CaptainACAB posted:

You should instead hate Japan for being a right wing ethnostate run by insane genocide denialist fascists who are often the literal flesh and blood descendants of some of the worst war criminals in the history of the world.

SuperKlaus posted:

So this looks like as good a point as any to jump in can someone tell me, like one would a dumb baby, why I should be skeptical of claims about the Uyghurs aside from general distrust of the liberal apperatus. I would accept a link or something if nobody wants to tread old ground. I've seen posts in this thread and I've heard it said this zenz guy is the root of it all and is not credible but I just need some foundational knowledge to understand what's happening in xinjiang

quote:

First, let us establish that China-bashing was not and is not purely a Trump thing. Obama tried to do the TPP and the "pivot to Asia" to isolate China!

Rather, desiring a hostile confrontation with China has bipartisan approval:

https://twitter.com/BenjySarlin/status/1373641018248212481

https://twitter.com/sudipsparikh/status/1371408520529215488

https://twitter.com/PostOpinions/status/1373296820709953536

https://twitter.com/MiaFarrow/status/1210975448458563585

https://twitter.com/MarkAmesExiled/status/1369803951521099782

https://twitter.com/GregGrandin/status/1369817582132412416



US to build anti-China missile network along first island chain: https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/International-relations/Indo-Pacific/US-to-build-anti-China-missile-network-along-first-island-chain

quote:

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. will bolster its conventional deterrence against China, establishing a network of precision-strike missiles along the so-called first island chain as part of $27.4 billion in spending to be considered for the Indo-Pacific theater over the next six years, Nikkei has learned.

They form the core proposals of the Pacific Deterrence Initiative that the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command has submitted to Congress and Nikkei has reviewed.

"The greatest danger to the future of the United States continues to be an erosion of conventional deterrence," the document said. "Without a valid and convincing conventional deterrent, China is emboldened to take action in the region and globally to supplant U.S. interests. As the Indo-Pacific's military balance becomes more unfavorable, the U.S. accumulates additional risk that may embolden adversaries to unilaterally attempt to change the status quo."

Specifically, it called for "the fielding of an Integrated Joint Force with precision-strike networks west of the International Date Line along the first island chain, integrated air missile defense in the second island chain, and a distributed force posture that provides the ability to preserve stability, and if needed, dispense and sustain combat operations for extended periods."

The first island chain consists of a group of islands including Taiwan, Okinawa and the Philippines, which China sees as the first line of defense. Beijing's "anti-access/area denial" strategy seeks to push American forces out of the East and South China seas within the first island chain.

China also seeks to keep U.S. forces from approaching the "second island chain" in the Western Pacific, which runs from southeastern Japan out to Guam and south to Indonesia.

The Indo-Pacific Command submitted an investment plan for fiscal 2022 through fiscal 2027 to Congress this month.

For fiscal 2022, it has requested $4.7 billion, which is more than double the $2.2 billion earmarked for the region in fiscal 2021, and is close to the roughly $5 billion Washington has spent annually on dealing with Russia.

___

Now, having established all that, now I need to inform you that it really is literally all just State Department propaganda:

https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/02/19/china-uighurs-genocide-us-pompeo-blinken/

The U.S. State Department’s Office of the Legal Advisor concluded earlier this year that China’s mass imprisonment and forced labor of ethnic Uighurs in Xinjiang amounts to crimes against humanity—but there was insufficient evidence to prove genocide, placing the United States’ top diplomatic lawyers at odds with both the Trump and Biden administrations, according to three former and current U.S. officials.

https://twitter.com/cnnbrk/status/1369167008764399617









https://twitter.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/965597695728668672





https://twitter.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1309525989463130112



___

Here's two more where a mainstream news organization from my country re-reports a piece from Reuters about Xinjiang.

https://twitter.com/rapplerdotcom/status/1364012397309083652
https://twitter.com/rapplerdotcom/status/1357133197163827200

At the bottom of the second piece:

quote:

Last year, a report by a German researcher published by a Washington think tank accused China of using forced sterilization, forced abortion, and coercive family planning against minority Muslims.

Who do you think that German researcher is?

And going back to the CNN article, if you go all the way to the end, you find this:

quote:

The detention camps, which Beijing refers to as "vocational training centers," are described by officials and state media as being part of both a poverty alleviation campaign and a mass deradicalization program to combat terrorism.

