While we (or most of us at any rate) were asleep, the Guardian’s Eleanor Schor was liveblogging the progress of the Olympic torch relay/rally through San Francisco. Or rather, on a boat circumnavigating San Francisco.
Watching from Kiwiland, No Right Turn asks a pertinent question:
Is it a relay if no-one can see it?
According to the Guardian’s liveblog, the torch has since returned to land, a significant distance from its original route, and it may not even finish at the original location. So, they have no protestors - but no spectators either. So much for taking the torch to the people…
Update: According to the Students for a free Tibet liveblog, one of the torchbearers pulled a Tibetan flag, and had the torch taken away.
Meanwhile, Kevin Rudd has got up the goat of the leader of the Tibet Autonomous Region, Qiangba Puncog:
Asked about previous criticisms by Mr Rudd, Mr Qiangba, a Tibetan Chinese, said: “Australia and other countries should have a better appreciation and understanding that people in Tibet are now enjoying democracy and wonderful human rights protection and those remarks are totally unfounded.”
Whatever. They can’t expect anyone outside China to take that seriously. Obviously it’s part of their typical Maoist-era information control tactics, and to warn Rudd not to press them too hard on human rights. It’s to his credit that he’s undaunted.
Image from The Age.
I must say, I’ve been impressed with Rudd’s approach, and his balls. I doubt this has ever happened to China before - a Mandarin speaking, Sinophile Western leader telling them how it is in Tibet.
They must want to like him - he’s perfect PR for them on so many scores. Won’t be surprised if he punches above Australia’s weight in the bilateral relationship.
It’s quite a combination - a Western leader straight-talking in Mandarin on human rights in China. I’m impressed as well.
“It’s quite a combination - a Western leader straight-talking in Mandarin on human rights in China. I’m impressed as well.”
Well it sure beats… pre this year, plus ten, boom boom… when we had a Prime Minister who spoke bullshit as a first language.
“Update: According to the Students for a free Tibet liveblog, one of the torchbearers pulled a Tibetan flag, and had the torch taken away.”
Hehe…that’s pretty cool. On a more serious note…although I’d like to start by saying that I am totally for the independence of Tibet from China, I can’t help but think that going out and protesting for a ‘Free Tibet’ (except in Tibet or China itself) is a bit politically ‘meh’ and a bit politically disorienting. Sort of a like a soft option that even Right-wingers can join in on and has the potentiality of the pro-Tibetan protester being seen to lend political support to the right-wing, pro-US, ‘the West is all shining beacons of liberty and everywhere else is horrid Commie/Islamic etc dictatorships that we have to go in a clean up’…like Iraq, for example.
There are plenty of places in this world that are struggling for independence (Palestine springs to mind) but would you see the level of support, not just from the public but from prominent public figures for struggles like that don’t have the support of Western imperialist governments..?
Chav your point is good one. I quite expect that Andrew Robb and the new champions of human rights will claim a victory for themselves in pressuring Rudd to speak up.
[link]
Well well, Chav and I find common ground at last.
I’m enthusiastically ambivalent about torch-protest. As a symbol of (admittedly saccharine) Olympism, it’s a much better as a political stick to make the Chinese Government live up to the claims of international friendship, equality between peoples, free competition, world peace and kittens. How difficult is it for people to say “if you want to talk the talk, walk the walk” instead of going at the flame with a fire extinguisher?
As Tibetan independence goes, I agree with Chav in saying that those supporters of an independent Tibetan State have it easy when the bogeyman is a Communist Government; but consistency would require them also to support independence for a lot of other non-nations. Palestine is the obvious comparison of a state which by Tibetan standards deserves to exist; so does Kurdistan, so does the Basque Country, so does Spanish Morocco, so does a Tamil State, frankly, so does South Vietnam. Tibet’s claims to sovereignty are pretty weak by international standards—oppression does not make for viable autonomy as a nation-state.
Opposition to the Chinese Olympics is on much safer ground when it’s based on opposition to the total lack of human rights for Chinese, well, anywhere in China. It’s easier to maintain a positive grounding for a movement, for instance in support for Chinese trade union rights and religious emancipation, than simply opposing an Olympic symbol because of one nation’s use of it.
