cartoon life

Found off of Karmacino, this post is a link to a Google video of a BBC Dispatches episode about Tibet. And this post from Asian Window covers an article from The Daily Mail.

How many oppressive pro-Chinese government bloggers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

Western media is biased stay out of internal affairs unless you lived in Tibet so you don’t have right to opinion we were a civilization before your country was even found monks made slaves screw in their lightbulbs nobody can deny the truth!

Chengdu Letters

These posts labelled Random Nexts are from stored bookmarks. I would stumble on a blog I liked, but really didn’t know if I wanted to follow it, or what to do with it, but didn’t want to lose the link. Chengdu Letters is one of these long stored bookmarks, and this post March Comes in Like a Snowlion is interesting in light of Tibet and China. Mentioning ‘Tibet’ as a text string, of course insures censorship of this post.

People are reacting more to the fear of not-knowing, to the possibilities of pain and change, than they are to the real events, real oppression. Police in the streets are fine; stories of threat are paralyzing. I tried to bring it up with one of my classes, innocently, with curiosity. Teach me. “What can you tell me about what’s going on in Tibet?” I asked. Never mention the three T’s, I’d been told. Tian an’men, Taiwan, Tibet. There was silence. Their faces darkened; I was no longer their hero. They didn’t want to speak at all after that.

John Fraser says it right with every breath in Butchers And Monsters;

And the answer, too, is always the same, or at least it will be so long as the Chinese Communist party controls the country: China overreacts, cares so much, and never “gets it” because it can’t do anything else. Because it lacks the confidence of its own people, the party’s endurance is based on never underestimating the power of small but dedicated protest groups. Because the party knows from its own successful experience 60 years ago that a small but dedicated protest group can take over and control an entire country, it can never let its guard down. Not once. Not ever. 

This reality never seems to penetrate over here. Over here, Falun Gong is just a weird group of exercise and “I-can-do-it” enthusiasts. Over there, it’s different. Falun Gong, unchecked, could replace the Communist party. Over here, we wonder why no one in Beijing is negotiating with the pacifist Dalai Lama, who offers the best hope of a fair and workable compromise. Over there, it’s different. Tibetan monks, unchecked, could replace party cadres as moral leaders in at least three major areas of China. Against such a threat, the bleatings of the West are merely ripples in an ocean. If it comes down to a choice of appearing “weak” to such groups or brutal to outsiders, the Communist authorities would not hesitate to choose resolute repression, regardless of the moral or economic costs, regardless of world opinion, regardless — if it comes to that — of the 2008 Olympics. Nothing will be allowed to diminish or otherwise threaten its power base.

And more, so much more. Air drop this as leaflets over the whole of China.

I’ve been having some fun with the Globe & Mail forums over this easter holiday weekend. Here and here. Gee, I really should be blogging. My hit stats have gone down. Oh, well.

[edit] A comment of mine from the first thread link:[/edit]

“China shows itself still and again to be a paranoid, self-interested ego-maniacial state, shall I say modern corporation? Anything that that goes ‘wrong’ must have been manifested by enemies of it’s self-involved paranoid ego. Practically the opposite of the Dalai Lama it vilifies. No wonder there is no understanding or even a chance for compromise. China, like so many today, believes it and only it [has] the truth.”

[edit]The threads usually break down into trails of badly named posters and poorly spelled complaints that the Chinese are just misunderstood.[/edit]

Here is a story with actual news and some balanced point of view.

Read the rest of this entry »