Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Spielberg razzista anticinese?

Vorrei chiedere come mai, durante tutto il vespaio sulla fiera del
libro di Torino, l'altro boicottaggio di un'evento non-politico per
ragioni politiche, la proposta di boicottare le olimpiadi Cinesi come
protesta per la politica Cinese in Sudan, non e' nemmeno stato
nominato?
A differenza della fiera, si ritiene un boicottaggio "rispettabile",
con personaggi illustri e non controversi che partecipano, e fiumi di
inchiostro sui giornali piu liberali che dicono che non boicottare le
olimpiadi di Pechino equivale a sbudellare personalmente un povero
contadino del Darfur.
Beh, non ci sto!  Perche' se c'e un boicottaggio veramente intriso di
razzismo, aggravato perche (come nei casi peggiori) e' motivato
dall'invidia, e' proprio questo!     Alla fine, cio' che si rimprovera
agli impertinenti piccoli gialli (pardon, il governo Cinese), e' che,
a causa della loro volgare e recente ricchezza economica, sono hanno
il potere di fare di testa loro.   Che possono fare businness in Sudan
(o dovunque) senza chiedere il permesso a nessuno.  E lo fanno, spesso
e volentieri, battendo sul campo le "etiche" (ROTFL) multinazionali
occidentali.    Sempre Capitalismo e', ma, in attesa di rivoluzioni
mondiali, criticarlo come "non etico" dall'occidente e' ridicolo
oltreche' razzista.
Questo razzismo esiste, in piccolo, dovunque ci siano comunita'
cinesi, e cioe' sotto casa.      Il pogrom inscenato dalla polizia di
Milano contro i commercianti
Cinesi (e aizzati dal piccolo-borghese legaiolo Meneghino, a cui la
libera concorrenza smette di piacere quando l'immigrato Cinese lavora
piu sodo e riesce meglio di lui) era sulle prime pagine di tutti i
nostri giornali appena un'anno fa.
E, addirittura, la settimana scorsa, mi e' toccato sentire, in
privato, da un'Americana ultra-liberale, che il fatto che il nuovo
direttore di un certo esperimento scientifico sia Cinese e' un male
"perche' purtroppo fra i Cinesi c'e
una tendenza ad essere piu' leali verso i loro connazionali").
Quindi, congratulazioni ai Cinesi e al Sudan per il loro successo
economico in barba ai pregiudizi.   E buone olimpiadi.
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/4506/
In the run-up to the Beijing Olympics, a new sport has emerged: Yellow
Peril-mongering. Western politicians, commentators and even athletes
(not previously known for their skills in political oration, or in any
other kind of oration) have been competing to see who can express the
shrillest and most spine-tingling fears about the Chinese beast
looming on the Eastern horizon. The Beijing Olympics have been turned
into an all-purpose platform for moral posturing about China's
pollution levels, industrial arrogance, meddling in Africa, lack of
free speech, and human rights record.
spiked has no illusions about the Chinese regime. We are passionate
defenders of democracy and liberty, which remain anathematic words to
the Communist Party of China. Yet nor are we remotely interested in
signing up to the current Orientalist Olympics, where writers, actors
and activists are using the premise of Beijing 2008 to spread some
snooty and frequently irrational fears about the Chinese.
This China-bashing competition is not about offering solidarity to the
Chinese masses who want to live more freely. It is about making
observers in the West feel like medal-winning moralists, possessed of
an Olympian Outrage, warm and moist in the notion that they are taking
a stand against Evil Far Easterners. Here, we list the main events in
the Orientalist Olympics so far, and unveil the winners in each
category.
Throwing the hammer at China for meddling in Africa
This week, film director Steven Spielberg pulled out of his role as
artistic adviser to Beijing 2008 over China's support for 'unspeakable
crimes' in Darfur. Other Hollywood actors-cum-bearers of the White
Man's Burden, including George Clooney and Mia Farrow, have slated
China for allegedly funding 'Khartoum's genocide'. Grotesquely, some
are referring to Beijing 2008 as the 'Genocide Olympics', comparing
China's hosting of the Games with Hitler's hosting in 1936.
Such hysterical language shows how purely and perniciously moralistic
is the China-bashing over Darfur. It is true that China has trade and
arms relations with Khartoum, but to leap from this fact to the
accusation that China is 'funding genocide' is to ignore two
inconvenient truths (a phrase that Hollywood types surely understand).
The first inconvenient truth is that few serious international
organisations, including the United Nations, describe Darfur as a
'genocide'; indeed, the evidence suggests that Save Darfur activists
have grossly exaggerated, for political purposes, the death rates in
Darfur (1). There was a bloody civil war in Darfur, but it reached its
nadir five years ago. As Jonathan Steele argues: 'Today's Darfur is
still appalling, but not so bloody a place [as it was in 2003 and
2004].' (2) Yet a five-year-old, tragically all-too-familiar civil war
in Africa is being used to label the 2008 Beijing Games as the
'Genocide Olympics' and to compare Chinese rulers to the Nazis.
The second inconvenient truth is that China's role in the events in
Darfur is far from clear-cut. As Steele writes, it is naive to pin the
blame for this extremely messy conflict solely on Khartoum, much less
on the Chinese officials with whom Khartoum does business: 'There are
around a dozen different rebel groups currently fighting the
government. To put the blame on only one party makes no moral or
political sense.' Indeed, even as China trades arms with Khartoum in
return for Sudanese oil, it has joined with the West in putting
pressure on Khartoum to end the conflict: 'It helped to pass the UN
resolution to set up UNAMID [the UN peacekeeping mission in Darfur],
and it has contributed several hundred military engineers to
UNAMID.' (3)
To accuse China effectively of being genocidaires is to distort both
the reality on the ground in Darfur and to overestimate China's
influence on Khartoum. The celebrity posturing over China allegedly
giving the nod to a new Holocaust is not about calling for a powerful
state to stop interfering in Africa's affairs (something that the
celebrities' own countries of origin do all the time). In fact, it's
