How Moon of Alabama Feeds Chinese Counter-Propaganda

January 15, 2022

How Moon of Alabama Feeds Chinese Counter-Propaganda

During my daily round of skimming various global news site I stumble upon this Global Times report:

FM uses slideshow to expose anti-China forces’ lies on Xinjiang

Fabricating reports with numerous loopholes, hiring "actresses" to play as "victims," covering malicious purposes of disturbing China's Xinjiang region with excuses on human rights… Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin on Friday used more than 20 slides to refute disinformation and rumors made by anti-China "scholars," the US and Western media, and the terrorist organization "World Uyghur Congress."

I checked the website of China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs to see if the slideshow is publicly available. Unfortunately that does not seem to be the case. But there is an English language transcript of yesterday's press conference with foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin.

bigger

Prompted by a planted question from a CGTN journalist Wang Wenbin made a prepared presentation on baseless Xinjiang allegations the U.S. likes to make.

This part made me smile (emph. add.):

First of all, those who fabricate lies on Xinjiang always camouflage themselves with three cloaks.
…
The second is the cloak of victims. They concoct lies by playing the victim or witness. Such fake witnesses abound. We once exposed how Zumrat Dawut and Tursunay Ziawudun lied. Today, I want to give you another example named Sayragul Sauytbay. She sometimes calls herself a teacher at a vocational training center, and sometimes a “victim” of the “detention center”. She claims to have witnessed “torture” and “violence” at vocational training centers on one occasion, but insisted that she has never seen any acts of violence on the other. She says the “detainees” were forced to have pork, but asserts that there was no meat at all in another context. In fact, this person has never learned or worked in vocational training centers, but is wanted by the public security authorities for suspected crimes of illegal border-crossing and loan fraud. The so-called “testimonies” of these individuals contradict themselves and cannot justify anything, only to reveal that the people are not victims or witnesses, but third-stringer actors that give themselves away while changing their playbooks.

To my best knowledge the first piece ever that took apart the diverging claims Sayragul Sauytbay made in various interviews was published by Moon of Alabama on December 5 2020.

"Uighurs forced to eat pork" – Horror Stories Told By Chinese Defector Seem To Evolve

The lies by Tursunay Ziawudun were subject of a follow on piece on this site posted on February 4 2021:

Why Do These Uighur Witnesses' Stories Constantly Change?

Two months ago we documented astonishing changes over time in the testimony of a Uyghur woman who had claimed to have been incarcerated in China:

Over the years [Sayragul] Sautbay has given several interviews. The details of her story continued to change in anti-Chinese directions.

In early interviews Sautbay claimed to have been an instructor working in a re-education camp. In later interviews she claims to have been a detainee.

In more recent interviews she claims that she had seen torture and violence in the camps. In earlier interviews she had refuted such claims.

In one story she claims to have observed mass rape. In older interviews she insisted that she had observed no violence at all.

While she now claims that detainees in the camp were forced to eat pork she had earlier claimed that no meat was served in the camps.

The changes in her story came after Sautbay had fallen into the hands of a propaganda group ..
…
A similar change can be observed in the testimony of another Uyghur woman who currently makes the rounds through the media. Tursunay Ziawudun, a Uyghur woman who last year moved to the United States, now claims to have observed mass rape in Chinese detention camps.
…

Moon of Alabama did not publish anything about Zumrat Dawut, the third person the spokesperson mentioned. But a short web search shows that she is a similar fake witness as the other two are. I am sure there are more.

It is a bit amusing to see that someone at the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs dug up and used content from this site for a press presentation by its spokesperson.

Moon of Alabama is not mentioned in it. But that is okay with me. I do not long for becoming a target of an anti-China campaign like those running in Australia, Britain (recommended), Canada and the U.S. itself.

This is however a Moon of Alabama donation request week. If some organization with a large budget would like to drop me a few or more Euros, preferable anonymously, it should feel free to do so.

Every other reader of this site should of course do the same :-).

