I genuinely went to read this in good faith since it's The Intercept (I know it's not great, but it's not CNN) but decided to do a quick text search for Zenz just to make sure. And of course, the whole fucking thing is full of Zenz.
This is just ridiculous at this point. I really don't want to be a genocide-denier if there is actually one happening, but for fuck's sake this is just ridiculous, LET ME SEE ONE REPORT ON THIS WITHOUT ZENZ ALL OVER IT.
Had the same reaction. Cntrl+F "Zenz" - uhh ok. One quote okay, but it's like... the entire article lmao
Yeah, it was shocking. I thought maybe they did some research or some shit, but no, like 90% of it is based on Zenz.
And believe me I'm not even a "uyghur genocide is 100% non-existent" type either like many on here. It's just genuinely impossible to really understand what's actually going on, especially when you don't have hours every day to research. We don't have the means to have a serious conversation about any of this. Every BBC report that horrified me in the past has been shown to be littered with fabricated nonsense, like claiming a building is a death camp based on satellite footage when it's actually just a factory that closed down a year ago.
The true centrist cold take here is "America & the west is genocidal as fuck in a way that we DO somewhat understand, let's not fix China let's fix America." I mean as if we had any power to 'do anything' about China, not like foreign policy is influenced by public opinion or democracy whatsoever.
It's fucked up, basically impossible to normally discuss. Every god damn report involves that idiot which makes it sound like I'm some kind of genocide denier to people who are unfamiliar with him.
I'm not. I have no clue what they're doing in China. But I know this dude is a psycho and it's really fucking suspicious that EVERY single western outlet is acting like he's some credible researcher and not a far-right religious extremist propagandist and that 99% of reports about the issue lead back to him.
Yeah. I'm pretty open about my views to my family, but I would NEVER launch into a discussion about the Uyghur situation, because like you said, it comes off looking like genocide denial - and let's be honest who fucking knows, from our media environment, it MAY ACTUALLY BE genocide denial.
It might, that's the fucked up part. The Intercept incorporating Zenz in their reporting just muddles the whole fucking thing. If it ends up somehow being proven that there was a genocide, the fact that people didn't believe it isn't on us, it's on these fucking assholes for constantly including Zenz in their shit.
If there was a story about something bad happening in the US, and every article's source about the story was Alex Jones -- people would rightfully dismiss it immediately. And you wouldn't blame them -- you'd blame the media for whipping shit all over their reporting by including Alex Jones.
For months I've had this nagging question in the back of my mind. "Why would the media pick a weirdo like Zenz?" I mean, there are more serious academics saying similar stuff. What's the benefit to focusing on Zenz?
I think I've finally settled on an answer.
It makes it easier to paint the left, and critics of the anti-China stories in general, as genocide deniers. It's actually easier than if they used a better source, because the criticisms of Zenz are going to sound less "nuanced" and that's all libs care about. They're not going to look into it, they're just going to go, "Leftists keep calling Zenz a complete lying bastard and the media says they're genocide deniers, so that checks out". Zenz is fucking bait for critics. The media knows they're going to be doing some heavy-handed consent-manufacturing for the foreseeable future, so they're just diving right in. They're not worried about it biting them later because that's not what matters for the next couple years of anti-China propaganda.
I don't know if any of that is actually what they're thinking or if there's a more mundane reason for Zenz, but it sounds way more plausible than I'd like.
there’s a more mundane reason for Zenz
Journalists are working under a deadline and Zenz content is easy, everywhere, and uncontroversial in mainstream circles. Why not include it to pad out your article?
Alex Jones, or honestly also basically any other right-of-center journalist, if we're talking democrat-related issues. Like just look at the fucking Hunter Biden saga and the mass censorship around it.
How is your family even aware of it? I'm sure the rhetoric is going to intensify but I still haven't heard a lot of ground swell about this in the media at large. It's mostly been grandstanding Mike Pompeo and Ted Cruz types that have been the most invested in this.
