The warning at the top of this article did not prepare me for the images, so I'll offer an additional one: the images are more disturbing than you think. Consider turning images off to read the content.
However, you do correctly point out how this article appears to draw people in and then goes for maximum shock effect. I'm sure that whoever created this article did that on purpose. Even if the cited numbers happen to be accurate, this kind of tactic is rather typical for propaganda. The same can be said about producing "facts" that are either hard or impossible to verify.
To be clear: I am not saying that this is propaganda, but it does at least raise a few red flags about potentially being just that. Further research needed.
EDIT: to be even more clear: I have no doubt that the CCP have committed horrible crimes. But that will not make me just believe whatever somebody might write about it.
Trying to find my thoughts on this. The Einsatzgruppen pretty much started the Holocaust via mass shootings (before all other methods). They switched to gas vans (according to this article, China uses this too? What in the fuck) for some vile cognitive gymnastics where they convinced themselves it was too demoralizing for the goons to have to shoot that many people without being drunk all the time (to carry out the deed). They sought a more efficient, less taxing method, and that’s where the gas vans came in.
The Nazis did this to anyone that they could lump into ‘a national threat’ bucket, so Jews that were also communist Russians were instant kill (as opposed to German Jews who initially got put in labor camps).
If the CCP ever decides routine shootings is taxing or inefficient (like the Nazis), things wouldn’t be so far off to having an “efficient” death camp to just handle it en masse.
I tend to always over-fit the Nazi parallels, especially with China, but China’s prime issue is scale. Whatever they do, they must always consider scale.
Crackdowns will happen at scale (Hong Kong), censorship will happen at scale (speech/internet), imprisonment will happen at scale (Uighurs), and mass executions (if we were to ever get the numbers) will happen at scale.
As hard it is to not turn away from that picture in the article, I would sincerely like to know what that woman’s crime was.
Not just imprisonment, mass raping of Uighurs women as well: https://www.insider.com/uighur-activists-mass-rape-chinese-m...
This book makes an interesting point about the bottom-up theory of what really started the Holocaust (this is an unforgettable read, I feel like author literally accounted for every death batch (and yes ‘batch’ has to be used due to the scale):
https://www.amazon.com/Bloodlands-Europe-Between-Hitler-Stal...
Basically, it was simple broad directives that got interpreted by these disparate elements of the Nazis in the Eastern front. What does it mean if someone is not only a Jew, but also a communist Russian? Pretty much an instant threat, and forward deployed units liberally interpreted it into mass-killing vs forced labor camps. Once that genie was out of the bottle, you would look unproductive in the regime if you weren’t upping the ante.
What is the CCP creating here? You want units with blood on their hands ratcheting up new and interesting ways of currying favor with the regime? Hey bosses, I found a great new way to promote CCP Authority, forget Uighur camps, get a load of this. Suddenly you have a macabre competition within a peculiar institution that can only become darker if left to find it’s own logical purpose (be the very best ccp you can be, whatever that means, and oh John the guy you started with recently rose the ranks doing this, not saying you should too, but take some initiative).
No master plan, just a dark organic evolution.
Sadly mental gymnastics seem to do their work often enough. For example firing squad style executions also tend to use mental gymnastics, by introducing blank rounds the individual members of the squad are no longer certain that they will fire the lethal shot, making them less hesitant to aim and shoot correctly.
The fact that the images are a 'shock' to some people shows just how disconnected they are from reality. They are powerful images but they should not be shocking... The term 'killing' should already embody these emotions without the images.
The emotions that people feel when looking at these images, that's exactly what 'killing a person' means.
Let's dissociate the country from the political apparatus. What's evil is the CCP, not China in itself - it's not like the citizens can vote the current regime out.
In nearly all parlance talking about countries you reference those countries directly 'the US invaded Iraq' for e.g.
It's a shorthand for 'the govt of xxx'.
because most other countries we talk about have some kind of representative system where the people actually have a say in who governs them. Of course it's all relative, no representation is ever perfect, but in a dictatorial regime there's no representation at all.
Why aren't you saying نظام instead of Iran? Why not 'Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela' instead of Venezuela?
