Five World War II Myths That Are Complete B.S.

A quick round-up of a few mistruths routinely bandied about regarding W.W.II

Now, I know what you're thinking. "Hey, a listicle outlining erroneous assumptions about World War II ... how original!" 

Perhaps this is indeed territory oft trudged by lesser websites, but I figured there were still falsehoods a plenty circling World War II that really haven't been addressed by that many web articles, and for some reason or another, haven't been given the glorious public debunkings they really deserve.

Think you have a firm grasp of why Hitler never invaded Switzerland, or why the Japanese never tried to carpet bomb Nebraska? Well, think again, Holmes ... as it turns out, our mutual misunderstanding of what went on during the Greatest War of 'Em All is enough to fill several history books.

Myth Number One:

Germany never invaded Switzerland because they feared their armed citizenry.

While the Wehrmacht made their best efforts to completely flatten continental Europe into a pancake of Aryan subjugation, a few countries remained unoccupied by Hitler’s forces. Spain and Portugal were spared Nazi wrath, and try as he may, old Adolf never could mount a full out assault on Great Britain. Furthermore, quite a few countries, including Denmark and Finland, actually fared pretty well against German invasions, with Norway having the proud distinction of kicking Stalin AND Hitler’s ass at various points throughout World War II.

Considering the geographic proximity to Germany, some historians and astute observers have wondered as to why Hitler never attempted to annex, invade or attack Switzerland -- especially since A.H. had been spewing some vitriol about the Swiss ever since the French collapsed.

One of the popular narratives is that Hitler never made an advance against the Swiss because they had a heavily armed citizenry. According to some guy on the PBS website, the Swiss public were packing heat like rappers, and ready to pop a cap in sundry Nazi asses as soon as they goose stepped their way into the country.

Indeed, Hitler had plans at one point to mount an invasion against Switzerland -- he even had as many as 500,000 Italian and German troops ready to pounce as soon as he gave the signal. Alas, Hitler never gave the go-ahead, a military maneuver that, to this very day, inspires great debate among armchair generals.

While the NRA crowds love to extol Switzerland as an example of how an armed public prevents fascism, the reality is that Switzerland’s rifle-toting homeowners probably had little-to-nothing to do with Hitler’s about-face on invasion.

To begin, let’s mull a little logic here. The Swiss had a fairly sizable armed militia, to be sure, but you know who had even more guns than they did? THE SOVIET UNION, WHICH HITLER INVADED TWO YEARS AFTER ABANDONING OPERATION TANNENBAUM. To say the Hitler was too much of a pussy to go after Switzerland when he then took on the most massive army in modern history just months later kind of lays waste to the whole hoplophobia argument. If Hitler was afraid his troops would have been shot, methinks he probably wouldn’t have sent his own boys into the meat grinder against Stalin’s considerably more powerful artillery units.

Furthermore, the invasion of Switzerland served no real strategic importance to the Nazis. In case you didn’t know, Switzerland is basically a giant landlocked salad, buffered all the way around by rocky terrain. With no waterway access, its geographic value in the middle of a freaking war was practically nil. Why would Hitler want to squander the time and manpower and put soldiers at risk to take over something that wouldn’t serve as a launching pad to the eastern or western theaters, precisely?

Lastly, an interesting hypothesis is that the Nazis needed a neutral Switzerland as their wartime piggy bank. Say, ever wonder what happened to all of the plundered gold the S.S. stole from occupied territories? Well, odds are, it wound up in a Swiss bank somewhere -- demonstrating the financial importance of Switzerland as a safe deposit box for the Krauts, even the motherfucking royalties from “Mein Kampf” were put inside a Swiss account. With that in mind, perhaps there’s an entirely different reason why the Germans never put boots on the ground in Switzerland; why the hell would they want to rob themselves?

Myth Number Two:

The Japanese never invaded the U.S. homeland because the public was well-armed.

It’s the same argument as with the Switzerland situation, only intensified a million times because we’re talking about ‘MURICA, dad-burn-it.

