It isn’t. It’s not saying Chinese people look like Winnie the Pooh. Or even than he looks like Winnie because he’s Chinese or asian. It’s just a coincidental resemblance. And people wouldn’t use it as a pseudo-insult if it didn’t upset him so much. Which is kind of baffling why anyone would be upset at that comparison; it makes you seem lovable.
Have some perspective my dude: nobody saying this shit on the internet in English is doing it because it “upsets him”. Xi Jinping isn’t reading this. You are not in communication with him. He doesn’t know who you are. White anglos say it to each other because it makes them feel good to have a license to make racist jokes in a context where their peers won’t shame them for it.
Is it racist? Or is it mocking someone among others and delighting in the known fact that it makes a deplorable person upset? Same thing with mocking Trump for small hands.
Yes I’ve seen it used that way commonly. I’m seeing it used that way commonly right now. The “joke” originates from a picture of Xi Jinping and Barack Obama in which the Asian man is compared to a yellow bear, and the black man is compared to an African cat named “Tigger”. If you saw people calling Obama “Tigger” (or “a tigger”, so be a bit less subtle about it) as an epithet, I seriously doubt you’d be willing to accept claims of ignorance, or that “catch a tiger by the toe, if he hollers let him go” is just a harmless phrase that people say because it “upsets” him in a totally race neutral way.
I’m glad you mentioned the Trump hands thing too, because while there’s not an analogous racial component, you make the joke for the same reason: it’s not to “upset Trump”, who absolutely doesn’t know you exist and is totally unaffected by anything you personally say or do. You do it to identify yourself to other American liberals as a consumer of John Oliver or Stephen Colbert’s TV shows. I think it’s petty and stupid to substitute fandom for politics, but at the end of the day, correcting you on that isn’t terribly important to me. Trump is a white American whose deliberate actions have made life materially worse for most people I personally know, and who has no shortage of public statements that are repugnant on their face. The entire US political and economic system exists to protect him and people like him.
Why do I give a shit what petty superficial shit you say about Xi then? I promise it’s not for his benefit. I don’t know the guy, and crucially, I don’t think you do either. I believe that you hate him, but I don’t believe it’s for anything specific that he personally said or did. I’m no expert, but by all accounts he seems to be a pretty boring guy that says pretty normal generic shit about development, stability, and cooperation. I’m willing to bet you don’t speak Chinese, or have some terribly deep personal connection to China, so I’m also willing to bet he only exists for you as a vague symbol of “badness” constructed through your consumption of English language capitalist media. Media produced by Euro-American companies with a direct financial stake in manufacturing consent for a war against China. I think if Xi were replaced tomorrow with a literal mannequin, you’d still believe you had good reasons for hating that mannequin. The reason I wasted my time typing all this isn’t because I believe Xi needs to be protected from you (maliciously or not) making racist jokes on the internet. It’s because I would really prefer it if English speaking people that probably believe themselves to be kind and good and caring didn’t invest their time and effort and energy into dehumanizing and othering one of the most populous nations on earth toward the end of justifying a nuclear war that will probably end human life on earth. There are simply less destructive ways to get your lulz online.
Barack Obama in which the Asian man is compared to a yellow bear, and the black man is compared to an African cat named “Tigger”. If you saw people calling Obama “Tigger” (or “a tigger”, so be a bit less subtle about it) as an epithet, I seriously doubt you’d be willing to accept claims of ignorance,
You do it to identify yourself to other American liberals as a consumer of John Oliver or Stephen Colbert’s TV shows. I think it’s petty and stupid to substitute fandom for politics, but at the end of the day, correcting you on that isn’t terribly important to me
And yet you still do it.
I’m no expert, but by all accounts he seems to be a pretty boring guy that says pretty normal generic shit about development, stability, and cooperation.
He can be the nicest dude ever but he leads a control with an iron-grip on speech and media consumption, which is anathema to most english-speaking countries. Also you know, the genocide.
constructed through your consumption of English language capitalist media.
Aaaaand there we go. Tankie talking points.
toward the end of justifying a nuclear war
Scare tactics! If you knew the first thing of geopolitics, you’d know this would never, ever happen. If russia isn’t going to lob nukes when it’s getting its ass handed to it, China won’t have a reason to.
This whole little diatribe is full of inaccuracies, huge ass-pulls and insinuations that are so wild as to be ridiculous. And as soon as you actually get a little specific, you throw your entire argument away.
Are you really asking why it’s racist for white settlers to call the Chinese head of state a yellow animal? Do you think it wasn’t racially motivated when people made similar “jokes” about Barack Obama because they “just referred to one individual specifically”?
