• Budwig_v_1337hoven [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      9 months ago

      you wouldn’t believe how excited germans get, when they hear someone else out there is supposedly doing a bit of a genocide

      they fall over themselves to condemn, of course. Turns out, most of the world is actually worse than hitler, huh. Convenient, I guess

  • Nakoichi [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    9 months ago

    The OP is horrible too.

    Over 90% of Tibetan people still speak their ancestral language.

    Wanna guess what that number is for indigenous people of Turtle Island?

    spoiler

    It is 8%. EIGHT FUCKING PERCENT. Fuck all of these cracker libs.

    Americans and Canadians love to pretend that just because their genocides were more successful and the victims less numerous less numerous now that this somehow invalidates their struggle. One of the longest enduring struggles against colonialism is still alive today in spite of all efforts to exterminate them. Efforts that are ongoing.

    • AcidSmiley [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      9 months ago

      the victims less numerous

      North Amerika had about 10 million inhabitants before the settlers arrived and half a million natives left once the expansion of the US and Klanada was complete. Libs downplay this by saying that half of the 9.5 million were killed by plagues instead of being directly murdered, which is ignoring pox blankets, but you have to be creative when you want to deny actual genocides that leave behind material evidence.

        • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          9 months ago

          Also worth mentioning that being displaced and robbed means that doing things like effectively quarantining become much harder, you are likely to be exposed to many other different diseases (native or otherwise) due to poor shelter, lack of medicine to prevent or treat infections, contact with different animal species and even human populations, etc., and really everything about the situation making the fact that there were any survivors basically accidental to the actual concern the colonizers had of making sure colonized land was “cleared” of native inhabitants.

      • for context, the 10 million inhabitants number is in dispute. some estimates for N. America alone go up towards 20 million or even 50 million (including Mexico).

        Part One: Numbers from Nowhere

        Mann first treats New England in the 17th century. He disagrees with the popular idea that European technologies were superior to those of Native Americans, using guns as a specific example. The Native Americans considered them little more than “noisemakers”, and concluded they were more difficult to aim than arrows. Prominent colonist John Smith of the southern Jamestown colony noted as an “awful truth” that a gun “could not shoot as far as an arrow could fly”. Moccasins were more comfortable and sturdy than the boots Europeans wore, and were preferred by most during that era because their padding offered a more silent approach to warfare. The Indian canoes could be paddled faster and were more maneuverable than any small European boats.

        The contrasting approaches of “High Counters” and “Low Counters” among historians are discussed. Among the former, anthropologist Henry F. Dobyns estimated the number of pre-Columbian Native Americans as close to 100 million, while critics of the High Counters include David Henige, who wrote Numbers from Nowhere (1998).

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491:_New_Revelations_of_the_Americas_Before_Columbus

        The population debate has often had ideological underpinnings. Low estimates were sometimes reflective of European notions of cultural and racial superiority. Historian Francis Jennings argued, “Scholarly wisdom long held that Indians were so inferior in mind and works that they could not possibly have created or sustained large populations.” In 1998, Africanist Historian David Henige said many population estimates are the result of arbitrary formulas applied from unreliable sources.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_the_Indigenous_peoples_of_the_Americas#Estimations

        it’s worth noting that Tenoctitlan at around a quarter of a million inhabitants was likely the 4th largest city on earth at the time, with a population larger than current day Paris or Istanbul and had 4x the population of London. the spanish conquistadors purposely fouled it’s extremely innovative water and transportation system, making disease rampant.

        • Nakoichi [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          9 months ago

          While some of this could be misconstrued as a noble savage trope, they really did have many novel forms of agriculture that were far advanced beyond European practices in terms of sustaining populations at scale.

          • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            9 months ago

            Simply acknowledging a concrete difference in practices isn’t a “noble savage” trope. Different civilizations often have different levels of advancement in different areas.

