All purpose news and politics thread part VI: This Is Not The Time For Posing

[PwrdOn]

You're right. I mean, I haven't been able to read Borderland Capitalism yet. I'm poor and don't have $65 to buy it.

I agree that the roots of fetishization of Asian Women is deep and long-standing, and it goes back well into the 19th century and even earlier, but I'd argue that current wave of Anti-Chinese rhetoric is mostly driven by the pandemic and a year of a government that was irresponsibly fanning its flames. Assuredly, it sits atop the last few decades of Anti-Chinese/Anti-Asian BS pushed by people for whom its politically useful, just as its politically useful to you now to ask for silence about Xinjiang by weaponizing a shooting for the sake of trying to win a message board argument. I'm pretty sure that if you were to ask most people, they'd simply say 'Uighur who?', so trying to hang the shooting around the necks of people discussing the Uighurs on a politics message board is just plain disgusting, alongside you showing your in ability to offer a concrete argument against the accusation beyond your personal assurance that 'they're gonna be okay' because of course China's government would never engage in racist practices towards a minority population that meets the UN definition of a genocide.

The only reason it would be politically useful for me to try and defend the Chinese government is if you assume that American society automatically assigns collective guilt on the part of any minority ethnicity for whatever crimes it wants to ascribe to them, and clearly there isn't any evidence of THAT ever happening...

But in all seriousness, we've heard this insane atrocity porn propaganda so many times before with Falun Gong, Tibet, Hong Kong, or what have you, and in each case nobody could ever be bothered to verify any of the claims that were being made. When you put that into the greater context where EVERY designated enemy of the United States is just accused of doing the most cartoonishly evil shit and the deeply concerned American public will just swallow it whole every time and rush into conflict after conflict with utter disregard for the well-being of the people they're supposed to be protecting, it really does just start making your head explode. By contrast, when it came to Nazi Germany, the US and the rest of the Western world pretended like they didn't even know the Holocaust was happening despite ample rhetoric from the Nazis stating exactly their intentions, and didn't join the war until the Axis powers attacked them. As you pointed out, most people have no idea who the Uyghurs even are, yet I'm supposed to believe that they have suddenly developed a deep concern for their well-being based on a few articles they read in the NY Times? It's taken us centuries of living together to even be able to see our neighbors and co-workers as fellow human beings who deserve to be treated with respect, so excuse me if I'm going to be a bit skeptical that Americans genuinely care about a group of people whom the vast majority wouldn't even be able to recognize on the street, and as recently as 2013 were actually being detained and tortured, not in China, but in Guantanamo Bay.

[OopsIdiditagain]

The argument was that there is no on-going genocide in Xinjiang, and people who are saying that there is are, are indulging in anti-Chinese rhetoric that leads to things like the shooting in Atlanta.

The argument is that "the west" is just as bad as China and Russia.

[OopsIdiditagain]

The only reason it would be politically useful for me to try and defend the Chinese government is if you assume that American society automatically assigns collective guilt on the part of any minority ethnicity for whatever crimes it wants to ascribe to them, and clearly there isn't any evidence of THAT ever happening...

But in all seriousness, we've heard this insane atrocity porn propaganda so many times before with Falun Gong, Tibet, Hong Kong, or what have you, and in each case nobody could ever be bothered to verify any of the claims that were being made. When you put that into the greater context where EVERY designated enemy of the United States is just accused of doing the most cartoonishly evil shit and the deeply concerned American public will just swallow it whole every time and rush into conflict after conflict with utter disregard for the well-being of the people they're supposed to be protecting, it really does just start making your head explode. By contrast, when it came to Nazi Germany, the US and the rest of the Western world pretended like they didn't even know the Holocaust was happening despite ample rhetoric from the Nazis stating exactly their intentions, and didn't join the war until the Axis powers attacked them. As you pointed out, most people have no idea who the Uyghurs even are, yet I'm supposed to believe that they have suddenly developed a deep concern for their well-being based on a few articles they read in the NY Times? It's taken us centuries of living together to even be able to see our neighbors and co-workers as fellow human beings who deserve to be treated with respect, so excuse me if I'm going to be a bit skeptical that Americans genuinely care about a group of people whom the vast majority wouldn't even be able to recognize on the street, and as recently as 2013 were actually being detained and tortured, not in China, but in Guantanamo Bay.

What's happening in Hong Kong is "atrocity porn propaganda", it's Hong Kongers using social media to speak out on their own movement.

[Kirby101]

Elaine Chao was already Deputy Secretary of Transportation when she met Mitch McConnell.

