People are only getting concerned by the "hype thing of the day". (today it is the 1500 immigrant children lost, yesterday it was some battle in Syria)
They don't care about things until a mob of similar people care about it. It is group thinking and virtue signaling at its peak
What exactly should they be concerned about? It's not as if they have even the thinnest possibility of having any impact on such things. There are more important things for them to worry about.
Whether you like China or not, Islamic fundamentalism is a huge problem to global peace today. Not just in the Middle East, Europe, but also parts of Southeast Asia (Malaysia, Philipphines) and China.
The problem is people clinging to old time religious beliefs that women are inferior and must be veiled and that infidels are not worthy
We've slowly dispelled Christian fervor (which used to be just as bad as Islamic fundamentalism) by slowly improving the scientific literacy rate and living standards in the west. Must of the Islamic countries haven't seen growth like this. How do you root these out?
Not sure if China's hard handed approach may work. Maybe it will, who knows. Maybe it will fail. But we at least must do something about it
Gaza is not a religion problem, it is a human right problem. Israel is scandalously denying human people living in Gaza any dignity in their living, after stealing their land and oppressing them for years.
I'm sick to see how much America is getting complicit with this. and happy to see that most of Europe realizes what is really going on there.
The problem is you are considered Anti-Semitic if you criticize the government of Israel. So you cannot even talk about it in public, or it will ruin your reputation and career.
In tech and in other liberal fields as academia it is the reverse: critique of islam, muslims, their treatment of women and education, is mostly forbidden unless you’re ok with being ostracized.
I also work in tech, I just don’t discuss anything remotely controversial IRL because it will end up offending someone. Recently, I made the mistake to actually speak what was really on my mind (when I was drunk) and I ended up getting physically assaulted which led to a concussion. Suffice it to say I will never talk about politics publicly ever again.
To be fair your username might be part of the issue. It makes it a bit hard to take claims of innocent-peace-and justice-no-anti-semetic-intent-intended and somewhat implies time spent watching "Evil Joos controlz the banking system and the Facebook!" videos.
Charitably, myself, I assume this isn't actually the case, but it could create that impression. FWIW.
Do you know many people in Gaza? Because I do and they complain much more about Hamas than they do about Israel. I'm far from agreeing with Israel's policies regarding Gaza, but the truth is it's far from being Gaza's biggest problem. Not to mention the often forgetten fact that Gaza has another border, with Egypt, which is closed, and Israel has nothing to do with it.
A Gazan friend told me this very week actually that they wish Israel would re-enter the Gaza strip and remove Hamas from power. Israel of course is not interested.
> Not to mention the often forgetten fact that Gaza has another border, with Egypt, which is closed, and Israel has nothing to do with it.
Suppose a universe in which Israel didn't exist. Would Egypt have closed off its border with Gaza? Not a chance. That means it has everything to do with Israel. If you think Israel and its allies wouldn't respond with pressure on Egypt the moment it'd open up a border with Gaza, precisely because of Israel, you're fooling yourself.
As for your anecdotal stories about a friend in Gaza, they're as meaningless as if I said I had a Gazan friend who said the opposite.
The notion you've got Gazans risking their lives protesting against Israel (with over ten thousand injuries and 100 dead in the past months, 100% Palestinian) but not Hamas apparently isn't telling to you.
And if you think Palestinian lack of satisfaction with its leaders at any point in its history (e.g. Hamas now) has nothing to do with Israeli oppression (including the closed borders and the destruction of Palestinian economy every time there's an lopsided violent clash) with the backing of the world's superpower, you're also fooling yourself.
* The Egyptian border is closed since the Egyptian army took control of the country. They hate Hamas more than anything. They have no love for Israel. Israel never asked them to close the border. What is your "not a chance" based on? Egypt blamed Hamas for terror attacks inside Egypt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_positions_on_the...)
* My stories are anecdotal, but my work for the past year has almost 100% to do with Gaza and it's internals conflict. I wish I could say more but I can't, and by the way, I can't because it would put my Gazan friends in risk of being hurt by Hamas. I'm sure it doesn't represent the majority, but you have to remember what's possible to say and what's impossible to say in Gaza. It was about two years ago when thousands of youth in Gaza wanted to organize a protest against Hamas. They FB event went crazy. Hamas broadcasted a very simple slide on all TV channels saying that everyone who'll be out on the street in the time of the protest will be immediately shot. The whole thing was canceled. So yeah, the voices against Hamas are much harder to be heard, but they are there and I believe that it's not only my stories who show them, but everyone who'll you have an honest (and unfortunately, fully encrypted) conversation with will tell you the same.
* I never said Gazans like Israel. They hate it. They also hate America, the Palestinian Authorities, etc'. So what? My note was only that the Human Rights issues in Gaza have only so much to do with Israel.
* I agree that Israel helped bringing Hamas into power. That doesn't change the fact that Hamas are no less of oppressors towards their own people. They abuse them, they care nothing for their lives, they're a bunch of gangsters willing the destroy all of Gaza just so they'll stay in power. Yes, Israel has to do with it, and not a little. But Hamas was chosen democratically.
Again, I've led so many campaigns and protests against Israel's governments and policies over the past years. I'm so far from agreeing with them on anything. But I care for Gazans a lot, and since I started hearing them, I learned that their day-to-day problems are at 90% of the cases things like corruption, women rights, inability to gather, abuse, and internal Stasi-like issues.
Gaza is a good example of how constant control and oppression makes people desperate and you get large scale issues. If you haven't noticed, that problem has not been solved.... that should tell you something.
I don't know what you'r trying say with that second line. Your perspective is very strange, it seems like madlibs for identity politics.
It really shouldn't be astonishing (although I disagree with your assessment of the situation in Gaza in particular -- Israel has been doing some seriously fucked up shit in the region for a long time). The most obvious long term response to Nixon's Southern Strategy is to do the opposite and wait for the GOP's embrace of being the conservative white party to screw them over. They've succeeded at that. Every demographic other than straight married white women and straight white men prefer the Democratic Party. Rhetoric painting that demographic as the enemy (often exaggerated IMO but based on at least partial truths most of the time) helps unify those groups despite their differences. Of course that's a big part of the polarization in our politics, but we're approaching a tipping point where the GOP's current position will become untenable and that might result in the polarization being dialed down as the GOP attempts to rebrand itself and expand it's constituency again.
I wonder how "out of control" you would be if you fell victim to settler colonialism. We can objectively say it's colonialism rather than occupation since it's permanent.
What would you do if an IDF Caterpillar D9 armored bulldozer shows up in your neighborhood accompanied by the military and starts demolishing houses to make room for settlers, leaving a bunch of people homeless in the process?
Freely, yes. People in the United States have the right to express publicly whatever their beliefs are. And we also have the right to judge people based on their beliefs.
I'm not sure about the rest of the "western" world. But I this the way it is in the United States.
The presence of the "nonviolent" but complacent and complicit minority in these countries is what enables things to be the way they are. Maybe not everyone participates, but if you poll them on whether or not they support honor killings, oppression of women, etc. a large number will agree. This is not some fringe set of beliefs. Now personally I don't think we need to "do something about it", but the U.S. has actually gone out of it's way to create chaos in the Middle East and empower fundamentalism. We treat Saudi Arabia as an ally while they export poisonous propaganda, we help remove mostly secular dictators from power (who are generally opposed to Islamism and who keep the peace between ethnic groups), and chaos, terrorism, and explicitly Islamist governments with far more extreme policies is the result. Basically, if we really wanted to "do something about it" we'd just stop doing what we've been doing for decades. And yes, that includes not overthrowing Assad. The same people claiming he gassed his people are the same ones that said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. I don't buy it.
No, I don't think that going out of our way to "liberate" people who are just going to immediately vote for theocratic government is doing anything to reduce oppression. Democracy does not inherently reduce oppression, in this case it just enables oppression by a majority which is often even more aggressive than the system that preceded it.
About your first point, you are totally right. A report made in France tells that 28% of Muslim support an authoritarian position and a separatism against their host country society. While 1/3 is technically a minority, it is still a really hight proportion and a really signifiant number of people that can be counted in millions.
"28 % des musulmans de France peuvent être regroupés dans ce groupe qui mélange à la fois des attitudes autoritaires et d’autres que l’on pourrait qualifier de « sécessionnistes ». L’islam est un moyen pour eux de s’affirmer en marge de la société française." [28% of muslim living in France can be grouped in this group that mix both authoritarian and « separatist » attitudes. Islam is for them a way to affirm themselves at the edge of the French society.] Un Islam de France est Possible, Institut Montaigne / Hakim El Karoui, 2016.
That's truly shocking. I wonder if anything can be done at this point. The only hope is that these numbers go down rather than increase in the next years.
The history of that region taught the Chinese government that if they don't do something about it, then
extreme religious groups may cause serious damage.
Global peace is and always has been threatened by only one thing: inequality and greed. Religious fundamentalism may often be used as the ideological substrate for violence, but I think we've seen enough the last hundred years to know that any old ideology will do, without any spiritual element.
What about population pressures? What about religous disagreements, what about nationalism? Old grudges?
Why can't fundamental belief systems be part of the substrate of this equation that results in war. They change every other aspect of life and politics in many cases.
The leaders who encourage and exploit fundamentalist belief do so not out of religious fervor, but out of their own search for power. There’s always something to exploit to sow division. If you sympathize with China here because you believe they are on your side against the bad religions then you are just playing into their game. They are exploiting your own biases against fundamentalist religion in order to gain political cover for their actions. Don’t fall for it.
Pakistan, Armenia, Egypt and many others are some of the most 'equal' nations in the world. I think people use income equality as a sort of euphemism for Scandinavia, and by most metrics yeah they're doing incredible there. But many of the characteristics they have, which includes relatively low income inequality when discussing matters with somebody with a left bias - and cultural/ethnic homogeneity when discussing matters with somebody with a right bias, are also shared by many other nations that are in awful shape.
I will fully agree with you on greed, however. And I'd even go as far as to agree with you on religion being a tool rather than the real factor. But there's also another thing you're missing on the religious issue. The terrorists in Xinjiang killed hundreds of completely random people - and often in close contact with weapons such as knives. Well random in at least they tried to target non-Muslims. That's something I think the vast majority of people simply could not bring themselves to do. That just takes a whole lot of hate, or at best complete sociopathic disregard, for somebody you know absolutely nothing about. And religion, fundamentalistic religion in particular, is something that helps breed that hate. And it also lets people believe that after they go kill those random people, somehow they're going to end up in a magical place where until the end of time they get to go screw 72 perpetual virgins while being served by 80,000 servants. Haha. Maybe we've come full circle and the religion itself ties right back into greed!
> which used to be just as bad as Islamic fundamentalism
This is unsubstantiated even in mediaeval times. For example the crusades were minor skirmishes compared to what is the invasion of spain and the balkans - not to mention all the other places in Africa, Asia and the middle east.
It is also implies that Islam can be reformed (because it's just another religion) and is just behind for developmental reasons, but there are fundamental differences.
Broadly speaking, Christianity is Orthodox - it is important what you believe, Islam is Orthopraxic - it is important what you do.
More importantly, Islam makes a virtue of violence and conquests and Christianity is centred on piety. Now clearly they can be binding forces for tribes and it is possible for Christians to be quarelsome and muslims to be peaceful but this is in contradiction with the teachings. (And all the refutations to this w.r.t. to the Quran either only apply to believers, or are superceded later in the Quran).
Bullshit. You want proof that doesn't appeal to the Quran? Fine.
In long-Islamic countries like Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Egypt, there are a large number of pre-existing minority religions: Yazidis, Mandeans, Samaritans, and a number of others -- as well as long-established Jewish and Christian communities. Those communities have been surrounded by Islam for more than a thousand years, and while they've undoubtedly got some legitimate complaints about Islam, the fact is that they're still there.
Compare and contrast to Christianity. Before Christianity took over, Europe, like the Middle East was a rich tapestry of pre-existing religions. None of them survived: they were universally exterminated with extreme prejudice. This was not a gentle process: Norway, for example, was Christianised by as man whose favoured way of dealing with stubborn pagans was to force iron rods down their throats and force poisonous snakes into them.
So no, Christianity wasn't a more tolerant religion. The absence of any survivors -- in contrast to Islam -- is a testament to this.
It is funny you take the example of Christians community in the Middle East, because right now they are precisely the target of Sunnis terrorists and in great danger. A few month ago, a Libanese bishop was saying in a newspaper that "Christians will inevitably disappear from the Middle-East, even from Lebanon". He predicted that to happen in the timeframe of a decade.
No, it's not funny. A century or two of attacks on the region from Christians has soured relationships in the area, but those Lebanese Christians lived in Muslim controlled areas for over a millennium. By comparison, Muslims in Spain were immediately forced to convert or leave, and in 200 years any ember of the religion was dead.
The current situation stems from much more than just religious choice.
You are rewriting history. The actual Lebanon territory contained Christians centuries before it became muslim. And it became a muslim territory after conquests. The fact that most regions of the world where there is muslim believers (Middle East, some parts of Europe and of the Indian subcontinent, Maghreb) is because of military conquest is telling. The only place this religion spread peacefully is South-Asia.
The Spanish case is also totally different and you can't blame them to get back again their territory and hold a grudge against the religion of their former invaders. I agree however that this is more complex than a simple religion choice, because in most case, this is not a choice (especially centuries ago) and its intertwined with a lot of other factors.
I'm not rewriting history, I'm separating the state from the religion. Yes, the Islamic empires were built with the military. After a state was conquered, there was usually not the forced conversion common in Christianity. Hence Lebanon containing Christians throug a millennium of Muslim dominance.
The Spanish case is not different. Much of Spain had been Muslim for as long as it had ever been Christian, and the Christians had been part of the empire for centuries. The expulsion wasn't an ancient grudge over being conquered, if it was then they wouldn't have also forced the Jewish population to do the same thing.
Oh, and if Spanish aggression was justified, colonialism justifies the current aggression in the Middle East.
These are different goalposts. I responding to the claim that Christianity has historically been a more tolerant religion than Islam; this specific claim is bullshit. The fact that religious minorities in Islamic-majority countries even exist -- in stark contrast to European Christendom, where all religious minorities were ruthlessly exterminated -- is proof of this.
But that's history. If we're talking about the present day, that's another matter entirely. The Islamic State is, today, roughly as ruthless and intolerant as Christianity used to be. This is not a defence of the Islamic State: what they do is evil and abhorrent and deserves to be stopped. And ISIS is in many ways a "natural" extremity of Wahhabi fundamentalism, which is deeply problematic wherever it is found. I'm not bringing up Christianity's appalling history in Europe for the sake of exculpatory whataboutism, but rather to make the point that no religion is a monolith, and that the same broad umbrella can contain both tolerant sects and theocratic genocidal ones.
So my contention is that Wahhabiism and its even worse offshoots should not be conflated with Islam as a whole, which both historically and continuing into the present day has been a largely (if unevenly) tolerant religion. Those tolerant elements should be acknowledged and accepted. When people condemn Islam as a whole, this diminishes the standing of tolerant Muslims (who can then be attacked as some kind of fifth column), and increasing the standing of extremists (who can then position themselves as stalwart defenders of the faith).
