The BBC article constantly references Adrian Zenz, supposed “Sinologist” who doesnt speak a word of Chinese and hasn’t set foot in the country. Oh, he’s also a cofounder of the “victims of communism memorial association” and a rabid christian fundamentalist. I wonder if any of that has anything to do with his desire to spread propaganda of “China bad”.

Go to the article: published May 2022, all the claims are of things that supposedly happened in 2017, 2018 or at most 2019. I repeat my original point: are there any ONGOING acts of mass mistreatment of Uyghur in Xinjiang? Best you can come up with is pictures from the well-known reeducation camps from 8 years ago.

What we know so far is this: there was a series of terrorist attacks in China in 2013-2014 onwards, coming from Islamist radicals linked to Al-Qaida and ISIS. The government responded later with a big reeducation program in the province of Xinjiang, which by all accounts is closed by 2021. There is anecdotal, mostly anonymous, evidence of mistreatment of particular individuals in the process, not corroborated by material evidence such as video or picture. All the news you find refer to processes that took place 5-ish years ago. I cast the same question that I asked at the beginning: IS THERE ANY ONGOING MASS-MISTREATMENTS OF UYGHURS IN XINJIANG

Thanks a lot

Claims in 2017 by a communist party member cherrypicked from 400 pages of documents in Chinese is very little incriminating in terms of what I’ve been asking from the beginning: material evidence of ongoing widespread mistreatment of Uyghur. We can move the goalposts to the claim “there are some officials in the Communist Party of China who have too hard, arguably racist and repressive stances regarding Uyghurs” if you want, but it’s not the original claim to which I’m responding.

BBC and New York Crimes both repeated Hasbara propaganda of widespread rapes during Oct 7th, which is exactly the same thing we’re arguing here. They don’t need to “make things up”, they only need to take a few instances of abuse, generalize them, and run a nonstop atrocity propaganda campaign for political purposes. Media manipulation in this regard is more refined and effective than, say, conservative propaganda like “Jan 6th was actually antifa”, which consists on simply manufacturing facts.

China isn’t a perfect state, and I don’t make such claims, but arguing about genocide or persecution of an ethnic minority is a very serious claim that, being a topic that in theory affects millions of Uyghurs, would have led to massive amounts of footage by smartphone owners as we have seen from Gaza

I accidentally deleted my comment, does it still feature in your inbox so I can copy-paste it instead of rewriting it?

deleted by creator

I provided stories that you have been unable to disprove.

You can’t disprove anonymous testimonies, that’s why the entire Amnesty International report consists of them. From the beginning I asked for independent journalistic work with material evidence, and you’ve supported your claims with nothing the likes of that. Again, compare that to the evidence for genocide in Palestine.

Ok, enslaver supporter. Get off your white horse, you literally said you support beheading monarchs.

I found this from Amnesty International

This is about a deportation of Uyghurs from Thailand. The reference to “torture and ill-treatment” is to their 2021 “study” which consists of… You got it: anonymous interviews!!

Since you like Sky News (Australian equivalent of FOX) so much: 2023 article showing the camps are long closed.

You keep proving that you have no idea about the topic, you didn’t even know that the camps were closed years ago. Yes, anonymous interviews are part of journalism, but go ahead. Open your phone, and google “tiktok Gaza” and find this week’s videos of genocided Palestinians. Now try and find the slightest shred of video evidence for mass mistreatment of Uyghurs: you won’t find it. In 2025, in the smartphone era, where literally every Chinese citizen holds a recording internet-connected device, it is simply impossible that there is an ongoing genocide or even mass abuse of Uyghurs without being documented.

I don’t defend human right abuses, I just don’t buy into western anti-china propaganda based off “anonymous interviews” in 2025. I’ve been to China myself and there is perfect freedom to record and do whatever the hell you want with your phone, and VPNs are easy to set up and not prosecuted. As a leftist, you should consider why the west cares so much about Chinese Muslims when it hates Chinese and it hates Muslims.

