Angry Planet - Why People Online Defend the Uighur Genocide

Episode Date: January 21, 2022

Genocide and disinformation. That’s the topic of today’s heady program. I hope none of you have had the pleasure of debating the Uighur genocide with friends or with, god forbid, with anonymous people on the internet. If you have, you may have noticed a certain … uniformity to the arguments despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary.It turns out there may be a reason for that.Here to help us untangle it all is Alexander Reid Ross. Ross is a senior fellow at the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right and senior data analyst at the Network Contagion Research Institute. He’s also the co-author of the report we’re talking about here today The Big Business of Uyghur Genocide Denial.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. People live in a world with their own making. Frankly, that seems to be the problem. Welcome to Angry Planet. Hello and welcome to Angry Planet. I'm Matthew Galt. And I'm Jason Fields. Genocide and Disinformation. That's the topic. of today's eddy program. I hope none of you have had the pleasure of debating the Uyghur genocide with friends or with, God forbid, anonymous people on the internet. If you have, you may have noticed a certain uniformity to the arguments, despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary. It turns out there may be a reason for that. And here to help us untangle all of it is Alexander Reed Ross. Ross is a senior fellow at the Center for Analysis of the Radical Right and a senior data analyst at the Network Contagion Research Institute.

He's also the co-author of the report we're talking about today, which is titled The Big Business of Uyghur Genocide Denial. Sir, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. All right, so my first question is, how does someone who spends his days analyzing the radical right turn his eye onto what I would call a conspicuously left-wing disinformation network? It's complicated.

I started researching disinformation because of the convergences, actually, between the left and right. And you see a lot of this in Bosnian genocide denial. And you see a lot of it in Russian disinformation that is often aimed towards, you know, humanitarian raising criticisms about the use of chemical weapons in Syria, bombing of hospital, and that sort of thing. So the real aspect of Chinese disinformation that sort of attracted me was how it intercepted the tendencies from the Russian disinformation syndicate and deployed it towards the ends of Uyghur genocide denial and also various oddball conspiracy theories about COVID-19 being a bioweapon

created by the U.S. military at Fort Diedrich or whatever. And so I noticed it's the same people, oftentimes, from left and right-wing backgrounds, promoting disinformation in this case. And it's a, what you might think of as an authoritarian rationale. In other words, the mass surveillance, mass detention, and really genocide. of the Uyghers in Xinjiang. So while it may be coming from a ostensibly left-wing government,

it's also using the same methods as an authoritarian conservative regime like Putin's Russia. And it's mobilized towards the ends of mass incarceration. right so it's the same it it doesn't strike me as sort of uh one ought to be you know what they call a campus in this in this way like one should just stick with the left wing or whoever calls themselves the left wing you know if they are carrying out massive crimes against humanity then that's precisely what it is we have to stay honest It strikes me as, and this is a problem across the American political spectrum, both right and left.

There's a certain kind of like American chauvinism with which we view the rest of the world where we are the main character of all the stories and all information kind of has to be processed through our norms and ideas. And that leads to some really weird stuff when you're looking at places like what's happening in Syria and Russia. But that aside, I want to get some real basic stuff out of the way here at the top. One of the things we do on the show, and then, you know, I've often been shocked when people, I talk to people and they have no idea who the Uyghurs are and what's happening. So just, you know, briefly, who are the Uyghurs and what is China doing to them and why? So the Writers are mostly Muslim, a Turkic ethnic minority in China in the province of Xinjiang. And as such, there's been a lot of tension between. the Uyghurs and their sort of customs practices, regional hegemony, etc.

On the one hand, and the Han-dominated apparatus of the Chinese Communist Party, on the other hand. And there has been repression of the Uyghurs in the past and resulting in resistance against the central authorities in Xinjiang, amounting to acts of extreme violence in some cases. And really in 2017, China really ramped up its repression of the Uyghurs, instituting things like increased sterilization, increased mass detention, and suppression of the cultural practices, raising cultural sites like mosques to the ground, and so forth. And this started effectively. It could be explained by a couple of different things.

