AuthorPeter Man Archives
March 2022
Categories |
Back to Blog
Iranians are the nicest people in the world?29/12/2021 I have never traveled to Iran although I have been to many places in the world. I have however a reliable source of information, my mother. First, let me provide a little background. My mother was a career educator in Hong Kong. She retired thirty years ago and since then had traveled the world. She loved traveling and had visited every nook and cranny on earth. Another thing about my mother is that she is a diehard redneck to the right of Proud Boys. America is paradise, it is being destroyed by evil China and illegal immigrants from Mexico, and Dubya Bush and MAGA Trump are her heroes who will save America. This is no joke. My mother belonged to a large, maybe a majority, group of people who had been teaching the young minds of Hong Kong. They are also government employees paid with public funds. Anyone who had visited the Hong Kong Teachers Association and seen the vitriolic anti-China propaganda there would understand. The organization had decided to disband after the implementation of the China Sedition Law.
With this in mind, we should understand that before visiting Iran, my mother had already been inculcated with an ingrained and immutable idea of the evil Iran in her mind, thanks to the excellent work of the mainstream media (MSM) of the West. She probably wanted to go and see for herself, so that she could tell others she had seen and experienced the evil Iran in person. In fact, she visited while there was an upheaval in Iran. The mainstream news was filled with images of angry protesters demonstrating in Tehran (that was over 10 years ago, and I don’t remember the exact occasion or timing). There were travel warnings for people wanting to visit Iran, and tour groups were canceling left and right. My mother was, and still is at 95 years of age, a fearless traveler (in the midst of Covid explosion, she just flew to Newark by herself, and then to Florida and back with my sister’s family, now spending New Year’s Eve at Princeton). Her Iran tour group had been delayed earlier, but this time she insisted on going and somehow there were just enough people to form a group. So away she went. My mother has a failing memory now. She has also mellowed somewhat. Only about a month ago, I asked her of all the places she visited, and that’s like, everywhere, which country had the nicest people. To my surprise, the answer was Iran. Not only Iran, but she said by far Iran. I said, What? Explain. Interestingly, the first thing my mother said was after her Iran trip, she would not trust mainstream news anymore. That’s a good start! She said after landing in Tehran, the group was told not to visit a certain district where the protesters were restricted to hold their demonstrations. Otherwise, the city was calm, peaceful, and fun. At no time did she notice or feel any dangers or disquiet. The mainstream media were warping the reality to make it seem like Iran had descended into a war zone. Okay, for some of us who have visited and even lived in evil China, we know about the all encompassing and relentless mainstream media lies of the West, but what makes my mother think Iranians are the nicest? Has she been brainwashed by evil Iranians? Although my mother sometimes traveled to different countries with tour groups (she actually traveled to many places by herself; but at 95, her adventuring days are pretty much over), she seldom, if not never, took local tours to visit the regular tourist traps. To her credit, she liked to interact and observe people. So while others in her group would visit the museums, historical sites, and shops, my mother would wander off by herself to the nearest park, for example, and checked out the ordinary people living their regular life. So on this day in Tehran, my mother was sitting by herself on a bench in a park watching the children play. A young Iranian lady sat down on the bench beside my mother. The young lady noticed that my mother’s shawl was not properly covering her head. It was a scarf that was not meant to be a hijab. She dug out a spare shawl from her handbag and put it over my mother’s head properly. They only communicated by hand signals. After a while, my mother wanted to walk around, and she thanked the young lady and tried to return the shawl. She was very surprised when the Iranian stranger told her to keep it. That was not just good luck. The next day, she was invited by another stranger (an English teacher) to visit her home and have tea with her family. The day after, a young boy brought over tasty snacks for her. She was an old Chinese lady sitting in a Tehran park all by herself being pampered. This was in a country which had been severely sanctioned by Western countries and vilified by Western mainstream media for decades, and the people were made to suffer for it. But everyone treated her with the utmost respect as if she was the matriarch of the family. My mother was utterly amazed. Iranians are the best, this is my mother’s conclusion. So how does that reconcile with her understanding of Iran as promulgated by the American beacon on a hill which always wags their sanctimonious finger at evil countries like China, Russia, and Iran? My mother quickly found her answer. The Iranian government and the religious leadership are evil but the people are nice. That explains the apparent contradiction. Since all human beings suffer from a psychological condition known as “confirmation bias,” which you will notice when some people basically say, “my mind is made up, don’t confuse me with facts,” making it impossible to carry on an intelligent conversation, I would therefore give up and leave it at that. This is a personal anecdote of course, and does not represent some statistical research based on measurable metrics. But there may be a moral lesson somewhere that we can all learn from.
