A hundred years ago Sigmund Freud’s American nephew, Edward Bernays, discovered you could make people buy things they didn’t need by appealing to their emotions. It had political ramifications too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04

Because we, in the western media, are always right and anyone who criticises us are wrong. We don’t have an agenda, honest, just check out our coverage of of the genoci I mean war in Gaza.

However, it was misrepresented by many major media outlets in their reporting.

No surprises there

I’m sure I read elsewhere recently that the Ukrainian army was killing 17, 000 Russian troops a day. Fifty thousand wont last long

He may not care about the Palestinian issue but he may feel a little different about Israeli expansion

That’s Tiananmen Square at the top. Doesn’t look like the kind of place where “ten thousand” students had been machine gunned down just a few hours before, does it?

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back. - Carl Sagan

• The massacre story was quite wrong, said Jay Mathews, former Beijing bureau chief for the Washington Post. “A few people may have been killed by random shooting on streets near the square, but all verified eyewitness accounts say that the students who remained in the square when troops arrived were allowed to leave peacefully.”

• New York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof, a bitter critic of China, wrote: “There is no massacre in Tiananmen Square, for example, although there is plenty of killing elsewhere.”

• Some told the truth years later. In 2009, James Miles, a senior BBC correspondent in Beijing at the time, admitted that he had “conveyed the wrong impression” and that “there was no massacre on Tiananmen Square.”

• Graham Earnshaw of Reuters, who was in the square, wrote a detailed report in his memoir explaining how the military came, negotiated with the students and made everyone, including himself, leave peacefully.

• Even the student protesters debunked the story. Wu’er Kaixi, who claimed to have seen the massacre with his own eyes, wasn’t even there, they said. He had left the Square hours earlier. It was later revealed that Wu’er was a Xinjiang Uyghur named Örkesh Dölet. He was spirited out of China through the Hong Kong-based “Operation Yellowbird” and taken to the US, where he was given a place at Harvard University.

• More recently, Wu’er Kaixi/ Örkesh Dölet drew parallels between the Tiananmen Square massacre and the Hong Kong 2019 riots—perhaps more accurately than he realised, both being heavily misreported using the exact same techniques, by the exact same unholy alliance of behind the scenes manipulators and anti-Chinese journalists.

• Madrid’s ambassador to Eugenio Bregolat was filled with righteous anger. He noted that western journalists were reporting the massacre as fact from their hotel guestrooms, while Spain’s TVE channel had a television crew physically in the square that evening and knew it was false.

Slavery, human trafficking and child labour: >https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/02/01/1152893248/red-cobalt-congo-drc-mining-siddharth-kara

Cobalt Red: a regressive, deeply flawed account of Congo’s mining industry https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/cobalt-red-siddharth-kara-democratic-republic-congo-book-review/

Toxic waste killing animals: >https://www.afrik21.africa/en/niger-chinese-gold-mines-closed-after-the-death-of-around-fifty-animals/

According to local livestock farmers

No further investigation? Certainly not, the US government just passed a bill dishing out $325 million a year of tax payers money for anti-China propaganda stories https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/1157/text

https://www.france24.com/en/africa/20240505-chinese-owned-gold-mines-in-niger-ordered-shut-after-herders-report-animal-deaths

The same story as above but it added the line:

French company Orano (formerly Areva), which has been extracting uranium in northern Niger for more than 40 years, is regularly accused by NGOs of polluting the environment.

The French have been doing it for 40 years and only now it gets a mention, a throwaway sentence at the end of an article criticising China.

Was there a follow-up? Did the mines reopen? Did the government send in the army, or allow private militias to quell restive natives as they would have to if the West were “protecting its interests?”

Labour violations, stealing land: >https://news.mongabay.com/2024/04/locals-slam-zimbabwe-for-turning-a-blind-eye-to-chinese-miners-violations/

Zimbabwe has been cut off from global financiers over failure to service its debts. The country was also hit by sanctions and trade embargos by the European Union, U.K. and U.S. over serious human rights violations.

They conveniently forget to mention how it got into debt and why the country can’t service it. Go look up the country’s history, it might give you a clue as to why they might prefer doing business with China instead of the West.

Of course, mining is a dirty, filthy business. It fucks up the land and is really shitty for anyone who lives nearby. There are bound to be accidents and there are bound to be people who are upset.

That doesn’t alter the fact that China is also building infrastructure, creating jobs and giving them the tools they need to develop thus creating wealth.

I know Americans think Africans still live in mud huts and beat drums at dinner time but they are not so stupid that they keep doing business with people who routinely rip them off.

You will, of course, cry “China bad, China worse.” It seems a lot of African countries are willing to take that risk. After all, the railways that China has built in Southeast Asia, which the West insisted were doomed to fail, are doing extremely well indeed.

That is not proof. It is also a cropped photo. The uncropped version shows Tiananmen Square at the top but it doesn’t show what your propagandists want it to show. I’ll post it for you when I get home.

Prove me wrong

Traditionally the US does not support Taiwan independence. Go look it up.

Though it is true that they are quietly trying to push their puppets in Taiwan to declare independence because they know damned well that is the only way they will get the war they so desperately want.

The vast majority of the Taiwanese want the status quo to remain exactly as it is

They are all over social media and news aggregators pushing nakedly pro-US narratives about everywhere the west doesn’t like, feverishly downvoting anyone who has the temerity to offer a different point of view

Perhaps you could share some details

China’s engagment in Africa is just as neocolonial as Western engagement if not more

How so?

China is building infrastructure, creating jobs and giving African nations the tools they need to develop thus creating wealth. What does China get out of it? Markets - a place to sell the products the make. That is quite a bit different from the western policy of enriching despots, plundering mineral wealth and leaving the countries to fester and rot.

Never mattered to the Democrats either. No matter who has been in power America’s geopolitical ambitions are all that mattered. To Trump, he is the only thing that matters.

Mum, Look! I’m waving my dick at China again!

It’s mainly for the benefit of their own constituents. A day later there will be a big black headline reading something like China Slams US long-range bomber. Few places outside the western media bubble will bother to report it.

Since the 1960s, the United States has systematically punished the Cuban people through a stringent blockade on its economy for having declared and built a political and economic model different from the one advocated and directed by the United States.

The US also has about 750 military bases (not including black sites) scattered across 80 countries around the world

HK$20,000 is nothing when you consider that is not much more than a months rent in Hong Kong.

Isn’t that a bit like asking the fox to guard the hen house?

How do you know its the truth?

Casualty counts and battlefield losses are disputed during active conflicts, and experts urge caution when considering tallies offered by either party in a war. Moscow and Kyiv very rarely nod to their own casualty counts.