https://sh.itjust.works/post/4274675
To this I say, no. As a community, we do not deny proven genocides, like the holocaust, or the genocide against indigenous Americans by various European colonizers, or the genocide against the Congolese by Belgium, or the Bengal famine that was carried out by the British empire. In fact, denying those genocides will get you banned, here. However: we are also aware of a tendency of nations to project their crimes onto others, and to manufacture atrocity propaganda to justify overthrowing or destroying rival governments… like Libya in 2011:
From Washington Bullets by Vijay Prashad (a great book I highly recommend)
A post from Michael Parenti regarding the destruction of Libya by NATO-backed reactionaries
A headline shortly after Libya’s destruction by NATO-backed reactionaries
The US government has been reenacting the fable of the Boy Who Cried Wolf, and has been cynically leveraging the very serious accusation of genocide against its geopolitical enemies. This is the source of skepticism on Xinjiang. And this is not a new strategy, yes, the Holodomor, which everyone in the US has been taught to take seriously lately, is a nazi fabrication first spread to the United States in the works of Robert Conquest. Why would the USSR deliberately starve a fellow socialist Republic? Why would Stalin, a Georgian, have some kind of Russian chauvinist grudge against Ukrainians? Why would Lenin (Donbass), Stalin (Lviv), and Khruschev (Crimea) all expand the territory of the Ukrainian SSR while also trying to kill off the people inside of it? Why would the USSR ethnically cleanse Ukrainains while simultaneously sending food aid to the starving British colony in Bengal? Natural famines and crop failures were spun by the nazis into atrocity propaganda. Also, a state does not have to be perfect to be defended against false accuations. I think China is far from perfect, but the burden of proof is on the United States to prove its accusations (which have changed in scope several times) regarding Xinjiang. Delegations from Muslim majority nations visiting Xinjiang do not agree with the United States that there is a genocide of the Uyghur people. There is however an attempt to reeducate extremist groups like ETIM. Reeducating extremists might seem a harsh government policy, but I assure you it is a better way of dealing with religious fundamentalism than drone striking weddings or air striking hospitals like the USA did in Afghanistan.
You aren’t a genocide denialist if the genocide genuinely did not happen.
If someone makes the claim that last week France genocided the English, and I respond “No that’s fucking stupid and did not happen.” I don’t magically become a genocide denialist as a result of making that statement.
Because that would be ridiculous.
A genocide did not happen in Xinjiang. That is simply factual. A re-education program in which people were forced to attend an education facility where they stay over night Mon-Fri and go home on weekends did occur. Pointing this out is not genocide denialism because a genocide did not happen.
Holocaust deniers are genocide deniers because a genocide genuinely occurred.
There is an important fucking difference here.
to be fair
society is steeped in reactionaory think tanks like VoCMF that try their best to larp like “what if holocaust memorial but for Gommulism” and this grants an air of institutional legitimacy and consensus that makes these genocide narratives seem very real and widely agreed upon and it is thus hard to deprogram people of their brainworms if they’re already committed to believing the narrative. After all it is an easy mental shortcut for most people who have neither the time nor the energy to investigate every historical claim to just assume that all genocide narratives are true, because they don’t want to seem like a genocide denier.
Ah, but did you consider William the Conqueror?
:smuglord: