Hacker News Reader

Comment by theossuary | Hacker News Reader

Thats how most propaganda works. Russia, for example, has been publicizing cases of extreme racism in the US for years to demoralize black people. [1] Hell this has been going on since WWII, when other countries saw how the US treated their black troops, and used it to damage loyalty. [2]

Nothing works like the truth, if the US could just stop being so racist it'd be that much harder to divide us. It seems like that's fundementally against our nature though.

1. https://www.npr.org/2017/10/30/560042987/russians-targeted-u...

2. https://perspectives.ushmm.org/item/german-leaflet-for-black...

View on HN

There's a museum in Shanghai with posters going back to Mao that take the same strategy. Lots of highlighting American racism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_Poster_Art_Centre

https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g308272-d18871...

US is a racist country though, at least at the government level. See how BLM and January 6th demonstrations got treated.

It took bipartisan pardons/commutations across 2 disparately ideological faction leaders to even the outcomes for both groups of people who purportedly aimed to overthrow the government that let them all be free.

So the outcomes are even now?

Black Lives Matter only sought to "overthrow" the system in place if you presume first that racism is a core component of it.

The thing that makes it a wedge issue that's useful for propaganda isn't that the US is racist, it's that the US is racist while (ostensibly) aspiring to be more in its creed.

The funny thing is Russia an China can claim to be less racist as they are homogenous societies.

Russia is homogenous? Interesting.

China is homogeneous?

... What?

That is completely nonsense. Absolutely ludicrous.

Neither Russia nor China are homogenous. Both have large Muslim minorities (and both are be pretty racist against them). Eastern Russians are not European descended and are looked down on by Western Russians. Tibetans are not Han Chinese.

Even the Asian nations that actually are pretty "homogenous" like Japan and Korea are also famously pretty racist.

There are also a ton of other ethnic groups in China and the government just call them all Han Chinese. Tons of ethnic groups in Russia too. These are countries with very long histories that span a large area, with many areas that were multiple kingdoms, tribes, etc. Makes perfect sense that they would have a lot of different ethnic groups.

If you were not aware, Russia is famously diverse and a large number of their oblasts(province level equivalent jurisdictions) are drawn up along ethnic lines

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_in_Russia

... Homogenous in _what way_?!

They're both the remnants of large land empires, each incorporating many ethnicities, languages, religions... They are not at all homogenous.

Like, that whole thing with the Uyghurs, what did you think that was about? Or Chechnya?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com