Excavating the Empire’s Lies: How Revolutionary Propaganda is Forged from Imperialist Deceit

How Imperialist Propaganda Works: Deconstructing the ‘China Slowed the Earth’ Narrative

At Weaponized Information, we don’t exist just to expose the lies of empire. We exist to teach the people how to fight on the ideological front, how to break down the enemy’s weapons, and how to forge revolutionary propaganda out of the shards of their deceit. We don’t merely react to their narratives — we seize them, we dissect them, and we turn them into firepower for the liberation of the oppressed masses.

Today, we take one glaring example from the information battlefield: the claim that “China’s Three Gorges Dam has slowed the Earth’s rotation and endangered the planet.“ This absurd story, which recently circulated through Western corporate media like a virus, offers a perfect case study in how imperialist propaganda operates in the age of technofascism.

We’re going to show you exactly how these narratives are engineered, how to extract the tiny shards of scientific truth buried under mountains of ideological filth, and how to rebuild those truths into weapons of revolutionary consciousness. Because the truth — the real truth — is that it’s not China threatening the Earth. It’s the dying U.S. empire and its capitalist-imperialist system that endangers all life on this planet. And their propaganda machine is working overtime to hide that fact.

This is not just an analysis. This is a weaponization of critical thought. Welcome to the battlefield.

II. Dissecting the Propaganda

To understand how imperialist propaganda functions, we must always begin with material analysis. Propaganda is never random. It arises out of the concrete needs of the ruling class, and it follows a logical structure designed to serve their interests. In the case of the “China slows the Earth’s rotation” narrative, we can break down the propaganda machine into four interconnected parts: the producer, the disseminator, the framing, and the emotional target.

A. Who Produced the Study?

The original scientific findings referenced in the story were conducted by researchers affiliated with NASA — the United States’ National Aeronautics and Space Administration. It is critical to recognize that NASA is not simply a “neutral scientific body.” It was born in 1958 out of Cold War competition with the Soviet Union, part of a broader military-industrial complex designed to assert U.S. dominance over Earth and space. As historian Walter McDougall documented in …The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (1985), NASA’s creation was explicitly political and strategic, not purely scientific.

Today, NASA remains deeply intertwined with U.S. national security priorities. As recently as 2020, NASA formalized its cooperation with the Pentagon through the Department of Defense–NASA Memorandum of Understanding, reinforcing its role in advancing U.S. strategic military objectives, particularly regarding space weaponization. Thus, any scientific finding produced under the auspices of NASA must be approached critically, situating it within the geopolitical interests of U.S. imperialism.

B. Who Publicized It?

The next link in the propaganda chain is the imperial media apparatus. After the initial findings regarding the Three Gorges Dam’s impact were quietly published years ago in scientific journals, it was Western mainstream media — CNN, Business Insider, The Guardian, and countless others — that resurrected and sensationalized the information. Headlines blared variations of the theme: “China Slows Earth’s Rotation”, “Massive Chinese Project Alters Planet’s Balance”, and so forth.

This is not journalism. This is ideological warfare. As Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky meticulously demonstrated in Manufacturing Consent, the Western media does not act as a neutral conveyor of information. It acts as a filtering and framing mechanism for the interests of capital and empire. The ruling class owns the media, and it uses it to manufacture public fear, resentment, and hatred toward whatever force threatens its dominance — in this era, China is enemy number one.

C. How Was It Framed?

Note the language employed: “unprecedented global consequences,” “massive disruption,” “environmental threat,” “scientists deeply concerned.” None of these phrases emerge organically from the raw scientific data. The actual measurable shift in Earth’s rotation due to the Three Gorges Dam is approximately 0.06 microseconds in the length of a day, and an axis shift of roughly 2 centimeters — effects so tiny they require the most sensitive instruments on Earth to detect, and pose no threat whatsoever to life on the planet (NASA Earth Observatory – Three Gorges Dam).

Yet, by using catastrophic language, the media creates an emotional landscape of fear and anxiety. This is a deliberate technique rooted in psychological operations theory: when the ruling class wishes to mobilize public opinion against an adversary, it does not rely on reasoned argument. It relies on emotional terrorism — saturating the public with feelings of imminent danger tied to the enemy’s actions.

Thus, the insignificant scientific fact (mass redistribution affects Earth’s spin very slightly) is weaponized into an ideological sledgehammer (China is a planetary menace).

