Ok, I’ll try and explain the way I see it using an example.
We, in the west, live in a bubble of western propaganda, the same way people in Russia live in a bubble lf Russian propaganda and people in China live in a bubble of Chinese propaganda. Let’s even disregard for a moment the fact that the USA, through arts, films and music, being the largest economic and therefore cultural hegemon of the past century up to today, has influence over everyone else.
When Russia started the war against Ukraine, the Russian propaganda gave as a casus belli to its population the “information” that Ukraine was genociding Russians in Eastern Ukraine. These affirmations stem from the Ukrainian civil war happening since 2014, in which the government and some pro-Russian rebels were fighting in eastern Ukraine, so the Russian government leveraged this and the fact that Russian as a language was removed from the studying plans in Eastern Ukraine, and made big claims of genocide of Russians, propagated all over Russian media. To many Russians within this bubble, all the reputable news sources, journalists, institutions and human right organizations, were giving this information, so they naturally believed it, and if people contradict this, they’re genocide deniers!
As a westerner: what should I do? Take the genocide claims at face value because otherwise I’m a genocide denier? No. I should look at the situation, look, importantly, at independent journalistic work and material evidence coming from the region, and reach a conclusion based on evidence and not on “claims”. There are plenty of Russian testimonies in Russian TV of how they were tortured in Ukraine, how they weren’t allowed to speak their language, how they were bombed for years by Ukraine… But those are just that, testimonies without material evidence. So, do I believe the claims? No, I don’t, I don’t believe Russians were being genocided in eastern Ukraine. I believe that Ukraine, much like my own country of Spain in Catalonia, was violating the right to self determination of people in Eastern Ukraine, and Russia amplified these claims by a factor of 10 and called it a genocide. I’ve seen with my own eyes with the information, independent journalistic work, and video and photographic evidence, what genocide looks like as is being carried out In Palestine, and nothing like that has been proven for Russians In Eastern Ukraine.
I can now repeat this analysis for the western claims of genocide of Uyghurs in Xinjiang by the Chinese government, and reach the same conclusion that nothing remotely like in Palestine is happening, so there is no Uyghur genocide. Is this “taking Chinese propaganda at face value”?
That’s the western claim, but Xinjiang is a special province of China called “autonomous region”, with more powers to local politics than most others. Uyghur people can study Uyghur language at school (unlike for exmaple Occitanian people in France) and their culture is preserved. You wanna see a cultural genocide in real time? Look up the population of Occitanian speakers over the past 100 years and the French policy towards Occitanian.
That’s the entire point of why tankies like me bring up such topics. When Europeans insist in the “superiority and democratic rule” of Europe vs. say China, it’s because we remain oblivious to the sins of our own countries while we’re constantly bombarded with propaganda against socialist projects. You can get started with the Wikipedia article on Occitan Language if you’re interested.
I don’t care what France is doing when I’m talking about China
Thats the entire point. There is immense propaganda about China while we literally don’t know what happens in the neighboring country. If there were an equal amount of contributions in .world about repression of Occitan as there is about China, I would make it less of a point to bring it up constantly. It’s not deviating, it’s not letting anti-China discourse dominate in the platform
When we’re talking about China, I don’t need info on the horrors America has inflicted on the world. Just like when I talk about America’s past, I don’t compare it to Canadian history
Advocate for good things and against bad things. Don’t interrupt people already doing that
“Allow western anticommunist propaganda to become the only political content in a political forum and to be severely overrepresented vs. the actual damage done by the west, or else you’re a whataboutism”
In the early 1900s, the French government attempted to restrict the use and teaching of many minority languages, including Occitan, in public schools. While the laws have since changed, with bilingual education returning for regions with unique languages in 1993, the many years of restrictions had already caused serious decline in the number of Occitan speakers. (via wikipedia)
It seems rather dishonest to conflate the attention given to the oppression of current minority groups with that given to the oppression of minority groups that hit it’s peak around a hundred years ago (and arguably started in the 16th centry).
