Writing in Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler showed where Nazi rule was heading. The Jewish people, the future German leader said, were “a ferment of decomposition.”
Comparisons between Hitler and contemporary political leaders are nearly always overdone.
When it comes to Xi Jinping and the Uighur people, however, Hitler finds his 2020 homage. In the Chinese Communist Party’s treatment of innocent people in China’s far northwest Xinjiang region, we see a modern heir to the Nazi treatment of Jews, Romani, and other supposed undesirables. We also see an heir to imperial Japan’s policy toward the Chinese people during the 1930s and 1940s, namely, the Three Alls Policy: Kill all, burn all, loot all.
As the Associated Press reported Monday, Xi’s hordes have spent the past few years engaging in a terror campaign of forced sterilization and abortion against the Uighurs. It’s just the latest element of a policy built around concentration camps, forced servile labor, and the destruction of basic human rights.
But it’s more than that.
It’s crystallizing proof of the great and terrible lie that has always underpinned China — the lie that the Chinese Communist Party is the ultimate servant of the people.
In 1945, Mao Zedong used a Chinese parable to describe how the party’s god “is none other than the masses of the Chinese people.” Fourteen years later, Mao showed his regard for his god as he dispassionately watched his policies starve perhaps 30 million or more of his people. The same principle applies to Xi. He will talk the talk of a party that serves the people first. But what’s happening in Xinjiang, which some experts are calling “demographic genocide,” proves that Xi has no use for the people beyond their kneeling to the party.
This is a regime fixated on the absolute subjugation of the people at the altar of an imperial tyranny. It is obvious both in its despicable immorality and its pursuit of a fanatical objective. (Obvious, that is, unless you’re the NBA or the European Union).
Still, our consideration of Xi’s fanatical objective is critical here.
What we’re seeing in Xinjiang is just one part of Xi’s strategy for the world. It’s a strategy built around economic thievery, territorial imperialism, and a global war on the democratic rule of law. The proof of that encompassing strategy is best encapsulated by the Communist Party’s activity in Xijiang. After all, that same province also forms the foundation of China’s effort to steal Indian territory and massacre Indian troops. The treatment of India’s sovereign territory and Uighur human rights are not distinct issues. They are reflections of a regime that cares nothing for the rights of other nations and innocent peoples. Like Hitler, Xi’s Communist Party aims to make those people new provinces of the empire — or simply purge them out of existence.
But the ultimate lesson of Hitler and Xi is one and the same. This new tyranny deserves no quarter nor equivocation.
