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In a new article promoting the CIA’s new mission center focused on China and the need to pour more resources into countering Beijing, Bloomberg also accidentally makes the case that many of the Chinese government’s controversial domestic policies are entirely justified and completely necessary.

Citing anonymous government officials alongside bloodthirsty psychopath John Bolton, the article “China Is Evading U.S. Spies — and the White House Is Worried” argues that “a stronger pivot to China can’t come soon enough” and reminds readers of last year’s House Intelligence Committee report which claimed that “Absent a significant realignment of resources, the U.S. government and intelligence community will fail to achieve the outcomes required to enable continued U.S. competition with China on the global stage.”

But in their efforts to justify the need for greater focus on espionage campaigns in China, the article’s multiple authors explain that the US intelligence cartel has been floundering on that front precisely because of the authoritarian policies which western institutions have been aggressively criticizing China for implementing.

“Xi’s sweeping efforts to change China’s domestic politics and consolidate his control also have taken a toll on American intelligence,” the article says. “The shift from a system of ‘collective’ leadership under former Presidents Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao toward one dominated by Xi means that the CIA has had to go from focusing on the inner circles of seven or even nine top leaders to, effectively, just one.”

“Chinese academia, the media and civil society organizations are all closely controlled by the government, further compounding the challenge of reporting on the country,” the article adds.

“CIA officers in China face daunting challenges posed by China’s burgeoning surveillance state, which has blanketed Chinese cities with surveillance cameras and employs sophisticated facial recognition software to track threats,” claim the article’s authors.

Bloomberg explains that China’s anti-corruption measures have made it much harder to recruit CIA assets, writing, “Xi’s broad anti-corruption campaign, which has punished more than 1.5 million officials, has also led to greater scrutiny of Chinese officials’ income, making payments to potential sources far more problematic, two former officials said.”

“Those efforts were detailed extensively in 2017 by the New York Times, which said as many as a dozen U.S. sources were executed by China, with others jailed, in what represented one of the worst breaches ever of American spying networks,” the article also notes.

So Beijing’s anti-corruption crackdowns, widespread surveillance and strict control over Chinese society is making it harder for the CIA to undermine that nation, and now the CIA is expressing its frustration through the billionaire media. Which shows that China is acting entirely in self-defense when it implements these policies.

https://twitter.com/JoshC0301/status/1458448508168540161

When people complain about Chinese authoritarianism and lack of transparency, what they’re really complaining about is that China is defending itself against a nonstop assault from the US-centralized empire which seeks to bring Beijing to its knees.

The heavy-handed domestic policies of US-targeted nations like China are not morally comparable to the censorship, propaganda, secrecy, surveillance and other authoritarian measures you see in the US and its lackey states, because US-targeted nations are actively defending themselves against a hostile foreign aggressor who won’t be content until all nations on Earth bow to its dictates.

These are not the same thing. One is a weaker government acting defensively, the other is a globe-spanning power structure that if given the opportunity will topple your government using mass-scale psyops, espionage, special operations, color revolutions and proxy conflicts to force your nation and its people to subordinate its interests to those of the US empire. Sure it would be great if all the world’s populations were free to say and read and do whatever they want without government interference, but to pretend we live in a world where populations aren’t deprived of those freedoms in response to a nonstop assault by a global juggernaut is to live in a fantasy land.

There is a slow motion third world war underway between the US-centralized empire and the few remaining nations which have successfully resisted its aggressive attempts to absorb them into its folds. Nations like the US use propaganda, censorship, secrecy and surveillance to advance those aggressions, while nations like China use them defensively. This is a fundamental difference, and to pretend it isn’t is to ignore the reality of the power dynamics at play.

It’s so silly how the US war machine uses the word “defense” to describe the machine by which it inflicts nonstop aggression upon the world. “Department of Defense”. “The defense industry”. The US war machine doesn’t “defend” anything, it attacks relentlessly and maliciously. Defense is what the nations who resist those aggressions are doing.