There’s been decades of effort to preserve the culture already, improve the cultural situation for Occitan speakers and there are active efforts to improve the treatment of minority languages and culture in general in France:
I don’t think a single person isn’t aware that France was staggeringly racist in the early 1900s - for good or ill, nobody is going to argue it wasnt. They’ve made huge strides on this specific topic, however, and while they can do better, the reason people are unaware is that it’s lost in the miasma of horror that was French Colonialism in the era that suppression of Occitan and related minority languages was at its it’s height - it’s rather restrained for that time period, if we’re being honest.
You’ve done some wonderful cherrypicking. That section of the article links to the Vergonha article:
France has also continuously refused to ratify the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, and native non-French languages in France continue to be denied official recognition, with Occitans, Basques, Corsicans, Catalans, Flemings, Bretons, Alsatians, Savoyards and other langues d’oïl speakers still having no explicit legal right to conduct public affairs in their regional languages within their home lands
Compare that with Uyghur:
The Uyghurs are one of the 56 recognized ethnic groups in China and Uyghur is one of the two linguae francae of Xinjiang, along with Standard Chinese. As a result, Uyghur can be heard in most social domains in Xinjiang and also in schools, government and courts
Back to France:
In 1972, Georges Pompidou, the President of France and a native of an Occitan-speaking region, declared that “there is no room for regional languages in a France whose fate is to mark Europe with its seal”.
In 1992, after some questioned the unconstitutional segregation of minority languages in France, Art. II of the 1958 French Constitution was revised so that “the language of the Republic is French” (la langue de la République est le français). This was achieved only months before the Council of Europe passed the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, which Jacques Chirac ignored despite Lionel Jospin’s plea for the Constitutional Council to amend Art. II and include all vernacular languages spoken on French soil. Yet again, non-French languages in France were denied official recognition and deemed too dangerous for the unity of the country, and Occitans, Basques, Corsicans, Catalans, Flemings, Bretons, Alsatians, Nissarts, and Savoyards have still no explicit legal right to conduct public affairs in their regional languages within their home lands. The text was again refused by majority deputies on 18 January 2008, after the Académie française voiced their absolute disapproval of regional languages, the recognition of which they perceive as “an attack on French national identity”.
On 27 October 2015, the Senate rejected a bill for the ratification of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, preventing the adoption of a constitutional reform that would have given a degree of official status to regional languages such as Occitan.[39] On 8 April 2021, the Breton MP Paul Molac tried to pass a law to protect minority languages, and this law was passed by the French Parliament in Paris.[40] However, the French Minister of Education, opposed to the teaching in minority languages, asked the Conseil Constitutionnel to declare it unconstitutional. This led to the law being constitutionally struck down on 21 May 2021
The use of regional languages in local governments is still severely contested. In 2022, some local councils in the traditionally Catalan-speaking department of the Pyrénées-Orientales, such as Elne, passed a modification of their statutes to allow the intervention in Catalan language by their elected members, as long as they provide an exact oral translation in French, as well a written French translation of the session.[42] Despite being considered a symbolic gesture, the prefect of the Department, arguing that the political rights of French speakers will be violated, appealed to justice to repeal these initiatives. In April 2023, the Administrative Court of Montpellier sided with the Prefect, thus declaring illegal the decisions of the local councils.
Regarding the segment where you quote “bilingual education” the article on said schools numbers:
A total of 62 such primary schools existed as of 2016, as well as four high schools, teaching 3,614 students in total
Tell me again how much worse Uyghur language is being treated than Occitan. For reference, there are about 13 million native speakers of Uyghur and there are 12 million ethnic Uyghur in China, meaning literally almost all of them speak it. There has clearly been a prolonged effort to maintain the language.
Tell me again how much worse Uyghur language is being treated than Occitan.
I never claimed that? Nor spoke to it? Please don’t try and misrepresent my comment as being at all a statement on the relative conditions of the treatment of the two groups - you’ve established you refuse to accept critical media on that topic so I didn’t even try - because it’s entirely about why the topic does not recieve the same amount of attention online as other contemporary topics.
