When the world said “Never Again” 75 years ago, it was never meant to be only for the Jews. We agreed, as a unified human voice, that the atrocities that were committed by the Nazis in World War II Europe should “Never Again” be allowed to occur on the face of this earth. When we recognize the horrors that the human race is capable of every year on Holocaust Remembrance Day, we do not merely mean to do so as only a form of acknowledgement or for mourning. It is also a call for constant vigilance that we should “Never Again” let evil flourish to such a degree, like an unattended weed.

It is no secret that there are comparable genocidal actions being committed against Uyghur Muslims by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), in what some may say is a plan to attain a perfect level of ethnic homogeneity. Such actions include human trafficking into concentration camps, organ harvesting, torture, rape, vast religious oppression, forced familial separation, and other horrible crimes against humanity. These claims are not coming from conspiracy theorists or from political rhetoric; they include Deputy Assistant Secretary Scott Busby to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, BBC, NPR, PBS, the Council on Foreign Affairs, and many more reputable sources. Horrifying anecdotes and primary accounts from Uyghur concentration camp escapees are abundant and easy to find.

In response to this I have been haunted with a question Where is the outrage? Where is the global response to the horrors that we collectively banished from the Earth not even a century ago? For what purpose was the U.N. founded if not for exactly this? This is not the time for whataboutisms, to focus light on other situations around the world. This is it, this is, from what I know, the only current situation that is undoubtedly comparable to the Nazi’s Final Solution, to their hellish treatment of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and disabled men and women. There are recent reputable reports of forced human experimentation, brutal ethnic cleansing and enslavement—more and more horrid violations of what we consider human rights. All analogues to the evil that the world banded together to defeat not even eight decades ago. We cannot stay silent.

And, sadly, to stay silent is almost to be complicit. A lack of intervention in the face of such evil is not what the American flag stands for, and certainly not what the Jewish people stand for. The Allied powers were aware of the scale of the Jewish Holocaust two-and-a-half years earlier than is generally assumed, and the lack of haste to rescue the Jewish people remains a blot on world history that will never be washed clean. We should not allow hesitance to action in China become a repetition of that same horrible mistake