Posted by b on January 15, 2022 at 13:15 UTC | Permalink

Comments

You never know what eyes are present.
I once chanced upon a scholarly paper that used the phrase: “promotion of democracy in the Middle East is a Trojan Horse for hegemony”.
I originated that (using an old handle) and had used it many times over the years.

Posted by: librul | Jan 15 2022 13:48 utc | 1

“astonishing changes over time in the testimony of”
An attribute of telling the truth is consistency. Lying is harder as the tangled web can create obvious contradictions and inconsistencies.
That is why the Navy Seals at the so-called “killing of Bin Laden” at Abbottabad were ordered to be silent forever.
If they talked enough they would put the spotlight on inconsistencies in the official story.
[Did you know who was killed first in the compound at Abbottabad? The courier was offed and silenced first. I suspect the CIA was trying to interpose, insert, their own fake Bin Laden into the al-Qaeda communication network. The compound was created to fool the courier into thinking he was carrying messages for the real Bin Laden. The CIA bragged that they monitored the courier’s phone calls. They told Obama that one call by the courier strongly suggested the real Bin Laden was in the compound. The opposite is likely true. The CIA realized that they hadn’t fooled the courier, so the whole operation had to be shut down and sanitized. If the Navy helicopter hadn’t crashed into the compound the CIA/Pentagon would have had the option of keeping the entire sanitation operation a secret.]

Posted by: librul | Jan 15 2022 14:58 utc | 2

. . .information operations/warfare
A hundred thousand Russian troops on the Ukraine border and human rights reports about China’s Xinjiang province. This is information warfare, hardly a new endeavor. In the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC, Persian ruler Xerxes used intimidation tactics to break the will of Greek city-states. Alexander the Great used cultural assimilation to subdue dissent and maintain conquered lands. These ancient strategists helped to lay the foundation for information warfare strategy in modern times. It’s currently called information operations (formerly psychological operations), which are planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence the emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups, and individuals. MISO focuses on the cognitive element of the information environment where its target audience includes not just potential and actual adversaries, but also friendly and neutral populations.
Unlike misinformation, disinformation is intentionally false. Examples include planting deliberately false news stories in the media, manufacturing protests, doctoring pictures, and tampering with private and/or classified communications before their widespread release. All of these activities take place within the information environment.
Many countries are involved in information operations, especially the US and its enemies. In the US the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has a history of conducting information warfare or psychological operations. In Nicaragua in the 1980s, the CIA wrote a manual on psychological operations for the contras for use in their civil war against the Nicaraguan government. The manual described “selective use of violence for propagandistic effects,” and to neutralize government officials. In particular, the manual recommended that the Contras lure demonstrators into clashes with authorities to provoke riots or shootings that could be used to further enflame public sentiment against the government. . .more here

Posted by: Don Bacon | Jan 15 2022 15:43 utc | 3

Gratulations. But not really astonishing. They are ALL silent readers. This blog is a very sophisticated and sharp minded covering of the worlds intransparent affairs. It is only a question of your success that westerns governments will become nasty.

Posted by: Jan | Jan 15 2022 16:13 utc | 4

b… very good sleuthing and work on your part and i would be very surprised if moa wasn’t indeed used as a means of getting closer to the truth by larger identities with bigger financial pockets… i hope they do consider a donation given all the work you do to unmask reality.. thanks for sharing your work..

Posted by: james | Jan 15 2022 16:15 utc | 5

Here’s a video clip of that event: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q07mhGVPFr0&t=320s

Posted by: U Lahiri | Jan 15 2022 16:23 utc | 6

I am not surprised at your visibility within China b
As others have noted, there are not many good alternative geo-political news sources and your treatment of subjects you cover is well done.
And yes, you have and will continue to be attacked by those that don’t like your positions.
That said, those that do support your positions/presentation and the forum you provide for discussion need to provide financial support for that which is offered for free. This is a social arrangement that we need to grow into and evolve…..merit based support…bottom up instead of top down….ring a bell?

Posted by: psychohistorian | Jan 15 2022 16:51 utc | 7

Wasn’t there a sitemeter on MOA at one time?

