cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/57662436
“When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out ‘stop!’ When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible.”
German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s observation on the political apathy that engulfed Germany in the 1930s resonates with 21st century survivors of the Chinese state’s war against Uyghurs in its northwestern heartland, known by exiles as East Turkestan.
Germany’s slide into fascism brought book burnings and arrests of “undesirables.” It lead step by step to antisemitism, concentration camps, torture, and death. That brutal history echoes today in Beijing’s campaign against the Turkic peoples of its western regions – and in the silence of a deaf world. Only those who have experienced the terror first-hand and survived to tell the tale can hope to describe its full horrors.
Kalbinur Sidik (formerly Romanized as Qelbinur Sidik) is one such rare eyewitness to what many nations have termed a genocide. Her ordeal as a teacher inside the camps drove her to the brink of collapse. She escaped in 2019 ostensibly for medical treatment, hoping to reunite with her daughter in the Netherlands and seek asylum. Speaking out became her path to healing.
She told The Diplomat that “silence is not an option.” The faces of captives in her class have haunted her to this day. Since leaving, her mission has been to give voice to their silent cries.
[…]
Her memoir, “Heart Full of Light” – a title reflecting the meaning of her name, Kalbinur – is full of horror and sadness but also memory, dignity and resistance. It is a cry against erasure and a wake-up call to a world that has not been listening.
[…]
Every inch of the compound was monitored. If someone moved, a screen flashed red and zoomed in. “It was impossible not to compare them to animals in cages,” Sidik wrote of her students. “There was nowhere to hide. For them, or for me.”
The specter of organ harvesting hung over everything. Healthy young prisoners disappeared. Across Xinjiang authorities collected biodata from everyone aged 16-65. Mandatory DNA tests, bloods, iris scans, voice and gait recordings filled vast data banks, many believed for organ matching. Research later identified Saudis and Gulf Arabs traveling to eastern China for halal organs.
“Alive we were worthless, dead, and cut up, our organs were worth a ransom,” Sidik wrote.
[…]
Please stop citing sources that are explicitly pro-China and pro-Russian, and, therefore, anti-democratic.
Greyzone is well-known to hire ex-'editors from Russia’s propaganda outlets RT and Sputnik, among them are Mohamed Elmaazi, Dan Cohen, Rania Khalek, Kit Klarenberg, Jeremy Loffredo, Wyatt Reed, Anya Parampil, Alex Rubinstein (you’ll find a lot of articles by them on the website).
Greyzone has also frequently echoing Chinese Communist Party propaganda, the outlet is even often cited by Chinese officials. As one article by ProPublica wrote in 2020,
The independent media outlet Coda Story published an article on how Max Blumenthal, the founder of Grayzone, downplayed Beijing’s actions in Xinjiang on international TV. In Enter the Grayzone: fringe leftists deny the scale of China’s Uyghur oppression, it states,
There is much more across the web. Your sources are outright rubbish.
Stop posting sources that are explicitly pro-west and anti-China, as there’s nothing more antidemocratic than governments run by the rich.
You imply therefore that Xi or Putin are poor/working class?
You’re either talking to tankie bots or paid tankie shills or the eventual mentally deficient tankie
Either way, its a lost discussion
Are you unfamiliar with western politics? The working class has absolutely no representation. There’s political theatre which serves to keep everyone as divided as possible, and plenty of fear mongering such as the disinformation here.
You’re bringing up single entities which are just a part of the giant systems. I’m not as familiar with modern Russian politics, but the Chinese people absolutely have a voice, and their quality of life has sky rocketed in the past 30 years. Meanwhile the quality of life in the west has tanked.
What side of the class war are you on? China and Russia are not our enemies. China, especially, is an ally of the working class.
What holds you and the majority of ‘tankies’ back then? Why aren’t they emigrating to China or Russia? I heard the latter they are desperately looking for new citizens of late.
