Intersectional Imperialism
How white supremacy and imperialism are intertwined, and how liberals use the veneer of progressivism to push us towards a cold war with China
Memes exposing liberal hypocrisy and warmongering have become popular recently.
On August 30th, 2021, the United States officially exited their military presence in Afghanistan, ending the 20 year long war with Afghanistan. Within a week, Taliban forces took control of the country, essentially rendering America’s efforts and the trillions poured into the region worthless.
Not that any outcome of the war would have been meaningful, unnecessary US intervention has typically had disastrous results for the country involved while energy and military companies were paid incredible amounts of money. Afghanistan was no different, while the original reason was to capture Osama bin Laden1, he was already killed in 2011 and American forces remained in the region for another decade, wasting valuable resources with no clear objective or goal.
Many articles from the right decrying the withdrawal were mostly influenced with trying to smear Biden for appearing weak and deferential to our enemies. But there was also pushback from the American left, only curiously for much different reasons.
Copaganda for Team America: World Police
Almost every article from liberal MSM outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post in September had some version of, “yes, the war was pointless and a waste of money, time, resources and people, but think of the women we helped!” While the plight of Afghan women had been written about before in the past, it seemed like all of a sudden a deluge of articles started flooding in after the disaster of the Afghanistan pull out start to come into focus. The liberal backpedaling and handwringing had no function other than to essentially serve as a way for liberal war hawks to save face for supporting a war for decades that had become increasingly unpopular among the left. War in the Middle East, after years of Islamophobia and knowledge that wars against Iraq were based off fabricated evidence, no longer had unilateral bipartisan support.
One wonders, if there is so much support for war to combat misogyny, why haven’t we invaded Saudi Arabia, one of the worst ranked places in the world for the treatment of women, particularly when that’s where most of the 9/11 hijackers came from?
The actual spillover effect of this kind of rhetoric is extremely damaging domestically. Less sophisticated readers assumed that if Middle Eastern men act terribly abroad, they must be just as terrible domestically. The hate crimes against the S Asian community following 9/11 shows that America’s government and its media are still part of a white supremacist state that generates racist propaganda and has no regard for the safety of its own citizens. Most people have formed some sort of idea of what Middle Eastern gender dynamics (and by extension S Asians) are like from these media reports, and automatically assume that Islam itself is an inherently misogynistic ideology (while ignoring that the West’s Judeo-Christian ideology have very similar values).
Debunking racist assumptions about Islamic culture.
All of this isn’t new, but rather a series of transformations over time from the West’s history of racism and imperialism. The American media and government have perfected the art of propaganda: indeed, up until 2014 when the Black Lives Matter movement began, most Americans believed that we were essentially a post-racial country. To many Americans, Obama was proof that although racial equality was not yet a reality, that we were at least on the right track, despite the fact that financial inequality for whites and Black people have remained the same if not worsened since the Civil Rights Movement.
However, ever since the Civil Rights Movement was co-opted by white liberals in the 1970s, the link between imperialism and racism was obfuscated.
Racism against African Americans and Native Americans is clear since their subjugation is easily traceable through our nation’s history, but the roots of racism against other minorities depend on how they immigrated to the US and the current foreign policy the US has against majority nonwhite states.
A Brief History of Western Imperialism
Agent Smith calling out capitalism, I mean Western imperialism, I mean white people, I mean…human beings
Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area.
There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus.
Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You’re a plague and we are the cure.
- Hugo Weaving as Agent Smith in “The Matrix” (1999)
Around the turn of the first millennia, Western civilization was united mostly under the rule of the Catholic Church. The Crusades were military expeditions carried out by the Church during the 11th-13th centuries in an effort to capture Jerusalem and various parts of the Middle East that were considered Holy Lands. Soldiers were promised Catholic indulgences and other spoils of war for their participation and as a result of their expeditions, they came across other “heathens” that they began to trade and learn from. Europeans would start to travel to Arabian countries, India and finally China, when Marco Polo began his expeditions across the Silk Road, bringing back many advanced tools and merchandise previously unknown to Europe.
This cultural exchange, along with the waning power of the Church, was part of the reason the medieval period ended around the turn of the 15th century, ushering in the age of the Renaissance. Spanish and Portuguese explorers began to traverse the globe, launching expeditions first to India and then after Columbus, to the Americas. Gold, spices and trade routes were the spoils for these efforts, and as European nations started to lay claim to territories in the New World, they needed labor to work the land to produce immense material wealth.
After the Europeans annihilated the indigenous population in the Americas with war and diseases, they turned to Africa and started the transatlantic slave trade.
The scale of the transatlantic slave trade was unimaginable for its time.
Previously, slavery had existed in all parts of the world including Europe, typically as convicts, vagrants, or prisoners of war. Initially, this is how the slave trade began, when Spanish colonizers invaded and conquered the Canary Islands in the 15th century, an archipelago off the coast of Africa, by taking advantage of pre-existing conflicts between African tribes. The islands became a naval base for European colonizers, and the Portuguese began raids off the western coast of Africa to capture slaves to transport to the Mediterranean.
By the 16th century, Europe had started to colonize the Americas. Portuguese traders delivered African slaves to Spanish America, which in turn made the Dutch, French and British interested in their success. In the 17th century, these new entrants started taking the reins of the slave trade until the 18th century when Britain became the biggest player. The British, French and Portuguese conducted the majority of the slave trade during that century, and while the slave trade was technically banned by the United States and Britain in 1807, the 19th century still had more total slaves transported than the 16th-17th until the American Civil War.