Really? I've been hearing about it quite a lot for the past 2 years now.
I've been hearing about it since the 2009 Urumqi riots that led to Facebook being banned--mostly because I was in Southwest China the summer it happened--but I've only seen people really start to care after Trump and the rest of the western world ramped up the Sinophobia to deflect blame for their complete bungling of Covid.
And believe me I’m not even a “uyghur genocide is 100% non-existent” type either like many on here.
You are perfectly in your right to be displeased about the situation, personally I don't think any of this is "ideal". But genocide is not a sliding scale. You can't genocide "less" or "more". It is either happening or it isn't, and it almost certainly isn't.
In a perfect world it wouldn't be necessary to find religious extremists and reeducate them. In a perfect world the revolution would be inherently convincing to everyone the moment it happens. This goes for fascists, capitalists, religious extremists etc...
Either you do something which you believe is the best choice, or you do nothing or worse, take the worst option available. The situation in Xinjiang was not something a government could just ignore.. Content warning :graphic and uncomfortable but really really important to watch if you haven't.
People either forget or are not aware that the issue here is not just "religious extremism" as if the party wants to do away with Muslims or whatever.
But that there is actual terrorism on a large scale that was going on for decades. Even worse still many of these terrorists ended up fighting for ISIS, like it or not contributing to a larger regional problem.
I can understand why a Westerner wants to be on the safe side, I mean who wants to be caught defending genocide right?
But my personal reasoning is even if Nazi Germany had the tech we have today they would not be able to hide Auschwitz from all the forms of modern intelligence, nevermind all the modern social interactions(it only takes one random guy with a smartphone taking the right picture at the right time).
There are more than enough resources available worldwide to prove if China was really committing such a large scale genocide. Yet the media doesn't want to go that far, remember one of the features of fascism: "The enemy is both strong and weak. By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak”.
it is such a large scale China must be stopped. Yet it is so carefully and masterfully done that obviously it is really difficult to prove and show that it is happening that is why we only have Google Maps, fucking Zens and the token fugitive that certainly didn't receive a paycheck or compensation for courageously "speaking up".
So what is the end game, what if we are "wrong"?
I personally don't see a problem in picking a side and accepting the consequences, if someone wants to be a lib and say we can't forcibly re-educate or just decide who gets to be taken away or not then that is his moral problem(this person isn't ever participating in a revolution then in the future let alone any of the past ones).
I would suggest suits him really well for not having to live under the threat that some religious terrorist(again watch the video in the link, this is not an exaggeration) is going to drive over people on the street, at least we can sleep at night knowing we could have done a lot more to stop the fascists but chose not to?
On the other hand what if the fascists and libs are wrong and their actions lead to a World War because they couldn't accept there was no easy way out of a problem they themselves helped create?
The world sucks and humans are far from perfect, capitalism amplifies all these problems(and creates new problems by itself) and sometimes there aren't many ways to make it better. I stand by that even if it means admitting to imperfect solutions.
As I said at the beginning this is not ideal, but if the solution is reeducation so that these people can learn the language, learn some new skill for a job and be reintegrated to society then fine by me. I know a lot of people living in third world countries that would kill for the same opportunity for their children.
But genocide is not a sliding scale. You can’t genocide “less” or “more”. It is either happening or it isn’t, and it almost certainly isn’t.
Eh. There's things that aren't literal genocide but they are still despicable so there kind of is a "sliding scale", the semantics of the word aren't terribly important and not universally agreed upon anyways. Cultural genocide is a thing. If anything it is closer to what the original intended meaning of the word was.
if someone wants to be a lib and say we can’t forcibly re-educate
What is "re-education"? Forced re-education against minority groups is cultural genocide. I don't understand how you can call someone a "lib" for opposing something like that.
