This 👇 is insane and really illustrates how far France has fallen. France's Foreign Minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, now says that anyone "who is distrustful of the European Union" is basically a useful idiot for Putin. The implication being that distrust or criticism of the EU is not a legitimate democratic position anymore but a form of collaboration with "the enemy." Which is absolutely insane given France's recent history: De Gaulle was famously opposed to the very kind of supranational Europe that the EU has become, and so have been a number of major French political figures both on the right (like Philippe Séguin) or the left (like Jean-Pierre Chevènement). Not to mention the 55% of French voters who rejected the EU Constitution in 2005 (and whose vote was ignored because that very constitution was adopted later on regardless under the Treaty of Lisbon). In effect, by Barrot's criteria - heck, by the current French government criteria since he is speaking as the government's Foreign Minister - De Gaulle, Séguin, Chevènement and 55% of the French population would be classified as Russian agents 🤦 The craziest aspect of it, if you take a step back, is that, fundamentally, people like De Gaulle who opposed EU integration did so because they cared first and foremost about France - about its independence, its sovereignty, its right to govern itself. Calling that a form of foreign allegiance is just absurd and a complete inversion of reality: love of country and patriotism is being rebranded as treason. More worryingly, this also shows the current state of the "democratic debate" in France, which is neither democratic, nor a debate. Not democratic because this is the French government treating legitimate and reasonable positions as treason. And not a debate because there's nothing left to debate: the EU has become a dogma, and distrust of it has become disloyalty and taboo. One can legitimately be afraid that this is the road to a form of totalitarian ideology across Europe, dressed up as centrism, where the only acceptable position is unquestioning loyalty to supranational institutions whose defenders, tellingly, would rather question the patriotism of their critics than submit themselves to the verdict of the people.

This is just pure unadulterated propaganda by the BBC. And it takes literally 2 seconds to debunk: go on Xiaohongshu (or any other Chinese social networks), type a keyword related to the mudslide (I typed "泥石流", "mudslide") and you'll see thousands of posts with footage about it - including from state media (the first post in my screenshot is from People's Daily)🤷 Even crazier - which shows the extent to which the BBC thinks its audience are complete idiots - their lead example of footage that supposedly isn't being shown in China is… footage that comes from China! This is how they open their article: "The dramatic footage was almost impossible to miss. A torrent of water tearing through Gyirong Port, one of the main border crossings between Nepal and Tibet, sweeping away all in its path as hundreds of people fled for their lives. The scenes, captured by CCTV cameras, quickly spread on social media and onto screens around the world. Except here, in China." We've all seen this footage, which is Chinese CCTV footage, released first in China, and extremely widely spread on Chinese social media (it's in the 3rd post on my Xiaohongshu screenshot below 👇). It's literally insane: they think you're stupid enough not to notice that they're using Chinese footage as their lead example to claim China isn't showing footage 🤦 This also all points to a deeper issue: China does have a completely different and largely insulated media ecosystem with little overlap with Western media, and extremely little reach in the West. Which means it's trivially easy for outlets like the BBC to make false claims about what's happening in China that: a) their readers will never check: it's actually difficult to for foreigners to access Chinese social networks, if only for the language barrier. b) won't be challenged by the other side: Chinese media has so little reach in the West that there's essentially no one to push back. It's like lying about someone who isn't in the room. That's the irony when you read about "Chinese propaganda": the bigger issue is that it actually doesn't really exist - at least not in a material way - and therefore falsehoods about China can be written with an impunity that they could never get away with if they were writing about, say, France or Germany. As I keep repeating, this is actually mostly bad for the West because - given the importance of China in the world today - this is a country you simply cannot afford to misunderstand. Bad journalism about China is a strategic liability. So, in a somewhat ironic way, if there were one genuine "China threat" worth worrying about, it's this: that China is not great at communicating about itself with the outside world and Western publics are left with garbage BBC articles to understand it.