This is why you can claim my quotes were cherrypicked - since they’re not about the topic you present, they’re obviously not going to be a comprehensive representation of that topic.
This person isn’t engaging in good faith - they present as though they have engaged with a wide range of sources, but they extremely clearly have not (if the blatant whattaboutism didn’t tip you off already). They don’t source the controversial claims, either.
I was just giving them enough rope to hang themselves with honestly
My positions are real… Cultural genocide is bad, and we should stop it from happening if we can
Is the thing in France happening? Probably not, but if it was I’d want it to stop
That’s the benefit of having real beliefs. When they start dancing around and mudding the waters, you can ignore all that and assert your beliefs proudly
Unfortunately, it also works if you believe in bad things, but luckily tankies (can’t believe they’re self admitted, that’s so rare) have to pretend they believe in good things
My issue is with the authoritarian governments and their tightly held control over their media. Recently I’ve felt that western news sources have also been very biased and I can’t take anything coming from them completely straight. I’ve even switched sources from legacy media outlets to individual reporters and small boutique media outlets. (YouTubers) They have less ties with the establishment and while they are still biased, they have far more of an objective overview of the situations at hand.
This is different from China and Russia because they control a lot of their social media as well.The great fire wall being infamous. Also the language barrier definitely makes it more difficult to find people organically.
I am also less likely to believe stuff I hear from a country like russia which heavily suppresses freedom of speech and jails protestors as compared to France which doesn’t do the same (or at least to that level).
Plus Putin and xi ping openly flaunt being dictators. There’s too much smoke to be oblivious to something like this.
Also if you believe these men really care about genocide of their people in any terms other than how it affects their status and power, then you are quite mistaken. Because I can say this with a straight face, that no democratically elected leader/politician cares about such issues without worrying about the same, much less so authoritarian dictators.
Is this “taking Chinese propaganda at face value”?
Well… no, not exactly.
Your approach to helping to see truth through the miasma of the narrative is, as you present it, reasonable if unavoidably inherently biased - independent journalists are largely going to be presenting the western Ukranian perspective, just by dint of volume (nobody puts them in prison just for being critical of the Ukrainan commanders (the nuances of that are a different discussion that is also important).
Side note about russian independent journalists
I can name many independent russian journalists, but that’s because their names stand out; there just aren’t that many allowed to exist, and their jobs are incredibly dangerous and memorable. Many of them are unironic proletariarian heroes. (Favorskaya and Kreiger, both of Sotavision, are the two that spring most readily to mind, both having been recently sentenced). They stick in the memory because of their rarity and how messy their fates tend to be.
(I am also (and I want to be clear not in a dismissive way I am just genuinely unclear what you are referring to) very curious as to what you mean by material evidence - things like photographs or 1st party accounts?)
I have done a similar thing, where I have based my opinion on careful research of my own interactions with Ukranians and the work of academics familiar with the situation as well as:
the documentation from both state and independent news reporting groups inside Ukraine (and to the extent we have them Russia
the patterns of behavior Russia has historically used to justify their imperialism that are reflected in their current actions
the truly overwhelming number of reports and analyses from long-established dedicated & well respected international groups who report on this
And that’s I suspect what you have done too.
But… when I do the same thing for the claims of genocide in China, I arrive at the conclusion it’s very much occurring. There’s overwhelming documentation from many many sources on the topic, and much as with the Ukranian conflict, the majority are going to be western aligned simply because (despite the fascist push for control of western media) independent and critical media is not suppressed in the west, but it very much is in china (to any comparable degree) (the list of independent Chinese journalists is longer than in Russia, which tracks it’s a much larger country, but their lives are often no less fraught). In different ways than in Russia, but nontheless the narrative is extremely strictly controlled.
Why then do you treat the mountain of inherently biased evidence for Russia being wrong as acceptable and reasonable, but when many of the same organizations you will have used to dismiss Russia’s claims say there is a genocide in china, they are dismissable?
