As I was leaving India, which is, according to the Empire “the largest democracy on Earth”, a flight hostess of Qatar Airways distributed, even before take-off, copies of the International New York Times. One of its cover stories was titled “China sounds alarm on ideas from West, with a big exception”.

In its usual vitriolic manner, a newspaper that could easily be described as the flagship of official Western propaganda, commented:

“They are out there, hiding in library stacks, whispering in lecture halls, armed with dangerous textbooks and subversive pop quizzes: foreign enemies plotting a stealthy academic invasion of Chinese universities.”

“So says China’s education minister, Yuan Guiren, who has been issuing dire alarms about the threat of foreign ideas on the nation’s college campuses…”

“Young teachers and students are key targets of infiltration by enemy forces,” Mr. Yuan wrote on Feb. 2 in the elite party journal “Seeking Truth”, explaining that “some countries”, fearful of China’s rise, “have stepped up infiltration in more discreet and diverse ways.””

That is correct. It is all fairly factual, even if garnished with creeping, although predictable sarcasm.

But it would not be the International New York Times writing on China, if it did not attempt to go ‘much further’. What followed was a typical anti-Chinese litany, which itself is really not difficult, on closer scrutiny, to define as the ‘infiltration by enemy forces’.

Naked in front of the ‘righteous’ and ‘oh so free and objective Western jury’, China stands once again accused, of censoring knowledge, interrupting the flow of information, and of being thoroughly and ridiculously paranoid.

And millions of readers of media outlets like International New York Times or The Economist do not seem to grasp the absurdity of what is being served to them! Qataris or Indians, Europeans and yes, even some Chinese readers; they have already been fully conditioned by the Western way of judging and analyzing the world, by perceiving reality: the past, present and future.

***

Let me say it bluntly and clearly: we are not talking about something hypothetical, hyperbolic, or imaginary. This has nothing to do with some conspiracy theories.

Western propaganda, the ‘best’, the mightiest, the most complete and advanced on Earth, has already managed to infiltrate and destroy dozens of countries on our planet. It has also diverted countless decent and honorable Communist and Socialist movements, forcing them into defensiveness, militancy and paranoia.

If you attack, harm and provoke, the chances are that countries will react. And that is what you want: to force them into defending themselves, and then you shout: “Yes! See! They are censoring and banning!”

I am talking about the Soviet Union and several countries of Eastern Europe. And I also have in mind, nations in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia.

Many were infiltrated, brainwashed, trapped and then ruined; then returned where they were before their short socialist intermezzo – under the imperialist boot. All in the name of freedom, democracy and information flow. I have worked in many of such countries, I lived in some of them; I know exactly what I am writing about, I know it first hand!

The infiltration and propaganda are not solely disseminated through the mass media. There are many more effective ways of indoctrinating people, for instance through the use and abuse of ‘culture’ and education or what is being these days perceived as education.

***

The way ‘culture’ is utilized by imperialism is obvious: the West, particularly the US, puts its client states and colonies on a diet of the lowest grade of de-intellectualized dung. It is always hyper-individualistic; it is pop, and one-size-fits-all.

If a country is invaded or if an Empire-sponsored coup succeeds, great artists, alternative film studios and publishing houses are shut down, people arrested, tortured and “disappeared”.

The greatest ever ‘experiment’ on how to quickly and effectively destroy almost all thinking human beings in one country, was conducted in Indonesia, after the 1965 Western-organized military coup. There, between 1 and 3 million people were slaughtered, but it was not only the ‘Communists’ and ‘atheists’ who were killed. Teachers, around 40% of them, were also victims. And so were painters, actors, and writers. A new nation that counts on no intellectual achievements was created from the ashes; a nation that only plunders its natural resources on behalf of the Western companies, and then consumes and consumes and consumes. A nation that does not think and does not rebel; a nation with imported, oppressive religious structures, a nation that listens to oblivion and stupor, to decades’ old tunes, from “I did it my way”, to “Feelings”. A nation with hate and violence hiding just under the surface: a nation that has committed three genocides (1965, East Timor and now the ongoing one in Papua), a nation that resembles a filthy insane asylum or a gladiator ring, more than it does a real country.

There are dozens of replicas, dozens of ‘Indonesias’, all over the world. Indonesia is a concept that the West created, and now supports and propagates. Indonesia is what the West wants the world to resemble: no creativity, no rebellion, no fighting for better world, no alternative thought. Only religion, only capitalism, only consumerism, only pop, and complete moral corruption and decay!

Such a world is easy to manipulate and control!

In order to maintain this ‘Indonesian’ model, tens of thousands of young people from the ‘elites’ of the most miserable countries on Earth are now ‘educated’ in the West, or in Japan (another country that had been successfully lobotomized and turned into a place that gives scholarships to Asian students, only in order to turn them into even more pro-Western junkies than Westerners themselves are).