So not only is the "Islam has always been intolerant, and therefore must be opposed" argument simply wrong on a factual basis, it's also bad tactics. Unless you want to be in league with the extremists.
It would require a serious commitment to the absurd to suggest that Beijing's quasi-genocidal policies in Xinjiang are just part of an unusually blunt women's-rights campaign.
China's "hard handed approach" is about ethnically cleansing conquered territories, crushing whatever indigenous subject populations they can't outright displace, and destroying any institutions or social organizations that exist independently of the CCP.
Usually oppressing a major marginalized group with blunt, heavy-handed approaches only serves to intensify local support. Particularly if two reasons for marginalization coincide greatly (say, ethnicity and religion)
See: Catalans, Scotland, Kashmir, Palestine, Tuaregs in Mali, etc.
China of course knows that. It's why they have the knives chained to the walls. Their intention is to entirely prevent the Uighur people from being able to defend themselves or fight back.
I keep wondering what China is going to do when these efforts fail (genocide being the primary worry). Xi's dictatorship will only grow more powerful and oppressive in the next five or ten years, as is nearly universal with the history of dictatorships. I don't believe China will be able to strip away the religious beliefs & culture easily, nor near-term. The only way they can do it, is over a very long time frame, and by trying to forcibly prevent the next generations from becoming Muslims.
As news of what's going on there spreads globally, to the Middle East and other bordering Islamic regions, China may have to build considerable border fortifications to keep terrorists out (people seeking revenge, or just an excuse to wage jihad, and attempting to flow weapons in). China of course borders Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan - all Muslim majority nations.
> Usually oppressing a major marginalized group with blunt, heavy-handed approaches only serves to intensify local support.
I think that is at best fragile as a general statement. I would argue that increases in local support are dependent on other factors besides heavy-handedness or harshness, and that these vary on a case by case basis. For a plethora of counter-examples see:
The history of the Jewish people, Native Americans during colonialism, the anabaptists or the calvinists in European history, the Muslim populations after the conquest of Granada.
>The problem is people clinging to old time religious beliefs that women are inferior and must be veiled and that infidels are not worthy
Wow, such an uninformed generalized comment. Not something you would expect to see at hacker news.
Anyway, just because the West had problems with Christianity does not mean the East have the same problems with Islam. That is one of the reasons why Islam has more practicing followers than any other religion on earth.
Just like any other legal system, Islamic Legal system is also incredibly complex and nuanced. I suggest reading this article on the issue of apostasy in Islam [0].
In a legal matter, what general Muslims think about it (like a pew poll) does not matter because most of them, just like any other population are not experts in judiciary.
Regarding your points about Muslims having more kids, there is nothing preventing these kids from turning away from the religion, just like the kids of old devout Christians today no longer identify as at least practicing Christians.
> The problem is people clinging to old time religious beliefs that women are inferior and must be veiled and that infidels are not worthy
Unfortunately if you compare Islamic societies in the late 19th/early 20th centuries to those from middle of the 20th to now it's seemingly become regressive and insular.
Let's not forget that if you go back a few centuries further Islamic societies were progressing and preserving scientific knowledge while Christendom was rolling around in mud (I'm exaggerating).
It's not a few centuries further historically. It's ~800-1258 AD.
You have to go back to the Abbasid Dynasty to reach the Islamic renaissance / golden age, prior to the Mongol destruction of that and the moving of the Caliphate to Egypt. By the time the Mongols sacked Baghdad, the Abbasid Dynasty and the renaissance had much eroded compared to its former glory. We're nearing a thousand years that you have to go back to reach the Islamic golden age.
"We've slowly dispelled Christian fervor" is an incredibly misinformed take. Christian fundamentalists are still well armed and causing trouble in the United States on a regular basis, even if the Crusades haven't happened in a while. The death toll is sizable.
Big names in evangelical culture with TV air time or even visits to the White House also trumpet on a regular basis that the end times are near, blood will need to be spilled, the muslim hordes are invading, etc. Moving the US embassy to Jerusalem was literally a move designed to please Christian fundamentalists who view that as a step towards the End Times, and the reaping that follows it.
At most, Christian fervor is more polite now, if only because there are fewer lands left for them to conquer and they're more comfortable.
The Iraq War for a start, Bush says God told him to "end tyranny in Iraq." Same with Afghanistan, and similar cases can be made for much of Western aggression for a while now.
"115 right-wing inspired terror incidents. 35% of these were foiled (meaning no attack happened) and 29% resulted in fatalities. These terror incidents caused 79 deaths.
"63 Islamist inspired terror incidents. 76% of these were foiled (meaning no attack happened) and 13% resulted in fatalities. These terror incidents caused 90 deaths.
"19 incidents inspired by left-wing ideologies (including eco-terrorism). 20% of these were foiled (meaning no attack happened) and 10% resulted in fatalities. These terror incidents caused 7 deaths."
I thought it was misinformed for the opposite reason. "Christian fervour" was responsible for the sailing of the Mayflower, the development of the modern public sphere, the majority of the high points of Western culture from Dante to Bach, and most of the values we live by today.
Not all Islam is the same. Indonesian islamic culture is not the same as Turkish, or Arabian. It's way too simplistic to lump the situation of every country together.
Are a minority of the people of Xinjiang committing violent acts because they want a Caliphate and to convert Han chinese, or are they doing it because the Uighurs are treated very badly by the Chinese government and they want autonomy and rallying around a common religious identity is their own recourse, especially if they want help from overseas?
Why do we not treat the Northern Irish who rallied around their religious identity and attracted the sympathies and support of American Irish?
Why when Tibetan Buddhists commit violence we don't say it's their religion and immediately start looking for geo-political or economic reasons?
When people are abused, tribes develop and they rally around whatever they have left: skin color, language, religion. While I have problems with Islam's doctrine, and religion in general (especially Abrahamic religions), it's extremely simplistic to attribute everyone's motivations and actions to the doctrine and not look at what drove individuals to commit acts against the state.
"...Why do we not treat the Northern Irish who rallied around their religious identity and attracted the sympathies and support of American Irish?
Why when Tibetan Buddhists commit violence we don't say it's their religion and immediately start looking for geo-political or economic reasons?..."
To be perfectly frank, a large part of the reason is just propaganda.
For instance, are Buddhists slaughtering muslims in Myanmar? Yes, without question. But a lot of our policymakers probably are thinking, "Man, we invested a whole lot in the Buddhists against the military government over there." (You know, Ang sang suu kyi and all that.) We, kind of, can't go back now. Maybe it's a lot like the sunk cost fallacy. But on a geopolitical scale? You're only willing to fold when the whole thing just collapses. And it hasn't, yet. So we keep trying to make it work.
The reason we don't accuse Buddhism when a Buddhist commits violence is because very rarely do they explicitly say they're committing whatever they're doing in the name of their religion, nor in anyway to propagate their religion. That is to say, you don't have a doctrinal, linear, absolute, form of religiosity that demands conversion, demands superiority, demands singularity as is fundamental to Islam. Muhammad and his Quran is supreme, whereas in Buddhism you kill Buddha, and Sutras while important are not absolute.
The Quran is equal parts a political construct, religion, and a sociological text that covers everything from spirituality, to the idea of man, to how to wage proper war. Whereas a Buddhist text is not, but rather simply a constellation of philosophical conjectures, and assertions that mostly pertain to one's own consciousness.
The question is simple. Does ideology, and in extension religion, motivate people to be violent? I dare you to actually bring and propose to reinterpret the Quran. It simply won't happen, and until and unless Muslims in majority seek to reform/reinterpret the Quran, like it has been done in Christianity, you cannot progress Islam.
I mean if we're going to be entirely reductive then I think we can also say that ALL ideologies are also the same. The Allies, and Axis powers were in essence both the same thing, and either party weren't in any way morally superior. The Nazis were the same thing as Americans, and whoever won the war is simply a mere coincidence.
In a similar sense not all religions are the same.
> In a similar sense not all religions are the same.
This is the one single point that is very hard to accept by the mainstream. Currently, the doctrine of all cultures being equal is something universal. If we accept the opposite view, there are many dangers on the way. Who is going to decide which culture/religion is better? By what criteria? What are the consequences? It's safer to declare equality, and this is what happened in the West - and any attempt to question that is perceived as a regressive view.
Well, it's quite clear they are not the same. But it's also clear that organized violence often arises out of tribalism and the devaluing of the out-group, and that our tendency towards tribalism can be extracted out of nearly anything we share in common, including religious doctrine even if that religious doctrine teaches peace or tolerance Buddhism isn't universally non-violent although Orientalism usually perceives it that way, and branches of it have become militaristic, on the flip side, branches of Islam like Sufi Islam, are perceived as more pacifist.
You're making the argument that cultural relativism is wrong. I'm making the argument that cultural supremacy often leads you to wrong reasoning about causes and effects, and ergo, bad policies. Are the Palestinians committing terrorist acts because they're Islamic? They're relatively more secular and cosmopolitan than some other Muslim communities, and Palestinian Christians also commit violence. If you ascribe their violence to religious grievances alone, then you are in a quandary. There's no way to solve the current situation without changing their religion. But if you recognize it as nationalistic and a response to geo-political grievances, then there is a political solution that may not require millions of people to be reprogrammed to a different religion.
Imagine if we ignored the Holocaust, and simply ascribed Jewish terrorism in the British Palestinian territories in the 1940s as a manifestation of Judaism -- that God gave them this land? Under that interpretation, it's scripture, and not the reaction to historic persecution, that drives the motivation to carve out a Jewish state. And yes, some far-right Jewish extremists believe this, but that's not the majority, and so you can't paint all of Judaism in this way, and we don't.
But we do paint all of Islam this way, and as a result, we engage in bad, immoral foreign policy.
The philosophic foundations that made it possible for Christians to transition from theocracy to secularity (separation between "church" and state) come from Islamic caliphates.
Take a look at the academic lineage of St. Thomas Aquinas and you will see what I am talking about. He studied from Saint Albert Magnus, a guy that studied from a vast bibliography left by the Islamic Caliphate of Al-Andalus (aka Islamic Spain) after the Spanish Reconquista.
Without St. Thomas Aquinas by the way, Reinassance scientists that made the subsequent "European enlightment" possible would have been burned by the Inquisition and we would be in the middle ages, or at least 200 years away from being technologically able to manufacture a computer. Instead of being on Hacker News you would be dying of plague or in some dumb war.
The Islamic civilization was not always as theocratic as it is today. This happened only after the Mongols razed them and nomadic tribes were left. These nomadic tribes were more militaristic and theocratic than the Islamic Caliphates razed by the Mongols.
Objectively, Western corporate-military ideology has been far deadlier in Asia and Africa than religious fundamentalism. The US has attacked far more countries and killed more civilians than religious extremists have.
This is disgusting. If you're so modern, respect a people's right to self-determination. Respect their freedom from oppression. Respect their freedom of religion. Respect the many rights of peaceful muslims in China, rather than make a ridiculous statement about global peace and islamic fundamentalism to become an apologist for China's consistent human rights violations on this matter. For someone who wants to espouse modernity you seem awfully uncritical of a totalitarian state.
As for your view on Islam, it's narrow. What you'll find is that literacy rates and living standards indeed have risen quite a lot, look at the data. Further, you'll often find many of the views people hold aren't necessarily religious views, but regional cultural ones. Rape, domestic violence, abortion of girls, dowry, child marriages are all prevalent threats to women in India among its 85% non-muslim population, just like it is in its muslim population, or that of say neighbouring India. Islam isn't the source of a patriarchal system as often as it's claimed, cultural practices that preceded Islam often are, nor is it as often the source of conflicts, the underlying geopolitical situation usually is. What I would say is that Islam can retard modernisation because it makes some conversations (that Muslims have every day in their own societies) much more difficult to have. But none of that has anything to do with the Chinese situation.
Stop saying that Islam is the problem. It's a facet, it ought to be considered, but it oughtn't be oppressed or seen as the sole or even primary reason different groups take political actions. It'd be as if I went around claiming the Troubles was a religious conflict or that Christianity was at the source of the violence despite it being a part of the story.
Seems to me that Christian fundamentalism is a far greater threat to world peace. Muslim extremists sometimes blow stuff up, Christian extremists invade and wreck entire countries.
I mean, Muslim extremists would do the same if they could, but they can’t. I’m more worried about those who can.
This crosses into religious flamewar. That invariably leads to shitty threads that destroy what's good about HN, and so is off topic here, therefore please don't.
Besides this being dystopian out of the western libertarian pov, i wonder what it actually does against crime? I imagine a crime free city would be an interesting human phenomenon without equal. The side effects of there not being any undetected and unprosecuted crime would be fascinating.
What is crime though? Do you want to live somewhere where spitting on a random sidewalk in front of the wrong camera means you're banned from flying for a year? Is the fear of criminal violence greater than the fear of state violence?
It won't be crime free. These types of authoritarian systems also tend to have deep corruption. In other words, there will be plenty of people "with the right connections" to evade the system.
The purpose is not to control 'crime', per se, the purpose is to repress the population. Uighers in China are effectively under permanent military occupation; it would be like asking whether the U.S. occupation of Baghdad 'actually did against crime': totally orthogonal to the actual purpose of these policies.
This paywall is defeating all my usual tricks, can someone help me out? On an iPhone and the web link didn’t work, nor did going through twitter or Facebook.
I don't really see the point of the excursion into my private life but I pay for my newspaper subscriptions myself, and I'm not really sure that being unable to pay for content somehow justifies stealing it.
I'm on Firefox but I assume it works for most browsers. Just change the site permissions so it can't store cookies. Then it'll work everytime you visit an article there. Works for Wired and others.
> As a result, more and more private prisons are being built: the incarceration archipelago is adding islands even faster than the South China Sea. Adrian Zenz of the European School of Culture and Theology in Kortal, Germany, has looked at procurement contracts for 73 private prisons. He found their total cost to have been $108 million, almost all spent since April 2017. Records from Akto, a county near the border with Kyrgyzstan, say it spent 9.6% of its budget on law enforcement (including private prisons) in 2017. In 2016 spending on law enforcement in the province was five times what it had been in 2007. By the end of 2017 it was ten times that: $1.24 billion.
Change a few keywords and it sounds more like the current situation in the USA.
> CCA revenue hit a whopping $1.79 billion in 2015, up from the year before, while GEO revenue hit an even higher $1.84 billion, likewise an improvement over their previous year.[0]
The situations don't compare well, even though the US too often uses terrorism as a guise to pursue global political goals.
Domestically there are 3.3 million Muslims in the US. There are ~50 detainees at Guantanamo Bay, with most of the former detainees having been released without charge. Some of them were charged as enemy combatants and or terrorists. And Guantanamo is widely considered a black mark on the US reputation.