Setting aside that a genocide does not have to look like whats happening in palestine (ask me about native american genocides I can go on for a while), it’s internally inconsistent reasoning.
My dismissal of the supposed “genocide of Russians in eastern Ukraine” doesn’t come from sources denying it, it comes from the sources claiming it not providing compelling enough evidence that it’s happening. To me, individual testimonies aren’t enough to determine there’s a genocide, and that’s really all the evidence available in the case of Xinjiang pointing towards genocide.
The Uyghur minority was, firstly, excluded from the single child policy precisely because they were a minority, and in this period acquired the majority status in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region. A wave of ISIS related terrorist attacks stroke China in the 2000s and early 2010s, and the government reacted to it by doing a big reeducation campaign in the Xinjiang province which, with its significant Muslim population, was the region where most attackers came from.
This reeducation, mostly consisting of vocational training (also linked to the Belt and Road initiative going through Xinjiang, and the development of the region), was compulsory for many. In the west this looks morally abhorrent, but to Chinese people, it’s not so strange a concept. Many Chinese people spend their teenage years in boarding schools in which they study from 9 to 9 and in which they sleep, so living in an education center isn’t that big of a deal in many Chinese people’s opinion.
As of 2022, the reeducation campaign finished, the camps were closed, and life returned to normal in Xinjiang. Even western state sources like BBC confirmed the closure of the camps, of course with their rhetorical “but at what cost / what’s next”.
The “evidence” of genocide, as per the International Amnesty inform (the most trustworthy source in my opinion), again consists of “anonymous interviews”. I don’t doubt there have been cases of police abuse (ACAB after all), but extending that to the definition of genocide is hurtful to people suffering actual, demonstrable genocide such as Palestinians.
Lastly, I’ll respond to this:
what you mean by material evidence - things like photographs or 1st party accounts?
Essentially information that can be falsified in nature. Pictures can be proven to have been taken at a location and time and to be unedited. Data (such as that of the Ministry of Health of Gaza) including names and identification of actually demonstrably existing people. What I don’t consider material evidence are things that aren’t falsifiable, such as testimonies (especially anonymous ones), reports of the type “it seems/it has been seen”…
Amnesty International has never provided evidence that there’s a genocide in Xinjiang, because they have never claimed there is a genocide in Xinjiang.
In fact the only times the word “genocide” even appears in their report is in one footnote, #688, where the word appears twice in the citations themselves and once in a clarifying citation about why the word ‘genocide’ may be inappropriate, included as a reference to the titles of the two cited works.
What they do provide exhaustive evidence for (including as you describe it material evidence - photographs, data and internal reporting) is that china has engaged in a program of human rights violations that they believe may qualify as crimes against humanity. This is extremely evident in any reporting done on this topic by AI - this isn’t a gotcha, it’s the subject of the most prominent western criticism of amnesty international and has been a central point of debate within the UN and most AI-aligned groups (including HRW, another extremely reputable organization that agrees with AI on this topic). Even the most prominent source of the pro-genocide arguments, The Uyghur Tribunal, agrees and provided independent verification justifying AI’s reservations with calling it a genocide - their claims of genocide are based on reports of forced sterilization and organ harvesting, topics AI has not engaged with.
You used the lack of evidence provided for claims made by an organization you regard as the most reputable source for this topic as supporting your position, but you used that to dismiss claims which that organization has never even made. An organization which actually agrees with you that (on the basis of their own investigation) there is no genocide of Muslims in Xinjiang.
I’m sorry, I just dont think I can believe you when you say you’ve personally engaged with this topic to the extent you claim. If that were true, you should have known this. It is at the very heart of this discussion.
I feel like this is why we need to stick with primary sources whenever we are debating with liberals . Liberals don’t trust any news source coming from Russia, China etc (which I’d actually say is a rational fear considering there education) but western news sources time and time again have been proven to lie and not base any of there arguments on the truth.
