I don't recall any US prison in the last 70+ years where people on the order of a million people, largely from a single region or ethnicity, were imprisoned on suspicion of mere affiliation. Every country probably has a signature few cases of prosecution that may provoke our indignation. That's not the same as putting people into prison because their religious beliefs make them enemies of the state.
No. It's not. In some instances people were in the wrong place at the wrong time, or treated poorly based on pretty minor actions, but even at it's height Guantanamo housed < 1000 people. If we were sweeping up any an all Islamists I'd expect a good deal more than that.
Also, the U.S. didn't 'get away with' Guantanamo. It was a big news cycle and the prison is nearly shut down now, and operates with much more consideration for the prisoners, giving them access to counsel and repatriating then when able.
Name a government that hasn't abused it's power at one point. Not sure what your definition of normal is in this instance.
> Who ended up in prison for it?
I'd be ok if China simply stopped what they are doing without sending anyone to prison.
To answer your question though, no one. It's hard to prosecute individuals for an organization's failings without dismantling the organization, which is the US military in this case. The best we can hope for is fixes to prevent such abuses inches future, which we got.
Many Americans, myself included, wish some people were put away, and also sincerely hope that the perpetrators of abuses in Xinjiang find similar ends.
I'd be okay if the US simply stopped invading some countries or toppling random governments every 5 years.
Many people of the rest of the world wish for the responsible US politicians to be put away. I hope the American perpetrators find similar ends.
Its an awful kind of mockery to see the US displaying themselves as the hand of justice in the Xinjiang situation. I wish countries like the Netherlands or Switzerland would do it instead, their hands are much, much cleaner.
This is the same kind of mockery as having Saudi Arabia on the UN panel for womens rights.
> I'd be okay if the US simply stopped invading some countries or toppling random governments every 5 years.
Me too, not sure what that has to do with anything.
> Many people of the rest of the world wish for the responsible US politicians to be put away. I hope the American perpetrators find similar ends.
ok? Not sure where that fits in though.
> Its an awful kind of mockery to see the US displaying themselves as the hand of justice in the Xinjiang situation. I wish countries like the Netherlands or Switzerland would do it instead, their hands are much, much cleaner.
If you consider doing nothing at all about bad things happening clean, then sure. Also, your diction leads me to believe you are Chinese yourself, so maybe a little bias?
> This is the same kind of mockery as having Saudi Arabia on the UN panel for womens rights.
The US doesn't have over a million people in a concentration camp right now, so I don't see the similarity.
Its also racist to make people held accountable for their ancestors. This is what the Nazis did to the Jews, and the US teached germany the hard way that it is not right. How comes you didn't learn that lesson?
Germany got the Nürnberger Trials, the US (clarification: politicians) was never held accountable for anything.
Other than that the US kidnaps people from various countries, often without approval of the country where the kidnapping happens, brings the rebel (patriot?) to Guantanamo Bay without even trial by US legal system and waterboards and tortures them and holds them indefinitely - although some are realized to be the wrong identity and let go - there is another point...
...Cuba has denounced the US military occupation of Guantanamo Bay for decades, and requested the US to leave. So this is happening against the wishes of the country it is happening in.
> ...Cuba has denounced the US military occupation of Guantanamo Bay for decades, and requested the US to leave. So this is happening against the wishes of the country it is happening in.
It's not a military occupation in the sense you imply. It is a perpetual lease made between the US and Cuba. [1]
See, it's not an occupation, it's a "perpetual lease". That I happen to enforce with my army. And we didn't steal that land, they kindly gave it to us. When we held a gun up to their heads and made them sign a document they did not understand. Oh, and these aren't slaves, they're workers. Who happen to be on an unbreakable contract.
(and also, how could I forget, "these Uighurs aren't prisoners, they're just people who, realizing their mistakes, kindly happened to voluntarily come here for education")
The point is that some party insisting that they have some legal contract giving them permission to do something does not mean that contract is legitimate or voluntary.