The US has millions of Muslims that co-exist entirely peacefully with a very large Christian majority. After 9/11, at the height of anti-Muslim emotions in the US, Muslim Americans weren't put into camps by the tens or hundreds of thousands; they weren't slaughtered; their rights weren't wiped out; their culture and religion wasn't made illegal; the US didn't arrest them by the hundreds of thousands in targeted fashion. In fact, it's extraordinary just how peaceful and calm the situation after 9/11 actually was: if you believed the propaganda, America surely would have killed or arrested every Muslim in the country, except the propaganda is all a lie.
The US is not trying to destroy Islam in the US. The US is not interning millions of Muslims, trying to eradicate their culture and beliefs. The US is not torturing its Muslim population of 3.3 million. The US is not restricting their movement, their worship, or keeping them from owning guns or knives to defend themselves. The US is not razing their places of worship. The US is not building massive camps to put hundreds of thousands of Muslims into.
The US isn't doing anything even remotely similar to what's going on in China.
The parent's point wasn't to put the US on the same ethical level as China, but to encourage people to be skeptical when terrorism is used as justification for harmful policies.
1.) Start moving factories out China, back into your local country. It could be an upgrade for companies to upgrade to more automated factories. Furthermore, it fights against China's agenda of 'Made in China in 2025', which they expect to make....everything in China.
2.) Shame companies that are investing further in China, destroying jobs in your local country.
3.) Stop buying things that are made in China. China doesn't have a big enough consumer base; it requires developed countries to purchase their good.
4.) Let everyone know about China's concentration camps that affect 1M+ muslims.
FWIW, 20% of the world is China. They also manufacture a lot of things. Also it'a a huge country with a huge tapestry of interwoven peoples and problems.
"The world" isn't just going to turn the other cheek and oust what will probably be the next global superpower.
In other news, the US, NATO and friends in this century alone destroyed Iraq, Libya, almost destroyed Syria and Yemen and did a few other nasty things that resulted in at least a million dead. Do you have a big enough item 5 for that?
I guess I inferred that he was pointing out the futility of looking for a place to move factories that is untarnished in this regard. If that was his point, he's right. I can't really think of any place to move the factories to that wouldn't just be kind of pointless. I mean, pretty much everyone uses deadly force against muslims. (Maybe someplace where they don't have muslims? We might be able to move there?)
In any case, I should probably just let him, (or her), outline what their own point was.
If you want to dispense justice, then I should remind you that Lady Justice is blindfolded for a reason.
If you want to selectively punish China but not others then it's not justice, those who are punished immediately see that it has nothing to do with their bad behaviour.
> In other news, the US, NATO and friends in this century alone destroyed Iraq, Libya, almost destroyed Syria and Yemen and did a few other nasty things that resulted in at least a million dead. Do you have a big enough item 5 for that?
Destroyed? You'll need to provide some pretty strong proof to convince me those countries aren't there anymore.
Also the Syria and Yemen are civil wars. Don't know how you think it's reasonable to pin that on the "US, NATO and friends" (that is, unless you want to do something silly like trace things too far back to look for butterflies, ignore a lot of recent history, and remove all agency from the locals).
Proof? Libya has currently been broken into four or more warring states, each controlling some part of Libya.
>Also the Syria and Yemen are civil wars. Don't know how you think it's reasonable to pin that on the "US, NATO and friends".
By providing the various sides with arms and support. Though I think you can put much of the blame of the civil wars staring on the US, even if you disagree the wars are still dramatically different than it would be without US support.
>> Also the Syria and Yemen are civil wars. Don't know how you think it's reasonable to pin that on the "US, NATO and friends".
> Though I think you can put much of the blame of the civil wars staring on the US, even if you disagree the wars are still dramatically different than it would be without US support.
I think that's profoundly ignorant and belies lazy thinking, especially in relation to Syria.
The precise cause of the civil war was the domestic policies of the Assad regime [1] [2] [3] [4].
As for "providing the various sides with arms and support," I would be gobsmacked if you could show the US provided arms to Assad, especially in significant numbers. I recall significant dithering by the Obama administration over the level of support to give the rebels, and the fact that the US withheld arms to the rebels (over fears of inadvertently supporting Islamic extremists) is what allowed ISIS to grow so strong and eclipse the more liberal rebel groups.
> the wars are still dramatically different than it would be without US support.
If only because the support of other nations would have had a relatively greater effect [5].
I think your version is ~ between Disney and high school.
read your [5] carefully again (I am sure you haven't), and note the nice sidebar on the right "Covert United States involvement in regime change", it's not there by accident.
> SOTT is a research project of the non-profit Quantum Future Group (QFG) and is run by volunteers. The project includes collecting, arranging, and analyzing news items that seem to best reflect the movement of macrocosmic quantum energies on the planet. This research further includes noting whether or not human beings, individually and/or collectively, can actually remember from one day to the next the state of the planet, and whether they are able to accurately read that information and make intelligent decisions about their future based on that knowledge. In short, SOTT is an experiment.
> While the site began as a one-woman operation, this work quickly attracted some truly fine, open minds – people interested in truth, many of whom are scientific professionals and whose work on SOTT is anonymous for their own protection. SOTT and QFG has been attacked, suppressed, and marginalized by the Powers That Be in ways that no other work has been, leaving editors and researchers with the distinct impression that they must be on the right track.
"the Powers That Be" links a page about the "Matrix Control System."
> and note the nice sidebar on the right "Covert United States involvement in regime change", it's not there by accident.
1) That lists the Syrian civil war. 2) It doesn't contradict anything that I said.
The precise cause of the present Syrian civil war was the domestic policies of the Assad regime. No one pretends that the US was friendly or neutral towards that regime prior to the war. I would not surprise me if the US took some action against it prior to that, but those actions were unsuccessful and not causally linked to the civil war (beyond butterfly-effect level stuff).
>I think that's profoundly ignorant and belies lazy thinking, especially in relation to Syria.
Why is it ignorant and lazy? The US has been backing the Syrian opposition since 2006, and arming them since 2011. Additionally, it was the US invasion of Iraq and the subsequent mismanagement that allowed ISIL to gain power in the region.
Mostly beside the point though. The US has been an active participant in the war for a while now, and other outside support doesn't change that.
Civil war implies it was a local phenomenon -- it was not. Foreign invaders occupied territory which has thankfully been restored to the democratically elected government.
> I agree but how should this actually work? I feel like we have no options here. Everything comes from China, beginning with my mobile devices.
One option is to more or less emulate China. It's factories were built over the last 30 or so years. There's no reason that other countries couldn't start to replicate those capabilities and supply chains over a similar time period. It would probably require more automation to be economical in the West, however.
The hard part with that will be to force Western profit-uber-alles corporations to comply.
There's no "we, as the world". There are individual actors driven by their own motives. There will always be desire to make extra money by some of them by dealing with the shady governments.
The question is this: which is more meritocratic - a totalitarian system of governance that rewards merit or a caste system masquerading as an open society? Please answer a or b.
Another question: system a: a developer with an idea and skills sitting in Montana believes (correctly) that the chances of getting funded are exponentially higher for people from Stanford university (or some other affiliation). System b : there is a similar guy sitting in a a rural shithole in China and he believes that he has an equal shot at vc funding as the next guy. Which system wins?
In the West we have a false sense of security that totalitarianism will inevitably fail. We've seen so many examples of fallen tyrannical states. But many ideas fail the first few times they're tried. China seems committed to making totalitarianism "work."
It's hard to think of any more dangerous invention. Even nuclear weapons aren't as dangerous as a sustainable model for modern tyrannical government.
This is an invention that would be exported and widely adopted.
The liberal democratic model of government spread around the world not just because the people saw it work in America and decided that's what they wanted, but also because the ruling aristocrats saw that it would be net better for them. The French Revolution probably helped convince them it compared favorably to the guillotine.
If another model is pioneered and proven that's better for the ruling class, it won't be difficult to find regimes eager to adopt it.
One could argue that “totalitarianism” was the default government form for most of history.
The problem is, the higher we go on the Maslow pyramid, the more likely it is for it to fail. You just can’t have a huge mass of creative, inventive people without them complaining about leadership (and wanting to improve it).
And totalitarianism by definition has problems accepting criticism.
The only way for totalitarianism to “work” is if the rulers are both much smarter than the population as a whole and also benevolent.
Regarding China, let’s see. These kinds of regimes don’t fail immediately. Just the cracks get bigger and bigger. From what I heard there’s a consolidation of power going on, that’s generally a sure sign of the first cracks appearing.
The amount of protests in China has been exploding over the past decade(s). I didn't even know until someone mentioned it on here a few months back, but iirc its gone from maybe a few thousand per year in the 90s to well over 100,000 in recent years.
The Chinese rich I've interacted with are also (in my experience, at least - I don't have stats to support this) really ignorant of how bad a lot of their countrymen have it. A friend of mine's father is some sort of government official in a tier 1 or 2 city, and he's told me that the rich and poor are segregated enough that he himself didn't even realize his family was anything other than middle class until he came to Canada and saw it wasn't exactly normal to have parents who can afford 100k+ annual tuition, luxury cars and apartments, etc.
>The only way for totalitarianism to “work” is if the rulers are both much smarter than the population as a whole and also benevolent.
I dont think thats realistic anymore. Once they are able to hit first and hit hard when opposition forms, they are pretty much untouchable.
The whole argument, of autocratic regimes having a higher chance of collapsing the longer the reign looks like a naive outdated approach to me.
It bets on a critical mass of opposition forming. With total surveillance this wont happen.
A successful mass protest has to start somewhere. If you arrest those first people willing to risk everything you quell the entire thing. Its the basic concept of 1984. The only thing holding back this dystopia was the lack of a big brother state with sufficient insight.
There mass surveillance back then was child's play in comparison what is possible today. There is a tipping point which is hopefully still in the future, where dissent is detectable and predictable enough that regimes are no longer at risk to collapse.
If you look at collapses of authoritarian regimes due to public pressure, they happen to a similar pattern. A small group of people start a protest and depending on how hated the regime is and how bad the living condition for most people are, others will join in, the more the less likely it becomes for them to be individually picked out.
This only works if the initial small group has enough time to motivate enough people to join in so that it snowballs. Earlier approaches were to minimize the time the small groups had to snowball with quick and hard actions, but with more and more surveillance, it becomes possible to target people even before they join. At a certain point it becomes possible to watch over every last citizen and target anyone who might be willing to start something like this in the future.
> You just can’t have a huge mass of creative, inventive people without them complaining about leadership (and wanting to improve it).
You create an upper middle class for the "creatives" and you restrict the areas of creativity to military and industrial use.
Most well off people that I know are happy to think the poor deserve to be poor and repressed (different people have different reasons for justifying it. Few seen to really care).
That didn’t work for the USSR, why would it work for China? As long as some things are off limits / as long as people know they arn’t alowed to research this or that, then they’ll be at a long term disadvantage to those that do.
China was here before. Cutting yourself off from the world just means you eventually find yourself having fallen behind everyone else.
> That didn’t work for the USSR, why would it work for China?
The CCP does have the benefit of learning from the failures of the Soviets.
> China was here before. Cutting yourself off from the world just means you eventually find yourself having fallen behind everyone else.
That mainly happened because they were so dominant in their sphere that they didn't bother themselves with far off areas that seemed primitive to them. I'm pretty sure the CCP has learned from that mistake.
> If they had learned from that mistake they wouldn’t be trying to wall the internet off.
They're walling off foreign political ideas and avenues for domestic political organization, not foreign technological advancements. They are very explicit about that.
Nothing is forever. The current regime in China won't be forever either. The question is how long.
After Augustus Rome still had a couple of hundred years of expansion where a nationalist could argue, “hey look at that! Things are still going good.” But they couldn’t outrun the rot in the system forever.
After Xi will China get another strongman? I think this is the key. If there are a series of total dictators things will decay. Whatever justifications a dictator uses for their rules, ultimately they are going to try to implement policies that keep themselves on top first.
This is a great point. Xi is a strongman dictator and has arguably harmed Communist rule a lot more than he realizes by eliminating term limits. If the next ruler is some fool who cannot handle the crises that a country inevitably faces... it could lead to the country's undoing.
Which is why I am personally a lot more alarmed at the current US Presidency than most of my peers. Inept rulers have historically been the best predictors of a civilization's downfall. The fervent opposition to the administration by ordinary US citizens gives me hope but if Republicans continue to hold on to power after November, I really do feel that all will be lost.
It's one thing to invoke Abraham Maslow for aesthetic purposes during flowery discussion, but Maslow isn't followed much or at all by current researchers.
I can’t say I follow modern economics too closely, but does anyone really dispute that the need for food is a lower level one than the need for academic achievements, for example?
Do we actually need creative inventive people? Maybe at some point we run low on truly innovative new ideas that are truly practical. Maybe we just start re-skinning the old ideas and selling them for no real benefit, and could do without the whole process. Maybe that's already in the process of happening.
I very much doubt it is sustainable. The cost of policing is quite substantial and the productivity lost is hard to replace which adds to the cost.
What we are seeing today is essentially a low intensity conflict[0] not unlike what took place in white Rhodesia/Namibia, Northern Ireland during the troubles, etc. There is a economic reason why these conflicts could not last indefinitely, no matter what ideologies drive them.
Northern Ireland (in the 1900s) was less about resistance to a tyrannical state, and much more about a population split 50/50ish who had hated each other for a few hundred years. British action there was far from exemplary, but had the people of Northern Ireland woken up one day to find they were part of the Republic of Ireland, precisely no problems would have been solved.
I think if the state enlists and coopts a sufficient percentage of the local population, then it can work indefinitely, if the gov't provides enough in terms of basic needs. The idea of local administrative committees and youth organizations as an arm to make others toe the line is not a foreign concept to the CCP.
There really isn't one when most of the Uighur population is impoverished if not otherwise disaffected, and the local Han population are effectively incentivised to leave Xinjiang for better prospects elsewhere. Between 2010 and 2013, there have been 400,000 fewer Han Chinese living in Xinjiang through a combination of natural population decline and emigration[0]; this represents a solid 2% of total population and there is no evidence to suggest the trend is slowing down.
Heavy policing may put a lid on the problem for now but in the long run it will only undo several generations of hard work pacifying the region.
I see what you are saying. I think there are ways to do it. The Soviets were successful in their central Asian and Caucasus "Republics". They tended to coopt a local leader and got them to do their bidding. Even Russia now with Chechnya has been able to use the same formula. It's not impossible for the CCP to do the same.
China has a social credit system that is locked in with this totalitarian system. Based on how irrational humans are I fully expect a huge spike in suicides. Once people get into so much social debt that people stop associating with them and they are locked out of work and simple things such as garbage collection they will start to end their lives.
I want to be wrong about suicide and right about social credit systems though....
What if you're wrong? You have doubts, where's the evidence?
> What we are seeing today is essentially a low intensity conflict
This part I don't see at all. Who are the sides in this low intensity conflict? The examples in Wikipedia are distinct identities or states. What identities are in contention in China?
