The Rise of Neo-fascism

Fascism was never defeated; it just went underground for a time and changed its branding. It has been able to resurge powerfully in large part because of the routing of the old internationalist and collectivist “red left”. 

That defeat was enabled in part by left sectarianism (itself actively fomented by the right), and in part by the politically-exsanguinated, “white left’s” collusion with, or failure to resist the rightward shift that enabled and accelerated the spread of global corporate capitalism.

The ideological and strategic move away from the wider left by sections of the women’s rights movement, and the subsequent rise of corporate-friendly feminism played a key role in the early Neo-liberal era, as did other progressive movements that pursued sectional interests.

The C21st white left includes many liberally-minded beneficiaries of the Neo-liberal resurgence. Many of them are drawn to identity issues and associated praxis. They support causes that not only pose no real threat to the capitalist status quo, but in many respects serve to strengthen it.

While those liberally-minded people shelter behind their political comfort blankets and guilt mitigators, the planet-killers carry on business as usual.

Marx said capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction, or now possibly the destruction of the entire planet. 

The digital age that has enabled the spectacular growth of  global corporate finance capitalism has strengthened some of the key ideological "chains of the mind", and weakened others. Capitalism's digital weaponry can be used against it.

The expansion of the immense destructive power of western conventional military forces, and the creation of heavily armed para-military police forces, along with systems of mass surveillance and control, are no accident.

They are a form of insurance.

The  acceleration of the profit-centred pillaging of the planet has sharpened the contradictions. The controllers of corporate capitalism know that the looming apocalypse of accelerating climate change, soil and water degradation, mass species extinctions, chemical and particulate pollution will tip into social chaos unless they stop now and put the profit machine into rapid reverse. 

They will not do that. 

Their preferred solution, like the Israeli right in Palestine is demonstrating, is to be ready and prepared to commit mass slaughter – by acts of commission and omission, ie blowing people to pieces from a safe distance, or creating the conditions in which they die from starvation and disease. 

To be able to do that, they need enough people in their domestic populations to be so full of hate and resentment of whoever is the current scapegoat, they will accept the slaughter of millions of other human beings. 

Some will just tolerate the slaughter; some will celebrate it, and a minority of hate-blinded or sociopathic people will participate in it. 

We can all agree with the principles of intersectionality, the problem is that without a unifying political theory and a strong, unified vanguard movement, the associated praxis is always likely to descend into a fight about whose sectional interests take precedence. 

This makes sectional politics a gift to the political, bureaucratic and technocratic enablers of corporate capitalism for whom it’s divide in order that their masters can continue to rule.

It is a fact that in the absence of genuine internationalism, extreme nationalism and its ugly offspring, ethno-nationalism, is more likely to escalate.

In the absence of genuine collectivism, pathological forms of individualism will proliferate. 

When Thatcher said there is no such thing as "society", there are only individuals and families, she was verbalising one of the ruling class's most critically important ideological manoeuvres – the apparent primacy of the individual and her/his rights in a world in which such rights for the vast majority are a trompe l'oeil. 

More on Dirty Dairying

Industrialised dairying is a hideous practice in animal welfare terms, as well as about as insane as it's possible to imagine on thin alluvial soils like those that overlie the Canterbury plains and the Amuri Basin. 

The early settlers learned the consequences of removing the remaining native bush on the plains as when the vegetation dried / was burned off, the hot, dry foehn wind blew top soil away. To stop that, they planted extensive exotic shelter belts (many of which are now an ecological problem and fire hazard) but they protected the soil and gave animals shade and shelter. 

To enable the central pivots, on which industrialised dairying on these soils relies, a new generation of  myopic, mendacious business people calling themselves "farmers"  cut down the shelter belts with no thought for what happens when (not if) the artificial irrigation and applications of imported nitrate fertilisers stop.

Even less thought was given to the end result of masses of nitrates and faecal coliforms entering aquifers and surface water ways. And as for shade and shelter for animals, the cows are viewed as short-lived, economic units, so who cares? 