If we want to actually argue points to liberals or other people we need to use primary sources that can’t be disbuted by saying “that’s Chinese communist propaganda”. Although that does represent another problem in that primary sources are usually harder to read, or are very long and most people probably aren’t willing to read through it to verify it’s authenticity themselves, which does create a vector for misinformation. Although I still think it’s better than secondary sources that liberals will just deny.
I do trust some news coming from China, but for russia it’s just too difficult to give them any credence given my own experience with news outlets that are just government mouthpieces.
Yet, it’s not a complete blackout state like North korea. Telegram has a lot of credible sources or so I’ve heard. They don’t shy away from Russian losses for eg.
Also my issue is with the authoritarian governments and their tightly held control over their media. Recently I’ve felt that western news sources have also very biased and I can’t take anything coming from that completely straight. I’ve even switched sources from legacy media outlets to individual reporters and small boutique media outlets. (YouTubers) They have less ties with the establishment and while they are still biased, they have far more of an objective overview of the situations at hand.
This is different from China and Russia because they control a lot of their social media as well.The great fire wall being infamous. Also the language barrier definitely makes it more difficult to find people organically.
So no, it isn’t about being liberal (which I am not).
The issue is that a decent amount of people on lemmy take wesern as gospel while giving any media from the global south no credit at all. Of course Im not acusing you, or anyone, specifically. Im just making a general observation.
Ok, I’ll try and explain the way I see it using an example.
We, in the west, live in a bubble of western propaganda, the same way people in Russia live in a bubble lf Russian propaganda and people in China live in a bubble of Chinese propaganda. Let’s even disregard for a moment the fact that the USA, through arts, films and music, being the largest economic and therefore cultural hegemon of the past century up to today, has influence over everyone else.
When Russia started the war against Ukraine, the Russian propaganda gave as a casus belli to its population the “information” that Ukraine was genociding Russians in Eastern Ukraine. These affirmations stem from the Ukrainian civil war happening since 2014, in which the government and some pro-Russian rebels were fighting in eastern Ukraine, so the Russian government leveraged this and the fact that Russian as a language was removed from the studying plans in Eastern Ukraine, and made big claims of genocide of Russians, propagated all over Russian media. To many Russians within this bubble, all the reputable news sources, journalists, institutions and human right organizations, were giving this information, so they naturally believed it, and if people contradict this, they’re genocide deniers!
As a westerner: what should I do? Take the genocide claims at face value because otherwise I’m a genocide denier? No. I should look at the situation, look, importantly, at independent journalistic work and material evidence coming from the region, and reach a conclusion based on evidence and not on “claims”. There are plenty of Russian testimonies in Russian TV of how they were tortured in Ukraine, how they weren’t allowed to speak their language, how they were bombed for years by Ukraine… But those are just that, testimonies without material evidence. So, do I believe the claims? No, I don’t, I don’t believe Russians were being genocided in eastern Ukraine. I believe that Ukraine, much like my own country of Spain in Catalonia, was violating the right to self determination of people in Eastern Ukraine, and Russia amplified these claims by a factor of 10 and called it a genocide. I’ve seen with my own eyes with the information, independent journalistic work, and video and photographic evidence, what genocide looks like as is being carried out In Palestine, and nothing like that has been proven for Russians In Eastern Ukraine.
I can now repeat this analysis for the western claims of genocide of Uyghurs in Xinjiang by the Chinese government, and reach the same conclusion that nothing remotely like in Palestine is happening, so there is no Uyghur genocide. Is this “taking Chinese propaganda at face value”?
You’re not categorizing genocides properly
The Uyghurs don’t have their own news agencies, and they’re not being splattered over the streets like Palestinians
It’s a cultural genocide, it was more like what the US did to the natives. Forced education, over surveillance and policing, forced marriages…
They’ve backed off on it, and it’s better than killing people… But it definitely isn’t good
That’s the western claim, but Xinjiang is a special province of China called “autonomous region”, with more powers to local politics than most others. Uyghur people can study Uyghur language at school (unlike for exmaple Occitanian people in France) and their culture is preserved. You wanna see a cultural genocide in real time? Look up the population of Occitanian speakers over the past 100 years and the French policy towards Occitanian.
