On 10 December 2021, David Fischer, HRW’s Media Coordinator, Germany published “A Human Rights Roadmap for Germany’s New Government“
…The climate crisis threatens catastrophic impacts on human rights, and ambitious climate action by the government to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is critical if Germany – the European Union’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter – is to help prevent the worst of those impacts. The new government’s coalition agreement, a non-binding roadmap for legislative action, calls for elimination of coal energy “ideally” by 2030, promises a roll-back of subsidies for fossil fuels and legislation to deal with climate change adaptation planning. These are positive steps but insufficient to reach Germany’s contribution toward the global goal in the Paris Agreement of limiting global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.
In addition to the climate crisis, the new coalition between the Social Democrat Party (SPD), the Free Democrats (FDP) and the Greens (Die Grünen) will have to tackle challenges to the rule of law within the EU, stand up for human rights against autocrats in China and Russia, and address the many challenges arising from the pandemic.
The coalition agreement makes promising commitments to advance the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people, including to change the law on legal gender recognition for transgender people so that it is based on self-determination. The coalition also commits to protecting human rights in supply chains in line with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights that include the right to a remedy for victims. It proposes to increase the capacity of German courts to prosecute universal jurisdiction cases such as the trial on state-sponsored torture in Syria.
Within Europe, the new government intends to push for judgements of the European Court of Human Rights to have greater impact and “be implemented in all member states”. It supports the use of mechanisms and sanctions to enforce the rule of law in European Union member states. It also calls for shared responsibility for migrants and refugees among member states, an end to pushbacks at EU borders and for the border agency Frontex to respect human rights.
Scholz’s new government will now need to live up to expectations on human rights and prove that what the coalition dubbed “Germany’s responsibility for Europe and the World” is expressed in actions and not just words.
We live at a critical juncture in world history. In spite of immense progress in some areas of human civilization, the prospects of annihilation caused by interstate conflict among competing powers with unimaginably destructive weapons continue to haunt human relations in the early part of the 21st century even when challenges such as climatic catastrophes may end up being disastrous for all forms of life on planet Earth. A few decades ago, it was the U.S.-USSR conflict that threatened to blow up the planet, thanks to the imperial ambitions of a newly emerged empire in world history to remake the world in its own image. Today, it is the U.S.-China conflict that threatens us with a futuristic scenario of global annihilation as the Western empire in decline continues to insist upon dictating the direction of world affairs according to its own image and interests.
In the interview below, one of our most esteemed public intellectuals of the last half century, whose intellectual stature has been compared to that of Galileo, Newton and Descartes, offers us his own views and assessment of the increasingly dangerous tension between the United States and China. Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor Emeritus at MIT and currently Laureate Professor at the University of Arizona. The recipient of scores of highly prestigious awards, including the Sydney Peace Prize and the Kyoto Prize (Japan’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize), of dozens of honorary doctorate degrees from the world’s most renowned universities, and author of some 150 books on linguistics, politics, international affairs, history and media studies, Chomsky has had tremendous influence on a variety of areas of scholarly and scientific inquiry, including linguistics, logic and mathematics, computer science, psychology, media studies, philosophy, politics and international affairs.
C.J. Polychroniou: Noam, the U.S.-China relationship has gone through ups and downs over the course of the last 30 or so years. Clearly, the sort of relationship that exists today between the two countries is far more antagonistic than it was even 10 years ago. In your own view, what forces or processes are responsible for the increasing tensions we are witnessing today in U.S.-China relations?
Noam Chomsky: After the fall of the USSR, there was much euphoria about the end of history with “liberal democracy” (a code word for the U.S.) having achieved total victory. A corollary was that China could now be brought within the “rule-based international order.”
The latter is a now-conventional phrase, one worth pondering. It refers to an international order in which the U.S. sets the rules, displacing the international order established by the United Nations, which the U.S. deems antiquated and irrelevant. The UN Charter is the Supreme Law of the Land under the U.S. Constitution, constantly violated, a matter of no concern to those who pledge reverence for the Holy Text. Its provisions have been considered inappropriate for the modern world ever since the U.S. lost control of the UN with decolonization, and occasional backsliding among the privileged as well. UN members no longer know “how to play,” to borrow Thomas Friedman’s ridicule of France when it failed to support the benign U.S. invasion of Iraq, accompanied by his call for the miscreant to be deprived of its permanent membership in the Security Council. The self-described “world’s greatest deliberative body” contented itself with renaming French fries as “Freedom fries” in the Senate cafeteria.
Right-thinking people understand that the outdated UN-based international order is to be replaced by the rule-based order, including such constructions as the highly protectionist “free-trade agreements,” right now yielding such pleasures as barring a “people’s vaccine” that would alleviate the COVID disaster. The Clintonites were particularly enthusiastic about incorporating a well-disciplined China within this forward-looking rule-based order.
It didn’t work as planned. China refuses to play when it doesn’t want to. Worse still, it can’t be intimidated. It goes its own way. That way is often ugly, but that’s of no relevance to the rule-based order, which easily tolerates vicious crimes by the righteous — notably the Master — with equanimity and often approval.
China is not Europe. The countries of Europe may fume when the U.S. decides to destroy the joint agreement with Iran (the JCPOA) and to impose harsh sanctions to punish Iran for Washington’s demolition of the agreement. They may even proclaim that they will develop ways to avoid the murderous U.S. sanctions. But in the end, they go along, not willing to incur the wrath of the Godfather, or his punitive measures, such as expulsion from the international financial system, controlled by Washington. Same in many other cases.
China is different. It insists on the UN-based system (which it violates when it chooses to). As former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating explained, the much-heralded “China threat” reduces to the fact that China exists and is successfully defying the rules.
It is not the first to do so. The charge of “successful defiance” comes from the annals of the U.S. State Department in the 1960s. It was directed against the “Cuban threat,” namely, Cuba’s “successful defiance” of U.S. policies dating back to the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which declared Washington’s intention to dominate the hemisphere once the British nuisance had been removed. That was anticipated by the great grand strategist John Quincy Adams, intellectual author of Manifest Destiny. He instructed his cabinet colleagues that U.S. power would increase while Britain’s declined, so that Cuba (indeed the hemisphere) would fall into U.S. hands by the laws of “political gravitation” as an apple falls from a tree. That happened in 1898 when the U.S. intervened to prevent Cuba’s liberation from Spanish rule, turning Cuba into a virtual colony, events recorded in properly sanitized history as Washington’s “liberation” of Cuba.
Cuba has been punished viciously for this successful defiance, including John F. Kennedy’s terrorist war, which almost brought about terminal nuclear war, and a crushing blockade. U.S. punishment of Cuba is opposed by the whole world: 184-2 in the latest UN vote, with Israel alone voting with its U.S. protector. But Europe obeys, however reluctantly.
Sometimes China’s practices sink to almost indescribable depths of evil. Once Washington realized that China is successfully defying the rules, it turned to the project of impeding China’s technological development — harming itself in the process, but overcoming the “China threat” is of transcendent importance. One aspect of the campaign to impede Chinese development is to keep others from using Chinese technology. But the devious Chinese are defying the rule-based international order by “setting up a network of vocational colleges around the world [to] train students in dozens of countries in technical areas … on Chinese technology with Chinese standards as part of a full court press to globalize Chinese tech. It is a component of a bigger effort to tighten the economic linkages between China and the Global South, which Beijing sees as key to competition with the United States,” according to foreign policy scholars Niva Yau and Dirk van der Kley. Worse still, they note, “the Chinese government has been willing to listen to host countries,” and is training local instructors who will upgrade the skills of the local trainees and be able to develop their own societies, within the Chinese orbit and using Chinese technology.
These projects fall within the broader Chinese global policy framework now being realized most extensively throughout Eurasia, probably soon reaching to Turkey and on to Eastern and Central Europe. If Afghanistan can survive U.S. sanctions, it too will probably be brought within the orbit of the China-based Shanghai Cooperation Organization, joining Russia, India, Pakistan, Iran and the Central Asian states. China might manage to shift Afghanistan’s economy from opium export, the staple when it was under U.S. control, to exploiting its considerable mineral resources, to China’s benefit. Chinese economic initiatives also extend to Southeast Asia, Africa, the Middle East (including Israel) and even to Washington’s backyard in Latin America, despite strenuous U.S. efforts to block such intrusion.
Critics of these initiatives “accuse China of pursuing a policy of ‘debt-trap diplomacy’: luring poor, developing countries into agreeing [to] unsustainable loans to pursue infrastructure projects so that, when they experience financial difficulty, Beijing can seize the asset, thereby extending its strategic or military reach.” Perhaps, but the charges are contested by reputable Western sources, including a Chatham House study that “demonstrates that the evidence for such views is limited,” and studies by U.S. researchers assert that these charges, including those leveled by Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo, are baseless and that, “Chinese banks are willing to restructure the terms of existing loans and have never actually seized an asset from any country,” in particular, the prize example in the charges, a port in Sri Lanka.
Nonetheless, debt traps are a concern, one that the U.S. understands well. Right now, for example, Washington is deeply concerned about a debt trap afflicting Cambodia, which is under pressure to repay a loan as it easily can, the lender claims, also arguing that it “would set a bad precedent for other states” if the debt were cancelled.
The lender is, of course, Washington. The debt was incurred by the government the U.S. was supporting (or more realistically, had imposed), in the early 1970s, when official U.S. policy, in Henry Kissinger’s immortal words, was “massive bombing campaign in Cambodia.… Anything that flies on anything that moves,” a call for genocide that would be hard to match in the archival record. The consequences were, predictably, horrendous. The perpetrator is greatly honored. The victims must repay their debts. We wouldn’t want to set a bad precedent.
Occasionally, depravity reaches such a level that words fail.
The report on Cambodia’s debt trap adds that, “if Washington were to wipe out a large chunk of the debt, it would only do so if it believed this gesture was met by good-faith reciprocity from Phnom Penh. Frankly, there’s zero reason for such a belief now. A case in point occurred last month, when, after [U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy] Sherman’s visit to Phnom Penh, the Cambodian government allowed the defense attaché at the U.S. Embassy, Marcus M. Ferrara, to tour the Ream Naval Base.… Yet he turned up to find that he was only allowed to visit parts of the site. Phnom Penh was in its rights to limit Ferrara’s visit, yet it did nothing to absolve U.S. fears that Cambodia is hiding something.”
It might be hiding a deal with China, which never ceases its malevolence.
As we have discussed earlier, much of the frenzied rhetoric about the China threat concerns alleged threats off the coast of China, where the U.S. military advantage is overwhelming (and a small fraction of the U.S. military advantage worldwide). That was so even before the recent U.S.-U.K. decision to provide Australia with a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines to confront China’s four old noisy diesel submarines bottled up by U.S. power in the South China Sea.
The U.S. claims to be defending freedom of navigation with its military maneuvers in China’s Exclusive Economic Zone — pure fraud, as we have already discussed. There are actually serious issues concerning Chinese abuses of the Law of the Sea, which has been ratified by all maritime powers except one: the usual outlier, the U.S. These should be addressed by diplomacy led by the regional powers, not by highly provocative acts that increase the threat of escalation to full-scale war.
Taiwan has returned as one of the thorniest issues in U.S.-Chinese relations. The Chinese military has stepped up its activities in the Taiwan Strait and, according to some military experts, is even acquiring the equipment necessary for an invasion. In fact, Taipei has warned that China is getting ready to invade the island by 2025, although one would have to assume that such a scenario is most unlikely because of the impact that it would have on China’s relations with the rest of the world. Still, would it be likely, as president Biden stated in late October during a CNN “town hall,” that the U.S. would defend Taiwan if China invaded? And is there really a “Taiwan agreement” between the U.S. and China, as Biden also seems to have suggested earlier in that month?
