No one is attacking your “factual and informative” comment.

No one is disputing the difficulties you’ve highlighted. What is being disputed is your assertion that those difficulties are relevant to your assertion that China won’t be able to achieve this.

And the subject of the conversation is a technology that humans have already developed and is in use. So what is it about China/the PRC that would cause you to assert they are incapable of building/employing this technology?

Your argument is that “Hard science doesn’t care about politics,” so I assume you don’t want to imply that you’re critiquing the capabilities of China’s political system. So what’s left? Is it racism? The removed can’t achieve what other humans have already proven is possible because the removed is subhuman?

You are making a political statement whether you intend to or not, you don’t just get to whine about how you were only talking about the science and why is everyone being so mean when you only started a discussion about the science to reinforce (or deflect from) your original assertion.

No one is asking you to?

I know this comment is a few days old at this point and the conversation is dead, but is it really true that reddit users skew younger?

Like, I was a teen when I made a reddit account over a decade ago, but I feel like reddit isn’t the cool thing for high schoolers to sign up for anymore. If feels more like legacy social media with very outdated design sensibilities even if you’re using new reddit.

I think reddit’s userbase is certainly more immature in the way that being a semi-anonymous user in an endless sea of throw-away accounts tends to foster. That kind of design creates an environment where people feel comfortable putting less care and thought into the views that they share because whatever bullshit they wrote will get buried when the thread dies, and most communities aren’t small enough for individual users to develop a persistent reputation in a community based on their previous comments, so every interaction starts off as a fresh slate with little/no stakes. And people are less likely to mature if they never have any accountability to the things they say/believe.

I don’t think the quality/maturity of posters on Hexbear vs reddit and the “reddit diaspora” on Lemmy can be explained by the age demographics of those groups. I think it has more to do with the quality of moderation here filtering out people with “reddit-brain,” as well as simply having a more well defined community where you can somewhat expect other people to recognize your username and therefore care about the impression you leave on people as a result.

Well Israel is a settler-colonial project propped up by a global military empire who wants a military ally/outpost in the middle east, and that settler-colonial project is ripping people out of their homes to give land to settlers.

Palestinians are the ones getting ripped out of their homes, having legal rights stripped away from them, and ultimately being corralled into what are fenced-in, open air concentration camps as Israel continues expanding its borders. This is what has resulted in conditions like what we see in Gaza, which is currently one of the highest population density places on earth as a result of Palestinians having more and more of their land colonized and the families who weren’t murdered in ethnic cleansing campaigns had to live closer and closer together as they were driven out of their homes. And as more and more people keep getting shoved into smaller and areas of land as Israel closes its borders in more and more via military occupation, Israel uses its control of the land surrounding these settlements to restrict food, medicine, and electricity from getting to Palestinians. Gaza usually only gets 4 hours of electricity every day despite living in an arid climate where not having air conditioning can result in death from heat stroke on particularly hot days. ~95% of the water in Gaza is not safe to drink, so death from starvation and dehydration are both incredibly common. And with extremely limited access to medical resources, very few people live to/past middle age, with the average age in Gaza currently sitting around 19 years old. Living conditions are so bad that suicidality among children is incredibly common, with over half of people under 18 reporting that they have no will to live when surveyed. And when Israel is not expanding its borders and settling more land, it preys on the desperation of the Palestinian people who have had their lives ripped away from them by employing them for cheap labor to make the lives of the settlers more comfortable. Those are the Palestinians who also have citizenship in Israel so that they can work in Israel, but even with citizenship they are second-class citizens without access to most political and legal rights.

Israelis don’t have any particular reason to hate Palestinians, they’re just doing what every settler-colony does and they keep experiencing blowback from the people they are colonizing. All of the propaganda about thousands of years of Holy War over a Holy Land is just a founding mythos used to obscure this colonizer/colonized relationship by pretending that these are two groups on equal standing that are bickering with each other because they just can’t get along.

mismanagement

When talking about the US, it’s more often correct to assume malice rather than incompetence

“You can’t just say America always bad, what about when they’re on the good side?”