Thank Joe2. Its actually quite sickening too to think of the the Liberal Party, the open party of big business, going on about ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ in Tibet and by extension China while their ‘mates’ at the head of Rio Tinto, BHP et al stitch up incredibly profitable business deals with the Chinese elite, deals that are based on the super-exploitation of Chinese workers, an exploitation enforced with the brutal denial of basic rights to trade union and freedom of association.
Actually, ditto the ALP, come to think of it…
Well it sure beats… pre this year, plus ten, boom boom… when we had a Prime Minister who spoke bullshit as a first language.
[snort!]
Burning underpants of the Olympic flame
“If I were the Chinese bureaucrat responsible for guarding the sacred Olympic Flame, the place I’d worry about most is Australia. Just before the Melbourne Olympics in 1956, a student pretending to be an Olympic athlete ran up to the mayor of Sydney and presented him with an “Olympic torch” consisting of burning underpants in a can nailed on top of a chair leg. He was gone before they realized it was not the real thing.”
[link]
LOL maybe we could do something like this in Canberra
Lefty E says:
Now all he has to do is ask nicely so we can sell them iron ore on the spot market again - and to please not buy out BHP Billiton. Seeing as they are now doubtless in a very receptive frame of mind, I bet they’ll be putty in his hands.
At least this time he’s not upsetting the Japanese. You don’t suppose he intends to drop by India on the way home, do you? Make it a hat-trick?
By the way, how funny was the fiasco with the stupid Torch in San Francisco this morning - dodging from cameras and running inside warehouses and jumping on boats to get away from the media and protesters.
Next thing you know it will be rushing through the back door of hotels and racing the wrong way up one-way streets in cars with Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan.
Can you imagine what its like being that Chinese bureaucrat looking after the flame as it travels around the world ? That’s got to qualify as close to the worst job in the world at the moment.
I can’t figure out why the Chinese seem so unprepared for all this. Its not as though using the Olympics for political purposes is something new. The Koreans did it 1988 against their own government. Anyone got an explaination for this?
The following are the thoughts of an American blogger called Jon Brown, who has stated more eloquently than I could what has been on my mind regarding the political forces behind these protests, and regarding the “forgotten” history of Tibetan Buddhism.
“It’s really sad to see how uninformed people are about the realities of Tibetan history, and especially about how repressive and undemocratic the Buddhist theocracy in Tibet really was. There have been many repressive regimes in history, but few have so systematically and violently enslaved their own people as the Buddhists who ran Tibet for so long. The Dalai Lama does not want democracy or human rights in Tibet. He wants to re-establish the theocracy so that the Buddhist priests can continue to live off the sweat of others. He’s a religious fundamentalist, the same as all of the other fundamentalists. But then some of you may see him arbitrarily picking his own successor through the process of “reincarnation” as democratic.
The real reason for these so-called “protests” is that American corporations are quite upset that the Chinese government is strongly moving ahead on the human rights issue, and has recently implemented a law that would give workers the right to join unions, and that would require the global corporations to pay living wages and meet health and environmental concerns. This interferes with the desire of American corporations to use Chinese slave labor to make their crap. So, naturally they seek to discredit the Chinese government, as they do any government in the world that has the strength and the will to stand up to their imperialism and fascism. That’s why the CIA began these “protests” (and that is documented). Not out of any concern for human rights, which we all know Americans don’t care about. It’s about power, and maintaining American hegemony, and making sure no other nation is in a position to challenge the US. And it’s more than a little sad that so many people who think of themselves as progressive are helping Pelosi and the other corporates in their schemes. (Pelosi, and most of her congressional buddies, have investments in corporations that do business in China, but somehow you don’t hear about that.)