The critical agreement is the “one-China” doctrine that has been held for over 40 years. It is kept ambiguous. The rational policy now is for both the U.S. and China to refrain from provocative acts, and for Taiwan to adhere to the ambiguous agreement, the best outcome that can be hoped for at this point.
As China is bent on expanding its nuclear arsenal, the U.S. appears willing now to push for arms-control talks. What are the lessons from the Cold War era to help us feel confident that a U.S.-China arms race can be prevented?
The main lesson from the Cold War era is that it’s a virtual miracle that we have survived. There should be no need here to run through the record once again, but it is worth remembering how many opportunities to reduce the dangers radically were lost.
The most instructive case I think was 60 years ago. Nikita Khrushchev understood well that Russia could not carry out the economic development he hoped for if it was trapped in an arms race with a far richer and more powerful adversary. He therefore proposed sharp mutual reductions in offensive weapons. The incoming Kennedy administration considered the offer and rejected it, instead turning to rapid military expansion, even though it was already far in the lead. The prominent international relations scholar Kenneth Waltz described what happened at the time: the Kennedy administration “undertook the largest strategic and conventional peace-time military build-up the world has yet seen … even as Khrushchev was trying at once to carry through a major reduction in the conventional forces and to follow a strategy of minimum deterrence, and we did so even though the balance of strategic weapons greatly favored the United States.”
As often has been the case, the policy harmed national security while enhancing state power, what really matters to Washington.
By now it’s widely recognized — including a joint statement by Henry Kissinger, Reagan’s Secretary of State George Shultz, the Senate’s leading specialist on armaments Sam Nunn and former Secretary of Defense William Perry — that we should move expeditiously to eliminate nuclear weapons, a process that the signers of the nonproliferation treaty are obligated to undertake. The UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons entered into force this year. Though not yet implemented because of U.S. interference, nuclear weapons-free zones have been established in much of the world.
In brief, there are ways to greatly enhance security.
China so far has held back in nuclear weapons development. It would be wise to continue this policy. The U.S. can facilitate it by ending its highly provocative actions and moving towards an arms-control agreement with China. There are feasible means, outlined by arms control specialists. While the Republican administrations since 2000 have been dismantling the arms control regime that has been laboriously constructed over the past 60 years, even Trump’s wrecking ball didn’t manage to demolish all of them; Biden was able to rescue the New Start Treaty just before its expiration. The system can be resurrected and carried forward to the point where this scourge is removed from the Earth.
The essential conclusion is simple: either the U.S. and China will work together on the critical issues that we all face, or they will expire together, bringing the rest of the world down with them.
3Mins Read Los Angeles-based Beyond Meat has finalised details of a new R&D centre in Shanghai, China. It marks the first location of its kind for the company, outside the U.S. The facility will house scientists and researchers charged with developing plant-based meats for the Asia-Pacific market. The move comes as part of a wider global expansion […]
I’ve been doing a lot of commentary on the western propaganda campaign against China lately, so my online notifications have been full of brainwashed human livestock regurgitating all the lines they’ve been programmed to bleat about that nation by the very propaganda campaign I’m criticizing.
What I find interesting is that it’s not just coming from complete mainstream normies; a lot of the pushback I’m getting comes from people who’ve succeeded in seeing through other western propaganda narratives on fronts like Russia, Syria, or Julian Assange. They’re just as brainwashed about China as any uncritical consumer of TV news, but because they get their information from people like Tucker Carlson and other so-called “right-populists” who have disputed those other narratives, they assume they are safe from mass media indoctrination.
And a liberal who gets their information from The New York Times will look over at the Tucker Carlson viewer and tut-tut about Fox News propaganda, then go back to reading a fearmongering article about how the Kremlin is militarizing Russian society. And both the Tucker Carlson viewer and the New York Times reader will look at nations like China and North Korea and shake their heads about how propagandized the people who live there are.
Fox guest: "We don't need a military that's woman-friendly, we don't need a military that's gay-friendly," we need "Type A men who want to sit on a throne of Chinese skulls" pic.twitter.com/JztfZKpYyr
Western mass media consumers are no less propagandized than North Koreans or any of the other nations we’re told to pity because their government indoctrinates them with state media, in fact they are arguably more propagandized, which is why Noam Chomsky said that any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the US media. The way the public is manipulated into consenting to all the agendas of the powerful without their even knowing that they are being propagandized has arguably been the most astonishing feat of social engineering anywhere in the world.
Yesterday I was listening to a podcast by commentator Carl Zha on the mistranslations and propaganda distortion the western media have been engaging in regarding the Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai, and at around the 24-minute mark Zha began discussing a peculiar point I’ve been noticing lately: the Chinese government is actually very bad at perception management. I can’t speak to how effective it is domestically, but when it comes to spinning controversies on the world stage Chinese state media comes across as incredibly incompetent and ham-fisted compared to the skillful manipulations of western spinmeisters. I’m a hundred percent certain I could do a much better job running CGTN than its current operators if that was the sort of gig I was interested in, that’s how bad it is.
People have told me that China’s ineptness at propaganda has to do with where it has historically placed its priorities, with its cultural disdain for the use of eloquent words as a substitute for action, and with the fact that a government who is free to use more overtly authoritarian force doesn’t need as much skill at manufacturing consent because consent is not as important. Whatever the reason, the fact that it’s so far behind the west on that front shows just how sophisticated the science of modern western propaganda has become.
That’s what we’re all dealing with here as we try to figure out what’s going on in our world: more than a century of progress in the science of mass-scale psychological manipulation.
"That western narrative is false." 'Oh yeah? Prove it!' "Here's a link." 'Ha! THAT outlet? You can't cite THAT outlet!' "Why not?" 'Because it always disputes western narratives!' "Yeah that's why I cited it." 'No. You can only cite outlets that never dispute western narratives.'
It’s important to be aware of how advanced western propaganda has become because propaganda only works if you’re not aware it’s happening. As soon as you’re aware that someone is trying to manipulate you all your critical faculties become engaged and all the information you’re presented with is intensely scrutinized at arm’s length, but if you don’t know you’re being manipulated it slides right past our cognitive guard dogs unchecked.
A big part of coming into true maturity as an individual is understanding on a deep, visceral level that propaganda isn’t something that only happens to other people. It doesn’t only happen in nations we’re told are backwards and totalitarian. It doesn’t only happen to people on the other side of the political spectrum. It happens everywhere, including right where we’re standing. Every issue about which public perception is of interest to the powerful is being manipulated by the powerful: eastern and western, left and right, mainstream media and alternative media. There’s perception manipulation happening everywhere.
The best we can hope to do in such a situation is refine our skill set at making sense of the world by continuing to learn, by watching the patterns and noticing the plot holes and discrepancies and where they’re appearing, by building up sources of information which tend to be more reliable on important issues than others, and by continually doing inner work on ourselves to remove the distortions in our own cognitive processes.
If we can manage to do that we’ll still be marinating in the propaganda narratives of the powerful all the time, but at least we’ll have some idea which way is up, and we’ll begin to perceive which direction humanity must begin heading if we’re to become a species that is guided by the light of truth.
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Fool me once, shame on the trickster for resorting to trickery. Fool me twice, shame on me. When someone has earned the reputation of a trickster, one ought to be very skeptical of that trickster. Thus, to be fooled twice by the same trickster brings shame on the gullible person.
The United States has been duping the gullible among its citizenry and also gullible people in the world for quite a while. Near the end of WWII, there was the lie that the US had to drop nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to get Japan to surrender. There was the American deception surrounding the Gulf of Tonkin incident that served as a pretext to deepen American militarism in Viet Nam. There was the twisting of facts about Iraq’s possessing weapons of mass destruction that resulted in over a million Iraqis being killed, the country’s infrastructure being destroyed, and Iraq being occupied by US military to this day. The US lied to USSR/Russia about no eastward NATO expansion; the US lied about Syria using chemical weapons. Why would anyone continue to believe the word of a serial, unrepentant liar?
Nowadays, the US barks that Russia is about to invade Ukraine. Then there is the allegation that China is committing genocide against Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Considering the US involvement in the oppression and killing of Palestinians, Iraqis, Libyans, Syrians, and Iranians — the notion that the US would shed a tear for Muslims is sadly risible.
Scads of disinformation have been revealed about a purported genocide of Uyghurs.
With the outrageous claims against China dismissed as flimsy artifices, the US seized upon an interpersonal altercation: an alleged sexual assault of a Chinese female tennis player by a retired former high-ranking Communist Party official.
There was a deleted post on Weibo, a Chinese social media site, by the player, Peng Shuai. The post purportedly contained the allegation of sexual assault. Then she became a meme: #Where is Peng Shuai. Western media implied the Chinese state had deleted the post, scrubbed the net of references, and disappeared Peng.
I wrote an article with the commonsense title “Jumping to China-bashing Conclusions: Due process calls demands waiting for the facts.” In any justice-based system, people must not be tried in media; they must be tried in a functioning court of law by a preponderance of the evidence. That is why one must scrutinize the information and evidence before jumping to conclusions.
Yet, the WTA, a professional body overseeing professional women’s tennis, had already deemed China to be guilty by suspending its tournaments in that country.
Recently, on 19 December, Peng was approached by a reporter from the Singaporean Chinese-language newspaper Lianhe Zaobao. Peng looks genuinely surprised by the encounter, like a deer in the headlights, but knowing that she has to get this over with. (See the interview here.)
Peng emphatically states, “First, I would like to emphasize a very important point: I have never said nor written about anyone sexually assaulting me. This point must be very clearly emphasized.”
Whether a post on social media is a personal matter or not, people can debate, but Peng maintains it is. Peng also affirmed that an earlier email to the WTA denying a sexual assault was hers.
Unanswered in the interview was why the wording in the Weibo post seems to allege a sexual assault.
The WTA remains unsatisfied. It issued a statement: “We remain steadfast in our call for a full, fair and transparent investigation, without censorship, into her allegation of sexual assault, which is the issue that gave rise to our initial concern.” The tennis body headquartered in the US is, in effect, demanding that a powerful country of 1.4 billion people with a 5000-year history should submit a domestic crime allegation to its dictate. This demand presented to a country that rues its century of humiliation by outside powers will curry as much influence as an ant to a hungry aardvark.
Peng said she has no travel plans now. It seems the WTA ought to do its due diligence and visit Peng in China.
Not too quickly though, as Sinophobes in the West see a need to keep the heat turned up to try and spoil the Beijing Winter Olympics.
With the selection made to go nuclear, the next question is from where, and which type? Is this the wrong time for a long odds bet? On 15 September 2021 the Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, US President Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson made a surprise joint media appearance to announce the […]
The Paris-based global media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has condemned three “dictatorial regimes” — Belarus, China and Myanmar — for their role in a global surge in the jailing of journalists doing their job.
According to the RSF annual round-up, a record number of journalists — 488, including 60 women — are currently detained worldwide, while another 65 are being held hostage.
Meanwhile, the number of journalists killed in 2021 — 46 — is at its lowest in 20 years.
RSF said in a statement that the number of journalists detained in connection with their work had never been this high since the watchdog began publishing its annual round-up in 1995.
