Evil or just ignorance and stupidity unbound? Not that these two possibilities need be mutually exclusive.
Congressmen are quizzing the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery about the apparent willingness of the Discovery Channel to collaborate with the Chinese Communist Party to produce a whitewashing “documentary” about the Xinjiang region of China. For many years, the CCP has been abducting, imprisoning, “reeducating,” torturing, sterilizing, raping, enslaving, and murdering Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
James Quinn at National Review reports (February 16, 2024):
The Discovery Channel partnered with Chinese propaganda outlet CGTN to produce a series of English-language videos presenting a sanitized look at Xinjiang, the northwestern region where the U.S. assesses that Beijing is carrying out genocide against Uyghurs, National Review has learned.
Members of Congress are investigating the partnership, which initially came to light last month when CGTN published a trailer advertising the videos, revealing Discovery’s role in the production of the series.
In their February 14, 2024 letter to David Zaslav, CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, the congressmen write:
[T]wo consecutive U.S. presidential administrations have affirmed that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is engaged in a genocide in Xinjiang. The PRC has imprisoned over one million Uyghurs in concentration camps, subjugated tens of thousand more to carry out slave labor, and sterilized and forced untold numbers of women in the region to have abortions.
3) Why did Discovery decide to partner with CGTN on this specific documentary series about Jinjiang?…
Yet that is far from what the series, titled “World’s Ultimate Frontier,” portrays. The depiction, whose trailer bills Discovery as a co-producer, instead highlights how well the CCP’s polices worked to rid the “frontier” of its inhabitants. The trailer for the first installment goes so far as to include scenes purporting to show how much the people of Xinjiang’s lives have improved in recent years, as a direct result of the CCP’s genocidal policies….
7) Will you commit to suspending this partnership and all other future partnerships with CGTN and other Chinese state-owned or -controlled media outlets, particularly where such partnerships have the appearance of Discovery endorsing CCP policy and echoing Party propaganda?
The signers of the letter are Representatives Jim Banks, Mike Gallagher, Mike Waltz, Robert Wittman, Carlos Gimenez, and Ashley Hinson.
Quinn says that Congressman Banks told him: “I don’t understand how Warner Bros. Discovery, who claims to be a ‘champion for inclusion and equity,’ would allow themselves to be complicit in whitewashing the Communist Party’s forced labor and genocide in Xinjiang.”
Professing to be virtuous is not the same as being actually virtuous in the sense of acting to achieve life-serving values. And words like “inclusion” and “equity” don’t have to mean what the congressman apparently thinks they mean when being used by tyrants and stooges of tyrants. Any words that can be used rationally can also be used irrationally to hide, rationalize, subvert, and destroy. Or can be simply ignored when they don’t serve a particular purpose, such as that of abetting the atrocities of the Chinese Communist Party.
Also see:
New York Times: “ ‘Absolutely No Mercy’: Leaked Files Expose How China Organized Mass Detentions of Muslims”
“More than 400 pages of internal Chinese documents provide an unprecedented inside look at the crackdown on ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang region….
“Even as the document advises officials to inform students that their relatives are receiving ‘treatment’ for exposure to radical Islam, its title refers to family members who are being ‘dealt with,’ or chuzhi, a euphemism used in party documents to mean punishment.”
