Thread by @shadihamid

Mass atrocities are happening against the Muslim Uighur population in China—in full view of the world. Details are too shocking to recount here. Yet little is said and even less done. And it presents us with an indictment of the international system

Like so many other things that seems hopeless, what China is doing as we speak has receded into the background and become a "new normal." How did this come to be? @dmarusic and I went back and forth in an attempt to answer that question: wisdomofcrowds.substack.com/p/do-we-care-a…

@dmarusic, who is Croatian-American, writes:

"More personally, having watched the wars of the 1990s in the Balkans, it became clear how low a priority human life plays in politics"

There are two responses to a tragedy of this scale. There's the "realist," and perhaps realistic, response, imbued with a an almost epic sense of the tragic arc. The other is a stubborn insistence that we can do better, despite all evidence to the contrary. I prefer the latter

Is our failure to act (and care) fundamentally an empathy question? Part of the problem is China's cultural remoteness: It's hard to get large numbers of people genuinely worked up about anything China does

wisdomofcrowds.substack.com/p/do-we-care-a…

I argue that our failure to act on China's atrocities is a failure not of empathy but of leadership. Empathy is great, but knowing human nature it wouldn't be wise to rely on it

wisdomofcrowds.substack.com/p/do-we-care-a…

Is leadership enough?

@dmarusic responds:

"One shouldn’t make the mistake of assuming that something called 'leadership' can overcome stubborn political realities that are grounded in human nature"

This from @dmarusic is also worth considering:

"In Europe, it’s difficult to cleanly separate that out from a persistent disdain for, and a sense of frustrated superiority towards, America and Americans"

wisdomofcrowds.substack.com/p/do-we-care-a…