Ok, I never thought about the “yellow animal” angle, so thanks for bringing that up. I just always assumed he didn’t like the comparison because it was like insisting he was short and fat and since he didn’t like it, everyone sorta just ran with it as an insult. Meanwhile I was thinking “who the hell doesn’t like Winnie the Pooh? He shoulda embraced the comparison”
I’d say regular people in general don’t think that deeply about these things.
And though the skin theory sounds correct, i still think it’s about the short and fat part more. It affected his dignity and image, and as i understand it, the concept of ‘giving face’ is of great importance in chinese culture.
White settlers? Some brief searching tells me the origin was from Indian social media and then taken for use by Chinese citizens who disagree with him.
I mean yeah, depicting people as monkeys is generally rooted pretty explicitly in racism, and even white eastern europeans have been subject to racism from western Europe. Read what Emma Goldman wrote about that “conniving slanty eyed Asian”(paraphrased) Stalin.
LoL that’s such a stretch.
Plus everyone knows Tiggers are marvelous chaps, and loaded with vim and vigor. Tiggers are wonderful things, and so, hardly an insult.
Not sure why rothschild conspiracies are marked as antisemitism when they specifically refer to one family and have nothing to do with that family’s judaism
It’s from a South Park episode. It isn’t racist, or at least it wasn’t, Hong Kong protesters and Tiwan use it regularly. It’s just making fun of Xi Jinping as an individual.
I’m not going to look up the context, but if you’re randomly shouting “uhygur genocide” in a thread about UN voting to end US embargo on Cuba, US and Israel oppose, that specific type of whataboutism does sound suspicious like parroting nazi disinformation.
I used to think people talking about “horseshoe theory” were all bullshitters. Because I had never seen people on the left unironically doing anything close to what the right does.
Then I saw the tankies on Lemmy. I’m still a proud leftist, but geez nothing has made me question that stance more than seeing how fervently the tankies deny genocides and defend aggressive warmongering—as long as the country perpetrating it is one that calls itself “communist”, or is a successor to one that used to call itself communist. Exactly the same way the right and centre-left do regarding Israel’s genocides. Lemmy’s tankies are way more similar to the nazis of other social media than any other group around.
Which scares me a little as someone who basically completely agrees with them on economic issues.
I’m still a proud leftist, but geez nothing has made me question that stance more than seeing how fervently the tankies deny genocides and defend aggressive warmongering—as long as the country perpetrating it is one that calls itself “communist”, or is a successor to one that used to call itself communist.
If that were true then we’d all be falling over ourselves to defend Pol Pot instead of calling him a shit and a CIA puppet and not wanting anything to do with him.
You see that’s kind of where the problem is. You can say there’s a genocide and I can say “where” and that gives me the vibe of a genocide denier.
I’ve looked for evidence, I’ve asked for evidence, but the best I’ve ever gotten is a satellite image of some prison in China, some (AI padded) mugshots with no context, and some thorough browbeating by very serious liberals.
Let me put this another way. I’m of Jewish descent. My great aunt was in a camp. I’m not trying to “deny” any genocides, but what should my standard of evidence be? Particularly when there is a clear incentive for western media to create false narratives about their enemies, and have done so before?
If you have something to present that I haven’t seen, I and the other “tankies” are wide open to engage with it.
You can pretend all you want that you’re “just asking questions”, but that doesn’t change facts. The Uyghur genocide has been very well-established for a long time now.
The Chinese propaganda trying to deny their genocide has the same vibes as that time a Chinese official went on a western political current affairs show and said “you have a voting democracy, we have a working democracy”. The fact that Chinese state censorship is so strong (while western media is not censored) means there is very good reason to distrust the reports from Chinese media when they are in disagreement with the majority of reporting from everywhere else. So yeah, I’m going to trust reports from high quality journalistic organisations like the ABC, rather than anything that’s allowed to be reported on publicly within China.
The irony here, of course, is that even if you take the Chinese party line at its word. That its actions are nothing more than heavily policing an area where there are dangerous terrorists and separatist. That’s pretty much exactly the same as the Israeli line. It boggles my mind that people can call out one but not the other. It’s not surprising for me that the right does it. There’s an element of racism there, and chauvinism for defending their political allies. And I’ll be honest, I’ve always associated the right with a denial of facts. But the fact that people who have the gall to call themselves leftists will pretend there’s nothing wrong is
Pretend all you want that you’re “just asking questions”
That’s pretty much exactly the same as the Israeli line
vibes of a genocide denier
doesn’t change facts.
What facts! I’m still waiting for one. We can go round and round all day but until you show me something to center this on it’ll be a waste of time.
