This is a repost from r/GZD
Originally posted by u/Gravelord-_Nito on Apr 6 2021
Archive: https://archive.is/lTb36
The post:
I’ve been looking into this for a while, and decided to try and put all my conclusions together into one big post to get this monkey off my back. Please feel free to copy and paste this whenever someone wants to debate about the genocide, but when doing so remember to be calm and non-confrontational- other people GENUINELY believe a straight up holocaust is happening here, and it’s not their fault. Most people don’t nerd over politics as much as we do. The reason I’m doing this is because I’m furious at the Western media and state departments for shamelessly gaslighting millions for their own cynical political ends. It’s not the people’s faults for being the victims of it. And please please please comment to correct me if I get something wrong or if you have something to add. Anyway. Also hello brigaders, please note that I literally don’t use a single piece of Chinese state media and do not consume it in any capacity in my personal news diet, you’re the ones who can’t formulate a single argument without relying on state media like BBC, VOA, and RFA, not me. Most of the sources I use in this actually come from Western media. You’re responding to a post that uses Western media to debunk Western media, and the sources you cite are Western media, and then you accuse me of spreading Chinese media propaganda. Ok.
1. Why the Uyghurs?
Starting off rhetorically to explain some of the background for this story, why it’s being invented, and why the West has a vested interest in perpetrating such a wide scale smear. Don’t take it from me, take it from Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson.China, as many of you may know, is very well placed economically to displace the United Stateas the dominant world superpower. One of their key projects is the Belt and Road initiative, a project to rebuild the Silk Road, connecting East, Central, and West Asia as well as Europe in the Belt, and South Asia and East Africa in the maritime shipping route of the Road. This is often painted as a ‘scheme’ by the Chinese ‘regime’ (Notice the use of incredibly loaded language almost literally every time the Chinese government is mentioned in the Western press, you’ll be seeing a LOT of this) to center global trade on them and weaken other countries through debt traps. This is a myth based in a very typical right-wing Western argumentation style you should all be aware of by now after 4 years of Trump- deflect, project, attack. Blame the opponent for something you actually perpetrate, both to accuse them, and to deflect the criticism you should be getting because the point of this argument is to muddy the waters and confuse people via false equivalence. Like when China gets one port and everyone cries about it, but ONE French billionaire owns 16 ports in Africa HIMSELF and we literally never even hear about it. Yes, the Belt and Road is good for China and projects soft economic power, but they do that by building high speed rail and mutually beneficial trade agreements instead of drone bombs and aggressively placed military bases. What exactly is so wrong with that? Is it because they called it a ‘plot’ in the news? So it’s easy to understand, especially given the West’s recent history with the last big rival, Japan, that they don’t want to lose their spot on the top. Additionally, China is an incredibly unique and terrifying thing for the West, moreso than Japan because Japan is a G7 country and has been since it’s inception, meaning they always played ball. China is the first example in the history of Capitalism of a former ‘third world’ neo-colony rising up by it’s own power, outside the system of Western control and influence, with open agitations to overthrow and displace the West’s domination after the entire country was destroyed by it during the century of humiliation. Not to mention, China is a proudly socialist country (I’m not going to debate Dengism here, but they say they are and that’s more than enough EDIT: More than enough to incite Western imperialist hostility, not enough to prove ‘it’s socialist’, sorry for the misunderstanding) which doubles the abject terror stricken in the hearts of Western oligarchs. Hopefully this lays out enough of a picture of why these oligarchs, who have complete regulatory capture of their governments and private ownership of the media outlets, would do anything to stop China- hopefully except for nuclear apocalypse. Even though the US state department lawyers can’t seem to find enough evidence to justify the use of the term genocide… This is why the current China controversies chiefly target Xinjiang and the South China Sea. If we can stir up destabilization and maybe even separatism in those regions, it disrupts China’s plans and could even curb them entirely. And stir up they have, since 2004-On the NED-
In 1986, NED’s President Carl Gershman said that the NED was created because "It would be terrible for democratic groups around the world to be seen as subsidized by the CIA… Throughout the course of a 2010 investigation by ProPublica, Paul Steiger, the then editor in chief of the publication said that “those who spearheaded creation of NED have long acknowledged it was part of an effort to move from covert to overt efforts to foster democracy” and cited as evidence a 1991 interview in which then-NED president Allen Weinstein said, "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA."Critics have compared the NED’s funding of Nicaraguan groups (pro-U.S. and conservative unions, political parties, student groups, business groups, and women’s associations) in the 1980s and 1990s in Nicaragua to the previous CIA effort “to challenge and undermine” a left-wing government in Chile. Latin Americanist scholar William M. LeoGrande writes that the NED’s roughly $2 million funding into Nicaragua between 1984 and 1988 was the “main source of overt assistance to the civic opposition,” of which about half went to the anti-Sandinista newspaper La Prensa.
