Thorsten Pattberg: Western Universities Are Propaganda Factories

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I've had my differences with Noam Chomsky. But when he and Ed Herman argued that Western information industries (starting with media and academia) are propaganda factories that “manufacture consent,” he was right on the money.

Today we travel to Asia for an insider’s view of the academic branch of the consent manufacturing industry. Dr. Thorsten Pattberg earned his doctorate at Peking University, has been a Visiting Fellow at the University of Tokyo, and has written extensively on what he calls the “East-West Dichotomy.” In this interview he reflects on his experiences watching Western academia crank out anti-China-propaganda sausages, among other unwholesome mind-meals.

Selection from the interview

And I became so interested in that because obviously I was part of this expert community. And how they're doing it is fascinating. We just mentioned Google and all this. They go into China from the Western perspective and they censor all the Chinese. They don't want anybody who says anything positive about China to get a platform on Google, to be preferred or featured or whatever. And the same happened to you, obviously, with Islamic topics, right?

So what they're doing is they're coming to China, they're focusing on all the negative views and they're trying to find dissidents against China, pro-Western dissidents, and they boost them like nothing. It's amazing. They get tickets to America. They get lecture tours through Europe. I mean, it’s amazing! If you're a Chinese dissident, criticize your own government and you're picked by Western powers, right? You have a good life.

I was at Peking University. They picked out this economic professor. I don't want to name his name. And they picked him as a new dissident. He was not a good professor or anything, but he was a rabble rouser. Always caused trouble. The Chinese students didn't like him. But “they” picked him and he suddenly got all the media attention in the West. And we got nothing. How they do it, this is amazing.

Money and media.

Yeah, they're attacking Chinese leader non-stop, right? And they downplay any positive China achievement. And they incite hatred, of course, between the various Chinese ethnic groups. I went to Xinjiang, everything was okay there. I came back and I heard horror stories that they're enslaving the Muslim population there. There's always a way to criticize this, but it's not at all like they do it, “prison camps and genocide against the Muslims.” It's totally ridiculous.

So Xinjiang, it doesn't look like Gaza?

No, absolutely not. In Beijing we have the biggest Muslim district in Asia outside Muslim countries, Islamic countries. So there are 200,000 Muslims there with the biggest mosque in East Asia. And many of my student colleagues were Islamic. Some of them from Xinjiang. We had a halal food. Every university in China has a halal cafeteria for food for the students. You can only dream of this situation in Europe, where it was a new idea 10 years ago. They started it in China. They always had it. They're very multicultural in China, actually. So that (“Uighur genocide” propaganda) was obviously false information about China. But it went on and on. They did it with purpose.

The Western press soldiers were in some common groups and you can hear them (saying) what do we do to rabble rouse? What's the worst that can happen? They're all agents, okay? They register as foreign agents in China. So the worst thing that can happen to them is that they're kicked out of China. But this is a good thing in their eyes. If they become super dissidents that China kicked out of China, they're going to Washington DC and they become big scholars, giving talks and lectures and winning Asian Studies awards.

Many of them did that. They went on to become very prominent scholars in the West. What did they do? Produce fake news about China.

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