In 30 years even your ABC will quietly walk back their claims of genocide and I hope when that happens you will tell the people around you not to trust the same sources that lied to you.
bud im going to sincerely tell you to re-evaluate this take. i don’t have the time to deconstruct it for ya, but the “uyghur genocide” claims are basically an astroturfed campaign by an evangelical christo-fascist named Adrian Zenz.
his offensive bullshit got amplified by the US because they’re ramping up for a second cold war with China. there’s a lot you can be critical about with China if you want, but you should base it in reality.
i believe you’re leftist, you just have a bit more deprogramming to do when it comes to imperialism. that’s the hardest part for a lot of Americans since you’re trapped in the belly of the war beast.
you already got a lot of the way there by supporting Palestinian liberation. You don’t have to take my word for it either, just dig into some other sources about this topic.
Where is the violent rebellion? If a genocide is happening, the people being genocided always fight back violently. Where is it?
Oh, the narrative relies on Uyhgurs all being sheep who line up to be killed, huh. Strange how overtly racist that part is given how many “leftists” believe the narrative.
Ok, the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia committed genocide when they were nominally communist at the time. Is that good enough for you? It’s the most noteworthy example I can think of. Actually maybe the Shining Path too, in Peru. I never liked them or their methods.
The supposed genocide in Xinjiang is not at all the same thing. There’s no open warfare, rebellion, nothing to suggest what western nations are claiming is happening. The only evidence I’ve seen is that prisons exist in Xinjiang, and their prisons are much like prisons anywhere else on the world. All other evidence I’ve seen comes from one specific person, the deluded mind of Adrian Zenz. A man who cannot speak Chinese, has never lived in China, and he’s one guy.
Horseshoe theory doesn’t make sense. That’s the thing.
Until suddenly you start seeing people who call themselves leftists denying genocide. Which is something we usually think of as being a quality of the far-right.
(The obvious solution here, of course, is that these people who call themselves leftists…aren’t. Because if leftism is about equality, there’s nothing equal about subjecting a people and preventing the continuance of their culture.)
99% of the time, calling someone a genocide denier is just burden shifting. Genocide is a crime; you have to prove it happened, you can’t simply assert it did and then smear anyone who asks for evidence.
We have spy satellites that can read a license plates and genocides, by their very nature, leave a lot of evidence. If there were a genocide in Xinjiang we’d have what we see in Palestine: tons of documentation in a wide variety of news outlets about crimes against civilians and actions like UN officials resigning in protest.
Where are leftists denying genocide? I’ve never heard a leftist deny a genocide, ever.
The reason horseshoe theory only makes sense if you don’t think about it is because it is entirely and completely surface level. A good recent example is that both the far left and the far right want to end the country of Isreal. So if you hear someone on the far left say “I don’t think Isreal should exist” and someone on the far right say “I don’t think Isreal should exist”, if you don’t think about it, you would conclude “wow they want the same thing! HORSESHOOOOEEE!!!”
When the reality is that the right doesn’t want Isreal to exist because they hate Jews and don’t want Jews to exist, and the left doesn’t want Isreal to exist because Isreal is a genocidal apartheid settler colonial state. The left’s viewpoints have nothing to do with the ethnicity of the people who live in Isreal, and the right’s viewpoints have nothing to do with the actions of the country of Isreal. Therefore any actions taken by the right or the left towards their statement of “I don’t think Isreal should exist” would be entirely and completely different. Although they’re saying the same thing on the surface, literally 1 second of thought is all it takes to realize “oh those are actually entirely different things.”
So if you think a leftist is denying a genocide somewhere and you start crying “MUH HORSESHOE THEORY” it just means you haven’t spent any time thinking about it. I bet if you did think about it you’d learn something.
Hm, so you’re saying that every political faction “denies genocide and defends aggressive warmongering”? Could it perhaps be that every faction gets accused at one point or another of genocide and aggressive warmongering, and it’s your responsibility as a political person to use your brain to figure out who is lying?
I’m a leftist who isn’t a tankie. I don’t much care about China and I think the struggle for liberation can only be fought where we are at. I don’t uncritically accept the propaganda and the worldview of the state I seek to destroy at face value. Thus I do not accept claims about “genocide” committed by the US’ main rival without good evidence. Having principles and critical faculties are important to my politics. What about you? What makes you, someone who identifies liberals as “center-left,” significantly different from them? Your conditional support for Palestinian liberation?
There’s a big difference between being upset at some difference in ideology and looking at people sincerely defending or denying a genocide in the name of that ideological difference.
There was a 2020 statement to the UN, read by a Cuban representative, speaking on the behalf of 45 other countries who were endorsing China’s policy on Xinjiang. Among those countries are Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Belarus, Syria, Venezuela, Yemen, Sri Lanka, Palestine (this one is important), and Myanmar.
