this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2022
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
You mean like Assange and Manning?
There's a difference between socially unacceptable and "straight to jail".
Manning not only released documents that were under her care as an intelligence officer, but also broke into other systems. Regardless of whether you support what she did, she did so knowing the consequences of breaking her oath. In doing so, she made public wrongdoing, but also exposed sources that the US had promised would be kept safe.
Assange... well, that feels more like a case of karma. The Obama/Biden administration declined to indict him in relation to the Manning leaks. He then screwed with the 2016 US elections, blatantly stoking conspiracy theories, laundering Russia's hacks in service of Trump, and coordinating with the Trump campaign to time releases to blunt at least one scandal. In return, the Trump administration indicted him. I don't fully understand the case, so I won't comment on it.
Compare that to investigative journalism in general in the US. Journalists can publish pieces that are extremely critical of both the government and corporations. High up people regularly are dragged down from their perch by an enterprising reporter. Maybe newsrooms aren't as well staffed as they used to be, but it's not in the same league as countries like China, Russia, and Venezuela that lack anything resembling a free press.
What do you have against Venezuela?
are these they?
I don't have anything against Venezuela per se. Maduro is a shitty leader who maintains his grip on power by giving oil money to the armed forces. He's nothing but a military-backed dictator that is so shitty that he and Hugo Chavez provoked a massive migration crisis with 15% of the country leaving. Part of the way he maintains his grip besides bribing the armed forces is extermination of any free press.
So just a straw man then?
Journalists can't question systemic problems in US. Entire books have been written on how journalism in US has been subverted. Read Inventing Reality and Manufacturing consent which both provide numerous case studies.
The fact that you genuinely believe that quality of journalism in China, Russia, or Venezuela is significantly worse than in the west is illustration of the effectiveness of propaganda in western media.
Assange did real journalism and he is being tortured for it right now. Instead of being outraged by the war crimes he exposed you choose to smear the man.
Also, I highly recommend that you read in this book detailing political repression in US. A few excerpts:
What do you think about https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_nihilism
(I did not read the whole context but it is impossible to ignore this)
Doesn't that describe exactly what western countries do? For example https://theconversation.com/school-curriculum-continues-to-whitewash-britains-imperial-past-53577
That was not what I asked. What is your view on China/CCP on historical nihilism in specific?
We can all agree about the factual bad things west does.
My view is that I have no idea what CCP is, but CPC doesn't seem to be doing anything exceptional with regards to historical revisionism. Perhaps you can try to articulate the point you're trying to make in more concrete terms.
I see. For a concrete example, does China/CPC censors or not Tiananmen Square events? Some context https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests_and_massacre#Censorship_in_China
Tiananmen square was an attempt at a color revolution by US https://redsails.org/another-view-of-tiananmen/
There was a whole documentary about it in China https://web.archive.org/web/20200604205421/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDMXV1smwR0
Meanwhile, every government censors things. For example, most Canadians don't realize that the genocidal residential school system operated well into the ~~80s~~ 90s. Thousands of children have been found in mass graves, and there's hardly a mention of this in the media.
The last residential school didn't close until 1996 actually, because Canada is shit.
Right, my bad. I always forget just how long that shit went on here. It's just kind of surreal to realize the country you're living in was doing low key genocide just a couple of decades ago.
But why not inform people about US involement then without further censorship? Latin American countries that have gone trough military dictatorships do not censor their crimes including torture and murder, and also publish information on US involvement on it.
So it seems you agree China/CPC censors historical events.
There's a reason why Latin American countries have been colonized and brutalized by US while China hasn't. Meanwhile, western states cover up their crimes and rewrite history with the best of them. So, if the choice is between China's policies and getting colonized by US, I very much support what China is doing.
