McCain & Race

Color of Change has a thorough fact sheet of John McCain’s problematic stances on race and civil rights over his career.

On just about every issue, John McCain emerges as more of the same. His image and even his rhetoric do not match his record and his actions. The more people learn about the real John McCain, the better chance we have of defeating him this November.

Update:

McCain was booed in Memphis today during his speech on MLK. He also looked incredibly uncomfortable talking about King and his failures to support a federal holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. ThinkProgress has the video.

McCain to Take Public Financing After All?

Jane has the details. No matter what happens with McCain and public financing in the general election, it should be clear that he is only considering it because he and his campaign know that the Democratic nominee will obliterate him in fund raising. Public financing is safe money for McCain, so he’ll do it. Taking public financing could not possibly considered as a moral statement by McCain about money and politics, other than to the extent that he wishes he had more of it.

Serious Nick Kristof’s Serious Column on Tibet

When last we saw New York Times columnist Nick Kristof, he was engaged in some serious wankery by asking his Chinese readers to submit comments to him about what they think about what’s going on in Tibet, but made no similar request for input from Tibetans. Yesterday the column based on input from readers ran in the Times. I’m just getting to it now because it’s been a busy few days for me, but I think it merits a thorough examination.

Kristof’s most salient point – and one most reminiscent of journalism free of personal prejudices – comes in the second paragraph. Kristof writes:

It would be convenient if we could simply denounce the crackdown in Tibet as the unpopular action of a dictatorial government. But it wasn’t. It was the popular action of a dictatorial government, and many ordinary Chinese think the government acted too wimpishly, showing far too much restraint toward “thugs” and “rioters.”

As I and others have been saying repeatedly, Chinese nationalism is a major factor in China’s response. There has been a real push from the Han Chinese population in mainland China for stronger responses and harsher rhetoric, something that the CCP has been all-too willing to oblige and foment in return. Unfortunately after this insight, Kristof engages in armchair punditry of the worst sort, by diminishing the hardships Tibetans suffer under and seeking to appease powerful Chinese interests, all in the name of Serious consideration of the matters at hand.

First is the Olympic wankery:

The best answer is: Postpone the decision until the last minute so as to extort every last ounce of good behavior possible out of the Chinese government — on Darfur as well as Tibet. But at the end of the day, if there have been no further abuses, President Bush should attend — for staying away would only inflame Chinese nationalism and make Beijing more obdurate.

Ah yes, we continue to do nothing in the hopes that by doing nothing, we will suddenly force China to do something. Which they haven’t. And then, when we concede we must do something, we should do nothing, because otherwise China will behave even worse. I’m not sure Tibetans, Uighurs, Falun Gong practioners, or Han Chinese dissidents can survive such a Serious and Thoughtful prescription offered by Kristof.

No worries, Kristof has a way of making his Serious Plan even more Thoughtful:

If President Bush attends the ceremonies, however, he should balance that with a day trip to a Tibetan area. Such a visit would underscore American concern, even if the Chinese trot out fake monks to express fake contentment with fake freedom.

Yes, the mere act of forcing the Chinese to put on another Theresienstadt-esq dog and pony show would be a Very Serious way to show America’s concern. I can see the Chinese quaking in their boots at the thought of such a hard-hitting investigation lead by President Bush.

Moving on, Kristof offers this gem:

The Dalai Lama is the last, best hope for reaching an agreement that would resolve the dispute over Tibet forever.