But go ahead, and help trash the Olympics, one of the few venues where the entire world can gather together in peace. The right-wingers hate all global institutions, including the Olympics, and would love to see it destroyed. Boycotting the Olympics will have absolutely no effect whatsoever on the Tibetan situation, and in fact will probably make it worse as these attacks will only force the Chinese government to take a hard-line. But it will certainly help American corporations continue their domination, and ensure that the Chinese workers do not receive fair wages or basic rights, which is the primary goal of the right-wingers behind these “protests.”
I think we all know that this all about distracting attention from the US’s infinitely worse human rights record and its abominable and endless wars on humanity. For the record, you are five times more likely to be in prison if you are an American than if you are a Chinese. But then, we wouldn’t expect anyone to protest America’s massive incarceration of people of color, probably the worst human rights problem in the world. Of course not. That would be accepting responsibility for what their own country is doing, which Americans won’t do. They prefer to attack other countries, and insist that they live the way we tell them to live, while ignoring their own problems.
And please note that the western nations that are leading these “protests” are in fact the largest arms dealers in the world, and responsible for most of the violence and human rights violations in the world.”
It’s not always easy to draw meaningful comparisons between countries when discussing human rights. Though Noam Chomksy makes this point about the USA:
That surprised you, didn’t it?
WTF?
Double WTF?
Triple WTF? China whips most other countries today for arms production and trafficking.
4xWTF? When they’re unions independent of the State, that’ll mean something.
Charmaine Liam (did I get that right?), silkworm hates teh religion, so he probably googled “tibet theocracy” to come up with that, errr,
informativeloony rant.Or maybe they’re kinda Last Superpowerish except without the anti-Maoist Maoism?
“The Dalai Lama does not want democracy or human rights in Tibet. He wants to re-establish the theocracy so that the Buddhist priests can continue to live off the sweat of others. He’s a religious fundamentalist, the same as all of the other fundamentalists.”,
That may be true, but is doesn’t mean he will have his way. I find it hard to imagine that the Tibetan people ( I don’t accept the CIA conspiracy theory concept of the riots unless I have proof) who, if they do win their independence against a world superpower, will meekly submit to the dictates of a exploitative theocratic ruling class.
This reminds me (ahem) of Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution, where he predicted that the Russian workers would not be satisfied with ’simply’ overthrowing the Tsar and then meekly go home while their bourgeois ‘betters’ calmly established a capitalist republic that continued the war and ground them down through exploitation. Rather, the workers wanted ‘not just some bread, but the whole bakery’ and indeed were forced to expropriate the capitalists both economically and politically by virtue of necessity.
As for the Olympics being one “one of the few venues where the entire world can gather together in peace.”, you don’t have to be a pro-US Right-winger to see that as a fantasy. The Olympics encourage an orgy of nationalism and are really just a war by proxy.
That particular bucket of discarded ideology’s on this thread, Kimberella.
It’s not true, anyway, Chav, if you look at what the dude says. Once was a theocracy, etc, and I’m highly suspicious of almost all the claims about its theocratic past because they’re rarely independent of an explicit or implicit pro-China position.
“…the Chinese government is strongly moving ahead on the human rights issue, and has recently implemented a law that would give workers the right to join unions, and that would require the global corporations to pay living wages and meet health and environmental concerns.”
Silkworm, I find this quite surprising. I am assuming workers have been granted the right to join ‘official’ government controlled trade unions? Do you have further information on this? It doesn’t seem to stack up in that I’m sure the Chinese ruling class aren’t particularly keen on having to page decent wages given that low wages seem to be one of the linchpins of their economic success…
Oopsy, Champagne Liam!
Getting back to the topic, I also have some concerns about the element of Orientalism/pr in the Tibet campaign, but it’s worth recalling, as I said a while back, most of the younger activists actually in Tibet have effectively rejected the Dalai Lama’s message, for better or worse.
[link]
Typical of the theists to argue ad hominem against the atheist/secularist, rather than address the issues of substance he posted.
Liam did. It’s not substance, it’s nonsense.
I have read some accounts (can’t find them now at work) that are relatively agenda-free, Kim. Sure, the theocracy probably sucked for most people, but
a) it was in the 20s, lots of places in the world were no better back then whilst being models of enlightenment (or thereabouts!) now.
b) No one serious is advocating a return to said theocracy, it couldn’t happen even if they wanted it.
c) the Dalai Lama himself isn’t advocating independence per se, he just wants a deal like hong kong.
