Joseph Biden just became America’s fourth post-9/11 “war president.” He now ends speeches with “May God protect our troops.” First lady Jill Biden even penned a children's booktitled, "Don’t Forget, God Bless Our Troops." Their son Beau was a soldier — and his parents suspect toxic“burn pit” exposureon his Iraq tour caused the brain cancer that later killed him. Both Jill and Joe repeatedly foreground military and veteran sacrifices — with good reason.
But just what is the best way for Americans to honor and respect veterans’ sacrifices?
Responses to this question tend to be as diverse as America itself. There's no single right answer, but there are plenty of wrong ones. One thing has become abundantly clear: America’s “thank you for your service” culture doesn't help veterans — or society.
Our country’s military is continually misused, and no amount of pyrotechnics, flag-waving, priority airline boarding, discount nachos, bumper stickers or military flyovers can fix that. For two decades, the U.S. government has knowingly sent its service members to self-perpetuating and self-defeating wars.
That’s not patriotism — that’s betrayal.
Deception in broad daylight
A more effective alternative to such lobotomized patriotism — and a better way to honor veterans' service — is to get informed about how the troops are used and to dissent whenever the military is not used wisely. Historically, veterans sacrificed plenty to preserve the rights that Americans enjoy.
Return the favor. Get informed, demand transparency, prevent the squandering of such service.
But respect for our military must begin before they become veterans — before they’ve sacrificed limbs, lives and mental health supporting bad policy. Because by then, it’s already too late. Instead, respect military service by ensuring that everyone who dons a uniform — beginning the moment when minors approach recruiting tables in high school lunchrooms — has informed consent about what they’re actually signing up for.
Isn’t it fascinating that many teachers would never expose children to graphic images of dead soldiers in classrooms, but those same students can be misled in broad daylight, at schoolhouses turned de facto recruiting stations? Consequently, American youths could unwittingly become those very dead bodies.
U.S. soldiers in Wardak province, central Afghanistan, in 2019.
Informed consent is a critical component of respect. And if our society believes that images of amputees or dead civilians — and statistics about suicide, post-traumatic stress disorder or drug abuse — are too explicit for underage audiences, perhaps its military should quit recruiting children.
Therefore, we advocate for our Pentagon and the rest of America’s war-making machine — the ever-euphemistic defense establishment — to adopt a code consistent with the American Medical Association’s ethics opinion on informed consent: “Patients have the right to receive information and ask questions about recommended treatments so that they can make well-considered decisions about care.” The AMA guidance further states that physicians — in our scenario, war doctors — should present relevant information about the “burdens, risks, and expected benefits of all options.”
Needless suffering, home and abroad
What, then, are some of the recruiting risks worth mentioning?
For starters, a survey by The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation reported that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan "have caused mental and emotional health problems in 31% of vets — more than 800,000 of them."
In one of the largest surveys available on post-9/11 veterans, “40% of veterans polled had considered suicide at least once after they joined the military” and roughly 20 veterans and active-duty service members committed suicide daily in the past several years — a truly staggering figure. That’s “more suicides each year than the total American military deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq," as a New York Times editorial board member characterized it.
Respect military service by ensuring that everyone who dons a uniform — beginning the moment when minors approach recruiting tables in high school lunchrooms — has informed consent about what they’re actually signing up for.
Divorce, alcohol, drugs, depression, endless “zombie” medication to mitigate endless deployments — the whole nine yards. All of it ought to be raised before any American enlists, but we do not know of a single instance where a recruiter discussed the risks of military service.
Likewise, because it is one of the most traumatic, highly personal elements of combat, recruits should recognize that America’s war on terror has resulted in the deaths, often violent, of more than 100 Sept. 11's worth of civilians from Africa to Central Asia. In the final sense, war offers only needless suffering. Ignorance to its evils is more needless still.
Taken collectively, burdens and risks seem subtle and are more easily dismissed. Most citizens prefer to avert their eyes than view war through honest lenses of fear, apathy, ignorance and guilt. The Pentagon, incidentally, seems quite happy with this arrangement.