RSF logged a total of 488 journalists and media workers in prison in mid-December 2021, or 20 percent more than at the same time last year.
This exceptional surge in arbitrary detention is due, above all, to three countries — Myanmar, where the military retook power in a coup on 1 February 2021; Belarus, which has seen a major crackdown since Alexander Lukashenko’s disputed reelection in August 2020; and Xi Jinping’s China, which is tightening its grip on Hong Kong, the special administrative region once seen as a regional model of respect for press freedom.
RSF has also never previously registered so many female journalists in prison, with a total of 60 currently detained in connection with their work – a third (33 percent) more than at this time last year.
China world’s biggest jailer of journalists
China, the world’s biggest jailer of journalists for the fifth year running, is also the biggest jailer of female journalists, with 19 currently detained. They include Zhang Zhan, a 2021 RSF Press Freedom laureate, who is now critically ill.
Belarus is currently holding more female journalists (17) than male (15). They include two reporters for the Poland-based independent Belarusian TV channel Belsat — Daria Chultsova and Katsiaryna Andreyeva — who were sentenced to two years in a prison camp for providing live coverage of an unauthorised demonstration.
In Myanmar, of the 53 journalists and media workers detained, nine are women.
“The extremely high number of journalists in arbitrary detention is the work of three dictatorial regimes,” RSF secretary-general Christophe Deloire said.
“It is a reflection of the reinforcement of dictatorial power worldwide, an accumulation of crises, and the lack of any scruples on the part of these regimes. It may also be the result of new geopolitical power relationships in which authoritarian regimes are not being subjected to enough pressure to curb their crackdowns.”
Another striking feature of this year’s round-up is the fall in the number of journalists killed in connection with their work — 46 from 1 January to 1 December 2021. The year 2003 was the last time that fewer than 50 journalists were killed.
This year’s fall is mostly due to a decline in the intensity of conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Yemen and to campaigning by press freedom organisations, including RSF, for the implementation of international and national mechanisms aimed at protecting journalists.
Journalists deliberately targeted Nonetheless, despite this remarkable fall, an average of nearly one journalist a week is still being killed in connection with their work. And RSF has established that 65 percent of the journalists killed in 2021 were deliberately targeted and eliminated.
Mexico and Afghanistan are again the two deadliest countries, with seven journalists killed in Mexico and six in Afghanistan. Yemen and India share third place, with four journalists killed in each country.
In addition to these figures, the 2021 round-up also mentions some of the year’s most striking cases. This year’s longest prison sentence, 15 years, was handed down to both Ali Aboluhom in Saudi Arabia and Pham Chi Dung in Vietnam.
The longest and most Kafkaesque trials are being inflicted on Amadou Vamoulké in Cameroon and Ali Anouzla in Morocco.
The French journalist Olivier Dubois was the only foreign journalist to be abducted this year. He has been held hostage in Mali since April 8.
Since 1995, RSF has been compiling annual round-ups of violence and abuses against journalists based on precise data gathered from 1 January to 1 December of the year in question.
“The 2021 round-up figures include professional journalists, non-professional journalists and media workers,” RSF explains.
“We gather detailed information that allows us to affirm with certainty or a great deal of confidence that the detention, abduction, disappearance or death of each journalist was a direct result of their journalistic work. Our methodology may explain differences between our figures and those of other organisations.”
Reporters Without Borders and Pacific Media Watch collaborate.
They’ll jail you for stealing from your employer but not from your employees. They’ll jail you for whistleblowing on civilian-killing drone strikes but not for killing civilians with drones. They’ll jail you for insider trading unless you’re doing it openly in the US Congress.
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The main difference between Hollywood stories about evil psychopaths trying to conquer the world and real life is that in real life the psychopaths succeeded a long time ago.
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I used be mad that the US is circling the planet with hundreds of military bases and slaughtering people by the millions in imperialist wars and destroying any nation which disobeys it but then someone informed me that China is building stuff in Africa which is clearly far worse.
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They just killed a few civilians with a drone. It's not like they did something REALLY bad, like tell the truth about killing civilians with drones. https://t.co/Q7R0N2ZzRQ
“China is going to take over and give me a social credit score” is the new “Muslims are going to take over and impose Sharia law.”
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“Of course there’s a lot of propaganda about China, but it’s still definitely a threat.”
“How do you know that?”
“Oh my god dude, it’s all over the news!”
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I’m comfortable holding my positions on China even when I’m getting hate mobbed for them on Twitter because I already saw all that with Russia and was completely vindicated. It taught me that in a highly propagandized population there’s no correlation between how loud people yell at you and how right they are.
I can tell I’m pushing against a wall of pure propaganda when I write about China because so many of the objections I get from people are empty appeals to emotion. No facts, just vapid, sputtering outrage that I would dare question what the TV told them about a government the US doesn’t like.
Another clue is the repetitive nature of the objections. Everyone’s bleating the same lines, just as they’ve been programmed to.
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I’m not even one of those high-octane commies who defends China because it is communist. It’s just clear to me that a mature and impartial analysis of the actions and power dynamics at play shows the US is the aggressor in these escalations and China is responding defensively to those aggressions.
The only way China invades Taiwan is if it is provoked. The only way it would be provoked is if that provocation was orchestrated by the US. They’re fearmongering about Chinese aggressions in a tense standoff that’s only tense because of US aggression.
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China is not actually a problem that needs to be solved.
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Western media virtually never use the word “detente” in reference to cold war escalations against Russia and China. They go out of their way to avoid informing people that de-escalation is even an option. The decision to plunge into cold war brinkmanship has already been made and fully committed to.
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I’m not “pro-CCP” or “pro-Kremlin”, that’s just what I look like from inside a propaganda-warped reality tunnel when I say things about US aggressions that fall outside the virulently pro-US Overton window that’s been constructed for you throughout your entire life.
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The Biden administration could very easily restore the Iran nuclear deal at zero risk to anyone simply by ending the unilateral US sanctions and coming to the negotiating table with the original agreement. They could have done it many months ago. The JCPOA has not been restored because they chose for it not to be.
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As the US war machine’s pivot to Asia sees it scaling down operations in the Middle East, the mass media are now permitted to do critical reporting on the fact that civilian casualties from US airstrikes are frequent and grossly under-reported. And of course they are. Duh.
We are making public hundreds of the Pentagon’s confidential assessments of reports of civilian casualties resulting from airstrikes. The documents lay bare how flawed intelligence has killed thousands of innocent civilians, many of them children. https://t.co/D1vE9aEDYh
The only people to whom these revelations are surprising are those who’ve been assuming you can drop military explosives on inhabited areas without killing civilians. Which is something you only believe because it is comfortable.
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Doing commentary on US warmongering is like being in a hostage situation with a crazed gunman who’s already killed a bunch of hostages, but most of the people in the room act like you’re a weird freak for talking about the gunman all the time instead of focusing on other things.
“Oh my god you only ever criticize that crazed gunman. Enough about the crazed gunman already! One of the other hostages just farted, how come you’re not criticizing her??”
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We still kill people for worshipping the wrong god. It’s just that now our god is a capitalist empire.
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Watching porn to learn how to fuck is like watching pro wrestling to learn how to fight.
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People say “Journalism is not a crime,” but it actually is a crime when those in power say it is. That’s precisely the problem with the Assange case. Many evil things have been legal, and many good things have been illegal. We’re looking at an effort to make critical natsec journalism on the US war machine illegal.
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Extinction is the future’s bouncer. If humanity can’t transcend its maladaptive conditioning and become a species that collaborates with its ecosystem, the bouncer will turn us away at the door like the dinosaurs with a “Sorry man, but you’re not on the list.”
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
Notwithstanding that China is a relatively “shy participant” in Middle Eastern policy, the US hegemony, which claims exclusivity among the most “obedient” Arab countries (those which fall into its strategic sphere of influence), is threatened by it. The worrying aspect for the US is that Beijing seeks to present a different model that integrates and takes advantage of the US’s failed military experiences in many wars and direct political interference attempts over the past decades.
China hopes for a non-aggressive economic-political breakthrough in the Middle East through a less ferocious and less explicit model than the American one. China has robust chances to succeed due to the mounting awareness in that part of the world of the need for the Middle Eastern states to diversify their international relations and sources of military equipment and commerce.
Nicaragua switches allegiance from Taiwan to China; free online tutoring for students; China observes the National Memorial Day for the victims of the Nanjing massacre.
It’s an especially dumb day for anti-China propaganda. The Biden administration has imposed trade restrictions on 34 Chinese institutions on the unsubstantiated allegation that they are developing “brain control weaponry“, a claim the mass media have been all too happy to uncritically pass on to the public. Between that and the ridiculous reporting on Russian Havana Syndrome ray guns it’s like they’re literally trying to get everyone to wear tinfoil hats.
Then there’s the Tucker Carlson guest who just told Carlson’s massive audience that the US military needs to be full of “Type A men who want to sit on a throne of Chinese skulls.” It’s highly disturbing how much the mass media have been talking about war with China like it’s a foregone conclusion lately, almost as though they’re working to normalize that horrifying idea.
The US military budget has once again increased despite the US ending a war this year, and despite its facing no real threats from any nation to its easily-defended shores. The increase has been largely justified by the need to “counter China” and includes billions in funding for the ongoing construction of long-range missile systems on the first island chain near the Chinese mainland, explicitly for the purpose of threatening China. One need only imagine what would happen if China began constructing a chain of long-range missile systems off a US coastline to understand who the actual aggressor is between these two powers.
Fox guest: "We don't need a military that's woman-friendly, we don't need a military that's gay-friendly," we need "Type A men who want to sit on a throne of Chinese skulls" pic.twitter.com/JztfZKpYyr
In reality, concern trolling from the western political/media class about things China is doing both internationally and domestically has pretty consistently been about actions that China has taken in response to aggressions from the US and its allies. Such concern trolling is generally framed as opposition to alleged human rights abuses and the need to protect China’s neighbors from “Chinese aggression”, but in reality it’s done to facilitate the agenda to make China weaker and smaller by any means necessary.
The actual source of tensions between the US and China never actually has anything to do with “human rights” or “protecting” anyone; that’s just the narrative overlay pinned on top of the actual agenda. The actual source of those tensions is always the fact that it is in the US empire’s interests to make China smaller and weaker and it is in China’s interests to be big and strong. The US resolved after the fall of the Soviet Union to prevent the rise of any other rival superpower, and all of the grievances we see aired about alleged Chinese abuses are really just justifications for aggressions geared toward undermining, subverting, threatening, out-maneuvering and balkanizing China to make it weaker and smaller.
Pretty much everything China gets slammed for by the imperial media is actually a response to western aggressions, whether you’re talking about Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan, territorial disputes over borders or ocean waters, or domestic authoritarianism. The US is consistently the aggressor, and China is consistently responding defensively to those aggressions.
Only an absolute moron would believe the US and its allies actually care about Muslims in Xinjiang after they just spent the last two decades slaughtering Muslims by the millions in their post-9/11 wars of aggression. The propaganda narratives focus on human rights, but the real reason is that Xinjiang is a very geostrategically valuable region that US imperialism would benefit from carving away from China, and Beijing would benefit from keeping. Take this excerpt from a 2017 SBS article about China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to illustrate (emphasis mine):
An example of one significant BRI project that has multiple purposes is the creation of an overland route from Xinjiang in China’s far west through Pakistan to its deep water Gwadar port on the Arabian Sea. US$54 billion of infrastructure is planned for this stretch, despite some of the route passing through territory disputed by India and Pakistan.
