It's a fascinating article. What can we make of students who look at China's history, and conclude the answer is more communism rather than less?
Are they unaware of the history of other communist regimes, unaware that the only thing that sets China apart from everywhere else Marxism was tried is that they went much further with getting economic growth back via free market reforms? What does Qiu Zhanxuan think would be different if "real Marxism" and "not dog meat passed off as lamb" were to be implemented in China? Is he totally unaware of how China was under Mao? It's easy to believe his understanding of Chinese history is garbled beyond recognition, but obviously he understands some of it at least.
It's of course also interesting that this is happening at the most 'elite' university in the Chinese system. In England during the cold war, the intelligence agencies were repeatedly penetrated by Soviet moles - something that was possible because these agencies only recruited from Oxford and Cambridge, both hotbeds of communist sympathy. It seems that the most selective universities in any society end up breeding communist students. My guess is it's because communist societies tend to be run by academics, and implicitly or explicitly are based on the belief that democratic societies are bad because the academic elite don't get to make decisions alone.
This is true, and such humility/pragmatism is pretty much the core idea of one kind of conservatism.
But I'm also not sure how much we should read these people's labelling of themselves as Marxists as indicating an opinion on the economic planning/freedom scale. Maybe the right analogy is something like Jesuits objecting to how Spain was abusing/enslaving native americans. Being Christian was an important part of how everyone involved thought about themselves, and such criticisms would inevitably have been phrased in christian terminology, that was the shared language of both power and protest. But that's not what the message was.
> Peking University’s young Marxists drew the government’s ire after they campaigned for workers’ rights and openly criticized social inequality and corruption in China.
I think you should, instead, listen to what the students are actually trying to say rather than react superficially on the fact that they label themselves as "communist."
When a government, regardless of political orientation, "disappears people" that's a sign that something is rotten to the core.
You probably mean the more "democratic" a county is. Democracies require cover stories for anything. You don't just disappear, you commit suicide or get thrown in prison on rape charges, possession of drugs, child porn, etc. But all the nasty things dictatorships do are still there.
This is kind of a trick question because only some will believe it’s a cover story while others believe it’s true.
President Trump is actually a good example that everyone could agree on: considering the amount of dirt thrown at him it a clear sign of system failure because either:
- he’s still not impeached
or
- his aides go down by presumably made up cover stories
I did read the article and their views. But I'm not sure I missed anything. The students in question sound like classical Marxists: one literally takes photos of himself with a clenched fist.
Obviously the Chinese government is rotten to the core. It's a late-stage communist government, it's how all such governments turn out. The very important question which needs to be answered (and so far, nobody is even trying to answer it in this thread), is why does a student who lives within that system want to double down on it?
I suspect the answer is simple and doesn't need much analysis. One of the most common stereotypes about communists is they always claim that the failure of communist states is because they didn't do it right - that they were just fake or hijacked socialist revolutions. Qiu is making that very claim in the article. But there have been many attempts to do communism right, so why do these people not accept that the lack of any success cases means the ideology is wrong?
I don't usually like to discuss these topics, but I want to point out a few things. First of all, communism and in general left-wing politics are viewed with a significant bias in the western world, even more in the US. While there have been many societies claiming to be socialist, none would actually qualify from a political theory perspective (it was something more akin to propaganda, e.g. look, we achieved socialism!). Even then, it's worth noting that those societies developed in an environment of extreme hostility from other nations, almost every time during a period of extreme difficulty (e.g. a civil war, right after a long and terrible conflict etc). Coming back to current China, I think Qiu's conclusion can actually make sense if we remove the bias that is normally present in western circles, especially since China's current system, classified by some (especially those that want to make use of the fear of radical left-wing policies) as communism, can also be classified as state capitalism. I don't really think that workers have much power in modern China (this article provides several examples), and I don't see how that could lead you to argue that China needs less communism (as Qiu intends it, that is, characterized by more workers power and less inequality). The only thing I can agree with you about is that Marxist societies, based on a vanguard party with control over everything and everyone, should (one would hope) be now left behind.
P.S. your claim that communist societies tend to be run by academics doesn't really hold much water - if you're interested in the russian revolution, consider reading Sheila Fitzpatrick's "The Russian Revolution" as an excellent introduction.
> First of all, communism and in general left-wing politics are viewed with a significant bias in the western world, even more in the US.
They are not being viewed more favorable in former East Block countries either. So what what is left there?
> While there have been many societies claiming to be socialist, none would actually qualify from a political theory perspective (it was something more akin to propaganda, e.g. look, we achieved socialism!).
Nonetheless those are the societies that are being cherished by the remaining fans of Socialism in the West. Especially in countries like Germany where there is a generation of kids who hear only the good things (everybody had a job!) about the DDR making it look like some kind of paradise (it actually was one in the East Block since everybody else was working to make the DDR look like one).
> Even then, it's worth noting that those societies developed in an environment of extreme hostility from other nations
Oh please. You can say that about every society. It depends on how much you reach backwards or how much you are ready to ignore.
Just like we see the growing ignorance of the evil that was fascism, there will come a time where a growing ignorance of state socialism will become mainstream and I'm afraid of that. I fled this madness once already and since the fans of state socialism today are not even ready to come up with new solutions to the issues this idealism had, there won't be new ideas later.
You are referencing countries which were either part of the USSR (Belarus, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia), or countries that were part of the Warsaw Pact. While there was still something left after the fall of the USSR (such as free healthcare and education, something rich countries such as the US don't offer, and that most post-USSR countries promptly removed) I agree the Soviet Union left behind a quite terrible legacy. I also believe, however, that it is wrong to argue that every socialist country will share the Soviet fate; the history of the Soviet Union (together with its worst aspects, such as Stalinism and the Gulag system) should be understood in the context of Russian society. Even then, your choice removes from the discussion quite a few altogether different societies, based on radical democracy, such as Republican Spain during the civil war, and the Free Territory of Ukraine during the Russian Civil war.
>Those are the societies that are being cherished by the remaining fans of Socialism in the West.
I'm sorry, but I rarely hear someone cheering for the DDR, or for the USSR in general. The legacy of Stalinism is such that the USSR (and its puppet states) are rightfully criticized, apart from a few small and unpopular groups (even in the left as a whole).
>You can say that about every society.
Republican Spain was challenged by a military general, leading to a conflict (the Spanish Civil War) which ravaged its economy and population. While the democracies (UK, France and US) decided not to intervene (partly because their interests were threatened by many policies of nationalization in Republican Spain), Franco received military help, both in terms of weapons and in terms of personnel from Germany and Italy. The USSR formed as a consequence of the extreme conditions faced by the general population in the aftermath of the First World War, followed by years of Civil War with an ever-decreasing availability of food. Once the Civil War was over, the USSR found itself in a state of constant panic of "capitalist intervention", the Five Year plans (and their horrible consequences) themselves a consequence of Stalin's fear of enemy attack. The Free Territory of Ukraine formed in the aftermath of the Russian Civil War, and lasted only a few years, being destroyed by a Red Army offensive. I'm sorry, but many societies haven't faced such extreme situations, and those that did usually had some kind of allies.
I'm sorry if you (as I am, maybe mistakenly, inferring) fled from an East Block country. I'm not arguing the USSR has a positive legacy. I'm simply arguing the western world (and the US in particular) has an extreme bias when it comes to left-wing politics (both the Red Scares come to mind), and that we should attempt to evaluate societies based on what they were, not what they claimed to be. Alternative societies (in particular Republican Spain and the Free Territory of Ukraine) should be evaluated differently from authoritarian countries such as the USSR: one of their main ideals were complete democracy. The fact that they aren't that well known is, in my view, a result of the bias I talk about above.
P.S. as for the comment above, my knowledge mostly comes from books, Sheila Fitzpatrick's being one. For the Spanish Civil War there is both Thomas' and Preston's. The historiography of the FTU is, unfortunately, mostly lacking.
> While there was still something left after the fall of the USSR (such as free healthcare and education, something rich countries such as the US don't offer, and that most post-USSR countries promptly removed)
The US is no good example for anything related with Socialism besides the paranoia maybe. Free healthcare and education is not something unusual on the continent. No matter what political/economic system you have.
> I agree the Soviet Union left behind a quite terrible legacy. I also believe, however, that it is wrong to argue that every socialist country will share the Soviet fate
This is because you assume that the SU was in control everywhere. In the Warsaw Pact countries it was the local government that was to blame here primary. Their versions of the ideology were what caused the problems. Not often they were even in conflict with the SU line.
> Even then, your choice removes from the discussion quite a few altogether different societies, based on radical democracy, such as Republican Spain during the civil war, and the Free Territory of Ukraine during the Russian Civil war.
The first existed for 3 years the second was an anarchist movement. Both fall much better in your category of societies developed in an environment of extreme hostility from other nations and did not show to be a relevant model to run a country.
> I'm sorry, but I rarely hear someone cheering for the DDR, or for the USSR in general.
I was able to vote for at least 2 parties who either completely or represented by a strong wing do cheer the DDR pretty much (die Linke, MLPD). There is a strong and relevant movement within the left in Germany to do just that.
I don't want to make this longer than needed; I don't know anything about die Linke and MLPD to speak about those. I would disagree about the relationship between the USSR and the Warsaw Pact countries, since while they definitely had some autonomy, in any case where they were against the USSR interests their leaders were promptly changed. What I find most unclear is your third point. I already noted they lasted for really short periods, and I agree, the FTU was an anarchist state (Republican Spain, with the CNT-FAI can be considered an in-between). Why did they, however, show not to be a relevant model to run a country? The fact that both were grassroots based, and democratically organized would make me think the opposite. Is it because they weren't able to defend themselves?
FYI: die Linke is what remained of the former DDR ruling party. Today they are "THE left party" in Germany The MLPD is...well weird but they have wealthy supporters so they've been there quite a while now.
> Is it because they weren't able to defend themselves?
No, it's because they did not run a state. Running a state is the whole thing. Sure protecting your borders is one thing but: economy, law, diplomacy, etc. you know, all the stuff you do as a country if you exist long enough.
What the anarchists did (and yes, I think there is a huge difference if you are an anarchist or someone who calls himself socialist) is something that already works on small scale in several projects or small regions. If this works out on a country-scale remains unproven yet.
Then you can agree with me when saying that it is something worth attempting. It may be a great alternative, or another failure. We won't know unless we try!
