Political attacks against the social media company TikTok are based on a lot of what-ifs with a heavy dose of racial bigotry. No evidence has been presented about the supposed “threats” other than theoretical speculation. Yet we are supposed to react to these paranoid delusions? This is the same thinking that got us into Iraq.
Editorial cartoonists Ted Rall (Left) and Scott Stantis (Right) debate breaking news across the nation on a busy week.
Congress grilled the CEO of the Chinese-owned social-media app TikTok, reminding Ted of the PMRC hearings of the 1980s, another moment when Congress worked hard to appear anti-fun and out of touch. Scott calls China a “threat”; Ted prefers to see them as a “challenge.” What do we have to fear from TikTok, other than becoming even stupider?
France is burning in the wake of President Emmanuel Macron’s sop to the neo-liberal class: raising the national retirement age from 62 to 64. Scott asks Ted, a French citizen, why younger Frenchmen are demonstrating in solidarity with older people they have to support in old age? Ted addresses the fact that pension reform might have been greeted differently from a different, more populist president.
Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg didn’t file charges against Donald Trump last week, but next week might be different. Scott and Ted agree that an arrest will empower the former president. Ted takes a victory lap on calling for Trump wanting a perp walk last week. Scott deplores liberal gloating because it feeds into Trump’s narrative.
Watch the Video Version of the DMZ America Podcast:
DMZ America Podcast Ep 94 Sec 1: Is TikTok a Threat?
DMZ America Podcast Ep 94 Sec 2: France is Burning!
DMZ America Podcast Ep 94 Sec 3: The Non-Arrest of Donald J. Trump
America and the West have begun promoting the idea of a war against China over Taiwan. If China invades Taiwan, President Biden has said, the U.S. would go further than it has in Ukraine, sending American ground troops as well as weapons. 37% of American voters agree with Biden. But how do you go to war to defend a country from invading itself?
According to the U.S., the U.N. and most of the world—including Taiwan itself—Taiwan is part of China.
Can the U.S. invade Ohio?
Like many other nations places, Taiwan is in a tough spot caused by decisions made by U.S. policymakers many years ago.
Until 1945 Taiwan was a Japanese colony. The birth certificate of my former father-in-law, an ethnic Taiwanese, read “Taipei, Japan.” The end of World War II brought a breather. Occupation forces withdrew. The Taiwanese expected independence as part of postwar decolonization. But America had other plans.
Across the Taiwan Strait, the Chinese civil war was drawing to a close. Mao Tse-Tung’s Communists were beating the far-right Nationalists (KMT) led by Chiang Kai-shek. The Nationalists, looting everything they could carry including China’s gold reserves, jumped aboard U.S. ships helpfully provided by President Harry Truman and fled to Taiwan. The exiled KMT took over, purged and murdered Taiwanese intellectuals and independence advocates and established a vicious authoritarian dictatorship of the type propped up by the U.S. around the globe during the Cold War. There was a remarkably calm transition to democracy following Chiang’s death.
“When,” my father-in-law would ask me during one of our long political discussions, “will the United States give independence to Taiwan?”
“Whether it’s the U.S. splitting from Britain, or East Timor,” I replied, “independence is taken, not given. You declare independence.” 1,400 Timorese died after declaring independence from Indonesia.
“We can’t do that,” he’d say. “China will invade. Many people will be killed.”
“Maybe they’d invade,” I’d replied. “Maybe not. But there’s no other way.”
The Taiwanese people are unwilling to die. So Taiwan has never declared independence. Since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, the island of Taiwan—whose legal name is the Republic of China—and mainland China have agreed on the legal fiction that Taiwan and China are part of the same country. Beijing calls Taiwan “a renegade province” it wants back in its fold; Taipei’s government, heir to the defeated Nationalist troops who fled to exile across the Taiwan Strait when the Communists seized power in 1949, officially maintains the ridiculous position that someday it will reconquer the mainland.
Mouse eats cat.
Like Kurdistan, Palestine and Pakistani Kashmir, Taiwan lingers in diplomatic purgatory, its people semi-stateless. It enjoys robust economic growth and de facto independence. But it’s not really a country. It has no seat at the U.N. Only 13 nations, most of the tiny—Belize, Haiti, Vatican City, Honduras, the Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau, Paraguay, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Tuvalu and Guatemala—recognize Taiwan as a country. Even its primary benefactor, the U.S., does not recognize it.
