China, Xinjiang & Amnesty International
A recent article by Amnesty International in these pages ‘released dozens of new testimonies from former detainees detailing the extreme measures taken by Chinese authorities since 2017 to essentially root out the religious traditions, cultural practices and local languages of the region’s Muslim ethnic groups’.
China and Amnesty International
Coincidentally, Amnesty International has released dozens of atrocity ‘testimonies’ before, invariably in support of a planned international invasion.
In the runup to the Iraq War, Nayirah, a young nurse, sobbingly testified to Congress that Iraqi soldiers had thrown babies out of incubators and left them to die on the floor. Amnesty confirmed that 312 babies had been murdered this way. The media ran wild with a story they must have known was completely, utterly false. Because Amnesty had hired PR experts to coach Nayirah, a diplomat’s daughter, in order to manufacture popular outrage towards the government of Iraq, then the most successful socialist state in the Middle East.
Widespread abuses of human rights have been perpetrated by Iraqi forces following the invasion of Kuwait on 2 August. These include the arbitrary arrest and detention without trial of thousands of civilians and military personnel; the widespread torture of such persons in custody; the imposition of the death penalty and the extrajudicial execution of hundreds of unarmed civilians, including children. In addition, hundreds of people in Kuwait remain unaccounted for, having effectively ‘disappeared’ in detention, and many of them are feared dead. [Amnesty International]
Peter Benenson, co-founder of Amnesty and avowed anti-communist, had deep ties to Britain’s Foreign and Colonial Office and his co-founder, Luis Kutner, gave the FBI its pretext to assassinate Fred Hampton. In 1963, the Foreign Office instructed its operatives to provide ‘discreet support’ for Amnesty’s campaigns and, from South Africa, and Benenson trolled the FCO’s Lord Lansdowne for work: “Communist influence should not be allowed to spread in this part of Africa, and in the present delicate situation, Amnesty International would wish to support Her Majesty’s Government in any such policy”. Amnesty then withdrew its support from Nelson Mandela and Downing Street blackmailed him to implement neoliberalism, rather than socialism, which Mandela considered better fitted for his people.
Amnesty supported regime change in Venezuela (‘more than 8,000 extrajudicial executions by the security forces,’ a flat lie) and in Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Nicaragua, in return for $300 million annually from the US State Department, the European Commission, George Soros, and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Why Uyghurs?
The West has invested billions fomenting terrorism in Xinjiang. Says US Ambassador Chas H. Freeman, former Director for Chinese Affairs at the U.S. Department of State,
The CIA programs in Tibet, which were very effective in destabilizing it, did not succeed in Xinjiang. There were similar efforts made with the Uyghurs during the Cold War that never really got off the ground. In both cases you had religion waved as a banner in support of a desire for independence or autonomy which is, of course, anathema to any state.
US-backed, Saudi-radicalized, Wahhabi Uyghurs massacred two thousand Chinese citizens over three decades in hopes of triggering government retribution, but the PRC imposed a media blackout on most attacks and–despite bitter complaints from victims’ relatives–meted out light jail sentences to perps, and launched a crash education and jobs program during which Hewlett-Packard disassembled and moved its giant factories to Xinjiang. Today, none of the Uyghur diaspora, historically scattered across five countries, lives as well as Xinjiang’s Uyghurs, and both know it. Because such groups cause problem in most Muslim countries, the World Muslim Council’s twelve Xinjiang inspectors pronounced themselves ‘envious’ of the resources China devotes to its radicalized minority.
In the absence of real Chinese atrocities, Amnesty is manufacturing them, as it did for Tibet, Tiananmen, and Hong Kong, which failed to elicit a local backlash but fed the media’s efforts to stain China’s reputation.
Why China and Amnesty International?
Margaret Thatcher’s claim–that there is no alternative to neoliberalism–triggered four decades of looting, pillaging, and immiseration. Simultaneously, Deng Xiaoping’s reforms unleashed forty years of unparalleled investment, growth and prosperity. Though our media strive to conceal the facts, China’s military is now more powerful, its economy bigger, and its society (including its human rights) more advanced than America’s. Today, the US has more hungry children, drug addicts, suicides, executions, and more homeless, poor, and imprisoned people than China, whose infant mortality is lower and whose children live longer, healthier lives, graduate high school three years ahead of Americans, and attend mostly free universities.
If neoliberal states cannot militarily attack China, they can at least target its attractiveness. Amnesty International will make it look repulsive and alien until its neoliberal masters finish pillaging what few national assets remain.
What Next between China and Amnesty International?
China will emerge from the pandemic having detected, diagnosed and sequenced a novel virus in two weeks; contained it and resumed business in six months; donated three-hundred million vaccine doses, two-hundred eighty billion masks, four billion hazmat suits, and four billion test kits to needy countries; grown its GDP by a staggering $2.4 trillion in one year (fifty percent more than Australia’s entire GDP), and earned the confidence of 98% of its people.
The WHO’s upcoming announcement that Covid-19 started outside China will devastate the Bad China narrative, leaving China standing taller, tougher, and smarter than ever.
Godfree Roberts is the author of Why China Leads the World: Talent at the Top, Data in the Middle, Democracy at the Bottom, and publishes the newsletter, Here Comes China.