  • Balefirex [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    9 months ago

    https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/

    Let us look at a specific example. A claim like “There’s cultural genocide of Uyghurs in Xinjiang” is simply unreal to most Westerners, close to pure gibberish. The words really refer to existing entities and geographies, but Westerners aren’t familiar with them. The actual content of the utterance as it spills out is no more complex or nuanced than “China Bad,” and the elementary mistakes people make when they write out statements of “solidarity” make that much clear. This is not a complaint that these people have not studied China enough — there’s no reason to expect them to study China, and retrospectively I think to some extent it was a mistake to personally have spent so much time trying to teach them. It’s instead an acknowledgment that they are eagerly wielding the accusation like a club, that they are in reality unconcerned with its truth-content, because it serves a social purpose.

    • mathemachristian [he/him]@hexbear.netOP
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      9 months ago

      Even Turkey backed off. And they were all “rah rah our turkic brothers are being persecuted, this will not stand!!”. Even they decided that nothing of the sort was happening there.

        • RedCat@lemmygrad.ml
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          9 months ago

          I have actually read that somewhere. It went a little like this “Ofc those evil corrupt governments side with China, they are just as corrupt as the Chinese so of course they will betray their own people as long as it benefits them!”

          which is deeply racist and also very ironic considering that officials across the EU have been more then ready to commit economic suicide after Washington asked them to.

  • Tachanka [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    9 months ago

    Said it before, will say it again.

    in 2000 America imported 6.38% of its total imports from China, in 2020 America imported 19.5% of its total imports from China, over a threefold increase. Setting aside the zenz question, if the US government (or their allies) actually cared about the treatment of Muslims in China (they don’t, they’ve been bombing Muslim countries nonstop for 20 years), they would have to decouple the American economy from the Chinese economy as quickly as possible with a general boycott of Chinese goods in order to end indirect material support for the genocide they claim is happening. But we all know that’s not gonna happen, lol.

    • PKMKII [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      9 months ago

      I think that’s where a lot of this “China Man Bad” rhetoric stems from. If they’re extra loud about how bad China is, find one or two token Chinese companies to boycott, it’ll assuage the nagging feeling of cognitive dissonance that getting all that plastic shit from China completely undermines the idea that capitalism buttresses “free” society.

      • BeamBrain [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        9 months ago

        wanted to celebrate winning a lawsuit against an anti-Muslim Trump policy by… going to a bar.

        Maybe it’s because it’s late and I’m tired, but I don’t see why that would be noteworthy.

        • WittyProfileName2 [she/her]@hexbear.net
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          9 months ago

          Intentional consumption of alcohol is haram, presumably they hadn’t considered that by going to a bar to celebrate they’d effectively barred any Muslim colleagues from joining them.

    • PosadistInevitablity [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      9 months ago

      They would not have been allowed to go even if they wanted to, as had recently become apparent.

      The rhetorical trick is ensuring only journalists who would never go end up in positions of power.

    • Tankiedesantski [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      9 months ago

      ABC (Australia) recently acceped a tour and published this schlock:

      In Urumqi, a flashpoint of unrest in the past, we were allowed to walk around and film unrestricted, past midnight and without a minder.

      Uyghur families appeared relaxed as they enjoyed kebabs and sheep brains at the bustling night markets.

      Those we spoke to said the city was safe and their lives were good.

      But our requests to see one of the former internment camps where more than 1 million people are believed to have been locked up for months or years, were denied by our Chinese hosts.

      “The people we claimed were genocided are clearly alive and happy. Now show us where you did the genocide!”

      The man and the camera During the tour, the ABC and a US outlet approached a souvenir vendor who claimed to have spent time in such a facility.

      He wasn’t provided by the tour guides.

      When we started interviewing him, another man we’d never met appeared with a camera, stood next to us and filmed his every answer.

      Imamu Maimaiti Sidike, a father of three, showed no outward sign of intimidation as he impassively described the “extremely radical religious ideologies” that saw him locked up for seven months.

      “I didn’t allow my wife to work,” he said.