Indeed, that is what CPC calls historical nihilism. China is doing very well economically, so they are doing something right. Too bad on socio-economic inequality and illegal profits like tax evasion though; they seem to be doing something about it.. https://www.msn.com/en-xl/money/other/china-e2-80-99s-xi-jinping-sends-e2-80-98warning-signal-e2-80-99-to-the-wealthy-as-he-opens-new-front-in-e2-80-98common-prosperity-e2-80-99-push/ar-AA139N4Z
Let's see if it will not make capitalists get very angry.
This is the real test of who holds power in China. So far it appears that the government in China is able to keep capitalists on a tight leash, we'll see if that'll continue to be the case going forward.
I support actual policies China has which have little to do with your deranged fantasies of China. It is kind of sad that a grown ass adult would guzzle propaganda uncritically.
Yeah these articles do sound deranged. First one is literal US state propaganda. Second is BBC, which is a British state propaganda outlet that has been repeatedly caught spreading misinformation regarding China. Again, it's amazing that people consume this narrative uncritically.
sadly westerners have been raised from birth with a huge anti-communist bias, its built into the fabric of their reality
Propaganda in the west is so pervasive that it takes an inordinate amount of effort for people who grew up in this environment to see it.
There is absolutely no factual evidence to suggest that China is any less trustworthy than western governments who have openly expressed an agenda to undermine China. The fact that surveys of public opinion in China consistently show that people have far more trust in their government than any nation in the west is a clear indication that westerners would do much better focusing on fixing shitholes they live in before judging China.
Ooh! Is this that Whataboutism thing that liberals keep accusing socialists of!
Actually no, this goes beyond just that when the US/UK/EU claim to be THE global bastions of free speech and the vanguards and protectors of free speech for the entire world. When they still pull this shit, you really have to start thinking if they have ulterior motives when they accuse China, Russia, or Belarus of human rights violations for not having free speech and whether this whole free speech thing is part of an agenda.
This isn't just pot calling the kettle black, this is pot, who also claims to be the inventor and defenser of white, calling the kettle black.
now you want to pretend to have nuance?
finally, one down
Please point where people are claiming that Russia or Belarus are beacons of democracy. The discussion is about the hypocrisy of western countries that claim to have more freedoms while doing same things as the states they decry as being authoritarian.
Sorry, but people in the states and Canada just aren't being jailed for their political opinions. There's nothing even remotely like https://youtu.be/TbzV1it1YPY or https://twitter.com/nikorepi/status/1503096676575236098 happening in North America...
They literally are. Go look at what RCMP does to the Indigenous people protecting their land in Canada as an example. When Canada wants to run a pipeline through indigenous land, that hasn't been seeded, they'll brutalize and arrest as many people as they want. The fact that you believe there is nothing like this happening in North America is pathetic.
Abuse of Indigenous people is political violence on top of the genocide Canadian settlers committed.
But this is not the same thing. This is people demonstrating by physically disrupting projects. We can agree or disagree about the validity of their movement, like I myself don't want us to build more pipelines, but clearly there's a difference. These people using more than just speech and persuasion to try and achieve their political ends, they are directly trying to intervene physically. Nobody in Canada is being arrested or even stopped from expressing their political outlook, talking to media, or trying to persuade people to join their cause. In fact, levels of government often actually help in these expressions by for instance allowing a protest/march to partially shut down streets for the duration of a demonstrations in major cities like Vancouver and Toronto. Major parties run and even win representation, running on anti-pipeline platforms.
But that freedom of speech and freedom of opinion and of the press does not extend to the point of taking matters into ones own hands. And if you tried to pull off something like this in Russia by physically blocking the construction of a natural gas pipeline I have a feeling that the police would be a lot less tolerant than the RCMP.
It's just a plain true fact that in Canada we have orders of magnitude more political freedom than in Belarus and Russia.
Illegal projects on unceded land. However, as links I provided show, this is not limited to pipelines being rammed through Indigenous land.
As long as you have blue eye and blond hair.
