By Caitlin Johnstone
August 12, 2020 "Information Clearing House" - The odious right-wing influencer Ian Miles Cheong recently posted a video of a man being brutalized by an unseen tormenter which he captioned “Chinese communism”, adding “I don’t know who needs to hear this but this is what real oppression looks like, not cops in Portland pepper spraying rioters for throwing molotovs at them.”
There’s nothing in the video footage that shows that this is happening in China, nor that the person performing the abuse is a government authority figure. But many people credulously shared the video around, because anti-China sentiment has exploded over the last two years with the help of careful narrative management by the western political/media class.
This video footage re-emerges periodically, like last year when it was shared by virulent China critic Arslan Hidayat, who claimed the footage showed the Chinese government’s persecution of a Uyghur Muslim.
“DISCLAIMER: Disturbing Video. Chinese policy when interrogating #Uyghur #Muslims is Beat and Tase first then interview the suspect. #SaveUyghur #CloseTheCamps,” reads Hidayat’s caption.
Except it’s not from China, and the man being tormented is not a Uyghur Muslim.
It turns out it’s very easy to get people to believe they are viewing irrefutable evidence of Chinese abuses. All you have to do is show them video footage of one thing and tell them it’s something else, and as long as they’re already predisposed toward believing anti-China narratives, they’ll believe you.
There’s nothing in the video footage that shows that this is happening in China, nor that the person performing the abuse is a government authority figure. But many people credulously shared the video around, because anti-China sentiment has exploded over the last two years with the help of careful narrative management by the western political/media class.
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Except it’s not from China, and the man being tormented is not a Uyghur Muslim.
Over the last few weeks I’ve seen three different verifiably fake videos depicting “Chinese” abuses which people have been frantically spamming around eager to show evidence of Beijing’s malfeasance, just in my own personal meanderings through social media. Like this one:
Only problem? That’s not Xinjiang, and those aren’t Uyghur Muslims.
https://twitter.com/Garou_Hidalgo/status/1285994495239245831
My favorite was this one shared by the account “Uyghur Genocide” on Twitter, captioned “#China has been keeping a world record in techniques to torture prisoners & detainees, such as those 5+ million #Uyghur adults and children currently being held in China’s #ConcentrationCamps, prisons & slave-labor factories. This is one:”
The following are screenshots from a machine translation of a fact check piece from a Taiwanese website:
Western power structures have a very extensive and extremely well-documented history of lying about just this sort of thing, so there’s no excuse for credulously believing what you’re told about any US-targeted government absent mountains of hard proof.
Refusing to believe western narratives put out against US-targeted governments doesn’t mean you automatically believe the opposite of those narratives or believe any Chinese narratives, it just means you remain agnostic until presented with proof that rises to the level required in a post-Iraq invasion world.
There’s a lot of geostrategic ambition riding on Xinjiang, since it plays a pivotal role in China’s Belt and Road Initiative which will upset unipolar US planetary dominance unless thwarted. Which of course means the west has a vested interest in disrupting China’s goals in that region, since US hegemony depends on keeping other nations down. Propaganda is being used to facilitate that agenda.
Ultimately this is all a part of the slow-motion third world war between the US-centralized power alliance and nations like China which have refused to be absorbed into that alliance. This slow-motion third world war is largely facilitated by dominance of international mainstream narratives about unabsorbed nations.
The above videos are a good illustration of the power of narrative. People believe they’re seeing undeniable video footage of an atrocity being perpetrated by a specific government, solely because the bit of text over the video told them that’s what they’re seeing. They literally see what they’re told to see. The narrative overrides the actual raw data that they are taking in with their own eyes.
The only sane response to a situation that is swamped with propaganda and disinformation is to hold tight to skepticism and agnosticism until presented with hard proof. Get comfortable with not knowing, and don’t forget that the power structures presenting you with these narratives have lied to you in the past.
Stay skeptical. Stay critical. Demand hard, verifiable proof about any claim about any US-targeted nation, and if it isn’t given to you, don’t swallow it. This is how you keep your head clear of the propaganda.
Caitlin's articles are entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking her on Facebook, following her antics on Twitter, checking out her podcast, throwing some money into her hat on Patreon or Paypal, or buying her book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. https://caitlinjohnstone.com
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/55450.htm
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