China’s state-run Global Times on Wednesday uncorked a long, rambling editorial that accused “U.S. warmongers” of feasting on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and other global conflicts, like profiteering “vampires.”
The screed was accompanied by an illustration of President Joe Biden, dressed like a portly iteration of Dracula, feeding a Ukrainian flag into a meat grinder to produce stacks of dollar bills in place of sausage:
The Global Times billed its rant as part of “a series of stories and cartoons to unveil how the U.S., in its status as a superpower, has been creating one crisis after another in the world.”
The real reason is Beijing’s outrage at stern warnings from the United States and Europe that it must not assist Russia’s flagrantly illegal invasion of Ukraine.
China has thus far settled for giving Russia political cover by refusing to condemn the invasion or support Ukraine against Moscow’s aggression, but the past week brought a chorus of warnings from across the Western world that China is considering more substantial support for its Russian partner in what both parties arrogantly describe as a “new world order.”
The propagandists at the Global Times – house organ of the tyrannical regime threatening bloody aggression across most of its land and maritime borders, from the Himalayas to the South China Sea, topped off by a potential invasion of Taiwan that could trigger a global conflict – dutifully accused the accusers of overspending on military forces and attempting to “incite wars around the world” for profit.
This included the war in Ukraine, where Russian dictator Vladimir Putin was portrayed as a helpless bystander while the sinister American and European “military-industrial complex” pulled all the strings. The Global Times even gave the military-industrial complex an acronym, MIC, as though it were a real agency with offices and stationery:
The MIC is a unique phenomenon in the US. During World War II, the five top US defense contractors – Lockheed Martin Corporation, Raytheon Company, Northrop Grumman Corporation, the Boeing Company, and the General Dynamics Corporation – made a large profit from the war and got a large number of federal government contracts during that period. Since then, their interests have been bound together.
During the Cold War era, the US military, defense contractors, the federal government, the Congress, and local universities cooperated closely and extended their forces to new industries like aerospace, energy, the electronics industry, information technology, and bioengineering, creating an enormous MIC. Think tanks and the media have all been dragged into it and they became part of the complex of shared interest.
The MIC has hogged most of the US’ wealth and become a monster that the country cannot get rid of.
The Global Times droned on and on about the iron grip of the MIC on politics in Washington plus most of the 50 states, without bothering to mention China’s gigantic surge in military spending, or the tight grip the People’s Liberation Army (PLA, and it really does have offices and stationery) maintains over the Chinese economy.
On most other days, Chinese state media loudly boasts about Beijing’s fascist strategy of “military-civil fusion,” which puts all of Chinese industry and “private” commerce at the service of military strategists. The Global Times and other Chinese state media frequently claim the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic proved centrally-planned authoritarianism – which is nothing if not a vast military-industrial complex, in which the hyphen between “military” and “industrial” has been largely erased – is superior to free-market democracy.
But now, with Beijing feeling stung and resentful by Western warnings not to assist Russia in Ukraine, the Global Times railed against American militarism as if there was not a single PLA-controlled industry in China. It also managed to forget about all those Chinese companies drooling over business opportunities in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan when it ranted against vampire war profiteers.
Most of the editorial was stitched together from Western media sources, hinting that someone at the Global Times was assigned to Google the phrase “military-industrial complex” and quote everything they could find. The only original writing supplied by the Chinese Communist editorialists consisted of outrage that America and Europe might push back against the new “world order” China and Russia trumpeted this week. The authors were very concerned that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine might have rallied the world against China as well.
“Voices encouraging the U.S. to prepare for a war with China and Russia at the same time are not alienated among U.S. scholars,” the Global Times muttered resentfully, comforting itself with the notion that America’s national debt is too high to sustain such a surge in military spending.