Billy Bob
The desire and threat of Western imperialism to kill and destroy without restraint in the maintenance of their global supremacy) is everything. This is the entire ballgame. Nothing else comes anywhere close to this fundamental reality in terms of importance or relevance for humanity and the planet we inhabit.
Caitlin Johnson has been one of the most prolific tellers of truth over the last several years. This is not empty praise. She churns out solid, relevant, and hard hitting insight and analysis on a near daily basis and from my perspective, she has been on the correct side of every issue she has engaged with. She recently wrote:
"In a time of great need the US government is letting its citizens freeze, go broke, get evicted, and die of preventable illnesses, so obviously it’s of paramount importance right now that Americans rise up with one voice and direct their righteous anger at China. I’m developing a special disdain for people who mindlessly regurgitate US anti-China narratives, especially people who are normally skeptical of US government claims. There’s just no excuse for this nonsense. The geostrategic agendas are so obvious, the barefaced liars so familiar, and the facts so readily available for anyone intellectually honest enough to look".
It is with this same mindset that I have penned the article below. I share Caity’s frustration with those that want to claim the mantle of the left but whose words are seemingly written by State Department apparatchiks.
We’ve all read the laundry list of Western propaganda that is designed to falsely depict China as a brutal dystopic, authoritarian shithole, where everyone hates their government and are totally miserable. It's interesting that with regards to Western propaganda targeted at China, the lies are simultaneously proportionate but the exact opposite of truth. So, Mao who did more good for more people than anyone else in the history of the known universe, is known as "the greatest mass murderer of all time". Or the Chinese government that according to a 2016 Harvard study has a satisfaction rating of 96% (compared to the 38% enjoyed by the US) is casually described by the Western press as “authoritarian, corrupt, unjust, and one of the biggest human rights violators on the planet”. For people that fail to recognize the chasm of incongruence here, and are incapable of coming to the only possible conclusion, please ensure that your fork is properly corked before continuing so you don’t injure yourself.
The false indoctrination that has taken hold of far too many self identified “leftists” goes something like this:
"...the CCP is entirely opaque, forbids a free press and completely censors free information... that a few hundred members of a single ruling party dictates policy and is unelected... that political opposition is all but illegal and completely suppressed... that no workers own the means of their own production... that China has the largest increase and concentration of new billionaires while income and wealth inequality is also at its largest, due to rampant exploitative and equally destructive capitalist practices in the past decades... that Chine engages in imperialism via debt and increased militarism to its Asian neighbors... that China is committing genocide against the Uyghur minority in Xinjiang... that China oppresses, exploits, and impoverishes it’s citizens.
The Most Necessary and Fundamental Context: Class War
There are several mitigating factors that need to be kept in mind when analyzing the issues brought up above. First and foremost is the reality that our planet is in the midst of a class war where an infinitesimally small group of obscenely rich plutocrats, industrialists, and oligarchs, seek to maintain their wealth, power, and privilege by enforcing a global system of political and economic control without any moral restraint whatsoever. The Western ruling class consensus sees China as the enemy and is looking for any possible way to subvert, weaken, divide, and destroy their society. These gangsters of capitalism are masters at their craft and have successfully dismantled the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Syria among others. They have regime changed scores of countries, most recently, Libya, Ukraine, Honduras, and Bolivia. They will not hesitate to exploit any weakness or to kill millions of people to defeat China and maintain their global supremacy. To ignore the fact that China must defend against this very real threat posed by Western imperialism and to simply analyze China's system in a vacuum, detached from the fundamental context of class war, is to demonstrate a cluelessness about the most important aspect of the big picture.