(It was nice to have this discussion with you :) )
> it is wrong to argue that every socialist country will share the Soviet fate
Clearly not all of them will be invaded by the germans, but there are nevertheless strong similarities, and quite general lessons to be learned about human behavior. Just concluding that that Russia does bad things misses the point.
Political control of the economy inevitably means an enormous concentration of power. Instead of your boss, your landlord, your mayor (and your priest) being independent forces, if they are all one person, then that person has tremendous, almost total, power over your life. The history of what people do to others when they have total power is not pretty.
The US founding fathers were keenly aware of this, although they lived too early to imagine that economic control was really something ought to be included in the list. Their concerns about un-opposed power have not been proven ill-judged.
Political control of the economy by a vanguard party leads to an enormous concentration of power, I agree. But I also disagree that is about all socialist nations: I can only argue that countries based on the ideals of both Republican Spain and the Free territory of Ukraine should be attempted again, this time without the extreme conditions that characterized them the first time. If they really end up as you say, then we shall conclude that socialism as a political theory is irreparably flawed, but until then it's wrong to conclude that.
> because these agencies only recruited from Oxford and Cambridge
Nothing has changed. This year, Oxbridge professors were writing articles in The Guardian asking people to stop saying Venezuela failed because of "socialism", and instead to look at the other thriving South America socialist countries as examples that socialism is amazing.
Instead of boring people with history – I say this as a history buff - we can just point out the ethical fallacies of communism. Most, most, most people are actually moral. You just have to explain stuff once in a while.
Most people erroneously associate "communism" with the regimes of Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong. These were not communist. They were totalitarian and communist only in name.
These activists simply recognize that capitalism is not working for everyone, like the factory workers working those 12-hour shifts under awful working conditions getting paid peanuts, and want to give them more representation and make things more fair. On this higher level I completely sympathize with them, though I have no knowledge of the details of what specifically they are advocating.
I increasingly feel that this is what it must have been like with the rise of Nazi Germany - I have frequently asked myself "how come people still supported Germany as it was heading in that direction? Why didn't other countries oppose it harder?". Well, I think I know how now - because it's invisible from the outside. I'm not saying that China wants to attack its neighbours and take over the world - but fuck, there's estimated to be over a million people in "reeducation" camps in China. The survailance apparatus judges you if you are being a "good" citizen with harsh consequences for doing anything that the party doesn't approve of. Censorship is widespread. And yet, people don't seem to have hugely negative feelings towards China. Most people I know wouldn't even object to going there on holiday. I honestly feel that in 20-30 years we're going to look back and say "how did we not see this? Or how did we ignore this?".
Can you share videos that prove all this stuff? The more people shown in the re education camps, the better. Seriously, please post 10-20 links to videos so we can share them!
Reports are going to have people claiming one thing and others denying that thing. This is a really serious human rights concern involving MILLIONS of people. It has been going on starting with Falun Gong since 2000 or earlier, then Uyghurs, Tibetans etc. It’s the word of the Chinese government vs all those groups. So it’s pretty clear this stuff is happening, but only because so many disparate groups are claiming this.
But there is nothing like VIDEO to make clear what exactly is happening. We need to have these videos in order to share them. Same as Tienemen Square videos.
In the age of cheap smartphones and the allways existence of desperate people who have nothing left to loose, I think its highly unlikely that videos of such camps could not get out. Not if it is on that scale.
(just refering to the argument, I did not check whether the camps exists or videos)
On the other hand, such camps would not look much different from prisons, so I doubt you can expect KZ style pictures.
Edit: just wondering, is my argument really that bad, or am I dealing with patriotic bite reflexes?
I don’t care who does it. There are cellphones everywhere today. Millions of detainees, I am sure there are videos somewhere!
I think that the following devices would be REALLY useful not just for human rights but proving what happened in an altercation:
A tiny device that can record video or video, perhaps embedded in the clothing or body of a person.
The stream is ENCRYPTED AND THEN transmitted to local towers or wifi or whatever, and finds its way to some servers. Maybe via a DHT routing.
Anyway, these servers store the encrypted data and the keys are generated by Shamir Secret Sharing so 3 or more parties can come together and decrypt the video.
In countries with rule of law, this could be used to figure out rapes on campus, by having such cameras in every dorm and bedroom. The keys would be obtained during a court case only.
In human rights cases, the keys would be generated by human rights organizations.
So this will eliminate “peeing toms” and “spying” by having warrants for decrypton of a video strean, and curation by trusted agencies what gets shown to the public.
I asked for the best VIDEO evidence from inside, showing the most people and smoking guns
It’s the difference between hearsay and video evidence. Like when people say the IDF harasses people in the West Bank, or cops kill unarmed Black people, and people dispute it one way or the other. But having video reveals exactly WHAT is happening. The more context for the video, the better.
A real trade war would be devastating for China both economically and politically. Imagine this 300m workers having nothing to do all day but also no income to buy the rice to feed their families.
The rest of the world could easily get by by moving production lines and factories to Vietnam and Indonesia and South America, etc, while paying a flat “tax” in increased prices across the board for cheap products.
You mean the trade war that you must oppose if you wish to be seen as a decent, intelligent person? The trade war that the entire mainstream media portrays as a delusional, racist folly? That trade war?
I'd go stand in front of a tank right now. Like what are we actually supposed to do?
I have tons of motivation to do something about the largest totalitarian regime. Just tell me where to go and what to do.
I woulnd't assume that quite a few people don't feel this way. The issue isn't lack of motivation. It's the lack of any sort of leverage over a giant totalitarian foreign government.
I can tell you there are plenty on HN, myself included. I mean if you wanna make a bigger impact you can learn Mandarin and maybe go to China to meet some more people. Actually there are plenty of Chinese in SFBA or Seattle already. Have you talked to some of them???
Have you learned Mandarin?? That seems like a large amount of time to devote to something, only to go to China and immediately get disappeared after contacting a plainclothes cop.
From your previous comment, you dare to stand in front of a tank, yet you wont put in the effort to learn Mandarin. I dont know about others but that's pretty irony to me.
What's more, you replied without read my comment (or misread?). I said I'm a Chinese in the first sentence. I would like to have conversations with people who are serious about the matter but even on HN where people are rational and logical in most other topics are not showing their best when it comes to topics about China.
Anyway here's one guy who learned chinese: https://www.youtube.com/user/jaredfaa
(he's a bigger influencer on bilibili coz youtube is unfortunately blocked in China)
here's a guy went around the world and passed China without knowing Mandarin:
You ignored the next part of my comment. It's a large amount of time to waste, not effort, just to be disappeared the moment I got to China and revealed my intentions.
In what capacity you are sure learning it will be a certain waste of time?
Anyway here's a Chinese social media site with many people working in SFBA. I guess you can have more access to places like that if you know a bit Mandarin.
Just in the capacity that I have a lot to learn that I deem essential and research already takes up the majority of my free time.
Not that I won't try again, but I know it's an ordeal for me which takes lots of time I already don't have right now. I've taken and failed two separate language courses, not due to a lack of trying.
Learning foreign languages seems quite hard for me due to the nature through which I learned to read. I taught myself to read between age 2-3 and kind of just coasted on that for a long time, since I had mostly subpar public education.
But failing at multiple foreign languages has taught me the need to step back and have a better understanding of language in general before tackling it again.
But Mandarin is so far left field from other popular languages. Learning the Greek and Cyrillic alphabet was hard enough. I have severe ADHD and memory problems. I have used Anki for a long time and spaced repetition alone takes up a lot of my time. And the amount of symbols to learn for Mandarin is staggering.
Last year I took up memory training after studying the techniques of a few memory masters. I'm doing everything I can to improve my memory but just skipping to Mandarin right now is not a smart or efficient use of my time.
You're the one who said they'd go stand in front of a tank. One hour of study a day for three years to learn somewhat decent Mandarin seems like a small sacrifice in comparison.
If you prefer to start right now, there are also plenty of Chinese people desperate for someone to practice their English with, e.g. on https://www.tandem.net/
The risk of getting disappeared is low if you limit yourself to social media (as I said, Tandem is one way to find Chinese people willing to speak to you in English) or if you make sure to only talk about politics with people you've become friends with. At least I haven't disappeared so far.
Do you know how to do wizadry on a computer? Because if you do, the answer is right here in this thread. Fetch those git repos, help distribute them. Work together with the Chinese who already are doing something. Then branch out…
If I tell you that I give you a billion dollar to quit your job, and find a solution to this, you will try to do so. Not knowing what to do is something that happens all the time in life: we try anyway. Stopping at "I don't know what to do" is just the first clue that you can see a cost and not a reward sufficient to dig and try.
I'm not taking a moral stand here. I don't think anybody not doing anything is a bad person. But let's not pretend ignorance and inability. We don't even try. Reading HN is much more comfortable, besides life has many challenges already.
So you're saying that if you gave me $1B I would drop everything and try to solve this. That's correct.
I wouldn't spend 100% of my time on that singular social problem, but yes.
But that has nothing to do with reality on account of you having not given me any money, and me not having enough resources to quit my job and fund such initiatives against one of the largest economic powers in the world.
[Setting aside the overwhelming likehood that you are lying, mistaken, or other not genuine in your hypothetical offer.]
If you offer me (1G$/50yr=) 20 million dollars a year to spend eight hours a day trying to find a solution to this, then sure, I'll take that job and do it to the best of my ability. I don't expect to succeed, but as long as the paychecks clear I'll keep working.
If you offer me a billion dollars contingent on finding a solution, I'm going to ignore you, just like I ignore the people offering a million dollars for a solution to P vs NP, or XX million dollars for correctly predicting which six balls they pull out of a basket.
Treat it as just as any other problems and solve it using the startup thinking? Understand the problem, explore the solution, deliver MVP.
Honestly, most comments here misunderstood the problem to the point the purposed solutions are ridicules. Go talk to Chinese people living near you. Ask them why things are operating like this. Plenty live in SFBA/Seattle as far as I know.
Well assuming you aren't Chinese, it's not our place to get involved in their internal issues. But that doesn't mean we have to deal with people we don't like.
The USA at least is doing something which respects their sovereignty and reduces their power.
To be fair a million people is 0.07% of China's population.
0.7% of the US is in prison, so that would be about 1/10th of the prison population.
