Select passages from the BBC article:
The UN has accused China of "serious human rights violations" in a long-awaited report into allegations of abuse in Xinjiang province.
China had urged the UN not to release the report - with Beijing calling it a "farce" arranged by Western powers.
The report assesses claims of abuse against Uyghur Muslims and other ethnic minorities, which China denies.
But investigators said they uncovered "credible evidence" of torture possibly amounting to "crimes against humanity".
They accused China of using vague national security laws to clamp down on the rights of minorities and establishing "systems of arbitrary detention".
The report, which was commissioned by the UN's Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights, said prisoners had been subjected to "patterns of ill-treatment" which included "incidents of sexual and gender-based violence".
Others, they said, faced forced medical treatment and "discriminatory enforcement of family planning and birth control policies".
The UN recommended that China immediately takes steps to release "all individuals arbitrarily deprived of their liberty" and suggested that some of Beijing's actions could amount to the "commission of international crimes, including crimes against humanity".
...
China denies all allegations of human rights abuses in Xinjiang.
In response to the Xinjiang Police Files, China's foreign ministry spokesman told the BBC that the documents were "the latest example of anti-China voices trying to smear China". He said Xinjiang enjoyed stability and prosperity and residents were living happy, fulfilled lives.
China says the crackdown in Xinjiang is necessary to prevent terrorism and root out Islamist extremism and the camps are an effective tool for re-educating inmates in its fight against terrorism.
It insists that Uyghur militants are waging a violent campaign for an independent state by plotting bombings, sabotage and civic unrest, but it is accused of exaggerating the threat in order to justify repression of the Uyghurs.
China has dismissed claims it is trying to reduce the Uyghur population through mass sterilisations as "baseless", and says allegations of forced labour are "completely fabricated".
Criticism of the report (Reddit comment):
A lot more underwhelming that I expected. Seems to boil down to a few main points:
- The XUAR has seen a large rise in acts of terrorism related to religious extremism
- To prevent this, China implemented a system of "Vocational Education and Training Centres" (VETCs) to rehabilitate and educate away the extremism
The concern then follows:
- China has implemented a system of policing that is overly vague and overreaching, that allows the government to easily place citizens in the VETCs.
- China trains their police force in ridiculous manners to identify religious extremism
- Once transferred to a VETC, the conditions there are brutal and more akin to a torturous prison.
- There are also concerns of erasure of religion and attempted forced birth control
My issue with the report, is the use of a small amount of interviews declared credible, to then corroborate the rest of the sources. These sources include the classic and long debunked Zenz, Xinjiang Police Files, unofficial document translations (long history of bias in translations), etc. Given the long history of terrible witness reliability (Nayirah testimony, SK $900,000 reward to NK defectors, Iraq's WMDs, etc), I'm still going to hold off on agreeing with the accusations of genocide.
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It's not, but it raises the question of why the U.N. is doing a special report there and not in El Paso. And of course why Americans are suddenly more concerned about Muslims halfway across the world than they are about people in their own backyard.
Whatever one thinks of China's actions here, the bias could hardly be more apparent.
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I'm getting a 404 on that, but the link looks more like a press release and less like a 50-page report compiled after sending investigators.
Shit, where are the U.N. observers at the jails in any large U.S. city?
they actually did make a report regarding imprisonment, refugees and kids in cages in the US. They admit they could only visit three states, couldn't see Guantanamo despite the US pinkie promising they were trying their best to close it, and a couple places refused the UN personnel entry. One of which was the Homan Square facility, a blacksite run by Chicago cops.
Despite having only 13 days, what they found was more than enough to warrant, by :LIB: standards, sanctions on at least individuals of the US government, if not entire sectors of industry
edit: also the language they use to get around saying "jail" or "prison" is darkly hilarious, these poor people get sent to "places of deprivation of liberty" instead. literally 1984
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you're doing the whataboutism thingy, this isn't reddit
oh makes sense
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In all likelihood, our politicians are gonna try and use this to further escalate tensions with China. They may even get that war they seem to be salivating over. Pointing out similar and/or more severe human rights abuses at home is mostly an attempt to preempt the narrative and divert war-fever.
