
Show no mercy: The tragedy in Xinjiang - dsr12
https://thecritic.co.uk/show-no-mercy-the-tragedy-in-xinjiang/
======
justusw
I would be interested to see how much western companies are involved in
providing some of the tools of oppression described here, such as facial
recognition and cell phone spyware.

~~~
ipiz0618
Not XinJiang, but after British and American companies refused to sell weapons
to Hong Kong Police , they turned to French and Swedish companies which
happily sold them whatever they wanted [1][2].

[1] - [https://hongkongfp.com/2020/06/06/explainer-piexon-
jpx6-the-...](https://hongkongfp.com/2020/06/06/explainer-piexon-jpx6-the-new-
hi-tech-pepper-spray-tool-for-hong-kong-riot-police/)

~~~
CogitoCogito
That article mentions a Swiss company, but I don't see any mention of Sweden.
Is this a mistake of yours or am I missing something? I guess a mistake since
you seem to have forgotten a link.

~~~
ipiz0618
My bad, I was looking for source of the second claim (French supplies) before
getting interrupted. Now I'm unable to edit my comment. My claim that France
supplied weapons to Hong Kong Police recently was not correct. The "Water
Cannon" truck they use was Mercedes Benz made in France [1].

[1]: [https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/law-and-
crime/article/30...](https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/law-and-
crime/article/3020397/anti-riot-vehicles-equipped-water-cannons-begin-road)

------
dsr12
I have always wondered how could the world allow the genocide of the Jews
during the Holocaust. Now I understand. It's all about financial gains. No one
will speak out against such atrocities if it's against their financial
interest. In today's world, no one will speak against China due to their
selfish interests.

~~~
himinlomax
The Holocaust happened during WW2, and mostly towards the end. The biggest
armies ever assembled were actually actively trying to stop the Nazis you'll
remember.

And while persecutions against Jews were nothing new, the nature and extent of
the actual genocide was definitely not publicized. It's well documented how
the Nazis scrambled to hide their deeds, however late. Note how they summarily
executed rural Jewish populations in Soviet territories, but deported those in
urban or Western locations to remote camps.

The reason why you'd think otherwise is because of a desire to further blame
the German population at large at the end of the war. Not that they didn't
deserve plenty of blame and were largely complicit, but I believe it's now
pretty clear Nazi leadership knew it would have been too controversial should
the truth of what was going on had been widely known.

To wit, right after a concentration camp was liberated, the US general in
charge forced the mayor of the nearby town to visit the camp
([https://www.scrapbookpages.com/DachauScrapbook/DachauLiberat...](https://www.scrapbookpages.com/DachauScrapbook/DachauLiberation/aftermath03.html)).
He and his wife then promptly committed suicide. Hard square that with the
nature of the genocide being public knowledge.

~~~
pasabagi
You should probably read the wikipedia article on this topic: there's far more
evidence than I could give a concise introduction to, but the majority
consensus is yes, the german people did know about the holocaust, because it
was the german people (not just a secretive subset) that did it. The majority
of the holocaust was carried out by ordinary german soldiers.

~~~
himinlomax
That it was carried out by "ordinary german soldiers," whatever that means, is
irrelevant to the issue at hand, namely whether what was actually going on was
widely known.

~~~
pasabagi
Do you have some kind of axe to grind on this topic? I just ask because, at
that time, almost the entire male fighting age population were mobilized. So
when it comes to the question 'is something generally known', it's obviously
relevant that such a large portion of the population were actively involved in
it.

~~~
himinlomax
There's a difference between what people can be made to do in the heat of the
action (and it's frighteningly easy given the right circumstances) and what
they will consent to when their rational, moral brain is engaged. (Though
according to cognitive dissonance theory, the former influences the latter.)

The only axe I have to grind is that this drive to further demonize Nazism, as
if it needed any outside help, is utterly counter-productive.

First it prevents us from drawing actual lessons from what happened. In this
case, I posit that merely hiding the most gruesome details of the Holocaust
was instrumental in allowing it to happen. "I should have known, I could have
known, I didn't know" Albert Speer said. It was sneered at as being self-
serving, but I think it reflects an important truth: it was rather easy to
have people choose to ignore what was going on. They could simply choose to
believe that the Jews had gone to live on a farm or something, so to speak,
and avoid thinking too much about it at a time when they had plenty of other
things to worry about.

