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Chinese scholars have recently published an excellent white paper on the colonization of the mind by the US.

Excerpts from the paper:

Since World War II, particularly after the end of the Cold War, by leveraging its global supremacy in political, economic, military, and technological might, the United States has been exporting its ideology worldwide in an attempt to capture the minds of nations with American values, reshape peoples’ conceptions, and create philosophical dependence on an American-centric worldview.

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“Reinforcing American culture’s position as the ‘exemplar’ for all nations is an indispensable strategy for maintaining U.S. hegemony” — Zbigniew Brzezinski.

The United States discovered that relying solely on “hard power” in the forms of political domination, economic control, military deterrence, among others, could not establish or sustain a lasting and extensive colonial rule; instead, employing “soft power” such as culture and values would enable it to reap higher colonial rewards at lower costs.

Compelling global “voluntary” compliance and subservience under a sentimental veil — this is the U.S. style of “mind colonization.”

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The U.S. has leveraged control over new technological platforms and cutting- edge cognitive technologies to tighten its ideological governance of social media. Under pretexts such as “countering disinformation” and “countering foreign influence”, it manipulates information flows on social platforms to dominate global perception-shaping.

If U.S. hegemonic dominance on the world’s political, economic, and military scenes serves as the “hard prerequisites” for its ideological colonization, then the enabling conditions in language and culture, discourse narratives, mass media, and academic research constitute its “soft foundation”.

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The U.S. systematically glorifies itself while energetically demonizing others, creating artificial binaries like “democracy vs. dictatorship”, “freedom vs. authoritarian- ism”, “market economies vs. non- market economies”, and “counter-terrorism states vs state sponsors of terrorism”.

He who controls the valves of information flows commands the initiative in shaping perceptions.

Today, the U.S. maintains an iron grip on global information and dissemination channels and platforms through its possession of numerous news agencies, powerful multinational media conglomerates, internet- based social media platforms, and a host of new tech giants. In the digital age, by leveraging platforms like Facebook, X (Twitter), and YouTube, the U.S. has achieved a manipulation of public opinions characterized by “wherever algorithms and audience traffic go, there go the agenda and perceptions”.

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The United States’ drive to colonize the mind is designed to consolidate U.S. cultural hegemony, thereby reinforcing its political dominance and preserving its economic privileges.

As a mind colonizer, the U.S. relentlessly glorifies itself, cloaking its values in a guise of “universality” — portraying its national character as something “universal” and repackaging national interests as “international morality”, ultimately disguising cultural colonization as “value leadership”. The U.S. presents itself as the practitioner, spokesperson, and defender of noble values, all to consolidate its central position in the ideological-cultural sphere and cultivate “cognitive dependence” on the U.S.

The fundamental purpose of America’s ideological manipulation and cognitive shaping is to turn rules that serve U.S. interests into a universally accepted international system and order and, in this process, ensure its permanent enjoyment of various privileges.

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From the two World Wars to the 1960s, the U.S. mainly employed newspapers and radio to “tell the American story to the world”. It established external publicity media mouthpieces such as Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, and Radio Free Europe to launch a long-term propaganda war against the Socialist camp led by the Soviet Union.

Then, the “information control and cognition” paradigm gradually replaced the “propaganda and cognition” model to become the new mainstream communication theory. Theories such as social psychology, game theory, and perceptual phenomenology were introduced into the analysis of international strategic situations and political decision-making processes.

Shaping audiences’ emotions, attitudes, and behaviors has long been an important objective in U.S. journalism, advertising, propaganda, and other related fields. The concept of “cognitive warfare” had emerged as early as the 1990s.

However, it wasn’t until the early 21st century, with breakthroughs in technological research in such fields as psychological science, neuroscience, brain science, and artificial intelligence, and other cutting-edge technologies, that “shaping cognition” became a truly relevant strategic objective.

In 2022, the National Security Strategy report raised cognitive warfare to strategic importance on par with physical combat, which marked the complete independence of the cognitive domain. In 2023, multiple congressional reports re- focused on cognitive security.

Thus, technology-driven cognitive manipulation became a new tactic for mind colonization by the United States.

A series of American values like capitalist democracy, freedom, equality, human rights, along with individualism, egoism, materialism, and hedonism, constitute the crux of the U.S. drive to colonize the mind.

Backed by immense financial power, American media conglomerates have gained end-to-end control over the entire chain-from news gathering, content production, and distribution to advertising and marketing. Their holdings of media resources span television, newspapers, radio, print, film, videos, and streaming platforms, enjoying access to a huge group of global users.

