Too Close to Home

Ethnic Cleansing In Eastern Europe Post WWII

Eastern European nations in the post World War II period harbour lots of dirty secrets.  The victorious Western allies allowed a process of ethnic cleansing, during which mainly German folk were forcibly repatriated back to Germany.  In many cases they had lived outside Germany for generations.  The victorious Allied nations at best turned away.  At worst, they helped facilitate the ethnic cleansing. 

R. M. Douglas has written a scholarly tome exposing and addressing the evil madness.  [R. M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012).]  Benjamin Schwarz, writing in The Atlantic said of Douglas's work:

The most thorough study available of the largest expulsion of a people in human history and by far the most horrific instance in post-war Europe of what is now called ethnic cleansing.

Douglas writes:

The moral and ethical questions raised by the population transfers are exceptionally complex and difficult, and it is not possible to deal with them exhaustively here.  But it is clear that many among the Allied leaderships and peoples derived a degree of vicarious satisfaction from the anguish the expellees were undergoing.  They also regarded the deliberately cruel way in which the expulsions were often conducted as not only forgivable but cathartic for the expelling societies themselves. . . .

(As David Curp has written) there is no doubt . . .  that the spectacle of "the Herrenvolk themselves (or at least their women, children, and elderly) being driven from their homes in misery provided a certain grim satisfaction for many Poles who had endured years of racially motivated contempt (punctuated by terror and grief) from their Nazi occupiers."  But grievously as these societies had been physically and psychically wounded by their experience of Nazi occupation, the suggestion that they could recover their collective self-esteem only by way of a display of their own capacity for violence and injustice is both psychologically unsound and ethically bankrupt.  [R. M. Douglas, p. 369-370.]

Surely this must leave a very sour taste in the hearts and minds of the victorious Allies. 

The Evils of the Chinese Government

Leaked Xinjiang Papers Confirm

Chinese Communist Party Is Full Of Lying Murderers


Unprecedented leaked documents confirm the Chinese Communist Party is committing ethnic cleansing, and lying about it to its own people and the world.

Helen Raleigh
The Federalist

The New York Times’ Asia correspondents Austin Ramzy and Chris Buckley dropped a bombshell last Saturday by reporting on the Xinjiang Papers, a 403-page collection of reportedly classified documents including speeches by Chinese leader Xi Jinping and other Communist Party officials on plans to carry out the massive incarceration of the Uyghur Muslim minority in Xinjiang and government directives instructing local officials how to coerce Uyghur students to return home with lies and threats.

The leak of such classified documents out of China is unprecedented. Ramzy said on Twitter that the person who leaked these documents was from the Chinese political establishment and “expressed hope that the disclosure would prevent party leaders, including Xi Jinping, from escaping culpability for the mass detentions.” We should thank this leaker for risking his or her life to expose the true evil of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in their own words. The Xinjiang Papers confirm what the CCP is doing in Xinjiang is an ethnic cleansing, and the CCP is ruthless and untrustworthy.

State-Conducted Torture, Rape, and Imprisonment

The United Nation defines ethnic cleansing as “a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas.” Some of the coercive practices used to remove civilian populations include “torture, arbitrary arrest and detention, extrajudicial executions, rape and sexual assaults, severe physical injury to civilians, confinement of civilian population in ghetto areas, forcible removal, displacement and deportation of civilian population.” These have happened and are still ongoing in Xinjiang, a supposedly “autonomous territory” in northwest China and home to many ethnic minorities in China.

Forced Repatriation in Eastern Europe

Complicit in Evil

We have been reading one of those books which is more a duty than a pleasure.  Written by R. M. Douglas, it's title is Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012).  It concerns the forced exile of Germans (mainly women and children) from countries surrounding Germany back to their (alleged) homeland within Germany.  Much much later similar atrocities were dubbed with a new name: ethnic cleansing.

[One reviewer (Benjamin Schwarz, The Atlantic) actually made this connection. He writes that the book is "the most thorough study available of the largest expulsion of a people in human history and by fr the most horrific instance in post-war Europe of what is now called ethnic cleansing."]

The key protagonists were Czechoslovakia and Poland.  It was supported by the Soviet Union, the US, and the UK.  The vast majority of those afflicted were females and children--in other words, non-combatants.  Plans were laid during the early forties by governments-in-exile; as the Third Reich crumbled in the east, the expulsion and relocation of ethnic German non-combatants began in earnest. 

The tale is long, sordid, and horrific.