"(But) you can simultaneously have an anti-terrorism campaign that is genocidal," said report contributor John Packer, associate professor at the University of Ottawa and former director of the Office of the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities in The Hague.

...

"This (is) not an advocacy document, we're not advocating any course of action whatsoever. There were no campaigners involved in this report, it was purely done by legal experts, area experts and China ethnic experts," he said.

But Packer said such a "serious breach of the international order" in the world's second-largest economy raised questions about the global governance. "If this is not sufficient to instigate some kind of action or even to take positions, then what actually is required?" he said.

So even in the context of "it's genocide by way of destruction of an ethnicity's culture", it's still being framed as being sufficient to be a call to action.

And I think everyone here is capable of imagining what kind of action that's going to come down to. Like, okay, the US is not going to issue a declaration of war against China. Then what? They impose economic sanctions on China? What happens if that doesn't slow them down? They impose more sanctions?

___

Here's an article from the Washington Post:

Academic faces Chinese lawsuit for exposing human rights abuses in Xinjiang: https://www.washingtonpost.com/worl...7530_story.html

again, guess who the academic is?

quote:

Beijing has targeted a high-profile U.S.-based researcher whose work has been critical to exposing human rights abuses in China’s northwest, with state media reporting he is being sued by companies in the Xinjiang region.

In a telephone interview from his home in Minnesota on Tuesday night, Adrian Zenz said he believed the lawsuit was a sign that U.S. economic sanctions on the region were having a significant effect. He said Beijing was probably seeking to create a chilling effect on other researchers doing similar work.

...

The lawsuit comes as Zenz and other researchers have been building a case that Beijing’s treatment of ethnic minorities in Xinjiang meets the definition of “genocide” under the Geneva Conventions.

The United States has imposed economic sanctions on Xinjiang over the past year in response to evidence documented by researchers, including Zenz, of a mass campaign of detention and forced labor targeting Muslim Uyghurs in the region. The sanctions include a blanket ban on cotton from the region, which accounts for 87 percent of the cotton grown in China.

Zenz, who is German, began researching conditions in Xinjiang several years ago as an independent scholar, and since 2019 as a senior fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a U.S.-based nonprofit organization.

...

Zenz was among more than 50 contributors to a lengthy report laying out the argument for a designation of genocide, which was released Tuesday by the Newlines Institute, a Washington-based think tank.

notice how Victims of Communism is merely characterized as a US-based nonprofit.

and then that report "released Tuesday by the Newlines Institute"? That was the one that CNN (and other media outlets) reported on, that I covered in my previous post. Stunningly, WaPo is willing to admit that Zenz was involved in that report, when other reporting didn't indicate it at all and only named the Think Tank. Indeed, you might even make the case that finding Zenz on the Contributor section of the About page of Newlines Institute wouldn't necessarily mean that he was involved in the report, and yet here is WaPo outright admitting it.

and the reason why I found this on my feed was that it was posted by Matt Duss, who was advising the Bernie Sanders campaign on foreign policy. Duss was supposed to a figure that was willing to go against The Blob of the American foreign policy establishment, and yet here he is towing the line expressed by both the Trump and Biden administrations: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/matt-duss-bernie-sanders-foreign-policy-blob/

___

https://twitter.com/andraydomise/status/1364051137578602501
https://twitter.com/andraydomise/status/1364054462374019072
https://twitter.com/andraydomise/status/1364056074026971136
https://twitter.com/andraydomise/status/1364056989614145537



basically, they asked eight people about how many people were in their village, and how many people in that village were sent to re-education camps

from there, they came up with the assumption that "okay, so the average is that at least 10% of people are detained in re-education camps, and another 20% of people are obliged to take re-education classes in the camps"

and then, they went "if we take the total number of people who live in every village in Xinjiang, and assume that 30% of people go to the camps, where 30% is taken from 10% + 20%, then over a million people should be in the camps, total"

___

https://twitter.com/cnni/status/1372712095633043461

if you read the article you'll find that CNN was able to find both the parents AND the kids, and speak to them, and put the kids in contact with the parents.

also, the article makes frequent reference to this earlier article from February: https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2020/02/asia/xinjiang-china-karakax-document-intl-hnk/

which, you guessed it:



and then also this article: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/21/asia/xinjiang-china-response-sterilization-intl-hnk/index.html



and then it also links back to the Newlines Institute Report that we've seen earlier

___



___



___


so I happened to see an article today about poverty eradication in China that reminded me of the recent discussion in this thread about anti-China narratives in Europe: https://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/zgx7vO/dyr-fattigdomsbekampning-ger-resultat-i-kina

for those of you not fluent in weird nordic moon languages, the tl;dr is that according to a particular "china expert", China hasn't really eradicated extreme poverty, because if you ignore the international poverty threshold and use a completely different one, it turns out China still has millions of poor people!

so who's the expert? let's find out!