Yes, they have largely stopped doing it, which is good.
No, it’s not good that it’s happening somewhere else. I haven’t heard about that at all. Maybe we should make it an issue so they stop too???
This is not a zero sum game. I don’t care what France is doing when I’m talking about China or vice versa, I just want less bad things in the world
That’s the entire point of why tankies like me bring up such topics. When Europeans insist in the “superiority and democratic rule” of Europe vs. say China, it’s because we remain oblivious to the sins of our own countries while we’re constantly bombarded with propaganda against socialist projects. You can get started with the Wikipedia article on Occitan Language if you’re interested.
Thats the entire point. There is immense propaganda about China while we literally don’t know what happens in the neighboring country. If there were an equal amount of contributions in .world about repression of Occitan as there is about China, I would make it less of a point to bring it up constantly. It’s not deviating, it’s not letting anti-China discourse dominate in the platform
No, that’s whataboutism.
When we’re talking about China, I don’t need info on the horrors America has inflicted on the world. Just like when I talk about America’s past, I don’t compare it to Canadian history
Advocate for good things and against bad things. Don’t interrupt people already doing that
“Allow western anticommunist propaganda to become the only political content in a political forum and to be severely overrepresented vs. the actual damage done by the west, or else you’re a whataboutism”
No, you fucking organize. Do you think a platform comes for free?
You have to work for it. If you actually cared for the cause, and weren’t bullshitting, you’d put in the work
It seems rather dishonest to conflate the attention given to the oppression of current minority groups with that given to the oppression of minority groups that hit it’s peak around a hundred years ago (and arguably started in the 16th centry).
There’s been decades of effort to preserve the culture already, improve the cultural situation for Occitan speakers and there are active efforts to improve the treatment of minority languages and culture in general in France:
I don’t think a single person isn’t aware that France was staggeringly racist in the early 1900s - for good or ill, nobody is going to argue it wasnt. They’ve made huge strides on this specific topic, however, and while they can do better, the reason people are unaware is that it’s lost in the miasma of horror that was French Colonialism in the era that suppression of Occitan and related minority languages was at its it’s height - it’s rather restrained for that time period, if we’re being honest.
You’ve done some wonderful cherrypicking. That section of the article links to the Vergonha article:
Compare that with Uyghur:
Back to France:
Regarding the segment where you quote “bilingual education” the article on said schools numbers:
Tell me again how much worse Uyghur language is being treated than Occitan. For reference, there are about 13 million native speakers of Uyghur and there are 12 million ethnic Uyghur in China, meaning literally almost all of them speak it. There has clearly been a prolonged effort to maintain the language.
I never claimed that? Nor spoke to it? Please don’t try and misrepresent my comment as being at all a statement on the relative conditions of the treatment of the two groups - you’ve established you refuse to accept critical media on that topic so I didn’t even try - because it’s entirely about why the topic does not recieve the same amount of attention online as other contemporary topics.
This is why you can claim my quotes were cherrypicked - since they’re not about the topic you present, they’re obviously not going to be a comprehensive representation of that topic.
(edit: clarity)
This person isn’t engaging in good faith - they present as though they have engaged with a wide range of sources, but they extremely clearly have not (if the blatant whattaboutism didn’t tip you off already). They don’t source the controversial claims, either.
I was just giving them enough rope to hang themselves with honestly
My positions are real… Cultural genocide is bad, and we should stop it from happening if we can
Is the thing in France happening? Probably not, but if it was I’d want it to stop
That’s the benefit of having real beliefs. When they start dancing around and mudding the waters, you can ignore all that and assert your beliefs proudly
Unfortunately, it also works if you believe in bad things, but luckily tankies (can’t believe they’re self admitted, that’s so rare) have to pretend they believe in good things
My issue is with the authoritarian governments and their tightly held control over their media. Recently I’ve felt that western news sources have also been very biased and I can’t take anything coming from them completely straight. I’ve even switched sources from legacy media outlets to individual reporters and small boutique media outlets. (YouTubers) They have less ties with the establishment and while they are still biased, they have far more of an objective overview of the situations at hand.