Other multitudes of the moneyed young people are ‘educated’ in local private, mainly religious schools, where they are shaped by the oppressive and highly bigoted claws of fate, by degenerate family structures and ‘culture’ (read: everybody listens to the same, decades’ old, Frank Sinatra’s tunes, drinks lattes at Starbucks, and uses the same abbreviations on their Facebook).

Stupidity and a lack of creativity are then promoted as something that is extremely ‘cool’, ‘secular’ and hip. Dissidents are not admired; they are ridiculed.

Such a “horror world” was force-fed to Russians under Yeltsin and to Chileans under Pinochet. But there, people rebelled. These were two countries destroyed by the West, but with tremendous histories of education and knowledge. Their own education; their own knowledge! They did not accept. They got rid of the tyrants who were serving Western imperialist designs. They rejected clones of the Suharto monster in their own nations. Fascism and servility is not to everybody’s taste!

But other nations succumbed. India and Qatar, Philippines, Thailand, Kenya, Nigeria, Egypt, Poland, Paraguay, Mongolia, to name just a few.

***

China is under fire, as are Russia, Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Eritrea and other nations that are insisting on following their own course, while defending the interests of their own people.

The West is pushing all the above nations into a corner and towards confrontation. It matters not, how many lives could be lost, again, soon.

A new version of the Cold War is now in full swing, and it is the West exclusively, that is on the offensive. Other countries are patient. But the more patient and determined they are, the more they are demonized.

The refusal of several states to submit, to obey, to serve, is seen in London, Paris and Washington, as ‘provocation’, even as an ‘attack’ on their ‘righteous interests’.

If a nation refuses to become a colony of the West, the West considers it its right to ‘retaliate’!

***

Western propaganda against China is of monumental proportions. It is also a multi-billion dollar industry. It generates millions of well-paid jobs: those of propagandists, ‘journalists’, ‘scholars’, agents, ‘analysts’, ‘strategists’ and soldiers.

There is nothing that the West fears more than successful, socialist and internationalist China.

It is clear why. Because if China or Venezuela, Cuba or Russia, or all together, succeed, the Western fascist, imperialist regime would finally be over!

And the West cannot let go of its control over the world. It simply cannot. It is too sick with lust for power. It has been, for centuries!

***

Now education is one of the battlefields.

For a normal country, education is just that – education. But for the true demagogues of imperialism, education is one of the gaps through which a ‘rebellious’ country can be infiltrated and destroyed.

In 2013 I spoke at Tsinghua University in Beijing. They ran an entire 2-day seminar on my work; showing my films, and letting me speak about the current situation in the world.

I interacted freely with both students and professors.

What was shocking were not the ‘anti-Western sentiments’. If there were some, they were well hidden, as Chinese people are very polite. What absolutely horrified me was the opposite: many of those young Chinese intellectuals who spoke English, were deeply indoctrinated by Western propaganda – about the world and even about their own country!

The editors of April Media gave me an example: when some mainstream book about the European colonialist expeditions into Western Hemisphere was translated and published in China, the publishing house was soon inundated with letters of protest: “Stop that Cultural Revolution crap! Western people are noble. They did not kill natives in North and South America!”

Chinese book sellers carry much more diverse and intellectual fare than anything that could be found in the mainstream bookstores in London, New York or Hong Kong: there is plenty of Communist theory, there are Soviet films on DVD’s, and there are biographies of US Presidents, theoretical books on business and economics, as well as just about everything from pop, to high-quality fiction, both Western and Asian.

In Hong Kong, it appears that it is mainly anti-Communist and anti-mainland Chinese stuff that is on display. Book offering is totally one-sided. When I was recently writing on the Hong Kong Umbrella ‘revolution’, it was easy to realize that it was Hong Kong students who were thoroughly misinformed, pathetically fanatical and brainwashed. Their slogans consisted mainly of propaganda disseminated by their former colonial masters.

In mainstream Chicago, New York, Paris and Tokyo bookstores, I could not find one single pro-Communist, pro-Chinese book on offer. That is truly very strange, given the fact that perhaps the most successful model, or at least one of the most successful ones, is actually that of Communist China. Not one book! Not one, I repeat!

The knowledge of Chinese people about the West is incomparably greater than the knowledge of Westerners about China. In fact, Westerners are mostly totally ignorant about it, although they feel qualified to judge it.

If you ask a Chinese child attending elementary school, the chances are that he or she would at least know by name, several Western writers, musicians, and politicians. I am aware of many European men and women, holding advanced degrees, who cannot name one single Chinese writer, classical musician, or one member of the Chinese government.

