The Uyghurs

version

Well-known member
Unlike WW2 and Germany we have no excuses of supposed ignorance...
How ignorant were people about what was going on in Germany?

When Nancy Astor was in the news due to the statue unveiling, I read up on the allegations of antisemitism and in 1938 she not only knew Hitler was specifically targeting Jews, but also thought it was a good thing...

Astor commented to Kennedy that Hitler would have to do worse than "give a rough time... to the killers of christ" for Britain and America to risk "Armageddon to save them. The wheel of history swings round as the Lord would have it. Who are we to stand in the way of the future?"
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
My parents were on holiday in China when Tiananmen Square happened. Apparently they had no idea until my mum was on the phone to my gran and she was freaking out over what was being shown on TV back home.

My fave podcast did an absolute 🔥 episode on Tiananmen Sq recently. Check it out, it's great.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
How ignorant were people about what was going on in Germany?

When Nancy Astor was in the news due to the statue unveiling, I read up on the allegations of antisemitism and in 1938 she not only knew Hitler was specifically targeting Jews, but also thought it was a good thing...

Astor commented to Kennedy that Hitler would have to do worse than "give a rough time... to the killers of christ" for Britain and America to risk "Armageddon to save them. The wheel of history swings round as the Lord would have it. Who are we to stand in the way of the future?"
Anti-Semitism and fascism were baked into politics and the prejudices of the ruling class back then in a way that was much more visible and socially acceptable than it is now. There are hundreds of post aristo Hitler supporters BUT to my knowledge people didn't know the full horror of the camps
 

version

Well-known member
Anti-Semitism and fascism were baked into politics and the prejudices of the ruling class back then in a way that was much more visible and socially acceptable than it is now. There are hundreds of post aristo Hitler supporters BUT to my knowledge people didn't know the full horror of the camps
Yeah, but my point is there was clearly some idea of what was going on if Astor was already pushing back on the suggestion of going to war with Germany back in '38. A war of that scale wouldn't be on the table without good reason.

You could point to Germany's ambitions and aggression, but Astor specifically mentions going to war to save the Jews, so apparently there was some suggestion that what was being done to them alone was bad enough that Britain and America should step in.
 
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version

Well-known member
Yeah, like with China now, I don't think there was any question that Germany was pursuing anti-semitic policies. It's just that the extent of what was going on wasn't public knowledge until the camps were first found near the end of the war. I mean, even the German Jews didn't know for sure what was going down. They just knew friends and relatives were disappearing, ostensibly to work camps in the countryside.
It's an unpleasant thought, but evidently there's a tolerable level of genocide.
 

version

Well-known member
Maybe I'm being unfair and the cost and scale of what would be necessary's too great, but the world's leaders are clearly aware of at least some of what's going on if this stuff's managed to filter down to us and nobody looks to be doing anything.

That being said, it's not the only genocide going on atm and we don't exactly seem to be rushing to help the Rohingya either.
 

sus

Well-known member
Maybe I'm being unfair and the cost and scale of what would be necessary's too great, but the world's leaders are clearly aware of at least some of what's going on if this stuff's managed to filter down to us and nobody looks to be doing anything.

That being said, it's not the only genocide going on atm and we don't exactly seem to be rushing to help the Rohingya either.
On the positive side, hear about the malaria vaccine?
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
It's also not obvious how states should deal with these problem tribes. Presumably not exterminate them but on the other hand there is no possible way to accommodate genuine nomadism, for example, in a modern capitalist state. Bad news for aborigines, Gypsies, Mongolians etc

Right. This is a truth you realise that many marxists funnily don't. That indigeneity is an agricultural relation to the land, and that any exalting of indigineity for indigeneitys sake under capitalism is a fetish for dispossession and genocide. This is the problem with land back, not that it is jus as nationalist, but that it is unachievable.
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Yeah, that's true. I thought it was mainly a religious difference behind the internment though, not nomadism? I might be wrong, know so little about it.

Uyghurs are not nomadic but they are indigenous to Chinese territory, whilst being a turkic peoples.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
I think anyone in China is part of a "problem tribe" if they have an ideology that can be seen as being in conflict with absolute rule by the CCP, or the cultural dominance of the Han majority. So that could be a religion (Islam, Christianity, Falun Gong), Tibetan independence, the Hong Kong democracy protestors, or the mere existence of Taiwan.

Yes, which is why many apologists will say China does not strictly prosecute muslims, which is true if you talk about Han muslims. So the state atheism we get fed in the west is a vastly inflated myth. There is also a lot of confucian ideology in CCP doctrine.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
Yes, which is why many apologists will say China does not strictly prosecute muslims, which is true if you talk about Han muslims. So the state atheism we get fed in the west is a vastly inflated myth. There is also a lot of confucian ideology in CCP doctrine.
I'm a big fan of the I Ching and that has lots of Confucianism embedded. Interesting to hear it's surviving elsewhere
Yeah, but my point is there was clearly some idea of what was going on if Astor was already pushing back on the suggestion of going to war with Germany back in '38. A war of that scale wouldn't be on the table without good reason.