More money, fewer victories
Americans have hardly exercised informed consent for their own defense. So few even comprehend the immensity of Pentagon largesse — the largest segment of the discretionary budget — its tradeoffs, or that it’s more than the next 10 countries combined (many of them U.S. allies).
Informed consent’s absence extends to the Overseas Contingency Operations account, a slush fund designed by defense hawks to circumvent spending controls imposed on all other government agencies.
Such consent-free exorbitant expenditures might be excusable if they produced positive results. Only the U.S. military’s win/loss record since World War II is paltry at best: a tortured tie in Korea; losses in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq; and embarrassments in Beirut and Somalia — hardly offset by the “big” wins in small wars like Grenada and Panama. That scarcely justifies such extravagant spending. Yet fearmongering from the military-industrial-congressional complex, and cynically crafted cries to “support the troops,” stifle patriotic dissent.
Demands for informed consent are unlikely to emerge among Americans long trained to quietly capitulate to war industry whims. For now, it might fall on veterans themselves to disavow endless wars — the death and injury caused — and the unsustainable spending underpinning it all.
Maj. Gen. Dennis Laich retired from the Army after more than 35 years of service. He is a graduate of the Army War College and author of "Skin in the Game: Poor Kids and Patriots." Erik Edstrom graduated from West Point and deployed to combat as an infantry officer in Afghanistan. He is the author of "Un-American: A Soldier’s Reckoning of our Longest War." Both authors are senior fellows at the Eisenhower Media Network (EMN) — an organization of independent military and national security veteran experts.
Secretary of StateAntony Blinkenspoke with his Chinese counterpart Friday, the first conversation between the two diplomats amid an adjustment in the relationship between Washington and Beijing.
Blinken had a phone call with Chinese Director of the Office of the Central Commission for Foreign Affairs Yang Jiechi to extend his best wishes for a happy lunar new year, according to a readout of the call from the State Department. The secretary of State pushed Yang on reports of human rights abuses against Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang and the crackdown of civil rights in Tibet and Hong Kong, among other security-related issues.
“Secretary Blinken stressed the United States will continue to stand up for human rights and democratic values, including in Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong, and pressed China to join the international community in condemning the military coup in Burma,” the State Department said.
“The Secretary reaffirmed that the United States will work together with its allies and partners in defense of our shared values and interests to hold the [People's Republic of China] accountable for its efforts to threaten stability in the Indo-Pacific, including across the Taiwan Strait, and its undermining of the rules-based international system,” it added.
The conversation comes at a time of uncertainty in the relationship between the U.S. and China in the new Biden administration.
President Biden has adopted a tough stance on China over its crackdown on human rights and violence against the Uighurs, as well as its economic pressure on the U.S.
“American leadership must meet this new moment of advancing authoritarianism, including the growing ambitions of China to rival the United States,” Biden said this week at the State Department. “We'll confront China's economic abuses; counter its aggressive, coercive action; to push back on China's attack on human rights, intellectual property, and global governance.”
Biden is also reviewing his predecessor’s decision to designate China’s oppression of its minority Muslim Uighurs as genocide, though that review is being conducted to ensure procedures were followed, not to dispute the severity of the crackdown.
However, Biden has also expressed openness to working with China on climate change.
The interests of Washington and Beijing are intersecting in Myanmar, where a military coup is underway against a nascent democratic government. Biden is leaning on the military to stand down, but experts say he may be wary of applying too much pressure for fear of pushing the country further into China’s arms.
WASHINGTON, Feb 5 (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State AntonyBlinken told top Chinese diplomat Yang Jiechi in a phone call onFriday the United States will stand up for human rights anddemocratic values in Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong, the StateDepartment said.
Blinken also pressed China to condemn the military coup inMyanmar, and he reaffirmed that Washington will work with alliesto hold China accountable for efforts to threaten stability ofIndo-Pacific, including across the Taiwan Strait, the departmentsaid in a statement.
Yang told Blinken that the United States should "correct"its recent mistakes and that both sides must respect eachother's political systems and development paths, according to astatement from the Chinese foreign ministry.
