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.
Just going to throw out that the tankies at the... uhhh... US STATE DEPARTMENT have also said officially that there isn't evidence for genocide in Xinjiang: https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/02/19/china-uighurs-genocide-us-pompeo-blinken/
If anyone calls you a genocide denier, throw out this one and see out they respond.
They won't. I can't get the fuckers to read the UN report, either. And good luck getting them to look in to any information on the 1932 famine that doesn't come directly from Himmler of the OUN-B.
I remember one guy who posted the UN report as proof of genocide but the report itself didn't say anything related to genocide.
I think sources are actually for trying to get people to exit the conversation, not actually assessing the continuity of evidence and argument.
🤔 well come to think of it they did roll M1 Abrams into Iraq
I did find a type of guy who defined tankies as anyone who does wars that harm civilians in any way. Pure vibes.
Second Punic Tankies
The way that Rome conducted war is ironically a lot like how westerners believe the Soviet Union did. But the Romans are percieved as some kind of elite superforce who beat their enemies in 10-1 fights rather than simply having more soldiers in the vast amount of wars.
Yeah Romans really just were very good at mass producing bare minimum equipment and throwing massive amounts of men at problems. I remember reading something from Julius Caesar talking about how the German tribes had clearly superior armor but it was of no concern.
The trouble is that people look at a state and culture that lasted 2100 years in some form or other, and yet apply the same expectations to every part of their history.
Rome winning the Punic wars with an excess of manpower, and winning 10-1 engagements against vast gallic and Germanic armies were further away from each other than we are from the Napoleonic wars today.
My favorite guy is the "tankie is when you want there to be no war" guy
Lmao was that the dude who unironically posted "imagine dying on the 'war is bad hill'?"
It's mostly just an amalgamation of every reddit argument I've been in since libs learned the word "tankie"
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).
hey, I wanted to read the RAND doc, so I googled it and there seemed to be a few of them, do you have a link to the one you're talking about?
It's been a while since I've read it but it's titled "War with China: Thinking Through the Unthinkable" (lol)
When you consider the actions that have been taken since this paper was published, there have been two major developments that stand out (aside from the obvious military buildups and sabre-rattling):
The US attempt at a virtual blockade of high-end semiconductors to China. I believe that this was the US trying to hamper the Chinese military capacity - no chips, no tech. No tech, no cutting edge military capacity.
The recent AUKUS alliance which features tight cooperation in the development of hypersonic missiles and counter-hypersonic tech as well as Australia building 8 nuclear powered submarines. It's hard to imagine a scenario where this isn't an attempt to tip the scales in the favour of the US in a situation of conflict in the South China Sea.
The more conspiracy-minded among us would see that Australia having access to highly-enriched uranium to fuel the submarines, its recent moves to expand its missile capacity to ones which can be armed with nuclear warheads, and its expansion of its airforce base to house up to six nuclear-capable B52 bombers would be laying all of the foundations necessary for Australia to be a turnkey nuclear state, making it (hypothetically) possible for Australia to have nuclear strike capabilities in a very rapid turnaround time especially in a situation, say, where war broke out in the Pacific for some unforseen reason.
All that Australia would likely need to do would be to pass some emergency measures through parliament and to get the blessings of the US and some tech transfer but all of the difficult aspects of sourcing the hardware, housing it, and having access to a nuclear payload would have already been put into place by this point so it'd be more or less a matter of simply assembling the parts.
It's crazy-making seeing this shit playing out before my eyes.
I'm not a military analyst or some specialist consultant or anything but... you don't need to be a genuis or to have some special insider knowledge to be able see what's going on. I've been waiting for a Gulf of Tokin incident to occur in the South China Sea for years now. It's not any accident that the US has been conducting "freedom of navigation" expeditions right off the coast of China and between the Taiwanese strait on a consistent basis in recent years.
I suppose that I should put a disclaimer on that RAND report because it was published almost a decade ago now so while the conclusions that it draws, speculative as they may be, they're also not as up-to-date as the more recent stuff so don't treat it as gospel. Although that being said, the broad brushstrokes would still be applicable at the very least.
shit this is terrifying lol, it's your fault if my dreams suck tonight! anyway thanks lol, and yeah I'll keep in mind it's a decade old
Yeah... sorry about that 😬
It's a bit of a blackpill to look into this stuff. But on the other hand, I'm just some internet stranger who is far from being an expert (I even said as much just before) so it could just be
style rambling from an absolute crackpot. It wouldn't be the first time that's happened on the internet lol.
I don't think this is actually a particularly good suggestion. It's too easy to dodge with "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence". It doesn't matter if they lack evidence of presence, because they're not trying to be objective, they're trying to be superior.
Sure, but then they're just arguing from a pseudo religous position of "well you can't prove it's not happening", which is a very weak one
Absolutely, but the people hurling accusations don't care about the strength of arguments. They're not even necessarily trying to make an argument (in the logical sense). Tossing back a document that says "genocide is hard to prove" isn't going to win them over. It's more likely to make them double down. And that strikes me as a mistake.
There's also the problem that to people who rightfully abhor it, any action that appears to be rules-lawyering genocide is almost certain to be rejected, turning away any audience that might have been receptive to a counter-narrative.
That just leaves commenters who already agree, and when they join in, Hexbear is 'brigading with denialist propaganda', which feeds into the chuds' sense of righteousness when they harrass us.
Something this contentious needs time and a degree of receptivity, neither of which is provided by 'throwing out' some bombshell of evidence.
You're never (well practically never) going to win over someone that's so set in their beliefs that they won't even stop and reconsider when they're shown to be wrong. You're moreso arguing for the observers on the sidelines.
I don't know if it sticks true here as well, but apparently Reddit used to have a 1:10 ratio of posters:commenters:voter's:lurkers.
What fraction of lurkers do you think are won over by 'Nuh-uh, it's not technically genocide'? Not many, I'd bet.
I'm well aware of the performative aspects of online discussion. It is exactly that performance that I'm criticizing. As I said before, rules-lawyering genocide is not a good look. And giving the opponent an easy out allows them to steal the show.
420blazeit69 has provided a better lead-in:—
which might then be followed by the reminder that a motivated US State department wasn't able to do that—not even with all the efforts of a Nazi apologist. With additional detail, that would be somewhat more persuasive than simply "[throwing it out and seeing how they respond]". It at least returns the burden of justification, although I still think there are better spectator sports to play.
Genocide is a crime, and to prove a crime occurred you have to come up with evidence.
Throw that rules-based international order nonsense back in their face.
They do have a dumb saying for everything, don't they?
The saying's not dumb, only the application