No, Australia Does Not Actually Need To Prepare For War With China
In the latest instance of the Australian media’s deluge of propaganda geared toward manufacturing consent for war with China, Nine Entertainment-owned newspapers The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age have brought together a panel of “experts” to assess how well-prepared Australia is for a hot war with its primary trading partner. The question of if that war is necessary or should be prepared for is left completely unexamined.
In a report titled “Australia faces the threat of war with China within three years – and we’re not ready,” we learn the names of the five “experts” SMH and The Age have recruited to make the titular claim, and you’re never going to believe this but it turns out they tend to work in professions that are intimately intertwined with the western imperial war machine.
This first “expert” is Mick Ryan, whom I have written about repeatedly because he seems to feature in literally every single Australian news media piece geared toward propagandizing Australians into accepting war with China as an inevitability which must be prepared for. Ryan is an Adjunct Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), which is funded by military-industrial complex entities like Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, and is also directly funded by the US government and its client states, including Australia and Taiwan. SMH and The Age make no note of this immense conflict of interest.
Mick Ryan is a fellow at @CSIS, a think tank funded by the military-industrial complex, arguing that Australia should funnel more money into the military-industrial complex via Ukraine. The Age neglects to inform us that this is effectively an advertorial for Northrop Grumman. https://t.co/hAL1Vz7iUU
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) October 5, 2022
The second “expert” is Peter Jennings, who is a Senior Fellow at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), where he was the executive director for ten years. Like CSIS, ASPI is a think tank that is funded by US-aligned governments and the military-industrial complex. It has played a major role in manufacturing consent for the foreign policy agendas of the western empire, particularly in escalations against China. ASPI has been described as “the propaganda arm of the CIA and the US government” by Australian diplomat Bruce Haigh.
The third “expert” is Lavina Lee, an academic who is a Council Member with ASPI and an Adjunct Fellow with CSIS, so when it comes to pro-war punditry she’s what they call a twofer.
The fourth “expert” is Australian defense insider Lesley Seebeck, a regular ASPI contributor. Seebeck is the chairperson of a swampy warmongering think tank of unclear funding called the National Institute of Strategic Resilience, which publishes woke-imperialist articles with titles like “First Nations Drone Network Project Initiation,” “Solomon Islands – time to take an Indigenous perspective,” “Building Australia’s Strategic Resilience: A Spotlight on Military and Gender in the Pacific Region,” and “Key to Australia’s Strategic Resilience: An Australian Feminist Foreign Policy,” the latter two authored by Seebeck herself.
The fifth is Alan Finkel, a scientist who works for the Australian government.
Again, none of these conflicts of interest were mentioned by The Sydney Morning Herald or The Age, which as we’ve discussed previously is an egregious act of journalistic malpractice. This is a little like gathering Ronald McDonald, Colonel Sanders and the Taco Bell chihuahua to discuss whether the government should employ fast food outlets to supply school lunches. Except these guys aren’t selling junk food — they’re selling mass murder, human suffering, ecological disaster, and the violent deaths of our children.
There are rivers of tax money at stake here; delicious, Reserve-backed dollars straight into the old bank account, mountains of them! And essentially these people are
Article from LewRockwell