Many in the West will acknowledge these atrocities, but attribute it to an unfortunate function of humanity: that throughout history, might is right was the prevailing philosophy, that even Eastern warlords like Genghis Khan was an imperialist who conquered much of the world during his rule. However, the scale of genocide and the slave trade was so horrific, even Europeans began to question the morality of their actions.
As early as 1688, Pennsylvania Quakers held the first formal protest of slavery in the English colonies, citing Biblical reasons of the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do to you.”
How does one justify annihilating and subjugating another group of people? The same way we do today: subtly dehumanizing them through distortion of the truth. While ethnocentrism and tribalism always existed, Enlightenment thinkers during the 17th century would attempt to identify “scientific” differences in groups of people based on their physical traits and appearance. During this time, reason and the scientific method were greatly in fashion, and so-called race “scientists” began to refer to themselves as white people and classified Native Americans as “savages” and Africans as “subhuman”. These became the building blocks of white supremacy, as they “discovered” natural law that dictated that they have the divine right to rule.
The ideology of white supremacy worked best with the English colonies, since colonial life was driven by solidarity among the colonialists against the Natives and the enslaved. After the Seven Years War (1756-1763), England levied heavy taxes and attempted to curb the colonies western expansion. Colonialists were also worried that England would soon end slavery within the colonies as new legal precedents were being passed that would increase England’s power over the colonies.
No taxation without representation was a catchy slogan, but the colonialists fought the Revolutionary War to also protect their right to genocide Native Americans and enslave African Americans.
Shortly afterwards, the West started to wind down its practices of slavery, partly due to the Haitian Revolution in 1804, in fear that the same could happen to their colonies. Europeans moved to abolish slavery because of the risk of a revolution, instead of any real sense of altruism. Africans had to earn the respect of Europeans through rebellious force in order to truly begin the end of their subjugation.
Europe Sets its Sights on Asia
While American imperialism in the form of its Westward Expansion became more of a domestically fascist project after the split from England, Europe continued to expand its influence around the globe. As the territories in the Americas started to gain their independence from Europe, Asia next door was a much easier target, especially after European military technology had advanced significantly.
In the 17th century, England and France dominated trade in India until the end of the same Seven Years War that drove America to war with England, when England took full control of India’s trade itself. England would go onto install a puppet government, which would be replaced by the British Raj after the Indian Rebellion of 1859. They would have full control of India until the end of WW2. While European interest in India was initially categorized as Indomania, a special interest in Indian culture, traditions and most importantly of all, its products (spices), after colonization European views on India transitioned in the 18th century into Indophobia.
British people taking shit after killing Indian rebels in 1857.
While there were rare occurrences of Indian rebels raping British women, British media would portray the events as a custom of Indians in order to justify their continued occupation of India going so far as to fabricate rapes to further their propaganda. The portrayal of Indian men as rapists in British literature would continue on into the 19th and even early 20th centuries.
Incidentally, a British newspaper had published a story of 48 British girls aged 10-14 being raped by Indian men in Delhi, which was criticized by Karl Marx who called out the fact that the story was written by a British clergyman in Bangalore, nowhere nearby.
The French, after losing much of its territories to England after the Seven Years War, sought new colonies and its intellectuals made the claim that French culture was superior to those of the people of Aanam (present-day Vietnam). They considered it their duty to civilize the Annamese with French culture and Catholicism. The French would use reports of anti-Christian sentiment among the Annamese as pretext to invading and occupying Vietnam and would control Saigon by 1858. Afterwards it would expand its control to Laos and Cambodia, as protectorates.2
By the late 1800s, the United States finally joined the imperialism party under similar pretexts. After the Spanish American War (1898), the US assumed control of the Phillipines, Guam and Puerto Rico. However, after fighting with the US against Spain, Filipino nationalists fought the US for 15 years for independence. The US Army would use extreme force, burning down and destroying entire villages. Rudyard Kipling would write a poem called “The White Mans’s Burden” in 1899 stating that the Filipino rebellion was evidence that the Filipino people were uncivilized brutes who didn’t understand the freedom they were being offered by the American people, and that it was their moral obligation to civilize them to progress them.
The final prize was China itself.
Up until the 19th century, European trade was limited to a few ports and controlled by the Chinese government with high taxes, not unlike today. Part of the problem was that Europeans didn’t have items that the Chinese particularly wanted, limiting profitable trade to European merchants, until Europeans started trafficking opium to China, which became forbidden by the Chinese government in 1800.
However, as the Qing dynasty started to weaken, European, Japanese and Russian imperialist sharks smelled blood. After losing the First Opium War of 1839 to the British, a war fought to allow the British trafficking of narcotics into China, China was forced to sign treaties that essentially gutted the country. The island of Hong Kong was given to the British, as well as unlimited access to Shanghai and Guangzhou to British trade. After losing the Second Opium War of 1856 to the British, French and the United States, more ports were opened to foreigners and eventually carved up China to start what’s known as the “Century of Humiliation” that would only end after WW2.
Lord Palmerston, the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and the future Prime Minister of England, considered Chinese culture uncivilized, and was responsible for the outbreak of the First Opium War. Sinophobia would expand as Chinese resistance of Western imperialism continued as imperialists were indignant that the Chinese would dare oppose them. The Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901) was when Chinese peasants and civilians disgruntled with Western presence within China set out to kill westerners and Chinese Christians.
