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It's hard for me to read this in a US newspaper and square it with the real world. It bemoans race riots and military police in Xinjiang - in China. From the
by peisistratos 7y ago
It's hard for me to read this in a US newspaper and square it with the real world. It bemoans race riots and military police in Xinjiang - in China. From the context of the Baltimore race riots three years ago I cast my mind to Xinjiang Muslim radicals within China - right next to the Afghans who American troops and military police patrol 18 years and counting, on the other side of the world. Radicals in Afghanistan who the US had originally armed in the 1970s and 1980s to overthrow the then secular Afghan government incidentally.
Then from Facebook Google and most of the surveillance San Francisco establishment, in lockstep with government PRISM, we look East to see the Chinese doing the same?
Africans in the US, native Americans at the Standing Rock reservation being water cannoned, are no better off than those in Xinjiang. More African men in the US are in the prison system than college.
The demonization of China by Americans for what Americans are doing, with less reason, is silly.
It is like the hypocrisy of telling Venezuelan military to revolt and cheering street protests in Venezuela, then going back to hearings about Russian interference in the US or condemnations of yellow vest protests. Macron praises the destructive protests in Caracas and condemns yellow vests in Paris in the same press conference.
- panarky 7y ago> no better off than those in Xinjiang. This is false equivalence. While treatment of many groups is disgraceful in the US, the level of surveillance, social control and repression is nowhere near what happens in China. China has locked up millions Uyghurs and other ethnic groups in re-education camps. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_re-education_camps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_re-education_camps Yes, America's wars are shameful. Guantánamo Bay, the FISA "court" and domestic concentration camps for asylum seekers are contemptible. But these things are not on the same scale as what China is doing. The fact that we can have this conversation without censorship or fear of arrest is evidence that the US and China are far from equivalent.