Confronting the great genocide illusion: Gaza and Xinjiang

The following essay by Russel Harland (trade unionist and Friends of Socialist China Britain Committee member) explores the bizarre phenomenon of “those apostles of ‘freedom’ [the Western ruling classes] wanting you to believe China is committing a genocide against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang whilst turning a blind eye to the most documented genocide in history, in Gaza”.

Describing the ongoing horrors being inflicted on the people of Gaza, of which there is an abundance of evidence, Russel notes that there is “not an atom of credible evidence” of genocide in Xinjiang, and yet the propaganda campaign against China is so pervasive that even many on the left have been taken in by it. He notes: “My own trade union, which has done some phenomenal work in advocating for the Palestinian cause, appears to be investing quite a lot of time and resources into targeting China, from a standpoint of political malice.”

The essay provides an overview history of Xinjiang, and highlights its strategic importance to China and to the growing cooperation between China and the countries of Central Asia. This strategic importance gives a valuable clue as to why the US would seek to foment instability in the region.

Russel concludes:

With the use of genocide both in reality and fiction now truly exposed as a political mechanism to maintain hegemony for US imperialism, the necessity to confront the great genocide illusion is about embracing our own humanity, preventing any more of the world’s children succumbing to the merciless fate of those in Gaza, and once and for all stopping US imperialism’s drive towards total domination through war.

‘Prometheus, in stealing the fire from the gods, lays the foundation for the evolution of man. There would be no human history were it not for Prometheus’ “crime.” He, like Adam and Eve, is punished for his disobedience. But he does not repent and ask for forgiveness. On the contrary, he proudly says: “I would rather be chained to this rock than be the obedient servant of the gods.”’ (Erich Fromm)

The epigraph above comes from a series of papers written in the 1960s by German-American social philosopher and psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, which became the book On Disobedience, published after his death in 1981. These dense texts illuminate the debilitating potency of US imperialism’s grasp on our everyday lives. Fromm, who fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s, wrote these papers at the height of the Cold War, when atomic confrontation was a distinct possibility, in a decade that witnessed trepidatious events such as the Cuban Missile Crisis, the intensification of the Vietnam war, and the Sino-Soviet split.  

In the midst of these papers, Fromm is describing how capitalism permanently tramples on the principles of solidarity and love to encourage the impersonal mechanisms of the market through individualism and egotistical action to regulate society while forgoing the expressed needs of the people. According to Fromm, the alienation into which humankind has been coerced is guided by bureaucracies of big enterprises through its consumers and workers under the illusion of freedom and independence. Granted that in writing these essays Fromm is stunned by the state of humanity under capitalism. He is also dismissive of the humanistic socialism being promoted in the Soviet Union or China, that finds inseparable the full development of the individual and society. Yet unbeknownst to Fromm, while the Soviet leaders, particularly from the time of Khrushchev, denigrated their predecessors to legitimate their own power, China navigated such incidences building on the legacy of each generation of leaders to set China on the path to national rejuvenation through Chinese-style modernisation. Thus far, the rejuvenation has included lifting around 900 million people out of extreme poverty to eradicate this scourge from China, whilst also helping the country become the second largest economy in the world. Unparalleled achievements gained in barely a few decades, to the contemporary despair of US Imperialism and its subordinates.  

Six decades on from Fromm’s sobering examination where he argued that ‘the capacity to doubt, to criticise and to disobey may be all that stands between a future for mankind and the end of civilisation,’ humanity is arguably at a more perilous crossroads. Resorting to war massively exacerbates this peril. In the last four decades the US has been involved in 24 wars/invasions, 13 of them in the 21st century. In that same period China has not been involved in any war. Fromm’s prescience must be heeded if humankind is to tackle the climate emergency, avoid global conflict, and to stop societal breakdown due to spiralling inequality in Western countries and elsewhere. These colossal concerns are encapsulated in the necessity to confront the genocide illusion. The aim of the illusion being conjured by political priests in defence of “democracy” and “human rights” would have largely passive populations believe that the 400-plus days of livestreamed horror from Gaza is not a genocide. Meanwhile the extraordinarily powerful world media machinery, using the US State Department as its principal source for the Uyghur genocide fabrication at least from 2014, spews this flagrant double falsity every minute of every day with intoxicating consequences: there is no genocide in Gaza but there is an ongoing one in China. Therefore, without an atom of credible evidence, those apostles of “freedom” want you to believe China is committing a genocide against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang whilst turning a blind eye to the most documented genocide in history, in Gaza. This is not only ludicrously inconsistent, incredibly slanderous, it is also detrimental to the project of ensuring the survival of our planet. It is within this context that I will now proceed.

