The Opposite of Genocide: China (Xinjiang) & Foreign Policy.

in this video we're going to talk about
the strategic situation globally from what's ultimately a pragmatic and even machiavellian perspective we're going to talk about the politics of china in relation to canada and the united states morally which obviously right now has to include what we can call the genocide question right both are important which one is more important ultimately it's the pragmatic and machiavellian side of things because that's going to impact billions of people's lives it's going to be a matter of life and death and also of course it's going to have impact on the world economy right now this is the end of february 2021. we have had a shocking turn in world diplomatic affairs the united states and canada quite independently took steps to alienate china and make it clear that in the post-donald trump era both the united states and canada would be much more ferociously and aggressively anti-chinese than they had been previously now intentions are to some extent separable from actions it is quite likely that the declaration made by the canadian parliament was not thought about diplomatically or strategically in this sense it is quite likely that what just happened in canadian parliament was an attempt by the conservative party to show how unpopular the leadership of the liberal party was even within the liberal party to turn the government of canada against itself if you like and to create discontent and debate within canadian parliament for reasons that only make sense when you're looking at canada as one political unit under itself it is quite likely that there was no grand plan or grand strategy for what would happen next in canada's relationship with china or canada's relationship with the united states or what have you because that initiative did not come from the party in power it did not come from the liberal party it came from the conservative party nevertheless the canadian parliament this week passing a resolution condemning china for genocide and this is genocide hypothetically or theoretically against their own people against the people of xinjiang province xinjiang region the west okay that is something china will not forgive and will not forget this is deadly serious from china's perspective now meanwhile on the other side of the world joe biden showed up in munich at an annual strategic conference that is normally not that important but probably seems a little bit more important this year than in other years because of the context of the coronavirus pandemic the difficulty world leaders have of attending any conferences in person um and that people gather there in part to strategize about or compare notes about what will happen next in the post-donald trump universe right that new things are possible some possibilities disappeared and new new doors are opening now that donald trump has been removed from the global strategic picture right and of course partly also just because of the ongoing progress of coronavirus vaccines world leaders would have a lot to talk about that way and the connected and attended questions of world trade world economics right so the munich conference is more important in 2021 than it might have been in in some other year all right and joe biden made what was very clearly a scripted and prepared statement not a spontaneous comment that we we the western powers organized at that conference we are supposed to regard china as our major serious and strategic long-term threat to make matters worse this language clearly talking about a global anti-china alliance short-term and long-term of western democracies against china came in the context of some genuinely diplomatic comments about russia just a few moments before so bizarrely he made some very generally positive statements that the cold war mentality has to end i think that must have been in reference to vladimir putin i don't know yeah it wasn't in reference to china getting what he said next about china soon thereafter right so he was talking about an end to cold war hostilities and a cold war mentality given the current situation in ukraine through the still current still ongoing situation in ukraine still current still ongoing situation in syria still current still ongoing situation in belarus and within russia itself you know the arrest of uh one of putin's major vocal critics recently alexei navalny there have been many flashpoints reminding us that the situation between the united states and russia is it's close to a cold war and by the way also economically just the situation in terms of absolute sanctions i.e the refusal to cooperate economically or even educationally or otherwise do you guys have a whole lot of uh you know russian university students coming to study wherever you live you know there was a time i remember back in the 1990s uh and early 2000s yeah but really i'm thinking of the late 1990s i remember when the university of toronto campus was full of russians i mean anyway do you do do you see a lot of positive cooperation with russia wherever it is you're living when you watch this video right it is it is we are close to a cold war situation with russia in fact so to follow up those diplomatic statements seemingly about russia with a hard long-term anti-china policy being declared by biden after we've all escaped from the cloud cast over world politics by donald trump who by the way he did accomplish some remarkable things during his time of government it wasn't all bad if you look at the foreign policy and from my perspective i don't give trump himself credit for that i do assume it was other other competent people in his government who struggled to accomplish positive things in world politics but when the reckoning is done it was it was not all bad nevertheless trump as an individual was so mercurial so unpredictable so dangerous that yes it is fair to say he cast a dark cloud over international politics what what was possible for example at this conference in munich who could even have a meaningful conversation about the future of democracy or strategy or what have you uh when donald trump was in power or and again a great example is