most insightful comment I've ever read in the "Guardian"
"The crusading zeal for Democracy - in other people's countries - combined with smugness about the condition of one's own society betrayed by many of the comments is frankly sick making.
If you don't want pragmatic solutions to this tricky problem, which was not created by the Chinese people or their Government, what do you want? Surely after the all this time the Middle East must function as some kind of object lesson for the growing redundancy of the 'Human Rights' agenda in a context where it merely fuels the 'moral duty' of western Governments and their arms manufacturers to supply imagined 'moderate oppositions' and support them with the latest experimental weapons systems from the air?
Meanwhile millions of ordinary people, children and old people suffer endlessly from unspeakable hardship and fear of imminent death.
Meanwhile, back at home you watch the spectacle of your ruling party putting before you the 'fundamental' domestic choices of for the next General Election - dismantling the NHS - 'nah, you can keep that for a bit longer (but we're turning it into such a shambles we'll soon persuade you it's not worth keeping)', or cutting 'benefits' either to 'wealthy' pensioners, or the working poor, while its members bleed away to a party which wants to withdraw the Human Right of Bulgarians, Romanians and others to travel freely in search of work.
Meanwhile, many contributors to these comments, having never set foot in China, assume that comparisons with North Korea are valid simply because the two states fall under the rubric of 'Dictatorship'. You cannot, unless you come, begin to appreciate the paradoxes of a regime where there is freedom without democracy, or where absolute power does not corrupt absolutely. The value of allowing Chinese working people the peaceful conditions and the time in which they can see if their dreams and hopes for the future are real or imaginary is self-righteously waived away on the insistence that unless they have Democracy and Human Rights on 'our' terms, and as soon as possible, everything they strive for is meaningless.
Beams and motes."
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/30/china-hong-kong-future-protesters-cry-democracy#comments
If you don't want pragmatic solutions to this tricky problem, which was not created by the Chinese people or their Government, what do you want? Surely after the all this time the Middle East must function as some kind of object lesson for the growing redundancy of the 'Human Rights' agenda in a context where it merely fuels the 'moral duty' of western Governments and their arms manufacturers to supply imagined 'moderate oppositions' and support them with the latest experimental weapons systems from the air?
Meanwhile millions of ordinary people, children and old people suffer endlessly from unspeakable hardship and fear of imminent death.
Meanwhile, back at home you watch the spectacle of your ruling party putting before you the 'fundamental' domestic choices of for the next General Election - dismantling the NHS - 'nah, you can keep that for a bit longer (but we're turning it into such a shambles we'll soon persuade you it's not worth keeping)', or cutting 'benefits' either to 'wealthy' pensioners, or the working poor, while its members bleed away to a party which wants to withdraw the Human Right of Bulgarians, Romanians and others to travel freely in search of work.
Meanwhile, many contributors to these comments, having never set foot in China, assume that comparisons with North Korea are valid simply because the two states fall under the rubric of 'Dictatorship'. You cannot, unless you come, begin to appreciate the paradoxes of a regime where there is freedom without democracy, or where absolute power does not corrupt absolutely. The value of allowing Chinese working people the peaceful conditions and the time in which they can see if their dreams and hopes for the future are real or imaginary is self-righteously waived away on the insistence that unless they have Democracy and Human Rights on 'our' terms, and as soon as possible, everything they strive for is meaningless.
Beams and motes."
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/30/china-hong-kong-future-protesters-cry-democracy#comments