It's as if,  as a nation, New Zealanders are incapable of learning from earlier generations' mistakes and are locked into a cycle of not just repeating earlier mistakes but amplifying them massively. 

And...do not get me started on the insanity of industrialised dairying aimed at the export of milk powder as yet another form of unsustainable extractive industry. 

It depletes our soils, pollutes our waterways, relies on an unsustainable road network and expensive imported products (fuel, fertiliser, machinery), and it builds up massive long-term social costs from which the people who profit in the sort term will walk away.

Developer Entitlement Syndrome

In case anyone was in any doubt about the direction that New Zealand's Coalition of Chaos will continue to take if it gets another term – in February, GMP Environmental, a subsidiary of Greymouth Petroleum, donated $100k each to the coalition members – National, NZ First and ACT.  

Here in Canterbury, Williams Corporation followed Wolfbrook Property's lead by donating $58k to the National Party. It's a move that political cynics will view as being in anticipation of their future developments being fast tracked and green lighted – like the environmentally bonkers 1500-section residential development planned on Gresson's Road just south of Waikuku which gobbles up 140+ hectares of productive farmland and will create even more traffic chaos on SH1.

Well, heaven forbid anyone with an advanced case of Developer Entitlement Syndrome should have to delay the treatment for the condition which comes in the form of making huge profits out of yet more unsustainable, car-dependent, satellite developments.

It seems that the Gressons Road fast track process was enabled by Waimakariri District Council (WDC) having rezoned the land residential – a decision which flies in the face of common sense and WDC's own claims to want to protect productive rural land.  

I'm told that WDC has carved up proportionately more of its rural land into lifestyle blocks and residential sprawl than any other district council in NZ. Of considerable interest to a logical person like me is why, having rezoned a 140-hectare dairy farm residential to enable yet another satellite housing estate, WDC turned down an application from the former owner of Pegasus golf course for rezoning of a 3-hectare lifestyle block on the edge of Pegasus. 

Speaking of which ...

You might be interested to know, the Pegasus new town sits on coastal land that WDC originally bought to use as a landfill – the entrance to which would have been off Gladstone Road. 

The environment dodged a mortar shell when WDC sold the land to Southern Capital (SC) which had plans for a new town. 

SC sold it to Infinity Investments Group (IIG) which also bought the farmland to the west of the town site. IIG reached a compromise with WDC over the rural zoning by making it the site of a golf course with 98 clustered "high-end" houses, and bisected by a new access road. 

IIG, via its subsidiary Pegasus Town Ltd, (PTL) made a mint before PTL went bust owing final debts of $101m. 

IIG sold the Pegasus development to Todd Property Group and moved on to develop Ravenswood just across SH1 from Pegasus. 

As IIG has retained ownership of, and intends to expand the Ravenswood commercial hub, the company is no doubt very happy with the adjacent Gressons Rd subdivision, and the possible further residential development of Pegasus. Ching ching.

It's ironic that WDC, the mayor of which publicly opposes residential development on the Pegasus golf course, may very well have paved the way for that residential development by having previously rezoned 7 hectares of the golf course for commercial development.

Pegasus residents and golf club members also failed to register any opposition to that proposed development.

I can almost hear the fast track commissioner saying that the impacts on stormwater, traffic, sewage, visual amenity etc of a subdivision of say 100 houses on that rezoned land would be not much greater than the proposed 50-bed, 3-storey hotel plus a sprawling spa, with accommodation and associated commercial development.

Watch this space.

More on moral voids

People who support the Israeli state’s actions in Gaza and more widely in the region either support the Zionist fascists who’ve stated openly that their intention is to destroy Gaza, annex the West Bank, remain in the occupied territories, and deny the Palestinians any sort of state – or they fail to challenge them. 

Either way makes them supportive of Israel as an openly far-right, aggressively colonising arm of US foreign policy in the Middle East. 

Who, in all seriousness can deny that the Palestinian people in Gaza, the West Bank, the occupied territories and the wider diaspora are the tragic victims of a vicious imperialist power play? 