What are you talking about? Are you saying being married to Mitch had nothing to do with being Sec. of Labor under Bush or Sec of Trans under Trump? She was named Sec. of Transportation by Trump regardless of the obvious conflicts of interest.
She did help her families company while in office and should have been prosecuted.
https://www.courier-journal.com/stor...ll/6921349002/
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/03/u...al-report.html

[CaptainEurope]

It's just hard for me to believe that Westerners who love to rail against the crimes of foreign governments genuinely care about human rights when they know so little of what's going on beyond a few sensationalist headlines, while ignoring much more longstanding and well-documented abuses occurring closer to home, things that we have actually have the power to change if we make enough noise about it. Not to mention so many of the accusations seem to fit exactly Goebbels' maxim to "accuse the other side of that which you are guilty," do you really believe that China is using slave labor to pick cotton, sterilizing women without their knowledge, running secret torture camps, and demolishing mosques, all based on conjecture with no solid evidence? Seems a bit too on the dot, doesn't it?

I feel like a lot of it has to do with us needing some kind of coping mechanism so that we can continue to believe that we're the good guys and that while this country might have flaws, we're headed on the right track and maybe given another couple hundred years, might come somewhat close to fulfilling the principles we were supposedly founded on. Because if we can't cast some enemy nation as the evil empire that we're heroically resisting, then we must be the evil empire, and all the shit we've been up to like funding terrorists and assassinating world leaders wasn't in service of some greater noble cause but just self-serving dickery. Getting back to my original post, if we have to go out of our way to ascribe sinister motives to something as evidently benevolent as donating vaccines to poor countries, what are our real motives here? Are we genuinely concerned that the people receiving the vaccines might become future wage slaves for Russian and Chinese owned companies, or are we just bitter that this makes us look incredibly selfish by comparison for hoarding so many doses?

Serious question:

Would you consider yourself a "tankie"?

[CaptainEurope]

I don't have any answers but just wanted to say this is a really great post.

Weird, I found it inhumane and naive?

[CaptainEurope]

The Uyghurs will be fine, if there was any evidence that China was actually killing them then you would surely know about it, given how much ink the press has spilled on this topic based on loose conjecture. Now, of course China will never let them break off their own independent country, and for some Uyghurs that is in and of itself an intolerable oppression that must be fought by any means necessary, but carving the world up into racially homogenous ethnostates has never worked before I don't know why we would want to start doing it again.

And yes of course the West should stay silent on this issue because we should have learned from the Iraq War that when you start throwing around outlandish accusations without evidence, that tends to have some pretty dangerous consequences, and when we inevitably realize that the accusations have been bogus all along, we won't be able to take a do over for all the damage that they caused. Case in point, all of the anti-China rhetoric these days has already led to a spike in hate crimes and led to the murder of several American citizens, and ratcheting up the tensions with baseless accusations of genocide will only make that worse.

This is despicable.

You know, 80 years ago there also wasn't a lot of solid evidence ab out what was going on in my country.

[Kirby101]

I don't mind some old America bashing. But PwrdOn has lost me with his defense of the Chines government.

[CaptainEurope]

The UK on its own has given more to COVAX...around 600 million Euros at current exchange rates. So I don’t think it’s completely unfair to argue that at least some vaccines arriving in poorer countries were funded by UK government.

But in general..I’m not sure what to make of overall Western response to “vaccine saga” so far. Partly it’s a joyous saga, the widespread sharing of scientific and technological expertise to develop use-able vaccines so quickly. But part of me is depressed by knowing distribution is so unfair.

Well, Germany individually has pledged 2.1 billion for COVAX so I guess we win that measuring contest.

[PwrdOn]

Serious question:

Would you consider yourself a "tankie"?

What you would label as a "tankie" doesn't actually exist. There's nobody out there who just simps for authoritarian dictators and advocates for oppressing and murdering people for no reason, that this was your takeaway from reading my post just speaks to the ignorance and lack of understanding on your part.

This is despicable.

You know, 80 years ago there also wasn't a lot of solid evidence ab out what was going on in my country.

Um, what? The Nazis were never shy with their antisemitic rhetoric and some pretty glaring red flags like the passage of the Nuremberg Laws and Kristallnacht happened well before the war started. I get that some people believe that something similar MUST be happening in Xinjiang but that's simply not the case. The official government propaganda has always been that Uyghurs and Han Chinese have always lived together in peace and that it is only radical CIA-funded terrorists that want to break apart that harmony for nefarious purposes. Of course, this is also not really true either, but assuming that this means that they're covering up a genocide is a bit of stretch, don't you think?