There's a whole lot of that kind of shit about Muslims and about Roma in Europe and when I catch someone trying to pull of that shit I call them out for the fash they are. It's hard to say what exactly is going on in China and the cold war climate that's getting built up really sucks but no one should support this shit if this is what's happening.
I would suggest suits him really well for not having to live under the threat that some religious terrorist(again watch the video in the link, this is not an exaggeration) is going to drive over people on the street,
This is literally what Macron is saying. Except, like, France actually has a far larger terrorism problem.
The word you are looking for is "ethocide." This isn't genocide at all. It's almost certainly an intentional ethocide of the Uyghurs to get them roughly assimilated to the same degree as the Hui and other Chinese Muslim groups
It’s not genocide or ethnocide, unless you think radical Islamism is a core part of Uyghur culture.
Eh, it's been a minority part of Uyghur culture around for almost 100 years now. That's what settler colonialism does to a people. It precedes the CCP and even the GMD.
conflating Mandarin classes with the complete obliteration of Uyghur culture is absurd.
I'm not. I'm conflating demolition of ancestral graveyards, intentionally depressing all group practice of religion, harrassing any family member of someone who has been previously detained, and detaining 10% or more of all Uyghur parents up to three years with ethocide. If any western country was doing the same thing it's be pretty obvious what was going on.
Hell, all kitchen knives have to be tethered in a Uyghur-owned restaurant. Come on now!
The word you are looking for is “ethocide.”
Cultural genocide is a perfectly valid term that exists for about as long as the term genocide does. For instance the stolen generations in Australia. They weren't outright killing Aboriginals, they were forcing them to integrate by stealing their children.
a term that has a very narrow legal meaning internationally
It's only so narrow because the people who "officially" defined the term were struggling to make it not apply to themselves, pretty much. Same thing happens with all international laws.
Thanks for writing this out. I definitely need to watch that video to reckon with "both sides" instead of just constant western propaganda.
But let's say that what the situation amounts to is just purely re-education and de-radicalization of Uyghur people, I think there's massive problems there too. Here in the US I've been involved in movements against the rampant profiling that our police department does. As this is despite (as much as the statistics get skewed) the fact that non-white people are in fact responsible for more crime than white people, and that gang violence is genuinely a huge problem. People understandably long for solutions, and the only solution presented is either more tough-on-crime rhetoric, or a "soft-on-crime" rhetoric. But I understand that the issue is far more complicated than just locking up the bad people, that we need to address people's material circumstances. Lasting poverty inevitably leads to crime, therefore it's both incredibly unjust and unpractical to lock up people who are "more likely to be criminals," so to speak. This makes me very hesitant when I hear about a lot of the surveillance programs which is admitted by Chinese media (forgive me if I'm misremembering on this point).
I do also understand though, you have to do SOMETHING to deal with terrorism. A re-education program for US neo-nazis for example sounds like a pretty merciful deal. From a 'hand of god' perspective this is obviously preferable to a war if it does indeed solve the problem.
Feel free to call me a lib or a pathologically western leftist, that's fair - but I'm not confident enough to come out in support of what likely amounts to cultural genocide. Very possible this is the propaganda speaking. I'm still reading and learning.
If you're interested there's some good books out there about the long history of Xinjiang, as in hundreds of years plus long, that has led up to the current conditions.
The true centrist cold take here is “America & the west is genocidal as fuck in a way that we DO somewhat understand, let’s not fix China let’s fix America.” I mean as if we had any power to ‘do anything’ about China, not like foreign policy is influenced by public opinion or democracy whatsoever.
The best way I have of dealing with this to regular people isn't to deny what's happening with the Uighurs, since it looks the same as holocaust denial, rather, say "Ok, even if the most dramatic numbers of Uighurs who are suffering are true, there are far more people suffering in Yemen, something our government can actually do something about" and then talk about Yemen
something our government can actually do something about”
To be fair, the situation with the Uighurs probably has an American element to it. Radicalizing extremists in areas strategically important to US foreign policy is kinda our thing.
