Well at least you won't have to waste money on expensive bombs and stuff. Just give the money to your oligarchs and send your troops off to breath on the enemy.
wurzelgummidge
joined 1 year ago
A hundred years ago Sigmund Freud’s American nephew, Edward Bernays, discovered you could make people buy things they didn’t need by appealing to their emotions. It had political ramifications too.
However, it was misrepresented by many major media outlets in their reporting.
No surprises there
He may not care about the Palestinian issue but he may feel a little different about Israeli expansion
Slavery, human trafficking and child labour: >https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/02/01/1152893248/red-cobalt-congo-drc-mining-siddharth-kara
Cobalt Red: a regressive, deeply flawed account of Congo’s mining industry https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/cobalt-red-siddharth-kara-democratic-republic-congo-book-review/
Toxic waste killing animals: >https://www.afrik21.africa/en/niger-chinese-gold-mines-closed-after-the-death-of-around-fifty-animals/
According to local livestock farmers
No further investigation? Certainly not, the US government just passed a bill dishing out $325 million a year of tax payers money for anti-China propaganda stories https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/1157/text
The same story as above but it added the line:
French company Orano (formerly Areva), which has been extracting uranium in northern Niger for more than 40 years, is regularly accused by NGOs of polluting the environment.
The French have been doing it for 40 years and only now it gets a mention, a throwaway sentence at the end of an article criticising China.
Was there a follow-up? Did the mines reopen? Did the government send in the army, or allow private militias to quell restive natives as they would have to if the West were “protecting its interests?”
Labour violations, stealing land: >https://news.mongabay.com/2024/04/locals-slam-zimbabwe-for-turning-a-blind-eye-to-chinese-miners-violations/
Zimbabwe has been cut off from global financiers over failure to service its debts. The country was also hit by sanctions and trade embargos by the European Union, U.K. and U.S. over serious human rights violations.
They conveniently forget to mention how it got into debt and why the country can’t service it. Go look up the country’s history, it might give you a clue as to why they might prefer doing business with China instead of the West.
Of course, mining is a dirty, filthy business. It fucks up the land and is really shitty for anyone who lives nearby. There are bound to be accidents and there are bound to be people who are upset.
That doesn’t alter the fact that China is also building infrastructure, creating jobs and giving them the tools they need to develop thus creating wealth.
I know Americans think Africans still live in mud huts and beat drums at dinner time but they are not so stupid that they keep doing business with people who routinely rip them off.
You will, of course, cry “China bad, China worse.” It seems a lot of African countries are willing to take that risk. After all, the railways that China has built in Southeast Asia, which the West insisted were doomed to fail, are doing extremely well indeed.
But if we say it loudly and often, spreading it through friendly news outlets and social media it will magically become true.