Well what makes them on the good side?

“They’re fighting against the bad guys like Russia/China”

Okay, well you can’t just always say Russia Bad China Bad, what about when they’re on the good side?

“Well what makes them on the good side?”

Well weakening the global military empire of the US is a good start, since that global military empire currently is the primary mechanism through which global capitalist imperialism is enforced onto the world at gunpoint, and anything that breaks the hegemonic control of that global military empire gives breathing room to liberation struggles around the world.

“Okay, but you can’t support dictators just because they weaken America”

Why not?

“Because what if America is on the good side?”

What makes them on the good side?

“Because they’re fighting against the bad guys.”

Repeat Ad Infinitum.

US citizens don’t lack access to those things because of a lack of budget. The threat of homelessness, hunger, and health insecurity are all forms of worker discipline. The barrier to solving those things is ideological, not budgetary.

Back in the early xbox days when open world destructible environments were still novel, there were quite a few games where just running around and breaking shit was a core part of the gameplay. I’m thinking of games like “Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction.” After a while, destructible environments just became just became a bullet point on a lot of games, usually scaled back and refined so that you still had areas with sensible level design after things were broken. But I can’t recall any games where destruction was a core part of the experience being made in a long time.

So I’d love to see a game like Ultimate Destruction made to modern standards with modern physics and such. I know Red Faction: Guerilla is known for having destructible environments with very complex physics that required you to think about how a building was constructed and which supports were load bearing if you wanted to topple a building over, and that is certainly the kind of attention to detail I’d want, but it still doesn’t scratch the same itch. The environment is certainly very destructible, but your tools for destroying the environment are much more limited and the game play is much more focused on the combat with the destructible environment offering an option for how you can approach combat.

“Break things apart sandboxes” probably aren’t made anymore because it’s not actually that engaging, and I only liked it because I was a dumb kid, but I would love to see a break the world with outrageous power style of game made to modern standards.

There’s just so much power in calling your shot a century ago and still scoring points from it to this day.

Part 3, Why does this context matter for talking about Xinjiang?

First, genocide is a powerful word with a lot of political weight behind it. Being able to declare something as a genocide is a powerful rhetorical tool, and is useful for manufacturing consent for war and other kinds of economic/political interventions. That’s the basis of atrocity propaganda as a tool for manipulating public opinion. Accusations of genocide and similar atrocity propaganda techniques are incredibly difficult to brush off regardless of how much evidence there is to substantiate those accusations, because any rebuttal to those accusations has a wide range of built-in “thought terminating clichés” that can be used to shut down dissent. Clichés like, “you’re just a genocide denier,” “why are you defending an authoritarian regime?” “but what if you’re wrong and we just let another holocaust happen under our noses!”

But as we’ve seen above, the official definition of genocide rejects the academic and historical context of genocide, and instead chose to define genocide in a political way. Specifically in a way that the UN nations who would otherwise be guilty of genocide could not be convicted, but that could still be used to prosecute their enemies. We see this play out all of the time not just with genocide, but in regards to human rights in general. Citations Needed has an excellent episode titled “The Human Rights Concern Troll Industrial Complex” That talks about the history of Human Rights groups and international courts almost exclusively weaponizing Human Rights violations as ways to penalize mainly formerly colonized nations in the global south, and are almost never used to punish the plethora of Human Rights abuses that occur in Western nations.

What this politicization of genocide creates is a warped conversation where events will try to be twisted in a way that can allow events to be classified as a genocide on a technicality for political purposes. That’s why you see a focus on coverage of Xinjiang focusing on things like increased access to contraceptives, because that could be twisted to fit the UN definition of “Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”

But with the broader, more holistic, more academic definition of genocide, and with an analysis of the techniques of the historical genocides that definition was meant to encompass, we can get a better idea of this kind of genocide and see how the situation in China compares. First, and probably most importantly, would be the vocational schools.

