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To those that believe that they would not have turned a blind eye during WWII to the systematic extermination of Jews, the current generation has been given a s
by TheUndead96 6y ago
To those that believe that they would not have turned a blind eye during WWII to the systematic extermination of Jews, the current generation has been given a similar challenge. Where is your cancel-culture now? How will our children think of us?
- suprfsat 6y ago[takes a deep breath] China is cancelled!
- PoissonVache 6y agoYeah, I'm realizing that it's all about geopolitics and power, not about cultural ideas.
- smhost 6y agoAmericans killed a million muslims and destroyed their homeland. China imprisoned a million muslims and put them in factories. Stop being so dramatic.
- dutch3000 6y agoa million? really?
- sveme 6y agoProbably correct estimate considering all the American wars in the middle east. Still annoying comparison and whataboutism.
- TheUndead96 6y agoJust to address the comment above (it has been flagged and I can no longer reply directly). This is not a debate of America vs China. This is a debate of morality. We should not reserve judgement only for "bad guys". The reason China gets a free pass on this is because they are economically valuable to other countries. Chaining up pregnant women is bad, by all nations at all times.
- Nginx487 6y agoI spot this demagogic argument from pro-Chinese position all the time: "they committed some crimes, so we have a right to do the same". Following that logic, they easily can justify their genocide with providing Holocaust as an example: "we just imprison and torture people, we do not burn them".
- hiq 6y agoI think it's useful to directly use the word which describes this strategy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism This makes it faster for you to refute their point, especially in front of other people who might be convinced by this argument at first.
- greatpatton 6y agoI think that regarding free pass the US get it all the time. Look at the Iraq war, I think that only western country that had to suffer consequences was France with the Freedom Fry silliness. Moreover in the US almost everybody is proud to have fight this war... We in Europe should be more vocal about what US and China think they can do to the rest of the world without consequences. China is an awful country, we just have to look at what they did in Tibet, for the last 40 years... there is nothing new. European country are currently doing nothing and this is despicable, my country being the worst, we just discovered that Chinese police officer are invited here to identify potential Chinese to send back to China... the moral standpoint is very weak, and only facts matter.
- hiq 6y ago
- rieter 6y agoYes, also impoverished and displaced several million people. Consider the impact of all the regime change operations undertaken under the patronage of the United States in countries like Iraq, Lybia, Syria and Yemen, as well as devastating effects of economic sanctions on Iran, Syria and other nations.
- emptyfile 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War Americans might have conveniently forgot what was happening in the world between the years 2001-2011, but the world hasn't.
- RandomBacon 6y agoThere is one estimate at 1 million, one estimate at 400 thousand, and multiple estimates at 100 thousand. The 1 million estimate seems to be a major outlier. Yes 100 thousand is still very terrible, but that's probably a more accurate number.
- dutch3000 6y agoi’m not questioning the existence of the conflict, yet your propagation of exaggerated figures.
- christophilus 6y agoIt’s almost like more than one country can do horrible things. Who’d have thought? It doesn’t make the situation in China any better to point out that other countries have also done bad things.
- ahmedalsudani 6y agoI believe the point is that people on this website are selective in their outrage.
- fsflover 6y agoNo, it's just that we are discussing here just one country, see the topic title.
- ahmedalsudani 6y agohttps://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=iraq&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... Where is the equivalent outcry? Why is the country we’re discussing here always China? That’s the selective outrage.
- xupybd 6y agoYes but America did that to foreign people during war. Its something else when a government does this to its own people.
- SCHiM 6y agoEhh, don't you think that actually makes it worse? I don't know about you, but even if the government does not have a legitimate democratic mandate, it still has a larger say than a foreign country. Especially if you consider that the USA isn't exactly a shining example of a functioning democracy.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- read_if_gay_ 6y agoWhataboutism
- hhjinks 6y agoChina's actions are targeted genocide. They're a completely different level of evil.
- rieter 6y agoHow many Muslims did China actually kill? I mean, what's happening in Xinjiang is obviously very concerning, however I don't think anyone has ever produced any evidence that a literal genocide is happening. Mass incarceration? Perhaps. Brainwashing? Maybe. Genocide? Highly dubious.
