Aren't there sources other than Adrian Zenz to use in this sort of centrist-socialist article? ('Xinjiang oppression is real but stop doing imperialism over it')
From 1998 to 2000 and 2002 to 2006, he worked at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in Central Asia on democracy and governance programs, designing and managing projects in civil society development, political party assistance, community development, independent media strengthening, and electoral assistance.
His present research is focused on China's development of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region as well as on democracy development in former Soviet Central Asia. Roberts continues his applied work on the design and evaluation of democracy and governance projects in the former Soviet Union, most recently in Ukraine where he worked on a USAID project to support decentralization and anti-corruption.
lol jacobin
this is similar to when I first checked out Dissent Magazine, after hearing about them on a Novara Media youtube video. The first article was by an author with an Eastern European name about the downfall of the Eastern Bloc. Googled the author's name and the first hit was their profile on the NED webiste, the fuck'n CIA National Endowment for Democracy. LOL, you gotta be careful what you consume with these "leftish" media, they might just be CIA ops.
You mean the official fan website of the hit podcast Citations Needed?
Won't they publish pretty much anyone's op-ed? The only reason they took down one of Amber's was because of (gasp) naughty language (the "It's Bernie, Bitch" column).
Also, obligatory: :amber:
Edit: I'm a jackass; that was The Baffler, and the same column was reprinted on Jacobin under a different headline with the profanity removed.
This isn't an op ed, it's an interview. Presumably the editor/s were involved in the process of selecting the interviewee.
Bah, you're right -- I remembered seeing the Baffler version before it was pulled, and the Jacobin version had a different headline ("It's Still Bernie").
Common Dreams has a writeup on the fiasco:
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/01/23/heres-pro-bernie-sanders-2020-op-ed-baffler-decided-its-readers-should-no-longer-see
I feel a little like I'm being gaslit, because I could have sworn I saw the Jacobin version first with the original headline, but I don't have an archive link.
We have to do something about Yugoslavia, we have to do something about the DDR, we have to do something about Afghanistan, we have to do something about Guatemala, we have to do something about Nicaragua, we have to do something about Grenada, we have to do something about Panama, we have to do something about China...
Kinda fun how the common thread in all "we have to do something about X" propaganda is that the current administration and government of those countries is doing land reform and or social programs that raise living standards and wages.
Also fun how "helping" them always ends up with tens or hundreds of thousands of excess deaths in the following years as well as massive reductions in employment, wages, and housing. it's great when "humanitarian bombs" level public infrastructure and industry and the IMF provides loans to rebuild it with the stipulation that it be privately owned.
THIS HAS BEEN THE FUCKING PLAY SINCE 1870 MOTHERFUCKERS! YOU DON'T TO CLAIM IGNORANCE ANYMORE YOU FUCKING GHOULS, ROT IN A PIT GOD FUCK.
The beginning of Parenti's book about the destruction of Yugoslavia sounds, word-for-word, like descriptions of the corporate media's take on Uyghurs in China. It was legitimately disturbing to read. The American ruling class is doing literally the exact same thing they did in the nineties—"we must protect the Muslim minority in China/Yugoslavia"—and many many people who were alive at the time and who saw the results are falling for it. Thankfully China today is much stronger than Yugoslavia was in the nineties, but we can't assume that this situation will last forever. Using the market to enrich your country means that you are subjecting yourself to the market's anarchy. I think the CCP knows this and has seen what happened in places like Yugoslavia (which took on a shitload of debt from the West in the '70s I think, thereby dooming them to eventual collapse), and that they're doing their best to basically use capitalism to take over the world via the Belt and Road Initiative and many other policies, but it's a dangerous game and the best laid plans of mice and men etc. etc.
Supporting Chezch fashists and helping them exterminate thousands of Slavs they missed in the Holocaust, displacing hundreds of thousands more with aerial bombardment then opening the doors for BP and United Steel to privatize what's left of the national infrastructure while hundreds of thousands more starve and unemployment skyrockets to 30% (from 0% or negligible during the socialist era).
Arming Muslim fascists that helped the Nazis in WWII to kill the refugees from the last bombardment and Muslims who identify as Yugoslavs, then doing the same thing to them after the ear ends.
It's a fun trend how the only Muslim lives that matter are the Muslim terrorists and not the people.
