I'm in complete and utter disbelief reading this. How can stuff like this be happening in 2020?
I mean this seriously but as a lowly computer programmer is there any way we can help these poor people other than offer our sympathy?
I mean this seriously but as a lowly computer programmer is there any way we can help these poor people other than offer our sympathy?
They are the ones who turned a blind eye to Rwanda and gave the guy who sold the guns a top job, aren't they?
On 11 January 1994, General Roméo Dallaire, commander of UNAMIR, sent his "Genocide Fax" to UN Headquarters.[108] The fax stated that Dallaire was in contact with "a top level trainer in the cadre of Interhamwe-armed [sic] militia of MRND." The informant—now known to be Mathieu Ngirumpatse's chauffeur, Kassim Turatsinze,[109] a.k.a. "Jean-Pierre"—claimed to have been ordered to register all Tutsi in Kigali. According to the memo, Turatsinze suspected that a genocide against the Tutsis was being planned, and he said that "in 20 minutes his personnel could kill up to 1000 Tutsis".[110] Dallaire's request to protect the informant and his family and to raid the weapons caches he revealed was denied.[110]
> You're black. You're not even a nier. You're an African.
Intervening in another's country internal affairs leads to a war. UN is a nice idea, though it doesn't work in reality. To apply for an asylum, you need to leave the country. Low likelyhood of happening.
I explain why its wrong to my kids. What then?
As sad as it is, we can't do much if anything.
This isn't a problem that will just go away by wishful thinking or by being ignored.
1/ « Keep an eye on » is different than « Intervene ». We have to have satellites out there mapping this stuff in excruciating detail, and spies tracking who is responsible for what, and special forces hit them if they step out in a zone where they can be hit. The people who perpetrate this must live in fear.
2/ The UN is full of problems, but if a resolution grants universal asylum to Uighurs anywhere in the world, then at least those people will know there is somewhere they can escape to. That’s something.
3/ Your kids might one day be in a position to do something about it. Telling them why this is wrong, and why they should care, might just be the most important thing you do in your life.
I don’t want to start a big argument. I just want to say that we can all do little things that do matter collectively.
Not necessarily. Anti apartheid campaigns for South Africa kinda worked for example.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/parliamentary-committee-uig...
My kingdom for a little perspective.
It should be obvious to you that something that effects millions of people is much worse than the CIA thing that only effected a couple hundred.
I'm unclear why you or anyone else might be creating analogies in your heads. It's even less clear why you want me to have made them.
Which might be your goal.
Also China has gone to war with and enslaved as many people as they had the capacity for. Pretending otherwise is weird.
I have no goals. I am on HN just to exchange opinions when I need a 5 min rest from a programming.
>"Also China has gone to war with and enslaved as many people as they had the capacity for. Pretending otherwise is weird."
Oh. I am sure thy did. But the end result is what counts. They sure treated their own citizens like crap. But in business of f..g up other countries I think they're bit behind comparatively. Might change in a future so we will see / or not.
My taxes have frequently paid for US Gov led torture. If we ever hold China accountable in a meaningful way, it won't be due to authentic moral outrage.
Ok, then convince your side to submit to the UN-appointed war crimes tribunal in The Hague. As long as the The Hague Invasion Act is still in force, that claim is hollow.
This goes back to the debate between Augustine, a former good vs evil Manichean, and Pelagius. One believed that "everyone is bad" and warned against excessive hubris, while the other believed that those who choose to do evil do so out of their own free will.
In the pre-9/11 world, there was the idea that torture was a relic of the past, and we had made moral progress beyond such barbarities. But it was the leading liberal democracy in the world, rather than some third world dictatorship, that reintroduced the practice.
The United States trained the guerillas that eventually became the Vietcong in Vietnam, and the country went to war under the Gulf of Tonkin false flag. Similarly, the United States invaded Iraq under the WMD charade. In Afghanistan, it promoted the Islamist fundamentalism of the mujahideen, in order to fight the USSR friendly government that the Afghans themselves elected. The mujahideen became the Taliban, and a similar story of is true of ISIS and al-qaeda (US trained them to do their dirty work then lost control of them)
I don't think the United States is the root of all evil. But it's important to realise that the Chinese don't think of their country as an evil dictatorship, the same way that you don't view your country as "the bad guys". Rather, as St Augustine put it in his doctrine of original sin, we are all "the bad guys" and we need to reflect on the worse demons of our nature.