Um, Nick. The Dalai Lama is also the first, best hope for reaching an agreement. See, the Dalai Lama was the leader of Tibet in 1949 when it was invaded by Mao’s army. He was the leader of Tibet for 10 years of Chinese occupation, during which time his representatives negotiated the infamous “17 Point Agreement” under duress (an agreement which, nonetheless, has never been honored by the PRC). In 1959, the Dalai Lama, seeing the Agreement not being followed and no hope for China to ever treat Tibet well, rejected it and went into exile. Since the 1970s the Dalai Lama has pursued autonomy over independence. China has never sat down to the negotiating table with him, despite repeated entreaties by the world community. Quite simply, the Dalai Lama has never been the obstacle to resolution – it has always been the Chinese government. And given that China’s strategy vis a vis Tibet is to wait until HHDL dies so they can push a puppet onto the Tibetan people, I don’t think China is concerned about the Dalai Lama being the “last, best hope.” Lastly, it is painfully offensive for Kristof to presume to know what the Tibetan people will seek in their leadership when the Dalai Lama dies. The Dalai Lama is the first hope for Tibetans to find freedom, but if he dies with that dream unfulfilled, I assure Mr. Kristof that it will survive in subsequent Tibetan leaders, be they secular or religious.

Kristof goes on to broker his own resolution to the Tibet question, something that I am fairly certain not a single Tibetan in exile or inside Tibet has ever asked him to do:

The outlines of an agreement would be simple. The Dalai Lama would return to Tibet as a spiritual leader, and Tibetans would be permitted to possess his picture and revere him, while he would unequivocally accept Chinese sovereignty. Monasteries would have much greater religious freedom, and Han Chinese migration to Tibet would be limited. The Dalai Lama would also accept that the Tibetan region encompasses only what is now labeled Tibet on the maps, not the much larger region of historic Tibet that he has continued to claim.

Boy, that is simple. Tibetans get spiritual autonomy in exchange for a massive reduction in the size of their country and no future for independence in their land. That is, in exchange for the basic human right of religious freedom, Kristof contends Tibetans must give up their human right of self-determination while still accepting some form of Chinese settlement in Tibet. For Kristof, the benefits are all on China’s side:

With such an arrangement, China could resolve the problem of Tibet, improve its international image, reassure Taiwan and rectify a 50-year-old policy of repression that has catastrophically failed.

Honestly Nick, go fuck yourself. This is a question of basic human freedoms and human rights. China’s national image has nothing – nothing – to do with human rights. There is no internationally recognized right to save face or to be well regarded by other countries. There are, on the other hand, international treaties recognizing a peoples right to free speech, free religion, and self-determination. There are also international laws prohibiting one country from invading another and occupying it, while committing genocide on the local population. But we can forget all of that if we can just find a way to trade an improved international image for China with one basic right for Tibetans. If anything is clear over the last 50 years, it’s that Tibetans are not a people whose aspirations can be reduced to their faith. Tibetans want freedom, plain and simple. The implication that the only thing they care about is getting to pray before a picture of the Dalai Lama is nothing more than a racist infantilization.

Kristof’s tour of anti-Tibetan wankery takes a turn towards libel further on in the column:

After the Dalai Lama dies, there will be no one to hold Tibetans back, and more militant organizers in the Tibetan Youth Congress and other organizations will turn to violence, and perhaps terrorism.

The Tibetan Youth Congress is not a “militant organiz[ation]”. There is no evidence that Kristof can point to support his claim. Likewise there is no evidence that TYC or any other Tibetan organization would turn to “terrorism.” Tibetans have been, in all likelihood, the most consistently nonviolent independence movement in modern history. The casual suggestion that a major Tibetan support group operating in exile is a militant organization is quite simply beyond the pale. TYC is an organization that supports Tibetan independence and their activists are in many ways the backbone of the globe independence movement. But “militant”? Please. TYC’s militancy extends primarily to their commitment to nonviolence as a means of gaining independence. They have used hunger strikes on a number of occasions to raise awareness of Tibet, but how could this possibly make them “militant”? Kristof is talking out of his ass and he’s libeling a respectable organization in so doing.

Kristof ends his column with two paragraphs that again reveal his inability to address the Tibet situation in a moral or thoughtful way:

The only other Tibetan who could fill that vacuum is the Panchen Lama, the No. 2 Tibetan leader, who turns 19 later this month. But the Chinese government kidnapped the Panchen Lama when he was 6 years old and apparently has kept him under house arrest ever since.

