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Comment by OtomotO | Hacker News Reader

"we've always been at war with eastasia"

The major problem I see, is that every major power uses propaganda to their benefit, yet even highly intelligent people often don't see the propaganda of their native (or chosen) home.

I see the propaganda of China, Russia as well as the one of the US and Europe.

There are no white, selfless knights around. There never were.

Does that mean that nothing matters, that (subjective) morale suddenly is meaningless?

Of course it doesn't!

But it puts "them vs us" into perspective.

Humans are humans and act like humans all around the world.

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That is one big false équivalence. The mistreatment of minorities by the CCP is not the same thing as the mistreatment of minorities by the USA. Or did I miss the news about the black lives matter forced sterilisations?

You missed the part where the USA killed off most of the native population of its western side and drove them off their lands, yes. Different times, but maybe that's just the thing to do to get to superpower status and China's just catching up.

No one missed this because Americans are educated in these atrocities from their early years in school.

On the other hand, such a record of atrocities committed by the CCP is not taught in Chinese schools. The Hundred Flowers Campaign, the reconstitution of Tibet and the sending of its natives to work camps by the half million have been erased from the record.

Will there be reparations or is the US going to keep the lands? Is it OK if the Chinese do it now and teach their schoolchildren about it 100 years later?

Looking from the outside this just looks like pulling up the ladder. "Oh we did kill them off but that was years ago. These other countries, though..."

I don't know what you expect to be done that hasn't been done already. Navajo Nation exists and it's 17,544,500 acres of land for the Navajo people. Native Americans qualify for college benefits that others with citizenship to the States do not qualify for. Compounding the dilemma of how a nation makes reparations for the sins of their mother's mother's mother's there just aren't many Native peoples left to make reparations to.

Your argument, at face value, offers little in the way of solutions. On the contrary, you make an enemy of my argument. Do you seek to apologize for the new makers of genocide today? Or what is the purpose of your comment?

Much as the Buddha focused on present action as a tool for change, that is what we must do now, collectively, so we do not repeat the atrocities of yesterday today.

The US gave land and money to tribes. They held fair trials and often lost. Just recently half of Oklahoma became tribal land because of a lawsuit.

For others as interested in this ruling as I was here is a link to a story that covers this verdict [1]

[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/07/09/889562040/supreme-court-rules...

How old is China? How big is China? Was it always that big? Everybody just come together in a big kumbaya circle one day?

> sending of its natives to work camps by the half million

Never heard of this event. Mind to provide a link with more details?

I should have put the link in my original comment, thank you for asking. It's at [1].

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-54260732

Thanks, this is what the major part of the report.

> The report, authored by Adrian Zenz, an independent Tibet and Xinjiang researcher, says that 500,000 people, mostly subsistence farmers and herders, were trained in the first seven months of 2020 and authorities have set quotas for the mass transfer of those workers within Tibet and to other parts of China.

One thing I hate about mainstream media reporting is that they never link to the source material.

Just from the above description, I cannot see that these people are forced in anyway. And deriving such numbers from public Chinese government documents is not accurate either, as certain words can be easily misunderstood given the sinophobia sentiment nowadays.

The expansion of Chinese civilization in the south was also not entirely peaceful. It followed patterns of settlers occupying fertile lands and forcing indigeneous people to retreat to less fertile ones and to mountain ranges. The suppressions of the Miao/Hmong rebellions during Ming and Qing dynasty was quite brutal.

The spread of civilization and the establishment of the modern nation states was rarely peaceful, neither in the West, nor in the East, and in many cases required cultural assimilation. It is disingeneous to pretend it was otherwise.

If you're referring to Xinjiang, China's ahead of the USA, not behind it. China emptied out Xinjiang in the eighteenth century; the people there today are not indigenous.

Of course, the government at the time was not Chinese, and the Emperor pursued this course over the objections of his Chinese advisors...

You missed the part where you can openly discuss that in the US.

You even have politicians like Elizabeth Warren overblowing their native ancestry to gain an advantage.

This happened 150+ years ago. Tianeman square was 1989, the "Great Leap Forward" with its 15-55M estimated dead was in 1960. And to this day China denies these things happened, purges the Internet of any records, and punishes/arrests anyone in China who mentions them. I'm not even going into the persecution of the Uyghur Muslims in China, their forced detention and "indoctrination" camps... which again China denies, covers up etc.

Western Europe and the US, while they have done some shit in the past, can't really be compared. At least in these countries, people are allowed to discuss these things, protest, vote out politicians whose views they disagree with. China meanwhile, is cracking down on free speech and democracy in Hong Kong.

Nah, its just getting less publicity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dzungar_genocide

Nah. Qing technically is Manchu. Qing racist to the Hans too. The main race in China. CCP actually has less racist ideology compare to others previous ruler in China. China is very complex country.

There is no such thing as unbiased news. But here in the west I can (legally) read Chinese state news and get the other side of the story. The other way around is not possible.

Well it's the first page from 'Politics for Dummies': find an enemy and blame it for everything. If there's no enemy,create one or even imagine one.

And if you already have an enemy and they’re doing horrible things, don’t look the gift horse in the mouth, tell people about it.

Comparing China’s bad behavior to the bad behavior of the West is a false equivalence on every aspect. It is clear that the West also has (or had) bad behavior, but bringing it up is a form of whataboutism to distract from the much worse behavior happening right now in China.

No it is not.

All this whataboutism talk is besides the point.

I am not saying what China is doing is right, I am saying that others are equally worse and we should deal with that TOO.

And yes, the US invading foreign soil is equally bad.

> I see the propaganda of China, Russia as well as the one of the US and Europe.

This is a huge false equivalence.

You won't see Chinese citizens publicly in favor of US/Europe but you will damn well see it the other way around.

E.g., some of my coworkers genuinely think it is ok for China to ban Western companies in the name of harmony but the US introducing the slightest of regulations is seen as fascism.

A discussion like this can't happen inside China on a popular platform.

I though US maintains list of black listed companies

You really think the cases are equivalent?

TikTok is allowed unabated in the US. Twitter is blocked in China.

This sort of false equivalency discussion is getting really annoying. Even Hacker News is partly blocked in China.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20600787

If the US follows China's policies symmetrically, a ton more companies would be blacklisted.

Of course I see Western propaganda, but at least Western propaganda pretends to benefit me.

So I would rather pretend to believe in Western progaganda than Chinese propaganda.

„Humans are humans“ is dangerously naive in a world full of thug nations.

Propaganda does not benifit you. It benifits the state. To think that the state's goals are your own is a symptom of being poisoned by propaganda.

Pretends to benefit you? Example, please?

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