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Comment by monocasa | Hacker News Reader

Uighurs have a extremism problem on the scale of the Taliban. Literally the Taliban was training Uighurs in the same camps, right across the border (western Afganistan shares a border with Xinjiang).

What would the US have done if the Taliban was in, say, West Virginia? Because that's what China is dealing with in Xinjiang.

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One would hope that a free country would arrest people who commit crimes and not people who share a religion or race as people who commit crimes.

If your brother commits murder, should the police arrest you?

It's China so as usual they are heavy-handed but they did solve the problem.

Most possibly they looked at Russia and their failed attempt to curb Islamic terrorism.

If the police arrest you because your brother committed a murder you have no connection to, are you going to feel good about authority later and not sympathise with his ideals?

You should ask George Takei; his whole family was thrown in an internment camp here in the US. And none of them committed any crimes at all.

There is a monument to this injustice in Washington, D.C.; growing up in the 90s, I read children’s books which taught how unfair, racist, senseless, and counter-productive Japanese internment turned out to be. Why do you think one crime justifies another?

The monument is actually a monument to those who remained patriotic despite the injustice rather than any sort of apology. It specifically excludes those who wouldn't call themselves patriotic after their country put their whole family in a camp and stole their land. And I have zero confidence that we wouldn't do the same thing today in a heartbeat. Also, going to throw out there that the Japanese internment covered all Japanese on the west coast. The Uighur estimates are single digits percentages of all Uighur population in China.

It's not that I think one crime justifies another. It's that the current poitical appartus of the past 30 years or so justifies it's actions in the now to those with traditionally liberal sensibilities with trumped up outrage over low information situations that when all of the facts are in turns out to be something we would totally do or have recently done. Iraq wasn't putting babies in incubators. We didn't have to invade a country to kill bin Laden (we ended up doing that in a country that was protecting him, but had nukes so they were off limits). Iraq didn't have a nuclear program or any yellow cake. etc. etc.

That is an incomplete description of the memorial. In addition to the names of Japanese-Americans who died fighting for the U.S., it specifically memorializes the injustice of the internment camps.

“The focal point of the memorial is a sculpture of two bronze cranes, tangled in barbed wire. Around the memorial is a curved wall, listing the name of each internment camp along with the number of people held there, as well as a list of all the Japanese Americans who died in combat in WWII.”

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/memorial-to-japaneseamer...

Was that the right action to take? Do you agree with that decision?

As I've said below when there's a media blitz from one geopolitical sphere of influence about the actions of another sphere, when those exact actions have happened in the past in the first sphere, and as far as we can tell would happen in the future I get very worried. That generally gets used to harm way more people than the original action.

And that goes double in cases where there's very low levels of information out of the area.

And everybody recognizes that was wrong. We're trying to be better than we were then.

Takei has called the immigrant camps worse than his internment. You can find plenty of Americans who support those today.

Doesn't seem that way.

Yeah, and I would be surprised to find a person here who praises that policy. This is textbook, premium grade whataboutism.

"Whataboutism" is the new phrase to shoot down any comparisons.

And you can certainly find plenty of people in America supporting the immigrant camps, which Takei has called worse than his internment.

Probably treat Taliban in West Virginia the same way they are treated in California.

"A California man who claimed to have Taliban ties was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison on Wednesday on charges related to trafficking Taliban-linked drugs to the United States."

https://www.stripes.com/news/man-accused-of-trafficking-tali...

When there's somewhere between 500k->1m of them, it's very different then the occasional one off.

And that guy was approached by DEA agents posing as Taliban, so his connections are specious at best.

Right. With so many of them, it would be worth opening a public conversation. Inform people about the issues and the law process involved. Maybe start international topic of the issues if the involved people could create a small country on their own.

In short - they could do exactly the opposite of secret prisons without trials.

I'm not asking what they "should" do; I'm asking what literally any other country would do, especially the US.

Why? This article is not about the US. It would be pure speculation and largely irrelevant.

Because it's extremely worrying to me when there's a media blitz from one geopolitical sphere of influence about the actions of another sphere, when those exact actions have happened in the past in the first sphere, and as far as we can tell would happen in the future. That generally gets used to harm way more people than the original action.