Posted by: dh | Jan 15 2022 16:57 utc | 8

@Posted by: Don Bacon | Jan 15 2022 15:43 utc | 3
re: “. . .information operations/warfare”

“I don’t see how people could claim that ‘mass-formation’ doesn’t exist or has never been scientifically studied. The term just refers – it goes without saying – to the process of the formation of a mass or a crowd. Mass formation has been studied for over 200 years, beginning with such scholars as Gustave Le Bon, Freud, McDougal, Canetti, Hannah Arendt, etc. In the twentieth century, psychologists such as Ash and Sheriff have studied mass formation experimentally.
Some of these scholars did explicitly use the term mass-formation, others didn’t. But what they studied was basically the same: the way in which individual’s mental states is influenced by their tendency to conform to group thinking. I myself have over 100 publications on Web of Science, a large part of them focusing on how individuals’ personality structures is influenced by their relationships with other people. Once you understand the basic mechanisms through which individual’s personality is in the grip of the opinion of other people, you understand the elementary mechanisms at work in this enormous psychological process that is happening when a mass emerges in a society.
In my upcoming book: The psychology of totalitarianism, I analyze and describe the way in which the psychological process of mass formation got stronger and stronger throughout the last two centuries and eventually leads to totalitarian thinking and in the end also to the emergence of totalitarian states.”
– Mattias Desmet, Professor of Clinical Psychology at Ghent University in Belgium

Posted by: librul | Jan 15 2022 17:31 utc | 9

the psychological process of mass formation got stronger and stronger throughout the last two centuries

It is impossible to have “mass opinion” without a population mass. I suggest that a mass population did not exist in the US until circa 1917 when the goverment was forced to turn down draftees as many lacked the ability to speak, or understand, English. Apart from one or two major population centers, America was a place of small towns where local rumour was the predominant form of communication.
Technological advance permits the creation of “mass opinion” with the first clear evidence associated with the 1938 Orson Welles radio broadcast of a Martian Invasion causing major public unrest. Given that current technoogy links all corners of the world together the danger of mass opinion resulting from the control of alternate voices and ultimately totalitarian control is not only likely but is evident in such matters as the COVID pandemic.
I do not see any means to counter this fact other than financial support for centres of excellence in critical thought such as MoA.

Posted by: Sushi | Jan 15 2022 18:03 utc | 10

Sometimes these operations are very rough. I remember having seen photos of supermarket meat packages with the tag “Muslim meat” (in English) with the Crescent Moon and Star and showing these pics as how Uighurs were being slaughtered and their meat sold to Chinese consumers.

Posted by: Andres | Jan 15 2022 18:46 utc | 11

The UK seems to have plenty of money for PR. It seems to have splashed $1.3 billion (seems high, maybe they mean rubles which translates to around £12.5 million). Payments to the usual suspects – ‘activists’, media people, etc.
“Oppen Geim” in English: a new leak of documents of the British Foreign Ministry
451 degrees at the Foreign Gate: the second part of the leak of documents of the British Foreign Ministry
Total coming-out: the third part of the leaked Foreign Office documents. Why did Britain invest $ 1.3 billion in Russia?

Posted by: Arfur Mo | Jan 15 2022 18:51 utc | 12

@Posted by: Sushi | Jan 15 2022 18:03 utc | 10
“It is impossible to have “mass opinion” without a population mass.”
Nonetheless, conforming to group thinking (mass-formation) has been with us for a very long time.
Churches have taken advantage of it’s power for centuries.
Again:

basically the same: the way in which individual’s mental states is influenced by their tendency to conform to group thinking. I myself have over 100 publications on Web of Science, a large part of them focusing on how individuals’ personality structures is influenced by their relationships with other people. Once you understand the basic mechanisms through which individual’s personality is in the grip of the opinion of other people, you understand the elementary mechanisms at work in this enormous psychological process that is happening when a mass emerges in a society.

Here is a fascinating example: The Children’s Crusade of 1212.
https://www.worldhistory.org/Children's_Crusade/

The so-called Children’s Crusade of 1212 CE, was a popular, double religious movement led by a French youth, Stephen of Cloyes, and a German boy, Nicholas of Cologne, who gathered two armies of perhaps 20,000 children, adolescents, and adults with the hopelessly optimistic objective of bettering the failures of the professional Crusader armies and capturing Jerusalem for Christendom.

