The current US propaganda war on China began in Australia when Barack Obama addressed the Australian Parliament in 2011 and announced America's "pivot to Asia." This launched the biggest peacetime build-up of US naval forces in the Pacific since World War Two, all of it aimed at China. Today, more than 400 US bases surround China, from northern Australia, to the Marshall Islands, throughout south-east Asia, Japan and Korea. Such intimidation of China, a nuclear power, is seldom mentioned when China is attacked for building its defenses on islands in the South China Sea. As part of the "pivot," a barrage of China-is-a-threat propaganda is dispensed by travelling Pentagon admirals and generals, who describe the Pacific Ocean as if it is theirs. In a WikiLeaks disclosure, Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State under Obama, demanded of a senior Chinese official that his government agree to re-name the Pacific "the American Sea." She later claimed she was joking.
What are your thoughts on the US and British elites treating coronavirus as a 'war' to be won, even though they cut back on public institutions that might have pre-empted the spread?
A pandemic described as a war to be won is in keeping with the language of "permanent war." The disabling or "lock down" of populations is routinely described as a "wartime measure." This is meant to evoke The Blitz in 1940 when the Luftwaffe attacked England. Of course, to compare the current crisis with the carnage and struggle of the Second World War is profane. The central issue is the ideological destruction of a health service that has been a beacon of a lost world of equity and fairness. How ironic and appropriate that the NHS is currently saving Boris Johnson's life. If there is a "war," the weapons ought to be mass testing and tracing the pathways and pattern of the virus, treating people quickly and comprehensively, protecting front line health workers, social distancing and transparency -- but most of this is missing.
As for locking down the population and the "forced isolation" of those over 70, to quote one of the British government's favorite journalists, Robert Peston, there is a salutary lesson to be learned. In 2012, a landmark study on the "disease of isolation" was published in Britain and the US. Researchers from University College, London, revealed that isolation was killing the elderly -- not loneliness, but isolation forced on people by circumstances beyond their control. More than "pre-existing" health conditions, isolation was the silent killer.
In my own reporting in Britain in the age of "austerity," I have seen underfunded voluntary services trying to cope with this killer disease -- for example, in the northern city of Durham, devastated by Conservative policies, one volunteer attempted to care for 21,000 people and to save many of them. This is occasionally a local media story, usually when a privatized care home is caught mistreating its elderly occupants, a common abuse. Once a humane extension of the NHS, Britain's social care of the vulnerable was privatized by both Tory and Labour governments. Many of the care homes are cash cows for ruthless individuals and their precarious companies. The people of Britain deserve better, at the very least their freedom from fear.
T.J. Coles is a postdoctoral researcher at Plymouth University's Cognition Institute in the UK and the author of several books, including Voices for Peace (with Noam Chomsky and John Pilger) and Privatized Planet.
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