The relationship between the world's two biggest economieshit its lowest point in decades during the presidency of DonaldTrump, and Chinese officials have expressed cautious optimismthat it would improve under the administration of Joe Biden.
Yang told an online forum on Tuesday that he hoped relationsbetween the two countries could return to a predictable andconstructive track, but he called on the United States to "stopinterfering" on issues of Chinese sovereignty, includingXinjiang, Hong Kong and Tibet.
Foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin also said on Fridaythat "the common interests of the two countries outweighed theirdifferences" and urged the United States to "meet China halfway"to improve relations.
However, criticism of China's human rights record hascontinued unabated, with the State Department saying on Thursdaythat it was "deeply disturbed" by reports of sexual abuseagainst women in internment camps for ethnic Uighurs and otherMuslims in Xinjiang..
Biden himself has shown little sign he is in a hurry toengage with Beijing, describing China on Thursday as "our mostserious competitor" and saying Washington would continue toconfront what he described as China's "attack on human rights,intellectual property and global governance".
"But we're ready to work with Beijing, when it's inAmerica's interest to do so," he added.
The Global Times, a tabloid run by Chinese Communist Partypaper the People's Daily, said in an editorial on Saturday thatit expected the Biden administration to keep talking tough whileimproving cooperation in some areas.
"This is obviously different from the later period ofTrump's administration, which had only hyped up antagonismbetween China and the U.S.," it said.(Reporting by Eric Beech and David Brunnstrom; Additionalreporting by David Stanway in Shanghai; Editing by Kim Coghilland Stephen Coates)
An estimated 1 million Uyghurs — and other Turkic peoples in the Xinjiang region — are detained in the CCP’s concentration camps. The brave work of the victims of this modern gulag, as well as that of the reporters and researchers who have fought to bring their stories to light, has added granular detail to the world’s understanding of an ongoing crime against humanity. The BBC story is the latest emergency call for the world to speak the truth about what’s happening in Xinjiang, and do what it can to combat it.
The BBC story features the testimony of Tursunay Ziawudun, a Uyghur woman imprisoned for nine months in the camps. Weaving together the testimony of Ziawudun and other Uyghur detainees, interviews with teachers and police in Xinjiang, in addition to satellite and primary-source analysis corroborating their accounts, the BBC reporters show that the abuses go far beyond the regime’s aggressive program of political brainwashing.
The torture endured by these Uyghur women included rape and torture with electric batons, in addition to other unspeakable acts of sexual violence. At one point, a teacher forced to work in the camps recounts witnessing the gang rape of a 20- or 21-year-old girl perpetrated before an audience of 100 detainees; the authorities subsequently punished anyone with visibly distressed reaction. Such atrocities aren’t the work of individual sadists, but are deliberate and systematic, as dictated by China’s foul totalitarian regime and Communist Party general secretary Xi Jinping.
At the end of its report, the BBC quotes Ziawudun, “They say people are released, but in my opinion everyone who leaves the camps is finished.” In her view, as the BBC puts it, that’s the point of the “surveillance, the internment, the indoctrination, the dehumanisation, the sterilization, the torture, the rape.” Ziawudun again: “Their goal is to destroy everyone. And everybody knows it.”
Indeed, everybody knows it, or should. The CCP’s campaign against the Uyghurs is not merely a disproportionate reaction to terrorist attacks and riots that took place in Xinjiang in the years leading up to the current “strike hard” campaign. The BBC report shows how rape is wielded in the camps as a weapon against the Uyghurs as a people. It’s also been used in Uyghur homes, where under a Party program, Han Chinese men are sent to live with and share the beds of women whose husbands have been detained. And in June, it was revealed that the Party is engaged in a systematic campaign to forcibly sterilize Uyghur women and abort their pregnancies.
This all fits into Beijing’s longstanding plan of settling the region with Han Chinese, and in this future, there is no place for the Uyghurs. The regime doesn’t just want to eliminate their culture; it seeks their physical annihilation.
