I can accept that the documents are real, and I can accept that China’s handling of the situation was problematic. As I said, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with that information. The only means I see of myself influencing China’s actions is through my government, and I should probably focus on trying to influence my government to stop abducting people to secret prisons themselves before I worry about influencing them to pressure China about it’s problems.
My thoughts and prayers go out to the Uighur people. Happy? I can waggle my finger at China, if you like, perhaps I can even write a letter to Xi Jinping about it. That all seems rather meaningless to me.
I’m more of a solution-oriented person. Genuinely, not just here, but in my personal life, I don’t really see the point in playing the blame game. Tell me how anything I do or don’t do is supposed to improve the treatment of Uighurs, and I’ll consider it. But I’m not really interested in playing St. Peter and saying which countries are good or bad and who deserves to go to heaven or hell. When I criticize the US, it’s because I’m trying to change the US. Unless you can either provide a mechanism for me to influence China without the US government, or are willing to argue that I should support the US against China, then I don’t see why I should care, or why you should care whether I care.
There are also the allegations of rape
What is your opinion of Tara Reade?
Two of the examples I listed involved the NYT and the BBC cynically exploiting their readers’ willingness to believe claims of sexual assault to advance their own agendas. If you give the imperialist propagandists any way to circumvent the normal process of skepticism and critical evaluation of evidence, they will use it.
That’s all I’m trying to say. Surely we should hold every country to consistent standards.
Tara Reade
I just looked up that person. I do think allegations of rape should be taken seriously, although apparently this particular person may not be entirely honest, because apparently she may not have been truthful about her education: “Antioch University… disputed her claim of receiving a bachelor’s degree from its Seattle campus”. Maybe she’s still right about Biden, I don’t know.
Anyway, I’m not some MAGA supporter who mentioned Xinjiang to smear my geopolitical adversary. I was just replying to someone who mentioned “imperialism”, and I asked them if they would condemn Chinese/Russian imperialism as well as western imperialism. The reason I asked this is because I’ve seen posts from Lemmy.ml or Hexbear users where they seem to celebrate China and Russia. Arguably the current US, China, and Russia are all imperialist.
would you condemn seemingly imperialist behaviour from countries like Russia and China as much as you would condemn imperialist behaviour from western countries
The only example you produced of China’s “imperialism” was settling some uninhabited islands in the Pacific. Compare that to the unprovoked invasion and decades long occupation of Afghanistan, and the comparison is obviously spurious and if that’s really your position then you’re obviously trolling and can be dismissed without further comment.
Surely we should hold every country to consistent standards.
I don’t actually agree with that, for a number of reasons, some of which I’ve already expressed: you should of course hold your own country to a higher standard than any other country, because you have a greater responsibility for how it behaves.
On top of that, I’m also partial to Lenin’s arguments for “revolutionary defeatism”. Let me explain.
Before the first world war, a bunch of socialists and social democrats got together in the Second International, and they issued a statement called the Basel Manifesto. The Basel Manifesto warned of the looming conflict, and expressed that, should socialists fail to prevent it, they should use the opportunity to launch a global revolution - ideally, the threat of revolution would be a deterrent that would prevent the war in the first place.
But the war happened anyway, and the revolution did not materialize, at least not I’m Britain, France, or Germany. In fact, the social democrats of each country, who had previously agreed in principle to that course of action, all suddenly found reasons to rally around their respective flags and support the war effort. The British social democrats pointed to Germany’s more autocratic system, while the German social democrats pointed to Russia’s serfdom, and so on. Or they said, all sides are bad, and we’re not trying to win or conquer anybody, we’re just fighting “against defeat.” And so they all kept killing each other, and countless lives were lost for no good reason.
Lenin, however, argued that, in that situation, the proper response is for the socialists of each country to be primarily opposed to their own respective countries, to advocate for their own country’s defeat. I cite him here because he expresses it much better that I could:
On closer examination, this slogan [“neither victory nor defeat”] will be found to mean a “class truce”, the renunciation of the class struggle by the oppressed classes in all belligerent countries, since the class struggle is impossible without dealing blows at one’s “own” bourgeoisie, one’s “own” government, whereas dealing a blow at one’s own government in wartime is (for Bukvoyed’s information) high treason, means contributing to the defeat of one’s own country. Those who accept the “neither victory-nor-defeat” slogan can only be hypocritically in favour of the class struggle, of “disrupting the class truce”; in practice, such people are renouncing an independent proletarian policy because they subordinate the proletariat of all belligerent countries to the absolutely bourgeois task of safeguarding the imperialist governments against defeat. The only policy of actual, not verbal disruption of the “class truce”, of acceptance of the class struggle, is for the proletariat to take advantage of the difficulties experienced by its government and its bourgeoisie in order to overthrow them. This, however, cannot be achieved or striven for, without desiring the defeat of one’s own government and without contributing to that defeat.
