The U.S. road to war on China

Adrian Zenz of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, an anti-China propagandist, appeared on Democracy Now!

The imperialist media reports all read the same, like they were written on the same computer. The Dec. 4 CNN report began: “The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill Dec. 3 demanding a tougher response from the Trump administration over reports of mass detention centers run by the Chinese government in Xinjiang.” 

CNN continues: “The Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act, which still needs to gain approval from the U.S. Senate, calls for concrete measures to be taken against Beijing over allegations that up to two million Muslim-majority Uyghurs have been detained in ‘re-education’ camps in the far western region.”

It’s the kind of report and action by Congress that’s done to whip up a war fervor.

There’s a long history of this kind of propaganda going back to the beginnings of imperialist warfare.

Lenin wrote about imperialist war in his popular outline, “Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism,” which was a polemic against those socialists who supported “their own government’s” war efforts in World War I.

Lenin’s main point was that all the big monopoly capitalist governments were fighting for predatory, expansionist and colonial goals. He showed that capitalism had emerged as a world system that was doomed to be involved in war after war as the imperialists redivide the planet for exploitative purposes.

At the time of World War I, the English and French governments whipped up war propaganda claiming a German “Rape of Belgium” was taking place.

The English and French governments and their media accused German troops of the public mass rape of Belgian girls in Liege. The classic image of the Allied propaganda against Germany was a dead Belgian baby impaled on a bayonet. German troops, eight in number, were accused of bayoneting a 2-year-old Belgian baby. The descriptions of atrocities continued and became ever more gruesome. A Belgian commission of inquiry in 1922, however, failed to find any evidence whatsoever for any of these alleged atrocities.

Such false propaganda has been used for launching almost every war in the imperialist stage of capitalism — not just inter-imperialist wars, but also wars on the oppressed as well as the socialist countries, including the Gulf of Tonkin Incident in 1964, used to launch a massive war on Vietnam. In the 2003 documentary “The Fog of War,” former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara admitted that the so-called Gulf of Tonkin attack never happened.

And for the Iraq War there were the “weapons of mass destruction” that never existed, promoted for the purpose of launching the war by politicians from then-President George W. Bush to then-Sens. Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton. The biggest source for this war propaganda at the time was the New York Times and its top reporter in the region, Judith Miller. 

The New York Times has not stopped being a source for war propaganda and has played a key role in promoting false information about China.

Congressional hypocrisy 

The Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act passed by the House of Representatives is presented in the media as a concern for the plight of Muslims. The reports do not question that narrative, yet it is a Congress that has practically declared war on Muslims. And, of course, President Donald Trump has instituted a Muslim ban, branded Islam as extremism and a vicious cancer that has to be excised, and increased the use of drones by five-fold over the already prolific Obama administration. He also dropped the “mother of all bombs” — the most powerful non-nuclear weapon in the U.S. arsenal — on Afghanistan.

If Congress wanted to act against the repression of Muslim peoples, why have they not said anything about the fascist-like repression and military occupation of Kashmir by the Narendra Modi government of India?

Like the reports that alleged weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the reports on the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China are based on propaganda with a political agenda.

“Media outlets falsely claimed the U.N. reported China is holding a million Uyghurs in camps. The claim is based on unsourced allegations by an American commission member, U.S.-funded outfits, and a shadowy government-funded opposition group,” Ben Norton and Ajit Singh wrote on The Grayzone in an Aug. 23 report titled “No, the U.N. did not report China has ‘massive internment camps’ for Uighur Muslims.”

A follow-up report by Ajit Singh and Max Blumenthal on Dec. 21 is titled “China detaining millions of Uyghurs? Serious problems with claims by U.S.-backed NGO and far-right researcher ‘led by God’ against Beijing.” The subheading says: “Claims that China has detained millions of Uyghur Muslims are based largely on two studies. A closer look at these papers reveals U.S. government backing, absurdly shoddy methodologies, and a rapture-ready evangelical researcher named Adrian Zenz.”

The report continues: “The claim that China has detained millions of ethnic Uyghurs in its Xinjiang region is repeated with increasing frequency, but little scrutiny is ever applied. Yet a closer look at the figure and how it was obtained reveals a serious deficiency in data.

“While this extraordinary claim is treated as unassailable in the West, it is, in fact, based on two highly dubious ‘studies.’

“The first, by the U.S. government-backed Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders, formed its estimate by interviewing a grand total of eight people.

“The second study relied on flimsy media reports and speculation. It was authored by Adrian Zenz, a far-right fundamentalist Christian who opposes homosexuality and gender equality, supports ‘scriptural spanking’ of children, and believes he is ‘led by God’ on a ‘mission’ against China.”

“As Washington ratchets up pressure on China, Zenz has been lifted out of obscurity and transformed almost overnight into a go-to pundit on Xinjiang. He has testified before Congress, providing commentary in outlets from the Wall Street Journal to Democracy Now!, and delivering expert quotes in the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ recent ‘China Cables’ report.”

Zenz, a German theologist, is a senior fellow for China studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation think tank, which is backed by the CIA.

All this comes at a time when the U.S. is openly and brazenly building up its military forces aimed at China. A recent Reuters headline declared: “Pentagon to cut troops in Africa as focus shifts to China, Russia.” 

The report, which, of course, is read in China and Russia as well as the U.S., says, “Earlier this year, the U.S. military put countering China and Russia at the center of a new national defense strategy. … A congressionally mandated report by former U.S. officials released earlier this week said that the military did not have sufficient resources to fund the military’s needs and goals.”

An openly military war has not yet begun, but the war preparations have. Make sure you don’t get caught up in the tangle of war propaganda. There is nothing being done in or by China that can in any way justify any type of intervention. It’s just imperialist propaganda that says otherwise.


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