This route gives China cargo overland access to the Arabian Sea, will spur investment in Xinjiang, and opens up a new route into China for energy imports from the Middle East – a route that is not vulnerable to US maritime power like its east coast sea lanes.
This map says more than any article you'll ever see in corporate media about why Western imperialist countries (that have spent decades killing Muslims) suddenly pretend to care about Uyghurs in Xinjiang, China.
When Uyghur separatist groups began inflicting acts of terror with the goal of driving the Chinese government out of Xinjiang and creating their own state, Beijing had essentially three choices:
To engage in a US-style campaign of mass military slaughter against these groups until they were defeated,
To allow a violent uprising of what would inevitably become western-backed jihadists as they had just seen in Libya and Syria carve away a geostrategically crucial part of China to be exploited by the US and its allies, or
To find some alternative to 1 and 2.
Beijing went with option number three, and the alternative it found was the aggressive deradicalization campaign it ended up implementing and the re-education facilities it has been so widely criticized for. This move would surely have entailed many of the abuses you’d expect from a mass-scale police action and dramatic escalation of authoritarian policies, but claims that it constituted “genocide” have been soundly discredited by independent research groups and by members of the public using publicly available information, while the most egregious allegations of abuse have been shown to be subject to manipulation and riddled with major plot holes.
You can criticize Beijing for how it went about its dilemma in Xinjiang all you want, but it was plainly universes less draconian than the US approach of killing millions and displacing tens of millions in its barbaric “war on terror”. And unlike the “war on terror”, Beijing’s approach actually worked, which even western media have been forced to grudgingly concede as tourism surges in Xinjiang.
I would like to think that maybe in the future people will be slightly more skeptical about sensationalist claims about human rights in official enemy countries but that's probably being optimistic https://t.co/nkdVI3rOsw
The west has understood for a very, very long time that it needs to keep China weak and small to retain supremacy. That’s why so many narratives revolve around “liberating” (balkanizing) parts of China from Beijing. Here’s a Winston Churchill quote from over a century ago:
I think we shall have to take the Chinese in hand and regulate them. I believe that as civilized nations become more powerful they will get more ruthless, and the time will come when the world will impatiently bear the existence of great barbaric nations who may at any time arm themselves and menace civilized nations. I believe in the ultimate partition of China—I mean ultimate. I hope we shall not have to do it in our day. The Aryan stock is bound to triumph.
It’s the same with the militarization of the South China Sea. Xi Jinping had been offering a mutual demilitarization of the sea, and instead Obama ramped up tensions with the still-ongoing “pivot to Asia” which has seen a continuous buildup of US and allied military activity in the area. As former UN Security Council President Kishore Mahbubani explained in an interview last year:
“I quote a former American ambassador to China, Stapleton Roy, who told me, ‘Kishore, when Xi Jinping made an offer to demilitarize the South China Sea, America should have grabbed that offer and agreed to stop all our military activities in the South China Sea. That would have pushed the Chinese out.’ Of course, the Americans would be out too. But the South China Sea is much more important to China than it is to America. If America steps out, the Chinese military steps out. And that’s a win for America, right? Instead, the U.S. Navy responded by sending naval vessels. So Xi said, ‘Okay. You reject my offer. So be it.’”
It’s the same even with the authoritarian domestic policies for which China is frequently criticized by the western world. We learned in a recent Bloomberg article that US spies are finding it hard to conduct operations against the Chinese government because its strict policies make it impossible for them to function.
“CIA officers in China face daunting challenges posed by China’s burgeoning surveillance state, which has blanketed Chinese cities with surveillance cameras and employs sophisticated facial recognition software to track threats,” claim the article’s authors.
Bloomberg explains that China’s anti-corruption measures have made it much harder to recruit CIA assets, writing, “Xi’s broad anti-corruption campaign, which has punished more than 1.5 million officials, has also led to greater scrutiny of Chinese officials’ income, making payments to potential sources far more problematic, two former officials said.”
“Those efforts were detailed extensively in 2017 by the New York Times, which said as many as a dozen U.S. sources were executed by China, with others jailed, in what represented one of the worst breaches ever of American spying networks,” the article also notes.
As John Pilger documented in his prescient “The Coming War On China“, the US has been surrounding the PRC with military bases and weaponry, building a “noose” around that nation which now includes the aforementioned long-range missile systems currently under construction through the first island chain. If any foreign power were doing this to the United States it would be considered an act of war, and war would be declared immediately, but it somehow never enters westerners’ heads that China could be the one who is responding defensively to an aggressor.
None of this means that China is run by innocent little girl scouts who never do anything wrong, it just means it’s clearly not the aggressor in these conflicts, and that the picture we are presented with in the western empire’s frenzied campaign to manipulate public thought about China is not based in reality. The propaganda campaign is so pervasive and forceful that even people who are aware it’s happening still commonly fall for its lies and distortions just because there’s so much of it coming from so many different directions.
The propaganda campaign against China is not going to go away; it’s going to get far louder, crazier, and more aggressive. With each new shrill narrative that comes up, research it with the question “How is this geared toward making China weaker and smaller?” in mind. You’ll find something there every time.
It doesn’t have to be this way. There’s no good reason nations can’t collaborate with each other toward the common good instead of squandering all their energy and resources in this insane struggle of US hegemonic conquest. The word “detente” never enters into mainstream discourse because it does not serve the interests of the western imperialists who rule us, but it does serve everyone else, infinitely more than pouring fortunes into cold war brinkmanship and flirting with the prospect of world war between nuclear-armed nations.
Detente is what’s needed. But in order for that to happen the US empire is going to have to stop aggressing, and it’s going to have to stop lying.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
HMS Queen Elizabeth’s 2021 world tour saw the flagship aircraft carrier visit some of the world’s most grotesque dictatorships while showing off British military equipment. It came at a cost of £73m to the taxpayer – not including one lost fighter jet. The figures emerged from a parliamentary question put to Tory defence minister James Heappey by Labour’s John Healey.
On 16 December, Healey asked:
what countries the carrier strike group has had (a) engagements and (b) military exercises to date; and what those engagements and military exercises were.
Heappey replied:
The table below sets out the countries and/or overseas territories that the UK Carrier Strike Group has interacted with during the 2021 deployment. This also includes activity undertaken by our Integrated Partners, the Netherlands and United States.
Bucket list
The list is a virtual Who’s Who of Western-backed dictatorships, authoritarian regimes, and human rights abusing states. These included countries on the UK’s own human rights priority list. Among them were Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Bangladesh. In the latter case, UK marines trained special forces as part of the carrier group’s trip. Brunei, which recently passed new anti-LGBTQI+ laws, and Turkey all featured.
The carrier group also stopped off in Haifa to work with the Israeli Navy, despite Israel also featuring on the human rights priority list. Some UK interactions with Gulf autocracies and Iraq were as part of the so-called Dragon Group, a regional and international military alliance.
Arms deals, strategic alliances
The itinerary also included Diego Garcia – an Indian Ocean island leased to the US as a strategic base. The native Chagossian Islanders were forcibly expelled by the British from the late 1960s to make way for American forces.
A visit to Ukraine to sign contracts for new military ships resulted in a controversial incident. Russian planes ‘buzzed’ a British warship as it sailed through contested waters. Handily, UK media teams were on board to record the incident. A leak later revealed the journalist’s presence had largely been orchestrated by the military for propaganda purposes.
Conservative estimate
The £73m figure may be conservative. General running costs for the carrier group which would accrue whether or not it was deployed were not tallied. Additionally, the loss of an (estimated $115m) F-35 fighter jet which crashed into the sea in November isn’t included.
Some in the MOD-adjacent press suggested that £73m seemed like “good value for money when considering the number of countries visited”. However, it’s more difficult to gauge the views of people in places like Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Brunei, or Palestine.
The US Senate has passed its National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) military spending bill for the fiscal year of 2022, setting the budget at an astronomical $778 billion by a vote of 89 to 10. The bill has already been passed by the House, now requiring only the president’s signature. An amendment to cease facilitating Saudi Arabia’s atrocities in Yemen was stripped from the bill.
“The most controversial parts of the 2,100-page military spending bill were negotiated behind closed doors and passed the House mere hours after it was made public, meaning members of Congress couldn’t possibly have read the whole thing before casting their votes,” reads a Politico article on the bill’s passage by Lindsay Koshgarian, William Barber II and Liz Theoharis.
The US military had a budget of $14 billion for its scaled-down Afghanistan operations in the fiscal year of 2021, down from $17 billion in 2020. If the US military budget behaved normally, you’d expect it to come down by at least $14 billion in 2022 following the withdrawal of US troops and official end of the war in Afghanistan. Instead, this new $778 billion total budget is a five percent increase from the previous year.
“Months after US President Joe Biden’s administration pulled the last American troops out of Afghanistan as part of his promise to end the country’s ‘forever wars’, the United States Congress approved a $777.7bn defence budget, a five percent increase from last year,” Al Jazeera reports.
“For the last 20 years, we heard that the terrorist threat justified an ever-expanding budget for the Pentagon,” Win Without War executive director Stephen Miles told Al Jazeera. “As the war in Afghanistan has ended and attention has shifted towards China, we’re now hearing that that threat justifies it.”
"For the last 20 years, we heard that the terrorist threat justified an ever-expanding budget for the Pentagon. As the war in Afghanistan has ended and attention has shifted towards China, we’re now hearing that that threat justifies it." https://t.co/GtBFUTRWmR via @AJEnglish
Upon the removal of US troops from Afghanistan, President Biden said the following in August:
“After more than $2 trillion spent in Afghanistan — a cost that researchers at Brown University estimated would be over $300 million a day for 20 years in Afghanistan — for two decades — yes, the American people should hear this: $300 million a day for two decades. If you take the number of $1 trillion, as many say, that’s still $150 million a day for two decades. And what have we lost as a consequence in terms of opportunities? I refused to continue in a war that was no longer in the service of the vital national interest of our people.”
You would think a government so grieved over the loss of “opportunities” for the American people due to Afghanistan war spending would be eager to begin allocating that wealth toward providing opportunities to Americans at the end of that war. Instead, more wealth has been diverted to the US war machine.
The NDAA passage comes amid heightened tensions between the US and Russia, and the bill includes $300 million for military aid to Ukraine, $50 million more than what the Pentagon requested. According to The Wall Street Journal, at least $75 million of the Ukraine aid will be “lethal,” meaning it will be spent on offensive weapons, such as Javelin anti-tank missiles the US has already provided to Kyiv.
A sane military (if there is such a thing) would be bolstered in times when a nation needs to defend itself and scaled down during peacetime. With the US military it’s completely backwards: it’s taken as a given that the budget must keep expanding, and then reasons are made up to justify doing so by making “peacetime” nonexistent. The military budget isn’t set to serve existing conditions, conditions are set to serve the military budget.
Before it was the Russians and the Chinese it was terrorists, and before it was terrorists it was the Soviets. After the fall of the USSR, there emerged a popular notion of a “peace dividend” in which defense spending could be reduced in the absence of America’s sole rival and the abundant excess funds used to take care of the American people instead. The only problem was that a lot of people had gotten very rich and powerful as a result of that cold war defense spending, and that money and power was used at some key points of influence. Less than three months after the dissolution of the Soviet Union we learned of the Wolfowitz Doctrine from The New York Times saying the US had resolved to prevent the rise of another superpower at all cost, and a few years later the neocons found their way into the George W Bush administration to usher in an unprecedented new era of military expansionism and wars of aggression.
