A claim like “There’s cultural genocide of Uyghurs in Xinjiang”^[1] is simply unreal to most Westerners, close to pure gibberish. The words really refer to existing entities and geographies, but Westerners aren’t familiar with them. The actual content of the utterance as it spills out is no more complex or nuanced than “China Bad,” and the elementary mistakes people make when they write out statements of “solidarity” make that much clear. This is not a complaint that these people have not studied China enough — there’s no reason to expect them to study China, and retrospectively I think to some extent it was a mistake to personally have spent so much time trying to teach them. It’s instead an acknowledgment that they are eagerly wielding the accusation like a club, that they are in reality unconcerned with its truth-content, because it serves a social purpose.

What is this social purpose? Westerners want to believe that other places are worse off, exactly how Americans and Canadians perennially flatter themselves by attacking each others’ decaying health-care systems, or how a divorcee might fantasize that their ex-lover’s blooming love-life is secretly miserable. This kind of “crab mentality” is actually a sophisticated coping mechanism suitable for an environment in which no other course of action seems viable. Cognitive dissonance, the kind that eventually spurs one into becoming intolerant of the status quo and into action, is initially unpleasant and scary for everybody. In this way, we can begin to understand the benefit that “victims” of propaganda derive from carelessly “spreading awareness.” Their efforts feed an ambient propaganda haze of controversy and scandal and wariness that suffocates any painful optimism (or jealousy) and ensuing sense of duty one might otherwise feel from a casual glance at the amazing things happening elsewhere. People aren’t “falling” for atrocity propaganda; they’re eagerly seeking it out, like a soothing balm.

I have tried to explain to people here how horrific the destruction of Iraq was

It doesn't work because they can't truly conceive of it as real, I think. It's "gibberish", as Day puts it above, although the genocide claim above is false while the destruction from the invasion of Iraq was very real. When met with it, to ward off the uncomfortable thought, all they can do is bleat out a "but we saved them from Saddam" because what else can they say? They fundamentally agree with the invasion of Iraq and all the deaths. It was imperialism of a kind that directly (e.g. a worker/manager/boss at an arms factory; a soldier who couldn't get into college but now has a cushy job drone-striking Iraqi children; etc) or indirectly (e.g. briefly further maintained US hegemony over oil production thus allowing lower gas prices and transportation costs for ships and thus treats) benefited them. It was in the material interests of many (but not all!) Americans. Once the latest suite of wars is over, we'll have liberals and grifters claiming they were against the war in Ukraine or Palestine from the very beginning, with the comfortable distance of time and with zero expectation of having to actually do anything that is at odds with their material interests. So it was with Iraq.