"Humanitarianism" is the weapon that modern U.S. imperialism uses as the cornerstone in its campaigns to destabilize countries and regions. By presenting its violence as a selfless effort to save the people it targets, the empire can not just claim its hands are clean, but pose as heroic. It's a natural evolution from the "white man's burden," repackaged for the modern age where the United States pretends to not be racist. And it fits perfectly into the falsely progressive and enlightened brand of liberalism in the social media age, which hides its support for oppressive systems behind feel-good sloganeering.
The ironic thing about the current manifestation of this "human rights" marketing for Washington's engineered global destruction is that Russia, the country behind the supposed atrocities, is actually fulfilling the humanitarian duties that the U.S. claims to carry out. Russia's special operation was in response to an imminent Ukrainian invasion of the newly independent Donbass republics, and to ethnic cleansing that's been occurring for eight years by the design of the fascist Kiev regime. Yet these realities, despite being supported by post-2014 Ukraine's belligerent history and by extensive human rights abuse documentation, are impenetrable within our discourse. Our cultural hegemony has been molded to block out the facts Washington wants to pretend aren't real, and to make all of the "facts" Washington puts forth appear unquestionable. The narrative management around Ukraine is so effective because it didn't start this year. The foundations for it were laid decades ago, and the extent of the "humanitarian" propaganda has been greatly intensified throughout the last decade in particular.
Lighting Syria on fire & blaming it on Assad
From the way commentators talk about Syria, you'd think it was a repeat of Nazi Germany, with Assad playing the role of Hitler and the "moderate rebels" being the liberators. Yet there are innumerable cracks in the wall of lies we've been subjected to about Syria, one of which is that the West's narratives on it have mirrored previous imperialist disinformation campaigns. Disinformation campaigns that have been undeniably exposed as such. To justify the Gulf War, George H.W. Bush claimed that Saddam Hussein was worse than Hitler. To support this, the imperialist propagandists got a child to testify to having witnessed Iraqi soldiers taking babies out of incubators and leaving them to die. Then this testimony was exposed as a lie, and the credibility of the United States was irrevocably damaged.
To justify its theft-ridden occupation of around one-third of Syria, its backing of Kurdish proxy forces that commit cultural cleansing to advance ethnic nationalism, its support for the jihadists behind the conflict, and its starvation sanctions, the U.S. has used these tricks again. The narrative managers have even repeated the tactic of manipulating a child into lying. As Max Blumenthal wrote in 2017 about the way the imperialist media was using the Syrian refugee girl Bana al-abed during the most intensive years of the propaganda war against Syria:
Bana Alabed was a seven-year-old who gained international celebrity by publishing video messages and pleas for intervention from her Twitter account in Aleppo ("it's better to start 3rd world war," read one of her tweets). Though she faked it as best as she could, Bana had no ability to understand English; her mother and a collection of helpers appeared to be writing her tweets and scripting her video soliloquies. (Bana's father, a former insurgent named Ghassan Alabed, carefully avoided the spotlight.) After Aleppo was taken from the insurgents, Bana was passed through Al Qaeda-controlled Idlib and into Turkey, where she became a centerpiece of state propaganda and was made a citizen following a bizarre photo-op with its Islamist premier, Tayyip Recep Erdogan. She was also granted an audience at Erdogan's palace with American actress Lindsay Lohan, who spoke in a bizarrely put-on Arabic accent.
These theatrics were so exaggerated and obnoxious because their purpose was to get Americans to view the war the same way they view Marvel movies. The goal was to create the impression that Assad is a supervillain, and that he was being taken down by the designated good guys-with the production's protagonists consisting of jihadists who'd been suddenly recast as heroes, Kurdistan fighters who were marketed as progressive despite indirectly taking example from Zionism, unaware child exploitation victims like Bana who were literally reading from scripts, and the White Helmets. The U.S. armed forces couldn't take the superhero role this time, because the one million dead Iraqis had prompted for a shift in how war gets advertised. So the destabilization of Syria was presented as an entirely organic project, done by actors who got presented as independent. It was like the propaganda-filled proxy war against Yugoslavia, except with a Hollywood aesthetic. One that Hollywood had a direct hand in manufacturing.
