Despite at times being disappointed that our nation isn’t living up to its promise, most Americans - left, right and center - regard this country as the greatest in the world. But how often do we hear such sentiments from the foreign press, let alone the Middle East or even Israel?
“Many believe that today, as a new global system forms, China, Brazil, India, Russia and China have an undeniable role to play. … The tremendous economic growth of these powers does come along with political influence. … But can we expect these countries to exercise the role that the United States plays at the global level, or in clearer words: Do these countries possess the audacity to forcefully intrude on international affairs, like the United States does?”
“America’s great generosity and sacrifice, both in money and in lives, is well-known. No nation in history has offered its sons to death and drained its coffers for the sake of others the way the United States of America has. ‘Courageous intrusion’ requires a spirit that stands apart from industrial growth or agricultural development. Today’s newly-industrial states don’t presently have this spirit, nor will they have it in the future. Because such a spirit requires so much money and so many souls that if any of these nations had such courage, its coffers would quickly be emptied and its economy would collapse, never to rise again.”
August 21st, 2008 By MICHAEL STICKINGS, Assistant Editor
In China, it seems, Olympics or no Olympics, capitalism or no capitalism, it’s probably best not to protest, not to challenge the totalitarians who run and rape the place:
BEIJING — Two elderly Chinese women have been sentenced to a year of “re-education through labor” after they repeatedly sought a permit to demonstrate in one of the official Olympic protest areas, according to family members and human rights advocates.
The women, Wu Dianyuan, 79, and Wang Xiuying, 77, had made five visits to the police this month in an effort to get permission to protest what they contended was inadequate compensation for the demolition of their homes in Beijing.
During their final visit on Monday, public security officials informed them that they had been given administrative sentences for “disturbing the public order,” according to Li Xuehui, Ms. Wu’s son.
Mr. Li said his mother and Ms. Wang, who used to be neighbors before their homes were demolished to make way for a redevelopment project, were allowed to return home but were told they could be sent to a detention center at any moment. “Can you imagine two old ladies in their 70s being re-educated through labor?” he asked. He said Ms. Wang was nearly blind.
That’s right, China has sentenced two women in their 70s to “re-education through labor” not for protesting but for wanting to protest the government for demolishing their homes.
What a charming country. I’m so happy they have the Olympics, a global platform that serves to legitimize their controlled-market totalitarian regime.
Mao might not go for much of what China has become, a technological superpower with capitalist leanings, but he would still find much to like in how it treats its people.
The Cultural Revolution, after all, isn’t over yet.
I wrote yesterday about the conflicting ambitions and hatreds in play here (which Russia is manipulating to further its own ambitions). The situation is an immense tangle of conflicting ambitions—in the form of the desire for land and resources— and furious ethnic hatred.
As I noted yesterday, Georgia is now bringing a lawsuit against Russia for ethnic cleansing:
“Today, the Georgian ambassador to the Netherlands filed a law suit to the International Court of Justice called ‘The state of Georgia against the state of Russia’ because of ethnic cleansing conducted in Georgia by Russia in 1993 to 2008,” Lomaia told Reuters.
The ICJ confirmed Georgia’s filing, in which the country accused Russia of violating an anti-discrimination convention during three interventions in South Ossetia and Abkhazia from 1990 to August 2008. Georgia requested the court to order Russia to comply with the convention, cease all military activities in Georgia, including South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and withdraw its troops, Georgia said in a filing released by the ICJ.
[Updated here, with further clarification] We’re Americans. We like to divide up opponents in any conflict into Good Guys and Bad Guys. Since reality tends to be more complicated than that, we can easily be misled by politicians and media pundits whose personal agendas are served by telling us which are the Good Guys and which the Bad Guys.
Russia has agreed to “stand down” (NYT); and Georgia has apparently filed a lawsuit against Russia in in the International Court of Justice for ethnic cleansing. (Newsmeat; Examiner.com) But Russia made similar claims against Georgia when it went into South Ossetia. Is either side telling the truth? Are both?
Both sides have traded accusations of genocide and ethnic cleansing.
Russia has accused Georgia of killing more than 2,000 people, mostly civilians… The claim couldn’t be independently confirmed, but witnesses who fled the area over the weekend said hundreds had died. (Examiner.com)
During the course of trying to fit together the pieces of the media jig-saw (speaking of trust, lack of), a number of quotes snagged my attention.
