Uighur Muslims and “Never Again, but…”
MAR 6, 2020, 9:23 PM
CC BY 2.0 - Dimitri Rodriguez - Women's March on NYC 2019
“The United States is running concentration camps on our Southern border, and that is exactly what they are – they are concentration camps…I want to talk to the people that are concerned enough with humanity to say that we should not, that ‘never again’ means something.”
These inarticulate and infamous words were
spoken by a cross-legged Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in June of 2019. Rambling her way through one of her nonsensical Instagram Live speeches, she compared United States detention centers – which house illegal immigrants at the border – to concentration camps. Specifically, by invoking the phrase “Never Again,” she compared those detention centers to the Nazi concentration camps in which millions of Jews were murdered as part of the Final Solution during The Holocaust.
Starving prisoners in Ebensee concentration camp, part of the Mauthausen concentration camp liberated on May 5, 1945.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, better known by the acronym AOC, said something which was deeply ignorant of both reality and history. Countless opinion pieces have explained precisely why her “concentration camp” comparison was as offensive as it was absurd, and others have succeeded in the rather simple task of proving her as nothing other than a strangely successful ignoramus.
However, by focusing purely on the undeniable stupidity of Ocasio-Cortez, we are often in danger of allowing the more impactful point to slip through our fingers. Her exclamation that all those who truly believe that “‘Never Again’ means something” must prove their fealty by supporting the Nazi-esque categorization of ICE is indeed another example of her personal illogical idiocy. It is also clear that she has no qualms about comparing countries like the United States, whose very foundation is built upon freedom of the individual, to regimes like Nazi Germany. However, the fact that she does so
while remaining silent when countries which share her ideology of collectivism commit unspeakable crimes is indicative of a deeper – and potentially deadly – danger.
Collectivism is the ideology which prescribes priority to the group over the individual, allowing notions such as “the greater good” to run roughshod over even our most fundamental rights. This ideology exists in a variety of forms, with the form promoted by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her equally-inept comrade Bernie Sanders being that of a watered-down communism, advertised by the rather oxymoronic term “democratic socialism.”
To this assertion, advocates for “democratic socialism” will decry such a slanderous comparison. However, those with any understanding of political ideologies or modern history understand that there is little difference between the goals of the current “progressive” form of socialism and the ultimate goals of communism. Not only did Vladimir Lenin, one of the founding fathers of the Soviet Union, state that “The goal of socialism is communism,” almost every single one of the revolutionary, envious, and entitled arguments made by characters like Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez are clipped almost verbatim from the Communist Manifesto.
The ideology of collectivism, regardless of its initial form, delivers an inevitable outcome for every society it infects, either folding it into ruin (see Venezuela, Cuba, or the Soviet Union), or dragging its people beneath the inescapable weight of vicious authoritarianism (see China or North Korea). If collectivism is able to survive, it is only due to the sacrifice of the individual, sweeping them aside in favor of the upper echelon’s subjective determination of what is “the greater good.”
It is this very style of authoritarian collectivism which explains precisely why Ocasio-Cortez’s reaction to the so-called Nazi-esque ICE detention centers was nothing other than a cowardly act of intellectual fraud in the pursuit of power.
At this very moment, the communist nation of China has imprisoned
hundreds of thousands of Muslims from its Uighur minority in high-security prison camps, detained for “re-education” and punishment for the crime of practicing their faith. The Chinese government is
monitoring members of this Muslim minority for “problematic behaviors,” and just this week, it was
reported that thousands of Uighur Muslims have been forced into labor “factories.” Quite reminiscent of Nazi Germany, no?
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s silence when it comes to these undeniable crimes demonstrates the core danger of collectivism. Even though Ocasio-Cortez’s closest “allies” include the Muslim Congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, she has failed to condemn the imprisonment of Muslims under a communist regime. Why? Because she adheres to the Bernie Sanders school of logic when it comes to totalitarian regimes:
Criticize them if they’re ideologically opposed on every issue, and defend them to the death if they’re ideologically aligned on any issue.
That is why Ocasio-Cortez will sit on her living room floor and condemn her fellow citizens for enforcing the laws of the United States and compare such enforcement to the Holocaust, while remaining silent about
actual crimes committed by regimes she hopes to emulate. Her dispassionate carelessness is the same carelessness which courses through the veins of collectivist regimes worldwide, where even the most indefensible crimes are justified by some “greater good.” A “greater good” which Ocasio-Cortez and her equally-despotic compatriots hope to define.
History has shown, time after time, that collectivism comes at the price of freedom. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claimed that she believed that “‘Never Again’ means something.” Unfortunately, given her silence in the face of the appalling imprisonment of Uighur Muslims in Communist China, it’s clear that for her it’s not “Never Again.” It’s “Never Again, but…”
From the blog of Ian G. Haworth at The Times of Israel
blogs.timesofisrael.com