I'm not saying US prisons are the same - you get a vaguely proper legal process, and conditions are probably better. You're not likely to have your organs havested. But "a million people" isn't the problem.
It's not "whataboutism" to point out that this level of incarceration is not unusual. It is being portrayed as unusual in the article, when, in global-historical terms it is statistically perfectly normal. The small number of western democracies that do not practice violent state suppression of dissent and exploitation of the poor are the anomalies. The comparisons to Nazi Germany are also misleading. Nazi Germany was unusual in the degree to which it industrialized and systematized its racial slaughter, but the propaganda, state suppression, and state police brutality doesn't seem to me like an outlier among 20th century governments.
It's exactly whataboutism to say "What about U.S. incarceration?" when defending China. It's 100% analogous to what would come up in discussions of the USSR.
"The USSR is bad for its people."
"What about Jim Crow?"
It's also worth noting that there is a bipartisan criminal justice reform movement in the U.S. that is critical of the U.S. government at various levels, so, no, it's not apples to apples.
The claim is a) that things have be put in relation to the size of the country, and b) that having less than 0.1% of the population in prison for relatively minor offences can't be that huge of a problem if that is the case in many countries, including the USA.
This is a self contradictionary statement. People who are shallow enough to sell their ideals for "cheap tat" will not care about the origin of said tat and how they vote withe their dollars.
During the rise of Nazi Germany antisemitism was a worldwide phenomenon. Recall that few countries wanted to take in the Jewish refugees. Had Germany not started the war, they might have gotten away with exterminating all the Jews.
I have a horrible feeling that, in 50 years people will be saying something similar about today.
"During the rise of <insert power here> anti<blank> was a worldwide phenomenon. Recall that few countries wanted to take in the <blank> refugees. Had <power> not started the war, they might have gotten away with exterminating all the <blank>."
Substitute for whatever you feel most applicable. A frightening number of variables fit.
Islamophobia is a worldwide phenomenon. Few countries want to take in refugees from Syria, Libya, or Yemen - and there are a lot of such refugees. There are 3.6 million in Turkey: https://data2.unhcr.org/en/situations/syria/location/113 (for a sense of scale for Americans, that's somewhere between the populations of Ohio and Conneticut)
Saudi Arabia is part of the problem in Yemen, they're a belligerent?
The Sunni-Shia conflict is an ancient one that's also a serious problem in the region for muslims, although how much of it is a religious conflict and how much is just a regular Iran-Saudi power struggle is hard to say.
Yemen is unfortunate in being both strategically located, having little oil, a huge problem with the drug Qat, and rapidly running out of water.
they might have gotten away with exterminating all the Jews
If they hadn't started the war, they wouldn't have had access to most of the Jews. Only around ~560,000 Jews lived in prewar Germany whereas Poland had over 3 million alone.
The Nazis would've needed the cooperation of the other governments in their plan.
Indeed some level of antisemitism was common. But don't forget that the vast majority of the Jews they murdered (96% or so) were living in other countries, who they had to invade first.
Well, you are probably ok with mass incarceration, other countries don't oppose it. You find a way to justify imprisonment for non-violent crimes, consent to this is manufactured through media that you are exposed to. So you feel like it's acceptable in society. I'm not exposed to that media, I feel as equally awful about mass incarceration as about reeducation camps.
Do you think people shouldn't go to prison for serious financial, non-violent crimes?
And it's quite rude to project such a belief on someone. OP made no statement about their feelings toward mass incarceration, and claiming they are OK with it just because of the country they are in is like saying the Chinese are OK with what's happening in their own country.
I think we can find better solution for them, like forbid them to use any bank account themselves by placing them under tutorship, it would probably cost much less to the society
When people talk about non-violent crimes, they are almost always talking about drug crimes.
But specifically about your question, serious financial crimes are violent. Violence on this case is done by proxy, but abusing the State's position of power to help you on a crime shouldn't clean your hands of the violence.
It's also a de facto ethnostate for the Han chinese. Foreigners cannot become citizens even if they marry a Chinese citizen. And the people they keep in their reeducation camps are stubborn ethnic minorities.
And proof that "ethnostates" are a terrible idea - see the amount of Han Chinese elites who are now fleeing that sinking ship and trying their luck in Western countries (that in turn, by and large, started out as "ethnostates" of their own but got rid of that aspect since it was a hell of a limit to their prosperity!) Ethnostate = good old boy network by another name.
Amazing you are downvoted so much. There are a lot of neo-fascist/alt-right/whatever kool aid drinkers in tech. Ethnostates are just another kind of collectivist totalitarianism and it works about as well as the rest. Those who can flee generally do.
I kind-of agree, but then, on the other hand, it’s nice to have a definite home that you’re always welcome to (and I think many Jews would agree). There’s not a lot of countries besides US and maybe some southamerican countries that have (almost) achieved that ideal...
The difference is that I can call Donald Trump a fascist Nazi (or Obama an illegal immigrant and a communist) with absolutely no fear of repercussions from the govt, credit agencies, etc. Hell, I could even plaster it on billboards, make YouTube videos, and tv commercials. Big difference there.
Yes. One can absolutely see things in a nuanced way, and acknowledge that there is much wrong in the USA, and quite a few things going right in China, but obviously political freedoms are in much better shape in the USA (and, say, Europe) than in China.
The mistake here is obviously to compare China and the USA as apples and apples.
The US is an empire comprising the mainland, as well as vassal and occupied states. China has a smaller periphery (Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, HK, etc.)
If you actually wanted to make this comparison, you would need to compare the treatment of people in the USA's occupied territories, such as Iraq or Palestine, to the worst in China, not the worst in China to the worst in the USA, that by default grants a huge arbitrary importance to national borders. (Although the worst within the USA is very bad). China's appalling assimilation of muslims should be criticized, but Americans rarely draw a baseline comparison to how they deal with large muslim populations (invading their countries, murdering their people, drone-bombing weddings, etc.)
Reminds me of a friend who said "Churchill may have been a belligerent racist, but I'd rather have lived under Churchill than under Stalin!". The assumption is that "soviets" lived "under Stalin", but "englishmen" lived "under Churchill". However, it turns out the victims of Irish and Indian human-made famines also lived "under Churchill". He automatically imagines himself as an english citizen, not an indian subject... and it's not clear why?
Or, to put it more simply, if the middle east or historical comparisons don't work for you, you can just look at the Monroe Doctrine that has been openly re-centered thanks to the efforts to realign Venezuela into American consensus.
If you compare all of China to all of the Americas, you get a much better comparable population + land mass, and you can really contrast how the USA treats peripheral regions: blockades, banana republics, coups, black sites, paramilitaries, etc.
Americans will tell themselves "we may be bad but we are better than the enemy" over and over again, and that is what we will eventually study as the core repeated mantra of American propaganda during its waning years.
> with absolutely no fear of repercussions from the govt, credit agencies, etc.
As corporations grow more and more important (it's getting harder to do things without a credit card, for example), the government isn't the only important factor here. If the government outsources the punishment to corporations, what difference does it make that the government doesn't punish you for calling them incompetent but the corporations will terminate your accounts, cutting you off from much of modern society? You're getting cut off, because you said something.
Even in the 90s, when this was a prominent issue in American minds, when the State Department would offer the occasional "stiff rebuke", politicians told us that trade would inevitably move China toward an open democratic society.
I think you just nailed the narrative that has been proven wrong: that free trade would move them toward an open society.
More generally I think recent history has disproven a core tenet of libertarianism: that personal and societal level freedom are inseparable from economic freedom and capitalism (in the liberal meaning of the term) and the prosperity it generates.
China proves that capitalism works just fine and even "benefits" (in a raw GDP sense) from an otherwise totalitarian state and that personal freedom and human dignity are optional.
Pushing back on China is one of the very few things I agree with the Trump administration about, and I think it was bound to happen anyway without them. The deal was that we would open generous free trade with China and they would liberalize and open up to us. They broke the deal in multiple ways, taking that economic growth and then closing their markets and re-embracing totalitarianism.
It's truly bewildering to read an American write this.
America right now is waging war in 8 nations, has caused the actual death of a million Iraqis, has destroyed several functioning nations such as Libya, is funding the death of how many in Yemen? It's choking Venezuela with completely arbitrary sanctions, while supporting the neo-fascist regime in Brazil. It's allied with the apartheid regime of Israel and the monarchy of Saudi Arabia, the latter which dismembers journalists and decapitates feminists and democrats.
Their history has them funding all sorts of paramilitary groups in Europe via Operation Gladio, such as the opposition to France conceding Algerian independence:
>France
>In 1947, Interior Minister Édouard Depreux revealed the existence of a secret stay-behind army in France codenamed "Plan Bleu". The next year, the "Western Union Clandestine Committee" (WUCC) was created to coordinate secret unorthodox warfare. In 1949, the WUCC was integrated into NATO, whose headquarters were established in France, under the name "Clandestine Planning Committee" (CPC). In 1958, NATO founded the Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC) to coordinate secret warfare.[29][30]
>The network was supported with elements from SDECE, and had military support from the 11th Choc regiment. The former director of DGSE, admiral Pierre Lacoste, alleged in a 1992 interview with The Nation, that certain elements from the network were involved in terrorist activities against de Gaulle and his Algerian policy. A section of the 11th Choc regiment split over the 1962 Evian peace accords, and became part of the Organisation armée secrète (OAS), but it is unclear if this also involved members of the French stay-behind network.[31][32]
and both domestically and in Germany itself employed and propped up actual Nazis,
>Germany
>US intelligence also assisted in the set up of a German stay-behind network. CIA documents released in June 2006 under the 1998 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, show that the CIA organized "stay-behind" networks of German agents between 1949 and 1953. According to the Washington Post, "One network included at least two former Nazi SS members—Staff Sgt. Heinrich Hoffman and Lt. Col. Hans Rues—and one was run by Lt. Col. Walter Kopp, a former German army officer referred to by the CIA as an "unreconstructed Nazi". "The network was disbanded in 1953 amid political concerns that some members' neo-Nazi sympathies would be exposed in the West German press."[35]
and actual assassins:
>Spain
>Several events prior to Spain's 1982 membership in NATO have also been tied to Gladio. In May 1976, half a year after Franco's death, two Carlist militants were shot down by far-right terrorists, among whom were Gladio operative Stefano Delle Chiaie and members of the Apostolic Anticommunist Alliance (Triple A), demonstrating connections between Gladio and the South American "Dirty War" of the Operation Condor. This incident became known as the Montejurra incident.[55] According to a report by the Italian CESIS (Executive Committee for Intelligence and Security Services), Carlo Cicuttini (who took part in the 1972 Peteano bombing in Italy alongside Vincenzo Vinciguerra), participated in the 1977 Massacre of Atocha in Madrid, killing five people (including several lawyers), members of the Workers' Commissions trade-unions closely linked with the Spanish Communist Party. Cicuttini was a naturalized Spaniard and exiled in Spain since 1972 (date of the Peteano bombing)[56]
Americans also have by far the largest imprisoned population in the world, one that is openly acknowledged by its architects to be the product of disenfranchisement strategies and continuing of slavery to ensure republic...