Yesterday, Vladimir Putin said:
“The ferocity in which the actions of the Georgian side were carried out cannot be called anything else but genocide, because they acquired a mass character and were directed against individuals, the civilian population, peacekeepers who carried out their functions of maintaining peace.” (BBC News Key Statements)
But Bush said on Aug. 11:
“Russia has invaded a sovereign neighbouring state and threatens a democratic government elected by its people. Such an action is unacceptable in the 21st Century. The Russian government must reverse the course it appears to be on and accept this peace agreement as a first step toward solving this conflict.” (BBC News Key Statements)
It’s not as if I had ever gazed into Putin’s eyes and seen his soul. On top of that, I grew up during the Cold War years. I don’t trust him. Sadly, based on hard experience, I don’t trust Bush either. If it were up to me—which it is not—I’d probably rate their souls about equally. (Fortunately for them—this is me speaking as a Quaker now—God’s empathy, understanding, and mercy in judging any given soul infinitely exceeds mine.)
Anyway: Putin. Is he just making up these allegations of ethnic cleansing to justify Russia’s action against Georgia?
In what is becoming an increasingly-tragic and bizarre coda to the Bush Administration, Russia has steamrolled through South Ossetia and is reportedly on its way to the Georgian city of Gori. Russia has effectively achieved its military objectives by repelling Georgian forces from South Ossetia and from Abkhazia. Where the war goes from now is anybody’s guess.
But the implications so far are clear: the US, NATO and the EU have done nothing to stop the Russian advance. And Georgians increasingly feel betrayed by the West’s refusal to aid Georgia in this crisis. Considering the promise of the Bush Administration after Georgia’s Rose Revolution in 2003, which put pro-Western President Mikheil Saakashvili in power, Georgians feel the US has failed to live up to its obligations. After all, Georgia sent 2000 troops to help the US in Iraq. Why can’t the US return the favor and stand up to Russia?
There are several reasons why the US has issued little more than vague pronunciations.
To understand this, we need to look at the South Ossetian War through three different, but related lenses.
Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who exposed Stalin’s prison system in his novels and spent 20 years in exile, has died at 89, Russian media say.
The author of the Gulag Archipelago and One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich, who returned to Russia in 1994, died of either a stroke or heart failure.
After 70 years, the United States has re-opened its embassy in Berlin - and despite local complaints about the architecture - Germans are taking it - along with the impending arrival of Barack Obama - as a sign of renewal. As Jochim Stoltenberg puts it in this article from the Berliner Morganpost, its an opportunity to renew German-American relations and for the United States to ‘leave behind the anti-terrorist fortress that was forced upon it’ after September 11.
“America’s reputation and appeal has suffered badly in recent years. That was due to political as well as military decisions that have been taken - and of course, a president whose sense of mission and often radical rhetoric was unsettling to many Germans. … From this embassy a message must be sent forth - having nothing to do with its disputed architecture: America is leaving behind the anti-terrorist fortress that was forced upon it, is opening itself up again, is displaying its flag in Germany again and is aggressively promoting understanding of its role as last superpower.”
How significant is it that Kim Jong-il has agreed to destroy his nuclear facilities in a place called Yongbyon? According to a man that knew him well - not very.
According to Hwang Jang-yop, the highest-ranking defector in North Korean history - a man who was once Kim Jong-il’s teacher and the former Chairman of North Korea’s Supreme People’s Assembly, the cooling tower and facilities that the North destroyed was “junk,” but nevertheless, the Dear Leader wouldn’t have the nerve to use a nuke in the first place.
“The Yongbyon nuclear complex is an obsolete piece of junk … But the Yongbyon nuclear reactor has already produced enough plutonium to make nuclear weapons. Indeed, it has already produced all the [nuclear weapons] it needs.”
It emerged in the East Asian press on Sunday that China is seeking to arrange a meeting between George W. Bush and North Korean despot Kim Jong-il, which would take place during the Opening Ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
According to this news account from the South Korean newspaper the Daily North Korea, several Japanese publications published the details over the weekend.
“Japan’s Asahi Shimbun reported that Taku Yamazaki, the former secretary general of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party told reporters, ‘Chinese Vice President Xi-jinping asked Kim Jong-il to attend the Olympics during their meeting on June 18. … If Kim attends the opening ceremonies, both President Bush and Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda would respond favorably. It would provide a good opportunity for a discussion on denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula.”
“one of purposes of Jinping’s visit to Pyongyang was to bring President Bush and Kim Jong-il together for a meeting at the Olympics. … A high-ranking Chinese official has been visiting Pyongyang on a regular basis to encourage Kim Jong-il to attend. If things go well, relations between the United States and North Korea would improve and China’s national prestige as host of the Six Party Talks would also be enhanced.”
June 16th, 2008 By DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, Assistant Editor, TMV Columnist
You might remember my reports on the monk’s, nun’s and Burmese people’s protests in September of last year, how my contacts in Yangon (Rangoon) dried up within days as cpu’s were confiscated, cell phones smashed, communications wires cut, and various deeply good souls arrested, many children, men, women beaten, many murdered by Than Shwe’s evil orders. It was agony and remains so, not to know the fates of those specific contacts/blogger/photographers who were bravely and desperately funneling information and photos out of Burma to literally anyone who would receive them.
