Young Master Smeet
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Alan,
the rank and file of the IS forces may have been recruited from the MB, but the core command/control and expertise was former regime officers, perhaps activating a stay behind operation. They provided the know-how, IS were not your usual ragtag bunch.
In that context, subsistence and personal survival played a huge part, but, as I think ALB has noted, there are regional/tribal differences and they may find reflection in remnant parts of the Afghan army. An ideology can always be found when it is needed.
I’m just looking at this as a possible ‘moderating’ influence.
A bit of perspective: at the end of the Troubles, the IRA had 300 men ‘in the field’ with about another 450 in support (compare with the Taliban’s 75,000). By the end of the Troubles, the British had about 17,000 troops in the six counties, and they couldn’t suppress the IRA.
Now, the question is, have the 300,000 Afghan Army troops gone away, or gone to the Taliban, to what extent could a stay behind force limit Taliban operations in the same way the IRA did.
Let’s remember, the core of ISIS was former Ba’athist officers who’d been put out of a job. The Taliban need to assimilate the Afghan National Army, especially it’s officers.
The rumours seem to be circulating that the Afghan army was basically ordered to stand down; and that the top government officials have been flying with suitcases stuffed with dollars.
Biden keeps repeating that the Afghan army numbered 300,000, so there is a big question of how a well equipped well paid for army of that size could evaporate so quickly.
I’ve seen analysis that neither the Taliban nor the Afghan army really existed, but the locals are just taking the cash: the phrase there were cousins on both sides seems to resonate.
Just because Western rivals are making propaganda out of atrocity, doesn’t mean atrocities aren’t being committed:
“In 2014, just over 200,000 IUDs were inserted in Xinjiang. By 2018, that figure had increased more than sixty percent to nearly 330,000 IUDs, with this rise taking place at a time when everywhere else in China, Han women were getting the devices removed.41 In 2018, eighty percent of all IUD insertions in China were performed in Xinjiang despite the region accounting for just 1.8 percent of China’s population.42
“According to its own budget documents, the Xinjiang government invested tens of millions of dollars into a birth control surgery programme from 2016 onwards, including the provision of community cash incentives for women to get sterilized.43 This has led to sterilization rates rising seven-fold in Xinjiang between 2016 and 2018, to more than 60,000 procedures; again, this occurred precisely when sterilizations are at a record low in other regions of China.44 While the rate of sterilization nationally continued to gently fall from forty to around thirty five women per 100,000, in Xinjiang it increased sharply from thirty to around 245 women per 100,000.45 The city of Khotän in the Uyghur-dominant southwest budgeted for 14,872 sterilizations in 2019, accounting for more than thirty four per cent of all married women of childbearing age.”
(Finley, again).
It does seem to be an uneven application of the child bearing policies of China.
I think there are two issues: firstly, the raw numbers of humans affected (a by-product of this colonial endeavour happening under a greater world population than, say, the genocides in Australia), and secondly, the planned and deliberate character (again, most previous genocides have tended to be sotto voce, unofficial, and, usually, ad hoc).
I believe in some of the re-education centres they are being made to speak mandarin, so there does seem to be an element of cultural suppression. The PRC says this is to help integrate them into the economy and get proper jobs: which I believe was one of the ways Welsh was deprecated. I think the difference is the Chinese State is doing this consciously and systematically.
Forced sterilisation does seem to be beyond the normal oppressive scale, the PRC shouldn’t get plaudits for stopping short of murder.
“The billionaire couple, in less than a decade, have accumulated more than 269,000 acres of farmland across 18 states, more than the entire acreage of New York City. The farmland was purchased through a constellation of companies that all link back to the couple’s investment group, Cascade Investments, based in Kirkland, Washington.”
Bill Gates is the biggest farmland landowner in America, apparently.
“70,000 acres in north Louisiana, where their farmland grows soybeans, corn, cotton and rice, to 20,000 acres in Nebraska, where farmers grow soybeans. They bought and later sold an additional 6,000 acres in Georgia, NBC News found. In Washington, the Gateses own more than 14,000 acres of farmland that includes potato fields so massive that they are visible from space and some of which are processed into french fries for McDonald’s. And in Florida, farmers grow carrots on their property. These land holdings are separate from their previous investments in companies that support large-scale farming like Monsanto and the tractor manufacturer John Deere.”
