I almost believed “Craig Jones” was a self-hating Western leftist with sloppy English until I reread that glaring error in terminology no educated native-born citizen of the above-mentioned countries would make.

滥竽充数, “Craig Jones.”

Despite the mutual agreement, the British expedition did take the lives of a few thousand unprepared Tibetan soldiers and civilians. The biggest massacre took place on March 31, 1904 at a mountain pass halfway to Gyantse near a village called Guru. Colonel Younghusband tricked the 2,000 Tibetan soldiers guarding the pass into extinguishing the burning ropes of their basic rifles before firing at them with the Maxim machine guns and rifles. The Tibetan casualty, according to Younghusband’s account, was “500 killed and wounded.” [40] Others have claimed that the Tibetan casualty was as high as 1,300.

In a telegraph to his superior in India, the day after the Tibetan massacre, Younghusband stated: “I trust the tremendous punishment they have received will prevent further fighting, and induce them to at last to negotiate.”

As for East Timor, it was the USA that armed and supported Indonesian suppression of East Timor self-determination. In fact, on the eve of the East Timor invasion (1978-9), President Gerald Ford asked his puppet Suharto to wait until his entourage left East Timor. In other words, Ford gave tacit, economic, and military approval to the invasion of East Timor.

In camparison to Cambodia (Killing Fields), Indosia killed half of the East Timor population. Interesting that the US condemned Cambodia but forgot that its close ally Indonesia had killed far more than Pot Pol.

I wonder how many Chinese movies will be made, in the future, featuring brave Chinese soldiers fighting hooded Tibetan ninjas and how many fools will end up believing this sort of thing?

My guess is the same sort of schmucks that root for John Wayne when watching western movies, or build statues of Kim Yu-shin…

. . . A young Chinese acquaintance who is a journalist sounded a troubled note in an e-mail message to me: “I read some news reports recently and am confused why the Western media reports on Tibet are inconsistent with the facts? Like they only report on the Chinese police but not the thugs attack the innocent people and the police? And even worse, why are they reporting lot of false and prejudiced news?”

The irony here, of course, is that Western coverage, whatever its faults, generally detailed the street violence in Lhasa, despite being barred access to Tibet by a country that made a big to-do last year over having supposedly lifted restrictions on the movements of international journalists in China.

Unlike the heavily controlled domestic press, the Western media also reported on the largely peaceful sympathy protests that unfolded over a broad stretch of the Tibetan plateau. They generally sought to give at least two sides to the story and questioned Beijing’s assertions about Tibetan protesters and about their spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, in the textbook way an independent press should.

Beyond the headlines, though, this crisis tells us a lot about China, and although the government may still have the means to control opinion, the more strenuously it has pressed its case, the less the picture of the country concurs with the image that China so eagerly wishes to promote of itself to the world.

China has invested hugely in its hosting of the Olympic Games in August with the idea of introducing itself as an overwhelming success story: increasingly prosperous, harmonious and forward-looking. The first statement is certainly true, but one needn’t be an enemy of China, as the propagandists would have it, to question the other two.

This may yet turn out to be China’s century, but it seems clearer than ever there’s a lot of work to do, reforming an awfully rickety system, rethinking policies built on bald fictions, such as the “autonomous regions” in China’s west, and learning to deal with criticism without turning it into a matter of ethnic pride or betrayal.

The official slogan of the Games may be “one world, one dream,” but that’s not the feeling one gets listening to the state’s organs. It is an ugly, wound-nursing nationalism one hears. “So strong,” said the filmmaker Tang, “that there’s almost no introspection, not even among Han intellectuals.”

I wonder how many Chinese movies will be made, in the future, featuring brave Chinese soldiers fighting hooded Tibetan ninjas and how many fools will end up believing this sort of thing?

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/wea.....ssues.html

It’s obvious the West picks and chooses where it intervenes.

Thank god for that. We need to be even more selective about which countries we invade in order to liberate.

To Mr. Cut-and-paste, #5:

As soon as I saw how long your “comment” was, I scrolled right past. Didn’t even stop to rubberneck.