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>[0] that could be parsed as either "to 99% of the stuff of which I am aware of, so I am aware of 100 times more things than you", or as "to 99% of all the stuff that actually goes on the world, which would mean you are aware of 1% of everything going on right now, which would make you something between Q and God", both of which are silly. Both of which are accurate (which is almost as good as polite). The average American can't pinpoint Belgium on the map, much less understand global inter-state politics. The people who do (and who don't just have an opinion based on reading NYT or Economist or worse Time) are much less. We're not even talking about having a nuanced opinion here, with all the subtleties of the history of the countries involved, etc. Being from a country that has actual involvement with 20th/21st century history (with other nations etc), not as something abstract that happens away, but in real time, also helps. As opposed to an isolated huge country where the main concerns are the local (state) affairs, and where the average person seldom if ever reads foreign literature, seldom if ever listens to foreign music, and almost never watches foreign movies. Heck, the average person don't even watch the other countries' athletes in Olympics, the media only give them an one-sided US athletes coverage. Heck, the average German or Frenchman can tell a lot more about global affairs than the average American, and I've had such discussions in all of those countries and more. Heck, most Americans can't tell who their own Vice President is. |
> The people who do (and who don't just have an opinion based on reading NYT or Economist or worse Time) are much less.
But at what percentage of Americans on a website do you just get to assume a commenter's nationality, and at what percentage of obliviousness to what is going on in the world and under their noses can you just declare an American ignorant by association, simply ignore any and all they said, and scold them for their supposed ignorance and one-sidedness? Again, what does this achieve?
> We're not even talking about having a nuanced opinion here, with all the subtleties of the history of the countries involved, etc.
I hope this isn't aiming at some kind of understanding how Chinese totalitarianism isn't really totalitarianism, or that for a Chinese child it's just different when their parents get tortured because they happened to own land at the wrong time, etc. I mean, what nuance could one be missing about harvesting organs from political prisoners? "Yes, it's horrible, but", is that the new "I'm not racist, but"?
And hey, when a Chinese employee in China makes a honest mistake the US government doesn't like, do they get them fired, as that Mariott employee got fired? When a Chinese company quotes someone Angela Merkel doesn't like on Chinese social media, does that company end up apologizing profusely, three times, like Mercedes Benz did for quoting the Dalai Lama (without attribution even, just the quote) on Instagram? At what point are we allowed to also talk about Chinese totalitarianism?
As a German, for me it's precisely not to "point fingers", I simply don't want this shit to be repeated elsewhere, either. And I cannot sit idly by when it's belittled or rationalized in any way. Not even when someone else might say the same thing with a different motivation or a different view of the world. I also don't think the world being fucked up elsewhere is something that relieves one of responsibility. Just like when you're on a sinking ship, that other ships are also sinking doesn't make it better, but even worse. It's simply orthogonal: criticizing China doesn't take away energy that would have been used for criticizing the US, it's simply that all these whataboutism comments ruined a discussion that, on a website where such stuff doesn't get flagged every single time anyway (while people complain about the crazy anti-China bent everyone is on, just seething with hatred against China, nothing to do with compassion, intelligence, and wishing China well), could have been interesting.
In the US, you have all necessary freedoms on paper, and probably more than enough even in practice, if people only used them, to change things. In China, that doesn't even remotely apply, and we're now decades into dissidents being murdered. The people who managed to survive in that system so far and are formed by it are not the people I ask "permission" of. They can forfeit their own human rights if they want, not those of their fellow citizens. Not 50 years ago, not today, not ever. Just like the Holocaust wouldn't have been suddenly okay if only the Nazis had won; and that the extent of it could even be somewhat discovered was because they lost the war, not because they didn't want to erase that completely from the history books, just like they completely erased villages.
I've also had many discussions about these subjects, but all of them combined were not half as insightful as the books by Sebastian Haffner and Hannah Arendt I read. They're a good way to find out just how dumb we have become, and how quickly. And when issues get split into country X versus country Y, rather than talking about individuals and groups of individuals within them and their actual actions and variety of motivations, that's already part of the circus for me. Abstractions that take on a life on their own in that way aren't helpful at all.
> [..] even the desert of neighbourlessness and mutual suspicion disappears, so that it is as if everybody melted together into giant being of enormous proportions. This too does the for a totalitarian environment so well prepared vernacular express in its own way when it no longer speaks of "the" Russians or "the" French, but tells us what "the" Russian or "the" Frenchman wants.
-- Hannah Arendt