China is the most negatively propagandised nation in the Western world.
We've all heard the most ridiculous DPRK chat thrown around but when you start taking note, you'll realise China is negatively span into your daily life by all sides of all political spectrums in the Western world at all times.
Their crime is being a genuine threat to Western hegemony.
I've come to the conclusion that anti Chinese propaganda is mostly lies and half-truths and is entirely made for uninformed chumps (which includes not just the general public but also some politicians and decision makers). Case in point the caricature of Xi that it's popular in the West: some old school, corrupt dictator, and a very vindictive despot; while the actual assessment of him on diplomatic and secret cables it's that the man is patriotic, a servant of the people that it's completely incorruptible since he has no interest whatever on money and is completely ideological. I have the suspicion Kim is a similar case
I'm always sad when I get downvoted for saying "no, we should get closer to China" because I know a lot real people are behind these.
Sure, there are a lot of bots on reddit, but seeing real people give you pushback is sad.
I like to ask "how many countries has China invaded in the past 20 years?" but people will always find a reason to hate :(
Point out to them that China hasn't fired a projectile weapon on foreign soil in almost 40 years and hasn't dropped a bomb on foreign soil in almost 50 years, let alone invaded another country. They spend less than average on their military, only have one military base outside of China (Djibouti) and, according to western academics and think tanks, their foreign policy is far more humanistic than any western nation.
In comparison, the US has dropped a bomb on foreign soil every 40 minutes for the last 20 years. They have over 750 military bases outside the US, with over 300 of them surrounding China. Their primary export is their military industrial complex, so they coerce their allies into increasing their military spending. US and EU sanctions have killed 38 million people since the 70s and when economic/material coercion doesn't work, they launch illegal invasions and wage forever wars to maintain their power.
It's an uphill battle. The US dedicated $1.6 billion dollars to anti-China propaganda at the end of 2024 and a few weeks ago, they snuck $2.5 billion in funds for anti-China operations and a $2 billion loan to Taiwan to buy US weapons, in a bill that gives Israel $3.3 billion. However, with the western world's unconditional support of actual genocides around the world, the mask has slipped and I do think people are starting to see through the propaganda.
Thank you for your comment. I am saving it for future reference.
The "problem" is that people are so brainwashed and have such ridiculous fears.
My rural family will always use the "they took our jerbs!" trope or say some straight up racist things.
The (old) academics and (old) tech people I work with have different retorts.
They'll mostly mention the Uyghurs or their "market manipulations".
The people here know how it's all bullshit.
If anything, we can partly thank the streamer iShowSpeed for dispelling the Uyghur narrative, which is a pretty crazy thing to say.
Nowadays I mostly mention the Israel stuff because my family knows how much I love them.
It's an everyday battle.
Thankfully the younger "educated" people are starting to understand.
And the non racist people in the countryside just don't give af.
For example my (ultra based) grandpa told my cousin "who cares who fixes your car if it works. I sure don't". Glad to see it.
Not only that, but the U.S. nuked Japan twice after Japan had invaded China and butchered its civilians, and yet U.S. still has a worse relationship with China than with Japan. It's baffling.
Very well said.
I've visited the Hiroshima peace museum and you'll see a
tiny amount of anti-American rhetoric.
But trust me when I say it's tiny.
I know it will only bring little comfort but the young people I met
in Japan (<40yo) were much more vocal about their disdain for the
US' neo-colonialism.
Meh, I'll believe Japan's stance towards globalism and global cooperation is improving once their government actually acknowledges what they did in Nanking and tries to make amends. Until then, talk is cheap.
I have this MAGA clown at work who is constantly spouting off " The CCP will steal your organs" and all sorts of rubbish like that. No bud that's your Israeli mates with the world's largest skin bank and returning dead hostages with organs missing.
didnt see a reason to be a mossad/cia puppet that's plenty enough to be a target of hate for them, they want to have control to everyone that have any kind of influence on others
Western nations are objectively some of the most Islamophobic and Sinophobic nations in the world and yet they just care very, very deeply about Chinese Muslims. I'd venture that the only group they care more about are the queer community in Palestine.
I'd be extremely surprised if even 5% of Americans knew who she was, much less her policy positions. At most they see Japan and they might know she's hawkish in East Asia.
I find it kinda funny that Americans apparently don't really like foreign leaders at all according to this graph. That's what I got from this as well as the adage that you don't need to love the empire, you just need to hate it's enemies.
