All: we ban accounts that foment nationalistic flamewar on HN, so please don't do that here. If you're going to comment on an inflammatory topic like this, do so with respect for the opposing point of view. If you can't muster any such respect, and only want to smite enemies, this is not the web site you're looking for; please find another.
> If you're going to comment on an inflammatory topic like this, do so with respect for the opposing point of view. If you can't muster any such respect, and only want to smite enemies
So you're saying we should respect the views like:
1. the members of particular ethnicity and religion are terrorists, and
2. that mass-imprisonment of innocent members of an ethnicity is the correct response to the fear of terrorism from them?
Because those are some of the views expressed in this thread:
This breaks the site guideline: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." It also exemplifies what I just asked people to stop.
> In September, a Chinese official at the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva said the West could learn from his country’s program of vocational training. “If you do not say it’s the best way, maybe it’s the necessary way to deal with Islamic or religious extremism, because the West has failed in doing so,” said Li Xiaojun, the director of publicity at the Bureau of Human Rights Affairs of the State Council Information Office.
> The Chinese government has been trying to change the ethnic balance by shifting members of the majority Han Chinese into the region. [...]
> Photos of ancestors and prayer mats usually on display in Kazakh homes were all gone. They were “burned,” the locals told him. “These items,” he said, “were replaced with photos of the Chinese president and Chinese flags.”
As someone unfamiliar with the situation, a question I still have is whether this is something unique or unusual for the Chinese government, or how they'd treat any other mass of people following some organized ideology or creed they saw as competing with their totalitarianism.
E.g. I've heard about their efforts to shift the ethnic balance in Tibet, has that been followed-up with similar indoctrination efforts?
> ”... how they'd treat any other mass of people following some organized ideology or creed they saw as competing with their totalitarianism”
Falun Gong is the blueprint for this: a homegrown spiritual practice that gained too much popularity in the ‘90s and the authorities turned against it. Human rights groups estimate hundreds of thousands are still in “re-education” camps.
Vancouver, BC / Richmond BC area here, which has a >30% Chinese-ethnicity population: Whenever Falun Gong makes the press here, there is a relatively active English language social media astroturfing campaign, and fake news campaign that has been going around for at least 15-20 years which attempts to equate Falun Gong with known harmful cults which Westerners are familiar with. I've seen it compared to Heaven's Gate, the Branch Davidians, and Jim Jones' Peoples' Temple.
As best I can determine it's a buddhist/meditation group that disagrees with the Chinese government on principles of fundamental human rights.
Falun Gong is pretty harmless. I used to go along to mooch off the free meditation and qigong during my salad days. While there is a fundamental cult of personality around the leader, the values seemed morally sound and in accordance with your meat-and-potatoes buddhism.
Would actually recommend to fellow cheap-skates. Definitely no hard-sell from the believers to recite their scripture (which they call 'The Fa').
Falun gong is basically Scientology of the east. Whether you would call them harmless is debatable but they're definitely not just your meat-and-potatoes Buddhism.
They believe in spiritual healing, reject modern medicine, and believe that one can gain superpowers and that only the leader of Falun gong can activate them.
So Falun Gong has celebrity drop-in centers? Aggressively pursues you if you leave? Has a central structure to where people donate all of their money? I'm not sure you know what you are talking about.
No, yes, yes. Does it really answer your question though? I don't know what you're assuming but I frequently have encounters with Falun gong practitioners in China and Taiwan.
That same campaign seems pretty active in this very HN post. Lots of apologists for the communist regime here, with some not so subtle approvals of racism and genocide.
This comment breaks the site guideline against insinuating astroturfing and bad faith, and it adds to nationalistic flamewar. Please don't post like this again. HN has plenty of users with legitimate reason to be on either side of this debate. Both sides need to respect each other, and if they can't, they can't post here.
All: if you really believe you're seeing organized manipulation on Hacker News, that's obviously a bannable offence, and you should alert us at hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate. But please don't insinuate it in comments just to take a swipe in an argument. That's offside, and also mind-numbingly tedious.
Speaking of tracking, is there a site that tracks and draws a graph of the position of a stories on the front page, their score and number of comments?
