Beloved critics don’t get excited, the title is paraphrased from The New York Times, your friendly neighbourhood newspaper. So, relax while we talk about erasing ethnic identity. Or better still, how about on a sensitive topic like this one, we just hide under the wings of The New York Times, and let them do the heavy lifting?
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/05/world/asia/china-xinjiang-uighur-intellectuals.html?utm
“Mr. Mamut and more than a hundred other Uighur intellectuals who had successfully navigated the worlds of academia, art and journalism became the latest targets of a sweeping crackdown in the region of Xinjiang that has ensnared as many as one million Muslims in indoctrination camps. The mass detention of some of China’s most accomplished Uighurs has become an alarming symbol of the Communist Party’s most intense social-engineering drive in decades, according to scholars, human rights advocates and exiled Uighurs. As the guardians of Uighur traditions, chroniclers of their history and creators of their art, the intellectuals were building the Central Asian, Turkic-speaking society’s reservoir of collective memory within the narrow limits of authoritarian rule. Their detention underscores the party’s attempts to decimate Uighur identity in order to remold the group into a people who are largely secular, integrated into mainstream Chinese culture and compliant with the Communist Party, observers say.
The Chinese government has described the detentions as a job training program aimed at providing employment opportunities for some of the country’s poorest people. But a list of more than 100 detained Uighur scholars compiled by exiles includes many prominent poets and writers, university heads and professors of everything from anthropology to Uighur history. “The fact that highly educated intellectuals and academics and scientists and software engineers are being held in these facilities is one of the best counterarguments to authorities’ claims that this is some kind of educational program meant to benefit Uighurs,” said Maya Wang, a Hong Kong-based researcher for Human Rights Watch.”
Now joining up all of the dots, we have in the newspapers words, via the headline: “China Targets Prominent Uighur Intellectuals to Erase an Ethnic Identity.” That is cultural and/or ethnic genocide is it not, given the word “erase”? What else could it be? And, shouldn’t that get the blood pressure up? Well, why are those high moral ground progressives who are protesting about Fraser Anning, Trump etc. not being consistent and protesting about this? You would think that a sincere colour-blind Social Justice Warrior would, if they were sincere, wouldn’t you?