Edit: Btw, China’s Xi Jinping has frequently confirmed that he rejects social welfare as it would make people ‘lazy’. Both wealth and income inequality have been sharply rising in China over the last decade and have now reached U.S. levels.
What we call a social safety net including healthcare, education, elderly care comes mainly from the wider family in China and sometimes from local villages in the rural areas. The Chinese Communist Party’s widely proclaimed “socialism with Chinese characteristics” exists at best on paper, as the state never developed a system for social welfare and workers’s rights that comes even remotely to the high standards in many Western democracies.
China’s hukou system of residency compounds many social problems, stopping many rural migrants from obtaining urban residency and thus preventing them from accessing higher quality urban social services (Hukou is sort of a registration, but also classification system, employed to assign urban or specific rural residency status and, with it, an individual’s eligibility to obtain services).
The workers in China are represented by the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU). It is the only trade union that is allowed in China - and it is led by Chinese Communist Party. China’s ‘996 working culture’ is legendary, and something that is prohibited by Western labour laws.
The 996 working culture that has been illegal for years in china?
I know many people who are forced to work 80 hour weeks to make ends meet in the west, and fail to even do that. Wtf are you talking about lol?
“Oh one bad system exists so the other similar bad system must be good.”
If 996 being ‘illegal’ matters why is it still such a big problem? Maybe capitalism ‘with Chinese characteristics’ is the problem, much like everywhere else?
Centralized power is inherently corrupt and dangerous. It doesn’t matter what colour flag you drape over it.
Source on it still being a big problem?
I’d love to take off. Easier said than done.
You’re a western disinformation machine. Probably a fed. This seems to be your favorite past time. Strange.
I’m on the side of the working class. And based on the evidence both Xi and Putin are running a kleptocratic circus at the expense of working class. While you apparently think they are any better the others, and focusing on this difference you deny human suffering.
What evidence is there that Xi is running a kleptocratic circus at the expense of the working class? In the last 40 years 800,000,000 people were lifted out of poverty.
Last time I checked, Xi Jinping is the president of China since 2013, and was VP from 2008. Either way not 40 years.
So, for starters you are commenting on thread about forcing people into labor camps. Many of them are workers who have no rights purely on behalf of their cultural affiliation.
On top of that, China absolutely nipped independent trade unions in their buds, and though local protests are often let go, almost every non party aligned labor rights activist had disappeared.
Current China economy can be attributed to Xi. Xi’s real impact on Cultural Revolution is transition from 996 to tang ping and to bai lan.
If it makes you feel better to consume western disinformation, have at it. It’s just the same shit as usual, though. You’d think for
millionsbillions of dollhairs they’d be able to spice it up a bit.https://responsiblestatecraft.org/china-cold-war-2669160202/
To stand by your words, can you please show any evidence of Chinese trade union other than All-China Federation Of Trade Unions?
With youth unemployment rate at 14%, how does ACFTU support them?
You think the working class has representation in China/Russia?
All states are the enemy of the people.
on china yes, compared to every western ‘democracy’.
russia isn’t that democratic, but also doesn’t get anything out of antagonizing china.
Absolutely. I’m less familiar with modern Russia, though…
Us commies don’t disagree completely. The end goal is to dissolve the government. The aggressive west makes that quite a challenge.
Before you respond, google how democracy in China works.
Can you provide a positive counter example?
Pick whatever you consider to be the most democratic democracy in the world. Can you explain how democracy works there?
Why are we skipping my request?
Maybe because by skipping context and relying on a broad call to ambiguous authority you are making a bad faith debate worse?
A person could spend a year studying any large democratic system and still wonder at all the bullshit and lies inherent in such a system.
So what are you actually trying to say? That your favourite system is not rigged for a certain oppressive status quo? Prove that it’s the exception to the global rule.
Because your question disingenuously suggests that there’s some clear standard of what democracy is or how it can be judged.
Until we have that standard it’s a vague word and there’s no objective way to discuss how it works in China or anywhere else.