The remainder of the comment illustrates some very obvious examples of this from the past.
> U.S. control of Guantánamo Bay came about through the end of the Spanish-American war and the Platt Amendment. This amendment was initiated in 1903 and outlined seven conditions for the U.S. withdrawal from Cuba. The United States intervened at the end of the Spanish-American War, taking credit for Cuban independence from Spain. The Platt Amendment was an amendment to the Cuban constitution that supposedly gave Cuba sovereignty, however it included conditions that allowed for U.S. intervention and the ability for the United States to lease or buy lands in order to establish naval bases. The U.S. was allowed to create up to four naval bases on the island of Cuba, but only ever built one, at Guantánamo Bay. The Platt Amendment was repealed in 1934, which is why the Cuban government considers the U.S. occupation of Guantánamo Bay illegal.
"conditions for the U.S. withdrawal from Cuba" = military force. "perpetual lease" my ass.
There was another lease, which was perpetual, signed with Cuba after that. See the link I posted. [1]
"A 1934 treaty reaffirming the lease granted Cuba and her trading partners free access through the Bay, modified the lease payment from $2,000 in gold coins per year to the 1934 equivalent value of $4,085 U.S. dollars, and added a requirement that termination of the lease requires the consent of both the U.S. and Cuban governments, or the U.S. abandonment of the base property."
> Can you point to some less biased source than the US military?
Yes. I called the 1934 document a lease, but it was actually a treaty that also included a modified form of the earlier lease's provisions.
In 1934, a new Cuban-American Treaty of Relations,
reaffirming the lease, granted Cuba and its trading
partners free access through the bay, modified the lease
payment from $2,000 in U.S. gold coins per year to the
1934 equivalent value of $4,085 in U.S. dollars,
and made the lease permanent unless both governments
agreed to break it, or until the U.S. abandoned the base
property. [1]
United States - Cuban Agreements and Treaty of 1934 [2]
Cuban–American Treaty of Relations (1934)
Yale Law School, Lillian Goldman Law Library [3]
Cuban–American Treaty of Relations (1934) [4]
Hey, I could have cited the untold millions who perished under Mao in that same range, but I didn't, because it's not relevant to the point: no one who made the decisions today at Guantanamo was also responsible for Japanese internment, and I'm happy to exonerate the CCP leadership today of Mao's misdeeds by benefit of the doubt. The length of time matters.
The US did have the moral high ground, which is a remarkable thing given what we're talking about: that's how horrific what China is doing is.
Were the Japanese released from that internment? Yes. Were they genocided? No. Were they stripped of their culture, heritage, social lives, and tortured for decades due to their beliefs? No. Does the US today recognize the Japanese internment as a moral crime? Yes.
That last one is a critical difference between cultures.
In China today you can't even discuss what's going on in Xinjiang.
You are of course lambasting the US, on a US website. Nothing bad will happen to you because of that. And in this thread you won't find thousands of bots attempting to say that the Japanese internment is ok, or otherwise justify that it should have happened; instead, most of the replies are fully agreeing that it was atrocious. Try that in China, see what happens.
> Does the US today recognize the Japanese internment as a moral crime? Yes.
Not only is it recognized as a moral crime, but the US government passed a law to give restitution to interned people. Does that clean the slate? No. Does that make it ok? No, of course not.
The point is not that the US is perfect or even good. The point is that the US system allows open discussion, criticism, protest, legislating, etc. It has built-in mechanisms to improve itself which it has done and continues to do.
The point is that you forget all the inconvenient facts - from American national guard murdering students in broad daylight, without any kind of punishment afterwards, to secret military kangaroo courts - and build your arguments on plain ignorance ("China has none of that").
In the US, we can acknowledge those "inconvenient facts", freely discuss them, educate people about them, push for accountability for those who did them and to change policies so that they do not happen again.
