The Corruption of Power and Genocide

       This week in class we are discussing WW2 and the cause of the war, as well as, the atrocities that came from it. For this specific post, I will be honing in on the xenophobia and racism that happened during the war and how those in power abused their authority to discriminate specific groups of people. Notably, examples of this abuse in power would be the creation of Jewish concentration camps by Germany and Japanese internment camps by the US. In both cases, the government of these nations wielded their powers to hurt the citizens of their nation because of their xenophobia towards those they saw as scapegoats and blamed for the war.

      To explain further, Germany created concentration camps mainly for Jews, but also those they saw as "lesser than", in an attempt to create an ultimate Aryan race as directed by Hitler, who had the power at the time. Many historians speculate that Hitler mainly targeted Jews because of his belief that almost all of the issues Germany was facing at the time (poverty, depression, unemployment) could be pinned to a common enemy that he had bias built towards due to his own narrow-mindedness that he grew up with. As a result, the rest of the German citizens ganged up against this minority of people and lashed out their anger towards them as the 'reason' for their poor quality of life, when it really was the government, and Hitler, they should be angry at.

     In the case of the US and the Japanese internment camps, the US government was blindsided by their own citizens and their enemies in war. Meaning that since they were currently fighting the Japanese they aimed their anger towards those they were fighting in the war, but failed to recognize the difference between the Japanese they were fighting and the Japanese-Americans in their own country, who they were meant to protect. As a result, their ignorance is what led to their decision to segregate their own citizens who they swore to protect.

      To connect this idea of xenophobia and abuse of government authority from WW2 to today, I will be mentioning the Uyghur Genocide by China. Surprisingly, this horrible atrocity has been seemingly swept under the rug and gone largely unaware by people everywhere. At least until it only came to light in 2020, in which it was discovered that China had effectively created their own "concentration camps" mean to forcefully assimilate Uyghurs to China and have them completely removed of their own culture and values. The fact that such a large act of discrimination and disregard of human rights can be allowed to happen without any interventions by any other nations can happen for so long is terrifying. This is because if the Holocaust was able to occur and people had to be convinced that it even happened (6 million victims), then it is scary to even think that something of such a large scale could possibly happen again in today's time.

REFERENCES:

 The Uyghur Genocide. (n.d.). The Organization for World Peace. https://theowp.org/the-uyghur-genocide/