In 2021 António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, told the UN General Assembly that ‘if there is a hell on earth, it is the lives of children in Gaza.’  That statement, near two and a half years before 7 October, introduced a noun that would become a requirement in describing the unfolding events in Gaza. Welcome to Hell is the title of a research report released in August 2024 by B’Tselem, a human rights NGO based in Jerusalem which details the inhuman treatment and abuse since 7 October 2023 of Palestinians held in custody. The executive summary states ‘testimonies clearly indicate a systemic, institutional policy focused on the continual abuse and torture of all Palestinians held by Israel.’ B’Tselem’s credentials are unimpeachable, and it includes Trocaire (the overseas development agency of the Catholic church in Ireland), UNICEF and UNWomen among its donors. China’s Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN, Ambassador Geng Shuang, also used the term recently when he stated that ‘Gaza has now turned into hell on earth.’

Andreas Malm poignantly does justice to the scenes we have been witnessing on a daily basis from our mobile devices when he described Israel’s genocide in April:

It’s been half a year, six months, 184 days of bombs picking off one family after another, one high-rise building after another, one residential district after another, relentlessly, methodically: half a year of the grey bones of children poking out under the rubble, of rows of tiny white body bags lined up on the ground, of a mutilated girl hanging from a window as if from a meat hook; half a year of parents bidding farewell to their children with eery composure, as if their spirits have left them empty and blank, or in uncontrollable spasms of grief, as if they don’t know how to ever again put one foot in front of the other and take a step on this Earth; half a year of a dozen massacres per day, summary executions, sniping, driving over the corpses with bulldozers and all the rest and it just doesn’t stop, it goes on and it goes on and it doesn’t stop and then it continues and proceeds apace and it won’t come to an end and it just doesn’t stop.

Six months on and the massacres have continued; in mosques, schools, hospitals, and so-called safe zones. Nowhere and no-one is safe in Gaza. In February 2024 UNICEF estimated that more than 17,000 children in Gaza are separated from their parents or unaccompanied. Al Jazeera reported in July 2024 that Gaza now had ‘the largest cohort of paediatric amputees in history’, whilst they also quoted UNICEF who said ‘that between October and January, at least 1,000 children lost one or both legs.  Many of these amputations were performed without anaesthesia, underscoring the dire medical conditions in Gaza.’  In addition, in July 2024 the respected medical journal The Lancet published research which estimated over 186,000 or more deaths may well be attributable to the ongoing genocide in Gaza. 

In a caustic opening to his 2004 book, the Egyptian Marxist economist Samir Amin wrote that some four hundred years ago the seeds had been planted for which a sickness would emerge near the end of the twentieth century. It had its origins in Europe before mutating in America; he called this ‘the liberal virus’ (providing the title for his book), historically justified as the ‘civilizing mission’, that infected the globe in the name of human rights. In the latter end of the twentieth century the world was being introduced to the Orwellian concept of ‘humanitarian intervention’ which was to justify a string of disastrous wars, predominantly on morally hypocritical, and legally spurious grounds. These wars would set the world on fire. The lack of accountability in every sphere of life would embolden the protagonists to take humanity to the precipice which has led us to the great genocide illusion. Jack Donnelly, a self-confessed American liberal and author of Universal Human Rights: In Theory & Practice, a textbook recommended to master’s students at British universities, wrote of

being more than a bit uncomfortable with this (limited) defence of the Kosovo intervention. Although I think that it is substantively sound in this particular case, it has considerable potential for partisan abuse and a very troubling “selectivity.”

Further on, Donnelly qualified that point by asserting that “selective humanitarian intervention, for all its problems, may be preferable to no humanitarian intervention at all.”

Some forty years beforehand, Fromm predicted such thinking when he wrote:

The ideas of Plato and Aristotle, of the prophets and of Christ, of Spinoza and Kant, are known to millions among the educated classes in Europe and America. They are taught at thousands of institutions of higher learning, and some of them are preached in the churches of all denominations everywhere. And all this in a world which follows the principles of unrestricted egotism, which breeds hysterical nationalism, and which is preparing for an insane mass slaughter.

The case of Xinjiang could be seen as simmering in the background. As the magnificent work of pro-Palestinian activists in the West continues to push for an end to the genocide in Gaza, opportunists within these circles are beginning to insist on raising the ‘Uyghur genocide’, about which they don’t provide any credible evidence. This atrocity equivalising seeks to let US imperialism and its clients off the hook, and is a strategy revealed by Italian Marxist Gramsci in his 1930s writings on the state and civil society, where he argued that when the state trembles “a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. The State was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks.”

Giving emphasis to Gramsci, Fromm contended that managerial bureaucrats who had taken over industry had also gained power in trade unions, where individual members have very little input. Fromm also stated that the average citizen has little awareness of the small groups of people making decisions about fundamental issues such as peace and war.

