David Cameron (the current British Prime Minister!) recently took some flak for endangering Britain’s trade with China, specifically possible inward investment in infrastructure that the Chinnese might make in Britain. Let’s leave aside for the moment the fact that this makes us resemble some quasi-colonised African state and consider some facts. Our Great Leader’s sin was to have met the Dalai Lama, who as we know the Chinese government consider to be an unperson. Three facts spring to mind, all pretty much indisputable I think.
A) North Korea is virtually a gigantic concentration camp, but worse, since the people are brainwashed as well as being subject to oppression and frequent death by famine while the leaders live in luxury.
B) China has supported the country practically and politically for decades. Without China’s help this loathsome family dictatorship – first among equals on the planet – would have collapsed decades ago.
C) China is one of our biggest and most important trading partners.
To make it even clearer, we do a massive amount of business with a country that is accomplice to and facilitator of oppression and mass-murder on a horrendous scale. The vast scale of this business allows the Chinese government to maintain its dictatorship and build up its armed forces, launching periodic bellicose threats towards Taiwan and other sovereign territories in the region.
The Western world seems quite happy with this state of affairs, or if not exactly “happy” then certainly accepting and of course profiting from it.
CONCLUSION: The entire western world is utterly immoral.
Please note that I have tried to be logical, though the last point is obviously a value-judgement.
What is puzzling about all this is that we seemed to adopt a moral high-horse at some cost to ourselves when it came to apartheid in South Africa, but not when it comes to North Korea, where people are in fact treated much worse. This could I suppose be because it was the Europeans who colonised most of Africa and so we felt a special guilt and had a special responsibility to try to put things right. But – being logical once more – “No man is an island.”, it seems bizarre to treat one group of oppressed and suffering humans differently from another. Brutal oppression is the same everywhere, and if globalisation is right for business then why not for the fight against human suffering at the hands of mass-murdering criminal family gangs?
Our Great Leader should tell the Chinese government to stick it. If it comes to a boycott of their goods (fat chance – we are too greedy), THEY would be the ones to suffer. And in the west, our unemployed workers could start making toasters and stuff again. Or a boycott would boost other third-world countries much worse off than China.
Whatever, it all leaves a nasty taste in the mouth.
North Korea – FURTHER READING:
“Michael Meister, a member of Mrs Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union party, said there was nothing to stop France and Italy from going it alone on common bonds.”
This would be great. Franco-Italian Bonds. (FIBS)
And why not Spanish, Portuguese, Irish and Greek Bonds bonds? (SPIGBOS).
They could be created in their millions and go immediately to junk status to save time …..
But poor old Herr Meister just doesn’t get it. The only POINT of “eurobonds” is to get your grubby hands on German money ……
“Worryingly, new French President François Hollande
says he’s unaware of any memo asking countries to develop a contingency plan
at all.”
????!!!!?? Any government NOT making contingency plans for a Greek exit for MONTHS now is three legs short of a table. Why the HELL do they need a MEMO?
Hollande is turning out to be a serial buffoon.