The true history of the Crusade is a bit sketchy as 1212 was during the Middle Ages. This passage I found interesting as it describes the same sort of shit we see in play today.

According to some sources, most of the children were shipped off to Sardinia, Egypt, and even Baghdad, and there sold into slavery. However, this version of events may have less to do with real events and more to do with the Church’s desire to treat the whole affair as a morality tale, a stark warning to others that only crusades with papal authority were ever likely to succeed.

Posted by: librul | Jan 15 2022 19:04 utc | 13

Sushi @ 10:
“Mass opinion” can be assumed to exist even if in reality many if not most people don’t support an action or actual policy. Often all that is needed for “mass opinion” to be assumed is passive public acceptance or tolerance. As we have seen over the past 20 years, the West invaded Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries in spite of huge public opposition among its own peoples.
I suspect my argument may lead me into a circular argument into how much “mass opinion” is dependent on a “population mass” which in turn is formed by cultural (including political) pressure on individuals and groups to conform to a narrative imposed from top down.
The really interesting aspect of Mattias Desmet’s research (referred to by librul @ 9) is how “mass formation” accelerated in the 1800s and 1900s. Population growth and the concentration of people in cities may have contributed to mass formation but these phenomena could equally also be consequences of mass formation.
You might consider also the possibility that the American Civil War in the 1860s itself was in part a consequence of an early mass formation forming around issues such as states’ rights versus federal government and slavery among others.

Posted by: Jen | Jan 15 2022 19:33 utc | 14

“Uighurs forced to eat pork” and these relatively benign stories stopped after Pompeo announced ‘Genocide’. Now all we hear is about mass incarcerations and population control, remember the ‘train’ youtube video? Young men being led away to their certain doom.

Posted by: Christian J. Chuba | Jan 15 2022 20:13 utc | 15

b, I hope the Chinese are contributing to your request for alms. you have carried a lot of water for them, especially in 2020 breaking your back to support the chinese explanation of covid.
may you long enjoy your chinese overlordship.

Posted by: ancientarcher | Jan 15 2022 20:59 utc | 16

Hello, to all reading

Posted by: Cresty | Jan 15 2022 21:02 utc | 17

Thank you b, for your continued fight against the rising Orwellian fascism and propaganda. Mailed support for your hard work this week.
From the Globe and Mail article:
“A source said CSIS officials asked MPs to alert them of any suspicious activity, and provided the politicians with names and contact information of agents handling foreign interference operations in Canada.”
So if a Canadian citizen writes to elected members of parliaments in order to participate in our ostensible democratic process, will those elected democratic representatives obediently forward Canadians’ thought crimes to Big Brother / Five Eyes?
This news will have a further chilling effect on democratic participation, and our MPs will increasingly hear only from anti-China voices as other Canadians calling for balance and truth will silence themselves in fear. The threat to real democracy comes not from external boogeymen but from the establishment Big Brother security apparatus that serves foreign, imperial interests (Five Eyes, Oceania, UKUSA yakuza crime organization.)

Posted by: Canadian Cents | Jan 15 2022 21:17 utc | 18

Although critical reading and listening skills are occasionally taught, how to critically determine your own interests and act in their behalf isn’t taught at all as far as I’m aware. If citizens actually acted in their own interests, I very much doubt we’d have the world we have today, which is ironic given the arguments made back in the 1780s in support of the proposed constitution assumed citizens would always act in their own interests, thus adding another balancing sector, or Countervailing Power as it was later conceived, to the Federalist Balance of Powers equation.

Posted by: karlof1 | Jan 15 2022 22:14 utc | 19

@19
If only!
More and more I see terrified looks on the faces of store clerks when they are faced with having to count money, which isn’t a great sign. History is nonexistent, despite being easier than ever to look up anything. Policy arguments that don’t fit into 140 characters or less are DOA. How in the world do you operate a democracy a world like this?

