Hey there.
Do you ever wonder what our era will be remembered
for?
Will it be Trump's MAGA revolution?
Will it be the neglect of Climate change,
like every science fiction writer seems to
expect?
No, it think this era will most likely be
remembered as the one that saw the return
of the concentration camp.
The world's three most important countries
are all involved.
In recent months, the world's attention has
been taken by China's struggle with Hong Kong.
This uprising is worthy of our attention of
course, but it should not distract us from
the horrors of Xinjiang.
The rich, internationally networked protesters
of Hong Kong, whose special status is useful
to Beijing for economic purposes are facing
haphazard and embarrassed repression from
a central government that doesn't want to
kill the golden goose.
As I have pointed out before the Uighurs of
Xinjiang are facing a science fiction dystopia.
Hong Kong's right to protest is in danger.
The right of the Uighur people to exist is
actively being crushed.
As many as a million people are in concentration
camps.
Satellite footage has documented this quickly
growing network.
On August 5th, India revoked Kashmir's special
status within the Indian constitution.
Since then, the territory has been subject
to stepped up repression.
I have read reports of as many as 4000 people,
including local politicians, being detained.
I don't know enough about this issue yet,
but I do know it will remain in the headlines,
thanks to its central role in the conflict
between India and Pakistan.
I am less confident about what is happening
on the other side of the country.
The first people in India crushed by British
imperialism were in Bengal.
The Indian government is continuing this repression
today.
The historic territory of Bengal is split
between Bangladesh and India.
In late August, India released a revised list
stripping 1.9 million people of their Indian
citizenship.
The Indian government's position is that these
families that have spent almost half a century
and generations as Indians now need to go
to Bangladesh.
There is already a network of detention camps
for these now stateless people in India.
Bangladesh probably doesn't want them either,
so many more camps will be built.
The United States has concentration camps
for its unwanted as well.
The temptation here is to blame Trump, whose
administration proposed indefinite detention
for asylum seekers last month.
But in truth, Ronald Reagan was the last American
President whose welcome for immigrants matched
our historic values.
Every administration since has militarized
our borders and ratcheted up the brutality
of our anti immigrant gestapo.
We have our own sci fi dystopia now.
Trump is worse than Obama of course, but not
as much as you would think.
To deal with the obvious criticism, yes, none
of these things are as bad as Nazi death camps.
But it's pretty fricking scary that I have
to make that statement.
A concentration camp is a technical definition,
and imprisoning people for their identity
is a bad thing, whether there happens to be
gas chambers and tuberculosis, or good sanitation
and courses you can take for college credit.
Also, the three separate crimes that the world's
largest countries are committing are also
different.
China's is the worse by far, in terms of scale,
duration, and the clear goal of cultural eradication.
India's treatment of its Muslim minorities
in the east and west is less severe, but also
massive in scale, and seems to represent a
turn for the worse.
The US's concentration camps are the least
horrific, because they are not filled with
citizens, only the desperate, hopeful people
who want to become citizens.
These distinctions are important, but I will
be honest, it doesn't mean much to me as an
American.
I expect more from my country damn it.
I really do think we should be an example
the world should follow.
If you agree with me on that you should be
as ashamed of our concentration camps as I
am.
Also, China is an authoritarian country, but
at least until recently it was getting better.
It's an ancient and glorious civilization
with growing wealth, it should be doing better
by its minorities than the Nazis circa 1935.
The Nazi death camps didn't get going until
the war started, they started out looking
a lot like the camps China is running today.
India is the world's largest democracy.
For a century now, long before independence,
Indian politicians at their best were moral
leaders in human compassion and dignity.
Seeing the country of Gandhi and the non aligned
movement reduced to this brutality to the
weak is disgusting.
The worst thing about the actions taken by
these countries is how unnecessary they all
are.
The main justification for China's horrific
escalation of Xinjiang policy in 2016, is
a series of riots from back 2009.
India is getting richer and more powerful
than Pakistan every day, the Muslim Indian
minority poses a much smaller threat than
it might have before.
Illegal immigration to the United States has
been falling for over a decade.
There is no crisis driving any of these actions.
It's just cruelty, and a sense that the politicians
can now get away with it.
Again, it's tempting to blame this on Trump.
Both of his secretaries of state have been
ostentatious in their contempt for Human rights
diplomacy.
Trump's complete lack of moral authority has
taken the ability to shame out of international
politics, and the pure dumb chaos of his administration
makes it impossible to pay attention to anything
other than his Twitter feed.
All the noise means people can get away with
more stuff now.
Places like Xinjiang and Kashmir are to some
degree worse because Trump is president.
But the more literate and sane looking Bush
and Obama administrations are probably more
to blame.
Their use of Human Rights language to justify
causing the murders of a million people in
Iraq, Syria and Libya tarnished these concepts.
Trump's sheer incapacity means he's unlikely
to be able to as much damage as they did.
It's not commonly recognized how new Human
Rights are as a focus of international politics.
Its an outgrowth of the horrors of World War
II, but its more recent than that.
In the first few decades after the War, few
people focused on the holocaust or the millions
of other people who were slaughtered.
Consciousness only grew in the 1960s, and
human rights only became a major focus of
cold war politics and with the Helsinki accords
in the 1970s.
Pressure for Human Rights was always political
of course.
Great powers used it to embarrass each other,
and since the cold war it has justified a
lot of interventions that led to even greater
violations of Human rights.
But there are plenty of activists and lawyers
who have used this focus to do great things,
save lives and improve the world.
We will miss this focus when it's gone.
Unfortunately I think our new concentration
camp era is a sign that it the focus on Human
Rights is already disappearing.
People will keep talking about them of course,
but it will get more and more meaningless
as a world of concentration camp guards try
to one up each other on morals and ethics.
It's possible that Human Rights as a political
issue was the product of a fleeting moment
in history, when rising wealth and cold war
competition interacted in just the right way.
That would be a pity.
It's probably not to late to save this area
of diplomacy.
But we won't be able to rely on our concentration
camp building governments to save human rights.
We have to do that ourselves.
