Beijing is among targets of Western media's lies

If you have been paying any attention to Western media, including all forms of social media with United States or Western origins, you will have heard allegations about the horrific "genocide "and "ethnic cleansing" in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region of China.

Supposedly, "mass rapes" and "mass sterilization programs" are being carried out against Uygurs, who allegedly are being held in "concentration camps".

It has been stated by many that, rather than being factual, all the reporting is actually an attempt by the West to demonize China in order to turn the entire world against it.

Why? As political economist William Briggs wrote recently in the public policy journal Pearls and Irritations, "China's economic star is rising, and America's best days are behind it." And if the past few decades have shown us anything, it is that the US can be a very sore loser.

Just look at what happened to Libya. Many observers of Middle Eastern events believe the US bombing of Libya came about because the late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafiwanted to move off the petrodollar and use gold for the oil trade instead.

So what is the truth about Xinjiang?

Many years ago in Xinjiang, I saw no obvious ethnic tensions. But that was a while ago.

Jerry Grey, a retired Australian living in Guangdong province, went on a bike tour through Xinjiang, thousands of kilometers away, in late 2019. He wrote that he had seen nothing of the prison camps or any of the other horrors reported (or magnified) by people who have never set foot in either Xinjiang or other parts of China.

What about the 1 million Uygurs "locked in concentration camps", as reported by the media? It turns out that this number comes from the World Uyghur Congress, which is based in Munich, Germany. Hilariously, in a video interview with a representative from this Congress that I watched, when asked where the figure 1 million came from, the representative answered, "The media". Astounding circularity.

And therein lies the rub. Quite clearly the Western mainstream media are responsible for a process of telling half-truths or outright lies in order to demonize China, with the final intention pointing to war.

As WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has said, "Every war in the last 50 years has been created by media lies". And that is the reason Assange sits in Belmarsh Prison near London, for creating a system to allow people to see the actual truth－raw documents－of what is happening in our world.

How does this process of false narrative building happen? The basic modus operandi is to produce so-called news, often based on "leaks" from unnamed but supposedly reliable sources.

So, for instance, someone from the US intelligence community will tell a US media outlet that there are "mass rapes of Uygurs" in Xinjiang. The media then run with this and sell it as truth. They embellish and dramatize. Horrific details are included, with the goal being to get emotional reactions and raise the levels of fear and disgust.

Then the whole process is put on repeat, day after day with the same messages. In other words, they use the technology of brainwashing that is called "manufacturing consent".

Ultimately, when caught lying outright, the media will do some disingenuous retraction, of just one or two lines on page 10 so the retraction is never seen. By then it doesn't matter, because truth-telling people have been destroyed, and readers hardly make it to page 10 anyway.

It is fair to say that, through these very deliberate processes designed to distort, smear, defame and lie, in the minds of people who are absorbing the "news" uncritically, China increasingly comes to be perceived in a very negative way, and thus consent for war is manufactured.

Sadly, this process of demonization is not simply directed at China. It is being directed at truth itself.

As a case in point, certainly not the only case, the last year-and-a-half of global madness around COVID-19 has been created by the very same process of lies and deception perpetrated by the Western media, supported by mass de-platforming and smearing of knowledgeable people who are trying to communicate true facts about the situation.

In this way, the majority of people only get to hear the official narrative when it's too late.

A war against truth and the people of the world, manufactured by means of media lies, is taking place in front of our eyes. The demonization of China is simply part of that larger war.

The author is a psychologist, linguist, educator, entrepreneur and corporate adviser. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.