FWIW I didn't mean to imply any moderator action, just user flagging. And I know there are many reasons for that, some people don't want political things period, and so on. But just going by sheer quality of this article, I think it's sad that people who don't want to discuss it impede on the ability of those who do want to discuss it. When it went to #1 instantly I thought "this won't last" and made some screenshots... got distracted, looked again and saw it had sunk like a brick.
I made myself a little scraper, I hope it's okay to grab the front page HTML once a minute, or is that too often?
I have met and worked with Uighurs. I personally did what was probably the largest collection on their language a couple years ago in my work at the LDC. The attempts to slander them are just that.
I’ll leave the other issue aside as I don’t know anything about it.
Let's don't bring them on the table. Just like you don't bring Peoples Temple or Branch Davidians or any other cult onto the table when you talking about such topic.
I actually knew some people who was practicing Falun Gong before the crack down (And some still practicing it after). If you want to paint a portrait of those people, just image an uneducated man/woman at age around 40~50, who probably encountered some misfortunes in their life and became vulnerable enough to take anything into their head without a thought, and act upon that thought.
They're those people who would also actually believed they can receive superpower from a tinfoil hat (Well, not actually a tinfoil hat, but guess what, they have upgraded version of that [0]), meditation, or, maybe, killing themselves/others.
Oh, also, do you know the "Eastern Lightning"[1]? Don't bring them as well.
A person of 40-50 at the time of the height of tha Falun Gong had been through some serious shit in their lifetime. Their childhood and formative years would have consisted of Mao's self-genocidal economic policies and then the cultural revolution, then a complete repudiation of those communist ideals in the subsequent opening to the west.
> been through some serious shit in their lifetime
That's for sure. Somebody actually hoping Falun Gong can be the cure for their cancer.
It's not actually a problem about economic policies and cultural revolution, I think the main problem was the government has failed to develop the infrastructure needed to educate and help those people. No, government was just let those people wander around by themselves without give them enough help, no wonder why they found such way to "help" themselves.
> Their childhood and formative years would have consisted of Mao's self-genocidal economic policies and then the cultural revolution, then a complete repudiation of those communist ideals in the subsequent opening to the west.
I don't think this is a thing, because I don't believe many people in China was that obsessed with communism to begin with. Lots of bad thing actually happened during cultural revolution and the great leap, enough for most of people to have realized.
There is a misconception many (if not most) westerners have, that is China and Chinese people are communist. WRONG. In reality, most Chinese people are just normal people who lives under the communist ruling, and that's all.
CCP of course always trying to push their ideology to the public (by education and censorship etc), but isn't that's an indication of "Not everyone believes communism in China"?
A good predictor of whether the Chinese government would react to a group is the threat that group poses on the national integrity of China. Any separatist/ independence movement will be harshly treated. You can find many examples of this. There is nothing the West that says or do that will change this policy.
> A good predictor of whether the Chinese government would react to a group is the threat that group poses on the national integrity of China.
I think the more accurate interpretation, which applies to authoritarian or totalitarian power, is that they don't tolerate competing power structures. A competing power structure, whether a political group, a labor union, a spiritual organization, can easily become a political organization and therefore a threat to the power of the government. If they are organized and independent, they are a threat. The government's motive is to protect and enhance its own power.
Think about the Falun Gong: Certainly they were no threat to the "national integrity" (whatever that means precisely) of China. Also consider labor and human rights movements, who have no interest in separatism. In fact, democracies are much more stable governments in general, and are more likely to preserve "national integrity".
Think also about the Chinese military, which IIRC is under control of the Communist Party, not the government. They are careful to not allow it to be an independent power structure - an independent military has been the downfall of many authoritarian governments (usually replacing them with another authoritarian government).
The part about incentivizing / cooking up other ways to relocate Han majority citizens is not unique or unusual. According to many reports, it's been going on in Hong Kong and Taiwan for a long time.
It's not unique or unusual for dictatorships in general. The Soviet Union, for example, worked hard at indoctrination, as did Mao. Arguably, any propaganda is indoctrination.
Xinjiang is an autonomous region, too. Tibet has been thoroughly “Hanified,” though you’re right that it hasn’t been as dramatic as in Xinjiang. The same is true for other ethnic minorities, too. Traditional costumes are kept to pay lip service to plurality, and there are some parks that feel more like Epcot Center exhibits. It’s not all due to government intervention, but China’s ethnic minorities are disappearing.
