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Comment by MathCodeLove | Hacker News Reader

> The US was killing more central asians than China every year of the last 20 years straight. Hopefully no longer true going forward.

That's absolutely a fallacious comparison.

1. We don't have accurate data from China on the number imprisoned and killed by them, so no one can make absolutely comparisons like you did.

2. The Chinese do this to people living peacefully inside their borders. If the US started rounding up and killing ethnic minorities WW2 concentration camp style then you could make this comparison. The US was engaged in active conflict with a group that itself was detrimental to human (specifically, women's) rights and that engaged us first.

I dont agree with a lot of what happened in the middle east, but you can't in good fairh stretch that as a comparison to fit your own narrative.

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There's those qualifications and spin I was asking for.

China is bringing economic development, secular institutions and women's rights, in a heavy handed way, whether the residents want it or not, with minimal regard for costs to those residents. It's the exact same thing as we've been doing, minus a fig leaf of democracy.

In neither case is the word genocide or ethnic cleansing appropriate, body counts don't support it. But it's especially rich to level the accusation 5 seconds after our 20 year war ended.

Note the word "war". They killed us as well. Again, this is not comprable to the situation in China with the Uighur Muslims. Unless you're one of those running these camps, you don't have an accurate body count, so you don't know what word is or is not appropriate. Based on the perceived scale of the operation, genocide seems very much correct, but I have no more information than you.

I don't understand how you can sit here and compare a war in the middle east to literal concentration camps. Stop performing mental gymnastics to fit your own narrative.

Because dead is dead. If you can't read, who cares what the declaration of war said.

It's counterinsurgency in both cases, attempting to modernize a tribal Muslim society in hopes of improving security from terror attacks.

You are aware there were terror attacks in Urumqi?

There are differences between their style and ours, the re-education camps vs the drone bombs. Maybe there's an argument about freedoms vs deaths. But Americans clearly do not actually give a shit about Muslim lives, it's just a political talking point. 300k dead in Yemen with our weapons doesn't even make the news, Afghanistan barely cracked the news for a decade, etc etc.

How many Americans were baying at the moon to invade Iraq and now they're the world's greatest humanitarians about Xinjiang?

>2. The Chinese do this to people living peacefully inside their borders. If the US started rounding up and killing ethnic minorities WW2 concentration camp style then you could make this comparison. The US was engaged in active conflict with a group that itself was detrimental to human (specifically, women's) rights and that engaged us first.

This kind of whitewashing is what allows us as Americans to ignore the mass scale death we inflict while pointing fingers at other kettles. You don't even have the cause of events correct - we invaded afghanistan first, America were the aggressors. Do you think we invaded Afghanistan to preserve women's rights? Do you know that American soldiers were told to turn a blind eye to the afghan national army raping little boys? You mention that we don't have accurate numbers about china's tyranny, but under Trump, we repealed the rule that the USG had to report drone strike casualties. I'm not surprised other countries don't see a functional difference between the US and China, after all only one of those countries has a solid track record of overturning democratically conducted elections because they didn't like the outcome.

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