> What if you're wrong? You have doubts, where's the evidence?
There's not enough data to make predictions like that. But one very good reason for optimism is that China's current totalitarian stability is an unstable false vacuum. It's sustained by the outrageously rapid economic growth seen in the decades since the cultural revolution.
Basically: if you're Chinese, your grandparents (if they were lucky) survived a devastating world war and invasion by Japan, an even more devastating civil war, and a yet more devastating still famine forced on them by the nutjobs who won the civil war.
And now their grandkids are all running around with smartphones in their pockets, collecting college diplomas and international graduate degrees, vacationing in Thailand and Hawaii, and generally dancing on the world stage like the Americans do.
That kind of success pays for a lot of totalitarian angst. But it won't forever. These folks' kids aren't going to be happy with only 2% GDP growth as payment for their political dominance by a corrupt elite. The proletariat never has been.
The Chinese proletariat isn’t running around the world colecting foreign graduate degrees; they are working in factories in Shenzhen to feed their children back in the village. But you’re right in that it’s typically privileged young people who are behind liberal revolutions.
>What if you're wrong? You have doubts, where's the evidence?
I am not in the clairvoyant business. Expressing doubt is as much as I could do.
>This part I don't see at all. Who are the sides in this low intensity conflict?
Armed insurrection has been ongoing on since the early 90s[0] loosely organised by ETIM[1] as well as various affiliated Islamist groups in neighboring countries especially of late. They are backed by sympathetic donors in the Gulf states, Turkey and (allegedly) the CIA. Since then there have been several high profile riots and terrorist attacks both in[2] and out[3] of Xinjiang.
Obviously they are fighting against the police and the army loyal to the government. In addition there are local entities known as Bingtuan[4] that are best described as a military-industrial complex with several company towns at strategic locations throughout the region. They are under the direct command of the state department and are expected to counter the provincial leadership should they become insubordinate.
There are also smaller groups of Hui (Chinese Muslims) seeking to consolidate their identity and Kazakh irredentists seeking reunification with Kazakhstan, but they are much less significant and tend to be allied with he government against the Uighur.
> I very much doubt it is sustainable. The cost of policing is quite substantial and the productivity lost is hard to replace which adds to the cost.
Why do you think the Chinese government can't sustain the cost? Intensive policing is manpower intensive, and China presently has manpower to spare. They also don't have to deal with democratic pressures to contain the cost and redirect the savings to programs that benefit the general public.
In my view, they are not sustaining the cost. We are, by buying their products. If totalitarianism becomes universal, that's when it ceases to be sustainable.
The ruling class has luxuries that they could not have developed for themselves without them being broadly available. I'm thinking of things like cell phones, the Internet, and possibly the money system.
I love that we're talking about how bad totalitarianism is meanwhile we literally have the upperclass exporting jobs to China for a quick buck and president who campaigned on bringing them back who just betrayed his base (and his country) by helping a Chinese company keep their jobs... Living in the free-ist country in the world apparently means you're free to sell out your fellow man to the totalitarian state overseas.
I think _that_ is the sustainability problem we need to talk about. We're feeding them and starving ourselves.
That's correct. Due to the one-child policy and other causes, China is already suffering a worker shortage, and the demographers say it will get much worse in the future.
Technology is making the price plummet of policing a large population. Natural language recognition, face recognition, location tracking, pattern-matching, deep packet inspection, graph traversal, and of course AI can all run unattended pointing out dissidents to the authorities who just have to go round them up and reeducate them. Oh and guess what China is making a big investment in lately?
TBH, AI worries me because it removes much of the human cooperation required to keep such regimes in place, however it is probably still a few decades ahead of us.
The false-positive/negative rates are the key here. If they are not too bad, then yeah, it may 'work' in the short term. If they are sky high, like most facial recognition is today, then it's not going to work. Word will leak out very quickly that the surveillance is worthless.
For an authoritarian police state, false positives are fine as a show of force.
If the system mistakes you for someone else, you might get your door kicked down, your dog shot, and get dragged in and interrogated. Then you will come to realize what will happen if you really run afoul of them. So maybe you think twice if you're planning an infraction in the future.
So they may well want to round up the top N suspects, knowing that N-1 are innocent.
Yes, but this is a separate issue than surveillance. You can have totalitarianism and surveillance just as well as with democracy (not ever typical though).
Ancient Egypt seems to be the exception in history. Such reliable agriculture and continued population concentration around the Nile are very peculiar situations that have no parallels elsewhere.
If Egypt was truly superior, it really should not have been so easily conquered by Ptolemy and then Rome which both had a much less authoritarian society.
Your argument does not preclude selective policing; if for example policing on Han ethnicities remains sufficiently light, this can remain indefinitely. Slavery as well as oppression of minorities used to be seen as part and parcel of human society; one should not doubt so easily that oppressive regimes can be sustainable
The Marxist/Maoist idea of the Chinese would be that the government is just part of the superstructure on top of the base. The base being the current state of the forces of production in their continual self-evolution and reinvention, and the relations of production flowing from that.
In other words, the economic system determines the political system. When hunter-gatherers became farmers, the political system changed. When farming as the center made way for manufacturing and industry, the political system changed (as did culture).
I don't see this as much different than Americans driving Lakota onto the Standing Rock Indian Reservation. Just two years ago the US federal government arrested and injured many on that reservation. Or Americans driving Vietnamese onto strategic hamlets. Or locking Japanese up in the 1940s. I don't see what innovation the Chinese have made.
You're never allowed to mention anything bad that's ever happened in the West, that's whataboutism. Randomly bringing up extremist scenarios like Mao's genocide of landlords or Stalin's gulags to prematurely shut down moderate pro-left discussions like "let's make healthcare a little more socialized in the US"? That's not whataboutism™.
You've hit the nail on the head. But I think there are two separate issues at play here. The first issue is the re-writing of the social contract that can only be done by implementing mass surveillance. This approach is arguably justifiable and gives the government more control to optimize how things work. The second issue is having one party government where there is not opposition. To me this approach is definitely dangerous long term. Complete tyranny is fantastic when you have a great dictator, however there's just no evidence that this model is sustainable. If China gets too crazy, the best and brightest will want to leave the country. It's definitely a crazy and bold experiment and it's definitely working in the short term.
There are good reasons to believe China's situation is in fact quite unique among totalitarian concepts and very difficult to replicate. China's situation represents a very complex, multi-generational cultural-political totalitarianism, and it required a unique context economically for it to occur. I've never seen another nation come even remotely close to replicating what it takes to set that up.
Take Turkey for example, under Erdoğan. Let's say he is, or wants to be, a traditional dictator. He's probably gone in 10 or 20 years due to age. His regime ends with him, very likely, because there's no broad cultural underpinning to his regime and legacy. That's the case in most totalitarian examples of the last century.
The cultural reformations that enabled the China boom, starting with Deng Xiaoping, are being systematically rolled backwards.
The economic gains from the late 1970s to ~2009, were very easy compared to the challenges that come next to continue pushing the per capita results ever higher. When you're starting from $175 GDP per capita in 1980, just about any meaningful improvement at all in the system will get you to $1,000 or $2,000 per capita.
My point being, only when the tide goes out do you see who is swimming naked, to borrow a line from Warren Buffett. China's vast growth no doubt masks immense problems that only become clearer in their scope and risk as their 30 year economic expansion matures (as it is now).
The people of China will tolerate a lot of things if you take them from $200 GDP per capita to $10,000. China is not going to be able to replicate that climb again, from here forward. That will have consequences, as the social contract in China requires perpetual, preferably rapid, improvement.
What China has done is extraordinarily expensive. They paid for it with a unique, historically singular export machine and trade surplus and starting from a context of a near zero welfare state (diverts capital from investment & growth) and from a setup with nearly maximum economic slack (easy to fill in for decades).
What other nations have anything like that setup to replicate from? Russia (fascist dictatorship, long totalitarian history) for example doesn't have that sort of extreme economic slack, its GDP per capita is already up where China is at today; the same goes for Turkey. The Russian system is mature, slow growth, with considerable existing structural financial demands that prevent the vast free use of capital as in China.
China's rules today are not the same as China's rules in 1996 or 2006. Culturally they've lost a lot of the modest freedom gains that were acquired over decades, in just the last five or six years. How does that impact the ability of their economic system to continue to scale over time, as the oppression ramps up?
These are two different systems - Deng vs Xi - not a continuing of the same system. Xi gets to ride on the accomplishments of the Deng revolution, including the financial capabilities it made possible. I think it's a fair question as to whether China can keep moving forward as they previously were, while simultaneously removing the Deng approach that made it all possible in the first place.
Successful "tyranny" could be analogous to successful multicellular life. We could be witnessing a similar development in the history of life. But note that multicellular life never wiped out single cells, and in fact we live symbiotically with a large number. Plus, cancer is apparently not something that can be eliminated.
> In the West we have a false sense of security that totalitarianism will inevitably fail.
At the height of civil war the western classical liberal democracies looked weak and near collapse while Soviet looked too strong and awesome until one day it just collapsed. It is a bubble boy vs Sewer Rat thing. The bubble boy looks extremely clean and insulated from bad things until one day it just dies of common cold. The filthy NY sewer rat however survives carrying in itself 10 different types of plagues.
> China seems committed to making totalitarianism "work."
We need to take a backseat and realise that American media simply does not get China, India or Japan. They are judging the world from their own spectacles which might be wrong. An average Chinese today is freerer than an average Chinese 30 years ago despite all efforts by their government. An average American today is less free than an average American 30 years ago.
I am incredible hopeful for India and China in upcoming efforts. I recently spoke to a Chinese attache at local embassy. He was as ecstatic to be outside China as now he could access Youtube and Facebook. He considered his own government moves to ban these services in his country absolutely stupid and saw them as a hindrance to help China emerge as a soft power.
> At the height of civil war the western classical liberal democracies looked weak and near collapse w hile Soviet looked too strong and awesome until one day it just collapsed.
FYI the American Civil War ended in 1865 while the first Soviet was in 1905. And the first ~10 years after the ‘17 revolution were absolutely terrible in the Soviet Union. So your statement just isn’t correct.
Yup Trump, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, the 2008 meltdown, Zuckerberg turning the internet into his private sewage factory etc etc are all shining achievements of western wisdom and deep thought. The poor unimaginative illiterates of the Orient just don't get it. If only they understood what magic freedom can produce.
Btw I suggest you reread your French Revolution history. The aristocracy was very much back in power within a year of the king getting his head chopped off. And then they propped up Napoloen who decided he needed to conquer the world. The next 100 years were spent with the elites of one European country or another colonising and pilaging most of South America, Africa and Asia. So much for freedom and equality and the aristocracy learning any lesson. They are still more of less in power with the same mindless global ambitions unless you haven't seen the inequality numbers and have your head buried deep in the sand.
Within a few decades of the French revolution half of the European governments were overthrown and replaced with constitutional Monarchies. The other half that resisted were forced into increasing totalitarianism and in a few more decades themselves overthrown in year zero revolutions.
The one country to avoid this, Britain, learned the lesson of the French Revolution. They maed enough reforms that there was no constituency for revolution.
> The one country to avoid this, Britain, learned the lesson of the French Revolution. They maed enough reforms that there was no constituency for revolution.
Er, Britain had been a constitutional monarchy for a long time before the French Revolution, and many of the others made reforms rather than being overthrown, and in many cases, like Britain, well before the French Revolution.
Both of you are somewhat right. The various events of the late seventeenth century helped prevent revolution from popping up around the French Revolution, but their political system at the time prevented most of the country from having a role in politics. This was a wide issue in Europe, and the Revolutions of 1848 were largely about that issue. Britain had addressed that issue with the Reform Acts, allowing their government to stay stable through the period.
> Seems many Americans are willing to crap all over the 2nd Amendment, which is specifically in place to prevent totalitarian government.
The 2nd Amendment specifies that a well regulated militia is necessary for a free state, and that the right to keep and bear arms cannot be abridged by the Federal government.
Nothing in that amendment specifically mentions the purpose of preventing totalitarian government. That's a modern interpretation, albeit one currently upheld by the Supreme Court.
> Nothing in that amendment specifically mentions the purpose of preventing totalitarian government.
You have to take into account the context. It was written and ratified by people who'd just staged a revolution against what they described as a "tyrannical" regime, often using their own personal weapons.
To note that the Constitution doesn't mention "totalitarianism" is to note that it doesn't contain an anachronism. It's a modern coinage that's not to far in meaning from "tyranny."
> Seems many Americans are willing to crap all over the 2nd Amendment, which is specifically in place to prevent totalitarian government.
Exactly. If America has learned anything from the past half century of foreign military adventures, it should be that a big modern Army can't easily defeat a motivated insurgency that has the support and sympathy in the local population.
The 2nd Amendment may have a lot of costs, but the private gun ownership it provides for would definitely make it much more difficult for a domestic totalitarian regime to establish itself in the US.
I wonder if the winning side of a US military civil war would capture territory "nation building" style or if they would just use asymmetric reprisals. If it's the latter, civilian gun ownership is just going to get neighbors of insurgents blown up.
I'm also pretty sure that Iraqi civilians didn't have much access to small arms prior to the destabilization of the country. Didn't slow down the insurgency any.
Successful insurgencies these days are supplied with heavy weapons and training by outside powers. You’re not going to do anything against armour and air power with small arms.
> Successful insurgencies these days are supplied with heavy weapons and training by outside powers. You’re not going to do anything against armour and air power with small arms.
An insurgency has a lot of freedom in choosing its targets. If they don't have the weapons to directly attack armor or air power, they can avoid them. And with armor, there are other options, such as IEDs.
Also, I'd bet that an American insurgency against a totalitarian American government would get outside arms and support, as well as sympathy, support, and defections from actual US Army units. I don't think the US military would be able to maintain the same level of cohesion it has during foreign wars in a civil war.
A totalitarian regime would probably repeal the 2nd amendment as one of it's first acts, the the existing stock of small arms and ammunition would be enough for an insurgency or rebellion to start. I'd be much harder for a disarmed population to begin resistance.
I think that's a pipe dream. If it was a right wing totalitarian government, which is imho the likely lean of any totalitarian government in the us, there would be little defection or protest from folks in uniform.
Think about any standoff between protesters and police or national guard in the us. Lefty students or unionists or whatever get shot or peppersprayed by cops or national guardsmen with a family to feed and a career defined by obeying the rules - that equation will not change with scale.
What is the "high cost" you refer to? There is incessant anti-2nd Amendment propagandizing by the leftist media who wish to extinguish the Bill of Rights as the continued assault on individual freedom in the US continues apace. You think mass shootings are because of arms available to civilians? That means that obesity would be caused by forks.
No, the problem in the US is cultural rot brought about by Fabian forces. They have done quite a number on this country since the end of WWII. Actually, it started even earlier than that when Marxism went into full swing in the late 1800s. We weren't immune from leftists, we just never had the full-on communist revolution that other nations suffered.
