Date: Friday, 12 July 2024
https://ericzuesse.substack.com/p/how-the-us-empire-works-2
https://theduran.com/how-the-u-s-empire-works-2/
How the U.S. Empire Works, #2
Eric Zuesse (blogs at https://theduran.com/author/eric-zuesse/)
This is #2 in the series that started with #1 here, which dealt with America’s colony Ukraine:
#3 in this series will be about — as the now solidly pro-U.S.-empire The Week magazine had reported on 8 January 2015 — “This is how the U.S. empire works: ‘by getting other countries not only to do its dirty work but also to take responsibility for it as sovereign states.’”
So, here is report #2 in this series:
Though the U.S. Government has not yet created as much harm as Adolf Hitler’s regime did in WW2, it is building up toward a crescendo which would dwarf that: WW3. The example of the U.S. regime’s (click onto that link if you don’t know that it’s a dictatorship instead of a democracy) 2014 coup-grabbed colony Ukraine for America’s proxy-war so as to capture Russia, is one example of this build-up toward WW3, but the other is America’s increasingly intense effort similarly to coup-grab China’s Taiwan Province so as to capture China. (Click onto that link if you don’t know about that.)
Already, the U.S. imperial regime has captured — yet again — the Philippines, now so as to facilitate capturing Taiwan. An excellent news-report on that is the sequence from the great geostrategic analyst Brian Berletic, which will here be presented complete in all three of its versions.
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First, is Berletic’s summary of it, at x,
https://x.com/BrianJBerletic/status/1811057685091209469
Brian Berletic
@BrianJBerletic
10 July 2024, NEW VIDEO (YouTube): The Philippines: Why it is Choosing US Destruction Over Chinese Construction
1. The US has dominated the foreign and domestic policy of the Southeast Asian country of the Philippines for decades, having formally ruled the nation as a colony from 1898-1946;
2. The Philippines has been used for US military basing throughout the Cold War and is now enlarging its military footprint on the Philippines under the government of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.;
3. It was under President Rodrigo Duterte that the US was being pressured to leave the nation while also expanding closer ties with China who was and still is the Philippines’ largest trade partner;
4. Today, infrastructure projects underway during President Duterte’s administration have been literally torn down, instead military bases are being built to point missiles at the Philippines’ largest trade partner, China;
5. The US through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) has created large numbers of media platforms, political organizations, and education programs meant to convince the Philippine people that serving US foreign policy objectives is in their own best interests;
6. The ultimate irony is that these US efforts have convinced Filipinos that fighting China is necessary to protect their sovereignty, when in fact US influence over Philippine foreign policy already constitutes the usurpation of Philippine sovereignty;
7. Ukraine provides an example of where this process of the US using the Philippines as a proxy against China ultimately leads if the Philippine people are unable to recognize their current government is serving US interests at the expense of their own interests;
VIDEO LINK: https://youtu.be/Bw026TLtGyM?si=h4sX1qWxiy0CA5Ht…
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Second, is his written and more complete version at neo or New Eastern Outlook on 3 July 2024,
https://journal-neo.su/2024/07/03/the-philippines-why-it-is-choosing-us-destruction-over-chinese-construction/
https://journal-neo.su/2024/07/03/the-philippines-why-it-is-choosing-us-destruction-over-chinese-construction/
The Philippines: Why it is Choosing US Destruction Over Chinese Construction
3 July 2024, Berletic
03.07.2024 Author: Brian Berletic
The Philippines: Why it is Choosing US Destruction Over Chinese Construction
While the ongoing conflict in Ukraine continues to dominate headlines, occasionally news stories surface regarding growing tensions in the Asia-Pacific region as well. Driven primarily by the US, these headlines also include the proxies Washington is using to stir up an Ukraine-style conflict in the region.
Among these proxies is the Southeast Asian archipelago nation of The Philippines.
The South China Morning Post in a late June 2024 article titled, “China-Philippines ties on ‘brink of total breakdown’: unpacking the collapse,” would claim to provide an explanation as to why once constructive ties between Beijing and Manila have deteriorated into what may possibly become a destructive confrontation.
The article describes how concrete pillars of a rail project being built with China, have since been torn down, and instead, construction in the Philippines now consists of military bases to be used to point missiles at China.
The article claims:
What began as a story of infrastructure cooperation has morphed into an epic tale of betrayal and confrontation, the once-chummy relationship between Manila and Beijing giving way to escalating geopolitical rivalry.
As with many pro-Western accounts of growing Chinese-Philippine tensions, the article omits the political transition from the administration of President Rodrigo Duterte to that of now President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., and how the independent foreign policy of President Duterte was overwritten by the pro-Washington policy of President Marcos Jr.
