On July 25, Max Blumenthal, the founder and editor of the far-left news site The Grayzone, went on Going Underground, a current affairs show broadcast by the Russian state-controlled TV channel RT. On air, he questioned the scale of the detention of Uyghurs in camps in China's northwestern Xinjiang province.
“I don’t have reason to doubt that there’s something going in Xinjiang, that there could even be repression,” said Blumenthal. “But we haven’t seen the evidence for these massive claims.” He went on to describe reports of Beijing’s abuse of Uyghurs as “the hostile language of a Cold War, weaponizing a minority group.”
Blumenthal’s statements met with outrage online and many social media users accused him of ignoring one of the largest-scale human rights violations of the 21st century.
This is not the first time a writer from The Grayzone has sought to refute or downplay reports of Beijing’s actions in Xinjiang, and there is precedent for Blumenthal’s words. With a hardline anti-imperialist ideology and a deep-seated antagonism towards U.S. interventionist foreign policy, The Grayzone has followed a similar path on Syria, challenging reports of atrocities by the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. What is more, these fringe views appear to be creeping into other areas of the American left.