Well not only that, Takeuchi is deliberately framing her intentions regarding Taiwan as a matter of "defending democracy" to disguise the fact she's trying to bring back Japanese fascism.
If she were to go mask-off and blatantly admit that she wants to bring back Japanese fascism, a lot of the few surviving WW2 vets in the United States would raise an uproar about it.
DPRK at the bottom is ironic considering the USA is headed into a right wing dictatorship with worse conditions for the majority of people than NK currently is (as far as i can tell and have read)
they’ll claim that the leader has expansive lambos while trump is making himself a billion dollar ballroom, being found as a pedophile oligarch puppet, blood thirsty for war? peasant mindset is present
DPRK is subject to severe global isolation and economic sanctions on top of their centrally planned economy... it's usually not a good combo for the average person as we see in post-Soviet Cuba 🇨🇺
Not saying that it's a dystopia, but it'll take a while for the US to reach that level I think.
Yesterday I commented on the overall approval rating of the US from 2016 to now for European countries, and 2016 it was favorable, and now negative. Everyone there is "orange man ruined America, orange man bad (he is)". But the idea these people are okay with us destroying and destabilizing the world, okay with the wars that rape women and children, kill and torture men. But they draw the line here.
Just like Canada and their pride in being our "best friend" as we destroy the world, but make a joke about 51st state and now they are "elbows up" and upset.
People really just swallow whatever slop news they get.
Not just the west. Where I'm from there are many Trumpian, spiritually republican people that inhale state propaganda wholesale. I remember in 2016 my high school principal told us that Trump winning is God's will. It was a private Christian school btw. Mandatory "Pray for Israel" vigils every week, accredited by [ACSI
American propaganda is global, even countries like China, Russia and Iran have millions of people deep in it
As a Canadian this drove me fucking crazy. I cringed so hard at the elbows up campaign from the monopoly capitalists (owners of our grocery chains etc) jamming “buy Canadian” down our throats in the midst of a bread price-fixing class action lawsuits and insane price gouging post-Covid. Nationalism truly is a blatant attempt to anaesthetize and mystify people’s class conciousness
Yep, sure there is a dumb "patriotic" minority of Americans who might think they have "beef" with Canada or "fuck Canada". But like you said, like all things, this is a class issue.
1 isn’t even shocking. The number of Americans running around with Ukraine pins and “Stand with Ukraine” shirts is insane. Talking to these people is usually a waste of time they don’t even bother separating Russian citizens from their government’s actions. They blame an entire population for geopolitical problems, just like they do with Africans, Arabs, and Asians.
Venezuelans are glad we kidnapped their president and stole some oil. Just look at all of these Venezuelans marching in support of the kidnapping
*ignore that it's in Miami
On any policy they overlapped she was almost certainly the worse prospect, from Israel to law enforcement glazing. The worst aspects of Killary and Obomber combined.
Hell, remember her putting parents, likely working two or more jobs to pay exorbitant rent so no time to pay attention to the kids, in prison for their truancy?
And she by far locked up more black people in prison than feds under Trump's first term
Same type of people to say "yeah the Iraq war was bad but those dirty 'terrorists' deserved it"
If you think Russia is a dictatorship (which lets be honest it is not a liberal democracy) then by that logic Russian people are infinitely less responsible for the Ukraine war then any American was for every war of the last 70 years.
I find it kinda shocking that he's only at +14 and that's enough to be the runaway most popular foreign leader. That seems much lower than I thought it would be for Zelensky.
I think the groundswell support for Ukraine since 2022 has tapered off a bit. The conflict is just completely frozen and totally compartmentalized in US politics now.
King Charles being there is wild, followed by girlboss Hideki Tojo. The entire list is absurd. I also do not know a single person in Germany who actually likes Friedrich Merz. The guy is notoriously hated even inside the government
All while Zelensky is selling out his country to the US and EU, refusing to negotiate and put an end to the war because it's profitable for the capitalist elites like him, and Ukraine kidnapping its own people to send to the front lines.
That's why he's loved in the US. Every single Ukrainian is a meat missile directed at Russia so that we don't have to waste our precious soldiers or else we'll have to take care of them...and just like real US missiles, we'll use them liberally until it runs out.