True, but it's much easier to explain how america can stop selling weapons to saudi arabia, refuelling their planes, and providing them with intel
And if the US actually put some pressure on Saudi Arabia, I suspect the war would end immediately.
That's a logical fallacy, namely whataboutism. How can you try to ignore a conversation about genocide?
But yeah good point lol. Yemen & the middle east in general.
It's not necessarily whataboutism so much as it's something out of control and suffering due to American foreign policy is (more) in our control to expose to an apathetic public and so on.
This is Chomsky's argument from the late 80s about why he's fine with Russian activists in Russia but he doesn't really care what Russia does because he can't do anything about it, meanwhile he can work to effect political discourse in the US. In some ways it's the opposite of whataboutism.
The Intercept without Glenn Greenwald is basically Vice News with a higher production quality.
It's Vice News but sub about the skatepunk aesthetic for a cyberpunk aesthetic
Lmao this is verbatim what the libs are gonna say to us in a few years as we walk into our first deradicalization hearings
Edit: Don't get me wrong, I'll defend China on it. Just kinda spooky realizing this China narrative is 100% gonna be used as justification to reeducate labor organizers.
but... are they all terrorists? who's definition of terrorism are we relying on? what process do they have to argue they're not terrorists?
well, its more going after people in poor material conditions to help them learn how to integrate, get a job, while still allowing to practice their culture. By keeping them out of poor material conditions, they prevent terrorism
2-3 years in detention and intentionally reducing practice of Islam as a key goal is not allowing people to practice their culture.
It is a shitty situation that didn't start with the CCP--it starts with the Qing genociding an entire Buddhist ethnic group and then promoting Han settler colonialism in the area ~250 years ago--but CCP has a bad track record of figuring out how to productively engage with non-assimilated ethnic minorities, and this is a continuation of that.
This one was always weird to me, what's the big deal regarding the name? Why is it a big deal for either side how they refer to the party?
Not trolling just geniunely curious since I've seen people react like you did occasionally.
I imagine it's also somewhat analogous to Cuba, where despite the economic revolution, remnants of anti-black racism is still prevalent. Much better than before, of course, but still there. (As I understand it)
China is a technocratic country that leads the world on scientific innovation. Which is great, but it leads to a lot of trickle down soft (or with the Uyghurs, often kind of blatant) bigotry towards disenfranchised minorities who seem "backward," religiously "superstitious," or otherwise unassimilated into modern society.
Would you say the situation in Cuba a bit like Brazil, where there's not exactly racism the way there is in the US, but still lots of colorism and classism tied to white European privilege?
I personally don’t agree with China’s approach, but how exactly are you supposed to get a bunch of 22-year old men to learn marketable skills without forcefully enrolling them in jobs programs? If you do nothing, many won’t enroll and will get left behind only speaking one language, and Xinjiang will stay poor. If you force them to learn Chinese and stay overnight at schools/camps, well then you’re putting people there against their will, potentially erasing their culture and violating them. Seems like a difficult situation
China seems to be going for the latter, but their culture seems to to remain, I mean there are still tons of mosques, with women even being allowed to be imams, a feat that is impressive
This sounds so strange to me. People all around the world including in socialist and religious countries pay good money and/or study to get education. What's wrong with those people that they have to be physically forced to get marketable skills? That just sounds like a failure to use available economic levers.
The leaked records in the article work out to 10% of all children in the region cited having one or more parent in detention.
This is a long article and I read bits and pieces, but did they say anywhere that they got the document from Zenz? Seems like they aren't afraid to align themselves with him, so why not put that right at the top? Either way, 50+ gigabytes of government records isn't an easy thing to fake, and presumably they have their own staff members employed to at least spot check the translations.
It is kind of odd that they didn't post the Chinese originals along with the English translations, I will certainly give you that.
It is for their own good as well as the good of China as a whole
:bolton:
These arguments would be more convincing if they weren't always immediately followed by "and America does THIS, so there." (Or conflating the American government with Americans.)
