Dude have you been to hawaii? their culture is very much in tact and proud. Not only that but locals have special rights and privileges over mainlanders not the reverse.

I've lived there and I can tell you that many Hawaiians are not appreciative of being colonized, nor should they be. Having their own flag and extra labor laws does not ameliorate the injustices and negative consequences of colonization.

Nor am I qualified to talk, I just want to point out that many of my Hawaiian friends would not in any way agree with your statement, and it is worth factoring that in to the broader discussion.

Not my experience, they seem like proud Americans, but i'm an outsider. It was during the Obama era and they seemed quite chuffed to tell me Obama was born in hawaii.

I wonder what they'd say if you asked them if they'd like to leave the USA?

You can't vandalize HN threads like this, regardless of how wrong other people are or you feel they are. If you know more about a topic, that's great, but the thing to do is share some of what you know so that people can learn. Flaming aggression doesn't help anyone and only hurts the cause you're trying to stand up for. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24563326 also.

I don't mean to pick on you personally and I'm not commenting on your views—only that your comments stand out in this thread as particularly nasty, and from a moderation point of view that's not ok.

From a human point of view, I sympathize. Most of us would feel and act this way in your position. I know what it feels like to be the sole person arguing against a majority view—it is extremely activating, and when people are speaking out of ignorance, it can be maddening. Nevertheless you can't post to HN like you've been doing in this thread. You have to manage the activation in yourself and post within the site guidelines.

In a way this is not fair, because others are also being nasty, but happen to have majority opinion on their side, which creates a false impression of reasonableness. But fair or not, it's the way that mass psychology works—there's a greater burden on the one who holds a contrarian position.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Sorry, my han supremacy leaked through.

I would have just spray-painted the han supremacy equivalent of a swastika onto a few walls, but there's no such thing. No Chinese KKK to join either. We really are lagging behind the west!

I'm trying to help you use HN as intended. If you can't or don't want to do that, we're going to have to ban you. I'd rather not do that, so would you please help us out and follow HN's rules? It is in your interest to do so, because your current comments are unfortunately just reinforcing the very prejudice you're hurt and outraged by. That's an important reason why you shouldn't be commenting like this. It contributes to hurting what you mean to defend.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This comment is not going to look great when/if the term 'Han Supremacy' becomes recognized as hate speech

Hawaiian culture is not intact. The Hawaiian language has suffered enormous domain loss. Few are the shops or restaurants where one can get by entirely in Hawaiian, and forget about being able to speak your language with most of your elected officials and public servants.

CCP can give you millions of examples of "their culture is very much in tact and proud. Not only that but locals have special rights and privileges over mainlanders not the reverse."

Does that make this reported events legitimate?

Han Chinese are paid to move to Tibet and then "act" Tibetan, for the benefit of Western tourists. My friend's sister is employed in this manner. It's enough to fool people like you, but it doesn't fool the local Tibetans, who are being sidelined more and more.

Judging the past on the standards of the present isn't a productive line of reasoning. Using past mistakes to rationalize further atrocities is beyond regressive.

True. On the other hand, many of those past behaviors that we see as wrong for today were a big part of how we got to our present high standard of living. Doing those bad things was cheaper and faster than less bad methods.

If we are going to tell lower standard of living countries that they need to take the slower or more expensive routes to wealth instead of using the same bad ways we did, we should be using some of our wealth to subsidize those more expensive routes for them.

So what happens next? 300 million people in the USA pull up stakes and move back to their (or ancestors) country of origin out of guilt?

It's not that the US government suddenly decided to be nicer to Native Americans. Rather, they're no longer deemed to be a threat to the United States and barely have anything that can be forcibly taken. In an alternate universe where Native Americans had connections with Islamic extremists, Native American reservations would closely resemble Xinjiang. Buildings getting their windows smashed in is enough to call the National Guard, so I can't imagine what real domestic tension would do to the US.

100 years from now, Xinjiang will most likely be peaceful when the last traditional Uyghurs pass away, and China will no longer have to force assimilation. That doesn't absolve China of its wrongdoings today.

Wait, you think Native Americans are confined in reservations? Like there's a big fence around the reservation, and they can't go out?

Puerto Rico can have independence any time they want. They've had several referenda, and independence has yet to win.

>Wait, you think Native Americans are confined in reservations? Like there's a big fence around the reservation, and they can't go out?

Good one, no.

I think that the lands they lived and had autonomy and their rule of law etc, have been taken from them as their ancestral places, and have been confined to the reservations.

The fact that they can move "freely" to New York or the greater South Dakota are irrelevant. It's like someone coming over, taking your house, handing you over the "right" to live and rule over the backyard, but also giving you the "freedom" to rent/buy/live in a room on their own old house if they want.