D. What Was the Emotional Message?

The propaganda is not fundamentally about the dam, or even about science. It is about conditioning the Western population to internalize a simple, powerful emotional lesson: China is dangerous. China threatens the Earth itself. China cannot be trusted with infrastructure, with development, with power. China must be contained, sanctioned, sabotaged, or even — when the time comes — attacked militarily under the banner of “saving humanity.”

This is classical colonial psychology. The Western ruling class has always justified its crimes — from the colonization of Africa to the atom bombings of Japan — by first framing the victims as existential threats to civilization itself. As Frantz Fanon taught us, imperialism is not just an economic theft; it is a psychological war waged against the minds of the imperialists’ own population to secure consent for conquest.

Today, in the twilight of U.S. hegemony, the same formula is being applied once more. China builds a dam to generate clean energy for 500 million people? Then China must be accused of “tilting the Earth.” Iran helps Syria resist imperialist occupation? Then Iran must be labeled a “terror state.” Russia seeks to defend its borders? Then Russia must be depicted as reviving Nazism. The facts do not matter. Only the emotional conditioning matters. Only the reproduction of imperialist consent matters.

III. Extracting the Scientific Truth

Dialectical materialism teaches us that within every ideological distortion there exists a kernel of objective reality. Our task is to extract that kernel without becoming contaminated by the ruling class’s framing. Scientific truth is not the enemy — but the way imperialism frames that truth, weaponizes it, and manipulates it for political ends must be exposed and destroyed.

A. What the Science Actually Says

Let’s start with the raw material facts:

• China’s Three Gorges Dam holds approximately 39.3 billion cubic meters of water at full capacity, weighing about 87 trillion pounds (NASA Earth Observatory – Three Gorges Dam).
• This mass, being redistributed inland from the oceans to the interior of the Earth’s crust, has an extremely small measurable impact on Earth’s rotation and axial tilt.
• According to NASA geophysicist Dr. Benjamin Fong Chao (2004), the dam could have:

• Increased the length of a day by about 0.06 microseconds.
• Shifted the Earth’s axis by about 2 centimeters (0.8 inches).

In plain terms: the effect is so minuscule that no human being would ever notice it without specialized instruments. A microsecond is one-millionth of a second. A two-centimeter axis shift is less than the width of a human finger — on a planet 12,742 kilometers (7,918 miles) wide.

No climatic events. No environmental disasters. No existential threats. No mass disruption of Earth’s systems.

B. Comparing to Other Events

Let’s situate this scientifically:

• The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake (9.1 magnitude) shifted the Earth’s mass so violently that it shortened the length of the day by 2.68 microseconds and shifted the Earth’s axis by about 7 centimeters (NASA JPL – Earthquake Effects).
• Ongoing melting of Greenland’s ice sheet due to global warming is shifting mass toward the oceans at such a scale that it causes Earth’s axis to wander at a rate of 10 centimeters per year (NASA Climate – Axis Drift from Climate Change).
• Massive groundwater depletion, especially in the United States (e.g., California’s Central Valley), has similarly altered the Earth’s rotation, contributing significantly more than the Three Gorges Dam to axis drift (AP News – Groundwater Depletion Shifts Earth’s Rotation).

Thus, from a strictly scientific standpoint, China’s dam is not a major disruptor of Earth’s system dynamics. It is a relatively small-scale redistribution of mass compared to natural geological processes and anthropogenic activities (especially those by Western industrial powers).

C. What the Media Does Not Tell You

The imperialist media never contextualizes the Three Gorges Dam in this way. They deliberately omit comparison to:

• U.S. nuclear bomb tests, which injected massive amounts of energy into the Earth’s crust and atmosphere.
• Decades of Western industrial extraction, drilling, and deforestation, which have caused far greater disruptions to the Earth’s mass balance and climate systems.
• The fact that the Three Gorges Dam provides clean hydroelectric energy to hundreds of millions of people — displacing carbon emissions that otherwise would have accelerated global climate catastrophe.

This is no accident. To acknowledge these facts would expose the hypocrisy of imperialist environmental discourse: a system that blames the Global South for ecological destruction while profiting from the ruin of the Earth through centuries of colonialism, capitalism, and war.

D. The Objective Truth

In dialectical terms, here’s the real synthesis:

• Truth: Yes, the Three Gorges Dam caused a microscopic shift in Earth’s rotation and axis. This is a scientifically measurable fact.
• Falsehood: No, this shift represents no existential threat. It is smaller than many other natural or anthropogenic shifts, and it is entirely within the dynamic, living, ever-changing nature of a geological planet.

Thus, while the raw data point is real, the emotional and ideological frame that China is “disrupting the planet” is a reactionary lie, constructed by imperialism to serve its strategic interests in the New Cold War.

