LYING TO CHINA!
They are lying to China. They are lying shamelessly and continuously. They are lying about its past and present, about prospects for its future, even its your ‘involvement all over the world’.
Whatever it does (and doesn’t do) is being scrutinized, analyzed, and in the end twisted, perverted, and methodically rearranged.
They need China to look evil, cynical, corrupt and terribly dangerous.
Don’t laugh; they are actually succeeding; that is how the world now sees China – as some neo-colonialist, neo-imperialist pariah. China that could be easily described as the most pacifist major country on earth, which has never attacked anyone, except after that one instance of terrible judgment, when its army crossed the border into Vietnam.
But who are ‘they’?
They are Western imperialists and neo-colonialists; all those who will never stop before they take full control over the world and before they choke even the last flickers of resistance. When I say full control, I don’t mean just over the planet’s natural resources (some people are naively thinking that financial greed is the only driving engine), but especially over the minds of the people living on all the continents.
They are Western fascists – Europeans and North Americans. I am talking about those who have been, for centuries, destroying the entire world, murdering hundreds of millions of innocent men, women and children, sparking wars and conflicts, just in order to be the sole rulers of the universe… those who plunder and rule, or more precisely, those who rule and plunder.
It is a deep chronic illness, so well identified and described by the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung – that obsession of controlling, ruling, violating… Do you remember all those Crusades? Knights carrying crosses, and on their way severing the heads of people from all over the Middle East, torturing innocent people just for enjoyment? They cut open the stomachs of pregnant women with their sharp swords, in the name of Jesus Crist, in the name of some ridiculous religious dogmas. They raped children and looted all they could put their hands on…. All well justified by early propaganda. All in the name of the cross and some grotesque divine justice.
Still the same… It is still the same.
And after all they have done, after all those crimes, they managed to convince millions all over the world, that this is a truly righteous way to live. Many in Asia, Africa, Latin America, even the Middle East, joined the ranks and became collaborators.
Look at all those bandits in Africa who learned so well from colonizers and are now choking, and keeping in misery, their own brothers and sisters. Look at those lunatic Protestant priests in Surabaya who are all living like pigs in oranges, while corrupting hundreds of millions of dollars, cheating, cashing on people’s ignorance, fears and deranged hopes!
Look how everything resembling social justice or even the simplest justice, gets discredited, dragged through dirt, spat on, ridiculed – in the Philippines, Indonesia and Oceania, in fact in every country marked by Western ‘values’.
Any country, be it China, Russia, Iran, Eritrea, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, Ecuador, Bolivia, Zimbabwe and even South Africa; any country that dares to stand against Western imperialism, is immediately attacked by the most vicious propaganda tools. It gets discredited in Western and regional media (that is mostly owned by servile local ‘elites’, anyway).
There should be no lofty ideals allowed to bloom, anymore. Just in the face stuffing, empty and idiotic world of social media where the entire human condition has to fit to just a few pretentious and primitive slogans… Soulless computer-generated pop, unbridled consumerism, and naturally, status symbols… This is all that this world is being reduced to.
If China keeps building schools in Africa and Oceania (and I saw it doing exactly that), it is deduced that it does it ‘because it is trying to get hands on the natural resources in those parts of the world’. You can argue as much as you want that there are hardly any resources in Polynesia and Micronesia, but your voice will be overpowered by the cacophony of those British and North American media outlets that, after centuries of spreading lies to their subjects, reached the highest level of perfection, so much that it was even admired by Nazi propagandists before and during the WWII.
The bottom line, the gospel of the West is that if North American and European imperialism and neo-colonialism are shit, then shit is the essential essence of human nature.
It is as if a boy or a girl raised in absolute submission to family, finds out that his or her parents are actually gangsters and thieves, and instead of digesting the facts and running away, comes to the twisted conclusion: ‘well, they are just humans… it is sad that the entire world is like that’.
But the world is not ‘like that’. And the banditry of Western colonialism, capitalism and imperialism, as well as its religions and dogmas, are totally unique and exceptional in its brutality and perversion.
The ability to twist the facts is breathtaking.
