Sunday, March 16, 2008

Beijing 2008 ~= Berlin 1936

[Originally posted on 3/16/2008]

Red China really wants you to watch the Olympics.  Really really badly.  They want to prove to you that they are a happy, peaceful, unified country.  They're not really bad, they're just misunderstood.  The Olympics will show just how happy their big happy family is.  Right?

Um....

Apparently, the many areas of Asia conquered by the Communists -- and let's not forget, in spite of the end of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, China is a Communist country -- haven't been brainwashed into the ChiCom's Big Happy Family (R) (after all, they're now "capitalist" and so I guess they're supposed to be okay) thoroughly enough.  Turns out the nation of Tibet has never really been happy being held at gunpoint to be (a) officially atheist and (b) happily Chinese, and they're picking now to take another shot at calling the world's attention to it.  And it's working. 

For all the noise China makes about how good they are, they're still a Communist dictatorship, attempting to shoehorn in a token amount of free economic activity into a society that is effectively under a Soviet-style dictatorship. 

In a Reuter's news story:
Kang Xiaoguang, a political scientist at the People's University of China who has long studied social stability, said there was very little chance of the Tibetan protests sparking a chain reaction in broader China.
"I think the chances are minimal," he said of the possibility of copycat protests. "This is a localized problem. In the Han Chinese regions there's virtually zero sympathy for the Tibetan rioters, and so virtually zero chance that this will spread."
Why is that?  Because they're not Chinese.  Duh.  Of course, even if they had sympathy, I'm sure they're not aching to be shot at.

The Federal government is either in utter denial, are totally scared out of the minds by them, or are secretly on the take from them.  We know they launch constant, concerted hacker attacks on our nation's computer systems, especially government and military systems.  We know they want to squash the legitimately capitalist and democratic Republic of China (we call it Taiwan mostly for convenience), which we can't bother to have diplomatic relations with.  They're totally useless in influencing the rogue nations they're supposedly friends with (e.g. North Korea, Burma, Sudan).  They control the Port of Los Angeles.  And huge chunks of our manufacturing has been shipped there, where they thank us by poisoning our children with lead in their toys.

But they have the Olympics, so that makes them okay.  How deeply into denial we've all fallen.