It's possible to criticize the national security state in the U.S. while not losing sight of the fact that China is run by an authoritarian government guilty of abuses at a completely different order of magnitude.
That difference is important, because a lot of people even in this thread seem to completely lose sight of it.
I would argue that the United States is worse than China. China isn't, nor has it really ever been imperialist. The United States is an imperialist country that has wreaked havoc across the globe, and is responsible for the death of millions of innocent civilians.
Your link includes post-WWII "regime change". Would you rather live in Western Europe or Eastern Europe? North Korea or South Korea?
The point is, the United States has done a lot of things across the world. Some of it may be havoc. It may be responsible for many deaths. It's also responsible for many improved lives.
China today is involved in territorial disputes involving military mobilization with more than half of its neighbors. In a few decades, we're probably going to look back on Xinjiang as an event comparable to the holocaust.
Boiling this down to "USA = imperialist = bad" and "China = not imperialist = OK" is silly.
I question the validity of the accusations i Xinjiang. If you can provide me evidence of wrongdoing, I will be more than glad to read and investigate it. China is dealing with radical Islamists in the best way they feel they can.
I never said that China was "ok", I simply pointed out the hypocrisy that is always present when we demonize a foreign nation, for political ends.
>I never said that China was "ok", I simply pointed out the hypocrisy that is
I'm sure you think this is helpful, but this is a false equivalence that, for practical purposes, serves to derail necessary and needed criticisms of China.
Luis Kutner was a co-founder of Amnesty international, and Kutner would go on to form the “Friends of the FBI” group, an organization “formed to combat criticism of the Federal Bureau of Investigations,” according to the New York Times, after its covert campaign to disrupt leftists movements — COINTELPRO — was revealed. He also went on to operate in a number of theaters that saw heavy involvement from the CIA — including work Kutner did to undermine Congolese Prime Minister and staunch anti-imperialist Patrice Lumumba — and represented the Dalai Lama, who was provided $1.7 million a year by the CIA in the 1960s.
Oh, I'm very aware of these JV debate team talking points about Amnesty International. I would just dismiss those as not relevant and point you toward some courses on remedial critical thinking skills to better understand what kinds of evidence are relevant to what kinds of claims, specifically how the signal diminishes as you increase the degrees of separation from your evidence and the content you are trying to apply it to.
This is several degrees of abstraction away from the point about Uighurs, so unless you are claiming Luis Kutner's actions in the 60s have a specific, direct evidentiary connection to the 400 instances of Uighur testimony about disappearances and torture across the world from the past few years, the only thing I can do for you is try to help explain how to critically think about evidence and its connection to different kinds of claims, and how to understand when it does and doesn't weigh on particular claims.
Did you have anything specific to the issue of Uighur testimony you would like to share that's not from 60 years ago? Is there a particular line in the wiki article or mintpressnews that you linked that directly and specifically debunks all 400 pieces of testimony?
If you looked at the second link I provided about Nayirah and Desert Storm, you would realize that my concerns about Amnesty and testimonies are inextricably linked. They "corroborated" her testimony. Bear in mind this was in the early 90's, not 1960.
Watch the testimony, and then read the video description. Its all public record.
The facts of the matter are that there HAVE been radical Islamic terrorist attacks in Xinjiang. The Chinese are dealing with the nature of this problem. The extent to which "atrocities" are occurring is constantly stated, yet somehow the numbers are always inflated, stories are changing, none of it adds up.
You asked for evidence supporting 'the accusations in Xinjiang.' I posted some. Since then, most of your reply has had nothing to do with that. None of the material you linked previously was directly related to Uighurs. And now you've come back with a second trove of links, and instead of explaining them you're inviting me to wade through a huge trove links that apparently imply somethingorother that you just can't get around to stating in plain language.
The most relevant appears to be a pair of articles that support a half-baked argument that someone's testimony has changed, although you aren't clearly stating how it changed, and it's not clear that your interpretation of that is one that I would share. And to the extent that there's an argument here at all that relates to Uighurs, it appears to depend on using a single account to disprove an entire trove of 400 interviews, which is a fundamental misunderstanding of how different kinds of evidence balance against each other.
