I readily believed in the Uyghur Genocide narrative until relatively recently. What ultimately changed my mind is actually hearing what Uyghurs living in Xinjiang have to say, which is a far cry from what we’ve been told is happening. The only response to their words is patronizing bullshit like “oh they’re afraid of the government” or “they’ve been brainwashed” and other things that remove their agency as human beings entirely. Because when the only Uyghurs claiming they’re facing persecution conveniently exist entirely outside the country the alleged genocide is occurring in while all the ones inside it say everything is fine at that point you simply have to stop and ask yourself if maybe the people actually living there have a better idea of what’s going on because even while being bombed, starved, and shot at in the ruins of their homes Palestinians have still been able to tell the world about the destruction they’re facing and unlike Uyghurs they’re facing a real genocide.

You can find no shortage of images & videos showing a Xinjiang that is flourishing with Uyghur culture but what you’ll never find is a single image of torture, detention centers, mass graves, or anything else that would indicate an actual genocide is going on despite it allegedly happening in a country where there are more smart phones than people and which receives hundreds of millions of tourists every year.

The fact that anyone believes this myth at all when it’s so easy to disprove just demonstrates how insulated Westerners are from the rest of the world. This isn’t like the Holodomor where there’s been several decades of pre-internet misinformation campaigns to build up a grand conspiracy theory that can actually convince people that some nefarious scheme was behind an ordinary tragedy; you can pull up Google Images and try to find any visual proof of the Uyghur Genocide only to get images of nothing but protests in foreign countries, with one sole image of men in jumpsuits surrounded by a fence by used as the consistent “smoking gun” that genocide is going on even though there is no immediate context to that image and it’s impossible to tell what is actually going on in it. The best part is that there is a second image taken from behind where it shows they’re in a drug rehabilitation center and watching a play that you’ll simply never see because it’s impossible to spin it as ‘proof’ of concentration camps.

We really have just been lied to about Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong, etc.