Chinese officials have compared their treatment of the Uyghurs to spraying crop-killing chemicals, likening practicing Muslim Uyghurs to malignant tumors and Islam to a communicable disease.
The Chinese Communist Party is guilty of crimes against humanity and genocide, as the State Department found in January, and as Joe Biden said on the campaign trail and Antony Blinken affirmed during his confirmation hearing. The CCP’s brutality meets the internationally recognized legal definitions for these acts, including under the U.N.’s 1948 Genocide Convention. Debate over the meaning of these terms can be overly legalistic but being forthright about them might help galvanize more of an international response.
There’s been some progress on that front, mostly led by the United States, but few countries have even issued a sharp condemnation of the CCP’s campaign against the Uyghurs. The U.N. secretary general hasn’t. Washington stands alone in having enacted sanctions targeting the officials responsible. And despite recent governmental moves to crack down on Uyghur forced labor, too many multinational corporations remain ensnared in Xinjiang’s slave-labor-supported cotton industry.
For every story like Ziawudun’s, there are probably hundreds of thousands of others just as horrific. Absent a drastic course correction, we will learn many of them one day — while sharing in the collective shame of not having done more.
The not-so-secret admirers of the Chinese Communist Party at the New York Times are at it again. For a long time, the Times’ opinion section has gawked at and fawned over the CCP and its ability to “get things done.” As far back as 2009, columnist Tom Friedman was arguing that “one-party autocracy” has “great advantages.” At least “when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today.” Enlightened? Is that the word?
The article begins by asserting that China “has mobilized its vast Communist Party apparatus to reach deep into the private sector and the broader population, in what the country’s leader, Xi Jinping, has called a ‘people’s war’ against the pandemic — and won.” Its four authors further celebrate the CCP by saying that its victory in this war — the Times appears to concur with the CCP’s self-assessment — has “emboldened Mr. Xi, who has offered China’s experience as a model for others to follow.” From the sound of it, so too is the Times.
That’s far from all the praise the authors lavish on Chairman Xi and his murderous regime. For example: “The government appeals to material interests, as well as to a sense of patriotism, duty and self-sacrifice,” they tell us. Moreover, the CCP provided a Chinese pharmaceutical firm with “everything it needed” to produce a vaccine: lab space and $780,000. For perspective, the U.S. government allocated $18 billion to Operation Warp Speed, which yielded safer and more effective inoculations.
The CCP “operates in part through fear,” they acknowledge, recounting how “when a villager near Shijiazhuang tried to escape quarantine to buy a pack of cigarettes, a zealous party chief ordered him tied to a tree.” But they follow that story with an unchallenged explanation from a Chinese journalist: “Many measures seemed over the top, but as far as they’re concerned it was necessary to go over the top, if you didn’t, it wouldn’t produce results.” Ah, of course.
Just as telling as what the Times does say is what it doesn’t.
You wouldn’t know it from reading the article, but in the Xinjiang region of China, the coronavirus has not slowed down Xi Jinping’s genocidal crusade against the PRC’s Uyghur Muslim minority. In fact, the state capacity of the Chinese government has only accelerated and accentuated their persecution. At present, 1 million Uyghurs are being held captive in concentration camps, and a new report from the BBC includes horrifying details about their treatment. Uyghur women inside and outside the camps are subject to CCP-sanctioned rape — often done in front of crowds as an intimidation tactic — as well as forced sterilizations and abortions. As National Review’s editorial on the matter put it:
This all fits into Beijing’s longstanding plan of settling the region with Han Chinese, and in this future, there is no place for the Uyghurs. The regime doesn’t just want to eliminate their culture; it seeks their physical annihilation.
The Times deems the CCP’s heavy-handed response to the pandemic “patriotic” and reflective of a dutiful Chinese ethic. Nothing could be further from the truth. In Xinjiang, coronavirus measures have included forcing Uyghurs to imbibe “traditional Chinese medicines” and subjecting them to other inhumane treatment. Consider the following story from the Associated Press last August:
When police arrested the middle-aged Uighur woman at the height of China’s coronavirus outbreak, she was crammed into a cell with dozens of other women in a detention center.