I think that links back to the problems with the idea of genocide itself: it is about destroying a people as a people, so acts like forced sterilisation, forced adoption, etc. are genocidal, especially as they tend to the elimination of the Uighurs as Uighers. The aim does seem to be that they will lose any cultural, linguistic identity at the end of this.
Part of the problem is that the bar is set by the Holocaust, as the most extreme version of genocide (or the Rwanda case).
It does seem China is going beyond oppression into a form of elimination, even if, it seems, they need the labour of the Uighers as well.
This is a useful backgrounder on the situation in Xianjing.
Why Scholars and Activists Increasingly Fear a Uyghur Genocide in Xinjiang
“In addition, an important foreign policy angle potentially explains why China has chosen this moment to impose a “security state” in Xinjiang and suppress the Uyghurs. In 2013, the PRC government adopted the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a global infrastructure development strategy which aims to invest in nearly seventy countries and international organizations and promote a China-led Eurasian integration. As the grand strategy within Xi Jinping’s “China Dream,” it seeks to balance against American primacy while securing the northwest frontier: as the key gateway to Xi’s vision, stability within the territory of Xinjiang is considered paramount.”
What is happening in Xianjing is settler colonialism, full bored and conscious on the part of the Chinese authorities, seeking to build a demographic majority in a border region: “At each turn, the Chinese authorities appear to have grossly over-reacted to the perceived Uyghur threat, coming finally in 2014 to view the group as dangerous, unco-optable and uncontainable – a circumstance not unknown in colonial and quasi-colonial borderlands managed by an insecure state.”
“Viewed through this lens, the situation begins to resemble a colonial genocide, where the perpetrator targets the indigenous peoples on the frontier because of their growing resistance to the former’s predatory behaviour.”
““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.””
The aim may not be to absolutely wipe out the Uighurs, but to reduce them to a demographic rump and shore up China’s Western border.
“Kazmi’s point about the US being itself imperialist and more interested in maintaining its position as global hegemon, supported by its UK partner in the “special relationship,” is well made. In the US, the Left has been similarly slow to react to the Xinjiang crisis owing to its reticence toward the idea of finding common ground with Trump-era Republicans.132 But in June 2020, something happened that provoked a shift: following publication of former National Security Adviser John Bolton’s memoir, The Room Where It Happened, it emerged that Trump had secretly encouraged Xi to continue constructing internment camps to detain Uyghurs. This revelation, argues investigative journalist Casey Michel, has opened up “an opportunity for the left to move into the moral vacuum Trump has created – and that [Joe] Biden, and Democrats more broadly, are suddenly moving to fill.””
It’s clear that meaningfully PRC is committing democide/genocide.
Alan, Hear, hear. It’s been tough, a lot of people have sided with the rocket launches. It’s taken some quiet ‘No war but the class war’ phraseology. Hamas’ rockets are rational, they cost $500 compared to $40K for Iron Dome rockets, but likewise Israel struck at the homes and property of richer Palestinians. The pass and fell of mighty powers.
They’ve actually done something quite clever with TUSC: basically, it’s just a franchise/brand, and anyone can stand as a TUSC candidate, as long as they agree with the platform approved by the steering committee, so they don’t need a network of branches or a top down bureaucracy.
Of course, this is classic front work, so, while they ostensibly aren’t in complete control of the situation, in practice they control all the co-ordinating levers. But it does point to a slightly different way of doing politics (though, I suspect, this is more like how US political parties operate, individuals and groups campaign under the brand umbrella, as compared to the European mass membership party model).
I always thought the right of return was the bargaining chip they would cash in for a final deal.
ISTR the Russian immigrants were far from unproblematic.
“Is the interview using data more up to date?”
Yes, it brings the article up to date: the interview was this year.
Yes, I managed to get a proper listen this morning, and it is heartening to hear a class analysis, which gets drowned out in so much of the noise about Israel/Palestine as abstract/total entities. I think the only thing missing was discussion of the Israeli Jewish working class’ conditions, because it’s not a bed of roses for them neither.