donald trump's involvement with ukraine the ukraine slash russia crisis what an absolute debacle terrible and nobody nobody knew what was supposed to happen next right so that's gone right we have we have the opportunity for new optimism in the world and with those comments you know in munich joe biden just slammed the door on any possible outdoors right so joe biden has made two major strategic decisions in this machiavellian strategic side of world politics just just within this last month okay one he slammed the door on china two he slammed the door on saudi arabia now how i personally feel about that morally or ethically or what i would do in his position um is really irrelevant and trivial okay you don't you know you don't sign treaties with your allies you sign them with your enemies you don't make peace with your friends you make peace with your enemies globally one of the most compelling reasons for the united states to be in an alliance with china is that china is one of the only countries in the world the united states could be in an alliance with all right the united states cannot cannot be in an alliance with or cooperating with or on good terms with iran it is impossible the range of possibilities for u.s relationships with iran go from outright war to you know some kind of you know barely tolerable treaty arrangement where each side is watching every other you know footstep taken it's it it's going to be bad to terrible relationships between the us and iran and we all celebrate if it's bad instead of terrible right that's all that's possible with iran turkey politically are you sleeping on turkey turkey is today again a major powerful world empire okay the french are not ignoring the steps that turkey has taken to expand its power in the region and frankly globally okay the germans are not sleeping on it the greeks are not sleeping on it okay the egyptians are not sleeping on it all of north africa libya is not sleeping on it okay you can ignore what turkey is doing at your peril what's possible for u.s foreign policy on turkey it's going to be bad or it's going to be terrible like there's such a limited range of positive outcomes there okay if you look around the globe i just i don't i don't want to sound like a jerk here i don't all right seriously what what do you think's possible between the united states and india a lot of you people have not studied i don't want to sound like a jerk here i could ask this is an open minded way have you spent any time studying the politics of india have you have you read a book about the politics of india i've read several okay i'm not an india specialist but yes i do have decades of experience reading about following the politics of india it comes up rarely on this channel so compared to my fellow canadians or even compared to the average lobbyist in washington dc i know quite a bit about the policy india indian what is possible with u.s relations u.s cooperation with with india very little okay now obviously much more positive situation than iran motion positive situation than turkey okay but if you want to have allies if you want to have cooperation if you want to make the world a better place very little is possible with india and a great deal is possible with china all right so one of the most compelling reasons to have more positive relations with china is just that it is possible something can change what is possible in russia as long as vladimir putin is in power in one word nothing so what the hell is joe biden doing saudi arabia is in the middle of a war to try to conquer and control yemen yemen is much more immediate to saudi arabia than mexico is to the united states you can live in los angeles and feel like mexico is a far off distant foreign country you know it feels remote to the lives of most americans yemen is much more intimately integrated into daily life in saudi arabia it's not just geographical it's cultural it's linguistic it's historical right it's it's not just in saudi arabia's neighborhood it really is saudi arabia's backyard and joe biden has just said that they are not going to sell arms munitions bullets airplanes they are not going to sell armaments to saudi saudi arabia so the saudis can pursue that that war not give not donate right it's not the u.s isn't going to support the u.s isn't it's not just the u.s saying they're not going to invade to participate in the recall conquest of uh yemen they're stabbing the saudis and the banks and they're forcing saudi arabia to instead buy munitions from the russians or possibly from the chinese right where do you think saudi arabia is now going to buy tanks and airplanes to fight this war saudi arabia doesn't have a choice they have to fight that war all right i may be the harshest critic on earth of the government of saudi arabia i mean to say to say that i do not sympathize with a feudal aristocracy ruling saudi arabia and it's it's a muslim fundamentalist feudal aristocracy is that to say i don't sympathize is an understatement right saudi arabia has to fight that war and they have to win there are absolutely no two ways about it right there's no no third possible conclusion that war so what can joe biden possibly gain by alienating saudi arabia and stabbing them back on this it's shocking it's a major twist in the road now one possibility which i i can't believe is true one possibility is that joe biden instead wants to be an ally of turkey and turkey is a rival to an enemy of saturn it's possible he instead wants to be an ally of iran that would be a massive reversal of u.s foreign policy if the united states became pro-iranian and anti-saudi arabian and that would be extremely shocking to israel because israel is basically part of this anti-iranian alliance you know look i doubt it i think joe biden is just totally incompetent that's that's my analysis of these two big decisions i think joe biden has no idea what he's doing strategically in foreign policy and obviously given his long career that is shocking to behold okay if you followed the presidential debates back when he was debating against bernie sanders before he really got practiced at reading these prepared statements there were always worrying