"Institute for Security and Development Policy", huh?



oh. cool.

___





oops all CIA

___

https://twitter.com/sarhanabdelbsir/status/1374367592727580674










___

Found this posted on my feed today, decided to do a little digging















It's not nearly as easy to find information on groups like "Keep Taiwan Free" and "Thai New Yorkers for Democracy" because they're small enough that they don't have a website with an About page, and even the NY4HK group has to be linked back to HKDC before you get to the good stuff.

It's almost like there's an outer layer of small-time orgs who are one degree removed from the direct State Department/CIA ghouls that you have to get past to really get to the meat of the regime change NGO ecosystem.

___

https://twitter.com/ReginaIplau/status/1416759584966864899

https://idi-international.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/New-Report.pdf

quote:

The accusations made over the past year by the United States and its main allies on the alleged Uyghur genocide taking place in Xinjiang and the supposed interment of one and a half million people in concentration camps52, are mainly based on the claims of a certain Adrian Zenz, an independent German anthropologist who has been speculating on the matter for years without ever having set foot in Xinjiang. Other testimonies reported in recent months have also called into question the statements made by two Uyghur women, Tursunay Ziawudun and Sayragul Sautbay, who claim to have been detained in the alleged interment and forced labour camps. Ziawudun, welcomed in the United States by the Uyghur Human Rights Project, has changed her version several times, first claiming that she had never been raped and never witnessed sexual violence53, and subsequently claiming to have been tortured and raped by a group of men54. Sautbay, who emigrated to Sweden, where she joined the Swedish Uyghur Association,a local subsidiary of the WUC (see chapter 1), initially stated that she has not personally witnessed any violence in the centres in question55; a year later, however, she was claiming to have witnessed “all kinds of tortures”in the detention centres56.

The aforementioned data from the official censuses carried out in Xinjiang refutes the proposition that such a large number of people of Uyghur ethnicity, or in any case of Muslim faith, could find themselves locked up in "detention camps".

Furthermore, between 2018 and 2020, over 1,200 delegates from more than 100 countries –including UN officials, foreign diplomats, UN permanent representatives, journalists and religious authorities –were able to visit Xinjiang57 and didn’t find any evidence of an alleged plan to repress or suppress the local population on an ethnic or sectarian basis. Many scholars and witnesses have appreciated the reinstatement policies adopted by the Chinese government to promote the de-radicalisation and address the problem at its root. Some Muslim-majority countries, such as Kazakhstan and Indonesia, have imitated such policies.

___

it was Tursunay Ziawudun!

https://medium.com/@hayatmanzili/an-english-summary-of-tursunay-ziyawuduns-eyewitness-account-b85115f4b963%22

quote:

After a month, they were transferred to a newly built facility. There, the toilets were inside the cell. However, since it had been erected recently, you could smell the cement, which had yet to dry completely. It was April and the room was very cold and damp, which led to her getting very sick. The guards took her to the hospital in handcuffs and shackles, which only added to the pain. She saw many injured people at the hospital. Most people had urinary disorders.

detained for a few months, then given her passport back and allowed to leave the country to be with her husband, who had already been allowed to leave.


No rape
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/meghara/china-uighur-xinjiang-kazakhstan%22

quote:

Nobody discussed rape in the camp. All conversations were monitored by guards or surveillance cameras. But it was on Ziyawudun’s mind all the time. If she were raped, she knew, there would be no one to tell about it, no place to report the crime. After all, she had landed in the camp because authorities felt she was “unreliable.” If one of the women were raped, who would believe them? She had never felt more vulnerable in her life.

Sometimes at night, she said, younger women would vanish and come back with no explanations.

In the darkness of the room, she would hear them quietly sobbing.

“Nobody can talk about this openly,” she said.

The real torture, she discovered, took place in silence, in the inmates’ minds.
“I wasn’t beaten or abused,” she said. “The hardest part was mental. It’s something I can’t explain — you suffer mentally. Being kept someplace and forced to stay there for no reason. You have no freedom. You suffer.”

