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Clik here to view.see this is the shit that SO annoys me about that post
america calling china out (rightfully or otherwise) on china’s abysmal human rights record = valid and correct
china calling america out (rightfully or otherwise) on america’s loooooong history of dehumanisation, racism, colonialism, imperialism, human rights violations, etc = china being hypocritical
okay
Totally. This extremely common thinking among Western liberals and conservatives alike is an offshoot of orientalism, which is an offshoot of white racism. The idea is { whiteness = virtue, democracy, freedom } whereas { oriental = backwards, authoritarian suppression, rigidity }.
In reality, any powerful nation-state publicly calling out another powerful nation-state for human rights violations is engaging in self-serving statesmanship and diplomatic maneuvering. Hypocrisy? It’s probably not even a strong enough word for what we’re talking about here. Nation-states are not in the human rights business, they’re in the business of monopolizing violence in and around their respective societies in the pursuit of power.
However, when it comes to the business of monopolizing violence globally, no nation-state on the planet comes close to the USA. Which country was built on African slavery and indigenous genocide? Not China. In the past century, how many countries has China invaded and/or bombed? How many has the US? Look up the numbers for some sobering reality.
Setting aside World War II, setting aside two atomic bombs dropped on Japan (only East Asian people have had atomic weapons used against them), restricting this list only to Asia, the US has waged war, killing countless millions of Asian people, in Hawaii, Guam, Samoa, the Philippines, Indonesia, Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia.
Having lived in China, having personally pushed the bounds of tolerable political activity there and been arrested for it, I know about human rights in China in comparison with so-called freedom in the US. In China, student protesters were able to completely shut down the capital city with barricades on arterial roads for six entire weeks. In the US, this would be totally impossible; everybody would immediately get arrested and the protest would be shut down within days. Protests in the US are neutered before they even begin by heavy-handed authoritarianism by another name.
China has four times as many citizens as the US, yet there are twice as many prisoners in the US as there are in China.
I could go on but you get the idea. Again, there are no powerful nation-states which can claim moral high ground regarding human rights. It’s a propaganda battle for diplomatic leverage and nothing more.
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zuky:gondoleia: see this is the shit that SO annoys me about that post america calling...
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