The Empire has fallen
For most of my younger years, the golden destination on the planet was the USA.
It was for this reason I went there on my first major solo trip, aged 23years, spending four months travelling to 48 states.
This year we went to Mexico, choosing to go there rather than the USA, to spend a week with my partner’s son, who is working and studying there. We did not want to go to the USA. However, the rules are such that you cannot transit the USA. You have to get a visa and enter, even if you are then flying out without leaving the airport. (The Visa costs about $75AUS per person.)
This means being in line at LAX for 90 minutes to get through immigration. It took us 15 minutes to get through immigration in Taiwan, Brisbane and Japan. I needed to remind myself that the USA touts itself as being an exceptional, advanced country, far from what visitors feel on arrival.
Having now spent time in Taiwan, our next adventure will be China. We want to experience China, sold to us by my government and most governments in the West as being a dystopian hellscape that curtails liberties.
Apparently, we are not alone. China is fast approaching the number one tourist destination in the world. As the USA tanks.
China wants tourists. The Visa requirements are easy, not hard. Come visit us and experience us for yourself, judge us through being here.
While I was listening to the morning news today, it was announced that the Australian defence budget is going up. The threat, it seems, is China. Just as the biggest threat in West Asia is, apparently, Iran. I want to go to Iran too.
I look at both of these countries, and I genuinely ask, where is the aggression towards other countries? Show me why we are supposed to fear them so much?
In reference to Iran, people might reply that it is through funding what people call ‘proxy’ militias, like Hamas and Hezbollah. It seems perfectly OK for the USA to fund their proxies, Israel. And to build military bases in the region in the hundreds. As I understand it, both Hamas and Hezbollah were born out of the need to defend themselves from one of the most aggressive and highly funded militaries in the world. If we are going to play war games and not roll over and give up our sovereign land to some Biblical mythic text about the rights to the land, then not arming ourselves is certain death.
But Iran has never been the aggressor like the USA and Israel have been.
And their nuclear capacity has been two weeks away from being ready for over thirty years.
I do not trust the cage-rattling, fear-mongering from my government and others about either country. Other than the thirty years, two weeks away from being able to have a nuclear bomb threat, I am waiting for my government to give me one single compelling reason why Iran is so scary. Their regime is oppressive. But so is Saudi Arabia. The deals done by our Western governments and their profiteering parasites – hello, Jared Kushner – with Saudi Arabia are staggering.
China does some serious oppression as well. But let us not ignore the terrible oppression in the USA, where more of its citizens are incarcerated than anywhere in the world, more kids get shot in the USA than anywhere else other than Palestine, and people are one medical disaster away from bankruptcy.
It is not the oppression. It is not the nuclear bomb. They have not started a war in the last 100 years. Meanwhile, the USA and Israel are not content unless they are fighting wars on at least 5-6 fronts. The USA can count the number of days in 250 years that it has not been in some war, somewhere.
But China. Terrible China.
If there is a battle for the next superpower, it has already been won. Not through aggression.
It has been won by playing a very long game and planning for a very uncertain future.
The Empire has fallen. The Emperor and his sycophants don’t know yet.
Tourists flock to China and avoid the USA.
Photo Taken April 18th 2018. Article published April 18th 2026