Second, it gives credibility to denialists' arguments. For example, they point
out that gas chambers look dodgy and extremely unsafe for operators. That's
because the Final Solution was initially presented as a well orchestrated,
industrial operation that would have required a larger population to have full
knowledge. But the current historical consensus is that while it was indeed a
massive operation, it was in fact committed with relatively limited resources
using leftover supplies.

~~~
pasabagi
I don't think this question is really about Nazism. I think it's about the
role of the German people in the Holocaust. One driving force in how Germans
think about it is the 'clean hands Wehrmacht' idea - simply, that the really
evil, anti-semetic and genocidal aspects of the Nazis were carried out by a
small minority of fanatics, and the larger body of German society was unaware,
unenthusiastic, and largely uninvolved. In this account, the Germans were
among the victims of Nazism - it's a view really typified by the Reichstag
Dome - where you can literally walk over, and look down on, the Bundestag.
This dome was inaugurated as an expression of the idea that the german people
should 'never again' be under the state.

Obviously, this kind of stuff is very comforting when you have to go to visit
Grandfather Klaus, because he was (after all) a victim, rather than a
perpetrator - and you can buy your good german products made by good german
companies, and if they have a somewhat dark and disturbing past, you can
remind yourself that they too were victims, in a sense.

Except, of course, it's not true. The Nazis were hugely popular with german
voters. Anti-Semitism was, if anything, _more_ popular still. The Holocaust
largely consisted of massacres by normal german soldiers, and the Germans had
explicitly genocidal aims in major policies (e.g. operation Barbarossa +
'lebensraum').

I don't think denialist arguments need to be taken into consideration when
thinking of the holocaust. They are obviously ridiculous. What does need to be
taken into consideration is the way in which Germans, and German culture,
aimed to shield itself from its own pathological underbelly, while keeping
hold of the economic spoils. After the war, everybody who was anybody had been
a Nazi. Many companies were literally founded by the Nazis (VW) or got their
big breaks under the Nazis (addidas, for instance). Everybody who was in the
film industry cut their teeth on propaganda films for the Nazis.

One of the most awful consequences of this is the fact that, after the Allies
left, most of the Nazis who had escaped execution in the Nuremburg trials were
released, and those who had not been caught yet, were generally not
prosecuted. If you read through the list of administrative personnel in a
concentration camp, the majority usually escaped prosecution, or received
short sentences (I recommend checking out
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treblinka_trials](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treblinka_trials)
\- three years! For operating a gas chamber! And remember, it takes many more
than ten people to run a camp. Or
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belzec_trial](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belzec_trial)
\- Of eight people they actually brought to trial, only one was sent to
prison! Here you can actually see the 'clean hands wehrmacht' logic - they
were all 'acting under duress!').

The West German unwillingness to find and prosecute the greatest criminals in
history is the kind of thing any nation should be ashamed of, except instead,
we just hear a lot of pretentious nonsense about 'remembrance culture'. The
reality is, forget the average Wehrmacht soldier - if you were an SS officer
employed at a concentration camp, and you avoided the soviets, and you didn't
get hanged by the Allies, your chances of avoiding serious legal consequences
were very good.

~~~
himinlomax
> The Nazis were hugely popular with german voters

They were not _that_ popular with voters, just popular enough. After that
there were no more votes. But that's a nitpick.

In any case, there's nothing diminishing the importance of antisemitism in my
argument. Rounding up the Jews in the first place clearly was a massive crime
and done in plain sight, and with the complicity of the population. It's the
ensuing extermination that I argue was hidden, lest it would have been too
unpalatable for too many people.

~~~
pasabagi
>too unpalatable for too many people

And this is, I think, totally wrong. The soldiers in the Wehrmacht and SS are
a representative section of the German population at the time. They are a far
larger percentage of the population than you'd need for a representative poll.
And, despite having no real consequences for refusal (no German soldier was
never executed or severely punished for refusing to kill jews) most not only
took part in the holocaust, but went above and beyond what was required of
them, piling on cruelty above and beyond what their orders demanded.

I don't think Germans are the only ones to blame, that said. German soldiers
were helped in the pogroms in Poland by ordinary citizens, for instance, many
of whom took active parts in torturing and murdering their neighbors. I would
imagine the only reason why this was not also common in Germany proper is that
there were simply far less jews there, and most of them were already
incarcerated by this point in the war.

I also think a lot of your argument rests on a dubious idea of what
constitutes 'knowledge of the Holocaust'. If we're talking about specific
knowledge of how operations at Auschwitz worked, I would imagine all the Nazis
not directly involved (perhaps even Hitler!) would be 'innocent'. Knowledge of
the camps existence was, on the other hand, commonplace[1]. Knowledge of the
extermination program was explicit amongst superior officers, but equally, not
at all uncommon amongst ordinary people, many of whom took a part in the
project (doctors, for instance, with the euthanasia program). The link has
some interesting reading about how the extermination policy did in polls - it
was more popular than the CDU is today, for instance.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsibility_for_the_Holocau...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsibility_for_the_Holocaust#German_people)

~~~
himinlomax
I'm well aware of the crimes of the Wehrmacht, and I implied as much when I
mentioned how they executed rural Jewish populations in Soviet territory.