That's in addition to the comprehension issue regarding how evidence diminishes in weight the further it is removed from the subject - the connection between stuff from 60 years ago on a different subject doesn't balance against Amnesty's work in the present the way you seem to think it does.
And again, I'm very familiar with the copy+pasted talking points from /r/Sino. For the most part, you still haven't directly addressed the veracity of the interviews, you've just attempted to turn the whole conversation into a pandora's box of digressions with unclear connections to the specific question you were originally asking about. This is more an exercise in Qanon-style free association than an expression of a coherent thought that logically addresses specific arguments.
> Some of it may be havoc. It may be responsible for many deaths. It's also responsible for many improved lives.
If we're making those kinds of tradeoff, China is just as responsible for many improved lives, just look at the Road and Belt initiative, projects against poverty and involvement in Africa.
China pulled an entire nation of 1 billion people out of poverty, industrialized and become a global force in less than a century. As is typical with propaganda, you must demonize the enemy as an all knowing specter read to pounce, and at the same time pretend they are a toothless tiger that has so many failing they could never be considered successful.
>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.”
I said nothing about China in my comment. All I said is that it is disingenuous and incorrect to call the U.S. a “liberal democracy” and use that to explain away the reasons that our surveillance state is “better” than theirs. I made no judgment about the comparison itself.
Call it what you like, but the reality is that the USA is so much more free at every level of society than China under the CCP, and that's even ignoring the horrors of Xinjiang and Tibet.
Even in this much-derided "Clean Network" document there is not a word about the sort of content-based censorship that is ubiquitous in China.
I said nothing about China in my comment. All I said is that it is disingenuous and incorrect to call the U.S. a “liberal democracy” and use that to explain away the reasons that our surveillance state is “better” than theirs. I made no judgment about the comparison itself. Clinging to the judgment that we are the least worst, or “clothespin”, surveillance state, seems pretty grim to me.
Between an Oligarchy posing as democracy that give me the 'illusion' of choice and an Hegemonic Autocracy run by a single party, without any alternative and by an egomaniac without opposition, I chose the former every day of my life.
At least the current egomaniac in the US Presidency can be voted out under the 'illusion' system
Nearly every affluent liberal democracy on the planet qualifies as an oligarchy by the premise that gets floated about the US.
Similarly qualified: Britain, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Spain, Japan, South Korea, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Ireland, Iceland.
Have you looked at how many billionaires there are in Sweden and Norway? Oligarchy. Sweden has considerably more billionaires per capita than the US does. They're clearly not a democracy at all. The billionaires control the entire country including its government, obviously.
Ever look at the perpetual old money dominance in Germany and France? Oligarchy.
You're down to there only being a dozen or so liberal democracies that aren't in some way broken, severely tainted by money or entrenched power groups, etc. - if you use the same standard used against the US.
Serious question: if you pick any given surveillance state from a liberal western democracy and pick it out of a hat, and set it side by side with China's surveillance state, are you telling me you would not be able to tell them apart?
Because that's the point at issue in the thread you are replying to. And I'm personally kind of amazed that it's possible to lose sight of something I find to be an incredibly obvious distinction.
I think you may have pulled the wrong point. This thread seems more about how the US prides itself on being a role model when we are often hypocritical. If we're good to slide on our principles and ideals "as long as we can tell ourselves apart from China" that's a pretty sad state.
This branch of comments goes back to a commenter who made the accurate point that the US is closer to a liberal democracy than China.
>If we're good to slide on our principles and ideals "as long as we can tell ourselves apart from China" that's a pretty sad state.
This is conflating a differentiation for a justification. We can form coherent thoughts about the relative scale of abuses committed by different powers without that meaning we think those abuses are okay.
If we lose our ability to form coherent thoughts about abuses committed by China because we can't express them without also having to labor through false equivalences to U.S. surveillance, those valid and needed criticisms get derailed and the comprehension of China's unique status as an abuser of surveillance infrastructure gets erased. Judging different scales of moral error is important, because otherwise we can never progress from a position of moral error to positive moral standing and we get bogged down with frivolous exercises in whataboutism.