On one hand, they explain it as a war on terror using the same rhetoric that the United States used to go into Iraq. And then on the other hand, they also, it's explained by some as part of their Belt and Road initiative, or rather the New Silk Road. So they're trying to effectively establish, massive secure trade routes through Central America, or excuse me, through Central Asia. And Xinjiang is a major sort of cornerstone because it's within, you know, the territory of China, but it also borders on Central Asian countries. And so they really need security there if they want to launch massive trade and industrial development investments throughout Asia. So, you know, there's a couple of different reasons for the,

mass repression for the genocide of the Uyghurs. But also the Chinese government is increasingly clamping down on minorities elsewhere as well, basically canceling previous policies to kind of bilingual policies, basically, in Inner Mongolia. And so it appears really that this is also part of a kind of a bringing into line of the Chinese state as, as very, really as an ethno state. Right. I think China also has been recently destroying some Mongol cultural artifacts as well as part of this. It's kind of like a little. So there's this thing that happens. This is one of the reasons I want to talk to you because I'm familiar with having these conversations with left-wing friends of

mine, with avowed communist friends of mine. You say, you know, like, hey, this is a bad thing that's happening. And they kind of like roll their eyes at you and say, like, well, you don't understand what's going on. You know, where did you get this information? There's like one study from like the UN, right? And anyone who, and I would urge, um, anyone who thinks that to just to take the five or 10 minutes and look at the way China itself talks about the Uyghurs and the information it publishes about what it's doing there. Because it's not as if it is, and you correct me if I'm wrong, it is not as if they are, desperately trying to hide what's happening there, right? It's more as if they're just trying to spin what people are seeing. Do you think that's correct, or am I completely off base? Yeah, in some cases, I think you're especially referring to the fact that China freely admitted that it has over a million people in what they call sort of re-education centers, right? And the question is, well, what does it look like, you know, inside and outside of these re-education centers,

right? And they call them vocational centers. You know, you can go there and earn an honest trade or what have you. They're basically scooping people off the street and giving them, you know, a livelihood again. And this is used as explanations for people who are the most devout critics of similar explanations for 19th century workhouses by old like Benthamite liberal capitalist. So the idea of vocational center is already a little bit touchy within the the Marxist tradition. But outside of that, there are so many studies, there's so much evidence, there's witness testimony of people who have been into these so-called vocational centers, you know, torture and all the things you would expect in an actual prison. And for people who spend a lot of time talking about the United States has no place to stand in international humanitarian concerns because of mass incarceration, to then turn around and try to explain away clear mass incarceration in Xinjiang is deeply hypocritical. So we, you know, we also have, we have New York Times, we have BuzzFeed, we have a lot of different sources of information,

satellite information, the yearbooks on demographics. And then we also have on the ground Chinese investigators who have gone out to these sites, who have filmed them, shown the massive prisons, the guard towers, and stuff. so on. And then you can also see, you know, what deniers point to, you know, to try to relieve some of these pressures. You know, there's an AP article that was recently published talking about how, according to one podcaster, the vibe has changed in Xinjiang. But if you read down the article, you can see that the journalist is clearly stating, this is an incredibly scary security state where people are fearing, you know, everything that they say for everything that they

say and where the old sort of ramshackle detention centers have been completely replaced by, you know, concrete walls, guard towers, all the sort of trappings of mass incarceration. So there's really no denying what's happening there, right? And like you said, it's a five to ten minute Google to find all of this stuff. It's not exactly hidden. And there's a population of 13 million Uyghurs right in and outside of China that are also, you know, documenting this live on social media various places. Like that kind of information is constantly getting out too. It's such a big thing that it's impossible to hide.

I actually have a friend who is from an ethnicity that nurse Xinjiang. And he's terrified for. his family and they're terrified that what's happening to the Uyghurs is going to spill over to them and it's going to happen to them too. This is like a real problem that's actually affecting people, you know, to put up a wall and to project all of this nonsense on there about, oh, well, you know, China has eradicated poverty, you know, and they couldn't do that without sort of modernizing this backwards, you know, ethnicity. It's, it's, It's not only heartless. It's also, it's sort of an imperial explanation that's also been

discredited in the scholarship on genocide, which shows that the explanations of modernization are typically wrong and that ethnicities that face genocide are often treated that way because they actually pose a financial. They're actually more adaptable to modernization. And as a result, they have competition. You know, they can compete with the dominating ethnicity. And so I think that that's part of really what's going on there. I think it would be helpful to actually define genocide for people. And my former employer, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, has like pretty much the definitive definition, definitive definition of genocide. Tell me what you think and we'll talk about how this applies to the Uyghurs.

Genocide is an internationally recognized crime where acts are committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. These acts fall into five categories. One, killing members of the group. Two, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group. Three, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part. imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group. Five, forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

I mean, wouldn't you say that China kind of hits on almost all of those with the weakers? Yes, definitely. And, you know, we've seen, as Matthew said, China pretty much admits to this. Only it phrases things in different rhetorical ways. and its defenders will say, again, this is a difference between colonial powers committing genocide and national projects modernizing their people. And so the Uyghurs are supposed to look at Han-dominated China, their national project, and they're supposed to move along with what is called, I don't know, cynization or something like that, right? So, you know, the Hanification of Vashenzhong or what have you. Because it's what's best for them and because that's just the modern world, right?