I cannot believe that I’m arguing in favor of not murdering innocent people

The barrier between innocent and guilty isn’t as clear to me. The wives and children were profiting from the slavery as much as the direct owners. I don’t necessarily agree with the excess murders, but that doesn’t mean I condemn the revolution, because slavery was killing many, many more than the liberation did. It was a net positive though mistakes were made, but honestly I can’t blame them after what they were forced to live through. The blame is not on the revolutionaries, it is on the enslavers for creating these conditions.

Are Puerto Ricans being interned in camps like Uyghurs in Xinjiang though?

The reeducation camps were closed years ago. You can travel to Xinjiang yourself and see with your own eyes that the Uyghur are thriving. Go open YouTube and search for travel vlogs in Xinjiang, for real.

RT seems to air lies, while I don’t think the BBC does

BBC was constantly airing lies of the genocidal maniacs of Isntreal, such as mass rapes during Oct 7th in an attempt to do atrocity propaganda against Palestine to justify genocide. They’re literal genocide supporters.

Here you have an interview with an openly lying genocide supporter on prime time.

What is wrong with the BBC article I provided?

That it’s outdated and based not on independent journalism but on supposed “anonymous interviews”, as all evidence of “mass sterilization” in Xinjiang.

Ok, now I hope you ask yourself why a predominantly black slave revolt decapitating the enslavers deserves no support, whereas a predominantly white peasant revolt decapitating the monarchs deserves support.

The black slaves were literally enslaved by the people they executed. They suffered from their whips, from their tortures, and from the murder of their loved ones by those very people. Do you really not see why a slave revolt in those conditions would lead to excesses in violence against former enslavers?

As for Molotov-Ribbentrop and the invasion of “Poland”: I’m gonna please ask you to actually read my comment and to be open to the historical evidence I bring (using Wikipedia as a source, hopefully not suspect of being tankie-biased), because I believe there is a great mistake in the way contemporary western nations interpret history of WW2 and the interwar period. Thank you for actually making the effort, I know it’s a long comment, but please engage with the points I’m making:

The only country who offered to start a collective offensive against the Nazis and to uphold the defense agreement with Czechoslovakia as an alternative to the Munich Betrayal was the USSR. From that Wikipedia article: “The Soviet Union announced its willingness to come to Czechoslovakia’s assistance, provided the Red Army would be able to cross Polish and Romanian territory; both countries refused.” Poland could have literally been saved from Nazi invasion if France and itself had agreed to start a war together against Nazi Germany, but they didn’t want to. By the logic of “invading Poland” being akin to Nazi collaboration, Poland was as imperialist as the Nazis.

As a Spaniard leftist it’s so infuriating when the Soviet Union, the ONLY country in 1936 which actively fought fascism in Europe by sending weapons, tanks and aviation to my homeland in the other side of the continent in the Spanish civil war against fascism, is accused of appeasing the fascists. The Soviets weren’t dumb, they knew the danger and threat of Nazism and worked for the entire decade of the 1930s under the Litvinov Doctrine of Collective Security to enter mutual defense agreements with England, France and Poland, which all refused because they were convinced that the Nazis would honor their own stated purpose of invading the communists in the East. The Soviets went as far as to offer ONE MILLION troops to France (Archive link against paywall) together with tanks, artillery and aviation in 1939 in exchange for a mutual defense agreement, which the French didn’t agree to because of the stated reason. Just from THIS evidence, the Soviets were by far the most antifascist country in Europe throughout the 1930s, you literally won’t find any other country doing any remotely similar efforts to fight Nazism. If you do, please provide evidence.

