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Comment by legostormtroopr | Hacker News Reader

Yes - we know this. We've known this for a long time.

The question is what now? Western nations have shown no political will to stand up to China.

When the Holocaust was happening, no one cared. The holocaust was stopped because it aligned with a different interest: to stop nazi Germany. The holocaust was only to make the nazi look bad. Otherwise no one cared about Jews either.

Most people did not know about the Holocaust until after WW2 started.

FDR/senior government and military officials in the US army knew. They made choices to focus on American interests at multiple points, even as they closed on victory on the European front, they prioritized strategic targets over concentration camps. The USSR ended up being the one to free most of the camps, and conquer most of Germany. Strategic targets are definitely important for protecting soldiers, but really the point here is that the military leaders were aware, and the fact the soldiers were surprised/shocked is a result of them not being informed and/or it being a shocking thing to see even when you know it’s coming.

> they prioritized strategic targets over concentration camps.

Well yeah, that's just Winning Wars 101. If the decision is between "let's knock out these strategic targets so that we can end the war quickly and (assuming we know about them) shut down the concentration camps all at once" v. "let's get bogged down by starting with the concentration camps while the enemy continues to churn out arms and war machines and troops because we couldn't be assed to focus on the strategic targets", the former is really the only reasonable choice.

> FDR/senior government and military officials in the US army knew.

I'd be interested to see the source material for that.

If you want a really damming example more recent than a war our grandparents were children during:

consider that the IDF provided they could get to Entebbe in Uganda at short notice, but failed to muster the moral courage to intervene in Rwanda.

So much for never again.

Are you suggesting that in 1939 (when WW2 started) the US knew about concentration camps? I would very interested in seeing some sources for that.

Regardless, even if they did, I said most people did not know. The president, some higher ups and some people in the military wouldn't account for most people.

Even if the general population knew, not focusing on the camps does not mean they did not care. It means ending the war (which would end the camps) was a more important goal than liberating the camps. Why focus on one thing when you can kill two birds with one stone?

Even soldiers who liberated concentration camps at the end of the were shocked at what they found; many people simply didn't know the extent of what happened until after the war.

I'm confused, didn't the camp happen after the war started ? the aryan supremacy theory predates it but not the mass murdering ..

I never really read timeline details about the concentration camps in WW2.

No one cared is not correct - a lot of people did. But the holocaust proper started in 1941 and the UK were already full on at war with Germany so there wasn't very much we could do beyond what was already being done.

The powers that be do not care, because they're Muslims.

Do the Muslim countries care, No!

That's the interesting part TBH... why is nobody sticking up for them?

Because for all the crap people give America for conducting foreign policy according to its economic interests, everybody else does the same. And right now, doing business with China is lucrative because of their human misery arbitrage.

The willingness to take a financial / trade hit for a random group of people hasn't been a common event as far as governments go... much ever?

Sad but that seems to be the case.

Muslims are hardly a unified front. Look at how many majority-Muslim countries have had civil wars or wars against each other at some point in the last 30 years.

In politics, everything happens primarily to gain or maintain power. If some group of people is not relevant for either, people in power will not stick up for them.

Because Muslim countries by and large are not in geopolitical or economic positions to act unilaterally in any way that is a)remotely effective, and b) not massively costly in economic and political terms.

Everyone is utterly dependent on cheap Chinese manufacturing. The price of manufactured goods would probably quadruple overnight if companies had to abandon China.

It’s not just cheap labor. China has all of cheap labor, lax environmental laws, cheap energy, a very manufacturing friendly government, a tech ecosystem, local expertise, and infrastructure. It’s literally the ideal place to manufacture, at least from an amoral economic perspective. Nobody can compete with China in manufacturing except in niche high skill areas.

Because its impossible to say fuck allah in front of a muslim Eduated or not they are way too conformance to religion. I can the same to a christian or any other religion friends and joke about it and does not have to fear.

How is that relevant to the question of why Muslim-majority countries aren't sticking up for Uighurs?

As a muslim, I can tell you that muslims and even non-muslims care a lot. It's a human thing.

Muslim countries are 99% dictatorships, where the leadership doesn't even care about their own people.

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