I would guess that the Chinese government is worried (rightly or wrongly) about outside (armed) support for Muslims in Xinjiang, and less concerned about the Tibetans tapping into international support, which to date has been fairly ineffectual. To my eye they are making such foreign involvement more likely, not less, with this overt campaign of imprisonment and mistreatment.
Well until now minority groups got preferential treatment as compared to Han Chinese. You will notice that the ethnic Uyghur Xinjiang governor actually supporting the camps.
Otherwise now the Party is treating the same way they treat normal Han Chinese who have different thoughts on the CCP. However not everyone in Xinjiang is affected, mostly the religious.
Taking a moment from the brutality here, this really makes me appreciate how much commercial satellite photography levels the playing field against state actors. Nobody can realistically control the space over their country and space access is sufficiently cheap that we can affordably monitor the entire surface of the earth for these kinds of events. Such an undertaking would have been impossible without state level assets a few short decades ago. These satellites are also nice because they're not capable of tracking individual people effectively or otherwise providing a route for significant invasions of privacy. In short, satellites let us see over the hedge without the risk of retaliation and with a lower likelihood of abuse against private individuals.
wrt privacy risks: this may be true for now, but it’s a matter of resolution. with time, satellite proliferation and camera tech advances could realistically make it an issue.
The topic is so brutal I feel bad pointing out how artistic they made it render in mobile. I’m so used to short articles now that I kept getting surprised by each step they took in actually doing research. Great job all around.
On the design / presentation: One thing that jumped out at me was the odd choice to use the phrase "1 million square meters - roughly the size of 140 soccer fields.". Are they trying to make "one square kilometer, - roughly[...]" sound more dramatic than it needs to?
Outside of the USA, floor space of buildings is typically measured in square meters. If you have a 15 floor office tower its gross and rentable square feet will be listed in square meters. This allows for comparison to other known structures.
out of curiosity, what do you think it'll take for anyone to do something?
the marginalized groups in the 1940s examples weren't popular anywhere, until stumbling upon the true nature of the camps for other reasons and liberation, so I see some parallels here
We can’t really do anything for the Kurds in Turkey or people in South Sudan but you think we can somehow get China to change behavior? Not a chance. We can’t even act against Russia or Iran either, or even North Korea without tremendous repercussions.
Look at Venezuela. It’s starving its own people for political reasons, they have some oil, but we could survive without it... do you think we’re gonna go down there and do anything about it? Nope!
> do you think we’re gonna go down there and do anything about it? Nope!
You sound like you think that we aren't going to do anything because we just don't care, or at least don't care enough. But "doing anything about it" in Venezuela would mean an invasion. It would mean killing a bunch of people in the name of helping people. (Granted, at least some of those killed would be part of the problem. Still, killing people to help people has a pretty bad track record and a very moral foundation.)
In China, it would mean all-out war with a near-peer nation, which would probably result in nuclear war. While what China is doing is horrible, nobody wants to stop them at that price, and not because we don't care enough.
I think we agree. The calculus is the solution involves a cost orders of magnitude larger than the problem and we’re not willing to assume that cost over principle.
Venezuela is not starving its people for "political reasons". At least not anymore. That strikes me as a US talking point more than fact. Sure, the politics and economics of the leadership crushed the economy, but at this point, sticking with the program is nothing more than a megalomaniacal dictator clinging to power. Same old story
Do the non-muslim Chinese people want to do anything? If they don't, I don't see much happening here. No one seems to be able to exert serious international pressure on Chinese politics. It's a pretty hopeless cause, for me.
Seems like political and economic isolation for China might be effective, but who wants to do that when they offer the world cheap labor and manufacturing?
Well, Mike Pence denounced china on October 3 while speaking at the Hudson Institute[0]. He specifically mentioned the million people in detention in Xinjiang. I've provided a link to the video in case you want to watch.
> Its just meant to pacify us commoners? Am I wrong to think so?
I think so, but only because I think governments know how little "us commoners" actually care, beyond wanting to virtue signal and wanting to see politicians raise a stink about things.
No fan of the current administration, but there’s a massive difference between locking up and torturing millions of Muslims, and denying travel entry to citizens from certain majority-Muslim countries. Comparisons to the Japanese interment camps set up by FDR during WW2 would make more sense.
