A problem of bandwidth
by Tom Sullivan
Even the most news-inhaling political junkies among us have only so much bandwidth to spare. There are only so many broadcast hours in a day, only so many column inches in our thinning papers. The current occupant of the White House demands and gets our attention. Convictions among his associates mount as Trump scandals deepen. It is hard to look away.
Still, we are aware, vaguely, that outside our own troubles the world's percolate unbothered if not emboldened by them.
Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum urges readers to turn away for a moment from the bright, shinies holding our attention. People ask her as a historian of Soviet history about Western indifference to Stalin's rise. Why did British diplomats who knew about During the Ukrainian famine of 1932-1933, why did British diplomats who knew Stalin had confiscated villagers' grain do nothing? Or the Catholic Church? Or the press?
There was Hitler's rise, of course, and the Depression to distract us. Political calculations were being made, Applebaum explains, writing:
The audiences I speak to are sometimes unsatisfied with these answers. They want to talk about the perfidy of the Left or the New York Times, or they want to blame the U.S. president at the time, Franklin D. Roosevelt. But blame is easy. Far more difficult, both for them and for me, is to admit something more profound: That precisely the same indifference, and the same cynicism, exist today.We know much more about these latest camps today than the world did about Ukraine in 1933, Applebaum explains. The New York Times and the Post have reported on them. Canada's Parliament has produced a detailed report, calling Chinese actions "a campaign of assimilation unprecedented in its scale and sophistication." China has moved beyond informants and police checkpoints, Applebaum continues, to "artificial intelligence, phone spyware and biometric data. Every tool that a future, larger totalitarian state may use to control citizens is currently being tested in Xinjiang."
Yes, the West looked the other way during the 1930s, when people were starving. But the West is also looking the other way in 2019, refusing to see the concentration camps in China’s Xinjiang province. These camps have been designed to suppress the Uighurs, a Muslim ethnic minority whose status in China in some ways resembles that of Ukrainians in the old U.S.S.R. Like the Ukrainians who did not want to be Sovietized, the Uighurs do not want to be fully absorbed into the Chinese state. Like the Soviets, the Chinese have responded with repression. Previous Chinese leaders sought to flood Xinjiang with ethnic Chinese, the same tactic they used against Tibetans. More recently, the state has grown harsher, creating camps where at least 1 million Uighurs undergo forced indoctrination designed to eradicate their language and culture.
As in the 1930s, there are explanations for the world’s lack of outrage. Newspaper editors are distracted by bigger, more immediate stories. Politicians and foreign policy “realists” would say there are more important issues we need to discuss with China: Business is business. Xinjiang is a distant place for people in Europe and North America; it seems alien and uninteresting. None of that changes the fact that in a distant corner of China, a totalitarian state — of the kind we all now denounce and condemn — has emerged in a new form.We have less time for Xinjiang because we are trying to forestall the emergence of another one here, less-competent if not less cruel. Our domestic, wanna-be totalitarian (on the Russian disinformation model) knows instinctively the public's attention is limited. When he wants our attention, he knows how to draw it. When he's drawing the wrong kind of attention, he knows how to divert it or to lob smoke. The Internet's bandwidth may be increasing, but human bandwidth is limited. He uses that.