It is frustrating and deeply disappointing how much the intoxicating anti-China media campaign has influenced top quality journalists, trade unions and others in relation to the non-existent genocide in Xinjiang, giving weight to Gramsci and Fromm’s theories. Medhi Hasan, the flamboyantly articulate broadcaster can go on the debating circuit giving a sophisticated and forensic defence of the Palestinian cause. Yet in the blink of an eye he turns into a daytime TV host barracking Chinese representatives to a favourable audience, with little interest in acknowledging points he no doubt understands to be legitimate security concerns from a Chinese perspective. At the point of writing, you can apply to attend a debate between Medhi Hasan and Eylon Levy, a former Israeli spokesperson during the early months of Israel’s genocide, on the topic of Were Israel’s Actions in the Gaza War Justified?  This evokes Robert Fisk’s analysis of this kind of “journalism” which is akin to giving equal time to the slave and captain upon disembarkation of the slave ship at Virginia during the eighteenth century. Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi’s words resonate when he stated that in not wishing ‘to abet confusions, small-change Freudianism, morbidities and indulgences. The oppressor remains what he is, and so does the victim.’ 

My own trade union, which has done some phenomenal work in advocating for the Palestinian cause, appears to be investing quite a lot of time and resources into targeting China, from a standpoint of political malice. In my own experience the level of awareness of Britain’s violent history in China is unknown to most ordinary people. This is unsurprising given the historical amnesia that enables Britain to sit at the knee of US imperialism. In 2022 I objected to my union putting their name beside an organisation called Stop Uyghur Genocide which I felt could put the good name of our union into disrepute given the lack of evidence for such an accusation. I then stated via email that there ‘is a very real danger that genocide can become trivialised by powerful forces who can be seen in some quarters to be making unfounded accusations for geo-political interests.’ The responses were inadequate and talked about a ‘growing body of evidence,’ to justify these purely propagandistic actions. This approach has been witnessed many times before, and it was Primo Levi who once again stated that ‘reality can be distorted not only in memory but in the very act of its taking place.’

The reality of Xinjiang and of the Uyghurs, though with its own complexities, is profoundly different to Gaza or the West Bank, which are blockaded and illegally occupied respectively by the settler colonial entity that is Israel. Xinjiang is a culturally diverse autonomous region of a sovereign nation comprising of Uyghurs, Hui, Tibetans, Han Chinese, Mongolians, and Kazakhs among others. With a sparse population of over 25 million (relative both to China and to Xinjiang’s landmass) spread over its vast western and north-western territory which borders central Asia, the region is ecologically diverse in the extreme. It is a hub for China’s green revolution and also contains many important natural resources including oil and gas. Moreover, the area is key to China’s ongoing development through the unparalleled Belt and Road Initiative that has identified mutually beneficial opportunities to address the infrastructural failings in the Global South, a legacy of colonialism and western controlled global capitalism. Fundamentally though, Xinjiang is vital to China’s continued unity and security.

The great genocide illusion starts to unravel when you look a little deeper into China’s history to reveal truth and facts continually omitted by Western ideologues, particularly around the Uyghurs, whose population has increased from 3 million in 1955 to 9.5 million in 2016 according to Wang Hui. Equally Xinjiang now has one of the highest concentrations of mosques anywhere in the Islamic world. Muslims have survived centuries without needing protection from a failing foreign empire that has tormented the Islamic world during the so called “war on terror”. Xinjiang has a long history of being part of a unified China beginning under dynastic rule, and besides different periods of political meddling from the Soviet Union in the twentieth century, is a fact that has never been seriously contested. Even when the country descended into chaos following the 1911 revolution, the government refused to follow the example of the Young Turks in the crumbling Ottoman Empire and suppress ethnic minorities, despite receiving advice to do so.

According to Zhang Weiwei, China’s ‘unparalleled cohesive strength’ is due to the civilisational nature of its state in part influenced by the Confucian belief of ‘unity in diversity’.  Moreover, Zhang further consolidates China’s conceptual link with the past with the dual ideas of minxin ziangbei, approximately meaning ‘winning the hearts and minds of the people,’ and xuanxian renneng roughly translating to ‘selection of talents based on meritocracy.’

Undoubtedly there have been issues in Xinjiang, like many parts of China, especially during its rapid development of the 1990s and 2000s. However, having problems and committing a genocide, the “crime of crimes”, are two monumentally different things. Wang Hui has identified new class divisions arising in Xinjiang due to market competition and economic reform that resulted in social transformations that have caused discontent. This is in part due to the influx of immigration of Han Chinese (China’s majority ethnic group) to work in developing industries.

