McCommunism
August 10, 2008
Naomi Klein on China and the Olympics
“Security, central planning, surveillance state is an ideal cocoon for global capitalism”
Naomi Klein: Billions of dollars spent on Olympic security, China buys tools of war on terror (2 of 4)
The Politics of Free Speech
August 9, 2008
No, I am not talking about China. That is easy, and meaningless. I am not moved when some designer anarchist from California privileged enough to afford the ticket to Beijing makes a statement about — Tibet. As if things were hunky dory back home; as if being a Brit or an American grants one the moral authority to dispense such admonition. And there is ignorance. I have never heard any of these peaceniks speak about the Uighurs. Or about the sweatshop labourers. Tibet is sexy, it comes with a patina of Hollywood legitimacy. Uighurs - who are they again?
Does any citizen of the US or UK have business telling the Chinese how to run their affairs when their own countries are busy inflicting genocide abroad (Iraq, Afghanistan) and curtailing rights and liberties at home? Guantanamo, Bagram, Falluja, Abu Ghraib, rendition, shock-and-awe, 42 days without charge — and we have the chutzpah to lecture China, Zimbabwe etc? How many are aware that both UK and US have a higher incarceration rate than China, Saudi Arabia or even Burma?
And all the talk of ‘freedom of speech’ rings a little hollow when neither US nor UK has done much to ensure it at home. Remember those whistleblowers who were last year put in jail by the British state? Can any country which has laws like the Official Secrets Act claim it upholds freedom of speech?
So here comes the latest revelation. Tom Feeley, who runs the excellent news resource Information Clearinghouse is being threatened by armed goons to shut down his operation. Here is a mail Mike Whitney recently sent (thanks Liz):
My friend Tom Feeley is in Big trouble. He runs the web site informationclearinghouse.info <http://informationclearinghouse.info/> which updates “news you won’t find in the corporate media” every day. The site is strongly anti-war.
Tom has gotten his share of death threats over the years, but what happened this week is a lot more serious.
The Olympics: Unveiling Police State 2.0
August 8, 2008
Naomi Klein on China, the Olympics and the police state. For more on this see Klein’s earlier piece China’s all seeing eye.
So far, the Olympics have been an open invitation to China-bash, a bottomless excuse for Western journalists to go after the Commies on everything from internet censorship to Darfur. Through all the nasty news stories, however, the Chinese government has seemed amazingly unperturbed. That’s because it is betting on this: when the opening ceremonies begin friday, you will instantly forget all that unpleasantness as your brain is zapped by the cultural/athletic/political extravaganza that is the Beijing Olympics.
The Celebrity Monk
June 1, 2008
‘Down with the Dalai Lama‘, writes Brendan O’Neill. ‘Why do western commentators idolise a celebrity monk who hangs out with Sharon Stone and once guest-edited French Vogue?’
Has there ever been a political figure more ridiculous than the Dalai Lama? This is the “humble monk” who forswears worldly goods in favour of living a simple life dressed in maroon robes. Yet in 1992 he guest-edited French Vogue, the bible of the decadent high-fashion classes, which is packed with pictures of the half-starved daughters of the aristocracy modelling skirts and shirts that most of us could never afford.
He claims to be the current incarnation of the Tulkus line of Buddhist masters, who are “exempt from the wheel of death and rebirth”. Yet he’s best known for hanging out with clueless western celebs like Richard Gere and Sharon Stone (who is still most famous for showing her vagina on the big screen). Stone once introduced the Dalai Lama at a glittering fundraising ball as “Mr Please, Please, Please Let Me Back Into China!”
The Dalai Lama says he wants Tibetan autonomy and political independence. Yet he allows himself to be used as a tool by western powers keen to humiliate China. Between the late 1950s and 1974, he is alleged to have received around $15,000 a month, or $180,000 a year, from the CIA. He has also been, according to the same reporter, “remarkably nepotistic”, promoting his brothers and their wives to positions of extraordinary power in his fiefdom-in-exile in Dharamsala, northern India.
