“Pro-American business interests overthrew the Queen” of Hawaii in 1893. The new Murican Empire quickly annexed it.

Another one while we’re at it … The Republic of Texas declared independence in 1835 … from Mexico … only fourteen years after Mexico itself declared independence from Spain. The US snapped that one up too. When they tell you to remember the Alamo, they sure as hell don’t want you to remember it with any nuance, pardner.

In the wake of Pelosi’s baffling visit to the Formosan big island, there’s been another development that makes it a little more clear what the fuck she was really up to.

First a little background.

After WWII, the Chinese finally kicked out the Japanese and fought a big civil war, and the Communists won it hands down. The Kuomintang anti-communists (capitalists?) under Chang Kai-Shek fled with what was left of their army to Formosa, aka Taiwan County, China (“Chiang was an autocratic ruler, especially to the Taiwanese natives, who detested the ‘carpetbagger’ invaders”). On the mainland, Mao and the communists said “close enough”. It was sorta like if Robert E. Lee and his richest officers set up shop in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and Lincoln shrugged, instead of hunting him down to the last man.

The interesting part is that both the Kuomintang and the Commies were BOTH adamant from day one that there was only one China and no other way of seeing it was legitimate or tolerated. In fact, under Chang’s government, “those who advocated independence risked long prison terms and torture”. This was because Taiwanese seceding and setting up their own shop would be an acknowledgement that the whole rest of China was lost forever, and Kai-Shek considered that an unholy opinion.

The One-China policy doesn’t come from outside. It’s a worldview that has been shared by everyone over there, winner, loser, Commie or not, for over seventy years.

Between the Nixon and Carter administrations, the US basically threw up their hands and said: “Fine, guys, OneChina it is. If that’s the way you feel, we’re severing official diplomacy with little China, closing down ‘Taiwanese’ embassies and consulates, and recognizing that China is China.

It’s been that way now for forty, fifty years, and pretty much everybody in the rest of the world agrees.

Suddenly, Joe don’t like it, Nancy don’t like it, and the one percent of Taiwan, who no longer have a reason to ever think that they’ll retake the whole mainland, they don’t like it either, no mo.

The next step comes courtesy of the one-headed oligarch party of the US. Senator Robert Menendez, the fake Democrat neocon, and Senator Lindsey Graham, the fake Republican neolib, have introduced legislation designed to put the whole thing into reverse and cash in.

As Pelosi Taiwan visit looms, Menendez bill would ‘gut’ One China policy

I can see clearly now the plane is gone.

I told you the other day that only seven percent of Taiwanese in a poll from last year wanted independence. Maybe I should have also told you that an even smaller percentage were in favor of full reunification with Beijing, and just becoming another province. For years and years and years, ninety-some percent of the Taiwanese themselves were strongly in favor of letting things bumble nebulously along just as they always had.

That’s beginning to shift now as Washington piles up the rhetoric, apparently committed to no end of money, weapons, and maybe even American lives to support yet another brave little ‘democracy’ full of corrupt shits like the ones who are in charge of (what’s left of) Ukraine.

Or the ‘pro-American business interests’ that betrayed their lovely Hawaiian Queen for thirty pieces of silver a hundred years ago.

Or any of dozens of puppet regimes the US has pushed to the throne or the ‘presidency’ out of short-term greed and expediency since, only to discard them when they were no longer useful. Like Mr. Sadaam Hussein of Iraq. Like Mr. Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.

It may very well come to pass that the Grahams and Pelosis and Menendezes and Bidens of this world proceed along their bloody merry path, wrapping themselves in the cloak of liberty and democracy and trying to turn Taiwan into their next banana republic, only this time with semiconductors.

The oligarchs of China are going to see that as an attack on their own sovereign soil, and based on what the US itself has been preaching in the decades since Nixon, it’s hard to see it as anything else.

Unless you let yourself be brainwashed into seeing it the way Your Democratic Institutions want you to see it.

***

All I really know for sure is that if some day next year I open up my phone and read a text message from my loved ones celebrating the indomitable spirit of the heroic President Tsai Ing-wen and her scrappy island’s freedom-loving people united in their resistance to the evil aggressor …

Or telling me how that horrible bad man Xi Jinping needs to be ‘eliminated’ …

Or that they don’t care if their next laptop costs ten thousand dollars if it means the shining light of all that is good and noble finds a foothold in this dark world with bad people everywhere trying to kill it …

I’m going to be very tempted to just have an aneurysm at last and settle in for a long comfortable dirt nap.

Please don’t send me to bed yet, darlings.