But to return to upbraiding you--no, I don't think that guns have any huge downside in that most of the people killed by guns either by suicides or accidents, probably would have died some other way. The so-called epidemic of gun violence in the US is a complete fabrication. Yes, there is "gun crime" in inner cities. A lot of it, in fact. But lacking guns, there would still be "knife crime" or "bat crime" or "bare handed crime." That kind of stuff never goes away.
If you genuinely believe this argument, wouldn't the logical parellal thought be to starve the government of manpower and weapons? Instead, most who espouse the '2 amendment is needed against tyranny' position are often voting for massive increases to defense and policing budgets. Not picking a fight, it just seems ineffective and incongruous to think that holding on to an AR15 in your home will help you against billion dollar integrated policing and surveillance systems...
> In the West we have a false sense of security that totalitarianism will inevitably fail.
Can you point to a serious author on the subject suggesting so? For example, Hannah Arendt:
> The frightening coincidence of the modern population explosion with the discovery of technical devices that, through automation, will make large sections of the population 'superfluous' even in terms of labor, and that, through nuclear energy, make it possible to deal with this twofold threat by the use of instruments beside which Hitler's gassing installations look like an evil child's fumbling toys, should be enough to make us tremble.
and
> Humans, in so far as they are more than a completion of functions able to react, whose lowest and therefore most central are the purely animal like reactions, are simply superfluous for totalitarian systems. Their goal is not to erect a despotic regime over humans, but a system by which humans are made superfluous. Total power can only be achieved and guaranteed when nothing else matters except the absolutely controllable willingness to react, marionettes robbed of all spontaneity. Humans, precisely because they are so powerful, can only be completely controlled when they have become examples of the animal like species human.
and
> We don't know a perfected totalitarian power structure, because it would require the control of the whole planet. But we know enough about the the still preliminary experiments of total organization to realize that the very well possible perfection of this apparatus would get rid of human agency in the sense as we know it. To act would turn out to be superfluous for people living together, when all people have become an example of their species, when all doing has become an acceleration of the movement mechanism of history or nature following a set pattern, and all deeds have become the execution of death sentences which history and nature have given anyway.
Notice the "very well possible" in "the very well possible perfection of this apparatus would get rid of human agency in the sense as we know it".
I suspect that we largely ignore this author and others not because they're too silly to even refute, but because we can't refute what they point out, and are unwilling to shoulder the responsibility that follows from that.
In a nutshell, I'd say a desire for power is just a futile attempt to fill a hole that cannot be filled that way, that even makes it bigger (kinda like people rationalize and identify with the abuser out of cowardice, reaping only more cowardice in the end). But "a boot stamping on a human face, forever" isn't necessarily static. The boot can keep stamping, and the human face can keep getting infinitely thin.
> Already history has in a sense ceased to exist, ie. there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted, and the exact sciences are endangered as soon as military necessity ceases to keep people up to the mark. Hitler can say that the Jews started the war, and if he survives that will become official history. He can’t say that two and two are five, because for the purposes of, say, ballistics they have to make four. But if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could become five if the fuhrer wished it. That, so far as I can see, is the direction in which we are actually moving, though, of course, the process is reversible.
-- George Orwell
"if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives".
That was then. Today we have great thoughts such as
> One could argue that “totalitarianism” was the default government form for most of history."
and
> Successful "tyranny" could be analogous to successful multicellular life. We could be witnessing a similar development in the history of life.
Very well put and also very true. Most people are absolutely unaware how fast big shifts happen. The invention of national-socialism with the foundation of the NSDAP happened 1920. A few years later a highly weaponized and aggressive Germany invaded Poland in 1939. 19 years from zero to war.
Considering how much more technology has evolved since then, it isn't far-fetched to think that this pace of devolution into totalitarianism could happen much faster today.
In fact, this is precisely what happened with ISIS. I shudder to think what might have happened if the powers to be had not put aside their differences to fight a common foe.
Don't ignore the different philosophical foundation of Asian societies. Confucianism is quite different from the Western line of tradition starting from the Greeks. Confucianism emphasizes community and obedience more, which is more compatible with mass surveillance.
What Xi is doing is not Confucianism. Confucianism had an elaborate set of rules that everyone, from the top down, was required to follow. Xi is basically making up the rules as he goes along.
> In the West we have a false sense of security that totalitarianism will inevitably fail.
The West has had, for the last 200 years (and arguably for the last 500) the advantage that its economic system is better than its rivals. This is a massive, game-changing advantage. But it's not obvious to me that the West is still ahead economically -- look at China's growth rates over the last 40 years. Admittedly they are coming from behind, but because of their population they only need 1/4 of the GDP per head of the USA to be ahead on total GDP.
I would say there's about a 50% possibility that China will make an authoritarianism that works, that's at least as successful economically as the West. And if that comes about it will be a real game-changer. And frankly, I don't think the West is up to the task of meeting the challenge; certainly I would not bet on Trump, Merkel, May et al doing the right thing.
The lengths that China goes to control the minority (although it's about half of the region) is astounding. I can't imagine what little privacy they have, between constant physical checks, personal party spies and electronic surveillance.
I heard once that in a world where everyone agrees to being spied on by carrying a mobile, the mobile-less will be suspect. I never thought this would actually be the case, but there it is: people must install government spyware on their personal devices.
Reading this gave me a new appreciation of how human rights are broken in China. I sincerely hope that those people recover their freedom.
As recent history had shown, even Western countries, proud of their freedom and Enlightenment values, may realize that something bad is happening when it's too late. Seeing how surveillance is making comparatively small advances here, I'm slightly more worried that privacy might be completely extinguished from the world one day.
You refer to a very qualified and narrow "identical". In the general sense, before an Uighur commits a crime, are they treated in an equal manner to a Han Chinese before they commit a crime? In all manners of expression, association, travel and employment, for example?
It would definitely ease how the Han Chinese feel about Uighurs being ungrateful.
For those that don't know, China as affirmative action policies for Uighurs and other minorities. They were exempt from the 1-child policy, they get additional social welfare, and have an easier time getting to college and government jobs.
So with all these perks, most Han Chinese see them as being ungrateful when they commit or support terrorist acts, like the Kunming massacre in 2014 or suicide bombing police stations.
As a European I hope we find the courage and the strength to allow ourselves to be militarized as we where at the beginning of the 20th century. I think to a certain degree a military conflict with China would not be a bad thing. Here we have achived quite a few things of which each of his own would be worth dying for.
Typical western values are seriously underrated and are not taken seriously.
Instead of military spending, we should get our education and politics act together. We should be at least ready to pivot to self sufficiency.
We depend on Putin's mercy for energy, because a lot of us skipped game theory in kindergarden apparently. Someone mentioned cell phones. Yes that'd be good, to have a full end to end electronics pipeline around here. And so on.
We have very little military spending. The ukraine invasion was a very successfull testrun for Putin.
We in Europe we keep ourselve weak and defenseless. Why?
We're not defenseless. The Ukraine just isn't part of either the NATO or the EU and not really close to the rest of Europe. If Russia was about to invade part of Finland the reaction would be quite different.
I don't think he really understands the full implications of modern warfare between global powers. He's likely thinking in terms of firearms and tanks. Maybe some airplanes.
The economist and other media love pointing fingers at others. That's easy to do. Everyone knows China is not a democracy but we are which makes surveillance here much more problematic.
Yet we do not see any serious examination from the economist on threats to democracy from surveillance. Infact it is at the forefront on hit pieces on Snowden accusing him of treachery [1] which means their concern for 'surveillance' is entirely fabricated.
Why is Assange still stranded and Snowden in Russia? What consequences has there been from the revelations on western security services and rubber stamp courts? No answer from the economist because they aren't even asking the question. Yet another cheap ploy to use 'human rights', 'democracy' and 'freedom' to attack other countries while soiling these principles.
The economist is a principal cheerleader of neoliberalism, shock therapy and other exploitative economic policies that directly lead to corruption, theft of national resources by uncontrolled privatization and oligarchies in third world countries. Nothing to do with democracy.
This kind of hypocrisy and grandstanding has run its course, its a dangerous distraction designed to lull readers into complacency while entrenched interests that publications like the economist support make democracy more and more meaningless.
A thought experiment, from an ignorant Canadian to those Chinese who accept ethnic discrimination in national policy:
Generation(s) of Han Chinese and Uighurs get together and start having children. An act of loving subversion, if you will. At what level of mixing does the dangerous Uighur contribution become safe to you? 50%? 25%? 12.5%?
It's not about race but rather their patriotism towards China.
The largest group of Muslims in China are the Hui Muslims (about 10 million of them). They are the descendants of the Muslims that were absorbed during conquests in the Tang and Ming Dynasty.
They eventually integrated and married other Han Chinese. They are still Muslim, but also identify as Chinese. There are also affirmative action programs for them, making it easier for them to into good colleges and government jobs.
They were also exempt from the 1-child policy.
They are how Asians are in the US, the "model minority."
> It's not about race but rather their patriotism towards China.
Please explain, then, why race is a category used to reduce a person's numeric "trustworthiness score" in China. If one is ethnically Uighur instead of Han or if one has received religious education then one is deemed by the government as "less trustworthy" -- not because of behaviour or evidence of a crime but simply because of ethnicity.[1][2][3]
Since this score is used to determine whether freedoms are restricted (e.g. travel, communication, and forced "re-education"), it is racism.
What happens if we find out China is committing atrocities like ethnic cleansing? Will we implement some economic sanctions or will we send in the troops?
Perhaps the most important reason authoritarian regimes fail in the modern world has to do with decision making. In order to make good decisions, you need accurate information and a good discussion of alternatives and their likely outcomes.
The modern world is so complex and changes so much that the only way to get this is a free flow of information in which everyone can honestly say what is happening in their particular part of the society, and everyone can make suggestions and offer evaluations.
Authoritarian regimes shut all of this off, such as through turning the press into a governmental propaganda machine, and dictating what university professors can research.
The consequence is the top decision makers live in an epistemic bubble and become increasingly out of touch with reality, and increasingly subject to group-think. And that in turn leads to poorer and poorer decisions, and eventually the system comes to an end. I think it is quite predictable that this is where Xi's regime is heading over the long term.
I have first hand experience in Xinjiang a decade ago. I can only imagine it's getting worse.
What I remember most was:
1) nearly hourly MMS messages to my flip phone from unknown numbers with an unknown attachment. Since my phone was bought outside China, the MMS attachment didn't automatically open the likely spyware.
2) Being followed and monitored by plainclothes policemen
3) Having my hotel room searched while I was away. Having police come to my hotel room to interrogate me but lacking access because I had the only key to the room (very very cheap hotel).
4) Armed convoys of Chinese army soldiers constantly going up and down major streets.
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 353 ms ] threadThey don't care about things until a mob of similar people care about it. It is group thinking and virtue signaling at its peak
The problem is people clinging to old time religious beliefs that women are inferior and must be veiled and that infidels are not worthy
We've slowly dispelled Christian fervor (which used to be just as bad as Islamic fundamentalism) by slowly improving the scientific literacy rate and living standards in the west. Must of the Islamic countries haven't seen growth like this. How do you root these out?
Not sure if China's hard handed approach may work. Maybe it will, who knows. Maybe it will fail. But we at least must do something about it
Like oppress an entire region of people who aren't committing violence to get to the handful who are?
The left's deep love and devotion to a religion that oppresses their other favoured groups - gays and women - astonishes me.
I'm sick to see how much America is getting complicit with this. and happy to see that most of Europe realizes what is really going on there.
Edit: The karma of my comment proves my point.
Charitably, myself, I assume this isn't actually the case, but it could create that impression. FWIW.
A Gazan friend told me this very week actually that they wish Israel would re-enter the Gaza strip and remove Hamas from power. Israel of course is not interested.
Reality is often much more complicated.
Suppose a universe in which Israel didn't exist. Would Egypt have closed off its border with Gaza? Not a chance. That means it has everything to do with Israel. If you think Israel and its allies wouldn't respond with pressure on Egypt the moment it'd open up a border with Gaza, precisely because of Israel, you're fooling yourself.
As for your anecdotal stories about a friend in Gaza, they're as meaningless as if I said I had a Gazan friend who said the opposite.
The notion you've got Gazans risking their lives protesting against Israel (with over ten thousand injuries and 100 dead in the past months, 100% Palestinian) but not Hamas apparently isn't telling to you.
And if you think Palestinian lack of satisfaction with its leaders at any point in its history (e.g. Hamas now) has nothing to do with Israeli oppression (including the closed borders and the destruction of Palestinian economy every time there's an lopsided violent clash) with the backing of the world's superpower, you're also fooling yourself.
* My stories are anecdotal, but my work for the past year has almost 100% to do with Gaza and it's internals conflict. I wish I could say more but I can't, and by the way, I can't because it would put my Gazan friends in risk of being hurt by Hamas. I'm sure it doesn't represent the majority, but you have to remember what's possible to say and what's impossible to say in Gaza. It was about two years ago when thousands of youth in Gaza wanted to organize a protest against Hamas. They FB event went crazy. Hamas broadcasted a very simple slide on all TV channels saying that everyone who'll be out on the street in the time of the protest will be immediately shot. The whole thing was canceled. So yeah, the voices against Hamas are much harder to be heard, but they are there and I believe that it's not only my stories who show them, but everyone who'll you have an honest (and unfortunately, fully encrypted) conversation with will tell you the same.
* I never said Gazans like Israel. They hate it. They also hate America, the Palestinian Authorities, etc'. So what? My note was only that the Human Rights issues in Gaza have only so much to do with Israel.
* I agree that Israel helped bringing Hamas into power. That doesn't change the fact that Hamas are no less of oppressors towards their own people. They abuse them, they care nothing for their lives, they're a bunch of gangsters willing the destroy all of Gaza just so they'll stay in power. Yes, Israel has to do with it, and not a little. But Hamas was chosen democratically.
Again, I've led so many campaigns and protests against Israel's governments and policies over the past years. I'm so far from agreeing with them on anything. But I care for Gazans a lot, and since I started hearing them, I learned that their day-to-day problems are at 90% of the cases things like corruption, women rights, inability to gather, abuse, and internal Stasi-like issues.
I don't know what you'r trying say with that second line. Your perspective is very strange, it seems like madlibs for identity politics.
What would you do if an IDF Caterpillar D9 armored bulldozer shows up in your neighborhood accompanied by the military and starts demolishing houses to make room for settlers, leaving a bunch of people homeless in the process?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDF_Caterpillar_D9
That's why people are a little bit upset over there. Among other things.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Example: http://www.france24.com/en/20180511-saudi-financed-belgian-m...
And while freedom of expression is important, it is limited (especially in Germany). Racists expressions are a no-no pretty much everywhere.
Now Jews feel increasingly unsafe in the streets of Europe.
I'm not sure about the rest of the "western" world. But I this the way it is in the United States.
Violence is obviously already illegal, as is anti-semitism in many western countries.
I doubt your sincerity about that and the rest of your arguments.
