Becoming Dangerously MAD for Jesus
This writer is of a certain generation, one that remembers regularly ducking under a desk at elementary school in preparation for a nuclear war.It wasn't some remote, abstract concept for me. The school was located just a few miles from the Mather Air Force Base where bombers flew in and out, one of nine Strategic Air Command (SAC) bases in California after WWII.
When I was outside playing (kids did that a lot back then, played outside), I could look up into the sky and see (and hear) flying overhead B-36's and B-47's, and then as technology "improved" came the B-52's. Flying as low as they were no one could confuse these planes with commercial aircraft. We knew they were all carrying nuclear weapons.
Sometimes my parents would drive us to the beach. I looked out over the water where, except for the curvature of the Earth, there was a theoretical unobscured view of Japan, where the United States dropped the only two nuclear bombs used in warfare. Nothing but the Pacific Ocean is between that beach and Japan.
When we did those duck-under-the-desk drills, I would wonder why the drills because we were in the total destruction zone should a nuclear bomb hit Mather AFB. This was before the term Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) was coined in 1962 by Donald Brennan, a strategist working in the Hudson Institute.
Today nuclear war is an abstract for most Americans. But not all Americans. As explained in the October 16, 2018 post "We’re modernizing our nuclear arsenal" to save the word of Jesus, Pence warns China and the world at the Koch funded Dr. Strangelove institute:
We’re modernizing our nuclear arsenal. We’re fielding and developing new cutting-edge fighters and bombers....
That speech was given at the same Hudson Institute the term MAD was coined in 1962.
Does Vice-President Mike Pence, a born-again Christian, reflect an attitude common to the religious right? What kind of precedent could he find for tying Christianity to nuclear war? How about a training program for the real guys with their "fingers on the button." For 20 years a course on “Christian Just War Theory” was taught by chaplains at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California to those who would turn the key should World War III break out.
A PowerPoint presentation which was part of the course consisted of 43 slides to demonstrate the moral justification for atomic warfare. Old and New Testament passages were used along with artwork and a quote from Nazi rocket scientist Werner von Braun who went on to work for the United States after the Second World War stating: “We felt that only by surrendering such a weapon to people who are guided by the Bible could such an assurance to the world be best secured.”
The officers were being told that “under fundamentalist Christian doctrine, war is a good thing”.
Is War Too Easy for A Non-Warrior Leadership?
Mike Pence was born in 1959. Like most American men born after 1957, Pence has not fought in a war. While technically military draft laws are in effect, none of those Americans men have been drafted. And historically only men have been drafted.
Despite the fact that since WWII there have been numerous wars and the draft was in effect through the Korean and Vietnam Wars, no American President since George H. W. Bush has seen active duty much less been shot at or shot at an enemy combatant.
Based on WWII standards, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump would have been considered draft dodgers. So would former Secretary of Defense and Vice-President Dick Cheney whose non-brushes with combat death should be considered as a stand-in symbol for most of the pro-war advisors to Presidents since Jimmy Carter. But Clinton, Bush, Cheney, and Trump should have fought in Vietnam, a war that they, along with many others who found a route to privilege, could avoid because it was politically unpopular.
Effectively most Americans born after 1957, including most in the White House and Congress, have gained their knowledge of war from the entertainment industry.
Quite literally, the United States has not had a comparably low percentage of Americans suffering from combat related PTSD since before the beginning of WWI.
Unfortunately, this creates a situation where most Americans do not recognize the nature of war risks being taken and might be startled at the reasoning behind taking those risks. Indeed, a pro-war "China threat industry" has developed in 21st Century America. The remainder of this post should be considered in that context.
On the day President Donald Trump was inaugurated, China’s military warned that war between the two countries was a real possibility. They did so with good reason.
"We’re going to war in the South China Sea in five to 10 years," Steve Bannon said on his radio show in a March 2016. In August 2016, Bannon was named the chief executive officer of Trump's 2016 presidential bid.
Bannon did serve in the Navy, as explained here in Why you should fear Trumpism's Steve Bannon: war with China within 8 years and other reasons in February 2017. But he has never been shot at by nor shot at an enemy combatant.