Progressive Palestinians in exile and supporters in the 70s and 80s warned of the way that the US and Israel and their allies were demonising the Palestinian left, promoting factionalism, and backing terrorism and religious extremism. 

Fast forward to this century and Israel actively enabled Hamas by channeling Qatari money to the organisation, and there is compelling evidence that the Israeli state either orchestrated or let the October attacks happen to justify escalating the conflict with the aim of creating the Greater Israel that sits at the heart of the Zionist project. 

Israeli far rightists state openly and proudly that there never will be a Palestinian state; the choice for Palestinians is to live in perpetual exile from their homeland, or in forms and degrees of subjugation within it. 

The death of an Israeli settler in the West Bank as a result of what was effectively a suicide attack by two eighteen-year-old Palestinians from Hebron, gave rise to expressions of outrage from supporters of Israel. 

Given the events of the past seven decades and the massive escalation of IDF and settler violence against Palestinians over the past two years, such expressions of outrage over one dead Israeli serve to reinforce the Zionists’ precept that one Jewish life is worth one hundred or more Palestinian lives. 

It was the same with the Jewish man who was stabbed in London and the second victim who the police shot accidentally, the expectation that we should feel those deaths more keenly than the tens of thousands of deaths in Gaza, the West Ban, Lebanon etc.  

On a personal level we should feel pity for the victims and their families, but we must also see them, not just as hapless victims of a deranged or desperate Muslim/Arab/Palestinian, but as victims of malign geopolitical manoeuvres by the powerful psychopaths and malignant narcissists who dominate politics in the region.

A wise person said the only thing Jews fear more than antisemitism, is no antisemitism. I would add the rider – right-wing Jews fear that.

To paraphrase Golda Meir, the Nazi holocaust gave Zionists a perpetual get out of coloniser jail free card. It serves both to create a perpetual guilt among the descendants of the perpetrators and colluders, and a sense of perpetual victimhood, fear and anger among Jews which now combines with an ideology of exceptionalism that makes Americans look positively modest. 

It’s toxic and harmful to Jewish people, and it risks fuelling real Jew hatred, not the ideological confection that apologists trot out to deflect away from the Israeli state’s appalling actions. 

It’s why so many progressive Jewish people would never live in Israel or support the Israeli state especially now that it has now lurched closer to actual fascism. 

The fact is, most of the Jews in Israel today, including most of the illegal settlers, have not fled from anti-Jewish persecution or even a viable threat of it.

They are there because of an ideology rooted in a spurious claim of indigeneity derived from a 3000-year-old religious text. That text also served to breathe life into the patriarchal kinship arrangements which spawned many of the world’s phallocratic regimes and institutions – a fact that too many Israeli-supporting feminists choose to ignore.

The politics of the Middle East and Palestine/Israel are hugely complex but what is simple is the fact that among the ruins caused by these geopolitical machinations, millions of real people who want nothing more than a simple life in peace and security, are suffering torments.

That is the horrible truth of it all.

Zionist Israel is wrong. It was wrong in its conception and its development. It may now be so wrong, it can never be put right. 

 

Moral Voids

In the USA’s Jim Crow era, a large majority of white citizens supported the racist status quo and either actively supported or failed to oppose the acts of terror – carried out by racist vigilantes and on occasion, the state – that were aimed at maintaining the economic and socio-political subjugation of black Americans.

In South Africa, the repressive apartheid apparatus and the racist lies on which it was built were also aimed at maintaining white economic and socio-political hegemony.

The colonialist ideologies underpinning both Jim Crow and South African apartheid were far-right and white supremacist, and the tactics used to oppress the target populations were terroristic and brutal in the extreme but the aim was not genocide or expulsion.

The same European colonialist, white supremacist ideology that underpinned Jim Crow and apartheid, had merged with the Zionist belief that the wording of the 3000-year-old founding text of their religion granted its modern-era adherents the divine right to settle in and control what they deemed to be Eretz Israel.

The flimsy leash on the genocidal potential of Israel’s form of apartheid was weakened with the current coalition of right and far-right parties under Netanyahu’s leadership. 

