Maybe it's just me, but I have a hard time understanding the pervasive attitude toward the Chinese crackdown on rioting Muslim separatists in Xinjian - if indeed that's what is happening. Articles like this one at Newsweek.com stress the "spin" being put on the rioting and the government response to it and indeed the reasons behind the unrest. I don't pretend to have facts that would challenge any accounts of what's going on, but I do have some history that fairly screams hypocrisy.
How many countries, including our own, treat separatist, secessionist movements without violence? How many can claim fair treatment for ethnic minorities? After all we've taken the opposite side in Israel, we came down hard and violently against the rather small Black Separatist movement here in the 1960's and there can't be anybody who hasn't heard of the bloody suppression of a Southern separatist movement in the 1860's. And then there were the Indian wars. There was the brutal supression of the labor movement in tth 1930's, brutal supression of anti- Vietnam war protesters and enough more to suggest that we're living in a glass house.
We concoct stories of Mexican separatism to scare children and Republicans and to support arguments for ethnic cleansing, yet we allow freedom of speech protection to White Separatists and Alaskan Separatists. I could go on, but it's easier to ask what the US would do if Texas, Arizona and New Mexico were to ask to secede, taking all the mineral and oil resources with them for ethnic and religious reasons. I think you know the answer.
Are we going to tell ourselves we support the Uighurs while a good part of America writes me e-mails demanding that "we" throw the Muslims out of the US? While we won't accept Uighurs we've falsely accused and jailed and abused because we are afraid of them?
Sure, China is trying hard to suppress news coverage. Heard much first hand coverage from Afghanistan lately or from any of the provinces where we're bombing and killing civilians every day in Pakistan? Were you accused of being a terrorist supporter or accomplice for questioning the WMD idea or the destruction of a neutral country? Many of us were, yet here we are, China bashing with tarnished halos and blood on our wings.
Very good, Fogg.
ReplyDeleteIts the same moral, slippery slope we tread when we tell other countries they can't have nuclear weapons when we refuse to give up our own.
Thanks. Sometimes we seem to support the idea that every ethnic group that decides it wants its own country carved out of another is in the right, sometimes we don't. They tell us it's not up to us to decide whether there should be an independent Kurdestan, but now we want to reestablish an oppressive theocracy in Tibet and "liberate" the Uighurs?
ReplyDeleteJust what do we think about independence for Puerto Rico? What about restoring the indigenous government of Hawaii illegaly overthrown by Americans? Are we pressing Europe to allow a Basque state?
For those who think violence solves nothing, History is not on their side.
ReplyDeleteDepends who's using the violence. Victors write the History, no matter if they were morally right, or wrong.
Violence to fight oppression is usually preferred over violence to oppress, but oppression is in the eye of the beholder.
Much of the World see America as an oppressor who uses violence.
We needed the help of France to win our Revolutionary War. We asked them for help over and over again.
England asked for America's help in WW II over and over again. We refused until we were attacked by Japan.
We claim to have freed the people of Iraq from the oppression of Saddam, but we were not asked, invited, or attacked.
We do what we can do when we feel like doing it, according to who we see as the oppressor.
What's right, is what's in our best interests. Usually decided by politicians. Morality has little to do with it.
Also to blame for this is the American game of seeing everything in Manichean, black-and-white terms. We have the Chinese government, which is likely up to no good, and the Uighur separatists, who have their own problems, but Americans insist on picking one to be all good and one to be all bad. Like other violent clashes between Muslims and others, in India, in Nigeria, in the Sudan, and of course in Israel/Palestine, the situation escapes such simplistic analysis. As long as it suits people's purpose to ignore this fact, we are going to keep getting into this kind of problem.
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