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AN international cast of speakers came together on Saturday to oppose a new cold war on China, which they say is “against the interests of humanity.”
The chair, author and academic Jenny Clegg, welcomed a “truly global gathering” with people from 49 countries attending the Zoom webinar, which others were able to follow on Facebook and YouTube.
Introducing the event, author Carlos Martinez said that the US was ramping up pressure on all countries to pick a side in its confrontation with China.
US activist Medea Benjamin of the Code Pink peace campaign called for a “pivot to peace, not a pivot to Asia.”
She said that she suspected an ulterior motive when US politicians “talk free speech while shooting rubber bullets at peaceful demonstrators.
“It’s hard to take them seriously [over allegations of persecution of Muslims] when both parties have supported a two-decade war on Muslims throughout the world, torturing them at Abu Ghraib, throwing them into prisons in Guantanamo.”
US news site Black Agenda Report editor Margaret Kimberley warned: “We’re told that a million Uighurs are in prison when there is quite literally no evidence of any such thing,” cautioning listeners to remember previous scare stories about “weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and babies taken from incubators in Kuwait.”
“When the US talks of human rights, remember it has more of its population incarcerated than any other nation, that its police force kills 1,000 people a year and that its military budget is bigger than the next 10 countries combined.”
The US talked “as if China were US property not a sovereign country, but that is what results from white supremacism extended to the field of foreign relations.”
And she savaged the “vassals and lackeys known as US allies that follow the lead of the gangster state.”
Academic John Ross said it was essential to resist a US administration that was “tearing up treaties,” had walked out of the Paris agreement on climate change and was trying to “force its policies on the world.”
Other speakers included The Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal, Tricontinental Institute for Social Research director Vijay Prashad, Renmin University executive dean Wang Wen and many more.
The meeting can be watched on YouTube at mstar.link/NewColdWar.
