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.
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.