China's Secret Internment Camps with Rian Thum

Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast

MS NOW, Chris Hayes

News, Versant Media, Versant, Ms Now, Nbcnews, Why Is This Happening?, The Chris Hayes Podcast, Chris Hayes, Politics, Government, Society & Culture, Msnbc, Withpod

4.6 • 8.9K Ratings

🗓️ 23 April 2019

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Did you know there are roughly one million people currently held in internment camps in China? One million people detained against their will, facing no criminal charges, cut off from the outside world. This is the story of the Uyghurs, a small insulated ethnic minority in Western China. The predominantly Muslim group has faced growing levels of Islamophobia and paranoia from the Chinese government. Right now, roughly ten percent of the Uyghur population has been ‘disappeared’, held indefinitely in re-education camps where they are subjected to totalitarian indoctrination in an attempt to erase their identity, their language, their religion and their culture. Rian Thum, who has spent his career studying the Uyghurs, joins us to explain everything we know about the camps and how they came to be – including the prison-like surveillance state that Uyghurs outside of the camps are forced to live in. LINKS The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History by Rian Thum How China Turned a City Into a Prison “Eradicating Ideological Viruses”: China’s Campaign of Repression Against Xinjiang’s Muslims

Transcript

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0:00.0	I mean, really, they're trying to make people less weaker or not weaker at all.
0:03.4	Yeah.
0:03.8	Stop them from speaking weaker.
0:05.4	The children are all being educated in Chinese.
0:07.4	They're not allowed to speak weaker at school.
0:09.8	They're forcing people in the detention centers to say, I'm not a Muslim.
0:13.7	I mean, it's a kind of final solution in which you're not killing the body.
0:21.7	Hello, and welcome to Why is this happening with me?
0:24.2	Your host, Chris Hayes.
0:26.2	You've probably heard the quote that I'm about to read.
0:29.5	I'm sure you have actually.
0:30.7	It's so commonly invoked.
0:32.9	It's almost become a cliche.
0:34.6	It's extremely profound, but it's profound in a way that's been so casually thrown around
0:38.1	that it becomes like trite.
0:40.2	And then it becomes trite and then almost like a weird, ironic joke to invoke it.
0:45.7	But I want to just recenter it because it's, um, it really truly is profound.
0:51.0	It despite how much has been used, despite how over invoked it is, despite how dangerous it
0:56.4	can be to draw parallels to the specific period of time and history,
1:00.2	it's a quote by a man named Martin Nemuller, who was a German clergyman who was an
1:06.5	anti-communist in the 1930s and a supporter of Adolf Hitler,
1:11.0	who then sort of a little late in the game,
	...

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