I have a lot of very left-leaning friends (although most of them are still liberals, which I am not of course pls believe me) and they're all heavily anti-China.
Occasionally I push back on this and they always bring up the Uyghur "genocide". As a German person, I feel insanely uncomfortable claiming that there is not actually a genocide happening. And like, as a matter of fact, I don't know what the truth, but at the same time I don't feel comfortable just letting US propaganda go uncontested.
I am compiling my own list of sources but I would greatly appreciate help on this, please give me the clearest sources and arguments you have, because this is an important topic to me.
Just saying "RFA and Adrian Zenz bad" isn't very convincing, not even to myself, the best I have is the letter by the Muslim nations.
Couple of points you can bring up.
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American media has lied numerous times about terrorism, wmds, etc and such to sponsor invasions. Iraq, Egypt, whatever. You should point out that assuming the media is completely truthful is a bit worrying considering the next few points.
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The Islamic Turkistan terrorist org (don’t remember exact name off the top of my head) were taken off the American terrorist list by Mike Pompeo in October. Every other nation, INCLUDING the western ones, have had it there since 9/11. This is extremely suspect considering firstly how America of all places is suddenly unconcerned about Islamic terrorism, given their track record, especially under trump. So trump doing this is sketchy. And secondly, it is also a tip off that America is planning something- they have funded terrorist orgs to destabilize communism so many times in the past, such as Bin laden and the Taliban. So to just overlook the sketchy stuff america is doing is blatantly ignoring the past.
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Xinjiang is rich in oil. You can look it up and a dozen articles will prove this.
All of these points combined with the other video should paint you a pretty clear idea. China is definitely in the wrong to inter people in xinjiang. But the circumstances are clearly being exaggerated and putting the pieces together, it looks like America is set to do the same damn thing they’ve always done.
Islamic Turkistan terrorist org (don’t remember exact name off the top of my head)
ETIM East Tkstan islmaic movement
I was reading their wikipedia page and came across this amazing passage (emphasis mine):
The United States captured 22 Uyghur militants from combat zones in Afghanistan in 2006 on information that they were linked to Al-Qaeda. They were imprisoned without trial for five to seven years, where they testified that they were trained by ETIM leader Abdul Haq, at an ETIM training camp. After being found No Longer Enemy Combatant, i.e. never having been enemy combatants, a panel of judges ordered them released into the United States. Despite the alarm of politicians that the release of embittered former Guantanamo detainees into the United States was unsafe and illegal, they could not be released back to China because of its human rights record.
Sometimes I struggle to find words for how absurd and insidious western propaganda is and this is one of those times.
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Just tell them to watch this BBC videos of the cam;ps that are all propaganda enough that theyll believe them but way before the msm tried to spin it as genocide and say theyre bad but theyre not ICE bad
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmId2ZP3h0c
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-mideast-crisis-syria-china-idUSKBN1840UP
follow up with this
So which parts of this you guys think are not true? This is not genocide genocide obviously (people claim it's a "cultural" genocide, right?), but it still doesn't look good.
yeah its still human rights abuses but the scale and the severity are extremely inflated to push cold war bullshit, even France's program IMO is more fucked up let alone the non-domestic policies that China's cold war opponents have destroyed the ME with
Are there good estimates for how many people are in/passed through those camps? If they actually house up to a million that's a hell of a lot of people for the province.
My problem with this is that the privately run mental health facilities operate almost exactly like this in the US and we consider them healthcare and force people to pay for them.
In addition to what others have mentioned, I think if you ask for sources they're basing their opinions on and point out objective problems with them and associate them with the US media's atrocity propaganda track record, I don't really see how it can be seen as anything other than being about media literacy rather than holocaust denial.
