China using families as 'hostages' to quash Uyghur dissent abroad
www.bbc.co.uk
Refugees and activists tell the BBC intimidation tactics are tearing apart Uyghur communities overseas.
  • GarbageShootAlt2@lemmy.ml
    2·
    1 year ago

    You can visit North Korea and never see their work camps either.

    Firstly, there is much more restriction on tourist movement in the DPRK for a litany of reasons, mostly pertaining to national security. Tourists in Xinjiang can move pretty freely, though if they are going all over the place they will cumulatively need to pass through many checkpoints.

    Secondly, “work camps” here is what people call prison labor in Bad Country. The DPRK has prisons, certainly, and we can have discussions about penal labor, but it’s much less notable than people pretend and much less secretive as well.

    Thirdly, “work camps” are not remotely comparable to committing genocide against one tenth of the entire population of the region, which is the claim that was popularly made against Xinjiang before it got walked back to “cultural genocide”.

    • yeather@lemmy.ca
      1·
      1 year ago

      Incredibly easy to search for this. Prison labour in America through the 13th amendment is certainly wrong but nowhere near what North Korea does. Look up Yeonmi Park and her story. A North Korean defector, she would know what happens when people fail to please Kim Jong Un. Entire generations of families are taken and worked to death, from pretty crimes like burglary to the heinous like not being sad enough when dear leader dies. Attempting to equivocate the two disproves that theory.

      Second, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_genocide Like come on there’s so much documented evidence of this atrocity. I don’t trust death rates on either side, but if the estimation of 1mil+ Uyghurs are in detainment camps, that’s still about 10% of the entire people’s being here for political reasons. Whether it’s a human genocide or cultural genocide, its still wrong and immoral being spear headed by an evil totalitarian regime.

      • GarbageShootAlt2@lemmy.ml
        1·
        1 year ago

        Your comment got removed before I saw it. If you’d like to give it another shot, I guess maybe check the modlog to see what rule you broke and reword it a little.

          • GarbageShootAlt2@lemmy.ml
            1·
            1 year ago

            It’s nice to know there are cool people on blahaj zone. Near the start of the reddit migration I saw that there was a bit of a red scare going on there. Are things a bit better now?

            Edit: I looked up that user’s comment in the modlog a yeesh, they really went whole-hog with Park’s spiel. As an aside, people say some really unhinged shit, like since then there was another comment about how the only thing to do about the DPRK is invade and diplomacy is a waste of time.