Yet Taiwan is different. Always on the periphery, the Chinese empire’s control of the island waxed and waned in proportion to its political stability and military strength, allowing the Taiwanese as well as the ethnic Han Chinese who migrated there from the mainland, to develop their own arts, food, and political and economic cultures. Seventy years of diplomatic limbo and de facto independence—their own coins, stamps, military—have accelerated those trends and made them feel permanent. They don’t want to be absorbed into the Borg, like Hong Kong.
It isn’t hard to see why Taiwan’s people embrace the strategic ambiguity of diplomatic limbo. Life is good and getting better, money is rolling in, and—bluster aside—China seems unwilling to risk the chaos and economic cost of reclaiming an island it hasn’t had under direct control since the 19th century. Why fix the unbroken?
Except—it is a broken situation. You can’t have national pride until you’re a nation. You can’t demand respect unless your people demonstrate courage. Most of all, there’s the question of what the future holds: President Xi Jinping seems smart enough not to try to put the band back together again, at least not via hard (military) power. What about his successor or his successor’s successor?
Every now and then some Taiwanese political theorist gins up a farfetched workaround that promises to deliver independence without the risk of Chinese tanks rolling through Taipei. The 51 Club, founded in 1994 with 51 members, is a Taiwanese organization dedicated to the goal of turning the island into the 51st state of the United States. Presto! War with Taiwan is war against the United States—something the Chinese would never want.
The idea hasn’t exactly caught fire. “All the PLA [People’s Liberation Army] has to do is lob a few missiles over, and people will be swarming to us,” founder David Choi predicted in 1994. No missiles yet.
Annette Lu, former vice president of Taiwan under the KMT, promotes One Zhonghua, a scheme under which Taiwan and China would form an economic commonwealth like the European Union, with economic integration and political independence. Neither the Chinese nor the Taiwanese are on board.
There’s also a theory that the U.S. is, under international law, has been—and still is—the administrator of Taiwan since World War II. In 1945, the U.S. appointed Chiang’s Republic of China (KMT) to administer Taiwan—think of it like a sublet. The San Francisco Peace Treaty didn’t go into effect until seven years later, in 1952. “The treaty never mentioned who would receive Taiwan. Japan surrendered its former colony, but it never said to whom,” writes The Taipei Times. So who gets it? “Regarding Taiwan, the official U.S. position was, is and continues to be that it is ‘undecided.’” Biden may be hanging his hat on this bit of unfinished business.
From a domestic U.S. political perspective, however, whatever enthusiasm Americans have for defending Taiwan would vanish as soon as they learn that we would be risking World War III over a “country” that isn’t even a country—and doesn’t claim to be. The United States has gotten itself into a lot of stupid wars, but this would be the craziest one ever.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
Political cartoonists Ted Rall (Left) and Scott Stantis (Right) join an about-to-grieve nation considering the presidency and legacy of Jimmy Carter, 98, who recently entered hospice. Not discussed elsewhere yet important is Carter’s policies, which began the current trend of the conservative Democrat. Yesterday was Presidents’ Day so it’s time to take a walk down historical-memory lane and consider which of our leaders enjoy an undeservedly positive reputation, and which presidents have been unfairly overlooked for their accomplishments. It’s the one-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine: what happens next? Quagmire and escalation. Most notably, the president of China is meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin this spring in Moscow in order to discuss material ways China can help the Russian war effort in Ukraine.
Hawkish critics of China complain that the country spreads its influence around the world via its Belt and Road Initiative, which somehow makes it a threat or adversary or even an enemy of the United States. But China doesn’t invade or bomb other countries. It gifts them infrastructure and hopes to build good will. If only there was some way for the United States to do something similar and compete with them.
No country in the world invades the sovereign airspace of other nations as brazenly or extremely as the United States with spy drones, assassination drones, spy satellites and outright invasions. So it’s beyond rich to see U.S. officials whine so much about China’s survelliance balloon.
American media, and therefore voters, often roar approvingly as the citizens of countries that are at odds with the United States engage in violent protests. When the same thing happens here, however, their hypocrisy becomes readily apparent.
Western athletes attending the World Cup in Qatar are trying to send critical political messages to the local authorities. It might seem cute but it’s also rude. If you can’t stand the politics of another country, it might be best not to visit.