Arundhati Roy very correctly pointed out, that in the Western lexicon, war is peace…
And let me add: the world’s most peaceful countries are portrayed as the most violent… while those that have plundered for centuries, are getting away with acting as self-designated enforcers of law and order.
*
Last year, Tsinghua University in Beijing ran a two-day seminar on my work. I was invited to address both professors and students, and on the second day, my then unedited and very long film about Rwanda and the genocide it has been committing in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), had been shown to a packed auditorium of exceptionally well behaved and enthusiastic young men and women.
At some stage and at a point, however, our dialogue became slightly peculiar. I was asked, again and again, what should be the approach of journalists, writers and thinkers, towards their own society. Should they always be extremely critical?
It was very clear that students were bombarded, and many of them already brainwashed by Western propaganda.
“Should we always be critical of our country?” asked one studious-looking girl sitting in the front row.
“I think you should, above all, try to understand your country… and the world… and first of all, to position China in the context of the world and its history… I also think that you should criticize mainly those global forces that are causing the most destruction to this planet,” I answered.
I received applause from some, and bewilderment from others.
“But isn’t it our obligation to criticize our own nation?” asked someone else. “Constantly… So it becomes better?”
“And what if it is doing some things right?” I snapped. “What if it does many things right? What if the new government continues with the reforms in education and medical care, making China a true and sound socialist country? What if it keeps building subway lines, high-speed trains, public parks, and playgrounds? What if it keeps subsidizing culture and becomes the world leader in the protection of the environment? ”
There was silence.
Here, criticism was obviously in vogue, but not in the West.
“Look”, I said, taking a further risk to confuse my new friends. “When I show my films at Oxford University or at Columbia University, or even at Hong Kong University… How many debates are there afterwards about whether the Western system sucks or should be totally trashed or overthrown? None. It is only you that are expected to ‘be critical’ to such an extreme… Only you, the Russians, Latin Americans, and everybody who is not in the same boat as Westerners.”
“And”, I continued. “When you go to your ‘798 Art District’ here in Beijing, full of galleries and theatres… Almost every artwork that you see there is critical and engaged… You go to similar districts in New York or London or Sydney, and what do you see? Nothing! Decorative crap, mostly… And you go to those few galleries in the West’s client states, in Indonesia or Philippines and Thailand, all you see there is total, absolute, low and dirty pop crap; nothing even resembling art or human thought!”
As we were driving through Beijing, Andy from “April Media” uttered:
“Recently, a local publishing house translated a book by some mainstream US academic… Something to do with colonialism after Columbus… He used some numbers… nothing controversial or ‘radical’. Just run-of-the-mill stuff… But you cannot even imagine what happened: this poor publishing house began receiving thousands of letters written by outraged readers. Like: ‘we had enough of this anti-Western Communist propaganda! Westerners are noble people; they never killed millions of locals in any part of the world…”
“So they are winning? Western propaganda is now controlling the minds of many educated Chinese people?” I wondered.
“Yes”, sighed Andy. “They are very successful. They are turning world opinion against China, and they are even managing to turn Chinese people against their own country… and definitely against their system that is still supported by the local majority.”
*
After a few beers in Beijing, I recalled Pilsen, a small city of 180,000 inhabitants, between Prague and Bavaria; the city where I grew up.
My mother is half Chinese and half Russia, my father is Central European. I was born in Leningrad, but they brought me to Pilsen when I was a small kid.
And when I was a small kid, the Soviet army and the armies of other East European countries, occupied Czechoslovakia in 1968. There were even few tanks parked in front of the building where I lived…. Just two or three… they soon left.
To occupy an independent country is always an ugly business. Few people died… no barbarity or mass rapes, though, unlike when the US or UK, or France fought to retain their colonies or their client states. No children violated in front of their parents, and no large civilian casualties. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers in motion, all that military hardware, and only a dozen or two people lost their lives.
But I remember that the world was told to believe that it was an event on the level of Chile in 1973 (3-4 thousands people died and tens of thousands were raped and brutally tortured) or Indonesia in 1965 (2-3 million died, millions raped and tortured).
