‘Silence Is Not an Option’: The Quest to Bear Witness to China’s Uyghur Camps

Just a reminder if you donate to lemmy’s development you’re donating to keeping this echo chamber running.

It’s in the post already.

I moved to piefed.

It’s been removed.

Just a different flavor of malignant ideologue running the show there.

The piefed dev has positive goals and is overzealous in how they do it. The intent is good, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired.

The lemmy devs spreads misinformation for a nefarious purpose.

One is worse than the other.

I'm sure dessalines believes their ideals are positive, too.

He can think all he wants. His ideals are objectively negative.

Not everything is relative or in the eye of the beholder.

Could literally be said about every single platform owner since the idea of distributed media: the Catholic church, Johannes Gutenberg, James Bernard, Marconi, etc.

Hot take: the whole of the internet needs to be burnt to the ground, every form of media since the printing press has been a horrible mistake, and we'd all be better off not knowing what happens outside of our own village.

You would think that Ireland@lemmy.ml would be opposed to interment without trial.

im so glad someone with objective morals was finally born! please write down all your theory so we can learn from you!

oh... oh wait...

Objectively good: helping people

Objectively bad: harming people

You are welcome.

Given recent drama, Piefed doesn't seem much better if you want to escape authoritarians in control of the software you're using. 😔

Which drama is this now?

Dammit rimu you were supposed to be a good one.

There's still mbin.

Yeah, Lemmy seems to have plenty of crazy mods who run a dozen communities and enjoy banning people from all of them and just writing some lie in the reason for the mod log.

That crazy mod is a lemmy developer and admin of the .ml echo chamber

I think China has designed systems of compartmentalization for the Uighur genocide. I think it is aided by being localized to Xinjiang (which shares a border with Afghanistan - a place America's war on terror has had its own oppressive impact on).

I think that many humanitarian rights violations around the world get drawn into politics. That the lack of clarity and separation of issues of politics can sometimes muddy the evidence when clarity is needed.

One only needs to be anti-genocide to be against a genocide. However when it comes to topics like Socialism in the west, the history of questionable rightwing propaganda is long and storied.

Because of that history it is understandable that believers in communistm and anti-capitalism get taken "out" of other proofs (lines of evidence) when they come across sources with names like "The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation", such as in this example below.

https://xjdp.aspi.org.au/explainers/sterilizations-and-mandatory-birth-control-in-xinjiang/

Unfortunately the west's own century-long campaign against communism (including western attrocities like various banana republics, various regime changes globally, the funding of right wing death squads in Latin America, the war in places like Vietnam, the propping up of military regimes like the 1970s military authoritarian regime of Taiwan, ignorance of factors like Lysenkoism), makes proof of the Uighur genocide (done through displacement, cultural destruction, imprisonment, and forced sterilization) harder to see and digest as separate from anti-communism.

The Uighurs are in a very unfortunate situation where language barriers between their region and the west, being oppressed by a very advanced civilization using technological means, a system designed for compartmentalization, as well as the west's own denial of anti-Muslim and anti-Communist propaganda, further obscures the uhigur activists from being heard clearly, the genocide from being understood as proven, and meaningful/clear/direct action being taken by western society.

Add to that the fact that the west gave China control over their manufacturing, and now rely on China - it's an extreme uphill battle. Western shitheads, like Republicans, like Jordan Peterson, the general anti-conm crowd including Lemmy's own anti-tankie communities who want to pretend Stalin is still a worthwhile topic, further bog down the issue of communicating MODERN politics, injustices and world events.

Ultimately western communist hardliners are such an incredibly small minority that they're probably as rare and diverse as trans people (themselves a tiny minority). I think anyone who hasn't simply blocked and walked away from .ml and hardline communists who only really want to argue, make obscure citations, and hide from real life, is insane. I blocked lemmy.ml a long time ago.

Basically feeding the trolls probably won't help the Uighurs. Understanding the historical and social pressures that created those trolls, and the fact those pressures share organizations and histories with those (anti-communist) Western forces that contribute to obscuring the Uighur genocide (through our own muddy politics) is probably a more important effort and use of time.

The history of the west is what makes western thought, and what hides other world events from us. We are all products of our time.

It seems less like they wanted to make a Reddit competitor without the crazy censorship, and more that they wanted to make one with even more crazy censorship that aligns with their own views.

China isn’t a communist state it’s capitalist and imperialist.

The only people responsible for China’s genocide of the Uyghurs people is China.

That's just like, your opinion, man

Joke’s on them — I banned them before they could ban me.