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http://www.unz.com/article/the-china-hoax/

Godfree Roberts

Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state. Noam Chomsky.

I was researching Chinese censorship when–irony of ironies–I fell afoul of American censorship, providing an opportunity to update you on the state of the art under both regimes, starting at home, with the recent attempt to frame the President for crimes he did not commit.

Like many attempts to frame people, events and nations–Vietnam, Iraq, 9/11, JFK, Bin Laden–it was a State hoax, a falsehood deliberately fabricated to masquerade as truth . An atrocity story sustained by artful censorship and loud, proud, bold and brassy propaganda. An expensive, in-your-face, preposterous conspiracy, sustained for two years at great financial and reputational cost to the nation. Wildly ambitious, batshit crazy and so self-destructive as to boggle the mind, it was one of many propaganda-driven frame-ups, another of which in progress as you read these lines.

It checks all the boxes: big, bold, loud and proud, expensive, in-your-face, a preposterous hoax, daringly ambitious and utterly self-destructive...

I bumped into them following a clue in Ann Lee’s[4] story about “A reporter and friend of Michael Massing,[5] who worked at the Beijing office of The Wall Street Journal, who told Massing that the editors in Washington regularly changed material information and opinions in his articles. Given the twelve-hour time difference, by the time his stories went to press in the West, the editors had replaced all the Chinese interviews with statements from American talking heads who work at think tanks promoting anti-China perspectives.”

Congressional testimony from the CIA’s Victor Marchetti[6] revealed the source of the talking heads’ funding: he told Congress that the Agency provided two hundred fifty million dollars[7] annually, “To The Asia Foundation for anti-communist academicians to disseminate a negative vision of mainland China,” and paid journalists and publishers worldwide[8] to do likewise.

Until two weeks ago my comments on China in mainstream media attracted thousands of responses (one-third angry) from millions of readers and provided priceless exposure for my upcoming book, I hoped. My readership stats climbed steadily until I received an email from Patrice Greanville of the socialist Greanville Post on April 4 with a warning from Google:

Patrice told me that, since Google downrated his site as part of its fake news campaign the Post had become almost invisible in their searches.

The next day I received a message from the Financial Times (to which I subscribed) informing me that my comments would be blocked thenceforth and, lo! they were:

I told another China-friendly FT commenter and he replied, “I was blocked last week.” When I checked the comment sections of China stories I found that positive comments had disappeared. One comment from a virulent China-basher, caught my eye, “Where are the wumao[9]? Have the fifty-centers given up?”

Three days later the leading comment plugin Disqus, which supports 750,000 websites and 35 million users, blocked me from a broad range of publications:

I was also blocked from several university-run China sites and two established China news services, Sinocism and SupChina (to which I also subscribe), whose mission is to publish negative stories about China. Yet uncensored fora like Unz Review, Greanville Post and Quora demonstrate that there is high and growing interest in fact-based China news–and growing suspicion of a frame-up. There is also–as we see daily in these pages–a growing awareness of our own censorship regime though a lack of knowledge about its makeup and authority…

Be seeing you