So, in 1941, the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor. We don’t think that shit’s cool, so we vote to go to war and show Hirohito and his troops what-for. While a huge component of raising war support in the States centered around fears of a second Japanese attack, the Imperialists never made a full-scale attack on the U.S. homefront. According to oh-so-ardent gun advocates, that’s because the U.S., much like the Swiss, had their shotguns a ‘ready in case Tojo came a knocking on any doors in the Heartland.

Unfortunately, there are so many things wrong with that little notion that I’m not quite sure where to begin. Perhaps we can start with the fact that Japan actually did attack the U.S. on its home turf quite a few times after Pearl Harbor, albeit in really poorly-planned subterfuge missions that sound like something out of a Chuck Norris movie.

Secondly, I don’t know how many of you were aware of this, but between the U.S. West Coast and Japan, there’s this thing called “The Pacific Ocean.” It’s really big, and it would take a long time for Japanese attackers to make it to Los Angeles -- if they could even make it to San Francisco before running out of gas altogether. For any kind of major (and non-submarine-launched) aerial or naval attack on U.S. soil to have transpired, the Japanese would have needed some sort of mid-Pacific launching pad, which would have been easily picked up by U.S. radar. If a Japanese armada were coming, U.S. military would have had not just hours, but days of advance notice. As a general rule, that usually doesn't bode well for a sneak attack's success rate.

Additionally, the primary goal for Japan during World War II was to maintain China, not try to dick around in California. With the Japanese Navy playing defense to the east -- and most of Japanese ground forces committing unspeakable war crimes in southeast Asia -- Japan simply didn’t have the manpower to mount any kind of invasion against the U.S., even if they wanted to. It’s a nice idea to think rifle-toting potato farmers were the only thing keeping us from getting gobbled up by the Japs, but unfortunately, that pesky reality speaks to the contrary.

Oh, and that "quote" up top from Yamamoto? Not that this is a shock or anything, but it's completely made up bullshit.

Myth Number Three:

The United States had no choice but drop the atom bombs on Japan.

We’ve all heard the narrative a million times: the U.S., having crippled the Japanese navy, now found themselves facing a long, grueling ground battle against the Imperialists. With resources diminishing, the Japanese were ready to fight a suicidal battle against occupying troops, with some early estimates tabbing as many as 1.7 million casualties -- with as many as 800,000 U.S. fatalities -- in a full-fledged invasion of the Japanese mainland.

Without question, Operation Downfall would have proven costly. In anticipation of heavy U.S. casualties, the military manufactured a surplus of Purple Hearts, which are still being handed out to injured troops today.

The unfathomably high death toll, we have all been told, is the primary reason why Truman went ahead with the decision to bomb Japan. The thing is, by the time the U.S. was mulling dropping the bomb, the Japanese military was pretty much already defeated. The Battle of Midway had more or less eradicated the Japanese Navy, and the nation's infrastructure had already been reduced to rubble and ashes thanks to daily air raids. The fire bombing campaign of 1944, it is perhaps worth noting, resulted in a higher body count than the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima combined.

Even Gen. Douglas MacArthur thought the Japs were ready to hang 'em up -- through blockades and continual bombings, he figured Hirohito would've surrendered within half a years time, anyway. In July 1945, Gen. Robert Eichelberger issued a similar sentiment, revealing that most of the U.S. military brass were anticipating a Japanese surrender much sooner rather than later.

And even if a mainland invasion were to occur, it's not like the U.S. would have gone into battle all by their lonesome -- but more on that in just a bit.

A popular hypothesis that has arisen over the last 50 years has been the possibility that Truman authorized the bombing of Japan not to goad the Imperialists into surrendering ASAP, but rather, to scare the ever-loving dog shit out of the Soviets, who were clearly the other big victor coming out of World War II.