Lies and more lies, by half-truths, omission, and innuendo— The West has literally made massive public lying and disinformation into a science. All Western nations are ruled by the Big Lie, disinformation designed for consumption at home and abroad. The lie is normally used to secure support, consent or passivity from the home populations for some enormous imperialist crime—whether it be an unjustifiable economic war via sanctions or actual kinetic war in the form of invasions and outright attacks. Here a report by an Australian network on the Three Gorges Dam dishes feigned environmental concerns wth innuendo to deride the achievements of China. Australia is of course a vassal of Washington, a member of the "Five Eyes" (US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand), an strategic and intel alliance of the world's Anglo-Saxon settler nations, all firmly integrated into the centralised American empire, currently "at war" with China, Russia, and Iran, plus other nations around the globe, as per official US "national security policy" endangering just about everybody on this planet. The Western media, of course, as cheerleaders for war and the world oligarchy, will never alert the public about what's really going on. —P. Greanville —The Editor #60MinutesAustralia World's biggest dam: China's engineering masterpiece or environment disaster? | 60 Minutes Australia |
This (the desire and threat of Western imperialism to kill and destroy without restraint in the maintenance of their global supremacy) is everything. This is the entire ballgame. Nothing else comes anywhere close to this fundamental reality in terms of importance or relevance for humanity and the planet we inhabit.
A Propaganda Battle Over Perception:
Does China censor speech? Of course they do as it would be naïve and reckless to allow subversive Western lies and divisive capitalist propaganda, free reign over the airwaves. A class war is taking place and the propaganda battle is an integral front. China censors divisive lies while the West censors truth. It's really that simple. The Chinese people aren't starved for truth. Truth is not censored in China. China censors lies that are intended to destroy their society. The West censors truth which threatens their hegemony. There is a tremendous difference here and failing to recognize this fundamental difference results in a misguided analysis that is detached from reality.
The Farcical and Self-Defeating Arrogance of Promotors of Liberal Governance:
The political system that governs China is in essence the dictatorship of the proletariat which has steadily raised living standards at an *unprecedented rate* for over 70 years straight and has a 96% satisfaction rating because of it. The Chinese working class correctly rejects putting the entire enterprise to a vote every four years or engaging in some bourgeois parliamentarian democracy with all the gridlock that entails and which is sure to be far less effective in furthering working class interests. Westerners arrogantly perceive this lack of liberal democracy in China as an indictment because their liberal minds have been deluded by nonsense and are detached from political reality. The Chinese see the lack of Western liberal democracy as a great thing because they prefer stability and the rapid advancement in living standards to gridlock, political chaos, and turmoil every four years. The Chinese working class collectively says “HELL NO” to Western pleas for liberal democracy and I for one agree with them. Hell no indeed. Long live the dictatorship of the proletariat. May they continue to work just as hard advancing working class interests over the next 70 years, as they have over the past 70 years.
Judging China Using Unreasonable Metrics:
China is condemned by pseudo leftists because no workers own the means of their own production, but this is an entirely illegitimate bar. Where exactly on this planet does anyone own the means of their own production? One may as well condemn China for still utilizing money, for maintaining borders, or for not eradicating scarcity. This is not legitimate criticism. China’s banks are nationalized, their biggest industries are publicly owned, the private sector is often owned by party members and it is subservient to party diktats and their five year economic plans which are designed to achieve specific social goals.
The pseudo left also attacks China for having classes. This too is no more legitimate than blaming China for not yet eradicating scarcity or for not abolishing private property. The nature of economic growth during socialist construction (the phase before actual comunism) is to allocate growth disproportionately. It's entirely true, China is not a classless society. So what? China has not eliminated class and? Totally classless societies simply do not exist at this point in time. But in China, it is the working class that has the monopoly on power. It is the dictatorship of the proletariat that tolerates the capitalist class but only as long as they obey the law and are advantageous to the economy, exactly as Mao explained.
China is indeed far from perfect. Room for improvement exists and this is acknowledged by the CPC. They have had tremendous success in their public battle against corruption and inequality, problems which have resulted from unprecedented economic growth. and the CPC is actively and successfully attempting to curtail these negative externalities while at the same time, trying to maintain growth, increase productive forces, and continue to raise living standards.
Oppressed, Angry and Scared?
I’ve seen Westerners point to China's "conviction rate" and claim that such a rate proves "innocence has nothing to do with the justice system". I'm curious how such a conclusion is deduced from the data. What conviction rate is optimal? At what conviction rate would we believe that justice is being served in a fair manner? Is the 90+% conviction rate in the US optimal and proof of a fair justice system? What about 93% for Israel? What about the 99.9% conviction rate in Japan? Is the Japanese justice system even less fair than China's? Or, are Westerners just being bamboozled into drawing bullshit conclusions from the dishonest presentation of decontextualized statistics? I'm pretty sure it's the latter.