What we know about these schools is that they were started in response a rash of extremist terrorist attacks in the region carried out by the East Turkmenistan Separatist movement. Many of those who were radicalized are people who were native to Xinjiang, left the region and fought on behalf of ISIS in Syria and Iraq, and then returned home to Xinjiang still radicalized after ISIS was dissolved.

The stated purpose of these vocational schools is to offer populations at risk of radicalization, those who have already expressed radicalized intents, those who have participated in extremist movements such as ISIS and the East Turkmenistan Separatist movement, and those who have been convicted of crimes related to the above categories. The vocational schools have a focus on creating economic and political opportunities through job training, Mandarin language education, and with an overall focus on deradicalization and countering the narratives that are used in radicalization.

These schools are used as the primary evidence that China is carrying out a genocide in secret, with comparisons made to concentration camps and indigenous schools. But these arguments fall apart when interrogated. In historical genocides that we can compare to, concentration camps are at best a way to force a group into a status as a second class citizen, systematically remove them from higher levels of participation in government, social practice, and economic activity. At worse, they are used as part of a wider program of mass extermination. Not only do we not see these kinds of outcomes as a result of the Xinjiang vocational schools, we see exactly the opposite of what you would expect from a genocide. Those who attend the vocational schools end up with higher levels of social, political, and economic participation. They have expanded opportunities for employment and political participation, and social participation is developed through broader policies that invest in building places of worship, cultural centers, and general public development.

Similarly, comparisons to indigenous schools in colonial empires also fall flat. The kind of cultural destruction and forced assimilation carried out by indigenous schools requires at least a generation of grooming children from the moment that they reach school age until they reach adulthood, and only makes sense in a broader context of cultural suppression. The vocational schools, on the other hand, are adult education, the classes are offered in their native languages, and there’s no broader cultural suppression to suggest that “deradicalization” is actually some kind of euphemism for cultural destruction and forced assimilation. And far from being a generations long effort attempting to systematically destroy any association or connection you have with your heritage, these vocational schools were only in operation for roughly 2-3 years, with any given person attending for around a year on average, and with the last classes finishing up in late 2019.

And that idea about broader policy is the really damning bit. Genocide, cultural or otherwise, has never been a single isolated policy. You never just have concentration camps, you have an entire legal and social framework designed around promoting one national group over others. Yet in China you don’t see that pattern anywhere else. There are 55 recognized national groups that are all guaranteed proportional representation in government at both the local and national level. Cultural sites, places of worship, and the like aren’t being destroyed, on the contrary public funding is used to help build places of worship and preserve cultural landmarks. Native languages aren’t suppressed and scrubbed from public life, on the contrary public spaces are accessible by native language speakers, public signage is multi-lingual, government services are available in your native language, including the right to an education in your native language. Economic opportunities and wealth isn’t being stripped away from any of these groups, on the contrary their economic livelihood is constantly being invested in.

There is no other policy that could establish the pattern of genocide that any other historical genocide has exhibited, and therefore nothing to suggest that Xinjiang schools are actually part of a genocide as opposed to the stated goals of deradicalization through education. There isn’t even the argument that this is a stepping stone that will lead to further repression, because the program has already concluded and is considered to be a success, having ended in 2019 after the rate of terrorist attacks and extremist inspired violence dropped to zero. If this were actually some form of brutal repression instead of the education and job training it is claimed to be, then you would expect to see an increase in radicalization and extremist inspired violence in response to fierce government repression, but we end up seeing precisely the opposite.

The only reason left for alleging that there is a genocide, cultural or otherwise, or that there is a pattern of human rights abuses in Xinjiang, is that those allegations help to advance US foreign policy interests in the same way that “Saddam has WMDs” did.

And you will even have state department officials admit to this in certain company, it’s not like they’re exactly shy about their intentions. Col. Lawrence Wilkerson gave a speech that lends credence to this idea that separatist violence and extremism has been cultivated and instigated by the US specifically as a way to destabilize China as part of the strategic objectives of the US military, and weaponizing the response to extremist violence in the media in order to control the narrative is a natural extension of this kind of warmongering.

