Google Pullout from China: In their own words
Kudos! My stance on the Chinese Government borders on irrational, so I’ve nothing but support for Google for drawing a line in the virtual sand. America might consider the same at some point (for any number of human rights violations / world pollution / Sudan arming reasons.) End rant.
I’m saddened that this lady has posted two things I felt the need to respond to in a week. Maybe i like to pick on people, maybe i just like pointing out that not everything is as simple as people would like to think.
I live in China. In total, I have spent 4 years here. I have never personally witnessed any abuse of human rights. The police are friendly, I can ask them questions without feeling as though they’re wondering if they have to pull a gun out and shoot me any second. I’m not saying that the things don’t happen, as im sure they do. It just makes me sad to see us setting up another fight we know we can win. One, that we will inevitably bitch about when we get into it.
I do not agree with the way china is judged. They are a 60 year old country. When the states was 60 years old our human rights abuses far outweighed theirs. We we’re butting a swath of death across the country killing anything brown, including buffalo and beaver. We bought and sold slaves, and by this point it was very very unfashionable with the rest of the world to do so. We used germ warfare.
Today, we still lock people up we deem to be threats to our national security, we give them neither a trial or sentence. We torture them. sound familiar? Our military snipers bait & kill civilians by placing expensive pieces of military hardware in the line of fire and shoot anything that picks it up. Yet we have the right to judge. Is there any question that the united states records all phone calls, emails, sms and any form of communication we can get our hands on? Did you know the state of texas executes more people than all of china?
It is easy to forget you are white, and how lucky you are to be where you live. To take whatever popular opinion that is fed to us without considering the circumstances behind the incident. Can we afford a nuclear power to go into civil war? Can we really sit by and judge their morality as we continue to buy everything we can get our hands on from them? No doubt they are one of the biggest contributors to world pollution, yet also one of the countries making the fastest improvements in policy.
Tienamen was an unfortunate incident, moreso that it was recorded on tape. How easily we forget live television broadcast of vietnam executions, but we should remember not to point fingers, because when you point a finger, three point back at yourself. What would we do were 300,000 people to suddenly descend on the white house and demand immediate massive changes to governmental policy? Oh yeah! We’d fuck them up the second they became violent. Which they did. I believe even Obama said in his nobel acceptance speech said, ” I — like any head of state — reserve the right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend my nation.” Could Tienamen have been handled better, yes of course. But being a country 30 years out from the last civil war, followed by starvation and poverty the likes of which no country has ever seen, I cannot fault them. The horrors they went through as we watched leave it to beaver were unimaginable. I cannot picture a survivor of that allowing anything to happen that could even potentially let them relive it.
I hope for a peaceful world, I truly do. But, I know that the way to get there is not to sit back on our plantation, sipping mint julips while pointing a finger at the rest of the world. Is it not better to recognize our own faults, admit them openly, strive to become better and hope that others follow by our example? Does forcing everyone else to act by our standards of morality make us any better than nazi’s?