These places are completely disparate in terms of geography and state ideology, yet they all came together to very solidly proclaim China’s policy in the region does not constitute genocide. Palestine and Yemen in particular seems very egregious to me, because if anything those should be aware of what an ethnic genocide looks like, and yet they endorsed Cuba’s statements on China. Furthermore, China’s Xinjiang program ended in 2019 as far as I know. This is part of the statement those nations endorsed:
“China has undertaken a series of measures in response to threats of terrorism and extremism in accordance with the law to safeguard the human rights of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang. There was no single terrorist attack in Xinjiang in the last three years. People of all ethnic groups enjoy their happy life in a peaceful and stable environment. China maintains openness and transparency by, among other things, inviting more than 1,000 diplomats, officials of international organizations, journalists, and religious persons to visit Xinjiang who witnessed Xinjiang’s remarkable achievement.”
At a certain point maybe you need to look in the mirror and ask if it’s yourself who’s clouded by ideology in this matter
getting your sources from a “very left wing NGO” how about actual socialists if you’re a ‘socialist.’ I get that you’re Swedish Swiss, we have more people in prison doing forced labor in America than in these ‘genocide camps’ so it’s really hard to take people seriously when they act like ‘genocide’ in China should somehow be at the forefront of what leftists in the west concern themselves with.
I can never get my head around why Tankies want to deny people the right to criticize two of the most end stage capitalist countries in the world, P.R. of China and The Russian Federation.
The U.S.A. is the same.
They should all fall.
if i had to guess, probably. it’s somewhat of a plausibly-deniable dogwhistle for ‘asian = yellow’. not saying you meant that, just that I don’t blame the mods for their hypervigilance here
You hadn’t thought of it because it’s completely made up. Xi started getting compared to Winnie the Pooh by Chinese citizens after a picture came out showing Xi and former US President Obama together in a similar pose to Pooh and Tigger. Used originally for rather light-hearted ribbing of Xi, the Chinese government decided to crack down on it hard, which has had a massive Streisand Effect with the comparison between Xi and Pooh becoming popular in the West because Xi has shown how sensitive he is to it.
There’s no racial component to it at all. It’s all about being critical of the absurd censorship of the current PRC’s government.
i wonder why western redditors found a depiction of an asian president as a fat yellow bear and a black president as a character called Tigger so funny 🤔 definitely no racism here, no sir
Wow, look at this racism denial from the same person who was criticizing Tankies for genocide denial.
“The meme was started by a Chinese person, therefore it can’t be racist” is just a new veneer on “black rappers use the n-word in music, therefore it’s not racist if I use it.”
except winnie the pooh isn’t already a slur, and it kinda does matter the history of the usage of a term if you’re trying to determine the intent and usage of it.
literally nobody used the winnie the pooh insult against him because of his race, it was always because he literally looks like the character, and then threw a fit and banned all mention or image of a worldwide-known and beloved fictional character. because he’s an unstable tyrant.
Have you considered that the meme might have different impact coming from a Chinese person ribbing their leader than a white westerner echoing it? The former might be “light ribbing” but the later is racist. Who says a thing matters significantly on whether its ok to say. You know this very well because I’d hope you’d know that its not ok for white people to use the soft r n word even though many black people use it.
So if someone say Christianism sucks because it’s a religion and I respond by saying all religions sucks, is that whataboutism ? Excuse me if I just think that it’s better to criticize everyone than a specific group of person…
That’s not really whataboutism, but it is flawed logic to conclude all religions suck just because you think one does. Whataboutism would be more like responding with “But other religions suck even more!” as a defense for Christianity.
Nations are a sociological formation that objectively exist in the world. Even fucking fascists have better education than you, and not because their education is impressive.
Ah. World news again. The modlog really needs to show which mods are behind the wrong actions. That’s a good screenshot, shitty comments but untrue reasons. Even lemmy code of conduct says that to fix a mod action it should be taken with the mod in question.
don’t see where you mentioned Tiananmen Square
If they told the truth, how could they make a post about being a victim of the evil “lefties?”
Nah, they got banned for being too leftie
Banned for making bad (and kind racist) “xinnie the poo” jokes, lmfao
Question: How is a “xinnie the poo” joke racist when it refers to one individual specifically?
Has it already advanced to be used against all chinese?
It isn’t. It’s not saying Chinese people look like Winnie the Pooh. Or even than he looks like Winnie because he’s Chinese or asian. It’s just a coincidental resemblance. And people wouldn’t use it as a pseudo-insult if it didn’t upset him so much. Which is kind of baffling why anyone would be upset at that comparison; it makes you seem lovable.
Have some perspective my dude: nobody saying this shit on the internet in English is doing it because it “upsets him”. Xi Jinping isn’t reading this. You are not in communication with him. He doesn’t know who you are. White anglos say it to each other because it makes them feel good to have a license to make racist jokes in a context where their peers won’t shame them for it.
Is it racist? Or is it mocking someone among others and delighting in the known fact that it makes a deplorable person upset? Same thing with mocking Trump for small hands.
