This is purely a rant because I don’t want to end up writing an effort post about this topic.
Every year, we see Westerners posting about the “Tiananmen Square Massacre” across social media. Their devotion to “fighting the oppressive Chinese government” is like fucking clockwork. It’s so reliable that if you wanted to, you can prepare posts and comments to counter their narratives months before each June 4th. The western narrative has been debunked thoroughly even by Western sources.
But the point of this post isn’t to complain about the twisting of events, but the glaring contradiction that is their relative (or absolute) lack of posts about events outside of China that were equally or even more brutal than they claim June 4th was.
Why is that?
Why aren’t they posting as regularly about the genocide of indigenous people in their own countries? Why aren’t they posting so frequently about the massacres in Jakarta? Why aren’t they posting as regularly about the bombing of Nagasaki or Hiroshima or Nagasaki or Dresden or Yemen or Iraq of Afghanistan or Syria? Why aren’t they posting each year about the famines Britain engineered in India and other countries? Why don’t I see yearly posts about the Nanjing Massacre? That also occurred in China. Why don’t I see the same reminders about the transatlantic slave trade?
The governments that perpetrated (and in some cases, continue) many of these atrocities still exist and are still oppressing the people who were targeted during these events. This is why they say they target China, right?
Hell, the Holocaust and the subsequent resurgence of facism sees less attention from Westerners than the June 4th incident these days.
The reason for this disparity is that these people don’t actually give a shit whether the Chinese people are oppressed. When they say “I hate the Chinese government, but I don’t hate the Chinese people,” they don’t give a shit whether the Chinese people support and continue to build their current government. It’s not about supporting others, it’s about asserting the dominance and righteousness of the Western world. Not only can they not empathize with those outside the West, they put immense effort into doing the opposite.
It’s about convincing themselves that they live in a just society and that, despite how badly they are oppressed, they could always be worse off. It’s racist, but that racism serves a purpose: it is the copium that keeps them convinced that it’s ok to be oppressed by their own governments.
I don’t rant because I expect the sinophobic propaganda to disappear. I rant because I’m tired of the racism. I rant because I’m tired of the ignorance. I rant because all I want is to see people show others a bit of empathy, to show a little skepticism when they are told others are evil, a little curiosity about the other’s point of view, but I’m constantly disappointed.
Rant over. Thanks for listening.
Neither Washington nor Moscow was and is a well-honed propaganda strategy employed by the CIA, US State Dept, western media, etc. It doesn’t matter to them if you’re willing to criticize them, they don’t care as long as in the same breath you criticize their enemies, implicitly acknowledge their propaganda, validate their contention that yes, things have been done badly here BUUUT the numbers of death and human rights violations (according to western propaganda) are much higher over there, thus naturally it’s better over here than there. After which comes the next step of dismissal which is “stop whining, things could be worse, be grateful, you have no idea how privileged you are, how dare you attack this great country why do you know in blah blah blah you can’t even blah blah blah?”.
People who say this are not engaging in critical thinking. You criticize the west but do you believe the Chinese media? Do you read their perspectives? If their media is invalid because they abuse human rights, so should the media you read from the west be invalid. Yet this is never the case. It is never the case that such propaganda is examined, subjected to ruthless criticism and introspection with outside the empire perspectives and discarded. Even when there is a history of people calling out problems time and again and being ignored in the moment, do you listen to them in future or breathlessly await the latest piece of China bad news to make you feel slightly better about your problems?
Self-effacing and dishonest acknowledgement with a framing that it’s still the best you’re going to get is not helpful. Acknowledging too little too late and offering worthless words of salve to the victims.
Education and awareness are worthless. The past is the past. It only matters if you learn to prevent it in the present and future. Do you think the dead care about you saying what was done to them is wrong? Do those suffering today from the western military/intelligence actions who you will say you feel sorry about in 10 years care that in 10 years you will be sad and acknowledge the wrong or do they care about you understanding the wrong, spotting it now and speaking up to stop it NOW. Not to deflect, not to “but China worse” their suffering.
Look no further than many of those mindlessly defending “isreal” and their genocide. There are many among them who understand the holocaust, who know the history all too well. Yet they didn’t take away the right lessons, they took away that it was bad it happened to Jews but it’s good when it happens to Palestinians who are deserving. They take away something that’s frozen, disconnected, it gives them no analytical power to prevent the next atrocity unless it’s exactly like the last.
This kind of thinking is never accompanied by an honest assessment that one can’t really impact the process in China, the problems in China. All one can do is assist aggression by powers that have historically, time and again done bad things (often to the very same countries these accusations are against).
Is it not proper to clean one’s own yard first before screaming at your neighbor and going to knock down their fence to try and force them to fix their yard? Yet the priority is always on their yard, on the soothing balm, the salve that at least you live in a less bad place than those savages in China, Russia, wherever. A complacency, a smugness, a racially tinged feeling that for all the problems in your land, it has many upsides while their land has few. A feeling that their problems would justify violence, revolution, uprising, but your problems should be solved by working within a system that has never done anything but appropriate the memories of its victims while continuing the victimization and has been happy to brutally crush any real dissent and threats to it time and again.
Minimization of real western atrocities in favor of playing up, laser-focusing on accusations against others.