And that's with tons of shady behavior from the federal/state level even for them living there and their resources (e.g. when uranium was discovered in those places).

Because Britain and Spain colonized Hawaii in the 1500s nobody can criticize China for using forced labor in the 2020s? That takes some serious mental gymnastics.

It makes sense when viewed as: people only care about us vs them tribal crap. The modern era and access to information just puts a veneer of "reasoning" for justifying their own BS.

Are you thinking of the Philipines or Puerto Rico? Hawaii was never colonized by the Spanish.

That said, I don't mind to refute the larger point. In fact, I would make Puerto Rico independent in conjunction with recognizing Taiwan.

Only 5% of Puerto Ricans want independence, in recent years there has been a push towards statehood though (and now a majority support statehood over their current status of free association)

https://web.archive.org/web/20121109002017/http://div2.ceepu...

Puerto Rico should be granted statehood, not independence, unless you want it to be an impoverished client of the United States.

Unlike how it is now?

It might have been clearer for "be" to be "remain".

I responded to your other post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24558926. It's more important to valorize independence regardless of what's actually best for Puerto Rico. Any paternalism no matter how honestly felt will defeat the purpose of this gesture.

My proposal is "bleeding heart realpolitik", and bound to thus illicit confusion in the US.

> So like Hawaii?

Are people in Hawaii still getting held at gunpoint to assimilate to whatever American culture is? If yes, we should definitely complain about it now.

> Yes. Plus they have old claims to the area (as valid as a claim can be).

Yes, we all know about those claims like the comical nine dash line. Tibet has always been a historical buffer state between the Chinese and Indian civilizations, culturally influenced by both. Sure, some Chinese empires were able to defeat them to force them to be a part of the empire for some centuries but that's about it.

It must be fun to take out a map with some line that some loon drew in the past to lay claim over anything you wish. I guess we can even expect a map for Mars in future.

If you think the nine dash line is comical, you're going to LOVE the British drawn India-Pakistani border with the most important Sikh holy site in muslim majority Pakistan! After you have a chuckle at that, you can ask the native americans how much fun they had with map drawing lunatics during the colonization of the Americas.

> the British drawn India-Pakistani border with the most important Sikh holy site in muslim majority Pakistan

As far as I understand for that at least, the divisions/districts were divided based on religion, because that's what the demand of the leaders who wanted Pakistan was. So Pakistan got every Muslim majority district on the west of the current Indian state. Is it possible the Sikh holy site you are talking about was a Muslim majority division/district?

But your point does underscore my point, look at all the chaos that line drawing left in the world. That's all the more reason to call out the comical claims that are being enforced now.

Your generalized claims and whataboutism are again underscoring my point.

If what you have written is true, do you want the same to be inflicted into new sets of people by a hegemonic power.

Please do not post in the flamewar style to HN. It's not what we want here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I apologize about the structure of my last statement, it came out like that because of the tone of the parent comment and the constant whataboutism and general misinformation(like "valid old claims") we see in these threads. It gets tiring after a while.

I don't understand why my other comment down the thread was flagged by you though.

Do you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24563331? For two reasons: because it perpetuated the flamewar, and because 'whataboutism' breaks the site guideline against name-calling (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...).

so if a reformed mob boss sees other mobsters extorting people, he cannot step in and stop them because he did the same thing in the past?

every culture has done horrible things in the past. does that mean no one should try to prevent modern crimes against humanity?

i really don't understand this kind of ethical reasoning, just sounds like pious excuses to sit on our hands

>so if a reformed mob boss sees other mobsters extorting people, he cannot step in and stop them because he did the same thing in the past?

Reformed? LOL.

>i really don't understand this kind of ethical reasoning, just sounds like pious excuses to sit on our hands

It's the ethical imperative of:

- not being a hypocrite,

- being the change you want to see in the world, and putting your house in order first

- the old-mob-boss not getting to keep his illegal riches (not to mention his old ways) and claim to be reformed,

- and not using the plights of "poor X" as an excuse to attack their opressor, when you don't really care about poor X, you have opressed and are still opressing others all over the world, and you have no problems with other opressors of third parties if they are allies...

Without self-reflection and equal corrective moves on the finger-pointing side, the finger-pointing at China is merely used as a political weapon to justify aggression and pressure against them in the ongoing trade/influence war.

As for the finger pointers, those higher-up cultivate this for this exact purpose (as popular support for their hawkish plans), and the masses just point at the "enemy of the day" as they are conditioned...

As for the "pious excuses to sit on our hands" that's what happens anyway, nobody is actually doing anything. The one's that do are those who control armies and policy - and those have their own agendas, could not give less fucks for justice for Tibet.