And Pence and Bannon are not the only advocates within and outside the Administration for aggression against China.
Americans need to be aware to two significant changes affecting the world.
One change is recent. In December 2017 and January 2018, the Trump Administration put forth a National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy that shifted from a focus on terrorism to a focus on China-as-a-hostile-nation. Not surprisingly, key national security positions are being filled with China hawks from a variety of viewpoints - Neoliberals and Neoconservatives, as well as economic nationalists, all of whom for their own ideological reasons want an aggressive policy toward China.
Key among those China hawks is National Security Advisor John Bolton who replaced in April 2018 General H.R. McMaster who received a Silver Star as a captain in the 2nd Cavalry Regiment, taking part in the Battle of 73 Easting in the Gulf War. Bolton, on the other hand, enlisted in the Maryland Army National Guard in order to avoid being drafted in the Vietnam War, subsequently writing in his Yale 25th reunion book: "I confess I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy. I considered the war in Vietnam already lost."
As long ago as 1993, while a private citizen, Bolton wrote a series of research papers on U.N. readmission for the Taiwanese government. In the The Wall Street Journal in January 2018, Bolton called on the US to “revisit the One China policy” and suggested the Shanghai Communiqué of 1972 be renegotiated 45 years after the US agreed to acknowledge that “there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China”.
Surviving the Collapse of an Established World Order
The other significant changes affecting the world Americans need to be aware of is the end of the world order established in the 20th Century. When the previous 19th Century world order ended, it was followed by two world wars resulting in the deaths of about 19.7 million people (WWI) and about 85 million people WWII.
The new world order after WWII was the Cold War period ending with the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991, which included what has been called a liberal democracy/global trade order based mostly in Western Europe and the United States. The liberal democracy/global trade order has been destabilized and is collapsing Nationalism has surged through populism resulting from greater inequality within countries, job losses caused by trade and technology, increased flows of migrants and refugees, and the power of social media to spread hate. Economic globalization has had its own negative impact - Climate Change.
The United States and China will be in competition for leadership. Chinese dominance would be an ideological shift characterized by authoritarian domestic political systems and statist economies that place a premium on maintaining domestic stability. Rather than a single global order, spheres of influence likely would evolve with China attempting to dominate Asia.
The "China threat industry" is oriented to having the U.S. engage in warfare in Asia to try to save what was perceived in the 1990's as a new private economy world order dominated by the United States. That is a mistake based upon ignorance about China and the Chinese.
Know Your Enemy - Sun Tzu in the Art of War
Some 50 posts in this blog have provided extensive information on China. Still it seems imperative we make it clear that the anti-China paranoia is not based on a correct understanding of China. Most Americans don't know anything about, and cannot relate to, China's history, language, culture and government. The Chinese are not culturally European - not even close.
So let us review some basic facts regarding China and the Chinese that probably should be considered before concluding that a shooting ware with China would be a good idea.
► Most importantly, China has the largest population in the world -1.4 billion - and the world's largest middle-class population.So what many saber-rattling American leaders are talking about is getting into a war with the country that has...
► The native language spoken by most of China's 1.4 billion people is not an Indo-European language. Recently brain scientists have discovered that learning Chinese involves a different brain development.
► No influence from Abrahamic religions permeates Chinese history and culture, unlike American history and culture which is full of references to the 31,102± verses of the bible many of which were used to teach starting an atomic war is ok.
► Our days of the week on our Gregorian Calendar are named for old European gods. The traditional Chinese calendar is a lunisolar calendar which reckons years, months and days according to detailed astronomical phenomena.
► China's 4000± year history of empires created a different civil perspective than the one held in the United States, a country that has existed less than 250 years and in which two of the last three Presidents lost the popular vote. The traditional Chinese form of national government has been an oligarchy with a touch (sometimes a heavy hand) of autocracy led by an emperor or, since the middle of the 20th Century, a paramount leader.
► China and the U.S. share the status of having the world's largest economy. There are two accepted methods used to compare the size of economies.
