Last week the Economist spent a thousand words explaining to us why, techincally, what the Chinese are doing to the ethnic Uyghurs is not genocide. Their argument is that a genocide requires that the offending regime be actively slaughtering people. Otherwise it’s just (gasp!) “persecution.”
On the one hand, I think this a weird hill for The Economist to die on, but on the other, there’s always been a “words matter” consituency in politics and I can understand the piece in that context. But the obvious follow up question should be asked.
Now what?
OK so they’re not gassing them en masse and they’re not lining them up alongside mass graves and shooting them? What are they doing, exactly? Well, they are herding them into forced labor camps where they are subjecting them to all sorts of horrific things like, according to news reports, forced sterilization of women.
So… why are they doing that?
They are doing that so that a generation from now there will no longer be any more Uyghurs in China. So yeah, techincially the Chinese may not have the stomach for mass slaughter anymore, especially when they can just play the long game and let Mother Nature do the killing for them. But won’t the ultimate result be the same as it would be if the CCP were committing the Economist’s definition of Genocide? We’re still talking about the elimination of an entire population based on the ethniticy and religion, aren’t we?
What are we supposed to call that?
Whatever we call it, one of the more frightening things about the Uyghur affair is what it says about how the Chinese see the world and how that vision is beginning to spread to the West. Why do the Chinese want to eliminate the Uyghurs? Because the Uyghurs are political dissidents. They cannot be made to heel, and so they must be eliminated.
That the Chinese think and act this way is not surprising. But what scares me is that I see this same Chinese way of looking at political problems beginning to infect the American political sphere, especially on the Left.
Going back to one of my first posts, NEVER AGAIN?, you can see the JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG template being used by the Chinese to eliminate the Uyghurs, and you can extrapolate the same template to the rhetoric coming out of the far Left regarding Conservative “insurrectionists” here in America. Already members of our military, who tend to lean Southern, Christian, and Conservative anyway, are being investigated en masse and subjected to loyalty oaths, despite there being no real evidence of widespread extremism in the ranks. Cops, who also tend to lean Right and whose unions often back Republican candidates, are being demonized and attacked across the country. Private Sector employees are being forced into unnecessary medical procedures as punishment for “wrongthink.” And powerful people, like AOC, are making lists of Trump supporters and vowing to deny them employment, harrass them in public, and otherwise ruin their lives.
One can’t help but wonder what’s next, where this all leads, and what The Economist will call it when we get there.