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37 responses to “Bloomberg CIA Apologia Accidentally Vindicates China’s Strict Domestic Policies”

  1. To show that China’s information wall is defensive, note that they don’t even enforce it in Hong Kong. Whereas the US tries to enforce its info filter through all the countries that Google reaches, for but one example.

  2. Does anyone else have the sneaking suspicion that Mayor McCheese and the Hamburglar are in a secret alliance to dominate the burger market?

  3. Ah, CIA mass hallucinations: more fun than a barrel of fish, or is it shooting monkeys in a barrel? Either way works for your standard short-tempered psychopath.

  4. In another amusing twist of events in global political bizzaroworld,
    The kremlin and the cia have apparently decided to go ahead and cut president popsicle stick out of the equation entirely and hold direct consultations with each other in Moscow, as of last week.
    The news gets funnier by the day…

  5. Ms Johnstone puts a long-missing polish on geopolitics, which gives readers a view of great clarity over the world around them. Her near perfect understanding of the US elite cartel and their national containment of citizen minds has given her a special perch from which to view the US global playground.This is not a view afforded to just anyone.

    The majority of published journalists in this genre are leashed like barking chihuahua’s to the corporate controlled news industry. Or they are commissioned by myopic journals of ideological obsession. We independent readers are fortunate to have her voice among our selections. Moreover, the young, who are destined to throw off and hog-tie the dead weight of the corporate monsters that oppress humanity, globally, are fortunate to be exposed to the precision of her knowing insights.

    One simply recognizes the unmistakable ring of truth — and pays attention.

    1. Well said, and I love the unusual note of optimism. Let’s hope that the destiny to which you allude is fulfilled, that the dead weight is indeed thrown off and hog-tied. Right now, that weight is compressing and depressing most all of us, especially the young, and the ropes seem very tight and secure. The young will need a social version of Houdini to pull off this apparently impossible escape.

  6. Although I freely admit that the cia, on the cia news network, pretending to fuss and cry about what amounts to the Chinese version of the ‘patriot act’ is entirely alternate dimension of reality hilarious.
    Wow.

  7. Disregarding, completely, the labels of ‘China’ and ‘the United States’, and ignoring the propaganda of each government via whatever channel,
    It is still easy enough to observe very nearly identical attempts by each government to consolidate power and remove as much power as possible from the populations of each country.
    Ironically, both governments falsely claim that reducing their own populations to utter helplessness and dependence on the government is ‘the only way to defend’ against a government on the other side of the planet which happens to be using the exact same lies in the exact same way to do the exact same thing.
    A suspicious individual just might think something isn’t quite right about the whole affair.

    1. Both governments never claimed that. A suspicious individual would do well to separate facts from fears before coming to a conclusion.

  8. I’m minded of a science fiction novel by Frederik Pohl titled The Cool War. The parallels he describes therein struck me as being eerily prescient. You can find a summary here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cool_War

  9. For the love of Buddha someone help me understand Caitlin et al’s argument. I agree completely with the thesis that the Empire is the source of our ills. But then it’s argued that we’re all going to be dead soon. So if both are true the the there’s no future to fight for and all this empire stuff is… ?

    As @annebauerwriter has pointed out:

    “U.S. Govt Official Messaging:

    We were wrong about witches, Manifest Destiny, slavery, Japanese internment, sugar, trans fats, miscegenation & sodomy laws, segregation, Vietnam, Defense of Marriage, AIDS, WMD and the Taliban.

    But we’re right about (Censored)! Why don’t you trust us?”

    https://twitter.com/annbauerwriter/status/1447616555202842633

  10. I noted that also.

    Meanwhile Robert F Kennedy’s book “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health” will be released Nov.16.

