China Berates American Press---Sunday Sermon

My brother is fluent in Mandarin & has traveled all over western China, which few foreigners visit---he was working for the UN org FAO as a rice pest expert and would explain to the local farmers how to avoid diseases & parasites affecting rice. His Australian wife accompanied him on for six months as she gathered info for an advanced degree at an Aussie U.

They wrote back that health & living conditions in these remote provinces were abysmal, abominable, and the population barely educated---even the local officials spoke poor Mandarin & had little expertise in anything except officious incompetence.

The Chinese continue to flood the US with shoddy merchandise of all kinds, and a recent health epidemic in Panama was from their substituting diethylene glycol for glycerine, causing over 100 deaths in Panama alone. While their high-end goods generally meet standards, the infractions against copyright infringement and patents continue to multiply. In a certain sense, the PRC is an international scofflaw and the Olympics are in danger of becoming just another marketing tool to vault them into respectability.

My brother told me that the Chinese are intensely nationalistic and have the "Middle Kingdom attitude," which puts China above all other countries---at least in their own consciousness. He compared it with American exceptionalism, but said that the squalor and mendacious peculation he encountered on every level of Chinese society made the comparison ridiculous, totally ludicrous. And my brother has become an Australian citizen---not even being a big fan of the USA! He does have a PhD & speaks Bahasa Malay fluently as well, and now heads a major USAID project in Indonesia. He's glad to live there rather than the PRC.

Yet the pretensions of an authoritarian military dictatorship to impugn American journalists appear okay to the servile American media who bow and scrape and "kowtow" to their Chinese masters---especially NBC, which has the Olympic Games broadcast rights stateside that it paid around $100 million to acquire.

Indeed, the PRC seems to be getting a free pass in much of the US MSM, as leftist social-engineering projects usually do. Even a book against Stalin, Koba the Dread, was pilloried in the British commentariat as impolitic, although author Martin Amis had impeccable leftist credentials and had simply decided to recant some of his more preposterous political stances of yore. Streng verboten.

Tsk, tsk. "No fault on the left," Lenin's Comintern directive to all fellow-travelers, is still robotically obeyed by almost all the western media---which makes excuses for Chinese Communist mega-projects that cause massive pollution and flood millions of riverine inhabitants out of their homes. Can't make those omelettes without breaking eggs, Uncle Joe used to say.

Preposterous human catastrophes like N. Korea and Zimbabwe and Cuba are simply given a wink and a nod by the chattering-class commentators. When Bush overthrew Saddam's socialist regime, the world recoiled. Bush is a Republican. When Clinton & NATO attacked Serbia over Kosovo, that was okay. Clinton was perceived as a man of the left, and Milosevic wasn't paying off the French and UN officials with big under-the-table oil money.

Laughingly, a nationalist party winning an election in Germany & Austria is cause for great alarm. And India, a country truly struggling to remain a true democracy, warts and all, simply gets little respect in the MSM. Indians don't hate America enough.

The international left still exists, as Ben Stein's excellent flick, pilloried by the socialist automatons at the NYT & in Hollyweird, pretty much lays out the landscape for the steady encroachments on American freedoms that "hate crimes," "intellectual deviation from Darwinism," and other threats Orwell and Huxley warned us about. The insipid second-raters in academentia keep pitching cloud-cuckoo land EUtopia to us Americans, who are not going to consign our rights to faceless bureaucrats in Washington, let alone Brussels.

The world we are entering in the 21st century is neither Brave nor New, but a rehash of authoritarian state controls gradually limiting human freedom to harmless superficial banality. Hannah Arendt was right about the origins of totalitarianism. And so were the Founding Fathers of America, who fought long & bravely to avoid what the world wants to inflict on the USA.

To the EUtopians, no nanny-state here, please.

And to the PRC, when you get a truly free press & stop oppressing your neighbors, as you do with your colonization of Tibet and your threats to Free Taiwan, then you can start preaching to free peoples. Until then, just keep your anthill to yourselves.