This past month has been spent reaching out to congressional staffers to set up meetings discussing issues regarding the Rohingya, the Uyghur, and Islamophobia in India. We have meetings planned with the offices of Representatives Hartzler and Morelle along with Senators Sinema, Blackburn, Peters, and Ernst so far. I suppose I am lucky to be working on a project that has broad bipartisan support, at least in terms of the genocide of the Uyghur. With the recent passage of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA), we have garnered some renewed interest in human rights in China. However, it is difficult to tell whether or not this is truly a result of renewed interest in the rights of minority groups or more in the vein of signaling opposition to the CCP. I suppose in this regard, we must be grateful for whatever gains can be made. There are parties with differing motives, but if we can appeal to each motive, we can build a coalition with a similar end result.
In the midst of this planning, to commemorate the Srebrenica genocide we hosted our second genocide panel focused on genocide prevention and next steps with Gregory Stanton, Karen Smith, Eve Zucker, and Max Pensky.
To me, the effect of digital media and social media is of both greatest interest and concern, thus I was drawn to Eve Zucker’s comments that I found to be particularly insightful and relevant. Zucker covered the Cambodian genocide, referencing the power of digital media in today’s world through a pertinent example—the alteration of photos of prisoners in Tuol Sleng during the Khmer Rouge genocide. Using tools of digital media, photographer Matt Loughrey edited photos of prisoners to make it appear as if they were smiling in an effort to “humanize” the genocide which were subsequently published by Vice. Acts like these blur lines of reality in collective memory— and more frequently as digital editing becomes progressively more realistic. It reminds me to some extent of the election of Marcos Jr. in the Philippines; it is as if the memory of his father’s horrors has been forgotten or twisted beyond recognition.
In an age in which we can preserve memory better than ever before with digitalization and massive caches of information accessible anywhere through the World Wide Web, we also face an erasure or distortion of history of epic proportions.