askchapo

This has been of interest to me, it's a blind spot for Radio War Nerd & others yet fans I speak to who listen to more episodes than me seem surprised. I'll get into RWN, as well as The Deprogram's Russia takes another time.

I think they did Empanada well on /r/TheDeprogram

https://libreddit.kavin.rocks/r/TheDeprogram/comments/11s7x4u/badempanada_uyhgers_video/

https://archive.is/LJd6A Long deleted Asatar Bair thread linked in the comments which is easy to miss

So the video begins with BE defining the two extremes: (1) a group that is so fanatically loyal to China that literally no injustice would sway them and (2) State Dept propaganda that claims there is a genocide based on dubious sources like Adrian Zenz 
My first thought is, where is this group of fanatical China defenders? I have not seen them.
As the video unfolds over the first 40 min, I’m starting to notice that for something that is trying to strike a balance of some sort between two camps, all this video has been about 
so far has been how ‘suspicious’ China is, and does a kind of frame-by-frame analysis of witness testimony, searching for differences in mood and expression to get at the deeper meaning. BE is good at this, and tells a compelling story 
However, I’m wondering when we get to the part where there is an incredible US-led propaganda campaign alleging a genocide going on rn, and I’m not sure the dimensions of it are clarified by what is essentially literary analysis of video, even by someone good at such things 
Nowhere is there a discussion of the broader context of massive, rapid economic and social dvlpmt in XJ. Nowhere is there a discussion of how on earth a genocide could be occurring in a region that has rapid pop growth, rising life expectancy, very rapid GDP growth of 8% /yr, 
and hundreds of millions of tourist visits per year. No, it’s all about how China didn’t give the press universal access to its facilities, and how sus that is 
What comes through most clearly is BE sneering at China’s badly staged patriotic displays, suggesting that ethnic cleansing must be happening, because China’s whole mood is just so suspicious, y’know? 
Like anytime a govt clumsily tries to control a narrative in the press, it’s obviously to conceal their genocidal intent, as though genocide were a secret desire that all countries cannot wait to get into 
Then he spends nearly 20 minutes getting into a personal story of a passport denial and a family that is separated. No doubt it is a sad story, but to not even get into the larger issues and spend this amount of time on it? 
Where is the bearing on the charges of genocide; BE doesn’t seem clear on what these charges are, but on something much hazier -- is a govt sus or not? 
Of course, BE also makes it clear where he stands on that, saying that (paraphrasing here) "no govt has ever cared for its minorities, nor even the average person in the majority group". It almost sounds as if he does not believe in govt at all. 
Could a govt, hypothetically, care about its minorities or its working class majority? What concrete policies would they pursue? What if such a country has powerful enemies, who have tried to parcel it up, colonize it, and otherwise control it in the recent past? 
What if the country must have certain controls in place to prevent such things from occurring? What if this results in the restriction of free speech, for example? 
BE seems to me to be the kind of leftist that the authorities most like. Naively assuming that all govts are bad, by hating everything, he becomes exactly the kind of naive rube that he continually ridicules others for being when they believe a govt might do something good
This kind of critic is easily controllable, for they will always point out ‘authoritarianism on both sides’. That is the perfect person to manipulate. All we have to do is convince this kind of person that the other side is just a little bit worse -- 1% worse is enough 
and they’ll spend most of their time criticizing a country that is our enemy, and not opposing actions we take against that country. Sure, maybe there will be some finger wagging, for say, the concentration camps on the US border, but not real opposition 
At the very end of the video, he makes a bizarre comparison between vocational centers and Guantanamo bay prison, providing a confusing comparison that is somehow based on the idea that Gitmo represents the only place terrorists were imprisoned, and it was only a few hundred, 
as a way of implicating China’s higher detention numbers; no context is given for what the War on Terror did to the Islamic world, the millions killed and displaced, so I truly don’t get the comparison 
The whole emphasis is on China controlling the narrative, somehow proving how sus the CPC is, how authoritarian, how unsophisticated are their propaganda. For BE to present China as the major player of propaganda in the western press is naive at best. 
China has almost no influence over the western media; the claims of genocide have been orchestrated by the State Dept. Witness the number of key US political players at a recent conference of the WUC; does Nancy Pelosi and Marco Rubio attend just anyone’s party, do you think? 
The star-studded guest list begins on p 4, and we can see the bipartisan interest in funding separatism, for all the DC attendees refer to the region as ‘East Turkestan’ 
. . .

Continued