And then, quite often, the police at various levels of government infiltrate the groups seeking accountability, engage in provocations to discredit them publicly and frame them for unrelated crimes for which they are prosecuted and punished, and actively coordinate with and/or passively use non-enforcement to enable opposed non-police groups to carry out violence against their members. (Of course, we can then acknowledge those inconvenient facts, educate people about them, and push for accountability, if we are willing to start the cycle over again.)
Is the US government less effectively repressive of dissent than the PRC? Sure. But it still does tend to violently repress dissent, especially when that is about conduct of policing or war.
Nice theory, doesn't work. Weed was made illegal to suppress ethnic minorities and war protesters, 50 years later that law is still serving the same purpose. Meanwhile US lawmakers are busy denying voting rights to those same minorities, and making it illegal to teach inconvenient parts of american history.
It's silly to bring up Kent State in a discussion comparing openness to criticism between the US and China. Kent State is well documented, it's taught in school. Tiananmen Square (government troops murdering protesting students) is actively supressed in China.
Yes, the US has done bad things. And some of those bad things have been forgotten. But if you want to find out about them... the government is not going to prevent you from doing so. China is much worse in that regard.
Tienanmen Square is taught in Chinese schools as well. There's a key difference however: people responsible for Tienanmen were punished, with Prime Minister spending the rest of his life in house arrest. Those responsible for Kent State didn't. And that's a common pattern with "bad things" happening in US.
I won't argue with that. The US has vastly improved in that regard over the last 70 years (or however far you want to go back), or the West in general, and could be considered ahead in many ways. However, if you want to put yourself on that high ground, it always comes across rather weird if you add overly specific inb4's. And actually, I think "well at least we can openly call out our government for having done fucked up shit even though nobody in charge will get prosecuted" is kinda rather a sad state of affairs too.
As a side node/regarding initial topic, I also really dislike the quick jump to "whataboutism" to try and kill off any form of discussion that draws parallels and comparisons with other countries (or, to anything else more generally). Because this is unfortunately how it mostly gets used today.
> In China today you can't even discuss what's going on in Xinjiang
You absolutely can, they openly put it on their own government websites and everything even. These measures are written into public law. All of this is behind some misleading language of course, but chinese people aren't stupid. People, especially in Xinjiang, being aware of what's going on is in fact beneficial to the government, as it serves as a warning to anyone who might resist in the future.
Also, aren't you German (https://hackertimes.com/item?id=31001842)? Would you agree that the lesson of Nazi Germany is Germans have no grounds to criticize any human rights abuses anywhere in the world ever again?
Why are you criticizing the US for human rights abuses? Aren't you a hypocrite?
Shouldn't we be talking about the Holocaust, right now? After all, what China's doing here pales in comparison to that atrocity. They're only imprisoning one million, while Germany murdered six million.
> Thats fine, where is your Nürnberg Trials equivalent? Which of your politicians have been hanged or gone to jail?
There is none, because the US didn't lose an aggressive war during which it also exterminated six million people based on ethnicity.
No one in Germany would have been hanged for Nazi crimes if it hasn't lost a war totally.
When you don't lose like that, past human rights abuses are handled differently. For instance, the US government has formally apologized to Japanese Americans for wartime internment and paid reparations for it.
> I think the EU should ally up with China and Russia. Korea and Vietnam will probably also want to join us.
So is this about human rights, or just monomaniacal anti-Americanism?
I'm sure you're aware of the quite Nazi-like aggressive war of conquest happening in Eastern Europe right now, where civilians are being indiscriminately shelled. Why would you want to ally with a country doing something like that?
> Go fix your own country first before pointing at others.
I'm sure the Uyghurs would appreciate that.
Should the US have followed your advice during WWII? After all, slavery was quite a sin that hasn't yet been fully atoned for, and even less so in the 40s.
>>> Go fix your own country first before pointing at others.
