Infuriated by the international community’s growing concern over its genocidal policy towards Uighur Muslims, China has unleashed a new propaganda narrative: describe its critics as Nazis.
The U.S.-led “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance is a “axis of white supremacy” screamed a Tuesday editorial in the Global Times propaganda newspaper. Directed by the Chinese foreign ministry, this newspaper is one of Beijing’s primary levers for broadcasting its party line to the rest of the world. This particular editorial was motivated by the Canadian parliament’s unanimous recognition this week of China’s Uighur policy as a genocide. It follows a similar designation by the U.S. State Department.
The Communists are not happy.
The Five Eyes is “becoming a racist axis aimed at stifling the development rights of 1.4 billion Chinese,” Xi Jinping’s propagandists say. “Except for New Zealand,” that is, which the Global Times describes as “the smallest of the five countries and unwilling to get too involved in international conflicts.”
China’s exclusion of that small nation from the other five eye members — America, Australia, Britain, and Canada — is noteworthy. As I’ve documented, China wants to insert a wedge and stoke very real concerns that New Zealand is no longer a reliable ally. This is a reality to which more western journalists should pay heed when they adorn Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern as some kind of modern-day Jesus.
Still, there’s a striking irony of China’s description of the Five Eyes as Nazis.
After all, China’s concentration camp policy towards the Uighurs; a policy centered around forced serialization, forced labor, and murder will be quite familiar to even the most cursory students of the Nazi regime. It’s true that the human cost of the Holocaust was far higher than what China has done to more than two million Uighurs. But we should not ignore the similarities between these two tragedies.
In both cases, an authoritarian regime sought to annihilate a culture and people simply for the fact of their perceived incompatibility with the regime’s ideology. While Beijing pretends that its concentration camps are actually just “vocational training” centers, the reality of its evil is now undeniable.
In turn, the four better of the Five Eyes should take China’s latest condemnation as a sign that they’re on to something.