#325

Let me preface this part of my post by saying that it's not like I think democracy is so great or that I think governments that are not democratic are helmed by gibbering rats. I know enough to know that everything is different everywhere, and that the underdog is not always necessarily the hero simply virtue of opposition to a power that is clearly oppressive. However, I will always be out in favor of more freedom as opposed to less freedom, and Chow Hang-tung, formerly of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, is sentenced to jail along with a couple of others, and what she had to say to her judge resonated with me enough that I'd like to quote her here, not something I have ever done and not something which will happen often.

“Sir, sentence us for our insubordination if you must, but when the exercise of power is based on lies, being insubordinate is the only way to be human,”

Regardless of the context, I can get behind this statement. I too have bared my neck to punishers in this way, for this reason. 

Personally, I would love for China to relax its more authoritarian policies just enough to, I don't know, be considered human. Also for genocide to stop would be awesome. It would also be super optimal if the U.S. could stop treating China like an entity whose behavior materializes from nowhere and try for a less racist perspective on exactly why their government behaves the way it does, reformulating its diplomatic efforts with that knowledge at the fore. I truly believe the possibility for an entente with China is real, culturally, economically, and politically. It would be an amazing start if western powers didn't expect China to merely sit, and heel, like some canid perversion of a superpower, and obediently produce all the stupid plastic shit they want to sell to their citizens.

When reading policy and intelligence reports regarding China, and when listening to economic cross-talk about China, I always find that the size of the country warps and shifts based on the speaker's prejudice. When they want something from China, it's a small place, like Bulgaria or some shit--just so happens it's filled with factories, only factories and nothing else. The acquiescence of the "third-world" is assumed, and when China does not meet these expectations, a truculent and baseless animosity on their part is to blame. When the speaker wants to conjure some devil with which to fight shadow wars, then China is as some alien race, poised in their planet-shattering dreadnoughts, waiting only for the calculation of their firing solutions to be complete ere their red lasers set our own meek and innocent world's atmosphere ablaze. 

Wonder what the dialogue would look like if we modified our notions and expectations just a touch towards the sane and rational. 

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Anyhow! Peoplefortheworldwideabolitionofprisonssaywhat

WHAT

what

--JL