Special to WorldTribune.com, August 14, 2023

Corporate WATCH

Commentary by Joe Schaeffer

Perhaps it’s not a coincidence given the close ties President Joe Biden, Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell and numerous other leading figures of the ruling U.S. political establishment have to China. Or perhaps it’s simply a matter of an emerging Western-based authoritarian monolith mimicking the proven tactics of a communist superpower.

Whatever the case may be, it’s astonishing how closely the Washington Swamp’s overtly hostile treatment of American citizens dovetails with China’s notorious “Three Warfares” policy of weakening identified and potential enemies abroad. The three planks of non-military belligerence employed by the bloody Beijing regime are all instantly identifiable markers of U.S. governing officials’ methods in tamping down domestic opposition to their corrupt and deeply unpopular machinations today.

U.S. Army Major Morgan Martin in a 2021 article posted at the U.S. Naval Institute website wrote:

Around 2003, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) adopted a strategic framework known as the “Three Warfares”: psychological, media, and legal. In its 2011 annual report to Congress on military and security developments in the PRC, the Department of Defense defined each area:
 

• Psychological Warfare seeks to undermine an enemy’s ability to conduct combat operations aimed at deterring, shocking, and demoralizing enemy military personnel and supporting civilian populations.

• Media Warfare is aimed at influencing domestic and international public opinion to build support for China’s military actions and dissuade an adversary from pursuing actions contrary to China’s interests.

• Legal Warfare uses international and domestic law to claim the high ground or assert Chinese interests. It can be employed to hamstring an adversary’s operational freedom and shape the operational space. Legal warfare is also intended to build international support and manage possible political repercussions of China’s military actions. China has attempted to employ legal warfare in the maritime domain and in international airspace in pursuit of a security buffer zone.

Now take those definitions and apply them to what is going on in this country right now. The blueprint is unmistakable. Let’s examine them one at a time, in reverse order. We’ll start with something that has become so widely recognized in the U.S. today that it has its own term, “lawfare.” From a 2021 op-ed in The Hill co-written by Bradley Thayer and Lianchao Han:
 

In March, Qi Shi, the official journal of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), published Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s article, in which he explains how to construct the Chinese socialist legal system. This is an important development. Compared with his predecessors, Xi’s ideas of law are more deceitful because they use familiar terms such as “rule of law,” “law-based” and “justice.” In practice, Xi increasingly uses law as a weapon to crack down on dissent to ensure regime security, while simultaneously employing it as a weapon in the CCP’s quest for world hegemony.

Sound familiar?

The evidence of legal warfare as a staple of Biden administration efforts to crush political opposition is overwhelming. One need only to point to the endless criminal-charges harassment campaign being waged against Donald Trump, the number one political threat to the insider power brokers calling the shots in the White House. But it does not come close to stopping there.

An out-of-control Justice Department is helmed by Attorney General Merrick Garland, former top aide to infamous Clinton administration AG Janet Reno, who presided over the slaughter of 82 American citizens, including 23 children, in Waco, Texas in 1993.

Garland currently runs a Justice Department that has labeled parents questioning their local school boards potential domestic terrorists, investigated churchgoing Catholics as potentially violent extremists, conducted NKVD-style house raids on pro-life activists and recently killed an elderly man in his home because he allegedly wrote threatening social media posts directed at Biden and other elected officials. The unjust incarcerations and harsh prison sentences doled out to Americans who wandered around the U.S. Capitol during the unrest of Jan. 6, 2021 are further meant to serve as a clear warning to those who would dare question the validity of the fraud-riddled 2020 presidential election.

Now onto plank two and the Biden administration war on "disinformation." Dean Cheng in 2013 wrote for the Heritage Foundation on China’s concerted effort to control the flow of information:
 

Information dominance rests on two primary factors: modern information technology, which is integral to information collection and transmission, and the ability to degrade the quality of information, whether by slowing down transmission or by introducing false or inaccurate data. But in the Chinese conception of psychological warfare, the users of information — both high-level decision-makers and lower-level policy implementers (individual soldiers, clerks, etc.) — are as important as the computers and networks and the software that runs them. Efforts to secure information dominance, therefore, will target not only the physical information infrastructure and the data that pass through it, but also the human agents that interact with those data, especially those who are making decisions.

In full accordance with that last sentence, the ruling political elites in America have applied massive undue pressure on social media goliaths such as Facebook and Twitter in a transparent attempt to censor opposing political viewpoints. And finally there is the ceaseless psychological assault on the American people. Demoralization is a key weapon of the third spoke of Chinese-style unconventional warfare, Cheng states:
 

Another facet of wartime psychological operations is the sowing of discord and a sense of hopelessness in the enemy. Not only will this help generate war-weariness among enemy forces and populations and discourage resistance, but once the conflict is concluded, such operations may facilitate peace negotiations and induce more concessions. “When one defeats the enemy, it is not solely by killing the enemy, or winning a piece of ground, but is mainly in terms of cowing the enemy’s heart.” In order to undermine the opponent’s morale, one must emphasize information favorable to oneself through various forms of media as well as through third parties, friendly elements in the opponent’s society, and similar outlets.

Demoralization of a nation’s citizenry by its own governing elites can take many forms. The breakdown of the social fabric via unchecked rampant lawlessness, the community-destroying plague of illegal and massive Third World immigration, a fentanyl crisis exacerbated by the willful refusal to secure the nation’s borders, inflation, celebration of the garish evil of transgender children, attempts to legalize “sex work” and the championing of similar noxious cultural ills all contribute to a general despair that saps the spirit.

Throw into that hearty mix an obesity crisis, enormous spikes in autism and diabetes rates and a basic lack of general health caused by poor dietary, environmental and everyday lifestyle options, and you are well on the way to “cowing the hearts” of citizens once raised to believe liberty was their birthright.

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