- dragonwriter 6y ago> How many Muslims did China actually kill? [...] I don't think anyone has ever produced any evidence that a literal genocide is happening. Mass incarceration? Perhaps. Brainwashing? Maybe. Genocide? Highly dubious. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article II: “genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” “Mass incarceration” with children forcibly transferred to boarding schools run by people outside of the group and “brainwashing”, together, seem to qualify for (b), (c), (d), (e), even if (a) is missing.
- hhjinks 6y agoThanks. There's no getting around it. This is genocide.
- misja111 6y agoFirst of all you seem to assume that everybody here is American. Let me tell you, they are not. Second, if the USA killed a million muslims, does that make it right that China does it as well? I don't think it does.
- berdario 6y agoFirst of all, China didn't kill a million muslims. Second, discrimination or racism is never right, but the arguments related to Xinjiang prisons are being used to drum up popular support for a [cold] war against China. We have a duty to speak out against our leaders, so that we can prevent tragic mistakes being made.
- throwaway189262 6y agoWhatabout the time Nazis killed millions of Jews? Imprisoning your minorities is practically doing them a favor!
- Aunche 6y agoEven the "million people" detained statistic is incredibly misleading. When you look at the original actual paper that conducted the investigation, it's about the total people who were ever detained, most of which are released after their mandatory reeducation is complete. However, western journalists intentionally make it sound like 1 million people are currently being detained. Whenever BuzzFeed or any news company talks about ICE detention or US prisons, they make it very obvious when they talk about current people being detained and the total population that had been detained.
- pixxel 6y agoTackling atrocities requires effort. Farming likes on twitter for being mildly offended is much easier.
- senectus1 6y agoThe more value there is in the world the cheaper life seems to be
- Darmody 6y agoSome of us don't have much power. I denounced it online several times, that's all I can do. People like Lebron James, who thinks of himself like a freedom fighter, when he criticized China he ended up saying he was misinformed and he wasn't educated about the issue. He loves the money coming from China more than anything else. I want him to be reminded by this. He put his millions before human lives, just like some nazi collaborators did.
- grugagag 6y agoWe all have power though very little but we do. Unfortunately it is scattered. The more people care about the issue the more visible it will become
- Darmody 6y agoThat's why I don't shut up.
- maskedinvader 6y agoAbsolutely , I cannot agree more about using the little power we have to bring about change. I cannot be in the wrong side of history on this.
- qiqing 6y agoHypothetically, let's say you're a regular Chinese citizen concerned about human rights abuses and police brutality in the US. Can you roughly estimate the impact of your forum posts, boycotts, and all that on US government policy?
- grugagag 6y agoIt depends on a lot of factors such as who and how many see your posts, how much you consume and how much you boycott etc. If you’re alone the impact is small but if others are starting to follow suit the number goes up fast and the voice becomes stronger. It is easy to think the impact is nill and that’s exactly how the opressor wants you to think, no wonder the divide and conquer is a strategy that works. But every movement starts off with a few who believe they make a difference and eventually it picks up a critical mass
- thecleaner 6y agoCancel culture never had any attention of pushing forward any reasonable change. It was mostly a tool for people to pretend that they somehow had an lasting positive impact on the world in the most convenient way. Boycotting goods made in China and substituting them with those made elsewhere is not as convenient. So cancel culture people and pretty much everyone else will pretend and argue such a measure will have no impact on the political situation. Maybe we should point out that apartheid in South Africa wasnt solved by good intentioned dialogue but through economic embargoes. But that argument will be ignored because its so inconvenient to not use goods made in China. You know its so easy to donate a paltry sum of money while looking at the photo of a poor African/Indian/Bangladeshi/Mexican kid and then feel great about ones magnanimity than to take the hard steps to curb an actual menace and human rights violation.
- vertex-four 6y agoI mean, for most of us on here, it's either use goods made at least partially in China or switch career - you're never going to get a computer with no Chinese-made components, especially not at a price which I can afford. Good luck doing that without years of planning, and managing to continue to feed yourself. Fact of the matter is that China is in an extremely powerful position over the world due to its position in the manufacturing chain. The world would fall apart overnight if China stopped manufacturing things - parts of it did already when Covid-19 caused lockdowns. There isn't the manufacturing ability elsewhere to scale up to what China provides.
- thecleaner 6y agoI really do not understand the downvoting here. The one reply on this comment says that we are not that powerful. Greta Thrunberg literally wrote a book saying this is not the case.
