Lest we Forget!

Rememberence Day has just passed and I thought one story I caught on http://cbc.ca/news worthy of mention this year in particular:

Ottawa announces new Hong Kong immigration options as committee warns Uighurs face ‘genocide’

Earlier today, members of a House of Commons committee looking into the plight of ethnic Muslim Uighurs in China’s Xinjiang province cited their recent conclusion that the Chinese Communist Party is guilty of perpetrating a genocide against the ethnic minority.

The all-party Commons subcommittee on human rights heard harrowing testimony from survivors of China’s imprisonment of Uighur Muslims. They shared accounts of mass incarceration, rape, forced sterilization of women and mass surveillance.

Critics say China has detained as many as one million Uighurs and members of other Muslim groups in what amount to mass prisons, where they are subjected to “re-education.”

The Chinese government has denied any abuse of human rights in the region and insists that reports claiming that are false.

— John Paul Tasker, CBC, Parliamentary Bureau (November 12, 2020)

The words decrying concentration camps setup by Nazi Germany following World War II come to mind: “Never again!” It made me reflect on the loss of Canadians who fought the kind of thing China is now obviously committed to and how those words ring hollower the longer we let their failing tyranny continue unopposed here in our nice, comfortable western democracies. Just as at the beginning of World War II, the Nazis setup concentration camps where they didn’t gas Jews to death along with the homosexuals and others the ‘master race’ decried as inferior. That came later, after the horrible living conditions and abuse had settled in. Now here we are again letting conditions deteriorate for the Uighurs. How long will it be before China decides on its own “final solution” to the Uighur problem? Do we in the free world continue to do nothing?

If so, I have just one question: do we really honor those who have given their lives for the freedoms we now enjoy? Something tells me, they didn’t dream of freedom and security for just Canada and its allies facing Nazi tyranny but even if they did, can we really be so naieve to think we’re secure from any future date where the Chineese Communist Party (or its surrogates) decides it is in its own interests to take them away?