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发帖数: 4825 | 1 http://www.rt.com/op-ed/495654-caitlin-johnstone-china-us/
Caitlin Johnstone: In post-Iraq invasion world, it’s absolutely insane to
blindly believe the US narrative on China
23 Jul, 2020
By Caitlin Johnstone, an independent journalist based in Melbourne,
Australia. Her website is here and you can follow her on Twitter @caitoz
My social media notifications have been lighting up over the last few days,
with virulent Chinagaters sharing a video which purports to show Uighur
Muslims being loaded onto a train to be taken to concentration camps.
It’s actually an old video that had already surfaced last year, but it is
magically making the rounds again as a new and shocking revelation in 2020,
now that Western China hysteria has been officially kicked into high gear,
at exactly the same time the US enacts one of the most dangerous and
incendiary escalations of recent years in the South China Sea.
Everyone tagging me in this video presents it as a self-evident "gotcha"
moment, in exactly the same way Russiagaters spent years tagging me in every
"HUGE BOMBSHELL WALLS ARE CLOSING IN" item of thinly sourced narrative
fluff for their debunked conspiracy theory that the Kremlin had infiltrated
the highest levels of the US government.
They are one hundred percent certain that the video shows Uighurs being
loaded onto a train to go to a concentration camp, solely because that is
what the bit of text over the video tells them they are seeing. They aren’t
looking at the actual data and thinking critically about it, they’re
looking at the narrative and believing it on blind faith. Which, in a post-
Iraq invasion world, is an absolutely insane thing to do when presented with
information about a nation that is being targeted by the US-centralized
empire.
In reality there’s nothing in the video which tells us that these are
Uighur people being sent to a “re-education camp,” and not merely a
conventional prison transfer of convicted criminals, the likes of which take
place in the far more populous US prison system all the time. It’s an
unknown. We are told by the BBC’s Andrew Marr (the same Andrew Marr whose
phony journalism Noam Chomsky derided years ago) that it has been “
authenticated by Western intelligence agencies and by Australian experts”,
which in practice are the same thing, and that’s really the extent of the
evidence. Again, this is an insane source to take on faith in a post-Iraq
invasion world.
There are in fact an abundance of reasons to be highly skeptical of the
establishment narrative about what is happening to Uighurs in Xinjiang. But
that isn’t the point that I am trying to make here.
The point I am trying to make here is that the only sane response to any
narrative that is being promoted by Western intelligence agencies and their
media stenographers about governments which have resisted absorption into
the imperial blob is intense and unrelenting skepticism. These organizations
have such an extensive and well-known history of lying about exactly this
sort of thing that they have left us no choice but to withhold belief from
anything they say, without a mountain of independently verifiable evidence,
if we want to have a fact-based relationship with reality.
None of this means that China has a wonderful government. It doesn’t even
mean that all the bad things we’re being told about what the Chinese
government is doing are false. It’s entirely possible that that video shows
exactly what we’re being urgently told to believe it shows. There’s
simply no way to be sure, one way or the other, in an information ecosystem
that is so severely tainted by propagandistic narrative manipulation.
Surely the Chinese government is far from sinless. It seems to be a constant
that power structures which keep secrets and use propaganda will always
wind up doing ugly things. But this doesn’t mean you go believing whatever
cold war-facilitating story we are fed about it by Western power structures.
Not if we want to avoid being duped into serving as pro bono CIA
propagandists, unwitting tools of a murderous war machine.
There is a slow-motion third world war underway between the US-centralized
power alliance and the nations like China which have resisted being absorbed
into it, and that war is being largely facilitated by propaganda. If one
doesn’t wish to become a propagandist themselves, one ought to withhold
belief from the stories they are told about the terrible, awful things the
unabsorbed nations are doing which require extensive sanctions, subversion
and interventionism in response.
This doesn’t mean you believe the opposite of what you’re told; it simply
means you refrain from believing either way and remain agnostic until
presented with hard, verifiable proof. Believing damaging narratives about
US-targeted governments is exactly as stupid as believing the words of a
known compulsive liar about someone you know he hates.
China is such a curious anomaly in the narrative matrix. Many who are
normally skeptical of claims by western governments immediately swallow
anything they’re told about China. They not only believe all such claims,
it never even occurs to them to seriously question them. It's like they're
genuinely unaware that skepticism of establishment China narratives is even
an option. The claims just slide right into the “believe” file in their
mind, completely unchecked by anything resembling critical thought.
I argue with people all over the political spectrum about China online, and
an astonishing percentage of them have clearly put exactly zero research
into critically examining these claims, even if they’re people who are
normally relatively critical of Western foreign policy. They’re often
completely unaware that whatever claims they’re advancing are not just
disputed, but have large amounts of evidence against them. This is because
they’ve done no research whatsoever into finding out if what they were told
is even true. They’ll do that research on Iran, they’ll do it about
Russia, they’ll do it about Syria, but with China all skepticism
immediately goes right out the window. It’s the weirdest thing.
Always be intensely skeptical of claims made about governments targeted by
the known liars who run the US-centralized empire. Always, always, always,
always. If you advance imperialist propaganda, then you are just as culpable
for the bloodshed and suffering they help facilitate as the people who are
actually launching the missiles.
Stay skeptical, my friends. |
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