by Giulio Meotti
The big German brands – banks, car manufacturers, chemical giants, electronics companies – made extensive use of forced laborers from occupied Eastern Europe and Jewish slaves from concentration camps in World War II. Siemens allegedly admitted to using at least 80,000 forced laborers who, it is said, “was seen as the only way to make up for the labor shortage” in the Hitler years.
Now Siemens CEO Roland Busch is lobbying against the European Union’s plans to impose an import ban on products made from Chinese forced labor, the Times said. This is despite his company’s mission today which says: “We have a zero tolerance approach to forced labor, slavery and human trafficking.”
Herbert Diess, the CEO of Volkswagen (another company that compromised itself with Nazism), also defended his company’s commitment to the Uyghur region of China, praising its “values in Xinjiang, including employee representation, respect for minorities and social and labor standards “.
Sahra Wagenknecht, heterodox essayist and economist of Linke, the party of the German left, is right when in her book Die Selbstgerechten (the hypocrites) punish multinationals such as Unilever, committed to changing the name of “gypsy sauce”. Because they use “diversity” as a distraction weapon while doing business with the most ruthless regime on earth.
“After the war, and recently in the 1990s, when German companies feared the collective lawsuits of former slave laborers, the logic was: we had to do it, the Nazi state put pressure on us to contribute to the war effort and ‘they were scruples being pushed aside as a matter of national duty, ”comments The Times. “Now the Chinese slaves are needed to avert the prospect of catastrophic global warming that has the better of human rights. And it seems no less cynical ”.
The green is providing the Chinese with a very powerful moral cover for their state violence.
“Almost all solar panels sold in the European Union originate in the China-oppressed Xinjiang region,” writes a Politico survey. “Everyone knows what is happening in China and when the facilities are based there you have to accept that there is a high possibility of forced labor being used,” said Milan Nitzschke, president of EU ProSun, an alliance of solar companies. Most solar panels are based on a vital raw material: silicon. Johannes Bernreuter, a polysilicon market analyst, tells the Telegraph that 80 percent of the world’s polysilicon comes from China.
It is not just a German problem. Elon Musk’s Tesla has just opened branches and showrooms in Xinjiang, “because wealthy Chinese people who drive clean vehicles help save the planet, so that’s okay,” jokes – half seriosusly – the Times.
And basically it’s okay, pecunia non olet. Except that companies like Siemens and Wolkswagen in their sites say they are very committed to race and rainbow.
The late Chinese dissident Harry Wu spent 19 years in Chinese labor camps, where he was locked up in 1957 after Mao launched the “one hundred flowers” policy for intellectuals to criticize the party. A trap and Wu fell right into it, denouncing the Soviet suppression of the uprising in Hungary. The book by him Laogai. The Chinese horror was a veritable geography of pain, of institutionalized physical and moral violence.
Wu compared the Chinese camps to Nazi concentration camps. The term “laogai” is a Chinese acronym which means “re-education through work”. He remembers the “Arbeit macht frei” at the entrance to the Nazi camps.
It is much easier and cheaper for large Western companies to flaunt neutral pronouns or blame Trump as “a symbol of racism and exclusion” (as Siemens CEO said) than to face a regime that holds us in its grip, to say the least.