China’s All-Seeing Eye
May 16, 2008
Naomi Klein explains how “with the help of U.S. defense contractors, China is building the prototype for a high-tech police state. It is ready for export.”
Thirty years ago, the city of Shenzhen didn’t exist. Back in those days, it was a string of small fishing villages and collectively run rice paddies, a place of rutted dirt roads and traditional temples. That was before the Communist Party chose it — thanks to its location close to Hong Kong’s port — to be China’s first “special economic zone,” one of only four areas where capitalism would be permitted on a trial basis. The theory behind the experiment was that the “real” China would keep its socialist soul intact while profiting from the private-sector jobs and industrial development created in Shenzhen. The result was a city of pure commerce, undiluted by history or rooted culture — the crack cocaine of capitalism. It was a force so addictive to investors that the Shenzhen experiment quickly expanded, swallowing not just the surrounding Pearl River Delta, which now houses roughly 100,000 factories, but much of the rest of the country as well. Today, Shenzhen is a city of 12.4 million people, and there is a good chance that at least half of everything you own was made here: iPods, laptops, sneakers, flatscreen TVs, cellphones, jeans, maybe your desk chair, possibly your car and almost certainly your printer. Hundreds of luxury condominiums tower over the city; many are more than 40 stories high, topped with three-story penthouses. Newer neighborhoods like Keji Yuan are packed with ostentatiously modern corporate campuses and decadent shopping malls. Rem Koolhaas, Prada’s favorite architect, is building a stock exchange in Shenzhen that looks like it floats — a design intended, he says, to “suggest and illustrate the process of the market.” A still-under-construction superlight subway will soon connect it all at high speed; every car has multiple TV screens broadcasting over a Wi-Fi network. At night, the entire city lights up like a pimped-out Hummer, with each five-star hotel and office tower competing over who can put on the best light show.
No Shangri-La
April 19, 2008
In a letter to the London Review of Books Slavoj Žižek dispels media myths about Tibet.
The media imposes certain stories on us, and the one about Tibet goes like this. The People’s Republic of China, which, back in 1949, illegally occupied Tibet, has for decades engaged in the brutal and systematic destruction not only of the Tibetan religion, but of the Tibetans themselves. Recently, the Tibetans’ protests against Chinese occupation were again crushed by military force. Since China is hosting the 2008 Olympics, it is the duty of all of us who love democracy and freedom to put pressure on China to give back to the Tibetans what it stole from them. A country with such a dismal human rights record cannot be allowed to use the noble Olympic spectacle to whitewash its image. What will our governments do? Will they, as usual, cede to economic pragmatism, or will they summon the strength to put ethical and political values above short-term economic interests?
There are complications in this story of ‘good guys versus bad guys’. It is not the case that Tibet was an independent country until 1949, when it was suddenly occupied by China. The history of relations between Tibet and China is a long and complex one, in which China has often played the role of a protective overlord: the anti-Communist Kuomintang also insisted on Chinese sovereignty over Tibet. Before 1949, Tibet was no Shangri-la, but an extremely harsh feudal society, poor (life expectancy was barely over 30), corrupt and fractured by civil wars (the most recent one, between two monastic factions, took place in 1948, when the Red Army was already knocking at the door). Fearing social unrest and disintegration, the ruling elite prohibited industrial development, so that metal, for example, had to be imported from India.
Human Rights and Media Manipulation
March 30, 2008
From Pinochet to ‘Human Rights’ in China. Michael Barker on the Regime-Change Industry, its humanitarian pretenses and its nexus with the Israel lobby.