It was wholly removed when the Hamas attack gave the Israeli right the excuse to carry out mass ethnic cleansing of Gaza and destruction of infrastructure, moving rapidly towards military occupation of the whole of “Greater Israel” including parts of Syria, bombing other sovereign states, and even killing heads of state. 

Israeli terror tactics in Gaza have included massive bombardment aimed at the obliteration of all civil infrastructure, the use of drones, boobytrapping, and sniping in the targeting of non-combatants such as medics, journalists and aid workers, and the killing of children; the use of starvation and access to water as weapons. 

In the 1930s, the Nazis created a vicious paramilitary, routed the left, cowed the centre, and took control of the entire state apparatus. The political architects and administrators of the Nazi concentration and death camps and the high command of the uniformed death squads went to great lengths to hide their crimes, (albeit also meticulously recording them). 

Ordinary German citizens had the excuses of genuinely not knowing the full extent of what was being done by the Nazis and collaborators, and/or the fear of the fascistic apparatus being turned on them. 

There’s no get-out-of-genocide-jail-free card for Israelis. 

As so much of what the Israeli military has done has been captured on camera and broadcast hourly to the world, ordinary Israelis cannot claim ignorance of what their government is doing. 

Nor can they claim they’re silent out of fear of state reprisals given they claim to live in the only democratic, liberal society in the Middle East.

A large majority of Israelis and their global supporters (real and opportunist) have either: steadfastly denied the Palestinian genocide by claiming that documentary evidence of it is Hamas propaganda, either staged, or produced by AI; or, they have claimed what the IDF has done is justifiable and wholly proportionate to the existential threat Israel faces from Palestine as an Iranian proxy.

Increasingly, the sheer weight of incontrovertible documentary evidence of Israeli atrocities means the latter argument now dominates. 

The slaughter of non-combatants, the obliteration of infrastructure, and the proposed expulsion of all or most Palestinians are deemed to be politically, militarily and morally justifiable because October 7th proved the entire Palestinian people – even babies, small children, the elderly and the disabled – to be actual or potential enemy combatants who have to be killed or dispersed in order to ensure Israel’s security.

Both denial and justification demonstrate that a scarily high percentage of Israelis are in the grip of a moral panic of such scope and intensity it has incinerated common sense and empathy leaving a political and moral void in which anti-Palestinian atrocities are not only excused or condoned, but openly celebrated. 

The Samson Principle

I wrote this yesterday and got so depressed I couldn't finish or publish it. Today, the crazed fascists running Israel have launched a "pre-emptive" strike on Iran, so here it is. 

A person on X claims there’s an “Islamic Regime” that wants to “commit a Holocaust, the likes of which the world has never seen …finishing what Hitler and the Nazi Regime started."'

If he’s referring to a global Islamic threat, his claim is as absurdly reductionist and extremist as anti-Semitic claims of a monolithic Zionist / Jewish cabal that controls the world.  It ignores the many national, sectarian, linguistic-cultural differences in the two billion people who identify their religion as Islam – a religion that sprang from the root of patriarchal, monotheist Judaism, which also contains national, sectarian and linguistic-cultural differences that the establishment of the state of Israel and creation of an Israeli national identity attempts to gloss over.

But the truth of it is, he's referring to a specific country, and the “Islamic Regime” is code for Iran which right-wing Zionists claim is using Hezbollah, Hamas and the PLO as proxies to soften up Israel while it prepares to deliver the final, nuclear, holocaust.

It’s a short ideological step to the stark conclusion – “we must neutralise them before they build the capacity to kill all of us.” Israel's “final solution” to the “Palestinian problem" is justified by claiming to be defending itself against the “Islamic Regime”, the heart of which is in Iran.

In effect, this person seeks to justify Israel’s wholesale slaughter by fire, starvation and disease, of Palestinian non-combatants, the on-going theft of Palestinian lands, and the erasure of Palestinian identity by placing all Palestinians within the orbit of the evil “Islamic Regime", and uses the same insane argument to justify its illegal, deadly incursions into other countries.

