When I first read today's lead editorial in the Washington Post about free speech repression in China, I sadly thought that WaPo was talking about the U.S. The online version asks
Why isn’t the West reacting to China’s crackdown?
WaPo posits that the lure of Chinese investments makes the West ignore the negatives or that the vibrancy of modern Shanghai makes it hard for westerners to believe the repression is real. Perhaps though, the U.S. isn't outraged because, compared to China's policies, U.S. policies on free speech and dissent look like close cousins.
The WaPo editorial criticizes "China's communist rulers" for "a fitting coda to a year of steadily decreasing tolerance for open dissent and discussion" in punishing activists for various crimes of writing and posting 36 essays online.
Punishing dissidents for writing? This sounds eerily similar to the U.S. State Department's treatment of whistleblower Peter Van Buren, who is also being punished for posting several blogs critical of U.S. policy, linking - not "leaking" - to Wikileaks documents, and writing a book about what he saw in Iraq "as a situation that was full of waste, fraud, mismanagement . . ."
WaPo goes on to criticize China's vilifying of dissenters and Christianity:
A top security official reportedly said that crackdowns on “hostile forces” (government code for peaceful advocates of democracy) and “illegal religious organizations” (code for Christians, Falun Gong followers and others who choose to worship without government approval) will be a priority in the coming year.
In the U.S. "hostile forces" is code for alleged "leakers," who are more often than not whistleblowers, and who the Obama administration has pursued with unprecedented fervor using the full weight of the criminal justice system. In the U.S., "illegal religious organizations" are "radical Islamist extremists," which is code for "Muslims we don't like." Our law enforcement community readily accepts this meme in targeting innocent Muslim communities and using racist training materials.
WaPo lambastes "China's rulers" as "quick not only to imprison their countrymen and censor their press but also, when convenient, to stoke the fires of nationalism."
Meanwhile, the G.W. Bush administration persuaded the New York Times to keep NSA's unconstitutional warrantless wiretapping program hidden from the public for over a year. Under both Bush and Obama, the U.S. Justice Department repeatedly attempted to subpoena journalist Jim Risen to testify about his sources. Under Obama, the Justice Department used the Espionage Act to go after National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Thomas Drake,telling us "[o]ur national security demands" that the U.S. punish Drake. In reality, the administration wanted to imprison Drake and threatened to imprison several other whistleblowers (including former NSA employees William Binney and J. Kirk Wiebe) for blowing the whistle through internal channels, exposing a billion-dollar boondoggle burning through taxpayer money in secret, and, in Drake's case, taking unclassified information that embarrassed NSA to the press.
Speaking of nationalistic repression gone awry, WaPo's Greg Miller has a must-read piece on the Obama administration's expansion of the front-page-news-yet-highly-classified drone program used to covertly murder both foreigners and American in all corners of the world without a shred of due process.
No wonder the West isn't outraged about oppression on the other side of the world. Many Americans don't seem outraged about repression in their own backyards.