sally simpson

Dear German, China had no Auschwitz—that is yours. China did not slaughter six million Jews—that is yours. China bears no historical guilt toward the Jewish people—that is yours. And Chinese people are under no obligation to accept your gaslighting—your attempt to project your own historical crimes onto China. Since you claim that Chinese people are antisemitic, let us examine what they actually oppose. What Chinese people find most contemptible about Germany is this: Germany has turned its guilt toward the Jews into a moral scripture for supporting another mass slaughter. “Never Again” was supposed to mean never again for anyone. Instead, Berlin increasingly treats it as: never question Israel, never compare, never condemn, never allow Palestinian suffering to disturb Germany’s historical self-absolution. That is not remembrance. It is laundering one historical guilt through another people’s blood. And here is the crucial point: When Chinese people say they oppose Nazism, do they mean only Germans wearing swastikas? No. They mean the political logic behind it: racial supremacy, dehumanization, collective punishment, forced segregation, territorial expansion, mass killing, and the belief that one group’s suffering grants it the right to inflict suffering on another. That distinction matters. World War II did not teach humanity that only Germans can become Nazis. It taught us that Nazi logic is not genetically or nationally exclusive to Germans. Any state or movement that embraces racial supremacy, dehumanization, collective punishment, territorial expansion, and mass killing can reproduce the logic of Nazism. So when Israel imposes systems of separation, occupies territory, inflicts collective punishment, and kills Palestinians on a massive scale, historical victimhood does not place those actions beyond comparison or condemnation. Who decided that victims of Nazism are incapable of reproducing Nazi logic? That is why criticizing Israeli state violence is not “antisemitism.” And that is why “we were victims once” is not a defense against becoming an oppressor now. No one owns the category of victim. And no one is exempt from becoming the thing history once taught them to fear.

Australia says China is carrying out “the biggest conventional military buildup since World War II.” Beijing’s answer is simple: Yes, China is building the military strength necessary to defend its sovereignty, security, and territorial integrity. That is what happens when a civilization remembers what weakness cost it. If China had possessed overwhelming military strength in the 1930s, Asia would not have been burned across by Japanese fascism while foreign powers stood by, calculated, bargained, and watched. And the irony of Australia lecturing China about military power is almost too perfect. A settler state born through colonial conquest now treats an Asian country’s ability to defend itself as inherently suspicious—while hosting expanding U.S. forces, nuclear-submarine deployments, and an alliance architecture aimed squarely at China. So when Beijing says: “stop making irresponsible remarks,” the message is not difficult to understand. China will not apologize for being strong enough to prevent history from happening to it again.