Quoting Jeffrey Veidlinger’s In the Midst of Civilized Europe, pages 53–54:
Following the economic and military failures of the summer, popular support for the provisional government collapsed. The Bolsheviks gained a majority in the Petrograd Soviet, and on the morning of November 7, Lenin issued a manifesto announcing the overthrow of the provisional government and the transfer of power to the Petrograd Soviet.
[…]
With victory in his hands, Lenin promised a “democratic peace to all nations and an immediate armistice on all fronts” and proclaimed “the right of self-determination” for “all nationalities inhabiting Russia.” Elections to the Constituent Assembly, he continued, would proceed as planned in January.
The Bolsheviks had succeeded in securing power in the Russian capital and immediately set about exporting their revolution to the rest of the former Russian Empire. This meant, first, encouraging workers, peasants, and soldiers to establish soviets and assume power in their own regions; and second, raising a Red Army to conquer by force those territories that resisted.
In Kyiv, the Central Rada refused to recognize the undemocratic Bolshevik coup
(Emphasis added.)
How does an otherwise competent writer manage to contradict hisself within the span of only two pages? Either he deliberately lied to appease a publisher, his hamsterlike brain decided that it was time to say something anticommunist, this was a clumsy attempt to represent somebody else’s point of view, or his definition of democracy is utterly fucked.
Earlier for today I was going to talk about the Georgian uprising on Texel, one of Europe’s last WWII battles, but I had a dentist appointment and I spent the little free time that I had goofing around with Sid Meier’s Civilization IV instead of studying for my thread. It’s May 21st in most time zones now so it is too late to make topic for the eightieth anniversary. Oh well.
‘The wealthy Jews control the world. In their hands lies the fate of governments and nations. They set governments one against the other, and by their decree governments make peace. When the wealthy Jews play, the nations and the rulers dance. One way or the other, they get rich.’
The redesigned mosques remind me of the Kaifeng synagogue, which is quite unlike any synagogue that I have ever seen. If you told me that it was a Confucian or Taoist monastery, I would have believed you.
In January 1923, the young journalist Ernest Hemingway covered the Lausanne Conference for the Toronto Daily Star. His first encounter with Mussolini left him distinctly unimpressed. Ushered into a room along with other journalists, Hemingway found the Premier so deeply absorbed in a book that he did not bother to look up. Curious, Hemingway “tiptoed over behind him to see what the book was he was reading with such avid interest. It was a French–English dictionary—held upside down.”¹
:::
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.
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).
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‽
Since when was that illegal?