Serious post warning, sleep-deprived wall of text ahead.
Someone who I dare say I respect publicly discouraged joining or supporting Lemmy on the basis of being The Tankie Place, linking this raddle post, a collection of horrifyingly flimsy evidence that Dessalines (lemmy.ml admin, maintainer of the wonderful dessalines.github.io/essays/) is a freedom hating redfash tankie who likes it when the evil CCP genocides uyghurs and bans femboys.
Naturally it all sucks but now i’m investing too many brain cells into thinking: how do you even refute this garbage?
I’m not proud of it, but I was an “anti-authoritarian leftist” too. I unironically said “tankie” once. And if i were told there is no Uyghur genocide, i would react exactly as if they had told me there was no holocaust. To the westerner, China really is as bad as nazi germany and straightforwardly saying otherwise, in their mind, is no different than if you replace Uyghurs with jews and China with germany. When this narrative is so deeply ingrained, how do you fight it? How the hell did I get here?
i really have no idea how to address it when, to them as it once was to me, it is so obviously true that anyone suggesting otherwise is not even worth listening to. these are fundamental beliefs and challenging them is grounds for instant block and report. its not open for discussion. all i can do is hope they find the truth on their own.
i’ll stop rambling now and sleep instead. so i wont respond for a while. sorry if theres a better community to post this in i just needed to get this out before i spontaneously combust. good night comrades.
I did read most of that, and it is interesting. First thing I want to address is this statement:
Yet the statement I linked to was made in 2019. So if they had been gathering data for 2 years, why would they have made the statement I linked? This confuses me. It’s not like they discovered the reality, or material conditions changed, since they made the statement; they had had years of data, supposedly. I’m going to set that aside for a moment and try to address the content of the document.
Also, yes I agree entirely that the treatment described in that section is completely unnaceptable. It mentions literal torture methods, unnecessary physical punishment, violation of right to determine or deny medical treatment, etc. None of that is acceptable. That being said, I am curious as to how frequently this happens. Not that any amount is acceptable, but if the rate in this region of these acts is the same as elsewhere in the country, then the framing of the issue needs to change from “targeted genocide” to a critique of the system as a whole. I don’t have any data as to the occurrence rate of these acts in this region or outside of it.
Much of the rest of the report leading up to the part you mentioned is really much less bothersome. It mentions use of the surveillance state to catch offending parties. You may think this is invasive or unacceptable but, again, this is not particular to this region and would be a critique of the whole system. There’s an attempt to criticize the use of imprisonment for punishment, which seems like a weird stance to take considering…the rest of the world.
In all honesty, I think the more damning part of what you linked would be everything after the part you mention specifically. The remainder of the document portrays traditional “genocidal” actions. I don’t know what to do with the document since it does seem bad, but it’s such a wild about-face from the reports just a couple years earlier, by the same group no less. More from 2019:
So unless the conditions were so perfectly hidden from many investigative groups until they suddenly weren’t, or unless the material conditions changed so much that none of the positive praise would apply anymore, I don’t know what to make of the report you’ve linked.
I think so too. That’s what I was trying to draw attention to.
I suspect it’s a complicated issue. Consider that there were at least two UN letters from 2019, one criticizing and one supporting. Note both of them (including yours above) were signed by members and not ratified by the entire UN or anything. Reference supporting existence
In general, I think it’s likely that some of the critics are being disproportionately critical because it’s China, and some of the defenders are so quick to dismiss it for the same reason.
While perhaps some of the louder US critics should think harder about mass incarceration in the US, I would suggest both countries work to treat their citizens better.
I was interested in which countries signed which statements, so I made a list of:
2019 States in Support
2022 States in Condemnation
This looks pretty divided along lines that we see on a lot of other ideological issues as well, but just out of curiousity I also compared this to:
NATO Member States
It looks like not a single state switched from Praise to Condemnation, that is, there is no state on the 2022 condemnation that was also on the 2019 praise document. Moreover, not a single NATO member state was on the 2019 praise document, but several are on the 2022 condemnation.
I think this helps reinforce your statement:
So yeah, unfortunately I’m left to assume that both reports are probably rather partisan. That being said, the 2019 praising was backed by other, third-party investigative souces, such as the ones I linked previously.
I wondered who was behind the report I linked. Apparently it was released by Michelle Bachelet on her final day as United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Notably, the word “genocide” was not once used in the report.
Yeah I’m not sure what to make of that. Here is her statement after she visited China, which doesn’t say much of anything. Her wikipedia page claims she didn’t even sign the report, but their linked citation doesn’t actually say that. It is interesting that Chile is not present on either the 2019 or the 2022 report, as I’d expect her opinion to be somewhat reflected/reflective there still.