0 Comments
Read More
Back to Blog
When we watch the Western mainstream media talk about China, all we get is the endless vilification of China as some evil empire planning to ruin the world or rule the world or both. When we listen to politicians of the West, we also get a sense that China is about to invade America, India, other Asian countries, Australia, Africa, Europe, Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan, the North Pole, the Pacific Ocean, the Moon, and everywhere else. Then of course there are numerous Western NGOs, non-profits, spokespersons, brain-trusts, think-tanks, talking heads, military experts, political pundits, religious leaders, and humanistic organizations funded by those who have funds also amplifying the evil China narrative. Even in the social media, we have numerous click-baiters regurgitating and reverberating horrific stories of Chinese communists committing genocide against ethnic minorities, stealing American wealth, controlling every Chinese citizen, and bullying everyone else. For people who have lived or are living in China, it is easy to know who is lying, but for people who have no idea what China is, their information and therefore impression about China is going to be completely wrong and overwhelmingly negative. But if people can't trust their mainstream media, elected officials, and NGOs, who can they trust? Since I don't have all the answers (hint: you can put more trust on someone who professes not to know everything), I'm going to get some help from others. Here is a Youtube clip from Canadian expat Daniel Dumbrill who lives in China and owns a small brewery in Shenzhen. Daniel knows his stuff and has been exposing lies from the West. His recent post titled "Mainstream Media Dishonesty" is a must watch. And to reap the benefits of Daniel's lucid truth, watch all the way to the end, subscribe, give it a thumbs up, and share it with your circle of friends. Learning the truth has never been easier, and you don't have to thank me. Thank Daniel Dumbrill! It is always best not to trust everything you hear or see, and to get your information from more than one source. It is also important to be critical and to objectively analyze the information you receive from others to ascertain their veracity. On first blush, it seems implausible that all of your esteemed mainstream media to which you entrust with the freedom of the press and depend to be the gatekeeper of the truth can be deliberately telling lies about China. It's also unbelievable for all your elected officials from both sides of the aisle to whom you entrust with the power to tax, go into debt, create laws, conduct surveillance, issue unilateral sanctions, fund the military industrial complex, patrol the world, torture enemy combatants, lock up whistleblowers, bomb anyone that looks suspicious, and generally make war on a whim, to be lying with one voice about China. Again, I seek help from a Canadian expat living in China. His name is Numuves and he is an ethnic Chinese. Numuves has traveled to Xinjiang on his own and shot videos of the people and places as he walked through the streets of Xinjiang. He is more fun and jokes about how the Chinese communists suck at genocide. But here are three clips that will help elucidate the doubters' mind because the information comes from the horses' mouth. The first one is by US Colonel Lawrence B. Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell under Dubya Bush. It will explain why we hear all these lies about Xinjiang. Ex-FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds who was ordered by the US attorney general to stop blowing the whistle somehow knew about the coming US attack on China regarding Xinjiang in 2015. Here is the clip. Finally, a German ex-mainstream journalist who spilled the beans about the Western Media being bought and put under a leash by the CIA to tell bald-faced lies on behalf of their masters. Udo Ulfkotte was vilified as a deranged nut and died in 2017 at the age of 56 from a heart attack. These things happen. One may want to research a bit on Operation Mockingbird to see if this guy was completely bonkers. The next vlogger is a Jewish guy from Israel who practically grew up in Beijing. His father apparently manages an equity fund from Israel specializing in Chinese investments. Raz Gao-Or's channel YChina is very popular and basically talks about China, the Chinese people, and foreigners living in China. Raz is basically a fun guy and is not interested in a lot of political mumble jumble. Unfortunately, he did travel to Xinjiang to find out for himself and his channel followers what was happening there, whether all the Western news reporters were telling the truth. That offended the Edifice of Truth in the West, the New York Times. And the mighty Gatekeeper of the Ultimate Immutable Truth of New York wrote a hit piece that referred to many expat vloggers in China, including Raz. NYT should know better than to incur the wrath of a Jew much less an Israelis. The following is Raz's reply. There are actually a whole lot more of the same from the Barretts (father and son from England living in Shenzhen), Kirk Apesland aka Gweilo60 (beer swigging shoot-from-the-hip Canadian living in China, in fact retired in Nanning; his latest clip explains very well why these giant mainstream media organizations would attack individual vloggers from China), another Brit Jason Lightfoot's Living in China (regularly stuffing Burger King triple burgers into his pie hole at a small city in Guizhou accompanied by his wife Jiao and their son Lincoln), Cyrus Jannsen, an American golf pro who lived and worked in China for ten years now relocated to Vancouver, eccentric American techie Nathan Rich, and Matt Galat, an American in China vlogging about his round the world trike adventures on his Jayoe channel, who has been forced to defend himself and China on his Nuance channel. Warning: Matt recorded his entire interview by the New York Times which lasts two and a half hours. Learn the truth if you dare. This is the tip of the iceberg. These vloggers normally just want to share their experience of living in China. Suddenly, they're targets of our lying Western mainstream media. Anyone interested to discover China can type China vloggers on Youtube and get a whole bunch. See for yourself their daily posts. Most of them don't ever talk about politics until they have to defend themselves.