This why I say pair criticism of China with penance.

For example, give up Puerto Rico and Hawaii but recognize Taiwan at the same time.

China may not officially give a shit, but Europe and many former colonies should.

Puerto Rico does not want to be "given up". It wants, and deserves, statehood. A so-called "independent" Puerto Rico would be nothing more than an impoverished client of the United States.

That might be true, but then China get's to say:

> Taiwan deserves provincehood so it isn't a impoverished client of the PRC.

Now, Taiwan is quite rich, but still, optics matter. Better to give Puerto Rico tons of reparations if you are worried about it being impoverished and dependent.

so you are fine with allowing all the human atrocities by CCP because of what usa has done in the past? i cannot make heads or tails of this perspective

as one of jewish descent, i am glad usa denounced the holocaust during ww2, and didn't use its past injustices as an excuse to remain silent

>so you are fine with allowing all the human atrocities by CCP because of what usa has done in the past? i cannot make heads or tails of this perspective

Let me reverse the question: are you fine with selective-outrage against all the human atrocities by CCP be used as a tool for foreign policy to further interests/help in new attrocities?

At the same time when those using those (to help their policies) have commited themselves, and continue to commit similar attrocities?

I'd say condemn all attrocities, don't be selective.

Else I can't make heads or tails of this perspective. It's basically "my country right or wrong, plus, I will condemnt whatever country my country's foreign interests want to target this period and ignore what others that are allies do".

>as one of jewish descent, i am glad usa denounced the holocaust during ww2

Well, not that much. For one, its businesses gave the logistics assistance that helped it go through. And few batted an eye in such cases:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_St._Louis

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/04/hitlers...

https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/american-respons...

"The American public discovered the full extent of the Holocaust only when the Allied armies liberated the extermination and concentration camps at the end of World War II. And as historians struggled to understand what had happened, attention increasingly focused on the inadequate American response and what lay behind it. It remains today the subject of great debate."

and do you think it was good the usa did so little about the holocaust?

there are a number of atrocities around the world today, but nothing approaches the scale of the ccp

It sounds like deflection, false equivalency and whataboutism. Discussions about the CCP frequently devolve into these tropes.

Wait, are Hawaiians put into forced labour camps?

Can they own property? Businesses?

Vote?

Can the run for Congress, Senate, President?

Are they taught that they cannot have their heritage?

"whataboutism'.

The Japanese were interned during WWII, illegals are in camps now, and the Chinese will likely be soon. Puerto Ricans STILL can't vote.

Its important to build your argument from sturdy facts, so that big bad reality can't huff and puff and blow it all down!

‘Illegals’ are not in forced labor camps and that sort of equivalence is just gross. Immigrants to Europe and the US need a place to stay while their cases are processed, with the increases in immigration (especially in Europe) it is difficult to keep up with. Does the west need to do better? Absolutely but stating that these immigrant camps are like forced labor camps is deliberately misleading and just flat out wrong.

Additionally - it hasn’t been until recently that Puerto Rico has favored statehood (over free association).

What is the difference in real terms between the border camps and forced labour camps? The labour? Taking bets that these camps introduce forced labour like the Nazi camps did. Odds stop at the decade.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/border-fac...

One is the result of excess immigration - where immigrants fleeing their countries come to hope for a better life in the EU or US. Immigrants are eventually granted asylum or are turned away.

Forced labor camps are created through force or threat of force and can detain people for decades with no recourse.

The difference is the reason to be in the camps. Breaking country's laws is generally viewed as legitimate reason to send someone to prison or camp, while being of a certain ethnicity is not.

Of course, there's an issue of laws that are by themselves are morally reprehensible, like the Nuremberg laws in Nazi Germany. However, immigration laws are clearly moral and expected to exist in some form or another in any modern country.

I have to say, this distinction is so obvious I'm very surprised that somebody asks this kind of question at all.

> However, immigration laws are clearly moral...

This is not, in fact, universally agreed upon.

It's a question of civics - entering the country is illegal, migrants do that knowingly. FYI they can leave anytime they want, there is a 72 hour clearing process. They are detained due to a transgression of the law, much like anything else. Where we can disagree mostly is the nature of the incarceration etc. - but this is besides the point - China's detention of citizens, arbitrarily, due to their ethnicity or because they simply want to 'move them into another job' is not remotely comparable to the detention of citizens who have broken very clear and stated laws, and of course can leave said detention as they chose.

It's reasonable that some degree of moral relativism can be made WRT China, but on these threads, there is no such thing.

China's arbitrary incarceration of citizens based on their ethnicity is beyond pale, the President should be bringing it up at every occasion, and it should be a pillar of our relations with China, including trade.