When, before the war, the Italian Social-Democrats raised the question of a mass strike, the bourgeoisie replied, no doubt correctly from their own point of view, that this would be high treason, and that Social-Democrats would be dealt with as traitors. That is true, just as it is true that fraternisation in the trenches is high treason. Those who write against “high treason”, as Bukvoyed does, or against the “disintegration of Russia”, as Semkovsky does, are adopting the bourgeois, not the proletarian point of view. A proletarian cannot deal a class blow at his government or hold out (in fact) a hand to his brother, the proletarian of the “foreign” country which is at war with “our side”, without committing “high treason”, without contributing to the defeat, to the disintegration of his “own”, imperialist “Great” Power.
Whoever is in favour of the slogan of “neither victory nor defeat” is consciously or unconsciously a chauvinist; at best he is a conciliatory petty bourgeois but in any case he is an enemy to proletarian policy, a partisan of the existing governments, of the present-day ruling classes.
To put it another way, the most important conflict is class conflict, and my most immediate enemy is the ruling class of my own country. Even if the ruling class of another country is just as bad, or even marginally worse, that’s a bridge to be crossed later.
Once our own rulers have been justly tried but a revolutionary tribunal and received whatever punishment is deemed appropriate for hundreds of thousands of counts of murder, then after that we can deal with Putin next. Not before.
I can accept that the documents are real, and I can accept that China’s handling of the situation was problematic. As I said, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with that information. The only means I see of myself influencing China’s actions is through my government, and I should probably focus on trying to influence my government to stop abducting people to secret prisons themselves before I worry about influencing them to pressure China about it’s problems.
My thoughts and prayers go out to the Uighur people. Happy? I can waggle my finger at China, if you like, perhaps I can even write a letter to Xi Jinping about it. That all seems rather meaningless to me.
I’m more of a solution-oriented person. Genuinely, not just here, but in my personal life, I don’t really see the point in playing the blame game. Tell me how anything I do or don’t do is supposed to improve the treatment of Uighurs, and I’ll consider it. But I’m not really interested in playing St. Peter and saying which countries are good or bad and who deserves to go to heaven or hell. When I criticize the US, it’s because I’m trying to change the US. Unless you can either provide a mechanism for me to influence China without the US government, or are willing to argue that I should support the US against China, then I don’t see why I should care, or why you should care whether I care.
What is your opinion of Tara Reade?
Two of the examples I listed involved the NYT and the BBC cynically exploiting their readers’ willingness to believe claims of sexual assault to advance their own agendas. If you give the imperialist propagandists any way to circumvent the normal process of skepticism and critical evaluation of evidence, they will use it.
I’m not expecting you to say anything to China. My original point which I said in my first post in this thread was this:
That’s all I’m trying to say. Surely we should hold every country to consistent standards.
I just looked up that person. I do think allegations of rape should be taken seriously, although apparently this particular person may not be entirely honest, because apparently she may not have been truthful about her education: “Antioch University… disputed her claim of receiving a bachelor’s degree from its Seattle campus”. Maybe she’s still right about Biden, I don’t know.
Anyway, I’m not some MAGA supporter who mentioned Xinjiang to smear my geopolitical adversary. I was just replying to someone who mentioned “imperialism”, and I asked them if they would condemn Chinese/Russian imperialism as well as western imperialism. The reason I asked this is because I’ve seen posts from Lemmy.ml or Hexbear users where they seem to celebrate China and Russia. Arguably the current US, China, and Russia are all imperialist.
The only example you produced of China’s “imperialism” was settling some uninhabited islands in the Pacific. Compare that to the unprovoked invasion and decades long occupation of Afghanistan, and the comparison is obviously spurious and if that’s really your position then you’re obviously trolling and can be dismissed without further comment.
I don’t actually agree with that, for a number of reasons, some of which I’ve already expressed: you should of course hold your own country to a higher standard than any other country, because you have a greater responsibility for how it behaves.
On top of that, I’m also partial to Lenin’s arguments for “revolutionary defeatism”. Let me explain.
Before the first world war, a bunch of socialists and social democrats got together in the Second International, and they issued a statement called the Basel Manifesto. The Basel Manifesto warned of the looming conflict, and expressed that, should socialists fail to prevent it, they should use the opportunity to launch a global revolution - ideally, the threat of revolution would be a deterrent that would prevent the war in the first place.
But the war happened anyway, and the revolution did not materialize, at least not I’m Britain, France, or Germany. In fact, the social democrats of each country, who had previously agreed in principle to that course of action, all suddenly found reasons to rally around their respective flags and support the war effort. The British social democrats pointed to Germany’s more autocratic system, while the German social democrats pointed to Russia’s serfdom, and so on. Or they said, all sides are bad, and we’re not trying to win or conquer anybody, we’re just fighting “against defeat.” And so they all kept killing each other, and countless lives were lost for no good reason.
Lenin, however, argued that, in that situation, the proper response is for the socialists of each country to be primarily opposed to their own respective countries, to advocate for their own country’s defeat. I cite him here because he expresses it much better that I could:
To put it another way, the most important conflict is class conflict, and my most immediate enemy is the ruling class of my own country. Even if the ruling class of another country is just as bad, or even marginally worse, that’s a bridge to be crossed later.
Once our own rulers have been justly tried but a revolutionary tribunal and received whatever punishment is deemed appropriate for hundreds of thousands of counts of murder, then after that we can deal with Putin next. Not before.
…is what Lenin would probably say, anyway.