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The fundamental differences between Chinese and Israeli history even when examined across the same timeframe make the comparison in terms of discrimination and racism facile at best and a purposefully misleading tactic at worst.
The reason I refuse to engage with your absurd comparison is because it’s such a stretch as to be impossible to reasonably tie back to the point we were talking about.
It’s a waste of time and I’m not interested in that.
It would also be cool if you didn’t just put words in my mouth and argue against them.
I made a bunch of posts in reply to you, why not respond to the things I said instead of some stuff you’re thinking about?
The fundamental differences between Chinese and Israeli history even when examined across the same timeframe make the comparison in terms of discrimination and racism facile at best and a purposefully misleading tactic at worst.
Do you want to expand on those differences at all or just gesture vaguely at them? It's not misleading to compare two countries against each other just because they have different histories. All countries have different histories from each other. If country A is doing a shitty thing they should be called out for it. If country B is doing a shitty thing they should be called out for it. The history and race of the people who make up the government does nothing to change the math here.
The reason I refuse to engage with your absurd comparison is because it’s such a stretch as to be impossible to reasonably tie back to the point we were talking about.
Man, if only I had explained over and over using identical language to relate the actions of those two countries. Do you understand what an analogy is? Of course they don't line up exactly because they are different! You can't do an analogy with identical things! The whole point was that the reasoning you are using to excuse the CCP is exactly the same as liberals use to excuse the Israeli government. You can "but it's different because reasons" if you want, you are just showing that you have no consistent framework to evaluate the actions of governments.
It would also be cool if you didn’t just put words in my mouth and argue against them.
I made a bunch of posts in reply to you, why not respond to the things I said instead of some stuff you’re thinking about?
Give me one example of me responding to something you didn't say or imply in what you wrote.
It would be cool if you actually provided any evidence or a substantiation of your claims even once. I guess quoting your exact words and responding to them is just putting words in your mouth! Maybe if you ever answered a single question I wouldn't have to assume your position on something. If you don't want to be misunderstood, maybe stop dodging questions.
Maybe you can help clear this up: is criticism of any government equivalent to criticism of its people? You argued that the government of China is made up of Chinese people which is a clear attempt to equate those things. After all, if it wasn't why would you have made that claim? Why would you feel the need to state the obvious unless you were trying to make a point related to my question?
And this one too: Is it ever racist to call out the bad actions of any government? If so, how could you ever criticize any country for its bad actions?
Maybe this one: How is this not just liberal idpol bullshit? What it really feels like is an attempt to use idpol to protect an authoritarian government from criticism. It feels like grasping at straws for any shield you could use to protect a government by foiling the racism its people have faced. As I've said before, sinophobic exists, but you don't get to point to valid criticism of the actions of China'a government as an example of that. That attempted connection is exactly the idpol shield bullshit I'm calling out.
And, just on a personal note, it also "gets stuck in my craw" when people who are supposed to be arguing for a better system for everyone bend-over backwards and tie themselves in knots trying to protect authoritarians who wear red. Any government that did what the CCP did both at TS and with the information surrounding it since can entirely get fucked. That says nothing at all about the people of China who are not their government by the way.
Are you going to provide a single piece of evidence showing that it's false to say " the Chinese government doesn't allow people to freely talk about TS or hold memorials for it"? Are you going to offer any logical reason why it would be racist to say "the CCP doesn't allow people to freely talk about TS or hold memorials for it" besides your liberal idpol?
I don’t need to explain how precisely the history of Israel and the history of China are wildly different such that comparisons between Sinophobia and antisemitism with regard to the government versus the people are so inconclusive as to be useless.
I can just say it and the baseline expectation that you, a person who hasn’t said “I’m still learning basic geography and world history”, will recognize and understand why precludes any need for a long winded explanation.
So you chose "just gesture vaguely" then. It's disappointing but not surprising. After all, it's all you've been doing this whole time.
It also appears that you chose not to provide any evidence at all, in this entire multi-day conversation, that the original claim is false.
It also appears that you chose not to provide any reason why it would be racist other than the liberal idpol you keep going back to. You haven't even tried to claim it's not idpol, just that it's not "fair" to the CCP to judge them by the same rules I do every government. Do you know what that kind of thinking is called when you apply it to people? Bigotry of low expectations.
Why should they get special treatment? Why do their improprieties get dismissed while others don't?
