People aren’t great at taking positions in situations that are extremely complex, especially those with layers upon layers of unfathomable brutality mixed in. X bad, Y good doesn’t always cleanly apply, and when it doesn’t, it breaks brains, especially those of always-online folks.
I disagree with you here, because what China is doing to the Uighurs and the recent ethnic cleansing of the Armenians are both unambiguously bad. Relaying even a smidgen of history and news about these events would convince just about anyone outside of the perpetrators. And I disagree with Goofy that these get less coverage because they are just plain bad. I think both atrocities have different explanations.
The Chinese and the Uighurs is the easiest. China is an immensely powerful country, both militarily and economically, and it’s strongly authoritarian with little to no freedom of the press. Any Western media outlet or other business that were to take a stand on the issue figures to be kicked out of the country and lose out on an immense market. You think, like, Disney is going to send ABC News correspondents and risk its entire Chinese market in the name of doing the right thing? Of course not. It has obligations to its shareholders that supersede doing the right thing.
There is some of that at play with Armenia, too. Turkey is seen as a valuable NATO ally, and it’s generally been US policy to not piss off NATO allies in the name of doing the right thing. “Who was president when the US officially acknowledged the Armenian genocide?” is a pretty good trivia stumper, imo: TRUMP! But also, there’s just a bunch of plain old ignorance. While the ethnicity is ancient and there are records dating back to ancient times, in modern history, Armenia was a free state only briefly between WWI and WWII before being annexed by the USSR, and it wasn’t a free state again until 1991. I’m not sure more Americans could find it on an unlabeled map vs. how many incorrectly point to Albania or Azerbaijan instead. Sure, a ton of Americans know of a person with Armenian heritage, but I’m not sure how many know that fact about her. Armenia is barely in our history books, let alone our novels or movies, and it’s certainly not the Bible, so it’s very much out-of-sight-out-of-mind.
Uighurs suffer from American ignorance, too. I don’t think most Americans would answer “What’s a Uighur” with “A Muslim minority in China” instead of “maybe, like, a rude name for a white person trying to dress, talk, and act like a Black person?”
Also hurting the coverage of both atrocities is the question of US agency. When it comes to Israel, most everyone knows that we give money and weapons to Israel, so we can debate if we should give more or less. With China, what should the USA do? I don’t think a lot of serious people would choose to go to war with a nuclear power and the second most powerful nation on earth over the Uighurs, and I don’t think even a lot of people would be willing to tank the global economy by cutting of trade relations with China over this (and that would be pretty unlikely to work, anyway), so what’s the plan then? Armenia and Azerbaijan both have both imports and exports from the US under $200 million per year, both under 1% of GDP. I guess we could slap some sanctions on, but it probably won’t do much if anything. Are we going to send in troops? Is arming the Armenians and starting a shooting war preferable to what is indeed ethnic cleansing but isn’t wholesale slaughter in territory that is internationally-recognized to belong to Azerbaijan? I don’t really think so. If you’re going to commit ethnic cleansing, it’s a whole lot more palatable to the international community to put people on buses and send them over the border into a state where their ethnic group is in the majority compared with bombing hospitals and neighborhoods. So, for these two atrocities, not only is there little debate about which side is bad, there’s little debate that what should be done is, basically, nothing. When that’s the answer of what to do, then interest in the story is going to plummet.
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Like I said up thread you don’t need to literally solve an 80 year conflict to take the position that you shouldnt commit genocide
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https://x.com/JoeKassabian/status/1725597759632195825?t=3tU8Kt-P1F17wr2hcm2JyQ&s=09
Well, not everything in my post was true, but this is a good action by the US government.
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well, they support hamas anyway, so.
are we even sure hamas didn’t just use ai to generate that clip? can’t trust anything coming from them
what’s biden’s offramp here? Bibi is absolutely not going to back down, at some point this is going to be too much. How’s Joey B gonna get off this train? Some sort of triangulated “we will always support israel but not bibi”? Can’t really do that because that’s “getting involved in politics” over there (we only do that covertly with CIA ops, duh).
losing the 2024 election
At which point Trump will be looking for the on-ramp to participate in the genocide.
Biden op-ed in WaPo: The U.S. won’t back down from the challenge of Putin and Hamas | non-paywall link
The word “settlements” does not appear in this piece. Is this a remotely serious proposal? A lot of the podcast episodes I’ve listened to recently have expressed extreme skepticism about the two-state solution in the modern era of Israeli settlements, because the whole point is that they never want to let Palestinians control the West Bank.
He says while supporting Israel as it… forcibly displaces Palestinians who are under siege and blockade, and appears to be well on the way to reducing territory if not flat out genociding.
Well… we’re waiting.
Not sure you could hope for much more from an oped from a us president than this.
Wouldn’t Palestine being a sovereign state kinda address the settlement issue as Palestine could decide their own immigration policies? Obviously Israel may not want that but at some point the world may force them to agree to something.
Well they’ve got to do try something, but there’s nothing here that hasn’t been attempted before. Israel giving up the settlements does not seem realistic and neither does the idea that Palestinian-controlled territory that is directly adjacent to Israel will not be used as a platform to attack.
And what if “the voices of Palestinian people and their aspirations must be at the center of post-crisis governance in Gaza” is not compatible with “Gaza and the West Bank should be reunited under a single governance structure, ultimately under a revitalized Palestinian Authority”?
All I can think of is establishing internationally-controlled and defended DMZs around Israel, but there are obviously a million problems with that idea.
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I don’t think so, because a two-state solution means picking one of these options:
- Israelis in West Bank settlements now live in Palestine, under Palestinian rule (completely unacceptable to Israel, will never happen)
- the West Bank is defined as the swiss-cheese areas of Palestinian control while Israel annexes settlements & the areas between them that it currently fully controls, necessarily keeping heavy movement restrictions on Palestinians (completely unacceptable to Palestine, will never happen, at least not with their consent)
- Israeli withdraws from the West Bank (hard to imagine them doing this; Israel hasn’t been slowly working towards annexation of the West Bank through settlements to just…give up, when they can keep doing what they’re doing instead)
Yeah, a one state outcome with an ethnic cleansing or genocide is basically inevitable if Israel keeps doing what it’s doing. So far the rest of the world isn’t stopping them, so unless the Israeli people get rid of Bibi, that’s what’s probably going to happen.
CNN reporting hostage deal was reached with hamas with no other details.
The Ukraine war guys on Twitter say 4 day ceasefire, release 50 Israeli hostages and Israel release 150 Palestinians from prisons
I think this ends with North Gaza becoming a buffer zone that gets annexed/resettled after a bit and then begins the slow project of evicting Palestinians out of South Gaza.