- vertex-four 6y agoI must admit that I have not read Greta Thunberg's book, but if it has a solution to capitalism's demand that we make sacrifices to our personal morals or starve in the specific instance of the tooling we need to perform our work, I'd love to hear it. You don't get to say "I am not using computers any more as they contain components made in China" and keep your job as a software developer, and you'd be very unlikely to receive unemployment benefits. The only way we're getting there is actual organisation and uprising to overthrow the capitalism which requires that we make those sacrifices, and frankly... it's not going to happen any time soon. People broadly agreed to the National Guard being sent in to handle some people who were mostly demanding that the police stop killing them, can you imagine what would happen if those people were actually calling to overthrow the state?
- Nginx487 6y agoThere's limited set of countermeasures we can impose on China. I joined "Boycott Made in China" initiative, I promote it in my LinkedIn, and I literally check "Made in" tags in the mall during shopping, and I do not buy any Apple products, until I see them implementing their project on moving production from China to India and Vietnam. However, I understand how terribly it is "not enough". Countless politicians and businessmen without moral compass keep dealing with China. Harward President cancelled human rights conference to please Comrade Xi during their meeting. Greed and cowardice rule the world, and nothing drastically changed since pre-WWII times. What else we, the people, can do to confront the evil, in the world where life of a nation, reputation of the whole country and principles of people who supposed to maintain peace all have a price?
- mola 6y agoWell, US greed gave China this power. Cancel culture have nothing to do with this. There were a lot of left leaning voices in the ninetees warning against the trajectory of globalism. The sell out of US manufacturing was done by people with money, not the people who dislike racism (and show it in a weird and harmful way).
- microcolonel 6y ago> US greed gave China this power Maybe from the U.S. perspective, but at this point there are heaps of countries around the world who at least claim to be dependent on China. This is a matter of global moral cowardice; at least today, the U.S. is more ready to say no to it.
- wayneftw 6y agoActually, this is a matter of global espionage. The CCP didn’t just appear organically, it was put there by people who have been working for generations, to build a one world government. Communism in China was not started by the Chinese. Yale also spurred Mao’s emergence. If you search for that phrase you’ll see an old Yale newspaper article about it. Yale, the home of skull and bones, the elite university built from opium money. The world is a lot darker than most people realize.
- coldtea 6y agoOr just another case of made-up US exceptionalism ("oh, how braver we are than those others for saying no to China now"), after the US corporations/market had profited from cheap Chinese manufacturing and sweat shop labor for years, and takes the high moral ground only now that "coincidentally" has an economic problem and wants to stop all the outsourcing. Meanwhile, all this talk of "global moral cowardice" was hardly there for hundreds of instances of the US doing all kinds of shit to third countries throughout the 20th and 21st century with bi-partisan agreement and the public hardly caring... China is shitted upon for those detention camps (and rightly so). Meanwhile, over a million muslim deaths have been directly and indirectly (e.g. pharmaceutical and food shortages) caused by the Iraq embargo/invasion alone [1] (one of several), and people talk about China as if their shit doesn't smell... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctions_against_Iraq#Estimates_of_deaths_due_to_sanctions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctions_against_Iraq#Estimat...
- pjc50 6y agoI genuinely believe this is getting less publicity because it's impossible to cover in the traditional way: there are very few first person sources and it's impossible to go there and film. Whereas unlimited media from the US domestic conflict is available.
- joelbluminator 6y agoWhat's happening there is despicable. But to the best of my knowledge there's no extermination. There aren't hundreds of thousands being shot or gassed. It looks more like a "cultural genocide", the kind we saw exercised against the Tibetans. I understand the emotions over this issue, and I don't think the holocaust is beyond comparison, but in this instance the comparison falls short.
- brobdingnagians 6y agoFrom what I know most Germans weren't aware of what was happening in the camps until after the war. They would have known there were people being taken away. Most genocidal governments don't publicize it as that. There is almost always a cover story. When there is a systematic removal of people from there homes, we mus assume the worst. Because a government with such widespread and systematic oppression, unrestrained, rarely restrains themselves.
- joelbluminator 6y agoI doubt it. Even in the 40s, with no internet or cell phone cameras, even back then most governments knew about the holocaust as early as 41-42. There were evidence from concentration camp prisoners who escaped, and probably other kinds of evidence...I mean it's kinda hard to hide exterminating millions of people even if you're super efficient and organised. The stories we hear from China are despicable, but again - they suggest cultural genocide, not actual genocide.