Come on man.
For Venezuela, people did vote for Chavez in the first place right? Which then made the turn to dictatorship. Which is what you should expect when when you elect a Marxist.
And yes, the same should go for Iran and Venezuela. But it's easy for CCP because they officially made the acronyms by themselves...
You do realize that Iran is a republic right?
They hold legislative and executive branch elections every few years with different political parties and all....
Poor example, EU is not a country and represents a political apparatus, nothing else.
"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
Overwhelmingly, this stuff is just internet-style cloak-and-dagger fantasy, and cheap rhetoric. How do I know that? Because when I look at who the actual users are who make these votes, and I see they were, for example, commenting on HN about Julia in 2015, the odds that they are a communist plant round to zero. This reality is so absolutely remote from what comments like yours are insinuating that it's hard for me to believe that people are willing to go there. Yet here we are, with spies in every closet and foreign agents under every bed. The only word for this is cartoonish.
The truth is that this is a very large, very international community, with millions of users having all sorts of backgrounds and views, and they disagree on divisive topics like China. That is the extremely mundane—albeit emotionally charged—reality of what is going on here. Accusing people who hold different views of being spies and foreign agents is the fastest way to poison the community, so we don't allow it, especially when there isn't a shred of anything resembling evidence to support it.
This entire dynamic is determined by tribal identifications on both sides. That leads people to hate and ultimately want to destroy each other. That's not compatible with the value of this site, which is curiosity. People can't be curious with each other and want to destroy each other at the same time—the nervous system doesn't work that way.
If anyone wants more explanation, there are arbitrary amounts of it at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....
When an account posts like this in various threads:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25583482
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25445883
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25029414
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24855732
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24721883
...it's painfully clear that this is not curious conversation but a pre-existing agenda.
Not sure how this could be any clearer.
I think it's a good thing to include these images, we've become too used to content moderation that we're desensitized to a lot of the atrocities that are still happening daily around the world.
That doesn’t make it any less brutal or disturbing, but it serves as a reminder of how often we are willing to turn a blind eye to atrocities when it’s economically or politically expedient.
Next thing you know the executions start for DMCA violations and so called hate speech that will radically change in 40y.
As george carlin famously said we are all circulating the drain.
And I don't see how "standing up" in the US would ever do you any good, with the sheer force of militarized police and actual military. I hope this is not leading into a tired "if only Germany would've had guns" point.
People who 'get triggered' are too sensitive. They have to train themselves. We are on planet earth, we live then we die. This is a fact. Emotions are tools to allow us to navigate our lives as members of society. They are useful, not something we should be shielded from.
We need negative emotions just like we need hunger to know we need to eat, thirst to know we need to drink, pain to know we need to avoid physical harm, etc...
IMO, those who can't face reality shouldn't be involved in shaping it.
>IMO, those who can't face reality shouldn't be involved in shaping it.
What is this even advocacy for? Voting rights only after you sit through a slideshow of graphic violence?
The association with the horrible imagery needs to be created or else people will not understand what they're reading with the appropriate degree of emphasis when the term comes up in the future. We will be a nation of apathetic, sedated cowards.
In the old days, people actually saw these horrors with their own eyes, not merely seen pictures; so they understood very well what 'war' meant. Probably why we haven't had a major war for so long.
It is funny reading this after not even been two weeks since the last attack on the US embassy compound in Iraq after the US denied Iraqi calls to remove US troops of the country it invaded 17 years ago
I don't know where you have been these last 70 years, but western powers have been "doing this" for a long, long, long time
What we really need is to listen to some Angela Davis speeches on what has been going on in the areas that The Media is too cowardly to report
We shouldn’t be supporting China, we should bring skilled work back to the USA.
I'm sorry, I can try to understand the well-meant intent behind this, but what, and pretend the world is all roses and rainbows?
No. Leave the images on. You first world city folk need to SEE the horror that goes on beyond your ivory towers, some of it enabled by the very work that you do.
If you need to see brutality to empathize with the brutalized, then go ahead and look at the gore. But I think most people are emotionally capable enough to realize that executions aren't pleasant experiences without photo evidence.