The so-called “People's Daily,” a
leading propaganda organ of the misnomered “Communist” Party of
China, is echoing the Egyptian military regime's justifications for
serial slaughters of supporters of the recently-overthrown by
military coup president Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood. The
Chinese propaganda spin is identical to the Egyptian military
butchers, “Egypt Is Fighting Terrorism.”
It's easy to understand why the Chinese
oligarchs would do this. Not for some esoteric foreign policy goal or
out of an arcane geopolitical strategy calculation. Simply because
the Chinese rulers are mass oppressors themselves, who when
confronted with popular protest brutally repress it as a matter of
course. (Not just Tiananmen Square either, but numerous smaller
Tiananmen Squares.) Naturally, when confronted with the spectacle of
a large group of protesters being slaughtered by a government, the
instinct of the Chinese rulers is to side with the foreign
government, not the protesters. How could it be otherwise? To side
with the protesters would present too stark a contrast with their own
treatment of citizens. And they wouldn't want to give Chinese people
the “wrong” idea, that mass protest is tolerable, or that gunning
down protesters is unacceptable in any way.
Since the U.S. declared “war on
terrorism,” many oppressive nations, most of them aligned with the
U.S., (not just Egypt, but Bahrain, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and others)
have availed themselves of this U.S.-created ideological
justification for state crimes and repression by calling their
victims “terrorists” and pretending they are in a “war” with
“terrorism.” This is one of the most malign and lasting
political results of the U.S. reaction to the jetliner attacks by
Al-Qaeda on 9/11/01, attacks which the FBI and CIA were complicit in.
For human rights not just in the U.S. but on the planet as a whole,
this era will go down in history as a disaster, a huge setback in the
centuries-long struggle to establish human rights against the
oppressive power of rulers.
