https://sh.itjust.works/post/4274675
To this I say, no. As a community, we do not deny proven genocides, like the holocaust, or the genocide against indigenous Americans by various European colonizers, or the genocide against the Congolese by Belgium, or the Bengal famine that was carried out by the British empire. In fact, denying those genocides will get you banned, here. However: we are also aware of a tendency of nations to project their crimes onto others, and to manufacture atrocity propaganda to justify overthrowing or destroying rival governments... like Libya in 2011:
From Washington Bullets by Vijay Prashad (a great book I highly recommend)
A post from Michael Parenti regarding the destruction of Libya by NATO-backed reactionaries
A headline shortly after Libya's destruction by NATO-backed reactionaries
The US government has been reenacting the fable of the Boy Who Cried Wolf, and has been cynically leveraging the very serious accusation of genocide against its geopolitical enemies. This is the source of skepticism on Xinjiang. And this is not a new strategy, yes, the Holodomor, which everyone in the US has been taught to take seriously lately, is a nazi fabrication first spread to the United States in the works of Robert Conquest. Why would the USSR deliberately starve a fellow socialist Republic? Why would Stalin, a Georgian, have some kind of Russian chauvinist grudge against Ukrainians? Why would Lenin (Donbass), Stalin (Lviv), and Khruschev (Crimea) all expand the territory of the Ukrainian SSR while also trying to kill off the people inside of it? Why would the USSR ethnically cleanse Ukrainains while simultaneously sending food aid to the starving British colony in Bengal? Natural famines and crop failures were spun by the nazis into atrocity propaganda. Also, a state does not have to be perfect to be defended against false accuations. I think China is far from perfect, but the burden of proof is on the United States to prove its accusations (which have changed in scope several times) regarding Xinjiang. Delegations from Muslim majority nations visiting Xinjiang do not agree with the United States that there is a genocide of the Uyghur people. There is however an attempt to reeducate extremist groups like ETIM. Reeducating extremists might seem a harsh government policy, but I assure you it is a better way of dealing with religious fundamentalism than drone striking weddings or air striking hospitals like the USA did in Afghanistan.
Legit had a liberal, when presented with the fact that the RAND corporation (the organisation that blurs the line between a US government agency and a private organisation which essentially set war policy in the Vietnam war for having kill counts as a metric for determining "success" in Vietnam, amongst other things) had released a paper that basically said that if the US wants to cripple the Chinese economy then what they'd need to do is to initiate a limited military conflict in the South China Sea within the next few years to disrupt the shipping lanes which China is largely dependent upon for foreign trade (before the Belt & Road Initiative gets away from the US and closes this window.)
The outcome, they determined, would be significantly more damaging to the Chinese economy than it would be to the US economy.
I stated that this has been around for some time now and it's not a coincidence that the US is clamouring for war in the SCS and escalating in that region as much as possible without actually firing shots (yet).
What did the lib do?
You guessed it! It was obviously Sissypee tankie propaganda. From the RAND corporation.
I wish I had a fraction of the confidence of these shit-tier libs on the internet have because goddamn, the absolute balls to make the bald-faced claim that a corporation which would have extremely high US security clearance requirements and which has been directly influential over US policy for three quarters of a century is somehow now churning out pro-Chinese propaganda without anyone noticing or making a fuss over it.
It's absolutely ridiculous the degree of information and knowledge that we are expected to bring to bear in a discussion and, upon presenting this info, the libs can summarily dismiss it for going against their narrative as Chinese propaganda (or tankie propaganda etc.) and they do it with zero evidence and zero familiarity with something like the RAND corporation's history and function.
You'd legit get a military officer to burst out in laughter if you claimed that the RAND corporation was an arm of the CPC in front of them. And that's a bad thing because I wish all US military a very unpleasant experience.
Not to get too into the "is federation good?" topic in every thread, but it is able push back against this dynamic to an extent.
If you argue against western propaganda on reddit, the libs usually far outnumber you. They feel reassured by this local superiority, and readers without a firm position can easily interpret the exchange as one crazy tankie arguing with a bunch of sensible, moderate progressives. And of course if you thread the needle just right and get some traction the mods will just nuke the thread.
Here, libs have to argue on equal footing or worse. We usually outnumber them. And thus far across instances we're federated with you don't have too many mod removals of threads just because they successfully challenge the prevailing western narrative.
I like RAND corp documents, they are openly arguing for and against things which some people think are "unthinkable". Then they print those up and distribute them in the typical US think tanks and places of governing power as well as archives (which is were I get them from mostly).
hey, I wanted to read the RAND doc, so I googled it and there seemed to be a few of them, do you have a link to the one you're talking about?
It's been a while since I've read it but it's titled "War with China: Thinking Through the Unthinkable" (lol)
When you consider the actions that have been taken since this paper was published, there have been two major developments that stand out (aside from the obvious military buildups and sabre-rattling):
The US attempt at a virtual blockade of high-end semiconductors to China. I believe that this was the US trying to hamper the Chinese military capacity - no chips, no tech. No tech, no cutting edge military capacity.
The recent AUKUS alliance which features tight cooperation in the development of hypersonic missiles and counter-hypersonic tech as well as Australia building 8 nuclear powered submarines. It's hard to imagine a scenario where this isn't an attempt to tip the scales in the favour of the US in a situation of conflict in the South China Sea.
The more conspiracy-minded among us would see that Australia having access to highly-enriched uranium to fuel the submarines, its recent moves to expand its missile capacity to ones which can be armed with nuclear warheads, and its expansion of its airforce base to house up to six nuclear-capable B52 bombers would be laying all of the foundations necessary for Australia to be a turnkey nuclear state, making it (hypothetically) possible for Australia to have nuclear strike capabilities in a very rapid turnaround time especially in a situation, say, where war broke out in the Pacific for some unforseen reason.
All that Australia would likely need to do would be to pass some emergency measures through parliament and to get the blessings of the US and some tech transfer but all of the difficult aspects of sourcing the hardware, housing it, and having access to a nuclear payload would have already been put into place by this point so it'd be more or less a matter of simply assembling the parts.
It's crazy-making seeing this shit playing out before my eyes.
I'm not a military analyst or some specialist consultant or anything but... you don't need to be a genuis or to have some special insider knowledge to be able see what's going on. I've been waiting for a Gulf of Tokin incident to occur in the South China Sea for years now. It's not any accident that the US has been conducting "freedom of navigation" expeditions right off the coast of China and between the Taiwanese strait on a consistent basis in recent years.
I suppose that I should put a disclaimer on that RAND report because it was published almost a decade ago now so while the conclusions that it draws, speculative as they may be, they're also not as up-to-date as the more recent stuff so don't treat it as gospel. Although that being said, the broad brushstrokes would still be applicable at the very least.
shit this is terrifying lol, it's your fault if my dreams suck tonight! anyway thanks lol, and yeah I'll keep in mind it's a decade old
Yeah... sorry about that 😬
It's a bit of a blackpill to look into this stuff. But on the other hand, I'm just some internet stranger who is far from being an expert (I even said as much just before) so it could just be
style rambling from an absolute crackpot. It wouldn't be the first time that's happened on the internet lol.