about doing precisely the opposite: it is motivated by a sense that
the Chinese, by doing business with Khartoum, are undermining Western
activists' ability to boss Khartoum around. China is seen as standing
in the way of Western interference in Africa, which is apparently the
right kind of interference, motivated by morals rather than money and
greed and avarice and other Chinese traits. As one American
commentator complained: 'Sudan's government feels it can ignore
Western revulsion at genocide because [thanks to China] it has no need
of Western money.... China, along with Sudan's other Arab and Asian
partners, feels free to trample on basic standards of decency.' (4)
Those bloody, indecent, no-standards Chinese, getting in the way of
Western efforts to financially blackmail an African country and
determine its affairs. Don't these uppity Easterners know that only
Westernised, well-educated NGO activists and super-rich LA luvvies
have the right to interfere in Africa? This event in the Orientalist
Olympics is not about calling for 'Hands off Africa!' - it's about
calling for 'Yellow Hands off Africa!'
Gold medal winner: Steven Spielberg, for magnificent displays of both
moral spinelessness (by giving in to months of pressure from Mia
Farrow who said he would be the Leni Riefenstahl of Beijing's
'Genocide Olympics') and moral superiority (see his references to the
power of his conscience in his resignation statement). It is hard to
disagree with the Chinese official who accused Spielberg of spouting
'empty rhetoric'.
Sprinting to denounce China's pollution levels
This is a toughly contested event in the Orientalist Olympics:
numerous green activists and green-leaning Western officials are
looking at China's stadium-erecting, road-building and subway-digging
with barely concealed disgust and claiming that these will be the
Grimiest Games in history.
Environmentalists are latching on to Beijing 2008 as a way of
ratcheting up fears about China's alleged poisoning of its own people,
and its potential poisoning of we Westerners, too. One commentator
says the Games will 'showcase pollution as well as world-class
athletes'. Reporters write that 'the effects of pollution can be seen
everywhere... smokestack factories spew toxins into the air... rivers teem
with sewage' (5). And it's not just the Chinese who will suffer at the
hands of their polluting rulers. Some say that athletes who have to
run or ride bikes in Beijing this summer will be weakened and choked
by smog (which will at least give British competitors a good excuse
when they lose), while others remind us that China is cooking the
entire planet: 'China's emissions of carbon dioxide, the most
important global warming gas, are expected to surpass those of the
United States in 2009.' (6)
Here, even the most positive thing about contemporary China - its
speedy, inspiring economic development - is discussed as something
disgusting. What ought to be celebrated as a wonderful leap forward
for mankind is seen as a threat both to the Chinese people and to the
West itself. No doubt China is a smelly, smoggy, sooty place right
now, but that is because it is experiencing the birth pangs of
industrialisation. There is a powerful whiff of double standards when
well-off greens in comfortable Western societies that were built on
Industrial Revolutions moan about Chinese smog.
The view of China as a 'green peril' overlooks the fact that Chinese
officials are taking serious steps to combat pollution. In the run-up
to the Olympics, they have completely relocated 100 Beijing-based
chemical, steel and pharmaceutical factories outside of the city,
dismantling, transporting and rebuilding them in pastures new. Beijing
is replacing 300,000 polluting taxis and busses with lesser-polluting
vehicles. In 1998, Beijing recorded 100 so-called Blue Sky Days - that
is, days with an acceptable level of pollution; in 2005, it recorded
244 Blue Sky Days (7). In Britain, 'tackling climate change' has
become a code-phrase for officials making petty interventions into our
lives: flush your toilet less; recycle your bottle tops; don't drive
to the supermarket. In Beijing, combating pollution is a targeted,
meaningful and ambitious project.
The idea of the Chinese as a pollutant has a long history. Today that
mass nation is seen as an environmental pollutant... in the past, as the
American author Jess Nevins points out, they were seen as 'physical,
racial and social pollutants' whose backward ways might undermine
Western civilisation (8). Today's pre-Olympics concern about the
'green peril' has ditched the overtly racist lingo of the past - but
it has breathed life back into old Western fears about Eastern
'pollutants' poisoning us, and especially our super-healthy athletes,
with their strange habits and thoughtless ways.
Gold medal winner: Environmentalist correspondents in the British
press (you know who you are), who seem incapable of writing about
China without using the words 'poison', 'sludge' or 'smog'. They have
displayed a truly Olympian ability to see only the bad in economic
progress and never, ever, ever the good (less absolute poverty, rising
living standards, greater mobility, and in the future more choice).
Boxing Chinese officials over freedom of speech
Some British athletes have attacked China's attempts to curb their
freedom of speech. British Olympians have been asked to sign a
contract before they arrive in Beijing: it will prohibit them from,
amongst other things, attending political demonstrations or making
'propagandistic' statements. Outraged athletes - including that well-
known political activist, er, the badminton champion Richard Vaughan -
have complained about being denied the right to criticise China's
human rights record or its antics in Darfur. The gagging of athletes
is held up as evidence of China's extreme authoritarianism, which
threatens even to ruin the greatest show on earth.
In reality, these new contracts build on strict rules that were drawn
up by the International Olympics Committee over the past 30 years.
Following the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico, when two black American
sprinters gave the Black Power salute as they received their medals,
the IOC introduced Section 51 to its charter - this forbids athletes
