I ran into this pro-Burma rally in Manhattan yesterday. Photo taken on 77th Street between 5th and Madison:
Funnily enough, I later ran into an anti-Scientology rally in front of the Scientology Center on 82nd Street. Yesterday was a good day for rallying, I suppose. (The weather was nice, anyway.) Both were small, very tightly controlled, mostly polite rallies behind those blue police barriers.
And thanks for playing nice this weekend. I didn’t have to work too hard after all.
I’ll be away for the weekend, so behave yourselves. Note that there may be some delays in comment posting, since I won’t be available to rescue comments from the moderation filter. However, my editorial backup support team (my daughter) will log in and tidy up from time to time.
I see this morning that the situation in Burma is growing more desperate. The United Nations and a few other aid organizations are getting some supplies and food into the country, but so far not nearly enough. Here is a list of aid organizations accepting donations for Burma, and here is an update on what was happening with aid efforts as of yesterday.
Today the Olympic torch, having been extinguished and re-lit several times in France, is in San Francisco. I haven’t yet heard what’s going on with it today, but protests are expected, and the IOC is considering scrapping the torch relay in the future.
You probably know that the government of China blames His Holiness the Dalai Lama for causing unrest in Tibet. You probably know this is bullshit. However, the people of China hear only the Chinese government’s side of the story, and they tend to support their government.
Here in the U.S. , wingnuts and the crackpots who lead them continue to promote the idea that either Iran, or al Qaeda (the original one), or both conflated together in John McCain’s addled brain, are the chief culprits behind the violence in Iraq. You probably knew this is bullshit, and if you don’t, Dilip Hiro and John Juan Cole explain it for you.
Republican presidential candidate and war hero John McCain continues to be confused about connections (unlikely) between al Qaeda and Sh’ia Iran. Michael Goldfarb thinks we’re all being picky.
This is getting beyond ridiculous. Sometimes people make mistakes, even liberals–like when Arianna Huffington, in the midst of attacking McCain for just such a gaffe, confused Iran with Syria. Does she really not know the difference between the two? Of course not.
Memo to Goldfarb: Arianna Huffington ain’t runnin’ for President. And McCain keeps making the same mistake.
Clinton supporters believe the Clinton campaign is struggling because media are mean to Clinton. The fact that Senator Clinton’s campaign keeps making big, fat, newsworthy mistakes is not, of course, a factor behind the negative press. Yes, there is some piling on, but she’s giving them so much to pile on about. (See also “Why the Clintons Held Onto Mark Penn.” Interesting read.)
And, as I remember, until the Clinton campaign started losing, the same press had built the Senator and her campaign team into the Most Awesome and Absolutely Unbeatable Political Juggernaut of All Time.
Ezra Klein writes that conservatives have a creative scapegoat for recent economic meltdown — liberals caused the subprime mortgage crisis:
The new line we’re hearing is that the financial meltdown was really the product of the Community Reinvestment Act, a piece of legislation from the late-70s that required federally-insured banks to lend throughout the areas from which they take deposits, including poor neighborhoods, which were being systematically excluded from credit. The legislation, by all accounts, worked. Now, however, conservatives are trying to argue that it’s behind the crisis: If the CRA hadn’t been pushing these banks to make all these unsafe loans, then the birds would still sing and Alan Greenspan could still start each morning by being anointed with the oil of the purest, youngest, olives.
As Robert Gordon shows, however, this is crap.
Well, yes.
Anyway, is there anyone out there actually taking responsibility for something?
The insanity among the Clintonistas continues.
See Benjamin Wallace-Wells for more on how the death of Martin Luther King devastated liberalism.
Tibetans are not the only minority group facing brutal oppression by the government of China. Charles Cummings writes on the treatment of the mostly Muslim Uighur people of Xinjiang:
Uighurs have been jailed for reading newspapers sympathetic to the cause of independence. Others have been detained merely for listening to Radio Free Asia, an English-language station funded by the US Congress. Even to discuss separatism in public is to risk a lengthy jail sentence, with no prospect of habeas corpus, effective legal representation or a fair trial. About 100 Uighurs were arrested in Khotan recently after several hundred demonstrated in the marketplace of the town, which lies on the Silk Road.