"28 % des musulmans de France peuvent être regroupés dans ce groupe qui mélange à la fois des attitudes autoritaires et d’autres que l’on pourrait qualifier de « sécessionnistes ». L’islam est un moyen pour eux de s’affirmer en marge de la société française." [28% of muslim living in France can be grouped in this group that mix both authoritarian and « separatist » attitudes. Islam is for them a way to affirm themselves at the edge of the French society.] Un Islam de France est Possible, Institut Montaigne / Hakim El Karoui, 2016.
What about population pressures? What about religous disagreements, what about nationalism? Old grudges?
Why can't fundamental belief systems be part of the substrate of this equation that results in war. They change every other aspect of life and politics in many cases.
I will fully agree with you on greed, however. And I'd even go as far as to agree with you on religion being a tool rather than the real factor. But there's also another thing you're missing on the religious issue. The terrorists in Xinjiang killed hundreds of completely random people - and often in close contact with weapons such as knives. Well random in at least they tried to target non-Muslims. That's something I think the vast majority of people simply could not bring themselves to do. That just takes a whole lot of hate, or at best complete sociopathic disregard, for somebody you know absolutely nothing about. And religion, fundamentalistic religion in particular, is something that helps breed that hate. And it also lets people believe that after they go kill those random people, somehow they're going to end up in a magical place where until the end of time they get to go screw 72 perpetual virgins while being served by 80,000 servants. Haha. Maybe we've come full circle and the religion itself ties right back into greed!
This is unsubstantiated even in mediaeval times. For example the crusades were minor skirmishes compared to what is the invasion of spain and the balkans - not to mention all the other places in Africa, Asia and the middle east.
It is also implies that Islam can be reformed (because it's just another religion) and is just behind for developmental reasons, but there are fundamental differences.
Broadly speaking, Christianity is Orthodox - it is important what you believe, Islam is Orthopraxic - it is important what you do.
More importantly, Islam makes a virtue of violence and conquests and Christianity is centred on piety. Now clearly they can be binding forces for tribes and it is possible for Christians to be quarelsome and muslims to be peaceful but this is in contradiction with the teachings. (And all the refutations to this w.r.t. to the Quran either only apply to believers, or are superceded later in the Quran).
In long-Islamic countries like Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Egypt, there are a large number of pre-existing minority religions: Yazidis, Mandeans, Samaritans, and a number of others -- as well as long-established Jewish and Christian communities. Those communities have been surrounded by Islam for more than a thousand years, and while they've undoubtedly got some legitimate complaints about Islam, the fact is that they're still there.
Compare and contrast to Christianity. Before Christianity took over, Europe, like the Middle East was a rich tapestry of pre-existing religions. None of them survived: they were universally exterminated with extreme prejudice. This was not a gentle process: Norway, for example, was Christianised by as man whose favoured way of dealing with stubborn pagans was to force iron rods down their throats and force poisonous snakes into them.
So no, Christianity wasn't a more tolerant religion. The absence of any survivors -- in contrast to Islam -- is a testament to this.
[1] https://www.lorientlejour.com/article/1110721/-a-quoi-serven...
The current situation stems from much more than just religious choice.
The Spanish case is also totally different and you can't blame them to get back again their territory and hold a grudge against the religion of their former invaders. I agree however that this is more complex than a simple religion choice, because in most case, this is not a choice (especially centuries ago) and its intertwined with a lot of other factors.
The Spanish case is not different. Much of Spain had been Muslim for as long as it had ever been Christian, and the Christians had been part of the empire for centuries. The expulsion wasn't an ancient grudge over being conquered, if it was then they wouldn't have also forced the Jewish population to do the same thing.
Oh, and if Spanish aggression was justified, colonialism justifies the current aggression in the Middle East.
But that's history. If we're talking about the present day, that's another matter entirely. The Islamic State is, today, roughly as ruthless and intolerant as Christianity used to be. This is not a defence of the Islamic State: what they do is evil and abhorrent and deserves to be stopped. And ISIS is in many ways a "natural" extremity of Wahhabi fundamentalism, which is deeply problematic wherever it is found. I'm not bringing up Christianity's appalling history in Europe for the sake of exculpatory whataboutism, but rather to make the point that no religion is a monolith, and that the same broad umbrella can contain both tolerant sects and theocratic genocidal ones.
So my contention is that Wahhabiism and its even worse offshoots should not be conflated with Islam as a whole, which both historically and continuing into the present day has been a largely (if unevenly) tolerant religion. Those tolerant elements should be acknowledged and accepted. When people condemn Islam as a whole, this diminishes the standing of tolerant Muslims (who can then be attacked as some kind of fifth column), and increasing the standing of extremists (who can then position themselves as stalwart defenders of the faith).
So not only is the "Islam has always been intolerant, and therefore must be opposed" argument simply wrong on a factual basis, it's also bad tactics. Unless you want to be in league with the extremists.
China's "hard handed approach" is about ethnically cleansing conquered territories, crushing whatever indigenous subject populations they can't outright displace, and destroying any institutions or social organizations that exist independently of the CCP.
See: Catalans, Scotland, Kashmir, Palestine, Tuaregs in Mali, etc.
I keep wondering what China is going to do when these efforts fail (genocide being the primary worry). Xi's dictatorship will only grow more powerful and oppressive in the next five or ten years, as is nearly universal with the history of dictatorships. I don't believe China will be able to strip away the religious beliefs & culture easily, nor near-term. The only way they can do it, is over a very long time frame, and by trying to forcibly prevent the next generations from becoming Muslims.
As news of what's going on there spreads globally, to the Middle East and other bordering Islamic regions, China may have to build considerable border fortifications to keep terrorists out (people seeking revenge, or just an excuse to wage jihad, and attempting to flow weapons in). China of course borders Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan - all Muslim majority nations.
I think that is at best fragile as a general statement. I would argue that increases in local support are dependent on other factors besides heavy-handedness or harshness, and that these vary on a case by case basis. For a plethora of counter-examples see:
The history of the Jewish people, Native Americans during colonialism, the anabaptists or the calvinists in European history, the Muslim populations after the conquest of Granada.
Wow, such an uninformed generalized comment. Not something you would expect to see at hacker news.
Anyway, just because the West had problems with Christianity does not mean the East have the same problems with Islam. That is one of the reasons why Islam has more practicing followers than any other religion on earth.
https://yaqeeninstitute.org/en/research/
The main reason there are so many islam followers is that they have more kids on average.
[0] http://www.pewforum.org/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-religi...
In a legal matter, what general Muslims think about it (like a pew poll) does not matter because most of them, just like any other population are not experts in judiciary.
Regarding your points about Muslims having more kids, there is nothing preventing these kids from turning away from the religion, just like the kids of old devout Christians today no longer identify as at least practicing Christians.
0. https://yaqeeninstitute.org/en/jonathan-brown/the-issue-of-a...
I think the lesson of the 20th century is that denying people's humanity and dignity as individuals leads to corpses piling up very, very fast.
Unfortunately if you compare Islamic societies in the late 19th/early 20th centuries to those from middle of the 20th to now it's seemingly become regressive and insular.
Let's not forget that if you go back a few centuries further Islamic societies were progressing and preserving scientific knowledge while Christendom was rolling around in mud (I'm exaggerating).
You have to go back to the Abbasid Dynasty to reach the Islamic renaissance / golden age, prior to the Mongol destruction of that and the moving of the Caliphate to Egypt. By the time the Mongols sacked Baghdad, the Abbasid Dynasty and the renaissance had much eroded compared to its former glory. We're nearing a thousand years that you have to go back to reach the Islamic golden age.
Big names in evangelical culture with TV air time or even visits to the White House also trumpet on a regular basis that the end times are near, blood will need to be spilled, the muslim hordes are invading, etc. Moving the US embassy to Jerusalem was literally a move designed to please Christian fundamentalists who view that as a step towards the End Times, and the reaping that follows it.
At most, Christian fervor is more polite now, if only because there are fewer lands left for them to conquer and they're more comfortable.
Context: I spent a decade in the ministry.
"115 right-wing inspired terror incidents. 35% of these were foiled (meaning no attack happened) and 29% resulted in fatalities. These terror incidents caused 79 deaths.
"63 Islamist inspired terror incidents. 76% of these were foiled (meaning no attack happened) and 13% resulted in fatalities. These terror incidents caused 90 deaths.
"19 incidents inspired by left-wing ideologies (including eco-terrorism). 20% of these were foiled (meaning no attack happened) and 10% resulted in fatalities. These terror incidents caused 7 deaths."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States...
https://www.theinvestigativefund.org/investigation/2017/06/2...
Are a minority of the people of Xinjiang committing violent acts because they want a Caliphate and to convert Han chinese, or are they doing it because the Uighurs are treated very badly by the Chinese government and they want autonomy and rallying around a common religious identity is their own recourse, especially if they want help from overseas?
Why do we not treat the Northern Irish who rallied around their religious identity and attracted the sympathies and support of American Irish?
Why when Tibetan Buddhists commit violence we don't say it's their religion and immediately start looking for geo-political or economic reasons?
When people are abused, tribes develop and they rally around whatever they have left: skin color, language, religion. While I have problems with Islam's doctrine, and religion in general (especially Abrahamic religions), it's extremely simplistic to attribute everyone's motivations and actions to the doctrine and not look at what drove individuals to commit acts against the state.
Why when Tibetan Buddhists commit violence we don't say it's their religion and immediately start looking for geo-political or economic reasons?..."
To be perfectly frank, a large part of the reason is just propaganda.
For instance, are Buddhists slaughtering muslims in Myanmar? Yes, without question. But a lot of our policymakers probably are thinking, "Man, we invested a whole lot in the Buddhists against the military government over there." (You know, Ang sang suu kyi and all that.) We, kind of, can't go back now. Maybe it's a lot like the sunk cost fallacy. But on a geopolitical scale? You're only willing to fold when the whole thing just collapses. And it hasn't, yet. So we keep trying to make it work.
The Quran is equal parts a political construct, religion, and a sociological text that covers everything from spirituality, to the idea of man, to how to wage proper war. Whereas a Buddhist text is not, but rather simply a constellation of philosophical conjectures, and assertions that mostly pertain to one's own consciousness.
The question is simple. Does ideology, and in extension religion, motivate people to be violent? I dare you to actually bring and propose to reinterpret the Quran. It simply won't happen, and until and unless Muslims in majority seek to reform/reinterpret the Quran, like it has been done in Christianity, you cannot progress Islam.
I mean if we're going to be entirely reductive then I think we can also say that ALL ideologies are also the same. The Allies, and Axis powers were in essence both the same thing, and either party weren't in any way morally superior. The Nazis were the same thing as Americans, and whoever won the war is simply a mere coincidence.
In a similar sense not all religions are the same.
This is the one single point that is very hard to accept by the mainstream. Currently, the doctrine of all cultures being equal is something universal. If we accept the opposite view, there are many dangers on the way. Who is going to decide which culture/religion is better? By what criteria? What are the consequences? It's safer to declare equality, and this is what happened in the West - and any attempt to question that is perceived as a regressive view.
You're making the argument that cultural relativism is wrong. I'm making the argument that cultural supremacy often leads you to wrong reasoning about causes and effects, and ergo, bad policies. Are the Palestinians committing terrorist acts because they're Islamic? They're relatively more secular and cosmopolitan than some other Muslim communities, and Palestinian Christians also commit violence. If you ascribe their violence to religious grievances alone, then you are in a quandary. There's no way to solve the current situation without changing their religion. But if you recognize it as nationalistic and a response to geo-political grievances, then there is a political solution that may not require millions of people to be reprogrammed to a different religion.
Imagine if we ignored the Holocaust, and simply ascribed Jewish terrorism in the British Palestinian territories in the 1940s as a manifestation of Judaism -- that God gave them this land? Under that interpretation, it's scripture, and not the reaction to historic persecution, that drives the motivation to carve out a Jewish state. And yes, some far-right Jewish extremists believe this, but that's not the majority, and so you can't paint all of Judaism in this way, and we don't.
But we do paint all of Islam this way, and as a result, we engage in bad, immoral foreign policy.
“Religious fundamentalism seems really bad, guys. Maybe totalitarianism will help? I can’t remember if that has a downside.”
Take a look at the academic lineage of St. Thomas Aquinas and you will see what I am talking about. He studied from Saint Albert Magnus, a guy that studied from a vast bibliography left by the Islamic Caliphate of Al-Andalus (aka Islamic Spain) after the Spanish Reconquista.
Without St. Thomas Aquinas by the way, Reinassance scientists that made the subsequent "European enlightment" possible would have been burned by the Inquisition and we would be in the middle ages, or at least 200 years away from being technologically able to manufacture a computer. Instead of being on Hacker News you would be dying of plague or in some dumb war.
The Islamic civilization was not always as theocratic as it is today. This happened only after the Mongols razed them and nomadic tribes were left. These nomadic tribes were more militaristic and theocratic than the Islamic Caliphates razed by the Mongols.
As for your view on Islam, it's narrow. What you'll find is that literacy rates and living standards indeed have risen quite a lot, look at the data. Further, you'll often find many of the views people hold aren't necessarily religious views, but regional cultural ones. Rape, domestic violence, abortion of girls, dowry, child marriages are all prevalent threats to women in India among its 85% non-muslim population, just like it is in its muslim population, or that of say neighbouring India. Islam isn't the source of a patriarchal system as often as it's claimed, cultural practices that preceded Islam often are, nor is it as often the source of conflicts, the underlying geopolitical situation usually is. What I would say is that Islam can retard modernisation because it makes some conversations (that Muslims have every day in their own societies) much more difficult to have. But none of that has anything to do with the Chinese situation.
Stop saying that Islam is the problem. It's a facet, it ought to be considered, but it oughtn't be oppressed or seen as the sole or even primary reason different groups take political actions. It'd be as if I went around claiming the Troubles was a religious conflict or that Christianity was at the source of the violence despite it being a part of the story.
I mean, Muslim extremists would do the same if they could, but they can’t. I’m more worried about those who can.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
He who holds the biggest stick writes the book of law
The book "Liars and Outliers" addresses this question some, at least in broad hypothetical terms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liars_and_Outliers
Thanks in advance for any help.
Paying for the content ought to do the trick.
Get real, only suckers pay for such things.
Menu: View -> page style -> no style
https://community.cloudflare.com/t/archive-is-error-1001/182...
Change a few keywords and it sounds more like the current situation in the USA.
> CCA revenue hit a whopping $1.79 billion in 2015, up from the year before, while GEO revenue hit an even higher $1.84 billion, likewise an improvement over their previous year.[0]
[0]http://allthatsinteresting.com/private-prisons-us-stats
Domestically there are 3.3 million Muslims in the US. There are ~50 detainees at Guantanamo Bay, with most of the former detainees having been released without charge. Some of them were charged as enemy combatants and or terrorists. And Guantanamo is widely considered a black mark on the US reputation.