Also, it doesn’t seem like it originates from racism: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/xi-jinping-winnie-the-pooh-comparisons
I don’t hang around in racist circles, but I’ve never seen it used in what others have said below. Have you seen it used that way commonly?
Yes I’ve seen it used that way commonly. I’m seeing it used that way commonly right now. The “joke” originates from a picture of Xi Jinping and Barack Obama in which the Asian man is compared to a yellow bear, and the black man is compared to an African cat named “Tigger”. If you saw people calling Obama “Tigger” (or “a tigger”, so be a bit less subtle about it) as an epithet, I seriously doubt you’d be willing to accept claims of ignorance, or that “catch a tiger by the toe, if he hollers let him go” is just a harmless phrase that people say because it “upsets” him in a totally race neutral way.
I’m glad you mentioned the Trump hands thing too, because while there’s not an analogous racial component, you make the joke for the same reason: it’s not to “upset Trump”, who absolutely doesn’t know you exist and is totally unaffected by anything you personally say or do. You do it to identify yourself to other American liberals as a consumer of John Oliver or Stephen Colbert’s TV shows. I think it’s petty and stupid to substitute fandom for politics, but at the end of the day, correcting you on that isn’t terribly important to me. Trump is a white American whose deliberate actions have made life materially worse for most people I personally know, and who has no shortage of public statements that are repugnant on their face. The entire US political and economic system exists to protect him and people like him.
Why do I give a shit what petty superficial shit you say about Xi then? I promise it’s not for his benefit. I don’t know the guy, and crucially, I don’t think you do either. I believe that you hate him, but I don’t believe it’s for anything specific that he personally said or did. I’m no expert, but by all accounts he seems to be a pretty boring guy that says pretty normal generic shit about development, stability, and cooperation. I’m willing to bet you don’t speak Chinese, or have some terribly deep personal connection to China, so I’m also willing to bet he only exists for you as a vague symbol of “badness” constructed through your consumption of English language capitalist media. Media produced by Euro-American companies with a direct financial stake in manufacturing consent for a war against China. I think if Xi were replaced tomorrow with a literal mannequin, you’d still believe you had good reasons for hating that mannequin. The reason I wasted my time typing all this isn’t because I believe Xi needs to be protected from you (maliciously or not) making racist jokes on the internet. It’s because I would really prefer it if English speaking people that probably believe themselves to be kind and good and caring didn’t invest their time and effort and energy into dehumanizing and othering one of the most populous nations on earth toward the end of justifying a nuclear war that will probably end human life on earth. There are simply less destructive ways to get your lulz online.
Wait, what? Tigers are not native to Africa. They are an Asian cat.
And yet you still do it.
He can be the nicest dude ever but he leads a control with an iron-grip on speech and media consumption, which is anathema to most english-speaking countries. Also you know, the genocide.
Aaaaand there we go. Tankie talking points.
Scare tactics! If you knew the first thing of geopolitics, you’d know this would never, ever happen. If russia isn’t going to lob nukes when it’s getting its ass handed to it, China won’t have a reason to.
This whole little diatribe is full of inaccuracies, huge ass-pulls and insinuations that are so wild as to be ridiculous. And as soon as you actually get a little specific, you throw your entire argument away.
Are you really asking why it’s racist for white settlers to call the Chinese head of state a yellow animal? Do you think it wasn’t racially motivated when people made similar “jokes” about Barack Obama because they “just referred to one individual specifically”?
whut
Also I thought the joke originated from China
Ok, I never thought about the “yellow animal” angle, so thanks for bringing that up. I just always assumed he didn’t like the comparison because it was like insisting he was short and fat and since he didn’t like it, everyone sorta just ran with it as an insult. Meanwhile I was thinking “who the hell doesn’t like Winnie the Pooh? He shoulda embraced the comparison”
So yea, thanks for the extra info.
I’d say regular people in general don’t think that deeply about these things.
And though the skin theory sounds correct, i still think it’s about the short and fat part more. It affected his dignity and image, and as i understand it, the concept of ‘giving face’ is of great importance in chinese culture.
White settlers? Some brief searching tells me the origin was from Indian social media and then taken for use by Chinese citizens who disagree with him.
So in the same vein, all those monkey caricatures of Putin are also racist as well then.
I mean yeah, depicting people as monkeys is generally rooted pretty explicitly in racism, and even white eastern europeans have been subject to racism from western Europe. Read what Emma Goldman wrote about that “conniving slanty eyed Asian”(paraphrased) Stalin.
When have racist depictions of Eastern Europeans as monkeys been a thing?
In the origin of the meme, by your logic, Obama was compared to a tiger.
Is Obama orange and striped with a white belly?
Tigger is very similar to a slur used against black people.
LoL that’s such a stretch.
Plus everyone knows Tiggers are marvelous chaps, and loaded with vim and vigor. Tiggers are wonderful things, and so, hardly an insult.
