Because images from the camps are missing, the world reacts without empathy to the brutal oppression of the Uyghurs by the Chinese state. This is unexcusable.
"In order to know, it is necessary to form an image," writes the French philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman in "Images Despite Everything," and there it probably already begins, the precarious dependence on images. "To make an imagine," the phrase refers to the concept embedded in our language that we need images in order to understand something, more than that: in order to be quite sure, in order to know that something has actually happened. What cannot be seen exposes itself to doubt. There may be other sources of information, written documents, testimonies of witnesses, independent and distanced or affected and involved - but still, despite all technical manipulability, images have a special authority. As if they gave a narrative or memory the seal of evidence.
Perhaps the reverse, the lack of images, explains the unforgivable lack of empathy with the Uyghurs in China, of whose brutal denaturalization and mass internment the public has known for years - and yet which remains politically unresponsive, as if no picture could be taken of the horror. As if all the reports from survivors who were able to escape from the prison camps labeled by the Chinese as "vocational training centers" were not enough, as if satellite images of the huge detention facilities were not enough. As if it were enough to speak of "unimaginable suffering" in order to put it immediately into the field of the unimaginable, so that it does not bother anyone. read more