Of course the world ‘believed’, as it eats all the propaganda that compares Nazi Germany and Soviet Union. You hardly hear people protesting: hey, if all human lives are equal and we are talking about casualties, the Russians were nowhere near the slaughterhouse unleashed by Western Europeans and the US in their colonies. If anything, German Nazis actually learned from West European colonial powers and from the North American advertising industry, shaping its propaganda on advertising tactics, and its concentration camps on those built by the Brits in South Africa, Kenya and elsewhere.
But of course the USSR, which saved humanity from Nazism and then made almost all liberation and anti-colonial struggles on all continents possible, had been designated as the main villain comparable to German Nazis. And who said so? The Western bigots and fascists!
And now China…
But back to Pilsen…
When I published my first book in the West… and when I was told that it is time to go… And then, when I finally arrived in New York… I still remember, how stupid I felt, how brainwashed! Not by Czech or Soviet propaganda, but by the BBC, Voice of America, Radio Liberty… My god, I felt so embarrassed, so fooled!
What did they do to us? How did they manage?
In New York, people asked me about breadlines in Czechoslovakia, about the torture of the political prisoners.
My best friend, Yuan Sheng, a brilliant Chinese concert pianist who graduated from the Manhattan School of Music and few years ago returned to Beijing, once confessed to me:
“I cried so many times… at night… when I lived in New York… what they were telling about China, what they were writing… I felt totally helpless.”
I felt the same. But I had no love for Central Europe; not what Yuan felt for his country. I never had my ‘own country’…
But I still felt totally helpless, because by then I understood how deep those lies went, how toxic, how bulletproof they were.
Czechoslovakia was not a paradise… Pilsen was not some heaven. But in New York, at night, I often recalled glimpses of life there:
How, for instance, one night, I was leaving a cine club where I had just watched a brilliant Japanese film, ‘Woman in the Dunes’. And how it was dark and I met my old friend Lenka, she was coming from some theatre and asked me whether we could have a drink… We were 18 or 19 then. We had a drink and talked about Japanese cinema and the latest British theatre and world politics…
The city of 180,000 had several theatres, and cinemas showing all sorts of stuff, from Italian, French and US avant-garde movies, including some Asian ones… And all that was almost for free, and so was the opera. There were many libraries and they were full of Sartre, Camus and Beauvoir. Writers like Joseph Heller had their books translated into Czech, and they were published – fifty to a hundred thousand copies each – in a language spoken by only 10 million people.
But we were told, we were ordered to think, that it was all total intellectual hell, full of censorship, and lacking freedom.
While it was very clear to me, soon after arriving in New York that the West, at least, judged by the kids of my age, was much more brainwashed, submissive and lacking in freedom of thought. When it came to substance, of course, not in terms of the form.
*
And so I am thinking: ‘can the greatest culture on earth, and one of the most ancient, go down the drain, torpedoed by the fabricated lies of Western mass media, which is clearly on yet another crusade – to destroy, to hurt and to abolish all alternatives in the world’?
And can we even see North American and European media outlets as ‘media’? I highly doubt so. They are part of the propaganda machine, defending business interests; the corporations that actually own them.
If advertising is basically a legalized set of lies and deceptions, then so is what comes out of Western magazines, newspapers and television channels.
My good friend who lives in Tokyo and writes for one of the most ‘respected’ British publications, recently explained: “when I write pieces about the US military bases in Okinawa, I have to keep a certain line; otherwise my articles would be changed or shelved. I have to say that the US bases are there to defend Japan and ‘free’ Asia, against the growing Chinese threat…”
As I was told by several academics in Manila, Philippines, the US is basically corrupting local intellectuals, pitching them against China. The Manila-based journo community is going wild, overboard, trying to please its handlers who fly them out for ‘training’ and offer countless perks. China is portrayed in the local press as a villain, a provocateur, not as a victim of both propaganda and open US military confrontational military policy.
But isn’t it obvious? How can a bandit, colonialist Western culture that has managed to overthrow hundreds of governments, to butcher hundreds of millions of human beings on all continents, still maintain some air of moral superiority? And how can China, a country that has suffered so terribly from Western occupations, deceit and plunder, believe in this entire propaganda charade?
