The Uyghur Genocide: An examination of breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention
I think any reasonable person can look at what&#x27;s happening with the Uyghurs and only come to the conclusion that it&#x27;s appalling. The only real defense here is that the reports of it happening are untrue or exaggerated and I think at this point we have ample evidence that&#x27;s not the case.<p>So let&#x27;s set that issue aside and look at the more general problem of polarization as that has wider implications. Fact is, most people in the US (as one example) don&#x27;t give a shit about genocide halfway around the world beyond maybe some slacktivism in liking a social media post about it every now and again.<p>So I&#x27;m not Chinese but as an outsider looking in who is not an expert by any stretch of the imagination this is what I see: I see a culture that within living memory came out of a period of severe instability, hunger and turmoil. China now under pseudo-Communist rule has entered a period of stability and prosperity for a significant portion of the population.<p>Because that&#x27;s so recent there seems to be (heavy IMHO here) a cultural fear of that going prosperity going away. I don&#x27;t want to trivialize this by any means but you see something roughly analogous to this with people who grew up poor vs those who didn&#x27;t, even if those people who grew up poor have money now. Just having that experience of growing up without food or housing security changes you. It changes your relationship to money.<p>So what I see is there&#x27;s an awful lot of Chinese people who look at any issue relating to China through this lens: anything remotely critical of China is an attack on that prosperity. So anything critical of China on HN (comments or posts) will attract a certain level of automatic downvote on any hot button issue (eg Uyghurs, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the origins of Covid-19).<p>The lesson here I think is in how dangerous things become when a large group of people become fearful.<p>As an example, in the US today you have polarization because people fan the flames of fear. The Trump base is one who fears their way of life is under attack, exploited quite masterfully where any demonstrable proof that Trump himself is by any objective measure a horrible human being gets labelled as &quot;fake news&quot; and people eat it up because that&#x27;s what they want to believe. And they want to believe that because they&#x27;ve bought into this culture of fear.<p>I just hope we&#x27;re not all screwed.