John Zmirak, senior editor at The Stream, warned in an interview Tuesday on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight with co-hosts Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak that China is “arming faster than Hitler was arming in the thirties.”

Decades of American foreign policy toward China have facilitated the one-party state’s ascendance as a rival power, said Zmirak.

“We have allowed China to become an economic powerhouse in one generation, effectively by destroying America’s industrial heartland; letting them cheat on trade deals; manipulate their currency; [and] steal hundreds of millions of dollars of our intellectual property,” said Zmirak. “Every weapons system that we build at the cost of billions of dollars in research and development, they just pick up and copy it because we let them.”

China’s military expansions are directed towards America, said Zmirak.

“The United States is the R & D department for the Chinese People’s Army, which is being built to counter no one but us,” said Zmirak. “There is no threat to China but us. Japan is pacifist and demilitarized. Russia has a gross national product equal to the state of New York. India is not going to attack China. China has no enemy but the United States, and yet, it continues to increase its military budget by double digits every year. It’s arming faster than Hitler was arming in the thirties.”

Unchanged, the status quo will create dangerous vulnerabilities of dependence on America, Zmirak said.

“Soon, we won’t be able to build defense computers without parts from China,” said Zmirak. “We won’t be able to build ships and tanks because they’ll have our steel industry. I’m a free trader, generally, but I would like to see Trump do tariffs targeted at China — not at specific industries — at China. China has not played fair for fifty years on these trade agreements, and it has devastated America. More importantly, it is building up a dangerous foreign enemy.”

Mansour lamented much of the news media’s focus on claims of Russian state “interference” in the 2016 presidential election while essentially ignoring threats from China.

“Russian Facebook memes are not going to hurt us,” quipped Mansour. “The Chinese expansionism and their militarism and their aims at taking out our industry and making us dependent on them, that certainly is going to have an effect on us long-term.”

“They need us more than we need them,” said Mansour of China’s current greater dependency on America than vice versa.

Zmirak drew on Steven Mosher’s analysis of China as articulated in Mosher’s book, Bully of Asia: Why China’s Dream Is the New Threat to World Order. He dismissed popular perceptions of China as a state victimized by and primarily shaped by outside factors, instead describing its current state as largely a function of a deep-rooted historical legacy of cultural and political authoritarianism.

“When we think of China, we tend to think of them as victims,” Zmirak said. “We think, ‘Oh, the British colonized them; the Opium Wars, and then all these countries carved out of pieces, and then they tried to have a democracy under Sun Yat-sen, and then the Japanese came in, and then Mao Zedong took them over, and this country has just been victimized over and over again, and all they ever wanted to do was bring the world printing and fireworks and dim sum and Confucianism.’ These are all wonderful things. What [Mosher] shows is that China actually invented the first totalitarian political system in the world. It was called the Chinese Empire. Confucianism was hollowed out and replaced by Machiavelli-style philosophy called legalism, which basically means if you make a law to say something is okay, it’s okay. If the emperor says it’s okay, it’s okay. Every citizen exists to serve the government and the emperor. Mao Zedong put a communist face on that. Now, under Xi Jinping, it has become more and more just plain Chinese socialism. It is a dictatorial, authoritarian, ultra-nationalist intolerant system that controls every aspect of every citizen’s life.”

Zmirak spoke of Mosher’s discovery, in the 1980s, of China’s implementation of state-forced abortions in pursuit of its one-child policy. Mosher witnessed the commission of forced abortions on women eight and nine months into term.

“[Steve Mosher] was the first social scientist let into China from America in many years,” said Zmirak. “He uncovered the one-child policy. He was in the operating room when doctors from the Chinese People’s Army did forced abortions on women who were eight and nine months pregnant. They injected a toxic serum, the baby died, and they took out the dead baby. A whole dead baby who could have lived outside the womb. It was done millions of times across China. Now, back then, it was because they were afraid of overpopulation.”

He continued, “Now, China is a little bit worried that it overdid it in terms of population control, yet they’re maintaining the complete control. Now, families are allowed to have two children, but only two. If a woman gets pregnant a third time, she has a mandatory abortion and no say in the matter. And why is China doing that? It is to maintain control over people at the most intimate level — telling them how many children they can have and when they can have them. That is the ultimate tyranny. Add to that complete control over the press, government crony control over all the businesses, and a one-party state. If the Nazis had won WWII, what they would have created would be something like today’s China, right down to genocide, because when you kill millions of people, especially baby girls who are aborted, that’s genocide.”

China’s informal official religion is worship of the state, Zmirak stated, echoing Mosher’s recent description of the Chinese state’s use of both ethnic- and race-based nationalism in its propaganda.

“[The Chinese state is] terrified of Christianity because the religion of China is China,” according to Zmirak. “They’re trying to create a nationalist religion, and communism is increasingly just a fig leaf on this narcissistic self-worship of China — the same way Germany used to worship Germany back then in the thirties and the way Italy worshiped Italy. … The state [seeks to be] dominating every aspect of society.”

Zmirak repeated his previous criticisms of Pope Francis and the Vatican establishment’s alignment with communist ideology, including the Vatican’s alliance with the Chinese government.

“I worry, as a Catholic, that the church is now going to discredit itself by becoming an arm of the communist party,” said Zmirak. “When China — not if China — when China becomes majority Christian, which I think will happen, it will be Protestant because the Catholics will be seen as collaborators with the Communists. That’s my fear as a result of these ridiculous, crazy negotiations between the Vatican and China. I don’t see it as a surrender; I see it as an alliance. The Vatican, today, is so anti-American that it sees China as an ally against capitalism … consumerism … the free market, and American-style democracy.”

Breitbart News Tonight airs Monday through Friday on SiriusXM’s Patriot channel 125 from 9:00 p.m. to midnight Eastern (6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Pacific).

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Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter @rkraychik.