signs of the cognitive decline of joe biden and if you went back and looked at joe biden as a young man as i did partly because sources like the new york times made it easy for me to do i i didn't have to do a lot of research to hear sound clips of and read quotations from what joe biden was like as a young man his cognitive decline was not starting from a very high level he he was a really weird guy as a younger man there are many times when you're listening to or reading those quotations of him as young man and he seems crazy he seems out of touch with reality he just seems astoundingly stupid back then so yeah so me you know what maybe cognitive decline is not appropriate now guys i could have said the exact same thing about donald trump two years ago right i could have said about donald trump hey everyone's talking about cognitive decline and senility for this guy but have you gone back and listened to the way he sounded in the 1980s have you listened to sound clips of him as a young man or interviews with him or have you read what he was writing back then as a young man with donald trump also you can talk about cognitive decline but decline from what you were starting already at a very low level of demonstrated intelligence with either one of these guys so yes the possibility that this is just incompetence on buying this part is very real it is easy for me to imagine that biden performed that script in munich with no knowledge of no memory of how seriously the chinese have taken similar declarations and announcements in the past there's a famous example of the owner of a multi-national news corporation guy who owned many newspapers tv stations satellite-based cable tv entertainment services this kind of thing a magnate of that kind and he made one statement at one public event about how his organization was going to help to bring democracy to china and all of the corporations he owned all of the businesses he had any investment in were immediately and permanently banned from china there's this one statement and it was translated into chinese and shared and that was it and before that like many multi-millionaires he'd had cooperation in china and he was growing a business there and he was really hoping to expand his presence uh in china and he kept going to the chinese government saying look he was willing to play by whatever rules the chinese government opposed like if they only wanted him to play movies and entertainment like he would do that like he was saying look you just tell me the rules and i'll play by the rules and no he was basically he was never able to do any business in china ever again for the rest of his life that was taken incredibly seriously about the chinese establishment i don't see any way the chinese establishment as existed today in 201 could laugh off or ignore these comments made by by joe biden the worst part of all diplomatically and strategically is the use of the first person plural right joe biden standing there at the munich conference he doesn't say what i'm gonna do he doesn't say what the united states ought to do what should do he's talking about what we have to do as a strategy long term and in this case we obviously mean some kind of loose alliance of the united states england germany france i mean you know it doesn't spell out uh australia i guess you know who's in who's in on this anti-china global conspiracy but that's that's what he's saying and he is also very clearly saying this is not merely a political rivalry he's talking about in terms of economic warfare i think it's fair to say that joe biden has no knowledge of no appreciation of no understanding of chinese politics or chinese culture i don't think i'm going way out on a limb in saying that joe biden from delaware he may have expertise in many other fields of politics he managed to give some very moving speeches about race relations between blacks and whites during the campaign that's something he's lived with his whole life i mean he's lived with the gap between uh ethnically black and ethically white people in america and those like i'm not saying this guy knows nothing about any topic but the gap between western democracy and china the gap between american political culture and chinese i think joe biden is out of his depth here he's uh he's swimming in in the wrong ocean you know entirely on this issue okay um let's look just to come back to the first premise here very briefly if you make an enemy out of china if you make an enemy out of saudi arabia if you already have an enemy in russia you already have an enemy in iran and the new rising turkish world world empire of turkey as a world power once again okay who are your friends who are you making peace with who are you cooperating with all right and we can talk about that on a purely machiavellian strategic level where are you going to make progress right i don't think the answer is going to be india you know they call a really visionary leader from the united states of america you have to you have to go there you have to do shoe leather politics you'd have to go and live in india and shake those people's hands you'd have to overcome you know a century of hostility and bad relations and you'd have to you'd have to really commit to a high level and low-level cooperation you'd have to have yes so yeah it's possible if america is willing to commit to it they could they could refashion their whole grand strategy globally by making a deep alliance with india that is something that both australia and japan have been trying to do now for many years there is an overt um military triangle really it's a military alliance between japan australia and india so america could step in and say hey guys this is a nice triangle you've got going on here let's make it a square um and that would commit america long term to being an absolute enemy of china because china and india don't mix it's you got to pick one side of the other there and indeed up until now that has been one of the limits on possible american uh cooperation with india but there are others if you think the memory of the vietnam war lasts long in southern california uh let me tell you for india um that they they remember