This exclusive episode finds award-winning cartoonist Ted Rall Zooming in a report from St. Petersburg, Russia. He and Scott Stantis (not in Russia) discuss Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s historic trip to Taiwan. Which leads the lads to talk about the assassination of Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. Scott and Ted also discuss Monkey Pox and, last, Ted delivers a boots-on-the-ground report about life inside the Russian Federation under Western sanctions. Spoiler: it’s nothing like you think.
The Washington Post recently published an op-ed purportedly written by President Joe Biden that tried to justify his visit with Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the psychopath who ordered the murder, dismemberment and dissolution in acid of Jamal Khashoggi, a columnist for—wait for it—The Washington Post. Let’s hope MbS likes Biden’s “writing” better than Khashoggi’s.
A publication whose motto is that “democracy dies in darkness” probably owes its readers the truth about who writes its articles. There is 1,000,000% no way in hell that Biden wrote that piece. Listen to him talk, then read it, you’ll see. Truth in advertising is important; accurate labeling more so. When I purchase a can labeled carrots, I don’t want to find pigs’ feet inside. Yet many newspaper opinion pieces and books bylined by high-ranking political figures and celebrities, like the piece that got Amber Heard sued, are ghostwritten. These are flagrant violations of journalistic ethical guidelines regarding attribution, a fraud against the readers, propaganda that elevates inarticulate fools into ersatz statesmen, and if editors won’t cut it out Congress should make it illegal.
It is the underlying argument, however, that makes “Why I’m going to Saudi Arabia” interesting. “I know that there are many who disagree with my decision to travel to Saudi Arabia,” “Biden” “writes,” going on to “say” that human rights concerns must take a backseat because the kingdom can help the U.S. “counter Russia’s aggression” in Ukraine, “outcompete China” and serve as a bulwark against Iran.
Even by the standards of the Beltway natsec Blob types whose “Risk” worldview considers countries and governments to be little more than pieces to be shuffled around a gameboard, “Saudi Arabia is a bulwark” is a shibboleth hard to top in its idiocy.
A bulwark?
Against what?
MbS rules the most notoriously barbarous, moronic and viciously violent regime on earth—one that by any metric is far worse than Iran, Russia or China. Torture, arbitrary arrests and political murders are commonplace. “Saudi courts have sentenced people to flogging for extramarital sex, drinking alcohol, and other offenses. While rarely, if ever, carried out, stoning sentences have been issued for adultery. The authorities have used and carried out sentences, albeit rarely, for amputation of limbs for theft,” according to Human Rights Watch. Saudi Arabia executes people, including children, for nonviolent drug offenses as well as witchcraft and sorcery.
In a single day this past March, Saudi Arabia executed 81 people, including non-citizens, for a variety of crimes, including “disrupting the social fabric and national cohesion” and “participating in and inciting sit-ins and protests.”
Saudi Arabia is one of the top destinations in the world for human traffickers, slave labor and sex trafficking.
Saudi women are treated like children under the law by the nation’s male guardianship program. As a result, the kingdom has the lowest female worker participation rate in the world, 5%.
Saudi Arabia finances countless radical Islamic terrorist groups around the world, including those who carried out the 9/11 attacks, and has spent an estimated $100 billion to spread its toxic brand of Wahhabi Muslim extremism to other countries. It has waged a brutal proxy war in neighboring Yemen, creating one of the worst humanitarian disasters on the planet.
The moral bankruptcy of American policy is exposed by the fact that Iran, which we target with sanctions, is a much more pluralistic and secular country than our frenemy Saudi Arabia. Iran has Jewish synagogues, Christian churches and Zoroastrian temples; its parliament has 14 non-Muslim members. Saudi Arabia, where anti-Semitism is widespread, required U.S. soldiers stationed there during the Gulf War to fly to international waters to observe Jewish services.
Iran’s support of international terrorism pales next to the Saudis’.
“For the past few decades,” Omar Bekdash wrote in the Cornell Diplomat in 2019, “women have enjoyed many more rights in Iran than in Saudi Arabia. In Iran, women are allowed to vote in every election and stand as candidates: six percent of Iran’s parliament is comprised of women, which is greater than the rate in cosmopolitan Lebanon, four percent. Women work and open businesses in Iran without the need for male approval—either from their male elders or their husbands.”
Iran has a vibrant opposition press; Saudi Arabia takes a zero-tolerance approach to dissent.
Given the record, it would make much more sense to cozy up to Iran as a bulwark against Saudi Arabia. The truth, of course, is that we have more in common with Saudi Arabia—because they’re the worst.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of a new graphic novel about a journalist gone bad, “The Stringer.” Order one today. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