As I said earlier, there is a big difference between what people can be made
to do in the heat of the action compared to when people have time to think.
There's intense peer pressure and training that stresses compliance. They had
been under fire recently, which made them more willing to kill. There's the
escalation of engagement, where you've been killing people for a while
already, so murdering civilians is, in a way, merely an extension.

> I would imagine all the Nazis not directly involved (perhaps even Hitler!)
> would be 'innocent'.

I'm not arguing in terms of guilt or innocence; it's a rather pointless
exercise. But if I really must, then the Germans were certainly guilty of
persecuting, despoiling and rounding up the Jews in concentration camps. As
such, they were ultimately guilty for the extermination that this made
possible.

~~~
pasabagi
> As such, they were ultimately guilty for the extermination that this made
> possible.

The wording here is kind of insane. The germans did the extermination. They
didn't make it possible for some other group to do it. Just because not
everybody involved can literally be throwing the cans of gas through the
trapdoor does not mean that all the masses people in all strata of society
directly involved in its planning and execution were not culpable. Doctors who
sent their patients to the gas chambers did not do so 'under fire'.

I think arguments like yours would hold much more weight if they hadn't
tacitly legitimized the holocaust in the post-war era, by not prosecuting even
the worst and most awful monsters of the system. If the German people were
truly shocked and horrified about what had happened, then surely they would
have made a bigger effort to make sure that the people who had done these
shocking and awful things were recognized as the criminals they were, rather
than just saying they were 'under duress', if they even bothered to bring them
to trial.

The real thing that bothers me about the German reaction to the Holocaust is
not the guilt or innocence of specific parties. It is this idea - 'under
duress', under which the Germans have fashioned themselves this whole idea
that they were unwittingly involved in monstrous acts, or terrified into
submission by a small group of crazy people, so they don't have to confront
the actual horror of what they did. If the Germans had been half so serious
about dismantling the Nazi state as they were about dismantling the DDR, you
can bet there would be no VW today, there would be no 'under duress', there
would be no smooth transition from the Nazi party to west-german beamter
(there certainly was no such transition for east german beamters). The whole
German state would have had to be re-built from scratch, and it would have
been better for it.

------
ipiz0618
It's incredibly sad that this is not getting as much attention as it should.
Lots of people in the world knows about them, but not many countries, even
those that suffered WWII are turning a blind eye to this. XinJiang is
practically a huge concentration camp, no better than the Nazi ones, and in
fact might be worse.

Unfortunately the only way to save these people is to defeat CCP, but most
governments are too busy earning RMB.

Now that the US government are taking on this issue, I hope the world follows.

------
biscotti
Sorry but Islam has problematic requirements for its adherants that mean the
Chinese are right. It should be regarded as a virus. It is a form of modern
day slavery, and compels its followers to subjugate, convert or depose of the
Kafir and terrorise their fellow Muslim to be compliant.

I'm sorry it hurts your feelings, but if we're cancelling links to slavery in
Britain. It's time to stop being tolerant towards the intolerant and stop
accepting this Abrahamic religion that hates us so if we're going to have any
kind of future.

The religion has caused more destruction and genocide, misery and despair than
most other ideologies except communism and modern leftism. If you don't
support China, you are missing the grass for the trees. They are well within
their rights to remove such a malignent, subsistant and coersive demos.

If you doubt me, read the history of Islam, and learn about the lot of those
they will subjegate eventually after theyve slowly improved their demographic
whilst the rest of us are trying to earn a living.

I don't have a problem with Muslims, but I hate Islam. Hardly any mixing has
occured in 60 years between them and non-muslims on my Isles, they have honor
killed many that have attempted it and as an aethiest it is not acceptable how
they treat apostates.

If you are going to bring your American Identity Politics to my Isles (where
we are not equipped to deal with them) in order to cancel my countries links
to slavery, it is time to cancel the modern day slavery that this man made
religion represents.

Consider it justice for the over 30,000 of our girls that were raped, injected
with heroin and cast aside.