You're right, but it's still hypocritical to morally condemn a prejudicial action against a people while you're acting out of prejudice against the same people. Especially since this moral condemnation seems conveniently timed and aligned with an active trade war.
This Muslim ban came before the immigrant camps and migrant child detention centers, which Pence also supported. If we don't hold him accountable for hypocrisy, then who will?
Considering a formal apology was issued by the state department to the surviving Saint Louis passengers, are we destined to keep repeating history's mistakes?
Trump demonizes both China and Islam. So I'm not sure what the best play for the Republican party is here. If you praise the Chinese government then that's going too far. But if you criticize them then you have to soften your own Islamophobia.
Is he ready to offer the affected Uyghurs (Or even some large percentage of them) asylum in the US? I'm sure that if he made that offer, China would gladly exile them.
The truth is that China is too big, to economically important, and to powerful militarily for either countries or companies to do anything except talk or write.
So I except nobody will do anything that has any impact.
What makes you think that something can be done? Playing international police hasn't worked out since World War II. Having been to Xinjiang, racial tensions are high. It isn't out of the question that Chinese oppression is the only thing preventing the region breaking out into civil war. Who would want to take responsibility for that fallout?
A more recent parallel, the USA opening the doors to the WTO to China long after the Dalai Lama fled, and the next Dalai Lama imprisoned as a child so the government of China can start selecting the next leaders of Tibetan Buddhism.
NATO intervened to stop the war crimes in the Yugoslav civil war mostly because it was right on the doorstep to Western Europe. Other Arab countries had already intervened years earlier with some people/weapons since the arms embargo had to some extent disproportionately affected the Muslim populations (one common thread with this gulag). This aid /intervention was only possible due to the geographic circumstances of the former Yugoslavia - no outside forces are going to step into China, and stuff like the Opium Wars/forced open doors afterwards means very few in China want foreigners to come in and help.
I hate saying this, but China has gotten itself in a position where people won't do anything to it...even where people can't do anything to it.
Let's think about an individual/NGO-style boycott where you encourage a billion people to boycott Chinese goods. Could you even boycott Chinese goods? What phone would you buy? What computer? Even if the place of final assembly isn't China, what percentage of the parts would be Chinese?
If we're talking about countries doing something, it's hard to look past the huge economic ties in place. We'd be talking about really a drop in the S&P 500 that would make every recession look tiny. Apple needs China for iPhones, Amazon needs China for goods for its retail operation and server components (as well as Microsoft, Google, etc.), Huawei powers most of Europe's mobile infrastructure, Volvo is the largest company in Sweden and Chinese owned, Foreign Direct Investment from the US to China topped $100B in 2017... Would the US or EU take such a huge hit to their economy for the Uighurs?
As you noted, the Allies didn't come for the Jews. They came to contain a Germany that was taking over Europe. The Soviet Union was content to let Germany do as it pleased until it was attacked itself. The UK and France tried appeasing the Nazis while they took over Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Memelland. The US didn't join the war in Europe until Germany declared war against the US.
If China doesn't attack Taiwan, Japan, or India, I can't see us doing anything. Tibet happened and while we might have had some strong words about Tibet, we haven't done anything about it.
Plus, to be honest, it's hard to see us doing a lot when the right-wing in Europe and the US has started replacing Jews as their go-to "it's their fault" target with Muslims. Hatred is a terrible thing, but there has been growing anti-Muslim sentiment. While that doesn't rule out saving people, I think it does make it less likely.
This isn't meant to say that we shouldn't do anything. It's more that I don't think we (collectively, governmentally) have the will to do something given the huge economic ties in play.
Russia might provide some clues, but it's also important to remember that our economic ties with Russia are a lot simpler: Russia has natural resources. While we have applied some sanctions, Russia is still in Ukraine. Given the level of our reliance on China, I can't imagine we will bring might strong enough for China to really change.
I would love for someone to change my mind on this comment. I really hope this comment is just totally wrong.