And how can it all be really tolerated and taken seriously? Go to almost any Hong Kong bookstore, and you will see dozens of sarcastic anti-Communist titles, open insults directed at the present system of the PRC; caricatures, and sentimental family journeys. But ask them for any books critical of their former colonial masters, ask them about the books on the legacy of great British bigots, racists and mass murderers like Winston Churchill or Lloyd George, and you will be confronted by long faces, and assistants would suddenly pretend that they don’t understand English, anymore.
It is all gloriously screwed up. And it is of course no secret. And it is of course not about the truth and honesty, anymore.
It is all very clear: those who trash China and its ‘new and dangerous role in the world’ still have much more money to dispense to their ‘followers’, than those who see the Chinese model as some sort of viable alternative for this planet.
And, as shown throughout the history, well-remunerated intellectual prostitution is much more common in certain circles of the empires and their colonies, than an honest but ostracizing search for truth.
But how did those students who attended my lectures, managed to get so confused? They were not some academic whores: they were a sincere, honest bunch…
*
It is clear that Western propaganda, especially in the colonies and client states, but not exclusively there, is very ‘selective’ and does not like any comparisons.
But comparing things, including crimes, is the only way how to arrive at some objective understanding of the way our world is arranged.
For instance, when some UK or US magazine throws an absolutely insulting and nonsensical cliché putting into one sack both “Nazism and Communism”, you are not supposed to ask: ‘all right, so how many people really died under Stalin for political reasons and how many died under British colonial rule? And how many nations were destroyed by European imperialism, or ravished by slavery?’
Or, didn’t tiny Belgium manage to massacre over 10 million Congolese people at the beginning of 20th century?
To use the Western propaganda ‘logic’ directed against Communist USSR and China, should mean that both Western style ‘democracy’ and ‘constitutional monarchy’ should immediately be declared evil and thoroughly illegal. And so should Christianity as a whole, naturally.
But it is never put like that. ‘Every human life matters’, we are told. Well, damn right, it does! And that is why, that is exactly why, we should compare, calculate and recall exactly who killed whom, how many millions were slaughtered by which continent, nation and by which ideology… And then and only then humanity should decide through an honest referendum and vote, who should have the moral mandate to rule, and who shouldn’t!
Any honest comparison clearly shows that Communism could never be comparable to Nazism, only Western Imperialism and colonialism can. And in fact, these two are two sides of the same coin. In the first half of the 20th century, British, US, French, Belgian, Dutch and other colonialist assassins inspired German Nazis who then performed on European soil what other Europeans were doing (and in a way are doing still) for centuries on all other continents.
The Soviet Union defeated Nazism, at a tremendous cost of 20 million of its citizens. It saved the world from this horrible racist and extreme-right-wing dogma. Later, it helped to liberate almost the entire world from European and US colonialism. Naturally, something like that could never be ‘forgiven’ by Western fundamentalists and their propagandists.
Now China is next. How could capitalism and market fundamentalism forgive a country that has managed to lift hundreds of millions of its people out of poverty? How could it excuse a nation that offered alternatives to the oppressed masses and to the [neo-] colonized world?
*
Several years ago I could not sleep onboard an Air New Zealand flight. I selected a channel showing the ‘iconic’ German film, ‘Life of the others’, about an East German Stasi officer who was spying on a couple of dissident artists. At the end of the film he breaks down, shows his human face and the couple survives.
In my life, I have covered dozens of conflict zones where Western intelligence officers have never cracked, and where children were raped in front of their parents (or vice versa), where entire villages and towns were destroyed and burned, where the hopes of thousands, even millions were shattered. I am talking about Central and South America, Southeast Asia, Africa, the Middle East.
Recently I saw another German film called “5 Jahre Leben” (5 Years Life), this time onboard Singapore Airlines. This autobiographic movie showed the horrific ordeal of an innocent Turkish Muslim man, imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay.
I believe these two films should be watched in one go, to compare the oppressiveness of the state apparatuses of East Germany and the United States. I believe it would be absolutely clear to any thinking being, which one was more horrific.