It's so funny to see Americans talk about their fears about the suppression free speech while my long post, packed with citations, gets sunk and deleted from the conversation without response:
Git is one of the most widely used distributed protocols on the internet. GitHub is just one node on the graph... seems like a decent use/definition to me.
I'm not sure if GitHub fits the definition of distributed (unless you're talking about their load balancing setup, in which case - is that relevant?), but git is designed to be a decentralized store of information (specifically code, but not stricty) and optionally distributed.
Git, the protocol, is not the same as GitHub, the service. Git, the protocol, is absolutely distributed. And just to repeat my point - GitHub is only a single possible node in the graph
I know democide has been mostly coined by Rummel. Do you by chance refer to him? If so, could I ask for your sources? I know that Rummel's data has been heavily criticized by many historians. His work is usually about taking the largest estimate, which is fruitful if you want big titles (à la Black Book of X), but unfruitful if you are interested in the truth.
No, no historian thinks he will find the definitive truth. My point is that there are valid historians (I only know about a few fields, but you can see which historians are valid by how much their peers respect their work) that at least try to get as close to the the probable number of, in this case, deaths. One example: taking a look at Rummel's data on the Soviet Union, he reports 60 million deaths 1917-1987, which is laughable (he even claimed that was a low estimate!). That's the number reported by Solzhenitsyn, which is not considered a reliable source in contemporary Sovietology (probably not a source at all). Here is a relevant thread on r/AskHistorians if you're interested: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3v5u2t/are_r...
I'm really sorry an AskHistorians thread is not good enough for you. Let me paste Jonathan Smele's remark about Rummel's work (Smele is known for his compiled bibliography on the Russian Revolution):
>A poorly researched, obsessively anti-Soviet polemical general survey. [1]
Unsurprisingly, you would have read that exact quote in the reddit thread I linked. Guess that was too much to ask for.
[1] Jonathan Smele, Russian Revolution and Civil War Annotated Bibliography
The point is that in this case Rummel doesn't even attempt to be objective. You can be biased, everyone is. A real historian, someone who is respected by his peers, actively tries to remove his bias from his work. It isn't really profitable (you earn much more by writing extremely biased pop-history) but some individuals, such as me, value it.
It's pretty hard to get objective and accurate count here; unlike Nazis, Soviets (and I imagine Chinese et al) did not keep meticulous accounting even of people specifically executed, let alone of those keeling over in prison camps despite technically being only sentenced to imprisonment). Solzhenitsyn himself said, at least initially, that his numbers are extremely approximate, based on what personal research he could do and that he hopes future historians will do better.
Having said that, 60 million killed in USSR alone would seem highly suspicious. 60 million repressed sounds quite feasible. And as Stalin would acknowledge (death of one is a tragedy, death of millions is statistics), in a way it doesn't really matter -- communists killed as many, if not significantly more, people as Nazis, but because they usually did it to their own population, and weren't defeated by an invading army, they escaped anything resembling Nuremberg Tribunal, and to this day Nazi defenders keep quiet in decent society, but Soviet apologia is pretty rampant.
Well, in fact, they did. It's why pretty much every Sovietology book pre-1991 is now rarely recommended. The Soviet archives were opened with the fall of the USSR, allowing historians to have a much more accurate view of what was happening. Sure, there are caveats (e.g. people freed from the gulag in a dying state) yet, contemporary historians have been able to provide estimates, based on the best data available. The thing with Solzhenitsyn is that he had no access to any kind of data, and as a refugee in the US it's clear he was extremely biased. Note that I'm not saying I don't understand why he did that, I'm just saying that, if you want a good estimate of the numbers related to the Gulag system Solzhenitsyn is not a good source.
Regarding your last points: 60 million repressed is entirely dependent on how you define "repressed". Some people may argue that not having access to health care and education means being repressed. Just noting that it's not really a useful value, it's already difficult estimating number of deaths, estimating such a vague term as "repressed" people will be next to impossible. Regarding your claim that communists killed as many if not more people than Nazis, I really dislike this kind of comparisons. It is an extremely politicized topic, removes the human part of the statistics and historical context. Even then, I would still disagree with your claim, unless you count Mao's Great Leap Forward as part of it, which is really a comparison between apples and oranges. I personally believe state-pursued, systematic genocides should be differentiated from famines (such as the Holodomor and the famines related to the Great Leap Forward) which were more of a consequence of the regime's terrible management (plus already low harvest in the case of the Holodomor). If you want to take a look, the Wikipedia page for the excess mortality under Stalin is not too bad, especially the source they used (Wheatcroft's Victims of Stalinism and the Soviet Secret Police).
I don't see Nazi defenders keeping quiet, I think it's enough to think of the growing "Identity Politics" movement. Soviet apologia is rarely referring to the Stalinist period, especially considering Khrushchev's 56' "De-Stalinization" speech. And if you only consider the USSR of Khrushchev and beyond, while definitely worth criticizing, I'm not sure it's even comparable to the Nazi regime.
Not really. Getting anything useful from the archives is still like pulling teeth, and quite a few documents still have not been declassified. Solzhenitsin only had access to his own experience and interviewing very few people (obviously, this research was not exactly looked upon with approval). But he was also the first to make note of it.
I mean specifically repressed through the state apparatus, not lacking Internet access. Of course there are different degrees of that repression here, from being executed on the spot, to dying of hunger and overwork, all the way down to being relocated 101+ kilometers from a big city.
I would very much count victims of Holodomor (as well as of less known famines in Central Asia etc.) and Great Leap -- it does not matter to the dying if the State actively wanted to kill them, or just did not care the least bit if they die or not. And there are studies from real historians that conditions in Soviet labor camps, during peace time, were worse than in Nazi extermination camps (I am not sure if there are English copies online, but certainly Russian ones are accessible).
Absolute numbers may not mean all that much (although as far as exterminating their own citizenry, communist Khmer Rouge have no equals) but it is still important to remember and never forget -- it's not a competition who is more evil, it's about making sure that evil does not get repeated.
USSR of Khrushchev and beyond -- it's also place where workers demonstrating for decent pay and food for their children were fired upon by the army, slight liberalization efforts in satellite countries were crushed with tanks, dissidents had their brains fried in psychiatric hospitals, etc. etc. Sure, it was much better than Reich in the 30s-40s, or USSR itself in the same period, but it is also an apples to oranges comparison. Had Reich been contained instead of defeated, chances are it would have evolved into something similar by then as well. But Soviet apologia usually does not make a distinction anyway.
> It's interesting that people who were subject to this sort of treatment created the constitution limiting the US govt.
> It's interesting that people who aren't subject to this sort of treatment are trying to change the constitution and give the govt more power.
You mean like, when the 13th amendment was passed to abolish slavery and involuntary servitude? Pesky "govt" now telling folks they can no longer own human beings as property, that kind of thing?
Not all government power is oppression. A huge ton of it is vital for basic human welfare. Simplistic assertions like "those who seek to change the consitution are trying to give the government more power and therefore obviously have not experienced real oppression" are not furthering the conversation productively.
parent poster said "change the constitution", as though the original document represented perfection, when it clearly did not. they should have provided more specifics if they meant something more specific.
OP said "change the constitution and give the govt more power". It's clear that OP's point is to oppose things that erode freedom, not that the constitution represents perfection.
Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
Clearly gives the government power to ban slavery. It does not enshrine any rights in citizens, and indeed notes that involuntary servitude may still be imposed as criminal sanction.
The 13th amendment abolished laws that had built up protecting slavery. It meant that the slave interests could no longer use the government to enforce what they wanted. It recognizes (does not grant) the right that we all have to not live as slaves, and requires the government to protect that right. It is an important protection from the use of government power to enforce the claims of slave owners.
Prior to this, various laws and judicial decisions (such as Dredd Scott) had made aiding fugitive slaves illegal, and had practically made slavery legal in all states regardless of the will of the people.
Surprisingly, slavery persisted even after the Civil War. Here is a powerful, true story of someone who was a slave around 1900:
Slavery was enforced by the government prior to the 13th amendment. So no, its not a valid example of government increasing its power over the people, its an example of limiting its power.
That's the point of constitutional amendments: to limit the power of the government.
Slavery was enforced by the government prior to the 13th amendment. So no, its not a valid example of government increasing its power over the people, its an example of limiting its power.
The Bill of Rights was about limiting the power of the (federal) government, but subsequent Amendments have both increased and decreased the power of the government.
In the North the government had outlawed slavery prior the Civil War. in the South, the Amendment promulgated Lincoln's wartime decree freeing the slaves. The Amendment limited the power of the states to enforce slavery and enshrined the power of the federal government to ban slavery.
The 16th Amendment gave the government the power to levy an income tax. The 18th Amendment, i.e., Prohibition, gave the government the power to ban alcohol (until it was rescinded by the 21st Amendment).
I'm not sure why the top comment for a story about Chinese politics is "From an American's point of view, the government is evil, because REASONS". An entirely predictable discussion ensues.
That person speaks from within the party. If he speaks less carefully, they will simply eject and ignore him, and then the party wouldn't even have someone in their circle calling these actions "a bit low."
> Qiu Shike, a socialist writer and Xi supporter who is influential within some elite Communist Party circles, said carefully
Oh interesting way to put it. Needing to avoid ejection from social circles must be a common motivator for most people. Now I am wondering how to tell if someone is masking a stronger feeling or not
Being banished from social circles is certainly one reason, but in this case I think it's fear of life or liberty by an authoritarian regime that has complete discretion to do so if you come across as speaking out against them.
