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.
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.
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.
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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.
Oh yeah definitely only heard of it under Trump.
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.
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.
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.
This is literally what Macron is saying. Except, like, France actually has a far larger terrorism problem.
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OK Macron.
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
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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.
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!
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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.
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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.
Misinterpreted Google maps images
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 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
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.
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Yeah for sure.
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.