I've been seeing a huge amount of anti-Chinese sentiment online, from obvious places like reddit, to even misinformed friends on social media falling victim to viral posts filled with misinformation.
What are we to make of this? Is this the slow march to war, by portraying them as pure evil, à la the fake story of Iraqi soldiers killing Kuwaiti babies to help get the public on board with our military response? It seems disadvantageous for the US and their allies to fight China, as we are incredibly reliant upon them economically and don't stand to gain much from the conflict.
Are these the irrational decisions of a dying empire? Or is there something else at play?
This is far beyond garden variety racism. You don't AstroTurf racism this hard, Americans kinda just do that on their own (and already were). Linking China with "Antifa terrorists" is a good way for them to justify massive political arrests at home though. There's a lot of shit going on. This is just going to open a lot of shit up on a lot of different fronts.
Yeah, I did a piss-poor job of explaining what I meant. My thinking is that if there was a white replacement capitalist hegemon (say the EU was becoming the economic superpower China is) that would be easy for American capitalists to accommodate. But some evil Oriental replacement hegemon? Even if it's capitalist, all the white supremacy baked into American society makes that a tougher pill to swallow. It's an alternate explanation that fits even if China isn't actually anti-capitalist.
That's definitely more clear, racism is just the a topping on the capitalist, imperialist, hegemonic neapolitan.