- thu2111 6y agoCan you cite that? My understanding is that the concentration camps weren't known to exist until the Allies stumbled onto them whilst advancing across Europe. In many camps the Germans had attempted to destroy them just hours before allied troops arrived, in an attempt to conceal what had been happening, but were interrupted by the high speed of the advance after D-Day. If everyone knew they wouldn't have put these camps far into the wilderness and forests, they wouldn't have tried to destroy them as they fled, and the allies wouldn't have been surprised by what they found. As for Germans knowing, they were subject to Nazi censorship. Some of them had their suspicions for sure. I saw a quote once from a woman who said of course they knew about the camps. When asked how she knew, her reply was: because that's exactly the sort of thing Hitler would have done. So she didn't really know, just suspected based on past behaviour, which is different.
- mc32 6y agoAs mentioned elsewhere what’s happening here is not extermination like the Holocaust but it’s also worse than Japanese internment that everyone denounces as having been a very bad thing... Yet, companies continue doing business and in some cases abetting the policy. Some of these companies will be the IBMs and Fords as well as the Wolksvagens and Thiessens but it’s pernicious and people don’t notice. But in retrospect years hence it will be stark.
- magicsmoke 6y ago"Japanese internment that everyone denounces as having been a very bad thing" If WW3 starts and Chinese internment camps start popping up you'll find out that what people say in peacetime and what they actually think are two very different things.
- cortesoft 6y agoI don’t understand what the ‘cancel culture’ comment is supposed to mean. There are a million tweets condemning China’s behavior... way more than the number of tweets targeting people who are ‘cancelled’ The difference is that tweets can effect a regular person’s life, and they are ‘cancelled’. China doesn’t care. A company will act to fire a single person who behaves badly because of consumer pressure; it doesn’t cost them much and is good PR. Stopping doing business with China is a lot costlier, so they don’t give in to the same consumer pressure that they would for an individual employee. The different outcome doesn’t mean there is some hypocrisy amongst the people tweeting their support for ‘cancelling’ someone. It just means that tweets aren’t that powerful for real change.
- misja111 6y agoCancel culture means boycotting public figures or companies after they have done or said something considered objectionable or offensive. You are talking only about tweets but those have little to do with it. Boycotting China is definitely possible, simply stop buying their goods. Vote with your wallet! If enough people do this then it will definitely have an impact, possibly even enough to bring about some real change.
- blisterpeanuts 6y agoI thought cancel culture referred to the practice of reporting someone's postings and getting them taken down or even banned by the platform. It also includes doxxing people and trying to get them fired from their jobs because of their online postings.
- CodeGlitch 6y agoNot sure why you are being downvoted. Cancel culture can hit non-famous/significant people as you describe. To me it's all about shutting down debate, and reducing free-speech.
- elliekelly 6y ago> Boycotting China is definitely possible, simply stop buying their goods. Is it possible though? I’m really not so sure.
- Miner49er 6y agoWe're doing similar in the United States. Shouldn't we focus on stopping it at home first?
- drieddust 6y agoAs evident from my other comments I don't like CCP one bit. But while we criticize oppression, Muslim extremism which triggered this oopression shouldn't be pushed aside either. Tibet is equally oppressed under CCP's boots for many decades now but nobody seems to be bothered. I don't like this selective outrage of west.
- derwiki 6y agoMy most cynical viewpoint is that it’s virtue signaling by Americans. We’re ashamed of our atrocities and it’s easy to point to this atrocity. Maybe it’s inadvertently selective?
- drieddust 6y agoI don't think that is the case. Media is biased but I am not sure why Media wants to exaggarate atrocities on Muslims but convinently skips atrocities on other ethnic group mostly by the Muslim extremists. I understand all Muslims are not involved but what stops Media from highlighting the atrocities of Muslim extemist group. Plenty of these groups exists but barely reported. I am not sure if this is because of White guilt or Media houses are scared of Charlie Hebdo like scenario.
- supergirl 6y agoI would be more concerned about challenges like these in my local area, i.e. the west (millions refugees living in tents as a result of western wars, for profit prisons, children refugees in border camps, etc). if we can't solve it in our own countries, what chance is there to solve it in china through twitter.
- throwaway4good 6y agoBut what if it wasn't actually true? Just like most of the reporting leading up to the major wars of the past many decades.
- actuator 6y agoGood thing then, that there are solutions other than war.
