When one is this far gone into a nationalist information bubble haze, it ceases to be productive to argue with them. Everything this poster demands to be “shown” is openly available in abundance from the relevant victims, decades of it. But offered such material they will quickly categorically dismiss it all and move goal posts again.
Yes when CCP undertakes an ethnonationalist settler campaign into Tibet and then instructs the settlers to “call for help”, it can be presented as Tibet “asking” for CCP authoritarianism. Same playbook as Russia in eastern Ukraine.
Yes, when the Xinjiang muslim population is terrorized by police state and concentration camps in a country with no free speech, it is hard to find locals publicly complaining and advocating for themselves.
1) I'm not Chinese, but I still have skin in the game for I am an internationlist.
2) Apart from a few google maps pictures, there are no pictures of those extermination camps.
3) Tibet has been part of China for centuries. Only since Mao landreforms that criminalised slavery have we been hearing about Tibet's "independence" movement.
4) If Xinjiang has concentration camps, then why are the Chinese allowing the UN , tourists and journalists in? Right now in Palestine, UN workers and journalists are shot on sight. Tourists are non existant. Muslim countries refuse to qualify any of the anti-terrorist measures as genocidal, but denounce the extermination campaign against the Palestinian people.
So as to keep the conversation productive, could you please define "China?" I have no idea what you're talking about when you say, "Tibet has been a part of China for centuries," but it sounds like the sort of ethnonationalism that the CPC likes to play with.
> If Xinjiang has concentration camps, then why are the Chinese allowing the UN , tourists and journalists in?
They didn't used to, I should know, I tried to go and was rejected.
Yes, Israel is committing a genocide in Palestine, and a far more violent one than the CPC committed against Xinjiang. The PLA did not snipe Uighur Muslim children in the back of head and did not airstrike hospitals in Xinjiang. It still committed a genocide.
Remember the words of Chen Quanguo: "Round up everyone who should be rounded up," immediately before ordering mass arrests.
I'm sorry, but I've had this conversation too many times, I will simply need to give you the challenge I've given everyone else. Please, can you canonically dismiss each of these sources? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Uyghurs_in_Chin... There are 402 of them. I understand it's a relatively monumental task, but that's the unfortunate reality you find yourself in when you argue against consensus, it's a lot of work. If you can't do that, then, I don't understand why I should believe you instead of the mountain of evidence against you. And no, "it's all CIA" doesn't really work considering the diversity of sources.
By the way, you never addressed imperialist threats against Taiwan. Could you please explain how threatening to invade a sovereign nation isn't imperialist?
As a marxist, I am obsessed about contradictions. I found two regarding the 402 sources that you've shown. I do not pretend to have read and understood all of them. I just scanned a couple titles, recognised a few famous newspapers.
1) Why is that that are very few if none of the sources you've linked are Islamic sources ? If Muslim people can recognise the plight of the Palestinian people, why can't they recognise the plight of the Uighurs?
2) Those sources are, for most of them, from countries that were extremely hostile to the idea of islamic and arabic independence movement. Why is that they wished for the continuation of Colonialism, wish for the destruction of the Palestinian people, and yet cheer for Uighur independence?
What we are facing here doesn't require spooks forcing journalists to write articles with a gun cocked against their head. This is gramscian cultural hegemony. Bourgeois journalists are reporting on those "facts" because it directly serves the interest of their wealthy Masters, and if we follow the rule of "don't bite the hand that feeds you" they would rarely if never contradict them.
Great! Me too. In fact I am a communist. That's why I can't enter the PRC without facing prison. Discussion of class consciousness is currently banned.
> 1) Why is that that are very few if none of the sources you've linked are Islamic sources ? If Muslim people can recognise the plight of the Palestinian people, why can't they recognise the plight of the Uighurs?
I don't understand how something like a newspaper can be "Islamic." As far as I know, all well-regarded news organizations are secular. So, I guess that is why none of the sources I've linked are "Islamic sources": because newspapers are secular.
Also, who is "Muslim people?" Every follower of Islam on planet earth? Why is it their specific responsibility to take notice of something in Xinjiang? Because the people have a religion of the same name? What's that matter?
This is what I meant when I wrote, "smells like ethnonationalism," this seems to me like an ideology that creates Statehood around people, and draws lines around people based on their ethnicity or religion. I prefer to take people as they are, rather than lump them into arbitrarily defined categories. Why aren't men in France doing anything to stop school shootings in America, which are committed almost entirely by men?
> Those sources are, for most of them, from countries that were extremely hostile to the idea of islamic and arabic independence movement.
