this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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How do we combat US propaganda when it's so prevalent? (lemmygrad.ml)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Serious post warning, sleep-deprived wall of text ahead.

Someone who I dare say I respect publicly discouraged joining or supporting Lemmy on the basis of being The Tankie Place, linking this raddle post, a collection of horrifyingly flimsy evidence that Dessalines (lemmy.ml admin, maintainer of the wonderful dessalines.github.io/essays/) is a freedom hating redfash tankie who likes it when the evil CCP genocides uyghurs and bans femboys.

Naturally it all sucks but now i'm investing too many brain cells into thinking: how do you even refute this garbage?

I'm not proud of it, but I was an "anti-authoritarian leftist" too. I unironically said "tankie" once. And if i were told there is no Uyghur genocide, i would react exactly as if they had told me there was no holocaust. To the westerner, China really is as bad as nazi germany and straightforwardly saying otherwise, in their mind, is no different than if you replace Uyghurs with jews and China with germany. When this narrative is so deeply ingrained, how do you fight it? How the hell did I get here?

i really have no idea how to address it when, to them as it once was to me, it is so obviously true that anyone suggesting otherwise is not even worth listening to. these are fundamental beliefs and challenging them is grounds for instant block and report. its not open for discussion. all i can do is hope they find the truth on their own.

i'll stop rambling now and sleep instead. so i wont respond for a while. sorry if theres a better community to post this in i just needed to get this out before i spontaneously combust. good night comrades.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I did read most of that, and it is interesting. First thing I want to address is this statement:

In conclusion, descriptions of detentions in the VETCs in the period between 2017 and 2019 gathered by OHCHR were marked by patterns of torture or other forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, other violations of the right of persons deprived of their liberty to be treated humanely and with dignity, as well as violations of the right to health.

Yet the statement I linked to was made in 2019. So if they had been gathering data for 2 years, why would they have made the statement I linked? This confuses me. It's not like they discovered the reality, or material conditions changed, since they made the statement; they had had years of data, supposedly. I'm going to set that aside for a moment and try to address the content of the document.

Also, yes I agree entirely that the treatment described in that section is completely unnaceptable. It mentions literal torture methods, unnecessary physical punishment, violation of right to determine or deny medical treatment, etc. None of that is acceptable. That being said, I am curious as to how frequently this happens. Not that any amount is acceptable, but if the rate in this region of these acts is the same as elsewhere in the country, then the framing of the issue needs to change from "targeted genocide" to a critique of the system as a whole. I don't have any data as to the occurrence rate of these acts in this region or outside of it.

Much of the rest of the report leading up to the part you mentioned is really much less bothersome. It mentions use of the surveillance state to catch offending parties. You may think this is invasive or unacceptable but, again, this is not particular to this region and would be a critique of the whole system. There's an attempt to criticize the use of imprisonment for punishment, which seems like a weird stance to take considering...the rest of the world.

In all honesty, I think the more damning part of what you linked would be everything after the part you mention specifically. The remainder of the document portrays traditional "genocidal" actions. I don't know what to do with the document since it does seem bad, but it's such a wild about-face from the reports just a couple years earlier, by the same group no less. More from 2019:

So unless the conditions were so perfectly hidden from many investigative groups until they suddenly weren't, or unless the material conditions changed so much that none of the positive praise would apply anymore, I don't know what to make of the report you've linked.