I pray for highly endangered bloggers and journalists and radio and broadcast press people everyday. But after such brutal crackdowns as the smug dictator Shwe’s in Burma, for instance, I dont know the storytellers’ whereabouts, if I should pray for them on earth, or perhaps they have been killed and are in heaven. So I pray for them wherever they might be, that they be given all mercy possible, that they be made invisible at just the right moments, that they somehow know we know; that they can be assured that their courage work did not fall on stones.
I would like a monument to The Unknown Bloggers of the World. I would. I am deadly serious. Those who risked their lives to tell the story. Those who gave their lives to tell the story before they were cut down.
Here is more on the hugely disturbing free-form arresting and harming of bloggers, a practice that despite public knowlege, continues without effective intervention… In this report from University of Washington, a reported 64 bloggers arrested for publishing their views in 2003, to a 192 bloggers reported arrested in 2007, the numbers only increase. It is poignant to note that ‘reported’ numbers does not include those who are maimed, disappeared, murdered. Nor does it include, as the article states, those arrested in place just like Burma where the government gives the evil eye to anyone who asks after the welfare of any citizen.
From BBC
…A University of Washington annual report….
More than half of all the arrests since 2003 have been made in China, Egypt and Iran, said the report.
Citizens have faced arrest and jail for blogging about many different topics, said the World Information Access (WIA) report.
Arrested bloggers exposed corruption in government, abuse of human rights or suppression of protests. They criticised public policies and took political figures to task. Read the rest of this entry »
While passions have risen in America over the course of the Presidential primary season, another huge political story is unfolding — in Africa, in Zimbabwe. And Time has a compelling interview with an opposition leader there. Here’s the intro and a small part of it:
Zimbabwe lurches deeper into crisis as President Robert Mugabe’s government menaces the opposition and its supporters in the walk-up to a second round of elections at the end of June. TIME’s Megan Lindow spoke by phone to Mugabe’s chief political rival, Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), in an interview arranged by MTVu, a college-oriented music network from MTV. Tsvangirai — who expressed his gratitude to MTVu, saying its help “will contribute to the awareness of the crisis in Zimbabwe internationally” — spoke after being detained twice in a single day by Zimbabwean authorities. The opposition leader sounded somewhat tired after his ordeal, which ended late Thursday night, but he was nevertheless focused and determined.
Here’s the first exchange:
You were detained twice yesterday, and Tendai Biti [secretary-general of the MDC] is now being charged with treason. What does this mean for the MDC and the runoff?
Tsvangirai: I think the facts are obvious — that the intention is to decimate our campaign, to slow down our mobilization and to frustrate the leadership. It is obvious that they realize they have lost the people, so the only thing to do is to frustrate the opposition.
What do you say to those who are calling for this runoff to be scrapped, claiming that there’s no way the election can be free and fair, and urging you to form a joint government with Mugabe?
This is democracy on trial. Do people want democratic change, or do they just want accommodation of a loser? Why did we go into the election if that was the case? We could easily — before the election — have negotiated a government of national unity without having had to subject people to this violence. Now my view is that there is no basis that the runoff should be scrapped, because no one has got the legal constitutional power to scrap it. The conditions are not free and fair; in fact, the conditions are so hostile for the opposition that talk of an election under these circumstances is ridiculous.
On Memorial Day, Barack Obama told a group of veterans, “My grandfather marched in Patton’s army, but I cannot know what it is to walk into battle like so many of you.”
He went on to talk about an uncle, “part of the American brigade that helped to liberate Auschwitz” and, returning from the war, spent six months in an attic: “Now obviously, something had really affected him deeply, but at that time there just weren’t the kinds of facilities to help somebody work through that kind of pain.”
Since then, the GOP gaffe police have been gleefully pointing out it was the Russians who freed Auschwitz and that Obama’s mother was an only child, causing his campaign to scramble and admit that he should have said “great uncle” and “Buchenwald.”
Sloppy as he may been with the words, Obama had the music right, as a Patton army contemporary of his ancestors can attest.
In the spring of 1945, we were sweeping through Germany and Austria. Along the way, we saw stragglers in ragged stripes, dazed gaunt figures wandering the roads and being picked up by Army trucks. We didn’t know the names of the places they had come from, but we knew who they were, and the sight of them was an indelible reminder of why we had been fighting.
Most of us didn’t spend any time in attics after coming home, but our lives were changed forever by having seen what human savagery can do.
Obama was trying to evoke and honor that pain. What he said might not win any prizes on a quiz show, but it was true to the spirit of Memorial Day and human decency.
Many Americans are unaware that most of the world considers Washington’s decades-old blockade and general treatment of Cuba to be - if not a war crime - certainly a case of human rights abuse.