Americans sometimes think that the Tibetan resentments are just about political and religious freedom. They’re much more complicated than that. Tibetan anger is also fueled by the success of Han Chinese shop owners, who are often better educated and more entrepreneurial. So Tibetans seek solace in monasteries or bars, and the economic gap widens and provokes even more frustration — which the spotlight of the Olympics gives them a chance to express.

Kristof has just described a number of monumental transgressions by China against Tibet. The kidnapping of Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, the six year old Panchen Lama, is glossed over. The Panchen Lama was, until recently, the world’s youngest political prisoner. No one has ever seen or heard from him since he was kidnapped, yet Kristof makes no moral judgment about this gross offense to the rule of law and the most basic standards of human behavior by the Chinese government. In fact, kidnapped cannot be the right word. China disappeared the Panchen Lama.

Kristof follows that with an amplification of the problems Tibetans in Tibet face at the hands of China’s occupation. The economic situation for Tibetans is disastrous, though it’s not as balanced in its genesis as Kristof depicts it. Chinese policies limit the amount of education Tibetans can receive. Chinese settlers are given preference in all facets of economic life over Tibetans. Tibet is commodified as a tourist attraction for Chinese tourists, and then Tibetans are shut out of profiting from this industry, other than through bars, night clubs, and brothels. Kristof again writes of this tragedy, but refuses to make a moral assessment of what China and the Chinese occupation is doing to Tibetans. He can only give Tibetans credit for recognizing the world will pay attention to them now because of the Olympics. Quite simply, Kristof is morally corrupt when it comes to Tibet and China. I would hope his editors at the Times prohibit Kristof from writing any more columns on Tibet until he develops a moral compass that is capable of telling him that it is acceptable to outraged at cultural, economic, and physical genocide. And the disappearing of six year old children is objectionable, too, yet Kristof is incapable of casting aspersions on Beijing when it comes to their atrocities in Tibet.

It’s remarkable to me that Kristof can be such a passionate, ardent advocate on behalf of Darfur and yet engage in such equivocation and apologism for China when it comes to Tibet. What makes Kristof’s advocacy for Darfur admirable is what makes his dismissiveness towards Tibet so infuriating: he is a true Sinophile, he is married to a Chinese woman, and he frequently writes from China. This hasn’t corrupted his moral compass when it comes to Darfur, but as soon as he touches Tibet, he seems to forget that there are universal standards for human behavior and morality. Kristof embraces the worst tendencies of opinion writers seeking Serious solutions to problems that are both patently offensive on their face and done in bad faith in the absence of morality.

I don’t know what Nick Kristof’s goals were for writing this column. In the traditional opinion journalist way, he presented a Very Serious discussion of Tibet that succeeded in preaching inaction, proposing a solution to the Tibet question predicated on an infantilized version of Tibetans and Tibetans conceding basic human rights, libeled a major nonviolent Tibetan support group, and failed to pass moral judgment on China’s disappearance of a six year old child. This piece does nothing to stop China’s crackdown in Tibet. It exists as a monument to the mindset promoted by Kristof (and in recent years by his colleague Tom Friedman vis a vis Iraq) that by thinking hard and wishing hard, but doing nothing and taking no responsibility for their words, opinion journalists can sleep well knowing they are Deeply Serious People who confront Hard issues without fear. Sadly, this mindset will go down in the annals of history as one that lead to more war, more violence, more suffering, and a propensity for inaction by those with the power to do something in the face of moral imperatives that has marked the early 21st century.

IOC Memo Claims Credit for Tibet, Preaches Inaction

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has obtained an International Olympic Committee internal memo on how they should respond to recent protests and crackdown in Tibet, as well as talk of a boycott. The RSF release on the memo notes:

“As the Olympic movement meets in Beijing, we were hoping the IOC would finally pluck up the courage to ask the Chinese authorities to stop the violence in Tibet and human rights violations in China,” Reporters Without Borders secretary-general Robert Ménard said. “Instead the IOC has sent its members a memo minimising China’s abuses and reiterating the position that the Olympic movement does not meddle in politics.”