Which sources? What does it mean to be hostile to "the islamic and arabic independence movement?" Which countries?
> Why is that they wished for the continuation of Colonialism
Who is "they?"
> Bourgeois journalists are reporting on those "facts" because it directly serves the interest of their wealthy Masters
And reports out of the PRC serve the interests of the CPC. The bourgeois journalists have provided substantially more evidence. The CPC restricted entry to Xinjiang, and when it finally acknowledged the existence of the reeducation camps, still never let foreign journalists in. As a Marxist, I choose the side with the most evidence.
By the way, some of the sources include: a PRC based associate professor in Fudan University (Chuchu Zhang), a newspaper famous for exposing corruption in South Africa (AmaBhungane), and other independent or NGO sources that I challenge you to claim are afraid to "bite the hand that feeds them." Did you know that Blackwater had plans to build a training center in Xinjiang? Did you know that it set aside 2.7$ million USD for establishing business in Xinjiang? Did you know that American companies helped build the surveillance system used in Xinjiang? (Thermo Fisher Scientific, Promega) But, it's the journalists that are bourgeois? (https://www.thenation.com/article/world/china-xinjiang-genoc...)
You still have not addressed PRC imperialism against Taiwan.
Let’s start with it being hell bent on annexing a peaceful independent island democracy, by force if needed, because of their own political insecurities.
The examples expand from there, but that one alone is sufficient.
In addition to the factors named by sibling comments, which I largely agree with, there is also the rise of short form entertainment on these platforms.
In 2004, social media was mostly text, images and low-fidelity game experiences like Mafia Wars. Compare to a bottomless scroll of immediate-attention-hook optimized, algorithmically targeted video content found on TikTok / Instagram.
The social behaviors got zombified out of the audience.
That's why I'm asking a question. For me the difference between then and now is then, 2015 it was still a thing that I saw hanging in the future, the OPM hack is what prompted me to write this. But if I had not written this then I would probably be writing it today on account of the ICE article currently on the front page.
All of those big tech companies have willingly given in to Trump and his band of goons and are cooperating at a scale that dwarfs anything the Germans could have ever wished for. The article shows the damage that one single field in one single file could do. Now multiply that by a couple of 1000.
The potential for an epic disaster is definitely there and even HN is apparently not immune to having its share of bootlickers and bootwearers.
you reference an ICE article "currently" on the front page, I think this comment would benefit from an explicit link to that discussion since it is ephemeral and I am unable to make sure I find the right one.
> All of those big tech companies have willingly given in to Trump and his band of goons and are cooperating at a scale that dwarfs anything the Germans could have ever wished for.
This is dangerously ahistorical and an offensive trivialization of the scale of human suffering inflicted by the Nazi regime. Fascism as practiced by the NSDAP involved the total integration of the state, the legal system, industry, media, and civil society into a single coercive apparatus in service of a genocidal war. German corporations were not “cooperating”; they were subordinated, aligned, and legally compelled within a one-party totalitarian state.
Yes, we substantially disagree on a contentious policy question. That does not change historical fact, nor does it make claims like “dwarfs anything the Germans could have wished for” anything other than profound historical illiteracy.
> Yes, we substantially disagree on a contentious policy question.
Ours is not merely a policy disagreement, you failed to provide a reasonable case for violating the 2nd, 4th, 5th, and 15th amendments. Indeed, you only seem to respond to comments when you can find a way to nitpick semantics and/or tone.
FWiW I come from a large extended family that racked up a lot of time on the pointy end of much of this; Desert Rats, Japanese PoW camps, jungle fighting, and a good deal of the post WWII ground work.
So I really do have to ask you, when you spoke of:
> The problem is the repeated use of Nazi analogies and grossly inflammatory language,
What, exactly, is up with the current US administration, Trump, Miller, clear throws to Blood Tribe language, veiled messages of racial purity and all that .. is it all "just a joke" ?
The early moves of both Stalin and Hitler, before either became the world villians we all know, was to extend their borders within their own countries so that they could sidestep "the law" of the land with their own personal squads of intesticial vagueness.
The administration is unquestionably veering unilateral and authoritarian and can no longer be trusted by allies.
Let's just stipulate everything you said is true. You do realize that the subordination of German corporations validates the quote you're ostensibly arguing against? Given your framing, German fascists would have loved the scale of cooperation that the American fascist executive branch is receiving from corporations, rather than have to do the difficult work of subordinating them.
The German population[1] was not unwilling; your error is not recognizing that it started with cooperation and grew until all of society was subordinated to the totalitarian state.