Ultimately, the real reason why the U.S went ahead with the bombings may have had little to do with ending the Pacific war as soon as possible, and a whole hell of a lot more with justifying the costs of the Manhattan Project. After spending more than $2 billion on developing the bombs, which is well over $25 billion in 2014 dollars, who is to say there wasn't an eagerness to reap the fruits of all of that secretive -- and pants-pissingly-horrific -- R&D?

Myth Number Four:

The atom bombing of Japan was the reason why Japan surrendered.

Looking at the chronology of World War II, it seems about the most obvious thing in the world. Nagasaki and Hiroshima both get a nice big dose of radioactive death in August 1945, and what do you know, Hirohito surrenders just a few days later. It’s about the simplest example of cause and effect there is, no?

Well, as it turns out, the bombings really weren't the likeliest reason why the Japanese finally surrendered. After the bombing of Hiroshima, Navy Admiral Soemu Toyoda said the remaining military was ready to fight through subsequent atom bombings, and even after the bombing of Nagasaki, the Emperor wasn't quite yet ready to throw in the towel. U.S. military leadership were actively mulling the possibility of dropping as many as seven more atom bombs on Japanese targets before November.

Clearly, the atom bombings alone weren't the final domino that lead to Japan's unconditional surrender to the Allies. The same date Nagasaki was bombed, something else happened, which probably had a greater influence on the Japanese leadership's decision to finally call it quits.

In 1941, the Russians and Japanese signed a neutrality pact. It did pretty much what it sounded like, insuring that no matter what happened in WWII, the two countries would never attack each other. This is pretty important, because the two nations had been unofficially warring over Asian territory since the early 1930s.

On Aug. 5, 1945, the Ruskies said fuck the pact, insinuating the Japanese had violated the agreement. This, interestingly enough, occurred just 90 days after the Yalta Conference, in which the Russians agreed to enter the Pacific War on behalf of the Allies following Germany's surrender.

And on Aug. 9, the Soviets formally declared war on the Japanese by invading Manchuria and royally fucking things up. Over the course of just a few days, the Soviets slew upwards of 80,000 Japanese troops and captured more than half a million prisoners -- the absolute worst land defeat Japan experienced in its entire, blood-soaked military history.

With a decimated military and air force -- and a large throng of army personnel stationed in occupied territory outside of Japan -- Hirohito, already on the verge of complete bankruptcy, was now starring down dual-invasion from the world's most powerful and technologically advanced nations. Nuclear obliteration wasn't enough to get the Japanese Supreme Council to finally mull capitulation, but the thought of Stalin and his boys plowing their way through China en route to a possible land invasion of Kyushu was.

While Hirohito listed the atom bombings as a reason why Japan surrendered in his famed public address on Aug. 14, he also made reference to the Soviet invasion when addressing the remnant of the Japanese military on Aug. 17:

"Now that the Soviet Union has entered the war against us, to continue … under the present conditions at home and abroad would only recklessly incur even more damage to ourselves and result in endangering the very foundation of the empire’s existence. Therefore, even though enormous fighting spirit still exists in the imperial navy and army, I am going to make peace with the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union, as well as with Chungking, in order to maintain our glorious kokutai."

Myth Number Five:

The Holocaust was the worst genocide of World War II. 

A whole lot of Jewish people died in World War II -- as many as 6 million, actually. While many historically-naïve folks consider that to be the absolute worst ethnic cleansing episode of the 1900s, it’s far from it. In fact, it’s not even the greatest Nazi-perpetrated genocide, in total victims, to happen during WWII.

Depending on who you ask, a grand total of 50 to 80 million people died during World War II. It's pretty hard getting an estimate for how many were killed by each side of the Axis and Allies, but most historians place the range of Nazi-instigated killings around the 20 million corpse mark as a conservative estimate. At least 8.8 million of those killed by Hitler's forces were Soviet troops -- a number that jumps up to almost 12 million when you factor in the three million plus Ukrainians who were also mass murdered by German occupiers. No matter how you look at it, Hitler easily killed twice as many Slavs as he did Jews, but for some reason, no one ever really reflects on that when discussing Nazi atrocities.