The military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned about in his farewell address as president became inevitable as soon as the US government espoused imperialist ambitions. War profiteering is what you get when you mix capitalism with a globe-spanning power structure that must labor continuously to maintain unipolar planetary domination, which can only be done with ceaseless violence and the threat thereof. It was inevitable that an industry would not only arise to meet that demand, but begin using the wealth it generates to push for more warmongering. The war industry surfs on the war-fueled empire like dolphins on the wake of a freight ship, except in this case the dolphins are also able to help propel and steer the ship.
One of the many disgusting things about the bloated $778 billion defense budget is next year anything less than that will be labeled "a cut to military spending" and the bi-partisan war hawks will end up increasing it again & again. Enough is never enough for the death merchants.
And meanwhile that insane, mindless juggernaut is hurtling toward a direct confrontation with Russia and China, who are growing increasingly intimate and unified against their common enemy. These are forming the head of a rapidly coalescing group of powers who have refused to be absorbed into the folds of the US-centralized power alliance, and you don’t have to be a historian to understand that world powers splitting into two increasingly hostile alliance groups can lead some very ugly places. Especially now in the age of nuclear weapons.
The human species has some very daunting tests ahead of it. I hope we pass.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
In November 2008, while ambassador to Nicaragua, death-squad manager nonpareil John Negroponte’s long time torture and terror campaign sidekick, Robert Callahan, remarked to a reporter in Managua, “US foreign policy toward Latin America has not changed in 50 years and is unlikely to do so under President Obama”. Just months later, the June 2009 coup in Honduras against President Manuel Zelaya proved him to be right. In fact, the veteran US war crimes insider’s comment explained unwittingly why US and allied foreign policy lurches from one mass murdering catastrophe to another.
Callahan and Negroponte, himself a veteran of the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, were the enforcers in Honduras of the US war against Nicaragua in the 1980s.
Many westerners trying to make sense of the events in the “dark continent” of Africa have many barriers standing in the way of their minds and reality. This must be the case, for without such filters of spin proclaiming Africa’s problems to be self-induced (or the consequence of Chinese debt slavery), we in the west, might actually feel horrified enough to demand systemic change. We might come to recognize that the plight of Africa has less to do with Africa and more to do with an intentional program of depopulation, and exploitation of vital resources.
Despite a rich history and over a billion people living on the continent, Africa suffers from the lowest per capita rates of electricity and potable water in the world. Of the 30,000 children who die needlessly each day from preventable causes (disease, water availability, hunger, etc), the majority are from Africa. Living standards are in turn abysmally low for the 340 million Africans who live in extreme poverty while insufficient healthcare infrastructure, and sanitation has resulted in a massive rate of infant mortality that reaches as high as 80-100 deaths per 1000 for many African nations.
To the degree that certain uncomfortable facts are kept obscured, this façade has been maintained.
Recently, a stone has been thrown at the glass artifice of false narratives that has attempted to maintain the belief that Africa’s problems arise from authoritarian governments or “not enough democracy”.
On November 23, a zoom conference call involving American, British and Finish and French diplomats went public, having been filmed and leaked by an unnamed participant. What made this zoom call relevant is that the topic of the call dealt with the need for regime change in Ethiopia, and the main speaker of the call was Berhane Gebre-Christos, former Ethiopian Foreign Minister (2010-2012) and now spokesman of the Tigray Peoples’ Liberation Movement. The call itself was hosted by the Peace and Development Center International which is a cardboard cut-out operation partnered with the National Endowment for Democracy and USAID (both proven CIA fronts) and set up days before the Tigray Peoples Liberation Front attacked Ethiopian government’s northern command on November 3, 2020 which launched a year of armed atrocities.
Featured among the participants of the conference call were none other than Vicki Huddleson (former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for African Affairs), Donald Yamamoto (former U.S. Ambassador to Somalia), Tim Clark (former EU ambassador to Ethiopia), Robert Dewar (former British Ambassador to Ethiopia) and a plethora of other rules-based orderistas. The point driven home is the need to force international pressure on the current Ethiopian government of Ahmed Abiy to treat the foreign supported insurgency of the TPLF as a legitimate group in arranging a restructured Ethiopian government OR simply depose of Abiy directly by all means necessary.
Despite the fact that the TPLF have been found complicit in trying to stage a civil war in Ethiopia and also having been caught using child soldiers, and using terrorism, the same Obama-era team running the Biden administration that carved up Sudan and brought about the humanitarian destruction of Libya and Syria have continued to give support to the rebels. Over the past months this has taken the form of sanctions, the cancelling of civilian loan programs affecting millions of lives, and consistently demanding Addis Ababa treats the rebels as a legitimate power broker.
Why the Regime Change Effort in Ethiopia?
The situation in Ethiopia is rather simple to understand as long as you don’t believe western media spin doctors.
For one, Ethiopia is the only nation of all sub-Saharan Africa to have successfully resisted colonization. Ethiopia is thus also among the economically most sovereign nations of Africa, capable of emitting sovereign bonds for large scale infrastructure projects (which it has done since 2011 to build the Grand Renaissance Dam on the Blue Nile) and also one of the nations most interested in working closely with China and the emerging Belt and Road Initiative.
In recent years, Ethiopia has also resisted pressure to bend to the depopulation lobby which exerts vast influence across Washington, Brussels and London.
It hasn’t merely said no to depopulation regimes, but has driven forward with the construction of the largest infrastructure project seen on this continent for generations: the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD). Once completed this dam will generate over 6200 megawatts (mW) of electricity for not only its own 118 million people, but for all of the Horn of Africa which currently represents 255 million souls. Most importantly, this dam, the largest in Africa’s history, will become a driver for industrial development for the entire continent, providing electricity for all residents and establishing a successful model for other nations across Africa to follow. With the growth of the multipolar order led by China’s successful win-win model of cooperation, idea of “managing poverty” in Africa is quickly becoming superseded by the higher drive to end poverty through industrial progress. This sentiment was loudly conveyed by leaders of the global south amidst the fanatical drive to impose de-carbonization regimes onto the entire globe during COP26.
Ethiopia has been one of the closest friends to China, which has provided expert training, funding and diplomatic assistance to Addis Ababa in recent years (which is an active member of the Belt and Road Initiative). Among the top Chinese-sponsored projects is the 756 km Addis Ababa- Djibouti standard gauge railway which has connected the landlocked Ethiopia with its Red Sea neighbor and driven home new industrial corridors that the World Bank had never permitted in the nation.
Although the construction of the Grand Renaissance Dam had been envisioned by the great Pan African leader Haile Selassie (and assisted with engineering surveys conducted by the United States of JFK), the project was killed with Selassie’s ouster in 1974, and only revived in 2011 through the tireless efforts of the late Prime Minister Meles Zenawi.
Early on, a talented engineer and nation builder was recruited to oversee the construction of the project named Simegnew Bekele. Sigmenew had overseen the construction of several major hydroelectric dams in Ethiopia and became known as “the public face of the GERD” until he was suicided in his car in 2018. When western powers refused to finance the dam, Ethiopia decided to do it themselves by rallying the population to purchase $5 billion in bonds which is ironically exactly how Abraham Lincoln financed the trans-continental railway during the Civil War and how the USA paid for much of WWII.
China’s presence in Ethiopia frightens many western game masters who are afraid of losing Africa to the prospect of win-win cooperation as they have already begun to lose the Middle East. In March 2021, the two nations signed a Memorandum of Understanding to “protect major projects under the BRI framework”, with Ethiopia’s Commissioner General stating:
Ethiopia and China are countries with long history, ancient civilization, and splendid culture. To achieve our goal, the support from China and its esteemed embassy plays a significant role… We like to see a continuation of our joint efforts for building a long-term and strategic partnership and today’s event comes at an important moment.
More recently, on December 2, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi visited PM Abiy and recommitted China to defend Ethiopia’s sovereignty. Standing next to Abiy, Wang Yi stated: “China will not interfere in internal affairs of any countries. We don’t interfere in the internal affairs of Ethiopia as well”. Speaking to those seeking to sever the two nations, Wang Yi also said the “Ethio-China friendship is very solid and unbreakable.”
Having failed to break the Belt and Road Initiative’s growth within the center of Mackinder’s World Island with Russia stopping the regime change operation in Syria during the dark years of Obama, and now China extending a powerful vision of east-west development corridors through the Middle East, the same bag of tricks has been deployed to Ethiopia using rebel fighters from the Horn of Africa.
The TPLF: More Terror and Less Rebel
The Tigray Peoples Liberation Front (now renamed the Tigray Defense Forces) are not a “democratic peoples’ movement” as western propaganda portrays.
In fact, this group has been caught conducting mass atrocities across occupied cities like Mai Kadra and Lalibela, broken cease fire treaties, using child soldiers and working closely with foreign Anglo-American interests in pushing regime change in Ethiopia as the leaked Zoom conference call demonstrates. Anyone doubting these claims need only read the rigorously compiled essays produced by one of the most competent investigative journalists Jeff Pearce living in Ethiopia whose articles can be found here.
In fact, only one month ago, on November 5, the TPLF announced a new “United Front of Ethiopian Federalist and Confederalist Forces” at the National Press Club in… Washington D.C.! This new insurgency group has attempted to link as many ethnic minority interests of Ethiopia together under one umbrella organization in order to project a semblance of legitimacy to this obviously undemocratic operation. The group’s press release stated: “This united front is being formed in response to the scores of crises facing the country; to reverse the harmful effects of the Abiy Ahmed rule on the peoples of Ethiopia and beyond; and in recognition of the great need to collaborate and join forces towards a safe transition in the country.”
At the press conference Berhane Gebre-Christos threatened the government of Adiy saying: “We’re trying to bring an end to this terrible situation in Ethiopia, which is created single-handedly by the Abiy government. Time is running out for him.”
It’s all Perception
The fact is, that none of these groups has the means to actualize their objectives under current conditions, with the Ethiopian population both in Africa and among the diaspora rejecting the western-directed propaganda. Protests across the world in defense of Ethiopian sovereignty, and the government’s success in combatting these scattered rebel forces indicates that reality is far different from the projection which perception managers wish be believed.
Just as we were told repeatedly that Venezuela would fall to the democratic movement of Juan Guaidó, or that Navalny’s democracy forces would depose of Putin’s authoritarian system, or that Syrian rebel forces would topple the “Butcher Assad”, or that Hong Kong and Taiwan would certainly win their freedom from evil Beijing… the rulers of the unipolar system have shown themselves to be little more than modern day illusionists caught one too many times trying to scam credulous townsfolk.
As Geopolitics.Press outlined in extraordinary detail, the replication of perception management operations used in Syria have taken the form of the Command and Control Fusion Center (C2FC) based in Kenya which gives the U.S. Government the ability to “conduct cohesive multi-pronged operations against the Government of Ethiopia across the domains of economic, information, diplomatic and kinetic warfare”… [the C2FC] has delegated some of its tasks to disparate subsidiary fusion cells that enjoy some degree of operational autonomy but organizational dependence on the fusion center.”
The Danger of Libya 2.0
If this fails, as it will, the greater danger waiting in the wings, is that the trans Atlantic population will be so confused and misinformed about the nature of the Ethiopian crisis that they will give their consent to a U.S.-led attack onto the nation, as was done in Afghanistan and Iraq in the wake of 9/11. In a November 9, 2021 Bloomberg op ed former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, James Stavridis called for American-led forces to intervene into the civil war both “to counter Chinese influence” and avoid a new Rwandan-style massacre from occurring.