If you saw the recent HBO series on Cheronybl, you can see the pains with which one person is trying to relay the seriousness of the situation without making himself a target, opposition figure, enemy of the state, etc. I also remember hearing that Sadam Hussein underestimated how easily Iraq could be toppled in case of invasion because his military generals were too scared to speak truth.
The first is that Asian culture (including Japan, Korea) is profoundly dogmatic and hierarchical. They have a completely different moral-alignment with being obedient.
The second is that over time, you can really achive the social transformation spouted by authoritarian governments. Russia was communist for 90 years. North korea approaching 70 years. After several generations what you have is the only thing that people know.
As a westerner, I find it truly amazing that these systems survive at all.
With enough aggressive “pruning” (read: murders by a tyrannical and totalitarian government) in a population, natural selection inevitably takes its course.
Anyone in North Korea who would speak up has long since escaped, been disappeared, or killed.
The scary generalization of this idea is that all governments engage in this activity to some degree.
The liberty nutjobs really have a point about being intolerant to the minuscule interventions: by this model, its a way of domesticating people.
OTOH I don't believe this idea is right, because humanity has had slavery and oppression since time immemorial, and freedom as we know it is relatively new. It is a natural desire of human beings to fight against glaring injustices, and for the oppressed to fight back.
They all do engage in some form of it... show me a modern Western country that doesn't have long sentences including death for sedition, subversion, or treason against "the State?" I think the only question is who gets to decide what are violations... because those charges are vague and arbitrary. Tax evasion or corruption charges have the same problem... I smile every time I read an article about someone arrested for tax evasion in Russia or corruption in China.
I think the second idea is the correct one, there are many counterpoints to the first one: you can see the same thing in any culture with the right ingredients, such as Germany in Nazi era (the movie "Downfall" captures the psychological difficulty very well), American prisoners during riots that all lie on the floor because there are consequences for not doing so, or "bending the knee" in Game of Thrones. Any situation where you risk harm to yourself or people that you care about by failing to be obedient, you will do so unless you are willing to suffer whatever the known consequences will be for failing to do so.
> As a westerner, I find it truly amazing that these systems survive at all.
It shouldn't be amazing, as a Westener, considering slavery was legally allowed and enforced in the West for longer than any alternate authoritarian regime in modern times. Just consider slavery in American from 1776-1865... I can't think of any authoritarian regime that lasted that long... North Korean regime (1948-present), Soviet regime (1917-1989), Chinese regime (1949-present), were/are close but still haven't yet achieved the length of authoritarianism exercised over some arbitrary portion of its populace.
> you will do so unless you are willing to suffer whatever the known consequences will be for failing to do so.
It's very different to not protest or to comply out of fear than to be morally aligned to the subservience. To this day South Korea still uses physical violence to discipline kids. I've seen some very authoritative and strong personality types turn into sheep by the mere act of talking to an older person, which is the key hierarchy. There is the famous phrase in Japanese: "The nail that sticks out gets hammered". Or chinese people, as in this topic, have a completely different relationship to Tiananmen Square or the Muslim than what the west would have with Abu Ghraib.
Asia just does not have the Liberty moral alignment the west has, be it for historical, cultural or biological reasons. Maybe rebelliousity is distinctly western, since the middle east also shows some of those patterns.
> It shouldn't be amazing, as a Westener, considering slavery was legally allowed and enforced in the West for longer than any alternate authoritarian regime in modern times. Just consider slavery in American from 1776-1865... I can't think of any authoritarian regime that lasted that long... North Korean regime (1948-present), Soviet regime (1917-1989), Chinese regime (1949-present), were/are close but still haven't yet achieved the length of authoritarianism exercised over some arbitrary portion of its populace.
There are plenty of examples of slave-driven societies that were sent into extinction because of this practice (Sparta, Rome, The US South). Its true it took a while in the US, but it was constantly violated and affected a small part of an imported population. Had the general populace been able to be thrown into slavery, I can't imagine it lasting much.
I can imagine chatel/small slavery lasting a long time because its a millenarian practice. But total control of the state? Near absolute economic slavery of the entire population? I cant imagine anything working out at all, and nobody collaborating to make it work.
Sometimes, like when we are near a certain anniversary, I wonder how much this order of things will endure, i doubt that economic growth will come fast enough for everyone. Who knows.
Sure, but i wouldn't be surprised if the people would soon start wanting "more" (or at least, starting to understand that there are substantial differences with what the rest of the world can or cannot do).
How many dead bodies are you asking for, exactly? 100M?
We've all got strong feelings about politics, but maybe Americans in particular ought to be a little less cavalier about dead foreigners in the name of American idealism.
I'm not asking for anything, I'm stating that if you want china to not do things like the article or not have internment camps you have to go to war with them.
I think the pragmatic answer is that unless the country cares about the stick (sanctions, tariffs, military conflict) or the carrot (financial aid, access to markets, military alliances), you can't do anything. How long have we been talking about human rights in China... 1989? They don't care, and why should they? It works better in smaller countries that are easier to isolate like North Korea or Venezuela, but even there it doesn't work great if a larger country like Russia or China is willing to support them. Beyond that, it's just symbolic gestures like expelling diplomats or lodging protests with the ambassador.
in this thread: bunch of white privileged people debating how wrong china is by using the state machine to smash minorities, while both doing nothing concrete and never once have been in a protest in their own country when the fallacy of war on drugs was used to smash afro Americans with mass incarcerations for "crimes" that everybody here "committed" safely within the campus walls of elite colleges.
not defending China, obviously, but have to call out the absurdity!
Chinese people must unite now! China has started putting Uyghur Muslims into camps, censoring internet etc. violating human rights. If you do not have your voice today your future will be doomed.
This is extremely disturbing, not to mention so ironic that a self-proclaimed "communist" regime is torturing and kidnapping communist activists.
We can debate Marxism here in the comments, but the fact is that nobody regardless of their political stance should have to worry about being kidnapped or tortured by their government. At that point your government is effectively a gang, of no higher moral ground than a bunch of thugs with guns.
Until China fixes their government, they will never be taken seriously on the same level of other "first world" countries. Unless people passively watch Peking University students (statistically harder to get into than Harvard) get kidnapped by their government and do nothing about it.
I wonder what Chinese people think about the odds of any of this improving.
> Until China fixes their government, they will never be taken seriously on the same level of other "first world" countries.
I think russia has been taken seriously for a century now, with not better track record. What makes your country be taken seriously is your military strength, which is your capacity to flip-off any other country that tries to take political advantage over you.
> I wonder what Chinese people think about the odds of any of this improving.
What I think is that the vast majority of chinese don't care about this topic at all, and would rather not think about it. Remember, most of them dont know about Tiananmen square, not because the government censored it, but because they don't care about it.
I've asked this question to people that live in china, which is very anecdotal.
In the modern age, it's impossible to keep information out. Any chinese person that left the country has had access to this information, and could have disseminated with virtually no effort.
China's government is not Marxist in any sense of the word. And it could hardly be considered to be communist unless you're willing to accept self-applied labels. From the article:
“The government is scared because the domestic contradictions are growing,” Michael said. “Once you study Marxism, you know real socialism and China’s so-called socialism with Chinese characteristics are two different things. They sell fascism as socialism, like a street vendor passes off dog meat as lamb.”
I seek to help Qiu Zhanxuan achieve freedom again. I think it is somewhat unlikely, but I have decided that the best thing I can do is petition US Universities to put Chinese student applications to US universities on hold until Qiu Zhanxuan is released, or his remains are released.
To that end I have created a petition. http://chng.it/WgwY9xdN8M
If you think my strategy is not optimal or have suggestions or a better idea - please respond below or reach out. @williamsharkey on twitter.
195 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 219 ms ] threadAre they unaware of the history of other communist regimes, unaware that the only thing that sets China apart from everywhere else Marxism was tried is that they went much further with getting economic growth back via free market reforms? What does Qiu Zhanxuan think would be different if "real Marxism" and "not dog meat passed off as lamb" were to be implemented in China? Is he totally unaware of how China was under Mao? It's easy to believe his understanding of Chinese history is garbled beyond recognition, but obviously he understands some of it at least.
It's of course also interesting that this is happening at the most 'elite' university in the Chinese system. In England during the cold war, the intelligence agencies were repeatedly penetrated by Soviet moles - something that was possible because these agencies only recruited from Oxford and Cambridge, both hotbeds of communist sympathy. It seems that the most selective universities in any society end up breeding communist students. My guess is it's because communist societies tend to be run by academics, and implicitly or explicitly are based on the belief that democratic societies are bad because the academic elite don't get to make decisions alone.
Maybe humility and pragmatism (as opposed to idealism) aren't easy to learn on the way to an elite education.
But I'm also not sure how much we should read these people's labelling of themselves as Marxists as indicating an opinion on the economic planning/freedom scale. Maybe the right analogy is something like Jesuits objecting to how Spain was abusing/enslaving native americans. Being Christian was an important part of how everyone involved thought about themselves, and such criticisms would inevitably have been phrased in christian terminology, that was the shared language of both power and protest. But that's not what the message was.
> Peking University’s young Marxists drew the government’s ire after they campaigned for workers’ rights and openly criticized social inequality and corruption in China.
When a government, regardless of political orientation, "disappears people" that's a sign that something is rotten to the core.
Can you point out some groups of people who "got suicided/..." in France/US/UK in recent years because of their political views?
More interestingly, while some have voted communism in, nobody seems able to vote communism out, without serious military involvement. I wonder why...
President Trump is actually a good example that everyone could agree on: considering the amount of dirt thrown at him it a clear sign of system failure because either: - he’s still not impeached or - his aides go down by presumably made up cover stories
Sure, such things sadly happen even in the Western world, but you can't seriously equate that with the scale of things happening in China.
Historical attempts at socialism in their country are exactly what set up the conditions for the rotten core you speak of to come about.
So if these students had their way, they would simply (albeit indirectly, inadvertently, over time) recreate the same rotten core.
This doesn’t excuse the current regime but it is worthy of attention.
I’m assuming there can be no perfect (reality matches theory) implementation of socialism, but I think that’s a good assumption.
And rather than pay attention only to the symptoms instead of the root causes, I think it’s good to pay attention to both.
Obviously the Chinese government is rotten to the core. It's a late-stage communist government, it's how all such governments turn out. The very important question which needs to be answered (and so far, nobody is even trying to answer it in this thread), is why does a student who lives within that system want to double down on it?