Not sure why Winnie the poo is marked as racism when it specifically refers to one person and has nothing to do with that persons race
Honestly seeking explanation because this is new to me and I’m afraid to Google it. What is “winnie” a dogwhistle for?
There’s too damn many conservative dogwhistles these days.
It’s from a South Park episode. It isn’t racist, or at least it wasn’t, Hong Kong protesters and Tiwan use it regularly. It’s just making fun of Xi Jinping as an individual.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Winnie-the-Pooh_in_China
https://www.npr.org/2023/03/23/1165504942/winnie-the-pooh-xi-jinping-china-film
Oh the Winnie the Pooh comic thing. I laughed at that, but didn’t realize it was turning into a bigger thing. Got it.
Not sure why $oro$ is marked as racism when it specifically refers to one person and has “nothing to do” with that person’s race.
Really makes you think.
Oh, really? Comparing an Chinese man to a yellow skinned character has nothing to do with race?
Comparing a Chinese man who looks like Winnie the Pooh to Winnie the Pooh has nothing to do with his race yes.
doesn’t look like that was what you were banned for
And calling the uhygur genocide bad is spreading nazi disinformation ? Hahahaha
I’m not going to look up the context, but if you’re randomly shouting “uhygur genocide” in a thread about UN voting to end US embargo on Cuba, US and Israel oppose, that specific type of whataboutism does sound suspicious like parroting nazi disinformation.
It’s spreading US disinfo, which might as well be the 4th Reich soooo yeah pretty much
I used to think people talking about “horseshoe theory” were all bullshitters. Because I had never seen people on the left unironically doing anything close to what the right does.
Then I saw the tankies on Lemmy. I’m still a proud leftist, but geez nothing has made me question that stance more than seeing how fervently the tankies deny genocides and defend aggressive warmongering—as long as the country perpetrating it is one that calls itself “communist”, or is a successor to one that used to call itself communist. Exactly the same way the right and centre-left do regarding Israel’s genocides. Lemmy’s tankies are way more similar to the nazis of other social media than any other group around.
Which scares me a little as someone who basically completely agrees with them on economic issues.
If that were true then we’d all be falling over ourselves to defend Pol Pot instead of calling him a shit and a CIA puppet and not wanting anything to do with him.
See also the most common opinion on Gonzalo (yes I know there are Gonzalites, haven’t seen them around here though).
You see that’s kind of where the problem is. You can say there’s a genocide and I can say “where” and that gives me the vibe of a genocide denier. I’ve looked for evidence, I’ve asked for evidence, but the best I’ve ever gotten is a satellite image of some prison in China, some (AI padded) mugshots with no context, and some thorough browbeating by very serious liberals.
Let me put this another way. I’m of Jewish descent. My great aunt was in a camp. I’m not trying to “deny” any genocides, but what should my standard of evidence be? Particularly when there is a clear incentive for western media to create false narratives about their enemies, and have done so before?
If you have something to present that I haven’t seen, I and the other “tankies” are wide open to engage with it.
You can pretend all you want that you’re “just asking questions”, but that doesn’t change facts. The Uyghur genocide has been very well-established for a long time now.
The Chinese propaganda trying to deny their genocide has the same vibes as that time a Chinese official went on a western political current affairs show and said “you have a voting democracy, we have a working democracy”. The fact that Chinese state censorship is so strong (while western media is not censored) means there is very good reason to distrust the reports from Chinese media when they are in disagreement with the majority of reporting from everywhere else. So yeah, I’m going to trust reports from high quality journalistic organisations like the ABC, rather than anything that’s allowed to be reported on publicly within China.
The irony here, of course, is that even if you take the Chinese party line at its word. That its actions are nothing more than heavily policing an area where there are dangerous terrorists and separatist. That’s pretty much exactly the same as the Israeli line. It boggles my mind that people can call out one but not the other. It’s not surprising for me that the right does it. There’s an element of racism there, and chauvinism for defending their political allies. And I’ll be honest, I’ve always associated the right with a denial of facts. But the fact that people who have the gall to call themselves leftists will pretend there’s nothing wrong is
vibes of a genocide denier
What facts! I’m still waiting for one. We can go round and round all day but until you show me something to center this on it’ll be a waste of time. In 30 years even your ABC will quietly walk back their claims of genocide and I hope when that happens you will tell the people around you not to trust the same sources that lied to you.
wait did they deny the real ones or the made up ones?