The first method uses the traditional nominal gross domestic product (GDP), the market value of all final goods and services from a nation in a given year estimated by financial and statistical institutions, which are calculated at market or government official exchange rates. The United States has the largest such economy. You know that because every American is wealthy - we must be as we have the largest economy.
The second uses a gross domestic product based on purchasing power parity, created using an international dollar, a standardized unit used by economists, which takes into account the relative cost of local goods, services and inflation rates of the country, rather than using international market exchange rates which may distort the real differences in per capita income. As experienced in the lives of ordinary people everywhere, China has the largest economy in the world.
► China has the world's largest military force collectively known as the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) and the second largest defense budget in the world. It is also the third largest arms exporter in the world.
If you've wondered why Trump wanted a "Space Force" think China. The PLA currently has five independent branches, including the army, navy, air force, plus a rocket force – the strategic and tactical missile operator – and a strategic support force, which is in charge of cyber, space, and electronic warfare. The last two branches were established as separate branches three years ago reflecting long-term efforts to modernize the military which included significantly boosting its navy, air force and new strategic units and downsizing its land-based army as part of a strategic shift.
- the largest population in the world, four times the American population, a population we have a hard time understanding;
- the oldest continuing culture and government in the world;
- an economy that is competitive with ours; and
- the largest military in the world armed with 21st Century technology;
The U.S. China Threat Disinformation Industry
Now this writer becomes immediately wary when some tome comes out of the Hoover Institute. As explained here in the post The critical civics lesson America & Trump needed: 21st Century Ideologies in America & the Government$ of the United States, the Hoover Institution is one of 487 Neoliberal think-tank partners of the Atlas Network.
Although the report cautions against bigotry against the Chinese people, in fact it is ideologically antagonistic towards the Peoples Republic of China strongly favoring what it frequently terms as American liberal democracy at the very moment in time America's systemically undemocratically appointed President has launched a Trade "War" against China, supported by a undemocratically structured Senate . The report clearly, though perhaps inadvertently, states its ideological bias:
...Since Party general secretary Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, the situation has changed. Under his leadership, China has significantly expanded the more assertive set of policies initiated by his predecessor Hu Jintao. These policies not only seek to redefine China’s place in the world as a global player, but they also have put forward the notion of a “China option” that is claimed to be a more efficient developmental model than liberal democracy.
In fact, that is a correct assessment of a change under President Xi. The difficult truth unacceptable to Neoliberals is that in certain circumstances a “China option” may be a more efficient developmental model than liberal democracy when liberal democracy is dominated by Neoliberal economics.
But most cultures in nations with advanced economies outside China have a fundamental objection to a state dominated society. Perhaps that is why one of the study participants, Susan Shirk, a 74 year-old Professor and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of East Asia and Pacific Affairs during the Clinton administration, wrote the following dissent including in the document:
Although I have no problem with the factual research that has gone into specific sections of the report, I respectfully dissent from what I see as the report’s overall inflated assessment of the current threat of Chinese influence seeking on the United States. The report discusses a very broad range of Chinese activities, only some of which constitute coercive, covert, or corrupt interference in American society and none of which actually undermines our democratic political institutions. Not distinguishing the legitimate from the illegitimate activities detracts from the credibility of the report. The cumulative effect of this expansive inventory that blurs together legitimate with illegitimate activities is to overstate the threat that China today poses to the American way of life. Especially during this moment in American political history, overstating the threat of subversion from China risks causing overreactions reminiscent of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, including an anti-Chinese version of the Red Scare that would put all ethnic Chinese under a cloud of suspicion. Right now, I believe the harm we could cause our society by our own overreactions actually is greater than that caused by Chinese influence seeking. That is why I feel I must dissent from the overall threat assessment of the report.
This brings us to a different view presented in a February 2019 article What China Threat? How the United States and China can avoid war. The article has a significantly different message suggesting we should reject the view of "the 'China threat' industry in the United States":
Reading about the imminent threat American officials believe China poses, it is not hard to see why Graham Allison, in his book Destined for War, reaches the depressing conclusion that armed conflict between the two countries is more likely than not. Yet since China is not mounting a military force to threaten or invade the United States....