Our task, as revolutionaries, is to recognize the fact while utterly rejecting the ruling class’s narrative. We seize the truth, strip away the imperialist illusions, and reframe it in service of proletarian and anti-colonial struggle.

IV. Understanding Why This Narrative Exists

Imperialist propaganda does not emerge spontaneously. It is not the product of isolated ignorance, nor a random distortion of facts. It is a systematic product of class struggle at the global level. To understand why the Western media machine fixates on demonizing China — even for imaginary planetary threats like slowing Earth’s rotation — we must analyze the material contradictions driving the U.S. empire into deeper desperation.

A. The Crisis of U.S. Imperialism

The United States is a capitalist empire in terminal decline. Decades of deindustrialization, financial parasitism, militarized overreach, and internal class contradictions have hollowed out its economic foundations. Productivity has stagnated. Wages have declined. Wealth inequality has reached levels unseen since the Gilded Age (Inequality.org – Income Inequality Facts).

Simultaneously, the U.S. is losing its unipolar grip over the world system. The rise of China, the expanding BRICS+ coalition, the de-dollarization efforts among Global South nations, and the erosion of Western political legitimacy have created a new historical moment: the slow death of imperialist hegemony and the birth of multipolarity.

This material decline compels the U.S. ruling class — the bourgeoisie of finance capital, technofascist monopolies, and the military-industrial complex — to resort to increasingly desperate measures. They can no longer dominate purely through economic superiority. Thus, they increasingly rely on psychological warfare, information warfare, and the weaponization of public opinion to hold the crumbling empire together.

B. Why China Is the Primary Target

China represents not merely a rival power. It represents an alternative model of development — one rooted in state-led planning, industrial policy, anti-poverty campaigns, and partial socialist governance structures. China’s poverty alleviation efforts alone lifted over 800 million people out of absolute poverty between 1980 and 2020 (World Bank – China Overview) — an achievement unmatched in human history.

For the imperialist bourgeoisie, this is intolerable. If the world sees that another path is possible — one not dictated by Wall Street, NATO, or IMF debt traps — the ideological foundations of Western supremacy crumble. China must therefore be painted as a threat: militarily, economically, ecologically, morally. Every act of Chinese advancement must be inverted into a tale of doom and destruction.

C. Psychological Operations and the Fear Reflex

Modern information warfare, as theorized in declassified U.S. military doctrine (U.S. Army FM 3-05.30 – Psychological Operations Manual), explicitly prioritizes the use of fear to manipulate target populations. Fear bypasses rational thought. It seizes emotional centers of the brain and drives people into defensive, reactionary postures — exactly the psychological state necessary to mobilize them for imperialist aggression.

Thus, framing China as a threat not just to jobs, not just to “freedom,” but to the entire planet’s survival — through narratives like the Three Gorges Dam “slowing Earth’s rotation” — is a direct application of psychological warfare theory. It is the deliberate cultivation of existential fear to rally domestic populations around the imperialist center, even as their material conditions deteriorate.

D. The Broader Pattern: Demonizing All Resistance

This tactic is not unique to China. It has been employed historically against every nation that resisted U.S. domination:

• Iraq was accused of having “weapons of mass destruction” (a lie used to justify invasion and mass murder).
• Venezuela was depicted as an existential threat to democracy despite facing brutal U.S. sanctions and sabotage.
• Russia is currently framed as attempting to “destroy Western civilization” simply for defending its sphere of influence from NATO encroachment.
• Cuba has been demonized for decades as a “terrorist state” for daring to build a socialist system in the Western hemisphere.

In each case, the goal is not simply to misinform. The goal is to morally prepare the domestic population for accepting war, sanctions, coups, sabotage, and mass suffering inflicted upon these nations in the name of “saving the world.”

E. Propaganda as Strategic Weapon

Dialectically, propaganda of this sort reflects a fundamental weakness. A confident, stable ruling class does not need to saturate its population with fear-based narratives. Only a declining empire, terrified of losing its grip, resorts to fabricating apocalyptic fantasies about its enemies.

Thus, the very hysteria of the “China slows Earth” narrative is itself proof that the empire is in crisis — not China, not the Earth.

Understanding this, we recognize that the information war against China is not merely ideological slander. It is preparation for the next stages of imperialist confrontation. It is an attempt to delay the inevitable collapse of U.S. hegemony through psychological mobilization of a bewildered, fearful domestic population.

But their lies cannot stop history. The wheels of dialectical motion are grinding the empire into dust, and no amount of manufactured fear will save them from the consequences of their own decline.

