Assessing the hypocrisy of U.S. imperialist propaganda.

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Using a murderous ideology as justification, a group of extremists invade a nation to set up an illegitimate state. With help from the imperialist power that backs it, the state establishes territory, separated from what it hasn't yet conquered by a military partition. For the next eight decades, the new little "country" carries out repression, genocide, and surveillance against the people it's conquered, and uses its nuclear weapons stash to threaten its neighbors. All the while, the empire that props this country up invades numerous nations, enacts neo-colonial projects around the globe, puts ethnic minorities within its borders into concentration camps, unleashes an unparalleled amount of greenhouse-gas emissions due to the greed of its government, and builds a terrifying national security state that's designed to preserve its internal system of cruel worker exploitation.

If you've been conditioned by Western imperialist propaganda, you're likely projecting this story onto China and the DPRK. But what those who use lies to demonize these two countries don't want to face is that every facet of the narrative they've constructed can be applied to the United States and Israel.

The lies that the imperialist media tells about Asia's socialist projects are eerie in this way, because they effectively hold up a mirror to the horrors of Euro-American imperialism and colonialism while insisting that this mirror shows a picture of Washington's adversaries. The story of the Korean War that Washington teaches is not one where the new socialist republic acted to defend itselfin the face of a plan for invading the north by south Korea's U.S.-backed dictator, but one where Kim Il Sung committed a senseless act of aggression. And for many years, U.S. media outlets have claimed that the DPRK is not just totally suppressing political dissent, but committing a genocide where political prisoners and ethnic minorities are forced into concentration camps. As the cold war with China has intensified in these last couple of years, these types of charges have become levelled against it just as frequently; citing shoddy "studies" with obviously flawed methodologies, imperialist pundits have claimed that China is putting millions into concentration camps where organ harvesting and forced sterilization occur.

This has gone along with narratives, based on easily debunkable claims, of China carrying out "neo-colonialism" in Africa. It's also gone along with portrayals of China as the primary country to blame for the climate crisis, even though China is nine years ahead of its greenhouse-gas reduction goals. Under the worldview that the U.S. empire has manufactured, China and the DPRK are the two paragons of necro-politics, evil to a truly legendary extent. The indoctrination has made it so that when you think of mass surveillance, persecution of ethnic groups, or brutal labor exploitation, the first things you tend to think about as an American are these two countries. But we must understand just how appallingly blatant these lies we've been fed are. As journalist Tony Cartalucci has written about the nonexistent basis for the DPRK atrocity stories that the U.S. media puts forth:

The "pattern" Washington Post writer Anna Fifield and many others claim to have spotted is merely a pattern of unverified claims being made by the Western media--built upon previously and likewise unverified claims, creating a cartoon-like vilification of a state writers at the New York Times and Washington Post know readers are unfamiliar with. The Western media understands their narratives are difficult for the public to question without conducting their own, extensive and time-consuming research. They depend on readers not clicking links--if links are even included--to long UN reports and understanding the paper-thin credibility of such reports when built entirely on "witness testimony."

The same kinds of plot holes exist in the Uyghur atrocity stories that we've been hearing lately. The U.N. gets all of its fraudulent DPRK accounts from former DPRK citizens who've been paid exorbitant amounts of money to make up lies for the media, who are found through CIA a program to farm for individuals from the country which are willing to become propaganda mouthpieces. In the last month, Amelia Pang, an Uyghur who'sworked for the Epoch Times (an outlet that's known to fabricate claims about China and is controlled by the far-right religious cult Falun Gong) has been doing the equivalent of what these opportunistic DPRK defectors do. Last month, Pang wrote a manipulative New York Times article titled "It Took a Genocide for Me to Remember My Uighur Roots," followed up by a New York Times "report" that claims to expose extensive labor exploitation in China's manufacturing sector.

I don't need to debunk everything these manipulators say, though it's worth mentioning that an academic study has shown the narrative about labor exploitation in China's manufacturing sector to be a myth. What I really want to talk about is just how totally the U.S. and its settler-colonial extension Israel mirror the false image that the empire has spun about China and the DPRK.