I hear Westerners opine that “Chinese workers are exploited” though wages have tripled every ten years for the past forty years. It is claimed that the Chinese are throwing themselves off of buildings into “suicide nets” though China’s suicide rate is 40% lower than that of the US. Western propagandists claim Chinese are miserable and simply too scared to speak out against their government though professional Western scientific polling companies claim China is one of the happiest places on earth.
Extreme poverty was eradicated this year and now every Chinese has “a home, a job, plenty of food, education, safe streets, health and old age care (there... [are] ...more drug addicts, suicides and executions, more homeless, poor, hungry and imprisoned people in America than in China). 500,000,000 urban Chinese... have more net worth and disposable income than the average American, their mothers and infants... [are] less likely to die in childbirth, their children... graduate from high school three years ahead of–and outlive–our kids. Ninety-eight percent of Chinese listed as ‘poor’ already own their homes and Xi has scheduled 2021-2035 to bringing GINI below Finland’s.”
“Imperialism” of Peace-Through-Mutual-Prosperity?
And what about imperialism? Is China just as imperialist as the Western ruling class which the pseudo left seems to only condemn after they are called out for their hypocritical attacks on anti-imperialist nations? As if purchasing resources from foreign governments or defending oneself from actual violent imperialism is itself imperialism? Please, Western imperialism is the only imperialism that actually exists. Defending oneself from imperialism is not the same as engaging in imperialism. China has not sandwiched the US with military bases just off it's northern and Southern borders. China has not been arming, training, and funding US separatists for years. China has not been working with Narco terrorist death squads, intolerant radical jihadists, or neo-nazi militias in order to perpetrate politically motivated acts of violence and murder. China hasn't regime changed nearly a country a year for the past 70 years. China doesn't have embargoes and economic sanctions against nearly 40 countries in order to force their political capitulation. Seriously, the pseudo left needs to just stop with the "China is imperialist" bullshit. It's not even close to true.
Genocide or Winning Hearts and Minds?
Hands down, the crown Jewel of the West’s dishonest propaganda offensive and the one which they are investing all their capital in and pinning all of their political hopes on is the claim of “Uyghur Genocide in Xinjiang province”. Much needs to be said about this particular strategy to destabilize, weaken, and subvert Chinese society but for the sake of brevity I will confine myself to explaining China’s perspective on the issue.
Here are some highlights regarding the terrorism problem faced by China:
"In February 1997 the CIA-instigated bombing of public buses in Urumqi that killed nine people died and injured more than 70.
In 2007-08, Uyghur separatists exploited the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing to internationalize their cause. An attempted suicide bombing on a China Southern Airlines flight was thwarted but a terrorist attack in Kashgar in Xinjiang killed 16 police officers four days before the start of the Games.
In July 2009, Uyghur extremists in the provincial capital Urumqi killed 200 people, mostly Han Chinese. True to the imperial double standard, Washington refuses to characterize such deadly attacks as acts of terrorism.
Since 2013, thousands of Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim minority from western China, have traveled to Syria to train with the Uighur militant group Turkestan Islamic Party and fight alongside al-Qaida, playing key roles in several battles. Syrian President Bashar Assad’s troops are now clashing with Uighur fighters as the six-year conflict nears its endgame.
The violence continued through 2014. There were two more failed hijackings of commercial planes as well as scores of bombings, killing tens of civilians each time. The knife attack at the southwestern China city of Kunming railway station in March 2014 was a watershed, resulting in 33 dead and 141 injured. (NATO member Turkey subsequently gave passports to four of the fugitives involved in the railroad station massacre.
In 2015 Uyghur-linked terrorists staged a Bangkok bombing which targeted mainly Chinese tourists and left 20 dead after Thailand offered to send Uyghur terror suspects back to China to face justice and defied US demands that the suspects be allowed to travel onward to Turkey."