So it seems clear that the United States is trying to ‘bring democracy’ to Xinjiang and supports the East Turkestan Independence Movement as a way to do that. Also evidenced by the fact that the US removed the Taliban affiliated ETIM from their list of terrorist groups even as they continued to bomb them…
The rest of this post is continued in the comments due to text restrictions on lemmygrad
3. Forced Sterilization
Zenz gives the following Chinese primary source: “Source: 2015 and 2019 Health and Hygiene Statistical Yearbooks, table 8-8-2.” But what does the yearbook actually say? Here’s the actual 2019 Chinese Health and Hygiene Statistical Yearbook. It’s quite a document, several hundred pages long. If you go through the slog of scrolling to page 228, you’ll find Zenz’s table 8-8-2 in the following page: https://i.imgur.com/Zsi11eh.jpg
The relevant column is 放置节育器例数, the number of IUD’s implanted. We have a total 总计 of 3.8 million, with Xinjiang 新疆 accounting for 328,475. Thus 8.7% of China’s IUD’s occurred in Xinjiang. It looks like the Chinese assistants helping Zenz mistakenly added a decimal. Either that or he’s just straight up lying. Zenz realized he got called out for this dishonest ‘research’ so he addressed it but only conveniently after the entire media ecosystem had recirculated his misleading claims, he didn’t seem to mind when this ‘misunderstanding’ served his narrative. In this case he ‘clarifies’ that the total of net IUDs over the four year period is ~239,000- the Uighur population in Xinjiang is 12 million. Half of those are women, naturally. However, the Uighurs are only about 45% of Xinjiang’s population, but let’s be generous and say 3/4 of the IUDs went to Uighur women, TOTALLY arbitrarily, and the rest went to Han, Hui, Kazakh women etc. 3/4 of 239,000 is 179,000. That is 3% of all Uyghur women in the entire province of Xinjiang. A more humorous example of how poorly this whole thing was reviewed was this chart showing 800+ net IUD placements per capita… which means each year, each female is getting 1,600 IUDs. Obviously an error, but this was only corrected recently to ‘per 100,000 of the population’, but the fact that nobody noticed or corrected it until skeptics started roasting it on twitter shows that nobody is actually paying attention to the research, just the explosive headlines, except those skeptics who almost unanimously come to the conclusion that this data is highly, HIGHLY suspect. The ‘falling birthrate’ argument is a blatant bad faith spin on the fact that Xinjiang Uyghurs only recently were placed under the same restrictions as the rest of China, where before ethnic minorities were allowed to have MORE children than the majority Han population So to suggest that it’s some genocidal scheme to breed out Uyghurs is patently silly and incorrect. If you want to argue that the two-child policy is bad for this reason or that, I’m not going to fight you on that, I think it’s a bad policy myself in fact. But it is consistent with China’s treatment of the Han population, and they’re just essentially replicating what they did- stifling an industrial boom that, due to China’s huge population, could conceivably put a strain on the rapidly developing infrastructure. I, like Zenz, am not Chinese and have never been there, but they use bilingual education and I’ve heard from Chinese people that they have affirmative action for minorities in China that Han people grumble about, similar to affirmative action here. Also, of course, other Muslim sub-cultures like the Hui Muslims exist and nobody is making any accusations about them whatsoever.
4. First Hand Testimony
Ok, so if the numbers and the forced sterilization arguments are called into serious doubt, what does that leave us with? Aside from “hack journalists” using “quotations marks” around “suspicious words” like “re-education” and “vocational training”, which I shouldn’t have to say, is not evidence. There’s no photo or video evidence like the Abu Ghraib photos (Look up at your own peril), so all we’re left with is firsthand accounts. Here’s the problem with them. Seriously just google “Uyghur/Uighur independently verify”. Virtually every single account is marked with this asterisk, the source is “Trust me bro”. This is worthless without evidentiary substantiation because firsthand accounts of geopolitical rivals have a history of being, shall we say, embellished. If not outright fabricated. Remember WMDs? Remember Libyan viagra rapes? Trust us about these Uyghurs though bro, we wouldn’t lie to you. In addition, there’s two major cases of highly suspect testimony contradicting itself when presented in two different instances, they can’t keep their story straight:
1
2
There is clearly some kind of ulterior motive such that actual CIA agents are pretending to be activists to manufacture consent for this story. If you’re not at least suspicious by now of why a country that spent decades bombing Central Asian Muslims and trying to fuck over China is suddenly heartbroken over Chinese Muslims, I don’t know what to tell you.
5. Miscellaneous Claims
Xinjiang has 24,000 - 25,000 mosques, which is one per 500 Muslims. The ENTIRE United Sttes has less than TEN PERCENT of that number.
Not destroyed, relocated from densely packed urban centers like the capital city Urumqi, set to expand with Belt and Road, giving the family ample opportunity to register and claim graves. This isn’t an incredibly common thing to happen but it’s certainly not an unprecedented act of genocide.
They have. A muslim majority UN delegation approved of the de-radicalization program, as did the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation after their delegation visited. China also has an open invitation to the UN human rights chief herself to come and visit… Invitees routinely turn these offers down. To close, I’d like to quote political scientist Michael Parenti as a pertinent warning for this new cold war. Always remember to stay objective and that you’re not immune from propaganda just like anyone and everyone else. Loaded language is not evidence. Sad photos are not evidence. Spooky music and lingering shots of barbed wire fences are not evidence. Stay objective and ask yourself who wants you to believe these headlines and why.