The invasion of “Poland” is also severely misconstrued. The Soviets didn’t invade what we think of when we say Poland. They invaded overwhelmingly Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian lands that Poland had previously invaded in 1919. Poland in 1938, a year before the invasion:

“Polish” territories invaded by the USSR in 1939:

The Soviets invaded famously Polish cities such as Lviv (sixth most populous city in modern Ukraine), Pinsk (important city in western Belarus) and Vilnius (capital of freaking modern Lithuania). They only invaded a small chunk of what you’d consider Poland nowadays, and the rest of lands were actually liberated from Polish occupation and returned to the Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian socialist republics. Hopefully you understand the importance of giving Ukrainians back their lands and sovereignty?

Additionally, the Soviets didn’t invade Poland together with the Nazis, they invaded a bit more than two weeks after the Nazi invasion, at a time when the Polish government had already exiled itself and there was no Polish administration. The meaning of this, is that all lands not occupied by Soviet troops, would have been occupied by Nazis. There was no alternative. Polish troops did not resist Soviet occupation but they did resist Nazi invasion. The Soviet occupation effectively protected millions of Slavic peoples like Poles, Ukrainians and Belarusians from the stated aim of Nazis of genociding the Slavic peoples all the way to the Urals.

All in all, my conclusion is: the Soviets were fully aware of the dangers of Nazism and fought against it earlier than anyone (Spanish civil war), spent the entire 30s pushing for an anti-Nazi mutual defence agreement which was refused by France, England and Poland, tried to honour the existing mutual defense agreement with Czechoslovakia which France rejected and Poland didn’t allow (Romania neither but they were fascists so that’s a given), and offered to send a million troops to France’s border with Germany to destroy Nazism but weren’t allowed to do so. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was a tool of postponing the war in a period in which the USSR, a very young country with only 10 years of industrialization behind it since the first 5-year plan in 1929, was growing at a 10% GDP per year rate and needed every moment it could get. I can and do criticise decisions such as the invasion of Finland, but ultimately even the western leaders at the time seem to generally agree with my interpretation:

“In those days the Soviet Government had grave reason to fear that they would be left one-on-one to face the Nazi fury. Stalin took measures which no free democracy could regard otherwise than with distaste. Yet I never doubted myself that his cardinal aim had been to hold the German armies off from Russia for as long as might be” (Paraphrased from Churchill’s December 1944 remarks in the House of Commons.)

“It would be unwise to assume Stalin approves of Hitler’s aggression. Probably the Soviet Government has merely sought a delaying tactic, not wanting to be the next victim. They will have a rude awakening, but they think, at least for now, they can keep the wolf from the door” Franklin D. Roosevelt (President of the United States, 1933–1945), from Harold L. Ickes’s diary entries, early September 1939. Ickes’s diaries are published as The Secret Diary of Harold Ickes.

"One must suppose that the Soviet Government, seeing no immediate prospect of real support from outside, decided to make its own arrangements for self‑defence, however unpalatable such an agreement might appear. We in this House cannot be astonished that a government acting solely on grounds of power politics should take that course” Neville Chamberlain House of Commons Statement, August 24, 1939 (one day after pact’s signing)

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this

I don’t think I’m moving the goalposts. My claim isn’t only “great progress happened in the USSR in terms of material conditions of workers”, my claim is “these improvements of material conditions point towards the existence of a more Democratic system than in places where said improvements don’t take place”. I’m using the improvements as a materialist measure of democracy because these improvements are, in my opinion, evidence of democracy.

It would be a lot easier to defend the USSR if they only intervened to allow the proletariat to hold referendums

Well, obviously, but reality isn’t so easy when you’re just one socialist country in a world dominated by capitalism. This was very obvious to the Bolsheviks from the beginning, when during the Russian Civil War, 10+ world powers including the USA, Great Britain or Poland invaded them trying to help the Whites and to reestablish tsarist absolutism. The USSR was an example of what is called “Actually Existing Socialism”. You cannot get a totally socialist country when capitalist relations still dominate the planet and threaten your very existence, as was the case in the Soviet Union. For example, the main drive of rapid industrialization In 1929 together with rapid land collectivization was not ideological, but geopolitical: threat of invasion. When geopolitical, and not purely ideological reasons, are behind a lot of your decisions, it’s hard to do socialism perfectly. I agree we should analyze the problems and failures, but we can also look at the entire experience of the country and, judging by the results, it was very positive and arguably better than any system we’ve had so far.