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Your irritation is warranted. It's kinda ironic that internal resistance to our own hegemony can end up centering the American perspective in a lot of the same ways supporting it does...
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hence the "thingy". You're doing the thing where you pretend that judging two things equally and looking at them in the context of the big picture is "whataboutism"
cool you can start by not speaking english then. Most anti-American thing you can do
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yes, and it would stop all sorts of brainworms transmission if they didn't
this isn't an unrelated issue.
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All roads lead to Rome as they say.
As the magnetic pole of the current hegemon, it is extremely difficult to talk about something and not find yourself relating it back to the Imperial Core; while it is an accurately assessed phenomena that people (particularly USians) can't shut the fuck up about the US, I don't know that it's avoidable to an extent or that it's necessarily rooted in exceptionalism.
I'm illustrating the bias.
Say you occasionally come into work a few minutes late, and every single time your boss reams you out and formally writes it up. A coworker comes in late as much or more, but at most they get a "you're late!" comment and it's left at that. Are you both being treated the same?
america, being the progenitor of our liberal rules-based-order morass we inhabit currently as well as enjoying hegemon status since basically 1945 and especially post Soviet Union, inserts itself like a miasma pretty much everywhere whether we like it or not
Because lopsided focus is an essential element of Western propaganda, the primary function of which is to prop up American hegemony.
You might be surprised at how little introspection Americans can do given the millions of deaths caused by the explicit actions of their military. They can and usually do place more time and effort on 1/1000th of the people impacted by less horrific outcomes in [bad country].
Worse, the impact of this propaganda is an essential component in the US' violence. A populace that thinks [bad country] is bad and needs to be "defended" against will provide consent for the bombing, starvation, and general deprivation of millions.
Because Americans love to be mad about things across the world. It's things they can't actually do anything about.... unless of course the US military were to get involved. :porky-happy:
I'm not sure you are correct about the U.N. not doing reports on the U.S. border
We got /c/news megathread posters for that.
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It doesn't need to be a conspiracy in the smoke-filled room sense (although countries absolutely turn diplomatic screws over stuff like this). A lot of times, you just don't get to a point in your career where you'd be charged with putting a report like this together if you have the type of politics that would make you skeptical of a report like this.
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Hugh is just here to waste our time like a greased pig. No need to bother debating him.
Eh, this is an issue where a lot of leftists have a lot of opinions, and usually trolls here out themselves far more obviously.
No trust :only-throw:
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Everyone point and laugh at the two day old account. :farquaad-point:
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Your ignorance of CIA Ops and US Hegemonic Imperialism that everyone else around here has already read-up on?
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The first lesson of propaganda is emphasis.
Why did this report happen in the first place? Why are there not similar reports given mass incarceration and detainments? What is the pattern of who is targeted by these reports?
Always ask, "why are we talking about this and not something else? Is the same questioning applied equitably to all parties in the category?"
An example: anticommunist tabulations of "death tallies" in communist countries fail to apply a reasonable standard, sure. But most importantly, they don't even make an attempt to apply the same standard. Amartya Sen looked at this question for India and found the same order of magnitude more capitalism-caused deaths happening every decade in India as even the most ridiculous counts for, e.g., the entire history of the Soviet Union (including when jokers include the deaths of Nazi soldiers in their tallies). What is the dominant narrative and understanding in the West? That communist countries oppress and kill en masse. Zero introspection. Zero attempt at a comparison. Used to vilify the other and entrench oppression at home.
When you read this report, when you talk about this report, you're already an unwitting victim of a propaganda effort, even if you don't think the report is good or even if you think the report is good but the decision to make such reports is unbalanced. It got you thinking about the bad things done by the bad country, which is the primary reason such reports happen.