In the heyday of the Cold War during the seventies and eighties, Western corporate media insidiously mounted a smear campaign against communists, maliciously branding them “infidels and heathens” having the nefarious agenda of forcibly converting pious Muslims to “Satanic atheism” in order to create a rift between devoutly religious and traditionalist Islamic World and the progressive communist bloc, despite being aware of the clear distinction that Marxism is simply an egalitarian economic theory having nothing, whatsoever, to do with religio-cultural affairs.
Then Western security establishments alongside their Middle
Eastern client regimes nurtured Islamic fundamentalists as regional proxies,
generously providing funds, training and weapons to Islamic jihadists while
internationally legitimizing them as “freedom fighters” battling Soviet
hegemony, and encouraged them to mount a holy jihad against “Godless
communists” all the way from Afghanistan in the Central Asia to Chechnya in the
North Caucasus and Bosnia and Kosovo in the Balkans.
Similarly, following the rise of China as a major economic
power in the 21st century, the mainstream media has once again been
tasked by the security establishments to demonize the global rival by blowing
out of proportions the sheer fabrication of alleged “genocide and ethnic
cleansing” of Uyghur Muslim’s in China’s western Xinjiang province in order to
drive a wedge between the rising industrial power and the Islamic World.
Unlike several hapless Islamic countries in the Middle East,
such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, that went through US military
occupation or intervention through regional proxies and where countless
large-scale massacres have taken place creating millions of refugees, no such
massacre or forced displacement of ethnic Uyghurs has ever been recorded in
China’s Xinjiang, not even by the corporate media, the foremost purveyor of
presumed Uyghur persecution in China.
After the deadly Urumqi riots in July 2009 between the Han
and Uyghur ethnic groups in Xinjiang’s provincial capital in which scores of
rioters on both sides were killed, China went through a series of violent
terror attacks that rocked Xinjiang and the rest of China in the following
years.
Dozens of civilians were hacked to death at a busy train
station in China’s south. A Uyghur drove a car into crowds at Beijing’s
Tiananmen Square. Forty-three died when militants threw bombs from two sports
utility vehicles plowing through a busy market street in Urumqi. When Chinese
President Xi Jinping visited Xinjiang in 2014, bombs tore through an Urumqi
train station, killing three and injuring 79.
After experiencing the spate of Islamist-inspired terror
attacks, Chinese authorities initiated de-radicalization programs in Xinjiang
in which Uyghurs were encouraged to participate, as in the Western countries
where Muslim immigrants were kept under surveillance and suspects with history
of violent crimes were asked to attend de-radicalization programs in the aftermath
of the 9/11 terror attack when anti-Muslim paranoia was at the peak.
Most of the aforementioned terror attacks in China were
claimed by East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), a formidable transnational
terrorist organization of Uyghurs that has taken part in Islamist insurgencies
as far away as Afghanistan and Syria. The militant group has been declared a
proscribed terrorist outfit by China, the United Nations and many regional
countries, though the Trump administration removed its terrorist designation in
2020.
Much like the Uyghur diaspora in the Western countries being
patronized by the security agencies and the corporate media to malign a global rival,
there is another clandestine organization of Chinese dissidents based in the US
that until the November 2020 presidential election enjoyed the protection of
the US security establishment and was used as a trump card to mount
psychological warfare against the Chinese government.
Falun Gong was founded by its leader Li Hongzhi in China in
the early 1990s. Today, Falun Gong maintains an informal headquarters, Dragon
Springs, a 400-acre compound in upstate New York, located near the current
residence of Li Hongzhi. Falun Gong's performance arts extension, Shen Yun, and
two closely connected schools, Fei Tian College and Fei Tian Academy of the
Arts, also operate in and around Dragon Springs.
Since 1998, Li Hongzhi has settled as a permanent resident
in the United States and maintains high-level contacts not only in the
governments of the US and China but also enjoys immense political clout among
Chinese diaspora across the world, thanks to the deep pockets of several billionaire
Chinese oligarchs that Falun Gong boasts in its ranks, who generously
contribute to finance the clandestine organization’s anti-China propaganda
operations.
Forget about criticizing the secretive society, up until the
elections it wasn’t even permitted to mention the name of Falun Gong on
mainstream news outlets. It was simply described as “a religious and spiritual
movement” that teaches “meditation techniques” to its members in all the
information available in the public domain about the objectives and activities
of the religio-political cult.
But in an explosive
article [1] for the New York Times in October 2020 to dispel a flurry of
reports about the “Chinagate scandal” implicating the Biden campaign in the
run-up to the US presidential election, Kevin Roose blew the lid off on the
subversive organization and its media outlet The Epoch Times, widely followed
by Trump supporters, and alleged:
“For years, The Epoch Times was a small, low-budget
newspaper with an anti-China slant that was handed out free on New York street
corners. But in 2016 and 2017, the paper made two changes that transformed it
into one of the country’s most powerful digital publishers.
“The changes also paved the way for the publication, which
is affiliated with the secretive and relatively obscure Chinese spiritual
movement Falun Gong, to become a leading purveyor of right-wing misinformation.
“First, it embraced President Trump, treating him as an ally
in Falun Gong’s scorched-earth fight against China’s ruling Communist Party,
which banned the group two decades ago and has persecuted its members ever
since. Its relatively staid coverage of U.S. politics became more partisan,
with more articles explicitly supporting Mr. Trump and criticizing his
opponents.