V. How to Deconstruct Imperialist Propaganda (Methodology for Readers)

Revolutionary consciousness is not simply about knowing the truth — it is about developing the method to discover it, repeatedly, under conditions of ideological warfare. Imperialism’s greatest weapon is not its bombs or banks; it is its ability to shape perception, to manufacture reality, to make the enslaved believe they are free and the free believe they are under attack.

At Weaponized Information, we are committed to teaching the people not just what to think, but how to think — scientifically, dialectically, and in service of liberation. Here is the method we use to dismantle the empire’s lies:

A. Always Begin With the Material Question: Who Benefits?

Propaganda is never random. It always serves someone’s material interests. When encountering any narrative — especially sensationalistic or fear-inducing ones — ask:

• Who produced this information? (What institutions, agencies, corporations?)
• Who publicized it and amplified it? (Which media outlets, platforms?)
• Who stands to benefit from the public believing this story? (What class forces, what governments, what capital interests?)

This immediately strips away the illusion of “neutrality” and re-situates the narrative within the ongoing class struggle.

B. Separate Objective Fact from Ideological Framing

Imperialist propaganda often embeds a tiny kernel of scientific truth within a massive structure of emotional manipulation. Our task is to surgically extract the fact while discarding the framing.

Example:

• Objective fact: The Three Gorges Dam caused a 0.06 microsecond increase in Earth’s day length.
• Propaganda framing: “China is endangering the entire planet.”

We accept the scientific measurement as real. We utterly reject the ideological interpretation imposed upon it by the ruling class.

C. Contextualize Every Fact Within Its Global and Historical Framework

No event stands alone. Every phenomenon must be situated within the broader motion of world history and global class struggle. Dialectical materialism demands that we ask:

• How does this event fit into the larger trajectory of imperialist decline and multipolar emergence?
• What historical parallels exist (e.g., previous propaganda campaigns against Iraq, Venezuela, the USSR)?
• What broader contradictions are at play (e.g., ecological destruction by Western powers, not China)?

Without historical context, propaganda remains effective. With historical context, it collapses under its own contradictions.

D. Examine the Emotional Payload

Every piece of propaganda carries an emotional payload designed to short-circuit rational analysis. Common emotional triggers include:

• Fear (e.g., “China threatens the planet!”)
• Righteous anger (e.g., “We must stop authoritarian regimes!”)
• Moral panic (e.g., “Freedom and democracy are under siege!”)

When you feel a strong emotional reaction to a piece of news, that is your signal to pause and analyze. Ask: “Why do they want me to feel this way? Whose interests does my emotional reaction serve?”

E. Always Reconstruct the Narrative From the Standpoint of the Oppressed

Once we have stripped the propaganda down to its facts and contradictions, our final task is to rebuild the narrative — but from the standpoint of the working class, the colonized peoples, and the forces of liberation.

We ask:

• What would this story look like if told from the perspective of the Global South?
• How would anti-imperialist forces frame these events?
• How does this information arm us in the struggle against colonialism, capitalism, and imperialism?

This is how revolutionary propaganda is born: by seizing the enemy’s information, stripping it of its lies, and reconstructing it in the service of human emancipation.

F. The Weaponized Information Method, Summarized:

1. Identify the producer, amplifier, and beneficiary of the information.
2. Separate raw facts from ideological framing.
3. Contextualize the information within historical and global contradictions.
4. Analyze the emotional manipulation embedded in the narrative.
5. Reframe the narrative from the standpoint of the oppressed and exploited.

This method does not just expose lies — it transforms them into weapons for revolutionary struggle.

VI. Rebuilding Revolutionary Propaganda

Deconstructing imperialist lies is only half of our task. The other half — the more important half — is to take the enemy’s discarded narratives and transform them into weapons for the people. Revolutionary propaganda is not simply a mirror reflecting injustice. It is a hammer that shapes consciousness. It does not passively expose the truth; it actively organizes, agitates, and mobilizes.

A. Flipping the Narrative: China as a Builder, the West as a Destroyer

If the imperialist media says China “slows the Earth’s rotation” by building infrastructure, we respond by reframing the entire question:

• While China builds the largest hydroelectric dam in human history, supplying clean energy to hundreds of millions, the U.S. builds drone factories, fossil fuel pipelines, and military bases on stolen land.
• While China’s projects shift the planet’s mass by 2 centimeters, U.S. nuclear bomb tests, oil extraction, and mass industrial pollution have devastated ecosystems, shortened Earth’s day more significantly, and brought the biosphere to the brink of collapse.
• While China lifts 800 million people out of poverty, the United States oversees the deepening immiseration of its own working class and the superexploitation of the Global South.

