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Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

The US did have the moral high ground, which is a remarkable thing given what we're talking about: that's how horrific what China is doing is.

Were the Japanese released from that internment? Yes. Were they genocided? No. Were they stripped of their culture, heritage, social lives, and tortured for decades due to their beliefs? No. Does the US today recognize the Japanese internment as a moral crime? Yes.

That last one is a critical difference between cultures.

In China today you can't even discuss what's going on in Xinjiang.

You are of course lambasting the US, on a US website. Nothing bad will happen to you because of that. And in this thread you won't find thousands of bots attempting to say that the Japanese internment is ok, or otherwise justify that it should have happened; instead, most of the replies are fully agreeing that it was atrocious. Try that in China, see what happens.

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> Does the US today recognize the Japanese internment as a moral crime? Yes.

Not only is it recognized as a moral crime, but the US government passed a law to give restitution to interned people. Does that clean the slate? No. Does that make it ok? No, of course not.

The point is not that the US is perfect or even good. The point is that the US system allows open discussion, criticism, protest, legislating, etc. It has built-in mechanisms to improve itself which it has done and continues to do.

China has none of that.

The point is that you forget all the inconvenient facts - from American national guard murdering students in broad daylight, without any kind of punishment afterwards, to secret military kangaroo courts - and build your arguments on plain ignorance ("China has none of that").

In the US, we can acknowledge those "inconvenient facts", freely discuss them, educate people about them, push for accountability for those who did them and to change policies so that they do not happen again.

And then, quite often, the police at various levels of government infiltrate the groups seeking accountability, engage in provocations to discredit them publicly and frame them for unrelated crimes for which they are prosecuted and punished, and actively coordinate with and/or passively use non-enforcement to enable opposed non-police groups to carry out violence against their members. (Of course, we can then acknowledge those inconvenient facts, educate people about them, and push for accountability, if we are willing to start the cycle over again.)

Is the US government less effectively repressive of dissent than the PRC? Sure. But it still does tend to violently repress dissent, especially when that is about conduct of policing or war.

Nice theory, doesn't work. Weed was made illegal to suppress ethnic minorities and war protesters, 50 years later that law is still serving the same purpose. Meanwhile US lawmakers are busy denying voting rights to those same minorities, and making it illegal to teach inconvenient parts of american history.

It's silly to bring up Kent State in a discussion comparing openness to criticism between the US and China. Kent State is well documented, it's taught in school. Tiananmen Square (government troops murdering protesting students) is actively supressed in China.

Yes, the US has done bad things. And some of those bad things have been forgotten. But if you want to find out about them... the government is not going to prevent you from doing so. China is much worse in that regard.

Tienanmen Square is taught in Chinese schools as well. There's a key difference however: people responsible for Tienanmen were punished, with Prime Minister spending the rest of his life in house arrest. Those responsible for Kent State didn't. And that's a common pattern with "bad things" happening in US.

I won't argue with that. The US has vastly improved in that regard over the last 70 years (or however far you want to go back), or the West in general, and could be considered ahead in many ways. However, if you want to put yourself on that high ground, it always comes across rather weird if you add overly specific inb4's. And actually, I think "well at least we can openly call out our government for having done fucked up shit even though nobody in charge will get prosecuted" is kinda rather a sad state of affairs too.

As a side node/regarding initial topic, I also really dislike the quick jump to "whataboutism" to try and kill off any form of discussion that draws parallels and comparisons with other countries (or, to anything else more generally). Because this is unfortunately how it mostly gets used today.

> In China today you can't even discuss what's going on in Xinjiang

You absolutely can, they openly put it on their own government websites and everything even. These measures are written into public law. All of this is behind some misleading language of course, but chinese people aren't stupid. People, especially in Xinjiang, being aware of what's going on is in fact beneficial to the government, as it serves as a warning to anyone who might resist in the future.

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