Show no mercy: The tragedy in Xinjiang | Hacker News Reader

Show no mercy: The tragedy in Xinjiang

thecritic.co.uk

44 pointsdsr1224 comments

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.

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-...

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.

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...

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.

That and... the war

What do you mean? The potential of a war breaking out? IIRC before the war started many countries happily traded with and weren't all that critical of Germany.

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...). He and his wife then promptly committed suicide. Hard square that with the nature of the genocide being public knowledge.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 - 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 - 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.

> 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.

>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...

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.

> 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.

The uncomfortable truth is that the eugenics and ""race science"" used to justify the Holocaust were mainstream in a lot of the colonial West.

It started with people conveniently far away: Africans and Native Americans. Genocide against them was incredibly profitable. This made the empires of Spain, Portugal, UK, Belgium, and France. The Axis countries were trying to acquire a similar empire at a later date, and therefore had to create a racial enemy out of those they wanted to conquer; Italy in Abyssinia, and Germany against the slavic peoples to the east. The Jewish people (and Romani, disabled, queer and other groups targeted) were a convenient internal enemy. Fascism relies on enemies to unify the "people" against.

Allegedly Hitler said "nobody remembers the Armenians" when asked about genocide, referring to the comparatively recent event: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide

The Holocaust of the Jews was the point at which the horror was brought home enough that most people could recognise it as morally abhorrent, and there was enough "never again" motivation to embed human rights into the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Convention_on_Human_R... .

Do you point out that Armenian Genocide was also an event nobody talked about while it was happening?

I believe Armenian Genocide cannot be compared to what happened in Holocaust or what is happening in Xinjiang.

I think you need more information on what happened during 1914–1923 in Anatolia. I suggest you to read "Dashnagtzoutiun Has Nothing To Do Anymore",The Manifesto of Hovhannes Katchaznouni, First Prime Minister of the Independent Armenian Republic.

You can find it in this PDF, the manifesto starts at page 29: https://ata-a.org.au/pdf/DASHNAGTZOUTIUN.pdf

Plenty of people talked about it, but to no particular result.

For the record, there is a controversy about authenticity of this book. Read the Wikipedia page about Hovhannes Katchaznouni, and also its talk page.

Or against Rwanda. Where there was no money involved.

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.

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.

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