There, she said, she was forced to drink a medicine that made her feel weak and nauseous, guards watching as she gulped. She and the others also had to strip naked once a week and cover their faces as guards hosed them and their cells down with disinfectant “like firemen,” she said.
“It was scalding,” recounted the woman by phone from Xinjiang, declining to be named out of fear of retribution. “My hands were ruined, my skin was peeling.”
State power isn’t being wielded for patriotic purposes in China, it’s being used for the Party’s purposes. Some of those, such as curbing the pandemic, may have the intended outcomes. However, they have been implemented not because the CCP cares deeply about the best interests of the population, but because they provide stability, which the CCP values above all else. Patriotism is about devotion to one’s homeland, and by extension its inhabitants. There is no special bond between those at the head of the Chinese government and the Chinese people. The former is willing to intern, torture, and murder the latter to achieve its ends.
Failing to mention the CCP’s Xinjiang atrocities is bad enough. But also unmentioned in the Times piece is that the PRC used its state capacity — so venerated by the Times — to muzzle and jail doctors who dared to speak the truth about the virus, suppressing for weeks evidence of the human-to-human transmission of the virus and thus denying the rest of the world time to prepare. Remarkably, the Times’ reporters are also apparently unaware of the mountainof evidence suggesting that its case and death numbers have been doctored by the CCP. It’s easy to “win” when you control the scoreboard.
It’s a sign of moral confusion, or perhaps bankruptcy, for the New York Times to have published a puff piece — both clumsy and contextless — about a genocidal regime that unleashed a devastating pandemic on the rest of the world and call it “reporting.”
Comment by editor: let us read this article together with the next one "The Times Lavishes Praise on China’s Coronavirus Response and Calls It ‘Reporting’". Great example of freedom of speech.
Washington, Feb. 3 (CNA) Taiwan must be ready to make sacrifices and bolster its military preparedness in order to prevent a possible war with China, a former U.S. security official said Wednesday.
Matt Pottinger, who served as deputy national security advisor under former President Donald Trump, urged the U.S. and other nations to take "substantive" actions to help Taiwan avert a potential conflict with China.
People in Taiwan must also "understand how significant and dangerous" the situation in the Taiwan Strait has become, as a result of Beijing's expansionist ambitions, Pottinger said during an international relations conference at Florida International University.
"The people of Taiwan should really rally around their leadership and understand that they are going to have to make sacrifices," Pottinger warned. "There are things that they're going to have to do to prepare for war in order to hopefully deter war."
Meanwhile, Republican Senator Jim Risch told the conference that China's crackdown on Hong Kong last year had made the question of Taiwan's future "all the more urgent and serious."
The military balance of power between China and Taiwan is shifting, which is eroding conventional deterrence and putting the U.S. military and its allies at risk, Risch said.
In addition to Taiwan's importance as a democracy, its geography is also key to the security of U.S. allies, and its technology is critical to global competition with China, he said.
On those grounds, Risch said, Taiwan is "one of the most strategic issues we face in this decade," and "must remain a key priority" for the U.S.
Another speaker at the conference, Hong Kong democracy activist Nathan Law (羅冠聰), suggested the U.S. send a message that it is not intimidated by China. This can be achieved though greater interaction by the U.S. with Taiwan and its leaders, he said.
At the same time, the U.S. must recognize the "concrete threat" of military conflict in the Taiwan Strait, said Law, who fled to the United Kingdom last year for fear of persecution under Hong Kong's new national security law.
Citing conversations with reporters in China, Law said Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had promised to tackle the Taiwan issue, in a bid to have his term limits lifted.
If that is true, Xi would likely feel pressured to accomplish such a goal by force, given that it would be "impossible" to do so using infiltration, soft power or other peaceful means, Law said.
新型冠状病毒灭活疫苗 图片来源：新华社记者 张玉薇 摄
新冠病毒的结构示意图 图片来源：作者提供
抗体检测的红线。上一行为阳性，下一行为阴性。
核酸检测与核酸疫苗的靶点
