Uyghurs

Don't really need to reach for Victims of Communism (who most people have never heard of) when Donald Trump is saying basically the same thing on a much bigger platform.

In general its extremely difficult to report on this story full stop - probably harder than in most wars - with a reliance on any first hand testimonies you can get. And as with Syria the grey area that creates becomes highly fertile ground for all sorts of charlatans with dodgy agendas.

Thing about Nick Cohen is that he's always more interested in bashing "the left" or even liberals in general than he is about what he's writing about. So internment camps and forced labour become just another stick with which to beat his usual targets. There's other dodgy stuff about his behaviour as well but he has forged a 25 year career denouncing everyone else's hypocrisy while being blind to his own (or just conveniently pretending it doesn't exist).

They are coming from a place where everything you see is propaganda, and the way you fight against that is to make some more propaganda for "your side"

Indeed. It's also interesting to note that Václav Havel, Lech Wałęsa and Emil Constantinescu have sat on its international advisory council.

You don’t have to have heard of Victims of Communism when the narrative they’re pushing gets disseminated by much more high profile people than them.

the grey area that creates becomes highly fertile ground for all sorts of charlatans with dodgy agendas

Paul Celan:

No one
bears witness
for the witness

"Victims of Communism (who most people have never heard of)"

Its one of two orgs Zenz is linked to who has done a lot of the research on this issue, whom Cohen links to.

I haven't heard of these "Victims of Communism" people before, but they sound pretty typical. They are coming from a place where everything you see is propaganda, and the way you fight against that is to make some more propaganda for "your side" - and being used to armies of wumaos means assuming there are similar armies of 白左 doing the same thing in the west, only they don't even get paid. Conspiracy theories flourish everywhere, because nobody trusts anyone or anything. For my wife, being left wing and opposed to the PRC makes her basically alone in the online Sinosphere, and it's really pretty sad.

Yep, it's pretty eye-opening to be in China with people freely talking about how corrupt the CPC is, how much land and how many state-backed corporations are still owned by Mao's relatives, how ludicrously expensive things like healthcare and housing can be, etc, etc, in a way that never makes it into the online space for obvious reasons.

Yes that's true, I would entirely believe you if you told me Trump and his team were avid followers. (xpost to gyac)

Re “sinophobia” I think it’s also important not to treat this “phobia” as equivalent to a pure racial prejudice. China is a longtime imperial power that is not that far off from playing an equal or greater role in global dominance to the US. Anti-China sentiment is not really the equivalent of “these damn Mexicans sneaking across the border” or whatever liberal centrists try to make it out to be.

the victims of communism folks include the nazis killed by the red army during wwii in their tally of communist atrocities iirc, just to give you an idea of the level of their playing field

Nah, but the most available people racists target are going to be working class Chinese immigrants, ethnic Chinese and others who are not responsible for the wrongs of the state. It’s not the ruling class they’ll hurt.

allday is a cop

sorry if this offends

If you were a Chinese immigrant in the UK prior to about two or three years ago you would have experienced a lot of garden-variety racism mostly centred around how funny you were to the person abusing you. In the last year in particular that's changed and become explicitly wrapped up with the actions of the Chinese state, Huawei etc, and turbo charged since January. Nothing racists like more than a socially acceptable excuse to heap suspicion and hatred on minority groups (as Muslims have found out for decades now).

Also it goes without saying that some of the most immediately at hand victims aren't going to be Chinese at all but the people we're talking about here aren't interested in distinguishing people from different East Asian countries let alone from the Chinese government.

who will police
the police

-- Paul Celan

with the Chinese ruling classes increasingly investing in/propping up English football teams, if anything they'll get more popular. proper blokes with proper money

that said I have a Huawei phone so idk how complicit I am in all this, probably very

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/19/world/asia/china-mask-forced-labor.html

who will police
the police

-- Paul Celan

― xyzzzz__

i never knew Juvenal's real name until now thanks

Got some answers now and are perhaps wiser than before. You're welcome!

supporting sources that are actively spreading disinformation is not a good way of going about things and a certain amount of skepticism of those sources and their framing is appropriate certainly

the analogy that keeps coming to mind is very immediate and present and it has to do with what is happening in portland right now

i am not a fan of twitter, i think it is not a reliable or trustworthy medium, i think there is a lot of bullshit and misinformation and disinformation that comes out of it

and when federal agents started kidnapping people off the streets of portland the only people talking about it were people on twitter, and they're not reliable sources and so it doesn't surprise me at all that it had to go on for a week until people started catching on

i'm beyond the point where i can employ source criticism on a level of "this is a reliable source and i trust it" and "this is not a reliable source and i don't trust it". sometimes the only sources for information you have are unreliable sources and sometimes you have to try and pick out the truth of what the hell is going on from the weird ass biased reports that come out

if you study ancient history you have to study herotodus, and people call him "the father of lies" and they're not wrong, and so everyone spends huge amounts of time trying to figure out what herotodus said that was actually true and what was some bullshit he just made up because that's the only way of knowing anything.

Nick Cohen is Herodotus for the left!

I’ll believe Uyghurs are being corralled into concentration camps when China confesses to its crimes.

No one is saying that China isn't suppressing dissent or that something isn't going on Xinjiang (allday denies it all but I was agreeing about his point on Novara inviting someone from Spiked on their show).

Distinguishing the two is key to everything here, blurring the distinction between the two is bad whoever is doing it, and tbh I do not understand why everyone doesn't just get this.

on the left a lot of this is the legacies of leninism & nationalism- the party/state is the people, useful thinking for people who are or aspire to be part of the former (most prominent leftists, way beyond obvious tankies). then reduction by the same people of all world events to a mirror image of the US neocon view of good guy/bad guy states, reinforced by various state lines and general war on terror racism. the thing about China not being imperialist is a tell, it only makes sense if you already accept a number of bullshit leninist and/or nationalist premises

this is the kind of shit that has had many prominent leftists helping the far right smear all dissident Syrians (& Iranians & Afghans & others) as US-backed Islamist terrorists, same thinking now applied to Xinjiang. it’s cost western leftists way more good will internationally than they seem to realise yet

obviously the right wingers using this as part of their yellow peril narrative to incite violence against asians don’t actually give a shit about any of it

xp it’s fake, it’s justified, it’s bad but exaggerated, use any and all as convenient, standard genocide denial. actually pretty widespread

Never knew truth telling is so easy, on the internet.

?

If you want the, uh, good guys to win, you gotta gloss over certain, uh, details. Otherwise you lose sight of the, uh, bigger picture.

Also wrt the footage posted by LBI above there is something desperate about the framing (and I've seen a couple of other tweets on my TL) of this as a new holocaust. I can believe there is something going on in China, but I can also see the voices pushing on about exactly what as to be questioned about how they get their info and their motivations.

An astonishingly dim take, even for you.

I know you wouldn't like it

Uighur doctor tells ITV News of disturbing testimonies of 'forced abortions and removal of wombs' | By @emmamurphyitv https://t.co/n135XfZWI2

— ITV News (@itvnews) September 2, 2020

This is horrifying.

I'd advise not clicking on that if you're likely to be distressed by the subject matter because there's some very grim stuff in there.

I don't know what to say other than fuck Xi and fuck every country that has abetted this, whether directly or indirectly. Just horrible.

Yeah :(

jfc.