I hate how people set up these strawmen. “Oooo, they had public floggings in 1783, if we give an inch, it floggings all round!!!” What Tibet _was_ like, is not the issue, what Tibet is like now is the issue, and now, it’s bad.
(note, I know you aren’t putting up those arguments!)
Silkworm, would you are to post a link to the piece you’ve just quoted? I’ve been looking for it for a little while and google does not seem to be able to find it anywhere. I’d be most interested, like Chav, for evidence of any kind of independent Chinese trade unionism.
When it comes to the Left’s response to clear evidence of human rights abuses in Communist countries, no matter how terrible, it’s as if they have some special gene inserted which compels them to acknowledge such abuses only if they can also provide some worse, countervailing demonstration of human rights abuses in the USA.
Take
comparison of China’s and the USA’s human rights in which he says “you are five times more likely to be in prison if you are an American than if you are a Chinese.”
Even if that was true, it wouldn’t alter this following fact:
And check out this little statistic from the same report:
They were busy, weren’t they? “Solving” 3,000 “crimes” in two days. And rounding up nearly 20,000 people in just six. In just one Province.
Now, since Jon Brown likes statistical comparisons (albeit uncorroborated), perhaps he’d like to compare just Hunan’s or Sichuan’s crime busting efforts with this:
There you go John. Nazi Germany’s entire pre-war Gestapo record of 40,000 convictions is equal to just 12 days police activity in Sichuan Province alone.
Now guess how many people were executed by the Nazis between 1933 and 1939?
Chav, wage costs have risen by about 40% in China due to improved labour protections - which is one reason why the inflation/deflation export thing is now working differently. Changes to labour laws are a reflection of concerns about social stability and the legitimacy of the CCP, basically. But silkworm’s buddy is putting quite a lot of spin on it.
[ahem] …would you be able to…
patrickg, noted! I’d also agree with what you say!
On freedom of association and labour law in China.
Shorter link - there’s isn’t any.
[link]
Eliot, you might like to refine your methodology for your attacks on teh left (losing the Nazi Germany comparisons might also be a good idea). The stuff silkworm posted has just been greeted with either scepticism or dismissal by every subsequent poster on this thread.
“Teh left” is not one big hivemind. Sorry to disappoint.
Kim says
Really? I would have thought any wage growth in China would be due entirely to the very robust rates of economic growth that country has been experiencing.
For example:
Improved labour protection?
The same article reports this:
So, who gave you your information, Kim? the Chinese “unions”?
The Australian Financial Review, Eliot!
Article a few weeks ago reporting both Chinese and Western manufacturing companies whinging about increased labour costs. It could be wrong. I don’t claim to be an expert.
As I suggested to you just before, sometimes there are a number of positions on an issue which don’t fit neatly into left/right slanging matches. The reason why I posted a link to a Hong Kong legal source on the inadequacies of China’s labour laws is because I think free association and unionism are good things, and China doesn’t have them!
You might also have noticed that all my posts and comments on this issue have explicitly or implicitly pinged the Chinese regime as responsible for human rights abuses in Tibet.
No. I’ve read him.
>
Chomsky’s painfully over-quoted by every anti-American these days but his enthusiasm for US democracy is constant. I think he’s a bit of a bore; over-simplistic, tends to demonize his own country’s imperial tendencies hence getting things wrong: eg Cambodia. Etcetera…
>
But he praises the open society and the Right forget this or don’t understand it in the first place.
Kim says:
Sorry, I got carried away. It’s the smell of napalm in the morning…
Just getting back to the item about the economic windfall to Chinese workers from their labour unions, here’s something they should get on to straight away:
I thought the bloody Nurses Union was slow off the mark.
“
There’s actually no point discussing Chomsky. I think he’s a tedious and often tendentious writer. The only reason why we are talking about him is that Eliot thinks that TEH LEFT CENTRAL COMMITTEE has inscribed each of his paragraphs in our secret manual or whatever.