The U.S. advantage in dissemination is further embodied in its control over internet- based media, platforms, and companies. By controlling critical resources such as global internet root servers and domain names, the U.S. dominates the overall operation of the World Wide Web. Through legislative and many other means, the U.S. government keeps a tight grip on domestic internet tech giants and wields unchecked power over a huge amount of online information. Platforms like Facebook, X, YouTube, and Instagram — the world’s most popular social media platforms — provide new space and facility for the U.S. to construct information cocoons and shape user perceptions through algorithms and lies.

“The easiest way to inject a propaganda idea into most people’s minds is to let it go through the medium of an entertainment” — Elmer Davis, head of the U.S. Office of War Information during WWII.

In Allied victors like France and Britain, the US forced open local film markets as a condition for financial aid, helping Hollywood films to dominate these markets. For as long as several decades thereafter, American films- commanding over 70% of the global market-served as an important means to colonize the mind.

Countless films centering on “heroism” crafted an image of the U.S. as the “righteous defender of the world order” and cultivated awe for American military power.

After 9/11, Hollywood once again became a powerful propaganda tool for the U.S. war on terror, with the industry and military forming a mutually beneficial military-entertainment complex and each party partaking of what it needs.

With the advancement of digital technology, video games have also become an important tool for manipulating the mind. The America’s Army game series, developed under the guidance of the U.S. military with over $30 million of funding, simulates realistic combat as the core game and has attracted about 20 million players worldwide.

To entrench American ideology worldwide, the United States leverages its leading position across academic disciplines to propagate Western knowledge systems and cultural values among intellectual elites in various countries and regions through education, training, academic exchanges, research funding, and faculty deployments.

It aims to cultivate a vast, globally dispersed “pro-American” contingent among elite circles globally.

Early on, the U.S. had positioned cultural exchange as the “fourth dimension of foreign policy”. Since 1948, the U.S. government has invested heavily in the Fulbright Program — viewed as a “model investment in long-term U.S. national interests” — sponsoring college students, scholars, cultural elites, and academic groups worldwide to study, visit, and research in America. By the late 20th century, the program had provided financial support to over 250,000 scholars from 140+ countries and regions.

Self-glorification and the vilification of others are the two most commonly seen sets of narratives in the U.S. efforts to colonize the mind.

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Riding on its monopoly in infrastructure, the U.S. selectively cuts or disrupts target countries’ channels of communication with the international community, creating a one- sided narrative environment in its favor, one that silences dissenting voices.

Faced with future competition, the U.S. is actively integrating cutting-edge cognitive science and technologies-such as artificial intelligence and biotechnology-into its strategic architecture for mind colonization.

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As American writer William Blum observes in Democracy: America’s Deadliest Export, since the end of World War II the United States has sought to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments and has brazenly interfered in the elections of at least 30 countries.

Out of its geopolitical and diplomatic needs, the United States often spreads political falsehoods and drives “cognitive wedges” between different interest groups — stirring up antagonism, inciting division, or engineering conflict to reap benefits, and even intervening directly to “discipline” those adversaries that refuse to fall in line.

Colonization of the mind means instilling blind confidence in U.S. culture around the globe, dismantling confidence in local cultures, dissolving the subjective cultures of target countries, eroding global civilization diversity, and exacerbating the antagonism and clash among civilizations.

Perennially impacted by American-style civilization, some developing countries have lost their national subjectivity and pride, suffering from rampant national nihilism. From the elite class to the general public, they imitate and even subsequently follow the U.S. and the West in every way, from thinking and ideas to food, clothing, housing, and transportation. This is the phenomenon of “post-colonial aphasia” as described by many scholars.

Independence of the mind is a prerequisite for independent development. Cultural confidence is the foundation of national strength and prosperity. Exchanges and mutual understanding are an effective instrument for inter-civilization coexistence.

August 1st marked the 50th anniversary of the Helsinki Accords’ inking. The event’s golden jubilee passed without much in the way of mainstream comment, or recognition. Yet, the date is absolutely seismic, its destructive consequences reverberating today throughout Europe and beyond. The Accords not only signed the death warrants of the Soviet Union, Warsaw Pact, and Yugoslavia years later, but created a new world, in which “human rights” - specifically, a Western-centric and enforced conception thereof - became a redoubtable weapon in the Empire’s arsenal.

The Accords were formally concerned with concretising détente between the US and the Soviet Union. Under their terms, in return for recognition of the latter’s political influence over Central and Eastern Europe, Moscow and its Warsaw Pact satellites agreed to uphold a definition of “human rights” concerned exclusively with political freedoms, such as freedom of assembly, expression, information, and movement. Protections universally enjoyed by the Eastern Bloc’s inhabitants - such as guarantees of free education, employment, housing, and more - were wholly absent from this taxonomy.

There was another catch. The Accords led to the creation of several Western organisations charged with monitoring the Eastern Bloc’s adherence to their terms - including Helsinki Watch, forerunner of Human Rights Watch. Subsequently, these entities frequently visited the region and forged intimate bonds with local political dissident factions, assisting them in their anti-government agitation. There was no question of representatives from the Soviet Union, Warsaw Pact, or Yugoslavia being invited to assess “human rights” compliance at home or abroad by the US or its vassals.

