Let's spy on the Chinese "spy" balloon.
What’s the big story? What’s the breaking news? What’s the thing that we must be worried about now?
It’s not that we are rushing toward a nuclear war. Neither is it the fact that we are killing the planet nor is it the that we are overpopulating the planet.
It’s none of that.
It’s a balloon. Still not scared?
It’s a CHINESE balloon. Just a little bit scared?
It’s a CHINESE SPY balloon. Now I know that you are trembling in fear, and you being afraid shows that you are a true patriot who deeply cares about the national security.
But you don’t need to worry now, because the balloon has been shot down, or I should say, the Chinese “spy” balloon has been shot down.
We are safe now. (That’s just me trying to be funny ;)
Between the day it got discovered over the US and the day it got shot down, the hysteria with which this whole news story got a coverage was "one of the stupidest news cycles in living memory," as called by Austin journalist Christopher Hooks.
Any thriller movie or a novel can never match the scaremongering with which the Chinese “spy” balloon was presented to the US public. I would even say that North by NorthWest (1959 thriller film) would pale when it comes to its comparison with the American media’s ability to create an environment of thrill.
When the balloon was first detected into the American airspace on Thursday, the only people who welcomed the news with both arms open were the Republicans. I am saying this because now they had another opportunity to blame the Democrats for being “soft on China” or Biden for being a “Chinese asset,” and guess what? The Republicans and China hawks didn’t procrastinate, and immediately wore their “China bad” hat that was in the closet since Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan last year.
Here are the examples:
Before the balloon was popped:
“Shoot down the balloon. Cancel Blinken’s trip. Hold China accountable. Biden is letting China walk all over us. It’s time to make America strong again.” - Nikki Haley.
“Literally every regular person I know is talking about how to shoot down the Chinese Spy Balloon. It would be great if an average Joe shot it down because China Joe won’t. Regular Americans can do everything better than the government and actually care about our country.” - Marjorie Taylor Greene.
“The CCP’s spy balloon is a symptom of the Biden administration’s weakness,” says Mike Pompeo.
After the balloon was popped:
“Chinese intelligence had clearly already completed their surveillance,” says Candace Owens.
“Joe Biden knew the Chinese spy balloon was coming. Tried to hide it from the American people. Let it fly across the ENTIRE COUNTRY. And only after the entire country begged him to act, our great military shot it down,” said House Committe of the Republicans.
If you have ever wondered what’s the difference between the Republicans and the Democrats, here’s the one: the Republicans would shoot the balloon right away over the land and the Democrats would wait for it to get over water and then shoot it.
Such a significant difference, eh.
China insisted that the balloon is “a civilian airship used for research, mainly meteorological, purposes” that “deviated far from its planned course” because of strong winds.
The same point has been confirmed by the Washington Post which says, “experts in national security and aerospace [who] said the craft appears to share characteristics with high-altitude balloons used by developed countries around the world for weather forecasting,” and Pentagon which says that “the payload wouldn’t offer much in the way of surveillance that China couldn’t collect through spy satellites” and that “the balloon posed no serious physical or intelligence threat”.
One thing is certain that it was not for collecting intelligence, and I am not saying that it coming from China to the US is a pure accident and nothing else, because all the great powers in the world act cunningly to have some advantage over its rivals and this balloon incident may be one of those acts.
Not certainly, but possibly.
One negative that was definitely a result of this incident is that Anthony Blinken’s trip to China, which was supposed to be this week and was seen as hopeful after the tensions between both countries were surging quickly, was canceled.
Apart from the balloon whose threat was hyped by the media, there is another balloon that is FORMED by the media. No one talks about this second balloon: the balloon of propaganda against #Russia and #China built by the most sophisticated network of information owned by the most powerful empire in the human history.
It was the result of the second balloon that the Americans felt so threatened by the first balloon.
This whole incident has cleared a couple of things for us:
As the US keeps surrounding China with its military bases, it’s always good to ask yourself how the US would react if China built a military base near the US borders, and the balloon story has given us the answer. Just a weather balloon was enough for the China hawks in the US to start beating the war drums, imagine how would they react in a scenario where China copies the US in terms of building bases around it.
The recent anti-China propaganda pushed by the media and the public submitting to it blindly shows where the American public would stand when the ultimate anti-China propaganda really takes hold. In other words, it has proved that the American public is ready to dance to the beats of the war drum and hypnotize to the sound of trumpets against China.
This “Chinese Spy Balloon” story has added another tenuous layer of China-hate over a loathed version of it. Undoubtedly, it’s going to be beneficial while manufacturing public consent for a coming war with China, just like the Russia gate story ingrained anti-Russia sentiments into the brain of Americans (which helped in public’s consent for an increasingly risky standoff with Russia).
I wish we were a little saner than what we are now.
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