And what happens to these innocent Uighur men and women once they land up in one of Xinjiang’s notorious “black prisons”? Amnesty International has reported numerous incidents of torture, from cigarette burns on the skin to submersion in water or raw sewage. Prisoners have had toenails extracted by pliers, been attacked by dogs and burned with electric batons, even
cattle prods.In Typhoon, I relate the terrifying true story of a prisoner in Xinjiang who had horse hair inserted into the tip of his penis. Throughout this diabolical torture, the victim was forced to wear a metal helmet on his head. Why? Because a previous inmate had been so traumatised by his treatment in the prison that he had beaten his own head against a radiator in an attempt to take his own life.
This is the reality of life in modern Xinjiang. Quite what the Chinese hope to gain from their inhumane behaviour remains unclear. According to Corinna-Barbara Francis, a researcher with Amnesty’s East Asia team, “the intensified repression of Uighurs by the Chinese authorities is in danger of contributing to the very outcome that China claims it is warding against - the radicalisation of the population and the adoption of violent responses to the repression.”
The government of China commits hideous atrocities on anyone it decides it doesn’t like. Of course, we’re hardly in a position to claim the moral high ground any more.
But ethnic minorities in China’s outlying areas, like the Uighurs and the Tibetans, are treated particularly harshly. As I said in “Rebellion in Tibet,” the Chinese are making every mistake every imperial power ever made.
That’s why it stuns me when some online publication that claims to be for “peace and social justice” publishes apologies for China such as this. Unbelievable.
The headline here is bleaker than the one on the other blog, where I explain why western powers have their hands tied and cannot — well, will not — help Tibet.
From what I can piece together from a distance, it appears that during the violence that broke out in Lhasa two weeks ago, a mob of mostly young Tibetan laypeople did kill and injure Han Chinese. However, I don’t believe monks were involved in that.
His Holiness the Dalai Lama has been in exile for 49 years. My understanding is that younger Tibetans may still revere him, but they don’t necessarily listen to him.
There’s a good background article on Tibet in the Wall Street Journal. Basically, Chinese government officials are idiots.
It should be no surprise that beatings of monks and closings of monasteries naturally stimulate civil unrest, or that civil unrest, spawned in this way, can turn violent.
Why aren’t these simple truths more obvious? Phuntsog Wanggyal, a Tibetan now retired in Beijing who for years was a leading Communist official in Tibet, has observed that a doctrine of “anti-splittism” has taken root among Chinese government officials who deal with religion and minority affairs, both in central offices in Beijing and in Tibet. Having invested their careers in anti-splittism, these people cannot admit that the idea is mistaken without losing face and, they fear, losing their own power and position as well.
Their ready-made tag for everything that goes wrong is “hostile foreign forces” — an enemy that justifies any kind of harsh or unreasoning repression. When repeated endlessly, anti-splittism, although originally vacuous, does take on a kind of solidity. Careers are made in it, and challenging it becomes impossible.
Sounds a lot like the Bush Administration. Who needs reality when you’ve got a good talking point?
It’s CNN’s headline, folks — “Al-Sadr in trouble, Iraq headed for meltdown.” The Independent has another alarming headline — “Iraq implodes as Shia fights Shia.” And if you need further alarming, read Juan Cole.
Professor Cole says that violence is breaking out in many parts of Iraq, including Baghdad and Najaf, the latter of which is often mentioned in President Bush’s Iraq success myths.
But even though Iraq is either melting down or imploding, or both, the warbloggers are curiously not on top of this so far. In fact, the only thing worrying the gang at the Weekly Standard site is a trip taken to Iraq in 2002 by some Dem senators that was bankrolled by Saddam Hussein’s government. Nothing going on in Iraq now is, apparently, interesting to them.
In other news, this morning about 30 monks disrupted a carefully controlled tour of Lhasa being conducted by the Chinese government for foreign tourists. The resistance is not completely crushed, it seems. You can read about it on the other blog.
I’m a tad baffled as to why The Moderate Voice chose to feature this apology for the government of China, except that it disses Hollywood icons Mia Farrow and Steven Spielberg.
Apparently Farrow has been critical of China, and Spielberg withdrew as an artistic adviser to the Beijing Olympics because China was not doing enough to pressure Sudan to end the ongoing atrocities in Darfur.
Here’s a 2004 Washington Post article explaining the China-Sudan-Darfur connection. Very simply, China is investing heavily in Sudan’s oil industry. Because they need Sudan’s oil, China is helping to prop up a rogue regime in Sudan. As part of their deal, China set up weapons factories in Sudan. The weapons plus revenue from the oil are finding their way into the hands of militia who have been carrying out mass slaughter in Sudan’s western region, Darfur.
