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 #2 (permalink) Thu Mar 27, 2008 12:09 pm Tibet riot |
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If the Chinese government had nothing to hide, it would allow foreign reporters to come in. The Chinese government has a history of imperialism, colonialism and human rights abuses in Tibet, and this is probably just a continuation of that.
In the 1950s the communist Chinese government in Beijing invaded Tibet, destroyed thousands of monasteries, killed thousands of people, and ended the Tibetans' freedom to practice their religion. The atheist Chinese government has kidnapped the Panchen Lama and substituted another child who is under government control. It's very absurd, but the officially anti-religious government thinks that it has the right to control the whole nation's religious affairs. They have forced Tibetan nomads to settle in towns without giving them ways to make a living. They have moved Han Chinese into Tibet and put the government of Tibet in their hands instead of in the hands of Tibetans. Basically, they've engaged in half a century of attempts to exterminate the Tibetan people's culture and religion. The Tibetans are probably just demanding their human rights.
However, nobody knows what's going on there, because the Chinese government controls the flow of information out of the country of Tibet. Since they don't allow foreigners in to see it, it's pretty clear they have something to hide. |
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Jamie (K)
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| #3 (permalink) Thu Mar 27, 2008 12:55 pm Tibet riot |
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| Quote: |
| The Chinese government has a history of imperialism, colonialism and human rights abuses in Tibet, and this is probably just a continuation of that. |
Don't most of the powerful (or soon-to-be powerful) nations have such a history?
The Romans, the English, the French, the Germans, the Americans (debatable though)...the Chinese aren't any different, I guess.
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Daemon99
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| #4 (permalink) Thu Mar 27, 2008 17:27 pm Tibet riot |
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| daemon99 wrote: |
| Quote: |
| The Chinese government has a history of imperialism, colonialism and human rights abuses in Tibet, and this is probably just a continuation of that. |
Don't most of the powerful (or soon-to-be powerful) nations have such a history?
The Romans, the English, the French, the Germans, the Americans (debatable though)...the Chinese aren't any different, I guess. |
Are you trying to excuse it? And isn't this hundreds of years later? |
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Jamie (K)
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| #5 (permalink) Thu Mar 27, 2008 19:52 pm Tibet riot |
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| daemon99 wrote: |
| Quote: |
| The Chinese government has a history of imperialism, colonialism and human rights abuses in Tibet, and this is probably just a continuation of that. |
Don't most of the powerful (or soon-to-be powerful) nations have such a history?
The Romans, the English, the French, the Germans, the Americans (debatable though)...the Chinese aren't any different, I guess. |
Are you saying that Chinese injustice bases its legitimacy on illegitimate deeds other governments committed in the past?
There's not much logic in that. It's like saying "Hey, the Nazis almost annihilated the Jews; the Americans almost wiped out their natives; the Serbs tried to cleanse their country but only killed 200,000 people in the 1990s -- so the Mongolians should get a Freebie ticket to suppress an ethnic minority of their choice." Tosh.
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| #6 (permalink) Fri Mar 28, 2008 2:51 am Tibet riot |
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| Ralf wrote: |
| There's not much logic in that. It's like saying "Hey, the Nazis almost annihilated the Jews; the Americans almost wiped out their natives; the Serbs tried to cleanse their country but only killed 200,000 people in the 1990s -- so the Mongolians should get a Freebie ticket to suppress an ethnic minority of their choice." Tosh. |
Even the Americans don't use the genocide against the Indians as justification for something. We usually use it as a warning AGAINST doing something. |
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Jamie (K)
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| #7 (permalink) Fri Mar 28, 2008 6:47 am Tibet riot |
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| Quote: |
| Are you saying that Chinese injustice bases its legitimacy on illegitimate deeds other governments committed in the past? |
I wonder what on earth made you guys think I was supporting China. Why would I do that? I wouldn't support any country that had such a marred history.
I was just saying that, probably, China wasn't any different from any of the nations I mentioned.
| Quote: |
| Are you trying to excuse it? And isn't this hundreds of years later? |
Anyway, those countries might have indulged in genocide in the past, may be a few decades/centuries ago, but then man (of any country) hasn't evolved into a better species since then, has he?
Let's forget about the Romans here, when did the Holocaust take place? It hasn't even been a century. Six million Jews. I wonder why the US didn't do anything about it, may be it hadn't started looking after the world yet then.
And the Roman Catholic Church of Poland had a sudden stroke of conscience after some six decades or so and asked for forgiveness for what they had done during World War II.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/898591.stm
India got independence from the British in 1947. It wasn't hundreds of years ago. The British suppressed the Sepoy Mutiny (First War of Independence) and many others, killing a lot of people. Doesn't it look similar to what's happening in Tibet now? Then there is this infamous Jallianwala Bagh Massacre carried out by General Dyer.
The motive behind the Iraq War isn't clearly known yet. And how would you explain Abu Ghraib and My Lai Massacre? They didn't happen during the Biblical times.
I guess you would vehemently denounce all the cruel acts I mentioned above, but then that's how the governments(=people) have been.
Though it's easy to be critical of such heinous acts (we should be, by the way), but come to think of it, had you been a German soldier (Nazi) during the World War II, would you have refrained from killing Jews?