So, China faces a serious threat from Western sponsored terrorist separatists, but did they really respond to this threat by initiating Genocide? Does genocide truly sound like the go-to for a government whose top priority has been raising living standards and eradicating poverty? What a ridiculous farce to suggest that China would believe its best interest would be served by secretly committing genocide. As always, nothing could be further from the truth and the truth is exactly the opposite:
"Some 600,000 Uighurs were lifted out of poverty in 2016, and another 312,000 in 2017. More than 400,000 have been relocated from remote villages to places where they are gainfully employed.
Neighborhood religious institutes have been set up to educate citizens on the perils of religious extremism (these community centers where classes are held to detoxify radical Wahhabism were labelled “re-education camps” or concentration camps by the western press, and those attending the classes termed “incarcerated”). Programs to eradicate poverty are implemented to train and prepare Uyghurs for jobs in towns and cities. The Chinese government, through various programs, has been winning the hearts and minds of ordinary Uyghurs–bad news for the US and Uyghur separatists who are making a desperate, all-out bid to unravel the work done by Beijing to eradicate religious extremism and poverty in Xinjiang. The deluge of fake news from Western corporate media since the beginning of this year seeks to demonize the Chinese government, painting it as a gross violator of human rights, when the truth is the exact opposite."
"Xinjiang’s GDP grew 8% last year and is expected to accelerate since it is a gateway for the Belt and Road Initiative. Its future is bright and we can expect its recent problems, like Tibet’s, to fade into memory within three years."
NG
The Only Rational Conclusion:
In summary, each and every one of the anti-China talking points pushed by the Western propaganda apparatus and which are dutifully parroted by Western pseudo leftists, are easily demonstrated to be false and dishonest.
The China described by the pseudo left agents of imperialism simply does not exist. In actual China the people are very happy and they appreciate their government to a degree that is simply unheard of by Western standards. This appreciation is understandable as the CPC has been tremendously successful in developing a happy, healthy, and prosperous society.
So called leftists that *honestly* bash China are confused and are totally upside down regarding political reality. Their support for Western imperialism through the regurgitation of anti-China talking points needs to stop.
Addendum—
The True Scale of the World's Largest Dams
SOURCE: Impartial to China.
The above video can help the public gauge the monumental accomplishment signified by the Three Gorges Dam. It's eoth noting that construction projects of this magnitude always arouse opposition: people are displaced and obviously resent it; old ways of life vanish; animal species suffer, etc. The problem is that there is no perfect solution. Human expansion requires energy—preferably cleaner—and hydro power is among the more aceptable forms of energy generation, despite the fact that it does entail such host of human and ecoogical costs. Western media have capitalised on this and made the Three Gorges Dam a poster child for human and environmental abuse. This is seen clearly in the Australian newsclip featured above, and in this French news report by France24 which uses the same line to subtly denigrate China:
China's Three Gorges Dam: The inside story of a mega-project with disastrous consequences
A decade ago, China finished construction of the largest, most expensive, most powerful and most controversial dam in the world: the Three Gorges Dam. The figures are staggering: 185 metres high, more than 2 kilometres long and a total of 27 million cubic metres of concrete poured into a structure that ended up costing the record sum of 23 billion euros. But this oversized project has caused a series of environmental and human disasters. FRANCE 24’s correspondent Antoine Védeilhé reports from China’s Yangtze valley.
But when the shoe is on the other foot...
Western propagandists conveniently forget that the building of dams, by their very nature, usually causes a great deal of regional dislocation, and opponents abound. Such has been the case with dam construction in India, Pakistan, Egypt (the Soviet built gigantic Aswan Dam on the Nile), and of course America's ambitious TVA project (the FDR-backed 1933 Tennessee Valley Authority) to provide navigation, flood control, electricity generation, fertilizer manufacturing, and economic development to the Tennessee Valley, a region particularly affected by the Great Depression. The people living in the valley were not unanimus in accepting the flooding of their ancestral land, and this gave rise to fierce oppostion, the basis for numerous articles, and some novels which were eventually made into memorable films. Below, a video featuring the 1960 film made on this story with none other than Montgomery Clift and Lee Remick. Obviously, the US establishment would rather not remember such details when judging China.
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