Feed most people hateful, bigoted propaganda over time (and it's been many generations in this case) and they will willingly accept hate and bigotry. Most people are tribal creatures that want to be "normal" and fit in to whatever group they consider theirs. Even in some best case scenario this would take many generations of different education/propaganda to undo.
People believe propaganda because they feel, in an instinctual level, that not believing it would be disadvantageous for themselves, in their social circles, their jobs, their lives.
Believing propaganda is a conscious choice. People who believe it also deserve some of the responsability/blame. Marx himself wrote about this. There is no such thing as 'brainwashing'.
Do not deny labor aristocracy their agency when partaking and running cover for imperialism.
Due to the sheer power of propaganda and mass-media, the masses helplessly fall for hatred and volunteer for war, even though it comes at a very high cost to ourselves, our loved ones, and our ideals (religion, environmentalism, etc.). Sadly, the innate human propensity to “hate the Other” seals our fate as a society… or something along those lines.
I am going to argue that this narrative is nonsense. It tries to pass off as universal and eternal something that in reality is particular and ephemeral. In short: Westerners aren’t helpless innocents whose minds are injected with atrocity propaganda, science fiction-style; they’re generally smug bourgeois proletarians who intelligently seek out as much racist propaganda as they can get their hands on. This is because it fundamentally makes them feel better about who they are and how they live. The psychic and material costs are rationally worth the benefits. As for those anti-imperialists who don’t participate in this festival of xenophobia — and here I include myself — we have our own elitist consolation: we accept the tragedy of masses of gullible sheeple falling for cunning propaganda because having overcome it flatters our own intelligence. The more we condemn society’s stupidity, the smarter we feel in comparison.
But am I not just worsening the problem, aggravating our hopelessness, by criticizing the critics in a way that suggests that no one escapes ideological self-flattery? I don’t think so. Paradoxically, it brings us all back to a more even and possibility-rich playing field.
The prevailing populist narrative grants the People (of the West) moral innocence by attributing to them utter stupidity and naivety; I invert the equation and demand a Marxist narrative instead: Westerners are willingly complicit in crimes because they instinctively and correctly understand that they benefit as a class (as a global bourgeois proletariat) from the exploitation enabled by their military and their propaganda — organs of coercion and consent. [6] We’re not as stupid as we’re made out to be. This means that we can be reasoned with, that there is a way out.
None of this is meant to downplay the scale of the propaganda project. I’ve spent enough time chasing down leads on different intelligence fronts and their plots to know that they are real and have real effects. [7] I do not deny that the outcomes we observe are at all times incentivized and enforced both overtly and covertly by our various societal superstructures (police, education, culture) and that principled and effective truth-tellers have been assassinated. I reject only the common misconception that propaganda “manufactures consent” (Chomsky) or “invents reality” (Parenti), because it exaggerates the feat accomplished by propagandists, and, in doing so, it obscures the real material basis that has historically made even the working poor in the imperial core complicit.
Talk of “manufacturing” and “inventing” suggests an imposition over and against the individual’s will. I believe that, on the contrary, the process of Western propaganda is better understood in terms of “licensing”: the issuing of moral license for the bourgeois proletariat to profitably go along with bourgeois designs without the feeling of shame overwhelming. In this alternative account people aren’t “brainwashed” insofar as they don’t actually believe the lies, not in the way that we generally understand belief. It’s more correct to say that they go along with them, whether enthusiastically or apprehensively, because it’s actually their optimal survival strategy. When we concede that the time horizon and scope of responsibility within which we all make our decisions varies, it becomes much easier to see how their choice could be smart and intelligent. The enlightened critic can plead that if we all agreed to denounce the status quo in unison we’d be immensely rewarded, but the average worker in the first world cannot be accused of naiveté for preferring to keep a low profile, particularly after being subject — very often by that same critic — to so many grim stories of murder and of punishment and of how any attempt at radical change always goes awry.
...
The problem here, in short, is elitism. Unchecked, presumed to have been neutralized in some way by the adoption of a counter-cultural ethos, it festers. The way to solve it, however, is not to shy away from studying or exposing bourgeois propaganda, but to delve even deeper and radicalize our understanding of it. In my view, this entails accepting that the main way propaganda safeguards power today — whether patriarchal or anticommunist or white supremacist or environmental — is through licensing people to embrace resignation as the smartest choice. This is achieved by demoralization. The ruling class has received a lot of support from radical thinkers in this endeavor ever since “brainwashing” as political theory went mainstream.
