Uyghur Question: Culture Under Attack (2 of 2)

So CPC is busy social engineering its own citizens, why should anyone care?

Setting aside the notion that oppression in an of itself is worth combating; for me, this is personal. In 1937, after years of conflict between Soviet Union and Japan, Stalin became fearful that Koreans who lived on the far-East border of the Soviet Union would spy for Japan. Stalin labelled them the 'unreliable people'. Some, like one of my great grandfathers, were executed outright. The rest, 170,000 people, were given 2 days to pack their belongings and report at the train station to be 'removed' aboard cattle trains. They didn't know it at the time but a freezing journey through Siberia would take a month, many would die.

Those who managed to survive were dropped off in the barren steppes of Central Asia in the middle of -50 degree winter. Among them were my great grandparents. To shield themselves from the freezing winds they had to dig holes in the frozen ground with their bare hands. Some 40,000 would die in the process. Those who managed to survive that winter did so in large part due to generosity of the Turkic people who inhabited Central Asia - Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Tajiks, and Uyghurs. They shared what little they had despite Soviet Party's outright contempt for Koreans.

To enforce assimilation, survivors were barred from proliferating Korean culture - Korean schools were banned, books were burned, and language outlawed. In Soviet Union, every person had to adhere to a model of a homo-Sovieticus. Future generations of Koreans in Central Asia grew up without culture or language to call their own and so they borrowed what was available. Their traditions and customs are a melting pot of Korean, Russian and Turkic traditions. I was born in the city of Fergana, Uzbekistan. As crows fly, it is 230 miles away from Kashgar, one of Xianjiang's most populous cities where 90% of the population are Uyghurs. I grew up around Uzbeks, Russians, and Uyghurs. Their culture is part my own and to their generosity my family owes its survival.

Cui Tiankai, China's ambassador to the US, has asserted that measures undertaken in the Xinjiang province are aimed to turn the Uyghurs into 'normal people'. Full quote given to Reuters states 'we are trying to re-educate most of them, trying to turn them into normal persons [who] can go back to normal life,'. There it is in plain sight, admission from a senior CPC official that 10 million Uyghurs in Xinjiang have no right to self-determination. That their way of life, culture, and religious practices are abnormal and will not be tolerated by a regime that has institutionalised acceptable concepts of 'normal persons' - homo-CPCticus - and 'normal life' in the name of all-prevailing national unity.

Identification of abnormality is the necessary starting point to moral exclusion - a psychological process by which members of the dominant group perceive their own group and its norms as superior to those of others; thereby marginalising, excluding, and dehumanising minority groups. Wars, genocides, acts of cultural-ethnic-religious cleansing, and slavery all find their point of origin in moral exclusion.

CPC propaganda in Xianjiang represents Uyghurs as little black people and rats. The same hatred that justifies portrayal of a group of people as dirt to be swept off the street, gives permission to destroy that group of people with an axe baring a proud emblem of CPC.

Having established that culture and identity of Uyghurs as inferior and is in need of re-education, CPC gave it self an uninhibited paternalistic right to cure and mould them to their design. When Uyghurs and their children are being indoctrinated and brainwashed in concentration camps, orphanages, their own homes, what is being offered is a life of servitude at the feet of an idol. What is being denied is an identity, cultural heritage, and right to self-determination. A way of life itself. It's not hard to see why either, elimination of culture has always been an effective tool of domination.

The value we ascribe to our lives comes in part from our heritage, culture and religion. Over the past few years, hundreds of Uyghur mosques, burial grounds, religious and cultural landmarks have been destroyed; books have been burned; and public Uyghur intellectuals, poets, musicians and teachers imprisoned. By eradicating these witnesses of the past the common memory and cultural identity of people is erased. If the tactic seems familiar, you may have read reports of ISIS militants destroying any traces of civilisations and religions that do not align with their ideology. Absolute paranoia of a totalitarian regime has no tolerance for false idols. The irony of false idolatry seems to evade those wishing to establish themselves as idols.

Writing on horrors of genocide in Bosnia, Peter Maass wrote 'The goal of ethnic cleansing was not simply to get rid of Muslims; it was to destroy all traces that they had ever lived in Bosnia. The goal was to kill history.' If invocation of Bosnian genocide strikes you as malicious misinterpretation of the CPC's intent, consider a statement by Maisumujiang Maimuer, a religious affairs official: 'Break their lineage, break their roots, break their connections and break their origins,'. How else is one to interpret a clear intent to destroy a group of people? Combined, ethnic and cultural cleansing denies Uighurs the very possibility of past, present, or future.