All Empires turn fleas into elephants to justify a garrison state. They customarily succeed in terrifying the public.
The species is easily frightened. Remember the 1938 radio drama “War of the
Worlds” directed and narrated by Orson Welles on CBS radio which incited a panic by convincing the audience that a Martian invasion was underway.
Chinaphobia in the United States has now gone off the charts to justify making Taiwan an American military outpost and the South China Sea an American maritime hot spot in anticipation of war.
A Chinese company, Fufeng USA, planned to build a corn mill in North Dakota. Corn is the State’s third most important crop. There is nothing facially suspicious about building a corn mill near corn stalks. And corn has not yet reached the status of a strategic mineral.
But Air Force assistant secretary Andrew P. Hunter discerned an alarming national security threat. He tacitly conceded that United States intelligence does not customarily use corn mills as covers for espionage. But in a letter to United States Senators John Hoeven and Kevin Cramer, both Republicans representing North Dakota, the assistant secretary worried that the 15 mile proximity of the planned corn mill from Grand Forks Air Base raised “near-and long-term risks of significant impacts to our operations in the area.” He warned that the Chinese company “project presents a significant threat to national security.”
The warning letter, released yesterday by North Dakota’s two Senators, occasioned instant fear like a fire alarm. Grand Forks’ Republican mayor, Brandon Bochenski, vowed to block construction by denying building permits and infrastructure connections. Who knows? The corn mill products might make their way to nourish China’s People’s Liberation Army.
The mayor further maintained that “Chinese students and professors at the University of North Dakota” were also a cause for concern. Their training in reading or science might be the first step on a journey of a thousand miles which culminates with work on a Chinese nuclear weapon. They could become national security threats unless lobotomized. The logical next step would be to prohibit educating Chinese completely because knowledge can be used to pursue nefarious ends.
The federal government’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States vetted the corn mill project. It concluded it had no jurisdiction because Fuefeng’s project was a “greenfield investment” and not an investment or acquisition of an existing American business. But that did not allay the fears of the assistant secretary or mayor.
The corn mill farce exemplifies the Chinaphobia epidemic. It has deranged America and cantered us closer to a catastrophic war. On the same day the corn mill project shipwrecked, the United States and India (part of the Quad with Japan and Australia to encircle China) agreed to expand cooperation on advanced weaponry, supercomputing, semiconductors, and other high-tech fields to secure a qualitative national security edge over China perceived as bestriding the world like a colossus.
Only we citizens can stop Chinaphobia manufactured by our Empire elites from igniting a pointless war with China. Communicate your opposition to President Joe Biden and Members of Congress your opposition. Public opposition thwarted President Barack Obama’s ambition to initiate war with Syria in 2013. A repeat performance is urgent for ourselves and our posterity.