China publishes a human rights record of the USA
chinadaily.com.cn
chinadaily.com.cn
Of course it's a bit hypocritical but a) that's sort of the point, where does the US get off writing these reports either all considered and b) so what? Why are we saying it is hypocritical? It mostly reads as a collection of facts and statistics. We are annoyed because in this collection they read a bit like a condemnation from someone we also view guilty of most of these... transgressions? However the underlying data shouldn't be dismissed just because we don't like the publisher, that's terribly unscientific. And if we insist upon this, where is the uproar when the US publishes its reports?
Ignore the hypocrisy, it's a BS smoke screen to try and dismiss the facts and stats. And yes, they don't paint the greatest picture. But maybe that should be looked into instead of just being ignored because we don't like it. Hypocrisy of the publisher has nothing to do with the validity and accuracy of the message.
The hypocrisy argument can go round and round without accomplishing anything more than saying no one can talk about anything. It is unproductive so let's abandon it and actually talk about what some of this article is shedding some light on. Are we happy about that? If not, what can we take away from it and what can we do?
I don't think anyone in Chinese government expects the world to take them seriously on human rights. They're just trying to deflect criticism.
If you mean crap as in pointing out the inconvenient truth to invite dialog, then all i have to say is fuck yeah America!
There are, I think, relatively few people who would claim the US has a perfect record on human rights, but I don't think it's fair to say that we turn a blind eye to them. These things do get debated, even if we ultimately decide to go with the less liberal option.
Saying that we ought to get our house completely in order before pointing out human rights violation in other countries is wronger than wrong: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wronger_than_wrong
http://www.dailydot.com/society/anti-foreign-sentiment-china...
http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2012/05/15/beijing-pledge...
That said, they raise many good points and we should be ashamed of our incarceration rate and out-of-control "national security" apparatus in particular. Of course they are in no position to scold us on most of these points, but that doesn't make their criticisms necessarily wrong.
Unfortunately, a lot of them seem misguided; in my opinion.
I come to my current perspective from years of watching.
As I mentioned though, I don't want to whitewash the US record. Police abuses do happen far too often, the TSA is an obnoxious joke, and asset forfeiture is a very problematic principle. The FBI, CIA, and NSA can in theory do nasty things to you, but they can do nasty things to you whether or not you're American. Plus, once you've gone through the due process, the prisons are pretty fucking awful and you have to stay there for an excessive period of time. And we have a death penalty. And the drug laws are a joke.
I agree with this general idea, but there is one very effective thing the govt can do to improve human rights, and that is to not curtail them.
Rolling back human rights reduction would be an unexpected bonus, but I'd be happy if they just stopped painting us into a smaller corner.
The US is actively and obviously violating human rights. I don't see how one could possibly get the idea that there even is the wish to seriously mitigate those violations let alone a genuine effort to do anything about it, quite the opposite actually.
Bush managed to give the US a reputation in Europe that is almost on par with Russia and China. Why do you think that is?
...Canadians
(but yes, conceptually you're right)
> And thieves should just turn themselves in.
In fact, if you read your modern world history, America was behind tons of the worst violations in the first place, supporting the regimes that perpetrated them as long as they catered to the US interests. They have setup lots of dictatorships in Latin America for example, they had armed Bin Laden and co, they have best terms with Israel and Saudi Arabia, the had Noriega as their puppet man, they had supported Saddam Hussein (yes, that Saddam) against Iran, they had toppled the democratic government of Iran to install a dictatorship in the sixties, etc etc.
If I had the mass genocide of Native Americans, the slavery of blacks, segregation till the '60s, concentration camps for Native Americans and later Japanese, McCarthyism, 2 atomic bombs on civilians, Agent Orange, and medical experiments without their knowledge on latin populations on my hands, I would be too ashamed to publish anything about any other country's "human violations".
As a dual US/CA citizen currently living in Canada, I think that both nations have made some troubling human-rights violations in recent months with the Occupy protests and G20 summit. While the Chinese article has its flaws, it does make some valid points about hypocrisy in our governments. One thing that especially bothers me is the treatment of the indigenous peoples of North America (Native Americans, aboriginal tribes, whatever term you like). Can we really take the moral "high ground" when bashing China about the Tibet issue? Granted, the Canadian government has made some baby steps towards reconciliation with indigenous tribes in the country, but there's a lot of room for improvement (I am not as up-to-date about the current state of affairs in the US).