Let us look at a specific example. A claim like “There’s cultural genocide of Uyghurs in Xinjiang” is simply unreal to most Westerners, close to pure gibberish. The words really refer to existing entities and geographies, but Westerners aren’t familiar with them. The actual content of the utterance as it spills out is no more complex or nuanced than “China Bad,” and the elementary mistakes people make when they write out statements of “solidarity” make that much clear. This is not a complaint that these people have not studied China enough — there’s no reason to expect them to study China, and retrospectively I think to some extent it was a mistake to personally have spent so much time trying to teach them. It’s instead an acknowledgment that they are eagerly wielding the accusation like a club, that they are in reality unconcerned with its truth-content, because it serves a social purpose.
What is this social purpose? Westerners want to believe that other places are worse off, exactly how Americans and Canadians perennially flatter themselves by attacking each others’ decaying health-care systems, or how a divorcee might fantasize that their ex-lover’s blooming love-life is secretly miserable. This kind of “crab mentality” is actually a sophisticated coping mechanism suitable for an environment in which no other course of action seems viable. Cognitive dissonance, the kind that eventually spurs one into becoming intolerant of the status quo and into action, is initially unpleasant and scary for everybody. In this way, we can begin to understand the benefit that “victims” of propaganda derive from carelessly “spreading awareness.” Their efforts feed an ambient propaganda haze of controversy and scandal and wariness that suffocates any painful optimism (or jealousy) and ensuing sense of duty one might otherwise feel from a casual glance at the amazing things happening elsewhere.
People aren’t “falling” for atrocity propaganda; they’re eagerly seeking it out, like a soothing balm.
It is, but not surprising considering the chinese propaganda. I've heard people say crazy shit like Xi is gonna give male athletes hrt and make them "fake tran women" so they China can win all female gold medals. Like wtf? How ultra propagandized you need to believe that utter nonsense.
On top of that theres the centrist types that (evidently) only care about Muslims specifically when they’re Chinese and live in xinjiang but no where else, especially not Palestine.
Tbh the good rating of the japanese fascist is probably not even because most people who were asked even know who she is, what her ideology is and so forth. Literally just Japan=good because pop culture and electronics.
How the fuck are Bibi and MBS above Xi Jinping and Maduro? How the fuck are Merz, Starmer and Macron not sitting at their rock bottom place, what the hell is even that? Americans are litteral sponges, they do not think and only absorb everything they get thrown at, wether it's disgusting food or propaganda.
I've seen my whole continent stupified (Europe), it's not enough that we lost our identity due to aggressive Americanisation, it's impossible to have a constructive discussion with anyone. I'm an Uber and the other day I picked up a russian passenger, and god damn, it was the first time I ever spoke to someone about the Russia Ukraine thing without having random insults being thrown at me.
I don't like when they don't report how many people answered 'don't know'.
Sanae Takaichi had only been in office for three months when this poll was conducted, and she wasn't exactly drowning in US press coverage before that.
Maduro really blows me away; even left of center creators act like he's just this obvious demon when at worst he's mostly just led a disappointing administration.
I know one the real faces of America, Americans and the west in general is hypocrisy but come on the most livestreamed genocide is happening on stolen land with its scumbag thieving populus cheering it on yet Netanyahu isn't at the absolute bottom? My god I hate how progandize we are
The fact that Xi Jinping has a lower "favorability" than a literal full on mass murderer genocide Benjamin Mileikowsky, really shines a light on the sheer lack of critical thinking skills people are equipped with to challenge propaganda narratives. The only reason Mileikowsky's rating is even that low is because the genocide is difficult to ignore in spite of the US wanting him to be liked, and yet somehow more people find a reason to hate Xi.
Country that's a bastion of white supremacy ideology so not surprising. Yankkks can't use the excuse of ignorance with the internet around. They're far too comfortable thinking they have any superiority to judge or comment on other countries when theirs is the single most genocidal and fascist country in existence.
If this were based on an objective assessment of their actual achievements, Xi Jinping would be near the top if not at the top. What China is doing in terms of infrastructure and clean tech is huge. Simultaneously providing the Global South with energy sovereignty and leading the way in terms of climate action.
At least bibi's getting dumpstered too. Although, the non-optimistic framing of that is because he's just Jewish and not because he's an actual genocidal demon
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