‘Lemmygrad’s resident expert on fascism’ — GrainEater, 2024

‘The political desperadoes and ignoramuses, who say they would “Rather be Dead than Red”, should be told that no one will stop them from committing suicide, but they have no right to provoke a third world war.’ — Morris Kominsky, 1970

  • 0 Posts
  • 30 Comments
Joined 6 years ago
Cake day: August 27th, 2019
  • Anarcho-Bolshevik@lemmygrad.mltoMemes@lemmy.ml•It's complicatedEnglish
    11·
    8 hours ago

    I’m disappointed that you are offering a low-quality source like the Financial Times for these serious accusations, and the shoddy reporting is apparent in the article itself:

    In many areas, officials have told current and retired civil servants that their benefits will be taken away if they worship more than a few times per year, according to Hui human rights campaigner Ma Ju.

    Which officals? Which current and retired civil servants? And why is the only source for this ‘a US-based campaigner for Chinese Muslim rights’? The lack of corroboration should be worrying. Relying on pseudonymous sources is usually not good reporting, either, as they have as many credentials as a common rumourer.

    The conclusion is also confusing:

    Two years later, these remarks were formalised into the government’s “Five-Year Plan on the Sinicisation of Islam”, which set out to standardise Chinese style in everything from Islamic attire to ceremonies and architecture, and called for the “establishment of an Islamic theology with Chinese characteristics”.

    Hui Muslims like Mohammed still fear a possible future without Islam in China.

    So, wait, Beijing wants to destroy Islam by… reforming it? I guess that that could be possible in some way, but the article does not explain how.

    That being said, I don’t want to dismiss every claim in this article at face value, like restricting religion to adults (which, honestly, might be for the best), but if I believed that Beijing was trying to eradicate Islam then I would be dissatisfied with this article’s quality.

    Although this does make me wonder if there are Chinese Muslims consenting to or even ordering these reformations. Perhaps @yogthos@lemmy.ml or @davel@lemmy.ml could inform me on this if they would be so gracious.

  • Anarcho-Bolshevik@lemmygrad.mltoMemes@lemmy.ml•The U.S. vs. China summarized in a memeEnglish
    8·
    2 days ago

    These are some of the reasons why I would argue that it is wrong to place the People’s Rep. of China in the category of a generic capitalist country. I actually consider the Chinese economy to be presocialist, but the evidence that I have seen suggests that capital, the law of value, and generalised commodity production are all steadily shrinking in terms of prominence and importance, which is the opposite of what we would expect to find under a typical capitalist régime (id est a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie).

  • Anarcho-Bolshevik@lemmygrad.mltoMemes@lemmy.ml•The U.S. vs. China summarized in a memeEnglish
    8·
    2 days ago

    What are you talking about? Every single information source in the United States is always constantly talking about how great the PRC is, whether it’s in schools, on television, on websites (especially Reddit), on the radio, from think tanks, and so on. A perspective like ‘China also invests in genocide and mass detention, torture, surveillance and rape’ should blow your mind away: nobody has ever said that before! How can you read that and remain unpersuaded‽

  • Anarcho-Bolshevik@lemmygrad.mltoMemes@lemmy.ml•Capitalism's death tollEnglish
    6·
    4 days ago

    Yeah, when you make easily falsifiable claims like ‘memorials or to draw attention to the deeds, not to honor it’, it is pretty clear that you did not read a damn thing that I linked to you, proving that you don’t care about Fascism after all. Thanks for the confirmation.

    Feel free to keep goofing around here but I’m done with you.

  • Anarcho-Bolshevik@lemmygrad.mltoMemes@lemmy.ml•Capitalism's death tollEnglish
    21·
    5 days ago

    Máo was particularly annoyed by the Eurasian Tree Sparrow (Passer montanus, 树麻雀) part of the diet of which was grain. Chinese scientists had calculated that each sparrow consumed 4.5kg of grain each year — and that for every million sparrows killed, there would be food for 60,000 people. Armed with these statistics, Máo launched the Great Sparrow Campaign to address the problem.

    […]

    The campaign against the sparrows was finally terminated in late 1959 when the Academy of Sciences leaders highlighted the findings of scientists such as Zhu Xi and Zheng Zuoxin. Zhu and Zheng had autopsied the digestive systems of sparrows and found that three-quarters of the contents were harmful insects and only one-quarter was human food. This showed that sparrows were beneficial for humans.

    On this advice from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Máo declared a complete halt to the Great Sparrow Campaign, replacing sparrows with “bed bugs” in the “Four Pests” campaign. Suddenly sparrows were not just protected but the domestic population was supplemented by imports of sparrows from [Soviet] Russia!

    Eventually, after several years of poor crop yields, the situation began to improve. The number of people who starved in the 1958–1961 famine is disputed — and it’s impossible to say how much of the disaster was caused by the extermination of sparrows — but there can be no doubt that this episode is a stark lesson about the unintended consequences of human interference into natural ecosystems.

    (Source.)