Usually in relation to Uighur camps, the argument is "since you're in America you can't change whether they're concentration camps or education facilities, so you should just concentrate on the concentration camps within your own borders instead."
Like, motherfucker, I can have an opinion on the actions in another country and still work on changing things I can change.
I guess my question is, is this concentrate on what you can change part of some theory or strategy I haven't read or is it just bad and lazy?
In particular for China it's essentially conceding to the people who thinks there are millions of Uighurs being murdered, rather than attempt to engage and show that there is no evidence of that, and just what abouting.
We shouldn’t ignore what’s happening internationally, but we shouldn’t tear each other apart over things where most of us do not have enough material or social basis for forming concrete, place-based, and experience-based knowledge — not the kind of knowledge one vaguely gets from reading reports.
I don’t know you, but when I entered the “workplace,” my understanding of all the Marxist ideas and concepts I had read before changed dramatically, not because I got smarter but because I got to know these theories from a different perspective (through work, through workplace relationships, through concrete events and experiences). This is not to say that one can’t know shit without personally experiencing things, but the truth is, in the US-Eurocentric cyberspace, we simply don’t even have the social network for building a shared, dialectically engaged knowledge base about Xinjiang (or many other stuff). It’s perfectly fine to opine, read, debate, but I seriously don’t think it’s worth it as any kind of sectarian battle line.
Great point. I do find it sad to read about the union culture that was destroyed in the 70s, and feeling what workplace isolation and combativeness is like today.