Posted by: ptb | Jan 15 2022 22:50 utc | 20

Pork and Uighur:
There isn’t Pork Production in Xinjiang, note that China has largest sheep(ovine) herd in the world, and most of that is located in Xinjiang, and around Urumqi it is all mutton ! You be hard pressed to get pork, is goat of sheep! Second country with largest sheep herd is Australia, but they are predominately Spanish Merinos and bred for wool production! .

Posted by: Grishka | Jan 15 2022 23:25 utc | 21

Nice catch! And a very gracious nod to the journos at Global Times, who I expect were giving kudos to the master.

Posted by: Dim sim | Jan 16 2022 0:00 utc | 22

Any forum that allows opinions and link information as freely as MoA is priceless. Thanks b.
Critically evaluate EVERYTHING people, and make your best decisions. Good luck folks, we’re battered on all sides by unadulterated BS…

Posted by: vetinLA | Jan 16 2022 0:37 utc | 23

Speaking about the Uighurs in Xinjiang. I noticed that Biden signed a law forbidding importation of anything from a Xinjiang region in the idea that it might use slave labor.
https://www.mondaq.com/china/export-controls-trade-investment-sanctions/1150248/biden-signs-uyghur-forced-labor-prevention-act
What most people assume is that is cotton. (Funny, as all cotton is picked by Uighur robots.) What they don’t know is that Xinjiang is a huge province of China, fully 1/3 of China, and it is where all the exotic and precious metals comes from.
China is BY FAR the world’s largest exporter of these metals. And they mostly all come from Uighur dominated territories.
https://news.metal.com/newscontent/101685532/China's-rare-earth-permanent-magnet-exports-decreased-slightly-MoM-in-October-/
This Biden Bill suggests a “final nail in the coffin” on precious and rare earth materials out of China to the United States.
Of course, we all know the truth about the Uighurs. They and Kazakhstan all lie on the BRI and the USA Military Empire has been busy “color revolution-ing” the entire Central Asia to block the unification between Russia, Iran, and China.
https://metallicman.com/failed-color-revolution-bri-russia-china-europe/
It’s an interesting time.

Posted by: Rufus Arrr | Jan 16 2022 1:34 utc | 24

After reading about Chinese malign influence, and wondering what propels them to do that, I learned what the true source of that malignity is. And it is right here!

Posted by: Piotr Berman | Jan 16 2022 1:51 utc | 25

Canadian Patriot Press on utoob has a story to tell of the two Michaels and George Soros. Up to no good in China

Posted by: uncle tungsten | Jan 16 2022 1:54 utc | 26

Posted by: Rufus Arrr | Jan 16 2022 1:34 utc | 24
China also dominates the production of solar panel and the essential materials for those panels, and the largest factories of those are apparently in Xinjiang, Chinese province with most accessible and reliable solar resources (Tibet has sunshine too, but high up on roadless plateau, not a good place for factories.). As with all things silicon, production scale and accumulated knowhow matter and Americans are not able to catch up, so green projects in USA are made with solar panels from Vietnam and Malaysia that are made from Chinese components. USA wants to forbid them too, but it is hard. So they wack Uighur workers when they want to work in their own province, and are not lucky enough to work in solar panel industry.

Posted by: Piotr Berman | Jan 16 2022 2:01 utc | 27

It is a bit amusing to see that someone at the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs dug up and used content from this site for a press presentation by its spokesperson. Moon of Alabama is not mentioned in it. But that is okay with me. I do not long for becoming a target of an anti-China campaign

I guess a big congratulations is in order but things get dicey whenever dealing with governments especially when you become too popular. If I recall correctly, MoA was already marked by Western MSM as fake news (or was it propaganda?) back in 2016? so the Chinese MoFA probably found this site from them and have been lurking here ever since.
Original content creators should always be credited. However, in this case I too would be relieved to remain anonymous especially when one goes against the official narrative. No one wants to go through what Julian Assange and Craig Murray have experienced.
Speaking of attracting government’s attention, there’s another “official” narrative where some here have complained on the lack of coverage of dissenting views. Whether b truly believes in it or not, he has to toe the line given the current political climate. Sad but that’s life.