I'm not going to end this post without leaving a small contribution of my own. Since we're talking about the mainstream media, I will disclose now that I used to work in the mainstream media. In fact, my first job in Canada was working as a news field-director. I took a crew around town to shoot news worthy stories. I also dabbled as an on-air news reader. I would eventually become the head of a national Chinese language television station in Canada. My experience has been that no one at the stations where I worked knew if the news that got disseminated to the gullible public was true or not. That was a long time ago of course, when we still trusted that news sources were not deliberately passing on insidious lies. Having had the pleasure of working in the mainstream media business for nearly twenty years, I was privy and even party to some rather unpalatable transactions. For example, I knew how the foremost investigative television program of Canada was manipulated by the leaking of partial confidential information engineered to fit a certain narrative popular to the news organization (i.e. anti-China), prompting them to go ahead with the story that was secretly meant to benefit a commercial undertaking. China was actually not involved at all, but they were vilified just the same. The world is really a complicated place. When I visited China in 1997 to get a better idea of the world we live in, I began to hold the suspicion that everyone in the West was working in concert to deliberately smear China. I did not want to believe that such a world-wide conspiracy could be possible. It was unbelievable that journalists entrusted with the sacred duty to safeguard the freedom of the press would so egregiously destroy that trust by deliberately lying about China. Perhaps they were too lazy to verify their stories; perhaps they were duped by people who understood their weaknesses; perhaps there were a few journalists not doing their job and giving the profession a bad name. I was prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt. I would eventually live and work in China for almost twenty years. I was lucky enough to be trusted and befriended by a general who was influential in the development of the PLA's communications department. He was also the technical head of the project that launched China's first communications satellite. His name was Yang Qianli (RIP). Director Yang introduced me to an old friend of his by the name of Sidney Rittenberg (RIP). Sidney had a storied life, sixteen years of which he spent in a Chinese prison. More than ten years ago, in one of our casual meetings, Sidney told me that he was invited by the Foreign Correspondents' Club to attend one of their gatherings in Beijing. They obviously thought that Sidney must hold a serious grudge against the Chinese Communist Party for the wrongful imprisonment. They were dead wrong. Sidney said he was shocked that all these Western journalists were conspiring in broad daylight under the nose of the Central Government in Beijing, a couple blocks away from government headquarters in Zhongnanhai, to maliciously smear and attack China. Oh yes, they all knew what they were doing. They all knew they would be telling bald-faced lies and half-truths, using false narratives and obfuscations, and they would be coordinating with their lying partners at the NGOs. think tanks, and political organizations. Why should we believe in Rittenberg, you ask? Well, the old man spent so many years in jail because he refused to admit that he was an American spy. He was told if he admitted, they would immediately send him back to America and he would be free. But Sidney would rather rot in jail than to admit to something that he was not. He paid a heavy price for maintaining the truth. Why would he tell me such a trivial lie about foreign journalists that would change nothing and benefit no one? Given the evidence, I think I'd much rather believe in Sidney Rittenberg. As for those lying liars who have betrayed our trust to shamelessly and remorselessly lie to the world causing death and suffering to millions, I hope they all rot in hell! Wait a minute; it's Christmas. In that case, good will to humankind and peace on earth. I hope these lying miscreants all die a slow painful death on earth and then rot in hell! Upton Sinclair once commented on journalists, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." Now we know we've been delusional. We should not expect the truth from salary earning journalists.
Back to Blog
Blame China13/12/2021 This little ditty practically germinated and gestated in a matter of minutes while I was trying to figure out a crossword puzzle clue: "One of 1200 in Central Park," an eleven letter word, first letter is "a," fifth letter is "i," and tenth letter is "l."
Blame China (by Peter Man) Why can’t I sleep a wink? Blame China. Why do I need a drink? Blame China. Why can’t I pay rent? Blame China. Why can’t I get a grant? Blame China. My papa hates my mama; blame China. My mama hates my papa; blame China. My brother hates my guts; blame China. I don’t know WTF; blame China. Why am I watching Fox? Blame China. Why do I watch Maddow? Blame China. Why is Biden just like Trump? Blame China. Why are donkeys like elephants? Blame China. Freedom of choice gets us asses; blame China Freedom of voice gets us liars; blame China Freedom of war turns the world to ashes; blame China Freedom of guns kills our own brothers; blame China Why can’t we sanction all Chinese? Blame China. Why can’t we sanction all dog fleas? Blame China. Why can’t I have peace? Blame China. Why can’t I eat cheese? Blame China. Now finally I can sleep, because I can blame China. Any New Yorkers know the answer to the crossword clue? |