I think nuclear weapons have significantly changed how large nation-states approach disagreements. :) Look at how the Cold War was won, and know that these things are played out over decades. iPhones might be assembled in China today, but that is clearly a huge liability going forward.
for many of us all we have to do is look no further than that phone in our hands and realize if we aren't even willing to forgo the luxury items that are sourced from this country then why should we hold our leaders to such standards?
edit: we had stories rallying for the workers protesting Google making software for the Chinese, why not rally against any manufacturer making product there? The tech sector is a place where it can bring pressure
The only thing that would probably have a chance of working is a large global coalition willing to take action simultaneously to sanction China's economy to the tune of at least being equivalent to a trillion dollars annually (whatever form that would need to take, a combination of targeting their companies, exports, imports, access to natural resources, banks, high level politicians, et al.). It would require at a minimum the US/Canada + EU + Japan + South Korea + AU/NZ. That gets you the majority of the global economy.
The big problem: it involves the world's consumers willingly punching themselves in the face at the same time. It might even throw the global economy into a deep recession and as a consequence kill a lot more people than the gulags are likely to. There are a lot of fallout problems in dealing with China, not least because they've historically shown a willingness to distribute any necessary pain upon their people to achieve party goals. There'd also have to be an elaborate verification program put in place, so China wouldn't continue their agenda in a more subtle manner; I don't see that sort of invasive foreign observation ever being allowed.
They've made a very conscious choice to eliminate the Uighur culture, as they did with Tibet before it. They have an end goal in mind, it's hard to imagine stopping them without upping the risks very high. Frankly I'm skeptical there is any way to stop them, I think they'd just take the pain and make it an us vs them conflict to convince the domestic population to absorb it (insert slogans here to drive loyalty during the great fight against the imperialists).
> It might even throw the global economy into a deep recession and as a consequence kill a lot more people than the gulags are likely to.
This isn't the last gulag of the CCP. We would never know how many future atrocities were prevented with proper diplomatic and economic sanctions against them.
I think you're right, and it illustrates a fundamental problem of the capitalist system—it is incapable of making value judgements on its own. "What about consumer choices?". Consumers, in general, are also not making value judgements when they buy something. Perhaps purchasing taps into something primal in us that we cannot intellectually override in the moment, just muse about after the fact. To wit, the market for ethical goods is miniscule, and most pick the product with the highest perceived cost/value ratio. What remains is government. While we don't tend to make value judgements when we shop, we do make them when we vote. Which is why it's crucial that governments have the power to regulate corporations' actions, also abroad.
What makes you think that the world cares so much about Uighur culture? Myanmar rohingya crisis is a clear proof that the world is not very keen to fight for human rights even when the cost is low (compared with a China conflict).
And this is the hard truth: If the rohingya were to be displaced in big numbers in the US or any of the developed countries(maybe with a few exceptions) I'm pretty sure they would be turned back/stopped at the border.
> out of curiosity, what do you think it'll take for anyone to do something?
Given that both our politicians and corporations are content with helping China cover this up at best, or are complicit in identification and imprisonment of the Uyghurs at worst, I don't know.
Perhaps if China invaded Taiwan or enabled NK in an attack on South Korea,
it would wake Western interests up.
I read someone not sure what one can. In fact there is something Americans can do instead of just reading this news:
Write to your congressman/woman and senator about this and support the motion (forget his name) to sanction the chinese officials and frozen of their assets in America. And promote this sanction to uk, a/Nz, Eu.
Better but may be too ambitious not allow their family and they go come to study or live.
That hurts. Really hurt.
Sanction anyone support any electronic survillence work ...
Support HONG kong and Taiwan for its democracy drive and enforce both us-hk and us-t rigourously.
Now, out of desperation, if some Uighurs take arms, and try to fight back militarily, everyone would say, oh, it's the Muslims doing their terrorism thing again. China was right all along.
I think you are totally flipped the excuse and consequence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_conflict
If Uighurs is a peaceful land, Chinese gov would never deploy so many military there. And also to be clear, China has zero tolerance for the separation, either it's Taiwan, HongKong, Macau, Uighur or Tibet, and China is not a liberal land, so the government's policy get the majority support.
Being a freedom and justice loving classical liberal, it pains me every time I read details of the Chinese government’s treatment of Uyghurs.
What I fear though is that any treatment that I would approve of would be ineffective in preventing radicalization. Is there any example of ethical and tolerant treatment that manages to prevent the spread of Salafi radicalism once it has taken root? In adjacent Pakistan we are seeing millions of people throwing a fit because a Christian woman accused of blasphemy and sentenced to death was finally ruled innocent and released after 10 years in prison. How can China avoid ending up like this and avoid having to deal with its own version of the Taliban? Is there any country that has pulled it off without resorting to brutal totalitarianism?
