cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/57662878
“When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out ‘stop!’ When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible.”
German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s observation on the political apathy that engulfed Germany in the 1930s resonates with 21st century survivors of the Chinese state’s war against Uyghurs in its northwestern heartland, known by exiles as East Turkestan.
Germany’s slide into fascism brought book burnings and arrests of “undesirables.” It lead step by step to antisemitism, concentration camps, torture, and death. That brutal history echoes today in Beijing’s campaign against the Turkic peoples of its western regions – and in the silence of a deaf world. Only those who have experienced the terror first-hand and survived to tell the tale can hope to describe its full horrors.
Kalbinur Sidik (formerly Romanized as Qelbinur Sidik) is one such rare eyewitness to what many nations have termed a genocide. Her ordeal as a teacher inside the camps drove her to the brink of collapse. She escaped in 2019 ostensibly for medical treatment, hoping to reunite with her daughter in the Netherlands and seek asylum. Speaking out became her path to healing.
She told The Diplomat that “silence is not an option.” The faces of captives in her class have haunted her to this day. Since leaving, her mission has been to give voice to their silent cries.
[…]
Her memoir, “Heart Full of Light” – a title reflecting the meaning of her name, Kalbinur – is full of horror and sadness but also memory, dignity and resistance. It is a cry against erasure and a wake-up call to a world that has not been listening.
[…]
Every inch of the compound was monitored. If someone moved, a screen flashed red and zoomed in. “It was impossible not to compare them to animals in cages,” Sidik wrote of her students. “There was nowhere to hide. For them, or for me.”
The specter of organ harvesting hung over everything. Healthy young prisoners disappeared. Across Xinjiang authorities collected biodata from everyone aged 16-65. Mandatory DNA tests, bloods, iris scans, voice and gait recordings filled vast data banks, many believed for organ matching. Research later identified Saudis and Gulf Arabs traveling to eastern China for halal organs.
“Alive we were worthless, dead, and cut up, our organs were worth a ransom,” Sidik wrote.
[…]
“Silence is not an option”: The quest to bear witness to South Africa’s white genocide
The quest to be one of the millions of tourists who visit Xinjiang every year.
Wow, still no hard evidence after all these years. Really makes you think, Israel must be hundreds of times more incompetent than China, as they had the full force of the Western media running defense for them, yet the world was able to see the obvious genocide unfolding. And somehow, still 0 hard evidence.
And let’s not forget, journalists are free to come and go to Xinjiang, while they are forbidden and actively murdered by the IOF in Gaza.
Germany’s slide into fascism brought book burnings and arrests of “undesirables.”
[…]
She escaped in 2019 ostensibly for medical treatment,Seems contradictory. How many Jews were able to leave Nazi Germany for medical treatment?
Her city had become an open prison. Checkpoints, cameras, arrests. She sank into melancholy. A badly fitting IUD caused constant pain, but removal would question her loyalty to the system. The prisoners’ faces haunted her. She dreamed of her upcoming daughter’s wedding in the Netherlands and began the year-long, 25-step passport process.
Despite having an Uzbek mother, her first application was denied. Too many guests at the wedding, they said. She might talk to them about the camps.
She resorted to a bribe. The “back door” worked.
Sidik told no one she was leaving for good, not even her estranged husband. At the airport, strip searches and double luggage checks brought heart-stopping moments. She left Urumqi for the last time on September 14, 2019 for Beijing. After three weeks her Dutch visa was granted.
Apparently the CCP is both so incompetent that they let her escape (try finding a Palestinian flying out of Gaza) but at the same time the CCP is so competent that there is zero evidence leaking of an ongoing genocide.
If a Jew had attempted to go through checkpoints to leave Nazi Germany, would that have worked?
Germany tried to get people to leave voluntarily, they didn’t want to pay for the deportations they wanted (which they also did do a lot, they paid a price per person to other states to take deportees. As much as possible they tried to use stolen assets to fund expulsion). Only mentioning this because this is happening in the US right now and that’s one of the elements I found especially disgusting after reading Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem. The collaboration of other states who should have read the signs and intervened instead of making deals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Office_for_Jewish_Emigration
Many Jewish people bribed their way out of nazi germany.
They bribed their way into not being identified as Jewish or not being checked at the border. She supposedly bribed her way into a medical exemption, but her papers were still properly identified and China’s government knows she left. Seems different!
By the way, is there any proof that any of that happened besides the book she’s trying to sell?
I can leave the us anytime without having to bribe anyone.
