This is purely a rant because I don’t want to end up writing an effort post about this topic.
Every year, we see Westerners posting about the “Tiananmen Square Massacre” across social media. Their devotion to “fighting the oppressive Chinese government” is like fucking clockwork. It’s so reliable that if you wanted to, you can prepare posts and comments to counter their narratives months before each June 4th. The western narrative has been debunked thoroughly even by Western sources.
But the point of this post isn’t to complain about the twisting of events, but the glaring contradiction that is their relative (or absolute) lack of posts about events outside of China that were equally or even more brutal than they claim June 4th was.
Why is that?
Why aren’t they posting as regularly about the genocide of indigenous people in their own countries? Why aren’t they posting so frequently about the massacres in Jakarta? Why aren’t they posting as regularly about the bombing of Nagasaki or Hiroshima or Nagasaki or Dresden or Yemen or Iraq of Afghanistan or Syria? Why aren’t they posting each year about the famines Britain engineered in India and other countries? Why don’t I see yearly posts about the Nanjing Massacre? That also occurred in China. Why don’t I see the same reminders about the transatlantic slave trade?
The governments that perpetrated (and in some cases, continue) many of these atrocities still exist and are still oppressing the people who were targeted during these events. This is why they say they target China, right?
Hell, the Holocaust and the subsequent resurgence of facism sees less attention from Westerners than the June 4th incident these days.
The reason for this disparity is that these people don’t actually give a shit whether the Chinese people are oppressed. When they say “I hate the Chinese government, but I don’t hate the Chinese people,” they don’t give a shit whether the Chinese people support and continue to build their current government. It’s not about supporting others, it’s about asserting the dominance and righteousness of the Western world. Not only can they not empathize with those outside the West, they put immense effort into doing the opposite.
It’s about convincing themselves that they live in a just society and that, despite how badly they are oppressed, they could always be worse off. It’s racist, but that racism serves a purpose: it is the copium that keeps them convinced that it’s ok to be oppressed by their own governments.
I don’t rant because I expect the sinophobic propaganda to disappear. I rant because I’m tired of the racism. I rant because I’m tired of the ignorance. I rant because all I want is to see people show others a bit of empathy, to show a little skepticism when they are told others are evil, a little curiosity about the other’s point of view, but I’m constantly disappointed.
Rant over. Thanks for listening.
Most of it is just successful propaganda. Most people are not media literate and don’t read and so are easily misled. You can provide them with information and many will change their views.
But many also will not change their views. They will start throwing a tantrum instead. Sometimes the tantrum is external and you can see how upset they are. Sometimes it’s internal and the only thing you can observe is how absurd and defensive their claims become.
These are the liberals who have invested some of their personal identity into being a “good person” that cares about “human rights”, both of which are now, in their minds, inextricable from “Western democracy” and its propaganda machine. Through their mental transitive property, being a good person means believing and repeating the “China bad” narratives they have been provided by the US State Department and associated and right wing think tanks, all laundered through a willing capitalist press and literal entertainment media that they treat like gospel.
When you contradict this false narrative, they don’t accept it and they are not humbled by the facts. They desperately seek out confirmation of their beliefs. It doesn’t even have to be about the exact topic you’re discussing. They’ll cling to anything “China bad”, revealing that they didn’t care avout the actual subject at all, just the thesis of who they’re told is the official Boogeyman or lesser. And they will have no trouble confirming that belief system whatsoever, as there are always many stories, some of them even true or partially true, that have been hyped up and promoted about the designated enemy via the government and media propaganda apparatus. You can repeat this process several times in a single conversation, with a liberal changing the subject over and over again, and they don’t even notice because they have also been taught that political discussions happen in bad faith. They’re a fight between competitors, not an opportunity for learning and self-criticism.
So, yes you are correct it’s very Western chauvinist. Even accepting the false narrative, their own countries do far worse on a regular basis and even more recently but liberals don’t do a yearly commemoration of the War on the Iraqi people, The War on Afghani people, the constant and deliberate economic violence (even just homelessness) that takes far more lives, the prison system, the suppression of George Floyd protests and liberal betrayals thereof, the unconditional US support for genocidal Israeli settler colonialism (you can even pick from 10+ events just in the last decade to commemorate), etc etc.
At the same time, it is an even more fundamental inability to think that has been ingrained into liberals by a very successful propaganda apparatus. I cannot stress enough that they literally don’t know how to sit and listen to and process contradiction of their own beliefs. They cannot handle it. The only tool in their toolbox is to act like babies and they think it’s the smart and right thing to do. This is something they have learned, it’s not inborn, and it can be changed, but it requires a dedicated struggle and a competing set of narratives that are resilient to censorship.
Hilariously, once you start getting too successful at contradicting Western chauvinist claims on online platforms, you have marked you and your community for a good banning - most of the platforms work closely with government agencies, lobbying groups, advertisers associated with these topics, etc etc. This is why irl work in an organization is just as important as having correct narratives more generally. Direct human-to-human communication is more difficult and expensive to censor and there is a multiplier effect to taking action in unison.