This thread is a reproduction for posterity of a good thread by @OohTheChilliOil, an account deleted by Twitter for unknown reasons, on the "Uighur Genocide". The only archives I've been able to find of this thread are damn near unreadable, so I'm piecing it back together here:
The “Uighur Genocide” - the most overt US Propaganda campaign since the Cold War
Let’s start with ‘Xinjiang’ - the north western province of China that is the home of all of these theories. Xinjiang is an autonomous region of China, integrated initially by the Han Dynasty in 2BC
It was conquered by force by the Turkic Khaganate between the 12th & 18th centuries (during much of the Mongol Conquest of the World)
The Qing dynasty reasserted control in the late 1800s. The region has been part of China since 2BCE, conquered, and then returned to China.
Today’s XJ Nationalists claim XJ had a “95% ethnic muslim Uighur population” - but this is false;
Han Chinese have made up at least 1/3 of the demographic since the initial Han Conquest before the birth of Christ (Gardner, Bovingdon, 2010; “Uighurs: Strangers in their own land”
Upon the victory of the People’s Liberation Army in 1949, with the declaration of the People’s Republic, the Uighur People’s Army welcomed the PLA as a liberator from their Kuomintang (Nationalist) oppressors. rand.org/content/dam/ra…
That’s enough about the History of Xinjiang, let’s get on to the Uighur’s, and China’s treatment of Ethnic Minorities:
China comprises of 55 ethnic groups (民族)and their government has exceptions in their laws specifically to allow for concessions to their ethnic populations
An example of these concessions was that all ethnic groups were excluded from the One Child Policy, meaning that only Han Chinese birth rate fell during the time of the OCP.
Another example is expanded religious freedoms. Both Hui and Uighur muslims are allowed to practice islam
Freely, including allowing them to display Islamic/Arabic artworks, read the Quran, and other such activities that are usually not allowed in the secular people’s
Go to any major city and every noodle house is usually owned by a Hui / Uighur Muslim family
So, why is China “imprisoning millions of Uighurs in death camps!” Then?
Well, they aren’t. China is arresting separatists, and Islamic fundamentalists. Why are there so many Islamic Fundamentalists in XJ? Let’s take a look at the geography of Central Asia
So as you can see, Xinjiang, the part of China visible in the map, has land borders with Pakistan and Afghanistan, two countries with high levels of Islamic extremism.
Did you have a read of that? No worries if not, here’s a summary:
Ethnic Uighur nationalism to establish a Sunni Sharia state in Western China.
Interestingly, these guys were all cool with the U.K. and the USA for years, despite being Al-Qaeda affiliates...
But then they pledged for ISIS and decided to start throwing their weight around in Syria. Here is a picture of Ethnic Chinese Uighur separatists fighting in Syria, under the Islamic State’s “Black Flag”
After this, ETLP was declared terrorists by the U.K. and the USA.
Around about this time, the USA was carpet bombing ISIS, and the U.K. was revoking the citizenship of its citizens who joined ISIS.
China suffered a major terrorist attack in Beijing, with a car bomb going off in Tiananmen Square, 5 were killed.
[link here unretrievable ~ CJ]
After this, China authorised their first “strike hard” policy against extremism. This included an arresting of anyone with known separatist or Islamic extremist views in XJ.
Many that were arrested were interviewed and freed, the most extremist were sent to re-education centres
Here is where the lines get blurred. China’s definition of a re-education centre is just that; a centre in which convicted ideological criminals are sent to be educated as to why their point of view is wrong and terrorism will not be tolerated. Then, the patients are moved to...
...Voluntary vocational centres to learn new skills and trades, and to teach them Mandarin Chinese so as to better integrate the region into China proper.
The Chinese government’s thought is that the way to combat extremism is by providing training, education, & opportunity
Now our good old friends at Radio Free Asia (the CIA) are constantly telling us that these “concentration camps” house 1-2 million people, they’re involuntary, torture goes on, etc. Etc. But these claims often come from the same 12-13 Uighurs
Who now all live in the USA and work for Uighur human rights organisations, coincidence? Separatists that ended up leaving the country when they realised they could not foment local revolution? Sounds like Joshua Wong. Anyway, back to the imagined Genocide
One major proponent of the “Uighur Genocide” claims, including the recent articles about forced sterilisation or some bullshit, is Adrian Zenz. Who is Adrian Zenz?
