Australia’s refugee problem has attracted global attention. This from the New York Times.
US08: Tibet, the torch and the mysterious (b)east
|
By dint of bad planning, your correspondent managed to be in a city where actual news was happening, an event which, in forcing direct observation of people interacting with each other, takes all that’s essentially American out of the experience. Anyhoo, by mid morning today, thousands of people had already assembled on the San Francisco waterfront, for the midday passage of the Olympic torch. Some of them weren’t protestors, though they were hard to find among the assembled Tibetans, Burmese, animal rights activists (caged bears - the cause, not the activists), etc. San Francisco was chosen a while back as the only American city the torch would pass through, on account of its large Chinese-originated population - 20% by some accounts - and its hallowed role as the town where chop suey was invented.
Presumably it never occurred to the organisers that it was also pretty much the heart of the American new left social movements, and that if protesting gets demonstration sport status this town will be going for gold. You don’t have to bus anyone in here to get a protest quorum. The hippies have just stayed and aged; a fair majority of the panhandlers look like they were roadies for the Grateful Dead and probably were. With the Paris and London experience fresh in their minds, the organisers had already laid on maximum security for the torch which arrived Tuesday in the pre-dawn dark and was given its own guarded hotel room - and was also reported to have been provided with a hookah. Hookah! Geddit, y’see what I… never mind. Anyway, with protestors piled up along the route and pretty much taking numbers regarding disruption, the authorities basically caved, halved the route length and run time (to about 45 minutes) so that cops could line the seafront shoulder-to-shoulder. The 75 torch carriers doubled up, and the general sense of the ‘08 olympics as an embattled, contested event was achieved. God knows who to barrack for in all this malarkey. You can’t blame Tibetan protestors for doing whatever they can to deny consent to China’s assumption of consent via the Olympics, but the whole campaign is so waist-deep in hypocrisy and western triumphalism as to make you gag. The idea that prior Western Olympics have been held by virtuous nations is laughable. The modern competition was invented by Baron de wossname as a way of inculcating the military virtues he thought French youth needed in the wake of the nation’s 1870 defeat at the hands of Prussia, and most of the modern pageantry was invented by Hitler in ‘36. In ‘04 it was held in the US when they were running a brutal colonial war in the Philippines, ‘08 happened in Paris, despite their gulag of concentration camps in Algeria, Antwerp got it despite the Belgian Congo, Berlin, Moscow, Mexico City say no more – and in 1956, Australia had been helping the Brits in a brutal colonial war against Malaysian independence, counting Aborigines as fauna and testing a-bombs on them. After that it got better - the international organisation was run for two decades by Franco’s minister for Sport. Yeah, you wouldn’t want China to lower the tone, for chrissake. Even better, the cause is Tibet, the ultimate cuddly insurgency. Though movie stars et al have by and large moved on from Dalai Lama love to lecturing us about global warming from their mansions, the theme of gruesome modernity crushing a spiritual, i.e. medieval nation, continues. Aristocrats always prefer the eternal and unchanging, and hence unchallenging, to anything which suggests change and transformation, and celebrities are simply the aristocrats de nos jours. Of course they like theocracies. The Tibetans undoubtedly have a right to self-determination, and many of the protestors are sincere, but the effect of campaigning on this issue, rather than putting more heat on their own government for, like, occupying a big chunk of West Asia, is simply to be enrolled in a broader Western campaign against China, part of a long-term process to construct it as “the enemy” for a time when the struggle for resources heats up to conflict further down the road. The ambiguity of this is no better expressed than the way in which the Darfur issue, and China’s support of the Sudanese government, has been drawn in. Whatever nastiness is going on in Darfur, pointing the finger at the Chinese is about African oil and who gets it and nothing more. God knows what any African must think when they’re told by the West that Chinese involvement in the continent is a threat to their human rights. The Australian today reprints a piece by the aptly-named William Pfaff which suggests that the Chinese reject such criticism because they have no equivalent words for “liberty” (or quite possibly chop suey) and react harshly to criticism out of a sense of innate Chinese superiority. Yes, how different they are to Europeans. Protestors and supporters slugged this out on the route the torch was to run – it was put in a bus almost before it had got started and taken to another part of the route