The Chinese government has built up the world’s largest known online disinformation operation and is using it to harass US residents, politicians, and businesses—at times threatening its targets with violence, a CNN review of court documents and public disclosures by social media companies has found.
The onslaught of attacks – often of a vile and deeply personal nature – is part of a well-organized, increasingly brazen Chinese government intimidation campaign targeting people in the United States, documents show.
The US State Department says the tactics are part of a broader multi-billion-dollar effort to shape the world’s information environment and silence critics of Beijing that has expanded under President Xi Jinping. On Wednesday, President Biden is due to meet Xi at a summit in San Francisco.
Victims face a barrage of tens of thousands of social media posts that call them traitors, dogs, and racist and homophobic slurs. They say it’s all part of an effort to drive them into a state of constant fear and paranoia.
Anyone can call any other group “brainwashed.” If that’s all it takes for you to justify violence in order to change a system, you yourself are the fascist. Regardless of how wrong or deluded you think a people are, democracy requires that you rely on debate and conversation to change their minds in order to accumulate the support needed to change the system. If you resort to violence, you are enacting authoritarian rule, plain and simple.
That’s the thing, often the rulers resort to violence even before the people. You can’t talk or debate your way into power against a dictator or monarch. They’ll shoot your peaceful protestors and kidnap and torture your leaders. They will blacklist your writers and artists. Talking and other avenues should always be the first step, and if you’re already in a democracy probably your only step, but if violence is used to enforce an unjust system I’m not sure how else you think it could be changed.
I could see a vanguard party providing for more than just defense or violence, too. It provides a way to organize and spread your thoughts and ideas, a way to provide mutal aid, a way to focus your demands, a way to teach political theory, etc. The rich always have class solidarity while they are masters of splitting up the poor intos different factions based on race, sex, gender, etc. Finding a way to foster solidarity into a big group where the proletariat can get their needs met seems like a worthy goal.
In the case of a dictator or a monarch, I agree there’s a case to be made for necessary violence, but in actual examples of communist revolutions, the violence has never been contained to the ruling governing body and its enforcers; it always expanded to “the bourgeoisie,” which often meant anyone who made beyond a certain amount of money, including small businessmen, teachers, doctors, etc. You talk about this process in the nicest possible terms, but that’s never how it actually plays out. It’s a violent revolution, people–often innocent people–get hurt and killed, and the whole point is to establish a new authoritarian system of government that explicitly denies the right for any other body to contest its right to rulership.
I’m sorry, but you are either a very subtle troll or extremely naive in my opinion. I don’t think we have much more to talk about. Good-bye.
And you like to take the nicest part of the pre-revolutionary history, where often rulers perpetrated violence against the poor as well for years, and ignore that as well. You also seem to be taking the worst examples. There’s been socialist revolutions where nothing happens to teachers, doctors, or small businessmen. Most of them, actually. China and it’s Cultural Revolution is the only one I can think of that went out and hurt a bunch of unrelated civilians.