That’s true. What worries me though is the reason Americans finally turned on the Vietnam war was the death of Americans, while the death of millions Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian people was not really viewed as a big deal by them.
This is something I was talking to my friend about the other day. I was upset that a large portion of Americans don't seem that caught up on the Iraq war - they will denounce it and call it a disaster, but the infrastructure that caused it is still there. America has enough global power to invade any rogue state that isn't aligned with the international community, but Americans just don't seem to care. They still vote for the people that voted for it, they still support a huge military budget, and any attempt to reign in the global might of America is met with "But Russia or China will take our place if we aren't the hegemons!" by the neoliberal types.
Anyway, we came to the conclusion that Americans are just a thoroughly brainwashed and self-centered bunch. This is true for all countries, but America's jingoistic education system + general lack of empathy lead them to just not care about stopping another Iraq or Vietnam. They care more about their paychecks and healthcare. The thought of their nation committing genocide in another continent is too abstract to get worked up about. So of course they only care about a war when their uncles start to get killed or whatever.
“But Russia or China will take our place if we aren’t the hegemons!”
I've had limited success telling libs things like "look at what happens to countries the US has domination over vs China and decide if China being the one meddling in third world countries is better or worse than the US."
Yeah I do this, basically. I think the Iraq war is a good entry to discuss if you want to get specific, and just highlight the lengths the US was willing to go. Just build up this idea that you can't blindly trust the state and pivot from there
Just one about the DPRK... liberals have no clue what the DPRK has gone through over the last 100 years. First the brutal occupation by the Japanese. Then the Korean War. I swear the only thing Americans know about that war is about a stupid 80s comedy set in it. The reality is, we killed 20-25% of their population. We practically levelled every building and destroyed just an unbelievable amount of crops. Their productive capacity was destroyed. Then further, they have to live with decades of constant military pressure from the US. The moment they let up, the US will invade. Then decades of sanctions. You have all that going on, what kind of country do you think will evolve in that environment? If aliens came and slaughtered like 75 million Americans, destroyed every factory and warehouse, wrecked a bunch of crops... and on top of that, threatened to invade again to finish the job at any moment... don't you think we might be a little "different"?
None of this is a defence of juche, DPRK communism, the Kims, etc... it's just meant to give some important context to Americans who know fuck all about the Korean War.
Right, I've found that if you start to even suggest that maybe the DPRK is even a little good, Americans just shut down entirely won't listen to anything else you have to say. But actually tell them about the horrible shit we did to them... then I've found people are just so shocked to learn that, after they've thought about it they're at least a little more open to hearing more.
I know Jacobin can be really liberal, but this article is great for describing how the US absolutely devastated the DPRK. "In other words, US-led forces just about did to North Korea what war and the Holocaust had done to Poland."
Try not to sound like a literal Nazi. I get wanting to make fun of sensationalised Adrian Zenz-sourced propaganda, but to someone uninitiated your epic "80000000 gorillion Uyghurs genocided" meme looks indistinguishable from some Nazi dipshit's Holocaust denial
I advised someone here to stop using gorillion type memes, and they were legitimately unaware that they originally came from Holocaust denying Nazis. Situations like this is why I'm pretty much completely against reappropriating nazi memes, like Stonetoss edits or whatever. All of that shit is tainted and it's pretty much guaranteed it'll end up being picked up by someone who lacks your internet savvy and the 70 layers of irony you're operating under.
I thought the initial gorillion memes were literally Dr Seuss cartoons about how much Hitler and Goebbels lied about Soviet casualties to pretend they were winning the war. Maybe I am operating under too many layers...
I wasn't aware of that! On the internet though, when people see someone talking about gorillions in relation to genocide, they will probably assume you're a fascist
I mean this interaction has sort of changed my mind on it too; if a leftist wouldn't assume it's making fun of fascist talking points like that or referencing the black book of communism's attempts at math then it truly isn't that good of a point to bring up with libs. Reminds me a lot of seeing a lot of literal nazis bashing Jewish people in pro-Palestinian twitter posts and how easy it is for neolibs to imply they are both the same groups.
I've seen gorillion jokes pop up here in relation to the Uyghur situation, sadly enough. The "you" there wasn't directed to you specifically, it was more of a plea to the community in general. People reading this, please don't do that shit
You know that cynical attitude libs use when talking about capitalism and bourgeois democracy? How they’ll say ‘it’s the worst system we have, except for all the others’?
Yeah, use that.
Liking things is for dweebs. Realists hate everything, but hate some things a little bit less.
Uighur re-education? Shrug and say ‘it beats the American approach of drone strikes to the point where children fear blue skies.
Criticism of tight control of the internet? Shrug and say ‘beats having antivaxx, plandemic, or white supremacist conspiracy theories spreading unchecked.
Criticism of single party rule? Beats having a perpetual war between do-nothing bureaucrats and theocratic white supremacists.
Authoritarian social control? At least they don’t have police killing people in the streets, or as high of a prison population as the USA.