I suspect the answer is simple and doesn't need much analysis. One of the most common stereotypes about communists is they always claim that the failure of communist states is because they didn't do it right - that they were just fake or hijacked socialist revolutions. Qiu is making that very claim in the article. But there have been many attempts to do communism right, so why do these people not accept that the lack of any success cases means the ideology is wrong?
P.S. your claim that communist societies tend to be run by academics doesn't really hold much water - if you're interested in the russian revolution, consider reading Sheila Fitzpatrick's "The Russian Revolution" as an excellent introduction.
They are not being viewed more favorable in former East Block countries either. So what what is left there?
> While there have been many societies claiming to be socialist, none would actually qualify from a political theory perspective (it was something more akin to propaganda, e.g. look, we achieved socialism!).
Nonetheless those are the societies that are being cherished by the remaining fans of Socialism in the West. Especially in countries like Germany where there is a generation of kids who hear only the good things (everybody had a job!) about the DDR making it look like some kind of paradise (it actually was one in the East Block since everybody else was working to make the DDR look like one).
> Even then, it's worth noting that those societies developed in an environment of extreme hostility from other nations
Oh please. You can say that about every society. It depends on how much you reach backwards or how much you are ready to ignore.
Just like we see the growing ignorance of the evil that was fascism, there will come a time where a growing ignorance of state socialism will become mainstream and I'm afraid of that. I fled this madness once already and since the fans of state socialism today are not even ready to come up with new solutions to the issues this idealism had, there won't be new ideas later.
You are referencing countries which were either part of the USSR (Belarus, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia), or countries that were part of the Warsaw Pact. While there was still something left after the fall of the USSR (such as free healthcare and education, something rich countries such as the US don't offer, and that most post-USSR countries promptly removed) I agree the Soviet Union left behind a quite terrible legacy. I also believe, however, that it is wrong to argue that every socialist country will share the Soviet fate; the history of the Soviet Union (together with its worst aspects, such as Stalinism and the Gulag system) should be understood in the context of Russian society. Even then, your choice removes from the discussion quite a few altogether different societies, based on radical democracy, such as Republican Spain during the civil war, and the Free Territory of Ukraine during the Russian Civil war.
>Those are the societies that are being cherished by the remaining fans of Socialism in the West.
I'm sorry, but I rarely hear someone cheering for the DDR, or for the USSR in general. The legacy of Stalinism is such that the USSR (and its puppet states) are rightfully criticized, apart from a few small and unpopular groups (even in the left as a whole).
>You can say that about every society.
Republican Spain was challenged by a military general, leading to a conflict (the Spanish Civil War) which ravaged its economy and population. While the democracies (UK, France and US) decided not to intervene (partly because their interests were threatened by many policies of nationalization in Republican Spain), Franco received military help, both in terms of weapons and in terms of personnel from Germany and Italy. The USSR formed as a consequence of the extreme conditions faced by the general population in the aftermath of the First World War, followed by years of Civil War with an ever-decreasing availability of food. Once the Civil War was over, the USSR found itself in a state of constant panic of "capitalist intervention", the Five Year plans (and their horrible consequences) themselves a consequence of Stalin's fear of enemy attack. The Free Territory of Ukraine formed in the aftermath of the Russian Civil War, and lasted only a few years, being destroyed by a Red Army offensive. I'm sorry, but many societies haven't faced such extreme situations, and those that did usually had some kind of allies.
I'm sorry if you (as I am, maybe mistakenly, inferring) fled from an East Block country. I'm not arguing the USSR has a positive legacy. I'm simply arguing the western world (and the US in particular) has an extreme bias when it comes to left-wing politics (both the Red Scares come to mind), and that we should attempt to evaluate societies based on what they were, not what they claimed to be. Alternative societies (in particular Republican Spain and the Free Territory of Ukraine) should be evaluated differently from authoritarian countries such as the USSR: one of their main ideals were complete democracy. The fact that they aren't that well known is, in my view, a result of the bias I talk about above.
P.S. as for the comment above, my knowledge mostly comes from books, Sheila Fitzpatrick's being one. For the Spanish Civil War there is both Thomas' and Preston's. The historiography of the FTU is, unfortunately, mostly lacking.
The US is no good example for anything related with Socialism besides the paranoia maybe. Free healthcare and education is not something unusual on the continent. No matter what political/economic system you have.
> I agree the Soviet Union left behind a quite terrible legacy. I also believe, however, that it is wrong to argue that every socialist country will share the Soviet fate
This is because you assume that the SU was in control everywhere. In the Warsaw Pact countries it was the local government that was to blame here primary. Their versions of the ideology were what caused the problems. Not often they were even in conflict with the SU line.
> Even then, your choice removes from the discussion quite a few altogether different societies, based on radical democracy, such as Republican Spain during the civil war, and the Free Territory of Ukraine during the Russian Civil war.
The first existed for 3 years the second was an anarchist movement. Both fall much better in your category of societies developed in an environment of extreme hostility from other nations and did not show to be a relevant model to run a country.
> I'm sorry, but I rarely hear someone cheering for the DDR, or for the USSR in general.
I was able to vote for at least 2 parties who either completely or represented by a strong wing do cheer the DDR pretty much (die Linke, MLPD). There is a strong and relevant movement within the left in Germany to do just that.
> Is it because they weren't able to defend themselves?
No, it's because they did not run a state. Running a state is the whole thing. Sure protecting your borders is one thing but: economy, law, diplomacy, etc. you know, all the stuff you do as a country if you exist long enough.
What the anarchists did (and yes, I think there is a huge difference if you are an anarchist or someone who calls himself socialist) is something that already works on small scale in several projects or small regions. If this works out on a country-scale remains unproven yet.
(It was nice to have this discussion with you :) )
Clearly not all of them will be invaded by the germans, but there are nevertheless strong similarities, and quite general lessons to be learned about human behavior. Just concluding that that Russia does bad things misses the point.
Political control of the economy inevitably means an enormous concentration of power. Instead of your boss, your landlord, your mayor (and your priest) being independent forces, if they are all one person, then that person has tremendous, almost total, power over your life. The history of what people do to others when they have total power is not pretty.
The US founding fathers were keenly aware of this, although they lived too early to imagine that economic control was really something ought to be included in the list. Their concerns about un-opposed power have not been proven ill-judged.
Nothing has changed. This year, Oxbridge professors were writing articles in The Guardian asking people to stop saying Venezuela failed because of "socialism", and instead to look at the other thriving South America socialist countries as examples that socialism is amazing.
These activists simply recognize that capitalism is not working for everyone, like the factory workers working those 12-hour shifts under awful working conditions getting paid peanuts, and want to give them more representation and make things more fair. On this higher level I completely sympathize with them, though I have no knowledge of the details of what specifically they are advocating.
Reports are going to have people claiming one thing and others denying that thing. This is a really serious human rights concern involving MILLIONS of people. It has been going on starting with Falun Gong since 2000 or earlier, then Uyghurs, Tibetans etc. It’s the word of the Chinese government vs all those groups. So it’s pretty clear this stuff is happening, but only because so many disparate groups are claiming this.
But there is nothing like VIDEO to make clear what exactly is happening. We need to have these videos in order to share them. Same as Tienemen Square videos.
On the other hand, such camps would not look much different from prisons, so I doubt you can expect KZ style pictures.
Edit: just wondering, is my argument really that bad, or am I dealing with patriotic bite reflexes?
I think that the following devices would be REALLY useful not just for human rights but proving what happened in an altercation:
A tiny device that can record video or video, perhaps embedded in the clothing or body of a person.
The stream is ENCRYPTED AND THEN transmitted to local towers or wifi or whatever, and finds its way to some servers. Maybe via a DHT routing.
Anyway, these servers store the encrypted data and the keys are generated by Shamir Secret Sharing so 3 or more parties can come together and decrypt the video.
In countries with rule of law, this could be used to figure out rapes on campus, by having such cameras in every dorm and bedroom. The keys would be obtained during a court case only.
In human rights cases, the keys would be generated by human rights organizations.
So this will eliminate “peeing toms” and “spying” by having warrants for decrypton of a video strean, and curation by trusted agencies what gets shown to the public.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=chinese+internment+camps
I asked for the best VIDEO evidence from inside, showing the most people and smoking guns
It’s the difference between hearsay and video evidence. Like when people say the IDF harasses people in the West Bank, or cops kill unarmed Black people, and people dispute it one way or the other. But having video reveals exactly WHAT is happening. The more context for the video, the better.
Right now it's still more of a civilized sparring.
The rest of the world could easily get by by moving production lines and factories to Vietnam and Indonesia and South America, etc, while paying a flat “tax” in increased prices across the board for cheap products.
I have tons of motivation to do something about the largest totalitarian regime. Just tell me where to go and what to do.
I woulnd't assume that quite a few people don't feel this way. The issue isn't lack of motivation. It's the lack of any sort of leverage over a giant totalitarian foreign government.
Going there and spreading that message seems like a bad idea.
What's more, you replied without read my comment (or misread?). I said I'm a Chinese in the first sentence. I would like to have conversations with people who are serious about the matter but even on HN where people are rational and logical in most other topics are not showing their best when it comes to topics about China.
Anyway here's one guy who learned chinese: https://www.youtube.com/user/jaredfaa (he's a bigger influencer on bilibili coz youtube is unfortunately blocked in China)
here's a guy went around the world and passed China without knowing Mandarin:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjI1O11S8KY (one of his several vidoes)
Anyway, ignorance promotes fear. Understand the problem first before propose solutions.
I mean no disrespect to Mandarin itself.
Anyway here's a Chinese social media site with many people working in SFBA. I guess you can have more access to places like that if you know a bit Mandarin.
https://www.douban.com/group/sfbayarea/
Not that I won't try again, but I know it's an ordeal for me which takes lots of time I already don't have right now. I've taken and failed two separate language courses, not due to a lack of trying.
Learning foreign languages seems quite hard for me due to the nature through which I learned to read. I taught myself to read between age 2-3 and kind of just coasted on that for a long time, since I had mostly subpar public education.
But failing at multiple foreign languages has taught me the need to step back and have a better understanding of language in general before tackling it again.
But Mandarin is so far left field from other popular languages. Learning the Greek and Cyrillic alphabet was hard enough. I have severe ADHD and memory problems. I have used Anki for a long time and spaced repetition alone takes up a lot of my time. And the amount of symbols to learn for Mandarin is staggering.