For those interested in sampling the general mood, this article written by a former member of the Mexican Congress is a good place to start.
“As he has done repeatedly, U.S. President George W. Bush - so discredited in his own country and in some ways bordering on mental retardation - persists in harassing the Cuban people under the ridiculous pretext of advocating liberty in that nation, which has for almost half a century endured terrorist attacks financed and supported from the highest spheres of the U.S. government.”
“Years before they popularized the concept of weapons of mass destruction so hypocritically applied against the enemies of the empire (Saddam Hussein is the best illustration of this), U.S. leaders used such weapons against the island. From U.S. military laboratories along the Panama Canal, originated biological cultures destined to contaminate pig farms, destroy Cuban foodstuffs and reduce resistance from the people with hunger. What is was, then, was an attempt to punish Cubans for supporting the Revolution. In a broader context, what better example of the use of weapons of mass destruction is there than the U.S.-imperial economic blockade of Cuba?”
“although the conditions imposed by economically powerful U.S. interest groups will try to bind the hands of the next president of that country, the truth is that with the approach of almost-Democratic-candidate Barack Obama, the situation can turn and give way to a stable relationship between the two countries. Rebuilding U.S. relations with Latin America is necessary for us and for the U.S. itself, and this will be impossible without rebuilding relations with Cuba. Already John McCain, in an attempt to discredit Barack Obama, has accused him of lacking expertise in international affairs. This remains to be seen; but the truth is that the Republicans - and especially Bush - are expert only in leading their people into wars they cannot win.” Read the rest of this entry »
The article warns, “A failure to maintain vigilance against the ‘liberty’ and ‘democracy’ promoted by the imperialists may result in grave and irrevocable consequences.”
“This they do in an effort to realize their ambition for global domination the easy way. This is why revolutionary peoples must intensify ideological education. The ideological and cultural poisoning of the imperialists must be prevented, and the socialist cause defended.”
With the Olympic Games just a few months away, what will Beijing do with all of those pesky Western journalists running around the country flouting the regime’s restrictions on a free press?
If this article from China’s Global Geographic Timesis anything to go by, the 2008 Olympic Games are likely to result in the mass jailing and expulsion of a majority of Western-trained journalists there.
“Western journalists turn press conferences into battlefields - an ideological contest. Some Chinese-conducted meetings have been seen by a minority of Western journalists as places to stage political performances. They take every opportunity to pose questions that express their own political views and never miss a chance to spread their own prejudices, even going so far as to call the Chinese people’s love for their country ‘nationalism,’ and charging that the spontaneous patriotic displays of Chinese young people are controlled behind the scenes by the Chinese government. In some cases, Western media outlets have used news topics as “traps” that are virtually impossible for our officials to guard against.”
“The reason that they dare spread such nonsense about Chinese issues is that they don’t have to pay a price for it. … Therefore, the best way of putting a stop to the impunity of Western journalists in regard to Chinese issues is to force them to bear legal and social responsibility for their actions. ”
“Within the international community today, vilifying China is in vogue and fabricating lies about China has become the common practice of certain Western media outlets. We must change our strategy and adopt a more proactive attitude and put into effect legal measures to defend China’s national and societal interests and protect the fundamental rights of the people. … if a few Western journalists knowingly violate the law, incite the breakup of China, encourage the actions of terrorist elements, maliciously invent news stories or spread gossip to confuse the public, they should receive the most sever punishment allowed by law.” Read the rest of this entry »
Did CNN host Jack Cafferty overstep his bounds as a TV commentator when he called Chinese-made products “junk” and referred to China’s un-elected rulers as “goons and things?’ As this report from China’s tightly-controlled Xinhua news service makes clear, Beijing’s rulers decreed that he had, and have ultimately brought CNN - that supposed bastion of the modern Western media - to heel …
May 15, 2008
People’s Republic of China- Xinhua - Original Article (English)
CNN President Jim Walton has apologized for insulting remarks made by CNN commentator Jack Cafferty on China, Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said here on Thursday.
“On behalf of CNN I’d like to apologize to the Chinese people for that,” said Walton in a letter to the Chinese ambassador to the United States, Zhou Wenzhong, according to Qin.
Walton also said, “CNN has the highest respect for Chinese people around the world and we have no doubt that there was genuine offense felt by them over the Jack Cafferty commentary.”
In early April, Cafferty said during a live broadcast that Chinese products were “junk” and that the Chinese were “basically the same bunch of goons and thugs they’ve been for the last 50 years.”
As a result of complaints from China, CNN in April issued a statement saying “it was not Mr. Cafferty’s nor CNN’s intent to cause offense to the Chinese people, and CNN would apologize to anyone who has interpreted the comments in this way.”
READ ON AT WORLDMEETS.US, along with continuing translated foreign press coverage of Beijing’s campaign against the Western media.