Claims to "self-defence" are rendered unbelievable when the majority of those they are killing are small children, women, the elderly and the infirm; and when they destroy civilian infrastructure including hospitals and sources of clean water, and when they slaughter animals, uproot ancient trees, raze fields.

Those are not defensive actions; they are the indefensible actions of an out-of-control colonising power, in which a scarily large proportion of the population are in the grip of a sort of collective psychosis.

This angry fellow not only positions ALL Jews as being at risk of imminent annihilation by the “Islamic Regime”, he ignores the historical role played by Israel itself, and more so by its main patron, the US, in the emergence of Islamic theocracies, most pertinently in Iran, and in aiding and abetting Islamist terror cells across the world. 

He ignores or possibly is too ignorant to know how political Islam was used, cynically and cruelly, first to combat socialism and to break the Non-Aligned Movement, and latterly to replace the spectre of global and domestic communism, with the spectre of “Islamic Terrorism". 

Like communism, Muslim terrorism is ideologically positioned as a threat that is both within and without, which is useful in justifying external wars and internal repression. 

* * * *

To embed the need for a Jewish homeland in Israel into the Jewish psyche, the architects of the Zionist state first weaponised Eastern European pogroms and the wider canon of anti-Semitic tropes. 

Post WW2, they weaponised the Nazi holocaust, creating a deep soil of perpetual grief, fear and anger in which their right-wing Zionist ideology would grow fast and strong. 

It is surely one of history’s cruellest ironies, that the right-wingers who held sway in the creation of Israel, and whose successors still dominate the Israeli state, behaved towards the “enemies” they created much like the Nazis had towards Jews. 

The Nazis didn’t start out with the aim of exterminating all Jews – they built up to it. The processes of demonisation, dispossession, ghettoisation and political oppression all preceded and laid the ideological tracks to the death camps.

What is wrong with our world, what is the root cause of all the harms being caused to people and the planet, is that right-wingers, whose thought processes are governed by their amygdala, wield immense economic, military and ideological power – and nowhere more so than in Israel.

Common sense, logic and rationality struggle to survive in the intense heat of a fear and rage-driven emotional state. The far more easily incinerated emotions of empathy and a sense of common cause don’t stand a chance. 

 

The crucible of Zionist Israel has created a majority population that is as completely in the grip of an irrational Islamophobia as a majority of Americans were in the grip of an irrational anti-communism during the Cold War. 

There is no difference between the Americans who allowed their right-wing governments to commit war crimes in North Korea and South-East Asia in the name of fighting communism, and Israelis who allow their far-right government to commit war crimes in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and Syria.

This X-man’s appeal is to his counterparts in the west – those who are in their own throes of rage and revulsion against “immigrants”, be they Muslims, or the wrong sort of Catholic. 

He dives deep into the stinky barrel of far-right tropes and comes up railing against liberal governments, university administrators, Jewish fellow-travellers, the woke left, the silent majority … in truth, pretty much everyone who won’t listen to him and back Israel in the war it wants to wage on Iran.

In keeping with his inflamed state of mind, he either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that such a war could well usher in a third world war and given the fragile state of the planet, it may well signal the end of humanity. 

I suspect far too many Israelis and their zealous supporters suffer from the Samson Psychosis – if they cannot dominate, they will bring it all crashing down.

  

 

Iron Fists and Velvet Gloves

This post was inspired by concern expressed by a friend about why a left-wing women’s rights group should focus on the effects on women and children of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, when so many other horrors go uncommented upon, including the alleged genocide of the Uyghur people by the Chinese government. 

That made me think about the various strands of contemporary anti-Islamic feeling which have been fuelled by real and imagined Muslim extremism, and in the way of these mad things, fuel a counter extremism.

Islamic extremism manifests as a violent misogyny which is certainly not confined to Muslims. It can also manifest as acts of extreme violence which are also not confined to Muslims, and which can be aimed at other Muslims.

