the same Stalin who executed Queers and Jews

Even at its most homophobic, the USSR never had a death penalty for being gay, and the only person who was executed in the Doctors’ Plot was the guy who fabricated the claims against the Jewish doctors. If they actually cared, they could have taken 30 seconds to confirm this with even liberal sources before they started saying bullshit, but…

A claim like “There’s cultural genocide of Uyghurs in Xinjiang” is simply unreal to most Westerners, close to pure gibberish. The words really refer to existing entities and geographies, but Westerners aren’t familiar with them. The actual content of the utterance as it spills out is no more complex or nuanced than “China Bad,” and the elementary mistakes people make when they write out statements of “solidarity” make that much clear. This is not a complaint that these people have not studied China enough — there’s no reason to expect them to study China, and retrospectively I think to some extent it was a mistake to personally have spent so much time trying to teach them. It’s instead an acknowledgment that they are eagerly wielding the accusation like a club, that they are in reality unconcerned with its truth-content, because it serves a social purpose.