unstoppable.
Sciences can ensure for China the instant death of millions of her human enemies despite the enemy machine-guns and tanks. Neither Kipling nor Guderian saw such nightmares in their worst dreams.
We are living in a new “post-industrial age.” The dictatorship of China has enough population to work out the new warfare. It can stimulate that population by rewards and prevent by penalties any refusal to work out the new warfare.
Also, given China’s population of 1.3 billion, its human losses may not be too critical.
China is not a giant machine—it is a giant human arrangement based on absolute power for some and on slavery for all the others.
For comparison, let us cast a look at the West today. It is a totally egocentric society. The two U.S. Democrats, the most visible as presidential candidates, aim at making the life of every voter as free from poverty and altogether pleasant as possible. China doesn’t seem to exist. It certainly cannot intrude into an American voter’s preoccupation with well-being. The third highly visible presidential candidate, McCain, a Republican, said on March 26, 2008: “China and the United States are not destined to be adversaries.”
See? Sun Tzu, the founder of China military strategy more than 2000 years ago, used to say that wars should not be waged—they should be won. That is, the war should be such a surprise for the enemy that the enemy would be defeated before understanding what is going on. Well, China’s war with the United States will be won before McCain has understood what is going on.