• 18 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: March 4th, 2022
  • DyesBrateeOPtoGenZedong@lemmygrad.ml•Why the Uyghur Genocide is probably bullshit: A masterpost
    9·
    3 years ago

    5. Miscellaneous Claims

    China is destroying thousands of mosques to erase Islam from China

    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.

    Graveyard are being destroyed

    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.

    Why won’t China let anyone in?

    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.

    In the United States, for over a hundred years, the ruling interests tirelessly propagated anticommunism among the populace, until it became more like a religious orthodoxy than a political analysis. During the Cold War, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them.

  • DyesBrateeOPtoGenZedong@lemmygrad.ml•Why the Uyghur Genocide is probably bullshit: A masterpost
    8·
    3 years ago

    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.

  • DyesBrateeOPtoGenZedong@lemmygrad.ml•Why the Uyghur Genocide is probably bullshit: A masterpost
    8·
    3 years ago

    3. Forced Sterilization

    “In 2014, 2.5 percent of newly placed IUDs in China were fitted in Xinjiang. In 2018, that share rose to 80 percent, far above Xinjiang’s 1.8 percent share of China’s population."

    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.

  • DyesBrateeOPtoGenZedong@lemmygrad.ml•Why the Uyghur Genocide is probably bullshit: A masterpost
    10·
    3 years ago

    2. Adrian Zenz and the Western Press

    Starting off with everyone’s favorite German China luminary who works at the propaganda outlet “Victims of Communism” which tried to lump all Covid deaths into their inflated body count for ‘Communism’, and who has never been to China and does not speak Chinese, and also wrote a book about the rapture, and thinks that things like gender equality are Satanic plots to destroy Christianity. All that to say, he’s an odd choice for the BBC to specifically, personally seek out and commission to get this scoop. I would put forth that they were perfectly aware that he’s a partisan crank with an axe to grind and they knew he would get them the story they wanted despite his blatant lack of qualifications. Now that you know who he is, WHY is he a fraud? Sure, he’s an odd guy, but in case a radical right wing anti-semite using the logic of white genocide to claim that race mixing and contraception are tools of intentional genocide isn’t enough to put you off, there’s a lot more to it than that. Essentially, he’s the starting gun that kicked off the campaign of circular reporting by the Western media, stories that link his research and then link to other articles linking his research, BBC loves to link to other BBC articles for instance. Here’s another perfect example of what we’re dealing with here, ‘British Lawyers Find Credible Evidence Of Genocide Against The Uyghurs In Xinjiang’- if you read that article there’s literally no evidence on display whatsoever, in fact the very first line says

    British lawyers from London based Essex Court Chambers, including Alison Macdonald QC, published a legal opinion about the nature of the alleged atrocities against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang finding credible evidence of crimes against humanity and the crime of genocide. A legal opinion is the professional judgment of an independent expert. It does not have a legal standing.

    I really can’t stress enough how unforgivably hacky this is. This is why we don’t trust Western media. The headline has literally nothing whatsoever to do with the article, because they know 90% of people just read the headline and don’t actually bother with the rest. So how does this dogshit excuse for journalism pass? How do random satellite photos of dusty buildings and pictures of Muslim women looking sad pass as convincing evidence? Largely because of the initial bombshell dropped by Zenz in his report that is twofold: A very large number of Uyghurs are interned in concentration camps, and the women are being forcibly sterilized. This report is cited by Gay McDougall at the UN, which is picked up by the media, and we’re off to the races. The first one is easy. The initial estimate of up to 1 million is based on interviews with EIGHT random people and then extrapolated across the entire region. (Ctrl-F 12.8 if you’re looking for it) There is no evidence beyond this. No refugee crisis, no internal protests or demonstrations in Xinjiang (And yes it is totally legal to protest in China, you don’t get disappeared by the government despite sensational propaganda to the contrary) Just eight dudes. This number has jumped to three million recently which just flabbergasts me, that’s 1/4 of the ENTIRE Uyghur population in Xinjiang. There are 1,833 state prisons, 110 federal prisons, 1,772 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,134 local jails, 218 immigration detention facilities, and 80 Indian Country jails as well as in military prisons, civil commitment centers, state psychiatric hospitals, and prisons in the U.S. territories. US prisons are also known to be constantly operating at maximum capacity. There should be over 6 thousand different sized facilities in the province of Xinjiang- Even the ASPI (A “non-partisan think tank that produces expert and timely advice for Australia’s strategic and defence leaders” AKA military industrial propagandists) have only ‘identified’ 380 dusty buildings they claim to be ‘camps’. If there was really anywhere close to 1 - 1.5 million in camps, the proof would be a lot less shaky than cam footage of MLM busts and prison transfers.