You're not addressing the point about immigration laws not being universally recognized as moral and just.

What about child migrants? You're meaning to tell me that its morally just to intern preteens because they broke your immigration law? To force children to appear before a judge that are so young that they have to draw a cross as their signature? What's grosser here?

These moral equivalence arguments are futile.

I addressed the issue, not only that, the concern about the 'moral universality' of the border laws isn't very relevant.

We put people in prison for 10 years for stealing cars, and there is no 'universal moral agreement' on the issue.

Migrants are not even being held against their will - they can leave in about 72 hours by filing paperwork. They have knowingly entered the country illegally, and are detained. They can go home essentially when they please.

If families were required to 'wait the Holiday Inn' until their hearing (which I think should be the case, no need to hold them in detention), I suggest few would be concerned, so what matters is not so much the issue of detention, but the conditions. I think that most people would probably agree that conditions should be reasonable but that's an operational issue.

But it's besides the point: the US has borders, and just like any for other nation, those borders have to be respected legally by some means.

But this is a giant distraction from the fact that:

China is arbitrarily putting it's own citizens in totalitarian concentration camp conditions due to their ethnicity.

The 'corollary' would be Trump putting 100 000 Latino American citizens in concentration camps purely due to their ethnicity, with no legal recourse, removed from any communication with their families, their every move, thought, action suppressed as they go through intense 'indoctrination training' daily, for years at a time.

It's unthinkable.

But it doesn't stop there:

China spies and censors each and every citizen, kidnapping students, academics - anyone - who speaks out too vociferously against the regime. They rigorously control all established media to enforce propagandistic measures, and censor or suppress anyone who acts against that system. China does not allow citizens to access information outside the country. They've created a giant, dystopian suppression machine.

The corollary would be Trump closing down CNN, NBC, CBS, then taking governmental control of Fox news, and legally requiring Fox to tout his agenda every day. Trump would then mandate Facebook to censor anyone who speaks out against Trump or the GOP / Government. Trump would insert a team of 'GOP agents' within Facebook to ensure absolute compliance. Any FB user who 'talks funny' would be flagged for future reference (i.e. maybe just a little visit from the local cops will suffice to get them to shut up).

Protests would be met with bullets, all media completely suppressed, no legal action or recourse would be possible. To merely mention the issue could land you in jail.

Of course in this scenario, Trump also has absolute power, does not need to be elected, directly controls the Fed/Monetary System, directly controls all major financial institutions, can amend the constitution essentially at will, has no need for any kind of judicial system which would of course be politically controlled, so he could put his enemies (or whoever) in jail whenever he wants, for whatever reason.

Of course he could direct Verizon, Google, AT&T, Stripe, Amazon to provide him with transactional data for anyone, anywhere on earth at anytime, for any reason.

And all of that is only scratching the surface!

So start justifying that list of transgressions, and when we get down to things like 'North Koreans fleeing to Chine held in less than optimal conditions' ... then we're having a discussion.

First of all, you're looking for the word 'equivalent', not corollary. Secondly, a talented lawyer could make a convincing legal argument for anything. The holocaust was legal. So really, the morality of the act is everything. Sure in practice, children are supposed to be held for 72 hours, but in reality it can be much longer. I'm not sure if I'm addressing your claims because you're using a bunch of big words, and I'm not sure if you're trying to say what they actually mean, so thats what I got.

> It's a question of civics - entering the country is illegal, migrants do that knowingly.

So was rescuing Jews from the Holocaust, and China's acts against Tibetans and Uighurs. Let's not mistake what's moral with what's legal; they often overlap in a decent society, but that's by no means guaranteed. You can make a case for "immigration laws are moral", but "they're moral because they're the law" isn't that case.

Morality and legality are deeply intertwined.

Conflating the fact that some people face basic detainment (which they can leave quickly at any time by merely choosing to return home) for breaking clear laws ... with 'Putting millions of Jews in Gas Chambers' is not helping the cause.

If we are so deeply concerned about 'legality vs. morality' then I'd imagine the very first issue coming to mind would be the issue of Uyghurs being put in concentration camps by the 100's of thousands, possibly millions, for no reason at all, other than the fact they are Uyghur.

Especially those dying, having their organs harvested and sent to Chinese elite. [1] [2] [3]

Their arbitrary detention due to ethnicity, and the conditions imposed upon them, I think make a very good corollary to the Nazi / Jewish holocaust, worthy of intellectual consideration.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/china-harvesting-organs-of-u...

[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-religiou...

[3] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/china-is-harvesting-tho...

Yes, they are "free", in their old land, under the laws and federal government of the US...

" the laws and federal government of the US"

Under their laws. They are equal to everyone else.