Authoritarian Covid response? At least they didn’t kill 200,000 of their own people through incompetence.
What can you say? Bourgeois democracy’s beautiful in theory, but it just doesn’t work in practice.
That's bad advice. These people love flinging the term "whataboutism" like nothing else.
I have a friend IRL who actually did say whataboutism to my face when talking about China. Shit's uncanny, almost like it is rehearsed. The conversation was in Spanish too, making it more jarring,though I guess there's no equivalent in Spanish yet.
Most radlibs are anti-war, so I use that as my starting point. I'll concede that China is detaining Uighurs, than point out that Turkey, the US, Israel, etc. etc. are also committing genocides and not getting a third of the press coverage. I'll ask them why they think that is. They're rad libs, so they'll come up with something about protecting wealth inequality or covering our allies asses, or maybe even gearing up for conflict with China. That's when I point out that their anti-war values are counter to that. We don't need libs to go "china good" we need libs to go "sanctions on China bad."
Most radlibs are anti-war,
Like 10 years ago maybe. Liberal hawkishness really took off after libs realized Obama wasn’t actually anti-war and some republicans have isolationist sentiments, and now you have them regularly engaging in Iraq apologia.
Why are you even bothering trying to talk to libs about this?
You guys need to be talking to working class people about how capitalism is fucking them, and offering them a hand in learning about Marxism and Socialism. Not talking about how China is so great or defending North Korea. Americans don't want to hear that shit. Most normal people are busy working 40+ hours a week and struggling to support their families. Because of this, they are angry with the system and our government. You'll have a much easier time getting them to listen to alternatives besides trying to convince them that China and North Korea are worth caring about.
Most working class people absolutely do not give a shit about China or North Korea. Talk to them in real life. They are more concerned about what's going on around them. The same applies for the Russiagate hysteria. Only libs care about that stuff.
Working class solidarity has to be international, otherwise you end up with a bunch of nazbols.
The US don't even have a working class movement right now, but go ahead and lecture the workers you know how they really need to believe in China being a communist utopia and North Korea really isn't all that bad. That will totally get them to listen to you and want to read Marx.
You mean to tell me that the cashier at the grocery store doesn't care about Xi's plans for socialism by 2050?
Judging from what I've seen on r/worldnews where it looks like many people have caught on to Adrian Zenz and ASPI, I think tackling these kinds of conversations from a media literacy angle seems to be the way to go.
I'd start off by bringing up the current geopolitical context (e.g. between US and China, I'd mention the Trump administration's trade war and his trying to shift blame of covid mishandling onto China) and tie that in with:
- the US's track record of using human rights concerns as means of manufacturing consent against its enemies with a main focus on the Iraq War (WMDs, Nayirah testimony)
- how the main stream media just followed along with the bs from 1.
From there, I'd just start going through commonly cited sources and debunking them with effort varying depending on how receptive they appear to be. So if they seem to be onboard the "most of this is highly sensationalized bs" idea, then I'd point them to some good sources that do the debunking, and otherwise I'd walk through the debunking process with them myself step by step.
Oh yeah for sources I'd provide, I don't know much about DPRK besides that fantastic haircut video, but for Xinjiang what I'd go with depending on topic would be:
Debunking stuff:
- one million uyghur claims/Zenz/US-backed NGOs - https://thegrayzone.com/2019/12/21/china-detaining-millions-uyghurs-problems-claims-us-ngo-researcher/
- forced labor camps/ASPI/Zenz/Falun Gong/US War Machine - https://thegrayzone.com/2020/03/26/forced-labor-china-us-nato-arms-industry-cold-war/
- unreliable witness testimony - narrative changes from "did not personally see violence" and "there was no meat" https://www.theglobeandmail.com/amp/world/article-everyone-was-silent-endlessly-mute-former-chinese-re-education/ to "there were all kinds of tortures there" and "meat was served on Fridays, but it was pork" https://www.haaretz.com/amp/world-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-a-million-people-are-jailed-at-china-s-gulags-i-escaped-here-s-what-goes-on-inside-1.7994216
- photos/videos that are straight up mislabeled - https://factcheck.afp.com/these-photos-show-protests-istanbul-and-xinjiang-and-migrant-shelter-thailand https://factcheck.afp.com/no-not-video-chinese-soldier-beating-uighur-muslim-having-copy-koran https://factcheck.afp.com/video-shows-police-officer-pinning-down-drunk-chinese-woman-his-knee-hotel-shenzhen https://twitter.com/j_bigboote/status/1182726991675625472
- shitty guesswork based off of satellite images/mosques being "destroyed" - https://medium.com/@sunfeiyang/the-case-of-the-keriya-aitika-mosque-efa29e456339
- more shitty guesswork based off of satellite images - https://twitter.com/ChengxinPan/status/1310051540397297665
- blatant propaganda witness testimony/Campaign for Uyghurs - "my friends and family are in concentration camps" from a Uyghur activist who worked at a CIA propaganda outlet and fucking Guantanamo Bay during the Bush administration https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/e9ad4n/
What is (most likely) actually going on:
- Not genocide - world bank investigation/statement: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/statement/2019/11/11/world-bank-statement-on-review-of-project-in-xinjiang-china
- BBC visitation with heavy editing and mistranslations - https://medium.com/@sunfeiyang/breaking-down-the-bbcs-visit-to-hotan-xinjiang-e284934a7aab
- Unedited visitation to a camp and interviews with Uyghur students there - https://youtu.be/Jp5y9LCZqTA I made a post about it including parts that the translator had left out here https://hexbear.net/post/33959
- All the Muslim countries side with China and even US-aligned Saudi Arabia sided with China since they had sent diplomats to visit Xinjiang and its re-education camps - https://www.economist.com/china/2019/07/27/chinese-actions-in-xinjiang-become-a-matter-of-international-dispute
Kim Jong Un died twice this year. Are people not finding it strange how mainstream media lied about such a thing? Could sow some seeds of doubt that media are not reporting the truth on countries on the official enemy list.