The former raises real and faux concerns over its impact on women, for example, western outrage over women's rights in Iran. If Iran was as much a US ally as Saudi Arabia, for example, any words spoken about the effects of fundamentalist Islam on women there would be far more measured in tone. 

Incidents of the latter justified the USA's so-called “War on Terror” with its decades of military overkill which, like all modern warfare waged or led by the US, primarily kills and maims non-combatants, the majority of whom are women and children, the elderly, and the infirm.

There is no doubt that Muslim extremism was deliberately fomented by the US and its allies to combat communist/socialist and national liberation movements inside the Muslim majority Soviet republics and autonomous regions, and in countries adjacent to the USSR, and/or strategic to the US and key NATO countries.

At that stage, the US and its allies did not see China as being as much of a threat as the USSR, possibly stemming from the same sort of deep-seated prejudice that JD Vance demonstrated when he sneeringly referred to "Chinese peasants”.

Post WW2, Iran had been moving towards becoming a secular, westernised democracy with massive wealth in its oil reserves. When Mossadegh nationalised the oil industry that was controlled by US, UK and Dutch oil companies, the CIA and MI6 staged a coup and installed the Shah – a western-approved dictator who killed, imprisoned or drove into exile the left and intelligentsia. 

When Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran in 1979 as an almost messianic figure, the scene was set for the rise of a fundamentalist Islamic theocracy whose anti-US stance soon made the country one of the USA's main enemies. 

Fourteen years earlier in Indonesia, the US had helped stage a military coup to overthrow President Sukarno who had maintained power via a balance between the communists, political Islam, and the military. The murder of a number of army generals was presented by the military as a "communist coup". The PKI, the largest per capita communist party in the world at the time, stringently denied any involvement but were ignored by the national and international media. 

The CIA was in possession of information which supported the PKI's denial, and they knew the confessions made by communists were fabricated but chose to back General Suharto who was later described as one of the most corrupt leaders in modern history, having embezzled $30bn from his country during throughout his 31-year rule.

The army and Islamists began a purge of communists, other left-wingers, women's rights activists, ethnic Chinese and Javanese, and atheists. The atrocities left at least 1 million people dead with some estimates as high as 3 million. The worst massacres were in Java and Bali where the PKI was very strong.

The overthrow of Sukarno and the slaughter also impacted the emergent Non-Aligned Movement which the US saw as a major threat to its Neo-colonialist expansion. 

As Khomeini was preparing to return to Iran in triumph, having convinced the US that he was not anti-American, the CIA, via a covert programme named Operation Cyclone, and MI6 via separate covert operations, were arming the rebel groups that wanted to overthrow the secular, socialist government in Afghanistan. 

Both countries sold the rebel forces to gullible people in the west as “resistance fighters”, and demonised the USSR's invasion and installation of a pro-Soviet government. (1)

The US, aided by the UK, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, poured billions of dollars into the war. After the Soviets withdrew in1988, the US continued to back the rebels until the fall of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan in 1992, the same year as the formal dissolution of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact.

Having helped to overthrow a secular government, the US and its allies proceeded to wreck the country and eventually abandoned it and its people to the insanely misogynistic theocratic regime they had created.  

The cynicism and hypocrisy go off the charts when the west clutches its pearls over the erosion of women’s rights in Iran and Afghanistan. Our masters don't give a toss about Muslim women but they want to continue to pull the ideological wool over liberals’ eyes and prepare them for collusion with yet another war.

The dissolution of the USSR ushered in an era of obscene plunder of state-owned assets, and massive social disruption and hardship as Russia was reconfigured into a neo-liberal, US-NATO ally.

Instead of NATO disbanding as had happened with the Warsaw Pact (which was formed after and in reaction to NATO) it immediately began expanding eastwards, and the outcomes of that are seen today in the war in Ukraine.

When Putin – the arch nationalist – stopped the west’s corporate plunder, he and Russia became the arch enemy once again, and the funding and fomenting of discontent within Muslim majority states inside the Russian Federation recommenced.

China was seen initially through racist eyes as merely a source of cheap labour to make the stuff for the wave of hyper-commodification that neoliberal capitalism was creating, and which not only made vast profits for the elite but also bought off all those in the west who were in receipt of the little that trickled down from the top. 