Why is it so hard for you to justify anything you say? It wasn't hard for me to provide a HRW article specifically about how the Chinese government censors and discourages discussion about the events of TS. It's not hard for me to explain my consistent framework for understanding and criticizing the actions of a government. Why is defending your position so difficult for you? Do you not have any evidence to support the "false" narrative you've been pushing this whole time? Do you not have a consistent framework that you use to evaluate the actions of any and all governments regardless of the type of people that make up that government? Why should I, you, or anyone hold China to a different standard than Israel, Kenya, America, or any other country? You do see how giving them a pass because the people who make up the government are one specific race is racist, right?
It would be just as racist to excuse the Israeli government for it's actions just because the people who make it up are Jewish, it would be just as racist to excuse the actions of the Kenyan government just because the people who make it up are black, and it would be just as racist to excuse the actions of America because the people who make it up are predominantly white.
Your argument, steel-manned into a syllogism, is:
P1) Making a claim related to the actions of a government that is both false, and correlates to racist claims about the predominant people-group of that country is racist.
P2) The claim that the government of China does not allow people to freely discuss the events of TS or hold memorial events for TS is both false and correlates to racist claims about Chinese people.
C) It is racist to say that the government of China does not allow people to freely discuss the events of TS or hold memorial events for TS.
Congratulations! It is a logically valid argument! But, you have not demonstrated it to be sound. I reject both premises for lack of supporting evidence.
P1 is what most of our discussion has been about. I reject it because people == government. Even if the attacks against the CCP were rooted in racism, systems don't have a race or personhood, governments don't have a race or personhood. Systems deserve no respect unless it is earned and have no value outside of what they do to improve people's lives. Demonstrate to me why I should hold any government at all to be inherently deserving of respect in the same way that people are.
P2 has two things you would need to prove. Even if I grant that it is correlated to racist claims, you'd still have to demonstrate it is false. Something you've made no effort to do this entire time and appear to have dropped entirely since you haven't even attempted to claim it's false in the last few replies.
The conclusion is only demonstrated to be true when the argument is shown to be valid in structure (Hooray! It is) and sound (something you've yet to demonstrate even though I've been asking for it since we started this conversation). You can still believe it if you want, but you are, by definition, being irrational about it. In particular, I'd recommend looking up special pleading.
Again, this is your attempt to give special treatment to this specific authoritarian government, presumably because you think they are some kind of vanguard for an ideology you like. If we can't call out the actions of countries that are ostensibly "on our side" as leftists then we have already lost. No government, whether capitalist or anything else, has the right to deny basic human rights. To say otherwise is an acceptance that we must sacrifice human rights to move towards a better system. I fundamentally reject that kind of thinking, that kind of giving up. A better system is only worth fighting for if it makes people's lives better, rights and all.
China is really big, Israel is really small. China has a lot of people, Israel has very few. China has a long history that stretches back millennia, Israel was formed after ww2. China was an imperial holding of several different states, had its people taken in chattel slavery and gained independence and prosperity during the 20th century. Israel is a European settler state.
They’re wildly different and suggesting that Sinophobia and antisemitism can be compared is silly but suggesting that I’m engaging in vague handwaving is even sillier. I expected that anyone would be able to see clearly how they’re unique and that comparison would raise more questions than it purports to settle.
If you reply, why not reply to just this post instead of writing a whole book putting words in my mouth and arguing against them. Just trying to save you some time.
One is big and one is small, one has lots of people one has fewer, and they have different histories in their formation. You see China as the victim of the imperial West and Israel as an extension of that imperial West into the Middle East. Got it.
Does any of that mean that it's acceptable to be racist to one but not the other? Does China get more of a hall-pass because of their previous mistreatment? If so, why shouldn't the Jewish people, who faced an attempted extermination, get that same pass? Why wouldn't the Kenyan government get a pass for their mistreatment of LGBTQ people since they've long been the subject of imperialism and racism too?
Again, this is inconsistent. I hold all governments to the same standard regardless of any previous mistreatment the people have faced. Why should I not? Why fall into the bigotry of low expectations?
You can compare any two things, even things that are wildly different. They don't have to be a certain level of similar to compare and contrast two things. I can just as easily compare sinophobia to antisemitic as I could antisemitic to anti-black racism. In this case, they are not even that different from each other. Both are bigotries towards a group of people that are based on perceived race and correlated factors.
What more questions would it raise? Why is it forbidden to compare two different kinds of racism against each other? Is one kind ok but the other isn't? How does any of this relate to bigotry against an institution like a government instead of against people or groups of people? Since they don't have personhood, what does it even mean to be racist against an institution?