The US has millions of Muslims that co-exist entirely peacefully with a very large Christian majority. After 9/11, at the height of anti-Muslim emotions in the US, Muslim Americans weren't put into camps by the tens or hundreds of thousands; they weren't slaughtered; their rights weren't wiped out; their culture and religion wasn't made illegal; the US didn't arrest them by the hundreds of thousands in targeted fashion. In fact, it's extraordinary just how peaceful and calm the situation after 9/11 actually was: if you believed the propaganda, America surely would have killed or arrested every Muslim in the country, except the propaganda is all a lie.
The US is not trying to destroy Islam in the US. The US is not interning millions of Muslims, trying to eradicate their culture and beliefs. The US is not torturing its Muslim population of 3.3 million. The US is not restricting their movement, their worship, or keeping them from owning guns or knives to defend themselves. The US is not razing their places of worship. The US is not building massive camps to put hundreds of thousands of Muslims into.
The US isn't doing anything even remotely similar to what's going on in China.
and at home the US strips away freedoms from their own people with the justification of "national security".
1.) Start moving factories out China, back into your local country. It could be an upgrade for companies to upgrade to more automated factories. Furthermore, it fights against China's agenda of 'Made in China in 2025', which they expect to make....everything in China.
2.) Shame companies that are investing further in China, destroying jobs in your local country.
3.) Stop buying things that are made in China. China doesn't have a big enough consumer base; it requires developed countries to purchase their good.
4.) Let everyone know about China's concentration camps that affect 1M+ muslims.
FWIW, 20% of the world is China. They also manufacture a lot of things. Also it'a a huge country with a huge tapestry of interwoven peoples and problems.
"The world" isn't just going to turn the other cheek and oust what will probably be the next global superpower.
I mean, where are we going to move the factories if the prerequisite is "No brutal use of deadly force against Muslims" ?
In any case, I should probably just let him, (or her), outline what their own point was.
Destroyed? You'll need to provide some pretty strong proof to convince me those countries aren't there anymore.
Also the Syria and Yemen are civil wars. Don't know how you think it's reasonable to pin that on the "US, NATO and friends" (that is, unless you want to do something silly like trace things too far back to look for butterflies, ignore a lot of recent history, and remove all agency from the locals).
>Also the Syria and Yemen are civil wars. Don't know how you think it's reasonable to pin that on the "US, NATO and friends".
By providing the various sides with arms and support. Though I think you can put much of the blame of the civil wars staring on the US, even if you disagree the wars are still dramatically different than it would be without US support.
> Though I think you can put much of the blame of the civil wars staring on the US, even if you disagree the wars are still dramatically different than it would be without US support.
I think that's profoundly ignorant and belies lazy thinking, especially in relation to Syria.
The precise cause of the civil war was the domestic policies of the Assad regime [1] [2] [3] [4].
As for "providing the various sides with arms and support," I would be gobsmacked if you could show the US provided arms to Assad, especially in significant numbers. I recall significant dithering by the Obama administration over the level of support to give the rebels, and the fact that the US withheld arms to the rebels (over fears of inadvertently supporting Islamic extremists) is what allowed ISIS to grow so strong and eclipse the more liberal rebel groups.
> the wars are still dramatically different than it would be without US support.
If only because the support of other nations would have had a relatively greater effect [5].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Course_of_events_of_the_Syrian...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Syrian_Civil_W...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/26/world/middleeast/26syria....
[4] https://carnegieendowment.org/2016/11/22/syria-s-path-from-c...
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_involvement_in_the_Syr...
https://www.sott.net/article/377588-Syrian-War-for-Dummies-T...
I think your version is ~ between Disney and high school.
read your [5] carefully again (I am sure you haven't), and note the nice sidebar on the right "Covert United States involvement in regime change", it's not there by accident.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timber_Sycamore
> https://www.sott.net/article/377588-Syrian-War-for-Dummies-T....
Sott.net doesn't seem like a very reliable source. This appears to be a friendly description of it in a related wiki (https://thecasswiki.net/index.php?title=Signs_of_the_Times):
> SOTT is a research project of the non-profit Quantum Future Group (QFG) and is run by volunteers. The project includes collecting, arranging, and analyzing news items that seem to best reflect the movement of macrocosmic quantum energies on the planet. This research further includes noting whether or not human beings, individually and/or collectively, can actually remember from one day to the next the state of the planet, and whether they are able to accurately read that information and make intelligent decisions about their future based on that knowledge. In short, SOTT is an experiment.
> While the site began as a one-woman operation, this work quickly attracted some truly fine, open minds – people interested in truth, many of whom are scientific professionals and whose work on SOTT is anonymous for their own protection. SOTT and QFG has been attacked, suppressed, and marginalized by the Powers That Be in ways that no other work has been, leaving editors and researchers with the distinct impression that they must be on the right track.
"the Powers That Be" links a page about the "Matrix Control System."
This is a much less friendly description of the person who founded sott.net: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Laura_Knight_Jadczyk.
> and note the nice sidebar on the right "Covert United States involvement in regime change", it's not there by accident.
1) That lists the Syrian civil war. 2) It doesn't contradict anything that I said.
The precise cause of the present Syrian civil war was the domestic policies of the Assad regime. No one pretends that the US was friendly or neutral towards that regime prior to the war. I would not surprise me if the US took some action against it prior to that, but those actions were unsuccessful and not causally linked to the civil war (beyond butterfly-effect level stuff).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timber_Sycamore:
> "Launched in 2012 or 2013"
That post-dates the beginning of the Syrian civil war.
irrelevant, it's not a source but a compilation with links to various sources.
>The precise cause of the present Syrian civil war was the domestic policies of the Assad regime
no it wasn't. it was a pretext, an opportunity the the US and UK seized upon to concoct a crisis - precisely like they did in various other cases.
Why is it ignorant and lazy? The US has been backing the Syrian opposition since 2006, and arming them since 2011. Additionally, it was the US invasion of Iraq and the subsequent mismanagement that allowed ISIL to gain power in the region.
Mostly beside the point though. The US has been an active participant in the war for a while now, and other outside support doesn't change that.
One option is to more or less emulate China. It's factories were built over the last 30 or so years. There's no reason that other countries couldn't start to replicate those capabilities and supply chains over a similar time period. It would probably require more automation to be economical in the West, however.
The hard part with that will be to force Western profit-uber-alles corporations to comply.
There's no "we, as the world". There are individual actors driven by their own motives. There will always be desire to make extra money by some of them by dealing with the shady governments.
Another question: system a: a developer with an idea and skills sitting in Montana believes (correctly) that the chances of getting funded are exponentially higher for people from Stanford university (or some other affiliation). System b : there is a similar guy sitting in a a rural shithole in China and he believes that he has an equal shot at vc funding as the next guy. Which system wins?
Just asking.
It's hard to think of any more dangerous invention. Even nuclear weapons aren't as dangerous as a sustainable model for modern tyrannical government.
This is an invention that would be exported and widely adopted.
The liberal democratic model of government spread around the world not just because the people saw it work in America and decided that's what they wanted, but also because the ruling aristocrats saw that it would be net better for them. The French Revolution probably helped convince them it compared favorably to the guillotine.
If another model is pioneered and proven that's better for the ruling class, it won't be difficult to find regimes eager to adopt it.
The problem is, the higher we go on the Maslow pyramid, the more likely it is for it to fail. You just can’t have a huge mass of creative, inventive people without them complaining about leadership (and wanting to improve it).
And totalitarianism by definition has problems accepting criticism.
The only way for totalitarianism to “work” is if the rulers are both much smarter than the population as a whole and also benevolent.
Regarding China, let’s see. These kinds of regimes don’t fail immediately. Just the cracks get bigger and bigger. From what I heard there’s a consolidation of power going on, that’s generally a sure sign of the first cracks appearing.
The Chinese rich I've interacted with are also (in my experience, at least - I don't have stats to support this) really ignorant of how bad a lot of their countrymen have it. A friend of mine's father is some sort of government official in a tier 1 or 2 city, and he's told me that the rich and poor are segregated enough that he himself didn't even realize his family was anything other than middle class until he came to Canada and saw it wasn't exactly normal to have parents who can afford 100k+ annual tuition, luxury cars and apartments, etc.
I dont think thats realistic anymore. Once they are able to hit first and hit hard when opposition forms, they are pretty much untouchable.
The whole argument, of autocratic regimes having a higher chance of collapsing the longer the reign looks like a naive outdated approach to me. It bets on a critical mass of opposition forming. With total surveillance this wont happen.
A successful mass protest has to start somewhere. If you arrest those first people willing to risk everything you quell the entire thing. Its the basic concept of 1984. The only thing holding back this dystopia was the lack of a big brother state with sufficient insight.
If you look at collapses of authoritarian regimes due to public pressure, they happen to a similar pattern. A small group of people start a protest and depending on how hated the regime is and how bad the living condition for most people are, others will join in, the more the less likely it becomes for them to be individually picked out.
This only works if the initial small group has enough time to motivate enough people to join in so that it snowballs. Earlier approaches were to minimize the time the small groups had to snowball with quick and hard actions, but with more and more surveillance, it becomes possible to target people even before they join. At a certain point it becomes possible to watch over every last citizen and target anyone who might be willing to start something like this in the future.
You create an upper middle class for the "creatives" and you restrict the areas of creativity to military and industrial use.
Most well off people that I know are happy to think the poor deserve to be poor and repressed (different people have different reasons for justifying it. Few seen to really care).
The party can pick the smart people from population to join.
China was here before. Cutting yourself off from the world just means you eventually find yourself having fallen behind everyone else.
The CCP does have the benefit of learning from the failures of the Soviets.
> China was here before. Cutting yourself off from the world just means you eventually find yourself having fallen behind everyone else.
That mainly happened because they were so dominant in their sphere that they didn't bother themselves with far off areas that seemed primitive to them. I'm pretty sure the CCP has learned from that mistake.
They're walling off foreign political ideas and avenues for domestic political organization, not foreign technological advancements. They are very explicit about that.
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/20/world/asia/chinas-new-lea...
You could split a country economically into a wealthy economic zone and a zone for the working class.
Or you could have a wealthy country that helps another country to be totalitarian, for the right economic gains.
After Augustus Rome still had a couple of hundred years of expansion where a nationalist could argue, “hey look at that! Things are still going good.” But they couldn’t outrun the rot in the system forever.
After Xi will China get another strongman? I think this is the key. If there are a series of total dictators things will decay. Whatever justifications a dictator uses for their rules, ultimately they are going to try to implement policies that keep themselves on top first.
Which is why I am personally a lot more alarmed at the current US Presidency than most of my peers. Inept rulers have historically been the best predictors of a civilization's downfall. The fervent opposition to the administration by ordinary US citizens gives me hope but if Republicans continue to hold on to power after November, I really do feel that all will be lost.
What we are seeing today is essentially a low intensity conflict[0] not unlike what took place in white Rhodesia/Namibia, Northern Ireland during the troubles, etc. There is a economic reason why these conflicts could not last indefinitely, no matter what ideologies drive them.
[0]:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_intensity_conflict
China seems to want to create a monoculture with norms that don't bend from locale to locale. I think the saying is: if it don't bend, it will break.
Northern Ireland (in the 1900s) was less about resistance to a tyrannical state, and much more about a population split 50/50ish who had hated each other for a few hundred years. British action there was far from exemplary, but had the people of Northern Ireland woken up one day to find they were part of the Republic of Ireland, precisely no problems would have been solved.
Heavy policing may put a lid on the problem for now but in the long run it will only undo several generations of hard work pacifying the region.
[0]:http://www.cqvip.com/qk/83491x/201503/665772571.html, the text is paywalled but a short excerpt containing relevant information can be viewed at https://www.1xuezhe.exuezhe.com/Qk/art/591377?dbcode=1&flag=...
China has a social credit system that is locked in with this totalitarian system. Based on how irrational humans are I fully expect a huge spike in suicides. Once people get into so much social debt that people stop associating with them and they are locked out of work and simple things such as garbage collection they will start to end their lives.
I want to be wrong about suicide and right about social credit systems though....
What if you're wrong? You have doubts, where's the evidence?
> What we are seeing today is essentially a low intensity conflict
This part I don't see at all. Who are the sides in this low intensity conflict? The examples in Wikipedia are distinct identities or states. What identities are in contention in China?
There's not enough data to make predictions like that. But one very good reason for optimism is that China's current totalitarian stability is an unstable false vacuum. It's sustained by the outrageously rapid economic growth seen in the decades since the cultural revolution.
Basically: if you're Chinese, your grandparents (if they were lucky) survived a devastating world war and invasion by Japan, an even more devastating civil war, and a yet more devastating still famine forced on them by the nutjobs who won the civil war.
And now their grandkids are all running around with smartphones in their pockets, collecting college diplomas and international graduate degrees, vacationing in Thailand and Hawaii, and generally dancing on the world stage like the Americans do.
That kind of success pays for a lot of totalitarian angst. But it won't forever. These folks' kids aren't going to be happy with only 2% GDP growth as payment for their political dominance by a corrupt elite. The proletariat never has been.
I am not in the clairvoyant business. Expressing doubt is as much as I could do.
>This part I don't see at all. Who are the sides in this low intensity conflict?
Armed insurrection has been ongoing on since the early 90s[0] loosely organised by ETIM[1] as well as various affiliated Islamist groups in neighboring countries especially of late. They are backed by sympathetic donors in the Gulf states, Turkey and (allegedly) the CIA. Since then there have been several high profile riots and terrorist attacks both in[2] and out[3] of Xinjiang.
Obviously they are fighting against the police and the army loyal to the government. In addition there are local entities known as Bingtuan[4] that are best described as a military-industrial complex with several company towns at strategic locations throughout the region. They are under the direct command of the state department and are expected to counter the provincial leadership should they become insubordinate.
There are also smaller groups of Hui (Chinese Muslims) seeking to consolidate their identity and Kazakh irredentists seeking reunification with Kazakhstan, but they are much less significant and tend to be allied with he government against the Uighur.
[0]：https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baren_Township_riot [1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Turkestan_independence_mo... [2]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_2009_%C3%9Cr%C3%BCmqi_rio... [3]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Kunming_attack [4]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_Production_and_Constr...
Why do you think the Chinese government can't sustain the cost? Intensive policing is manpower intensive, and China presently has manpower to spare. They also don't have to deal with democratic pressures to contain the cost and redirect the savings to programs that benefit the general public.
The ruling class has luxuries that they could not have developed for themselves without them being broadly available. I'm thinking of things like cell phones, the Internet, and possibly the money system.
Parasites need a viable host.
I think _that_ is the sustainability problem we need to talk about. We're feeding them and starving ourselves.
And in twenty years they will not, that is the crux of the issue.
If the system mistakes you for someone else, you might get your door kicked down, your dog shot, and get dragged in and interrogated. Then you will come to realize what will happen if you really run afoul of them. So maybe you think twice if you're planning an infraction in the future.
So they may well want to round up the top N suspects, knowing that N-1 are innocent.
Autocratic regimes have lasted for as long as 3000 years (pharonic Egypt).
I'm sure lots of people want to believe the Chinese system won't work; but that doesn't make it true.