Last year I took up memory training after studying the techniques of a few memory masters. I'm doing everything I can to improve my memory but just skipping to Mandarin right now is not a smart or efficient use of my time.
If you prefer to start right now, there are also plenty of Chinese people desperate for someone to practice their English with, e.g. on https://www.tandem.net/
It seems like a lot of people with moderate computer skills are fulfilling this role. My skills and time would be wasted on such an initiative.
I do think it's good advice to contact some people who are already involved, though. They would best know what else needs to be done.
I'm not taking a moral stand here. I don't think anybody not doing anything is a bad person. But let's not pretend ignorance and inability. We don't even try. Reading HN is much more comfortable, besides life has many challenges already.
I wouldn't spend 100% of my time on that singular social problem, but yes.
But that has nothing to do with reality on account of you having not given me any money, and me not having enough resources to quit my job and fund such initiatives against one of the largest economic powers in the world.
If you offer me (1G$/50yr=) 20 million dollars a year to spend eight hours a day trying to find a solution to this, then sure, I'll take that job and do it to the best of my ability. I don't expect to succeed, but as long as the paychecks clear I'll keep working.
If you offer me a billion dollars contingent on finding a solution, I'm going to ignore you, just like I ignore the people offering a million dollars for a solution to P vs NP, or XX million dollars for correctly predicting which six balls they pull out of a basket.
Honestly, most comments here misunderstood the problem to the point the purposed solutions are ridicules. Go talk to Chinese people living near you. Ask them why things are operating like this. Plenty live in SFBA/Seattle as far as I know.
I don't know any Chinese people living near me. I don't know many people here at all. I would definitely like to talk to people close to the issue.
The USA at least is doing something which respects their sovereignty and reduces their power.
0.7% of the US is in prison, so that would be about 1/10th of the prison population.
I'm not saying US prisons are the same - you get a vaguely proper legal process, and conditions are probably better. You're not likely to have your organs havested. But "a million people" isn't the problem.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
"The USSR is bad for its people."
"What about Jim Crow?"
It's also worth noting that there is a bipartisan criminal justice reform movement in the U.S. that is critical of the U.S. government at various levels, so, no, it's not apples to apples.
Since China is so big anything they'll do will affect a huge number of people, even if it's not excessive.
This resemblance doesn't make a lot of sense.
Imprisoning someone for drug charges after due process is not the same as imprisoning someone for being the wrong ethnicity.
The moral weight of a life does not change based on the population of a country.
I feel like these statements are pretty close to being axiomatic.
"During the rise of <insert power here> anti<blank> was a worldwide phenomenon. Recall that few countries wanted to take in the <blank> refugees. Had <power> not started the war, they might have gotten away with exterminating all the <blank>."
Substitute for whatever you feel most applicable. A frightening number of variables fit.
And that's about islamophobia? Saudi-Arabia is refusing to help because they hate muslims?
The Sunni-Shia conflict is an ancient one that's also a serious problem in the region for muslims, although how much of it is a religious conflict and how much is just a regular Iran-Saudi power struggle is hard to say.
Yemen is unfortunate in being both strategically located, having little oil, a huge problem with the drug Qat, and rapidly running out of water.
If they hadn't started the war, they wouldn't have had access to most of the Jews. Only around ~560,000 Jews lived in prewar Germany whereas Poland had over 3 million alone.
The Nazis would've needed the cooperation of the other governments in their plan.
And it's quite rude to project such a belief on someone. OP made no statement about their feelings toward mass incarceration, and claiming they are OK with it just because of the country they are in is like saying the Chinese are OK with what's happening in their own country.
Financial crimes always boil down to some kind of theft.
But specifically about your question, serious financial crimes are violent. Violence on this case is done by proxy, but abusing the State's position of power to help you on a crime shouldn't clean your hands of the violence.
Sounds just like the USA. Just look at Snowden or Assange.
The US is an empire comprising the mainland, as well as vassal and occupied states. China has a smaller periphery (Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, HK, etc.)
If you actually wanted to make this comparison, you would need to compare the treatment of people in the USA's occupied territories, such as Iraq or Palestine, to the worst in China, not the worst in China to the worst in the USA, that by default grants a huge arbitrary importance to national borders. (Although the worst within the USA is very bad). China's appalling assimilation of muslims should be criticized, but Americans rarely draw a baseline comparison to how they deal with large muslim populations (invading their countries, murdering their people, drone-bombing weddings, etc.)
Reminds me of a friend who said "Churchill may have been a belligerent racist, but I'd rather have lived under Churchill than under Stalin!". The assumption is that "soviets" lived "under Stalin", but "englishmen" lived "under Churchill". However, it turns out the victims of Irish and Indian human-made famines also lived "under Churchill". He automatically imagines himself as an english citizen, not an indian subject... and it's not clear why?
Or, to put it more simply, if the middle east or historical comparisons don't work for you, you can just look at the Monroe Doctrine that has been openly re-centered thanks to the efforts to realign Venezuela into American consensus.
If you compare all of China to all of the Americas, you get a much better comparable population + land mass, and you can really contrast how the USA treats peripheral regions: blockades, banana republics, coups, black sites, paramilitaries, etc.
Americans will tell themselves "we may be bad but we are better than the enemy" over and over again, and that is what we will eventually study as the core repeated mantra of American propaganda during its waning years.
As corporations grow more and more important (it's getting harder to do things without a credit card, for example), the government isn't the only important factor here. If the government outsources the punishment to corporations, what difference does it make that the government doesn't punish you for calling them incompetent but the corporations will terminate your accounts, cutting you off from much of modern society? You're getting cut off, because you said something.
It‘s not an isolated phenomenon. It is very widespread.
Even in the 90s, when this was a prominent issue in American minds, when the State Department would offer the occasional "stiff rebuke", politicians told us that trade would inevitably move China toward an open democratic society.
More generally I think recent history has disproven a core tenet of libertarianism: that personal and societal level freedom are inseparable from economic freedom and capitalism (in the liberal meaning of the term) and the prosperity it generates.
China proves that capitalism works just fine and even "benefits" (in a raw GDP sense) from an otherwise totalitarian state and that personal freedom and human dignity are optional.
Pushing back on China is one of the very few things I agree with the Trump administration about, and I think it was bound to happen anyway without them. The deal was that we would open generous free trade with China and they would liberalize and open up to us. They broke the deal in multiple ways, taking that economic growth and then closing their markets and re-embracing totalitarianism.
Political freedom that is. Personal freedom and human dignity are optional in "open societies" too with many countries having it worse than in China.
America right now is waging war in 8 nations, has caused the actual death of a million Iraqis, has destroyed several functioning nations such as Libya, is funding the death of how many in Yemen? It's choking Venezuela with completely arbitrary sanctions, while supporting the neo-fascist regime in Brazil. It's allied with the apartheid regime of Israel and the monarchy of Saudi Arabia, the latter which dismembers journalists and decapitates feminists and democrats.
Their history has them funding all sorts of paramilitary groups in Europe via Operation Gladio, such as the opposition to France conceding Algerian independence:
>France
>In 1947, Interior Minister Édouard Depreux revealed the existence of a secret stay-behind army in France codenamed "Plan Bleu". The next year, the "Western Union Clandestine Committee" (WUCC) was created to coordinate secret unorthodox warfare. In 1949, the WUCC was integrated into NATO, whose headquarters were established in France, under the name "Clandestine Planning Committee" (CPC). In 1958, NATO founded the Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC) to coordinate secret warfare.[29][30]
>The network was supported with elements from SDECE, and had military support from the 11th Choc regiment. The former director of DGSE, admiral Pierre Lacoste, alleged in a 1992 interview with The Nation, that certain elements from the network were involved in terrorist activities against de Gaulle and his Algerian policy. A section of the 11th Choc regiment split over the 1962 Evian peace accords, and became part of the Organisation armée secrète (OAS), but it is unclear if this also involved members of the French stay-behind network.[31][32]
and both domestically and in Germany itself employed and propped up actual Nazis,
>Germany
>US intelligence also assisted in the set up of a German stay-behind network. CIA documents released in June 2006 under the 1998 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, show that the CIA organized "stay-behind" networks of German agents between 1949 and 1953. According to the Washington Post, "One network included at least two former Nazi SS members—Staff Sgt. Heinrich Hoffman and Lt. Col. Hans Rues—and one was run by Lt. Col. Walter Kopp, a former German army officer referred to by the CIA as an "unreconstructed Nazi". "The network was disbanded in 1953 amid political concerns that some members' neo-Nazi sympathies would be exposed in the West German press."[35]
and actual assassins:
>Spain
>Several events prior to Spain's 1982 membership in NATO have also been tied to Gladio. In May 1976, half a year after Franco's death, two Carlist militants were shot down by far-right terrorists, among whom were Gladio operative Stefano Delle Chiaie and members of the Apostolic Anticommunist Alliance (Triple A), demonstrating connections between Gladio and the South American "Dirty War" of the Operation Condor. This incident became known as the Montejurra incident.[55] According to a report by the Italian CESIS (Executive Committee for Intelligence and Security Services), Carlo Cicuttini (who took part in the 1972 Peteano bombing in Italy alongside Vincenzo Vinciguerra), participated in the 1977 Massacre of Atocha in Madrid, killing five people (including several lawyers), members of the Workers' Commissions trade-unions closely linked with the Spanish Communist Party. Cicuttini was a naturalized Spaniard and exiled in Spain since 1972 (date of the Peteano bombing)[56]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio
Americans also have by far the largest imprisoned population in the world, one that is openly acknowledged by its architects to be the product of disenfranchisement strategies and continuing of slavery to ensure republic...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20014965
Any complaints about this censorship? Gets sunk too. The daily two-minute hate against China cannot and will not be interrupted!
Terminus 端点星计划，是在 GitHub 开放平台搭建的一个站点，以去中心化的方式备份微信、微博等平台被删文章。
Terminus is a site set up on GitHub's open platform to back up posts deleted from WeChat, Weibo and other platforms by means of decentralization.
What a mind-bogglingly clueless and disrespectful thing to say.
It's interesting that people who were subject to this sort of treatment created the constitution limiting the US govt.
It's interesting that people who aren't subject to this sort of treatment are trying to change the constitution and give the govt more power.
It's interesting to me that democide is the number 1 cause of death in the 20th century and everyone ignores that fact.