Paris Commune. They shut down all communication with the commune to prevent them from orgs organizing a peasant revolt. Then used French troops given back by the Germans to massacre the Communards while the papers complained about the "depravity" of the "whores standing shoulder to shoulder with men" and "property destruction by the savage communards" after murdering 30,000 women, children, and men mostly in cold blood.
Basically every either uprising in any country was treated similarly. In America, Reconstruction era massacres of Freedmen and the whole John Brown saga before the war.
The Boxer rebellion in China, they called them "violet xenophobes" for killing christian oppressors and destroying private property of imperialists. Literally read the wikipedia. It still uses that language.
I'm sure there are more examples, but that's 3 off the top of my head
they'll throw in the line "but don't be handmaidens for warhawks" in an article where they act as handmaidens for warhawks
I was actually thinking about this topic today. I've long taken it for granted that war, military action, interventions, etc etc etc are all necessarily incongruous with leftist beliefs. But leftism isn't inherently pacifist, right? It's opposed to unnecessary and immoral violence and the commercialization of violence. But if we accept violence as necessary in some cases (for example, in opposition to fascism), and we also accept the notion that there is a moral obligation to act (which we seem to believe when it comes to things like being anti-racist), doesn't it follow that leftism also dictates intervention in support of a maligned party who lacks recourse? I'm super conflicted now, tbh, and I'm really curious what y'all think.
The history and manner of US intervention is obviously bad in many ways. I'm more thinking would the People's Army of FALGSC Hexbearistan have moral standing--or even the moral obligation--to intervene if Elon's Mars Colony started selling slaves or something?
Yeah I shoulda said "imperialism" because leftist intervention is cool and good
no discussion at all about the US trying to arm or radicalize Uyghurs to destabilize China, as they have done for decades with religious or ethnic factions in the middle east to destabilize governments. i believe osama bin laden was a CIA asset at one point. "moderate rebels" etc.
it was openly discussed by one retired army colonel and former state dept. official lawrence wilkerson in 2018. he specifically mentions disrupting the road and belt initiative running through xinjiang.
U.S. Admits to Using Uyghurs in Xinjiang to Destabilize China
of course this was the "ron paul institute" so he could just be a kook
this article dedicated to brave
mujahideenuighur fighters ofafghanistanxinjiang :joker-dancing:they have always been SucDems right? That ideology is pretty infamous historically for being imperialist
Bashkar is a DSA member, so of course they are sucdem imperialists
DemSocs = :Care-Comrade:
Soc dems = :fry:
Edit: if I'm full of shit and being judgemental plz explain y
I have seen that whole talk like three times. Laurence Wilkerson is awesome and is probably worth trusting more than any reporter on this stuff. Turns out that there is a whole set of Libertarians who do better anti-imperialist discussions than anyone on the left. The grayzone interviews them pretty regularly. The recent Push Back interview with Scott Horton was good.
Wilkerson used to appear regularly on TheRealNewsNetwork with Paul Jay, he's informative in understanding how the State Department/MIC manufactures consent in Imperialist adventures. He was one of Colin Powel's top guys in leading the US invasion of Iraq which he now regrets. He's not a leftist, he even jokingly called Paul Jay a Marxist.
I'm aware of that, I shouldn't have said "he's awesome" but it is awesome to have someone with his access to information become an anti-war advocate. A lot of information about US foreign policy seems to come from ex-military people questioning their values.
it's the simping for libertarians, for me. i'm sorry i've just seen murray bookchin dismissed by MLs because he palled around with right libertarians, so it reads as corny
"this libertarian war nerd knows about US strategy and leftists have an interest in this" != "libertarians are good"
sure i'm corny af
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91wz5syVNZs The whole talk - this clip is from the end.
How have they not found a less problematic source at this point?
Right? You would think they'd notice that Zenz makes their bullshit easier to debunk and publish their slop under Damian Benz by now.
All the other sources are biased by having actually visited China at some point?
I’m just baffled that it’s so easy to point out how awful he is. You’d think they’d be able to find someone that isn’t a turbo racist.
Maybe they think he'll be more willing to say what the US wants going forward. If they're trying to get that last bit of international support for intervention, they can just tell him to say China is eating Uyghur babies or some shit, whereas more serious researchers might refuse.
"We can sit on the fence and be useless asses."
Yep! Keep up the good work!
Sitting on the fence would be outright better.
Useless asses > Useful idiots for imperialism
How did I ever think jacobin was good? Did they used to be better or was I just that that poorly informed?
