Tag: ethnicity
Terrorwashing a Genocide
“In The War on the Uyghurs, Sean Roberts begins the arduous task of probing these and other mysteries of the first two decades of the global war on terror. In doing so, he shows how the United States’ efforts to build an international consensus for its counterterrorism projects had far-reaching consequences on the other side of the world, changing the relationship between the Chinese state and its long-oppressed Uyghur minority. He also shows how, during that same period—apart from any Western influence—the Chinese government became increasingly brazen in its oppression of Muslim and Turkic minorities, steadily curtailing freedoms of movement, assembly, and speech in Xinjiang long before the moment in 2016 when it began secretly interning hundreds of thousands of people in extrajudicial “Transformation Through Education” centers.”
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“It is tempting to think of Xinjiang as a vast and arid Guantanamo Bay, one roughly as large as Alaska and as populous as Texas. Like Donald Rumsfeld’s own “world-class operation,” on a much grander (albeit largely domestic) scale, it is a hypertrophied state-within-a-state where minority residents are guilty before judgment and where the rule of law is reengineered in the name of fighting a pervasive, unbounded, and infinitely flexible terrorist threat. According to Darren Byler, another scholar of the region, China’s counterterrorism campaign in Xinjiang “rests on the assumption that most Uyghurs and significant numbers of Kazakhs are terrorists, separatists, and extremists-in-waiting.” But while Guantanamo Bay’s purpose is containment, Xin-jiang’s state of exception is intended to cure a diseased population. This philosophy is made explicit in government statements dating to the 2014 start of China’s “People’s War on Terror.” In the words of one 2015 report from Hotan City, anyone whose thinking has been “deeply affected” by “religious extremism” must be transformed through “military-style management.”
Roberts argues that this state of exception is facilitating cultural genocide. In addition to the system of extrajudicial detention that has incarcerated hundreds of thousands of people—possibly more than a million—in camps, more than 300,000 residents have also received formal prison sentences in the last three years, an order of magnitude more than in previous periods. An entire generation of Uyghur academics, artists, and businesspeople has disappeared, probably into prisons; they include internationally respected anthropologists, poets, comedians, novelists, and economists. There have been many credible reports of torture, sexual violence, and forced sterilization among Xinjiang’s minority population. Children are routinely taken from detained parents and placed in state orphanages where minority language and culture are demonized. And more than a million Communist Party cadres have been sent to live temporarily with Uyghur and Kazakh families, where they perform searches of homes, lecture their hosts on the dangers of Islam, and even sleep in the same beds as their “brothers” and “sisters.” Meanwhile, birth rates have plummeted in minority areas. The end result, scholars and activists fear, will be the eradication of Uyghurs as a distinct people.”
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“It’s true that small numbers of Uyghurs have sometimes pushed for political independence in their homeland, even founding two short-lived Republics of East Turkestan in the years before China’s Communist revolution. But in case after case, Roberts shows, the Chinese government has used deceptive framing, official secrecy, and the framework of the war on terror to artificially inflate the danger of Uyghur separatism in order to justify increasingly ruthless policies in Xinjiang. “Often,” he writes, “what was framed as a ‘terrorist attack’ by authorities at this time was really armed self-defense against police and security forces, which were seeking to aggressively apprehend Uyghurs they viewed as ‘disloyal’ to the state, often merely determined by their religiosity.””
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“As the war on terror escalated outside of China, state-conjured threats of separatism led to harsher policies in Xin-jiang. Roberts argues that this environment created a “self-fulfilling prophecy” where state tactics made spontaneous acts of rage and violence—eventually including genuine acts of terrorism, such as a coordinated knife attack in Kunming in 2014—all but inevitable, retroactively justifying the policies that caused the violence in the first place.”
What does it mean to be Asian American?
“The label “Asian American” is almost comically flattening.
It consists of people from more than 50 ethnic groups, all with different cultures, languages, religions, and their own sets of historic and contemporary international conflicts. It includes newly arrived migrants and Asians who have been on American soil for multiple generations. Depending on visa types, immigration status, and class, there are vast differences even among those from the same country. In fact, the income gaps between some Asian American groups are among the largest of any ethnic category in the nation. Yet these differences are rarely explored and discussed.”
Far East Deep South
https://www.pbs.org/video/far-east-deep-south-ovijey/
The Left’s New Constitution
“Consider the Emergency Relief for Farmers of Color Act, a $5 billion monstrosity that Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock snuck into the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act of 2021. The bill aims to provide payments to “Black farmers, Indigenous farmers, and farmers of color.” It includes $1 billion to address “systemic racism” at the Department of Agriculture.
The bill never says explicitly that blacks, Native Americans, or farmers who are immigrants from Latin America or their descendants should receive benefits; instead, it uses the term “socially disadvantaged famers.” For example, it instructs the secretary of agriculture to “forgive the obligation of each socially disadvantaged farmer or rancher who is a borrower of a farm loan made by the Secretary to repay the principal and interest outstanding as of the date of enactment of this Act on the farm loan.”
Warnock’s bill explains that “the term ‘socially disadvantaged farmer or rancher’ has the meaning given the term in 19 section 2501(a) of the Food, Agriculture, Conservation, and Trade Act of 1990.” As that law explains, “The term ‘socially disadvantaged group’ means a group whose members have been subjected to racial or ethnic prejudice because of their identity as members of a group without regard to their individual qualities.” Department of Agriculture regulations also “define socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers as belonging to the following groups: American Indians or Alaskan Natives, Asians, Blacks or African Americans, Native Hawaiians or other Pacific Islanders, Hispanics, and women.”
In other words, membership in any of these racial, ethnic, or gender categories automatically entitles a farmer to benefits, “without regard to individual qualities.” As University of Maryland professor George La Noue has written, “social disadvantage is, as a practical matter, established at birth, and cannot be challenged by evidence of a successful life.” These are the makings of a rigid caste system in America.”
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“These and other bills in the works create entitlements based on race or ethnicity, not need. If the Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle, were to turn part of her California estate into farmland, she, too, would get federal money, as could former President Barack Obama, NBA legend Michael Jordan, and Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. It is that absurd.”
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“All of this is likely unconstitutional, violating the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, as well Titles VI and VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.”
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“Will the courts strike down these laws? Or will they use them to build on the illegitimate new “constitution” of racial preferences? We will see.”