    Fauci is the Nixon of this generation, this century and this millennium.

    https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/the-real-anthony-fauci-robert-f-kennedy-jr-7-days/?utm_source=salsa&eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=e6fea322-22e5-4c3c-a83d-d5d3fe8002f9

    1. You mean RFK the rabid anti-vaxxer and immunological ignoramus, whose idiotic rants have polluted many a halfway sensible blog?
      Nixon was hugely flawed but he accomplished more good things than any president since.

      1. Pasha: Chances are RFK Jr knows more about vaccines than you do and you are only peddling – hopefully for some financial gratification – the lies you’re told by the snake oil salesmen made famous by Mark Twain in Huckleberry Finn and Arthur Penn in Little Big Man. Funny enough, the father of John D. Rockefeller (who invented “modern” chemical medicine as an outlet for his oil at a time when it was only used for lamps and lobbied Congress to ban any other therapy as superstitious bullshit) was himself a snake oil salesman. Wikipedia excerpt: “Rockefeller was the second child born in Richford, New York, to con artist William Avery “Bill” Rockefeller and Eliza Davison (…) Bill was first a lumberman and then a traveling salesman who identified himself as a “botanic physician” who sold elixirs, described by locals as “Big Bill” and “Devil Bill.” Unshackled by conventional morality, he led a vagabond existence and returned to his family infrequently. Throughout his life, Bill was notorious for shady schemes”.
        No, they’re not talking about Bill Gates (who also probably knows less about vaccines than RFK Jr. but more about making money :o)

      2. You are becoming rather good at playing the Mentally Deficient !!!!

        1. Is that what M.D. stands for?

    2. Really now? I wrote something about that a few months ago. Find it here. https://yaxls.wordpress.com/2021/08/23/the-three-way-battle-of-the-pandemic/
      Basically, there has been a three way fight about how to deal with the pandemic. It is sad that Bobbie Kennedy junior identifies one bad side of this struggle, but can’t find the right side.

  11. In Enter the Dragon, Bruce Lee’s opponent O’Hara punches a board and sends it flying to impress Lee who then says: “Boards don’t hit back”. Having failed to notice this detail costs O’Hara his life when Lee hits back. The US should file a complaint at the UN about how China is making it increasingly difficult for US spooks to do their job and should be chucked out of the Security Council to be replaced by Taiwan before it’s too late :o)
    https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=bruce+lee%3a+boards+don%27t+hit+back&view=detail&mid=CA4E800DCA241B79FF9ECA4E800DCA241B79FF9E&FORM=VIRE

  12. Hypocrisy and double standards are the keystones of our foreign policy which is why we’re in perpetual conflict, albeit very profitable perpetual conflict, … for a select few.

    1. The irony is that the US applies what Chinese general SunTzu, considered one of the greatest strategists ever, advises: “All warfare is based on deception” :o)

  13. Caitlin Johnstone, with respect, I disagree. According to the Fed’s latest Flow of Funds report the wealthiest 1% of Americans have seen their wealth increase from $17.9 Trillion in 2006 to $41.5 trillion today. While the poor got poorer. This year the USA will spend $1 Trillion more on imports than it earns on exports.
    Of course with world reserve currency, they can, and will, print more $Trillions. This is not a “right” of the USA, the world community will decide with what and when it will be replaced. And all those dollars will flow back home causing hyper inflation. Americans are bitterly divided and the chasm grows deeper and wider each day. The head of the armed forces admits that the glory days of hegemony after the fall of the USSR are gone. China and Russia are rival superpowers.
    So America continues to decline as her rivals draw level and in some ways surpass her. Her rivals are united as she loses support from important allies like Germany who now face gas shortages because the USA delayed NordStream 2 with sanctions. There are many more examples, France with the Australian subs etc.
    Can American leaders really be this foolish? Or has someone taken the template of how to destabilize a nation and applied it to its inventors.
    China feeds America’s addiction for worthless junk paid for with worthless dollars, as her industrial base withers. As Russia reclaimed the Crimea and the Donbass, China could as easily reclaim Taiwan, but let America waste their energy and resources blustering how they will defend it, falling into the trap.
    America plays tiddlywinks as Russia and China plays 3 dimensional chess.

