Originally Posted by
PwrdOn
Enough for what? The only honest thing you've said this entire conversation is admitting that you had no idea who the Uyghurs were before you became such a spirited advocate for them.
And maybe you're a bit confused, but I was giving a list of things that I would personally criticize China for. I'm not quite sure what it is with the media and the foreign policy blob and their fetish for "holding China accountable" because I see that phrase in pretty much every article I read and it's just tiresome beyond belief. Who exactly is going to hold China accountable, and how? If you're expecting some Nuremberg type scenario, that kind of requires winning a war first and then subjecting them to victor's justice, something which I have been assured will never happen under Joe Biden's watch.
Let's be very clear about something here - the #1 threat that China poses to this country is that, by acting as a bogeyman on which we can blame pretty much everything, they prevent us from engaging in any kind of self-reflection or self-improvement, so that over time we will grow ignorant, stupid, and weak, while the Chinese continue to move forward. We all laughed when Trump claimed that climate change was a Chinese hoax, but the Biden administration's China policy isn't any more intellectually rigorous. So when people go around claiming that the coronavirus was a Chinese bioweapon, or that 5G towers are Chinese spy stations, or that "stop Asian hate" was a Chinese propaganda op, then ultimately that hurts us far more than it hurts the Chinese. When we hype up this Uyghur genocide narrative while brushing aside Australian war crimes as merely the product of rogue soldiers caught in the fog of war, we shouldn't be surprised when our efforts to form an alliance of Muslim nations to combat the Chinese falls flat on its face. When we start lecturing African nations about how China building ports and railroads is "neocolonialism" when they are very well aware of what colonialism is and who did it to them, that just makes it even harder for our investment projects there to get off the ground. When we go around telling poor countries that Chinese vaccines don't work and that they should wait for Pfizer shipments that will never come, that kills people and makes these countries question our commitment to public health. Yes, the Chinese make plenty of diplomatic blunders as well, but if there's one thing that country understands better than just about anyone else, it's how dangerous it can be to have an overblown sense of self-importance and invincibility, and there's nothing they'd like more than to see us make the same mistake.
I think it's unfair to characterize my posts as a tirade. Yeah I typed a lot, but I wasn't really expecting to change anyone's mind and just wanted to have a discussion about some topics I happen to know a bit about. But evidently, nobody is really all that interested in delving deep into the details of the Ili Rebellion or the Sino-Vietnamese War, or the history of the South China Sea dispute. You guys just seemed to want to declare that China was self-evidently bad, and that I was a propaganda spewing bot for saying otherwise, and that was the extent to which you would engage with any of these topics. And yeah, I suppose if you think that I'm just a paid propagandist, then there's not really much I can do to convince you otherwise. Really, I am just a guy who is sick of getting PERSONALLY blamed, as a American citizen no less, for every last cartoonishly evil thing people assume China to be doing, and I assure you I WISH I was making that line up. If anything, that actually compelled me to do a lot more research into these topics than I otherwise would, so I think I am a lot more informed about the situation now than I would be if I could just ignore it like all of you have, so some good has come out of it at least.