If you are able to tell people what they should think then the reverse must also apply. To compare these camps, from the little we know of them, to the extermination camps is not justified IMO.Original Post Deleted
Discussed this with hubby this morning. This is his theory - that they are basically rounding up pretty much everyone, putting them in a camp and then effectively "testing" them to see who is a radical. (Doing a lot of language lessons and retraining at the same time, pretty efficient). Anyone who is spotted as being radical then gets moved to a "re-education" facility or whatever. So probably most of these "camps" are fairly benign, a few are pretty nasty.
Reading the article linked by Civil Servant above, the strategies for de-radicalisation were quite interesting. On the face of it, no worse than what they have been doing to Christians in China for years. We all know China is a fundamentally "anti religious" society. Worship the CCP as your God, or else. As someone who thinks that religion is pretty backward and tends to result in people who lack the ability to think rationally, I would probably have agreed with some of these strategies a few years back.
However, you have to factor the "people" factor into this. People who are co-ersed into doing things they don't want to do (such as have their culture or religion taken away from them) tend to cling more strongly to it. Where has the radicalisation of the middle east come from? At least some from a reaction to American invasions and the forced introduction of democracy and the actions around the world to "ban the burqua" and similar. They feel their religion is under threat so they backlash.
No different to white rednecks in the USA backlashing against perceptions of political correctness and "triggered" snowflakes.
So if you really want to deradicalise, you need to do it VERY carefully. Free language classes are fine - forced to speak the language not fine. Vocational training - fine ; forced internment to be free labour - not fine. The bit about Cosmetic Fairs to make the women want to not wear veils nearly had me spewing. Goodness if there are some bits of western craziness and commercialism that really don't need to be pushed onto people who have not already grasped it!
And while I think that religion is silly and irrational, it does appear to be a stabilising force in many places. Many (not all, but many) religious "rules" (be good to your neighbour, feed the poor etc etc) are good for society generally and a religious society is often a cohesive society. I wish humans could cohere around a general moral code without there being a "god" behind it, but the evidence is weak for that right now! So the CCP needs to be careful what it wishes for..... a society of people who believe they have been invaded but no longer care about their fellow man might be more dangerous than what they started with.
Little Sunday morning philosophy.
It provides such a beautifully simple way to test ways of thinking and courses of action.
I think for Beijing (and many people in the world) there would be no difference. For me it would be about somehow forcing that fundamentalist view on others which would make them radical.Original Post Deleted
I guess the only line there would be believing it in a non-disclosed hypothetical way and really believing and supporting it should be actioned, if you understand what I mean.Original Post Deleted
https://www.afp.com/en/news/15/insid...ks-doc-1a73p62
But earlier this year, one of the local government departments in charge of such facilities in Xinjiang's Hotan prefecture made several purchases that had little to do with education: 2,768 police batons, 550 electric cattle prods, 1,367 pairs of handcuffs, and 2,792 cans of pepper spray.
You seem to be completely at odds with Xinjiang's party secretary Chen Quanguo who said the centres should "teach like a school, be managed like the military, and be defended like a prison" to build new, better Chinese citizens, another document argued, the centres must first "break their lineage, break their roots, break their connections, and break their origins".