Its also interesting to me that the internet allows people to communicate and learn how much all govts lie.
Change is coming as govts try to control the internet and the communication people have with each other.
It's estimated to be the number one cause of non-natural deaths
Do you really think its possible to find "the truth" of numbers when it comes to things like democide?
>A poorly researched, obsessively anti-Soviet polemical general survey. [1]
Unsurprisingly, you would have read that exact quote in the reddit thread I linked. Guess that was too much to ask for.
[1] Jonathan Smele, Russian Revolution and Civil War Annotated Bibliography
Having said that, 60 million killed in USSR alone would seem highly suspicious. 60 million repressed sounds quite feasible. And as Stalin would acknowledge (death of one is a tragedy, death of millions is statistics), in a way it doesn't really matter -- communists killed as many, if not significantly more, people as Nazis, but because they usually did it to their own population, and weren't defeated by an invading army, they escaped anything resembling Nuremberg Tribunal, and to this day Nazi defenders keep quiet in decent society, but Soviet apologia is pretty rampant.
Regarding your last points: 60 million repressed is entirely dependent on how you define "repressed". Some people may argue that not having access to health care and education means being repressed. Just noting that it's not really a useful value, it's already difficult estimating number of deaths, estimating such a vague term as "repressed" people will be next to impossible. Regarding your claim that communists killed as many if not more people than Nazis, I really dislike this kind of comparisons. It is an extremely politicized topic, removes the human part of the statistics and historical context. Even then, I would still disagree with your claim, unless you count Mao's Great Leap Forward as part of it, which is really a comparison between apples and oranges. I personally believe state-pursued, systematic genocides should be differentiated from famines (such as the Holodomor and the famines related to the Great Leap Forward) which were more of a consequence of the regime's terrible management (plus already low harvest in the case of the Holodomor). If you want to take a look, the Wikipedia page for the excess mortality under Stalin is not too bad, especially the source they used (Wheatcroft's Victims of Stalinism and the Soviet Secret Police).
I don't see Nazi defenders keeping quiet, I think it's enough to think of the growing "Identity Politics" movement. Soviet apologia is rarely referring to the Stalinist period, especially considering Khrushchev's 56' "De-Stalinization" speech. And if you only consider the USSR of Khrushchev and beyond, while definitely worth criticizing, I'm not sure it's even comparable to the Nazi regime.
I mean specifically repressed through the state apparatus, not lacking Internet access. Of course there are different degrees of that repression here, from being executed on the spot, to dying of hunger and overwork, all the way down to being relocated 101+ kilometers from a big city.
I would very much count victims of Holodomor (as well as of less known famines in Central Asia etc.) and Great Leap -- it does not matter to the dying if the State actively wanted to kill them, or just did not care the least bit if they die or not. And there are studies from real historians that conditions in Soviet labor camps, during peace time, were worse than in Nazi extermination camps (I am not sure if there are English copies online, but certainly Russian ones are accessible).
Absolute numbers may not mean all that much (although as far as exterminating their own citizenry, communist Khmer Rouge have no equals) but it is still important to remember and never forget -- it's not a competition who is more evil, it's about making sure that evil does not get repeated.
USSR of Khrushchev and beyond -- it's also place where workers demonstrating for decent pay and food for their children were fired upon by the army, slight liberalization efforts in satellite countries were crushed with tanks, dissidents had their brains fried in psychiatric hospitals, etc. etc. Sure, it was much better than Reich in the 30s-40s, or USSR itself in the same period, but it is also an apples to oranges comparison. Had Reich been contained instead of defeated, chances are it would have evolved into something similar by then as well. But Soviet apologia usually does not make a distinction anyway.
> It's interesting that people who aren't subject to this sort of treatment are trying to change the constitution and give the govt more power.
You mean like, when the 13th amendment was passed to abolish slavery and involuntary servitude? Pesky "govt" now telling folks they can no longer own human beings as property, that kind of thing?
Not all government power is oppression. A huge ton of it is vital for basic human welfare. Simplistic assertions like "those who seek to change the consitution are trying to give the government more power and therefore obviously have not experienced real oppression" are not furthering the conversation productively.
If so, the main issue with slavery was that it was legal, not that it was rampant.
Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
Clearly gives the government power to ban slavery. It does not enshrine any rights in citizens, and indeed notes that involuntary servitude may still be imposed as criminal sanction.
Its not banning the practice of slavery but the promise of legally enforcing them.
Prior to this, various laws and judicial decisions (such as Dredd Scott) had made aiding fugitive slaves illegal, and had practically made slavery legal in all states regardless of the will of the people.
Surprisingly, slavery persisted even after the Civil War. Here is a powerful, true story of someone who was a slave around 1900:
https://www.amazon.com/Emancipation-Robert-Sadler-Twentieth-...
That's the point of constitutional amendments: to limit the power of the government.
The Bill of Rights was about limiting the power of the (federal) government, but subsequent Amendments have both increased and decreased the power of the government.
In the North the government had outlawed slavery prior the Civil War. in the South, the Amendment promulgated Lincoln's wartime decree freeing the slaves. The Amendment limited the power of the states to enforce slavery and enshrined the power of the federal government to ban slavery.
The 16th Amendment gave the government the power to levy an income tax. The 18th Amendment, i.e., Prohibition, gave the government the power to ban alcohol (until it was rescinded by the 21st Amendment).
https://solid.inrupt.com/
Can you please provide a reputable source for this claim? I find this difficult to believe.
How removed from society can you be to view disappearing, humilating and torturing citizens as "a bit low"?
Have we forgotten the purpose of a government?
> Qiu Shike, a socialist writer and Xi supporter who is influential within some elite Communist Party circles, said carefully
If you saw the recent HBO series on Cheronybl, you can see the pains with which one person is trying to relay the seriousness of the situation without making himself a target, opposition figure, enemy of the state, etc. I also remember hearing that Sadam Hussein underestimated how easily Iraq could be toppled in case of invasion because his military generals were too scared to speak truth.
The first is that Asian culture (including Japan, Korea) is profoundly dogmatic and hierarchical. They have a completely different moral-alignment with being obedient.
The second is that over time, you can really achive the social transformation spouted by authoritarian governments. Russia was communist for 90 years. North korea approaching 70 years. After several generations what you have is the only thing that people know.
As a westerner, I find it truly amazing that these systems survive at all.
Anyone in North Korea who would speak up has long since escaped, been disappeared, or killed.
The liberty nutjobs really have a point about being intolerant to the minuscule interventions: by this model, its a way of domesticating people.
OTOH I don't believe this idea is right, because humanity has had slavery and oppression since time immemorial, and freedom as we know it is relatively new. It is a natural desire of human beings to fight against glaring injustices, and for the oppressed to fight back.
> As a westerner, I find it truly amazing that these systems survive at all.
It shouldn't be amazing, as a Westener, considering slavery was legally allowed and enforced in the West for longer than any alternate authoritarian regime in modern times. Just consider slavery in American from 1776-1865... I can't think of any authoritarian regime that lasted that long... North Korean regime (1948-present), Soviet regime (1917-1989), Chinese regime (1949-present), were/are close but still haven't yet achieved the length of authoritarianism exercised over some arbitrary portion of its populace.
It's very different to not protest or to comply out of fear than to be morally aligned to the subservience. To this day South Korea still uses physical violence to discipline kids. I've seen some very authoritative and strong personality types turn into sheep by the mere act of talking to an older person, which is the key hierarchy. There is the famous phrase in Japanese: "The nail that sticks out gets hammered". Or chinese people, as in this topic, have a completely different relationship to Tiananmen Square or the Muslim than what the west would have with Abu Ghraib.
Asia just does not have the Liberty moral alignment the west has, be it for historical, cultural or biological reasons. Maybe rebelliousity is distinctly western, since the middle east also shows some of those patterns.
> It shouldn't be amazing, as a Westener, considering slavery was legally allowed and enforced in the West for longer than any alternate authoritarian regime in modern times. Just consider slavery in American from 1776-1865... I can't think of any authoritarian regime that lasted that long... North Korean regime (1948-present), Soviet regime (1917-1989), Chinese regime (1949-present), were/are close but still haven't yet achieved the length of authoritarianism exercised over some arbitrary portion of its populace.
There are plenty of examples of slave-driven societies that were sent into extinction because of this practice (Sparta, Rome, The US South). Its true it took a while in the US, but it was constantly violated and affected a small part of an imported population. Had the general populace been able to be thrown into slavery, I can't imagine it lasting much.
I can imagine chatel/small slavery lasting a long time because its a millenarian practice. But total control of the state? Near absolute economic slavery of the entire population? I cant imagine anything working out at all, and nobody collaborating to make it work.
China has been showing us that it can so far.
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20014593
2) Real War
Lets not forget what stopped nazism!
We've all got strong feelings about politics, but maybe Americans in particular ought to be a little less cavalier about dead foreigners in the name of American idealism.
not defending China, obviously, but have to call out the absurdity!
So here's the archive.is version: http://archive.is/o8uvi
We can debate Marxism here in the comments, but the fact is that nobody regardless of their political stance should have to worry about being kidnapped or tortured by their government. At that point your government is effectively a gang, of no higher moral ground than a bunch of thugs with guns.
Until China fixes their government, they will never be taken seriously on the same level of other "first world" countries. Unless people passively watch Peking University students (statistically harder to get into than Harvard) get kidnapped by their government and do nothing about it.
I wonder what Chinese people think about the odds of any of this improving.
I think russia has been taken seriously for a century now, with not better track record. What makes your country be taken seriously is your military strength, which is your capacity to flip-off any other country that tries to take political advantage over you.
> I wonder what Chinese people think about the odds of any of this improving.
What I think is that the vast majority of chinese don't care about this topic at all, and would rather not think about it. Remember, most of them dont know about Tiananmen square, not because the government censored it, but because they don't care about it.
In the modern age, it's impossible to keep information out. Any chinese person that left the country has had access to this information, and could have disseminated with virtually no effort.
“The government is scared because the domestic contradictions are growing,” Michael said. “Once you study Marxism, you know real socialism and China’s so-called socialism with Chinese characteristics are two different things. They sell fascism as socialism, like a street vendor passes off dog meat as lamb.”
This is hubris. It won't matter how seriously they are taken if they become the dominant power.
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/03/01/how-the-west-go...
Meanwhile, the US is leaving a power vacuum and can't be taken seriously either.