Along the same lines, you really have to wonder why nobody knows what Holodomor was, either, since the one-year Ukrainian death toll there was almost certainly as high as the Jewish body count from all of World War II -- if not considerably higher. And for god's sake, whatever you do, don't bring up the fact that 2 million Germans died in "forced expulsions" from 1944 to 1950. Seriously, don't even think about it.

And that actually pales in comparison to the mayhem wrought by Imperial Japan. Really, the ultimate crimes against humanity victims of WWII were the Chinese, as Japanese occupiers slew approximately TWENTY MOTHERFUCKING MILLION of them -- more than three times the number of Jews killed by the Nazis. Oh, and that's not counting the additional 4 million in the Dutch East Indies, 2 million in Vietnam, and 1 million in the Philippines they also exterminated, plus another million or so scattered throughout Korea, Malaysia and Oceania. I still have trouble grasping why, precisely, that Nazi Germany is considered the most evil empire in history, when the Japanese killed far more people, across a wider range of territory, in ways that are almost inconceivably barbaric, for a much longer period of time.

Of course, none of this is to say that the Jewish Holocaust wasn't a horrible moment in history. It was indelibly tragic, but the frank reality? It was far from aberrational, and unquestionably, nowhere close to being the largest genocide of the war.

And compared to post-World War II genocide numbers, the Holocaust is positively dwarfed in terms of total victims. Joey Stalin likely killed more of his own people after World War II then were actually killed during the conflict -- and for a real mind-blower, the policies of Chairman Mao were likely responsible for the deaths of anywhere from 49 to 78 MILLION.

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Book Review: “The Next Decade” by George Friedman (2011)

According to one of America’s most respected strategists, the United States’ biggest dilemma is managing the consequences of being an unplanned global empire while simultaneously upholding the founding virtues of the Republic. So how will this dual-problem impact geopolitics until 2021?

A few years ago, I reviewed George Friedman’s 2009 speculative fiction title “The Next 100 Years.” It was an entertaining read, to be sure -- what, with all of those hypersonic missiles and wars with a united Turkish-Japanese-German front over intergalactic battle systems and all -- but the thing that really struck me most about the book was just how much the author knew his stuff regarding U.S. sociopolitics. As a high ranking official for STRATFOR -- one of the premier geopolitical intelligence groups in the United States -- Friedman is a guy who definitely has his thumb and forefinger on the pulse of international stratagem, and his straight-and-to-the-point explanations of how and what the U.S. must do to maintain its hegemonic influence in the world in “The Next 100 Years” piqued my curiosity in “The Next Decade” quite a bit.

“The Next Decade,” despite having a tighter locus than “The Next 100 Years,” is actually the sequel, having come out two years after “100.” Whereas the first book peered into the future with somewhat rose-tinted glasses (microwave technologies and loosened international immigration policies will save the world, Friedman predicted) this book is a lot more blunt and sardonic. Indeed, the opening chapter of the book emphasizes the need for a good Machiavellian leader a’la Lincoln, FDR or Reagan, as the POTUS during the ensuing decade will have to be an expert at finagling and fudging with an almost unlimited number of ever-changing geopolitical alliances. The core thesis of the book, then, is Friedman’s assertion that the United States -- unintentionally -- has become a global empire, and the role of the U.S. President is to more or less serve as the world’s most important political diplomat and agenda-setter. Of course, Friedman also notes that the President -- whoever he or she may be -- must also be able to at least promote the virtues and ethics of the homeland, despite the fact that his or her duties as a global leader now far supersede his or her role as a domestic figurehead. The great internal political battle of the decade, Friedman predicts, will be how the U.S. people react to an executive leadership whose primary interests rests not in serving the American people, but in maintaining a stranglehold on the rest of world’s military and economic doings.