We have a definition of genocide which makes almost no reference to cultural destruction, despite Lemkin considering cultural destruction as being a core component of his definition of genocide. He describes his involvement with drafting the UN convention in his autobiography:

“I defended [cultural genocide] successfully through two drafts. It meant the destruction of the cultural patter of a group, such as the language, the traditions, the monuments, archives, libraries, churches. In brief: the shrines of the soul of a nation. But there was not enough support for this idea in the Committee (…) So with a heavy heart I decided not to press for it.”

Part 2, why does this matter?

A lot of this conversation about how do you define genocide and what technically counts as genocide feels a lot like pedantry. “We know that genocide is bad, we don’t need to split hairs to call something bad.”

But this history is very important, and it’s important to understand both the crime of genocide, as well as all of the things that genocide encompasses, as well as understanding the motivation for why many nations would want to have a narrower definition for genocide in order to discuss how that shapes the narrative around genocide and our understanding of genocide.

So lets take a look at what crimes are being effectively buried and hidden from being prosecuted as a genocide that otherwise should be considered a genocide based off of the original, academic formulation.

America is chock full of these examples, as well as the colonial empires of the British, French, Spanish, Germans, and so on.

In no particular order, from America we have biological warfare against Native Americans, events like the trail of tears, systematically forcing native populations into “reservations,” indigenous schools designed to “Americanize” native children, paying settlers to go out and murder nearby native populations and paying for every scalp delivered. A lot of these actions would fall under the “official” definition of genocide, where members of the group were deliberately killed or physically destroyed, but those things happened “way in the past.” However, the isolation of large parts of the remaining native population into reservations which are basically slums with little to no access to economic development should absolutely be considered an ongoing act of genocide. Similarly, you have the apartheid that is American Black Codes and American Jim Crow that legally enshrined a segregated and second class status to black Americans that was ongoing and would continue for sometime afterward when the UN genocide convention was being drafted.

Some examples that were given by representatives that were a part of drafting the resolution:

Sweden noted that its forced conversion of the Lapps to Christianity might lay it open to accusations of cultural genocide.

Brazil warned that ‘some minorities might have used it as an excuse for opposing perfectly normal assimilation in new countries.’ (New countries in this context meaning settler colonial states)

South Africa endorsed the remarks of New Zealand, insisting upon ‘the danger latent in the provisions of article III where primitive or backward groups were concerned.’

Source: “Genocide in International Law: The Crime of Crimes,” William Schabas

And then we have what is somewhat of a low hanging fruit when talking about the history of colonial regimes, which basically conducted themselves exactly in line with Lemkin’s definition of genocide. You militarily occupy a region, claim authority over the region as your colony, implement your own government and legal system that has two tiers for colonizers and the colonized, and impose that rule against the colonized and in exclusion to their own legal and social customs. And indigenous schools were a large part of enforcing this colonial rule on a social level as they were institutions that tried to scrub out any native identity and culture and enforce the colonial nation’s culture as the correct culture.

And lets take a moment to really interrogate what indigenous schools do, and why they relevant when talking about genocide, especially when using Lemkin’s definition. Indigenous schools at their core are an institution of forced assimilation. They take children and punish them for using their native language, punish them for wearing native styles of clothing, punish them for eating their traditional cultural dishes, and create an environment that creates deep shame for expressing any kind of cultural heritage. It’s a systematic process that forcibly takes an entire generation and tries to destroy any association they have with their parent’s culture, and in its place you teach them the colonizer’s language, the colonizer’s style of dress, the colonizer’s style of worship, the colonizer’s values, the colonizer’s mode of economic organization, the colonizer’s legal structure, and so on.

As a side note, this is also where the conception of cultural appropriation comes from. On its face, sharing music, styles of dress, cuisine, ideas of spirituality, and so on across cultures isn’t some nefarious thing. What makes something cultural appropriation is when you have this greater context of colonization and forced assimilation, where these national groups have their heritage forcibly torn away from them, ridiculed, and used as a signifier of “backwardness,” “savagery,” and marks them as a second class citizen, only for members of the dominant group to take that same heritage and commodify it as exotic novelties.