The Boxers believed that Christian missionaries were destroying Chinese culture and worse, giving preferential treatment to those who converted to Christianity. For example, if a Chinese citizen were guilty of crimes against another Chinese person, they would simply run to missionaries to “convert” and would be absolved. This is not unlike the way HK protestors like Joshua Wong performatively posts verses from the Bible on his Twitter or promotes the ridiculous notion that China is trying to rewrite the Bible.
Joshua didn’t get the memo that most Europeans (and more Americans) don’t really give a shit about Christianity anymore
Even though most of the casualties were Chinese Christians, Westerners quickly united to form a pre-NATO alliance to destroy the rebels and on top of that, raped and pillaged as they sacked Beijing. After hearing the horrors of this, some Chinese women and girls would commit suicide when at risk of being captured by Russian and Japanese forces.
8 vs 1, in Beijing, not exactly a fair fight.
Afterwards, images of Beijing in shambles would reinforce Yellow Peril propaganda: that the Chinese were gross, barbaric, disgusting beings with special powers that threatened to destroy the rest of the world. Many of the same stereotypes Americans associate with African Americans: crime, prostitution, drug use, dirty and poor were associated with the Chinese in London. Yellow Peril, the idea that the zombie-like Asian race was going to threaten the world was the pretext for European invasion and colonization of China. In other words, Europeans claimed Chinese imperialism was necessary because the world was in danger of being subjugated by hordes of these disgusting, beastly subhumans with magical enchantments. (Sound familiar?)
By projecting the worst of their own crimes against humanity onto Asia, Europeans justified committing the worst crimes against humanity in Asia.
Houston Stewart Chamberlain, a British born German philosopher, would remark, “One thing I can clearly see, that is, that it is criminal for Englishmen and Dutchmen to go on murdering each other, for all sorts of sophisticated reasons, while the Great Yellow Danger overshadows us white men, and threatens destruction.” He would go on to write “The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century” in 1899, which would describe how the Aryan race was the most superior and the Jews were a negative influence on society. As his most popular book, this would be one of Hitler’s biggest inspirations on developing his Nazi ideology.
Above: “Judaism, Freemasonry, Bolshevism. Part one: Judaism” (1936) published by Der Reichsführer SS. Der Chef des Rasse (anti-Semitic/communist Nazi propaganda)
Below: September 2021, The Professional Journal of the US Army
The Cold War Cools off White Imperialists
The end of the Second World War brought an end to much of European imperialism. The USSR used its soft power to pressure the West, pointing out its hypocrisy of expecting the world to fight for it against the Nazis but not grant them freedom. England and France, while technically victors, sustained major damage from the war which seriously weakened their capacity to maintain their colonies. A fear of rebellion in India led Britain to “voluntarily” grant India’s independence in 1947. England would start to unwind its remaining African colonies as well3. China would resume their Civil War, until the CPC’s victory in 1949, after which they pushed out foreigners and foreign influence during the Cultural Revolution. Ho Chi Minh would lead Indochina against the French during the First Indochina War to liberate Vietnam in 1954.
However, while the United States would relinquish their control of the Philippines in 1946, they would fight wars in Asia for a different purpose: President Eisenhower would claim that communism was antithetical to American freedom and that allowing a country to become communist meant that they risked other countries becoming communist as well. Indeed, the United States involvement in the First Indochina War was to help France recapture its colonies but also in an effort to quell socialist sentiment in France. Marcel Bigeard, a former French military officer, admitted that:
"One of the deepest mistakes done by the French during the war was the propaganda telling you are fighting for Freedom, you are fighting against Communism."
This was the line used to justify the Korean and Vietnam Wars to the American public, that America was spreading freedom and democracy to these places, by laying waste to millions of civilians with Agent Orange, napalm and unexploded ordinance that still exists in Cambodia and Laos today. However, France’s loss would inspire Algeria, an African colony, to also fight the French for their independence, which they would gain in 1962. Perhaps Eisenhower and the United States were more concerned that more colonies would be inspired to gain their independence than they were for the former colonized so-called “freedom”.
During these wars, the dehumanization never stopped. In addition to the term zipperhead4, the term gook5 was borne out of the Korean War and used in the Vietnam War as well. During Senator McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign, he was quoted as saying:
"I hate the gooks. I will hate them as long as I live… I was referring to my prison guards and I will continue to refer to them in language that might offend."
McCain would later apologize but the message was clear, a politician could be openly hateful towards Asian people in the 21st century and run for President.
The Modern Era: Team America, World Police
After the fall of the USSR in 1991, the United States became the sole superpower in the world. Most formal imperialism had ended and capitalists told the world was that a new dawn was coming to usher in an era of prosperity. Pundits would remark that globalization and interconnectedness would make conflicts obsolete and that only progress awaited society.
A certain Saudi Arabian terrorist would disagree.
Prior to the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden, born into the powerful network of Saudi Arabian ruling class, would go on to pursue a militant political career which ultimately turned into al Qaeda, a terrorist organization. Initially an ally of the United States and the West in the Soviet-Afghan War, bin Laden quickly became an adversary after being lionized among Muslims for driving out the Soviets in 1989. For the next decade, bin Laden would conduct terrorism campaigns against the West and make these demands in 1998:
The end of the United States occupation of sacred lands of Islam (Saudi Arabia) that they have been turning into military bases in order to invade for oil and murder Muslims
Reparations for the Gulf War which he saw as an attempt by the United States to destroy Iraq and annihilate its citizens
The dissolution of the alliance with Israel who he saw as an oppressive state that attacked Muslims and sought to annihilate Muslims and saw that the United States was supporting Israel in order to weaken Arabic states to make them easier to subjugate and colonize
bin Laden would go on to make more demands after the attacks, but his essential problem with America was its imperialism in the Middle East. However, bin Laden would couch his beliefs in extreme fundamentalist Islamic rhetoric, which of course was magnified and spun to be the main reason al Qaeda hated the United States, our freedom.