almost immediately. As the authorities scoped the number of protestors, they further cancelled the closing ceremony of the run, which was rescheduled to a secret location. To be fair to the SF protestors — aside from a few archaic anti-communists who mixed uneasily with the rest — most of them seemed to be anti-Iraq War as well, to judge from the buttons that all but obscured several of them. Steve, an ageing “child of hippies”, told me that “I’m against you know, oppression everywhere. Doesn’t matter man. I was out marching against the war, I’ll march against this.” But didn’t the anti-China protest have a touch of the military humanitarian attitude that guided Iraq? A degree of racism? “Man you can’t worry about being called a racist.” Hmmmmmmm. Beth, a younger, better turned out protestor, didn’t worry either. She kinda was a racist. “I’m a Buddhist, that’s how I became aware.” Aware? Of everything? “I feel like the Chinese are kinda, I dunno, jealous of the Tibetans. I think there’s a lot of bad energy going on.” Oh yes, it was San Francisco alright. It must be said the pro-Chinese protestors were more on message, at times sounding like an embassy press-release. “They do not tell the truth about Tibet. The Tibetans lie about China,” Jian told me. What did her friend think?: “The Tibetans do not tell the truth”. Ah. Meanwhile, all three presidential candidates are towing a very careful line on the mysterious (B)east. China-bashing helps all of them - McCain for a general idea of western supremacy, Obama and Clinton to outflank each other with committed Dems in the remaining primaries. The only thing tempering their humanitarian ardour mindfulness is the fact that China owns their country’s ass. |
|
|
16 Comments
Couldn’t agree more, Guy. When the US incarcerates more of its citizens per capita than any other nation and is continually at war to maintain its standard of living, it would seem to be a matter of the pot calling the kettle…something. And anyway, is it not a good idea to be in conversation, and in friendly competition on the sports field,with China, while defending the rights of protesters to make their point, as George argues? After all, with their meteoric development of coal-fired power stations, ably abetted by the coal farmers of Australia, we’d better start talking - fast. They hold our future in their hands.
I have a more recent source…10/4/08. go to “Risky political game…” by F. William Engdahl.
http:www.globalresearch,ca/index,php?context=va&aid=8625
The cold war really never went away, it is just more sophisticated.
Sad, jaded, head up your own *rse. Nothing racist in protester quotes except your own tendentious wanky faux moral superiority. Democracy only exists through the exercise, like yours on any subject or government. It’s an absolute outrage you talk down to readers (yeah like me) and people in SF who call for a fair go for Tibet. You’ve lost YOUR humanity. And your joke about reporting real news by mere accident is totally stale. Get real. You would be whining about civil liberties in a nano second if you tried in mainland China but because you take the contrary view by comparison with the overwhelming consensus in the West seems to suggest you are in fact playing the angles, maybe for an invite like career Lefty Meredith Burgmann recently in her report on New Matilda recently to North Korea. Pathetic sanitising of 2 million dead in their murderous famine of the late 90ies. Another dictatorship like propped up like … Beijing, like Burma. No sense of timing, no perspective here …
I am also in SF. I did not see a mention of the air war.There were two light planes with banners pro China. Tibet will always be part of China and go Beijing go Olympics.There was also plane with SF supports Tibet and a pro Burma banner on a fourth aeroplane.What a great city.The athletes got to run the Torch the Chinese suporters ,who seemed to outnumber protesters, waved flags and the protesters highlighted the plight of Tibetans. If only we could be so tolerant in other parts of the world. I was inspired by the lack of an authoritarian insistence on the torch goes through the pre-specified route no matter what !
Gifted writer injured by toppling weight of own baggage? It’s 2008, the IOC//Big Capital (including US) handshakes with China Inc, racketeers both, so a select few get rich, and bugger most everyone else and their environments (which is where I buy in especially). Beijing and IOC parade the torch seeking feedback, and they got it sincerely. What’s more the whole Olympic raison d’etre today is leveraging a goal in this case China engagement with open societies. So let’s do the open society thing not confected hangups. My 15cm of Sydney 2000 clippings in 2000 on all the ‘drugs, bribes, lies and arrogance’ shows how free press works. Enough of the sophistry. The real price of Beijing Olympics is a major injection of democratic critique, without fear or favour. By all means contrast the history of the western empire govts to China in terms of hypocrisy, and current geopolitik rivalry but that’s not the civil society ngo’s so why exactly are you falsely conflating the two?
