The repression is brutal in its ambitions: Chen Quanguo, Xinjiang’s governor, has proclaimed a “smashing, obliterating offensive,” pledging to “bury the corpses of terrorists and terror gangs in the vast sea of the People’s War”—an especially disturbing turn of phrase given that people are suspected of terrorism if they socialize too little or have the wrong kind of beard. It is a frighteningly high-tech kind of persecution. Surveillance cameras are programmed to recognize Uyghur faces, all cars have state-issued GPS trackers, phone data is exhaustively harvested, and QR codes are affixed to houses to provide instant information to the police. It is dehumanizing in the most fundamental ways. One Uyghur doctor, now in Istanbul, told ITV that as part of a government-run “population control plan,” she had taken part in more than 500 operations on Uyghur women including forced contraception, abortion, and sterilization. The question—one question, anyway—is whether all this meets the legal definition of genocide.
The word is one of the most potent neologisms of the 20th century, coined by the Jewish-Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin around 1944 and codified by the U.N.’s Genocide Convention in 1948. Sir Geoffrey Nice acknowledged the difficulty of pinning down a definition. “The public citizen has been given this word,” he says. “Can you imagine being as powerful after your death as Lemkin, in giving every educated person on the planet this new word? They didn’t have it before; now they’ve got it. What a phenomenal success. But, they don’t really know how”—he pauses—“they know how to use it, but they don’t really use it accurately, according to the law.” However, he believes the legal nuances are no reason to abandon the term. “It suited the politicians and the lawyers at the time to hand out this definition. They shouldn’t then be allowed to take it away by saying, ‘Oh, no, it’s too difficult to use.’ You can’t give and take away at the same time.”
The Genocide Convention was the first ever treaty passed by the U.N. General Assembly: it represents, in some ways, the beginnings of the post-war international order. Over the next few years we may discover how much of that order remains.
#TheAmericanConservative #China #Uyghurs #Xinjiang #Genocide
When future historians sort through the ruins of America, columns like this racist, sexist trash from the Daily Beast will be evidence of who killed this country, and how they did it. The author is Wajahat Ali, who devotes an entire unhinged rant to denouncing white women — “Karens."
If you are a leftist who believes that Critical Race Theory is a fake controversy, you are completely out of touch with reality. These white women weren’t voting to ensure that they remained “powerful handmaidens of white supremacy.” They were voting to defend their children from fanatical racists like Wajahat Ali and his allies in the education bureaucracy. Democrats who cannot accept this basic truth are going to keep losing.
The world of Wajahat Ali is so perverse that even black and brown people who don’t share his radical ideology are fake black and fake brown people:
Does Wajahat Ali not recognize that these white women he condemns in these columns have white husbands, white fathers, and white sons, who don’t appreciate their women being trashed by the likes of him? For that matter, don’t these loonies understand that many white women rightly regard their votes as defending the white men in their lives from the systemic race hatred that the Wajahat Alis and Terry McAuliffes of the world wish to institute?
They are poisoning our country with their bigotries. We are better than that. It’s time we stopped being intimidated by them.
The recent ignominious departure from office of Andrew Cuomo is the latest act in New York’s sad saga of political decline. Cuomo fell because of his private life, such as it was; the right thing for the wrong reason.
The standards applied to him would have victimized, among others, the state’s 49th governor, Nelson Rockefeller. Cuomo’s manipulation of nursing home statistics would have been an appropriate ground for forcing his departure; groping was not, unless we are to make of sexual harassment law a blackmailer’s charter. The facts of these matters cannot be accurately determined, especially when time has passed, and in any event they are largely irrelevant to performance in public office, though the greatest leaders, e.g. Winston Churchill and Charles De Gaulle, avoid such hazards.
One reflecting on the downfall of the New York Democracy must call to mind the words of the railroad president Charles Francis Adams in his “Chapters of Erie,” quoting the third act of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, on the decline of the New York judiciary from Chancellor Kent to the satraps of the Tweed Ring: ”Could you on this fair mountain leave to feed. And batten on this moor?”