June 20, 2018
Language matters, I think we all agree. And we are alert that terms like infesting, when applied by our president to people instead of vermin, are signifying a parallel to fascistic linguistic practices. We are aware that phrases like separate but equal, when used by our president for his new space military project, express his longing for Jim Crow times. What flew, at least for me, under the radar though, was a seemingly innocuous change in name for one of our military operational forces.
Three weeks ago, the US Pacific Command became the US Indo-Pacific Command, a seemingly innocuous name change declared by General Mattis. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/05/31/615722120/in-military-name-change-u-s-pacific-command-becomes-u-s-indo-pacific-command
There are those who ague that, “to the Chinese leadership, changing PACOM’s name to the Indo-Pacific Command will just be another signal of Washington’s determination to extend its unprecedented military presence westward from the Pacific around Southeast Asia into the Indian Ocean and so further restrain the attainment of what it sees as China’s legitimate destiny.” In fact, Michael Klare, a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College (and a man, admittedly, prone to catastrophic thinking) predicts that the US is girding for military confrontation with China.
He points to the fact that Mattis disinvited the Chinese from the world’s largest multinational naval exercise, the Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC), conducted annually under American auspices. And on June 8th the DoD launched Malabar 2018, a joint Pacific Ocean naval exercise involving forces from India, Japan, and the United States. Incorporating once neutral India into America’s anti-Chinese “Pacific” alliance system in this and other ways has, in fact, become a major twenty-first-century goal of the Pentagon, posing a significant new threat to China.
The full article is attached below, giving an extensive overview of the changes in policy and military approach to China as US power declines and China’s rises.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176438/tomgram:_michael_klare,_is_a_war_with_china_on_the_horizon/
And officials in the military (or now in the diplomatic corps, like Admiral Harris who has been appointed to become the U.S. Ambassador to South Korea) use this language: “Make no mistake, our 27-year holiday from history is over. Great power competition is back. Freedom and justice hang in the balance and the scale won’t tip of its own accord simply because we wish it would.” Or a senior Pentagon official, Lt. Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, director of the Joint Staff, when asked about China’s militarization of the islands in the region and the U.S. capability to “blow apart” China’s artificial islands and its military installations, “I would just tell you that the United States military has had a lot of experience in the Western Pacific taking down small islands.”
When asked to clarify his remarks the pentagon official said: “It’s just a fact we had a lot of experience in the Second World War taking down small islands that are isolated, so that’s a core competency of the U.S. military that we’ve done before; shouldn’t read anything more into that than a simple statement of historical fact.”
https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3446034
Right; we shouldn’t read anything into anything. Just let the language flow over us and get its hooks into us and let it settle, preparing the grounds.
A few years ago the idea of a Sino-American war would have sounded like a script for a bad Hollywood movie; so would have the vision that the US would put infants into tender-age prison tents in Texas during temperatures of 106 degree.