Some sources that I think should cover most of the problematic narratives surrounding the issue copied from my response in this thread https://hexbear.net/post/39756
Debunking stuff/illustrating the widespread problematic reporting surrounding this issue:
- one million uyghur claims/Zenz/US-backed NGOs - https://thegrayzone.com/2019/12/21/china-detaining-millions-uyghurs-problems-claims-us-ngo-researcher/
- forced labor camps/ASPI/Zenz/Falun Gong/US War Machine - https://thegrayzone.com/2020/03/26/forced-labor-china-us-nato-arms-industry-cold-war/
- unreliable witness testimony - narrative changes from "did not personally see violence" and "there was no meat" https://www.theglobeandmail.com/amp/world/article-everyone-was-silent-endlessly-mute-former-chinese-re-education/ to "there were all kinds of tortures there" and "meat was served on Fridays, but it was pork" https://www.haaretz.com/amp/world-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-a-million-people-are-jailed-at-china-s-gulags-i-escaped-here-s-what-goes-on-inside-1.7994216
- photos/videos that are straight up mislabeled - https://factcheck.afp.com/these-photos-show-protests-istanbul-and-xinjiang-and-migrant-shelter-thailand https://factcheck.afp.com/no-not-video-chinese-soldier-beating-uighur-muslim-having-copy-koran https://factcheck.afp.com/video-shows-police-officer-pinning-down-drunk-chinese-woman-his-knee-hotel-shenzhen https://twitter.com/j_bigboote/status/1182726991675625472
- shitty guesswork based off of satellite images/mosques being "destroyed" - https://medium.com/@sunfeiyang/the-case-of-the-keriya-aitika-mosque-efa29e456339
- more shitty guesswork based off of satellite images - https://twitter.com/ChengxinPan/status/1310051540397297665
- blatant propaganda witness testimony/Campaign for Uyghurs - "my friends and family are in concentration camps" from a Uyghur activist who worked at a CIA propaganda outlet and fucking Guantanamo Bay during the Bush administration https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/e9ad4n/
What is (most likely) actually going on:
- Not genocide - world bank investigation/statement: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/statement/2019/11/11/world-bank-statement-on-review-of-project-in-xinjiang-china
- BBC visitation with heavy editing and mistranslations - https://medium.com/@sunfeiyang/breaking-down-the-bbcs-visit-to-hotan-xinjiang-e284934a7aab
- Unedited visitation to a camp and interviews with Uyghur students there - https://youtu.be/Jp5y9LCZqTA I made a post about it including parts that the translator had left out here https://hexbear.net/post/33959
- All the Muslim countries side with China and even US-aligned Saudi Arabia sided with China since they had sent diplomats to visit Xinjiang and its re-education camps - https://www.economist.com/china/2019/07/27/chinese-actions-in-xinjiang-become-a-matter-of-international-dispute
Oh yeah there's also this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91wz5syVNZs&feature=youtu.be&t=1260
The third reason we’re there is because there are 20 million Uyghurs, and they don’t like Han Chinese, in Xinjiang province in western China and if the CIA has to mount an operation using those Uyghurs - as Erdogan has done in Turkey against Assad - there are 20000 of them […] in Syria right now for example. That’s why the Chinese might be deploying military forces to Syria in the very near future to take care of those Uyghurs that Erdogan invited in. Well the CIA would want to destabilize China and that would be the best way to do it. To form an unrest and to join with those Uyghurs in pushing the Han Chinese in Beijing from internal places rather than external.
Which helps to illustrate the geopolitical motives behind the atrocity propaganda.
Ask them why the entire UN security council showed aggressive support for these exact actions beyond even what they actually are doing in 2003.
I think it all depends on who you are talking to. ScreamoBMO has some good points, but with a lot of libs are holier than thou fart sniffing clowns, so even addressing the point at all constitutes support and potentially denial of whatever they imagine is going on in Xinjiang. So sometimes it requires knocking them off balance a bit, and because they are libs there's roughly 80 billion instances of them tacitly or actively supporting vastly worse similar things. Something like "I find it hard to take your concern for Muslims seriously when you just installed a president who was one of the main architects of a million Iraqi deaths." Then when they start sputtering and equivocating, that's when you come with facts.
