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Comment by stared | Hacker News Reader

I am European and not affiliated in any way with China. And don't want to whitewash them.

Still, there is a double standard regarding China vs the Western World. While China gets (IMHO deserved) criticism for their territorial claims and human right abuse, the Iraq War (over 400k deaths) was "business as usual".

The same goes with anti-pandemic restrictions - when it happens in China, it's an authoritarian rule. When in the West - it's social responsibility. When China started vaccinating children, I saw an article with "child soldiers" and a photo of a crying kid. The same action in the West had a picture of a smiling kid, and a more welcoming title.

Or even when it comes to pollution and worker's rights, the West is hypocritical. Blames China, while happily outsources most heavy industry there, due to lower costs. (When was the last time you bought some electronics and there were not "Manufactured in PRL"?)

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We're not discussing the US, we're discussing the latest abuse of power by the CCP. That's where the link goes. Would you like to next make a false equivalence of US prison labor to slave labor in China? Because that's where this goes, every thread.

Submit a link of the US' latest atrocity to HN. A world of tolerance allows and accepts the stories of violence perpetrated by all actors. The reason you are seeing so many related to China is we have some new flagrant human rights abuse happening from the CCP every week, sometimes multiple times a week, that's why you see so many of these stories percolate to the top. Just two days ago, the CCP tore down the statue commemorating the Tiananmen Square massacre in Hong Kong. [1]

This is the screaming of the machine doing its work of control, every day of every week. The memories of them will be inhaled whole and exhaled as dust, a phantom of a thing that never truly existed.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-59764029

The commenter you replied to seemed to be comparing 2 situations. That seems normal to me. Comparing things seems to be great way to understand complex issues.

What makes the comment a wrong way to discuss? Is it a bad form of comparison for some reason?

Providing common knowledge on the topic rehashes things everybody knows so it is seen as noise and not signal.

If you have uncovered stuff few people know, please share. Then finding comparisons is more insightful.

Not really. The Iraq war was horrible and unnecessary and I doubt you’ll find too many people here who’ll say otherwise.

But it was the past and it’s settled. China is happening now.

Aren't Guantanamo Bay and other torture camps (black sites as they are known now) still open?

They are, and it’s horrible.

But they key difference is that you won’t really see anyone downplaying them or outright denying their existence.

To me the key difference is in the way the propaganda is done.

Pro-CCP people are posting comments on the Internet to try to convince western people.

Pro-Russia people are paying celebrities of western countries to promote their culture, they are also creating news networks in the west to do the same.

USA is using the global western culture (Hollywood, singers...) to promote their agenda.

Since we're talking about torture, in the last two decades, the USA produced dozen of films or TV shows where torture is depicted as a necessary evil for the good guy to win over the bad guys. Just look at Jack Bauer. They don't need to go an Twitter saying "no, that's not what happens, we're the good guys, see...", because in the mind of (almost) everyone, it's already accepted, since they saw a good guy doing it in a movie.

The propaganda machine from CCP is just not as evolved as the USA's, they are trying to catch up. But all in all, it's a same. It's just more obvious for the CCP guys because they haven't the right tools yet. But given how they are investing in cultural services, I'm sure they will soon be better at it and we won't have those kind of discussion anymore. It will not be "propaganda", but just people arguing against each other on topics on which their favorite state has different opinion.

I don't know, running torture camps doesn't sound much better if you can talk about them and yet they are not closed.

Could be worse, you could run a real risk of getting disappeared for talking about them. Which is obviously a non-issue in the west.

That’s whataboutism. Most liberal democracies didn’t invade anyone recently and have free press and a history of little recent human rights abuse.

It’s possible to criticize China on its own merits without somehow excusing anyone else.

I’d happily pay more for goods from manufacturers saying they avoid China. Hopefully this will be easier and cheaper in coming years.

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