vietnam and they remember cambodia in a way nobody else does okay so they have their own history of what they what they perceive as the reckless you know massacres of the american american imperialism run amok in asia and they'd just come out of a background of the critique of the british empire and then they were looking at what the american empire did after world war ii and their assessment of that was very negative and they really do see i mean to some extent correctly they saw america as a as a threat um in a way that in that historical period england and france and spain were not right now of course they also see china as a threat a top for another video but that's that's kind of kid stuff all right now look we now turn to the other big category introduced at the start of this video the ethical side of the argument including questions of genocide uh forced assimilation okay i grew up in toronto canada everywhere i went in toronto i saw chinese restaurants often enough korean restaurants mexican restaurants have you ever once in toronto seen a mohawk restaurant have you seen an iroquois restaurant have you seen an ojibwe restaurant have you seen a cree restaurant now i think during my childhood there were actually zero in the city of toronto right on the streets of the city of toronto there were chinese newspapers i know newsprint in general is going out of style but when i was a kid there were chinese newspapers there were korean newspapers i believe there was also a vietnamese newspaper i saw around have you ever once in your life seen a printed newspaper in the mohawk language in the iroquois language in the cree language in the ojibwe language our history of genocide here in canada and the united states is very real it's genocide in every meaningful sense of the term now if you go to china by contrast it's not just that they have xinjiang restaurants in xinjiang there are xinjiang restaurants in beijing in kunming in every corner of the mega continent that is china i mean china in terms of its population and just how much of it is habitable is a much bigger place than it looks on the map whereas whereas canada is a much smaller place like we just can't have a lot of land but most of it is empty and it's not inhabited it doesn't have any cultural depth and so on because now we have tundra all right china is a world unto itself and it is not just the case that xinjiang culture and language and cuisine thrives within xinjiang okay it's everywhere else also we used to eat at one xinjiang restaurant when we were in a small town in yunnan um because they could make a vegan noodle dish and they were they were muslim and the woman wore the full head scarf and stuff they were traditional xinjiang muslim people who had gone and opened a restaurant selling that cuisine and another okay i never once had the experience growing up as a child never once of eating ojibwe food served to me by an ojibwe person who spoke the ojibwe language and wore an ojibwe costume a traditional style of dress sorry regalia one shouldn't say costume i never had the experience of this with the mohawk or the iroquois or anyone else all right indigenous culture in canada is close to disappearing even in the areas where the native people comprise 10 percent of the population they have become an endangered culture an endangered language and an endangered people even in their own homeland okay that is not what happened to the people of xinjiang after they were conquered by the qing dynasty all right and it is also not what is happening in xinjiang today under the chinese government okay one of the surreal statistics that the chinese government points out in terms of the status of islam as a religion in sinjar is the number of temples now i think it's very important to emphasize islam is not a race okay islam is not a culture islam is a religion all right and it is possible to be genuinely opposed to islam as an atheist or from whatever perspective presumably an atheist while not encouraging the extinction of an indigenous language an indigenous culture an indigenous style of food or clothing or anything else in any other sense right uh it is true that china is supporting the secularization of xinjiang as would i okay i'm ethnically jewish i support the secularization of the state of israel i support not just conceptual atheism for the people of israel i also think their government should be reformed to cease to be a theocracy to cease to have any status for judaism as a religion within government and to to really be institutionally secularized or institutionally atheist i think that's tremendous important i think that within israel religious schools should be abolished i don't think you know muslim children should be raised in muslim schools i don't think jewish children should be raised in jewish schools i don't think christian children should be raised in christian schools i think it's tremendously important to have secular atheist scientific education basically for everyone okay so yes the government of china has an agenda for the secularization of islam of the muslim majority people in sinjiang and guess what that is also their policy for buddhist people in tibet and for animist people in yunnan we used to live in yunnan china there are indigenous people there who are neither christian nor buddhist nor muslim but have their own unique religion that we generally call animism like the jing jingpo okay there are jingpo religion i could make that point too i was gonna say look there are jingpo religious temples there are jingpo restaurants in yunnan and you see jingpo signs and people wearing the traditional costumes and attending festivals and doing their traditional dances and playing their traditional music all right the jing pull have not been moved to the brink of extinction the chinese government's policy about the jing po has not been genocidal in the way that the canadian government and the american government have had genocidal policies against their native people believe it or not there's something really positive and important that canadians and americans can learn from the history of china's ethnic minority policies and in case you hadn't heard in the