• JohnBrownsBussy2 [she/her, they/them]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    Less than 10% of Native Americans can speak their native language. How many Uighers and Tibetans can speak theirs?

    Have you been to a reservation? I remember one that we drove through in Arizona, the Hualapai. It wasn’t just a desert, but a salt flat, utterly devoid of vegetation. Along the road, you had dilapidated pre-fabs, occupied of course by the victims that had been placed here. Not all reservations are as harrowing. I’ve visited the Navajo Nation, as well as Lakota and Ute reservations. Poverty is intense, and people do the best they can, but the reality is that these people had their lands stolen from them and were forced to the most marginal places in US, unsuitable for much agriculture and barely suitable for ranching.

    There is no healing in these places, rather the victims of genocide are constantly blamed for their own poverty by the settler communities stole their land. The native peoples were devastated by covid due to the lack of healthcare resources as well.

    Let’s look at the Black American community as well. It was just 3 years ago that the US had its largest protest movement in history against the police killings of unarmed Black men. And what was the response by the government and media? After a moment of groveling, to take back all promises of reform and instead funnel even more money to an increasingly militarized police force, and to engage in a panicked sensationalized crime wave reportage. Police killings continue (1 in 20 homicides are perpetrated by the police), and the economic situation hasn’t improved much for Black Americans since the Great Recession lead to a massive seizure of Black household wealth.

    The situation in the US isn’t healing, it’s an oozing pustulate sore. There has been a failure to reinforce voting rights, and anything like reparations, even just targeted relief, is considered a joke and a non-starter in the halls of power. The only healing is in the minds of libs that think that donning Kente cloth and watching Black Panther constitutes absolution.

    This of course is to say nothing of the murderous wars waged by the US in Iraq, Laos, Vietnam and elsewhere, and the genocides it co-sponsored in Guatamala and Indonesia. Or the general neo-colonial global financial mechanisms that lock the third world into permanent debt traps and underdevelopment.

    • MrSpArkle@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      Yeah, the US did and is doing fucked up things. But we’re talking scale in the modern era here.

      How much longer will the Uyghurs be able to speak their language when china bans Uyghur language books in Uyghur schools? Why does China put up signs at those schools saying that only language permitted on school grounds is Mandarin? Why is china sending hundreds of thousands of Han Chinese to Uyghur home for days at a time to ensure they are speaking Mandarin?

      Maybe the US can heal better and faster from its atrocities, but China is actively pursuing atrocities at an official industrial state level.

      • CloutAtlas [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        ??? Xinjiang’s curriculum still has Uyghur as the primary language as of 2023, Uyghur internet celebs aren’t speaking Mandarin on Douyin (ever wonder why TikTok has subtitles as a default? Partially for the hearing impaired, but the app it’s cloned from is Chinese and that is multilingual, hence pushing for subtitles as a default. Cantonese, Hokkien, Haka, Min, Tibetan, Uyghur, etc etc)

        The news is broadcast in Uyghur, the road signs are in Uyghur

        What Reddit post said Han people were going into homes to enforce Mandarin? Han people ourselves don’t even speak Mandarin exclusively.

        • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          The han people in Uighur homes thing is in the UN report. Afaik the official explanation is some kind of cultural exchange, meet your neighbors, get to know other cultural groups from your country thing, but it sounded pretty clumsy. I don’t recall anything about telling people not to speak their language.

      • duderium [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        Have you heard of Adrian Zenz? The dude is a Christofascist CIA operative, and every claim you made there can be traced straight back to his imagination (aside from your nonsensical hypotheticals of course). Liberals hate christofascists—except when they uphold anticommunism. The Uyghurs and Han Chinese have also coexisted for centuries. Even if anything Zenz says is remotely true, none of it compares in the slightest to the genocide, slavery, and destruction perpetrated around the world by the USA in the last ten years alone.

      • happyandhappy [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        youve got a lot of spunk for somebody who doesnt really know what they are talking about. China has 56 recognized and protected ethnic minority groups where scholars are creating alphabets for minority languages that had not been previously written as a way to preserve their languages. How many indigenous people in the US and Hawaii can even say that they speak their language after having had them systematically destroyed for decades?

        • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          Hint: it’s like 2%, and the death of every one of the precious few elders who still fluently speak these languages is an incalculable and irrevocable loss.

      • JohnBrownsBussy2 [she/her, they/them]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        1.) I think others in the thread have done a good job on the Uighers situation. On that front, I see a somewhat heavy handed anti-terror program, but the claims of genocide are fabricated and inconsistent with material reality. Of course, the Chinese reaction to terrorism was a bluntly applied education and job training program, and I can see the carcerel angle even from China-sympathetic sources. Was it good? It wasn’t great, but the program is effectively over. Compare this to the US anti-terror response which was to invade 2 countries and wage decade long occupations leading to the death and displacement of millions of people.

        2.) Is the modern era literally just the past 5 years for you? Do you have the brain of a fucking goldfish? If I stabbed you in the leg are we good 5 years down the road? How about 10 years, or 20, or 50? This makes me mad because the United States was founded on the stolen land and labor of these people, and it continues to treat them like shit. What is healing to you? How can there be healing sans any sort of restitution? China has actually invested a fair amount of resources to protect the various languages and cultures that constitute its society. The US stripped every resource from the Native Americans and gives them the bare minimum to survive as individuals, nowhere near enough to recover.

        • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          Yeah, like no question the Chinese anti-terror operation violated basic rights, the rights were things like arbitrary arrest and detention where people were held for several months (and forced to sing patriotic songs for some bizarre reason), not the unhinged fantasies being punted aorund on Reddit and the news.

          Like yeah, arresting people and holding them for a month or three without telling their families where they are is wrong. You shouldn’t do that. But for some reason Libs never know about what’s in the UN report and trying to tell them is like trying to tell a brick wall.

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        Is this one of those Marvel: What If? Things? Which issue should I be looking at? Is it X-men?

        Hey, did you know 250,000 or more internal refugees are fleeing state repression from American government forces that, according to the UN definition, are engaged in an active genocidal campaign against them?