For all the reach of images in an age of images, for all the outrage in an age of outrage, what is happening in the far northwest of China right now has been rendered essentially invisible and any moral fury at the crimes committed there, muted.
Uighurs are a minority Muslim people of the far northwest Chinese province of Xinjiang, an area slightly smaller than Alaska. Somewhere between 11 and 15 million Uighurs live in Xinjiang.
For well over a decade, the Chinese government has been suppressing the Uighurs’ desire for independence. For about three years, the Chinese have increased their repression to this point: over a million Uighurs are now locked away in concentration camps where torture and “reeducation”, brainwashing, is practiced.* This is what is known. The reality is likely far worse.
It does not take much of an imaginative leap to see ourselves in the plight of others. We do it all the time when a friend’s parent or spouse dies (or God forbid a child). We know in our blood the pain we would feel if such an event fell upon us. We fashion that emotion into sympathy and solace for the afflicted. So all we need do is think a little bit more and envision the round up of people like us, suspect because we speak another language or practice another religion or look different than the rulers do. The 3 A.M. shouting, rifle butts smashing on doors, men and women we love disappearing into the backs of dark vehicles. No idea where they are being taken. No rights of visitation — no rights to any knowledge including proof of life. Now only look at what a government and leader with complete power is willing to do to those it despises.
Are you not also made utterly wretched by the poison of nationalist fervor, by boasts of religious and racial supremacy, by the powerful deciding who is a human being and who is not, by the sickness of ideology and of systems made to crush individuals? What is being done to the Uighurs deserves our attention and our moral fury.
