In the early 2000s, China’s Xinjiang province suddenly began experiencing deadly waves of terrorist attacks, and hundreds of people were killed.
There's lots of evidence the US was involved in instigating these attacks as an attempt to destabilize China. 🧵
How?
By funding extremist religious groups, particularly groups like ETIM, in China and neighboring Afghanistan whose goal was to turn Xinjiang into a separate fundamentalist Islamic state.
This degree of fundamentalist Islam has no historical precedent in China.
During these years, some of these radicalized groups left China to fight in Syria on the side of ISIS and the “moderate rebel” groups that the US funded to topple Syria’s government.
After 2015, these groups began returning to China, leading to a new wave of attacks.
China responded by infiltrating these terror networks and arresting the people involved in coordinating the attacks.
Due to the urgency and severity of the problem, China cast a wide net and also arrested people promoting religious fundamentalism and anti-China sentiment.
For everyone else, there were no mass arrests, campaigns to demonize muslims, or bombs dropped on Afghanistan.
Instead, China attacked the root of the problem through poverty alleviation, vocational training, and education.
As a result of this humanistic approach, Xinjiang no longer suffers terror attacks and the standard of living is rising fast. Cultural practices are protected and celebrated, and there are 9x more mosques in Xinjiang alone than there are in the entire US.
Since having their favorite strategy of destabilization neutralized, the US has pivoted to its second favorite tool: sanctions.
These sanctions are targeted at the industries which have brought Xinjiang prosperity, such as cotton and tomatoes.
In the midst of all this bombastic posturing by the west, many foreign diplomats have visited the region and come away singing China’s praises.
Unsurprisingly, western diplomats have universally refused to visit.
And as a sign of the turning tide, last year UN member states rejected a western initiative to force a debate on China’s treatment of the Uyghurs, infuriating western countries and their ecosystem of regime change lobbyist groups.
In truth, there is no evidence that China could provide to disprove the genocide narrative in the eyes of most westerners, who resemble creationists or flat earthers in their constant retreat to new fantastical claims requiring an endless cycle of debunking.
Put very simply: the entire Uyghur story is being flipped on its head to serve western audiences atrocity propaganda, licensing them to disregard any potential lessons from China while assuaging any latent guilt they might carry from their own legacy.
Which is a real shame, since the many successes of communist countries provide myriad lessons westerners could learn from and adapt to our own conditions.
But the constant atrocity-propaganda blitz facilitates a mental short circuit, making learning virtually impossible.
90%+ of Uyghurs speak Uyghur, while
13% (and falling) Indigenous peoples in Canada can speak their language.
In 2022, Nord Stream was bombed, forcing Germany to import gas from the US.
In 2023, the govt of Niger—France's largest supplier of uranium—was overthrown in a coup.
Are these events connected? 🧵
Since the Russia-NATO war in Ukraine began in early 2022, Germany’s energy mix has dramatically changed.
The first change involved banning the import of Russian coal into the EU in the summer of 2022, ostensibly as a response to Russia’s actions in Ukraine.
6 weeks later, in the largest act of industrial sabotage of the modern era, the Nord Stream undersea pipelines connecting Russia and Germany were bombed, irrevocably severing the Germany-Russia energy connection.
There’s a very real chance Ukraine is about to attack the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in an attempt to create a nuclear disaster.
But why? 🧵
The Zaporizhzhia NPP, the largest nuclear power plant in Europe, is located on the east bank of the Dnieper river in territory currently controlled by the Russian military.
The plant has been under Russian control since shortly after the conflict began in early 2022. Early this year, Russia transitioned the plant to “safe” mode, with 5/6 reactors in cold shutdown and one remaining in hot shutdown to allow easier restart when winter demand increases.
Poor countries exist at the bottom of the global value chain.
In order to develop, poor countries need access to capital to purchase from other countries the labor saving tools & technologies that’ll allow them to begin building an advanced economy.
Enter IMF loans.
On condition of gaining access to these loans, the US uses its unilateral power over the IMF/World Bank to force countries into relinquishing control of their monetary policy.
Among the loan conditions is the stipulation that the national currency be devalued.
China, despite being a communist country, has not yet progressed beyond wage labor, and thus still has a form of exploitation intrinsic to capitalism, in which the ‘surplus value’ that labor produces is appropriated by capital.
Surplus value is the new value a worker produces in a day *in excess of what they’re paid in wages*.
Yesterday, an open mutiny emerged within Russia’s Wagner forces deployed in Ukraine, followed by immediate media hysteria about a potential coup.
In confusing situations like this, a “cui bono?” line of questioning is usually the best place to start. 🧵
When 3 of 4 Nord Stream pipelines were severed by underwater explosives last year, the goal of the culprit was immediately clear to anyone not thoroughly consumed by the western disinformation bubble: to remove any possibility of economic reintegration between Russia and Germany
Yet when the notoriously erratic and increasingly insubordinate figurehead of Russia’s contract army immediately after it became clear the AFU’s much anticipated Big Spring Offensive™ was a complete bust, suddenly people lose all their bearings of “who benefits?”
Western leftists—some of the biggest beneficiaries of imperial plunder in world history—see class antagonisms as the principle contradiction within the imperial core and assume that this applies everywhere.
When the western left regurgitates that “socialism means workers own the means of production" as a trans-historical truism, they fail to understand the historical context of how this truism emerged within the societies of industrialized colonial powers.
Socialism is better defined as “the stable control of the state by the evolving interests of the working class”.
Post-revolutionary communist countries in the global south do not see class antagonisms as primary while still struggling under centuries of parasitism by the west.