I feel similarly, I think it's very easy to be left of liberal on domestic American issues but foreign policy tends to pick out the libs
I feel like they print pretty much any viewpoint left of the DNC so you get a super mixed bag. They print plenty of good shit but also a lot of succdem nonsense as well.
They have actually good articles sometimes. It's disappointing, like ordering a really good omelette and there's shards of eggshell in it
Intercepted did a similar piece on "Jing-Jang" province. I just don't understand how I'm supposed to take any of these people seriously.
Don't need to put in any effort when you know your audience will lap anything you say up
Experienced and professional journalists are just doing their job, feeding state department and natsec info directly to the public without any modifications.
I'll bet they also said "Peking". Whenever I see that I just assume that the editor is a 90 year old dinosaur that lives off the blood of 3rd world children.
Westerners can't pronounce the "X" from Xinjiang. It literally uses a phoneme that does not exist in English. As does Xi. It's like Chinese is a foreign language.
I mean xi is basically just "she" but with your tongue moved forward, same as the Japanese し. It's not really hard to learn, but pinyin is non-obvious to English speakers and it's totally understandable that people would just guess at how to pronounce a leading x. I would never expect good or even partially acceptable Chinese pronunciation from people who don't speak any Chinese.
But if you don't know that xin is closer to "shin" or "sheen" than "jing" you've pretty clearly never heard a Chinese person say it. In which case I have no idea why you're doing reporting on it, or why I'm supposed to take you as an authority on it.
"It’s not a central thread in the book, but you do mention that the CCP’s economic aspirations for Xinjiang province are a significant driver of the escalating repression. What are those aspirations, and why do they not include the Uyghurs?"
What?
The Institute for International Economic Policy (IIEP) is one of the Elliott School's premier research institutes, collaborating with organizations like the World Bank Group and the International Monetary Fund frequently, which are both headquartered across the street from the Elliott School.
Like holy fuck Jacobin. Do 5 fucking seconds of research before just deepthroating the CIA.
I mean, they've probably done the research. And they found nothing they saw as problematic.
This isn't incompetence.
I know, there's no way you give someone this many words without at least googling then first. Jacobin giving me real "the second international supports the war" vibes. Imperialism good actually because you might get ultra-imperialism (UN, EU, NATO) and have peace in earth!
read a bit from the Author's book, still trying to figure out how assertations like "the PRC began a systematic and violent dismantling of Uyghur culture and identity that can be unequivocally described as cultural genocide." are justified What important facet of Uyghur culture faces eradication right now? Their language, clothing, cuisine, and religion are all extremely prominent in everyday life in Xinjiang and even elsewhere. skimming his chapter titled Cultural Genocide, he mostly just lists uyghur violence, state crackdowns, and of course the author's continual suspicion that the Turkestan Islamic Party doesn't exist or is being controlled by China. and policies of incarceration rather than how a cultural genocide is taking place,
http://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=C98E5A83074B27525F4910D7FE4B9B06
edit: Found his argument eventually, first in the introduction and then in "Welcome to the Pomegranate" section of chapter 6. Weird take on "Miscegenation" which I was pretty shocked to read. he cites as genocide the demolition of particular graveyards, mosques and holy sites (as reported by Bellingcat using satellite images), new houses which lack traditional Uyghur furniture and architecture, Women entering the work force decide to bring their children to state-run day-cares, an expansion of boarding schools at all levels of education, migrant labor, and re-education camps preventing Uyghurs from being fully socialized into Uyghur culture. I realize now having read more and looked at the authors bio what a propaganda hack job this is. repetitions of any incendiary claim he comes across, even the lowest of the low, like without caveat quoting from an anonymous Chinese official that spoke to RFA, i.e. a person who almost certainly does not exist. I don't find him doubting or debunking any anti-china claim yet, which is inexcusable, Instead the pattern is often "Zenz describes how China is doing something bad, and though the evidence he uses isn't conclusive I hope it poisons the well enough that these separate claims start sounding believable"
example: By late February 2017, the government began construction of 4,387 preschools that were intended to serve 562,900 new students, particularly in the south of the Uyghur homeland, with a completion deadline before the beginning of the 2017–2018 school year. While this goal itself appeared ambitious, it is noteworthy that during the 2017–2018 school year, the number of children enrolled in preschool was far greater than this target. While the total preschool intake target for the region in fall 2017 had been around one million, the actual number enrolled was closer to 1.4 million. [I.e. China is building new schools to meet the current approximate demand] Furthermore, Zenz suggests that a substantial number of these new preschool students appeared to attend institutions with the capacity to house boarding students from a very early age. While there is no way to prove conclusively that this larger enrollment figure is accounted for by the children of interned parents, there are few other reasonable reasons for it. If this is the case, these children have effectively become wards of the state unless they are returned to their parents once they have ‘graduated’ from ‘re-education.’