The enemies of Ethiopia will use humanitarian concerns as an excuse to potentially deploy military forces under the pretext of protecting the Ethiopian people from their own government. This doctrine, known as R2P-the responsibility to protect- was created by George Soros and Tony Blair. Samantha Power and others in the Obama administration used R2P to justify the overthrow of President Kaddafi and the destruction of Libya.
The author delivered an interview on this topic to Ethiopia’s Prime Media which can be viewed here:
The most powerful regime on the planet imprisoning a journalist for journalistic activity is as brazen and obvious an act of tyranny as you could possibly come up with, and yet you still get pseudoleft pundits acting like you’re some kind of weird freak for expecting them to oppose it.
The Assange issue is not actually complicated. The most powerful government in the world is trying to extradite a journalist and try him under the Espionage Act for exposing its war crimes. It is that simple. This isn’t some super complex subject that you defer to the experts on.
That’s one of the things that’s so frustrating about this case. It’s such a blatant abuse of government power that virtually everyone would normally be ideologically opposed to it, but because there’s been so much media spin on it for so long people don’t see it.
Don’t imprison journalists for exposing the truth. I mean, like, duh. This should really be such a mainstream issue that fringey types like myself would see no need to focus on it, and if the media environment wasn’t being so despicably manipulated it would be.
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China is far, far better than the US. That doesn’t mean China is awesome, it just means the US is far, far worse than anyone else in terms of tyranny and destructiveness. Working to destroy any population which disobeys you anywhere in the world makes you worse than anyone else.
The only reason nobody seems to recognize this in the west is because the US has such phenomenally excellent global narrative control. If it didn’t, the entire world would’ve laughed when the butchers of the Middle East started pretending to care about Muslims in Xinjiang.
People will respond to this by saying things like, “China is more oppressive domestically, US is more oppressive abroad.” But nothing China is doing domestically is anywhere remotely as bad as what the US is doing abroad. Nothing China is currently doing rises to the level of the US killing millions and displacing tens of millions just since the turn of this century in still-ongoing military operations.
This is an unassailably correct position; there exists no robust arguments to the contrary. The only reason people experience so much cognitive dissonance whenever I say this is because so few step all the way back and look at the big picture of our present reality as it currently exists.
Maintaining an awareness of the indisputable fact that the US is by far the most destructive government on earth gives you a much clearer perspective in our current media environment, because you see that it’s always vastly worse than 100 percent of the governments it tries to demonize.
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It’s amazing how many people I’ll interact with who blame China for the rising authoritarianism of their own governments. It takes a lot of propaganda consumption to believe western governments using western means to oppress westerners has anything to do with China.
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“Left-versus-right is just designed to keep us divided against each other.”
No that’s capitalism. Capitalism is what’s designed to do that. And you either oppose that right-wing, divisive, competition-based model or you don’t.
Sure Democrat-versus-Republican, Tories-versus-Labour etc is fake and divisive bullshit, but those are right wing, capitalist parties. You either support their ideology or you oppose it. This is a real distinction and pretending otherwise serves nobody.
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Capitalism depends on scarcity. Go to a communist country and give everyone a bunch of free stuff and everyone will be better off. Go to a capitalist country and give everyone a bunch of free stuff and you’ll collapse the economy.
Capitalism needs lack. Lack is capitalism’s number one product.
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Democratic Party leadership and its allied media will always find some reason to take the focus off the need for healthcare and economic justice. Sorry can’t talk about healthcare and wealth inequality, gotta shriek about Russians. Sorry can’t talk about healthcare and wealth inequality, gotta shriek about anti-vaxxers. Sorry can’t talk about healthcare and wealth inequality, gotta shriek about Trump’s 2024 campaign. Sorry can’t talk about US healthcare and wealth inequality, gotta shriek about some other thing.
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Humanity arrived on the scene through a frightening and violent process of death, mutation and natural selection, leaving a bunch of trauma conditioning imprinted on these newly-evolved massive brains of ours even long after the threats have gone. We’re still sorting that out.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
The IOC says it stays out of politics. But what is happening in Xinjiang is a fundamental matter of human rights
The financial crisis of 2008 was the moment which cemented both China’s rise and its growing confidence as the west faltered. But the Olympics held in Beijing a few months earlier was the global symbol of its ascendancy: a coming-out party which proclaimed its return to the forefront of political and economic power, greeted with genuine international enthusiasm, despite the misgivings of dissidents.
Fewer will celebrate the Winter Games due to kick off in Beijing in February. Last week, the UK and Canada joined the US and Australia in announcing a diplomatic boycott, and New Zealand has said it will not send anyone of ministerial level – to the wrath of China, which warned that countries will “pay a price” for the decision. (France will participate as usual, with Emmanuel Macron describing the boycott as “insignificant”, and much of Europe remains undecided). Concern for tennis champion and three-time Olympian Peng Shuai, since she alleged that a former senior leader had coerced her into sex, have magnified attention to China’s human rights record – and to the International Olympic Committee’s keenness to reassure the world that there is nothing to worry about, a repeated pattern.
In a major development in the Korean peace process, South Korea, North Korea, China and the United States have agreed to declare an end to the Korean War. The announcement was made by South Korean president Moon Jae-in on Monday, December 13, who said the four parties to the Korean War agreed “in-principle” to formally declare its end, 71 years after it broke out in 1950.
China and Nicaragua have resumed diplomatic relations in what Nicaragua’s Presidential Advisor Laureano Ortega Murillo called “a historic date.” The Government of the Republic of Nicaragua announced it had broken diplomatic relations with Taiwan, ceasing to have any contact or official relationship, in a statement by Foreign Minister Denis Moncada before Nicaraguan diplomats and press, on Thursday and effective immediately. Kawsachun News attended the meeting virtually.
Another cartoonishly ridiculous anti-China propaganda piece has been published in the western mass media, this time by The Guardian, which at this point could arguably be labeled the single most destructive promulgator of empire propaganda in the western world. It is authored by Simon Tisdall, who could most certainly be labeled the single most destructive promulgator of empire propaganda at The Guardian.
The article is titled “In China’s new age of imperialism, Xi Jinping gives thumbs down to democracy” and subtitled “Beijing is aiming for global ascendancy – but its leader’s vision of world dominion is centralised, oppressive and totalitarian.” None of these claims are substantiated in the text which follows.
It’s pretty cute how the only time you’ll ever see the word “imperialism” used in The Guardian (without scare quotes) is when it wants to criticize a nation the world’s actual imperialist dominator, the United States, doesn’t like. You will never see that word used to refer to the behavior of the cluster of US-aligned nations which functions as a single empire on foreign policy, nor to the government which has circled the planet with hundreds of military bases and works to kill, starve and subvert any population who refuses to be commanded, controlled, exploited or plundered.
In fact, Tisdall goes so far as to promote the hilarious idea that the days of any western power having imperialist inclinations are long gone.
Simon Tisdall @guardian ……complete and utter trash
"Imperialism, in all its awful forms, still poses a threat. But it is no longer the imperialism of the west, rightly execrated and self-condemned. Today’s threat emanates from the east."https://t.co/At8opweTEb
“Imperialism, in all its awful forms, still poses a threat,” Tisdall writes. “But it is no longer the imperialism of the west, rightly execrated and self-condemned. Today’s threat emanates from the east. Just as objectionable, and potentially more dangerous, it’s the prospect of a totalitarian 21st-century Chinese global empire.”
Well cool. The western world at some point in history apparently renounced imperialism, and now the east is the only direction from whence that threat emanates. Not sure when that happened, but Tisdall appears quite certain that imperialism has been completely stomped out everywhere west of Xinjiang, including in the United States government.
“[N]ascent empires establish an (often delusional) narrative, or ‘mission statement’, to justify their activities,” Tisdall writes. “British imperialists claimed to be a civilising force, bringing law and Christianity to the great unwashed. The postwar American empire was, supposedly, all about championing democracy.”
“Was”. The postwar American empire, back in the days when it existed, “was” supposedly about championing democracy. You know, back when it would exert force upon nations on the basis that they were insufficiently democratic. Again, Tisdall does not say on what precise date this ended, or name the point in history when the entire US empire blipped out of existence.
This would be the same United States that is currently constructing long-range missile systems on a chain of islands near China’s coast for the explicit purpose of threatening China. One need only imagine what would happen if China began building long-range missile systems off a US coastline to understand who is the real imperialist aggressor between these two nations.
There exist all kinds of arguments that can be made about whether or not the Chinese government is imperialist and if so to what extent. What absolutely do not exist are arguments that China is more imperialist than the United States and its tight cluster of allies, or anywhere remotely close. The government which continually uses its military and economic might to bully and manipulate the world into aligning with its geostrategic interests is indisputably the more imperialist force, by a massive, massive margin.
As evidence for his pants-on-head gibbering lunatic position that China has completely supplanted all western powers as an imperialist force in our world and is trying to become a globe-dominating empire, Tisdall cites three points: (1) that China engages in trade, (2) that China has a single military base in Djibouti, and (3) that the US intelligence cartel has asserted that China plans on building a second military base in Equatorial Guinea, with perhaps more to follow.
“The first phase of China’s new imperial age is already in train. Xi’s ambitious belt and road investment and infrastructure initiative (BRI) touches 60 countries,” Tisdall writes. “China is the world’s largest trading nation and largest exporter, with $2.6tn worth of exports in 2019.”
So, trade. That’s trade. The idea that an investment and infrastructure plan rises to anywhere near the level of US wars which have killed millions and displaced tens of millions just since the turn of this century is risible.
“The CCP’s focus is meanwhile shifting to empire phase two: military bases,” says Tisdall. “US media reported last week that the port city of Bata in Equatorial Guinea could become China’s first Atlantic seaboard naval base – potentially putting warships and submarines within striking distance of America’s east coast.”
Antiwar’s Daniel Larison has a great article out mocking and debunking the foam-brained hysterical shrieking about how the completely unsubstantiated US intelligence claim that Beijing is trying to establish a military base in Equatorial Guinea “some six thousand nautical miles away from the US mainland” poses any threat to the United States.
“The US faces very few serious threats from other states, and the United States is extraordinarily secure from physical attack,” Larison writes. “To make other states seem remotely threatening to US security, the government and cooperative media outlets have to exaggerate the power of other states and inflate their ability to threaten Americans. Because of the huge mismatch between the demands of propaganda and the less alarming reality, this often creates absurd results.”
“China already has a naval base in Djibouti, in the Horn of Africa,” Tisdall writes. “It is said to be considering an island airbase in Kiribati that could in theory threaten Hawaii. Meanwhile, it continues to militarise atolls in the South China Sea. A Pentagon report last month predicted China will build a string of military bases girdling the world, including in the Arctic. CCP ‘target’ countries include Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, the United Arab Emirates, Kenya and Angola, it said.”
So, one single foreign military base in the whole entire world, plus a bunch of imagination and conjecture by military and intelligence operatives. This compared to the 750 military bases that the US actually, physically has around the world. Some “empire” you’ve got there, Xi.
Not only is it laughable to claim that the US is no longer imperialist, there’s not even any evidence that China seeks to replace it as the unipolar global hegemon. Western spinmeisters have been churning out think pieces for years claiming that China is trying to rule the world, but if you actually examine the basis for those claims all you’ll find is evidence that China wants a multipolar world of multiple powers as opposed to a unipolar one where the world is dominated by the US or any other nation.
