-----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Sid Shniad Sent: Monday, January 24, 2011 12:36 PM Subject: Re: Hu's thinking on US (letter to the editor, Asia Times)
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Letters.html Some may wonder what Hu Jintao was thinking when Barack Obama began his usual tired, cliched harangue about China's human rights record. Well, wonder no more, Wonderlanders! Futureman sent me a copy of Hu's biography, to be written in 2027. I quote: "So Obama, whose soldiers were, as he was speaking, waging war on Afghans, Iraqis, Somalis and God knows how many other people with the same colored skin as his, started playing that same old broken record about China's failures with human rights, civil liberties, free speech, blah blah blah. Huh. Last time I looked, killing men, women and children in illegal occupations qualifies as human rights violations too. And there were those activist people outside waving signs about Tibet, which everyone, including this country, recognizes as Chinese sovereign territory. "But maybe they're right. Maybe we could have done something different with the Tibetans, instead of bringing their feudal society into the 20th century and giving them roads and industry and a higher standard of living. Perhaps we should have taken a page out of America's stellar record in human rights and did to Tibetans what the Anglo-Saxons did with the native red people; herd them into cramped, arid deserts thousands of miles from their homes or simply kill those recalcitrants who refused to go. Or maybe we could have treated Tibetans like American black slaves. Why, we could have sold them to work in American cotton fields! And I loved Obama's insinuating comments about his imprisoned fellow Nobel peace laureate. What a sense of humor these Westerners have. "Peevishly, I wanted to ask the president if the rumors were true that his own peace prize keeps oozing fresh blood every day, but I was the gracious guest and refrained. I could have been a real churl and asked the "Change" president why millions of his own people were still denied health insurance, one of the most basic human rights recognized as such by even most other white societies. But I didn't. No, I let him drone on about currency manipulation, which God knows these Americans have never been guilty of a million times over. "My speech writers even wanted me to add a cutting comment about how some social historians think that huge wealth gaps, capitalist speculation and a blind ideological devotion to unrestrained human greed are the most egregious human rights violations of all, and boy, was that one tempting. But I'm proud that I stayed above the pettiness to the end. "Of course, we both had to go through these hollow exercises in play-acting, pretending the Americans are still relevant. I even continued that habit with the American dictator who overthrew their government in 2022. She owed us big time too; we bankrolled her entire coup d'etat in return for Taiwan and Japan. But that's another story." Hardy Campbell United States (Jan 24, '11) !DSPAM:2676,4d3de2a1308682048120238!
_______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
