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Comment by booleanbetrayal | Hacker News Reader

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/08/ch...

It's easy to criticize China's handling of culturally incompatible indigenous peoples when your own are either dead or accepted their place in a depressing reservation. From China's perspective, their heavy handed tactics are the only thing preventing the region from falling into civil war.

No one in the US is forced to live in a reservation, let alone kidnapped and tortured by the government just for being indigenous.

Sarcasm is hard to detect via text, I'd try and be more explicit (add a /s).

If you are in fact being serious, Google 'indian reservations'

Maybe the key word is “forced”.

Are you saying that historically Indians where not forced onto reservations, or that now there are no pressures to keep them there?

The other operative word is "is". No one is trying to defend the history of the united states... slavery was a rather common thing at one point.

There is no threat of punishment keeping them there. They are free to live their lives anywhere in the US the same as any other US citizen. They do, unfortunately, have a higher percentage of poor people than most demographics, but being poor is quite obviously better than being kidnapped and tortured.

If you want to live as a Native American, then yes, you basically have to be on a reservation, and we forced them there to begin with. We'd do so again if they were deemed a large enough national security risk. Our current moral high ground is built on the history of hundreds of years of dirty work. In a hundred years, when Uyghur culture is wiped out, China too, will start claiming their own moral high ground.

If you are comparing not being able to live in their ancestors traditional manner to being tortured, you are trying to compare "live a normal north american life" to "being tortured". I hope it's clear that "forcing" people to do the former by otherwise having them move to land set aside, is a far way away from kidnapping people and torturing them.

No one is trying to defend the history of the united states (there was this whole slavery thing after all), just the current united states. A past wrong does not justify a current one.

That's not my point. You can't judge China's actions towards a situation that you don't face. It doesn't help that the US completely failed in their treatment of Native Americans. It's comfortable to believe that modern day America is more enlightened, but do you really think that's the case? Hundreds of thousands of people were killed during the war in Iraq, in the name of "national security." Technically, we didn't force anyone to do anything after Sadaam was captured, but we basically set up two sides to kill each other and feign suprise when they did. Imagine how we would react to an actual internal threat of national security.

Maybe you think you can do better. Let's say you had a chance to be Andrew Jackson in 1830, and you're facing an American Indian crisis in Georgia. You have two options. The first is to let history repeat itself with the Trail of Tears. The second is to let the settlers and natives duke it out. Ultimately, the settlers will win and Indians are drived out anyways, but thousands more are killed in the process. The two groups are too different to coexist peacefully, and you don't have the authority from stopping people from moving to Georgia. Which option do you choose? Either way, history would remember you as a terrible person.

"You can't judge China's actions towards a situation that you don't face"

So, if one isn't facing a certain ethical situation, they can't make judgements about the response? This seems like quite poor reasoning to me.

Besides, why can't one accept that two different actions committed by different nations are both wrong? I suspect you're assuming that the posters are from the US too, which isn't necessarily true.

To be clear, I think what China is doing in Xinjiang is terrible. My issue is that the American news outlets do everything they can to paint a picture that the Chinese are genocidal maniacs. The media would never treat the actions of a single abusive prison guard as the will the American government, but they do for China. The media never implied that the war on terror was modern day genocide, but they're doing that with China.

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