The US is not a democracy for the vast majority of Americans. It is an oligarchy posing as a democracy.
That difference is important, because a lot of people even in this thread seem to completely lose sight of it.
I would argue that the United States is worse than China. China isn't, nor has it really ever been imperialist. The United States is an imperialist country that has wreaked havoc across the globe, and is responsible for the death of millions of innocent civilians.
Would Tibetans agree with you on that point?
> The United States [...] is responsible for the death of millions of innocent civilians.
Are you aware of China’s Great Leap Forward and the ensuing Great Famine?
The point is, the United States has done a lot of things across the world. Some of it may be havoc. It may be responsible for many deaths. It's also responsible for many improved lives.
China today is involved in territorial disputes involving military mobilization with more than half of its neighbors. In a few decades, we're probably going to look back on Xinjiang as an event comparable to the holocaust.
Boiling this down to "USA = imperialist = bad" and "China = not imperialist = OK" is silly.
I never said that China was "ok", I simply pointed out the hypocrisy that is always present when we demonize a foreign nation, for political ends.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2019/12/ozils-uyghur-...
>I never said that China was "ok", I simply pointed out the hypocrisy that is
I'm sure you think this is helpful, but this is a false equivalence that, for practical purposes, serves to derail necessary and needed criticisms of China.
Luis Kutner was a co-founder of Amnesty international, and Kutner would go on to form the “Friends of the FBI” group, an organization “formed to combat criticism of the Federal Bureau of Investigations,” according to the New York Times, after its covert campaign to disrupt leftists movements — COINTELPRO — was revealed. He also went on to operate in a number of theaters that saw heavy involvement from the CIA — including work Kutner did to undermine Congolese Prime Minister and staunch anti-imperialist Patrice Lumumba — and represented the Dalai Lama, who was provided $1.7 million a year by the CIA in the 1960s.
If you want more recent events: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony
They were the ones that "corroborated" her testimony.
If it weren't so tragic, it would almost be comical, its like they have manufactured consent before, and know what they are doing...
This is several degrees of abstraction away from the point about Uighurs, so unless you are claiming Luis Kutner's actions in the 60s have a specific, direct evidentiary connection to the 400 instances of Uighur testimony about disappearances and torture across the world from the past few years, the only thing I can do for you is try to help explain how to critically think about evidence and its connection to different kinds of claims, and how to understand when it does and doesn't weigh on particular claims.
Did you have anything specific to the issue of Uighur testimony you would like to share that's not from 60 years ago? Is there a particular line in the wiki article or mintpressnews that you linked that directly and specifically debunks all 400 pieces of testimony?
After: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7599941/Whistleblow...
Before: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-everyone-was-s...
If you looked at the second link I provided about Nayirah and Desert Storm, you would realize that my concerns about Amnesty and testimonies are inextricably linked. They "corroborated" her testimony. Bear in mind this was in the early 90's, not 1960.
Watch the testimony, and then read the video description. Its all public record.
The facts of the matter are that there HAVE been radical Islamic terrorist attacks in Xinjiang. The Chinese are dealing with the nature of this problem. The extent to which "atrocities" are occurring is constantly stated, yet somehow the numbers are always inflated, stories are changing, none of it adds up.
More sources and references:
https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/ehrd6y/cmv_th...
If you want a REAL deep dive:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1d0lynghlCnR6Hs57pypEEhlh...
Here is a video from April of this year in Xinjiang, one of the terrorist attacks is included in the video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oKvulTU8oU&bpctr=1597232967
You asked for evidence supporting 'the accusations in Xinjiang.' I posted some. Since then, most of your reply has had nothing to do with that. None of the material you linked previously was directly related to Uighurs. And now you've come back with a second trove of links, and instead of explaining them you're inviting me to wade through a huge trove links that apparently imply somethingorother that you just can't get around to stating in plain language.
The most relevant appears to be a pair of articles that support a half-baked argument that someone's testimony has changed, although you aren't clearly stating how it changed, and it's not clear that your interpretation of that is one that I would share. And to the extent that there's an argument here at all that relates to Uighurs, it appears to depend on using a single account to disprove an entire trove of 400 interviews, which is a fundamental misunderstanding of how different kinds of evidence balance against each other.
That's in addition to the comprehension issue regarding how evidence diminishes in weight the further it is removed from the subject - the connection between stuff from 60 years ago on a different subject doesn't balance against Amnesty's work in the present the way you seem to think it does.
And again, I'm very familiar with the copy+pasted talking points from /r/Sino. For the most part, you still haven't directly addressed the veracity of the interviews, you've just attempted to turn the whole conversation into a pandora's box of digressions with unclear connections to the specific question you were originally asking about. This is more an exercise in Qanon-style free association than an expression of a coherent thought that logically addresses specific arguments.
If we're making those kinds of tradeoff, China is just as responsible for many improved lives, just look at the Road and Belt initiative, projects against poverty and involvement in Africa.
>The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
http://www.openculture.com/2016/11/umberto-eco-makes-a-list-...
Even in this much-derided "Clean Network" document there is not a word about the sort of content-based censorship that is ubiquitous in China.
Similarly qualified: Britain, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Spain, Japan, South Korea, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Ireland, Iceland.
Have you looked at how many billionaires there are in Sweden and Norway? Oligarchy. Sweden has considerably more billionaires per capita than the US does. They're clearly not a democracy at all. The billionaires control the entire country including its government, obviously.
Ever look at the perpetual old money dominance in Germany and France? Oligarchy.
You're down to there only being a dozen or so liberal democracies that aren't in some way broken, severely tainted by money or entrenched power groups, etc. - if you use the same standard used against the US.
Because that's the point at issue in the thread you are replying to. And I'm personally kind of amazed that it's possible to lose sight of something I find to be an incredibly obvious distinction.
>If we're good to slide on our principles and ideals "as long as we can tell ourselves apart from China" that's a pretty sad state.
This is conflating a differentiation for a justification. We can form coherent thoughts about the relative scale of abuses committed by different powers without that meaning we think those abuses are okay.
If we lose our ability to form coherent thoughts about abuses committed by China because we can't express them without also having to labor through false equivalences to U.S. surveillance, those valid and needed criticisms get derailed and the comprehension of China's unique status as an abuser of surveillance infrastructure gets erased. Judging different scales of moral error is important, because otherwise we can never progress from a position of moral error to positive moral standing and we get bogged down with frivolous exercises in whataboutism.
No. The comment said the US is a liberal democracy. Not "closer", IS.
It's like "hey, this number is 100!" - "no, that number is 13" - "but 13 is closer to 100 than 2".