But, you know, people who make these kinds of claims have to look at what happened in Turkey with Armenians, right? They have to look all over the world at modernizing nation states and genocide. And it's not a pretty picture. You will just stick around just a few minutes. We're going to play some ads for you on Angry Planet, and we will be right back after this. If you never want to hear ads again, angryplanet.substack.com, and you can get a commercial-free version of this episode. We'll be right back after this silence. Hello and welcome back to Angry Planet.

We are talking to Alexander Reed Ross about the big business of Uighur genocide denial. All right. So we've kind of, I think, established that a genocide is happening. These are who the Uyghurs are. let's talk about what I think is kind of the bulk of the work in this article, the big business of denying this. I kind of even don't know how to begin to wrap my brain around this giant kind of thing that you've, I wouldn't say uncovered, but more mapped out in your article. But let's start with, I think there's a tech bro at the center of this.

Maybe tech bro is the wrong word because he's 67 years old. Who is Neville Roy? Is it Singham? that do you say his last name? Yes. Okay. Who is Neville Roy Singham? So Singham is a, he's kind of like an old guard radical leftist, I guess.

He comes from Sri Lankan, Jamaican heritage and sort of grew up in the Detroit radical scene. He was in the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in the. in the 70s. But then in the 80s and 90s, he starts to kind of turn over into the tech industry. And he starts to get into consulting from this sort of like garage startup that he later calls ThoughtWorks. And in the 90s, he's super celebrated as, you know, kind of reframing the way that people do business.

He's pretty like well regarded as a software consultant, particularly because he does like bespoke software development to help corporations with specific needs, you know. So thought works was, I don't know, it's sort of like integrated some of the Maoist ideology into a corporate doctrine, almost in this very neoliberal way, right? Like direct flexibility interfacing with the customers and like, you know, out of the box sort of software solutions for your specific needs. You know, so like quite sort of focused on decentralized systems, you know, questioning hierarchies in a kind of a model of nothing being settled and, you know,

sort of like a neoliberal model for a software of the 21st century. And into the 21st century, he starts working pretty closely with Chinese corporations, namely Huawei from 2001 to 2008, I believe, where he actually performed sort of consultancy work. And he brags actually in 2008 when ThoughtWorks has its agile conference. That's what he calls his sort of consultant ideology, agile. So they had their conference in Beijing, and he brags about how Huawei sort of is super influenced by him. And so this gets kind of interesting. And his relationship with China is like he sort of sings their praises to the editor of Fortune saying that this is sort of the next wave in the United States is going to learn from free markets sort of tempered by government planning.

And so we get this kind of picture of of Singham as falling into. to the Chinese Communist Party's propaganda apparatus. Around the same time as, you know, the financial collapse leads to added protest movements, which he then becomes involved in, like he was on this panel with Peter Thiel, who was a very reactionary software or a bro. We just did a whole episode about him. Yeah, so like during the Occupy days, he was on a panel with Peter Thiel. And he also, you know, he gets into the Julian Assange.

stuff. And it's interesting. You know, we don't see a whole lot of his impact, I guess, except for kind of behind the scenes in those days. It wasn't really until 2017, where it appears that he masterminded a coordinated and international effort to establish financial organs and sort of Marxist educational schools, if you will, as well as. as news portals in the United States, India, South Africa, and Brazil. All sort of, you know, mapped out and helped coordinated by a former professor of mine actually named Vijay Prashad. And so the idea here with Prashad and with, I think, Singham to an extent, is really kind of like re-galvanizing the old third world movement, the sort of non-aligned movement that refused to

side with Russia or the United States during the Cold War, using kind of the some of the bricks countries, Brazil, Russia, India, South Africa as a sort of stepping stone for internationalism throughout the world. And but what it seems like, though, is that this entire apparatus, which, you know, as a left winger, I would otherwise support, is simply being used to espouse genocide denial in the interests of the Chinese government. So it's very unfortunate at the end of the day. Can you make those connections for me? Like, how do we, I mean, I want to be careful here because I think what you've got here

that you've kind of mapped out is like a network of relationships and money, right? Like, it is not as if, as far as we know, that there is a Communist Party functionary in Beijing that is handing down orders to some. someone say like, here are your talking points for the week on, you know, the Uighur situation. Correct. It is right? You're looking at me as if I'm, that is what's going on. No.

