The real Xinjiang story is not so difficult to understand:
- The rise of Xi Jinping and the Belt & Road Initiative posed a serious challenge to American supremacy much earlier than they were expecting, so
- the US amped up their funding of terrorism in the region, as per the “Afghan Trap” 1 doctrine outlined by [Carter’s Russia hawk, Zbigniew] Brzezinski, but
- instead of sending in the PLA, repeating the error of the Soviets, China reacted by building schools and vocational programs.
- As a result, the US and its allies desperately pivoted to accusing them of “genocide,” despite lack of evidence.
I’ve yet to see any evidence whatsoever challenging this basic understanding.
Roderic Day, cited in Three China Reads: 1, the Uighurs
Whether through credulity or worse, NGOs like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are acting as advance ideological guards for the US Empire. See Professor Tim Hayward on how it worked in Syria. This is the context for my exchanges, yesterday and this morning, below an Amnesty International appeal to “end persecution” – have you stopped beating your wife yet? – of its Uighurs in Xinjiang.
How many, I wonder, of those who buy this particular aspect of the West’s vilifying of all things China could even locate that geostrategic hotspot on a map?
And so to those Facebook exchanges …
Fallacious or not, Mr Smith’s second comment – Muslim refugees desperate to enter ‘the West’ – is a non sequitur, 2 useful only for its showcasing of the gloopy thinking I encounter over and over on Empire issues from the brainwashed indignant.
Postcript – 24 hours later …
* * *
- Zbigniew Brzezinski’s ‘Afghan Trap’ is briefly discussed in What about the Afghan Women?
- One might, with extreme sophistry, argue that Mr Smith’s invoking Muslim refugees not wanting to enter China is on topic. But it would require evidence not only that Muslim refugees don’t want to come to China, but that any such reluctance is due to Beijing mistreating its own Muslims.