To be sure, China does not desire to go to war with the United States of America. But they would not mind having some leader of a vassal state mouthing the great anti-US rhetoric if only to see how the US will play its hand. By the measure of recent world history, they will most likely overplay it as they always seem to do.
The anti-US discourse is not a new discourse. It is a rather old one. But it does still have a market these days, especially in the war-torn countries in Africa and the Middle East.
If it has any place at all in the Western world, this would be in the poverty-stricken slums where refugees and immigrants lose finally their last remnants of faith in the American and/or Western European dream. Kurt Vonnegut was right. I rephrase: Any other place on this planet is just as miserable as where you are now. So why move?
But it is in the Middle East and Africa where the great anti-US rhetoric finds greatest expression in the language of violence and war, with bombs bursting in air, so to speak; flag burning whenever good opportunity arises; and the rise of semi-anarchistic terrorist cults driven by the most quaint and esoteric ideologies. What about Maoism? Even in China, they don’t sell that anymore.
America is the great Satan! America and Western Europe committed genocide on our ancestors, bombed the hell out of our cities in World War II and burned whole villages in a previous war. It is partly responsible by action or inaction for our own corruption and poverty. They are all things evil and more. Pay no mind to the fact that our own fathers and mothers would have immigrated there, given half the chance. Nor pay any attention that some of our children and grandchildren might end up fighting their way through its borders in a way not dissimilar from the Syrians and Afghans now. These places too were hotbeds of the great anti-US rhetoric. As they are to a lesser extent, even now.
The great anti-US and Western European discourses are easy to infiltrate by anyone, including the Americans and Europeans themselves. Take for instance the collective self-loathing oratory of Donald Trump’s campaign: “America is in great trouble, folks!” Change is what we need. That, and a great big wall. China and Putin don’t mind the rhetoric. Trump as US president is exactly like Caligula becoming Rome’s emperor. He was one of the best-known historical markers of Rome’s impending and final fall.
But what of us who, in our own quaint way, facilitate all these in the social networks? Good for us now to recognize what the great anti-US discourse sounds like and where it comes from. We have the right to join in, of course. But I remember my late father giving me good advice whenever buying automotive parts from the Chinese stores. The Chinese are honest.
They will tell you if you’re buying a cheap fake. But only if you have half the brain to ask.
But quite fortunately, or unfortunately, politics is still a game mostly fought not by you and me through the safe avenues of Facebook. The great political decisions of our time are not even made solely by thoughtless and brainless politicians. It is still a shadow play of the old and dying.
It would be a good thing if they prove themselves to be people of wisdom as well, and they would not allow the country to become still another test case for how to foment absurd wars designed only to produce in the end great violence and hapless Filipino refugees. And since the Chinese are involved, one hopes and prays they will not disrupt business too badly and for too long.