...American policymakers have to accept the undeniable reality that the return of China (and India) is unstoppable. Why not? From the year 1 to 1820, China and India had the world’s two largest economies. The past two hundred years of Western domination of global commerce have been an aberration. As PricewaterhouseCoopers has predicted, China and India will resume their number one and two position by 2050 or earlier.
The leaders of both China and India understand that we now live in a small, interdependent global village, threatened by many new challenges, including global warming. Both China and India could have walked away from the Paris Agreement after Trump did so. Both chose not to. Despite their very different political systems, both have decided that they can be responsible global citizens. Perhaps this may be the best route to find out if China will emerge as a threat to the United States and the world. If it agrees to be constrained by multiple global rules and partnerships, China could very well remain a different polity—that is, not a liberal democracy—and still not be a threatening one. This is the alternative scenario that the “China threat” industry in the United States should consider and work toward.
The China Threat Industry represents a real risk to all of us, particularly in the context of MAD. But it has a strong appeal to the Alt-Right and to Neoliberals for two reasons. The first is simply racial and cultural bigotry. The second is economic and political ideology.
Historical Anti-Chinese Racial Bigotry in the U.S.
In terms of racial bigotry, perhaps we need to consider one element of American history that buried deeply in our WASP-created culture an inability to comfortably deal with the Chinese.
A review of the history of the U.S. is not complete without discussing the Transcontinental Railroad. Building the Transcontinental Railroad achieved a goal of creating a fast and easy economic and migrant connection between the two coastlines by crossing the Transcontinental Divide, a physical barrier which in earlier times would have assured the existence of a different country on the west side of the divide.
In order to assure a permanent occupation of the area west of the Transcontinental Divide on the map above, during the Civil War President Abraham Lincoln signed the Pacific Railroad Act of 1862 authorizing the creation of two private railroad companies, the Central Pacific in the west and the Union Pacific in the mid-west. The companies were created June 28, 1861, two months after the Civil War began. With the secession of the South, the modernizers in the Republican Party founded in 1854 controlled the US Congress wanted to build the First Transcontinental Railroad.
The 1,912-mile continuous railroad line that connected the existing eastern U.S. rail network at Omaha, Nebraska/Council Bluffs, Iowa with the Pacific coast at the Oakland Long Wharf on the San Francisco Bay was completed in 1869. The new line crossing the Transcontinental Divide reached the Pacific and connected in Omaha to railroads serving the Atlantic Seacoast.
The implementation of that construction is a symbol of the evolving cultural difference between the Pacific States and the states east of the Transcontinental Divide. The construction could not be done without immigrant workers.
The "foreignness" of the Chinese became a problem for white America.
Ultimately, in the spring of 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed by Congress and signed by President Chester A. Arthur. This act provided an absolute 10-year moratorium on Chinese labor immigration.
The Chinese Exclusion Act was the first law implemented to prevent a specific ethnic group from immigrating to the United States. It was repealed 61 years later by the Magnuson Act on December 17, 1943. That was after the United States rounded up descendants of immigrants from Japan and put them in concentration camps.
Anything about this sound similar to the immigration policy controversy today? And does that history color the attitudes of many Americans regarding the Chinese today?
Impassioned Ideologues in Both the U.S. and China are Dangerous
As socialism does in the People's Republic of China,economic and political ideology also color the attitudes of many Americans. Ideology endangers all of us.
Among the previously mentioned 50 posts on China are five posts with the heading
which provide an extensive background on economic and political ideological issues regarding China. At the end of one of those posts, the following was included as a footnote.
Some American's get hung up on the issue of freedom. The goal of these posts is to discuss cultures and economies, but if "truth, justice, and the American way of freedom" are going to get in the way....
Pretend for a moment that you are a Chinese person who has received a decent education, perhaps even having spent some time in the United States. And you are fluent in reading English.