As legal scholar Samuel Moyn has extensively documented, the Accords played a pivotal role in decisively shifting mainstream rights discourse away from any and all economic or social considerations. More gravely, per Moyn, “the idea of human rights” was converted “into a warrant for shaming state oppressors.” Resultantly, Western imperialist brutality against purported foreign rights abusers - including sanctions, destabilisation campaigns, coups, and outright military intervention - could be justified, frequently assisted by the ostensibly neutral findings of organisations such as Amnesty International, and HRW.

Almost instantly after the Helsinki Accords were signed, a welter of organisations sprouted throughout the Eastern Bloc to document purported violations by authorities. Their findings were then fed - often surreptitiously - to overseas embassies and rights groups, for international amplification. This contributed significantly to both internal and external pressure on the Soviet Union, Warsaw Pact, and Yugoslavia. Mainstream accounts assert the conception of these dissident groups was entirely spontaneous and organic, in turn compelling Western support for their pioneering efforts.

US lawmaker Dante Fascell has claimed the “demands” of “intrepid” Soviet citizens “made us respond.” However, there are unambiguous indications that meddling in the Eastern Bloc was hardwired into Helsinki before inception. In late June 1975, on the eve of US President Gerald Ford signing the Accords, exiled Soviet dissident [anti-semite, fascist sympathizer and anti-communist propagandist] Alexander Solzhenitsyn addressed senior politicians in Washington, DC. He appeared at the express invitation of hardcore anti-Communist George Meany, chief of the CIA-connected American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO). Solzhenitsyn declared:

“We, the dissidents of the USSR don’t have any tanks, we don’t have any weapons, we have no organization. We don’t have anything...You are the allies of our liberation movement in the Communist countries…Communist leaders say, ‘Don’t interfere in our internal affairs’...But I tell you: interfere more and more. Interfere as much as you can. We beg you to come and interfere.”

In 1980, mass strikes in Gdansk, Poland, spread throughout the country, leading to the founding of Solidarity, an independent trade union and social movement. Key among its demands was that the Soviet-supported Polish government distribute 50,000 copies of Helsinki’s “human rights” protocols to the wider public. Solidarity founder-and-chief Lech Walesa subsequently referred to the Accords as a “turning point”, enabling and encouraging the union’s nationwide disruption, and growth into a serious political force. Within just a year, Solidarity’s membership exceeded over 10 million.

The movement’s inexorable rise sent shockwaves throughout the Warsaw Pact. It was the first time an independent mass organisation had formed in a Soviet-aligned state, and others would soon follow. Undisclosed at the time, and largely unknown today, Solidarity’s activities were bankrolled to the tune of millions by the US government. The same was true of most prominent Eastern Bloc dissident groups, such as Czechoslovakia’s Charter 77. In many cases, these factions not only ousted their rulers by the decade’s end, but formed governments thereafter.

Washington’s financing for these efforts became codified in a secret September 1982 National Security Directive. It stated “the primary long-term US goal in Eastern Europe” was “to loosen the Soviet hold over the region and thereby facilitate its eventual reintegration into the European community of nations.” This was to be achieved by “encouraging more liberal trends in the region…reinforcing the pro-Western orientation of their peoples…lessening their economic and political dependence on the USSR…facilitating their association with the free nations of Western Europe.”

In August 1989, mere days after Solidarity took power in Poland, marking the first post-World War II formation of a non-Communist government in the Eastern Bloc, a remarkable op-ed appeared in the Washington Post. Senior AFL-CIO figure Adrian Karatnycky wrote about his “unrestrained joy and admiration” over Solidarity’s “stunning” success in purging Soviet influence in the country throughout the 1980s. The movement was the “centerpiece” of a wider US “strategy”, and had been funded and supported by Washington with the utmost “discretion and secrecy.”

Vast sums funnelled to Solidarity via AFL-CIO and CIA front the National Endowment for Democracy “underwrote shipments of scores of printing presses, dozens of computers, hundreds of mimeograph machines, thousands of gallons of printer’s ink, hundreds of thousands of stencils, video cameras and radio broadcasting equipment.” The wellspring promoted Solidarity’s activities locally and internationally. In Poland itself, 400 “underground periodicals” - including comic books featuring “Communism as the red dragon” and Lech Walesa “as the heroic knight” - were published, read by tens of thousands of people.

Karatnycky boasted of how the Empire was intimately “drawn into the daily drama of Poland’s struggle” over the past decade, and “much of the story of that struggle and our role in it will have to be told another day.” Still, the results were extraordinary. Writers for Warsaw’s NED-funded “clandestine press” had suddenly been transformed into “editors and reporters for Poland’s new independent newspapers.” Former “radio pirates” and Solidarity activists previously “hounded” by Communist authorities were now elected lawmakers.