Posted by: Ian2 | Jan 16 2022 2:42 utc | 28

Posted by: Rufus Arrr | Jan 16 2022 1:34 utc | 24 — “…. Biden signed a law forbidding importation of anything from a Xinjiang region….”
Getting around this “law” is easy peasy. Just ship the Xinjiang products through an intermediary in another nation, or have an intermediary nation assemble the product out of Xinjiang parts. Americans simply have to pay more for the work-around. Every time US leadership has a brainwave, American citizens pay for being led by idiots.
The US leadership knows that illogical acts such as this will be shown up in due time. But they still brazenly do these things because their comeuppance is in the future, by which time they will be retired, or in another official position. Right now, they are too busy “winning” — lying, stealing, raping, killing, enriching themselves, doing favours for their puppet masters. That is what charlatans do. They know no better. C S Lewis calls this kind bastards. I agree.

Posted by: kiwiklown | Jan 16 2022 3:44 utc | 29

Posted by: ancientarcher | Jan 15 2022 20:59 utc | 16
Ancient AH, your expectation is that b should propagate in enhanced manner the weapons of mass destruction story or Viagra for Libyan troops , to get paid by your masters who print dollar and give it away to any charlatan and huckster that puts out trash like Belling-Crap!

Posted by: Grishka | Jan 16 2022 3:48 utc | 30

When I read the excellent article on the MH17 trial posted by lex tallonis on the previous thread I was delighted to see MoA mentioned extensively in the footnotes, especially in regards to the Integrity Initiative.
There are numerous sites where you can find “outrage at the latest woke outrage” (or its inverse) but precious few that produce work of such quality that it is cited in scholarly articles or picked up by the foreign ministry of a permanent member of the security council. Raise a glass to b and all who comment here (and for the recently departed, vk and Jackrabbit you are missed).

Posted by: S.P. Korolev | Jan 16 2022 4:11 utc | 31

Raise a glass to b and all who comment here (and for the recently departed, vk and Jackrabbit you are missed).
Posted by: S.P. Korolev | Jan 16 2022 4:11 utc | 31
YOU BET!!!! I concur…..

Posted by: vetinLA | Jan 16 2022 4:59 utc | 32

Interesting article;
https://www.unz.com/article/poverty-and-inequality-in-china/
An excerpt;
In 1850, when Western nations were the richest on earth, capitalists created the first market economy. By privatizing credit, land, and labor, they allowed human society to be regulated by the market. In 1950, when China was the poorest nation on earth, communists created an organic economy by subordinating credit, land, and labor to the service of society and trusting the government to regulate it. In 2020, after growing twice as fast, China’s economy is overtaking market economies in two important aspects: eliminating poverty and inequality.
• • •

Posted by: vetinLA | Jan 16 2022 5:08 utc | 33

China’s Excellent, Very Good Year
With its socialist central planning, China easily escapes the periodic crises that afflict the capitalist West.

Posted by: uncle tungsten | Jan 16 2022 5:47 utc | 34

@19 Karlof1
I think your comment is so fundamentally vital that I’d like to repeat it verbatim for emphasis:

Although critical reading and listening skills are occasionally taught, how to critically determine your own interests and act in their behalf isn’t taught at all as far as I’m aware. If citizens actually acted in their own interests, I very much doubt we’d have the world we have today, which is ironic given the arguments made back in the 1780s in support of the proposed constitution assumed citizens would always act in their own interests, thus adding another balancing sector, or Countervailing Power as it was later conceived, to the Federalist Balance of Powers equation.

