AkariMizunashi [comrade/them]

You’re correct that if Taiwanese independence is taken as a goal there is a spectrum between doing nothing and immediately declaring war, and thank you for clarifying. I think peaceful engagement is absolutely preferable in this situation but I’m deeply suspicious of the consequences of alignment toward the US and I don’t believe the country has a goal of minimizing tensions in the region. I’ll leave it at that.

OK, but what exactly is the goal of your critique then? In talking about appeasement you’re clearly drawing parallels to a specific historical period in the 1930s, which people look back on and argue that other European powers should have been more ready to go to war with the Germans over territorial claims. if China were to launch an invasion of Taiwan, would it justify an intervention by the United States? would the results of that intervention ultimately be good for anyone but the American military industrial complex (assuming that it didn’t lead to nuclear war)? the US being a country which you call the most evil and imperialist on the planet, intervening in a conflict on the opposite end of the world and which you call a civil war elsewhere in thread.

And do you think that China, in trying to integrate a (very large) majority Han Chinese island province which is widely recognized as belonging to the legitimate Chinese government (the PRC) internationally, and resolve what you elsewhere in this thread call a civil war, is on a similar level of needing to stopped as Germany when it was trying to conquer all of Eastern Europe and then Russia in order to establish a genocidal colonial regime?

What is your prescription in order to avoid “appeasement” and would you support a US (or British or Japanese or Canadian etc.) military intervention in a conflict over Taiwan?

this line has been and will continue to be trotted out every time Americans or their allies are braying for war anywhere and with anyone ever since the one example everyone can point to in Nazi Germany. how many times has the US justifiably escalated confrontation since WWII, and how many times has it led to a good outcome (and how many times has it led to arguably genocidal warfare on the part of the US)? Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, too many other examples in Latin America, Iraq, Afhganistan, as well as every smaller operation listed in another comment in this thread? America is the biggest threat to peace in the world today and has been since the Second World War.

even if you take it as a given that Americans have good intentions and China is literally Hitler, the calculus of appeasement versus confrontation has to be a hell of lot different from a hundred years ago and compared to a world without any nuclear weapons. The costs of pushing confrontation with Germany in the 30s would have been minuscule and provincial compared to those resulting from escalation between nuclear powers today.

This worked (to some extent, in the small cohort of industrialized capitalist countries as a sort of class collaborationist regime mediated by unions and a relatively activist government) for around 20-30 years after WWII but that’s exactly what it is - something that will only work temporarily and for as long as it’s tolerable to capitalists, because the political system is built by and for capitalists, and as soon as they see an opening they will use the state to beat back and discipline labor (in this case the neoliberal reaction that’s continued since the 80s). Reformism is a circular dead end because politics and economics are inseparable, and political power just like economic power under capitalism is always (in the long term) gonna be stacked in favor of the people with capital - and those people aren’t gonna give up their power without a fight.

That analysis is also looking at the whole labor market as a closed system within rich capitalist countries when the reality is that most of the breathing room that the middle class / unionized labor had during that period was built on top of capitalist super exploitation of labor in Africa, South America and Asia, and that sort of exported exploitation is always gonna be the case under a capitalist political system built around nation states.

To add on to what others have said, the concept that capitalism is just letting the economy do its thing with no government influence is really mystifying and innaccurate. Capitalism requires immense support from a state (some sort of apparatus with a monopoly on force) in order to guarantee and enforce property rights, contracts, the collection of debts, ensure stable currencies that are widely accepted as payment etc. Just because the state is overwhelmingly working on the side of people with capital to preserve and accumulate that capital, doesn’t mean it isn’t working.

it looks like they got pooled between “doesn’t exist” and “no” to “are oil and gas companies responsible?”. “global warming doesn’t exist and if it does it isn’t their (our) fault”

It feels really remarkable how quickly in the late 2010s that top level people in the US government (as well as the media and society generally) pivoted to using annihilationist rhetoric as though China is some sort of anime arch-enemy they have to power up to defeat. I guess this is probably what the red scare years after 1945 felt like when the US and USSR quickly shifted from allies to rivals