I saw a barge once, Mr. Yeaman, filled with colored men in chains heading down the Mississippi to the New Orleans slave markets. It sickened me. And more than that, it brought a shadow down. A pall around my eyes. Slavery troubled me, as long as I can remember, in a way it never troubled my father, though he hated it.
In his own fashion. He knew no smallholding dirt farmer could compete with slave plantations, he took us out from Kentucky to get away from 'em. He wanted Indiana kept free. He wasn't a kind man, but there was a rough moral urge for fairness, for freedom, in him. I learnt that from him, I suppose, if little else from him.
Uighurs being shipped to work in America's outsourced electronics factories.
Universal Electronics, Inc.
They make remote controls.
Remember that name, and the names of the blind-eye multinationals they supply.
The Nasdaq-listed firm, which has sold its equipment and software to Sony, Samsung, LG, Microsoft and other tech and broadcast companies, has employed at least 400 Uyghur workers from the far-western region of Xinjiang as part of an ongoing worker-transfer agreement, according to the company and local officials in Qinzhou and Xinjiang, government notices and local state media.
In at least one instance, Xinjiang authorities paid for a charter flight that delivered the Uyghur workers under police escort from Xinjiang's Hotan city - where the workers are from - to the UEI plant, according to officials in Qinzhou and Hotan interviewed by Reuters. The transfer is also described in a notice posted on an official Qinzhou police social media account in February 2020 at the time of the transfer.
Evil. Pure evil.
No doubt UEI, like the rest of the scum corporations it supplies, is big into preaching "equity" to its American serf class and paying customers.
So, my children, this sort of thing is one of the reasons why the notion of Hell does not bother me as much as it does other people.
Only thing I'm curious about: Is it like slavery, or is it like Schindler? Are these factories acting like a shelter to rescue the Uyghurs from the camps?
ReplyDeleteThe article states:
Reuters was unable to interview plant workers and therefore was not able to determine whether they are being compelled to work at UEI. The conditions they face, however, bear hallmarks of standard definitions of forced labor, such as working in isolation, under police guard and with restricted freedom of movement.
UEI's Uyghur workers are under surveillance by police during their transportation and life at the factory, where they eat and sleep in segregated quarters, according to details in Qinzhou government notices and local state media.
Which doesn't really answer the question. If they're still under guard, that's disappointing. If the workers are free now from the experiments and indoctrinations, then that's an improvement.
And of course it doesn't help that - assuming for a moment the company was run by saints and this was all a completely noble effort - the Chinese government's ever watching eye means the company would have to be very careful and hide good treatment of the workers less China decide to take its slaves back and return them to camps. A disgusting situation either way.
May the Lord's justice be visited upon China & North Korea soon, and those who aided the evil be judged as well. (And may the Lord remember all those who fought it.)
"Schindler" is a possibility I hadn't considered. Which, if true, mitigates the hell-bound part considerably.
ReplyDeleteBut I still think the better approach is to abandon Red China entirely and set up shop someplace else.
With all the shipping problems of late, I'm scarcely in a position to argue with you. ;)
DeleteI'll even admit the Schindler stratagem is a long shot. Heck digging into the article and looking at details the Chinese "minders" force on the factory, they certainly seem paranoid about it and won't make it easy on any noble souls attempting such.
One formidable book I read in my youth was - believe it or not - Jurassic Park. In the book, the park has motion sensors to keep track of the dinosaurs. During one climatic moment, Ian Malcolm asks the supervisors to set the monitoring system to an insane amount. When they do - that's when they discover the dinosaurs had been breeding right under the park's noses the entire time. But the park admin had set the motion sensors to only look for X number of dinosaurs - so the system ended up "seeing" that number, and then ignoring the excess.
It taught me that it can be really easy to miss something if you don't try looking - or even ENTERTAINING the idea of it. (Something I've carried into my work as a computer programmer - where it comes up often.) So I always try to ask out of habit: is there ANY other possible answer the evidence my provide, and how might we go about distinguishing which answer is right?