The real planetary threat is not Chinese infrastructure. It is Western imperialism.

B. Exposing the Hypocrisy of Western Environmental Narratives

The imperialists accuse China of disrupting the Earth while ignoring:

• The U.S. military is the single largest institutional emitter of carbon dioxide in the world (Costs of War Project – Pentagon Emissions).
• Western corporations continue large-scale deforestation, mining, and extraction across Africa, Asia, and Latin America with no concern for planetary balance.
• Over 50% of cumulative carbon emissions have historically been produced by the U.S. and Europe (Our World in Data – Cumulative CO₂ Emissions).

Thus, when the imperialists scream that China is destabilizing the planet, they are projecting their own crimes onto their adversary. This is psychological warfare 101: accuse others of what you yourself are guilty of.

C. Celebrating the Global South’s Infrastructure and Sovereignty

Rather than apologizing for the Three Gorges Dam, we celebrate it:

• It is a monumental achievement of public engineering, state planning, and environmental adaptation.
• It represents sovereign control over natural resources, independent of Western monopoly capital.
• It provides an alternative to Western-led capitalist development models based on endless war, debt, and underdevelopment.

Our narrative must present Chinese development — like the projects of Venezuela, Iran, Russia, Bolivia, and other Global South nations — as acts of resistance against imperial domination, and as part of humanity’s broader struggle for a multipolar, just, and sovereign world.

D. Weaponizing the Exposure: Building Consciousness and Mobilization

Our exposure of these contradictions must not remain an intellectual exercise. It must build revolutionary consciousness:

• Among workers in the imperial core, to recognize their real enemies are not foreign peoples, but their own ruling class.
• Among colonized and oppressed peoples, to affirm that their struggles for sovereignty and development are righteous and necessary.
• Among internationalist movements, to intensify solidarity with China and all forces resisting Western imperialist domination.

We do not merely “defend” China. We defend the global revolutionary process against the decaying empire of finance capital and settler colonialism. We build a new narrative, rooted not in fear but in hope, in struggle, in the rising tide of multipolar resistance.

E. Synthesis: Turning the Enemy’s Weapons Against Them

In the end, the imperialist narrative that “China is slowing the Earth” is a gift. It reveals the weakness, the desperation, and the ideological bankruptcy of the U.S. empire. It hands us, on a silver platter, the evidence of imperial decline — the shrillness of their lies, the nakedness of their fear.

It is our task to seize these discarded lies, reforge them into revolutionary weapons, and drive them back into the heart of the empire.

This is not just journalism. This is not just criticism. This is war by other means.

VII. Turning the Battle for Truth Into a Battle for Power

In this essay, we have walked through the anatomy of imperialist propaganda: from its imperial producers, to its emotional weapons, to its manipulative framing, to its strategic purpose of sustaining a dying empire. We have seen how a microscopic scientific fact — a dam shifting Earth’s axis by two centimeters — was twisted into an apocalyptic moral indictment of China itself.

But we have done more than just expose their lies. We have shown how to seize the truth buried beneath the rot, how to burn away the ideological illusions, and how to reconstruct reality from the standpoint of the global oppressed and exploited masses.

And this is the heart of revolutionary propaganda: to take what the empire means for death and turn it into a weapon of life. To take the enemy’s fear-mongering and transform it into courage. To take the empire’s narrative collapse and organize it into the revolutionary momentum of a new world struggling to be born.

We must understand:

• Imperialist propaganda is not merely error — it is strategy, it is warfare, it is class struggle at the level of consciousness.
• Our resistance must not be passive — it must be scientific, militant, organized, and aimed not just at exposing the empire but at overthrowing it.
• We are not neutral observers. We are combatants on the frontlines of an information war whose outcome will shape the future of humanity.

At Weaponized Information, we do not believe the battle for truth is an academic exercise. We believe it is a battlefield where the ruling class fights to maintain its dominion, and where we fight — with words, ideas, exposures, and organization — to destroy that dominion and build a world in the image of the people’s liberation.

The “China is slowing the Earth” story is just one skirmish in a larger war. They will invent a thousand more lies. They will summon a thousand more manufactured panics. They will unleash every weapon in their arsenal of deceit.

But we have our weapons too.
We have dialectical materialism.
We have revolutionary internationalism.
We have history and humanity on our side.

And most importantly, we have the iron will to turn every enemy attack into another step forward toward the destruction of empire and the birth of a liberated world.

The empire is crumbling.
The people are rising.
The future belongs to us.