Almost every adult Chinese person knows, in theory, about what Westerners define as “multi-party democracy”. Do Westerners know how the Chinese system functions? Most of them, like parrots, repeat that it is “undemocratic”, but what do they really know?

***

Western universities and universities in the client states have lately been regurgitating people who are perfectly fit to serve the system, the regime, the Empire. The alumni know how to reason within the allowed framework, and they are conditioned not to step out, and think differently or independently. They are shaped and formed into perfect 9-5 material. Western institutions of learning are definitely not manufacturing ice-breakers, only reliable barges! Reliable to the masters that are reigning over the world.

Countries like Indonesia, Thailand and India, South Korea, Nigeria and Kenya, are sending the kids of their elites to Western universities, to ‘get an education’. Graduates are then made to think like colonial masters, or as good serfs of the colonial masters. In exchange, they are almost certain to get well-paid jobs at home or abroad, as well as recognition. That is actually all that matters… to them.

Such an education is not designed to produce revolutionary minds, to create people who will improve lives in their countries. Such an education is there to secure that the status quo is guaranteed forever, and that the master-servant arrangement of the world prevails. It also fully injects ‘Western values” into young brains who eventually become rulers in their countries, or go-betweens for the Empire and local people. Again, it is clearly visible in countries such as Thailand or the Philippines, India and Kenya.

The ‘education’ predetermines both ‘values’ and where the allegiances of the alumni should lie.

For instance, no matter what the rhetoric is, a young Kenyan or Indonesian ‘expert’ educated in the West or in some local Western-style institution, becomes more loyal to his or her personal interests (and the interests of the family or clan), to his or her corporation or to the capitalist system in general, than to the country and its people. This is the key to corruption, both financial and moral.

It is important to realize that corruption is most widespread where elites are conditioned and educated abroad, and from abroad, on Western injected ‘values’, religions and ‘culture’.

Through grants and scholarships, funding and other means, the Western educational system has lately been forcing its way into even the bastions of the national education system– state run universities. There, many lecturers have already been prepared and indoctrinated overseas.

Later this year, I will write a detail essay on this trend, using as examples, several universities in India, Indonesia and Africa. It is a very well planned and deadly design – deadly for the recipient countries.

I will also write a much longer essay on ‘censorship’, using Cuba, Venezuela and China as three very diverse examples. Hard questions will be asked including this one: “Faced with open sedition and attempts to destabilize and destroy entire nations, do countries under attack from the West have the moral right, even obligation, to defend themselves, by imposing censorship and interrupting the flow of disinformation and propaganda?”

***

Onboard Qatar Airways, which was taking me from one enormous country (India) where, despite all the desperate Western propaganda defining this ‘failed’ and brutal, oppressive feudal state as “the largest democracy on earth”, to a tiny turbo-capitalist country (Qatar); which together with Saudi Arabia is spreading the most violent forms of Islam all over the world on behalf of the West, I repeatedly savored the beauty of the first sentence of the International New York Times report:

“They are out there, hiding in library stacks, whispering in lecture halls, armed with dangerous textbooks and subversive pop quizzes: foreign enemies plotting a stealthy academic invasion of Chinese universities.”

How true and how well written! Pity the truth was only told in the first two opening paragraphs! Thereafter everything gets twisted.

China should not and will not follow the path of India, Indonesia and East Africa. Its government and the Communist Party of China are obliged to put the interests of their people first.

Is the International New York Times actually saying that the enemies are not plotting a stealthy invasion of Chinese universities? Are they denying a fact that is clear to everyone who works closely with Chinese academia?

China’s education minister, Yuan Guiren was correct. In fact, he was being too polite. One could use many different ways to describe the reality ‘on the ground’.

One of my Indian academic friends recently used much more colorful language:

“Those bloody bastards don’t know where to stop. The entire Indian education system has been kidnapped, privatized and subverted, mainly from abroad. Again, they will turn us into their serfs and butlers, in exchange for their recognition, titles and their cash. The country will stop inventing, producing, even thinking, if this trend continues!”

Together, in unison, openly or anonymously, we should give a hand to the outspoken education minister, Yuan Guiren, and write about this appalling but taboo (in the West) topic: “How education became yet another weapon of war, used by Western neo-colonialism and imperialism.”

Andre Vltchek is a novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. His critically acclaimed political revolutionary novel Point of No Return is now re-edited and available. Oceania is his book on Western imperialism in South Pacific. His provocative book about post-Suharto Indonesia and market-fundamentalist model is called “Indonesia – The Archipelago of Fear” (Pluto). He just completed feature documentary “Rwanda Gambit” about Rwandan history and the plunder of DR Congo. After living for many years in Latin America and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides and works in East Asia and Africa. He can be reached through his website.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/02/13/education-has-little-to-do-with-knowledge/print

 

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