Tankies on Lemmy like to pretend China isn’t committing genocide against Uyghurs.
bud im going to sincerely tell you to re-evaluate this take. i don’t have the time to deconstruct it for ya, but the “uyghur genocide” claims are basically an astroturfed campaign by an evangelical christo-fascist named Adrian Zenz.
his offensive bullshit got amplified by the US because they’re ramping up for a second cold war with China. there’s a lot you can be critical about with China if you want, but you should base it in reality.
i believe you’re leftist, you just have a bit more deprogramming to do when it comes to imperialism. that’s the hardest part for a lot of Americans since you’re trapped in the belly of the war beast.
you already got a lot of the way there by supporting Palestinian liberation. You don’t have to take my word for it either, just dig into some other sources about this topic.
Where is the violent rebellion? If a genocide is happening, the people being genocided always fight back violently. Where is it?
Oh, the narrative relies on Uyhgurs all being sheep who line up to be killed, huh. Strange how overtly racist that part is given how many “leftists” believe the narrative.
Ok, the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia committed genocide when they were nominally communist at the time. Is that good enough for you? It’s the most noteworthy example I can think of. Actually maybe the Shining Path too, in Peru. I never liked them or their methods.
The supposed genocide in Xinjiang is not at all the same thing. There’s no open warfare, rebellion, nothing to suggest what western nations are claiming is happening. The only evidence I’ve seen is that prisons exist in Xinjiang, and their prisons are much like prisons anywhere else on the world. All other evidence I’ve seen comes from one specific person, the deluded mind of Adrian Zenz. A man who cannot speak Chinese, has never lived in China, and he’s one guy.
Horseshoe theory only makes sense if you don’t think about it for even one second.
So, not surprised it makes total sense to you
Horseshoe theory doesn’t make sense. That’s the thing.
Until suddenly you start seeing people who call themselves leftists denying genocide. Which is something we usually think of as being a quality of the far-right.
(The obvious solution here, of course, is that these people who call themselves leftists…aren’t. Because if leftism is about equality, there’s nothing equal about subjecting a people and preventing the continuance of their culture.)
99% of the time, calling someone a genocide denier is just burden shifting. Genocide is a crime; you have to prove it happened, you can’t simply assert it did and then smear anyone who asks for evidence.
We have spy satellites that can read a license plates and genocides, by their very nature, leave a lot of evidence. If there were a genocide in Xinjiang we’d have what we see in Palestine: tons of documentation in a wide variety of news outlets about crimes against civilians and actions like UN officials resigning in protest.
Where are leftists denying genocide? I’ve never heard a leftist deny a genocide, ever.
The reason horseshoe theory only makes sense if you don’t think about it is because it is entirely and completely surface level. A good recent example is that both the far left and the far right want to end the country of Isreal. So if you hear someone on the far left say “I don’t think Isreal should exist” and someone on the far right say “I don’t think Isreal should exist”, if you don’t think about it, you would conclude “wow they want the same thing! HORSESHOOOOEEE!!!”
When the reality is that the right doesn’t want Isreal to exist because they hate Jews and don’t want Jews to exist, and the left doesn’t want Isreal to exist because Isreal is a genocidal apartheid settler colonial state. The left’s viewpoints have nothing to do with the ethnicity of the people who live in Isreal, and the right’s viewpoints have nothing to do with the actions of the country of Isreal. Therefore any actions taken by the right or the left towards their statement of “I don’t think Isreal should exist” would be entirely and completely different. Although they’re saying the same thing on the surface, literally 1 second of thought is all it takes to realize “oh those are actually entirely different things.”
So if you think a leftist is denying a genocide somewhere and you start crying “MUH HORSESHOE THEORY” it just means you haven’t spent any time thinking about it. I bet if you did think about it you’d learn something.
Hm, so you’re saying that every political faction “denies genocide and defends aggressive warmongering”? Could it perhaps be that every faction gets accused at one point or another of genocide and aggressive warmongering, and it’s your responsibility as a political person to use your brain to figure out who is lying?
No. Leftists who aren’t tankies don’t.
I’m a leftist who isn’t a tankie. I don’t much care about China and I think the struggle for liberation can only be fought where we are at. I don’t uncritically accept the propaganda and the worldview of the state I seek to destroy at face value. Thus I do not accept claims about “genocide” committed by the US’ main rival without good evidence. Having principles and critical faculties are important to my politics. What about you? What makes you, someone who identifies liberals as “center-left,” significantly different from them? Your conditional support for Palestinian liberation?
Are you or are you not genociding the people of mars right now?
boohoo wittle baby got mad people are on their left.
There’s a big difference between being upset at some difference in ideology and looking at people sincerely defending or denying a genocide in the name of that ideological difference.
There was a 2020 statement to the UN, read by a Cuban representative, speaking on the behalf of 45 other countries who were endorsing China’s policy on Xinjiang. Among those countries are Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Belarus, Syria, Venezuela, Yemen, Sri Lanka, Palestine (this one is important), and Myanmar.