You could point to Germany's ambitions and aggression, but Astor specifically mentions going to war to save the Jews, so apparently there was some suggestion that what was being done to them alone was bad enough that Britain and America should step in.
Yeah for sure but I don't think she would have known it was a war of extermination. The Nazis kept this pretty well concealed even from themselves.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
Source: https://fivebooks.com/best-books/world-war-ii-antony-beevor/

One day I'll have time to read all these damned books.

....One sees the implications particularly when it comes to the difficulties of a setting and the exact progress towards the Final Solution. For example, he looks at the decision about when to launch the Holocaust or the Shoah by gas, as Grossman called it, which is one of the key areas of debate amongst historians. And Kershaw’s assessment is probably the most reliable and accurate of all.

What is his assessment?

In his book he defines “the Final Solution to the Jewish question” as “the systematic [Nazi] attempt to exterminate the whole of European Jewry”. And this is the traditional view and the one currently accepted by mainstream historians. Kershaw goes on to state the three major questions that, in his view, surround the Final Solution. They are: How and when the decision to exterminate the Jews came about; what was Hitler’s role in this policy of mass murder, and whether the Final Solution followed a single order from a long-held programme or evolved in a haphazard and piecemeal fashion over a period of time?

After posing these questions, he concludes: “The deficiencies and ambiguities of the evidence, enhanced by the language of euphemism and camouflage used by the Nazis, even among themselves when dealing with the extermination of the Jews, mean that absolute certainty in answering these complex questions can not be achieved.” He is saying there is room for doubt in regard to the answers mainstream historians have given to the previous questions.
 
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HannahB

Well-known member
Maybe I'm being unfair and the cost and scale of what would be necessary's too great, but the world's leaders are clearly aware of at least some of what's going on if this stuff's managed to filter down to us and nobody looks to be doing anything.

That being said, it's not the only genocide going on atm and we don't exactly seem to be rushing to help the Rohingya either.
But we help by buying Chinese products, as with Tibet. Uighurs are in labour camps building all that right? It’s only more fenced around than Congolese coltan mining children - maybe they too are fenced in. An outlying step from the at-home theft of people’s lives spent in unnecessary poverty and ardor. Just we are all complicit hurting each other and the system dumps downhill on what it can construct as the bottom - We need to look at actualities from the ground up, real conditions, since the dominant ideologies are the same the world over (are there exceptions?) - this is not new thought but it isn’t happening.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Yes, which is why many apologists will say China does not strictly prosecute muslims, which is true if you talk about Han muslims. So the state atheism we get fed in the west is a vastly inflated myth. There is also a lot of confucian ideology in CCP doctrine.
The question "what religion do most Chinese practice?" is a pretty tough one to answer, I've found. Depending on the resource you look at, the answer can be "nothing at all", or "Chinese folk religion", but that overlaps with Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism in a big way. And the cult of Mao I guess has religious aspects, although I understand the authorities have tried to suppress that in recent decades.
 
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HannahB

Well-known member
The question "what religion do most Chinese practice?" is a pretty tough one to answer, I've found. Depending on the resource you look at, the answer can be "nothing at all", or "Chinese folk religion", but that overlaps with Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism in a big way. And the cult of Mao I guess has religious aspects, although understand the authorities have tried to suppress that in recent decades.
maybe whichever religions or ways sufficiently warped/ manipulated or their cherry picked parts coalesce with whichever dominant ideology(ies) of whichever time… (I learned in class 15 years ago that Confucianism was great at perpetrating heteronormative good little people family values including to shame non. Isn’t that like everywhere?) xmas here is the same afterall.. Nowhere is a tabular rasa - no place has no religious construct behind its atheism or land use or former king worship/ now updated king worship like of one dominant despotic man, etc.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
The question "what religion do most Chinese practice?" is a pretty tough one to answer, I've found. Depending on the resource you look at, the answer can be "nothing at all", or "Chinese folk religion", but that overlaps with Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism in a big way. And the cult of Mao I guess has religious aspects, although understand the authorities have tried to suppress that in recent decades.

Yes it's weird. The CCP was monitoring capital M Maoists a few years ago. Although this does have parallels during the cultural revolution of the 60s I.E: the hunan provincial proletarian committee who quite logically actually tried to advocate the smashing of the existing Chinese state to establish a transitional proletarian dictatorship to actually purge the tendancy developing towards capitalism. Needless to say Mao turned against these ultra-leftists, despite them being the most faithful inheritors of sino-Marxism at the time. but of course one has to follow the nose stick, and Mao himself was forced to follow the rapid development of productive forces (in spite of himself!) to enter onto the stage of global capitalism.

