The Pot calling the Kettle black
In the north of China live the Uighurs, an ethnic minority different
from the dominant Han. Uighurs speak their own language; unlike the
rest of the Chinese population, they are Muslim. Since 2016 the
Chinese government has retained large numbers of Uighurs in
re-education camps. Inmates are said to be forced to speak Mandarin
instead of their native Uighur language. They are being indoctrinated
into Chinese Communist ideology to replace their own traditional
beliefs and religious commitments. It appears that the Chinese
government has mounted a brutal campaign to eradicate one of the
minority cultures in their country.
Western media criticism has been loud. Interestingly, media in the
Middle East Muslim countries as well as in Turkey have noticed the
internment but have not condemned it. Muslim countries do not seem to
perceive the treatment of the Uighurs as a frontal attack on Islam.
Perhaps Western media exaggerate to score propaganda points; perhaps
Chinese influence in Muslim countries is more powerful than we had
thought.
The well-being of the Uighurs seems to be seriously threatened. US
media such as the New York Times are very critical of China for their
treatment of the Uighurs. The Times regularly runs articles about the
efforts of the Chinese government to destroy the Uighur language and
culture and to produce instead a nation of committed adherents to the
official Communist culture. Western media consider this campaign
barbarous, violating human rights to the culture one is born into. In
the background of the articles about the Chinese internment camps one
can hear the boast that in the West such re-education campaigns are
recognized for what they are: inhumane treatments of minority groups.
Western government would not inflict such brutality on its minority
groups.
No doubt these mass internment projects are deplorable, but Western
governments have not hesitated to use similar techniques in order to
destroy indigenous oppositional cultures. The public criticisms of
Chinese maltreatment of the Uighurs are hypocritical. They are only
reflections of techniques used by the US government and military in
the 19th and 20th century to try to assimilate
American Indians to the dominant White Anglo-Saxon culture of the US,
attempting to make distinct indigenous cultures disappear.
In the 1830s, General Jackson, later to be elected president, moved
American Indians from fertile lands to what were then remote areas on
the United States. Thus the Cherokees were forced to walk from North
Carolina to what today is Oklahoma but was then an unknown
wilderness. Fifty years later, by 1879, wild land not desired by any
Whites had disappeared, but the American Indians were still here and
continued to be in the way. The government and military invented a
new technique for making the Indians disappear. Children were forced
to attend boarding schools, often a thousand miles away from where
their parents lived. Fathers who refused to give up children to these
Indian schools were deprived of government distributed rations.
Families who resisted were punished in other ways. They were forced
to surrender their kids.
The first of the schools was established in Carlisle, PA by Col.
Richard Pratt who is reputed to have described the schools mission as
“kill the Indian in him and save the man.” To that end children
arriving at one of the many Indian schools immediately had their hair
cut, a shameful experience for many youngsters from different tribes.
They were forbidden to use their own or any other Indian language.
Failure to use English was punished severely. Children were taught
that their parents and other members of their tribe were “savages”
and the Americans “civilized” notwithstanding the inhumane
treatment the children received including abuse, sexual,
psychological and physical and the frequently filthy conditions in
the schools. Children died of ill treatment and disease. The Carlisle
school operated between 1879 and 1918–39 years. 200 children died
in those years; their remains were shuttled from one place to another
by various administrators so as not to be buried in the vicinity of
Whites, until some of them finally found a resting place near their
families.
By 1978, the last Indian schools closed but the policy of destroying
tribal cultures and Indian families did not end. In fact, it is still
continuing. But the techniques used today were not those invented by
Col. Pratt. Today Indian children are given out to adoption by White
families at a much higher rates than children of other ethnic groups
in the United States.
Racially-based
separation of children from their parents is still a problem. The
Department of Health and Human Services acknowledged in
2016 that black and Native children were overrepresented in
the child welfare services. Many more American Indian and
African-American children, than children belonging to other groups,
have been adopted by white families even where functioning families
existed and were ready to take in the children.
Whites
first took the land and then took the children.
US
media must cease claiming that we respect human rights more seriously
than the government of China. Both the US and China have not
hesitated to try to rid themselves of populations they found
inconvenient. If the US government wants to claim superiority over
China, it must acknowledge its brutalization of American Indians, it
must acknowledge its past and present inhumane practices and make
belated efforts at reparations.