Indonesia seems to be doing OK. Though arguably Suharto did some of the "brutal totalitarianism" bit.... That said, that's over 20 years in the past, and I'm not sure radicalism has really been spreading that much in Indonesia. It exists, of course; it's just not clear to me that it's getting stronger.
Until the last few years, I would have said Turkey was doing OK, even with the various military coups it's had; whether those count as "brutal" is an interesting question. The last few years, Turkey has definitely turned in a totalitarian direction, though I don't think combating radical islam was the cause.
I _think_ Bangladesh has done more or less ok. But I don't know much about it, to be honest.
Malaysia I think has done ok. So has Morocco.
Again, none of these completely lack radical Islamists. But that would be a pretty high bar to clear (e.g. the US probably doesn't clear it, and definitely doesn't clear it if you replace "Islamists" with "Christians", but keep the radicalness).
This article doesn't mention about another related activity which I found interesting, is that Chinese government makes its Han employees to go stay in Uighur homes to monitor their activities.
http://www.chinafile.com/reporting-opinion/postcard/million-...
i was also very naive my first year there, many people won't get even past that period, many people just enjoy pubs and don't care about the rest too muchmuch
and most of the people have no clue at all with zero first hand experience
The scariest thing about China's authoritarian tendencies is that they are more powerful than the USSR or Nazi Germany ever imagined; not to say that this is where I think China will end up... but we're dealing with a completely different beast.
When training and development are mandates like forcible shaving of beards and forcing pork/alcohol upon these people, it's less about training/development and more about erasing individuality, religion, and thoughts that don't conform to the nation-state. This may be less violent than directly killing these people, but it's just as cruel and the world should meet such cruelty with resistance.
So do individual killers...which is about as relevant.
If the US government was threatened, the plan is the same as it always was. Lock everyone up who is tacitly related to the "others" eg American Indians, Japanese internment, McCarthy.
I (and many people I know) would stand against this internment and join protests in the streets to put pressure on the government to reverse such a ridiculous blanket action. Regardless of what the government does to preserve their self interests and power, these actions are wrong and I will do what I can in my power to oppose them.
You realize that there is no blanket action and 95% of Muslims and Uyghurs aren't arrested? Don't just listen to propaganda. Millions of Uyghurs are living regular lives. The current top actress in China is a Uyghur, an Uyghur just won the Rap of China, the situation is nowhere close to Japanese internment. The people targeted are the ones who had suspected contact with Wahhabist extremists. The process is non-transparent and probably incompetently executed but that's a function of China's immature and authoritarian justice system.
If the police arrest you because your brother committed a murder you have no connection to, are you going to feel good about authority later and not sympathise with his ideals?
There is a monument to this injustice in Washington, D.C.; growing up in the 90s, I read children’s books which taught how unfair, racist, senseless, and counter-productive Japanese internment turned out to be. Why do you think one crime justifies another?
The monument is actually a monument to those who remained patriotic despite the injustice rather than any sort of apology. It specifically excludes those who wouldn't call themselves patriotic after their country put their whole family in a camp and stole their land. And I have zero confidence that we wouldn't do the same thing today in a heartbeat. Also, going to throw out there that the Japanese internment covered all Japanese on the west coast. The Uighur estimates are single digits percentages of all Uighur population in China.
It's not that I think one crime justifies another. It's that the current poitical appartus of the past 30 years or so justifies it's actions in the now to those with traditionally liberal sensibilities with trumped up outrage over low information situations that when all of the facts are in turns out to be something we would totally do or have recently done. Iraq wasn't putting babies in incubators. We didn't have to invade a country to kill bin Laden (we ended up doing that in a country that was protecting him, but had nukes so they were off limits). Iraq didn't have a nuclear program or any yellow cake. etc. etc.
That is an incomplete description of the memorial. In addition to the names of Japanese-Americans who died fighting for the U.S., it specifically memorializes the injustice of the internment camps.
“The focal point of the memorial is a sculpture of two bronze cranes, tangled in barbed wire. Around the memorial is a curved wall, listing the name of each internment camp along with the number of people held there, as well as a list of all the Japanese Americans who died in combat in WWII.”