The United States would respond by proving bin Laden right, pushing us towards another war with Iraq which was justified with lies of WMDs and a war with Afghanistan on which Amerca spent trillions for no discernible gain. Every US president since Bush would authorize the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians in the region6 with drone strikes and bombings, only the American public would barely notice or care because these they “deserved” it for being terrorists. The War on Terror would cause almost a million casualties7 as well as the displacement of almost 40 million more.
Domestically, Americans would call Muslims “sand n-words”8 and would barely register any hint of outrage. Islamophobia would be a bipartisan effort as the media would spread anti-Muslim propaganda: warnings about jihad, jokes about virgin rewards for suicide bombers, and the idea that al Qaeda’s aim was to subjugate the entire world to repressive fundamentalist Islamic practices. Islamic leaders across the country would denounce bin Laden’s actions to no avail: South Asians, even non-Muslims, would all be targeted for vicious hate crimes, which were also ignored because it was in service to “patriotism”.
Yuri Kochiyama, a close confidant and supporter of Malcolm X, would comment on bin Laden saying:
"The goal of the war on terror is more than just getting oil and fuel. The United States is intent on taking over the world" and "it's important we all understand that the main terrorist and the main enemy of the world's people is the U.S. government."
In 2003, she would continue:
"I consider Osama bin Laden as one of the people that I admire. To me, he is in the category of Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Patrice Lumumba, Fidel Castro ... I thank Islam for bin Laden. America's greed, aggressiveness, and self-righteous arrogance must be stopped. War and weaponry must be abolished."
While America finally pulled out of Afghanistan, the War on Terror technically is still ongoing. Although the United States exacted its vengeance on bin Laden, in many ways, bin Laden succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. America’s response in the past 20 years has crippled its own economy, alienated its allies, created more Islamic support for terrorist organizations and introduced much more authoritarian restrictions and surveillance on its own citizens.
Today: Co-opting Wokeism to Do a Racist Imperialism
The BLM movement in 2013 and the #MeToo movement in 2017 sparked many conversations about race, gender and sexuality in America. Since the end of the Civil War, African Americans were subjected to extreme bias and police brutality. Over the years, even after the Civil Rights Movement, whites would build a narrative that Black people were inherently violent, drug addicts and superpredators in order to justify high rates of Black incarceration pushing the idea that policing in America was fair and equitable.
The cameraphone and social media would change the calculus. Now ordinary citizens were able to record and document police brutality for themselves and show the public that police were untrustworthy and abused their power, causing unnecessary deaths and trauma. Many started to recognize the fact that America was not, in fact, a post-racial society. During the Ferguson protests, Obama himself gave a tepid response to Black people to essentially trust the system and would disappoint many African Americans.
In 2017, Ronan Farrow and others uncovered a huge scandal in Hollywood: Harvey Weinstein was accused of sexual assault and misconduct from several in the industry. As the Domino theory9 of sexual allegations played out, many others within Hollywood would be exposed for abusing their positions of power to coerce sexual favors from women. Nationwide debates on consent, gender, power dynamics, sexuality, homophobia, transphobia would ensue as culture writers scrambled to find the appropriate dialogue, language and stage to discuss these issues.
Discussions of race and gender and their intersectionality and the conservative pushback against such conversations would dominate the culture wars and discourse in America, supercharged after Donald Trump’s presidential victory in 2016. Woke-ness, the idea of being alert to social injustices10, was constantly being redefined as liberal journalists and politicians scrambled to change their messaging to fit this new paradigm while conservatives fought equally hard to maintain that white supremacy no longer exists and that political correctness is counter to American values and the First Amendment.
As the dust started to settle in 2018, liberal MSM would successfully co-opt woke standards and essentially lay out its own standards of what it means to be progressive and what it means to be bigoted. White liberals were happy to dunk on white conservatives who were clearly being racist, misogynist and queerphobic, but fail to see (or broadcast) their own racist policies, especially in urban areas that are heavily designated as liberal, like NYC, SF, Chicago and LA. The Green Book (2018) would play into this white savior trope by painting the Black character’s main adversary as a cartoonishly racist white man while portraying the Black character’s white driver as his hero11 and friend and would go on to win Best Picture at the Oscars, an American film ceremony.
Intersectionality, the relationship between race, class, gender and sexuality is complex and the practical implications in American society are not yet fully understood. However, in the past few years, mainstream liberals have brute forced marginalization into a framework of hierarchies and claim that identity marking variables are independent and therefore total oppression can be calculated by simply stacking identities linearly12. This was done to be able to provide a consensus as to how to litigate politics and conversations on diversity, very similar to DEI initiatives in liberal institutions.
But calculating intersectionality is not that clean. While nonwhite women face patriarchal violence from nonwhite men, nonwhite men face gendered violence from the police at much higher rates than nonwhite women. A white gay person can codeswitch their way out of discrimination, whereas a Black man cannot. Black trans people face disproportionately much more violence than white trans people. And how the hell are Asians classified when they have the highest disparity in income distribution? Do we disaggregate by S/SE/E Asian? What’s the methodology behind this?