Okay. So it's complicated. There's there, I've written about this in the past apropos Russian disinformation systems where there's definitely what is called in the literature, the vertical, which is Russian state own media, right? So, and that goes into. English language with Sputnik and so forth. And then there is like basically a kind of dispersed and decentralized horizontal network of sites and individuals who are basically inventing reasons

to support the Russian side of things. And sometimes those folks will get boosted by the sort of state, but otherwise they're in kind of competition sometimes with one another to prove their worth, you know, and I think there's some of that happening with China as well. Like you see the state-run media, the media organs of the Communist Party, vaunting a lot of these people. You see them go on Chinese state media and, you know, do their little song and dance. But as for their own talking points, I mean, some of them are unique and others are directly. coordinated with the Chinese state and others are, you know, absolutely identical to the Chinese propaganda. We see them going to the same conferences and part of the same think tanks. Like,

there's a think tank out of Renman University called, I think it's called Changdong. And this is, I don't remember the name of it off the top of my head, but this is a think tank that Vijay Prasad is part of, which helped to put on just a few months ago. a conference with the, you know, state propaganda agency about the Uyghurs, where two members of the Prashad's other organization that Tri-Continental gave a talk about how China's ending poverty and modernization and all that stuff on the same panel as the editor of People's Daily, which, of course, is the organ of the Chinese Communist Party. The integration between the Chinese state through academic institutions with this specific network is pretty impossible to miss.

But at the same time, their autonomous behavior shouldn't be written off. So it's not necessarily a top-down conspiracy. It's just a very complex, mediated information operations. So who were they trying to convince and why are they trying to convince them? What do they really hope to get out of it? I mean, they're not convincing the mainstream press, for example. Yeah. I mean, I kind of modeled out this, you know, media system, echo chamber or whatever a few years back. The idea is sort of that by appealing to activists, to radicals, to bleeding hearts, that they will be able to change sentiment, you know, through the blogosphere and through, you know, independent media networks and so forth. And, you know, in so doing, they could possibly change what mainstream media is saying.

They can cause a sea change in popular understanding of global issues. And this would naturally help, especially because the Xinjiang situation has caused corporations to boycott products created with weird labor. And that really has hit China in the pocket books. So, you know, by reaching out to consumers as well, hopefully they could possibly break boycotts, you know. And, you know, they have also expansionist claims elsewhere that they want to have free reign to pursue. And, you know, it doesn't help them to have bad press. Did you get the sense that Singham is a true believer that he actually believes this? You do?

Okay. Oh, yeah. Well, okay. So that's complicated. It's like saying, you know, is somebody who is a diehard, you know, in the 19. 70s, let's say, somebody who's a diehard defender of Soviet Russia, you know, would they at the same time be denying the existence of Goulogs in good faith, right? On the one hand, yes, that person actually believes that the Soviet Union is a freaking workers' paradise. But on the

other hand, they're not denying this in good faith. I personally hold Singham perhaps ironically in higher regard than to believe he would be such a dupe as to believe that what's happening to the Uighurs does not amount to the very definition of genocide. So then he has, he has like a higher realm of understanding personally for this. He thinks this is part of the bigger game. game that he has to win to affect some political change that he wants is what you're saying. There are definitely tradeoffs. We know that he's not, you know, he's going to make tradeoffs. I mean, he founded a corporation that was recently sold for several billion dollars.

You know, I mean, he has worked the corporate sphere and, you know, he's willing to do, he's willing to compromise to pursue his ideals. And I think it appears that those ideals may have shifted fairly radically to positions that would otherwise be identified as a right wing. In other words, like support for genocide. And yeah, you saw this also with Prashad, Singham's good buddy. In around 2013, he writes this book called The Poor Nations, where he's documenting effectively the creation of the Bricks countries. And he states that, you know, China and other Bricks countries, their development model was in Prashad, where it's cannibalistic, using land grabs and, you know, economic exploitation

to build up their GDP. But he also says that the nation should be the primary building block on which the left can, you know, assert itself. So that was sort of a turning point where Prasad moved away from what before then was sort of known as the world social forum model of networked social movements supporting populists leftist, you know, pink-tied governments in Latin America, for example. And then, you know, even in 2018, Prashad was saying the treatment of Uyghurs is problematic, but, you know, nevertheless, we have to kind of work with in the Briggs format because it's against Western imperialism or what have you. But now he's completely denying any evidence at all of genocide. And not only that, but he's saying it can't be genocide because