Many of the comments here serve no more than to indicate the role China now plays in bucking up jaded Western political morality - a replacement for invading Iraq now that that undoubted disaster has lost all capacity to reassure us that we’re the good guys.
Most instructive in this respect is the justification of the British/Australian role in the Malayan war (called an emergency, so that British plantation owners wouldn’t lose their Lloyds insurance claims). This was an attempt to create a pseudo-independent client state, waging a vicious war against anyone inconvenient to British interests, and including the summary execution of insurgents and civilians, in which Australian troops participated.
Clearly fondness for the empire on which the sun never set (and the blood never dried) dies hard, as does our ability to swallow ideology whole.
I agree with Tom McL. Well done Guy, you could have said that you see human rights hypocrisy in many places but instead managed to obscure the important point to something verging on Doublethink. D minus.
By the by it’s arguably a false distinction to say China Inc is not in Iraq by proxy. Because where Iran’s interests go, so does China which has a US$70 billion oil supply deal with Beijing. Hence China conveniently shot a ‘faulty’ weather satellite out of space last January 08 to demonstrate to the US they didn’t buy their contemporaneous (bogus) ‘Gulf of Tomkin’ gambit in the Arabian Gulf getting very close to an excuse to bomb Iranian military facilities. The message was clear - we can knock out your international spy/communication satelillites to protect our oil supply. The USA returned the demonstration favour a few weeks ago on the (bogus) claim their faulty satellite was a pollution risk (from a country that happily tests nukes and DU filth everywhere in Bosnia, Gulf War 1 and 2. Conclusion - in the great game of oil for geopolitik economic survival/superiority China is riding Iraq like every other vested interest. What a f*cking complex nightmare. Drive one to drink - tea!
You say Australia helped the Brits “in a brutal colonial war against Malaysian independence”. It was a counter-insurgency campaign that Britain conducted AFTER it announced in 1949 its intention to grant Malayan independence and during which it gained the overwhelming support of Malays, Indians and later the moderate Chinese against the misnamed “Malayan Peoples Liberation Army” (which was overwhelmingly Chinese). Elections took place in 1952 and independence came in 57 - some war against “Malaysian” independence! Malaysia didn’t even come into being until 1963, when Sabah, Sarawak and Singapore joined Malaya).
Maybe the Palestinians need to get a torch too?
I’ll wager the West Papuans are hoping Indonesia gets the 2016 Olympics!
Lucky for the Timorese in 1975 that they didn’t have any British plantation owners insured by Lloyds. God knows what would have happened.
Now in Tibet the Tibetan people is not even half of the population. So if we allow the Tibetan people to self-determine and allow Tibet to be separated from China, why dont all White Australians also sail back to Europe and return the land to the aboriginal people? Oh maybe even better when White Australians leave they give all their property to the aboriginal people for the past use of THEIR land?
I think those White Australians yelling out for Tibet Independent are like Hollywood Stars, who live in big mansions, calling for reducing CO2 emission…
Guy, you win gold for clear thinking. Once it became clear that the CIA master-minded the 1952 Tibet uprising , the Colorado training camp for Tibetan terrorists, and that D.Lama was on the CIA payroll, also its role in taking over a Chinese communication satellite for the F.L.Gong for a week, all bets are off for the Chinese. These skunk works do nothing for the Tibetans and they are the ones that suffer. I think the protesters should go to Tibet and fight the Chinese themselves and and not make things more difficult for the local Tibetans.
All interesting and no doubt contentious grist but the fact is there is no free press or freedom of religion in Tibet or Beijing, and the Olympics is about opening up. As cynical and wicked as the USA and its No Such Agency/Office of Strategic Services has been in every cold war proxy forum the world over (at least 50 countries including Australia) we get to see the pictures, debate here on the event du jour being th eapproaching Olympics biggest circus every 4 years. That’s the point. Central Chinese Govt must become an open society just as Watergate closed down Nixon. As for the terror bogey man story running today readers may want to inform themselves by looking at the SBS interview here of visit to Australia: “INTERVIEW WITH REBIYA KADEER” 5th March 08 http://news.sbs.com.au/dateline/interview_with_rebiya_kadeer_542091
That’s what an open democracy can do for yer, may it always be so here. Our birthright.
Agree with Michael. About time you came home Guy. You’re starting to lose it.