https://sh.itjust.works/post/4274675
To this I say, no. As a community, we do not deny proven genocides, like the holocaust, or the genocide against indigenous Americans by various European colonizers, or the genocide against the Congolese by Belgium, or the Bengal famine that was carried out by the British empire. In fact, denying those genocides will get you banned, here. However: we are also aware of a tendency of nations to project their crimes onto others, and to manufacture atrocity propaganda to justify overthrowing or destroying rival governments… like Libya in 2011:
From Washington Bullets by Vijay Prashad (a great book I highly recommend)
A post from Michael Parenti regarding the destruction of Libya by NATO-backed reactionaries
A headline shortly after Libya’s destruction by NATO-backed reactionaries
The US government has been reenacting the fable of the Boy Who Cried Wolf, and has been cynically leveraging the very serious accusation of genocide against its geopolitical enemies. This is the source of skepticism on Xinjiang. And this is not a new strategy, yes, the Holodomor, which everyone in the US has been taught to take seriously lately, is a nazi fabrication first spread to the United States in the works of Robert Conquest. Why would the USSR deliberately starve a fellow socialist Republic? Why would Stalin, a Georgian, have some kind of Russian chauvinist grudge against Ukrainians? Why would Lenin (Donbass), Stalin (Lviv), and Khruschev (Crimea) all expand the territory of the Ukrainian SSR while also trying to kill off the people inside of it? Why would the USSR ethnically cleanse Ukrainains while simultaneously sending food aid to the starving British colony in Bengal? Natural famines and crop failures were spun by the nazis into atrocity propaganda. Also, a state does not have to be perfect to be defended against false accuations. I think China is far from perfect, but the burden of proof is on the United States to prove its accusations (which have changed in scope several times) regarding Xinjiang. Delegations from Muslim majority nations visiting Xinjiang do not agree with the United States that there is a genocide of the Uyghur people. There is however an attempt to reeducate extremist groups like ETIM. Reeducating extremists might seem a harsh government policy, but I assure you it is a better way of dealing with religious fundamentalism than drone striking weddings or air striking hospitals like the USA did in Afghanistan.
Legit had a liberal, when presented with the fact that the RAND corporation (the organisation that blurs the line between a US government agency and a private organisation which essentially set war policy in the Vietnam war for having kill counts as a metric for determining “success” in Vietnam, amongst other things) had released a paper that basically said that if the US wants to cripple the Chinese economy then what they’d need to do is to initiate a limited military conflict in the South China Sea within the next few years to disrupt the shipping lanes which China is largely dependent upon for foreign trade (before the Belt & Road Initiative gets away from the US and closes this window.)
The outcome, they determined, would be significantly more damaging to the Chinese economy than it would be to the US economy.
I stated that this has been around for some time now and it’s not a coincidence that the US is clamouring for war in the SCS and escalating in that region as much as possible without actually firing shots (yet).
What did the lib do?
You guessed it! It was obviously Sissypee tankie propaganda. From the RAND corporation.
I wish I had a fraction of the confidence of these shit-tier libs on the internet have because goddamn, the absolute balls to make the bald-faced claim that a corporation which would have extremely high US security clearance requirements and which has been directly influential over US policy for three quarters of a century is somehow now churning out pro-Chinese propaganda without anyone noticing or making a fuss over it.
It’s absolutely ridiculous the degree of information and knowledge that we are expected to bring to bear in a discussion and, upon presenting this info, the libs can summarily dismiss it for going against their narrative as Chinese propaganda (or tankie propaganda etc.) and they do it with zero evidence and zero familiarity with something like the RAND corporation’s history and function.
You’d legit get a military officer to burst out in laughter if you claimed that the RAND corporation was an arm of the CPC in front of them. And that’s a bad thing because I wish all US military a very unpleasant experience.
Not to get too into the “is federation good?” topic in every thread, but it is able push back against this dynamic to an extent.
If you argue against western propaganda on reddit, the libs usually far outnumber you. They feel reassured by this local superiority, and readers without a firm position can easily interpret the exchange as one crazy tankie arguing with a bunch of sensible, moderate progressives. And of course if you thread the needle just right and get some traction the mods will just nuke the thread.
Here, libs have to argue on equal footing or worse. We usually outnumber them. And thus far across instances we’re federated with you don’t have too many mod removals of threads just because they successfully challenge the prevailing western narrative.
I like RAND corp documents, they are openly arguing for and against things which some people think are “unthinkable”. Then they print those up and distribute them in the typical US think tanks and places of governing power as well as archives (which is were I get them from mostly).