Shouldn’t you guys be gushing over Kevvie. Shouldn’t his Fuck You CCP of the PRC - Anachronisms!
./
>
Stop wasting all this energy getting people pointing the right way. And Tibet and Taiwan are not part of China if they don’t fucking wannbe. Pull your head in!
>
Hear hear Kevvie and I thought he had the balls… Probably not a good idea to say that here - [link]
>
Um
>
But here’s to the PM. He’s done a good deed. True he may have fucked up our resources industry a tad. But there are more important things than money. Like living in a world where the government doesn’t sell your organs.
Kim says:
It’s more like they’ve put a little microchip down at the full sub-dermal level that they activate remotely. C’mon, admit it.
Yes, Eliot. China is just one counter-example to the maxim that productivity gains are the worker’s only friend. You can’t have a freed economy without freedom of association and the rule of law.
Like I said in the post, Adrien:
As to labour rights in China, I recall that Howard was more keen on bilateral free trade deals than multilateral ones - where labour rights and wages were on the agenda. It’s been civil libertarians and unionists who’ve been highlighting China’s record on labour rights, not big business and conservative parties.
“Now guess how many people were executed by the Nazis between 1933 and 1939?“.
And after 1939..? Oh no, don’t tell me we have a Holocaust denier on our hands!?
“You can’t have a freed economy without freedom of association and the rule of law.”
I thought China proved the opposite, that economic liberalisation can be achieved without the same happening in the political sphere?
Well, it’s not really economic liberalisation as liberals would understand it - state ownership is still important, and China doesn’t make the grade on all the sacred cows of “property rights” and “rule of law”. A lot of the attention on ameliorating working conditions (and - nb - Eliot - I’m not saying all is rosy by any means) comes from an internal struggle within the Communist Party over the degree of marketisation and the need for measures to ensure social “harmony” - which they’re big on, as Ruddy noted.
I reckon the head of the Chinese equivalent of the KGB is in very hot water with the Politburo right now.
Of course, he (or his juniors) might well have been warning of this, and been ignored by powers that be who expected the foreigners to lay flowers in the path of the torch bearers…
I might add that the Chinese regime has its own specificity - as it were. The economic/political liberalisation dichotomy is really a generalisation from other “post-Communist” studies which were and are highly ideological. It took a long time for people in the West to realise that China wasn’t part of a monolithic Soviet bloc. It appears to have escaped many analysts’ attention that China isn’t what Russia is now - basically a liberalised economy with an authoritarian regime but something sui generis. I think it would be useful to discount the “end of ideology” style analyses when talking about China.
Warning! Danger, Will Robinson! This is just one of those find-a-penny-pick-it-up types of snark ya just couldn’t resist, not any real daggers at dawn…
Liam: “I’d be most interested… for evidence of any kind of independent Chinese trade unionism.”
They have a union, Liam! It’s called… (drumroll) The Chinese Communist Party! Remember all that crap about “workers of the world”? This was what they meant!
Or, as an old friend of mine used to bitterly remark… “Hey, workers of the world! Remember those chains we all used to talk so much about? Well, guess what? We’ve still got ‘em! And look, they still fit! Isn’t that fucking incredible?”
/Okay, now Snark-o-tron dials set back to “low”…
These protests against China with the torch have been very interesting. (And not only because it’s such a refreshing palate-cleanser to see lefty protesters denouncing someone other than America for a change…)
As a sort of connoisseur of certain types of complex symbolic irony, I think the protesters have scored an amazingly deep ironic image-complex, by causing the Olympic Torch, symbol of lofty and peaceful ideals, to have to be guarded by a detachment of poorly-disguised foreign security goons who seem to have been trying to exact a symbolic quasi-kowtow from various and sundry nations (yep, they got some symbols of their own over there, now don’t they), and then chased all over the place like one of those “Yakety Sax” routines on Benny Hill, as a tyrannical government is roundly thwarted in its efforts to hijack the Seal of All That Is (Allegedly) Pure and Good. This is like something out of “101 Dalmatians”. I hope everyone is relishing it. BUT… on the other hand… woops, look at the time.