We have forgotten the Augustinian lessons, indulging in excessive pride and hubris, and failing to reflect on the same pattern that has been occurring cyclically for millennia.
I don't support China either - I don't believe in the "good vs evil" narrative that was alien to the Ancient Romans and Greek pagans. The idea that there's historical moral progress culminating in the values of the United States is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence. In Hegel's philosophy of right, which was fashionable in Germany, he believed that history culminated in the values of the Prussian constitutional monarchy.
It's unlikely that China will become a superpower. The United States, in the next few years, will no longer hold world wide hegemony, as it seems to be distancing itself from Europe among other countries. It's also unlikely that we'll return to a bipolar world, similarly to the period of the Cold War. It's more likely that we're moving towards a multi-polar world.
Interestingly your premise is a form of forever torture that forever punishes and condemns entire nations of people even if they weren't directly (or even indirectly) responsible for the actions of a small group of people.
Every American is denied the ability to have authentic moral outrage because of what a very small number of people did eg at Abu Ghraib? I disagree. That's an absurd premise and it means a nation can never change its behavior or move beyond past mistakes. In fact, your premise encourages a nation to never change, because you're forever condemned no matter what you do.
It's a collectivist punishment system. The kind of thing that has been used to apply inherited or associative morality based on nation, group or race for thousands of years. It's straight out of the old testament.
Let's examine that however. So because of things that happened in the past, or things outside of your direct control, a person or government decades or centuries later can never hold a position of "authentic moral outrage." How about people that were disgusted by acts of US torture and voted their conscience accordingly (electing Obama instead of the war hawk McCain, for example), do they get to have authentic moral outrage? Can you clarify how your all-powerful god-like moral ruling works in practice?
The French can never have authentic moral outrage because Napoleon murdered millions of people and the French did horrible things in Vietnam? Is there an expiration timer on any of this?
The Russians can never have authentic moral outrage because of what happened under the USSR and because of what Putin is doing currently?
The people of Belgium are forever condemned to never possess authentic moral outrage because of King Leopold II?
The people of Cambodia can possess no authentic moral outrage, regardless of their involvement in the genocide and that condemnation shall last an eternity.
The Germans....
Shall I continue? These are all intentionally extreme examples to make a very obvious point.
The world found out about Abu Ghraib, and the US was shamed, humiliated, and Obama issued an executive order specifically banning the CIA's torture techniques in 2009 in response. The NDAA of 2016 also further restricted abusive interrogations. The people of the US were widely disgusted. It was very public as a matter, it was broadcast to the American people 24/7 for months. Culturally we had a large, very public debate over it as a nation. That was for a few dozen cases of torture. The world's superpower - which needed to have zero concern for the world's opinion - was very clearly humiliated by it and took action to prevent torture in the future (and yes, one can be reasonably skeptical of that being successful; as time goes on the US should be judged by its actions and not words on the matter).
Why should a nation of people or its large government/s be comprehensively denied "authentic moral outrage" because of the actions of an exceptionally small part of the population? A plainly absurd position to take on how morality should work.
The only reason we got mad about Vietnam, Cuba, South America is not because of "Communism" as an abstract concept. It's because the government seized or threatened to seize assets. See also Pinochet. We had no problem with him.
The reason why this is relevant to China is that China has made a lot of people a lot of money. So they commit a genocide every so often. As long as it doesn't cost American capital money, we'll ignore it.
Why were people so up in arms about Cuba, but not Ethiopia? Well, Cuba is much closer, true. But the real issue was that people owned stuff in Cuba. There was no significant interest in Ethiopia.
The US certainly doesn't have a stellar Human Rights record in wars or other; but it's mostly because of incompetence and not as an agenda to keep one race only.
I am curious what would happen should you face those countless victims of "incompetence" and explain it to them.
Check out the history of Brown Moses, and Bellingcat:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliot_Higgins
"Higgins' analyses of Syrian weapons, which began as a hobby out of his home in his spare time, are frequently cited by the press and human rights groups and have led to parliamentary discussion."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellingcat
"Bellingcat (stylized as bell¿ngcat) is an investigative journalism website that specializes in fact-checking and open-source intelligence (OSINT). It was founded by British journalist and former blogger Eliot Higgins in July 2014. Bellingcat publishes the findings of both professional and citizen journalist investigations into war zones, human rights abuses, and the criminal underworld. The site's contributors also publish guides to their techniques, as well as case studies."