When the twentieth century becomes history it will be seen as distinctive, I believe, for three developments in liberal Western societies: the growth of democracy; the rise of huge concentrations of economic power, known as corporations; and the professionalizing and institutionalizing of propaganda, especially as a means for safe-guarding the power of free-enterprise corporations against democracy.” (Alex Carey, 1987) [1]
Most regular readers of alternative media will be acutely aware of the US government’s antidemocratic history. Indeed, according to William Blum and Dr Danielle Ganser, since 1945 this much neglected history has seen the US government attempt to “overthrow more than 40 foreign governments”, “crush more than 30 populist-nationalist movements” and provide support to right-wing terrorist (stay behind) armies in every European country. Unfortunately as most members of the public rely upon the corporate media – for the most part unaware that a useful and democratic alternative media exists – they are for the most part unaware of the extent of this antidemocratic foreign policy (and perhaps more importantly still they are unaware that they can do something to change it).
Tibet, the ‘Great Game’ and the CIA
March 26, 2008
Richard M Bennett on the new great game. For background also check out Fanonite contributor Michael Barker’s ‘“Democratic Imperialism”: Tibet, China, and the National Endowment for Democracy‘. (thanks Dave, Mike)
Given the historical context of the unrest in Tibet, there is reason to believe Beijing was caught on the hop with the recent demonstrations for the simple reason that their planning took place outside of Tibet and that the direction of the protesters is similarly in the hands of anti-Chinese organizers safely out of reach in Nepal and northern India.
Similarly, the funding and overall control of the unrest has also been linked to Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, and by inference to the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) because of his close cooperation with US intelligence for over 50 years.
Indeed, with the CIA’s deep involvement with the Free Tibet Movement and its funding of the suspiciously well-informed Radio Free Asia, it would seem somewhat unlikely that any revolt could have been planned or occurred without the prior knowledge, and even perhaps the agreement, of the National Clandestine Service (formerly known as the Directorate of Operations) at CIA headquarters in Langley.
Holy Man
March 24, 2008
‘What does the Dalai Lama actually stand for?‘ Pankaj Mishra pores through a book on the holy man an answer.
Last November, a couple of weeks after the Dalai Lama received a Congressional Gold Medal from President Bush, his old Land Rover went on sale on eBay. Sharon Stone, who once introduced the Tibetan leader at a fundraiser as “Mr. Please, Please, Please Let Me Back Into China!” (she meant Tibet), announced the auction on YouTube, promising the prospective winner of the 1966 station wagon, “You’ll just laugh the whole time that you’re in it!” The bidding closed at more than eighty thousand dollars. The Dalai Lama, whom Larry King, on CNN, once referred to as a Muslim, has also received the Lifetime Achievement award of Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America. He is the only Nobel laureate to appear in an advertisement for Apple and guest-edit French Vogue. Martin Scorsese and Brad Pitt have helped commemorate his Lhasa childhood on film. He gave a lecture at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, in Washington, D.C., in 2005. This spring, in Germany, he will speak on human rights and globalization. For someone who claims to be “a simple Buddhist monk,” the Dalai Lama has a large carbon footprint and often seems as ubiquitous as Britney Spears.
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At War With the Utopia of Modernity
March 23, 2008
‘Tibetans’ rage is directed not at communist rule,’ writes Pankaj Mishra, ‘but the consumerist threat to their traditions and sacred lands’.
Last week many western commentators scrambling to interpret the protests in Lhasa found that they did not need to work especially hard. Surely the Tibetans are the latest of many brave peoples to rebel against communist totalitarianism? The rhetorical templates of the cold war are still close at hand, shaping western discussions of Islam or Asia. Dusting off the hoary oppositions between the free and unfree worlds, the Wall Street Journal declared that religious freedom was the main issue. “On the streets of Lhasa, China has again had a vivid demonstration of the power of conscience to move people to action against a soulless, and brittle, state.”
This is stirring stuff. Never mind that the rioters in Lhasa were attacking Han Chinese immigrants rather than the Chinese state, or that the Chinese authorities have been relatively restrained so far, one cautious step behind middle-class public opinion - which I sensed in China last week to be overwhelmingly against the Tibetan ethnic minority.
