Estimated 37 million displaced from the war on terror.
Estimated 1 million detained uyghurs
Obviously the 1m stat is an exaggeration to say the least but even if you take it at face value it’s lopsided.
Edit: why is my post purple?
Researcher Nicolas J S Davies put together a three-part investigation for Consortium News in 2018 to find out how many people had been killed in America’s post-9/11 wars. Part one covers Iraq, part two covers Afghanistan and Pakistan, and part three covers Libya, Syria, Yemen and Somalia. At the end of the series, Davies writes the following:
“Altogether, in the three parts of this report, I have estimated that America’s post-9/11 wars have killed about 6 million people. Maybe the true number is only 5 million. Or maybe it is 7 million. But I am quite certain that it is several millions.”And that probably doesn’t even count the dead in Iraq due to sanctions in the 90s. Death to America.
I think we can just do a 1:1 comparison. I bet the US has the largest number of political prisoners per capita of any other nation. Every single american in prison for a non-violent crime is a political prisoner. When we stop accepting their weird premises and just think about it from first principles.
500,000 Incarcerated for Drug Crimes
50,000 ICE detainees
%0.16 of the us population are political prisoners
1,500,000 Uyghurs in camps
%0.11 of the chinese population are political prisoners.
And this is me giving the US media the benefit of the doubt and letting them supply the numbers. By any reasonable metric, we're simply worse than china.
I bet the US has the largest number of political prisoners per capita of any other nation.
It’s actually not even per capita. It’s absolute numbers too, despite China having over three times as many people.
How is this not whataboutism? Like, we're on a left-wing site, we all agree the US is worse—a lot worse—than China. I can totally understand defending China on reddit or elsewhere, but it seems like this is the exact sort of place we should be criticizing our own, not preaching to the choir about how bad the US is.
Thanks for actually responding to me, I appreciate it. I love Citations Needed, but I haven't listened to this episode. I'll give it a listen tomorrow.
Not sure if you've listened to that pod or not, but there's a good quote (from either that one or another one on imperial propaganda):
"Successful propaganda does not rely on outright fabrications, but emphasis"
The whole whataboutism deflection is meant to maintain the skewed emphasis presented by the western media. To shut down any actual material analysis that might include a look behind Oz's media curtain.
She even addresses that in the article:
I do not bring this up with the intention of committing the unforgivable sin of “whataboutism”, but to point out that the governments, politicians, pundits and reporters who are rending their garments about human rights violations in Xinjiang do not actually care about human rights. If they did they would be putting more effort into attacking the depravity of their own government’s escalating “war on terror” than they are into unsubstantiated and far less egregious allegations against a nation that their government has targeted for balkanization.
Sure, but "putting more effort into attacking the depravity of their own government’s escalating “war on terror” than they are into unsubstantiated and far less egregious allegations against a nation that their government has targeted for balkanization" is precisely what we do around here. This article is fantastic, it just doesn't seem like a very useful critique to be presenting to the Chapo audience, except to argue for something we all already agree with.
Sometimes it’s nice to read something that reminds you that you aren’t insane, or wrong, or a complete outcast.
Also, maybe there’ll be someone here who does need to read it. Or maybe they can share it with someone else.
Reading any effort to diminish ethnic cleansing makes me feel like an outcast, sorry.