From your perspective the problem is that any ongoing news coverage of China caters to a knee-jerk reaction in too many Westerners, as we shall see. Americans start writing about the horrors of Marxist ideology because "proper" American thinking about freedom begins and ends with getting rich, with a side thought of being able to criticize others without retribution.
The American idea of a "big picture view" is a 72-inch TV screen. They freely express concerns about authoritarian rule in China while being ignorant of their own country which is built on the pain of native Americans - the largest population in world history to be subjected to government-sponsored genocide.
And it is as if they don't understand that Capitalism, which has an "-ism" at the end of the word, is an economic ideology every bit as much as is Socialism and the evils of both ideologies when rigidly applied are real.
In much American writing, a government implementation of Socialism is an attack on freedom while the U..S. government's implementation of Capitalism is not even acknowledged despite the fact that it is much of the subject matter of the Constitution.
Most certainly most white Americans do not understand what "authoritarian" means or how it has been carefully implemented by governments in the U.S. to support Capitalism.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary authoritarian means "favoring or enforcing strict obedience to authority, especially that of the government, at the expense of personal freedom."
You know, of course, that the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world.
The reason for this most Americans understand clearly. The United States has a set of government implemented laws that are based on a very subjective morality that has deliberately selective racial and religious bigotry components that would have been unacceptable in all other countries of the West in 1999.
The "Black Lives Matter" movement didn't arise because the United States offers the most authoritarian-free government possible to its people. If you're a black American, you live in a fearful world created by a police state not unlike Nazi Germany. If you read that as an overstatement, you are an "in-denial probably-white American" or participant in the police state culture.
If the enforcement of strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom is what defines "authoritarian", then the United States is the most authoritarian country in the world. The People's Republic of China (PRC) doesn't even come close with an incarceration rate somewhere between Canada and Luxembourg.
Of course, in China the expression of opinion regarding political, economic, and social issues is subject to government restriction. And that includes a lack of freedom of the press. Whether within the United States today that is considered good or bad depends on
Pretend for a moment that you are a Chinese person who has received a decent education, perhaps even having spent some time in the United States. Would you think a system built on Capitalist ideology that imprisons many thousands of people - the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world - is much better than imprisoning a relative handful of people for being outspoken against the Communist Party? Would you think a system built on Capitalist ideology that has uniformed police killing because of their race more people in the street than any country in the world is much better than one built on Socialist ideology that kills people who engage in and advocate revolution?
But these posts are about the economic future of our children and grandchildren. So pretend for a moment that you are an American who knows practically nothing about the world's most populous nation which by many standards has the largest economy in the world. Since many understand that this nation, China, has already begun to replace the United States as the leader of the world, it is likely that it will be very important in the lives of your children and grandchildren.
Pretend for a moment that you are a Chinese person who has received a decent education, perhaps even having spent some time in the United States. And you are fluent in reading English.
From your perspective the problem is that any ongoing news coverage of China caters to a knee-jerk reaction in too many Westerners, as we shall see. Americans start writing about the horrors of Marxist ideology because "proper" American thinking about freedom begins and ends with getting rich, with a side thought of being able to criticize others without retribution.
The American idea of a "big picture view" is a 72-inch TV screen. They freely express concerns about authoritarian rule in China while being ignorant of their own country which is built on the pain of native Americans - the largest population in world history to be subjected to government-sponsored genocide.
In much American writing, a government implementation of Socialism is an attack on freedom while the U..S. government's implementation of Capitalism is not even acknowledged despite the fact that it is much of the subject matter of the Constitution.
Most certainly most white Americans do not understand what "authoritarian" means or how it has been carefully implemented by governments in the U.S. to support Capitalism.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary authoritarian means "favoring or enforcing strict obedience to authority, especially that of the government, at the expense of personal freedom."
You know, of course, that the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world.
The reason for this most Americans understand clearly. The United States has a set of government implemented laws that are based on a very subjective morality that has deliberately selective racial and religious bigotry components that would have been unacceptable in all other countries of the West in 1999.
The "Black Lives Matter" movement didn't arise because the United States offers the most authoritarian-free government possible to its people. If you're a black American, you live in a fearful world created by a police state not unlike Nazi Germany. If you read that as an overstatement, you are an "in-denial probably-white American" or participant in the police state culture.
