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.