As we discussed previously, it’s not like the floundering US empire has been making the business of planetary domination look sexy. The idea that every nation wants to dominate the world the way the US does is just a dopey projection by propaganda-addled western minds who’ve been programmed to believe the game of unipolar conquest is normal and desirable.
Tisdall also inserts the obligatory accusation of “genocide” that every western propagandist is required to bleat whenever the Chinese government is under discussion, which has been thoroughly discredited by many people and even the western media have been forced to walk back from as tourism surges in Xinjiang.
Tisdall also cites a quote by Xi Jinping saying that China will defend itself from those who try to bully, oppress or subjugate it as evidence that the leader has “combative ideas” and believes “imperial might makes right”:
“We have never bullied, oppressed, or subjugated the people of any other country, and we never will. By the same token we will never allow anyone to bully, oppress or subjugate [China],” he said. “Anyone who tries will find themselves on a collision course with a steel wall forged by 1.4 billion people.”
It is very revealing how many empire propagandists keep interpreting a warning that China will defend itself from aggressors as a menacing and aggressive act. Almost like they believe it is their right to bully, oppress and subjugate all nations without opposition or resistance.
Agreeing with Simon Tisdall on any foreign policy issue is nature’s way of telling you to revise your media consumption habits.
The mass media have been growing astonishingly forceful in their efforts to manipulate the world into being so terrified of China that they’ll consent to any agenda no matter how insane and dangerous. The more forceful they become with their manipulations, the more important it is to counter their lies.
We’re being shoved in a very bad direction at an increasingly frenetic pace. This is being done for a reason. Be alert.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
We are constantly bombarded with messages telling us that if our country and our way of life are to survive we must weaponize, weaponize, weaponize… We must recognize this as Cold War messaging to be resisted, and help others do the same.
The first thing to understand is that the Cold War is psychological war waged by the US and its allies. It is carried out on a worldwide basis and especially in the United States against the public. These operations are aimed at conditioning people to accept war preparations and war operations. They involve the joint efforts of what Ray McGovern (a co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity) has called the MICIMATT Complex — the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academic-Think Tank Complex.
In the last two decades, economic links between Latin America and the People’s Republic of China have been expanding at a dizzying rate. Bilateral trade in 2000 was just $12 billion (1 per cent of Latin American’s total trade); now it stands at $315bn. In the same time period, China’s foreign direct investment in Latin America has increased by a factor of five. Since the launch of the Belt and Road Initiative in 2013, 19 of the 33 countries in the Latin American and Caribbean region have signed up to the China-led global infrastructure development strategy.
The Assange case is the most powerful government in the world defending its right to lie to you.
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Q: What’s the difference between how the US deals with journalists it hates and how Saudi Arabia deals with journalists it hates?
A: Speed.
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The US is currently building a network of long-range missile systems on a chain of islands near China’s coast for the explicit purpose of threatening China. You can tell who is the aggressor in US-China tensions by asking yourself what would happen if this situation was reversed.
Per Washington’s own logic it would be perfectly reasonable, and indeed responsible, for China to set up military arsenals along both US coastlines to “contain” it and “deter” attacks on Latin American nations, as the US has an extensive history of launching such attacks and will surely try to again. But we all know what the US response to such behavior would be.
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It’s a bit annoying living in a world that’s ruled by a dying empire whose increasing desperation to retain control could lead it to initiate a dangerous military confrontation with a major power at any time.
The rise of China crashing into the Washington doctrine that US unipolar hegemony must be preserved at all cost is an unstoppable-force-meets-immovable-object situation that could very easily end in nuclear armageddon.
If the preservation of US unipolar hegemony requires continually escalating military brinkmanship against nuclear-armed Russia and China as well as powerful forces like Iran, then the claim that US unipolar hegemony makes the world a more peaceful place is plainly false.
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You currently have a much higher chance of dying as a result of a nuclear war instigated by your government or its allies than as a result of someone else refusing to take a Covid vaccine. You hear about the latter threat but not the former because the mass media exist to protect imperialist agendas from scrutiny.
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You know you’re getting scammed when your government ends a long and expensive war and then the military budget goes up.
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There is no sector of US government policy more significant and consequential than the command of the most powerful military force ever assembled. There is also no sector of US government policy with less oversight, accountability, or press scrutiny.
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Besides a brief window after 9/11 the US has never really been able to sell the narrative that governments it wants to ramp up aggressions against are about to attack its easily-defended shores. So instead it does ridiculous things like claiming those governments are about to invade Ukraine and Taiwan.
The US empire never attacks, it only “defends”. All its aggressions are always about “defending” freedom and democracy, “defending” human rights, “defending” nations that can’t defend themselves, etc. Often it even “defends” preemptively, before the attacker has done anything. Sometimes the attacker is the last to find out that they were planning an attack.
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Ever since getting our eviction notice I’ve struggled to be creative because my mind is so focused on the daunting task of finding a nice yet affordable place for my family to live, and it really makes me feel for everyone for whom housing security is a chronic creativity drain. All to pay for the privilege of living on the fucking planet we were fucking born on.
I mean, think about how much creativity and innovation our species is missing out on because our dopey, primitive societal models force people to spend so much brainpower just figuring out how to stay fed and housed. That brainpower could have gone toward improving our world.
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Really I’m just a mother. I’m just a mum who wants a healthy planet and a healthy society for her kids, and I advocate the things I believe will facilitate that. You can add whatever -ists and -isms you want on top of that, but my true ideology is motherhood.
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Right now being smart and informed is a detriment to happiness because things are shitty and the more you understand the harder it is to be happy. Once we create a healthy world this will reverse; the more you understand about the world the more uplifted and optimistic you’ll be.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
4Mins Read A 45-minute documentary in mainland China promoting vegetarianism has been heavily criticised across the country’s social media channels. Well-known Chinese actresses Zhang Jingchu and Tao Hong both appeared in the film, in which meat-eating was linked to carbon emissions and cruelty, while vegetarianism was projected as a healthy choice. Viewers took to the comments to […]
The People’s Liberation Army Navy Air Force’s (PLANAF’s) Xian H-6J strategic bombers have reportedly conducted sea mine-laying and air-to-surface attack drills as part of a live-fire exercise in the South China Sea. According to video footage released by the state-owned China Central Television (CCTV) on 3 December, several H-6J bombers deployed at night and transited […]
President Biden’s virtual Summit for Democracy on December 9-10 is part of a campaign to restore the United States’ standing in the world, which took such a beating under President Trump’s erratic foreign policies. Biden hopes to secure his place at the head of the “Free World” table by coming out as a champion for human rights and democratic practices worldwide.
The greater possible value of this gathering of 111 countries is that it could instead serve as an “intervention,” or an opportunity for people and governments around the world to express their concerns about the flaws in U.S. democracy and the undemocratic way the United States deals with the rest of the world. Here are just a few issues that should be considered:
(1) The U.S. claims to be a leader in global democracy at a time when its own already deeply flawed democracy is crumbling, as evidenced by the shocking January 6 assault on the nation’s Capitol. On top of the systemic problem of a duopoly that keeps other political parties locked out and the obscene influence of money in politics, the U.S. electoral system is being further eroded by the increasing tendency to contest credible election results and widespread efforts to suppress voter participation (19 states have enacted 33 laws that make it more difficult for citizens to vote).
A broad global ranking of countries by various measures of democracy puts the U.S. at # 33, while the U.S. government-funded Freedom House ranks the United States at # 61 in the world for political freedom and civil liberties, on a par with Mongolia, Panama and Romania.
(2) The unspoken U.S. agenda at this “summit” is to demonize and isolate China and Russia. But if we agree that democracies should be judged by how they treat their people, then why is the U.S. Congress failing to pass a bill to provide basic services like health care, child care, housing and education, which are guaranteed to most Chinese citizens for free or at minimal cost?
And consider China’s extraordinary success in relieving poverty. As UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said, “Every time I visit China, I am stunned by the speed of change and progress. You have created one of the most dynamic economies in the world, while helping more than 800 million people to lift themselves out of poverty – the greatest anti-poverty achievement in history.”
China has also far surpassed the U.S. in dealing with the pandemic. Little wonder a Harvard University report found that over 90% of the Chinese people like their government. One would think that China’s extraordinary domestic achievements would make the Biden administration a bit more humble about its “one-size-fits-all” concept of democracy.
(3) The climate crisis and the pandemic are a wake-up call for global cooperation, but this Summit is transparently designed to exacerbate divisions. The Chinese and Russian ambassadors to Washington have publicly accused the United States of staging the summit to stoke ideological confrontation and divide the world into hostile camps, while China held a competing International Democracy Forum with 120 countries the weekend before the U.S. summit.
Inviting the government of Taiwan to the U.S. summit further erodes the 1972 Shanghai Communiqué, in which the United States acknowledged the One-China policy and agreed to cut back military installations on Taiwan.
Also invited is the corrupt anti-Russian government installed by the 2014 U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine, which reportedly has half its military forces poised to invade the self-declared People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk in Eastern Ukraine, who declared independence in response to the 2014 coup. The U.S. and NATO have so far supported this major escalation of a civil war that already killed 14,000 people.
(4) The U.S. and its Western allies—the self-anointed leaders of human rights—just happen to be the major suppliers of weapons and training to some of the world’s most vicious dictators. Despite its verbal commitment to human rights, the Biden administration and Congress recently approved a $650 million weapons deal for Saudi Arabia at a time when this repressive kingdom is bombing and starving the people of Yemen.
Heck, the administration even uses U.S. tax dollars to “donate” weapons to dictators, like General Sisi in Egypt, who oversees a regime with thousands of political prisoners, many of whom have been tortured. Of course, these U.S. allies were not invited to the Democracy Summit—that would be too embarrassing.
(5) Perhaps someone should inform Biden that the right to survive is a basic human right. The right to food is recognized in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights as part of the right to an adequate standard of living, and is enshrined in the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
So why is the U.S. imposing brutal sanctions on countries from Venezuela to North Korea that are causing inflation, scarcity, and malnutrition among children? Former UN special rapporteur Alfred de Zayas has blasted the United States for engaging in “economic warfare” and compared its illegal unilateral sanctions to medieval sieges. No country that purposely denies children the right to food and starves them to death can call itself a champion of democracy.
(6) Since the United States was defeated by the Taliban and withdrew its occupation forces from Afghanistan, it is acting as a very sore loser and reneging on basic international and humanitarian commitments. Certainly Taliban rule in Afghanistan is a setback for human rights, especially for women, but pulling the plug on Afghanistan’s economy is catastrophic for the entire nation.
The United States is denying the new government access to billions of dollars in Afghanistan’s foreign currency reserves held in U.S. banks, causing a collapse in the banking system. Hundreds of thousands of public servants have not been paid. The UN is warning that millions of Afghans are at risk of starving to death this winter as the result of these coercive measures by the United States and its allies.
(7) It’s telling that the Biden administration had such a difficult time finding Middle Eastern countries to invite to the summit. The United States just spent 20 years and $8 trillion trying to impose its brand of democracy on the Middle East and Afghanistan, so you’d think it would have a few proteges to showcase.
But no. In the end, they could only agree to invite the state of Israel, an apartheid regime that enforces Jewish supremacy over all the land it occupies, legally or otherwise. Embarrassed to have no Arab states attending, the Biden administration added Iraq, whose unstable government has been racked by corruption and sectarian divisions ever since the U.S. invasion in 2003. Its brutal security forces have killed over 600 demonstrators since huge anti-government protests began in 2019.
