I have encountered this so many times so that I’ll give today’s example in order to display how blatant it is:
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I prefer generally not to read at X and other sites where posts tend to be user-hostile for skeptical readers (like I) who are constantly checking to find the original source for an allegation, but I just happened upon an X from Arnaud Bertrand, on August 18th, headlined from the World Bank “Military expenditure (% of GDP) – China,” and it showed China at a remarkably stable and low percentage of around 1.7% since 2010, during which time the U.S. empire have enormously increased their joint efforts to get Taiwan to declare independence from China so that the U.S. will have an excuse (though a false one) to invade and take control over China (like it has over EU/NATO countries, Japan, banana republics, etc. — the entire existing U.S. empire). The objective is to encourage and then get Taiwan to declare independence, at which point China will invade its province of Taiwan, at which point America will ‘defend Taiwan’s democracy’ by invading China — as-if the U.S. has any RIGHT to involve itself in China’s internal affairs. As Bertrand’s post at X said, “So there’s a LOT of dishonesty in this discourse and even more so when these folks tell you how certain they are about China’s intent behind that ‘buildup’: it’s essentially guessing why there’s a ‘buildup’ that’s their own constructed narrative, that’s what passes for serious analysis these days.” And it showed that World Bank picture, but I needed to authenticate what that picture showed, to look at its source, and so I Googled its headline “Military expenditure (% of GDP) – China” hoping and expecting there’d be a find from the World Bank, but instead got: “Your search did not match any documents.”
I then searched that headline at the other search-site I use, Yandex (go to yandex.com), which often finds things that Google hides; and, at the very top of the finds there, was the one from the World Bank, it’s at the top of
The World Bank’s article is at https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS?locations=CN. It is very informative, and basically gives the lie to the U.S. empire’s allegations against China as being an aggressor-nation (such as the U.S. itself is: the unchallengeable #1 on that).
I have been told by some sites that post articles from me, that Google had threatened them with de-monification of advertising income unless they’d cease accepting (publishing) my submissions, and most of the sites that used to publish me don’t do so now, or else do it only very rarely, and, for whatever reasons, my articles are far less easy to find via Google searches than was formerly the case. For example, the site where I have been directly posting each one of my articles for many years, theduran.com, is among the many sites that Google blacklists from showing up in Google’s searches.
But, anyway: Bertrand is correct that propagandists for the U.S. Government (including its colonies) are basically lying to allege that China’s military spending (in response to the increasing danger of America invading China) is soaring ‘and so we need likewise to increase greatly OUR military spending so as to defend ourselves against the increasing threat from China’. All of this propaganda is just free advertising on behalf of U.S. firms such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, and Generals Dynamics, to increase their sales. But it could end up producing WW3. So, it’s very dangerous.
Interestingly, the World Bank’s article “Military expenditure (% of GDP) – United States”, shows that America’s percentage bottomed-out at 3.1% in 2000 when Putin came into power in Russia, then reached 4.9% in 2010, and has been between 3.3% and 3.7% since 2018. The world average is around 2.1% to 2.3% since 2000. So: China’s is actually below the world’s average. America’s is above.
Incidentally: the second listing down on that Yandex search-find is this: “China has already won Asia’s arms race with defence budget larger than the rest of Asia combined”. It’s an article originally from NIKKEI Asia, in the world’s largest financial newspaper, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, in Tokyo, which, of course, is the capital city in America’s largest colony. The article opens by saying: “There has been much chatter over recent years about an Asian arms race triggered by China’s surging military expenditure. This, it is argued, is reflected in increased defense budgets and new equipment programs announced by a number of Asian countries.” It then says: “The country’s surging defense budget has allowed every aspect of the PLA [China’s army] to be transformed and modernized. … In contrast to the PLA’s advances, numerous militaries across Asia have been starved of funds and are facing relative obsolescence. … If China’s neighbors view its military advances as a long-term problem, then they need to take action now. They have to spend far more on defense.” Maybe the article will help to fool the Japanese people to fear an invasion by China, and so not to, for example, kick out the 79 U.S. military bases in Japan.
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But if Japanese people are so afraid of an invasion by China, then why isn’t their Government requesting from China a mutual-defense treaty, to defend against the country that constantly does threaten war in every region of the world? How much is sheer corruption behind all of this? Do the Japanese people even care? And are they really that easy to fool? I wonder. Maybe for the individuals who are so rich that (via their profit and ‘non-profit’ corporations) they can spend enough to fool the public of anything, the answer is inevitably yes.
An objector here stated, “as for ‘why isn’t their [Japanese] Government requesting from China a mutual-defense treaty’? Because article 9 from the US-imposed Constitution of Japan states that Japan cannot launch wars abroad. It is prohibited from having a military; hence the term Japanese Self-Defense Forces. What could be agreed to between China and Japan is a mutual non-agression treaty.” However, there is no one to enforce a ‘non-aggression treaty’, and they have a record of briefly postponing instead of preventing wars. (Consider, for example, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact, which lasted from 23 August 1939 till Germany’s invasion of Russia on 22 June 1941 — not even two years, and Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa invasion of the Soviet Union lasted nearly four years, from 22 June 1941 till 8 May 1945 when the Soviet Union defeated Hitler with the assistance of Lend-Lease funding from FDR’s America.) By contrast: a mutual-defense treaty lasts as long as both of its participants want it to last. In the case of Japan and China, that could be a very long time — especially because the larger country, China, would actually be protecting the smaller one. Furthermore, Japan’s U.S.-designed Constitution is already irrelevant because Japan has the world’s 27th-largest military, with 261,000 personnel (0.4% of Japan’s labor force) employed in it.
Reprinted with permission from Eric’s Substack.