As I've said below when there's a media blitz from one geopolitical sphere of influence about the actions of another sphere, when those exact actions have happened in the past in the first sphere, and as far as we can tell would happen in the future I get very worried. That generally gets used to harm way more people than the original action.
And that goes double in cases where there's very low levels of information out of the area.
Probably treat Taliban in West Virginia the same way they are treated in California.
"A California man who claimed to have Taliban ties was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison on Wednesday on charges related to trafficking Taliban-linked drugs to the United States."
Right. With so many of them, it would be worth opening a public conversation. Inform people about the issues and the law process involved. Maybe start international topic of the issues if the involved people could create a small country on their own.
In short - they could do exactly the opposite of secret prisons without trials.
Because it's extremely worrying to me when there's a media blitz from one geopolitical sphere of influence about the actions of another sphere, when those exact actions have happened in the past in the first sphere, and as far as we can tell would happen in the future. That generally gets used to harm way more people than the original action.
You'll find the same criticism of interning Japanese people, US black sites abroad, and many other issues both in general media and posted on HN. This is no sudden media blitz. Just discussing current issues (camps in China are the topic here) rather than speculating over possible one.
Because if someone tells me not to do X, yet he himself would do X in the same circumstances, that's reason to think his behavior does not stem from a sincere moral conviction but is a cynical attempt to manipulate me?
Where do I or China say that? It's single digit percentages of Uighur that are interned, and the governor and large portions of the police of the region are Uighur.
This is exactly the kind of fundamental misconception of the situation that's particularly terrifying to me.
This is likely because the Uyghurs were discriminated against and monitored/abused similar to how US combat operations in the Middle East produced instability and collateral damage, making it easy to recruit people to the cause.
I highly doubt that one day this minority just decided to start attacking people randomly. It would take a crazy person to do something like this in China where the Communist government is known for making people disappear without trials or explanations, so it bears thinking about what would drive these people to be so desperate.
Do I support the attacks? Of course not, but I understand why they occur.
It all makes sense but how does it happen that people born and raised in western countries (Belgium, UK, France, US) became terrorists?
People don't need to be desperate to become loyal to some movement/faith(i.e. terrorism). They believe all kind of fairy tales without being desperate.
This is because they read these stories of desperation and identify with the oppressed. Don't get me wrong, the Taliban is also twisted in many ways and evil at the core - but they're on message and know how to exploit oppression to entice others to join. The only way they're able to do this though, is for the oppression to occur in the first place.
I'm sure, and that's an abomination. Violence is never the right means, but an entire minority does not become violent on their own until they feel they are desperate enough to perform these attacks in some futile effort to preserve things (culture) that means something to them or revenge for abusive actions taken against them.
If China was peacefully coexisting with them and allowing them to perform their religion freely, it makes no sense that they would feel the need to attack random civilians.
Would you say the same thing about those from Muslim countries who have engaged in terrorist activities against the US? Many of them travelled half of the globe over to carry out the attack and many were willing to sacrifice their own lives.
that's always what Western talked about the terrorism attacks in China. If the same thing happened in China, it's not terrorist, but fighting for freedom, while, if it happened in any west countries, it called extremist terrorism. If you don't care innocent Chinese people, why they would care your opinion? Who give your right to ignore the death of hundreds civilian's to maintain a fake peaceful appearance.
Said attacks were spontaneous reactions to racist treatments that pushed the people over the edge. The gov response was in turn over the top and further exacerbated the situation. People were fighting... _for their lives__.
The factor lying at the root of everything is that China's government is fundamentally illegitimate from the West's point of view. Because of this perceived illegitimacy, when a violent bombing/stabbing incident happens, the default assumption (so the West insists) to make is that it's an case of oppressed subjects fighting for freedom; the burden of proof is on the Chinese government to show that it's a genuine act of terrorism. Likewise when activity purporting to be terrorism prevention measures take place, the default assumption to make is that it's an attempt at ethnic cleansing ala Nazi Germany, the burden of proof is on the China government to show otherwise. At bottom it's a disagreement over where the burden of proof is located. Because both sides are operating with different standards of evidence it's a dispute that's
basically impossible to resolve.
The US already did this in an earlier era and its called the American Indian Wars as the natives were quelled and cleansed by the majority race government. Only this one is a Communist Chinese version of it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html