China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is the most ambitious infrastructure and economic integration project ever devised, linking over 140 countries across Asia, Africa and Europe. Much unlike the political West, Beijing is trying to project power through economic means, a starkly different approach to that of the most aggressive power pole in human history.
On Monday, Le Monde reported on one of Ukraine’s flagship construction projects, very much in line with the limited possibilities for reconstruction under wartime conditions and the needs of the moment: a large military cemetery. According to the French outlet, the site will have a bunker to protect against possible bombing—although the dead have not been a specific target of Russian troops, as they have been of Israeli troops in Gaza—places to pay tribute to fallen warriors, and more space to bury soldiers now that existing cemeteries are overflowing. Without even minimally realistic data on casualties in either army, the warnings from sympathetic journalists are indicative when they state, as one Ukrainian blogger recently did, that “currently, the Ukrainian Armed Forces lack infantry. Completely. The infantry has fled, is in the hospital, or in the cemetery.” The growth of cemeteries is undoubtedly another important indicator. According to Le Monde , the new facilities will initially house graves, although the number could reach 130,000 or 160,000 in the future, indicating the current very high level of casualties and the possibility that such losses will continue in the future.
Capes, Cameras, and the Cult of Visibility: The SeaLight Crusade as White Savior Theater
By Tina Antonis
The South China Sea is more than a maritime dispute—it’s a theater of narrative warfare. While headlines focus on Chinese aggression and Philippine resistance, a quieter campaign unfolds in the background: one of satellite feeds, curated imagery, and Pentagon-backed storytelling. At the center of this effort is SeaLight, a project that claims to illuminate truth but often casts shadows of its own.
As explored in my article at Antiwar.com, SeaLight doesn’t just document—it performs. It reframes geopolitical tension through moral spectacle, positioning its creators as heroic arbiters of transparency. But when the messenger wears a cape and the funding flows from defense budgets, we must ask: is this clarity, or choreography?
Stage Left: The White Savior Enters
In the comic-strip cosmology of Ray Powell’s SeaLight project, transparency wears a cape. Clad in heroic postures and backed by satellite imagery, Powell casts himself as the guardian of maritime morality—unarmed, except with satellite feeds, theatrical flair, and strategic messaging.
Yet beneath the cartoon and Pentagon-funded optics lies a familiar archetype: the white savior, rebranded for the South China Sea.
China Is Imperialist? Says Who?
Calling China a “maritime occupier,” Powell positions himself as a bulwark against aggression. But that moral pose collapses under scrutiny. He speaks for a country with over 800 foreign military installations and a documented history of over 250 military interventions since 1991—wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Somalia, and dozens more, all under the banner of peace, freedom, or preemption.
By comparison, China’s post–Cold War footprint includes no sustained foreign occupations and only scattered border conflicts and peacekeeping missions. The imbalance is staggering. And Powell’s framing doesn’t just ignore it—it performs around it.
As David Vine argues in The United States of War, this vast base empire is not a passive network—it’s an architecture of perpetual war. These outposts make military engagement not an exception but a structural habit, cloaked in strategic necessity and sold as global stewardship.
Powell’s cartoon rhetoric—calling China an occupier—obscures the scale of U.S. militarism. The term “occupation” is deployed not to analyze, but to project. When adversaries hold territory, it’s a crisis; when the U.S. spans the globe with armed installations, it’s policy.
Framing Conflict: The Optics of Consent
This isn’t irony. It’s performance. Powell’s language manufactures a moral frame for confrontation—costumed in transparency, but driven by escalation. The cape is literal. The conditioning is deliberate. And the stage is set for war.
SeaLight’s mission is not just visual documentation—it’s narrative warfare. As the Japan Times openly notes, its “chief weapon is photography, applied purposefully, generously and consistently over time.” These images—enhanced, curated, and distributed across media—are not neutral. They’re constructed to shape public perception, sway international opinion, and ultimately manufacture consent for confrontation.
Assertive transparency becomes a kind of ideological scaffolding—a stage on which geopolitical tension is dramatized, simplified, and morally polarized. The goal isn’t simply to reveal conflict; it’s to condition audiences for escalation.
And when the messenger dons a superhero’s cape, the spectacle transforms into something deeper: a story of rescue, of virtue, of intervention. This is not analysis—it’s soft propaganda dressed in heroic metaphor.
Consent for war doesn’t begin with missiles. It begins with mythmaking.
The admin just gave $30M to GHF, the organization at the center of charges that Israel is weaponizing assistance and shooting at desperate civilians seeking it
Two weeks ago, masked men attacked Major Andriy Korynevych, a recruitment officer from the Azov Brigade in the National Guard of Ukraine (NGU), and beat him in broad daylight near his home in Ivano-Frankivsk, western Ukraine. About ten days later, he dropped a bombshell: police identified his attackers and their accomplices, all of them from the Azov movement’s 3rd Assault Brigade (AB3). Furthermore, Korynevych suggested that the assault took place on the orders of Andriy Biletsky, the leader of the Azov movement, who he said is “closely connected” to the attackers. NGU Azovites are evidently furious—their unit published a statement denouncing the alleged assailants—and many AB3 Azovites are no less enraged at their counterparts’ betrayal, for going to the police and airing their dirty laundry.
This isn’t just about missile inventories. It’s about a superpower stretching its supply chains thin while picking fights on multiple fronts. As analyst Brian Berletic warned: “The US is unprepared for the scale of war it is provoking around the globe” (RAND might call it “Overextending America”—assuming they ever write the sequel). The numbers may look technical, but the pattern is strategic exhaustion. Below is the report—and my commentary on why shortfalls in interceptors are just a symptom of something far broader.
While many believe that under the Trump administration the controversial National Endowment for Democracy (NED*) was defunded, dismantled, or otherwise dissolved, the reality is far less dramatic and far more dangerous.
Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 
You must be logged in to post a comment.