The “cancel culture” attack on companies
by Guy Mettan, freelance journalist and author
(25 May 2021) Should companies submit to the dictatorship of the good? Like all human activities, the economy must respect basic moral principles. Primum non nocere, first do no harm, and second do not fool.
We cannot tolerate that companies pay for pseudo-scientific studies (as it was the case for tobacco, oil companies, and certain manufacturers of toxic products) to abuse public trust and offload deadly risks. We also welcome the fact that banks can no longer turn a blind eye on tax fraud or on the potentially criminal funds they manage.
The economy is also an ethic. But should the economic world accept the diktats that certain civil society organizations and certain political powers are trying to impose upon it, in the name of a sense of responsibility that no longer has any limits? I strongly doubt it.
Yet, this is what is happening throughout the West. The “Cancel culture”, the purge culture, is spreading like a cancer and is moving out of the private domain (personal attacks on people deemed racist or sexist on university campuses and social networks) where it was confined until now, to invade the economic sphere.
The United States had already given a foretaste of these abuses at the end of the 1990s with the Jewish funds affair about the handling by Swiss banks of accounts lying dormant from jews fleeing the Holocaust; then with the war against banking secrecy; and the generalization of economic sanctions against countries and leaders that displeased them at the end of the 2000s. Recently, the BDS [Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions] movement, which also emerged from American campuses, and which seeks to boycott products manufactured in Israeli settlements, has extended this practice to civil society.
Economic sanctions validated by international law – the United Nations – must naturally be respected. But what about all those taken unilaterally, in violation of the law of nations, and imposed by force, as is the case with sanctions against Iran, Russia, China, Venezuela, Cuba and so many others?
Today, under the influence of the holders of the Uyghur narrative of Anglo-Saxon origin, this hunt for the alleged culprit tends to become hysterical in the West. Every day, in the newspapers and on the airwaves in Europe and the United States, there are torrents of reports, testimonies and editorials all pointing in the same direction. There is not a hint of contradiction or a different opinion. It is taken as an established fact that China is committing “genocide” against the Uighurs. And, under this pretext, our companies are ordered to boycott Xinxiang products, as we have seen recently in our media, which complacently transformed themselves into spokespersons for the anti-Chinese “human rights” networks.
This political interference in matters that does not fall under the direct responsibility of the economy is all the more unwarranted, as this “genocide” has not been proven and has never taken place (for the time being at least), contrary to what is being insinuated. Numerous counter-investigations by renowned American investigative journalists1 show above all that this is an extremely active and skillfully orchestrated propaganda campaign against China since the Trump Administration declared war on Beijing.
There is no doubt that China is undertaking a fierce crackdown on Uighur Islamists, who, by the way, were for years and until 2017 on the US list of terrorist organizations. But the accusation of genocide is clearly a campaign of intoxication.1 It is a safe bet that once the 2022 Beijing Olympics have been boycotted by the United States and the most servile Europeans, the fever will subside.
This case will end up similar to the alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US election, which had the entire Western mainstream press holding its breath until 2019, before being demolished by the Mueller report. Similar to the 1999 demonisation to justify the illegal NATO bombing of Serbia; or with the fake case of Kuwaiti babies taken out of their incubators and thrown to the ground by Iraqi soldiers in 1991 to justify the Gulf War. Also the case of Saddam Hussein's fake weapons of mass destruction to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the saga of the Syrian White Helmets, so-called friendly rescue workers who served as a front for Islamist terrorists financed by the Gulf monarchies in 2015–2018.
It is striking that in Europe no media ever questioned such anti-Chinese narrative, which has been set up like a clockwork, if only to dismantle the mechanisms, the financing and the networks, not whitewashing the Chinese regime but shedding light on the hidden strings of this geopolitical battle with the Uighur people being only an involuntary instrument and collateral victims.
In any case, businesses and the economy should not be held hostage in a war they bear (this time at least) no responsibility whatsoever.
| * Guy Mettan is a political scientist and journalist. He started his journalistic career with Tribune de Genève in 1980 and was its director and editor-inchief in 1992–1998. From 1997 to 2020, he was director of “Club Suisse de la Presse” in Geneva. Nowadays he is a freelance journalist and author. |
1 Cf. example: Ajit Singh, The “Independent” Report Claiming Uyghur Genocide, The Grayzone, 21 March 2021; Gareth Porter and Max Blumenthal, “The US “Genocide” Accusation Against China, Consortium News, 21 February 2021