Complex Update

Joseph Britt offers his insightful thoughts on the Chinese protests:

Hamet is convinced that Chinese leaders are playing a deep, brilliant game by attempting to fan and harness popular passions and resentments at the same time. I'm not sure I agree. It wasn't just the failure of central planning or the bloody stalemate in Afghanistan that undermined the legitimacy of Soviet Communism, but the slowly spreading knowledge among educated Russians of what had been done in the Party's name. Horror can be a corrosive force. Knowledge of the past can be limited, and controlled, but not forever. What will happen when the Chinese now being urged to demonstrate against part of the past start asking about the part the Party has striven to hide from them all these years?

This, again, applies to the Muslim world. The vast majority of Muslims rhetorically lynch the West for it's imagined crimes against Islam but very rarely do they show the same contempt for the Muslim tyrants and thugs that rule over them. That is why the erroneous figure of 100,000 killed in Iraq because of the US-led war gets far more airing than the thousands of gassed Kurds and the nameless 300,000 in mass graves.

See my earlier post here.