This is different from China and Russia because they control a lot of their social media as well.The great fire wall being infamous. Also the language barrier definitely makes it more difficult to find people organically.
I am also less likely to believe stuff I hear from a country like russia which heavily suppresses freedom of speech and jails protestors as compared to France which doesn’t do the same (or at least to that level).
Plus Putin and xi ping openly flaunt being dictators. There’s too much smoke to be oblivious to something like this.
Also if you believe these men really care about genocide of their people in any terms other than how it affects their status and power, then you are quite mistaken. Because I can say this with a straight face, that no democratically elected leader/politician cares about such issues without worrying about the same, much less so authoritarian dictators.
Well… no, not exactly.
Your approach to helping to see truth through the miasma of the narrative is, as you present it, reasonable if unavoidably inherently biased - independent journalists are largely going to be presenting the western Ukranian perspective, just by dint of volume (nobody puts them in prison just for being critical of the Ukrainan commanders (the nuances of that are a different discussion that is also important).
Side note about russian independent journalists
I can name many independent russian journalists, but that’s because their names stand out; there just aren’t that many allowed to exist, and their jobs are incredibly dangerous and memorable. Many of them are unironic proletariarian heroes. (Favorskaya and Kreiger, both of Sotavision, are the two that spring most readily to mind, both having been recently sentenced). They stick in the memory because of their rarity and how messy their fates tend to be.
(I am also (and I want to be clear not in a dismissive way I am just genuinely unclear what you are referring to) very curious as to what you mean by material evidence - things like photographs or 1st party accounts?)
I have done a similar thing, where I have based my opinion on careful research of my own interactions with Ukranians and the work of academics familiar with the situation as well as:
And that’s I suspect what you have done too.
But… when I do the same thing for the claims of genocide in China, I arrive at the conclusion it’s very much occurring. There’s overwhelming documentation from many many sources on the topic, and much as with the Ukranian conflict, the majority are going to be western aligned simply because (despite the fascist push for control of western media) independent and critical media is not suppressed in the west, but it very much is in china (to any comparable degree) (the list of independent Chinese journalists is longer than in Russia, which tracks it’s a much larger country, but their lives are often no less fraught). In different ways than in Russia, but nontheless the narrative is extremely strictly controlled.
Why then do you treat the mountain of inherently biased evidence for Russia being wrong as acceptable and reasonable, but when many of the same organizations you will have used to dismiss Russia’s claims say there is a genocide in china, they are dismissable?
Setting aside that a genocide does not have to look like whats happening in palestine (ask me about native american genocides I can go on for a while), it’s internally inconsistent reasoning.
My dismissal of the supposed “genocide of Russians in eastern Ukraine” doesn’t come from sources denying it, it comes from the sources claiming it not providing compelling enough evidence that it’s happening. To me, individual testimonies aren’t enough to determine there’s a genocide, and that’s really all the evidence available in the case of Xinjiang pointing towards genocide.
The Uyghur minority was, firstly, excluded from the single child policy precisely because they were a minority, and in this period acquired the majority status in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region. A wave of ISIS related terrorist attacks stroke China in the 2000s and early 2010s, and the government reacted to it by doing a big reeducation campaign in the Xinjiang province which, with its significant Muslim population, was the region where most attackers came from.
This reeducation, mostly consisting of vocational training (also linked to the Belt and Road initiative going through Xinjiang, and the development of the region), was compulsory for many. In the west this looks morally abhorrent, but to Chinese people, it’s not so strange a concept. Many Chinese people spend their teenage years in boarding schools in which they study from 9 to 9 and in which they sleep, so living in an education center isn’t that big of a deal in many Chinese people’s opinion.