“As the 2016 election neared, reporters noticed that the
paper’s political coverage took on a more partisan tone. ‘They seemed to have
this almost messianic way of viewing Trump as the anti-communist leader who
would bring about the end of the Chinese Communist Party,’ Steve Klett, who covered
the 2016 campaign for the paper, said.
“Where the paper’s money comes from is something of a
mystery. Former employees said they had been told that The Epoch Times was
financed by a combination of subscriptions, ads and donations from wealthy
Falun Gong practitioners.
“Steve Bannon, the former chief strategist of the White
House, is among those who have noticed The Epoch Times’s deep pockets. Last
year, he produced a documentary about China with NTD. When he talked with the
outlet about other projects, he said, money never seemed to be an issue. ‘I’d
give them a number,’ Mr. Bannon said. ‘And they’d come back and say, We’re good
for that number.’”
The Times report wasn’t the first instance of the mainstream
media implicating Chinese dissidents in the electoral politics of the US. In a
tit-for-tat response to the pro-Trump New York Post’s bombshell report exposing
Hunter Biden’s murky financial dealings with Ukrainian and Chinese oligarchs in
the run-up to the US presidential elections, the Daily Beast came
up with a scoop [2] in October 2020 that the hard disks on which Hunter’s
emails were found were provided to Rudy Giuliani by a Chinese billionaire Guo
Wengui on behalf of dissident members of the Chinese Communist Party.
According to the report: “Weeks before the New York Post
began publishing what it claimed were the contents of Hunter Biden’s hard
drive, a Sept. 25 segment on a YouTube channel run by a Chinese dissident
streamer, who is linked to billionaire and Steve Bannon-backer Guo Wengui,
broadcast a bizarre conspiracy theory.
“According to the streamer, Chinese politburo officials had
‘sent three hard disks of evidence’ to the Justice Department and House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi containing damaging information about Joe Biden as well as the
origins of the coronavirus in a bid to undermine the rule of Chinese President
Xi Jinping …
“While Guo’s ties to Steve Bannon have long been
known—Bannon was arrested for defrauding donors in August on a 152-foot-long
yacht reportedly owned by Guo—the billionaire appears to have also joined
forces with Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani in the former New York
mayor’s relentless anti-Biden dirt-digging crusade.
“Guo Wengui has been in the Trumpworld orbit pretty much
from the beginning, paying the $200,000 initiation fee to become a member of
the president’s Florida golf resort Mar-a-Lago, which Trump has dubbed the
‘Southern White House.’ But Guo’s membership soon became a headache for the
administration in the run-up to Trump’s first summit meeting with Chinese
President Xi Jinping in 2017, due to Guo’s fugitive status in China.
“At one point, Trump had reportedly considered deporting Guo
after the Chinese government called for his extradition in a letter delivered
to Trump by casino mogul Steve Wynn in 2017. After presenting the letter during
a policy meeting, the president reportedly said, ‘We need to get this criminal
out of the country,’ only for aides to remind him that Guo was a Mar-a-Lago
member, eventually talking him out of the decision and ensuring the deportation
was scuttled …
“Guo has framed himself as a stalwart critic of the CCP and
China’s corrupt elite, but his efforts have divided China’s exile community.
Guo has enthusiastically attacked other critics of Beijing as jealous poseurs,
including most recently a Texas Christian pastor and Tiananmen protester named
Bob Fu—who was imprisoned in China for his faith before escaping to the
U.S.—whom Guo accuses of being a secret agent for the CCP. Fu has lobbed the
same charge back at Guo and his followers.”
Although the Daily Beast article didn’t even once mention
the name of the clandestine organization Falun Gong, Guo Wengui is known to be
a trusted associate of Li Hongzhi, the founder and veritable prophet of the
religio-political cult presumed to be having “supernatural powers” by
brainwashed followers.
Regardless, it’s noteworthy that it wasn’t just financial
inducements offered by billionaire Chinese oligarchs that lured the Trump
campaign into the Falun Gong orbit, but also the political mileage that could
be obtained by initiating a trade war against China.
In order to understand the real and perceived grievances of
Donald Trump’s “alt-right” electoral base, it would be pertinent to point out
that during the last decade, all the manufacturing has outsourced to China. Although
the bankers and executives of multinational corporations are the beneficiaries
of outsourcing, the middle and working classes that constituted Trump’s
electoral base are finding it hard to make ends meet.
Besides the Trump supporters in the United States, the
far-right populist leaders in Europe are also exploiting popular resentment
against market fundamentalism. The Brexiteers in the United Kingdom, the Yellow
Vest protesters in France and the far-right movements across Europe are manifestations
of a paradigm shift in the global economic order in which nationalist and
protectionist slogans have replaced the free trade and globalization mantra of
the nineties.
Trump withdrawing the United States from multilateral
treaties, restructuring trade agreements, bringing investments and employments
back to the US and initiating a trade war against China were some of the
salient features of the “alt-right” economic reforms agenda that appealed to
the working class constituency he represented, and won over 74 million popular
votes, likely the largest number of votes won in the US history by a losing
presidential candidate.
Citations:
[1] How The Epoch Times Created a Giant Influence Machine:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/24/technology/epoch-times-influence-falun-gong.html
[2] Chinese Billionaire’s Network Hyped Hunter Biden Dirt
Weeks Before Rudy:
About the author:
Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based geopolitical and national
security analyst focused on geo-strategic affairs and hybrid warfare in the
Af-Pak and the Middle East regions. His domains of expertise include
neocolonialism, military industrial complex and petro-imperialism. He is a
regular contributor of meticulously researched and credibly sourced
investigative reports to alternative news media.
11 Feb 2022.
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