This confusion leads to bad faith actors to attempt to use oppression and woke-ness to service their unexamined political takes.
Doing a reverse MRAsian to be woke.
When you definitely know what the term colonizer means.
On the surface, these types of tweets look progressive, because they come from two women of a specific ethnic group speaking out against misogyny from men of the same ethnic group. However, when you examine them more closely, there’s a suggestion that white supremacy would solve their problems. This is similar to the kind of rhetoric I mentioned in my previous article, when Asian women would use the idea that Asian male misogyny is inherent that white men needed to save them. Whenever a nonwhite group in America attacks their own in a racialized manner, white supremacists and media immediately boost that rhetoric in order to give white men the appearance of being progressive and understanding. This fuels further racism against that marginalized group, and helps manufacture consent for war with countries with majority nonwhite populations.
In 1985, Gyatri Spivak coined the term “white men saving brown women from brown men” when describing the British abolition of the sati tradition in India, which the British used as pretext for the justifying their continued rule over India in order to “civilize” them
Liberal concern trolling13 is the basis for the White Man’s Burden 2.0, a reboot of America’s Cold War policies of “spreading democracy” by destroying countries and installing puppet governments that would benefit the United States. After the West installed many of these fundamentalist Judeo-Christian values14 into former colonies, they would now claim that these countries now had it wrong and needed their values to be updated to the “correct” American ones…and by force if necessary.
Conservatives would soon catch on as well.
Yellow Peril 2.0
For most Americans today, China in many imaginations remains an impoverished third world country. Overt anti-Chinese sentiment was acceptable since whites would claim they weren’t talking about Asian Americans, but about the Chinese people, insulting them for being out of touch and poor people who were uncultured and uncouth, brainwashed by an oppressive authoritarian government. Indeed, many Asian Americans joined in and promoted anti-Chinese sentiment both out of classist and self-hating racist reasons to fit in with whites. This unchecked racism baked in sinophobic sentiment for decades as most Asian Americans today immigrated post-1965, unaware of America’s racist past.
However, in the past 10 years, since China has now demonstrated its economic and military power, racist derision has changed to racist fear.
After the death of Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping rose to power in 1978. Since relations between China and the USSR had worsened significantly, Deng wanted to strengthen China militarily and economically, to be able to both defend itself and become more prosperous. He purged corruption in the military, downsized their fighting force and focused on military technology, while introducing a 70 year plan of market reforms and opening China to economic development:
1. Double the 1980 GNP (achieved by the end of the 1980s)
2. Quadruple the 1980 GNP by 2000 (achieved by the 1995)
3. Increase per capita GNP to the level of medium developed countries by 2050
Deng would break from the dogmatic nature of his predecessor, and introduced his own school of thought of “socialism with Chinese characteristics”, reasoning that socialism did not preclude market planning and trade just because capitalists participated in them, and that socialism was not about shared poverty. Using dialectical materialism, essentially the political scientific method, China would accelerate modernization as local politicians would attempt to allocate funds and fine-tune their investment in industries they thought would be most profitable for exports.
America, for its part, was happy to take advantage of cheap Chinese labor. The PRC established their first diplomatic relations with the United States in 1979, as Deng became the first Chinese leader to visit the United States, and the United States in return would recognize the People’s Republic of China, rejecting Taiwan’s Republic of China claims. Soon afterwards, American manufacturing would move overseas, which would lower the cost of goods in America but greatly diminish the manufacturing capabilities of the US.
In addition, Deng would also go on to negotiate an end to the British colonial rule of Hong Kong and normalize relations with both the United States and the USSR, choosing strategic diplomacy over hostile militarism. Deng’s leadership and the policies he put into place would have unimaginable returns on investment. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, China became the largest official Marxist-Leninist one party socialist republic. When Deng retired in 1992, China’s GDP was $426.7 billion. By 2020, China’s GDP would balloon to $14.7 trillion15. China had successfully completed its goal of lifting all of its citizens out of extreme poverty by the end of 2020, a truly remarkable feat considering almost 18% of the Earth’s population is a Chinese citizen.
But the partnership between a socialist country and a capitalist one would be fraught with tension. China’s policies such as its restrictions on media and the one-child policy would be seen as human rights violations by western countries, and while they would be shown to be vindicated for the first (Facebook and Twitter have had measurable deleterious effects on mental health, misinformation and propaganda in America) and would finally adjust the one-child policy to a two-child one in 2015 and abolish it altogether in 2021, the stained stereotype of being “backwards, uncivilized people” would remain with the Chinese.
Westerners would apply “progressive” ideas onto countries like China that are still developing, while neglecting to talk about the ways in which their own countries became prosperous and developed16. This is not dissimilar to how after the destruction of Beijing during the Boxer Rebellion, later western visitors would remark that its citizens were poor, dirty and disheveled, conveniently leaving out their culpability in making them that way. In other countries, like South Korea and the Philippines, westerners have been known to call out rampant homophobia and sexism, while conveniently leaving out that they pushed fundamentalist Christianity onto those countries when they were being colonized.
Progressive ideas require a certain threshold of material wealth to explore. When a society is underdeveloped, many of the citizens are more concerned with survival versus whether or not someone offended them on social media. As societies move up their own collective Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, they start to address social issues that have been previously ignored. Different cultures also have different values and philosophies as to what they find progressive or not, and it is somewhat egotistical to think that every country should bend to the rules of the West, given that the West has reneged on its own rules countless numbers of time in the past and repeatedly say, “this time, we’ll play fair.”