If Egypt was truly superior, it really should not have been so easily conquered by Ptolemy and then Rome which both had a much less authoritarian society.
" Oh don't worry this nightmare will stop in about 2 decades"
In other words, the economic system determines the political system. When hunter-gatherers became farmers, the political system changed. When farming as the center made way for manufacturing and industry, the political system changed (as did culture).
I don't see this as much different than Americans driving Lakota onto the Standing Rock Indian Reservation. Just two years ago the US federal government arrested and injured many on that reservation. Or Americans driving Vietnamese onto strategic hamlets. Or locking Japanese up in the 1940s. I don't see what innovation the Chinese have made.
Take Turkey for example, under Erdoğan. Let's say he is, or wants to be, a traditional dictator. He's probably gone in 10 or 20 years due to age. His regime ends with him, very likely, because there's no broad cultural underpinning to his regime and legacy. That's the case in most totalitarian examples of the last century.
The cultural reformations that enabled the China boom, starting with Deng Xiaoping, are being systematically rolled backwards.
The economic gains from the late 1970s to ~2009, were very easy compared to the challenges that come next to continue pushing the per capita results ever higher. When you're starting from $175 GDP per capita in 1980, just about any meaningful improvement at all in the system will get you to $1,000 or $2,000 per capita.
My point being, only when the tide goes out do you see who is swimming naked, to borrow a line from Warren Buffett. China's vast growth no doubt masks immense problems that only become clearer in their scope and risk as their 30 year economic expansion matures (as it is now).
The people of China will tolerate a lot of things if you take them from $200 GDP per capita to $10,000. China is not going to be able to replicate that climb again, from here forward. That will have consequences, as the social contract in China requires perpetual, preferably rapid, improvement.
What China has done is extraordinarily expensive. They paid for it with a unique, historically singular export machine and trade surplus and starting from a context of a near zero welfare state (diverts capital from investment & growth) and from a setup with nearly maximum economic slack (easy to fill in for decades).
What other nations have anything like that setup to replicate from? Russia (fascist dictatorship, long totalitarian history) for example doesn't have that sort of extreme economic slack, its GDP per capita is already up where China is at today; the same goes for Turkey. The Russian system is mature, slow growth, with considerable existing structural financial demands that prevent the vast free use of capital as in China.
China's rules today are not the same as China's rules in 1996 or 2006. Culturally they've lost a lot of the modest freedom gains that were acquired over decades, in just the last five or six years. How does that impact the ability of their economic system to continue to scale over time, as the oppression ramps up?
These are two different systems - Deng vs Xi - not a continuing of the same system. Xi gets to ride on the accomplishments of the Deng revolution, including the financial capabilities it made possible. I think it's a fair question as to whether China can keep moving forward as they previously were, while simultaneously removing the Deng approach that made it all possible in the first place.
At the height of civil war the western classical liberal democracies looked weak and near collapse while Soviet looked too strong and awesome until one day it just collapsed. It is a bubble boy vs Sewer Rat thing. The bubble boy looks extremely clean and insulated from bad things until one day it just dies of common cold. The filthy NY sewer rat however survives carrying in itself 10 different types of plagues.
> China seems committed to making totalitarianism "work."
We need to take a backseat and realise that American media simply does not get China, India or Japan. They are judging the world from their own spectacles which might be wrong. An average Chinese today is freerer than an average Chinese 30 years ago despite all efforts by their government. An average American today is less free than an average American 30 years ago.
I am incredible hopeful for India and China in upcoming efforts. I recently spoke to a Chinese attache at local embassy. He was as ecstatic to be outside China as now he could access Youtube and Facebook. He considered his own government moves to ban these services in his country absolutely stupid and saw them as a hindrance to help China emerge as a soft power.
FYI the American Civil War ended in 1865 while the first Soviet was in 1905. And the first ~10 years after the ‘17 revolution were absolutely terrible in the Soviet Union. So your statement just isn’t correct.
Btw I suggest you reread your French Revolution history. The aristocracy was very much back in power within a year of the king getting his head chopped off. And then they propped up Napoloen who decided he needed to conquer the world. The next 100 years were spent with the elites of one European country or another colonising and pilaging most of South America, Africa and Asia. So much for freedom and equality and the aristocracy learning any lesson. They are still more of less in power with the same mindless global ambitions unless you haven't seen the inequality numbers and have your head buried deep in the sand.
The one country to avoid this, Britain, learned the lesson of the French Revolution. They maed enough reforms that there was no constituency for revolution.
Er, Britain had been a constitutional monarchy for a long time before the French Revolution, and many of the others made reforms rather than being overthrown, and in many cases, like Britain, well before the French Revolution.
Your version of history is badly distorted.
The 2nd Amendment specifies that a well regulated militia is necessary for a free state, and that the right to keep and bear arms cannot be abridged by the Federal government.
Nothing in that amendment specifically mentions the purpose of preventing totalitarian government. That's a modern interpretation, albeit one currently upheld by the Supreme Court.
You have to take into account the context. It was written and ratified by people who'd just staged a revolution against what they described as a "tyrannical" regime, often using their own personal weapons.
To note that the Constitution doesn't mention "totalitarianism" is to note that it doesn't contain an anachronism. It's a modern coinage that's not to far in meaning from "tyranny."
Exactly. If America has learned anything from the past half century of foreign military adventures, it should be that a big modern Army can't easily defeat a motivated insurgency that has the support and sympathy in the local population.
The 2nd Amendment may have a lot of costs, but the private gun ownership it provides for would definitely make it much more difficult for a domestic totalitarian regime to establish itself in the US.
I'm also pretty sure that Iraqi civilians didn't have much access to small arms prior to the destabilization of the country. Didn't slow down the insurgency any.
An insurgency has a lot of freedom in choosing its targets. If they don't have the weapons to directly attack armor or air power, they can avoid them. And with armor, there are other options, such as IEDs.
Also, I'd bet that an American insurgency against a totalitarian American government would get outside arms and support, as well as sympathy, support, and defections from actual US Army units. I don't think the US military would be able to maintain the same level of cohesion it has during foreign wars in a civil war.
A totalitarian regime would probably repeal the 2nd amendment as one of it's first acts, the the existing stock of small arms and ammunition would be enough for an insurgency or rebellion to start. I'd be much harder for a disarmed population to begin resistance.
Think about any standoff between protesters and police or national guard in the us. Lefty students or unionists or whatever get shot or peppersprayed by cops or national guardsmen with a family to feed and a career defined by obeying the rules - that equation will not change with scale.
No, the problem in the US is cultural rot brought about by Fabian forces. They have done quite a number on this country since the end of WWII. Actually, it started even earlier than that when Marxism went into full swing in the late 1800s. We weren't immune from leftists, we just never had the full-on communist revolution that other nations suffered.
But to return to upbraiding you--no, I don't think that guns have any huge downside in that most of the people killed by guns either by suicides or accidents, probably would have died some other way. The so-called epidemic of gun violence in the US is a complete fabrication. Yes, there is "gun crime" in inner cities. A lot of it, in fact. But lacking guns, there would still be "knife crime" or "bat crime" or "bare handed crime." That kind of stuff never goes away.
Can you point to a serious author on the subject suggesting so? For example, Hannah Arendt:
> The frightening coincidence of the modern population explosion with the discovery of technical devices that, through automation, will make large sections of the population 'superfluous' even in terms of labor, and that, through nuclear energy, make it possible to deal with this twofold threat by the use of instruments beside which Hitler's gassing installations look like an evil child's fumbling toys, should be enough to make us tremble.
and
> Humans, in so far as they are more than a completion of functions able to react, whose lowest and therefore most central are the purely animal like reactions, are simply superfluous for totalitarian systems. Their goal is not to erect a despotic regime over humans, but a system by which humans are made superfluous. Total power can only be achieved and guaranteed when nothing else matters except the absolutely controllable willingness to react, marionettes robbed of all spontaneity. Humans, precisely because they are so powerful, can only be completely controlled when they have become examples of the animal like species human.
and
> We don't know a perfected totalitarian power structure, because it would require the control of the whole planet. But we know enough about the the still preliminary experiments of total organization to realize that the very well possible perfection of this apparatus would get rid of human agency in the sense as we know it. To act would turn out to be superfluous for people living together, when all people have become an example of their species, when all doing has become an acceleration of the movement mechanism of history or nature following a set pattern, and all deeds have become the execution of death sentences which history and nature have given anyway.
Notice the "very well possible" in "the very well possible perfection of this apparatus would get rid of human agency in the sense as we know it".
I suspect that we largely ignore this author and others not because they're too silly to even refute, but because we can't refute what they point out, and are unwilling to shoulder the responsibility that follows from that.
In a nutshell, I'd say a desire for power is just a futile attempt to fill a hole that cannot be filled that way, that even makes it bigger (kinda like people rationalize and identify with the abuser out of cowardice, reaping only more cowardice in the end). But "a boot stamping on a human face, forever" isn't necessarily static. The boot can keep stamping, and the human face can keep getting infinitely thin.
> Already history has in a sense ceased to exist, ie. there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted, and the exact sciences are endangered as soon as military necessity ceases to keep people up to the mark. Hitler can say that the Jews started the war, and if he survives that will become official history. He can’t say that two and two are five, because for the purposes of, say, ballistics they have to make four. But if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could become five if the fuhrer wished it. That, so far as I can see, is the direction in which we are actually moving, though, of course, the process is reversible.
-- George Orwell
"if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives".
That was then. Today we have great thoughts such as
> One could argue that “totalitarianism” was the default government form for most of history."
and
> Successful "tyranny" could be analogous to successful multicellular life. We could be witnessing a similar development in the history of life.
Which both actually employ the sam...
In fact, this is precisely what happened with ISIS. I shudder to think what might have happened if the powers to be had not put aside their differences to fight a common foe.
The West has had, for the last 200 years (and arguably for the last 500) the advantage that its economic system is better than its rivals. This is a massive, game-changing advantage. But it's not obvious to me that the West is still ahead economically -- look at China's growth rates over the last 40 years. Admittedly they are coming from behind, but because of their population they only need 1/4 of the GDP per head of the USA to be ahead on total GDP.
I would say there's about a 50% possibility that China will make an authoritarianism that works, that's at least as successful economically as the West. And if that comes about it will be a real game-changer. And frankly, I don't think the West is up to the task of meeting the challenge; certainly I would not bet on Trump, Merkel, May et al doing the right thing.
This is mainly colonialism. The Han Chinese state is subjugating the Uighur people and taking their now strategic land.
I heard once that in a world where everyone agrees to being spied on by carrying a mobile, the mobile-less will be suspect. I never thought this would actually be the case, but there it is: people must install government spyware on their personal devices.
Reading this gave me a new appreciation of how human rights are broken in China. I sincerely hope that those people recover their freedom.
As recent history had shown, even Western countries, proud of their freedom and Enlightenment values, may realize that something bad is happening when it's too late. Seeing how surveillance is making comparatively small advances here, I'm slightly more worried that privacy might be completely extinguished from the world one day.
https://youtu.be/0vVOXlgHC1U?t=37m5s
For those that don't know, China as affirmative action policies for Uighurs and other minorities. They were exempt from the 1-child policy, they get additional social welfare, and have an easier time getting to college and government jobs.
So with all these perks, most Han Chinese see them as being ungrateful when they commit or support terrorist acts, like the Kunming massacre in 2014 or suicide bombing police stations.
Typical western values are seriously underrated and are not taken seriously.
We depend on Putin's mercy for energy, because a lot of us skipped game theory in kindergarden apparently. Someone mentioned cell phones. Yes that'd be good, to have a full end to end electronics pipeline around here. And so on.
What, like nuclear bombs?
Because that's what most likely will kill you in a large scale conflict between superpowers.
There ought to be a law that you can't advocate for war unless you've actually been to war...
He's in for a big surprise.
On the plus side, the surprise will be quick.
I'm not saying I agree that war would be good.
Yet we do not see any serious examination from the economist on threats to democracy from surveillance. Infact it is at the forefront on hit pieces on Snowden accusing him of treachery [1] which means their concern for 'surveillance' is entirely fabricated.
Why is Assange still stranded and Snowden in Russia? What consequences has there been from the revelations on western security services and rubber stamp courts? No answer from the economist because they aren't even asking the question. Yet another cheap ploy to use 'human rights', 'democracy' and 'freedom' to attack other countries while soiling these principles.
The economist is a principal cheerleader of neoliberalism, shock therapy and other exploitative economic policies that directly lead to corruption, theft of national resources by uncontrolled privatization and oligarchies in third world countries. Nothing to do with democracy.
This kind of hypocrisy and grandstanding has run its course, its a dangerous distraction designed to lull readers into complacency while entrenched interests that publications like the economist support make democracy more and more meaningless.
[1] https://www.economist.com/democracy-in-america/2014/01/10/tr...
Generation(s) of Han Chinese and Uighurs get together and start having children. An act of loving subversion, if you will. At what level of mixing does the dangerous Uighur contribution become safe to you? 50%? 25%? 12.5%?
[Only somewhat tongue-in-cheek.]
The largest group of Muslims in China are the Hui Muslims (about 10 million of them). They are the descendants of the Muslims that were absorbed during conquests in the Tang and Ming Dynasty.
They eventually integrated and married other Han Chinese. They are still Muslim, but also identify as Chinese. There are also affirmative action programs for them, making it easier for them to into good colleges and government jobs.
They were also exempt from the 1-child policy.
They are how Asians are in the US, the "model minority."
Please explain, then, why race is a category used to reduce a person's numeric "trustworthiness score" in China. If one is ethnically Uighur instead of Han or if one has received religious education then one is deemed by the government as "less trustworthy" -- not because of behaviour or evidence of a crime but simply because of ethnicity.[1][2][3]
Since this score is used to determine whether freedoms are restricted (e.g. travel, communication, and forced "re-education"), it is racism.
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/thousands-chin...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/15/opinion/china-re-educatio...
[3] (TFA) https://www.economist.com/briefing/2018/05/31/china-has-turn...
The modern world is so complex and changes so much that the only way to get this is a free flow of information in which everyone can honestly say what is happening in their particular part of the society, and everyone can make suggestions and offer evaluations.
Authoritarian regimes shut all of this off, such as through turning the press into a governmental propaganda machine, and dictating what university professors can research.
The consequence is the top decision makers live in an epistemic bubble and become increasingly out of touch with reality, and increasingly subject to group-think. And that in turn leads to poorer and poorer decisions, and eventually the system comes to an end. I think it is quite predictable that this is where Xi's regime is heading over the long term.
What I remember most was:
1) nearly hourly MMS messages to my flip phone from unknown numbers with an unknown attachment. Since my phone was bought outside China, the MMS attachment didn't automatically open the likely spyware.
2) Being followed and monitored by plainclothes policemen
3) Having my hotel room searched while I was away. Having police come to my hotel room to interrogate me but lacking access because I had the only key to the room (very very cheap hotel).
4) Armed convoys of Chinese army soldiers constantly going up and down major streets.