Letters

​​No Excuse for Silence

Posted

I wanted to commend George Weigel for his article (CNY, Dec. 16) calling out the ghastly human rights abuses China and its CCP are currently inflicting upon its citizens.

As more and more time goes by, there can be no excuse for any person or politician to deny what goes on within that regime. The treatment of the Uyghurs is just one of many ways they abuse their own people and neighbors. No one calls out the total decimation of this population that is actually Turkish in ancestry and practices Islam. Their land was taken over by Mao and they are being forced to assimilate to the Han Chinese way of life. The families are sent to “re-education camps” and their children are separated from them. They are tortured and forced into hard labor. They are surveilled from above and other Chinese are sent to their families to spy on their habits and report back to the CCP. It is unfathomable to a Western mind.

The Church should be loud in its rejection of China’s treatment of its people. I don’t hear nearly enough noise from that direction.

One can go back in time and see how easy it may have been for the people of the 1930s to ignore the signs they saw and heard about, hoping it wasn’t actually as bad as it sounded.

Yet, when someone brings up these atrocities, like NBA player Enes Kanter Freedom, they are told to keep quiet. How quickly we try to make people with a platform “pipe down” when we don’t want them talking about a terribly uncomfortable topic.

We can only hope those types of courageous people will be around when we need someone to defend us.

Dee Cadigan
Poughkeepsie