To begin the book, Friedman says that the ongoing decade will be a quest to emerge from underneath the two defining aspects of the aughties -- the late 2000s global recession and George W.’s War on Terror. Regarding the former, Friedman asserts that downturns of the like are natural endpoints of boom and bust cycles, citing the downfall of municipal bonds at the end of ’70s, the late 1980s Savings and Loans scandal and the dot.com doomsday scenario of the early 2000s as hard-to-deny proofs of his theory. Ultimately, he believes the inevitable fallout from the Great Recession will be a general shift towards greater individual state involvement in the world markets, which in turn, will likely lead to a resurgence in economic nationalism.

As for our post War on Terror fates, Friedman believes the United States will henceforward be caught up in a skillful balancing act in the Middle East, with the utmost goal of insuring that no single regional power rises to prominence while simultaneously keeping the Gulf’s oil supply from being disrupted. Doing so, Friedman suggests, requires the U.S. to slowly disentangle itself from Israel and seek accommodations with Iran -- primarily to “use” as a Shiite counterweight to an emerging Sunni powerhouse in Turkey.

In regards to European affairs, Friedman says that the U.S. strategy is quite simple: to prevent any single nation from dominating the peninsula. Since Russia is a natural resources-strewn titan and Germany is the continent’s lone economic super power, Friedman believes it is an imperative that the U.S. do everything it can to halt Berlin and Moscow officials from coming to any major trade agreements. To drive a wedge between any possible ententes between the two countries, Friedman suggests that the U.S. powers that be help Poland and the surrounding Slavic countries develop economically, as both a financial and geographically literal buffer zone. He also expects relations between the U.S. and U.K. to strengthen in the face of a hypothetical “Mediterranean Union” between Germany and France. The key to strategic success on the continent, Friedman believes, hinges on the sneakiness of the President of the United States. “The president must appear to be not very bright, yet be able to lie convincingly,” he writes. “The target of this charade will not be future allies but potential enemies.”

As made glaringly apparent in “The Next 100 Years,” Friedman isn’t buying the hoopla surrounding China’s booming, export-dependent economy. Rather, he believes the import-reliant Japan will slowly begin to pull ahead of China as Asia’s de facto regional powerhouse, quite possibly by outsourcing to China itself. As for U.S. strategies in the Pacific, Friedman believes more investments are necessary in South Korea, Singapore and Australia -- and as bizarre as it may sound, he wouldn’t be surprised if the U.S. attempted to strengthen China’s market access in a preemptive strike against Japan, either. As for India -- considered by some to be a possible “democratic China” -- Friedman remains pessimistic; not only does he not believe the economy in southeast Asia will explode this decade, he actually believes that U.S. and Indian relations are likely to grow stagnant between now and the 2020s.

Friedman isn’t too concerned about what happens south of the border, although he does note a few things that could potentially transpire in Latin America over the next few years. For one, he believes it is possible -- although  unlikely -- that Brazil could open up naval lanes in the South Atlantic, and begin scoring oil shipments from Angola and Nigeria. Just to be on the safe side of things, the author suggests U.S. policymakers start looking at ways to beef up Argentina’s economy as a counterbalance. Regarding Mexico -- the number two buyer of U.S. goods -- Friedman believes that both sides of the Rio Grande will promote “the illusion of activity” regarding illegal immigration and the drug trade over the ensuing years, while the “threat” of an independent Quebec remains a remote, if not insignificant, possibility in the Great White North. Ultimately, Friedman believes there is little worth fighting for in Africa at the moment, outside of preventing Islamic extremism from arising in oil-rich hotbeds on the west coast. Allegations of an ongoing  “resource war” between China and the U.S. in the region, the author states, are also greatly exaggerated.

On the domestic front, Friedman zeroes in on the mass retirement of baby boomers, and their vast healthcare needs. Unfortunately, he believes that technology today is more about acquiring market share than true scientific innovation, and as such, Friedman doesn’t believe we’ll start seeing true breakthroughs in energy and robotics until next decade, at the least. For now, Friedman says U.S. strategy is about maintaining its naval power…and then we’ll start talking about space ops.