>> Should the US have followed your advice during WWII? After all, slavery was quite a sin that hasn't yet been fully atoned for, and even less so in the 40s.
> Yes.
Even if that meant the Nazis won or achieved a negotiated peace that left them in power (e.g. no Nuremberg trials, no hangings)?
When China shuts down their internment, officially condemns it, gives restitution to the interned, and stops censoring any education, discussion and criticism of their internment on message boards in their own country but instead welcomes it as part of the self-correcting mechanisms that allow a nation to continually bend towards greater justice and not repeat the old injustices, then the situations will be equivalent.
Let me remind you that a number of US states is fighting to introduce censorship of education, because apparently teaching objective truth is "anti-american".
And yet you can openly criticize those actions, mobilize people to fight against it, file lawsuits, create and distribute alternative resources to continue to educate about whatever is being censored, and no one will stop you.
>> I don't recall any US prison in the last 70+ years where people on the order of a million people, largely from a single region or ethnicity, were imprisoned on suspicion of mere affiliation.
> coughinternment of japanesecough
cough2022-70=1952cough
That was also like three generations ago: there are a lot of things that happened in the US at that time that the US itself now roundly condemns.
You may return with this comparison when the PRC makes a formal apology to the Uyghurs, pays reparations, and teaches about the Xinjiang camps in schools as a shameful event of Chinese history.
I don’t recall China invading and destroying a successful Middle East country twice and utterly laying waste to the region and throwing it into chaos. One can debate over which crime is “worse” I suppose.
What’s also interesting is that towards the late 80s and 90s the USA was really warming up to China at a time when they were carrying out pretty horrible atrocities, far worse than the USSR, but that was the political agenda of the time.
> Every country probably has a signature few cases of prosecution that may provoke our indignation.
A “few signature cases”??
I completely agree that what China is doing is completely wrong, immoral and bordering on genocide but let’s not swing too far the other way here.
The US has used the prison system to persecute black people en mass for the past 70 years. Look at differing rates of incarceration and length of sentences.
On top of that, the reason that the US has the highest prison population is because of the war on drugs, which the US has long used as an excuse to persecute minorities, whether they are black, Hispanic, Chinese or Mormon.
> The US has used the prison system to persecute black people en mass for the past 70 years. Look at differing rates of incarceration and length of sentences.
Do you mean the absolute difference between rates (black people in prison for 1000, white people in prison for 1000) or relative to the crimes that people commit (X people getting a longer sentence on average than Y people for the same crime)?
It should be noted that it is only "bordering on" genocide by the very watered down defintion that the UN countries themselves were willing to approve such that their own actions (notably the native american genocide) were not considered genocides.
Given that in the order of million people were killed abroad as a result of certain escapades people on the opposite site of the fence are never going to view the west as sitting on a high horse. Hell the US openly accused china of purposefully not keeping extremism in check few years prior when some ended up flowing into Afghanistan.
Fuck the CCP but I'm sure they have an easy time using the US's own actions in the domestic arena where they have the upper hand.
As they can magnify every bit of hypocrisy and flaw just like happens here.
Countless incarcerated? Still much less than in the US!
Hell they too can probably make up some stuff on the go. Refer to the Tibetans that were armed and then paid by the US to leave and claim similar stuff is happening now.
It doesn't take much for their people to align with em. Hell plenty were already mad about exemptions the uighurs got from the 1 child policy and such.
Whataboutism is a distraction from discourse regardless of the conduct of the target. As an example, if even Nazi Germany had held the US accountable for interment of Japanese citizens, that would still lead to a positive outcome. Their own acts of genocide wouldn't excuse the US's actions.
> The incarceration rate is around 5 times that of China
You have no idea what the incarceration rate is in China in fact - part the charm of the zero human rights modern China, which is itself an authoritarian prison state - and their supposed official figure does not include millions of Uyghurs.