And weren't those the beloved soldiers that, ostensibly, went to help people of another country, involved in massacres?
Lastly, I wonder why governments(=people) commit such crimes in the first place. May be there's something more to it than meets the eye.
I am reminded of a quote here.
"If we were to wake up some morning and find that everyone was the same race, creed and color, we would find some other causes for prejudice by noon."
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Daemon99
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| #8 (permalink) Fri Mar 28, 2008 15:00 pm Tibet riot |
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| daemon99 wrote: |
| Let's forget about the Romans here, when did the Holocaust take place? It hasn't even been a century. Six million Jews. I wonder why the US didn't do anything about it, may be it hadn't started looking after the world yet then. |
WHAT?! The US didn't do anything about it?! Are you crazy?! Do you call getting 400,000 men killed in World War II combat "nothing"? Do you call bombing Germany back to the stone age "nothing"? Do you call converting almost our whole economy to war production to defeat the Nazis "nothing"? Do you call liberating Nazi concentration camps and forcing Germans to clean them up "nothing"?!
The big question is why the Europeans themselves didn't do anything about it until too late. The answer to that question is that Europeans always prefer to "engage in the peace process", regardless of how much the death toll mounts. No matter how scary the dictator is, they'll do nothing to stop him until the situation is very far out of control, and then they call in the Americans. Together, the British and the French, along with some other countries, could have stopped the Nazis early on, when they were still relatively weak, but they preferred to chatter until it was too late, and the US had to come into the war.
| daemon99 wrote: |
And the Roman Catholic Church of Poland had a sudden stroke of conscience after some six decades or so and asked for forgiveness for what they had done during World War II.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/898591.stm |
Notice that the article talks out both sides of its mouth. It says that the Catholic Church opposed Nazism, but the recent criticism is that it didn't take enough of a "public stand". You see, people today think that going on the radio or TV and blabbering against a problem is more important than doing anything about it. Early in World War II, Pope Pius XII publicly criticized the Nazis, but the bishops in Germany and the Netherlands told him to shut up, because every time he spoke that way, there would be intensified Nazi persecution of Jews and Catholics. Given that, the best tactic was to keep quiet but take concrete action to rescue Jews. Under direct orders from the pope, the Catholics were hiding Jews in monasteries, giving them false passports, and in other ways facilitating their escape. Golda Meir, one of the founders of the state of Israel, among others, credited the Catholic Church with saving the lives of over 800,000 Jews.
| daemon99 wrote: |
| India got independence from the British in 1947. It wasn't hundreds of years ago. The British suppressed the Sepoy Mutiny (First War of Independence) and many others, killing a lot of people. Doesn't it look similar to what's happening in Tibet now? Then there is this infamous Jallianwala Bagh Massacre carried out by General Dyer. |
It's only superficially similar. The British didn't attempt to exterminate Hinduism or any other indigenous Indian religion, and they didn't try to exterminate the actual Indian ethnicities and replace them with British residents. China is trying to destroy Tibetan Buddhism and is trying to eliminate the Tibetan people by placing Buddhism under government control and replacing Tibetans with Han Chinese.
| daemon99 wrote: |
| The motive behind the Iraq War isn't clearly known yet. |
The motive was explained by the US government before they even went to the United Nations about the issue. Saddam Hussein was giving financial and other support to Al-Quaeda and to other terrorist groups who wanted to destroy Israel and attack non-Muslim populations, including the US, as captured Iraqi documents now confirm.
| daemon99 wrote: |
| And how would you explain Abu Ghraib and My Lai Massacre? |
The Abu Ghraib incident was independently perpetrated by some lower-ranking US soldiers (probably obsessed with pornography, from the looks of it). The "torture" mainly consisted of humiliation and didn't even remotely approach the level of torture that was engaged in in that prison when it was controlled by Saddam Hussein's forces. Before the media had even reported the story, the US military had already begun to investigate the situation. They made arrests, and the soldiers involved are now in prison. This can't be compared to the Nazi Holocaust or the Chinese suppression of Tibet, because it was not connected to US government policy, and the US government prosecuted and imprisoned the perpetrators -- instead of giving them medals, like the Nazis and the Chinese would.
The conditions for the My Lai massacre were created by the fact that communist forces (and now the Muslim terrorist forces who have been trained in their strategy) make it their practice to take cover among innocent civilians and launch their attacks from among those populations. Then, if the US, Israeli or whatever forces defend themselves, civilian deaths are unavoidable, and they can be used for propaganda purposes. It was the practice of the Vietnamese communist forces to nest among civilians, and even to arm children and young girls. The forces that attacked My Lai and My Khe had lost men in attacks that were launched from civilian villages, and they were told to clean the combatants out of those villages. In the process, in the stress of battle, some of the soldiers went berserk. Add to that the fact that it was often impossible to tell who was a combatant and who wasn't.
Events like this are a propaganda coup for the enemy, because the general policy of the US and its allies is not to attack civilians. Our enemies take advantage of this by attacking from amidst civilians, whom they use for "protection" if they're alive, and for propaganda if they're dead. |
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Jamie (K)
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