Signing off, Karatnycky hailed how Poland proved to be a “successful laboratory in democracy-building,” warning “democratic change” in Warsaw could not be a “a political aberration” or “lone example” in the region. Karatnycky looked ahead to further neighbourhood insurrection, noting AFL-CIO was engaged in outreach with trade unions elsewhere in the Eastern Bloc, including the Soviet Union itself. So it was, one by one, every Warsaw Pact government collapsed in the final months of 1989, often in enigmatic circumstances.

The “revolutions” of 1989 remain venerated in the mainstream today, hailed as examples of peaceful transitions from dictatorship to democracy. They have also served as a template and justification for US imperialism of every variety in the name of “human rights” in all corners of the globe since. Yet, for many at the forefront of Western-funded, Helsinki Accords-inspired Warsaw Pact dissident groups, there was an extremely bitter twist in the tale of the overthrow of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe.

In 1981, Czechoslovak playwright and Charter 77 spokesperson Zdena Tominová conducted a tour of the West. In a speech in Dublin, Ireland, she spoke of how she’d witnessed first-hand how her country’s population had benefited enormously from the state’s Communist policies. Tominová made clear she sought to fully maintain all its public-wide economic and social benefits, while adopting Western-style political freedoms only. It was a shocking statement to make for a woman who’d risked imprisonment to oppose her government with foreign help so publicly:

“All of a sudden, I was not underprivileged and could do everything…I think that, if this world has a future, it is as a socialist society, which I understand to mean a society where nobody has priorities just because he happens to come from a rich family,” Tominová declared. She moreover made clear her vision was global in nature - “the world of social justice for all people has to come about.” But this was not to be.

Instead, Eastern Bloc countries suffered deeply ravaging transitions to capitalism via “shock therapy”, eradicating much of what citizens held dear about the systems under which they’d previously lived. They were thrust into a wholly new world, where hitherto unknown homelessness, hunger, inequality, unemployment, and other societal ills became commonplace, rather than prevented by basic state guarantee. After all, as decreed by the Helsinki Accords, such phenomena didn’t constitute egregious breaches of “human rights”, but instead were the unavoidable product of the very political “freedom” for which they had fought.

From Bandera to Ben-Gurion, a new axis of ethno-supremacy is rising, fueled by U.S. backing. Same guns. Same flags. Same ideology. Gaza and Donbass are not separate wars. They are one machine.

Across two battlefields, one scarred by siege, the other by shelling, an unholy alliance of Zionist settlers and Ukrainian fascists wages a war against history’s unwanted.

From IDF-trained Azov fighters and Israeli PMCs in Ukraine, to Ukrainian militants surfacing in militarized Gaza aid ops—this isn’t coincidence. It’s infrastructure.

Palantir, Anduril, Elbit Systems. AI drones. Biometric fences. Shared ideologies. Shared enemies. Shared tools.

In a West drunk on racialized supremacy and privatized war, these forces are not defending their nations.

They are refining extermination.

The mass ethnic cleansing of Serbs by a US-backed Croatian leader was premeditated, newly uncovered files show.

On the 30th anniversary of Operation Storm, Kit Klarenberg exposes the hidden history of one of NATO's most ghastly crimes.

Another day, another China W.

Meanwhile in Europe...

China began building the world’s largest hydropower dam in Xizang, a $168 billion project with 70 GW capacity, expected to supply 3% of China’s 2024 electricity.

The dam, comprising five cascading power stations, is expected to generate around 300 bn kWh of electricity annually — equivalent to the United Kingdom’s total power consumption in the past year. The project taps into the steep drop of 2,000 metres across a 50-kilometre section of the Yarlung Zangbo, offering unparalleled hydropower potential.

Whatever flaws modern China may have, nothing will ever diminish how historic of an achievement this is. What China managed to do in going from 1949 to what it is today is nothing short of a miracle.

I'm making this post because quite frankly, at this point, i just don't care anymore for the constant nitpicking and purity testing that i have to constantly read and hear from western leftists.

I just want this for the entire global south. If it means that a people who have suffered so much in their history get to finally live like human beings with dignity, happiness and prosperity, i don't give a fuck that they aren't "doing socialism right".

Call them nationalists, call them revisionists, call them liberals, call them whatever names you like, fact is one and a half billion people are now living in a modern, developed, stable, peaceful and increasingly prosperous society.

Long live the Communist Party of China and long live the People's Republic!

The New York Crimes panicking over China's EV dominance and calling for a "Manhattan Program" for EVs. Good luck with that. The US's neoliberal brain worms are dug in too deep. They couldn't do it for the MIC and they certainly won't do it for the auto industry.