This was a way of taking the military propaganda within superhero movies to the next level, making Americans feel like they were actually watching enforcers of justice try to defeat an enemy of humanity. There was no depth or serious analysis to it, which was the point. With our culture being conditioned to view Syria in a way so utterly detached from reality, it was easy to cover the tracks of Washington's proxies when they got caught fabricating a lie or committing an atrocity. The terrorist ties of the White Helmets, which in many cases involved White Helmets members directly assisting in murders, were portrayed as entirely imaginary. The idea that they had anything to do with the Al-Nusra Front, or the other jihadist organizations, was labeled as the product of a Russian disinformation campaign. Netflix produced a documentary about the White Helmets designed to make them out as the real-life equivalents of the Avengers. The film won an Academy Award, reinforcing just how seriously we were supposed to take the spectacle.
It was all to provide a counter-narrative to the revelations which inevitably came out about how the White Helmets had been staging false flag chemical attacks. When Wikileaks showed that the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons had suppressed its own findings on how the 2018 Douma incident wasn't a gas attack but a case of mass dust inhalation, contradicting what the White Helmets had said, the damage had already been done. Syria had been reduced to a point where Washington could leverage sanctions towards sabotaging the rebuilding effort. And as indie media commentator Edward Curtin assessed, the sources behind the propaganda which brought about this tragedy had been made untouchable within our cultural hegemony:
The film with the Orwellian title, Bellingcat: Truth in a Post-Truth World, received its Emmy at a recent ceremony in New York City. Bellingcat is an alleged group of amateur on-line researchers who have spent years shilling for the U.S. instigated war against the Syrian government, blaming the Douma chemical attack and others on the Assad government, and for the anti-Russian propaganda connected to, among other things, the Skripal poisoning case in England, and the downing of flight MH17 plane in Ukraine. It has been lauded by the corporate mainstream media in the west. Its support for the equally fraudulent White Helmets (also funded by the US and the UK) in Syria has also been praised by the western corporate media while being dissected as propaganda by many excellent independent journalists such as Eva Bartlett, Vanessa Beeley, Catte Black, among others.
It's had its work skewered by the likes of Seymour Hersh and MIT professor Theodore Postol, and its US government connections pointed out by many others, including Ben Norton and Max Blumenthal at The Gray Zone. And now we have the mainstream media's wall of silence on the leaks from the Organization for the Prohibition on Chemical Weapons (OPCW) concerning the Douma chemical attack and the doctoring of their report that led to the illegal U.S. bombing of Syria in the spring of 2018. Bellingcat was at the forefront of providing justification for such bombing, and now the journalists Peter Hitchens, Tareq Harrad (who recently resigned from Newsweek after accusing the publication of suppressing his revelations about the OPCW scandal) and others are fighting an uphill battle to get the truth out.
These narrative manipulations made the parallel propaganda campaign about Xinjiang easy. Naturally, it was shortly after the Douma disinformation blitz that the narrative managers pivoted towards this new target.
The Uyghur "genocide" & the solidification of the new cold war's anti-communism
It was in August 2018, with the claim by numerous media outlets that the United Nations had reported there being "massive internment camps" for Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, that the next stage in the "humanitarian" propaganda campaign began. The perception that the Uyghurs are an oppressed minority had already been cultivated for decades. With this new wave of disinformation, the narrative managers could expand it into a mythology about a new Holocaust taking place within China.
In reality, the United Nations hadn't reported any internment camps. The claim was only made by the sole American member of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. And the basis for this claim came from the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders, which is heavily funded by the CIA's front group the National Endowment for Democracy. This was where the popular assertion about China interning "1 million" Uyghurs originates, with far-right Christian fundamentalist Adrian Zenz being the pseudo-expert leading the paper-thin investigations "proving" the number's accuracy. This and other wild allegations against China were given an additional sense of legitimacy by the Uyghur Tribunal, an "independent" mock legal procedure that was funded by the U.S. government. The Tribunal's actors did an 80-hour performance which "proved" China was guilty of genocide, as if time matters more than substance.
The narrative managers had put on another production, with the drama this time relying on rhetorical storytelling; there was no visual evidence that could be construed as genocide. There were no mass graves, and no refugee crises. Just a bunch of stories, ones sourced from paid Uyghur testimony-givers in the same fashion as the DPRK's celebrity defectors. The propagandists were determined to ingrain these stories into the collective consciousness, as this was the only way to manipulate people's emotions. So they had to be big and hyperbolic, however dubious the statistics or the sources were. Ajit Singh and Max Blumenthal assessed that:
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
