Communist China's threats to nearby countries like Taiwan, Japan, and Australia, its violation of Hong Kong's autonomy, and a recent threat to kill a U.S. member of Congress shows that this "outhouse country" (my family-friendly version of Donald Trump's supposed pejorative) is a de facto, albeit not yet de jure, enemy of the United States and indeed the entire civilized world.

Its geopolitical agenda seems to differ little from that of Imperial Japan during the 1930s through August 1945. This perception is reinforced by its apartheid treatment of Uyghur Muslims and widespread violation of the human rights of more than a billion Chinese people. A ChiCom-appointed government meanwhile enacted legislation to block emigration from Hong Kong. The instant a country has to prevent people from leaving (as East Germany did during the Cold War), that's ample proof that the country in question is indeed an "outhouse."

The Communists (Not the Chinese People) are the Enemy

It is important during wartime to have a name for the enemy that does not include ordinary people who have the misfortune to live under that enemy's rule. Colonel Paul Linebarger's Psychological Warfare said explicitly that it is unwise to define the enemy too widely. When General George Patton gave his famous speech, for example, he proclaimed "the Nazis are the enemy" rather than "the German people are the enemy." Most German people lived in terror of the Nazis, and it is in fact alleged credibly that Hitler was willing to sacrifice Germany itself to achieve his personal ambitions. It is a historical fact that he sent hundreds of thousands of Germans to their deaths on the Eastern Front and would not allow them to retreat from untenable positions like Stalingrad. The ChiComs, who similarly view their own people's lives as expendable as anybody else's, threw human waves at South Korean and American positions during the Korean War in the hope that we would run out of bullets before they ran out of soldiers.

It is similarly important to avoid saying "the Chinese are the enemy" because there is more than enough anti-Asian bias in this country as there is, with "enough" being exactly zero. Chinese-Americans left their outhouse country as ruled by the Chinese communists (a.k.a., ChiComs) or previously by autocrats, the same way our own ancestors left equally undesirable homelands. Unless we're Native Americans, we or our ancestors didn't come here because the Old World was a great place for us to live. If, for example, you were a Pole or a Jew under tsarist rule, you probably viewed Russia as an outhouse country that was a very good place to be from. "May God bless and keep the tsar… far away from us!" The ordinary Russian was not usually the biggest problem, but the tsar and his government were. Taiwanese, Hong Kong Chinese, and the billion or so mainland Chinese who still have the misfortune to live under communist rule are not the problem either. General Secretary Xi Jinping and his fellow Gongfei (communist bandits) are the problem.

"Communist bandit" is not an exaggeration. The Beijing government has no legitimacy that any civilized nation is obliged to recognize noting that it seized power by force, murdered twenty to forty million Chinese people during the Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward, and was never elected by the Chinese people. If Comrade Xi really wants to insist that there is only one China then Tsai Ing-wen is its lawful head noting that millions more Chinese people voted for her than for Xi. The Beijing "government" is meanwhile nothing more than a gang of organized criminals that managed to take control of an entire country and now has control of nuclear weapons.

We need to respect Xi's nuclear weapons the same way we must respect a rabid animal we can't put down, but we don't have to respect Xi's government. We need to deal with the nuclear threat by modernizing and possibly expanding our own arsenal, while Taiwan, Japan, and Australia would be well within their rights to build nuclear weapons capable of reaching any part of communist China. We also need to give civil defense the same attention we gave it during the Cold War, and accelerate deployment of Israel's Arrow 3 missile and Iron Beam system. The Arrow 3 is capable of exoatmospheric engagements. The Iron Beam's current range is only a little more than four miles but can probably be increased. Missile defenses are also needed in light of Vladimir Putin's (another gangster who happens to have an army and nuclear weapons) threats to NATO, and the United Kingdom needs to ask whether one on-patrol Trident missile boat is sufficient to deter Putin from acting on a threat to drown the U.K. in a nuclear tidal wave.

Friends Don't Let Friends Buy ChiCom

The ChiCom Gongfei are powerful only because short-sighted American business "leaders," the kind whose eye is never on the job but always on the dollar, offshored American manufacturing jobs in exchange for cheap labor. They got what they paid for in shoddy and often counterfeit active pharmaceutical intermediates, contaminated heparin, counterfeit semiconductor devices, and counterfeit N-95 respirators that put their users at risk during the COVID-19 epidemic. The only difference between the organized criminals who sold bootleg alcohol during the Roaring Twenties and the Gongfei seems to be, in fact, that Al Capone and those like him tried to assure the quality of their products so their customers would keep coming back, while the Gongfei do not care if they kill their customers with shoddy products.

The problem is that the American consumer has been conditioned by advertisers and marketers to pay made-in-America prices for ChiCom-made trash. Consumers need to be educated that placement of a famous athlete's name or picture on a ChiCom-made shirt you could get from a big box store for ten dollars does not make it worth eighty or ninety dollars. Placement of a famous brand name on ChiCom-made clothing you can buy for twenty dollars from a big box store does not make them worth the two hundred dollars on up that some upscale stores charge for them. If the overpriced product says only "Imported," you can be pretty sure the seller is ashamed to say where it is imported from. There is nothing the Chinese Communists make that we cannot make in the United States, and we need to get the Gongfei out of our lives as quickly as possible.

Civis Americanus is the pen name of a contributor who remembers the lessons of history, and wants to ensure that our country never needs to learn those lessons again the hard way. He or she is remaining anonymous due to the likely prospect of being subjected to "cancel culture" for exposing the Big Lie behind Black Lives Matter.

Image: Pixabay / Pixabay License