ALB
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That’s the point. There are minorities all over Asia, Africa and Latin America that are the subject of state oppression. So why single out China? Easy. It’s because it has become a threat to US domination of the Pacific area. So the US propaganda machine and its offshoots such as Radio Free Asia and the Victims of Communism Foundation have gone into action, mixing fact and fiction and exaggerating.
I don’t doubt that, for strategic and commercial reasons, the Chinese authorities want to change the demographic composition of Sinkiang. But frankly I don’t believe that they are deliberately sterilising Uigher women to bring this about. I can believe that sterilisations have been carried out but as part of the one-child policy that the authorities enforced throughout China.
The Chinese authorities have teams of people spreading their propaganda on social media. The US doesn’t do so so obviously but relies on ordinary people to spread theirs. We should be wary of inadvertently helping them by spreading their propaganda.
It seems to be agreed by everyone that the Chinese government is not carrying out a policy of mass killings, death camps etc (which is what most people will understand them to be doing if they are accused of “genocide”). So what are they doing besides the “normal” policy pursued by many other states, today and in the past, of oppressing some “national” minority?
The end result may be that the Uighers end up a minority in Sinkiang but will their culture and language have been suppressed? Is their language banned?
Thanks, Alan, for who invented his own definition and somehow got it incorporated into that scrap of paper known as international law.
Joanne Smith Finlay writes:
•It’s genocide, full stop. It’s not immediate, shocking, mass-killing on the spot type genocide, but it’s slow, painful, creeping genocide. These are direct means of genetically reducing the Uighur population.”I don’t know who introduced this dubious extension of the meaning of the word “genocide” into the English language or what axe they had to grind, but the suffix -cide has always implied physical extermination as in homicide, suicide, parricide, regicide etc. Persecuting someone does not amount to homicide. Nor are republicans regicides just because they want to abolish monarchies.
The word for killing off a culture or language should not be “cultural genocide” but something like “culturecide” or “linguacide” if you want a word for it.
Extending the meaning of genocide to include this sort of thing weakens its original meaning and reduces what the Nazis did in the end to the Jews to the same level as attempts to discourage the use of the Welsh language in the 19th century.
The Chinese government is oppressing the Uighers but it is not seeking to exterminate them as applying the word “genocide” to this implies and in many cases is deliberately meant to imply.
And what does she mean by “genetically reducing”? She appears to mean reducing the proportion of Uighurs in the population of Sinkiang. This would seem to be the policy of the Chinese government, or at least a consequence of it, but it doesn’t involve killing anybody. It’s the language of the propagandist rather than of the objective academic researcher.
Let’s not accept this manipulation of language any more than we accept the attempt to extend anti-semitism to mean anti-Zionism.
I am not denying that something funny is going on in Sinkiang and that the Chinese government is giving the Uighers there a hard time. That was not my point. It was that we should not use material supplied by a rabid anti-Communust and fundamentalist Christian (raptures and all) like Zerz. It grants him credibility and it tarnishes our reputation.
I don’t agree with YMS’s statement and will explain why on that thread (because of the misuse of the word “genocide”).
Zenz is a notorious religious fanatic and sinophobe. As to the Victims of Communism Memorial here’s their latest stunt (referenced from Wikipedia on them).
“In April 2020, the organization announced they would be adding the global victims of the COVID-19 pandemic to their death toll of Communism, blaming the Chinese government for the outbreak and every death caused by it”.
We should not be touching these people with a barge pole.
Here’s what the Chinese authorities think of Zenz.
To tell the truth, I didn’t think it was any good. At no point was capitalism defined, though the assumption by all four of them seems to have been that it was production for private profit. I suppose it might have some use as showing what some politically interested young people today think about “capitalism”, and the fact that the word is now part of the standard political vocabulary gives us a chance to say what we mean by it and what we think is the alternative to it.
Jeremy Corbyn re-appears as his old self.
Yesterday’s Times quotes the Russian Foreign Ministry’s spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, as accusing the West of hypocrisy because
“they had failed to condemn the forced grounding of a plane carrying President Morales of Bolovia in Vienna in 2013 over suspicions that it was also carrying Edward Snowden, the American whistleblower.”
Did that happen?
I see that Dominic Cummings has confirmed what we and others suspected that the government had originally thought in terms of letting the pandemic rip amongst the general population so as to achieve herd immunity.
At the time we said we wouldn’t be surprised if Cummings was behind it but if it wasn’t him it must have been the government’s chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, a real live Mad Professor.
I thought I would check what the SWP said for these elections and it’s still the same as ever:
“In most places socialists will have to vote Labour”
If we were a centralist top-down party with a leadership that could tell branches what to do, we could have contested dozens of seats across the country. But — fortunately — we are not and if the branches in the North, the Midlands and the West Country don’t want or don’t feel up to contesting elections so be it. Personally I think that’s a pity.
Admittedly SPEW is bigger than us but they have greater expectations from contesting elections at the moment than we do. For us it’s mainly a chance to get our views across. They want to build a “new workers party” and influence the policy of the capitalist state. By that standard they fail more than we do.
I don’t think we have ever done as badly as TUSC here:
https://www.kingstonlibdems.org/210508_lib_dems_win_by_election
In fact most of their results were in the same league as us.
I wonder how long they will keep this up.
