Human Camps: Silence and Denial in a New Era

Image from Camp Album Project, depicting "daily reflection of a Xinjiang person" and "perpetual silence, stigma, and representational violence they always have to face alone". The project documents lived experience, trauma, and resistance.

When Eugen Kogon published the English-language version of ‘The Theory and Practice of Hell’, the first book written from inside the German concentration camp system, U.S. publishers cited “apathy on the part of the public” to explain its small print-run. 5 years after the fall of the Third Reich and Holocaust survivors still had to work hard to find intelligent and creative ways to have their stories and the facts heard. If “never again” is to mean genocide should never happen again, it will help to remember that we only remember the Holocaust even happened because its survivors made an unreceptive world listen. Little has changed since 1950. People in Xinjiang have experienced the largest, ethnically targeted internment of minority groups since the second world war. Yet even renowned experts of China struggle to name a real, living person from Xinjiang, despite their growing calls to be heard online and across mainstream media.

The comforting lie that we could never commit such exceptional evil fuses with the shock that such things are still possible in the 21st century, making our era a perplexing one where people say “never again” while watching it happen again. In 1940, Walter Benjamin warned that “the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule”. Silence from the majority who consider themselves unaffected while minority groups are targeted as threats is tragically normal. Naively believing that fascism was an exceptional period aids its return because it prevents us from recognising it until it’s too late. Hannah Arendt famously described the “banality of evil”, that people can choose to retreat from reason and free themselves of responsibility in the refuge of bureaucratic determinism, normalising and routinising violence against groups deemed worthless to their political goals. That people can commit such violence as a routine through a sense of inevitability is more psychologically and philosophically challenging than thinking of fascism as exceptional and dismissing its manifestations. For Benjamin, every document of civilisation is also a document of barbarism.

Why such silence? In a digital age, the evidence from Xinjiang has not only been more compelling and more rapidly available than ever, but also clearer that all global consumers are implicated. While working on the topic, many people who do not tell me why the issue is unworthy of their attention. The reasons I’ve been given, even in 2019, was that “we need more evidence”, at a time when the evidence available included visual satellite images displaying rapid growth of the camp system, official documents outlining funding channels including military equipment, and multiple testimonies of people released describing their experiences. When discussing the consensus among scholars of the subject that the camps and related practices constitute cultural genocide according to the U.N. Convention on Genocide, one friend dismissed the experts, “but there’s no chimneys with fumes of the dead bellowing out”. To focus on the quantity of deaths, in many respects, misses the camp’s purpose and their significance: dehumanisation of peoples towards promotion of the state’s goals. Germany’s “extermination camps” for mass annihilation (Vernichtung) were only one specialised form of concentration camp (Konzentrationslager) and not all concentration camps contained gas chambers or furnaces. Yet all camps were designed to identify, dehumanise, and isolate groups viewed as incompatible with the state’s goals of reviving and producing a romantic vision of an ancient, culturally pure society. The conversation reminded me of an exchange with a Dutch student who proudly told me how Mein Kampf was banned in the Netherlands to ensure fascism could never repeated, before using logics from its pages that his town was being “taken over” and “infected” by immigrants from “outside western civilisation”. Learning about that uncomfortable history would help people recognise its recurrence. This is the engagement Benjamin called for in his Theses on the Philosophy of History; an engagement with history, not a recollection of the past but an attempt to make sense of and respond to the present. Ironically, a talk from a Dutch resistance fighter at primary school, telling the class to “forgive but never forget”, inspired me to read Mein Kampf so that I could just do that.

Since existence of the camps became widespread knowledge, outright denial narratives shifted to downplaying the issue’s significance. Many people say to me, “it comes down to whether it affects us”. Everyone who has lived there or has long-term connections to people who do is affected every day. When they even hear or read the words camp or “training centres”, they are reminded of people they love and people they are disconnected from, not knowing if they are safe, not knowing if they are being tortured, raped, or put to forced labour. That affects us. Widespread existential anxieties about the environment, terrorism, and impending world wars circulate in popular culture. Yet what Benjamin called the “stubborn faith in progress”, blinds us to the uncomfortable reality that we are accepting concentration camps and genocide against stateless groups as banal, inevitably parts of life in the 21st century. Concentration camps not only challenge the belief that the world is progressing but the very idea of progress itself because they are so depressingly familiar. The shock that this could still be happening in the 21st century is useless, unless it shocks us into realising that we see history through the lens of the present and learn that evil can emerge when humans choose to retreat from reason into inevitability.