Long-standing Australian IOC board member Kevan Gosper has condemned protesters who disrupted the London and Paris legs of the Olympic torch relay, saying they were fuelled by a hatred of China.

…

They just take their hate out on whatever the issues are at the time, and that hate against the host country is being taken out on our torch,” he said.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/beijing2008/gosper-says-protesters-hate-china/2008/04/08/1207420368388.html

Laughable, isn’t it?

Important as Eliot no doubt finds it to turn every issue into a political point-scoring fest, some might prefer to take the Tibet situation and its ramifications seriously.

Hang on? Who brought up Nixon’s visit to China again? Hang on, here it is..

patrick says:

On a slightly off topic note, G. Henderson in the SMH a couple of weeks ago was trotting out his old chestnut about how the left embraced the murderer, Mao. Of course he neglected to mention Nixon’s visit. The intersting thing is that now it’s the Right that’s embracing the oppressive, totalitarian regime in Bejing. Lots of stuff about “n” millions lifted out of poverty etc.

- at Apr 8th, 2008 at 9:52 am

I think we might call a halt to Eliot’s Chomsky quote-a-thon, entertaining as it is. Because it has bugger all to do with the actions of the Chinese government, responses by Western governments, the situation in Tibet, the Olympics or the protests.

Important as Eliot no doubt finds it to turn every issue into a political point-scoring fest, some might prefer to take the Tibet situation and its ramifications seriously.

Indeed, a recent article in the China Quarterly — which is hardly a pro-Red Chinese journal — compares Chinese and Russian communization to the very great credit of the Chinese communization, precisely for these reasons, pointing out that its greater success in achieving a relatively livable and to some extent just society was correlated with the fact that these methods involved much less terror.

http://www.chomsky.info/debates/19671215.htm

This is at the very height of the cultural revolution, mind you. Fawning all over Mao’s “just” and “livable” society.

This sort of guff was blurted out continually by imebeciles like Chomksy for years in a massive sustained effort to legitimise the remime internationally at the diplomatic level.

Chomsky “is the most frequently quoted person on the planet”, apprently. “The Einstein of linguistics, the Darwin of our age, the world’s leading intellectual, the anti-American extremist”, blah, blah.

http://www.chomsky.info/onchomsky/20031206.htm

Well, for a while there he was the wstern world’s chief propagandist dupe for not just mao but Pol Pot too.

The transparently venal hypocrisy of Rightist world leaders is irrelevant. What we need to discuss is the blatherings of deluded academics. Who make of us all hypocrites. Or something.

And the material impact of this support by the “Left” was …? Be practical. ranting about the misguided opinions of historical figures is so much hot air when you fail to consider the boost that the visit of the (Rightist) leader of the free world at the time gave to the “failed Communist experiment”. These were not the words we heard from RN at the time, indeed he insisted the China was a “great nation”. Where you guys get it wrong is that you actually think that the opinions of the aforementioned French intellectuals and the like have some sort of impact on historical events. Nothing could be further from the truth.

China is an important example of a new society in which very interesting and positive things happened at the local level, in which a good deal of the collectivization and communization was really based on mass participation and took place after a level of understanding had been reached in the peasantry that led to this next step.

- Noam Chomsky, December 1967

http://www.chomsky.info/debates/19671215.htm

There you go. Maybe Nixon was so impressed by Chomsky’s account of Mao’s China, he just had to go and see for himself.

It appears that it’s OK to have an oppressive one party state that ignores the rule of law and maintains a strict, closed ruling elite if everyone’s got an iPhone.

This is Communist China we’re talking about, isn’t it? Because I’m sure it was for a couple of decades there “OK to have an oppressive one party state that ignores the rule of law and maintains a strict, closed ruling elite” before Nixon visited the place so long as it was strictly Communist.

You know, like it’s just dandy if “to have an oppressive one party state that ignores the rule of law and maintains a strict, closed ruling elite” so long as it’s headed up by Fidel Castro. Or Ho Chi Minh.

China is for all intents and purposes one more failed Communist experiment degenerated into an outright Fascist statist centrist tyranny.

And the Left, which supporte it for decades, while perfectly entitled to criticise China is hardly in a position morally to criticise the west for not opposing China sufficiently.

I mean, do you think we’ve just entirely forgotten the last 90 years of Leftist support for regimes just like that of Mao Tse Tung, including China itself?

No as I understand it his admiration ran on a much more personal level. Although I think it could be argued that Nixon’s enthusiasm for the opening to China allowed many on the Right to suddenly get over their animosity and turn a blind eye to Mao’s past “indiscretions”. Still I expect you are one of GH’s hard right left over warmed up cold war warriors.

cheers

Patrick.

Yep, and whatever the Australian left says now is of course *hypocrisy* because something Claude Simon and Luigi Nono said decades ago indicates the left’s *real* beliefs. Whoever they were.

…but what Nixon did decades ago is, of course, of contemporary relevance to Conservative criticism of China today.

Claude Simon was the 1958 Nobel laureate for literature, so I’m not surprised you haven’t heard of him.
Luigi Nono is, of course, the avante-garde composer and acolyte of Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse and other Frankfurt School marxo-blatherers.

Here’s a bet – by the time the Torch reaches Beijing, it will be absolute lore on political fringes that the USA “backed” and “armed” Mao Tse Tung – and American backing for the Kuo Ming Tang and Chiang Kai Check will never again be mentioned in latté society.

A small price to pay for the time honoured marxisant privelege of continually re-writing its own history in order to excuse its implaccable record of failure.

Fwiw, I second what Nabs said about positive Politics.

And the left is forever branded with the shame and horror of Marcuse’s financial arrangements for the support of his research.

Really?

patrick

says:

On a slightly off topic note, G. Henderson in the SMH a couple of weeks ago was trotting out his old chestnut about how the left embraced the murderer, Mao.

Oh, that old chestnut.

Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Claude Simon, Luigi Nono, Edgar Snow, the Ausralian communist Wilfred Burchett, stupid Brett Whitley and many other leftists openly expressed their admiration for Mao’s ‘Cultural Revolution’.

Noam Chomksy not only endorsed the moronic Leninist orthodoxy of Mao Tse Tung but even infamously attempted to defend Pol Pot, whom Mao greeted as a hero in 1975.

While Marcuse blathered on about the virtues of the “cultural revolution”, he continued to accept grant funding from the Ford Foundation, adding typical marxisant hypocrisy to their usual brief of simple minded stupidity at the theoretical level.

Nixon, as far as I am aware, never endorsed the “cultural revolution” or China’s domestic policies

And they liked him back; they were pall-bearers at his funeral.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Norman