Thread by @Edourdooo

The recent turmoil in #Myanmar exposes Washington's retreating influence; an emerging "Asians' Asia" scenario is becoming more evident,

Russia, a European power, increasingly aligns its interests with those of Asia while Japan, an Asian country, continues to buck the trend in sticking with its pro-Western anti-China orientation.

“Xinjiang’s biggest mistake is that it has been too peaceful and happy over the past five years” and the West hates it,

“Washington's Chengdu consulate, which was shut down after the Trump administration shut down the Chinese consulate in Houston, was used to spy on China's northwestern provinces, Xinjiang in particular.”

Academia Sinica's Wu Chi-na has been researching Xinjiang for almost 30 years and speaks Uyghur, listen to what he has to say about this topic,

Most of the so-called testimonies and allegations quoted in Western media outlets lack basic credibility, as Wu argues.

In post-colonial societies like Myanmar (and Egypt), military rule is actually the preferred form of political domination as democratically elected governments often struggle to gain legitimacy.

The NLD, in part due to lack of competent governing talents, has not been able to cure many of the ills that bedevil the Burmese state, like ethnic separatism.

Under British rule, ethnic Bengalis worked as miners and policemen, something the majority Burmans resented.

When Myanmar gained independence, the Rohingya, descendants of the Bengali immigrants, even refused to join the Union.

Aung San Suu Kyi's government, once touted in the West as a fine example, has also been seen as too accommodating of Chinese interests.

Even if outright conflict can be avoided, the UN World Food Program has warned that the unrest and economic malaise could push the 54m-strong country into hunger. 
ft.com/content/79930f…

As in Syria, where its military support has helped Assad’s regime to survive the civil war, Moscow appears to see Myanmar as an opportunity to defy western democracies and play a regional power-broker role.

China is Myanmar’s biggest trading partner and investor, shares a border and — while it cares little about a reversal of democracy — has a vested interest in keeping the country stable.

Since the era of the Great Game in the late 19th century, the Brits have had an avid interest in Xinjiang, as former Taiwanese lawmaker Julian Kuo (郭正亮) argues,

Kuo argues that by boycotting Xinjiang's cotton, the West wants to cause mass unemployment in Xinjiang, destabilizing a vital province of China at a critical juncture of its Belt and Road Initiative.

If US intelligence agencies, given their highly advanced spy satellites, have proof of the kind of abuses that Adrian Zenz claims, they would have provided to many media organizations.

Hyping the China threat will help the Pentagon inflate its budget and defense contractors, which fund anti-China think tanks like Australia’s ASPI, will benefit handsomely.

Biden will struggle to get the trillions of dollars he needs to fund his infrastructure plans when the military-indutrial complex busies itself with demonizing China.

As to the BBC's insidious role in the British government’s propaganda offensives,
google.com/amp/s/amp.theg…

In the Middle East,
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IRD also worked alongside the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6) and the BBC's World Service.
news-archive.salford.ac.uk/news/articles/…

The Information Research Department (IRD), set up in 1948 to counter Soviet propaganda, was the brainchild of Christopher Mayhew, Labour MP and under-secretary in the Foreign Office, and grew to become one of largest Foreign Office departments.

Infamously, the BBC helped MI6 and the CIA overthrow Iran’s democratically elected prime minister Mosaddegh in 1953.

BBC correspondents in Eastern Europe in the 1950s, including the veteran broadcaster Charles Wheeler, were fed classified material gleaned from covert intercepts of Soviet bloc communications.

Wheeler was the father of Boris Johnson's ex-wife Marina Wheeler.

According to Michael Nelson, formerly with Reuters, who was allowed full access to BBC archives, "The Foreign Office regarded the BBC as by far the most important propaganda weapon it had in Eastern Europe."

Ernest Bevin, then Foreign Secretary, wrote a secret memo in April 1948 in which he said that the British government's views should be made clear in Eastern Bloc countries principally through the BBC.

In the case of the Iraq war, the fact that the BBC was so ferociously attacked by the New Labour government should not obscure the fact that it was largely pro-war. 
opendemocracy.net/en/ourbeeb/und…

The fact that the BBC did belatedly challenge the Government’s case for war at least partly reflects the fact that it was being briefed against the Government by powerful members of the Establishment.

Conflicts between the BBC and the government are common, but such tensions notwithstanding the Corporation’s history is overwhelming one of conformity to elite agendas.

The great ambition of its founder John Reith was to become Viceroy of India and according to the historian Siân Nicholas, under Reith’s leadership the BBC was a ‘willing, even evangelical, propagandist of empire’.

What became the BBC World Service was established as the Empire Service, with the goal of ‘imperial consolidation’ and the countering of independence movements.

One of the BBC’s first PR men, Stephen Tallents, who went on to become the founding President of the Institute of Public Relations, was recruited from the Empire Marketing Board.

The Empire Marketing Board was Britain’s first peacetime state propaganda group which sought to re-brand the British Empire as a community of trading partners.

During the Second World War, Tallents worked at the Ministry of Information, which was for a time headed by the BBC’s founder John Reith.

Having spent the war lionizing the Soviet Union, the BBC now went on to play a key role in anti-communist propaganda.

Its Overseas Service collaborated closely with the IRD, originally headed by Ralph Murray, a former BBC journalist who was later appointed a BBC Governor.

The BBC’s Eastern Europe correspondent Hugh Greene would later become one of the BBC’s most respected bosses, but not before a period working as head of propaganda for Harold Briggs, the British General overseeing a ruthless counter-insurgency campaign in Malaya.

The BBC’s role in the so called ‘Suez Crisis’ is fondly remembered as an example of BBC intransigence in the face of government intimidation.

It was nothing of the sort.

Whilst it is true that the BBC maintained a degree of autonomy and gave airtime to the official opposition, its output marginalized anti-war opinion and remained overwhelmingly favorable to the British government’s case.

Decades later during the 1982 Falklands War and the 1991 Gulf War, the BBC would follow the same pattern of notional independence and ideological subordination.

After the First Gulf War, John Major praised the BBC for ‘trying to keep proper balance in reporting’. This balancing act had involved twice cancelling a Panorama program which exposed the fact British companies were involved in the development of a ‘supergun’ for Saddam Hussein.

The single most deadly attack suffered by Iraqi civilians occurred without warning on the early morning of 13 February 1991 when the US conducted a night time bombing of a civilian air raid shelter in Baghdad.

This resulted in the deaths of between 200 and 300 civilians.

While some BBC reporters (like Jeremy Bowen) attempted to maintain an admirable degree of independence and professionalism, in general the BBC was reluctant to attribute any blame to ‘the allies’ for civilian casualties.

According to Richard Sambrook, part of the rationale for recruiting Andrew Gilligan to the Today programme in 1999 was that “for many years the BBC defense correspondent had simply reflected the Ministry of Defense’s point of view.”