In Episode 149 [22] of the CounterVortex podcast [23], Bill Weinberg notes that the UN Human Rights Office determination [24] that China may be guilty of "crimes against humanity" in its mass detention of Uyghurs in Xinjiang province is dismissed by the tankie [25]-left ANSWER Coalition [26] as "propagandistic." Meanwhile, it falls to Radio Free Asia [27], media arm of the US State Department, to aggressively cover [28] the very real conditions of forced labor faced by the Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples of Xinjiang—and how Western corporations benefit from it [29]. While the Western pseudo-left betrays the Uyghurs, US imperialism exploits their suffering for propaganda against a rising China in the Great Game for the Asia-Pacific region. Figures such as Australia's Kevin Rudd incorrectly portray a "Return of Red China [30]," blaming the PRC's increasingly totalitarian direction on a supposed neo-Marxism. Fortunately, the new anthology Xinjiang Year Zero [31] offers a corrective perspective, placing the industrial-detention complex and techno-security state in the context of global capitalism and settler colonialism.
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Production by Chris Rywalt [36]
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