Yes. It’s called colonialism. The ideas of freedom, equality and fraternity were only meant to be for white people. The same progressive revolution wholeheartedly supported the enslavement and murder of millions of Africans in the colonial processes that took place during and after.

Do you still support the French revolution?

I don’t support extreme actions to enact change, I want to enact change which is met with violence, to which I respond. Look at Allende in Chile being murdered and a Democratic peaceful movement being turned into fascist dictatorship. Look at Mosaddeq in Iran. There are many such cases.

The system in which we live is already violent. Millions of people are killed needlessly every year by lack of healthcare, poor nutrition and mental health crises, even in developed countries. US economics kic sanctions have been found to kill half a million people yearly for the past 30 years, more than the worldwide deaths due to war during the same period. Ending this violence is the peaceful alternative.

So what would you call extremist about the extremist socialists?

My statement isn’t that the USSR was perfect, it is that all of the material benefits listed above must come from material reasons. You would not expect a government based on a set of self-serving antidemocratic bureaucrats to result in such benefits, because when that’s the form of governance it ends up more towards things like Saudi Arabia.

What’s more feasible, that Soviet Citizens got lucky with Lenin, then Stalin, then Khruschyov and then Brezhnev, or that there were actually democratic means of exerting popular power other than electoralism?

Why do you call the USSR “imperial” power? It never engaged in colonialism or economic exploitation of the global south, quite the opposite. What was imperialist about it?

Regarding China, I would argue they’re more democratic than the west based on the outcomes of governance and on the satisfaction of citizens with their government.

Yeah but that’s what extreme leftists suggest: universal healthcare and education, guaranteed employment and housing, good retirement benefits, good working conditions under collective ownership…

They’re colonising islands in the South China Sea which other South East Asian countries claim

Hardly can you call it “colonize” when there isn’t a population in said islands. At any rate it’s much less violent than the poverty and lack of political representation that Puertoricans are imposed by the US.

mistreatment of ethnic minorities

Oh wow, a BBC article from 2021. Surely we should trust western state media to tell us unbiased facts about its geopolitical opponents. The BBC has famously avoided the word “genocide” for referring to Gaza over the past years, with scandals coming out of editorial orders of employees to avoid such reporting. Taking the BBC seriously on the mistreatment of Muslims in China is as laughable as taking Russia Today seriously on the mistreatment of ethnic Russians in Donetsk.

As for the “mistreatment of Uyghur”. I have had this discussion 50 times in Lemmy: bring me a 2022-2025 source with contemporary independent journalistic accounts of generalized mistreatment of Uyghurs. Not a piece written by Radio Free Asia based on “anonymous witnesses”. Not a piece written by Adrian Zenz based on “official government statistics”. Bring me some, any independent journalistic work post-2021 about mass mistreatment of Uyghurs.

Also, your lack of concern for Ukrainian mass economic and population crisis suggests that your criticism for Russia doesn’t come from a genuine care about the people suffering from the actions of the Russian government, but rather from an agreement with western propaganda.

Tell me a war in which China has participated over the last 30 years. China simply doesn’t engage in remotely imperialist behaviour compared to the west.

As for Russia, I wish it was still a socialist country, but unfortunately now it’s another capitalist antidemocratic regime. Surely since you care about Ukraine, you condemn the capitalist regime in Ukraine which led to the defunding of healthcare, education, the removal of guaranteed housing and guaranteed employment, and a massive demographic crisis of loss of life through hunger, crime, drug abuse and lack of healthcare, which killed millions of Ukrainians prematurely?