We know the cost of apathy all too well
When I was growing up, in the decades following the Holocaust, one of the defining traits of a “proud Jew” was someone who would never think about buying a Volkswagen. For the “frummer” proud Jews, the self-imposed ban extended to all German products. But Volkswagen, which had used slave labor — Jewish and gentile — stood at the top of the totem poll of products to be avoided.
The war was over, yet the feeling remained that everything German was irremediably tainted, and that the failure of a Jew to act accordingly reflected a lack of sensitivity to the horror inflicted upon his people. The act of buying a Beetle might somehow retroactively implicate a Jew in the crimes of the Nazis, yemach shemam.
GENOCIDE AND CONCENTRATION CAMPS did not disappear from the world in 1945. Pol Pot and his legions were responsible for the deaths of approximately two million of their fellow Cambodians in their efforts to “reeducate” them. Hundreds of thousands of Tutsis were slaughtered with machetes, over the span of a few weeks, by their Hutu neighbors in Rwanda.
And today in China, up to a million Muslim Uyghurs are being held in reeducation camps surrounded by barbed wire and high watch towers, where they are subjected to constant electronic surveillance, all as part of ongoing efforts to turn them into proper Mandarin-speaking Chinese. These reeducation camps are not Birkenau or other camps designed for extermination. Rather, the goal of the central government is the wiping out of Uyghur culture, just as it has sought to wipe out Tibetan culture for decades.
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