Just a rampant, homophobic, Christian fundamentalist who feel’s he’s on a “One man mission from God” against China
So this man, who has no credibility, is the sole source that gets quoted when related to this tale, alongside our friends at Radio Free Asia (No, seriously, they’re just the CIA*) - and yet, conspiracy theories are being debated in British Parliament? nytimes.com/1977/12/26/arc…
Ok, so if it’s just conspiracy, then why is it being so heavily thrust upon us by the media and the governments of the world?!
I wondered the same thing about Saddam’s Weapons of Mass destruction. But no, we’re currently in a new Cold War and propaganda and lies will be rife.
Contradictions:
🇺🇸: China Has concentration camps!
Truth: America has concentration camps (most prisons offer them free/slave labour, Guantanamo & Other CIA Blacksites are torture/death camps, pot calling kettle black)
🇺🇸:China started these brutal crackdowns after a terrorist attack on their capital
...And what did the USA do after 9/11? Homeland security, the destabilisation of the Middle East, billions more for the terrorist military industrial complex?
America is guilty of the crimes it accuses China of, and China has shown that bombs and bullets are not necessary to Deradicalise extremist dissidents.
The west has built its hegemony on this very terror that China is proving unnecessary. The west doesn’t like it.
The Media's Odd Double Standard On Evidence Required For Claims Of An Impending Attack
When claims begin emerging of an imminent attack by a US ally, the media suddenly remember their journalistic training to note that these claims are "without evidence". caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/the-medias-o…
I've highlighted a key repeating phrase we've been seeing in a few quotes to help you spot the difference between the way the western media cover unevidenced claims about a future attack by Moscow and unevidenced claims about a future attack by Kyiv:
See if you can spot the difference between the above examples and the way CBS News reports an anonymous government official's claim that Putin has ordered the invasion of Ukraine to proceed:
Replies have highlighted the fact that this recording is in fact the calling song of the Indies short-tailed cricket, which was established as the origin of the "Havana Syndrome" noise in *2019*. Listen for yourself; it's an exact match: orthsoc.org/sina/492a.htm
This is not some fringe esoteric information. It was reported in The New York Times. Anyone doing a basic Google search on this story while preparing this 60 Minutes special would have encountered it. nytimes.com/2019/01/04/sci…
NYT suddenly remembers to put this disclaimer on unproven claims about an imminent large-scale attack.
This is happening throughout all MSM; claims made about an attack by Ukraine are made "without evidence", but when evidence-free claims are made about an attack by Russia it's just "government sources say" and "based on intelligence". theguardian.com/world/2022/feb…
It's not that the US elects incompetent leaders who make bad decisions that kill millions of people with warfare, it's that the global US empire is held together with military violence and the threat thereof. It's an intrinsically evil institution and you should always oppose it.
It's not that the US government has *done evil*, it's that the US government *is itself evil*. The very way it has set itself up to operate in the world necessarily means it must exert endless violence and oppression to keep populations functioning in its interests. That's evil.
The Mafia hasn't happened to make bad decisions throughout its history that resulted in the unfortunate demise of certain individuals, it's an institution explicitly set up to reap profits by exerting and threatening violent force. The US empire is exactly the same. Same evil.
Anyone who talks about the Ukraine crisis like it's just Putin being evil while ignoring the actions of the US and NATO which got us here is a disinformation agent.
This is really and truly as deep as most western analysis of this situation goes:
It should really be common sense by now that when the entire western political/media class starts screaming that a government is acting like an evil supervillain you're probably being propagandized. But most people are swallowing it hook, line and sinker. fair.org/home/what-you-…
The onus is not on anyone else to prove that US claims about Russian operations are false, the onus is on the US to prove that they are true. The burden of proof doesn't magically disappear just because some pundits and politicians said something in an assertive tone.