ideology is a hell of a drug

    • ieatpillowtags
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      1 year ago

      I hope the Uighurs hang on to their identity then! I’m sure nothing bad is happening to threaten that…

      • GorbinOutOverHere [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        Oh cool a reddit liberal

        Do you ever feel like maybe you’ve been lied to whenever people dig into the Uigher genocide thing and literally EVERY single source eventually circles back to Adrian Zenz or literal State Department mouthpieces like Radio Free Asia?

        Do you ever look at the constantly increasing Uigher population and the fact that they, like other ethnic minorities, were exempt from the One Child policy, and think “hmmm you know what that doesn’t make sense if they’re genociding them?” Because idk, that fact would give me pause before I go into a xenophobic fury like a good little drone.

        • NoGodsNoMasters [they/them, she/her]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          Don’t mean this as a gotcha at all but do you have any idea what ended up happening with the curriculum reform in Inner Mongolia that was set to replace Mongolian with Mandarin in core subjects even in the Mongolian schools? I know there were some protests about it a few years back but I never heard if the government actually walked it back. Would kinda suck if they didn’t.

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        Afaik they’re doing pretty good. A part of the china genocide uighurs xinjiang eleven billion dead was helping jurists and clerics in Xinjiang untangle the Salafi/Wahhabi innovation from actual Islam. I believe there were also programs to educate Uighur people about Uighur history and culture, and the history of Xinjiang, to try to inoculate people against Salafist ideology being promulgated from Saudi. Knowledge is power, and knowing as much as possible about Islam and their own culture was apparently a powerful way to shut out Saudi-back Salafi ideology. It’s hard to overstate how much Salafism/Wahhabism is an incredible deviation from most prior Islamic schools of thought. It’s a really perverse distortion of the religion. Unfortunately with unlimited oil money and the full backing of the US Saudi has been able to shape Islamic education around the world. You want a school, you just call them up and they’ll build a school and send you textbooks and teachers that’ll start pumping kids full of Salafism.

        • SkibidiToiletFanAcct [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          for what it’s worth, Salafism is a sincere religious belief, and most conceptions of human rights hold freedom of religion as inviolable. In China’s case, it’s the political content of salafism rather than religious intolerance that caused the crackdown. Salafism spread to communities of Hui muslims in the early 20th century, and because this historic community is unrelated to modern political messages, they’ve been largely exempt from suppression, and China is content to let them practice just an austere form of Islam.

          • Redcat [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            Salafism isn’t just a sincere religious belief. It’s a political project that is heavily financed by the gulf monarchies all across the world. Particularly vulnerable countries like Pakistan have their school systems injected with gulf money to spread Salafism. Countries like Turkey, which retained a state religious authority, could only slow it’s advance. Nowadays, the Salafi lie of being the true Islam as practiced by the ancients is genuinely believed in the background of islamic culture, while the actual religious tradition as it was practiced for more than a thousand years is regarded as ‘mystic’ and ‘sufi’. It’s a real problem that is nearly impossible to disentangle. We can only hope that prosperity, rising literacy, and straight up peace would help. But to draw an analogy, the rise of a liberal, urbanized culture in the United States only served to spook the evangelicals and make them go global in their hateful, exploitative, preaching.

            • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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              1 year ago

              Salafism is a sincere religious belief.

              And that’s a problem.

              most conceptions of human rights hold freedom of religion as inviolable.

              Who cares?

              Wahhabism is a hyper-reactionary militant political movement every bit as inimical to leftist projects, and human wellbeing in general, as fascism. Sucks for the Hui but their coreligionists are assholes and need to be suppressed. Same with the Christian Fascists in America, same with the fascist Hindutva movement in India, same with the Mormons, same with the Scientologists, same with a dozen other ideological groups that can’t play nice with others. I don’t care if it’s a religion or a secular ideology or a book club. I’m still holding out hope that the Muslims will rise up against Saudi and crush Wahhabism but it seems increasingly unlikely as time goes on.