Have more to say about all this, but this is getting long, to be continued…
Mark
You call that gushing? Gush damn you! I demand that you gush in the name of freedom. That’s an order.
.
Indeed and it’s to the shame of many who consider themselves advocates of liberalism that their one concern is the damage this might do to the fucking mining companies which governments have no business being so cosy with in the first place.
Ideology doesn’t end it just changes. And there was no ‘Communist Bloc’ really, just old fashioned imperialism. The capacity of the Soviet Union to impose itself on other Comintern nations was directly proportional to the extent to which it could dominate them economically and militarily. The more bargaining power an ‘other’ communist nation had the free-er it was from Soviet dictates.
>
I reckon you could look on Chinese communism as just part of the global push to replace regimes ancien with modern industrial republics. This started in 1776 or 1789 depending on your definitions. To the Chinese the authoritarian discipline of Communism as well as the existing anti-Western alliances might’ve seemed a desirable way of updating Confucian tradition without going crazy. The Chinese and the Vietnamese have both shown great pragmatism especially economically. Shame about North Korea.
A particularly repugnant ideological goal desired by many of our own citizens who would probably describe themselves as very anti-Communist.
>
Good on Kevvie. I haven’t felt good about anything a politican’s done since the last century. Kevvie’s okay in my book.
>
‘Til the end of the week.
Just as soon as I finish my daily quota of loud denunciations!
If that is a direct quote from Kevin Rudd in Chinese then he needs a grammar lesson.
Really? He did say he was rusty. Maybe it’s a faulty transcript from a news org?
I’ll gush, Adrien.
It warms my heart and makes me proud to have a PM who’ll articulate an independent Australian foreign policy instead of grovelling to military and commercial might like Howard.
Talking about gushing…
Teh funny.
Yes, Kim, Girlchild and I were saying that Kev isn’t perfect but it is just nice not to have to constantly cringe with embarassment whenever our PM is on the loose.
Ive got loads of Chomsky on my book shelf - never read a single one. Looks far too boring. I actually prefer his linguistic work, which is rather interesting.
Chomsky is a classic ‘also rand’ gift you get from people who haven’t really tried to think about what a progressive, but rather non-doctrinaire person, resident of Keating Towers, might enjoy.
“I reckon you could look on Chinese communism as just part of the global push to replace regimes ancien with modern industrial republics. This started in 1776 or 1789 depending on your definitions.”
Great point Adrien. I was just going to say that the CCP seizure of power in 1949 was the consolidation of the Chinese ‘bourgeois’ revolution during which a middle-class cadre where able to expel foreign imperialists and establish a coherent national republic using the peasantry as a social and military battering ram. They did this, mind you, over the backs of the urban working class, who since the crushing of the revolution in 1927 played next to no role in the events of 1949.
Subsequent nationalisations and largely symbolic use of ‘Communist’ rhetoric were to follow and were to become the model for other third world liberation movements, led by a nationalistic petty-bourgeois cadre of intellectuals who wished to expel foreign powers and build a modern nation state. And in a world already tightly divided between two rival imperialist camps, and with a weak native capitalist class, for many the only way to achieve these aims and ‘break into’ the system of nation states was to adopt this Stalinist model of development.
So, to whit, China has never been a socialist society. If you say that is has and base that on a nationalised economy, do you say Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and the UK, USA and other nations during WWII were also socialist? If you say that it was because the CCP says so, well then, have you never heard a politician lie..?
All this “gushing” business sounds a bit reminiscent of the old Rudd story….
“In fact, Rudd’s Mandarin-speaking ability has come a long way since his early days as a diplomat in Beijing. In 1984, when translating then Ambassador Ross Garnaut’s remarks to a Chinese delegation that ‘Australia and China were enjoying a great closeness in their relationship’, Rudd is reported to have said ‘Australia and China are enjoying simultaneous orgasms in their relationship’.”
[link]
Is this Eliot Ramsay guy paid per word? I hope so, it would be sad if he were doing this for free.