I feel like you won't answer because you haven't so far, but what words have I put in your mouth? If you think I have misunderstood your argument then clarify it.
hang on, why did you feel the need to change my language around israeli and chinese history?
I didn't say china was a victim of the imperial west. I didn't say israel was an extension of the same.
that's what i mean when i keep asking you to stop putting words in my mouth. i type some stuff up in a post in reply to you and you change a few words around to change my meanings and start attacking what you changed around.
i'm not going to respond in detail to your post because it's just more of what i described. it really seems like youre trying to get me to fight you on ground you define but you do so in response to things i wrote.
if you want to have a fight with someone about the stuff you wrote, make a post about it and see if anyone takes you up on it instead of mangling my words to suit your desires.
You said:
China was an imperial holding of several different states, had its people taken in chattel slavery and gained independence and prosperity during the 20th century. Israel is a European settler state.
And my shortening was:
You see China as the victim of the imperial West and Israel as an extension of that imperial West into the Middle East. Got it.
How are those meaningfully different? Were Chinese people not victims of those imperial holders when they were subjected to chattle slavery? Those holders were in the west right? Therefore they were the victims of imperialism from the west. Israel as a settler state is also the act of an imperial West right? Europe (in the west) used imperialism to settle in the middle east. Those aren't new words with new ideas in your mouth, it was a restatement of what you said in fewer words. What specifically do you disagree with? You didn't use the word victim or West, but those are both true logical extensions of what you said, right?
I wanted you to defend your claims the same way I would anyone else. Just because you've been unwilling to provide any evidence at all doesn't make it my fault. I provided you evidence yesterday you never even mentioned or responded to. I steel-manned your argument into a syllogism for you just to help you understand the argument you were making, the flaws with it, and how it is being inconsistently applied. I didn't have to do any of that, I could have just called you a "dumb tankie" and walked away if my goal was to dunk on you or shadow box.
As I said before, the reason I chose to do all that is because claims like you expressed are detrimental to the cause I believe you and I share. Maybe you don't, I don't know you, but I certainly get the impression that you and I share similar sentiments towards capitalism, imperialism, and the end goals of improving the lives of everyone on earth through fundamentally different and better institutions than we have today. Claims like the one you made chain us to the worst attempts at making a better world. Defending the authoritarian governments that spawned from them shows an (in my opinion unacceptable) defeatism towards fundamental human rights and freedoms. When claims like yours speak the loudest, we risk being forever bound to those mistakes of the past and being forced to bend over backwards to find reasons to excuse unacceptable behavior.
I won't support limiting freedom of information, freedom of thought, freedom of expression, or freedom of protest even if the government is made of people who have been subjected to objectively terrible treatment. Being the victim doesn't give you the right to victimize your citizens.
You don't have to respond, no one is making you, but I keep trying to get you to back up your original claim and you just can't seem to do it.
I didn’t say China was a victim of the imperial west because a person would at the very least have to include Japan in the west for that to make any sense. A person could make that statement but I didn’t.
I didn’t say that Israel was an extension of the imperial west because that would condense the interactions between Zionist formations before its creation and Israel as a state afterwards and the Anglosphere and Europe into an unhelpful mess.
I didn’t use language like “I see” because opinion or perspective don’t enter into the conversation. Anyone can look at those statements and recognize that they’re true and relatively uncolored by “political” thought. That Israel is a settler state might bug some liberals, but I was careful to try and use neutral language.
I did that because I think it should be clear to anyone that a comparison between Sinophobia and antisemitism is absurd. A person doesn’t need to be a Marxist to recognize that. A doctrinaire liberal would recognize it. Nazis literally made whole branches of race science to accommodate the fact that they recognized it.
The nations and people are wildly different and responding to someone pointing that out when you try to draw parallels between discrimination and hate leveled at them by saying that person is handwaving is deeply unserious.
I didn’t say China was a victim of the imperial west because a person would at the very least have to include Japan in the west for that to make any sense. A person could make that statement but I didn’t.
That's fair enough. The reason why I didn't include that is that most people I know include modern day Japan in "the west" since that's where they have the closest ties and it was more modern than I thought you were talking about given the talk of the long history of the region vs Israel.
I didn’t say that Israel was an extension of the imperial west because that would condense the interactions between Zionist formations before its creation and Israel as a state afterwards and the Anglosphere and Europe into an unhelpful mess.