Maybe you could also mention the reporting about corona virus when it started in China(how their authoritarian approach won't work and freedom and democracy of western countries are much better at fighting the pandemic, and other similar stuff), but a lot of people don't believe that Chinese really have the pandemic situation under control.
The economics is especially hilarious, because if some fundamental problem is tanking the economy, then the solution is obviously to deal with the problem, whatever the short term effects are and if your economy is healthy, then it will rebound after that no problem. And this is actually what happened in China. They are the only country growing currently. Meanwhile the second wave of pandemy is hitting Europe hard. US is basically still in the first wave. Businesses are closing again, people are going to be scared to go to the restaurants etc, and it is probably going to continue like this for the next year as well. And of course with million+ victims as a cherry on top.
On reddit? I'm not sure it is possible. You aren't just conversing with the one person, you are fighting a crowd that are reinforcing each others views and a system of vote-based reinforcement of beliefs. You getting downvoted into oblivion by the horde on top the lib answers getting 10,000 upvotes will result in anything sensible you are saying being ignored.
What does work within reddit? Creating spaces that are likeable to people for other reasons and also happen to have this information with a critical mass of people that can maintain upvotes on content. People will stick around for the content they like and then they are exposed to the information they usually completely ignore. Seeing people the usually like reinforcing that information and views through the vote systems results in them starting to soften on it.
CTH did this fantastically. MTC and CTH2 were just channels into deeper and deeper de-libbification.
Right now the best approach I think that could be mustered is engaging in struggle in soft-left places like /r/socialism to create a dominant voice there. Then having that spread into other left communities. Places like sino and genzedong are good but they're not doing anything that is attractive to libs and they're explicitly about those topics. What you need is the place to be about a different topic and then incidentally reinforce the issue whenever the topics come up. For that you need a mass of people.
Offline outside the workplace I am shamelessly communist, shamelessly open about my politics being guillotines in hyde park, shamelessly critical of anyone that believes 24 witness accounts from criminals and dissidents with zero other tangible evidence that doesn't typically get debunked in under a week. I turn on the heat and critically attack people for believing that nonsense while openly recognising that iraq and every other war for the last 50 years was a lie. I see very little value in hiding who we are or what we believe. What we believe will eventually be proven right and their reaction when it happens will be "the communist told us this", I would rather have an immediate negative interaction for the eventual reflection the individual will have than the underhanded potential of a victory in the short term by coding my messaging. People don't need to be subtle-ey moved, they need to have revelatory changes inside their head that click and those revelations need to come from knowing that the information came from a socialist. I suspect this is probably easier in my country than it is in yours but I can't say for certain as I have no experience of the advanced hostility you might receive by being openly red over there. I hide absolutely nothing.
Inside the workplace I'm more subtle and focus not on changing anyone's views but on moving groups of people towards unionising. The politics themselves are irrelevant there, instead it's all about economic interests and building class consciousness. I avoid open politics in the workplace entirely because I don't want management sniffing out the fact I don't care one jot about the job and am only interested in the company to try and organise their workers.
i just try to not defend them. i just say we should bring the troops home and stop fucking with other countries on the other side of the world. we'll be just fine not meddling in chinese, afghan, or korean affairs
I've said do you really think the US could solve this problem given our track record? It has had a decent success.
Reframe the Uyghur shit as a counterterrorism program immediately, and make sure to let them know that calling random shit a genocide takes away validity from actual genocides. Whatever ur actual take on it is, you should probably cede that it’s a shitty solution to something that isn’t that big of a problem on a macro level, and make sure you throw in a “ya know the whole situation seems like something the us would do it’s own Muslim population”
As for the dprk, make sure you point out that they historically have had way more parties involved in higher government than the us, or if ur arguing with an anarchist make sure to point out the founder of juche ideology was an anarchist
You kind of can't unless they happen to be open to it already. You'd have to undo decades of propaganda to get anywhere. Start them on Bernie style socialism and maybe a Chomsky book instead.
