Biden team faced "tirade" at meeting with Chinese over America's poor human rights record in "Diplomatic humiliation"
- Thread starter Dwarvenhobble
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Do you not see the ellipsis? Those three little dots are screaming at you, and you're shutting your ears to them.
Adrian Zenz doesn't inspire much confidence in his rigour. He's a member of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, an org established by the US Congress for largely propaganda reasons, and which has highly publicised dubious stats in the past. He also says he's "guided by god" to do his work, which never evokes trust. Several of the numbers he's alleged have been uncorroborated by other sources, but have been repeated by official outlets nonetheless.
Still, there's clearly some valid points in research he's made; his claim of forced labour in cotton-fields has been corroborated, as has his claim on the suppression of birthrates (way beyond that enforced on the majority ethnic groups).
Either way, hyper-focusing on a single speaker's credibility is a deflection. He's hardly the only researcher working on this; there're plenty of other (better) sources. It's a little like arguing that since Solzhenitsyn overestimated the death-toll of Stalinist repression, therefore we can assume Stalin didn't commit crimes against humanity.
As far as I can tell, he just had a bit of a pause in his speech. Either that or ten different news outlets all found exactly the same words irrelevant. Or maybe they're all just repeating the same source. That'd be thematic.
- May 6, 2020
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I was going to respond to what you had originally wrote, but I'm glad you changed it.
Two wildly different situations as Satinavian has already pointed out. There will always be people who try to mask their denialism as skepticism.
When I search "Red Sails" the first result I get is for produce, the second is for a video game, and the third is for a communist apologist website. I assume that's the one you're going for?
Thank you for the answer.
They're all repeating the same source. Best I can tell, the Washington Post did the interview and nobody else has the primary source. Regardless, all the sources I found quoting him had that it was according to the Washington Post.
Well it's not established history like the holocaust yet.
There is this though...
China: Draconian repression of Muslims in Xinjiang amounts to crimes against humanity
Hundreds of thousands of Muslim minority men and women subjected to mass internment and torture Millions of Muslims subjected to systematized mass surveillance Muslim ethnic groups forced to abandon their religious traditions, cultural practices and local languages More than 50 former camp...
www.amnesty.org
Or one denying "white genocide"! Perhaps we should ban all information from the US government since it hasn't recognized its own genocides. Or maybe the Escapist should ban all the users who deny the genocidal nature of the Nakba and the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem and the rest of Palestine.
Very strange that you only have this concern about allegations against a rival of the United States.
Going further, any mention of the Irish Potato Famine should enforce a strict policy of recognizing that it was a genocide. After all, someone has made the accusation that it was a genocide and anyone disagreeing is therefore denying a genocide.
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It's not far off to say the Irish Potato Famine was a genocide in the same way the Holodomor was genocide
And you can say something similar about the massacres in 1965 Indonesia, which involved not only the Sukarno regime but the United States, UK, and Australia. Are none of these debatable?
I agree.
But is it debatable? Or to put it another way, does it require silencing disagreement?
yes there can be a debate about specifics but nothing we say will not make that genocide just like what's going on in China.
What is going on in China is a form of genocide if the allegations made by e.g. Amnesty are true. I think people ought to suspend judgment about the truth of the accusations because human rights NGOs are staffed by people rather than infallible truthtelling robots, and there are incentives and pressures on people who work at these organizations to support certain narratives in order to both maintain the relevance of their organizations (attention paid by mainstream news outlets) and secure funding.
For example, Human Rights Watch (the whole thread these tweets are a part of is well worth the read)
All credit to them for finally declaring Israel an apartheid state some number of decades late, but they are absolutely not above criticism. Tellingly, none of the above was ever a big scandal. The media treats such things with a collective shrug of its shoulders; criticism is marginalized not by some conspiracy to keep the truth hidden but by simple failure to spend any time whatsoever examining it in popular publications: just move on to the next story. Perhaps it helps that such failures are ubiquitous. I've read that Putin's propaganda machine aims to make everything uncertain; if so, he probably learned that technique from us.
People are capable of misrepresenting situations in order to further the designs of US imperialism, and just like the promise of some lucrative consultancy after a period in government, the same sort of opportunities exist for people who work at human rights NGOs and "promote human rights" in the desired ways. There are reasons for the United States (or the ruling class that it serves) and its media vehicles to promote hostility toward China that have absolutely nothing to do with human rights but which nonetheless would not stand well on their own in promoting the desired hostility. And so we have a situation where there is ample incentive for allegations made against China to be published and popularized and for critiques of those allegations to be suppressed or ignored by a relatively concentrated mainstream media. A degree of suspicion toward accusations about Chinese violation of human rights is therefore justified no matter what is actually going on in Xinjiang; just because propaganda isn't as nakedly racist and cartoonish as that employed in the 1940s does not mean that it isn't propaganda.
Representations of China as a Han supremacist state are, of course, very convenient for people who want to muddy the waters or ignore the white supremacy of the United States. The accusation of genocide against Uyghur Muslims is very convenient for Zionists who want people outside of Israel to ignore the ethnic cleansing of Palestine ("what about these other Muslims? Ignore the thing you can influence, what about that thing that you can't?!"). Getting the political left on board with (or at least less vocally opposed to) anti-Chinese actions requires more than just "well, global finance capital can't control them as easily as it can a place like Colombia"; the prospect of human rights abuse is exactly what is needed. Such can be weaponized just like fabricated security threats were in the case of the invasion of Iraq. Say that "Iraq WMD is different" all you like, but people were fired and essentially (if not formally) blacklisted from appearing on mainstream news for being on the right side of that, while those who were wrong in the correct way of uncritically parroting and accepting the premises for war (whether or not they personally endorsed the war itself) mostly advanced and prospered: a lesson which no doubt endured, as the media's complicity in the Iraq invasion has never been reckoned with in any sufficient way.
The United States is currently experiencing hegemonic decline, and the last time that sort of thing happened there was a world war in which Germany, Italy, and Japan challenged the supremacy of the British Empire and the British Empire was ultimately supplanted by its ally (the United States) or allies (the US and Soviet Union) depending on how you look at it. The Chinese are the strongest rival to the United States and have a much larger population and more impressive economic growth, so to avoid being supplanted by China the United States would likely have to confront it directly at some point and the earlier the better from its point of view. The biggest problem with that, of course, is nuclear weapons: I'm not confident that the ruling class of the United States (or to be more precise the apparatus it has created to secure its power) would choose to relinquish world domination rather than suicide the world in thermonuclear warfare. In any case, the accusations against China may very well be true, but it's all a little too perfect in my opinion to just uncritically accept.
I don't think there is any blame in skepticism toward a system of propaganda that produces people like the woman on the right in the following clip.
Almost as if there's a glaring, monumentally huge difference!
Who on earth is "banning" you for talking about it? Who's "silencing disagreement" on this topic? You can say whatever you want, and you already have been, at great length.
Gasp! You're denying it's real. That's the first step.
No one is at present. Which is good! Anyway, what would you call post #367* if not a call to do exactly the latter, at the least?
*it won't let me quote it for whatever reason
Ah yes, because all denial is logically equal, regardless of what it is responding to. Denying climate change is rationally identical to denying ghosts.Gasp! You're denying it's real. That's the first step.
No.
This is putting me in mind of Laurence Fox, appearing constantly on prime-time television and newspaper interviews to talk about how his exposure is being stifled.
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