China left the propaganda field broad open to their challengers and failed to make use of the political opportunities the Uyghur tribunal provided.
As the opening of the Olympic video games in Beijing was approaching, a few of the propaganda projects started months and even years earlier entered into sharper focus. We are alluding in particular to the Uyghur genocide farce and the phony London proceedings under the auspices of former ICTY district attorney Geoffrey Nice, staged to offer the farce an aura of quasi-judicial sobriety.
It is, naturally, simple to offer an analysis that ends up being essentially appropriate whenever you are handling unimaginative individuals who are either incapable of originality or are simply too insecure to abandon the safe precincts of their worn-out playbook.
In this particular case, the analogy they are straining to produce between the 1980 Moscow Olympics and this year’s Beijing occasion is rather glaring. In both circumstances, a global event is being co-opted to create huge no-shows and thus wreck the video games, causing serious PR damage and humiliation on the host nation. Forty years ago, it was the Afghanistan incursion, today it is the concocted “genocide” of the Uyghur minority in Xinjiang.
Never ever mind that the Uyghur “victims of genocide” seem to be extremely alive and well, to the degree of popping up as proxy foot soldiers in royal interventions all over the map, from Syria to the current color revolution effort in Kazakhstan. Well-funded and with sufficient logistical support, Uyghur émigrés and radicalised components within Xinjiang itself are making just enough sound and fury to be weaponised by Western masters in their anti-China propaganda offensives.
So the “verdict” of Nice’s counterfeit “tribunal,” in fact an ad hoc personal association developed particularly for the purpose, astonished nobody, just as the “decisions” of the Hague Tribunal, where earlier Nice had actually honed his persecutorial skills, triggered no surprise. China was properly condemned on all counts of “genocide” versus the Uyghur minority in its Xinjiang province. The stage was thus set for the vilification of China by imputing to it the most heinous criminal offense known in worldwide law.
Sadly, the Chinese inexplicably left the propaganda field large open to their perfidious challengers and stopped working completely to exploit the political opportunities the Uyghur tribunal provided to them. Instead of calling their critics’ bluff and dispatching qualified barristers and reputable witnesses to strongly challenge the lightweight case on its own grass, as at first and for kind’s sake the “tribunal” had invited them to do while totally depending on their rejection, the Chinese chose to stand back and nurse their offended dignity. It was a mistake of tactical judgment which considerably helped with the phony “tribunal’s” corrupt task by creating the convenient impression that the implicated party was given the chance however had nothing important to say.
China’s clumsy reaction is water under the bridge. The concern before us now is what relocation are the uncreative impresario next most likely to make?
That is not a complex question exactly because they are imagination-challenged and playbook-bound. Their look for a comfy old paradigm that, with a couple of adjustments and little imaginative effort they can apply to a new factual circumstance has obviously led to creating a strategy. It is to reframe Xinjiang, now in the Black Sea basin, with Crimean Tatars designated the Uyghur role of genocide victims. With tensions rising around the Black Sea, another magnificent little genocide to stoke the public’s fervour would undoubtedly be just what Dr. Goebbels purchased.
So, again predictably, the propaganda drumbeat about Crimean Tatar injustice, abuse and discrimination by Russia is collecting momentum and just by pushing a couple of extra buttons it can easily be updated to the level of “genocide,” must political exigencies so determine.
The web accordingly is overruning with Tatar sob stories. The leitmotiv of the fraudulent new genocide campaign is the assertion that within its large territory Russia is actually “concealing” captive countries (“Why Russia Conceals Countries Within Its Borders?”) viciously denying them of their language and culture just for sadistic enjoyment. And, obviously, as trusted “Radio Liberty” reports, arrests of “Tatar activists” are ongoing, promising to yield a rich crop of brand-new ethnic martyrs. It is obviously yielding currently a respectable variety of “Tatar refugees” who will be invited by Western services as were their Uyghur counterparts, to form the nucleus of the “Tatar Freedom Motion” which is no doubt in the works as this is being composed.
Following the tested pattern set formerly for the creation of the Uyghur legend, the general public are now bombarded with “webinars” and pseudo-scholarly conferences claiming to illustrate the dire condition of the Tatar minority in Russia. Where this propaganda blitz will eventually go stays to be seen, but the basic contours of the thinking that motivates it are unmistakably noticeable.
It is now Russia’s turn, after China, to be tarred and put on the defensive as a possibly genocidal oppressor of ethnic minorities which dot the large stretch of its area. It is of no importance whatsoever that from the Tsarist period to today day no minority in Russia has actually been eradicated or deprived of its cultural identity, in sharp contrast to the many nations, messed up and left on the edge of termination, which had the misery of being in the path of Western colonizers. Those nations have no “activists” to advocate for them and their martyrs will never be Western media poster young boys.
Should the moribund empire discover the audacity to once again forecast its sins onto others by shamelessly setting up a “Tatar Tribunal” as a follow up to the Uyghur charade, hopefully Russia will show itself more savvy than China and will carry out a vigorous and proactive counteroffensive, pour écraser l’infâme.