It Can Happen There

I really dislike articles like this one by S. Frederick Carr at the Wall Street Journal, the thesis of which is that the Chinese cannot extinguish the Uighur people and culture. Here’s its kernel:

Beijing hopes its ruthless “Strike Hard” campaign will stamp out the Uighurs as a distinct group. But sheer numbers will make that effort near impossible. Official data put the Turkic population of Xinjiang at 8.6 million, but it is likely well over 10 million. To exterminate them would require a double Holocaust.

Beijing’s alternative to genocide is to destroy the language and culture, but a culture’s identity cannot be so easily destroyed. Memories of Yusuf, Mahmud, scores of other poets and saints, the language, folklore, cuisine and way of life are simply too deeply rooted. The Uighurs also have developed coping mechanisms. While the government demands that boys be sent to Chinese schools, girls are continuing the study of their native language. Efforts to suppress the Uighurs’ culture will further radicalize them and drive their lives deeper underground.

The Uighur tragedy now holds the world’s attention. Beijing has managed to bribe Saudi Arabia, Turkey and several other Muslim countries into silence, but the gag order cannot be sustained for long. Meanwhile, multiple countries near and far now host large, well-educated and active communities of Uighur expatriates.

Let’s look at the record book. From 1938 to 1945 the Germans killed roughly 6 million Jews and another 4 million gypsies, homosexuals, and other minorities. Ashkenazic culture and the Western dialect of the Yiddish language were effectively wiped out. The Eastern dialect continues to be spoken by 1.5 million people in Ukraine, Israel, and the United States. Don’t be surprised if, in another generation, it is only spoken natively by a handful of old people.

The British, far more temperate than the Nazis, extinguished Cornish several centuries ago and nearly succeeded in eliminating Scots and Irish Gaelic (now fewer than 200,000 native speakers between them). The French came pretty close to exterminating the Breton language and culture. They also did a pretty good job on the French Basques—about 50,000 continue to speak their language.

Stalin killed nearly 20 million Ukrainians, about two-thirds by starvation, the rest by more direct means. The wars fought in Genghis Khan’s name killed 40 million people, extinguishing who knows how many languages and cultures.

In the 16th century the Spanish extinguished many entire cultures in their conquests in the Americas including the Aztec, Maya, and Inca, leaving few speakers of their languages (today there are probably around 10 million all told), replacing their cultures with a version of their own.

The Romans destroyed the Gaulish language and culture, first by the sword and then finishing off the remainders by cultural means. We don’t know how many languages and cultures they overwhelmed but they certainly include Coptic (now a liturgical language), Phrygian, and Galatian. We also don’t know how many languages and cultures the Ottoman Turks killed off.

There is a long list of North and South American Indian languages and whole cultures which are extinct, killed off by European invaders and settlers, disease, their neighbors or just overwhelmed. The number of languages and cultures extinguished by Arabization since the 6th century is vast.

If languages and cultures could never be destroyed, we would still have people walking around speaking Sumerian, Elamite, Hittite, and Akkadian. We don’t. None of those language have even left descendants.

Eradicating the Uighurs, other than its diaspora population, is certainly within the power of the Chinese. Whether they will do so or not I cannot say but the sooner the world realizes that the better. The Uighurs have no allies willing to defend them.