A good example of this comes later on:

The memo repeats several times that the Olympic Games are serving as a “catalyst” for a dialogue on Tibet and its independence but rules out IOC involvement in the resolution of the “complex” crisis. The message that Rogge wants to get across is that “The IOC shares the world’s desire for the Chinese government to bring about a peaceful resolution as quickly as possible.” But the memo adds on the next page that the IOC does not raise such matters with countries that host the games.

Jacques Rogge is involved in an international game of wanting to eat his cake and have it too. The IOC remarkably seeks to claim credit for political progress if and when China makes substantive or illusory improvements in human rights. But if the outside world, seeing the clear connection between the Olympic Games and politics, asks Rogge to speak out himself or use the host role as a stick to get China to stop a military crackdown in Tibet, the IOC pleads that they are only a sporting organization and gently chides those of us with principles for confounding sports and politics.

What’s even more offensive is that this organization has used its international clout and billions of sponsorship and advertising dollars to elevate China’s status on the world stage while human rights groups and NGOs repeatedly made clear that China has massive human rights and democracy problems. For eight years the IOC has refused to make Tibet part of the discussion when it comes to the Beijing Olympics. Subsequently these Games have been seen by China as a means of solidifying their rule of Tibet and effectively ending the Tibet question in the eyes of the international community. That this organization, so consistently and stoicly opposed to standing up for Tibetans now will try to brand itself as “a “catalyst” for a dialogue on Tibet and its independence” strikes me as offensive at the most elemental levels of my sentiments.

Tibetans inside Tibet are rising up against China’s military occupation. For their courageous pursuit of freedom, these Tibetans are being killed, tortured, thrown in prison, and subject to brainwashing patriotic reeducation. But it is the IOC that seeks credit for “serving as a “catalyst” for a dialogue on Tibet and its independence“. Disgusting. Simply disgusting. Has the IOC no shame? Has Jacques Rogge no shame?

The IOC could be a catalyst for change in China and freedom for Tibet. But they have refused that role year after year. Their attempt to claim credit for what has happened in Tibet and in response around the world in the last month is as dishonest and disingenuous a pursuit of historical revisionism as I have ever seen. Rogge and his partners at the IOC are collaborationists in the repression of Tibet. Attempts to claim otherwise at this point are laughable. Only the IOC’s actions can change this assessment and internal messaging memos instructing their surrogates to lie about what they have done does not improve their chances for being written about favorably by posterity.

The Tibetan Moment

My former colleague at Students for a Free Tibet, John Hocevar, had an op-ed in the Hartford Courant earlier this week. It’s a good piece that puts the foundation of a very complicated and still evolving situation in a clear context. Hocevar closes his piece with these lines that I think get to the heart of what I and others outside of Tibet have been asking for over three weeks:

The protests in Tibet continue to spread. When Tibetans rose up in the late 1980s, there was no Internet, no Free Tibet movement, and very little support. Tibetans have no doubt that they will regain their independence. The only questions, really, are how long it will take, and at what price.

And for those of us in the land of the free, what will we do to help them?

Chinese Propaganda

Howard French, writing for the International Herald Tribune, has a very good piece on China’s historic and contemporary uses of propaganda.

Mao’s state created a propaganda system built on a crude triage: a world of heroes who were unalterably and impossibly good, and an even larger one of villains who were irredeemably, cartoonishly bad. Over-the-top became the routine in official rhetoric. Enemies were called “monsters” and “cow ghosts,” “snake spirits” and “running dogs.” And in one campaign after another the public was called upon to “resolutely crush” or “relentlessly denounce” them.

