And now the chinese are our enemies all of a sudden. And we need to stop them from genociding our friends, the muslims. You know, the people who were our deadly enemies like 5 years ago. Huh.
But hey, there's no propaganda at work here, no sir. We're immune to that shit. We have our freedom, so no one would ever lie to us.
Americans can only keep track of one enemy, or thing to be mad about, at a time.
It's why in 2019 all the anti-Chinese outrage centered around the Hong Kong protests, but now that those have fizzled out a bit, it's all about the Uyghurs. Hell, 12 years ago everyone's perception of China began and ended with Free Tibet.
What we're seeing now is the completion of the United State's "pivot to Asia" which began under the Obama administration, but is thoroughly bipartisan. American leaders have finally come around to the fact that China will not be joining the Neoliberal Club as they all expected, and that its massive state subservient industrial base (much of which was brought with the help of Western Capital, with the added bonus of hollowing out American industry) poses a genuine threat to their hegemony. This realization has forced them to regard imperial projects in the Middle East, which used to utterly consume Americas foreign policy, as quaint.
Make no mistake. While, Americas deadly presence in the Middle East will not be scaled back, regardless of of who wins the coming election, we're likely not going to return to the 2001-2015 era obsession with scary black flag waving "radical Islamic terrorism" anytime soon. In fact, I wouldn't be suprised if the next Rambo film is dedicated to the brave mujahideen of Xinjiang.
And we're already getting "Mongolia is oppressed" because it looks like the Uyghur thing might not stick.
It's so fucking obvious, but the neutered western "left" is just going along with it.
the neutered western “left”
unlike nerds who can never talk about the proletariat in China because that would poke a hole in their Dengist idealism.
I completely agree, and would characterize this as correct, with the one exception of wars of conquest in the middle east. Those wars were, in large part, setting up a strategic position from which to strangle the belt-and-road initiative and provide propaganda, funding, and matériel to religious extremists in Xinjiang.
The State Department OPENLY allied with al-Qaeda in Syria and nobody in the media or the general public gave a shit, the pivot has been happening since at least 2012
I'm a euro too, from the north.
I remember like 15-20 years ago, before we had many immigrants from the middle east here. Back then it was the eastern europeans "coming here and taking our jobs and our blonde women". Then when we started getting more immigrants from the middle east, the eastern europeans were suddenly our friends and the middle easterners were "taking our jobs and women and making them wear burkas".
And now my country has joined that "anti-china coalition" or whatever the fuck it's called that's made up of like 7 or 8 countries, so I think I can see where this is going.
If the west keeps pushing a new liberal coalition China is gonna end up being pressured to build a new comintern out of existing socialist states, pop ups on their way in SA and anti-imperialist African efforts that will head on their way that direction. You can pretty much look at Belt and Road countries as an informal anti-imperialist coalition due to the enormous interests involved.
Fingers crossed.
I'm so old I might not live to see it, but I have hopes for the next generation.
Yep, and most don't know that Afghanistan literally shares a border with China.
Right next to Xinjiang.
So, if you bomb the shit out of Afghanistan, where will the extremists go to recuperate and recruit?
Same as it ever was. I've seen, in my lifetime, the "enemy" be:
Soviets
Iran
Iraq
DPRK
"Muslims"
Iraq again
ISIS flavored Muslims
DPRK again
China
It's always the same spiel, about how they hate us for X reason, and we are perfect angels. Occasionally, there's a piece that recognizes that China/US is a passing of the guard, but they always like to throw in stuff about "guaranteeing free trade" being one of the things that will be missed about US hegemony, as if "free trade" isn't what gave China a huge boost and immeasurably increased the rate of decline of the US.
No they knew about the attacks months before they happened and didn’t do shit about them
Interestingly, there was apparently another stabbing attack in France recently and I barely even heard about it
now its those durn antifas and scary chinamen lighting our forests on fire
Crazy how USA was bombing uyghur muslims what like... three years ago? But yes now we need to go liberate them. Makes total sense 100%
France was being praised by western media for their Muslim reeducation programs as recently as 2016