it's part of a national project's modernization. Right. We're just, we're just getting everybody on the same page, right? We're not actually genociding anybody. So it looks like, and this all comes after millions and millions of dollars is sunk into a network that he appears to sort of be a kind of leader over. And so, yeah, it looks like big money was made in 2017 and that money has resonated in ideological conversion of sorts. How do we combat something like this? And I guess like another question, another way to ask this question would be, is there a way

to get through to the tankie? Well, I mean, I think one of the big issues with this recent investigation that we found is just a massive chunk of hypocrisy going on. Not only with left-wingers who assert the idea of equality and freedom, you know, caping for genus, but also the means through which they obtain money. One of the primary funding organizations, this Wall Street fund called the People's Support Fund, run by Codepinks Jody Evans, is deeply invested in companies that are targeted by the boycott divestment sanctions movement for participating in the repression of Palestinians, you know, in the West Bank and in Gaza and in Israel. So they are investing in companies targeted by Palestinian activists in order to pay for media that is denying genocide against Muslims in China, while all the while presenting themselves as the great defenders of Muslims throughout the world against the war on terror. with ongoing war on terror, neocons and all the rest of it.

In fact, often some of these people will call me a neocon, you know, when they're the ones who are supporting the war on terror, as it's been delinked from the United States and effectively made into a geopolitical strategy for the accumulation of capital. So how do we get through to people? I mean, pointing out that massive gaping contradiction that has to, sort of wake some people up. That has to wake some people up that, you know, what's going on here is not exactly kosher.

And I think further academic studies, yada, yada, yada. I don't know. I don't know. You sound so defeated. No, I'm not. I mean, if I was, I would say, you know, there's nothing we could do. but I still feel like, you know, we have to be reasonable. I used to think, you know, hey, it's a fight against fascism when the right was rising.

You know, that'll really bring us all together. And then sure enough, a lot of anti-fascists got thrown under the bus by the same people who are, you know, denying atrocities by the Assad regime in Syria, denying atrocities by Xi and China, you know, denying crimes against humanity in Venezuela, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You know, so I mean, sometimes the only thing to do, I have a very long range view of things. I tend to believe that in the short term, you know, criticisms and stuff like that, when the facts are brought to light will ultimately, you know, be dispelled. And it's, it remains important to raise cardinal issues as soon as you find them, you know, loudly. in order to warn people who are, I guess, jaundiced enough to actually understand what's happening.

And so, you know, it's a question of moving the post forward, I guess, just moving, moving it forward. It's a long trudge, a slog. But, you know, if we're honest, if we keep, you know, going, you know, if we keep it up, I think that tankies will, you know, nobody will talk about tankies anymore. Well, I think we also should acknowledge the literal billions of people who don't give a flying fuck. Yeah. Yeah. That's the other weird thing about this is like, I mean, do you even talk, like, trying to even think about how I would explain what a tankie is to my mother, you know, just like makes my brain.

on fire, right? And sadly, a lot of people just kind of don't care about any of this. You know, they're more concerned about not getting COVID and making sure they've got food on the table tomorrow and they're less concerned about what's going on in China, right? So I think fighting against apathy is also a big part. And let me ask you this final question to kind of go out here. How do you, this is such a big, weird thing. And there's like slides in your article that look like conspiracy maps, you know, like you think of Charlie from Always Sunny with like the big map and the news like behind them, like all the interconnected stuff. How do you communicate this stuff to people effectively? I don't know. I don't know. That's a really good

question. I mean, I want to say I don't. I'm extremely ineffective actually. Like this is just one, my, my work on this subject is just reaffirming the famous Beckett quote, try, fail, try again, fail better, you know, it's hard to reach out to people. It's hard to convince people of things. I think that this report actually is the first one where most of the response has been positive. From the left, that is. A lot of people have been sending me messages on Twitter or whatever saying just thank you so much and congratulations and like yeah that kind of thing so that makes me feel better well if you would

like to arm yourself with these facts check out alexander reed ross's article the big business of weger genocide denial we will link it in the show notes sir thank you so much for coming on to angry planet and walking us through this that's all for this week angry planet listeners as always angry planet is me matthew galt jason fields and kevin odell is created by myself and jason fields If you like the show, please leave us to comment, rate us on iTunes, and most importantly, go to angryplanet.com, where for mere $9 a month, you get commercial-free versions of the mainline episodes and two bonus episodes enough a month, two bonus episodes a month. You can hear in the most recent one, me getting mildly upset with a Canadian who is predicting doom for America. Again, you go to angryplanetpod.com or angryplanet.com to sign up for that. We will be back next week with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet.

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