That hasn’t stopped Republicans, known social justice warriors and civil rights defenders, from trying to smear China with every claim of human rights violation in the book.
It is not in the scope of this article to talk about the 2019 HK protests, the Xinjiang Uyghur reeducation centers, alleged aggression against Taiwan and other propaganda that the United States has been pushing over the past few years. Most of these events have been debunked or explained by sources like Qiao Collective and The People’s Forum. But most of these stories you’ve heard about in Western outlets operate by leaving out key pieces of information:
The HK Protests in 2019 were against an extradition law proposed in HK when a Taiwanese citizen killed his girlfriend in Taiwan, fled to HK and could not legally be extradited back to Taiwan to await trial. The protests were then spun to be a total independence movement, when most protests were only just about the law itself
Xinjiang is a region that has repeatedly experienced separatist violence since 1997, which has been tacitly encouraged and funded by the State Department's National Endowment for Democracy, a front that has ties to the CIA
Most Taiwanese people in Taiwan want the status quo to be maintained, separatism and reunification are both more fringe positions, Tsai Ing-Wen was the polling in last place of the major candidates until she used the HK protests to generate fear17 that Taiwan was in danger of being invaded
By leaving out critical parts of the story, the West makes it seem like China is haphazardly violating human rights for its own gain, trying to expand their territory and subjugate other people. They infantilize China’s 1.4 billion citizens as a brainwashed horde incapable of independent thought, especially when they support such an evil government. And while anti-Chinese racism was mostly in the form of mean spirited and annoying jokes when China was perceived to be weak, it turned violent this year when the cocktail of coronavirus, China’s growing economic and military power and China’s technological advances in AI and 5G infrastructure started to make white people fear the end of their unquestioned 600 year reign on Earth.
Manufacturing (non)-Consent
While conservatives were happy to spew anti-China rhetoric mostly as a distraction from the mishandling of the pandemic, liberals were caught between the schizophrenic position of wanting to appear anti-China but also wanting to appear sympathetic to anti-Asian hate.
The New York Times, Washington Post and NPR, circa 2020
They would be given a bone to run with that they so desperately wanted.
On November 2nd, 2021, Peng Shuai, a professional Chinese tennis player living in China posted on Weibo, a Chinese social media network, a lengthy post describing an affair she had with Zheng Gaoli, a former Senior Vice Premier of the CPC. The account, translated here, says that Zheng and Peng had consensual sex 7 years ago, but that three years ago after his retirement, Zheng pressured her into having sex with him by using nostalgia of their prior engagement. While the allegations should be investigated, western media has immediately attempted to paint the situation as China’s #metoo moment.
While there are parallels to Harvey Weinstein18, the actual dynamics are different. Peng’s letter read more as a jilted ex-lover than someone accusing someone of sexual assault. And while Zheng was indeed a high ranking official of the CPC, it’d be a stretch to say that he would have control over her career as a tennis player, especially since he was retired at the time of the assault. It seemed that Peng’s motive in posting the letter was to publicly shame Zheng, rather than to seek justice for a crime. In any event, western liberal media’s editorialization and sensationalization of the story played into America’s preconceived biases of Chinese people and the CPC.
Liberal media would run with the story citing a Taiwanese19 news source which translated the letter into the least charitable interpretation as sexual assault. Their evidence for her disappearance was that she had not posted on social media for two weeks after her post was deleted from Weibo. For an entire week, the media would print stories suggesting the worst, playing on the public’s previous conception of a totalitarian oppressive state, that she was disappeared by Chinese authorities. One insane take suggested it was a return to "ancient Chinese concubine” culture, where powerful Chinese men would have a wife and many different concubines20.
Hong would walk back her statements after Peng resurfaced, claiming that she was too famous to be disappeared.
Lies on top of lies on top of lies.
Peng would later go on to send an email to the WTA and appear on a video call with the IOC and verify that she was alive and well and wanted to have her privacy respected at this time. It’s likely she’s simply embarrassed after posting a public affair on social media21. In America, when a celebrity posts and deletes an embarrassing post, not posting for a couple weeks doesn’t mean they disappeared, it usually means they went to rehab. However, the WTA, unsatisfied, wants Peng to leave the country to prove her safety. This is extremely infantilizing, implying that Chinese citizens are not safe in their own country and that only the west knows what’s best for their own citizens. If Peng is indeed fine and this is all a misunderstanding, to make Peng leave her own country to satisfy westerners is ridiculous.
The narrative was changed to shift to the worst possible interpretation of incoming events. First she was disappeared. Then the email sent to the WTA was faked. Next, the IOC wasn’t to be trusted, and was secretly working with the CPC to ensure that the Olympics won’t be boycotted22. Now, nothing short of Peng’s extradition will satisfy western pundits. Goalposts kept being shifted after every verification as if China was guilty of unimaginable horrors until proven innocent. The news reports are reminiscent of Jack Ma’s “disappearance” when insane news outlets like the Financial Times attempted to suggest the worst after Ma criticized China’s financial regulators and banks.
Despite the overwhelming majority of interracial sexual assault committed globally by white men, because of British Yellow Peril propaganda, the West is already primed to believe the worst about Asian men (South, East, SE). Many people are familiar with how Asian men are feminized in America (for the purposes of making the interracial pairing of a white man and an Asian woman seem preferable), but before 1945, Asian men were seen as sexual deviants23, so much so that the interracial marriage of an Asian man and a white woman was seen as a threat to white society at large. Given these views, it’s no surprise that the BBC and other British outlets are the first to publish many of these sinophobic stories.