This has been going on for five years, so one might have assumed Spielberg ought to have figured things out sooner, but never mind. This is not about Spielberg. It’s about China.
Poor, misunderstood China is also helping to prop up the military junta in Burma (a.k.a. Myanmar). China is not alone; the junta also benefits from association with the U.S. multinational oil giant Chevron, the French oil company Total and a Thai oil firm. Unfortunately for the monks and laypeople of Burma, their country is a rich source of natural gas, much of which is being piped into China. And if you want to know what life is like in Burma today, please read this heartbreaking story in the National Catholic Reporter.
Barbed wire surrounds pagodas, and large numbers of Burma’s monks are either exiled, imprisoned, or “disappeared.” There are rumors of mass slaughter of monks. And then there’s this:
An economic symptom that Peters has seen develop over the past 10 years are “pint-sized monks and nuns” — children not older than 6 or 7 years who are left at Buddhist monasteries by parents unable to care for them. At the monasteries, the children will be educated and “they’ll go on the alms rounds and the public will feed them,” Peters said.
In Myitkyina, a priest who runs an orphanage told Peters that parents will come to Mass and leave a child behind. “Parents have to decide: Which of the seven kids are we leaving in the pew on Sunday?” Peters said. “It’s the mother’s job to pull the kid aside and say, ‘After Mass, when we leave, you stay. Stay in the pew, don’t leave.’ What does that do to a child’s mind, for the rest of his or her life saying, ‘What did I do that you chose me?’ What does that do the woman who made that choice?”
During last year’s “Saffron Revolution,” many nations called on China to apply pressure on the Burmese junta. China was silent.
Basically, China is willing to supply arms to and support any dictatorship, no matter how vile, as long as they’re getting oil and gas in the deal. And why is this sounding familiar?
I’ve been blogging all week at the other blog about the atrocities in Tibet. I’m not sure most westerners really appreciate the situation in Tibet. I have a background article here. I argue here why the government of China, not His Holiness the Dalai Lama, is entirely at fault for the unrest in Tibet.
I don’t know what Mia Farrow said about the government of China, but if anything I bet it wasn’t harsh enough.
Update: See also The Peking Duck.
Hale Stewart on the Bear Stearns situation:
The Federal Reserve is scared shitless.
Sort of gets your attention, doesn’t it? Hale understands financial stuff and explains it better than I can, so see him for details. See also Paul Krugman.
I’m still watching the Tibet crisis on the other blog. Per my agreement with About.com I cannot cross-post, but today I wish I could. Chinese bloggers are weighing in, and they do not understand why the Tibetans are so ungrateful for being liberated. You’d think they’d be greeting the Chinese with flowers and candy, after all. Oh, wait …
The Chinese are really cracking down now. They are going house to house in Lhasa, arresting people and parading prisoners through the streets. I suspect the protests will either taper off after today, or they’ll get a lot worse. See also the Peking Duck, here, here and here.
Marc Ambinder catches Bill Kristol in a major flub. See also Balloon Juice.
Scott Helman reports for the Boston Globe that Republican voters are coming out for Clinton.
For a party that loves to hate the Clintons, Republican voters have cast an awful lot of ballots lately for Senator Hillary Clinton: About 100,000 GOP loyalists voted for her in Ohio, 119,000 in Texas, and about 38,000 in Mississippi, exit polls show. …
… Spurred by conservative talk radio, GOP voters who say they would never back Clinton in a general election are voting for her now for strategic reasons: Some want to prolong her bitter nomination battle with Barack Obama, others believe she would be easier to beat than Obama in the fall, or they simply want to register objections to Obama.
Now that McCain has sewed up the Republican nomination, Republicans in remaining primaries could really do some mischief. Pennsylvania has a closed primary, meaning only registered Dems can vote in the Dem primary, which should help. And I’m sure the pro-Clinton bloggers who have alleged there’s something sinister about Obama’s appeal to Independent and moderate Republican voters will take note and … oh, wait. They won’t. Never mind.
Oh, and happy Saint Patrick’s Day. Image above copyrighted — © Jeannel | Dreamstime.com
While I’m busy blogging the Tibet crisis on the other blog, see Pastor Dan on the Jeremiah Wright/Barack Obama flap.
Thanks to RingSurf | Join? | Nominate? | Questions? |