This was a universe of variable geometry, where people were not to reason things out on their own, but to fall in line. Today’s hero could be tomorrow’s villain, with no clear evidence or explanation. The sole moral compass point was the immoral leader himself, Mao, who to this day remains a sacred cow whose likeness peers out from every bank note.

In recent years, it had seemed as if this movie had been retired, but last month the production was cued up once again. The bad guy this time has been the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, and the fact that outside China this villain is one of the world’s most admired people has only caused the propagandists to ramp up the volume.

For the purpose of the cause he has been turned into a canine and called a “wolf in monk’s robes,” “a wolf with a human face and heart of a beast” and the “scum of Buddhism.” In case anyone missed the message, the government has also called the struggle against the Dalai Lama “a life-and-death battle.”

French goes on to look at how the propaganda machine played out in the media. Chinese domestic organs hyped Tibetan violence, repeatedly replayed pictures of a handful of Han Chinese victims, and viciously attacked bias in the Western media (even though Western outlets were happy to print Chinese propaganda alongside statements about the nonviolent nature of the overwhelming majority of the protests).  I think French’s analysis is strong on the use of propaganda as a tool to create power for the Chinese government, but misses out on the parallel byproduct of and element in the propaganda itself: nationalism.

China has invested hugely in its hosting of the Olympic Games in August with the idea of introducing itself as an overwhelming success story: increasingly prosperous, harmonious and forward-looking. The first statement is certainly true, but one needn’t be an enemy of China, as the propagandists would have it, to question the other two.

It isn’t just the propagandists that would think questioning whether or not China is “harmonious and forward-looking.” The target of the propagandists, too, would and do perceive you as an enemy because of their own intense nationalistic sentiments towards China. Propaganda doesn’t merely control the message and the medium, but creates an environment that allows the sentiments and goals within the propaganda to be realized. In China’s case, the vilification of peaceful Tibetans and the Dalai Lama lead directly to and through nationalism. As French notes, this will continue to poison China’s response to anything that the outside world says or does regarding the Olympics.

India Codel Introduces Legislation on Tibet

Great news via The Gavel.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi released the following statement today after she and members of the bipartisan Congressional Delegation that met with His Holiness the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan Government-in-Exile in India introduced House Resolution 1077. The Resolution, which calls on the Chinese government to end its crackdown in Tibet and to enter into a substantive dialogue with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, will be on the House floor next week.

Read the resolution (pdf) >>

“Leaders around the world have called for the Chinese government to take steps to end its crackdown on peaceful Tibetans and enter into a dialogue with his Holiness the Dalai Lama, and now the House of Representative will have the opportunity to join the international chorus of calls for peace and freedom.

“The cause of Tibet is a challenge to the conscience of the world. For far too long, the Tibetan people have suffered due to the repressive policies of the Chinese government as they have sought the basic human rights and dignity to which all people of the world are entitled.

“I look forward to the House making a powerful and unified statement in support of the fundamental freedom and dignity of the Tibetan people at this critical time.”

Pelosi continues to be the clear leader in the US government when it comes to responding  the ongoing situation in Tibet. Thank you again Speaker Pelosi for continuing to fight for human rights and freedom for Tibet.

They Write Letters

Democratic Representatives John Conyers, Jerry Nadler, and Bobby Scott write to Attorney General Mukasey to ask him about his comments about a pre-9/11 call from Afghanistan that the Bush administration knew about, but did not intercept, that is allegedly connected to the 9/11 attacks. The letter also questions Mukasey on a controversial memorandum from the Office of Legal Counsel that claims “the Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations.” These House Judiciary Committee Dems are pushing back hard on the Bush administration’s latest fear mongering and iterations of the unitary executive theory. Nadler, my Congressman, has been fantastic on rule of law issues of late and was a key architect of the improved House FISA legislation passed last month. I think his efforts are under appreciated by the netroots community, though if he keeps on this pace, that will change. Keep up the good work Congressman.

Full letter below the fold.

Continue reading “They Write Letters” →