It is for their own good
Sorry, but that's a disgusting take. Putting people into "re-education camps" against their will to try and make them forgo their religion is completely unacceptable and goes against basic human rights.
I've seen at least 3 testimonies that said they were preventing some of them from praying (in the camps in question I mean), for example. I've seen no obvious reason to say they're lying / CIA plants or something.
Also, what the fuck is that picture ? who are these people (not trolling, genuinely asking; because if they're indeed uyghurs that's totally unacceptable) ?
Please remember too that China still has a crazy number of Mosques, far more per-capita than pretty much any Western country.
That's a good point, I'll admit. Though "far more" is not true I think; just did a quick calculation and both my own country (France) and Germany have slightly more mosques per capita than China - though the difference with China is not really statistically significant.
Testimonies are not evidence, especially not when it is backed by the west who has a massive history of atrocity propaganda. There are active secessionist movements in the area and a lot of the time people will repeat what they have already heard from others as fact.
Those are likely prisoners in that photo. It’s common practice in prisons all around the world to blindfold prisoners during transportation
Those are likely prisoners in that photo
That was my assumption too when it was first published, yeah.
It’s common practice in prisons all around the world to blindfold prisoners during transportation
Not really ? not in my country, not in the EU in general at least. Again, shaving the heads of prisoners, putting them like this on the ground, and blindfolding them is absolutely not OK (though we're talking about a country that also still has the death penalty, mind you, another human rights violation).
Critical support for China of course, but I refuse to close my eyes to their numerous human rights violation.
Oh I thought many countries did that. I know my country does. I agree with everything else you wrote, China has a lot of backward legal practices, like banning drugs also
If you think shaving the heads of prisoners, putting them like this on the ground, and blindfolding them is OK then I'm not sure what to tell you. As for them being "regular" prisoners, that's what I suspected too when the photo first came up, thanks.
Testimonies are worth dirt, frankly.
Not really ? though I'll admit trying to get to the bottom of what's happening with the Uyghurs in China is hell - so much disinformation, so much of it connected to that shithead Zenz. To my eyes something really bad (though clearly not genocide, but cultural erasure ? maybe) is happening, but I can't be sure and I'd really like to be able to actually find out more with certainty.
Testimonies are the go to method of spreading atrocity propaganda specifically because "I don't see a reason to think they are lying or CIA plants", its something used against every enemy of the west constantly 24/7 to create this miasma of "This country is evil and must be opposed".
Not really ?
did you also believe Saddam was killing babies in incubators?
Right, sorry if I overreacted a bit. Moreover, if you have actual reliable sources about the Uyghurs thing in general I'll take them.
Super hot take - Zenz is a Chinese agent meant to disrupt the discussion on the detention program.
TBH, I'm fucking tired of the Zenz posting. He'll get quoted regardless in any document leak because he did (however mistranslated in some cases and colored by his weird ideology) get some analysis of government documents. The police database document leak (which is the point of the story) is much more interesting than anything he was quoted as saying in the article. Just go read the documents and they speak for themselves how bad the situation is. The article also quotes Darren Byler 25 times, who is a pretty anti-capitalist ethnographer/anthropologist (who I found out about via an old TMBS interview and some grad student friends before I got more into political economy twitter) who spent years in Xinjiang and whose opinion I respect.
Oh, if anyone wants a big list of other people to read on Xinjiang and the development of western China, check out the resources in this post. Lots of good authors. Also just fyi for everyone, I am not a specialist. If anything the only history I formally studied was the history of European socialism and cold war technocultures, and that was minor as I'm a Computer Science Theory person. I just know East Asian Studies and Central Asian Studies grad students and trust their recommendations.
Being "anti-capitalist" doesn't make someone trustworthy. There's a long history of capitalist powers using splits among communists in the imperial core to discredit communist movements outside the imperial core. If you want to make the Xinjiang story believable, it should come from the nominal left.
