The West Is Everything They Told You China Was

Good day, Aontacht readers,

And for decades, the Western public has been fed a simple and digestible narrative. The world is divided into two kinds of countries: the benevolent, liberal, democratic, freedom-loving ones…and the bad ones. The bad ones are ‘authoritarian’. They silence dissent. They persecute journalists. They use state power to crush political opposition. They beat and arrest protesters. They censor speech they don’t like. China, for example. Or Russia. Or Iran.

The West, by contrast, is the shining beacon of all that is good, sat atop the hill, the place where human rights are sacrosanct, where the rule of law prevails, where a journalist can say what they like without fear.

This was always a convenient fiction.

But over the past few years, the mask has slipped, and what we are seeing now is not the exception but the rule, finally visible to those who were determined not to see it. The West is not the opposite of the authoritarian regimes it condemns. The West is everything they told you those ‘regimes’ were.

The Police Videos You Will Never See In Beijing

Let’s start with the videos, because the images do not lie and the Western media would prefer you not see them.

In Berlin, on the 16th of May 2026, thousands gathered to mark the 78th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba. It was a peaceful commemoration. The response from German police was captured on video: protesters were hit, pepper-sprayed, beaten in the face and body, with officers storming into the crowd repeatedly shoving cameras in peoples’ faces in an attempt to create mass panic.

One video shows multiple officers pinning a grieving Palestinian father to the ground as he screams, ‘Israel killed my son, and you are trying to kill me.’

This is not an isolated incident. Dozens of videos showing unnecessary and excessive police violence have emerged from Berlin protests over the past two years. The catalogue is grimly consistent: demonstrators punched, pepper-sprayed at close range, dragged by their limbs, pinned to the ground.

A parliamentarian shoved. A bystander floored. People arrested not for violence but for the words they chose.

Human rights officials at both the Council of Europe and the United Nations have written to German authorities to remind them of their obligation to protect rather than suppress freedom of expression. Germany’s response, delivered by a senior civil servant at the Interior Ministry, was:

‘I do not see any specific details in your letter to support your assessment.’

He needn’t look far. The videos are everywhere. Some long-time spectacle readers might even remember this article I wrote on the topic one year ago:

The spectacle

Why does the Berlin Police enjoy beating up women?

Read here

And the repression is only getting worse.

Then there is the Netherlands. On the 30th of May 2026, a video flooded social media showing a Dutch police officer grabbing a visibly pregnant woman by the arm and hurling her to the ground. The woman, in her final months of pregnancy, was the wife of Wesam Miqdad, a Palestinian refugee who fled Gaza, and she had approached officers simply to ask whether she could remain with her husband while he was taken into custody. The response was to slam her onto the pavement.

‘My wife is pregnant, my wife is pregnant!’ her husband screamed as he tried to reach her, which led to further police action involving a dog unit. The woman later safely gave birth to a baby girl named Reem. Thankfully.

But now you must ask yourself this: when was the last time you saw a video of Chinese police body-slamming a pregnant woman? When was the last time you saw Chinese police break a woman’s nose? The answer is never, because those videos would be weaponised by Western media as proof of the regime’s barbarism. But when the violence happens in Berlin and Amsterdam, the outrage is muted, and the next day the headlines return to condemning Beijing or Tehran or Moscow.

The Gaslighting: Von Der Leyen’s Masterclass

No discussion of Western hypocrisy is complete without Ursula von der Leyen, the unelected queen of the European Commission and an unequivocal master of the genre.

There is a video, widely circulated at this point, of von der Leyen being heckled by a member of the public. The man asks a difficult question. She responds with a smile and a line that was clearly rehearsed:

‘If this was in Russia, he would be arrested.’

The crowd laughed.

The man was arrested.

I wish I were exaggerating. The unelected leader of the European Commission, a woman who has never won a popular election in her life, lectured a heckler about Russian authoritarianism and then had him arrested for heckling her. You genuinely could not write it.

This is the same European Union that has added German journalist Hüseyin Doğru to its sanctions list for the crime of ‘Russian disinformation.’ Doğru, who runs a media platform called Red, has had his bank accounts frozen. His wife’s accounts were frozen. His mother’s pension savings are inaccessible. He is permitted a mere €506 per month as an ‘existential minimum.’ He cannot work. He cannot receive money or even food donations, as that could violate the sanctions. He has three young children.

When challenged on this disgraceful farce, the EU argued that it does not need to prove Doğru is a Russian agent as it is sufficient, they claimed, that Doğru cannot prove he is not. The burden of proof has been reversed. A German citizen, a journalist, is being treated as guilty unless he can demonstrate his innocence with evidence that does not exist. If this happened in China, the Western media would be screaming about it but it’s not, it’s happening in Germany and the silence is deafening.

The Censorship Machine

On the 22nd of February 2026, at the BAFTA Film Awards, filmmaker Akinola Davies Jr. won Outstanding Debut for his film My Father’s Shadow. He dedicated the award to those whose parents migrated to obtain a better life, spoke of economic migrants, conflict migrants, those under occupation and persecution, and ended with:

‘For Nigeria, for London, the Congo, Sudan, free Palestine.’

The BBC broadcast, naturally, cut that entire section. Viewers at home saw Davies thank his family. They did not hear the words ‘free Palestine.’ The BBC’s explanation was procedural at best, saying the ceremony ran long and that other speeches were cut. But as one industry outlet noted, while an involuntary shout of the N-word by a man with Tourette’s was kept in the broadcast, ‘free Palestine’ was removed. This is a public broadcaster, funded by a licence fee every British household is legally required to pay, deciding which political statements are permissible and which are not. This is state censorship and we don’t buy the bullshit.

The Arab Centre for Research and Policy Studies recently noted that civil society across the West is ‘increasingly subject to tighter constraints: the enactment of anti-protest laws, suppression of critical journalism, and increased pressure on academic institutions have become more pronounced, particularly following Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.’ In Germany, definitions of antisemitism have been broadened to encompass human rights movements and individuals advocating for Palestinian rights, with authorities reportedly using vague antisemitism allegations to justify deporting pro-Palestinian activists without criminal convictions. In the United States, legislation conflating criticism of Israeli policies with antisemitism risks, in the words of the researchers, ‘free speech and academic freedom.’ Their conclusion: these developments suggest ‘a recalibration of democratic governance, stripping electoral legitimacy of traditional liberal guarantees.’ In plain English, the West is becoming authoritarian, and it is using the very tools it once claimed were the exclusive domain of its enemies.

The Imperial Boomerang

All of this, of course, is not an accident. It is the logical conclusion of an empire that has spent decades projecting violence outward while maintaining a fiction of domestic innocence. You cannot build a surveillance state to monitor ‘terrorists’ abroad without that apparatus eventually being turned on your own citizens. You cannot normalise the use of drones to kill people in other countries without normalising the use of force as a first resort at home. You cannot treat international law as optional for your allies without eventually treating domestic law as optional for your political opponents.

So the next time you hear a Western politician condemn China for silencing dissent, ask them about Hüseyin Doğru. Ask them about the BBC cutting ‘free Palestine’ from a BAFTA speech. Ask them about the pregnant woman body-slammed in Amsterdam and the demonstrators being brutalised in Berlin. Ask them about von der Leyen’s heckler being arrested after she joked that in Russia, he would be arrested. The West is everything they told you China was. The only difference is that the Empire has better public relations.

And on that thought, I’ll let you go.

This article was originally published in The Spectacle.