Wednesday night, the Empire State Building in Manhattan shone red and yellow as a tribute to the sixtieth anniversary of the Communist takeover of China.

When lit, the Empire State is a lovely sight.  Yet last night’s display cast a rather ugly glow.  Why?  Because given the nation it is honoring, we must ask the sponsors of this celebration which highlights of China’s history during those sixty years they especially want to honor.

Might it be the murder of Christian missionaries in the late 40s and 50s?  How about the killing of millions of Chinese during Chairman Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” campaign of the mid-fifties? During those years, Communist authorities pressed rural Chinese to modernize, demanding such insanities as backyard steel mills.

China enveloped Tibet in the late 50s. That ancient Buddhist land is still being suppressed and its unique culture eradicated fifty years later. The Dalai Lama and many other Tibetans still live in exile.

In the mid-60s, Chairman Mao initiated the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution which left more millions dead. Fanatical Red Guards beat and brutalized anyone who had exposure to Western Culture—and even trashed China’s revered cultural heritage.

Continue reading »

Comments: 2 |

Recently President Obama signaled to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee his treaty ratification priorities for the 111^th Congress.  Not surprisingly, the Convention to End All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) is on the list as the lone “Human Rights” treaty Obama wants ratified.  A pleasant surprise, however, is the conspicuous absence of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).  Both treaties are extremely pernicious and the United States should ratify neither, as Pat Fagan, Bill Saunders, and I explain here.  It’s good to see that for now we only need to worry about one of them.

Comments: - |

On Friday government officials from the regime of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela raided the offices of Globovision, the only remaining television broadcaster in the country that openly criticizes Chavez.  The pretext for the raid has something to do with the station’s news reporting on an earthquake in Venezuela in early May, which asserted that the government had been slow to report on the incident.   According to press reports and comments from worried United Nations officials, Globovision stands to lose its license, which would mean the end of the last media outlet that dares to disagree with Chavez or his increasingly oligarchic powers.  Interestingly, Venezuelan government officials characterized the Globovision report as “hate speech” that risked alarming the country and “destabilizing” the populace. Government’s facile use of such expressions is reason for alarm.

As The Washington Post notes this morning, Latin American caudillos are no novelty, but the silence of the United States (i.e., the Obama administration) in the face of such repression is a first.  Not a first, but similarly worrisome, is the news that Nancy Pelosi, fresh from accusing the C.I.A. of lying to Congress in private briefings, is off to Beijing with nary a word prior to her trip of criticism of China’s abusive human rights practices.  Time was, U.S. Democrats like former Rep. Dick Gephardt (Mo.) were among the leaders of efforts to hold the Chinese accountable for their abuses of workers, and other Democrats spoke of Chinese denial of religious freedom and its record of forced abortion and sterilization.  Pelosi instead wants to engage the oligarchs in Beijing only on climate change.   But it is the climate for political freedom that is turning adverse.

Comments: - |