So you have no problem trusting statistics from a warmongering country with world's highest incarceration rate, and very obvious racial skew among those imprisoned (those fortunate enough to not be shot on the street by police), but you up front assume that it's the Chinese statistics that can't be trusted.
You mean, the mechanism that allows one to ask government for something, and for the government to deny that information for whatever reason?
Okay, show me some example. US Air Force droning a wedding, where can I find information about that? Drone video recordings, perpetrators' names etc? Let me guess - that's "national security" and can't be public. And that's somehow different from how it works in China (if China was droning random civilians that is).
I think the point is you are wholly ignoring atrocities committed by the ccp and changing the topic. So what if the US did bad things, the ccp is doing horrible things and that is what the article is about. What is your response to that? They are imprisoning millions, it boggles my mind how bringing it to light could be considered nothing more than point scoring.
As long as the US can’t be held accountable, neither will China. Simple as that. China’s abuses flourish amid a global economic order that the United States of America has a stranglehold on.
Why does China not “enjoy” the same kinds of sanctions as the Russia? Because we live in a world without justice where the demand for open (not free!) markets and the flow of goods to the metropol.
And if you support out present system, you should acknowledge that things are exactly as they should be.
> And if you support out present system, you should acknowledge that things are exactly as they should be.
Why exactly? Are you suggesting that we do exactly nothing? Why can't we try to push our countries to be better citizens of the world?
I don't think we should accept atrocities. If outrage and anger didn't matter and if there actually was no way to change the economic order of the world Taiwan would have been invaded already.
I think it should have been clear enough from the reply that I think China's actions in Xinjiang are reprehensible?
Maybe here's an example you'll like better: It is true that Ukraine has had a serious rise in neonazi activity in recent history. I am not a fan of neonazis. However Russia's justification of their invasion by that is obviously disingenuous. Their own government is proto-fascist, obviously they are going to do anything but that.
If you apply that same logic to the US, you'll have a pretty good understanding of my position.
Do you think the camps in Xinjiang are as bad, or worse than Guantanamo?
I think they are worse because:
1) You are put there for your ethnicity and religion, (no suspected crimes are needed for detainment), despite being a Chinese citizen.
2) Freedom of press in the US means we found out bad things were happening in Guantanamo, and the prison has since been mostly wound down.
I think Guantanamo is good example of why the US's interest in Xinjiang is not disingenuous. We felt the same about Guantanamo as we do about Xinjiang: it's bad.
> Ditto in Guantanamo. I suggest doing a bit more research.
There are far more than 1000 Islamists in the US. Not sure where you're pulling that statement from.
> Done not by the US press but by Wikileaks, whose founder ( Assange) is being hounded by both the US govt and the media.
And I can freely read all about it.
It was picked up by every major news organization on American soil.
>Stop with the sanctimonious hypocrisy please.
Is it hypocritical to point out bad comparisons? I think Gitmo was bad. I think Xinjiang is worse given it's larger scale. I'd like both to stop, along with a billion other things, but here we are, on a thread about Xinjiang.
> There are far more than 1000 Islamists in the US. Not sure where you're pulling that statement from.
I am responding to this statement: "You are put there for your ethnicity and religion, (no suspected crimes are needed for detainment), despite being a Chinese citizen.".
I am sure you are aware that there were no suspected crimes needed for detainment in Gitmo and the US government said: "It Can Indefinitely Detain Anyone — Even U.S. Citizens".
> Is it hypocritical to point out bad comparisons?
No, not as an individual and I will concede that to you. But as a government, MOST certainly yes. The US always berates and sanctions other nations for policies that itself regularly carries out without any blowback. Most of the bad stuff never makes it to the US media if the media favours the party in power and it doesn't serve US interests.
One set of standards for the US (& its close allies) and another set of standards for the rest of the world
> I am sure you are aware that there were no suspected crimes needed for detainment in Gitmo and the US government said: "It Can Indefinitely Detain Anyone — Even U.S. Citizens".