Despite all of the Machiavellian stuff Friedman says about the U.S. executive branch, he ultimately states that the greatest barrier to civic progression in America is the Cerberus of bureaucratic overkill and political infighting. “Americans prefer mutual vilification to facing up to the facts,” he writes, “they prefer arguing about what ought to be to arguing about what is.” As such, he concludes the tome by stating that “an enormous act of will for the country to grow up” is essential for the United States to maintain its Republican ideals as the 2020s approach.

At the end of the day, this book is really more of a no-frills, no-bullshit look at America’s geopolitical interests -- and the underhanded ways the executive powers maintain the U.S. hegemony -- than it is a work of pure speculative fiction. There’s not that many concrete predictions the author tosses out there, although the few that he does -- like the U.S. seeking to repair its relations with Iran -- have indeed come to light since the book was originally published. All in all, “The Next Decade” is a thorough, straight-to-the-point primer on international relations and the way the U.S. of A truly views its geopolitical sphere of influence; fantastical, this book may not be, but it’s certainly an illuminating little title nonetheless.

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Is China Really That Big Of An Economic Threat To U.S. Interests?

Why Predictions of a Red Planet are just a little unwarranted

A few weeks ago, I posted a blog entry about new possible revenue models for modern journalists. Well, The New York Times managed to come up with an idea I didn’t, and admittedly, it’s a pretty ingenious one:

They leased four pages of their print space to another newspaper.

Of course, it wasn’t an American newspaper. Come on, that would just be silly. Instead, they gave China Daily, one of the largest (and by the way, state-run) papers in China four pages to editorialize like a mother in the Business section of the Nov. 11, 2011 edition of The Times. Not surprisingly, the four page spread (which included a plug for the Nook version of the paper, in case you were wondering), was a big, fat wad of propaganda, telling readers that WTO deals between the States and China were beneficial to all of us big-shouldered Americans.

Well, reading through that gobbledygook got me thinking about just how much economic sway China is going to carry over the U.S. in the decade ahead. Now, depending on who you ask, this means that either China will ultimately falter due to being unable to overcome thousands of years of extreme regionalism, or they will develop malware programs that will takedown all of our military satellites and subsequently proceed to beat us likerented mules until we accept the yuan as our official currency. Apparently, there is no in-between opinion on the matter.

The problem with all of this economic hype surrounding China is that pretty much all of it is undue. Yeah, they are making a lot of money these days, but there are so many misperceptions out there - including some downright HUGE ones - that most Americans think the Chinese are on the fast track to steamrolling the planet like in “Red Dawn” or something. The reality is, China is nowhere near as economically, militarily, or infrastructural-y sound as the press would lead you to believe. Time to set the record straight about U.S./China financial relations, don’t you think?

For starters, all of that stuff you’ve been hearing about the U.S. owing an infinity amount of money to China? Well, believe it or not, China actually owes more money to the U.S. than the other way around. You see, all of that technology and infrastructure-building tools the Chinese have today? Pretty much all of it was either directly donated to the country by the U.S., or leased out to the country by U.S. holdings. And that’s not to mention the fact that the Chinese economy is more dependent on U.S. investments than vice versa - all it would take would be el presidente gaining some huevos and declaring a trade embargo on China, and the Chinese economy would collapse like a game of Jenga during a caldera eruption.

Yes, it is true that China is becoming a more technologically advanced nation, and wages are beginning to go up in the country. The thing is, if you compared the Chinese middle class with the American middle class proportionally, only about 1 percent of the entire Chinese population is even close to bringing in the same amount of income the aggregate American household does. That means that China has an estimated technocracy of about 10 million people compared to an estimated technocracy of about 40 million here in the U.S. Sure, we’ve all seen videos of Shanghai and Hong Kong, and if the 2008 Olympics were any indication, China is a country armed to the teeth with about 900 million math wizards prepared to bury us alive at Hu Jintao’s first command. The reality, however, is that the average Chinese person is still remarkably impoverished in comparison to U.S. statistics - despite all of the nonstop rhetoric about “a rapidly industrializing” China, the aggregate worker in the country still makes only a fraction of what the aggregate American worker makes annually.