As of 2022, the reeducation campaign finished, the camps were closed, and life returned to normal in Xinjiang. Even western state sources like BBC confirmed the closure of the camps, of course with their rhetorical “but at what cost / what’s next”.
The “evidence” of genocide, as per the International Amnesty inform (the most trustworthy source in my opinion), again consists of “anonymous interviews”. I don’t doubt there have been cases of police abuse (ACAB after all), but extending that to the definition of genocide is hurtful to people suffering actual, demonstrable genocide such as Palestinians.
Lastly, I’ll respond to this:
Essentially information that can be falsified in nature. Pictures can be proven to have been taken at a location and time and to be unedited. Data (such as that of the Ministry of Health of Gaza) including names and identification of actually demonstrably existing people. What I don’t consider material evidence are things that aren’t falsifiable, such as testimonies (especially anonymous ones), reports of the type “it seems/it has been seen”…
Amnesty International has never provided evidence that there’s a genocide in Xinjiang, because they have never claimed there is a genocide in Xinjiang.
In fact the only times the word “genocide” even appears in their report is in one footnote, #688, where the word appears twice in the citations themselves and once in a clarifying citation about why the word ‘genocide’ may be inappropriate, included as a reference to the titles of the two cited works.
What they do provide exhaustive evidence for (including as you describe it material evidence - photographs, data and internal reporting) is that china has engaged in a program of human rights violations that they believe may qualify as crimes against humanity. This is extremely evident in any reporting done on this topic by AI - this isn’t a gotcha, it’s the subject of the most prominent western criticism of amnesty international and has been a central point of debate within the UN and most AI-aligned groups (including HRW, another extremely reputable organization that agrees with AI on this topic). Even the most prominent source of the pro-genocide arguments, The Uyghur Tribunal, agrees and provided independent verification justifying AI’s reservations with calling it a genocide - their claims of genocide are based on reports of forced sterilization and organ harvesting, topics AI has not engaged with.
You used the lack of evidence provided for claims made by an organization you regard as the most reputable source for this topic as supporting your position, but you used that to dismiss claims which that organization has never even made. An organization which actually agrees with you that (on the basis of their own investigation) there is no genocide of Muslims in Xinjiang.
I’m sorry, I just dont think I can believe you when you say you’ve personally engaged with this topic to the extent you claim. If that were true, you should have known this. It is at the very heart of this discussion.
I feel like this is why we need to stick with primary sources whenever we are debating with liberals . Liberals don’t trust any news source coming from Russia, China etc (which I’d actually say is a rational fear considering there education) but western news sources time and time again have been proven to lie and not base any of there arguments on the truth.
If we want to actually argue points to liberals or other people we need to use primary sources that can’t be disbuted by saying “that’s Chinese communist propaganda”. Although that does represent another problem in that primary sources are usually harder to read, or are very long and most people probably aren’t willing to read through it to verify it’s authenticity themselves, which does create a vector for misinformation. Although I still think it’s better than secondary sources that liberals will just deny.
I do trust some news coming from China, but for russia it’s just too difficult to give them any credence given my own experience with news outlets that are just government mouthpieces.
Yet, it’s not a complete blackout state like North korea. Telegram has a lot of credible sources or so I’ve heard. They don’t shy away from Russian losses for eg.
Also my issue is with the authoritarian governments and their tightly held control over their media. Recently I’ve felt that western news sources have also very biased and I can’t take anything coming from that completely straight. I’ve even switched sources from legacy media outlets to individual reporters and small boutique media outlets. (YouTubers) They have less ties with the establishment and while they are still biased, they have far more of an objective overview of the situations at hand.
This is different from China and Russia because they control a lot of their social media as well.The great fire wall being infamous. Also the language barrier definitely makes it more difficult to find people organically.
So no, it isn’t about being liberal (which I am not).
The issue is that a decent amount of people on lemmy take wesern as gospel while giving any media from the global south no credit at all. Of course Im not acusing you, or anyone, specifically. Im just making a general observation.