The percentage of the Uyghurs living in Xinjiang changed from 73 percent of a 5 million population in 1955 to 46 percent of a 22 million population in 2010, with Han Chinese now making up 39 percent of that total. Furthermore, some problems between the Uyghurs and Han Chinese have emerged as a result of the fact that the groups live predominantly in countryside and cities respectively. These are real issues for China to address and overcome. However, China has a history of synergising diversity and overcoming differences without resorting to Western style conflict. Moreover, the Western obsession on fixed identity has reduced people to one-sided abstractions which belies the persistent permeability of change in nature, society, and people. 

It is not hard to see why US imperialism would target this region of China to try and exploit discontent, having successfully overseen the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. The former President of Burkina Faso and Marxist revolutionary Thomas Sankara had warned that, to prevent its own destruction, humankind must collectively and individually fight against imperialist domination and Balkanisation, something China is acutely aware of. China specialist Jenny Clegg notes that China had been criticised by Amnesty International for its methods of dealing with Uyghur armed separatists, but had largely contained the problem by persuasion and only using force when necessary. China’s peaceful development these last four decades cannot be undone and no amount of unjust slander is going to change that. Thomas Sankara perished at the hands of pro-imperialist forces for dreaming of an alternative world for all oppressed peoples. How proud he would have been to witness the bond of shared experience fighting racism, colonialism, and imperialism that unite the leaders of Africa and China to promote development and safeguard global peace.  

It is not my intention in this paper to drag up and debunk the multitude of defamations hurled at China from nefarious sources that have nothing to do with genocide or protecting Uyghur rights and culture. That has been methodically scrutinised, amongst others, by Carlos Martinez in the chapter Manufacturing Consent for Containing China of his book The East is Still Red.However, there are two points from Martinez that I would like cover to help expose the great genocide illusion and bring this article to a conclusion.

The quote below is from Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky:

Genocide is an invidious word that officials apply readily to cases of victimisation in enemy states, but rarely if ever to similar or worse cases of victimisation by the United States itself or allied regimes.

This prophetic quote cited by Martinez in his book published in 2023 not long before the genocide in Gaza began is fully corroborated by the UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese’s investigative report of the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories submitted to the Human Rights Council in April 2024 entitled Anatomy of a Genocide. This authoritative account of the genocide in Gaza and how international law is being disregarded to maintain the current global order has fully exposed the complicity of advanced capitalist countries. With most of the EU, France, Germany, Britain and of course the US, all rushing to help organise and coordinate the bloodshed with Israel, according to Andreas Malm.

In 2000, legal scholar Makau Mutua stated that international law was a predatory system devised to support empire and maintain the subordination of non-European people by Europeans. Here we are brought back to Fromm who deliberated the dialectical relationship between obedience and disobedience, giving the example of Antigone who had to choose between obeying the laws of humanity or the inhuman laws of the state; choices we see displayed by all manner of resistance in Gaza, and also by independent journalists and activists around the world with conscientious acts of revolutionary bravery from which we must all take inspiration.  

Secondly, Martinez rightly states that solidarity with China can incur a ‘hefty psychological and perhaps material and physical cost’:a potential consequence of confronting the monstrous genocide fabrication in Xinjiang. In the 1960s, Fromm was writing at a time when newspapers, radio and television were being used to distract, misinform and indoctrinate a population into a consumer culture that would poison the spirit with unquenchable desires and give US imperialism free reign to cause well documented havoc on the world. The subsequent decades have only intensified that voracious hunger for conspicuous consumption, particularly with the marketing dividend at the end of the Cold War and then the onset of the internet ensnaring more of the global population to become alienated from their true species being. Bestselling author and physician Gabor Maté wrote in his most recent book The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, Healing in a Toxic Culture that:

From a wellness perspective, our current culture, viewed as a laboratory experiment, is an ever-more globalised demonstration of what can go awry. Amid spectacular economic, technological, and medical resources, it induces countless humans to suffer illness born of stress, ignorance, inequality, environmental degradation, climate change, poverty, and social isolation. It allows millions to die prematurely of diseases we know how to prevent or of deprivations we have more than enough resources to eliminate.

Consequently, with the age of multipolarity upon us we must regain our ability to criticise and disobey for the greater good without fear of sanctions. The dispossessed and disenfranchised have always been the first to bear the hardships in this decrepit dying system. Therefore, with penalties all but guaranteed, the working class should embrace the possibility of a new more prosperous path. With the use of genocide both in reality and fiction now truly exposed as a political mechanism to maintain hegemony for US imperialism, the necessity to confront the great genocide illusion is about embracing our own humanity, preventing any more of the world’s children succumbing to the merciless fate of those in Gaza, and once and for all stopping US imperialism’s drive towards total domination through war. Finally, the accusation of the ‘Uyghur genocide’ is a despicable fabrication, and as Karl Marx once wrote, ‘ignorance helps absolutely nobody.’ Engaging with China with integrity will reveal that we have much to learn and little to fear.

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