Check out some of the work being done peering into North Korea as well for ideas e.g.: "North Korea’s Yongbyon Nuclear Center: Flood Damage Repairs Underway" https://www.38north.org/2020/10/yongbyon201022/
There is probably a lot to be learned from constructing various elements of an open-source intelligence pipeline that uses software to aggregate information from dissidents, analyze satellite imagery to identify concentration camps, provide encryption, translation, etc.
The ironic and actually instructive part of this is that his work was used to rationalize the Syrian war for the west, which has left an absolutely devastating trail of misery for countless millions of Syrian people.
Even more instructive is that the people responsibly for that misery all still pretend to be the good guys.
I don't think the pieces of Syria fit quite so neatly together.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN as intended, we'd appreciate it. The intended use is this: primarily for intellectual curiosity, only secondarily for politics, and then only in the form of curious and thoughtful conversation—not smiting enemies.
> I mean this seriously but as a lowly computer programmer is there any way we can help these poor people other than offer our sympathy?
You are not a lowly computer programmer, but a person near the top of income vertical for as long as salaried people go.
The two most potent political instruments ever are the money, and firearms. You may not have the second, but certainly have first.
Saying this, people have to ask a question not who are the bigger enemies to the civilised mankind, but who are the biggest threat. Are they are the people who perpetrate genocides in parts of the world where the light doesn't shine, or the people who cover for them in the West, while living a comfy life, and enjoying all benefits of life in a civil state.
Without any hesitation I will say that while Xis, Putins, and Sisis are the biggest enemies of the civilised mankind, but the biggest threat to civil state as we know it comes from people in the West who made their ascension to power possible.
I believe the majority opinion of WW2 historians is that the war was very well preventable, or it was possible to nip it at the bud if the West wasn't stalled in its tracks by internal political sabotage by people who were not much dissimilar to those Western politicians who now flirt with rouge regimes, and sometimes directly facilitating them.
A very good reason to think to all of HN readers who were fortunate to be born in the free world.
From my lifelong misfortune with politics, I can affirm the saying that it's much, much, much more hard to "create" new power, than it is to take, or receive existing power from somebody else.
My advise, join all major political parties, and fight, fight, fight, until you can do something real, and the money you have can help you in this a lot.
> Contact your Senators to urge them to co-sponsor the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act [0]
> Endorse the global campaign for fashion brands to end complicity in Uyghur forced labour [1]
And several other things including signing petitions you can find on their website: https://uhrp.org/what-you-can-do
[0] https://wilberforce.salsalabs.org/preventforcedlabor/index.h... [1] https://enduyghurforcedlabour.org/
I'm surprised at your surprise.
Aren't there stories about improper arrest and torture quite often?
Heck, a friend of mine was improperly arrested recently (the cops lied about what he was doing) and I actually met a guy who had been tortured (soon before I met him) by a state secret police.
I also knew a Holocaust survivor. I can't be the only person who thinks states behaving badly is more the norm than the exception?
This normalizes decorum over inconvenient truths.
@dang shadowbanned me for accurately discussing the propaganda warfare happening in US vs China relations, and the way current neo-Marxist riots tie into a long history of subversive movements.
How would one go about that?
Hundreds of camps have been spotted, plenty of interviews given by ex-detainees. No doubt Uighurs are being detained en masse but I wonder how many don't ever make it out.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/15/uighur-genocide-xinjian...
"The specific intent element defines the purpose of committing the acts: "to destroy in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such". The specific intent is a core factor distinguishing genocide from other international crimes, such as war crimes or crimes against humanity.
In 2007, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) noted in its judgement on Jorgic v. Germany case that, in 1992, the majority of legal scholars took the narrow view that "intent to destroy" in the CPPCG meant the intended physical-biological destruction of the protected group, and that this was still the majority opinion. But the ECHR also noted that a minority took a broader view, and did not consider biological-physical destruction to be necessary, as the intent to destroy a national, racial, religious or ethnic group was enough to qualify as genocide.[29]"