It’s interesting that throughout all this, Western journalists have not covered the Ghislane Maxwell trial, which is sure to implicate powerful Westerners such as Bill Gates, Bill Clinton24, Prince Andrew and Donald Trump. Ordinary non-political Western civilians have even commented on the lack of coverage and its oddity.
Bizarre indeed, Bob. Bizarre indeed.
It doesn’t take a tin-foil hat to make the connection that Western journalists are no doubt trying to run interference for these leaders by screaming “China bad” as loudly as they can.
Wokeism to do a Racism to do an Imperalism
US Embassy in Seoul, South Korea. They are literally doing the meme.
Racism, the idea that races have different characteristics and capabilities based on their physical appearance, is a construct invented during the age of western imperialism. The purpose of racism is to rationalize violence and control of another people for profit. White supremacy has justified genocide, slavery, rape and plundering, by the dehumanizing of other people.
When slavery was abolished in America, one proposal before the end of the Civil War was to give each Black person 40 acres and a mule in order to help them start new lives as free men. However, after Lincoln’s assassination, Vice President and successor Andrew Johnson discarded all of those plans in favor of one that restored the Union without protecting Black American rights, offer reparations for former slave owners, allowing Black Codes25 and opposing the 14th Amendment, which made former slaves citizens.
Time and time again whites would impede the progress of Black Americans: Jim Crow, separate but equal, the Tulsa Massacre of 1921, gerrymandering, redlining, the enfranchisement of white women voters, FBI surveillance and responsibility of the assassinations of Civil Rights Movement leaders Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Panthers, CIA involvement of drug trafficking in Los Angeles, the 1994 Crime Bill, stop and frisk policies in NYC and now Black Lives Matter.
White supremacy isn’t exclusive to white men in hoods burning crosses, but more to do with white men in Congress drawing up laws and policies to control African Americans.
However, for the first time in over half a millennia, white supremacy and the west have a legitimate threat to their hegemony. China not only has a strong military with some technology that is starting to outpace the United States, they have many economies around the globe that depend on them for trade. And unsurprisingly, whites are using their media to protect white hegemony by projecting their crimes against humanity onto the Chinese people.
Less than a decade ago, mainstream media were running even more insane stories about China
Here’s how the Sinophobia flywheel works:
Western media either fabricates or exaggerates claim on China and its allies (such as the DPRK), that cannot be verified or disputed
China denies wrongdoing, which the West uses as pretext for cause for more suspicion
When the claim is finally debunked some time later, the outlet (depending on how faithful it is to journalistic standards), will retract in a little read section of the paper, or simply pretend like the story never happened
Most people never read or see the retraction and continue to believe more and more outlandish stories about China, increasing sinophobia
Repeat Step 1 so many times, you believe that the Chinese are cannibal loving monsters with hordes of concubines at their disposal who want to slowly take over the world and turn us all into robot slaves
A media literacy guide on foreign policy reporting
The reality of the situation is that many of the totalitarian measures during the early years of the CPC were during extreme conditions when material conditions were much worse. But conditions have significantly improved for many of its citizens since the end of the Cold War. The idea that the CPC can simply disappear citizens without people noticing or reporting it is ludicrous: the resources and manpower to maintain such kind of subterfuge today would be incalculable. The fabled Great Firewall of China prevents most Chinese from having easy access to American web services and media, but those savvy or determined enough have been able to find their way through with VPNs. And Chinese citizens, many of them now wealthy, are more and more choosing to remain in China rather than move abroad. If life was so horrific under Chinese rule, why would Chinese citizens not simply move to a “free and democratic” country when they had the means to do so?
Western media’s strategy is essentially to support “white no matter who”
The only thing unifying all of these contradictory ideas is racism. When Chinese citizens support the CPC, they are brainwashed. When one notes that the CPC has over 90+ million members, the west claims a one party system cannot be democratic26. When Asian diaspora speak out against sinophobia in the media and how it connects to anti-Asian racism domestically, they are dismissed as wumaos27, paid operatives of the CPC. When you show how China has been working with Africa to develop their economies, the west screams that this is neo-colonialization, while neglecting the West’s AFRICOM, ongoing French military involvement in Niger and that the majority of debt African countries hold is still from the West. When anti-Asian hate is attempted to be talked about, liberal media downplays the severity of the violence we face by amplifying corny Asian liberals who talk about their hurt feelings growing up with stinky lunches.
The west wants you to believe that China is attempting to do what the west has done to the rest of humanity for the past 600 years.
Most in Washington likely are aware that an actual war with China would result in the deaths of possibly billions of people. China’s nuclear capabilities are growing quickly, and its advancements in AI tech starts to level the playing field in aerial combat. Russia, Iran, North Korea and other states would come to China’s aid, spelling disaster all over the Asian pacific region. Their motive in spewing sinophobia is most likely not to start a direct hot war with the Chinese, as such a war could result in significant American civilian casualties and infrastructure damage. Not only that, America and much of the west depend on China for many manufactured goods. Throughout the pandemic, even with the constant sinophobia in mainstream media, China has supplied America and much of the world with PPE, vaccines and aid to help pandemic efforts across the globe.
