Tag: war

One for the Memory Hole?

An important historical document. Though published all over the Internet, it was most linked-to where it was housed by The Guardian, the British newspaper.

But it has been taken down by The Guardian. This is what it says on the page where it formerly resided:

Removed: document

This page previously displayed a document containing, in translation, the full text of Osama bin Laden’s “letter to the American people”, which was reported on in the Observer on Sunday 24 November 2002. The document, which was published here on the same day, was removed on 15 November 2023.

The transcript published on our website had been widely shared on social media without the full context. Therefore we decided to take it down and direct readers instead to the news article that originally contextualised it.

Just like the news media, claiming their coverage provides full context, but deprecating the primary source document itself!

Orwellian.

In an article on Thursday, “TikTok ‘aggressively’ taking down videos promoting Bin Laden ‘letter to America,’” The Guardian explains some of the background of the current fracas. Youngsters on TikTok and elsewhere had recently discovered Osama bin Laden’s letter — which Representative Ron Paul has often famously referenced — and were expressing their surprise, interest, and judgments on social media. Many of them were awful takes, of course, as is common among the young … and others.

But remember the keywords: free speech.

Under pressure from politicians, bureaucrats, Jewish activist groups, and conservative influencers, the free speech of users of Tik Tok and X (to name just two) were abridged, disallowed from expressing their opinions of — or even quoting — the late terrorist.

TikTok explained itself on X: “Content promoting this letter clearly violates our rules on supporting any form of terrorism. We are proactively and aggressively removing this content and investigating how it got onto our platform.”

Discussing the letter is not, of course, “supporting” “terrorism.”

Yet Osama’s letter has been scrubbed from most websites that had published it. It can nevertheless be found, by paying subscribers, at scribd.com — at least it could as of Sunday.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom international affairs national politics & policies

It’s a Date

Taiwan, China, war, defense, freedom, technology

“Do not mess with Taiwan before 2028,” Vivek Ramaswamy instructed translators to tell Chinese ruler Xi Jinping, “before the end of my first term, okay?”

Responding to a question from Hugh Hewitt on his radio program, Ramaswamy — the entrepreneur, author, and GOP presidential candidate — urged a “move from strategic ambiguity to strategic clarity.”

The right idea, I guess, just not elaborated in the clear-thinking manner I have been hoping for.

You see, there was a “second part” to Ramaswamy’s foreign policy prescription. “That commitment is only as far as 2028,” he explained, “by which point I will have led the United States of America to achieve semiconductor independence, and we will not take the risk of war that risks Americans lives after that for some nationalistic dispute between China and Taiwan.”

“Some nationalistic dispute”?* Sure, between the democratic miracle of the last century and a genocidal totalitarian regime that claims it … along with claiming 90 percent of the South China Sea, the world’s busiest waterway.

A skeptical Hewitt heard Ramaswamy “saying ‘I will go to war, including attacking the Chinese mainland, if you attack before semiconductor independence. And afterwards, you can have Taiwan. So if you just wait until 2029, you may have Taiwan.’”

Let’s make the world safe for semiconductors!

But … not for people?

Ramaswamy’s transactional approach might make the Taiwanese feel less inclined to assist our efforts toward semiconductor independence. And what a terrible message to send other allies in the region!

As the democratic countries of Asia and the world are stepping up and coming together to push back against Beijing’s belligerence, the U.S. ought not jeopardize this by suggesting more convenient dates for calendaring in future Chinazi invasions.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* From the interview, Ramaswamy appears ignorant of Taiwanese history; namely, the fact that the Nationalist Chinese forces that fled to the island in 1949, as well as their offspring, comprise a distinct minority of the island nation’s population. Meanwhile, the native Taiwanese had been under Japanese colonial rule for the previous fifty years and, prior to that, never completely under Chinese control.

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Look Around

Yesterday marked the 34th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Not in China, where the Communist Party (CCP) has always clubbed down any public remembrance of the thousands murdered on that day by the bullets from the so-called People’s Liberation Army.

While Hong Kong long witnessed massive June 4 vigils — even under COVID restrictions — that changed after the draconian National Security Law in 2020. Still, this year public silence required the Chinazis to arrest more than 30 Hong Kongers, some for “suspicion of carrying out acts with seditious intent.”

Seems our “leaders” quite quickly forgot about the Butchers of Beijing … and only now are waking up to the threat the CCP poses via their embrace of totalitarianism, their military build-up, the biggest since World War II, and their claims to Taiwan as well as the entire South China Sea.

“China has been bullying its neighbors for years,” explains Chris Chappell, host of China Uncensored on Rumble, before adding: “Now its bullying is coming back to bite it.”

Chappell notes that “[e]ven countries that kinda hate each other, like Japan and South Korea, have been teaming up because of the China threat.”

Mr. Chappell offers:

“Thanks to China, last year Japan announced a plan to double its military budget.”
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol recently called Taiwan “a global issue” and joined President Biden in “[opposing] any unilateral attempts to change the status quo.”
“Australia is beefing up its military — specifically in response to China.”
“The Philippines … has moved back to closer ties with the United States, allowing the U.S. to expand its military presence there.”
“India is also increasing its defense budget.”

This allied response has been spurred not by U.S. arm-twisting, but good old-fashioned fear.

Chappell also applauded open collaboration with the U.S. and NATO by South Korea, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. But he dubbed NATO’s declaration of China as “a security challenge” “the understatement of the year.”