    1. Too bad for the pore ole USA … proudly playing tiddlywinks since 1945

    2. And: It was right there in the book – forever wars with the neighbors are not about national defense, they are part of mind control of the populace in establishing and maintaining the rigid class structure of an Orwellian society. Power is vested forever in the hands of the psychopaths of the Inner Party who themselves are made into dogs by their superiors lest they threaten the billionaires above them and Big Brother Xi at the top who has to watch his own back regardless of his success in the game. Substitute ‘Xi’ for ‘Trump’ and except for a few remaining decencies which we are still working to subvert it is equally applicable, no heroes in this game.
      In external affairs the weak/strong dynamic is the same. American troops murdered 3 million Filipinos to make it a colony. The Dutch did similar in Indonesia and the Chinese are doing it in Burma in a more underhanded way, backing tyranny by locals in exchange for jade, rubies, and the teak forests, analogous to the US in Chile.

    3. It’s amazing that Russia is a superpower with a GDP smaller than California’s, so I’ve been told.

  14. The seven basic propaganda devices: Name-Calling, Glittering Generality, Transfer, Testimonial, Plain Folks, Card Stacking, and Band Wagon. Simple rule: Take whatever message they are promoting, and apply the exact opposite – as truth. Prime example: Is China “acting entirely in” offense? Or, is China “acting entirely in self-defense”? It works almost every time, as a starting point. Is Russia the aggressor? Or, are they under siege? Is Venezuela the aggressor? Or, are they under siege? Is Syria the aggressor? Or, are they under siege? And so on.
    https://seaclearly.com/2021/05/01/a-final-warning

    1. I was very fortunate to have a middle school teacher, who taught us the seven basic propaganda devices. She had the good sense to only use commercial advertising as examples. But it didn’t take much to realize that they also applied to politics.

      I have long thought that this should be part of every child’s education.

  15. The US Emperors of War and hubris must be feeling extremely frustrated.
    When one considers the huge quantity of goods that corporations like Amazon, E Bay and Walmart purchase from China, even hinting at conflict would result in some heated exchanges between the CEOs of those corporations and the warmongers.
    Gotta laugh.

  16. Happy Thursday and all other days to all the people that did not join the US military to support the most destructive, wrong headed organization in the world.

    1. Carolyn L Zaremba Avatar
      Carolyn L Zaremba

      Hear, hear!

  17. Very succinct, and to the point. It is clear that the US assault is weakening, and the Chinese defence strengthening. As you point out, it is so ironic that the US classifies its activities as defensive, when it is the other way round. And so hypocritical, too.

    1. There is a good argument that attack is the best defense so that the Dept. of Defense name can be defended.

  18. Excellent article. Thank you.

  19. Well, I’m glad Cait is getting this point. A long as there exists in the world an impulse to gain undeserved power, free speech or political rights cannot be absolute. The creeps have to be seen and shut down.

    Any kind of surveillance system can not be absolutely right or wrong. It depends on the kind of people using it and their motivations.

    1. But let us also admit there is danger in authoritarianism and surveillance, no matter how defensively it is used. Castro used these same tools, without the high tech, to ward off the hijacking of the Cuban Revolution by American imperialism and capitalism. They worked then as now in China, but at a stiff cost, however worth paying.

      1. Carolyn L Zaremba Avatar
        Carolyn L Zaremba

        You mean Fidel used them. Anticommunists refer to him as “Castro”.

        1. Thanks for making me aware of this. When the history books are written following the end of American imperialism, if we’re lucky enough to survive and write such books, Fidel will be among the few political luminaries of the 20th Century. Only when I read a book about the Cuban Revolution, written by an insider, did I fully realize that without Fidel, there wouldn’t have been a revolution, much less a lasting one.

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