It's really frustrating, I was talking to someone about how successful China has been in de-radicalization of reactionaries. But they responded to this by saying they're only successful because, and I quote "put them all in concentration camps and killed them"
Has anyone here been successful in deprogramming people about this topic? If so any good sources I can use to dissuade them? I tried telling them that the UN report, if you read it, just says that there's concerns about abuse by internment offcials, and there's no evidence of genocide. But when I say this they just dismiss it as if the UN is controlled by the PRC. It's like a religion to liberals to believe anything bad about China and can get really frustrating.
Gonna take this opportunity to bounce an argument off of you folks.
This supposed Uyghur genocide seems to have zero confirmed martyrs. No one is confirmed to have died in this genocide. So I like to ask people to name one person who has died in this genocide and folks never have any answers.
Some people like to say that it is a cultural genocide. Even madempanada said this. One could argue that hypothetically you could culturally genocide a people without killing one of them. But reality does not turn out this way because it turns out that peoples are intimately linked with their cultures and they don't usually just accept their culture's erasure without fighting back. This often leads to violent encounters which leads to people dying. But the supposed Uyghur genocide does not have any incident like this.
Meanwhile actual cases of genocide always have confirmed reports of people dying during the struggle. Rohingyas in Myanmar, the Muslims in Kashmir and so on. Seems like the Uyghur are unique in the fact that they don't fight back and instead delegate their struggle to NGOs based in Washington lead by Guantanamo translators.
One thing that I find to be very odd about the Uyghur genocide accusations is that we are currently witnessing a genocide in Palestine and it is being extremely well documented through social media posts, news coverage, etc. We can hear directly from the victims of the genocide and their families in near real-time and see direct evidence of what is happening because everyone there can document it using a phone that has a camera and a microphone.
It has to be said that we live in the age of social media where information always leaks out in some form or another no matter how much anyone in power within any system tries to stop it from doing so. If there were such a genocide occurring the victims would be documented, we would know their names, and we would see posts about it which show very clear evidence of this crime.
This is especially glaring as the USA attempts to ramp up to a new cold war with China (The US military has even released statements saying they consider themselves in a war footing with China, and nearly every new military RnD project is designed to counter Russia and China). If this genocide were happening, the documentation of it being done by the United States Government's most significant enemy would be everywhere on the news, you would be hearing constantly about the victims of such an act. It would be used to make the public favor economic warfare against China.
But we have seen almost no documentation or evidence of such a crime in the news, on social media, or anywhere else despite the fact that so many people have the tools to document it with ease.
It's a confluence of several forms of racism to put it naively. They see "the Chinese" as devious, where they could covertly culturally genocide you without you knowing anything about it, and other groups as too backwards to speak for themselves.
The genocide of Palestinians has thrown a spanner in the works of their racism factory because now they cannot accuse others of genocide as casually as they did before.
That is a very good analysis, IMO. The only way one could say they are doing it with such effective suppression of information is if they believed that:
A. The victims of this genocide are totally passive and not speaking out in an to attempt to stop it and have not done so for years.
B. The general public of China is marching in total 100% lock-step and nobody is brave enough or has any desire to sound an alarm about a genocide and again, have not done so for years.
It requires you to view the Chinese people as a totally monolithic entity that always does what the government wants them to do without any resistance or friction. As if, out of such a large group of people, not a single one would have desired to or found a way to leak definitive information about an ongoing genocide to the wider world.
This is also, once again, extremely strange that we aren't seeing more evidence about this in the west when, if it were happening, it would be used as a means to make the public hate the Chinese government and increase support for actions against them. We would see the evidence on the news constantly, the coverage would almost be inescapable.
It also can't be a cultural genocide (whatever vibes based analysis that would entail) because they are still considered an ethnic group part of China and not part of another ethnic group. Uyghurs have political representation in the CPPCC and people in China know they exist. It is literally called the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.
Meanwhile, the US has beyond a reasonable doubt committed a cultural and physical genocide on the various indigenous tribes in North America. From boarding schools where children were forced to give up all links to their culture to what the US literally calls "reservation camps" which native peoples are forced to live in total systemic poverty. The children who grow up in the US are not taught anything about indigenous cultures beyond the fact that the US displaced and exterminated them. Indigenous peoples couldn't even vote until the 1900s.
Xinjiang poses a threat to the settler class because it is an instance of a nation state actually resolving ethnic conflict not by state-backed terrorism and displacement. If people were to learn the truth about Xinjiang it would only endanger the grip that settler-colonialism has on the West.
these cannot be applied as principle, the existence of administrative units and official recognition are components of a dignified reality but not necessarily indicative of one. Israel has an 'autonomous' administration for the palestinians in the west bank 'Palestinian Authority'. it does not protect the palestinians. the native reservations in the US are recognized and autonomous but cultural genocide is ongoing against indigenous populations because of the marginal economic position these autonomies are in relative to the white supremacist state, to say nothing of the land & resources. by all accounts China's autonomous regions & minority programs bring disproportionate funding and support in favor of its minorities, but it is not the simple existence of autonomous administration that makes it so.
Absolutely right, shows how China not only does the minimum required but exceeds it.
The thing is that concern trolls have conjured ample ammo to consider it a cultural genocide. It is mostly because they aim for a white Eurocentric envisionment of genocide that assuages their own guilt since it falsely equivocates state-designated enemies with themselves. For example, an American news outlet that I can't remember the name of won a major journalistic award off of this shit. (I think it was Pulitzer but I could be wrong.) The investigation involved looking at satellite images to discover what they supposed were demolished mosques.
So I asked within this context of their weird conception of genocide whether it is reasonable to ask them to find one confirmed martyr in this genocide.
this seems like bad faith argumentation, can you offer specific names in "Rohingyas in Myanmar, the Muslims in Kashmir and so on" on the spot without any investigation?
also the characterization of no deaths and no fighting back is easily contradicted by the terror attacks. i wouldn't attempt to argue that the re-educational and deradicalization camps/schools the narrative revolves around are unrelated to those attacks.
anyway when you bring up the terror attacks it's relevant to make clear the US had the militant groups on the terror list & Uyghur prisoners in Guantanamo bay
Well I don't mean it in bad faith. I don't mean to put people on the spot with gotchas. I allow people to look into it as long as they want to. The point is that with both Kashmir and Rohingyas you can find confirmed kills, even massacres.
I don't understand this. Can you explain more?
there is a list here of terror attacks, mostly associated with the ETIM (East Turkestan Islamic Movement) shootings, bombings, car attacks
I still don't understand your point. Sorry. Do you mean to say that the terrorist attacks can be seen as the Uyghur people fighting back?
yes. those are uyghurs fighting the government, and many of them were killed i.e. martyrs. terrorist is just a political designation, many 'terrorists' can represent positive forces so simply arguing that being designated terrorist invalidates the ETIM is going to fall flat if you support or defend groups the US/Israel calls terrorist.
which is why US/NATO designations of uyghur terror groups as terrorists is an important factor
I can't say for sure that you are wrong. But the western consciousness does not acknowledge these terror attacks.
The last one happened in 2014 and the process of setting up reeducation centres happened after that, which is the foundation of the claims of genocide. Plus the terror attacks were terrorism in the rawest sense, which makes it almost impossible to frame them as a genuine struggle.
if you can get into the details of specific acts, ideology, and background of these groups it indeed is hard to argue. all i'm saying is your initial argument should not be presented in a way that makes you look like a fool through the simple addition of context prior to 2014. no one died? these
terroristsfreedom fighters died