I only specified that in comparison to Zenz since Zenz is so ideologically anti-communist, and Byler's main work is on the development of capitalism in Xinjiang and its effects on Uighurs.
Being “anti-capitalist” doesn’t make someone trustworthy.
Awkwardly hides copy of Animal Farm
I've always felt that Byler was a little sus. Darren Byler is a fellow at Center for Asian Studies and China Made and writes for China Channel which are all financially supported by the Henry Luce Foundation which funds anticommunist organizations like the Atlantic Council (a NATO cutout), the Asia Foundation (was heavily funded and originally established by the CIA), and the Council on Foreign Relations. The Henry Luce Foundation was established by the vehemently anticommunist media tycoon Henry R. Luce.
Rushan Abbas also boasted of her “extensive experience working with US government agencies, including Homeland Security, Department of Defense, Department of State, and various US intelligence agencies.” Abbas was a National Endowment for Democracy (a CIA cutout) grantee and worked for Radio Free Asia.
I hate to nitpick, but I don't see anything wrong with what Byler did in that tweet. The original tweet accused her of helping run Guantanamo, which is blatantly not true.
I cannot imagine what anyone would do working at Guantanamo that did not involve torture or collaborating with torturers to extract confessions under duress while the torture was happening and translate it.
Yeah he knee jerks like that too often then has to clarify (I mean in that Zha thread he effectively says he doesn't believe her on on the treatment of the detainees in GITMO). Guy is extremely emotionally involved in the whole thing because he lived there for years. I'm most familiar just with his PhD thesis which is very good.
Yeah, but why always him tho? Why smear your reporting with shit by including him? He doesn't even speak/read their language -- how is he the ONLY one that keeps getting these scoops and reports?
I'm sorry, but as I said to another comment. If somebody in the US based most of their article on shit Alex Jones uncovered, nobody would take it seriously -- no matter how true it actually was. You would ignore the whole article -- which is what I choose to do with every article that has anything to do with Zenz (which is like 99% of the most serious allegations).
I think it is a combination of media clout, the fact that some of his stuff has come out to be broadly correct, and since he's anti china he got propped up be large media outlets so now the whole thing has snowballed and he gets cited because he's somehow become "the guy" to cite even though there are much better people like Byler to go to. Left media has been sounding the alarm bells for years about conditions in Xinjiang, including left media inside of China before security was tightened.
IDK, here's a dive someone did into one of the first pieces Zenz did 2018 and basically chocks the paper up to broadly correct but his Chinese isn't very good and his citations aren't either (in that they had to go contact Zenz to send the documents because they couldn't find them, but he did send them and the person was later able to find them). I also from knowing who interacts with the person who does this blog that they do speak Mandarin pretty well.
Funny enough, there's a whole episode on Sinica about Chinese pro-democracy figures that were siding with Trump right after the election based on twitter posts and the like. So liberal idiocy definitely runa in both directions.
By the way, the hosts of Sinica are pro-democracy, anti-authoritarians liberal types (one more optimistic and one more pessimistic), so their takes tend to go in the direction of a "both sides" approach to US-China politics, which make them a bit more nuanced and worth critically engaging and debating than the usual shameless western propaganda. For example, they had a great episode recently with Indian reporters who cover China talking about the dearth of Indian knowledge about China and the hosts kept chiming in with variations of "sounds about as ignorant as the US then."
They covered Xinjiang a while back but I never listened to it so I don't know how credulous they are about the reporting. I'm sure it's not great.
“Another important God-given authority structure that Satan is attacking through the postmodern spirit is that of gender authority structures”, Zenz continued. "Through notions of gender equality [...] the enemy is undermining God's unique but different role assignments for men and women."
You'd have to ask the author or Ryan Tate. The author is active on Twitter so they'd probably answer.