Maritime disputes treated as minor bilateral concerns to be worked out with Beijing under President Duterte, were escalated into a growing conflict under President Marcos Jr. with US backing, meant to serve as the very pretext to cancel and literally tear down joint Chinese-Philippine projects and replace it with the expansion of the US military’s footprint across the Philippines.
Beijing claims growing tensions specifically over the Second Thomas Shoal, a mostly submerged shoal in the South China Sea, followed the breaking of an agreement with China to suspend Filipino resupply missions to a grounded WW2 ship at the shoal during the Duterte administration. Under the Marcos Jr. administration, resupply missions resumed with Manila, claiming no such agreement was ever made.
China has since released audio recordings of the agreement, causing Manila to backpedal and claim the agreement was not official.
The question becomes, why has Manila decided to choose confrontation with Beijing rather than cooperation?
The answer is Manila did not choose between confrontation and cooperation, Washington did. Far from defending Philippine sovereignty from “Chinese aggression,” growing tensions between China and the Philippines is a direct result from the Philippines’ own sovereignty already being stripped from it through its political capture by Washington.
The US, through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED*) and adjacent organizations has invested for decades millions of dollars a year to influence and interfere in the internal political affairs of nations around the globe, including the Philippines, to shift the respective foreign policies of targeted nations from serving their own best interests to serving Washington’s.
US government-funded media outlets in the Philippines like Rappler, founded by Maria Ressa, a dual US-Philippine citizen, former CNN employee, who also works directly for the NED* as well as receiving funding from the NED*, have an entire section on their homepage dedicated to news about what they call the, “West Philippine Sea.”
The US-funded media platform fits into a wider strategy of manipulating Philippine public perception regarding China, specifically to poison the Philippine public against China.
In this specific instance, Rappler and others aim at convincing the public that China poses a threat to Philippine sovereignty and territorial integrity while convincing the Philippine people to allow US military basing on their own territory and to redirect more public funds from development and infrastructure, to be spent instead on military spending including on facilities for US troops to operate out of, and on US weapons sold to the Philippines itself.
Recently, Reuters exposed other instances of the US government deliberately and malicious manipulating the Philippine public with the intent of poisoning them against China.
In its investigative report, “Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic,” it admits:
[The clandestine operation] aimed to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other life-saving aid that was being supplied by China, a Reuters investigation found. Through phony internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos, the military’s propaganda efforts morphed into an anti-vax campaign. Social media posts decried the quality of face masks, test kits and the first vaccine that would become available in the Philippines – China’s Sinovac inoculation.
Reuters, citing US officials and healthcare experts, admitted that the campaign wasn’t based on a “public health perspective,” but simply aimed to “drag China through the mud,” and endangered the lives of the Philippine public in the process.
While Washington has convinced the Philippine public through US government-funded media that China poses a threat to the Philippines, in actuality it is the US government itself demonstrably harming the Philippines and its people through what are admitted are deliberate lies.
Its campaign to poison the Philippines against China, resulting in canceled public infrastructure projects in exchange for a US-backed military build up threatening to drag the country into armed conflict to fight Washington’s adversary on its behalf and at the Philippines’ own expense is only the most recent chapter in a long, sad story of Washington’s abuse and exploitation of the Philippines.
Washington’s History of Manipulating, Abusing the Philippines
Omitted from pro-Western coverage of the current tensions between the Philippines and China and the supposed threat an “expansionist” China poses to the Philippines, is the fact that it was the US who actually colonized the Philippines from 1899-1946, brutally suppressing a war for independence fought by the Philippine people against American occupation.
The US State Department’s own Office of the Historian admits US forces, “burned villages, implemented civilian reconcentration policies, and employed torture on suspected guerrillas,” resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Filipinos.
The US State Department’s Office of the Historian also discussed a “policy of attraction,” which was “designed to win over key elites and other Filipinos.”
Even after the US officially recognized Philippine independence in 1946, through first the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and then the NED*, the US continued a “policy of attraction” meant to manipulate both the Philippine government and its population to serve US interests even at the expense of the nation’s own best interests.
While those in the Philippines, including Rappler, claim that the NED* is not equivalent to the CIA and that the NED* is “promoting democracy” rather than regime change, the Western media itself over the years has admitted that the NED* was created specifically to take over regime change operations previously carried out by the CIA to make such operations more politically acceptable.
A 1997 New York Times article titled, “Political Meddling by Outsiders: Not New for the U.S.,” would discuss the role the NED* plays in US interference around the globe and specifically in regard to China itself.
