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19:45
"We don't have to look back very far in history to see that there's this pattern where the media pushes forward a particular narrative around a specific piece of foreign policy, in those cases of full-scale wars in Iraq or Afghanistan or Libya, or Syria or Yugoslavia," said Carlos Martinez in an interview with CGTN.
Martinez is a researcher, anti-war activist and co-founder of the No Cold War campaign based in London.
He said the currently escalating negative portrayal of China and baseless accusations toward Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region on Western mainstream media is the same process that had people believing Iraq had weapons of mass destruction that it could use against London or Washington 18 years ago.
"These established methods of building a public consensus to build public support for an attack. In this case, in terms of all the kind of basically pretty hysterical propaganda around Xinjiang and around Taiwan and around the South China Sea and around Hong Kong, it's about building support for the new Cold War," he added.
A resident asks about the price of goods in Kashgar, northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, April 12, 2019. /VCG
In 2019, Martinez toured across China, visiting places including Beijing, Gansu Province and Xinjiang. Not only did henot see any oppression on Muslims or Uygurs in Xinjiang, but also the "backward, authoritarian state" that Western media tend to portray China as was nonexistent.
However, the contrast with what he saw in New York, where he traveled to the same year, is particularly interesting.
It would not take too much effort for him to see countless homeless people in big cites like New York or his hometown London, yet he failed to see any homeless people in any cities of China.
"The U.S. considers itself as being the quintessential, successful, advance capitalist democracy. Yet there's a huge proportion, literally tens of millions of people, who live in abject poverty, who don't know where the next meal is coming from," Martinez said.
He also pointed out racism, treatment of indigenous people and incarceration are also huge problems that exist in the American society.
"The U.S. has more than 2 million people in prison, which is by far the highest incarceration rate in the world. They are actual incarceration rate, the number of people per capita in prison is six or seven times higher than it is in China," Martinez said after comparing data.
Although accounted less in the overall population in the U.S., the African American, Native American and hispanic community accounted the majority of people live in poverty or in incarceration.
"But the media portrays China as a prison nation, and they portray the U.S. as the land of the free," Martinez laughed.
After his research and trip into those countries, he together with other activists from around the world decided to found the No Cold War campaign in order to stop the American and British governments from escalating aggressive actions toward China.
"As a campaign, we really believe that those major problems we face in the world have to be solved on a global level. And any kind of Cold War stands in the way of that when we stand for global cooperation, mutual understanding, and against decoupling against Cold War," Martinez said.