from taking part in any 'kind of demonstration, or political,
religious or racial propaganda in the Olympic sites, venues or other
areas' (9). In asking for the rules to include barring athletes from
making 'politically sensitive' statements, the Chinese are building on
already-existing IOC directives rather than importing their Stalinist
distaste for liberty into an apparently free and open sporting event.
British athletes are not principled fighters for 'freedom of speech'.
If they were, we might have expected to hear them complain about New
Labour's numerous assaults on free speech over the past 10 years -
from its criminalisation of criticism of religion to its imprisonment
of five students for the 'crime' of browsing radical websites (10).
The Chinese do not have a monopoly on criminalising 'sensitive'
comments that are likely to 'cause offence' (11).
The British athletes are actually demanding the 'freedom to be morally
outraged'. They want the 'right' to use the opportunity of a visit to
China to wear a Free Tibet t-shirt or to state their concern about
pollution or to join Spielberg and Farrow and others in exaggerating
the crisis in Darfur in order to get their moral rocks off. In this
sense, they're actually dragging free speech's name through the mud,
turning it into a political weapon that can be used to take potshots
at foreign regimes. Their outraged reaction against their contracts
gives the impression that illiberal attitudes to free speech are a
peculiarly Eastern thing; in calling on British Olympics officials to
reject the contracts and rewrite them - in the name of British fair
play and liberty - the athletes are conniving in the mad idea that
Britain is a free country and therefore it has the right and the
responsibility to lecture the Chinese about their attitudes and
affairs. Such a paternalistic and partial use of the banner of 'free
speech' will do no favours whatsoever for either the campaign for free
speech in Britain or the campaign for freedom and autonomy in China.
Laughably, some of the gagged athletes are comparing themselves to
Tommie Smith and John Carlos, the black American runners who raised
their black-gloved fists and bowed their heads during the playing of
the American national anthem at the 1968 Games. Smith and Carlos made
a serious protest at a time of violent conflict over civil rights
within their own country, when an armed oppositional movement - the
Black Panthers - was fighting under the banner of Black Power. And
they paid an extremely heavy price: they were effectively barred from
sports for the rest of their lives. To compare this brave and dramatic
stand to the hurt feelings of a largely unknown badminton player who
wants to express his pity for poor pathetic Africans while in China,
and who would do so with the full backing of Hollywood, American and
European liberals, most Western governments and a mish-mash of armed
rebel groups in Darfur... that only highlights the extent to which this
event in the Orientalist Olympics, bashing China over its gagging
contracts, is driven by bloated moral pomposity.
Gold medal winner: Richard Vaughan, the British badminton champ who
has made a right shuttlecock of himself by trying to pose as a warrior
for freedom of speech. Clearly he has swallowed whole the idea that
sportsmen and other modern-day celebrities are so supremely important
that they must single-handedly try to topple the Chinese regime by
wearing a shocking t-shirt or holding a press conference with some
Tibetan monks.
Spearing China's dedication to sports training
Forget the empty rhetoric of the Save Darfur missionaries and the
'green peril' screaming of the environmentalist lobby - the Olympics
are, of course, all about sport. For all Western observers' attempts
to attach their narcissistic agendas to Beijing 2008, the vast
majority of us will enjoy it as a spectacular competition between the
fastest runners, longest jumpers and most agile gymnasts on Earth. And
yet... even in the area of sport, China is getting an earful from
concerned Westerners.
The Chinese are being attacked for 'torturing' their young people by
forcing them to become the best. The Chinese training of gymnasts,
some as young as seven or eight, has been described as a form of
'child abuse', where teachers and trainers bend kids' bodies in
'unnatural directions' and push them, at all costs, to become the
flexible champions of the future (12).
Apparently the Chinese are far too obsessed with self-sacrifice and
winning at any cost. During an earlier Olympics contest, one
commentator said: 'When entertainment requires this kind of self-
sacrifice, our values - for willingly watching and participating - and
the values of the Chinese are severely out of line with basic human
standards.' (13) Notice how even the discussion of Chinese attitudes
to sport, as well as their attitude to Darfur, focuses on their
alleged inhuman depravity.
There's no doubt that young sportsmen and women in China are put under
extraordinary pressure. Yet even this desire to win, in a competition
in which winning is the only thing that counts, is talked up in the
Orientalist Olympics as evidence of China's warped ways. The Chinese
are seen as unemotional, unforgiving, as peculiarly arrogant. Again,
this is an old prejudice that is being rehabilitated on the back of
the Olympic Games. As Robert L Gee points out in his book Orientals:
Asian Americans in Popular Culture, China-bashers in the past talked
about 'Chinese arrogance' and 'Chinese aloofness' (14). Back then,
people saw 'Chinese arrogance' in their snooty 'Yellowfaces' (15);
today it is glimpsed in the robotic automatons forcing young children
to become winning machines.
Perhaps Western observers and athletes are making excuses for
themselves early. If they lose, it won't be down to their own lack of
training or determination - which could be seen as products of the
West's distinctly PC and un-Chinese 'everyone's a winner' attitude to
competitive sports - but rather down to the strange powers of the
Eastern weirdos.
Gold medal winner: BBC TV's Newsnight, which recently sent a reporter
to stare in horror at young Chinese children training to become
gymnasts of the future. Much to Newsnight's disappointment, however,
the kids seemed to be enjoying themselves.

