Its A National Holiday

its a national holiday

Do you know that there is a city on Earth that actually lives in a dystopian future? and it's terrifying.

Who are the Uighurs?

The Uighurs are mostly Muslims, and number about 11 million in western China’s Xinjiang region. They see themselves as culturally and ethnically close to Central Asian nations, and their language is similar to Turkish.

But in recent decades, there’s been a mass migration of Han Chinese (China’s ethnic majority) to Xinjiang, and the Uighurs feel their culture and livelihoods are under threat.

Nowhere in the world, not even in North Korea, is the population monitored as strictly as it is in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region.  Oppression has been in place for years, but has worsened massively in recent months.

- Uighurs can no longer openly practice Islam

- Men are not allowed to wear beards. Exception only for old people

- They can no longer learn their native language at school

- They cannot move freely around the country and cannot leave it

- All mosques have been turned into shops and office centers

Beijing has also turned Xinjiang into a security state that is extreme even by China’s standards, being a police state itself. The provincial government has recruited over 90,000 police officers in the last two years alone - twice as many as it recruited in the previous seven years. 

At the same time, Beijing is equipping the far-western region with state-of-the-art surveillance technology, with cameras illuminating every street all over the region, from the capital Urumqi to the most remote mountain village. Iris scanners and WiFi sniffers are in use in stations, airports and at the ubiquitous checkpoints - tools and programs that allow data traffic from wireless networks to be monitored.

Checkpoints are installed in every district of the city. In simple terms, you can not get from one area of the city to another without passing the checkpoint and the police.

The data is then collated by an “integrated joint operations platform” that also stores further data on the populace – from consumer habits to banking activity, health status and indeed the DNA profile of every single inhabitant of Xinjiang.

Anyone with a potentially suspicious data trail can be detained. The government has built up a grid of hundreds of re-education camps. Tens of thousands of people have disappeared into them in recent months.

“Qu xuexi,” meaning to go or be sent to study, is one of the most common expressions in Xinjiang these days. It is a euphemism for having been taken away and not having been seen or heard from since. The “schools” are re-education centers in which the detainees are being forced to take courses in Chinese and patriotism, without any indictment, due process or a fair hearing.

Xinjiang, one of the most remote and backward regions in booming China, has become a real-life dystopia. It provides a glimpse of what an authoritarian regime armed with 21st century technology is capable of.

Uighurs are very intimidated and refuse to talk to the press, even if they miraculously escaped the country. 

What’s happening in China is terrible. Maybe some people finally realize that the concentration camps are the reality of our time. There are concentration camps in America too. Don’t forget that. 

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Just casually thinking about 2016 where the day before the election, my professor for the Race sociology class I was taking made mention of the fact that he was nervous, but hopeful. He wished us all a happy election day, told us to go vote, and he’d see us on Wednesday for our quiz and a recap of marginalization and voter suppression.

Then on Wednesday, we walked into that 9:30am class and found him sitting on the table up front with puffy red eyes, wrinkled T-shirt, shoes untied, and no quiz on the board. He just sat there and watched us come in and we all sat in silence and he spent the whole class leaking tears and talking it out with us.

He was a white man, a self-professed privilege magnet: male, heterosexual, Christian, college educated, middle class, etc and so forth, and he was in absolute shambles. He told us that he stayed up all night watching everything he built his career around get ground into the dirt in one evening. He spent all night and all morning fielding terrified phone calls from the undocumented kids he helped get into the university he worked at, who were wondering when they were going to get deported now, from his Black and Latino coworkers just sobbing in utter rage and agony and fear, from his students of color and his LGBT friends and students. And, he said, all he could do was listen, because we, as the majorities, had failed them. We let the worst happen.

Several folks in the class tried to be optimistic and say that it wouldn’t be that bad, but the professor, who up to this point had always been a ray of sunshine and hope, shut every one of them down because, he said, it absolutely would be that bad.

One girl in the corner started sobbing and told us that just a week before her uncle in Arizona, who had a green card, got deported illegally, and they were fighting to get him home, but now she was wondering when it was going to happen to her. She was too scared to go home and visit her parents for Thanksgiving because she was afraid of going through security at an Arizona airport and getting snatched and shipped out of the country illegally just because she was latina.

And our professor passed her a tissue out of his own pocket, looked at all of us and said, “Remember this in 2020. Don’t you dare let it happen again.”

So I’m sending his plea on to all of you. Don’t let it happen again. Don’t let it happen again. Please, don’t let it happen again.

I don’t study genocides war crimes and human rights for fun. I study it bc my people have been at the foot from the very first genocide of the 20th century and previous attempts to exterminate my entire race. The fact that no one is speaking up when another genocide is at the brink of occurring to the ethnic Armenians living in Artsakh (Nagorno Karabakh) is mind blowing. I have to say I’m not surprised by the lack of effort - Americans, especially, are the most self interested humans I’ve met. This isn’t about narrative, this is about rapid belligerent individualism. We can philosophize all day about it but at the end - people don’t give a shit about anyone but themselves. There is rarely any altruism left in this world. As Monte said, no ones gonna fight for us, we will have to fight on our own to survive. The alternative is not an option.

@sarinezeitlian on IG for the photos

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