If the enforcement of strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom is what defines "authoritarian", then the United States is the most authoritarian country in the world. The People's Republic of China (PRC) doesn't even come close with an incarceration rate somewhere between Canada and Luxembourg.
Of course, in China the expression of opinion regarding political, economic, and social issues is subject to government restriction. And that includes a lack of freedom of the press. Whether within the United States today that is considered good or bad depends on
- whether people think that the press is an obstacle to their objectives and
- whether you believe the myth that entertainment can be defined as the press.
- that know their country has the highest incarceration rate in the world,
- that know that most of the incarcerated are black and brown males,
- that know that "a." and "b." were the result of a deliberate choice by white people, and
- that, without acting to stop it, know that their police are killing
Pretend for a moment that you are a Chinese person who has received a decent education, perhaps even having spent some time in the United States. Would you think a system built on Capitalist ideology that imprisons many thousands of people - the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world - is much better than imprisoning a relative handful of people for being outspoken against the Communist Party? Would you think a system built on Capitalist ideology that has uniformed police killing because of their race more people in the street than any country in the world is much better than one built on Socialist ideology that kills people who engage in and advocate revolution?
But these posts are about the economic future of our children and grandchildren. So pretend for a moment that you are an American who knows practically nothing about the world's most populous nation which by many standards has the largest economy in the world. Since many understand that this nation, China, has already begun to replace the United States as the leader of the world, it is likely that it will be very important in the lives of your children and grandchildren.
It's interesting how Americans fall back on some "freedoms" argument to attack China. Yet many of those same Americans, including members of Congress, are concerned about the evident harm to America the lack of any control of the internet has permitted, harm which has not come to China solely due to tight government restrictions. But that's too easy a subject to use.
Far more complex has been the recent criticism over China's persecution of some Muslim minority groups, huge numbers of whom are allegedly being held in internment camps. Curiously, many American Christians have led that criticism. There are reports of physical as well as psychological torture in the camps. An almost complete surveillance state in Xinjiang has been indicated.
So that's a simple one - the Chinese state is evil. Right? Well, not so fast.
Xinjang Uyĝur Aptonom Rayoni 新疆维吾尔自治区 is
- is a provincial-level autonomous region of China in the northwest of the country bordering the countries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Mongolia, and Russia;
- is the largest Chinese administrative division and the eighth largest country subdivision in the world and home to about 24 million people , including 14 million Muslims; and
- is larger in land area than the largest U.S. state Alaska, more populous than any U.S. state except California and Texas, and home to a Muslim population that is larger in total than any U.S. state total population except California, Texas, Florida, and New York - more people than 14 least populous U.S. states combined.
Current Active American Military Provocation
It's one thing to be economically competitive with China in the global arena which this writer supports. It's another thing to talk about a war with China in Asia. And make no mistake about it. The U.S. Navy is currently engaged in provocative behavior less than 70 miles from the several coastline Chinese cities. (Google South China Sea aircraft carriers for the latest news stories.)
Don't be confused about a war in Asia. We did not win the Korean War. We did not win the Vietnam War. The Chinese will not allow us to win a war threatening the Chinese mainland even if it were to lead to mutual assured destruction which is correctly abbreviated as MAD.
And if you examine carefully the "China threat" disinformation industry propaganda, you will find it is based on outdated 20th Century ideology. We need to effectively counter their efforts.
It's not that there is nothing to these headlines this week...
...but let's get one thing straight. The China-Russian border is 2,500+ miles long and has existed in some form for perhaps a thousand years. It is essentially the same as the border between the Russian and Qing Empires settled by a number of treaties in 17th through 19th century.
In every century some conflict and tensions occurred. In the 20th Century there was the Sino-Soviet conflict of 1929 and the Sino-Soviet border conflict was a seven-month undeclared military conflict between the Soviet Union and China at the height of the Sino-Soviet split in 1969 with numerous border clashes. The most serious clash in March 1969 is referred to by Chinese historians as the Zhenbao Island Incident brought the two communist-led countries to the brink of war.