I don't have a Tweeter so w/e, I only bring it up because Zenz has a habit of feeding documents through Google translate and having his conclusions dunked on by people who are actually fluent in Chinese
Thank you for this. Very interesting stuff and he pretty much owned me so I guess I should hear him out
I know, but I still really didn't expect Adrian Zenz levels of diarrhea from them.
“Overall, this testifies to an incredible police state, one that is quite likely to place suspicions on people who have not really done anything wrong,” said Adrian Zenz, an anthropologist and researcher who focuses on Xinjiang and Tibet.
https://twitter.com/theintercept/status/1355137546116857857
MOTHERFUCKERS ARE TWEETING HIS QUOTES
"AN ANTHROPOLOGIST AND RESEARCHER"
I'm putting on Joker makeup right now
Ah yes, an article about how ChinaBAD genocides minorities; brought to you by the same person who wrote the hit pieces:
"Zoom Meetings Aren’t End-to-End Encrypted, Despite Misleading Marketing"
"Why is the healthcare industry still so bad at cybersecurity?"
"The Best VPN Service"
"How one hacker's push to secure the internet became a crucial part of Mac, Linux, and Windows operating systems"
https://yaelgrauer.contently.com/
I enjoy these discussions, because it really lays bare who here is serious and who here is just doing a LARP.
:geordi-yes: "Send the MAGA chuds to the gulags! Central Park for the billionaires!"
:geordi-no: "That, but China?"
I have logged onto twitter and yelled at them, hopefully they do some research on their own sources after getting chewed out
Man i even saw the stupidpolers calling it out on multiple issues. Not that im defending them. Just pointing out the article is bullshit enough that even some of those guys are calling it out. Still tons fucking dumb as fuck takes though.
unsurprisingly, there's almost no real anti-imperialist journalism in the imperial core outside of zigzag, max blumenthal/gray zone and mintpress news, and they're frequently barred from 'leftist media' events put on by the jacobin/intercept/haymarket crowd
now that I know this, I love watching folks discover it in realtime
this doesn't mean that those 3 (and others in the imperialist left media) are always bad, but highly critical support (i.e. OP is great criticism, especially because the sinophobia is so damn lazy and Zenz is so damn easy to impugn)
At this point, I genuinely don't really like any publication. I like some of the Grey Zone folk, I love that they're unabashedly leftists unlike other US leftist who always hide their "power level," but their insane pro-Putin and Russia shit is really a turn-off.
It's one of those "I'm anti-imperialist" things some leftists do. So they don't "really" support Putin, but defend him at every stop just because he's opposed to the U.S.
I think that's fine to a certain extent, but the GZ folk go way and above to defend Putin.
GZ is probably controlled by Putin to some extent (well, not him personally, you get the idea). Russia controlled media can often be good because Russia is trying to seriously rival the west, which means that it is in the interest of Russia to stir shit up in the west. Some of the shit they're trying to stir up is useful for the left. Some definitely not. But the point is, while the media they control are basically propaganda media, they're opposed to the other propaganda media that is a more immediate concern for the left so you can reap some benefits from that. But also they're still propaganda media so be slightly careful with that. People mock the Russiagate thing but it's not like Russia isn't trying to interfere at all to any extent. All superpowers do that.
Yeah this in US socialist circles is sometimes called Marcyism or Campism because it mirrors stances the WWP took under Sam Marcy, and that tradition was largely continued with how PSL, despite splitting from WWP, maintained those positions. Interestingly with GZ, you can see it take some of those positions (especially with Ben Norton) right after Norton joined PSL (and started attacking DSA as Trotskyite) and deleted a bunch of his old posts about Syria lol.
Navalany or whatever his name is that's us-backed dissidence is outright fash so it's one of those cases of extremely critical support because there's no better options to take in the west
Blumenthal probably goes too far but I'll take that over shit like the OP
outright fash
What? I thought he was just a neolib and kinda racist, not full fash.
Idk I'm parroting a post here from a week or so ago but I think his being kinda racist included calling for pogroms