Nope, sorry. Dead wrong, hyperbolic statement. Nobody in Canada is being arrested for holding up a piece of paper on the street with a political message, regardless of their ethnicity. Yes, indigenous people are treated unfairly by the police, in some cases even murdered by the police. But this is a completely different topic than that of political freedom.
Regarding the starlight tours, this is utterly unrelated to the freedom of speech issue. Yes, police have abused indigenous people in the past and in some cases are still doing so in the present but we acknowledge this as a society all the way to the top offices of the country. We have a judicial system which is attempts to correct this and even compensate for biases such as the Gladue Report etc.
By any reasonable definition, Canada is much more politically free than Russia/Belarus. A reasonable bar to say that Canada enjoys political freedom is not "no injustice ever occurs on in Canada" or "police never abuse anyone in Canada" or "the state has never violated freedom of speech/expression even once". If we are going to have the bar that high, then literally no society ever in history, or probably in the future, can adhere to this definition of freedom of speech so the phrase becomes useless and your criticism of Canadian society becomes meaningless because no society in the real universe can ever live up to your ideal.
A more reasonable definition would be something like "almost everyone, almost all the time, enjoys basically unlimited ability to express their political opinions without being subjected to persecution from the state" and we undoubtedly have that in Canada, and more so than in just about any other country. No police officer is going to do anything to any indigenous person for just holding up a protest sign in downtown Vancouver or Winnipeg or Toronto.
This is not at all true in Russia. People are arrested for as little as holding up a blank piece of paper, let alone an actually dissenting opinion!
That's a false statement. Harassment of Indigenous people is fundamentally political in nature. Canada illegally occupied unceded land that belongs to these people, and it violates their sovereignty. This is a political issue.
If you're white.
You set up a false narrative that ignores actual political activity of Indigenous people that they get arrested and even murdered for.
I'll also remind you what Canadian government did when the trucker protest blocked the bridge to US. Whatever we might say about this protest, it definitely was peaceful and citizens were expressing their views in a democratic fashion. The government invoked emergency powers to disperse this protest. Interestingly, this protest was allowed to go on right up to the point where it started affecting business interests.
What exactly are you even saying here? Are you saying that non-white people don't have more political freedom / freedom of speech than a non-white person in Russia? I have never seen anyone, not even a person of colour, taken away by police immediately as soon as they so much as hold up a piece of blank paper.
Okay I know you don't want to admit that you used hyperbole and I know that you probably like really love Russia and Belarus and don't like Canada and you disagree with our whole society and everything but you really are not staying focused on what we're talking about. Your claim is that Western countries like USA and Canada bestow less freedom to their populations and are more authoritarian than Russia and Belarus. This is just plain false. That isn't to say that all political activity, broadly defined, is permitted. Virtually anything and everything could come under the banner of political activity, and so obviously there are going to be limitations on it. In Canada that tends to be when your political activity infringes on the rights of others in society. Yes, we live in a Capitalist society so that includes people's property right. Protesters in Canada are only removed from the situation by the police when they do things like physically block people or projects or disrupt infrastructure.
You know perfectly well that that kind of political activity is not tolerated in virtually any society, least of all Russia and Belarus.
I'm saying that, as the numerous articles I linked earlier explain, Indigenous people in Canada suffer incredible amounts of abuse and political repression. The fact that you continue to deny this clearly shows that you're not interested in comparing actual freedoms people have in Canada or whether the laws are applied equally.
No, that's just the straw man you keep using. What I said was that western regimes are themselves often culpable of the same crimes they accuse their designated enemies of. I've even linked an entire book documenting such repressions in US in another comment in the same thread.
Oh you mean when a protest is an actual protest as opposed to a parade.
Another straw man.
I encourage you to read chapter 10 in this book that invalidates your narrative.
Hahah I knew it would be a parenti book :D
Parenti did some heroic work documenting the sins of the empire.
I did not realize this database existed, so a sincere thank you for providing a link.
Book time!