And that is why we’re here @ MOA: to learn what our interests are, what the actual situation is, and thereby derive a more-perfect navigational heading.
Next: on the issue of groupthink and how to use it to achieve one’s political goals. Here in the U.S. Edward L. Bernays wrote Propaganda in 1928. It’s a manual on how to establish and guide groupthink. Goebbels credited Bernays as a valuable source some years later. Bernays was related to Freud. Here’s a fascinating article about Bernays.
A few decades after Bernay’s work the advertising and media industry emerged as a major factor in shaping groupthink here in the U.S. If you read that article above about Bernays, you’ll see vividly the wellspring of the ad industry.
In their landmark book Manufacturing Consent published in the mid-eighties Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman’s explain how media and ad revenue shape groupthink. That was in the eighties, before Google and Facebook and so forth. Think what it’s like now.
Of course, implicit in all this is the state’s hand on the scale about what the media outlets … outlet. See Operation Mockingbird for a brief overview.
A long time ago, my father – in one of his interminable walking lectures on all things wise and wonderful – said to me “whatever you have….has you”. He was speaking about possessions, but the notion is even more useful if you extend it into the realm of “relationships”.
The group has more influence on you than you do on it. So one must be circumspect about which “groups” to belong to.
At one point, I took out a piece of paper and conducted a referendum on my social relationships.
Column 1: the relationship (workplace, family, church, trade union, Red or Blue team, etc.)
Column 2: Costs. For ex: Do I have to check my brain at the door in order to fit in?
Column 3: Benefits. Affirmation. Economic inputs. Security. etc.
It took a while to soak in, but that referendum changed things for me. And to pick up on Karlof’s point above, I came to see better what my interests were, and henceforward I took more effective steps to advance my – much more clearly defined – interests.
So, managing the groupthink has a long and storied history, and this is what makes Karlof’s remark about knowing your interests so vital. It also underscores the utility of forums like MOA. It’s a groupthink antidote.
I hope I’ve provided yet another reason to donate to b if you haven’t already.

Posted by: Tom Pfotzer | Jan 16 2022 10:02 utc | 35

The obnoxious worm tongue MSM Guardian 5+1 Eyes security service stenographer let’s it’s attack dogs move on from burying Corbyn by getting on the bandwagon
“No friendly politician is too obscure for insecure China, not even Barry Gardiner.
Nick Cohen”
They really think that no one notices. Or cares if they do.

Posted by: D.G. | Jan 16 2022 10:47 utc | 36

Posted by: librul | Jan 15 2022 19:04 utc | 13
—
Interesting history.
But I would class the church as an indoctrination scheme imposed by a body that has elite social standing, is the sole interpreter of the religious texts, has significant control over education, is the primary source of alms and hospital services with all of these roles well embedded in the culture.
Mass hysteria seems to be opposed to the above. It appears as the consequence of control of technical means of communication (the church also achieved this) coupled with extreme indivualization ( “I” am no longer a person anchored in a religious group, “I” am a unique personality totally unanchored and free to choose as per my whim. The mass hysteria effect appears to derive from the loss of prior social bonds and embeddding. This would include being embedded within an ordered religious construct.
Meta and Alphabet have enourous power to influence and shape your thought in a way that seems far beyond the capacity of any church. In the church you knew what you were to believe in. On the Internet you think yourself free to think anything.
I do not claim to be correct but it is an interesting exhchange.

Posted by: Sushi | Jan 16 2022 14:32 utc | 37

uncle tungsten @ 34
I don’t think ‘easily escapes’ is the right phrase (Ten Crises) but somehow China has managed to keep its eye on the ball and fight corruption and work for the 99%.
As an example:
“Because of state involution (Duara 1995), some of its rural grass root personnel reverted to villainous gentry that had existed repeatedly over history in the past. Alliances of ‘villanous gentry + elite’ were formed with local governing authorities”
“Kan Xiaoguang et al (2002) believed that Chinese society had since 1990s seen the formation of an elite alliance including political, economic and intellectual elites”

Posted by: financial matters | Jan 16 2022 16:09 utc | 38

Here is the 10 Crises book link. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-16-0455-3

Posted by: financial matters | Jan 16 2022 16:12 utc | 39

This book is open access and the author is affiliated with Michael Hudson.

Posted by: financial matters | Jan 16 2022 16:14 utc | 40

@31 – thank you. You made my Sunday better. SP Korolev is one a hero of mine. The good version of Werner von Braun. Evil piece of dukkie.
I love MoA so much. As a film editor working on all of this business, the links, the discourse… the dough I send to b is well worth it. And everyone else should contribute what you can. There is no place like MoA.

