Okinawa Disproves The US Narrative About Overseas Bases
Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
Okinawa governor Denny Tamaki has implored the UN for international backing in his opposition to the prefecture being overrun with US military bases.
The Japan Times reports:
“I am here today to ask the world to witness the situation in Okinawa,” Tamaki told a session of the world body’s Human Rights Council, arguing that the concentration of the military bases there threatens peace.
Tamaki, the first Okinawa governor in eight years to address the council, said, “The reclamation work proceeds despite the fact that it was clearly opposed by Okinawan voters in a democratically held referendum.”
Whenever I talk about the rapidly increasing number of US military bases and operations surrounding China I get empire simps telling me “But the people in those countries WANT us there!” Okinawa shows it’s always been a nonconsensual relationship disguised as a consensual one.
And it should here be noted that Japan’s national government was itself the product of extensive US manipulation after World War II. A 1994 New York Times article titled “C.I.A. Spent Millions to Support Japanese Right in 50’s and 60's” details the massive amount of energy the US intelligence cartel poured into stomping down the Japan Socialist Party and ensuring that the Japanese right wing “maintained their one-party rule, forged close ties with Washington and fought off public opposition to the United States’ maintaining military bases throughout Japan.”
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Silicon Valley, the mass media and the British government seem to be doing everything they can to delegitimize the very serious allegations against Russell Brand by making it abundantly clear to everyone that what they actually care about is his online content, not his accusers. The Google-owned platform YouTube has demonetized Brand’s account, empire propagandists like James Ball of “The only barrier to Julian Assange leaving Ecuador’s embassy is pride” fame are writing screeds attacking Brand’s content, and a British MP with ties to the British army’s psychological warfare division has been writing letters to other social media platforms demanding that Brand be demonetized.
I wasn’t even going to weigh in on this controversy. But I also wasn’t expecting the media, government officials and Google to openly advertise the fact that they care solely about removing Brand’s content from the internet, not about helping his accusers.
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Republicans are so stupid and evil that they’ll literally support invading Mexico and ramping up nuclear brinkmanship with China in the name of curbing fentanyl overdoses instead of just supporting a sane drug policy based on science and facts.
It’s not a mystery what would solve America’s opiate crisis: a sane drug policy and a nation where people aren’t miserable and desperate to numb the pain. But because a globe-spanning empire depends on keeping Americans too poor and busy and too psychologically abused by propaganda to start making sense of the world and start pushing for reasonable foreign policy, the sane path is not seen as an option.
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It should be more widely understood that denying the “Uyghur genocide” propaganda narrative is not the same as denying that there was an authoritarian crackdown in Xinjiang. Empire apologists tend to conflate these two points in a motte-and-bailey fallacy wherein the much harder claim to defend (Uyghur genocide) is misrepresented as one and the same as a much easier claim to defend (authoritarian actions in Xinjiang).
That Beijing began implementing a giant police action in Xinjiang in 2014 involving large-scale detention of certain Uyghurs in reeducation camps is not seriously debated, and is not denied by Beijing. What’s denied is that any of this was done with the intention — or the effect of — eliminating or diminishing the Uyghur people or their culture. There is simply no basis for that claim, and mountains of evidence to the contrary.
These reeducation camps have been spun by western propagandists as concentration camps and extermination camps in a ham-fisted effort to frame Xi Jinping as another Adolf Hitler, when in reality they really were re-education camps in the literal sense of the term. They were facilities designed to indoctrinate/de-indoctrinate Uyghurs believed to have become radicalized into an ideology that had plunged Xinjiang into violence and chaos and threatened to tear apart the PRC. By all accounts — including by the western press — these facilities were decommissioned around 2019–2020.
This was all covered in a recent report by two prominent German sinologists which didn’t get enough attention. Were there abuses in Xinjiang? It’s hard to imagine how there wouldn’t have been in a sweeping police action involving large-scale involuntary detainment. You can criticize Beijing for those abuses all you want, but what you can’t do is legitimately call it anything like genocide.
When Uyghur separatist groups began inflicting acts of terror with the goal of driving the Chinese government out of Xinjiang and creating their own state, Beijing had essentially three choices:
- To engage in a US-style campaign of mass military slaughter against these groups until they were defeated,
- To allow a violent uprising of what would inevitably become western-backed jihadists as they had just seen happen in Libya and Syria carve away a massive and geostrategically crucial part of China to be exploited by the US and its allies, or
- To find some alternative to 1 and 2.
Beijing went with option number three, and the alternative it found was the aggressive deradicalization campaign it ended up implementing and the re-education facilities it has been so widely criticized for.
Again, you can criticize Beijing for how it went about addressing its dilemma in Xinjiang all you want, but it was plainly universes less draconian than the US approach of killing millions and displacing tens of millions in its barbaric “war on terror”. And unlike the “war on terror”, Beijing’s approach actually worked, which is why those facilities were shut down and Xinjiang is returning to normal.
China has an authoritarian government. China has never not had an authoritarian government. That’s nobody’s business but China’s. The Chinese have been managing their own affairs just fine for thousands of years without a bunch of white people running in wagging their fingers at them, and the real reason western rulers are angry about what happened in Xinjiang is because it prevented the PRC from being balkanized by a western-backed separatist uprising.
Only a moron would believe the same empire that spent the last two decades murdering Muslims by the millions suddenly cares about Muslims in China.
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Mainstream journalism is mostly just a vanity career for Ivy League trust fund kids who don’t need the work but want to feel like important members of society. No grand conspiracy is required for them to administer propaganda — they do it to advance their own class interests.
The mainstream press don’t push people toward culture war instead of class war because they’ve been instructed to do so by the CIA or a shadowy cabal of elites, they do so because it would hurt their family’s interests if people began focusing on class war.
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Featured image via Aaron on Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