      “I believed that if we spent her income, we would go to hell and forced her to stay home. I also promoted these values to the people around me.”

      He denied any mistreatment at the facility, claiming he ate well, played chess and read books and was even allowed to go home on weekends.

      Repression in Xinjiang China is completely reshaping how people act and speak in its Xinjiang region, a new report finds.

      A farmer walks past propaganda depicting ethnic minority residents reading the Chinese constitution

      “Through my studies, I realised that radical religious views harm people. I no longer have this mindset. I can get along with people of any ethnicity and faith.”

      So the street vendor was treated humanely, reeducated to reject extremism and accept feminism and tolerance of other people and religions, has a job now, and showed “no outward sign of intimidation” but a guy recorded our interview so we’re going to paint this as scary and 1894 dystopia.

    • HornyOnMain [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      9 months ago

      iirc it started getting mainstream coverage outside of just fox news and other really far right outlets like a week after it was revealed that in the ICE camps immigrants were being operated on and sterilised without their consent

      • ProxyTheAwesome [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        9 months ago

        May 2018 was when Zenz published his first report to the Jamestown Foundation. It didn’t pick up steam until Washington Post’s article about him on May 2019. It was pushed extremely hard April-May 2021 by bellingcat, Bloomberg, WSJ and SCMP. There are multiple waves of it because re-wording of the initial “study” findings keeps getting re-published and re-posted to places like Reddit. If you go on Reddit you will see the same debunked Zenz-based Uighur articles posted like clockwork every 3 months for years on end.

        On the Jamestown Foundation founder William W. Geimer:

        Geimer was described as “a visionary” by Jamestown Foundation Board member and former Central Intelligence Agency director R. James Woolsey, and by Jamestown Foundation Advisory Board member Zbigniew Brzezinski as “a patriot with a vision, an idealist with a program, and a leader who knew how to get things done”. Geimer’s funeral service was attended by then-Vice President Dick Cheney, also a Jamestown Foundation Board member.

        Basically an anti-communist and imperialist DC based think tank published a “study” from Zenz. That study used Radio Free Asia as a source, as well as extremely flawed methods of extrapolation, to come to its conclusions and Zenz never visited Xinjiang nor does he speak or read Chinese or Uighur.

    • betelgeuse [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      9 months ago

      Yeah but that’s actually freedom. You see, Arizona has entered a public-private partnership to seek alternative solutions for public executions. They’re killing so many people that it’s costing the state too much tax money. This is to reduce costs. They get to purchase this alternative execution method in the free market, at a fair market value. Authoritarianism is when the state makes its own Zyklon B and kills masses with it. When your private prisons are so full that gassing people is the only economical solution, that’s liberal democracy.

      Please read a book.

  • Tankiedesantski [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    9 months ago

    There are some Uyghurs who could flee the country…

    I read one of the US-based Uyghur activists accounts of how she escaped China. Thought it was going to be a harrowing story of people smugglers and fake IDs but it turned out that the genocidal Chinese government just gave her a passport and she bought a plane ticket to the US.

    Every genocide in history has created huge outflows of refugees trying to escape death. Xinjiang has a huge and relatively poorly patrolled border with several Islamic nations who would all be very sympathetic to their brothers and sisters getting murdered. Where are the mass refugee outflows? Nowhere.

    • Krem [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      9 months ago

      also there are lots of uyghur people in China outside of Xinjiang, in pretty much every province and city. go to a normal city like Xi’an or Beijing and you’ll see a hundred thousand uyghur people owning businesses and going to work and meeting up with friends and going to the mosque.

    • flan [they/them]@hexbear.net
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      9 months ago

      the genocidal Chinese government just gave her a passport and she bought a plane ticket to the US

      what a bunch of morons, they didn’t know it’s what she actually wanted all along

      • Tankiedesantski [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        9 months ago

        The funny thing about the Xinjiang genocide is that if you look at the quality of life and treatment of actual Uyghur people, you have to conclude that the genocide is either not happening or that the CPC is comically bad at it.