All I can say is, their crossword puzzles are WAY harder than the ones we have in the States.

The thing is - and this is sort of the big story people really aren’t talking about in the media - is that China really hasn’t figured out how the whole “democratic free-market” thing works quite yet. Yeah, they have the Internet and cable TV, but Google is edited by the government and citizens aren’t allowed to watch “Back to the Future” because it gives them the wrong idea about time travel. This may come as a surprise to some people, but the transition from Mao’s Communist Wonder Land  to globalized super-democracy really hasn’t been that smooth of a ride for China. For one thing, there’s this problem with overpopulation  - if you think what the U.S. is experiencing right now with the great baby boomer extinction period going on, just WAIT a good 20 years down the line when approximately a quarter of China’s population will hit retirement age. Not surprisingly, health care in China is pretty lacking. . .which really isn’t helped by the insane pollution levels within the nation’s people clogged mega-cities, many of which lack common modern infrastructure like automobile-accessible roadways and potable drinking water.

If China’s urbanized areas seem just a little backwards, than the countryside might as well be a full century behind the rest of the modern world. And then, there are the numerous autonomous regions within the country, filled with alienated, isolated communities that are practically unconnected to the rest of the nation, socially or financially - and a lot of times, they sort of have a penchant for kicking the government’s ass every time they send troops to crack down on their protests.

Don’t let the rumors of a democratizing China fool you: despite the leaps and bounds the country has made financially over the last twenty years, most of that revenue is going to the central government and NOT private enterprises within the nation. And, if you didn’t pay attention in high school, the Chinese government has been historically pretty crappy at maintaining the best interests of its people.

Yeah, they have an expanding military. Yeah, they have an expanding space program. They have a lot of government controlled industries that appear to be growing, but these aren’t exactly the models of efficiency we’ve been lead to believe they were. And irony of ironies? Confronted with a majority population that lacks even primary school education, a lot of Chinese companies have resorted to outsourcing  jobs to southeast Asia to stay profitable. 

The kicker - and the part of the story that you definitely WON’T be hearing the next time Fox or CNN runs a special about the looming specter of Chinese economic dominance - is that the country has a MAJOR problem ahead regarding energy needs. As China gets more technologically advanced and more people are able to partake of normal Western stuff like watching TV and driving cars, the country is headed towards an energy crisis that makes the absolute WORST the U.S. has encountered seem like a day at the beach by comparison. As industry increases, you need more and more oil, and since China doesn’t have the petrol hook-up like the States does, the nation is almost completely dependent on gasoline sucked out of sub-Saharan Africa to meet its ever-increasing consumption needs. And oh yeah - SHHHH! - there’s kind of an unpublicized cold war going on  in the Dark Continent between the U.S. and China over oil reserves. But, uh, we’ll get to that one when we get to that one, I guess.

And that’s not even taking into consideration just how bumpy Pacific Rim economics can be (just ask Thailand, who got a taste of the worldwide recession ten years in advance), not to mention stiff competition from Japan and South Korea, two highly technologically adept markets that a.) have WAY more experience/success with free trade and democratic governance and b.) nowhere NEAR as many internal and infrastructural problems that China has. And that’s coming from a country with half of its Diet on trial for political malfeasance AND a freaking leaking nuclear reactor, for crying aloud!

So, with all of this stuff taken into consideration, is China really the economic juggernaut so many people are making the nation out to be? I hate to be a naysayer, but all signs point to overrated,  if you ask me.

Yeah, they’re making some progress, but they have way too many internal problems they have to address (which they won’t), assess (which they definitely won’t) and remedy (which won’t happen ever) before I would call them a sustainable financial empire.

And oh yeah! Their newspapers definitely need some work, too. . .

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