 una tendenza ad essere piu' leali verso i loro connazionali").
e Bonaiuti: perche' gli elettori dovrebbero comprare da Veltroni il
cinese un prodotto contraffatto, quando hanno a disposizione il
prodotto originale, il programma di Berlusconi?'
e via andare...oh, ma vorrai mica criticarli, non sono antisionisti,
possono dire quello che vogliono...

 Vorrei chiedere 
Senza entrare nell'intrico di falllacie logiche che permettono di 
equiparare una fiera culturale e un evento politico organizzato da un 
governo, mi chiedo, a quanti standard morali contemporanei è arrivato 
Torrieri il neocinese?
Tre, quattro, cinque?
Ho perso il conto.
Tb
-- 
Libertà per i comunisti siriani in carcere: Fateh Jamus, 'Isam Dimashqi,
Basel Hurani, 'Abd al-Halim Rumieh, Ratib Sha'bu, and Doha 'Ashur
al-'Askari 
http://snipurl.com/1oqtm

 Senza entrare nell'intrico
ti dirò: mi era sembrato di leggere "razzista antiTIcinese" e pensavo
che Giorgino ce la avesse con Spielberg che, chissà, magari aveva
brontolato che in Ticino non si trovava il caffé italiano, e Giorgino
riusciva a legare questa faccenda alle banche elvetiche aggredite
dalla lobby sionista e stritolate dall'industria dell'Olocausto. O ai
poveri svizzeri che durante la guerra hanno solo cercato di impedire
ai sionisti di andare a massacrare palestinesi. Poi ho letto il
messaggio di Giorgino e lo ho visto colmo di furore verso i liberal
americani, che difendeva un Paese capitalista. Non è buffo come la
Gialappa's che fa la Televisione della Svizzera Italiana, ma è
sufficientemente yesterday da strappare almeno un sorriso. E chissà la
sua mamma come sarebbe contenta.

 dalla lobby sionista e stritolate dall'industria dell'Olocausto.
qui c'è qualcuno fissato coi sionisti, ma non è Giorgino...

 Beh, non ci sto!
sai che novità 

arrivatoTorrieriil neocinese?
去你奶奶的, 混账
GT

 Non male per un'evento "non politico".
Forse ti è sfuggito che Torino non è la capitale di Israele, né della Cina.
Devi esserti incaprettato nell'intrico fallace.
