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Comment by pishpash | Hacker News Reader

Hong Kong provides a sort of comfort to Western society, a place where, in the face of increasingly credible challenges to hundreds of years of unchecked dominance, Westerners can still have their superiority complex validated in the image of yellow people willingly speaking their language, believing their religion, singing their songs, using their laws, wearing their wigs, and waving their flags. Any change to that is an unimaginable evil and a moral affront.

What is shocking is how many Western people I know who are nice and rational people, but once the word China is spoken, become angry tape recorders spewing hate. This is proof nationalistic religious-style racist education in Western society is dangerous to both Westerners and the world.

You see, Chinese and Western reactions are completely predictable, none better than the other.

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I'm an Australian citizen and know that every day evil things are done in the name of my government. People are beaten in police cells and detention centers, important policy and budget decisions are made out of self interest, not for the public good.

Very few people may be truly intentionally evil, but we are flawed, greedy and lazy. I have every reason to believe that this is universal. I don't believe that the inherent nature of westerners or Chinese people is any different.

I also know the democracy is not the wonderful perfect mechanism we like to imagine, it is an arena, in which the contest is heavily weighted towards government and the powerful. People who fight in this arena against power are brave and rare. Most of us, in China or the west do not do this.

I admire the Hong Kong protesters, not because I see them as representing the west against the east, but because I believe they are individuals bravely standing together against power. I have stood in more modest protests, before lines of Australian and American police, and I know how scared I was and how limited my own bravery was.

Nationalists who embrace government propaganda without thought are frightening whether they are Australian, American or Chinese nationalists.

Knowing these things, I believe any argument that presents the Hong Kong protests as a conflict between east and west, regardless of whether they take a pro-western or pro-Beijing stance, is using a grain of truth to tell a dishonest story. But it's a story that will continue to be told because seems to be something we all enjoy about hearing a story in which the the most generous, idealistic view of ourselves or our group is contrasted against the most negative achievable portrait of the other group.

So I am not surprised to hear, that mixed into the Hong Know protests is an offensive caricatures of mainlanders. If it were not true, it would be the perhaps the first conflict in human history to rise above petty unproductive insults

trying to explain what i mean further: Stories that portray an idealistic image of ourselves against a negative portrayal of others are intoxicating. Nationalism is a state of dwelling within those intoxicating stories, and what makes nationalism so frightening is that in that state, people will do terrible things to others, I believe, in part, to sustain the immersion in the story. This same thing happens in protest movements too, being part of a movement, especially if the cause is noble and good, the sense of yourself in a grand narrative is exhilarating. Even if you believe the protests are good, intelligent and brave - as I do - it's unrealistic to think there would not be people in the protests who view the conflicts in racist terms. When I said people are lazy, what I should have said is that we are limited, we can only comprehend reality through simple models, and it can be very hard to remember that the models we use to navigate reality are only models.

So many of the squabbles on this an other forums seem to begin with people who have models of reality, perfectly suitable for navigating their own lives, and assuming with no evidence that their model is also adequate for describing other peoples lives, shouting their models at each other without a lot of listening.

There's well deserved disapproval here of the 'whataboutism' approach to debating, but a some whataboutism is necessary. You need to be able to see the ways in which Tiananmen square and the Nagasaki bombing are similar events in order to get past a cartoon view you, your group and the other.

I agree that prejudice plays a role in the West's view of China, and I'd agree that while China doesn't have democracy, the government has done tremendous good for millions of people. But that being said, what's happening with the Uighur population and "reeducation camps" is beyond unacceptable. And for that alone, I think the current Chinese government deserves all the criticism it's receiving.

China would have the moral high ground to argue the merits of non-democratic political systems if it didn't engage in such human rights atrocities.

Comments like this are especially funny and dishonest because you, like most Westerners, likely have absolutely no idea what's happening to the Uighurs. Reports of "millions" being forced into camps are pure propaganda. And while China is taking some drastic measures in the region, most Uighurs at this point likely welcome the enhanced investment into the region.

The West' "view of China," like the West's view of the HK situation, is just a fantasy. It has nothing to do with actual evidence, facts or serious research. Like Iraq, the entire narrative is being driven by anonymous sources that do nothing but validate the Western hatred of China.

> China would have the moral high ground to argue the merits of non-democratic political systems if it didn't engage in such human rights atrocities.

Oh, the irony. As we speak American bombs are being dropped on Yemen, slaughtering thousands of children and escalating what the UN has repeatedly called the worst humanitarian situation on planet. But yes it's China that's engaged in human rights atrocities.

> The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits 'atrocities' but that it attacks the concept of objective truth; it claims to control the past as well as the future.

-- George Orwell

And it's not continued murder and pretending it and Tiananmen etc. never happened, all sorts of flowers can bloom on that:

https://shanghai.ist/2019/09/05/this-group-of-scholars-have-...

Bombs dropping every twenty minutes is a heinous evil that most Americans are ill-prepared to confront.

It takes a great deal of courage to learn the truth of the American military endeavours that have plunged the world into chaos and war for decades now. This concept is too scary for most Americans - even, Westerners in general - to deal with, and therefore: it continues.

Yeah, while this story joins the mass of stories that get flagged off the front page. Right now, one opportunity to be moral and show solidarity was given to you, and this is how you used it -- you aren't making a thread to help with what you use to belittle this, you use one atrocity to cover another, and think you're better than "most Westerners".

It's not primarily about who does bad things, it's about the victims, and how to help them. That's what empathy is, and that's why punishing evildoers even matters, not because the evildoers do. And yeah, I said evildoers instead of bending over backwards to say the same thing in more bloated language.

The victims need to be acknowledged by those who enable the perpetrators of the crimes.

I myself have helped multiple refugee families get their lives back together again. You?

> The victims need to be acknowledged by those who enable the perpetrators of the crimes.

Nah, I dont engage in and normalize sophistry, and still acknowledge them, and I don't use straw men to look the other way.

I happen to have a keen interest in the HK situation, and propaganda in general.

> Reports of "millions" being forced into camps are pure propaganda

Might it be possible for you to tell us what the actual number of Uighurs is that are are being forced into camps (and the number that are going there willingly, if some are doing so), as well as how you came to know the truth (actual numbers) of what is going on?

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