The article would admit:
Congress routinely appropriates tens of millions of dollars in covert and overt money to use in influencing domestic politics abroad.
The National Endowment for Democracy*, created 15 years ago to do in the open what the Central Intelligence Agency has done surreptitiously for decades, spends $30 million a year to support things like political parties, labor unions, dissident movements and the news media in dozens of countries, including China.
More recently, The Guardian in 2004 admitted the US NED* and its subsidiaries carried out regime change operations in Serbia, Georgia, Belarus, and Ukraine.
And in 2011, the New York Times would admit the so-called “Arab Spring,” was the result of years of preparations carried out by the NED* in cooperation with US-based tech giants like Google and Facebook preparing opposition groups from North Africa and the Middle East to overthrow their respective governments.
It is not that the NED* has previously engaged in regime change, it’s that the NED* itself is a regime-change organization and those receiving funding from the NED* play a role in undermining a nation’s sovereignty and aiding the US in politically capturing that nation.
It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that US-funded organizations lying about public health or national security threats would also lie about their own funding and their relationship to those in Washington providing it.
Washington’s Anti-China Agenda is Objectively Threatening the Philippines
It can be objectively concluded that it is not in the Philippines’ best interests to escalate an ordinary maritime dispute with China into a potential conflict involving the US military on Philippine shores and along its coastlines, and ultimately serving Washington’s open ambitions to contain China.
Looking at the Philippines’ trade, according to Harvard University’s Atlas of Economic Complexity, 30% of Philippine exports go to China, while only 14% (less than half) go to the US.
32% of all Philippine imports come from China, with only 6% coming from the United States.
Does starting a war over a grounded WW2 ship on a submerged shoal with its largest trade partner serve the Philippines’ best interests? Or does it serve Washington’s interests at the expense of the Philippines? The SCMP article already illustrated how badly needed public infrastructure has literally been torn down in exchange for escalating tensions with the Philippines’ largest trade partner, China.
One needs not guess where this will lead the Philippines if it continues to serve US interests by escalating tensions with China because the same process is already well underway in Ukraine.
In Ukraine, the US successfully poisoned the population against Russia through likewise US government-funded media and political organizations, installed into power a pro-Washington government, militarized the nation, and aided in precipitating a conflict with neighboring Russia resulting in a self-destructive war Ukraine is irreversibly losing.
The US is repeating this process in the Philippines. It spends money funding organizations like Rappler to convince ordinary people, otherwise looking out for their best interests, to choose war over economic opportunities, real development, infrastructure spending, better healthcare, and better education.
It requires constant effort to convince people that somehow hating and confronting their largest most important economic partner, on behalf of their former colonial master, is somehow in their best interests.
Genuinely Defending Sovereignty
Nations in the region must secure not only their borders with armies, shores with navies, and airspace with air forces, but also their information space, political space, academic and cultural space, all from foreign infiltration and capture. The price is just as high as when a foreign nation breaches these spaces as when they breach borders, shores, and airspace.
Bills should be passed to prohibit foreign interference, banning NED* and other foreign-funded organizations and political parties. Investments should be made in creating genuine local media outlets. Academia should be made up of qualified professors with real-world skills to teach students how to build up their nation, not divide and destroy it. Culture should be preserved, celebrated, and added to, rather than undermined, defamed, and erased.
A nation that has a military to secure their physical domains but have left all other domains unprotected – even overrun by foreign influence and interference – have failed just as badly as if they failed to stop an outright military invasion.
Ukraine is a living – or more accurately – dying example of what failure to genuinely protect a nation looks like.
While people in the Philippines are meant to believe China is a threat and that fighting against China is in their best interests, the fact that they’ve been turned against China in the first place means they’ve already lost to foreign invasion – not by China – but by their old and now renewed colonial rulers in Washington, and not along their shores, but within their information and political spaces.
*- is banned in Russia
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And third, is his most complete of all his presentations of it, at youtube,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bw026TLtGyM
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Then, finally, fourth, is the following analysis from the Hong Kong based South China Morning Post:
https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/3260574/ukraine-asia-pro-duterte-coalition-slams-philippiness-involvement-us-proxy-war-against-china
“‘Ukraine of Asia’: pro-Duterte coalition slams Philippines’ involvement in US ‘proxy war’ with China”
Coalition led by supporters of former president Duterte launch campaign against the Philippines’ growing military alliance with the US
Their manifesto criticises [the incredibly corrupt kleptocrat son of a kleptocrat, “Bongbong,” son of Ferdinand Marcos] President Marcos Jnr’s South China Sea stance, claims China’s aggressive actions justified by his provocations.