These places are completely disparate in terms of geography and state ideology, yet they all came together to very solidly proclaim China’s policy in the region does not constitute genocide. Palestine and Yemen in particular seems very egregious to me, because if anything those should be aware of what an ethnic genocide looks like, and yet they endorsed Cuba’s statements on China. Furthermore, China’s Xinjiang program ended in 2019 as far as I know. This is part of the statement those nations endorsed:
At a certain point maybe you need to look in the mirror and ask if it’s yourself who’s clouded by ideology in this matter
Except that I’m a Swiss socialist and that I’m taking my sources from very left wing ONG that I work with ?
getting your sources from a “very left wing NGO” how about actual socialists if you’re a ‘socialist.’ I get that you’re
SwedishSwiss, we have more people in prison doing forced labor in America than in these ‘genocide camps’ so it’s really hard to take people seriously when they act like ‘genocide’ in China should somehow be at the forefront of what leftists in the west concern themselves with.@sharedburdens Hahaha… Thankfully this campaign just started: https://youtu.be/0oNX_BHgi3c?si=xojukxKnUyZ–jFS
I can never get my head around why Tankies want to deny people the right to criticize two of the most end stage capitalist countries in the world, P.R. of China and The Russian Federation.
The U.S.A. is the same.
They should all fall.
@Starshader @WhyEssEff
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/0oNX_BHgi3c?si=xojukxKnUyZ–jFS
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
So it was for calling the CCP president Winnie then ?
if i had to guess, probably. it’s somewhat of a plausibly-deniable dogwhistle for ‘asian = yellow’. not saying you meant that, just that I don’t blame the mods for their hypervigilance here
Oh wow. I honestly didn’t thought about that. I may be an ass sometime but… not like that :o !
no worries, thanks for being receptive
You hadn’t thought of it because it’s completely made up. Xi started getting compared to Winnie the Pooh by Chinese citizens after a picture came out showing Xi and former US President Obama together in a similar pose to Pooh and Tigger. Used originally for rather light-hearted ribbing of Xi, the Chinese government decided to crack down on it hard, which has had a massive Streisand Effect with the comparison between Xi and Pooh becoming popular in the West because Xi has shown how sensitive he is to it.
There’s no racial component to it at all. It’s all about being critical of the absurd censorship of the current PRC’s government.
i wonder why western redditors found a depiction of an asian president as a fat yellow bear and a black president as a character called Tigger so funny 🤔 definitely no racism here, no sir
defending that racism is so transparently in bad faith holy shit
That’s a pretty bold statement to make. Have you seen the west?
Wow, look at this racism denial from the same person who was criticizing Tankies for genocide denial.
“The meme was started by a Chinese person, therefore it can’t be racist” is just a new veneer on “black rappers use the n-word in music, therefore it’s not racist if I use it.”
except winnie the pooh isn’t already a slur, and it kinda does matter the history of the usage of a term if you’re trying to determine the intent and usage of it.
literally nobody used the winnie the pooh insult against him because of his race, it was always because he literally looks like the character, and then threw a fit and banned all mention or image of a worldwide-known and beloved fictional character. because he’s an unstable tyrant.
Deleting some memes from Weibo isn’t a “hard” crackdown, westerners just want to pretend it is and for some reason still care ten years later.
Have you considered that the meme might have different impact coming from a Chinese person ribbing their leader than a white westerner echoing it? The former might be “light ribbing” but the later is racist. Who says a thing matters significantly on whether its ok to say. You know this very well because I’d hope you’d know that its not ok for white people to use the soft r n word even though many black people use it.
Yeah, the comments of yours in the modlog are rude but the mod is definitely reaching and banning you for dissent
You were banned for whataboutism. We take it extremely seriously.
Taken very seriously, and applied very selectively. That mod team loves to put their thumb on the scale.
So if someone say Christianism sucks because it’s a religion and I respond by saying all religions sucks, is that whataboutism ? Excuse me if I just think that it’s better to criticize everyone than a specific group of person…
sure idk
sorry pal but all of your critiques are textbook whataboutism
That’s not really whataboutism, but it is flawed logic to conclude all religions suck just because you think one does. Whataboutism would be more like responding with “But other religions suck even more!” as a defense for Christianity.
Not agreeing with the system of having nations is one thing, but you can’t just not believe they’re there
Nations doesn’t exist, states does. It’s different.
Nations are a sociological formation that objectively exist in the world. Even fucking fascists have better education than you, and not because their education is impressive.
I’ve gotten into arguments in this instance in WorldNews (if I recall) where I strongly disagreed with communists on something. Nobody ever banned me.
Keep up the good work, mods, and thanks for addressing someone’s ban complaint
Ah. World news again. The modlog really needs to show which mods are behind the wrong actions. That’s a good screenshot, shitty comments but untrue reasons. Even lemmy code of conduct says that to fix a mod action it should be taken with the mod in question.