My point was that didn't happen. If we were putting people there solely for their religion and ethnicity, it'd be much more than a thousand. It would be millions... like in Xinjiang.
> No, not as an individual and I will concede that to you. But as a government, MOST certainly yes.
I'm not a government. You called me hypocritical.
In any case, democracies are necessarily hypocritical. They change leaders pretty often, and different leaders tend to have different beliefs.
> My point was that didn't happen. If we were putting people there solely for their religion and ethnicity, it'd be much more than a thousand. It would be millions... like in Xinjiang.
Tens of thousands passed through Abu Ghraib too in Iraq. A truckload of torture and prisoner abuse done to people of only ONE ethnicity. People lost limbs in prison. No one in the US administration paid for these crimes against humanity.
Some folks in the US govt who were in explicit favour of hard intervention in Iraq and who were deeply influential in igniting the Iraq war are the same ones criticising China now. (Hint: Under Secretary of State). So, yes, it is definitely sanctimonious and ridiculous hypocrisy.
Not you personally, but I assumed you were supporting the US government in this stance. If not, I apologize.
> Tens of thousands passed through Abu Ghraib too in Iraq. A truckload of torture and prisoner abuse done to people of only ONE ethnicity.
If we put Iraqis in prison because of their religion and ethnicity, there would have been millions locked up. In Xinjiang, people are put in camps because of their religion and ethnicity, that's why millions are locked up. Key word: because
> Some folks in the US govt who were in explicit favour of hard intervention in Iraq and who were deeply influential in igniting the Iraq war are the same ones criticising China now.
Sometimes murderers snitch on murderers. Doesn't mean they shouldn't be arrested. I mean, there is plenty of evidence on what's happening in Xinjiang, it's not like we are talking about taking war-hawks on their word.
> In Xinjiang, people are put in camps because of their religion and ethnicity, that's why millions are locked up.
Well, it's not by Religion. If so, China would have ~45 million muslims permanently imprisoned. Contrary to popular belief, the folks in Xinjiang don't make up the majority of Muslims in China. Those would be the Hui who make up ~3% of the population just by themselves.
It is indeed deeply distressing that Uyghurs are detained for months, under-go re-education before being released. And torture if they fail to comply. But we have an international council for that - the UNHRC. The US has no leg to stand on to individually judge other nations with their extra-ordinary violent history and propaganda in the modern era.
> Sometimes murderers snitch on murderers..
Indeed and such people should be treated for the evil hypocrites they truly are until they pay for their crimes. American citizens can support them and be sanctimonious about this, but the rest of the world (esp Middle-East/Asia) will take it for what it truly is:
"Might Makes Right and Daddy USA is Mightier Than You, So None Can Judge Us, But We Can Judge You".
The US should make make a clear, evidenced case at UNHRC, hold an international hearing and attempt a resolution. But hey, then everything would need to be questioned and analysed from more than one party.
It would be, if it was true. So far, the only source is the "China Tribunal" - a private NGO operating without any kind of legal mandate or even oversight, which to me looks like a propaganda outlet masquerading as a proper law institution.
Freedom of the press doesn't prevent the majority of Americans getting served whole distorted picture of what happened in Iraq and the Middle East in general or just flat out misinformation, or simply no reporting at all.
Because there are very few actual journalist on the ground (and even less with any understanding of the local politics), most of the media just gets their information from gov news releases.
Eventually it wide spread abuse in one prison in Iraq came to be known and was downplayed and called isolated. People old enough will remember the prisoner on a dog leash for example. But there were many other prisons as well. And many had even worse control for abuse so we can assume what happens.
And tons of other things the US does in Middle East that are secret or so widely distorted that its hilarious to even call it news. Reliable allies turn into terrorist murderers within one strategic meeting. And terrorist turn into freedom fighters at the drop of a hat.
