TELL me what comes to mind as you watch footage of what’s going on inside China?

We see images of prisoners in identical uniforms, kneeling, blindfolded, shackled. They’re on a railway platform. Black-clad soldiers herd them on to trains.

The prisoners are Muslims, ethnic Uighurs. There’s evidence and claims that Uighur women have been forcibly sterilised by Communist Party doctors. There’s evidence and claims of torture and rape. One million have been sent to “re-education camps”. We have no idea what’s happening to these people inside this Chinese gulag.

I ask again, what comes to mind as you watch footage of what’s happening to fellow human beings inside China?

A totalitarian state has targeted an ethnic minority. Now soldiers are taking them away in trains to camps. We’ve seen this before. Our grandparents and great-grandparents certainly saw this before.

What comes to my mind as I look at images emerging from China is the same thoughts that must come to every rational mind. It’s impossible not to think of Germany in the 1930s, of Nazi concentration camps and round ups of Jews. It’s impossible not to think that something terrible is happening. Something that the world must respond to. We cannot fail to respond – if we do we’ll be judged by history. A blind eye is no excuse.

It’s impossible to read and see what’s going on inside China and not make these most dreadful of historical comparisons.

And if it’s impossible not to see shades of 1930s Germany in present day China, then it’s also becoming impossible not to see shades of our own failings in the 1930s when it came to confronting Nazism, being echoed now in 2020.

We look back on our ancestors, the people of the 1930s, and see heroes who faced down Hitler – and indeed that’s true. But we forget that the people of the 1930s, here at home, and in the other democracies of the western world in Europe and America, came late to their heroism. Far too late.

For years, as Hitler took power, then consolidated power and finally built a totalitarian and murderous regime, Britain and America practised a wilful form of blind denial. Even implacable opponents of Hitler thought that the stories of what the Nazis were doing to the Jews couldn’t be true. No-one, not even Hitler surely, could be engaged in such crimes, they thought, and said. Bad things were going on, for sure, even terrible things – discrimination, violence, arrests – but it couldn’t be mass murder, they said. It couldn’t be genocide in the 20th century, they thought.

Our best intentioned ancestors – from just a few generations ago – were terribly wrong. These are our grandparents and great-grandparents. They went on to risk their lives and give their lives to defeat Nazi Germany – but when it came to the truth about the concentration camps, they were too blind to see for far too long.

When war broke out in 1939, it was too late for six million innocent human beings. If allied powers had faced reality sooner would it have changed such an historic tragedy? We’d watched, we’d read, but we’d also doubted and we’d waited and waited.

Even throughout the war, there was a reticence to admit what was happening. There’s a book called London Has Been Informed, which tells of how Polish and Jewish escapees from Auschwitz sent reports of Nazi death camps to Britain. Allied leaders couldn’t, or wouldn’t, believe it – the information wasn’t revealed to the rest of the world.

It took until 1945, and a global war of total destruction, for the allies to finally learn the truth – or rather to accept the truth. It took allied soldiers discovering mountains of the dead as they liberated Nazi death camps for the Holocaust to become an historical truth – even though everyone had seen what was happening from 1933 onwards.

We in the western states are currently engaged in a protracted bout of navel-gazing in each individual nation when we should be lifting our eyes up to the rest of the world. Here in Britain and Scotland we’ve had our eyes locked on Brexit and Scottish independence. It’s not that these issues aren’t important, or that the majority of the public have cut themselves off from other issues – but these are the matters which dominate. They block out global issues which are far more important.

If we are indeed living through some great crime committed by China against its Uighur minority, yet all we do is think of our own petty issues, or worse post some meaningless platitude on social media that we stand with victims of oppression, then shame on us for the rest of time. If we deny the evidence of our own eyes, or concoct some false equivalency or engage in partisan whataboutery, then God help us.

A good way to gauge the interests of a nation today is to look at the websites of national newspapers and broadcasters. There’ll be a box somewhere telling you about the most popular stories. Every day it’s the stuff of petty domestic politics. A row between Nicola Sturgeon and Boris Johnson deemed more important than events which will mark history forever.

A century from now Brexit and Scottish independence will mean little. A millennium from now the human race will still be thinking about the Holocaust. Will they also be thinking of China and the Uighurs?

Of course, there’s a first step that can be taken. China has brought this suspicion on itself. If Beijing rails about being tarnished with echoes of Nazi Germany it has no-one to blame but itself.

One initial way to establish the truth is to send a delegation from the Red Cross to the Chinese camps, and open the gates of these gulags to reporters from across the world.

I, for one, would like to take the opportunity this column affords me to ask both the Chinese ambassador to the UK Liu Xiaoming and Chinese President Xi Jinping to allow journalists like me into the camps.

Let reporters, and medics, and observers from overseas inside so we can see what is happening, and tell the world the truth. Until then, China will simply look like a tyrant nation carrying out its great crimes in secret.