Being racist (and also rather stupid in all things other than making virtual money), the NL architects underestimated the Chinese. They failed to recognise that the CCP was using them, and they saw too late that China would become their biggest threat – not just militarily, but technologically and ideologically. 

The US and its allies have attempted to deploy their trusty weapon, the fomenting of Islamic extremism which, in China, means among the Uyghurs – a Turkic speaking people who are mostly Muslim and are one of the 55 distinct ethnic minority groups acknowledged by the Chinese state. (2)

The internet is full of stories of an effective genocide against the Uyghur via forced sterilisation and forced marriage, torture, brainwashing and forced labour in concentration camps but it’s always wise to dig beneath the surface to the sources of those horror stories.  Any sources that are conservative think tanks which act as fronts for western propaganda, and/or are heavily indebted to US corporate interests via funding should be treated with a healthy amount of scepticism. (3) 

The Chinese government claims it is combatting forms of Islamist extremism fomented by its enemies, a claim that could well be true, given US Inc's form in other countries.

I don’t doubt the Chinese government is capable of behaving repressively in defence of what it sees as its national interests, but everything in modern China points more to the use of the velvet glove of such things as national pride, full employment, cheap food and housing, free education and health care, than it does to the iron fist that is still on display in for example, the country's large number of capital offences and use of execution. (4)

The bottom line of this is, all countries use propaganda to enhance their national image by overstating positives and understating negatives, and none more so than the USA. 

While projecting the image of global peacekeeper, the USA acts like a global thug. It is notorious for interfering in the internal affairs of other countries; it leads the world in the number of unprovoked attacks on other countries, and in the numbers of non-combatants that its direct and proxy wars kill and maim. 

It engages in domestic and international acts which, were they to be carried out by Russia or China, would be decried as state terrorism, such as the kidnap and illegal detention of foreign nationals and the use of torture. "Rendition" and "enhanced interrogation" compete with "collateral damage" in the most obscene euphemism stakes. 

Mass incarceration has long been a running sore on the face of the USA but is now being eclipsed by the human rights abuses inherent in the deportation without due process of presumed "illegal aliens" to hellish prisons in El Salvador. 

When it comes to US Inc it is always best to view all its claims of its own righteousness and its enemies' nefariousness with a healthy level of scepticism.

Notes:

1) Wikipedia entries about the Afghan-Soviet war repeat a lot contemporary western propaganda claims about Red Army actions. There is no doubt it was a brutal war and as in all wars, many innocent people died, and no doubt women were raped but the Wikipedia entries are so one-sided as to be risible to anyone with any knowledge of the Cold War and the Afghan war.

(2) Modern Uyghurs are thought to be descendants of a number of different peoples, including the ancient Mongolian Uyghurs who migrated into the Tarim Basin after the fall of the Uyghur Khaganate, eastern Iranians and other Indo-European peoples who had inhabited the Tarim Basin before the arrival of Turkic Uyghurs.

 

(3) As an example, one of the most prominent sources of data about these alleged abuses is Human Rights Watch, a US-based NGO which was originally formed as Helsinki Watch to monitor the USSR’s adherence to the Helsinki agreement. A number of other watch groups merged with HRW in 1988. The organisation has been criticised for its failure to adequately challenge human rights abuses by the US and its allies and almost always reaching conclusions that are consistent with US and wider western foreign policy positions and interests.

(4) China executes more people than any other country but per capita its execution rate is comparable to Singapore and Vietnam, and lower than Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran. It is also moving towards a more liberal approach. The Chinese government has admitted to utilising organs from executed prisoners but is moving to stop the practice. Claims by Falun Gong that China harvested organs without consent from death row prisoners and from FG members for commercial organ trafficking have not stood up to scrutiny by independent investigators including the Laogai Research Foundation and Australian Refugee Review Tribunal. They concluded that the stories were fabricated although if you read Wikipedia entries on the Falun Gong claims you could be forgiven for not knowing that.