So what is their ultimate goal? As both Trump and the Biden presidencies have failed miserably in the past two years handling COVID-19, political tensions are high as Republicans and Democrats play the blame game as to who’s responsible for trillions in economic value lost and nearing close to a million American lives. Horrific policy decisions such as the CDC giving uneven guidance on masking, overpromising on the efficacy of vaccines, inability to combat social media disinformation, distribution of emergency stimulus funds to businesses without means testing while giving paltry sums to individuals, inability to curb monopolistic corporate pricing during supply squeezes and more have allowed COVID-19 to be much more devastating than it needed to be. And they need a scapegoat.
China is an easy punching bag. Ever since the Cold War, most in the west have been propagandized to believe that socialism is an inherently flawed and oppressive ideology, especially boomers who grew up hiding under desks for nuclear warfare drills. Combine that with Yellow Peril sentiment since the Boxer Rebellion and a majority white journalist class covering China in American/Australian/UK foreign policy news sections, and manufacturing propaganda and anti-China sentiment is as easy as getting away with murdering a Chinese American. American efforts to curb anti-Asian racism have been pathetic at best, as anti-Asian violence since Biden took office increased significantly in liberal cities.
A common phrase uttered by liberals is: “criticizing the CPC is not anti-Asian, we care for the Chinese people”. This is utter bullshit. White liberals do not care about Asian people, as evidenced by politicians like former NYC Mayor Bill deBlasio and SF District Attorney Chesa Boudin, and see them as acceptable sacrifices to push progressive policies that make Asian Americans pay the lions share of the cost. This sentiment is similar to the messaging of “hate the sin, not the sinner” told to the LGBTQ community by conservative groups in the 1980s. No one actually believed that these conservatives cared about gay people.
As we head closer to year 3 of this pandemic with the Omicron variant in our sights and no more money left to print, it seems that America is on the verge of an economic recession. The government will continually draw the ire of the American people away from the government and onto China as it has ramped up sinophobia in the media for the past few months. And when Americans continue to fear China and see that military action won’t be possible, more of their ire and anger will fall to Asian Americans. When they start to feel helpless, they will fall back to racism to feel in control. When they commit hate crimes against Asians, they will believe that they are in fact, fighting for America.
When you have to run counterpropaganda to your previous propaganda
During WW2, America allied with China against the Japanese. As most Americans had a negative view of China and Russia since the beginning of the 20th century, America needed to run a media campaign to assure people to not be racist, this time. They threw Japanese Americans into internment camps, even though there was no real reason to believe the Japanese had allegiances to Imperial Japan anymore than the average German or Italian American did with Germany or Italy.
Asian Americans are in danger of being castigated and discriminated against as tensions grow between the West and China. Asians must recognize that most white people see all Asians as a Chinese monolith and that the only way to destroy white supremacy is to come together in pan-Asian unity, as well as unity with other oppressed nonwhite countries of the world, lest we divided and conquered once again by the West.
A pretext of which was dubious, when the Taliban offered to give up bin Laden as a negotiation of a peace
The official definition of protectorate is: “a state that is controlled and protected by another.”, which is a fancy way of saying: our bitch
Though some, like South Africa, would continue their own racist policies like apartheid, not unlike its other former colonies with majority white settler populations, like Australia
During the Korean War, dead Korean soldiers who had been run over by jeeps would reportedly leave a pattern that resembled a closed zipper on the corpse. Another possible explanation is that when the heads of Korean soldiers exploded with a high powered weapon, their head resembled an unzipped zipper.
The Korean word guk, 국, means country, and miguk, 미국, means America, likely misheard as “me gook”
Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia
Estimated 364,000 civilian deaths of approx 900,000 total deaths
With the hard R, no less
The more people come forth with sexual assault allegations against a powerful person, the more reports of corroborating allegations will appear against that powerful person and others like him
When you’re asleep, you’re not aware of anything going on around, until you “wake up”.
The family of Don Shirley, who the movie is based on, would disagree with the characterization that his driver was his friend.
e.g. if the total amount of oppression a Black person faces is x, and the oppression a woman faces is y, a Black woman faces x + y oppression
Oxford: the action or practice of disingenuously expressing concern about an issue in order to undermine or derail genuine discussion.
Which included anti-semitism, sexism, homophobia and the justification of racism/slavery
the United States would increase its GDP by a little over 3x in the same period
The aforementioned, genocide, slavery and continued imperialism, for example
Today Hong Kong, tomorrow Taiwan
Large age gap, man in a position of power
No bias there, at all, clearly
In the west, you don’t need concubines, you just need to employ Jeffery Epstein
Asian cultures are much more conservative when it comes to talking about sex in general, let alone revealing you had an affair to billions
Incidentally, the United States did not boycott the 1936 Berlin Olympics, when Nazi ideology was extremely clear
Asian men were actually considered crafty and seductive, which is hilarious to think about when you think about how they’re seen in the West today. Almost like the way the West flips from the Japanese/Chinese being their ally every other generation.
Accused on 12/6/2021 of sexually assaulting 4 teenagers who worked for Ron Burkle, an associate of Jeffery Epstein
Jim Crow
Vote for blue no matter who really got us places
a half yuan, as in what a random civilian is paid for tweeting pro-CPC propaganda
An article written by a bitter asian male who glorifies the CCP, mixes historical facts with fiction and conveniently leaves out the mass atrocities committed by asians and every other race on this planet. Remind us how many million people died under Mao's regime?
This article is a weak attempt at creating a "white man bad" narrative and victimization of asian men, hide your agenda better next time if you want to be taken serious atleast... And the irony of demonizing white men while complaining that asian men are demonized.
To end this comment on a positive note: we both like Metal Gear Solid. Also hope you'll be man enough like Snake to leave up critique.