I Don’t Always Believe CIA Narratives. But When I Do, I Believe Them About China

What exactly is in this old "gotcha" video that makes it impossible this is a routine transfer of prisoners between two prisons?

My social media notifications have been lighting up the last few days with virulent Chinagaters sharing a video which purports to show Uighur Muslims being loaded onto a train to be taken to concentration camps. It’s actually an old video that had already surfaced last year, but it is magically making the rounds again as a new and shocking revelation in 2020 now that western China hysteria has been officially kicked into high gear, at exactly the same time the US enacts one of the most dangerous and incendiary escalations of recent years in the South China Sea.

Everyone tagging me in this video presents it as a self-evident “gotcha” moment, in exactly the same way Russiagaters spent years tagging me in every HUGE BOMBSHELL WALLS ARE CLOSING IN item of thinly sourced narrative fluff in their debunked conspiracy theory that the Kremlin had infiltrated the highest levels of the US government.

They are one hundred percent certain that the video shows Uighurs being loaded onto a train to go to a concentration camp, solely because that is what the bit of text over the video tells them they are seeing. They aren’t looking at the actual data and thinking critically about it, they’re looking at the narrative and believing it on blind faith. Which, in a post-Iraq invasion world, is an absolutely insane thing to do when presented with information about a nation that is targeted by the US-centralized empire.

In reality there’s nothing in the video which tells us that these are Uighur people being sent to a “re-education camp” and not merely a conventional prison transfer of convicted criminals, the likes of which take place in the far more populous US prison system all the time. It’s an unknown. We are told by the BBC’s Andrew Marr (the same Andrew Marr whose phony journalism Noam Chomsky derided years ago) that it has been “authenticated by western intelligence agencies and by Australian experts”, which in practice are the same thing, and that’s really the extent of the evidence. Again, this is an insane source to take on faith in a post-Iraq invasion world.

There are in fact an abundance of reasons to be highly skeptical of the establishment narrative about what is happening to Uighurs in Xinjiang. But that isn’t the point that I am trying to make here.

The point I am trying to make here is that the only sane response to any narrative that is being promoted by western intelligence agencies and their media stenographers about governments which have resisted absorption into the imperial blob is intense and unrelenting skepticism. These organizations have such an extensive and well-known history of lying about exactly this sort of thing that they have left us no choice but to withhold belief from anything they say absent a mountain of independently verifiable evidence if we want to have a fact-based relationship with reality.

None of this means that China has a wonderful government. It doesn’t even mean that all the bad things we’re being told about what the Chinese government is doing are false. It’s entirely possible that that video shows exactly what we’re being urgently told to believe it shows. There’s simply no way to be sure one way or the other in an information ecosystem that is so severely tainted by propagandistic narrative manipulation.

Surely the Chinese government is far from sinless. It seems to be a constant that power structures which keep secrets and use propaganda will always wind up doing ugly things. But this doesn’t mean you go believing whatever cold war-facilitating story we are fed by western power structures about it. Not if we want to avoid being duped into serving as pro bono CIA propagandists, unwitting tools of a murderous war machine.

There is a slow-motion third world war underway between the US-centralized power alliance and the nations like China which have resisted being absorbed into it, and that war is being largely facilitated by propaganda. If one doesn’t wish to become a propagandist themselves, one ought to withhold belief from the stories they are told about the terrible, awful things the unabsorbed nations are doing which require extensive sanctions, subversion and interventionism in response.

This doesn’t mean you believe the opposite of what you’re told, it simply means you refrain from believing either way and remain agnostic until presented with hard verifiable proof. Believing damaging narratives about US-targeted governments is exactly as stupid as believing the words of a known compulsive liar about someone you know he hates.

China is such a curious anomaly in the narrative matrix. Many who are normally skeptical of claims by western governments immediately swallow anything they’re told about China. They not only believe all such claims, it never even occurs to them to seriously question them. Like they seem to be genuinely unaware that skepticism of establishment China narratives is even an option. The claims just slide right into the “believe” file in their mind, completely unchecked by anything resembling critical thought.

I argue with people all over the political spectrum about China online, and an astonishing percentage of them have clearly put exactly zero research into critically examining these claims, even if they’re people who are normally relatively critical of western foreign policy. They’re often completely unaware that whatever claims they’re advancing are not just disputed but have large amounts of evidence against them. This is because they’ve done no research whatsoever into finding out what they were told is even true. They’ll do that research on Iran, they’ll do it about Russia, they’ll do it about Syria, but with China all skepticism immediately goes right out the window. It’s the weirdest thing.

Always be intensely skeptical of claims made about governments targeted by the known liars who run the US-centralized empire. Always, always, always, always. If you advance imperialist propaganda, then you are just as culpable for the bloodshed and suffering they help facilitate as the people who are actually launching the missiles.

Stay skeptical, my friends.

Source: Caitlin Johnstone

7 Comments
  1. Mary E says

    So the US continues to bash China – after starting a not so self-serving trade war – and wants to make us all believe that China is so bad that the US just can’t have anything to do with them anymore
    no more “Made in China” goods coming our way? In the meantime, the US is doing what they accuse China of doing: moving in on territory that is not theirs! Whaaaat? China has more right to the China Sea than does the US, which is so delusional that it thinks they own the world and everything in i, but lest we forget: the US has NO money – and nothing to back up what is out there floating around that looks like money….
    Bluster and more bluster is all the US has (well along with its
    war machines, which are being outdated as we speak)…they are nothing but a big foul bag of wind.

  2. Roopods6 says

    Chinagaters? This hack author has nothing but praise and excuses for the totalitarian CCP Empire. So anti-empire is like those who lie about being anti-fascist. Caitlin seems a good candidate for the Ministry of State Security (MSS) Thousand Talents Program there in Australia where she lives yet has practically nothing to say about there. Never mind the massive empire building that the Communist Chinese Party is doing right now. It’s massive tentacles spreading along its Belt & Road Initiative into Africa, Europe, even through Tehran to Beirut (unofficially of course). Is that skeptical enough Caitlin or are we only allowed such skepticism against Xi Jinping’s enemies?

    1. Mary E says

      Investing big money into these countries that join the Belt and Road project is a win-win for China and for the countries that join up. What does the US have to offer except war, unrest and devaluation of a country’s money…and the looting of their natural resources?

    2. disqus_3BrONUAJno says

      We are allowed all of the false flags that will work to suck us into their paradigms.

  3. disqus_3BrONUAJno says

    Caitlin Johnstone might as well be a bot if she isn’t one. Dialog isn’t an option with her.

    1. Roopods6 says

      https://twitter.com/caitozhttps://caitlinjohnstone.com/ …that’s who the slagheep is. Another loosely defined “journalist” who lives in Australia yet apparently has nothing to say about it and whose interests are the CIA and UFOs. Yunno because the truth is out there. Way, way, way out there.

      1. disqus_3BrONUAJno says

        You haven’t been reading her for as long as I did before I lost interest.
        She doesn’t seem to have any American sources for her information that isn’t common on the Internet. She appears to be in it for the donations, because her analysis is diminutive.
        The most tightly defined journalist that Australia has ever produced is Julian Assange.

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