DEFENDING TYRANNY?

I’ve gotten some fair comments in the mail asking me to unpack my assertion that although China is a tyranny, it does deserve some sphere of influence as a great power. I should say I don’t believe that extends to Taiwan, which deserves our support and protection. I don’t believe it involves any territorial aggression, and that includes Tibet. But a state as large and as potentially powerful as China can’t be wished away. It has to be dealt with. With any luck, it may break up into smaller units in the future, or democratize in some measure. Until then, we have to accept its existence and work with it. I don’t regard it as I regarded the Soviet Union, i.e. as an international menace, and so I don’t adhere to the containment fixation of some on the right. Speaking of which, I must say I’m a little stunned by their quiescence. Marshall Whitman has a fair comment on this today. If Clinton had sent that letter, the Republicans would now be sending him Chamberlain umbrellas en masse. But Clinton wouldn’t have deserved that either.

WHITE NIGGERS AGAIN: A reader sends in the following passage from Ronald Takaki’s book, “A Different Mirror.” According to Takaki, the term was actually coined by pre-Emancipation African-Americans to describe racist Irishmen, who initiated race riots in New York City in 1863. Fascinating. “”Led by Irish longshoremen, the rioters warned employers ‘not to put any niggers to work’ and blacks to stay away from the docks. they insisted that all stevedore jobs belonged to white men. The riot continued for four days. Finally, an army regiment rushed to the city from Gettysburg and restored order. By then scores of people had been injured and 105 killed. Condemning the ‘revolting fiendish, cowardly, cruel’ treatment of poor unfortunate negroes,’ an Irish newspaper, the Metropolitan Record, declared that ‘a superior race should distain to vent their passions on an inferior one… Reacting to Irish hostility, blacks called their tormentor ‘white niggers.’ They resented being told by immigrants to leave the country of their birth and ‘go back’ to Africa, a place they had never been. On one plantation, slaves mocked their Irish overseer by saying that an Irishman was ‘only a Negro turned inside out.’ Blacks told anti-Irish stories about the alleged gullibility and stupidity of the new-comers…”

FINALLY: “On top of the foot-and-mouth epidemic, there is now a growing emergency concerning the welfare of animals. Across the country there are appalling scenes of animal suffering.” – Tory leader William Hague, breaking the silence among British politicians about the hideous cruelty of some of the measures to counter foot and mouth disease in Britain.