According to the BBC, China 'is fuelling war in Darfur'. China is supplying military training and supplies to the government of Sudan, who in turn are supplying the rebels responsible for the genocide. A lot of the killing is being precipitated from the skies by Sudanese Government fighter planes, and the Chinese military is allegedly providing training for those pilots.
For the Sudanese government-backed Janjaweed, it's about water. For the Chinese, it's all about the fucking oil. Not to say that the U.S. is any better, of course -- Bush's folly, aka the Iraq War, is itself about the goddamned oil. Granted, the Chinese government probably doesn't give a shit -- they sent in tanks to crush the pro-democracy demonstrators during the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre*, and went to great lengths to erase the public memory of that event to make it a non-event!
The Chinese government did not try to deny this. Angry denials of the BBC story would at least imply that they feel some sense of shame that innocent lives are being ended by Chinese-made weapons of mass destruction. However, their silence regarding the veracity of the report implies a tacit acknowledgment of guilt, and a tacit acknowledgment that they just don't care enough to respond. Again, let me repeat myself: They just don't give a shit! It's just about the fucking oil. Peasants don't count, only governments and their powerful representatives do. And that just makes it worse.
So, while I was already inclined to boycott the opening and closing ceremonies of the upcoming Olympic Games in Beijing, China -- in no small part due to the violent suppression of the Tibetan protests, earlier this year, the presence of President Bush (who I absolutely cannot stand), the events of June 4, 1989 in Tiananmen Square, and their treatment of political prisoners -- I am even more determined not to watch the broadcasts at all! The Chinese government just doesn't care that they are indirectly contributing to the mass murder and suffering of human beings in the Darfur region. I'm sorry for the athletes who have trained their whole lives just to make it to the Olympic Games, any one of them, but I cannot, in good conscience, support the Chinese Government in this way.
I will, however, be watching certain events -- the track and field events in particular -- and rooting against the Chinese athletes. This isn't because I have any personal antipathy towards individual athletes, mind you, but because having the home team lose big would humiliate the Chinese Government. They deserve to eat shit for supporting the humanitarian disaster in Darfur, and they deserve to eat a whole boatload of it. Fuck them, they're going down.
In the meantime, I will be supporting Team Darfur with donations, and urge anyone reading this to make a donation to anyone of the more than 100 organizations represented at Save Darfur.
And, lest I seem overly one-sided against China, I urge you to go to Antiwar.com to learn more about aggressive U.S. foreign policy, and to Bring Them Home Now to learn about ways to end the War in Iraq sooner.
This isn't just business as usual; there are millions of human lives at play here. I would like to think human beings matter more than oil, no matter how backwards you think they or their society are. Make a stand for what is right and just. Boycott the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics. I know I will.
*Check out a 53 minute long "Tank Man" video here.
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