There was massive alignment across their society. What they “achieved” would not have been possible any other way.
As someone that abhors the destructive ideologies of that era — and has spent a considerable amount of time studying the history — it’s amusing ironic to be repeatedly compared to the predominant fascist ideology (not that you personally have done this) by people echoing the behavior of the predominate destructive left-wing ideology of the day.
From a historical perspective, it’s not the right-wing that I’m worried about now. I worry about the totalizing, agency-eroding, violence normalizing, and norm-enforcing (thought terminating) “ethics” that have taken firm hold of the left’s levers of power over the past 15 years.
[1] except for the German populations that they literally wanted to murder, of course.
I definitely have worries about far-left capture if/when a power vacuum occurs after the current fascist executive and semi-fascist legislative experience the whiplash of Americans finally pushing back. But you know what? I'll start focusing on that when we get closer to that reality. It's the fascists currently in power that deserve our focus. And you seem to be willing to carry water for them. I assume you don't see it that way, but that's hard to square with some of your other comments.
It's an observed fact and I honestly don't care what anybody thinks of that. It should be pretty clear that I think that seeing such excesses requires one to take a stance rather than just to pretend it isn't happening.
Comparing Nazi Germany and the PRC in any way is certainly an interesting choice, considering they're the one major power in the world that actually doesn't have a recent history of invading sovereign nations.
Yeah they do. Even right now they're trying to take territory from the Philippines.
China just has a history of denying what they're doing as they're doing it.
There are so many examples online. My favourite is of a Chinese warship ramming into its own coast guard vessel as they fail to intimidate the Philippines Coast Guard.
As an Indian I have to agree with this assessment. But India has gone through the socialist phase, it still maintains a liberal democracy and is now rapidly building out its industry. Socialism is completely dead in the cities, my opinion is it will eventually fall once the rural areas also develop.
I grew up in the USA and the changes in India even in the last 10 years has been completely astounding. For example I’m from Hyderabad and some of things changes I see: A national freeway that didn’t exist 10 years ago, a metro that covers most of the core of the city, skyscrapers, trains that now ship containers instead of boxcars, massive power plants that have recently been built.
Is India perfect? No. It still has a hierarchical society, sectarianism is still pretty acute, like everywhere else in the world India’s fertility rate has dropped off a cliff, and traffic in Hyderabad proper is a nightmare.
But culturally the submissive Indian mindset of my youth is largely gone. The millennial India is entrepreneurial and everyone is looking to get ahead. The next 20 years of India will be amazing at which point a lot of the issues of low fertility rates will start affecting India as well. Lastly, I think India really only has capacity to send a sizable amount of its citizens overseas only for the next 5 years or so at which point migration out of India will largely subside.
> like everywhere else in the world India’s fertility rate has dropped off a cliff
It's amazing when people flag this as a bad thing when it's undoubtedly a key component of getting places to prosperity in the first place. Got to get people away from being starvation-limited.
> I think India really only has capacity to send a sizable amount of its citizens overseas only for the next 5 years or so at which point migration out of India will largely subside.
That's how you can tell a country is ""winning"" in the international rankings, when more people want to move in than move out.
No society today got to prosperity on the back of falling birth rates. And nor did any of the western countries that went through population booms have food-production created famines.
> it's undoubtedly a key component of getting places to prosperity in the first place
The baby boom and a couple previous generations in the US is also associated with getting to high prosperity and high fertility. This part of your thesis is debunked and thus your whole argument falls apart.
> It's amazing when people flag this as a bad thing when it's undoubtedly a key component of getting places to prosperity in the first place. Got to get people away from being starvation-limited.
Exponentially falling fertility rates can create dynamics which can be destructive in its own right. As with other complex phenomena it would be for example foolish to rapidly cool the earth's climate. Stability is the key, here. Right now India is just below replacement which short to mid-term looks very promising but will it stabilize? Looking at worldwide trends I very much doubt that. A growing economy needs some demographical stability so coming from a long-term view fertility dropping off a cliff, now, could be bad news later (in one, two generations).
Turning some knobs one way or the other does not produce linear results, quite the opposite, there are thresholds, there is criticality. To draw on another more time compressed analogy here: I guess some operators thought back then: What could go possibly wrong by running a nuclear reactor (RBMK) at safer lower powers?
Yip, the reality is that words mean what people think they mean, and that changes over time. Don't think I'm yet ready to accept 'I could care less', but the colloquial meaning of begging the question is logical, reasonable, and is only objectionable on historical grounds.
/s
reply