The footnotes are pretty bad, I think also. Chapter 2 footnote 43 is useless, and contradicts his claim for at least two Uyghurs I was able to find there.
There are some documents Zenz straight up did get translated. He twists the presentation, but unfortunately the first citations of them were from him. The one citation of stuff related to Zenz in that article I see on a first look (the AP one about birth control rates skyrocketing) is real and you can access the archived version of the Chinese government statistics site it was pulled from (unfortunately only the archived version since then the Chinese government has blocked access to those statistic pages).
There are also many non Zenz related sources in that article.
Also, regardless of the personal history of the author (which imo is basically a soc dem convinced they could reform US policy during the Bush years from the inside, which is bs), I find it a bit ridiculous people in this thread are saying this is pro US intervention when throughout the piece the interviewer and interviewee are arguing against it (and what the interviewee is arguing for is basically liberal consumer driven boycotts) and the only Uyghur group they gave support for was a leftist one in the UK that's aligned with a bunch of groups that oppose the US war in Yemen.
It makes you look like hypocrites if you join the people saying that China is a nation of baby eaters and then say "But we shouldn't stop them from eating babies though". All you've done is made the case for intervention against the baby eating savages and then made people want to ignore you cause you dont want to solve the goddamn baby eating question.
Exactly.
Cheering for World War 3 but crossing my fingers behind my back.
There are also many non Zenz related sources in that article.
Those "non Zenz related sources" either use Zenz or are mostly based off of two other sources: 1) a "study" done that estimated that 1 million people were being detained by interviewing ONLY EIGHT PEOPLE and extrapolating from there (https://www.nchrd.org/2018/08/china-massive-numbers-of-uyghurs-other-ethnic-minorities-forced-into-re-education-programs/), or 2) exile testimony, many of which are paid for by orgs such as the NED, etc (also the mainstream never lets us hear from Uyghurs who support the Chinese government, and there are a lot of them).
And of course they throw in VICE as a source. Also Amnesty International lol. They even cite The Intercept, which itself cites Zenz lolol. People have dug into pretty much all of the "sources" and they've debunked all the ridiculous shit.
As for the IUD claim, that comes from Zenz not being able to read, or more likely intentionally misrepresenting the data. He took an 8.7% number and turned it into 80%:
According to the 2019 China Health Statistics Yearbook published by the National Health Commission – the original source of Zenz’s claim – the number of new IUD insertion procedures in Xinjiang in 2018 accounted for only 8.7 percent of China’s total. So Zenz’s “major finding” appeared to be off by a factor of 10, a staggering error that substantially undermined the explosive quality of his argument. (https://thegrayzone.com/2021/02/18/us-media-reports-chinese-genocide-relied-on-fraudulent-far-right-researcher/).
Like I said people have debunked all this shit and it's been made public for a while, especially in leftist circles. So you can't give the benefit of the doubt to an outlet like Jacobin that should know better. There are nuanced discussions to have about how China is handling Xinjiang, but citing all those ridiculous and already debunked sources is like trying to talk about racism in the US by saying "well despite only making up 13 percent of the population black people commit 50 percent of the crimes!"
I've read that thread, and some of the stuff they said about him is a straight up lie. Like for example looking at his writing, he has rightfully called all those attacks terrorist attacks.
The thread accused him of significantly downplaying terrorism, not denying it, as well as other sorts of misinformation
They extensively cited his own tweets in the thread. There's also a patreon episode by someone debunking his book, though it's obviously behind a paywall
This literal regime disinfo warrior during the war on terror
Give me the disinfo articles he wrote then, because all the articles I can find from him are lib shit saying things like "these programs suck, they could be better if we didn't do x y z" where x,y,z is basically the point of the program from the perspective of the state department. Like basically his entire body of work with USAID is "this thing sucks, why is no one listening to me that it sucks" which is absolutely liberal reform shit.
Real freedom is artificially constraining employment through interest rate policy and off-shoring, then telling all the Uighurs that they should learn to code.