It's the U.S. that's established an ever-expanding network of concentration camps. After years of children dying in the migrant camps due to unsanitary conditions, reports of physical and sexual abuse by guards, and accounts of women in the facilities getting forced hysterectomies, Biden is opening an overflow facility for migrant children. And the prison-industrial complex that motivates this genocidal detention campaign is here to stay for as long as the United States still exists; this was made apparent when Biden, who's supposedly the "most progressive president in history," signed a prison-reform law that only symbolically changes the country's mass-incarceration system while essentially leaving the for-profit prison model alone.

It's the U.S., in partnership with Israel, that's been carrying out heinous police violence against its impoverished residents as punishment for their defiance of the country's plutocratic and genocidal system. In the last decade, the U.S. has been heavily militarizing its police forces while Israelifying its national security state, with the same Israeli forces who repress the Palestinians being used to train U.S. officers. This has resulted in an uptick in police violence against America's colonized peoples, and a greater ease for U.S. police to commit atrocities against protesters. It's also gone along with the creation of the most intrusive digital-surveillance state on the planet, facilitated by a vast NSA operation to process the online and phone-based communications of everyone in the country.

It's the U.S. that's built an imperialist apparatus that is forcing millions around the globe into poverty and perpetuating the world's largest polluting operation. Euro-American neo-colonialism continues to intensify austerity, wage cuts, and privatization throughout the Third World, with the IMF imposing these measures onto 81 countries as a means to exploit the pandemic. The U.S. military-industrial complex is doing more to exacerbate the climate crisis than any other entity, with the U.S. military alone consuming more hydrocarbons than most countries do. And U.S. imperialism perpetrates all of the kinds of belligerence that China is accused of, with Washington engaging in military buildup against Russia and China, regularly moving navy vessels into Chinese waters, and carrying out assassinations against Iranian generals and scientists in collaboration with Israel.

It's the U.S. that's forcing its people into ever-increasing deprivation due to the demands of its neoliberal profit-making paradigm. After the economic crash of this last year, a quarter of the U.S. population is food insecure, nearly half of lower-income adults have newly gotten trouble with paying their bills, and millions have become at risk of losing their homes despite the federal government's weakly effective moratorium. Austerity within the U.S. is also being furthered due to Biden's agenda of perpetual war, which siphons resources that should be used for humanitarian purposes into the military. At the same time, in this last year China has improved the living standards of its people, eliminating absolute poverty for the first time.

It's Washington's puppet Israel that's doing all the evil deeds that the DPRK gets accused of. Israel regularly carries out crimes of aggression against its neighbors Syria and Yemen while threatening nuclear strikes against Iran. Israel's government bypasses civil liberties and basic democratic norms to persecute those within its borders who support BDS. Israel keeps hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the open-air concentration camp of Gaza, where people are deliberately deprived of food, water, and medical care while being subjected to constant Israeli bombings and shootings of civilians. Israel perpetually lies to justify its army's killings of Palestinian children and unarmed individuals, frequently inventing threats to justify these war crimes and using the baseless "human shields" defense. Israel subjects Palestinians to an extreme authoritarianism where their movements are deeply restricted, intrusive checkpoints are part of daily life, and no one can politically organize or exercise freedom of speech.

Since the start of the colonial occupation, Israel has also applied surveillance to Palestinians, which as one 2017 report on Israeli apartheid says has recently gotten more intensive than ever: "a plethora of new technologies, such as phone and internet monitoring and interception, CCTV, and biometric data collection, have enabled Israel to surveil the population it occupies on a massive, intrusive scale. Israel particularly uses social media to monitor what individual Palestinians say and do, as well as to gather and analyze information on attitudes among the Palestinian public more broadly." This surveillance paradigm extends globally, with the report also saying that "The country's military industrial complex is an even more profound enabler of the digital surveillance of Palestinians. Israel manufactures and exports a massive amount of military and cyber security technologies... Such technologies were sold to authoritarian and repressive regimes in Colombia, Kazakhstan, Mexico, South Sudan, the UAE, and Uzbekistan, among others."

Hypocrisy pervades every aspect of the U.S. ruling-class ideology, with its posturings of concern for supposed human rights abuses by Washington's geopolitical rivals. The U.S. and Israel are the two most necro-political countries on the planet, not China and the DPRK. Projection is how Americans become convinced of the opposite.

Authors Bio:

Rainer Shea is writing articles that counter the propaganda of the capitalist/imperialist power establishment, and that help move us towards a socialist revolution. Donate to me on Patreon here:
https://www.patreon.com/user?u=11988744