You'll find the same criticism of interning Japanese people, US black sites abroad, and many other issues both in general media and posted on HN. This is no sudden media blitz. Just discussing current issues (camps in China are the topic here) rather than speculating over possible one.

Where exactly are those extremely polished single page apps from the BBC, Reuters, and CNN detailing the scope and scale of CIA blacksites?

One Google away - this is a lazy question. First link: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/oct/...

You can find the rest. (There are more)

Because if someone tells me not to do X, yet he himself would do X in the same circumstances, that's reason to think his behavior does not stem from a sincere moral conviction but is a cynical attempt to manipulate me?

You just assume every Muslim in that region is a terrorist? Based on what exactly?

Where do I or China say that? It's single digit percentages of Uighur that are interned, and the governor and large portions of the police of the region are Uighur.

This is exactly the kind of fundamental misconception of the situation that's particularly terrifying to me.

It didn't help that "China is locking up Uighurs" is the news title used everywhere.

> What would the US have done

Who cares? That's whataboutism. What's the right thing to do is the real question.

This is likely because the Uyghurs were discriminated against and monitored/abused similar to how US combat operations in the Middle East produced instability and collateral damage, making it easy to recruit people to the cause.

I highly doubt that one day this minority just decided to start attacking people randomly. It would take a crazy person to do something like this in China where the Communist government is known for making people disappear without trials or explanations, so it bears thinking about what would drive these people to be so desperate.

Do I support the attacks? Of course not, but I understand why they occur.

It all makes sense but how does it happen that people born and raised in western countries (Belgium, UK, France, US) became terrorists? People don't need to be desperate to become loyal to some movement/faith(i.e. terrorism). They believe all kind of fairy tales without being desperate.

This is because they read these stories of desperation and identify with the oppressed. Don't get me wrong, the Taliban is also twisted in many ways and evil at the core - but they're on message and know how to exploit oppression to entice others to join. The only way they're able to do this though, is for the oppression to occur in the first place.

> I highly doubt that one day this minority just decided to start attacking people randomly

you must know that that happened quite a few times in last ten years, like 2009, a lot of innocent people died.

I'm sure, and that's an abomination. Violence is never the right means, but an entire minority does not become violent on their own until they feel they are desperate enough to perform these attacks in some futile effort to preserve things (culture) that means something to them or revenge for abusive actions taken against them.

If China was peacefully coexisting with them and allowing them to perform their religion freely, it makes no sense that they would feel the need to attack random civilians.

Would you say the same thing about those from Muslim countries who have engaged in terrorist activities against the US? Many of them travelled half of the globe over to carry out the attack and many were willing to sacrifice their own lives.

that's always what Western talked about the terrorism attacks in China. If the same thing happened in China, it's not terrorist, but fighting for freedom, while, if it happened in any west countries, it called extremist terrorism. If you don't care innocent Chinese people, why they would care your opinion? Who give your right to ignore the death of hundreds civilian's to maintain a fake peaceful appearance.

Said attacks were spontaneous reactions to racist treatments that pushed the people over the edge. The gov response was in turn over the top and further exacerbated the situation. People were fighting... _for their lives__.

The communists have an extremist problem the dwarfs the scale of the Taliban. They have starved and killed people in the tens of millions.

The factor lying at the root of everything is that China's government is fundamentally illegitimate from the West's point of view. Because of this perceived illegitimacy, when a violent bombing/stabbing incident happens, the default assumption (so the West insists) to make is that it's an case of oppressed subjects fighting for freedom; the burden of proof is on the Chinese government to show that it's a genuine act of terrorism. Likewise when activity purporting to be terrorism prevention measures take place, the default assumption to make is that it's an attempt at ethnic cleansing ala Nazi Germany, the burden of proof is on the China government to show otherwise. At bottom it's a disagreement over where the burden of proof is located. Because both sides are operating with different standards of evidence it's a dispute that's basically impossible to resolve.

The US already did this in an earlier era and its called the American Indian Wars as the natives were quelled and cleansed by the majority race government. Only this one is a Communist Chinese version of it.

Well, if there are any individuals alive today responsible for those atrocities, then they should be called out.

Otherwise, it's about as relevant as Roman atrocities in Gaul.

Fine, let's call them out. Forced sterilization of Native Americans continued through the 1970s in the US. Victims and perpetrators are still alive.

I'm pretty sure it'll be called out in 50 years when it's over and done with.

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