Some free PR advice for the Chinese leadership
(First of what could become a long series....)
Actually, this could apply to most Chinese people, since they all too commonly share the hidebound thinking and inept techniques of argumentation propagated by their rulers and their state-controlled media.
(First of what could become a long series....)
Actually, this could apply to most Chinese people, since they all too commonly share the hidebound thinking and inept techniques of argumentation propagated by their rulers and their state-controlled media.
In perusing various blogs and bulletin boards over the past few days to try and keep abreast of responses to what I am for now still euphemistically referring to as the troubles out west, I have found it depressing how often the first response of Chinese commenters is to completely ignore the central issue - what should the Chinese government's response to this situation be? - and instead disparage everybody else they can think of. The basic line of thinking is: "America does not have the moral standing to criticise us because it has done many bad things itself (slavery, annihilation of the Native American tribes, Gigli). Ditto Britain (the Raj, The Opium Wars, bodyline bowling). Ditto France (more colonial nastiness, blowing up The Rainbow Warrior, being so fucking smug all the time). And so on. And so on."
Please, guys (and, occasionally, gals), grow up. This kind of historical muck-raking is absolutely irrelevant, and reduces the discourse to the level of schoolyard name-calling.
And please, please, please (are you listening, government spokesmen?) don't ever use this line again: "No country has a perfect record on human rights."
Indeed not. But some do a lot better than others. And it is the mark of what I like to think of as a "grown-up" country that it strives to improve its human rights record, that it listens to criticism, that it is (usually) prepared to acknowledge its shortcomings and strive to address them.
When government leaders, official spokesmen, and state-run media resort to this kind of response (and they often do) - well, it just makes them look like a bunch of assclowns. Stop it!
7 comments:
But remember kids, Cuba is bad. And Saudi Arabia is good. It's a problem having a morality based foreign policy when the person in charge has the moral sense of a three year old.
Well, even the moral sense of a three-year-old is better than no moral sense at all.
And at least the US administration doesn't respond to European criticism by saying, "France, Germany, shut the fuck up! You invaded Russia, for chrissakes!" Well, not quite.
Well I'm not sure...
In a lot of ways I prefer a good, old fashioned, realpolitik approach to the bullshit we have now, which is raw power grabs dressed up in the clothes of morality.
Let's be a little more honest - Iraq has oil, Sudan/Rwanda don't. Saudi Arabia has oil, but is friendly to us (superficially, when they aren't funding terrorist attacks) so can do bad things, Iraq has oil but is unfriendly, so gets attacked.
And also to add in that there are countries which are equally oppressive, but who are too important politically/economically to be fought with...
Interesting debate. I take both viewpoints - very much so - but veer towards Froog's perspective on the basis of one word. Elections.
Okay, so we can be cynical about 'hanging chads', but at least America has a system whereby, ultimately, if someone is too much of an assclown they get kicked out. Tricky Dicky got impeached. Mao got canonised. What 'checks and balances' do they have in the Chinese 'constitution' I wonder?
I read an interesting book recently called 'Curtain Call' by Leslie Gardiner which describes his pre-fall-of-communism rambles ad lib through Romania, Bulgaria and Albania. He offered the very tentative viewpoint that perhaps communist dictatorships were not as oppressive as the propaganda we in the 'west' were deluged with might have suggested. Of course he could have been 'nobbled' by the goddammed commies (as we in the 'west' were all brought up to 'know' that propaganda was an exclusively communist device and that our newspapers printed the unalloyed 'truth') but my own minor ramblings behind the Iron Curtain in the late 1970's were nowhere near as oppressive as I had imagined. Mind you, I visited no Gulags.
On the other hand, my friend in Martha's Vineyard assures me that in the USA there is a 'sus' law that entitles a Federal officer to stop and search any person and if the latter is found in possession of a large sum of money that they cannot explain convincingly then the cash can be impounded without trial. My friend refers to it as an 'anti-black law'. How cynical.
The same friend is still laughing about the idea that in the UK we have to have a license to view a TV and that if you find gold or oil on your land it is automatically the property of the state.
Every country has, historically, certain infringements of liberty that the majority of its citizesn accept as 'normal'...and feel that they are entitled to be amazed and/or mock other countries' different restrictions on liberty. In the UK we are 'free' (hey, our police are unarmed!) but there are CCTV cameras everywhere and if the police stop you on some trumped-up charge from which you are acquitted then they can legally keep the DNA sample. Personally I feel that this is outrageous, but I gather that in Japan everybody has to be fingerprinted at age 18 or so...and might regard our system as 'liberal'.
Is there much of a difference between the Kent State killings and the Tienanmen debacle? Give or take an order of magnitude of the numbers shot and about thirty years or so? Yes, I take TBC's viewpoint completely...that sword of justice can rust so very easily in careless and/or complacent hands. And hypocrisy has no race.
However, Froog's original point is highly valid in my opinion - the people of the Middle Kingdom do seem to have an unique ability to try to throw their own shortcomings into 'perspective' by the childish slagging off of other peoples... I used to love those wonderful 1970's slogans about 'Capitalist Running Dogs' and 'Imperialist Paper Tigers'. Whatever happened to them?
America seems to have taken on the psychological mantle vacated by the British Empire - ie a fairly unconscious assumption that they are the world's 'best' with no pressing need to make a song and dance about it. China, on the other hand, persistently acts in ways that suggest that they have a collective inferiority complex - that they feel that they SHOULD be the world's 'best' but somehow just can't quite seem to make it...
The relationship between China and the rest of the world seems to be similar to that of Australia and the UK - 'they' loathe 'us' and 'we' don't even notice 'them'...
Ouch, that Australia analogy hurts.
I'm partial to the word "asshats" vs. assclowns.
Both 'asshats' and 'assclowns' have much to recommend them :-) The word 'Dolt' has a certain pithy, onomatopoeic, pejorative nature that has always appealed to me (how is the 'reading level of this blog coming on, Froog?)
I WAS going to use the analogy of the EU vs. the USA when it came to 'us' and 'them' but I settled on Australia vs. UK as my contentious bit of provocative nationalism as, actually, nobody really DOES give a toss about Australia ;-)
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