In essence, none of our governments are perfect, but finger-pointing isn't going to get us anywhere. I think that it's more important for us to look at how we can improve in the future. Having the US include itself in its human-rights report would be a great first step but I seriously doubt that it'll happen.
In particular, they include two quite different things in their list:
1. Human rights abuse by the government
2. Violence by criminals that the government fails to prevent
So the Chinese government is accusing the US of being neglectful towards law and order, and claiming that its of equivalent severity to inflicting human rights abuses upon them.
I wonder how much they believe that, and how much is just maintaining face?
And so they don't really need the high ground for this to work, they just need to be able to control local propaganda and press..
That said, just because they don't have the moral high ground, it doesn't mean the points they raise aren't perfectly valid (n.b. I haven't actually read their release yet, so I'm not going the opposite direction and saying believe everything they said).
Everyone should be allowed to point out everyone else's human rights violations. Sadly most western countries are not gonna confront the US on this because they don't want to harm relations.
Having said that, I'm too uncomfortable with his situation, but I would be that for every Manning there are a hundred Chinese who already got shot.
His isolation is also overkill. There are more humane ways to make sure that he does not escape the judicial process. But this isn't about what's right; this is about finding ways to punish him without due process.
I trust you've read the charges against Bradley Manning and can cite where the UCMJ or the US Code sections listed say that releasing classified information to the public does not constitute espionage or is otherwise not an offense?
Anyway, yes, innocent until proven guilty. Nonetheless, there's little dispute about the facts of the case. And there's no indication that his treatment in any way exceeds or violates the regulations around the ordinary treatment of the accused. Unless you think it's unusual for accused spies to be held in maximum security?
Manning was charged under the Espionage Act of 1917. Manning clearly isn't a spy, so he shouldn't be charged based on those laws. Non-espionage activity shouldn't be judged based on espionage laws.
The military law is constructed to be purposefully vague (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_article_(military_law)). Anyone can be charged based on anything, so appealing to the technicality that Manning's case is not explicitly excluded does not matter. Disobeying in general is already illegal.
Us is a large net positive force in the world, but also the largest one on hypocrisy. Unless you include talking without doing anything of cause.
Yes, they are murdered, like Malcom X and Dr. King. Or persecuted by senator McCarthy. Or jailed, like the Chicago 7 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Seven ). Or killed like Ruben Salazar ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rub%C3%A9n_Salazar ) Or shot, like in Wounded Knee (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wounded_Knee_incident ). Or, burned like in Waco, TX ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waco_siege ).
Or, things that never go out of style, they are beaten to a pulp, entrapped and jailed, etc like tons of African American and/or labour activists.
Some more unfortunate are held in overseas prisons, without due process or any kind of proof, to be proven innocent 5-6 years later, you know those prisons Obama was to close...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque
the day that China has a free and fair national election for the national leadership, covered by an uncensored independent press. In 1989,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/03/tiananmen-square-an...
it looked like China was close to achieving that kind of political reform, and if it had, the world today would be a much better place. Until the reformers in China finish their difficult task of overcoming a repressive regime, the press in the United States will continue to report criticisms of the United States from all comers, and the net flow of immigration with respect to almost all other countries in the world will continue to be into rather than out of the United States.
I get the US is not perfect, but this propaganda piece would make a lot of my friends in advertising and marketing pale.
Anyway, I thought it was amusing. Sort of like the old Soviet Propaganda about how the US is a capitalistic wasteland of suffering. [0]
So is this an annual thing now?
Think about what the policy of not taking criticism seriously when the criticizer is hypocritical would lead to. How many people do you know who are absolutely perfect and completely unhypocritical? Most would say no one, but nearly everyone is going to agree that a perfectly unhypocritical person is at least very rare. So if you won't accept criticism except from perfect people, then that's tantamount to not accepting criticism at all. And is that a good policy? No.