Category: The Dish

A reader writes:

Wright’s speeches condemning the United States for racist policies are an updated (although much less elegant) version of Frederick Douglass’s famous 1852 speech "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" Here’s an excerpt:

"What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy–a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour."

Strong stuff! Comparing the U.S. to "a nation of savages"? Of course, Douglass was condemning an era of slavery, but Wright was referring to just such an inheritance.

And there’s also this:

"This Fourth of July is yours, not mine.

You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak today? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn you that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation whose crimes, towering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrecoverable ruin! I can today take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people. ‘By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! We wept in the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of us a song; songs of Zion. How can we sign the Lord’s song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.’ (Psalm 137.1-6)…Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty? that he is the rightful owner of his own body? You have already declared it. Must I argue the wrongfulness of slavery? Is that a question for Republicans?….How should I look today, in the presence of Americans, dividing, and subdividing a discourse, to show that men have a natural right to freedom?"

When will people accept that strongly worded condemnations of the United States
are a fundamental part of our literary tradition–as they should be of any
vibrant democracy?

"Iraq’s reconstruction will be as symbolically important as West Germany’s was after World War II, but it will be a much tougher project. With three vehement ethnic and religious groups within, and Islamic radicals in the hills nearby, it looks more like Yugoslavia than Germany. In that sense, Iraq predicts the complexities of Asia: the religions, cultures and traditions of governance are profoundly different from ours, the chances of lethal misunderstandings far greater than they were in Europe. President Bush seemed to dismiss this concern in a speech to the American Enterprise Institute on Feb. 26: "It is presumptuous and insulting to suggest that a whole region of the world…is somehow untouched by the most basic aspirations of life. Human cultures can be vastly different, yet the human heart desires the same good things everywhere on earth.

But surely it is not presumptuous to suggest that freedom isn’t easily imposed by outsiders, that it is nurtured slowly and indigenously and may develop in ways that we find strange," – Joe Klein, in his column on the eve of the Iraq war five years ago this week.

"In politics, as in religion, my tenets are few and simple; the leading one of which, and indeed that which embraces most others, is to be honest and just ourselves, and to exact it from others; meddling as little as possible in their affairs where our own are not involved. If this maxim was generally adopted, wars would cease and our swords would soon be converted into reap-hooks and our harvests be more peaceful, abundant and happy," – George Washington, cited in Steve Waldman’s new book, "Founding Faith," just published.

Doesn’t sound like a Christianist, does he?

American Footprints wonders about the changing role of Dalai Lama:

The CCP will attack Tibetan dissent with a grim combination of determination, desperation, and relish, and deploy every police, military, political, propaganda informational, and diplomatic resource it possesses, even as the government struggles to maintain the smiley face China Rising facade for the Olympics and the international community.

The question that is roiling the Chinese government and, the Dalai Lama’s government in exile in Dharmsala, is whether this represents a change in tactics, a new upsurge in militancy, and/or a challenge to the leadership of the Dalai Lama in Tibetan affairs.

De Spiegel has a round-up of German reaction. An except from Financial Times Deutschland:

It’s certainly too early to decide on a boycott. But this cuts both ways: Politicians and athletes who now reject the idea out of hand are speaking prematurely. It’s arguable whether such threats will push Beijing to a different policy over Tibet. Nevertheless, a refusal by the West to take part in the Games is its most powerful weapon of protest. It would be a severe mistake to use it now — without knowing whether China will escalate the violence in Tibet, which is still a risk.

A Japanese blogger connects the Tibetan protests to the Taiwan independence movement:

On the 22nd of this month, presidential elections will take place in Taiwan. The uprising in Tibet and the elections in Taiwan will soon join together and come to a head. It is like a threat: if Taiwan tries to declare independence, this is the kind of thing that they will go through. Although the force of the appeal for self-government in Tibet is not directly supporting the elections in Taiwan, through a [common] undercurrent they are induced to join together.

St Patrick’s Day revellers celebrate in Trafalgar Square on March 16, 2008 in London, England. By Ben Stansall/Getty Images.

Fallows reports from inside China:

The propagandists black out news coverage and blame every problem in Tibet on what they call (when they speak in English) "hooligans" from "the Dalai clique." Most people in China assume that Tibet, like Taiwan, Inner Mongolia, or the Muslim Xinjiang region of the northwest, is an integral and inalienable part of its territory. That’s all they have ever heard from the media and in the schools. The threat of regional "splittism" raised by riots in Tibet is in this view a true threat to national security.

Thus conditions are set for the next stage of tragedy in Tibet, as Monday’s deadline for the end of protest draws near. The government is conditioned to be tough — and to have the support of its public, and not to care about objections from overseas. It has to care more, in this year of the Olympics. Soon we’ll see how much that tempers the policy.

I’m going to keep making this very basic point until Senators Clinton and McCain provide the same transparency as Obama. It’s particularly important with the Clintons, whose massive increase in wealth in the last few years and past financial shenanigans demand a process of real vetting – a process they are unaccountably resisting. And not a few days before the next critical primary. Now. We need time to ask all the right questions and for the press to do its job. The returns are available unless they weren’t filed.

So where are they? And when will the press do its job and demand either the returns or a half-way credible account of why they’re being withheld? So far, the Clintons are stalling and doing their usual wagon-circling. Anyone who remembers the 1990s knows this is not a good sign. I think they’re hoping that Obama will be destroyed and then they can blame the Republicans for re-booting Ken Starr.

I’ve posted this in previous years, and I’ll post it again:

Clive Crook says bankruptcy would have been better for the stockholders:

Bankruptcy would surely have recovered more value for shareholders than this give-away-–but the Fed evidently feared that closure and disposal of Bear’s assets would have jeopardized other parts of the country’s teetering financial system. Preventing that was the Fed’s overriding goal. The firm had to be acquired in a hurry, shored up, and then run, so far as counterparties were concerned, as though nothing had happened. By any measure, Bear Stearns was not that big: it was surely not “too big to fail”.

Megan argues most everyone is to blame:

There’s a certain amount of moral outrage floating around in the punditocracy, looking for a solid target. The implication is that someone, or at least some small group of people, must have done this to us in the course of feeding their insatiable greed. I’m sure there will be a post-mortem in which some reporter will tell a very convincing story about how this could all have been averted if only someone had Made A Rule. It may be Bear’s managers who should have done it, or the Fed, or the SEC. I don’t know who the culprit will be, but I am very sure that everyone else will be very sure that Someone could have (and should have) prevented all this.

Before we enter into the orgy of blame, I’d suggest that that someone was everyone, almost. Crazy Asian people who thought America was some sort of Miracle Market sent us more money than we needed for investment, inflating an asset price bubble. The Federal Reserve, complacent after more than twenty years of tame inflation, added a little kerosene to an already blazing fire. Silly people decided that real estate prices would continue rocketing upwards forever, and took on ridiculous mortgages that they had no reasonable hope of paying off. Idiot bankers thought that their enormous brains, raffish good looks, and advanced computer models had enabled them to conquer risk.

The kind of thing only Ron Paul would have the balls to do.