And yet four years earlier in 1965 this writer found himself in trouble in college for challenging the myth of monolithic communism with regard to China and Russia (Soviet Union) which was being taught as some inherent truth. I argued that there has never been any love lost between the Chinese and Russians as the two nationalities had a history of conflicts.
Now we're back to China and Russia being the threat, but allegedly it is really China that represents the biggest threat because, among other reasons it's economics and politics are still run by a Communist Party. Russia, after all, is now like us with it's economics and politics run by corrupt capitalists who attacked our elections - so China is more dangerous.
What really has American undies in a bunch is 5G technology. A post on 5G will follow in the coming days, but what you need to know is that 5G isn't about you and your phone-type devices. As explained in the New York Times:
It is the first network built to serve the sensors, robots, autonomous vehicles and other devices that will continuously feed each other vast amounts of data, allowing factories, construction sites and even whole cities to be run with less moment-to-moment human intervention. It will also enable greater use of virtual reality and artificial intelligence tools.
But what is good for consumers is also good for intelligence services and cyberattackers. The 5G system is a physical network of switches and routers. But it is more reliant on layers of complex software that are far more adaptable, and constantly updating, in ways invisible to users — much as an iPhone automatically updates while charging overnight. That means whoever controls the networks controls the information flow — and may be able to change, reroute or copy data without users’ knowledge.
In interviews with current and former senior American government officials, intelligence officers and top telecommunications executives, it is clear that the potential of 5G has created a zero-sum calculus in the Trump White House — a conviction that there must be a single winner in this arms race, and the loser must be banished. For months, the White House has been drafting an executive order, expected in the coming weeks, that would effectively ban United States companies from using Chinese-origin equipment in critical telecommunications networks. That goes far beyond the existing rules, which ban such equipment only from government networks.
But what is good for consumers is also good for intelligence services and cyberattackers. The 5G system is a physical network of switches and routers. But it is more reliant on layers of complex software that are far more adaptable, and constantly updating, in ways invisible to users — much as an iPhone automatically updates while charging overnight. That means whoever controls the networks controls the information flow — and may be able to change, reroute or copy data without users’ knowledge.
In interviews with current and former senior American government officials, intelligence officers and top telecommunications executives, it is clear that the potential of 5G has created a zero-sum calculus in the Trump White House — a conviction that there must be a single winner in this arms race, and the loser must be banished. For months, the White House has been drafting an executive order, expected in the coming weeks, that would effectively ban United States companies from using Chinese-origin equipment in critical telecommunications networks. That goes far beyond the existing rules, which ban such equipment only from government networks.
Good reasons exist for concerns. The stand-in-for-China boogeyman target, Huawei, surpassed Apple as the world’s second largest smartphone brand in 2017 behind Samsung, a South Korean multinational conglomerate.
Samsung manufactures 50 percent of its mobile phones in Vietnam, one of the world's five nations run by a Communist Party, as it recently reduced its Chinese production by approximately 40 million because of high labor costs in China, one of the world's five nations run by a Communist Party.
Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. Ltd (aka Foxconn) currently assembles the majority of Apple's iPhones in its Shenzen, China, plant while another company, Pegatron, built about 30 percent of the iPhone 6 orders in its Chinese plants.
If smartphone assembly were the worry, China already won that competition. But while Chinese-made 4G or older smartphones are essentially all we have in the U.S., 5G will be embedded in the entire world around us.
That is why the the "China threat" disinformation industry is being allowed to assert itself. It is reasonable for United States to not want Huawei (aka China) to win the 5G competition. But creating a war with China to win a competition with Huawei is simply a weird idea. It's an economic competition. If it's important, subsidize 5G development, production, and sales by American companies using taxpayer money after ramping up corporate taxes back to where they were in 2016.
Perhaps it's well that America wake up to the world-wide technology competition. After all, in terms of rollout, the nation leading the 5G race is Germany. Meanwhile much of the American geography has no access to 4G cell phone service and 5G will be too expensive to implement in those areas.....
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