There is a deep, impersonal aspect to any sort of historical materialism, Nick Land tries to invert this by making id come into its own, but that's another debate and I don't have his fetishistic preoccupations so I won't go into that.

Assessing the Chinese cultural revolution is a complex undertaking. For one thing it is necessary to oppose the present-day rightist atmosphere that prevails in both the U.S. and China and that labels any movement of the masses as "insanity."(1) It's also necessary to give some credit to Mao Zedong for reforms carried out during this period. As a peasant populist Mao consistently stood for reforms such as improving health care and educational facilities in the countryside, and the cultural revolution did bring about some improvements in this area (at least temporarily).
. But it's also necessary to oppose the diehard enthusiasm of the Maoists and "Gang of Four" cheering squads like the RCP,USA, who negate serious analysis of this period. Mao led the cultural revolution, and the cultural revolution spawned a mass movement that was to some degree a genuine expression of revolutionary sentiments. But it doesn't follow that Mao led, or wanted to lead, a genuine revolutionary movement. Such a movement would have smashed up the state-capitalist bureaucracy he headed and established a revolutionary-democratic regime based on the working class and poor peasantry who made up the vast, vast majority of the population. Far from trying to lead such a movement, Mao worked to suppress those who were striving to build it.
. From the standpoint of the struggle against revisionism, the most interesting feature of the cultural revolution was the rise and demise of the "Ultra-left," the movement to the left of Mao and the other leading Maoists (Lin Biao, the Gang of Four, etc.). For even though Mao and the other leaders of the cultural revolution talked a good deal about the masses, and opposition to revisionism, the fact is that from its beginning the movement was never meant by its Maoist leaders to be part of a social revolutionary movement. The Maoists themselves were leading lights of the state-capitalist system that congealed after China's liberation in 1949. This is precisely the system that needed to be revolutionized. Mao, despite his calls against bourgeois elements in the party, essentially backed the system. Hence he ended up with a factional struggle against his enemies -- other leading lights whom Mao stigmatized as "Rightist" but whose policies in many cases weren't all that different from his own. As the cultural revolution went on, its sectarian character became more and more clear to everyone; which is why eventually the masses became disillusioned with the whole thing.
. But the interesting thing is that, beyond Mao's limited aims, the working masses did take up genuine struggles in the midst of the cultural revolution. They did fight for political and economic reforms. They did target revisionism and capitalism. They did strive to build their own build independent political organizations. And outside of China, the cultural revolution did inspire militant activists around the world to seek out new forms for fighting revisionism.
. The domination of Mao Zedong, Chinese revisionism and three-worldism was a heavy burden for the newly emerging movement of the late 1960s. It took the new generation of anti-revisionist activists years, sometimes decades, to cast off this burden. Even today groups calling themselves Marxist persist in praising China as "socialist."

 
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Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Yes it's weird. The CCP was monitoring capital M Maoists a few years ago. Although this does have parallels during the cultural revolution of the 60s I.E: the hunan provincial proletarian committee who quite logically actually tried to advocate the smashing of the existing Chinese state to establish a transitional proletarian dictatorship to actually purge the tendancy developing towards capitalism. Needless to say Mao turned against these ultra-leftists, despite them being the most faithful inheritors of sino-Marxism at the time. but of course one has to follow the nose stick, and Mao himself was forced to follow the rapid development of productive forces (in spite of himself!) to enter onto the stage of global capitalism.

There is a deep, impersonal aspect to any sort of historical materialism, Nick Land tries to invert this by making id come into its own, but that's another debate and I don't have his fetishistic preoccupations so I won't go into that.



I don't have a deep historical background on this, but it sounds a lot like Lenin's and Stalin's purges of Trotskyites and other groups critical of the Soviet government from the left.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
I don't have a deep historical background on this, but it sounds a lot like Lenin's and Stalin's purges of Trotskyites and other groups critical of the Soviet government from the left.

No it was not really like the Stalin purge of Trotskyism at all.

From that article:

A striking point is their worshipful attitude towards Chairman Mao and Lin Biao; this was of course a major weakness at a time when Mao was working hard to smash the "ultra-left". The manifesto's writer has a hard time explaining this and at one point simply says these actions of Mao's are difficult to understand. Many theories were prevalent among the "ultra-left" in those days -- that Mao wasn't properly informed, or was being held hostage by enemies, etc. But it's significant that Mao's rightward turn did not deter them; they pursued their policy of opposition to the establishment of three-in-one combinations which they knew meant the death of the revolutionary upsurge, even though they had a limited analysis of the system they were trying to mount opposition to.
 
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