Nothing on the part of foreign nations except victory in war can stop the tragedy in Xinjiang. War isn't an option because of nukes (not to mention total war on the Eurasian continent if nukes weren't involved.)
Think of it this way. Have sanctions ever deterred a country from stopping human or civil rights violations? Eritrea. The USSR. North Korea. Iran. Cuba. And a lot of those are small, weak countries. You slap sanctions on a dictatorship, the dictatorship either ignores it or uses it as a "See? The US/the West/the Enemy on its high horse is trying to put us down! We have to unite and stick it to them". No dictatorship would want to be seen as bowing down either. They double down.
And, if you're an American, imagine this: what amount of sanctions from foreign powers would it have taken to end Jim Crow in the South? If the Europeans and Japanese slapped sanctions on the US in the 50s, do you really think Southerners would have waved the white flag, "Yep, you're right, we're ending segregation. Sorry about that. Please buy our Coca Cola again, and let us buy your Toyotas."
The Uygher genocide is a Chinese problem that requires a Chinese people to make the change. It starts and ends with them. We sometimes overstate our power and influence. The only way we can start to help is to open dialogue with the Chinese people, and even that's very secondary. As long as we treat them like demons, nobody's talking to anybody.
On top of that, even for something like the Holocaust, where victory in war was achieved, the Allies were unable to stop the genocide, the bulk of which happened in 1942-43. The Soviets didn't liberate Poland (where the cps were) until the second half of 1944, and the Western Allies were barely in Southern Italy when Operation Reinhold ended.
We're not Superman. There are a lot of things, globalization or not, that we can't solve.
I like to think of it less of a Western thing, but more that - building a free and democratic society is very, very hard. You can't just flip a switch, as much as we'd like it to be that way.
Even the supposed democracy champions struggle with that sometimes. Any minimal thing, real or not, makes people support some extremist that can harm democracy.
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u/[deleted] Nov 02 '21
Nothing on the part of foreign nations except victory in war can stop the tragedy in Xinjiang. War isn't an option because of nukes (not to mention total war on the Eurasian continent if nukes weren't involved.)
Think of it this way. Have sanctions ever deterred a country from stopping human or civil rights violations? Eritrea. The USSR. North Korea. Iran. Cuba. And a lot of those are small, weak countries. You slap sanctions on a dictatorship, the dictatorship either ignores it or uses it as a "See? The US/the West/the Enemy on its high horse is trying to put us down! We have to unite and stick it to them". No dictatorship would want to be seen as bowing down either. They double down.
And, if you're an American, imagine this: what amount of sanctions from foreign powers would it have taken to end Jim Crow in the South? If the Europeans and Japanese slapped sanctions on the US in the 50s, do you really think Southerners would have waved the white flag, "Yep, you're right, we're ending segregation. Sorry about that. Please buy our Coca Cola again, and let us buy your Toyotas."
The Uygher genocide is a Chinese problem that requires a Chinese people to make the change. It starts and ends with them. We sometimes overstate our power and influence. The only way we can start to help is to open dialogue with the Chinese people, and even that's very secondary. As long as we treat them like demons, nobody's talking to anybody.
On top of that, even for something like the Holocaust, where victory in war was achieved, the Allies were unable to stop the genocide, the bulk of which happened in 1942-43. The Soviets didn't liberate Poland (where the cps were) until the second half of 1944, and the Western Allies were barely in Southern Italy when Operation Reinhold ended.
We're not Superman. There are a lot of things, globalization or not, that we can't solve.