Attested by the weekend’s near collision of Chinese and U.S. naval vessels in the Taiwan Strait.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Note: China Uncensored also plays on YouTube, but, as Chappell complains, “YouTube frequently demonetizes, suppresses, and secretly unsubscribes people from this channel.”

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Why We Fight

A recent Senate hearing addressed a big problem facing America’s All-Volunteer Force (AVF): recruitment.

The Army fell 25 percent short of its 2022 goal; the Air Force is 10 percent below; the Navy met its target for enlisted folks but not officers; and the Marines hit their mark but said “never before” has it been so challenging.

“The Pentagon has attributed its difficulties to a variety of factors,” reports The Washington Post, “including the nation’s low unemployment rate, school closings during the coronavirus pandemic that limited recruiters’ access to high school students and faculty, and a shifting culture in which more teens gravitate to jobs with work-life balance.”

As The Post paraphrased Army Undersecretary Gabe O. Camarillo, “the most significant barriers to service [include] fears of death or injury, suffering psychological harm, and leaving behind friends and family.”

Indeed, what with possibility of overseas deployment and combat, the job of soldier certainly does not score well in the “work-life balance” category. While a sense of mission — and the country’s need — has helped spark interest in the past, that need has been blurred by a long string of misguided military adventures in recent decades.

Sure, President Joe has repeatedly promised American military force in defense of Taiwan against repeated Chinese threats to invade.* But do young Americans perceive this as anything to them? Has the wokeness mission, stressed by the administration and the Pentagon and interrogated during the Senate hearings, occluded the more traditional sense of mission upon which the AVF has relied?

It’s time for Mr. Biden to speak to the people on the military’s core mission — including his promises, and those of other politicians. Asking them to keep his word.

Plus, a personal presidential request might add an element of responsibility and accountability from the commander-in-chief to the soldiers recruited.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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defense & war general freedom international affairs

Playing With Fire?

In merely the last month …

Belligerently attempting to enforce China’s illegal claim to virtually the entire South China Sea, a People’s Liberation Army jet intercepted a U.S. Air Force reconnaissance aircraft over international waters, coming within 20 feet, forcing the U.S. pilot to take evasive action to avoid a crash.

And a war.

Which China’s continually threatened invasion of Taiwan would definitely precipitate. The sort of military assault that the PLA practiced this week, Reuters reported, sending 57 aircraft and four ships into “the sea and airspace around Taiwan, focused on land strikes and sea assaults.”

Yet talk of a deadly conflict with China is not limited to Southeast Asia.

“Is India Getting Ready For A War With China?” was the headline of Peter Suciu’s 19fortyfive.com story last month detailing a clash between these two nuclear-armed, billion-plus-people nations sharing a disputed 2,100-mile border.*

The good news? The world may be waking up to the enormous threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party.

Japan has announced it will double military spending — and deploy U.S. tomahawk missiles “capable of striking targets deep inside of North Korea and China.” To better counter the Chinazi threat to itself and neighboring Taiwan, the Japanese also have made “path-breaking” agreements to cooperate with the U.S. and the United Kingdom.

Take a smidgen of comfort, too, in the recent Center for Strategic and International Studies’ war games, which saw Taiwan, Japan and the U.S. “rapidly cripple the Chinese amphibious fleet” in beating back a Chinese invasion of the democratic island nation.

In renewing “its longstanding threat to attack Taiwan,” the CCP warned that foreign countries were “playing with fire.”

Correction: we’re no longer just “playing.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* CNN explained that the tensions between the two countries increased “sharply in June 2020 when hand-to-hand fighting … resulted in the deaths of at least 20 Indian and four Chinese soldiers in Aksai Chin-Ladakh.”

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Fight or Flight?

Be strong or be gone. America must choose one of these two options in East Asia.

China insists.

Let’s note at the outset that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) did not “directly” threaten to shoot down House Speaker Pelosi’s plane on her possible upcoming visit to democratic and free Taiwan. That friendly suggestion was instead offered by a columnist for the “state-run” Global Times.

On Twitter.

Which, incidentally, is banned in China.

That being said, the totalitarians are indeed “bad folks.” In addition to continually threatening the invasion of Taiwan, they’re known to rough up defenseless old folks. For instance, browbeating 79-year-old President Joe Biden last week in a multi-hour phone call, in which, according to a Chinese foreign ministry read-out, Xi Jinping warned our president about standing with Taiwan: “Those who play with fire will perish by it.”

While no one in his right mind wants war with the Dragon, to avoid war with fear and cowardice may ultimately require ceding the world’s greatest democratic success story, Taiwan (the Republic of China), to the genocidal (and misnamed) People’s Republic of China.

Our cowardly leaders might opt to shut up and look the other way — especially if there is payola attached — but not the rest of us.

Should the United States tangle with a nuclear power over Taiwan?

Isn’t that like asking whether we should go to war over my mother or yours? Or your spouse … or your son or daughter?

Is one person — or a small nation of 24 million souls — worth such a risk?

When the Dragon demands a sacrifice, recognize it for what it is.

If one person, recognize it once.

If a nation, recognize it 24 million times.

Resist the Dragon.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Note: As I point out in last weekend’s podcast, Taiwan can successfully repel a Chinese invasion, especially with U.S. and Japanese assistance. And here, Ian Easton, author of The Chinese Invasion Threat, speaks to the issue.

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