When it comes to the Left’s response to clear evidence of human rights abuses in Communist countries, no matter how terrible, it’s as if they have some special gene inserted which compels them to acknowledge such abuses only if they can also provide some worse, countervailing demonstration of human rights abuses in the USA.
Lays his first predictable egg; ascribing some sort of projected nefarious, groupthinking behavior onto an abstract capital-l Left. That’s the whole point isn’t it - the only interest in the Tibet Situation is that it offers another theme for the necessary daily LP quota of strawman snarks at an imaginary opponent. Who are these people you are talking about Eliot? What is this Left? Bob Brown maybe? The abominable Phillip Adams? Lets have the bogeymen Leftists’ names please. Lets have a go at what they actually said.
There’s nothing wrong with making comparisons between the human rights violations committed by OUR OWN democratically elected representatitves and those of a foreign regime that we have no responsibility for. Because like it or not, both the Chinese government and America’s Axis of the Willing are responsible for massive human rights violations - the main difference is that China’s are confined within its own internationally recognized borders. The West has no regard for borders at all, and in the last decade has committed atrocities on an enormous and horiffically violent scale that has no parallel within contemporary China.
Take
Jon Brown’s
comparison of China’s and the USA’s human rights in which he says “you are five times more likely to be in prison if you are an American than if you are a Chinese.”
Even if that was true, it wouldn’t alter this following fact:
Hold up a second Eliot - even if that was true? Might you not be bothered to ascertain for yourself whether that’s true or not, or isn’t research included in your payscale?
China executed more people in the last three months than the rest of the world did in the past three years, the human rights group Amnesty International says.
So you are comparing prison rates to execution rates, which were not the subject of the study that you snidely dismissed in setting up this “comparison”. What are you saying man? Do you have a point or are you just reaching for the word limit?
And check out this little statistic from the same report:
In southern Hunan province, police reported solving 3,000 cases in two days in April, Amnesty International said.
And in south-western Sichuan province, police reportedly said they apprehended 19,446 people in six days.
They were busy, weren’t they? “Solving” 3,000 “crimes” in two days. And rounding up nearly 20,000 people in just six. In just one Province.
Now, since Jon Brown likes statistical comparisons (albeit uncorroborated), perhaps he’d like to compare just Hunan’s or Sichuan’s crime busting efforts with this:
The Gestapo had been woefully understaffed and lacking resources for the pre-war stage, and had almost entirely relied on denunciations from the normal population when going after people for political crimes. 40,000 people had been punished for crimes of a political nature by 1939, and 12,000 convicted of high treason. The following is about how German society interacted with the terror apparatus of the regime.
There you go John. Nazi Germany’s entire pre-war Gestapo record of 40,000 convictions is equal to just 12 days police activity in Sichuan Province alone.
Now guess how many people were executed by the Nazis between 1933 and 1939?
I don’t really understand what you’re saying because all I see is nonsensical garbage. 3000 “crimes” solved over 2 days in a “single province” with a population of 67 MILLION - and 20,000 people “rounded up” by police over 6 days in Sichuan (population 87 million) is compared to the 52,000 trials and punishments for political crimes in pre-war Nazi Germany? Are you saying that all of these police round-ups and crime solving are related to political activity?
Becausee unless you are, you’re not making any point, you’re just churning out some very poor quality stuff. If you’re being paid to do this, I have a message for your employer - hire me. I’ll waste my time fighting the good fight on leftist blogs for a fee and you’ll probably get more bang for your buck.
Glad to hear we’re so dangerous the Right has to hire people to post right wing crap on teh Left blogs.I mean. I know they’re deluded but … sheeeeet!
I think you should make allowances for John Howard. Look at the statesman like way he, as the shortest kid there mind you, jumped so high going - “pick me, pick me, pick ME!” - when Tony and Dubya were getting their team together. I mean the other team didn’t notice him at all until he started jumping so high and shouting “C’arn the Western Bulldogs” so loudly! Then they really paid attention.
>
And that’s gotta be good for ‘Straya!