F. 26 April 2024
Supporters of former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte have formed a coalition opposing the country’s growing alliance with the United States in its conflicts with China, which they warn is becoming a “proxy war” that could turn their nation into “the Ukraine of Asia”.
At the end of the launch event for the Citizens’ Coalition Against War in Manila on Wednesday, the group released a petition calling for signatures supporting an end to the proxy war as well as a manifesto criticising the government’s position on the Second Thomas Shoal, a highly contested maritime landmark in the South China Sea that the Philippine refers to as Ayungin and Beijing calls Ren’ai Jiao.
The coalition, led by Herman Tiu Laurel, founder of the Philippine-Brics Strategic Studies think tank and board chairman of the Association for Philippines-China Understanding, objected to the Philippines defending its territorial rights over the shoal, saying: “The Ayungin incidents have been described as Chinese ‘aggression’, but appear to be a valid response to the US-BBM EDCA military ‘provocations’.”
BBM refers to President Ferdinand Marcos Jnr’s nickname “Bongbong” while EDCA is the abbreviation for the Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement, which the Philippine government signed with the US, allowing the latter’s troops to have a rotational presence inside Philippine military facilities.
US President Joe Biden meets Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jnr on September 22, 2022. Photo: AP
The incidents referenced in recent months involved Chinese maritime vessels disrupting – through the use of water cannons and other “grey zone” tactics – missions by Philippine forces to deliver supplies and building materials to the BRP Sierra Madre, a World War II era navy vessel that was purposefully grounded on the shoal to strengthen Manila’s territorial claims to the area.
The coalition’s petition states: “We strongly reject, as the world must reject, the false narrative that China has acted as ‘a naked aggressor’ in these non-lethal incidents. To begin with, China has been circumspect in making sure that no weapons of war were used, and there were no fatalities in these unfortunate incidents.”
The text of the petition also argues that the United States’ “pivot to Asia” strategy – aimed at strengthening Washington’s bilateral security alliances with a number of countries in the continent – “has led to the escalation of tensions in the region, using the Philippines, among others as a strategic pawn in its dangerous game”.
One of the speakers at the event, Anna Malindog-Uy, claimed that other countries now perceived the Philippines as being well on its way to becoming “the Ukraine of Asia”.
Malindog-Uy, who describes herself on her Facebook page as a doctoral candidate in economics at Peking University, acknowledged that “the Philippine’s strategic location makes it a pivotal player in any potential military conflict in the Asia-Pacific region, particularly in the context of rising geopolitical tension between the US and China”.
However, the Philippines should not take sides if war should break out since the conflict would be “American-orchestrated”, she said.
“Why should we allow the Philippines to be dragged into a conflict which is not of its own making and where it should not take part,” she argued.
Why the Philippines has returned to its US alliance
Why is the Philippines aligning itself with the US after years of close China ties under Duterte
Duterte’s former spokesman, Harry Roque, also spoke against the presence of US troops at Philippine military facilities, saying these were “a threat to our security because with their presence the country becomes a target by other countries opposed to the US”.
Former president Duterte himself vowed in a recent interview with Chinese state-run news agency Global Times that should he ever succeed in removing Marcos Jnr from the presidency, he would remove the EDCA bases.
During his time in office, Duterte shifted the country’s foreign policy towards closer alignment with China and away from the US. He recently revealed that he had made a handshake agreement with Chinese President Xi Jinping to maintain the “status quo” in the South China Sea, including refraining from missions to reinforce the BRP Sierra Madre’s position on the Second Thomas Shoal.
Roque had also raised the so-called gentleman’s agreement between Duterte and Xi, and suggested China’s aggressive actions towards resupply missions to the shoal were because it felt the Marcos Jnr administration had violated the unwritten pact made by his predecessor.
Although Duterte was highly popular during his time in office, his rants against America and his threats to eject the EDCA bases and scrap the 1951 US-Philippine Mutual Defence Treaty apparently did little to dent most Filipinos’ positive perceptions of the US, which has long been an ally to their country.
A survey by private pollster Pulse Asia conducted in December 2022 showed that 84 per cent of 1,200 Filipino respondents wanted the government to work closely with the US to assert its sovereignty over the West Philippine Sea – which includes the country’s exclusive economic zone and other features such as Thitu island in the South China Sea that Manila considers part its maritime territory.
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MY COMMENT: It would be interesting to know who funded “Bongbong” into the Presidency after the disastrously corrupt Presidency of his father, and who own the major ‘news’-media in the Philippines.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.
