the_dunk_tank
It's the dunk tank.
This is where you come to post big-brained hot takes by chuds, libs, or even fellow leftists, and tear them to itty-bitty pieces with precision dunkstrikes.
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It is, largely, because they are bombarded with this message. And they're bombarded with the message because the national leadership needs to win the consent of the governed in order to pivot to a hostile stance against the nation's largest trading partner.
The China-hate wasn't anywhere near this bad 20 years ago. And nothing between our two countries can really explain it outside of the geopolitical need to engage with their nation as hostile.
Okay, but why China and why now? We could be doing this same dance with Japan or Indonesia or Brazil or India just as easily. If anything, it would be easier because it is true. This is a purely arbitrary move by a handful of PNAC goons who see Big China Line Go Up and fear what their GDP eclipsing ours means for the future.
The China Hate is purely a consequence of the international dick measuring contest run out of DC. It doesn't have anything to do with the lay American's self-perception.
I completely agree that it's not an accident that China in particular is the US State Dept's chosen enemy. But that is only one half of it, the other half that I'm considering is why the public is receptive to it. There is a degree of information control in the US, but it is still easy to hear alternative viewpoints through the internet.
I don't believe it is as simple as brainwashing, or Chomsky's manufacturing consent, or Parenti's inventing reality, or any other top-down approach on a totally passive population.
There's a good article on RedSails about this topic, in which the author argues (convincingly IMO) in favor of licensing, rather than brainwashing. In summary it argues that people are not merely duped by propaganda, they often choose to believe it for whatever reasons corresponding to their real conditions of life.
Edit: Ok I've been re-reading this article and it turns out they talk about the Uiguhr-genocide narrative, so it's even more fitting to this dicussion:
The amount of times one can simply quote the Red Sails essay is ridiculous, in regards to the modern-day Western hit-pieces...
I see a few flaws in their analysis. Straight off the bat
Because it isn't merely a stated claim. It is a work of propaganda enforced by a blizzard of images, testimonials, and bits of statistical data intended to build a conception of who the Uyghurs are, what Chinese state officials are doing, and how there is an urgent need for American intercession.
I agree its a fool's errand to run in after the fact and try to deprogram a person sold on a heavily invested narrative. You're bringing a pen to a gun fight.
At the same time, a broad understanding of historical patterns and a materialist understanding of global conditions over time forms a foundation that's resistant to these kinds of explosive claims. If you have a population that's familiar with the historical arc of the East Asian sub-continent - the famines, the wars, the Century of Humiliation, the repeated failed revolutions, the genocide committed by the Japanese, and then the 60 decades of rebuilding that brought the modern nation of China into its current state - then seeing the Chinese modernization of Xinjiang as meaningfully distinct from British Enclosures or the American Homestead Acts or King Leopold's conquest of the Congo is easier.
Its this understanding that leads to agitation. But it has to come from some broader historical understanding, particularly one that they can get a piece of in their own lives.
I don't buy this, because I know too many people who are functionally agitated and are actively looking for opportunities to rebel. Its these people who the "Uyghur Genocide" or "Slava Ukraini" narratives work the best against, as they can channel efforts into a struggle against evil colonialism in a manner that doesn't kick the hornet's nest quite so close to home.
By contrast, the folks who are all in on American Exceptionalism tend not to respond to the baseline of outrage. A weak ethnic minority being suffocated by its neighbor is fine - even desirable. A regional rebel government espousing liberal-ish values is Woke beside the Based Might of Big Daddy Russia and deserves to lose.
If people were eagerly seeking this shit out to balm their consciences, American conservatives would be the first ones in line to gobble this shit up.
No. I think trying to displace blame from a central cohort of influence peddlers and bullshit artists onto a generic mass of information consumers by claiming they're subconsciously complicit in their own gullibility... It really is just victim blaming.