It is also obvious that Western market fundamentalism and neo-colonialism won, for now, over progressive and socialist ideals, only because of its brutality, lack of compassion, canny propaganda and disinformation strategy.
Only the total horror and pain the West put this planet through, can explain this temporary ‘victory’, this monstrous unnatural state, and arrangement in which we are all forced to live.
This black sarcasm, depressing nihilism, degenerate culture of consumerism as well as extreme individualism, can never bring inspiration to the human race. The fear, lies and propaganda of the neo-colonialists can delay natural development of human race, but can never create an even semi-decent society.
In their essence, people are optimistic, sharing, willing to work, to live and even to die for humanity.
This sad state of affairs that I see in almost all parts of the world, is nothing else other than a result of intensive brainwashing, indoctrination and the lowest grade of capitalist and fascist propaganda.
East Europe, including the Soviet Union, never came close to creating such an effective indoctrination system. China never did, either.
*
It is not that the countries that are resisting Western dogma are perfect. Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, China, Russia, Eritrea, Iran, and dozens of other proud places, are not some sort of paradise on earth.
And the Soviet Union, which fought for the freedom and self-determination of almost all the oppressed nations of the Earth, often did so by using wrong means. But it fought. And thanks to it, many colonial structures were smashed, and many shackles were broken.
We have never managed to build an ‘ideal society’ on this planet. Maybe one day we will, or maybe not. And who really cares about an ‘ideal society’ – a just, honest, and socially sound one would be good enough.
But we know that exploiting others, oppressing others, sacrificing pride and dignity for consumer goods, creating and then glorifying those ‘me-me-me bubbles’ never made people anywhere happy.
Building a nation did. Fighting for those millions of poor and oppressed did. Building turbines and railroads, new houses, schools, hospitals, did!
And it is not some theory or dogma. I saw it in so many parts of the world, with my own eyes. And I only believe what I see.
*
China made tremendous progress; it leapt forward. The majority of its people are now living good middle class lives. They are decently housed, fed, and clothed. Their children are well educated and if the medical reforms continue, everybody will soon be enjoying free and decent medical care.
All over the country, new high-speed ecological trains are connecting all the major cities, and the network is now the longest on earth. Urban centers are enjoying thousands of miles of new subway systems. Huge parks and playgrounds are there for all, and so are hundreds of new cultural centers, concert halls, theatres and museums.
China is also not perfect, far from it. But it is one enormous alternative for our humanity, one great new hope.
And above all, it is a socialist country, the ‘Chinese way’, and the Asian way. Not socialist or communist the way Europeans or Westerners see socialism or communism.
But now, paradoxically, the greatest danger China is facing is the propaganda coming from abroad – from the West – and the impact on its people. It has got used to ‘listening to the enemy’ who want to ruin it, destroy it, as it did with the Soviet Union.
This propaganda is creating, unnaturally, ‘the fifth column’, similar to that which broke Eastern Europe into pieces including the Soviet Union, and which now batters, day and night, countries like Cuba and Venezuela.
They are lying to, China, of course they are! Ideologists and propagandists of the countries responsible for billions of ruined lives all over the world are trying to find weak spots; to humiliate and confuse this enormous ascending dragon (and to set the record straight, in Asia, dragon is beloved, wise, fable creature, not some monster as in the West).
They are not doing it ‘for the good of Chinese people’. They are doing it in order to destroy China, as they have done several times in the past. They are doing it so there is no Chinese, no Asian alternative available to the world.
China has to be strong. It has to resist; for its own good, and for the humanity.
Mr. Andre Vltchek who is one of the frequent contributors for The 4th Media is a novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. His discussion with Noam Chomsky On Western Terrorism is now going to print. His critically acclaimed political novel Point of No Return is now re-edited and available. Oceania is his book on Western imperialism in the South Pacific. His provocative book about post-Suharto Indonesia and the market-fundamentalist model is called “Indonesia – The Archipelago of Fear”. He has just completed the feature documentary, “Rwanda Gambit” about Rwandan history and the plunder of DR Congo. After living for many years in Latin America and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides and works in East Asia and Africa. He can be reached through his website or his Twitter.