Detention is bad, yes. We can all agree with that!

She thinks maybe there was possibly rape because some of the detainees were sad at night. Notably, they were all released and got together to reminisce and none of them said anything then, either:
quote:

quote:

After their release, the former detainees gathered several times to have dinner together. She found that they had changed. It seemed to her that they had lost hope. They started drinking a lot. She’d find herself crying often.

Then something happened: The Uyghur Human Rights Project (lol) got her to the US. The page was deleted "in suspicious circumstances" but archive.org still has it: https://web.archive.org/web/20201002083713/https://uhrp.org/press-release/uyghur-camp-survivor-arrives-safely-united-states.html

quote:

She spent nine months in detention, where she suffered malnutrition, dehydration, forcible ingestion and injection of unknown drugs, and physical and mental torture. Her testimony will be vitally important for future atrocity-crimes determination processes and tribunals.

I don't rememember that in her interviews before

what happened next?
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-55794071%22

quote:

The men always wore masks, Tursunay Ziawudun said, even though there was no pandemic then.

They wore suits, she said, not police uniforms.

Sometime after midnight, they came to the cells to select the women they wanted and took them down the corridor to a "black room", where there were no surveillance cameras.

Several nights, Ziawudun said, they took her.

Darkly humorous that they deflect it as "oh but she might have been returned to china and didn't want to get punished more" when she's in the US on a temporary visa and a not-yet-approved asylum claim being handled by a state department NGO that's the one asking her these questions! That's some serious coercive power demanding she "remember" more abuses.

Of course it's from Zenz, the paragon of truth and if you don't believe him you're worse than a holocaust denier.

CaptainACAB posted:

You should instead hate Japan for being a right wing ethnostate run by insane genocide denialist fascists who are often the literal flesh and blood descendants of some of the worst war criminals in the history of the world.

Jetto Jagga posted:

Yeah but I mean, we did that

F Stop Fitzgerald posted:

im guessing pearl harbor drove americans completely insane in the same ways 9/11 did, probably even more so

CaptainACAB posted:

Oh also don't forget the victims of communism foundation lists all the Nazi soldiers killed on the eastern front as victims of communism.

Which is pretty telling for their real ideology.

CaptainACAB posted:

Nah we just didn't change it all the monsters were there well before America was.

F Stop Fitzgerald posted:

im guessing pearl harbor drove americans completely insane in the same ways 9/11 did, probably even more so

CaptainACAB posted:

Nah we just didn't change it all the monsters were there well before America was.

Truga posted:

still funny how the commie party was about to win and big % in elections and suddenly said monsters get millions in CIA money while some prominent commie leaders disappear lol

StashAugustine posted:

what's japanese for gladio

Some Guy TT posted:

https://mobile.twitter.com/joshrogin/status/1465675008454369286

i lol every time i remember space force is real and mysteriously stopped being a punchline for goofy incompetent warmongering the minute biden became commander in chief

StashAugustine posted:

what's japanese for gladio

F Stop Fitzgerald posted:

im guessing pearl harbor drove americans completely insane in the same ways 9/11 did, probably even more so

F Stop Fitzgerald posted:

im guessing pearl harbor drove americans completely insane in the same ways 9/11 did, probably even more so

gradenko_2000 posted:

Some Guy TT posted:

https://mobile.twitter.com/BDCCeltics/status/1465850965718876165

StashAugustine posted:

what's japanese for gladio

StashAugustine posted:

what's japanese for gladio

Some Guy TT posted:

https://mobile.twitter.com/joshrogin/status/1465675008454369286

i lol every time i remember space force is real and mysteriously stopped being a punchline for goofy incompetent warmongering the minute biden became commander in chief

Judakel posted:

gradio?

brugroffil posted:

I've heard this claimed before but is there a source on it

quote:

Such convictions set the stage for decades of murder on an industrial scale. In total, no fewer than 20 million Soviet citizens were put to death by the regime or died as a direct result of its repressive policies. This does not include the millions who died in the wars, epidemics and famines that were predictable consequences of Bolshevik policies, if not directly caused by them.

quote:

The victims include 200,000 killed during the Red Terror (1918-22); 11 million dead from famine and dekulakization; 700,000 executed during the Great Terror (1937-38); 400,000 more executed between 1929 and 1953; 1.6 million dead during forced population transfers; and a minimum 2.7 million dead in the Gulag, labor colonies and special settlements.

quote:

USSR: 7,000,000 (Tolz) to 69,500,000 (Panin)

quote:

World War II endures in the popular imagination as a heroic struggle between good and evil, with villainous Hitler driving its events. But Hitler was not in power when the conflict erupted in Asia—and he was certainly dead before it ended. His armies did not fight in multiple theaters, his empire did not span the Eurasian continent, and he did not inherit any of the spoils of war. That central role belonged to Joseph Stalin. The Second World War was not Hitler’s war; it was Stalin’s war.

