They make nice Apple computers but totalitarianism dies hard and still sucks.
On the edge of a desert in far western China, an imposing building sits behind a fence topped with barbed wire. Large red characters on the facade urge people to learn Chinese, study law and acquire job skills. Guards make clear that visitors are not welcome.
Inside, hundreds of ethnic Uighur Muslims spend their days in a high-pressure indoctrination program, where they are forced to listen to lectures, sing hymns praising the Chinese Communist Party and write “self-criticism” essays, according to detainees who have been released.
The goal is to remove any devotion to Islam.
Trump seems to like Xi Jinping though, so…
.
Remember those quaint days when people such as these who have been arrested and imprisoned were described as what they were: prisoners?
That hideous oh-so-polite word detainee is yet another disfigurement inflicted on us by the previous Repugnican administration, during its catastrophic adventure in Iraq. The press initially referred to prisoners as such, and the administration and its shills put up such a ferocious yammering that editors meekly fell into line. Now it’s become fully normalized.
It makes me sick. I never use it.
. . . do “well”.
This definitely doesn’t seem suspicious.
Nothing to see here. Move along. 😉
Trump never met an authoritarian leader/dictator he didn’t like. That’s who he is. And his base is totally fine with that. The US is in a very dangerous place unless the Dmocrats seize Congress.
The whole self-criticism thing in Maoism always struck me as odd, as the point of the exercise is not genuine self-reflection but rather to demonstrate (usually unsuccessfully) that one is now toeing the party line. Noticed that with MLM types back when I was a much, much younger person. I guess if mindless conformity is the thing, then groovy. Never was much of the party line type. Am thankful to be in a situation where that is not too much of an issue (at least for the time being).
“Self-criticism” or something like it, is a core tenet of Marxism and the throughline of 1984. It’s not like Orwell was coming from nowhere.
It’s the racism, and it’s pretty awful. The Han majority gets all the benefit of the market economy. Tibetans receive similar treatment to Uygurs, and Han settlers are sent to colonize the whole west as well as northeastern Mongol and Manchurian regions. Minorities expected to stay quiet and cute and unorganized, and encourage tourism by developing folk dance performances for Han tourists.
It’s US History repeated isn’t it?
In a way it’s the other way around. China lost its Vietnam war a thousand years before we lost ours, and everybody knows they built a Wall, which failed to keep the barbarians out, and generally dominating the savages kept them superbusy in every dynasty.
But there was this one period, in the three centuries of the Tang dynasty (607-918), when they went crazy with xenophilia, Buddhism, Central Asian and Korean music, etc., and welcoming immigrants, and that’s when China was best.
Is that the period when their ships traded with Peru?
Way before Europeans did. IIRC, then a new Emperor came to power and pulled back from all things foreign.
The giant ships of Admiral Zheng He between 1405 and 1433. Sadly, there’s no real case he made it across the Pacific or even tried. This was the Ming dynasty, and official trips are pretty thoroughly documented. What he did accomplish is pretty astounding though.
The populations of Inner Mongolia and the so-called Manchurian regions have largely been culturally assimilated to the Han for quite some time. The Manchu language has almost entirely died out, replaced by Mandarin. Interesting as when the Mongols and Manchu ruled China (the Yuan dynasty and then the last/Qing dynasty), then took steps to try to preserve their language and culture against the overwhelming power of the country they had conquered.
Yeah, I went a little too far on the Manchu. I don’t think it’s correct to say they preserved language and culture, though; the brief effort under the Qianlong Emperor in the later 18th century was a failure. It’s the smaller Tungusic peoples that really suffer in the far northeast, and I think the “model minority” of ethnic Koreans.
Mongols are clearly not often treated violently the way Tibetans and Uygurs are, but there’s still plenty of conflict over land rights and the sharing of wealth and educational opportunity and language discrimination and sheer colonial-style mismanagement. I’m sure there’s a lot more, especially for the minority communities in the far southwest.
This is simply further proof that China is way ahead of the U.S. and many of its allies in mind control.
We try to do it with media.
From birth.
Those who do not take the bait?
Those who are driven truly insane by the contradictions contained in that totally artificially constructed “majority worldview?”
Those who are excluded from that mind-controlled society by race, religion, or beliefs?
They are either totally excluded from that system, used by it for cheap labor, imprisoned for acting out or spend their lives in a public lie while managing to preserve some sort of private truth.
I have no real confidence in statistics about China…or the U.S., either, truth be told…but the Wikipedia List of countries by incarceration rate chart has the U.S. a clear worldwide winner in its “Incarceration rate of prisoners per 100,000 population” chart.
USA-655 per 100,000
Russia comes in 14th-411 per 100,000
And poor ol’ China!!!???
An also-ran. 118 per 100,000….a lowly 134th on the chart.
Not even in the running.
Them Uighurs must be a real hard nut to crack, eh?
AG
P.S. The lowest-ranking major countries in this awful competition?
India (33 per 100,000) and Japan. (45 per 100,000)
A complaint about China’s “totalitarian” society?
From one of the most important parts of the U.S. media mind-control system?
The N.Y. Times!!!???
All’s I can say is:
P.P.S. As a sidenote:
China is kicking the United States’ butt economically.
Bet on it.
Gotta be doing something right!!!
No, the billionaires are GIVING the economy away. They don’t care about the rest of us as long as they can getting even more mindlessly richer. And politicians don’t care as long as the 1% fund their campaigns and foundations (like the Clinton Foundation).
China is a police state, AG. I’m not going to pretend we haven’t got problems here, but if you’re insinuating that the US and Chin are both police states, then you’re being ridiculous.
Please define a “police state.”
If one country locks up approximately 655 people per 100,000 and another country locks up 118 per 100,000?
And if the “655 people per 100,000” country is the leading locker-upper in the world!!!???
Which is the greater “police state?”
Please!!!
AG