Posted by: lex talionis | Jan 16 2022 16:48 utc | 41

Good work.
However, I have still not seen a debunking of the claims made by
Guanguan.
And that is what I’ve most wanted to see, since it was the thing brought up by a friend in response to my claims and arguments against Xinjiang atrocities a month ago.
I think it may be identical or similar to some video on PBS, but I don’t much watch PBS so I’m not sure.
I myself wonder if all the compounds shown are really what Guanguan claims.

Posted by: Charles Peterson | Jan 16 2022 17:49 utc | 42

In the comments of the video:
to guanguag

Posted by: lala | Jan 16 2022 21:22 utc | 43

Charles Peterson @ 42:
I watched a bit of that video and as you say, you have to take Guanguan’s word that what he says about the centres is true.
He spends a lot of time around the periphery of these camps. It is curious that all these camps appear to have no security personnel in the watch-towers or near their entry and exit gates. If the various camps have similar features, might that not be because the guy goes around the same places (travelling in one direction one day along one camp, the next day travelling along the same camp in the opposite direction) several times perhaps?
He seems able to travel quite freely around Urumchi and other cities where these camps are located. No checkpoints or toll booths along the way where toll collectors might double as security checkpoints?
The other thing too is that he has located the camps with help from Buzzfeed and Radio Free Asia: in other words, his task is to confirm what these sources say. Whether the camps are what Buzzfeed and RFA claim they are, is irrelevant: if they look like concentration camps, that seems to be good enough for them and Guanguan.

Posted by: Jen | Jan 17 2022 2:27 utc | 44

Charles Peterson @ 42:
Many of the building the guy shows the in the video are in fact traceble, in fact you can verify that those are prisons. Just go on Baidu.com and type in Chinese Ulumuqi provincial prisons. And btw no facilities like prisons are found on Baidu maps or similar services. But if you need you can search all the buildings shown in that guy’s video on ask Baidu. The simplest way to debunk that guy’s claims is to make a quick research on the internet.

Posted by: Charles | Jan 17 2022 11:47 utc | 45

I actually been to Xinjiang. A few obvious things aren’t mentioned enough in terms of all the misinformation around Xinjiang:
1) Walking around Xinjiang, you see quite a few heavily armed non-Han Chinese policemen / soldiers etc. Ask yourself whether Israel would ever dare allow Palestinians to be heavily armed police officers. The fact that there are so many heavily armed Uighur police / soldiers etc seems to negate the notion that Uighurs are being oppressed and genocided – why the heck would you let ANY uighur near heavy machine guns if you’re freaked out about their potential for sedition? You can argue that they’re being assimilated and losing their local customs etc, but this is also happening to the Cantonese in terms of their kids focusing on Mandarin and not being as fluent in Cantonese or other dialects.
2) Spoke to a major publicly listed Taiwanese textile company re: Xinjiang “slave” labor. This company has some operations in China, but not a lot, and being a Taiwanese company, they’re not fans of the mainland. But they did say this: Xinjiang “slave labor” allegations are completely made up. There’s no slave labor in Xinjiang. Maybe other human rights abuses, but definitely no slaves. They noted that the whole “Better Cotton Initiative” was a cynical PR ploy designed to embarrass the Chinese because it basically forced any company who might have Xinjiang-sourced cotton to send a team on an impossible deadline to certify no slave labor – and this was impossible because of China’s strict COVID-19 quarantine rules. So only option was to say they would ban Xinjiang cotton from supply chain. So even this company, which had nothing nice to say about mainland China otherwise, confirmed this whole BCI thing was obviously just cynical geopolitics by the US.

Posted by: Handsome Man | Jan 17 2022 18:08 utc | 46

Anglo-Saxon country eliminated most of their aborigines, so they have the minimum cultural conflicts, giving them advantage to critize other countries about ‘assimilation’.

Posted by: Russell | Feb 10 2022 10:05 utc | 47

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