Drawing on ambitious new research in Soviet, European, and US archives, Stalin’s War revolutionizes our understanding of this global conflict by moving its epicenter to the east. Hitler’s genocidal ambition may have helped unleash Armageddon, but as McMeekin shows, the war which emerged in Europe in September 1939 was the one Stalin wanted, not Hitler. So, too, did the Pacific war of 1941–1945 fulfill Stalin’s goal of unleashing a devastating war of attrition between Japan and the “Anglo-Saxon” capitalist powers he viewed as his ultimate adversary.

quote:

George Robert Acworth Conquest CMG OBE FBA FRSL (15 July 1917 – 3 August 2015) was a British historian and poet. He is best known for his laws of politics.

quote:

Conquest posited two laws of politics, apparently not referenced in any of his books but as observations he made in conversations while alive:

Generally speaking, everybody is reactionary on subjects he knows about.

Every organisation appears to be headed by secret agents of its opponents.

quote:

Every organisation appears to be headed by secret agents of its opponents.

quote:

China 'hunting' Taiwanese in PH, abroad through deportation: rights group

Agence France-Presse

BEIJING — Beijing has pressured foreign governments to deport hundreds of Taiwan nationals to China, a new report found, in what human rights activists describe as a "hunt for Taiwanese."

More than 600 Taiwanese were extradited from various countries to China between 2016 and 2019 in an effort to "undermine Taiwanese sovereignty," rights group Safeguard Defenders said in a report Tuesday.

China claims self-ruled democratic Taiwan as its territory, to be retaken one day by force if necessary, and has stepped up efforts in recent years to diplomatically isolate it.

China and Taiwan agreed in 2009 that police from both sides would return overseas suspects to their respective territories.

But Beijing began to increasingly ignore this agreement after the election of Taiwan's President Tsai Ing-wen in 2016, according to the NGO's report.

As Tsai has tried to assert the island's distinct identity, China has more aggressively professed its claim over Taiwan.

Safeguard Defenders said Beijing had pressured governments -- including the Philippines and Cambodia -- to extradite hundreds of Taiwanese mostly accused of telecoms fraud to China, despite efforts by the Taiwan government and the UN Human Rights Council to prevent the forced transfers.

Those extradited to China faced "arbitrary detention, torture, enforced disappearances, and forced televised confessions", Safeguard Defenders said.

Spain accounted for the greatest number of known forced transfer cases -- more than 200 -- despite being bound by the European Convention on Human Rights, according to the report.

A Spanish court ruled in 2017 that a group of 121 Chinese and Taiwanese fraud suspects could be extradited to China, pointing to Beijing's widely followed "One-China policy" -- in which Taiwan is diplomatically considered a part of China.

The Spanish government has shown a "clear disregard" for its human rights commitments and a "lack of understanding of the severity of human rights abuses in China", Safeguard Defenders said.

In a contrasting European ruling, last year the Czech Supreme Court rejected China's extradition request for eight Taiwan nationals, citing the risk of torture and Beijing's poor rights record.

In response to the report, Taiwan's government said Wednesday that China "does not have jurisdiction" over Taiwanese citizens implicated in criminal cases abroad, who it said should be returned to Taiwan to face trial.

The Mainland Affairs Council, Taiwan's top China policy-making body, said Beijing aims to "show its sovereignty over Taiwan" by pushing for the deportations.

"We again urge the Chinese side that crime-fighting should not involve politics and we hope law enforcement units on both sides can continue to cooperate on existing basis to effectively fight crimes and protest public welfare," it said in a statement.

Madrid-based Safeguard Defenders is an organization that monitors and supports human rights activists in Asia.

Co-founder Peter Dahlin was deported from China in 2016 after being detained for 23 days and forced to make a televised confession.

quote:

"We made it clear to the Kremlin that we will respond resolutely, including with a range of high-impact economic measures that we've refrained from using in the past," Blinken said.