this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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There's some talk about "a rise in anti-China posts that have hit Reddit lately" in https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/users/07-history-of-lemmy.html, which struck me as odd.
Criticism of any governments should be allowed, especially authoritarian ones.
Yeah. This is kinda gaslighting:
No. Anti-china posts are not racist. We all hate Hitler Germany. Does that mean we are racist against Germans?
This sentence is fundamentaly flawed and shouldn't exist in the documentation.
To push back on this a little: there's definitely historical precedent for anti-regime sentiment bleeding over into anti-populace sentiment. To use your example of WWII, a lot of the anti-Japan sentiment bled over to anti-Japanese sentiment in the US in the form of internment camps.
Of course this was in the 1940s and I like to think that we've become a little bit less racist now. But I've noticed a lot more racist "jokes" on Reddit as anti-China sentiment has risen. Don't get me wrong, we should still criticize China for its many human rights abuses and imperialistic practices as well as their violations of personal freedoms in their citizens etc. etc. but we should also be aware that these criticisms will be used by racists to justify their views and their actions, and call it out when it starts becoming more about the people than the government.
I think it's because people nowadays are brought up to to ***follow ***what they read.
There is so much importance of memorising facts one is informed like a computer, then alongside this, are informed by media and abrihamic based religions repeatedly, that life is binary good and bad.
And as such, when an average reader attempts to criticise China, or Israel, UK or US present governmental practices for instance, they struggle to not generalise and lump government, people, race, and more all into one.
To educate massess of people into being able to criticise policy is a surefire way to get the masses to be critical of the practices of a present government, and get you out of power.
Binary identity politics however, will keep you there, in power, forever.
It's an absolute gaslight. He doesn't mention that the subs closed down supported authoritarian regimes and were a safe space for violence and extremism where members regularly advocated for it.
But yeah it's typical authoritarian/fascist gaslighting.
Anti-China posts can be racist. If someone is yelling about the Chinese government oppressing people, great.
But it sure does seem like people are out there fomenting FUD about China as China, not really in reference to particular policies or practices that need to change.
For example, in The New York Times's coverage of that time the US decided to try and ban people anywhere selling good GPUs and semiconductor stuff to people in China, it's all about "how effective will this be at preventing China from having things" and "how much will this cost Americans". Not "is this the right thing to do to best stop people in China from being oppressed" or "why should the US be in charge of who can make microchips".
You could say "we think China's government is going to use GPUs to abuse human rights" or "we think if China ever develops a halfway decent semiconductor industry they will immediately invade Taiwan", but often that kind of context seems to have been deemed irrelevant. People are just taking it as read that it is right and proper for the US to decide what industries Chinese people may or may not do, and how good at them they are allowed to be.
And I don't think they'd do that in the absence of racism.
It's from the people developing Lemmy the software, not the creators of independent instances like this one or lemmy.world and many others. I think there's not much to worry about since the software is open source and if they start to "leak" their ideologies/politics into the software (no idea how 😆), people will fork it quickly.
However I worry that this is so off-putting to some people that they stop doing anything to help Lemmy grow when they learn about the developers' politics. A good example is Lemmur, an Android app for Lemmy, whose author stopped further development on it, due to "lack of interest and political differences", which is sad.