bad old days under mao zedong yeah it was a disaster huge numbers of people died but huge numbers of people of all ethnicities in china died and don't you ever forget it right don't you ever forget that ethnic chinese people members of the majority they starve to death and they were killed and they were oppressed also so this is uh in that context but yeah of course uh ethnic minority life in china was also terrible uh during the years of mao zedong communism the cultural revolution the great leap forward you know so on and so forth this is not i'm not trying to redeem any of that history all right but nevertheless despite that when you are looking at the ethnic minorities in china and their history in the last 500 years and then you look at the history of our indigenous ethnic minorities in canada the united states in the last 500 years guess which country comes out as morally and ethically superior here it's china and it's not even close and there is no comparison i've said this before so i just mentioned very briefly we were living in a small ethnic minority uh town or city on the cusp of chinese civilization in yeonen and one of the high schools was called the beast it was called the ethnic minority high school it was the high school for the indigenous people and it was the best high school it was the most prestigious high school and one of the problems they had to deal with was that there were so many ethnically chinese families so members of the ethnic majority right were applying to have their children go to that school because it was the best and numerically there weren't that many of the indigenous people and they had to struggle to try to keep some like 30 percent of the students being the indigenous minority they just were trying to recruit them in from the countryside to have enough indigenous minority people that the the special school for the indigenous might already still had this character to it because it was the best school in the province it was the most desirable most elite school any student could attend so all the chinese families want to send their kids there have you ever heard of anything like that for the cree or the ojibwe or the navajo all right they did not get our best schools they were not the center of our attention of our government policy right you have never heard of white families in saskatchewan or manitoba lobbying the government so that white children can get into the same schools the special schools for the the native people all right it's the opposite white people are avoiding and running away from those schools and they're the worst schools and the most deplorable with the lowest quality of education and also by the way with lower budgets and lower pay for the teachers i've done research on that stuff there are some very obvious ways in which that's still a worse school system but the whole history of it is is terrible okay there are a lot of things china has fundamentally done right in relation to xinjiang and in relation to all of the ethnic minorities it's very curious that this critique in 2021 is exclusively directed at xinjiang and not at tibet was anyone else alive when the beastie boys had a special concert tour supporting tibet they did several songs in their album or about that they did a whole tour remember that remember that like and i don't know what it is so i know the real history i know how much of the tibetan story is [ __ ] and propaganda and what the reality i know i know that for xinjiang also right i'm in this tiny minority of white western people who know what's really up with chinese politics okay if there were any validity at all to this discourse about xinjiang there would be ten times more validity to offering the same critique of tibet and i i just don't know why that is i mean if this is your concern i mean if you are morally opposed to people in xinjiang learning the chinese language at all like you think the only language they should learn should be their indigenous language right because currently the chinese education system is bilingual they learn their own language and they also learn standard chinese tibet same story basically they do learn tibetan they do have tibetan in schools and even in the universities right but they also learn chinese which is one of the most powerful and important languages in the history of the world and in the present world and in the future i would love it for my own children to grow up knowing english and also knowing chinese so if you were tibetan or you were a xinjiang person you probably also would see the advantages of getting your kid bilingual education rather monument but if you really believe this argument about xinjiang then that argument would make 10 times more sense about tibet and i just wonder if after so many decades of people kind of uh whipping a dead horse on tibet i don't know has there been some level of cynicism has there been some level of skepticism about the tibetan independence movement about the claims made about i i have at this moment i have absolutely no uh explanation of this okay i recognize that having restaurants representing your indigenous ethnic minority is not what really matters okay i recognize that i recognize that having newspapers or street signs in the language or festivals or traditional styles of dress i recognize that that's not ultimately what matters with the survival of indigenous people indigenous cultures and their incorporation into a democracy i recognize that these are imperfect and indirect ways of marking or tracking genocide and what i can only call in this video the opposite of genocide you know what matters ultimately are political rights and political power how many senators in the united states of america today in 2021 are american indians are indigenous people how many senators in the entire history of the united states of america were in any meaningful sense native americans indigenous people the absence of those restaurants the absence of those languages the absence of those newspapers right it very imperfectly reflects the total disenfranchisement of the total silencing of a whole category of people that the united states and canada both were founded to extinguish