I didn’t use language like “I see” because opinion or perspective don’t enter into the conversation. Anyone can look at those statements and recognize that they’re true and relatively uncolored by “political” thought. That Israel is a settler state might bug some liberals, but I was careful to try and use neutral language.
That's fine. The history of that area of the world more than most others is a complicated mess. It's reasonably neutral language and I agree with the accuracy of history being referenced.
I did that because I think it should be clear to anyone that a comparison between Sinophobia and antisemitism is absurd. A person doesn’t need to be a Marxist to recognize that. A doctrinaire liberal would recognize it. Nazis literally made whole branches of race science to accommodate the fact that they recognized it.
So here is part of where you are losing me.
First, how exactly does this connect to the previous statements about their histories? What about their histories being different precludes us from comparing and contrasting them. Is it only in the context of historical racism that we can't compare them? Could I compare their GDPs? Can I compare their government structures? I am not seeing the connection you are trying to draw between the differences in their history and our inability to compare the racism their peoples have / are facing.
As stated before, I also don't see the connection you are trying to to draw between the people who make up the majority of a particular institution and the institution itself. I have no reason to think institutions have feelings or personhood. I don't care about the instructions themselves other than the good they do for their people and the people around them. Other than making up some or most of the workers in that institution, what is the connection between the instruction itself and the people?
Second, why is it absurd to compare two similar things? We can easily compare the racism faced by Chinese people with racism faced by Jewish people with racism faced by black people. And how does this tie into the correlation I believe you are drawing between the people and the government? Is it that you believe one group is overall on the receiving end of the mistreatment and the other is overall on the giving side of mistreatment?
I don't agree that anyone or even most people would find it absurd to compare two things with so much overlap. Both China and Israel are countries. Both have predominate people groups that have faced historical racism and mistreatment. Sinophobia and antisemitism are both objectively bad things that cause harm based on inherited characteristics. I don't see why this is so preposterous to you. And I don't see how the history of their mistreatment changes anything?
If I can ask directly, does being the victim of racism or any other mistreatment give you any more leeway in causing harm to others? If not then I don't understand why bringing up their history matters. And if so, why should I let people who have been victims victimize others? Again, isn't this just bigotry of low expectations?
The nations and people are wildly different and responding to someone pointing that out when you try to draw parallels between discrimination and hate leveled at them by saying that person is handwaving is deeply unserious.
The reason I said hand waving is because you have answered very few questions directly. To your credit, you have done so in this reply.
What it sounds like you are saying (you can correct me if you'd like) is that it's unfair to compare the actions of these two governments because their histories are so different. That it's fair to criticize Israel and doing so isn't antisemitic, but not fair to criticize China and doing so is sinophobic. And the reason for that (again as far as I can tell) is their different histories of oppression. My problem here is I don't agree that criticism of a government = criticism of a people group and I don't agree that people groups who have historically faced oppression should be less open to being criticized for bad actions.
When people say “apples and oranges” it’s not because two things are irreconcilably different, it’s because accepting and recognizing their differences and describing them on their own terms is much more important than using one to talk about the other.
Both apples and oranges are round, both grow on trees, both are fruits. I could probably think for a while and list off a bunch of similarities. They’re also fundamentally different to the point that a person can’t effectively use an understanding on one to transmit an understanding of the other.
I can’t tell you about the flavor, texture or smell of an orange using your understanding of the flavor, texture or smell of an apple as a baseline. I could try but ultimately the better way would be for you to bite into an orange. My comparison wouldn’t be useful.
You can and did compare antisemitism and Sinophobia. I responded that the comparison isn’t useful because of the vast differences. We went back and forth about this and here we are.
I said that it wouldn’t be useful to compare the two because it wouldn’t transmit understanding. With each parallel a person tries to draw, myriad differences and fractal relationships arise and must be dealt with.
We send a simple particle into the cloud chamber and an array of arcs, lines and spirals must now be accounted for.
I do not think it’s unfair to compare the two, I think it’s not useful. The context of that usefulness is our discussion and the measure of that usefulness is the comparisons ability to transmit understanding. As evidence I’d present our discussion in which it does not transmit understanding.
I chose not to just say the same thing someone else said but: there are plenty of criticisms of the Israeli and Chinese governments with varying degrees of antisemitism and Sinophobia as their underpinnings.
“Chinese people can’t talk about tiannamen” isn’t one whose underpinnings have zero degrees of Sinophobia. I explained how a while back.