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I am an Uighur who faced China’s concentration camps

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Re: I am an Uighur who faced China’s concentration camps

#61
post #57
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess would be politics. Congress in the US is democratically controlled while the Senate and Presidency are republican controlled. The current administration is fairly anti-Muslim and has ignored the Uighar issues entirely, the current administration likely told the State Department not to issue the visa.

What, visas are determined by politicians? Wow. That's like no rule of law at all!

Emissaries and consulates are typically ran by career government employees in the US but their operation is overseen by the Secretary of State (a presidential cabinet member) and the State Department. So the presidential appointee has a lot of power over what does and does not happen at consulates/emissaries.

It's not optimal but it's what we have.

Re: I am an Uighur who faced China’s concentration camps

#62

This is horrible. No doubt this is an allergic immune response to terrorism. The actions here on a different level than what's going on in Hong Kong, possibly because of this: "In July 2009, riots broke out in Xinjiang in response to a violent dispute between Uyghur and Han Chinese workers in a factory and result in over 100 deaths. Following the riots, Uyghur radicals killed dozens of Chinese citizens in coordinated…

Terrorism is the practice of terrorizing mass populations through use of force in the hopes of promoting an ideological agenda. What the Chinese state is doing right now, that sounds a lot like terrorism on an epically larger scale, doesn’t it?

Terrorism is more than that. Terrorism is the use of violence, harm and killings to promote an ideological agenda.

You're 100% percent correct. What China is doing fits the definition of "terrorism." My question is:

Is is using terrorism itself as a means to an end to end terrorism worth it?

Keep in mind that the US reaction to 9/11 can in itself be defined as terrorism for what it did to the other countries. War is a form of terrorism. Perhaps it is much worse than terrorism as terrorism uses small acts of violence to produce a big effect while in war the big effect is the violence itself.

My own personal reaction to what happened with the US is that the war definitely went on for too long and the extension to Iraq was unnecessary. But whether a war was needed in the first place is something I'm unsure about.

Imagine you were there on the day of 9/11. How could you not go to war? The American sentiment was the same at the time... it had to be done. What other course of action is there to take?

What was going on through the minds of the Chinese everytime they saw slaughter after slaughter occur by terrorism on their soil? How could you not? What other course of action is there to take? This is a serious question. What in your mind should have been done instead?

Re: I am an Uighur who faced China’s concentration camps

#63

In the article he mentions “Their goal is just to exterminate all Uighurs in one way or another”, if that is the case, why not just shoot them all? Why did they let him out?

Probably harder to claim a dead person is alive, than a live person wasn't tortured.

Also it's pretty clear that they don't care about eliminating the people - they want to eliminate the culture.

Re: I am an Uighur who faced China’s concentration camps

#64

This is horrible. No doubt this is an allergic immune response to terrorism. The actions here on a different level than what's going on in Hong Kong, possibly because of this: "In July 2009, riots broke out in Xinjiang in response to a violent dispute between Uyghur and Han Chinese workers in a factory and result in over 100 deaths. Following the riots, Uyghur radicals killed dozens of Chinese citizens in coordinated…

Are you justifying China for eradicating a whole culture and its people due to some extremist attacks?

The number of “missing” Uighurs is over a million.

Re: I am an Uighur who faced China’s concentration camps

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would have been far easier for Nazis to shoot all "lesser" races too, yet they used to send people to concentration camps first. And yes, people used to be released from those from time to time too. The answer with Nazis was that after arrival at a concentration camp the weak were sent to immediate excution, the rest were kept for labour, and everyone was stripped off their possessions first - which was very conve…

The Nazis committed many mass shootings, predating the concentration camps in many cases. Snyder’s Bloodlands is the definitive work on the subject. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodlands

That just confirms the point. Shooting people wasn't economical.

Re: I am an Uighur who faced China’s concentration camps

#66

Why 39 minutes old submission with 148 up-votes is ranked 13th on the HN front page? The first entry at this moment is a 41 minutes old submission with 43 points, the 2nd entry is 59 minutes old with 35 points. Is this because this post is heavily flagged?

Purely going by measures, this post has way more comments than the referenced one, which usually puts a post a bit lower on the top list (afaik).

On the other hand, political topics are generally not that welcome here, especially because it will mostly spark flamewars and does not really help anyone. As evidence for the "dislike" of purely political topics, there was at least one political detox period where political topics were discouraged altogether. (Edit: that's why there are more people flagging/downvoting the post, it's not just censorship)

I'm not arguing for or against political topics here, both have their merits. If the above sounds otherwise then it's because english is not my native tongue and choosing words is not my specialty.

Re: I am an Uighur who faced China’s concentration camps

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ultimately, this is specific of any form of government with too much power over its people. That’s a requirement of communism which is why this is often attributed to communism as an expected outcome. It’s entirely possible in any form of government that disarms and controls its people, rather than empowers them.

That is not true. Communism in its core is incompatible with any other system of beliefs. It must replace religions and customs in order to succeed, it must rewrite history in order to seem valuable.

[flagged]

Re: I am an Uighur who faced China’s concentration camps

#70

Primary sources have been lacking in coverage of this story; is the Communist party that powerful in controlling first hand accounts?

Of course there are primary sources, it's just that they're usually in Mandarin or Uyghur or some other non-English language of the region, and they're not nicely reduced down to a few key statements like a news article.
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