Chinese Media Parrot Egyptian Military Dictatorship's Line

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.