Yeah I mean specifically for the holier than thou fart sniffing clown types. Sometimes you have to remind those types that they literally aren't saints walking among us before you can say anything that breaks with their propaganda.
Then they just respond "that's whataboutism." What's the response to that?
Look, they'll have a bunch of dumb pacifier responses to ease the break with their propaganda regardless of what you say, that is unavoidable when arguing against the dominant ideology. If you don't point out their horseshit and just go with criticizing sources they'll probably call you David Duke and say you're as bad as any holocaust denier. It's inevitable when you're arguing from a position of weakness. No argument is perfect because these people didn't reason themselves into this belief in the first place, they just took whatever nonsense they were fed at face value.
All I'm pointing out is that sometimes these smug assholes can be knocked off balance when you point out their hypocrisies, and when they start having to explain themselves it opens up discussion a bit more. Not all cases but it can be useful.
Yeah good point. I think the best tactic there is to get ahead of it before they do. Something like, "before you say 'it's whataboutism,' consider we know for certain that the US kills more muslims than is even claimed against China. Under Obama, 90% of drone strike victims were not the intended target. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drone_Papers "
Yeah it's another instance of, if you're a socialist you have to be an expert and know everything about history, economics, foreign policy, etc while they can get by farting out half considered bullshit and suffer zero consequences for it.
I usually go halfway to soften em up. Say there's no killings happening, they're actually re-education camps to help re-integrate extremists. They say that re-edu camps are still wrong, and you say well, the rest of the worlds solution to extremism has been carpet bombing. China is good.
It's honestly just not the hill to die on. There's no way to argue about it with liberals and come out looking good.
Yeah I will look into Zenz, anything to discredit NYT. Anyhow my main point was I'm not gonna waste breath saying "its internment, not genocide" if I think both are wrong. I just say that there are things I disagree with their government does, but that's no reason to disavow the good parts of China. I'd stack the China's Muslim bodycount against the US's any day.
I fully believe it's bullshit simply because if it was true the US government would have already shown soul shredding evidence of mass graves with it's world encompassing surveillance apparatus. No we just have anonymous sources telling us it's definitely happening and we should take it at face value.
Tell them "if they're genociding the yoghurts how come there's supermarket aisles full of them?!"
Then make them read this https://www.greanvillepost.com/2019/07/22/march-of-the-uyghurs/
no offense but this comes off as super biased and will probably turn libs away
I think there is a 'passive angle' in which you don't bring anything up - you wait for them to press you.
It's how I got my right-libertarian friends to mellow on the Soviet Union and China - let them get intrigued and ask questions, then you let loose - they're less likely to shut off because they actually want to hear you, i.e. it is provoked vs. unprovoked. ExampleIn this case, I would not proffer anything - I would wait for them to ask my opinion and then start simple with something like "I don't believe it's happening" - the expected response is one of reasonable incredulity - "But why?! All the evidence?!" to which you say your piece on Zenz and the US funded RFA.
You're never gonna convince someone out of an entrenched position in a single exchange - it's a battle of attrition.
Getting them to essentially concede 'defeat' with an 'okay I guess' is a minor victory in the short term, but it all adds up - the point is to plant the seeds of doubt; to set the foundation for a larger change of perspective.I've had further IRL conversations with this person on China and the USSR and they've shifted from the standard position of western antagonism to one of respect for their material achievements.
I'm from a Muslim background and I have faced backlash for it. If you really can't avoid the subject then just casually question why there isnt much evidence outside of far right sources, why Muslim nations deny it or why the Trump administration (Mike Pompeo specifically) refused to see for themselves, etc.
You dont need to defend China against debatelord chuds and libs. You can't change most people's minds even if you have all the evidence. Just ignore it.
I don't know if this is a good tact to take. Because this very closely parallels a Zionist talking point of discounting Palestinian ethnic cleansing since the Palestinian population is still increasing.
It also ignores the fact that genocide can happen without mass killings.