[CaptainEurope]

What you would label as a "tankie" doesn't actually exist. There's nobody out there who just simps for authoritarian dictators and advocates for oppressing and murdering people for no reason, that this was your takeaway from reading my post just speaks to the ignorance and lack of understanding on your part.



Um, what? The Nazis were never shy with their antisemitic rhetoric and some pretty glaring red flags like the passage of the Nuremberg Laws and Kristallnacht happened well before the war started. I get that some people believe that something similar MUST be happening in Xinjiang but that's simply not the case. The official government propaganda has always been that Uyghurs and Han Chinese have always lived together in peace and that it is only radical CIA-funded terrorists that want to break apart that harmony for nefarious purposes. Of course, this is also not really true either, but assuming that this means that they're covering up a genocide is a bit of stretch, don't you think?

No, I don't think so. I think the evidence of genocide is very compelling.

[Kirby101]

What you would label as a "tankie" doesn't actually exist. There's nobody out there who just simps for authoritarian dictators and advocates for oppressing and murdering people for no reason, that this was your takeaway from reading my post just speaks to the ignorance and lack of understanding on your part.



Um, what? The Nazis were never shy with their antisemitic rhetoric and some pretty glaring red flags like the passage of the Nuremberg Laws and Kristallnacht happened well before the war started. I get that some people believe that something similar MUST be happening in Xinjiang but that's simply not the case. The official government propaganda has always been that Uyghurs and Han Chinese have always lived together in peace and that it is only radical CIA-funded terrorists that want to break apart that harmony for nefarious purposes. Of course, this is also not really true either, but assuming that this means that they're covering up a genocide is a bit of stretch, don't you think?

This is poorly argued. No one is taking what the Chinese is saying at face value, nor saying it is evidence of the opposite. Rather I look at places like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and reporting on Chinese internal documents to say there are atrocities ongoing.
Again, "The West Bad" is not a defense of the Chinese, or in your words, assuming that this means that they're not committing genocide is a bit of stretch, don't you think?

[PwrdOn]

This is poorly argued. No one is taking what the Chinese is saying at face value, nor saying it is evidence of the opposite. Rather I look at places like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and reporting on Chinese internal documents to say there are atrocities ongoing.
Again, "The West Bad" is not a defense of the Chinese, or in your words, assuming that this means that they're not committing genocide is a bit of stretch, don't you think?

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and most of the accusations of genocide in Xinjiang are based off of grainy satellite photos and witness testimonials. For example, the claim that millions of Uyghurs are being detained comes from interviewing a total of eight people in different villages who claimed that about 10% of their villages had been imprisoned, and then this was extrapolated to the entire Uyghur population to arrive at the oft-cited figure of 1 million, which then has just been arbitrarily inflated to 2, 3, 5, 10 million depending on who you ask.

What I don't get though, is why so many Western commentators on this subject seem to WANT there to be a genocide in Xinjiang, just like they want to believe that covid was leaked from a lab in Wuhan, or that organs are being harvested from Falun Gong prisoners, or that protesters are being murdered on the streets of Hong Kong. If it's exposing crimes against humanity that you care about, I think that you'll find all that and more much closer to home, whether you're talking about the child separation at the border, or the prison industrial complex, or the continuing drone strikes against schools and hospitals.

Maybe you didn't see how this conversation started, but it was when we were talking about vaccine diplomacy and I pointed out that Russia and China had donated 800 million doses to poor countries and the US and UK had donated none, and the immediate response I got was "Oh yeah? But what about the Uyghurs? Checkmate tankie!" If you can't see how fabricated claims of genocide poison the public discourse to serve imperialist aims, then I don't really know what else to say.

[Kirby101]

I agree that the Uyghar atrocities are not a good response for the vaccine debate.
I disagree with you about down playing the evidence as nothing but western propaganda. Your dismissal of the evidence and that the Chinese are innocent hampers any of your arguments.
Just as Russia donating vaccines to other countries doesn't negate Russia from being a bad actor or Putin from being a murderer.
And yeah, America doesn't smell like a rose.

[AnakinFlair]

Um, what? The Nazis were never shy with their antisemitic rhetoric and some pretty glaring red flags like the passage of the Nuremberg Laws and Kristallnacht happened well before the war started. I get that some people believe that something similar MUST be happening in Xinjiang but that's simply not the case. The official government propaganda has always been that Uyghurs and Han Chinese have always lived together in peace and that it is only radical CIA-funded terrorists that want to break apart that harmony for nefarious purposes. Of course, this is also not really true either, but assuming that this means that they're covering up a genocide is a bit of stretch, don't you think?

People outside of Germany knew about the Anti-Semitism. They didn't know about the concentration camps or the extent of Germany's extermination of the Jews and other 'undesirable' minorities.