(8) What, pray tell, is democratic about the U.S. gulag at Guantánamo Bay? The U.S. Government opened the Guantanamo detention center in January 2002 as a way to circumvent the rule of law as it kidnapped and jailed people without trial after the crimes of September 11, 2001. Since then, 780 men have been detained there. Very few were charged with any crime or confirmed as combatants, but still they were tortured, held for years without charges, and never tried.
This gross violation of human rights continues, with most of the 39 remaining detainees never even charged with a crime. Yet this country that has locked up hundreds of innocent men with no due process for up to 20 years still claims the authority to pass judgment on the legal processes of other countries, in particular on China’s efforts to cope with Islamist radicalism and terrorism among its Uighur minority.
(9) With the recent investigations into the March 2019 U.S. bombing in Syria that left 70 civilians dead and the drone strike that killed an Afghan family of ten in August 2021, the truth of massive civilian casualties in U.S. drone strikes and airstrikes is gradually emerging, as well as how these war crimes have perpetuated and fueled the “war on terror,” instead of winning or ending it.
If this was a real democracy summit, whistleblowers like Daniel Hale, Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange, who have risked so much to expose the reality of U.S. war crimes to the world, would be honored guests at the summit instead of political prisoners in the American gulag.
(10) The United States picks and chooses countries as “democracies” on an entirely self-serving basis. But in the case of Venezuela, it has gone even farther and invited an imaginary U.S.-appointed “president” instead of the country’s actual government.
The Trump administration anointed Juan Guaidó as “president” of Venezuela, and Biden invited him to the summit, but Guaidó is neither a president nor a democrat, and he boycotted parliamentary elections in 2020 and regional elections in 2021. But Guaido did come tops in one recent opinion poll, with the highest public disapproval of any opposition figure in Venezuela at 83%, and the lowest approval rating at 13%.
Guaidó named himself “interim president” (without any legal mandate) in 2019, and launched a failed coup against the elected government of Venezuela. When all his U.S.-backed efforts to overthrow the government failed, Guaidó signed off on a mercenary invasion which failed even more spectacularly. The European Union no longer recognizes Guaido’s claim to the presidency, and his “interim foreign minister” recently resigned, accusing Guaidó of corruption.
Conclusion
Just as the people of Venezuela have not elected or appointed Juan Guaidó as their president, the people of the world have not elected or appointed the United States as the president or leader of all Earthlings.
When the United States emerged from the Second World War as the strongest economic and military power in the world, its leaders had the wisdom not to claim such a role. Instead they brought the whole world together to form the United Nations, on the principles of sovereign equality, non-interference in each other’s internal affairs, a universal commitment to the peaceful resolution of disputes and a prohibition on the threat or use of force against each other.
The United States enjoyed great wealth and international power under the UN system it devised. But in the post-Cold War era, power-hungry U.S. leaders came to see the UN Charter and the rule of international law as obstacles to their insatiable ambitions. They belatedly staked a claim to universal global leadership and dominance, relying on the threat and use of force that the UN Charter prohibits. The results have been catastrophic for millions of people in many countries, including Americans.
Since the United States has invited its friends from around the world to this ”democracy summit,” maybe they can use the occasion to try to persuade their bomb-toting friend to recognize that its bid for unilateral global power has failed, and that it should instead make a real commitment to peace, cooperation and international democracy under the rules-based order of the UN Charter.
Today’s Caitlin Johnstone essay has been replaced by a breaking report from the National News Conglomerate. NNC: Obey.
People around the world are reacting with anguish, heartbreak and rage at the news that the US, UK, Australia and Canada will not be sending diplomatic representation to the Beijing Winter Olympics in protest against human rights abuses by the Chinese government.
“Why even have an Olympics if there aren’t going to be any of those sexy British diplomats in the audience?” Amina Sani told NNC reporters at a mass demonstration of mourning in Lagos, Nigeria.
“The only reason any of us were planning on watching the Winter Games was the hope of catching sight of a low-level government official from a white Anglophonic western nation,” said Juanito Noriega at another demonstration in Manila.
“God damn you, Xi Jinping!” cried Tu Pham in Hanoi, Vietnam. “Because of you, the only Five Eyes alliance diplomats at the Olympics will be from Canada and New Zealand!”
Informed by NNC reporters that Canada had joined in the diplomatic boycott, Pham fell to his knees.
“People around the world are very upset about the diplomatic boycott and the tyranny of the Chinese government which made it necessary,” NNC was told in a teleconference with Ray Theon of the Washington-based think tank Institute for Democratic Cruise Missiles. “The Olympic games can’t be enjoyed by anyone without the diplomatic attendance of the United States and its western English-speaking allies, because, as we all know, the entire world revolves around those nations and their governments.”
“We’re all in deep emotional pain over this boycott, but we’ll all just have to transfer our outrage to the evil CCP where it belongs,” Theon added.
“I dunno, seems like China’s pretty much the same kind of country it was during the 2008 Olympics in Beijing,” interjected Theon’s wife from the next room. “I kinda think this has more to do with a crumbling empire seizing on any opportunity to undermine a rising economic force which increasingly threatens its unipolar global domination.”
“Shut up honey,” Mr Theon responded tersely. “You shut your goddamn mouth.”
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Independent report says crimes include torture and the systematic suppression of births
Uyghur people living in Xinjiang province in China have been subjected to unconscionable crimes against humanity directed by the Chinese state that amount to an act of genocide, an independent and unofficial tribunal has found.
Hundreds of thousands and possibly a million people have been incarcerated without any or remotely fair justification, the tribunal’s chairman Sir Geoffrey Nice QC said as he delivered the tribunal’s findings in London. “This vast apparatus of state repression could not exist if a plan was not authorised at the highest levels,” Nice said.
Beijing accuses nations of using Games ‘for political manipulation’ amid diplomatic boycotts
China has said that Australia, Britain and the US will pay a price for their “mistaken acts” after deciding not to send government delegations to February’s Winter Olympics in Beijing, in the latest warning demonstrating China’s escalating diplomatic tensions with the US and its major allies.
The US was the first to announce a boycott, saying on Monday its government officials would not attend the February Games because of China’s human rights “atrocities”, weeks after talks aimed at easing tension between the world’s two largest economies.
President Biden, in full mood of marking “red lines” against Russia and Ukraine in a virtual meeting with Vladimir Putin, does not forget the importance of boycotting China’s Winter Olympic Games. It’s a diplomatic boycott only, so says Madame Jen Psaki, White House press secretary. Nevertheless, she and Biden are wishing the US sport-participants best of luck and they will support them throughout. So, they say. US athletes are allowed to part-take in the games. It’s the US diplomacy that is held back. It’s a hypocrisy that only Washington – and perhaps Brussels as EU and NATO headquarters – can muster. Now Australia has also joined the nefarious club.
Do they seriously hope the rest of the world will follow suit, because they want to be “with” the US and not be perceived as “against” the Big Empire? – Perhaps some will, indeed, be copy-cats. Fear is the name of the game, be it for covid or political sanctions. Western humanity is trembling from fear. So much fear, that the thought process has literally stopped functioning according to logic, even by the tyrants themselves.
Ms. Psaki explained the boycott as a response to “Beijing’s human rights violations”, adding what she calls “genocide and crimes against humanity”. She was, of course, referring to the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), a landlocked autonomous region of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), by surface the largest single territory of China, located in the northwest of the country, close to Central Asia.
It is well possible that the Press Secretary doesn’t know what she is talking about, but is just repeating the current narrative. There is a set of standard accusations that are regularly being launched against China, with no substance at all. This is one of them. See “Xinjiang in My Eyes”: Debunking the Lies and Anti-China Propaganda Focusing on China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region“. Suffice it to say that the Xinjiang region is a pivotal point for the famous Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), connecting China with Europe via Central Asia, as well as with the Indian Ocean.
Washington sees China, and especially the BRI, as an economic threat on their perceived supremacy, therefore does everything to denigrate China, and especially the Xinjiang region, where about 12 million Uyghurs live, mostly Muslims, out of a total population of 26 million. What is not said by Washington, is that the CIA and other US secret services recruit Uyghur Muslims, train them and send them to the Middle East to fight the Jihad, mostly in Syria, but also in Iraq. If, and when, they return, they were trained to create havoc and instability in Xinjiang. The Chinese Government is re-educating them for reintegration in the Uyghur society of the Xinjiang region.
The other area of China on which Washington and its western allies like to attack Beijing, is Taiwan, a Chinese territory. When the Kuomintang, the Chinese Nationalist Party, lost the civil war against Chairman Mao’s Communist Party in 1949, they fled to the island of Taiwan which they occupied ever since. However, Taiwan is part of China. In October 1971, the UN General Assembly passed a Resolution, that stopped recognizing Taiwan as China and, instead, decided the PRC would represent China, implying that Taiwan was part of the Peoples Republic of China. It looks like the US have stayed back in history, still looking at Taiwan as an independent country and their ally.
As President Chi has mentioned on several occasions, Taiwan will be integrated into the PRC in a peaceful way. Outside interferences, like by the United States and some of their European allies, have no place in these negotiations. It is a Chinese internal affair. Just imagine, China getting involved and taking sides in US internal affairs. Unimaginable!
What also seems to escape most western powers — still fond of the “freedom seeking” US of A — is the Unites States abysmal human rights record. It is so unabashed and shameful. The Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, as well as Guantanamo in Cuba, are well known as America’s torture chambers, where human rights do not exist. And these are just two out of some 100-plus US prison camps where human rights are not only trampled by military boots, but where in most cases they are openly abolished. Torture is the name of the game. Only an extreme hypocrite could accuse any other country of human rights abuse.
Earlier this week, Beijing announced stern counter measures, in case the US will indeed implement their “diplomatic” boycott of the Chinese Olympic Winter Games.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Zhao Lijian, said that China would see such a move as outright political provocation. However, he did not offer any details as to how China might respond to the “diplomatic boycott”. He also said that after the virtual summit last month between Presidents Xi and Biden, no American diplomats, nor the President, were invited to the Olympic Games. This means, without saying so, the “boycott” is a mere US public relations farce.
Western supporters of the move hope to draw falsely negative attention to China’s human rights record. Even American athletes may be “trained” to openly accuse the Chinese human rights record, reproaching them of Uyghur tortures, although they have no clue what they are talking about, because they would simply parrot messages, without knowing what they are actually saying.
In fact, most countries expected to toe the line given by Biden, don’t know the truth, or they do know the truth, but are keen to stick to their hypocrite master’s lies.
So, Beijing has a number of avenues to “boycott” the US back – as in “Build Back Better”. For example, by trade sanctions. Mainland China and Taiwan are the largest producers of semi-conductors used in modern cars. If China holds back on producing and/or supplying semi-conductors, the entire western car industry comes to a halt. Supply shortages, due to covid-caused delivery-chain interruptions, are already affecting the Japanese and South Korean car industry. Currently, the Toyota car production is basically at a standstill.
The west also depends 70% to 90% on medical equipment (70%) and medication (up to 90%) on China. With a ferocious pandemic being sold to the people in the west, a pandemic that by reducing the human immune system will create all kinds of diseases that require regular medication, shortages of medication may be problematic. A supply chain interruption may trigger not only consternation, but outright disaster.
Is it possible that Biden and his top advisors do not understand what China’s counter-measures could mean to a US car industry that is already largely outsourced? Let alone to the health sector, plagued by a western manufactured disease that is currently “ravaging the west”, and is depending badly on Chinese made medication.
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