Journey of harmony

The Chinese government wants everything about the coming Beijing Olympics to be nicey-nice, which is why they're putting down dissent by force in Tibet, invading Nepal to take the torch to the top of Everest, and trying to fling Darfur down the world's already well-used memory hole. Oh, yeah, and calling the Dalai Lama:

a jackal in Buddhist monk’s robes, an evil spirit with a human face and the heart of a beast...

Oom! Harmonious. Kim Jong Il will be so proud of his big brothers!

Image from Wikimedia Commons under CCA ShareAlike 2.5. Rights owned by Luca Galuzzi - www.galuzzi.it.

The price of Iraq

I know the conventional wisdom is that Americans don't give a damn about anything in Africa. Well, white Americans, anyway. OK, white Americans older than college age. (I remember one candlelight march thirty years ago: What's the word? Johannesburg!)

One of the consequences of the dusty quagmire in Iraq is that no one at a principal's level in the American government has time for Darfur.

After the Holocaust, we said, "Never again." Turns out we were rationalizing as a salve for our consciences.

Now, the ADL needs intense negotiations to acknowledge the genocide that Armenians suffered. Bill Clinton failed utterly in Rwanda - by far the largest moral failing of his administration. Communist Vietnam stopped the Khmer Rouge, and that wasn't because they had moral objections.

And the Bushists have failed even to care about the Sudan, with the one small exception of a certain aspirin factory that they can hang around Bill Clinton's neck.