Tag: surveillance

Palestine

Podcast: for Palestinian-Uyghur solidarity

Palestinian UyghurIn Episode 213 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg notes how divergent responses to the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and mass internment of the Uyghurs reveal the West's shifting definition of genocide. Tragically, elements of the Palestinian leadership merely reverse the double standard, causing elements of the exiled Uyghur leadership to balk at supporting the Palestinians. Yet another example of how a global divide-and-rule racket is the essence of the state system. Illustrating the irony, the same corporate nexus is involved in putting in place the surveillance state that monitors the Uyghurs for China and the Palestinians for Israel. Fortunately, principled voices of dissent among both the Palestinians and the Uyghurs are calling for Palestinian-Uyghur solidarity. Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon. (Image: Hasbi Sahin & Tatohra/Shutterstock via Islam21c)

East Asia

Wildcat labor actions spread in China

China laborAlthough winning no coverage in English-language media, labor actions are spreading across China in the current economic downturn in the People's Republic. This week, workers hung banners outside the headquarters of the Guilin No. 3 Construction Company in Guangxi province to demand payment of outstanding wages owed to hundreds of employees. On the same day, migrant workers in Jinan, Shandong province, raised banners in the city's central business district demanding payment of backlogged wages by the China Railway Construction Corporation. By definition, such actions are not authorized by the state-controlled All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU). Numerous such recent actions were described at the symposium "Non-violent Resistance, High-Tech Totalitarianism and China's Future," held last weekend in Washington DC. (Image: China Labour Bulletin)

Europe

UK orders closure of China-run ‘police stations’

Loon FungUK Minister for Security Tom Tugendhat told Parliament that the government has ordered China to close "overseas police service stations" operating within the United Kingdom, calling the stations' existence "unacceptable." Tugendhat said that British authorities received reports from non-governmental organization Safeguard Defenders of such stations in Croydon, Hendon and Glasgow, with allegations of another in Belfast. The United States and Ireland both claim to have recently uncovered similar stations in their countries. Like the UK, they said the stations were used to monitor and harass Chinese diaspora communities. (Photo of Glasgow location, within restaurant storefront: Google via The Ferret)

East Asia

Macau national security law threatens free speech

MacauReporters Without Borders denounced Macau's expansion of its national security law, saying the revision "increases the pressure on journalists and further threatens…residents' right to information." The Macau Special Administrative Region's National Security Law, first passed in 2009, defines seven crimes that can result in a maximum sentence of up to 25 years' imprisonment. Under the revised rules, these crimes have been expanded far beyond their previous definitions. For example, "subversion" and "secession" now extend to non-violent acts, while "sedition" includes "acts that incite participation in riots." Additionally, the law now applies to "any individual" who is suspected of undermining China's national security. This applies regardless of the territory in which the acts occur, and regardless of the individual's nationality—meaning that Macau law enforcement will have authority to pursue suspected violations extraterritorially. (Photo: kewl.lu via Wikimedia Commons)

East Asia

China: nationwide protests challenge dictatorship

NanjingFollowing weeks of sporadic protests against the recurrent draconian COVID-19 lockdowns in China, spontaneous demonstrations broke out in cities across the country. Street demos were reported from Shanghai, Nanjing, Chengdu and Wuhan as well as Beijing. In addition to slogans against the lockdowns and for freedom of speech and assembly, such verboten chants were heard as "Xi Jinping, step down" and "Communist Party, step down." The spark was an apartment block fire in Urumqi, capital of western Xinjiang region, that killed at least 10 who were under lockdown orders and unable to flee. Hong Kong-based Borderless Movement left-dissident website has issued a list of "Demands from Chinese and Hong Kong Socialists" in response to the outburst, calling for an end to lockdowns and forced testing, provision of multiple vaccines, and the right to citizen and worker self-organization. The statement calls for "marginalized groups in the mainland and abroad, including Hongkongers, Taiwanese, Uyghurs and Tibetans to continue building a long-term strategic program for democratic struggle in China." (Photo of student protest in Nanjing via Twitter)

Palestine

Robo-Zionist policing of West Bank

apartheid wallThe Israeli military has installed robotic weapons that can fire tear-gas, stun-grenades and "non-lethal" bullets in two volatile locations on the West Bank. One is atop a turret at al-Aroub refugee camp; the other in the nearby city of Hebron, where soldiers often clash with Palestinian residents. When young protesters pour into the streets hurling rocks and improvised firebombs at Israeli soldiers, the robotic weapons unleash gas and projectiles on them, according to witness accounts. The robo-weapons, produced by Israeli firm Smart Shooter, use artificial intelligence to track targets. Israel says the technology saves lives—both Israeli and Palestinian. But, as YNet states in its report on the installation, "critics see another step toward a dystopian reality in which Israel fine-tunes its open-ended occupation of the Palestinians while keeping its soldiers out of harm’s way." (Photo: Filippo Minelli)

Central Asia

Podcast: state capitalism and the Uyghur genocide

UyghursIn Episode 149 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg notes that the UN Human Rights Office determination that China may be guilty of "crimes against humanity" in its mass detention of Uyghurs in Xinjiang province is dismissed by the tankie-left ANSWER Coalition as "propagandistic." Meanwhile, it falls to Radio Free Asia, media arm of the US State Department, to aggressively cover the very real conditions of forced labor faced by the Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples of Xinjiang—and how Western corporations benefit from it. While the Western pseudo-left betrays the Uyghurs, US imperialism exploits their suffering for propaganda against a rising China in the Great Game for the Asia-Pacific region. Figures such as Australia's Kevin Rudd incorrectly portray a "Return of Red China," blaming the PRC's increasingly totalitarian direction on a supposed neo-Marxism. Fortunately, the new anthology Xinjiang Year Zero offers a corrective perspective, placing the industrial-detention complex and techno-security state in the context of global capitalism and settler colonialism. Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon. (Photo: Xinjiang Judicial Administration via The Diplomat)

Central Asia
Uighurs

Huawei ethnicity-recognition tech tracks Uighurs

MLKIn Episode 158 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg notes that the Russian Socialist Movement has issued a call for solidarity actions with anti‑war activists in Russia on Jan. 19. This is the date when left activists Stanislav Markelov and Anastasia Baburova were gunned down by far-right militants in Moscow in 2009. Today, the Vladimir Putin regime is persecuting activists such as Alexandra Skochilenko—who faces a long prison term for producing public art on an anti-war theme. Instead of responding to this call for solidarity, the ANSWER Coalition and other exponents of the "tankie" pseudo-left have called a rally against aid to Ukraine, and implicitly in support of Putin and his war aims, for Jan. 14 in locations such as New York's Times Square—perversely, in the name of Martin Luther King. The Ukraine Socialist Solidarity Campaign repudiates this pseudo-anti-war rally, urging: "No exploitation of Dr. MLK Jr. to support war criminal Putin!" Debunking the Russian propaganda that portrays Putin's aggression as a defensive move against NATO encroachment, Weinberg demonstrates that the principles propounded by Dr. King in his courageous dissent from LBJ's criminal war in Vietnam now mandate that we direct our protests at Vladimir Putin. Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon. (Photo: MLK at anti-war march in Chicago, March 25, 1967, under banner with quote from Vietnamese pacifist Thich Nhat Hanh. Via Portland Observer)

North America
It Can't Happen Here

Podcast: two faces of fascism

In Episode 54 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg explores the twin threats of a totalitarian order that the United States faces at this history-making moment: Trump-fascism, perhaps to be lubricated by a “Reichstag Fire” scenario ahead of the November… Read morePodcast: two faces of fascism