'Spaghetti Politics' Propaganda Narratives

Narratives move fast in social media. Especially the memes and cultural tropes. If you have ever stumbled upon 30000 (not a lot in Chinese social media terms) teenage Little Pink LGBT loonaists declaring Twitter-wise (sometimes sarcastically) that #loonaiscoming, then you're familiar with just how fast the social media memes and their ancillary discourse and narratives are disseminated, and how near-instantaneously they take root and expand. That's both web memes, and the Dawkinsian memes that are their terminological and conceptual inspiration (Evolutionary psychology, and, ironically, epigenetics, provides a not unreasonable scientific grounds for Dawkins’ pre-theoretic and scientistic concept of replicating social-psychologial memes.)

Little Pink pro China and faux pro China memes can be difficult to distinguish.

Pro-CPC Diaspora are very proficient memetic combatants. Don't let the bunny ears fool you.

In an interesting twist, it's not uncommon for Little Pinks and similar social media memetic 'warriors' to propagate narratives that are smarter, better informed, more accurate, and more critically savvy than the propagandised narratives generated by The US State Department and by other agents of Western military industrial business and establishment 'hawks'. Social media is an unforgiving environment for Western military business propaganda cells like Australia's ASPI. There's simply no way for them to control well organised and well informed dissenters and critics.

The ASPI and similar groups have even less defence against those who are also capable in dialectics, argumentation, statistical analyses, and the presentation of astute critical thinking. Moreover, if they want to claim to be bulwarks of free speech in contrast to what they allege the CPC is doing, then they can hardly start sending in security services every time a 'Tweep' posts an expose of the incoherence, blatant bias, and questionable research methods of the ASPIs and Christian fundamentalist 'researchers' currently swamping the West with voluminous narrative nonsense. (A propensity to shortcut research discipline due to leaps of fideism are just one reliable Achilles heel of such groups.)

The US State Department and the Australian Morrison government do not help their case much by being hopelessly duplicitous in their primary narratives. For example, one will hear very little (nothing) from Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison or US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo about the draconian effective anti-blasphemy laws, and largely dictatorial nature, of Singapore's government. The unmistakable reason for this is Pompeo's, and Morrison's, own fundamentalist Christian commitments.

This religiously motivated duplicity runs deep. As Chinese-Australian political scientist Professor Chenxing Pan has recently observed, there's a stark contradiction inherent in the US State Department's determined mislabeling, as an oppression of religious freedoms, China's efforts to contain Islamic jihadist terrorism in Xinjiang, Yunnan, and other provinces. The US itself has waged a foreign hot war on terror - THE war on terror - against precisely these religious fundamentalists for decades.

The duplicity and hypocrisy of the State Department is significantly about economics and competition, and 'containing' China's economic and industrial expansion. However, religious ideology cannot be excluded from the set of motives that configure Pompeo's modus operandi and public declarations. Such narratives and imperatives loom quite large in Pompeo's rhetoric for a reason. The average Western and South East Asian atheist should, ironically, keep Bishop Niemöller's famous historical admonition in mind whenever Michael Pompeo uses the narrative of religious freedom as a rallying call for what is really a dominionist religionist attack on China's ruling atheists precisely because they're atheist and in control.

Managing and constructing narratives to satisfy fundamentalist religious groups in Western society is as much an art form now as it was for dictators and faux-democratic leaders during the Cold War and Second World War. The US State Department has been largely overrun by Christian fundamentalists, or by those deploying as front men such fundamentalists as Micheal Pompeo for the purposes of narrative construction and control. Donald Trump is set to stack the US Supreme Court judiciary with similarly motivated, epistemically and rationally questionable, agents.

Pompeo and Trump continue to make the Little Pinks and alleged wumao, whom their narratives and supporters much malign, look good by near-unfailingly deploying what's become known as 'Spaghetti Politics'. 'Spaghetti politics' (not the Italian variety) is the political narratological equivalent of a Spaghetti Western: badly conceived, badly written, and quite ridiculous. In spaghetti politics, one throws whatever one can up on the wall of social media to see what sticks: Uyghur death camps, Mongolian dissent and oppression; religious oppression; Hong Kong is Britain; 'surround and contain' isn't aggressive: etc.

Australia's ASPI is an example of the kind of ancillary resources that such spaghetti politicking, and corresponding psychology of polity, relies upon: they're a spaghetti-political science 'stink' tank, for dire want of a better term.

Happily, the dialectically and discursively double-edged sword of social media and free speech mean that the anti-China spaghetti politics of The US State Department and Australia's current government elect are not able to run amok unopposed. For example, regarding Pompeo's religious freedom narrative: it's economic competition and the prosperity of China that most of the US administration and establishment wants to stop. Not human rights abuses, nor threats to liberty, nor oppression of religion, but economic and geopolitical competition.

No one is fooled, of course. Not outside of the current US administration’s domestic political faithful. The UN is not fooled. If the US had not withdrawn from the UN Council on human Rights and UNESCO, they'd likely have risked ejection over their actions in Hong Kong and Taiwan, at minimum. Their withdrawal from the World Health Organisation is a parallel case due to the Trump administration's blatantly racist, and socially dangerous, COVID-19 narratives and rhetoric.

The aggressive Spaghetti-political posturing and physical regional military impositions accompanying the US's 'surround and contain' narrative are, clearly, significantly about economics and geopolitical jealousy. That being said, Niemöller's admonition does still ring true. Atheists who recognise the religious fundamentalist narratological roots and imperatives of the rhetoric of the likes of Pompeo and Morrison might do well to ponder it. Especially in the current Western climate and context of racist China-bashing and continued anti-China sabre rattling. It's anti-China-prosperity, but it's also anti-irreligion and anti-freedom from religious imposition. Those narratives are interdependent, and they mutually semantically and discursively support and reinforce each other.