- enriquto 6y ago> To those that believe that they would not have turned a blind eye during WWII to the systematic extermination of Jews, the current generation has been given a similar challenge. Where is your cancel-culture now? How will our children think of us? I agree 100% with what you say. But if you are from the USA, you may better not say it. It is just impossible for a person from the USA not to sound ridiculously hypocritical when criticizing China. You are the greatest war-mongering country in the last few generations! If you are from the U.S.A., it is more realistic and effective to work on stopping your country killing people abroad. Not that anything that you say or suggest about China is wrong. But this century will not be remembered only by the Chinese genocide of the Uighurs, but also by the north-american aggressive and murderous imperialism.
- blindspot557 6y agoHow is that comparable to Jews? jews were tortured killed and their personal properties were robbed. Do you see anyone in this article got the same result? Where does you sense of self righteous coming from?
- pmachinery 6y agoYes, if there's one thing the Uighur people desperately need right now is people outside China cynically exploiting their suffering for petty axe grinding about young people ("current generation") and "cancel culture".
- erik_landerholm 6y agoI’d take it further. If you do business in/with China right now you would of done business with nazi Germany.
- asimovfan 6y agoWhat about the United States?
- accurrent 6y agoI am of Indian origin but grew up in China. If you want to know how its got to this state I can tell you my point of view. Back in ~2007 I saw the first brush of Uighur Han tensions. My family and I were stuck in a traffic jam in a very crowded market place. We were in car with a driver. At some point my mom, who used to be a journalist, spotted a pickpocket. This pickpocket was armed with a knife and was going about pick pocketing people. There was a police patrol around, however it was clear that he was trying to steer clear of trouble with the pickpocket. When my mom saw this her inner indian-journalist/activist was immediately re-awakened. She was about to open the door and take on the negligent police and pickpocket. At this point our driver immediately locked the door and told her to stop. He explained that the man was an Uighur and the police just did not want to run in to his gang. Later on we learnt that many Uighurs would leave their home towns for second and first tier cities in China in the hope of finding work. However due to linguistic and cultural barriers they would inevitably be unable to find work and hence fall to other ways to make money. Unfortunately when you are a minority if one person of you're kind does something wrong, your entire minority comes under scrutiny. There was a point in time when news of mass stabbings by Uighurs was becoming a weekly phenomenon. The one sited on Wikipedia is a stabbing at train stations, but I remember some which even involved children in kindergartens and pre-schools. Naturally, the local population will expect something. China may not be a democracy but their government has a social contract with the han majority to make sure they deliver. All of this was happening around the time that Xi was slowly taking the reigns from the then president Hu Jin Tao. Xi's rise was not particularly clean and his establishment of "anti-corruption" bureaus was most certainly a good way of him to get rid of opposing politicians. To prove his metal he needed to act. One of the things that was evident was the Uighurs needed "education" so they could work. For all purposes, the average Chinese would back this (heck even I would think that it'd be a good thing to help disadvantaged people come out of poverty). The only problem with "education" in China is that its not always what the rest of the world would consider humane. As a child, I had a piano teacher would beat me if I played the wrong notes. When my parents found out they of course flipped shit and immediately fired her, but I'm pretty sure other children were subjected to similar treatment and their parents would support such treatment. It is only very recently that the average Chinese parent actually started to consider child abuse by teachers as wrong. Hence it was not difficult for the CCP to recruit a group of people who sincerely believe they are doing social work to design, build and run these camps. To add to the fire you of course had western media which would report terrorism acts that were predominantly muslim (seems like american media thinks white shooters are not terrorists but anyone muslim is, and yes, Chinese do read western media its not North Korea). Hence the local Chinese also would be lead to believe that stamping out Islam is what the rest of the world supports. Towards the end of the stay there were a few times that the police stopped myself and my dad because we looked Uighur, but once we told them we were foreigners they became very jovial and let us carry on with our work. I don't know how cancel culture will solve this. In fact I don't how the world will solve this without causing more divides and hurt to an already very polarized world. But I do know one thing, it is important that we remain kind to one another irregardless of race, language or religion.
- Aunche 6y agoWe invaded Nazi Germany in response to their own invasion. Nobody is willing spend their effort to stop genocide unless they have another motive. For example, I only hear about the Rohingya genocide when people use it as an argument to break up Facebook.
- eric_b 6y agoWhy is this flagged? This is a powerful opinion and deserves to be seen.