Comment by virtuous_signal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by virtuous_signal | Hacker News Reader

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virtuous_signal

I think there are multiple factors that will prevent the US from ever taking a united stance on it:

1) Republicans are probably louder about criticizing China but lose credibility when they don't speak up about (less severe, but still serious) issues such as police here brutalizing protesters. There also needs to be a reckoning with our own national overreaches after terrorist attacks such as the Patriot Act -- the Uighur camps were built in response to some attacks in the Xinjiang region, and I don't think Republicans have set a good example for how governments should respond to that.

2) Leftists and sympathizers who deflect with "But America..." with absolutely no sense of relative scale. This happens so much that it's a trope[1], and China is more than happy to feed this[2].

3) In higher education and tech, sheer numbers of moderately patriotic Chinese citizens mean there can never be consensus. See what happened at Warwick [3] earlier this year with a student vote about Hong Kong. CSSA is at every large university here and they know how to organize. For an example re: Uighurs, some Chinese who have been fed a steady diet of state media since birth actually consider this story fake news (blind discussion [4]).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_Negroes

[2] https://www.npr.org/2020/06/03/868566978/in-george-floyd-pro...

[3] https://www.axios.com/hong-kong-british-university-chinese-s...

[4] https://www.teamblind.com/post/Did-you-know-about-China-and-...

Regarding your point 2), yes: whataboutism is a real problem and an impediment to productive discourse. But in questions of moral authority, the "But America" whiners have a certain point. America's internal conflict and state-sanctioned misconduct is not a secret to the world. If our citizens cannot be seen making good-faith efforts (and progress!) towards justice and equality on our own soil, who would follow our example? With what credibility?

I view it as less "But America killed George Floyd, so let's give up on other oppressed people in the world," and more "But America killed George Floyd, and then peaceful Americans withdrew their consent from the violence conducted in their name." It is a way of leading by example in the spheres where we actually have influence. We can chew gum and stand in solidarity with Uighurs, at the same time.

> Leftists and sympathizers who deflect with "But America..." with absolutely no sense of relative scale.

Are you sure? I looked into the prison population in the US and it's on par with the number of Uyghurs in these camps. And that's absolute numbers, not per capita.

A bad comparison.

Bad comparison because of ? Because I have the same question, and it seems pretty much fair to compare

Americans are generally sentenced to prison for committing specific crimes. Sure there may be some things you think the law should decriminalize (do vote), and also, sometimes innocents are imprisoned, which absolutely should not happen. But our prison system as a whole is not comparable to the indefinite detainment and reeducation of people purely due to their ethnicity or religion, which is happening with Uighurs.

A better comparison would be Japanese internment camps - I don't think anyone is defending those anymore.

You say "committing specific crimes" like popular support for the war on drugs wasn't fueled by racist propaganda. You say "sometimes innocents are imprisoned" as if overburdened public defenders don't recommend a guilty plea because it's "safer" than attempting to establish innocence in a racist judicial system, biased again certain races in arrests, extrajudicial killing, in prosecution, in sentencing, in the jury supposedly of peers. Indigenous women are still being sterilized against their will, a continuation of centuries of genocide.

No, it's not a perfect comparison, in large part because responsibility doesn't rest on a single central entity. But it's awfully similar. The US has more prisoners per capita than any country in the world. The "scale" of it is atrocious (as is the Chinese treatment of Uyghurs, just to be clear) and America's lack of moral standing on this issue is a big deal because until recently, we've been both a military superpower and the vanguard for human rights.

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