The widespread cognitive dissonance which saw shoppers conceptually opposing genocide, and yet continuing to shop at Zara and H&M, has today found it’s solution – buying the exact clothes you want from Zara and H&M on Depop instead.
Reports coming out of China, that British firms are profiting from forced labour at the “re-education” camps in Xinjiang, have stuck something of a spanner in the works for British fashion – which has happily ignored reports of modern slavery in Bangladesh and elsewhere for decades.
Nonetheless, the credible and continuing evidence of Uighur Muslims being tortured, forced into slave labour, and sterilised by the Chinese government has led to shoppers seeking to defer their moral guilt – by buying the exact outfits they wanted from major retailers secondhand on Depop instead.
A report from last year suggests that Zara, H&M, Adidas, and Boohoo may all be implicated in the use of slave labour for cotton picking in the region – where birth rates have fallen by more than ⅓ in just a year. The fact that Boohoo recently hosted a profitable “£1 sale” is allegedly unconnected.
This news from the world of fashion comes as the British media have increased their coverage of the ongoing genocide – elevating the issue from a level 1, “continue to ignore as we have done since reports emerged in 2017”, to a level 2 – “we should maybe acknowledge this somewhere around page 7”.
It has been suggested that the lack of intervention from the West is due to a rising fear of China – who have received no repercussions after preventing a WHO embassy entering the country to investigate the coronavirus outbreak, other than a possible aside in the next series of Spitting Image. It would seem some politicians are even going as far as to echo controversial sentiments from Xi Jinping in the press – possibly explaining Boris Johnson’s historic Islamophobia, including a notable description of Muslim women wearing Burqas resembling “letterboxes” in a Telgraph column in 2018, which saw a 375% rise in Islamophobic hate crimes in the following weeks.
Thus far, the rampant anti-Muslim sentiment of the Chinese government – who notably defended Myanmar at the UN over the Rohingya genocide in Rakhine – has gone relatively unchecked, possibly for fear of stoking further tension. The view from the squid? Maybe we should consider the historical success rate of the policy of appeasement.
